Yesterday, I listened to Doug Henwood's radio show [1] which featured a long interview with feminist theorist Nancy Fraser. In it, she elaborated, among other things, her take on Polanyi's Great Transformation, which has been used, also on nettime, to frame the current crisis. I found her quite interesting, since her approach is both appreciative and critical of Polanyi.
[1] http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S170112 A quick search showed that her argument was developed in a 2013 article in the New Left Review: A Triple Movement? Parsing The Politics Of Crisis After Polanyi. It bares quoting her take at length, because it addresses also some of the unease Polanyi generated on nettime. Immediately before this quote, Fraser ask why no "protective movement" has emerged against the ravages of "marketization" (as Polanyi would have predicted) and then goes through a list of conventional reasons: lack of leadership, financialization, globalization. All of which leave her unconvinced. <quote> Whenever a question stubbornly resists sustained interrogation, it is worth considering whether it may have been wrongly posed. When we ask why there is no double movement in the 21st century, we repeat a familiar counterfactual gesture—as in, why were there no socialist revolutions in the advanced industrial states of the capitalist core? The problem here is clear: focusing on what is absent, we ignore that which is present. Suppose, however, that we re-cast our inquiry in a more openended way, by examining the grammar of really existing social struggles in the decades following publication of The Great Transformation? To this end, let us consider the vast array of social struggles that do not find any place within the scheme of the double movement. I am thinking of the extraordinary range of emancipatory movements that erupted on the scene in the 1960s and spread rapidly across the world in the years that followed: anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-war, the New Left, secondwave feminism, lgbt liberation, multiculturalism, and so on. Often focused more on recognition than redistribution, these movements were highly critical of the forms of social protection that were institutionalized in the welfare and developmental states of the postwar era. Turning a withering eye on the cultural norms encoded in social provision, they unearthed invidious hierarchies and social exclusions. For example, New Leftists exposed the oppressive character of bureaucratically organized social protections, which disempowered their beneficiaries, turning citizens into clients. Anti-imperialist and anti-war activists criticized the national framing of first-world social protections, which were financed on the backs of postcolonial peoples whom they excluded; they thereby disclosed the injustice of ‘misframed’ protections, in which the scale of exposure to danger—often transnational—was not matched by the scale at which protection was organized, typically national. Meanwhile, feminists revealed the oppressive character of protections premised on the ‘family wage’ and on androcentric views of ‘work’ and ‘contribution’, showing that what was protected was less ‘society’ per se than male domination. lgbt activists unmasked the invidious character of public provision premised on restrictive, hetero-normative definitions of family. Disability-rights activists exposed the exclusionary character of built environments that encoded able-ist views of mobility and ability. Multiculturalists disclosed the oppressive character of social protections premised on majority religious or ethnocultural self-understandings, which penalize members of minority groups. And on and on. In each case, the movement criticized an aspect of the ‘ethical substance’—Sittlichkeit—that informed social protection. In the process, they forever stripped the term ‘protection’ of its innocence. Aware that a wage could serve as a resource against domination premised on status, these movements were naturally wary of those who idealized protection and demonized markets. Demanding access, as opposed to protection, their paramount aim was not to defend ‘society’ but to overcome domination. Nevertheless, emancipatory movements were not proponents of economic liberalism. Having broken ranks with ‘society’, they did not on that account become partisans of ‘economy’. Aware that marketization often served more to re-function than to eliminate domination, they were instinctively sceptical, too, of those who touted the ‘self-regulating’ market as a panacea. Wary of efforts to totalize marketization, they claimed the freedom of contract not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to emancipation, broadly conceived. In general, then, the social movements of the postwar era do not fit either pole of the double movement. Championing neither marketization nor social protection, they espoused a third political project, which I shall call emancipation. Occulted by Polanyi’s figure, this project needs to be given a central place in our efforts to clarify the grammar of social struggle in the 21st century. I propose, accordingly, to analyse the present constellation by means of a different figure, which I call the triple movement. Like Polanyi’s figure, the triple movement serves as an analytical device for parsing the grammar of social struggle in capitalist society. But unlike the double movement, it delineates a three-sided conflict among proponents of marketization, adherents of social protection and partisans of emancipation. The aim here is not simply greater inclusiveness, however. It is rather to capture the shifting relations among those three sets of political forces, whose projects intersect and collide. The triple movement foregrounds the fact that each can ally, in principle, with either of the other two poles against the third. __Political ambivalence To speak of a triple movement is to posit that each of its three constituent poles is inherently ambivalent. We can already see, contra Polanyi, that social protection is often ambivalent, affording relief from the disintegrative effects of markets upon communities, while simultaneously entrenching domination within and among them. But the same is true of the other two terms. Marketization may indeed have the negative effects Polanyi stressed. But as Marx appreciated, it can also beget positive effects, to the extent that the protections it disintegrates are oppressiveas, for example, when markets in consumer goods are introduced into bureaucratically administered command economies, or when labour markets are opened to those who have been involuntarily excluded from them. Nor, importantly, is emancipation immune from ambivalence, as it produces not only liberation but also strains in the fabric of existing solidarities. Even as it overcomes domination, emancipation may help dissolve the solidary ethical basis of social protection, thereby clearing a path for marketization. Seen this way, each term has both a telos of its own and a potential for ambivalence which unfolds through its interaction with the other two terms. Contra Polanyi, therefore, the conflict between marketization and social protection cannot be understood in isolation from emancipation. Equally, however, subsequent conflicts between protection and emancipation cannot be understood in isolation from the mediating force of neoliberalization. A parallel critique can thus be made of emancipatory movements. If Polanyi neglected the impact of struggles for emancipation on conflicts between marketization and social protection, these movements have often neglected the impact of marketizing projects on their struggles with protectionist forces. We have seen that emancipatory movements challenged oppressive protections in the postwar era. In each case, the movement disclosed a type of domination and raised a claim for emancipation. However, these claims were also ambivalent—they could line up in principle either with marketization or with social protection. In the first case, where emancipation aligned with marketization, it would serve to erode not just the oppressive dimension, but the solidary basis of social protection simpliciter. In the second case, where emancipation aligned with social protection, it would not erode but rather transform the ethical substance undergirding protection. As a matter of fact, all of those movements encompassed both protectionist and marketizing tendencies. In each case, liberal currents gravitated in the direction of marketization, while socialist and socialdemocratic currents were more likely to align with forces for social protection. Arguably, however, emancipation’s ambivalence has been resolved in recent years in favour of marketization. Insufficiently attuned to the rise of free-market forces, the hegemonic currents of emancipatory struggle have formed a ‘dangerous liaison’ with neoliberalism, supplying a portion of the ‘new spirit’ or charismatic rationale for a new mode of capital accumulation, touted as ‘flexible’, ‘difference-friendly’, ‘encouraging of creativity from below’.9 As a result, the emancipatory critique of oppressive protection has converged with the neoliberal critique of protection per se. In the conflict zone of the triple movement, emancipation has joined forces with marketization to double-team social protection. </quote> In in this light, what is happening now, in the UK and US, is a teaming up of marketization and social protection (at least on the level of rhetoric) against emancipation. And it seems that quite a few people, when forced to choose between the two, chose protection over emancipation, particularly when emancipation meant emancipation of other people. all the best. Felix -- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
