Capitalism did not, therefore, tragically disrupt, as Polanyi would have it, the warm, loving, "social" relations of pre-capitalist era. Capitalism took the outcasts of society: the beggars, the highwaymen, the rural over-populated, the Irish immigrants, and gave them the jobs and wages which moved them from destitution to a far higher standard of living and of work. It is easy enough to wring one's hands at the child labor in the new British factories; it is, apparently, even easier to forget what the child population of rural England was doing before the Industrial Revolution-and during the Revolution, in those numerous areas of England where the I.R. and the new capitalism had not yet penetrated: these children were dying like flies, and living in infinitely more miserable conditions. This is why we read nowadays, when it seems inexplicable to us, British and American writings of the period which praise the new factories for giving work to women and children! This praise was not due to their being inhuman monsters; it was due to the fact that, before such labor was available, and in those regions where such labor was not available, the women and children were living and suffering in infinitely worse conditions. Women, children, immigrants, after all, were not driven to the factories with whips; they went voluntarily and gladly, and that is the reason.
There are even broader aspects of the population problem which Polanyi ignores. For capitalism was responsible, in a sense, for the huge increase in population in the modern world. Capitalism's upsurge in living standards has enabled capitalism to free the world from the Malthusian checks, from the grim evils of over-population, and has permitted a rapid multiplication of population at even higher living standards than before. So when Polanyi, in effect, asks us to scrap the market and return to a caste or communal or even tribal society, he is not only asking us to abandon the luxuries of civilization and return to the subsistence level of the primitive tribe; he is also asking for the liquidation and eradication of the vast bulk of the world's population Because if a caste or tribal system will "work," even on the least subsistence level, it will work only for a small, tiny minority of the population; the rest of us will starve en masse. The fact noted above, of the small numbers of the primitive tribe, takes on, then, a new and more terrible significance.
Excuse me, this is an update, made after the first six comments: Ah, controversy! What fun! Here is the Mises Blog post and a couple of links gleaned from their comments section on this article: a fellow Misesian attacker of Karl Polanyi and The Polanyi Institute's defense. I have to criticise TMI's lack of a permalink connecting the post with the comments. It won't be long before the post is shuffled off to the archives along with the comments attached to it.
[Update: Oh, for God's sake! Here it is!]
I'm not sure that Sandall's final letter is devastating. I'll have to find the book and read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment