Burawoy & Polanyi's paradox

 Michael Burawoy, whose 'Manufacturing Consent' came out in 1979- the year I enrolled at the LSE- has just been killed by a hit and run driver. He is the first victim of Trump's Neo-liberalism agenda which has not only failed to ban dicks but has also failed to make automobiles of any sort illegal. 

Some years ago, he invented the term 'Polanyi's paradox'-

Attributing colonial atrocities,

which began when our species either slut shamed or otherwise killed off the Neanderthals  

two world wars,

the first of which was caused by the Kaiser hating his Uncle Teddy and the second of which had to do with the Tzar having been replaced by an even more evil and genocidal regime 

and the rise of fascism

in response to a clear and present Bolshevik threat 

to the repercussions of a market fundamentalism,

Stalin's?  

Polanyi believed that humanity would never be so irrational and irresponsible as to take another plunge toward a market utopia.

Yet, Karl had the sense to emigrate to Capitalist England and then the even more Capitalist USA. Neither were 'market utopias' in the full sense, but at least they had markets where ordinary people could buy nice things.  

Yet this is precisely what happened. I call this “Polanyi’s Paradox” – a mistaken idealistic response to a materialist diagnosis. He failed to recognize the mighty economic forces driving marketization.

Stuff like wanting to earn good money and buy nice things.  Burawoy himself had gone to work in a factory. He was amazed to find that his fellow workers expected him to work hard so the team could get bonuses. Why didn't they desire to kill and eat Management? The answer, obviously, was that 'Consent' was being 'Manufactured'. Did you know that the only reason the proletariat don't eat their own shit is because they have been brainwashed by the Monopolistic Food industry? 

I try to reconstruct Polanyi’s framework by elaborating two tensions running through ... Polanyi’s writings. The first tension is between market and society

there is no such tension. Societies have markets or swap meets or other mechanisms of exchange. If such markets disappear, Societies collapse or warp into something else- e.g. Gulags.  

in which the former threatens to destroy the latter through the commodification of so-called fictitious commodities – land, labour and money.

If a guy pays rent on land and receives a money wage, Society is threatened. Yet this nutter, like Polanyi, voluntarily emigrated to America whose ancient indigenous societies might not have 'commodified' land or labour. Indeed, they may have had no money.  The plain fact is Societies thrive where there is monetization and commodification and the division of labour on the basis of the theory of comparative advantage. The sort of Societies Karl and this nutter valorised would have no professional Sociologists though not doubt, head-hunters might engage in methodenstreit with their victims from time to time. 

In Polanyi’s view these entities were never intended to be commodified.

Intended by whom? Neanderthals? They went extinct.  

In their commodification they undermine human livelihood, human capacities and human agency,

Which is why so many Americans keep trying to emigrate to North Korea.  

commodification disembeds land, labour and money from their necessary social supports.

The US of A killed off indigenous people thus 'dis-embedding' them from land. On the other hand, the European colonists had no objection to getting labour from darker skinned people or earning plenty of money by selling tobacco or cotton or whatever to anyone who could pay for it.  

Society, then, springs back in self-defence.

at Custer's last stand? That didn't alter the outcome. The less productive can't protect valuable territory from the more productive even if the actual genocide is done by a third party. 

The second tension is between capitalism and democracy.

Democracy can fuck Capitalism in the ass. Sadly, it may thereafter turn to shit.  

Here, too, the tension is between the economic and the extra-economic, between the interests of capitalists in accumulation and the interests of workers in democracy.

The workers run the fuck away from Democracies where they starve to death. As for 'accumulation', Kings do it, Dictators do it, the birds and the bees do it. Even this cretin did it, till he was killed by a speeding SUV while crossing the road at a crosswalk.  

Polanyi claims that the unstable equilibrium between capitalism and democracy results either in the democratic transformation of capitalism (socialism)

everybody eating their own shit. 

or the capitalist dissolution of democracy (fascism).

i.e. Trump becoming President.  

My hypothesis is that in The Great Transformation as well as in reality, the first tension, between market and society, is propelled by a first wave of marketization in the nineteenth century,

Markets in England were well developed by the late sixteenth century. But they were earlier periods when other countries were even more marketized. 

whereas the second tension, between democracy and capitalism, is propelled by a second wave of marketization in the twentieth century.

e.g. China in the Eighties or Russia a little later.  

Each wave, therefore, gives rise to different countermovements – crystallizing around localized social movements in the nineteenth century and around the state in the twentieth century.

Nonsense! Movement was always one way- viz towards higher productivity. The Luddites and 'Captain Swing' failed immediately. I suppose there may have been places where productivity fell but they lost salience and either suffered depopulation or turned into Malthusian shitholes.  

The question we have to ask, then, is how these two sets of tensions play themselves out in the present third wave of marketization that begins in the 1970s, calling for a reaction of a global character.

Sadly, the reaction was Stupidity of a colossal character.  

Human fate depends not only on the possibility of such a global reaction but also on the form it might take, whether authoritarian or democratic. Polanyi was concerned with the alternatives of fascism and socialism on a national scale, we have to be concerned about them on a global scale.

No. What we have to be concerned about is speeding SUVs which might mow into us as we cross the road. Burawoy's first degree was in Math and thus he had enough nous to use the cross-walk. But his students may not have acquired that knowledge. Today, more than ever, it is important that Sociology students receive instruction on how to safely cross the road. Otherwise, Trump wins.