Oldal 47 [47]
OCR
What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? | 45 interests which eventually ensure that the required step be taken”! ‘There is therefore no economic rationality separate from circumstance because economic activity takes place within the framework of social institutions. These determine in each era what counts as reasonable activity. The economic order depends on the social order. A selfregulating market is possible only if this relation is reversed and the entire society is subjected to the logic of the operation of the market and all relations become relations of products. This, however, would lead to impossibilities. According to Polanyi, modern market-centred economic theory can only provide a realistic picture of economic processes if we assume - that everything is produced so as to be sold on the market, according to the changes in supply and demand - and that the factors of the economic process are universally comparable and theoretically interchangeable with one another; therefore, the spontaneously developing rates can ensure the dynamic balance of market processes by themselves. Polanyi proves that both suppositions are untenable. The two most important conditions of production, human work capacity and natural resources, are not capable of following the fluctuations of supply and demand, because they exist not for the purpose of sale, but according to the order of life — the order of culture and nature. “To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, even in the amount and use of purchasing power would result in the demolition of society... Robbed of the protecting covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.”'* In the meantime the use of the conditional has become superfluous. Since the time of Polanyi, a multitude of species and habitats have been destroyed by the economically completely reasonable and wonderfully profitable exploitation and, sure enough, the market rates have not reflected the value of lost raw materials and poisoned ecosystems. But this is not due to prices but to the fact that nature is incapable of behaving like a “Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation, p.46. Octagon Books, New York, 1975. 8 Ibid. p.107.
