SUPERPOWER BULLIES AND NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY-8
Created | Updated May 9, 2016
A WORLD HAUNTED BY THE MALTHUSIAN DEVILS OF WAR, FAMINE AND DISEASE
As all this gathered momentum the Grand Old Man of British politics W.E. Gladstone, back in 10 Downing Street again, more than sixty years after having been first elected as an MP, was reduced to tears in 1894 because he saw where all of this was leading.
What was at issue was the Naval Estimates submitted by the Royal Navy as the minimum necessary if indeed Great Britain was to continue to “Rule the Waves” for the use of all law abiding people, who wished to benefit from the “Freedom of the Seas” that Great Britain offered to the world as part of its belief in Freedom of Trade, just as for twenty years the Bank of England had seen the maintenance of the Pound Sterling as a base currency bringing some stability for all the other currencies of the world as almost its major obligation, developing a unique skill in the use of gold in “Open Market Operations”. But the Arms Race now meant that Britain’s ability could only be sustained by means of very expensive modernization to match the challenge of ‘modernizing’ powers that were fast catching up with and overtaking Great Britain in various measures of purely national power.
Gladstone’s distress came from the realization that this would just increase the oppressive weight of the State machinery that he had always sought to reduce as much as possible, having done his best as Chancellor of the Exchequer to honour William Pitt’s promise that Income Tax would only be a temporary wartime expedient. Now there were even “Progressive” Income Taxes and paying for the Navy would involve introducing Death Duties so that people could no will the wealth that they had earned to their family. And, in this mood of excessive competition between Great Powers, improvements in the Royal Navy would just be seen as a challenge to rival Naval powers especially Germany. But in a Great Britain already very much in decline from the optimistic days of Mid-Victorian prosperity British mastery of the sea was assuming the proportions of a “Last Ditch Stand”.
All of that railway building around the world had helped to globalize the idea of the Chattel Ownership of the Land as sanctioned by the modern state, an idea that had been really introduced into England by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield during the Age of Civilized Security: and railways, whether publicly or privately financed, became an expression of the right of the State to impose its will on both the Land and the people living on or near it: and where this meant opening up new territory the building of the railway was followed by the allocation of new patterns of landholding in which Labour was applied to the exploitation of whatever assets the Land had to offer, and in default of any mineral resources or other natural bounty that could be asset-stripped, large areas of “virgin soil” could be settled by ‘sodbusters’, those pioneer homesteaders who asked for no more than the challenge of wresting a subsistence living while living ‘cheek by jowl’ with Nature, under the protective umbrella of the State as both implied and expressed by the railway, which could bring various forms of relief in emergencies.
But such security came at a price and in British India, for example, the task of building the railway system that criss-crosses and joins up the sub-continent, and that remains one of the more valued legacies of the British Raj was seen as so vital that the shares that were sold in order to fund their construction came with a guarantee of profit dividends in a form of ‘public-private partnership’: and by the late nineteenth century the Land Tax being levied on the Indian peasantry was raised to 50% of their crops, which is only one example of the way that by this time “the squeeze was on” for Labour, and most especially the labour of those extracting food, raw materials and commodities from the Land.
But there was nothing very new about the way that the creation of a militarily and economically powerful “superstructure” tended to widen the gulf of living standards between Plato’s “gold” the “establishment”, and Plato’s “drones”. Back in Ancient Greece Aristotle, wrote about the Corinthian tyrants, who could be said to have “modernised” that city-state by giving it a more dynamic and forceful government that was then able to dominate its neighbours by its military and economic might during its ‘flowering’ period, when many great public works that testify to the power and majesty of Corinth, commenting that “all these things had the same force, to keep the subjects poor and occupied”. And describing the rise of the Greek tyrants in 1956 in a political evolution that rather resembled the Marxist sequence of monarchy, aristocracy, and the rise of a middle class “meritocracy” Professor Andrewes of Oxford University observed in the light no doubt of Post-War Britain that “the tyrant’s building programmes …were an end in themselves and tended to the greater glory of the city, and if they had any further purpose in home politics they might as reasonably be called a full employment policy.” (page 51)
Well in Greece, as in most of the Ancient Worlds, a large proportion of “the poor” who needed to be “kept occupied” were slaves, and one of the features of nineteenth century “modernization” was the abolition of slavery and serfdom, which assumed ‘continental’ proportions in 1843 when the Indian Princes decided to follow the British who had abolished slavery in 1833. Just over twenty years later the Russian Tsar emancipated the serfs and the USA emancipated its slaves. But in all these cases emancipation made it necessary for millions of people to find new lives within civil society, predominantly in trying to stay ‘on the land’ basing their new life on what was familiar and using their existing skills in order to work for themselves.
But this also suited others who saw the vast ‘virgin lands’ that were being really opened up by the railways as ‘lands of opportunity, both those of ‘the poor’ who wished to migrate away from “Old Worlds”, and those with political and economic power, who saw how keeping both “the masses” and these virgin lands “occupied” enhanced their own security, because almost from the earliest days of the establishment of European ‘frontiers’ across the oceans European military superiority had given the “frontiersmen” and their local friends a capacity to act as a first line of defence in a savage and potentially dangerous world.
And all of this expansionism could be seen by those, who looked at the ‘bigger picture’, as one way to protect civilization from what J.M.Keynes called “the Malthusian devil”, those “Natural Checks” of war, famine and disease that are Nature’s way of dealing with over-population. But in this post 1867 world of “high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism” for most people who were concerned with worldly matters there was no “bigger picture” than that of the Nation, especially when the Nation itself was an “empire”, an “Old World” term that the USA has consistently refused to embrace. And in terms of Adam Smith’s theory of “Economies of Scale” great empires could justify themselves because Keynes “defined mankind’s permanent economic problem as to establish a balance between population and the means to feed, clothe and house it” (page 385)
But Nature ‘the Land’, the habitat that has shaped and formed us, provides for those basic needs and the opening up of the continental interiors of the world increased the Supply of all that the Land could produce, with very few things that Nature produced in just one or two locations granting any effective long-term monopoly. Gold and silver “rushes” tended to be brief, leading to the exhaustion of the mineral deposits and the creation of ‘ghost towns’. But the rubber trees and tea plantations that briefly offered the prospect of permanent prosperity to the Congo and Amazonian rainforests and to parts of China proved to be eminently suited to the creation of new plantations in new regions: and the Cotton Famine created by the Northern-blockade of the Southern States in the American Civil War, bringing Lancashire’s ‘King Cotton’ to a standstill, proved a great incentive to investment in commercial Cotton cultivation elsewhere, notably Egypt.
But the result of all of this, as J.M.Keynes argued in “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” in 1919 had been the creation of a “global system, which sustained a growing population at an increasing standard of life”, a theme that was taken up by the “They’ve never had it so good” politicians of Britain in the 1950s, not least because of the spirit of Victorian philanthropy that had found constant champions in Sir William Beveridge and Beatrice Webb, the main architects of Britain’s “Welfare State”. Keynes background too was in British Protestant Nonconformity with its Puritanical morality that hoped to ‘save’ the masses from themselves after the model of Goethe’s Dr. Faust. As Robert Skidelsky summed Keynes’ argument “Throughout Europe ‘all those instincts pf puritanism’ which in previous times had led people to withdraw from the world were redirected to the task of securing a prosperous future. [But] A radically unequal distribution of income was sustained by a bluff or deception, by which workers were subjected to an enforced abstinence on the tacit understanding that the capitalists ‘saved’ most of their profits. Thus the world’s economic organization ultimately rested on the exercise of the Victorian virtues.” (page 385)
And one might add that it was probably not only his background in Nonconformist ministry, but also his education at Eton and Cambridge, where he was a member of the ‘elite’ of ‘Apostles’, that helped Keynes to readily embrace the idea of a state “establishment” ideally acting as a collective of Good Shepherds delivering “almost absolute security of property and person” from above in accordance with the “radically unequal distribution of income” since, in general terms the “increased standard of life” for ‘the working classes’ , in an age when increasingly Money Income was one of the major determinants of anyone’s standard of life in Economies where workers finally got the right to receive all their remuneration in cash rather than in kind, did not come in increased Incomes, but in lower prices for the ‘basket of goods’ that households needed buy allied with some improvement in public services that were provided by redistributive taxes. For in general and global terms the increased exploitation of the Land increased the Supply of Food, Raw Materials and Commodities so that on average prices fell between 1870 and 1914 by about 30%, with catastrophic effects on some communities, some of which, like the Great Depression in British Agriculture, the ruin of farms and country estates, and the flood of hundreds of thousands of countrymen into the British cities or out into the colonies or the Americas. And British industries like Coal Mining and the Metallurgical Industries suffered in much the same way from competition with lower cost, or in some cases luckier, foreign producers: all of which helps to explain why the wages of working people in Britain were stagnant for over thirty years, undermining the confidence in progress and improvement of the previous hundred years.
Of course the politicians and historians could already claim that “they’d never had it so good”, because the trend towards more State intervention on the French and German model was already well-established. Their children were now forced to attend school and be taught “puritan” virtues and values that would help them to live better and more moral lives under the protective outreach of the State, and there was public health and other advances, while the working class consumer could now buy many things that had formerly been luxuries, or had just never been available.
But back in the build up to the “Great Leap in the Dark” in Great Britain in 1867, some of the proposals that were considered as an appropriate basis for the extending the right to vote beyond the essentially middle-class electorate that had been established in 1832, included linking the franchise to those Victorian virtues including thrift, industry, sobriety, ambition, and a capacity for delayed gratification to the Post Office Savings Bank. For the whole ‘New Model Trade Union’ movement that persuaded Parliament that such organizations were above all Friendly Societies was based on the fact that during the mid-Victorian prosperity working people made their own various kinds of investment in the future. In the 1880s a Trade Unionism in Britain and around the developing world became associated with ‘New Industrial Trade Unionism’ that harnessed and channelled the desperate need of the lowest paid and most insecure workers both in appealing to the conscience of the general public and in hitting the employers where it hurt most, in their pockets.
But, important though events in Great Britain were, the plight of most working people was not as desperate as many of those who had hoped to make new lives for themselves as free men working on some holding of their own, for Dale Carnegie’s father was doubtless not the only husband and father for whom the American Dream turned into a nightmare that brought him to the brink of suicide. But such essentially individual personal dramas were less ‘historic’ in their impact and implications than the plight of the millions who had been so recently emancipated.
Many African-Americans down in the ‘Cotton Belt’, once freed from slavery, took up ‘Crop Sharing’ contracts and worked smallholdings growing cotton as a cash crop, where many sank into poverty because, as smallholders found all over the world, banks and lawyers took no account the idea of the increase purchasing power of “real incomes”, debts to banks, and to the taxman had to be settled in full as per contract. And even more generally the Russian Serfs, the vast majority of the people of that vast empire, were offered State Mortgages that would make it possible for them to own their own smallholdings, and Russia had long been an exporter of grains. But the collapse of cereal prices, that more or less wiped out cereal production in England, after its Golden Age from c1840-1860, also impacted on the ability of the Russian peasantry to keep up with their mortgage payments: and the Russian State was forced to renegotiate the terms and give them more time. But more than half a century later, when Lenin offered them “Peace, Bread and Land” in 1917 after the February Revolution he knew that many had not yet managed to pay off their state loans: and given what had happened so far in the twentieth century it was not unreasonable for people convinced of Germanic Scientific genius to believe that Karl Marx prediction of the inevitable “Proletarian World Revolution” was about to be realized. Even within mainland Britain the ten years up to 1914 had seen a decline not only in ‘money wages’ but in ‘real wages’ too, and some of those who saw evidence of ‘the Class War’ all around were quick to accuse the “Capitalist” political establishment in the summer of 1914 of latching on to the assassination in Sarajevo as just another excuse to play “divide and rule” with “the working class” in order to keep them occupied with the ultimate “public work” for the militaristic state, the waging of war.
And indeed Lord Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth, as a major proprietor of a number of the major national daily that became possible in the railway age claimed the credit for having prepared the British public regarding the inevitability of a war against Germany, sooner or later, the significant thing about the reports of the Belgian Outrages that turned British womanhood into the best possible recruiting officers not necessarily being the question of whether indeed German troops had raped Belgian Nuns and crucified gallant Belgian soldiers seeking, but the question as to just why such behaviour had become what one had to expect from the new Huns in the service of the modern German Empire.
As all this gathered momentum the Grand Old Man of British politics W.E. Gladstone, back in 10 Downing Street again, more than sixty years after having been first elected as an MP, was reduced to tears in 1894 because he saw where all of this was leading.
What was at issue was the Naval Estimates submitted by the Royal Navy as the minimum necessary if indeed Great Britain was to continue to “Rule the Waves” for the use of all law abiding people, who wished to benefit from the “Freedom of the Seas” that Great Britain offered to the world as part of its belief in Freedom of Trade, just as for twenty years the Bank of England had seen the maintenance of the Pound Sterling as a base currency bringing some stability for all the other currencies of the world as almost its major obligation, developing a unique skill in the use of gold in “Open Market Operations”. But the Arms Race now meant that Britain’s ability could only be sustained by means of very expensive modernization to match the challenge of ‘modernizing’ powers that were fast catching up with and overtaking Great Britain in various measures of purely national power.
Gladstone’s distress came from the realization that this would just increase the oppressive weight of the State machinery that he had always sought to reduce as much as possible, having done his best as Chancellor of the Exchequer to honour William Pitt’s promise that Income Tax would only be a temporary wartime expedient. Now there were even “Progressive” Income Taxes and paying for the Navy would involve introducing Death Duties so that people could no will the wealth that they had earned to their family. And, in this mood of excessive competition between Great Powers, improvements in the Royal Navy would just be seen as a challenge to rival Naval powers especially Germany. But in a Great Britain already very much in decline from the optimistic days of Mid-Victorian prosperity British mastery of the sea was assuming the proportions of a “Last Ditch Stand”.
All of that railway building around the world had helped to globalize the idea of the Chattel Ownership of the Land as sanctioned by the modern state, an idea that had been really introduced into England by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield during the Age of Civilized Security: and railways, whether publicly or privately financed, became an expression of the right of the State to impose its will on both the Land and the people living on or near it: and where this meant opening up new territory the building of the railway was followed by the allocation of new patterns of landholding in which Labour was applied to the exploitation of whatever assets the Land had to offer, and in default of any mineral resources or other natural bounty that could be asset-stripped, large areas of “virgin soil” could be settled by ‘sodbusters’, those pioneer homesteaders who asked for no more than the challenge of wresting a subsistence living while living ‘cheek by jowl’ with Nature, under the protective umbrella of the State as both implied and expressed by the railway, which could bring various forms of relief in emergencies.
But such security came at a price and in British India, for example, the task of building the railway system that criss-crosses and joins up the sub-continent, and that remains one of the more valued legacies of the British Raj was seen as so vital that the shares that were sold in order to fund their construction came with a guarantee of profit dividends in a form of ‘public-private partnership’: and by the late nineteenth century the Land Tax being levied on the Indian peasantry was raised to 50% of their crops, which is only one example of the way that by this time “the squeeze was on” for Labour, and most especially the labour of those extracting food, raw materials and commodities from the Land.
But there was nothing very new about the way that the creation of a militarily and economically powerful “superstructure” tended to widen the gulf of living standards between Plato’s “gold” the “establishment”, and Plato’s “drones”. Back in Ancient Greece Aristotle, wrote about the Corinthian tyrants, who could be said to have “modernised” that city-state by giving it a more dynamic and forceful government that was then able to dominate its neighbours by its military and economic might during its ‘flowering’ period, when many great public works that testify to the power and majesty of Corinth, commenting that “all these things had the same force, to keep the subjects poor and occupied”. And describing the rise of the Greek tyrants in 1956 in a political evolution that rather resembled the Marxist sequence of monarchy, aristocracy, and the rise of a middle class “meritocracy” Professor Andrewes of Oxford University observed in the light no doubt of Post-War Britain that “the tyrant’s building programmes …were an end in themselves and tended to the greater glory of the city, and if they had any further purpose in home politics they might as reasonably be called a full employment policy.” (page 51)
Well in Greece, as in most of the Ancient Worlds, a large proportion of “the poor” who needed to be “kept occupied” were slaves, and one of the features of nineteenth century “modernization” was the abolition of slavery and serfdom, which assumed ‘continental’ proportions in 1843 when the Indian Princes decided to follow the British who had abolished slavery in 1833. Just over twenty years later the Russian Tsar emancipated the serfs and the USA emancipated its slaves. But in all these cases emancipation made it necessary for millions of people to find new lives within civil society, predominantly in trying to stay ‘on the land’ basing their new life on what was familiar and using their existing skills in order to work for themselves.
But this also suited others who saw the vast ‘virgin lands’ that were being really opened up by the railways as ‘lands of opportunity, both those of ‘the poor’ who wished to migrate away from “Old Worlds”, and those with political and economic power, who saw how keeping both “the masses” and these virgin lands “occupied” enhanced their own security, because almost from the earliest days of the establishment of European ‘frontiers’ across the oceans European military superiority had given the “frontiersmen” and their local friends a capacity to act as a first line of defence in a savage and potentially dangerous world.
And all of this expansionism could be seen by those, who looked at the ‘bigger picture’, as one way to protect civilization from what J.M.Keynes called “the Malthusian devil”, those “Natural Checks” of war, famine and disease that are Nature’s way of dealing with over-population. But in this post 1867 world of “high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism” for most people who were concerned with worldly matters there was no “bigger picture” than that of the Nation, especially when the Nation itself was an “empire”, an “Old World” term that the USA has consistently refused to embrace. And in terms of Adam Smith’s theory of “Economies of Scale” great empires could justify themselves because Keynes “defined mankind’s permanent economic problem as to establish a balance between population and the means to feed, clothe and house it” (page 385)
But Nature ‘the Land’, the habitat that has shaped and formed us, provides for those basic needs and the opening up of the continental interiors of the world increased the Supply of all that the Land could produce, with very few things that Nature produced in just one or two locations granting any effective long-term monopoly. Gold and silver “rushes” tended to be brief, leading to the exhaustion of the mineral deposits and the creation of ‘ghost towns’. But the rubber trees and tea plantations that briefly offered the prospect of permanent prosperity to the Congo and Amazonian rainforests and to parts of China proved to be eminently suited to the creation of new plantations in new regions: and the Cotton Famine created by the Northern-blockade of the Southern States in the American Civil War, bringing Lancashire’s ‘King Cotton’ to a standstill, proved a great incentive to investment in commercial Cotton cultivation elsewhere, notably Egypt.
But the result of all of this, as J.M.Keynes argued in “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” in 1919 had been the creation of a “global system, which sustained a growing population at an increasing standard of life”, a theme that was taken up by the “They’ve never had it so good” politicians of Britain in the 1950s, not least because of the spirit of Victorian philanthropy that had found constant champions in Sir William Beveridge and Beatrice Webb, the main architects of Britain’s “Welfare State”. Keynes background too was in British Protestant Nonconformity with its Puritanical morality that hoped to ‘save’ the masses from themselves after the model of Goethe’s Dr. Faust. As Robert Skidelsky summed Keynes’ argument “Throughout Europe ‘all those instincts pf puritanism’ which in previous times had led people to withdraw from the world were redirected to the task of securing a prosperous future. [But] A radically unequal distribution of income was sustained by a bluff or deception, by which workers were subjected to an enforced abstinence on the tacit understanding that the capitalists ‘saved’ most of their profits. Thus the world’s economic organization ultimately rested on the exercise of the Victorian virtues.” (page 385)
And one might add that it was probably not only his background in Nonconformist ministry, but also his education at Eton and Cambridge, where he was a member of the ‘elite’ of ‘Apostles’, that helped Keynes to readily embrace the idea of a state “establishment” ideally acting as a collective of Good Shepherds delivering “almost absolute security of property and person” from above in accordance with the “radically unequal distribution of income” since, in general terms the “increased standard of life” for ‘the working classes’ , in an age when increasingly Money Income was one of the major determinants of anyone’s standard of life in Economies where workers finally got the right to receive all their remuneration in cash rather than in kind, did not come in increased Incomes, but in lower prices for the ‘basket of goods’ that households needed buy allied with some improvement in public services that were provided by redistributive taxes. For in general and global terms the increased exploitation of the Land increased the Supply of Food, Raw Materials and Commodities so that on average prices fell between 1870 and 1914 by about 30%, with catastrophic effects on some communities, some of which, like the Great Depression in British Agriculture, the ruin of farms and country estates, and the flood of hundreds of thousands of countrymen into the British cities or out into the colonies or the Americas. And British industries like Coal Mining and the Metallurgical Industries suffered in much the same way from competition with lower cost, or in some cases luckier, foreign producers: all of which helps to explain why the wages of working people in Britain were stagnant for over thirty years, undermining the confidence in progress and improvement of the previous hundred years.
Of course the politicians and historians could already claim that “they’d never had it so good”, because the trend towards more State intervention on the French and German model was already well-established. Their children were now forced to attend school and be taught “puritan” virtues and values that would help them to live better and more moral lives under the protective outreach of the State, and there was public health and other advances, while the working class consumer could now buy many things that had formerly been luxuries, or had just never been available.
But back in the build up to the “Great Leap in the Dark” in Great Britain in 1867, some of the proposals that were considered as an appropriate basis for the extending the right to vote beyond the essentially middle-class electorate that had been established in 1832, included linking the franchise to those Victorian virtues including thrift, industry, sobriety, ambition, and a capacity for delayed gratification to the Post Office Savings Bank. For the whole ‘New Model Trade Union’ movement that persuaded Parliament that such organizations were above all Friendly Societies was based on the fact that during the mid-Victorian prosperity working people made their own various kinds of investment in the future. In the 1880s a Trade Unionism in Britain and around the developing world became associated with ‘New Industrial Trade Unionism’ that harnessed and channelled the desperate need of the lowest paid and most insecure workers both in appealing to the conscience of the general public and in hitting the employers where it hurt most, in their pockets.
But, important though events in Great Britain were, the plight of most working people was not as desperate as many of those who had hoped to make new lives for themselves as free men working on some holding of their own, for Dale Carnegie’s father was doubtless not the only husband and father for whom the American Dream turned into a nightmare that brought him to the brink of suicide. But such essentially individual personal dramas were less ‘historic’ in their impact and implications than the plight of the millions who had been so recently emancipated.
Many African-Americans down in the ‘Cotton Belt’, once freed from slavery, took up ‘Crop Sharing’ contracts and worked smallholdings growing cotton as a cash crop, where many sank into poverty because, as smallholders found all over the world, banks and lawyers took no account the idea of the increase purchasing power of “real incomes”, debts to banks, and to the taxman had to be settled in full as per contract. And even more generally the Russian Serfs, the vast majority of the people of that vast empire, were offered State Mortgages that would make it possible for them to own their own smallholdings, and Russia had long been an exporter of grains. But the collapse of cereal prices, that more or less wiped out cereal production in England, after its Golden Age from c1840-1860, also impacted on the ability of the Russian peasantry to keep up with their mortgage payments: and the Russian State was forced to renegotiate the terms and give them more time. But more than half a century later, when Lenin offered them “Peace, Bread and Land” in 1917 after the February Revolution he knew that many had not yet managed to pay off their state loans: and given what had happened so far in the twentieth century it was not unreasonable for people convinced of Germanic Scientific genius to believe that Karl Marx prediction of the inevitable “Proletarian World Revolution” was about to be realized. Even within mainland Britain the ten years up to 1914 had seen a decline not only in ‘money wages’ but in ‘real wages’ too, and some of those who saw evidence of ‘the Class War’ all around were quick to accuse the “Capitalist” political establishment in the summer of 1914 of latching on to the assassination in Sarajevo as just another excuse to play “divide and rule” with “the working class” in order to keep them occupied with the ultimate “public work” for the militaristic state, the waging of war.
And indeed Lord Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth, as a major proprietor of a number of the major national daily that became possible in the railway age claimed the credit for having prepared the British public regarding the inevitability of a war against Germany, sooner or later, the significant thing about the reports of the Belgian Outrages that turned British womanhood into the best possible recruiting officers not necessarily being the question of whether indeed German troops had raped Belgian Nuns and crucified gallant Belgian soldiers seeking, but the question as to just why such behaviour had become what one had to expect from the new Huns in the service of the modern German Empire.
