by Karl Polanyi
Secondly, there is the equally mistaken doctrine of the essentially economic nature of class interests. Though human society is naturally conditioned by economic factors, the motives of human individuals are only exceptionally determined by the needs of material want-satisfaction. That nineteenth-century society was organized on the assumption that such a motivation could be made universal was a peculiarity of the age. It was therefore appropriate to allow a comparatively wide scope to the play of economic motives when analyzing that society. But we must guard against prejudging the issue, which is precisely to what extent such an unusual motivation could be made universally effective.
Purely economic matters such as affect want-satisfaction are incomparably less relevant to class behavior than questions of social recognition. Want-satisfaction may be, of course, the result of such recognition, especially as its outward sign or prize. But the interests of a class most directly refer to standing and rank, to status and security, that is, they are primarily not economic but social.
The classes and groups which intermittently took part in the general movement toward protectionism after 1870 did not do so primarily on account of their economic interests. The “collectivist” measures enacted in the critical years reveal that only exceptionally was the interest of any single class involved, and if so, that interest could be rarely described as economic. Assuredly no “shortsighted economic interests” were served by an act authorizing town authorities to take over neglected ornamental spaces; by regulations requiring the cleaning of bakehouses with hot water and soap at least once in six months; or an act making compulsory the testing of cables and anchors. Such measures simply responded to the needs of an industrial civilization with which market methods were unable to cope. The great majority of these interventions had no direct, and hardly more than an indirect, bearing on incomes. This was true practically of all laws relating to health and homesteads, public amenities and libraries, factory conditions, and social insurance. No less was it true of public utilities, education, transportation, and numberless other matters. But even where money values were involved, they were secondary to other interests. Almost invariably professional status, safety and security, the form of a man’s life, the breadth of his existence, the stability of his environment were in question. The monetary importance of some typical interventions, such as customs tariffs, or workmen’s compensation, should in no way be minimized. But even in these cases nonmonetary interests were inseparable from monetary ones. Customs tariffs which implied profits for capitalists and wages for workers meant, ultimately, security against unemployment, stabilization of regional conditions, assurance against liquidation of industries, and, perhaps most of all, the avoidance of that painful loss of status which inevitably accompanies transference to a job at which a man is less skilled and experienced than his own.
Once we are rid of the obsession that only sectional, never general, interests can become effective, as well as of the twin prejudice of restricting the interests of human groups to their monetary income, the breadth and comprehensiveness of the protectionist movement lose their mystery. While monetary interests are necessarily voiced solely by the persons to whom they pertain, other interests have a wider constituency. They affect individuals in innumerable ways as neighbors, professional persons, consumers, pedestrians, commuters, sportsmen, hikers, gardeners, patients, mothers, or lovers—and are accordingly capable of representation by almost any type of territorial or functional association such as churches, townships, fraternal lodges, clubs, trade unions, or, most commonly, political parties based on broad principles of adherence. An all too narrow conception of interest must in effect lead to a warped vision of social and political history, and no purely monetary definition of interests can leave room for that vital need for social protection, the representation of which commonly falls to the persons in charge of the general interests of the community—under modern conditions, the governments of the day. Precisely because not the economic but the social interests of different cross sections of the population were threatened by the market, persons belonging to various economic strata unconsciously joined forces to meet the danger.
The spread of the market was thus both advanced and obstructed by the action of class forces. Given the need of machine production for the establishment of a market system, the trading classes alone were in the position to take the lead in that early transformation. A new class of entrepreneurs came into being out of the remnants of older classes, in order to take charge of a development which was consonant with the interests of the community as a whole. But if the rise of the industrialists, entrepreneurs, and capitalists was the result of their leading role in the expansionist movement, the defense fell to the traditional landed classes and the nascent working class. And if among the trading community it was the capitalists’ lot to stand for the structural principles of the market system, the role of the die-hard defender of the social fabric was the portion of the feudal aristocracy on the one hand, the rising industrial proletariat on the other. But while the landed classes would naturally seek the solution for all evils in the maintenance of the past, the workers were, up to a point, in the position to transcend the limits of a market society and to borrow solutions from the future. This does not imply that the return to feudalism or the proclamation of socialism was among the possible lines of action; but it does indicate the entirely different direction in which agrarians and urban working-class forces tended to seek for relief in an emergency. If market economy broke down, as in every major crisis it threatened to do, the landed classes might attempt a return to a military or feudal regime of paternalism, while the factory workers would see the need for the establishment of a cooperative commonwealth of labor. In a crisis “responses” might point toward mutually exclusive solutions. A mere clash of class interests, which otherwise would have been met by compromise, was invested with a fatal significance.
All this should warn us against relying too much on the economic interests of given classes in the explanation of history. Such an approach would tacitly imply the givenness of those classes in a sense in which this is possible only in an indestructible society. It leaves outside its range those critical phases of history, when a civilization has broken down or is passing through a transformation, when as a rule new classes are formed, sometimes within the briefest space of time, out of the ruins of older classes, or even out of extraneous elements like foreign adventurers or outcasts. Frequently, at a historical juncture new classes have been called into being simply by virtue of the demands of the time. Ultimately, therefore, it is the relation of a class to society as a whole which maps out its part in the drama; and its success is determined by the breadth and variety of the interests, other than its own, which it is able to serve. Indeed, no policy of narrow class interest can safeguard even that interest well—a rule which allows of but few exceptions. Unless the alternative to the social setup is a plunge into utter destruction, no crudely selfish class can maintain itself in the lead.
In order to fix safely the blame on the alleged collectivist conspiracy, economic liberals must ultimately deny that any need for the protection of society had arisen. Recently they acclaimed views of some scholars who had rejected the traditional doctrine of the Industrial Revolution according to which a catastrophe broke in upon the unfortunate labouring classes of England about the 1790s. Nothing in the nature of a sudden deterioration of standards, according to these writers, ever overwhelmed the common people. They were, on the average, substantially better off after than before the introduction of the factory system, and, as to numbers, nobody could deny their rapid increase. By the accepted yardsticks of economic welfare—real wages and population figures—the Inferno of early capitalism, they maintained, never existed; the working classes, far from being exploited, were economically the gainers and to argue the need for social protection against a system that benefited all was obviously impossible.
Critics of liberal capitalism were baffled. For some seventy yea
rs, scholars and Royal Commissions alike had denounced the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, and a galaxy of poets, thinkers, and writers had branded its cruelties. It was deemed an established fact that the masses were being sweated and starved by the callous exploiters of their helplessness; that enclosures had deprived the country folk of their homes and plots, and thrown them on the labor market created by the Poor Law Reform and that the authenticated tragedies of the small children who were sometimes worked to death in mines and factories offered ghastly proof of the destitution of the masses. Indeed, the familiar explanation of the Industrial Revolution rested on the degree of exploitation made possible by eighteenth-century enclosures; or the low wages offered to homeless workers which accounted for the high profits of the cotton industry as well as the rapid accumulation of capital in the hands of the early manufacturers. And the charge against them was exploitation, a boundless exploitation of their fellow citizens that was the root cause of so much misery and debasement. All this was now apparently refuted. Economic historians proclaimed the message that the black shadow that overcast the early decades of the factory system had been dispelled. For how could there be social catastrophe where there was undoubtedly economic improvement?
Actually, of course, a social calamity is primarily a cultural not an economic phenomenon that can be measured by income figures or population statistics. Cultural catastrophes involving broad strata of the common people can naturally not be frequent; but neither are cataclysmic events like the Industrial Revolution—an economic earthquake which transformed within less than half a century vast masses of the inhabitants of the English countryside from settled folk into shiftless migrants. But if such destructive landslides are exceptional in the history of classes, they are a common occurrence in the sphere of culture contact between peoples of various races. Intrinsically, the conditions are the same. The difference is mainly that a social class forms part of a society inhabiting the same geographical area, while culture contact occurs usually between societies settled in different geographical regions. In both cases the contact may have a devastating effect on the weaker part. Not economic exploitation, as often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is then the cause of the degradation. The economic process may, naturally, supply the vehicle of the destruction, and almost invariably economic inferiority will make the weaker yield, but the immediate cause of his undoing is not for that reason economic; it lies in the lethal injury to the institutions in which his social existence is embodied. The result is loss of self-respect and standards, whether the unit is a people or a class, whether the process springs from so-called culture conflict or from a change in the position of a class within the confines of a society.
To the student of early capitalism the parallel is highly significant. The condition of some native tribes in modern Africa carries an unmistakable resemblance to that of the English laboring classes during the early years of the nineteenth century. The Kaffir of South Africa, a noble savage, than whom none felt socially more secure in his native kraal, has been transformed into a human variety of half-domesticated animal dressed in the “unrelated, the filthy, the unsightly rags that not the most degenerated white man would wear,”* a nondescript being, without self-respect or standards, veritable human refuse. The description recalls the portrait Robert Owen drew of his own workpeople, when addressing them in New Lanark, telling them to their faces, coolly and objectively as a social researcher might record the facts, why they had become the degraded rabble which they were; and the true cause of their degradation could not be more aptly described than by their existing in a “cultural vacuum”—the term used by an anthropologist† to describe the cause of the cultural debasement of some of the valiant black tribes of Africa under the influence of contact with white civilization. Their crafts have decayed, the political and social conditions of their existence have been destroyed, they are dying from boredom, in Rivers’s famous phrase, or wasting their lives and substance in dissipation. While their own culture offers them no longer any objective worthy of effort or sacrifice, racial snobbishness and prejudice bar the way to their adequate participation in the culture of the white intruders.‡ Substitute social bar for color bar and the Two Nations of the 1840s emerge, the Kaffir having been appropriately replaced by the shambling slum-dweller of Kingsley’s novels.
Some who would readily agree that life in a cultural void is no life at all nevertheless seem to expect that economic needs would automatically fill that void and make life appear livable under whatever conditions. This assumption is sharply contradicted by the result of anthropological research. “The goals for which individuals will work are culturally determined, and are not a response of the organism to an external culturally undefined situation, like a simple scarcity of food,” says Dr. Mead. “The process by which a group of savages is converted into gold-miners or ship’s crew or merely robbed of all incentive to effort and left to die painlessly beside streams still filled with fish, may seem so bizarre, so alien to the nature of society and its normal functioning as to be pathological,” yet, she adds, “precisely this will, as a rule, happen to a people in the midst of violent externally introduced, or at least externally produced change.…” She concludes: “This rude contact, this uprooting of simple peoples from their mores, is too frequent to be undeserving of serious attention on the part of the social historian.”
However, the social historian fails to take the hint. He still refuses to see that the elemental force of culture contact, which is now revolutionizing the colonial world, is the same which, a century ago, created the dismal scenes of early capitalism. An anthropologist* drew the general inference: “In spite of numerous divergencies there are at the bottom the same predicaments among the exotic peoples to-day as there were among us decades or centuries ago. The new technical devices, the new knowledge, the new forms of wealth and power enhanced the social mobility, i.e. migration of individuals, rise and fall of families, differentiation of groups, new forms of leadership, new models of life, different valuations.” Thurnwald’s penetrating mind recognized that the cultural catastrophe of black society today is closely analogous to that of a large part of white society in the early days of capitalism. The social historian alone still misses the point of the analogy.
Nothing obscures our social vision as effectively as the economistic prejudice. So persistently has exploitation been put into the forefront of the colonial problem that the point deserves special attention. Also, exploitation in a humanly obvious sense has been perpetrated so often, so persistently, and with such ruthlessness on the backward peoples of the world by the white man that it would seem to argue utter insensibility not to accord it pride of place in any discussion of the colonial problem. Yet, it is precisely this emphasis put on exploitation which tends to hide from our view the even greater issue of cultural degradation. If exploitation is defined in strictly economic terms as a permanent inadequacy of ratios of exchange, it is doubtful whether, as a matter of fact, there was exploitation. The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim (whether force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether relevant). These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is forced upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into commodities, which, again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society. Changes in income and population figures are evidently incommensurable with such a process. Who, for instance, would care to deny that a formerly free people dragged into slavery was exploited, though their standard of life, in some artificial sense, may have been improved in the country to which they were sold as compared with what it was in their native bush? And yet nothing would be altered if we assumed that the conquered natives had been left free and not even been made to overpay the cheap cotton goods thrust upon them, and that their starvation was “merely” c
aused by the disruption of their social institutions.
To cite the famous instance of India. Indian masses in the second half of the nineteenth century did not die of hunger because they were exploited by Lancashire; they perished in large numbers because the Indian village community had been demolished. That this was brought about by forces of economic competition, namely, the permanent underselling of hand-woven chaddar by machine-made piece goods, is doubtless true; but it proves the opposite of economic exploitation, since dumping implies the reverse of surcharge. The actual source of famines in the past fifty years was the free marketing of grain combined with local failure of incomes. Failure of crops was, of course, part of the picture, but despatch of grain by rail made it possible to send relief to the threatened areas; the trouble was that the people were unable to buy the corn at rocketing prices, which on a free but incompletely organized market were bound to be the reaction to a shortage. In former times small local stores had been held against harvest failure, but these had been now discontinued or swept away into the big market. Famine prevention for this reason now usually took the form of public works to enable the population to buy at enhanced prices. The three or four large famines that decimated India under British rule since the Rebellion were thus neither a consequence of the elements, nor of exploitation, but simply of the new market organization of labor and land which broke up the old village without actually resolving its problems. While under the regime of feudalism and of the village community, noblesse oblige, clan solidarity, and regulation of the corn market checked famines, under the rule of the market the people could not be prevented from starving according to the rules of the game. The term “exploitation” describes but ill a situation which became really grave only after the East India Company’s ruthless monopoly was abolished and free trade was introduced into India. Under the monopolists the situation had been fairly kept in hand with the help of the archaic organization of the countryside, including free distribution of corn, while under free and equal exchange Indians perished by the million. Economically, India may have been—and, in the long run, certainly was—benefited, but socially she was disorganized and thus thrown a prey to misery and degradation.