Econ-Atrocity Bulletins

By Yahya Mete Madra

The 1990s saw a revived interest in the writings of Karl Polanyi (1886-1964). Given that capitalism is still in the process of being re-instituted everywhere across the globe; given that the expansions and contractions of capitalism cause endless social dislocation; given that the
recent wave of financial liberalization, labor market deregulation, and privatization has led to grave socio-economic costs; this revived interest should not be surprising. Those who wanted to understand and devise alternatives to capitalism have found it useful to revisit Polanyi’s account of the emergence of capitalism as laid out in his The Great Transformation.

Polanyi maintained that exchange, along with redistribution and reciprocity, has always existed, albeit embedded in different socio-institutional forms. Nevertheless, during the nineteenth century, first in England and then in Western Europe and North America, as land, labor, and money gradually became commodities, the price mechanism and the profit motive, rather than the deliberation and negotiation of diverse social interests and concerns, became the structuring principle of the society. The market society, for Polanyi, was not only undesirable but also was socially and ecologically unsustainable. He believed that the society will develop spontaneous responses to protect itself against the advent of the logic of the markets. Read more »