Karl Polanyi in Dialogue: A Socialist Thinker for Our Times 9781551646015, 9781551646039, 9781551646053

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POLITICS • SOCIAL THEORY

Karl Polanyi in Dialogue

Karl Polanyi in Dialogue A Socialist Thinker for Our Times Michael Brie With Nancy Fraser

Michael Brie is a senior fellow of the Institute for Critical Social Analysis at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin. His research interests include the history and theory of socialism and the socio-ecological transformation of society under capitalism. He is chief editor of the series Contributions to Critical Transformation Research and coeditor of Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist Transformation (Black Rose Books, 2017).

A Socialist Thinker for Our Times

Michael Brie

Amid the tension of this crisis Michael Brie argues for an urgent theoretical and practical reorganisation of the Left. Developing the work of philosopher and social theorist Karl Polanyi, Brie advocates an alliance of socialist liberals and libertarian ‘commonists’ that unites contemporary campaigns for recognition with more traditional struggles for social welfare and economic democracy. Starting from Nancy Fraser’s critical reappraisal of Polanyi in her article “A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi”, Brie reinterprets Polanyi’s thought for present times, developing powerful Polanyian response to neoliberalism, the authoritarian right and the ongoing threat of global ecological disaster. Also included are two articles by Polanyi translated into English for the first time and Kari Polanyi-Levitt’s 2014 lecture to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin.

Karl Polanyi in Dialogue

The contemporary Left fights its political battles on various fronts: protesting the crippling inequalities that sustain neoliberal economic policy; developing sustainable alternatives to the consumerism that exacerbates the environmental crisis; and advocating for the emancipation and celebration of the diversity of human identity. But despite this versatility the Left is in worldwide retreat whilst an aggressive ‘Alt-Right’ is taking to the streets and the internet, regurgitating a regressive and patriarchal vision of society that has already won startling political victories in the US and Europe.

Nancy Fraser is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her research interests include social and political theory and contemporary European thought. Her most recent publication is Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Verso, 2013).

Montréal/New York/London www.web.net/blackrosebooks

Michael Brie

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Karl Polanyi in Dialogue

Karl Polanyi in Dialogue A Socialist Thinker for Our Times

M i c h ael Brie (ed.)

Montreal • New York • London

Copyright ©2017 BlaCk ROSE BOOkS No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system – without written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright licensing agency, access Copyright, with the exception of brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine. Black Rose Books No. RR385 Black Rose Books acknowledges the financial support of this publication by the Rosa luxemburg Foundation (Berlin) library and archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication karl Polanyi in dialogue: a socialist thinker of our time / Michael Brie (ed.). includes bibliographical references. issued in print and electronic formats. iSBN 978-1-55164-603-9 (hardcover).–iSBN 978-1-55164-601-5 (softcover).– iSBN 978-1-55164-605-3 (PDF) 1. Polanyi, karl, 1886-1964.  2. Socialism.  3. Right and left (Political  science).  i. Brie, Michael, editor  HB102.P64k37 2017   

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Table of contents

7 For an alliance of liberal Socialists and libertarian commonists: Nancy Fraser and Karl Polanyi— a Possible Dialogue Michael Brie 65 a Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of crisis after Polanyi Nancy Fraser 79 The common Man’s Masterplan (1943) Karl Polanyi 95 hamlet (1954) Karl Polanyi 109 From Great Transformation to Great Financialization Kari Polanyi-Levitt 119 Bibliography

michAel brie

For an Alliance of Liberal Socialists and Libertarian Commonists: Nancy Fraser and Karl Polanyi — A Possible Dialogue The essential connotation [of “nation”] is always about the communion of humans. The heart of the feudal nation was privilege; the heart of the bourgeois nation was property; the heart of the socialist nation is the people, where collective existence is the enjoyment of a community culture. I myself have never lived in such a society. karl Polanyi, in a last letter written shortly before his death on 23 april 1964, to Rudolf Shlesinger, the editor of Co-Existence, a journal founded by Polanyi. (Quoted in Polanyi-levitt 1990a, 263) Man has learned much since morning, For we are a conversation, and we can listen To one another. Soon we'll be song. … Friedrich Hölderlin

The Beginning of the Journey: Nancy Fraser Meets Karl Polanyi – but Which One?1 it was a dark autumn evening in Berlin in 2012 when Nancy Fraser delivered her Rosa luxemburg lecture “a Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi” and took us on a journey. She sat in the overcrowded hall of a former brewery in the old central district of Berlin and asked why there is no “Polyanian” counter-movement for the “protection of society” against neoliberalism. She listed the obstacles to such a movement: the lack of a clear leadership, the fragmentation of the organised labour movement, and the devaluing of the national arenas of struggle. But for Fraser these obstacles were not sufficient to explain

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the lack of an effective resistance to neoliberalism. The need remains great and the counterforces much too meagre. However, she also made clear how suspect the earlier form of “social protection” was. We should not once again defend a movement that in the years after the Second World War led to bureaucratized and patriarchal welfare systems often characterized by racism. Weren’t the new movements of the 1960s and 70s right to be up in arms against this? They decried the “oppressive character of bureaucratically organized social protections…financed on the backs of postcolonial peoples” (Fraser 2013a, 128) whilst pointing out the structural disadvantage of women as well as people of colour in the USa and the “invidious character of public provision premised on restrictive, hetero-normative definitions of family.” (ibid.,128) and these are only a few of the protest movements’ criticisms of social protection and the welfare states which were characteristic of the post-1945 period in the USa and Western Europe. For Fraser, a mere repetition of the old counter-movements seemed equally impossible and undesirable. a real breakthrough would, according to her, only be possible through an alliance with a third movement, that is, with the aforementioned protest movements. These movements, she claimed, arose from a confrontation with post-war capitalism and “do not fit either pole of the double movement. Demanding access, as opposed to protection, their paramount aim was not to defend “society” but to overcome domination.” (Fraser 2013a, 128) Such a breakthrough would integrate emancipatory factors of the market “to the extent that the protections it disintegrates are oppressive.” (ibid.,p.129) Fraser summarised her resulting diagnoses of our contemporary situation as follows: i propose, accordingly, to analyse the present constellation by means of a different figure, which i call the triple movement. like Polanyi’s figure, the triple movement serves as an analytical device for parsing the grammar of social struggle in capitalist society. But unlike the double movement, it delineates a three-sided conflict among proponents of marketization, adherents of social protection and partisans

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of emancipation. The aim here is not simply greater inclusiveness, however. it is rather to capture the shifting relations among those three sets of political forces, whose projects intersect and collide. The triple movement foregrounds the fact that each can ally, in principle, with either of the other two poles against the third. (ibid., 128 f.) On this basis she developed her vision of a new emancipatory project, which connects justified concerns about emancipation, social protection, and individual rights and freedoms. Precisely because i consider this project so important there was a moment during Fraser’s lecture that evening that caused me some worry; i imagined a conversation taking place between Fraser and Polanyi. it was a brief remark that struck me: ‘We can already see, contra Polanyi, that social protection is often ambivalent.’ (ibid., 129) But i remembered having read in Polanyi: “Speenhamland was an unfailing instrument of popular demoralization. if a human society is a self-acting machine for maintaining the standards on which it is built, Speenhamland was an automaton for demolishing the standards on which any kind of society could be based. Not only did it put a premium on the shirking of work and the pretense of inadequacy, but it increased the attraction of pauperism precisely at the juncture when a man was straining to escape the fate of the destitute.” (Polanyi 2001, 103 f.)2 Nancy Fraser invited us that evening to take part in her search for a way out of the crippling blockages within capitalism’s crisis. While listening to her i was reminded of a wonderful reflection of Ernst Bloch’s who, at a very advanced age and from his own experience, wrote: “it is especially in creative work that a formidable boundary is crossed, which i call the transition point to something which is not yet known. Toil, darkness, thundering ice, and a calm sea and prosperous voyage are found here. if we can break through this point we see a country where nobody has ever been, which indeed itself has never before existed. and which needs at once people, wanderers, a compass and depths in the landscape [Tiefe im Land]” (Bloch 1959, 1f.) and it seemed to me that setting out and reaching the country “where nobody has ever been, that has never before existed”

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required a very intensive dialogue across generations. it could be a dialogue between Nancy Fraser and karl Polanyi, but also between the social protest movements and left wing forces of the last two decades. in 1954 Polanyi published an article on Shakespeare’s Hamlet against the backdrop of his own experiences in the First World War, through which he had always carried with him an edition of Shakespeare’s works (reprinted in this book). He wonders why Hamlet follows his father’s request for revenge whilst at the same time denying it to himself: “Hamlet is about the human condition. We all live, insofar we refuse to die. But we are not resolved to live in all the essential respects which life invites us to. We are postponing happiness, because we hesitate ourselves to live… life is man’s missed opportunity.” (Polanyi 1954, 350) Polanyi carries out a dialogue with Shakespeare’s Hamlet in order to explore his own lived and unlived possibilities. He suffered from the fact that his world had given him so little “enjoyment of a community culture”. like Hamlet’s friend, the humanist Horatio, we could also invoke the spirit of Polanyi: “Stay, illusion! if thou hast any sound, or use of voice, Speak to me: if there be any good thing to be done, That may to thee do ease and grace to me, Speak to me…” in such a dialogue with Polanyi we should not fall into the temptation to separate The Great Transformation from his subsequent works, because, according to alfredo Salsano, Polanyi’s writing constitutes “a life-work, that, by virtue of a coherence that is apparent only when seen as a whole, still has real vitality.” in pointing out this coherence Salsano identifies one of the peculiarities of the reception of The Great Transformation, that the book has mostly been appreciated in complete absence of what the author himself said about it. This also applies to Nancy Fraser, who limits her reading of Polanyi to The Great Transformation. However, this work is incomprehensible when removed from the context of Polanyi’s total œuvre. Reading it in isolation misleads one into taking it as an epiphany that suddenly appeared in the world, without asking where the light emanating from this work comes from; we do not go beyond being enthralled at the so brilliantly illuminated phenomena, forgetting that in other places Polanyi treated other phenomena not illuminated here. as

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in Plato’s cave, everyone gazes on the shadow images while no one looks at the source of the illumination nor at what remains dark in the work. The work itself accommodates this, providing a wonderfully convincing and coherent narrative which gives the impression of having emerged in one piece.3 From the very beginning a misunderstanding has to be cleared up — the reduction of Polanyi’s work to that of a reformer who wants to counter the excesses of market radicalism with social protection measures and believes that the crisis of modern civilisation can be overcome in this way. This clarification leads to the second and third part of the dialogue, in which Polanyi speaks as a socialist and anti-fascist who sees the ‘great Transformation’ as the overcoming of capitalist market society necessary if we are to live in freedom. On this basis Nancy Fraser’s triple movement will then be taken up in a fourth dialogue and expanded to a quadruple movement which stages a confrontation between market radicalism and social protection on the one hand and emancipatory and oppression movements on the other. Fifth, we will then see that even this quadruple movement does not suffice for understanding what Fraser refers to as the “political grammar” of the present. a space of alternatives will be sketched out in which emancipatory and authoritarian movements confront each other over the contradiction of inter-subjective claims to freedom and demands for equal access to the basic goods of society. Sixth, this leads to a brief look at concrete projects dealing with these contradictions – neoliberalism, liberal socialism, libertarian commonism, and authoritarian social paternalism. Seventh, this then makes it possible to look at Polanyi’s actual vision, a great Transformation towards a society which reorganizes modern society’s production of wealth on an emancipatory-solidary basis and liberates the basic goods of that society – nature and labour, money and knowledge – from their subordination to markets. Finally, this leads to the question of paths towards transformation. From the dialogue with karl Polanyi and Nancy Fraser an ever growing polylogue with many societal movements arises. it can, i hope, help overcome the divisions of the left within the common struggles for a societal change which goes beyond capitalism to ‘another world’. Still, the conversation has to begin with the clarification of a misunderstanding.

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First Part of the Dialogue: Clearing Up Misunderstandings – ‘Polanyi Light’, ‘Polanyi Faked’, and ‘Polanyi Himself’ When karl Polanyi’s name is mentioned reference is always made to the socalled ‘double movement’. in this kind of reception Polanyi often appears as a reformer who wants to force back the unleashed markets into the river bed of social protections, whatever the concrete forms of social control and regulation are—as long as they restrain the destructive effects of the markets. Our present era seems to repeat his diagnosis of the epochal situation of the 1920s and 1930s, “only at another scale” (Zincone and agnew 2000, 7; see also gill and Mittelman 1997, 80) or with another emphasis, that of ecology (Burawoy 2010, 309). in such a reading of his work, Polanyi’s concerns are largely reduced to the idea that “ever-wider extensions of free market principles generated counter-movements to protect society.” (Webster and kalekin-Fishman 2009, 265)4 This is the Polanyi whose spirit Nancy Fraser invoked that evening and which she described in the following way: in the first half of the 20th century, social struggles surrounding the crisis formed what Polanyi called a “double movement”. as he saw it, political parties and social movements coalesced around one side or the other of a simple fault-line. On one side stood political forces and commercial interests that favoured deregulating markets and extending commodification; on the other stood a broad-based, crossclass front, including urban workers and rural landowners, socialists and conservatives, that sought to “protect society” from the ravages of the market. as the crisis sharpened, moreover, the partisans of “social protection” won the day. in contexts as divergent as New Deal america, Stalinist Russia, fascist Europe and, later, in postwar social democracy, the political classes appeared to converge on at least this one point: left to themselves, “self-regulating” markets in labour, nature and money would destroy society. Political regulation was needed to save it. (Fraser 2013a, 120) in this depiction the double movement is presented in a completely one-dimensional way. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Hitler’s racist-genocidal project via a Eurasia dominated by greater germany and Stalinist state

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socialism are assigned to the pole of the counter-movement without distinction. in relation to their resistance to deregulated markets, the differences amongst them appear to be secondary. The contrasts between the real goals of this resistance and the differences between the means employed become completely unrecognisable in respect to the one commonality – overcoming market society. We should however follow albert Einstein’s maxim: “it can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” (Einstein 1934: 165) The difference between fascism and the New Deal, Stalinism or the kind of democratic socialism advocated by Polanyi is more than “a single datum of experience”. For Polanyi it would have made no sense to construct a theory that smoothed over the differences between social and democratic oriented responses and fascist ones.5 The conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries can in no way be reduced to the one-dimensional conflict between supporters of a market society and their opponents. Polanyi saw the central divide of his time as being between fascism and socialism; both were “rooted in a market society that refused to function.” (Polanyi 2001, 248) The claim that Polanyi was blind to the fact “that social protection is often ambivalent” (Fraser 2013a, 129) is not sustainable. Fraser points out cautiously enough that “feminist theorists should not embrace Polanyi’s framework in the form in which it appears in The Great Transformation.” Her goal is “a new, quasi-Polanyian conception of capitalist crisis that not only avoids reductive economism but also avoids romanticising ‘society’.” (Fraser 2013b, 230)6 it is unsurprising that Nancy Fraser cannot find the path she is seeking on her map of Polanyi’s thought because this map characterizes all paths as an either-or—either market deregulation or paternalist social protection. But Polanyi left behind completely different maps from his research voyages to discover an alternative to capitalist market society. We could also say that he was already in the waters where Nancy Fraser would like to take us, and it makes sense to study more closely what findings he brought back with him. Perhaps in this way we will more easily find the

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path that we are searching for Nancy Fraser’s introduction of a triple movement is a response to a problem that, in the way she presents it, does not even exist in Polanyi’s work. She supplements it through a second dimension without his own theory needing this supplement, as we will show in what follows. However, there is a reason for this misunderstanding. The timeliness of The Great Transformation is so striking that the reader imagines it is above all dealing with the contemporary situation. For example, Polanyi writes that in the context of the end of the 19th century, “the repudiation of foreign debts, or attempts to tamper with budgetary guarantees, even on backward governments, was deemed an outrage, and was punished by relegation to the outer darkness of those unworthy of credit.” (Polanyi 2001, 214f.) Observations of this sort are constantly being made today. Many of our contemporaries therefore have a déjà-vu feeling reading The Great Transformation: “the world has been here before”, writes the British columnist Will Hutton in connection with “the veto on politics placed by the global capital markets.” (quoted in Polanyi-levitt 1994, 132) Polanyi’s representation of the destruction of society, nature, and culture is alive 70 years after he wrote his book; his description of the crisis of the financial system is almost completely up to date. as Joseph Stiglitz wrote in his preface to a re-edition of The Great Transformation more than 10 years ago: “Because the transformation of [19th-century, M.B.] European civilization is analogous to the transformation confronting developing countries around the world today, it often seems as if Polanyi is speaking directly to present day issues. His arguments—and his concerns—are consonant with the issues raised by the rioters and marchers who took to the streets in Seattle and Prague in 1999 and 2000 to oppose the international financial institutions.” (Stiglitz 2001, vii) and this is even truer today! But this timeliness also has a flipside. in his magnum opus Polanyi describes the counter-movements against market society in the 19th century so vividly, so trenchantly, that the basis of movement as well as countermovement—the capitalist market society—appears self-evident and natural. One is tempted to speak of a ‘natural law’, and market society appears as an unalterable fact on whose basis there can only be either

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more market or more social protection. This is diametrically opposed to Polanyi’s innermost intentions. in a certain sense his portrayal of the appearance of social protection measures in England is too plausible when he describes how from the unplanned efforts of England’s ruling classes, which in no way emerged from a common conviction and strategy, attempts grew to bring the destructive tendencies of unbridled markets under control, above all under the leadership of the Conservatives. in Polanyi’s view, the Conservatives had brought “the principle of social protection” (Polanyi 2001, 138) to bear. in passages in The Great Transformation everything seems to happen automatically and society heals itself as a matter of course. as he writes: The countermove against economic liberalism and laissez-faire possessed all the unmistakable characteristics of a spontaneous reaction. at innumerable disconnected points it set in without any traceable links between the interests directly affected or any ideological conformity between them. Even in the settlement of one and the same problem, as in the case of workmen’s compensation, solutions switched over from individualistic to “collectivistic”, from liberal to antiliberal, from laissez-faire to interventionist forms without any change in the economic interest, the ideological influences or political forces in play, merely as a result of the increasing realization of the nature of the problem in question. (ibid., 156) He summarises succinctly: “While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate State action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way.” (ibid., 147) Such a message and promise for the crises of capitalism is in its own way so catchy that it is much too convenient. it could lead one to believe that the poison of globalised market society would in fact, almost on its own, necessarily have to be dealt with through the antivenom of a strengthened social or ecological government. Nancy Fraser calls this concept “Polanyian counter-movement”. in the process it is completely forgotten that Polanyi limited this kind of counter-movement to the second half of the 19th century. This is where he identifies the spontaneous healing powers of counter-movement, even

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if the background of this ‘spontaneity’ consisted of fierce struggles and large-scale social movements—Chartism, the 1848/49 Revolution in France, germany, and other central European countries, and the emerging labour movement in all these countries. Without these movements there would have been no social reform. Significant intellectual reform movements also played a role in these struggles. Polanyi himself shows that the “Ten-Hours Bill of 1847, which karl Marx hailed as the first victory of socialism, was the work of enlightened reactionaries” (Polanyi 2001, 174), but at the same time he points to the role of the Chartists and Owenites and the fateful effect of their suppression: ‘When Owenism and Chartism had burned themselves out, England had become poorer in that substance out of which the anglo-Saxon ideal of a free society could have drawn its strength for centuries to come.” (Polanyi, 2001: 175) The social reforms were a ‘revolution from above’ intended to prevent a revolution from below, and were often carried out in the face of resistance from the capital-owning class. Bismarck had developed an especially clear idea of this situation. in a 21 January 1881 address he said, regarding his first social reforms, “sooner or later there had to be an attempt to reconcile the workers with the state. […] Even a large sum is not too much to pay for the contentment of the propertyless classes, of the disinherited. […] When we use the results to secure the future of our workers, whose anxiety is the main reason for their hatred of the state, then this secures our own future …: in so doing we are preventing a revolution, which could break out in fifty years, but also in ten years …’ (Bismarck 1986, 356).7 in a certain respect his very detailed presentation of the history of England in the 19th century occludes the central concern of Polanyi’s book. He wanted to find a way out of the “great Crisis” of the Western civilisation of his own time, a crisis he saw as beginning with the First World War. any reception of The Great Transformation focused on the presentation of the so-called double movement in the 19th century distracts us from Polanyi’s actual message, namely that this double movement collapsed in the first third of the 20th century. The book itself shares some responsibility for this impression. Because Polanyi concentrated on the origins of the crisis, that is, on the 19th century, the strategic choices for Polanyi’s own time seemed secondary—if for no other reason that his presentation of the 20th century occupies so much less space. Polanyi

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wanted to demonstrate the thesis “that the origins of the cataclysm [of World wars, the great Depression, and Fascism—M.B.] lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.” (Polanyi 2001, 31) He showed how “the balance of power [between the main European states—M.B.], the gold standard, and the liberal state, these fundamentals of the civilization of the nineteenth century” (ibid.,: 31) gradually collapsed and the double movement came to an end—first in the First World War and then at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. all these bases of civilization are, according to him, “in the last resort, shaped in one common matrix, the self-regulating market.” (Polanyi, 2001: 31) The double movement emerged, Polanyi claimed, from this matrix of a market society; thus both sides of the double movement came to an end, that of the extension of marketization as well as that of social protection. He had no hopes for a social protection movement on the basis of market society. For him this was a part of the problem and not the solution. Polanyi’s political-economic analyses of the 1920s and especially of the 1930s offered a detailed examination of the attempts to resurrect the selfregulating market system of the 19th century, and at the same time he investigated efforts at protecting various social groups (workers, farmers, owners of wealth) from the effects of this system (on this see Polanyi, 2002b). analysing concrete developents in England he showed how the collapse of democractic capitalism in central European countries grew out of the antagonism between these two tendencies. it was against this backdrop that Polanyi was searching for a socialist alternative to fascism. Only if these central dimensions of his thought are disregarded is Nancy Fraser’s criticism that Polanyi’s approach can be reduced to a double movement valid. Her insistence on escaping such a binary concept of market regulation and social protection by introducing a third emancipatory tendency is understandable in this framework. However, it does not contradict but rather compliments Polanyi’s innermost intentions. and precisely this shows that there are good reasons for reformulating the concept of the triple movement. it seems to me that Nancy Fraser has become the victim of the success of a simplified Polanyi reception. it is a reading of Polanyi that trims him to

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fit the thesis of a necessary ‘social’ reining in of the excesses of globalised markets, financial-market capitalism and neoliberalism and in so doing divests him of his radical content that addresses root causes. Today this would mean the concept of a social democracy on the basis of, and accepting, neoliberalism as the ‘highest form of liberalism’. This is the approach advocated by Colin Crouch. For him the answer to the challenges contained in Polanyi’s work is quite simple: “The point is to note when a destruction occurs; to ask what the market puts in its place; to ask also whether this is an improvement; and, if not, to propose alternatives.” (Crouch 2013, 49) His conclusion for today’s situation is that ‘… not only can social democracy thrive in a liberal capitalist environment, but in that environment it produces a higher degree of liberalism than conventional liberalism left to its own devices, because it is the clash between liberalism and social democracy that generates the incentive to keep seeking new creative compromises.’ (ibid., 139). Polanyi then appears as the progenitor of an ‘embedded neoliberalism’. in this case, this would not be ‘Polanyi light’ but a ‘Polanyi faked’. Second part of the dialogue: Hearing Who is Speaking — The Socialist Karl Polanyi and his Vision of Freedom Every dialogue begins with listening. This also applies to karl Polanyi. One of the reasons why the socialist karl Polanyi is so little known has to do with the unavailability in English of many of his important writings from his early life in Hungary and the 1920s.8 additionally, vehement post-1945 anti-communism in North america led to the eclipse of questions of systematic political transformation. although Polanyi taught at Columbia University in the USa, his wife ilona Duczynska was barred, as a former member of communist parties (from which she was regularly expelled, among other reasons for her ‘luxemburgism’), from living in the US, and they kept a house together across the border in Canada. This is another reason why the socialist Polanyi is still to be rediscovered.9 in 1943 Polanyi considered adding a second volume to The Great Transformation. The main title of a sketch for the book is extremely ambitious: “The Common Man’s Masterplan”. The title of the first part, “Origins of the Crisis”, already points to the original title of The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1943, 1). Polanyi’s starting point is the capacity of simple citizens,

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the common man, to make the right decisions—precisely when long-term perspectives are at stake (ibid., 7). it is for them that he wants to write, for “the unresolved problems which forced the great transformation upon us imperatively demand their solution in and after this war.” (ibid., 1) For him democracy is not the work of the privileged and educated: “Democracy is a way of life and as a method of decision it is about the contents of life. Now these are not matters about which there is any set knowledge… and it is a simple fact that the way of life of democracy was not developed by so called educated people nor was it practiced by them nor was it even preferred by them, but it was practiced by communities of simple people like those of the History of apostles, Quaker communities, pioneering villages of the early frontier or the pilgrim father’s on board the Mayflower.” (ibid., 10) From this Polanyi derives how he wants to write his work. Here is a very abbreviated summary: This book is addressed to the general reader and discusses the urgent problems of our time from the point of view of the common man. While the various shades of anti-democrats have their own story of the world catastrophe—the democrat has yet to produce his own story. This story should tell in simple language how it all started […] This story should be ruthlessly frank […] This story should be consistent […] The story should be intelligent… This story should be true… This story should be complete … in the sense that it should envisage the scene of man’s collective life in all its breadth and depth […] This story should be practical […] This story should be the story of the common man […] This story should be about the unsolved problems of our time… (ibid., 15–19) The Great Transformation can only be understood against a backdrop that was largely suppressed in the reception of Polanyi’s work—the deeply grounded socialist background of his thinking, a socialism of the commoners.10 Curiously enough, this book was not then nor is it now understood by the general public as the work of a socialist and anti-fascist seeking a solution for the fundamental problems of his time (Polanyilevitt 2004, 4).11 in contrast to the mainstream reception of his work his horizon was neither a reformed capitalism nor a social market economy but another, non-bourgeois, civilisation—a socialist society of culture.

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Because this driving force of Polanyi’s research breakthroughs over a period of 50 years, which included The Great Transformation, were not part of the reception of his work, the last chapter of his book, the section “Freedom in a Complex Society”, is seldom dealt with or, when it is, it is deprived of its socialist dimension. But if this book is above all a drama of the ‘Common man’, such an approach would be as if one closed it just before its end, preventing one from finding out why the drama was written in the first place or guessing how it will end. The path chosen by Polanyi would appear to be everything, rendering his ultimate goal irrelevant. But it was precisely this goal that led him to write his epochal work from 1941 to 1943 at the small remote Bennington College in Vermont, USa, while in Europe the fate of civilisation stood balanced on the edge of a bayonet before Moscow and Stalingrad; and its theoretical and political content remains completely unintelligible if this purpose is ignored. karl Polanyi is thus at once one of the most read and one of the most misunderstood 20th-century social scientists. To enter into Polanyi’s work without taking seriously the socialist and anti-fascist intentions that motivated the author is to miss the question he was actually formulating and take his presentation as a mere narration of 19th and early 20th-century English and Western European history. One might even think that Polanyi wanted to continue ad infinitum the play of the so-called double movement of the deregulation of markets, on the one side, and the protection of ‘society’, on the other. and this would mean that what is now at stake is no less, but precisely no more, than a new wave of social ‘protection’. On the contrary, Polanyi saw the world facing a strategic choice, having to decide in favour of a socialist or a fascist answer in order to escape this socially destructive double movement. He did not conceive a third possibility; society had to break with market society, from which this double movement grows, and position itself on a completely new civilisational basis if it was to avoid total collapse. in order to understand this perspective, we should briefly indicate the intellectual background of Polanyi’s thought. Polanyi’s very specific socialist horizon was originally formed in the academic left Jewish-Hungarian circles of the galilei Circle founded and led by him in Budapest, but there was also a socialist predisposition in his

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family (see in detail Dale, 2016). in his very vivid portrayal, Peter F. Drucker wrote about Polanyi’s family: The Polanyis, father and children, were the most gifted family i have ever known or heard of. They were also the most highly achieving family; every one of them had success and impact. But what made them truly remarkable was that all of them, beginning with the father in Victorian days and ending with karl and his brother Michael in 1960s, enlisted in the same cause: to overcome the nineteenth century and to find a new society that would be free and yet not ‘bourgeois’ or ‘liberal’; prosperous and yet not dominated by economics; communal and yet not a Marxist collectivism. Each of the six, the father and five children and the mother as well went his or her own quite separate way, but each in search of the same goal. They reminded me of the knights of the Round Table setting out in search of the same Holy grail, each in a different direction. (Drucker 1994, 126 f.; for a very critical view of this description of Polanyi see McRobbie, 2006) Drucker summarises Polanyi’s concern in The great Transformation in this way: “To Polanyi, the most important parts of The Great Transformation were the theoretical models of integration between economy and society that he developed. His aim was to show that the market is neither the only possible economic system nor, necessarily, the most advanced one; and that there are alternatives that harmonize economy and community, and yet permit both economic growth and individual freedom.” (ibid.,136) The circles in which the young karl Polanyi moved were remarkable: “They included not only karl Popper’s family, the idealist-anarchist theoretician Ervin Szabó, the sociologist and historian Oscar Jászi, the composer Bartók, the psychoanalyst Ferenczi, the future Marxist philosopher georg lukács, but also foreign thinkers like Werner Sombart, Max adler, and Eduard Bernstein.” (Cangiani and Thomasberger 2002, 12) His experiences as an officer at the Russian front in the First World War, a serious wound, and the traumatic experiences of the Hungarian Revolution and counter-revolution plunged him into a deep crisis. He experienced

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this as a personal as well as collective failure, according to Cangiani and Thomasberger in their introduction to the first volume of Polanyi’s writings of the 1920 through the 1940s. They quote from a manuscript written during a period of serious personal depression at the beginning of the 1920s: “We live in a time of trials. Nations and classes, states and individuals are experiencing continually more serious suffering in the last six years. and no one doubts that the cup of sorrow is not yet full. Nothing would be more natural than to tirelessly strive to understand what the causes of these agonies are, and how we singly or together can remove them.” (quoted in ibid., 12 f.) He subsequently devoted himself to this task. What marked Polanyi was that he experienced the World War both as a social as well as a directly personal crisis. He saw himself as having been complicit in it. as he saw it, along with others he had borne responsibility for what was unjustifiable, the primal catastrophe of the 20th century. in the 1920s the hope still resonated with Polanyi that the complexity of society could be so reduced that it would completely dissolve into interpersonal relations and community [Gemeinschaft]. in The Great Transformation, he was to call this expectation an illusion and ignorance of the “reality of society” in complex societies (Polanyi 2001, 268). But in the 1920s he still wrote, though relativised: ‘We will have climbed to the highest stage of societal freedom when the societal relations of human beings become clear and transparent, as they actually are in a family or in a communist community. To directly monitor the effects of our life movements on the lives of all others and thus on our own lives, in order to take responsibility, on the basis of this knowledge, for the social effects of our existence—that is the ultimate social freedom.’ (Polanyi, 2005b: 150)12 The late 1930s, the years immediately preceding the writing of The Great Transformation, was a time of intensive teaching activity for Polanyi, first in the circle of the Christian left group13 and then in the Workers Educational association, whose president was R. H. Tawney.14 This framework of teaching and discussion provided a decisive space for his thinking before he wrote his main work. This is where the narrative of the book arose and took final shape. it was here that he came into contact with English socialist thought, above all with that of Robert Owen, and

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formulated his specific view of the distinction between society and community which underpins The Great Transformation. This is also where he developed his position on the limits of Christian attempts to lead society back to community. From here on “recognition of the reality of society”, of the complexity of society, became for him an indispensable condition of every emancipatory-solidary politics. as he said both positively and critically: The Christian axiom about the essence of society is of the utmost boldness and paradox. it can be put in the simple phrase that society is a personal relation of individuals. Now, to regard society thus means to disregard altogether the share of institutional life and of other impersonal forces in social existence. in a sense it is the complete denial of the objective existence of society. […] Two negative assertions seem to follow from this position. 1. Society as such, as an aggregate of functional institutions … is no concern of Christianity. His concern is with the individual in community, not with society. 2. Neither is history as such his concern. (Polanyi n.d., 1–3) in view of large-scale social catastrophe, however, this ‘double indifference’ is no longer acceptable: “… if the claims of community press for change in society, the judgement passed upon society is inexorable. and when history points to the next step in the achievement of universal community, its claim to the allegiance of the Christian is unconditional.” (ibid., 3) The aim has to be a “democracy of freedom.” (ibid., 16) which simultaneously preserves the institutions of a complex society and subordinates them to the free life of its citizens. in the already cited 1937/38 notes from the training weekends of the Christian left we find some remarkable utterances: “There is no contracting out of society. But where the limits of the socially possible are reached, community unfolds to us its transcending reality. it is to this realm of community beyond society that man yearns to travel.” (Polanyi 1937, 16) Taking up this approach he then continues in The Great Transformation: “if industrialism is not to extinguish the race, it must be subordinated to the requirements of man’s nature.” (Polanyi 2001, 257)

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The interrelationship between the realm of universal community, the uniqueness of the individual and his/her freedom and responsibility, together with the irreducible complexity of society and democracy as a mode of life which shapes society are key concepts in Polanyi’s work and form the matrix of his understanding of socialism.15 in his final years Polanyi wrote in a letter full of hope, especially because of the anti-colonial uprising in asia and africa: “My life was a world life—i have lived the life of the world. But the world stopped living for several decades, and then in a few years it advanced a century. So i am only now coming to my own, having somewhere lost thirty years on the way—waiting for godot—until the world caught up again, caught up to me. in retrospect, it is all quite strange, the martyrdom of isolation was only apparent—ultimately, i was only waiting for myself.’ (quoted in Polanyi-levitt 1990, 112) if we go on a journey with Nancy Fraser, if we try to contribute to new solidary emancipatory movements that are up to the challenges of the crisis of neoliberal financial-market capitalism, Polanyi could prove to be a travelling companion even today, one who was waiting for us until the moment that the period moved closer to him. and perhaps he was not only waiting here but was ahead of us the whole time.16 This Polanyi, however, is not a ‘Polanyi light’ but the Polanyi who for fifty years, in the face of two world wars, fascism, and the Soviet socialist experiment, grappled with the cataclysms and crises of western capitalism in a way that few of his contemporaries did. This is ‘Polanyi himself’. it is with this Polanyi that we should carry out our dialogue. For this purpose we need to take note of a very particular understanding of freedom in complex societies, which he illustrated through the parable of the ‘murdered Chinese’. Excursus: The Philosopheme of the Murdered Chinese—or the Vision of a Responsible Society of the Free in his 1927 lecture manuscript Über die Freiheit (On Freedom) Polanyi writes: “you have surely all heard of the philosopheme of the murdered Chinese. Through a miracle, so it goes, we will be given a gift by which through simply pressing a button every wish we utter at a given moment

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will be immediately granted, but at a price: every time we press the button one of 400 million Chinese will die in far off China. How many people would refrain from pushing the magic button?” (Polanyi 2005h, 152 f.) This ‘philosopheme’ goes back to François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), who reconverted to Christianity in post-revolutionary France and was the founder of its literary Romanticism as well as an avowed Royalist. in 1802, in The Genius of Christianity, he wrote: “Conscience! is it possible that thou canst be but a phantom of the imagination, or the fear of the punishment of men? i ask my own heart, i put to myself this question: If thou couldst by a mere wish kill a fellow-creature in China, and inherit his fortune in Europe, with the supernatural conviction that the fact would never be known, wouldst thou consent to form such a wish?” (Chateaubriand 1871, 187 f.; on the philosophicalhistorical background see ginzburg, 1994) The philosopheme found its way into literature with Honoré de Balzac, in whose novel Father Goriot we find the following dialogue, which plays simultaneously on the superficial education of the protagonist and the conventional reference to Rousseau as the intellectual father of the Revolution, of Sentimentalism, and at the same time of the Terror (Falaky, 2011). The interconnection between ‘ethics’ and the ‘social question’ becomes obvious. The dialogue deserves to be quoted in detail: Rastignac went at once to the École de Droit. He had no mind to stay a moment longer than was necessary in that odious house. He wasted his time that day; he had fallen a victim to that fever of the brain that accompanies the too vivid hopes of youth. Vautrin’s arguments17 had set him meditating on social life, and he was deep in these reflections when he happened on his friend Bianchon in the Jardin du luxembourg. “What makes you look so solemn?” said the medical student, putting an arm through Eugène's as they went towards the Palais. “i am tormented by temptations.” “What kind? There is a cure for temptation.” “What?” “yielding to it.” “you laugh, but you don't know what it is all about. Have you read Rousseau?” “yes.” “Do you remember that he asks the reader somewhere what he would do if he could make a fortune by killing an old mandarin somewhere in China by mere force of wishing it, and without stirring

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from Paris?” “yes.“ “Well, then?” “Pshaw! i am at my thirty-third mandarin.” (Balzac, 2010) Reading this parable against the backdrop of his own experience of liberal market society and of the First World War Polanyi develops a new conception of the relationship between freedom and responsibility: “This whimsical philosopheme offers us a true symbol of the situation in which even the best person today finds himself in relation to his co-citizens. Everyone who is able to pay a suitable price on the market can immediately conjure up everything which humanity can produce. The consequences of this trick are found beyond the market. He knows nothing of them; he cannot know anything about them. For each one of these people, the whole of humanity consists today of nameless Chinese, whose life he is at any moment ready to extinguish, and in fact does, without batting an eyelid, in order to fulfil his wish.” (Polanyi 2005b, 153) adam Smith’s invisible hand is deadly—or at least it can be, it is just that we are not immediately aware of its effects. Every “coal that we have just thrown into the oven, the light by which we now see”, can, as Polanyi says, “embody a portion of a human life.” (Polanyi, 2005b: 154) and as long as social relations are “not transparent”, it will be impossible to fulfil the kantian imperative to act according to that maxim “whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” (kant 1903, 421) For independently of any purpose or maxim, the consequences of acting under the given conditions of market society may incur a lethal boomerang effect. Based on this insight Polanyi formulated a new radical concept of freedom, which includes both individual responsibility and the necessity of societal transformation. His idea of the relationship between freedom and responsibility takes negative freedoms as given and asks under what social conditions people can deal with freedoms in such a way that they do not harm others but support them in living their own free lives. He wanted to think about how society could be constructed so that that people would be able to act with complete responsibility, fully responsible for the consequences of their own decisions, and “where no choice is possible….allow[ed] to shoulder the finally inevitable burden of their responsibility for coercing and interfering with the lives of our fellows.” (Polanyi 1937, 16)18 No one who today steps into a car or airplane, buys coffee,

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heats his or her house, or even opens the mains faucet can escape from this distressing confrontation with a life that cannot be personally controlled (see the article on the imperial mode of life in Brand and Wissen, 2011). Despite the social institutions through which we absolve ourselves of this guilt the still-unfulfilled community of humanity calls us—locally and globally, today and in succeeding generations. This kind of life makes people guilty. and in this guilt the pain of missing solidarity is felt. These reflections led Polanyi to consider the question of a post-capitalist society. “The idea of assuming responsibility for our personal connection to the lives of others, for social realities, and to thus incorporate this into the realm of freedom is not feasible in the bourgeois world. However, it is equally unfeasible to give up this idea and willfully limit our responsibility and thus our freedom. The freedom/responsibility idea of bourgeois society points beyond the frontiers of this world.” (Polanyi 2005b, 146) The bourgeois idea of freedom is in Polanyi’s view not realisable in a society constituted on a bourgeois basis. But state socialism is not an alternative either. in the latter case all responsibility is delegated to the state “as the general scapegoat” (ibid., 154).By contrast, Polanyi’s understanding of society gives rise, on the one hand, to the demand for a far-reaching reconstruction of relations, so that personal responsibility can be taken for the consequences of one’s own actions and, on the other, that this reconstruction be performed in a complete and systematic manner. Paraphrasing Hamlet’s famous question ‘to be or not to be’, he writes: The more organised … society becomes, the smaller the circles of cohesiveness in production, consumption, and civic life which let individuals become solidary, the more quickly approaches the hour at which the only choice one still has is either to be a coward and close ones eyes to the true relationship between one human life and another, thus giving up freedom in favour of any self-erected powers— or to boldly face reality in order finally, through this new responsibility, to reach the new freedom. if we see in socialism more than a question of filling people’s stomachs, more than a mere demand for justice, if we hail it as the final programme for the emancipation of humanity then we cannot and must not shrink back from this highest of all freedoms. (ibid., 154)

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Beginning with this concept of freedom, socialism for Polanyi was above all a society in which people live under conditions in which they can and must be directly and personally responsible for their actions. Such a society ought not to be governed by an ‘invisible hand’ but should show transparently the interrelations between the deeds of individuals and their social consequences. at the end of his lecture on freedom Polanyi adds, “Socialism as a leap into freedom has to be taken not in the historical sense but in the logical sense. Beyond the demand for justice in classless society the real calling of the human race now appears to it, that is, the realisation of the highest social and personal freedom through the concrete acquisition of solidarity between persons.” (ibid.,164) From here he decisively rejects Mises’ positions developed in the latter’s critique of a socialist society (Mises 1932; for a detailed criticism of Mises’ position see Polanyi 2005f). in this Polanyi drew important inspiration from guild socialism (Cole 1980) as well as from austromarxism, above all from Otto Bauer (for the central European background to his thinking see Polanyi-levitt 2006). The problem of freedom in a complex society remained a central one for Polanyi in his later years. at the forefront of conversations with his student abraham Rotstein between 1956 and 1959 was the emergence of a “machine society” that further exacerbates the problems of market society. Rotstein summarised the position Polanyi took in those years as follows: “For Polanyi, our communal decision to have an industrial, complex society meant that we bear responsibility for its unintended consequences; thus, we have cast a social net around each individual, constricting his movements. any member of that society could not help but participate in compelling others.” (Rotstein 1994, 139) in this view, social transformation has to concentrate on extending the concrete individual freedoms within a complex society and create the institutional preconditions necessary for it. Third part of the dialogue: Fascism as an Epochal Challenge and Karl Polanyi’s Alternative There is a second background to Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which, just like his concept of socialism, has been almost forgotten. This

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is his examination of fascism—which is completely adequate to our times. For Polanyi, fascism, just as the socialism of his day, grew from the great Crisis; they both emerged out of “a market society that refused to function” (Polanyi 2001, 248) and both were “revolutionary” in so far as they strove to go beyond the given situation. Common to both were the radical break with market utopia and, in Polanyi’s formulation, the recognition of the “reality of society”: “Power and compulsion are a part of that reality; any ideal that would ban them from society must be invalid.” (ibid., 267) This idea is only understandable if one first takes into account both the above discussion of Polanyi’s coming to terms with the communist notion of the Aufhebung of complexity in a completely transparent society totally subordinate to the organised common will (Rousseau’s volonté générale) and Mises’ critique of this notion. The complexity of society cannot be transcended, nor it be reduced to the free acts of individuals, as liberalism does. The latter utopia ends in market society and thus in the destruction of the bases of every civilisation—of human individuality, nature, and society. The unhindered action of individual freedom does not yield the greatest good but instead leads to society’s general collapse. it is at the same time remarkable and frightening that in the reception of The Great Transformation Polanyi’s “agonising question" is completely overlooked. as he formulated it: “…upheld or not; is freedom an empty word, a temptation, designed to ruin man and his works [as in liberalism —M.B.], or can man reassert his freedom in the face of that knowledge [of the reality of society—M.B.] and strive for its fulfillment in society without lapsing into moral illusionism?” (Polanyi 2001, 267) Polanyi had hoped that the “spirit and content of this study [of the great transformation—M.B.] would indicate an answer.” (ibid.) in his mind there was no doubt about the need and inevitability of an end to the liberal age and in fascism and socialism he saw the two real historical contenders for going beyond or going backwards. The direction of these ideological tendencies could not be more contrasting in his view. Out of the socially destructive tendency of liberalism fascism draws the conclusion, as Polanyi said, that freedom itself, the uniqueness of the individual and the unity of humanity must be destroyed (ibid., 268).19 Socialism, on the other hand, would help implement “man’s claim to freedom” (ibid.) in a complex society.

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Beginning with an analysis of adolf Hitler’s January 1932 speech before german industrialists and corporate leaders Polanyi comes to the conclusion that fascism wants to “abolish politics, make the economy absolute, and capture the state via the economy.” (Polanyi 2005c, 219) He concludes that ‘Fascism’s intervention in this sense accordingly means on the practical level the salvaging of capitalism, indeed with the aid of a revolutionary restructuring of the whole system of state and society. What it plans is not a return to liberal ‘laissez-faire’ but a planned economy, which, however, is not directed by a democratic state as an adversary of the entrepreneurs but by those capitalists who govern the ‘economic caste’.” (ibid.) Socialism shares with fascism “a common trait directed towards the ‘total’.” (Polanyi 2005c, 219) But this commonality cannot obscure the “religious war” (ibid., 221) between fascism and socialism. a break with the “primitive, half-conscious, and unintegrated contemporary situation” (Polanyi 2005g, 227) is obligatory: “The painful rebirth is descending on us independently of human will. However, what in fact depends on us, and on us alone, is whether this transformation brings society to a higher or lower level of existence than the present level. Whether it will bring more human freedom and equality within a community, in which the socialist economy is only the framework of a much truer and more comprehensive democracy than what now exists, or whether the end of western and Christian ideals will mean the human breeding farm of a eugenically improved capitalism under fascist rule.” (ibid,. 228) Democracy and capitalism are incompatible and, according to Polanyi, there are two answers to this incompatibility. Fascism removes democracy and leaves capitalism untouched (Polanyi 2005d, 236), but in his view there is another solution: “The retention of democracy and the overcoming of capitalism. This is the socialist solution. For just as capitalism needs fascist policy to complete itself, so democracy needs socialism as its own expansion. Socialism is democratic or there is no socialism.” (ibid., 236) For Polanyi socialism is “preformed in democracy” (Polanyi 1979, 96). it is ‘the only economic system under which the substance of individualism can be maintained in the modern world.” (ibid. 97) From such a system he hopes for an approximation to the “highest ideal condition of societal freedom”, in which the “personality” can finally be “free”, namely: (1) “mastery of the necessary consequences of socialization”; (2) “humanity’s universal goal” of a “human state”, of

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a “human economy”, and; (3) “the final responsibility for all social effects of our existence.” (Polanyi 2005b, 151) as he writes in the 1920s, socialism is the “solidary form of life” (ibid., 160). Fourth Part of the Dialogue: From the Double to the Triple and Quadruple Movement The first three parts of my dialogue with Nancy Fraser and karl Polanyi were mainly moments of listening to what concerned Polanyi. it was necessary to take account of his own vision of solidary emancipation and socialism and his implacable resistance to fascism. For him fascism was at once an expression of social protectionism and an attempt to radicalise market society, instituting a society defined by a racist form of centralized economic power in which the democratic freedoms of individuals are destroyed. in contrast to what Fraser supposes Polanyi not only knew “that social security is often ambivalent” (Fraser, 2013a: 129), he even saw himself dealing with a movement that both invoked social security and posed a deadly threat to democratic society. in a still more general way he wrote: “There can also be a dictatorial justice, and if justice, if realised through democracy, actually means civilisational progress, this is not because of the nature of justice but that of democracy, which is inseparable from the responsibility of the individual, however little that might be.” (Polanyi 2005b, 142 f.) The question then is whether there is a connection between Polanyi’s concept of democracy and Nancy Fraser’s triple-movement model; is a dialogue really possible between them? The two-fold omission outlined above, on the one hand of Polanyi’s socialist positions and on the other hand of his anti-fascists positions, lead to the reception of The Great Transformation as a treatise on the pendulum movement between market and state in a one-dimensional to-and-fro space (see graph 1 above). With iron regularity, only more market or more ‘protection’ of society seems possible—tertium notern datur! Or, as Jens Beckert writes, “…social change is conceptualized as a dynamic process of oscillation between embedding, disembedding, and reembedding.” (Beckert 2009, 53) There are good reasons why Nancy Fraser posits a triple movement to counter this one-dimensional Polanyi. applying the experiences of new social movements since the 1960s Fraser’s triple movement introduces an additional axis of the conflict that differs

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from the axis of the marketization of society versus social protection and transverses it; this is the vector of emancipation. But interestingly Fraser does not suggest an alternative to the double movement, but only the addition of this third element alongside ‘more market’ versus ‘more social protections’. Under specific circumstances she credits the market with an emancipatory function, namely when it is able to dissolve “mechanisms of domination” (Fraser 2013a, 129).20 She also identifies a dangerous “love affair” between emancipatory forces and neoliberalism that threatens a twofold attack on social security by the supporters of liberation movements and by market radicals that reinforces the hegemony of neoliberalism (Fraser, 2013a: 132). But it remains unclear why she only speaks liberation movements and does not at the same time point out that there are movements for increased domination drawing on the potential of the markets as well as that of social protection. Within her own logic there are good reasons to speak of a quadruple movement (see graph 1). From the combination of market orientation, very specific demands for protection, and a clear authoritarian orientation the Tea Party movement, for example, and the rise of right-wing populist and neofascist forces in Europe can be better understood. On a closer reading of his work the Polanyi moment proves not to be a simple counter-movement to market-radicalism but the epochal moment of a society at a crossroads (Brie 2014c). This is not simply the point at which the pendulum swings back towards new social protections, but nor can the complexity of this moment be captured by Frasers triple-movement model. if we are to understand the political grammar of the present we have to edit out the increasingly stronger tendencies to authoritarian and barbaric regression, as has long been seen in the orientation to repressive structures, fundamentalisms, fortress capitalisms, and qualitatively new forms of militarisation (see Crouch 2008; Streeck and Schäfer 2013; Deppe 2013; Rilling 2013). However, we need a conceptual framework that organically encompasses these dangers. in my opinion, we need to aufheben the concept of double and triple movement in a third “grammar of the political situation”, that is, to preserve their productive aspects and integrate them into a different approach. The mainstream perception of the double movement suggests a one-dimen-

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Graph 1: ‘Double movement’, ‘Triple movement’ and ‘Quadruple movement’

Double Movement Marketisation

Social protection

Emancipatory Movements

Marketisation

Triple Movement

Social protection

Emancipatory Movements

Marketisation

Quadruple Movement

Social protection

Movements strengthening dominance and exploitation

sional tension between the extension of markets and social protection, in which the dimension of conflict between emancipatory movements and movements of authoritarianism—or, as Polanyi sees it, between socialism and fascism—are excluded. in this respect the so-called protection movements, whose 19th century development Polanyi describes in detail, were mostly conservative or reactionary and aimed directly against the emerging labour movement as an emancipatory social movement. They selectively took up certain worker demands and integrated them into new forms of domination. They were revolutions from above that did not hand over to workers the power to represent protective interests but arrogated it to themselves; as such they were revolutions that made people passive (gramsci 1994, 1329 f.). By contrast, Nancy Fraser’s model of

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triple movement does not provide for the existence of movements that are primarily regressive, although she so vehemently opposes neoliberal market authoritarianism and is conscious of authoritarian communism of the leninist-Stalinist or Maoist type. But a possible collapse into barbarism, which Polanyi had in mind as someone for whom the great Depression, fascism, and Stalinism were vividly present, is not conceivable within the concept of a triple movement. it gets left out but should in my view be integrated. The tendencies to totalitarian rule and barbarism are inherent in our civilisation (on this see my analysis of Hannah arendt’s reconstruction of the emergence of fascism in Brie 2007a: 129–132). Therefore, in what follows i recommend conceiving of a two-dimensional space in which not only two or three but at least four major goal-orientations have their place. This is the already mentioned ‘quadruple movement’ (see again graph 1). Fifth Part of the Dialogue: From the Quadruple Movement to the Open Space of Alternatives However, the transition from a triple to a quadruple movement is not enough to do justice to Nancy Fraser’s concern, which she summarises thus: “… the triple movement suggests a political project for those of us who remain committed to emancipation. We might resolve to break off our dangerous liaison with neoliberalism and forge a principled new alliance with social protection. in thereby realigning the poles of the triple movement, we could integrate our longstanding interest in non-domination with the equally valid interest in solidarity and social security. at the same time, we could reclaim the indispensable interest in negative liberty from the neoliberal uses to which it has been bent.” (Fraser 2013a, 132) in order to explore the possibilities of such alliances, we need in what follows to examine the horizontal axis of the ‘quadruple movement’. The question is whether the opposition ‘liberation of the markets’ vs. ‘social protection’ accurately captures the contradiction that needs to be dealt with in a solidary-emancipatory way. The dialogue should be continued. Fraser’s point of departure is the political objective of second-wave feminism. This represented, as Fraser says, a “transformative political project… premised on an expanded understanding of injustice and a systemic

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critique of capitalist society”. She adds: “The movement’s most advanced currents saw their struggles as multidimensional, aimed simultaneously against economic exploitation, status hierarchy, and political subjection. To them, moreover, feminism appeared as part of a broader emancipatory project, in which struggles against gender injustices were necessarily linked to struggles against racism, imperialism, homophobia, and class domination, all of which required transformation of the deep structures of capitalist society.” (Fraser 2013c, 217) For the future, Fraser feels the main challenge is “to envision arrangements for re-embedding markets that simultaneously serve to overcome domination.” (Fraser 2013b, 237) To do justice to the objectives emphasized by Fraser i believe it is necessary to dissolve the conflation she assumes between market liberalism and the defence of contractual freedom or negative freedom. The one pole of the double movement, the liberal pole, is for her at once occupied by market liberalism and by the defence of inter-subjective rights of freedom. Because she defends the rights of freedom she is then forced to defend market liberalism. in the same breath, however, she demands that the alliance with market liberalism be terminated. The ambiguity of her position becomes clear when she writes: “… an emancipatory project wedded to the wholesale rejection of markets effectively cedes indispensable liberal ideals to free marketeers, while abandoning the billions across the globe who rightly understand that there is something worse than being exploited—namely, being counted as not worth exploiting. in general, then, no emancipation without some new synthesis of marketization and social protection.” (Fraser, 2013a: 131f.) Here the liberal ideas of contractual or negative freedom, markets per se and exploitation are cited in one breath in the context of a capitalist market society. But it is precisely on this identification that neoliberalism feeds. an emancipatory position has to break up this conflation of freedom and market society. This is why in our thesis the model of a triple movement, but also that of a quadruple movement, is not tenable in the way it was depicted above. Fraser’s fixation on the either-or double movement of regulation through the market or social protection blinds her such that she ignores a central feature of Polanyi’s thought—his distinction between markets and a market

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society. She stresses, it is true, that Polanyi is correct to identify the dangers of the commodification of “fictitious commodities”, but she herself does not conceptually distinguish between the “impact of marketizing projects” (Fraser 2013a, 130) and a situation in which the market mechanism is extended “to the elements of industry—labor, land, and money” (Polanyi 2001, 78), the market becomes self-regulating and the economy becomes market economy; the process through which society mutates to ‘market society’. This mutation is the core of neoliberalism. it offers the extension of markets as an opportunity to escape bureaucratic or paternalistic dependencies and uses the resulting liberated energy for the erection of systems that are largely dominated by the globalised logic of the valorisation of financial-market capital. it reduces personal and bureaucratic domination and reinforces material dependency and subordination to the associated constraints of an unleashed capital accumulation. it extends the freedoms of protagonists who already have abundant market power and at the same time undermines the conditions for solidary development based on society’s common goods. Polanyi dedicated all of his later historical-anthropological research to the question of the potential and limits of market-based social relations (Polanyi 1977; Polanyi et al. 1957). He believed it was irrefutable that in complex societies market relations are not only unavoidable but are also productive if they are embedded within entities that control them, helped by other forms of exchange and cooperation based on reciprocity and redistribution. This is his fundamental insight in The Great Transformation: “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society.” (Polanyi 2001, 76) The limitation of the commodity character, as Polanyi maintained in his definition of the double movement, is related precisely not to the commodity form that social relations take but is related to labour power, land, and money, that is to the “fictitious commodities”. Social history in the nineteenth century was thus the result of a double movement: the extension of market organization in respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction in respect to fictitious ones. (ibid. 79)

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Staying with Nancy Fraser’s example of women becoming breadwinners and thus escaping patriarchal or bureaucratic social-state dependency, in this case the space for market-based relations is naturally expanded. The question is to whether, and to what extent, the new relations are emancipatory or regressive; whether women are able to determine their market relations or whether these relations lead to a new and even more oppressive form of domination. This in turn depends on the social, economic, and cultural ‘capital’ of each of the affected groups in the labour markets, the character of their regulation as well as the possibilities for ‘voice’ and ‘exit’ (Hirschman, 2004). all of these elements play a role in deciding whether labour power is a commodity from the point of view of the employed and it is at the mercy of the labour market, or whether self-realisation and social usefulness are foregrounded. This leads to a further objection to Nancy Fraser’s model of a triple movement, and this time it involves the vertical axis: markets and social protection can be more or less clearly referred to specific institutions, but emancipation is not attached to any concrete institution. Fraser’s ‘third’ movement is a form of mediation, a form of conciliation between the other two. This naturally also works in reverse for movements that strengthen the character of domination in modern societies, whether through markets, by means of the state or community, or by the combination of these means. Real movements are always a form of mediation of contradictions—either more solidary-emancipatory or exclusionary and authoritarian, either more oriented to inter-subjective rights of freedom or to access to the basic goods of life—and we must take account of this feature in a different model. let us then try to formulate this kind of model step by step—in dialogue with karl Polanyi and Nancy Fraser. What follows is an attempt to map the development of the socio-historical space of complex, capital-dominated societies in the last two hundred years; not through the pendulum motion between the unleashing and taming of markets, nor by the addition of a third emancipatory movement, but instead by conceiving of the poles of society in a more general and fundamental way. in the process we will see that this kind of new mapping can connect much more directly than Nancy Fraser’s own triple movement to her earlier work on the concept of justice.

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in undertaking such a mapping of the socio-historical space of capitalist modernity, it is imperative to distinguish both analytically and in real terms between the extension of the liberal rights of freedom (economic, political, and cultural) and the implementation of a dystopic capitalism. The first consists of steps towards an open-access social order characterised by the following features: “1. a widely held set of beliefs about the inclusion of and equality for all citizens. 2. Entry into economic, political, religious, and educational activities without restraint. 3. Support for organizational forms in each activity that is open to all (for example, contract enforcement). 4. Rule of law enforced impartially for all citizens. 5. impersonal exchange” (North et al. 2009, 114). in the case of dystopic capitalism, “leaving the fate of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them.” (Polanyi 2001, 137) The valid objective of liberalism, the defence and extension of the rights of freedom for individuals, is immediately confronted by individual’s need for protection as a member of a community that provides the conditions of their life. From their birth people are at once individual and communal beings, personal development occurs within this tension, and with the emergence of complex civilisations this tension acquires new dimensions. Classical liberalism reduces this communal horizon to a negative definition; the freedom of individuals (conceived as masculine) is not to be allowed to limit the freedom of other individuals (likewise conceived as masculine) (Habermann 2008). as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (National assembly of France, 26 august 1789) states: “liberty consists in the power to do anything that does not injure others; accordingly, the exercise of the rights of each man has no limits except those that secure the enjoyment of these same rights to the other members of society. These limits can be determined only by law.” (Französische Nationalversammlung 1982, 105 f.) The securing of the “enjoyment of equal rights” for all is for its part, however, a positive communal task, which in today’s societies would require the constant redistribution of 40 to 50 per cent of the gross social product. access to the basic goods of a free life (for this concept see klein 2003), the whole public basic services system, the maintenance of the institutional conditions of an open-access social order, and a living culture are only possible if the communal bases of complex societies, the commons, are preserved and expanded. The oft

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denied condition for the life of a liberal order is its communal, which is to say, communist foundation (Brie, 2012a, 2012b).21 as the state-socialist ‘experiment’ showed, this foundation can only be sustainably preserved and developed under conditions of an open-access social order. in what follows the proposed model differentiates between the space of possible alternatives and the real movements that fill this space. The horizontal axis of the model locates the basic contradiction of modern societies and the vertical axis describes the alternative between its emancipatory or authoritarian form. in this respect these axis are fundamentally distinct from each other. The horizontal axis captures the indissoluble connection between the protection of individual civil liberties, which needs constantly to be renewed, and the creation and distribution of the material and spiritual conditions of freedom. What is at issue is how these poles are connected. By contrast, the vertical axis is of the either-or type—either progress towards solidary emancipation or regression through authoritarianism and exclusion. Beginning with these considerations, the first axis in the coordinates system of the socio-historical space of modern societies should be defined by the poles ‘access to the basic goods of a free life’ vs. ‘the implementation of the inter-subjective rights of freedom’. This axis describes the fundamental contradiction of every modern complex society, for all such societies consist of different ways of mediating these poles. They are their two indispensable foundations. This axis directly takes up Nancy Fraser’s concept of justice as “parity of participation” (Fraser 2003, 36). as she emphasises, it necessitates social arrangements ‘that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers.” (ibid., 36) For this purpose, according to Fraser, two conditions would have to be met, neither of which can be reduced to the other: “First, the distribution of material resources must be such as to ensure participants’ independence and ‘voice’.” (ibid) This is for Fraser the objective condition of justice. Communally controlled production of goods essential to a free life and their largely equal distribution is the precondition for securing a fundamental parity of participation. This corresponds to the pole ‘access to the basic goods of a free life’. But justice, according to Fraser, requires more: “…the second condition requires that institutionalized patterns of cultural

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value express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem.” (ibid.) This is the “intersubjective condition of participatory parity” (ibid.). in contrast to how Fraser conceived the triple movement, i first propose, starting from her concept of justice, that we distinguish struggles focused on the inter-subjective rights of freedom from the implementation of markets. authoritarian-repressive tendencies in markets must be differentiated from emancipatory-solidary ones in each concrete case. What matters in each case is the specific formation of these tendencies. These formations, as Polanyi made clear, are essentially determined by the extent to which the basic goods of a free life are subordinated to capital accumulation or repressive state structures, war lords, organised crime, etc. Secondly, i claim that these reflections allow for a reformulation of the vertical axis; whilst the horizontal axis describes the basic contradiction of every complex society, the vertical axis describes the concrete way in which this contradiction is mediated, whether in a solidary-emancipatory or authoritarian-exclusionary way. On the one hand, the focus is on the inter-subjective rights of freedom or access to the basic goods of a free life; and, on the other hand, there is a struggle over whether progress towards solidary emancipation or increased personal, bureaucratic and material oppression prevail. in the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels the great vision is of an “association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx and Engels, 1976: 506) and therefore no longer occurs “at the cost of the majority of human individuals and whole human classes.” (Marx 1989, 348) The contradiction between the development of the individual and the development of all is mediated in such a way that the freedom of the individual is no longer obtained at the cost of the many but rather promotes the freedom and solidarity of all. This is accomplished above all by the individual reproducing basic communal goods in a richer form, whilst at the same time these goods provide the condition for the development of the individual. The opposite of this is the exclusionary-authoritarian mediation of this contradiction, which was seen in its most extreme form in german National Socialism.

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Graph 2: The Space of Alternatives

Struggle for solidarity emancipation

Defense of inter-subjective rights of freedom

Space of alternatives

Access to the basic goods of a free life

Enforcement of exclusionary authoritarian tendencies

To summarise: the horizontal axis of the space of alternatives i outlined is not constituted in the model developed here by Polanyi’s double movement but is directly linked to Nancy Fraser’s two poles of participatory justice: inter-subjective rights of freedom vs. the communally guaranteed access to the basic goods of a free life. This requires more Nancy Fraser and less ‘Polanyi light’. The vertical axis in the model developed here points to the two contrasting possibilities of mediating these contradictions—in a solidary-emancipatory or an exclusionary-authoritarian way (see graph 2). This at the same time captures Polanyi’s alternative of socialism or fascism. Fraser concludes her article: “… no emancipation without some new synthesis of marketization and social protection.” (Fraser 2013a, 132) Beginning with the positions developed, her conclusion could be reformulated as follows: no solidary emancipation without a new synthesis of the inter-subjective rights of freedom and access to the basic goods of a free life, the commons. Sixth Part of the Dialogue: The Real Movement in the Space of Alternatives if we observe this space of alternatives more closely we can better understand and classify the real-world social movements that Polanyi and

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Graph 3: Alternative movements of the Present

Democratic green Socialism Liberal socialism

Struggle for a solidary emancipation

Defense of intersubjective rights of freedom

The space of alternatives

Authoritarian neoliberalism

Enforcement of exclusionary authoritarian tendecies

Libertarian commonism

Access to the goods of a free life

Exclusive authoritarian social paternalism

Totalitarian domination and barbarism

Fraser want to confront. in this alternative framework the productive approaches of double or triple movements are preserved and presented in a new light. a dialogue emerges with an entire spectrum of movements and counter-movements. i would like to pursue this dialogue in relation to neoliberalism, liberal socialism, libertarian communism, and social paternalism (graph 3). let us begin with neoliberalism: in Nancy Fraser’s outline the “advocates of the emancipatory perspective” have ended up separating out the social question. She argues that these specific emancipation movements are largely concerned with a further realisation of the inter-subjective rights of freedom and of expanded recognition. They are directed against the forms of economic, patriarchal, nation-state-centred structures of injustice inscribed into Fordist social state capitalism (see for details Fraser 2013c; Winker and Degele 2009). it is precisely these structures that are attacked by the other side, by the wealth-owning class,

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whose early protagonists were interested in an unimpeded ‘free’ accumulation of capital and wanted to blow up the cage of ‘state-organised capitalism’. Neoliberalism is the linking of capital-valorisation interests to the recognition of the inter-subjective demands for freedom while disregarding the social conditions of their realisation. The resulting contradictions are mediated in an authoritarian way by pointing to the material constraints of financial-market capitalism. The striving for individual freedom and recognition within difference and variety, for a self-determined life beyond the attributes of origin, ethnicity and gender were subordinated by the project of neoliberal hegemony to the goals of the most unimpeded global capital valorisation possible, one connected to various global locations through the new technologies of information processing, real-time communication, and the networked manufacture of complex products. as Fraser writes, “on the one hand, the relatively small countercultural movement of the previous period has expanded exponentially, successfully disseminating its ideas across the globe. On the other hand, feminist ideas have undergone a subtle shift in valence in the altered context. Unambiguously emancipatory in the era of state-organized capitalism, critiques of economism, androcentrism, statism, and Westphalianism now appear fraught with ambiguity, susceptible to serving the legitimation needs of a new form of capitalism.” (Fraser 2013c, 223) if the old labour movement subordinated struggles for recognition to those for redistribution,22 then today we see the domination of tendencies “to subordinate social struggles to cultural struggles, the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition.” (Fraser 2009, 106) The privatisation of public services, the precarisation of work and life and division along the lines of markets, features which privilege to the most extreme degree elite groups and above all the 0.1 per cent (atkinson and Piketty, 2010), produce harsh new exclusions, remove essential processes from democratic control, and lead to the impoverishment and plundering of the communal bases of a free life. This symbiosis of radical economic liberalism, whose goal it is to establish a global market society beyond social and democratic control and realise the unimpeded primacy of capital accumulation, with an individualised promise of freedom deprived of its ‘communist’ foundation and therefore of its chances of implementation; this is what is particular to neoliberalism. its logical

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position in graph 3 is in the lower left quadrant. Using Polanyi’s formulation: “The ruling classes had committed the error of extending the principle of uncompromising class rule to a type of civilization which demanded the cultural and educational unity of the commonwealth if it should be safe from degenerative influences.” (Polanyi, 2001: 181) The dominance of capital valorisation is always connected to authoritarian tendencies—beginning in companies and ending with the subordination of entire states and regions to the imperative of financial markets. Neoliberalism is the political-economic-cultural domination of a capitalist oligarchy and the coercion of an economy driven by the unrestricted accumulation of capital. There is a second movement, today still politically weak, which is grouped mainly around a green New Deal, a New Public Deal, the concept of a global Marshall Plan, etc. (see, inter alia, Institut für Gesellschaftsanalyse 2011, 14–18; Candeias 2013). Their common background is a renewed social liberalism. Polanyi related positively to social liberalism, and many of his proposals for the institutional formation of the post-World War ii order overlap with keynes’ positions (see, inter alia, Polanyi 2002d; see also Polanyi-levitt 2013, 71–93) and Roosevelt’s New Deal (u.a. in Polanyi, 2002a). Historically however, social liberalism has been reduced to organised capitalism, whose dominant protagonists are corporations and corporately organised groups under the primacy of a reined in capital valorisation, represented in the West by Fordism and the post-World War ii social state (Busch and land 2013; on the fate of the New Deal see Fraser and gerstle, 1989). By contrast, keynes formulated a version of liberal socialism going beyond social liberalism, which he summarised in this way: “The question is whether we are prepared to move out of the nineteenth century laissezfaire state into an era of liberal socialism, by which i mean a system where we can act as an organized community for common purposes and to promote social and economic justice, whilst respecting and protecting the individual—his freedom of choice, his faith, his mind and its expression, his enterprise and his property.” (keynes 1982, 500) in contrast to social liberalism, a liberal socialism places advocates the subordination of liberal institutions to emancipatory goals and solidary inclusion (it can be

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located in the upper left quadrant of our model). keynes’ long-term perspective was closely tied to his vision of full employment, the transition to a steady-state economy and a society of adequacy and leisure (keynes 1963, 2003; Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012).23 While neoliberalism relies on privatisation, austerity policy, regulation in the interest of the central oligarchies of financial-market capitalism (Dellheim, 2014), and wants to organise society on a market model—that is, market-radical (klein, 2008)—liberal socialism is above all oriented to strengthening the intersubjective rights of freedom by generalising them, deploying markets as an essential form of regulation, and at the same time making access to the basic goods of a free life independent of power in the market. Today a liberal socialism closely overlaps with the concept of a socio-ecological transformation. Polanyi shows that English liberals in the 19th century viewed “the idea of popular government” with “abhorrence”, and that “the concept of democracy was foreign to the English middle classes.” (Polanyi 2001, 180) in neoliberal financial-market capitalism too, democracy and market (liberalism) go their separate ways once again (as Streeck 2013 bitterly realises; see also Deppe 2013; Demirović 2013). in the end it could be shown once again that when separated from one another neither democracy nor liberal institutions can be salvaged. One could also say that socialism and liberality have a common future or they have none. a third contemporary movement, which is gaining in importance, is based on the reappropriation of common goods as a domain for the production of a free communality, incorporating commoning, solidary economy, and the various forms of alternative production from cooperatives to peer-topeer economy (Daly et al. 1994; Dolšak and Ostrom 2003; Dellheim 2008; Voß 2010; Helfrich et al. 2010; Elsen 2011; Huber 2013; Bauwens and P2P Foundation 2014; Bollier 2014). This movement could be designated libertarian commonism and is located in the upper right quadrant of our model. Here traditions of syndicalism and anarchism are taken up in modern forms and libertarian communist traditions are revived, such as those represented in the early 19th century by godwin, Fourier, and Owen, among others. The classical cooperative movement, the social revolutionary conceptions for reconstructing rural Russia, as well as anarcho-syndicalism and the radical initiatives of William Morris are elements of this historical tradition. Their special focus lies in a new kind of participatory

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organisation of public services and the whole reproduction economy, harnessing the living networks of municipal life and cooperative cultural production and consumption. This kind of libertarian commonism puts at its centre the reproduction of the bases of free communality and the constant new production of relations of living solidarity. it is here that the economy of caring and gentleness reigns, a politics of commoning and of the commoner as well as a culture of dialogue, of conversation and of dance.24 Buen vivir positions are also indispensable approaches to a new free communality beyond the imperatives of a market economy and the growth compulsion (for a good example see acosta 2009). Only in this new form does the ‘protection’ of society really become a breakthrough into freedom, into free communality and direct democratic participation in the public sphere and the commons. This is not a glorified throwback to a lost world but a look ahead to completely new possibilities, many of which have their starting point in the cooperative experiments of the past. Fourth, there is a movement that again defends the social in an authoritarian and communal way, which reduces negative rights (beginning with ‘foreigners’) and tends to exclude people who think differently, who are different. The umbrella term for this is exclusionary authoritarian social paternalism. it is located in the lower right quadrant of the model. its extreme case would be totalitarian rule. Together with market fundamentalism, this movement reinforces tendencies to barbarism. Following the crises of post-colonial state-centred politics, as well as of neoliberal projects in all regions of the globe, state failure is endemic. Fundamentalist movements have considerable support. War lords pillage the areas they control and supply the world market. The barbarism of a militarised imperial neoliberalism, which reached its highest point with george W. Bush, and the barbarism of ‘protection’ against the dangers of the market and imperial powers on the part of fundamentalist movements are mutually strengthening. They are twin brothers. There are various possibilities in this situation. The first variant is the continuation of neoliberal financial-market capitalism in the same or another form. For this the related structures and institutions have to be protected. as Stephen gill writes, “it can be shown that many of the neoliberal forms of state have been authoritarian.” (gill 1995, 420) Such a

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‘protection of society’ in this case is mainly the protection of the reigning relations of power. Statism is accordingly transformed (Brangsch 2012) and in the case of the European Union a deep crisis sets in (Demirović and Sablowski 2012). The degree to which the interests, needs, and also desires of the subaltern classes are included depends on the counter-movements, on the concrete form of hegemony and/or sheer domination.25 The narrower the basis for accumulation becomes, the more restricted the possibilities are of including broad parts of the population, and the more marked become neoliberalism’s authoritarian and exclusionary features (Candeias 2012a). it is an open question to what extent the commodification of the basic goods of society can be linked to the level of the provision of resources and of social stability that is necessary and sufficient for the maintenance of neoliberal capital valorisation. This is not predetermined but it will be decided in a practical way in the competition amongst alternatives. The weaker the alternatives are, the more brutal will be the evolution of neoliberal financial-market capitalism. Today’s neoliberalism could change into an openly authoritarian fortress capitalism (Raskin et al. 2010). a second variant includes forms of a capitalism under the primacy of political-cultural and security-policy objectives (Sum and Jessop 2013: 486). The most recent form of this kind of capitalism is the ‘Chinese Dream’ proclaimed by the new leadership of China’s Communist Party (Central Party School of the Communist Party of China 2013), which is wavering between the unleashing of capitalism along with social paternalism, on the one side, and socio-ecological reconstruction and broadened participation, on the other. The initiatives for green Capitalism and a green New Deal (green New Deal group 2008; WgBU 2011) also point in the direction of opening up new sources of accumulation (especially through the ecological, or socio-ecological reconstruction of production, transportation, and reproduction), of a broader ‘historic bloc’, as well as of new modes of production and life (Institut für Gesellschaftsanalyse 2011: 19; Brand and Wissen 2013). in its most far-reaching form it could mean the primacy of the reproduction economy (Jochimsen 2003; Madörin 2006; Brückner 2010; Winker 2012; Chorus 2013) in a solidary mixed economy; the financial system would be strongly regulated (see also Troost 2010; with reference to Polanyi and keynes see Bischoff and

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Graph 4: enterprises as Protagonists of the reproduction of bourgeois-capitalist Societies

Tradable natural resources

Open Access Order

Wage labor

Capital

Knowledge and culture as commodities

Capitalist enterprises

Payment for goods, wages, rents, etc.

Supply of goods and services on the market

Repayment of credits, etc.

lieber 2013: 144–162) and investments would be socially and ecologically controlled. This would herald a transition to a green Socialism (Rilling, 2011; Candeias, 2012b); one could speak of a double transformation in capitalism and beyond it (klein, 2013).26 Seventh Part of the Dialogue: From Market Society to Solidary Society Starting from Nancy Fraser’s ‘triple movement’ and the work of karl Polanyi, the current struggles have up to now been embedded in a public space of political-social alternatives. its two axes are formed firstly through the relation between the struggles inter-subjective rights of freedom and attempts to expand access to the basic goods of a free life and secondly between the solidary-emancipatory and the exclusionary-authoritarian mediations of these struggles. Neoliberalism, liberal socialism, libertarian commonism, and authoritarian paternalism are movements within this space alongside others. The ‘political grammar’ of the present is reinterpreted in the light of karl Polanyi and Nancy Fraser. in my view, this offers a more compelling account of the plethora of opposing tendencies and the diverse hegemonic and counter-hegemonic options than that described by the ‘double’ or ‘triple’ movement. Still, the question re-

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mains whether this framework can give rise to a narrative to support “a coherent counter-project to neoliberalism.” (Fraser 2013a, 121) Such a narrative should be able to outline four aspects: socio-ecological reconstruction, redistribution from top to bottom and from private to public wealth, democratisation of democracy, and encompassing solidarity (see klein 2012). in the process the dialogue finally becomes a polylogue. any emancipatory-solidary alliance built on such a narrative must go to the roots of market society. For Polanyi market society’s point of departure was the transformation of the basic goods of society—human labour power, nature, money and culture—into “fictitious commodities”. This transformation is the condition of their entrepreneurial combination with the goal of capital valorisation (graph 4). Vigour and self-assertiveness, as well as tendencies to civilisational one-sidedness, arise from this selfvalorisation of value. The basic goods of society are transformed into ‘fictitious commodities’, combined and recombined, subordinated to the capitalist-oriented imperatives of efficiency and innovation and oriented to possible future demand based on an ability to pay. The disembedding of the basic goods of a society from their traditional patrimonial contexts carries a high price and has an immense power of attraction, for “market society has produced more income, wealth, goods, and services than any other form of human social organization.” (Fligstein 2001, 3). This explains the importance for such a mode of production for underprivileged groups aspiring to social development as well as for state and elite groups that otherwise have no reason to expect security or prestige. Therefore capitalism has up to now been able to defend itself from every criticism, resistance and attack, to absorb almost all elements of the latter (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005) and expand with renewed and unprecedented power. Up to now Marx’ and Engels’ dictum has been borne out that the capitalist mode of production “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.” (Marx and Engels 1976, 488) it is this power of attraction, this exorbitant productivity and capacity for renewal, which the great majority of the left either takes for granted and ascribes to each non-capitalist alternative or simply disregards or even

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consciously denies (on the critique of naïve anti-capitalism see Haug, 2007). But if one does not talk about capitalism’s strengths one cannot talk about any alternative, however it is shaped (for a detailed treatment see Brie 2010). a great socialist transformation has to preserve and apply the emancipatory strengths of bourgeois-capitalist societies or it is condemned to failure at the very outset. Today’s market society has changed in respect to the society that Polanyi depicted, which emerged in England in the 19th century. it is less rigid, and the interrelations between economy, politics, and culture are much closer. as Michele Cangiani and Claus Thomasberger wrote in their introduction to Polanyi’s economic analyses: “The result is a new institutional structure characterised by … an open but fragile international currency system requiring continual intervention, politically regulated national money and labour markets and a state oriented towards intervention. The market’s domination of society has thus not … ended. On the contrary, precisely because the market system is no longer independent, because it no longer represents a separate sphere and because it depends on social intervention and support measures, all other institutions had and have to be so reconstructed that they satisfy this function [i.e., of serving the market system—M. B.].” (Cangiani and Thomasberger 2002, 38) The state, international governance structures, but also education and culture and law develop to conform to the market and competition (on the reconstruction of the state see Jessop 2007; on the interlinkage between the economical, the political and the cultural dimensions see Sum and Jessop 2013). Block and Somers rightly point out that in this respect every economic order is socially embedded (Block and Somers 2014, 155 ff.). The task however is to determine the social imperative from which the decisive, predominant dynamic emerges and to which the protagonists (must) orient themselves. in a capitalist economic order this is capital accumulation. What Polanyi reveals is the fact that the so-called factors of production (raw materials, knowledge, labour power, means of production, and even credit) are not commodities. in this sense Polanyi also breaks with Marx, for whom money as well as labour power have a commodity character (see kuczynski, 2009). Polanyi points to a fundamental contradiction: in

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a market economy these ‘factors of production’, “also must be organized in markets; in fact these markets form an absolutely vital part of the economic system.” (Polanyi 2001, 75) in reality however they are only “fictitious commodities”; they are treated as commodities although they are really not commodities. His argument needs to be quoted extensively: … labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them… labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance. (Polanyi, 2001: 75 f.) Under the imperatives of capital accumulation the market economy always takes factors of production from spheres in which basic relationships completely different from commodity production from are at work.27 Raw materials, energy, and the products produced through their use are taken from the earthly environment, the gaiasphere and influence the later in turn, becoming parts of it and changing it, above all as the technosphere, as waste and pollutants. Human labour power is nothing other than a specific capacity of people that arises in the sphere of their communalindividual life worlds (to which paid labour also belongs). ‘Money’ is nothing but one of the many institutions that characterise the social order. a judicial system, the possibilities for independent organisation in the economic, political, and cultural area, a developed finance and credit system, etc. are also part of this order. knowledge circulates in the cultural-public sphere, whose gradual development started in the 17th century. Taken together these form the sphere of the natural-technical, of the social, of the societal and cultural wealth of every society. in the crisis of neoliberal financial-market capitalism it has become clear how fundamental the questions are that arise with such a capital-market-dominated economic and social order (graph 5): What should we be allowed to create? How

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do we want to live? What do we want to defend? What is a human being? Market society undermines its own foundations—ecological, life-world, societal-institutional, and cultural (this position is developed in detail in Brie 2014d). it is time to recognise the karl Polanyi who was a theorist of the ‘great Transformation’ pointing beyond capitalism and who has been eclipsed by a ‘Polanyi light’ limited to a discussion of the double movement inside the framework of capitalism. in his work he offers two examples of this transformation: the transition to a market economy that describes the England of the early 19th century (Polanyi 2001, 35–45), and the potential great transformation following the collapse of the liberal order in the 1930s, whose contemporary scenarios he analysed—fascism, the New Deal, and Soviet socialism (ibid., 231–257). He himself develops a conception of socialism as “the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society.” (ibid., 242) The most important positive proposals that he then develops in his chief work are the removal of labour, land (nature), and money from the market; they are no longer to be primarily treated as commodities. as a result, market economy would be overcome through a painful transitional period (ibid.,258 f.). He advocates enforceable social civil rights and complete political rights: “The list should be headed by the right of the individual to a job under approved conditions, irrespective of his or her political or religious views, or of color and race.” (ibid., 264) Freedom “should be upheld at all costs—even that of efficiency in production, economy in consumption or rationality in administration. an industrial society can afford to be free.” (ibid.) The alternatives that Polanyi faced in his own time are still with us: Will the foundations of our societies be irreversibly destroyed through the imperatives of capital accumulation, or can they still function in accordance with their own potential and with the goal of a richer human life today and in the future? The positive alternative is, at least for Polanyi, incompatible with a market society: “… the conflict between the market and the elementary requirements of an organized social life” (Polanyi, 2001: 257) must be resolved through overcoming market economy, or we will see civilisation sink into barbarism—this was Polanyi’s firm conviction

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Graph 5: The four questions during the crisis of neoliberal financial-market-capitalism

The gaia sphere

Tradable natural resources Bourgeois society

Sphere of the communal-individual life worlds Wage labour

Sphere of the social institutions

Capital

Sphere of the public-cultural Knowledge and culture as commodities

Economy and society under the dominance of capital accumulation

The earth as a mining area and garbage heap

Society of labour and leisure

Financial-market capitalism and capitalist oligarchy

Culture as entertainment and self-preservation

The new ecological question: What are we allowed to produce and consume in which way

The new social question: How do we want to live

The new democratic and peace question: How do we want to decide on which question?

The new cultural question: What does it mean to be human today?

in view of the epochal crisis of the 1930s and 40s. Dieter klein underscores how apposite this approach is today: “after the great transformation that karl Polanyi analysed in his homonymous work there is a new transformation on the agenda, which will revolutionise all spheres of social life on earth and that categorically excludes pure financial-capitalist regulation.” (klein 2013, 12). it would involve the “transition to another, alternative social system … to a solidary, just society in harmony with nature, which can also be called a democratic green socialism.” (klein 2013, 13; see also Brie and klein 2011) Based on an analysis of Polanyi’s great transformation of the 19th century, Rolf Reißig has developed the concept of a great transformation of the 21st century or a Second great

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Transformation towards a “sustainable solidarity society.” (see Reißig 2009, 2011, 2012) Eighth Part of the Dialogue: Paths of Transformation Nancy Fraser rightly points out that it is completely wrong to hope for and work towards a pendulum swing of the so-called double movement away from market radicalism and towards social protection. This protection can take on authoritarian, repressive, and even barbaric forms under the domination of capital oligarchies or with their active participation. Elements of various forms of neofascism have been emerging for a long time now. The global surveillance of the communication of citizens is only one such element. The new border regime, drone-based warfare, the massive erosion of social civil rights, and above all the emptying out of democratic institutions are threatening. This kind of ‘protection’ is the flipside of precisely those tendencies of an unleashed market radicalism against which Polanyi is arguing. The continuation of a double movement is the attempt to stabilize capitalism on its own basis. The decisive strategic task of a transformatively oriented left would be to challenge the foundation of the so-called double movement—the capitalist market society. This in turn overlaps with the goal of ‘non-reformist reform policies’ of the kind that Nancy Fraser asks for: These would be policies with a double face: on the one hand, they engage people's identities and satisfy some of their needs as interpreted within existing frameworks of recognition and distribution; on the other hand, they set in motion a trajectory of change in which more radical reforms become practicable over time. When successful, nonreformist reforms change more than the specific institutional features they explicitly target. in addition, they alter the terrain upon which later struggles will be waged. By changing incentive structures and political opportunity structures, they expand the set of feasible options for future reform. Over time their cumulative effect could be to transform the underlying structures that generate injustice. (Fraser 2003, 79 f.) Socially and ecologically oriented entry projects towards a green New

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Deal would meld together with entry projects into a solidary economy in the broadest sense (Dellheim 2008), into a reproduction economy based on commoning.28 in Polanyi’s 1943 Common Man’s Masterplan a series of ‘entry projects’ are cited, which are also invoked at the end of The Great Transformation: Regulated markets mean markets with no supplementary markets for labor, land and money. This security is possible in a society wealthy enough to banish want without even raising the question of the motivation to work. The freedom of the arbitrary rejection of employment to be limited. The freedom of arbitrary dismissal limited. The freedom of unlimited profits limited. The unlimited rights of private ownership limited. The public spirited forms of enterprise fostered. The plastic society achieved. The helpless society transcended. The concept of freedom reformed. Christianity transcended. The philosophy of the common man established. (Polanyi 1943, 2) Polanyi’s late work further develops approaches to a plurality of exchange principles already adumbrated in The Great Transformation. The traditional societies, which he investigates, are characterised by reciprocity, redistribution, and a subsistence economy. at the same time, Polanyi notes, they developed extensive markets that were subjected to strict control. Despite this the “safeguards of the rule of law and of the traders’ liberty” were impressive; “ways were found to reconcile economics planning with the requirements of markets in communities as different as democratic attica of the fifth century B.C. and the preliterate Negro kingdom of Dahomey in West africa, more than 2000 years later.” (Polanyi 1977, Xii) He rejected the alternative ‘market society or oppression’. For him, planning and regulation could be the condition for freedom. His vision is that of a society with a plurality of property and socialisation forms, in which diverse protagonists shape their own lives in a self-conscious way and on the basis of a free agreement of their goals and means.

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Today’s initiatives, either in the form of a socio-ecologically radicalised neo-keynesianism and, on the other side, of a libertarian commonism, are its preconditions. all such initiatives have a prerequisite in Polanyi’s view—democracy. Democracy is in his understanding the only form in which free communality can still exist within a complex society composed of “aggregates of functional institutions”. He thought that democratisation would give rise to socialism as an attempt, however incomplete, to “make society a distinctively human relationship of persons.” (Polanyi 2001, 242) He is aware that the complexity of society always produces unintended consequences which can never be fully controlled. Full oversight and transparency is impossible. However, a much higher degree of freedom and responsibility for the consequences of one’s own actions can be achieved. it is true that new relations of domination and new exclusions constantly emerge: “No society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function.” (Polanyi 2001, 266) But, according to the last paragraph of The Great Transformation, “uncomplaining acceptance of the reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength to remove all removable injustice and unfreedom. as long as he is true to his task of creating more abundant freedom for all, he need not fear that either power or planning will turn against him and destroy the freedom he is building by their instrumentality. This is the meaning of freedom in a complex society; it gives us all the certainty that we need.” (Polanyi 2001, 268) Here, as seen before in Rosa luxemburg’s thinking, freedom is understood as the combination of socialism and democracy, as a goal that is at the same time the path.29 if we were to reformulate Nancy Fraser’s message on the basis of the approach developed here, it could read as follows. We should work at countering the alliance of neoliberalism and authoritarian social paternalism, which is now taking shape, with an alliance of liberal socialists and thoroughly libertarian commonists. The socio-cultural basis of such an alliance would be a solidary lower-middle coalition (regionally, nationally, supranationally, and globally) whose most important milieu would be represented by: (1) the social-emancipatory circle of skilled personnel in

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the public sector, above all in public basic services (education, healthcare, and culture); (2) the wage-earning strata in the services area, in industry, and in commerce, and; (3) the precariously employed (for a detailed treatment see Brie 2007b, 2007c). Precisely the weakest social groups today are often pressed into political passivity (Schäfer 2011; kahrs 2012). Their word counts for little (Bartels 2008). However, these classes and groups can claim a decisive political force by joining and moving together (for concrete examples see Clawson 2003; Whitaker 2007; Mason, 2013; Candeias and Völpel, 2014). a transformative left can emerge from a mosaic left (Urban 2009, 2014). We are still a long way off from this. The Preliminary Conclusion of the Dialogue: We Advance Through Listening to Each Other The civilisational dimension of Polanyi’s vision appears when he writes: “after a century of blind ‘improvement” man is restoring his ‘habitation’.” (Polanyi, 2001: 257) The horizons this ‘restoration’ opens up could include the concepts of landscape, urban community (‘polis’), the squares and loci of public communality (the ‘agora’), and the home. Far too many people remain unaware of the radicality of this task. it is a great, enormously attractive vision, which deserves to flourish. a great deal of this tomorrow has for a long time danced today, as Dieter klein has vividly shown (klein, 2013: 169–202). The philosopher lothar kühne formulated this context thus: “in the landscape the individual is not only incorporated into a specific community through the house that is crowned by the landscape; in the landscape he/she also has the incipient spatial form of his/her incorporation into humanity, because the landscape indeed exists because of the house although it is essentially nature and earth. The finiteness of individual life has become negated by/absorbed, in creative everyday life, by the species. […] Thus the house takes back the values that have been separated out and seigneurially inverted in the church. The house is not seigneurial but is homey and wonderful.” (kühne 1985, 39) To this end, however, the earth must become a paradise, which we take care of and cautiously preserve—the old Persian word for garden is pairi-daēza (Turner 2005, 121).30 The walls must crumble so that everyone can come and go freely in our cities and communities, no one as an outsider but always as a guest or at home, no one humiliated and no one

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Graph 6: Sustainable Solidary Society of Good life

The gaiasphere

Sustainable reproductive economy, localisation and regionalisation

The sphere of communalindividual life-worlds

Sphere of openaccess social institutions

The sphere of cultural public

Self-determined unity of labour, care, co-decisionmaking and leisure

Socialisation of important decisions on investments, participatory and deliberative democracy

Emergence of a cultural society of a good life

The economic order Solidarity care economy

Economic organisations as associations of the reproductive workers

The social order Libertarian institutions of open access and intersubjective freedoms

Egalitarian distribution of the basic goods of freedom

exalted. We could then take responsibility for our freedom; solidary communality of provision and care would be a daily matter; citizens would put much time and effort into subjecting social institutions to democratic control (for an emancipatory perspective on time see Haug 2009). in the place of a society whose rhythms and spaces are determined by capital accumulation (Harvey 2006) the reproduction of solidary life would be shaped in all its diversity. Traditions of pre-capitalist and modern societies could be combined on a new basis in a “city of being”.31 a sustainable solidary society of good life would arise (Reißig 2009: 141 ff.) (graph 6). karl Polanyi’s contemporary Ernst Bloch captured this hope in these words: ‘True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts

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to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e., grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating [and, we should add, caring—M.B.] human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and re-established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: a homeland.” (Bloch 1995, 1375 f.) karl Polanyi’s and Nancy Fraser’s concerns overlap through time and space. Their common denominator is solidary emancipation, the movement towards freedom for each and all. From this conversation friction grows, out of which the new can emerge. This conversation can then be connected with innumerable narratives that have grown out of the new protest movements against neoliberal financial-market capitalism. The dialogue becomes a polylogue; the conversation becomes a ‘song’, as Hölderlin wrote. Polyphony is the condition for a new narrative of solidary emancipation. But this requires a cooperative structure, which can emerge from listening to each other while we move ahead laboriously and searchingly. Perhaps the polylogue with Nancy Fraser and karl Polanyi we conducted in this essay can contribute to this beginning. NOTES 1 My thanks are due to Frank adler, Dieter klein, and Claus Thomasberger for their critical advice, the importance of which reaches far beyond the current essay. 2 Block and Somers point out that the “facts in the famous Poor law Commissioners‘ Report (1834)” to which Polanyi refers were not the reports of the “poor” themselves but almost exclusively of those who were responsible for poor relief (Block and Somers 2014, 129). it was the upper class’ view of those who depended on its mercy. The causal assumptions of the 1834 report and the criticism based on it are questionable, according to Block and Somers. They summarise their own analysis as follows: “instead of bread scales undermining work effort, we get a picture of a rural population facing broad structural forces that undermined their capacities for self-support. in this context it is difficult to see increasing poor relief as anything but a partial remedy to problems outside the control of the rural poor.” (Block and Somers, 2014: 142) Edward P. Thompson gives another, differentiated picture of the situation and of the reactions of rural workers to the Speenhamland System: “On the side of the poor, threats to the overseers, sporadic sabotage, a “servile and cunning” or “sullen and discontented” spirit, an evident demoralization documented in page after page of the Poor law Commissioners‘ Report. “It would be better for us to be slaves at once than to work under such a system … when a man has his spirit broken, what is he good for?” in the Speenhamland counties of the south the labourers had their own bitter jest—the farmers “keep us here [on the poor-rates] like potatoes in a pit, and only to take us out for use when they can no longer do without us.”” (Thompson 1968, 247)

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On 23 February 1941 Polanyi wrote to his daughter kari: “So about four weeks ago i began writing, and tomorrow i intend to go to New york to hand the introduction and the first three chapters to the publishers. Curiously enough, it is not a draft, but a finished text, ready for print. Of the many surprises the writing was connected with, this is one.” (Polanyi-levitt 2004, 13). gareth Dale gives an overview of this reception of The Great Transformation (2010: 221–230). “Polanyi’s method, like Marx’s and many other great thinkers in the European tradition, is paradoxical in that complex, highly sophisticated historical analyses are performed using extremely simple conceptual frameworks. This method of “simple complexity” produces clear thought, nowhere more so than in The Great Transformation… “ (gregory 2009, 134) The reproach that Polanyi ‘romanticised society’ can only be maintained if one abridges the work to omit some of its essential aspects. Polanyi’s depiction of the Speenhamland system, it is true, has much to do with some important elements of Fraser’s critique of the Fordist welfare state—especially its paternalistic character, even if Polanyi, like so many before the 1960s (and some today) was blind to the gender dimensions of restrictions on freedom and individual possibilities for development along with the intersectionality of class, ethnicity, gender, and age (Winker and Degele, 2009). Polanyi depicts very accurately the “powerful reinforcement of the paternalistic system of labour organization” (Polanyi 2001, 82) and emphasises that the abolition of the Speenhamland system was in the end also in the interests of the wage labourers “even though this meant depriving them of their legal claim to subsistence” because “the ‘right to live’ had proved a death trap to them.” (ibid., 83) Polanyi treats in detail the restrictions on freedom that were bound up with the Poor law legislation. For the simple people this meant the securing of their existence and the “seal of their disabilities” (ibid., 92). The “reactionary paternalism’ (ibid., 107) of the Speenhamland system had become a “veritable masterpiece of institutional degeneration” (ibid., 100). it was an “unfailing instrument of popular demoralization” and hindered the workers “from developing into an economic class” (ibid., 103) and autonomously resisting capitalist market society. This sounds quite different from the romanticising of social protection and Polanyi was in fact hostile to economism. in a completely similar way Winston Churchill said in 1909: “The idea is to increase the stability of our institutions by giving the mass of industrial workers a direct interest in maintaining them. With a ‘stake’ in the country in the form of insurance against evil days these workers will pay no attention to the vague promises of revolutionary socialism… it will make him a better citizen, a more efficient worker, and a happier man.” (quoted in Dale, 2010: 76) Social reform ideas were also developed intellectually in germany, as they were in other countries, not least by lorenz von Stein with his conception of social democracy and later of the social kingdom. at the end of his large-scale presentation of the political-social and intellectual history of France between 1789 and 1849, strongly criticising the propertied classe and invoking an alliance of the state (in the leading position) and workers, he writes “… if the industrial revolution is victorious one result will be the definitive domination of capital and also a legal subjugation of labour [thus the end of the legal freedom of the workers— M.B.]; if social democracy is victorious, then we will see the beginning—perhaps after a very bloody period—of the social order of mutual interest.” (Stein 1959, 408) in England we could say that John Stuart Mill’s 1848 work, Principles of Political Economy, with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy represents the philosophy and political economy of social reform (Mill, 1920). in France it was first Comte and then Durkheim who developed a sociology and philosophy of organic solidarity, which was translated by léon Bourgeois directly into the sphere of the political (Böhlke 2010, 15–27). all these reform concepts had a direct socialist and communist prehistory. in 2016 gareth Dale edited papers of karl Polanyi translated from Hungarian (Polanyi, 2016) a decisive contribution has been made here by Michele Cangiani, kari Polanyi-levitt, and Claus Thomasberger with their german edition of Polanyi’s writings from the 1920s and 30s,

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which are concerned with his understanding of freedom and socialism as well as the confrontation with fascism (Polanyi, 2005a). in 1942 then U.S. Vice-President Henry a. Wallace gave a remarkable address entitled “The Century of the Common Man” (Wallace, 1943), in which he supported Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ and criticised Henry luce’s concept of an ‘american Century’ (luce, 1941). The New Deal itself represented a shift towards ‘the common people’. Strange to say, this also applies to the comprehensive work of Fred l. Block and Margret F. Somers, which only contains a superficial account of Polanyi’s ‘view on socialism’ (see Block and Somers 2014, 220–223). gareth Dale in his introduction to Polanyi’s thought also notably separates his treatment of The Great Transformation from the last section of this very work and at the same time sees this conclusion of the book as its actual ‘manifesto’, if indeed there is any (Dale 2010, 239). Polanyi was not least influenced by Ferdinand Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). Tönnies understood socialism as an attempt emerging within “individualist socialisation” to achieve the unified management of communication and labour, as the attempt that would, when consistently carried out, mean the destruction of its own bases, that is, of individualistic socialisation (for a summary see Tönnies 1887, 293; see in reference to state party socialism Ruben 1998; Crome 2006, 63–66). in this context Polanyi published Christianity and the Social Revolution (lewis et al., 1935) together with John Macmurray, Joseph Needham, and others. He may have also been influenced by the thought of Macmurray, who saw community and society as necessary poles of human-social existence, neither of which can be dissolved into each other: “The members of a community are in communion with one another, and their association is a fellowship. and since such an association exhibits the form of the personal in its fully positive personal character, it will necessarily contain within it and be constituted by its own negative, which is society. Every community is a society; but not every society is a community.” (Macmurray 1961, 146) Polanyi repeatedly returns to the motif of the “acquisitive society”, the subject of Tawney’s first influential book (Tawney, 1920). Tawney had criticised an ideology that derived the fulfilment of societal functions purely from ‘free’, egotistical action and he contrasted this with the vision of a society that rests on the connection between personal responsibility and social functions: “a society which aimed at making the acquisition of wealth contingent upon the discharge of social obligations, which sought to proportion remuneration to service and denied it to those by whom no service was performed, which inquired first not what men possess but what they can make or create or achieve, might be called a Functional Society, because in such a society the main subject of social emphasis would be the performance of functions. But such a society does not exist, even as a remote ideal, in the modern world, though something like it has hung, an unrealized theory, before men's minds in the past. Modern societies aim at protecting economic rights, while leaving economic functions, except in moments of abnormal emergency, to fulfil themselves.” (Tawney 1920, 28 f.) Polanyi later saw the model of an acquisitive society as ignorant of the reality of society: “No society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function. it was an illusion to assume a society shaped by man's will and wish alone. yet this was the result of a market view of society which equated economics with contractual relationships, and contractual relations with freedom. […] any decent individual could imagine himself free from all responsibility for acts of compulsion on the part of a state which he, personally, rejected; or for economic suffering in society from which he, personally, had not benefited. He was "paying his way,” was "in nobody's debt,” and was unentangled in the evil of power and economic value. His lack of responsibility for them seemed so evident that he denied their reality in the name of his freedom.’” (Polanyi 2001, 266) Polanyi exposed this as a convenient illusion. We can only go briefly into his specific view of the Soviet socialism of the 1920s and 30s. like many of his left-wing contemporaries he blinded himself to the extent of Stalinism’s

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destruction of civilisation. He also refused to acknowledge the gap between his understanding of socialism and Soviet-type socialism, which destroyed democratic social spaces and the bases of individual freedom (for remarkable perspicacity at a very early date see luxemburg, 2004; in this connection see arendt, 1993: 39 f.; for my own position Brie, 2014a). His relationship to socialism was mainly shaped by the non-communist left and by Central and Western European experiences. For him, ‘Bolshevism’ was a subform of socialism alongside others. in this way he missed what was specific to the Soviet system of rule. in the 1930s he wrote that “Russian socialism is still in the dictatorial phase, although a development in the direction of democracy has already become clearly visible.” (Polanyi 1979, 124) in 1939 he said “The working class must stand by Russia for the sake of socialism. Both parts of the sentence are of equal importance. To stand for socialism and not for Russia is the betrayal of socialism in its sole existing embodiment. To stand for Russia without mentioning socialism would also be the betrayal of socialism, which alone makes Russia worth fighting for.” (quoted from Polanyi’s 1939 manuscript “Russia and the Crisis” in Nagy 1994, 99) in 1943 he cited ‘the French Revolution, the american Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and socialist Britain’ in a summary of Rousseau’s legacy (Polanyi, 2005e: 310); and after 1944 he saw the problems of Soviet socialism in the fact that on the one hand the Russian Revolution “centres rather on the practice of co-operation and the ideal of human fraternity than on liberty and equality” and, on the other hand, that “the Russians are moreover in a different phase of their revolution…far from having reached final fruition.” (Polanyi 1944, 6–7) in 1994, in the era of market fundamentalism, kenneth McRobbie wrote in the preface to a volume about karl Polanyi: “at this moment, karl Polanyi seems very far away. He beckons to us, to be sure, but as if from decades into the future. He believed in mankind. But he overestimated both this generation’s power of reason, and its ability to conceive of how human self-interest might best be served. and we find it difficult to see where lies the path that may lead towards him.” (McRobbie 1994, iX) Vautrin is a central figure in Balzac’s work. The Romance philologist Curtius calls him “a criminal in the grand style, who goes his dangerous way in full consciousness, […] carried by man’s sense of superiority, who has examined earthly matters and realised that there are only two possible alternatives to choose: either stupid obedience or revolt.” (quoted in Wikipedia, 2014 [german]) This idea of direct personal responsibility was not an abstract principle for Polanyi but a direct ethical imperative. Peter F. Drucker gives us a picture of Polanyi’s extremely modest way of life despite the fact that as editor of the weekly Der Österreichische Volkswirt, he earned a good living. When he brought this up he got an unequivocal answer of Polanyi’s wife: “ ‘What a remarkable idea; spend your paycheck on yourself! We never heard of such a thing.’ ‘But’, i stammered, ‘most people do that.’ ‘We are not most people”, said ilona, karl's wife, sternly; “We are logical people. Vienna is full of Hungarian refugees, refugees from the Communists and refugees from the White Terror that succeeded the Communists; and a good many cannot earn an adequate living. karl has proven his capacity to earn. Therefore it is obviously only logical for him to turn his paycheck over to other Hungarians and then go out and earn what we need.’” (Drucker 1994, 126) “The state-political content of fascism is … nothing more than the eradication of the democratic idea, of democratic institutions, of social, economic, and political forms of democratic civilised behaviour. The idea of social equality and its institutions, the idea of citizens’ freedom and its institutions, the idea of human solidarity and its institutions are … to be stamped out.” (Polanyi 2002c, 191) a greater enforcement of market relations can have an emancipatory effect, ‘when markets in consumer goods are introduced into bureaucratically administered command economies, or when labour markets are opened to those who have been involuntarily excluded from them.” (Fraser 2013a: 129) already at the time of the French Revolution the population was exasperated by what it experienced: “Freedom is nothing but a vain phantom when one class of men can starve another

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with impunity. Equality is nothing but a vain phantom when the rich, through monopoly, exercise the right of life or death over their like. The republic is nothing but a vain phantom when the counter-revolution can operate every day through the price of commodities, which three quarters of all citizens cannot afford without shedding tears.” (Roux 1793) This is of course an interpretation of the 19th- and early 20th-century labour movement against the backdrop of their deformation and defeat through the reforms from above, the split into a communist and social democratic wing as well as through fascism and the Cold War. The original labour movement was, notwithstanding its internal restrictions, a movement that tried to organically connect the rights of freedom and social participation. it was a social and political freedom movement par excellence. it should incidentally be noted that Polanyi fundamentally understood keynes as someone who had tried to salvage market economy through changing its mode of regulation. He did not take up keynes’ positions which pointed beyond market economy. Erich Fromm described a culture where “the conversation ceases to be an exchange of commodities (information, knowledge, status) and becomes a dialogue in which it does not matter anymore who is right. The duellists begin to dance together, and they part not with triumph or sorrow—which are equally sterile—but with joy.” (Fromm 2008: 29) in the ‘best’ scenario, domination is coupled with hegemony. This means: “Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed—in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethico-political, it must also be economic, it must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity.” (gramsci 2000, 211 f.; on this concept see Haug 2004). adler and Schachtschneider (2010) provide an extraordinarily well substantiated overview of the main initiatives. Michael Burawoy is certainly right when he notes that Polanyi ‘…in his hostility to orthodox Marxism especially toward its theories of history and the centrality of exploitation—… lost sight of the imperatives of capitalist accumulation that lie behind the resurgence of markets’ (Burawoy, 2010: 301 f., see also 2013: 38). On the concept of ‘entry projects’ see klein and Brangsch (klein 2004; Brangsch 2009; Brie 2014b). in this context the institute for Critical Social analysis has studied, among other phenomena, participatory budgets (Brangsch and Brangsch 2008), energy-democracy initiatives (Müller 2012), as well as free public transport (Dellheim 2011; Brie and Candeias 2012). Erik Olin Wright’s real utopias project has tracked these kinds of projects within a comprehensive concept of socialist transformation (Wright 2010, 2013). Taking issue with lenin and Trotsky, Rosa luxemburg wrote in the summer of 1918, “…socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not comes as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators.” (luxemburg 2004, 208) She wanted transformation in the sense of “resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society”, but “in the manner of applying democracy…out of the active participation of the masses,…subjected to the control of complete public activity.” (ibid). in his utopia of a liberated, communist future society, William Morris has a contemporary witness of the great transformation look back and say: “‘yes, […] the world was being brought to its second birth; how could that take place without a tragedy? […] The spirit of the new days, of our days, was to be delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells [… ] many of the things which used to be produced—slave-wares for the poor and mere wealth-wasting wares for the rich— ceased to be made.’” (Morris 2004, 119, 121)

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31 This vision was outlined by Erich Fromm who wrote in the conclusion of his work To Have or To Be: “later Medieval culture flourished because people followed the vision of the City of god. Modern society flourished because people were energized by the vision of the growth of the Earthly City of Progress. in our century, however, this vision deteriorated to that of the Tower of Babel, which is now beginning to collapse and will ultimately bury everybody in its ruins. if the City of god and the Earthly City were thesis and antithesis, a new synthesis is the only alternative to chaos: the synthesis between the spiritual core of the late Medieval world and the development of rational thought and science since the Renaissance. This synthesis is The City of Being.” (Fromm 2008, 164).

nAncy frASer

n Ancy f rASer

A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi1

iN MaNy RESPECTS, today’s crisis resembles that of the 1930s, as described by karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation. Now, as then, a relentless push to extend and de-regulate markets is everywhere wreaking havoc—destroying the livelihoods of billions of people; fraying families, weakening communities and rupturing solidarities; trashing habitats and despoiling nature across the globe. Now, as then, attempts to commodify nature, labour and money are destabilizing society and economy— witness the destructive effects of unregulated trading in biotechnology, carbon offsets and, of course, in financial derivatives; the impacts on child care, schooling, and care of the elderly. Now, as then, the result is a crisis in multiple dimensions—not only economic and financial, but also ecological and social. Moreover, our crisis seems to share a distinctive deep-structural logic with the one Polanyi analysed. Both appear to be rooted in a common dynamic, which he called “fictitious commodification”. in both eras, ours and his, free-market fundamentalists have sought to commodify all the necessary preconditions of commodity production. Turning labour, nature and money into objects for sale on ‘self-regulating’ markets, they proposed to treat those fundamental bases of production and exchange as if they could be commodities like any other. in fact, however, the project was self-contradictory. like a tiger that bites its own tail, neoliberalism threatens now, just as its predecessor did then, to erode the very supports on which capitalism depends. The outcome in both cases was entirely predictable: wholesale destabilization of the economic system on the one hand, and of nature and society on the other.

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given these structural similarities, it is no surprise that many analysts of the present crisis are now returning to Polanyi’s magnum opus, nor that many speak of our time as a “second great transformation”, a “great transformation redux”.2 Nevertheless, the current conjuncture diverges in a crucial respect from that of the 1930s: despite the structural similarities, the political response today is strikingly different. in the first half of the 20th century, social struggles surrounding the crisis formed what Polanyi called a ‘double movement’. as he saw it, political parties and social movements coalesced around one side or the other of a simple faultline. On one side stood political forces and commercial interests that favoured deregulating markets and extending commodification; on the other stood a broad-based, cross-class front, including urban workers and rural landowners, socialists and conservatives, that sought to ‘protect society’ from the ravages of the market. as the crisis sharpened, moreover, the partisans of ‘social protection’ won the day. in contexts as divergent as New Deal america, Stalinist Russia, fascist Europe and, later, in postwar social democracy, the political classes appeared to converge on at least this one point: left to themselves, ‘self -regulating’ markets in labour, nature and money would destroy society. Political regulation was needed to save it. Today, however, no such consensus exists. Political elites are explicitly or implicitly neoliberal—outside latin america and China, at least. Committed first and foremost to protecting investors, virtually all of them— including self-professed social democrats—demand ‘austerity’ and ‘deficit reduction’, despite the threats such policies pose to economy, society and nature. Meanwhile, popular opposition fails to coalesce around a solidaristic alternative, despite intense but ephemeral outbursts, such as Occupy and the indignados, whose protests generally lack programmatic content. Progressive social movements are longer-lived and better institutionalized, to be sure; but they suffer from fragmentation and have not united in a coherent counter-project to neoliberalism. all told, we lack a double movement in Polanyi’s sense.3 The result, therefore, is a curious disjuncture. While today’s crisis appears to follow a Polanyian structural logic, grounded in the dynamics of fictitious commodification, it does not manifest a Polanyian political logic, figured by the double movement. What should we make of this disjuncture? How can we best explain the

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decidedly non-Polanyian character of the political landscape in the 21st century, and how should we evaluate the present constellation? Why do political elites today fail to champion regulatory projects aimed at saving the capitalist economic system—let alone society and nature—from the ravages of out-of-control markets? and why do social movements not unite around a counter-hegemonic project aimed at defending threatened livelihoods, battered communities and endangered habitats? are we dealing here with political mistakes—with failures of leadership, defects of analysis, errors of judgement? alternatively, does the current constellation of political struggle in some respects represent an advance over Polanyi’s scenario? Does it reflect hard-won insights that point to weaknesses in the idea of the double movement? in what follows, i propose to address these questions in two stages. First, i shall assess some widely cited hypotheses as to why the current political landscape deviates from Polanyi’s analysis. i shall then propose an alternative hypothesis, which in my view better illuminates our situation. This hypothesis requires that we revise Polanyi’s idea of a double movement in a way that better clarifies the prospects for emancipatory social transformation in the 21st century. A Failure of Leadership? let us begin, then, by asking: why is there no double movement in the 21st century? Why, despite apparently favourable structural conditions, is there no counter-hegemonic project aimed at protecting society and nature from neoliberalism? Why do the political classes of our time cede the making of public policy to central bankers, and why do their ranks include so few committed keynesians, let alone socialists, willing to champion solidaristic alternatives? Why is there no broad coalition of new-New Dealers: trade unionists, unemployed and precarious workers; feminists, ecologists and anti-imperialists; social democrats and democratic socialists? Why no Popular Front insisting that the costs of fictitious commodification should be paid, not by ‘society’ as such, nor by nature reduced to a sink, but by those whose relentless drive to accumulate capital precipitated the crisis? Why have the creative protests of the indignados and Occupy movements failed to find any coherent, sustained political expression that could mount a credible challenge to those ‘malefactors of wealth’, as Franklin Roosevelt would have called them, and to the governments who do their bidding?

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Several explanations suggest themselves. The simplest attributes the absence of a double movement to failures of political leadership. This hypothesis must have leapt out at anyone who followed the us Presidential campaign. To the dismay of many, Barack Obama proved unwilling or unable to articulate an alternative to the unabashed neoliberalism of Romney and Ryan. in the Presidential debate of 3 October 2012, for example, the moderator fed the incumbent a softball question: how does your view of the role of government differ from Romney’s? it would take a psychoanalyst to plumb the full depths of the President’s failure to offer a full-throated answer, the hesitancy expressed in his body language and tone of voice, and the embarrassed character of his response: Well i definitely think there are differences. The first role of the federal government is to keep the american people safe . . . But i also believe that government has the capacity—the federal government has the capacity—to help open up opportunity and create ladders of opportunity, and to create frameworks where the american people can succeed . . . the genius of america is the free-enterprise system, and freedom, and the fact that people can go out there and start a business . . . But as abraham lincoln understood, there are also some things we do better together . . . Because we want to give these gateways of opportunity to all americans, because if all americans are getting opportunity, we’re all going to be better off.4 Contrast this with Franklin Roosevelt boldly mocking his market-fundamentalist opponents as he campaigned for re-election in 1936; here again, the transcript cannot do justice to Roosevelt’s delivery—his selfassured sarcasm and evident pleasure in mocking his opponents’ transparent bad faith: let me warn you and let me warn the nation, against the smooth evasion that says: “Of course we believe these things—we believe in social security, we believe in work for the unemployed, we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things. But we do not like the way the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them, we will do more of them, we will do them better, and most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.5

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The comparison shows that the hypothesis of leadership failure has genuine force. a charismatic individual can indeed make a difference to the course of history, and the prospects for a double movement today would certainly improve if FDR, and not Obama, were leading the charge. Nevertheless, this idea does not suffice to explain why there is no double movement in the present conjuncture. it would be one thing if we were dealing here with the foibles of a single individual. But Obama’s weakness is hardly unique. it is the broader pattern—the across-the-board collapse of political keynesianism among the elites—that must be explained. Faced with the failure of an entire ruling stratum to make any serious attempt to stop an impending train wreck, we cannot restrict ourselves to hypotheses centred on individual psychology. Labour and Financialization let us turn, therefore, to a deeper explanation, which concerns a fundamental change in the character of capitalism since the 1930s. What is at issue here is the shift from a Fordist regime of accumulation, resting on industrial production, to a post-Fordist one, dominated by finance. in the Fordist capitalism of Polanyi’s day, labour occupied a central place, as its exploitation constituted the principal engine of capital accumulation. industrial workers possessed considerable clout: concentration facilitated organization and the threat to withhold labour was a potent weapon. Organized labour constituted the backbone of a broad-based popular front, spearheading efforts to regulate capitalism and shield society from the disintegrative effects of laissez-faire.6 Structurally, then, industrial capitalism generated a ready-made constituency and political base for the protective pole of the double movement. The situation of present-day capitalism is fundamentally different. in the current conjuncture, capital prefers, when possible, to bypass the risky business of production. Simplifying the circuit of accumulation, investors find profit in the buying and selling of money and of new financial products that commodify risk—thereby avoiding dependence on labour, whose role is in any case further reduced by new technologies. Necessarily, then, labour lacks the leverage it had in the 1930s. Manufacturing decamps to the semi-periphery, union membership plummets, and the strike weapon loses much of its force—at least in the global North. Equally important, the class division between labour and capital ceases to appear

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self-evident, becoming obfuscated by the seemingly more salient divide between the thinning ranks of the stably employed, on the one hand, and the swelling precariat on the other. in this situation, organized labour does not speak for society as such. in the eyes of some, it defends the privileges of a minority that enjoys a modicum of social security against the far greater number who do not. For structural reasons, then, labour cannot supply the backbone for the protective pole of a double movement in the 21st century. Nor is there any obvious successor in sight: the precariat or ‘multitude’ has the power of numbers on its side, but its situation is not conducive to organization; and much of it possesses nothing that capital needs and that it could withhold. youth, peasants, consumers, women, the no-longer-so ‘new’ class of symbolic workers, lately appearing in the guise of hackers and cyberpirates—all have been tried and found wanting in political heft. all told, a capitalism dominated by finance poses formidable structural obstacles to the Polanyian political dynamic. By its nature, it generates no identifiable social force that could spearhead a counter-hegemony, let alone any designated ‘grave-diggers’. This hypothesis of a shift from production to finance offers some insight into the conditions militating against the emergence of a double movement in the present era. yet it fails to capture the full spectrum of political possibilities. For one thing, this approach neglects to consider labour’s prospects outside the global North. For another, it does not look beyond the official economic system to the broader terrain of social reproduction, which currently serves as a major site of opposition to neoliberalism—as witness struggles throughout the world over education, health care, housing, water, pollution, food and community life. Then, too, the financialization hypothesis focuses one-sidedly on class relations as the sole or principal ground of political struggle, while failing to consider relations of status, which presently serve as major bases of mobilization—as witness the politics of recognition, arguably the dominant grammar of protest today, organizing struggles over gender, sexuality, religion, language, race/ ethnicity and nationality. Finally, this hypothesis misses the discursive face of politics—the grammars of claims-making that mediate structure and agency, the social imaginaries through which social conditions are experienced, interpreted and evaluated by social beings.

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A Crisis of Framing? a third hypothesis focuses on another structural shift that has taken place since the 1930s. What has changed, in this case, is the scale on which crisis is experienced—and therefore the frame through which it must be addressed. What is at stake, specifically, is the shift from a 20th-century crisis scenario that was framed in national terms, as requiring action by territorial states, to a 21st-century scenario, which has destabilized the national frame without yet generating a plausible replacement.7 in Polanyi’s time, it went without saying that the modern territorial state was the principal arena and agent of social protection. The parameters of the double movement’s protective project were therefore clear: in order to manage its national economy, the state needed to mobilize the national purse, which in turn required controlling the national currency. Virtually the first thing Franklin Roosevelt did upon assuming office in 1933 was to take the United States off the gold standard. This was the move that made possible the entire range of policies and programmes, including Social Security, which we associate with the New Deal. after the Second World War, moreover, in the US and elsewhere the national frame continued to specify all the major parameters of social protection: defining the protecting agent as the national state; the object to be managed as the national economy; the means to be employed as national policy—fiscal, monetary and industrial; and the circle of those entitled to protection as the national citizenry. Just as important, the imagined community of the nation supplied the solidary ethos that made protection a viable political project, able to command broad support.8 Today, however, the national frame no longer goes without saying. Out of the wreckage of the Second World War, the US spearheaded the construction of a global capitalist system based on the Bretton Woods framework, which aimed to combine international free trade with state regulation at the national level. But that compromise formation crumbled within a few decades. By the 1970s, the US was on its way to becoming a rentier nation; scuttling the system of fixed exchange rates, investing its capital abroad, and incurring massive sovereign debt, it ceded control of its currency and enfeebled its capacity to manage its economy. Other, weaker states also lost the ability to steer development, if indeed they ever had it. Thanks to long histories of colonial subjection, as well as to the continuation, after independence, of imperialist predation by other means,

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postcolonial states never enjoyed protective capacities equal to those of the core—a disparity later exacerbated by neoliberal policies of structural adjustment. Meanwhile, the construction of Europe as an economic and monetary union, without corresponding political and fiscal integration, disabled the protective capacities of member-states without creating broader, European -wide equivalents to take up the slack. Today, the evidence is all around us: greece is reduced to a protectorate, Spain, Portugal and ireland are ruled from Brussels, and central bankers set limits to domestic policy even in germany and France. The upshot is that the project of social protection can no longer be envisioned in the national frame. With no alternative on the horizon to replace it, the project seems to lose its credibility. We therefore lack another crucial presupposition of the double movement. The ‘frame’ hypothesis provides a real insight into the difficulty of building a counter-hegemony to neoliberalism in the 21st century. it sheds light on the weakness of national movements for social protection, which exist mainly in counter-historical, retrograde forms like lepenisme in France or golden Dawn in greece. But this hypothesis fails to explain the weakness of broader, transnational alternatives. Why is there no Europeanwide movement against austerity? if capitalists have organized globally to extend the reach of markets and to liberate them from national controls, why have the partisans of social protection not organized a countermovement at a comparable scale? in short, none of the hypotheses considered here is fully satisfying. Nor would a simple combination of the three suffice: even were we to succeed in articulating psychology, financialization and globalization, we would still have failed to grasp the specifically political dynamics that have derailed Polanyi’s scenario. We would still be left to wonder: why does ‘society’ not organize politically to protect itself from ‘economy’? Why is there no double movement in the 21st century? Emancipation: The Missing Third Whenever a question stubbornly resists sustained interrogation, it is worth considering whether it may have been wrongly posed. When we ask why there is no double movement in the 21st century, we repeat a familiar counterfactual gesture—as in, why were there no socialist revolutions in the advanced industrial states of the capitalist core? The problem here is

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clear: focusing on what is absent, we ignore that which is present. Suppose, however, that we re-cast our inquiry in a more open-ended way, by examining the grammar of really existing social struggles in the decades following publication of The Great Transformation? To this end, let us consider the vast array of social struggles that do not find any place within the scheme of the double movement. i am thinking of the extraordinary range of emancipatory movements that erupted on the scene in the 1960s and spread rapidly across the world in the years that followed: anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-war, the New left, second-wave feminism, lgBT liberation, multiculturalism, and so on. Often focused more on recognition than redistribution, these movements were highly critical of the forms of social protection that were institutionalized in the welfare and developmental states of the postwar era. Turning a withering eye on the cultural norms encoded in social provision, they unearthed invidious hierarchies and social exclusions. For example, New leftists exposed the oppressive character of bureaucratically organized social protections, which disempowered their beneficiaries, turning citizens into clients. anti-imperialist and anti-war activists criticized the national framing of first-world social protections, which were financed on the backs of postcolonial peoples whom they excluded; they thereby disclosed the injustice of ‘misframed’ protections, in which the scale of exposure to danger—often transnational—was not matched by the scale at which protection was organized, typically national. Meanwhile, feminists revealed the oppressive character of protections premised on the ‘family wage’ and on androcentric views of ‘work’ and ‘contribution’, showing that what was protected was less ‘society’ per se than male domination. lgBT activists unmasked the invidious character of public provision premised on restrictive, hetero-normative definitions of family. Disability-rights activists exposed the exclusionary character of built environments that encoded able-ist views of mobility and ability. Multiculturalists disclosed the oppressive character of social protections premised on majority religious or ethnocultural self- understandings, which penalize members of minority groups. and on and on. in each case, the movement criticized an aspect of the ‘ethical substance’—Sittlichkeit—that informed social protection. in the process, they

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forever stripped the term ‘protection’ of its innocence. aware that a wage could serve as a resource against domination premised on status, these movements were naturally wary of those who idealized protection and demonized markets. Demanding access, as opposed to protection, their paramount aim was not to defend ‘society’ but to overcome domination. Nevertheless, emancipatory movements were not proponents of economic liberalism. Having broken ranks with ‘society’, they did not on that account become partisans of ‘economy’. aware that marketization often served more to re-function than to eliminate domination, they were instinctively sceptical, too, of those who touted the ‘self-regulating’ market as a panacea. Wary of efforts to totalize marketization, they claimed the freedom of contract not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to emancipation, broadly conceived. in general, then, the social movements of the postwar era do not fit either pole of the double movement. Championing neither marketization nor social protection, they espoused a third political project, which i shall call emancipation. Occulted by Polanyi’s figure, this project needs to be given a central place in our efforts to clarify the grammar of social struggle in the 21st century. i propose, accordingly, to analyse the present constellation by means of a different figure, which i call the triple movement. like Polanyi’s figure, the triple movement serves as an analytical device for parsing the grammar of social struggle in capitalist society. But unlike the double movement, it delineates a three-sided conflict among proponents of marketization, adherents of social protection and partisans of emancipation. The aim here is not simply greater inclusiveness, however. it is rather to capture the shifting relations among those three sets of political forces, whose projects intersect and collide. The triple movement foregrounds the fact that each can ally, in principle, with either of the other two poles against the third. Political Ambivalence To speak of a triple movement is to posit that each of its three constituent poles is inherently ambivalent. We can already see, contra Polanyi, that social protection is often ambivalent, affording relief from the disintegrative effects of markets upon communities, while simultaneously entrenching domination within and among them. But the same is true of the other

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two terms. Marketization may indeed have the negative effects Polanyi stressed. But as Marx appreciated, it can also beget positive effects, to the extent that the protections it disintegrates are oppressive— as, for example, when markets in consumer goods are introduced into bureaucratically administered command economies, or when labour markets are opened to those who have been involuntarily excluded from them. Nor, importantly, is emancipation immune from ambivalence, as it produces not only liberation but also strains in the fabric of existing solidarities. Even as it overcomes domination, emancipation may help dissolve the solidary ethical basis of social protection, thereby clearing a path for marketization. Seen this way, each term has both a telos of its own and a potential for ambivalence which unfolds through its interaction with the other two terms. Contra Polanyi, therefore, the conflict between marketization and social protection cannot be understood in isolation from emancipation. Equally, however, subsequent conflicts between protection and emancipation cannot be understood in isolation from the mediating force of neoliberalisation. a parallel critique can thus be made of emancipatory movements. if Polanyi neglected the impact of struggles for emancipation on conflicts between marketization and social protection, these movements have often neglected the impact of marketizing projects on their struggles with protectionist forces. We have seen that emancipatory movements challenged oppressive protections in the postwar era. in each case, the movement disclosed a type of domination and raised a claim for emancipation. However, these claims were also ambivalent—they could line up in principle either with marketization or with social protection. in the first case, where emancipation aligned with marketization, it would serve to erode not just the oppressive dimension, but the solidary basis of social protection simpliciter. in the second case, where emancipation aligned with social protection, it would not erode but rather transform the ethical substance undergirding protection. as a matter of fact, all of those movements encompassed both protectionist and marketizing tendencies. in each case, liberal currents gravitated in the direction of marketization, while socialist and social- democratic currents

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were more likely to align with forces for social protection. arguably, however, emancipation’s ambivalence has been resolved in recent years in favour of marketization. insufficiently attuned to the rise of free-market forces, the hegemonic currents of emancipatory struggle have formed a ‘dangerous liaison’ with neoliberalism, supplying a portion of the ‘new spirit’ or charismatic rationale for a new mode of capital accumulation, touted as ‘flexible’, ‘difference-friendly’, ‘encouraging of creativity from below’.9 as a result, the emancipatory critique of oppressive protection has converged with the neoliberal critique of protection per se. in the conflict zone of the triple movement, emancipation has joined forces with marketization to double-team social protection. Here, at last, we begin to recognize the actual state of political play in the 21st century. in the present alignment, an emboldened neoliberal party draws strength from the borrowed charisma of emancipatory movements. Styling itself as an insurrection, it adopts the accents of emancipation to excoriate social protection as a fetter on freedom. Meanwhile, a deflated protectionist party struggles to rid itself of the taint of domination, exposed by emancipatory movements. Demoralized, on the defensive and lacking conviction, it generates no romance, no counter-hegemonic vision that could galvanize opposition to neo liberalism. Finally, the party of emancipation finds itself on a narrow precipice. Tacking between the other two poles, its dominant currents repeatedly cross the line that separates a valid critique of oppressive protection and legitimate claims for labour-market access, on the one hand, from an uncritical embrace of meritocratic individualism and privatized consumerism, on the other. Rethinking the Politics of Crisis By clarifying this constellation, the triple movement highlights the specifically political challenges facing efforts to build a counter-hegemonic project to neoliberalism. Parsing the field of really existing struggles, it brings into focus the grammars of claim-making and social imaginaries that mediate the responses of political actors to their situation. This political focus does not invalidate, but enriches and complements, the three hypotheses we considered earlier. above all, it clarifies the processes that have demoralized social-democratic elites, endowed neoliberalism with

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the charisma that enabled its hegemony, and defanged and dispersed the forces of emancipation. Equally important, the triple movement suggests a post-Polanyian assessment of the present state of political struggle. For one thing, it implies that we should not mourn the absence of a double movement. However much it complicates the struggle against neoliberalism, the rise of emancipation represents an advance. There is no going back to hierarchical, exclusionary, communitarian under standings of social protection, whose innocence has been forever shattered, and justly so. Henceforth, no protection without emancipation. at the same time, the triple movement suggests the need to complicate the project of emancipation. Disclosing the latter’s ambivalence, this analysis implies that emancipation is not the single, all-inclusive name for all that is good. Everything depends, rather, on how the impulse to overcome domination is shaped by its historical encounter with other intersecting projects—above all, marketization and social protection. an emancipatory project coloured by naive faith in contract, meritocracy and individual advancement will easily be twisted to other ends—as has been the case in the present era. However, an emancipatory project wedded to the wholesale rejection of markets effectively cedes indispensable liberal ideals to free marketeers, while abandoning the billions across the globe who rightly understand that there is something worse than being exploited—namely, being counted as not worth exploiting. in general, then, no emancipation without some new synthesis of marketization and social protection. Finally, the triple movement suggests a political project for those of us who remain committed to emancipation. We might resolve to break off our dangerous liaison with neoliberalism and forge a principled new alliance with social protection. in thereby realigning the poles of the triple movement, we could integrate our longstanding interest in nondomination with the equally valid interest in solidarity and social security. at the same time, we could reclaim the indispensable interest in negative liberty from the neoliberal uses to which it has been bent. Embracing a broader understanding of social justice, such a project would serve at once to honour Polanyi’s insights and remedy his blind spots.

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NOTES 1 [Originally published in the New Left Review, Vol. 81(May/June), 119–132] an earlier version of this essay was delivered as a ‘luxemburg lecture’ in Berlin on 22 November 2012. i gratefully acknowledge support from the Rosa luxemburg Stiftung, the Einstein Stiftung (Berlin), the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (Bad Homburg), and the Centre for advanced Studies ‘Justitia amplificata’, Frankfurt. Thanks also to Blair Taylor for research assistance. 2 The number of such interpretations is enormous. Examples include: Michael Burawoy, ‘a Sociology for the Second great Transformation?’, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 26, 2000, pp. 693–95; Michael Brie and Dieter klein, ‘The Second great Transformation’, International Critical Thought, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 18–28; giovanna Zincone and John agnew, ‘The Second great Transformation’, Space and Polity, vol. 4, no. 1, 2000, pp. 5–21; Edward Webster and Robert lambert, ‘Markets against Society: labour’s Predicament in the Second great Transformation’, in ann Dennis and Devorah kalekin-Fishman, eds, The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology, london 2009; Mitchell Bernard, ‘Ecology, Political Economy and the Counter-Movement’, in Stephen gill and James Mittelman, eds, Innovation and Transformation in International Studies, Cambridge 1997, pp. 75–89; Ronaldo Munck, ‘globalization and Democracy: a New “great Transformation”’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 581, 2002, pp. 10–21 3 For a salutary corrective to the ‘pollyanna-ism’ of many present-day Polanyians, see Michael Burawoy, ‘From Polanyi to Pollyanna: The False Optimism of global labour Studies’, Global Labour Journal, vol. 1, no. 2, 2010, pp. 301–13. 4 See the 3 October 2012 Presidential debate on youTube, from 1:09:25 to 1:10:35. 5 See ‘FDR: “let me warn you . . .” (1936)’, on youTube 6 Beverly Silver, Forces of labor, Cambridge 2003; göran Therborn, ‘Class in the 21st Century’ NlR 78, Nov–Dec 2012, pp. 5–29. 7 For the destabilization of the national frame, see Fraser, ‘Reframing Justice in a globalizing World’, NlR 36, Nov–Dec 2005, pp. 69–88. 8 Of course, this framing was also a misframing, as it excluded from the circle of those entitled to protection all those non-nationals in the periphery whom the market exposed to danger and whose labour helped to finance social provision in the countries of the capitalist core. For ‘misframing’, see Fraser, ‘Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Toward a NeoPolanyian Conception of Capitalist Crisis’, in Craig Calhoun and georgi Derluguian, eds, Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown, New york 2011, pp. 137–58. 9 For the dangerous liaison between feminism and neoliberalism, see Fraser, ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’ and ‘Feminist ambivalence and Capitalist Crisis’, both in Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, london and New york 2013.

kArl POlAnyi

k Arl P OlAnyi

The Common Man’s Masterplan

1

PaRT ONE: ORigiNS OF THE CRiSiS governing viewpoints: 1. The collapse of the institutional system of the nineteenth century was not caused by the conflict of ambitious empires, warring ideologies or even a single massive event like World War i, but by an underlying process of vast scope, the origins of which reach far back into the social and industrial history of the period. This viewpoint allows us to dissociate the world crisis from the accompanying wars and the problems of the Peace Conference. Unless this is done, it is impossible to prove that post-war reconstruction is not the question of “What to do with germany?” The story of the origins of the crisis will reveal that the great transformation was happening long before the single nations decided to hitch-hike on that movement towards their own ends. These problems partly explain World War i, and certainly the period 1919-1933. This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the unsolved problems of the period are the background and root cause of all present troubles. PaRT TWO: OUR PRESENT SiTUaTiON 2. The unsolved problems which forced the great transformation upon us imperatively demand their solution in and after this war.

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This viewpoint will allow us to show in what manner the ambitious nations made use of the hitch-hiking process; how they even gained a kind of intellectual superiority over the complacent powers which failed to see the hidden weaknesses of the system. That will allow us to show why the conservative countries, like great Britain, were handicapped by their adherence to gold in their armaments and strategy. The Bolshevik bogeyman was mobilized by the ambitious states to paralyze the conservative Powers. The story of appeasement policy, of the Four Pact policy; of the Manchurian, the abyssinian, the Spanish episode. The unsolved internal problem: How to reform the economic system? The unsolved international problem: How to replace the international economic system? Consequences: The Fall of France The British appeasement policy. PaRT THREE: FREEDOM ON TRial 3. as in every previous phase in the history of Western civilization, external influences form the decisive factor in the development of national life. The survival of democracy depends upon the measure of its success in tacking the global tasks of the time. if freedom fails in: (a) restricting the scope of wars; (b) securing a medium of exchange between increasingly large areas of the world, then the dominant empire will emerge with its corollary of slavery and ensure peace and division of labor within its confines. The greatest single step towards the relative division of labour and the enlargement of peace is represented by the empires. They are semi-autarch and semi-peaceful. The regulated economy allows cooperation in freedom i.e., irrespective of internal regimes. all except the predatory empire are acceptable. The tame empire is no longer a utopia.

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But the will to cooperation must be positive and institutionalized. it is the new form of that peace interest which the nineteenth century produced and which we should retain and develop at all costs. internally we must have regulated markets. and the inevitable centralization must be met by positive will to freedom for minorities where great Britain is the model. Regulated markets means markets with no supplementary markets for labour, land and money. Security is possible in a society wealthy enough to banish want without even raising the question of the motivation to work. The freedom of the arbitrary rejection of employment to be limited. The freedom of arbitrary dismissal limited. The freedom of unlimited profits limited. The unlimited rights of private ownership limited. The public spirited forms of enterprise fostered. The plastic society achieved. The helpless society transcended. The concept of freedom reformed. Christianity transcended. The philosophy of the common man established. The new politics demand a new broadcasting service. The exploded theories include: a. the fiction of the “masses” which no political judgement; b. the fiction that some mysterious kind of “education” is needed in order to understand politics; c. the fiction of politics as a jungle of intrigue, ambition, chance and vested interest in which there is neither meaning nor logic. The true axioms replacing these are: a. the axiom of the common man whose common sense is the actual and factual basis of politics in a democracy; b. the axiom that political judgement on ultimate issues is rooted in common human experience;

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the axiom of the basic rationality of man and of politics: i.e., that the inevitability of risk provides for the element of chance in all human action; but that barring chance human situations leave only simple alternate lives, one of which is as certain to be realized as is any proposition of geometry.

These axioms involve: a. the debunking of “mass psychology” which is never, in the long run, a cause, but always an effect of political situations; b. the consequent debunking of the legend that “dissatisfaction” is in all countries usually a factor in politics; c. the debunking of political prophecies pretending to be certain which of two alternatives will actually occur; d. the debunking of the opposite, pseudo-scientific prejudice that we cannot know anything about politics, one person’s view being as good as another’s, not only on ultimate, but also on current issues. This leaves room for an entirely new type of political comment, which only needs touch of humour to camouflage its academic origins. it might be called, for instance, “ignoring the Obvious”, or “Through the looking glass” or “The Wrong End of the Telescope” or “Seeing the Forest and the Trees” or “afterthoughts and Perspectives” or something similarly expressive of the slightly displaced viewpoint. actually, the talks would have to be extremely topical, not in the obvious, but in the true sense. 10 or 15 minutes should prove sufficient. Range of subjects: analysis of the global war. When does morale decide military outcome, and when does the military outcome decide morale? Military and political command (Napoleonic pattern) Non-military factors in modern strategy is there total war other than in defense, i.e. on one’s own territory? Why were the four best military writers so consistently wrong in this war? What is the connection between finance and strategy? Between democracy and strategy?

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The subject of morale: the ultimate reason for the need for “morale” for any kind of action, individual or collective, athletic, economic, military or otherwise. First – That the masses have no political judgement of their own. against this you have the evidence of the facts, hard statistical facts, of the greatest exactitude, the gallup polls prove that the masses in this country have been consistently ahead of their leaders. Now mind you that does not prove them right, they may have just have been ahead of the mistakes made later by their leaders. But that isn’t the point. The point is whether the masses have an opinion of their own, or whether it is made for them. in this respect the evidence is absolutely conclusive. Second – listen to people’s arguments and political discussions. The issue may be anything: war and peace, free trade versus protection, prohibition versus anti-prohibition, or anything you please. The blues and the bluffs3 will argue anything and everything/deny the other sides contention whatever it be. listening to the arguments it is difficult not to be convinced that you are listening to a pair of fools, for the argument has obviously nothing whatever to do with the issues involved. They are arguing the rights and wrongs of incidents which propaganda has dumped into the issue, shoals of red herrings are let loose and each herring is chased to some hiding place until some fresh herring attracts attention and the game of confusing the issue starts all over again. But i cannot help conceding that this is true. The fallacy of the implied argument is simply shown: the arguments adduced in discussion and the actual arguments on which people make up their minds are two entirely different sets of arguments. The arguments adduced are numerous and foolish, the arguments which are actually objective are few and to the point. it is not very different from private life. One makes up one’s mind about a matter in business or family life, rightly or wrongly, on one or two, rarely three, arguments. But once one has made up one’s mind and taken up a position in consequence, one is prepared to defend it against any

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oncomer, and the arguments then used may be simply repartees, to what the other man or woman says, with very little, indeed, mostly with no connection at all with the original, and relevant points of argument. let me put it this way. There comes a point in every public discussion— and the more heated and the more confused it is, the more likely is this to happen—when a man comes home tired and disgusted, utterly fed up, and in undressing he tells himself in a kind of pondered and sententious way what he, John Doe, personally reckons is at the bottom “of all this bother”. Now, watch: What he is now going to say will usually be rather cynical, at least he intends it to be so. it will have hardly any reference to the heated discussions of the day; and—it will be very simple. John Doe now believes himself to be very clever; he believes himself to be at his best; he will not be bamboozled. That is why he tries to be cynical. and what he now tells himself—that’s my point—is itself thoroughly reasonable. it is not necessarily true; but it bears reference to the things he believes are really important: and—here’s my second contention—HE CaNNOT BE FaR WRONg. For a very simple reason: the things he believes are really important are the few things which actually matter: To him i would them as crudely follows (and contend that he cannot be far wrong about either of them): (a) his income; (b) what he can get for his income; (c) the security of his existence, job, life, and otherwise; (d) whether he on the whole feels happy or basically fed up with things. That is all he cares for—and jolly well right he is; and it takes something to say that anybody was a better judge of his long run money wages, his long run real wages, his long runs security of job or limb, his long run feeling about life and its livability, than John Doe himself. But—it is interjected—here’s the trouble. For he does not judge the matter from the long run view, but from the short run view. He will go in for inflation, if that gives him higher income; he will go in for rationing if that gives him cheaper prices; he will stand for free competition for planning, whichever gives him more security in his job, and every time he will disregard the long-term effects of his desires—the ruin of the currency, the increase in cut-throat competition, the growth of bureaucracy, and so on.

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against this i appeal to the facts. For it is precisely on big decisions or ultimate issues that the average man is apt to be sound—that is what the poll shows. and every time he is credited with taking the short view, he actually takes the long view. This was true on the question of aircraft; on the war issue; on rationing; on taxation, on working hours; on man power; on every other issue. The explanation is again quite simple: the ultimate issues are simply the long run issues. On definite short run issues, the man is much more apt to be mistaken, but these are the comparatively unimportant issues. They are technical, the can be and perhaps should be dealt with by the expert. But the basic issue, is by its very nature outside the competency of the expert, because the only person who really knows the rights and wrongs of these issues is the person whom they must ultimately affect and that is the again common man. Take capital issues: like war and peace. i maintain that there is no expert on the question of life and death. We all come in to life once and move out once; nobody has more experience or less on this point. Now the question of war and peace is precisely on this: Whether a life is as it is not worth living, and what risks we should reasonably take to change in order to make it livable. Nothing more ridiculous than the call for the expert who is supposedly an authority on whether i should prefer to live or die. and this is precisely the true long run question—and yet who but the common man should be able to pronounce upon it. But in the same way there is no expert on the value of liberty; no expert on the various sides and shades and aspects of liberty; there is no expert on the value of security in life; or whether adventure or security both worth more under the given conditions; there is no expert on the types of happiness we are consistently gambling against one another; there is no expert on the question whether i prefer stable money and restricted jobs to less stable money with more certainty of jobs. all the experts usually know is that which is entirely unessential to the common man, because experts have long since discovered any fallacy in the arguments of experts.

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i may now of course be in danger of having proved too much, for if i have my way, then, it seems, the common man would always be right, and it would be entirely inexplicably why there are still differences of opinion, seeing that only one view can be right at a time. Now i don’t argue anything of the kind. i restrict my view to ultimate issues in critical situations, and exclude all the issues which are not basic, i.e. do not decide the fate of the community in some essential respect. Now, quite naturally, views will differ according to the experiences and interests of the various strata, and if they vote accordingly, this merely proves that they have voted according to their interests. But still reasonably, and—that is all i contend. Now i come to a second fallacy on the masses and on democracy, and it is that democracy is simply a matter of education. against that i should like to put up a counter thesis which is that although education is not only a good thing, but one of the things which make individual and community life worth living—it has very little to do with democracy. The reason again is simple. Democracy is a way of life and as a method of decision it is about the contents of life. Now these are not matters about which there is any set knowledge. One man’s knowledge is as good as another’s, and it is a simple fact that the way of life of democracy was not developed by so-called educated people nor was it practiced by them nor was it even preferred by them, but it was practiced by communities of simple people like those of the History of the apostles, the Quaker communities, pioneering villages of the early frontier or the pilgrim father’s land on board the Mayflower. None of these communities can boast to have been especially educated. Poor fishermen at the best; small obscure people who had fled from Northern England in Elizabethan times; poor ill-educated frontiersmen—there were the inventors of the idea and technique. The notion that education is needed to understand democracy or to practice it, is a misunderstanding which deserves to be cleared up, because it obscures the general human import and the general human validity of the democratic idea.

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The truth is that common human experience is at the base of democracy, and where that experience includes tolerance, patience with the views of dissenting minorities, there democracy itself will be tolerant and not enforce more uniformity than necessary to effect the decisions of the majority. The third change in the nature of politics is the passing of the conviction that politics is about power and 4, a mere junkie5 of blind chance and interests, human passions and irrational ambitions. against this i want to defend the growing conviction of the basic rationality of man and of politics. Chance cannot of course be eliminated from politics. a war that was certain to break out may be averted by the sudden death of the chief actors; an inevitable fall in prices and consequent unemployment may be averted by the chance discovery of large gold fields as actually happened in the middle of the century both in California and australia. But this only means that some measure of risk is inevitably linked with any political prediction or forecast; that we cannot be safe from the action of chance however prudently we have mapped our course. But that does not mean at all, that politics is not rational. Take, again, our private life and existence. Who would argue that our life is not largely under the sway of rational plans, decisions, attitudes, moral purposes and the promptings of duty and affection on the one hand, passion and ill considered emotion on the other. The fact of chance which may deflect the rational course of things in life does not prevent us from thinking about moral life as ruled by reason and the laws of reason. in other words, all we do is to account for chance by facing risk—an entirely usual happening. The same is the case in politics. Barring chance, human situations leave only simple alternatives, this is the law of private life. But precisely the same is also the law of public life, or politics. Barring chance, political situations leave simple alternatives, and these alternatives are as inevitable as those which govern private life. There are situations which allow of

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no other solution than to fight; other situations allow also the solution of compromise; but in every situation the number of basic alternatives is limited, and therefore the forecast of the future is possible, as long as we restrict ourselves to these alternatives. i agree that this is most unsatisfactory. When it is certain that one of the two partners must win and the other lose one is only able to say that either the one or the other will win. This almost sounds like a bad joke. But if one looks at it more closely, the matter is not quite as bad. although i may be burning to know which will win, i may yet be interested to know for certain which two events i can expect to happen—alternatively, i.e. either the one or the other. Something similar happens, after all, in private life. How often the warning of a friend may take on the form: mind, once you put yourself into this situation, there will be only the choice for you to stay or quit; or to go in for the venture or cut it out; to stand up for your views and take the consequences or back out of these views too late. and so on. are such views entirely worthless? Surely not. They in effect help us to make up our minds, since they clarify the situations we are in by objectifying the situation we would get into by taking one or another decision. and although they are not able to foretell what will happen, they help us by telling us for certain that one of the two things must happen. This, i submit is the nature of political forecast. and if we do not expect more from it, we will hardly ever be cheated. i repeat—Barring chance, the political situation allows only a very few alternatives, and with the certainty of a geometrical proposition we can foretell that one of them is bound to happen. True, nobody knows for certain which will happen, since that precisely is the matter still under decision. But that is far from saying that the student of politics cannot offer a view which has more chance of being right than one who has not studied the nature of the alternatives. With one important qualification; that on the really decisive issues, the common man’s view is worth as much as his; on less important one’s however, he has more chance to be right than the common man. Democracy is well grounded in the rationality of man.

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COMMON MaN’S MaSTERPlaN This book is addressed to the general reader and discusses the urgent problems of our time from the point of view of the common man. While the various shades of anti-democrats each have their own story of the world catastrophe—the democrat has yet to produce his own. This story should tell in simple language how it all started; where responsibility lay for past mistakes; what was unavoidable and should not be a subject for recrimination; and what were avoidable failures, whether they sprang from moral, intellectual or political weakness. This story should be ruthlessly frank. it should discard the illusions concerning the nature of international peace systems, such as were fostered by hosts of wishful thinkers entrenched in the pacifistic and economistic camps. The all too simple view which assumes war to be merely due to a ramp of international financiers or big armament makers should be discounted. Only then is it possible to propose methods which can be seriously expected to reduce the probability of wars, to restrict the scope of those that occur, and to ensure that if they occur the aggressor be the loser. This story should be consistent. There was not an independent observer in the 1920s that did not agree that Europe had too many sovereign potentates; that there were too many political frontiers; and that the liberum veto of the liliputs was at its best a nuisance, at its worst a dangerous breeder of anarchy. it is emerging today how many tend to forget this. The consistent democrat must staunchly oppose reactionary insistence on antiquated boundaries, while rigidly maintaining the right to cultural freedom—a right much too frequently trodden under foot by the selfsame governments who insist on inflated territorial acquisitions and hypertrophic sovereignties. The story should be intelligent. We should recognize progress even where the forces of evil are using it as their vehicle. if germany’s masters have opened the path to a united Europe, to regulated economies and to the displacement of the gold standard, we should not rush back thoughtlessly

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into the past only because the doors of the future were thrown open by those who wanted to dominate that future for their own criminal advancement. The story should be true. We must at last face the facts—the facts. We must not shirk those facts which seem to contradict our ideals, but take a straight look at them and redraw the outlines of our ideals, where they conformed only loosely to the facts. Do not let us squeamishly hide ourselves behind complacent references to past formulations. These may have admirable fitter other situations, but would betray today the essential faith of their authors, if one attempted to wangle the formulations instead of submitting to the facts and restating the truth in their light. This story should be complete. Not in the sense of the pedant or the antiquarian who imagines that he who has all the facts has all the truth. He may have merely collected all the words of a dead language. But complete in the sense that it should envisage the scene of man’s collective life in all its breadth and depth, and that it should formulate the task all-round, for democracy is either a form of life or it is nothing. But life is the fullness of all actions and meanings, the pervasive substance which acts and reacts upon all things. So let us range over the whole field of communal existence—the political, cultural, and social, the economic, financial and technological, the military, educational and artistic, the scientific, philosophical and religious. Man’s life is not this or that, not the one or the other; society lives by and through each; democracy is kindred to them all. This story should be practical. Not in the sense of suggesting popular solutions for supposedly burning issues while evading essential ones for fear of being called academic. But in the responsible sense which implies that no one should advocate beliefs to which he does not feel able to live up himself. Demands however high-minded, which by their very nature can not be realised, are not idealistic but meaningless; and he who obstructs in the name of such ideals the achievement of the possible is not an idealist but merely a social nuisance. The idealist is he whose values correspond to the nature of human society, and who is bent on achievement even when there is nothing thrilling about the details he is hammering

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out. yet such realism should not be permitted to become an excuse for the complacent acceptance of avoidable ills, for society allows the fulfillment of the best in man, and it is only the unselfish realist who can be trusted to aim at the best. This story should be the story of the common man. if Jesus exalted the poor, he did not do so because he 6 the poor better than others, but because the poor man was the common man of the time. a society can consist of working and labouring people alone; but no society can consist of rich people alone. The rich man is not any worse than the working man, but he should put up with the fact that he is not the common man, and it is to the needs of the latter that society should be adapted. a human society is one in which the common man feels at home; the wealthy should be content with his wealth and not expect public esteem merely on account of his wealth. The expert should serve the common man, and not attempt to make him serve the expert. On the fundamental questions of government there can be no specialists. Questions like these can concur the value of human life itself, and there is no expert in the matter of life and death. Whether a community should or should not risk the lives of its members; whether it should turn to one or the other chief task of existence; whether it should accept one or another ultimate rule of conduct is for the common man to decide. all he needs is such information as the government is in duty bound to provide him with. it has been confirmed by statistical proof that the common man is a safer judge of the essentials of a vital issue than the so-called educated person (while on unessential and non-vital issues the latter may be more reliable). The anti-democratic argument of the alleged educational and cultural handicaps of the common man derives from mere prejudice. Education is no safeguard against social superstition as witnessed by the vicious untruths sponsored and spread by the intellectuals of the 1920s who served as the hotbed of fascism. The miasma of cultural degeneration throve in academic circles and it was the common man who was least susceptible to that emotional epidemic. This story should be about the unsolved problems of our time. What we need is not so much a clarification of intentions as of the situation we find ourselves in—not of values but of facts. Complacency results in in-

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tellectual failure to comprehend the meaning of the events, so we remain in the dark about the problems, the dangers and the tasks of the age. These unsolved problems caused the catastrophe, shaped the course of events, and still dominate the situation. On a complete understanding of these problems, the common man must base his masterplan if he is to become the conscious ruler of his own world. The story of the unresolved problems should drive home the following recognitions: 1. That post war reconstruction is not about “What to do with germany” but what to do with the unsolved problems of the world. No conceivable treatment of germany will resolve them. 2. That these unsolved problems led to World War i and were only partly resolved by the destruction of the feudal empires of the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg, the Romanov and the Sultan-khalifs; that the betweenwars period was entirely dominated by them, including the rise of Hitlerism, British appeasement, the Russian bogeyman, the collapse of France, the gay twenties, and the wasted thirties in america. 3. That these unsolved problems centered around the antiquated international system of absolute sovereignties and an automatic gold-standard on the one hand, and of a national life based on unregulated economies on the other. Between them they corroded the civilization with unemployment and unrest, deflations and super-wars. 4. That the Hitlerism crime wave could be successful only because it benefited from these unsolved problems which were bursting the world wide open; in the Hitlerian venture some of the most obstructive features of the old world perished including nuisance sovereignties, the gold-standard fetish, and chaotic markets. But if Hitlerian barbarism was thus “hitch-hiking on the great transformation”, it was only because it could pretend to offer an ultimate solution even though it was that of slavery for all under the heel of the Nordics of the Munich beer garden. 5. That the survival of democratic methods depends upon the measure of their success in tackling the global tasks of the time. if freedom fails (a) to restrict the scope of wars, (b) to secure a medium of exchange

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7.

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between increasingly large areas of the planet, then the war-waging slave empire will triumph and ensure peace and division of labour within its confines of death. That the greatest single step towards division of labour and the enlargement of the peace area is represented by essentially autarch and essentially peaceful empires the co-operation of which is institutionally safeguarded, empires such as the U.S.a., latin america, great Britain, the U.S.S.R. and a similarly peaceful federation of a german Central Europe, China, india, and some other regions. That the will to cooperation between the empires must be positive and institutionalized. it is the new form of the peace interest which the 19th century produced, and which we should retain and develop. all but the predatory empires are eligible under the new dispensation. The tame empire is no longer a utopia. That the 19th century was peacefully imperialistic since under the gold-standard the leading powers insisted on spreading their business pattern to all countries and forced them to accept their institutions, without which trade was then not possible. We should model ourselves on China which is and was based on the tolerance of other people’s ways of life. That self-sufficient empires can regulate their economic life in the way that they please and live at peace with others. The helpless method of free trade must be superseded by direct responsibility of the governments for economic and financial relations with other governments. That internally we must have regulated markets which remove labour, land and money from the scope of anarchy. The inevitable increase in centralization that is involved must be met by the positive will to freedom for all minorities—racial, religious, regional or otherwise— made effective with a single-mindedness modelled on England’s achievement.

NOTES 1 This is the first English publication of Polanyi’s Masterplan. The Masterplan is a sketch for a book to be written immediately after The Great Transformation was prepared for the publisher. The agreement for this second book is in the karl Polanyi Digital archive (http://hdl.

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handle.net/10694/563). The three papers are typewritten. Handmade changes are taken into consideration. Corruptions in the original text are footnoted. The term ‘masterplan’ was widely used at this time in the context of community land planning organizing larger cities around zones for housing, business, industry, shopping and recreation. The ‘father’ of ‘zoning’, Edward M. Basset, published his most influential work The Master Plan, with a Discussion of the Theory of Community Planning Legislation in 1938 (Bassett 1938). Possibly it is possible that this is misprint and should read, “The blues and the reds”, perhaps referring to the Republicans and Democrats in the US. illegible Possibly Possibly

kArl POlAnyi

k Arl P OlAnyi

Hamlet

1

a BRiEF REMiNiSCENCE at the outset will serve a twofold purpose. it should reduce to the vanishing point the literary claims of this piece of amateur writing, while adding a note of authenticity to the author’s reasons for putting off publication for almost a life-time. Nearly forty years ago i was serving as an officer in the old austroHungarian army.2 The Russian winter und the blackish steppe made me feel sick at heart. it happened that at the time my personal life had taken a turn towards darkness; daylight seemed bounded in a narrowing disk that grew dimmer and dimmer. at one time, i remember, the cold was so intense that when my horse stumbled and fell i was too apathetic to get out of the saddle. Fortunately—though i may not have thought so then— the gaunt stiff creature, a yellow Cossack mare that we had picked up, jerked herself onto her long legs and i was saved, for had she rolled over i might have been crushed to death. For companionship i had nothing but a volume of Shakespeare’s plays; in my desolation i found myself reading and rereading one: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. altogether, i must have read it through well over a score of times. My soul was numbed and fell under the spell of a recurrent daydream. i read my Hamlet and every word, phrase, and intonation of the hero's ravings came through to me, simple and clear. For many years the memory of those bleak months haunted me. i could not rid myself of the idea that by some weird chance i had possessed myself of Hamlet’s secret. i knew why he did not kill the king. i knew what it was he feared. i knew why he so swiftly ran Polonius through the body when he mistook him for the king, pretending he was only after a rat. i

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knew what his confused words to Ophelia meant. But even while i still felt i knew, i was already fast forgetting. My days were clearing up and, as light broke in, knowledge passed into shadowy recollection. This, in its turn, faded into a mere intellectual understanding. i was now happy again and could only faintly remember what once had formed part of my being: Hamlet’s inhuman sufferings. yet something in me insisted my theories on Hamlet’s indecision and forced antics were not merely the morbid offspring of my late malady. i saw proof of this in my excessive reaction to the opinions of the great a. C. Bradley, whose insights into Hamlet’s character, as i chanced to come across them, struck me by their resemblance to my own.3 But Bradley, who was on the right track, had stopped just short of the solution. By a slight inconsistency, he failed to recognize the obvious. Hamlet’s inaction, so he thought, was to be explained by the influence of a profound melancholy. He is shocked by his mother's gross sensuality into utter disgust of life. it is in this state that the revelation of his father’s murder and the command of revenge reach him. His mind is poisoned and paralyzed, hence his endless procrastinations. The other inner obstacles to action—his moral sensibility, intellectual genius, temperamental instability—are either the causes or the effects of this pervasive melancholy. it alone accounts for the course of the play, together with the periods of normal behavior during which his “healthy impulses,” remnants of a virile personality, break through. in this picture i recognized my Hamlet. at the same time i knew that Bradley had not penetrated the twin secret of Hamlet the person and Hamlet the play. For the key, which i firmly believed i possessed, had to fit both locks. at the heart of the matter, to be sure, there is the inaction which the hero can neither justify nor account for; but there is also the enigma of how so exciting a show could ever have been staged about inaction. let me try to make myself clearer. at first glance, Hamlet’s melancholy explains both his dilatory behavior and his lack of comprehension of himself. in his utter dejection he is averse to any kind of action. He indulges in mechanical puns, in trivial backchat, repeating sometimes the speaker’s words without irony or wit,

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like a man too benumbed to hear what he himself is saying, yet, this selfsame emotionally shocked and mentally absent person as the critic Edward Dowden remarked, “suddenly conceives of the possibility of unmasking the king’s guilt on the accidental arrival of the players, and proceeds without delay to put the matter to the test, suddenly overwhelms Ophelia with his reproaches of womanhood, suddenly stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras, suddenly, as if under some irresistible inspiration, sends his companions on shipboard to their deaths, suddenly boards the pirates, suddenly grapples with laertes in the grave, suddenly does execution on the guilty king, plucks the poison from Horatio’s hands, and gives his dying voice to a successor to the throne.”4 But why then do those “healthy impulses” arise so frequently as to make Hamlet into a person of almost terrible ruthlessness, yet prevent him from doing the deed which he has sworn to the spirit of his father to do? Having caused without remorse the deaths of at least four persons in the king’s entourage, why does he still seem to have come no nearer to the performance of his supreme duty? Why does the “veil of melancholy” never lift when he has an opportunity to take his revenge on the king? The spectators must feel that this is no mere coincidence, otherwise they would lose interest. There must be some hidden cause for Hamlet’s reluctance to perform the required act, a reason which Hamlet himself cannot fathom, and which, maybe, only his death will reveal. The audience remains expectant. On looking closer, it struck me that Hamlet often does one thing instead of another. His spurts of action are not mere freaks of a temperament that alternates between feverish exploits and slothful lethargy. He not only refrains from slaughtering the king in the prayer scene, but immediately afterwards slays Polonius, mistaking him for the king and coldbloodedly shouting “a rat.” yet he cannot be too melancholy to make a thrust at the king, but sufficiently healthy to stab Polonius; his "healthy impulses” cannot intervene too late to make him act rightly, yet in time to make him act wrongly. an ebbing of will power should not prevent a man from pressing for action in one way, while leaving him uninhibited to act eagerly in another. Eventually, Hamlet, having made no preparations to destroy the king, kills him on the instant. He thus performs with zest a series of actions except the one required of him, and then unexpectedly does the deed without any sign of reluctance. The mysterious delay in killing the king still stares us in the face.

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Bradley’s solution missed the mark by a hair’s breadth. He listed instances of Hamlet’s proneness to action and added that he acts in these cases since it is not the one hateful action on which his morbid self-feeling had centered. Bradley meant, of course, the revenge on Claudius. Unfortunately, he did not follow up the clue. The simple truth is that Hamlet does not kill his uncle because by force of circumstances and by reason of his character his aversion to living has become focused on this “one hateful action.” He is unable to decide to live. He can exist only as long as he is not forced to resolve to do so. if challenged to choose between life and death, he would be undone, because he cannot deliberately choose life. This, in terms of human existence, is the purport of Hamlet’s melancholy. We should not take Hamlet’s professions of wanting to die literally; they are no more than the rhetoric of an ambiguous mood. Oh no, he does not wish to die; he merely hates to live. a hero who stubbornly insisted on dying would be insupportable. There would be no conflict to follow, no play to watch, since there would be no one to obstruct him in having his way. Hamlet's elaborations on the theme “i wish i were dead” mean no more than that he would refuse to settle down to the job of living, should he perchance be forced to make such a choice. But why of all living creatures should he alone be compelled to do so? The rest of us need not decide to live, and yet we go on living as long as we can. Hamlet, too, is prepared to defend his life, and maybe all the more bravely because he does not set it at a pin’s fee. Here, i felt, lay the roots of the delay. Hamlet has turned away from life, but it is only the appearance of the ghost that starts the tragedy. He merely wished to withdraw from the Court and retire to Wittenberg, though at his mother’s entreaties (and perhaps for Ophelia’s sake) he postponed his departure, when his father’s disembodied spirit appears on the battlements of Elsinore and orders him to kill the king. Events themselves are pushing him towards a decision. To obey his father’s behest would involve all that living involves. He is to become king, perhaps with Ophelia, for his Queen, the princely ruler of the Court of Elsinore, a radiant sun amongst a host of Rosencrantzes and

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guildensterns. He knows in his bones that he will never comply. His refusal to set the world aright springs from his dread of becoming part of a world he has learned to detest with all his being. The ghost has uttered his death sentence. He will perish before be fulfils that injunction and knows it. But in the humiliating interim he will be like the rest of us, stretching out the number of his days. The killing of the king, O cursed spite, now stands for compulsion to live. He cannot perform this action on which his morbid self-feeling centers, not as a physical act of execution—that is indifferent—but as a deed of filial duty enjoined upon him by his father’s tearful command, as a step involving him in a fatal sequence of obligations, as a gesture of obeisance that will plunge him into the maelstrom of life. Hamlet could instantly kill the king as it were by accident, off the record, under cover of mistaken identity, through a disowned thrust, by means of any emphatically unsymbolic act; or, at the opposite end, when he himself was doomed to die, solemnly assured of his impending departure. Never, never as a deliberate act that would commit him to live. This, in a sense, is Hamlet’s most personal secret. actually, he attempts both: to do it, pretending it to be unintentional, and to do it, when this can no more affect his own fate. He stabs Polonius in a trice, mistaking him for his better, while denying in the very act any real purpose. and, even more decisively at the end, when poisoned by laertes’ foil, he almost exultantly repeats his “i am dead,” and the skeptical dreamer turns in a twinkle into Voltaire’s butcher boy5, whose slaughterings are no more than mechanical acts committing him to nothing, since he, Hamlet, is now securely dead. i suspect that in my malady Hamlet’s pretended madness was for me the vortex of attraction. i must have sensed that those antics would eventually prove the vehicle of self-destruction. However genuine at first, Hamlet’s excited doings after the encounter with the ghost soon turn into a mere feint of his melancholy. He was moving away with all his being from the Court, from convention, from all that seems, when fate arrested his flight and hurled him back into the center of damnation. The apparition all but makes him lose his senses. But as the fit wears off—and he recovers quickly—a definite concern

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overmasters him and henceforth determines the use he will make of the discovery of his bent for “seeming.” That new anxiety springs from the fear of being pushed to action against his will. He turns secretive in order to remain free. This is no mere act of political caution. Of that there is no need; by confiding the secret of his “antic disposition” to his friends he proves that he trusts them implicitly. But should they as much as suspect what passed between him and the ghost, the dread decision could not be deferred. Only as long as he alone—and later may be Horatio, his alter ego—knows of the awful revelation is he, Hamlet, safe. in delaying the decision, Hamlet is fighting for his life. The feigned madness was his most personal response to an unexpected situation. Unhinged by horror and fear, Hamlet, the passionate lover of sincerity, has espoused insincerity as his weapon and armor. The mechanism of the plot and the rhythm of the tragedy are set by this fact. it has been noted that towards the end of the play Hamlet's gloom lifts and the assumed derangement fades away. For some unaccountable reason —one would rather expect the opposite—he now appears placid and composed. This anticlimax is one of the subtle beauties of the play. yet, could it be otherwise? Hamlet, who imagined that he wished to die, is now ready for death. He makes no preparations to kill the king and yet appears certain, that the hour of revenge is approaching. again, how could it be otherwise? He now welcomes death, no longer from a confusion of moods that denies the meaning of life, but from a recognition of that meaning. When he strikes down the king, he proclaims himself “dead,” and death comes to him when he is ripe for it. The apparent accidents that control the course of the play are revealed as no more than a semblance; its progress is as plain as Calvary.6 indeed, the figure of Hamlet has been interpreted as that of a saint. No worse misunderstanding is possible. What we are witnessing is tragedy, the story of guilt and expiation. and it is his put-on madness, that self-elected device of hovering between just revenge and unjustifiable evasion, that involves him deeper and deeper in guilt. Hamlet, with a grim sense of humor stages his antics with precision. The “dumb scene” sends the crying Ophelia straight into the arms of her father; who rushes with his discovery to the king, who on the spot decides to set a trap with Ophelia herself as the bait. Hamlet now excels in feats

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of romantic irony. He sets the “lawful espials” a riddle: what is the cause of his own supposed madness. He makes each guess true to character. Polonius, the pompous vacuity, displays all the self-assurance of his wordy cynicism: Hamlet thwarted in seducing Ophelia has gone mad. The Queen, nearer the truth, is made to feel the guilt of her overhasty marriage. Claudius alone is on a par with the challenger and refuses to be duped by his foiled lover's frenzies. He sends for Rosencrantz and guildenstern, arranges for the trap, orders Hamlet to be put under guard, dispatches him to England, sets laertes on his trail, and concocts the murder plot. Except for Claudius, they are so many puppets in the hands of Hamlet. He enjoys his cruel superiority: the chastisement of those fawning gigglers, Rosencrantz and guildenstern, even the anguish of the king caused by Hamlet's ominous conversational flashes. Eventually, Hamlet, playing the madman, stages a play within the play, the effects of which on the king send him into transports of delight. and yet, all the time his helpless self is more and more entangled in guilt. in spite of his glamorous antics he knows, in his most sensitive heart, that he has lost his way. Hamlet’s tragedy is enmeshed in his love for Ophelia, whom he has sacrificed. “i loved Ophelia,” he cries at her grave when suddenly he is faced by the truth. it is the turning point of Hamlet's personal drama. Up to that time external events have failed to penetrate the shroud of his melancholy; in his isolation he has hardly known himself. Now laertes’ highpitched sorrow strikes his ear. in a flash of inhuman pain light breaks through to him. This is his horrible awakening: What is he whose grief Bears such an emphasis? Whose phrase of sorrow Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane. His love for Ophelia is pure and ardent. Hamlet is driven to the point of platonic frenzy by his mother’s sexual debasement, which has tarred Ophelia with the same brush. But not even his mother is beyond redemption, terribly though she has sinned; how much less so the innocent Ophelia who, he must feel, is merely a victim of his own delusions. His love

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for her lies like a chasm between him and the others. He knows the putrid atmosphere of the Court. He knows his laertes, the youthful lecher, who is depraving his own sister’s mind. He knows his smutty Polonius, who instills vile suspicions into her confiding soul. He knows his Rosencrantz and guildenstern, whose horizon is bounded by lasciviousness. He knows his king and Queen, who set their hopes on Ophelia's physical charms to seduce him to become untrue to his mission. He abhors them for their calumny of all that is most truly noble. Not one but has debased Ophelia’s love for him and his love for her into a political counter, speculating on what there is of frailty in either. He detests and despises them, yet of all men he, Hamlet, has the least right to do so. For who first conceived the idea of using Ophelia’s pure feelings for political ends? Who fooled, her in the garb of the distracted lover, so grossly conventional in his disordered attire, that the mere recounting of the scene called forth from the Prime Minister a hackneyed “Mad for thy love”? Who fed Polonius’ suspicions, harping on his daughter at every turn of their ambiguous dialogue? Who confirmed these aspersions in the nunnery scene by his insults? Who indeed heaped these awful deeds on an innocent victim? Who but he, Hamlet the Dane? at every turn of the screw Hamlet’s sufferings feed on the effects of his own actions. Does he not slander Ophelia to her own father, tainting himself with the virus he loathes, dragging her through the mire of Court intrigue, prompting the king to make her a decoy in the eavesdropping scene, in which he takes unjust revenge on Ophelia for playing the very role he himself had devised for her? yet it is in this scene that she is most true to him. Hamlet arraigns her for prostituting herself, a worthy ally of his debauched mother, while all the time he knows only too well that he alone is to blame; for even what seems to bear out his accusations is in truth of his own doing, and no better than a crime against this pure and beloved child against whom he is bearing false witness. Ophelia has been promised by the Queen that she shall marry Prince Hamlet if she restores him to his normal self. Beauty and honor, love and marriage, are for once in concord. She loves Hamlet and knows not of the danger that threatens him. He never confided his burden to her. Her

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task, she is told by his own mother, is to charm him back to life and happiness, to exorcise the demons that are darkening his spirit. What role could be more appropriate to her selfless devotion? in the presence of her own father and of the king himself, the Queen says to Ophelia: And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish; That your good beauties be the happy cause Of Hamlet’s wildness; so shall I hope your virtues Will bring him to his wonted way again, to both your honors. To which Ophelia replies: Madam, I wish it may. and later, at Ophelia’s grave, the Queen laments, ignorant of Hamlet’s presence: I hop’d thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife; I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid, And not have strew’d thy grave. in the nunnery scene Ophelia, who knows nothing is met by Hamlet, who knows everything. He winces at the thought that Ophelia has been “loosed” to tempt him from the allegiance to his dead father and sway him from the course of honor and honesty. His words are as much to the point as they are unjust to Ophelia: Hamlet: Ha, ha! are you honest? Ophelia: My lord? Hamlet: Are you fair? Ophelia: What means your lordship? Hamlet: That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty. Ophelia: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than

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with honesty? Hamlet: Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. Hamlet knows that his turning back from the path of duty for Ophelia’s sake would dishonor them both, True, resentful at the role cast for Ophelia, and desirous of revenge for Polonius' and laertes' innuendoes, he gives an insane twist to his words. On the matter itself, he is clear and concise. if Ophelia (who is offering to return his tokens) were to try to make him marry her, she would he depraving him; yet should she attempt to follow him in the path of honor, she would have to divest herself of the power of beauty, instead of tempting him by her charms. She should go to a nunnery—also slang for brothel—that is where she belongs. Has she not given proof of it by offering herself in the treacherous presence of an adulterous murderer and a parental bawd? yet all that is of Hamlet's doing. Presently he will insult her in front of the Court and use her as a smoke screen in his hunt, for the murderer. Eventually, he will kill her father, whom she adores. By the time Ophelia drowns herself, Hamlet has deserved more than one death. Within, he must have died a hundred. But why does the mere delaying of revenge or, maybe, the quest for certainty, for a public proof of the king’s guilt, involve him in such monstrous deeds? The answer is clear (and the producer should convey it to the audience): the use to which he puts his antic disposition is the accursed root of all the evils that befall. Born of hatred of life and a wish to put off the doing of his filial duty, it breeds guilt. it tempts him into employing not only his enemies but even his friends as unconscious tools; it traps him into evasions and elevates insincerity to a noble obligation. inevitably, it confuses him and makes him a riddle unto himself. But after that public confession of his love for Ophelia, he plays the fool no more. He is preparing for the end. There is but a short “interim” before the king must learn of the death of his agents in England, Hamlet’s com-

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posure in this last part of the play is of supreme beauty. Reconciled to his own death he need no longer hesitate to kill the king. He now utters no wish to die. This shows the difference between the Hamlet of the first and the last act. Then he only imagined that he longed for death and made it his favorite theme; now he is longing to die and keeps silent. The readiness is all. it is the king whose hours are numbered. Thus far the play seems to have no other subject than the refusal to live. But that precisely is why its theatrical success is an enigma. longing for death is the only passion that is undramatic. and yet “Hamlet,” if anything, is a good play. Where should we look for an answer? Everybody knows the history of the purloined letter which was left in the rack in full view where one would least think of searching for it.7 So it is here. The very words and the scene that resolve the puzzle are almost too patent to hold a secret. i still remember the day, i was then a young man, when it first struck me: To be, or not to be; that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep— No more… Much has been written about this monologue. Some of it is amazing. “in this soliloquy," Bradley said, "Hamlet is not thinking of the duty laid upon him at all. He is debating the question of suicide.” Hamlet, he thought, had by this time forgotten his sacred promise. “What can be more significant than the fact that he is sunk in these reflections [on suicide] on the very day which is to determine for him the truthfulness of the ghost?” Bradley, like some others before him, had come to the conclusion that the great soliloquy was of no dramatic importance. Millions of people have listened to those lines and have not felt so, Nor have the hosts of actors who have spoken them. They have been convinced that the very heart of the play is throbbing there.

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They have not been mistaken. Piece the parallelism together, and those five lines give away the mechanism of “Hamlet,” the play. “To be or not to be; that is the question.” a clear-cut alternative stated by the hero at a moment of high dramatic tension. Consequently, the hero must be weighing the alternative on which the play hinges: to kill the king or not? yet nothing could seem more paradoxical than the way in which Hamlet rephrases the question. What is nobler in the mind, “to be" and “suffer,” or "not to be” and "take arms”? Clearly, it ought to run the other way. yet the implications of the paradox are plain. Hamlet can think of life only in terms of passivity, even if the suffering of life and its duties happens to involve a number of so-called actions, such as killing the king, marrying Ophelia, ruling the country, and so on. For the one and only true action falls under the heading “not to be.” One could, perform it with a bare bodkin, were it not that … conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. With the thought of action the soliloquy opens and ends. yet it deals solely with suicide. in this apparent confusion we have the dramatic truth of the play. The alternative is killing the king or killing himself. all through the play the inner and the outer scene of action run parallel and are coordinated by Hamlet's visionary gifts. He sees is father's figure “in his mind’s eye” even before he is told of the appearance of the ghost; he doubts "some foul play" before the ghost reveals it to him; his prophetic soul suspects his uncle’s guilt; he foresees Ophelia’s report to her father; he is conscious of the eavesdroppers in the nunnery scene; he is on the track of the spying courtiers; he guesses their mission; he justly appraises the purpose of the fencing match; he correctly instructs the players, and with the sole exception of Polonius behind the arras, whom he mistakes for the king, he is as a person endowed with second sight.

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Until the very end his premonitions are translated into actuality: Hamlet: … I shall win at the odds. But thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart; but it is no matter. Horatio: Nay, good my lord, – Hamlet: It is but foolery; but it is such a kind of gain giving as would perhaps trouble a woman. Horatio: If your mind dislike anything, obey it; I will forestall their repair hither and say you are not fit. Hamlet: Not a whit. We defy augury; there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is ’t to leave betimes? Hamlet parts willingly from life; he commits suicide, not in despair, but in fulfillment. His readiness to die is readiness, to accept life in its true meaning. He is murdered and the certainty of his own death releases him to do his duty. The innerward stage and the outward stage reflect each other to the end. as in “lear,” “Othello,” or “Macbeth,” by the end of the first act the tragedy is set. lear in his vanity and folly has thrown himself on the generosity of his heartless daughters; in the rest of the play be fulfils his fate. The Moor's conquest of Desdemona is a triumph of spirit over disparity of age and race, which will never stand the test of brute passion; Othello goes to his doom. in “Macbeth” the witches draw the circle of tragedy around the hero and his uxorious ambitions; the end follows as by geometrical necessity. So in “Hamlet”: the opening act contains the tragedy in nuce. When his father's command reaches him, Hamlet's fate is sealed. Before the curtain rises on the second act, it has been decreed that Hamlet, playing the madman, will lose his life while delaying action. We need not go far to understand why “Hamlet” is popular. The hero’s innermost conflict, his self-defeating shadow play on the confines of life and death, is translated into external events, into sharply accentuated drama. The play is about suicide in terms of killing an enemy; it is about endless delay in terms of incessant action.

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The plot is extremely clever. But for his simulated madness, Hamlet could never have put off his decision without a clash with his friends and supporters. His own inner conflict thus dragged to light would have been artistically fatal. a Hamlet who refused to obey the behest of the ghost or hesitated to act when pressed by devoted friends would lose our sympathy, just as he would jeopardize our admiration if he were defeated in his quest for revenge by external obstacles. Throughout, Hamlet himself is the only obstacle both to the decision to take revenge and to the carrying out of that decision. Thus is utmost universality reached in terms of inner life, while the event is spelt out on the stage in blood, fire, and brimstone. Personally, in the blind alley of a mood that almost lost me my life, i may or may not have glimpsed a facet of that which moved the poet. The finished work needs no interpreter; the audience comprehends. “Hamlet” is about the human condition. We all live, insofar as we refuse to die. But we are not resolved to live in all the essential respects in which life invites us. We are postponing happiness, because we hesitate to commit ourselves to live. This is what makes Hamlet’s delay so symbolic. life is man’s missed opportunity. yet in the end our beloved hero retrieves some of life’s fulfillment. The curtain leaves us not only reconciled, but with an unaccountable sense of gratitude towards him, as if his sufferings had not been quite in vain. NOTES 1 Originally published in Yale Review 43 (3), 336-350, 1956. karl Polanyi made some changes to the printed text and these changes are included in this version. 2 karl Polanyi was enlisted into the army in 1915 and returned after being severe wounded in 1917. 3 Polanyi is referring to the lectures of a.C. Bradley (1851–1935), delivered in the early years of the 20th century at Oxford (Bradley 1904) 4 Edward Dowden (1843–1913) was an irish poet and critic whose best known work is on Shakespeare (see Dowden 2009). 5 This refers to the satire of Voltaire‚ Candide: or, The Optimist, in which the hero is facing a world which is by no means “the best of all worlds”. 6 Calvary (or golgotha) is the name of the hill where Jesus was crucified. 7 This is an allusion to the story of Edgar allan Poe ‘The Purloined letter’.

kAri POlAnyi - leviTT

k Ari P OlAnyi -l eviTT

From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization Rosa luxemburg lecture in Berlin, May 8 2014

i aM DEligHTED to be here at the invitation of the Rosa luxembourg Foundation on this very special day. There are probably very few of you for whom the date of May 8 has any significance, but anyone who is vaguely as old as i am will remember it as the day the war ended. it was VE Day in london, Victory in Europe Day. it was the definitive and final end of the Nazi regime. For those of us living in london throughout the war, it was a day of enormous, unbelievable celebration. When we set out from kentish Town towards Trafalgar Square, we were swept up in rivers of people from the four corners of london. The final destination was Buckingham Palace. around every other corner were bonfires made from the debris of the bombing. There was dancing in the streets, and many elderly joined the celebration after not having been out at night for years, and of course, for the first time there was light after four years of blackout. in the introduction to my talk, it was mentioned that i participated in the famous study on the effects of allied strategic bombing on the german war effort. Contrary to the intention, german war production increased with the bombing. The german bombing of Britain had a similar effect. People worked longer hours and did what the country required of them: a seventy-two hour week was not uncommon. This is also a year of many other anniversaries: 70 years since the publication of The Great Transformation in 1944, karl Polanyi’s best known work; and 50 years since his death in 1964. But then, there is the historic anniversary, which marks a hundred years—a century—since the outbreak of the First World War in august 1914. i am very old, born in 1923

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as was explained, but the great War is not within my memories. it was, however, the most important event in the lives of both of my parents. let me begin with my mother, ilona Duczynska: if i were a believer, i would know that my mother was smiling down upon me here at the podium of the Rosa luxembourg Foundation. My mother was a student of engineering in Zurich in 1915, when she was befriended by a community of representatives of the Russian Social Democratic Party opposed to the war, including lenin, his wife krupskaya and angelica Balabanoff. Together with delegations from germany, France, and Britain, as well as other European labour and Socialist parties, they met to draft a program of action against the war, known as the Zimmerwald Declaration. as an 18-year-old Hungarian-speaking student unknown to any informant, ilona was entrusted with delivering this call to action to the leaders of the Social Democratic Party in Vienna. When she presented herself to these gentlemen, they took one look at her and told her to go home, child, just go home. Having failed in this mission, she proceeded to Budapest where she received a warmer welcome from Ervin Szabo—a leading anarchist and head of the public library. With his counsel and advice, she found other young people to participate in a plan to distribute anti-war literature. She wrote the texts, found the printer and together with her comrade Tibor Sugar, they organized the distribution of leaflets in the great Weiss Manfred war factory and the army barracks. Eventually they were caught, imprisoned and charged with treason—it was not a small matter. The trial of Duczynska, a beautiful young woman from a very good family, and Tibor Sugar, who was briefly her partner in marriage before she met my father, aroused considerable public interest. They were liberated from prison by the 1918 revolution which terminated the war and established the first Hungarian Republic. ilona was a founding member of the Hungarian Communist party, at that time largely composed of young people. With an excellent education and knowledge of several languages, she was called to Moscow to serve as translator to karl Radek in the preparations for the historic Second international Congress of Communist Parties. ilona returned to Vienna in 1920, and subsequently was expelled from the party for “luxembourgist deviations” and

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a publication in a journal edited by Paul levi, who also fell into disfavor with the party. as a young woman in her early twenties, she must have admired Rosa luxembourg, who was a generation older, as a very important and senior figure in the movement. Many years later, following the destruction of the austrian working class movement in February 1934, my mother rejoined the Communist Party in order to continue the struggle of the now-illegal Schutzbund, the military arm of the austrian Social Democratic Party, until 1936 when she joined my father and myself in london. Subsequently, she was expelled from the austrian Communist Party in london on orders from Moscow. No reasons were given. My mother was a very independent person and my father adored her. karl and ilona first met in 1920, at the Helmstreits Muehle, a villa provided as a refuge for political exiles from Hungary, by a Viennese wellwisher. My father left Budapest in 1919, and was soon joined by a larger exodus of communists, socialists, radicals and liberals following the accession of the reactionary regime of admiral Horthy. The comrades in the villa were of my mother’s generation, and my father, who was 10 years older, would sit by himself, quietly writing. in a letter he wrote much later in life about meeting my mother, he said that she was a revolutionary and her name was Polish, and that was close enough to his ideal of the Russian revolutionary young woman. ilona recalled that he seemed like a person whose life was behind him. For the generation of my father, who was then 34, the great War was a traumatic experience which shattered the apparent certainties of the era that finished in 1914. This was particularly true in the defeated countries of germany and austro-Hungary. in a speech delivered in Budapest on “The Calling of our generation,” Polanyi expressed the total disillusionment of a generation. During the First World War, my father was a cavalry officer in the austroHungarian army on the Russian front. The conditions were appalling, and he fell ill with typhus. On a bitterly cold night, his horse fell and he found himself underneath it. He was certain he would die, but when he

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regained consciousness he was in a Budapest military hospital. He was tormented by a sense of personal responsibility for the disasters, the killings, the war, and what he later described as the collapse of our civilization. While he was at the front he took with him one book, the collected works of Shakespeare in English. later, he wrote a semiautobiographical essay on Hamlet, and Hamlet’s indecision, indeed reluctance, to assume his responsibility as king of Denmark. The great War was, i believe, the defining event in the life of my father, which motivated him to engage in the search for the ultimate origins of the collapse of the world before 1914 and all the disasters which followed. The spirit of the Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came into the lives karl, his elder siblings, and their cousin Ervin Szabo, earlier mentioned above, through the close family friendship of the Pollaceks with the klatchkos in Vienna. karl’s mother, Cecile Wohl, had been sent from Vilna to Vienna by her father when she was seventeen, accompanied by another young girl, Nyunia, from Simferopol, to stay with the klatchkos, family friends from Vilna. Russian was Cecile’s first language, german her second and, while she learned to speak Hungarian, it seems she was not able to write it. Nyunia married Samuel klatchko and Cecile met and married Mihaly Pollacsek. in the early 1890s, my grandfather moved the family from Vienna to Budapest, but they retained close relations with their friends the klatchkos in Vienna. klatchko was the non-party envoy of all the illegal parties and movements then existing in Czarist Russia. He met many of the great early Russian revolutionaries—Plekhanov and axelrod included—and leon Trotsky was a daily visitor to his bookshop on the karlplatz. The Russian revolutionary environment which centered around the klatchko family made a huge impression on the young karl and his cousin Ervin Szabo. i recall my father’s accounts of his early childhood memories of men arriving cold and hungry, feet wrapped in newspapers, to stay for a while before moving on to their next revolutionary assignment. My grandfather, Mihaly Pollacsek, came from a well-to-do Jewish family in the Hungarian town of Ungvar, now Uzhhorod, Ukraine. He was a successful railway engineer, contractor, and entrepreneur, and a Hungarian

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anglophile who believed, above all, in the importance of education. Mihaly spent the family’s economic resources on providing a superb classical home education for all six children including latin, greek, English and French, and fencing for the boys, until they were of age to enter the gymnaseum. karl spoke of his father as being unadulterated by the commercial values of the ascending bourgeoisie of Budapest. in Hungary, karl Polanyi is remembered as the founder and first president of the Hungarian student movement, named for galileo. it challenged the old order of monarchy, aristocracy, gentry, and the Church, and engaged in popular education, including thousands of literacy classes for young workers and peasants. it received moral support from the poet Endre ady and logistic assistance from the free-masons. Polanyi stated many times that his model was the Russian student movement of late 19th and early 20th centuries. He admired the Russian revolutionaries who challenged the authorities of the repressive Tsarist Russia by direct action, including assassinations of tsarist officials. They would certainly be called terrorists today. i think that throughout history, students have played an important role in revolutions, and more generally in signaling the discontent of a society. During the student strike that i witnessed in Montreal in 2012, there was a remarkable level of democratic organization. The students wished to avoid having prominent leaders and instead organized horizontally with spokesmen rather than identifiable leaders. Polanyi supported the Hungarian revolution which ended the First World War and the monarchy, in 1918, but opposed the short-lived communist regime that followed. in 1919 he left for Vienna, soon followed by a large exodus of all sections of the political left. in the 100 years which have passed since 1914, the First World War and the Russian Revolution stand out as watershed events which transformed the landscape of Europe. kaisers, Tsars and kings all bit the dust. There were wonderful posters of caricatures of the mighty being chased off the throne and literally falling into the dustbin of history. The austro-Hungarian Empire splintered into the succession states of Czechoslovakia and yugoslavia, while the kingdom of Hungary was reduced to one third of its

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previous population. Vienna, the glittering capital of the former Hapsburg Empire of 50 million, was now the capital of the Republic of austria, with only 6 million, considered to be too small to be politically viable. in the province and municipality of Vienna, the Socialists were continuously elected from 1918 to 1934. Polanyi admired the achievements of the Vienna Socialist municipal administration, including the creation of social housing that was bright and modern and designed by some of the leading architects. More than that, he valued the importance placed on the organization of a variety of cultural, educational and recreational activities. The bourgeoisie of Vienna, by contrast, was hostile. The financing of these social programs was raised by taxes imposed on privately owned real estate. Friedrich Hayek, eminent austrian economist and protégée of ludwig von Mises, wrote that the high taxes would result in a deterioration of the stock of privately supplied accommodation. They were unsympathetic to the socialist administration and frightened by language like “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Mises, in his memoir, recalled a demonstration which took place before the war, of more than 200,000 workers marching in military fashion on the Ringstrasse. Under the banner of the Social Democratic Party, they demanded the right to vote. Mises described it as utterly terrifying to see that these unwashed masses should actually get the right elect their representatives to parliament. Mises was the most famous of the austrian economists, but he had no university position. He was employed by the Chamber of Commerce, with his junior colleague Hayek. He published an article in 1922 in the Archiv fur Sozialwissenshaft und Sozialpolitik which aimed to prove the impossibility of the construction of a socialist economy in the absence of price signals established by supply and demand in markets for commodity, labor and capital. There then followed a debate in the pages of this prestigious journal with several participants, including karl Polanyi. at that time, there was not yet any country that had a socialist economy. The early Soviet Union was engaged in a civil war of survival.

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Traditional European social democratic parties, armed with the Marxist faith in the historic inevitability of socialism, believed that the growing ranks of the industrial proletariat would eventually gain a parliamentary majority and introduce socialism. My father rejected the existence of historic laws that could determine the future. in his view, progress towards socialism must be grounded in existing institutions such as trade unions, cooperatives, and other civil societies, associations or organizations. He rejected the imposition of administrative, bureaucratic structures by advocates of Soviet style centralized command economies. karl Polanyi’s vision was a socialist economy that would be efficient in terms of the allocation of resources, socially just in terms of the distribution of income and participatory in terms of a democratic representation of the interests of workers, enterprises, consumers, and citizens. in his view, an individual is at one and the same time a worker, a consumer, and a citizen. This is not the model of atomistic individuals participating in the market for goods or labor services as consumers, workers or employers, but rather a model of mutual negotiation associations and organizations. i’m approaching the limit of my time, and we have hardly addressed the title of this talk, From the great Transformation to the great Financialization, which precipitated the financial crisis of 2008. i believe that the financial crisis of 2008 was more than a gigantic debt induced financial bubble, which temporarily raised gDP per capita in ireland and Spain above that of Britain. it was the result of the multi-trillion financialization of the capitalist economies of Europe and North america. it has created a crisis more intractable than that of the 1930s, because governments are now captive to financial interests of international creditors. They respond more rapidly to the bond markets than to opinion polls or elections. Political parties contesting for electoral support are increasingly similar in their policies. These policies represent the interests of the corporate world: economic growth over environmental protection; rescue of banks over rescue of home owners; favorable investment climates over concerned social programs; austerity over increased government expenditures, and the reduction of public sector deficit.

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i believe that the continuing and unresolved financial and economic crisis reveals the relative decline of the advanced capitalist heartlands of the West, and a shift in international economic relations of power from the West to the East, from the North to the South. The impact of the financial crisis was most severe in Europe and North america, while regions of asia, latin america and even africa recovered rapidly and resumed strong economic growth. “Developing asia”, comprising more than half the population of the world, achieved economic growth rates of 8–9% per annum in the first decade of the 21st century, whereas iMF assistance was required to shore up faltering economic growth in Europe. i have no illusions about economic growth as measured by gDP, but there is no doubt that we are witnessing a historic shift in global power relations. The continuing crisis has four dimensions: financial, social, political, and environmental. Since the 1980s, an economic counter-revolution of deregulation, privatization and the liberalization of trade and finance has created unprecedented inequalities of income and wealth on a global scale. Debt creation by financialization; displacement of labor in the production of goods and services by automation; the degeneration of democracy by the capture of governments, and a reluctance to face our ecological problems. The situation is financially, socially, politically and environmentally unsustainable. Financial instability continues, and fear of the next financial crisis looms. The banks are more powerful and profitable than ever. There is agreement that the world needs a new financial architecture, but no effective action has been taken. in the past 60 years, large banks have not been allowed to fail. By contrast, in the great Depression, 10,000 american banks were permitted to fail within a week. Employment in the United States has hardly been restored to pre-2008 levels and in some countries of Europe youth unemployment is 30-50%. as the proceeds of growth accrue to the top 10%, the lack of employment has diminished economic opportunity and social mobility for the 90%. While automation is reducing the demand for labor, many people are working harder and longer hours sometimes two or three jobs at once

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and employment is increasingly precarious. The economist reported a study which found that 47% of the world’s jobs will disappear in the next twenty years. information technology has extended the working day beyond conventional office hours for white collar workers, who are now expected to respond to electronic communications 24/7. logically, automation should bring benefits of less work and more leisure, but the capitalist system is organized in such a way that for the great majority a job is necessary to access economic livelihood. Financialization has created a new form of debt bondage and democratic deficit for individuals and nations. in Europe, the weaker economies have no effective economic sovereignty. There are elections, but the options are restricted to choosing which set of politicians will implement the orders and conditions that accompany the debt relief coming from Brussels. Furthermore, the assistance accrues principally to external financial creditors. lastly, we are faced with the undeniable evidence of the ongoing destruction of the natural environment and the biosphere, including the effects of climate change. Regrettably, the power of corporate interests continues to frustrate efforts to address the problem. We must ask: why is it that the great Transformation, written 70 years ago by an author who was virtually unknown and did not have a university position until he was 61 years old, has not only survived, but gained increasing authority? The appeal of the book is the author’s rejection of a system which subordinates society to the requirements of a capitalist economy. But according to Polanyi, the economy is a social and political construct; if it does not serve society, it must and will be reconstructed by the conscious will of people to live in harmony with nature and each other.

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green New Deal group. 2008. A Green New Deal. Joined-up policies to solve the triple crunch of the credit crisis, climate change and high oil prices. london: new economics foundation http://www.neweconomics.org/page/-/ files/a_green_New_Deal.pdf (accessed October 10, 2013). gregory, Chis. (2009) “Whatever happened to householding?” in: C. M. Hann and keith Hart (eds) Market and society. The great transformation today. Cambridge, Uk ; New york: Cambridge University Press. Habermann, Friederike. 2008. Der homo oeconomicus und das Andere. Hegemonie, Identität und Emanzipation. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of neoliberalization. Towards a theory of uneven geographical development. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg. Haug, Frigga. 2009. Die Vier-in-einem-Perspektive. Politik von Frauen für eine neue Linke. Hamburg: argument. Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. (2004) “Hegemonie” Wolfgang Fritz Haug (ed) . Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus 6/i:1–25. Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. (2007) “Zur Dialektik des antikapitalismus.” Argument 269:11–34. Helfrich, Silke, Rainer kuhlen, Wolfgang Sachs, and Christian Siefkes. 2010. Gemeingüter - Wohlstand durch Teilen. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung www.boell.de/downloads/gemeingueter_Report_Commons.pdfHeinrichBöll-Stiftung. Hirschman, albert O. 2004. Exit, voice, and loyalty. Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Huber, Berthold, ed. 2013. Kurswechsel für ein gutes Leben. Wege zu einer solidarischen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Campus. institut für gesellschaftsanalyse. (2011) “Organische krise des Finanzmarktkapitalismus: Szenarien, konflikte, konkurrierende Projekte.” www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/rls_papers/Papers_Organische_ krise_web.pdf. Jessop, Bob. 2007. State Power. A Strategic-Relational Approach. Cambridge: Polity. Jochimsen, Maren. 2003. Careful Economics. Integrating Caring Activities and Economic Science. Boston: kluwer academic Publishers. kahrs, Horst. 2012. Abschied aus der Demokratie. Zum sozialen Klassencharakter der wachsenden Wahlenthaltung und der Preisgabe staatsbürgerlicher Rechte. Berlin: Rosa-luxemburg-Stiftung. kant, immanuel. (1903) “grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten.” Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. IV. Berlin: königlich Preußische akademie der Wissenschaften. keynes, John Maynard. (1963) “Economic Possibilities for our grandchildren (1930).” Essays in Persuasion. New york: W.W.Norton & Co.

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Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The Contemporary Significance of The Great Transformation KENNETH MCROBBIE, KARI POLANYI-LEVITT (EDS.) Karl Polanyi’s seminal critique of the dominance of market capitalism has assumed a new urgency in an era of unchecked neoliberal globalisation. This timely work contains a selection of papers presented at the Fifth Karl Polanyi International Conference on the contemporary resonance of his seminal work The Great Transformation. Exploring themes such as globalisation, the privatisation of the state and alternative democratic approaches to community and citizenship, the book also includes reflections on the life and work of Polanyi’s wife, Ilonya Duczynaka, and archival material on the Polanyi family in Vienna. 270 Pages Paperback: 978-1-55164-142-3 $36.99 Hardback: 978-1-55164-143-0 $65.99 Available now through UTP Distribution, Toronto (North America & International) or Central Books, London (UK & Europe)

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The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi: A Celebration KARI POLANYI-LEVITT (ED.) The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi provides an accessible and engaging account of Polanyi’s work on the relation between economics and everyday in democratic society whilst providing a personal impression of the man, his times and his place in the evolution of social and economic thought. As economist Prof. J.R. Stanfield observed: "In his life and in his work Polanyi seems to represent a unique and compelling blend of the Enlightenment tradition with the more existential thinking of the twentieth century. His economics was both holistic and sharply focused on the effects of economic forces on the life of the human individual." 398 Pages Paperback: 978-0-921689-80-5 $19.99 Available now through UTP Distribution, Toronto (North America & International) or Central Books, London (UK & Europe)

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POLITICS • SOCIAL THEORY

Karl Polanyi in Dialogue

Karl Polanyi in Dialogue A Socialist Thinker for Our Times Michael Brie With Nancy Fraser

Michael Brie is a senior fellow of the Institute for Critical Social Analysis at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin. His research interests include the history and theory of socialism and the socio-ecological transformation of society under capitalism. He is chief editor of the series Contributions to Critical Transformation Research and coeditor of Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist Transformation (Black Rose Books, 2017).

A Socialist Thinker for Our Times

Michael Brie

Amid the tension of this crisis Michael Brie argues for an urgent theoretical and practical reorganisation of the Left. Developing the work of philosopher and social theorist Karl Polanyi, Brie advocates an alliance of socialist liberals and libertarian ‘commonists’ that unites contemporary campaigns for recognition with more traditional struggles for social welfare and economic democracy. Starting from Nancy Fraser’s critical reappraisal of Polanyi in her article “A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi”, Brie reinterprets Polanyi’s thought for present times, developing powerful Polanyian response to neoliberalism, the authoritarian right and the ongoing threat of global ecological disaster. Also included are two articles by Polanyi translated into English for the first time and Kari Polanyi-Levitt’s 2014 lecture to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin.

Karl Polanyi in Dialogue

The contemporary Left fights its political battles on various fronts: protesting the crippling inequalities that sustain neoliberal economic policy; developing sustainable alternatives to the consumerism that exacerbates the environmental crisis; and advocating for the emancipation and celebration of the diversity of human identity. But despite this versatility the Left is in worldwide retreat whilst an aggressive ‘Alt-Right’ is taking to the streets and the internet, regurgitating a regressive and patriarchal vision of society that has already won startling political victories in the US and Europe.

Nancy Fraser is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her research interests include social and political theory and contemporary European thought. Her most recent publication is Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Verso, 2013).

Montréal/New York/London www.web.net/blackrosebooks

Michael Brie

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55164-601-5 Hardback ISBN: 978-1-55164-603-9 eBook ISBN: 978-1-55164-605-3

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