Capitalism and community have always stood in contradiction to one another. As social analysts from Marx to Karl Polanyi to John Gray have pointed out, capitalist relations are the acid, dissolving communal bonds and reconfiguring people into individual atoms whose relations to one another become mediated principally by the market. Under capitalism, there is nothing is so sacred that it cannot be converted into a commodity, and traditional beliefs and norms preventing the commodification of land, labour and life itself have often fought a losing battle. This notion has been extrapolated to the current global economy.
