14/03/24 – Reconfiguring Russian Poland’s Industrial Civilization (1882-1922): Assimilated Jewry and the Idea of National Development – MAŁGORZATA MAZUREK (Columbia University)

The talk is a shortened version of the opening chapter of my book manuscript Economics of Hereness. The Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism 1918–1968 (forthcoming with Cornell UP). It illuminates the cultural roots of Polish developmental thought, which by the mid-1930s envisioned a full-employment economy as a solution to the country’s poverty and ethnic antagonisms. The paper features two protagonists, Michał Kalecki (1899-1970) and Ludwik Landau (1902-1944). As they were coming of age, during and after World War Two, they thought about interwar Poland’s recovery in terms of RE-industrialization and RE-construction. In other words, they sought to restore the industrial prowess of the pre-WWI Kingdom of Poland (Russian Poland). I argue that that we should not think about the “Polish Keynesian revolution” in terms of a simple, ascending shift from rural ‘backwardness’ to an industrial welfare state but as a more crooked story of reviving Russian Poland’s industrial civilization in the conditions of new, but devastated and largely agrarian Second Republic.