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November 8, 2007
Bruno Gullì in The Folly of Utopia in Situations says that some theorists hold that it is a sheer folly to imagine a radically different world to the present one. Utopia, in other words, cannot be imagined.
Amartya Senin his book, Development as Freedom, says that “we have to avoid resurrecting yesterday’s follies that refused to see the merits of – indeed even the inescapable need for – markets”. Coupled to this is Friedrich Hayek’s “chastising description of the communist economies as ‘the road to serfdom’, which has played a key role in the ‘revolutionary’, neoliberal policies of Thatcher, Reagan and Howard.
One of these ‘follies’ is contained in Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation, where it is shown that the problem is not the market per se, that is, the practical institution whereby useful things are exchanged, but an economy “controlled by markets”, which Polanyi calls a “self-regulating system of markets. The latter is no longer simply a practical reality, but one which has a formal and political set of institutional moments and apparatuses; we are tempted to say: an institutional institution. This is the neo-liberal critique of the social democratic critique of the market economy institution that ensures the capitalist economy is geared toward profit, and profit only.
Sen’s book is a defense of capitalism on the basis of a shift from the emphasis on human capital and economic growth
to a new emphasis on human capability and freedom where the former modality is not replaced but only supplemented by the latter. It t is difficult to see how this capability can become actual in a system, which, in order to function, needs to reduce or annihilate it in the first place.
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