The Great Transformation. - book reviews

This is the welcoming address to the Participants of the Fifth Annual Conference of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, held in Vienna in November 1994 and organized jointly with the Socio-economic Research Unit of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The background and context of the conference are woven into the text of the welcoming address. The title is added with the agreement of professor Levitt. It is anticipated that a selection of the presentations at the conference will be published in book form. MR readers will be kept informed. In the meantime, they are cordially invited to join the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy which, in our opinion, is doing extremely valuable work on the basic problem of, and challenges to, domestic and global societies as the century and millennium draw to a close. For further information, write to the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd., Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G IM8. --The Editors

Eight years ago, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences hosted a centenary conference to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Karl Polanyi. The ashes of my parents Karl and Ilona were returned from Canada, and the conference participants joined family members to wish them eternal rest on Hungarian soil. It was there that I conceived the wish that at some time in the future, the work of my father would also be recognized and celebrated here in Vienna, where he was born and where he worked from 1920 to 1933 as a senior member of the editorial staff of Austria's leading economic weekly, the Osterreichische Volkswirt--and that his life companion, Ilona Duczynska, would also be remembered on such an occasion. In 1933, editorial self-censorship at the Volkswirt made it impossible to keep Polanyi on staff. He left for England, but continued to write for the journal until 1938.

On November 1, I visited the cemetery in Budapest where my parents are resting, shaded by old trees and surrounded by some of Hungary's favorite actors and artists. I told them that my wish has been fulfilled. Vienna has joined Budapest in honoring Polanyi, a product of the intellectual ferment of Austria and Hungary in the first two decades of the century. Today, more than seventy years since my parents arrived in Vienna--separately and unknown to each other--as political emigrants from Horthy fascism in Hungary, Polanyi's reflections on the reasons for the disasters of the interwar period have contemporary relevance for the transition countries of central and east Europe. In The Great Transformation, he attributed Stalinism, fascism, and the New Deal to the failed attempt by the victorious powers to use financial leverage to restore the nineteenth-century liberal economic order. In the context of the global reach of a resurgent neoliberal ideology, this conference will evaluate Polanyi's critique of "market society" and the dangers inherent in attempts to restructure the world on the basis of "the market knows best."

For this opportunity, we express our sincerest thanks to the Austrian Academy of Sciences, to Concordia University of Montreal, to the Dr. Karl Renner Institute, and to ministries of the government of Austria, which have given support. I want to thank all the foreign and overseas participants who have travelled far and mostly at their own expense. A warm welcome to Vienna! I want to thank the Austrian participants who have responded to the call to this conference. We know what a busy time of the university year this is--and how difficult it is to juggle conflicting commitments of teaching and the many other conferences taking place at this time. We anticipate an exciting and fruitful intellectual exchange, new friendships, and the extension of the international network of Polanyi-related cooperation. In that respect, this conference is a landmark. Although the third Polanyi conference of 1990, organized by our colleague Alfredo Salsano, took place in Milan with significant participation by international and Italian scholars, this fifth conference has truly been a major effort of transatlantic institutional cooperation between the Research Unit for Socio-economics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy of Concordia University. On behalf of the Polanyi Institute, I wish to express a very special thanks to Dr. Wolfgang Blaas, Karl Althaler, and all other Austrian colleagues who have contributed to the organization of this conference. On my personal behalf, I extend heartfelt thanks and deep appreciation to my colleagues Marguerite Mendell and Ana Gomez, without whose untiring efforts we would not be here today.

This conference marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Great Transformation and the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Karl Polanyi. The book first appeared in the United States in 1944. An English edition, under the title The Origins of Our Time, appeared a year later. Initially, the work attracted little attention in the United States, and none at all in England. From 1947 to the late 1950s, Polanyi taught at Columbia University and engaged in research on economic life in primitive and archaic societies. He challenged prevailing "formalist" orthodoxies, which applied the methodology of neoclassical economics to the study of traditional "non-market" societies. The "formalist-substantivist" debate initiated by Polanyi and his associates established his scholarly reputation in the area of economic anthropology, and secured him an academic foothold in the "institutionalist" camp of U.S. social science. He was at that time in the seventh decade of his life. The long detour into economic anthropology was a test of the principal thesis of The Great Transformation. Polanyi's "substantivist" argument maintained that in all previous human societies, the economy was submerged (embedded) in social relationships. Prior to the rise of industrial capitalism, markets were never more than accessories of economic life. In that regard, the generalized market economy of modern industrial capitalism stands revealed as an exception. In the course of the past two-hundred years, economic life has been progressively disembedded from the societal and cultural matrix. As "improvement" (read "efficiency") conquers "habitat" (read "security"), as labor, land, and money have become commodified, the economy has acquired an existence of its own, driven by "laws" of its own, whether conceived in neoclassical or Marxist terms. It is the central argument of The Great Transformation that the liberal "Utopia" of a generalized "self-regulating" market is a prescription for disaster. "Such an institution," Polanyi wrote, could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society. It would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Stripped of social, cultural, and ecological support systems, he wrote, people will perish from hunger, pestilence, violence, and neglect. Fifty years ago this language might have seemed excessive. Today, as the carrying capacity of the biosphere is threatened by the wasteful lifestyle of Western consumerism, and millions of people are uprooted, displaced, homeless, or seeking access to work which Europeans and North Americans no longer want to do, the degradation of the environment and population migrations are at the top of the agenda of concerns in the rich countries of the West.

Re-issued in 1957, The Great Transformation slowly gained in influence. Polanyi had by now retired. He entered academic life too late to found a school. In so far as there were followers, they were a small number of former Columbia graduate students in anthropology and sociology. The insights of The Great Transformation in the area of international political economy lay dormant, although it has been suggested that they were a (largely unacknowledged) influence on the "world system" paradigm. The book, however, took on an existence of its own. A remarkable number of diverse individuals have reported the excitement with which they discovered and read The Great Transformation, and the influence it had on their thinking. Translations began to appear. The first was a Spanish pirate edition (1947) out of Buenos Aires, followed by editions in Japanese (1956), Italian (Einaudi, 1974), German (1977), and Brazilian Portuguese (Rio de Janerio 1980). All of Polanyi's works have been translated to Italian and Japanese, while the Hungarians translated everything except The Great Transformation (perhaps because Polanyi's treatment of distant and exotic societies was politically safer--and thus more "scholarly"). More recently, there have been translations into Turkish (1986) and Swedish (1991). Interest has been minimal in Western Europe: a French translation (Galimard) did not appear until 1983.

When my mother died in 1978, I inherited the Polanyi papers, and with them the responsibility of the Karl Polanyi legacy. I visited Vienna and Budapest to meet with family members--in Vienna Maria Szecsi and her husband Eduard Marz, and in Budapest George Striker and his wife Barbara. Only Barbara is still with us. She is here this evening, and tomorrow she will tell us about her participation in the illegal radio transmissions of "Radio Schutzbund" in the months following the demise of Redvienna in February 1934. In 1978, I made enquiries concerning individuals or institutions that might be interested in the life and work of my father, with a view to depositing his papers here in Vienna. Nobody was interested. As my mother would have said, "Keine Katz und kein Hund hatsich interessiert." In thatregard, nothing much changed in the course of repeated visits over the next ten years. In 1987, following the Budapest Centenary Conference of 1986, Marguerite Mendell and I established the Karl Polanyi Institute at Concordia University in Montreal, and this is where the papers are now deposited. We believed that our institute could serve as a forum for the exchange of views between scholars concerned by the rise of the neoliberal market paradigm to the status of semi-official ideology of governments. A decade of Thatcher and Reagan had unleashed an economic and social counterrevolution in the West. In the 1980s, the international financial institutions, acting on behalf of the United States and other major OECD members, forced developing countries to undertake extreme measures of economic and financial liberalization as conditions for continued access to international capital markets. Then came the collapse of Communism, and a sea change in economic and political relations on a world scale.

The passing of an era is more clearly evident than is the shape of the present, not to speak of the future, as manifested in the proliferation of "posts," as in post-industrial, post-modern, post-positivist, post-cold War, or post-communist. We note the trend to the "deconstruction" of concepts which have served the social and natural sciences since they emerged. (Economics has undergone its own deconstruction, in the form of the new macroeconomics.) Progress, development, democracy, socialism, political "right" and "left" are among terms whose meanings are not as clear they once seemed to be. From Chile to Brazil to Jamaica--not to mention Europe-prominent personalities of the "left" have reappeared as recycled advocates of "free market" capitalism.

Grand ideas are out. "Identity" is "in," defined in terms of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexual preference, and a proliferation of cross-overs of these attributes. In the West, and among opinion-making elites in developing countries within the cultural sphere of the West, there is a paralyzing sense of loss of vision, the absence of a "social project"-reflected in the devaluation of politics and politicians. The priority of individual economic advancement over societal objectives of collective well-being and elemental social justice are creating a culture of alienation manifested in the rise of crime, violence, xenophobia, and the general cheapening of human life. There is a pervasive sense of insecurity and fear in the West. In developing countries, the privileged elites have long lived behind protective walls, guarded by razor wire and fierce dogs. In the former socialist countries, a primitive form of robber capitalism is practiced in the streets of major cities.

In the chaotic uncertainty that hangs over the shape of things to come, Polanyi's Great Transformation has moved from the margin closer to the center of discussion. There has been a noticeable increase in Polanyi citations in books, articles, and even newspapers. Polanyi is now cited in England--where he was almost totally unknown--and also in Austria where, I suggest, The Great Transformation was originally conceived. The book took shape in England in the form of lectures prepared for adult education courses on English social and economic history and international affairs. From 1934 to 1940 my father earned his living as extra-mural tutor for the Workers Education Association, until he was invited to spend three years in the United States, where the book was written.

The source of the gripping rhetoric that pervades this work originates from Polanyi's central European experience. The listening post from which he observed the failed attempts to restore the nineteenth-century liberal economic order was the editorial office of the Ostereichische Volkswirt where, as he wrote a friend, he earned an honest living as a journalist, specializing in international affairs, from 1924 to 1933. His articles--now available in book form in Italian translation, thanks to our colleague Michal Cangiani--constitute a detailed account and analysis of key political, economic, and financial events of the interwar period, summarized in Part One of The Great Transformation as "Conservative Twenties: Revolutionary Thirties." Emigration to England and the shock of discovering of the deculturalization and immiserization of the working classes in the homeland of industrial capitalism was an important experiential input to the central chapters which form Part Two of the book. The legacy of Blake's "Dark Satanic Mills"--the slums of London, Birmingham, and Manchester, the coal valleys of Wales, the hopelessness in the faces of England's 2.5 million unemployed, and the country's crass class structure--stood in contrast to the higher quality of life of the working class in (economically much poorer) socialist Redvienna. England, it must be remembered, was at that time richer than any other European country, while postwar Austria suffered persistent high unemployment. In Polanyi's formative years, England was the mecca of the intelligentsia of central Europe--a role played on a world scale by the United States after the Second World War.

The closing paragraph of the second chapter of The Great Transformation reads as follows: Market society was born in England--yet it was on the continent that its weakness engendered the most tragic complications. In order to comprehend German fascism, we must revert to Ricardian England. The Industrial Revolution was an English event. Market economy, free trade, and the gold standard were English inventions. These institutions broke down in the 1920s everywhere--in Germany, Italy, or Austria the event was merely more political and more dramatic. But whatever the scenery and the temperature of the final episodes, the long-run factors which wrecked that civilization should be studied in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, England.

The thesis of The Great Transformation is that the civilization which collapsed in the 1920s was "economic" in a different sense that in which all societies have been limited by the material conditions of their existence. It was "economic" in the distinctive sense that it chose to base itself on a motive never before raised to the level of justification of action and behavior in everyday life, namely gain. Market economy grew to maturity in England, spread to the continent, and to the United States and eventually, he wrote, "it shaped daily issues into a pattern the main traits of which were identical in all countries of Western civilization." "Identical" is perhaps an overstatement. The differences in the way capitalism has impacted on different societies are not unimportant. On re-reading the cited passage about the English origins of the key institutions of liberal capitalism, one is struck by the continuity of an Anglo-Saxon political culture that has elevated the institutions of private property, private enterprise, and private profit to normative ends in and of themselves, and the fiction of "economic man" to a pseudoscientific shibboleth. In the Anglo-amefican political culture, the worth, value, and social status of an individual is judged by the market price he or she is able to command. Thus, for example, a Japanese CEO of a major corporation makes perhaps 20 to 25 times the pay of an average worker in the company; in Germany, perhaps 30 to 35 times, in the United States, 160 times. Moreover, the U.S. CEO pays a lesser rate of tax than in any other country. In Britain, barely one third of workers now have full-time tenured jobs. The rest, according to a Guardian report, "have been plunged into uncertainty and conditions that nineteenth-century factory workers would have recognized." Britain ranks at the bottom of the league of OECD countries in terms of the protection of labor. British employers

can treat labor more as a disposable commodity and displace the risk of fluctuating demand onto their workers. They meet the very high financial returns demanded by the City of London by pushing labor into abysmal insecurity and increasing poverty.

In Britain, the poorest 10 percent of the population has had an absolute fall in income of 17 percent since 1979, while the richest 10 percent enjoyed an increase of 62 percent. Almost one in three children now live below the poverty line, compared with 10 percent a decade ago. Similar figures could be cited for the United States and for Canada. The Anglo-American variety of capitalism is individualistic as no other national capitalism has ever been. Time horizons are shorter, time preference stronger, expected rates of return higher, and rates of savings lower than is the case in continental Europe, Japan, or the Asian Tigers. It is this Anglo-American model of capitalism that is being unleashed upon the world today.

Fifty years ago, Polanyi believed that the lessons of the 1930s had resulted in the transformation of the nineteenth-century liberal economy into some form of planned and regulated economic order, under the guidance of the nation state. Since the mid-1970s, market economy, free trade, and the primacy of finance over production of essential material requirements of economic livelihood--which was the essence of the international gold standard and the reason why this institution was a central target of Polanyi's (and also Keynes') invective--are back on the agenda. Socialism in all its forms is in deep retreat. Polanyi was premature in dismissing "market economy" and "market society" from the stage of history. But was he wrong in his analysis of the dangers inherent in the elevation of "the economic instance" over all other aspects of human endeavor and human existence? Is there really no alternative to global neoliberalization? Have nation states--even large ones--been fiscally emasculated into helplessness and passivity by the dictates of global money markets? These questions are crucial and they are the reason why The Great Transformation has surfaced from relative obscurity and why Polanyi's critique of market economy has attracted the attention of many scholars, including those gathered here.

Fantastic as it may seem--"Utopian" as Polanyi would have said--the policy prescriptions favored by the neo-utilitarian ideologues of our day are modeled on the glory days of nineteenth-century economic liberalism. The fourth quarter of the twentieth century has been described as the "Age of Hayek," in contradistinction to the third quarter as the "Age of Keynes." A reading of Hayek reveals a radical liberal vision of the economy as a structure "arising without design from human interaction." The "macroeconomics of the last fifty years" is demonized as a

delusion... the nearest thing to the practice of magic ... by professional economists whose extensive use of mathematics has unduly impressed politicians lacking in mathematical education.

But Hayek's nineteenth-century liberal El Dorado, once described by Eric Hobsbawm as "the anarchism of the bourgeoisie ... which had no place for the state" did not arise "without dcsign from human action." As Polanyi explained in The Great Transformation, the liberal economic order was designed by the early English political economists and was instituted by the power of the state, which created "free" labor markets to force workers to accept employment on conditions offered by the capitalists or go hungry--or worse, go to the poorhouse. Nor did the British state acquire the most extensive empire in all human history in a "fit of absent mindedness."

Prior to 1914, Britain's formal and informal empire yielded backflows of rentier incomes of 8 to 9 percent of GNP which fed the life-style of the English upper classes and the wealth of the City of London as premier financial center of the world and the anchor of the international gold standard.

In the inter-war years, the gold standard served as a means of imposing deflationary measures on debtors to protect the value of financial assets of creditors and the interests of the City of London and Wall Street. Keynes understood better than any other major economist that the inter-war gold standard was a mechanism that favored the propertied classes at the expanse of the laboring classes: "The gold standard, with its general regardlessness of social detail, is an essential emblem of those who sit in the top tier of the machine." His scathing indictment of "The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill" and the Bank of England, which subjected British miners to the "economic juggernaut" of deflationary policies to defend the over-valued pound in the 1920s, is a classic of economic literature. Polanyi's account of the vulnerability of the small and weak peripheral states of central and east Europe to a pull on the "golden thread" reads like a preview of the IMF stabilization and adjustment programs of the 1980s. There was hardly an internal crisis in Europe that did not reach its climax on an issue of the external value of the currency. By means of deflation, mass dismissal of public servants, wage repression, and persistent unemployment, currencies were stabilized and fixed in terms of gold to guarantee debt service to foreign bond holders. In the succession states of central Europe, international creditors instituted regimes of external supervision under the auspices of the League of Nations operating from Geneva.

In describing the role of international financial interests in restoring rightist regimes in central and eastern Europe and in precipitating the Great Depression of the 1930s, Polanyi noted that

Vienna became the mecca of liberal economists on account of the brilliantly successful operation on Austria's krone which the patient unfortunately did not survive. In Bulgaria, Greece, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, and Rumania, the restoration of the currency provided counterrevolution with a claim to power. In Belgium, France, and England, the left was thrown out of office in the name of sound monetary standards. An almost unbroken sequence of currency crises linked the indigent Balkans with the affluent United States through the elastic band of the international credit system, which transmitted the strains of the imperfectly restored currencies first from eastern to western Europe, and then from western Europe to the United States, until the United States itself was engulfed in the premature stabilization of European currencies.

Like Kindleberger's classic interpretation of the origins of the Great Depression, Polanyi's account turned on the dynamics of unsustainable structures of external indebtedness.

Today, the power of financial capital is greater and much more invasive than was the case in the interwar period. At the same time, it is less transparent. Today it is not clear who is pulling the strings that reign in debtor governments. Global finance appears to have acquired a life of its own, as a mass of disembodied money enveloping the globe, able to descend from the skies to mount attacks on currencies and cause politicians and senior public servants sleepless nights waiting for the reaction of the markets and credit ratings of government bonds. But this gigantic engine of inequality which operates to transfer real wealth from the weak to the strong, from debtors to creditors, from productive to financial activity, is not the autonomous creation of a technological revolution in communication--as is widely believed--but was instituted by deliberate state action in the interests of the owners of capital assets.

The move to financial liberalization, which destroyed the Bretton Woods order designed by Keynes and White in 1944, was led by the City of London and subsequently received the support of the United States, which has benefitted from the position of the dollar as the major reserve currency of the world economy. The role of British and U.S. policy in unleashing private financial markets is documented in an excellent study by Eric Helleiner (1994), who was unfortunately unable to join us here. The United States has been able to postpone adjustment to the loss of competitiveness by attracting large net capital inflows, reminiscent of Britain's ability to finance an import surplus by the backflow of overseas interest and profits in years gone by. The unrestricted international movement of capital has eroded the fiscal basis of the welfare state and the capacity of countries to pursue full employment policies, as Keynes knew it would. This is why he advocated permanent capital controls.

For two or three decades after the Second World War, finance served industry. The Keynesian consensus secured relative stability and unprecedented economic expansion under state-managed welfare capitalism within the political framework of the Cold War standoff between the nuclear super-powers and the capacity of the United States to finance general economic expansion. Since the mid-1970s, the international economy has become less stable, growth momentum weaker, real interest rates higher, unemployment chronic, competition fiercer, and income inequalities within and between states much greater. Exchange rates are no longer governed by trade flows but by capital movements, including speculation against weak currencies and capital flight from weak economies. The Bretton Woods institutions, which have long ceased to play the roles originally assigned to them, have used financial leverage to bulldoze economic and social protective structures of weak indebted countries. Countries have been forced to dollarize internal prices so that food and other basic necessities of life cost the same injamaica as they cost in New York or Toronto, where average incomes are 5 to 10 to 20 times higher. Debt service has priori ty over developmental expenditures, and real resource transfers from debtor to creditor countries in the form of export surpluses are reminiscent of the economics of colonialism. The leverage which is crushing the poor to create "level playing fields" for capital is external and financial. It has been said that for Keynes "the great problem of the age was to free modern industrialization from the fetters of financial capitalism." The Bretton Woods institutions created by Keynes and White fifty years ago have been perverted to serve financial capital and debt collection. Criticized by developing countries and NGOs for their failed structural adjustment programs--as in the "Fifty Years Is Enough!" campaign--and threatened with reduced financial support by the major OECD countries, they may soon be fighting for their continued institutional existence. Unregulated financial capital has been "crowding out" and choking the real economy on a world scale. "Development" is off the agenda of the major industrial countries.

The challenge is to reclaim the state for society as an instrument to regulate and contain disembodied capital. This cannot come about until common societal interests prevail over individual greed and gain. It is the task of the social movements which have received increasing attention--also here in this conference--to harness the forces of democracy to challenge financial power. The task is today more difficult, especially in the rich North because creditor interests which drive restrictive monetary policies and the privatization of public and social infrastructure--including education and health--have won the support of the new middle classes, including millions of wage and salary earners concerned to maintain the value of their assets, whether in the form of institutional savings or equity in home ownership. The "proletariat" with nothing to lose, insofar as it exists in the North, is an impoverished underclass, generally of ethnic origin other than that of the majority, with no voice in society. The opinion-making elites, including the media and the academic community, reflect the concerns of the "haves" of tbe world.

But the world is no longer a world of Europe and its diaspora in the Americas and elsewhere. The transformations we are witnessing today, the outcome of which is dramatically indeterminate, is playing out on a global scale. We are conscious of the end of the era, but it is not clear how far back we must reach to locate the start of that which is in decline. To 1945? 1914 or 1917? 1789? or to the sixteenth century, when Europe's explosion of creativity and conquest first burst forth upon the world? It is absurd to suggest that Karl Polanyi had the answers to such big questions. But his intuition, combined with his observation of the collapse of (Western) civilization in the wake of the great European war of 1914-1945, led him to see capitalist "market economy" as an aberration of human development, replete with dangers for the human race. In the Vienna of the 1920s, Polanyi challenged von Mises and Hayek to a debate on the feasibility of democratic socialism. At that time, Polanyi and Hayek were obscure and minor intellectual figures. The Great Transformation and Hayek's Road to Serfdom both appeared in 1944. In the course of the last twenty years, Hayek's neoliberal manifesto has attained global influence. It is said to be the bible of senior policy-makers from Washington to Prague. It is fitting that we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of The Great Transformation here in Vienna, to engage the neoliberal ideology based on the elevation of individual gain to the guiding principle of economic life in intellectual combat.

The Great Transformation is an eloquent warning of the consequences of subordinating societies and cultures to the accumulation of capital on a global scale. It points to the urgent need to impose limitations on market forces and to defend, protect, and restore the capacity of societies to shape economic institutions in accordance with the diversity of social and cultural priorities of peoples. It is the responsibility of intellectuals of independent mind to explore alternatives to prevailing trends which exclude ever increasing numbers of people from access to economic livelihood, dignity, and meaningful participation in society. We reject the proposition that there are no alternatives. In this spirit, I wish you a successful conference.

NOTES

(1.) Karl Polanyi, Conrad Arensberg, and Hany Pearson, eds., Trade. and Market in the, Early Fmpires (New York: Free Press, 1957). (2.) Two books by Polanyi's former students were significantly important in disseminating his ideas. George Dalton edited a well-known selection of Polanyi's writings under the tide Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). Harry Pearson edited previously unpublished Polanyi texts, including some of his Columbia lectures on "General Economic History," as The Livelihood of Man (New York: Academic Press, 1977). (3.) Dudley Dillard, "The Keynesian Revolution and Economic Development," Journal of Economic History (November 1948).

Kari Polanyi Levitt, co-director of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, is Emeritus Professor of Economics at McGill University and George Beckford Professor of Caribbean Economy at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group