My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  And should the child survive, work awaits in trades that are not merely unhealthy but lethal. In the linen trade wet feet and wet clothes, a result of the preparation of the flax, lead to bronchitis, pneumonia and severe rheumatism, and the women, who start work at the age of seventeen or eighteen, break down and are physically destroyed by the time they reach thirty. Laborers in the chemical industry, “picked from the strongest and most splendidly built men to be found,” live on average less than forty-eight years. In the potter’s trade dust gradually settles into the lungs until eventually a case of plaster is formed, making breathing more and more difficult, until finally it ceases.

  * * *

  Jack London wrote his book in 1903 in London, thirty-five years after Karl Marx published the first volume of his Das Kapital but only eighteen and nine years respectively after the posthumous publication of volumes two and three. Jack London was a socialist, The People of the Abyss an attempt to raise awareness by entering into a world usually viewed from some great distance, and to describe that world from the inside. It contains no analysis, but a wealth of emotions; indignation and resignation being the most dominant. Das Kapital, on the other hand, is an analysis of the fundamental preconditions of the misery Jack London describes: commodities, labor, and capital. Theoretical as it is, the work includes lengthy statistically based descriptions of conditions among the lowest class, the same people London would later visit, which at the time, in the 1850s and 1860s, were not much different to those in the first decade of the twentieth century. In his Chapter 25, “General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” Marx tries to outline the circumstances that led to the “intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power” that industrialization had brought about for the privileged classes, not in this instance conditions in the workplace, in themselves appalling, with working days of sixteen, seventeen hours or more in cramped spaces with little light or ventilation, but conditions outside the workplace, the standards of diet and housing of the most poorly situated workers. In 1855, the official list of paupers in England numbered 851,369 persons, these being people without employment and relying on public alms for their survival, while in 1864, due to the crisis in the cotton industry, that figure rose to 1,014,978 persons. These are people living below the very minimum level of existence.

  * * *

  These enormous numbers of poor were an unmanageable problem for society insofar as the colossal changes in production circumstances of which they were a result, the massive industrialization that had taken place, found no counteraction in any form of societal planning or governance; poverty’s bottomless pit, concentrated as it was in huge ghetto-like areas of the inner city, arose over a period of only a few decades, and many considered it to be the result of some kind of natural law or force of nature, not least in the wake of Darwin’s breakthrough theory of the survival of the fittest, whose axiom was applied equally to the social domain, and the apparent moral and spiritual decline that accompanied it was seen to derive from a kind of human inferiority, self-inflicted, irremedially mushrooming among the lowest classes.

  It was as if a whole new society or societal order had arisen within the framework of the old, and the huge pressure it applied to its structures cannot be underestimated. Prior to industrialization, in rural society there were no classes at all but status and strata, and poverty found quite different forms, dealt with in different ways altogether. Marx’s analyses, as an instrument by which to understand the enormous upheavals that had taken place in society, were of course invaluable. He had experienced the consequences of poverty at first hand, three of his own children having died when they were still small, and he had seen misery with his own eyes in the great English industrial areas from whence it had spread, seemingly systematically, as if according to its own laws, to large parts of the world.

  Industrialism knew no boundaries; nor indeed did the misery that followed in its wake, and the fierce political strife that divided Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century was in the main a matter of a horizontal, transgressional solution versus a vertical, national solution. In other words, identification with class or with place. Hitler, who came from a small petty-bourgeois environment in a relatively homogenous town, source of all his ideals, accorded much emphasis to the poverty issue in Mein Kampf, written at a time when the decay of which he had been a part no longer threatened to consume him. His understanding of it was primarily structural:

  If I did not wish to despair of the men who constituted my environment at that time, I had to learn to distinguish between their external characters and lives and the foundations of their development. Only then could all this be borne without losing heart. Then, from all the misery and despair, from all the filth and outward degeneration, it was no longer human beings that emerged, but the deplorable results of deplorable laws; and the hardship of my own life, no easier than the others, preserved me from capitulating in tearful sentimentality to the degenerate products of this process of development.

  No, this is not the way to understand all these things!

  Hitler recognized poverty as a major political problem and he was just as distraught about its inhumanity as Karl Marx and Jack London, but in Vienna it had not only emerged within a relatively homogenous working class as in London, but was exacerbated by great numbers of immigrants from all corners of the empire converging on the city in the hope of finding work, and the ethnic conflicts that were so rife there in that period are crucial to Hitler’s way of understanding his surroundings and the time in which he lived. He was born a German in Austria, his father was a German nationalist, albeit moderately so, loyal to the Kaiser, while many of his teachers at school and the majority of students cultivated a more radical German nationalism, and the idea of the supremacy of the nation, not merely in constitutional terms but almost as if it were some kind of metaphysical entity, pervades every conception in Mein Kampf, and also, if we are to go by Kubizek’s memoir, everything else he thought as a young man when it came to politics. When Hitler observed such gross social injustice he did not look firstly toward class relations in search of a solution, but to relations between peoples. In the Greater Germanic Reich of which he dreamed there would be no division between burgher and aristocrat, but between German and non-German. It was on this basis that he was already at the age of eighteen a confirmed anti-Marxist. The international orientation of Marxism went against everything he stood for. He was anticapitalist for the same reason. And the fact that he knew what it meant to be poor, and had seen firsthand the huge and inhuman poverty that existed in Vienna, was surely significant in the formation of his viewpoints on social misery as expressed in Mein Kampf, where rather than being seen as a problem of class structure, it is understood as a combined consequence of the disintegrating Dual Monarchy and international capitalism. That his meticulousness and overarching need for control moreover may be seen as a kind of embodiment of the wish to delimit and localize even the biggest structures into more manageable units, in the same way as his fear of everything that spreads, everything that crosses boundaries, like disease and flotsam, may be seen as a kind of embodiment of all the great currents and forces that were at work in his time and which knew no boundaries of nation, is not quite as tenuous and forced as it might appear, for if there is something going on in Mein Kampf it is precisely an interpretation of the external world on the basis of the feelings and temperament of the internal being.

  After the turn of the century, Vienna was, socially speaking, one of the most backward cities in Europe.

  Dazzling riches and loathsome poverty alternated sharply. In the center and in the inner districts you could really feel the pulse of this realm of fifty-two millions, with all the dubious magic of the national melting pot. The Court with its dazzling glamor attracted wealth and intelligence from the rest of the country like a magnet. Added to this was the strong centralization of the Habsburg monarchy in itself.

  It offered the sole possibility of holding this medley of nations togeth
er in any set form. But the consequence was an extraordinary concentration of high authorities – in the imperial capital.

  Yet not only in the political and intellectual sense was Vienna the center of the old Danube monarchy, but economically as well. The host of high officers, government officials, artists, and scholars was confronted by an even greater army of workers, and side by side with aristocratic and commercial wealth dwelt dire poverty. Outside the palaces on the Ring loitered thousands of unemployed, and beneath this Via Triumphalis of old Austria dwelt the homeless in the gloom and mud of the canals.

  In hardly any German city could the social question have been studied better than in Vienna. But make no mistake. This “studying” cannot be done from lofty heights. No one who has not been seized in the jaws of this murderous viper can know its poison fangs. Otherwise nothing results but superficial chatter and false sentimentality. Both are harmful. The former because it can never penetrate to the core of the problem, the latter because it passes it by. I do not know which is more terrible: inattention to social misery such as we see every day among the majority of those who have been favored by fortune or who have risen by their own efforts, or else the snobbish, or at times tactless and obtrusive, condescension of certain women of fashion in skirts or in trousers, who “feel for the people.” In any event, these gentry sin far more than their minds, devoid of all instinct, are capable of realizing. Consequently, and much to their own amazement, the result of their social “efforts” is always nil, frequently, in fact, an indignant rebuff; though this, of course, is passed off as a proof of the people’s ingratitude.

  Such minds are most reluctant to realize that social endeavor has nothing in common with this sort of thing; that above all it can raise no claim to gratitude, since its function is not to distribute favors but to restore rights.

  I was preserved from studying the social question in such a way. By drawing me within its sphere of suffering, it did not seem to invite me to “study,” but to experience it in my own skin. It was none of its doing that the guinea pig came through the operation safe and sound.

  This passage, so typical of Mein Kampf, begins by sketching the divide between Vienna’s rich and poor, viewed as if from afar, from the viewpoint of an impersonal “you,” which is to say in general terms, though not objectively; the multinational state has a “dubious magic” and the many nationalities held together by the centralizing power are a “melting pot.” The preliminary conclusion is that no other city would seem to be as well suited for the study of social issues. However, such a study is possible only at first hand, and, moreover, only by someone “in the jaws of this murderous viper,” in other words someone who has actually lived in poverty. What this says is: I was there, I know what I’m talking about, unlike almost everyone else. In this way Hitler lends ethos to his text, the same ethos as is evoked at intervals at the beginning of the book, and gradually, by way of meticulous insistence and the fundamental lack of other perspectives, that ethos becomes increasingly self-propelled, jettisoning “This is true because I say so, having seen it with my own eyes” in favor more simply of “This is true because I say so.”

  To what purpose does the text employ this legitimacy? It pursues no analysis, presenting only a sudden outburst against those who condescendingly “feel for the people” and who fail to realize that their false charity is degrading to its recipients. Hitler shares this same perspective with Marx, but in Hitler’s case, judging by the sudden intensification of mood and the closeness of association of subject matter to writer, signaled by the use of the first-person pronoun, it would seem to have its source in his own experience, entangling moreover with more general misogyny. His conclusion, that genuine social activity consists not in handouts but in the reestablishment of a more just system, was likewise shared by Marx.

  In Jack London’s depiction of London’s East End ghetto, life there is described as raw, brutal, and base, words like barbaric and primitive are employed, and to those who live such a life, at the very bottom of the world, in the most wretched need, men abandoned to drink, for instance, who batter their wives and neglect their children, or women who lose their babies to disease and sickness and who themselves cough and hack and shiver from cold and hunger, no crack of space exists between themselves and their misery to allow them a more generous perspective on their fellow human beings or to insist on maintaining some kind of human-centered mind-set, as Jack London is able to do as he wanders about and observes them as if they were a part of some abominable freak show. Humanity requires at least some minimum of material comforts. As Mackie Messer says in Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” – first food, then morals. The same is true of human worth. For this is what happens in these vast slums, the value of human life, to those who live there as well as to those outside, diminishes. Thus, Jack London:

  No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole of the “awful East,” with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks. The color of life is gray and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty. Bathtubs are a thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia of the gods. The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic. Strange, vagrant odors come drifting along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like grease than water from heaven. The very cobblestones are scummed with grease.

  Here lives a population as dull and unimaginative as its long gray miles of dingy brick. Religion has virtually passed it by, and a gross and stupid materialism reigns, fatal alike to the things of the spirit and the finer instincts of life.

  It used to be the proud boast that every Englishman’s home was his castle. But today it is an anachronism. The Ghetto folk have no homes. They do not know the significance and the sacredness of home life. Even the municipal dwellings, where live the better-class workers, are overcrowded barracks. They have no home life. The very language proves it. The father returning from work asks his child in the street where her mother is; and back the answer comes, “In the buildings.”

  A new race has sprung up, a street people. They pass their lives at work and in the streets. They have dens and lairs into which to crawl for sleeping purposes, and that is all. One cannot travesty the word by calling such dens and lairs “homes.” The traditional silent and reserved Englishman has passed away. The sidewalk folk are noisy, voluble, high-strung, excitable – when they are yet young. As they grow older they become steeped and stupefied in beer. When they have nothing else to do, they ruminate as a cow ruminates. They are to be met with everywhere, standing on curbs and corners, and staring into vacancy. Watch one of them. He will stand there, motionless, for hours, and when you go away you will leave him still staring into vacancy. It is most absorbing. He has no money for beer, and his lair is only for sleeping purposes, so what else remains for him to do? He has already solved the mysteries of girl’s love, and wife’s love, and child’s love, and found them delusions and shams, vain and fleeting as dewdrops, quick-vanishing before the ferocious facts of life.

  Marx quotes from a report on living standards drawn up in 1863 by one Dr. Simon:

  It must be remembered that privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that as a rule great poorness of diet will only come when other privations have preceded it. Long before insufficiency of diet is a matter of hygienic concern, long before the physiologist would think of counting the grains of nitrogen and carbon which intervene between life and starvation, the household will have been utterly destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel will have been even scantier than food – against inclemencies of weather there will have been no adequate protection – dwelling space will have been stinted to the degree in which overcrowding produces or increases disease; of household utensils and furniture there will have been scarcely any – even cleanliness will have been found costly or difficult, and if the
re still be self-respectful endeavors to maintain it, every such endeavor will represent additional pangs of hunger. The home, too, will be where shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where commonly there is least fruit of sanitary supervision, least drainage, least scavenging, least suppression of public nuisances, least or worst water supply, and, if in town, least light and air. Such are the sanitary dangers to which poverty is almost certainly exposed, when it is poverty enough to imply scantiness of food. And while the sum of them is of terrible magnitude against life, the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very serious moment … These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness. In all cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed, as regards the indoor operatives, the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food is for the most part excessively prolonged. Yet evidently it is only in a qualified sense that the work can be deemed self-supporting … And on a very large scale the nominal self-support can be only a circuit, longer or shorter, to pauperism.

  The intimate connection between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, reveals itself only when the economic laws are known. It is otherwise with the “housing of the poor.” Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the centralization of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding heaping together of the laborers, within a given space; that therefore the swifter the capitalistic accumulation, the more miserable are the dwellings of the working-people. “Improvements” of towns, accompanying the increase of wealth, by the demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces for banks, warehouses, etc., the widening of streets for business traffic, for the carriages of luxury, and for the introduction of tramways, etc., drive away the poor into even worse and more crowded hiding places. On the other hand, every one knows that the dearness of dwellings is in inverse ratio to their excellence, and that the mines of misery are exploited by house speculators with more profit or less cost than ever were the mines of Potosí. The antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation, and therefore of the capitalistic relations of property generally, is here so evident, that even the official English reports on this subject teem with heterodox onslaughts on “property and its rights.” With the development of industry, with the accumulation of capital, with the growth and “improvement” of towns, the evil makes such progress that the mere fear of contagious diseases which do not spare even “respectability,” brought into existence from 1847 to 1864 no less than 10 Acts of Parliament on sanitation, and that the frightened bourgeois in some towns, as Liverpool, Glasgow, etc., took strenuous measures through their municipalities. Nevertheless Dr. Simon, in his report of 1865, says: