¶ 10, 11, & 12: Introduction: My Grand Narrative: Slouching Towards Utopia: Notes & Long Notes
I am starting to go through the manuscript of my forthcoming book, paragraph-by-paragraph, adding in the full notes that could not make it into the print version...
¶ 10, 11, & 12: A 2.1 percent per year growth rate is a doubling every 33 years. That meant that the technological and productivity economic underpinnings of human society in 1903 were profoundly different from those of 1870—underpinnings of industry and globalization as opposed to one that was still agrarian and landlord-dominated. The mass-production underpinnings of 1936, at least in the industrial core of the global north, were profoundly different also. But the change to the mass consumption-suburbanization underpinnings of 1969 was as profound, and that was followed by the shift to the information-age microelectronic-based underpinnings of 2002. A revolutionized economy every generation cannot but revolutionize society and politics, and a government trying to cope with such repeated revolutions cannot help but be greatly stressed in its attempts to manage and provide for its people in the storms.[p]
Much good, but much ill also flowed: people can and do use technologies—both the harder ones, for manipulating nature, and the softer ones, for organizing humans—to exploit, to dominate, and to tyrannize. And the long twentieth century saw the worst and most bloodthirsty tyrannies that we know of.
And much that was mixed, both for good and for ill, also flowed. All that was solid melted into air—or rather, all established orders and patterns were steamed away.[7][q] Only a small proportion of economic life could be carried out, and was carried out, in 2010 the same way it had been in 1870. And even the portion that was the same was different: even if you were doing the same tasks that your predecessors had done back in 1870, and doing them in the same places, others would pay much less of the worth of their labor-time for what you did or made. As nearly everything economic was transformed and transformed again—as the economy was revolutionized in every generation, at least in those places on the earth that were lucky enough to be the growth poles—those changes shaped and transformed nearly everything sociological, political, and cultural.
Printed Endnotes:
[7] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, London: Communist League, 1848; Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, New York: Liveright, 2013; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Verso, 1983.
Longer Notes:
[p] A very, very nicely put thumbnail summary of the implications of the coming after 1870 of what Simon Kuznets named “Modern Economic Growth”. It destabilized politics and political economy around the globe. Shaky regimes crashed. Solid regimes became shaky. And rock-solid regimes began to feel earthquakes building:
Dominic Lieven: The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I & Revolution: ‘Although the Russian case is unique, in this respect too international comparisons are nevertheless very important. In the two generations before 1914, European society as a whole had been transformed more fundamentally than in centuries of earlier history. It was hard for anyone to keep his balance amid dramatic economic, social, and cultural change; predictions as to where change might lead in the future could inspire even greater giddiness…
LINK: <https://archive.org/details/endoftsaristruss0000liev>
Also:
Viktor Shvets (2021): The Great Rupture: Three Empires, Four Turning Points, and the Future of Humanity (Newark, OH: Boyle & Dalton) <https://www.amazon.com/dp/1633374106/>: High capital intensity combined with better-disciplined and trained labor drove the modern miracle of productivity that exploded around the 1870s and continued unabated for more than a century. A great deal of these gains accrued to labor, thus creating what later became known as the Western “middle class” and contributed toward successful re-inventions of various stages of capitalism and a decline in the attractiveness of communism, feudalism, and any other alternative ideology. Any society that refused to participate was condemned to both relative and absolute decline. Three factors were critical to success in this new world: openness to ideas, trade, and the extension of rights to an ever-widening segment of the population. Indeed, these three factors reinforced each other…
Before 1770, there were historical changes—political/military, literary/ideological/cultural, religious/social, and economic/technological. They worked on different time scales. Political/military affairs could overthrow orders and make new ones inside of a decade; literary/ideological/cultural required a generation; religious/social took a few centuries; and economic/technological took close to a millennium, at least. What that meant is that people might find themselves operating in a political/military context that might be brand-new, and in a literary/ideological/cultural framework that diverged from that of their parents, they still operated in a religious/social context that their grand- and great-grandparents would have found familiar, and there was barely any memory at all that there might have been a time in which the patterns of technology were substantially different. The fact that major changes in different realms proceeded along such different time scales had powerful consequences for how patterns of action and the institutions and orders that channeled them came under stress and were adopted in response.
From 1770 to 1870 the pace of economic change quickened. But it was really not the case that “all that was solid melts into air”.
That did not become true until after 1870.
But after 1870 it became true with a vengeance. And so over 1870-2010, repeated technological and economic revolutions shook, and shook, and shook the human world to pieces over and over again, and then people had to try to pick the pieces up and assemble them into something over and over again.
Which of the ancien régimes with capitals in Europe managed to avoid revolution and civil war in the transition to “modernity”? 1848 saw only Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, and Great Britain see little unrest. Piedmont—the Kingdom of Sardinia—avoided domestic insurrection by having its ancient régime put itself at the head of the Italian nationalist movement. The Russian Empire escaped radical or nationalist revolution in 1848—Poland had already tried to rebel in 1830. But that there would be a Russian Revolution of some form—more than a series of demonstrations followed by reform or by a coup—seemed very much in the cards. Nobody with a capital outside Europe’s far northwest corner seemed likely to escape.
Why? Because even in 1848 the underlying pace of socio-economic change was too great for an ancien régime to maintain its precarious perch. And the pace of global socio-economic change—in the average global technological underpinnings of society—was going to be amped-up by a factor of 4.5 as the world moved from the already extraordinary Industrial Revolution century of 1770-1870 to the post-1870 Modern Economic Growth era. Thus the post-1500 political-socio-economic history of the long 20th century was indeed, as Eric Hobsbawm says of his short 1914-1991 century, the history of an Age of Extremes. But the sheer magnitude of the wealth generated by technology those extremes more extreme on the high than on the low side: much more marvelous than terrible. But the terrible parts were very terrible indeed.
But why did it have to be terrible at all? Why couldn’t increasing wealth simply be semi-equitably distributed, and social and political systems adapt peacefully and gradually to underlying changing patterns of production and exchange and the relationships of social power that those patterns produced? Before 1870 the economy was changing only slowly, too slowly for people's lives at the end of a century to be that materially different from how they had been at the beginning. The economy was thus the painted-scene backdrop behind the stage, rather than the action on the stage.
From 1770-1870 there did indeed come an Industrial Revolution. But at its end, in 1870, in every country the bulk of people were still peasants, craftsmen, and servants working much as their ancestors a century before had done—even though the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph, the automated factory, the furnace, and the steam engine dominated the wealth-creation process. You could hang on.
British politics and governance in 1870 was different from how it had been in 1770, but not as different as the British economy was. French politics and governance had been utterly transformed. But for the other great powers—for their heads Regent Francisco Serrano Domínguez Cuenca y Pérez de Vargas, King Vittorio Emanuele Maria Alberto Eugenio Ferdinando Tommaso di Savoia, Emperor Franz Joseph Karl von Habsburg, Emperor Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig von Hohenzollern, Sultan Abdülaziz of the House of Osman, and Czar Aleksándr II Nikoláyevich Romanov, and for all their ministers, industrialization and its consequences were one of the major factors they had to deal with, but not major enough to totally transform how they tried to rule.
Then in 1870 we got the final institutional pieces needed to support global economic growth: the industrial research laboratory, the modern corporation, and full globalization. One gathered communities of engineering practice to supercharge economic growth. The other organized communities of competence to deploy the fruits of invention. With globalization, cheap ocean and rail transport that destroyed distance as a cost factor and allowed humans in enormous numbers to seek better lives, along with communications links that allowed us to talk across the world in real time. The coming of all three of these more or less at once was a truly mighty change, rationalizing and routinizing the discovery and development and the development and deployment and not just the local but the global deployment and diffusion of technological advances.
To put it another way, the industrial research lab fused science to technological innovation and technology to enterprise: a scientist could science, an inventor could invent, and a technologist could technologize without one person having to be all three—plus financier, manager, chief pitchman, human resource department, and so forth. Division of labor. And the bureaucratic corporation allowed the visible hand of management to scale a successful workshop and store nationwide, or worldwide. And then there was diffusion: what one bureaucratic corporation could do, another could duplicate. And duplicate worldwide, with globalization. Discovery, development, deployment, and diffusion—the rationalization and routinization of those are what more than quadrupled the proportional rate of technological progress in the years around 1870.
The coming of all these three more than quadrupled the pace at which humanity’s technological empire was increasing. And that post-1870 step-up in the growth rate lasted. Thereafter it has been, for all politicians, hang on for dear life—and desperately try to rebuild working institutions on the fly as the socio-economic underpinnings of society are revolutionized and then re-revolutionized every single generation.
Stepping back and looking at the big picture, the post-1870 acceleration in growth and the more than twenty-fold amplification of human technological prowess in the years since 180 is a REALLY BIG F---ING DEAL. Briefly and very very roughly, what twenty workers were needed to do in 1870 with their eyes, fingers, thighs, brains, mouths, and ears, 1 worker was able to do in 2010. To get an equivalent proportional jump in the other direction, you have to go back from 1870 to the Bronze Age—to the year -2000 or so. We are, proportionately, as separate in technology from the railroad's Golden Spike and the first transoceanic cables of 1880 as those were from the earliest chariots and the sculptor of the dancing girl of Mohenjo-Daro:
Moreover, the overwhelming bulk of the potential benefits for humans from that twenty-fold -6000 to 1870 upward creep of technological knowledge had been eaten up by growing resource scarcity: the land and other natural resources available to support 1 person in -6000 had to support 200 by 1870. Thus better technology did not lead to as much changes in the life of the average peasant, craftsman, or servant as one would think. And so the problems of and techniques for ruling Russia faced by Czar Aleksándr II Nikoláyevich Romanov in the year 1870 still bore a family resemblance to those faced by Ensi Gilgamesh, son of Lugulbanda, in Uruk in the year -3000.
Few people know or consider the extent to which, back even in 1870, for the working classes of even the richest countries in the world, sheer calories were a considerable constraint on your daily activities. You could work and do stuff until you had drained your energy budget and so were tired. Then you more or less had to stop. That the work or other stuff you could do was tightly constrained because you simply could not afford the calories that you needed to do it—that is not a thing in the global north today. Yet that was an important part of the experience of humanity back before 1870.
But thereafter much was different. As much economic change and creative destruction as had taken place over 1720-1870 took place every 33 years after 1870. And the pace of change over 1720-1870 had already been more than fast enough to shake societies and polities to pieces. "All that is solid melts into air", Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx had written in 1848: all established hierarchies and orders are steamed away. But even they had no real idea what was coming after 1870. For Freddie from Barmen and Charlie from Trier mistook dawn for high noon. Yes, the business class—the French term bourgeoisie was the word they ultimately settled on (they had, earlier, followed Heinrich Heine is using the unfortunate terms “Jews and the Jew-like”)—had done revolutionary things in the century before 1848. But polities and societies had, for the most part, creaked and groaned, but had not (yet) shattered.
The post-1870 faster-pace repeated economic creative destruction upended societies, and in addition to opportunities posed two problems for governments: How were they to deal with the "destructive" part of creative destruction as it upended the lives of their people? And how were they to deal with neighboring governments that decided to use enhanced technological powers for evil for destruction and oppression? At the sharp end, a government gone horribly wrong was a genocide-scale problem for the people under its boot, and for the people who were that government's neighbors. And so the long 20th century saw the worst tyrannies ever.
I think the best way into understanding the problems thus created by economic creative-destruction at the post-1870 is the path blazed by Karl Polanyi, who denounced this technological-advance market-economic project, in which humanity is made rich as a byproduct of profit-motivated economic agents responding to the price signals sent by the rich as a:
stark utopia… [that] could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society…. Society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it…
Think of it: Your community and its associated land-use and sociability patterns ("land"), your occupations and its remuneration on a scale appropriate to your status and to your desert resulting from your applying yourself ("labor"), and the very stability of and your ability to be paid for performing your job at all (“finance”)—all of these melt into air if they do not satisfy some maximum-profitability-use-of-resources test (“fictitious commodities”) imposed by some rootless cosmopolite thousands of miles away. Furthermore, it is a maximum-profitability test that is applied, not a societal-wellbeing test The (competitive, externality-free, in-equilbrium) market system definitely and certainly maximizes something. But what it maximizes is not any idea of the well-being of society, but rather the wealth-weighted satisfaction of the rich.
No: ‘The market giveth, the market taketh away; blessed be the name of the market' was not a stable principle around which a government could organize society and political economy. The only stable principle had to be some version of ‘The market was made for man, not man for the market’.
So society responded: people believe that they have other rights rather than property rights (which are valuable only if your particular piece of property is useful for producing things for which the rich have a serious jones). And so they strove to organize society to vindicate those other Polanyian rights. And so society did so by attacking the market, and by attacking all of those it saw as its internal and external enemies that the global market system was empowering to oppress them. And those enemies included their government, that was trying and failing to manage the process to everyone’s satisfaction. Upheaval was inevitable. Revolution nearly so.
In addition, there was nationalism. For nationalism, let me give the mic to the very sharp Cosma Shalizi, channeling the even sharper Ernest Gellner:
Cosma Shalizi: Ernest Gellner, “Nations & Nationalism”: ‘The inhabitants of… “Agraria” were economically static and internally culturally diverse…. Because industrial economies continually make and put into practice technical and organizational innovations… their occupational structures change significantly in a generation…. No one can expect to follow in the family profession…. Training must be much more explicit, be couched in a far more universal idiom, and emphasize understanding and manipulating nearly context-free symbols…. It must in short take on the characteristics formerly associated with the literate High Cultures of Agraria…. States become the protectors of High Cultures, of “idioms”; nationalism is the demand that each state succor and contain one and only one nation, one idiom…. Faced with a difference between one’s own idiom and that needed for success, people either acquire the latter, or see that their children do (assimilation); force their own idiom into prominence (successful nationalism); or fester….
To recap: industrialism demands a homogeneous High Culture; a homogeneous High Culture demands an educational system; an educational system demands a state which protects it; and the demand for such a state is nationalism. The theory is coherent, simple, widely applicable, convincing, and empirically testable (which tests, to all appearances, it passes).….
It is hard to decide whether nationalists or anti-nationalists will find Nations and Nationalism more disturbing; rootless cosmopolitan though I am, it changed my mind on a great many subjects. This is already a rare enough achievement for a philosopher or social scientist…. Unfortunately for those of us not enamoured of nationalism, he wasn’t talking rubbish at all…
Thus it is very comprehensible the pseudo-classical semi-liberal order governments tried to build on the fly in the mid- and late-1800s, in what was retrospectively called the Belle Époque, fell apart into so many different catastrophes. Governments and élites failed to manage economic creative-destruction at the fever-heat pace at which it lurched forward after 1870, This failure-to-manage led to many, many societal reactions against the ongoing rush of claims that all was OK, and turned Europe into a hellhole and an abattoir until 1945.
[q] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, London: Communist League, 1848 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf>. My suspicion is that at least in English standard readings of Marx and Engels, at least of the Marx and Engels authorial team in the late 1840s, are not technologically determinist enough. What I see as an assertion in the connotations of the German original of Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft that it is technology that is doing the work is lost in the traditional English translation “all that is solid melts into air”. Jonathan Sperber suggests “Everything that firmly exists and all the elements of the society of orders evaporate.” That seems to me too passive: steamed away. See Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, New York: Liveright, 2013 <http://books.google.com/?id=hBpSh9JYAKcC>.
The underlying ideas, however, are in my opinion best developed by Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Verso, 1983 <http://books.google.com/?id=mox1ywiyhtgC>
See also:
Jem Thomas: On Evans on Sperber on Marx: ’Richard J. Evans’s comment on Jonathan Sperber’s attempt to find a better translation of Marx’s phrase ‘Alles ständische und stehende verdampft,’ usually rendered ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ pinpoints a particular difficulty in translating the German term Stand (LRB, 23 May). Sperber’s preferred version – ‘Everything that firmly exists and all the elements of the society of orders evaporate’ – is, well, frankly hideous. On the other hand it is a lot more accurate than the elegant version it seeks to replace.
The words Stand and its adjective ständisch have been variously translated as ‘status’, ‘estate’, ‘estate-type’ and now here as ‘a society of orders’. None of these captures what Marx is talking about here, which is inequality organised on a basis other than class or market. For Marx the problem of the emancipation of the Jews was that it would ‘free’ them only to enter an unequal, class-based world and, in so doing, would dissolve what was distinctive in a Jewish way of life, whatever value you might place on that.
Even more than Marx, Max Weber contrasted status-based (ständisch) inequality with market-based divisions. A status group (Stand) has a distinctive way of life, which is regarded in a particular way, and is reflected in legal provisions and even in clothes or diet. An example in our contemporary world might be children: we think of them as fully human yet somehow as a different order of beings from adults, with a different legal position and different preoccupations. To some degree, gender divisions too are ständische differences. For both Marx and Weber what mattered was that the sweeping away of the old order – the ancien regime of, er, ‘social orders’ – is at first experienced as emancipation, only for the reality to dawn that what replaces it are different forms of exploitation and oppression and new social identities grounded solely in market position: in buying or selling labour-power.
The German term Stand is first cousin to the English word ‘standing’, and both Marx’s and Weber’s point was that modernity erodes all identities, honour and relationships in the acid of commercial exchange, leaving few of us really happy with where we stand…
LINK: <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n10/richard-j.-evans/marx-v.-the-rest>
Indeed, the concerns were much broader:
Hugh Brogan: On Evans on Sperber on Marx: ’As a student of Tocqueville who unfortunately knows no German, I am fascinated by the correspondence about Marx’s phrase ‘Alles Ständische’. Jem Thomas’s letter suggests to me that ‘ständisch, Stand’ are exactly what Tocqueville was concerned with in Democracy in America. In his opening sentence Tocqueville says that nothing caught his attention in the United States so much as ‘l’égalité des conditions’. This phrase has given modern readers and translators a lot of trouble, as ‘conditions’ nowadays are almost always taken to be physical – material – economic. I have long preferred to use the word ‘status’ to express Tocqueville’s meaning, and it is clear from Thomas’s letter that this is exactly what Marx had in mind. ‘Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft’ would have given Tocqueville no trouble (he did know German); but he would of course have differed from Marx in not wanting or expecting a proletarian order to ensue. What is most striking to me is that both sages laid so much stress on the same phenomenon – the collapse of the ancien régime. The irreversibility of this calamity may seem self-evident to us, but it was hardly so in Restoration Europe, the Europe of Metternich, Nicholas II and Guizot, which shaped both men. By Thomas’s account, Weber merely deepens and intensifies Tocqueville’s anxious account of the new democratic regime. All that was solid had indeed melted into air, and we are still struggling with the consequences. I seem to glimpse a new framework of historical interpretation, which will leave the stale orthodoxies of left and right on the scrapheap at last…
LINK: <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n10/richard-j.-evans/marx-v.-the-rest>
Also worth reading—certainly a clearer and more organized thinker than Marx, and one about whom I often wonder: What kind of thinker would Friedrich Engels have become if he had never met Marx, and thus had not come to regard himself as a mere secretary to the Great Man?—is Freddie from Barmen, Friedrich Engels:
Note that Marx and Engels had no real idea what was coming: the pace of worldwide change of their day was less than 1/4 of what it would become after 1870.
The original German phrase in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848): Manifesto of the Communist Party <https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifest#bourgeois> is “Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft…”—”all that is solid melts into air…”—everything that firmly exists and all the elements of the society of orders evaporate…”—”all traditional estates and status-marker fixed patterns are steamed away…”
The left and the right do, however, have different reactions to the coming of market society’s steaming away of all intermediary structures and sources of social power that are not based on property rights recognized by the market economy. The left works to moderate market- (and other-)created wealth inequalities and to give individuals equal entitlements based on their status as citizens. The right works to shore up traditional hierarchies, liberties, privileges, and other sources of social power—no matter how unequal and unfair they may be—in a rearguard action against the solvent of the market economy.
