Marxian ‘alienation’, Polanyian ‘fictitious commodification’, and

Keynes' ‘love of money’: an enquiry into the diminution of ‘the

social’ in contemporary economic thought

Abstract

The gradual diminution and effective erasure of ‘the social’ as a formal category of analysis
in contemporary, ‘neoclassical’, economics is here referred to as the issue of ‘a-sociality’. An
avowed a-sociality, both in this programmatic sense as well as in a general intuitive sense,
may be said to be the thematic constant uniting the various analytical shortcomings of the
economics discipline in its present state. A-sociality describes first and foremost a
methodological habit—namely, that of theorizing the economy as an autonomous entity unto
itself, distinct from extant non-economic realms of human social life. We trace the genealogy
of this practice, finding its foundations in the endogenous market logic of the so-called
‘catallactic’ framework of economy-society theorization, wherein the market is
conceptualized as a closed referential system, severed in its functionality from surrounding
social institutions. The point is this: that a failure to theorize about the market system in
conjunction with the non-economic, non-contractual, social context within which it is
everywhere and always embedded, and upon which it depends for its reproduction, occults
the causal channels between these two objects of analysis and, as a consequence, removes
from analytical remit an understanding of the manner in which markets often tend to destroy
their own conditions of possibility, through their jeopardizing of the human capacity to
maintain social bonds. This is shown through a demonstration of the explanatory efficacy to
be garnered from the employment of the framework lying in contradistinction to the
catallactic framework, namely, the ‘sociologic’ framework—predicated upon the fact of the
structural, social embeddedness of the market economy—through a survey of the adverse
sociological consequences of capitalist marketization, documented in the works of three
renowned adherents of this framework, Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, and John Maynard Keynes.
These ‘consequences’, specifically, are ‘mechanisms’ through which the market effectuates,
within its social basis, a generalized Durkheimian anomie, hence undermining its own
existential presuppositions. Marxian ‘alienation’, Polanyian ‘fictitious commodification’, and
Keynes' ‘love of money’ all in some way contribute to the ‘breakdown of the social’
witnessed under capitalism: the atrophy of the sociocultural processes that supply the
solidarity relations, affective dispositions and value horizons—the general capacities for
social reproduction—that underpin social cooperation and market exchange. The
epistemological constraints of a-sociality renders neoclassical thought blind to these realities
in their totality, attaching a certain troubling superfluity to the conclusions therein reached.
The bringing of the social back into economics, through the realization of the embeddedness
postulate both in theory and in practice, along with the repudiation of the catallactic mode of
thought, is proposed to amend this state of affairs.

Keywords: A-sociality, Anomie, Polanyi, Embeddedness, Alienation, The Love of Money

1. Introduction

The economics profession today finds itself mired in myriad different troubles, ranging from

a-empirical, a-historical methodological postulates, to substantive, policy-induced

depredations. In all these specific cases, there is manifest one major theme: namely, the

gradual diminution and effective erasure of questions of ‘the social’ as a formal category of

economic analysis. Undoubtedly, it is the epistemological dictates of that formidable,

discursively hackneyed, ‘neoclassical economics’ which is to account for this development.

The latter continues in the classical tradition of conceptualizing the economy as a distinct,

autonomous sphere, fundamentally disengaged from the rest of society. ‘The market’ and its

respective social ontological suppositions are universalized, and its broader non-economic

implications are deliberately dispelled from immediate consideration. Economic phenomena

are interpreted in purely economic terms (specifically, in the economistic vocabulary of the

market), which implicitly relegates the greater part of man’s existential condition (for man’s

existence is fundamentally non-economic) to a position of lesser significance than his

activities in the realm of the deified market. This is the nature of the issue we can plausibly

refer to as that of ‘a-sociality’—a definite methodological, implicitly epistemological, sleight

of hand, that deems much of that which is espoused by the contemporary economics

profession analytically myopic.

The conceptual habit of theorizing the economy as an autonomous sphere unto itself, distinct

from extant non-economic realms of society, engenders, by logical extension, the rejection of

the following proposition: that all economic phenomena are inadvertently, and at once, also

social phenomena. What this then allows, is the denial of what 19th century Austrian

political-economist Karl Polanyi referred to as the inexorable ‘embeddedness’ of the

economy in the broader non-economic institutional framework of which society is composed.

What this means is that not only is the economy a product of human volition and political

action—the market order, however fervently naturalized and universalized by its

theoreticians, is of course nothing other than a historically specific form of economic

organization, brought into being by a dramatic expansion of both the bureaucratic and

administrative functions of the state—but also that it is just another institution (component)

within society, and thus must be studied as such (instead of being studied as a singular,

universal realm). The relationship of the economy to the rest of society then becomes of

paramount importance, including of course the implications that the way the former is

organized has for the condition of the latter. Indeed, if ‘economic’ is taken to mean

‘concerning production’, and ‘economy’ therefore taken to mean the realm in which

productive processes are carried out, then it stands almost self-evidently to reason that the

economy should under all conditions be conceived of in its relationship with the rest of

society. Such is emphatically not the case in contemporary economics (Polanyi 1944).

The purpose of this paper lies in the task of further explicating this ‘a-sociality’ that maligns

contemporary economics, by way of the latters comparison with the oeuvres of three of the

most luminary economists of past times: Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, and John Maynard

Keynes. In doing so, it is hoped that the analytical degeneration of economics as an

explanatory tool, up to the present juncture of neoclassical hegemony, is demonstrated, vis-à-

vis the expository efficacy that characterized the paradigms of economic thought constructed

by the aforementioned figures. This will be done by, first, explicating the nature of the a-

sociality issue in its entirety. Second, we will trace the genealogy of the catallactic

framework within the neoclassical edifice. Finally, the theoretical works of Marx, Polanyi,

and Keynes will be dealt with; specifically, each of their considerations of the sociologic
implications of capitalism will be illuminated, with the intention of demonstrating the

analytical efficacy garnered by such considerations.

1.1 Economy and Society: two theoretical frameworks

At issue in this paper are two opposing perspectives on the relationship between market and

society: one is economic, one is sociological. The first framework is used within pure

economics or economic theory, the second in economic sociology or sociological economics.

The Greek word ‘catallactics’ will be used to denote the economic framework for

approaching the market, whilst the expression ‘sociologics’ will be used to designate the

sociological. In essence, catallactics expresses what can be called ‘endogenous market logic’,

whilst ‘sociologics’ conveys the theoretic paradigm of exogenous ‘social structural logic’.

The former framework is that favored by contemporary neoclassical economics, whilst the

latter was standard fare in the works of the more eclectic economists of the pre-neoclassical

profession—Heilbroner's ‘Worldly Philosophers’ (a formulation we will hereafter use as ‘the

Worldly Philosophers’) (Heilbroner 2011).

1.1.1 Catallactics

Catallactics is the dominant perspective of market-society relations in contemporary

neoclassical economics. This perspective conceives of the market as a distinct autonomous

sphere, separate from extant non-economic social structures. That which occurs in the latter

realm is interpreted almost entirely in the vocabulary of the market, developing thenceforth
an endogenous market logic wherein the market is analyzed as a closed referential system.

The market is purely an economic mechanism, and all the non-economic relations and

dynamics that it entails are ‘economized’ (in the sense of their being considered as entirely

economic relations and dynamics) and so effectively purged from analysis. For catallactic

theoreticians, the approach to analyzing economic questions is wholly economic in nature,

meaning, precisely, that they are delimited to questions of market phenomena such as

exchange transactions, money, value, prices, and so forth. These economic phenomena are

not theorized as having causally related to them a set of particular social phenomena and

dynamics—they are not considered in their social dimensions (if indeed the existence of such

dimensions is even admitted). The non-economic institutional relations, buttressing the

market mode of production as relations of production, are removed from immediate

consideration. The critique of this system is predicated precisely upon this failure to cognize

about the relationship between ‘the economic’ and those non-economic institutions in which

human social existence is embodied, a failure which effectuates an analytic myopia wherein

it becomes impossible to grasp 1) The ‘true’ nature (‘essence’) of substantive economic life,

and 2) Disruptive strains, created by the prevailing economic system, within the non-

economic institutional structure, that pose an eventual existential threat to the latter's

continued functioning (specifically, to the further development of the forces of material

reproduction, of economic forces). These criticisms will be further developed in the overview

of the sociologics account of the market-society relationship (Zafirovski 2003).

1.1.2 Sociologics

The criticism of the catallactic methods of contemporary neoclassical economics, is to be

found within the contradistincting ‘Sociologic’ methods of the Worldly Philosophers—Marx,

Keynes, and Polanyi in the context of this work. The Sociologics approach treats the market

as a complex social category, rather than as just a purely economic phenomenon. In

particular, it conceives of the market as everywhere-and-always ‘embedded’ within an

extensive non-economic institutional structure. Thus the market is, in sociologics, a social

field and structure—just another institution within the broad, fundamentally non-economic,

framework constitutive of ‘society’. Within the works of those critical economic theorists,

‘the market’ is stripped of the quasi-dogmatic, universalized identity accorded to it by

contemporary economics, and instead conceptualized as an entirely social institution,

amongst others, within a given polity.

The central assertion is this: every kind of productive system (economic system) involves a

definite set of social relations and non-economic institutional dynamics, upon which the very

functioning of that system depends. The endogenous market logic of neoclassical theory, that

regards the market economy as a purely economic ‘thing’ (entailing purely economic

processes) hence conceals the social character which production always manifests. The

material reproduction of man through the market system, as in any economic system,

effectuates a collary process of social development. There is no type of economic system

which is not founded upon a definite set of non-economic relations and dynamics of

production. It is upon the latter that the former's ordered functioning depends. The productive

system, within which individuals work, shapes not only the material world, but also human

beings. This is because the productive system demands a particular way of organizing and

cooperating. In order to produce through the prevailing economic system, human beings enter

into a definite existential groove and non-economic social condition, and it is only within the

specificity of these realities that production takes place. That is to say, in every form of

economic organization, there exists an amalgam of productive forces, upheld by a

historically-created set of social institutional relations and dynamics, that are entirely non-

economic in nature (Zafirovski 2003).

This conceptualization of the general relationship between economy and society makes

evident the source of the disruptive strains that may eventually bring about the collapse of the

prevailing economic system. In any relatively stable society, there holds an equilibrium

between the mode of material reproduction and the non-economic social dynamics and

relations which are integral to that mode of production—for, after-all, the mode of production

(the economy) is everywhere and always embedded within what can be called the non-

economic institutional ‘superstructure’; a particular economic system will require a particular

non-economic superstructure for its continued functioning. With the progression of the mode

of material reproduction (specifically, with the advancement of the material forces of

production) the non-economic sociologic dynamics within the superstructural realm, induced

by the particular mode of material reproduction, will necessarily intensify and become both

more potent and pervasive. These dynamics and relations, however, may prove nefarious to

the vitality of the non-economic institutional superstructure writ large; they may produce a

great many nefarious social realities, corroding gradually this structure. With the further

advancement of the mode of material reproduction, a point maybe reached where the non-

economic phenomena, set into motion (demanded) by the economic system, begin to impede

the further functioning of this same system, through the manner in which they deteriorate the

organic totality that is the non-economic social superstructure. A contradiction will thus arise

between the movement of the mode of material reproduction, and the non-economic social

dynamics and existential realities that it is willing into existence—for these are disintegrating

that structure upon which it is predicated. This contradiction, needless to say, poses a threat

to the functionality of the economic, for within it is expressed the self-contradictory fact that
the economic system demands for its functioning the concurrent existence of a set of

sociological motions that, however, erode the very basis upon which it itself is predicated. It

is implied that the latter may soon cease to support the economic system. This contradiction

can in other words be expressed as such: a time may come where the economic system (the

material mode of production) erodes the non-economic base upon which it is predicated—by

way of effectuating certain disruptive social dynamics and relations within this base—

therefore, by logical extension, terminating its own existence. This entire relationship is

nothing other than the expression of the theoretical raison d'etre of the sociologics

perspective, which states that all economic phenomena are at once, inadvertently, also social

phenomena (Giddens 1971).

This framework makes apparent the futility of the catallactic framework. Failure to theorize

about the economic system in conjunction with the non-economic superstructure within

which it is embedded, occults the effects that the former has on the latter (ie. the sociological

relations and processes it conditions within the latter), and, consequently, removes from

immediate purview tensions that the economic system may provoke within its non-economic

basis. This, then, renders the analysis of the economic system incomplete and inchoate in its

totality, for the very realm upon which its functioning quite literally depends, has been

rendered non-existent.

It follows that the explanatory efficacy of economic analysis depends largely on the degree to

which, present within the analysis, is a thorough consideration of the non-economic social

dynamics and relations instituted by that system. As mentioned earlier, in this work will be

recounted the works of three economists whom, in their accounts of the capitalist system at

its various stages of development, all brought the question of the non-economic dynamics
and existential motions effectuated by its productive logic to the very forefront of their

respective analyses. Expectedly, immense explanatory efficacy was garnered— ‘efficacy’

that is to be measured in terms of the degree to which those issues, within the non-economic

capitalistic superstructure that these figures identified, demonstrate continuity in their

surfacing in the realities of contemporary capitalism (so, simply, in terms of the degree to

which the non-economic sociological strains that were collectively identified continue to

today inhere within the remit of advanced capitalist societies).

2. Genealogy of the catallactic framework

How did neoclassical economics construct the catallactic perspective of market and society?

From wherein within its intellectual edifice have arisen its a-social dispositions? Precisely,

we here posit, from two theoretical developments: the first to do with a conflation between

the two different meanings of the notion of ‘embeddedness’, and the second with the

universalization of the market ethos and the equating of the human condition under the

market order with the human condition as such. Together, these two conscious conceptual

maneuvers piece together the catallactic analytical framework.

2.1 The conflation of substantive and methodological ‘embeddedness’

The notion of ‘embeddedness’ remains today an invaluable tool of analysis in

conceptualizing the relationship between economy and society or, more specifically, the

relationship between the market and extant non-economic institutions prevalent within a

given societal context. The term was first used by 19th century Austrian political economist

Karl Polanyi, as a hermeneutic to understand the historically unprecedented relationship

between ‘economy’ and ‘society’ inaugurated by the emergence of industrial capitalism.

Polanyi used the term in two different dimensions: initially, it was used to describe the

changing causal relationship between economy and society that the advent of marketization

had brought about: prior to the rise of the market, the economy was embedded within non-

economic institutional structures and relations, and thus economic activity was in essence

driven by non-economic motives (political, religious, cultural, etc.); with the emergence of

the market mode of production, however, this relationship become inverted, such that social

relations now became embedded within the economic system, and subordinated to the

dictates of the self-regulating market. The economy in this latter scenario was said by Polanyi

to be ‘disembedded’ from society writ large: no longer did non-economic social institutions

regulate productive activity, instead, now, production ran according to an exterior system that

functioned according to its own laws and in its own grooves. This process of disembedding

was primarily one of commodification, where that which had erstwhile had its own sovereign

dynamics embedded within a complex non-economic institutional structure, was forcefully

transmuted into a transactable market commodity, and made subject to the vagaries of the

market juggernaut. These contrived ‘commodities’ included all the major factors of capitalist

production, land, labor and money. This is the first meaning of embeddedness—

embeddedness as a historical variable describing the changing positionalities of the economy

in relation to society.

The second meaning of embeddedness entails a definite methodological postulate. Both

meanings have as their concern the relationship between economy and society, however,

unlike the first meaning where embeddedness describes a fluid relationship between market

and society, embeddedness in this second instance describes a static and unchanging

relationship between market and society. At first this might seem to be an untenable
contradiction, an irreconcilable conceptual ambiguity, yet, soon the rationale for the

disjuncture shall become apparent: embeddedness in the first case is a historical variable that

describes the degree to which economic activity is governed by non-economic institutional

mechanisms—as opposed to market mechanisms—while embeddedness in this second case

posits the fundamental analytical reality that the market is always and everywhere embedded

within a broader non-economic institutional framework; this fact is posited as an inescapable

empirical reality. It is a variance and changing of analytical scope that produces these two

different iterations of embeddedness. Under a market economy, the economic system is

directed predominantly by market, rather than non-economic, institutions and motives, and

thus is substantively disembedded from society. Yet, if one were to broaden their analytical

scope, they would find that this new economic system—the market—however naturalized

and deified by those individuals involved in its day to day workings, is nonetheless, after all,

still a product of 1) conscious human political action, and 2) still, inadvertently, located

within society. The market is an institutional fact which has arisen within society and

therefore it would be fallacious to say that it has become disembedded from society, however

much it appears to have become on a narrower, substantive existential level.

The first meaning of embeddedness is naturally of use as a descriptive category at a more

substantive, ‘inner-societal level’, whilst the latter meaning lends itself to questions of

methodology. It is from the conflation of these two ‘versions’ of embeddedness that a-

sociality, in the first place, arises. In empirical society, once the normative and cultural

obstacles preventing the inclusion of land and labor in competitive markets had been lifted,

the basis was established for a completely autonomous economy (‘the market’) and a radical

overturning of the relationship between the economy and other social spheres. Theoretically,

at this point, the market can indeed be thought of as an autonomous sphere, detached from
the rest of society. This is true, however, only on the substantive level—on the level that

enquires into the degree to which economic activity is directed by non-economic institutions

and motives. More holistically, methodologically, such a statement cannot be legitimated, for

fundamentally the market is not autonomous from society writ large, for it itself has been

constructed by human beings in sensuous material reality, and, most importantly, it is still

located within that all-embracing existential category, ‘society’. Thus, when studying the new

market economy, one must pay heed to the non-economic basis within which it is embedded,

lest analytic myopia is to be induced. It is very easy to, immediately upon the substantive

disembedding of the economy through the establishment of the market system, conceive of

the economy as having been once and for all causally separated from society (for this is after

all what appears to have happened, and has happened at a certain level). Nevertheless, at the

most totalizing meta-theoretical level, to admit this is to fall prey to a terrible absurdity. It

appears that neoclassical economics has failed to differentiate between these variants of

embeddedness, engendering a displine-wide acquiesce to the ‘autonomous market’ fiction.

This has then, in the last analysis, rendered the ‘non-economic’ obsolete to economic

analysis-proper in the eyes of neoclassical theoreticians, hence producing a-sociality (Polanyi

1944).

2.2 The universalization of the market ethos

The most egregious of all neoclassical analytical habits is undoubtedly that of universalizing

the market and its social ontological presuppositions, such that the economic man of the

market is assumed to be ‘real man’ and, consequently, the market assumed to ‘really’ be

society. It should not take long to see that the non-economic social realm is not only in this

case dispelled from analytical consideration, but, actually, not even recognized as an extant
existing life-domain. From the neoclassical point of view, the social realm is simply ‘one big

market’, in which man behaves in strict accordance with the functional logic of the market

apparatus. The nature of social reality in the non-economic institutional superstructure is

equated with the nature of social reality presupposed under the market order. A rigid

economism is thus partaken in, wherein the non-economic framework of society becomes

subsumed, in its entirety, by the market.

How possibly could this conceptual leap of faith have taken place? How is it that market man

was so assuredly universalized to soon assume the position of man proper? It has long been

demonstrated by behavioral economists that man has never been as selfish as capitalist theory

demands. ‘Economic’ motives never formed with him the sole incentive to work. In vain was

he exhorted, by economists and utilitarian theorists alike, to discount, in his day to day

engagements, all other motives but material ones. In stark contrast to this vulgar economism,

it was found that human social behavior is influenced by more than simple self-interest, that

human institutions are more varied than the vocabulary of the market would suggest, and that

human deliberativeness and purposiveness goes beyond a crude mechanistic utility

maximizing rationality. Man is now known to act on a remarkably mixed array of motives,

the larger part of which are social and communitarian in nature (Lawson 2013). How exactly

were these findings displaced? How did the a-historic, a-empirical Hayekian conception of

atomistic, individualistic, instrumentally rationalistic, and self-interested man re-legitimate

itself? The mystery in this matter arises precisely from the fact that empirical reality was so

absolutely negated, rejected, and replaced by a set of conjectures that had to them not an iota

of empiric veracity. What a fanciful theory of knowledge must have been invoked to carry

out this coup. Fanciful, most certainly, it was; understood as ‘theoretical realism’ within

epistemological philosophy, this is a theory of knowledge that, in effect, rejects empirical

observation as the primary condition for positive knowledge, and, instead, uses theory to

deduce that there exist certain hidden properties and regularities that are the causal

mechanisms underlying all social processes, and that it is precisely these social processes that

are the real foundations of knowledge. Within the formal rigor of this system, that which is

arrived at through axiomatic deductivism is given greater factual gravity than empirical

actuality, which becomes only an ephemeral concern (Block and Somers 2014).

‘Theoretical realism’ can thus be thought of as the tool employed by neoclassical

theoreticians to universalize the market realm, by equating social reality under the market

order with social reality in the surrounding non-economic social superstructure. Convergence

between the social ontological vision stipulated by market theory and that present in the latter

was required. The theoretical realist epistemic framework facilitated—and, of course,

legitimated—the process of doing so. This process unfolded along the following lines. To

commence, a set of behavioral laws underlying all social reality were adduced. These laws,

naturally, were in direct accordance with the functional requisites of the market system.

Social reality was presented along lines that ran in direct opposition to that which has long

been substantively observed about it; it was presented as atomistic (as opposed to internally-

related) as discrete (as opposed to processual), as deterministic (as opposed to emergent), and

individuated (as opposed to structured) (Lawson 1997). This conception of social reality lead

to a model of man as the following: individualistic, instrumentally rational, and self-

interested. The process of market universalization, of harmonization of market man with real

man and thus market with society, of the analytic displacement of motley non-economic ties

with the market juggernaut, was thus complete. And with its completion was excreted from

analysis all considerations of the non-economic superstructural realm, for, not only was it

deemed irrelevant to the general purposes of economic exegesis, but, more basically, its
existence was not even readily admitted. The market was the only known ‘thing’. It was this

thing that was to be the sole object of economic enquiry.

3. Marx, Polanyi, Keynes and the consideration of the social

It could be said that the defining theme of the divergence between the neoclassical tradition

and all prior schools of economic thought, is the degree to which, in each, the social,

political, and cultural context, within which the market is embedded, features or featured in

formal analysis. The Worldly Philosophers, to lesser or greater extents, incorporated the

postulates of methodological embeddedness into their works, and hence garnered an

explanatory power and efficacy that contrasts starkly with the ethereal, narrow output of the

displine today. Economics, until the emergence of neoclassical formalism in the 1870s, was

conceived of as a fundamentally social science, with important responsibilities to serve in the

advancement of the potentialities for human development and existential emancipation.

Therefore, the relationship of the economic system to the non-economic frameworks and

relations within which it was embedded lay at the forefront of most research paradigms. The

highly formalistic neoclassical definition of economics, as a science which studies human

behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses, is

considerably far-removed from this view. By the Worldly Philosophers, economics was

conceived of as a moral and social-philosophical science—an intellectual enterprise that

never fails to emphasize the fact that economics, like other social sciences, is in the final

analysis concerned with an explanation of actual human problems, and, therefore, should

engage fruitfully with substantive economic realities, in particular, with the relationship

between the economic sphere and the society within which it ‘lives’ (Heilbroner 2011).
This tradition is manifested most apparently in the works of the figures listed above, each of

whom were interested primarily in understanding the capitalist economic framework and its

impact on society—the ‘great transformation’ that it had brought. Each recognized the

veracity of Schumpeter's famous statement that economic analysis should cover not only

“economic phenomena” but also “economically relevant phenomena” and “economically

conditioned phenomena” (Schumpeter 1942). These theorists payed close attention to the

nature of the relationships that the market assumes with the various non-economic structures

within which it is embedded, and from which, of course, it derives its very existence. Of

particular concern to Marx, Keynes, and Polanyi, were the potential non-economic forces that

could undermine the workings of the market economy. Specifically, each took notice of the

manner in which—the mechanisms by which—the market may actually negate the requisites

for its own stable functioning, by way of conditioning its non-economic embedding in a way

that is deleterious to the latter's stability. Despite the variances between the specificities of

the individual mechanisms identified by each of the three thinkers, they are essentially

interrelated along the same theoretical lines: each makes an implicit contrast between a pre-

modern world, in which individuals have a well-defined social and moral place, and the

contemporary world, in which these strands of solidarity are breaking down. In each case

what is being grappled with, it seems, is a particular absence in capitalist modernity—an

absence of a social and moral setting that gives the individual a basis for self-respect and

sociable, functional, collaboration and interaction with others. Quite simply, in each of the

mechanisms identified, ‘the social’ is itself posited to be breaking down, disintegrating, in the

wake of capitalist modernization. We may more formally describe this condition with

Durkheim's ‘anomie’. Anomie refers broadly to a societal state wherein the institutions that

had hitherto regulated social intercourse disintegrate, giving way to a state of social

fragmentation (Durkheim 1997). Marx, Keynes, and Polanyi each identified a mechanism
whereby the market effectuates, within its social basis, an anomic state, and thus lays the

grounding for its own demise. It is thence first necessary to particularize the social state of

anomie—that is to say, to delineate concretely the way in which social anomie impairs the

functioning of market capitalism—prior to presenting the various sociological mechanisms.

3.1 Anomie

It requires only a simple further development of the vision of capitalism implied in the

sociologic framework to understand the relationship between anomie and the process of

social provisioning through price-fixing markets. Firstly, Capitalism is to be conceptualized

as not only ‘an economy’, but also, a ‘society’. That is to say, ‘capitalism’, denotes both an

economy as well as a society. This is because the very ‘ontology of capitalism’, the very

nature of its existence, is imperialistic vis-à-vis the surrounding ‘non-economic’ order.

Capitalism tends towards, in Marx's terms, the ‘subsumption’ of non-market realms,

integrating perpetually all social and natural entities into the calculus of commodity logic.

The reasons for this (entailing the fact of capitalism's regarding of land and labor as fungible

‘inputs of production’) we have already delineated. Let us now formalize them. Capitalist

society is a society that has instituted its means of material reproduction in a manner that can

said to be capitalist. It is a society which has coupled its material provisioning to the private

accumulation of capital, measured in units of money, in the form of free contractual exchange

in markets predicated atop of individual calculations of utility. This introduces the

‘everything for sale’ principle, which dictates that all social provisioning deliberations take

place within the context of price-fixing markets. Insofar as the natural environment and

human beings are thoroughly important constitutive elements of this process of social

provisioning, then the percolation of the commodity logic past the strict bounds of market
exchange becomes inevitable (Streeck 2012). We thus arrive at the central point, namely, that

the market system has, invariably, a non-capitalist ‘embedding’: it is based upon a complex

set of non-economic conditions of production, constitutive of its very conditions of

possibility, which, however—as the work of Marx, Polanyi, and Keynes make apparent—it

simultaneously tends to erode and destabilize. These conditions, pre-conditions, of capitalist

production consist of both an ecological as well as social dimension. The former pertains to

the natural processes that sustain life and provide the material inputs for social provisioning,

while the latter addresses the social-reproductive processes that supply the solidarity

relations, affective dispositions and value horizons that underpin social cooperation. With

regards the social dimension, what the sociological phenomena set into motion by capitalism

recognized by the three figures uncovered, were means whereby the capitalist system

effectuates ‘the breakdown of the social’—what we can now do is express this fact in a rather

more specific way. Conclusively, it is the Alienation of the individual being from the product

of their own enterprise and their fellow beings, the commodification of human life chances,

and the suffusion of a limitless ‘love of money’ into the mass physcology that jeopardizes the

universe of meanings, value horizons, and affective dispositions—the general capacities for

social reproduction—that underpin society as well, consequently, market exchange. These

sociological ‘sequences’ rip violently human beings out of their life worldly context, turning

them into mere instruments in the perpetual service of profit (Fraser 2014). The social bonds

that had erstwhile maintained social cogency are doubly ruptured, unable to support the

social organization upon which markets invariably depend. The social, and with it market

economy, dissolute into schizoid disjunction. We now examine each of these sequences

independently.

3.2 Marxian ‘alienation’

Just as in religion Feuerbach had observed that the more man places into God, the less he

retains himself, so in political economy, Marx observed that the greater the laborer's product,

the less he retains himself, the less he is himself. This alienation is threefold. First, it is to be

found in the relationship of the worker to his product, as an alien object which has power

over him, and which is at the same time his relation to the outside world as a whole. Labor is

independent of, far-removed from, its product, which is in other hands; labor remains a thing

outside the laborer, it is only his exterior state: “appropriation is alienation,” “realization of

labor is its derealization”. The life that labor has given the object of its labor comes to

confront it as a hostile force. Labor eventually becomes the slave of its object, since only

through it can the laborer continue to exist, not only as a worker, but as a human being. This

is the ‘alienation of labor from its product’ or ‘alienation from the object’. Second, alienation

is expressed in the relation of labor to the act of production itself: the worker's activity does

not belong to him; indeed, it is turned against him. Since labor is exterior to the laborer, labor

is forced labor, a means to satisfy needs, not a need itself: “What is animal in man becomes

human, what is human becomes animal”. This is ‘alienation of labor from the act of

production’ or ‘self-alienation’. Finally, alienation is also manifested in the relationship that

exists between man, nature, and his species, mankind. Since mankind's deepest need is to

produce, to create, and alienation makes productive life only a means to satisfy needs,

individual man is alienated from mankind: “man makes his essence only a means of his

existence” (Marx 1844). Since alienated labor takes species-life away from man, it takes his

advantage over the animal away from him. A worker may as well be a horse the way society

treats him: he gets just enough to subsist. The life of mankind is alienated as a whole; man is

not what he should be as a human being, but finds himself treated as a means, a mere tool.

Therefore, man is alienated from his fellow men, since he treats them also instrumentally, as
mere tools. This is ‘alienation of man from nature and from his species being’. The aggregate

of these three alienation relations may be accordingly expressed:

“[The laws of political economy] express the estrangement of the worker in his

object thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more

values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better

formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his

object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the more powerful labor

becomes, the less ingenious becomes the worker and the more he becomes

nature's bondsman” (Marx 1844).

3.2.1 Alienation and the physcology of the individual

This amalgam of alienation relations might be formalized into a more specific set of

phenomena and mechanisms, so as to make easier the process of identifying the channels

through which alienation at the individual level, effectuates anomie at the societal level: 1)

Alienation is a legal notion denoting some kind of transference of a property right to the

ownership of another. An individual alienates a piece of land when he sells it to another; 2)

Alienation is a social process, occurring within social relations between persons, referring to

how affections, trust, and loyalties might be alienated (stolen away, transferred) from one

institution or person to another. The alienation, meaning loss, of trust in institutions such as

the legal code, the banks, the political system, can be immensely damaging to the social

fabric; 3) Alienation is a passive psychological term, describing the isolation and

estrangement of an individual from a certain valued connectivity. It is experienced and

internalized as sentiments of grief and sorrow at some undefinable loss that cannot be

convalesced; 4) Alienation is an active psychological condition, in which an individual is

angry and hostile at being or feeling deprived, oppressed or dispossessed, and consciously

acts out that anger and hostility, expressing aggression often outwardly, without any clear

reason or cogent target, against the ‘world’ writ large. These behaviors arise in response to an

individual's feeling frustrated at a perceived lack of life-chances, or because their search for

emancipation assimilated them gradually into yet another system of domination.

From this diversity of meanings arises many potential avenues through which alienation at a

micro, physcological level, brings about an anomic social state in the societal totality. The

worker under capitalism legally alienates the use of his or her labour power for a stipulated

period of time, to the capitalist, in return for a money-wage based remuneration. For the

entirety of this time, the capitalist demands from the worker loyalty and attention. The

worker is required to have an unwavering faith in the efficacy of the capitalist system as a

mechanism for the generation of wealth and realization of human existential potentialities.

The worker is, however, during this contractually posited time of labor-service, estranged and

separated from all that which he produces (the product) as well as from other workers, from

nature and all other realms of social life. Overwhelming feelings of deprivation and

dispossession are experienced and internalized as a foreboding sense of loss and sorrow at the

frustration of the worker's own creative and intellectual instincts. Generalize this neurotic

psychic state to the mass of the wage-laboring populace, conceive of the epic magnitude of

the dislocation between the accomplishments of human productive powers and the

estrangement of the mass of the population from the control of the wealth they have thus

created, and indefinitely will become apparent the redoubtable potentialities for the

breakdown of the body social (Harvey 2014). It is starkly the case that “the limitation of

capital is that its whole development takes place in a contradictory manner, and that the
elaboration of the productive forces, of universal wealth, science, etc., appears as the

alienation of the individual worker from himself” (Marx 1857).

3.2.2 Alienation under neoliberalism

The theme of alienation manifests itself widely and prolifically across the contemporary

neoliberal capitalist landscape. The sensuous contact with the commodity—its ‘use value’—

is lost and perceptible relations to nature are obscured by the domination of exchange values.

The social meanings and worth of labor get occluded in the hegemony of the representational

form of money. The collective ability to arrive through democratic means at collective

decisions gets lost in the ceaseless tension between conflicting rationalities of isolated private

interests and of state powers. Social wealth is appropriated by private persons, producing an

ever-growing bifurcation between a privately manage world of affluence and abundance, and

a publically endured world of squalor and deprivation (Storm 2017). The direct producers of

value are alienated from the value they produce. An eradicable chasm comes to exist between

people through class formation. An ever-intensifying, and perpetuating, division of labor

makes increasingly difficult the task of conceptualizing consciously the whole in relation to

the schizoid, itinerant, fragmented parts. All possibilities for social justice or equality are

annulled, even as the universality of equality before the legal code is proclaimed as the

utmost bourgeoisie virtue. Accrued antipathies boil over into the political realm, inducing

institutional deadlock. Contractual freedom becomes domination; domination becomes a

discursively legitimated form of freedom. Social dysfunction ensues (Harvey 2014)

3.3 Polanyian fictitious commodification

Tacit within the presumption that markets and market signals can best adjudicate all

allocative decisions, is the belief that everything can in principle be treated as a commodity—

that everything ought to be treated as if fungible and as if made for sale—hence the

neoliberal obsession with establishing property rights over processes, things, and social

relations. Endemic to the neoliberal capitalist project has been the putting of prices on things

that were never actually produced as commodities: for example, the commodification of and

monopoly rent extraction from indigenous inimitability and originality in the domains of

sexuality, culture, history, heritage, and nature. Thus, throughout the long sweep of neoliberal

history there abound many an instance of what Polanyi referred to as ‘fictitious

commodification’, where that which had erstwhile had its own sovereign dynamics

embedded within a complex non-economic institutional structure, was forcefully transmuted

into a transactable market commodity and made subject to the vagaries of the market

juggernaut. This supposed ‘commodity’, however, was of course a crude fabrication, as

fundamentally it had no congruence whatsoever with the definition of a commodity proper:

namely, an entity produced explicitly for the purposes of buying and selling in processes of

market exchange.

Polanyi first applied the concept of the commodity fiction to his analysis of the three major

inputs into (or ‘factors of production’ in) any market-based production process: namely, land,

labor, and money. Polanyi identified how the nascent neoliberal theoreticians operated on the

premise that these fictitious commodities would behave in the same way as real commodities,

and how their entire endeavor orbited around the central necessity of establishing coherent

markets for them. Yet, as Polanyi pointed out:

 “Labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is

bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. In

other words, according to the empirical definition of a commodity they are not commodities.

Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn

is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached

from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not

produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a

rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state

finance. The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious” (Polanyi

1944).

While, indeed, the neoliberal system cannot function without these fictions, it wreaks untold

sacrilege if it feigns cognizance to the highly complex sensuous human realities that lie

behind them. Aphoristically, yet with remarkable prescience, Polanyi delineated the

commodification quandary as follows:

“To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their

natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in

the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity ‘labor power’ cannot be shoved about,

used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who

happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of man’s labor power, the

system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’

attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings

would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social

dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its

elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized,

the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of
 purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits

of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society”

(Polanyi 1944).

The narratives outlaid for each of the fictitious commodities demonstrate a lucid continuity

through our own neoliberal era. We are here, however, concerned with the social realm and

the sociological dynamics set into motion therein by the expansion of the market. Therefore,

out of the three fictitious commodities identified by Polanyi, it is labor with which we are

first and foremost concerned (formally, labor ‘power’, ie. the capacity to labor), and,

specifically, Polanyi's postulate pertaining to the social depredation of the bearer of this

peculiar commodity—the capitalist wage laborer.

3.3.1 Fictitious commodification and institutional deterioration

Polanyi made clear that the establishment and expansion of the market for labor entails a

veritable process of cultural degradation, wrought by the rapid and violent disruption of

‘those institutions in which human social existence is embodied’. Upon the founding of

market society, these institutions are torn asunder as labor is wrenched into commodity

form—a procedure which amounts to the revocation of human agency to the workings of a

blind mechanism, running in its own grooves and according to its own laws. Indeed, the

process of commodifying labor, Polanyi pointed out, was only a short formula for the

liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society: social relations and

institutions become inadvertently embedded in and subordinated to the dictates of impersonal

market mechanisms, whilst the economy becomes ‘disembedded’ from its broader, non-

economic basis (disembedded, to be sure, in the analytical, not methodological, sense). That

is to say, the commodification of labor ‘robs men of the protective covering of cultural
institutions’, through ceaseless exposure to volatile catallactic whims. It engenders dramatic

social dislocation, instigating ‘vice, perversion, crime, and starvation’. The institutions that

had erstwhile regulated social intercourse disband in the face of the market juggernaut. All

social institutions become subordinated to the economic imperative (Lodhi 2017).

3.3.2 Fictitious commodification under neoliberalism

Beyond the delphic confines of Polanyian theorization does this postulate extend. It finds, in

fact, robust empirical verification in contemporary neoliberal times. Consider the so-called

‘flexible labor market’. Upon entrance into the precincts of this numinous construct, all

individuals exist as sensuous beings of character, as socialized individuals embedded within a

milieu of social institutions, as physical beings identifiable by various individualized

characteristics (for example gender and phenotype), as individuals who have procured a

multifarious range of skills and preferences, and as aspiring living beings conscious of their

own dreams, desires, ambitions, hopes, doubts, and fears. To the capitalists to which they are

selling their labor to, however, these individuals are simply another factor of production—

albeit, not an undifferentiated factor, for employers demand labor of varying qualities

appropriate to different types of vocational tasks. These workers are employed on a particular

contract, contracts which are transient and short-term, so as to create conditions that allow for

flexible accumulation. Increasingly, capitalists make use of naturally occurring variances in

the labor market to divide and conquer. Segmented labor markets emerge out of various

administrative activities carried out by employers; distinctions of ethnicity, gender, religion,

and race are often incited—to be later used, outwardly or covertly, by the capitalist.

Ultimately, such methods of differentiation and scouting rigor work towards the latter’s

advantage.
In response to these tactics by employers, workers may look to use the social networks within

which they are embedded to procure access to certain domains/lines of employment. Workers

will seek typically to monopolize skills, and, through properly coordinated collective action,

to regulate the labor market to protect their interests in the face of the capitalists' ever

intensifying disciplining of their existential positionality—in doing so, they are merely

constructing Polanyi's ‘protective covering of cultural institutions’.

Neoliberal flexibility diktats are aimed precisely at the stripping away of these protective

coverings— protective coverings the existence of which the post-Second World War

Keynesian embedded liberalism allowed, and even facilitated, for. Neoliberalism has carried

out a two-pronged attack on labor; the first of these prongs entails four policy maneuvers

carried out by an amalgam of state power and capitalist interests: firstly, the power of trade

unions has been curbed or dismantled. Secondly, flexible labor markets have been

established. Thirdly, the state has more or less resigned from its hitherto active public

management role, withdrawing itself almost entirely from the domain of social provisioning.

Finally, technologically induced shifts in job structures have made vast segments of the labor

populace redundant, thus completing the complete domination of capital over labor in the

market arena. The now powerless and sociologically atomized worker confronts a labor

market in which only short-term contracts are offered on a highly itinerant basis. Security of

tenure and other such notions of occupational longevity dissipate into the distant past

(Thatcher abolished it in Universities). A system of personal responsibility takes the place of

social protections that were erstwhile a legal obligation of employers and the state. In

accordance with the neoliberal ethos, individuals now buy products in the market that provide

social protections instead. Privatization of health care, pension, and social security services is
carried out under the characteristically superfluous neoliberal verbiage of private sector

efficacy vs public sector in-efficacy, of individual ‘freedom of choice’ as opposed to the

‘authoritarian’ imposition of services by the state. Experience tells however that the function

of such rhetoric lies only in the obscuring of that which is really taking place: namely, the

transformation of the very notion of individual security into a matter of individual ‘choice’ to

either pay exorbitant prices to inefficient, gargantuan, highly bureaucratized, but highly

profitable monopoly rent-seeking corporate conglomerates—whose products are increasingly

financialized and embedded within the vacillations of volatile financial markets—or the

individual ‘choice’ to go without any sort of social protection at all. (Again, a decidedly

Orwellian tincture to neoliberal semantics, this time seen in the employment of the term

‘choice’).

The secondary set of labor disciplining methods entails the transformation of the spatial and

temporal co-ordinates of the labor market. The unbounded geographical mobility of corporate

capitalist prerogative under neoliberalism—facilitated by the often judicially imposed

porosity of state borders with respect to capital flows—allows it to dominate an international

labor force whose own geographical mobility is restricted. Captive labor reserves arise from

immigration policies which lock the doors safely upon the supernumeraries who become

caged within the confines of the labor market. These spatial barriers can of course only be

evaded by way of illegal immigration—the juridical ramifications of which provide yet

another avenue through which capital finds an easily exploitable labor force at its behest.

Amidst the vicissitudes of global neoliberalism has emerged the quintessential figure of ‘the

disposable worker’: one need think only of the accounts of the despotic conditions under

which laborers work in the sweatshops of the world. Neoliberalism has produced a disposable

workforce stripped of the protective covering of lively democratic institutions; a workforce

whose day to day realities have been contorted to the grotesque ontological precepts of the

market ethos by way of ceaseless exposure to the exploitative strains that indefinitely inhere

within the logic of the neoliberal system. Having been commodified to their very core, this

populace is subject to all manner of social dislocations. The social incoherence wrought by

the neoliberal commodification of the human condition leaves ultimately a gaping hole in the

social order. Towards alternative forms of social solidarity do the degraded masses then turn.

A renewed sense of collective cohesion is sought in activities ranging from gangs and

criminal cartels, narco-trafficking, minimfais, and favela bosses, to community grassroots

and nongovernmental organization to secular cults and religious sects. Such are the ancillary

social mechanisms that fill the void left behind as state powers, political entities, and other

traditional institutional structures are actively dismantled or wither away as localities of

collective existence and communal consonance.

Neoliberalism considers labor in the abstract as a thing; labor as a commodity. The labor

process transfigures man as a sensuous species being into a mere instrument of production,

which is employed to yield as much as possible with as little cost as possible. The worker is

not at all in the position of a free seller vis-à-vis his employer. The capitalist is in all

conditions free to utilize labor power, whilst the worker is always obliged to sell it. Labor can

neither be accumulated nor even be saved, for it isn't a true commodity. Labor is human life

and if life isn't each day reciprocated for food then it is impelled to suffer and soon perish.

The commoditization of human life under neoliberalism recreates the slavery of old; it is an

admittance of those very conditions of an infinitely binding servitude. Under neoliberalism

the worker is perfected whilst the man degraded. The product of the laborers toil comes to

assume an existence outside of him, as something that is alien to him, something that

becomes a power unto itself confronting him; that life which the laborer has conferred upon
the commodity comes to oppose him—upon its engulfment into the ebbs of flows of the

global system—as something increasingly estranged and malefic. In certain emergent

capitalist regions there exist large armies of laborers, operating under the directorate of

industrial peonage, who work sixteen hours a day in conditions of unremitting exertion, yet

scarcely buy the right not to die. The neoliberal accumulatory process presents itself almost

as a war. To be conducted with success, the war demands large armies which it can amass on

one spot and in the next moment diffuse profusely. Such is the nature of the lives of the men

who make up its capital wealth; men squandered with an indifference the callousness of

which is comparable only to that with which the most vainglorious conquerors of past times

disposed of their own armies (Lodhi 2017).

3.4 Keynesian ‘love of money’

Keynes took issue with the moral ramifications of laisezz faire capitalism's philosophic raison

d'etre: namely, the belief in the efficacy, and indeed the necessity, of the opportunity for

unlimited private money-making as an incentive for individuals to exert maximum productive

effort. This issue remains, of course, the most generalized point of discussion in critical

theories of capitalism: the system's harnessing of the love of money to the task of distributing

economics resources in the way best calculated to increase wealth—under the presumption

that the lust for money is the most powerful of all human motives, the motive for which men

will be most assiduously drawn to labor—has attracted many a virulent appraisal, so much so

as to render the subject rather prolix, banal, from the standpoint of contemporary discourse.

Yet Keynes' treatment of what he called this ‘love of money’ is uniquely penetrating for its,

as we will see, theoretical tenability with a broader state of social disintegration. The love of

money constitutes of the following moral elements:

 “Habitual appeal to the money motive in nine-tenths of the activities of life, with the universal

striving after individual economic security as the prime object of endeavor, with the social

approbation of money as the measure of constructive success, and with the social appeal to

the hoarding instinct as the foundation of the necessary provision for the family and for the

future” (Keynes 2010a).

Keynes first approached the subject in his futuristic 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for

Our Grandchildren. Published in the second year of the Great Depression, Keynes took as his

subject the ‘bad attack of economic pessimism’ that had begun to inhere within the

conscience of his academic contemporaries. Keynes did not think that the pessimists of the

era were right about the long-term prospects for the capitalist system. Rather than the

‘rheumatics of old age’, Keynes suggested that contemporary civilization was suffering

instead from the “growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment

between one economic period and another.” Keynes thus dismissed the pessimists and turned

to the long-term future, asking “what can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life

to be a hundred years hence?” What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren’?

Despite the doldrums of the time, Keynes went on to provide a remarkably sanguine

prognostication. He imagined that by 2030 standards of living would be dramatically higher;

human beings, liberated from immediate subsistence needs—and the desire to consume for

the sake of consumption—would work no more than fifteen hours a week, devoting the rest

of their time to the enjoyments of leisure and culture:

“I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in

population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution,
 within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the

future—the permanent problem of the human race” (Keynes 2010b).

This transformation in the nature of economic life, would hold legion social and cultural

consequences. When the accumulation of wealth had lost its social centrality, Keynes

asserted, ‘there will be great changes in the code of morals’. Purged from the remit of

civilized society would be those various pseudo-moral principles that have hitherto weighed

heavy on the conscience of capitalist society. Denounced would be those debauch ontological

qualities that have hitherto been exalted among the highest virtues. The most important of

these social advancements, however, Keynes maintained, would be our changed relationship

to the capitalist money-motive—the love of money:

“We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of

money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the

enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, one of those semi-criminal,

semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in

mental disease” (Keynes 2010b).

3.4.1 The love of money and moral boundlessness

The relationship of the love of money to the social state of anomie, has to do with the manner

in which the totality of moral rules—that hitherto forms about each person an imaginary wall,

at the foot of which the flood of human passions simply dies without being able to go

further—disbands in the case of the former physcic condition. As articulated by Keynes,

capitalistic motives shake violently the moral architecture that has traditionally governed

economic life, exciting and inflaming the search for pecuniary gain beyond pre-existing
bounds. When these passions are contained, it remains possible to satisfy them. If at any

point the barrier restraining them weakens, however, then these human forces will pour

tumultuously forward, through the open breach, finding no limits where they can stop. They

may now only devote themselves to the pursuit of an end that perpetually eludes them.

Individual disillusionment will result, as the emotions and appetites ruled by this sector of

morality become unrestricted and, in fact, accentuated by this very release. These lusts will

be unable to fulfil themselves for they have been liberated from all limitations.

Morality has the function of constraining human pecuniary desire. Thus, because of the

power that wealth confers, too much wealth eventually becomes a source of immorality.

Wealth diminishes the power of things to restrain the individual; it is the great liquidator, the

great dispeller of all fixed, metaphysical solemnities. The accumulation of wealth intensifies

desire and makes harder the task of holding them in check. Moral disequilibrium ensues, and

requires but a feeble nudge to disrupt it entirely. This condition can be understood as a

‘malady of infiniteness, wherein man is tormented for lack of a tangible moral purpose;

before him he sees boundless, free, and open space, having lost sight of the moral barrier

which under normal conditions would have cut off his vision. No longer does he perceptively

sense those forces that would normally restrain him and delimit his horizon. These forces do

not anymore possess their usual degree of authority. They are weakened and thus cannot

function as they should. ‘The infinite’ thus appears as a physcic, social notion—dealing with

human passion, desire—that comes to inhere within the body social in times when moral

displine has lost its reign over wants. The atrophy of any moral system, which has prevailed

for centuries, manifests itself in the weighing heavy of precisely this ‘infiniteness’ on the

minds of those it has hitherto governed.

Why might the limitless, infiniteness, that an unchecked lust for private wealth accumulation

brings, compel upon an individual an anomic state of existence? Precisely, because no living

being can be happy, let alone exist, unless his needs assume some sort of congruity with his

means. If one's desires (or perceived needs) demand more than can be allocated to them by

the means found at their behest, then they can only function painfully and with great and

constant moral abrasiveness. Nothing appears in man's organic or psychological constitution

which sets a limit to such tendencies as the covetousness of money, for they are the pure

outcome of various free combinations of the human will. The savage is satisfied simply when

there comes to exist an equilibrium between its supply of energy, its subsistence-means, and

its energy expenditures; when this gap produced by the demands of life is filled, the savage,

fulfilled, asks nothing more. Its powers of thought are not sufficiently developed to

contemplate ends other than those implicit in its very physical, material nature. Not so with

man—a more developed intelligence ensures that a wider range of conditions and desired

ends, demanding fulfillment, occupy his conscience. The development of social life does not

require man's desired quantities of well-being, comfort, or luxury to legitimately cease at one

point rather than another—evidently, they have steadily increased since the beginnings of

history, becoming satisfied more and more without any evident harm to the social body. It is

in this context that such appetites as Keynes's love of money emerge to the social fore

(Durkheim 1972).

3.4.2 The love of money under neoliberalism

Within the non-economic superstructural landscape of contemporary capitalism, where is to

be found this ‘semi-pathological’ phenomenon in its anomie-inducing form? Where are

Keynes's normative postulates most clearly reified? Of course, nowhere other than
contemporary capitalism's quintessential accumulatory locality: the vulgarly popularized,

notorious, Wall-Street, New York City. It is here, amidst the whimsical trepidations of

electronic herds of financiers, that Keynes's concerns are most patently realized. Traverse

onto a trading floor and immediately one is subsumed by the beguiling aura of capital—of

capital in the process of sublimation. Universal capitals perpetually furthering their dominion

over the anarchic world market. Power, strength, pecuniary preoccupation—such are the

sentiments weighing heavy on the conscience of those occupying this realm. All compelled

by the single vivacious sense that if only they could navigate the computer game like set-up

of flat-screen TVs, high-tech computer monitors, phone turrets lined with dials, knobs and

buttons correctly—if only they could win the game—then the vaunted aspiration of wealth

could be theirs. They could become, in a word, rich. Received a $40,000 bonus? Thrilled, for

once the habitual checking of the bank account before expenditure is relegated to a distant,

ascetic past. But, generally, it is only a matter of time before a senior trader gets hired away

for something astronomical, for, say, $900,000. 22 times the size of your initial bonus, envy

overwhelms—excitement, then engulfs, excitement at the prospect of how much wealth one

can amass. Maniacal work regimens engender a gradual ascent up the Wall-Street ladder,

allowing for the entrance into such revered occupational lines as bond and credit default

swapping. Four years later and suddenly offers of a “1.75 by 2” (meaning $1.75 million per

year for two years) arise from the likes of Bank of America and Citibank. Rent a loft

apartment on Bond Street for $6,000 a month, the purchasing power to go to any restaurant in

Manhattan—Per Se, Le Bernardin—simply by phoning the brokers running unlimited

expense accounts for traders. With such money, power, individual happiness is now managed

by an exterior being. Yet, there remains a nagging envy. Sit down at the trading desk, amidst

interns and managing directors. Sitting adjacent is a manager who takes home $10 million; $1

million, $2 million suddenly loose the lure they had erstwhile possessed. Suggestions perhaps
by worried relatives or counsellors may arise at this point regarding ‘spiritual malady’, ‘inner

wounds’, but they're easily dismissed by the epistemic imperialism of a caustic monetary

‘rationalism’. Pack up and move to a hedge fund. Working elbow to elbow with billionaires.

Beset by angst, an inexplicable covetousness for accumulation for the sake of accumulation.

They could buy Micronesia if they wanted to, they could become the mayor of New York

city. Power, not only money—power beyond getting a table at Le Bernardin. They had the

global polity at their behest. A billion dollars then becomes the aspiration. In the course of

five years, from being thrilled at a first bonus of $40,000 to disappointment at a seemingly

meagre $1.5 million. Day to day discussions in the boardroom, the vitriol of traders at

emergent and extant hedge fund regulations, pathological bile directed at the government for

limiting bonuses after the crash. Fury in their voices at the utterance of higher taxes.

Antipathy towards anything that threatens dizzying remuneration. Witnessing the

transfiguration of the trading floor the month before bonuses into a neighborhood in the midst

of ‘the wire’—the moment the heroin runs out. Looking on enviously at those who earn

more. In a single career had been amassed more wealth than a median income wage laborer

would earn in an entire lifetime—most likely in even two lifetimes. Marketable talents, sharp

with numbers, talented derivatives trader, yet, at the same time, from the standpoint of a

productive agent operating within the collective societal capital, a net contribution of naught

if not negative. Hardly would the world change if the position was to tomorrow disappear.

Not so pediatricians, or educators. Yet, still, the former is endowed with far greater

occupational value, importance, cultural significance, within one’s conscience, than is the

latter. Amidst rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an

obesity crisis, it is the exchanging of fictitious ‘products’, whose own value derives from the

unrealized value of an underlying asset, in entirely imagined digital money flows, that is

ascribed the greatest value—indeed, not simply are these issues intentionally ignored, but,
also, they are often seen as major avenues for profit accretion, through such mal-practices as

predatory lending to marginalized populations, structured inflationary asset destruction in

processes of urban gentrification, and the promotion of profligate credit incumbency that

reduces entire populations to stringent debt servitude, among others—pathology indeed (Polk

2014).

4. Conclusion

Thence, the a-sociality matter has been explicated along three paths. Market capitalism has

been shown to have innate to its very workings socially destructing potentialities. By the very

smooth operation of its purely economic logic, it induces a great many frictions amongst the

non-economic, social logics within which it is embedded. This latter fact indicates, again, the

crucial question of the ‘ontology of the market’ in capitalism—the nature of the market's

existence. This existence is of a thoroughly ‘embedded’, ‘interrelated’, ‘causally dependent’,

nature, vis-à-vis a vast array of non-contractual, non-economic, social and natural realities,

wherein, crucially, the market's conditions of possibility inhere. In and through its

destabilizing of precisely these realities, averred Marx, Keynes, and Polanyi, the market

destroys itself, meaning to say it ruptures the Newtonian equability of its constitutive, purely

economic logics.

Neoclassical economics rejects all this, choosing instead to adopt a market ontology that,

through a posteriori abstraction, that is to say, by means of various formalizing abstractions,

presents the economic as a mechanical and natural process, separate from non-economic

social facts. The task of economic theory is here purely the analysis of the market as a formal,

reliable mechanism—rigorous in its internal logic—and the delineation of its optimum

effects. Analytically all that must be ‘acted’ upon are economic facts and realities. No

‘conditions of existence’ of the market, no more fundamental, structural, and general

‘conditions of possibility’, as such, should take up the attention of the economist.

Yet here we have constructed a rather different ontology. Marx, Keynes, and Polanyi make

clear that this ‘system’, ‘Capitalism’, is a complex whole, including, most certainly,

economic processes the specifically economic analyses of which is a matter for pure theory

and theoretical formalization which takes the form of a formalization of the many processes

endogenous to the functional logic of the market. Yet these economic processes only really

exist, in history, insofar as an institutional framework and a multitude of positive organic

conditions have provided them with their conditions of possibility. So thence one ought to

begin at the level of, in Marxian terms, the relations of production, and realize that they will

have to act, analytically, also on facts that are not directly economic facts, but which, rather,

are conditioning facts for a possible market economy. Attention must be paid to the

conditions of existence of the market, that is to say, to what we have called the market's non-

economic, non-contractual, embeddedness—its foundational ‘social framework’. The

question should be how to theoretically intervene on not only the mechanisms of the market

economy, but also on the conditions of the market—the facts of the ‘framework’—such that

the market economy can come into play. It goes without saying that it is in the interest of, as

it were, ‘making the market possible’, that one should profess this concern for the market's

social environment (Foucault 2008).

The sociologic, embeddedness-adhering economist, then, always in his analysis of capitalism

apprehends two coexisting components: the rigor of capitalism's formal, internal, ‘economic’

structure, and the fragility of its real, historical, ‘social’ existence. This leads us to a whole
set of more general conclusions about the moral, social-philosophic, discontents of

neoclassical economics, which really suggest that the way in which the discipline seeks to

appropriate that social fact ‘Capitalism’ in theory, the way it construes it in popular

discourse, is actually constitutive of capitalism's destruction, for its total fissure of the body

social in the social imagination. We may employ in the expression of these issues, once

again, the incredibly lucid formulations of Marx.

4.1 Neoclassical discursivity and the destruction of capitalism

The conditions of labor and life, the sense of joy, anger, or frustration that lie behind the

production of commodities, the states of mind of the producers, are all obscured by formal

neoclassical analysis, which is concerned only with the exchange of one object (money) for

another (the commodity). Such exchanges take place through extensive systems of

mathematical formulae, without a thought for the myriad people who engage in them. All

traces of social malignancy are concealed under esoteric Greek notations. To the question of

what conditions of labor lay behind a particular process of production, behind the coming to

being of a particular commodity, the neoclassical economist has no answer. The conceptual

particularities of the money-form and market exchange draws a veil over, ‘masks’, the social

relationships underlying the various economic phenomena being studied. Marx called this the

‘fetishism’ of commodity life. This fetishism renders opaque the lives and aspirations of

those sensuous human individuals, ‘agents’, whom neoclassical economists are so objectively

dependent on for the purposes of their analysis. An overt complicity with the fact of fetishism

and a tragic indifference towards underlying social meanings characterizes contemporary

economics—a profession enraptured by masks and illusions, unable to comment cogently on

substantive social realities (Harvey 1989).

The works of Marx, Keynes, and Polanyi, demonstrate how this fetishistic mask may be torn

away, and provide insight into how the cabalistic categories of neoclassical analysis might be

deconstructed, so that the relationships we observe in the market-place can be interpreted in

appropriate social terms. It is readily apparent that something radically different in the way of

investigative methods and mental conceptions is needed, lest economics, as a societally

legitimated branch of social enquiry, is to be torn asunder by its own myopia and explanatory

futility. It is only then that the capitalist social formation may be harnessed, in its idyllic

Smithian formulation, as the instrumentality of social betterment and advancement (Harvey

2006).
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