The Meridian of Her Greatness – sam[ ]zdat

Skip to content

On The Great Transformation, suffering, and still using Malick stills for all of my blog posts.

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation

Every so often, a piece thinker trips onto the global stage and says something like: "Sure, people say that they’re unhappy, and they say that it’s the economy, but GDP is steadily growing and a lot of those people are rich. So they’re wrong." Then Donald Trump gets elected or some country ‘exits, and the slightly clammier thinker regurgitates their argument, but this time they punctuate it with: "You dicks."

More nuanced thinkers add a few parentheticals ("2008", "racism", "coastal gains and middle drains", etc.) but they retain the basic structure.

It’s important to understand something: They’re not wrong. They’re just insane.

The same thing happens on the left, this isn’t split across the French National Assembly. It’s something more like "current system" vs. "new/old one", which does sound like "conservative" vs. "other", but doesn’t match any such party we have.

Take Occupy. No, first, take this graph:

Ok. The left is quick to point out inequality, or the fact that poverty still exists. Here’s the counter: though inequality might be a problem, it’s not clear that it’s the problem. Our society has made everyone richer by [expression for large multiplier here]. Boats and tides, something about rising-but-not-like-Bane-rising, etc. Man’s root state, after all, is not wealth but poverty. If we started with very little, and then capitalism made us all wealthier, is it really the devil if, while doing that, a few got wealthier than others?

This is a hard argument to counter, and one has to question the instinct to counter it. That graph and the common narratives – mass dissatisfaction, endemic poverty, social malcontent – do not work together. And yet we do observe such things – people are really angry. There’s something strange about telling a very angry person that they aren’t, in fact, a very angry person. The real problem is reconciling that anger with an economic motivation. "What if they’re just wrong?" Fine, phrase it this way: what’s the motivation for being angry then? It means the same thing with less presumptions.

So we have: Trump, Brexit, and Occupy. All of those threatened the status quo, all of them claimed economic reasons (more or less), and all of them had no way to deal with the graph above.

Here’s how one economist puts his colleagues’ position contra the critiques:

Nothing in the nature of a sudden deterioration of standards, according to these writers, ever overwhelmed the common people. They were, on average, substantially better off after than before […] and, as to numbers, nobody can deny their rapid increase. By the accepted yardsticks of economic welfare – real wages and population figures – the Inferno [of 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.

Except that that isn’t about our time. The brackets are, respectively, "…before the introduction of the factory system", and "the Inferno of early capitalism". The description is of the Industrial Revolution and its contemporaneous debates. The author is Karl Polanyi, writing a history of said debates.

I really wanted that to be more of a gotcha, but Polanyi is just such a fucking dated writer. So, yes, finally: that’s from 1944.

II

"Wait, the  Industrial Revolution? The one with all the child labor and missing limbs and -" Yes, that one. "But -"

Whatever you want to say about capitalism, the Industrial Revolution was a terrible time to be poor. Anecdotally, I’ve yet to meet a single person who dismisses Marx without qualification (that isn’t a contest, comment section), and the qualification is always, always, "Well, yes, that made sense if you lived in England then. But today it’s wrong." I’m talking both progressives and conservatives. This isn’t the time to get into Marx, I merely mention that to make a point: everyone knows that being poor during the Industrial Revolution was atrocious. But they don’t all know that it was relatively lucrative.

I should probably say this quickly: I’m not comparing the modern Western world at all to the people of Industrial Britain. The point is simply that these kinds of debates aren’t new. People have been pointing to graphs to falsify complaints for forever.

The quoted line comes about 150 pages into The Great Transformation. About 100 of those pages detail the near-constant immiseration and degradation of (what would become) the British working class. From all ends of that island they were drawn into cities, or factory towns, and, piece-by-piece, reduced. "Reduced how?" Simply reduced. Diminished in every way one can imagine, qualification is...