Margaret Jane Radin: Contested Commodities: the Trouble with Trade in Sex, Children, Body Parts, and Other Things.

Margaret Jane Radin

Contested Commodities: The Trouble with Trade in Sex, Children, Body Parts, and Other Things

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001, xiv + 279 pp.

ISBN 0-674-00716-6 (pbk) 12.95 [pounds sterling]

Arlie Russell Hochschild

The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes From Home and Work

University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, ix + 313 pp.

ISBN 0-52021488-9 (pbk) 10.95 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0-52021487-0 (hbk) 32.95 [pounds sterling]

Contested Commodities is a critique of the conceptual scheme, associated in particular with Gary Becker and the neoliberal Chicago School, and implicit in rational choice theory, which conceives all human actions and interactions, regardless of whether or not money changes hands, as self-maximising trades. This perspective, for example, treats people's choice to have children or not as an economic one, so that a rise in the 'price' of children--the cost of rearing them--will logically, it says, lead to a fall in demand. Within this conception, which Radin calls 'universal commodification', all the choices, commitments, feelings and attachments of individuals are fungible: they correspond to an economic equivalent, and will be willingly relinquished or foregone if the market price is met.

This rhetoric of universal commodification is one that legitimates the attempt, by some neoliberals, to extend the actual marketplace to all forms of activity, including sexual services, organ donation and adoption. Intelligent opposition to this endeavour often comes in the form of what Radin calls the 'domino theory'.

This is the argument that 'marketisation' should be resisted because the commodification of some activities precludes the survival of their non-commodified analogues, with the market driving out the non-market versions. This theory--an early variant of which Radin identifies in Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness--was implicit in Richard Titmuss's study of blood donation.

If sales of blood are permitted, he argued, the giving of blood will increasingly be experienced as the giving of a money equivalent (the market price of blood) and, since money is a fungible commodity detachable from the person of the giver, the sense of personal generosity that motivates the act of giving blood will be harder to sustain.

Although Radin is sympathetic to the domino theory, and believes it to be relevant in some cases, she argues that it is wrong to assume that commodified understandings of human interactions are necessarily stronger than non-commodified ones. In her view, commodified and non-commodified interpretations of social interchange can often peacefully co-exist, sometimes in the same person's consciousness. We might regard a family heirloom as priceless, for instance, but still have it appraised for insurance purposes; or we might see our work both as the sale of labour power, and as the exercise of unique personal qualities such as dedication, altruism, creativity or care. Competing understandings may also co-exist in society as a whole: the payment of compensation for personal injury, for example, is understood by some legal thinkers to be the trading of personal integrity for its economic equivalent--the victim being indifferent as to whether they are harmed and paid, or not harmed at all. Others see it not as material rectification but as symbolic redress: that is, as a public affirmation of the victim's rights, and of the fault of the transgressor in having violated those rights.

Radin suggests that contested understandings of such social actions and exchanges are evidence of 'incomplete commodification', and this is why she opposes those liberal doctrines--the best-known of which is Michael Walzer's theory of 'separate spheres'--which seek to compartmentalise society into market and nonmarket domains. In her view, if things are incompletely commodified in the public imagination, then social policy should reflect this by making such things market-alienable only to a degree. Though this is, of course, what most states do when they regulate market forces, what is important for Radin are the motives behind measures such as price controls, health and safety legislation, and restrictions on trade.

From the perspective of universal commodification, imposing limits on market alienability is necessary in order to control those externalities that prevent markets from achieving efficient outcomes (the 'Tragedy of the Commons' scenario). From Radin's perspective, however, these limits are necessary in order to protect and foster non-market conceptions of personhood and well-being, which are essential to proper human flourishing. These conceptions imply a 'thick' theory of a self whose identity is fashioned through personal attributes, commitments, relationships and surroundings, none of which can be detached and exchanged without injury to personhood. Recognising, nonetheless, that human self-development requires opportunities for detachment and change as well as stability, Radin notes the irony in the discourse of universal commodification and the 'thin' theory of the self, since by treating all the choices available to that self as commensurable, it makes the possibility of life-transforming choices inconceivable.

The liberal compartmentaliser, on the other hand, may wish to ban the sale of children, sexual services and body parts on the same grounds on which traditional liberals have opposed the selling of oneself into slavery: such actions are so destructive of personhood, it is argued, that they cannot plausibly be an act of freedom, but must instead be compelled by conditions of poverty. The problem with this argument, Radin points out, is that if people are driven to such 'desperate exchanges' by poverty, then it is poverty that violates their freedom, not the exchanges they may pursue in order to alleviate it, and only far-reaching welfare reform and wealth distribution will remedy those circumstances of coercion.

The issue of desperate exchanges also reveals another dilemma, which Radin raises: the dilemma of how we should treat such contested commodities in the transitional period before coercive circumstances are removed. As a self-avowed pragmatist, Radin believes that we should evaluate each case on its own terms, 'and keep redeciding as time goes on.'

In her view, for example, we should decriminalise the sale of sexual services but also, in order to check the domino effect, prohibit pimping and recruitment. Prostitution contracts should be made unenforceable, since this smacks of the legal ownership of another's body, and the idea of banning advertisements for sexual services should be considered, so as to defend private discourse about sex from corruption by the rhetoric of commodification.

On the other hand, the selling of children should not be permitted since babies, unlike prostitutes, cannot decide whether, under current non-ideal circumstances, they are better off as commodities, and because the domino effect would be particularly strong: a market in children would make it difficult not to be aware of the economic value of one's children, or of oneself as a child.

As for surrogacy, Radin concludes--with notable ambivalence--that paid surrogacy should probably be banned, with the ultimate aim being to prevent the language and concepts of commodity exchange from permeating the normal processes of procreation and parenting.

As befitting its author's position as a professor of Law at Stanford University, Radin's book is rigorously argued, refreshingly free of ideological presuppositions and, showing great respect for the complexity of the problems under consideration, devoid of cavalier assertions and conclusions. Even so, her analysis contains elements of ambiguity, as well as of personal ambivalence, which may frustrate readers.

In particular, Radin takes the pragmatist's view that 'there are no bright lines separating words and facts', and that damage to human personhood is always damage to our understanding of human personhood.

Thus, Radin argues that the harm inflicted by the economic rhetoric that sees children as commodities, and the harm caused by the actual trading of babies, is of the same kind--'the harm is forthrightly discursive'--and that, if we permit the former and ban the latter, this is because the former 'is different in magnitude from that of consummated sales, not because it is different in kind.'

A determined materialist will not find this argument convincing, and some may also wonder whether Radin should not be more sympathetic to the arguments of the so-called domino theory.

Were she to read Arlie Russell Hochschild's latest thoughts on 'the fate of love and care' in the era of capitalist globalisation, in The Commercialisation of Intimacy, then her outlook might not be so sanguine.

Hochschild's textual analysis of contemporary women's advice books, for instance, shows how the earlier, patriarchal--but emotionally rich--tone of these books has given way to a cool, instrumental outlook on sexual love and intimacy, which bears all the hallmarks of the market mentality. The books now advocate a hardened, calculating, detached female self, stripped of emotional dependencies and less likely to be hurt--the same 'thin' self that Radin believes underwrites the discourse of universal commodification. Feminism has thus been 'abducted', Hochschild claims, in much the same way that Calvinism was exploited in order to legitimise the cultural spirit of capitalism. Instead of challenging the commercial spirit of patriarchal society, these books 'conserve the already capitalised male culture', and encourage women 'to assimilate to male rules of love.'

This apparent transformation of domestic life, in which emotional bonds are deliberately pared down in order to 'adapt us to survival in a destabilising culture of capitalism', is reinforced, in a vicious circle, by social trends which make family life increasingly stressful. Women's unprecedented participation in paid employment, and men's failure to adapt to this by sharing domestic chores, contributes to high divorce rates and growing numbers of working single mothers, as well as reconstituted families which require the difficult elaboration of new kinship patterns. Meanwhile, the corporate community has taken over many of the civic activities previously performed in the home and in the neighbourhood. Hochschild cites examples of companies with gyms, take-home meal services, on-site banks and stores, dry cleaners and hairdressers, health support groups, singles clubs, and a wide variety of organised sporting and recreational activities. For many of the employees Hochschild interviewed in her research, the company was also the major source of security in their lives: the one dependable partner in a life of serial marriage and divorce.

There seem to be two major consequences of these trends. First of all, workers have taken to applying the uncomplicated standards and values of the workplace to their personal lives, either as a means of making their homes run more smoothly, or as a means of quantifying the injustices they perceive in them. Reflecting on the research she undertook for her previous book, The Time Bind, Hochschild recalls a number of workers who transferred the images and language of the workplace to the home, including a man who improved his marriage by treating his wife as his primary 'customer', a women who likened her domestic chores to 'running a bed and breakfast', and a grandmother who complained that caring for her grandchildren was equivalent to 'babysitting'. Home life becomes a place of burdensome work because, as the domino theory predicts, the growth of commodified substitutes for household activities make those activities seem like unpaid labour.

The second consequence is that, as the subtitle of The Time Bind insists, 'work becomes home and home becomes work'. The employees that Hochschild studied increasingly see work as an escape from the trials and frustrations of home--a perception that is unintentionally strengthened by desperate attempts to save scarce time by applying the principles of efficiency to private life. The saddest figures in Hochschild's book include the mothers who elect to do overtime 'just to get away from the house', and a father whose technical competence in the factory is never in doubt, but whose son barely communicates with him. With fashionable worker-empowerment programmes bestowing honour, appreciation and ceremonial rewards on successful employees, and women who eschew wearing their wedding rings remaining proud to sport the company pin on their lapels, Hochschild identifies 'a Durkheimian solidarity at work that was sometimes missing at home.'

In fact, around a fifth of the employees of the company Hochschild studied 'described work as the "haven" and home as--if not a heartless world--a lesser haven.'

Perhaps the most interesting essay in this collection examines the 'economy of gratitude' in the home. Here, Hochschild challenges the idea that gift-giving is an inherently personal affair, and points out that what constitutes a 'gift', deserving of gratitude, is 'profoundly cultural', since it reflects a social interpretation of the boundary between what is rightfully due and what is a voluntary extra. The importance of this observation, for Hochschild, is that it allows us to comprehend how the 'misgiving' of gifts causes unhappiness in domestic relationships.

This mis-giving derives from clashing interpretations of the boundary between the obligatory and the voluntary. For instance, a man, comparing himself with his male friends or his father, may see his small contribution to household chores as a gift, warranting gratitude, whereas his wife, who is informed by modern ideas of gender equity, sees her husband's efforts as 'welcome but not extra, not a gift'.

Hochschild's analysis is particularly useful in demonstrating how patriarchy reproduces itself through these cultural frames of reference, lowering the expectations of women--thus making the husband's slightest concession appear as a gift--and raising the expectations of men.

Her discussion is not without its problems, however. Though claiming to be studying the giving of gifts, Hochschild actually finds herself examining conflicts over the negotiation of obligatory dues, since it is only when the books are balanced, in the eyes of both participants, that a contribution is consensually perceived as voluntary.

Yet in practice, these conflicts are corrosive of the very bonds that gift-giving is meant to generate, since they follow a market logic which potentially converts into fungible, tradeable currency any and every contribution (whether practical, emotional or sexual) which one partner may have made to another's well-being. 'Much of marital dialogue is trying to work out just how much a stint of housework, disapproval-shielding, or "taking it from the boys about your wife's higher salary" counts in the currency of gratitude'.

Quite so; and in other chapters, Hochschild provides more depressing examples, such as the woman who withdraws emotional warmth and sexual contact when her husband fails to help in the home--thus trading her 'emotional labour' (a singularly troubling concept, the growing use of which epitomises the phenomenon of the domino effect) for her husband's housework.

Hochschild's analysis of the commercialisation of intimate life thus seems to stall at the most critical juncture, for what is really needed is a theory of personal relationships--of the so-called 'economy of gratitude'--which is fully shorn of the language of exchange.