The CBC program IDEAS did a great series on Karl Polanyi and I heard some of it today and it reminded me that I should really recommend to anyone interested in economic issues, the book he wrote in the early 50s called the Great Transformation.
It's a great book, it destroys the claims that economists make. Specifically the idea that the market reflects natural behaviour. In fact he brings up one of my favorite criticisms, and I think one of the best deserved. The attempt by economists to use market based ideas when looking at the past.
In fact as Polanyi notes, the creates of a self- regulating market is a stark utopia.
No other civilization before the development of the industrial revolution promoted the values that the market dictates. All people have traded, but we are the first to try and base our civilization on the market, a mere mechanism, a tool.
The individualism, competitiveness, acquisitiveness and especially the divorce of economics from politics or the social order, are all things that no civilization has pushed as hard as we have. Not many societies have stressed individualism and competitiveness as values.Probably none before ours could afford to, for it would have destroyed them.
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of his book, and probably on of the more cited, is his idea of the double movement. That the market and society are fundamentally at odds with each other, and if the market forces itself into an area, there is a spontaneous building up of opposition to such a move. A sort of pushing and pulling between the market and society. For as he argues, the market alone would destroy any civilization.
The fact that this work is still so accessible and feels so current speaks to its applicability in an age so dominated by the assumptions of the economists, and gives voice to those who oppose the spread of market principles to everyday life. It provides well articulated cogent and strong material to do battle with the market fundamentalists.
We seem to be in a period between ages, and at such a critical juncture we can only hope the economist lose, for if they do, we all win.
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