Updating Karl Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ for critical agrarian studies

Abstract

Karl Polanyi’s concept of the ‘double movement’ refers to a reciprocal dialectic between market forces and social protections for citizens. It concerns ongoing struggle against individualization of people’s lives under capitalist marketization – which continues today. While Polanyi focused on protective responses to deepening commodification of land, labor, and money across the 1840s–1940s century, the ‘double movement’ remains in force in the contemporary neo-illiberal era, with notable significance for agrarian transformations. This essay reviews adaptations by agrarian counter-movements, NGOs, and analysts to new pressures on producers, farmworkers, Indigenous peoples, and landscapes across the world, and various associated interpretations and analyses.