Is the commodification of everything a predictable outcome of capitalism?

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How do we commoditize evil black men who should be rotting in jail?

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A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.

Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

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By the mid twentieth century a mass consumer culture had evolved which was capable of commodifying much more than Marx had ever envisioned in his day. By the 1950's, abstract ideas like lifestyle and art were marketed and sold as pop culture. Hugh Hefner sold the Playboy idea of the suave, cultured, swinging bachelor. Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegal sold the Las Vegas idea that anyone could strike it rich at the gaming tables. Jack Kerouac helped create the Beatnik culture. Hollywood contributed, with the likes of James Dean and Marlon Brando, the individualistic, albeit apolitical, social rebel. After all, a rebel without a political cause is hardly a threat to the status quo.

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While culture as a commodity tends to be upbeat and cheerful (happy, optimistic people buy more), it also has its darker side.

Today almost two million Americans are locked up in prisons and jails. Another five million are on parole or probation. Together this is around two percent of the total American population, higher if only adults are counted. Many millions more have cycled through the American criminal justice system and now lead the stigmatized, second class, politically disenfranchised lives of convicted felons and ex-convicts.

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Inmates are exploited for free labor

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Inmates are exploited for free labor - a practice which can be traced back to Convict Leasing after the Civil War

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Did you finish high school?

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