Fred Block

From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate.

To understand the rise of market fundamentalism from the margins of influence to mainstream hegemony, we compare the U.S. 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act and the English 1834 New Poor Law—two episodes in which existing welfare regimes were overturned by market-driven ones. Despite dramatic differences across the cases, both outcomes were mobilized by “the perversity thesis”—a public discourse that reassigned blame for the poors condition from “poverty to perversity.” We use the term “ideational embeddedness” to characterize the power of such ideas to shape, structure, and change market regimes. The success of the perversity thesis is based on the foundations of social naturalism, theoretical realism, and the conversion narrative. In the poverty to perversity conversion narrative, structural blame for poverty is discredited as empiricist appearance while the real problem is attributed to the corrosive effects of welfares perverse incentives on poor people themselves—they become sexually promiscuous, thrust aside personal responsibility, and develop longterm dependency. This claim enables market fundamentalism to delegitimate existing ideational regimes, to survive disconfirming data, and to change the terms of debate from social problems to the timeless forces of nature and biology. Coupling economic sociology with a sociology of ideas, we argue that ideas count; but not all ideas are created equal. Only some have the capacity to fuel radical transformations in the ideational embeddedness of markets.

Karl Polanyi and the writing of the great transformation

Karl Polanyis 1944 book, The Great Transformation, has been recognized as central for the field of economic sociology, but it has not been subject to the same theoretical scrutiny as other classic works in the field. This is a particular problem in that there are central tensions and complexities in Polanyis argument. This article suggests that these tensions can be understood as a consequence of Polanyis changing theoretical orientation. The basic outline of the book was developed in England in the late 1930s when Polanyi was working within a specific type of Marxist framework. However, as he was writing the book, he developed several new concepts, including fictitious commodities and the embedded economy, that led in new directions. Because circumstances did not give him the time to revise his manuscript, the book is marked by a tension between these different moments in his own theoretical development. The result is that Polanyi glimpses the concept of the always embedded market economy, but he does not name it or elaborate it.

Swimming Against the Current: The Rise of a Hidden Developmental State in the United States

Despite the dominant role of market fundamentalist ideas in U.S. politics over the last thirty years, the Federal government has dramatically expanded its capacity to finance and support efforts of the private sector to commercialize new technologies. But the partisan logic of U.S. politics has worked to make these efforts invisible to mainstream public debate. The consequence is that while this “hidden developmental state” has had a major impact on the structure of the U.S. national innovation system, its ability to be effective in the future is very much in doubt. The article ends by arguing that the importance of these developmental initiatives to the U.S. economy could present a significant opening for new progressive initiatives.

Understanding the Diverging Trajectories of the United States and Western Europe: A Neo-Polanyian Analysis

This article proposes a neo-Polanyian theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics within contemporary market societies. It uses this framework to analyze the divergence between the United States and other developed societies that has become more pronounced in the first years of the twenty-first century. The argument emphasizes the shifting political alliances of the business community in the United States and suggests that from 1994 onward, business lost power in the right-wing coalition to its religious Right allies. The growing power of a religious-based social movement is a critical ingredient in the unilateralist turn in the Bush Administration’s foreign policy.

In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law:

In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act that ended the entitlement of poor families to government assistance. The debate leading up to that transformation in welfare policy occurred in the shadow of Speenhamland—an episode in English Poor Law history. This article revisits the Speenhamland episode to unravel its tangled history. Drawing on four decades of recent scholarship, the authors show that Speenhamland policies could not have had the consequences that have been attributed to them. The article ends with an alternative narrative that seeks to explain how the Speenhamland story became so deeply entrenched.

Beyond Corporate Liberalism

The theory of corporate liberalism has emerged as a key paradigm for critical analyses of American institutions. The theory emerged from analyses of the Progressive Era and of the Kennedy-Johnson years. The shift away from liberalism at the national political level since 1969 has resulted in a number of efforts to revise the theory of corporate liberalism. One argument is that the shift was caused by the depth of the economic crisis of United States capitalism. However, the theory suggests that corporate liberals would respond to crisis by increased use of the state to rationalize the economy. Yet there is good reason to believe that analysts who follow this logic have greatly exaggerated corporate support for some type of national economic planning, which reflects a fundamental weakness in the theory.

Political choice and the multiple “logics” of capital

ConclusionThe issue of whether one sees the constraints on domestic freedom of action as economic or political has important practical consequences. If one accepts the position that reforms such as the expansion of social welfare actually interfere with the fundamental logic of a capitalist order, it becomes very difficult to defend those reforms from conservative attack. One can argue that over the long term the only way to protect those reforms is through a break with the capitalist system, but this does not provide much strategic guidance in the short term. On the contrary, since the left is agreeing that these reforms contribute to the problems of the economy - inflation, slow growth, unemployment - it follows that the citizenry is acting rationally when it supports the right-wing attacks on the reforms. In a context in which the immediate transition to socialism is not possible, it follows that the best way to enhance the collective welfare is by trading off the reforms for the promise of faster economic growth.This is, I would argue, what has happened in the past decade in the United States. While one can easily exaggerate the influence of leftist ideas, the wide dissemination of the accumulation versus legitimation perspective within academia and activist circles has had the effect of persuading key groups of the futility of resisting the Reaganite attacks on the all-too-limited American welfare state. The very notion that Reagans policies were necessary for American capitalism had the effect of disempowering those who were in a position to resist those policies.If, on the contrary, the left had stressed that the constraints are political and that there are multiple ways to make a capitalist economy work, the possibilities for effective resistance would have been greater. Rather than perceiving Reaganite policies as reflecting some economic necessity, it would have been possible to formulate alternative policies for responding to the economic problems. With such alternative frameworks, it might then be possible to build broader political alliances while also empowering the victims of the cutbacks to fight both to protect earlier gains and to win new concessions.Because the struggle to protect the remnants of the welfare state continues, it is not too late to break the chains of the economistic fallacy. The costs are slight and the benefits could be enormous.

Economic Instability and Military Strength: The Paradoxes of the 1950 Rearmament Decision

THE crisis created by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan it the end of 1979 bears a striking resemblance to the events almost thirty years before when North Korean forces invaded South Korea and began the Korean War. In both situations, the invasions were widely seen as proof of the Soviet Unions’ commitment to a policy of global conquest, and each invasion precipitated an effort by the administration in Washington to increase dramatically U.S. levels of military spending and military preparedness. To be sure, the events in Korea gave rise

New productive forces and the contradictions of contemporary capitalism

ConclusionThe analysis that we have put forward is necessarily incomplete without developing its implications for political practice. However, considerations of space prevent us from elaborating on this aspect of our argument here. It is also the case that our ideas on politics are less coherent and developed than the theoretical perspective that we have outlined. This seems inevitable, since political thinking must be a collective project; political programs written by isolated individuals always sound hollow and abstract.Yet there are a few broad political implications of our analysis that are important to state here. The first is that any emancipatory politics in the present must begin with the realities of contemporary society, rather than from Marxist categories that have been rendered obsolete by the passing of accumulationist capitalism. While this point might seem obvious, it bears restating since so much current Marxist writing fails to grasp this idea. Second, while some might read our argument as an optimistic alternative to those theorists (Piccone, Lasch, Jacoby) who despair of the existence of emancipatory possibilities in the present, that is not our intention. For us, optimism and pessimism are not the important categories. In fact, our analysis incorporates the most pessimistic possible scenarios, since continued social stalemate in the face of post-industrial transition can unleash awesomely powerful pressures for individual and social regression. The point is rather that we have sought to develop an analysis that is genuinely dialectical — recognizing in this historical moment the interlocking processes of decay and development.

Using social theory to leap over historical contingencies: A comment on Robinson

ConclusionTo be fair to Robinson, it is worth mentioning that he does offer a number of qualifications to his thesis. He tries to avoid excessive determinism and at one point suggests:A satisfactory account should not imply an evolutionary notion and should leave open the possibility of historic discontinuities and of contingencies that generate alternative pathways of development, including alternative futures.In other words, maybe this embryonic TNS will never progress beyond its current stage or perhaps it will continue to grow but it will never become a real state. But the main thrust of Robinson’s account is strongly deterministic. In fact, he does not consider a single factor that might impede the unity of the global bourgoisie or derail transnational state formation.In a sense, Robinson’s mistake is that he has tried to derive a theoretical solution to a concrete problem that global capitalism has not yet solved in practice. While it might well be a logical step for capitalist elites to create a Transnational State, it is always risky to attribute too much rationality to an order that is notorious for its contradictions.