People :
Author : Murray Bookchin
Text :
From the sixteenth century onward, Europe was the stage for a drama unique in history: the development of nation-states and national cultures in which populations tended to identify with what we, today, accept as a commonplace—a sense of personal nationality. Even the notion of citizenship, long-rooted in loyalty to a city and the public body that occupied it, began to shift toward a large territorial entity, the “nation,” and to its “capital” city. Politics, too, began to acquire a new definition. It increasingly denoted the professionalization of power with roots in the state and its institutions.
We would be gravely mistaken to assume that these changes and redefinitions occurred within the span of a few centuries or that they have been completed even in our own time. The development toward nationalism was slow, uneven, and very mixed. Nor is it secure in its major European centers. There is a strong human proclivity, reaching back to the socialization process itself and familial care, that identifies “homeland” with home rather than nationalist abstractions, hence even the most consolidated nation-states are more divided internally than nationalist myths would have us believe. For example, the intense domestic conflicts that beleaguer the United States—notably between ethnic groups, regions, and even localities, not to speak of economic classes and interests—are testimony to the hold of specific cultural and territorial identities among populations, even those that belong to highly nationalistic “superpowers.” These divisions are more strongly evident in modern Russia.
Nationalism exercises its strongest power over the popular imagination in oppositional ways when a nation is in some sense under attack. As an internally cohesive fdrce, it has always been fragile. The success of National Socialism in “unifying” the German people has deeper roots in German history than in a sense of national allegiance, a history that is notable for the tragic decline of German social life after the Reformation and the need for compensatory mechanisms to counteract the slump that marked that bloody and ennervating period.
But how did these nation-states come into existence? What role did European cities play in forming them? And what began to happen to cities—and with them, politics and citizenship—when the nation-state asserted its sovereignty over public fife?
We have seen that nationalism existed only in an incipient form in the ancient world where, with few exceptions, people psychologically and culturally identified themselves with their villages, towns, cities, and immediate territorial area. Classical antiquity was mainly an era of empire building, not of nation building, and ancient imperialism took a very special form. It was patrimonial, not strictly political; its center was the royal household, not a capital in any nationalist sense. If “all roads lead to Rome,” it is not because Rome; was, a city that commanded a high degree of national loyalty but’rather because it was the hub of ancient power and order. Its centrality was derived from its administrative significance, not, as is the case with Jerusalem, its symbolic significance. Indeed, insofar as Rome was symbolic of anything, it was seen as a symbol of oppression. Crucifixion, a mode of punishment normally reserved for rebels and intransigent slaves, imparted to the cross a symbolic meaning not unlike that which was attached to the Nazi swastika during the World War II. The adoption of this symbol by the Church instead of the fish, which early Christians used as an expression of plentitude and conversion, reflected the accommodation of the heavenly city to the worldly city—Rome—and of a rebellious creed to the institutions it originally opposed. Rome, once the whore of the world; to the early Christians became the holy city of the papacy and acquired a spiritual status in the very act of seducing its most intransigent rebels, a lesson in statecraft that far too many rebels have failed to learn.
Medieval Europe did, not have nations at all. Loyalties were mainly localist in character, notably to one’s, village, parish, town, city, barons, and rather tenuously to one’s monarch. Strong kings such as Henry II of England and Philip Augustus of France had an unusual amount of power for their times and, by their innovations as well as their actions, exercised a great deal of authority over their barons and clerics. More often than not, however, tlieir heirs were weaklings and royal authority was easily subverted by feudal lords until another strong monarch surfaced and managed to centralize power for a brief period of time. Personal authority and the forcefulness of a monarch’s character created the illusion of a nation-state, but it was still along patrimonial lines. The association of the monarch with the “nation,” such as it was, was so close that “nationalism” in the Middle Ages rarely survived the person of the king. The wide swings in royal authority that we encounter in European feudalism stem from the tenuous basis of centralized authority as such in the ancient arid medieval worlds. Centralized power was limited by the hard facts of a primitive communications system and a largely Neolithic technology. Armies and officials could move no faster than horses; roads were very poor, often almost trackless; and weaponry had barely emerged from the Bronze Age. The simple fact that obedience depended heavily upon personal ties and a reasonable modicum of fear of a resolute king resulted in a loosely hanging political system based on individual’ commitments and the use of brutal punitive measures. The times were cruel rather than barbarous because of the nature of statecraft in a world where authority was extremely fragile and punishment took a very harsh form in order to sustain monarchical and baronial power.
The one institution that commanded widespread allegiance beyond that which any monarch could hope to achieve was the Roman Church and the papacy. Shaped over centuries into a vast hierarchical bureaucracy, the Catholic Church eventually became the most unifying and certainly the most centralized apparatus in western Europe. It could reach into villages with an effectiveness that was the envy of any royal authority, and its command of resources had no precedent on the continent. I refer not only to its enormous wealth and landholdings but also to its spiritual power—ultimately the power of excommunication and interdiction that brought even emperors such as Frederick Barbarossa to their knees.
Yet here one encounters a paradox to which J. R. Strayer gives deserved emphasis.{63} The papacy as early as the eleventh century, during the time of Gregory VII, was an empire unto itself. More important than its centralized institutional structure is the compelling fact that it was an elaborate state: a vast apparatus not only with its black-robed bureaucracy but a system of law and a juridical machinery adequate enough to make its legal sovereignty effective. The emergence of ecclesiastical law served to open a crucial area for the development of secular law. In the great division of power that Gregory VII created between church and state, the latter essentially disentangled itself from the former. Secular law, rarely free in the past of ecclesiastical influence and priestly functionaries, could now come completely into its own. In the very act of charting and firming up its own authority, the Church created an ever-growing space for the expansion of the state and for a largely nonreligious form of statecraft that no longer required supernatural sanction and legitimation. However much monarchs were to claim divine right to support their authority, their rights were divine, not their origins—origins that even the Roman Caesars claimed. Hence, like all rights, they could be challenged even on religious grounds by the church, the barons, and later by the people. Rights are always subject to rational evaluation and legitimate defiance, a problem that monarchs such as Charles I of England and Louis XVI of France were to face before accusing regicides. That the Church, too, by claiming a legal domain of its own, was to pay a heavy penalty by being removed later on from every sphere other than its spiritual authority is a part of history that adds a dimension of irony and paradox to all assertions of power—the paradoxical reality of history’s own dialectical process.
The great division between state and church, monarch and pope, secular and divine can be taken as a symbolic expression for the many divisions that riddled medieval society and made the nation-state possible. Had medieval society been entirely unitary, it might very well have been blanketed by large, suffocating, patrimonial empires that would have drained its resources and diverted it into a relatively stagnant dead end. Ironically, it was the fragmentation of the European world that made its unification into several nation-states possible. In contrast to empires, nations are relatively self-contained; their existence, at least between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, was possible only because empire building by one state was blocked by the power of another. Nation building, in effect, occurred not only because monarchs accumulated sufficient power to establish a central authority in parts of western Europe but also because their ability to extend that power beyond a region was arrested by countervailing powers external to them. Charles V’s efforts to create an empire in the sixteenth century failed because other states acquired enough power to successfully resist him and his son, Philip II. The successful revolt of the Netherlands and the defeat of the Spanish Armada by England ended any serious attempt to create an empire within Europe up to our own time, despite the Napoleonic wars and Germany’s expansion from 1940 to 1945. Nation-states and nationalism have vitiated all efforts to create empires on the continent, at least by direct means. Russian expansion toward the west, seemingly vigorous after 1945, has visibly begun to ebb. American power in Europe, although rarely exercised in a direct manner, stands at odds with its strongly republican institutions.
This external system of “checks and balances” that medieval Europe produced on a continental level has its parallel in an internal system of “checks and balances” that existed on a domestic level. The intercity trade that provided economic underpinnings to the formation of nation-states repeatedly came up against strong localist barriers—artisan gilds, relatively self-sufficient village economies, popular hostility to trade that formed the legacy of medieval Christianity, and a very strong individual desire, particularly among craftsmen and free peasants, to live directly by their own skills and on their own property with minimal commercial intercourse—a state of mind we would call “self-sufficiency,” today, which has its roots in the Greek concept of autarkeia. Nor can we ignore the immense hold of the Gemeinde, the local community, on. the minds of people during that period, a sense of communal loyalty that was reinforced not only by cultural bonds but by a tradition of communal land ownership and mutual aid.
The considerable attention that recent economic historians have given to the role of foreign trade in producing a capitalistic society and the nation-state is somewhat ingenuous. That the earliest forms of capitalism in the ancient as well as medieval worlds were commercial and that port and riverine cities often enriched themselves enormously, promoting a domestic market for goods acquired abroad, does not remove the need for a balanced perspective toward the reach this economy had into the depths of emerging European, nations. Owing to the poor condition of the roads that existed in Europe, the cost of commodities brought from abroad rose enormously as they moved inland. A cartload of hay priced at 600 denari during Diocletian’s time increased by 20 denari every mile so that the cost of transporting it as little as 30 miles rendered its sale in a nearby market prohibitive. Unless a good network of waterways existed, foreign trade had a limited economic impact on the interior of a region. Generally, the commodities that passed from port and riverine cities to inland towns were luxury items or direly needed goods in limited supply. Spices, expensive cloths, skillfully crafted artifacts and weapons, and exotic foods from abroad were the usual fare that were carried from port cities into the interior of Europe. Within the heartland of the newly emerging nations, trade was often local rather than national. Intercity trade brought towns and villages together but in regional networks and local, markets, not in national ones.
This “parochialism,” to use a term that is distinctly pejorative today, gave inland towns a certain degree of economic strength: their relative self-sufficiency and ingrown cultures provided them with the material and spiritual fortitude to resist the overbearing effects of the nation-state, particularly during the “Age of Absolutism,” when strong monarchs came to the foreground of European political life. Decentralism remained a major obstacle—and, for generations, an abiding civic impulse—in counteracting the extension of royal power. Hence, emerging European nation-states were often checked internally as well as externally from successfully engaging in empire building. European empire building found an outlet not in the “old” continent but abroad, in so-called “new” continents such as the Americas, where indigenous peoples, living in tribal communities were easily quelled by recently discovered firearms, and, in no small part, by dazzling European trinkets. Needless to emphasize, European epidemics, too, played a major role in depleting aboriginal populations and demoralizing them..
The rise of European nation-states, so unique when compared with the imperial systems of antiquity and the fragmented social structures of feudalism, can thus be explained by a special conjunction of forces. A few are simply negative: the internal resistance within emerging nations to centralism that made a highly organized patrimonial state difficult to achieve and the balance between new states that confined them to a “national” scale. Other, factors, more positive in nature, consist of the fairly organic links established between municipalities primarily by local and regional trade and secondarily by the exceptionally rich rewards that port cities acquired from foreign commerce. The royal power that built the nation-state, virtually brick by brick as it were, used the internal intercity networks as political routes for extending its bureaucracies into the depths of the country just as the Church, centuries earlier, sent its missionaries and holy orders into the forests and farmlands of barbarian Europe along trails and footpaths.
Despite the enormous wealth monarchs gained from the taxes these commercial networks provided, nation building was still primarily a political phenomenon. Economic explanations to the contrary notwithstanding, the absolute monarchs of the sixteenth century who dominated the emerging era of European nationalism drained the economy as much as they fostered its development; The removal of feudal tolls on roads and riverways, the domestic tranquility provided by the “King’s peace,” the creation of a national currency and presumably a reliable monetary system were vitiated by the enormity of royal taxes, the ongoing wars between nation-states that placed Europe in a chronic state of siege, and the monetary instability produced by royal loans and defaults.
The role cities played in this development was very mixed; indeed, to understand it, we must know what kind of city we are talking about and what phase of nation building we are examining. Generally, the smaller, artisan-oriented towns tended to oppose the nation-state and often gained support for their opposition from the relatively free peasantry in their environs. Indeed, it could be said in a very broad way that where artisans were the majority of a free town, they elected for municipal freedom and were more predisposed to forming town confederations than larger, commercially oriented cities. Their high sense of independence and their striking defiance of authority was not to end with their opposition to royal rule; whether as master craftsmen or as skilled workers, they shared an intuitive inclination toward a vague kind of republicanism, often even democracy, that clashed with the politically more conservative merchant, banking, and professional strata in their own communities and in strongly commercial cities.
The radical role played by skilled artisans in precapitalist society and in periods of transition to the nation-state and capitalism is only recently gaining the attention it deserves. This is not to say that this on-going stratum that was not to disappear as a major social force even after the Industrial Revolution, which virtually destroyed it, shared a completely unified outlook. Between a master craftsman who enjoyed the privileges conferred by gild membership and a skilled worker who was barred from the status of a master by increasing gild exclusivity, a serious gap developed that could rend communities in violent struggles. We have seen evidence of such struggles in Flanders and Italy, where skilled as well as unskilled workers were proletarianized and reduced to exploited wage earners. But elsewhere in Europe, the traditional bridges between master craftsmen and skilled workers served effectively to close the gap that had been created by status differences; indeed, in many places gild doors remained fairly open well into the Middle Ages.
What is so noticeable about this town stratum, taken as a whole, is the fairly high educational level it attained. Artisans were often well-read, surprisingly well-informed, and intellectually innovative. Craftsmanship sharpened not only one’s dexterity and esthetic sense; it sharpened one’s mind as well. The radical heretical movements within medieval Christianity consisted of large numbers of well-read artisans, not simply “millenarian” peasants, as Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawn would have us believe.{64} The Brethren of the Free Spirit and many revolutionary gnostic sects that challenged the church’s hierarchical system were filled with artisans. Town revolts against ruling bishops, barons, and commercially minded patricians were initiated by well-informed, even well-read, artisans who could argue holy writ with disquieting acuteness. They often provided the ideological coherence for these uprisings that historians often impute to professional strata, not only mass support. This tradition did not die out with the Middle Ages. It continued for centuries, through the Reformation, which was by no means only a peasant war, through the era of the democratic revolutions, and into the Industrial Revolution, indeed for several generations afterwards.
Skilled workers, particularly craftsmen, are remarkably self-contained individuals—the urban counterpart of the yeoman farmer who formed the basis for the democratic revolutionary era. Skill and a minimal competence, whether in the form of a personally owned shop or land holding, confers a sense of independence and self-esteem upon a person. It is out of these traits that the classical—and, to some extent, the modern—ideal of citizenship was fashioned. The lack of a respected skill and the absence of material independence makes for mobility in the pejorative sense of the term, notably, a wayward, fickle, and free-floating mob that is easily manipulated, no less by patrician demagogues than by dispossessed ones. Rebellion that lacks men and women with the moral substance produced by a sense of material independence and self-esteem—or, at least, a sense of hope that these attributes can be acquired by concerted action—tends to degenerate as easily into nihilistic counterrevolution as it does into constructive revolutionary behavior. The gap that emerged between the skilled popolo of Italian cities during the High Middle Ages and the more or less lumpenized proletariat was to last for centuries and disappear only when craftsmanship was dissolved by the factory system.
European absolutism repeatedly came up against this human element in its endeavor to place its territorial realm under royal authority. That many artisans were in the service of the royal court as producers of luxury items does not tarnish the character of those who lived outside the orbit of absolutism and opposed it. These outsiders, in fact, were the great majority in Europe and generally serviced local and regional markets. By contrast, the bankers, professionals, and merchants whose incomes were derived from loans to the upper classes, bureaucratic positions, and international trade—thej “big bourgeoisie,” as it were—were generally royalist and more irresolute than the artisans in their localist loyalties. Absolutism provided them not only with domestic security and a huge source of revenues; banker and merchant followed in the wake of royal armies, garnering the spoils acquired by conquest, the need for arms, and the opening of new markets. Where these strata were deeply entrenched in a municipal establishment, they tended to resist but rarely rebel against royal authority. Here they might act as an inertial force against nation building but seldom as a major obstacle. Hence they formed opportunistic alliances with rebellious artisans that, they readily betrayed when things threatened to get out of hand and demands for civic autonomy threw municipalities into violent and serious opposition with the centralized state.
The “bourgeoisie” that is said to have given support to absolutism against the feudal lords consisted mainly of bankers and merchants and later, to some extent, of the new industrial bourgeoisie, Indeed, this “bourgeoisie” was strikingly conservative; it consistently supported some kind of royal power, whether absolutist in the sixteenth century or constitutional in the eighteenth. Republicanism and democratism (a very revolutionary concept until well into the nineteenth century) found its most steadfast recruits in artisans and, less reliably, the “mobility” people or rootless, statusless, and homeless “mob,” whom even the English Levelers viewed warily because of their dependence on the largesse of the possessing classes.
Our picture is further complicated by the aspirations of the territorial lords, who openly rose in rebellion time and again against the monarchy—and, of course, by the peasantry that never lived on comfortable terms with the royal power, the manorial estates, or the towns. The story of the conflict between the monarchy and nobility, a struggle that reached its violent zenith in the Fronde, which literally chased the young Louis XIV out of Paris, is the stuff out of which the conventional history of European absolutism is written. It does not require emphasis here. The peasant wars in England in the late fourteenth century and in Germany in the early sixteenth were really climactic events in a chronic conflict that went bn for centuries from the High Middle Ages to our own time. John Ball and Thomas Miinzer were the ancestors of a host of later agrarian leaders such as Emilian Pugachev in Russia and Emiliano Zapata in Mexico. All of them shared the central goal of preserving the village community, its insular lifeways, its networks of mutual aid, its common lands and communitarian economy.
Nation building during the era of absolutism was unique precisely because it occurred within—and by the tensions it produced and fostered—a highly diversified and creative social arena for political development. The ancient world had been dominated by massive, generally immobile empires that suffocated social development with their parasitism and massive bureaucratic structures. Medieval Europe was an embryonic world—rich in promise, to be sure, but largely unformed, lacking in cohesion, indeed more particularistic than decentralistic. Absolutism and the early era of nation building stood somewhere in between. As Perez Zagorin tells us: “In spite of the expansion of absolutism and its critical collisions with rebellious subjects, royal government never became uniform or monolithic, even in the kingdoms where it suffered least limitation. Confusions of jurisdictions and rivalries and conflicts among governmental institutions abounded under its rule. Its actual power was more like an intricate mosaic of particular prerogatives, rights, and powers than a homogeneous, all-inclusive authority. The attributes of sovereignty that were ascribed to absolute kings by royalist lawyers and political philosophers, such as the French thinker Jean Bodin, were more often than not greater in theory than the powers these same kings could dispose of in practice. The monarchies of our early modern states continued to be in many regards conservative and traditionalistic, as befitting regimes ruling hierarchic societies and of centuries-long growth from ancient origins. Absolutist kings did not quarrel with social privilege, of which their own position was the supreme manifestation. They quarreled only with the privileges that resisted their authorities or claimed immunity from their government [which, one is obliged to add, seems to mean that they opposed all social privilege but their own]. In building their more centralized states, they did not sweep the stage clean with a new broom and many older and outmoded political forms and institutions survived the reign of absolutism, like scenery left standing while a new play was performed.”{65}
What Zagorin seems to reproach the absolutist monarchies for -namely their failure to “sweep the stage clean with a new broom” and achieve a more homogenized, efficient, and smoothly working social order—is what gave the era its incredibly mism and creativity. It was precisely the rich social features of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centunes-the extraordinary diversity of social life and its forms, the creative tension from whffih so much mobility in status, cultural, and intellectual fervor emerged—that makes the era so fascinating and provocative. The absolute monarchies, caught in a complex web of ancient priveleges and rights, thus became the reluctant conservators and the gnawing subversives of an accumulated wealth of old customs autonomous jurisdictions, traditional liberties, and hierarchical claims to authority.
Within this immense warehouse of historical rights and duties, communities and individuals, institutions and interests could move with remarkable freedom and function with exciting fecundity often invoking past precedent to defend recent innovation in an old guise and play history against present to create amew future Marx was to reprove the French revolutionaries of 1848 for dressing their rhetoric, claims, and ideals in the slogans of the French revolutionaries of 1789–94, who in turn borrowed the language and postures of the Roman Republic to legitimate then own ideals. Yet it was precisely this rich sense of historicity and variety of forms, manners, and ideas-whose power and insightfulness we will explore in the closing chapter of this book-that gave such fecundity to both French revolutions and opened such sense of promise in Europe two centuries ago. What an individual “thinks of himself”—not simply the hidden economic laws or some unknown “spirit” that ostensibly guides history—has a very profound effect on how he or she acts as a social being deeply influences the course of social development, Marx to the contrary notwithstanding. The richly variegated images that people had of their own time, their rights, and themselves profoundly taped much of the history of that time. Diversity made fo greater choice and a more fertile social landscape, however often precedent was invoked and reshaped to serve new ends. The tensions created by the alternate developmental pathways that emerged before communities, orders, classes, and, yes, individuals fostered a highly creative practice in the achievement of their ends.
Nor is it true, as Marx tells us, that “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.”{66} I leave aside the fact that this dictum begs the very question it poses: we presuppose that the limits of a social order are defined by their “productive forces,” notably technology and the various ways of organizing labor, indeed that they constitute the essence of a “social order.” Actually, we have no way of knowing how far the “productive forces” could have developed in precapitalist society, nor do there seem to be any limits to the development of “productive forces” today, which means, by inference, that a market society will be with us forever.
But what is most disquieting about Marx’s vision of social change is the extent to which it denies the power of speculative thought to envision a new society long before an old one becomes intolerable or is bereft of any room for development. Artisans and peasants in the era of nation building had many sound ideas about the kind of society they wished to create. It is a mechanistic arrogance of the most extreme kind to predetermine how far communities can go—whether forward, backward, or both, m their vision of the good society and the elements that compose it—and literally dictate the material or productive limits of their vision, its “preconditions,” its possibilities, and its place in a theory of history structured around various “stages” and presuppositions.
We may say, returning to Zagorin’s description of absolutism, that it was not in spite of a monarch’s “brutal collision with rebellious spirits” but because of this collision that the nation builders of Bodin’s time failed to “sweep the stage clean with a new broom...” English, French, and Spanish monarchs, like their ancient counterparts who built huge empires, wanted very much to achieve “homogeneous and all-inclusive authority. They did not require the existence of local hierarchies to justify the development of a national hierarchy, nor did they need the challenges created by local privileges to justify their own claims to national privilege. To the extent that they tolerated local hierarchies and privileged strata, it was because they did not have the resources and the economic supports to replace them. Jean Bodin’s justification for the all-inclusive authority of every national government over the rights claimed by lesser, more local jurisdictions is evidence of a prevailing vision among the monarchies of his day that clashed with the reality of their situation and profoundly unsettled the real world. What European monarchs did “think” of themselves—namely, all-powerful rulers of highly centralized state’s—deeply affected the development of European history. Their centralists proclivities clearly influenced the thinking of men like Robespierre, France’s centralizer par excellence, who also struggled to overthrow royalism as such, using Rousseau-like principles of a democracy that “forces” men to be free. Herein lies one of the great ironies of the modern era: leaders of the popular opposition to absolutism were to function in many ways like the monarchs they professed to oppose and, ultimately, they were to turn against the very popular movements that brought them to power.
It was the artisans and peasants—of the autonomous towns whose walls centralistic royalists such as Cardinal Richelieu were to demolish, not only self-governing and parochial feudal lords who were to rise in rebellions against the monarchies of Europe. I have already examined the resistance and alternative offered by the Comuneros and the German peasants as examples, together with others who typified the most important efforts to arrest centralism and statist forms of nation building. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no less than the sixteenth, exploded in numerous albeit more localized conflicts of the kind that produced so much civil turmoil in the sixteenth. To catalog these smaller but highly numerous revolts, particularly those that occurred in France, would be tedious. Their overall pattern, however, is described by Zagorin very ably:
In every case, some new exorbitancy of royal finance, a tax on taverns, for instance, or the abolition of as exemption from certain imposts, sparked the outbreak. Then the residential quarters of the poor erupted, mobs of three, five, and even ten thousand took to the streets, and the pursuit of the gabeleurs [tax collectors] became the order of the day. Riot and excitation, violence coupled with aspects of a popular festival and its drunken indulgence, dominated these outbreaks, as the lower orders dropped their workaday routine for the collective action that demonstrated their anger and made them feel their strength. The militant base was always the urban plebs: not made up entirely, perhaps, of what the president of the parlement of Bordeaux called “the lowest part of the people,” but com sisting of artisans, journeymen, day laborers, small shopkeepers, and sometimes womenfolk, too, who participated with their men! At, Bordeaux a boatman and a tavernkeeper, at Agen a master glover, a pack-saddle maker, and again a tavernkeeper, at Perigeau a physician, stood out as leaders and hafanguers of the crowd. Peasants swarmed in from the outskirts to unite briefly with the revolt, as happened in Bordeaux, At Agen, six thousand peasants who tried to enter were kept out by the bourgeois militia and burned the property of gabeleurs in the vicinity.{67}
A more detailed account would include attacks upon the town hall, the release of jailed prisoners, the killing of tax collectors and finance officials, even of wealthy individuals who were suspected of being in collusion with the state. Without the leadership provided by artisans, small proprietors, occasionally professionals, and even members of the lesser nobility, it is unlikely that these uprisings would have gone very far. Apparently their extent depended upon “the passivity, neutral or ambiguous behavior, and even partial support [of] the notables and well-to-do. The bourgeois militia of Bordeaux showed little will to act.. At Perigeux the bourgeois guard was similarly slack. Only at Agen, where the violence was particularly intense and accompanied by a definite social antagonism, did elites and authorities take concerted steps against the outbreak.”
The limits of these insurrections, rural as well as urban, should be noted. Again, Zagorin comes to our aid:
Taken as a whole, French urban rebellions were devoid of programs or ideas. In the same way as the concurrent agrarian revolts, they seemed to reflect a stasis in French society despite its exceptional amount of violence and insubordination, an inability by insurgent-forces to transcend the existing state of things with any informing vision of an alternative. Although again and again the centralist offensive led to resistance, the latter failed to give rise to demands for political changes.... Urban rebellion was essentially a defensive response by the whole community. To the plebeian populace, the punishment of gabeleurs was a deserved act of communal justice. If such people took the largest, most active part in these insurrections, that was because they were the most sensible of fiscal oppression. But elites usually shared responsibility in some measure. Their ‘own opposition to exactions helped to legitimize resistance, and they encouraged revolt, whether by actual instigation, covert approval and sympathy, or inaction, when disorder broke out.... But they were helpless to hold back the advance of absolutism and its centralizing grip because they had no political reforms to propose and conceived of no new institutional limits on the power of the royal state. {68}
Actually, Zagorin’s account of the way these chronic town insurrections unfolded—ultimately leading to the French Revolution itself a century or so later—fails to explore certain important details that help us understand the extent to which the uprisings actually did “hold the advance of absolutism and its centralizing grip” under control. The French monarchs such as Louis XIII and Louis XIV were strong kings who were guided by even stronger advisers such as the cardinals Richilieu and Mazarin, respectively. They created the strongest armies and created the most far-reaching bureaucracies in western Europe in their day. They were ruthless centralizers and patently hostile to their own nobility, often encouraging trade and playing the “bourgeois” classes against the noble classes who were as protective of their particularistic privileges as they were of their economic. Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a status-oriented world. It was made up more of “orders”—status groups who enriched themselves, developed extravagant patterns of conspicuous consumption, and spoke in a mannered language according to an elaborate body of etiquette—rather than of classes who simply and unadornedly pursued their material interests. Power and social recognition were no less important than wealth; in fact they were major sources of material wealth. Personal enrichment, in turn, was often pursued precisely to gain more power and greater social recognition. Consumption in all its dazzling forms thus assumed greater significance than production, even for the bourgeoisie, which tried to elbow its way into the social hierarchies of the era. Mary Beard’s account of the merchant’s values in the Roman world holds as well in the era of absolutism as it does in the era of empire, a thousand years earlier. The trader, she observes, “had drained the wealth of the West for ‘bones and stones’ [gems and ornaments] from the East and thereby brought on currency troubles for which there was apparently no remedy.... Because he had yielded much to the landed gentleman’s ideal, he tended to draw fortunes away from the business to the land, taking wealth out of circulation and energy out of business enterprise. His children, growing up in the country, were often lost to business entirely.”{69}
In western Europe, especially in “classical” France—the country that so many radical and liberal thinkers were to regard as the model for “pure” feudalism and the “bourgeois-democratic” revolution—this process of moving from the status of trader to that of nobleman was especially marked and adds considerable ambiguity to what we mean by the word “bourgeois.” Many “bourgeois” and noble interests coalesced. Both orders generally had a greater fear of the “mob” than of each other—and, in moments of crisis, of the monarchy. The two orders were united by bonds of marriage, land ownership, cultural tastes, values, and‘ a desire for status and the power, political as well as economic, that it conferred.
The “bourgeois militia” of Bordeaux, Perigeaux, and Agen probably included many aspiring master craftsmen, merchants, and a good sprinkling of “industrialists” who were eager to acquire noble status—even if only “nobles of the robe” (nobles who had noble status conferred upon them for service to the state or, quite crassly, for money) rather than “nobles of the sword” (hereditary nobility). They were more like medieval burghers, than capitalists in the present-day sense of the term. Indeed capitalism, conceived not simply as an economic system structured around commercial transactions or trade but, in its truly modern sense, as an accumulative system (what Marx called “expanding reproduction”) in which industrial expansion became an end in itself, was a feeble thing in western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more characteristically Dutch than either English or French. Hence, it would be of value to discriminate between the words “bourgeoisie” and “capitalists” rather than turn them into synonyms.
By the same token, the “lowest part of the people,” whom the president of the Bordeaux Parlement designated as the principal activists in the urban rebellions of the 1630s, were not simply laborers, vagabonds, and beggars. In a status-oriented society, they could also be said to include master craftsmen, artisans, shopkeepers, and small-property owners. The fact that tavernkeepers, master glovers, pack-saddle makers, and. even a physician “stood out as leaders and haranguers of the crowd,” to use Zagorin’s words, tells us something about the “crowd” they led and harangued. That nobles, too, occasionally became such “leaders” tells us something about the transclass nature of such uprisings and the extent to which nearly all sectors of society could be united against the centralization of power by the monarchy. Most of the people hated men like Richelieu, Mazarin, and members of the king’s administrative bureaucracy, despite’their ritualistic expressions of affection for the king. Such cries as “Long live the king without the gabelle!” meant that the king, ostensibly beloved for his symbolic status as a caring father, could earn popular loyalty only if he was shorn; of the all-important fiscal means for maintaining his commanding position in the country—a position that amounted to very little without the money for provisioning his army, paying his bureaucrats, and carrying on domestic wars against recalcitrant towns and nobles.
Which raises Zagorin’s’ question of how much of a program French insurrectionaries actually needed if French society was indeed in a “stasis.” Zagorin’s use of the word stasis stands at odds with, his notion that the insurrectionaries were “helpless to hold back the advance of absolutism and its centralizing grip.” The “stasis” of the time consisted precisely of a lasting balance of forces between the central power and the regions, localities, orders, and classes of the time, not an ever-encroaching central power. Richilieu and Mazarin, working ruthlessly on behalf of their monarchs, tried to forge a completely centralized nation-state around the king and his bureaucracy. It is myth, in my view, to believe that any but the most naive of the absolutist Frerich kings trusted their nobles, although one French monarch, Louis XVI, tried to enlist his nobles in 1788 against an ever-demanding “Third Estate.” They betrayed him without scruples and, in the most self-seeking manner, brought about his downfall as well as their own.
Thus Richelieu and Mazarin did not succeed, in fact. They carried centralization far in France, but not so far that it could prevent the French Revolution, which tried in its early phases to reverse the power of the king and the aristocrats alike, initially driving toward a relatively decentralized, indeed minimal, state. If centralism is to be identified with the interests of the newly emerging capitalist economy insofar as the “bourgeoisie” seeks a politically unified country, the French Revolution was categorically not a “bourgeois revolution.” Nor did the French “bourgeoisie” want a “democracy” or even, necessarily, a republic. Indeed, it tried to model France on England’s constitutional monarchy. The supreme irony of the French Revolution is that a movement designed to curb privilege, hierarchy, and, above all, centralized power was twisted by liberal intellectuals, “forward-looking” lawyers, and marginal strata into the most centralized state in Europe in order to defeat its counterrevolutionary enemies. In some respects, the Jacobin Republic that followed the collapse of these hopes for a constitutional monarchy and a fairly decentralized political structure was marbled by feudal concepts of government, notably, the famous “maximum” that limited the rise of placed prices and wages, state intervention in many parts of the economy and society, and a moral posture that espoused “republican virtue” as a political calling. The Jacobin Republic, in effect, was a wartime state that Napoleon was to make fairly permanent. This quixotic turn of events etched itself, deeply into French national fife for nearly two centuries, and centralism became a focal issue around which popular movements were to rebel throughout the nineteenth century. The climax of this popular movement was reached in May 1871 when the Commune of Paris tried to establish a confederal republic based on a commune of communes, a struggle that ended in a bloody massacre and the ebbing of decentralistic notions of socialism in France itself.
Robespierre and napoleon, more than Richilieu and Mazarin, were the true forgers of the nation-state in France, and it was they who provided the real “classical” example of centralized national authority in Europe.
What role did the towns and cities play in abetting this development from the sixteenth century onward? Towns and cities responded, as we have seen, in very mixed ways to the emergence of a centralized authority that tried to absorb them. Some resisted that authority with very little internal division or difference of opinion. Others, particularly where the “bourgeoisie” and elite orders prevailed, favored a well-coordinated society in which trade could prosper. They thereby abetted the work of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Napoleon, both the original article and his nephew, Louis Bonaparte, in the 1850s and 1860s. But there is a sense in which all the towns of Europe unwittingly abetted the formation of nation-states, even as they opposed it for social, political, and cultural reasons. They did this by creating the arteries and veins, as it were, for national consolidation: the elaborate, indeed historically unprecedented, road systems and nodal market towns that fostered the monetization, commercialization, and industrialization of nations—and with these possibilities, the effective centralization of the state along national lines.
I wish to advance the view that this was one of the most important achievements of Europe during the Middle Ages and well into recent times. So much emphasis has been placed by historians on Europe’s development of a market economy, its relative freedom of trade, and its openness to industrial innovation—features that are certainly uniquely European—that we fail to recognize how little they would have been able to affect the continent’s development without a network of roads, canals, and rivers to make such an economy possible. Apart from the trade that created market towns—towns where all goods were systematically exchanged—long-distance commerce was an elitist affair and served the well-to-do, not society at large. Local trade was necessarily very local because of the insular nature of most European communities. So, too, was political power. Rivers, canals, and maritime transportation served to link a fair percentage of Europe’s towns and villages together, but by no means the majority. A European “hinterland” existed almost everywhere on the continent, such that towns and villages were almost entirely self-sufficient in the staples of everyday life and culture remained highly insular. These “hinterlands” were largely beyond the reach of the nation-state and surprisingly impenetrable to commerce, monetization, and the “bourgeois” incubus that was to claim Europe for itself during the nineteenth century.
We can begin to sense the importance of road systems in economic development and political control today (perhaps even more than during any other part of our century) because of the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare in the Third World. The very lack of “development” and the poor road systems that exist in Central America, mountainous portions of Asia, and the rain forests in southeast Asia have brought even nation-states aided by “superpowers” to their knees. All the “colonizers” of the past recognized the need for effective road systems. The Romans were able to hold their empire together precisely because it was networked by a highly elaborate system of roads that penetrated into the Iberian peninsula, Gaul, and portions of Britain and Germany as well as the hinterlands of the Mediterranean basin. Even quasi-tribal societies such as the Inca of Peru developed “empires” because roads—actually well-maintained pathways and footbridges—made central coordination possible. It matters little whether elaborate road networks emerged because “economic forces” created a need for them or because they made the emergence of such “economic forces” as a market economy possible. The two, in fact, may have interacted reciprocally with each other: road building stimulating commerce and commerce stimulating road building.
Judging from Rome’s network, however, good roads in themselves did not necessarily foster a high volume of commerce, although they were indispensable for commercial advances. This great network of antiquity was not constructed primarily to transport merchandise. It was created mainly to move troops and imperial administrators to various parts of the empire. Even the transport of goods to supply the legionnaires was a secondary factor in road design and its routes. As R. S. Lopez tells us in his absorbing discussion of land transport, Roman troops were encouraged to live “as far as possible on the food produced in their immediate vicinity and the administrative centers were almost all situated either on the sea or on internal navigable waterways.”{70} This orientation is very “un-European”: it reflects the astonishing extent to which a world oriented toward agrarian values dominated its merchants and morally denigrated their sources of income. Essentially, it was the “merchant, glutted, or rather contented with his profit, [who] retires from the port to become a landed proprietor,” Cicero tells us, “... [who] seems to me worthy of full praise,” not the “small-scale” trader, much less, artisan, “who should be of little account.”{71}
Accordingly, Roman roads wore built almost defensively along mountain crests, very much like fortresses, rather than through populous valleys. Their seemingly indestructible large blocks of stone gave them a rigidity that increased their vulnerability to climatic changes, opening large surface cracks that, as Lopez tells us, “needed gangs of slaves, or continuous work by those obliged to furnish road-services to the state, and even so they were unsuitable for heavy or broad vehicles.”{72} The Roman road system, indeed ancient road networks generally, were not designed to expand local commerce beyond its regional confines or open trade routes to a continental exchange of ordinary staples. Long-distance trade of luxury goods and delicacies transported by sea or along rivers was favored over a mosaic of local and regional commercial transactions that brought ordinary goods and money into remote areas of the continent.[10]
By contrast, Europe placed a high premium on the local artisan and merchant. At a time when so much emphasis is placed on the role of long-distance commerce in forming capitalism and the modern age, it is important to recognize how local producers and local markets slowly reworked the interior of the European continent, preparing it for a monetized economy and providing the goods and markets for creating a market society. This slow but historic change in the economic culture of Europe—a slow but decisive change in attitudes toward trade, production for sale, and the use of money—was the work in large part of small towns, not only busy, glamourous ports.
Little by little a new network of roads was put into effective operation, different totally in structure and methods from the ancient one and used by quite different types of transport and haulage. The changes in transport which accompanied the commercial revolution and the outburst of economic activity in this period can themselves be described as a slow revolution, If we consider them more closely, we find that they reveal the changed political and social face of Europe. For in medieval Europe there was no large and powerful state like the Roman Empire. Slavery disappeared and in many regions, of which Italy was the first, serfdom was abolished. Finally, the dignity of the, merchant and of trade won recognition, though with many reservations. Hence private initiative or local associations largely took the place of coercive government action. The routing of roads reflected the needs of commerce rather than the convenience of soldiers and civil servants. Maximum use was made of animal labor in transport, while human labor was safer as possible, economized.
Lopez goes on to say that road construction “initiative came from autonomouslocal bodies or independent private companies. Plurality of roads, which is always possible when the dogma of the straight line is abandoned, enabled a great number of minor centers to be included in the network.”
To say, Ferdinand Braudel reminds us, that “Napoleon moved no faster than Julius Cesar” misses a number of very important points. Even if this statement were true, Napoleon had a greater variety of transportation choices than Cesar and climatic factors limited his strategic decisions far less than those of his Roman counterpart; so, too, for the European tradesman by comparison with the Roman. Even if we examine the regional network of roads created by this gradual transportation revolution, new possibilities and a sharper division of labor between the artisan and food cultivator—with its concomitant elaboration of skills, local inter action, use of money, and growing wants—all constituted the indispensable spadework for creating a sophisticated market economy.
What is important is that it was the proliferation of craftspeople, of new wares and technics, of more craft organizations or gilds, and the intensive as well as extensive development of market interactions—generally intimate, humanly scaled, and ethical—that is most characteristic of the market economy that emerged in Europe. Let me emphasize that this rich patchwork of commercial relationships enhanced human interaction, unlike the capitalistic type of market economy that was to replace it centuries later. Even as it slowly advanced over the European continent, trade on a small, local scale between closely associated communities and individuals fostered cooperation rather than competition. It tended to deepen and extend local ties rather than sever them. It was more participatory than adversarial, more moral than predatory, and politically it provided the individual producer with a stronger material base for the exercise of citizenship.[11] Finally, it tended to dissolve barriers between local communities and adjacent regions, opening the doors to new ideas, cultures, values, and the interchange of skills and technics. In time, the towns themselves acquired greater political and economic weight in the struggle to form nation-states. It may have entangled them in the crises of nation building, but it also turned them into centers of revolutionary social transformation, an advance signaled by the Comunero movement in Spain and the sectional movement in France.
These markets and towns were not capitalistic. Marx has appropriately designated their economy as “simple commodity production” in which profit making and the plowing of surplus earnings back into capital expansion are largely nonexistent. Taken in this pure form, his account of their “mode of production” is more of a Weberian “ideal type” than an actual reality. Capitalism almost certainly did exist in European towns, even predominantly in some artisan ones, and even dominated many European cities, particularly port and riverine cities. But Europe also developed for centuries by elaborating its artisan-oriented towns rather than by significantly transforming them. Viewed as a whole, the continent from the fourteenth century onward until well into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seemed to have a mixed economy, which was neither predominantly feudal, capitalist, nor structured entirely around simple commodity production. Rather, it contained and combined elements of all three forms. That one of these elements seemed to be of greater significance than another in some communities and areas does not alter the mixed nature of economic life as a whole. Contrary to the widely held belief that a capitalistic economy emerged within the “womb” of feudalism and asserted itself as a “dominant” form with the attempt to build nation-states in the sixteenth century, it seems more accurate in my view to say that capitalism coexisted with feudal and simple commodity relationships. This long era, perhaps spanning more than five centuries, simply cannot be treated as “transitional” without reading back the present into the past and teleologically structuring European history around an Aristotelian “final cause” called “capitalism.”
At various times and in various places, this mixed economy assumed a very balanced form—in some respects more stable in terms of everyday life than our own war-ridden century. Marxist and liberal historians have been vexed to give this long era a name that accords with the dogmatic “stages” theories of history that abound in Marx and Engels’s writings. Its existence seems to be an affront to the neat categories that even radical historians impose on the rich flux of social development. Conclusions that it was either “feudal” or “capitalist,” or what able writers like Paul Sweezy designate as “precapitalist commodity production” (a designation that tells us we know more about what it was not than what it really proved to be), often stand in flat contradiction to the data at our disposal.{73}
A more open-minded reading of the data and the empirical evidence at our disposal on the era—one that extended well beyond the sixteenth-century period of nation building—will show, I submit, that western Europe existed within a force field in which feudal traditions interacted with simple commodity and capitalist forms of societal organization. Nor were feudalism, capitalism, and simple commodity production socially rigid economic systems. They were evolving cultures, differing in values, sensibilities, ways of experiencing the world and organizing it artistically and intellectually, not simply “modes of production,” to use Marx’s terminology again. They constituted unique social ecologies, as it were, that were patterned in highly diverse ways throughout the continent. They also changed with the passage of time in varying degrees and with varying accent or emphasis on their components, often as a result of their interaction with each other.
Space does not allow me to make a closer examination of this’ seemingly “transitional era,” which in actuality forms a yery definable and long era of European history. That it fits none of the dogmatic interpretations advanced by many moderni historians who have an ideological ax to grind says more about academic trends in contemporary historiography than the richly varied texture of European life over the past thousand years: The “stasis” to which Zagorin alludes in his account of the state’s development seems also to have occurred in town development during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, possibly even later in many parts of Europe. Although greatly increased in number, European towns seem to have entered into a demographic slack period where urban populations ceased to grow and in some cases diminished. Trade, too, appears to have declined and the development of new towns generally came to an end.
A number of historians have called this period the “crisis of feudalism,” a terminology that may very well express a typically modern identification of “progress” with expansion. This bias tends to overlook qualitative growth and cultural elaboration for quantitative growth and cultural change. Apparently, “progress” is to be defined primarily as material growth, the increasing “domination of nature.” Cultural stability and the elaboration of cultural traits, by contrast, is often conceived as evidence of stagnation,” even of “crisis” and social regression. The received wisdom of historians to the contrary, is it not possible that Europe had paused during these centuries and begun to live with minimal changes in the “force field” of the era, perhaps even reaching a fairly stable balance between the three components of the mixed economy that began to develop centuries earlier? That violence, was endemic at that time, as it generally was before and afterwards, does not alter the stability of everyday life, especially in the small towns that contained the majority of Europe’s urban population. This much is reasonably clear: by the seventeenth century, western Europe and its towns seem to haye reached a historic crossroads. The continent’s further “development,” a term that by no means denotes “progress” in any qualitative sense, was to depend less on the growth of a centralized state and on the expansion of commerce than on technology—on the development of machines and transportation techniques that were to rework all the traditional ties that had produced such an ecologically extraordinary cultural, political, civic, and economic diversity of social and urban forms.[12]
The market society we call “capitalism”—a society that tends to reduce all, citizens to mere buyers and sellers and debases all the ecologically varied social relationships produced by history to the exchange of objects called “commodities”—did not “evolve” out of a feudal era. It literally exploded into being in Europe, particularly England, during the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries, although it existed in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and with, growing significance in the mixed economy of the West from the fourteenth century up to the seventeenth. It is still spreading around the world—intensively in, its traditional Euro-American center and extensively in the non-European world; Its forms have varied from the largely mercantile (its earliest kind) through the industrial (its more recent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms) to the statist, corporate, and multinational forms of our own time. It has slowly penetrated from its special spheres, such as market arenas of exchange and the production of commodities in cottages and later in factories, into domestic life itself, such as the family and neighborhood. This is a fairly recent “advance” that can be dated most strikingly from the midpoint of the twentieth century. Its invasion of the neighborhood, indeed of villages and small towns into the recesses of the domestic or familial relationships, has subverted the social bond itself and threatens to totally undermine any sense of community and ecological balance and diversity in social life.
Moreover, the newly gained dominance of the capitalistic market relationship over all other forms of production and consociation is a major source of what I have denoted as “urbanization”—the explosion of the city itself into vast urban agglomerations that threaten the very integrity of city life and citizenship. What makes the market society we call “capitalism” unique, even by contrast to its early mercantile form, is that it is an ever-expansive, accumulative, and, in this respect, a cancerous economic system whose “law of life” is to “grow or die.” Capitalism in its characteristically modern and “dominant” form threatens not only to undermine every “natural economy” (to use Marx’s own terms), be it small-scale agriculture, artisanship, simple exchange relationships, and the like; it threatens to undermine every dimension of “organic society,” be it the kinship tie, communitarian forms of association, systems of self-governance, and localist allegiances—the sense of home and place. Owing to its metastatic invasion of every aspect of life by means of monetization and what Immanuel Wallerstein calls “commodification,” it threatens the integrity of the natural world—soil, flora, fauna, and the complex ecocommunities that have made present-day life forms and relationships possible by turning everything “natural” into an inorganic, essentially synthetic form.{74} Soil is being turned into sand, variegated landscapes into level and simplified ones, complex relationships into more primal forms such that the evolutionary clock is being turned back to a biotically earlier time when life was less varied in form and its range more limited in scope.
The effect of capitalism on the city has been nothing less than catastrophic. The commonly used term “urban cancer” can be taken literally to designate the extent to which the traditional urbs of the ancient world have been dissolved into a primal, ever-spreading, and destructive form that threatens to devour city and countryside alike. Growth in the special form that singles out modern capitalism from all earlier forms of economic fife, including earlier forms of capitalism itself, has affected what we still persist in calling the “city” by leading to the expansion of pavements, streets, houses, and industrial, commercial, and retail structures over the entire landscape just as a cancer spreads over the body and invades its deepest recesses.
Cities, in turn, have begun to lose their form as distinctive cultural and physical entities, as humanly scaled and manageable political entities. Their functions have changed from ethical arenas with a uniquely humane, civilized form of consociation, free of all blood ties and family loyalties, into immense, overbearing, and anonymous marketplaces. They are becoming centers primarily of mass production and mass consumption, including culture as well as physically tangible objects. Indeed, culture has become objectified into commodities as have human relationships, which are increasingly being simplified and mediated by objects. The simplification of social life and the biosphere by a growth-oriented economy in which production and consumption become ends in themselves is yielding the simplification of the human psyche itself. The strong sense of individuation that marked the people of the mixed society preceding capitalism is giving way to a receptive consumer and taxpayer, a passive observer of fife rather than an active participant in it, lacking in economic roots that support self-assertiveness and community roots that foster participation in social life. Citizenship itself, conceived as a function of character formation, and politics, as part of paideia or the education of a social being, tend to wane into personal indifference to social problems. The decline of the citizen, more properly his or her dissolution into a being lost in a mass society—the human counterpart of the mass-produced object—is furthered by a burgeoning of structural gigantism that replaces human scale and by a growing bureaucracy that replaces all the organic sinews that held precapitalist society together. The counselor is the humanistic counterpart of the indifferent bureaucrat and the counseling chamber is the structural counterpart of the governmental office.
Let it be said that this debasement of the ecological complexity of the city, of its politics, citizens, even of the individuals who people its streets and structures, is of very recent origin. It did not really begin in a manorial society, with its barons and serfs, food cultivators and artisans, and all the “orders” we denote as feudal. Nor did it follow from those grossly misnamed revolutions, the “bourgeois-democratic” ones of England, America, and France, that ostensibly catapulted capital into political control of a society it presumably “controlled” economically during earlier generations. Rather, this development began to appear with technical innovations that made possible both the mass manufacture of cheap commodities and, that is crucially important, their increasingly rapid transportation into the, deepest recesses of western Europe, inexpensive and highly competitive with the products of local artisans who serviced their localities for centuries. It need hardly be emphasized that this development depended enormously for its success on the opening of colonial markets abroad: the Americas, Africa, and particularly Asia, the area where the English crown found its richest jewel, notably India.
It was the extraordinary combination of technical advances \yith the existence of a highly variegated society, relatively free of the cultural constraints to trade that prevailed in antiquity, that gave economic ascendancy to the capitalistic component of the mixed economy over all its other components. Neither wealth from the Americans nor the large monetary resources accumulated by port cities from long-distance trade fully explains the rise of,industrial capitalism—a form of capitalism that more than any other penetrated into the very inner life of Europe.[13] Had the wealth acquired from the “New World” been a decisive factor in creating industrial capitalism, Spain rather than England should have become its center, for it was Spanish cqnquistadores who initially plundered the Aztec and Inca empires and brought their precious metals to Europe. The very wealth these “empires” provided for the ascendant nation-state in Spain served to weaken town life in the Iberian peninsula and provide the means for absolute monarchs to embark on an archaic program of continental empire building that eventually ruined Spanish cities and the countryside alike.
Nor did long-distance trade provide the most important sources for capitalizing industrial development. Rather it fostered consumption more than production, the dissolute lifeway that makes for a diet of luxuries instead of the parsimonious habits that steer investment into new means of production. Indeed, too much state centralization and too much commerce, despite the wealth they initially generated, ultimately led to excessive expenditures for territorial expansion and high living by elite groups in all the orders of a courtly society. That nation-building, increased ceritralization, or, more properly, national consolidation prepared the way for industrial capitalism by opening more “hinterlands” to trade is patently clear. So, too, did increases in the population of dispossessed, propertyless hands, whether as a result of land enclosures or normal demographic growth, hands that were available for a factory system that had yet to appear on the economic horizon. Europe, in effect, was more open than any part of the world to the expansion of its Capitalist’component along industrial lines. This was especially true of England, a country in which a remarkable balance had emerged between a particularly bourgeois-minded aristocracy and monarchy on the one hand and a very open economy on the other, peopled by a tight-fisted, god-fearing Puritan yeomanry and structured around towns with decaying gild systems and cottagers in the countryside who were already engaged in a domestic form of textile mass production. Whether the new industrial capitalists who were destined to totally reshape the country emerged from the merchants involved in the sale of raw wool to cottage weavers and its sale in the towns, or whether it came from well-to-do artisans, yeomen, artistocrats who used sheep to create a new form of pastoral agribusiness, or merchants who were inclined to siphon their wealth into production—possibly even all of them combined at one time or another—need not concern us here. What pushed the capitalist component of this mixed economy into a nation that could regard itself as the “workshop of the world” in the, nineteenth century was a series of inventions that made the factory system and the distribution of its wares possible.
Nor need we be concerned with whether the needs of a “rising bourgeoisie” produced the Industrial Revolution or the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the “bourgeoisie,” which in any case was always a presence in all the major cities of Europe. Factories, in fact, had begun to appear in eighteenth- and even seventeenth-century England long before an industrial technology had emerged. Wherever the “bourgeoisie” entered into the productive sphere rather than the commercial, it tried to bring labor together and rationalize output even with tools, hence a strictly technological interpretation of the rise of industrial capitalism would be greatly misleading. My concern here is how industrial capitalism managed to gain ascendancy over other forms of production, including commercial capitalism, and alter all social relationships that encountered its power. Waterwheels had preceded the steam engine as a prime mover, and worksheds organized around simple tools had preceded mechanized factories. But without the inventions that introduced the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is doubtful that industrial capitalism could have impacted so powerfully on Europe and ultimately on the entire world.
England, perhaps more so than other countries in the western European orbit, seems to have been an ideal terrain for technological innovation. Its society was highly mobile socially and extremely fluid territorially. The few remaining feudal inhibitions to change of its various elites, aristocratic as well as commercial, had already been shattered by the civil war of the Cromwell period, a conflict that brought armed Puritans to power and added a strongly plebeian character to the country’s system of government. Even the English aristocracy had been readied for a gainful capitalistic economy by the wealth it acquired from the sale of wool. We shall have occasion to note that landed squires and industrial capitalists were not without serious differences over the distribution of manpower in the country’s economy, nor did the rural patronal system disappear completely. But it can be said that England, more than any other European country at the time, had begun to acclimate itself to industrialization owing to the relative weakness of absolutism, which might have drained the nation’s wealth to fulfill imperial ambitions and the growth of a money-minded yeomanry and a highly avaricious merchant class.
One must consult Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to understand how much gain became a quasireligious “calling” among England’s merchants and its well-to-do yeomanry and artisans; how much they were readied psychologically for the plundering of their own communities and country. The Spanish conquistadores had ruthlessly sacked the
Indian “empires” of the Aztecs and Inca in order to enrich themselves, not to “save” their “souls.” They were maniacally involved in acts of destruction that often verged on self-destruction with only indirect effects upon the texture of Spanish society. The English Puritans, by contrast, dourly plundered their own country in a systematic and lasting manner to accumulate capital. Their behavior seemed to be guided by a moral imperative that made greed an end in itself, an imperative that was to transform the lifeways of the precapitalist society from which they had derived. Long after Puritanism had passed away as a movement, English society had become secularized. The joyless spirit that the Puritans brought to England then lived on, largely bereft of the few moral constraints that religion generally imposed on the acquisitive spirit engendered by the Reformation.
Within a span of some two generations, England was transformed on a scale unprecedented in the history of western Europe. Frederick Engels’s The Condition of the Working-Class in England, a period piece based on personal observations in 1844, could justly call the changes introduced by the new industrial inventions—principally in textiles, metallurgy, and transportation—a historic change of unpredented proportions. The rapidity of the transformation is what makes these changes so startling in a domain of human endeavor—technology—which had developed over centuries at a slow, piecemeal pace. The social and cultural ramifications of this technological revolution were nothing less than monumental. “Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like every other,” Engels tells us, “with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but proportionately large agricultural population. Today {1844} it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabitants; with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry that supplies the world, and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two thirds are employed in trade and commerce, and composed of classes wholly different, forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a different nation from the England of those days.”{75}
Engels’s words are meant as much to praise the “revolutionary” work of the English industrial capitalist as they are intended to startle the German readers, who first encountered his book. The Enlightenment’s uncritical commitment to technical progress completely infects the author’s generalizations, however much he is bitterly critical of, the misery inflicted by,industrial capitalism on the new proletariat. Accordingly, we learn that the preexisting cottage weavers, who were to be devastated economically and culturally by the new textile machines invented around the middle of the eighteenth century, “vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous arid peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better than that of their successors. They did not have to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed: They had leizure for healthful work in garden or field, work which, in itself, was recreation for them, and they could take part besides in the recreations and games of their neighbors, and all games—bowling, cricket, football, etc., contributed to their physical health and vigor. They were, for the most part, strong, well-built people, in whose physique little or no difference than that,of their peasant neighbors was discernible. Their children grew up in the fresh country air, and, if they could help their parents at work, it was only occasionally; while of eight or twelve hours work for them [introduced, later, by the factory system] there was no question.”{76}
The mixed messages in this passage reflect the characteristic tension created among the “progressives” of the era between the, claims of an abstract sense of “history” and an existential sense of humanity that was to rend apart major socialists such as Engels and ultimately, owing to his commitment to industrial progress as a “precondition” for a free society, justify the most horrible barbarities of a Stalin as the “modernizer’ of Russia, The unquestioning humility” of the English cottage weavers and yeomen, “their silent vegetation ... which, cozily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings,” to use Engels’ pejorative remarks, is doubtful on its own terms, particularly from the standpoint of our own time when the ebullient concept of ‘ progress” that prevailed over the past two centuries is so much in doubt.[14]{77} But placed in a broader historical context, it is hard to square this denigration of the cottage weavers and lesser yeomanry with their vigorous role in the English Civil War of the 1640s and their resistance to the introduction of machinery—indeed, the role they played in the’ Chartist movement, the most radical cause, culturally as well as economically, that England has seen since the Puritan revolution.
The explosive nature of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of industrial capitalism can best be understood by rioting the limited time span in which the new technology surfaced and swept over England—a period so brief that it is almost difficult to call it an “era,” as so many historians do. James Watt’s steam engine, which freed the factory system from its reliance on waterpower, was invented by 1769; James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, which enormously increased the output of yarn, by 1764; Richard Arkwright’s throstle, a sophistication of the spinning machine calculated for the use of a mechanical prime mover, by 1767; Samuel Crompton’s mule, by 1785, followed around the same time by Arkwright’s carding machine and preparatory frames; finally, Edmund Cartwright’s workable power loom by 1785. All of these inventions totally revolutionized the production of textiles as it had been pursued for thousands of years and catapulted English cottons, woolens, linens, even lace and silken goods (as a result of another group of machines invented in the first decade of the nineteenth century) into a largely agrarian domestic and world market. The opening of extensive coalfields and iron mines, owing in large part to the use of coke, and the staggering enlargement of smelting furnaces on a scale fifty times bigger than earlier, more customary sizes paved the way for transportation changes that were to open the most remote areas of the country to industrialization and “commodification.”
The men who invented the textile machines and prime movers that powered them were plebeians and, by no means accidentally within the context of modern English history, included a sprinkling of very pious individuals, even clergymen. Watt was an instrument maker; Hargreaves, an engineer; Arkwright, a barber; and relegate the past, with all its humane as well as barbarous traditions, to a historical “junk heap.” Eventually socialism, like Puritanism, was to be deprived of all its ethical content and turned into a doctrine very much like the egoistic political economy of the industrial bourgeoisie itself.
Crompton, an ordinary textile worker; and Cartwright, a minister, who went on to work with Robert Fulton in the development of the steamship. English society had opened itself, more than most European societies, to advancement by individuals in the “lower classes/’ Moreover, many of the inventors whose work introduced the Industrial Age were to become major capitalists in their right. Only a few exhibited the breadth of spirit that characterized Robert Owen, a textile manufacturer who demonstrated at New Lanark that relatively humane conditions for workers did not conflict with the acquisition of high profits and later placed his life and his fortune in the service of the rising labor movement.
The transportation revolution that paralleled the Industrial Revolution is of monumental proportions in the development of modern capitalism itself, a revolution that a century and a half later was to turn into a “communications revolution” whose effects have yet to be fully grasped. During the first forty years of the nineteenth century, Scotland, much of which had been an untamed “hinterland” only two generations earlier, was interlaced by nearly a thousand miles of good roads and an even larger number of bridges. This was largely “the work of private enterprise,” Engels tells us, “the State having done very little in this direction.”{78} Indeed by 1844 England, apart from Scotland, had well over two thousand miles of canals, substantially in excess of its navigable river mileage. Finally, the early railroad fines that finked Manchester to Liverpool, were rapidly extended across the entire industrial midlands, sweeping in Lancester, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, and, of course, London further to the south.
English industrial and commercial towns, too, exploded in sifee and population. Within the first thirty or forty years of the nineteenth century, Birmingham increased its inhabitants from 73,000 to 200,000; Sheffield from 46,000 to 110,000; Halifax from 63,000 to 110,000; Leeds from 53,000 to 123,000. Such astonishing rates of growth among comparatively small communities in so short a time had never been seen before in European history. The congestion and diseases they produced have been fully chronicled in the novels as well as the histories of the period. For the first time, apart from a few cosmopolitan centers in antiquity and perhaps some Flemish and Italian towns in medieval times, we begin to see the authentic devouring of cities, not only the countryside, by urbanization. Birmingham, Sheffield, Halifax, and Leeds, among many others in England, were beginning to lose their identity as cities in any classical meaning of the term. Their factories, sprawling out into the countryside, were phasing into urban agglomerations, sweeping in villages and small towns that had existed with relatively little change for centuries. William Wylde’s panoramic painting of Manchester in 1851 reveals a forest of smokestacks and a dense collection of squalid dwellings, a new, formless, and repellent urban world that industrial capital began to introduce into the world—first in England, then in France, Belgium, Germany, and, of course, across the Atlantic where the grimmest images of Pittsburgh as a steel-making center seem interchangeable with Wylde’s picture of Manchester as a textile center generations earlier.
Yet, what is very important about this period of rampant industrialization is the fact that the more commercial and administrative cities of England and even the industrial towns that blighted the island’s landscape were to develop a communal character of their own. Growing industry, commerce, and “commodification” did not seep completely into the neighborhood fife of the new cities, nor did it totally destroy the conditions for the regeneration of domestic fife. The buffeting that towns and cities of the nineteenth century took from industrialization, however disastrous its initial effects on traditional fife ways, did not destroy the inherently villagelike subcultures of workers and middle-class people who were only a generation or two removed from a more rural culture. Like the ethnic groups that entered the New World through New York City throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, displacement was followed by resettlement and recommunafization, even in the most desperately poor slums of the overpopulated cities of Europe and America. The pub in the industrial cities of England, the cafe in France, and the beer hall in Germany, no less than the various community centers around which the ethnic ghettos formed in New York and other American cities, provided foci for a distinctly working-class culture, largely artisan in its outlook, class-oriented in its politics, and knitted together by mutual self-help groups.
This recolonization of community life was greatly abetted by the organized labor movement in all its different forms. Socialist clubs, trade-union centers, local cooperatives, mutual-aid societies, and educational groups created a public space that included classes in reading, writing, literature, and history. The socialist clubs and union centers provided libraries, periodicals, lectures, and discussion groups to “elevate” worker consciousness as well as mobilize them for political and economic ends. Picnics, athletic activities, outdoor forays into the countryside served to add a very intimate dimension to purely educational projects. The casas del pueblo established by Spanish socialists and the centros obreros established by the Spanish anarchists, which existed up to the late 1930s, are reminders of the vigorous development of community life even in the most depressed areas of Europe—indeed, of an “underground” culture that always paralleled the received culture of the elite orders and classes.
There was always a plebeian cultural domain at the base of society, even in the most dismal and squalid parts of ancient, medieval, or modern cities, that was beyond the reach of the conventional culture and the state apparatus. No economy or state had the technical means, until very recently, to freely infiltrate this domain and dissolve it for a lasting period of time. Left to itself, the “underground” world of the oppressed remained a breeding ground for rebels and conspirators against the prevailing authority. No less urban in character than agrarian, it also remained a school for a grass-roots politics that, by definition, involved groups of ordinary people, even in sizable communities, in a plebeian political sphere and often brought them into outright rebellion. This “underground” school created new political forms and new citizens to deal with changing social conditions. Even after the great boulevards of Baron Haussmanri ripped into the plebeian quartiers of Paris, opening the city to artillery fire and cavalry charges against barricades, the sizable neighborhood pockets left behind retained an imperturbable rebellious vitality that finally culminated in the Paris Commune. Few of Europe’s major cities were spared crowd actions and uprisings in the nineteenth century, indeed well into the first half of the twentieth. As industrial capitalism spread out from England into western Europe and America, the initial destabilization it produced as a result of urbanization and mechanization was followed by a regeneration of popular culture along new patterns that also included the integration of old ones. Just as the French village was reproduced as quartiers in French cities and the Spanish pueblo as barrios in Spanish cities, so the Jewish shtetl, the “Little Italys,” and “Little Irelands” were reproduced in altered form but with much Of their cultural flavor, personal intimacies, and traditional values in world cities such as New York. Even the industrial cities replicated on a local basis the specific cultural origins of their variegated populations and regions.
The elaboration of the Industrial Revolution into a textile economy in England, a luxury goods economy in France, an electrochemical economy in Germany (itself a second industrial revolution in the last half of the nineteenth century), and an automotive economy in America did not eliminate this “underground” communal world. Which is not to say that any of the countries cited above did not also, expand economically and technologically into the key industries that distinguished each from the other. But the textile manufacturing that catapulted England into the world market and even helped to make it; the fashioning of luxury goods that gaye France, especially Paris, its distinction as the artistic center of the world; and the mass production of electrochemical commodities and automobiles by Germany and the United States, respectively, which finally began to transform the world into its present form—all seemed to carry over into the popular culture and give it specific national features. We find a fixidity in England along industrial lines that appears in its conventional and underground cultures as well: a strong system’of orders, open enough to add titles to the names of its gifted plebeians but consciously hierarchical in its cultural and social structure with a tendency to. retain social status and elaborate it along stable lines. The intellectuality of France, expressed by its esthetic emphasis in industrial production, carried over into the popular culture as a discursive politics that nourished an ideologically innovative working class, largely ar tisanal in its outlook but with all the intellectuality of that stratum. Germany, which seems to have straddled the hierarchical culture of England and the intellectual culture of France, gave rise to a philosophically inclined popular Culture that took pride in its academic spokesmen as surely as English workers were endeared to noblemen who often spoke on their behalf. The pragmatism and dynamism of American culture, with its strong republican values, carried into the popular culture as various images of the “American Dream,” partly utopian, partly materialistic, in which the automobile symbolized enhanced sexuality together with freedom of movement, both socially upward and territorially outward. This symbolism was to shape American architecture and city planning by producing the first skyscrapers and the most sprawling, homogeneous “cities” of the twentieth century, even if one includes London.
Yet every class culture was always a community culture, indeed a civic culture—a fact that finks the period of the Industrial Revolution and its urban forms with precapitalist cultures of the past. This continuity has been largely overlooked by contemporary socialists and sociologists. While the factory and mill formed the first fine of the class struggle in the last century, a struggle that in no way should be confused with the class war that is supposed to yield working-class insurrections, its fines of supply reached back into the neighborhood and towns where workers lived and often mingled with middle-class people, farmers, and intellectuals. Wage earners had human faces, not merely mystified proletarian faces, and functioned no less as human beings than class beings. Accordingly, they were fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, citizens and neighbors, not only “factory hands.” Their concerns included issues such as war and peace, environmental dislocation, educational opportunities, the beauty of their surroundings as well as its ugliness, and in times of international conflict, a heavy dose of jingoism and nationalism—indeed a vast host of problems and concerns that were broadly human, not only class-oriented and rooted in wages and working conditions.
This communal dimension of the industrial era is of tremendous importance in understanding how class conflicts often spilled over beyond economic issues into broadly social, even utopian, concerns. Indeed as long as the market did not dissolve the communal dimension of industrialism, there was a richly fecund, highly diversified, cooperative, and innovative domain of social and political fife to which the proletariat could retreat after working hours, a domain that retained a vital continuity with precapitalist fife-ways and values. This partly municipal, partly domestic domain formed a strong countervailing force to the impact of an industrial
economy and the nation-state. Here, workers mingled with a great variety of individuals, particularly artisans, intellectuals, and farmers who brought their produce into the towns. In a purely human fashion that revealed all the facets of their personalities, they developed a sense of shared, active citizenship. This communal or municipal citizenship kept political fife alive even in highly centralized and bureaucratized nation-states. It would be difficult to understand not only the radical uprisings of the nineteenth century but also the twentieth—particularly the series of urban and agrarian uprisings that culminated in the Spanish Civil War—without keeping this communal dimension of the “class struggle” clearly in mind. Every class movement from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries was also a civic movement, a product of neighborhood, town, and village consociation, not only the factory, farm, and office. It was not until a technology developed that could make deep, perhaps decisive, inroads into this “underground” municipal domain that politics and citizenship were faced with the total “commodification” of society, the supremacy of statecraft, and the subversion of the city’s ecological diversity and creativity.
The older generation of our time is still too close to the present and the younger too far from the past to realize the extent to which communal, precapitalist cultural traditions permeated the first half of the twentieth century. Nor do we fully realize how rapidly these traditions are being simplified and the extent to which they are disappearing in the second half of the century, largely as a result of sweeping technological and cultural developments that occurred during the Second World War and its aftermath. Science systematically applied to technics has only recently revealed the deepest secrets of matter and fife with nucleonics and bioengineering. We are just making contact with the possibilities opened by cybernetics, space travel, and communications systems for public surveillance, not to speak of mass “mind bending” with techniques that will make conventional advertising methods seem childish and means of detection that will make fingerprints seem primitive.
The psychological implications of these chilling advances are as significant as their cultural and institutional ones. The military armamentorium they have produced is as disempowering to the individual as it is frightening to the public. The result is that the ego itself tends to become passive, disembodied, and introverted in the face of a technological and bureaucratic gigantism unprecedented, indeed unimaginable, in earlier human history. Public life, already buffeted by techniques for engineering public consent, tends to dissolve into private life, a form of mere survivalism that can easily take highly sinister forms. Citizenship, in turn, tends to retreat into an increasingly trivialized egoism in which banal conversation and venal pursuits replace searching discourse and rebellious demands. Even more than ordinary individuals, the people of mind and art who formed for ages the troubled conscience of past societies and were deeply engaged in public life as the principal catalysts for achieving the good society—in short, those socially involved thinkers whom the Russians of the last century called the intelligentsia—retreat into the confines of the academy and are transformed into mere intellectuals. Research tends to replace creative speculation; libraries tend to replace the cafes that nourished a Diderot; classrooms replace the squares that brought a Desmoulins to the surface of public life; the academic conference and its journals replace the clubs and presses that provided the public forum for a Thomas Paine.
Industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century treated a market economy in which production and exchange still formed a layer;of social life, not a substitute for society. The “cash nexus” that Marx and Engels regarded as the core of the new economy in The Communist Manifesto—culturally as well as commercially—was evidence more of their foresight than a description of the f actual conditions of their times. Important barriers stood between the penetration of the “cash nexus” created by the factory and by commerce into the community and domestic life, where the oppressed in all their different forms and even the agrarian squirearchy seethed with hatred of the new economy. The Speenhamland Law, which English country squires passed in the 1790s to provide the material means for keeping the rural population out of the emerging factory system, reveals the stronghold precapitalist patronal traditions had on a society in the very midst of the Industrial Revolution.
What is Unique about the post-World War II era, now unfolding four decades after tbe war’s end, is that the market economy to which industrial capitalism gave a firm and dominant productive base is turning into a market society. The “cash nexus” has become an all-embracing commodity nexus in which consumption, not only production, has become an end in itself. Objects now mediate nearly all the social relationships that once had a living and creative flesh-and-blood character. Popular culture, which meant the disdained culture produced from below by the people, has now become “pop culture,” the synthetic “culture” generated from above by the mass manufacture of books, sounds, pictures, movies, radio shows, and, above all, television “goodies”—from news to situation comedies, soap operas, and even serialized novels that transfix millions of viewers to their “tubes.” Human relationships are increasingly defined in terms of material things and expressed in a commercial vernacular—be it marriage as an “investment,” child rearing as a “job,” life as a “balance sheet,” ideals as things one “buys,” and community as a “business.” The notion that towns and cities should be “managed” by “entrepreneurs” as though the civic bond has no dimensions to it other than its “efficiency” in coordinating “services” and its capacity for generating “revenues” permeates the language not only of bankers, merchants, politicians, and retailers but even liberal and—most tellingly—socialist public officials. Social life, so conceived and lived in the form of marriage, child rearing, education, friendship, conviviality, entertainment, culture, and values, reveals a degree of commodity penetration and commercialism unprecedented even in the halcyon days of “free trade” and capitalist production.
Which is not to say that the period following the Second World War did not have its preludes in the pre-war era. Technologically, the radio and particularly the cinema had a strong grip on popular culture throughout the twenties and thirties. The automobile and the vast economy created were already part of American life well before the outbreak of the war. Mercifully, the Great Depression of the 1930s froze this development for a decade, and the war aborted it for an added five years while the world reverted to the barbarism of organized slaughter and urban demolition. The assembly line was a portent of what was soon to come as was the increasing wedding of science to technology, which the war put on a thoroughly systematic basis.
But there was much that these pre-war preludes to the postwar era left untouched. The Depression had given a bad name to capitalism and placed its legitimacy in grave doubt. This loss of faith stimulated a sweeping drift toward cultural and social movements that challenged the system’s integrity and claims to meet human needs. Agrarian life still had a strong base in American and French society, even as depression foreclosures reduced its economic significance. As late as 1929, twenty-five percent of the employed labor force in the United States owned or worked labor-intensive farms that had changed very little from the last century. Approximately three-fourths of American agricultural produce was sold at home. Although tractors were beginning to appear in growing numbers, horses were still in wide use and kerosene was still a major fuel for illuminating farm homes. Culturally, agrarian values were very much alive in America. They were embodied in the high proportion of immigrants from the villages of eastern Europe, Italy, and Ireland, and in the yeoman farmers who were being scattered throughout the continent by the dust storms that swept over middle America.
The Depression, in fact, witnessed a remarkable regeneration of precapitalist agrarian values. The end of the First World War had seen a cultural mystification of urbanism and substantial migrations of young people from rural areas to cities. Songs such as “How Can You Keep Them Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen ‘Par-ee!’ ” typified a glorification of urban lifestyles in the 1920s. The rural “hick,” once conceived as the source of America’s sturdy republican values and the “pioneer” of continental settlement, had become a caricature in the cartoons, literature, and cinema of the twenties, a “country-cousin” bumpkin who would do well to conceal his identity in the “big city.” This remarkable change in the historical imagery of Americans reflected the ascendancy of the industrial city and the modern age over the small town and the Jeffersonian age—in short, the cosmopolitan capitalistic era over the parochial precapitalist era.
The Depression decade reversed this imagery dramatically. For millions of unemployed or economically uncertain Americans, capitalism was patently not a working system. For all the hoopla about the decline of socialism as a movement from its high point in the period immediately preceding the First World War, it is worth recalling that Norman Thomas, the presumed heir of Eugene V. Debs, received 900,000 votes in 1932 as the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate, a figure that comes very close to Debs’s highest vote some fifteen years earlier. The Depression reversed the migration from farm to city, at least until the dust storms of later years drove many farmers to other parts of the country. Rural culture also began to thrive in the mass media of the decade, particularly as an evocation of community values, mutual aid, and compassion for less fortunate people. The extraordinary degree of social vitality that marked the 1930s stands in marked contrast to the socially devitalizing selfishness of the 1920s, which celebrated Calvin Coolidge’s maxim: “America’s business is business”—and, one might reasonably add, let morality go to the devil. Social justice, not personal venality, rings through the thirties as the motif of the radical left and radical right. Indeed, for much of the political spectrum, the business ethic was relegated to damnation together with the values of the twenties, which to many Americans had brought on the crises of the thirties.
Characteristically, the cinematic foppery of the twenties and early thirties began to give way to movies that focused on such themes as poverty, unionism, justice, and the pristine values of agrarian lifeways. Even where capitalists are shown in a benign light, such as in The Devil and Miss Jones, businessmen were seen as converts to the new humanitarianism and the high sense of public responsibility that marked the decade. Others, like Mr. Deeds Ges to Town and Grapes of Wrath, unabashedly lauded precapitalist rural values and vilified the rich, hypostasizing the face-to-face simplicity and high moral sense of the small town. The rural community was set ethically against the spiritual poverty and cynicism of the city. A cultural populism swept over America after 1935 that has no parallel with any time before the 1890s, one that gave to community, public service, political idealism, and social justice a premium that makes the decade unique in twentieth-century American history.
To a leftist of the 1930s, it seemed that industrial capitalism had reached its economic, social, and cultural limits; that from an ascending society, it had begun to descend historically, just as feudalism did centuries earlier. The Depression held on doggedly up to the Second World War; indeed, in the judgment of some economists, the closing years of the thirties appeared to be drifting into a new economic crisis comparable to or worse than the one that had darkened the decade’s opening years. Technological advance, saddled by the inertial weight of an increasingly monopolistic economy, seemed to have come to a virtual end. The monographs of the Temporary National Economic Committee of the late thirties, established to assess the growth and effects of business concentration in the United States, were filled with citations of technological stagnation, indeed the suppression of technical innovations that made for higher productivity and lower prices. That these innovations, seen as a source of economic instability and oligarchic control, had been generally arrested was’ cited by the literature of the time as evidence of a “decline” of capitalism itself and as proof of the Marxian thesis that “bourgeois social relations” stood in a “historical contradiction” to the “mode of production.” Capitalism, it was argued by liberals and leftists alike, was incapable of furthering the “productive forces” of society and could no longer play a “historically progressive” role.
Yet there were also harbingers of significant tendencies counteractive to the radical analyzes that marked the decade. Rural electrification was to basically alter the traditional agrarian life-ways that the Depression decade celebrated. It brought the radio into the home and exposed a socially pristine population to the mass media. The spate of public works that marked the Roosevelt era opened roads into the remaining hinterlands of the continent and the automobile culture improved existing roads for engine-powered vehicles. The great federal highway system of a later generation was to give, the coup de grâce to regional isolation and network the entire country with a remarkable road system that all but obliterated centuries-old cultural variations and customs. Distance and time were being overcome by the internal combustion engine, whether by rail, road, or air.
Finally, the need for state intervention into a failing “free enterprise” economy vastly strengthened the nation-state and enlarged its bureaucratic apparatus. Rural life, however much it was celebrated culturally, was being locked into urban life and the city increasingly placed in a position subordinate to the nation-state. Business, too, was becoming concentrated and centralized. By 1929, nearly half of American industrial wealth was controlled by 200 large corporations and by 1932, despite the ravages of the Depression—or perhaps because of them—600 corporations controlled nearly two-thirds of the country’s industrial economy. Politically and economically, power was to concentrate and centralize into fewer hands, linked together by an endless number of bureaus, bureaucrats, and shared interests that were to prepare the way for the “technobureaucratic” nation-state so characteristic of our own time.
The Second World War, while holding the values of die thirties somewhat in place during the first half of the forties, foisted another Industrial Revolution on western society whose scope, as we are now beginning to see, rivals the shift of humanity from a hunting-gathering society to an agricultural one. By 1946, the technical basis had been created for a world that men and women of the thirties could never have anticipated. Electronics, nuclear power, giant strides in biochemical research, and the sophistication of rocket propulsion, not to speak of less visible but monumental advances in physics, chemistry, and biology that were tb yield revolutionary applications of scientific knowledge to industry, were to totally change the economic landscape. Political change for “total war” had already given rise in Europe to a new phenomenon in the west—the totalitarian state—beside which royal absolutism seems in retrospect like a feeble thing. The population dislocations created by military mobilization as well as war refugees, followed by the expansion of migration of industry to the western United States, and the pouring of billions into European reconstruction, vastly transformed the urban landscape. Los Angeles, a “small” city in the thirties by present-day standards, became the “paradigm” for unlimited, unplanned, and sprawling urbanization with its individual anomie, and a predatory form of capitalistic enterprise that overshadowed the “Roaring Twenties,” with its naive imagery of personal greed and vice. The fifties introduced a more anonymous and faceless phenomenon: corporate greed and commercialized vice, the marketing of managerialism and suburban self-indulgence (material as well as sexual) as a new way of life and a new set of values.
Cities were to lose not only their territorial form; they were to to lose their cultural integrity and uniqueness. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, particularly as embodied in the sartorial conventions of Gregory Peck, became the avatar for the new managerial bureaucratism, despite the movie’s tribute to suburban family fife. Social justice, idealism, and agrarian values of community gave way to privatization, self-indulgence, and suburban cookouts. The desiderata of a corporate age, its synthetic and highly personalized culture, was a sanitized and socially vacuous world, held together not by the “underground” culture of past centuries but by an “above-ground” culture engineered by government and corporations. A mass society, notable for its de-spiritualized and amoral version of “possessive individualism” had emerged from the debris of the thirties, a mass society structured around television networks, counseling offices, bureaucratic agencies, and, above all, commodities. The market society had begun to come into its own, destructuring the city, the domestic world, the psyche, and ultimately the natural world. “Man,” brought into collision with “man” in a highly competitive world mediated by commodities, was finally brought into collision with nature on a scale unprecedented in history.
Urbanization may be taken as the symbol and the reality of this historic ecological disarray of the modern landscape—indeed this reversal of the evolutionary clock—from organic to synthetic human and biotic relationships. Nor can this disarray be sorted out and pieced together on the summits of social fife. Historically, the power of preindustrial fifeways to survive and preserve a moral sense of social fife depended on the existence of an “underground” culture in towns, neighborhoods, and cities—even during the stormiest periods of nation-building, industrialization, and “commodification”—to countervail the power of the market and the official culture. They depended, in effect, upon the power of a popular culture to resist the elite culture and, in no small part, on the inability of the elite culture to successfully penetrate the popular one. The crisis of our time as expressed in the decline of political fife and citizenship, of community and individuality in the classical sense of these concepts, stems from the invasion and colonization of culture’s subterranean domain by a highly metastatic capitalistic technics and its commodities. Objectified and fragmented, the social bond itself faces dissolution. What we call the “grassroots” of society is turning into straw, and its soil—the locality or municipality—is turning into sand. Whatever evidence of “fertility” and “fife” these roots exhibit seems to be the result of toxic chemicals—mass media, bureaucratic sinews, and managerial controls—the nation-state and corporations seem to be pouring into its bedrock, just as agribusiness generates “food” out of the chemically saturated sponge we call “soil” today.
Redemption must come from below, from the municipal level where the “underground” culture of past times flourished, not from an “above” that constitutes the very source of the problems we face. The “long march through the institutions,” which sixties radicals such as Rudi Dutschke advocated in Germany and Herbert Marcuse evoked in America more than a decade ago, has demonstrated that it is the institutions that ultimately absorb modern rebels, not the rebels who capture the institutions.
Urbanization, insofar as it still permits the city to retain any identity, alters not only its form but its function as a civilizing arena for humanity. The “stranger” who could once find a home in the city and a role in its political fife as a citizen atavistically reverts to his or her status as an alien. Ghettoization moves hand in hand with urban sprawl, the dissolution of the self hand in hand with the city’s dissolution. Bureaucracy fills the vacuum created by the absence of an active community fife, notably the police officer who is the last custodian of order in disintegrating neighborhoods and the social worker who is the last custodian of order in domestic life. Critically viewed, the social ecology of urbanization is the’ compelling story of the destructuring of all social life from home to community, the erosion of heterogeneity, interaction, and civic creativity. The return of the stranger expresses the change from the “lonely crowd,” explored by David Reisman three decades ago in his book of same name—indeed, to, the fearful crowd of today, a crowd in which everyone moves guardedly through the modern city with a sense of subdued dread toward surrounding people and unfamiliar neighborhoods. As urbanization spreads, so too does the state machinery needed to administer it. Whatever its form, the nation : state increasingly approximates a totalitarian state and the privatized individual, riddled by egoism and fear, increasingly becomes more like one commodity among many rather than a consumer. Ultimately, society threatens to become as inorganic as an ecosystem that has been divested of its flora and fauna. When totalitarianism eventually does emerge, it is likely that the coherent self, so direly needed to resist it, will have undergone such erosion that it may well lack the psychological resources to recognize the danger, much less oppose it.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 02, 2021 : Chapter 7 -- Added.
January 16, 2022 : Chapter 7 -- Updated.
HTML file generated from :
http://revoltlib.com/