Freedoms utter frustration: considerations on neoliberal social-policy reforms and the shift to the far-right through Polanyis theory of fascism

The recent crises of capitalist market societies were accompanied by a global upsurge of right-wing populist movements and parties and their entry into government in many countries. These developments are often presented as countermovements to neoliberal globalization and marketization from a Polanyian perspective. Such an interpretation, however, neglects that for Polanyi the emergence of far-right, fascist countermovements was not simply an answer to the crisis of unfettered market expansion but also to the post-First World War expansion of democracy and welfare policies and the stalemate the unresolved tensions between these developments created. Thus, in his papers about fascism of the 1930s as well as in The Great Transformation he identified three elements of fascist philosophy that lay at the core of its political strategy to “save capitalism†(Polanyi). These consisted of a full-scale attack on democracy, the rejection of equality and an attack on freedom in all social spheres. By focusing on emerging aporias of neoliberal welfare reforms that rest upon a retrenchment of democratic participation of e.g. unions, the expansion of inequality and enforced commodification at the expense of individual autonomy the chapter explores whether and how fascism/right-wing populism can constitute itself as a social alternative to tackle not only the crisis of neoliberal market expansion but also to overcome the (fractured) continuities of a welfarist embedding of the economy.