Karl Polyani

from The Great Transformation, Rinehart & Company, Inc, 1944

Chapter 15, MARKET AND NATURE

WHAT WE CALL LAND is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man's institutions. To isolate it and form a market out of it was perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors. (178)

Traditionally, land and labor are not separated; labor forms part of life, land remains part of nature, life and nature form an articulate whole. Land is thus tied up with the organizations of kinship, neighborhood, craft, and crecd-with tribe and temple, village, gild, and church. One Big Market, on the other hand, is an arrangement of economic life which includes markets for the factors of production. Since these factors happen to be indistinguishable from the elements of human institutions, man and nature, it can be readily seen that market economy involves a society the institutions of which are subordinated to the requirements of the market mechanism. (178)

The proposition is as utopian in respect to land as in respect to labor. The economic function is but one of many vital functions of land. It invests man's life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons. We might as well imagine his being bom without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land. And yet to separate land from man and organize society in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a real-estate market was a vital part of the utopian concept of a market economy. (178)

Again, it is in the field of modern colonization that the true significance of such a venture becomes manifest. Whether the colonist needs land as a site for the sake of the wealth buried in it, or whether he merely wishes to constrain the native to produce a surplus of food and raw materials, is often irrelevant; nor does it make much difference whether the native works under the direct supervision of the colonist or only under some form of indirect compulsion, for in every and any case the social and cultural system of native life must be first shattered. (178)

There is close analogy between the colonial situation today and that of Western Europe a century or two ago. But the mobilization of land which in exotic regions may be compressed into a few years or decades may have taken as many centuries in Western Europe. (178, 179)

The challenge came from the growth of other than purely commercial forms of capitalism. There was, starting in England with the Tudors, argricultural capitalism with its need for an individualized treatrnent of the land, including conversions and enclosures. There was industrial capitalism which - in France as in England - was primarily rural and needed sites for its mills and laborers' settlements, since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Most powerful of all, though affecting more the use of the land than its ownership, there was the rise of industrial towns with their need for practically unlimited food and raw material supplies in the nineteenth century. (179)

Superficially, there was little likeness in the responses to these challenges, yet they were stages in the subordination of the surface of the planet to the needs of an industrial society. The first stage was the commercialization of the soil, mobilizing the feudal revenue of the land. The second was the forcing up of the production of food and organic raw materials to serve the needs of a rapidly growing industrial population on a national scale. The third was the extension of such a system of surplus production to overseas and colonial territories. With this last step land and its produce were finally fitted into the scheme of a self-regutating world market.(179)

Commercialization of the soil was only another name for the liquidation of feudalism which started in Western urban centers as well as in England in the fourteenth century and was concluded some five hundred years later in the course of the European revolutions, when the remnants of villeinage were abolished. To detach man from the soil meant the dissolution of the body economic into its elements so that each element could fit into that part of the system where it was most useful. The new system was first established alongside the fold which it tried to assimilate and absorb, by securing a grip on such soil as was still bound up in precapitalistic ties. The feudal sequestration of the land was abolished. "The aim was the elimination of all claims on the part of neighborhood or kinship organizations, especially those of virile aristocratic stock as well as of the Church - claims, which exempted land from commerce or mortgage." (Brinkmann, C., "Das soziale System des Kapitalismus," Grundriss der Soziale System des Ekonomik, 1924). Some of this was achieved by individual force and violence, some by revolution from above or below, some by war and conquest, some by legislative action, some by administrative pressure, some by spontaneous small-scale action of private persons over long stretches of time. Whether the dislocation was swiftly healed or whether it caused an open wound in the body social depended primarily on the measures taken to regulate the process. Powerful factors of change and adjustment were introduced by the governments themselves. Secularization of Church lands, for instance, was one of the fundaments of the modern state up to the time of the Italian Risorgimento and, incidentally, one of the chief means of the ordered transference of land into the hands of private individuals. (179, 180)

The biggest single steps were taken by the French Revolution and by the Benthamite reforms of the 183o's and 1840's - "The condition most favorable to the prosperity of agriculture exists," wrote Bentham, "when there are no entails, no unalienable endowments, no common lands, no right of redemptions, no tithes....” Such freedom in dealing with property, and especially property in land, formed an essential part of the Benthamite conception of individual liberty. To extend this freedom in one way or another was the aim and effect of legislation such as the Prescriptions Acts, the Inheritance Act, the Fines and Recoveries Act, the Real Property Act, the general Enclosure Act of 1801 and its successors (Dicey, A. V., op. Cit., P. 226), as well as the Copyhold Acts from 1841 up to 1926. In France and much of the Continent the Code Napoleon instituted middle-class forms of property, making land a commerciable good and making mortgage a private civil contract. (180)

The second step, overlapping the first, was the subordination of land to the needs of a swiftly expanding urban population. Although the soil cannot be physically mobilized, its produce can, if transportation facilities and the law permit. "Thus the mobility of goods to some extent compenstites the lack of interregional mobility of the factors; or (what is really the sarne thing) trade mitigates the disadvantages of the unsuitable geographical distribution of the productive facilities." (Ohlin, B., Interregional and International Trade, 1935, P. 42). Such a notion was entirely foreign to the traditional outlook. "Neither with the ancients, nor during the early Middle Ages - this should be emphatically asserted - were the goods of every day life regularly bought and sold." (Bilcher, K., Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, 1904. Cf. also Penrose, E. F., Population Theories and Their Application, 1934, quotes Longfield, 1834, for the first mention of the idea that movements of commodities may be regarded as substitutes for movements of the factors of production). Surpluses of grain were supposed provision the neighborhood, especially the local town; corn markets up to the fifteenth century had a strictly local organization. But the growth of towns induced landlords to produce primarily for sale on the market and - in England - the growth of the metropolis compelled authorities to loosen the restrictions on the corn trade and allow it to become regional, though never national. (180, 181)

Eventually agglomeration of the population in the industrial towns of the second half of the eighteenth century changed the situation completely - first on a national, then on a world scale. To effect this change was the true meaning of free trade. The mobilization of the produce of the land was extended from the neighboring countryside to tropical and subtropical regions - the industrial agricultural division of labor was applied to the planet. As a result, peoples of distant zones were drawn into the vortex of change the origins of which were obscure to them, while the European nations became dependent for their everyday activities upon a not yet ensured integration of the life of mankind. With free trade the new and tremendous hazards of planetary interdependence sprang into being. (181)

The scope of social defense against all-round dislocation was as broad as the front of attack. Though common law and legislation speeded up change at times, at others they slowed it down. However,common law and statute law were not necessarily acting in the same direction at any given time.(181)

In the advent of the labor market common law played mainly a positive part - the commodity theory of labor was first stated emphatically not by economists but by lawyers. On the issue of labor combinations and the law of conspiracy, too, the common law favored a free labor market, though this meant restricting the freedom of association of organized workers. (181)

But, in respect to land, the common law shifted its role from encouraging change to opposing it. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, more often than not common law insisted on the owner's right to improve his land profitably even if this involved grave dislocation in habitations and employment. On the Continent this process of mobilization involved, as we know, the reception of Roman law, while in England common law held its own and succeeded in bridging the gap between restricted medieval property rights and modem individual property without sacrificing the principle of judge-made law vital to constitutional liberty. Since the eighteenth century, on the other hand, common law in land acted as a conserver of the past in the face of modernizing legislation. But eventually, the Benthamites had their way, and, between 1830 and 1860, freedom of contract was extended to the land. This powerful trend was reversed only in the 1870’s when legislation altered its course radically. The “collectivist” period had begun. (181, 182)

The inertia of the common law was deliberately enhanced by statutes expressly passed in order to protect the habitations and occupations of the rural classes against the effects of freedom of contract. A comprehensive effort was launched to ensure some degree of health and salubrity in the housing of the poor, providing them with allotments, giving them a chance to escape from the slums and to breathe the fresh air of nature, the “gentleman’s park.” Wretched Irish tenants and London slum dwellers were rescued from the grip of the laws of the market by legislative acts designed to protect their habitations against teh juggernaut, improvement. On the Continent it was mainly statute law and administrative action that saved the tenant, the peasant, the agricultural laborer from the most violent effects of urbanization. Prussian conservatives such as Rodbertus, whose Junker socialism influenced Marx, were blood brothers to the Tory-Democrats of England. (182)

Frequently, the problem of protection arose in regard to the agricultural populations of whole countries and continents. International free trade, if unchecked, must necessarily eliminate ever-larger compact bodies of agricultural producers. This inevitable process of destruction was very much aggravated by the inherent discontinuity in the development of modern means of transportation, which are too expensive to be extended into new regions of the planet unless the prize to be gained is high. Once the great investments involved in the building of steamships and railroads came to fruition, whole continents were opened up and an avalanche of grain descended upon unhappy Europe. This was contrary to classical prognostication. Ricardo had erected it into an axiom that the most fertile land was settled first. This was turned to scorn in a spectacular manner when the railways found more fertile land in the antipodes. Central Europe, facing utter destruction of its rural society, was forced to protect its peasantry by introducing corn laws. (182)

But if the organized states of Europe could protect themselves against the backwash of international free trade, the politically unorganized colonial peoples could not. The revolt against imperialism was mainly an attempt on the part of exotic peoples to achieve the political status necessary to shelter themselves from the social dislocations caused by European trade policies. The protection that the white man could easily secure for himself, through the sovereign status of his communities was out of reach of the colored man as long as he lacked the prerequsite, political government. (182, 183)

The trading classes sponsored the demand for mobilization of the land. Cobden set the landlords of England aghast with his discovery that farming was “business” and that those who were broke must clear out. The working classes were won over to free trade as soon as it became apparent that it made food cheaper. Trade unions became the bastions of anti-agrarianism and revolutionary socialism branded the peasantry of the world an indiscriminate mass of reactionaries. International division of labor was doubtless a progressive creed; and its opponents were often recruited from amongst those whose judgement was vitated by vested interests or lack of natural intelligence. The few independent and disinterested minds who discovered the fallacies of unrestricted free trade were too few to make any impression. (183)

And yet their consequences were no less real for not being consciously recognized. In effect, the great influence wielded by landed interests in Western Europe and the survival of feudal forms of life in Central and Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century are readily explained by the vital protective function of these forces in retarding the mobilization of the land. The question was often raised: what enabled the feudal aristocracy of the Continent to maintain their sway in the middle-class state once they had shed the military, judicial, and administrative functions to which they owed their ascendency? The theory of “survivals” was sometimes adduced as an explanation, according to which functionless insitutions or traits may continue to exist by virtue of inertia. Yet it would be truer to say that no institution survives its function - when it appears to do so, it is because it serves in some other function, or functions, which need not include the original one. Thus feudalism and landed conservatism retained their strength as long as they served a purpose that happened to be that of restricting the disastrous effects of the mobilization of land. By this time it had been forgotten by free traders that land formed part of the territory of the country, and that the territorial character of sovereignity was not merely a result of sentimental associations, but of massive facts, including econonuc ones. "In contrast to the nomadic peoples, the cultivator commits himself to improvements fixed in a particular place. Without such improvements human life must remain elementary, and little removed from that of animals. And how large a role have these fixtures played in human history! It is they, the cleared and cultivated lands, the houses, and the other buildings, the means of communication, the multifarious plant necessary for production, including industry and mining, all the permanent and immovable improvements that tie a human community to the locality where it is. They cannot be improvised, but must be built up gradually by generations of patient effort, and the community cannot afford to sacrifice them and start afresh elsewhere. Hence that territorial character of sovereignty, which permeates our political conceptions." (Hawtrey, R. G., The Economic Problem, 1933). For a century these obvious truths were ridiculed. (183, 184)

The economic argument could be easily expanded so as to include the conditions of safety and security attached to the integrity of the soil and its resources - such as the vigor and stamina of the population, the abundance of food supplies, the amount and character of defense materials, even the climate of the country which might suffer from the denudation of forests, from erosions and dust bowls, all of which, ultimately, depend upon the factor land, yet none of which respond to the supply-and-demand mechanism of the market. Given a system entirely dependent upon market functions for the safeguarding of its existential needs, confidence will naturally turn to such forces outside the market system which are capable of ensuring common interests jeopardized by that system. Such a view is in keeping with our appreciation of the true sources of class influence: instead of trying to explain developments that run counter to the general trend of the time by the (unexplained) influence of reactionary classes, we prefer to explain the influence of such classes by the fact that they, even though incidentally, stand for developments only seemingly contrary to the general interest of the community. That their own interests are often all too well served by such a policy offers only another illustration of the truth that classes manage to profit disproportionately from these services that they may render to the commonalty. (184)

An instance was offered by Speenhamland. The squire who ruled the village struck upon a way of slowing down the rise in rural wages and the threatening dislocation of the traditional structure of village life. In the long run, the method chosen was bound to have the most nefarious results. Yet the squires would not have been able to maintain their practices, unless by doing so they had assisted the country as a whole to meet the ground swell of the Industrial Revolution. (184, 185)

On the continent of Europe, again, agrarian protectionism was a necessity. But the most active intellectual forces of the age were engaged in an adventure which happened to shift their angle of vision so as to hide from them the true significance of the agrarian plight. Under the circumstances, a group able to represent the endangered rural interests could gain an influence out of proportion to their numbers. The protectionist countermovement actually succeeded in stabilizing the European countryside and in weakening that drift towards the towns which was the scourge of the time. Reaction was the beneficiary of a socially useful function which it happened to perform. The identical function which allowed reactionary classes in Europe to make play with traditional sentiments in their fight for agrarian tariffs was responsible in America about a half century later for the success of the TVA and other progressive social techniques. The same needs of society which benefited democracy in the New World strengthened their influence of the aristocracy in the Old. (185)

Opposition to mobilization of the land was the sociological background of that struggle between liberalism and reaction that made up the political history of Continental Europe in the nineteenth century. In this struggle, the military and the higher clergy were allies of the landed classes, who had almost completely lost their more immediate functions in society. These classes were now available for any reactionary solution of the impasse to which market economy and its corollary, constitutional government, threatened to lead since they were not bound by tradition and ideology to public liberties and parliamentary rule. (185)

Briefly, economic liberalism was wedded to the liberal state, while landed interests were not - this was the source of their permanent political significance on the Continent, which produced the crosscurrents of Prussian politics under Bismarck, fed clerical and militarist revanche in France, ensured court influence for the feudal aristocracy in the Hapsburg empire, made Church and Army the guardians of crumbling thrones. Since the connection outlasted the critical two generations once laid down by John Maynard Keynes as the practical alternative to eternity, land and landed property were now credited with a congenital bias for reaction. Eighteenth century England with its Tory free traders and agrarian pioneers was as forgotten as the Tudor engrossers and their revolutionary methods of making money from the land; the Physiocratic landlord of France and Germany with their enthusiasm for free trade were obliterated in the public mind by the modern prejudice of the everlasting backwardness of the rural scene. Herbert Spencer, with whom one generation sufficed as a sample of eternity, simply identified militarism with reaction. The social and technological adaptability recently shown by the Nipponese, the Russian, or the Nazi army would have been inconceivable to him. (185, 186)

Such thoughts were narrowly time-bound. The stupendous industrial achievements of market economy had been bought at the price of great harm to the substance of society. The feudal classes found therein an occasion to retrieve some of their lost prestige by turning advocates of the virtues of the land and its cultivators. In literary romanticism Nature had made its alliance with the Past; in the agrarian movement of the nineteenth century feudalism was trying not unsuccessfully to recover its past by presenting itself as the guardian of man’s natural habitat, the soil. If the danger had not been genuine, the stratagem could not have worked (186)

But Army and Church gained prestige also by being available for the "defense of law and order," which now became highly vulnerable, while the ruling middle class was not fitted to ensure this requirement of the new economy. The market system was more allergic to rioting than any other economic system we know. Tudor governments relied on riots to call attention to local complaints; a few ringleaders might be hanged, otherwise no harm was done. The rise of the financial Market meant a complete break with such an attitude; after 1797 rioting ceases to be a popular feature of London life, its place is gradually taken by meetings at which, at least in principle, the hands are counted which otherwise would be raining blows. (Trevelyan, G. M., History of England, 1926, p. 533. "England under Walpole, was still an aristocracy, tempered by rioting." Hannah More's "repository" song, "The Riot" was written "in ninety-five, a year of scarcity and alarm" - it was the year of Speenhamland. Cf. The Repository Tracts, Vol. I, New York, 1835. Also The Library, 1940, fourth series, Vol. XX, P. 295, on "Cheap Repository Tracts (1795-98)”). The Prussian king who proclaimed that to keep the peace was the subject's first and foremost duty, became famous for this paradox; yet very soon it was a commonplace. In the nineteenth century breaches of the peace, if committed by armed crowds, were deemed an incipient rebellion and an acute danger to the state; stocks collapsed and there was no bottom in prices. A shooting affray in the streets of the metropolis might destroy a substantial part of the nominal national capital. And yet the middle classes were unsoldierly; popular democracy prided itself on making the masses vocal; and, on the Continent, the bourgeoisie still clung to the recollections of its revolutionary youth when it had itself faced a tyrannic aristocracy on the barricades. Eventually, the peasantry, least contaminated by the liberal virus, were reckoned the only stratum that would stand in their persons "for law and order." One of the functions of reaction was understood to be to keep the working classes in their place, so that markets should not be thrown into panic. Though this service was only very infrequently required, the availability of the peasantry as the defenders of property-rights was an asset to the agrarian camp.(186, 187)

The history of the 1920's would be otherwise inexplicable. When, in Central Europe, the social structure broke down under the strain of war and defeat, the working class alone was available for the task of keeping things going. Everywhere power was thrust upon the trade unions and Social Democratic parties: Austria, Hungary, even Germany, were declared republics although no active republican party had ever been known to exist in any of these countries before. But hardly had the acute danger of dissolution passed and the services of the trade unions become superfluous than the middle classes tried to exclude the working classes from all influence on public life. This is known as the counterrevolutionary phase of the postwar period. Actually, there was never any serious danger of a Communist regime since the workers were organized in parties and unions actively hostile to the Communists. (Hungary had a Bolshevik episode literally forced upon the country when defense against French invasion left no alternative to the nation.) The peril was not Bolshevism, but disregard of the rules of market economy on the part of trade unions and working-class parties, in an emergency. For under a market economy otherwise harmless interruptions of public order and trading habits might constitute a lethal threat (Hayes, C., A Generation of Materialism, 1870-1890, remarks that "most of the individual states, at least in Western and Central Europe, now possessed a seemingly superlative internal stability) since they could cause the breakdown of the economic regime upon which society depended for its daily bread. This explained the remarkable shift in some countries from a supposedly imminent dictatorship of the industrial workers to the actual dictatorship of the peasantry. Right through the twenties the peasantry determined economic policy in a number of states in which they normally played but a modest role. They now happened to be the only class available to maintain law and order in the modern high-strung sense of the term. (187, 188)

The fierce agrarianism of postwar Europe was a side light on the preferential treatment accorded to the peasant class for political reasons. From the Lappo movement in Finland to the Austrian Heimwehr the peasants proved the champions of market economy; this made them politically indispensable. The scarcity of food in the first postwar years to which their ascendancy was sometimes credited had little to do with this. Austria, for instance, in order to benefit the peasants financially, had to lower her food standards by maintaining duties for grain, though she was heavily dependent upon imports for her food requirements. But the peasant interest had to be safeguarded at all cost even though agrarian protectionism might mean misery to the town dwellers and an unreasonably high cost of production to the exporting industries. The formerly uninfluential class of peasants gained in this manner an ascendancy quite disproportionate to their economic importance. Fear of Bolshevism was the force which made their political position impregnable. And yet that fear, as we saw, was not fear of a working-class dictatorship - nothing faintly similar was on the horizon - but rather the dread of a paralysis of market economy, unless all forces were eliminated from the political scene that, under duress, might set aside the rules of the market game. As long as the peasants were the only class able to eliminate these forces, their prestige stood high and they could hold the urban middle class in ransom. As soon as the consolidation of the power of the state - and even before that - the forming of the urban lower middle class into storm troops by the fascists, freed the bourgeoisie from dependence upon the peasantry, the latter's prestige was quickly deflated. Once the "internal enemy" in town and factory had been neutralized or subdued, the peasantry was relegated to its former modest position in industrial society. (188)

The big landowners' influence did not share in this eclipse. A more constant factor worked in their favor - the increasing military importance of agricultural self-sufficiency. The Great War had brought the basic strategic facts home to the public, and thoughtless reliance on the world market gave way to a panicky hoarding of food producing capacity. The "reagrarianization" of Central Europe started by the Bolshevik scare was completed in the sign of autarchy. Besides the argument of the "internal enemy" there was now the argument of the "external enemy." Liberal economists, as usual, saw merely a romantic aberration induced by unsound economic doctrines, where in reality towering political events were awakening even the simplest minds to the irrelevance of economic considerations in the face of the approaching dissolution of the international system. Geneva continued its futile attempts to convince the peoples that they were hoarding against imaginary perils, and that if only all acted in unison free trade could be restored and would benefit all. In the curiously credulous atmosphere of the time many took for granted that the solution of the economic problem (whatever that may mean) would not only assuage the threat of war but actually avert that threat forever. A hundred years' peace had created an insurmountable wall of illusions which hid the facts. The writers of that period excelled in lack of realism. The nation-state was deemed a parochial prejudice by A. J. Toynbee, sovereignty a ridiculous illusion by Ludwig von Mises, war a mistaken calculation in business by Norman Angell. Awareness of the essential nature of the problems of politics sank to an unprecedented low point. (188, 189)

Free trade which, in 1846, had been fought and won on the Corn Laws, was eighty years later fought over again and this time lost on the same issue. The problem of autarchy haunted market economy from the start. Accordingly, economic liberals exercised the specter of war and naively based their case on the assumption of an indestructible market economy. It went unnoticed that their arguments merely showed how great was the peril of a people which relied for its safety on an institution as frail as the self-regulating market. The autarchy movement of the twenties was essentially prophetic: it pointed to the need for adjustment to the vanishing of an order. The Great War had shown up the danger and men acted accordingly; but since they acted ten years later, the connection between cause and effect was discounted as unreasonable. "Why protect oneself against passed dangers?" was the comment of many contemporaries. This faulty logic befogged not only an understanding of autarchy but, even more important, that of fascism. Actually, both were explained by the fact that once the cornmon mind has received the impress of a danger, fear remains latent, as long as its causes are not removed. (189)

We claimed that the nations of Europe never overcame the shock of the war experience which unexpectedly confronted them with the perils of interdependence. In vain was trade resumed, in vain did swarms of international conferences display the idylls of peace, and dozens of governments declare for the principle of freedom of trade - no people could forget that unless they owned their food and raw material sources themselves or were certain of military access to them, neither sound currency nor unassailable credit would rescue them from helplessness. Nothing could be more logical than the consistency with which this fundamental consideration shaped the policy of communities. The source of the peril was not removed. Why then expect fear to subside? (189, 190)

A similar fallacy tricked those critics of fascism - they formed the great majority - who described fascism as a freak devoid of all political ratio. Mussolini, it was said, claimed to have averted Bolshevism in Italy, while statistics proved that for more than a year before the March on Rome the strike wave had subsided. Armed workers, it was conceded, occupied the factories in 1921. But was that a reason for disarming them in 1923, when they had long climbed down again from the walls where they had mounted guard? Hitler claimed he had saved Germany from Bolshevism. But could it not be shown that the flood of unemployment which preceded his chancellorship had ebbed away before his rise to power? To claim that he averted that which no longer existed when he came, as was argued, was contrary to the law of cause and effect, which must also hold in politics. (190)

Actually, in Germany as in Italy, the story of the immediate postwar period proved that Bolshevism had not the slightest chance of success. But it also showed conclusively that in an emergency the working class, its trade unions and parties, might disregard the rules of the market which established freedom of contract and the sanctity of private property as absolutes - a possibility which must have the most deleterious effects on society, discouraging investments, preventing the accumulation of capital, keeping wages on an unremunerative level, endangering the currency, undermining foreign credit, weakening confidence and paralyzing enterprise. Not the illusionary danger of a communist revolution, but the undeniable fact that the working classes were in the position to force possibly ruinous interventions, was the source of the latent fear which, at a crucial juncture, burst forth in the fascist panic. (190)

The dangers to man and nature cannot be neatly separated. The reactions of the working class and the peasantry to market economy both led to protectionism, the former mainly in the form of social legislation and factory laws, the latter in agrarian tariffs and land laws. Yet there was this important difference: in an emergency, the farmers and peasants of Europe defended the market system, which the working class policies endangered. While the crisis of the inherently unstable system was brought on by both wings of the Protectionist movement, the social strata connected with the land were inclined to compromise with the market system, while the broad class of labor did not shrink from breaking its rules and challenging it outright. (190, 191)