Business As Usual by Derluguian Georgi M. Calhoun Craig J. & Georgi Derluguian

Author:Derluguian, Georgi M.,Calhoun, Craig J. & Georgi Derluguian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2011-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

8. Twenty-first-Century Capitalist Crisis in the Light of the Triple Movement

The previous discussion has established two points. We have seen, first, thanks to feminists and anti-imperialists, that the social arrangements that reembed markets can be seriously flawed. Even in democratic welfare states, social protections can be oppressive insofar as they are hierarchical and/or misframed. From this, it follows—and this is my second point—that neither the great transformation described by Polanyi nor the one we are living through now can be adequately understood by the figure of the double movement. In reducing the logic of crisis to a two-sided conflict between marketization and social protection, that figure not only occults projects of emancipation but also distorts our understanding of the two projects it purports to clarify. In fact, neither marketization nor social protection can be adequately understood without factoring in struggles for emancipation. I want to conclude by spelling out what is to be gained by transforming Polanyi’s double movement into a triple movement.

The triple movement conceptualizes capitalist crisis as a three-sided conflict among marketization, social protection, and emancipation. In our time, each of these three orientations has committed adherents. Marketization is championed by neoliberals. Social protection commands support in various forms, some savory, some unsavory—from nationally oriented social-democrats and trade-unionists to anti-immigrant populist movements, from neotraditional religious movements to antiglobalization activists, from environmentalists to indigenous peoples. Emancipation fires the passions of various successors to the new social movements, including multiculturalists, international feminists, gay-and-lesbian liberationists, cosmopolitan democrats, human-rights activists, and proponents of global justice. It is the complex relations among these three types of projects that impress the shape of a triple movement on the present crisis of capitalist society.

To clarify this constellation, critical theorists should treat each term of the triple movement as ambivalent. We have already seen, contra Polanyi, that social protection is often ambivalent, affording relief from the disintegrative effects of deregulation while simultaneously entrenching domination. But the same is true of the other two terms. Deregulation of markets does indeed have the negative effects Polanyi stressed, but it can also beget positive effects to the extent that the protections it disintegrates are oppressive—as, for example, when markets are introduced into bureaucratically administered command economies or when labor markets are opened to former slaves. Nor is emancipation immune to ambivalence, as it produces not only liberation but also strains in the fabric of existing solidarities. Thus, even as it overcomes domination, emancipation may help dissolve the solidary ethical basis of social protection, thereby fostering marketization.

Seen this way, each term has both a telos of its own and a potential for ambivalence that unfolds through its interaction with the other two terms. None of the three can be adequately grasped in isolation from the others. Nor can the social field be adequately grasped by focusing on only two terms. It is only when all three are considered together that we begin to get an adequate view of capitalist crisis.

Here, then, is the core premise of the triple movement: the relation between any two sides of the three-sided conflict must be mediated by the third.

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