Substantive Economy

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Description

Lionel Maurel et al.:

"While the field of alternatives to platform-companies is not homogeneous, it nonetheless manifests some common principles of openness, sharing and reciprocity. If these principles are to be fully grasped in the field and explained, a conceptual framework that allows the economy to be viewed more broadly than through a purely market-based prism seems to be necessary . This conceptual framework is furnished by the substantive economy approach developed by Polanyi.

It is to Karl Polanyi that we owe the concept of “substantive economy”. For Polanyi, the market is not the only form that permits the circulation of economic goods and services. In his view, the importance of the market in our societies tends to mask other forms that co-exist with it: reciprocity, redistribution, and the household. He proposes the concept of “substantive economy” to show that, historically, the economy has its roots in humans’ dependence on nature and their fellow humans. From this, he deduces the need for people to manage this dependence to ensure their survival. The meaning of “substantive” thus derives from the “man's dependence for his living upon nature and his fellows” (Polanyi, 2011).

Polanyi posits that there has been a deliberate will over the course of history to gradually commodify three factors of production – labour, money and land. This transformation appears as a sine qua non for the emergence of a “self-regulating” market (Postel & Sobel, 2010), as the market needs to put a price on raw materials, the number of hours worked and productive assets financed by credit. The market economy thus needs these “fictitious commodities” in order to establish its hegemony and ensure its endless expansion. For Polanyi, this transformation is a priori inconceivable. Labour, money and land are not commodities. Never have these factors been produced to be sold. As such, the process of the great transformation and commodification observed by Polanyi is reversible. If disembeddedness means freeing market forces by breaking the resistance to labour protection, the fight against financial speculation and the protection of nature, re-embeddedness is achieved through consideration for workers, their protection and emancipation, the use of social money (non-speculative by nature) and through the all-important concern to preserve natural resources and ecological balances. It is thus possible to differentiate those economic actors who contribute to disembeddedness from those who contribute to re-embeddedness. This distinction can be made by observing actors’ practices with regard to these three commodities"

Source

  • Article: Alternative Platforms and Societal Horizon : Characterisation and Strategies for Development. By Guillaume Compain, Philippe Eynaud, Lionel Maurel, and Corinne Vercher-Chaptal, June 2019

URL = https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333403649_Alternative_Platforms_and_Societal_Horizon_Characterisation_and_Strategies_for_Development