The Great Transformation, cont.

So in our last installment,  I showed a bit of the Communist Manifesto and how Marx and Engels viewed the emergence of capitalism. Polaynyi, writing 100 years later, had a longer and somewhat different perspective. A central point, to him, which Marx and Engels don ' t much note, is that in pre-modern societies, most people had limited interaction with markets as we understand them -- systems of capital accumulation and exchange facilitated by money. To be sure, money and markets have existed since ancient times, and while they were of varying importance at different times and places for the most part they were secondary.In the first place, the vast majority of people were farmers, and they farmed for subsistence, not for monetary profit. HistorianBret Devereaux writes a prolific long-form blog on many aspects of social history, which you may enjoy exploring at leisure.Here ' s his first installment on pre-modern farming. It ' s much too long and complicated of a story to do any justice in a summary here. But the key point is that subsistence farmers -- the vast majority of the population -- simply could not turn any surplus they were lucky enough to have one year into monetary savings, or money to somehow invest. The world didn ' t work that way. Instead, they would turn it into social capital, by banqueting their neighbors, in expectation that they could count on help  in hard times.  And they made their own clothing -- more precisely the women did -- an...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs