I recommend checking out this article, which posits that "human beings want much richer social lives than they can maintain under strict market conditions, and much of the reaction against market societies comes from that" https://samzdat.com/2017/06/01/the-meridian-of-her-greatness/
This is complicated. On one hand, the Soviet Union was a market society from the perspective of the average person. No capital market, and price controlled and planned and all that, but it still had that transactional, machine-like, anti-communal thing that Polányi, if I understand it right, was criticising. It seems we cannot not have market soceties with modern technology.
What we can have is market societies plus redistribution. Welfare, New Deal. I don't really understand why Polányi is thinking that is helping with community. Quite the opposite. It institutionalizes and bureaucratizes helping other people: the more taxes I pay, the less likely I will volunteer at a soup kitchen, because I will the government's job to feed the hungry. Capitalism is already an alienated machine and the welfare state just puts another alienated machine on top of it. Perhaps for utilitarian reasons, it is necessary. But with community it is not helping at all. People without jobs on welfare have the least community and feel the loneliest.
Community would require the kinds of interventions people would not support. For example, two days a week, all TV and all social media blocked so that people have no choice but talk to each other.
According to the article Polanyi is saying market redistribution or protections don't help community for the reasons you state. They just enable the system to continue while still not giving people what they really want.
I also grew up in a post-Soviet country and realized the Soviets completely distorted Marx. Marx never advocated central planning, he thought until capitalism reaches the post-scarcity stage, market competition is necessary, and his view of capitalism was *dialectical* which means there are both good things and bad things, it is not just simply bad. What I have learned from Marx is that capitalism is not simply free markets, absence of regulation. It is large capital investments, division of labour and automatization in the sense of machine work. In other words. the Soviet system was state capitalist.
Anyhow what I learned from Marx that give these two alternatives, market capitalism is better, but let's not think that if the Soviet system was bad, then Western capitalism is perfect and there is nothing to criticize.
Now that that central planning thing is dead, my basic instinct to take my stances *against* capitalism because it is always healthy to be critical of whatever is currently powerful. It does not really matter that in the past there were things much worse.
Anyhow, I think in this case the question itself does not make sense. Smartphones are making people lonely. And no matter the economic system, only very poor people do not have one and making people poor is not a good solution.
Isn’t it possible to have economic freedom and free markets without capitalists? If so, I’m not sure if economic freedom is synonymous with capitalism.
Great data, which makes sense. I wonder how much of affluent loneliness is more linked to self-actualisation than actual social connection. Also, do you think that inequality could play into the sense of increasing loneliness? I.e. those left behind by economic growth feel relatively more lonely?
I recommend checking out this article, which posits that "human beings want much richer social lives than they can maintain under strict market conditions, and much of the reaction against market societies comes from that" https://samzdat.com/2017/06/01/the-meridian-of-her-greatness/
Thank you, will check it out.
This is complicated. On one hand, the Soviet Union was a market society from the perspective of the average person. No capital market, and price controlled and planned and all that, but it still had that transactional, machine-like, anti-communal thing that Polányi, if I understand it right, was criticising. It seems we cannot not have market soceties with modern technology.
What we can have is market societies plus redistribution. Welfare, New Deal. I don't really understand why Polányi is thinking that is helping with community. Quite the opposite. It institutionalizes and bureaucratizes helping other people: the more taxes I pay, the less likely I will volunteer at a soup kitchen, because I will the government's job to feed the hungry. Capitalism is already an alienated machine and the welfare state just puts another alienated machine on top of it. Perhaps for utilitarian reasons, it is necessary. But with community it is not helping at all. People without jobs on welfare have the least community and feel the loneliest.
Community would require the kinds of interventions people would not support. For example, two days a week, all TV and all social media blocked so that people have no choice but talk to each other.
According to the article Polanyi is saying market redistribution or protections don't help community for the reasons you state. They just enable the system to continue while still not giving people what they really want.
Very interesting link which immediately makes me want to ask what does richer really mean and how does that contrast with loneliness?
I love how this is written, engaging and thoughtful.
Thank you for the kind words!
I also grew up in a post-Soviet country and realized the Soviets completely distorted Marx. Marx never advocated central planning, he thought until capitalism reaches the post-scarcity stage, market competition is necessary, and his view of capitalism was *dialectical* which means there are both good things and bad things, it is not just simply bad. What I have learned from Marx is that capitalism is not simply free markets, absence of regulation. It is large capital investments, division of labour and automatization in the sense of machine work. In other words. the Soviet system was state capitalist.
Anyhow what I learned from Marx that give these two alternatives, market capitalism is better, but let's not think that if the Soviet system was bad, then Western capitalism is perfect and there is nothing to criticize.
Now that that central planning thing is dead, my basic instinct to take my stances *against* capitalism because it is always healthy to be critical of whatever is currently powerful. It does not really matter that in the past there were things much worse.
Anyhow, I think in this case the question itself does not make sense. Smartphones are making people lonely. And no matter the economic system, only very poor people do not have one and making people poor is not a good solution.
my guess is correlation with car ownership
Isn’t it possible to have economic freedom and free markets without capitalists? If so, I’m not sure if economic freedom is synonymous with capitalism.
Great data, which makes sense. I wonder how much of affluent loneliness is more linked to self-actualisation than actual social connection. Also, do you think that inequality could play into the sense of increasing loneliness? I.e. those left behind by economic growth feel relatively more lonely?
I don’t have to read it––yes! haha