part0016

Almost no approach has been more successful in shaping recent discourses in economic sociology than the concept of ‘socially embedded’ economic action coined by Karl Polanyi (1944) and Mark Granovetter (1985). In her opening remarks to a Polanyi symposium held in 2002, Greta Krippner pointed to some paradoxical consequences of the use of the concept. As she argued, the focus on ‘social’ factors enabling market transactions, such as political institutions, networks, or trust, had the implicit consequence of ‘preserving intact the asocial market construct’ (Krippner 2004: 111). Contrary to its own critique of the self-misunderstanding of neoclassical economics as a kind of ‘physical’ science (Mirowski 1989), economic sociology still seems to have no serious intention of entering into an analysis of private property as such (i.e. apart from organisations, networks, trust, and so on) as the core institution of markets. As an involuntary consequence of the embeddedness perspective, economic sociology helped to preserve the neoclassical view of the economy as a sphere of ‘instrumental’, ‘utilitarian’ and ‘material’ calculations.

As one could add to Krippner’s point, another conceptual implication of embeddedness lies in a parochial or – at least – a nation-state-focused understanding of society. If the presence of society in markets exhausts itself in the influence of locally based social norms, network ties or – at most – national political institutions, the underlying concept of society cannot be anything but a particularistic one. Certainly, the embeddedness concept has opened up new views on the local complexity of market transactions. What has been lost from sight, however, is the universal dimension of markets, which stretch across local and national borders and which connects actors with each other at the global level. Without a doubt, economic sociology has profited much from social anthropology with its focus on economic transactions in and between the small communities of primitive societies. However, the countervailing perspective of universal history, with its view on societies developing encompassing forms of communication and intercourse, should not be neglected either. ‘Society’ should not be understood merely as an aggregate of locally based socio-culturally integrated communities, but as a system that develops its identity from ‘within’, aiming at the ‘world-society’ as its ultimate horizon. In their widely renowned theories of ‘axial civilisations’, Karl Jaspers (1949) and Shmuel Eisenstadt (1986) have highlighted the role of religions in constructing such universal forms of human interdependence. However, it is not only religions, but also markets that should be considered in this context. It has been the main intention of this study to elaborate the character of disembedded markets as a universal form of sociality – a form which by no means is alien to the universality of religions, but which continues it and even surpasses it.

There is no need here to recapitulate the well-known contributions of Max Weber to the sociology of religion and his analysis of ascetic Protestantism as a pacemaker for capitalism. The rise of global capitalism was certainly no historical accident, with the latter falling from heaven and becoming at odds with the basic principles of the human condition. To the contrary, the society of global capitalism embodies in some sense the very universalistic legacy which the critics of capitalism refer to themselves: the liberal idea of civil society, which – certainly not without reason – has been interpreted as a secularised version of the Christian idea of human universality. Today’s global capitalism goes back to the intellectual heritage of the market narrative invented by eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophers, and it can be interpreted as a consequence of its overwhelming success. The spread of markets and the market narrative around the world, and into all dimensions of society, achieved something that not only Christianity but also Islam have striven for in vain: the creation of a truly global society encompassing all nations, religions and civilisations. Any critique of capitalism that is based on a ‘disavowal’ (Konings 2015: 90) of this legacy misses the point. What is required, rather, are careful historical reconstructions of the process in which the market narrative became turned into practice and of the unanticipated consequences occurring in that process. The liberal utopia, like any great social vision, cannot be expected to manifest itself on a one-to-one basis when becoming a force of real social transformation. Benjamin Nelson states the following at the end of his analysis of the historical transformations of the Mosaic prescriptions about usury:

Indeed, universal ‘otherhood’ would seem to be the price for mankind becoming a single coherent society. As I have argued in this book, ‘otherhood should not be equated with immorality. Even disembedded and self-regulated markets are clearly social systems, not natural or technical ones. They are based on the institution of private property, the medium of money; they are governed by the ‘abstract’ and culturally indifferent norm of personal liability. The characteristics of this system were analysed from two perspectives: disembedded markets as a universal social system and as an interface between society and its non-social environments. Moreover, I have discussed the epistemological problems arising from such conceptualisations.

As a universal social system, markets stand above civilisations, nations and local communities; in this respect, their role can be compared with the encompassing hegemony of institutionally specialised religion over society in the ‘axial’ civilisations. 1 At the same time, disembedded markets are not self-sufficient (again similar to institutionally specialised religion), as they depend on their coexistence with morally more inclusive institutions and social structures, the reach of the latter being, however, confined to the regional, national or local levels. These institutions and structures do not simply ‘embed’ markets, as they are in their turn ‘embedded’ into the more encompassing system of global markets. As I have argued throughout the book, this relationship of bilateral ‘embeddedness’ is not a harmonious, but a contradictory and potentially antagonistic one. The very social structures securing the quality and reliability of economic transactions at the regional and local levels are being undermined and disrupted by the forces of transnational competition. The vicious circle evolving here may end up in a militant revival of local religious or national identities, which can be interpreted as an involuntary reaction to the experience of global interconnectedness. Benjamin Barber has highlighted this dilemma with his model of ‘Jihad vs. McWorld’. In a similar vein, Wolfgang Streeck spoke of a self-destructive interaction between ‘Durkheimian’ and ‘Williamsonian’ institutions. Most recently, Pankaj Mishra characterised the revolt of those excluded from the capitalist promises of freedom and prosperity as a mobilisation of ressentiment (Mishra 2017: 159). These approaches promise to throw light on present-day social and political conflicts, as well as on unsettled controversies in the globalisation debate. Obviously, global “otherhood” alone cannot offer a viable model of society, as men cannot live in a world consisting solely of markets. In this sense, Polanyi certainly is right in his verdict over the liberal model as a ‘stark utopia’. However, given the advanced level of present-day globalisation, his plea for political counter-movements aiming at a restoration of nationally controlled economies also appears to be ‘utopian’.

Is there a way out of the vicious circles between global markets and local identities that aims at a state of at least peaceful coexistence between both? We may be able to find that way out if we turn to the second perspective on disembedded markets as an interface between society and its non-social environments. As a self-description of society, disembedded markets constitute the demarcation of society vis-à-vis the non-social, as I have tried to show. They do not only form society’s perspective on itself, but also the interface of society with its non-social environments, including not only nature but also spiritual transcendence or the ‘telic’ system, as the late Talcott Parsons (1951) called it with reference to Robert Bellah. The disembedding of markets indeed has a lasting impact on the relationship of society with its non-social environments, as it constitutes a private property claim on nature as well as on the creative potential of work. It is neither possible nor necessary here to recapitulate the vast literature on the ecological impact of capitalism and on the devastations of the natural environment due to the application of capitalist technology. The focus here has been on the capitalist growth imperative, which is the main factor behind the expansion and disembedding of markets and behind significant environmental changes. As I have tried to show, capitalism can indeed be understood as a secularised version of Christian eschatology, as it strives to bring down paradise all the way down to the earth. No longer is the absolute perceived as a supreme and self-sufficient reality, but as a field to be explored and conquered in a this-worldly process of never-ending ‘creative destruction’. To make the system move, and to promote the private exploitation of the creativity of work, ever-new economic visions need to be created and implemented. In this sense, capitalism has become an encompassing social reality governing individual actions not only by setting external constraints, but also by providing meaning and personal orientation. It is a system caught up in a never-ending drive to redeem its indebtedness to itself by moving into new territories. Despite its spectacular technical and material achievements, it can never manage to reach a stable state of tranquillity.

This does not mean that capitalist growth can go on infinitely. To the contrary, there are clear limits, which are due not only to the foreseeable stagnation and decline of the population, but to mounting ecological threats as well. A key problem lies also, as I have tried to show, in the endogenous deterioration of the socio-structural conditions of entrepreneurship built into the macro–micro feedback loops of capitalist growth. What destabilises capitalism as a social order is its very success in promoting market-based social advancement. The promise of wealth makes people strive for social advancement, affluence and success. For decades, liberal and social-democratic parties have successfully propagated equality of social chances as a key receipt for social integration, and they continue to do so. However, what would happen if these promises materialised on a large scale? Social integration in capitalism depends on growth, and growth depends on the structural tensions created by the polarisation of classes. With continuing structural upward mobility, and expanding middle and upper classes, these tensions, and incentives for subsequent entrepreneurs to arise, will diminish. The class polarisation will become top-heavy, with an increasing accumulation of financial wealth at the top and declining chances for those at the bottom. The class structure will cease to function as an incentive structure for social advancement, and, hence, for growth. The present-day phenomenon of ‘financialisation’ in the advanced industrial economies can be understood from this background. The decoupling of the financial sector from real entrepreneurship means a state of permanent crisis, which in turn can become a factor fuelling the vicious circle between global markets and local identities.

Thus, capitalism seems to be exposed not only to one but two ‘vicious circles’, in the sense of the very expansionary drive of markets that gives rise to countervailing, self-undermining forces. The territorial universalisation of markets provokes countervailing forces that strengthen collective identities at the national and local levels, and the innovative dynamics of capitalism tend to undermine the social foundations of entrepreneurship. There is some evidence that the two antagonistic circles do not operate in isolation from each other but are intertwined, as had been observed already by Max Weber: ‘As a rule, time periods and countries dominated by “pure” class conditions are also characterized by economic roll over, while any slow-down of economic transformations will result in an immediate revival of status ties, and a restauration of social “honour”’ (Weber 1972: 539, my translation). The present-day condition of capitalism seems to confirm the interconnectedness of the two vicious circles, as it is characterised by an exhaustion of the innovative circle and an escalation of national and cultural antagonisms at the same time . Joseph Schumpeter’s pessimistic predictions about the future of capitalism and entrepreneurship seem to have found a late justification. At the same time, the idea Schumpeter played with – that nationally based state socialism could provide a way out – can be clearly ruled out today.

Again: is there a way out? Let me, at this point, come back again to Arlie Hochschild’s above-cited ( Chapter 9 ) metaphor about social climbers, which she extracted as a ‘deep story’ from her interviews with frustrated US middle-class workers and Tea Party followers in Louisiana:

You are patiently standing in a long line leading up a hill, as in a pilgrimage. You are situated in the middle of this line, along with others who are also white, older, Christian, and predominantly male, some with college degrees, some not. Just over the brow of the hill is the American Dream, the goal of everyone waiting in line. Many in the back of the line are people of colour – poor, young and old, mainly without college degrees. It is scary to look back; there are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, you’ve waited a long time, worked hard, and the line is barely moving. You deserve to move forward a little faster. You’re patient, but weary. You focus ahead, especially on those at the very top of the hill. … Look! You see people cutting in line ahead of you. You’re following the rules. They aren’t. As they cut in, it feels like you are being moved back. How can they just do that? How are they? Some are black. Through affirmative action plans, pushed by the federal government, they are given preference for places in colleges and universities, apprenticeships, jobs, welfare payments and free lunches.

Hochschild’s deep story gives a concise reconstruction of the perceptions and motives underlying the eruption of racist and nationalist stereotypes amongst the white middle classes, which could be observed in the Tea Party movement and in the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump. It is obvious, as she emphasises, that the mobilisation of such stereotypes cannot really help to solve the underlying social problems. However, the deep story involuntarily also shows us why the liberal strategy of social inclusion, which the author herself is advocating, cannot work either. Given the huge concentration of wealth on the top of the hill, the line will become only longer and larger, and it will slow down even more should everybody (irrespective of sex, race, religion, ethnicity, and so on) be enabled to join the line. The competition between the aspirants in the line will become all the more fierce and destructive.

Thus, if we stick to Hochschild’s metaphor, the only way out of the dilemma would be questioning the agenda of the game itself: finding ways to flatten the hill, to put the sanctuary of the American Dream down to the earth and to make it accessible to everybody. What would this mean? At present, there is no lack of debate about the future of capitalism. Are we facing a possible ‘end’ of capitalism, as Streeck (2016) suggests? Should we enter into a new debate about socialist ideas (Wright 2010; Honneth 2015)? Sociology is not philosophy of history, and its competence to discuss such questions is limited. Still, many of the debates about a post-capitalist future are characterised by a narrow focus on the advanced economies. Apparently, they do not take the global character of capitalism seriously, as they are neglecting the fact that there are still many developing and emerging countries in Africa, in the Near and Middle East, and in Latin America suffering less from capitalism itself than from an insufficient level of capitalist development. For many of the problems of these countries, such as excessive population growth and poverty, no realistic solution seems to be available except some path to capitalist development, perhaps even the Chinese one. Thus, any debate about the future of capitalism should keep the differences between developing, emerging, and advanced countries in mind. For many of the developing and emerging countries, ‘degrowth’ is clearly not a formula for solving their problems in the near future.

The situation in the advanced economies is different. Here, the challenge is to think over the institutional shape of a society which continues to offer freedom and social opportunities at the individual level, but must no longer grow as a collective . It would be superficial to ascribe the capitalist growth imperative solely to excessive consumer wants or to greedy and egoistic personal habits, as a vast anti- and post-growth literature is doing. Sermons against egoism and consumerism alone will not suffice. What appears more promising is a debate about a society that consciously accepts its own mundane limitations and refrains from the demonic quest for the endless exploitation of human creativity. The point is not how to unfetter the ‘productive forces’ of society even more, as Marxists are arguing in accordance with liberals. To the contrary, it is vital to find ways to confine the forces of production in a socially legitimate and ecologically efficient way. The modern project of transferring the paradise to earth certainly cannot be cancelled. However, the project must be given a shape that takes account of the mundane and natural constraints of human life, and which puts an end to the institutionalised imperative of unceasing desires. There is no lack of general philosophical ideas about this; however, there is little clarity about the institutional and political implications of such a solution, which I am going to discuss now in my concluding remarks.

As I have argued above ( Chapter 9 ), the logic of capitalist growth can be analysed sufficiently only within a multi-level approach that takes account of the shaping of social action by institutions and, in particular, by private property. The capitalist growth imperative has its institutional basis in the extension of private property rights to the conditions of production (‘material disembedding’), with the material and human conditions of production constituting separate categories of ownership. It is this particular design of private property rights that gives rise to the need of capital to grow and to produce a separate yield for capital. In order to remove the growth imperative of capitalism, there would be no need to dismantle the market and the institution of private property altogether. What would be required, however, is a different design of private property rights , with the abolition of divided property rights over production and land as a key step in the design process. With stakeholders owning the means of production jointly, money-based property claims would no longer extend directly to the potential of labour, but only to its products or to pre-contractually defined personal services. This would not mean curbing human creativity; however, it would put an end to the capitalist commodification of creativity as the key driver of growth. With net revenues flowing to stakeholders in their entirety, there would be no need for profit and growth, though growth would nevertheless be possible. Given the consent of stakeholders, production could be continued under conditions of stagnation, and even under conditions of declining revenues.

Certainly, the distinction between capital and labour cannot be undone overnight. What makes sense, nevertheless, is a discussion about the legitimacy of attributing property rights over production to different social classes under advanced capitalist conditions. Capital as a distinct form of property falls into three main categories: industrial technology and means of production, land, and finance. Here, we meet one of the top sanctuaries of orthodox economic theory, which is the postulate that any rational allocation of economic means is impossible without an autonomous capital account and a separate calculation of the efficiency of capital. Though not being wrong altogether, the postulate needs to be made more specific, as I have tried to show. It is not the instalment of machinery and technical equipment as such that generates the profit of firms, but the dispositive and innovative work of entrepreneurs and managers (who, regrettably, are almost completely absent in orthodox economic theory). Moreover, it is not only entrepreneurs and managers who are relevant, but likewise employees investing in new ideas and securing the implementation and market success of innovations on the shop-floor level (‘intrapreneurs’ in management parlance). Management handbooks tell us that the true capital of firms is located not in the hardware of their technical and material infrastructure, but in their software, that is, in their knowledge and in the explicit and implicit competencies of their staff. This applies in particular to modern firms employing digitalised industrial and service technologies. Though advanced digital technologies seem to have the potential to automate an unprecedented amount of complex production, service and administrative tasks (Lanchester 2015; Frey and Osborne 2017), it remains controversial whether this will lead to a corresponding reduction of employment. The consequence may be not to make work redundant, but to concentrate it even more on newly generated, highly skilled non-routine operations (Bonin et al. 2015). More than ever in the past, the new and the irregular are becoming the domains of human intervention. Firm hierarchies are becoming decentralised; the qualification levels and the operative autonomy of workers have increased as a consequence; and the functional preponderance of labour over capital will increase even more.

A positive contribution of capital to production and profit-generation can be identified in the case of the owner-entrepreneur, where the owner personally engages in dispositive or managerial work and takes care of the success of the firm. The owner-entrepreneur continues to be relevant in (mostly middle or small) family firms, which still constitute the majority of companies in the advanced capitalist economies, though their contribution to value creation and employment is clearly less than proportional. The situation in the dominant sectors of the global economy is different: here, despite persisting national differences in corporate governance, capital has confined itself largely to the role of a profit-seeking principal, while it has delegated the factual organisation of production to managers and employees. The factual retreat of financialised capital from the control of production which can be observed today is anything but a new phenomenon. It can be interpreted as the culmination point of a long-term historical process starting already with the ‘managerial revolution’ (Chandler 1977) of the early twentieth century, when managers took control over firms, while owners drew back to a passive role, confining themselves largely to the collection of dividends. The ‘counter-revolution’ of shareholders, which started in the United States in the 1970s, did not restore the productive functions of capital ownership; to the contrary, as analyses of the consequences of financialisation for firms have shown, the main concern of the institutional investors, whose control over firms tightened, concentrated on the extraction of higher revenues for their clientele (Windolf 2005; Lazonick and O’Sullivan 2000; Lounsbury and Hirsch 2010; Lazonick 2017). To secure the cooperation of top managers, the investors allowed manager salaries and bonuses to rise spectacularly. Yet, the appalling experiences of shareholder activism and of Anglo-American hedge funds should not be overgeneralised, for the degree of company financialisation as well as its impact on income inequality appears to be lower in ‘coordinated’ market economies (to use the terminology of the well-known ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach) such as Germany, France or Sweden than in ‘liberal’ market economies such as the United States or the United Kingdom (Faust 2017; Robertson and Kwon 2017). Nevertheless, with mounting financialisation and with firms themselves becoming a tradeable commodity, industrial capital ownership is clearly taking on ‘parasitic’ (Sayer 2015) traits, contributing little to productivity and innovation and engaging in minimal capital risk so that their investors may have flexible exit options. This is not to say that industrial innovation no longer takes place in the large, global corporations. However, innovation here increasingly takes the form of oligopolistic competition between a small number of internet companies (such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) striving for monopolistic control over data and social infrastructure – a trend which meets with increasing public criticism due to its totalitarian potential (for an overview, see Dolata 2017).

The legitimacy of land as a distinct form of capital investment is no less dubious as it had been since the early times of industrial capitalism. Adam Smith and David Ricardo interpreted the rent of the landowner as a deduction from wealth, not as a reward for contributing to its creation. Different from entrepreneurial profit, the income of the rentier is based not on productive work, but solely on his monopoly over the ‘fictitious commodity’ of land, which allows him to extract rents from the rest of society. Free real estate markets do not only hamper the accumulation of productive capital by inflating differential rents and living costs, but they also have a devastating effect on the natural environment. Thus, there are little objections even from a liberal standpoint against the transfer of land into public ownership or against a land-value tax siphoning off speculative profits on land, an idea that was already intensively discussed in the nineteenth century (George 1879).

The finance form of capital has not really been much of a success story either. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the working of free market forces in liberalised financial markets resulted, due to the spread of derivative financial products, in the build-up of a speculative bubble of historically unprecedented dimensions. The collapse of the bubble, which was imminent in 2008–2009, was prevented only by unconventional ‘rescue’ and ‘quantitative easing’ policies of governments and central banks. As these policies were implemented on a large scale, central bank interest rates went down to and even below zero. Finance capital today is no longer an outcome of self-regulated market processes, but depends on permanent injections of central bank money. As asset inflation is being guaranteed politically, finance capital is no longer scarce, but in huge oversupply. To some degree, John Maynard Keynes’ vision of a long-term ‘socialisation’ of investment (Keynes 1978: 378) with the consequence of bringing down interest rates to zero has come into being. In so far as they are still private, financial markets have largely become an arena of speculation. The traditional definition of finance as a mediator for real production has become outmoded. Where real firms or start-ups, nevertheless, are trying to finance their investments by bank credit instead of internal funds, they are often having difficulties due to the higher attractiveness of financial projects for the banks. Under such conditions, the idea of transferring the privilege of money creation from private banks to national banks is likely to meet with increasing support. Similar to the case of land, the justification for maintaining a large private finance sector appears weak. As the case of finance demonstrates again, through radicalising itself the capitalist dream of absolute wealth is losing its transformative power. Imagine that, by some accident, the entire superstructure of inflated assets and derivative products would disappear at one stroke, with the exception only of primary balances of states, households and firms. Would that really do much harm to the rest of society outside the finance sector?

A capitalist order, where the factor of capital exhausts itself largely in speculative real estate and finance projects while no longer being rooted in real entrepreneurship, can no longer claim legitimacy. Instead of promoting innovation, capital seems to move between excesses of (politically safeguarded) financial speculation and the parasitic exploitation of land and industrial resources. Increasingly, the capitalist class is taking on the character of a quasi-feudal rentier class (Neckel 2010), taking advantage of its monopoly over the means of production to extract rents from the rest of society. Capitalist growth no longer indicates a rising aggregate level of wealth, but reduces itself to a zero-sum game, with the profits of the wealthy equalling the losses of the non-wealthy. In some sense, the American Dream destroys itself, as if the hill it is located on (according to Hochschild’s deep story) would be closed to the public and access reserved to a small elite of super-rich people. The question is indeed: can society still ‘afford the rich’ (Sayer 2015)?

No one would recommend removing the legal separation between capital and labour at one stroke. Nevertheless, policies and institutional models aiming to dismantle it step by step are worth considering. Possible policies would include an expansion of public control over real estate markets, a re-regulation of the global financial system, and, moreover, a relocation of the money-creation function of private banks to central banks. Employee share-ownership programmes (which already exist in many European firms, albeit only to a small degree) could be enlarged, including the perspective of exclusive employee ownership over companies. Likewise, policies to strengthen the industrial and commercial middle classes, in combination with strong systems of industrial co-determination, deserve to be discussed. The cooperative as a model of economic organisation may gain new life in the industrial as well as in the banking and consumer fields (Brockmeier and Fehl 2007). Without the separation of capital and labour and with net revenues falling entirely to stakeholders, as is the case in the cooperative model, the economy would no longer need to grow, but could remain in a stable stationary state. Though this arrangement is not meant to curb market competition and the Faustian drive of the economy altogether, it probably would slow down the pace of innovation. However, under conditions of a stagnating or declining population and a technologically sophisticated economy, this would certainly not do much harm. Moreover, it might be good for a society that has let technology take itself over in ways that nobody had ever wanted. On the other hand, a re-arrangement of property rights over production, attributing ownership over production collectively to stakeholders, would offer significant advantages in terms of social fairness, equality and stability. Money would lose its numinous quality as capital and become a profane exchange medium. The slowdown of economic growth could also have a beneficial effect on the natural environment.

Today, there is no need to warm up to Marx’s communist vision of universal individuality, reconciling men (and women) with each other as well as with nature in a spontaneous way, which he developed as a positive counterpart to capitalist alienation in his early writings (Marx 1968). 2 Just as the immediate immersion in God remains a gift that is reserved to religious virtuosos and cannot be practised by the ordinary believers, Marx’s romantic idea of human universality cannot immediately offer a way to organise everyday social and economic life. With regard to this point, system-theoretical insights about the key importance of functional differentiation for social universality appear more convincing than Marx’s critique of alienation. Contrary to what the young Marx believed, humans cannot unite globally as natural beings, but only on the basis of highly formalised and functionally specified social structures. In this sense, practised social universality is possible only at the price of ‘alienation’. Legitimate critique of market fundamentalism should not brush aside the biggest historical achievement of markets, namely their universalism . At the same time, global market integration meets its limits in the need of framing markets by national and local institutions, which Polanyi had emphasised. In a similar vein, ‘communitarian’ approaches (Amitai Etzioni, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer) have pointed to the importance of intermediate nationally, regionally and locally based collective identities for maintaining a balanced relationship between markets and different social ‘spheres of justice’ (Walzer 1983).

However, how do we overcome the present-day hegemony of disembedded markets over society? Marx was probably on the right track when he considered a change in property relationships as a key for overcoming the evils of capitalism. However, to avoid the tyranny of market fundamentalism, there is – as I have tried to show – no need to abolish the institution of private property altogether and to replace it by a politically controlled system. The disastrous experiences with ‘real socialism’ should be kept in mind; given the present level of global economic integration, the model of state socialism appears to be even more anachronistic. What appears vital, rather, are private property rights reforms that aim to integrate social control over the human and material conditions of production. Moreover, the limits not only of material, but also of territorial and social disembedding will require a new, thorough discussion; here, I am reminded of Dani Rodrik’s (2011) well-founded plea for political limitations on transnational market liberalisation. A selective redesign and re-embedding of private property rights would help to curb the capitalist growth imperative. The vanishing of the growth imperative, in turn, would strengthen intermediate communities and help to establish subsidiary relationships between transnational markets and national and local communities. 3