“The enemy now is nothing less than a force lusting to make the world their personal Walmart — everything is cheapened — human lives and cultures, the personhood of women, the wealth of the land and air and water that is the life of the planet — all for their purchase and disposal. Akin is a tiny demon in the stream of Mammon, but he’s (also) another telling blip. We cannot just defeat them in this election, we must make sure that every last one of their outmoded, inhumane theories are debunked and permanently wiped clean from any further valid consideration in public policy, education, and history. This is the past that needs to be swept clean away, boxed securely and dumped in the darkest cellar we can find.”
I wrote those words at Daily Kos in response to the remarks on “legitimate rape” made by Todd Akin, Missouri’s Republican senatorial candidate. At the encouragement of my Daily Kos colleagues, I have expanded my thoughts, which I share with you here today.
What came out of Akin’s mouth was a blip on the sonar screen of a larger and widely held belief, a belief deeply ingrained in our society, and one that will take all our efforts to root out not just during this election cycle, but over the coming generations. Undoubtedly, the platform the Republican Party will build in the lead up to their convention in a few weeks will be a free-market free-for-all we’ve come to expect, now with legalizing rape an undercurrent. But the larger picture is all-consuming commodification.
A commodity is the generic term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services. The Republican platform is a way to further facilitate commodification of our country, its finite resources and its people. It is about removing governmental obstacles so companies can have their way, and in terms of women’s reproductive freedom, under this mindset, it’s easy for those of this belief to imagine that our bodies are ‘real estate’, a commodity whose future use is to be determined and controlled by someone else.
We’re familiar with the model used a few hundred years ago when cheap-to-free labor was used to fire up the economic engine of America’s Southern agricultural industry. The cost of that industrialization was horrific human misery, which we are still trying to progress ourselves past, with some still fighting against that progress. And they’re fighting hard.