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[Thread] Karl Polanyi on how the market economy represents a radical break from most of human history:
No society could, naturally, live for any length of time unless it possessed an economy of some sort; but previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets.
In spite of the chorus of academic incantations so persistent in the nineteenth century, gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important part in human economy.
Though the institution of the market was fairly common since the later Stone Age, its role was no more than incidental to economic life.
While history and ethnography know of various kinds of economies, most of them comprising the institution of markets, they know of no economy prior to our own, even approximately controlled and regulated by markets.
The role played by markets in the internal economy of the various countries ... was insignificant up to recent times.
If one conclusion stands out more clearly than another from the recent study of early societies, it is the changelessness of man as a social being.
[Man's] natural endowments reappear with a remarkable constancy in societies of all times and places; and the necessary preconditions of the survival of human society appear to be immutably the same.
The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships.
He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end.
Neither the process of production nor that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interests which eventually ensure that the required step be taken.
These interests will be very different in a small hunting or fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives.
This cursory outline of the economic system and markets, taken separately, shows that never before our own time were markets more than accessories of economic life.
As a rule, the economic system was absorbed in the social system, and whatever principle of behavior predominated in the economy, the presence of the market pattern was found to be compatible with it.
The principle of barter or exchange, which underlies this pattern, revealed no tendency to expand at the expense of the rest.
Ultimately, that is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market.
Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.
These rough indications should suffice to show the entirely unprecedented nature of such a venture in the history of the race.
