When Selling Your Soul Isn't Enough

Georg Simmel wamed in 1900 that capitalism creates not only a market economy but also a market culture in which "money becomes the central and absolute value."' Some cultural critics seem to take the "root of all evil" claim seriously, asserting with rhetorical flourishes filled with normative hyperbole that commodification is the primary cause of all social problems. Our anxieties about money, however, are often vague and tempered by our sense that it appears to be more or less the best way to organize life and measure value in such a complex and pluralistic world. Somewhere between demonization of the market and blind faith in it lies a clear analysis of precisely what is wrong with the commodification of life. In his Bodies for Sale: Ethics and Exploitation in the Human Body Trade, Stephen Wilkinson attempts to parse the ethical criteria at work in critiques of commodification in order to apply them to contemporary debates regarding the commercialization of the human body. He devotes a chapter each to clarifying the relevance of exploitation, objectification, harm, consent, and coercion before putting them to work in the context of organ sales (where a piece of the body is sold as a physical object), paid surrogacy (where the body is "rented" or bought in its capacity to provide a service), and patenting human genetic material (where the body is sold as an abstract object). This is all immensely useful and should substantially advance these growing debates. We must note from the outset, however, that neither Marx nor his heirs appear at any point in the book. Wilkinson therefore ignores many of the deepest questions lurking beneath his analysis. Because his conceptions of terms such as exploitation and coercion stop at the boundaries of liberal presuppositions, his conclusion that markets in the human body can be justified are predictable. Likewise, he shifts between Kantian and Utilitarian perspectives when either threatens to test