Cameron Hughes
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz

Outlined in a 2013 article published in the New Left Review, the “triple movement” is a concept introduced by critical political theorist Nancy Fraser. In the article, Fraser addresses the recent resurrection of Karl Polanyi’s seminal work The Great Transformation (2007 [1944]) (specifically his notion of the double movement) by scholars hoping to apply its insights in an analysis of the conjuncture that precipitated the 2008 economic crisis (Burawoy 2003, 2000; Levien and Paret 2012; Arrighi and Silver 2003; Brie and Klein 2011). Fraser seeks to challenge this renewed interest, not by doing away with Polanyi’s framework wholesale, but by attempting to update and extend its key precepts so as to make it relevant to the contemporary period of global financial capitalism.

Defined briefly, the double movement describes the dialectical motion of two counterposed social forces interacting with and against one another. Arrayed on one side are politicians, parties, and business interests working to implement Laissez-faire reforms, while on the other is a cross-class/cross-sectoral coalition brought together through opposition to such reforms. Polanyi contends that these proposals for Laissez-faire restructuring act to disembed the economy from its historical nesting within society. The ultimate aim of the liberal reformers is the total subordination of society to the market, which its proponents are convinced is ideal given the market’s supposed capacity for self regulation. In Polany’s analysis, attempts at the subsumption of society by the market happen primarily through the increasing transformation of land, labor, and money, into what he calls “fictitious commodities”. These commodities are fictitious insofar as they originate outside of the market and thus were not produced according to its logics. The social carnage resulting from these attempts to establish market supremacy invariably produces a reaction — a variety of politically and socially disparate actors rising up to “protect” society by “re-imbedding” the market, usually through regulations (e.g. labor law, environmental protections, financial ordinances) (Polanyi 2007).

From this point of departure, Fraser asks why, in the face of extreme degradation wrought by the “great recession”, has there not emerged the sort of unified corrective social force promised by the double movement? While she acknowledges mass social movements like Occupy in the U.S. and the Indignados in Spain, Fraser points out that these movements failed to coalesce into anything resembling the material forces of re-imbedding that, during Polanyi’s era, had produced the New Deal, the Soviet Union, Continental Social Democracy, and in its darkest iteration, fascism. Instead, what Fraser asserts we are left with today are austerity policies driven by a neoliberal consensus firmly lodged in the highest echelons of state power. 

Following this, Fraser posits several hypotheses for the present absence of a coherent counter-hegemonic front. First, and perhaps most simplistically, is the lack of political leadership capable of energizing such a movement. This is evidenced by Fraser in the stark contrast between the prevarications of Barack Obama in 2012 and the brashness of Franklin D. Roosevelt some 76 years earlier. Next, Fraser turns her attention to the profound structural changes that have transformed the global economy into something that would be nearly unrecognizable to Polanyi or his contemporaries. Hyper financialization paired with deindustrialization, Fraser asserts, cut the legs out from under labor in the global north. Thus, not only are class antagonisms less visible, but any hope that labor could reprise its historic role as a main vector of struggle is similarly reduced. Finally, Fraser considers whether the erosion of fixed national identities has compromised what was previously an effective tool for popular mobilization. Here Fraser’s argument betrays its age a bit, as we are now all too familiar with the resurgent nationalism which has recently swept through the U.K., U.S., Hungary, Ukraine and elsewhere (Gusterson 2017).

Fraser makes clear that none of these explanations are satisfactory, taken either alone or in combination. But instead of continuing to dwell on how and why movements for social protection have not emerged, Fraser submits that we should reframe the question entirely. Rather than focus on that which is not there, Fraser calls us to examine what is. She then invokes those movements which blossomed only shortly after Polanyi’s death in the early 1960’s — the Black freedom movement, anti-imperialist/war movements, the second wave of the feminist movement, LGBTQ liberation movements — and asseets that none of these fit neatly into the binary categories provided by the double movement framework. Fraser argues that this is because these movements did not seek institutionalized social protection (they were in fact highly critical of its provisions), but rather aimed at critiquing the myriad forms of domination that they were encountering. As they side with neither the camp promoting marketization, nor the camp insisting on social protections, Fraser believes that this diverse collection of movements champion what she calls “emancipation” therefore constituting a third force in an extended Polanyian analysis (Fraser 2013, 128).

Fraser concludes that our current moment allows for an ever shifting series of alliances between each of these poles. In some cases the constituents of the emancipatory pole may align with those forces seeking to expand marketization, while in others they may partner with groups organizing for social protection. Thus, the double movement of Polanyi’s epoch becomes the triple movement in ours.

(See Double Movement, Liberalism, Neoliberalism, The Welfare State)

Bibliography

Brie, Mircea, and David Klein. “The Second Great Transformation: Towards a Solidarity Society.” International Critical Thought 1 (1): 18-28, 2011.

Burawoy, Michael. “For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi.” Politics & Society 31 (2): 193-261, 2003.

Burawoy, Michael, Pavel Krotov, and Tatiana Lytkina. “Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia.” Ethnography 1 (1): 43-65, 2000.

Fraser, Nancy. “A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi.” In Beyond Neoliberalism, edited by S. Sassen, 29-42, 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Gusterson, Hugh. “From Brexit to Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism.” American Ethnologist 44 (2): 209-214, 2017.

Levien, Michael, and Mary Paret. “A Second Double Movement? Polanyi and Shifting Global Opinions on Neoliberalism.” International Sociology 27 (6): 724-744, 2012.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Beacon Press, 2007.

Silver, Beverly J., and Giovanni Arrighi. “Polanyi’s ‘Double Movement’: The Belle Époques of British and US Hegemony Compared.” Politics & Society 31 (2): 325-355, 2003.