Читать книгу Karl Polanyi - Группа авторов - Страница 17

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 basic necessities for human life. Finally, when money is used to make money, for example through currency speculation, then its value becomes so uncertain that it can no longer be used as a means of exchange, putting businesses out of business and generating economic crises. Today we have to add a fourth fictitious commodity – knowledge – a factor of production that is not only an essential ingredient of the modern economy but crucial to the production of the other three factors.

How do fictitious commodities partake in shaping the lived experience of marketization? What is it about the commodification of labour, land, money and knowledge that contributes to social movements? Polanyi points to the act of exchange itself as violating the essential nature of land, money and labour. It is true that trafficking of human beings or trading of human organs may arouse such abhorrence that they can lead to social movements, but they are unlikely to be movements of those who are trafficked or who sell their organs. Alternatively, social movements may be a response to the lifting of protections won against commodification, as when welfare benefits are reduced, trade unions are decertified, labour laws violated or withdrawn.

There are, however, other ways of attributing movement responses to commodification distinct from the process of exchange itself. Polanyi devotes little attention to the processes through which entities are turned into commodities, processes of disembedding the commodity from its social integument. Marx’s original ‘primitive accumulation’ focused on land expropriation for the creation of a labour force dependent on wage labour. Today the dispossession of peasantries is designed to commodify land rather than create a dependent labour force. Whatever the goal, land expropriation has generated much determined resistance. Equivalently, the expropriation of knowledge from the craft worker has historically generated much labour protest. Today, however, it is not only the deskilling of the worker that is at stake, but the appropriation and commodification of the product, namely knowledge itself. In the privatization of universities, for example, dispossession involves turning knowledge from a public good into a sellable asset. This, too, is the source of much protest.