The Young Men of Łódź
Written with Miroslaw Manicki
Don’t try to say the name, Łódź. You cannot. It has deep linguistic roots in the Polish language that are beyond general understanding and pronunciation. It sounds more like a whoosh of air than what it looks like to non-Polish-speakers.
The city enjoys a long and storied part of the history of Poland as well as the countries of Central Europe at large. Located near the smaller city of Piotrków Trybunalski that has an even longer history, Łódź stands alone in terms of history and culture of Poland and of the world.
Łódź is an in-between city like a few others. It inherits its traditions from many social, political, and economic veins. This is seen in a much-acclaimed novel by Władysław Reymont and feature film called The Promised Land (Ziemia Obiecana). The novel was published in serial form from 1897 to 1898. It considers Polish, German, and Jewish traditions in the area in those times. Łódź was for a time the center of the largest Russian economic cluster in the last years of the Romanovs. It was the center of a vast textiles industry in the region and a place of significant industrial activity and wealth-creation. It was a Central European embodiment of the late Industrial Period.
Łódź was not London, nor Paris, nor New York, but it was a little bit of each and then more. It was another hotbed of human innovation and mercantilism. People living there experienced things, saw things. Among other things, Łódź was at the center of a world, a society, an economy. The river brought cotton from Egypt for spinning and weaving.
There were two men of Łódź whose work was meritorious — each made contributions beginning about a hundred years ago that the world has yet to digest. Raiment was not sparing in his assessment of Łódź’s shortcomings:
“For that ‘promised land’ — for that tumor — villages were deserted, forests died out, the land was depleted of its treasures, the rivers dried up, people were born. And it sucked everything into itself. And in its powerful jaws it crushed and chewed up people and things, sky and earth, in return giving useless millions to a handful of people, and hunger and hardship to the whole throng.” Władysław Reymont (Michael Henry Dziewicki 1927 translation)
A bit like Polanyi. Dark.
The two young men of Łódź saw the pain, but also saw promise. The first was a nobleman, Alfred Korzybski. The second, Michał Kalecki, was not. Neither was an academic in the strictest sense. Korzybski was trained as an engineer, while his roles in history led him to observe many things, largely from his service in the Russian Army in World War I. Kalecki was an apt student of civil engineering but was forced due to family economic conditions to enter the job market before graduating, where he worked as accountant, then economist, then commentator. Both were particularly apt in mathematics — due in large part to strict early-age schooling.
Both grew up in the world and environment of Łódź in the late 19th century. Korzybski’s early life was split, to be sure, between Warsaw where his mother lived a courtly, but modest life and a family farm in the Łódź area, which he oversaw from early childhood in his smart little uniform and cap.
Apart from Reymont’s prior assessment of Łódź’s regional impact, neither the city nor the country of Poland had visions of empire, conquest, and colonization. Having been divided and subjugated by their neighbors to the west, south, and east, Poland was on a different mission — and attempt to hold on to their culture and prepare for a time of independence and autonomy. This resulted in a complex set of relations with the Russian government. The Polish sector was politically subdued, but the country was strong — in many ways, modern ways, stronger than its parent.
The attitude there was a healthy one in this regard. Not tempted to look for half measures, the people of Łódź were oriented toward solutions. Some of this is inherently Polish and Slavic — a people who had always lived on the edge of natural instabilities and political crossfire. The Poles then and now have a notorious lack of patience when it comes to facts that matter. Some of this had to do with their perspective as leaders in a thriving regional industrialized society and a place of last resort as to policy. The other regional economic urban locales had a colonial perspective to fall back on, allowing for sloppy policy. Any externalities, whether natural or social, could be exported to the periphery. There, as similarly faulty policy frameworks were put into place, the reverse could also occur. Through the decades, leading to centuries, such imbalance could subsist under an awkward juggling act that persists to this day.
That wasn’t the Polish perspective — at least as it coalesced around the thoughts and acts of Korzybski and Kalecki. They wanted solutions. They wanted systems. They wanted systems that would derive solutions. As to Korzybski, the point was that sense-making was made possible under contemporary conditions, but mankind needed to “grow up” to want it and to work for it. His first book, published in the United States after WWI, declared “the manhood of humanity,” or at least the opportunity for that. He designated mankind as a “time-binding” class of life as distinguished from animals. As described by Korzybski in the book, humans perform time binding by the transmission of knowledge and abstractions through time which become accreted in cultures. His second book, “Science and Sanity,” declared in 1933 a need to fuse mathematics with meaning, although he declared in so doing that the means of accomplishing this would wait for “workers of the future” to know how to carry out. His work was unapologetic and unambiguous: Mankind needed to do this because its collective insanity, or unsanity, was capable of destroying itself and many other forms of life at the same time.
Kalecki saw what other economists witnessed as the Great Depression of the early 1930s took hold, but he viewed them from a unique perspective. It was not so much the economy that mattered as the people. This was a similar perspective as that of Marriner Eccles, the Utah banker that appealed to the American federal government to fund works projects so that people could get and spend money to meet their needs while jumpstarting the economy. Kalecki published his ideas and analysis in a Polish language journal. Sometime later, it was noted that these ideas paralleled those of the famous mathematician and economist John Maynard Keynes but preceded them by three years.
This led to a trip to Scandinavia and then to England and Cambridge, where Kalecki began to collaborate with Keynes and other economists on demand stimulus and other solutions to economic problems. Others noticed nuances between the Kalecki approach and the Keynes approach. Ultimately, the question of demand stimulus was a mathematics issue to Keynes. By stimulating demand and creating money, he observed an expansion of the economy was likely if not inevitable. It was a math problem. Kalecki viewed the issue as a social one, requiring planning and guidance so as to spend the money well, ensuring that needs be met and rational actions taken.
Joan Robinson was a particular supporter of Kalecki’s efforts. She served as buffer between Keynes and Kalecki, who went on to work in Canada and the United States, and ultimately back in Poland in 1955 — returning shortly to Cambridge where he celebrated his 70th birthday before dying later that year back in Poland. He had published a great deal, considering social and business cycles and their effects.
Kalecki’s last published article, for example, outlined means by which social and capitalistic interests might come to permanently coexist. This was a context involving a “right to work” and stabilization of working conditions “with a considerable expansion of social security.” Not popular in Poland of 1970, he had the work published in Italy. Not popular in Western circles thereafter, it is possible that it is more acceptable now, as populist challenges to the status quo keep coming in wave after wave.
Compromise is seen as desirable. Corporations are great at what they do. As to social security, as he indicates, how is that to be gained? Is this a monetary factor? Possibly so, but in trying times, it may difficult to get foodstuffs and other necessities. They might be best provided directly. There is nothing new in this — the ever-normal granaries of China and the great organizations of ancient Sumer performed this very service. Maintenance of such stores could come from corvée or assigned labor for able-bodied citizens.
There is no reason to go to war against corporations. They have their own issues and provide a service to the whole. There is no reason to expect them to be charitable beyond that.
Korzybski’s point has to do with the quality of information in society. We need a rich semantic library in order to survive, if not thrive. The point is, is there process behind declarations that float about in society? It is now clear to many, if not most, that much of the misinformation in society results from a form of improvisation that is carried out with plausibility as its aim. There pretends to be process in such fabrications, but the only process is deception. In an overabundance of stimulus, it is thought that a particular issue — however heinous or pernicious — will be lost to the collective mindset through time alone. All that is required of a deceptive dodge is to by a few days. Before long, it will be replaced by something — good, bad, or indifferent, it doesn’t really matter. The singular point is to change the subject or to hold out until something else does.
How does Korzybski deal with this? He died in 1950, before the onslaught of impressions brought on by television. There had been radio and movies in his time, both of which scattered impressions at unprecedented levels, but nothing like television, which has been replaced many times over by the Internet and social media. Is it possible now to go from insane and unsane to sane?
This brings us back to Łódź, which is incidentally, the motion picture capital of Poland. The key is to match media with media. Conventional social media is not going away — although it is refreshing to see some editorial oversight in the United States regarding the spread of documentable falsehoods. Combined, the men of Łódź help us to lay out the answers. As to process and credibility, from the standpoint of authority and knowledge, it is important to “stick the landing” as gymnasts would say. Media needs to be used in direct support of the needs and wants of the people in valid and reliable ways. Workers of the future, as described by Korzybski, need to rise to the occasion. They live in Łódź now. They live everywhere.