Bibliographic record
Abstract
The claim that capitalism drives to commodify everything is widely made in late-20th century and early-21st century critical political economy and plays a central role in prominent theoretical frameworks and texts. The argument is, however, rarely articulated in any detail, and proponents do not explain why capitalism would drive to commodify not just very many things but everything. In this paper I carry out the first systematic review and critique of works making the claim. I show that the literature fails to define ‘everything’ and ‘the commodification of everything’ and identify significant weaknesses in the six implicit argumentative strategies these works employ. I also show that positions that might appear to reject the claim do not get traction on it. In the second section I reconstruct the argument by defining terms, positing six commodifying mechanisms that should emerge from capitalism’s core features, and searching for ‘things’ the literature has ignored. The search draws especially on historical research into surprising examples of commodified violence, governance, authority and monopoly. My analysis both greatly expands the literature’s theoretical and empirical scope and argues that capitalism generates decommodifying drives with respect to certain key ‘things’. Capitalism does not drive towards ‘the commodification of everything’ under any non-trivial definition of the latter term.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".