Examen de la crítica de Karl Polanyi a la totalización económica de la vida humana

Resumo

Karl Polanyi was not a usual anthropologist, but rather a critical historian of economy who, nevertheless, was committed to a heterodox anthropological reflection whose analysis was finally aimed at the historical development of modern industrial market-based societies; and certainly never avoided the most urgent problems of his frenetic era, since his theoretical intervention was also intended to be political. The Polanyian work has to be considered as one of the most essential knots within social sciences' history, and his core approaches constitute a wake-up call which still echoes loudly in the second decade of the 21st century. Indeed, when the furious come-back of market civilization reaches once more, at an increased and more powerful scale, the dimension of a catastrophe, recalling Karl Polanyi is far beyond the limits of a mere exercise of academic erudition. It is important to explain whatthe economic totalization of human life we refer to in the title of the research means, as we intend to allude to an "anthropological danger" which constitutes one of the most crucial axes underneath the whole Polanyian thinking. Indeed, Polanyi understood that the dynamics attached to a completely emancipated and omnipotent market mechanism, as the defining feature of the moderneconomic institutional framework, had questioned the subsistence itself of human nature. The danger was of an ultimate, anthropologic quality, since the most vital resources of the human community were losing its consistency as they were being progressively subsumed in the market-based mechanism and integrated in an institutional and normative framework in which it was beginning to be considered that every domain of human social life had to be at the service of the economic activity, with the latter having lost its subordinate place within the cultural order. Thus, Polanyi's work seems to preferably deal with the serious historical-cultural consequences unleashed by the utopian attempt of putting into practice the principles established by the economic liberalism. The defensive reactions of a social fabric in the process of being consolidated at a market society scale, that is, in the process of witnessing how all their community fabrics and their non-economic bondsare being reduced to mere abstractly economic relationships, were formed in many different ways. Fascism was, perhaps, the most terrifying and cutting one, and could be understood as a sort of evil and criminal restoration of politics in a dismembered world. Some other reactions to the corporate breakdown of the world, however, should have been able to walk towards some kind of "industrial democracy". Anyhow, and as we will be able to prove after this thorough study of the details of Karl Polanyi's work, one of the most important thesis which emanates from the latter can be formulated as follows: the market society must be defined as anthropologically anomalous and socially self-destructive. The implementation of the liberal economic utopia was close to dismembering the anthropologic consistency of human being and this is the danger that beats at the core of the Polanyian political concern. Indeed, if democratising the economy by means of some sort of non-technocratic a non-centralised socialism entails ending with the tyranny of the market system, which subjected the whole social life to the autonomous necessities of an emancipated economy, it should not be forgotten that Polanyi's final concern is also anthropological, since themain reason for pursuing the decommercialization of social relationships was the restoration, as far as possible, of personal and community relationships. Therefore, Polanyi promoted a sort of democratic socialism which would institutionalise an economy at the service of common people so that, precisely and above all, these people would find themselves again in a different sociability, one that was not determined by the tyranny of a totalizing commodification and that maintained, as much as possible, a substratum of community human bonds and a reserve of personal bonds free from the homogenising schemes of the hypertrophied economic and technical relationships.