LITMIR.BIZ

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political science, geography and anthropology. Being a critique of the market economy for the way it destroys the fabric of society, it has gained ever more followers over the last four decades of neoliberal thought and practice. The book is simultaneously an investigation of the sources and consequences of commodification and an account of counter-movements against commodification – movements that gave rise to fascism and Stalinism as well as social democracy. Hence it has obvious relevance to our present global context. In this interview with his daughter Kari Polanyi Levitt, she describes the life of her father, and the influences leading to The Great Transformation. She also points to the special relation her father had with her mother, Ilona Duczynska, herself a lifelong political activist and intellectual. Here Kari Polanyi Levitt traces the four phases of Karl Polanyi’s life (1886–1964): the Hungarian phase, the Austrian phase, the English phase and then the North American phase. Kari Polanyi Levitt is an economist in her own right, living in Montreal, author of numerous publications, including From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization (2013), and the edited collection The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi (1990).

       Michael Burawoy: Let’s start at the beginning. We are used to thinking of Karl Polanyi as Hungarian, but he was actually born in Vienna, right?

      KARI POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, that’s right. Interestingly, my father and I were both born in Vienna and my mother was born in a small town not far from Vienna – which of course was the great centre of intellectual life, the great metropolis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family, that is the mother and father of Karl Polanyi, started in Vienna. Karl’s mother, Cecilia Wohl, was sent by her father from Vilna, then in Russia, to Vienna to learn a trade. As a result of her education she spoke Russian and German. She met Karl’s father, a young Hungarian Jewish engineer – Mihály Pollacsek – in Vienna. He spoke Hungarian and German. So the family started as a German-speaking family.

      And, not that long ago, I learned from correspondence that my father never learned Hungarian until he entered the Gymnasium in Budapest. My father’s Hungarian period, which is of course very important, was also shaped by a Russian influence – that came politically through Russian socialists, very different from the social democrats of that time. It was a socialism more oriented toward the countryside, the peasantry. It had anarchist elements. Communes, of course, were very much part of that political formation. And I would have to say that this Russian influence was balanced on his father’s side, who was an anglophile. And if there were two important literary figures in the life of my father it was Shakespeare – he took a volume of his collected English writings with him to the war – and, of all the great Russian writers, I would say Dostoyevsky.

       And then there was the influence of Russian émigré revolutionaries, among them a man called Klatchko.

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, Samuel Klatchko was an extraordinary figure. He lived in Vienna. He was the unofficial emissary connecting Russian revolutionaries with international and European ones. He came from a Jewish family in Vilna and spent his youth in a Russian commune in Kansas. The commune didn’t last very long. It eventually broke up, and they say that he drove 3,000 cattle to Chicago and after that he visited the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York. He was an activist. The Kansas commune was named after a Russian figure called Nikolai Tchaikovsky. But when Klatchko came to Vienna he formed a close friendship with the Pollacsek family and he looked after Russian folks who came to buy Marxist literature, or whatever they came to Vienna for. And my father told me – which I have never forgotten – that these men made a huge impression on him, and also on his cousin Irvin Szabo who played an important part in Hungarian intellectual life; he was also a kind of anarchist socialist. Some of them didn’t have shoes and they had their feet tied up in newspapers. My father was immensely impressed by the heroism and the courage of these people. And altogether my father had a… I was going to say ‘romantic’, but in any case, a huge respect for these revolutionaries – and particularly for Bakunin who, I suppose, is the greatest figure of all, a man who broke out of every prison in Europe.

       And the social revolutionary sympathy continued throughout his life, which explains in part the ambiguity he would have towards the Bolsheviks.

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, it continued throughout his life. It explains the antagonistic relationship to the social democrats of Russia, who after all included what would become the Bolshevik majority faction.

       Your father was already politically active when he was a student. Is that correct?

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, he was a founding president of a student movement, known as the Galileo Circle, whose journal was Szabad Gondolat, meaning “Free Thought.” It was against the monarchy, the aristocracy, the church, against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was not a socialist movement, although many of its participants were socialists. And finally, it included also young people from the gymnasiums, as well as from universities. It gave, I read somewhere, up to 2,000 literacy classes a year. So its main activity was education.

       And then there was World War I.

      POLANYI LEVITT: He was a cavalry officer in the war, on the Russian front. The situation was horrible. It was equally horrible for the Austro-Hungarians as for the Russians. He contracted typhus, which is a terrible illness. Eventually, he told me, when his horse tripped and fell on top of him, he thought that he was going to die but he woke up in a military hospital in Budapest.

       And at the end of the war there was the Hungarian Revolution.

      POLANYI LEVITT: The Hungarian Revolution of 1918 ended the war, with the First Republic and Count Karolyi as the first president in the autumn of that year. Therefore it’s usually called the Aster or Chrysanthemum Revolution, or after some other flower denoting autumn. It was then followed by the short-lived Revolution of the Councils, which ended in August of 1919 when it was defeated in a counter-revolution that led Hungarian intellectuals, activists, communists, socialists, liberals into exile in Vienna. Including my father.

       So your father left before the end of the revolution, right?

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, he left before the end.

       How did he view the Hungarian Revolution?

      POLANYI LEVITT: He was ambivalent, as were many others. I think they initially welcomed the formation of the councils all over the country. But when the councils decided on a wholesale nationalization of business – of everything – I think he thought it was going to have a very bad end. Which it did, in reality.

       So the leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party fled from Budapest to Vienna?

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes. The Communist Party in exile had two leaders, Bela Kun and George Lukács. There was a certain rivalry between the two. And here’s a funny story that involved my mother who spent the year 1919 in Moscow, where she – because of her linguistic abilities and education – worked in the office with Karl Radek, organizing the meetings of the Second Communist International. Eventually, when she returned to Vienna, she was given some financial assistance to deliver to the exiled Hungarian Communists there. It was in the form of a diamond, and it was put in a tube of toothpaste. But the interesting thing is that she was to deliver it to Lukács, because as the son of a banker he was perhaps thought to be more reliable than Kun.

       But at this point your mother and father had not met. In fact, they would meet in Vienna in the following year, 1920. Is that right?

      POLANYI LEVITT: It was a fateful meeting – in a villa put at the disposal of Hungarian communists and leftist émigrés by a Viennese well-wisher. As the darling of this company of young men, according to my mother, no one would have expected that she would be attracted to a gentleman ten years older than her, whose life appeared to be behind him – who was depressed, and scribbling notes in the corner …

       But they were very different characters, these two. One is more the activist and the other is more the intellectual; one spends her time in the

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