8 Karl Polanyi
Tooze
Margaret Somers and Fred Block offer this blurb for their article in Dissent on “The Return of Karl Polanyi”:
Karl Polanyi, whose ideas took form in 1920s Vienna in direct opposition to the free-market orthodoxy of Ludwig von Mises, has gained belated recognition as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His central argument, contra von Mises, is that a self-regulating economic system is a completely imaginary construction, impossible to achieve or maintain.
Though he was never quite forgotten, there has been a definite uptick in academic interest in his work as scholars grapple with the lessons of the 2008 crisis. His emphasis on “utopian” nature of ideas about pure market societies, with self-regulating markets, came to seem like the wise words of a seer. But he was much more than this; and as the picture above shows, he was a political militant committed to passing his ideas to workers so that they could better fight for them and claim the mantle of realism in that great “double movement” where they would have to oppose the real utopians, the believers in market utopias. One interesting question, then, is whether we follow him in demanding decommodification — including of land, labour and money — as a route out.