A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  One of the leading intellectuals in the German party was Eduard Bernstein. He had been a friend of Engels, and had played an important role in keeping the party going from exile during the period of illegality. In the mid-1890s he declared that the basic theoretical assumptions of Marx and Engels had been wrong. He argued that generalised economic crises were no longer an integral part of capitalism, and said they had also been wrong to foresee an ever-greater polarisation between classes:

  In all advanced countries we see the privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie yielding step by step to democratic organisations … The common interest gains in power to an increasing extent as opposed to private interest, and the elementary sway of economic forces ceases. 19

  Bernstein argued that this process could come to fruition without the ‘dissolution of the modern state system’ 20 demanded by Marx in his writings on the Paris Commune. All that was necessary was a further spread of parliamentarianism, with socialists embracing a thoroughgoing ‘liberalism’ 21 and a policy of piecemeal reform within the existing system.

  Karl Kautsky, the SPD’s main theorist, denounced Bernstein’s argument. He insisted that capitalism could not be reformed out of existence – at some point there had to be a ‘struggle for power’ and a ‘social revolution’. But his practical conclusions were not very different from Bernstein’s. He argued that the socialist revolution would come about through the inevitable growth of the socialist vote. Eventually the party would have an electoral majority and the legitimacy to put down any attempted overthrow of a socialist government by the forces of capitalism. Until then it had to avoid action which might provoke reprisals. Unlike Bernstein, Kautsky said that there remained a distant goal of social transformation. But his prescriptions for day-to-day socialist activity were hardly any different.

  Both shared the optimistic ‘scientism’ or ‘positivism’ of the middle-class intelligentsia and believed in the mechanical inevitability of progress. For Bernstein, science, technology and increasing democracy were turning capitalism into socialism. Kautsky saw the process as taking place in the future, not the present, but was just as certain about its inevitability. Throughout history, changes in the forces of production had led to changes in the relations of production, and they would do so now, he said, if people only waited. The 27-year-old Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was alone in challenging such complacency.

  The SPD’s organisers, who spent all their energies on getting out the vote and maintaining the ancillary organisations, threw their weight behind a formal condemnation of Bernstein’s ideas, but continued to pursue a path of moderate action within the system. So too did the trade union leaders, whose main concern was trying to get employers to negotiate. Bernstein lost the vote within the party, but won the argument.

  Yet the ability of the socialist parties to expand their influence within capitalism depended, in the end, on the stability of capitalism itself. Bernstein recognised this when he made the supposedly crisis-free character of the system a central part of his argument. German capitalism did go through a phase in the 1890s when it seemed to have overcome any tendency to move into crisis, and Bernstein generalised from this into the future.

  By contrast, Rosa Luxemburg insisted that the very processes which seemed to be stabilising capitalism in the 1890s would lead to even greater instability later. 22 She also grasped something which had already been half-recognised by the English liberal economist Hobson and would be spelt out in 1916 by the Russian revolutionaries Nikolai Bukharin and Vladimir Lenin – the phase of rapid capitalist growth was closely connected to the imperial expansion of the Great Powers.

  Imperialism

  In 1876 no more than 10 per cent of Africa was under European rule. By 1900 more than 90 per cent was colonised. Britain, France and Belgium had divided the continent between them, leaving small slices for Germany and Italy. In the same period Britain, France, Russia and Germany established wide spheres of influence extending from their colonial enclaves in China; Japan took over Korea and Taiwan; France conquered all of Indochina; the US seized Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain; and Britain and Russia agreed to an informal partitioning of Iran. Even the smaller islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans were subject to the dictates of London or Paris. The number of genuinely independent states outside Europe and the Americas could be counted on the fingers of one hand – the remains of the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, Ethiopia and Afghanistan.

  The mythology conveyed by children’s stories and the novels for their parents was of intrepid white explorers subduing ignorant but subsequently grateful ‘natives’ – people who were ‘half-devil and half-child’, according to Kipling in a poem urging the Americans to emulate the glories of British colonialism. This mythology depicted the peoples of Africa and the islands of the Indian and Pacific oceans as uniformly ‘primitive’, characterised by cannibalism and witchcraft.

  In fact, European ‘explorers’ such as Mungo Park in the 1790s and 1800s, and Livingtone and Stanley in the 1850s and 1860s, were only able to make their famous journeys through Africa because structured societies and established states existed. These states had been easily able to deal with the first European attempts at conquest. In 1880, it is worth remembering, western Europeans had been in regular maritime contact with the African coast for 400 years – and Indians, Arabs and Turks had been in contact with whole swathes of the African interior for considerably longer. Yet Europeans directly controlled only a few isolated, mainly coastal, regions. As Bruce Vandervort has written, ‘In the early modern period at least, Europe’s technological edge was seldom very great, or important, except perhaps at sea. Indigenous peoples were quick to catch up with European innovations’. 23

  The first European attempts to carve out colonies in Africa involved them in bloody battles which they often lost. The French had to fight long and bitter wars to conquer Algeria and Senegal. The British lost to an Ashanti army in the early 1870s, to the Mahdi’s Sudanese army at Khartoum in 1884 (when the same Charles George Gordon who had helped crush the T’ai-p’ing rebellion in China met a justly deserved death), and to the Zulus at Isandlwana in 1879. The Italians suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of an Ethiopian army at Adowa in 1896, when ‘a whole swaggering ethos of white conquest was shattered’. 24

  But by the 1880s the accelerated industrialisation of western Europe was shifting the balance decisively towards the would-be colonisers. New weapons – breech-loading rifles, steel-plated steamships capable of navigating far up-river and, most notoriously, the Gatling machine gun – gave European armies the decisive edge in most battles for the first time. What is more, the endless flow of commodities spawned by industry made it relatively easy for Europeans to bribe African allies to fight for them. Half the ‘Italian’ troops at Adowa were Eritreans or Tigrayans, and many of the ‘British’ troops in Sudan were Egyptian or Sudanese. The ‘divide and rule’ strategy which had worked so well for Britain’s rulers in India now began to be applied on a large scale in Africa.

  The Europeans claimed to be fighting against ‘savagery’, but their methods were barbaric. When the British army of Lord Kitchener finally conquered Sudan at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, his machine-gunners killed 10,000 Sudanese troops with the loss of only 48 men. ‘The many thousands of Mahdists dying and wounded on the battlefield received no aid from the British, who simply turned their backs and marched away’. 25 ‘They called for water and they called for our aid, but our officers spurned them,’ a British soldier wrote in his diary. Kitchener had the skull of their leader, the Mahdi, turned into an inkstand. 26 Just as brutal was Lord Lugard’s expedition against the rebellious village of Satiru in Nigeria. He estimated that his men killed 2,000 rebels without loss. Prisoners were executed and their heads put on spikes. 27 The Belgian king, Leopold, was in the forefront of pushing for a Western crusade in Africa, claiming it would bring ‘civilisation’ and stamp out slavery. He carved out the huge territory of Congo as a personal empire
, and used methods notorious even among other colonial powers. In an official report to the British foreign office, Roger Casement told of a visit to a rubber-producing region where ‘whole villages and districts I knew well and visited as flourishing communities … are today without human beings.’ He learned that Belgian soldiers who looted and burned villages then collected basketloads of severed hands hacked from victims to prove they had not wasted ammunition. 28

  The capitalist powers certainly did not expend money and effort conquering the rest of the world out of philanthropy. But they were not led to do so simply by racism either, however much they saw this as justifying their mission. The motive was profit.

  There has been much argument among historians as to whether the colonial powers were right to believe that empires would make them richer. But, like the similar argument about the economics of the slave trade in the eighteenth century, it is misplaced. The Great Powers thought empires would make them richer. Those in the forefront of imperial expansion were hard-faced men who understood only too well that it was money which made the world go round. People like King Leopold or the British adventurer Cecil Rhodes might have considered themselves idealists, but they were out to enrich themselves. As Leopold wrote to the Belgian ambassador in London, ‘I do not want to miss a chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake’. 29

  The carve-up of the world cannot be understood without looking at what was happening to the capitalism of the West in this period. The 1870s and 1880s were a period – often called ‘the Great Depression’ – of depressed markets, falling prices, and low profits and dividends, especially in Britain. To British investors there seemed one way to maintain their incomes – investment abroad. Total investment in foreign stocks rose from £95 million in 1883 to £393 million in 1889. It soon equalled 8 per cent of Britain’s gross national product and absorbed 50 per cent of savings. 30 The money went mainly in ‘stocks’ – fixed interest investments for the construction of railways, bridges, harbours, docks and waterways, or for the financing of government bodies. Whatever the investments were for, they promised a level of profitability higher than that to be obtained at home. They also provided a market for domestic industrial output (such as steel rails, locomotives and bridge girders) and led to an increased flow of cheap raw materials. In this way they helped pull British capitalism into a new period of expansion. 31 Such investments required a means to stop foreign borrowers defaulting on their payments. Colonialism provided this through the armed force of the state.

  So Britain and France jointly took charge of Egypt’s finances when its rulers could no longer pay their debts in 1876, and in the early 1880s the British government used armed force to establish a ‘protectorate’ – in effect absorbing Egypt into the British Empire, guaranteeing the dividends of the Suez Canal Company and safeguarding the route to Britain’s even bigger investments in India.

  In a similar way, British forces attempted to seize control of the Transvaal area of southern Africa, ruled by Dutch-speaking Boers, after the discovery of gold and diamond deposits. A bitter war established South Africa as a stable protector of British business interests.

  Not all investment went to the colonies. Much of British investment went to the US, and quite a lot went to Latin American countries like Argentina. This has led some to claim that there was no connection between overseas investment and imperialism. However, the point is that colonies offered the capitalists of the colonial power protected outlets for investment. They also provided military bases to protect routes to investment elsewhere. For Britain possessions such as Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, South Yemen and the Cape were important not just as sources of profit in their own right, but as stopping-off places to India – and India, ‘the jewel in the crown’, was also a stopping-off place to Singapore, the tin and rubber of Malaya, the recently opened markets of China, and the rich dominions of Australia and New Zealand. The empire was like a woven garment which stopped British capitalism catching a cold: a single thread might seem of little importance, but if it snapped the rest would start unravelling. At least that was how those who ran the empire, their colleagues in the City of London and their friends in British industry saw things.

  Britain was not the only imperial power. France controlled almost as much of the world, Holland had the giant archipelago we now call Indonesia, Belgium held an important chunk of central Africa, and the tsar had a huge area of territory to the east, west and south of Russia proper, all the way to the Indian border and across to the Pacific port of Vladivostok.

  But Germany, the European power with the fastest industrial growth, was left virtually without an empire. Its heavy industry was increasingly organised through ‘trusts’ – associations of companies which controlled production all the way from the extraction of raw materials to the disposal of finished products. They had grown up alongside the state and had none of the old small-capitalist distrust of state power which still characterised many British capitalists. They looked to the state to protect their domestic market through tariffs (taxes on imports) and to aid them in carving out foreign markets.

  They looked in four directions: to China, where Germany grabbed its own treaty port; to Africa, where it was able to seize Tanganyika, Rwanda-Burundi and South West Africa; to the Maghreb, where Germany challenged France and Spain for control of Morocco; and to establishing a corridor, centred on a projected Berlin–Baghdad railway, through south east Europe and Turkey to Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. But in whatever direction Germany’s capitalists and empire-builders moved, they bumped up against the networks of colonies, bases and client states run by the established empires – against the Russians in the Balkans, the French in north Africa, the British in the Middle East and east Africa, and everyone in China.

  To put it crudely, the growth in profitability which had produced a recovery from the ‘Great Depression’ and enabled capitalism to concede some improvements in living standards to its workers depended upon the spread of empires. But as the empires spread they tended to collide with each other.

  Those who ran the empires knew that the outcome of such collisions depended upon the strength of their armed forces. Therefore, Germany set about building battleships to challenge Britain’s domination of the seas, and Britain retaliated by building ‘Dreadnought’ battleships of its own. France increased military service in its conscript army from two years to three, so as to be able to match the German military. Tsarist Russia set up state-run arms factories, and designed its railway system with potential wars against Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire in mind. The drive towards war was the flipside of the illusion of stability which imperialism brought to capitalism – and which so impressed reformist socialists like Bernstein.

  Syndicalists and revolutionaries

  The struggle between classes did not stop in this period. At some points and in some places it appeared blunted or was deflected into a purely electoral sphere. This was especially true in the country where the socialist party was strongest, Germany. But elsewhere there were some bitter confrontations. There had been a wave of agitation over the working day in the US in the mid-1880s, and there were bitter struggles in steel (the Homestead lockout of 1892), on the railroads (the Pullman strike of 1894), and in mining (the Pennsylvania anthracite strike of 1902). The US employers smashed these movements, using armed police and Pinkerton private detectives to shoot down strikers.

  In Britain economic recovery in the late 1880s was accompanied by a wave of strikes and unionisation among unskilled workers, starting with the famous ‘match girls’ strike’ in the East End of London and the dock strike of 1889. Employers took advantage of renewed economic recession in the early 1890s to destroy many of the new unions through strikebreaking (as with the use of professional strikebreakers in Hull), starving people back to work (as in a long strike of mainly women mill workers in Bradford), lockouts, and legal action to seize union funds (as in the case of the Taff Vale railway strike). In France t
here were some bitter strikes in the 1880s and 1890s. A six-month strike by 2,000 miners in Decazeville early in 1886 resulted in the deployment of troops and numerous arrests, and troops fired on striking textile workers at Fourmies in northern France on 1 May 1891, killing ten and wounding more than 30, including children. 32

  There have been claims that imperialism led to the ‘bribery’ of workers in western Europe and North America from the profits of ‘super-exploitation’ in the colonies – or at least to the ‘bribery’ of a privileged ‘labour aristocracy’ of skilled workers – and that this explained the influence of reformist socialism such as that of Bernstein. But many groups of workers received a hammering in the peak years of colonisation, when the flow of investment out of western Europe was at its greatest. They were by no means all unskilled workers. In Britain, the biggest imperialist power at the time, many of the strikes and lockouts of the 1890s involved skilled engineers, printers and boot and shoe workers resisting cuts in wages and conditions. The classic working-class novel about the early 1900s, Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists , is about skilled painters and decorators. The stability enjoyed by capitalism in western Europe and North America came not from bribing groups of workers, but from the way in which imperialism reduced the tendency towards crises in the system, creating an atmosphere in which reform seemed possible and ‘practical’.

  In any case, the period of relative class peace began to draw to an end with the onset of the new century. The spread of capitalist relations entailed a growth and transformation of the working class. Old craft industries like shoe-making, printing, typesetting, shipbuilding and engineering were restructured in accordance with the most up-to-date capitalist methods. Mining and iron and steel production expanded everywhere; new industries like chemical and electrical manufacturing emerged. Alongside the textile workers in the mills which typified Britain’s industrial revolution there were now many millions of workers in heavy industry around the world. There were also the first moves towards mass production, based on vast numbers of semi-skilled workers tied to the rhythms of the assembly line. In 1909 Henry Ford began selling the first motor car aimed at a mass market, the famous Model T (or ‘Tin Lizzy’). In 1913 he opened his Highland Park plant in Detroit, with its tens of thousands of workers. Within two decades, millions of workers in a dozen countries would be working in similar places. Meanwhile, the system as a whole showed signs of new economic instability. Real wages began to fall in most industrial countries in the early 1900s. The economic crises that Bernstein had claimed were a thing of the past returned with a vengeance.