Merchandization is a critical term coined by the anti-globalization movement to designate the process of changing the viewpoint of individuals or society towards an object, service, or substance. Things that were formerly thought of as "simply being there" are now being thought of as commodities for sale and corporate profit. This change in viewpoint is called the merchandization of an object.

For example, anti-globalization and anti-capitalism activists claim that in today's society, many things, including health care, culture, and education, are becoming mere merchandise.

Marx discussed this "fetishism of commodities" in the nineteenth century.

In other words, something may have usefulness, but it has no value unless it can be exchanged in the marketplace for something else considered to have value. That value may come because it fills a need through consumption or is further exchanged. In this way, labor, time, and natural resources have come to serve the market instead of the other way around.

The slogan of ATTAC is "the World is not Merchandise" (le monde n'est pas une marchandise).

A related theoretical framework is Karl Polanyi's concept of "fictitious commodities," developed in his 1944 work The Great Transformation. Polanyi argued that land, labour, and money are the three principal things treated as market commodities in self-regulated economies, despite not having been produced for sale. Labour, in his view, is simply human activity inseparable from life itself; land is another name for nature; and money is a means of exchange created through banking or state finance rather than through production. Polanyi considered this fictitious treatment a necessary condition for the functioning of market societies, but one that generated internal contradictions requiring social countermovements to correct. His framework has been widely applied by anti-globalization scholars to analyse how processes of merchandization extend beyond goods into domains such as healthcare, education, and natural resources.

See also

• Anti-capitalism

References