by Peter Watson
It would be inadequate to label Marx as simply an economist. Many people regard him, alongside Auguste Comte, as one of the fathers of sociology. This mainly has to do with the fact that his interests went much wider than the purely economic. For Marx, in order for man to be free he has to understand freedom, and it was always his aim to show how the material outcome of history has interfered with this understanding. For Marx, this understanding was a central drama of politics.88
He was, above all, materialistic. He flatly rejected Hegel’s ideas about history as a dialectic of spirit and of thesis producing antithesis. For Marx, the course of history is the result of the material conditions human beings have been faced with.89 In particular, he argued that it is the labour and technology that people use in their work which either does or does not bring them fulfilment. But he did use one idea of Hegel’s, the notion of alienation, though Marx adapted it to mean that people can appear to be free (in their work, mainly), and yet in reality they are fettered.90
Throughout the 1850s, diligently burrowing away among the many facilities of the Reading Room of the British Museum, ‘working like the devil’, Marx consolidated his exposé of capitalist and industrial practices through which he intended to maintain that it is the material conditions of society–the way work is organised and wealth produced–that mould every aspect of that society, ‘from the way we think to the institutions society allows and approves’.91 It was a massive ambition and this is why Marx was much more than an economist. His main argument was that the conditions of production are the foundation, the fundamental base, on which society is built. ‘All social institutions–what he called the superstructure–stem from this, be it the law, religion, the different elements that make up the state. In other words, power is what counts.’92 Then, in equally copious detail (the book is three volumes long), he set out the personal consequences of this fundamental reality. Here, his most potent idea is the one alluded to above, his adaptation of Hegel’s notion of alienation. Marx argued that, in industrial society where the division of labour is essential for efficiency and for adding value, ‘the labourer is alienated from himself’. What he meant was that the very logic of factory organisation and production makes a man an automaton. The main human characteristic of factory life is that the identity of ‘factory hands’ is thereby diminished, since for the most part the workers hate what they do and, moreover, have no control over their work. No less important, and equally diminishing, they are forced to operate ‘well within their capabilities’. This is alienation.93
Workers do not become aware that they are alienated, Marx says, because of something he called ‘ideology’. As a result of the way society is organised, the way power is organised, a set of beliefs–an ideology–is produced, regarding the conditions of that society. This ‘ideology’ includes theories about human nature itself, theories which in themselves serve the interests of the dominant class; they help it preserve its power but are for the most part false. Marx said that organised religion was a good example of what he meant by ideology in action because it taught that people must accept God’s will–the status quo–rather than take any action to change things.94
As well as being more than an economist, Marx was also in some ways more than a sociologist, a philosopher almost. Nowhere in Capital does he actually discuss ‘human nature’, as philosophers or theologians might, but that is the point. For him, there is no abstract essence of man: instead a man’s sense of self emerges from his material situation, his relations with others significant in his life, and the economic, social and political forces by which he has been shaped. What mattered here, and what disturbed many people, was that Marx’s argument implied that a man can change his nature by changing his circumstances. Revolution was psychological as well as economic.95
The final layer in Marx’s new way of looking at the world was what many people found the most contentious of all. This was the idea that his work was scientific, that his investigations in the British Museum had uncovered something hitherto hidden but now revealed as objective about society, and that therefore his analysis unveiled a progression that was inevitable. While many objected to this, for others it gave ‘Marxism’ the character of a millenarian religion, the more so as his huge book divided human history into stages, each stage being characterised by the dominant method of production. For Marx, the origins of the modern world occurred with the transition from feudalism to capitalism. And then, perhaps most famously of all, he went on to argue that economic instability and class conflict are inherent aspects of the history of production which must ultimately result in revolution, and the final transition–to communism. ‘The knell of capitalist private property sounds.’ (Before ‘revolution’, Marx first used the word ‘dissolution’.)96
The timing of Capital was crucial. Here was a new world view, a theory beyond economics, beyond sociology, beyond even politics, imbued with a post-enlightenment scientific aura, which offered, or purported to offer, an all-encompassing understanding of human affairs at a time when religion was visibly failing. As a result, during the 1860s Marx himself became a political figure. Particularly after publication of the first volume of Capital, in 1867, he was taken up by the various European revolutionary movements, as the man who had, after years of research in the British Museum, provided scientific validation of revolutionary action. For example, his ideas were behind the Working Men’s International Association, the so-called ‘First International’, which was established in 1864, and where the term ‘Marxism’ was first used.97
Among the imaginative responses to the industrial revolution was a set of ‘industrial novels’, written and set in Britain. These included Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), both by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sybil (1845), by Benjamin Disraeli, a future prime minister of Great Britain, Alton Locke (1850), by Charles Kingsley, Felix Holt (1866), by George Eliot, and Hard Times (1854), by Charles Dickens, an extract from which began this chapter. The main themes of these books were not only criticism of the new society, but also a fear of violence that was felt might erupt from the working classes at any time.
While some of these books exerted a great impact, then and since, from the perspective of the twenty-first century a remarkable set of observations, about the new uses of certain words, are more pointed. The British critic Raymond Williams has shown that ‘in the last decades of the eighteenth century, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of new words, which are now of capital importance, came for the first time into common English use, or, where they had already been used in the language, acquired new and important meanings.’ He went on to say that these words described a general pattern of new ideas which reflected a wider transformation in life and thought, and which, as we shall see, ‘bear witness to a general change in our characteristic thinking about our common life’. These words were industry, democracy, class, art and culture.98
Before the industrial revolution, Williams said, the word ‘industry’ could be paraphrased as ‘skill, assiduity, perseverance, diligence’. Although this traditional usage survives, industry also now came to be a collective word for manufacturing and productive institutions, and for their characteristic activities.99 It was followed by ‘industrious’, ‘industrial’ and, from 1830, by ‘industrialism’. The key phrase ‘industrial revolution’, he says, was first coined by French writers in the 1820s, modelled explicitly on an analogy with the French Revolution.100 (Others credit its first use to Engels, see above, page 565.) ‘Democracy’, although in use from Greek times as a term for ‘government by the people’, only came into popular use at the time of the American and French Revolutions. In England, although there may have been democracy, at least in theory, since the Magna Carta, or since the Commonwealth, or since 1688, it did not call itself a democracy and at the end of the eighteenth century democracy was more or less equivalent to Jacobinism or mob-rule. ‘Democrats, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, were seen, commonly
, as dangerous and subversive mob agitators.’101 ‘Class’, in its important modern sense, dates from about 1740. Before that it was used mainly in its scholarly setting, to indicate a group in schools or colleges. First came ‘lower class’, to join ‘lower orders’, then ‘higher classes’ in the 1790s, followed by ‘middle’ or ‘middling classes’, with ‘working classes’ not appearing until about1815, ‘upper classes’ soon after. ‘Class prejudice, class legislation, class consciousness and class conflict and class war follow in the course of the nineteenth century.’102 Williams is not so naïve as to claim that this was the beginning of social divisions in England but he is adamant that the new usage reflected a change in the character of those divisions. People were more aware of divisions, and found the vaguer meaning of ‘class’ more useful than ‘rank’, which had been used previously and now applied less and less.
The changing use of ‘art’, he said, was very similar to the changing use of industry. Its traditional meaning was ‘skill’–any skill. ‘Artist’ had meant a skilled person, as had ‘artisan’. But ‘art’ now came to stand for a particular group of skills, the imaginative or creative arts, and ‘Art with a capital A came to stand for a special kind of truth, imaginative truth, making the artist a special kind of person…A new name, aesthetics, was found to describe the judgement of art and…The arts–literature, music, painting, sculpture, theatre–were grouped together, in this new phrase, as having something essentially in common which distinguishes them from other human skills. This is when the distinction between artist, on the one hand, and artisan and craftsman, on the other, arose, and when genius, which originally meant “a characteristic disposition”, came to mean “exalted ability”.103
The change in the meaning of ‘culture’ was perhaps the most interesting response of all. This term had originally meant a culture of something, as in the tending of natural growth, the biological sense. Its change in meaning went through several phases. ‘It came to mean, first, “a general state or habit of the mind,” having close relations with the idea of human perfection. Second, it came to mean “the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole”. Third, it came to mean “the general body of the arts”. Fourth, later in the century, it came to mean “a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual”.’104 Matthew Arnold, in particular and most famously in Culture and Anarchy (1869), defined culture as an inward journey, an attempt to rid ourselves of ignorance, ‘a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.’105 Arnold thought that in each class in the new industrialised society there was ‘a remnant’, a minority which existed alongside the characteristic majority, who ‘were not disabled’ by the ordinary notions of their class and who loved human perfection. Through culture, in the sense he defined it, these people would develop their ‘best selves’ to set a standard of beauty and human perfection, thus ‘saving’ the greater mass of men. He did not see this as in any way elitist.106 Arnold’s ideas were a long way from Marx’s, or Owen’s, or Adam Smith’s, and the very concept of ‘high culture’, which is what he really had in mind, is now under much criticism and, to an extent, in retreat. All the more important, therefore, to add these lines of Arnold’s which are often omitted: ‘Culture directs our attention to the natural current there is in human affairs, and its continual working, and will not let us rivet our faith upon any one man and his doings. It makes us see, not only his good side, but also how much in him was of necessity limited and transient…’107
Kenneth Pomeranz has recently argued, in The Great Divergence, that the economies (and therefore the civilisations) of Britain and Europe accelerated after 1750, quickly outstripping those of India, China, Japan and the rest of Asia, to create the great inequalities in the world which we see around us today (and which are in the process, in some regions, of being rectified). He argues, however, that the industrial revolution, which is generally given credit for both the acceleration and divergence, is only part of the picture. For the full impact of the industrial revolution to be understood, he says, we need to allow for two extra factors. One is the invention of steam-driven transport (especially steamships), which greatly reduced the cost of long-distance trade, in the process making the second factor, the existence of the New World, a more viable economic market. The New World, with its mineral and other resources, its slave society (helping generate unprecedented profits), and its vast geographical extent, provided exactly the kind of market conditions to reciprocate with the new technologies and economies of scale represented by the industrial revolution. He says that the economies of India, China and other Asian regions in the early eighteenth century were not so different–hardly less sophisticated–than in Europe, and that the ‘second acceleration’ of the West (after the first surge ahead between 1050 and1300) would not have been so decisive without this conjunction of factors. The growth of empires also played their part–they were essentially protected markets.108
A related, and possibly the most important long-term, effect of the industrial revolution was that the world was at peace for a hundred years between 1815 and 1914. This link is not often made but the case was persuasively set out in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, published in 1944 but reissued in 2001.109 Polanyi’s argument was that the vast fortunes formed by the industrial revolution, and the prospect of equally or even vaster fortunes to be made in the future, together with the international character of many of the new businesses (cotton, railways, shipping, pharmaceuticals), plus the development of the bond market, which had matured since the sixteenth century, to the point where, generally speaking, foreigners owned a substantial proportion of any government’s public debt (say 14 per cent), meant that, for the first time in history, there emerged ‘an acute peace interest’ and this was, he says, ‘a distinct stage in the history of industrial civilisation’. After 1815 the change is sudden and complete. The backwash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution in establishing peaceful business as a universal interest. Metternich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not liberty but peace.110 The institution which most characterised the ‘peace interest’, he said, was what he called haute finance, by which he meant international finance.
Polanyi didn’t deny that there were ‘small wars’ in the nineteenth century (and more than one revolution) but insisted there was no general or long war between any of the major powers from 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War. (Lawrence James characterises this period as a ‘cold war’; and just how unusual it was may be seen from the statistics in Niall Ferguson’s The Cash Nexus, where he quotes figures to show that there were 1,000 European wars between 1400 and 1984: ‘On average a new war begins every four years and a Great Power war [i.e., a war involving more than one Great Power] every seven or eight years.’) Haute finance, Polanyi said, functioned as the main link between the political and economic organisation of the world. These high financiers were not pacifists and had no objection to any number of minor, short or localised wars. ‘But their business would be impaired if a general war between the Great Powers should interfere with the monetary foundations of the system.’ Haute finance was not designed as an instrument of peace, he said, and it had no specific pro-peace organisation, but since it actually was independent of any single government, it comprised a new power in the world. The vast majority of holders of government securities, as well as other investments, were ‘bound to be the first losers’ if a general war should break out. These powerful people, therefore, had a vested interest in peace. The crucial factor, he said, was that loans, and the renewal of loans, hinged upon credit, and credit upon good behaviour. This was reflected in constitutional government and the proper conduct of budgetary affairs. Polanyi gave a few examples where
financiers had in effect taken over (at least some of) the reins of government for a short time, in places such as Turkey, Egypt or Morocco, to administer financial problems (usually debt supervision) that were threatening political stability. All of which, he said, showed that trade had become linked with peace. This was the time that saw the emergence of financiers such as the Rothschilds. In 1830 James de Rothschild went so far as to quantify the cost of war–he said that, in the event of hostilities his rents would drop by 30 per cent. Disraeli calculated that the 1859 Franco-Italian challenge to Austria was costing 60 million sterling on the stock exchange, and the marquess of Salisbury observed in regard to the lack of outside investment in Ireland: ‘Capitalists prefer peace and 3 per cent to 10 per cent with the drawback of bullets in the breakfast room.’ The picture has been expanded and deepened by recent scholarship showing that exactly this period, 1820–1917, saw the greatest growth of democracy, and democracies, in history, apart from the years after the Second World War.111
In the end, haute finance failed to avert the First World War, which in turn would bring about a fundamental change in the banking system of the West. But a watershed was reached in 1815. Before then, governments and merchants had always accepted that wars provided the opportunity to expand trade. After the industrial revolution, with the rise of a prosperous middle class, the economics of war changed for all time. The hundred years peace, as Karl Polanyi called it, allowed the industrial revolution to spark the development of mass society, a totally new form of civilisation.
