Moral Economy Strikes Back - Polanyi's Countermovements in the Age of Neo-Liberalism

The rise of reactionary political movements and support for reactionary political parties and politicians has been on the rise in recent decades: among others, the National Front in France, Law and Justice in Poland (with their ensuing anti-democratic policies), Vladimir Putin and his siloviki ruling circle, UKIP, India’s BJP, and the increasingly reactionary turn in the American Republican Party (including the Tea Party and the candidacies of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz).  Left-wing movements and parties have been less apparent, although OWS, the Indignados movements in Europe and Mexico, Podemos, Syriza, and Bernie Sanders and Francois Hollande reveal that there is some foundation for left-wing mobilization. Instead of unique political tendencies on a individual-country basis, it seems we have the phenomenon of a global “wave” (cf. Goldstone 1991) of contentious, right-leaning politics in recent years. How might we make sense of this global wave, and then reconcile what seems to be a global trend with some variation with some country-level variation?

            A sensible first answer is that this wave is a response to the global neoliberal project of taming states and transferring economic wealth and political power to an increasingly unaccountable and transnational oligarchy. Yet positing this correlation does not provide any sense of causation. In this paper, we formulate an initial exploration into an intriguing causal dynamic: we are witnessing the second half of a Polanyian (1944) “double movement” (the “countermovement), in which broad swathes of the populations of various countries affected by global neoliberalism bite back against increasing exploitation and disempowerment. As Polanyi claimed, the combination of elite-influenced state policies and global market forces create market societies, and eventually this triggers a “countermovement,” often of a reactionary nature, in which non-elite actors attempt to re-embed economies in social norms (akin to remaking a moral economy). We thus argue for a return to Polanyi’s framework, with amendments to more problematic facets, e.g. reifying “society” and assuming functionalism in his double movement argument. In doing so, we also propose a set of measures that, when operationalized, should be able to show the double movement (increasing effects of global neoliberalism, then the emergence of the countermovement).

            We accept that more recent models from political science and political sociology remain quite relevant: the capacity of contentious elites and affected populations to mobilize, and the direction such mobilization takes (e.g. progressive or reactionary, broadly defined), are certainly functions of state capacities and political institutions, available resources (including marginal elites allying with these movements), and frames of interpretation and mobilization. We conclude our paper by suggesting that these models help explain variation across polities, e.g. variation in degree of mobilization and likelihood and strength of some political qualities over others (e.g. one country’s mobilization more reactionary than another). However, that structurally and institutionally conditioned variation arises out of a foundation of popular discontent that is well explained through a Polanyian framework.