Decommodification and Work Absence in the Welfare State

Abstract

Marx's theory of alienation was premised on the argument that capital ist society destroys the connection between man's productive life and his social being. This theme also guided Polanyi's (1957) analysis of why an economy based on the fictitious commodity status of labor is inviable in the long run. Even within the harshest epoch of laissez-faire capitalism, the pure commodity status of the worker was probably rarely, if ever, fully operational. The concept is better regarded as an ideal-typical construct that in varying degrees was approximated in real life. Ideal-typically, the pure commodity status of labor entails that a human being has no rights to income or need satisfaction outside the cash nexus. The market, not the family or community, is thus the ultimate dictator of social choice. Both Polanyi and Marx argued that this kind of subordination of civil society could be upheld only by the assertion of power; as Lindblom (1977) puts it, the pure "free" market assumes, in fact, the status of a prison. The contradiction of such a system is that, if individuals can opt out, they will cease to follow the rules of the cash nexus; but, if they cannot, civil society will be de stroyed. Here lies the roots of the 44social question" that came to permeate late nineteenth-century political discourse. The social question was, in reality, a conflict over the extension of social rights in a market economy. It nurtured highly diverse models for social policy. The conservative tradition was, not surprisingly, a