Fictitious commodities

Labor as a fictitious commodity

Karl Polanyi challenged the conventional ideas of market economy and related notion of labor, where he declared the status of labor as a commodity to be fictitious. Labor is necessary for a market system that is self-regulating but cannot be sustained in this system.  He countered the notion of labor as a commodity that could be regulated within a free market as supported in previous economic theory development. The efforts to make labor to be a commodity subjected workers to free labor contracts, and this destroyed the existing social structure and attempted to reduce social livelihoods to material quantification (Block & Margaret, 109).

Nature as a fictitious commodity

Treating nature as a commodity involves turning human habitats into parcels of land and using the land to generate profits. Polanyi’s arguments against commodification of nature comprised anticipating the dangers come with it, where the land would be subjected to severe environmental degradation.  In this sense land is just a human’s natural environment and this means that treating it as a commodity is fictitious. Human being faces risks of treating land as a source of profit – raw materials – rather than using it for food production (Block & Margaret, 112).

Currency as a fictitious commodity

Treating money as a commodity is fictitious according to Polanyi since it cannot be consumed.  When the production of money is not regulated and left to totally to the financial institutions, they become reckless in their pursuit for profit through credit. Dismantling the various restraints on the expansion of credit gives the financial actors an opportunity to use the notion of free market increase the debt-to-asset ratios with the possibility of destroying the economy (Block & Margaret, 109).

Works cited

Block, Fred, and Margaret R. Somers. The power of market fundamentalism. Harvard University Press, 2014. 108-113