Moral Economy Versus Political Economy: Provincializing Polanyi

Despite Polanyi addressing the emergence of capitalism in Britain in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, there is no discussion of Britain as a colonial and imperial power. Moreover, the core conceptual apparatus of the book – the analysis of the three fictitious commodities of land, labour and money – appears to have no place for a treatment of ‘race’, except as a residual category of the ‘social’ in its resistance to market incursions. Nor is there a discussion of race in the many commentaries on Polanyi and attempts to update his work. I shall suggest that the original form of the commodity status of labour does not reside in labour-power as a commodity, but in the labourer, himself or herself, as a commodity. In this way, enslavement, rather than free-labour, can be seen as central to the development of capitalism and should no longer be seen as a residual form destined to disappear as capitalism becomes the dominant economic system as a consequence of capitalism’s inherent logic to commodify labour power. I shall also suggest that this interpretation is consistent with other sociological accounts such as those of Durkheim and North American pragmatism where labour is seen as a political, rather than an economic category, albeit that the racialized aspect is not discussed by these writers. With this shift in analytical focus, I shall suggest that we will be able to understand the central significance of ‘race’ and also be able to better understand the return of unfree labour in contemporary capitalism.