Commodification Quotes

• At the heart of the WTO is an assault on everything left standing in the commons, in the public realm. Everything is now for sale. Even those areas of life that we once considered sacred like health and education, food and water and air and seeds and genes and a heritage. It is all now for sale. Economic freedom - not democracy, and not ecological stewardship - is the defining metaphor of the WTO and its central goal is humanity's mastery of the natural world through its total commodification.

  Maude Barlow

  Heart, Air, Water

  54 Copy quote

• We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification - be it of music, food, people, or parking meters.

  Cornel West

  Parking Meters, People, Capitalist

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• Everything is now for sale. Even those areas of life that we once considered sacred like health and education, food and water and air and seeds and genes and a heritage. It is all now for sale.

  Maude Barlow

  Health, Air, Water

  23 Copy quote

• The nation no longer stands for the enlightenment tradition, but rather for military-political hegemony and the total commodification of life.

  Morris Berman

  Military, Political, Enlightenment

  "Waiting for the barbarians" by Morris Berman, www.theguardian.com. October 5, 2001.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The first and probably most fundamental aspect of this crisis is that we are now close to the commodification of everything. That is, historical capitalism is in crisis precisely because, in pursuing the endless accumulation of capital, it is beginning to approximate that state of being Adam Smith asserted was 'natural' to man but which has never historically existed. The 'propensity [of humanity] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another' has entered into domains and zones previously untouched, and the pressure to expand commodification is relatively unchecked.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Men, Humanity, Historical

  12 Copy quote

• What has changed about an entire generation of young people includes not only neoliberal society's disinvestment in youth and the lasting fate of downward mobility, but also the fact that youth live in a commercially carpet-bombed and commodified environment that is unlike anything experienced by those of previous generations. Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable and savage new world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes and stillborn projects.

  Henry Giroux

  Fate, People, Frustrated

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• That is why we may say that the historical development of capitalism has involved the thrust towards the commodification of everything.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Historical, Development, May

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.16, Verso

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The role of globalization is to homogenize all cultures, and to turn them into commodified markets, and therefore, to make them easier for global corporations to control. Global corporations are even now trying to commodify all remaining aspects of national cultures, not to mention indigenous cultures.

  Jerry Mander

  Trying, Culture, Roles

  28 Copy quote

• When you tell women that they are, and you train them to actually believe that their value is involved with, the commodification of their sexuality, then you open the floodgates to this kind of absurd sort of reductive view of a human.

  Kamala Lopez

  Believe, Views, Kind

  Source: www.progressive.org

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Ideas, Progress, Transition

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.97, Verso

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am not a particularly political person, but, as a Tribeca resident, the commodification of September 11th is offensive to me.

  Lena Dunham

  Political, September, Offensive

  "Downtown’s Daughter" by Rebecca Mead, www.newyorker.com. November 15, 2010.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The challenges that young people are mobilizing against oppressive societies all over the globe are being met with a state-sponsored violence that is about more than police brutality. This is especially clear in the United States, given its transformation from a social state to a warfare state, from a state that once embraced a semblance of the social contract to one that no longer has a language for justice, community and solidarity - a state in which the bonds of fear and commodification have replaced the bonds of civic responsibility and democratic vision.

  Henry Giroux

  Responsibility, People, Justice

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Spiritual models for me are the communities of Tibetans living in exile in India, or the banjars of Bali, which exist in times of difficulty, oppression. Alternative spaces-perhaps this kind of communication can take place over the Net? Probably only up to a point as the Net's controlled by the military. But the idea is to live outside multi-national, monocultural, commodification prison, outside the grey areas of power-mad, monied collusion.

  Anne Waldman

  Spiritual, Military, Communication

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a need for subjects who find intense pleasure in commodification of violence and a culture of cruelty.

  Henry Giroux

  Needs, Culture, Violence

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It doesn't surprise me that aspect of the black nationalist movement, the cultural side, has triumphed because that is the aspect of the movement that was most commodifiable and when we look at the commodification of blackness we're looking at a phenomenon that's very profitable and it's connection with the rise of a black middle class I think is very obvious.

  Angela Davis

  Thinking, Class, Black

  Frontline Interview, www.pbs.org. 1997.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source