The Great Transformation

by Karl Polanyi

  To Owenism with its claim to man as a whole there still clung something of that medieval inheritance of corporative life which found expression in the Builders’ Guild and in the rural scene of its social ideal, the Villages of Cooperation. Although it was the fount of modern socialism, its proposals were not based on the property issue, which is the legal aspect only of capitalism. In hitting on the new phenomenon of industry, as Saint-Simon had done, it recognized the challenge of the machine. But the characteristic trait in Owenism was that it insisted on the social approach: it refused to accept the division of society into an economic and political sphere, and, in effect, rejected political action on that account. The acceptance of a separate economic sphere would have implied the recognition of the principle of gain and profit as the organizing force in society. This Owen refused to do. His genius recognized that the incorporation of the machine was possible only in a new society. For him the industrial aspect of things was in no way restricted to the economic (this would have implied a marketing view of society which he rejected). New Lanark had taught him that in a worker’s life wages was only one among many factors such as natural and home surroundings, quality and prices of commodities, stability of employment, and security of tenure. (The factories of New Lanark like some other firms before them kept their employees on the payroll even when there was no work for them to do.) But much more than that was comprised in the adjustment. The education of children and adults, provision for entertainment, dance, and music, and the general assumption of high moral and personal standards of old and young created the atmosphere in which a new status was attained by the industrial population as a whole. Thousands of persons from all over Europe (and even America) visited New Lanark as if it were a reservation of the future in which had been accomplished the impossible feat of running a successful factory business with a human population. Yet Owen’s firm paid considerably lower wages than those current in some neighboring towns. The profits of New Lanark sprang mainly from the high productivity of labor on shorter hours, due to excellent organization and rested men, advantages which outweighed the increase in real wages involved in the generous provisions for a decent life. But the latter alone explain the sentiments of all but adulation with which his workers clung to Owen. Out of experiences such as these he extracted the social, that is, wider-than-economic approach to the problem of industry.

  It was another tribute to his insight that in spite of this comprehensive outlook he grasped the incisive nature of the concrete physical facts dominating the laborer’s existence. His religious sense revolted against the practical transcendentalism of a Hannah More and her Cheap Repository Tracts. One of them commended the example of a Lancashire colliery girl. She was taken down the pit, at the age of nine, to act as drawer with her brother, who was two years younger.* “She cheerfully followed him [her father] down into the coal-pit, burying herself in the bowels of the earth, and there at a tender age, without excusing herself on account of her sex, she joined in the same work with the miners, a race of men rough indeed, but highly useful to the community.” The father was killed by an accident down the pit in the sight of his children. She then applied for employment as a servant, but there was a prejudice against her because she had been a collier, and her application failed. Fortunately, by that comforting dispensation by which afflictions are turned into blessings, her bearing and patience attracted notice, inquiries were made at the colliery, and she received such a glowing character that she was taken into employment. “This story,” the tract concluded, “may teach the poor that they can seldom be in any condition of life so low as to prevent their rising to some degree of independence if they choose to exert themselves, and there can be no situation whatever so mean as to forbid the practice of many noble virtues.” The sisters More preferred to work among starving laborers, but refused so much as to be interested in their physical sufferings. They were inclined to solve the physical problem of industrialism by simply conferring status and function on the workers out of the plenitude of their magnanimity. Hannah More insisted that her heroine’s father was a highly useful member of the community; the rank of his daughter was recognized by the acknowledgments of her employers. Hannah More believed that no more was needed for a functioning society.* Robert Owen turned away from a Christianity which renounced the task of mastering the world of man, and preferred to extol the imaginary status and function of Hannah More’s wretched heroine, instead of facing the awful revelation that transcended the New Testament, of man’s condition in a complex society. Nobody can doubt the sincerity which inspired Hannah More’s conviction that the more readily the poor acquiesced in their condition of degradation, the more easily they would turn to the heavenly solaces on which alone she relied both for their salvation and for the smooth functioning of a market society in which she firmly believed. But these empty husks of Christianity on which the inner life of the most generous of the upper classes was vegetating contrasted but poorly with the creative faith of that religion of industry in the spirit of which the common people of England were endeavouring to redeem society. However, capitalism had still a future in store.

  The Chartist Movement appealed to a set of impulses so different that its emergence after the practical failure of Owenism and its premature initiatives might have been almost predicted. It was a purely political effort which made a bid for influence on government through constitutional channels; its attempt to put pressure on the government was on the traditional lines of the Reform Movement which had secured the vote to the middle classes. The Six Points of the Charter demanded an effective popular suffrage. The uncompromising rigidity with which such an extension of the vote was rejected by the Reformed Parliament for a third of a century, the use of force in view of the mass support that was manifest for the Charter, the abhorrence in which the liberals of the 1840s held the idea of popular government all prove that the concept of democracy was foreign to the English middle classes. Only when the working class had accepted the principles of a capitalist economy and the trade unions had made the smooth running of industry their chief concern did the middle classes concede the vote to the better situated workers; that is, long after the Chartist Movement had subsided and it had become certain that the workers would not try to use the franchise in the service of any ideas of their own. From the point of view of the spreading of the market forms of existence this may have been justified, since it helped to overcome the obstacles presented by the surviving organic and traditional forms of life among the laboring people. As to the entirely different task of restoring the common people, whose lives had been uprooted in the Industrial Revolution, and inducting them into the fold of a common national culture, it was left undone. Their investment with the vote at a time when irreparable damage had already been inflicted upon their capacity for sharing in leadership, could not retrieve the position. 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.

  The Chartist Movement was political and thus easier to comprehend than Owenism. Yet it is doubtful whether the emotional intensity, or even the extent of that movement can be realized without some imaginative reference to the times. The years 1789 and 1830 made revolution a regular institution in Europe; in 1848, the date of the Paris rising was actually forecast in Berlin and London with a precision more usual in regard to the opening of a fair than to a social upheaval, and “followup” revolutions broke out promptly in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and some towns of Italy. In London also there was high tension, for everybody, including the Chartists themselves, expected violent action to compel Parliament to grant the vote to the people. (Less than 15 percent of adult males were entitled to vote.) Never in all the history of England was there a comparable concentration of force put in readiness for the defence of law and order as on April 12, 1848; hundreds of thousands of citizens were prepared in the
capacity of special constables to turn their arms against the Chartists on that day. The Paris Revolution came too late to carry a popular movement in England to victory. By that time the spirit of revolt roused by the Poor Law Reform Act as well as by the sufferings of the Hungry Forties was waning; the wave of rising trade was boosting employment, and capitalism began to deliver the goods. The Chartists dispersed peacefully. Their case was not even considered by Parliament until a later time, when their application was defeated by a five-to-one majority in the House of Commons. In vain had millions of signatures been collected. In vain had the Chartists behaved as law-abiding citizens. Their movement was ridiculed out of existence by the victors. Thus ended the greatest political effort of the people of England to constitute that country a popular democracy. A year or two later Chartism was all but forgotten.

  The Industrial Revolution reached the Continent half a century later. There the working class had not been forced off the land by an enclosure movement; rather, the allurements of higher wages and urban life made the semi-servile agricultural laborer desert the manor and migrate to the town, where he consorted with the traditional lower middle class, and had a chance of acquiring an urban tone. Far from feeling debased, he felt elevated by his new environment. Doubtless housing conditions were abominable, alcoholism and prostitution were rampant among the lower strata of town laborers as late as the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet there was no comparison between the moral and cultural catastrophe of the English cottager or copyholder of decent ancestry, who found himself hopelessly sinking in the social and physical slums of some Northwestern factory neighborhood and the Slovakian or, for that matter, Pomeranian agricultural laborer changing almost overnight from a stable-dwelling peon into an industrial worker in a modern metropolis. An Irish or Welsh day laborer or Western Highlander might have had a similar experience when slouching through the alleys of early Manchester or Liverpool; but the English yeoman’s son or the evicted cottager certainly did not feel his status raised. Not only had the recently emancipated farm laborer of the Continent a fair chance of rising into the lower middle class of craftsmen and traders with their ancient cultural traditions, but even the bourgeoisie, which socially towered above him, was politically in the same boat, being almost as removed from the ranks of the actual ruling class as he was himself. Against feudal aristocracy and Roman episcopacy the forces of the rising middle and working classes were closely allied. The intelligentsia, particularly the university students, cemented the union between these two classes in their common attack on absolutism and privilege. In England the middle classes, whether squires and merchants as in the seventeenth century, or farmers and tradesmen as in the nineteenth, were strong enough to vindicate their rights alone, and not even in their near-revolutionary effort in 1832 did they look to the laborers for support. Moreover, the English aristocracy unfailingly assimilated the wealthiest of the newcomers and broadened the top ranks of the social hierarchy, while on the Continent the still semifeudal aristocracy did not intermarry with the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, and the absence of the institution of primogeniture hermetically insulated them from the other classes. Every successful step toward equal rights and liberties thus benefited. Continental middle and working classes alike. Since 1830, if not since 1789, it was part of the Continental tradition that the working class would help to fight the battles of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, if only—as the saying ran—to be cheated by the middle class of the fruits of victory. But whether the working class won or lost, its experience was enhanced, and its aims raised to a political level. This was what was meant by becoming class conscious. Marxian ideologies crystallized the outlook of the urban worker, who had been taught by circumstances to use his industrial and political strength as a weapon of high policy. While the British worker developed an incomparable experience in the personal and social problems of unionism, and left national politics to his “betters,” the Central European worker became a political socialist, expected to deal with problems of statecraft, though primarily with those that concerned his own interests.

  If there was a time lag of some half a century between the industrialization of Great Britain and the Continent, there was a much greater lag in respect to the establishment of national unity. Italy and Germany arrived only during the second half of the nineteenth century at that stage of unification which England achieved centuries before, and smaller East European states reached unity even later. In this process of state-building, the working classes played a vital part, which further enhanced their political experience. In the industrial age such a process could not fail to comprise social policy. Bismarck made a bid for unification of the Second Reich through the introduction of an epochal scheme of social legislation. Italian unity was speeded up by the nationalization of the railways. In the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, that congeries of races and peoples, the Crown itself repeatedly appealed to the laboring classes for support in the work of centralization and imperial unity. In this wider sphere also, through their influence on legislation, the socialist parties and trade unions found many openings for serving the interests of the industrial worker.

  Economistic preconceptions have blurred the outlines of the working-class problem. British writers have found it difficult to comprehend the terrible impression that early capitalistic conditions in Lancashire made on Continental observers. They pointed to the even lower standard of life of many Central European artisans in the textile industries, whose conditions of work were often perhaps just as bad as those of their English comrades. Yet such a comparison obscured the salient point, which was precisely the rise in the social and political status of the laborer on the Continent in contrast to a fall in that status in England. The Continental laborer had not passed through the degrading pauperization of Speenhamland nor was there any parallel in his experience to the scorching fires of the New Poor Law. From the status of a villein he changed—or rather rose—to that of a factory worker, and very soon to that of an enfranchised and unionized worker. Thus he escaped the cultural catastrophe which followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in England. Moreover, the Continent was industrialized at a time when adjustment to the new productive techniques had already become possible, thanks, almost exclusively, to the imitation of English methods of social protection.*