A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (49 page)

The total number of killings came to somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 according to calculations by present day French historians.
¹⁴²
Another 40,000 Communards were held in prison hulks for a year before being put on trial—5,000 of these were sentenced to deportation and another 5,000 to lesser penalties.

One of the deportees was the best-known leader of the fighting women, Louise Michel. She told the court, ‘I will not defend myself; I will not be defended. I belong entirely to the social revolution. If you let me live, I shall not cease to cry vengeance’.
¹⁴³
The Commune had been held back from granting women the vote by the prejudices of its time. But working class women understood, despite this, that the crushing of the Commune was a crushing of themselves.

The repression had a terrible impact on the working class of Paris. As Alistair Horne comments, ‘The face of Paris changed in one curious way for some years: half the house painters, half the plumbers, the tile layers, the shoemakers and zinc workers had disappeared’.
¹⁴⁴
It was to be almost two decades before a new generation of French workers rose, who remembered the suppression of the Commune by the ‘republican’ government, but who had the determination to resume the struggle for a better world.

Yet Karl Marx had the last word on the Commune. He saw that it represented the greatest challenge the new world of capital had yet faced—and the greatest inspiration to the new class created by capital but in opposition to it. He wrote to his friend Kugelmann that the Communards had been ‘storming heaven’,
¹⁴⁵
and had provided ‘a new point of departure of worldwide significance’.
¹⁴⁶

1880s:
Britain occupies Egypt. Carve up of Africa. Commercial development of telephone, phonograph, electric generation and light.

1890-1900:
Japan attacks China and takes Taiwan, Spanish-American war. Invention of motor car and movies.

1899-1902:
Boer War—British set up first concentration camps.

1900:
Mendel’s genetic theory gains publicity, 16 years after his death.

1903:
First airplane.

1904:
Russia loses war with Japan.

1905:
Revolution in Russia. Industrial Workers of World founded. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

1910-14:
‘Great Unrest’ in Britain, Orangemen arm in Ireland.

1911:
Proclamation of Chinese Republic. Mexican Revolution.

1912-14:
Strikes and barricades in Russia, Dublin Lockout, ‘Bread and Roses’ strike.

1912-13:
Balkan Wars.

1913:
Ford mass production car plant.

1914:
Outbreak of First World War, collapse of ‘Second International.

1916:
‘Easter Rising’ in Dublin.

1917:
Russian Revolutions in February and October, mutinies in French army and German navy, US enters war.

1918:
Revolution in German and Austro-Hungarian empires.

1919:
Foundation of Communist International, murder of Rosa Luxemburg, civil war in Germany, Bavarian and Hungarian Soviet Republics, guerrilla war in Ireland, Amritsar killings in India, 4 May movement in China, Versailles Treaty.

1920:
German workers defeat Kapp Putsch. Factory occupations in Italy.

1921:
Britain partitions Ireland. Kronstadt revolt in Russia.

1922:
Italian Fascists given power.

1923:
French occupation of Ruhr, great inflation, Communists call off rising, Nazi putsch.

1925:
Heisenberg’s quantum theory.

1926:
Defeat of General Strike in Britain.

1927:
Massacre of workers in Shanghai. Leon Trotsky exiled.

1928-29:
Stalin takes all power, First Five Year Plan, ‘collectivisation’ of agriculture, mass arrests.

1929:
Wall Street Crash.

1931:
Revolution in Spain.

1933:
Hitler takes power in Germany, famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

1934:
Vienna anti-fascist rising, anti-fascist protests in France, Asturias rising in Spain, strikes in US.

1936:
Popular Front electoral victories in France and Spain, occupation of factories in France, military coup and revolutionary risings in Spain, formation of CIO in US, General Motors sit-in. Moscow trials.

1938:
Hitler takes over Austria, Munich agreement.

1939:
Victory for Spanish fascists, German invasion of Poland, Second World War begins.

1940:
Fall of France, Italy enters war.

1941:
Hitler attacks Russia. Japan attacks US fleet.

1942:
Nazis draw up plans for Holocaust, German army defeated at Stalingrad. Famine in Bengal, ‘Quit India’ movement.

1943:
Strikes in Turin, Allies land in southern Italy.

1944:
Allied landings in Normandy, uprising liberates Paris, Warsaw Rising, Greek resistance attacked by British.

1945:
Resistance liberates north Italian cities, US and Britain take western Germany, Russia the east. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Britain reestablishes French rule in Vietnam. Communist-led governments in Eastern Europe.

1947:
Britain leaves India. Partition leads to bloodshed. UN backs Israeli state in Palestine. First computer.

1947-49:
Beginning of Cold War. Marshall Plan, Prague coup, Berlin airlift, Yugoslav split with Russia, McCarthyism in US. Chinese People’s Liberation Army enters Beijing.

1950:
Korean War. Indonesian independence from Dutch.

1952-57:
Mau Mau rebellion against Britain in Kenya.

1953:
Overthrow of Egyptian monarchy by Nasser. Death of Stalin. US explodes H-bomb.

1954:
Geneva agreement ends war in Korea and divides Vietnam. CIA overthrows Guatemalan government. Revolt against French rule in Algeria.

1955-56:
Montgomery bus boycott starts civil rights movement in US.

1956:
Egypt nationalises Suez Canal, attacked by Britain, France and Israel. Khrushchev denounces Stalin. Hungarian Revolution.

1957:
Ghana wins independence.

1958:
Nationalist revolution in Iraq. ‘Great Leap Forward’ in China. De Gaulle takes power in France.

1959:
Castro’s rebels take Havana.

1960:
Nigerian independence.

1961:
Abortive CIA invasion of Cuba. First split between Russia and China. US ‘advisers’ in Vietnam.

1962:
Cuban Missile Crisis.

1964:
Independence for Algeria. US landing in Dominican Republic.

1965:
Military coup in Indonesia, half a million people killed.

1967:
Israel occupies West Bank after ‘Six Day War’. Black uprising in Detroit. Founding of Black Panthers. Far right colonels’ coup in Greece.

1968:
Tet Offensive in Vietnam, student revolts all over Europe. May events in France. ‘Prague Spring’.

1969:
‘Hot autumn’ in Italy. Cordoba rising in Argentina. ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland.

1970:
Strikes bring down Gomulka in Poland. Election of Allende in Chile. US invasion of Cambodia, students shot dead at Kent State University.

1973:
Coup in Chile, war in Middle East, polytechnic rising in Greece.

1974:
Outbreak of world recession, second miners’ strike and fall of Heath government in Britain. Revolution in Portugal, fall of Greek colonels.

1975:
‘Historic compromise’ in Italy. Independence for Portuguese colonies. Defeat of revolutionary left in Portugal. Guerrilla struggle in Rhodesia.

1976:
Opposition legalised in Spain. School student uprising in South Africa. CIA sponsors civil war in Angola.

1976-77:
Turmoil in China after death of Mao, first market reforms.

1979:
Iranian Revolution, ‘Islamic Republic’. Sandinistas take power in Nicaragua. Thatcher government in Britain. Russia invades Afghanistan.

1980:
Occupation of Polish shipyards, Solidarnosc workers’ movement. Military coup in Turkey. Iraqi war against Iran with US backing. End of white rule in Zimbabwe. First personal computers using silicon chip.

1981:
Cruise missiles in Europe. ‘Second Cold War’. Civil war in El Salvador, US Contra terrorism against Nicaragua. Polish military crush Solidarnosc.

1982:
Falklands War.

1983:
US invasion of Grenada.

1984-85:
British miners’ strike.

1987:
Glasnost
permits first free debate for 60 years in USSR.

1988:
Demonstrations in non-Russian republics of USSR. Miners’ strikes in Poland. Strike waves in Yugoslavia and South Korea. Near uprising in Algeria.

1989:
Non-Communist government in Poland, Tiananmen Square protests in China, miners’ strike in Russia, political revolutions across Eastern Europe. Rise of Milosovic in Serbia. US invasion of Panama. Scientists begin to warn about danger of ‘greenhouse effect’.

1991:
US-led war against Iraq. Failed coup in Russia, disbandment of USSR. Civil war in Yugoslavia and Algeria.

1992:
Famine and civil war in Somalia. Civil war in Tajikistan. Slump in Russian economy.

1994:
Black rule in South Africa.

1995:
Strikes rock French government.

1998
Economic crisis across east Asia, collapse of Suharto in Indonesia.

1999:
US-led war against Serbia.

Capital had stamped its imprint everywhere in the world by 1900. There was scarcely a group of people anywhere whose lives were not being transformed by it—only the ice deserts of Antarctica, the most remote forests of the Amazon and the valleys of highland New Guinea still awaited those apostles of capitalism, the European explorers with their cheap goods, Bibles, germs and hopes of unearned riches.

The impact of capital was not the same everywhere. In many parts of the world it still meant the age-old application of muscle and sweat, now directed towards profit-making for far away capitalists rather than local consumption. But in Western Europe and North America mechanisation spread to ever-wider areas of industry, transport and even agriculture.

The industrial revolution a century before in Britain had been concentrated in one branch of textile production—cotton-spinning. Now every conceivable form of a manufacturing was revolutionised and then revolutionised again—soap-making, printing, dyeing, shipbuilding, printing, boot and shoe-making, and paper-making. The discovery of how to generate electricity and the development of the filament bulb created a new way of producing artificial light and prolonging working hours (Bombay’s first textile strike was a reaction to this). The invention of the electric motor opened up the possibility of driving machinery at some distance from an immediate energy source such as a steam engine. The typewriter revolutionised procedures for business correspondence, and broke the monopoly of male clerks with long years of office experience. The invention of the telegraph and, at the end of the 1880s, the telephone enabled both production and warfare to be coordinated more easily over long distances—as well as allowing people to keep in touch more easily (Engels had a telephone in his London home shortly before his death in 1895). The rise of the factory was matched by the relentless spread of the railways, bringing remote regions into close contact with cities. Coal mines proliferated to feed the ever-growing demand for fuel of the railways, factories and steam ships. Iron and steel works the size of small towns sprang up, with towns beside them for their workers.

The growth of one industry encouraged the growth of another. The people of the cities, mining villages and steel towns had to be fed and clothed. The first agri-industry developed as grain from the previously ‘unopened’ prairies of the American Midwest, beef from the Argentinian pampas and wool from Australia were shipped thousands of miles. This in turn encouraged the development of new ways of storing and preserving food. Growing cities required some means of getting people from where they lived to where they worked. Capitalists who believed they could make money by running horse-drawn ‘omnibuses’, building tram systems or even digging underground railways did so—and where they would not undertake such tasks, local municipalities often would. The middle classes of the mid-19th century had been willing to tolerate the poor living in overcrowded squalor and dying of disease or hunger. But by the late 19th century they understood how diseases could spread from poor to rich neighbourhoods, and pushed for the building of sewage systems, the clearing of overcrowded city centres, the supply of clean water, and the provision of gas to light streets and heat homes. Groups of capitalists set out to profit from such services and employed new groups of workers to supply them.

The process of urbanisation accelerated. In the 1880s more than a third of London’s population were newcomers to the city.
¹
By 1900 three quarters of Britain’s population lived in towns or cities and only about one in ten worked on the land.
²
Britain was the extreme example. In Germany a third of the population still worked on the land, and many industrial workers lived in small towns or industrial villages rather than cities at the beginning of the century. In France 30 percent of people still worked the land as late as 1950, and in Japan the figure was 38 percent.
³
Even in the US there remained a large farming population (although mechanisation was beginning to transform the prairies), and until the 1940s more people lived in small towns than big conurbations. Nevertheless, in all these countries the trend was to follow the British example. The village—with its church, preacher, squire and, perhaps, schoolteacher—was becoming a thing of the past. The whole way in which people lived was being transformed.

This provided both opportunities and problems for capital. The opportunities lay in the provision of non-material goods. People had needs other than material ones. They needed to relax, socialise and recover from both the physical exhaustion and the numbing monotony of work. Factory production and city life had stamped out most of the old ways of satisfying such needs, based as they were on village life, with its seasonal rhythms and opportunities for informal get-togethers. Capital could profit by providing new ways of socialising. The brewers had their profitable networks of pubs. The first newspaper barons discovered an enormous audience for titillation and amusement (the British newspaper millionaire Harmsworth had his first success with a weekly called
Titbits
). The entertainment business took its first tentative step forward with the music halls, and another with the invention in the 1890s of the phonograph (forerunner of the record player) and of ‘moving pictures’.

Organised sport also sprang from the new world of capitalist industry. Informal games with balls were many thousands of years old. But the organisation of teams playing according to rules which reflected the competitive ethos of capitalist industry was one of the new features of 19th century Britain which soon spread across the world. Factory towns, and even factories, were the birthplace of many teams (hence names such as ‘Arsenal’ and ‘Moscow Dynamo’), with local businessmen presiding over them—seeing advantages in a focus of local identification which cut across class lines.

Capitalism had begun by taking people who were a product of a previous form of society and utilising part of their lives—the part that involved slaving away for 12, 14 or 16 hours a day in a workshop or factory. But now it could profit from enveloping their whole lives—from the beds people slept in and the roofs which kept them dry, to the food they ate, the effort it took them to reach their workplaces and the diversions which allowed them to forget the world of labour. It became a total system.

This created a problem, however. Capitalism could no longer look for a supply of fresh labour power outside the system. It had to take steps to ensure the supply existed, and that meant addressing the raising of new generations of people. Capitalists had shown few such concerns in the early days of the industrial revolution in Britain, and the industrial capitalists of other countries were usually just as indifferent. Women and children provided the cheapest and most adaptable labour for the spinning mills, and they were crammed in with no thought for the effect on their health or on the care of younger children. If capital accumulation necessitated the destruction of the working class family, then so be it!

By the 1850s, however, the more far-sighted capitalists began to fear that future reserves of labour power were being exhausted. In Britain in 1871, the Poor Law inspectors reported, ‘It is well established that no town-bred boys of the poorer classes, especially those reared in London, ever attains…four feet ten and a half inches’ in height or a chest of 29 inches ‘at the age of 15. A stunted growth is characteristic of the race’.
⁴
The Mansion House Committee of 1893 drew the conclusion that ‘the obvious remedy…is to improve the stamina, physical and moral, of the London working class’.
⁵

A succession of laws restricted the hours which children could work, and banned the employment of women in industries that might damage their chances of successful pregnancy. A few capitalists built ‘model villages’—like the soap-manufacturer Lever’s Port Sunlight on the Mersey and the chocolate-maker Cadbury’s Bourneville near Birmingham—where they could ensure their workforces were housed in conditions which would encourage long term productivity (aided by a strict ban on alcohol). But government efforts to deal with the ‘physical stamina’ of workers had to wait until the end of the first decade of the 20th century. An inquiry by a ‘Physical Deterioration Committee’ into the low physical calibre of recruits for the Boer War of 1899-1902 expressed concern at Britain’s future ability to wage war, and a Liberal government reacted by introducing free school meals—the first limited move towards what later became the welfare state. Aside from this, most of the stress was on improving the ‘moral stamina’ of the working class—on a moral offensive against ‘improvidence’, ‘dissoluteness’, ‘drunkenness’, and the ‘demoralisation produced by…indiscriminate charity’.
⁶

Dealing with these alleged defects involved campaigns by philanthropists, churches and parliamentarians which extolled the middle class ideal of the family—a stable, monogamous nuclear family of working husband, loyal housewife and disciplined children. Only such a family, it was claimed, could lead to children growing up dutiful and obedient. The woman’s place was in the home, in accordance with ‘human nature’. Practices which might challenge the model family, however widespread in the past, were branded as ‘immoral’ or ‘unnatural’. So pre-marital and extra-marital sex, divorce, contraception, and discussion of sexual hygiene and sexual enjoyment were all castigated in a new climate of official puritanism. Male homosexuality became a criminal offence for the first time in Britain.

Associated with this model of the family was the notion of the ‘family wage’—of male earnings being sufficient for a wife to stay at home and bring up the children. This never became a reality for anybody except a tiny minority of workers. Employers who would grant men wage increases during periods of boom, when strikes and labour shortages could damage them, would just as readily take these back in times of recession. Many of the women who gave up jobs to become housewives after getting married and having children remained involved in various forms of work for wages (homeworking or cleaning). But setting an ideal and making it seem that a woman’s work was not as important as that of a male ‘breadwinner’ made it easier for employers to get away with paying low wages.

Along with concern for the ‘morals’ of workers went a growing obsession with efficiency. The capitalists of the early industrial revolution had seen the road to profit in making people work for as long as possible each day—extracting from them what Karl Marx called ‘absolute surplus value’. With the possibility of running production virtually non-stop with two and three-shift systems, concern began to switch to intensifying labour and obliterating any pauses in it. An American, Frederick Taylor, introduced ‘scientific management’—the use of inspectors with stopwatches to break down what a worker did into its component actions in order to work out the maximum number of actions a worker could perform in a working day, and then to make the wage dependent on fulfilling this norm. The machine was no longer an adjunct of the worker, but the worker an adjunct of the machine.

Finally, concern with productivity also implied the need for education and literacy. Reading, writing and arithmetic had been optional for the peasants and farm labourers of pre-industrial societies. That is why any discussion of literature in pre-capitalist or early capitalist times involves the literature of the upper and middle classes. But the complex interacting processes of capitalist production now required a literate workforce—if only to read instructions on machinery and labels on packing cases—with a basic level of numeracy and, as important as these two things, ingrained habits of time discipline and obedience. Even British capitalism, which had managed its industrial revolution without this, felt compelled to introduce compulsory schooling up to the age of ten for its future workers in the 1870s—although it left the education of its middle and upper classes to private ‘grammar’ and (misnamed) ‘public’ schools. Late-arriving capitalisms, requiring workforces competent enough to challenge Britain’s hold on markets, usually pushed stringent public educational programmes from the beginning, aimed not only at training future workers but at technically equipping parts of the middle class.

The infant capitalism of the late feudal and absolutist periods had grown to adolescence at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. By the early 20th century it was entering maturity in Western Europe and North America. As such, it showed many of the features of the society we live in today. One consequence was that people began to take these features for granted. In the early industrial revolution, people had been shocked by the transition from rural life to industrial labour. They had often looked to the past for some remedy for their ills—as when the Chartists set about a scheme of establishing small farms. The sense of shock had gone by the beginning of the 20th century. People could still be amazed by individual innovations, like the motor car or electric light. But they were not shocked any more by a society built on competition, timekeeping and greed. Capitalist society was all that people knew. Its characteristic forms of behaviour seemed to be ‘human nature’. People no longer realised how bizarre their behaviour would have seemed to their forebears.

The ideology of progress

Apologists for the new world of industrial capitalism believed they were on the verge of solving all humanity’s problems. The same optimism infected much of intellectual life. Each year saw new miracles of human inventiveness. Life was more comfortable than ever before for the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, and even some sections of workers saw their conditions improve. It seemed that things only had to continue as they were for the dreams of past generations to be fulfilled.

Such beliefs were reinforced by developments in science and technology. The physicist Thomson (Lord Kelvin) used Newton’s mechanics to provide a mechanical model of the whole universe, from the smallest atom to the largest galaxy, and James Clerk Maxwell tried to integrate into this the experimental findings of Michael Faraday about electricity and magnetism.
⁷
Simultaneously, the naturalists Darwin and Wallace had provided an account of how species evolved through a natural process of selection, and Darwin had gone on to show that humanity itself was descended from an ape-like mammal. Chemists had succeeded in making some of the organic substances found in living things out of inorganic materials.