Karl Polanyi’s term for anything treated as a market commodity that is not produced for the market. Land is nature. Labor is human activity. Money is a token of exchange or state finance. None of the three is created for sale, and treating them as commodities would (per Polanyi) demolish people, business, and nature unless countervailing protections were built.
The concept is foundational to BioConomy’s framing. Where the historical Retention Economics tradition addressed only the second and third fictitious commodities (labor through wages and employment policy, money through national banking and monetary sovereignty), Regenerative Economics extends the frame to the first (land, and beyond it the wider ecological substrate). The planetary boundaries framework can be read as the empirical demonstration that Polanyi’s warning about the first fictitious commodity was correct at planetary scale.
Related terms
Sources
- Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation
Provenance
Borrowed from Polanyi (1944) and preserved with Polanyi’s original meaning. See Karl Polanyi for biographical context.