the 1960s.
The third wave, not anticipated by Polanyi, begins in 1973 with the energy crisis, subsequently described as the Washington Consensus with a major impetus from the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in the form of a renewed assault on labour. Over time it has become an era of the recommodification of money with the ascendancy of finance and the deepening commodification of nature, that is of air, land and water. This third-wave marketization led to and was given new energy by the collapse of state socialism. Structural adjustment came to Latin America at the very time it was emerging from dictatorship, prompting experiments in participatory democracy. Indeed, whereas in core countries the waves of marketization have succeeded one another over two centuries, more peripheral countries have had to face these waves in rapid succession, making them all the more explosive.
There have been national reactions to market expansion – whether in the form of Islamic nationalism or shades of socialism in Latin America – but they cannot reverse third-wave marketization as this requires a planetary response to the global reach of finance capital and the looming environmental catastrophe that threatens the whole earth. Indeed, finance capital is the force behind the precariatisation of labour – both its recommodification and, correlatively, its excommodification – as well as the rising levels of debt, not just at the level of the individual but also of the community, the city, the state, and even the region. Finance capital has commodified and propelled knowledge into production and together they have incorporated nature as an accumulation strategy of capital (Smith 2007, pp. 16–36). A countermovement will have to assume a global character, couched in terms of human rights since the survival of the human species is at stake.
The question arises where exactly we are on the curve of third-wave marketization. Optimists have argued that third-wave marketization has already begun to reverse itself and that we are climbing towards the confinement of marketization. Others think that commodification has been far from halted. Many, including myself, thought that the economic crisis of 2008 and the reshuffling of world power offered an opportunity for a countermovement, but this proved to be illusory. It is possible that the countermovement is still in the distant future just as it is also possible that there will never be a countermovement with the aim of limiting marketization.
References
Burawoy, Michael (2015): Facing an unequal world. In: Current Sociology, Vol. 63(1), pp. 5–34.
Smith, Neil (2007): Nature as accumulation strategy. Socialist Register Vol.43: Coming to terms with nature. pp. 16-36.
‘WHEREVER MY FATHER LIVED HE WAS ENGAGED IN WHATEVER WAS GOING ON’
Shaping The Great Transformation: a conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt.1
MICHAEL BURAWOY
Karl Polanyi has become a canonical thinker in sociology and beyond. His book The Great Transformation, has become a classic that touches on almost every subfield of sociology. Its influence extends far beyond sociology to economics, political science, geography and anthropology. Being a critique of the market economy for the way it destroys the fabric of society, it has gained ever more followers over the last four decades of neoliberal thought and practice. The book is simultaneously an investigation of the sources and consequences of commodification and an account of counter-movements against commodification – movements that gave rise to fascism and Stalinism as well as social democracy. Hence it has obvious relevance to our present global context. In this interview with his daughter Kari Polanyi Levitt, she describes the life of her father, and the influences leading to The Great Transformation. She also points to the special relation her father had with her mother, Ilona Duczynska, herself a lifelong political activist and intellectual. Here Kari Polanyi Levitt traces the four phases of Karl Polanyi’s life (1886–1964): the Hungarian phase, the Austrian phase, the English phase and then the North American phase. Kari Polanyi Levitt is an economist in her own right, living in Montreal, author of numerous publications, including From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization (2013), and the edited collection The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi (1990).
Michael Burawoy: Let’s start at the beginning. We are used to thinking of Karl Polanyi as Hungarian, but he was actually born in Vienna, right?
KARI POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, that’s right. Interestingly, my father and I were both born in Vienna and my mother was born in a small town not far from Vienna – which of course was the great centre of intellectual life, the great metropolis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family, that is the mother and father of Karl Polanyi, started in Vienna. Karl’s mother, Cecilia Wohl, was sent by her father from Vilna, then in Russia, to Vienna to learn a trade. As a result of her education she spoke Russian and German. She met Karl’s father, a young Hungarian Jewish engineer – Mihály Pollacsek – in Vienna. He spoke Hungarian and German. So the family started as a German-speaking family.
And, not that long ago, I learned from correspondence that my father never learned Hungarian until he entered the Gymnasium in Budapest. My father’s Hungarian period, which is of course very important, was also shaped by a Russian influence – that came politically through Russian socialists, very different from the social democrats of that time. It was a socialism more oriented toward the countryside, the peasantry. It had anarchist elements. Communes, of course, were very much part of that political formation. And I would have to say that this Russian influence was balanced on his father’s side, who was an anglophile. And if there were two important literary figures in the life of my father it was Shakespeare – he took a volume of his collected English writings with him to the war – and, of all the great Russian writers, I would say Dostoyevsky.
And then there was the influence of Russian émigré revolutionaries, among them a man called Klatchko.
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, Samuel Klatchko was an extraordinary figure. He lived in Vienna. He was the unofficial emissary connecting Russian revolutionaries with international and European ones. He came from a Jewish family in Vilna and spent his youth in a Russian commune in Kansas. The commune didn’t last very long. It eventually broke up, and they say that he drove 3,000 cattle to Chicago and after that he visited the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York. He was an activist. The Kansas commune was named after a Russian figure called Nikolai Tchaikovsky. But when Klatchko came to Vienna he formed a close friendship with the Pollacsek family and he looked after Russian folks who came to buy Marxist literature, or whatever they came to Vienna for. And my father told me – which I have never forgotten – that these men made a huge impression on him, and also on his cousin Irvin Szabo who played an important part in Hungarian intellectual life; he was also a kind of anarchist socialist. Some of them didn’t have shoes and they had their feet tied up in newspapers. My father was immensely impressed by the heroism and the courage of these people. And altogether my father had a… I was going to say ‘romantic’, but in any case, a huge respect for these revolutionaries – and particularly for Bakunin who, I suppose, is the greatest figure of all, a man who broke out of every prison in Europe.
And the social revolutionary sympathy continued throughout his life, which explains in part the ambiguity he would have towards the Bolsheviks.
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, it continued throughout his life. It explains the antagonistic relationship to the social democrats of Russia, who after all included what would become the Bolshevik majority faction.
Your father was already politically active when he was a student. Is that correct?
POLANYI LEVITT:
