A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (83 page)

Conclusion

Illusion of the epoch

The 20th century began with a great fanfare about the inevitability of progress, exemplified in Bernstein’s predictions of growing democratisation, growing equality and growing all-round prosperity. The theme dominated again in the mid-1950s and early 1960s in the writings of politicians like Anthony Crosland, political theorists like Daniel Bell and economists like Paul Samuelson. It re-emerged again in 1990, when Francis Fukuyama proclaimed ‘the end of history’, and persisted into the late 1990s, with Anthony Giddens’s insistence that the categories of left and right belonged to the past. If everything was not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, a few little changes and it would be.

Yet the reality of life for vast sections of humanity was at various points in the century as horrific as any known in history. The forward march of progress gave rise to the bloodletting of the First World War; the mass impoverishment of the early 1930s; the spread of Nazism and fascism over most of Europe; the Stalinist
gulag
; the Japanese onslaught on Shanghai and Nanking; the devastation of much of Europe between 1940s and 1945; the Bengal famine; the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the 30 year war against Vietnam and the nine year war against Algeria; the million dead in one Gulf War and the 200,000 dead in another; tens of thousands killed by death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala and Argentina; and hundreds of thousands dead in the bloody civil wars of Croatia, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. Industrial progress all too often translated itself into the mechanisation of war—or most horrifically, with the Holocaust, into the mechanisation of mass murder. Nor was the picture any more hopeful at the end of the century than halfway through. Whole countries outside Western Europe and North America which had hoped at various points in the century to ‘catch up’ with the living standards of the ‘First World’ saw the dream fade away—Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Russia. The whole continent of Africa found itself once again being written out of history as income per head fell steadily over a 30 year period. Civil war continued to devastate Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Congo-Zaire. To the word ‘genocide’, born of the Nazism that arose in the 1930s, was added the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’, coined in the civil wars of the 1990s.

Even in the advanced industrial countries the promises of endless wealth, endless leisure and the withering away of class division that were so fashionable in the 1890s, and again in the 1950s, proved to be a chimera. Measured economic output continued to rise in most years for most economies, but at only about half the rate during the long boom of the 1950s and early 1960s. And the rises did not translate into improvements in most people’s quality of life.

In the US there was a more or less continual fall in real hourly wages through the last quarter of the century. In Europe the statistics continued to show rising real wages, but there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the increases were eaten up by rising indirect costs associated with the changing pattern of work (longer journeys from home to work, rising transport costs, increased reliance on fast food and frozen food, increased childcare costs), with one ‘index of sustainable welfare’ suggesting that it rose more or less continually from 1950 until the mid-1970s and then started to decline thereafter.
¹
There has certainly been no qualitative improvement in people’s lives, as was experienced in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the same time, there has been increased pressure on those with jobs to work longer and harder. The average American worked 164 hours longer in 1996 than they did in 1976—the equivalent of one full month a year longer,
²
with survey after survey reporting people feeling under increasing stress at work. Recurrent recessions and repeated ‘downsizing’ of workforces, even during periods of ‘recovery’, created levels of insecurity among people about their futures not known since the 1930s. Mainstream political parties that had said insecurity was a thing of the past in the 1970s insisted in the 1990s that there was nothing they could do about it because it was part of the ‘new global economy’ (an unacknowledged revamping of the old left wing phrase ‘international capitalism’).

There was another side to the growing poverty of wide parts of the Third and former Communist worlds and the growing insecurity in the West. It was the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the ruling classes. By the late 1990s some 348 billionaires enjoyed a total wealth equal to the income of half of humanity. In 1999 the United Nations Human Development Report could tell that the world’s richest 200 people had doubled their wealth in four years.
³
At the end of the 1960s, the gap between the richest and poorest fifths of the world’s population stood at 30 to one, in 1990 at 60 to one, and in 1998 at 74 to one. Most of the very rich were concentrated in advanced counties. In 1980 the top managers of the 300 biggest US corporations had incomes 29 times larger than the average manufacturing worker—by 1990 their incomes were 93 times greater. But the same phenomenon was visible elsewhere in the world, where even in the poorest countries a thin ruling stratum expected to live the lifestyles of the world’s very rich, and to keep multi-million dollar deposits in Western banks as an insurance against social unrest at home. Everywhere their reaction to social crisis was to accumulate wealth in order to insulate themselves against its effects, not worrying overmuch if, in the process, the basis fabric of society was undermined. The contracting out of state tax raising to wealthy individuals (tax farming) had been a recurrent feature accompanying the crises of pre-capitalist class societies, a feature which only served to intensify the long term trend to crisis. The contracting out of state services became a growing feature of capitalist class society in the last decade of the 20th century, with equally inevitable long term effects.

Along with the reborn insecurity and the recurrent slumps, another spirit emerged from the nether world where it had been apparently banished after the Second World War—various forms of fascism and Nazism. It became quite normal, even during periods of ‘economic recovery’, for far right figures like Le Pen in France and Haider in Austria to get 15 percent of the vote—and quite realistic for them to hope to do much better with the onset of the next great recession. It became equally normal for mainstream conservative political parties to trade in the language of racism and ethnic division in order to pick up votes, and for social democratic parties to concede to that language in a desperate attempt to hold their own electorally.

Socialism, barbarism and the 21st century

Rosa Luxemburg, writing in the midst of world war in 1915, recalled a phrase from Engels: ‘Capitalist society is faced with a choice, either an advance to socialism or a reversion to barbarism.’ ‘We have read and repeated these phrases repeatedly,’ she notes:

In this passage she was challenging in the most forceful way the illusion of inevitable progress under capitalism. She was making the same point made by Marx and Engels in
The Communist Manifesto
when they pointed out that the historical alternative to the transformation of society by a newly emerged class was the ‘common destruction of the contending classes’. This, as we have seen, happened not only with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, but also with the first ‘Dark Ages’, the early Bronze Age civilisations of Eurasia, the collapse of the Teotihuacan and Mayan civilisations of Meso-America, and the crisis of Abbasid Mesopotamia in the 11th century. It came close to happening in second millennium BC Egypt, in 12th century AD China and in 14th century AD Europe. Rosa Luxemburg saw the world war as threatening a re-enactment of such disasters: ‘In this war, imperialism has been victorious. Its brutal sword of murder has dashed the scales, with overbearing brutality, down into the abyss of shame and misery’.
⁵

Leon Trotsky made the same point in 1921:

The founding document of Trotsky’s Fourth International, written on the eve of renewed world war, posed the alternative grimly: ‘Without socialist revolution, in the next historical period a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of humanity’.
⁷

Both Luxemburg and Trotsky located, as few other thinkers did, the insane logic of capitalist society in the 20th century—the way in which forces of production had turned into forces of destruction, and human creativity been distorted into inhuman horror. The century was a century of
barbarity
on a scale unknown, in Europe at least, since the 17th or even the 14th century. If the century did not fulfil the worst prophesies of Luxemburg and Trotsky, in terms of a complete collapse of culture and civilisation, there were also repeated lurches towards
barbarism
in the strict sense of the word as used by Engels and Luxemburg, of rulers prepared to pull society down around them rather than concede their power—the behaviour of the White armies during the Russian civil war, the drive to complete the Holocaust by the retreating Nazi forces in the Second World War, and the willingness of both sides in the Cold War to deploy nuclear devices which would have reduced the whole world to a radioactive desert. In the last decade of the century whole areas of Africa, the Caucasus and central Asia seemed caught in the same logic, with armies led by rival warlords massacring each other and ravaging civilian populations as they fought for scraps of wealth amid general economic and social decay. That decade also exposed terrible new threats alongside the old ones of war and economic slump.

The most dramatic is that of ecological catastrophe. Class societies have always shown a tendency to place excessive demands on the environment which sustains their populations. The history of pre-capitalist class societies was a history, beyond a certain point, of famines and demographic collapse produced by the sheer burden of maintaining greedy ruling classes and expensive superstructures. The very economic dynamism that characterises capitalism has vastly increased the speed at which negative ecological consequences make themselves felt. Nineteenth century accounts of what capitalism does to working class communities, from Dickens and Engels onwards, are also accounts of polluted atmosphere, endemic diseases, overcrowding and adulterated food in slum life. But at a time when a maximum of ten million people worldwide were involved in industrial capitalist production, ecological devastation was a localised problem—Manchester’s smoke did not affect most of England, let alone the rest of the world. The spread of capitalism to the whole world in the 20th century, encompassing six billion or more people by the end of the century, transformed ecological devastation into a global problem. The year 1998, one authoritative report tells, was ‘the worst on record and caused more damage then ever before’, forcing 25 million people to flee as refugees, ‘outnumbering those displaced by war for the first time’.
⁸
With one billion people living in unplanned shanty towns, and 40 of the world’s 50 fastest growing cities located in earthquake zones, the worst horrors are still to come. But that is not the end of it. The production of ever-escalating amounts of carbon dioxide is causing the ‘greenhouse effect’ to heat up the globe, producing unpredictable weather patterns that are expected to produce freak storms and rising ocean levels that will flood huge coastal areas. The CFCs used in refrigerators are eating up the ozone layer, causing a proliferation of skin cancers. The use of antibiotics in animal feed is undermining the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with human diseases. The unrestricted use of genetically modified crops could create havoc for the whole of the food chain. Such ecological disasters, actual and threatened, are no more natural disasters than were those which destroyed the food supply of Mesopotamia in the 12th century, or which led to mass starvation across Europe in the 14th century. They are a result of the specific way in which human interaction with the environment is occurring on a world scale.

Under capitalism, that interaction is organised through the competition of rival capitals—of small scale firms in the early 19th century, and of giant multinational and state-owned firms at the end of the 20th century. Competition leads to an incessant search for new, more productive and more profitable forms of interaction, without regard to their other consequences. States sometimes try to regulate the whole process. But they are themselves drawn into it by their desire to advance the interests of nationally based firms. Regulation, they all too often say, is impossible because it will undermine the competitiveness of locally-based firms to the advantage of foreign competitors. And even when they do intervene it is after the damage is already done, for there is no way state officials can second guess every industrial innovation and foresee its wider impact.

So dangerous were the consequences by the end of the 20th century that there was a tendency for people to turn their back on all science and all technology. Yet without the technologies of the last century, there would be no way to feed the world’s population, let alone free them from the ravages of hunger and overwork that have been most people’s lot since the rise of class society. There was a parallel tendency for people to adopt one argument of that old reactionary Malthus, and to insist there were simply too many people—or, at least, that there would be by the time the world’s population had doubled in 30 or 40 years. Yet the eightfold growth in humanity’s numbers since Malthus’s time was matched by a more than eightfold increase in its food supply. If people went hungry in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, it was a result not of an absolute shortage of food, but of its distribution along class lines.