Autumn

A seasonal translation of Rilke's poem "Herbsttag":

Lord, it is time. Great summer is no more.
Set thy shadows upon the sundials' faces;
And through grassy spaces let the harsh winds roar.

Bid the last fruits take on ripened shape,
Grant them but a few more southern days,
Push them toward fulfilment then, to raise
A final sweetness in the heavy grape.

Too late for the homeless now their roofs to build;
And for him that lives alone - he'll long live so,
He'll read by night, compose long letters, go
Roaming up and down in avenues filled
With restlessness, and leaves that sharp gusts blow.

Philosophy felt through hands and feet

Back in the spring, I spent most of a week in a small German village in Lower Saxony, staying with an intriguing friend of mine, an aristocratic philosopher who will be referred to in the following only by his initials, GvC. In 2007 GvC hosted a performance by the Swiss modern dancer Anna Huber, attended by much of the village, in an unusual venue: the upper level of his enormous 18th-century barn. This time the place was quieter, and besides conversations with GvC, my other German philosopher friend Reinhard Knodt, and a few others who visited, I had time to explore the house, barns, attic, and courtyard by myself. The house contains a beautiful, old wood-panelled library:

and an adjoining conservatory:

In these surroundings of a faded yet still cultivated distinction, objects are placed with care, waiting for the late afternoon sun to pan across them:

Yet what one encounters on the other side of the courtyard, in and around the barns, is quite another matter. There are two characteristics of these spaces that strike anyone wandering through. The first is the accumulation of technological remnants, sometimes dormant, piled-up, sometimes cleverly rearranged, that occupy them. Here are tools, vehicles, means of transport and agricultural labour from a nineteenth-century carriage chassis to a 1960s tractor.

 Just inside one of the barn's entrance's sits an old-fashioned sleigh, its plush red upholstery spread with a light covering of dust and straw:

The second is the sheer physical invitingness of the spaces themselves. The barn is something like Piranesi's Carceri, labyrinthine in three dimensions, with ladders, hay bales, piles of bricks or open windows always issuing temptations to climb up or around a corner into some new, unexpected, protected nook.

It is like being ten years old again, except that here the fascination I then mostly only received from playing with and imaginatively inhabiting spaces in miniature, with Lego or other building blocks, is now realized in real life: the principle of the treehouse, multiplied and realized on a grand scale. (I never had a treehouse, but even growing up in the city you imagine them...)

These two characteristics are found again - or I find them - in the writings of these marvellous buildings' owner. For a while I confess I found GvC's writings difficult to approach. As is not surprising for a philosopher tucked away in the German countryside, his acknowledged greatest influence is Heidegger, the Black Forest thinker's gnarled, mystical, sometimes suddenly glowing late essays alternately bowing down to the earth and foreswearing modernity's enchantment by all technology that removes us from that earth. Such as aeroplanes (I travelled by train to reach the village), or the inkless, insubstantial media of digital dissemination (hence GvC's anonymity in this blog, or the fact that our correspondence is entirely by handwritten letters - although since they only take three days in the post, one supposes they probably travel by aeroplane...). More metaphorically, in the realm of thought, it is calculation and dualistic, falsely metaphysical thinking that distance us from authentic human existence - "Being" - and it is Language, the basic substance of the everyday words we use, that takes us back to Being again.

One problem: Heidegger doesn't just mean any language.  He means German (although he quite likes ancient Greek too - not that that really helps from the standpoint of accessibility). Which is why his late philosophy is, when it comes down to it, untranslatable. It's hard to avoid the parochial conclusion that we can't exist in consciousness of authentic Being unless we speak German, and furthermore unless we realize all the philosophical hints contained in the etymology of the words we are using. I love the German language as much as the next musicologist, but that does seem to be taking it a little too far! And as recent controversies over Heidegger's notebooks - the so-called "Black Books" - make clear, there are political difficulties: not to put too fine a point on it, Heidegger was an unrepentant Nazi.

Yet recently I found a point of access to my friend's way of thinking that made it seem much more than a set of footnotes to Heidegger, and which does not, it seems to me, fundamentally depend on one's choice of language for philosophizing in. Let us begin instead, as one of GvC's essays does, with a considerably less well-known German thinker of the early twentieth century, whom he knew personally: Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Here he is in a portrait painted by Kurt Schwitters, more famous as a pioneer of Dadaist collages and sound-poems, in a British internment camp in 1941.

The proximity of hand and head in Schwitters' portrait is fitting, for Sohn-Rethel's main theme was how man might overcome the historical split between the two, between "Intellectual and Manual Labour", to cite the title of his belated philosophical magnum opus (Geistige und körperliche Arbeit. Zur Theorie gesellschaftlicher Synthesis, 1970). Sohn-Rethel was a Marxist, and shared with Marx the ambition to invert philosophy's traditional prioritization of mind over matter. But rather than refashioning modern philosophy on the basis of modern economics, as Marx did, he wanted to understand how even ancient philosophy had been profoundly influenced, in its predilection for the abstract, by material, economic processes.

For Sohn-Rethel, there was still something suspiciously idealist or intellectualist about the belief that man's ability to create abstractions - numbers, philosophical concepts, geometric diagrams - was something innate and supra-historical. According to the neo-Kantian and scientific materialist worldviews that dominated German philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humanity had finally come into its inheritance in the modern era by applying abstract reasoning in order to predict and control the physical world - setting aside emotions, superstitions, and immediate physical attachments, and coolly figuring out how things (ought to) work. From that breakthrough there then followed numerous historical and economic consequences. Sohn-Rethel boldly argued that the sequence was the other way around. It was an event in economic history - the invention of gold and silver money in Lydia in the 6th-7th century B.C. - that preceded and made possible the earliest developments of Greek mathematical and philosophical abstraction. Lydia's fabled wealth lives on our idiom, "rich as Croesus" - the king who ruled Lydia from 560-547 B.C.

Maybe Sohn-Rethel's seems like too big a claim: how could we really prove it historically? And on a global scale too: after all, didn't the Chinese start using coinage around the same time - and isn't their philosophical history quite different? Granted: but we don't need to interpret the thesis in quite such a determinist fashion. Rather, as GvC observes, Sohn-Rethel is undertaking a kind of phenomenology, an attempt to imaginatively sketch out the key traits of a social world in which coins have just begun to mediate a large number of transactions between people, and to think about what kinds of activity might begin to seem more or less possible or significant in that world.

Here the two categories - once again taken from Marx - whose balance decisively alters at this moment are use (Gebrauch) and exchange (Tausch). And exchange involves an abstraction from use: not a mere conceptual abstraction, but what Sohn-Rethel considers more fundamental, a "real abstraction" - a socially agreed fiction, embodied in coinage, that considers different goods (such as salt and wheat) to be equivalent to and exchangeable for each other according to a fixed relationship. The fixing of that relationship will always involve ignoring what happens to commodities, or at least most commodities that human beings trade: namely that they and their value decay, both naturally and due to human uses of them. Here is GvC's own summary of Sohn-Rethel's argument about "real abstraction", which I think is clear enough (once translated) to stand without further explanation:

"How is abstraction implied in the act of exchange? The answer lies...in what was said above, insofar as it is seen phenomenologically... In the situation of an exchange one must abstract from, i.e. disregard, any acts that make use of/use up [the objects of exchange], in order that the exchange can be completed. For if anything about the commodity were to be altered, either by consumption or by [further] production, during the exchange itself, then the commercial basis of the exchange would be void, i.e. the commodity would no longer be equivalent to the agreed price.

"Yet even without human uses of them, materials are constantly involved in processes of material change. Wood, for instance, matures; iron rusts; plastic becomes worn-out. The prerequisite of immutability in materials to be exchanged is realistic as far as banning human interference is concerned, but the ban on material change in general is illusory, and thus remains a fiction, i.e. a pure postulate. This unreality makes exchange abstract in a particularly acute fashion, transcending the limits of the realizable.

"In order to give reality to the illusion of immutability, the most imperishable substances, such as precious metals, are cut into equal pieces and pressed into apparently permanent forms. From them there then radiated the idea of an imperishable value. With the idea of value, finally, the fiction of the equi-valence of dissimilar materials could be secured - for exchange only makes sense when dissimilar materials are set equal to one another.

"Once value and equivalence had become a reality - if an abstract sort of reality - then calculation could begin. The postulate of immutability made things and processes calculable... And once calculation was secured in the sphere of exchange, then from there it gradually invaded the sphere of use... First the materials to be consumed were abstractly fixed (e.g. by being standardized), then the human interactions that produced them (e.g. the production line)."

This "invasion" of the sphere of "use" by processes of calculation, and postulates of immutability, derived from the act of exchange connects to one of Sohn-Rethel's, and GvC's, other concerns: technology, and our relationship with the tools and machines we use, or simply with the environments we physically inhabit. For both of them, the study of technology is of no interest considered scientifically, as an application of principles of mechanics to establish how machinery might best function in its own right; it is of interest only anthropologically. What does a relationship with a tool make possible for us - that is, for our development as human beings, not for the practical end we hope to achieve by completing the activity? (In more mundane terms, why do so many men, and doubtless women too, enjoy "doing it yourself", or pottering about in a tool shed at the bottom of the garden?)

Sohn-Rethel's primary engagement with this question was in an early essay written in Naples and published in Germany's main daily paper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, in 1926, with the title, "The Ideal of the Broken-Down: On Neapolitan Technology" (Das Ideal des Kaputten. Über neapolitanische Technik). It is on the face of it a very witty piece of journalistic travel-writing; at a deeper level, a reflection on what seemed to the author like a more authentic and creative relationship to the world of modern technology than his own countrymen possessed. Sohn-Rethel was at the time living in close proximity to a whole German exile colony of artists and thinkers in Positano, not far from Naples, which happened to include two of the most significant members of what was later called the "Frankfurt School": Walter Benjamin and Adorno, along with another intellectual heavyweight of the period, Ernst Bloch. Benjamin is reported to have "squealed with delight" on reading Sohn-Rethel's essay - there must have been some envy intermixed, since unlike Benjamin's own essays on his Italian milieu, Sohn-Rethel's was written from the experience of someone fluent in Italian and able to interact confidently with the people he was writing about:

"Mechanical appliances in Naples are broken as a point of principle. Only exceptionally, thanks to some disconcerting piece of luck, does one discover anything still intact and functioning. As time goes on, one gets the impression that everything must already be manufactured in a broken condition... [Yet] for the Neapolitan, the functioning [of a device] only really begins when it is broken... With inimitable mastery he succeeds in getting his defective automobile going again through the unforeseen insertion of a small piece of wood that he picked up off the street - although only temporarily, until it unavoidably breaks down once more. For conclusive repairs are anathema to him: in that case he would much rather do without the car altogether" (Alfred Sohn-Rethel, ed. Carl Freytag, Das Ideal des Kaputten (Bremen: Bettima Wassmann, 1992), pp. 33-4)

Sohn-Rethel's conclusion is that "technology" in the anthropological sense, as a realm of human activity that enhances our lives directly, "only really begins at the point where man exercises his veto against the secretive and inimical automatization of the mechanical sphere, and involves himself personally in its world. But he thereby proves his clear superiority to the law[fulness] of technology... Bound by a minimum of prescribed goals and uses, technology here is subjected to the oddest vagaries, absorbed with startling but convincing efficacy into a mode of existence quite alien to it... A further example: the motorbike engine, released from its forced service to a now smashed-up motorbike, that with its swirling rotations around a slightly eccentric axis serves to whip the cream in a latteria" (pp. 36-7).

The Neapolitan, in other words, does not accept the illusion of immutable, indestructible, unpervertable efficiency radiated by the devices that arrive from Northern Europe on the streets of his city, so lately under the unchallenged sway of mules, carriages, and oil lamps. All these things are meant to be used, that is, adapted, patched up, taken apart, kicked, whacked, bent out of and back into shape; the pleasure in them, and in oneself, is lost if they merely function automatically the way they were designed to. For then one is submitting to an abstraction, a reliance on exchange: one only enjoys the device's functioning as something one has paid for, something one does not understand and must submit to paying over again for in a new version as soon as it ceases to perform its predestined role.  (What Sohn-Rethel saw in the 1920s in southern Italy is now of course to be seen all over more distant developing countries such as India, while Western Europe as a whole has since succumbed to the dulling effects of planned obsolescence.) 21st-century microelectronics only intensify in this sense what clockwork had already begun, as GvC's ironic little note ("What's inside") in the photo below emphasises:

Where did Sohn-Rethel get his interest - unfortunately not pursued in later life - in the human experience of technology? Why did he abandon the attempt to describe, phenomenologically, the positive values to be derived from a more creative and authentic use of tools and objects? GvC claims that when he visited Sohn-Rethel in hospital, as the latter recovered from a leg operation, he furnished the answer: the interest in such a phenomenology came from Heidegger, and its abandonment was related to the conflict between Heidegger and the Marxist Frankfurt School - for it was as a member of the Frankfurt School that Sohn-Rethel came to see himself. "It appears it was Adorno's authority", GvC writes, "that compelled [Sohn-Rethel] to direct his gaze [only] negatively towards all that abstracted from use"; for in Adorno's pessimistic vision, the "damaged life" one was forced to lead under the generalized capitalist system of abstract exchange-relations was a life that could never be repaired or patched up. The best that intellectuals could do was understand the logic of the system that imprisoned them.

Meanwhile Heidegger himself, though he may have prompted Sohn-Rethel's incipient phenomenology of technology, and provided his own famous analysis of the experience of hammering in his early masterpiece Sein und Zeit (1927), ended up more or less demonizing technology altogether, seeing salvation only in escape from it into the domain of the poet, language. Only the poet's language would reveal reality; technology would forever obscure the essence of the world from us by treating everything as a means to something else. More interested by the possibility of reclaiming Technik, GvC began to look elsewhere for intellectual forebears: most notably, to the German Romantic philosopher and poet Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), but also to Eastern philosophy - Zen and Taoism - and the thought of Franz Kafka.

As scholars of Romanticism such as Frederick Beiser have recently emphasized, the early German Romantics were anything but apologists for art or poetry as escape from reality. Novalis in particular cultivated an active and diverse circle of interests, at the centre of which stood Poesie ("poesy") as a transfiguring imaginative attitude to the world. One of the domains he wanted it to transfigure was that of human beings' physical movements and interactions with the material world. He dreamed of a "theory of the modifications of movement", a "physics" centred on the human body. Tools would expand and develop the capacities of the people who used them - and in that lay their redemptive potential: "Each tool thus modifies on one side the powers and thoughts of the artisan [who uses it]". Effective tools considered from this perspective were "anthroposcopic" - they brought man into focus, were adjusted to his scale. Novalis's ultimate vision of technology was a single omnipotent tool  - a "magic wand" (Zauberstab). Yet we should not imagine he had something like a robot or computer in mind, for the potency of this tool would not lie in its own autonomous power, making human activity superfluous, but in its ability to promote our range of activity. In GvC's barn I found a piece of paper with a German translation of this, similar dream of the French poet René Char (a friend of Heidegger's, incidentally) - "A tool, whose blessing our hand, relieved of memory, could experience at each moment, would never age; it would keep our hand whole" ("Un outil dont notre main privée de mémoire découvrirait à tout instant le bienfait, n'envieillirait pas, conserverait intacte la main").

A possible everyday example of such a tool, only invented after Novalis' lifetime, is the bicycle: it has the instrumental value of allowing us to move faster from place to place, but its use also requires us to refine our ability to balance while in motion. It is built to our scale, and expands what we can do with our own bodies in a much more fundamental and integral way than driving a car does (though of course that too is a skill involving one's whole body). Another, simpler example is the swing, constructed purely for the pleasure of "modifying one's movements" (the unusually long one below hangs in GvC's barn):

In the case of Kafka, the example he chose of technology's potential is more classical, more Heideggerian, and yet the interpretation he gives it is more mysterious. Kafka wrote in 1920 that he wanted "to hammer a table together with meticulously careful attention to craft, and at the same time, to do nothing - not in such a way that someone would say, 'The hammering means nothing to him', but 'The hammering is to him a genuine hammering and at the same time means nothing', whereby indeed the hammering would have become still bolder, still more decisive, still more real, and if you like, still crazier". 

Surely what Kafka is driving at in this passage is a conception of engaging in a practical act for its own sake, as an "amateur" would, not in order to get the job done, i.e. not "professionally" - but nevertheless with the kind of intensity belonging to a professional, not with an amateur's leisurely detachment. The hammering is as real as if it really mattered to complete the job with total craftsmanship; and yet it does not, because if the consciousness of the job's purpose is allowed to take over, then the focus on the present act is lost. Only in the present moment does the redemptive - one could even say, religious - power of the activity lie. Walter Benjamin, who quoted this passage in an essay, saw in it Kafka's proximity to Taoism. It represented to him an "absolutely elemental purity of feeling", deriving from a perfect equilibrium of motive and self-sufficient attentiveness, the yin and yang pushing back at each other, interpenetrating.

What is once again surprising, for us who think of Kafka as the writer of his era most concerned with literature's autonomous power, is (as GvC points out in another essay) that he thought of immanent activities such as this hammering as the purpose of life - not writing literature. Writing would rather have an instrumental function - for once having attained his realization of the primacy of the practical, it would be necessary "to use writing to convince other people of it".

For GvC, philosophy has much the same function, it would seem. I am almost tempted to see his property - the house and barns - as a kind of embodiment of the goal of his thought. Its technological remnants, mysterious, antique spaces, and playful détournements of everyday objects provoke one's hands and feet to new tactile experiences, experiments. In my bedroom was a unique "wardrobe": 

Perhaps it was from the same tree that the tree-trunk "bookcase" came that I found standing in the corner of a downstairs drawing-room - a slot widened out of its bole, holding a single book. Efficient as a storage unit it was not, but how much more pleasing to make and contemplate than anything from a Swedish furniture chain... 

GvC has a project to use the barn's spaces as a location for "performances" or performance workshops (in the sense of performance art) - of which Anna Huber's dance display, mentioned at the start of this post and described in an earlier blog piece, is conceived as a forerunner. Yet it is as practices and processes, not as "art", that such "performances" are chiefly important to him - and the same seems to be true in the case of music, the reason we became acquainted with one another to begin with. Music has no "product" (other than those that our technologies of notation and recording have artificially abstracted from it). It is an activity in which sensitivity of feeling, subtlety of equilibrium, are paramount, and realized only in the moment of music-making itself. What abstract calculation it involves ends up reconverted back into feeling - the proportions of duration and tone sensed as rhythm and harmony. A small remnant of a "technology" of practice whose pleasures and accomplishments once penetrated much more of our working lives.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

I've laid out my views on translating poetry elsewhere on this blog; suffice it to say that in the case of Rilke's perhaps most famous poem, the "Archaischer Torso Apollos", it looks to me as though the translators out there aren't quite facing up to their task. Rilke wrote a sonnet, and most of them, from professional translators like Stephen Mitchell to modern poets like Don Paterson, are writing free verse paraphrases or resorting to half-rhymes. Maybe we ought to get a rapper or a performance poet like Kate Tempest to do the job instead - at least they still know why rhyme and metre matter. Anyway, enough dissing the opposition: here's my try. Criticisms welcome!

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We never knew that high-reputed head
With all pride's ripeness in its eyes. Yet here
Still stands its torso, like a chandelier
Inset with lamps - and their glow instead

Must be this figure's gaze. For were it not,
How could its rising breast thus blind? or bend
Of hips to thighs a subtler smile send
Down to the centre that new life begot.

Lacking that light from each true place, this stone
Should under marble's sheen lie maimed and prone:
It would not glisten like a wild beast's pelt,

And would not like a star obliterate
All lines of form: force such that you felt
It saw you, crying: Live now, do not wait.

Reading Karl Polanyi: how wild goats and gold explain the last two centuries of global history (part 2)

The first part of this post got as far as explaining how Polanyi sees the liberal-capitalist view of labour inaugurated by arguments for the abolition of poor relief (or social security), put forward in 1786 by Joseph Townsend. Insofar as they were imagined as living agents at all, and not simply as a mechanical force of production with an attached price-tag, the poor were pictured like hunted wild goats, driven by hunger and fear. The second part of this post investigates the effects of commoditizing another factor of production - not land, although the history of how land-ownership has come to be valued in purely monetary terms is fascinating and important, and explains much of the terrible history of North American and Australian indigenous peoples over the last 200 years - but money.

Is money a commodity? Contemporary anti-neoliberal writers on the subject such as Ann Pettifor deny that it is. Pettifor actually cites Polanyi as her authority on this: "the dominant, orthodox or neoclassical school of economists...conceive of [money] as akin to a commodity... Because all commodities have a scarcity value, these economists theorise as if money is subject to market forces of supply and demand, and like commodities, can become scarce. But money is not like a commodity. To define it as such is to create a ‘false commodity’ as the political economist Karl Polanyi argued" (Ann Pettifor, Just Money: How Society Can Break the Despotic Power of Finance (2014), introduction). All well and good - and personally I agree with Pettifor that we should stop treating money as a commodity and start to see it according to an alternative definition: as a token of "purchasing power", in Polanyi's view (Great Transformation, pp. 205-6).

What difference does that make? It means money is only useful insofar as it is spent (or, perhaps, directly invested). It should never be something that accumulates value simply by existing, by being hoarded while its public supply grows scarce. This is the basis of recent suggestions such as George Monbiot's that Europeans - starting maybe with the Greeks, if they exit the euro - revive the "stamp scrip" systems that were experimented with in the 1930s: local currency tokens that lost value over time, thus encouraging rapid circulation and preventing hoarding. Economic activity would thus be boosted equitably, without having to rely on the power of banks.

Yet Polanyi does not actually make a philosophical decision as to whether money "really is" pure purchasing power, rather than being a commodity: he is too much of a historian to do that. Money "really is" however people have treated it. And in the system of 19th-century "market society", whose functioning and eventual collapse Polanyi analyses, money in large measure did work as a commodity, because those wielding global power treated it as such. In fact it was precisely by making money work as a commodity that certain financiers and governments - above all, the British - actually sustained their global power. For it was commodity money that had the unique power to overcome the nation-state-centred model of markets that I discussed at the end of part 1 of this post. It did so during the 19th century through the mechanism known as the gold standard.

The gold standard was theorized and enforced in the interests of international trade - trade in which the British Empire surpassed all its competitors. It meant that all national currencies were given a value in terms of gold: they were "pegged to" gold. Gold is of course literally a commodity, in that it is produced (mined and minted) for exchange. One might think that it differs from other commodities in not having a use-value: but it does - gold jewellery, or even finely-wrought salt-cellars for a king's table, as in this famous piece by the Renaissance goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini:

Previously in history it had mainly circulated as what is technically known as "specie": gold coins - which could be stolen, lost at sea, melted down, or subject to any number of other unpredictable misfortunes. Banknotes allowed for greater security: large amounts of gold could stay in bank vaults, while the notes that were theoretically exchangeable for them circulated instead. However, when it came to international trade, a country's gold reserves actually came into play - in ways that could prove devastating for its national economy.

Theoretically, the gold standard worked like this: if a nation was running a deficit on international trade, that meant it was buying in more goods than it was managing to sell, which meant that more of its currency was circulating abroad (in exchange for imports) than the amount of foreign currency it was acquiring (in exchange for exports). Its currency was thus in greater general supply, and supply gaining an edge over demand means that prices drop: the value of the currency, its exchange rate, is reduced. Movement of gold reserves is supposed to balance this out: gold leaves the country for abroad, where it can be exchanged for higher-value currencies, meaning that the amount of gold backing for the country's currency is reduced. Yet because the currency remains pegged to gold, this means that the amount of currency circulating in the country itself must also be reduced. The money supply shrinks - and with it, the economy.

This economic contraction is supposed to act - in purely financial terms -  as part of an adjustment to international trade balances. If the supply of money shrinks, then so do prices and wages: this is deflation. People earn less and can pay less for imports from abroad (whose prices are of course unaffected). At the same time, exports reduce in price and thus come to seem more attractive to foreign buyers. The country starts exporting more and importing less: equilibrium is gradually restored.

But at what social cost? Apart from the effects on consumers, unexpected contractions in the whole of a national economy can be devastating for businesses. It's all very well looking forward to increased exports, but if the "adjustment" that precedes such an increase puts a significant proportion of companies out of business (because they can't secure credit any longer), then who's going to be around to profit from all the exporting? (Someone, for sure: but probably a large, perhaps even multinational company which has no trouble weathering the storm. Not good for competition.)

So once again, according to Polanyi's "double movement", the institution of a gold standard was followed by countries taking steps to protect their economies from the worst effects of deflation. One such step was the institution of central banks. Their "normal function was cushioning the immediate effects of gold withdrawal on the circulation of notes" (p. 203). The country does not "go off" gold, but the central bank makes sure that adjustment is more gradual and general than it would otherwise be. Interest rates are lowered; loans are made.

Yet there was only so much that nation-states and their central banks could do. When their economies were weakened, deflation was inevitable - if they were to stay on the gold standard. (Without it, as in the early 1920s, they would print money in ever greater quantities to replace the currency leaving the country, and the value of banknotes would drop precipitously: hyper-inflation instead of deflation.) "Under nineteenth-century conditions", writes Polanyi, "foreign trade and the gold standard had undisputed priority over the needs of domestic business" (p. 203). Gold was a language even the Chinese could understand; abandon it, and you lost your ability to buy and invest all over the world. The British, before all others, were unwilling for that to happen.

How had the British attained this position - of relying on and promoting gold as universal commodity currency? I suggested the answer in my earlier blog post, Calicoes and capitalism. It was simple: they had stolen vast quantities of it, so naturally they had an interest in its value and power being as universal as possible. Piracy was phase no. 1, generating booty for the Crown that led to the establishment of the East India Company. But what I didn't record in that post was that phase no. 2 of the British gold hunt was conducted in India itself.

Having run a long-standing trade surplus created by exporting fine cottons, spices etc, the riches of the East were now ripe for plunder. On Clive of India's victory at the battle of Plassey, the treasuries of the Nawab of Bengal were thrown open. Macaulay described the scene: "There was piled up, after the usage of Indian princes, immense masses of coin, among which might not seldom be detected the florins, and byzants with which, before any European ship had turned the Cape of Good Hope, the Venetians purchased the stuffs and spices of the East. Clive walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself" (Essay on Clive (1840/1903), p. 53).

As one military historian of India, Colonel Malleson, put it: "There never was a battle in which the consequences were so vast, so immediate and so permanent" (The Decisive Battles of India (1883), p. 68). And the nexus of military and economic history established by Clive's victory did not cease to grow and transform itself over the next two hundred years - as not only economists but military historians themselves testify. For the source of my last two quotes is not Polanyi: it is a book by a figure about as dissimilar in character and outlook from this gentle, bespectacled, socialist Hungarian Jew as one could possibly imagine - the severely moustachioed British Army officer, military historian, and fascist sympathiser Major-General J. F. C. "Boney" Fuller:

Fuller's three-volume masterwork The Decisive Battles of the Western World (1954-6) was some of my favourite non-fiction reading matter during my later childhood, before I started to lose interest in military history, wargaming and toy soldiers and get interested in philosophy. I still remember buying the Picador edition of the book (ed. John Terraine, 1970) in the shop of the National Army Museum in Chelsea. What I was really interested in (as I recorded in the first blog post on this site) was the diagrams of battles it contained - the moves and countermoves, strategy and tactics of the famous generals. But some of the surrounding historical context must have sunk in at some level: because when I read Polanyi on the significance of the gold standard for the origins of the Second World War, I suddenly recalled Fuller having given a surprising amount of attention to this exact same topic. Digging my dog-eared copy out of a cardboard box in the under-stairs cupboard, I found that gold and the economics of the gold standard formed a thread running more or less unbroken through Fuller's interpretation of the history of modern warfare ever since the late eighteenth century.

He starts with the impact of Clive's gold grab on the Industrial Revolution and Empire - "The most world-changing [of the western world's "big ideas"] was the use of steam as power... All that was lacking was gold to fertilize it, and it was Clive who undammed the yellow stream" (Decisive Battles, vol. 2, p. 16). Over the next half-century, the British banking system underwent massive expansion: "in 1750 Burke informs us that there were 'not twelve Bankers' shops' in the provinces, while in 1796 they were to be found 'in almost every market town'" (ibid., p. 17). "Out of the field of Plassey...there sprouted forth the power of the nineteenth century. Mammon now strode into supremacy... What the Cross had failed to achieve, in a few blood-red years the trinity of piston, sword, and coin accomplished: the subjection of the East and for a span of nearly 200 years the economic serfdom of the Oriental world" (ibid., p. 18).

While Clive was subjecting Bengal, the French were still competing with Britain in the global conflict of the Seven Years' War: soon that too was settled in Britain's favour in the concluding peace treaty of 1763. "France not only lost her colonial empire and her navy, but was left in that financial ruin out of which emerged the French Revolution" (ibid., p. 21). The Revolutionary regime could have been stifled at birth, had the campaign led against it by the Prussians in 1792 been successful: instead they were repulsed at Valmy by a new kind of national army, prepared for total war. It was this army that Napoleon was to lead - and his intentions in fighting Britain with it were, once more, economic.

Once defeated by Nelson at Trafalgar, the French had to give up hope of controlling the Channel or being able to launch a direct attack on England (as the Spanish had tried to do with the Armada). But what Fuller calls the "indirect approach" remained, which "depended on the command of the coastal ports of Europe. Could [Napoleon] gain control of them, England's foreign trade, the source of her financial power, would be strangled, and without a heavy purse it would be impossible for the English Government to subsidize their continental allies... Therefore, as Paul H. Emden states in his Money-Power of Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries [the kind of obscure economic-historical source Fuller constantly refers to in these discussions!], 'The strongest of all the powers allied against Napoleon was the power of British finance'" (ibid., p. 97).

How could Napoleon combat that power? Not simply by accepting the terms on which this "nation of shopkeepers" wanted to run international politics - the terms of free trade, on which gold would count most heavily. Since he was dictator, Napoleon could summarily ignore the interests of France's merchant class and consider only the national interest; "he held that free trade would make France become the debtor of England. His economic ideas were those of Rousseau, according to whom 'the perfect state was one that suffice for all its needs and could do without foreign trade'." (ibid.). This became elaborated into the European trade blockade against England known as the Continental System: and it was to enforce the Continental System that Napoleon began the Peninsular Wars in 1807 and invaded Russia in 1812, both of which proved militarily disastrous.

With Napoleon finally defeated in 1815, Britain almost immediately began to lay the currency foundations for the free-trade regime of the "Hundred Years' Peace" that was to follow: the Great Recoinage of 1816 produced a flood of specie in both gold and silver and stabilized the pound. As Polanyi explores in The Great Transformation, and as I mentioned at the end of part I of this post, the Hundred Years' Peace and the stability of the gold standard could only be maintained by constant colonial expansion. Just as has happened since World War II, wars became "cold", essentially colonial-economic affairs, or contained adjustments to the balance of power (e.g. the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1); and in all cases, trade between the countries concerned was allowed to continue - as had not been the case in the Napoleonic Wars, and would once again cease to be the case in the twentieth century (Polanyi, p. 17).

The balance of power was of course upset by World War I, which disrupted world trade so much that the gold standard was finally broken. It continued to be an ideal for European political leaders of all stripes throughout the 1920s. But its brief re-establishment in the latter part of that decade - for the sake of which "small and weak" peripheral countries including Greece "literally starved themselves to reach the golden shores" (Polanyi, p. 27 - the present parallels are plain enough) - was once again curtailed by the Wall Street Crash, an event whose location pointed to a critical difference between post-war and pre-war financial regimes: the new economic priority of the U. S. A. Britain went off gold in 1931, America in 1933: "the snapping of the golden thread was the signal for a world revolution" (Polanyi, p. 29).

What kind of revolution? A fascist one, most obviously. It is because of its underlying economic interests in undermining the golden substructure of international trade that Polanyi describes fascism in terms that may shock many readers: "If ever there was a political movement that responded to the needs of an objective situation and was not a result of fortuitous causes, it was fascism" (p. 245). "The appearance of such a movement...should never have been ascribed to local causes" (ibid.); rather "the part played by fascism was determined by one factor: the condition of the market system" (p. 250). Without denying that fascism was "degenerative", a "remedy...[which] would everywhere produce sickness unto death" (p. 245 - and it hardly needs to be mentioned that its rise forced Polanyi himself into exile), Polanyi seems to be suggesting that it was, in a sense, a necessary phenomenon.

For as Napoleon had discovered in quashing the interests of his own commercial middle class, a campaign against economic liberalism could be most effectively (which is to say, ruthlessly) led by an absolute dictator. Instead of businesses, trade unions and social classes democratically voicing their interests - which it must be said were, at the height of the nineteenth-century system, all pretty squarely behind expanding international trade, and thus exploiting the natural environment and colonial populations to the hilt - you had a Leader backed by a united People, hypnotized into renouncing their identity as part of a single national mass.

Fuller, who records in a footnote that he "met Hitler on a number of occasions", and was the first to theorize the Blitzkrieg strategy by which Nazi armies overwhelmed half of Europe in 1939-40, saw Hitler as an embodiment of a powerful alternative myth to the capitalist notion of Economic Man. This was "Heroic Man", the self-sacrificing, idealist warrior (Decisive Battles, vol. 2, p. 433). And challenging Economic Man meant not only waging war on the nations that believed in him; it also meant challenging the central tool of his economic power - the gold standard. Fuller's summary of Hitler's economic doctrines is startling, for the Führer emerges not just as a second Napoleon, but as a prophet of what are, in the 21st century, standard tenets of anti-neo-liberal economics, including the idea that money is not a commodity and that international financial exchanges should not function as means of speculation:

"Hitler's goal was Napoleonic: to establish a German Continental System under the aegis of Germany. Also, his means were not far removed from those of the great emperor: to liberate Germany from the shackles of international loan-capitalism...

"Hitler held that, as long as the international monetary system was based on gold, a nation which cornered gold could impose its will on those who lacked it. This could be done by drying up their sources of exchange, and thereby compelling them to accept loans on interest in order to distribute their wealth - their production. He said: 'The community of the nation does not live by the fictitious value of money, but by real production which in its turn gives value to money. This production is the real cover of the currency, and not a bank or a safe full of gold'. He decided: (1) To refuse foreign interest-bearing loans, and base German currency on production instead of on gold. (2) To obtain imports by direct exchange of goods - barter - and subsidize exports when necessary. (3) To put a stop to what was called 'freedom of the exchanges' - that is, licence to gamble in currencies... And (4) to create money when men and material were available for work instead of running into debt by borrowing it.

"Because the life of international finance depended upon the issue of interest-bearing loans to nations in economic distress, Hitler's economics spelt its ruination. If he were allowed to succeed, other nations would certainly follow his example... This financial pistol was pointed more particularly at the United States, because they held the bulk of the world's supply of gold, and because their mass-production system necessitated the export of about 10 per cent of their products in order to avoid unemployment." (Fuller, Decisive Battles, vol. 2, pp. 435-6)

The outbreak of actual war in 1939 was thus preceded by what the U. S. embassy's military attaché in Berlin termed "an economic war in which Germany is fighting for her very existence" (ibid., p. 437), waged between the "loan-capitalism" propagated by the U. S. and Britain and a new barter system backed by Germany. And here Fuller formulates a statement that I am almost reluctant to quote, because it may well reflect in part his pre-war fascist sympathies (he had been a member of the British Union of Fascists led by Oswald Mosley). Yet as a judgement on international economics, quite separate from Fuller's (condemnatory) judgements on Nazi anti-Semitism and Blut und Boden ideology, it is too thought-provoking to ignore: "When we consider these economic causes of the Second World War it must be borne in mind...that the struggle between the two economic systems is not a question of right and wrong, but of survival values. It was no more right or wrong for loan-capitalism to fight for its supremacy than it was for Hitler to fight for his barter system" (p. 437). Compare it to Polanyi's above-quoted statement that "the part played by fascism was determined by one factor: the condition of the market system", and you have a single diagnosis made independently by two highly intelligent and deeply-read scholars who lived through the events in question - a diagnosis whose relevance to our present-day situation is intense, and frightening.

It is that relevance I should probably now get around to addressing explicitly. Polanyi is not an economic determinist in the sense we would normally interpret that term. Though he acknowledges early on that an economic "explanation of one of the deepest crises in man's history must appear as all too simple", and promptly insists with his habitual gift for paradox and controversy that despite how it must appear, such an explanation is necessary and justified (p. 4), his "economics" is precisely not the sphere of mathematical system to which the subject was reduced by classical liberal thinkers. And so the machinations of the gold standard system did not lead inexorably to fascism: they provoked it as one, very sudden and militarily aggressive, reaction among a number of others. One alternative which was scarcely any better in humanitarian terms was Stalinist "socialism in one country", which Polanyi shows to be based on an economic model significantly different from Leninism, very similar in crucial respects to that of Nazi Germany, and as exploitative as the latter of terror, dictatorship and enforced labour. But Roosevelt's New Deal was also a turn away from liberal laissez-faire economics, one that never required - despite the false arguments of Polanyi's rival Hayek - the renunciation of traditional political freedom. "The emerging regimes of fascism, socialism, and the New Deal were similar only in discarding laissez-faire principles" (Polanyi, p. 252).

The fact that the parties of the more moderate alternative won the war probably has more to do with the historical depth of their economic advantage than anything else (Hitler was in the end forced into economic dire straits that resulted in a gold-looting spree of his own; and even that could not pay for the costs of the war effort). It has not turned out to be the dawn of a new era that Polanyi predicted: instead the "nineteenth-century civilization" has re-emerged, based now not on gold, but on a tightly interconnected system of supposedly "self-regulating" currency and bond markets that functions (or fails to function) in alarmingly similar ways. As Joseph Stiglitz observes in his preface to the 2001 re-edition of The Great Transformation, Polanyi's "concerns are consonant with the issues raised by the rioters and marchers who took to the streets in Seattle and Prague in 1999 and 2000 to oppose the international financial institutions" (p. vii):



Polanyi's closing reflections on "freedom in a complex society" are relevant to our roughly parallel situation, in which the global "market society" is on the verge of collapse and fascist alternatives are already rearing their ugly heads across Europe. He saw the problem of defining human freedom as crucial - and in his analysis, the failure of market society proved the failure of the liberal definition of freedom, which had seen it as a purely political, legal matter, separated from the economic sphere. The Western "comfortable classes enjoy the freedom provided by leisure in security; they are naturally less anxious to extend freedom in society than those who for lack of income must rest content with a minimum of it" (p. 262). Rights have only been granted to those less materially privileged at a pace sufficiently slow that the "comfortable classes" maintain their comfortable advantage: the African-American is no longer a slave, but he or she still often lives without the material "freedom provided by leisure in security".

In other words, if you want true liberté, it cannot be separated from égalité and fraternité. And that may well mean restricting its current, more absolute forms: in other words, introducing regulation, the enemy of classical liberalism. To quote Polanyi, "To turn against regulation means to turn against reform. With the liberal the idea of freedom thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise...[which] means the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security needs no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property" (p. 265). 

Regulation does mean compulsion - Polanyi is open about this. His response is simply that maintaining an absolute conception of freedom will lead to the collapse of society and its swift reconstitution without freedom, in the name of fascist unity: "Freedom's utter frustration in fascism is, indeed, the inevitable result of the liberal philosophy, which claims that power and compulsion are evil, that freedom demands their absence from a human community. No such thing is possible; in a complex society this becomes apparent. This leaves no alternative but either to remain faithful to an illusionary idea of freedom and deny the reality of society, or to accept that reality and reject the idea of freedom. The first is the liberal's conclusion; the latter the fascist's. No other seems possible" (pp. 265-6). No other is possible, unless we first revise and moderate our conception of what it means to be free.

And that means revising and moderating our conception of economic value - for some version of such value must be a given in society: unless we are hermits, we cannot help but contribute to it. "Any opinion or desire will make us participants in the creation of power and in the constituting of economic value. No freedom to do otherwise is conceivable" (p. 267). As I suggested earlier, we surely do need to get away from the stranglehold exerted by the classical commodity conception of money - of which gold has for most of history been the prime exemplar. But we also need to learn the lessons of history concerning the pitfalls of those attempts that have been made to break that stranglehold. It is an uncomfortable truth that the most radical global-scale challenges to modern capitalism have been made by charismatic dictators: Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin. Can we break out of the trap of neo-liberalism while avoiding a future of dictatorship?

Polanyi suggests we can. His ideal of a truly socialist thinker and activist is Robert Owen, who like the Saint-Simonians in France around the same time, recognized that solving the problem of freedom involved transcending the West's pervasive individualism. The problem with Heroic Man as the alternative to Economic Man is that he rests singular (and masculine). For both Owen, who founded the co-operative movement, and the Saint-Simonians, the future must be based on co-operation, not singularity. Such co-operation requires putting community before "market society", small-scale collective freedoms before the freedom of powerful individuals.

But one thing is clear: a movement like Owen's "townships" or the Saint-Simonian communes will probably not get far today without securing some kind of international legal agreement, some space defined against the current neoliberal consensus. Otherwise it will be shut down swiftly - most probably through the ideological, but superficially "reasonable", insistence that such communities "open themselves up" to wider networks of trade and currency. It is the basis of such insistence that needs to be removed. The future should be "transnational" in one sense: it should be regulated transnationally. Yet the purpose of such regulation should be to restore a balance that allows nations and localities more communal freedom and solidarity than they have been permitted to have to date. The high level of material transnational "flows" that define our consumerist present must be replaced by a a more ideal level of international co-operation.

In other words: we need the internet, we need Skype, we need multiculturalism, translations, flows of ideas, virtual fora in which information, images and descriptions of other ways of life and other communities' issues and problems are exchanged. We do not want to become parochial bigots. We do not, however, need - in fact we must learn to do without - the vision of unlimited consumer choice, boundless cheap air travel and ever-expanding intercontinental trade that the system of the last 200 years has dangled in front of us. That system, as Polanyi makes clear, reifies and exploits its three "fictitious commodities" in unacceptable ways. And even if the poor do accept being treated like wild goats and money does carry on representing a substance to be hoarded, the third factor I have not discussed here - land, or Nature - cannot for much longer continue to be treated as a pure material resource for exploitation without unleashing devastating environmental consequences. If there are no ways to transport commodities around the world other than by burning fossil fuels - and at the moment, green intercontinental freight looks like something of an oxymoron - then "autarchy" or "economic nationalism" should certainly not be considered dirty words, whatever their dubious past realizations.