To Fix Our Economy, Consult a Book from 1944

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:


To Fix Our Economy, Consult a Book from 1944
Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi anticipated our current economic mess

By David Bollier
Economy and Markets




Events of the past several years have altered some deeply rooted assumptions about economics and politics. The market-based worldview – a rosy vision of deregulation, privatization, free trade, limited government and few public services — has been discredited. Who can seriously talk about a “free market” and “freedom to choose” when taxpayers were forced to pay trillions of dollars to prop up right-wingers’ ideological fantasy?

Yet I wonder why there are so few substantive conversations about what should replace the market fundamentalism promoted in the U.S. and around the world for the past 30 years. It may take years for the shell-shock of the economic crisis to ease, but when that occurs, I recommend that we resume the conversation that Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi initiated with his 1944 book, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

Polanyi understood that the modern market economy is not a natural, universal system for organizing societies, as its champions assert. It is, in fact, an anomaly in the long sweep of human history – one that has produced many benefits, to be sure, but has also spawned deep structural tensions that threaten to overwhelm human societies.

The Next Great Transformation

Prior of the rise of “the market” as an ordering principle for society, politics, religion and social norms were the prevailing forces in society. Land, labor and money itself were not regarded chiefly as commodities to be bought and sold. They were “embedded” in social relationships, and subject to the moral consideration, religious beliefs and community authority. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/magazine/fix-our-economy-consult-book-1944

[NYC_SKP]

1. Nailed it.

K/R

The basic dilemma is that the free market cannot self-regulate itself. A laissez-faire economy is, in fact, planned. It depends on government management and social control. What’s more, because markets treat nature as essentially limitless and human beings as commodities, they are always pushing human societies and nature to the breaking point. Crises invariably erupt that require social and government interventions. The relentless push of markets cannot prevail indefinitely against the needs of human beings and nature.

Almost by their very nature, modern economic systems can NOT be sustainable.

The sad thing is that they COULD be, but as a product of human nature and greed, they are unlikely to ever be.

Let's try to change that.

[Fire Walk With Me]

3. Occupy is a social intervention which the government acted to smash. The DOJ recently stated that

the big banks are too big to jail. HSBC laundered millions of international drug cartel monies and will see zero punishment. This is a corporatocracy, not a democracy. It's already done and done. Social activism which stands a chance at creating change will meet riot police desperate to push people into rioting. The government will do nothing to stop the banks and corporatocracy. The government continues to let banks off the hook and to fund them with billions of taxpayer dollars in bailouts while forcing "austerity" upon the poor, meaning "another theft" of the poor's monies. Watch for them to finally attempt to guzzle down the Social Security funds (W Bush waltzed around the country for months saying SS was in imminent danger and that we had to give it to Wall Street to save it...GULP! It's gone...) Bush's wars had two purposes: immediate profit and long-term profit through stacking up impossible debt. Read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman". Debt is slavery.

Think: What to do?

[NYC_SKP]

4. Potentially, only collapse will end this madness.

But for now, we educate, we organize, we never give up.

[reformist2]

2. Many aspects of life (health care, education) don't work as "sectors of the economy."

In fact, it's literally dehumanizing to speak of either of these as "businesses." They are not. Never have been.