In its most frequent description, capitalism has an inherent tendency to dissolve previous social relations and to transform all objects of private life previously outside its control into commodities. The human beings produced by this growing expansion of the market would be completely dominated by capitalism. Their very needs would be created by the market and through the manipulation of public opinion by the mass media controlled by capital. We would thus be moving in the direction of increasingly regimented societies dominated by the major centres of economic power. Given that the working class would be increasingly incorporated into the system at the same time, no radically anti-capitalist sector would exist and future prospects would appear more and more bleak. Hence the deep pessimism of an Adorno. But this picture does not at all correspond with reality. It is without doubt true that the phenomenon of commodification is at the heart of the multiple dislocations of traditional social relations. But this does not mean that the only prospect thrown up by such dislocations is the growing passive conformity of all aspects of life to the laws of the market.

The response to the negative effects of the commodification process can be a whole variety of struggles which attempt to subject the activities of the market to social regulation. This does not necessarily have to be state regulation; numerous forms of local and national organization -- consumer organizations, for example -- can be given the power to participate. Only a nostalgia for traditional social relations can maintain an exclusively pessimistic vision of this process. And it is worth remembering that the world broken up by capitalist expansion was far from idyllic and was the source of many relations of subordination. More crucially still, a world organized round traditional social relations is one in which the possibilities of variation and transformation are strictly limited: human beings cannot choose and build their own life because it has already been organized for them by a pre-existent social system. The dislocation of social relations, on the other hand -- generated by a phenomenon such as commodification -- provokes acts of resistance which launch new social actors into the historical arena; and the new actors, precisely because they are moving on a dislocated terrain, must constantly reinvent their own social forms.

In one sense, our analysis keeps within the field of Marxism and attempts to reinforce what has been one of its virtues: the full acceptance of the transformations entailed by capitalism and the construction of an alternative project that is based on the ground created by these transformations, not on opposition to them. [Emphasis in original]