Fictitious Commodity Research Articles

Rethinking Sporting Mystification in the Present Tense: Disneylimpics, Affective Neoliberalism, and the Greatest Transformation

While questioning the universalization, naturalization, neutralization, and idealization of sport and physical culture, this paper examines the ultimate mystification process of sport and physical culture by expanding upon two conceptual frameworks: Jules Boykoff’s celebration capitalism and Lawrence Grossberg’s affective landscape. It first analyzes the evolution of the Olympics into a corporatized, commercialized, spectacularized, and celebritized “Disneylimpics” that can consistently evoke an affective reverberation. It then introduces the idea of “affective neoliberalism” to highlight neoliberalism’s affective and ideological aspects. With Grossberg’s concept of affective landscape, this paper explores the internalization and intensification of anxiety and affective isolation within society. Additionally, the paper utilizes Karl Polanyi’s analysis in his influential book, The Great Transformation, to investigate the historical expansion of affective neoliberalism. By highlighting the 11 September 2001, attacks in the United States, it points out provocative militarization and (re)organization of the soul into a fictitious commodity, in addition to labor, land, and money, which triggers the greatest transformation. Lastly, summarizing central arguments, this paper concludes with modest suggestions, mainly focusing on two questions: (1) where are we now? and (2) how can we more effectively respond to the present context?

Bringing Money to the Market: The Ambiguity in Polanyi’s Third “Fictitious Commodity”

The contribution examines Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the fictitiousness of the commodity description of money, and its suitability as a reference for the analysis of the commodification of money within contemporary markets for credit and finance. Any critique of the commodification of money that draws on Polanyi’s influential argument should distinguish between two fundamentally different meanings of the occurrence of money as a commodity: the institutional system that makes some commodity money versus the commercial practice that turns money into a commodity. Only a particular strand of Polanyi’s analysis provides a point of reference for a comprehensive critique of the commodification of money, rather than the monetization of some type of commodity. Departing from the aspects of Polanyi’s analysis that are specific to the political economy of the gold standard, the article draws on Polanyi’s material account of the essential contributions of public organization and social convention in the constitution of money. On these grounds, the commodification of money is potentially objectionable as the social disembedding of a common public institution.

More a Commons Than a Fictitious Commodity: Tacit Knowledge, Sharing, and Cooperation in Knowledge Governance

More a Commons Than a Fictitious Commodity: Tacit Knowledge, Sharing, and Cooperation in Knowledge Governance

Why European legal scholarship should become aware of Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation and the integration project

AbstractAs the Second World War was drawing to a close in 1944, two great works of political economy were published. One of them was Friedrich August von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom,1 inspiring the defenders of free market movements ever since and up to the present. The other was Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.2 This essay will focus on Polanyi but also pay tribute to Hayek. Contrasting the two helps to understand both of them better. Of the two, Hayek, the Nobel prize winner, is of course more widely known and by far more influential. But Polanyi’s work, too, has achieved and has been attracting as of recently such attention that one of the Directors of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne proclaimed that ‘we are all Polanyian now’,3 not only in economic sociology, but also in related disciplines, including, of course, political economy and political theory. A plethora of aspects of The Great Transformation are very widely discussed. This essay will be concerned with the not-so-well explored importance of Polanyi’s work for European Law and legal scholarship in general, including his theorems on the ‘embedded economy’, his conceptualisation of labour as a ‘fictitious commodity’ as well as the notion of counter-movements. It will then juxtapose Polanyi’s expectation of a new international order with the development of the European integration project and sketch out the contours of the democracy-enhancing conflicts law and its affinities with Polanyian core normative principles.

‘Does the Prime Minister Care?’

Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s theorization of care as a “fictitious commodity”, Rashna Darius Nicholson’s article ‘‘Does the Prime Minister Care?’: Spectacular solidarity, infelicitous performatives and the doubly fictitious commodification of care in India during the COVID-19 pandemic’ describes how organised gestures of care in India work to interpellate Indians into soft, palliative forms of populism and authoritarian governmentality. Through an analysis of inter-related state-sanctioned gestures of care such as symbolic acts initiated by the Narendra Modi administration during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the PM Cares fund, and artist-in-aid programs, this article suggests that state-affiliated, spectacular care functions in the contemporary Indian context as a doubly fictitious commodity. Fictionalized first through commodification by the neoliberal marketplace and subsequently by a government seeking to advance a Hindu nationalist project, care as state-affiliated mass spectacle has become an infelicitous performative, that is, a seductive aesthetic mode that facilitates the political choreographing of (extra-)legal political interventions. Through an analysis of the infelicities of institutional care, the article shows how the state’s systematized affirmations of public concern obfuscate the breakdown of civil society-state relations, normalization of Hindu culture and increasing violence in contemporary India.

Karl Polanyi and the Reappraisal of Happiness Economics

Happiness economics unearths the undesirable effects of economic growth and criticizes the economic model based on the belief in the supremacy of market relations over the relational bonds of society. Economic growth brings about substantial increases in material well-being; yet, it has the potential to destroy the social and environmental fabric of society. This is visible in the post-World War II cross-country variability of the subjective well-being measures, which shows the importance of relational goods and associational activities. These themes echo Karl Polanyi’s concerns over the destructive effects of the self-regulating market mechanism. In this paper, we demonstrate the relevance of the interdisciplinary work of Polanyi for happiness economics. We argue that Polanyi’s conception of the self-regulating market system comes together with the spread of unhappiness. The treatment of labor as a fictitious commodity is of utmost significance in this respect. No less important is the similar degrading of land, a proxy for environment. Furthermore, the distinction Polanyi maintained between “exploitation” and “cultural degeneration” in assessing the Industrial Revolution is useful for this critique. In essence, Polanyi’s approach is relevant to explain the deterioration of social relations, which is thought to be the ultimate reason behind the happiness paradox.

Individualizing Consumption: Audience Attention and the Role of the Advertising Industry

Zoe Sherman’s Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention presents a powerful, provocative historical-theoretical analysis of the advertising industry, building on Polanyi’s conceptual framework of the “fictitious commodity” to demonstrate the historical process by which our sensory organs have become objects of capitalist commodification since the 1870s. Drawing on archival sources, advertising case studies, and an analysis of the capitalist state’s facilitating monopoly rents, the book outlines the commodification of audience attention. Sherman’s work connects to Marx’s historical project of identifying the production-consumption dynamic in each mode of production and has clearly identified a tendency that was always latent within capitalist consumption but only became clearer with the advertising industry’s maturation: the individualization of consumption. Sherman’s work thus allows researchers to further expand on the intricacies of digital capitalism, its relationship to contemporary finance, and the recent supernormal profits of tech giants.

Remittances and Households within Neoliberalism: A “Triple Movement”

The article aims at advancing feminist institutional theory by expanding and revising Karl Polanyi’s framework of capitalist development as it applies to remittances and transnational households. The triple movement is offered by Nancy Fraser to revisit Karl Polanyi’s conception of the double-movement from a feminist perspective. It encompasses not only marketization and social protection, but also emancipation from social relations and markets. The article applies this concept to an understanding of remittance-driven labor exports and the formation of transnational households as an emerging institution of social protection. The discussion focuses on labor as a globalized fictitious commodity, global care chains, and the effects of COVID-19. The article points to the centrality of social subordination in marketization of remittances and labor, as well as to the fragility of this approach to social provisioning.

Pieniądz jako towar fikcyjny – utopia liberalizmu według Karla Polanyiego

This article concerns Karl Polanyi’s theory of money as a fictitious commodity and its importance for understanding liberal ideology. According to the Hungarian economist, money is not a commodity but a social relation between the debtor and the creditor. Therefore, the complete commodification of money is part of a liberal utopia, as it is associated with a counter-movement and an economic crisis, two processes that make impossible the constitution of a market society. The author analyzes the problem of counter-movement through the prism of Karl Mannheim’s theory of utopia and ideology. The final part of the article deals with the problem of economic crises, Polanyi’s views on the nature of economic breakdown are compared with contemporary reflection on the role of money in financial markets.

Knowledge as a fictitious commodity: a Polanyian reading of the 'digital economy'

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the attempts to use Karl Polanyi's framework to make sense of current developments have multiplied, producing a noticeable and lively debate. This debate centres on the notion of double movement put forward by the Hungarian thinker in his masterpiece – The Great Transformation. The paper is a contribution to this debate. The first part addresses a series of questions that make the interpretations of the double movement advanced so far not very compelling. To this end, a close reading of Polanyi's text, with the aim of dismantling and rearticulating its analytical structure, is carried out. The upshot is a dynamic and multistage picture of the double process as a recurrent and vortex-like attempt to progressively commodify natural and social resources against growing opposition. The second part employs this revised reading of the double movement to explain the collapse of the postwar consensus politics, the success of the neoliberal counterrevolution and the development of the knowledge economy. The claim put forward here is that, in addition to sustained efforts to deepen previous forms of commodification (land, labour and money), we are witnessing a fullblown attempt to turn knowledge into a new fictitious commodity. Building on the idea of digital Taylorism, the paper tries to show that information and computer technologies are being used to standardise and routinise a growing number of intellectual, professional and managerial activities which were able to escape previous attempts in this direction. Once again, at the forefront of this process there are powerful state actors, who are using New Public Management policies strategically to: support the enclosure of intangible cultural resources through the creation of intellectual property rights regimes, and undermine the counter-reaction of negatively affected societal actors by rising the collective action problems they face.

The struggle for bread. The Emperor, the city and the bakers between moral and market economies of food in Vienna, 1775–1791

ABSTRACTIn the second half of the eighteenth century, a larger socioeconomic struggle about society, the market, and food occurred in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire. As in Paris two decades earlier and New York City some decades later, in Vienna food was reconceptualised from a public to a private good. This paper argues that in all three cities, surprisingly similar attempts were made to commodify food and to make it a ‘fictitious commodity’. As this triggered resistance, the process can be described as a double movement between embedded and disembedded markets coined by Karl Polanyi that significantly affected how food was sold and bought. By using heretofore-disregarded archive material of the capital’s Bakers’ Guild, the contribution traces the double movement around bread between 1775 and 1791 and introduces Vienna into the internal debate on the political economy of food and the city.

Care as a fictitious commodity: Reflections on the intersections of migration, gender and care regimes

Care as a fictitious commodity: Reflections on the intersections of migration, gender and care regimes

Care as a fictitious commodity: Reflections on the intersections of migration, gender and care regimes

Care as a fictitious commodity: Reflections on the intersections of migration, gender and care regimes

Neoliberal Development, Sustainability and the Production of Fictitious Commodity: Some Cases from the Adivasi Region in India

Neoliberal Development, Sustainability and the Production of Fictitious Commodity: Some Cases from the Adivasi Region in India

Main problems of public procurement as a mechanism for investment

Problem Setting . In the article were considered the basic problems of enforcement of the public procurement, namely: abuse of exceptions to the legislation on procurement; offenses during the organization of tender committees and planning of procurement, preparation and approval of documentation of trading, opening, evaluation of bids and at the conclusion and execution of contracts; mistakes during the negotiation procedure; breaking the rules of how to fill complaints on procurement to the Antimonopoly committee; by changing the essential terms of the purchase agreements. For example, a fictitious commodity transactions when the customer signs the note and realizes a profit on the goods in accounting, whereby the payment is, but actually the goods to the customer are not fed or fed incomplete; avoiding procurement procedure by dividing the procurement subject into parts; purchase of goods, works and services that are not really necessary for the customer; incorrect selection by tender committee the procurement procedures; customer can nominate to participants following requirements: the availability status of VAT, annual turnover of funds in discriminatory limits, the presence of experience of working practice only with the state purchasers, the experience of supplying only identical goods (services). The actuality of the topic. Based on the previous analysis were defined the ways of improving the legislation on: 1) approval in the form of an explanation of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine list of typical violations in the sphere of public procurement; 2) ensure the implementation of the principle of legal certainty in legislation by fixing the essential terms of the purchase agreement; 3) consolidation in the purchase agreement provisions that limit the participation of intermediaries: direct prohibition on intermediaries (commercial, retail) where a participant has to perform the contract itself; the right of provider to engage party agents to perform the procurement contract, if the customer gives prior consent. The purpose of the article. It is concluded that the lack of government support of any members or groups of species subject procurement in Ukraine is a significant problem. We can provide various grounds for state aid without violating the international commitments of Ukraine, depending on the purpose of such support, such as: small and medium enterprises; innovative enterprises; innovative products containing advanced technology solutions and patents. For this goal it is important to increase the share of non-price criteria in mixed assessment of tenders. Conclusions. Directive 2014/24/EU of the European Parliament and the EU Council «On public procurement and repealing Directive 2004/18/EU» from 02.26.2014 g. provides for state support certain categories of participants, including: (a) in respect of small and medium enterprises; (b) customers are entitled to create innovative partnerships with one or more participants. In the Agreement on Association between Ukraine and the EU such positive legal institutions are not reflected, while fixed limits on state support. Significant restrictions on regulatory support in this sector are also set in the Agreement on Government Procurement WTO

As Consequências do Progresso e da Economia de Mercado: Reflexões de Karl Polanyi Aplicáveis ao Neoliberalismo

Como consequência do surgimento do progresso após a Revolução Industrial, foram alterados os valores da sociedade, da economia e da política. Permitiu-se a economia de mercado, gerando uma desarticulação catastrófica na vida das pessoas. O "Moinho Satânico" de Polanyi é o processo que triturou e transformou os homens em massa. As relações sociais foram inseridas no sistema econômico e a sociedade humana se tornou um mero acessório dele. Com a expansão e organização dos mercados globais, a sociedade se protegeu contra os riscos do sistema de mercado autorregulável. Embora existam vantagens econômicas num mercado de trabalho livre, estas não justificam a potencial destruição social. Entretanto, hoje retomou-se a idéia de desregulamentação para possibilitar a concorrência e a competitividade internacional de mercadorias. Nossa sociedade contemporânea mudou seus valores e o dinheiro foi priorizado em vez da vida humana. Hoje os homens se tornaram apenas uma mercadoria. De fato, uma mercadoria fictícia.

Hard cash, easy credit, fictitious capital: Critical reflections on money as a fetishised social relation

AbstractThis article explores some aspects of money as a social relation. Starting from Polanyi, it explores the nature of money as a non-commodity, real commodity, quasi-commodity, and fictitious commodity. The development of credit-debt relations is important in the last respect, especially in market economies where money in the form of coins and banknotes plays a minor role. This argument is developed through some key concepts from Marx concerning money as a fetishised and contradictory social relation, especially his crucial distinction, absent from Polanyi, between money as money and money as capital, each with its own form of fetishism. Attention then turns to Minsky's work on Ponzi finance and what one might describe as cycles of the expansion of easy credit and the scramble for hard cash. This analysis is re-contextualised in terms of financialisation and finance-dominated accumulation, which promote securitisation and the autonomisation of credit money, interest-bearing capital. The article ends with brief reflections on the role of easy credit and hard cash in the surprising survival of neo-liberal economic and political regimes since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis became evident.

Land as fictitious commodity: the continuing evolution of women's land rights in Uganda

In sub-Saharan Africa, colonial influences have altered traditional practices as a way to manage that which Polanyi labeled as ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labor, and money. Land has now become a highly marketable commodity and an intrinsic part of the global economy. Over the past century, Uganda's land rights have evolved from communal rights to that of male-dominated, individual ownership practices that have excluded women. Despite constitutional provisions, which confer title of both a deceased husband's property rights and equal rights to property within a marriage to a wife, postcolonial patriarchal tradition prevails. This article examines historical changes in land rights in Uganda and discusses the impact of shifts in land rights from communal ownership to individual tenure, altering power structures and attempting to create marketable land title. The Ugandan women's movement's opposition to policies and implementation of laws that exclude women has been unable to facilitate the required changes in unbiased access to land rights, despite apparent victories in revisions to the letter of the law. Situated within contemporary interpretations of tradition and pressures of market demand, this article shows that women's access to landownership and use are restricted by misinterpretation of traditional law and a lack of enforcement of contemporary legal rights. To illustrate the impact of a lack of access to land, this article examines an empirical case study of widowed subsistence farmers in southern Uganda. Women in Uganda continue to lose ground, quite literally, decreasing the possibility of gender equity in terms of land.

Work, employment and society through the lens of moral economy

In this article a moral economy approach is proposed that is informed by Karl Polanyi and E. P. Thompson, who capture the ubiquitous tension between a stable, moral and human society and the economic practices of self-regulating markets, and by Andrew Sayer’s consideration of lay morality. Moral economy is an analytical framework that gives voice to critical concerns for the workings of an increasingly disconnected capitalism, its inherent tendencies to treat labour as a ‘fictitious commodity’ and the impact this has on the well-being of individuals and wider society. Hence, at the heart of the approach suggested here is a normative understanding of mutual reciprocality and embedded sociality that raises questions about how to support the human capacity to flourish.

On Life as a Fictitious Commodity: Cities and the Biopolitics of Late Neoliberalism

AbstractBuilding on a biopolitical understanding of the economic crisis, this essay contends that the occurrence of the crisis warns that life is not a real commodity but — to put it in Karl Polanyi's terms — a ‘fictitious commodity’. This means that life cannot be integrally subsumed within the economy, and therefore the crisis is to be seen as a pathological way in which societies react to the pervasiveness of capitalist relations, showing the illusory character of self‐regulating markets and ownership ideologies. Two mutually contradictory biopolitical responses to the neoliberal crisis, led by the state and grassroots movements respectively, are discussed in the concluding section of the essay.