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essays to Polanyi’s theses (‘Is Capitalism a Threat to Democracy’ – a review of Robert Kuttner’s book on Polanyi). The influential New York Review of Books published a review by Robert Kuttner of Gareth Dale’s Polanyi biography, titled ‘The Man from Red Vienna’.
The fact that Bernie Sanders’ market-critical ideas were substantiated in reference to Polanyi is almost self-explanatory (‘Polanyi for President’, Dissent Magazine, Spring 2016). Dissent Magazine, situated politically somewhere between communitarian and social democratic, also published several other texts on Polanyi, including, for instance, ‘The Elusive Karl Polanyi’ (Spring 2017), and ‘The Return of Karl Polanyi’ (Spring 2014).
Debates about neoliberalism struggle to avoid reference to Polanyi. In The New Republic, the fiercely embattled and unkempt leftist magazine, English political scientist William Davies proclaims:
‘This ideal of separate political and economic realms has been widely criticized, not only by Marxists on the grounds that it provides a cover for class exploitation (…), but notably also by Karl Polanyi, who argued that it was only ever an illusion. From Polanyi’s perspective, the state is never entirely absent from the economic realm, but is constantly at work in manufacturing and enforcing the economic freedoms that proponents of laissez-faire treat as “natural”.’ (13 July 2017)
Or, as Steven Han succinctly wrote in an article on poverty in the US in the left flagship magazine The Nation: ‘“Laissez-faire was planned”, as Karl Polanyi once put it.’ (18 April 2018)
Young neo-Marxists kicked against the pricks in the magazine Jacobin, calling Polanyi’s proposals a kind of welfare capitalism: while they certainly represented a step forward, they still did not go far enough for true socialists. That said, such irony may be out of place given the current political struggles in both the UK and the US. The magazine more recently issued a critique of Polanyi (Jacob Hamburger, ‘The Unholy Family’, Jacobin 1/2018) based on Melinda Cooper’s book Family Values, denying that he had truly presented an alternative to much-criticised neoliberalism, arguing that the structure of the nuclear family was inherent to both, socialism (or social democracy) and neoliberalism. That said, the main takeaway is that Polanyi’s work is still alive and kicking, it is being referenced and passionately discussed as a guidepost for present-day left politics. This could serve as an example for our own left (not least in its media presence). This book seeks to contribute to this effort.
Annotation 1
This summary takes into consideration neither online media (such as, for example, orf. at, which has given Polanyi ample credit) nor radio stations like Ö1, a broadcaster that has repeatedly engaged with Polanyi, nor TV series (The German-French TV station Arte reported on Polanyi in a six-part documentary on major economists).
Annotation 2
This summary is intended as non-judgemental. It seeks not to point out the correct or incorrect perception of Polanyi’s ideas, but to depict (in an inevitably inconclusive form) the coverage in consumer publications and newspapers in the German- and English-speaking world over the past five years.
FICTITIOUS COMMODITIES AND THE THREE WAVES OF MARKETIZATION
On the nature of fictitious commodities and how public goods are turned into private capital. Reading and expanding on Karl Polanyi.1
MICHAEL BURAWOY
Following the financial crisis in 2008, various new progressive protest movements emerged around the globe, at least initially. Subsequently, we also saw a rise in right-wing populist forces. Based on Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation, I analyse ‘marketization’ from the standpoint of the social movements which it engenders. I distinguish between three historical waves of these movements against marketization.
The fictitious commodity: from commodification to excommodification
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, first published in 1944, it is a searing account of the threat posed by the over-extended market to the survival of society – a threat so dire that, on pain of death, it would precipitate society’s self-defence. To understand the lived experience of marketization and the possibility of its reversal Polanyi’s concept of ‘fictitious commodity’ is especially useful. In this concept, Polanyi focuses on the destructive character of commodification.
Polanyi contends that labour, land and money – in terms of production factors – were never conceived in order to be bought or sold, and that their unregulated commodification (their transformation into commodities) destroys their ‘true’ or ‘essential’ character. When labour power is exchanged without protection against injury or sickness, unemployment or over-employment, or below-subsistence wages, the labour that can be extracted rapidly declines, and it veers towards uselessness. Equally, when land, or more broadly nature, is subject to commodification then it can no longer support the basic necessities for human life. Finally, when money is used to make money, for example through currency speculation, then its value becomes so uncertain that it can no longer be used as a means of exchange, putting businesses out of business and generating economic crises. Today we have to add a fourth fictitious commodity – knowledge – a factor of production that is not only an essential ingredient of the modern economy but crucial to the production of the other three factors.
How do fictitious commodities partake in shaping the lived experience of marketization? What is it about the commodification of labour, land, money and knowledge that contributes to social movements? Polanyi points to the act of exchange itself as violating the essential nature of land, money and labour. It is true that trafficking of human beings or trading of human organs may arouse such abhorrence that they can lead to social movements, but they are unlikely to be movements of those who are trafficked or who sell their organs. Alternatively, social movements may be a response to the lifting of protections won against commodification, as when welfare benefits are reduced, trade unions are decertified, labour laws violated or withdrawn.
There are, however, other ways of attributing movement responses to commodification distinct from the process of exchange itself. Polanyi devotes little attention to the processes through which entities are turned into commodities, processes of disembedding the commodity from its social integument. Marx’s original ‘primitive accumulation’ focused on land expropriation for the creation of a labour force dependent on wage labour. Today the dispossession of peasantries is designed to commodify land rather than create a dependent labour force. Whatever the goal, land expropriation has generated much determined resistance. Equivalently, the expropriation of knowledge from the craft worker has historically generated much labour protest. Today, however, it is not only the deskilling of the worker that is at stake, but the appropriation and commodification of the product, namely knowledge itself. In the privatization of universities, for example, dispossession involves turning knowledge from a public good into a sellable asset. This, too, is the source of much protest.
Fictitious Commodities as Sources of Social Movements
| Inequality | |
| Ex-Commodification | LABOR (precarity) |
| Commodification | MONEY (debt) |
| Dispossession | |
| Ex-Commodification | NATURE (destruction) |
| Commodification | KNOWLEDGE (privatization) |
In addition to the