Abstract
Like a message in a bottle, How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? originally written in the late 1960s in Hungarian, has recently arrived on the shores of critical theory in the form of an English translation. As a critique of Marx’s economic determinism, the authors aim to set Marxist thinking on a more realistic path. This article looks first, at what the authors think are flawed premises in Marx’s work. Second, I sketch the contemporary economic context of a global digital economy to point at issues a critical economic theory inevitably has to contend with today to prove its relevance. Finally, I argue that Maria Márkus’s ideas of a politicisation of needs and civil/decent society make a significant contribution to a potential answer to How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? and also advance the idea of a mixed economy with the goal to sustain an economic order that allows a maximum of economic and political freedom while simultaneously reducing economic and political inequalities to a minimum.
Introduction
In Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, Jonathan Sperber (2013) states if ‘[v]iewed positively, Marx is a far-seeing prophet of social and economic developments and an advocate of the emancipatory transformation of state and society’. On the other hand, Sperber (2013: xii) goes on to say, if viewed negatively, ‘Marx is one of those most responsible for the pernicious and evil features of the modern world.’ While we can hardly say that Marx is personally responsible for any evil caused, those who turned his ideas into dictatorial regimes are. But there can be no doubt that the works and lives of the authors of How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? (Márkus et al., 2022) have been shaped by both views. And it is safe to say that their own life experiences played a crucial part in the development of their view that a ‘rethinking of the foundations of Marxist history’ (2022: xi) was necessary if the emancipatory value in Marx’s work was to be rescued. And How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? attempts nothing less than exactly that with the goal of ‘embedding economics in the wider framework of a critical theory’ (Márkus et al., 2022: xix).
The title How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? is by no means self-explanatory. And it is not necessarily my goal here to clarify it. Neither is it possible in the short space of this article to even try to attempt an answer to a question so far-reaching, broad and complex. Having been published in English only recently, it is maybe also too early to fully assess the book’s impact on the whole of critical theory. What is clear though is that critical theory has never addressed its Marxist origins in the same radical way as Márkus et al. do. If taken seriously, the book is much more than an attempt to revitalise Marxist thinking. It could potentially spark a recalibration of critical theory’s take on the economy, politics and work as developed by Habermas, Honneth or Fraser, to name only a few of the main exponents. While I touch on some of those questions, it goes beyond the scope of this article to address them fully.
The purpose of this article is instead to take the title or the question the book title asks as a starting point to reflect first, on what the critical economic theory suggested by the authors is critical of in the first instance, namely some of Marx’s fundamental premises. At its core, their approach is based on a critique of Marx aimed at setting Marxist thinking on a more realistic path. Only with their critique of Marx’s premises in mind, can we start to unpack what the authors consider needs rethinking. At the risk of distorting what they had in mind, their question could be recast as follows: how is critical economic theory possible without repeating or making the same flawed assumptions Marx made, and how can we rethink his ideas so that they more realistically contribute to the unfinished project of human emancipation? Second, I sketch the contemporary economic context of a global and increasingly digital economy to point at a specific issue a critical economic theory has to contend with today. This needs to include a brief look at work as a quintessentially human activity to contextualise questions of economic and political freedom and equality, which the authors of How Is Critical Economic Theory? aim to preserve in contrast to Marx. Finally, I argue that Maria Márkus’s ideas of a politicisation of needs and civil/decent society provide a missing centrepiece in the conceptualisation of political and economic freedom. Her work makes a significant contribution not only to a potential answer to How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? but also advances Karl Polanyi’s idea of a mixed economy intended to sustain an economic order that allows a maximum of economic and political freedom while simultaneously reducing economic and political inequalities to a minimum.
Rethinking the Marxist contours of a critical economic theory
The authors of How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? found Marx’s general project of a critical economic theory ‘attractive and fruitful’ and at the same time ‘deeply problematic’ (2022: xxv). It is useful to briefly identify three core issues that Márkus et al. raise: (1) Marx’s conception of history as an inevitable and telic movement towards communism; (2) communism in the form of a market-less society as the only possible remedy for capitalism’s failures; and (3) that an increasingly impoverished working class would lead the change from capitalism to communism.
To start with, the authors problematise the Marxist conception of history as the inevitable transition from primitive to mature forms of communism. Thus understood, the impersonal forces behind the idea of historical materialism also reduce human action to a mere function for the inevitable realisation of a communist society. Instead, Márkus et al. (2022: xii) envisage: an alternative conception of history in which humans are not mere means of historical necessity; rather at each moment they face a set of alternatives to choose from, and these aggregate choices and actions could and do actually change the course of social change.…the biologically fixed nature of the human species is ‘incomplete’: Its gaps are filled by the socially created material and symbolic culture. It is not just the direction of history that is not fixed once and for all: human nature itself is a product of history; it changes with the societal culture humans themselves create and make their own. One of the focal ideas guiding our work was the claim that multilinear evolutionism could be reconciled with the young Marx’s philosophy of history, explaining social change from individual choices between alternatives and from the aggregation of acts based on those choices. (Márkus et al., 2022: xiv) Capitalism should be replaced by a social system based on the voluntary co-operation of free and equal producers, liberated both from the personal rule of the private owner of the means of production and from the impersonal rule of the market.
And finally, the authors make the point that it is equally unrealistic to ‘measure and compare all kinds of labour in terms of a common unit of simple labour’ (2022: xxiv). Here too they conclude that ‘Marx’s blueprint of a market-less, centrally planned labour time economy is neither desirable nor feasible’ (2022: xxiv). As Polanyi (2018: 38) explains, an economic system ‘must be oriented on producing a price that is as favorable to each partner as he can make it. Such a behavior contrasts sharply with that of exchange at a set price.’ Marx, however, believed that a market-based price system would result in the pauperisation of the working class and that such a pauperised working class would drive the overthrow of the capitalist labour system. Márkus and his co-authors do not completely disagree but add that it takes more than an impoverished working class to overthrow the capitalist system. In their words, pauperisation might cause the working class to ‘rebel against the capitalist order, but it does not provide them with the intellectual and motivational tools necessary for building an order based on freedom, equality and solidarity’ (Márkus et al., 2022: xxiv–xxv).
These three points of critique highlight what a fundamental rethinking of Marxist ideas means for the authors of How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible?. To briefly reiterate, first, they reset the course of Marxist thinking from an economically predetermined historical outcome, that is, communism, to an understanding of history that is neither static nor fixed. The emancipatory potential here lies in the fact that individuals can contribute to the open-ended course of history based on self-determination and self-organisation. Second, they reset the Marxist view that the only remedy against capitalism is to abolish capitalist markets altogether. In their view, the belief in communism as a market-less society is not only unrealistic but also deprives individuals of the economic freedoms that come with a decentralised market system. They conclude that even communist societies cannot do without markets. To be sure, this does not mean markets should be the sole organising principle for the whole of society. Finally, they reset the Marxist view from a pauperised working class as the driving force behind social change towards communism to social change emanating from individuals’ determining and organising their own lives.
For a critical economic theory to be possible, it needs to adopt what Karl Polanyi called the ‘double movement’. Both Marx but also economic liberalism ‘misread the history of the Industrial Revolution…[and] insisted on judging social events from the economic viewpoint’ only (Polanyi, 2001: 35–6). It is the Polanyian dialectic that reveals Marx’s approach as one-sidedly focused on self-regulating markets fearing the economic sphere to become the only organising principle of society. Marx’s nightmare was a completely disembedded market economy. For Polanyi, it was more realistic to speak of tendencies in societies that emphasise markets and countertendencies that wish to protect against the negative consequences of markets.
What then do Márkus et al. believe a critical economic theory needs to be premised on? While they agree with Marx that it would be ideal to eliminate reification, alienation and exploitation from society, they expose the idea of communism as envisaged by Marx as far too idealistic and utopian. Instead, they are looking to outline a critical economic theory ‘that is different from the Marxian design of a communist society, and yet entailing the promise to be significantly more just and more solidaristic than either capitalism or the Soviet-type system’ (Márkus et al., 2022: xxvi). Most importantly, this included the view that the struggle against reification, alienation and exploitation cannot be won once and for all with the establishment of a communist order. Instead, it needs to be imagined as an ongoing process with the hope ‘to be able to attack specific syndromes of reification and alienation, one after the other. There is no last fight, there is only an indefinite series of fights’ (2022: xxvi).
The task then of a critical economic theory is to contribute to achieving a society with lower levels of inequality and higher levels of freedom; in short, a good life for all members of society. As János Kis explains, the good life for a human being is one where they are equally free to pursue their personal life project in accordance with their own judgement on what kind of good life is good for them, while having an equal part in the collective decisions regarding the direction their society should be heading and what priorities should it set for itself, and how it should treat its members. What members of a good society do in their personal life is to freely realise their innate capabilities so as to become many-sided and harmonious personalities. What they do in their collective life is to take control of communal outcomes as the aggregate of individual choices and actions thereby enabling themselves to make and execute meaningful choices in their personal lives. (Márkus et al., 2022: xii)
Critical economic theory in the age of global digital capitalism
Marx’s idea of historical materialism carries a strong notion of progress and Márkus et al. (2022: 53) share the belief in the possibility of progress towards a good life. Where they substantially differ from Marx, however, is that the very idea of what a good life means is subject to negotiation by all members of society and not predetermined by a fixed inevitable historical stage, that is, communism. The question of progress therefore also relates directly to questions about equality and freedom with which we are ‘seeking out the meaning of progress’ itself (Cannizzo and James, 2020: 273).
The modern ideal of freedom means not just economic and technological progress but also emancipation, liberation and release from rigid economic, political or social structures such as the shift from feudalism to capitalism, from religious to secular worldviews, from simple forms of differentiation to highly individualised, fragmented and hyper-differentiated lifeworlds (see, for example, Beck, 1992: 127–8; Ebert, 2012, 2017; Elias, 2009: 4–8). It includes emancipation from the yoke of alienating forms of modern labour and bourgeois forms of power just as Marx saw them (Elster, 1985: 100; Tucker and Marx, 1978: 16) as well as freedom from large-scale social processes, which are ever more rationalised, administered and bureaucratised and which Weber (1965: 217) referred to as the ‘iron cage’, later thematised by Habermas (1985: 305) as the prevention of a ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ by economic and political systems.
Similar to freedom, the idea of equality matters hugely in modern societies not only economically, but also politically (Wagner, 2012: 54–5). Questions of equality and freedom are crucial when it comes to defining what a good life for all members of society could or should mean. In the age of a global digital economy, it is intersecting questions around sexism, gender, racism, climate change and class that are among the most pressing issues (see, for example, Hill Collins, 2019). And while Marx and also Márkus and his co-authors allude to those topics, their idea of progress is mainly and quite uncritically based on a notion of unhindered economic growth, itself one of the biggest challenges for a critical economic theory today (see, for example, Raworth, 2017).
In The Communist Manifesto Marx (1978: 476) famously proclaimed that ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Economic globalisation has, without doubt, contributed to that ‘melting’ in the pursuit of economic growth including the literal melting of polar caps. The paradoxes resulting from contemporary capitalism become more and more obvious. Issues such as migration and climate change emerge as separate but intertwined consequences of an increasingly digitalised and global market economy (see, for example, Vince 2022; von Brackel, 2022; Walia, 2021). In large parts this is due to transnational corporations being able to more easily outsource work from regions with higher labour costs to cheaper ones and the most advantageous fiscal environment for the bottom line (Beck, 2000: 3). As Walia (2021) explains, the contemporary version of global neoliberal capitalism ‘facilitates the movement of capital and militaries but restricts the mobility of impoverished racialised people unless they agree to inclusion as migrant workers with deflated labor power and no legal or social citizenship’. The growth of a digital economy has enhanced the access to goods and services for consumers and has equally intensified a global division of labour including labour migration from the Global South. This is particularly true for the global finance industry but also includes the decline of manufacturing industries in the Global North (see, for example, Applebaum and Batt, 2014; Ebert, 2021; Krippner, 2005).
These global economic trends are underpinned by de-politicisation. The global economy operates beyond the reach of local, mainly national, political systems. As Ulrich Beck (2000: 4) writes, globalisation is characterised by ‘a multiplicity of social circles, communication networks, market relations and lifestyles, none of them specific to any particular locality’. And, he continues: companies can produce in one country, pay taxes in another and demand state infrastructural spending in yet another.…national states…must all attract capital, people and knowledge in order to survive the competition in world society.…The magic formula is: capitalism without work plus, capitalism without taxes. (2000: 4–5 emphasis in original)
Reflecting on this question, I take the notion of work as a crucial reference point in the following discussion to develop a basic sociological framework with which we can better grasp the contours of a critical economic theory. My discussion is focused on the axes of economic and political freedom and the corresponding forms of economic and political precarities as prominent contemporary manifestations of reification, alienation and exploitation.
Work, economic and political freedoms and precarities
The fact that humans need to work to make a living is stating the obvious. Long before Marx, thinkers such as the 14th-century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldūn (2015: 305) already define work as a quintessentially human and social activity without which ‘a single human being could not fully exist by himself, and even if,…his existence would be precarious’. Hence, cooperation is essential and to that end, humans must form societies to satisfy material needs such as food, shelter and clothing. In The German Ideology Marx (1978: 156) makes a very similar point when he writes: ‘The first historical act is…the production of the means to satisfy…needs, the production of material life itself.’ What follows from Ibn Khaldūn and Marx, is that the struggle for subsistence is an existential question rooted in the human condition, more precisely the human lack of instincts, the lack of physical strength and the absence of a pre-existing, stable social order (see Berger and Luckmann, 1971: 65–6; Gehlen, 1975: 125–6; Heilbroner, 1972: 16; Kim-Wawrzinek and Müller, 1974: 453).
Together these lacks depict a situation of existential precarity, which humans need to address socially. Society is simply a necessity for human survival. Hence, we overcome existential precarity with ‘[w]ork’, which, as György Márkus (1988: 15) explains, ‘constitutes the real, historical relation of man to nature and at the same time it determines the fundamental relations between man and man, so it forms the basis of all human life’. Work is at once a quintessentially human activity and the origin of society, the social conditions with which we ensure the material satisfaction of needs and with which we overcome existential precarity. Polanyi (2018: 29) makes a similar point when he writes: ‘The substantive meaning of economic derives from man’s dependence for his living upon nature and his fellows. It refers to the interchange with his natural and social environment.’
We could simply leave it at that and define work as a life-sustaining human activity from which societies also happen to emerge. There are, however, questions that follow from here. As Milton Friedman (2002: 12) points out, there is the resultant ‘problem of social organisation’ and ‘how to co-ordinate the economic activities of large numbers of people’. How society is organised is by no means given or historically predetermined. For Friedman (2002: 13–14), it is the market where coordination manifests as the result of mutually beneficial, non-coercive exchange of goods and services. What sounds so simple, results in a definition of work as a complex social process of thinking, doing, cooperating and coordinating as quintessentially human capacities. ‘The challenge’, as Friedman (2002: 13) writes, ‘is to reconcile this widespread interdependence with individual freedom’.
With the rise of capitalism, economic precarities are progressively the result of a capitalist organisation of work driven and motivated by the profit motive. Put differently, economic freedom under capitalism refers to individuals’ rights enshrined in law to trade, sell, buy or invest in assets, including technologies, or labour power to generate profit based on private property rights. Economic freedom thus means two things: the freedom to make a living in whatever way one chooses and, if successful, freedom from existential precarity. In essence, successfully making a living under capitalism is based on the freedom to pursue economic growth and profits. However, a social organisation of work defined by the free pursuit of profits and income maximisation in a capitalist, global and increasingly digital market economy, can only increase economic inequalities. Economic competition means after all that we are not all equally successful at making a living. It is about the freedom to find ever more ways to economically expand, grow and ensure the satisfaction of material needs in pursuit of profits. Friedman (2002: 13) describes this as a ‘free private enterprise exchange economy’.
The contrast to Marx’s vision of communism as a market-less society could not be starker. It is, however, exactly that economic freedom that Márkus et al. want to preserve as part of a self-determined individual life and a self-organised society. We need to keep in mind though that ‘economic freedom…is an extremely important part of total freedom’ (Friedman, 2002: 9), which, if left unlimited can determine ‘the shape and form of society’ negatively (Polanyi, 2014: 41). The question is of course: if economic freedom is only one part of total freedom, what are the other relevant parts and how can economic freedom be limited?
While work and an economic order is mainly about how a society organises the satisfaction of material needs, it is not the only question a critical economic theory needs to consider. Once social conditions emerge from work, there is also the social question about the allocation, distribution and redistribution of resources, rewards and penalties (see Hirsch, 2016: 7; Negt, 2008). And all the debates and controversies, often ideologically charged, about communism, Keynesianism, neoliberalism, ordo-liberalism or universal basic incomes seem to grapple with the question how best to achieve the satisfaction of needs. The debates oscillate between completely abolishing markets (orthodox Marxist communism), favouring self-regulating markets (economic liberalism), increased state regulation (Keynesianism) and various measures of social protection or what Karl Polanyi (2001: 138) described as the ‘double movement’. What follows is that the central question a critical economic theory needs to be able to address is: how can we as societies organise economic processes in such a way that all members of society are protected from precarity in the context of a global and increasingly digital economic order? And how can we equally benefit from economic growth without depriving ourselves of the environmental basis of human life?
At this point though, dealing with the social question reveals another essential sociological dimension of work: the equal satisfaction and contingency of human social needs, what and whose needs are supposed to be satisfied and how. This is the individual freedom that was not part of Marx’s version of communism. Part of the human condition is, as mentioned above, that humans as a species lack instinctual programming or, as Zygmunt Bauman (1995: 141) puts it, are underdetermined. It is this underdetermination that lets us imagine: a new society where individuals are bound together by true social relations, each having access to the goods of the material and symbolic culture, each having equal opportunity to make free choices regarding the way of life they want to pursue as individuals and, as members of a community, an opportunity to bring the processes of their society under their collective control and each of them having the power to take part in their collective decisions on an equal footing. (Márkus et al., 2022: xiii)
Adding political freedom: Politicisation, civil society and decent society
Like György Márkus, Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, Mihály Vajda and others, Maria Márkus was part of a circle of intellectuals that gathered around Georg Lukács in Hungary at the time. When it comes to her role in the so-called Budapest School that formed around Lukács, one could easily get the impression that she simultaneously was and was not a member of the school. It is usually the aforementioned names that are cited first as the core members of the school. Hence, it is worthwhile to briefly reflect on Maria Márkus’s role since it also informs the intersection of critical economic theory and economic sociology.
Iván Szelényi (2010: 25) refers to a ‘first Budapest School of Sociology’ before the Second World War, which included, among others, Karl Mannheim and Karl Polanyi. After the Second World War Hungarian sociology is reborn, more specifically between 1963 and 1968, with the establishment of the Sociological Research Group of the Hungarian Academy, which is where Maria Márkus worked as a sociologist. The director of this group was András Hegedüs and it is the collaboration between Maria Márkus and Hegedüs that contributed significantly to the rebirth of critical sociology in Hungary and beyond (Szelényi, 2010).
Szelényi (2010: 27, 2019: 11) claims that ‘Lukács and the Budapest School…until the late 1960s had no respect for the social sciences.’ Hence, one gets the impression that the Sociological Research Group around Hegedüs and Maria Márkus and the mainly philosophically oriented Budapest School around Lukács developed next to each other, not necessarily together. However, it is, as Szelényi (2019: 12) writes, Maria Márkus who, in her role as critical sociologist, operates as ‘the bridge between Lukács and Hegedüs, between “theory and praxis”‘. While Hegedüs did not meet Lukács regularly, Maria Márkus was ‘a first-hand witness of the inspired discussions which took place between Lukács and “his” Budapest School’ (Szelényi, 2019: 12). She was ‘the real intellectual force behind Hegedüs’ (2019: 9) whom she introduced to the work of Hegel, Marx, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, thus theoretically informing and shaping their research collaboration. Maria Márkus provided both sides with what each of them may have lacked at the time: she provided Hegedüs with critical social theory to inspire empirical social research, while bringing her social analyses into the inner circle of the Budapest School around Lukács (Szelényi, 2019: 12).
With this background in mind, we can now look at what Maria Márkus means with a ‘politicisation of needs’ and the idea of a ‘civil/decent society’. Both ideas can be considered significant inputs that not only complement but flesh out what a critical economic theory requires. In the later stages of her career, these ideas emerge more clearly and become central to her work, but also represent a continuation of the Budapest School’s focus on needs, which featured large in particular in Agnes Heller’s work (see, for example, Heller, 1976, 2015). Maria Márkus goes beyond the immediate critique of the Eastern European context in the 1960s and develops the critical sociology of needs further as times and contexts change with the end of the Cold War. She critiques neoliberal capitalism using the idea of needs as it became more pronounced in the 1990s and also starts to engage with questions of identity and diversity on the same basis as they become prominent issues of our times.
A well-functioning civil society is the bedrock of Maria Márkus’s critical sociology. She takes a keen interest in the re-emergence of civil societies in Eastern Europe as soon as the Cold War ends. She admits the concept is and has to be difficult to define and operationalise (Márkus, 2001: 1012) mainly because – if taken seriously – it cannot and should not be pinned down. While Kis, for example, only claims that, ‘the prospect cannot consist in reaching a stationary state where reification and alienation are radically eliminated’ (Márkus et al., 2022: xxvi), Maria Márkus locates civil society as the place where self-determination and self-organisation reside. Civil society is, as Maria Márkus (2001: 1013) outlines ‘not something that a society is [civil], but rather what some societies have’ (emphasis in original), namely a quality. She wonders what this particular quality is and comes to the conclusion that ‘civil society exists, when there is a sustained attempt by people to be in charge of shaping their own life conditions’ (2001: 1014). One could say it is a form of self-organisation separate from, but not opposed to the state, a mediating and yet not homogenising process between the plurality of material and social needs present in society (Márkus, 2001: 1021). Her understanding of civil society here not only advances the critique of Marx and the call for a rethinking of critical economic theory, but it also identifies a space where individuals themselves can ‘make’ themselves and also collectively set the priorities of society.
To this, Maria Márkus (2001) adds the idea of a ‘decent society’. She understands the idea of a decent society as complementary to the idea of civil society. While she refers to civility as ‘cool, almost depersonalised’ and ‘basic and inalienable rights’ of a person, she defines decency as ‘respect for the “dignity” of each person and…the ability of all members of society to lead a dignified, humanly meaningful life’ (2001: 1012–21). Decency is, therefore, a normative concept that – apart from the outlined criteria of dignity – remains open-ended, vague and empty, and thus avoids the essentialisation of needs and norms or a Marxist teleological view of history for that matter. Its ‘meaning can, and must, be constantly constructed and reconstructed’ (2001: 1023–4). And it is the ongoing and never-ending role of what Maria Márkus calls the politicisation of needs to do exactly that as part of a critical economic theory. We can now look more closely at what defines the politicisation of needs and with it insert the idea of political freedom into a critical economic theory thus complementing the idea of economic freedom.
The politicisation of needs can broadly be defined as ‘bringing the needs into the arena of public debate’ (Márkus, 1995: 168). The question is though, who brings them into the public arena and from where? This is where Maria Márkus is most obviously a sociologist. Needs are not just philosophical ideas that can be given to a pauperised and rebelling working class to successfully start a Marxist revolution. They are concrete in people’s everyday lives.
The question of political equality and freedom complements and maybe even counteracts the economic freedoms that markets as an organising principle for exchange are based on. More specifically, the satisfaction of social needs is about three interrelated dimensions of political freedom and equality. Every human being can be equally recognized for having an unlimited number of diverse needs. It is not the needs that are equal or the same here, but the recognition of their infinite individual diversity and plurality (Weeks, 2011: 23). Every member of a society has the equal right to articulate their needs and make them part of public debates thus openly advocating for their satisfaction (Brown, 1988: 129; Friedman, 2002: 16). Polanyi (2014: 39) describes this as ‘the freedom to differ, to hold one’s own view, to be a minority of one, and yet to be an honoured member of the community’. This is where decency matters. But it is also where needs become truly social and political by entering the public arena. This is in more detail what Nancy Fraser and Maria Márkus refer to as the ‘politicisation of needs’ (Fraser, 2007: 166; Márkus, 1995: 168). Resources to satisfy both material and social needs are limited. Polanyi (2018: 31) refers to this as the ‘scarcity-postulate’. It is therefore important that every member of society can equally participate in and contribute to the negotiation of norms and values based on which resources are allocated and distributed. This is not about the equal satisfaction of needs – although, resources permitting, that might be the ultimate goal – but rather equal control over and access to the definition of needs, society’s priorities, what and whose needs are being satisfied and why others are not (Brown, 1988: 88). It is in this process where individuals and society together define what kind of good life is good for them. And it is the ‘political relations of power’ to counteract the ‘exploitative and alienating dimensions of work’, as Kathi Weeks (2011: 21) puts it, that matter here.
It is here where the emancipatory potential in the struggle against ‘specific syndromes of reification and alienation’ that Márkus et al. (2022: xxvi) refer to lies and where the idea of a politicisation of needs makes a significant contribution to what a critical economic theory could look like.
Conclusion
How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? is essentially a critique of Marx’s economic determinism. It attempts to find a middle ground between economic freedom in the market and political freedom in civil society protected by the state. This is quite similar to Karl Polanyi’s idea of the ‘double movement’. Capitalism understood as a market society, on the one hand, allows ‘the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings…[and] would result in the demolition of society’; on the other hand, ‘society protected itself against the perils inherent in a self-regulating market economy’ (Polanyi, 2001: 80). But just like too much market liberalism results in the demolition of society, too much protection or a forced elimination of markets, would result in a ‘dictatorship over needs’ (Fehér, 1978; Fehér et al., 1983).
While Márkus et al. argue that markets are necessary to preserve and guarantee economic freedom, Maria Márkus adds political freedom as an indispensable ingredient of a critical economic theory. Thus, political freedom can be described as individuals’ right to freely and equally participate in and contribute to the negotiation, definition and satisfaction of social needs, including what and whose needs are to be satisfied. This does not ask for an exercise of political power as an organised or centralised form of government, but the decentralised multitude of social interactions in people’s everyday life in civil society. It is through this politicisation of needs that we negotiate what it means to not only have a good life but to work out what kind of good life is good for us. The pursuit of political freedom means equal recognition, articulation and control over social needs. Correspondingly, any factors that curtail the equal recognition of diverse needs, restrain their articulation and confine the control over the politicisation of needs, result in political precarity.
What embeds economics in a wider framework of critical theory is the politicisation of needs. It complements economic freedom and markets as a social ‘decision-making’ process within which the profit-driven satisfaction of material needs is embedded. Not communism as a historically inevitable state of societies without markets is the goal here. Instead, it is the continuous politicisation of norms and values that underpins economic processes in a society where the emancipatory potential of a critical economic theory lies. The way is the goal (Ebert, 2010) and neither the way nor the goal should be dictated by the state or the market but is ideally anchored in the realisation of individuals’ economic and political freedoms in civil society. Elsewhere, the Budapest School has referred to this as ‘radical democracy’ (see Ebert, 2019).
Civil society as a heterogenous, pluralistic and thus decentralised home of individuals’ economic and political freedom is what Maria Márkus’s idea of a politicisation of needs, in essence, reveals as a necessary component of a critical economic theory. She provides a theoretical bridge between the two movements identified by Polanyi. Her work on the politicisation of needs provides a touchstone for the embeddedness or a successful and ongoing re-embedding of the economy in society. This no doubt requires a balancing act between individuals’ self-determination and society’s self-organisation of its priorities in both the economic and political spheres. In the end though, what makes a critical economic theory possible is the ‘courage and strength to remove all removable injustice and unfreedom’ and an unwavering commitment to stay ‘true to…[the] task of creating more abundant freedom for all’ (Polanyi, 2001: 268). And it is Maria Márkus’s politicisation of needs that serves as a reminder of that never-ending task, which she in her personal as well as intellectual life exemplified with courage and strength.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.