Introduction What does it mean to turn something into an asset—not just conceptually, but also in terms of the good itself? And what are the implications for doing business with others through assets? These are crucial questions as they connect the nature of a good to the issue of what role we want business and economic matters to play in our lives. If Birch (2017a) is correct in his observation that certain industries like biotechnology have abandoned the market and its principles in favor of capitalizing on their assets instead of selling them, and if Muniesa et al. (2017) are right about connecting assets to what is commonly called “capitalism” (as opposed to “market economy”), we need to inquire into the relationship between the nature of a good, including its economic and wider social effects. But how to approach things as elusive as assets? Birch (2017a, 462) argues that (contrary to many STS approaches to eco- nomic matters) the answer is best sought not in the materiality of goods but in the way these goods are valuated through specific forms of calculation and assessment. This is a compelling argument: after all, Tesla’s net income from selling electric cars has been consistently negative until recently while Amazon barely makes any profits from its online sales, yet both companies continue to soar at the stock markets, being valued at several billion USD each. If we want to understand the gap between the market value of com- panies and the market value of the goods they produce, it is not enough to simply look at the latter, Birch rightly concludes—we rather need to look at how they are produced as something valuable. This conclusion, however, also comes with several drawbacks. Firstly, it poses the danger of falsely rei- fying commodities: who’s to say that a commodity’s market value is any 8 From Commodity to Asset and Back Again: Property in the Capitalism of Varieties Veit Braun Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/chapter-pdf/631522/9780262359030_c000700.pdf by guest on 21 July 2020