A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (75 page)

The changes in consumption and lifestyle were matched by changes in production. New techniques from the inter-war years came into their own. New or expanded factories with new workforces turned out washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, televisions, and, above all, cars. There were more than 70 million manufacturing workers in the US and more than eight million in Britain, concentrated in plants employing hundreds, thousands or, in the case of some car and aerospace plants, tens of thousands of workers. Over time the mass production factory became the model for many other sorts of employment. Its pattern of regimentation spread to employees of the burgeoning supermarket chains, its time and motion studies to typing pools and data-processing centres, its payment system to coal mining, and its managerial methods to dock work and construction. So widespread were such factory-inspired approaches that some industrial sociologists used the word ‘Fordism’ to characterise the period. But just as the factory of the industrial revolution had provided workers with the potential to fight to improve their conditions, so, on an even greater scale, did the spread of factory-like employment in the long boom. The car plants of Detroit, Turin, Coventry, Dagenham, Cologne and Billancourt, the aerospace plants of Seattle and the arms plants of California joined the great steel plants, coalfields and shipbuilding yards to offer centres of potential resistance to the owners of capital. Under conditions of full employment this was something capital itself had to take into account. In North America and most of Western Europe it relied upon politicians who preached ‘consensus’ to stabilise society.

The years of the long boom were years in which the old poor laws were finally transformed into the ‘welfare state’. From the point of view of capital this was partly a question of using trade union or political intermediaries (social democratic politicians in Europe, ‘liberal’ Democrats in the US) to buy the consent of a workforce which was potentially much stronger than it had been before the war. It was also a way of making sure that expensive labour power was reproduced efficiently through measures to improve child health and education. In either case, ‘reform’ of welfare meant improvement, not, as it meant in the 19th century and means today, cutting welfare so as to compel people to sell their labour power more cheaply.

The long boom brought other changes of immense importance in the advanced countries. A shortage of labour caused capital to scour the world for fresh supplies of workers. Migrant workers from rural Italy were soon labouring in Belgian mines and Swiss factories as well as adding to the growing populations of Milan and Turin. The flow of black former share-croppers to Los Angeles, Detroit and Chicago became a torrent. German firms welcomed refugees from the east, and organised the arrival of millions of ‘guest workers’ from Turkey and Yugoslavia. French firms recruited labour from north Africa. Britain’s health service sought workers in the Caribbean, and its textile plants workers in Punjab. Capitalism had long since drawn together the labour of people in all continents through the world market. Now it was drawing together many of the peoples in its great cities. This led to more or less spontaneous fusions of the distinct cultures from which people came. But it also led to racist attempts to turn ethnic groups against one another.

Finally, the boom led to historic changes in relations between the sexes. Desperate for new sources of labour power, capital turned to women to supply it, as in the early days of the industrial revolution. There had always been some industries which depended on women, especially textiles, and there had been continual growth in the number of women in the industrial labour force since at least the time of the First World War. But the great majority of married women (80 percent in Britain in 1950) did not have paid employment. Concerned to ensure the reproduction of the labour force, the state encouraged married women to stay at home, look after their children and cater for their husbands—and most married women did not find the low wages they could earn was a sufficient incentive to carry the double burden of paid employment and domestic labour. A massive change occurred with the long boom. The new domestic appliances reduced the burden of housework, making it easier to do paid work as well. Employers were keen to take on women, on a part time basis compatible with childcare if necessary, and the need for extra money to buy domestic appliances provided an incentive for women to take the jobs.

The new arrangements were a result of economic pressures. But they had much wider implications. Women who were drawn into employment welcomed the independence that a wage gave them. It made them more prepared to stand up for themselves. Women had largely been denied a public role ever since the rise of class society 5,000 years before. Now a majority of women were being drawn out of the private sphere of the home into the public sphere of industry.

The double burden persisted. One reason many employers welcomed women workers was that they could get away with paying them low wages. The labour market was still structured round the notion that a man’s income mattered more than a woman’s. A mass of ideological stereotypes supported this, meaning women were usually left, literally, holding the baby. But in its drive for profits and accumulation capital was creating conditions in which women would gain the confidence to challenge this set-up. It was laying the ground for an unparalleled demand for women’s liberation, even if it could never satisfy that demand.

Colonial freedom

On 15 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru raised the Indian national flag above the Red Fort in Delhi. Britain was leaving the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of its empire. The age of empire was coming to an end a mere 60 years after the scramble for Africa, although its death throes were to last through to the final abandonment of white minority rule in South Africa in the 1990s.

Britain’s rulers had not given up their hold on India willingly. Their attempts to avoid doing so left a divided subcontinent awash with the blood of communal fighting.

The Indian national movement had gained new momentum in the 1930s. The world slump had impoverished the countryside. ‘Agrarian radicalism was found everywhere, from the princely state of Kashmir, far in the north, to Andhra and Travancore in the south’.
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The number of workers involved in strikes rose from 128,000 in 1932 to 220,000 in 1934.
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The influence of Congress grew as did that of its left wing, led by figures like Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose. Congress candidates who campaigned on a programme including reductions in rents and taxes swept the board in elections for provincial assemblies in 1937. Of the seats reserved for Muslims, the Muslim League took only a quarter.

But the real power within Congress remained with the right and with a coterie of Indian capitalists close to Gandhi. Congress-run provincial governments were soon passing anti-strike laws, stalling the class-based agitation. The way was open for a revival of communal conflicts, as Muslim separatists blamed all Hindus for the behaviour of Hindu landowners, and Hindu chauvinists blamed all Muslims for the misdeeds of Muslim landowners.

Hostility towards Britain grew when it announced that India was at war with Germany without consulting any Indians, and then refused even to consider giving India a government of its own while claiming to fight for ‘freedom’. Even Gandhi agreed to a mass ‘Quit India’ campaign in 1942. There were strikes, mass demonstrations by students and workers, and repeated clashes in which police beat people off the streets. Police fired on unarmed demonstrations on hundreds of occasions. There were guerrilla attacks on British installations, police stations were burned down, telegraph wires cut and railway lines blocked. Repression eventually broke the movement. There were 2,000 casualties and 2,500 sentenced to whipping in Bombay alone. Villages were burned and even machine-gunned from the air. But the British viceroy, General Archibald Wavell, told Churchill late in 1943 that ‘the repressive force necessary to hold India after the war would exceed Britain’s means’.
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The imperial authorities had one last card to play. They turned to the Muslim League as a counterweight to Congress. They claimed it represented all Muslims and gave it control of several provinces despite its poor performance in the 1937 elections. Its best known leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, now embraced the demand for a separate Muslim state—one he had previously opposed—even though it was impossible to draw the boundaries of such a state without including within it very large numbers of Hindus and Sikhs and excluding the very large number of Muslims who lived in Hindu majority areas. The Communist Party, which had opposed communal division in the past, went along with this demand as part of its support for the British war effort, claiming that Muslims and Hindus were two different ‘nations’.

There was still enormous potential for the national movement to break through the communal divide. In February 1946 Indian ratings in the British navy in Bombay began protests against racial insults, and the lower pay they received than white sailors. The protests escalated into mutinies on 78 ships and 20 shore stations, backed up by demonstrations and strikes by students and workers.
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The mutineers carried Hindu, Muslim and red flags. It was the first time the military forces established to defend the empire had turned against it in mass since 1857—and they had done so in a way that opened the possibility of forging Muslim-Hindu-Sikh unity from below and undercutting communalism. But the leaders of Congress were not prepared to countenance this. Gandhi opposed the mutiny and Nehru tried to quieten it down. Communalism was able to revive, even though the mutiny sank any British hopes of hanging on to power.

Jinnah’s Muslim League took the bulk of the Muslim seats in elections—the only time it ever did so—and treated this as a mandate to press for a separate state through communal agitation. In Bengal the Muslim League head of the provincial government, Suhrawardy—a man who had made millions through black market deals in grain during the great famine of 1942-43—unleashed a wave of mob violence against Hindus.
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Hindu chauvinists seized the opportunity to organise counter-pogroms against Muslims, and 5,000 died. There were communal riots in city after city in the days that followed, laying the ground for the final horror a year later.

Congress leaders and their business backers were desperate to get their hands on a state of their own, even if it was a truncated one, and agreed to partition the subcontinent with Jinnah. An English civil servant, Radcliffe, who knew nothing about India, drew a line of partition which chopped Bengal and the Punjab in half. There were completely inter-mixed Hindu, Muslim and Sikh populations on either side of the Punjab border, including the neighbouring cities of Lahore and Amritsar. Now bands of right wing Muslim thugs on one side of the line, and right wing Hindu and Sikh thugs on the other, set out to secure the territory allocated them by massacring, terrorising and driving out those belonging to the ‘wrong’ religion. Somewhere between 250,000 and a million people died. At the same time mobs attacked the substantial Muslim minorities in cities such as Delhi and Lucknow, ‘persuading’ them to migrate to Pakistan.

The horror of partition was followed by a final disaster—war between the two new states. Both claimed Kashmir, which had a Muslim majority, a Hindu prince and an imprisoned Muslim opposition leader who supported Congress. Pakistan and India both made armed grabs for it. The Indian army reached the capital, Srinigar, first. There was a year of intermittent fighting before a truce left the rival armies staring at each other across a demarcation line hundreds of miles long.

Partition had a devastating effect on both countries. It strengthened the hands of the Hindu chauvinists in India, encouraging the trend for Indian party politics to be based on shifting coalitions of bosses of different local castes, linguistic and religious groups. Military confrontation with Pakistan also absorbed resources desperately needed for improving people’s lives.

The effects on Pakistan were even worse. Religion was the only thing its peoples had in common—and even then there were clashes between the Sunni and Shia versions of Islam. The country was divided in two, separated by several hundred miles of Indian territory. In the eastern part most people spoke Bengali, and in the west Punjabi. But the national language was Urdu, spoken only by the minority of the population who had migrated from central north India. Moreover, vast areas of the western part were dominated by landowners who exercised almost feudal power. The outcome was continual political instability, a succession of military dictatorships, the breakaway of eastern Pakistan in 1971 to form Bangladesh—following the bloody repression of a popular revolt—further military coups in western Pakistan, the execution of its former prime minister, and a state of near civil war in its main industrial city, Karachi, in the 1990s.

However, the disaster of partition could not prevent Britain’s withdrawal having an enormous impact elsewhere. The imperialists were on the retreat, and there were people in every colony prepared to learn the lessons.

‘People’s China’

In the summer of 1949, just two years after the departure of Britain from India, a People’s Liberation Army led by old Communists like Mao Zedong, Zhu De and Liu Shaoqi occupied Beijing. As it marched south to unify all of China except for the large island of Taiwan and the British city-colony of Hong Kong, the days of the foreign concessions and foreign warships which had imposed themselves on the country for a century were over for good.

Mao’s army had started life as a group of Communists and dissident soldiers from the nationalist armies who had escaped the massacres at the hands of Chiang Kai Shek in the late 1920s by establishing a base on the border of Kiangsi province in the south. They had recruited local peasants to an army which must have resembled the rebel peasant armies thrown up periodically in Chinese history. When pressed by Chiang’s troops they took it on a circuitous 7,000 mile ‘long march’ through south and west China to Yenan in the remote north west. Fewer than one in ten of the 100,000 who set off arrived. But this rump was able to build new support, particularly after the Japanese attack on China in 1937.