Gabriela Segura-Ballar
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
The Double Movement is a concept originated by Hungarian-American political economist Karl Polanyi in his 1944 The Great Transformation. It refers to the dialectical process of marketization and push for social protection against that marketization. American sociologist Fred Block writes in an introduction to the 2001 edition that “because efforts to disembed the economy from society inevitably encounter resistance, Polanyi argues that market societies are constituted by two opposing movements-the laissez-faire movement to expand the scope of the market, and the protective countermovement that emerges to resist the disembedding of the economy” (xxviii. On Polanyi’s double movement, see also Block 2008). Thus, as Polanyi explains in Chapter Eleven, social history in the nineteenth century was the result of a double movement: the market expanded continuously only to be met by a countermovement checking its expansion in definite directions. This countermovement was a reaction against dislocations attacking the fabric of society. Since this social reaction was looking for the protection of society, it found itself incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself (Polanyi 2001, 136). The double movement is the interaction of two organizing principles in society:
one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market-primarily, but not exclusively, the working and the landed classes-and using protective legislation restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods. (Polanyi 2001, 138-9)
Thus, the double movement refers to a dialectical process of marketization and its negation in the form of a push for social protection against that marketization. The argument rests on Polanyi’s distinction between so-called real and fictitious commodities. Since land, labor, and money are not produced in the market, they are, Polanyi claims, fictitious commodities. Modern economists treat fictitious commodities as if they behave in the same way as real commodities, and this places human society at risk (Block 2001, xxv). As Polanyi (2001) explains,
Self-regulation implies that all production is for sale on the market and that all incomes derive from such sales. Accordingly, there are markets for all elements of industry, not only for goods (always including services) but also for labor, land, and money, their prices being called respectively commodity prices, wages, rent, and interest. (72)
The commodity fiction not only allows to keep production going, it also became a vital organizing principle of society. “This means that the development of the market system would be accompanied by a change in the organization of society itself” (Polanyi 2001, 79). A protectionist countermove or movement of self-preservation originated as a result of this destructive and annihilating principle. In Polanyi’s words, “the extension of the market organization in respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction in respect to fictitious ones” (2001, 79).
Polanyi’s intuition that history advances through a series of countermovements has been adapted to interpret the neoliberal turn. For example, in The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (2014), sociologists Fred Block and Margaret Somers (2014b) argue that the ideas of Karl Polanyi are crucial to understanding the 2008 recession and its aftermath. Additionally, the idea of double movement acts as a frame for Rolando Munck’s analysis of the rise and fall of neoliberalism across Latin America. In Rethinking Latin America: development, hegemony, and social transformation (2013), Argentinian sociologist Rolando Munck shows “the relevance of the Polanyian ‘double movement’ (market dis-embedding and re-embedding) for a reading of social transformation in Latin America” (130. On Polanyi’s double movement, see also Munck 2002). According to Munck (2003), “We can posit that the emergence of ‘globalization’ in the last quarter of the twentieth century represents the belated fulfillment of the nineteenth internationalizing phase of human history characterized by ‘an attempt to set up one big self-regulating market’” (132). Thus, “the Polanyi problematic provides…a complex and dialectical framework for an understanding of globalization and contestation” (Munck 2003, 164).
Despite the structural similarities between today’s crisis and that of the 1930 as well as the potential of Polanyi’s idea of a double movement to analyze contemporary reality, the concept does not allow us to fully grasp some specificities of the present conjuncture. In the article “A Triple Movement?” (2013), Nancy Fraser argues that “we lack a double movement in Polanyi’s sense… While today’s crisis appears to follow a Polanyian structural logic, grounded in the dynamics of fictitious commodification, it does not manifest a Polanyian political logic, figured by the double movement” (121). Fraser offers several explanations to explain the absence of a double movement. The first hypothesis refers to failures of political leadership. The second refers to the shift from a Fordist regime of accumulation to a post-Fordist one, dominated by finance. A third hypothesis focuses on another structural shift that has taken place since the 1930s. For Fraser (2003),
What has changed, in this case, is the scale on which crisis is experienced—and therefore the frame through which it must be addressed. What is at stake, specifically, is the shift from a 20th-century crisis scenario that was framed in national terms, as requiring action by territorial states, to a 21st-century scenario, which has destabilized the national frame without yet generating a plausible replacement. (125)
Thus, the project of social protection can no longer be envisioned in the national frame (Fraser 2003, 126).
Although these hypotheses shed light on why there is no double movement in the present conjuncture, they still “failed to grasp the specifically political dynamics that have derailed Polanyi’s scenario” (2003, 127). So, Fraser refers to the emancipatory movements which do not fit within the scheme of the double movement. The paramount aim of these movements was not to defend society but to overcome domination. “In general, then, the social movements of the postwar era do not fit either pole of the double movement. Championing neither marketization nor social protection, they espoused a third political project, which I shall call emancipation” (Fraser 2003, 128). For Fraser, the conflict between marketization and social protection cannot be understood in isolation from emancipation. Emancipatory movements encompassed both protectionist and marketizing tendencies. They have often neglected the impact of marketizing projects on their struggles with protectionist forces. Therefore, “In the conflict zone of the triple movement, emancipation has joined forces with marketization to double-team social protection” (Fraser 2003, 130). Thus, for Fraser (2003),
Occulted by Polanyi’s figure, this project needs to be given a central place in our efforts to clarify the grammar of social struggle in the 21st century. I propose, accordingly, to analyse the present constellation by means of a different figure, which I call the triple movement. Like Polanyi’s figure, the triple movement serves as an analytical device for parsing the grammar of social struggle in capitalist society. But unlike the double movement, it delineates a three-sided conflict among proponents of marketization, adherents of social protection and partisans of emancipation. The aim here is not simply greater inclusiveness, however. It is rather to capture the shifting relations among those three sets of political forces, whose projects intersect and collide. The triple movement foregrounds the fact that each can ally, in principle, with either of the other two poles against the third. (128)
Bibliography
Block, Fred. “Introduction.” Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
Block, Fred. “Polanyi’s Double Movement and the Reconstruction of Critical Theory.” Interventions Économiques Pour Une Alternative Sociale, 38 (2008): 1-16.
Block, Fred and Margaret Somers. The power of market fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s critique. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014a.
Block, Fred and Margaret Somers. “The free market is an impossible utopia.” Interview by Henry Farrel. The Washington Post, Jul. 18, 2014b. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/07/18/the-free-market-is-an-impossible-utopia/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.06d90a14f125
Fraser, Nancy. A triple movement? New Left Review 81 (2013): 119–132.
Munck, Ronaldo. Globalization and Democracy: A New “Great Transformation”? Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 581 (2002): 10–172.
Munck, Ronaldo. Rethinking Latin America: development, hegemony, and social transformation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.