Purity Politics? Moral Sensibilities and the Commodity Form

This paper provides a comparative historical sociology of a contemporary phenomenon: the tendency to equate “ethical” goods with aesthetic quality. Studies of moral markets suggest that this equation of ethics and quality would reveal a process whereby moral sensibilities saturate market forms and processes. Yet this paper argues that we should also examine how these forms and processes can condition moral sensibilities, not just absorb them. Drawing on primary source archival materials from late eighteenth century abolitionists and turn-of-the-twentieth-century consumer activists, the author demonstrates that these activists participated in a recurring purity politics of consumption conditioned by the commodity form. This manifests in activists’ equation of: 1) the treatment of the laborers and 2) the quality of the labor with 3) the quality of the goods. To claim that goods were pure, in many instances, was also to claim that the laborers and the labor conditions behind those goods were as well. This purity politics, further, entails both public and private ways of arguing for the equation of ethics and quality, as well as distinct civic visions of ethical labor. It also opens up ways to explore certain racialized dimensions of the commodity form.

Frictitious commodities: Virtuality, virtue and value in the carbon economy of repair

What ‘nature’ is being commodified in carbon markets, and why does it matter? How are carbon commodities and ecologies of repair co-produced through carbon forestry? Are the Polanyian notions of ‘fictitious commodification’ and ‘embeddedness’ appropriate for thinking about carbon forestry and voluntary carbon market (VCM) offsets? This article addresses these questions and extends the critical understanding of conservation in the ‘repair mode’ through an analysis that delves deeply into the black box of value production in the VCM. Focusing on the interplay of ‘virtuality’ and ‘virtue’ in the production of one variety of so-called ‘boutique’ blue forest carbon offset, this analysis demonstrates the technical abstractions needed isolate ‘carbon’ and force it into the commodity form create slippages between concrete socio-natures and geographies of offsetting and the imagined natures and geographies of a market environmentalist model of the world. This politics facilitates a dual pathway of accumulation via the material extraction of nature to feed the expansion of industrial growth (the subject of Polanyi’s critique) and, in parallel, through feeding new growth markets for nature-based commodities such as the VCM. These markets promise to repair the damage caused by industrial growth, but can only ‘work’ in the abstract, virtual realm despite entanglement with underlying concrete ecologies of repair. Based on this analysis, this article argues that the widespread view of carbon offsets as ‘embedded’ Polanyian fictitious commodities is incomplete, based on an ontological fallacy that conflates the ways in which concrete and abstracted, virtual ‘natures’ are used to produce value in the contemporary restoration economy. This fallacy implicitly reifies the central fictions and contradictions of carbon markets and the market environmentalist model more broadly. Considering VCM carbon forestry in terms of ‘scale-making’ and ‘world-making’ projects, the article presents an alternative conceptualisation of VCM carbon offsets as intangible ‘frictitious’ commodities that inhabit a complicated and only provisionally stabilised commodity form.

Rights Gone Wrong on the City’s Edge

This chapter states that the village residents, described as being displaced for a new urban zone in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, very much participated in the vision of an aesthetically upgraded city. Using state resettlement policies to examine the fiction that liberal property automatically delivers liberal political rights, the chapter shows how residents adopted the expectation that improvements to the land they occupied would improve their standing as urban citizens. The chapter also exhibits how land-related documents — including petitions, titles, government-issued reclamation orders, and a labyrinthine array of legal papers — simultaneously do and do not have the power to act on the world. In addition to offering a novel way of looking at land fictions in Vietnam, the chapter argues for a reconciliation of what have heretofore been seen as antagonistic Latourian and Marxist perspectives on fetishism. On the one hand, a Latourian perspective would rightly highlight how the land documents in this case engender novel forms of action. But such an approach would only capture part of the story, because the evidence also shows that documents like these also contribute to forms of mystification. This chapter further uses insights from Marx's critique of the commodity form to show the work of nonhuman actors in staging and maintaining the commodity fiction.

MAIN PROBLEMS OF WORKING CAPITAL ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT IN THE COMPANY

One of the main functions of the entire enterprise is the production, release of goods, its provision to the consumer, service and success. And the goal of each enterprise is to produce high-quality products, generate revenue and form its place in the market. Currently, the number of foreign and domestic enterprises working in the production sector is growing. Therefore, enterprises should always strive for innovation and consider the possibility of using advanced technologies in the production of goods. Production of goods directly related to the working capital of the enterprise. The article examines the structure of working capital within a certain enterprise and the features of its management. Considering the issues identified in the study, the main directions of working capital organization and management were proposed. Working capital can be divided into three stages of working capital maintenance. They are in the monetary, production, commodity. At the first stage of turnover, funds are advanced for raw materials, materials and labor items necessary for the production of other products. Capital is transferred from monetary form to commodity form. The second stage will produce products that will be consumed and contain the newly created value. At this stage, capital passes into the production form with the addition of labor from the commodity form, after which it passes into a new type of commodity. At the third stage, the production enterprise produces finished products and takes back the monetary form with the release of funds from the commodity form. When funds are credited to the company's current account for the products sold, the turnover is considered terminated. Since working capital is an important asset structure of the enterprise, its effective organization and management are important activities of the enterprise.

Non-Racialism: The New Form of Racial Inequality in a Neo-Apartheid South Africa

Non-racialism is a deep-rooted ideal in the history of resistance in South Africa. It is not only the basis of the post-apartheid legal order, but also crucial to the form of capitalism. This paper reinterprets non-racialism and inequality in post-1994 South Africa by revisiting conventional understandings of the nature of the state and the rule of law. It shows that racial inequality is inscribed in the non-racial form of the state. The non-racial democratic shell correlates with the commodity form. Scholars have neglected the shift in the form of the state after 1994, partly because they focus on policy and see the state as an external structure in a racial society.

Wesensform und Funktionswert

The essay begins with some historical considerations on design, philosophy and science. The subsequent reflections focus on the quasi-metaphysical prerequisites of the conditions under which design objects and design processes are produced and received. It is a question of the relationships that can be reconstructed – in the context of nature’s subjugation, work, and social interaction – between purposes of use and external and internal determination of form. Under the social conditions of the capitalist economy, design casts things, nature and people into commodity form. This makes it possible to communicate them and to communicate with them. And by doing this in an aesthetic way, design produces at the same time images or representations of things, nature and people beyond their commodity form. In the sphere of the aesthetic appearance of objects and processes, their functionalisation is exceeded. The aesthetic paradigm shift from the primacy of the form of the design object to the primacy of the social function of aesthetic practice – introduced by Walter Benjamin’s media aesthetics – is actualised in a contradictory fashion in contemporary high-tech communication.