Responding To A Growing Wealth Gap, For Jesus’ Sake
Karl Polanyi died in 1964 about 100 Kilometres from my home, in Pickering, Canada. He managed to survive two world wars, sickness, difficulties of life as a Jewish member of Hungarian society, migration to England and the USA, all the while bridging the worlds of the elites and the commoners. One of his life’s most significant work, The Great Transformation, is therefore not only an assessment of the relationship of economy to society, but a lived story of the strain he speaks of.
Originally written in 1944, Polanyi’s work is an indictment against the market-driven economy for the way it vilifies members of society who cannot participate in it. Simply because self-regulating markets offer incredible wealth does not negate their dark side of increased volatility, insecurity, and servitude that the population experiences along with it. Gareth Dale, in his recent June 2024 article on Polanyi’s work spelled out Self Regulated Market’s (SRM) interwovenness with what he called “the crisis of liberal civilization”, asking “could the world wars, fascism, and the Great Depression all have been symptoms of [it]” [1]?
In Evangelicalism and Capitalism, Jason Clark’s argument that the origin of the sickness in our Western Societies is playing out in real time [2]. The populace’s subservience to the SRM can be seen in inadequate guardrails for the protection of land and people, in the name of economic progress. Instead of seeking the good of the community, public life is more like a shared canvas of individuals each valuing their own personal wealth, private property, and mantras like “don’t work for money – let your money work for you”. These all create what Charles Taylor calls a ‘social imaginary’ build around the market itself [3]. In such a world, how can Christ-followers demonstrate love for God, and live out concepts of stewardship? For “‘No-one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money” (Matthew 6:24).
Commodification of land, labour and money.
On of Polanyi’s most articulate critiques is in reference to the absurdity of ‘fictional commodities’, where land, labour and money became necessary functions within the market system, whereas earlier public markets did not [4] In criticizing this shift, he wrote, “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society” [5]. One way to observe this is how people are treated when the market no longer needs the labourers. Whenever the free market economy is struggling or flagging, and unemployment goes up, the free market economy does not have to adjust wages to allow for more labour, but can blame unemployment on the conditions of the market itself. No one has to admit that the system they’ve created is untenable by treating land, labour and money like real commodities. Dale writes,
In subsuming these vital elements of human life, the market system subjects society to its own peculiar laws. It reduces economic motivation to the fear of hunger (for workers) and greed for profit (for entrepreneurs), transforming social life as a whole into a realm driven by competition in which all become entangled in webs of coercive compulsion [6].
In Canada, Faith communities have charitable status, meaning that they exist for the “common good of all people”, but even here, the influence of the church is not known as a countercultural model, upholding the value of all people, setting communal interest above individual, or shared stewardship above supply and demand.
How Now Shall We Live?
Responding to this, Polanyi does not oppose the value of participation in markets, but seeks to ensure that the checks and balances provide for the victims of its regulation when they feel caught in what he calls the “satanic mill” [7]. In fact, he points out the necessary Government interventions required when the SRM creates harm with this question, “But how, then, is order in production and distribution ensured? The answer [he proposes is] by two principles of behavior not primarily associated with economics: reciprocity and redistribution”. Government regulations, he argues, would be needed to keep the market in check [8].
Other voices confirm the limitations of Adam Smith’s pure market economic theory. Anna Lanoszka summarizes a few of these key voices in reflecting on the economic history behind late 20th Century international development. She writes,
Marx was at the opposite end of Liberalism, advocating that Adam Smith’s free market capitalism didn’t help the poor. Marx wanted to see the elimination of personal property altogether. John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), saw the necessity of interventionist governments, who stimulate the economy to get moving again, and his theories are the centre of IMF and The World Bank, and are still predominant. Friedrich A von Hayek (1899-1992) emphasized free competition, using government regulatory authority and law to prevent monopolization [9].
Each of these presents another layer to the compelling case that an unchecked SRM capitalism is indeed a myth. For Christian leaders seeking to invite people to a vision for a new humanity in Jesus, it is crucial to heed the warning that capitalism has invaded the social imaginaries of most Western cultures, and even after someone might experience a call to follow Jesus, they remain disciples of a culture which offers a syncretism with the Gospel and capitalism so intertwined, they may seem inseparable. Clark points out that this is like
…a movement, a sleight of hand, in which initially God provides through the market to enact imaginations for the telos of life, but, ultimately, God is removed from this process completely, leaving as the only reality the market itself. We can also now understand how Selves are imagined and created within the SRM through this providence of the market, a providence that is activated through the disciplines of the market [10].
Gratton, Lynda, and Andrew Scott, in The 100-Year Life, critique John Maynard Keynes’ underestimation of the lure of greed in his globally-connected macroeconomic theories, by pointing out that what “Keynes underestimated was the development of consumerism in the twentieth century. It is true that as people get richer they want more of most things, including leisure. But it turned out that what people wanted was material possessions and they wanted these a great deal more than they wanted leisure time” [11].
So in trying to sort out how to navigate living in a world where people feel the dark side of the SRM at a global scale, the question remains whether we will call for a next-generation new deal which continues to uphold the societal guardrails that seek to regulate and moderate market-driven economies, or challenge them directly? As Gareth Dale speaks to the prophetic relevance of Polanyi’s critique, “The social pathologies that we witness – social inequality, geopolitical volatility, virulent nationalism and conspiracy fantasies – are all reminiscent of processes that he analysed in The Great Transformation [12].
I maintain the conviction that faith communities have something to offer through their charitable status to exist for the “common good of all people”. The influence of the church can become a countercultural model, upholding the value of all people, within a shared stewardship of resources and money, respect for the dignity of all people and the sacredness of the land.
___________
[1] Dale, Gareth, 2024, “The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi Is a Classic Critique of Capitalism – but It Wasn’t an Overnight Success,” June 26, 2024, http://theconversation.com/the-great-transformation-by-karl-polanyi-is-a-classic-critique-of-capitalism-but-it-wasnt-an-overnight-success-227727.
[2] Clark, Jason, Evangelicalism and Capitalism: A Reparative Account and Diagnosis of Pathogeneses in the Relationship, London School of Theology, 2018, 143.
[3]Evangelicalism and Capitalism, 156, 163.
[4] Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd Beacon Paperback ed., Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001, 75.
[5]The Great Transformation, 76.
[6] The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi Is a Classic Critique.
[7] The Great Transformation, 77. Polanyi speaks at length of this grinding down of humanity, saying “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity ‘‘labor power’’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘‘man’’ attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill” 76-77.
[8] The Great Transformation, 49-50.
[9] Lanoszka, Anna, International Development: Socio-Economic Theories, Legacies, and Strategies, 2018, 12-14.
[10] Evangelicalism and Capitalism, 63.
[11] Gratton, Lynda, and Andrew Scott, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, 230.
[12] The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi Is a Classic Critique.
About the Author
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.