Beyond the North-South binarity: Social neutrality as a commodity ethic in globalisation[Au-delà de la binarité Nord-Sud : La neutralité sociale comme éthique de la marchandise dans la mondialisation]

The commodity is a cultural attribute of some things that have the property of being exchangeable; it has a social trajectory that consists of its election as such or of its exclusion, hence the thesis of its social life. This social life influences the stability of societies. In the era of globalization, reflecting the interconnection of different societies, practices around the commodity tend to obscure this dimension, undermine lifestyles, and generate violence in both production and consumption areas. Globalization is essentially based on an economic conception of the world, at once bipolar and dichotomous, which is proving to be erroneous today. This paper proposes a new understanding of socialization at the global scale and its ethical implications: it argues that world socialization is an extra-social dynamic that has its source in the externalization of social violence. Because ethics has become a direct political action, social neutrality is defended here as the ethical principle of the commodity.