1 Capitalism and the Commodification of Domestic and Leisure Activities
Thomas, a 25-year-old unemployed musician, buys and sells secondhand guitars locally on a web platform.1 Elisabeth, aged 42, quit her job as an IT engineer to sell home-sewn items on her online Etsy shop and to take care of her young children. Delphine, a 30-year-old middle-class civil servant earns freebies and money from advertising and partnerships with food brands thanks to her food blog. Deborah, aged 22, pays her rent from her paid activity as a camgirl performing erotic and pornographic online shows from home. Kolia, a 55-year-old intermittent low-skilled worker, and his 60-year-old pensioner wife Natalia sell their household-farm produce to supplement Natalia’s pension.
All these individuals commodify their personal belongings or the products of their domestic and leisure activities. This book explores the marketization of practices previously considered to be recreational or domestic, such as blogging, cooking, craftwork, gardening, knitting, selling secondhand items, sexcamming, and, more generally, the economic use of free time.
Market expansion into areas not previously commodified is a long-standing phenomenon (Polanyi 1944) which creates new professions. For example, care workers are professionals who live off the commodification of traditionally free domestic activities. Similarly, artists and sportsmen make a living from the commodification of leisure activities. This book addresses the expansion of capitalism into domestic and leisure realms with a focus on the non-professional side of these markets.
Why are ordinary people who used to engage in domestic and leisure activities for free now trying to make a profit from them? How and why do people commodify their free time? Commodification and marketization are considered as synonymous here. These terms refer to taking an unpaid activity conducted in an individual’s free time, and transforming it into a market product with a price tag. People who set out to make money from activities previously considered outside of the realm of paid work are not necessarily looking to “professionalize” their domestic or leisure activity or try to make a living from it. This then lends different meanings to the “extra money” generated by the commodification process.
“Extra money” can mean “pin money” to middle- and upper-class individuals with additional sources of income, who are just looking to finance the cost of their domestic or leisure activity. “Extra money” can also be seen as “savings” by people who commodify domestic and leisure activities as a form of “side job.” This applies to people from the lower classes struggling to make ends meet, but also to middle- and upper-class workers anticipating a drop in income and wanting to maintain their social status by developing a side job. Lastly, “extra money” can also refer to the income from a main activity in the process of being professionalized. These distinct meanings of “extra money,” which echo the “social meaning of money” depicted by V. Zelizer (1997), correspond to different amounts of money and different types of commitment to commodification. Meaning varies by the social class and gender of the people who commodify their domestic and leisure activities. The particular focus in this book is on gendered and/or popular domestic and leisure activities. There tends to be a lack of academic studies on these activities, which are seen as trivial and demeaning. Our aim is to show that commodification pervades even the most mundane social activities and that it takes on different meanings depending on the individuals’ social characteristics and life histories.
1.1 Market Expansion
Two competing sets of theories analyze the overall social effect of commodification. On the one hand, some theories condemn the “moral contamination” of growing commodification in social relations. These belong to what V. Zelizer calls the “hostile worlds” theories based on the idea that “Such a profound contradiction exists between intimate social relations and monetary transfers that any contact between the two spheres inevitably leads to moral contamination and degradation” (Zelizer 2000: 817). This common assumption is shared by Marxist theory of “commodity fetishism” (Marx 1992), the Frankfurt School’s criticism of the global commodification of culture (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002), anthropological thinking on commoditization versus singularization (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986), and even social theories observing a disconnect between profit-maximizing large-scale production and pure production based on the rejection of the economy (Bourdieu 1980, 1996). Applied to the case of the marketization of domestic and leisure activities, these theories see commodification as a form of “denaturing” everyday activities. Rather than conducting domestic and leisure activities for themselves, they are seen in an instrumental light as work to meet the needs of customers outside the domestic sphere. This consequently changes their meaning for the people conducting them. On the other hand, another body of theories points to the positive social impact of marketization. Economic theories see commodification as positive for consumers, since it helps consumers make choices by displaying prices that capture the quality of the goods (Spence 1974). Commodification is also positive for producers. It can economically empower subordinate social groups, especially women, by means of the commodification of their activity. Feminist scholars have long argued that access to the labor market releases women from the household burden and their subaltern position (Delphy 1977). Putting a price on domestic work and traditional feminine leisure is said to secure social recognition of their “invisible work” (Kaplan Daniels 1987) and potentially access to welfare. It is also argued that it empowers women and low-skilled individuals by granting them access to their own earnings. From these angles, marketization is considered as a form of valuation, both for the products and the producers, and both economically and symbolically. This book draws on these different research fields to answer the empirical questi...