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| A solemn crowd gathers outside the Stock Exchange after the crash. 1929. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
My Log 323 Oct 4 2012: A Last Word on Eric Hobsbawm, the wonderful British social historian, whose death at the age of 95 I referred to in a recent blog. In August 1996 I wrote the following article for
Canadian Forum magazine, based on my reading of Hobsbawm's book about what he called
Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century. The article testifies to my high regard for his intellectual and social wisdom.
MY
LIFE AND SHORT CENTURY
A
socialist balance sheet for the 20th century
by
BOYCE RICHARDSON
Published in The Canadian Forum,
July/August 1996
The year after I was born the
economy of the Western world collapsed. The drama began on Wall Street, but
quickly reached into the tiny farming village in the far south of New Zealand
where I had become the sixth child of a carpenter who built farm gates and cow
byres.
My family was
plunged into crisis. Three of my older brothers had to leave school and work
for my Dad for nothing, so that he could ease his family through the Great
Slump. My fourth brother was told on Friday that he was leaving school on
Monday to go work for a building supply firm. He did as he was told and was
stuck for ten years in a job he hated.
At the other end
of the country, far to the north, my wife Shirley’s parents were struggling in
the same way. Every penny was precious, clothes were handed down through the
family, every bus or ferry ticket was a significant expenditure, every
vegetable grown in the family garden an important resource. Her father was a
labourer in a factory, a courageous man who defied the perils of an age of mass
unemployment to help form a union and, later, to elect the first Labour
government.
That socialist
victory in 1935 lifted the spirits of working people. A year after the
election, my wife’s grandmother, an elderly Maori born in 1855, gave Shirley a
watch for her birthday. Thanked effusively for this wondrous gift, the old lady
said, with calm but total conviction, “Don’t thank me, dear. Thank Michael Joseph
Savage.” He was the Labour Prime Minister.
I have often marvelled at how fortune
has favoured me. A child of the Depression, yet too young to be really affected
by it; too young to go to war; and then, as the world emerged from war, an
adult revelling in years of full employment, economic plenty and the
beneficence of what we now call the welfare state. And yet the fact is, I was
born smack in the middle of what historian Eric Hobsbawm in Age of Extremes: the Short 20th Century calls
the, “Age of Catastrophe”, which he de- scribes as the most brutal era in the
history of civilization.
How could a guy get so lucky? While
my older brothers were in the army, while millions of decent people around the
world were scrabbling desperately to keep body and soul together, and millions
were later mercilessly herded into concentration camps and gas ovens, or
condemned to starvation in massive famines, or reduced to huddling in the
cellars of bombed-out, once-beautiful cities, I was a teenager playing cricket
and football on idyllic summer evenings and getting a democratic education in
a good high school.
Hobsbawm explains how, in 1914,
human beings began a retreat from the material, intellectual and moral progress
of the 19th century into a state of absolute barbarism unparalleled in history.
I didn’t know it, but capitalism, the predatory economic system in which I grew
up, was mired in a deep crisis from which it was rescued only by the
mobilization needed to win the Second World War.
For some reason I grew up disliking
the system, and always expecting to be on the wrong side of authority. Perhaps
that sense came from a day when I was 14 and the headmaster of my high school
told us all during a chemistry class, “There’ll be no millionaires in the
future, you know.” It was a classic mistake in futurology, but it had a big
effect on at least one pupil, and I wish there were more headmasters like him
today.
Or perhaps my political values came
from the time (I was still in my teens) when a dissident member of the Labour
Party toured the country to persuade people that the banks should be
nationalized. His speech was serious politics, expressed to a serious audience,
and it drew 1,500 people on a Sunday night in our small city. That’s what
politics should be like, I felt — dissenting voices, constantly arguing for improvements
in society. We were far, then, from the era of the seven-second sound bite.
Perhaps my belief in socialism came
from the knowledge that, in our small country, we had somehow managed to build
a humanist tradition. New Zealand was one of the first countries in the world
to have an old-age pension (1898), and the first in the English-speaking world
to create a national health scheme (1938), described by Savage as “applied
Christianity” (and brought in, of course, as later in Britain and Saskatchewan,
against the shrill opposition of all the conservative elements in society).
I never had any doubt that the welfare
state was good. And now Hobsbawm, in his magisterial survey of our century,
confirms that it was the welfare state that actually saved capitalism from its
own worst instincts. Those who had fought that war to end all wars believed
things would never again be the same, that the old order had to give way to a
new and better world. “The Great Slump [of the 1930s],” writes Hobsbawm,
“confirmed intellectuals, activists and ordinary citizens in the belief that
something was fundamentally wrong with the world they lived in.”
Hobsbawm's marvellous book (written
at the ripe age of 77) takes me by the hand and, unlike any other book I have
ever read, explains my life to me.
The “Age of Catastrophe” ended in
1945, the very year I left high school and became a worker. Throughout what is
now called the developed world, people who’d suffered began to insist that the
harshness of the economic system be alleviated. The Scandinavian countries
began their remarkable years of social engineering, aimed at improving the
collective welfare. The British electorate kicked out their great national hero,
Winston Churchill, even before the war was finished; the Labour government
that succeeded him, embracing the reformist thinking of Keynes and Beveridge,
introduced fundamental measures designed to ameliorate the living conditions of
the common people. Thus we entered the era of the welfare state, described by
Hobsbawm as the “Golden Age of Capitalism”, successor to the "Age of
Catastrophe”.
It is profoundly satisfying to note
that these years of my adulthood brought “the most dramatic, rapid and profound
revolution in human affairs of which history has record”. Amen to that: I have
been not only a beneficiary of the welfare state, but a firm believer in it and
a proponent of it. And that will never change. I have never voted for a
Conservative (and I never will), because Conservatives do not want an
egalitarian society. I have always known that more than any other political
system, democratic socialism concerns itself with the quality of life of the
ordinary working person.
My wife and I left New Zealand in
1950 to take a good look at the world —a trip from which we never returned.
In many ways the world, although
still recovering from the great conflict, was a beautiful place, easy to move
around in. For a few years we lived a sort of personal odyssey, a couple of
relatively innocent youngsters gobbling up experience: we stood wide-eyed
under the Gateway to India, cycled past unimaginable graveyards in destroyed
European landscapes, talked earnestly with German ex-soldiers, hung
goggle-eyed over French charcuterie and patisserie shops, and tramped through
museums, marvelling at the great artworks of our century.
“It was like the whole world was
waiting for us,” Shirley said recently. “We were able to do whatever we wanted,
and go anywhere.” For one thing, we had British citizenship, and much of the
post-Imperialist world was open to us for that very reason. By the time we
completed our odyssey, we’d been immigrants into four countries.
We went to Australia first, where we
found the right-wing Menzies government. Sick-making! The next year, fed on a
diet of Gandhi and Nehru and the glories of the struggle against colonialism,
we went to India, three years after partition. Hundreds of thousands of
refugees were living on the sidewalks. For the first time we came into contact
with how things had been, and still were over much of the world, during the
"Age of Catastrophe”.
We saw people dying from starvation
and children lying on sidewalks, their bones sticking through their skins,
literally minutes from death. We worked in a rehabilitation colony for refugees
north of Delhi. There we met splendid people, animated by the left-wing ideals
in which we believed, working to overcome the horrors of the system they had
inherited from the British; and others, more complacent, more conservative, who
were quite content to take their salaries and carry on as if nothing needed to
be done. For a time we lived among the poorest people in the world, Indian
peasants, and they embarrassed us with their hospitality, overwhelmed us with
their generosity of spirit.
Now we began really to understand
the terrors of poverty and lack of opportunity; the urgency of equalizing
wealth in every corner of the globe; the horrors of race discrimination, a
major legacy of colonialism; the need for people to embrace each other,
regardless of colour, creed or social condition.
Faced with the reality of a brutal
world, I began to interpret modern history as an inexorable movement to introduce
decency into the management of human affairs. In my reading of it, this
movement began with the TolpuddIe Martyrs, the six agricultural labourers in
Britain who first dared to take a union oath in 1834, and were transported to
Australia for their bravery. Their action gave rise to the labour-union
movement, for which, in the next 150 years, thousands of people laid their
bodies on the line against harsh employers and brutal conditions. Equivalent
movements were under way throughout the world — against colonialism, racism,
apartheid, and economic and social injustice — and I began to understand that
all these struggles were one. I came to believe that there has never been
anything more decent and inspiring, at any time in history, than this slow
development towards an egalitarian world, this struggle to improve the lot of
common people everywhere.
Our money ran out in India, and we
had to leave. We arrived in Britain just in time to see the Labour Party go
down to defeat, the restoration of Churchill as Prime Minister. And now I began
to realize that the very decency of socialism, its very democratic ethos, was
its major handicap. The wealth-owners had no scruples, and did not hesitate to
lie about left-wing governments, twisting the lie into people’s minds by using
the immense levers for influencing opinion that lay within their control.
In Britain (as earlier in New Zealand),
it had been a self-educated working-class politician, Aneurin Bevan — one of
the great political orators of our century — who had forced through the National Health Act, the cornerstone of the
British welfare state. This was a major achievement in a society as
class-ridden as Britain, and even the governments of Churchill, and later of
Macmillan (both of whom we lived under), never set out systematically to destroy
what Labour had built. For me, that was a key point. The values of the welfare
state were becoming entrenched in every civilized society. They were
permanent. Or so I naively thought.
When we came to Canada in 1954, we
found the CCF/NDP injecting their mildly leftist ideas into the mainstream
political discourse. I came to believe that the existence of this party was
perhaps the main thing that differentiated Canada from the free-enterprising
United States. I supported (but never joined) the CCF/NDP, and voted for them
until Bob Rae’s apostate government effectively disenfranchised people like
me, and I couldn’t make my cross for them, even while holding my nose.
But time moves
on; influences change. The welfare state had been built by a gerontocracy that
dated back to the First World War, and bore the scars and memories of
everything that had happened since. But by the 1960s, the children of those
people as they grew into adulthood had been sundered from that historical
memory. They grew up in a prosperous, free-spending world, a fully-employed generation
for whom political awareness was gradually replaced by private feelings and
desires, such as those expressed in the famous posters of the 1968 student
revolt in France: “I shall call anything that worries me political”; “I take
my desires for reality, for I believe in the reality of my desires”; “When I
think of revolution, I want to make love”. Perhaps to the dismay of their
parents, they seemed ready to embrace what Hobsbawm calls “the unlimited
autonomy of individual desire."
Such people were
not equipped to oppose in any effective way the immense power of those who
controlled wealth. Hobsbawm writes: “The old moral vocabulary of rights and
duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards and
penalties, could no longer be translated into the new language of desired
gratification. Once such practices and institutions were no longer accepted
as part of a way of ordering society that linked people to each other and
ensured social cooperation and reproduction, most of their capacity to
structure human social life vanished. They were reduced simply to expressions
of individuals’ preferences....”
The creation of a
generation with such beliefs was an unexpected side-effect of a social
liberalization whose advantages, Hobsbawm says, “seemed enormous to all except
ingrained reactionaries."
Much about the new mass-society isolated people,
rather than drawing them together. Perhaps we are all guilty. Many of us have
become accustomed to (and, in my case, have insisted upon) the privacy and
detachment of an individual’s life jn the modern city. Even some of our
welfare measures, demanded by socialists for so long, have changed social relationships in ways that increased anomie
among people. In fact, we have had little choice: the temper of the times, not
our individual choices, dictates such things.
I have never
really understood why the welfare state has fallen out of favour with the
public. (Or has it? Maybe that’s just propaganda, relentless and unceasing, and
successful.) Hobsbawm gives many interesting explanations, some economic, some
psychological.
By 1980, the
wealth-owners felt confident enough in their power to launch an attack, as
Churchill and Macmillan had never dared to do, on the very bases of the welfare
state. Ronald Reagan, their political spokesman, seemed like an idiot, but he
knew how to put over simple ideas on television. One of those ideas — the most
dangerous, as it turns out — was that the government he headed was the enemy of
the people who had elected it. This hatred of government, propagated
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, has become embedded in the public
consciousness as more or less the norm. This has made it relatively simple for
the right to carry out its real agenda: the diversion of wealth from the poor
and middle class to the rich, something that has been achieved with lightning
speed in the last decade.
As a consequence,
the wealth-owners have obtained a stranglehold over money, trade and the
economy. This state of things has shown up at every level of society. For
example, at the local level, hundreds of people had to be willing to risk
imprisonment to stop the corporate rape of Clayoquot Sound, and even then they
didn’t really win. In Ontario in recent months, we have had to watch helplessly
as a neo-conservative government has ruthlessly closed halfway houses, women's
shelters and enterprises manned by the mentally handicapped.
At the national
level, voters were flummoxed by Mulroney, and the propaganda with which the
wealth-owners supported him, into approving his plan to sell the country to
American big business. At the global level, international financial
speculators, using uncontrollable high-tech communications, have been able to
force our governments to abdicate their responsibility to legislate in the
interests of their citizens (e.g. the Chretien government’s pathetic cave-in
on NAFTA, and the 1995 Martin budget).
And back in New
Zealand, the record of social legislation I grew up to be so proud of has been
thrown into the dustbin by a Labour government that never mentioned its plans
to the voters who elected it; and the country has been transformed (a huge
success story for conservatives!) into one of the four most inegalitarian nations
in the developed world.
There is great
irony involved: throughout the “Golden Age” it appeared that the welfare state had
saved capitalism from its own worst instincts. But the real reason that
capitalism had succeeded, Hobsbawm writes, was because “it was not just
capitalist”. Profit maximization and accumulation of wealth may have been
necessary conditions for its success, but they were not in themselves
sufficient. Slowly, from the 1970s, the global economy became less stable as
economic growth faltered, government revenues ceased to increase and, in these
more straitened economic circumstances, the welfare state began to weigh
heavily even on its strongest proponents, such as the Swedes.
Then the cultural
revolution in values that capitalism created, expressing that “unlimited
autonomy of individual desire”, began to erode the very bases of capitalism
itself. Hobsbawm is eloquent on the irony: looking down on the ruins of the
communist regimes that had opposed it, “capitalism triumphed at the very
moment when it ceased to be as plausible as it had once seemed. The market
claimed to triumph as its nakedness and inadequacy could no longer be
concealed.”
Finally, it has
become clear that capitalism has run out of control. What Hobsbawm calls “the
iron logic of mechanization” has clicked in. It has long been assumed that
alternative employment would be created for those thrown out of work by
machines, just as the peasantry, in an earlier time, had been absorbed by the
Industrial Revolution. But now it is obvious that this is not happening. Under
the pressure of the “prevailing free-market ideology”, government has ceased
to be the employer of last resort, and workers are once again at the mercy of
private firms “which, by definition, consider no interest but their own
pecuniary one”. So we have the creation of huge, impoverished Third World urban
populations and, in the developed world, the emergence of a significant
underclass, now growing rapidly everywhere.
As we entered the
1990s, as familiar ways of life crumbled, people began to lose their bearings.
It was now that “a culture of hate” (largely propagated by the American
entertainment machine with its individualist values) began to show up in the
lyrics of popular music and the growing cruelty of films and television
programs.
Take, for
exampIe, the changing ethos of the American fllm, one of the world’s dominant forms
of popular culture. In the early westerns, violence — the sock on the jaw as
the solution to all personal problems, the gunfighter shooting it out with the
bad guys on behalf of an innocent community —was seen in the context almost of
a fairy tale. By the 1960s, however, what Hobsbawm calls “the technology-based
triumph of sound and image” had virtually put to rout all of the assumptions
about classical or elite culture with which earlier generations had grown up.
The images that now accompany us from birth to death are those of advertising,
consumption and mass entertainment, the sounds those of commercial pop music.
The depiction of violence in a good guys-bad guys context has gradually evolved
into a glorification of violence as an end in itself.
All of this, of
course, has spun over into political conflict. A few years ago, even violent
political protesters recognized certain limits to their behaviour. Now we live
in a world where the United States can send bombers to Libya in violation of
all previously recognized norms of international behaviour, with the object of
"taking out” the Libyan leader; where a terrorist targeted by the Israeli
security forces picks up a phone and has his head blown off; where that act
gives rise to a series of awful events in which obsessed religious fanatics
are willing to meet their maker so long as they can “take out" dozens of
their hated enemies. A culture of hatred indeed, spreading inexorably
throughout the world.
Thus we arrive at
Hobsbawm’s troubling and superb final chapter, his summary of human life as we
head “towards the millennium”’ confronting “problems for which nobody has, or
even claims to have, solutions”.
For the first
time in two centuries, he writes, we lack any international system of structure.
New states are popping up almost every year. And identity politics, the right
of ethnic groups to self-determination, which he describes as a “combination of
intellectual nullity with strong, even desperate emotions” (he includes Quebec
nationalism in this stricture), has become politically powerful in a time of
disintegrating states, creeds and institutions. The conflict between
Soviet-sponsored command socialism and free enterprise, which has dominated
the world for so many decades, “may turn out to be as irrelevant to the third millennium” as 16th-century
religious conflicts were for later centuries. But more worrying is the
disorientation that has hit those who would advocate a mixed economy, combining
private and public, market and planning, state and business — the type of
economy that has created the most impressive results in the history of
economics.
In addition, demography and ecology
have become the two central issues, requiring that a balance be struck among
humanity, the resources it consumes,
and the effect of its activities on the environment. “No one knows, and few
dare to speculate how this is to be done,” Hobsbawm writes. “One thing,
however, is undeniable. [The solution] will be incompatible with a world economy
based on the unlimited pursuit of profit by economic enterprises dedicated, by
definition, to this object and competing with each other in a global free
market.”
Hobsbawm finds three aspects of the
global economy “alarming”. These are:
• the “squeezing of human labour out of the
production of goods and services”, and the failure to provide other work for
those displaced;
• the inexorable movement, in a global labour
market, towards creation of widespread impoverishment (even in the developed
countries); and
• the loss, as a result of the triumph of
free-market ideology, of the instruments that nation-states need to
manage the social effects of economic upheavals.
“The world economy is an increasingly
powerful and uncontrolled engine. Can it
be controlled, and if so, by whom?” he asks.
Again, a cruel irony: economic orthodoxy
has begun to eliminate social security at the very time that mass unemployment
appears to be settling in as a permanent feature of the modern economy. The
nation-state is in decline, battered by a world economy it cannot control, and by its own apparent inability to serve its
citizens and maintain public law and order.
Yet Hobsbawm warns that “the state,
or some other form of public authority representing the public interest”, has
become more indispensable than ever, if the social and environmental
inequities of the market economy are to be countered. The state is still needed to allocate and
redistribute income if we are to have an equitable society.
“It is absurd to argue,” he writes,
“that the citizens of the European Community, whose per-capita share of the
joint national income increased by 80 per cent from 1970 to 1990, cannot afford
the level of income and welfare in 1990 that had been taken for granted in
1970.” With this simple but devastating proposition, he explodes the ridiculous
economic policies that are transforming Canadian life for the worse in 1996.
He leaves us with a question that I
believe should be put to every senior-level high school class, so that young
people can get a realistic handle on the world they are now confronting.
What will happen, he asks — “the
scenario is not utterly fantastic” — if present trends continue and we develop
a society in which 25 per cent of the people are working, 75 per cent are not,
and the economy is producing twice as much per capita as it is now?
“Who, except public authority, would
and could ensure a minimum of income and welfare for all? Who could counter the
tendencies to inequality so strikingly visible in the Crisis Decades? To judge
by the experience of the 1970s and 1980s, not the free market.”
Of course, the
free-market ideologues— people such as Michael Walker, Andrew Coyne, David
Frum, Clare Hoy, Brian Mulroney, Mike Harris, Ralph Klein, Preston Manning et al, mean-spirited people whose views
are hammered into us by the mass media (“which is now a more important component
of the political process than parties and electoral systems”, writes Hobsbawm)
— hate the very idea of equality. They care nothing about the answer to such a
question.
Our future is not
safe in their hands. They have taken us back in a giant leap to the world of
uncertainty from which we thought the welfare state had rescued us. It looks as
if all the battles of our fathers will have to be fought over again.
Whether
generations dominated by “the unlimited autonomy of individual desire” are
equipped for this fight is a major question that will be answered in the next
decade or so. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the welfare state saved capltalism from
revolution by those millions who were oppressed by its harsh rules. But if the
welfare state is no more (as the neo-conservatives hope and pray), what will
save capitalism next time around? Hobsbawm is clear about one thing:
free-market economics cannot, by their very nature, solve the huge economic and
social problems of the near future. Is it conceivable that within 20 years or
so, those millions who are now being so heartlessly dropped off the social and
economic scale will get their act together and rise in rebellion against their
oppressors?
The
book referred
to in this article is Age of
Extremes: the Short 20th Century, by Eric
Hobsbawrn, published by Abacus, London, 1995, 627 pages, $19.95 paperback.
