I was returning home from a park with my daughter on a sunny day in late May. She’s 12 years old, bright but with the emotional maturity of a child half her age.

“Do you know what thongs are?” she said.

“Sure,” I replied, confident in my ability to answer accurately. “Thongs are things that you wear on your feet.”

“No they’re not,” she countered, telling me about thong underwear. There’s not much to them, I Iearned.

“That’s not good,” I said. My daughter agreed.

Later, I discovered that Abercrombie & Fitch is a firm that makes and markets thong underwear to 12-year-old girls such as my daughter in all 50 states. Is there no shame in today’s market economy?

Not for Abercrombie & Fitch. If the clothier let shame guide its business plan, how could it create and capitalize on an untapped market for adolescent female sexuality?

Now, my wife and I make every effort to ban as much commercial advertising as possible in our home. Much harder to control are the ads that reach our daughter when she steps out the front door into the world of school, etc. Parents understand this.

Society wasn’t always this way. In an earlier time, markets were part of society. Now, society is part of the market, as author Ellen Meiksins Wood has observed.

Today, thong underwear are a commodity for sale on the market. Commodities are made by a person to satisfy a human need other than the worker's, who has produced them for exchange. As a commodity, thong underwear have exchange-value when they are bought with money.

Commodity production precedes commodity circulation. Sexuality is a natural part of humanity. But in a market society, sexuality becomes a commodity, a means by which companies sell their commodities such as thong underwear.

Madison Avenue has long used sex to sell commodities. All the more so now with the market economy literally on top of the world. Some leaders say there is no alternative.

Producing and advertising a commodity are different sides of the same coin. Commodities for exchange exist for one reason—to create wealth for those who own the forces of production—natural resources and labor-power. This isn’t always easy to see on the surface of the world we live in, but it’s there.

To be sure, a market economy that in part produces thong underwear for young girls developed historically. The causes of this specific form of socio-economic organization have definite consequences that affect a growing number of people now. One consequence is companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch enticing girls ages 10 to 14 to dress like grownups and perhaps be treated in a like manner by adult men (a scary thought).

In response, people are challenging the power and prerogatives of the market economy in many ways. For example, before the clothier’s line of thong underwear for young girls, Abercrombie & Fitch faced protests over its t-shirts that cast Asians in a racist stereotype. As a result, the company was forced to pull this product from its shelves, a victory for democracy.

In this protest against a company’s commodity, people’s unity was a key. We’ll need more, much more of such activism to transform the market economy into one that meets humanity’s basic needs for education, health care, housing and nutrition. The power of saying “no” to the current form of socio-economic organization is a big first step in that transformation to create a more civilized world.

Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive newspaper. Email: ssandron@hotmail.com

###