That the debate, in its most pristine form, should have originated in Russia is not entirely surprising. The country, like the United States, was really a continent. It contained both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ elements. It had a highly educated intellectual class, aware of the deficiencies of their country and of its possibilities. It had had a statist and bureaucratic direction since the days of Peter the Great. It had a highly diversified economy: in 1877, according to a land census 24 per cent of rural property was in private hands, 33.5 per cent in communal hands, and 42.5 per cent in state, crown, and clergy hands.96 Russia had great ambitions, but these seemed to be constantly thwarted by fate or by its rulers, its people, or by foreigners.
Be that as it may, the fact remained that, by 1907, the growth of prosperous independent farmers, with their own livestock, some machinery, and some savings, made discussions on a future role for the obshchina increasingly unreal and out of step with the real developments in Russia.97 The obshchina was in its death throes. On this point Marxists such as Georgi Plekhanov in Our Differences (1885), and the early Lenin, who wrote The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1896–9), were right. Russia, like it or not, was on the road towards capitalism, a weak capitalism, to be sure, one perhaps devoid of thrusting native entrepreneurial spirit, one far too dependent on foreign investment, but capitalism nevertheless.
The Russian intelligentsia, like some of their counterparts in the West, believed capitalism had to be tamed before it could be unleashed. Fear of an uncontrolled social process was deeply embedded in Russian political culture. Eventually the intelligentsia accepted the inevitability of capitalism while criticizing the capitalists for their lack of social conscience.98
The people were less sure. Most, of course, were peasants who just wanted their own land, unencumbered by debts. Like many peasants, they hated the landlords more than they hated the state, which might explain the paradox that perturbed the Christian thinker Nikolai Berdyaev when he wrote in 1935 (by which time he was in exile in France, and no longer a Marxist) that the Russian people are ‘State-minded, … submissively giving themselves to be material for founding a great empire, and yet at the same time inclined to revolt, to turbulence, to anarchy’.99
The problem that faced Russian modernizers was the same facing modernizers everywhere. As the Narodnik writer Vasilii Vorontsov explained in The Fate of Capitalism in Russia (1882), following the West entailed opening up one’s economy, but in so doing there was a risk that the more efficient Western industries would choke Russia’s new capitalism.100 Was it better to rely on the peasant economy or import Western models? And how should the peasant economy evolve? Peter Struve, a so-called ‘legal’ Marxist (i.e. one sufficiently moderate to be able to publish their works openly), writing in 1894 and having declared the obshchina moribund and capitalism inevitable, asserted that Russian capitalism could only be developed on the basis of German-style Junker farms, namely, large landlords turning into capitalist farmers. Of course this would be a harsh transition since ‘capitalism … is evil from the point of view of our ideals.’101 Lenin too, writing in 1907, thought that capitalism was both inevitable and desirable and indeed already taking over the Russian economy. Partly following Struve, he contrasted the so-called German Junker path based on large landholding with the American model based on capitalist farmers. Unlike Struve, however, he disparaged the German way, believing that it would condemn ‘the peasants to decades of most harrowing expropriation and bondage, while at the same time a small minority of Grossbauern (“big peasants”) arises’. The American path, which Lenin regarded as far preferable, was one on which the small peasant evolves into a capitalist farmer.102
Nowhere else in Europe and nowhere in the United States was the intelligentsia so obsessed with discovering what might be the right path towards industrialization.
9
The American Challenge and the Love of Capital
For much of the nineteenth century Britain was the ideal of modernity, but this was increasingly challenged. The United States and France thought they were at least as modern as Britain, which was after all a monarchy, while a truly modern country, they thought, should be a republic. Besides, Britain did very little to project an image of modernity. On the contrary it sought to combine its undoubted scientific and industrial progress with an unremitting respect for traditions, many of which it invented with surprising zeal. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, neither Britain nor France was regarded as the epitome of modernity – the torch had passed to America, where so many Europeans had gone to improve their living conditions and make their fortune. The USA, the country with no past, had become the country of the future.
The thirty years or so that followed the American Civil War had changed the shape of the country dramatically. The United States became the leading manufacturing country in the world, overtaking Great Britain. The population had nearly doubled, thanks to massive immigration. Urbanization added a further fifty cities with over 50,000 inhabitants. Railway lines more than trebled, wheat production more than doubled, while steel production increased from 77,000 tons in 1870 to a staggering 11.2 million tons in 1900.1 The American South, however, remained overwhelmingly rural: 88 per cent in 1880 and still 72 per cent in 1920, with cotton accounting for almost half of the region’s total production.2
The myth of America was particularly strong in laggard countries such as Russia. As was to be expected, reformers were the most pro-American. The economist Ivan K. Ozerov, in two influential articles written in 1903, pointedly entitled ‘Why Does America Advance So Quickly?’ and ‘What Does America Teach Us?’, contrasted Russian sloth, bureaucratic arrogance, the absence of civil rights and legal security, and risk-averse entrepreneurs, as well as Russian workers accused of being drunk, illiterate, and lacking in discipline and work ethics, with American initiative, energy, sobriety, education, and the protection given to every individual:
How can we awaken our energies, develop our slumbering strength; what magic slogan will summon forth the riches of our soil? Why, with our vast territories do we lack land; why, with a relatively sparse population do so many of our people have no opportunity to apply their labor?3
And the poet Alexander Blok, in a poem of 1913 entitled ‘New America’ (‘Novaia Amerika’), imagined a Russia in the image of the new great model shining across the ocean:
I see black factory chimneys towering
And everywhere the hooters scream.
… I see huge factories with many stories,
And workers’ cities clustering round.
…
Now crackles the coal, now the salt whitens,
I hear molten iron hiss from afar,
Now over thy empty steppes there brightens,
My America, my new-risen star!4
This was a laggard’s conception of America – America as the future, quite different from the older usage of America as a mysterious continent to be explored, when John Donne called his mistress ‘Oh my America! my new-found-land’.5 Or a primitive continent that ignored the existence of money and hence of real labour, as John Locke declared in the Second Treatise: ‘Thus in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as money was any where known.’6
By the end of the nineteenth century America had indeed become the future. The percipient W. T. Stead (an influential crusading British journalist who died aboard the Titanic) declared, in his The Americanization of the World, or The Trend of the Twentieth Century (1902), that the United States of America had now reached ‘such a pitch of power and prosperity as to have a right to claim the leading place among the English-speaking nations’, adding that there were now more ‘white-skinned’ people in the United States than in the whole of the British Empire. Towards the end of the book he showed qualms about the frenetic modernity of America and suggested that perhaps the obsession with rapid change and constant work might ‘easily be carried to such a point as to make existence i
tself hardly worth having’.7
Each country had its own way of becoming like America, its own way of catching up, of becoming like the others, while remaining different, knowing that no two roads can be alike, hence the proliferation of claims to distinctiveness: l’exception française, American exceptionalism, l’anomalia italiana, the German Sonderweg, and the distinct road to a market economy announced in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping under the terms of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (zhongguo you teside shehui zhuyi).
As with most things in history, America’s own path was unique and unrepeatable. It had its own sense of possessing an extraordinary destiny, something not all countries can have. Tocqueville noted that the ‘position of the Americans is … quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one’.8 Walt Whitman was quite certain about this. In his 1867 poem ‘As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario’s Shores’, he wrote:
Any period, one nation must lead,
One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.9
The country’s outstanding economic performance in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was due to a multiplicity of factors, but the central one was the vast ‘open’ lands and territories, drawing forth Europe’s pullulating rural ‘swarms’, which led to a formidable increase of its population. This constantly expanded the number of producers and consumers while containing wages. In 1790, shortly after the declaration of independence, there were fewer than 4 million inhabitants. By 1900 there were 76 million. In May 2017 there were over 325 million.10 In the same time span Britain’s population increased much more slowly: from fewer than 10 million in 1800 to 38 million in 1900, to 65 million in 2015. The growth in the population of France was even slower: 29 million in 1801, 40.7 million in 1901, and 66 million today.
The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 has been seen as an epic conflict between slave-owners and the liberators of the slaves. Karl Marx saw it as ‘the first grand war of contemporaneous history’.11 It appeared to many as a conflict between an old, traditional society in the South and the new world of capitalism in the North. The political economy of the slave South clashed with that of the North based on free labour.12 The southern plantation owners were either indifferent to capitalism or hostile towards it, even though they were connected to world capitalism. The profits made sustained a southern lifestyle to the detriment of slaves and poor whites (who derived some psychological benefit from being above the slaves). Southerners emphasized their largely invented aristocratic traits, the mission of the southern gentleman against the money-grubbing soulless mentality of northerners. Some denounced capitalism as a ‘brutal, immoral, irresponsible wage slavery in which the masters of capital exploited and impoverished their workers without assuming personal responsibility for them’.13 Northerners retorted by emphasizing the horrors of slavery, of life on the plantations, the nastiness of auctioning slaves and the brutal treatments inflicted.
As far as the industrial North was concerned, the southern slave economy could not have provided a large consumer market for northern products (since slaves did not earn wages), so there were sound economic reasons to be against it. There could, of course, have been a compromise between northern industrial interests and southern agricultural ones: tolerance for slavery in the South, and economic growth in the North. The North could have manufactured cotton cloth just like Britain, following the pattern already established before the Civil War. There was an intrinsic economic reason why the Civil War occurred, though wars seldom occur for purely economic reasons.14
Moreover, slaveholding plantations sometimes took a more scientific and modern approach to management than the factories of the North. Plantations ‘became laboratories for agricultural experiment, and planters and overseers measured and monitored human capital with great precision’.15 That slavery could be economically successful (and not as damaging to the slaves as it had been thought) had already been mooted by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman in their classic Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974).16 A plantation system operating by slavery was ‘no anachronistic excrescence on industrial capitalism’.17
Slavery was profitable, but slave-owners wanted some ethical principles to defend slavery on moral grounds, arguing that it was better than wage labour and benefited both slaves and masters.18 Economic rationality needed to be bolstered by ideology, vision, beliefs. The idea that God had created masters and slaves was fine for the masters, but the entire ideological basis of the American Revolution was that all men were created equal.19 Indeed the entire basis of bourgeois capitalist society required some kind of affirmation of the importance of individual human effort against the idea of heredity.
Southern political economists were committed to laissez-faire policies as well as slavery, which they defended as being more humane towards the slaves than capitalism was towards its ‘wage-slaves’.20 Even after the end of the war many southerners, including many clergymen, insisted that slavery protected workers against the ravages of capitalism (just as the Russian Slavophiles believed that serfs were better protected by the obshchina, the village commune).21 And yet the North won. And it won not because it was on the side of justice against nefarious slavery (though it was), but because it was technologically, financially and industrially superior to the South, had more people and better transport.22 The victory of the North seemed a victory for Alexander Hamilton’s late eighteenth-century vision of the American future (at a time when there was no industry to speak of) against Thomas Jefferson’s and Andrew Jackson’s reactionary populist approach. While Hamilton conjured up a grand vision of a commercial America, others, such as Benjamin Franklin, were sceptical.23 Jefferson and his followers assumed an international division of labour where the Europeans, and Great Britain above all, would be the manufacturing powers, while the United States would be the great exporter of agricultural products. As Michael Lind put it: ‘The United States, in effect, was to have been the world’s largest banana republic, with cotton and tobacco in place of bananas.’24
The fear of urbanization, of what cities might do to the pioneering spirit, has pervaded American conservatism in its various aspects ever since, even though such anti-urban ideology clashes with the cult of modernity. Modernity on its own is too frightening a thing – even for Americans. Many of the Founding Fathers had a pronounced conservative bias against big cities, a bias that small-town America, ‘so calmly philistine and so very, very solid in its certainties’, as Irving Kristol put it in 1970, has maintained to this day and in its own inimitable way.25
The victory of the North over the South was a victory for abolitionism, though the war was fought originally with the more modest aim of preventing slavery expanding into the western territories. It was also a victory for democracy, since the freed slaves enjoyed the same political rights as whites, though not for long. Finally, it was also a victory for the ideal of small farms – of the nation’s 10.5 million workers, 6.2 million worked on farms.26 Hence the sentimental celebration by politicians, artists, and writers of ‘thrifty villages’, ‘honest labor’ – in other words, what was then (and for some still is) the American Dream.27 As is often the case, reality shatters the dream, but there is seldom a return to the previous state of affairs. After the political conflicts in the period of immediate post-war Reconstruction when something approaching interracial democracy seemed to emerge, the post-emancipation South turned out to be still largely controlled by its previous masters and, long after the end of slavery, the 3 million former slaves and their descendants remained trapped in a system of segregation, disenfranchisement, and misery.28 As Eric Foner wrote, ‘the legacy of decades of plantation dominance’ could not be erased in the two years of radical Reconstruction, for the planter class ‘had no intention of presiding over its own dissolution’.29
Once, the slave-owning plantation owners had been the most powerful political class in the whole of America. After the Civil War they could l
ord it only in the South.30 As for the black man who had been a slave, now he was a disenfranchised labourer. W. E. B. Du Bois, scholar, pan-Africanist, and civil rights activist, lamented that, following the Civil War, ‘The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.’31
Slave plantations, both in the American South and in the West Indies, as Sven Beckert has shown, were an integral part of the world capitalist economy (more than the protected American North); but, in themselves, they were not capitalist and not particularly integrated into the developing American capitalism.32 Two economies lived side by side: a strong plantation economy in the South and a developing industrial one in the North. They might have coexisted. But it was not to be. The Civil War turned out to be the first great international military victory of capitalism. It was, as William Roy put it, ‘the precipitating event for the creation of the corporate infrastructure as we know it’. Barrington Moore called it ‘the Last Capitalist Revolution’.33 It paved the way for large-scale industrial corporations, the creation of a national currency and a national banking system, and the establishment of Wall Street as the centre of finance.34 A flood of immigrants from the rural South (mainly former slaves) as well as from Europe ensured a steady supply of cheap labour to the burgeoning North. Few European immigrants settled in the South. Everyone went north, east, and west. The construction of the railways led to a boom in coal and steel and the expansion of the frontier brought farmers within the orbit of capitalist expansion.35 Before 1850 those who settled in America came from Britain and northern Europe (Germany, Sweden, and Holland). Then between 1850 and 1880 some 300,000 European settlers arrived each year on America’s shores. Between 1880 and 1900 the numbers shot up to 600,000 a year and in the early years of the twentieth century about one million a year arrived in America, mainly from Italy, the Russian Empire, including Poland, and parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.36
The Anxious Triumph Page 33
