It's All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources.

It's All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources

James Ridgeway. 2004. It's All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources. Duke University Press, Durham and London. ISBN 0-8223-3374-0 (paper) 0-8223-3426-7 (cloth). C$24/82

Under capitalism, an ever-widening array of things are transformed into private property and subjected to market relations, a process some have dubbed the 'commodification of everything'. The outcomes of this are the subject of James Ridgeway's book, It's All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources, which reviews, one by one, global patterns and future trajectories of commodity control, production, trade, and consumption, situating these historically, geopolitically, and in relation to environmental and social problems.

What emerges, not surprisingly, is a very uneven picture, with most commodities characterized by extreme imbalances in North-South consumption and dominated by a handful of massive transnational corporations. As Bertolt Brecht once put it, 'imperialism has an address', and Ridgeway helps to locate the addresses of the new sovereigns in the age of globalization. The result is a useful reference guide to global commodity chains, with the most detail given to fuels, metals, and food.

But what is missing is a map to help readers navigate the economic system itself, and the rules and ideological assumptions that underpin it. The absence of theoretically informed connections between and within chapters is stark, and there is only a brief introductory chapter and no concluding one (the book just abruptly ends, as do most chapters). Ridgeway's dispassionate journalistic style further gives the book an encyclopedic quality (Ridgeway is a staff writer for the left liberal New York City weekly The Village Voice).

For some, this approach will undoubtedly feel deficient. Scholars of political economy and international development will long for more on the process driving--and linking--the stories of individual commodities, from the dynamics of enclosures and primitive accumulation, to colonialism, to the economic architecture of globalization such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (the WTO and World Bank receive only scant attention, the IMF not a single mention).

The problems of narrow commodity dependence in many Third World countries could also have been discussed more systematically, particularly with reference to the extensive and ongoing work that the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has done on the issue. From environmental and social perspectives, the imbalances of trade and consumption could have been connected and fortified through the important concept of ecological footprinting and with reference to the United Nations Development Programme's figures on the distribution of global wealth. Related to the lack of theory and structural analysis is the absence of discussion of alternatives, such as the need to democratize political and economic structures on multiple scales.

One danger with such an approach is that it could leave the reader bewildered about what can be done to challenge the vast concentrations of private power described. The end of the water chapter provides a good example of Ridgeway's potentially debilitating style: "We more or less have given up on doing anything about it. Instead of attempting to put a stop to pollution through government regulation, we will just switch to bottled water. We look forward to a future in which the commodity most necessary to sustaining life ends up in the hands of private corporations" (p. 8). In sharp contrast, Immanuel Waller-stein (2002:38) argues that to build stronger anti-systemic movements, and ultimately more socially just and ecologically sustainable systems of production and consumption, "one of the most useful [strategic considerations]--substantively, politically, psychologically--is the attempt to move towards selective, but ever-widening, de-commodification."

In short, one could argue that Ridgeway needed to draw many more lines connecting the dots. After all, aspiring to neutrality is an inescapably political stance, "a passive acceptance of the existing distribution" of power (Jensen 2004). But what makes the effectiveness of the book so difficult to assess is that there is no doubt Ridgeway believes the global economy is deeply inequitable and environmentally destructive. Thus, it must have been a strategic decision to describe outcomes without process and evidence without theory, while striving to conceal his ideological foundations.

The question of whether this is effective, I think, relates to an important question that activists and activist-minded scholars invariably wrestle with in the struggle for change: how do we convince our wealthy, largely unconscious society about the scale, scope, and urgency of the world's social and environmental problems? This challenge is made especially difficult by the fact that so many people have been taught and socialized to see radical thinking as something vaguely menacing at worst, hopelessly unrealistic at best.

For activists and scholars, it is always easier writing or 'preaching to the converted' (conversion here implying a broad sphere of shared concern, if not ideological agreement). It is much harder to pry the 'unconverted' away from Reality TV, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, and SUVs, and to encourage them to think critically about the problems of the world and the need for individual and collective revolutions. And perhaps it is here where Ridgeway is partly aiming, and quite possibly successful. For those not already concerned and aware about the nature of globalization, and predisposed to disregard ideologically-explicit critiques, It's All for Sale might provide a useful entry point to inspire a more critical understanding of the world (i.e. the dots can get connected later).

Given its utility as a guide to corporate power along commodity chains--and whether in spite of or because of what is left out--this book can be a good complementary textbook for undergraduate courses on geopolitics and global environment and development issues.

References

Jensen, Robert. 2004. The Myth of the Neutral Professional. Progressive Librarian 24 (Winter). retrieved at: http://www.libr.org/PL/24_Jensen.html

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2002. New Revolts Against the System. New Left Review 18: 29-39.

Reviewed by Tony Weis, Department of Geography, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada, N6A 5C2.