The iron law of democratic socialism: British and Austrian influences on the young Karl Polanyi

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.A central thesis of Karl Polanyi's The great transformation concerns the tensions between capitalism and democracy: the former embodies the principle of inequality, while democracy represents that of equality. This paper explores the intellectual heritage of this thesis, in the ‘functional theory’ of G.D.H. Cole and Otto Bauer and in the writings of Eduard Bernstein. It scrutinizes Polanyi's relationship with Bernstein's ‘evolutionary socialism’ and charts his ‘double movement’ vis-à-vis Marxist philosophy: in the 1910s he reacted sharply against Marxism's deterministic excesses, but he then, in the 1920s, engaged in sympathetic dialogue with Austro-Marxist thinkers. The latter, like Bernstein, disavowed economic determinism and insisted upon the importance and autonomy of ethics. Yet they simultaneously predicted a law-like expansion of democracy from the political to the economic arena. Analysis of this contradiction provides the basis for a concluding discussion that reconsiders the deterministic threads in Polanyi's oeuvre. Whereas for some Polanyi scholars these attest to his residual attraction to Marxism, I argue that matters are more complex. While Polanyi did repudiate the more rigidly deterministic of currents in Marxist philosophy, those to which he was attracted, notably Bernstein's ‘revision’ and Austro-Marxism, incorporated a deterministic fatalism of their own, in respect of democratization. Herein lies a more convincing explanation of Polanyi's incomplete escape from a deterministic philosophy of history, as exemplified in his masterwork, The great transformation

Social democracy, embeddedness and decommodification: On the conceptual innovations and intellectual affiliations of Karl Polanyi

Of the several debates that revolve around the work of the economic historian and political economist Karl Polanyi, one that continues to exercise minds concerns his analysis of, and political attitudes toward, post-war capitalism and the welfare state. Simplified a little, it is a debate with two sides. To borrow Iván Szelényi's terms, one side constructs a ‘hard’ Karl Polanyi, the other a ‘soft’ one. The former advocated a socialist mixed economy dominated by redistributive mechanisms. He was a radical socialist for whom the market should never be the dominant mechanism of economic coordination. His ‘soft’ alter ego insisted that the market system remain essentially intact but be complemented by redistributive mechanisms. The ‘double movement’ – the central thesis of his ‘Great Transformation’ – acts, in this reading, as a self-correcting mechanism that moderates the excesses of market fundamentalism; its author was positioned within the social-democratic mainstream for which the only realistic desirable goal is a regulated form of capitalism. In terms of textual evidence there is much to be said for both interpretations. In this article I suggest a different approach, one that focuses upon the meaning of Polanyi's concepts in relation to their socio-political and intellectual environment

Contested understandings in the global garment industry after Rana Plaza

This Introduction synthesizes the key themes of this special cluster of articles and explores the implications of the three contributions on garment supply chains after the Rana Plaza disaster. The three articles examine the perspectives of key stakeholders in garment value chains — global buyers, managers of garment factories in Bangladesh, and workers at these factories — and analyses their responses to the new governance initiatives that emerged in the aftermath of Rana Plaza. Placing the contrasting perspectives of these stakeholders alongside each other starkly reveals how their different positions within hierarchically organized global value chains form the particular lens through which they view post-Rana Plaza initiatives. This special cluster scrutinizes the particular understandings of these stakeholders and reveals the very different capacity for voice and influence that they bring to bear in shaping outcomes. It reflects on the contradictory imperatives faced by actors in the garment industry caught between a logic of competition on the one hand and global labour standards norms on the other. The Introduction concludes by examining the prospects for a re-embedding of the market in global value chains via the activation of civil society

Happiness, environmental protection and market economy

The manufacturing sector is leaving the West for Asia’s low wages and good working culture. Europe would be better off keeping these manufacturing activities, slowing down wage inflation and what is more, letting a young, cheaper workforce from the East settle down within their borders. This would aid in preserving the diverse economic structure which has been characteristic for Europe.Beside the economic growth there are two more concepts which have turned into the “holy cows” of economics during the last fifty years. One is the need to constantly improve labor productivity and the other is increasing competitiveness of nations. The high labor productivity of some countries, induces severe unemployment in the globalized world. In the other hand it is high time we understood that it is not competition, but cooperation that brings more happiness to humanity.Should we still opt for “happiness” and “sanity”, it is quite obvious that we all should, in economists’ terms, define our individual welfare functions corresponding to our own set of values, staying free from the influence of media, advertisements and fashion. The cornerstone to all this is the intelligent citizen who prefers local goods and services

Networked but Commodified: The (Dis)Embeddedness of Digital Labour in the Gig Economy

This article investigates the (dis)embeddedness of digital labour within the remote gig economy. We use interview and survey data to highlight how platform workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are normatively disembedded from social protections through a process of commodification. Normative disembeddedness leaves workers exposed to the vagaries of the external labour market due to an absence of labour regulations and rights. It also endangers social reproduction by limiting access to healthcare and requiring workers to engage in significant unpaid ‘work-for-labour’. However, we show that these workers are also simultaneously embedded within interpersonal networks of trust, which enable the work to be completed despite the low-trust nature of the gig economy. In bringing together the concepts of normative and network embeddedness, we reconnect the two sides of Polanyi’s thinking and demonstrate the value of an integrated understanding of Polanyi’s approach to embeddedness for understanding contemporary economic transformations

On the nature and determinants of poor households’ resilience in fragility contexts

Several global policy frameworks focus on managing (risks of) disasters affecting broad populations. In those frameworks resilience is a conceptualisation that possibly has important ideological implications. It is often opposed to fragility, and used to validate the notion of recurring insecurity, promote individual adaptability almost in the form of an obligation, and push the idea that crises/catastrophes are opportunities for profound changes. While effects from the COVID-19 pandemic have brought the protective role of the state to the fore, applying the word resilience to poor people requires clarification, especially in contexts of weak state public services and because assessment of complex poverty situations too often remains oversimplified and error-prone. We argue that to build capacity for resilience poor households need policies that protect and help them out of poverty, and that policy-making processes require engagement with people. Individuals must be asked about their perceptions and management of risks and threats, both in daily life and under exceptional circumstances, especially if the resulting stress factors accumulate and interact. This socially informed, place-specific, and multi-level approach could contribute substantially to identifying interventions, reducing poverty and poverty related risks, enhancing well-being and promoting development and cooperation programmes that meet people’s expectations.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio