Restricting Suffrage, Contracting Rights: Variations on Polanyi’s “Double Movement”

Karl Polanyi analyzed a “double movement” of society against the market in the nineteenth century. In our populist moment of the twenty-first century, we may be witnessing a movement in the other direction, of defenders of the market against the welfare state. A key method of implementing such a strategy is the motive of protecting “electoral integrity,” which may be in fact a rationale for restricting suffrage, especially among African American voters in central cities. The narrative of the stolen election of 2020, promoted by former President Donald J. Trump, may be providing the cover for targeting specific populations to disenfranchise them. Whereas expansion of suffrage in the nineteenth century was a method of supporting the working class, an opposite movement of contraction of suffrage may empower efforts to dismantle the welfare state and whatever is remaining of progressive taxation While the ravages of Neoliberalism might otherwise have been expected to propel a movement to defend society once again, the prospect at present may be to “double down” on defense of the market, to achieve a new form of authoritarian minority governance. According to Bruno Latour, a durable movement for the protection of society must build an alliance of labor with ecologists, to defend the earth, which forms the material foundation of Polanyi’s other fictional commodity, land.