The Great Transformation

by Karl Polanyi

  If the trading class was the protagonist of market economy, the banker was the born leader of that class. Employment and earnings depended upon the profitability of business, but the profitability of business depended upon stable exchanges and sound credit conditions, both of which were under the care of the banker. It was part of his creed that the two were inseparable. A sound budget and stable internal credit conditions presupposed stable foreign exchanges; also exchanges could not be stable unless domestic credit was safe and the financial household of the state in equilibrium. Briefly, the banker’s twin trust comprised sound domestic finance and external stability of the currency. That is why when both had lost their meaning bankers as a class were the last to notice it. There is indeed nothing surprising either in the dominating influence of international bankers in the 1920s, nor in their eclipse in the 1930s. In the 1920s, the gold standard was still regarded as the precondition of a return to stability and prosperity, and consequently no demand raised by its professional guardians, the bankers, was deemed too burdensome, if only it promised to secure stable exchange rates; when, after 1929, this proved impossible, the imperative need was for a stable internal currency and nobody was as little qualified to provide it as the banker.

  In no field was the breakdown of market economy as abrupt as in that of money. Agrarian tariffs interfering with the importing of the produce of foreign lands broke up free trade; the narrowing and regulating of the labor market restricted bargaining to that which the law left to the parties to decide. But neither in the case of labor nor in that of land was there a formal sudden and complete rift in the market mechanism such as happened in the field of money. There was nothing comparable in the other markets to the relinquishing of the gold standard by Great Britain on September 21, 1931; nor even to the subsidiary event of America’s similar action, in June, 1933. Though by that time the Great Depression which began in 1929 had swept away the major part of world trade, this meant no change in methods, nor did it affect the ruling ideas. But final failure of the gold standard was the final failure of market economy.

  Economic liberalism had started a hundred years before and had been met by a protectionist countermove, which now broke into the last bastion of market economy. A new set of ruling ideas superseded the world of the self-regulating market. To the stupefaction of the vast majority of contemporaries, unsuspected forces of charismatic leadership and autarchist isolationism broke forth and fused societies into new forms.

  * The underlying theory has been elaborated by F. Schafer, Wellington, New Zealand.

  C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N

  Self-Regulation Impaired

  In the half-century 1879–1929, Western societies developed into close-knit units, in which powerful disruptive strains were latent. The more immediate source of this development was the impaired self-regulation of market economy. Since society was made to conform to the needs of the market mechanism, imperfections in the functioning of that mechanism created cumulative strains in the body social.

  Impaired self-regulation was an effect of protectionism. There is a sense, of course, in which markets are always self-regulating, since they tend to produce a price which clears the market; this, however, is true of all markets, whether free or not. But as we have already shown, a self-regulating market system implies something very different, namely, markets for the elements of production—labor, land, and money. Since the working of such markets threatens to destroy society, the self-preserving action of the community was meant to prevent their establishment or to interfere with their free functioning, once established.

  America has been adduced by economic liberals as conclusive proof of the ability of a market economy to function. For a century, labor, land, and money were traded in the States with complete freedom, yet allegedly no measures of social protection were needed, and apart from customs tariffs, industrial life continued unhampered by government interference.

  The explanation, of course, was simply free labor, land, and money. Up to the 1890s the frontier was open and free land lasted;* up to the Great War the supply of low standard labor flowed freely; and up to the turn of the century there was no commitment to keep foreign exchanges stable. A free supply of land, labor, and money continued to be available; consequently no self-regulating market system was in existence. As long as these conditions prevailed, neither man, nor nature, nor business organization needed protection of the kind that only intervention can provide.

  As soon as these conditions ceased to exist, social protection set in. As the lower ranges of labor could not any more be freely replaced from an inexhaustible reservoir of immigrants, while its higher ranges were unable to settle freely on the land; as soil and natural resources became scarce and had to be husbanded; as the gold standard was introduced in order to remove the currency from politics and to link domestic trade with that of the world, the United States caught up with a century of European development: protection of the soil and its cultivators, social security for labor through unionism and legislation, and central banking—all on the largest scale—made their appearance. Monetary protectionism came first: the establishment of the Federal Reserve System was intended to harmonize the needs of the gold standard with regional requirements; protectionism in respect to labor and land followed. A decade of prosperity in the twenties sufficed to bring on a depression so fierce that in its course the New Deal started to build a moat around labor and land, wider than any ever known in Europe. Thus America offered striking proof, both positive and negative, of our thesis that social protection was the accompaniment of a supposedly self-regulating market.

  At the same time protectionism was everywhere producing the hard shell of the emerging unit of social life. The new entity was cast in the national mold, but had otherwise only little resemblance to its predecessors, the easygoing nations of the past. The new crustacean type of nation expressed its identity through national token currencies safeguarded by a type of sovereignty more jealous and absolute than anything known before. These currencies were also spotlighted from outside, since it was of them that the international gold standard (the chief instrument of world economy) was constructed. If money now avowedly ruled the world, that money was stamped with a national die.

  Such emphasis on nations and currencies would have been incomprehensible to liberals, whose minds habitually missed the true characteristics of the world they were living in. If the nation was deemed by them an anachronism, national currencies were reckoned not even worthy of attention. No self-respecting economist of the liberal age doubted the irrelevance of the fact that different pieces of paper were called differently on different sides of political frontiers. Nothing was simpler than to change one denomination for another by the use of the exchange market, an institution which could not fail to function since, luckily, it was not under the control of the state or the politician. Western Europe was passing through a new Enlightenment and high amongst its bugbears ranked the “tribalistic” concept of the nation, whose alleged sovereignty was to liberals an outcrop of parochial thinking. Up to the 1930s the economic Baedeker included the certain information that money was only an instrument of exchange and thus inessential by definition. The blind spot of the marketing mind was equally insensitive to the phenomena of the nation and of money. The free trader was a nominalist in regard to both.

  This connection was highly significant, yet it passed unnoticed at the time. Off and on, critics of free-trade doctrines as well as critics of orthodox doctrines on money arose, but there was hardly anyone who recognized that these two sets of doctrines were stating the same case in different terms and that if one was false the other was equally so. William Cunningham or Adolph Wagner showed up cosmopolitan free-trade fallacies, but did not link them with money; on the other hand, Macleod or Gesell attacked classical money theories while adhering to a cosmopolitan trading system. The constitutive importance of the currency in establishing the nation as the decisive economic and political unit of the time was as tho
roughly overlooked by the writers of liberal Enlightenment as the existence of history had been by their eighteenth-century predecessors. Such was the position upheld by the most brilliant economic thinkers from Ricardo to Wieser, from John Stuart Mill to Marshall and Wicksell, while the common run of the educated were brought up to believe that preoccupation with the economic problem of the nation or the currency marked a person with the stigma of inferiority. To combine these fallacies in the monstrous proposition that national currencies played a vital part in the institutional mechanism of our civilization would have been judged a pointless paradox, devoid of sense and meaning.

  Actually, the new national unit and the new national currency were inseparable. It was currency which provided national and international systems with their mechanics and introduced into the picture those features which resulted in the abruptness of the break. The monetary system on which credit was based had become the life line of both national and international economy.

  Protectionism was a three-pronged drive. Land, labor, and money, each played their part, but while land and labor were linked to definite even though broad social strata, such as the workers or the peasantry, monetary protectionism was, to a greater extent, a national factor, often fusing diverse interests into a collective whole. Though monetary policy, too, could divide as well as unite, objectively the monetary system was the strongest among the economic forces integrating the nation.

  Labor and land accounted, primarily, for social legislation and corn duties, respectively. Farmers would protest against burdens that benefited the laborer and raised wages, while laborers would object to any increase in food prices. But once corn laws and labor laws were in force—in Germany since the early 1880s—it would become difficult to remove the one without removing the other. Between agricultural and industrial tariffs, the relationship was even closer. Since the idea of all-round protectionism had been popularized by Bismarck (1879), the political alliance of landowners and industrialists for the reciprocal safeguarding of tariffs had been a feature of German politics; tariff log-rolling was as common as the setting up of cartels in order to secure private benefits from tariffs.

  Internal and external, social and national protectionism tended to fuse.* The rising cost of living induced by corn laws invited the manufacturer’s demand for protective tariffs, which he rarely failed to utilize as an implement of cartel policy. Trade unions naturally insisted on higher wages to compensate for an increased cost of living, and could not well object to such customs tariffs as permitted the employer to meet an inflated wage bill. But once the accountancy of social legislation had been based on a wage level conditioned by tariffs, employers could not in fairness be expected to carry the burden of such legislation unless they were assured of continued protection. Incidentally, this was the slender factual basis of the charge of collectivist conspiracy allegedly responsible for the protectionist movement. But this mistook effect for cause. The origins of the movement were spontaneous and widely dispersed, but once started it could not, of course, fail to create parallel interests which were committed to its continuation.

  More important than similarity of interests was the uniform spread of actual conditions created by the combined effects of such measures. If life in different countries was different, as had always been the case, the disparity could now be traced to definite legislative and administrative acts of a protective intent, since conditions of production and labor were now mainly dependent on tariffs, taxation, and social laws. Even before the United States and the British dominions restricted immigration, the number of emigrants from the United Kingdom dwindled, in spite of severe unemployment, admittedly on account of the much improved social climate of the mother country.

  But if customs tariffs and social laws produced an artificial climate, monetary policy created what amounted to veritable artificial weather conditions varying day by day and affecting every member of the community in his immediate interests. The integrating power of monetary policy surpassed by far that of the other kinds of protectionism, with their slow and cumbersome apparatus, for the influence of monetary protection was ever active and ever changing. What the businessman, the organized worker, the housewife pondered, what the farmer who was planning his crop, the parents who were weighing their children’s chances, the lovers who were waiting to get married, revolved in their minds when considering the favor of the times, was more directly determined by the monetary policy of the central bank than by any other single factor. And if this was true even with a stable currency, it became incomparably truer when the currency was unstable, and the fatal decision to inflate or deflate had to be taken. Politically, the nation’s identity was established by the government; economically it was vested in the central bank.

  Internationally, the monetary system assumed, if possible, even greater importance. The freedom of money was, paradoxically enough, a result of restrictions on trade. For the more numerous became the obstacles to the movement of goods and men across frontiers, the more effectively had the freedom of payments to be safeguarded. Short-term money moved at an hour’s notice from any point of the globe to another; the modalities of international payments between governments and between private corporations or individuals were uniformly regulated; the repudiation of foreign debts, or attempts to tamper with budgetary guarantees, even on the part of backward governments, was deemed an outrage, and was punished by relegation to the outer darkness of those unworthy of credit. In all matters relevant to the world monetary system, similar institutions were established everywhere, such as representative bodies, written constitutions defining their jurisdiction and regulating the publication of budgets, the promulgation of laws, the ratification of treaties, the methods of incurring financial obligations, the rules of public accountancy, the rights of foreigners, the jurisdiction of courts, the domicile of bills of exchange, and thus, by implication, the status of the bank of issue, of foreign bondholders, of creditors of all description. This involved conformity in the use of banknotes and specie, of postal regulations, and in stock exchange and banking methods. No government, except perhaps the most powerful, could afford to disregard the taboos of money. For international purposes the currency was the nation; and no nation could for any length of time exist outside the international scheme.

  In contrast to men and goods, money was free from all hampering measures and continued to develop its capacity of transacting business at any distance at any time. The more difficult it became to shift actual objects, the easier it became to transmit claims to them. While trade in commodities and services was slowed down and its balance swayed precariously, the balance of payments was almost automatically kept liquid with the help of short-term loans that flitted over the globe, and funding operations that only faintly took note of visible trade. Payments, debts, and claims remained unaffected by the mounting barriers erected against the exchange of goods; the rapidly growing elasticity and catholicity of the international monetary mechanism was compensating, in a way, for the ever-contracting channels of world trade. When, by the early 1930s, world trade was down to a trickle, international short-term lending attained an unheard-of degree of mobility. As long as the mechanism of international capital movements and short credits functioned, no disequilibrium of actual trade was too great to be overcome by methods of bookkeeping. Social dislocation was avoided with the help of credit movements; economic imbalance was righted by financial means.

  In the last resort, impaired self-regulation of the market led to political intervention. When the trade cycle failed to come round and restore employment, when imports failed to produce exports, when bank reserve regulations threatened business with a panic, when foreign debtors refused to pay, governments had to respond to the strain. In an emergency the unity of society asserted itself through the medium of intervention.

  How far the state was induced to interfere depended on the constitution of the political sphere and on the degree of economic distress. As long as the vote was restricted and only
the few exerted political influence, interventionism was a much less urgent problem than it became after universal suffrage made the state the organ of the ruling million—the identical million who, in the economic realm, had often to carry in bitterness the burden of the ruled. And as long as employment was plentiful, incomes were secure, production was continuous, living standards were dependable, and prices were stable, interventionist pressure was naturally less than it became when protracted slumps made industry a wreckage of unused tools and frustrated effort.

  Internationally, also, political methods were used to supplement the imperfect self-regulation of the market. Ricardian trade and currency theory vainly ignored the difference in status existing between the various countries owing to their different wealth-producing capacity, exporting facilities, trading, shipping, and banking experience. In the liberal theory Great Britain was merely another atom in the universe of trade and ranked precisely on the same footing as Denmark or Guatemala. Actually, the world counted a limited number of countries, divided into lending countries and borrowing countries, exporting countries and practically self-sufficient ones, countries with varied exports and such as depended for their imports and foreign borrowing on the sale of a single commodity like wheat or coffee. Such differences could be ignored by theory, but their consequences could not be equally disregarded in practice. Frequently overseas countries found themselves unable to discharge their foreign debts, their currencies depreciated, endangering their solvency; sometimes they decided to right the balance by political means and interfered with the property of foreign investors. In none of these cases could the process of economic self-healing be relied upon, though according to classical doctrine those processes would unfailingly reimburse the creditor, restore the currency and safeguard the foreigner against the recurrence of similar losses. But this would have required that the countries concerned should be more or less equal participants in a system of world division of labor, which was emphatically not the case. It was idle to expect that the country whose currency slumped would automatically increase its exports, and thereby restore its balance of payments, or that its need for foreign capital would invariably compel it to compensate the foreigner and resume the service of its debt. Increased sales of coffee or nitrates, for instance, might knock the bottom out of the market, and repudiation of a usurious foreign debt might appear preferable to a depreciation of the national currency. The world market mechanism could not afford to run such risks. Instead, gunboats were dispatched on the spot and the defaulting government, whether fraudulent or not, faced with the alternative of bombardment or settlement. No other method was available to enforce payment, avoid great losses, and keep the system going. A similar practice was used to induce colonial peoples to recognize the advantages of trade, when the theoretically unfailing argument of mutual advantage was not promptly—or perhaps not at all—grasped by the natives. Even more evident was the need for interventionist methods, if the region in question happened to be rich in raw materials required for European manufactures, while no pre-established harmony ensured the emergence of a craving after European manufactures on the part of the natives whose natural wants had previously taken an entirely different direction. Of course, none of these difficulties was supposed to arise under an allegedly self-regulating system. But the more often repayments were made only under the threat of armed intervention, the more often trade routes were kept open only with the help of gunboats, the more often trade followed the flag, while the flag followed the need of invading governments, the more patent it became that political instruments had to be used in order to maintain equilibrium in world economy.