[...] Polanyi has been rediscovered by critics of capitalism in recent years for two principal reasons. The first is his argument that capitalism only developed via the evolution of three "fictious commodities"--things that it must pretend are produced for sale on the market, but are not: land, labour, and money. Polanyi says that none of these are a commodity in the "widget" sense. Yet, because land, labour, and money must circulate on markets like other commodities to make capitalism work, we accept the fiction that they are commodities.

Polanyi's second contribution is his acount of modern capitalism's attempt to produce a social structure that "disembeds" the market from its broader historical and geographical context. This allows it to appear "self-regulating," divorced from the life-world in which all human activity is unavoidably embedded. [...] The upshot is that the contractual relations that define markets and firms in capitalism hinder by their very structure the creation of perfectly efficient, autonomous markets.