State–peasant movement relations and the politics of food sovereignty in Mexico and Ecuador

This contribution argues that the articulation between the state and peasant organizations’ internal structures – the class characteristics of their mass bases, their leaderships and the modes of interaction between the two – is critical for determining the nature of contemporary struggles guided by the discourse of food sovereignty. It will show that that counter-hegemonic demands are not synonymous with counter-hegemonic practice; rather than struggling to replace the neoliberal food regime, many peasant organizations employ the food sovereignty discourse as a political tool in their negotiations with the state in order to access resources from within the prevailing neoliberal model, not to transform it.     

波兰尼与波普尔认识论思想之比较

科学的发展使得纯粹认识论的研究范式发生了改变,认知科学将传统的认识论研究日益推向技术化的向度。在研究论域上,波兰尼的默会认识论与波普尔的进化认识论都有其鲜明的特色和丰富的内容。二者的认识论都是20世纪物理学革命的产物,在哲学研究范式发生转向的背景下,他们的认识论对传统认识论的消解的同时,怀着深切的人文情怀,建构起新的科学认识论;在认识论模式的具体建构和话语表达上,他们的分歧是明显的。默会认识论与进化认识论的思想价值不容忽视,但也存在着一定的认识局限。     

The problem of Irish Unionism

The paper is a critique of a recent article by Luke Martell which attempted to set out a new, non-statist and non-coercive socialist agenda. The critique suggests that coercion and repression are probably inherent to the socialist project and that Martell's proposals fail to address this. It also takes issue with Martell's proposals for limiting the role of markets and for developing local forms of corporatist agencies. The assumption that market capitalism is in some way antithetical to communal morality is also challenged on the grounds that genuine communalism is likely to arise out of voluntary co-operation rather than state-sponsored initiatives and programmes.     

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: perverse effects,protectionism and Gemeinschaft

Abstract

Drawing upon Karl Polanyi's journalistic writings and unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, this article reconstructs the lineaments of his research programme that was to assume its finished form in The Great Transformation. It identifies and corrects a common misinterpretation of the thesis of that book, and argues that Polanyi's basic theoretical framework is best conceived as Tönniesian: market society is Gesellschaft, while the ‘protective counter-movement’ of The Great Transformation is Gemeinschaft, understood dynamically. It examines the two central mechanisms by which, in Polanyi's understanding, Gesellschaft broke down in the mid-twentieth century: the ‘clash between democracy and capitalism’ and the ‘perverse effects’ whereby political intervention in markets impairs profitability and saps the vitality of the market system.     

Problems and opportunities in Polanyian analysis today

Abstract

The three books under review in this article all demonstrate the beginnings of a shift in the tone of literature on or derived from the work of Karl Polanyi. On one hand, the authors all show a willingness to admit a variety of problems and weaknesses in his work. But on the other hand, it is precisely this degree of critical introspection that enables the authors under review to identify some of the most important and contemporarily relevant aspects of Polanyi's thought. In the two main sections of this article – on Polanyi's concepts of ‘embeddedness’ and ‘double movement’ – I define the problems highlighted in previous iterations of Polanyian literature, moving on to examine how the texts under review address those problems, laying particular emphasis on the ideational components of Polanyi's thought. I conclude by suggesting future directions for Polanyian scholarship, mooting the possibility of a distinctively ‘post-Polanyian’ perspective in which ideas, discourse and framing are placed centre stage.     

The iron law of democratic socialism: British and Austrian influences on the young Karl Polanyi

Abstract

A central thesis of Karl Polanyi's The great transformation concerns the tensions between capitalism and democracy: the former embodies the principle of inequality, while democracy represents that of equality. This paper explores the intellectual heritage of this thesis, in the ‘functional theory’ of G.D.H. Cole and Otto Bauer and in the writings of Eduard Bernstein. It scrutinizes Polanyi's relationship with Bernstein's ‘evolutionary socialism’ and charts his ‘double movement’ vis-à-vis Marxist philosophy: in the 1910s he reacted sharply against Marxism's deterministic excesses, but he then, in the 1920s, engaged in sympathetic dialogue with Austro-Marxist thinkers. The latter, like Bernstein, disavowed economic determinism and insisted upon the importance and autonomy of ethics. Yet they simultaneously predicted a law-like expansion of democracy from the political to the economic arena. Analysis of this contradiction provides the basis for a concluding discussion that reconsiders the deterministic threads in Polanyi's oeuvre. Whereas for some Polanyi scholars these attest to his residual attraction to Marxism, I argue that matters are more complex. While Polanyi did repudiate the more rigidly deterministic of currents in Marxist philosophy, those to which he was attracted, notably Bernstein's ‘revision’ and Austro-Marxism, incorporated a deterministic fatalism of their own, in respect of democratization. Herein lies a more convincing explanation of Polanyi's incomplete escape from a deterministic philosophy of history, as exemplified in his masterwork, The great transformation.     

从波兰尼到格兰诺维特:“社会人”对“经济人”假设的反拨与超越——兼议新经济社会学的最新进展

作为西方经济学理论体系的硬核,“经济人”假设从形成起就不断受到“社会人”假设的反拨与挑战,促使经济学理论体系不断调整自己的保护带,推动整个经济学学科理论的发展。波兰尼的“嵌入”理论对“经济人”假设的批判是颠覆性的。为后来的学者建构以“社会人”假设为基础的经济社会学理论做好了铺垫。格兰诺维特等建立的新经济社会学首先把人视为“社会人”,再考察其置身其内的社会关系和制度空间。进而分析其经济行为的激励因素,对传统的理性选择、效用驱动的经济模型所提出的那些理论进行补充解释甚至是替代解释。这种基于相同研究对象而引起的学科交流和对话已势在必行。     

Progressive Responses to Populism: A Polanyian Critique of Liberal Discourse

This article explores the recent rise of populist politics from the perspective of Karl Polanyi's theory of the ‘double movement’. It firstly introduces Polanyi's understanding of interwar populism, and relates this to his broader critique of liberal economic thought. This framework is then used to analyse three prominent explanations for populism which emerged in the wake of the UK's 2016 EU referendum: globalisation; cultural reaction; and social media. I show how each of these explanations exogenises contemporary populist movements, narrating them as something external to the liberal economic restructuring pursued globally since the 1980s. Failing to diagnose adequately the causes of contemporary populist movements, which lie in this utopian attempt to treat labour as a commodity, they cannot support an intellectually coherent progressive response to Brexit. Finally, I outline a political agenda centred on labour de‐commodification, which could directly address populist grievances and reclaim the discourse of ‘taking back control’ for the left.     

Polanyi in Brussels or Luxembourg? Social rights and market regulation in European insurance

The decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union to ban sex discrimination in insurance has shown the potential reach of the principle of non‐discrimination. This paper discusses the different positions taken by participants in the policy process leading up to the decision, in order to reveal the potential and limitations of non‐discrimination as the basis for market‐regulatory social policy. It is shown that the European Commission's initial support for prohibiting insurance discrimination faltered with the realization that the measure would have little efficacy as a distributive social policy. It was left to the Court to assert that non‐discrimination rights are constitutive for European markets, regardless of their functional and instrumental limitations. The Court's focus was on the market‐integrative potential of rights as sources of norms for the conduct of insurance relationships. It is argued that this form of constitutive regulation is distinct from distributive social policy as it does not require that outcomes are egalitarian, but, rather, that the processes governing market relations should respect fundamental rights.     

A Theoretical Note on Commodification of Labour Power in China and the Global Putting-Out System

This article captures China’s role in global manufacturing through the prism of conceptualisation of the commodification of labour power in Marxist theory. It argues that modalities of China’s labour force co-optation in assembly and lower value added production for export of consumer goods to advanced economies carries more of a family resemblance with putting-out systems of the pre-capitalist era than with the commodification of labour power sensu stricto marking the capitalist era from the mid-nineteenth century.