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A Marxian-Polanyian Synthesis? Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market Gareth Dale Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010, 320 pp, hardback $110, paperback $34.95
During his address for the third annual Ted Wheelwright Memorial Lecture at the University of Sydney last October, Professor Fred Block drew a sharp distinction between Polanyi's and Marx's approaches to radical social change. In making the case for a renewed Social Democracy, he argued that the Marxist emphasis on the 'primacy of property relations' was inferior to the Polanyian 'primacy of polities', in which democratic states and societies subordinated markets to achieve socially progressive goals (Block, 2010). A quite different argument can be found in a recent book on Polanyi. Gareth Dale's Karl Polanyi offers a sophisticated Marxist critique of Polanyi's vast body of work. In considering the breadth of Polanyi's ideas, Dale suggests that a synthesis of Marxist and Polanyian approaches is possible.
Dale makes an interesting and compelling case. He argues that most followers of Marxist and Polanyian thought share similar concerns that movements for radical social change need to be revived. As Dale notes, other scholars have attempted to bring Marx and Polanyi together. For example, Arrighi's analysis of long waves of accumulation is compared to Polanyi's economic history (Arrighi, 1994). In Arrighi's hands, Dale argues, the 'great transformation' becomes a 'great oscillation' between the forces of marketisation and social protection. From this vantage point, the Great Recession may be interpreted as the pendular movement of marketisation reaching its 'point of return' as free market economics begins to crack under the weight of its own contradictions (p. 230).
Dale argues that a more explicit attempt to synthesise Polanyi's approach with Marxism can be found in Burawoy's treatment of 'sociological Marxism'. According to Burawoy, Polanyi (along with Gramsci) helped to transcend the problems of historical materialism by treating an 'active/civil society' as the contested outcome of capitalism, not socialist revolution or, indeed, class struggle (Burawoy, 2003). Dale is critical of this interpretation, suggesting that Burawoy is guilty of a sleight of hand in which Marxism is reconstructed as 'as an essentially Polanyian research program' (p. 243).
Dale's alternative is to take a 'scorecard' approach, in which he identifies 'the areas of convergence between Polanyi and Marxism while recognizing the considerable...