The true significance of the tormenting problem of poverty now stood revealed: economic society was subject to laws which were not human laws. The ri… - Karl Polanyi

the neoliberal utopia of a borderless and peaceful globe requires that millions of ordinary people throughout the world have the flexibility to tolerate — perhaps as often as every five or ten years — a prolonged spell in which they must survive on half or less of what they previously earned. Polanyi believes that to expect that kind of flexibility is both morally wrong and deeply unrealistic. To him it is inevitable that people will mobilize to protect themselves from these economic shocks.

As such dissatisfactions intensify, social order becomes more problematic and the danger increases that political leaders will seek to divert discontent by scapegoating internal or external enemies. This is how the utopian vision of neoliberals leads not to peace but to intensified conflict.

Actually, the labor market was allowed to retain its main function only on condition that wages and conditions of work, standards and regulations should be such as would safeguard the human character of the alleged commodity, labor. To argue that social legislation, factory laws, unemployment insurance, and, above all, trade unions have not interfered with the mobility of labor and the flexibility of wages, as is sometimes done, is to imply that those institutions have entirely failed in their purpose, which was exactly that of interfering with the laws of supply and demand in respect to human labor, and removing it from the orbit of the market.