¶ 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.

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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.

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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.

That was very different than all previous history.

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[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:

READING: Friedrich Engels on the Materialist Conception of History

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.

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