this was impossible – because without price making markets, there was no rational way of allocating resources. I’m sure most of you who study economics are familiar with this argument. And then Polanyi challenged this with a model of associational cooperative socialism, based partly on Otto Bauer, and partly on G.D.H. Cole.
What was your father’s view of the Russian Revolution of 1917, when he was in Vienna?
POLANYI LEVITT: Well, first of all, the first Russian Revolution in 1917 – the February Revolution – was the one that ended the war. His view was that this was wonderful, because like just about everyone in Hungary he wanted the war to end. The war was extremely unpopular. Then the war finished. The initial Russian Revolution was welcomed, I think.
What about the October Revolution?
POLANYI LEVITT: For Polanyi both the February and October Revolutions were bourgeois revolutions. They were the last wave that followed the French Revolution and had crossed Europe – and had finally reached the most backward country in Europe, which was Russia. So that’s how he put it.
So the true revolution comes later with the move toward collectivization and five-year plans?
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes. I think he would say that socialism came only with the Five-Year Plan, after 1928 or 1929. Prior to that, Russia was a predominately peasant country, an agricultural country. We now have an interesting article written in Bennington in 1940, which has recently come to light. There he talks about Russia’s internal dilemma. To put it simply: the working class, which was the basis of the Communist Party, controlled the cities and was dependent on the peasantry, who controlled food supply in the rural areas. But then there was an external dilemma: it was not possible for Russian peasants to export their grain because international markets had collapsed in the Great Depression, grain being the principal export commodity of Russia at the time. This contributed to the decision to undertake the accelerated industrialization of Europe’s most backward country – and to undertake it as a socialist project of nationalization – not only of industry, but also of agriculture.
So this is already paradoxical, right? Because of course hitherto we hear him endorsing the social revolutionaries and the idea of a participatory democracy, but now it seems he endorsed Stalinism.
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes. But as has been pointed out by other people, also regarding my father’s life, it was very contextual. And precisely what is so attractive about his thinking – but also makes it sometimes contradictory – is that it does not proceed from a single principle, so to speak. It proceeds from situations, and their possibilities. This is the first polarity: reality, and freedom – what is the real situation and what are the possibilities for Russia at that time? You have a revolution that is led by a proletarian party. You have a peasantry that did not want to be nationalized – they wanted to own the land. And they did. And they had a lot of power, controlling the food supply. And then you had an international situation. Shortly after, you had fascism in the 1930s. Only in England, does my father really become a strong supporter of the Soviet Union, and it was in the context of the impending conflict with German expansionism and Nazism.
So your father leaves Vienna in 1933.
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, he left Vienna because of the impending fascism. A decision was made by the editorial committee of the famous economic journal Der Österreichische Volkswirt, where he was then a leading editorial figure, that Polanyi should go to England because the political situation was tenuous. His English was excellent. He had contacts. So he went to England in 1933. He continued to contribute articles from England until the journal ceased publication in 1938. We didn’t go as a family. My father went in 1933. I was sent to England in 1934, and went to live with very close English friends, Donald and Irene Grant, whom we had known well in Vienna. They were Christian socialists working for the Student Christian Movement of Britain, handing out relief to impoverished post-war Austrians. And that is how we met them. And I lived with them. My mother came in 1936, two years later.
Let’s go back to your father, now in England. What did he do there?
POLANYI LEVITT: When he first arrived in 1933, he had no fixed employment. His support system there was Betty and John MacMurray and the Grant family who belonged to something called the Christian Left. They were Christian socialists. There were also communists and there were religious leaders, mostly Protestant. He wrote an important essay on the essence of fascism, which he considered to be an affront to Christian values, that would be included in a book he co-edited, Christianity and the Social Revolution. My father also led a study group of his English Christian friends, on the two volumes of Marx’s early writings, including The German Ideology and the famous Paris Manuscripts, which had just been published in 1932. He read to them from these writings, translating into English as he went along. He was very excited about these works. I remember the sense of his agreement with them. I call Marx’s early writings the common starting point of Marx and Polanyi.
He says as much in The Great Transformation. So what did his teaching involve? How did England influence his thinking?
POLANYI LEVITT: It was not until 1937 that Karl obtained employment with the Workers Education Association (WEA), a very large and very old adult education movement. In England it is connected to Ruskin College that enables working-class people, who were not able to go to university, to obtain further education. My father got the chance to teach in English provincial towns in Kent and Sussex. He stayed overnight with the families. He got to know more intimately the life of working-class families, and he was shocked at the conditions he found and, to be honest, the low cultural level. By comparison with working-class people in Vienna they were culturally poorer, even though Austria was a far poorer country in monetary terms than Britain. The subject that he was required to teach was English social and economic history, about which he did not know anything. It was a period of self-study for him. If you look at the back of the book – The Great Transformation – you will see the enormous range of the studies he undertook. It is very similar to Marx’s Grundrisse that interestingly enough relies on similar authors – Ricardo, Malthus and others – writing on the early industrial revolution. So, my mother wrote – and it is written in the foreword to the book called The Livelihood of Man, which was published posthumously – that it was in England that Karl put down the roots of a sacred hate of market society, which divested people of their humanity. That is how she put it. Then, of course, he discovered the class system in England. It consisted of differences of speech. And he described the class system as similar to caste in India, and race in the United States.
In 1940 Karl Polanyi is invited to give lectures at Bennington College in the US.
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, in Bennington he received a two-year fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to write The Great Transformation. He had good support from the president of Bennington, but he had to report to the Rockefeller Foundation. Whatever he gave them to read, they did not like it. They had very serious doubts about his suitability to be in a university. They wrote that he really was more interested – and listen to this, as a put-down – in “Hungarian law, and college lecturing, and philosophy.” To say he was interested in philosophy is a total put-down. However, they renewed the grant. And at the end of the two years – we’re now in 1943 – my father was very keen to return to England. He did not want to stay in the United States. He wanted to participate in the post-war planning of England. By this time the Battle of Stalingrad had turned the tide of the war; it was very clear that the allies were going to win. And he left the two penultimate chapters of The Great Transformation unfinished. And if you look, those chapters have traces of being unfinished. Not the last chapter, but the two chapters before the last one. If he had stayed to finish the book, I think
