The child as an economic entity? New childhood studies and children's cooperatives according to Janusz Korczak

Abstract

Contemporary childhood studies, even when problematising the slogans of “reclaiming” the child’s voice and drawing attention to the political entanglements of empowering children in the public sphere, relatively rarely emphasise the child as an economic subject. In a world of market dependency, the child is still seen primarily as an object of oppression rather than a subject: as a being threatened by poverty and economic exploitation on the one hand, and by consumerism on the other. It is relatively rare for social research to draw on children’s economic practices and their perceptions of what money, market exchange, ownership and the solidarity-based sharing of goods are. In contemporary cultural narratives, the economic sphere is seen as one in which the child cannot or should not express themselves in a manner displaying agency. In the world of late capitalism, in the reality of increasing infiltration by global market mechanisms of all cultural institutions, the exclusion of the child as a subject from the economic sphere is puzzling. This invisibility of the child as an economic subject, and the disregard of their economic practices related to the circulation of not only money, goods and labour, but also goods that do not necessarily hold market value for the young, is a phenomenon of modernity. The author claims that this phenomenon was first revealed in the writings of Janusz Korczak (the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit). The article discusses his concepts of economic — or more precisely cooperative — children’s agency against the background of the history of economic ideas of the Polish interwar period.