#karlpolanyi — Public Fediverse posts

“The victory of #fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation or control.” - #KarlPolanyi annpettifor.substack.com/p/its-time-t...

Its Time to Ignore Defeatists ...

“The victory of #fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation or control.” - #KarlPolanyi annpettifor.substack.com/p/its-time-t...

Its Time to Ignore Defeatists ...

“The victory of #fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation or control.” - #KarlPolanyi annpettifor.substack.com/p/its-time-t...

Its Time to Ignore Defeatists ...

“The victory of #fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation or control.” - #KarlPolanyi annpettifor.substack.com/p/its-time-t...

Its Time to Ignore Defeatists ...

Economic Sociology & Political Economy: The Karl Polanyi Bibliographic Database of Scholarship and Digital Archive. “The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University has launched the Bibliographic Database of International Scholarship – a project dedicated to exploring Karl Polanyi’s preeminent intellectual legacy and current influence worldwide.”

“ #KarlPolanyi analyzed the nineteenth-century notion of the #self-regulating #market as a #utopian construction—the impossible project of a society that has done away with power and politics … “ open.substack.com/pub/adamtooz...

Top Links 1040 Tax the billion...

Appunti di lettura: Karl Polanyi, “Per un nuovo Occidente”

https://rizomatica.noblogs.org/2026/02/pellegrino-appunti-lettura-karl-polanyi-nuovo-occidente/

L’opera che qui presentiamo, “Per un nuovo Occidente”, è una raccolta di saggi scritti tra il 1919 e il 1958. Questa raccolta di scritti molto vari può costituire una valida t

#Economia #Politica #democrazia #economia #globalizzazione #KarlPolanyi #liberalismo #libert #mercato #neoliberismo #occidente #pace #socialismo

“The economic system is, in effect, a mere function of social organization”*…

The AI race is, of course, afoot. But while most headlines focus on the new capabilities and benchmarks achieved by competing developers, Jeremy Shapiro reminds us that the winners in this race won’t necessarily be the most objectively capable, but rather the players who most effectively integrate the technology into their organizations, economies, and societies…

Artificial intelligence has rapidly become a central arena of geopolitical competition. The United States government frames AI as a strategic asset on par with energy or defense and seeks to press its apparent lead in developing the technology. The European Union lags in platform power but seeks influence over AI through regulation, labor protections, and rule-setting. China is racing to catch up and to deploy AI at scale, combining heavy state investment with administrative control and surveillance.

Each of these rivals fears falling behind. Losing the AI race is widely understood to mean slower growth, military disadvantage, technological dependence, and diminished global influence. As a result, governments are pouring money into chips, data centers, and national AI champions, while tightening export controls and treating compute capacity as a strategic resource. But this familiar race narrative obscures a deeper danger. AI is not just another general-purpose technology. It is a force capable of reshaping the very meaning of work, income, and social status. The states that lose control of these social effects may find that technological leadership offers little geopolitical advantage.

History suggests that societies unable to absorb disruptive economic change become politically volatile, strategically erratic, and ultimately weaker competitors. The central question, then, is not only who builds the most powerful AI systems, but who can integrate them into society without triggering a societal backlash or an institutional breakdown.

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, published in 1944, explains why the capacity to “socially embed” new market forces determines national strength. By “embeddedness,” Polanyi meant that markets have historically been subordinate to social and political institutions, rather than governing them. The nineteenthcentury idea of what he called a “self-regulating market” was historically novel precisely because it sought to “disembed” the economy from society and organize social life around price and competition rather than social obligation. As Polanyi put it in his most succinct formulation, “instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”

Writing in the shadow of the Great Depression, Polanyi argued that the attempt in the nineteenth century to create a self-regulating market society that treated labor, land, and money as commodities generated social dislocation so severe that it provoked authoritarian backlash and geopolitical collapse. Stable orders, he insisted, required markets to be re-embedded in social and political institutions. Where they were not, societies sought protection by other means, which often translated into support for fascist or communist regimes that promised to tame the market. Today, it often means electing populist leaders who promise to break the entire existing order, both domestic and international.

Polanyi insisted that the idea of a “self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia” because such a system could not exist “for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society.” The interwar gold standard, for example, disciplined states in the name of efficiency, but it did so by transmitting economic shocks directly into social life. When democratic governments proved unable to shield their populations, they either abandoned the liberal economic order or turned authoritarian (or both)…

[Shapiro considers the history of the 20th century, in particular the rise of Nazi Gernmany, sketches the state of play in the AI arena, considers the challenge of embedding the changes that AI will bring in The U.S., Europe, and China, then teases out the ways in which the “industrial revolution” is different from it predecessors (in particular, the mobility of capital, the services (as opposed to manufacturing)-heavy character of employment today, and the accelerating pace of tech deelopment. He concludes…]

… Geopolitical competition in the AI age will not take place solely in clean rooms or data centers. It will also involve the less visible realm of social institutions: labor markets, communities, social protections, and political legitimacy. Polanyi teaches us that markets are powerful only when societies can bear them. When they cannot, markets provoke their own undoing and often in rather spectacular fashion.

The West’s success in the Cold War owed much to its ability to reconcile capitalism with social protection. If the AI age is another “great transformation,” the same lesson applies. Chips matter. Data matters. But the ultimate source of power may be the capacity to re-embed technological change in society without sacrificing cohesion.

That is not a liberal-progressive distraction from geopolitical competition. It is its hidden core.

“The Next Great Transformation,” from @jyshapiro.bsky.social and @open-society.bsky.social.

For a complementary perspective (with special focus on the interaction between labor and the supply side of the economy) pair with: “Brave New World- a third industrial divide?” from @thunen.bsky.social in @phenomenalworld.bsky.social.

And see also: “AI and the Futures of Work,” from Johannes Kleske (@jkleske.bsky.social). A response to dramatic predictions of AI’s impact– most recently, Matt Shumer‘s viral “Something Big Is Happening“: it’s a possible future, Kleske suggests. but only one possibe future– and one that, while plausible, isn’t likely (at least outside the rarified atmsphere of coding, in which Shumer operates). In a way that echoes Shapiro’s piece above, Kleske suggests that individuals need to better understand the technology in order to retain/regain some agency, and societies need the same kind of rekindled resistance to act clearly and with purpose in re-embedding AI, and markets, in society. Not the other way around… Resonant with the thinking of Tim O’Reilly and Mike Loukides featured here before: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it“; and with Ted Chiang‘s “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” and “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?” And then there’s the ever-illuminating Rusty Foster (riffing on Gideon Lewis-Kraus‘ recent New Yorker piece): “A. I. Isn’t People.”

For a look at a high-value, trust-based use case for AI that seems to avoid the objections to AGI (and speak to Shapiro’s points), see “The Middle Game: Routers at the Edge,” from Byrne Hobart.

But back to AGI… as Nicholas Carr observes, we might understand Bosrtrom’s “paperclip maximizer” “not as a thought experiment but as a fable. It’s not really about AIs making paperclips. It’s about people making AIs. Look around. Are we not madly harvesting the world’s resources in a monomaniacal attempt to optimize artificial intelligence? Are we not trapped in an “AI maximizer” scenario?”

###

As we digest development, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962 that an early precondition for the revolution underway was first achieved: telephone and television signals were first relayed in space via the communications satellite Echo 1– basically a big metallic balloon that simply bounced radio signals off its surface.  Simple, but effective.

Forty thousand pounds (18,144 kg) of air was required to inflate the sphere on the ground; so it was inflated in space.  While in orbit it only required several pounds of gas to keep it inflated.

Fun fact: the Echo 1 was built for NASA by Gilmore Schjeldahl, a Minnesota inventor probably better remembered as the creator of the plastic-lined airsickness bag.

source

Zur Einleitung von Sven Beckerts Kapitalismus-Buch: Kapitalismus als Prozess

https://wittenbrink.net/zur-einleitung-von-sven-beckerts-kapitalismus-buch-kapitalismus-als-prozess/

2 “ #Nature would be reduced to its elements, #neighborhoods and #landscapes defiled, #rivers polluted, #military #safety jeopardized, the power to produce #food and #rawmaterials destroyed.” - #KARLPOLANYI, THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF OUR TIME #institutions

Klimapolitik, Geopolitik und Mario Draghis Rede – Überlegungen zum Standard-Interview mit Kywan Riahi

https://wittenbrink.net/klimapolitik-geopolitik-und-mario-draghis-rede-ueberlegungen-zum-standard-interview-mit-kywan-riahi/

OnlineFirst - "Exploring decommodification strategies: A Polanyian perspective on a collaborative housing initiative in Vienna" by Benjamin Baumgartner and Hans Volmary:

#decommodification #KarlPolanyi #collaborativehousing #housingsystems #Vienna

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X251336894

"However, the important thing in Polanyi’s contribution is that he argued that skills are a precondition for articulate knowledge in general, and scientific knowledge in particular. For example, to carry out physical experiments requires a high degree of skills. These skills cannot just be learned from textbooks. They are acquired by instruction from someone who knows the trade."

#RagnarFjelland, 2020

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0494-4

(1/2)

#science #KarlPolanyi

There were no accepted criteria of fascism, nor did it possess conventional tenets. Yet one significant feature of all its organized forms was the abruptness with which they appeared and faded out again, only to burst forth with violence after an indefinite period of latency. All this fits into the picture of a social force that waxed and waned according to the objective situation.

What we termed, for short, “fascist situation” was no other than the typical occasion of easy and complete fascist victories. All at once, the tremendous industrial and political organizations of labor and of other devoted upholders of constitutional freedom would melt away, and minute fascist forces would brush aside what seemed until then the overwhelming strength of democratic governments, parties, trade unions. […]

To imagine that it was the strength of the movement which created situations such as these, and not to see that it was the situation that gave birth in this case to the movement, is to miss the outstanding lesson of the last decades.

Fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function. (Polanyi, 2001, p. 239)

Habe gerade versucht, bei Karl Polanyi ein Zitat zu finden, das zur aktuellen Situation passt. Anlass: Ein Interview im Deutschlandfunk mit einer „Wirtschaftsweisen“, die zwar von den „Gebeutelten“ der Globalisierung spricht, aber die historische Situation nicht benennt und die Parallelen zur Situation vor 100 Jahren absichtlich oder unabsichtlich ignoriert (Malmendier, 2025).

Es ist sicher gefährlich, die Ähnlichkeiten zwischen den aktuellen Ereignissen und denen vor einem Jahrhundert zu überschätzen. Aber wenn man in Polanyis „Great Transformation“ liest, versteht man wohl mehr von dem, was sich gerade tut, als es die Analysen einer unhistorischen Ökonomie bieten. Der Trumpismus ist wie der autoritäre Rechtspopulismus anderswo die falsche Antwort auf eine objektiv gegebene Situation: Märkte, die sich die Gesellschaft unterworfen haben statt von ihr kontrolliert zu werden. Damals haben, wie Polanyi es darstellt, vor allem die Regierenden in England nicht daran geglaubt, dass die Nazis tatsächlich mit dem bestehenden internationalen Wirtschaftssystem brechen würden. Jetzt, so kommt es mir vor, glauben die Anhängerinnen und Anhänger der Globalisierung, die Feinde der sogenannten „globalen Handelordnung“ müssten nur zur Vernunft gebracht werden. Wenn Polanyi Recht hat – und man müsste seine Thesen für unsere „Anthropozän-Situation“ übersetzen – dann besteht die eigentliche Alternative heute aber zwischen dem Faschismus Trumps und seiner Verbündeten und einer – internationalen – gesellschaftlichen Kontrolle der Märkte.

Blauschwarz in der Berichterstattung des Falter – Zum Gap zwischen politischer Berichterstattung, Klimajournalismus und ökologischer Ökonomie

https://wittenbrink.net/blauschwarz-in-der-berichterstattung-des-falter-zum-gap-zwischen-politischer-berichterstattung-klimajournalismus-und-oekologischer-oekonomie/

A short piece from the Guardian on Karl Polanyi, his work The Great Transformation and the understanding of fascism both then and now. “The whole book is, in a sense, about fascism, something that Polanyi himself suffered from enormously....This is why it has renewed, real relevance today.”
#Fascism #KarlPolanyi #GreatTransformation #CriticalTheory #Sociology
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/23/the-greatest-thinker-youve-never-heard-of-expert-who-explained-hitlers-rise-is-finally-in-the-spotlight

'‘The greatest thinker you’ve never heard of’: expert who explained Hitler’s rise is finally in the spotlight
After fleeing Hitler, brilliant #Jewish #economist #KarlPolanyi was never welcomed by the #British. Now, for the first time in 80 years, his masterwork #TheGreatTransformation has been published in the #UK'

'In it, he accused influential liberal economists, ..., of commodifying human beings and the #environment in the name of the #FreeMarket.'

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/23/the-greatest-thinker-youve-never-heard-of-expert-who-explained-hitlers-rise-is-finally-in-the-spotlight
#GE2024 #Economics

If you've heard/read analysis that tips its hat to Karl Polanyi & his idea of the 'double movement' but have not been sure what is being alluded to, here (marking 80 years since his death) is a concise introduction to his life & thought.

Its only an introduction (there's a lot more to Polanyi that discussed here) but if you're interested in finding out more about this staple of critical political economy, this is a good a place to start as any.

#KarlPolanyi #economics
https://www.socialeurope.eu/karl-polanyi-against-the-free-market-dystopia

OnlineFirst - "Uneven decommodification geographies: Exploring variation across the centre and periphery" by Geoff Goodwin:

#decommodification #KarlPolanyi #land #labour #food

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X231209766

OnlineFirst - "Reassembling the politics of “Green” urban redevelopment in East Garfield Park: A Polanyian approach" by Ihnji Jon:

#financializationofurbanspace #greengentrification #KarlPolanyi #racializedunevendevelopment #greenurbandevelopment

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0308518X231221019#

OnlineFirst - "Embedding the land market: Polanyi, urban planning and regulation" by Edward Shepherd and Matthew Wargent:

#KarlPolanyi #land #urbanplanning #regulation #markets

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X231203484

«Aunque la restricción es aplicable a todos, los privilegiados tienden a resentirse, como si estuviera dirigida únicamente a ellos. Ellos hablan de esclavitud, cuando, en efecto, intencionalmente solo se busca extender entre los demás la libertad establecida de que ellos disfrutan.»
#KarlPolanyi

«Las evidencias [de un movimiento fascista] más importantes consistían en la difusión de filosofías irracionalistas, la estética racista, la demagogia anticapitalista, los puntos de vista heterodoxos, la crítica al sistema de partidos, el extendido menosprecio al "régimen" o cualquiera que fuera el nombre dado a la estructura democrática existente».
#KarlPolanyi #Fascismo

«Las tasas de crecimiento natural de la población, en realidad, pueden ser un índice ya sea de vitalidad cultural o de degradación cultural. El significado original de la palabra "proletario", que vincula a la fertilidad con la mendicidad, es una expresión impresionante de esta ambivalencia»
#Cita #KarlPolanyi #NowReading

#NowReading #KarlPolanyi

As part of her #KarlPolanyi Visiting Professorship,
Julia Steinberger will give a public lecture at #WUvienna on Tuesday (May 30) at 6:30pm.

And I'm exited that she'll also visit #IIASA to discuss the balance between individual agency and institutions in a #JustTransition...

More info at https://www.karlpolanyisociety.com