Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities by Luc Boltanski

Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities by Luc Boltanski

Part I
Destruction and Creation of
Wealth

1
The Age of the Enrichment Economy
The deindustrialization of Western Europe
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, in Western societies, mass
production was no longer viewed as the only way – perhaps not even as the
principal way – to maximize profits and accumulate wealth. For capitalism,
too, the extension beyond mass production proved to be a necessity
imposed by the requirement of profit as the possibilities opened up by that
form of production, initially considered virtually infinite, seemed to reach
their limits. While the standard form was not abandoned, the extension of
capitalism entailed financialization and – in the realm of the production
and/or commercialization of objects – the redrawing of geopolitical maps.
Certain “emerging” countries took over responsibility for mass production
as the primary path to enrichment (the accumulation of wealth), while some
countries that had been among the powerhouses of world capitalism in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries concentrated on finance and on
developing high-tech goods in order to retain power – from a distance –
over the manufacturing of the most common goods, insofar as these were
products derived from technological innovations. However, the latter
countries also turned toward a much more intensive commodification of
domains that had long remained more or less on the margins of capitalism.
The geographic expansion of capitalism redistributed – toward countries in
which the labor force was abundant and ill-organized and in which wages
were therefore low – a number of standard production sites, although the
conception and sales of the objects produced remained for the most part
under the control of companies headquartered in Western countries, which
were still at the heart of world capitalism. Among other effects, these
transfers accelerated the deindustrialization of Western Europe.
Deindustrialization in the first decade of the twenty-first century is a wellstudied

phenomenon affecting Western economies, France’s in particular.
Industrial employment reached a peak in 1974, with more than 5,900,000
salaried workers. In the early 2010s, this sector lost a little more than 40

Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities by Luc Boltanski