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KM: Book review of "From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization"

This paper aims to reconsider Polanyi's approach to money. His best-known writing on money uses is deeply original and presents strong insights that dissociate money from the concept of the market. Polanyi also developed an interesting non-dichotomous understanding of money in hisThe great transformation. However, taken together, these two contributions lead to some unresolved questions: his critique of the orthodox approach to money is ambivalent; his argument to separate payment from...

Economist Guy Standing explains how millions of people are in the precariat, and in defining this emerging class, points to the dangerous political and social consequences as well as the exciting progressive revival that this class could produce.

The work of Karl Polanyi has gained in influence in recent years to become a point of reference to a wide range of leading authors in the fields of economics, politics, sociology and social policy. Newly available in paperback, this volume is a combination of reflections on, and assessment of, the nature of Polanyi's contribution and new strands of work, both theoretical and empirical, that has been inspired by Polanyi's insights. It gathers together the key contributions to the first ever...

We review here recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance, listing its achievements, shortcomings, and prospects, while referring back to the discipline's founders a century ago. We take our departure from the work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, both of whom combined openness to ethnographic research with a vision of world history as a whole. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields and marginal debates. The anthropological...

This study develops a Polanyian perspective on income inequality in advanced capitalist countries. Polanyi's historical account of the rise and fall of classic liberalism in Britain illustrated how social groups and society at large devised "protective institutions" to shield themselves from socially destructive market forces. Recent qualitative applications of this idea identify three protective institutions as being the most important - the public sector economy, trade unions, and the...

Following decades of economic globalisation and market-oriented reforms across the world, Karl Polanyi'sdouble movementhas 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...

Marx and Polanyi both held that socialism, in one form or another, was a preferable and possible alternative to capitalism. Their ideas are seen to offer theoretical tools to understand the tensions and contradictions of capitalism, and to inform ways to overcome them. This paper discusses Polanyi's work from a Marxist perspective in order to illuminate his strengths and weaknesses. Its main focus is to discuss Polanyi's juxtaposing of commodification against exploitation, in diagnosing the...

The classical conceptualization of the working class, of workers’ collective action and, especially, of trade unionism, was implicitly or explicitly based on the Standard Employment Relationship that, for a few decades, has been dominant in North America, Europe, Japan and Australasia. The ‘classical’ model of collective bargaining, which has shaped the world's traditional labour movements, was based on this conceptualization. However, it is now increasingly undermined by the rapid spread of...

The recent upsurge in workers’ struggles globally has bought labour again to the forefront, despite predictions that the working class was no longer relevant as a force for social transformation. Neoliberal globalization, with the hypermobility of capital, has led to the emergence of new forms of flexible work/labour, the co-existence of old and new working classes, and an extreme rise in inequality, realigning class structures nationally and globally. Financialization has ushered in a new...

The crisis of neoliberal globalization has led many scholars back to Karl Polanyi in their search for alternatives to the present malaise. The dominant reading appropriates the concepts of embeddedness and the double movement in support of a system of regulated, welfare-state capitalism. This article contends, however, that the concepts of embeddedness and the double movement point not towards the need to regulate capitalist markets, but towards the radical supersession of capitalism itself.

Is there a labour movement in China? This contribution argues that China does not have a labour movement, but that contestation between workers, state and capital is best characterized as a form of ‘alienated politics’. Widespread worker resistance is highly effective at the level of the firm because of its ability to inflict losses on capital and disrupt public order. But authoritarian politics in China prevent workers from formulating political demands. Despite the spectacular repressive...

This article argues for the primacy of class relations and struggles as determinants of developmental processes and outcomes, emphasizing the evolving, dialectical nature of these relations. It does so by providing a case study of export horticulture in North-east Brazil. It documents how the region's rural trade union has been able, through mobilizing its membership base, to achieve significant improvements in their livelihoods, pay and conditions. It also shows how the region's employers...

This article sets out a framework for analysing the globalizing labour process, arguing that the old dualisms of ‘capital’ versus ‘labour’ and ‘formal sector’ versus ‘informal sector’ are inadequate and unhelpful. It begins by making conceptual distinctions between work and labour and between labour and labour power, and goes on to identify a globalizing class structure in which a ‘precariat’ is emerging as a potentially transformative new mass class. Denied so-called ‘labour rights’ and...

The food-energy-climate change trilemma refers to the stark alternatives presented by the need to feed a world population growing to nine billion, the attendant risks of land conversion and use for global climate change, and the way these are interconnected with the energy crisis arising from the depletion of oil. Theorizing the interactions between political economies and their related natural environments, in terms of both finitudes of resources and generation of greenhouse gases, presents...

Capitalism is the only complex system known to us that can provide an efficient and innovative economy, but the financial crisis has brought out the pernicious side of capitalism and shown that it remains dependent on the state to rescue it from its own deficiencies. Can capitalism be reshaped so that it is fit for society, or must we acquiesce to the neoliberal view that society will be at its best when markets are given free rein in all areas of life? The aim of this book is to show that...

Through a framework drawn from Karl Polanyi's substantivist theorization of economic practices, this paper evaluates the quest for equitable urbanization in Chongqing, a major city-region in south-western China. Illuminating the tensions arising from two interrelated reforms, namely the ambitious attempt to construct 40 million m2of public rental housing between 2010 and 2012, and the large-scale drive to ensure peasant migrants enjoy equal access to social benefits as current urban...

Karl Polanyi's concept of a "double movement" has been used to describe the protectionist measures taken by governments to mitigate damage caused by the expansion of markets. Through a lens of political economy and historical institutionalism, this article uses Polanyi's framework to examine competing notions of the public interest as exemplified by the socially constructed nature of American and British broadcasting and the legitimating discourse that produced divergent outcomes. A...

The period leading up to and following the global financial crisis has been characterized by rising global financial diversity and multipolarity, a process underscored by the growth of so-called sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). To date there has not been any systematic examination of the interactions between this rising global financial diversity and national economic institutional diversity. Here I apply an institutional 'comparative capitalisms' perspective to the analysis of Gulf...

In the work of Karl Polanyi, the negative effects of a self-regulating market economy are described as being limited by societal forces such as the policies of the welfare state. With the decline of the modern welfare state since the late 1970s, social activities of business firms are increasingly regarded as an important complement to or even as a substitute for welfare state policies by a part of the literature. However, and controversially, another stream of argumentation regards these...