Fortunes of Feminism (39 page)

2. EMANCIPATION: THE MISSING “THIRD”

To speak of emancipation is to introduce a category that does not appear in
The Great Transformation
. But the idea, and indeed the word, figured importantly throughout the period Polanyi chronicled. One need only mention epochal struggles to abolish slavery, liberate women, and free non-European peoples from colonial subjection—all waged in the name of “emancipation.” It is surely odd that these struggles should be absent from a work purporting to chart the rise and fall of what it calls “nineteenth-century civilization.” But my point is not simply to flag an omission. It is rather to note that struggles for emancipation directly challenged oppressive forms of social protection, while neither wholly condemning nor simply celebrating marketization. Had they been included, these movements would have destabilized the dualistic narrative schema of
The Great Transformation
. The effect would have been to explode the double movement.

To see why, consider that emancipation differs importantly from Polanyi's chief positive category, social protection. Whereas protection is opposed to exposure, emancipation is opposed to domination. While protection aims to shield “society” from the disintegrative effects of unregulated markets, emancipation aims to expose relations of domination wherever they root, in society as well as in economy. While the thrust of protection is to subject market exchange to non-economic norms, that of emancipation is to subject both market exchange and non-market norms to critical scrutiny. Finally, whereas protection's highest values are social security, stability, and solidarity, emancipation's priority is non-domination.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that emancipation is always allied with marketization. If emancipation opposes domination, marketization opposes the extra-economic regulation of production and exchange, whether such regulation is meant to protect or to liberate. While marketization defends the supposed autonomy of the economy, understood formally as a demarcated sphere of instrumental action, emancipation ranges across the boundaries that demarcate spheres, seeking to root out domination from
every
“sphere.”
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While the thrust of marketization is to liberate buying and selling from moral and ethical norms, that of emancipation is to scrutinize
all
types of norms from the standpoint of justice. Finally, whereas marketization claims efficiency, individual choice, and the negative liberty of non-interference as its highest values, emancipation's priority, as I said, is non-domination.

It follows that struggles for emancipation do not map neatly onto either prong of Polanyi's double movement. Granted, such struggles appear on occasion to converge with marketization—as, for example, when they condemn as oppressive the very social protections that free-marketeers are seeking to eradicate. On other occasions, however, they converge with protectionist projects—as, for example, when they denounce the oppressive effects of marketization. On still other occasions, struggles for emancipation diverge from both prongs of the double movement—as, for example, when they aim neither to dismantle nor to defend existing protections, but rather to transform the mode of protection. Thus, convergences, where they exist, are conjunctural and contingent. Aligned consistently neither with protection nor marketization, struggles for emancipation represent a third force that disrupts Polanyi's dualistic schema. To give such struggles their due requires us to revise his framework—by transforming its double movement into a triple movement.
⁵

3. EMANCIPATION FROM HIERARCHICAL PROTECTIONS

To see why, consider feminist claims for emancipation. These claims explode the double movement by disclosing a specific way in which social protections can be oppressive: namely, in virtue of entrenching status hierarchies. Such protections deny some who are included in principle as members of society the social preconditions for full participation in social interaction.
⁶
The classic example is gender hierarchy, which assigns women a lesser status, often akin to that of a male child, and thereby prevents them from participating fully, on a par with men, in social interaction. But one could also cite caste hierarchies, including those premised on racialist ideologies. In all such cases, social protections work to the advantage of those at the top of the status hierarchy, affording lesser (if any) benefit to those at the bottom. What they protect, accordingly, is less society
per se
than social hierarchy. No wonder, then, that feminist, anti-racist, and anti-caste movements have mobilized against such hierarchies, rejecting the protections they purport to offer. Insisting on full membership in society, they have sought to dismantle arrangements that deny them the social prerequisites of participatory parity.
⁷

The feminist critique of hierarchical protection runs through every stage of Polanyi's history, although it is never mentioned by him. During the mercantilist era, feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft criticized the traditional social arrangements that embedded markets. Condemning gender hierarchies entrenched in family, religion, law, and social custom, they demanded such fundamental prerequisites of participatory parity as an independent legal personality, religious freedom, education, the right to refuse sex, rights of custody in children, and the right to speak in public and to vote. During the laisser-faire period, feminists demanded equal access to the market. Exposing the latter's instrumentalization of sexist norms, they opposed protections that denied them the right to own property, sign contracts, control wages, practice professions, work the same hours and receive the same pay as men, all prerequisites of full participation in social life. During the post-WWII era, “second-wave” feminists targeted the “public patriarchy” instituted by welfare states. Condemning social protections premised on “the family wage,” they demanded equal pay for work of comparable worth, parity for caregiving and wage-earning in social entitlements, and an end to the gender division of labor, both paid and unpaid.
⁸

In each of these epochs, feminists raised claims for emancipation, aimed at overcoming domination. At some moments, they targeted traditional community structures that
embedded
markets; at others, they aimed their fire at the forces that were
dis
embedding markets; at still others, their principal foes were those who were
re
-embedding markets in oppressive ways. Thus, feminist claims did not align consistently with either pole of Polanyi's double movement. On the contrary, their struggles for emancipation constituted a third prong of social movement, which cut across the other two. What Polanyi called a double movement was actually a triple movement.

4. CONCEPTUALIZING THE TRIPLE MOVEMENT

But what exactly does it mean to speak of a “triple movement”? This figure conceptualizes capitalist crisis as a three-sided conflict among forces of marketization, social protection, and emancipation. It understands each of these three terms as conceptually irreducible, normatively ambivalent, and inextricably entangled with the other two. We have already seen, contra Polanyi, that social protection is often ambivalent, affording relief from the disintegrative effects of marketization, while simultaneously entrenching domination. But, as we shall see, the same is true of the other two terms. The disembedding 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. Nor is emancipation immune to ambivalence, as it produces not only liberation but also strains in the fabric of existing solidarities; even as it dismantles domination, emancipation can also dissolve the solidary ethical basis of social protection, thereby clearing the way for 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 the grammar of social struggle in 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. Thus, as I have just argued, the conflict between marketization and social protection must be mediated by emancipation. Equally, however, as I will argue next, conflicts between protection and emancipation must be mediated by marketization. In both cases, the dyad must be mediated by the third. To neglect the third is to distort the logic of capitalist crisis and of social movement.
⁹

5. THE TABLES TURNED: EMANCIPATION'S

AMBIVALENCE IN THE NEW GREAT TRANSFORMATION

So far, I have been using the triple movement to explore the ambivalence of social protection. Now, however, I want to turn the tables and use the triple movement to explore the ambivalences of emancipation. Thus, having just stressed the need to view conflicts between marketization and social protection as mediated by emancipation, a mediation Polanyi neglected, I want now to stress the need to view conflicts between protection and emancipation as mediated by marketization, a mediation that I believe has been neglected by important currents of the feminist movement.

Here, accordingly, I shift the focus to the “great transformation” of our own time. To understand this transformation, we must begin with the “Embedded Liberalism” that was established in the aftermath of World War II.
¹⁰
Underpinned by the international regulatory framework known as Bretton Woods, Embedded Liberalism encompassed the Keynesian welfare states of the First World and the developmental states of the Third. Since the 1980s, however, those arrangements have come under pressure from neoliberalism, which has promoted the renewed disembedding of markets, thereby provoking the most severe capitalist crisis since the Great Depression.

Let us then analyze the current crisis by means of the figure of the triple movement, just as Polanyi used the double movement to understand the previous crisis. For us, as for him, the point is to clarify prospects for a new wave of democratic re-embedding, stabilized by a global regime of political-economic regulation. For us, however, social protection must be re-envisioned in the light of emancipation. Thus, our task is to envision arrangements for re-embedding markets that simultaneously serve to overcome domination.

I begin by noting that, in our time, each prong of the triple movement has zealous exponents. Marketization is fervently 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 anti-globalization 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.

Consider, now, the role of emancipatory projects within this constellation. Since at least the 1960s, such movements have challenged oppressive aspects of social protection in Embedded Liberalism. Earlier, New Leftists exposed the oppressive character of bureaucratically organized welfare regimes, which disempower their ostensible beneficiaries. Likewise, anti-imperialists unmasked the oppressive character of First World social protections that were financed through unequal exchange, on the backs of ex-colonial peoples. More recently, multiculturalists have disclosed the oppressive character of social protections premised on majority religious or majority ethnocultural self-understandings, which penalize members of minority groups. Finally, and most important for my purposes here, second-wave feminists have exposed the oppressive character of social protections premised on gender hierarchies.

In each case, the movement disclosed a type of domination and raised a corresponding claim for emancipation. In each case, too, however, the movement's claims for emancipation were 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 social protection
simpliciter
. In the second case, where emancipation aligned with social protection, it would serve not to erode, but rather to transform, the mode of protection.

This argument holds, I claim, for all the emancipatory movements I just mentioned. Here, however, I focus on second-wave feminism's critique of an oppressive dimension of social protection in Embedded Liberalism. Too often, I argue, this movement saw itself as locked in a two-sided struggle. Focused on opposing oppressive protections, it was not always sufficiently aware of the triple movement's third prong, namely, efforts to extend and autonomize markets. Neglecting the rise of neoliberalism, many second-wave feminists misunderstood their situation and misjudged the likely consequences of their actions. The result of their failure to mediate the conflict between emancipation and social protection with reference to marketization is even now shaping the course of capitalist crisis in the twenty-first century.
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6. FEMINIST AMBIVALENCES

Recall that second-wave feminism targeted the gender-hierarchical character of social protections in the postwar welfare state. In the US, this meant exposing the gender subtext of a system divided into stigmatized poor relief for women and children, on the one hand, and respectable social insurance for those constructed as “workers,” on the other. In Europe, it meant disclosing a related androcentric hierarchy in the division between mothers' pensions and social entitlements tied to waged work. In both cases, feminists discerned traces of an older schema, inherited from before the War, known as “the family wage.” That schema envisioned the ideal-typical citizen as a breadwinner and a family man, whose wage was the principal, if not the sole, economic support of his family, and whose wife's wages, if any, were supplemental. Deeply gendered, this “family wage” ideal supplied a central portion of the ethical substance on which postwar welfare states drew to re-embed markets. Normalizing women's dependency, the resulting system of social protection compromised women's chances to participate fully, on a par with men, in social life. Institutionalizing androcentric understandings of family and work, it naturalized gender hierarchy and removed it from political contestation. Equally important, by valorizing waged work, Embedded Liberalism's mode of protection obscured the social importance of unwaged carework.
¹²