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Bauwens, Michel --- "Foreword" [2018] ELECD 1591; in Cogolati, Samuel; Wouters, Jan (eds), "The Commons and a New Global Governance" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) xvii

Book Title: The Commons and a New Global Governance

Editor(s): Cogolati, Samuel; Wouters, Jan

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781788118507

Section Title: Foreword

Author(s): Bauwens, Michel

Number of pages: 2

Extract:

Foreword In his influential book, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi describes a fundamental double movement that has traversed the history of industrial capitalism, which is also referred to as the `Lib-Lab' pendulum. With the global system understood as a combination of a Capital system, a State system, and an `Imagined Community', that is, the Nation, Polanyi showed how phases when the market forces prevailed at the cost of increasing ecological and social instability were alternated with periods where the pendulum swung back and social forces mobilized, driving the state to rein in the free market economy. It seems quite clear that this mechanism no longer functions as it once did. Despite a massive growth of social movements from the right and the left, social and ecological progress remains limited. The impending challenges posed, inter alia, by climate change, ecological and resource crises demand new approaches. The reason that the pendulum logic no longer seems applicable is, in all likelihood, that on the one hand, the new neoliberal global system today relies on a financialized transnational capital, coupled with global private platforms, whose global functional governance is threatening the very sovereignty of state actors; and, on the other, that the inter-state system is rather weak, pervaded by rivalries that preclude more united global action. Part of the solution might be to scale-up the double movement to the global level. A vital question then becomes, what kind of processes or institutions might create sufficient countervailing influence, and alternative global ...


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