In Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Polanyi, 2001), he describes what he terms the “double movement”. Within the critical domains of state, market, and society, Polanyi asserts that there are movements and counter-movements between regulation and deregulation as they apply to market forces, and their effect on human society and the physical environment. To paraphrase Polanyi, the double movement is firstly the push for economic liberalism, aimed at the establishment of a self-regulating market, followed by a counter movement of social protection aimed at the conservation of man and nature.

Using Polanyi’s work, we can identify periods of transformation and reformation, and the changes are seismic in their effects. The first movement ushered in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 (Archives, n.d.), which penalised the poor. It forced people into workhouses if they could not find other work in the urban factories of the industrial revolution, which had begun some seventy years prior.

In the sixty years following the Poor Law Amendment Act, mercantilism was replaced by “the market”, and a new ‘market utopia’ was globally expanded through colonialism. Utilitarianism dominated public debate, with some arguing that an unfettered market achieves the greatest good for the greatest number, by allowing the free-market to ‘correct’ wage levels. During this time, labour becomes a commodity, and ‘the market’ is increasingly disembedded from society.

From the 1890’s to the beginning of the World War II, socialism attempts to counter the harm done to society by laissez-faire capitalism. In other words, it tried to re-embed the market into society through the protection of labour and wages; to create a ‘welfare state’ for the destitute; and enact measures to improve the cruel, dangerous, and dehumanising workhouse and factory conditions.

The nadir of this first double movement was the second world war. Its zenith was the Bretton Woods conference. Bretton Woods helped to stabilise the world economy and created a charter that sought to “improve labour standards, economic advancement and social security” for all (Archive, 2009). A generation later, populations lifted out of gross exploitation and conflict, found their memories of hardship fading. From the Nixon Shock of 1971 to the Washington Consensus, the first movement of the second double movement began.

The Washington Consensus (Anon., 2014) brought utilitarian ethics back into public debate, and our contemporary era of neoliberalism again disembedded the market from society. Laissez faire was back in fashion. By the late 1980s, welfare reform and privatisation sought to dismantle state institutions in the belief that a free market is best, and that smaller government improved efficiency and competition. Privatisation ‘trimmed the fat’, and labour unions were greatly weakened.

Through coercion and violence, the United States under President Ronald Reagan, spread the neoliberal dogma, particularly in Latin America. Milton Friedman replaced John Maynard Keynes as the new superstar of economic theory, and the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously declared “there is no such thing as society”.

The International Monetary Fund furthered the liberalising of free market utopianism globally, by stipulating conditionalities on loans that ensured nations needing assistance had no choice but to liberalise and privatise much of their state services and enterprises. Technological advances gave velocity and immediacy to globalised trading networks and communications.

Until the 1999 World Trade Organisation’s Ministerial Conference in Seattle, dissent against the ills of global neoliberalism had been weak and marginalised. By 1999, the negative effects of globalisation, the excesses of finance, and the increasing exploitation of labour and the environment, catalysed into a violent protest at the World Trade Organisation’s conference. Frustrations that had been simmering erupted, and a militarised police force responded with rubber bullets, tear gas, and multiple arrests (Smith, 2014). No significant or lasting changes were made to correct the capitalist class’s assault on the working class, the lower middle class, or the environment.

Since then, despite poverty reduction in developing countries, inequality has risen. Downward pressure on wages continue, environmental degradation is at crisis levels in many parts of the world, and global climate change is of great concern to us all.

Irrational market forces allow boom-bust cycles on Wall Street, placing those without capital ever at the mercy of wealthy speculators. Movements such as Occupy Wall Street, and even acts of terrorism such as 9/11, represent the counter-movement against globalised neoliberalism.

The rise in nationalistic populist movements expose deepening frustrations in many parts of the world, and the discourse around what Polanyi calls fictitious commodities – labour, land, and money – is changing. One can only hope that the result will be a more just and humane society, and at a pace that society can cope with, for long term social and environmental benefit.

 

References

Anon., 2014. Washington Consensus. [Online]
Available at: http://internationalrelations.org/washington-consensus/
[Accessed 11 April 2018].

Archives, T. N., n.d. 1834 Poor Law. [Online]
Available at: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/1834-poor-law/
[Accessed 10 April 2018].

Archive, U. D. o. S., 2009. The Bretton Woods Conference, 1944. [Online]
Available at: https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/wwii/98681.htm
[Accessed 10 April 2018].

Parliament, U., n.d. Parliament UK. [Online]
Available at: https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/19thcentury/overview/poorlaw/
[Accessed 10 April 2018].

Polanyi, K., 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 2nd Paperback ed. Boston: Beacon Press.

Smith, N., 2014. The Atlantic. [Online]
Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-dark-side-of-globalization-why-seattles-1999-protesters-were-right/282831/
[Accessed 10 April 2018].