this was such a beautiful read. Both the writing and the embroidery--both threads of meaning and connection through time and place. I used to embroider handkerchiefs as gifts too--I got out of the habit, and was never taught how to sew, but there's something timeless about it that I loved. That said, I have a quilt I was going to embroider a poem on for my son that I started when he was about three and it is still unfinished--I'm making good on the promise that it will be finished by the time he leaves for college. 😭 The line work and others of your women ancestor's is so moving and beautiful, grateful to have learned more about it.
I kept picturing your little yarn ball section dividers!
What a beautiful thing about the quilt for your son. My mother-in-law cross-stitched this incredibly detailed Noah's Ark for my son when he was born, with individually cross-stitched animals you could put in and out of the boat. She started something for my daughter but nearly 13 years later it's unfinished and will probably remain so ... This stuff takes time!
Thanks for this, Nia. It makes me happy that you're again finding time to write in residency. When you think and write, it's good for the world. We get observations like this from you on the human condition: "The messy, the loving, the growth and form of relationships, the birdsong and smell of lilacs, the loneliness and desire to be known, the care and mutual aid, the inefficient and creative."
You are always so kind, Bryan! Thank you. 🧡 And it *does* feel different, as I'm sure you can imagine. All sorts of unexpected ideas coming out ...
Including that I'm wondering if I can steal your idea about an online gathering for subscribers. I never wanted to do that before but now that I have some space in my head, I kind of want to see how people are doing.
(Also, have you ever read "On Growth and Form"? It's one of those books that's lurked at me from my TBR pile for years and years and I wonder if I'll ever get to it.)
I have not read The Great Transformation, but it sounds like I ought to. I did read the article you posted in one of your comments: Karl Polanyi Explains It All. It definitely piques my interest.
But once again, as with almost everything I read—even so-called progressive treatises, even passionate appeals to humanitarianism, even those noble calls to justice and the common good—there are bedrock values and principles that remain unacknowledged and unspoken. They have become so normalized as to become invisible. Almost everything I read is predicated upon an anthropocentric view of the world. It is simply understood that human happiness and prosperity are the highest values in the cosmos, that all social and political institutions are to be instituted with those ends in mind, that all forms of injustice have only to do with injustices suffered by human beings, that all social and political reforms are undertaken in order to expand and more equitably distribute happiness and prosperity (or at least the opportunity to achieve them) to the greatest number of humans, and that the rest of nature is mere standing reserve, or fodder, with which to advance those highest values. Our whole way of thinking and being, every aspect of it, is built upon this house of cards.
I have two other things to say here:
1) The trial for Held v. State of Montana begins tomorrow. Will you be following?
2) This composition was pure joy to read. Thank you for the gift.
There is no third thing. The pillow is calling me to come dream the night away. I shan't refuse.
Honestly, I'm not sure it's one you need to read and that article is probably enough of a summation of the ideas. I finished it yesterday and while all the scholars who advised me to read it were right to do so -- it is pivotal to a lot of this thinking -- it is, as you say, completely anthropocentric. He has a lot to say on the subject of land as commodity, but it was hard to pick out perspectives from that. He doesn't think land (or labor or money) *should* be a commodity, but there's none of that aspect of relationship with land/nature that we've talked about. He does talk about kinship networks a fair bit, and what market capitalism does to all that as it forces land and labor into commodification. But it's more a jumping off point for a lot of your own thinking than necessarily a deepening of it.
Also, I had to really work to apply the lessons to our current times. They're frighteningly relevant (mostly about the openings for fascism as people find themselves helpless under the crushing damage of the enforced free market) but he's so specific about the timeframes he's talking about that I had to keep pausing to think about how a specific situation applies to *now*. Which it does! He just doesn't generalize, so you have to extrapolate.
I'll recommend Patty Krawec's "Becoming Kin" and Jessica Hernandez's "Fresh Banana Leaves" instead. And of course there's always Robin Wall Kimmerer, whom it never hurts me to return to.
1) I will try. My environmental lawyer friend will certainly text me about it constantly and I will be reading about it. (Also I know one of the kids -- not well, but a little.)
2) 🧡😭 🧡
3) I hope you slept well! I've been sleeping well. It's a nice treat.
Lovely, thank you. Feels like so many areas of our lives have been cordoned off, habitualised and siloed, and the threading is an essential element of reconnecting these apparently disparate parts, whatever form that threading takes. Home baked cookies are the best! 🍪
I like that image of threading the disparate parts of our lives together, too. Like mycelial networks on the forest floor, but for human activity that restores our spirits and joy ...
Home baked cookies forever! Especially warm out of the oven. With milk.
I love this writing. The parallel personal and political (or economic/ policy) reflections. And you raise such a powerful point about human motivation, which can be infinitely diverse.
Homo Economicus is such a bizarre construction, and so easily disproven by our actions that can't be explained by selfish rationality. In my own academic work (which is maybe just beginning), I have been trying to identify the levers for land use change - and understanding the behaviour of farmers and landowners is critical to this. While we all need to earn enough money to pay our bills, we don't necessarily chase every bit of profit available. In Europe and the UK, the main tools for changing farming practices are economic incentives. That so many policy makers are shocked when landowners continue to resist change even when they are losing profit, shows how deeply the capitalist understanding has penetrated.
I tend to weave (haha) back and forth between the personal and the more research-heavy; this is just my instinct but I feel like it's an effective way to meet people where they are when you're trying to talk about ideas that feel-counter-intuitive or difficult. Also it's how I like to write. 😂
The mindset has penetrated SO deeply, I think you're right. That's something Polanyi gets into a bit, though of course we're in different times now. But it's one of the things that makes me pessimistic about change, people's inability to imagine not only that things could be different, but that all our lives could be better if that were the case!
Do you listen to the Farmerama podcast? They've had a number of interesting episodes on farming practices in the UK. They did a series relatively recently on fabrics/fashion/farming, trying to make clothing local. And another one quite a while ago on cereal grains that went from bakeries back to grain millers and farmers. Really intriguing stuff. I like listening to it because the people doing the work do a great job articulating their values as well as the practical aspects of how they make it work.
Golly Antonia -- there I was happily reading along, nodding and feeling and absorbing and thinking about capitalism intertwined with the singular magnificence, the humanity and inhumanity, of Uptown Butte with all its mess and charm and grief and wind and sun and birds and love of place--well I don't really have words for it which is fine because you do-- and it was so perfect to slip from there into chopping wood and digging holes (skills I very much admire and once prided myself on), and then back into the bliss of embroidery and the way the actions of needle and yarn and cloth have opened up so many things for somany -- and then suddenly, there were my words --and -- oh my-- surprise and delight and confusion and I had to pause and spin a little yarn before, of course, I was puled to read on. Thank you again for all you do. (Not sure if what I justwrote is actually a sentence but I'll leave it as is cuz... why not?)
Being a ubiquitous user of m-dashes and ellipses and semi-colons, I am fully on board with that being a sentence! (Also, sentences can be creative, too, can't they? As someone who corrects grammar for most of my income, I am ALL for throwing the rules out the window and doing what makes meaning.)
Anyway, I loved reading this and it was exactly like being pulled into the process of deep creative flow itself! 💖💖💖
Suddenly I’m imagining a camping/ woods-centric grammar gathering for independent writers who would like to brush up on structure and writing “rules” (including ways to play with both), taught/led by you. Or you and Chris La Tray cuz what fun to hear you both. Just an idle rainy morning dream… And in the meantime, thank you for not being too horrified by my casual way with words. And m dashes. And ellipses. And fragments. But oh, commas—you do lead me a merry dance. Comma users anonymous, where are you??
That sounds like an absolutely delightful gathering! I love grammar and especially messing with it and explaining the weird things like English being stuck with nonsensical rules from Latin because it's an easy thing to do standardized testing on (hello, ending sentences with prepositions). Being a copy editor and all (and NOT a poet), I'd of course come at it from a different angle than Chris, but I think you'd find yourself with two people saying, essentially, "Who cares about all that?!" (We've been on a couple of panels together before and had a good time. It's been a while!)
And in the meantime, as I tell all of my relatives and close friends who constantly think I'm silently judging their grammar, I want my gravestone to read, "She never cared about your typos." 😀
This gave me goosebumps, Nia: “When we know—don’t we?—that what pulls us through and along life is so much more than that. The messy, the loving, the growth and form of relationships, the birdsong and smell of lilacs, the loneliness and desire to be known, the care and mutual aid, the inefficient and creative.”
Your essays INSPIRE me in unexpected ways most every time. Forgive if this seems a tangent. It is 100% inspired by an important paragraph in your essay.
Your short profile of "The Great Transformation" was an eye-opener. I have struggled to bring some loose ideas in an essay to suitable form hence it wallows in the Draft folder. I was reminded when Substack changed the publish home page. The [Posts] tab now provides a count of posts, drafts and scheduled. I was alarmed by the number of half-baked Drafts. I could not resist but to make a quick pass through and separate wheat from chaff.
The paragraph you shared with the warning it was printed in 1944 is powerful. My working premise for the period was the world broke into two camps. I don't know enough about the Soviet and PRC journeys to write with authority. My sense of Post WWII is different. I believe now the US imposed a better version of itself shaped by the FDR era carving out the proper role of government that did not leave everyone on their own. I think the national identity that emerged in Post-War Germany and Japan in many ways represent "the more perfect Union" that could never be without a fight in the US. The conquered were blessed because they are not bound by a festooned Constitution that is unchanging.
These democracy 2.0 instances eventually emerged and challenged the US in unexpected ways. We had created these more perfect unions yet when faced with reinvention we reverted in the late 70s and early 80s to Neoliberalism (Reagan and Thatcher). We live today with the consequence of this with greater inequality, a loss of faith "in the system" and a creep toward Fascist instincts. I am an optimist. I hope and believe we will throw off this 1980s pivot and return to the promise of looking out for everyone. I agree with the thesis of the book and imagine the creep toward fascism in a two party system is inevitable until we embrace a reinvention. Perhaps Democracy 3.0. I fear there are many who will fight to the last for Neoliberalism 2.0. This is the reinvention to revitalize life for all of us.
Polanyi bases a lot of his ideas on enclosures of the commons in 1400s England (which as you know is right in my wheelhouse), with the note I hadn't read before that as awful as the consequences were, they were made slightly less awful by the power of the state being used to slow the changes. He follows that with looking at changes in the Poor Law and other legal shifts in England that tried to grapple with the question of poverty, BUT he also talks about a huge difference in a market economy turning land, labor, and money (through interest) into commodities, which he said had never been done before.
I haven't gotten to this part yet, but I gather that part of his thesis about World War I and then II has to do with attempts to keep grip of a gold standard, which was desired by the market and capital, but which put ordinary people in many countries into devastating economic circumstances.
I agree with you that many will fight to the last for Neoliberalism 2.0 -- but as you likely know, part of what I look for all the time are the people who are trying to build something entirely different, based on relationship of all kinds. He *does* talk directly about government/the state warping itself to serve the market/capital and how that leads people to lose any trust they ever had in government (this is in a section on early 1800s England), which is daunting but clarifying.
“He *does* talk directly about government/the state warping itself to serve the market/capital” — this is _really_ interesting. In Debt by David Graeber, he argues that the it’s the market is a creation of the state (no matter what neoliberals may have you think): ”Stateless societies tend also to be without markets” pp50
That is another not-yet-read book on my shelf! I keep wanting to read it for my own pleasure, not just for research. Graeber was such a force and is such an engaging writer.
This is only a guess, but it might be a difference in the definition of "market." Polanyi gets pretty deep in the weeds on what he means by it when he's talking free-market ideology, versus the kinds of more localized or even regional markets and trading that humans engaged in for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution. I don't know enough about it to know whether he's right or not, but he's specific that he sees a difference.
After completing a recent class, we touched on a lot of these topics. I look forward to the article from prospect.org -- I cannot get over the breadth of your knowledge on the subject. The loss of trust in government is nothing I ever considered with its roots in 1800s England! More questions to come and thanks for lots to think about here.
I don't think my knowledge is terribly broad! But one true benefit of not being in academia is that I can explore wherever a subject or curiosity lead. No silos. It's very helpful, honestly, which I get from your writing, too.
Your writing carries the theme and reinforces the message. When people write about trust in government (lots are worried) you often get someone's bias or opinion. When I read your writing you elevate the discussion to the system we are in and how that drives us to a conclusion. If you want to examine whether the conclusion is right, you need to change the system. A system built on maximum economic growth and debt to fuel it drives to an outcome. Operating it comprehensively around the globe within a FINITE system like one planet is just fine when you are pounding rocks together PERHAPS. It is quite different when there are 8B practitioners and there now exists the means to EXCEED the carrying limit of the system in which the 8B live. That's a hard concept to get across but you do by taking us on a trip through a beautiful world just walking.
Seeing as how that's exactly what I try to do in my writing, that's quite a compliment! It's a little thrilling when someone gets what it is you're aiming for. I obviously have opinions on right, wrong, and how to do things, but find that the strongest dialogue is had in the questioning. Because so often the questions we're asking or being asked are looking where the foundation of the problems aren't. (Which has something to do with people always thinking their society's problems are new or unique, where studying history shows us a lot of it really does rhyme.)
What a gorgeous essay! The thoughts on embroidery are so evocative to me-- my grandmother embroidered, too, and I did when I was younger (now I knit). Her embroidery always reminded me of the song Bread and Roses-- of kindling beauty amid the grinding labor outside and inside the home.
Thanks for all of this, and especially for the beautiful shot of the sky, which comes as rare and refreshing fruit given the smoky haze here right now.
I was thinking a lot of all the people I know who knit and crochet as I wrote this. I do neither, but picking up embroidery again somehow got me to understand having those things on hand all the time in a way I hadn't before. I was on a trail crew last year with two women who brought their knitting and worked on them after hiking and sawing all day. Kind of like you're never lonely with a book, you're never bored with knitting? "Kindling beauty amid the grinding labor outside and inside the home" -- that's so well said.
And I am so sorry about the smoky haze. I've been seeing photos, of course, but it never really gets to the heart of what that's like, does it? Too many summer have been like that here, though it's raining a lot now. It's an awful thing to live with, and especially daunting so early in the year.
Yes. We were in the flood zone and had to evacuate in the middle of the night, wading through the rising water. This year we are staying on higher ground. There are flash flood warnings today, but I think it's for the general area and not specific to Red Lodge.
Sounds like dinnertime is adventurous. :) I am very much a recipe follower, which doesn't make for bad meals but doesn't lead me into experimentation much. The one thing I like baking is pie, maybe because the crust doesn't need quite the precision that other baking does, and I like pie more than I like, say, cupcakes!
Nicely done. Glad you have the retreat time. Butte is one of those places in the world that's just a little different.
Surpised you had not run onto Karl Polanyi before. But yes, we have been warned about where we seem to be heading for a very long time. For some reason, reading that line you quote triggered a childhood memory, a time when dad got hurt on the job. I guess, feeling that moment roll through me again, that young as I was, I knew we had no safety net. It turned out better than feared. But I do not understand why we not only accept, but idolize such a harsh world.
"I do not understand why we not only accept, but idolise such a harsh world." This is something that gets me all the time. Like, the fact that we got through hardship means others should have to do so too.
It really is just a little different. I got a great tour of some spots yesterday with a retired miner that a local friend of mine set up, and it was really eye-opening. And maybe there's something else in the air with your memory -- today is the anniversary of the 1917 Granite Mountain Mine Disaster here. It was sobering to be at the memorial site yesterday and read the notes some of the miners had left while waiting for rescue.
Polanyi's been on my shelf for 2 or 3 years. I should have read him earlier. For some reason I thought his book was about the advent of agriculture and I decided to read James C. Scott first. But it's good to read this now, because I might have forgotten a lot of it by the time I needed it!
Thank you, Jill -- good to see you here! (A friend arranged a mining tour of Butte given by a retired miner yesterday; I think you would have found it really interesting.)
That is one of the nicest compliments to receive. 🧡🧡🧡 I think I needed a reminder, too, that many people in awful circumstances all over the world have continued to create beauty, along with whatever deeper or more powerful meaning goes along with these works of hand.
this was such a beautiful read. Both the writing and the embroidery--both threads of meaning and connection through time and place. I used to embroider handkerchiefs as gifts too--I got out of the habit, and was never taught how to sew, but there's something timeless about it that I loved. That said, I have a quilt I was going to embroider a poem on for my son that I started when he was about three and it is still unfinished--I'm making good on the promise that it will be finished by the time he leaves for college. 😭 The line work and others of your women ancestor's is so moving and beautiful, grateful to have learned more about it.
I kept picturing your little yarn ball section dividers!
What a beautiful thing about the quilt for your son. My mother-in-law cross-stitched this incredibly detailed Noah's Ark for my son when he was born, with individually cross-stitched animals you could put in and out of the boat. She started something for my daughter but nearly 13 years later it's unfinished and will probably remain so ... This stuff takes time!
Thanks for this, Nia. It makes me happy that you're again finding time to write in residency. When you think and write, it's good for the world. We get observations like this from you on the human condition: "The messy, the loving, the growth and form of relationships, the birdsong and smell of lilacs, the loneliness and desire to be known, the care and mutual aid, the inefficient and creative."
You are always so kind, Bryan! Thank you. 🧡 And it *does* feel different, as I'm sure you can imagine. All sorts of unexpected ideas coming out ...
Including that I'm wondering if I can steal your idea about an online gathering for subscribers. I never wanted to do that before but now that I have some space in my head, I kind of want to see how people are doing.
(Also, have you ever read "On Growth and Form"? It's one of those books that's lurked at me from my TBR pile for years and years and I wonder if I'll ever get to it.)
I have not read The Great Transformation, but it sounds like I ought to. I did read the article you posted in one of your comments: Karl Polanyi Explains It All. It definitely piques my interest.
But once again, as with almost everything I read—even so-called progressive treatises, even passionate appeals to humanitarianism, even those noble calls to justice and the common good—there are bedrock values and principles that remain unacknowledged and unspoken. They have become so normalized as to become invisible. Almost everything I read is predicated upon an anthropocentric view of the world. It is simply understood that human happiness and prosperity are the highest values in the cosmos, that all social and political institutions are to be instituted with those ends in mind, that all forms of injustice have only to do with injustices suffered by human beings, that all social and political reforms are undertaken in order to expand and more equitably distribute happiness and prosperity (or at least the opportunity to achieve them) to the greatest number of humans, and that the rest of nature is mere standing reserve, or fodder, with which to advance those highest values. Our whole way of thinking and being, every aspect of it, is built upon this house of cards.
I have two other things to say here:
1) The trial for Held v. State of Montana begins tomorrow. Will you be following?
2) This composition was pure joy to read. Thank you for the gift.
There is no third thing. The pillow is calling me to come dream the night away. I shan't refuse.
Honestly, I'm not sure it's one you need to read and that article is probably enough of a summation of the ideas. I finished it yesterday and while all the scholars who advised me to read it were right to do so -- it is pivotal to a lot of this thinking -- it is, as you say, completely anthropocentric. He has a lot to say on the subject of land as commodity, but it was hard to pick out perspectives from that. He doesn't think land (or labor or money) *should* be a commodity, but there's none of that aspect of relationship with land/nature that we've talked about. He does talk about kinship networks a fair bit, and what market capitalism does to all that as it forces land and labor into commodification. But it's more a jumping off point for a lot of your own thinking than necessarily a deepening of it.
Also, I had to really work to apply the lessons to our current times. They're frighteningly relevant (mostly about the openings for fascism as people find themselves helpless under the crushing damage of the enforced free market) but he's so specific about the timeframes he's talking about that I had to keep pausing to think about how a specific situation applies to *now*. Which it does! He just doesn't generalize, so you have to extrapolate.
I'll recommend Patty Krawec's "Becoming Kin" and Jessica Hernandez's "Fresh Banana Leaves" instead. And of course there's always Robin Wall Kimmerer, whom it never hurts me to return to.
1) I will try. My environmental lawyer friend will certainly text me about it constantly and I will be reading about it. (Also I know one of the kids -- not well, but a little.)
2) 🧡😭 🧡
3) I hope you slept well! I've been sleeping well. It's a nice treat.
Lovely, thank you. Feels like so many areas of our lives have been cordoned off, habitualised and siloed, and the threading is an essential element of reconnecting these apparently disparate parts, whatever form that threading takes. Home baked cookies are the best! 🍪
I like that image of threading the disparate parts of our lives together, too. Like mycelial networks on the forest floor, but for human activity that restores our spirits and joy ...
Home baked cookies forever! Especially warm out of the oven. With milk.
I love this writing. The parallel personal and political (or economic/ policy) reflections. And you raise such a powerful point about human motivation, which can be infinitely diverse.
Homo Economicus is such a bizarre construction, and so easily disproven by our actions that can't be explained by selfish rationality. In my own academic work (which is maybe just beginning), I have been trying to identify the levers for land use change - and understanding the behaviour of farmers and landowners is critical to this. While we all need to earn enough money to pay our bills, we don't necessarily chase every bit of profit available. In Europe and the UK, the main tools for changing farming practices are economic incentives. That so many policy makers are shocked when landowners continue to resist change even when they are losing profit, shows how deeply the capitalist understanding has penetrated.
I tend to weave (haha) back and forth between the personal and the more research-heavy; this is just my instinct but I feel like it's an effective way to meet people where they are when you're trying to talk about ideas that feel-counter-intuitive or difficult. Also it's how I like to write. 😂
The mindset has penetrated SO deeply, I think you're right. That's something Polanyi gets into a bit, though of course we're in different times now. But it's one of the things that makes me pessimistic about change, people's inability to imagine not only that things could be different, but that all our lives could be better if that were the case!
Do you listen to the Farmerama podcast? They've had a number of interesting episodes on farming practices in the UK. They did a series relatively recently on fabrics/fashion/farming, trying to make clothing local. And another one quite a while ago on cereal grains that went from bakeries back to grain millers and farmers. Really intriguing stuff. I like listening to it because the people doing the work do a great job articulating their values as well as the practical aspects of how they make it work.
Golly Antonia -- there I was happily reading along, nodding and feeling and absorbing and thinking about capitalism intertwined with the singular magnificence, the humanity and inhumanity, of Uptown Butte with all its mess and charm and grief and wind and sun and birds and love of place--well I don't really have words for it which is fine because you do-- and it was so perfect to slip from there into chopping wood and digging holes (skills I very much admire and once prided myself on), and then back into the bliss of embroidery and the way the actions of needle and yarn and cloth have opened up so many things for somany -- and then suddenly, there were my words --and -- oh my-- surprise and delight and confusion and I had to pause and spin a little yarn before, of course, I was puled to read on. Thank you again for all you do. (Not sure if what I justwrote is actually a sentence but I'll leave it as is cuz... why not?)
Being a ubiquitous user of m-dashes and ellipses and semi-colons, I am fully on board with that being a sentence! (Also, sentences can be creative, too, can't they? As someone who corrects grammar for most of my income, I am ALL for throwing the rules out the window and doing what makes meaning.)
Anyway, I loved reading this and it was exactly like being pulled into the process of deep creative flow itself! 💖💖💖
Suddenly I’m imagining a camping/ woods-centric grammar gathering for independent writers who would like to brush up on structure and writing “rules” (including ways to play with both), taught/led by you. Or you and Chris La Tray cuz what fun to hear you both. Just an idle rainy morning dream… And in the meantime, thank you for not being too horrified by my casual way with words. And m dashes. And ellipses. And fragments. But oh, commas—you do lead me a merry dance. Comma users anonymous, where are you??
Comma users anonymous are everywhere! 😂
That sounds like an absolutely delightful gathering! I love grammar and especially messing with it and explaining the weird things like English being stuck with nonsensical rules from Latin because it's an easy thing to do standardized testing on (hello, ending sentences with prepositions). Being a copy editor and all (and NOT a poet), I'd of course come at it from a different angle than Chris, but I think you'd find yourself with two people saying, essentially, "Who cares about all that?!" (We've been on a couple of panels together before and had a good time. It's been a while!)
And in the meantime, as I tell all of my relatives and close friends who constantly think I'm silently judging their grammar, I want my gravestone to read, "She never cared about your typos." 😀
This gave me goosebumps, Nia: “When we know—don’t we?—that what pulls us through and along life is so much more than that. The messy, the loving, the growth and form of relationships, the birdsong and smell of lilacs, the loneliness and desire to be known, the care and mutual aid, the inefficient and creative.”
I mean, we KNOW, right? There was something about Polanyi's phrasing that pulled together the capitalism/free market angle for me at a deeper level. 🧡
Your essays INSPIRE me in unexpected ways most every time. Forgive if this seems a tangent. It is 100% inspired by an important paragraph in your essay.
Your short profile of "The Great Transformation" was an eye-opener. I have struggled to bring some loose ideas in an essay to suitable form hence it wallows in the Draft folder. I was reminded when Substack changed the publish home page. The [Posts] tab now provides a count of posts, drafts and scheduled. I was alarmed by the number of half-baked Drafts. I could not resist but to make a quick pass through and separate wheat from chaff.
The paragraph you shared with the warning it was printed in 1944 is powerful. My working premise for the period was the world broke into two camps. I don't know enough about the Soviet and PRC journeys to write with authority. My sense of Post WWII is different. I believe now the US imposed a better version of itself shaped by the FDR era carving out the proper role of government that did not leave everyone on their own. I think the national identity that emerged in Post-War Germany and Japan in many ways represent "the more perfect Union" that could never be without a fight in the US. The conquered were blessed because they are not bound by a festooned Constitution that is unchanging.
These democracy 2.0 instances eventually emerged and challenged the US in unexpected ways. We had created these more perfect unions yet when faced with reinvention we reverted in the late 70s and early 80s to Neoliberalism (Reagan and Thatcher). We live today with the consequence of this with greater inequality, a loss of faith "in the system" and a creep toward Fascist instincts. I am an optimist. I hope and believe we will throw off this 1980s pivot and return to the promise of looking out for everyone. I agree with the thesis of the book and imagine the creep toward fascism in a two party system is inevitable until we embrace a reinvention. Perhaps Democracy 3.0. I fear there are many who will fight to the last for Neoliberalism 2.0. This is the reinvention to revitalize life for all of us.
Polanyi bases a lot of his ideas on enclosures of the commons in 1400s England (which as you know is right in my wheelhouse), with the note I hadn't read before that as awful as the consequences were, they were made slightly less awful by the power of the state being used to slow the changes. He follows that with looking at changes in the Poor Law and other legal shifts in England that tried to grapple with the question of poverty, BUT he also talks about a huge difference in a market economy turning land, labor, and money (through interest) into commodities, which he said had never been done before.
I haven't gotten to this part yet, but I gather that part of his thesis about World War I and then II has to do with attempts to keep grip of a gold standard, which was desired by the market and capital, but which put ordinary people in many countries into devastating economic circumstances.
I agree with you that many will fight to the last for Neoliberalism 2.0 -- but as you likely know, part of what I look for all the time are the people who are trying to build something entirely different, based on relationship of all kinds. He *does* talk directly about government/the state warping itself to serve the market/capital and how that leads people to lose any trust they ever had in government (this is in a section on early 1800s England), which is daunting but clarifying.
This article seems a good overview of his ideas: https://prospect.org/power/karl-polanyi-explains/
I have many drafts of ideas, you're not alone!
“He *does* talk directly about government/the state warping itself to serve the market/capital” — this is _really_ interesting. In Debt by David Graeber, he argues that the it’s the market is a creation of the state (no matter what neoliberals may have you think): ”Stateless societies tend also to be without markets” pp50
https://archive.org/details/debtfirst5000yea0000grae/page/50/mode/1up
That is another not-yet-read book on my shelf! I keep wanting to read it for my own pleasure, not just for research. Graeber was such a force and is such an engaging writer.
This is only a guess, but it might be a difference in the definition of "market." Polanyi gets pretty deep in the weeds on what he means by it when he's talking free-market ideology, versus the kinds of more localized or even regional markets and trading that humans engaged in for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution. I don't know enough about it to know whether he's right or not, but he's specific that he sees a difference.
After completing a recent class, we touched on a lot of these topics. I look forward to the article from prospect.org -- I cannot get over the breadth of your knowledge on the subject. The loss of trust in government is nothing I ever considered with its roots in 1800s England! More questions to come and thanks for lots to think about here.
I don't think my knowledge is terribly broad! But one true benefit of not being in academia is that I can explore wherever a subject or curiosity lead. No silos. It's very helpful, honestly, which I get from your writing, too.
Your writing carries the theme and reinforces the message. When people write about trust in government (lots are worried) you often get someone's bias or opinion. When I read your writing you elevate the discussion to the system we are in and how that drives us to a conclusion. If you want to examine whether the conclusion is right, you need to change the system. A system built on maximum economic growth and debt to fuel it drives to an outcome. Operating it comprehensively around the globe within a FINITE system like one planet is just fine when you are pounding rocks together PERHAPS. It is quite different when there are 8B practitioners and there now exists the means to EXCEED the carrying limit of the system in which the 8B live. That's a hard concept to get across but you do by taking us on a trip through a beautiful world just walking.
Seeing as how that's exactly what I try to do in my writing, that's quite a compliment! It's a little thrilling when someone gets what it is you're aiming for. I obviously have opinions on right, wrong, and how to do things, but find that the strongest dialogue is had in the questioning. Because so often the questions we're asking or being asked are looking where the foundation of the problems aren't. (Which has something to do with people always thinking their society's problems are new or unique, where studying history shows us a lot of it really does rhyme.)
What a gorgeous essay! The thoughts on embroidery are so evocative to me-- my grandmother embroidered, too, and I did when I was younger (now I knit). Her embroidery always reminded me of the song Bread and Roses-- of kindling beauty amid the grinding labor outside and inside the home.
Thanks for all of this, and especially for the beautiful shot of the sky, which comes as rare and refreshing fruit given the smoky haze here right now.
I was thinking a lot of all the people I know who knit and crochet as I wrote this. I do neither, but picking up embroidery again somehow got me to understand having those things on hand all the time in a way I hadn't before. I was on a trail crew last year with two women who brought their knitting and worked on them after hiking and sawing all day. Kind of like you're never lonely with a book, you're never bored with knitting? "Kindling beauty amid the grinding labor outside and inside the home" -- that's so well said.
And I am so sorry about the smoky haze. I've been seeing photos, of course, but it never really gets to the heart of what that's like, does it? Too many summer have been like that here, though it's raining a lot now. It's an awful thing to live with, and especially daunting so early in the year.
What clouds you have in Butte! Wonderful! Over in Red Lodge we have had a few dramatic displays every day after the rain clouds begin to breakup.
Aren't they gorgeous? Both today and two days ago there have been huge thunderstorms that poured rain and shook the house. Absolutely delightful.
Welcome to Red Lodge. Fingers crossed for no flooding this time. Weren't you there last year when it flooded?
Yes. We were in the flood zone and had to evacuate in the middle of the night, wading through the rising water. This year we are staying on higher ground. There are flash flood warnings today, but I think it's for the general area and not specific to Red Lodge.
Stay safe. 🧡
My wife is the baker, which works out well because I have difficulty following the same recipe more than once. I experiment too much for baking.
Sounds like dinnertime is adventurous. :) I am very much a recipe follower, which doesn't make for bad meals but doesn't lead me into experimentation much. The one thing I like baking is pie, maybe because the crust doesn't need quite the precision that other baking does, and I like pie more than I like, say, cupcakes!
Oh, this one is glorious. Thank you <3
Thank you, Hannah!
Nicely done. Glad you have the retreat time. Butte is one of those places in the world that's just a little different.
Surpised you had not run onto Karl Polanyi before. But yes, we have been warned about where we seem to be heading for a very long time. For some reason, reading that line you quote triggered a childhood memory, a time when dad got hurt on the job. I guess, feeling that moment roll through me again, that young as I was, I knew we had no safety net. It turned out better than feared. But I do not understand why we not only accept, but idolize such a harsh world.
"I do not understand why we not only accept, but idolise such a harsh world." This is something that gets me all the time. Like, the fact that we got through hardship means others should have to do so too.
SAME.
It really is just a little different. I got a great tour of some spots yesterday with a retired miner that a local friend of mine set up, and it was really eye-opening. And maybe there's something else in the air with your memory -- today is the anniversary of the 1917 Granite Mountain Mine Disaster here. It was sobering to be at the memorial site yesterday and read the notes some of the miners had left while waiting for rescue.
Polanyi's been on my shelf for 2 or 3 years. I should have read him earlier. For some reason I thought his book was about the advent of agriculture and I decided to read James C. Scott first. But it's good to read this now, because I might have forgotten a lot of it by the time I needed it!
Superb!!
🙏💖
Lovely thoughts to read this morning. Writing, skies, birds, embroidery, ancestral legacies.
Thank you, Jill -- good to see you here! (A friend arranged a mining tour of Butte given by a retired miner yesterday; I think you would have found it really interesting.)
That is one of the nicest compliments to receive. 🧡🧡🧡 I think I needed a reminder, too, that many people in awful circumstances all over the world have continued to create beauty, along with whatever deeper or more powerful meaning goes along with these works of hand.