POLANYI AND MODERN ECONOMIC VIEWS

The author states: "Transformation doesn’t require an alternative 'social economy' because the economy we have is already social. We just need to recognize and act on that fact." Polanyi, basing his analysis on the findings of early economic anthropology, argued however that the theory of capitalism up to modern times was based on 'the conception of the economy as an interlocking system of markets that automatically adjust supply and demand through the price mechanism'. Polanyi showed what a radical break this conceptionalisation - which only became dominant in core capitalist countries in the 19th Century - represented from all known pre-existing societies where the economy was embedded in society.

The term “embeddedness” for Polanyi and anthropologists expresses the idea that the economy is not autonomous as it *must* be in bourgeois economic theory, but is instead subordinated to politics, religion, arid social relations. In capitalist society on the other hand the system of self-regulating markets requires that society becomes subordinated to the logic of the market, and inexorably has to extend the barriers of market commodification in order to sustain the process of capital accumulation.

In my view therefore it is not sufficient to merely assert that the capitalist economy is 'already social and we merely need to act on that fact' - we first need to recognise and then act on the fact that capitalism inevitably subordinates society to the market. As Polanyi said: "... the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”

So, the question I would suggest is - is that the kind of social relations that we want to have, or would we prefer to live in a society where the market economy is subordinated to the social? I know what I would like to see. Does the author?