Karl Polanyi and the Anti-Antimonies of Embeddednesss

Abstract

(Gemici 2008) reiterates much of the literature surrounding Polanyi's ‘embeddedness’, suggesting that there exists, within its conceptual grammar, an untenable contradiction: a contradiction between its dualistic usage as, on the one hand, a methodological principle to affirm all economic processes as ‘socially instituted and organized’ (hereafter ‘embedded embeddedness’), and, on the other hand, as a historical variable to describe the unprecedented relation between economy and society that market capitalism had brought about (hereafter ‘disembedded embeddedness’). It is argued here that there is only a semantic contradiction between these two ‘embeddednesses’, and in fact, substantively, they together constitute an incredibly powerful analytical apparatus through which to understand market capitalism. We demonstrate this first by tracing the genealogy of both variants of embeddedness to two, entirely legitimate, observations Polanyi made about the ontology of market society — that it is imperialistic vis-a-vis the surrounding organic order, by dint of its drive towards the commodification of the ‘fictitious commodities’; and that it is not a ‘natural’ social formation, but rather one that had to be politically ‘constructed’ right from the beginning. Next, we apply the insights that were herein conceived to an explication of contemporary neoliberalism. In doing so, not only is the immense intellectual utility of both variants of embeddedness realized, but also certain long-standing ambiguities in the embeddedness literature are solved. Neoliberalism as interpreted by embeddedness comprises of two elements, each illuminated by a different ‘embeddedness’, both which fall under the overarching telos of the restoration of elite class power. First, disembedded embeddedness elucidates the ‘weaponization’ of the market's endogenous commodity logic under neoliberalism — its brutal intensification as a means to subsume the fictitious commodities, nature and human beings, under the logic of capital accumulation at the behest of capitalist class prerogative. Second, embedded embeddedness elucidates the ‘re-embedding’ of market economy in ‘bad embeddings’ under neoliberalism — institutional configurations that seek to entrench domination by ‘protecting’ certain privileged interests from the exigencies of market forces, and by denying ‘others’ the liberative opportunities presented by the ‘radical leveller’ that is money. We conclude that, in this capacity — textual minutia aside — embeddedness is of immense analytical efficacy.