The Great War enhanced the sense of peril since there had not been a major war on Europe’s soil in living memory (if we exclude the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71). ‘I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones,’ wrote T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, while Giuseppe Ungaretti in a short poem (‘Soldati’, 1918) remembers how it felt to be a soldier in that war:
Si sta come We were as
d’autunno in autumn
sugli alberi leaves
le foglie on trees
A literature of alarm emerged: everything was doomed; the barbarians were at the gates. W. B. Yeats, in his great poem ‘The Second Coming’, composed in 1919, with the war, the Russian Revolution, and the failure of the Irish Easter Rising in mind, warned:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
…
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This poem has continued to resonate in English-language culture. The theme of doom is exciting. Lines of this poem have been used for a novel describing the end or decline of traditional life (Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, 1958) and an essay critical of modern counter-culture (Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’, 1967).6 Didion’s essay begins thus:
The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices … of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes … It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers … children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together … It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high …7
This was San Francisco in the 1960s, one of the richest cities in one of the richest nations in the world.
Of course, doom-mongering has always existed. It’s just that, after the First World War, the trope of ‘decline and fall’ became a fashionable genre, further popularized by writers such as Arnold Toynbee in his multi-volume A Study of History (1934–61). The most famous example was Oswald Spengler’s best-selling Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), published in 1918 (though actually written before the war). But even before Spengler, in 1904, Constantine Cavafy had published his poem (composed a little earlier), ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, in which he imagines a city in decline whose people and rulers await the arrival of the ‘barbarians’ not just with some trepidation and fear but almost with a sense of deliverance from a mindless and visionless existence. The barbarians do not come and the citizens ask: ‘What is to become of us without barbarians? Those people were a solution of a sort.’
Earlier than Cavafy, in 1892–3, Max Nordau (born Simon Südfeld), a physician and an early Zionist, had published in Berlin his Entartung (Degeneration), soon translated into Italian (1893), French (1894), and English (1895). Degeneration was dedicated to the celebrated Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (who believed that criminal traits were inherited). Degeneration was, as one would expect, a dirge about the end of civilization. The first chapter, entitled ‘The Dusk of the Nations’, provides us with some fin-de-siècle anecdotes: an exiled king who, short of money, renounces any claim and titles in exchange for money; a bishop who, prosecuted for insulting a politician, sells the transcript of his defence, obtaining more than the fine he has to pay; the head of the secret police, who turns the skin of an executed criminal into cigar cases that he sells to his friends; and so on. Nordau then adds: ‘All these fin-de-siècle cases have … a common feature, to wit, a contempt for traditional views of custom and morality.’8 And they are all about the transformation of everything into marketable commodities.
The use of the word ‘decadence’ in essays and books increased very rapidly, peaking in the decade before the First World War. This offered some evidence of the fact that intellectuals were alarmed; although, in a way, alarm is their default position. That pessimism should increase after the First World War was understandable, but there was relatively little reason for so much despondency before it. Despite the Long Depression of 1873 to 1896, the industrial world continued to grow, subduing much of the rest of the world. In the period 1871 to 1914, in the West, there were no major wars, revolutions, or regime changes. (The only important European conflict, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, left the rest of the continent unperturbed.) And an unprecedented international migration of people to the Americas did not cause major political changes either in Europe (whence most of the migrants originated) or in the Americas (where most of the migrants went). This is all the more impressive since the flow of immigrants into the United States in the 1880s was, in proportion, three times that of the 1990s.9
Elsewhere, in the first years of the twentieth century, there was significant political unrest, even revolutions (see Chapter 11): Persia (1906), Turkey (1908), Mexico (1910), Portugal (1910), China (1911), the failed revolutions in Russia (1905) and in Albania (1910, against Ottoman rule), and the ‘liberal’ revolution in Paraguay (1904). Such turmoil and the hopes it inspired were designed to bring about modernity, democracy, and constitutional rule, and move ‘forward’ to a capitalist stage – not to return to a previous state of affairs.
Those enslaved by colonialism suffered considerably, but they often had suffered previously. The local rulers and their clients, though humiliated by the arrogance of their white masters, remained powerful. There were rebellions against colonial rule – as we saw in Chapter 17 – but only the Ethiopian resistance against Italy’s attempt to take over the country in 1896 was successful.
In spite of the widespread fears, the panics, and the anxieties that at times seemed to overwhelm easily frightened elites in the ‘advanced’ countries, dissident anti-capitalist forces did not present a real threat before 1914. Anarchists, nationalists, conspirators, and various deranged individuals killed, in the decades between 1880 and 1914, a Tsar (Alexander II in 1881), two American presidents (James Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in 1901); Abraham Lincoln had been murdered in 1865 and the presidents of France, Mexico, and Ecuador; the Prime Ministers of Russia, Bulgaria, Japan, and Persia; an Austrian Empress (Sissi) and the kings of Greece, Italy, Serbia (and his wife), and Portugal; but little of significance was achieved except, in some cases, to justify the subsequent repression. Then, in Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914, an Austrian archduke and his wife were killed by a Bosnian Serb.
Anarchist movements brought about no advance towards their utopian aims and not even limited success. Engels understood this well in 1895 when, in his introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (1850), he wrote that ‘The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past.’ One of the main aspects of capitalism is that it cannot be overturned by destroying or capturing its centre since it has none. It would take more than a few half-deranged terrorists and naive rebels to dismantle such a power structure. Terrorists are never in control of the consequences of their action. They can throw the initial stone but are quite unable to predict what ripples will occur. Those already powerful and against whom the action of terrorists are directed are the ones who decide how and when to respond, thus making the impotence of terrorism all the more evident.
Other forms of resistance, such as strikes and riots, were of far greater importance than plots and insurrections, but they succeeded, at best, in obtaining reforms that the elites should have h
ad the intelligence to enact earlier. Socialist parties, as we have seen, were strong between 1880 and 1914 in only a few countries (such as Germany and Austria) and, though unable to form governments, had some influence on the pace of reforms (as did the trade unions in Great Britain). Only in Australia was a socialist party able to form a majority government before the First World War. Between the two world wars socialist parties became more politically significant and were occasionally in power (usually in coalition, as in Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, and New Zealand). Only after 1945 would they become leading contenders for government in almost all Western European countries.
The improvement in literacy and education expanded the cohort of those who could be classified as members of the intelligentsia, but these were no more rebellious, if at all, than their forefathers, often entertaining the bourgeoisie with their harmless anti-bourgeois postures. Those of an artistic disposition, painters and sculptors, simply sold their wares to the nouveau riche who could not afford Renaissance masters. Modernism, whether embodied in stream-of-consciousness novels (prefigured in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 1757), twelve-tone music, or abstract art, was no threat to the bourgeoisie and seldom claimed to be, though some naively claimed it was, for instance, Daniel Bell, who regarded modernism ‘as the agency for the dissolution of the bourgeois world view …’.10
Before the First World War, capitalism, in spite of its undoubted success, remained unpopular in culture (elite and non-elite) – as it still is today. The sheer accumulation of wealth, though the avowed goal of so many, was seldom celebrated in novels and poetry. Many of the revered writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who wrote about money (Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Giovanni Verga, Wilhelm Raabe, Henrik Ibsen, Anthony Trollope, Émile Zola, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and many others) could barely disguise their contempt for capitalists and financiers (see Chapters 9 and 15). These writers, on the whole, were far from being socialists, but they regarded competitive capitalism as irrational or inhuman, or vulgar, or a waste of resources or backward and belonging to the past. At a time when socialists were not thinking of a planned economy (this would come later, after the Russian Revolution and the crisis of 1929), many writers and thinkers were developing schemes for a planned and rational society ruled by technocrats – an ancient dream whose origins lie in Plato’s Republic (where the rulers should be philosophers) and whose nineteenth-century antecedents could be found in the writings of Henri de Saint Simon and others (who thought that bankers and businessmen should be in charge). Much of this ‘technocratic’ anti-capitalism was expressed in novels about the future such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888, see Chapters 14 and 15) and H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905) along with his book Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901), as well as Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System (a collection of essays originally published in the journal The Dial in 1919).11
In the Cold War period as well as in the post-communist era that followed, anti-capitalism was far more present in popular culture than pro-capitalism. As the self-styled anarcho-libertarian pro-capitalist economist Murray N. Rothbard wrote, somewhat regretfully: ‘It’s true: greed has had a very bad press’, adding with obvious glee as if trying to shock right-thinking people: ‘I frankly don’t see anything wrong with greed’12 – a bon mot somewhat resuscitated in 1998 by the British Labour Party’s guru Peter Mandelson when he declared to California computer executives that he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes’.
People are envious and resentful of those who make money. Meanwhile the rich can just shrug their shoulders and go on counting their cash, since on the whole being envied for being rich is better than being pitied for being poor. In the West, traders in the City of London and on Wall Street earning huge bonuses are despised by many, while in post-communist Russia, among ordinary working people or the old, one could hardly hear a good word said about the so-called ‘New Russians’.13 Some may attribute this to the lingering success of Soviet propaganda, or to the nostalgia for the austere Soviet style of the 1960s; but the simplest explanation is that the rich are intensely disliked even when admired, and that rich capitalists are more disliked than the aristocracy of old, since being born an aristocrat like being born rich is a matter of luck, like winning the lottery, while self-made capitalists suggest that those who did not make it were incompetent or lazy.
There are exceptions to popular anti-capitalism in fiction. One is Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), preceded by another best-selling novel in 1943, The Fountainhead, celebrating an individualistic architect. In Atlas Shrugged the ‘good guys’ are tycoons and captains of industry and the ‘bad guys’ are ‘collectivists’ of various hues and bureaucrats. Ayn Rand (born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg in 1905) had written the novel precisely because she was dismayed that so little fiction had a positive attitude towards industrialists. While most fiction celebrates altruism and self-sacrifice (on behalf of one’s faith, country, friends, family, or one’s beloved), Ayn Rand celebrated selfishness, not always successfully.
The anti-capitalist genre was particularly prominent in popular science fiction and spy films produced in the United States and Great Britain, heartlands of capitalism. The anti-capitalist theme recurs constantly in Bond films, usually regarded as Cold War movies. In the third James Bond film, Goldfinger (1964), the eponymous villain is not the usual Soviet agent but a crooked bullion dealer who plans to contaminate the gold held in Fort Knox to force up the value of his own gold. In Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Bond forms an unlikely alliance with a (beautiful) Chinese spy who works for the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China to thwart the monstrous plans of a press magnate (a kind of Rupert Murdoch), who wants to provoke a third world war because wars are good for newspaper sales. In the film Superman (1978) the arch-criminal Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) wants to nuke the California coastline since he’s bought the adjoining desert land that he wants to develop and so make a fortune. In Superman III (1983) the nasty capitalist Ross Webster, in order to monopolize the world’s coffee crop, wants to destroy the totality of Colombian coffee. In Total Recall (1990, with Arnold Schwarzenegger), malevolent capitalists exploit the ‘mutants’ on Mars. In James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) the earth’s resources have been depleted and a capitalist company exploits those of another planet endangering the natives and their harmonious way of life. In Alien III (1992) the Weyland-Yutani, a soulless, profit-driven corporation with no ethical values, runs extra-solar human colonies.
There are many such examples. The accumulation of wealth for its own sake is decried. The ‘social’ point of capitalism is consumption. Marx was aware of that when, in the opening lines of Das Kapital, he declared that the wealth of capitalist societies presented itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’.14 We usually enjoy the commodities far more than the process of accumulating wealth, unless the job is particularly pleasurable and interesting. And it is the demand for commodities that propels the process of accumulation. Whether this process requires a system of (largely) private ownership, as capitalist ideologues claim, or whether it can work equally well (or better) under some form of communal or state ownership, as socialists maintain, was one of the major controversies of the twentieth century.
Although few people today defend communism, not many actually like capitalism. A survey commissioned by the World Service of the BBC in 2009, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism in the twenty-seven countries surveyed. Only 11 per cent of those interviewed thought that capitalism worked well and felt that greater regulation was not a good idea. In only two countries did more than one in five feel that capitalism worked: in the United States (25 per cent) and, less predictably, in Pakistan (21 per cent). Worldwide, 23 per cent of all th
ose surveyed felt that capitalism was fatally flawed, and that a new economic system was needed. This was the average: in France the anti-capitalists accounted for a staggering 43 per cent, in Mexico 38 per cent, in Brazil 35 per cent, and in Ukraine 31 per cent. In fifteen of the twenty-seven countries a majority thought that the government should own or control their country’s major industries – a view strongly held in countries of the former Soviet Union such as Russia (77 per cent) and Ukraine (75 per cent). Among former communist countries a majority of Russians (61 per cent) and Ukrainians (54 per cent) thought that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a ‘bad thing’, unlike 80 per cent of the Poles and nearly two-thirds of Czechs.15
Be that as it may, popular anti-capitalism has never seriously affected the workings of capitalism; there has never been an anti-capitalist armed revolution in an advanced capitalist country. Perhaps capitalism requires, ideologically speaking, some enmity towards those who become wealthy to reassure the majority who are not and who will never be wealthy, hence sayings such as ‘money does not make you happy’; ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ (a passage addressed specifically to ‘servants’ and ‘slaves’ in First Timothy 6:10); ‘You cannot serve both God and money’ (Luke 16:13); money ‘is the Devil’s dung!’, as Pope Francis declared in 2015, quoting Basil of Caesarea, a Church Father of the fourth century.16 Even Margaret Thatcher told the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland that ‘It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.’17
Reluctance to embrace a pro-capitalist ideology grew during the Great War (when the economy was put on a war footing) and even more in the interwar period. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the runaway inflation of the early 1920s (in Germany, Austria, and Hungary), the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression of the 1930s made capitalism more unpopular than ever. In those years the globalized economy, as it had developed between 1860 to 1914, contracted, as most countries resorted to protectionism and state intervention in the economy: the New Deal in the United States, planning in the USSR, the takeover of the banking system by Italian Fascism, and the massive rearmament programme in Japan and Nazi Germany. After the Second World War, the capitalist economies, in direct competition with the newly emergent communist world, followed variants of what came to be known, in Western Europe, as the ‘Keynesian’ welfare state, while in the USA a high-wage economy provided capitalism with its most formidable base of consensus: mass consumption.
The Anxious Triumph Page 71
