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This article captures China's role in global manufacturing through the prism of conceptualisation of the commodification of labour power in Marxist theory. It argues that modalities of China's labour force co-optation in assembly and lower value added production for export of consumer goods to advanced economies carries more of a family resemblance with putting-out systems of the pre- capitalist era than with the commodification of labour power sensu stricto marking the capitalist era from...

There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal “Great Transformation” of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries. This article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of...

Ecological economics is largely about the ‘substantive’ (in ‘kind’) study of the economy, as opposed to a purely ‘formal’ economic analysis (in ‘money’). Following Kapp, Polanyi and others, this article argues that ‘substantive economics’ is interested in the biophysical and politico-institutional structure of the economy rather than in correct prices within a particular axiomatic conformity, as in ‘formal economics’. After outlining the history of the substantive vs. formal dichotomy, we...

Costly Fix examines the post-1995 Alberta tar sands boom, detailing how the state inflated the profitability of the tar sands and turned a blind eye to environmental issues. It considers the position of First Nations, the character and strength of environmental critiques, and the difficulties that environmental groups and First Nations have had in establishing a countermovement to market fundamentalism. The final chapter discusses how Alberta's new NDP government, in its first couple of...

In this article, we attempt to update the understanding of the external constraint in Latin America by examining the recent history of the region through the analytical framework of Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation. As we argue, the greatest force behind today’s external restriction is the financial sector, much as it was a century ago. To reinforce this hypothesis, we provide the reader with relatively new historical material and with arguments made by scholars from diverse...

This paper explores some features of the development paths taken by Brazil and China (two member countries of the BRICS grouping) in the current context of the crisis of neoliberal globalization and transformation of the political and economic world order. The authors use Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ thesis to argue that newly emerging rural development (RD) dynamics in China and Brazil are part of a protective ‘countermovement’, driven by actors and institutions responding to the...

This paper analyzes the municipal development in Brazil from the theoretical design of Karl Polanyi. Methodologically, the Polanyi's city development index of Polanyi (IDMP). The results show that according to the concepts analyzed, the Brazilian municipalities, in their majority, have multidimensional incipient features and that there is a direct positive relationship between economic pluralism and quality of life levels. (English)

The role of the landlord class in Japan's prewar economic and political development has been widely debated. Moving beyond conflicting arguments of landlords as semifeudal exploiters or as the linchpins of rural market development, more recent research has emphasized the nonmarket institutions, often inherited from the Tokugawa era, in which the contractual relations between landlords and tenants were embedded. However, this research has overemphasized the continuity of the rural economy....

It is well known that Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation were written contemporaneously (between 1940 and 1943), that their authors propounded antithetical political ideologies (right-wing liberalism and left social democracy respectively), and that the two books revolve around a similar problematique: the causes of the collapse of liberal order in the interwar era. This chapter undertakes a detailed comparison of Hayek and Polanyi’s...

In their new indictments of global neoliberalism and the economic profession's culpability in its harms, Dani Rodrik and Joseph Stiglitz press the case for reconstructed globalization that generates benefits for all and not just for corporate and financial elites. Both books are deeply consistent with the insights of Karl Polanyi, who had identified the inherent contradictions of the project to create what he called a self-regulating economy. Like Polanyi, Rodrik and Stiglitz are attentive...

In this contribution we offer a broad overview of the technological, institutional and policy dynamics associated with the great transformation--borrowing Karl Polanyi (1944) expression--leading from traditional, mostly rural, economies to economies driven by industrial activities (and nowadays also advanced services), able to systematically learn how to implement and eventually how to generate new ways of producing and new products under conditions of dynamic increasing returns. Such a...

The “plowing of the half-acre” episode in Langland’s Piers Plowman includes a chilling passage in which Piers summons Hunger to force able but unwilling laborers to work the land. This chapter approaches the episode by way of the economic history of Karl Polanyi, whose critiques of free-market ideology are receiving renewed attention in the context of globalization and the international economic crisis. One of Polanyi’s key points is that the threat of starvation is a prerequisite to the...

The aim of this article is to contend that Karl Polanyi's work bears significant coincidences with the republican tradition of thought. The first of them is one of a methodological or epistemological kind, and it consists of the use of a very

Esta monografia versa sobre as visões críticas de Karl Marx e Karl Polanyi à ideia de livre mercado proposta por Adam Smith. Smith disserta sobre a positividade no funcionamento automático dos mercados e, assim, funda o bem-estar das sociedades nas ações livres e espontâneas no domínio econômico. Marx crítica essa sociedade livre por visualizar grandes contradições em seu funcionamento, em especial no que diz respeito à relação de trabalho, uma vez que o trabalho é elemento fundamental na...

In this important new book, Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi take a fresh look at the big questions surrounding the peculiar social form known as “capitalism,” upending many of our commonly held assumptions about what capitalism is and how to subject it to critique. They show how, throughout its history, various regimes of capitalism have relied on a series of institutional separations between economy and polity, production and social reproduction, and human and non-human nature, periodically...

When looking at definitions and understandings of the social and solidarity economy, one issue stands out as particularly significant. The issue of how it links to organizational (micro and meso level dimensions) and societal specificities. Whereas social enterprise also in the EMES ideal typical version (Borzaga & Defourny, 2001) is only indirectly linked to a Polanyian framework (Gardin, 2006), the notion of solidarity economy can hardly be understood at an elaborate level without...

The economic crisis in Greece resulted in high unemployment and the dismantlement of social protection policies. How does society respond to the collapse of both welfare-state and market mechanisms? I examine these issues through the study of one working class community in Athens over 2012-13. Since the onset of the crisis, my informants experienced a simultaneous drop in living standards, loss of social status, and debasement of their symbolic construction of reality. To respond to these...

Like the lifelong sinner who makes a deathbed conversion, it was always likely that supporters of neoliberal globalisation would rediscover ethics towards the end. Having devastated communities through indifference, and coercively imposed commercial priorities on to family life, the political “centre” now has to deal with anger, distrust and rejection on an unmanageable scale. In The Future of Capitalism, Paul Collier, a former chief economist at the World Bank, now professor at the Oxford...

En el presente trabajo mostraremos que la filosofía liberal operó en muchas ocasionesa través de un esquema teleológico, desde el cual entendía que la espontaneidad delmovimiento histórico conducía de forma natural hacia una economía de mercados libres.Semejante interpretación tenía que presuponer otra controvertida tesis, a saber, que lascategorías que informan la racionalidad práctica dentro de una sociedad de mercado no sonuna simple contingencia histórica, sino que responden a la...