A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  The most visible expression of what soon became known as the ‘Cold War’ came in the summer of 1948. Germany had been divided into four occupation zones, and so had its capital, Berlin. Now the US, Britain and France merged their zones and introduced a new currency, which had the effect of cutting them off from the Russian zone. Russia reacted by imposing a blockade on the movement of goods and food by road and rail to West Berlin, which was an isolated enclave in the midst of the Russian zone. A huge US and British airlift succeeded in keeping the supplies flowing – and became part of an Anglo-US propaganda campaign about the ‘defence of freedom’.

  The campaign provided the background for a campaign against Communist and left-wing activists in the West. In the US the Taft–Hartley law required trade unions to purge Communist officials; government employees (including teachers and college lecturers) were sacked for refusing to sign ‘loyalty oaths’; and directors and writers who would not denounce alleged ‘Communist’ contacts were banned from working in Hollywood by Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Writer Dashiell Hammett was among the many alleged Communists imprisoned. Charlie Chaplin was banned from entering the country, and Paul Robeson from leaving it. In a grisly climax, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair for allegedly passing atomic secrets to Russia. In France and Italy anti-Communist splits tore the trade union movement apart. In Britain several major unions banned Communists from holding office.

  While this was happening in the West, the most sterile form of Stalinist ideology was imposed in eastern Europe, with prisons and labour camps for anyone who objected.

  The two blocs were quickly organised into rival military alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and to a large extent cut off from one other economically. The US banned a massive range of ‘strategic’ exports to the Eastern bloc, while within it Russia insisted on ‘the unreserved subordination of politics, economics and ideological activity to the needs of the bloc as a whole’. 268

  Military expenditure on both sides leapt to heights unprecedented in peacetime, reaching about 20 per cent of US national output and up to 40 per cent of Russia’s smaller output. Russia built secret cities to develop an atom bomb to rival the US, while the US developed the H-bomb – 100 times more destructive than the atom bomb – and maintained a fleet of armed nuclear bombers permanently in flight. It was not long before the combined arsenals of the two superpowers were enough to destroy the world many times over. Yet generals on both sides played war games which assumed the use of these weapons.

  As ideological conformity was imposed on either side of the ‘iron curtain’, a generation grew up under the shadow of ‘the bomb’. Anyone in either camp who dared to oppose this monstrosity could expect to be labelled a supporter – or even an ‘agent’ – of the other. All too often this labelling was accepted by those in opposition. Many socialists in the West and the Third World were misled into believing the rulers of the USSR were on their side, while many dissidents in the Eastern bloc believed Western leaders who claimed to stand for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Those who stood out against this nonsense at the beginning of the 1950s were tiny in number.

  The Cold War never became hot on a world scale. If it had, few of us would be around. But it did become hot in Korea. The rival dictators established North and South of the partition line in 1945 each sought to gain legitimacy by unifying the country, and there were clashes from the spring of 1949 onwards. The Northern dictator, Kim Il Sung, decided to act before his Southern rival, Syngman Rhee, got the chance. He launched an attack in June 1950, after receiving the go-ahead from Stalin, expecting it to cause an immediate collapse of the Southern regime. Neither he nor Stalin thought the US would intervene. But the army of the South did not collapse, although it retreated to the southern tip of the country, and the US rushed to intervene. It was worried about the impact that an Eastern bloc victory in Korea would have on a still devastated and impoverished Japan, where a powerful Communist Party was using revolutionary rhetoric. US President Truman also saw war in Korea as an excuse for persuading a previously reluctant Congress to approve a massive increase in military spending.

  The war lasted three years. The human cost was enormous. There were 500,000 Western casualties and three times that number on the other side. Two million Korean civilians died, and half the Southern population lost their homes or became refugees. The mass of the Korean people gained nothing at all. The final demarcation line was the same as at the beginning, and millions of people were precluded from ever seeing friends and relatives on the other side. There had been considerable support for Kim Il Sung in the South when the war began, and some guerrilla activity to back his armies. Those Southern leftists who stayed behind in the South remained in prison for decades; those who retreated North with Kim Il Sung’s armies were imprisoned or executed as ‘unreliable elements’. Meanwhile a succession of dictators ruled South Korea, and it would be almost 40 years before its population had a chance to exercise even the most limited ‘democracy’ for which the war was supposedly fought.

  This futile and barbaric war summed up the Cold War. The massive technological advances of the previous two centuries were marshalled to threaten humanity with destruction by rival ruling classes. Each used the language of the Enlightenment to subjugate as much of the world as possible, and each succeeded in convincing large numbers of people it was right to do so.

  The shortest golden age

  Poverty and insecurity are in the process of disappearing. Living standards are rising rapidly; the fear of unemployment is steadily weakening; and the ordinary young worker has hopes that would never have entered his father’s head. 269

  These were the words of British right-wing social democrat Anthony Crosland in 1956. His conclusion, like Bernstein’s 60 years earlier, was that capitalism had overcome its crises and that ‘we stand … on the threshold of mass abundance’. 270

  Subsequent events proved him wrong. But there was no challenging the statistics he marshalled. World capitalism went through the most sustained boom it had ever experienced. By 1970 the US economy was turning out three times as much as in 1940, German industrial output was up fivefold on 1949, and French output up fourfold. Italy was transformed from a peasant country into a major industrial power, and Japan leapt ahead to take second position behind the US. No wonder many economic historians today describe the period as a ‘golden age’.

  The lives of vast numbers of people were transformed. Unemployment fell to levels only known before in brief periods of boom – 3 per cent in the US in the early 1950s, 1.5 per cent in Britain, and 1 per cent in West Germany by 1960. There was a gradual and more or less uninterrupted rise in real wages in the US, Britain and Scandinavia in the 1950s, and in France and Italy in the 1960s. Workers were living better than their parents, and expected their children to live better still.

  It was not just a question of higher incomes. Wages could be spent on a range of consumer goods – vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, televisions, instant hot water systems. There was a qualitative leap in the working-class standard of living. Housework remained a chore for women, but no longer entailed endless hours of boiling and kneeling and scrubbing. Food could be purchased weekly rather than daily (opening the door for the supermarket to replace the corner shop). Entertainment of sorts was on tap in the home, even for those who could not afford the cinema, theatre or dancehall.

  There were other changes as well. Employers conceded the five day rather than the five and a half day week, and more than a one week annual holiday. Concessions which had seemed a great gain for workers in France in 1936 became commonplace in western Europe and North America. Holidays for the masses came to mean more than a couple of days in the country or a week at the seaside. Workers whose ambition in the past had been restricted to buying a bicycle could now save up for a second-hand car. For the first time young workers had incomes high enough to constitute a market in their own right. ‘Youth culture�
�� was born in the mid-1950s out of the seemingly insatiable demand for pop songs and fashions fuelled by teenage dreams and adolescent insecurities.

  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 nineteenth 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 sharecroppers 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 per cent 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 gave 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 setup. 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’. 271 The number of workers involved in strikes rose from 128,000 in 1932 to 220,000 in 1934. 272 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’. 273

  The imperial authorities had one last card to play. They turned to the Muslim League as a counterweight t
o 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 being paid less 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. 274 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.