Gabriela Segura-Ballar
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Governmentality is a concept developed by Foucault in its 1977-1978 lectures on Security, Territory, and Population (2007). By governmentality, Foucault (1991) means three things:

1. The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.
2. The tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, etc.) of this type of power which may be termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs.
3. The process, or rather the result of the process, through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages, transformed into the administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gradually becomes ‘governmentalized.’ (102-103)

The analytical tools created by French philosopher Michel Foucault are extremely useful to approach the analysis of the state as power relations. For Foucault (2012), the idea of power as coercion and domination is a totally insufficient conceptualization. Therefore, one of his most powerful insights is the notion of governmentality for understanding the real functioning of power. This concept plays a decisive role in the analysis of state power because it connects the constitution of the subject to the formation of the state. 

For German sociologist Thomas Lemke (2002), this concept offers a view on power beyond a perspective that centers either consensus or violence, and helps to differentiate between power and domination (51). From the perspective of governmentality, “government refers to a continuum, which extends from political government right through to forms of self-regulation” (Lemke 2002, 59). According to Lemke (2002), “Governmentality is introduced by Foucault to study the ‘autonomous’ individual’s capacity for self-control and how this is linked to forms of political rule and economic exploitation” (52). For Foucault (2002), government refers to systematized, regulated, and reflected modes of power which is the idea of the technology of power. Therefore, as Lemke (2002) states, the notion of governmentality is useful to investigate the relations between technologies of the self and technologies of domination (52). It is impossible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality behind them. As Lemke (2002) argues, political rationality is “an element of government itself which helps to create a discursive field in which exercising power is ‘rational’” (55). By producing new forms of knowledge that provide arguments and justifications, the political rationality contributes to the “government” of new domains of regulation and intervention. Therefore, the production of new modes of subjectivity is linked to governmental technologies (Lemke 2002, 59, 55).

Lemke (2001) explains the two sides of governmentality,

On the one hand, the term pinpoints a specific form of representation; government defines a discursive field in which exercising power is ‘rationalized’. This occurs, among other things, by the delineation of concepts, the specification of objects and borders, the provision of arguments and justifications, etc. In this manner, government enables a problem to be addressed and offers certain strategies of solving/handling the problem. On the other hand, it also structures specific forms of intervention. For political rationality is not pure, neutral knowledge which simply ‘re-presents’ the governing reality; instead, it itself constitutes the intellectual processing of the reality which political technologies can then tackle. This is understood to include agencies, procedures, institutions, legal forms, etc., that are intended to enable us to govern the objects and subjects of a political rationality. (191)

British sociologist Mike Gane works on the emergence, development, and critique of neo-liberal governmentality and culture. In his “The New Foucault Effect” (2018), Gane argues that today there is a new Foucault effect, which has arisen around the courses on governmentality, neoliberalism, and biopower. How can the concept of governmentality be used to analyze neoliberalism? What are the specific neoliberal technologies of government? Lemke (2001) underlines the concept of governmentality and the critical political angle it provides for an analysis of contemporary neo-liberalism. Foucault discusses the basic definition of the practices of the neoliberal art of government (neoliberal governmentality) in its 1978-1979 lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics (2008). While in his 1978 lectures Foucault traced the genealogy of governmentality from Classical Greek and Roman days via the early Christian pastoral guidance to the notion of state reason and the science of the police, the 1979 lectures focused on the study of liberal and neo-liberal forms of government. Foucault concentrates in particular on two forms of neoliberalism: German post-war liberalism and the liberalism of the Chicago School, which derives from the former and takes German post-war liberalism a step further to give it a more radical form (Lemke, 2001).

For Foucault, “neoliberalism is not the end but a transformation of politics that restructures the power relations in society” (Lemke 2002, 58). Thus, the concept of governmentality allows us to pinpoint the specific character of the neoliberal notion of rationality and its power techniques and forms of knowledge which translate into specific practices, political programs, and social policies. As Lemke (2002) argues, “the concept of governmentality construes neoliberalism not just as ideological rhetoric, as a political-economic reality, or as a practical antihumanism, but above all as a political project that endeavors to create a social reality that it suggests already exists” (60). The new principles, practices, agencies, and instruments of government under the neoliberal model have shaped new realities and subjectivities creating governable domains and governable persons. The concept of governmentality allows us to make more complex analyses of neoliberal forms of government and to shed light on the effects of neoliberal governmentality in terms of (self-)regulation and domination. It also allows us to analyze the close link between power relations and processes of subjectification as well as the processes for the creation of legitimacy and hegemony to reproduce the neoliberal model. 

Bibliography

Gane, Mike. “The New Foucault Effect.” Cultural Politics 14, no. 1 (2018): 109-127, doi: 10.1215/17432197-4312952

Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: with Two Lectures by and An Interview with Michel Foucault, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller,  87-104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Foucault, Michel. Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Foucault, Michel. The Mesh of Power. Viewpoint Magazine (2012). https://www.viewpointmag.com/2012/09/12/the-mesh-of-power/

Lemke, Thomas. “‘The Birth of Bio-Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality.” Economy and Society 30, no. 2 (2001): 190-207, doi: 10.1080/03085140120042271

Lemke, Thomas. Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 3 (2002): 49-64, doi: 10.1080/089356902101242288

Gabriela Segura-Ballar
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

The coloniality of power refers to a new model of global power which started with the Conquest of the Americas in 1492. This new model of power has two fundamental axes: the idea of race and a new structural control of labor. On the one hand, race and racial identity were established as instruments of social classification and domination of “inferior” or non-European races. Consequently, the idea of race granted legitimacy to the relations of domination imposed by the conquest. The idea of race helped to “naturalize” colonial relations between Europeans and non-Europeans. On the other hand, the new global model of labor, global capitalism, implied the domination/exploitation of race/labor. Additionally, the racist form of controlling labor under world capitalism entailed the articulation of all forms of labor control around capital. 

Eurocentrism refers to a specific rationality or perspective of knowledge associated with Western Europe which became universal (Quijano 2000, 549). This new hegemonic representation and mode of knowing claims universality for itself and relies on “a confusion between abstract universality and the concrete world hegemony derived from Europe’s position as center” (Dussel 2000, 471). Thus, Eurocentrism denotes the new intersubjective universe of the global model of power in which Western Europeans are the only producers and protagonists of modernity. Through the coloniality of power theory, the concept of modernity refers to a new space/time that was constituted materially with America. For Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, modernity, as experience and as an idea, is colonial from its origin. In sum, coloniality of power refers to the colonial/modern, capitalist, and Eurocentered axis of the global model of power that started with the invention of America. As Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez (2008) argues,

the coloniality of power is a category of analysis that makes reference to the specific structure of domination imposed on the American colonies since 1492. According to Quijano, Spanish colonizers established a relationship of power with the colonized based on ethnic and epistemic superiority of the former over the latter. (281)

The concept of coloniality, introduced by Aníbal Quijano in 1989, refers to the epistemic strategy of domination. While colonialism refers to particular political relations, coloniality refers rather to relations of power, and to conceptions of being and knowing that produce a world divided between legitimate human subjects and others who are fundamentally dispensable, denoting only negative or exotic meaning (Maldonado-Torres 2008, 119). Coloniality is the invisible and constitutive side of modernity. That the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality are two sides of the same coin is an idea developed by Argentine philosopher and semiotician Walter D. Mignolo. Mignolo builds on the work of Anibal Quijano and argues specifically for the necessity of epistemic decolonization.

The geopolitics of knowledge, a pertinent category broadly utilized by Mignolo, refers to the local historical grounding of knowledge. For Mignolo (2005),

knowledge is always geo-historically and geo-politically located across the epistemic colonial difference. For that reason, the geo-politics of knowledge is the necessary perspective to dispel the Eurocentric assumption that valid and legitimate knowledge shall be sanctioned by Western standards. (43)

Geopolitics of knowledge refers to the process of converting local histories into a unique and universal point of enunciation and production of knowledge. According to Mignolo (2000), the geopolitics of knowledge is organized around the diversification, through history, of the colonial and the imperial differences (59). The irreductible colonial difference refers to “the difference between center and periphery, between the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism and knowledge production by those who participated in building the modern/colonial world and those who have been left out of the discussion” (Mignolo 2000, 63). Referring to Mignolo’s geopolitics of knowledge, Castro-Gómez (2008) argues that “knowledge that is not produced in the centers of power or in the circuits controlled by them is declared irrelevant and ‘prescientific’…Asia, Africa, and Latin America…are not viewed as producers but rather as consumers of knowledge generated by the centers” (279-280).

For Argentinian philosopher María Lugones, the colonial/modern gender system is constitutive of the coloniality of power. Like race, gender was also an instrument of classification and domination. This process entailed the imposition of the heterosexual understanding of gender relations among the colonized. According to Lugones (2008), “Women racialized as inferior were turned from animals into various modified versions of ‘women’ as it fit the processes of Eurocentered global capitalism” (13). Therefore, we have to add the effects of the coloniality of gender to the material and subjective implications of the coloniality of power, capitalism, and Eurocentrism. Lugones (2008) also specifies that “the gender system is heterosexualist, as heterosexuality permeates racialized patriarchal control over production, including knowledge production, and over collective authority” (15). The gender system constitutes the modern/colonial meaning of “men” and “women.” This gender system has been functional to the capitalist economic system not only because it reproduces domination and the reproduction of labor but also because it makes labor racialized and gendered. For Lugones, Quijano’s idea of the coloniality of power is limited in revealing these gender dynamics. Therefore, Lugones approaches the logic of race and gender and the intersection of these two “structural axes” of global capitalism as necessarily based on oppression, exclusion, and violence.

Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel also elaborates on the coloniality of power in his analysis of the capitalist world-system. He calls attention to the risks of using a hierarchical theory of power when thinking about the modern/colonial world-system. For Grosfoguel (2011), the colonial power that “arrived in the Americas was a broader and wider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the word-system is unable to account for” (8). Therefore, for Grosfoguel, we need to move towards what the Greek sociologist Kyriakos Kontopoulos (1993) called heterarchical thinking. Heterarchical thinking is an attempt to conceptualize structures with a new language that goes beyond the paradigm of Eurocentric social science inherited from the nineteenth century. The old language is for closed systems because it has a unique logic that determines everything else from a single hierarchy of power (Castro-Gómez 2007, 18). When the logic of power is understood in hierarchical terms, global market relations determine the functioning of all other power relations, even at local levels. In contrast, the genealogical analysis thinks of power as a multiple net that functions as a heterarchy where there is no  “basic logic” of power that determines the logic of all other relations.

Grosfoguel conceptualizes the coloniality of power as an entanglement of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (“heterarchies”) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic, and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide reconfigures all of the other global power structures. For Grosfoguel (2011), what is new in the “coloniality of power” perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system (11). The analysis of these entangled heterarchies led Grosfoguel to propose an alternative decolonial conceptualization of the world-system. For the author (2011), 

Given the hegemonic Eurocentric “common sense,” the moment we use the word “capitalism,” people immediately think that we are talking about the “economy”. However, “capitalism” is only one of the multiple entangled constellations of colonial power matrix of what I called, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, “Capitalist/Patriarchal Western-centric/Christian-centric Modern/Colonial World-System.” (13. See also Grosfoguel and Cervantes 2002)

We are living then in the era of the capitalist/patriarchal Western-centric/Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system.

Bibliography

Castro-Gómez, Santiago. La hybris del punto cero: ciencia, raza e Ilustración en la Nueva Granada (1750-1816). Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2007.

Castro-Gómez, Santiago. “(Post)coloniality for dummies: Latin American perspectives on Modernity, Coloniality and the Geopolitics of Knowledge.” In Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Enrique Dussel, Mabel Moraña and Carlos Jáuregui, 259-285. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Dussel, Enrique. “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism.” Nepantla 1, no. 3 (2000):  465-478.

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Transmodernity 1, no. 1 (2011), 1–36.

Grosfoguel, Ramón and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez. The modern/colonial/capitalist world-system in the twentieth century: global processes, antisystemic movements, and the geopolitics of knowledge. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Kontopoulos, Kyriakos. The Logics of Social Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Lugones, María. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise 2, no. 2 (2008): 1-17.

Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Mignolo, Walter. “(Post)Occidentalism, (Post)Coloniality, and (Post)Subaltern Rationality.” In The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, 86-118. Duke University Press, 2000.

Mignolo, Walter. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005.

Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla 1, no. 3 (2000), 533-580.

 Politics Graduate Students at the University of California, Santa Cruz

The Mundell-Fleming approach is a macroeconomic model that was developed to show the relationship between factors contributing to balance of payments. This model illustrates the tensions involved in an international political economy based on the integration of ostensibly sovereign individual units. The approach is commonly cited as the primary way to what is known as the Impossible Trinity (also referred to as the unholy trinity, the policy trinity, The Mundell-Fleming trinity, The Trilemma, and so on). Briefly, the Impossible Trinity states that it is impossible for a state to achieve all three of the following policy goals at one time, and the state must choose two: an autonomous monetary policy, capital mobility (financial integration), and a stable exchange rate. As Cohen (2017) explains, this principle complicates the policy choices a state has available for responding to a deficit balance of payments, which occurs when a country imports more capital, goods, and services than it exports. This entry briefly discussed each side of the Impossible Trinity before turning to an examination of their dynamics.

The ability for capital (particularly financial capital) to move across borders (i.e. capital mobility) has been widely regarded as a primary characteristic of the modern international political economy since the late 1970s. As Frieden (1991) notes, this mobility has been seen as undermining or contravening national policy, especially as it relates to monetary policy. Monetary policy, according to Cohen (2017) refers to control, by a central bank, of the money supply and of interest rates, which determine the rate of return on capital. Thus, an autonomous monetary policy entails that the state, typically by way of a central bank, can effectively make decisions concerning the amount of money within an economy and the interest rate without external constraint. Cohen’s analysis draws on previous work (Cohen 2006) on monetary power wherein he argues that monetary power allows a state to minimize the costs of adjusting its balance of payments through various policy options. Finally, a stable exchange rate is typically achieved through a pegged exchange rate regime, which entails a state controlling the supply of both foreign and domestic currency. To achieve a set exchange rate, a state can buy or sell amounts of either the foreign or domestic currency.

It is in this final consideration of what a state must do to achieve a fixed exchange rate under conditions of capital mobility that we see the trade-offs with an autonomous monetary policy, particularly in terms of controlling the supply of money. As Cohen (2017), Frieden (1991), and Aizenman (2010) explain, if a state increases the supply of money, this will create a downward pressure on domestic interest rates, which will cause capital to shift from investment in domestic bonds to higher yielding foreign bonds. This increased demand for foreign currencies to purchase foreign bonds provides a dilemma for the central bank, which must interfere in the currency market to maintain a stable exchange rate: the bank must sell its reserve of foreign currency, in order to maintain the exchange rate, and buys back the domestic money it created in the first stage of the process. Thus, as these authors explain, maintaining a fixed exchange rate with capital mobility entails giving up monetary autonomy. The same logic can be applied across the Impossible Trinity.

Empirically, Aizenman (2010) argues that multiple historical financial crises can be explained by attempts to achieve all three sides of the Impossible Trinity: the 1994 Mexican peso crisis, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the 2001 Argentinean financial collapse. Interestingly, Aizenman (2013) argues that due to the significant costs of deleveraging crises, which are associated with recessions, the Trilemma framework should be updated as a Quadrilemma with the inclusion of financial stability.  

Notably, the Impossible Trinity can be used to further justify Grosfoguel’s pessimism of the futility of nation-level liberation struggles. The Impossible Trinity appears to indicate that the ability for a single nation-state to remain integrated into the international policy economy while retaining autonomy over important aspects of domestic governance is limited. Although, Grosfoguel would perhaps argue that it is unrealistic to achieve monetary autonomy, insofar as that monetary autonomy is used towards decolonization, democratization, and social justice.

Bibliography

Aizenman, Joshua. “The Impossible Trinity (aka the Policy Trilemma): The Encyclopedia of Financial Globalization.” Working Paper, No. 666, University of California, Economics Department, Santa Cruz, CA, 2010.

Aizenman, Joshua. “The Impossible Trinity: From the Policy Trilemma to the Policy Quadrilemma.” Global Journal of Economics 2, no. 1 (2013).

Cohen, Benjamin. “The IPE of Money Revisited.” Review of International Political Economy, 2016.

Frieden, Jeffry. Invested Interests: The Politics of National Economic Policies in a World of Global Finance. International Organization, 1991.

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Transmodernity 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–36.

Ingy Higazy
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Considered to be the single most continuous historical event in, and thus an integral feature of, human history, war is a historically loaded term to engage with. How can one begin to define a ubiquitous past and present event and, to some, human condition such as war? One approach to defining war, and thus an approach to the scholarly study of war, begins with an historical chronology of the development of modes and norms of warfare. This approach is most common in the discipline of International Relations (IR), which begins its study of war with the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece. Despite its limitations, a chronological history of the development of warfare is crucial, because the seeming historical continuity of war might mistakenly suggest a continuity in the modes and methods of war (essentially, war-making). Thus, accounting for the mutations in war, and the relationship of war to politics, society, and the economy more generally paints a more in-depth picture of what war is, and why it is important to account for it as a central term/pillar in the study of Political Economy.

Modern warfare revolutionized how and, most importantly, where war battles are fought, as well as who fights them. Beginning with Napoleon in France in the early nineteenth century, wars have become highly organized and economic (in this sense, calculated) undertakings. Thus, modern war-making revolutionized society and began to underpin political and social, as well as urban, organization in the nineteenth century onward. The French philosopher Michel Foucault perhaps best traces modern war’s revolutionizing of society—and the extent of the war-making machine, the military—in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). For Foucault, the social organization and logic of war not only gave birth to processes of discipline and surveillance in society, but also constituted its very political logic(s). For Foucault, the discipline needed to produce and sustain efficient militaries found its way into the spatial organization of prisons, schools, and hospitals. Thus, Foucault famously argued, by inverting von Clausewitz’ statement,[1] that “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (Foucault 2003, 15). Foucault’s inversion of the statement introduced a new framework through which social theorists could begin to conceptualize of war. It establishes that war, not politics, is the main driver behind the project of modernity and is an instrument and effect of modern power. It also troubled the distinction, widely accepted and especially advocated for within the liberal strand of IR, between war and peace. In doing so, Foucault effectively argues that what we usually perceive of as realms of peace, and within foreign affairs, diplomacy, are simply different iterations of war. In his study of the emergence of the modern Egyptian Military in the nineteenth century, historian Khaled Fahmy situated his study as a critical response to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. While Fahmy did not reject Foucault’s diagnosis of modern power, through his study of the nascent war-making institution in Egypt, he argued that such a theoretical standpoint—that war underpins all life processes—overshadows moments and windows of resistance to wars and war-making. To Fahmy, such moments of resistance, like war-making, also defined the course of modernity.

Yet, what is war? And why is it central to modernity? The Oxford Dictionary approaches its definition of war from a solely political, state-based framework, and begins by defining war as first and foremost “an armed conflict between political actors.” However, within the subfield of historical sociology, war is conceived of as, first and foremost, a social process (see Mann 

1988). Thinkers like Charles Tilly conceived of war-making as essential in the development and organization of large-scale bureaucracies. Thus, for Tilly, modern war-making efforts essentially made the modern state (see Tilly 1992 and 1985). Ingrained within Tilly’s theory of modern war-making and state-making is the role of circulation and exchange, and thus of economics (broadly conceived), in war. Thus, war is also an economic process. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, in The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (2012), clearly engage war as a tool of global capitalism. Their extensive analysis of the role of several wars, namely the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II, in the making of the United States (US) a global facilitator and police of capital attest to the centrality of war in political economic processes, and especially capitalist processes of production. In fact, war was essential in the construction of global infrastructures for the movement of capital. Panitch and Gindin trace extensively how the construction of continental infrastructures in the US opened new spaces for capital accumulation, and how such infrastructures later aided the American capitalist class in exporting its products, and relations, abroad (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 29-31).

War is furthermore crucial to the functioning and understanding of one of modernity’s most central and uneven processes: imperialism. The French-Egyptian Marxian thinker and theorist Samir Amin conceptualizes of the trajectory of modern capitalism as essentially imperialist, building on Lenin and critics of capitalism who avidly thought about the centrality of imperialism in the capitalist project. In his last interview, Amin argued that: “We cannot discuss how to prevent war. War and chaos are inscribed into the logic of this decaying system” (“Globalization and Its Alternatives: An Interview with Samir Amin,” 13). Thus, for Amin and his anti-imperialist critique of capitalism—or more accurately, his critique of the intertwined processes of capitalism and imperialism—war is not an aberration or an outlier. It resides at the very heart of the capitalist process. Thus, war, especially the Cold War, was an instance of anti-imperialist organizing which situated ‘abstaining’ from and opposing the war as a platform for anti-imperialist and Third World solidarity.

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975.

Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. Picador, 2003.

Mann, Michael. “States, War, and Capitalism.” Social Forces 67, no. 3 (1989): 699-724.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso, 2012.

Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990. Blackwell, 1992.

Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 169-191. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

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.

Lucia Vitale
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

In its most basic definition, welfare is a form of state assistance which helps individuals meet their basic needs. Folbre defines the welfare state as “…a public sector providing education and a social safety net…” (Folbre 2009, xxx), where the social safety net is comprised of services such as health, old age security, and education (Folbre 2009, 325). In many ways the welfare state and how it has been defined since the writings of Marx has reflected not only the political and economic principles of the time, but also hegemonic ideas of the roles of women and migrants in a market society.

While welfare is not explicitly referenced in the writings of Marx, the reproduction of labor power is a related concept, and one that is later taken up by feminists and Marxist geographers in order to explore themes of welfare in contemporary times. Marx writes: “Given the individual, the production of labor-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance… the value of labor-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the laborer” (Marx 1867, 115). The value of labor power must be sufficient in the short run to satisfy a laborer’s natural wants, such as food, clothing, fuel, and housing. In the long run it must also “…include the means necessary for the laborer’s substitutes, i.e., his children…” (Marx 1867, 116). The capitalist, who is able to accumulate capital only when the laborer produces surplus value, is motivated to keep wages low so that they may cover the minimum required to reproduce the worker. Without this process of reproducing the laborer, there would be no laborer for the capitalist to accumulate surplus labor from. The reproduction of labor power requires wages from the employer to purchase goods on the market such as food. Unpaid female labor which is, for example, used to cook the food purchased from the market, is one way that labor power is reproduced. Alternatively, or in addition to, labor power may be assisted by the state through welfare programs used to acquire necessary goods such as housing and access to medical care.

In a discussion on Marx’s conception of capital as value in motion, Marxist geographer David Harvey writes how this motion begins with a capitalist going into the market to purchase labor power. The price of purchasing this labor power, Harvey writes, is determined by the costs of reproducing labor power at a given standard of living. Inherent in this calculation, then, are questions of who is responsible for the reproduction of labor (the two examples above were women and the state). Harvey writes,

In effect capital relies upon the workers and their families to take care of their own processes of reproduction (with perhaps some assistance from the state). Marx follows capital and likewise treats of social reproduction as a separate and autonomous sphere of activity providing in effect a free gift to capital in the persona of the laborer who returns to the workplace as fit and ready to work as possible (Harvey 2018, 14, italics added).

The capitalist, then, is reliant on unpaid labor from the family and, if present, support from the state in the form of welfare given as free gifts to his laborers.

Feminist scholar Nancy Folbre picks up on these themes of reproduction of labor, arguing that mens’ pursuit of self-interest is made possible only when women act in an altruistic manner, i.e. caring for children, the elderly, and performing housework necessary to reproduce the laborers in her household. In one passage she uses Adam Smith’s critique of state intervention into the economy, writing on how Smith was a known critic of his era’s “poor laws” and how they would hinder free trade and mobility of labor while simultaneously stifling male initiative (Folbre 2005, 65). Folbre traces this idea through time, and comments on how early welfare state policies have often been called the nanny state, a term which “…is often used to deprecate public policies that seem fussy, intrusive, and expensive, policies that would perhaps be unnecessary if individual women were more virtuous” (Folbre 2005, 268). State welfare, often deemed an inefficient intrusion onto a free market economic system, doesn’t provide support for traditionally market-based activities, but rather finances forms of care such as education and childcare, which are traditionally performed by women. Extending rights to women, then, allows them to exit their care roles, thereby facilitating state intervention through welfare and, as we will later see, a subsequent market co-optation of these public goods.

The New Deal era in the post-war “golden age” led by Americans was “…usually presented as the victory of the interventionist, or welfare, economy over the market economy” (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 9). It is this protective response to the marketization of society that Karl Polanyi calls the double movement (Polanyi 1944). During this time of interventionist welfare programs, Keynesian macroeconomic policies allowed, among other things, states to run deficits in order to invest in public works projects. This investment laid the groundwork for the modern welfare state, and its subsequent eradication (Hardt and Negri 2001, 242). As public monies were put to work establishing systems of Social Security, unemployment payments, and public health programs in the 1930s, the largest immigration surge in US history was underway. By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies were in motion, immigrants, including white European immigrants and Mexican immigrants, made up 12% of the US population. Race and ethnicity, tied up with immigrant status, were used as exclusionary tools in protecting the welfare state from “undeserving recipients”. In an impressive comparative project which considers welfare access by European immigrants, Mexican immigrants, and Black Americans in the United States from the Progressive Era to the New Deal, Cybelle Fox (2012) considers the racial and ethnic exclusionary practices employed to keep state resources aimed at groups thought to possess the ability to “assimilate” into American culture. Just as welfare programs provoked anxieties surrounding the emancipation of women, so too did they provoke racial and ethnic anxieties of the “worthy” recipient.

As the Keynesian promise of full employment was fulfilled, workers gained bargaining rights and saw their social wage rise (both in terms of wage paid and in welfare received). The resulting squeeze on capitalist surplus spurred a decrease in the rate of profit and sparked a backlash in the 60s and 70s. As inflation soared through the 70s, Chair of the Federal Reserve Paul Volker hiked interest rates in an effort to break inflation. “Fundamentally, the Volker shock was not so much about finding the right monetary policy as shifting the balance of class forces in American society” (Panitch & Gindin 2012, 171). It was under this pretense that the Ronald Regan presidency was able to cut welfare, food stamps, Medicare, public pensions, and unemployment insurance.

These programs had been developed with public funding and, as such, had become a certain basket of public goods existing in the commons to which citizens were entitled. Hardt and Negri write, “The rise and fall of the welfare state in the twentieth century is one more cycle in this spiral of public and private appropriations” (Hardt & Negri 2001, 301). Since the structure of public assistance and their distribution systems were created through publicly-funded projects, their subsequent co-optation by the market represents privatization and expropriation for private gains. The commons are the basis for the concept of the public, and when they are privately appropriated by market regimes and neoliberalism “…the immanent relation between the public and the common is replaced by the transcendent power of private property” (Hardt & Negri 2001, 301).

Not only is the privatization of publicly-funded social programs existing in the commons a hallmark of neoliberalizing processes, so too is exposure to risk. In his book on the 2008 financial crash Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, Philip Mirowski (2013) considers the American neoliberal entrepreneurial spirit, writing that “…Anyone who participates in the welfare states is just a dull drone, lost in a vegetative state. They are debased because they expect the state to shield them from risk, when in fact, they should be reveling in the opportunity to remake themselves” (116). The contemporary neoliberal individual, then, is conditioned to reject welfare services on the basis that the “nanny state”, to borrow Folbre’s term, prevents the development of a self-sufficient, entrepreneurial market subject.

Also writing from the Great Recession, Eva Bertram uses the term “workfare” to describe the patchwork American welfare state and its requirement of (often private) employment in order to receive state benefits. This process, which she identifies as beginning in the 1960s and reaching its peak in the 1990s, occurred alongside deindustrialization and the resulting inability of low-wage jobs to provide income security and stability. She writes that “workfare policies were imposed in the context of sweeping economic changes that made low- wage work an increasingly unreliable path from poverty to economic security” (Bertram 2015, 6). The policies, another example of welfare state policy following the contours of political economic development, effectively kept lower classes from achieving social mobility.

Bibliography

Bertram, Eva. Workfare: Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats. American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Folbre, Nancy. Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Fox, Cybelle. Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Harvey, David. Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume One, The Process of Production Capital. 1867.

Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso 2013.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. New York: Octagon Books, 1944.

Alyssa Mazer
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

As capitalism and its specific form of sexual as well as class division of labour developed…wives were pushed into a few, low-status areas of employment or kept out of economic life altogether, relegated to their ‘natural’, dependent, place in the private, familial sphere. Today, despite a large measure of civil equality, it appears natural that wives are subordinate just because they are dependent on their husbands for subsistence, and it is taken for granted that liberal social life can be understood without reference to the sphere of subordination, natural relations and women. The old patriarchal argument from nature and women’s nature was thus transformed as it was modernized and incorporated into liberal-capitalism. (Carole Pateman 1989c, 123)

While not a traditional political economic term, wife is a title that denotes a very specific role. A wife is best described in negative form, in opposition to a citizen and a worker; by definition, a wife can be neither a public individual nor a free laborer. Although individual women may not end up becoming wives, women at large are coerced into the role and therefore contractually subordinated through the institution of marriage.

For the purposes of this definition, a wife is understood as a political, social, and economic subordinate to the rational individual of liberal economic theory, expected to provide unpaid labor to enable his success; this is a position maintained by legal, cultural, and financial circumstances. This entry introduces the various processes and expectations associated with the idea of a wife through a brief description of liberal theory, via Carole Pateman’s feminist critique.

Pateman’s groundbreaking work The Sexual Contract, originally published in 1988, explains that the initial social contract of liberal theory delineates sex-specific realms and roles. By their (either implicitly or explicitly) sexed articulation of a consenting, free individual and his place in the public sphere, liberal theorists have continuously emphasized that the rational individual—capable of contracting the use of his labor power for a wage, capable of participating in civil society and exercising his public capacities—can only ever be a man. This is an understanding of liberal society that questions key pieces of the contemporary political structure, troubling the foundations of a theory that proclaims individual freedom yet legally enforces arbitrary hierarchies.

One of Pateman’s most thorough critiques, which appears again in her 1989 collection The Disorder of Women, lies in her examination of how “marriage” is described by liberal theorists. Before more specifically considering her description of the wife’s role, it is important to begin with how the wife comes to be subordinated in theory.

Many liberal theorists root the wife’s subordination in nature; John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, argue that marriage occurs in the state of nature—the abstract time before our recognizable, organized society (Pateman 2018a, 54). They argue that families are already well-established by the time husbands consent to be governed and leave the state of nature (Pateman 1989a, 19). According to these thinkers, wives are natural subjects, not rational individuals, and are therefore justly controlled by their husbands for their many reproductive capacities (Pateman 2018a, 53).

Likewise, and more explicit about the purpose of marriage, Hegel argues that women are naturally incapable of participating in civil life. His articulation of women’s political disruptiveness is not dissimilar from Rousseau’s, and they both hold that the social contract necessarily delineates a distinct private sphere to which women are incorporated “as members of the family” (Pateman 1989d, 182). To these theorists, “The family is seemingly the most natural of all human associations and thus specially suited to women, who cannot transcend their natures in the manner demanded by civil forms of life” (Pateman 1989a, 19).

This sexed division helps reveal how the role of a wife is socially assigned, and for a particular reason. Although he doesn’t recognize it, Thomas Hobbes’ description of marriage reveals two of liberal theorists’ core assumptions about the formation of a civil public: first, men have brought it into existence and only men have the proper capacities to govern it; second, their own rules dictate that the proper way to exclude women from it is to legally secure their subordination through marriage (Pateman 2018a, 48-9). Controlling women in this way is vital for the success of the state and the economy. In order to maintain their civil relationship, rational individuals need to organize access to wives that will enable their success in the public sphere. The same way that the individuals entering the social contract agree to their legal equality, they acknowledge their collective interest in accessing women’s bodies and labor (1989b, 43).

Because civil (public) society is a crucial aspect of how the wife comes to be, citizenship—while a word worth unpacking on its own terms—is a useful concept for articulating the wife’s public position. If a citizen is a free and equal individual who trades independence for state protection, the role of a wife is diametrically opposed. This wife vs. citizen tension is most obviously identified in two examples contemporary to the 1980s, and arguably still apparent today.

Pateman writes that legal conditions in Britain, the US, and Australia deny a wife’s right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband, thereby demonstrating her lack of personhood (1989d, 186). In addition, wives are economically subordinated by husbands, not only because he relies on her labor in the home to reproduce his labor power, but also because the expectation that a woman will become a wife limits the wage she can earn in the marketplace and the support she can receive from the state (1989d, 190); she is therefore forced to enter the marriage contract for her own survival.

Importantly, this is a historical condition. While Pateman does not agree that women’s subordination is natural, their position as such has been continuously maintained for centuries, solidifying itself as a kind of common sense. This inequality especially appears in their economic conditions. Despite multiple generations of “equal rights” enjoyed by women, they are more likely than men to live in poverty (1989d, 180); it is not a coincidence that, meanwhile, “the legislation, policy-making and higher-level administration of the welfare state…remain[s] predominantly in men’s hands” (181).

Finally, on the economic role of the wife, it is important to note that her labor is not equivalent to that of a worker. However, the liberal theorists’ reliance on this family structure helps to reveal the fundamental importance of a wife’s labor in the home. The nature of this relation appears most poignantly in Hobbes’ assertion that all people are servants of a particular kind, and wives embody the specific domestic servitude reserved for women (Pateman 2018a, 50).

There are empirical parts of a liberal state, society, and economy that make the idea of wife as servant obvious. According to Pateman’s telling, the legally recognizable position of a wife was nonexistent in the liberal societies of Britain, the US, and Australia until the late 1800s: a wife could not claim an independent identity, and instead was completely subsumed under the master-husband. Wives were regularly sold and treated as property; for example, a man could sue someone for damages inflicted on his wife. Wives had no bodily autonomy, no right to refuse a husband anything he asked, and they worked full time, their entire lives, without pay (2018b).

In the hundred-odd years between then and when Pateman is writing, the legal subordination of wives has changed faces, but its practical effects have not become less coercive. From Pateman’s perspective in the late twentieth century, the wife is a domestic servant, and marriage subordinates the wife to the husband as a kind of laborer. Most married women work outside the home and yet must also be readily available to provide for their husbands and arrange their lives exactly how he asks (2018b, 128). While men have at least some choice in where and to whom they contract the use of their labor power, “women collectively are coerced into marriage” socially and economically (2018b, 132). Both in the theoretical social contract and in practical life, women are made into wives.

The fact that a wife and a worker are definitional opposites further explicates this relation. The distinction is definitional in that the very idea of the worker is constructed as “the other side” of the wife; indeed, the role of a worker “presupposes that he is a man who has a woman, a (house)wife, to take care of his daily needs” (Pateman 2018b, 131). As a practical matter, this sexed division of labor is the norm in political, social, and economic hierarchies; for example, “the labours of housewives are not included in official measurements of national productivity” (Pateman 2018b, 137). The relative invisibility of the wife’s labor is further enforced—or perhaps mandated—by lack of reference to women’s labor in classical economic literature overall.

By now it should be clear that the role of wife is directly linked to women’s subordination in liberal societies. Succinctly, the claim is not that men have political, social, and economic dominance over women and, by unrelated incident, have also institutionalized marriage. This feminist critique demonstrates that the act of making—the many processes coercing—women into wives is what establishes, justifies, and reproduces those many forms of dominance.

(See Social Reproduction, Feminist Economics, Primitive Accumulation, Power)

Bibliography

Pateman, Carole. “‘The Disorder of Women’: Women, Love, and the Sense of Justice.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 17-32. Stanford University Press, 1989a.

_____________. “The Fraternal Social Contract.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 33-57. Stanford University Press, 1989b.

_____________.“The Public/Private Dichotomy.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 118-140. Stanford University Press, 1989c.

_____________. “The Patriarchal Welfare State.” In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, 179-209. Stanford University Press, 1989d.

_____________. “Contract, The Individual, and Slavery.” In The Sexual Contract, 30th Anniversary Edition, 39-76. Stanford University Press, 2018a.

_____________. “Wives, Slaves and Wage Slaves.” In The Sexual Contract, 30th Anniversary Edition, 116-153. Stanford University Press, 2018b.

Boyeong Kim
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) is a social program that directly transfers cash to qualified low-income households that satisfy health and education-related requirements. It has been widely adopted by governments in the global South since the 2000s and generally has been assessed as having improved poverty indicators. However, critical approaches have investigated how the rise of CCTs as a popular social initiative has been related to the deepening of financial capitalism. Brazil’s Bolsa Familia provides a good example. Launched in 2003, Bolsa Familia has gained worldwide recognition as an innovative and effective (at the same time, less costly and politically rewarding) CCT that has contributed to poverty reduction. Conditions that eligible families must comply with include sending children to primary school and having them vaccinated and get medical check-ups. While various positive outcomes of the program has been observed – e.g. in reducing child mortality, improving tuberculosis treatment, and increasing women’s decision power within households (Rasella et al. 2013; Oliosi et al. 2019; De Brauw, Gilligan, Hoddinott, and Roy 2014) – the financialization of social policy has resulted that debt and credit relations have replaced social security. Exploring the deeper impact of Bolsa Familia, Lavinas (2018) explicates that on one hand, the program is exclusively funded through indirect taxation, thus its redistributive effect has been limited; on the other hand, a phenomenon that the author calls the collateralization of social policy has been taking place, in which the explosive expansion of personal and consumer credit under the center-left governments is now allowing the beneficiaries of CCTs to take out more loans holding the government aid money as collateral. The continued lack of public services leads to the dependency to private loans and insurance, exacerbating insecurity and inequality.  

Soederberg (2012) highlights another dimension of financialization of the social in Latin America by looking at how the strategy to promote financial inclusion of the poor in Mexico has led to the colonization of informal spaces. Since the mid-2000s, the “bottom of the pyramid (BOP)” market, or “poverty industries,” targeting the “unbanked” informal sector workers went through a remarkable growth under lax regulation that it became a common practice that leading economic groups that own banking and retail chains offer credit to the working poor with an extortionate interest rate to purchase their products. This process has been mediated by what she terms the “debtfare state” that facilitates a debt-driven accumulation strategy, in which the poor get incorporated into the financial market but excluded from capital relations.

Yet another important aspect of the financialization of social policies is its disciplinary effect. As Lavinas (2018) puts, “microcredit and CCTs act as a moral lever aimed at transforming the behavior of the poor and those at the bottom of the social ladder (508)”. The conduct-shaping effects of the financialization of social policies involve the construction of an ethical standard defined by the compliance to the power relations between creditors and debtors, in which the notion of social entitlement fades away and debt relations dictate the details of life conduct of subjects (Lazzarato 2012).

Bibliography

De Brauw, Alan, Daniel O. Gilligan, John Hoddinott, and Shalini Roy. “The Impact of Bolsa Família on Women’s Decision-making Power.” World Development 59 (2014): 487-504.

Lavinas, Lena. “The Collateralization of Social Policy under Financialized Capitalism.” Development and Change 49, no. 2 (2018): 502-517.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Semiotext(e), 2012.

Oliosi, Janaina Gomes Nascimento, Barbara Reis-Santos, Rodrigo Leite Locatelli, Carolina Maia Martins Sales, Walter Gomes da Silva Filho, Kerollen Cristina da Silva, Mauro Niskier Sanchez, et al. “Effect of the Bolsa Familia Programme on the Outcome of Tuberculosis Treatment: A Prospective Cohort Study.” The Lancet Global Health 7, no. 2 (2019): e219-e226.

Rasella, Davide, Rosana Aquino, Carlos AT Santos, Rômulo Paes-Sousa, and Mauricio L. Barreto. “Effect of a Conditional Cash Transfer Programme on Childhood Mortality: A Nationwide Analysis of Brazilian Municipalities.” The Lancet 382, no. 9886 (2013): 57-64.

Soederberg, Susanne. “The Mexican Debtfare State: Dispossession, Micro-lending, and the Surplus Population.” Globalizations 9, no. 4 (2012): 561-575.

Tamara Ortega-Uribe
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Neoliberalism is often related to economic policies to opening national markets and liberalizing economies in the global markets with the minimized role of nation-states. Free markets, free trade, and a sort of economic dominion over the political sphere (states included). However, considering the term from its economic theory origin, and its practical implementation through specific policies, neoliberalism is a polysemic concept and a multifaceted reality that has been challenged and become more complex over time. A considerable amount of literature has been written about neoliberalism and its multiple definitions. From the earlier theoretical ideas about neo-liberalism contended by the Mont Pelerin Society since the forties to the neoliberal policies implemented from different nation-states in the seventies onwards. Indeed, the seventies is the crucial period of time when neoliberalism was carried out, having one of the most successful experiments during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, which Milton Friedman called the “miracle of Chile”. But it was during 1978 and 1980 with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan when the neoliberal principles of economic thought were implemented, based on the idea of Margaret Thatcher that “there is no alternative” (TINA). As a result, neoliberalism was spread as the only path to guide the new global order, through international institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization), which made neoliberal policies as the hegemonic consensus. In this sense, the Washington Consensus, through structural reforms that increased the liberalization of developing countries’ economies, allowed neoliberalism to become the new political economic arrangements throughout the western world.  

According to Harvey (2005, 2), “neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”. Based on this definition, the nation-states have a specific role to play in this particular political and economic arrangement. Following the same author, “the role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices…it must also set up those military, defence, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary.” (Harvey 2005, 2). However, the role of the state is limited, and it has to intervene at a minimum level because, according to Hayek (1945), the state only has a small fraction of knowledge and information of all members in the society. Then, a free-market society means decentralized planning and price-fluctuations instead of a centralized and planned economy by the state, which cannot achieve a rational and efficient economic organization. Additionally, this brings to the center of neoliberalism’s definition the problem of freedom.

Certainly, the ideal of freedom, and specifically individual freedom, were part of the common claims during the second half of the twentieth century, where the promoters of the free market offered a compelling theoretical framework that sought to pursue this ideal as fundamental values of the neo-liberal societies. The Mont Pelerin Society pointed out:

The central values of civilization are in danger…In some countries, freedom has disappeared entirely; in others it is under constant menace. Even freedom of thought and expression is being curbed. Freedom is being sacrificed to a view of history which denies all absolute moral standards and questions the desirability of the rule of law. This requires study on several fronts: explaining the crisis of the time; redefining the functions of the state; reaffirming the rule of law; establishing minimum standards that are compatible with the market; combating the misuse of history; and safeguarding international peace, liberty, and trade…The group does not aspire to conduct propaganda…it is politically unaligned, aiming only to help preserve and improve the free society by facilitating the exchange of views among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common. (Mont Pelerin Society)  

Nevertheless, the theory does not always correspond with reality. As David Harvey has pointed out, there is gap between the theory and practice of neoliberalism, where the failures of the market, the differentiated freedom between the members of society, and the role of state in market crisis have shown that the neoliberal theory acquires different processes of neoliberalization (Harvey 2005). The multifaceted nature of neoliberalism and neoliberalization processes also materializes in the fact that the role of state would acquire different relevance to guarantee free market and competition according to neoliberalism or ordoliberalism, which have overlapping origins and definitions[1]. At the end, the critical point is what Sparke (forthcoming) points out, “neoliberalism is never automatic in practice…The anti-state state requires all sorts of active pro-market state-making and re-regulation.” (3).

In this regard, neoliberalism is not only an economic configuration, as the Document Index of Paul Treanor suggests “neoliberalism is not just economics: it is a social and moral philosophy”. Following Harvey (2005), it can be understood that neoliberalism was adopted as an economic method, but with a clear political goal: the restoration of class power. Thus, neoliberalism as a political project has been quite effective modifying all human relations, challenging the state sovereignty, designing new social and political arrangements throughout the world, and achieving a certain level of consensus (Harvey 2005). Neoliberalism as a political domain works through concrete neoliberal policies, practices and discourses (Brand & Sekler 2009) that, among other things, undermine the basis for organized class struggle and the channels for the effective mobilization of popular discontent (Portes & Hoffman 2003). Similarly, Wendy Brown (2015) contends that neoliberalism eliminates the people’s sovereignty and the homo politicus, imposing the homo oeconomicus over the political capacity of the demos, and overestimating the economic definition of neoliberalism. While this definition focuses on the distinction between economic and polity, and the common idea of economy reigning over polity, Foucault highlights the differences between neo-liberalism and liberalism. Neoliberalism is a redefinition of the relation between the state and the economy, where the market is the organizational principle for the state and society (Foucault, Lecture 31 January 1979; Lecture 7 February 1979).

In addition, neo-liberalism creates a new type of government that places freedom as a rational principle for economic-rational individuals (Lemke 2001, 200). In other words, neoliberalism can be understood as a specific form of governmentality, which is more than an ideological rhetoric, and a political-economic reality, it is a political project that endeavors to create a social reality that it suggests already exists. Thus, this definition allows us to pay attention to the biopolitical nature of neoliberalism as a new paradigm of power (Lemke 2002), and as a political regime, where individuals are experiencing neoliberalism through a sort of everyday neoliberalism (Mirowski 2014). In this sense, Sparke (forthcoming) offers seven self-making practices as market-modeled behavior: responsibilization, entrepreneurialization, self-capitalization, self-commodification, personalization, fragmentation, and externalization. Nevertheless, while Sparke and others have emphasize that these types of behavior would configure the homo oeconomicus and neoliberal subjectivity that transform citizenship toward a depoliticization, precarity, and cruelty (Brown 2015; Sparke forthcoming), Gago (2017) observes that the self-involvement practices on neoliberalism and its contestation are creating something she calls neoliberalism from below, as a proliferation of forms of life that reorganize notions of freedom, calculation, and obedience, projecting a new collective affectivity and rationality within the very center of neoliberal realities.

On the other hand, recent works have pointed out the critical juncture that neoliberalism is facing in current societies, where the lack of legitimacy of neoliberal policies has brought the interest to think of it from new theoretical debates, even considering the need to dismiss the concept, but at the same time recognizing that the term has become truly heterogeneous and diverse (Slobodian & Plehwe 2020). Therefore, neoliberalism is not a monolith, on the contrary, it has the capacity for improvisation and flexible responses to policy problems, as the key to understand the different forms that neoliberal ideologies have taken recently, such as conservative-neoliberal, progressive neoliberal (Slobodian & Plehwe 2020; Fraser 2019), and authoritarian “Frankenstein” neoliberalism (Brown 2018). This multifaceted and flexible nature of neoliberalism highlights the relevance of analyzing concrete and historical placed realities. Following Gago’s claim, “the character of neoliberalism makes it impossible to define it in a homogenous way because it depends on its landings and connections with concrete situations” (Gago & Brown 2020).

The polysemic nature of neoliberalism as well as the crisis of hegemony and legitimacy of neoliberal political institutions (Sader 2009; Gago & Sztulwark 2009) show an open debate about its definition, also considering the need to understand theoretical and political paths of a transitional stage known as postneoliberalism that could take the form of anti-neoliberalism or not, depending precisely on the different perceptions of neoliberalism (Brand & Sekler 2009).

(See Governmentality, Ordoliberalism, The Capitalist State, Neoliberalism)

Bibliography

Brand, Ulrich, and Nicola Sekler. “Postneoliberalism: Catch-all Word or Valuable Analytical and Political Concept?” Development Dialogue 51 (2009).

Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First Century ‘Democracies’.” Critical Times 1 (1) (2018): 60-79.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Fraser, Nancy. The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born. London/New York: Verso Books, 2019.

Gago, Verónica, and Wendy Brown. “Is there a Neoliberalism ‘from Below’? A Conversation between Verónica Gago and Wendy Brown.” Verso Books. Accessed March 14, 2021. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4926-is-there-a-neoliberalism-from-below-a-conversation-between-veronica-gago-and-wendy-brown (2020).

Gago, Verónica. Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2017.

Gago, Verónica, and Diego Sztulwark. “Notes on Postneoliberalism in Argentina.” Development Dialogue 51 (2009).

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: University Press, 2005.

Hayek, Friedrich. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review 35 (4) (1945): 519-530.

Lemke, Thomas. “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxism 14 (3) (2002): 49-64.

Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London/New York: Verso Books, 2014.

Mirowski, Philip, Plehwe, Dieter, and Quinn Slobodian, eds. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. London/New York: Verso Books, 2020.

Portes, Alejandro, and Kelly Hoffman. “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era.” Latin American Research Review 38 (1) (2003): 41-82.

Sader, Emir. “Post Neoliberalism in Latin America.” Development Dialogue 51 (2009).

Sparke, Matthew. Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions, and Uneven Integration. 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell. (Forthcoming).

Md Mizanur Rahman
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Feminist Economics is an approach that critically looks at the implicit gender biases prevalent in theories and practices in the study of economics. It has already emerged as an integral sub-field of economics. Feminist Economics challenges extant biases in economics, attempts to revise them, and searches for adequate alternatives both in theory and policy areas. Nelson writes, “it includes both studies of gender roles in the economy from a liberatory perspective and critical work directed at biases in the content and methodology of the economics discipline” (Nelson 2008). The field emerged with a critique to the studies of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, where women’s lesser market earnings were not discussed, rather women’s specialization in household works was idealized, giving a justification for their unpaid household responsibilities and lesser market income (Nelson 2008). This research addressed women issues neither to equalize earnings nor to democratize working conditions but to rationalize women’s lower earnings and unpaid household responsibilities (Nelson 2008).

Feminist Economics focuses on the areas of research that are relatively ignored in mainstream economics, namely unpaid care works, intimate partner violence, the economics of sex workers. The research that ignited the field is Marilyn Waring’s If Women Counted (1988), which provocatively and systematically critiques the standard of measuring economic growth in mainstream economics that excludes the value of unpaid works of women and nature due to its biased understanding of the concept of productivity. It unravels how women’s traditional works have been made invisible within the national accounting systems and identifies the damages the economy incurs. The book, thus, “encouraged and influenced a wide range of work in ways, both numerical and otherwise, of valuing, preserving, and rewarding the work of care that sustains our lives” (Nelson 2014, ix-x). Nevertheless, Feminist Economics as a field of study emerged with the edited volume Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics published in 1993, and subsequently, the journal Feminist Economics appeared in 1994. 

The volume shows that Feminist Economics challenges to mainstream economics, “not because economics is too objective but because it is not objective enough” (Ferber and Neslon 1993, 1). It argues that Feminist Economics can improve the objectivity of economic practices by including gender effects in economic thinking, focusing on “how economics could be improved by being freed from the straitjacket of masculine mythology” (Ferber and Neslon 1993, 8). Its objective was both theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, the volume shows how men have dominated the making of economics as a discipline from the classical to the contemporary theorization of the field. Feminist Economics declares that it tends to break this hegemony incorporating women’s voice in the discipline. Empirically, it shows that the standpoint from that traditional economists’ world view has been man-centric that either ignored or assumed facts about women and their works, which were not bolstered by empirical data. It further claims that the questions mainstream economics asked were so dominated by male understanding and patriarchal social norms that they either missed or ignored the crucial economic issues of equal pay for women and counted women’s unpaid care work. For example, they “ignore the socialization and education processes undertaken at home as well as the care from birth (or even from before birth, as in maternal health and nutrition) devoted to creating and developing a child’s capacities” (Ferber and Nelson 1993, 5). The essays of this volume also explain that men’s growth and the emergence of “economic man” was dependent on the nurture he got from women as an infant, care for his children, and promise to care for him in old age. They argue that a society cannot take these cares as a given.

Feminist Economics attempts to reshape the bias questions and ask the questions that remained excluded in the economic research. Diana Strassmann tells us the topics with which Feminist Economics is concerned and the questions it tends to ask in a recent interview with New Economic Thinking. She posits, “we want to measure human wellbeing…widespread care works, and care works’ interactions with the paid economy” (Strassmann 2020). She claims that without considering the economics of these works, the research in paid and unpaid sectors remains one-sided and less rigorous. For her, here, not only the unpaid women’s work is neglected, but the economics of earning women is misanalysed. According to Strassmann, Feminist Economics wants to ask: why are labor markets disaggregated? Why are women hired in specific jobs and not in others? How does that interact with social norms? Are not some occupations structured so that women cannot pursue them as the work condition does not fit with women’s social norms and their bodies and lives? Can we simply reduce them to women’s choices? What are the social, cultural, and structural factors that determine women’s eligibility for certain types of occupations?   

These questions and concerns may raise the question of how Feminist Economics differs from feminism and other relevant fields of study. Ferber and Nelson (1993) clarify that Feminist Economics is not an entirely new approach to the study of economics, and it is inherently intersectional. Although Feminist Economics approach challenges the inbuilt biases of scientific economic investigations, it does not reject them. Rather, it tends to find “a new conception of where such methods fit in the overall picture of human knowledge and a willingness to consider methods previously rejected, not because they were bad or ineffective but simply because they were perceived as feminine” (Ferber and Nelson 1993, 14).    

Feminist Economics has several perspectives; the central three include liberal feminist economics, constructivist feminist economics, and critical feminist economics. Liberal feminist economics focuses on gender equality through equal access to the labor market and institutions. It believes that if structures could be shaped in favor of women’s equal access and wages, individuals would realize their potentials, and gradually the berries of gender equality would be dissolved. Constructivist feminist economics concentrates on gender identities and gender performativity. They argue that gender identities influence economic decisions, structures, and processes. At the same time, processes and structures have repercussions on identities and other spheres. In the case of performativity, constructivist feminist economics is concerned if “women reproduce gender inequalities and stereotypes if they exercise a labor perceived as ‘female’ and thereby meet social expectations” (Urban and Pürckhauer 2016). Finally, critical feminist economics, dominated by Marxist feminist economists, focuses on the role of material foundations to understand inequalities. Marxist feminist scholars like Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa began debates on women’s unpaid reproductive labor and its relations in the production process; an integral aspect of the debate was to critique the Marxist labor theory of value, which does not account for the reproductive labor carried out by women (Urban and Pürckhauer 2016). They consider homework in the context of exploitative labor relations. They argue for the incorporation of reproductive labor in the capitalist production process. However, Marxist feminist scholars believe that “women’s liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the capitalist systems in which they contend much of women’s labor is uncompensated” (Feruson, Hennessy, and Nagel 2019).

Nevertheless, Feminist Economics is a well-grounded sub-field in the study of economics. Nancy Folbre (2009) argues that Feminist Economics, with a host of other approaches, substantially contributed to the changing nature of the discipline by facilitating a better understanding of the ways in which “individuals come to identify with and care for, others…challenging the conventional assumption that self-interest is just another word for selfishness” (Folbre 2009, 306). Folbre maintains that Feminist Economics research mainly contributes to drawing attention to the inherent intellectual bias in the discipline and resists the disciplinary bias in the data collection and research in viewing “family as an idealized, moral, feminine, non-economic realm.” It places the sexual wage inequality in the center of the economic debates, looking not at the effect of that, but unraveling their causes. Folbre further claims that Feminist Economics did not attempt to replace the rational economic man with irrational loving women but wanted to develop a broader perspective—economics for humans. She is optimistic that “feminist economics with roots in both the individualist and social traditions can flourish in the new terrain of institutional and behavioral economics” (Folbre 2009, 319).

(See Economic Reason, Primitive Accumulation, Social Reproduction)

Bibliography

Ferber, Marianne A., and Julie A. Nelson, eds. Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Ferguson, Ann, Rosemary Hennessy, and Mechthild Nagel. “Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/feminism-class/ (retrieved on May 2, 2021).

Folbre, Nancy. Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Nelson, Julie A. “Feminist Economics.” In The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, edited by Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume. DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_2210-1, 2008.

Nelson, Julie A. “Foreword.” In Counting on Marilyn Waring: New Advances in Feminist Economics, edited by Margunn Bjørnholt and Ailsa McKay. Bradford: Demeter Press, 2014.

Strassmann, Diana. “What is Feminist Economics?” November 18, 2020. Institute for New Economic Thinking. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/videos/what-is-feminist-economics (retrieved on April 18, 2021).

Urban, Janina, and Andrea Pürckhauer. “Feminist Economics.” December 18, 2016. https://www.exploring-economics.org/en/orientation/feminist-economics/ (retrieved on May 1, 2021).