The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  This was not the case in Victorian Britain. In a striking chapter in Capital, Karl Marx, dripping with outrage and indignation, reports the death from overwork of Mary Anne Walkley, a 20-year-old milliner.62 Mary Anne worked, on average, sixteen hours a day without a break, but during the ‘season’ (March to July) the workshop had to produce elegant dresses for noble ladies in time for a ball in honour of the Princess of Wales. At one point Mary Anne had to work continuously for over twenty-six hours, with thirty other girls in one small room. Her death was reported in all the main newspapers. Punch, whose ethos was mildly Tory, was just as indignant as Marx. Its famous cartoon by John Tenniel, published in the magazine on 4 July 1863 and entitled The Haunted Lady, or ‘The Ghost’ in the Looking-Glass, depicting Mary Anne’s death, thunders against the rich as loudly as any radical pamphlet. The noble lady, wearing, presumably, the dress that caused Mary’s death, looks at herself in the mirror only to see, to her consternation, the moribund body of the exhausted seamstress. The woman behind the lady is reassuring: ‘We would not have disappointed your Ladyship, at any sacrifice, and the robe is finished à merveille.’

  This was in 1863 – more or less when this book starts – at a time when Mary Anne and her fellow sufferers worked less than a mile away from the consumers of the produce of their labours – the distance from Soho to Mayfair. Over one hundred and fifty years later the Mary Annes of this world still exist, but far from the putative cause of their misery, though the distance is somewhat tempered by the power of the modern media. In the contemporary ‘advanced’ world, Mary Anne’s descendants – the Western workers of today – are relatively prosperous; they live a long life; they work shorter hours; they have holidays; they have education; expenditure on food is a relatively small proportion of their income; they have culture on tap (television, music, internet); they have pensions; they have healthcare. Far from threatening the foundations of society, as many bien pensants feared, they have become its archetypal supporters. And who can blame them? The process of democratization turned them into citizens with equal rights. Economic growth has granted them access to the consumer society, which many value more than the suffrage.

  Today there are still many poor people in the West, but few regard them as victims of an exploitative system. Being a minority marks them out as losers – the ‘left behind’ – in a world where the winners seem to be the majority. They can blame themselves and their fecklessness or they can blame their bad luck or they can blame foreign immigrants – but not capitalism, since capitalism, visibly, has provided well for the majority. And there is enough wealth around so that those the Victorians called the ‘undeserving poor’ can be kept alive on state benefits, albeit increasingly grudgingly; hence the ever-increasing number of mendicants and homeless and the widespread use of ‘food banks’ even in rich countries such as the United States (where they started), Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

  The victory of market capitalism was sealed by the democratization of consumption. Some communist economies, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia for instance, had been successful in laying the foundation of an industrial society, but none matched the achievements of modern consumer capitalism. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, some of the media reported ironically that those who were among the first to jump across the breach between East and West went shopping, as if some dramatic pilgrimage of thanksgiving would have been more appropriate for such a history-making event: ‘Clamor in the East: Jubilation in Berlin; A Day for Celebration and a Bit of Shopping’ intoned The New York Times on 11 November 1989. In more hallowed times, prayers in a cathedral to celebrate freedom regained would have been an almost universal choice.

  Ten years before the fall of the Wall, in December 1978, at the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Deng Xiaoping, the new ‘paramount leader’, had launched the ‘Reform and Opening Up’ policies that would put the country on a path towards a market economy, albeit one with ‘Chinese characteristics’. That was a clear and clear-headed move towards a consumer society. Symbolically, at the same session of the Central Committee, the opening in Shanghai of the first Coca-Cola plant was also announced.63 Mao Zedong had been dead for just over two years.

  In the final decades of the nineteenth century, such a clear triumph for capitalism was not generally anticipated. By the 1880s, throughout the world of independent states – including most of Europe, almost all of North, Central, and South America, Japan, China, and some countries in Asia and Africa (such as Ethiopia) – there was a common recognition that it was necessary to ‘modernize’, that is to say, to embrace industrial capitalism. But its advance caused considerable anxiety, even in prosperous England; and not only, as one might expect, among suffering workers and threatened peasants, but also among the middle classes themselves, who were afraid of potentially seditious workers, of economic uncertainty, of rapidly changing status, of Jews and Irish, of cholera and smallpox, and, above all, of the poor.

  They were right to be scared. The Industrial Revolution that had begun in England and was sweeping throughout the West, and the concomitant move of workers from the countryside into the cities, was bringing about an unparalleled upheaval in social structure. This was not simply a change of jobs. It involved abandoning a life of tranquil poverty in a settled community for the unstable conditions of urban life, at times in another country. Usually, though not always, this meant better housing and better food, but it also meant anxiety about the future.

  Optimism and anxiety go together since it is not unreasonable to assume that the years of abundance will be followed by years of scarcity. It is, after all, an ancient view, narrated in the Old Testament. As Joseph explained to Pharaoh, the seven years of abundance will be followed by seven years of famine: ‘and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt; and the famine shall consume the land’ (Genesis 41:25–31) – a kind of pre-capitalist ‘boom and bust’. Such anxiety had been even more marked in the early part of the nineteenth century when England was like a huge ship sailing into uncharted waters. What would industrialization produce? How severe would the business cycles be (identified by the French economist Clément Juglar in his Des Crises commerciales et leur retour périodique en France, en Angleterre et aux États-Unis in 1862). Pessimism was rife among the intellectual classes. Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), thought that population growth, unless held back by war or disease, would outstrip growth of production, particularly of food, causing widespread famine. Since he was writing before the first population census (1801), he could not be certain of his figures, but we are pretty sure that the population did increase: in 1721 the population of England (not Scotland, Wales and Ireland) was over 5 million; by 1761 it was 6 million and by the census of 1801 it was 8.6 million.64

  Some, such as Thomas Carlyle, lamented the horrors of modernity, explaining in his essay ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829) that ‘It is the Age of Machinery … Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside.’65 And after ten pages of whining he added:

  The truth is men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible; … This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us. The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable … Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has sub-dued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all other things.66

  Two decades earlier, in 1802, William Wordsworth had composed a famous sonnet (‘The World Is Too Much with Us’) which begins thus:

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

  Little we see in Nature that is ours;

  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

  Those who lamented the dawn of capitalism, the empire of m
oney, the dangers of modernity continued to complain throughout the nineteenth century, usually, but not always, from a religious angle. Juan Donoso Cortés, who inspired Pope Pius IX’s anti-liberal 1864 document Syllabus Errorum, discussing liberalism and socialism in the context of the revolutions of 1848, lamented in one of his last essays, published in 1851, that:

  The revolutions of modern times have … an unconquerable and destructive force which the revolutions of ancient times did not possess; and this destructive force is necessarily satanic, since it cannot be divine.

  Corruption, he continued, is the god of Liberalism: ‘All combine to bribe the people with their promises, and the people, in turn, intimidate every one by their clamors and threats.’67 Such invectives marked much of the nineteenth century, particularly in France: from Joseph de Maistre’s tirades against science and the Enlightenment (Examen de la philosophie de Bacon, 1836) to Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) and Louis Veuillot (1813–1883) – all traditional Catholics who supported the principle of Papal supremacy. For them, the ‘new’, the ‘modern’ were harbingers of disaster.

  By the middle of the century the doom-mongers were beginning to give way to the optimists. The ship of British industry had found its course towards the seductive pleasures of modernity. With varying degrees of reluctance and enthusiasm other countries, France, later Germany and Japan, had to follow, fearing to be left behind, but anxieties plagued them too.

  By the 1860s, at least in Europe, the debate among political elites developed within a specific framework: the recognition that industrialization was an unavoidable imperative, and the fear (for the socialists, the hope) that this would destabilize the political system. These elites divided themselves into various broad political tribes: liberals (then by far the most important group), enlightened conservatives, reactionaries, and socialists. Each had its own narrative about capitalism, and, of course, each narrative overlapped with the others.

  The liberal tribe embraced capitalism enthusiastically, as an end in itself. Capitalist industrialization would wipe away feudal residues such as aristocratic and clerical privileges; liberate entrepreneurship; enable economic growth and prosperity; and strengthen the nation (often the new nation) militarily and politically. It would enable progress and promote science. These liberals were the true heirs to the Enlightenment. They celebrated the individual as the maker of his own destiny, breaking away from the limits imposed by birth and caste.

  By the 1880s, however, most liberals even in Britain had abandoned their previous commitment to the untrammelled development of market forces. Such notions were no longer held dogmatically, as a matter of faith, but only pragmatically when it suited the development of one’s own national capitalism. Most liberals and intelligent conservatives recognized that capitalism could also be a devastating force, and sought to temper its disruptive effects with policies of social and political reforms. Liberalism itself promoted reforms in fin-de-siècle Europe, starting at the centre of liberalism itself: Great Britain.

  Here, by the end of the century, individualistic liberalism was giving way to a new ‘collectivist’ liberalism. This envisaged a positive role for the state in the solution of social problems and the establishment of a just society. The road was open for the great reforming Liberal administrations of the years 1906–14 that laid the foundation of the British welfare state. The proponents of untrammelled capitalism were on the defensive even in Great Britain.

  While Britain was moving towards the new ‘caring and softer’ liberalism, on the continent the older, ‘authentic’ liberal position was still regarded as the last word in political ideology by much of the intelligentsia. It is often the case that laggard countries, countries worried that they are failing to keep up with others, seek to modernize themselves on the basis of ideas that have become obsolete in the advanced ones. Thus, in France, by the 1890s, liberals dominated the universities and the political and economic establishment. While their British counterparts were having second thoughts about the joys of free-market forces, French liberals still assumed that state intervention would cause more harm than good. The state, they believed, should never have been entrusted with the railways and the post office where it would face pressure for higher wages from its own employees, and for lower prices from consumers. And, to cap it all, politicians, keen to ingratiate themselves with their supporters, would spend tax revenues without inhibition.

  These liberals were not wrong. French politicians, like their counterparts in Germany and Italy and elsewhere, paid lip service to the principles of economic liberalism, while exchanging public funds for votes. It became a well-established practice. Democratization empowered groups, such as artisans, small farmers, and shopkeepers, who feared the advance of capitalism. Democracy enabled them to lobby politicians and extract from them promises of tax concessions or restriction of competition.68 Local politicians spent their days beseeching the government to spend money on behalf of their electorate before offering a few hurried prayers to market forces in their after-dinner speeches. Governments responded by introducing some taxes, reducing others, initiating public works programmes, and subsidizing this or that enterprise.

  The economists who argued that there should be no political interference with capitalism did not understand a simple truth: capitalism was not simply an economic system, but a way of organizing social relations. In order to thrive, capitalism required the existence of a supportive infrastructure and a wide consensus around itself that the capitalists themselves, often forced to think for the short term, could not possibly achieve on their own.

  The state and its institutions were needed, above all, by the new social class, the bourgeoisie, in the sense that the emerging capitalist system needed a centralized state with a civil service and a standing army and a legal system that regulated commerce, enforced contracts, kept workers at bay, and developed communication infrastructures.69 The old aristocracy (and the peasantry) of the eighteenth century were not so dependent on state structures.

  Such consensus could only be built by political power. How could this be achieved – in democracies – without vote-seeking policies? And if this required higher public expenditure and some degree of interference in the market mechanism, that was a price well worth paying for capitalist progress. This, of course, could not be calculated with any exactitude. The door was opened for endless arguments over whether or not the state had over-reached itself. Even old-fashioned liberals were not sure where the boundaries of state interference should be erected. All agreed that the state should have – as Max Weber put it later – a monopoly of the means of force. Most also agreed that some basic infrastructures could only be built and maintained by the state, such as roads and bridges. Education generated more debate. In principle, liberals were happy for those who could afford it to have most of it, but they also feared that if the state refrained from running schools, the priests would do so – hence the rapid development of compulsory and free state education in most European countries.

  What was happening outside Europe?

  In Latin American countries, between 1870 and 1930, the so-called ‘Liberal’ era was one where natural resources were exported while opening the economy to European capital and labour. Since these countries were export-oriented they were vulnerable to external shocks, but there was an overwhelming consensus on the economy until the First World War. The ruling classes were divided politically: liberals versus conservatives, centralists versus federalists, and Catholics versus the anticlerical. But they were all in agreement about free trade, accepted some protection for domestic activity, and encouraged foreign investment and immigration.

  Enlightened conservatism rather than liberalism prevailed in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a succession of finance ministers (Mikhail Reutern, Nikolai Bunge, Ivan Vyshnegradsky, and Sergei Witte) who realized only too well that in order to defend the autocracy it was necessary to modernize the country. That spirit of intelligent and enlightened conserva
tism was epitomized at the time by diverse European leaders and politicians – conservatives such as Bismarck in Germany and Disraeli in Britain but also liberals such as Giolitti in Italy and Gladstone in Britain. In Japan,Ōkubo Toshimichi, one of the champions of the Meiji Restoration, and Ōkuma Shigenobu, the great modernizing Prime Minister, embraced change to preserve what they regarded as essential. All of these and more radical politicians (such as Theodore Roosevelt in the United States) understood something that few conservatives today appreciate: that for the old order to survive it is necessary to perceive early on which reforms are inevitable and implement them on one’s own terms and under one’s own direction, before they become irresistible, unavoidable, and ungovernable. One must not leave reforms to the last moment, when revolution threatens, and it is too late. Alexis de Tocqueville explained this so well:

  It is not always going from bad to worse that leads to revolution. What happens most often is that a people that put up with the most oppressive laws without complaint, as if they did not feel them, rejects those laws violently when the burden is alleviated. The regime that a revolution destroys is almost always better than the one that immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform … The evil that one endures patiently because it seems inevitable becomes unbearable the moment its elimination becomes conceivable.70