Briefly considering Polanyi

Some thoughts I had a bit ago, sharing here for posterity & maybe discussion.

BTW: it looks like I’ve found a workaround for Storify: export the HTML!

Some thoughts about a comparison raised by Dissent Magazine

1. Spotted on Twitter a link to an unexpected comparison of Karl Polanyi — author of The Great Transformation — to the current competitors for the Democratic party presidential nomination. Normally I’d laugh at such a thing, but having heard of Polanyi in passing, though unfortunately not having much chance to read in depth, I figured I’d at least look. Link was here:
2. 

   Patrick Iber@PatrickIber

   The explainer you didn’t know you needed: Karl Polanyi and politics in 2016, by @rortybomb and me, up at @DissentMag  https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/karl-polanyi-explainer-great-transformation-bernie-sanders …

   
   
3. So I read it, and the gist was an observation about the construction of the existing market, as in Polanyi in his time seeing the market as having been constructed to begin with, which contradicts talk about the “free market” in reference to existing economy. I’d agree with such despite not going along with any electoral support unlike the authors of the piece (at least as far as I could tell.
4. #lrt I’m not a supporter of anybody. But going by the summary there, I’d be close to Polyani to an extent.

   
   

   
   

   Market as we know it is structured by state, & yes ppl will rebel against all things being a matter of prices. >
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   > The thing is, these don’t mean IMO that *nothing* being priced is possible, or that no market exchange can exist without gov’t. >
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7. That is, outside of a deliberately primitive society cost of some sort is a fact. Also, exchange isn’t something that inherently requires the violent arbiter known as the state — the current structure does not justify itself merely by existing.
8. > Rather, a significant chunk of the scarcity & inequality that exists is because of the rules imposed, the assumptions operated under. >

   
   

   
   

   > There are things that currently are matters of price that if not for that imposition would not be. >
10. This is to say that in my opinion Polanyi’s observation about the penetration of market logic has a point. An environment that maximizes the amount of interaction that involves prices isn’t something that sprouts up naturally.
11. > There’s other things that the imposition makes artificially expensive for the benefit of ruling class that would otherwise be cheap.

    
    

    
    

    Meanwhile, other parts of the imposition make labor for others both artificially cheap & ultra necessary when it otherwise wouldn’t be.
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    Both Sanders & Hillary see current market as inevitable, they just have slightly different responses to it. >
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    > Bernie is like “remove X & Y from price mech. & we’re good”. Hillary goes “don’t remove anything, just subsidize”. >
15. This gets to the point of the original piece. The authors say Bernie Sanders questions current market structure as inevitable, but IMO they’re offbase on that. If he truly thought it wasn’t inevitable then he’d be arguing its restructuring in terms of entirely different starting assumptions, rather than about regulating behavior that arises naturally — “unfettered capitalism”.
16. If Sanders *were* questioning from the ground up, then it’d be acknowledged that “unfettered capitalism” is a contradiction: capitalism is itself a set of fetters. What him & Hillary are talking about is degree of amelioration.
17. > An actual capital L Left in comparison would acknowledge how everything was constructed & call for *deconstruction*. >

    
    

    
    

    > Divide then would be between Rebuild in whole other form vs Don’t Build Jack Shit.
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19. In other words, state vs no-state. Marx vs Bakunin.
20. Sanders vs Clinton has nothing to do with this.