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ABSTRACT
Karl Polanyi’s concept of the ‘double movement’ refers to a reciprocal dialectic between market forces and social protections for citizens. It concerns ongoing struggle against individualization of people’s lives under capitalist marketization – which continues today. While Polanyi focused on protective responses to deepening commodification of land, labor, and money across the 1840s–1940s century, the ‘double movement’ remains in force in the contemporary neo-illiberal era, with notable significance for agrarian transformations. This essay reviews adaptations by agrarian counter-movements, NGOs, and analysts to new pressures on producers, farmworkers, Indigenous peoples, and landscapes across the world, and various associated interpretations and analyses.
Acknowledgements
I thank two very helpful reviewers for their constructive suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Thomas Palley’s analysis linking this socio-political crisis to today: https://thomaspalley.com/?p=2280
2 E.g. Arrighi and Silver Citation1999; Silver and Arrighi Citation2003; McMichael Citation1999; Burawoy Citation2003; Patel Citation2009; Holt-Giménez and Shattuck Citation2011; Esteva, Babones, and Babcicky Citation2013; Hall Citation2013; Andrée et al. Citation2014; Vergara-Camus Citation2014; Streeck Citation2016; Collins Citation2017; Scott-Villiers and Hossain Citation2017; Mendell Citation2018; Brand, Görg, and Wissen Citation2020; Canfield Citation2022; Liu Citation2022.
3 See Halperin (Citation2004) for an alternative historical account of the genesis of The Great Transformation in long-term class restructuring, stemming from competition among ruling elites, and manipulations of ‘nationalism.’ Also see Halperin (Citation2018).
4 See, e.g. Escher et. al. on the new generation of rural development policies focusing on ‘opening and sustaining new circuits of the social and economic reproduction of peasants and family farmers, allowing them to remain viable as food producers, even in the face of adverse market conditions’ (Citation2018, 102).
5 ‘Discovery’ is open to interpretation, the most generic being that socializing the market stabilizes social life and civil rights. Burawoy interprets Polanyi’s ‘society’ as ‘active society which is always understood in its contradictory tension with the market … [in] reaction to the degradation brought about by the market’ (Burawoy Citation2003, 198, 253) – suggesting that social-democratic struggle under capitalism is endemic.
6 Polanyi preferred a democratic socialist ‘society,’ premised on elimination of land and labor markets (Lacher Citation1999), to ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie Citation1982).
7 See Patel and Goodman (Citation2020) for a critique of the politics of New Deal politics then and now.
9 By large agro-export powers, such as US and Europe, which subsidized (cheapened) food commodities for export, outcompeting local farmer produce and augmenting food-import dependencies (Rosset Citation2006).
10 A strict conception of the ‘double movement’ associated with the commodification/social protection dialectic would exclude focus on authoritarian populisms (cf., Scoones et al. Citation2018; Borras Citation2020). While their rural politics stem from (discriminatory) undermining of agrarian livelihoods and cohesion via the devastations of global capitalism, such movements’ reactionary political content is essentially geared to restorative cleansing 21st C ‘society,’ rather than remaking it as anti-capitalist and for social justice.
11 Even so, with digitalization, Varoufakis (Citation2021) argues ‘value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.’ Some data, though, is deployed for marketable information for producers and retailers.
12 Notably the G8/New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (2012), where 10 African states partnered with 100+ corporations to build growth corridors, corralling small producers into marketizing value chains.
13 Over a decade ago, while land’s commodity status remained somewhat ‘fictitious,’ remaining restrictions have been largely removed (Hall Citation2013, 111) – represented in the rise of digital fencing.
14 Even so, Brazil experienced an about-face by ex-transgenic crop farmers objecting to deepening dependency relations with Monsanto (Preschard Citation2012).
15 In the period 1990-2019, southern external debt rose on average from roughly 90 percent of GDP to 170 percent, with the pandemic accelerating the crisis (Monbiot Citation2022).
16 Alongside dismissive designation of ‘agroecology’ as ‘just one tool in the toolbox:’ in the US critique of the UN Committee on World Food Security’s 2019 HLPE report on Agroecological and Other Innovative Approaches, as ‘an explicit rejection of the very idea of progress.’ https://foodtank.com/news/2020/05/u-s-agribusiness-takes-aim-at-global-food-policy-reform/
17 Counter-movements may or may not be ‘spontaneous’ – depending on political landscapes, and solidarity of producers, workers, and Indigenous groups, for whom social contracts are wanting. Note that ‘peasant collaboration is as present and relevant as peasant resistance’ (Lapegna Citation2016, 166). These outcomes may depend on the relative strength and oversight of public institutions (Trauger, Claeys, and Desmarais Citation2017).
18 Polanyi’s daughter, who I had the pleasure to meet in 1996 at the 6th International Karl Polanyi Conference, Concordia University, Montreal.
19 A founding member of La Vía Campesina (LVC).
21 Compare Jakobsen (Citation2018, 8), and Baviskar and Levien (Citation2021, 1342) for alternate views on the middling-class ZBNF movement, which also overlaps with Modi’s Hindutva project (Borras Citation2020, 19; Khadse et al. Citation2018).
22 At present, beyond Indigenous rights issues, counter-hegemonic movements may lack for solidarity in context of neo-extractivism for hegemonic state populist ‘welfarism’ (Tilzey Citation2019).
23 Intensifying extractive assault on the commons marks a new ‘commodities consensus’ (Svampa Citation2015).
25 Cf., Peña (Citation2016), and Giunta (Citation2014) for complementary analysis of targeting state institutions.
26 Not unlike villagers forced from their land by manipulative ‘social engineering of extraction’ – used by the Indian Adani coal mining+ company, and sometimes channeled through village elites (Pariwal Citation2023).
27 Cf., Dale (Citation2018).
28 As elaborated by Antonio Gramsci (Citation1971).
29 Inverting this experience somewhat, Freshour and Williams (Citation2022) detail the recovery of place-based environmental justice by the Mississippi Black Freedom Movement.
30 Arguably, the phenomenon of ‘cheapening’ nature, women, work, care, and lives, addressed in Patel and Moore (Citation2017), underwrote the violent history of capitalist colonialism, neocolonialism, and provides a pedestal for socially violent ‘neoliberalism,’ or market fundamentalism, today.
31 https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/4/13/hmc-brazil-scrut/. A similar outcome in the Argentinian ‘soy boom’ has been documented sensitively by Leguizamón (Citation2020).
32 Founded on his rather ideal-typical anthropological comparison of ‘market society’ with pre-industrial societies submerging ‘economy’ in ‘social relationships’ – expressed in principles of ‘reciprocity,’ ‘redistribution’ and ‘householding’ (Polanyi Citation1957/1944, 46–53).
33 Colin Duncan develops this formulation as an antidote to the defining of modernity in industrial terms (Duncan Citation1996). See also Ajl (Citation2014).
34 See e.g. Bernstein Citation2016; Tilzey Citation2017; Levien, Watts, and Hairong Citation2018. Cf., Borras (Citation2023b, 4).
35 As a bridge, there is a notable connection between Polanyi’s ‘fictitious commodities,’ and Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism,’ where each exposes the ideological dimensions of capitalist ontology, with distinct but related understandings of its veiled forms of governing of social life.
36 See for instance Shattuck et al. Citation2023, 15; and McMichael Citation1997, Citation2013, Citation2022, Citation2023.
37 At the expense of a ‘territorial logic’ (Arrighi Citation1990). For elaboration, see Canfield (Citation2022).
39 McMichael (Citation2008).
40 With food as a ‘public good’ (Akram-Lodhi Citation2013, 156); and see https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-01-05/jose-luis-vivero-pol-treat-food-as-a-commons-not-a-commodity/).
41 E.g. ‘the commodification of land, labor and money is a process shaped by the relations between social classes, in particular contexts at particular times’ (Wolford and Nehring Citation2015, 219).
42 This holds of course for the more recent multi-class uprising against PM Modi’s attempt to (further) corporatize the Indian agrarian sector, which, arguably evokes ‘agrarian citizenship.’
43 Marx’s ‘method of political economy’ enjoins us to invert the historical succession of landed property to capital, to establish capital’s determinate role. However, ‘seeing like capital’ risks eliding agrarian practices, or life-worlds (McMichael Citation2013, 131–138).
44 And this invokes an alternative ‘agrarian question of food’ (McMichael Citation2009; Yaşin Citation2022).
45 Da Vià (Citation2012) documents such counter-movement solidarities under the radar of European Union regulations concerning the outlawing of use and sharing of local seeds, and solidarity with urban farmers’ markets.
46 Cf., McMichael (Citation2022, Citation2023).
47 Cf., Madelaine Moore’s comparison of movements against jurisdictional forms of water commodification, as instances of a global water grab, threatening social reproduction (Citation2023). And see: https://www.tni.org/en/publication/rivers-of-resistance
48 See Gaarde (Citation2017) for an ethnographic account of these institutional operations.
51 While appearing as populist self-representation, Wiebe’s quote qualifies producer movements as progressive, versus authoritarian, populism. Such ‘politics of appearances’ (Borras Jr. Citation2020, 7), are not necessarily class blind.
52 Orthodox critique tends to ignore this dimension of capitalism – in a strict class-analytic theme. Polanyi’s emphasis on commodification (rather than class exploitation per se) is critical here.
53 Polanyi’s representation of the original impact on European agriculturalists of substantial settler grain exports (Polanyi Citation1957/1944, 182).
54 Edelman (Citation2009). Note here ‘peasant’ refers to a size and activity range of producers, from self-provisioning through commodity producers to pluri-active households.
56 See also Wolford et al. (Citation2013) on impacts of varying authorities (and governance) within states.
57 Note that social protection for communities against predatory market relations does not necessarily end domination within them – articulated as a ‘triple movement’ to counter social hierarchies, in both economy and society (Fraser Citation2013). Such a ‘triple movement’ is especially manifest in the feminist focus on women’s emancipation in the food sovereignty movement, expressed in part in the CFS via the new Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZNIJAUNSRFXP9QMGQG2V/full?target=10.1080/21683565.2022.2091717 which CFS 50 (2022) failed to adopt: https://www.actionaidusa.org/cfs-50-was-completely-stalled-by-geopolitical-interests/. See also Lee (Citationforthcoming) on socialization of care and gendered social economy.
58 See Jakobsen (Citation2018, 5).
59 And protesting chemicalization of farming (Sethi Citation2021). Cf., Shattuck (Citation2021, 242).
60 Here, ‘expression’ refers to a protective counter-hegemonic protest, rather than a movement to reinvent ‘society’ in a democratic and redistributive socio-ecological transformation.
61 Triggering farmer-driven digital technology as the ‘double movement’ evolves (Wittman, James, and Mehrabi Citation2020).
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Philip McMichael
Philip McMichael is Professor Emeritus of Global Development at Cornell University. He has authored Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (Sage 1996–2021, 7th edition), award-winning Settlers and the Agrarian Question (Cambridge, 1984), Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (Fernwood, 2013), and edited Contesting Development. Critical Struggles for Social Change (Routledge, 2010). He works with/for the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism (CSIPM) in the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS).