We live in a neoliberal era. Colloquially, this means governments adopt policies meant to put into practice the idea that the economy operates best when the role of the state is minimal.

But this conventional understanding is incorrect, positing a retreat of the state that hasn’t happened and, more fundamentally, misreading the market-state relationship under capitalism. As Karl Polanyi, Neil Fligstein, and Alejandro Portes tell us, markets are embedded in frameworks built by states. Capitalism wouldn’t have emerged without the active hand of the state. And the private is birthed through its co-optation of the public, not vice-versa.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth century enclosures of the commons in Britain, communal lands were taken away from peasants — in part to force them into the factories and urban centers — thus creating a rentier class that profited off the land. India’s textile industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was turned inside-out for the benefit of British industrialists. More recently, in the late 1960s, Indonesian public assets were divvied up and sold off under the Suharto dictatorship, which was in cahoots with international capitalists and high-level functionaries from Western governments, such as the United States.