Half-cast Polanyi Social Processes of State and Market in Mexico: An Interpretation

Abstract

This article attempts a theoretical process-tracing exercise on the interaction between the State and the market. Special attention is placed on the way in which the historical trajectory of the State’s political and economic developments has varied. The analysis is both theoretically informed and illustrated by Mexico’s trajectories of reform. The current trends towards the recommodification both of economic activities and the roles of the State are developing tendencies which are not exempt from undertows. Although social, political and economic contradictions are mediated through crises, they are sorted in two broad and distinctive ways. In the first of these, major changes involve a decisive intervention of the State in which a new trajectory might be imposed; whereas in the second one, some minor moments of crises are solved and negotiated in the pursuit of softer transformations, by adaptation and reformist strategies. This theoretically informed Neopolanyian account, whilst drawing on concepts developed for an understanding of State development in Europe, is illustrated by referring to the contemporary Mexican experience. While corporatism and import substitution industrialization involved processes of decommodification of economic activities, the outwardly oriented economic model meant a modification of the State’s trajectory toward practices associated with processes of re-commodification.