Provision of Social Costs and the Free Market: A Polanyian Perspective

In this article, we analyze at a conceptual level some of the more relevant effects of the neoliberal takeover on the provision of social costs, including employment, health care, and nutrition. Adopting key perspectives of Karl Polanyi and other thinkers, we develop our examination under the seemingly perpetual conflict between markets and social reproduction. We argue that financialization has both expanded market spaces and changed relationships within those spaces. The ever-greater domination of financial markets means that employment has become increasingly more precarious in the strict spaces of the labor market. At the same time, financialization has steadily eroded the social forms that exist outside of formal markets, greatly weakening the mechanisms through which societies can both defend themselves from predatory markets and reproduce themselves with some degree of purpose and hope for the future.