How to break out of the commodification of everything

July 14, 2025
bill
Bio economy, Degrowth, Demise of the Left
0 Comments

Regular readers will know that I run a bit, like lots. Last week, while I was in Europe, I decided to stay on Australian time, given the brevity of the mission, so I found myself running at midnight or just after awaking at 22:00 or 23:00 (after going to sleep around 14:00). It turned out to be a good strategy because the abnormally (scary) high temperatures during the day last week in Europe gave way to warm nights with just a hint of crispness in the air – perfect running conditions. Yesterday morning, though, I was in Melbourne, Australia and set off on my early run (around 7:00 being Sunday) and I was a bit tired from yesterday’s Parkrun in Newcastle. Yes, I move around a bit. This morning though, I saw more than the usual numbers out and about on the familiar running areas in the park lands of Melbourne and soon came across Run Melbourne, a large event with screaming speakers, ridiculous geeing-up announcers on microphones, and thousands of people blocking the usual serene early morning paths along the Yarra River. I had earlier been re-reading Chapter 13 of Harry Braverman’s colossal book from 1974 (which everyone should read) – Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century – which was published by Monthly Review Press. The words of – Harry Braverman – came back to me as I tried to work out a way around yesterday morning’s mayhem down by the river.

Harry Braverman and the spreading profit machine

Harry Braverman died a premature death as a result of cancer in 1976, not long after he published Labor and Monopoly Capital.

It was a great pity because his magnificent legacy to radical research and writing was cut short.

You can see his extant works though on the – Marxists’ Internet Archive: Harry Braverman – starting with his writing as a 20-year old in 1940 up to 1959 (the Archive is incomplete so far).

In the blog posts above, I have covered some of his ideas in more detail.

Harry Braverman examined what he termed his “de-skilling” hypothesis where capital systematically restructured labour processes to enhance their control in order to extract higher profits.

He also proposed that commodification was becoming generalised under Capitalism – extending into more and more areas of our ‘social’ lives.

Progressively, these ‘labour processes’ (market-values) subsume our whole lives – sport, leisure, learning, family – the lot.

Everything becomes a capitalist surplus-creating process.

This process has intensified under neoliberalism – it seeks to commodify everything.

That is create labour processes that produce commodities for profit.

The spread of the labour process is one of the characteristic features of the last several decades.

Even those activities that have previously been part of our non-working lives – our lives away from the oppression of work – are targets for commodification.

If you read Labor and Monopoly Capital, you will find that Braverman tried to reorientate the debate on the Left back to the essence of work and the dynamics of surplus value production as it affected the way people worked and lived.

He was particularly interested in how workplaces were changing as the corporate structures became more concentrated and politically powerful.

This was the beginning of the period when the Left were becoming obsessed with ‘post modernism’ and losing touch with the essence of the Marxist tradition.

So various dead-ends starting emerging – gender, ethnicity, sexuality. Identity politics!

I am not saying these are dead-ends because of their unimportance.

Each of these issues is crucially important.

But as the Left splintered into various groups pursuing one identity issue or another, it lost a central organising focus – the class conflict between labour and capital – within which the pursuit of these identity issues would have been more powerful and effective.

With the two trends – an obsession with ‘individualism’ (breaking down the collective and societal understandings of poverty, unemployment etc) and the broadening of the labour processes – many aspects of our society changed fundamentally.

Harry Braverman wrote (p.14):

And finally, the new wave of radicalism of the 1960s was animated by its own peculiar and in some ways unprecedented concerns. Since the discontents of youth, intellectuals, feminists, ghetto populations, etc., were produced not by the “breakdown” of capitalism but by capitalism functioning at the top of its form, so to speak, working at its most rapid and energetic pace, the focus of rebellion was now somewhat different from that of the past. At least in part, dissatisfaction centered not so much on capitalism’s inability to provide work as on the work it provides, not on the collapse of its productive processes but on the appalling effects of these processes at their most “successful.” It is not that the pressures of poverty, unemployment, and want have been eliminated — far from it — but rather that these have been supplemented by a discontent which cannot be touched by providing more prosperity and jobs because these are the very things that produced this discontent in the first place.

Remember this was written in 1974 and he was commenting on the experience of an evolving full employment situation where workers had jobs but the jobs were being redesigned, restructured – call it how you like – into activities that increasingly alienated the workers and increased the surplus value creation for capital.

So, calling for more jobs might sound like a reasonable thing for a Leftist to advocate but our conception of full employment has to be different now to ensure we are not just satisfied with creating work.

Politicians are wont to tell us how many jobs they are creating as if that is a standard to aspire to.

But what Harry Braverman was telling us way back then was that the way Capitalism was evolving was no way forward if we wanted sustained prosperity for all.

In – Chapter 13 The Universal Market – Harry Braverman begins by noting that the:

The scale of capitalist enterprise, prior to the development of the modern corporation, was limited by both the availability of capital and the management capacities of the capitalist or group of partners.

As a consequence, the scope of capitalist enterprise in our lives, while central to our capacity to obtain wage payments, was somewhat limited.

There were many activities in our daily lives, particularly within the family, that had not yet become ‘labour processes’.

The spreading of the labour process, where increasingly, every hour of every day is ripe for commodification is exactly what Harry Braverman predicted in the early 1970s in ‘Chapter 13 The Universal Market’ of Labor and Monopoly Capital.

He clearly understood that capitalist profit-making would seek to impose its constructs on all aspects of human activity.

Even those activities that were previously part of our non-working lives – our lives away from the oppression of work.

Where we have fun.

The aim of Capital was to make everything ‘work’ by which a special meaning was attached – that activity that allowed private capital to make profits and accumulate more capital.

So activity or effort that helped communities – plant a tree or help an elderly person wash or whatever – was not considered to be work under this spread of labour processes.

Such work was vilified as being unproductive and constituted boondoggling.

That is one of the reasons the elites are so opposed to government direct employment creation.

They are scared that people might challenge the concept of ‘work’ and start realising that effort expended outside of the profit-making machine is, in fact, highly rewarding, if not just because it connects us as humans and rewards our inner needs to be useful to each other and feel good when someone else is feeling good.

If that idea spread then the game would be up for the elites.

We would not keep supplying more effort to private capital at diminishing or flat real wages growth.

We would not tolerate millions of people being unemployed and being used as a rump (a reserve army) to suppress wages growth.

Importantly, we would start to see that governments could use their fiscal powers to create commonwealth rather than private wealth and we would not tolerate corporate welfare at the expense of more general human welfare.

If we judge all human endeavour and activity by whether they are of value in a sense that we judge private profit making then we will limit our potential and our happiness.

So what has this to do with Fun Runs

All this is relevant, I think, to what has happened with community sport and mass participation events.

Sport was once considered to be the antithesis of ‘work’.

It was part of our play to soothe our souls (and bodies) after the hours of working for the boss to generate profits that the corporation would enjoy.

Increasingly, sport is now work – a labour process creating surplus value – albeit as a variation on the normal work process.

Retired Australian Professor of Sport Policy, Bob Stewart, who formerly played for the Melbourne Football Club in Australia’s premier football competition, published a magnificent article in 1980 – The Nature of Sport under Capitalism and its Relationship to the Capitalist Labour Process in the journal Sporting Traditions, 6(1), 43-61]

Bob Stewart traces the characteristics of modern sport that define it as a work place rather than a leisure activity, which is an “activity … performed for its own sake, or as an end in itself”.

An ‘activity performed for its own sake’.

The – Running boom of the 1970s – was a really great movement and:

… The boom was primarily a ‘jogging’ movement in which running was generally limited to personal physical activity and often pursued alone for recreation and fitness …

Growth in jogging began in the late 1960s,[1] building on a post-World War II trend towards non-organized, individualistic, health-oriented physical and recreational activities.

Studies have shown a continuous trend of ‘democratization’ among participants of running events since 1969 with broader socio-demographic representation among participants, including more female finishers …

It was community oriented and brought lots of people into contact with each other, who would normally not interact.

It engendered a sense of self worth and improved the health of participants, notwithstanding the growth in sporting injuries.

But it was also too much fun to be left as it was.

The corporations saw profits in what began as just a grass roots movement.

And soon enough the ‘fun run’ concept emerged and it has intensified since.

Except the fun bit was subjugated for the profit bit.

Now these mass community events are major profit makers for the companies that organise and stage them.

Participants pay enormous entry fees enticed by the chance to receive a plastic finishing token or some other piece of trivia.

High-priced merchandise is flogged to the participants as ‘mementos’ – probably made for a fraction of the retail price.

They also turn people into walking advertising boards for corporations yet the people earn no remuneration.

Cities get closed down at great inconvenience to the public so the corporations can make profit.

The event organisers are crafty and often suggest these are charity events.

The evidence is that most of these events do not contribute a cent to charity – although individual participants might raise money off their own back during the events.

This article – How much of your fun run entry fee goes to charity? – documents research into that question.

I thought the evidence that “the break even point where the fun run costs are covered is roughly 1600-1800 entrants” was interesting even though that threshold was event specific.

The event that crippled inner-city Melbourne yesterday – Run Melbourne – had by their own accounting ‘more than 27,000 runners’.

Run Melbourne, which is representative of these big events, also refuses to disclose its books so we have no idea of how much the event costs to stage and how much profit they take from the $A168 adult fee for the half-marathon, $A95 for the 10k event, and $A69 for the 5.5k event.

They hold out that they have raised lots for charities but this comes via individuals making their own appeals to sponsors to contribute if they finish.

Run Melbourne also note that “No portion of the entry fee will be donated to charity. Entry fees are used to cover the cost of staging the event.”

Yet they will not disclose the break down of costs and profits.

Go figure.

The participants become part of the surplus value producing machine that masquerades as a community event.

And while in other labour processes, workers at least get paid for some of the hours they give to the profit machine, the runners/walkers in these community events pay the organisers so they can be used to make profits.

Which is why I love Parkrun

Parkrun – is the antithesis of this profit-machine that has taken over our leisure and sporting fun.

Every Saturday, runners all over the world, line up at 8:00 (sometimes 9:00) for their weekly 5km run, walk, whatever.

It is organised by volunteers – the revolving group who run most weeks but offer their services occasionally to keep the show running.

There are no entry fees.

All participants are timed and there is an elaborate world-wide database that allows one to track their history.

Some run fast (or try to in my case).

Some walk.

I have done parkruns in the UK, Japan, Netherlands and Australia.

Every time I sense the same spirit which is the antithesis of capitalism.

There is a massive sense of engagement and bonhomie among those who participate.

There is minimal corporate involvement and it is restricted to acknowledging the sponsors at the start of the event.

There is some merchandise available via the home page but all proceeds go back into growing the movement.

It is taking us back to the running boom of the 1970s where the emphasis was on participation, exercise and community.

Conclusion

A bit of a different blog post.

Parkrun is an example of a movement that gives me some hope that we can work ourselves back to a past without labour processes intervening in everything we do.

I see these movements being integral to advancing the bio economy based on localism and community action rather than the prioritisation of private profit.

I will write more about the research I am doing in this area in further posts.

That is enough for today!