The missing link for reconfiguring the economic system: Human connections

An excerpt of my review essay of Karl Polanyi’s Our Obsolete Market Mentality: “Civilization Must Find a New Thought Pattern” (1974)

Polanyi explains that under the “market-economy”, labor and land became fictitious commodities and that “the true scope of such a step can only be gauged if we remember that labor is only another name for man, and land for nature”. When we truly assimilate the fact that at some point in history, humans decided to make profit with man and nature, we gain a new perspective about the origin of many problems in our current society.

He says that the “embodiment” of the economic sphere in a distinct and separate sphere had the effect of making the rest of the society dependent on that sphere and originated a new social order where the market mechanism became determinative for the social life (p.111). For current generations, growing up in such a system, that not only separates the economic sphere but prioritizes it, it is difficult to grasp the idea that this reality is man-made and that if “man’s economy is, as a rule, submerged in social relations (p.112)”, then we should be able to reconfigure that reality by finding new ways to connect as human beings. 

While most people agree on the fact that humanity needs to do something different to achieve more just and equal societies, there is polarization in the ways of conceiving solutions. As Polanyi concludes, “some people believe in elites and aristocracies, in managerialism and the corporation, they feel that the whole of society should be more intimately adjusted to the economic system, which they would wish to maintain unchanged”. Whether we call it ‘stakeholder capitalism’ or the many other names that have branded this movement, they are no different than what Polanyi described as the “Brave New World, where the individual is conditioned to support an order that has been designed for him by such as are wiser than he (p. 117)”.

The problem with “re-imagining” capitalism is that we constantly fail to consider the fact that, if we do not change the way humans relate to each other, then no change in the economic system will ever be attained.