Men and Things: Karl Polanyi, Primitive Accumulation, and Their Relevance to a Radical Green Political Economy

Now is an important moment to be thinking and talking about a critical and normative green political economy. Whether via attempts to develop effective and socially just climate policies at multiple scales of governance including REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) schemes, or to develop proliferating and controversial neoliberal instruments for dealing with undesirable environmental change, environmental governance, and environmental change in the context of contemporary global capitalism are on the agenda. What would a critical and normative green political economy for the current moment look like? This paper draws on Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation as a resource for answering that question. In particular, Polanyi's discussion of problematic and dualistic notions of nature and society in early political economy and the role he accords social struggles over land in developing his theory of fictitious commodities, embeddedness and the double movement are revisited. The paper stresses how Polanyi's ideas, at once conceptual and polemical, draw centrally on Marx's theorization of primitive accumulation as an inherent, ‘extra-economic’ facet of historical—geographical capitalism, a differentiated unity linking the commodification and objectification of human and nonhuman natures as exchange-values. In this respect, Polanyi offers (or seems to offer) a potential reconciliation of a politics of nonhuman and human nature through his emphasis on primitive accumulation as a site of both political struggle and epistemic transformation.