Read A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium Online
Authors: Chris Harman
The old forces of religion and superstition tried to resist these advances in knowledge, but the connection between science and industrial profit-making meant they could only engage in a rearguard action. The Anglican bishop of Oxford could denounce Darwin’s disciple Huxley, just as the papacy had once denounced Galileo. But the clergy had lost their ability to control people’s minds. It was as if the Enlightenment had finally emerged victorious in its battle with the forces of unreason.
The new belief in the unimpeded advance of progress came to be called ‘positivism’ (the name given to these ideas by the French thinker Comte) or ‘scientism’. It provided the rationale for Émile Zola’s novels, trying to depict human behaviour as the blind interplay of material conditions and hereditary passion, and for Theodore Dreiser’s attempt in his novels about big business to show capitalist behaviour as a version of ‘the survival of the fittest’. It underlay the optimism in the early science fiction of H G Wells, with his image of triumphant humanity landing on the moon, or of plays by George Bernard Shaw like
Man and Superman
and
Major Barbara.
It was present in the attempts by Sigmund Freud to explain irrational feelings and behaviour in terms of forces within the human mind—the ego, the superego and the id—interacting much like the parts of Kelvin’s universe.
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It was the backdrop to the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and the guiding principle behind those, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their Fabian Society in Britain, who believed society could be changed for the better through piecemeal reform implemented by benevolent civil servants.
Even reactionary forces which had previously depended on religious obscurantism claimed to follow a scientific approach. Darwin’s scientific insights into nature were twisted into the theories of ‘social Darwinism’, which claimed that classes, nations or races which ruled over others did so because their ‘innate superiority’ had won out in the battle for survival. Old prejudices about ‘better blood’ or ‘superior breeding’ were translated into a modern, apparently scientific, terminology. In the same way, the old argument of St Augustine (and Luther and Calvin) about the necessity for a strong state power to stop the evil which flowed from ‘the curse of Adam’—‘original sin’—was now rephrased in terms of the necessity of controlling people’s ‘animal instincts’. Whereas the church had demanded the right to police people’s behaviour, proponents of ‘eugenics’ now demanded that the state used supposedly scientific measurements of ‘innate’ intelligence and ‘criminality’ to restrict some people’s ability to breed. This was combined with forbodings about the fate of the ‘race’, as the poor tended to have larger families than the rich—a concern which could be shared by middle class reformers like the young John Maynard Keynes as much as by upper class reactionaries.
Yet, by and large, ‘scientism’ and ‘positivism’ were associated with the belief that the future could only be better than the present, that modernity itself meant human improvement. By 1914, faith in the future was well on its way to replacing faith in God—although there were still many upholders of respectable opinion who tried to combine the two.
The rise of capitalist democracy
The word democracy was anathema to the ruling classes of the mid-19th century. They still denounced it as the ‘mob rule’ of Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’. Macaulay, the English Whig historian, could be as adamant as any Tory. ‘Universal suffrage’, he said, ‘would be fatal for all purposes for which government exists’, and ‘utterly incompatible with the existence of civilisation’.
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Even when the ruling classes were forced by pressure from below to concede the right to vote, they sought to impose property qualifications which excluded the lower classes. Britain’s Reform Bill of 1832 extended the suffrage from 200,000 to a million men—that is, to not more than one fifth of adult males. An act of 1867, carried through in the midst of great popular agitation,
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increased the numbers voting but still left half the male population without the vote, and ‘neither the Liberal nor the Conservative leaders expected the act to establish a democratic constitution’.
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In Prussia and a number of other German states a three class voting system gave the majority of parliamentary seats to the minority with the greatest wealth. On top of this, almost all ruling classes insisted on an unelected second chamber—a House of Lords or a senate of notables—with a veto over decision-making, and a monarch with the power to appoint the leader of the government. No wonder Marx expressed the view at the time of the Paris Commune that the dictatorship of Louis Bonaparte was more in tune with the desires of capitalist ruling classes than a democratic republic: ‘It is the state form of modern class rule, at least on the European continent’.
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Yet as the century progressed certain ruling class figures saw that democracy did not have to be a menace to them, providing they were able to set down the rules within which it operated. Louis Bonaparte himself had discovered how to manipulate a vote based on universal (male) suffrage when it came to confirming his own seizure of power in 1851. The majority of the French electorate were peasants, dependent on village priests and schoolmasters for their knowledge of political events. If Bonaparte controlled the flow of information sufficiently to scare them with stories about what was happening in the cities, he could win their votes and prove he was ‘more democratic’ than the republicans. It was an example Bismarck was happy to follow when he made the king of Prussia into emperor of Germany—universal male suffrage elected to an imperial parliament with very limited powers, while a property-based system still operated in state elections.
Britain’s ruling class discovered that piecemeal extensions of the franchise did not undermine their power to determine the policies of the state, since most state power lay outside immediate parliamentary control. It resided in the unelected hierarchies of the military, the police, the judiciary and the civil service. These laid down the parameters within which parliament normally operated and could reject any measure they particularly disliked as ‘unconstitutional’ (as they did when the House of Commons voted for ‘Home Rule’ in Ireland in 1912). Under such conditions, rather than acting as a mechanism by which mass pressure was applied against the ruling class, parliament turned into a mechanism for taming the representatives of mass feeling—forcing them to curtail their demands to fit within the narrow space allowed by the ruling class. Gladstone, the leader of Britain’s main capitalist party—the Liberals—already sensed in 1867 ‘the desirability of encouraging a larger share of the population to feel the centre of its political attention should be parliament’.
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As Ralph Miliband has written:
The politicians’ appropriation of ‘democracy’ did not signify their conversion to it: it was rather an attempt to exorcise its effects…A carefully limited and suitably controlled measure of democracy was acceptable, and even from some aspect desirable. But anything that went beyond that was not. The whole political system was geared to such sentiments.
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Everywhere extensions of the franchise were accompanied by a conscious effort by ruling class politicians to influence the hearts and minds of the lower classes. In Britain the first attempt of the Conservative Party to create a ‘National Union’ with a membership outside parliament came in the year of the 1867 Reform Act. Its aim was ‘primarily to bring together Conservative working men’,
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through a network of local associations and drinking clubs: ‘The directness and urgency of the Conservative appeal to the working classes is the most striking feature of the early work of the National Union’.
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It was an appeal based on the deference of sections of workers to their supposed betters, on the religious or ethnic antagonisms of some workers towards others (so in certain towns in northern England and Scotland to be a Conservative was to be an Orange Protestant opponent of Irish immigrants), on a glorification of Britain’s imperialist expansion, and on charitable handouts to the poor at election time.
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The Conservatives’ efforts to appeal to the lower middle and working classes were matched by the Liberals, who set up their own national network of local associations. Only after 1905 did a few ‘independent’ Labour candidates enjoy success against the two capitalist parties which had hegemonised politics among the working class for 40 years—and they were as committed to the existing set-up as their established rivals.
The pattern elsewhere was essentially the same. In the US the working class was divided between Republicans and Democrats, essentially along the lines of native-born Americans versus immigrants (with the added complication of the Democrats’ pro-South sympathies). In France conservative Catholics encouraged anti-Semitic sentiment as they battled for influence with middle class anti-clerical republicans. In Germany the
Junker
landowners of the east found it relatively easy to ensure rural workers voted as they wanted; the ‘National Liberal’ pro-Bismarck industrialists ran a party of their own; and in the south the Catholic church was able to dominate people’s political thinking even in many mining areas.
The efforts of the upper class parties were aided by the growth of the mass press. In the 1820s and 1830s the British ruling class had attempted to prevent the spread of seditious ideas among the new working class by taxes designed to price newspapers beyond their pockets. From the 1850s onwards a new breed of capitalist entrepreneur saw the possibility of making money out of popular papers. By the beginning of the 20th century people like Alfred Harmsworth (soon to be Lord Northcliffe) and Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook) saw newspapers as political weapons. Such men were able to turn a minor episode in the Boer War, the Siege of Mafeking, into a focus of attention for people of all classes. In a similar way, the French press was able to whip up anti-Semitic hysteria in the case of Captain Dreyfus, wrongly imprisoned as a German spy, and the German press used a war scare to beat back the socialists in the 1907 election.
The cultivation of a new sort of nationalism was part of the process of controlling capitalist democracy. The nationalism of the mid-19th century had been found mainly among those peoples divided or oppressed by the state system imposed on Europe with the restoration of the old order in 1814-15. It was a rallying cry for those fighting for liberation, and it was associated with the demands for democracy and republicanism. Such nationalism from below was still widespread at the end of the century among groups oppressed by the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The spread of the market encouraged it. Middle classes, speaking local languages, emerged from the peasantry, and they began to struggle to create national states, or at least autonomous national structures within existing states, in order to further their interests.
A different sort of nationalism arose alongside and in opposition to this old variant, propagated from above both by old monarchies and by newer capitalist rulers. So Bismarck embraced a form of German nationalism; the Russian tsars tried to ‘Russify’ their Finnish, Ukrainian, Polish, and Turkic speaking subjects; the French upper classes attempted to direct people’s energies towards ‘revenge’ against Germany and enthusiasm for the conquest of North Africa and Indochina; and Britain’s rulers proclaimed their mission to ‘rule the waves’ and ‘civilise the natives’.
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Governments, newspapers, industrialists and financiers threw their weight behind the propagation of such nationalism, proclaiming the common identity of the ruling and exploited classes of each country—insisting they were ‘kith and kin’ even while one lived in luxury and the other sweated or even starved. The career opportunities for sections of the middle class in administering empires cemented them materially to the new nationalism, encouraging them to help spread its influence among layers of workers—for instance, by running new mass semi-militaristic organisations such as the Scouts for the youth of both the middle and working classes. These organisations were allegedly ‘non-political’, but their commitment to the ruling class ideology of monarch, ‘country’ and ‘empire’ was never in doubt.
The overall effect of such measures was to turn suffrage, which ruling classes in the 1840s had seen as a deadly threat, into a means of domesticating a layer of workers’ representatives by the 1900s. The change did not occur overnight, or without friction. There was often upper class resistance. In Britain it took 95 years for the ruling class to move from accepting in 1832 that the middle classes should have the vote, to conceding universal adult suffrage. In Belgium it required two general strikes to force an extension of the franchise. In Germany there were bitter clashes in the streets over the issue in the 1900s, and it was only in 1918 that revolutionary upheaval caused the ruling class to concede the vote to everyone.
Resistance to granting workers the vote was matched by resistance to granting it to women. The spread of market relations meant that more middle class as well as working class women entered the paid labour force. But the moralists’ model family, with its concern for the ‘proper’ upbringing of the next generation, saw a woman’s role as confined to the home, and justified this with corresponding notions of female competence and female ‘values’. Such notions would have made no sense to the medieval peasant woman engaged in heavy labour, and they hardly fitted the Lancashire mill worker. But to the middle class men of the first decade of the 20th century—and the working class men influenced by the newspapers—they made the demand for votes for women an absurdity.
Paradoxically, even the denial of the vote had the effect of binding people to the system of capitalist democracy. Most of the agitation was fighting to be part of the system, not to go beyond it. Before 1914 the campaign for the vote led upper and middle class women to take direct action against property and the state. But when the war came, the best-known leaders of the women’s suffrage movement in Britain—Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst—threw themselves into the campaign to recruit men for the slaughter on the Western Front. Sylvia Pankhurst, who opposed the carnage, came to see parliament itself as a barrier to progress.