Karl Polanyi’s Relevance in the Contemporary Setting of Contested Marketization.

Abstract:

Polanyi’s insights were never more relevant or prophetic. The turn to neo-fascism in the US and parts of Europe is precisely the result of excessive marketization, created by political and economic elites, harming the livelihoods of ordinary people. And it’s important to view “marketization” or “commodification” not as abstractions, but as the work and embodiment of a shift in political power, from labor to capital. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the de-commodification and containment of capitalism that had resulted in the broad prosperity and democratic legitimacy of the postwar boom was overturned by elites, using new rules of globalization as their instrument.

Neoliberalism destroys democracy on two flanks. The capture and privatization of political decisions by private capital weakens the public realm. And then the reaction to the ensuing economic crisis for working and middle class people increases political support for anti-democratic leaders and parties—pure Polanyi again.

Global climate change is, as Nicholas Stern once put it, is history’s most extreme case of market failure. This is also the result of elites making catastrophic decisions, with bad consequences for democracy as well as for the planet and the survival of humanity. More Polanyi.

Karl Polanyi has been embraced by many social democrats. But Polanyi was a socialist. He lived long enough to be a left critic of postwar social democracy. The postwar welfare state was essentially managed capitalism or welfare capitalism. When the political circumstances changed, capitalists and their political allies shook off the democratic restraints. Polanyi would likely say that the cure is more radical de-commodification and more social ownership, with drastic narrowing of the realm of private capital, to limit both its economic and political power and to expand the public and democratic sphere. It will not be easy to find this majority politics, except perhaps, paradoxically, in the US.

Biografie:

Robert Kuttner hat eine Professur an der Heller School der Brandeis Universit,äty/USA. Die meiste Zeit seiner Karriere arbeitete er als Wirtschaftsjournalist. Kuttner ist Mitbegründer und Mitherausgeber des Magazins The American Prospect und war langjähriger Kolumnist für BusinessWeek. Außerdem war er Gründer des Economic Policy Institute und gehört dessen Vorstand an. Robert Kuttner ist Autor von zwölf Büchern, darunter der New York Times Bestseller von 2008, Obama’s Challenge: American’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency,0. Sein jüngstes Buch The Stakes, 2020 and the survival of American democracy wurde 2019 veröffentlicht.

Robert Kuttner arbeitete als Autor und Kolumnist für The Washington Post, und war leitender Forscher des Banking Committees des U.S. Senats, Direktor der National Commission on Neighbourhoods unter President Carter und wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Herausgeber von The New Republic.

Als Wissenschaftler lehrte er an der Boston University, der University of Oregon, der University of Massachusetts und dem Institute of Politics in Harvard.
Kuttners Arbeit befindet sich an der Schnittstelle von Wirtschaft und Politik. Seine aktuellen Forschungen beschäftigen sich mit den Auswirkungen der Globalisierung auf die Demokratie auf nationalstaatlicher Ebene, und möglichen Alternativen zur gegenwärtigen Wirtschaftsstruktur, die zu einer größeren Einkommens-, Wohlstands- und Chancengleichheit führen und gleichzeitig die Demokratie stärken.