[Peace-discuss] To market, to market...

[C. G. Estabrook]

The Financial Times' chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, reviews today a 
book by a gentle left-liberal Englishman, Will Hutton, "Them and Us: Changing 
Britain - Why We Need a Fair Society."

They agree that "the financial crisis challenges the the orthodoxies of the past 
three decades [which neither, apparently, calls by their right name: 
neoliberalism] ... [and so] the state has to rescue the financial system..." And 
that's an important point - a beginning for a politics beyond the limits of 
allowable debate for either party (in Britain or America).

But the rescue Hutton proposes and Wolf approves is only a matter of tinkering 
with "the market". The book, which Wolf risibly refers to as a "manifesto for a 
new left-of-centre politics for the UK" is nothing of the sort. (Or, it's that 
sort of manifesto as it might be approved by the chief economics commentator of 
the Financial Times.)

More than two generations ago one of the great books of the 20th c. set out an 
important account of the market - which this book, even in the midst of the 
Great Recession, doesn't approach.

In /The Great Transformation/ (1944) Karl Polanyi charted the social and 
political upheavals that took place in England during the rise of the market 
economy. He argued that the modern market economy and the modern nation-state 
should be understood not as discrete elements, but as the single human invention 
that he called the "market society." He sees its effects as overall deleterious, 
and - while approving of the existence of markets within a society - excoriates 
the transformation of the society into a market.

Today the most our current advanced thinkers - like Hutton - seem to be able to 
do is to advise that we ameliorate its effects.  --CGE
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20101120/94415a89/attachment-0001.html>