i think we're using 'commodification' to mean quite different things.
the issue of standardisation of activities and parts, in the particular sense i think you mean it (as industrial production) relates to the production process itself, but i would not say that the fordist production methods upon which the mass character of the labour process and its products is founded exhausts any definition i would have of commodification. what about, for instance, labour-intensive production methods that are still subject to the commodification of both the labour itself (through the wage) and the results of that labour? this is where i think your argument becomes more about a specific moment of capitalist production rather than capitalist production per se (in all its various manifestations, both high-tech and low-tech).
that is, what's starts off as a good intention -- the desire for a decommodification -- ends up being a desire for simply another kind of production process (low-tech, or non-tech) that can just as easily be conducted as a process of commodification as i understand that term and as i understand capitalism.
i mentioned marx's essay, "Results of the Immediate Process of Production", which is in the recent Penguin edition of _Capital_, but not in earlier editions (though you can find it in the _Collected Works_) in another post in this thread. i mention it here again, because it really is i think quite important an essay in showing the mutable relationship between capitalism and specific types of production processes within capitalism.
moreover, i don't think that the issue of comparability (and the universal language of money) is a necessary adjunct to complex or large-scale social forms. this assumes that money is simply a technical means of communication about something else. but, in capitalism, money is a means to nothing other than more money, to put it somewhat crudely again. it does not make communication possible, it makes more money (well, capital) possible. in any event, small-scale societies are not simple, despite the exoticist view from elsewhere. it could just as easily be said, if we just shift our perspective a little, that capitalism simplifies complexity by making everything refer to money or being at risk of non-existence. isn't this why almost everyone was at seattle, for instance, because in some ways it has become so simple?
Angela _________
adam wrote:
> yeah the guys i was referring to are "primitivists" but i think they have
a
> point. I never said their thesis was "we get more alienated the more
> complex a society"; rather i said: "characteristics of capitalist social
> relations, such as commodification... are inescapable in industrial
> society even if the economic structures were not capitalist in the
Marxist
> sense"
>
> I think these are quite different thesis; and let me try to sharpen this
> latter claim: that the economic relation of exchange (commodification) is
> unavoidable if you want to create a modern (say at least the last 75
years)
> industrial infrastructure (e.g. those of communication, transportation,
> health etc.).
>
> To build these kind of instructures you need to have standard parts and
> standard measures; and also standard measures of costs. Thus inevitably
> products (the results of productive activity) are assigned cost and
become
> interchangeable, and costs can't be ignored -- even if the classical
market
> place doesn't exist. As the scope of these infrastructures in grow in
> terms of range of human activity encompassed (for example, consider the
> evolution of mass media) so does the scope and depth of the
standardization
> and commodification of the output of that activity.