Karl Polanyi writes of a particular kind of institutionalized violence and political conflict endemic to the liberal project of remaking institutions under the rule of the laissez faire market ideal which has as its main pillars three “fictitious commodities”: money, land and labour.

Let’s start with the commodification of money:

Recall that Marilyn Waring points to the fact that in the framework of the United Nations System of National Accounts, only those activities that are mediated by money, regardless of whether they are good or bad, worth doing or not, only those activities with a cash generating capacity are valued: everything outside of it, no matter how important for human survival or flourishing, has by definition no value, is in fact devalued.

These UN rules of the system are one institutional pillar of the distinction between capitalist wealth and other kinds of wealth (common wealth, personal wealth of belonging, etc.) the other institutional pillar are state laws and power defending capitalist property.

 

The commodification of money means that value of money becomes volatile, as betting on the price of one currency against another determines its value more than its effectivity as a store of wealth, a medium of exchange, a measure of value and as access to cooperation.

Commodification of money thus realizes the real essence of money as capital: money only has value if it can turn into a larger quantity of money; if it cannot, it loses value. Money, qua capital, cannot sit still, unlike the loose change in the couch. So we have a world of price fluctuations, inflation and deflation: and so businesses have trouble planning for the long term.

Because money cannot sit still and has to do its own thing and become a larger pile of money, no matter what, money as capital —capital in money form as the measure of value— is a world unto itself, completely blind to whether something/ anything we do is good or bad, worth doing or not doing, constructive or destructive.

Why war industries are considered valuable but things like learning foreign languages that would help keep peace are not, from the POV of capital.

Cigarettes but not women’s work of looking after the sick is poorly paid

 

Now, let’s consider the commodification of “Mother Earth”:

Essentially, destruction of ecosystems due to always expanding commodification of “Mother Nature” so that above all else M>M’: As long as M>M’, it doesn’t matter if we have cut down the last tree in this forest or have completely polluted that river etc. We keep going until there is absolutely nothing left: An always expanding commodity frontier and alway expanding colonial frontier.

Now as we destroy ecosystems, we are also turning people into wage dependents since they have no alternative ways of adapting to nature reproductively.

Now, let’s consider the commodification of labour power:

We have already noted that the commodification of money results in a division between capitalist wealth and other kinds of wealth (wealth valued in other ways)

We have noted that commodification of Mother Earth expands the process of proletarianization or the creation of wage dependency.

Now from the Marilyn Waring documentary (as well as the work of Silvia Federici) we have seen that wage dependency itself has long been divided into two kinds:

gendered social division of labour where the value of some kinds of women’s work becomes invisible to governments, to the POV of capital

which overlaps but only partially with a social division of labour between (less exploited, better paid, better protected) formal work and super-exploited informal work (that is valuable in so far as enables households to reproduce intergenerationally just marginally): no debit side of national income accounting insofar as costs are externalized to the politically weakest: this is the condition of possibility of profit (capitalist wealth) but also capitalist poverty

So intensifying conflict between proprietors of capital and divisions between wage dependency deepened by sexism, racism and other interlocking systems of oppression.