On the Dialectics of Global Governance in the Twenty-first Century: A Polanyian Double Movement?

Abstract

Following decades of economic globalisation and market-oriented reforms across the world, Karl Polanyi's double movement has been invoked not only to explain what is happening but also to give reasons for being hopeful about a different future. Some have suggested a pendulum model of history: a swing from markets to society leading, in the next phase, to a swing from society to markets, and so on. The double movement can also be understood dialectically as a description of an irreversible historical development following its own inner laws or schemes of development. Going beyond a thesis–antithesis–synthesis pattern, I maintain that conceptions and schemes drawn from dialectics, and especially dialectical critical realism, can provide better geo-historical hypotheses for explaining past changes and for building scenarios about possible future changes. I analyse political economy contradictions and tendencies, and focus on normative rationality, to assess substantial claims about rational tendential directionality of world history. I argue that democratic global Keynesianism would enable processes of decommodification and new syntheses concerning the market/social nexus. A learning process towards qualitatively higher levels of reflexivity can help develop global transformative agency. Existing contradictions can be resolved by means of rational collective actions and building more adequate common institutions. These collective actions are likely to involve new forms of political agency such as world political parties.

EXTRACTO

Después de décadas de globalización económica y reformas orientadas al mercado en todo el mundo, el doble movimiento de Karl Polanyi ha sido invocado no solamente para explicar lo que está sucediendo sino también para proporcionar motivos para tener esperanza en un futuro diferente. Algunos han sugerido un modelo histórico pendular: un movimiento de los mercado a la sociedad que lleva, en su siguiente etapa, a un movimiento de la sociedad a los mercados y así sucesivamente. El doble movimiento puede también ser entendido dialécticamente como la descripción de un desarrollo histórico irreversible regido por sus propias leyes internas o esquemas de desarrollo. Pasando más allá del patrón tesis-antítesis-síntesis, se mantiene que concepciones y esquemas sacados de la dialéctica y, especialmente, del realismo dialéctico crítico, pueden proporcionar mejores hipótesis geo-históricas para explicar cambios pasados y para la creación de escenarios para posibles cambios futuros. Se analizan contradicciones y tendencias de economía política con un enfoque en racionalidad normativa para evaluar posiciones substanciales sobre la tendencia de la direccionalidad de la historia del mundo. Se argumenta que el Keynesianismo democrático global permitiría un proceso de des-comodificación y una nueva síntesis en materia de la relación mercados/social. Un proceso de aprendizaje hacia niveles cualitativamente más elevados de reflexión puede contribuir al desarrollo de una agencia de transformación global. Las contradicciones existentes pueden ser resueltas mediante acciones racionales colectivas y la creación de instituciones comunes más adecuadas. Estas acciones colectivas podrán muy seguramente involucrar nuevas formas de agencias políticas tales como partidos políticos mundiales.

Keywords:

• contradiction
• critical realism
• market
• political economy
• scenario
• utopia

Notes

1 The following will be briefly discussed in this paper: Blyth (2002), Burawoy (2010), Cox (1996), Dale (2012), Gill (2008), Gills (2008), Lie (1991), Maertens (2008), Meier (2008), Munck (2007), and Silver and Arrighi (2003). My aim, however, is to develop the idea of double movement further.

2 It is often forgotten that the central concepts and categories of dialectics are metaphorical extensions of dialektikē tekhnē, the ancient Greek art and craft of persuasion and argumentation. Also in contemporary contexts of dialogue, debates, and processes of collective will-formation, involving political struggles, this basic scheme can be used fruitfully for the purpose of rationally reconstructing the ways in which arguments are built and actors are positioning themselves. See Rescher (1977) and Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984, 2004). The scheme ‘thesis & antithesis → synthesis’ can be a helpful way of thinking about various other processes as well. The tripartite dialectical scheme is applied to the Polanyian double movement, for example, by Cox (1996).

3 See also Polanyi's later works on tribal economies and early civilizations, such as the volume edited by Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson (1957, and esp. Chap. XII by Polanyi himself). Polanyi stressed that only a few societies in the universe of all societies have been characterized by markets.

4 In spite of the overall positive Mortality Revolution of the nineteenth century Britain and other countries, urban life expectancy initially dropped quite significantly, especially among the slum dwellers and factory workers. Life expectancy in the cities was far lower than in the surrounding countryside (Szreter & Mooney, 1998). Also the mean height of men declined in this period (Komlos, 1998). Thus arguably human degradation in the early industrial period was absolute; but see also note 7.

5 Even in Polanyi's own formulation there is a risk of reading the present into the past (cf. note 6). The fully fledged doctrine of price mechanism as the meeting of independently operating supply and demand originates in the second half of the nineteenth century. This doctrine rose with value subjectivism, which was adopted and developed by neoclassical economists.

6 Polanyi criticises the Whig interpretation of history (cf. Butterfield, 1950) as linear long-term progress towards the nineteenth century market society. Polanyi's (Polanyi, 1957, p. 45) criticism still applies to neoclassical economics. The standard reply by neoclassical economists tends to rely on Milton Friedman's instrumentalism: all assumptions are false anyway; what matters, is whether the theory can ‘predict’ (e.g. Rottenberg, 1958). Thus North (1977) maintains that the logic of the Economic Man can be expanded (by taking into account side payments, etc.) to ‘predict’ (i.e. postdict) at least some of the principles of earlier societal forms. See also McCloskey (1997) for a cavalier dismissal of Polanyi's account on the basis of an appeal to one authority (Philip Curtin) and a very brief discussion of classic Mayan civilization before 800 AD.

7 Accounts vary and have changed over time on what happened to the material standards of living of working people in the early phase of industrialisation from the 1790s to mid-1800s (cf. the optimism of Lindert & Williamson, 1983 vs. the pessimism of Feinstein, 1998). Polanyi (1957, p. 129) was not concerned only with aspects such as wages or life expectancy. Citing Robert Owen, he maintained that poor people's situation in the first half of the nineteenth century was ‘infinitely more degraded and miserable than [it] was before the introduction of those manufactories’. Even though the employed workers might have been somewhat better off financially, in terms of their social environment, neighbourhood, standing in the community and craft (skills), the new situation compared very unfavourably.

8 This conflation is understandable given Polanyi's aim to explain the rise of fascism and national-socialism. However, as one of the anonymous referees of this paper stated, there is an important conceptual difference between the politics of conservative social protection (expressed as protectionism), and the politics of de-commodification (which has, at times, been the driving force of ‘anti-market’ and later ‘anti-globalization’ or ‘alter-globalization’ political struggle). Polanyi lumps together all contra-free-market developments (see 1957, p. 144). Polanyi (1957, 144) lumps together contra-free-market developments together: ‘When around the 1870s a general protectionist movement—social and national—started in Europe … ’ See also the long list of different measures and phenomena thereafter (including what many Marxists would call expressions of monopoly capitalism).

9 For an explanation of the First World War along these political economy lines, see Patomäki (2008), Chapters 2 and 3.

10 Polanyi (1957, p. 148) calls their interpretation as ‘the legend of antiliberal conspiracy’, according to which it is ideological preconceptions or narrow group interests, or ‘impatience, greed, and short-sightedness’ (p. 142), which are to be blamed for the rise of social protection at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. In contrast, after having discussed this issue at some length, Polanyi concludes that ‘everything tends to support the assumption that objective reasons of stringent nature forced the hands of the legislators’ (p. 148).

11 Many neoclassical economists maintain that currently prevailing ‘modern’ economic theories have been a rational response to the problems of Keynesianism. The critics of neo-liberalism disagree with this story, of course, but they do not provide a shared single interpretation to replace it. The French regulation school equate Keynesianism with the Fordist regime of accumulation and neo-liberalism with post-Fordism, presupposing the classical Marxist base/superstructure distinction (e.g. Amin, 1994; Boyer & Durand, 1997; and Tonkiss, 2006, Chap. 4). Harvey (2005) attributes neo-liberalism to an ideological attempt to restore the position of upper classes, while Gowan (1999) focusses more on a related to restore the position of Britain and the USA in the world economy. These are at best partial accounts, and ‘post-Fordism’ is more a result of the hegemony of neoliberalism than its explanation.

12 Kalecki (1943) famously argued that the business leaders and capitalists tend to wish to create circumstances in which policies depend on their confidence; the scope of free markets are maximised; and hierarchical power-relations in the workplace are ensured. They are willing to do this in spite of the real (but contested) macroeconomic effects of their preferred free-market policies (less growth, more unemployment and inequality, and more volatility, turbulence and crises).

13 The relatively recent rise to prominence of the term ‘governance’ is closely associated with the market-oriented theories, stories and blueprints of neoliberalism (e.g. Taylor, 2002), and more generally with the prevailing geo-historical formation that Foucault (1991) has labelled as ‘governmentality’. Aware of the risk of reifying neo-liberalism, I will rather use other related concepts whenever appropriate, such as arrangement, government, organization, and rule.

14 In Patomäki (2011) I ask: how would it be possible to combine (i) the capacity to establish an overall, binding direction to the activities of the party with (ii) a democratic process of will-formation that also maximises its learning capacity?

15 Strategies must be reflexively context-specific. In the aftermath of the Asian crisis, and the rise of the World Social Forum, I argued with Teivo Teivainen that by tackling important aspects of the power of finance and by creating democratic forums and new public sources of finance, the world political context can change. Relieving debt and reducing the effects of short-term finance on the policies of states would make a number of states more autonomous; while UN reforms would become more likely once new sources of funding the UN system have been institutionalised (Patomäki & Teivainen, 2004). All these reforms are still needed, yet by mid-2010s the world-political context has changed, not least in terms of potential transformative agency.

16 For instance, Sweden in the 1960s and early 1970s reveal processes of ethico-political learning and unlearning; responses to various local problems and skirmishes; and the ideals of the socialist emancipatory project; led in many places to aspirations to move beyond that model. This happened at the time when the intrinsic and extrinsic conditions of social-democratic power-mobilisation were already rapidly changing (Patomäki, 2000, pp. 125–128; Ryner, 2002).

Additional information

Heikki Patomäki is a professor of world politics at the University of Helsinki. Patomäki's research interests include philosophy and methodology of social sciences, political economy, futures studies, peace research and global political theory. His most recent books in English are The great Eurozone disaster: From crisis to global new deal (Zed Books, 2013) and The political economy of global security (Routledge, 2008). Previously Patomäki has worked as a professor of world politics and economy at the Nottingham Trent University, UK and as a professor of globalisation and global institutions at the RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia. In 2012 he was a visiting professor at the Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan.