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Ocean Limits: Commoditization and the Crisis of the Fishery

By Eric J. Ziegelmayer

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges contemporary debates about the regulation of ocean fisheries by deploying the theoretical insights developed by Karl Polanyi. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi documented the consequences of the establishment of a market economy upon European society, and therefore upon the entire planet. The concept of the self-regulating market, according to Polanyi was based on three "commodity fictions" of land, labor and money; the extension of this concept to all of the economic institutions of society he called "market utopianism". This paper extends Polanyi's fictitious commodity thesis to the living resources of the oceans and argues that the roots of contemporary problems of the world's fisheries originate in the exposure of nature to a price system.

The paper is concerned with the future governance of ocean resources and the problem of democracy in fishery regulation. The paper places international commercial whaling and the current globalization of the fishing industry in comparative and historical perspective to illuminate the validity of Polanyi's theory.

While there can be no final agreement as to what constitutes a "good society" a useful starting point is provided by the work of Karl Polanyi. A good society, he claims, is a society capable of producing goods, and a necessary condition of living in such a society is that human beings and nature are not treated as commodities.

KEYWORDS: fishery Polanyi regulation markets democracy price commodity


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