Michal Kalecki - excerpts from a paper entitled Michal Kalecki's Contributions to the Theory and Practice of Socialist Planning

Monthly Review, Oct, 1987 by D.M. Nuti

MICHAL KALECKI

I first met Michal Kalecki in the autumn of 1962, when I started attending his lectures on growth theory at the SGPiS (Central School of Planning and Statistics) in Warsaw, where I had gone immediately after graduation in the previous spring. His two-hour lectures consisted of an hour of uninterrupted exposition, very formal and assertive and, like his writings, without a single word of padding or hesitation, followed by an hour of discussion with members of the audience, a small group of senior and junior staff and a few postgraduates, all very tentative and respectful. If there were no questions, Kalecki would go over the same material all over again, st if he expected not to be understood easily. It was clear that reputations were made and destroyed in these discussions, and people took great care in preparing and formulating their interventions. To his views on European integration not having made any impact on economic growth, I raised, in my best Polish, a Kaleckian objection: if firms believed that their market had been enlarged by European integration they would invest and therefore collectively make their market grow faster. Out-Kaleckied by a young foreigner, he replied that this would be a once and for all effect, probably not very large, but conceded the point: that brief exchange was a kind of confirmation that made the members of his group recognize my existence.

Later that year I attended a course organized by SGPiS for planners from developing countries, at which he lectured in English on growth and planning. This was a much less formal environment, with freer discussions. When I went to see him in his office in the Central Planning Commission, he looked even smaller, behind a giant desk in a huge red-carpeted and red-curtained room. From Warsaw I went to Cambridge, where my connection with him endeared me to Joan Robinson; while preparing a dissertation on investment planning in socialist economies (with Nicholas Kaldor and Maurice Dobb), I visited Warsaw and saw him again several times. He would give me appointments always at 7 a.m. at SGPiS, even in the dark and icy cold of Polish winter; I would raise points mostly arising from his work, and he would pace up and down his room, with hands joined behind his back, occasionally stopping to work at the big blackboard. He did not like to be criticized, not out of intolerance or touchiness (though he was a little touchy), but because it was clear that he had already considered most of the objections, had dismissed them not as wrong but as not very serious in practice, and did not like being confronted with them again. Only once, I think, did I get him worried, by suggesting that his recommended procedure for project selection embodied three different implicit discount rates without ever mentioning one; in practice the three values were close to each other and the whole procedure made practical sense, so he was slightly upset by my sheer impertinence but otherwise unmoved. He was mindful of other people's possible susceptibility when he criticized someone else: always firmly but kindly, as I know from experience. He was not polemical and mostly let things pass: once he told me that Sraffa's price theory neglected aggregate demand and I asked him "Did you tell him?'. "No, I did not want to hurt him,' came the reply. Goodness knows how much Kalecki must have been hurt by Cambridge's curt and uncaring academic habits. I translated into Italian his "Theory of Growth of a Socialist Economy,' and saw him once in Rome to discuss it. He was very pleased that the book should be published by the CP publisher, Editori Riuniti, and tremendously amused that for his book the Communist printers had had to borrow Greek characters from the Vatican. Of that meeting (in spring 1965) I remember his lamenting the process of Social Democratization of European socialist parties.

I saw him again in May 1968 in Warsaw, where I read of the Paris evenements in the Polish press, which described them at first as the work of hooligans and provocateurs. Poland had had street protests and student unrest in the previous March, when a strong authoritarian and anti-Semitic move had affected Polish society and in particular universities, which were now being purged. Kalecki and his group had come under heavy attack, as revisionists and bourgeois. At a seminar, he told me, somebody had challenged him to say whether he was a Marxist: "If you are a Marxist,' Kalecki had replied, "then I am not.' Kalecki had not yet resigned his post, which he did in September; though already retired, he could have stayed on for another year according to Polish practice. He was still in good spirits, preparing his selected papers for publication as a definitive statement of his intellectual contribution and very pleased at the prospect of Cambridge University Press publishing them. A year later in Cambridge, where he spent a term, Kalecki was much more pessimistic about Polish developments and generally depressed. His qualms now went beyond Poland, also in view of Czech events, and were extended to existing socialist models. The trouble with socialism, he told me, is that the same kind of conformist and opportunistic people eventually come to positions of power who would be there in other societies. Cambridge did not do anything to cheer him up; indeed he had been promised a professorial salary, but he was being paid only a small amount for a visiting fellowship; too proud to complain, he mentioned this to me as evidence of British decline. For the first time he made witty and biting remarks, and told jokes about the regime to me, probably a mixed sign of increasing disillusionment and of a friendlier relationship. He died in Warsaw the following April. In my subsequent visits to Warsaw I often saw his widow, Pani Ada, a formidable person who had been inseparable from him during their married life (literally, except for a week, they had always been together), and who was now devoting her life to the preservation and publication of all his work. Through her I learnt more of him, of the epigrams he used to write castigating Polish customs and morals, his silent but undying disappointment with Keynes's failure to recognize his achievement (it appears that a German version of Kalecki's theory of aggregate demand sent to Keynes in the early thirties elicited a note from Richard Kahn saying that it could not be read because of language difficulties--probably a little joke, or a polite though improbable excuse, which later must have become a nagging obsession for Michal Kalecki); the frustration of not being taken seriously by mediocre politicians (he used to say that he had been influential only in Israel, where the government had done exactly the opposite of his advice). He was a great man, and he knew it, but he did not like people to say it, not out of modesty but on the contrary because the very fact that it should be necessary to say it would have detracted from his greatness and offended his pride.