this is simple: Jeremy Corbyn’s economic policy is based on and orientated towards Polanyi. However, this is not the only reason why conservative media like The Economist have covered Polanyi (‘The great transformation: Corbynomics would change Britain – but not in the way most people think’, 17 May 2018); long before Corbyn, political scientist Adrian Pabst had apodictically established in an article in the left-of-centre Guardian that Polanyi, not Keynes, was ‘the only economist to grasp the real limitations of capitalism and socialism’ (9 November 2008). The Guardian states in an editorial: ‘Corbynomics has been framed in such moral (Polanyian, A.T.) terms – and that is a very good thing’ – what is lacking is the courage to produce concrete examples (27 May 2018).
More recently, UK-based economist Ann Pettifor, co-initiator of Jubilee 2000, an organisation demanding debt relief for the poorest countries, gave the German left-leaning daily paper taz an interview in which she explained the current political situation with reference to Polanyi:
‘Trump certainly represents a substantial part of society. He represents the fearful, people who have been unsettled by the economic crisis. The banks were bailed out, while the ordinary population was subjected to austerity and told they had to make sacrifices. Wages today are still lower than they were before the crisis. Ordinary people lost their houses, they see their jobs being threatened by competition from China, and the banks in Washington are doing better than ever before. As Karl Polanyi already explained as early as the 1930s, people will vote for a strong man if they feel that they need to be protected. It is a reaction to an unregulated economy. The strong man promises to build a wall on the border with Mexico and fight against the Chinese. In France, we are witnessing the revolt of a similar segment of disadvantaged citizens (…) The election of an authoritarian leader does not solve the problems of the population, it aggravates them. This is what people will discover. In both the US and Great Britain, pensions have largely been privatised, money is managed by shadow banks who use it for speculation. What exactly is it that they do with pensions? No one knows, there is no transparency. Nor any kind of oversight. Mister Blackrock manages six billion dollars’ worth of such funds. What do we know about Blackrock?’ (taz, 12 January 2019)
In the United States, Polanyi’s position is equally unchallenged. The New York Times cites his work and includes his magnum opus in a list of the most important books written in emigration, alongside those of Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann (1 February 2017); or it quotes from it, as does Pankaj Mishra in an article about Indian prime minister Modi (14 November 2016).
Consumer publications like the New Yorker dedicate 15-page 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
