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From Dissent Magazine: Karl Polanyi for President
It’s a fairly long read, but really interesting. And it even comes with a musical interlude!
An excerpt:
Here’s a story that we hear all the time. The free market is the most effective way of ensuring prosperity. We can ensure that the market is free by getting the government to simply get out of the way, or, at most, fix a few market failures here or provide some economic security . . . .
Polanyi’s work dismantles this argument in two important ways. The first is to show that markets are planned everywhere they exist. Economic organization is always the result of the state. “Laissez-faire,” he writes, “was planned. . . . [The] laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate state action.”
Polanyi says that the economy is “embedded” in society—part of social relations —not apart from them. He believes that a pure free market society is a utopian project, and impossible to realize, because people will resist the process of being turned into commodities. In fact, he calls labor a “fictitious commodity,” along with land and money. And this process of turning fictitious commodities into market commodities can only be carried out by the state.
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