The Politics of Dependence by Patrick J. L. Cockburn

Author:Patrick J. L. Cockburn
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Using Polanyi Today

Polanyi’s work left at least two powerful lessons to later social theories of economic life.

The first was that any economy is comprised of a patchwork of economic practices that are qualitatively different from one another and yet co-exist in people’s lives. If we look at how people actually meet their needs as they care , produce, consume, distribute and exchange, then we will realise that markets are only a part of a broader process, the totality of which comprises ‘the economy .’ It was this idea that he captured with the ‘substantive’ meaning of ‘economic.’

The second lesson was that, since the industrial revolution, capitalist societies have lived through unprecedented times, where markets stand at the practical and ideological centre of these societies’ economies and have somehow disengaged themselves from the broader patchwork referred to above. Self-regulating markets , not bound by custom or politics, became a dream and—to a certain extent—a reality that reorganised societies across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and came crashing down with the rise of communism and fascism. Unbeknownst to Polanyi, the dream would be revived from the 1970s and onwards under the banner of ‘neoliberalism .’

While not directly contradictory, these two lessons do stand in a certain tension with one another. For one thing, we are left asking how separate, detached or ‘disembedded’ markets can really become, given that they too are institutions that need a complex assemblage of social conditions—from property laws to technology to social habits—in order function. 44 We are also left wondering about those practices and institutions—from the household to religious organisation to governments—that the market overshadowed. Has their actual importance diminished? Or only their social legitimacy? Or neither? And finally, what current importance shall we give to the other patterns of integration—reciprocity, redistribution and house-holding—that market exchange stands in contrast too?

Answers to these questions return us to the metaphor of the ‘empty economy .’ Elements of economic practice that do not belong in the market have not disappeared from our societies, but they have been pushed to the margins of our economic ideology where, in social science, politics and everyday life, they appear as adjuncts to the real economy . For example, state redistributions through taxation and public spending are, according to political critics, only necessary because of market failure (failure to produce basic infrastructure, failure to provide full employment and so on). Or again: when economists calculate the value of unpaid work in the home by estimating what the same labour power could earn for a person on the labour market, they are simply imagining domestic work as an extension of work in the monetary economy . 45 In both cases, the home and the state are imagined as adjuncts to markets : in but not quite of the economy . An economic ideology dominated by market behaviour as the paradigmatic example of economic action will thus struggle to imagine economic practices except through the analogy with markets , leaving us with the sense of lack that I have here called ‘the empty economy .

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