Anticapitalism and the social insertion of the marketplace

Abstract

The article pursues a comparison between André Gorz and some of the most important authors from the new economic sociology. True enough, this dialogue never took explicit form. What makes the comparison relevant, though, is that it enables the exposition of two alternative ways of approaching the basic sociological theme of the insertion of markets in social life. For Gorz, market and civil society are antinomic terms and there is no more important political task than to prevent the invasion and colonization of social life and affective relations by the marketplace. For economic sociology, by contrast, markets are completely immersed in and explained by social life, and cannot be considered as autonomous institutional spheres. This difference in the way of conceiving the relationship between economy and society has fundamental political consequences: for Gorz, the social networks involved in the expansion of free software potentially represent the beginning of a non-capitalist society. For the new economic sociology, networks based on non-commercial relations can be encountered in the market itself. In addition, the social insertion of markets encourages political action to be directed not only towards the public and associative sector, but also increasingly the organization of the private sector itself.