The Market Fetish - Part 3

Today Jeffrey Epstein talks with Asad Zaman about the 2001 edition of Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation. Professor Zaman is a PhD economist based in Pakistan, with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic. <br/><br/>The Great Transformation reveals, essentially, that what we think to be a foundation of our economy and society is, in fact, an illusion. Specifically, Polanyi calls capitalism and its free or "self-regulating" market "a stark Utopia". By definition, a Utopia (an imagined place where everything is perfect) is impossible to achieve. However, the attempt to achieve it &#8211; to eliminate literally all market regulation &#8211; can result only in the complete destruction of all human life and the land they live on. This is evidenced by our increasingly likely extinction at the hands of a human-created ecological crisis, caused largely by unprecedented and still-growing levels of inequality and the mass exploitation of all natural resources, including most human beings.<br/><br/>Here's Polanyi, on the first page of the first chapter:<br/><br/><em>Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.</em><br/><br/>Unfortunately, the only way to maintain the fiction of the self-regulating market, is to continue the mass exploitation of the poor. Instead of treating human beings as the infinitely precious and unique beings they are, they are rather treated as mere interchangeable and disposable cogs to run the Unending Greed Machines; most often under terrible conditions. Polanyi calls this grave maltreatment the <em>commodification of labor</em>.<br/><br/>The only way to get human beings to submit to these terrible conditions, is to threaten them with an even more terrible condition: starvation and death. As quoted in the book, starvation "can tame