The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique by Fred Block, Margaret R. Somers
By Fred Block, Margaret R. Somers
What is it approximately free-market rules that supply them tenacious endurance within the face of such happen mess ups as chronic unemployment, widening inequality, and the serious monetary crises that experience under pressure Western economies during the last 40 years? Fred Block and Margaret Somers expand the paintings of the good political economist Karl Polanyi to provide an explanation for why those rules have revived from disrepute within the wake of the good melancholy and global battle II, to develop into the dominant financial ideology of our time.
Polanyi contends that the unfastened industry championed through marketplace liberals by no means really existed. whereas markets are necessary to let person selection, they can't be self-regulating simply because they require ongoing country motion. moreover, they can not by way of themselves offer such must haves of social life as schooling, health and wellbeing care, social and private safety, and the precise to earn a livelihood. while those public items are subjected to industry ideas, social existence is threatened and significant crises ensue.
regardless of those theoretical flaws, industry rules are powerfully seductive simply because they promise to decrease the function of politics in civic and social existence. simply because politics involves coercion and unsatisfying compromises between teams with deep conflicts, the desire to slender its scope is comprehensible. yet like Marx's concept that communism will bring about a "withering away of the State," the ideology that loose markets can substitute govt is simply as utopian and dangerous.
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Extra info for The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique
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Two fundamental points follow. First, socialists could not ignore the difficulties entailed in imposing democratic accountability on governmental power. Second, Marxists were guilty of imagining that a shift in property relations would—by itself—usher in a new and better society (see Chapter 2). According to Polanyi, Marx mistakenly had accepted the claims of the classical economists, especially Ricardo, that property relations can and will determine the entire shape of the social order. Polanyi’s view here is based on his unique insight that market society was imposed in the nineteenth century through political means.
The problems that have been facing Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal since 2010 replicate those that developing nations have been facing for many years. 16 Unable to keep up with their debt payments and yet unable to borrow new funds in the private market, governments had to turn to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These institutions imposed “structural adjustments” as the price for new assistance. Structural adjustment dictated a large dose of austerity—especially reductions in state spending on social programs—as well as much higher levels of unemployment.
But those who strive for a society organized around a self-regulating market are forced to weaken democracy and limit the public’s capacity to make its own decisions. It is precisely those weakened and unresponsive democracies that are most vulnerable to attack by extremist leaders bent on imposing authoritarian solutions. 35 36 T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M The Political Embedding of Markets: The Speenhamland Story (Chapter 5) Polanyi argues that market fundamentalists naturalize the market economy into something that is autonomous of human artifice and operates according to its own inner logic of nature.