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another source of social movements is the growing inequality that follows from commodification. For example, in the sale of labour power ‘precarity’ or insecurity has become the dominant experience of increasing proportions of the population. The commodification of labour power has been compounded by the commodification of money, making money from money by gambling on debt.
Another process Polanyi overlooked is the process of excommodification – the expulsion of entities from the market, entities that were formerly commodities but no longer. Excommodification captures the idea that there are lots of useful things that, to their detriment, are expelled from the market. In the face of excommodification, commodification can be a very attractive prospect. In relation to labour, in many places, and increasingly all over the world, expanding reservoirs of surplus labour make it a privilege to be exploited. Vast populations are exiled or confined to the informal sector of the economy where they eke out a hand to mouth existence. In relation to nature it is its incorporation into a capitalist economy that is so wasteful, yet often the absence of the market is responsible for its undervaluation. We are able to plunder nature because it has insignificant market value. Very different are knowledge and money where commodification leads not to waste but to distorted utilization – the production of knowledge is geared to those who can pay for it while the production of different types of money is used to create profit from debt.
Moving beyond the characteristics of fictitious commodities it is important to examine their interrelations in specific historical contexts. Indeed, social movements have to be understood not as a reaction to the (ex)commodification of a single fictitious commodity, but as responses to the articulation of the (ex)commodification of labour, money, nature and knowledge. In the Arab Spring uprising, the intersection of the precarity of labour and indebtedness due to micro-finance proved to be a motive for protest; the student movement can be analysed in terms of precarity of labour and privatization of knowledge production; environmental movements lie at the intersection of the destruction or commodification of nature and the precarity of labour. This framework of fictitious commodities provides an account of the underlying forces driving protest. The articulation of the (ex) commodification of fictitious commodities can also be used to understand different historical periods of marketization.
Polanyi believed that we would never again experiment with market fundamentalism
In truth Polanyi pays little attention to fictitious commodities, more concerned to develop his majestic history that begins with the advance of marketization at the end of the 18th century and ends in the 1930s with a countermovement that brings about new forms of state regulation – both those that advance freedoms, such as the New Deal and social democracy and those that restrict freedoms, such as Fascism and Stalinism. The double threat – on the one hand to the survival of society and, then, to freedom ravaged by the reaction to the destruction of society – led Polanyi to believe that humanity would never again experiment with market fundamentalism. Polanyi was wrong. Beginning in 1973 there developed a new round of market fundamentalism which has had far reaching consequences for the history of capitalism and the specificity of the contemporary period.
Three waves of marketization and the countermovements
Indeed, looking back on the history of capitalism that Polanyi analyses and its development to this day, one can see three waves of marketization, each with their associated, real or (in the case of the third wave) potential countermovement. Referring to English history – the main focus of Polanyi’s analysis – the first wave can be said to begin at the end of the 18th century with the Speenhamland Law of 1795 which became a critical obstacle to the development of a national labour market that would only crystallize with the New Poor Law of 1834. The abolishment of the Speenhamland Law and the unleashing of market forces generated countermovements through which society sought to protect itself: the formation of a working class though the factory movement, cooperatives, trade unions, Chartism and the formation of a political party, factory laws and social legislation.
The second wave of marketization began after the First World War with a renewed ascendancy of the market that included the recommodification of labour, and the opening up of free trade based on the gold standard. This worked very well for imperial countries like the US and UK, but for competing countries such as Italy and Germany the constraints of rigid exchange rates resulted in catastrophic decline in the economy and rampant inflation that led them to break with the international economy and turn to a reactionary regime of market regulation. This redounded back to the US and the rest of Europe with the Depression that was only counteracted by state intervention and market regulation, in this case of a progressive character. With the defeat of Fascism in the Second World War, the more liberal regimes prevailed. Even in the USSR there was a certain liberalization in the 1950s. In advanced capitalism this period was ruled by Keynesianism and ‘embedded liberalism’ in economics and the end of ideology in sociology, only to be burst open by the upswing of social movements in the 1960s.
The third wave, not anticipated by Polanyi, begins in 1973 with the energy crisis, subsequently described as the Washington Consensus with a major impetus from the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in the form of a renewed assault on labour. Over time it has become an era of the recommodification of money with the ascendancy of finance and the deepening commodification of nature, that is of air, land and water. This third-wave marketization led to and was given new energy by the collapse of state socialism. Structural adjustment came to Latin America at the very time it was emerging from dictatorship, prompting experiments in participatory democracy. Indeed, whereas in core countries the waves of marketization have succeeded one another over two centuries, more peripheral countries have had to face these waves in rapid succession, making them all the more explosive.
There have been national reactions to market expansion – whether in the form of Islamic nationalism or shades of socialism in Latin America – but they cannot reverse third-wave marketization as this requires a planetary response to the global reach of finance capital and the looming environmental catastrophe that threatens the whole earth. Indeed, finance capital is the force behind the precariatisation of labour – both its recommodification and, correlatively, its excommodification – as well as the rising levels of debt, not just at the level of the individual but also of the community, the city, the state, and even the region. Finance capital has commodified and propelled knowledge into production and together they have incorporated nature as an accumulation strategy of capital (Smith 2007, pp. 16–36). A countermovement will have to assume a global character, couched in terms of human rights since the survival of the human species is at stake.
The question arises where exactly we are on the curve of third-wave marketization. Optimists have argued that third-wave marketization has already begun to reverse itself and that we are climbing towards the confinement of marketization. Others think that commodification has been far from halted. Many, including myself, thought that the economic crisis of 2008 and the reshuffling of world power offered an opportunity for a countermovement, but this proved to be illusory. It is possible that the countermovement is still in the distant future just as it is also possible that there will never be a countermovement with the aim of limiting marketization.
References
Burawoy, Michael (2015): Facing an unequal world. In: Current Sociology, Vol. 63(1), pp. 5–34.
Smith, Neil (2007): Nature as accumulation strategy. Socialist Register Vol.43: Coming to terms with nature. pp. 16-36.
‘WHEREVER MY FATHER LIVED HE WAS ENGAGED IN WHATEVER WAS GOING ON’
Shaping The Great Transformation: a conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt.1
MICHAEL BURAWOY
Karl Polanyi has become a canonical thinker in sociology and beyond. His book The Great Transformation, has become a classic that touches on almost every