Commercialization of Science in a Neoliberal World

In a well-known passage of The Great Transformation Karl Polanyi wrote: But labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. In other words, according to the empirical definition of a commodity they are not commodities. Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in 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; land is another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance. None of them are produced for sale. The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious.1 Polanyi showed in detail that the self-regulating market economy that emerged in the nineteenth century was organized around the commodity fiction of labor, land, and money, which were the essential factors of production for industrial capitalism. Without that fiction, industrial capitalism could not have come about. He also argued that commodification of land, labor, and money would destroy the livelihood, society, and environment of human beings, as we know them.