Mother Country

by Marilynne Robinson

  In Marx’s view, the laborer in America escapes expropriation because he can acquire land, basically. But the essential thing is not the availability of land but the value of his labor, the fact that he can sell it for a wage that significantly exceeds subsistence. “So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself—and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production—capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible.” Risking hubris, I must say that Marx seems to have things backward here, since accumulation in the first instance is the result of a high wage, and wages of course go to those who are not possessors of means of production. (If he means to include money among the means of production, as it would be entirely reasonable to do, then of course I withdraw my objection.) As he says a little later, in America “the wage-worker of to-day is to-morrow an independent peasant or artisan, working for himself.” In other words, the value of his labor allows him to become a possessor of means of production—not, as Marx makes very clear, a capitalist, however, for the same reason that his own employer was not, in Marx’s terms, a capitalist. The demand for labor precludes “the social dependence of the labourer on the capitalist,” that indispensable requisite of capitalist production. Marx says, “In the Colonies property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative—the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.” The “man … compelled to sell himself of his own free-will” is an apt description of the British worker from the dawn of the Poor Laws through the rise of Fabian socialism.

  Marx failed so miserably in his effort to put an end to the confusion he found in Wakefield that America, where the population retains still its relative immunity to “expropriation,” and where wealth is still broadly dispersed, is considered to be the ultimate capitalism on precisely those grounds, by Marxists first of all.

  Of course the argument will be made that America has changed since Marx wrote. This is certainly true. It has changed so utterly as to make comparison futile, in all but the broadest terms. Broadly speaking, then, it remains true that the American economy is characterized in a high degree by the accumulation of “self-earned private property,” sufficient in most cases to allow people to change jobs, acquire skills, strike, move into a better labor market, become self-employed. This minimal independence, an effect of relatively high pay, allows those who work for wages to demand relatively high pay. Marx saw capitalism growing on the tomb of the “colonial” economy, and it may yet. When it does, the signs will be a marked decline in independence, mobility, and standard of living—the things we Americans associate with “capitalism.”

  It will be objected that we have already suffered a decline in these things—by those who know nothing at all about America in the nineteenth century. It is hardly likely that a reader as voracious as Marx was would not have come across accounts of crises, bankruptcies, and so on in the United States. They were neither rare nor unremarked, nor was the poverty that attended them.

  Clearly, however, there was a degree of difference which amounted to a qualitative difference in Marx’s view. Marx, repeating Wakefield’s comparison of what Marx wishes to show are antithetical systems, says that Wakefield “depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising and comparatively cultured, whilst ‘the English agricultural labourer is a miserable wretch, a pauper … In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labour employed in agriculture, much exceed a bare subsistence for the labourer? … Undoubtedly, farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.’” Marx argues that the margin above subsistence which allows for culture and independence—and he is speaking here of farm laborers and “peasants” as such, hardly a prosperous group—makes an absolute difference in the character of the society. This conclusion is prepared by the eight hundred or so pages that precede it: a rehearsing, in large part, of the parliamentary reports, which document again and again expropriation and immiseration of an order so extreme that we might measure the relative happiness of our history by the difficulty we have believing it could be true. Capitalism, as Marx used the word, is very well described as growing on a tomb. I mention Sellafield here, how it thrives on poverty and unemployment, and never alleviates it, despite the great returns it boasts of bringing home to Britain. Marx, paraphrasing Wakefield, says, “But, never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people.”

  Americans are surprised when they learn that they are mentioned in Capital at all. They think of themselves, at best, as rather like Virgil and Plato, excluded from the scheme of salvation by accident of birth among the pagans. At the same time, oddly, they have appropriated the myth entirely to themselves, to the extent that, rather than looking into Capital to find out what Marx had in mind, they use themselves as the definition of capitalism and judge Marx as they feel kindly or unkindly disposed toward themselves.

  Americans are startled to learn that Karl Marx was employed as a foreign correspondent by the New York Daily Tribune, from 1853 to 1861, during the years in which he was preparing Capital. His Tribune articles, of which there are a great many, describe European and British affairs, the possible entry of the British government into the Civil War on the side of the South being an especially urgent interest of Marx. At the same time, though for a shorter period, Marx wrote about American affairs for Die Presse, a newspaper in Vienna. The articles were based on wide reading in American periodicals. Indeed, Marx said a great deal to Americans, and about them. He was in almost every instance more than generous, doing his American readers a courtesy to which they are now little accustomed, by addressing them always as humane and intelligent people.

  Marx submitted articles to Horace Greeley, whose Tribune, published across the country in daily, semiweekly, and weekly editions, was the largest newspaper in America, important to the development of abolitionist feeling and to the founding of the Republican Party. Marx’s columns were often published in all three editions, sometimes unsigned as editorials. Abraham Lincoln is known to have perused the Tribune in the years before his presidential candidacy, while he was developing his political position. If he looked to the Tribune in 1861 for news of British intentions with regard to the war (preventing Britain from entering the war on the side of the South was his most pressing foreign policy problem), then Lincoln read Marx as President. Given the importance of the Tribune, and the long list of its distinguished contributors, and Horace Greeley’s ties with Northern literary society, it is reasonable to assume that Emerson and Whitman read him, too. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a short life of Lincoln that appears to echo at least one of Marx’s essays. Marx had written about Mrs. Stowe, so it seems all the more probable that she was aware of him. There was so much shared language among Marx and his American contemporaries that influence is not readily established. Greeley delivered attacks on wage slavery, and Marx described the condition of the British workers as slavery and called for their emancipation. An early essay of Friedrich Engels demonstrated the practicability of communist societies with accounts of American Shaker settlements, communal farms in the Midwest, and with mention of a community in Northampton, Massachusetts. Every example was drawn from the United States.

  More generally, as Marx and the abolitionists both insist, the circumstances of workers of the time made slavery, actual as well as virtual, a live prospect for them. At least one Southern writer, George Fitzhugh, proposed ending the injustice of black slavery by enslaving whites as well. The revered Thomas Carlyle had called for the enslavement of workers in Britain, and lesser lights kept the idea alive, down to the time of the Fabians.

  Abraham Lincoln’s origins were of a kind to have made the enfranchisement of his
own family fairly recent. Considering the legal constraints that had always burdened the poor, and the fragility of such rights as they had gained, there is a special resonance in his saying, “He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave.” The boundaries human bondage threatened to overleap were racial as well as geographic. Conversely, its suppression had vastly more than national and humanitarian implications. And that is why, calling the Civil War a “working man’s revolution,” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote:

  The revolution through which the American nation has been passing was not a mere local convulsion. It was a war for a principle which concerns all mankind. It was the war for the rights of the working class of society as against the usurpation of privileged aristocracies. You can make nothing else of it … The poor labourers of Birmingham and Manchester, the poor silk weavers of Lyons, to whom our conflict has been present starvation and lingering death, have stood bravely for us. No sophistries could blind or deceive them; they knew that our cause was their cause, and they suffered their part heroically, as if fighting by our side, because they knew that our victory was to be their victory. On the other side, all aristocrats and holders of exclusive privileges have felt the instinct of opposition, and the sympathy with a struggling aristocracy, for they, too, felt that our victory would be their doom …

  In the 1867 preface to Capital Karl Marx wrote:

  As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle-class, so in the 19th century, the American civil war sounded it for the European working-class.

  I am haunted by the sense that a changeling has been put in the cradle of American culture. Adam Smith, the supposed capitalist, whose influence among us is notorious, developed an economic system in which prison, the poorhouse, and starvation have no role, and in which the flourishing of the people (a term he prefers to “the poor”) is the desired end. Compare the Fabians, those most sedulous strainers of mercy. Why are Smith’s proposals for public projects to enhance the economy, taxes that weigh less heavily on the poor than the rich, and education to alleviate the effects of industrial work, called capitalist, while subsidies of the cost of labor, and visits of inspection to the homes of the poor to assure that their destitution was perfect before they were relieved—that women had sold their wedding rings, for example—are called socialist? Why do the Land Grant Act, the Homestead Act, and the G.I. Bill, three distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain, have no status among political events, when the dreary traffic in pittances institutionalized as the British Welfare State is hailed as the advance of socialism?

  We must find a political and moral clarity that will enable us to address the starkest problems of survival, if the world is to have any hope. For a long time now, socialists have claimed an exceptional interest in the well-being of the generality of people, a special inclination to humanize collective life. But the history of socialism is disheartening. It is too strongly associated with repression, and these ties are too casually dismissed, for socialism to be conceded the special virtues it claims for itself. Plutonium manufacture and radioactive waste dumping are enterprises of the British government, and as good a proof as one could wish that government ownership in itself means nothing. The pattern identified by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the accumulation of capital through the destruction of wealth, is fully present in Sellafield. British socialism has always been no more than the left hand washing the right, and yet for years it has compelled the admiration of American socialists, who can find nothing in their own tradition to compare to it for moral grandeur.

  The mainstream political tradition in America is represented insistently now as unrelievedly “capitalist,” whatever Marx might have said about it, and as compromised, grubbing, and mean-spirited because of the supposed relative prevalence of “private property”—whatever Marx may have said about that. On both the right and the left, capitalism, not democracy, is represented as the basis of our institutions. If Sellafield is sometime sold to private owners, as the government has long intended that it should be, then overnight it will become a classic capitalist enterprise by Marx’s definition.

  There is a third option, however, described by both Smith and Marx, and, as luck would have it, indigenous to America, of a society based upon individual autonomy, to be achieved through policies of government that by act or omission enhance the specific, tangible, material well-being of individual people, by creating or protecting conditions of life that enhance vigor and morale. These include education, fair wages, wholesome food and water, and reasonable hope for one’s children. These things correspond in a general way with what Americans consider to be “Western values,” yet they never have described, and do not now describe, the condition of life of ordinary British people. To the inevitable reaction, that people do not miss what they have never had, that the austerity of their lives has spared them the corruptions of materialism, that legal protections are needed only where society is a war of each against all, that there is the dole to assure them security from cradle to grave, however tedious the passage, or however swift, the reply must be that the history and present condition of ordinary British people make it clear enough how they have been used and in what spirit, by capitalists and by socialists, in tacit or declared collaboration. The best American political impulses occur outside this sham opposition. They need to be rediscovered as valuable impulses. Certainly we need to rediscover the complexity of our own political history, which deserves vastly better than to be seized upon by capitalists or dismissed by socialists.

  When Abraham Lincoln said of a hypothetical black woman that “in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands … she is my equal, and the equal of all others,” he expressed an economic proposition which is by no means commonplace or inevitable. Lincoln based the woman’s rights on what she earned, not what she needed, a departure from “subsistence theory” and an implicit acknowledgment that labor creates value—that is, a margin between the cost of the worker’s subsistence and the amount of wealth she creates—and that she has a right to share in this overplus. One learns from Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle, E. G. Wakefield, and others that subsistence was assured to slaves as it was not to free workers. In Britain before the Second World War, employers still felt day laborers’ arms before they hired them, so that men who were frail or malnourished could be turned away. Under ordinary circumstances slaves would have had as much as economic theory, up to the time of Beveridge, promised or allowed fully employed working people in Britain—enough to maintain them in a condition of physical efficiency. Lincoln made the case, successfully, that in justice more was due anyone. If he had used Marx’s language, he would have declared the right to “self-earned private property.” Against a history in which vulnerability triggered the crudest abuse—the history of the British poor, into which Africans were swept up fairly late—so modest a statement as Lincoln’s sounds like beatitude.

  The most difficult struggle of our civilization has been to find the means to create autonomy for ordinary lives, so that they might not be plundered or disposed of according to the whims of more powerful people. Ideas like civil rights and personal liberty come directly from this struggle, which is not terribly well advanced at best, and which is untried, failed, or abandoned in most of the world.

  So very much depends on a poor man’s wage. At present there is a Youth Training Scheme in Britain to absorb the energies of unemployed school-leavers. Industries are encouraged to take on trainees in place of regular hiring. These youths are paid by the government at wages that about equal the dole. In other words, the government donates to industry the free use of unskilled labor. Without reference to the wealth these young people produce, their subsistence is counted as welfare spending, and they are thought of as the beneficiaries of this arrangement, from which it is hoped they will learn the value of honest work.

  People in their teens are historically the most coveted workers in the British econ
omy. They are relatively healthy, and from the government’s point of view, they are cheap, because they have no dependents and normally live with their families. This scheme merely reproduces the ancient pattern, severing work from pay, making the wage a charity, while reducing work to an escape from the opprobrium of idleness.

  Britain invests more money abroad per capita than any other country, and invested more in absolute terms, until Japan surpassed it in this decade. Those who control capital, whether banks or industries or the government itself, have always had the means to punish or starve policies they disapprove of, or to crown with success policies friendlier to their interests, simply by leaving money at home or by siphoning it off to the United States, or to South Africa or elsewhere.

  Mrs. Thatcher was described in an essay by Bernard D. Nossiter in The New York Times (June 15, 1988)7 as arguing to a church assembly “that abundance, the rich, were blessed while poverty, the poor, were not, and Creation proves it.”

  She has her reward. Britain is experiencing economic growth, of the hectic, selective, up-market kind which does not threaten to drive upward the cost of industrial labor or the demand for social services. British economics is a game of keep-away. Whence all the jiggling of statistics—it is easy to get a big percentage increase from a very small base, as in calculating wages and pensions, and it is easy to take away with one hand what is given with the other, to raise wages a little and cut benefits more, and it is easy to increase rates of saving and contribution to private pension plans by reducing benefits for the elderly or cutting back on the administration needed to deliver them or adding to the obstacles involved in obtaining them or threatening to phase them out altogether, as the Thatcher government has done.