Commodity Identity
How a society built on consumption leaves us rootless, reshapes our relationships, and turns grievance into political power
We live in a world of commodities. Rather than enriching life, they often leave us poorer—not in money, but in meaning. Surrounded by things, we’re nudged to attend to objects more than to one another.
I have lived in villages where people come first—wants are modest, and care and generosity weave through everyday life. By comparison, our consumer world feels thin. We accumulate possessions but have fewer real friends. Although we enjoy the advantages of modern life, consumer society teaches us to measure life by what we consume rather than by what we share.
This poverty of relationship shows itself when desire meets cost. Each calculation reminds us that scarcity sets the terms—and teaches us to say no even to those who need help. We rationalize the refusals; each one hardens us a little.
There is a deeper impoverishment: we build identity out of things. Advertising promises that the right brand will make us sexier, healthier, more admired. Consumption becomes a performance of self. While people have long used things to mark status and meaning, what is new is the scale: markets now flood every corner of life with commodities.
Even memory is filtered through objects. Souvenirs, gifts, heirlooms stand in for relationships we value. Yet the market intrudes here as well. A guitar made for me by a friend carries trust and affection in its very grain; a store-bought instrument, however fine, arrives stripped of story. Estate sales make the point plainly: memory reduced to inventory.
Today the market mediates nearly every exchange. It brings distant goods, and it deepens inequality. Wealth concentrates; most people sell their labor and must brand themselves as if they were products. Work becomes identity. In the U.S., the first question to a stranger is often, “What do you do?” In my wife’s village in Mexico, it is, “Who are your kin?”
Traditional communities once anchored identity in kin, neighborhood, and mutual aid. Small-town America shared that ethos—neighbors helping neighbors, obligations and care knitting lives together. Labor markets demand mobility; globalization hastens the erosion. Plants close, young people leave, those who stay face shrinking options. While moving away may open up greater opportunities, it also leaves people rootless, as nothing can quite replace the bonds they leave behind.
The strain shows everywhere: paychecks stretched thin, credit propping up budgets until it fails, foreclosures hollowing neighborhoods. Each crisis frays social ties and leaves grievance in the gaps.
Grievance seeks a target. Populism feeds on that hunger. Slogans promising a return to greatness and “family values” speak to people who feel abandoned. Immigrants, political opponents, the “deep state” are cast as culprits. He thrives by turning loss into resentment, and resentment into a weapon against imagined enemies.
What’s at stake is more than consumer choice or economic efficiency. When identity is built out of commodities and labor is treated as just another thing to buy and sell, we lose sight of the ties that once gave life meaning. Communities unravel; in the vacuum, resentment becomes currency. Populists convert that loss into power. The task is to remember that we are not commodities, and our worth is not a brand, a wage, or a ledger. What sustains a democratic people are care, kin, and trust—ties no market can price, and without which no republic endures.
Suggested Readings
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Farmer, Paul. “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below.” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 261–283.
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011.
Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park, eds. Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital across the Last Millennium. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.
Guyer, Jane I. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Park, Thomas K., and James B. Greenberg. The Roots of Western Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital in the Ancient World. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944].
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Thank you for your summary of profit over people. We have been called the richest nation in the world 🌎. And yet as far as community and relationships one of the poorest. Scandinavian nations surpass us in this area. Norway 🇳🇴 uses is oil profits to help its people and others. Even China 🇨🇳 does more than America 🇺🇸 for their people. For our very survival we must change our mindset from profit back to people.
Very good essay--again, a apt X-ray of what ails us...
Reading this causes me some pain--a deep spasm of nostalgia (the pain of missing home)--Not for my literal home--sadly, it wasn't the place a sane person would miss--But for the small-town-ness of my childhood Queens, New York neighborhood...
I say "neighborhood" because we weren't separated, like legitimate towns, from other neighborhoods by stretches of highway, or forests or bodies of water. In the city it was all one big structure, broken by various commercial no-man's-lands of factories or used car lots.
But once you got into a distinct "neighborhoos" like mine it had most the components of any small town in the country at large...
Not to wax too nostalgic--a common symptom of the old--but I have lived long enough to see the whole country tuned into a place where everyone is constantly connected and, at the same time, everyone is a stranger; this is the great irony of our time. Without understanding just how it happened, we awake in 2025 to find ourselves in a no-mans-land of thick-walled commercial/emotional/political silos-- and, as you suggest, we inevitably feel alienated, lonely and disenfranchised.
BUT--at least for the time being--we are all STILL human. We want human companionship; we need human society. From there, it doesn't take much for a demagogue to politicize/monetize this state of disconnection and separation--to "unite" OUR tribe against THEIR tribe... To get fat and rich off the panic that comes from mass loneliness, desperation and anger.
Anyway, as always, you've written a great analysis of what we once had and what has been lost.
The question is, of course, can it be retrieved. Maybe history doesn't work that way; maybe its nothing but dead-end Malthusian mathematics until we extinguish ourselves and evolution starts all over again... I confess that I'm too cynical too have much hope--But it's always possible that people will wake up and discover they're being robbed and treated like herd animals; And--provided there are still elections-- vote these criminals out of office...