Great transformation

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As Great Transformation (engl., Dt. Great forming or Great Transformation ) called the Hungarian - Austrian Economics sociologist Karl Polanyi in 1944 the profound transformation of Western society in the 19th and 20th centuries mainly on the historic example of England, when the industrialization and political action ( or better: not acting) led to major social and economic changes. According to Polanyi, the two essential moments of secular change were the development of market economies and nation states . He assumed a strong interaction between the two phenomena and called this complex the market society .

Making the economy independent

Polanyi described this increasing market orientation as the independence of the economy from society. This process began with the increasing fencing of properties by large landowners. This often deprived rural residents of the means for an independent livelihood and forced them further into market society. The uniform agriculture was replaced by a differentiated agriculture, in which the pasture economy dominated and which led to the dynamic development of the wool processing.

In fact, in the 16th and early 17th centuries, the crown, the head of the administration and the courts succeeded in slowing this process down so that its disruptive consequences could be largely avoided. B. by the farmers building a wool processing home industry. According to Polanyi, the paternalistic behavior of the state under the Tudors and the early Stuarts represented a high level of statecraft that made use of modern statistical methods; but parliament wrested power from the crown and, 150 years later, allowed free maritime trade and the import of cotton to " threaten life and well-being in the country with a catastrophe in the form of the industrial revolution " and the "rural people to slum dwellers [of industrial cities]. has been dehumanized ”.

Polanyi saw the starting point of this "great transformation" in 1834, when the British government abolished the Speenhamland Act , passed in 1795 , which was supposed to solve the problem of rural poverty, but also to alleviate the pressure to work. Polanyi described this process as “disentangling” and explicitly pointed out a parallel to the enforcement of market mechanisms and wage labor among colonial peoples .

After the free movement of residents had already been enforced parallel to the introduction of the law in 1794 , the way was paved for the free labor market for the emerging industry ; Workers were able to move freely within the country and wages were no longer distorted by the quasi-payment of wage subsidies to manufacturers. Hunger and lack now drove the former small farmers and farm workers into the factories . Polanyi assessed this as the introduction of a free labor market . The enclosures by the large landowners also led to the transformation of the land into a freely tradable property.

With the “fiction of goods” of labor, land and money, the destructive effect of the Great Transformation emerged as a “transformation of the natural and human substance of society into goods”. The traditional feudal and feudal system had to adapt very quickly to the consequences of industrialization. In this, Polanyi recognized the change from an agrarian society with the motive of livelihood and the dominance of class collectives to a market society in which an individual pursuit of profit and the maximization of self-interest dominated.

Polanyi explained the social upheaval of the Great Transformation not through the evolutionary course of its own, but through the politically deliberate introduction of free markets for what he called "fictitious goods" of labor , land and money . Industrial and economic progress was associated with growing social inequality. In the system of the market economy, the structures and rules of the economy become independent from the structures and rules of social cohesion. Economic exchange processes became independent of social relationships (“externalized economy”), social processes became dependent on economic expediency. The economy was no longer embedded in feudal and guild structures, but, conversely, social and industrial relations were embedded in a system of markets; this is how money became capital.

According to Polanyi, such rampant materialism in a market society runs counter to the nature of society and constitutes an existential threat. The destructive power of this development is shown not so much in a material shortage or in the miserable working conditions of the time, but in a cultural and social neglect.

Misjudgments by liberal economists and philosophers

Polanyi points out that the "emotional belief in spontaneity" (of the market) and the "mystical willingness to accept the social consequences of any economic improvement" made philosophers and economists forget that a process of unguided change should be slowed down. This everyday knowledge, which was also based on the knowledge of traditional social philosophy, was first discredited in the 19th century, "erased" from the thoughts of the educated elite and replaced by an uncritical trust in the self-healing powers of the market and a crude utilitarianism . The role of the state and the government lies in the possibility of influencing the pace of this transformation. The idea that the pace cannot be changed or that it is even sacrilege to change it leads to inaction in the face of the devastating and "degenerative" process and ignores the fatal physical and moral damage suffered by the dispossessed.

Formation of nation states

According to Polanyi, economic interests promoted the development of nation states as homogeneous domestic markets and changed the political order , as Polanyi shows using the example of Great Britain .

He justified this with the economies' need for a strong, modern state, since only this could implement the necessary reforms in the social structures in order to stop or weaken the serious social effects of capitalism .

For Polanyi, the climax of the Great Transformation was the time before the First World War, with international peace through the four institutions of balance of power, gold standard, self-regulating market and liberal state. However, when the gold standard as the fixed conversion standard for international currencies was gradually abandoned in the early 1930s, the collapse of liberal market society, which Polanyi noted, was almost only a matter of time.

In contrast, Polanyi pleaded in the final chapter for a "socialism" that removes labor, land and money from the market and controls them democratically.

"Double movement"

Polanyi describes the establishment of a self-regulating market and the commercialization of land, capital and labor as a “frivolous experiment”. It leads to social disintegration and the abandonment of human values ​​through an individualistic materialism. All previous societies would have fought against the uncertainty and moral degradation emanating from free markets. The economic liberalization therefore took place from the beginning as a “double movement”, since it immediately triggered counter-efforts by society to regulate the market. The economic crises and political upheavals of the first half of the 20th century are manifestations of such a double movement. The fascism have tried in vain to adapt the company by violence and demagoguery to the requirements of capitalism. Future freedom requires economic planning, regulation and control based on binding moral values ​​and duties.

reception

The Great Transformation was one of the key texts of the shrinking anti-capitalist left in the United States and remained largely unknown in Europe. That changed in the 1980s with the dissolution of national economies and the beginning of globalization and its similarity to the development in the 19th century . Since then it has been used for political reasoning against neoliberalism and also as a forerunner of a new economic sociology .

The historian Philipp Ther used "The Great Transformation" as a guideline for his essays on current developments in the USA, Germany, Italy, Turkey and Russia. He points out that the "Polanyi pendulum" of the double movement, as far as protection from the consequences of the free market is concerned, can swing in two directions: to the left towards democratic socialism and to the right towards fascism. Since 2016 at the latest (Trump election, Brexit), but actually since the 1990s, it is clear where the pendulum is currently moving.

Web links

literature

  • Karl Polanyi: The great transformation . Farrar & Rinehart, New York / Toronto 1944.
  • Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation. The political and economic origins of our time . Beacon Press, Boston 1957.
    • Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation. Political and economic origins of societies and economic systems . Translated by Heinrich Jelinek, Europaverlag, Vienna 1977, ISBN 978-3-203-50618-0 .
    • Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation. Political and economic origins of societies and economic systems . 3rd edition, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 978-3-518-27860-4 (1st edition 1978, ISBN 978-3-518-07860-0 : 2nd edition 1990, ISBN 978-3-518- 27860-4 ).
  • Gareth Dale: Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market. Polity Press, 2010, ISBN 0-7456-4071-0 .
  • Chris Hann , Keith Hart (Eds.): Market and society: the great transformation today , Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-51965-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Polanyi: The Great Transformation. Boston 1957, p. 35 ff.
  2. ^ Polanyi: The Great Transformation. Boston 1957, p. 38 f.
  3. ↑ See the pointed summary by Christoph Deutschmann : Postindustrielle Industriesoziologie. Weinheim, Munich 2002, p. 61 ff. Deutschmann speaks of a functional “dedifferentiation of the use of money”. P. 64.
  4. ^ Polanyi: The Great Transformation. Boston 1957, p. 33 (translated).
  5. ^ Polanyi: The Great Transformation. Boston 1957, p. 37 (translated).
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Streeck , Karl Polanyi. The great transformation . In: Dirk Kaesler , Ludgera Vogt (eds.). Major works of sociology (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 396). Kröner, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-520-39601-7 , pp. 359-361, here p. 360.
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Streeck , Karl Polanyi. The great transformation . In: Dirk Kaesler , Ludgera Vogt (eds.). Major works of sociology (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 396). Kröner, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-520-39601-7 , pp. 359-361, here p. 361.
  8. ↑ Philipp Ther : The other end of the story. About the Great Transformation , Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-12744-5 .
  9. ↑ Hans von Trotha: Philipp Ther: "The other end of the story": After liberalism . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur , January 30, 2020.