Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left by Gareth Dale (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left by Gareth Dale
This vibrant and erudite biography explores Polanyi's Jewish-Central European upbringing, Anglo-American exile, and intellectual accomplishments. His outstanding achievement was The Great Transformation (1944), which analyzed the nineteenth-century rupture caused by the Industrial Revolution in Britain when the commodification of land and labor destroyed communitarian assistance for the poor. Polanyi reasoned that a society subjected only to the laws of the market must self-destruct. Hatred of markets' asocial individualism plus Christian/socialist universalism might explain how this rather consistent apologist for the Stalinist Soviet Union believed that he could synthesize "individual integrity" and "community life." Polanyi's commitment to the work ethic—like that of George Orwell—contradicted his "democratic" productivism. He imagined that the "dispersion of education among factory workers" transformed "in a mysterious way" the nature of manual labor. He deduced that workers must end restrictive trade-union practices, absenteeism, and wildcat strikes.
Like his subject, Dale paints an overly idealistic picture of interwar "Red Vienna," where workers supposedly ruled, and alcoholism and other vices allegedly declined. Nor does Dale remark that Polanyi's analysis of fascism had a skewed Central European orientation and repeated the communist analysis which identified fascism with bourgeois capitalism. Polanyi asserted that capitalism was inevitably hostile to democracy, omitting the successful and ultimately triumphant development of conservative or counterrevolutionary antifascism in the United States, United Kingdom, and Western Europe of the Resistance. After World War II, his critique of the market led him to become sympathetic to "nonmarket" and "primitive" societies. Like the New Left, he became more unfavorable to productivism. His distrust of markets and the challenges of replacing them remain relevant. [End Page 179]
Michael Seidman is professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. His first book, Workers against Work: Labor in Barcelona and Paris during the Popular Fronts, 1936–38, has been translated into six languages. Other publications include Republic of Egos: A Social History of the Spanish Civil War; The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968; The Victorious Counterrevolution: The Nationalist Effort in the Spanish Civil War; and, most recently, Transatlantic Antifascisms from the Spanish Civil War to the End of World War II.
