HOPE AND HORROR GO HAND IN HAND
Capitalism today dominates the world. How has this system developed from one that has transformed the world and led to major technological changes to one that can now destroy it? Mike Haynes investigates
Issue 236 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published December 1999 Copyright © Socialist Review
Nothing, as the saying goes, succeeds like success. Certainly the propagandists of capitalism never tire of boasting of its successes, and no more so than at the start of a new millennium. But there is an important partial truth in their argument. Capitalism has transformed the lives of successive generations so that humans no longer have to feel the weight of the biblical punishment god visited on Adam and his descendants: 'Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.' But it is only a partial truth--capitalism tantalisingly denies us what is within our grasp and has turned it against us, making this past century the most destructive one ever.
The system that has created this contradiction was born some 500 years ago in western Europe. We cannot date its origin precisely, for capitalism is an economic system which grew up within decaying European feudalism, as forces for change pressed against the old social relations of a society dominated by the landed class. The new capitalist society was not simply about trade--that has always existed--nor was it about money, or even profit. For capitalism to develop, something more was necessary. Profit and the market had to be brought to the centre of social life, and the process of production itself came to be determined by the competitive investment of capital and the employment of labour for profit. When we talk of capitalism, therefore, the central idea is the capital part of the word. Across the world in 1500 we find elements of such a system struggling to appear, but the first breakthrough came in western Europe, in part because it was a more backward area of the world and less controlled and regulated than the great empires of the Middle East, India and China.
To understand how capitalism developed from its beginnings it is helpful to think of two types of movement occurring side by side. One is the intensive development of the system. In the first instance much production remained relatively primitive, whether on the land or in the town and country workshops of Europe where handicrafts dominated. Then, with the industrial revolution of the 18th century, capitalism got into its full stride, and its transforming power has grown thick and fast. The second movement has been an extensive one which has pushed capitalism outwards until, in the 20th century, it has encompassed the whole globe, leaving no part untouched.
Historically this expansion has produced two streams of wealth that have fed the accumulation of capital. One has been from global plunder--the primitive accumulation of capital. The other has been from the exploitation of workers in the core of the system. In a system built on the competitive drive for profit these two elements have been inevitable complements of one another. But if we are forced to draw a balance between them, then the exploitation of workers in the core has been the greatest source of capital accumulation, for the labour of these workers has proved the most 'profitable' for businessmen in the long run. This is one important reason why, although there have always been dashes over control of the globe, the most bitter struggles have always been for control of the heartlands of capitalism.
The impact of capitalism's extensive development has been enormous and often horrifically brutal, as the slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries shows. Capitalist slavery was profitable for a period, and on a scale that was hard to imagine in a previous age--as one British observer put it in 1817, 'This [slave] trade is beyond all comparison so indolent and lucrative that even were there any appeal to their feelings, it would not influence in competition with such inordinate gain. Every other trade requires, comparatively, activity and exertion, and yields very inferior profit. It is unreasonable, therefore, to expect any conduct on the part of the natives but such as may be auxiliary to the slave traders.'
Capitalism is a global system, but it is a global system of competing capitals and states. Look at a map of medieval Europe and your eyes will gaze over a crazy patchwork quilt of kingdoms that spreads across the page. Counting the exact number defeats historians, but in 1500 there were at least 500 different independent political entities. Europe today has just under 50. The development of a world of competing nation states is so closely intertwined with the development of capitalism that some commentators get the argument the wrong way round. They think that it was the development of the state system that produced capitalism, rather than the development of a capitalist system that produced a world of nation states, as was the case.
The very fact that the system is competitive forces capitalists to build political structures within which control can be exercised over the workforces that produce the profit and which can be used as a base for competition with other capitalists. Part of the success of the system is that these forms can then be used to persuade people that they have a common national interest with their employers against the employers and workers who live the other side of the border. But these tricks can only work because capitalism is based on a much more sophisticated form of exploitation than past societies. Class relationships and exploitation are not new. In ancient Greece, Plato had recorded that 'every city is two cities, a city of the many poor and a city of the few rich; and these two cities are always at war'. But in earlier class societies the link between the poverty of the many and the wealth of the few was clearer. Peasants and slaves who had to work for their lord knew they were exploited: 'Their [the lords'] satiety was our famine; their merriment was our wretchedness; their jousts and tournaments were our torments,' said one peasant in 14th century England.
With the development of capitalism the exploitative relationship became veiled behind the wage relationship. It is the dull compulsion of starvation that forces workers who have no other means of survival to work, not the whip of the slave master or the sword of the lord. And it is the idea of a fair day's work for a fair day's pay allowing a legitimate profit that is proclaimed as the philosophy of 'progressive' capital. Most people have a gut feeling that something is wrong with this argument. To see through it, however, requires some thought, and to translate that insight into an effective argument requires a social movement.
Before industrialisation, artisans and craft workers were moved to protest against the developing society based on these new wage relationships. But to go beyond street protests and food riots the system had to develop more. What drove it forward was the link between capitalism and the factory. It was forged in the industrial revolution and symbolised by the new textile industry of Manchester. Contemporaries like the young Frederick Engels or the French writer Alexis De Tocqueville came in awe to the city. 'From this foul drain,' wrote De Tocqueville, 'the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy river pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its wonders and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.' But those who De Tocqueville saw as savages Engels saw as a concentrated working class which held the possibility of seizing control of this new society and realising its benefits for all mankind. It was exactly this part of his analysis that attracted the young Karl Marx to Engels' analysis of The Condition of the Working Class in England. But it took time for Marx to develop his ideas and even more for the first conscious socialist movements to develop.
While this was happening the capitalist powers were tightening their global grip. Industrialisation gave European capitalists the power and technology they finally needed to conquer the whole world. In 1839, when the British government fought a war to enforce the sale of opium in China, military leaders of this once proud empire were reduced to trying to defend themselves against a superior navy by tying firecrackers to monkeys and throwing them on board the British boats to try and ignite them. Western governments gathered ever larger empires around them. Their philosophy was set out by Sir George Goldie, who in 1879 organised the United Africa Company to compete with the French in the Niger Valley: 'With old established markets closing to our manufactures, with India producing cotton fabrics not only for her own use but for export, it would be suicidal to abandon to a rival power the only remaining undeveloped opening for British goods.' In this way, by the end of the century virtually the whole world was in the hands of Europe and the United States, and conflict was for control in the heart of the system. Capital and state became welded together, leading to war in 1914, 1939 and then a half a century of Cold War. Events in the Gulf and the former Yugoslavia show that, for all the talk of 'global capital', the link between economic and state power is still there.
But beneath the formal empires there were increasing global economic ties. Technology provided the base. By 1914 more than 515,000km of undersea cables had been laid. These helped direct flows of trade, capital and labour which, for all the talk of latter day globalisation, were already intense in 1914. Indeed, as the century progressed it became apparent that direct colonial control was often unnecessary, as other means could allow the development of capitalism without the need for direct political control. Yet for all this, capitalism at the end of the 20th century stills fails to deliver its promises of a world free from war and want.
A capitalist world is a world of uneven development--the road to catching up is only available to a few and they can easily be derailed, as the impact of crisis on the Asian tigers shows. And in the absence of forces making for global equality the lot of the mass of the world's population remains dire. Class relationships across the world mould this basic polarisation of wealth and power. Today the class gap is as wide as ever. Even organisations like the IMF and the World Bank are forced to painfully document its contours as they try to explain away how following their prescriptions has led, not to a trickledown of relative wealth, but to a massive flow upwards.
Those in power struggle to hang on to their wealth. In Eastern Europe, for example, many on the left were deluded into thinking that here were different kinds of societies with different leaders. But the class which ruled these societies yesterday, exploiting people in the name of 'socialism', sits in place today exploiting them in the name of 'capitalism'. The Indian nationalist leader, Gandhi, once said that the 'earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not enough for every man's greed'. He was right about the capacity of the earth. Capitalism's transformation has created huge food supplies as well as huge numbers of manufactured goods. But is it 'every man's greed' which is at the root of our problems? Is it 'every man' who stands astride the locked food stores? Is it 'every man' who directs the nuclear power programmes? Does 'every man' launch salvoes of cruise missiles or drive the Exxon Valdez onto the rocks as part of what one Exxon executive called 'the price of civilisation'?
Yet a new century is also a time of hope. Despite the ways in which the socialist movement has been derailed in the last century and a half, the development of capitalism has continued to increase the potential power of workers. Earlier this year the United Nations tried to identify the birth of the world's 6 billionth person. But some time in the 1970s another more significant birth took place somewhere--to a peasant mother who had a child who would grow to become a wage worker, and so tip the balance for the first time in history to make the working class the majority class on the planet.
When Marx wrote, such a situation was no more than a far distant dream. Today it is a reality. But harnessing the power this creates requires us to have an imagination that goes beyond the limits of the present. This means breaking with the spurious idea of 'common sense' which says that just because this is the way things are, this is the way they have to be.
This is the value of history. When we look back, we see that the past is like a foreign country where things are done differently. As capitalism was carried across the world, trampling more primitive societies underfoot, it encountered peoples who saw the propagandists of capitalism as the ones who lacked common sense. Take class and hierarchy, supposedly common to all human societies--in the 1630s a French Jesuit missionary in Eastern Canada reported that the local Indians 'have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs... [They] cannot endure in the least those who seem desirous of assuming superiority over the others; they place all virtue in a certain gentleness or apathy.' A quarter of a millennium later, in 1867, a white Australian expressed similar exasperation with the Aborigines 'They do not understand exalted rank and, in fact, it is difficult to get into a blackfellow's head that one man is higher than another.' or what of the eternal role of women and the family? In the 1630s the same Jesuit missionary reported a conversation with a Naskapi Indian in which he tried to explain their 'proper' role: 'In France women do not rule their husbands... I told him that it was not honourable for a woman to love anyone except her husband, and that this evil being among them [women's sexual freedom] he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son.' But it was he who was rebuffed, for the Naskapi replied, 'Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children, but we love all the children of our tribe.'
These societies were based on a rough equality of poverty, and they went under because they could not withstand the corrosive impact of capitalism. But today we have the possibility of a different kind of equality that can satisfy humanity's aspirations and go beyond the social and psychological limits of capitalism. Capitalism itself has given us this possibility, but its failings make it all the more urgent for us to realise the opportunities it creates. The very fact that as a system it has a beginning means also that it has an end. The sooner we are successful in bringing it to a close, the sooner we will see that the future can also be like a foreign country where things are done, not only differently, but in a way that can realise humanity's deepest dreams.