Karl Polanyi. Группа авторов

LEVITT: Yes and no. You know, my father wherever he lived was engaged in whatever was going on. He wrote articles for the general public, for whomever would read what he had to say – published by whoever would publish whatever it was. In Hungary it was like that. In Vienna it was like that. In England too. So, he was really engaged with the present. He was an intellectual, yes. But he was not an intellectual with an idée fixe, an obsession which they nurture, and who, wherever they go – from one place to another – take the same idea with them. No, no. Not at all. My mother had really started her activities with a very high-profile participation as a remarkable young woman in the Hungarian Revolution: in a way, there was nothing she could do for the rest of her life that quite equalled that. And there was a certain sadness about her. You know, when you achieve at a very early age what you really aspire to do – which is to play an obviously important role in history, in this case, in the communist socialist movement – whatever you do for the rest of your life never quite lives up to that.

       So they both had their sad experiences but then in 1923, something very special happened. You were born! And your parents were rejuvenated.

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, according to his own account, my birth helped to pull my father out of depression, which was, like all such things, a private experience. Nevertheless, he wrote a lot about it. He wrote about what he felt was the responsibility of his generation for all the awful things that had happened, particularly the terrible, meaningless, stupid war. He wrote a lot about the First World War – how it really changed very little. It was never very clear – according to him – what it was really about. It was just a terrible massacre. A human disaster. And he felt the responsibility of his generation. And that sense of responsibility – social responsibility for the state of the world, the state of the country – I wonder whether it was an attribute of that generation, and whether that sense of responsibility has passed. Do we still have people – including intellectuals – who bear a sense of responsibility for our society, in the way he and many others of his generation did?

       This was a very special generation, indeed, and for many reasons. But one of the reasons was Red Vienna – the socialist reconstruction of Vienna from 1918 to 1933, overlapping the years that your father was also in Vienna.

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, Red Vienna was an amazing episode in history – a remarkable experiment in municipal socialism. It was really a situation in which workers were privileged, and were privileged socially – in terms of the services, in terms of the wonderful collective tenements that were built; Karl-Marx-Hof, of course, being the outstanding example. But not only that. The atmosphere and the cultural level were very unusual, marked by the fact that somebody like Karl Polanyi, who had no status and was not employed by any university, gave public lectures on socialism and other matters. He could challenge the market-oriented thinking of Ludwig von Mises in an established financial journal. Mises would reply, and my father would respond. There was an intellectual life outside the university, in the community.

       What do you remember of this period?

      POLANYI LEVITT: I was only a child, but I do remember the wonderful summer camps in the most desirable lakes in Salzburg that were all organized by the socialist movement. And the people came from all over the world to look at Red Vienna, as an example of modern urbanism at its best. Although neither of my parents had great affection for social democracy, both of them conceded later in life that those years in Vienna – so-called Red Vienna – were remarkable, and laudable. It was the only time I ever heard my mother say anything laudable about social democrats. My father, as a matter of fact, was no big enthusiast either.

       In 1922 your father wrote his famous article on socialist calculation, which is a sort of celebration of another vision of socialism – Guild Socialism – that was also influenced by Vienna’s municipal socialism.

      POLANYI LEVITT: Well, look. At that time there was no country in the world that had a socialist economy, right? Russia was emerging out of a brutal civil war. So, there was an intellectual debate on the possibility of organizing a socialist national economy. And Mises fired the first shot. He was the one who wrote the article to say that this was impossible – because without price making markets, there was no rational way of allocating resources. I’m sure most of you who study economics are familiar with this argument. And then Polanyi challenged this with a model of associational cooperative socialism, based partly on Otto Bauer, and partly on G.D.H. Cole.

       What was your father’s view of the Russian Revolution of 1917, when he was in Vienna?

      POLANYI LEVITT: Well, first of all, the first Russian Revolution in 1917 – the February Revolution – was the one that ended the war. His view was that this was wonderful, because like just about everyone in Hungary he wanted the war to end. The war was extremely unpopular. Then the war finished. The initial Russian Revolution was welcomed, I think.

       What about the October Revolution?

      POLANYI LEVITT: For Polanyi both the February and October Revolutions were bourgeois revolutions. They were the last wave that followed the French Revolution and had crossed Europe – and had finally reached the most backward country in Europe, which was Russia. So that’s how he put it.

       So the true revolution comes later with the move toward collectivization and five-year plans?

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes. I think he would say that socialism came only with the Five-Year Plan, after 1928 or 1929. Prior to that, Russia was a predominately peasant country, an agricultural country. We now have an interesting article written in Bennington in 1940, which has recently come to light. There he talks about Russia’s internal dilemma. To put it simply: the working class, which was the basis of the Communist Party, controlled the cities and was dependent on the peasantry, who controlled food supply in the rural areas. But then there was an external dilemma: it was not possible for Russian peasants to export their grain because international markets had collapsed in the Great Depression, grain being the principal export commodity of Russia at the time. This contributed to the decision to undertake the accelerated industrialization of Europe’s most backward country – and to undertake it as a socialist project of nationalization – not only of industry, but also of agriculture.

       So this is already paradoxical, right? Because of course hitherto we hear him endorsing the social revolutionaries and the idea of a participatory democracy, but now it seems he endorsed Stalinism.

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes. But as has been pointed out by other people, also regarding my father’s life, it was very contextual. And precisely what is so attractive about his thinking – but also makes it sometimes contradictory – is that it does not proceed from a single principle, so to speak. It proceeds from situations, and their possibilities. This is the first polarity: reality, and freedom – what is the real situation and what are the possibilities for Russia at that time? You have a revolution that is led by a proletarian party. You have a peasantry that did not want to be nationalized – they wanted to own the land. And they did. And they had a lot of power, controlling the food supply. And then you had an international situation. Shortly after, you had fascism in the 1930s. Only in England, does my father really become a strong supporter of the Soviet Union, and it was in the context of the impending conflict with German expansionism and Nazism.

       So your father leaves Vienna in 1933.

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, he left Vienna because of the impending fascism. A decision was made by the editorial committee of the famous economic journal Der Österreichische Volkswirt, where he was then a leading editorial figure, that Polanyi should go to England because the political situation was tenuous. His English was excellent. He had contacts. So he went to England in 1933. He continued to contribute articles from England until the journal ceased publication in 1938. We didn’t go as a family. My father went in 1933. I was sent to England in 1934, and went to live with very close English friends, Donald and Irene Grant, whom we had known well in Vienna. They were Christian socialists working for the Student Christian Movement of Britain, handing out