In the conclusion, we return to Raymond Williams’s conception of democracy as a political culture born of collective working-class struggle and experience. Just as Williams looked at Britain in the 1950s as a place where a new wave of popular democratization was both possible and necessary, so under current conditions it is possible to see populism as a potential catalyst rather than a danger to democratic culture in a radical sense. In his later writings from the 1980s, Williams bore witness to the early phase of neoliberalization in the UK under Margaret Thatcher. He noted how the consumerist paradigm marked a withdrawal from collective concerns into the limited sphere of the individual or family home. Returning to the present moment in UK politics, the historic defeat of the Labour Party in the 2019 general election is ascribed to the party’s increasing distance from its traditional working-class constituency. The populist appeal to ‘get Brexit done’ allowed Boris Johnson to amass a Conservative majority in the UK parliament undreamed of two and a half years earlier when Theresa May called a mid-term election. The way for Labour to return from the political wilderness, it is proposed, it to see populism for what it truly is, namely a demand by the working class that the political establishment make good on the historical promise of modern democracy. This must involve, first and foremost, democratization of the workplace, education, healthcare and all other vital social sectors and organizations.

Though Polanyi referred to three distinct fictitious commodities, one, money, and the fate of the apex structure that commodified it, the gold standard, structured The Great Transformation’s narrative. Despite this centrality of money and its commodification to Polanyi’s masterwork, there is near-deafening silence in Polanyi scholarship on money as a fictitious commodity. This chapter ends it. It traces Polanyi’s understanding of fictitious commodities to its sources in classical political economy and explains how the near total dominance of the antithetical tradition of neoclassical economics obscures understanding. The chapter also argues that the resulting argument shared a great deal with the classical Marxist theories of imperialism and of uneven and combined development of previous decades, particularly their arguments about the centrality of powerful nation states to capitalism. It stresses another hitherto neglected aspect of Polanyi’s argument, that the double movement led to the emergence of ‘crustacean nations’. As such, the chapter argues, The Great Transformation contributes a great deal towards a new approach to understanding world affairs, geopolitical economy, which challenges Ricardian ‘universalist’ understandings and takes the ‘materiality of nations’ seriously. It, and Polanyi, are more relevant than ever in our ‘deglobalizing’ age of multi-polarity.

The chapter addresses the potential of Karl Polanyi’s contribution as a spatial theorist, or as an economic geographer in all but name. Although Polanyi did not identify as a spatial or geographical theorist as such, his work is rich with spatial insights and implications, notably as one of the original analysts of economic diversity. The chapter begins by contextualising Polanyi’s work in relation to the shifting locales and vantage points that shaped its production. It then turns to the question of the potential of Polanyi’s research programme (incomplete as it understandably was) for the conceptualisation and exploration of economic geographies. The goal here is to sketch some of the ways in which neoPolanyian approaches can be put to work in the service of geographically sensitive modes of economic inquiry, including those attuned to the ongoing diversity of economic formations and development trajectories, contemporary engagements with uneven spatial development, and the evaluation of (localised) economic experimentation. Polanyi’s programmatic project of ‘comparative economics’ was never completed during his own lifetime. There is much to be gained from resuming this project.

Chapter 5 analyses the mechanisms of adaptation and settling among Polish migrants in the UK. Even though settlement processes remained more noticeable among the Poles than the Ukrainians, they could still be better characterised in terms of anchoring rather than putting down roots. The research demonstrated the centrality of security and stability in the experience of Polish migrants in the UK. The migrants represented agents looking for life opportunities while recovering their sense of stability and security, based mainly on the ethno-cultural networks, family ties and work opportunities. The footholds strengthening Polishness and ethnic bonds included: Polish language and culture; strong national identity; close family; narrow circles of support and the wider Polish community (particularly involvement in the Polish school, church and voluntary work). They were related to gender and family roles as well as homemaking and other daily practices. The main footholds grounding the migrants in British society encompassed: work, English language (e.g. skills, language classes); children’s (English) school and after-school activities, and anchors in neighbourhoods and local communities. In spite of many commonalities in anchoring across the sample, differences were noticeable between family-oriented participants, single (working) self-oriented migrants and institution-oriented migrants (e.g. the homeless or other vulnerable individuals), showing the variety of adaptation and settling patterns.

This chapter addresses fierce disputes between some feminists and some trans women and their supporters. It draws on feminist critiques of binary oppositional thinking to explore some of the complexities of trans politics, and to explore commonalities as well as differences between apparently opposing groups. Its final sections address a number of practical issues, including whether trans women have a right to access women-only spaces, to compete against cis women in sports, or to be included in measures (such as all-women shortlists) designed to counter discrimination against women. The chapter seeks to move beyond heated disagreements, and it argues that cis and trans feminists should focus their energies on the interests they have in common, rather than on fighting each other. It concludes by suggesting that sex should no longer be the basis of our legal identity.

Having charted the background and growth of British populism from nineteenth-century worker agitation to discontent with the gig economy of the 2010s, this chapter offers a concluding prognosis of the possible future of UK liberal democracy in the wake of Brexit-based populism. Bringing together the two threads of cultural denigration and economic marginalization of the working class, the question arises: how can contemporary populism be channelled into a renewal of democratic political culture? Here I consider the complex and influential interventions of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2016) and Paul Mason (2015), which have in common the notion that the current wave of automation sweeping through the global economy has the potential to lead us out of the prevailing pattern of mass material scarcity and deprivation. One of the mechanisms seen as pivotal to such a transition is a radical and scalable programme of universal basic income (UBI). I reject this solution as untenable, in part because it represents an extension of André Gorz’s (2012) earlier and, I contend, implausible argument that the very idea of the ‘working class’ should be abandoned as automating technology and structural unemployment make work a less politically significant reality. While leftist commentators and theorists may criticize the legacy of Marxism for enthroning a ‘labour theory of value’, the lived reality of the working class cannot be so easily severed from its connections to socially meaningful work. In other words, progressive populism cannot, I contend, take the form of a world beyond work.

This chapter brings Karl Polanyi into dialogue with Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The dialogue is intended to make visible key aspects of Polanyi’s theoretical framework while also suggesting limitations in Piketty’s approach to political economy. Specifically, the authors use the concept of ‘predistribution’ – implicit in Polanyi – to critique Piketty’s emphasis on redistribution as the solution to growing wealth and income inequality. Predistribution conveys the idea that the initial market distribution of income is not natural but is shaped by the systematic exercise of political and economic power.

In these remarkably stirring reflections, delivered at the 2014 conference from which most of the contributions to this volume emerge, the late Abe Rotstein, Polanyi’s student and collaborator, recalls the projected sequel to The Great Transformation, to be titled Freedom and Technology. Whereas the former was built on a social sciences approach using institutional analysis, the sequel was to follow the intention Hegel expressed in the words ‘Wir die religiöse Vorstellung in Gedanken fassen’ (We want to turn religious expression into philosophical thought). Polanyi took religion seriously – not its outer ceremonial trappings but the important truths that lay behind and beneath these beliefs and practices. The sequel was to trace humanity’s progression through three major revelations: the knowledge of death, the discovery of our inner life and conscience, and the realization of freedom amid our social obligations. This was the idea of ‘the reality of society’ around which the whole book was to be built. It was the precursor of our cherished civil freedoms and closely connected with Polanyi’s idea of freedom in a complex society; it is also deeply threatened in an age of state and corporate cyber surveillance.

Karl Polanyi’s call, in The Great Transformation, for a re-embedding of markets, is widely understood to have come to fruition in the American New Deal and in the post-war order of ‘embedded liberalism’. Based on archival sources, this chapter shows that Polanyi’s political project was far more radical. Polanyi initially considered the New Deal a vital response to the problems of American capitalism, but one that would have little relevance to the problems and dynamics of European societies. There, he considered a socialist transformation both possible and necessary. But eventually, Polanyi realised that the US, far from remaining an exceptional outlier of ‘nineteenth-century civilisation’, was imposing its model on Britain and Europe. The internationalisation of the American New Deal in the Bretton Woods order marked the defeat of Polanyi’s political project.

This short Conclusion finds that feminists are in an increasingly strong position, and that digital technology is enabling them to build on gains that have already been made. It argues that political and economic leaders are finding feminism increasingly hard to ignore, but that they tend to support feminist goals only if they think this will be profitable. It concludes that long-term feminist goals should be based on socialist principles, that steps taken towards this are as important as the final destination, and that they must always always include the most disadvantaged women.

This introduction places the contributions that follow in the context of Polanyi’s rising influence, its causes and effects, and of the key twenty-first century developments that make his oeuvre more relevant than ever. It emphasizes how the contributions push the boundaries of received understandings of Polanyi. While some contributions fill gaping holes, such as those on money as a fictitious commodity, others overturn received understandings, whether that of the double movement or fictitious commodities, or the provenance (Central European or American) of his principal ideas and concerns or how he understood socialism. Yet others demonstrate how amenable Polanyi’s ideas are to further development. Last but not least, the introduction outlines Polanyi’s historical diagnosis as it emerges from these innovative contributions and argues that the stark choice he felt faced European societies, socialism or fascism, is once again before us as we face the groundswell of nationalist and far right forces.

The chapter reviews aspects of the possible transformation of the financial system into a banking complex, that comprises both embedded Too Big to Fail (TBTF) financial institutions and disembedded ones. The transformation of the financial system into a two-tier banking complex is the result of the disconnection of the TBTF embedded institutions and the right size to fail disembedded financial institutions. The chapter revises the scope and consequences of this change on the monopolization of financial capitalism and international financial governance. It contains two sub-sections. The first reviews Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness/ disembeddedness and TBTF; the second reviews the concept of a complex. This chapter aims to use Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness and disembeddedness in order to understand how the category of TBTF financial institutions came into being through the double movement of market deregulation and social regulation. The concepts of embeddedness in social regulation and disembeddedness under market regulation permit an understanding of how, as the few TBTF financial institutions re-embedded themselves, becoming risk proof, the majority remained disembedded and subject to failures. We argue that, given this, the financial system may no longer be considered a system.

Chapter 2 shows how the author’s empirical research on the processes of adaptation and settlement of Polish migrants in Belgium and later Vietnamese and Ukrainian migrants in Poland provided a basis for her critical reflection on the limitations and sometimes insufficiency of the key concepts used in migration studies, especially the concept of integration. It illuminates how the former empirical work and outcomes of previous analyses of the existing theoretical field in migration studies led the author to her search for different ways of conceptualising migrants’ adjustment and settling, and allowed her to sketch her first integrative and transdisciplinary framework incorporating the previously underestimated psychological perspective. This chapter analyses the role of the metaphor of anchor and how the concept had been built upon, and it highlights the significance of a single study of psychological usage of anchors in therapy for cancer patients to overcome identity crises and restore their feeling of continuity and integrity (Little, Jordens and Sayers 2002). The chapter demonstrates that in spite of its theoretical and practical potential, anchoring has not been developed into an analytical concept either in migration studies or in broader social theory, only being mentioned in passing in a metaphorical way by authors such as Bauman (1997) or Castells (1997). The concept of anchoring is thus presented here as an analytical tool which makes use of the strength of its founding metaphor and the promising intuitions which it embraces. The chapter ends by featuring the general characteristics of the concept.