India's Double-Movement: Polanyi and the National Alliance of People's Movements

Through an examination of India's National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), the largest social movement alliance resisting neoliberal globalization in India, this paper attempts to theoretically reconstruct Polanyi's theory of (t the double movement" for the neoliberal age. Polanyi famously observed that early twentieth century liberal attempts to "dis-embed" the market from social controls created unprecedented social dislocations, leading to widespread protective (< countermovements "to "re-embed" the market within social constraints. I analyze the usefulness and shortcomings of Polanyi's formulation for understanding the current politics of neoliberal globalization. Specifically, I argue that Polanyi failed to explain how a "countermovement" is politically organized and did not develop an adequate theory for the anti-market countermovement he described. Using ethnographic observation ofNAPM's efforts to organize a national alliance against neoliberal globalization, I show how the nature of a "Polanyian" constituency creates previously untheorized obstacles for the effective political organization of a countermovement. These obstacles derive from inherent characteristics of a Polanyian constituency: 1) the economic and social diversity of—and therefore potential antagonism between—its prospective agents, who do not share similar relationships to the means of production, but only the common fact of being negatively affected by the market, and 2) the vastly different ways in which such diverse groups experience market displacements, leadings to a proliferation of single-issue movements whose commonality is hard to perceive and unity difficult to build.