![]() ![]() The most important distinction, perhaps, was between the human and the nonhuman: proletarianization is, after all, a human process.Ĭommodification, on the other hand, tends to overwhelm distinctions, starting with the human-nonhuman: while only humans can be proletarianized, everything can be “priced”-placed in a relationship with other things that can be expressed in terms of a number. Labor history and business history-as they were written up through, say, the 1990s-thrived on drawing distinctions, on identifying stages of development and differentia specifica. ![]() This boundlessness is quite different from the implicit premises of a narrative focused on proletarianization. Sklansky argued that one of the reasons why commodification has become such an important frame for new histories of capitalism is because-unlike proletarianization-it seems to have no necessary boundaries. ![]() ![]() Now, at the end of last week’s post, I began a discussion of Jeffrey Sklansky’s equation of commodification with quantification. Before beginning this week’s post, I owe an apology for being a tardy or absent respondent to comments on previous posts, especially last week’s-I just realized today that I’ve left two comments hanging. ![]()
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