Activity

under capitalism, it is essentially driven and shaped by what Karl Polanyi has characterized as an almost Manichaean battle between a ‘movement’ towards liberalization and ‘counter-movements’ for social stabilization, or for collective political control over markets and the direction of social change

a progressive subsumption of social life under the organizing principles of a capitalist economy is an inherent ever-present danger of life under capitalism that needs to be politically counteracted.

‘the economy’ appears as producing inputs for politics, in the form of competing group interests, preferably presenting themselves as functional imperatives of efficient economic management, that need to be politically adjudicated.

Unlike in what I believe are simplistic readings of Marxian political economy, or ‘historical materialism’, noting the hegemonic tendencies of the capitalist economy in a capitalist society does not imply that ‘the economy’ is always the predominant ‘subsystem’ of a society, in the way of a ‘substructure’ governing a ‘superstructure’.

Of course, at present European institutions are ruled by a camarilla of national governments conspiring to hide from their citizens what they are doing in their name