Polanyi

[Doug Henwood]

A couple of people have written me offlist to defend Polanyi's Great
Transformation against my apparent criticism of it. I wasn't criticizing
the book at all - I liked it a lot. I'm concerned more about the uses it's
being put to today - it's being appropriated by a bunch of communitarians
and conservatives in a rather nostalgic fashion to criticize the "excesses"
of capitalism. The critique avoids all the issues that a reading of, oh say
Marx, couldn't avoid - issues like class power and the control over
investment.

Doug