All posts by IKPS

Deglobalization and the EU: In search of a new balance between markets and states

May 24, 2020DeglobalizationIKPS

Debate on Deglobalization

Deglobalization and the EU:
In search of a new balance between markets and states

25th of May, 2020

Anna Ząbkowicz, Maciej Kassner

To our knowledge, the term deglobalization was first coined by Walden Bello in the book Deglobalization. Ideas for a New World Economy (2002). The idea behind the concept is simple: global economy as we know it should be progressively dismantled and replaced with more local economic arrangements. The concept of deglobalization also takes us back to a half-forgotten essay by Karl Polanyi “Universalism or regional planning,” published in 1945 in the London Quarterly of World Affairs. Polanyi argues there that universalistic projects such as Soviet-style communism or American-style capitalism have failed and should give way to a new world order based on regional treaties, national planning, and managed trade. What we would like to propose here is a state-centered approach to the question of globalization and its possible reversal. If one practical effect of globalization is the weakening of the state, then a deglobalizing response should seek to restore the state’s capacity to regulate the economy. According to Bello, the best way to achieve this goal is to roll back economic integration and restore rigid economic controls. Alternatively, the states could cede some aspects of their formal sovereignty to a regional organization like the EU and develop the capacity to regulate the economy on a regional level. This strategy seems closer to Polanyi’s vision of regional economic planning.

Following in the footsteps of the Polish economist Władysław Szymański, we define globalization as the progressive diminishing of state power vis-à-vis transnational capital markets. With taxes and controls scaled down, they find themselves less and less autonomous in shaping their economic and social policies. The power of international financial markets, which constitutes the essence of globalization, derives from enhanced capital mobility, which although legally guaranteed by states, stems at the same time from the failure of international coordination. In Europe, many institutional changes that benefit capital at the expense of sovereign states have been introduced as part of the integration process. Nevertheless, we argue that regional integration and successful coordination offer a chance to re-empower governments.

The EU project is now facing increasing skepticism and resistance. However, further integration remains the main goal of European elites. It is hard to imagine that our current political leaders would suddenly change their minds. More importantly, even relatively poorer Europeans benefit from cheaper foreign products, holidays abroad, and other fruits of economic integration. Middle-class families tend to rely on foreign workers for care and domestic services, while the interests of the European working class are closely tied to export-oriented industries. Brexit notwithstanding, there is every reason to believe that economic integration enjoys much broader support in Europe than its opponents tend to assume.

Thus, rejecting economic integration in Europe is neither possible nor desirable. As it becomes increasingly clear, the crisis caused by the CORVID-19 pandemic actually calls for more cooperation at both global and regional level. Recovering from the economic shock will require a coordinated response similar to the Marshall Plan. Moreover, policies dealing with issues such as labor rights, climate change or tax evasion demand political action on international scale. By giving up certain attributes of formal sovereignty to the EU, its member states possibly reinforce their real sovereignty.

Two adjustments are necessary if the EU is to successfully deal with the above problems. First, the fundamental goal of the European project should be reconsidered. Instead of emancipating capital, the EU should aim to subordinate it to the needs of society. We need to rediscover the sources of European solidarity, which is rooted in the socialist heritage of the labor movement and the tradition of Christian social thought. The EU needs a common investment policy focused on a green transformation of the economy, as well as a common social policy centered around some version of universal basic income or guaranteed minimum income. Integration should be deeper, with the EU becoming a confederation of states.

Read the other essays on Deglobalization here:

Does the Covid-19 Crisis Lead the EU Towards De-Globalization?

May 23, 2020DeglobalizationIKPS

Debate on Deglobalization

Does the Covid-19 Crisis Lead the EU
Towards De-Globalization?

25th of May, 2020

Kurt Bayer

The deep economic crisis which follows the Pandemic exhibits some signs towards deglobalization: the recognition that the most important pharmaceutical base materials are produced in China and India; the fact that Europe has hardly any producers of the necessary protective equipment left; the break-up of global supply chains for European lead companies; the threat that falling stock prices might make it easier for foreign (esp. Chinese) „predators“ to buy up European high-tech firms; the recognition by the business and research community that lock-downs require virtual meetings to be held in spite of face-to-face meetings and that this new mode actually saves a lot of time and travel inconvenience; the need to cancel long-distance tourism patterns: all these might be interpreted as the previous neo-liberal model of cost-efficiency-driven globalization and capitalism having come to an (well-deserved) end.

More directly visible signs are the temporary lifting of the EU Stability and Growth Pact provisions by the EU, in order to enable governments to support workers and businesses from the effects of the lockdowns, as well as the EC Vice President Vestager‘s exhortation to EU governments to protect some of their essential businesses from being bought out by foreign firms by allowing the states to take equity positions in these firms. Suddenly, the role of government intervention is seen as essential for restoring economic growth.

In addition to these anti-crisis developments, there are some signs that EU officials and governments have begun to listen a little more to their citizens: the most recent trade agreements (with Japan and Mexico, for instance) do no longer insist on businesses being able to sue governments, they attempt to establish „fairer“ dispute settlement procedures and show small signs of including social and environmental criteria into the agreements.

The Covid-19 crisis makes some of these changes possible and strengthens them. However, many business leaders and politicians are already dreaming of re-establishing the previous order. Financial institutions are holding back on lending, despite extensive government guarantees. Some politicians argue that the commitments of the Paris Climate Agreement must be put behind the commitments to revive traditional growth.

But the crisis shows that previously unheard-of government interventions can be unleashed, even though priority is given by most countries to businesses, instead of workers. Some countries manage this balance better than others. This momentum could be used by the Left to regain hegemony over the sustainability discourse, that this is the time to combine the aid to business after lockdown with social and environmental targets, to replace the stranded carbon assets with investments promoting better working conditions and de-carbonized structures.

At present, citizens in Europe are speechless and frightened. But as soon as life comes back to life, they will be able to make themselves heard and fight the vested interests of the previous status quo. A more inclusive, sustainable degree of globalization for the EU might emanate from this difficult fight.

Read the other essays on Deglobalization here:

Return to a societal steered market economy – with new ecological and social development directions

May 23, 2020DeglobalizationIKPS

Debate on Deglobalization

Return to a societally steered market economy -
with new ecological and social development directions

25th of May, 2020

Dr. Rainer Land

1) Overcoming the global crises – human-made climate change, environmental and social crises, poverty, underdevelopment and inequality – requires a different kind of globalisation. Economic development would have to be geared globally to substantive goals, not to financial market gains.

There were societally steered market economies with development goals defined in terms of content: USA 1938 to 1968, Western Europe until 1968, Japan until 1989; today in China. An alternative globalization strategy must again be oriented to the model of a controlled market economy – with new and expanded goals. This does not require that the entire world community, currently comprising 193 states, agree on that but that the centres of economic development, China, the USA and the EU, must work together for mutual and shared benefit instead of fighting each other.

2) A controlled market economy is not a centrally administered economy; it presupposes goods and financial markets and independent enterprises (private and public, municipal, national and international), but steers innovation and investment in certain societally desired directions. It uses legal frameworks for this purpose and controls development using defined instruments: monetary and fiscal policy, credit management, exchange rate policy, innovation and industrial policy, science, wage policy, regional development, etc.

Guided economic development requires shared substantive goals, both nationally and globally. Ecological transformation and coping with climate change, social progress in the form of overcoming poverty, work with sufficient income, participation, health and social services, education – a better life for all. Decisions on economic development directions and the use of steering instruments must be based on these goals, which must be worked out in an open discourse, democratically decided and politically institutionalised. In a controlled market economy, framework conditions are designed in such a way that profits and returns on capital can only be achieved in accordance with such shared goals.

3) A comprehensive investment programme for a new globalisation strategy, oriented towards such goals, would be the starting point. A new, ecologically sound and societal progressive globalisation strategy requires an update of the regulatory system, an overcoming of the neo-liberal idea that economic development is determined by financial markets and shareholder value and cannot or must not be politically defined.

This requires a review of how historically successful steered market economies – the USA and Western Europe until 1973, Japan until 1989 and China today – have functioned or are functioning. Important points are: The regulation of financial markets and their subordination as serving the real economic development, controls on capital flow, regulation of exchange rates in a new international monetary system, participatory involvement of social groups (workers, environmental and consumer associations, regional actors) in long-term global investment programmes, public holdings in companies, management of ecological resources to ensure their conservation, use and reproduction, instruments of credit control, promotion of regional economic cycles and coordination with global cycles, regulation of the relationship between productivity and wage development.

4) Any economy that wants to steer economic development first needs a national steering system. This also applies to cooperative networks of economies that regulate and steer certain areas jointly, such as the euro zone, NAFTA, APEC, Brics and others. Only if the national regulatory systems work, economies are multinational or global capable of cooperation at all.

It is not a question of globalization versus de-globalization, but of other, societal desired directions of development instead of the dominant selection by financial markets.

5) To achieve this, one must not eliminate capital, but break the power of finance capital and neoliberal ideology. In doing so, one must include as allies companies and investors who can and want to make money with progressive developments.

At present, the change in the global balance of power necessary for this is not foreseeable. The USA and the EU continue to pursue a neoliberal strategy. The best that can be done today is to support the new Chinese globalization strategy, One Belt, One Road (The New Silk Road), to promote projects for the mutual and shared benefit of all and to participate in an ecologically and societally progressive orientation of this globalization strategy – instead of standing beside it as sceptical observers or trying to stop it. We need closer cooperation with China, because this is currently the only successful societally steered market economy with the experience and means to manage economic development on a global scale.

Read the other essays on Deglobalization here:

Three theses for our debate on Deglobalization

May 23, 2020DeglobalizationIKPS

Debate on Deglobalization

Three Theses for our debate on Deglobalization

25th of May, 2020

Judith Dellheim

(1) When, in the 1980s the mainstream publicly started to use the term “globalisation”, many economists had already observed:

a faster rise of foreign investment in relation to international trade,
an increasing relative independence of rising financial markets,
an expansion of business processes remaining within the bounds of one corporation with branches in different countries,
an increasing use of modern information and communication technologies,
a new mode of general business strategy primarily relying on flexibilization,
an on-going process of simultaneous liberalisation, commercialisation and privatisation of economic processes, to the detriment of the public sphere and the state,
an increasing role of transnational corporations in the national and world economy and an intensification of global competition.

Already in the 1960s, in the face of an emerging new international division of labour, theories of globalization had been formulated. The US and the European ex-imperial powers had found new strategies to subordinate former colonies and semi-colonies, especially by imposing transfers of cheap resources and knowledge from them. The same “globalizing forces” have been active in the Cold War, in order to destabilise the Soviet bloc. In this confrontative ‘system competition’ the very boundaries of global ecological sustainability were beginning to be systematically exceeded.

(2) The reality addressed by the first thesis makes it possible to identify the agency underlying and driving these developments: The “globalizing forces” have not been ‘subjects of strategies’, but actors/agencies serving the interests of the most powerful owners of transnational corporations and the most powerful actors on the financial markets. These actors cooperate with agencies of government, of politics, of the military/”security” apparatuses, of law, as well as of accounting and consulting services, of science, culture and media, of lobbying and even of civil society. This co-operation is itself contradictory: Conflicts do arise from the fact that specific subjects of co-operation do not represent all actors involved. However, their co-operation is a condition for the on-going accumulation of highly concentrated and centralized capital. These subjects of capital rule act globally and established the need for global rules on credit, free trade, protection of investment and intellectual property rights. At the same time, they tend to avoid these very rules whenever they could work against their own interest. This need underlies the history of such institutions as the WTO and the emergence of rising global problems.

Any Green New Deal or any comparable project aiming at a just resolution of global problems and a socially and ecologically sustainable development, has to deal with these forms of co-operation, i.e. with the underlying capitalist oligarchies – especially with their contradictory linkages with “the state” and supra-state institutions. Any new competitor (as a particular capital oligarchy or a country) has to submit to the rules of the game of free trade, protection of investment, intellectual property and “security”. This increases the global problems and provokes attempts to change the game.

(3) Globalisation as a growing interdependence of the world’s economies, brought about by international trade and flows of resources, investment, labour force, knowledge and information in the interest of the globally dominating forces (i.e. the capitalist oligarchies) therefore leads to social exclusion, to social, economic and ecological destruction, and to a special type of competitive regionalisation. A closer look at the processes referred to in our first thesis makes it obvious that technological, ecological and health disasters, social and political strife, trans- and international confrontations (including wars), and so-called ‘globalisation’ in its complex reality, are largely determined by capitalist oligarchies. They do, indeed, primarily shape economic and societal development in global industrial regions, but these are also modified by concrete outcomes of societal and international struggles. E.g. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is aimed at becoming a winner within globalisation – and not at promoting deglobalisation, as a democratic alternative towards socially and ecologically sustainable development.

Peace, fighting global warming and countering the loss of biodiversity, a solidarity-based support for local producers of food and renewable energy, a democratic appropriation of common goods can be affirmed to be the main pillars of political strategies to overcome this situation – by struggling against capitalist oligarchies. Polanyi’s search for the deeper background of current problems has produced important starting points for a radical work on alternatives, bringing together radically democratic political forces with different social, ethnic, cultural, and political backgrounds – as an opportunity for a renewal of criticising globalisation in the perspective of a renewed alterglobalisation movement.

Read the other essays on Deglobalization here:

Globalization was planned, deglobalization was not

May 23, 2020DeglobalizationIKPS

Debate on Deglobalization

Globalization was planned
Deglobalization was not

25th of May, 2020

Andreas Novy

In The Great Transformation (TGT), Polanyi analyzed the long-term transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society that was ideologically underpinned by the liberal creed, a deliberate strategy of economic liberalism to introduce the logic of One Big Market. This was the first wave of globalization as world-wide marketization. Laissez faire as well as the creation of a world market were planned. But its objective was illusory from the beginning, leading to diverse countermovements of protection and planning – including tariffs and restrictions on migration. After 1929, the inherent contradictions of this first wave of globalization, centered on the Gold Standard, caused the collapse of liberal capitalism and cosmopolitan civilization. This led to political revolutions in the 1930s which Polanyi denominated “great transformation”, signifying the unexpected, somehow unplanned implementation of a new socio-economic and spatial order. This specific, deglobalizing spatiality of the great transformation is crucial, but often overlooked. Socialism has been internationalist until Stalin embarked on his road to “socialism in one country” in the 1930s. Democratic reformism, especially the US New Deal, focused on national economic recovery too. In the periphery, especially in Latin America, forced delinking from global markets from 1929 to the end of the great war, and in part the Corean War (1953), strengthened import substitution policies, the internal market and industrialization. Post-war Fordism of mass production for mass consumption was inward-oriented.

The second wave of globalization started in the 1970s with the demise of Bretton Woods and fixed exchange rates, followed by the Big Bang of financial deregulation in the 1980s. In the 1990s, “hyperglobalization” (Rodrik) was institutionalized by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other trade and investment agreements. This universalized “deep integration”, that means global rule setting which cannot be changed by national and democratic politics: capitalist rules of property, contract and consumer sovereignty dominate over democracy and popular sovereignty. As Quinn Slobodian described in “The Globalists”, this was the implementation of neoliberal plans that have been elaborated in rudimentary forms already in the 1920s in Geneva, partially executed by the League of Nations in austerity programs, eg. in Austria. Countermovements, once again, popped up rather spontaneously. First, from the Left, in Seattle in 1999, protesting against WTO. The hope that “another world is possible” did not materialize. In the West, not even the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 led to a systematic, “planned” shift away from hyperglobalization. While China started a project of strengthening internal markets as well as building a proper global infrastructure (Belt and Road Initiative), the West under the guidance of Obama and Merkel repeated the “conservative twenties” (Polanyi) with a vain attempt to stabilize liberal capitalism and cosmopolitan civilization. First right-wing populism, then Orbán, Trump and Bolsonaro challenged the liberal mainstream. Today, a new reactionary politics promotes nationalism and criticizes globalization, combining the persecution of the Left with a strong rejection of Enlightenment values, from human rights to scientific reasoning. Ugly forms of deglobalization emerge: from white supremacy to open military threats and the cancellation of international cooperation and universal human rights. This might signify a new lasting transformation of politics, culture and the economy, again accompanied with a spatial shift away from globalization. The Corona crisis accelerated deglobalization by chaos. The Left, once again, is a latecomer, divided in futile disputes between cosmopolites and communitarians, unable to acknowledge the necessity of selective economic deglobalization (esp. in finance, transport and rent-based activities, like patenting and digital platforms) as a prerequisite for a proper territorialized space of manouevre, including national sovereignty, but also enlarged urban and regional policy space. Today, Polanyi would be a fierce critic of globalization and he would most probably have searched for innovative forms of planetary coexistence of diverse regionalized mixed economies. Enlarging and democratizing policy space from below (eg. via remunicipalization and the strengthening of the foundational economy) is a precondition for new forms of international cooperation that are urgently needed to deal with burning issues of planetary importance: climate change, disaster relief (eg. currently the Corona crisis) and global peace keeping. Deglobalization must not be left to reactionary politics, it has to be planned as a progressive regionalizing project, bottom linked, from below as well as from above. In a nutshell: deglobalization by design.

Read the other essays on Deglobalization here:

Brexit and its Consequences (2016)

May 19, 2020BREXITIKPS

Debate on Brexit

Brexit and its consequences

18th of May, 2020

Ann Pettifor
Political Economist and director of Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME)

This text is the conclusion of Ann Pettifor’s Essay ‘Brexit and its consequences’, which has been published in August of 2016. The full text can be read here.

I voted to Remain. I do not believe that Brexit is a wise decision. I fear its consequences in energising the Far Right both in Britain but also across both Europe and the US. I fear the break-up of the United Kingdom, and the political dominance of a small tribe of conservative ‘Little Englanders’. They will diminish this country’s great social, economic and political achievements.

But Britain’s ‘Brexit’ vote is but the latest manifestation of popular dissatisfaction with the economists’ globalized, marketised society. And if there should be any doubt that these movements are both nationalistic and protectionist, consider Donald Trump’s campaign threat to build a wall between Mexico and the US, to deter migrants, “gangs, drug traffickers and cartels” (Trump website). Trump’s plan for financing the wall involves the introduction of controls over the movement of capital. If the Mexican government resisted, argued Trump, the US would cut off the billions of dollars that undocumented Mexican immigrants working in the US send to their families annually. “Its an easy decision for Mexico” Trump wrote in a note to the Washington Post on 5th April, 2016. “Make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country every year.”

Nationalism, protectionism and populism are not confined to western nations. In India, a BJP MP, Subramanian Swamy fired a salvo at Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan that led to his resignation. Swamy made clear that “the governor should have known the “inevitable consequence of rising and high interest rate and (that) his policy was wilful and thus anti-national in intent”. (My emphasis). The RBI governor’s post Swamy added, “is very high in the Warrant of Precedence and requires a patriotic and unconditional commitment to our nation”.

Karl Polanyi predicted in The Great Transformation that no sooner will today’s utopians have institutionalized their ideal of a global economy, apparently detached from political, social and cultural relations, than powerful counter-movements – from the right no less than the left – would be mobilized (Polanyi, 2001). The Brexit vote was to my mind, just one manifestation of the expected resistance to market fundamentalism. The Brexit slogans “Take Back Control” “Take Back Our Country” “Britannia waives the rules” – represented an inchoate and incoherent attempt to subordinate unfettered, globalized markets in money, trade and labour to the interests of British society. Like the movement mobilized by Donald Trump in the US, the Five Star Alliance in Italy, Podemos in Spain, the Front National in France, the Corbyn phenomenon in the UK, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, Brexit represented the collective, if (to my mind) often misguided efforts of those ‘left behind’ in Britain to protect themselves from the predatory nature of market fundamentalism.

By doing so, they confirmed Polanyi’s firm prediction: that “the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society….Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way.” (Polanyi, 2001).

Brexit has endangered British society in yet another way, but the vote was, I contend, a form of social self-protection from self-regulating markets in money, trade and labour.

Read the other essays on Brexit here:

The Cultural Political Economy of Brexit

May 1, 2020MediaIKPS

Debate on Brexit

The Cultural Political Economy of Brexit

1st of May, 2020

Andreas Novy

The first debate organized by the International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS) is on Brexit. The short essays offer rich insights in understanding contemporary developments, helping to explain the difficulties of finding progressive answers and implementing effective political strategies. Brexit exposed old issues of class struggles entangled in conflicts about social protection, lost identities and habitation. And it, once again, exposed the North-South divide that inspired Antonio Gramsci´s reflection on hegemony – turned upside down in the UK. In the 1930s, George Orwell reflected in his “The Road to Wigan Pier” on the difficult alliance of the Southeastern middle class and the Northern working class. It was in this specific conjuncture in which Karl Polanyi was earning his living in workers education. For these courses for the deprived British working class he collected the data and gained the knowledge to write “The Great Transformation”, reflecting on the links between political economy and socio-cultural dynamics, modernization and tradition, improvement and habitation. He obtained skills and insights that made him, in the words of Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop, a proto-cultural political economist.

Although not new, these old topics of uneven development and class alliances are posed with renewed urgency under the conditions of Brexit, as the prolonged debate on Brexit further eroded longstanding social and political loyalties and traditional class politics. Confronted with more than a simple political crisis, British politics before and after Brexit is faced with multiple crises, leading to an interregnum, shaped by uncertainty and volatility.

All contributions in this first debate agree that the vote for Brexit is related to political-economic discontent; but all include cultural explanations, especially when discussing the declining trust in the Labour Party. There is agreement that neoliberalism is facing a legitimation crisis, that trust in business-as-usual policy-making is shrinking, but this applies to traditional forms of political organization and cultural belonging as well. The differences in the contributions reside in evaluating the outlook for post-Brexit (and post-Covid-19) politics.

Kevin Morgan is probably the most optimistic in identifying potentials for progressive change in the current delegitimation of British politics, due to the dispute on Brexit, the exhaustion of neoliberalism and the mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis. In the best of the cases, this renewed opportunity (after the failures following 2008) will open new room of manouevre to strengthen the foundational economy, the essential economic activities that enable a civilized, good and secure life. This foundational renewal is not impossible under the current conservative government, as Johnson´s extreme electoral opportunism has, according to Matthew Watson, led to a bizarre policy shift of the former radical neoliberal Tories. While Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop call it “authoritarian neoliberalism”, Watson stresses Johnson´s shift to “nationalist politics of habitation”. There might by room of manoeuvre to re-invent forms of “municipal socialism”, introduced by liberal conservatives in the 19^th century due to social pressure from below. Chris Hann offers a short history of a Welsh valley, while Mikael Stigendal describes an episode and shows empathy with Joker, the tragic villain in Superman. Both use their stories to dwell on the decline of the Labour Party, its loss of working class roots and the profound alienation from the party establishment. There is, they observe, no longer an organic alliance of middle and working classes. The complexity of the double movement, of marketization and resistance, is exposed by Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop who are skeptical of a renewed pendular shift away from neoliberal marketization. Brexit is over, but “the organic crisis of the British state and society” continues.

The way out of this impasse is not easy. But, according to Mikael Stigendal, there is no alternative to making an effort to better understand the life world of the working class. Karl Polanyi learned a lot in teaching in popular and workers education. In line with Polanyi´s anti-elitist form of intellectual agency, knowledge alliances – partnerships of researchers and practitioners – could help to foster a common understanding of ordinary people and intellectuals. They might offer insights during and after the pandemia to deal with Trump’s, Bolsonaro’s and others deliberate attempts to attract precarious working and middle classes with anti-scientific discourses.

Read all essays on Brexit here:

Polanyi in Australia

April 30, 2020Media, PAOTWIKPS

Polanyi all over the World

Polanyi in Australia

In the second part of our series 'Polanyi all over the world', Alan Scott and Claire Baker talk about the importance of Polanyi's work in Australia. Claire Baker is a Lecturer in Sociology, Alan Scott is professor of sociology, both at University of New England (Armidale, Australia).
'Polanyi all over the world' is a column initiated by the IKPS which aims at strengthening our ties with other Polanyi-related institutes, communities and organizations around the globe.

25th of April, 2020

The authors outside Vorgartenstrasse 203, Vienna. Photo by Jamie Peck

In the Sherlock Holmes mystery Silver Blaze, Holmes refers to the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time”. The curious incident was that the dog did not bark. The tale of Polanyi in Australia is largely one of the dog that did not bark in the night. Australian social science – including, or particularly, its left variant – has oriented itself towards European rather than US social thought. But Polanyi has been largely absent. When Australian social theory took its post-Marxist turn, it was towards Foucault and Central and Eastern European thinkers, notably Ágnes Heller and Zygmunt Bauman. One possible exception may have been at Monash where Boris Frankel had been teaching Polanyi in the 1970s (our thanks to Peter Beilharz (La Trobe) for this information).

The reasons were partly contingent. The influential sociologist, Barry Hindess, moved from the University of Liverpool (UK) to ANU and a strong school of Australian Foucauldians emerged, gaining international attention. Between 1978 and 1986, Ágnes Heller (along with her husband, the philosopher Ferenc Fehér) lived in Melbourne and worked at La Trobe University. Via Thesis Eleven – the respected Melbourne-based theory journal – the ideas of the Budapest School, and European dissident thought more generally, entered Australian intellectual debate. But still no Polanyi (Thesis Eleven did carry a brief review symposium on his work in 2014 (no. 125)).

Nevertheless, in a nation in which agriculture and the mining of raw materials are so central to the economy, there is no shortage of material waiting for Polanyian analysis. And it is thus – as they say – no coincidence that some home-grown analysis has affinities with Polanyi’s arguments, even though explicit reference is largely absent. Here the work of Michael Pusey is of particular relevance. His 1991 book Economic Rationalism in Canberra questioned the primacy of economic thinking and management within the state and how this increasingly discounted the needs of society. Pusey’s work – which is regaining attention – may act as a bridge to a more explicitly Polanyian analysis of Australia in a context in which nation-building state policies have increasingly been replaced by familiar neoliberal nostrums and an opening to the world market in the case of agriculture (which has always been the case with mining – for an interesting Polanyian examination of an Australian mining economy, see Peck 2013a and 2013b). What is interesting about the case of agriculture is that the socially painful restructuring of the sector through the 1990’s, framed as a ‘necessary’ move to efficiency and productivity, has now led to a recognition of the ways in which this approach has had a devastating effect on both land and labour and provides a fascinating case study for Polanyian analysis (for a deeper historical view, see Baker, forthcoming).

As an example of actual policy discourse, a significant policy paper was released in 2018 that provides an indication of the turning point that may bring Australia into a Polanyian ‘double movement’. Released by the peak national agriculture industry body the National Farmers’ Federation (NFF), the report draws upon the results of an extensive consultation process with approximately 380 industry, community and government representatives. Historically the NFF has been supportive of increasingly neoliberal policy positions, advocating for a reduction in state intervention in markets and championing deregulation of the sector in favour of productivity and efficiency gains. This report is significant because it provides clear acknowledgement (based on consultation and research) of the failure of policy in a number of respects and provides a multi-faceted call for state intervention as the key to growth in the sector, including a call for payments by the state for conservation services to protect biodiversity and build environmental stewardship, and state intervention in debt management to protect farmers from risk and the social impacts of debt.

As Australia reckons with unprecedented drought and bushfire events, as well as significant water shortages, this rediscovery of the state as market modifier may be too late. In a political system where action on climate change is held hostage to corporate mining interests and the ability of these interests to capture ground-level fears of unemployment and change, it is difficult to see a timely way ahead. Ironically, it is the very embeddedness of the economy at the local level that provides the political purchase for older carbon-based industries such as coal mining. This week the federal Labor party committed to make Australia a net zero carbon emitter by 2050, but it is a long road from their position as opposition party to being able to act on this commitment and see a swing back to state intervention in the market to protect the sustainability of both land and labour in the Australian context.

References:

Baker, C. (forthcoming) A Sociology of Land Use in Australia. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
National Farmers Federation (2018). 2030 Roadmap: Australian Agriculture’s Plan for a $100 Billion Industry. NFF: Canberra, Australia.
https://nff.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/NFF_Roadmap_2030_FINAL.pdf
Peck, J. (2013a) Excavating the Pilbara: A Polanyian exploration. Geographical Research, 51(3): 227-242.
Peck, J. (2013b) Polanyi in the Pilbara. Australian Geographer 44(3): 243-264.
Pusey, M. (1991) Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-building State Changes its Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

More ‘Polanyi all over the World’:

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Debate on Deglobalization

Deglobalization and the EU: In search of a new balance between markets and states

Anna Ząbkowicz

Maciej Kassner

Debate on Deglobalization

Does the Covid-19 Crisis Lead the EU Towards De-Globalization?

Kurt Bayer

Debate on Deglobalization

Return to a societally steered market economy - with new ecological and social development directions

Rainer Land

Debate on Deglobalization

Three Theses for our debate on Deglobalization

Judith Dellheim

Debate on Deglobalization

Globalization was planned Deglobalization was not

Andreas Novy

Debate on Brexit

Brexit and its consequences

Ann Pettifor

Debate on Brexit

The Cultural Political Economy of Brexit

Andreas Novy

Polanyi all over the World

Polanyi in Australia

Claire Baker

Alan Scott

Deglobalization and the EU:
In search of a new balance between markets and states

Does the Covid-19 Crisis Lead the EU
Towards De-Globalization?

Return to a societally steered market economy -
with new ecological and social development directions

Globalization was planned
Deglobalization was not