The Consequences Of Land And Labor By Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi talks about the invention of ‘fictitious commodities’ in his book about land and labor in particular. He discusses how there are damaging environmental and human consequences to the spread of market forces so, as labor gets transformed into a commodity. Polanyi argues that labor is only another name for a “human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized.” However, land and labor are bought and sold on the market. Polanyi points out that “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 …show more content…
Although Land and labor are bought and sold, they are not produced specifically for sale as “land is subdivided nature; labor is simply the activity of human life that is mention in Polanyi’s book.” As Colin Whitston suggests in his article that markets cannot exist without a “minimum of regulation, without which contracts would be unenforceable; hence all market systems are rule-bound, and these rules, among other things, enable long-term relationships to be sustained.” Nonetheless, in capitalist societies, companies are continuously trying to evade regulation any way they can. Colin Whitston further points out that this is particularly true for “labor markets that are typified by a great disparity of power so that most protective employment legislation is ‘an attempt to infuse law into a relation of command and subordination.” By restricting the market, the laborer is somewhat protected by the regulation that comes with it. However, companies can also work around the regulation that is made by liberalizes country or they can make their product in other countries that have less regulation with regard to …show more content…
Naomi Klein suggests that the “primary driving forces of the particular trade system designed in the 1980s and 1990s were always to allow multinationals the freedom to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force.” Naomi Klein describes how the journey that passed through “Mexico and Central America’s sweatshop maquiladoras and had a long stopover in South Korea” in search of the cheaper labor forces but ends up in China. Naomi Klein describes China as the ideal place for companies to produce their good