Karl Polanyi’s theory of fictitious commodification as a cultural political economy of institutionalization

This paper aims to offer a new reading of Karl Polanyi’s political economy by reinterpreting and reconstructing his institutional analysis as a cultural political economy that critiques capitalism as a historically specific symbolic system. For this purpose, it will draw on his earlier concepts from the socialist calculation debate to reinterpret Polanyi’s theory of fictitious commodification. In particular, it will examine how Polanyi conceptualized the symbolic structure of capitalism as an institutional articulation of particular economic facts, accounting concepts, and economic theory. Polanyi not only critiques the intrinsically cultural nature of foundational categories of the capitalist market economy such as profits, factors of production, and fictitious commodities but also shows how the gap between these categories and ‘the reality of society’ eventually brings about crises and crisis tendencies expressed in the ‘double movement’ and the ‘self-protection of society’. In this sense, Polanyi is a critical cultural political economist with contemporary relevance for the analysis of capitalism as a historically specific symbolic system in which culture plays both constitutive and ideological roles.