Can the Two Karls – Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx Meet? A Critical Examination of Chinese Vocational Education, Internship Regimes, and Labor Forms

Can the two Karls – Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx meet? Sociological debates tend to provide a negative answer and prioritize Karl Polanyi in current education and labor studies. This article poses an alternative approach by examining how the commodification of human life, the central postulation of Karl Polanyi, can be bridged into Karl Marx’s labor process theory where different forms of commodified student-labor will eventually end up in the production sphere, producing variegated internship and labor regimes. Using China’s vast vocational education system as an anchor to ground the theoretical dialogue, I contribute not only to raising an intellectual puzzle, but disclosing complex school-to-work phenomena that internship regimes, namely, the dual-despotic, market despotic or hegemonic, shapes the world’s largest young working class. By studying the complex configuration of the student-labor regimes, I argue that commodification process of human life could hardly escape the class perspective, as Karl Polanyi put it.