"Neoliberal Violence"-An Attempt to Embed Society in the Market (original) (raw)

2018, Hüseyin Özel, “‘Neoliberal Violence’ –An Attempt to Embed Society in the Market,” Karl Polanyi's Vision of a Socialist Transformation, Michael Brie and Claus Thomasberger (eds.), Black Rose Books, 2018, pp. 110-24.

No human society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function," says Karl Polanyi (Harré and Madden 1975), arguing that liberalism's failure should be sought in its claim "that power and compulsion are evil, that freedom demands their absence from a human community" (Polanyi 1957, 257). Given the fact that the "laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate state action" and "laissez-faire was planned" (Polanyi 1957, 141), rhetoric that denies the reality of power and compulsion is, of course, self-contradictory. The market system, from the very beginning, was a project designed by the liberals and implemented through state actions: "free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course" (Polanyi 1957, 139). Throughout the history of the market system, any attempt at constituting or reforming the system has always involved deliberate use of force and even violence on the part of the state. The present paper deals with the most recent example of the use of overt force, namely the "neoliberal" attempt at "embedding" society into the market, arguing that violence has been an effective tool for reducing all aspects of human society to mere "appendages" of the market (Polanyi 1957, 77). This neoliberal transformation has been so widespread that it represents a climax or "limit condition" of the attempt to "annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one" (Polanyi 1957, 171). In order to understand this process, the paper will first focus on the relations between the notions of power and violence in the context of the institutionalization of the market system, and then examine this new attempt at "embedding society into the market." It is argued that two forms of power, the power of making a difference, or of "agency," and "power relations," are closely interrelated. In the spirt of the last chapter of Polanyi's The Great Transformation, I conclude that escape from the power relations created by the market system requires an active use of the power of agency, defending humanity from the encroachment of the market by accepting the reality of power and compulsion and "resigning" ourselves to the reality of society.