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Though Polanyi referred to three distinct fictitious commodities, one, money, and the fate of the apex structure that commodified it, the gold standard, structured The Great Transformation’s narrative. Despite this centrality of money and its commodification to Polanyi’s masterwork, there is near-deafening silence in Polanyi scholarship on money as a fictitious commodity. This chapter ends it. It traces Polanyi’s understanding of fictitious commodities to its sources in classical political economy and explains how the near total dominance of the antithetical tradition of neoclassical economics obscures understanding. The chapter also argues that the resulting argument shared a great deal with the classical Marxist theories of imperialism and of uneven and combined development of previous decades, particularly their arguments about the centrality of powerful nation states to capitalism. It stresses another hitherto neglected aspect of Polanyi’s argument, that the double movement led to the emergence of ‘crustacean nations’. As such, the chapter argues, The Great Transformation contributes a great deal towards a new approach to understanding world affairs, geopolitical economy, which challenges Ricardian ‘universalist’ understandings and takes the ‘materiality of nations’ seriously. It, and Polanyi, are more relevant than ever in our ‘deglobalizing’ age of multi-polarity.

This chapter traces the conversion of feudal land tenures into private agricultural property in the immediate post-Independence period, a subsequent phase of agricultural corporatism, and the recent subsumption of agrarian land into the current regime of urban rent-seeking. It clarifies the meaning and defends the utility of Karl Polanyi's conception of land as a fictitious commodity. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research into processes of land commodification and dispossession in rural northwest India, the chapter argues that Polanyi's conception of land as a fictitious commodity helps to explain why state action — including but not limited to dispossession — is an important mechanism for transforming land into a commodity. The chapter then reveals different configurations of state force were required to disembed land, first, from a feudal regime, then from the joint family, and finally from regulated agricultural developmentalism. Underlying each of these transformations were particular narratives of land's social function — as symbol of sovereign power, as grounds for productivist nation building, and ultimately as a source of foreign investment. The chapter employs this historical analysis to offer a sociological reconstruction of Polanyi's concept of fictitiousness, elucidating the unique challenges of commodifying land and the crucial role of extra-economic forces in the process.

In the last decades, Karl Polanyi has gained recognition as one of the most important social scientists of the twentieth century. His seminal book, The Great Transformation, is listed among twentieth- century classics. How can this book, written more than seventy-five years ago, be applied to the current conditions? In order to answer this question the chapter not only compares the civilization of the nineteenth century in Europe with our own epoch. It also reconstructs some of Polanyi’s most important insights, such as his critique of the liberal utopia (in its classical and neoliberal version), his interpretation of the double movement, his vision of the meaning of the industrial revolution, his understanding of the problem of freedom in a complex society and his idea of a necessary ‘reform of human consciousness’. The chapter closes with a discussion of the question of how Polanyi’s categories can be used fruitfully so as to throw light to the post-war era and our society today.

Earth exceeds globalizing capitalism, whose raggedy edges are characterized by a complex dialectic. While such edges are enrolled in its expansion, they consistently exceed its logic (challenging its globalization), unpredictably transforming globalizing capitalism and more-than-capitalist processes. Karl Polanyi’s fictitious commodities, people, Earth, and finance, are such raggedy edges. People and Earth instantiate distinct processes from those of commodity production. These can be enrolled in globalizing capitalism through accumulation by dispossession and the commodification of nature and culture. Yet, with globalizing capitalism failing to realize its promise, they also undermine and challenge it through the agencies of civil society and the more-than-human world. Financialization facilitates and disrupts globalizing capitalism in other ways, including post-Bretton Woods financial crises, reflecting its emergence as the ultimate, virtual, unlimited commodity. All three tend to reinforce the unequalizing implications of uneven, asymmetric connectivities.

This conclusion brings together key points from the alternative macro-paradigms in Part I, the institutional parameters and reforms to these, discussed in Part II– and the political and economic re-structuring advocated in Part III. It argues that a new social democracy is needed to achieve the rebalancing of the market-state-civil society relationship distorted by neoliberalism. This shift, should be based on democratization and accountability in the social and economic spheres as well as in conventional politics. A paradigm and practice drawn from and substantially driven by a social base rooted in recent social movements and more progressive NGOs. Applied to ‘fictitious commodity’ fields such as housing, finance and employment, its discourse would emphasis gender and practical environmental issues to ground a post-neoliberal politics in more relevant and popular concern than the stagnant, tendentious and often obscure abstractions of economic discourse. It is argued that the related ideas and policies could, at the least, achieve a regime change within contemporary capitalism. A change comparable to the social democracy which successfully displaced the market hegemony of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

A vast new world of transnational standards has emerged, covering issues from human rights to sustainability to food safety. This chapter develops a framework for making sense of this new global order. It is tempting to imagine that global rules can and should bypass corrupt, incapacitated, or illegitimate governments in poor and middle-income countries. This assumption must be rejected if we want to understand the consequences of global rules and the prospects for improvement. After showing how a combination of social movements, global production networks, and neoliberalism gave rise to transnational private regulation, the chapter builds the foundations for the comparative approach of this book. The book’s comparative analysis of land and labor in Indonesia and China sheds light on two key fields of transnational governance, their implications in democratic and authoritarian settings, and the problems of governing the global economy through private regulation.

This chapter examines two interrelated practices integral to the construction of urban land as a fictitious commodity in the redevelopment of Camden, New Jersey. It begins with the process of rule making which establishes an institutional structure that makes Camden's land available for middle-class investment while displacing existing residents who are constructed as a deterrent to a resurgent land market. The chapter then reviews how the successful performance of the urban land market necessitated the alignment of actors' subjectivities such that they are willing and capable of performing the roles required for the redevelopment process to achieve its objectives. These interrelated practices locate the urban political in the highly contested domain in which the materiality of urban land meets urban subjectivity in the performance of the land market. Ultimately, the chapter traces the unfolding of the double movement through three interrelated moments of political contestation over its form and content: in the construction of land as an investable commodity; in the countermovement against displacement attendant on proposed redevelopment; and in constructing the subjects whose self-governance enacts the land market in Camden.

We here explore the gradual emasculation of the household as the basic unit of provisioning during the four evolutionary phases of capitalism. This economic history reveals a gradual redefinition of the purpose of the household from the center of entrepreneurial initiative to a besieged and insecure provider of inconvenient and unwanted labor to managerial capitalism whose central imperative is to reduce labor costs in the service of greater net returns to owners of capital. This evolutionary pathway will reveal the household to be an increasingly precarious and politically vexing participant in global capitalism.

Marx and Polanyi each proposed that land, labour and capital are central aspects of capitalist development. For Marx they were the foundation of a free-trade ideology that obscured labour’s central importance to capital accumulation. Polanyi rejected production as the nexus of exploitation, and instead emphasized the free trader’s ideology of self-regulating. This chapter examines these competing claims and considers their implications the place of SSEs in today’s global political economy, exploring the extent to which they have the emancipatory potential to mitigate the consequences of capitalist development.

Beginning in the 1980s, inequality of incomes in the metropolitan core began to increase. This great divergence was most pronounced in the Anglophone world—Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This divergence suggests that there is nothing inherent—structurally determinative—in capitalism as it operates in the rich metropole that brings about this unwelcome trend. Rather, inequality is willful—intended. Ironically, inequality is enabled by the prevalence of possessive individualism that reveals the acquisitive individualist to be the source of his or her own unwanted economic marginalization. The individualist’s embrace of a livelihood strategy based on the celebration of rights and the illusion of freedom—being free to choose—has placed him or her at the mercy of the capitalist firm equally committed to possessive individualism. The capitalist firm must be transformed into a public trust. However, this will not be sufficient. Improved livelihoods will also require that the possessive individual be reimagined.