I think it useful to end with the commodity as the third stratum of pacification because it is only after understanding its discrete temporal and spatial aspects that we can appreciate how these qualities are embodied within the very fabric of making capitalism. We have established that dispossession and exploitation are essential codeterminant strata in the commodification process that, as I have already argued, may be understood as essential to pacification. We have also established in our review of Marx's notion of productive labor that such labor in its ideal form is labor that produces surplus-value for a capitalist enterprise in the pursuit of making vendible commodities. All other forms of economic activity under capitalist relations are under pressure toward this end. The pacification process leading to commodification continues to place relentless pressure on all business enterprises and fabricates a social and political order that, by extension, also comes under pressure from a set of compulsions. Within this third stratum of the pacification process, therefore, there are at least three more component processes that are endemic to pushing commodification forward. We may understand these as compulsions related to the security of the capitalist order. These are the compulsions to (1) valorize, (2) prudentialize, and (3) fetishize. I will examine each of these compulsions in turn before concluding with an examination of their aggregate manifestation in the system as a whole: the hegemonic character of security within an advanced capitalist system.

Before I begin my discussion of the three compulsions of commodification, it is important to understand that commodification does not mean privatization. The latter simply implies the movement of activities that were formerly the responsibility of the state to private interests. This may include a process of commodification but not always. Privatization speaks to political reassignment; commodification speaks to economic process. When Canadian public policing organizations such as the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) try to “sell” their services to police service boards through marketing, wining and dining board members, and submitting competitive bids, this may be said to mimic commodification but it is certainly not privatization because we are still dealing with public agencies. When a not-for-profit security organization such as the Corps.