Fictitious Commodities Research Articles

Aggravated commodification as a new dimension of precarity in platform economy

The concepts of precariousness that emerged in Western countries from the 1980s onwards highlight uncertainty regarding the form, scope and nature of labour in the near future. In this article, we use the concept of aggravated commodification as a new dimension of precariousness faced by platform workers. This concept is derived from Polanyi’s idea of fictitious commodities and is treated as a form of labour-market expansion. Applying critically evaluated theory of Karl Polanyi, the article argues that platforms transform labour into a commodity, potentially leading to exploitation and societal unrest. Aggravated commodification refers to work arrangements that introduce (three-sided) market mechanisms within the labour process. Moreover, thanks to the technological infrastructure platforms are leading to the commodification of activities previously performed outside the market and free absorption of activities that were previously a part of wage labour. The study contributes a comprehensive framework for understanding and enriching discussions on precarity in the context of platform capitalism, especially within Central and Eastern European countries.

Fictitious Commodities, Social Costs, and Institutional Contradictions. Karl Polanyi’s Critique of Commodification

The articles reconstruct Karl Polanyi’s idea of fictitious commodities with the help of Karl William Kapp’s theory of social costs. According to the proposed argument labour land, and money are social spheres, where major social and ecological costs of a functioning market economy tend to accumulate. Hence, commodity fiction concerning land, labour, and money is crucial for understanding ideological and redistributive conflicts characteristic of contemporary capitalism.

Facing the fiction: can the European Union regulate fictitious commodities and capital?

AbstractThe years following the financial crisis of 2008 have witnessed a revival of interest in both the Polanyian concept of ‘fictitious commodities’ and the Marxian concept of ‘fictitious capital’. The former, with its focus on the consequences of markets for the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labour, and money, appears as a plausible explanation for our present instability along environmental, social, and economic axes. The latter, with its focus on what sets financial capitalists apart from their industrial counterparts, sheds light on what really separates Wall Street from Main Street, and what it all means for the prospects of class struggle in the 21st century. Building on a decade and a half of discourse on the role of these phenomena in financialisation, this paper explores the kinds of limits the law can place on high finance’s most flagrant flights of fancy. Taking as case studies the post-crisis efforts by the European Union (EU) to intervene in two key financial markets – private equity and securitisation – it asks how far current regulatory frameworks go, and what more can be done to protect Europe from capitalism’s excesses.

Expropriation and the Natural World: Some Reflections on Karl Polanyi and Thorstein Veblen

Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece, The Great Transformation, and Thorstein Veblen’s last book, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times, offer acute diagnoses of the relationship between capitalism and the natural environment. From Polanyi’s fictitious commodities to Veblen’s absentee ownership, this study explores the differences and similarities between these perspectives regarding the natural world. To organize our analysis, we follow Nancy Fraser’s and Rahel Jaeggi’s understanding of capitalism as an exploitative and expropriative system. In this sense, we state that despite their differences, Veblen and Polanyi emphasize seizure and confiscation when regarding the statute of the natural world in market societies.

Karl Polanyi’s theory of fictitious commodification as a cultural political economy of institutionalization

ABSTRACT This paper aims to offer a new reading of Karl Polanyi’s political economy by reinterpreting and reconstructing his institutional analysis as a cultural political economy that critiques capitalism as a historically specific symbolic system. For this purpose, it will draw on his earlier concepts from the socialist calculation debate to reinterpret Polanyi’s theory of fictitious commodification. In particular, it will examine how Polanyi conceptualized the symbolic structure of capitalism as an institutional articulation of particular economic facts, accounting concepts, and economic theory. Polanyi not only critiques the intrinsically cultural nature of foundational categories of the capitalist market economy such as profits, factors of production, and fictitious commodities but also shows how the gap between these categories and ‘the reality of society’ eventually brings about crises and crisis tendencies expressed in the ‘double movement’ and the ‘self-protection of society’. In this sense, Polanyi is a critical cultural political economist with contemporary relevance for the analysis of capitalism as a historically specific symbolic system in which culture plays both constitutive and ideological roles.

The River Runs Through It: Naturalising Social Policy and Welfare

This paper reconceptualises social rights through an integration of human welfare and environmental welfare. This is essential if we are making a case for the radical policy changes required to respond to the current environmental crisis, such as maximum living standards and maximum income. As living standards and the demand for social rights increase across the world, this will lead to a concomitant pressure on nature. A maximum living standard based on an ecological footprint is a starting point to think about the need to grant legal rights and resources to nature. Following Polanyi, both humans and the environment are fictitious commodities; we therefore need to rethink our approach to social policy and decommodification to include the environment. This requires approaching social rights from an ecological perspective and breaking the anthropocentric barriers welfare policies create between society and nature. Here, we draw on the work of Michel Serres on ‘the natural contract’ in order to rethink the content of the social contract and develop an argument in favour of decommodifying nature. Using rivers as legal entities in New Zealand as our example, we illustrate how this theoretical approach could provide the foundations for sustainable eco-social policies in general and maximum living standards in particular.

Can language be commodified? Toward a Marxist theory of language commodification

ABSTRACT This article begins with an overview of the literature on language commodification and the Marxist critiques of this concept. I argue that, while these critiques have raised pertinent issues surrounding the concept of language commodification, they are limited by their reliance on Karl Polanyi’s notion of fictitious commodification, which suggests that entities like land, labor, money and, likewise, language cannot be commodities because they have not been produced to be sold in the market. Drawing on Nancy Fraser, who suggests that fictitious commodities are different from regular commodities not because of their ontological status but because of the role they play in maintaining the conditions of possibility for human life, I try to reorient the debate on language commodification by proposing a new theoretical understanding of this term, grounded in a Marxist approach to language as a social, historical and ideological practice.

Land, International Mobile Labor, Remittances, and Provisioning

We continue exploring Karl Polanyi’s analysis of “fictitious commodities” in relation to international labor migration. In this article we focus on land and discuss examples that show the cumulative processes of international migration, people, agriculture, debt, inequities, and nature.

Cooperative identity as a yardstick for transformative change

Cooperatives serve a competitive yardstick role in markets dominated by market power such as monopsony or monopoly. This paper argues they can also serve a normative yardstick role in efforts to provide contextual social indicators for sustainability reporting that aims to instigate transformative change. The Statement on the Cooperative Identity, which includes cooperative values, principles, and purpose of associative economic organizing (ica.coop), can serve as a blueprint for the construction of social sustainability indicators. The paper then addresses two issues: one, it answers the question what should cooperatives measure and why; and two, it suggests the framework for transformative indicators informed by the purpose of cooperative organizing. In particular, cooperative enterprise model contributes to fair income distribution, promotes economic democracy, de-commodifies necessities and fictitious commodities, and contributes to community development by investing in the real economy. These impact areas ought to be measured and disclosed.

The liberal corporate order and the market transition in colonial Upper Canada, 1825–1841

ABSTRACT This analysis of the corporate ‘franchise state’ in the settler colony of Upper Canada (Ontario) highlights its role in introducing both a liberal market and a corporate revolution. I contrast the liberal legislative project to create laissez faire markets with the private corporate agenda of those legislators, a group of ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ known as the Family Compact. The corporation became the vehicle by which these oligarchs controlled trade and introduced managed markets in the fictitious commodities of land, labor and money; the fictitious commodities were legal reifications (as was the corporation itself) used to govern the trade in real commodities. Control of these corporations allowed these gentlemanly capitalists to also assume control of British emigration and thereby introduce new forms of ‘systemic colonization’ and settler colonialism; and change conceptions of colonial citizenship from loyalism to liberalism. The corporate revolution was thus key to the formation of liberal settler colonialism in the province.

Rethinking Polanyi’s Fictitious Commodities Based on the Brazilian Nuclear Segment

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to show evidence of the undetermined expansion of Polanyi’s fictitious commodities within the Brazilian nuclear context. The issue of the marketification of social agendas has drawn a lot of attention to the data, collected through in-depth interviews. The analytical process was guided by the decolonial theory approach and by critical discourse analysis. Among the analysis’ main findings, it is possible to point out the elaboration of a framework which reveals the mechanisms employed by the Brazilian nuclear segment as a way of exercising parallel power and silencing social agendas. The main contributions are the temporal and geopolitical updating of Polanyi’s thesis; and the definition of the mechanisms used by the company Eletronuclear and by institutions as a way of co-optation, naturalisation and marketification of social and political agendas.

The Climate Leadership Council’s Carbon Dividends Plan: Polanyi’s Market Embeddedness, Fictitious Commodities, and Double Movement

The Climate Leadership Council’s Carbon Dividends Plan: Polanyi’s Market Embeddedness, Fictitious Commodities, and Double Movement

Giving Them a Piece of Our Mind

Zoe Sherman’s Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention gives historical substance to the theory that advertisers are buying the commodity of audience attention. Attention, she maintains, was commodified as the American advertising business assumed its modern institutional form during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Her study is notable for extending beyond print media to outdoor and direct-mail advertising. Based in trade publications and other primary sources, the study notes the complicated institutional relations among advertisers, agents, and media. These relations usually favor big-budget advertisers, but attention is a slippery commodity, difficult to measure or control. Sherman uses Karl Polanyi’s concept of fictitious commodities to explain attention as a phenomenon that is inherently ill-suited for full commodification.

Frictitious commodities: Virtuality, virtue and value in the carbon economy of repair

What ‘nature’ is being commodified in carbon markets, and why does it matter? How are carbon commodities and ecologies of repair co-produced through carbon forestry? Are the Polanyian notions of ‘fictitious commodification’ and ‘embeddedness’ appropriate for thinking about carbon forestry and voluntary carbon market (VCM) offsets? This article addresses these questions and extends the critical understanding of conservation in the ‘repair mode’ through an analysis that delves deeply into the black box of value production in the VCM. Focusing on the interplay of ‘virtuality’ and ‘virtue’ in the production of one variety of so-called ‘boutique’ blue forest carbon offset, this analysis demonstrates the technical abstractions needed isolate ‘carbon’ and force it into the commodity form create slippages between concrete socio-natures and geographies of offsetting and the imagined natures and geographies of a market environmentalist model of the world. This politics facilitates a dual pathway of accumulation via the material extraction of nature to feed the expansion of industrial growth (the subject of Polanyi’s critique) and, in parallel, through feeding new growth markets for nature-based commodities such as the VCM. These markets promise to repair the damage caused by industrial growth, but can only ‘work’ in the abstract, virtual realm despite entanglement with underlying concrete ecologies of repair. Based on this analysis, this article argues that the widespread view of carbon offsets as ‘embedded’ Polanyian fictitious commodities is incomplete, based on an ontological fallacy that conflates the ways in which concrete and abstracted, virtual ‘natures’ are used to produce value in the contemporary restoration economy. This fallacy implicitly reifies the central fictions and contradictions of carbon markets and the market environmentalist model more broadly. Considering VCM carbon forestry in terms of ‘scale-making’ and ‘world-making’ projects, the article presents an alternative conceptualisation of VCM carbon offsets as intangible ‘frictitious’ commodities that inhabit a complicated and only provisionally stabilised commodity form.

New Limits of the Neoliberalism: Society and Market

: Neoliberalism has been able to change the markets and the economy of societies around the world. These transformations are especially important with regards to fictitious commodities: land, labor, and money. However, the 2020 pandemic imposes new limits, when life itself is at risk globally. This work highlights the major neoliberal reforms relating to fictitious commodities, the difficulties of society to resist and create counterweights. The health crisis that has emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic is the result of decades of over-exploitation of nature and human beings. The reforms over fictitious commodities, especially labor, have led to a constant and systematic decline of society. This article is supported by the theoretical legacy of Karl Polanyi and Kari Polanyi Levitt that allows us to consider the most important trends of neoliberal reforms and their main objectives.

Responding to Socioeconomic Diversity in the European Union (and to Steven Klein’s Essay) with Democracy-Enhancing Conflicts Law

Responding to Socioeconomic Diversity in the European Union (and to Steven Klein’s Essay) with Democracy-Enhancing Conflicts Law

Pandemic Paradox and Polanyi: Financial markets rise, economies crash, and regulators toss a coin.

In the pandemic, investors like all responsible citizens share an obligation to keep the community safe. This obligation extends to informed market decision-making which goes beyond self-interest. The current disconnect between financial markets and the economy is a story of two different realities – or perhaps one harsh reality and one expectant gamble. The disconnect cannot just be explained by the different purposes of economic and financial market analysis but rather by the information indicators on which these rely. To forewarn regulators concerned that these two worlds of global wealth generation and growth moving to polar opposite futures, this brief review has these aims: • To reflect on a legal model for financial markets, their regulation and its limitations so that law and finance may be understood as positively relational when considering market sustainability; and then • To suggest that the explanation for this dangerous disconnect can be found in Karl Polanyi’s understanding of fictitious commodities in self-regulating markets, dis-embedding from the social and his propositions for market correction through the double movement. Despite the neoliberal logic to the contrary (where financial markets are deemed only for maximising investor/shareholder profit) financial market regulation should prioritise market sustainability as part of pandemic control policy.

Nonhuman Animals as Fictitious Commodities: Exploitation and Consequences in Industrial Agriculture

AbstractThis article examines how nonhuman animals, along with land and labor, represent fictitious commodities as described by Karl Polanyi. Animals in agriculture are examined as an extreme example of animal commodification whose use resembles the exploitation of land and labor. Conceptual frameworks developed from Marxist theory, including the subsumption of nature, the second contradiction of capitalism, and alienation, are applied to illustrate how the negative impacts to animals, the environment, and public health associated with animal agriculture are caused by attempts to overcome the incomplete commodification of animals. This article illustrates how social theory can be extended to apply to animals, especially animals who are deeply embedded in human society. The inclusion of animals in social analyses also serves to strengthen our overall understanding of exploitation and oppression under capitalism.

Fictitious commodification and agrarian change: Indigenous peoples and land markets in Highland Ecuador

AbstractCreating private property rights and establishing land markets were fundamental to the historical development of capitalism in the Global North and remain at the centre of capitalist development in the Global South. This article contributes to debates about these processes by analysing the relationship between land markets and indigenous peoples in Highland Ecuador. Building on Karl Polanyi's concept of fictitious commodities, it elaborates a new concept that makes an analytical distinction between the activation and development of land markets. The former refers to the occasional participation of actors in markets to secure land, whereas the latter relates to the establishment and expansion of markets that regulate the distribution and value of land through market prices. Focusing on indigenous land struggles in the late 20th century, this article shows that the activation of land markets created opportunities for indigenous peasants to secure land, whereas the development of land markets closed them down. Social and class differentiation among the highland indigenous population increased through this contradictory process. The article connects this historical analysis to recent developments in Ecuador to contribute to empirical and theoretical debates about contemporary land struggles and agrarian change elsewhere in the Global South.

Past and Future Work at the International Labour Organization

This article analyses past and future work at the International Labour Organization (‘ILO’) with reference to the transformational analysis offered by Karl Polanyi, examining how constitutional statements made through ILO Declarations reflect countermovement to market dominance. These policy shifts at the ILO are also analysed in relation to the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, economic and social), which arguably map onto Polanyi’s three fictitious commodities (with a focus on labour as emblematic of social concerns). It is argued that the emphasis on social justice and sustainability in the 2019 ILO Global Commission Report, including the proposal for a Universal Labour Guarantee, provides significant resistance to the economic orthodoxy regarding the future of work promoted by the World Bank Group and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (‘OECD’). However, this narrative of ILO countermovement also exposes a lack of balanced regulation which requires more inclusive voice on the global stage.