Commodity Books

“Indeed, the utopian nature of a market society cannot be better illustrated than by the absurdities in which the commodity fiction in regard to labor must involve the community. The strike, this normal bargaining weapon of industrial action, was more and more frequently felt to be a wanton interruption of socially useful work, which, at the same time, diminished the social dividend out of which, ultimately, wages must come. Sympathy strikes were resented, general strikes were regarded as a threat to the existence of the community. Actually, strikes in vital services and public utilities held the citizens to ransom while involving them in the labyrinthine problem of the true functions of a labor market. Labor is supposed to find its price on the market, any other price than that so established being uneconomical. As long as labor lives up to this responsibility, it will behave as an element in the supply of that which it is, the commodity "labor," and will refuse to sell below the price which the buyer can still afford to pay. Consistently followed up, this means that the chief obligation of labor is to be almost continually on strike. The proposition could not be outbidden for sheer absurdity, yet it is only the logical inference from the commodity theory of labor. The source of the incongruity of theory and practice is, of course that labor is not really a commodity, and that if labor was withheld merely in order to ascertain its exact price (just as an increase in supply of all other commodities is withheld in similar circumstances society would very soon dissolve for lack of sustenance.”
― Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time