Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

by Marilynne Robinson

  The penchant for developing theories to account for suffering and death proved useful. Press and parliamentary reports of the Victorian period describe a system of exploitation which ravaged the culture, extruded every ounce of labor from those able to work—including small children and women recently delivered—starved them, beat them, poisoned them, housed them in cellars into which sewage drained from the streets, taking from them everything that could be taken, turning every good thing into a mode of exaction.

  Housing, for example, which was typically wretched, was often rented to workers as a condition of employment, so that the employer could withhold rent and therefore be at no risk of losing it, raise rent as a control on the amount received by the worker in wages, and expel the worker from the house when he was fired, adding to the terrors of idleness the loss of shelter, and dreaded vagrancy. The houses would be inhabited, however foul or wet or crowded, and no one would be in a position to request repairs. How could more economic advantage be found in the supplying of shelter? Well, this sort of housing permitted the claim to be made that the factory was a relatively wholesome environment for young children, and the sixteen-hour day a positive philanthropy. It was not merely dirtiness or neglect but low morals as well that were said to characterize the working-class home, whole families and even lodgers sharing a single bed, where there was a bed. This state of affairs seized upon the imagination of moralists, who lamented all the degradation such a life must entail. At the same time, the morally convenient view that degraded people were less sensitive to insult and imposition and therefore could be exposed to conditions their betters would find intolerable resulted in savings to both employer and taxpayer.

  The Victorians, who presided over this squalor at its worst, evolved a fastidious system which seems, in context, designed to widen the chasm between the wealthy and the poor by devising a system of virtue dependent on privacy and on elevating amenity to the status of morality. A Victorian lady was confined from the time her pregnancy became discernible. A working-class woman worked until she delivered, gave birth in a crowded room, and returned to work a few days afterward. At the end of her ten to sixteen hours, her clothing would be sodden with milk. When morality was so thoroughly confounded with mere fastidiousness, these women must have seemed appalling indeed, and their children as well, who could scarcely pretend to any innocence at all, as their betters understood the word. Added to this compromising proximity of family members was a virtually absolute lack of sanitation, which involved the laboring classes in an awareness of the particulars of bodily processes as far beyond the pale even as begetting and birthing. Their quarters were swamped in excrement. Again this was not a peculiarity of urban life, since the depopulations of the countryside had squeezed farm laborers into rural slums entirely as dense and filthy as industrial slums. All this simply indicates how invasive and pervasive were the exploitations of the controlling classes, who determined every particular of the lives of those who lived by labor.

  Reading Taine or the earlier St. Simon or Zola, one can see an equivalent in another context. There is no reason to imagine that any European country experienced less severe exploitation of the masses of its people than Britain did. But British society was remarkable for the progressive nature of its immiseration—extreme poverty in association with unprecedented advances in science and technology, and in national power and wealth. It was Britain’s inspiration to transform static feudal custom into dynamic capitalist system, to convert wealth into capital; that is, to release its astonishing powers of self-replication. Italian city-states and the Low Countries developed banking and trade to a very high point. But Britain added industrialism, with its special opportunities for the growth of capital through expansion and innovation. Britain’s importance as a center of trade and finance gave it world markets, highly suitable for absorbing its production of staples such as textiles, which were cheap because they came from modern factories whose operatives were as badly paid as any in the world. I am aware of the little charts which show a worker of whatever kind earning however many shillings and pence. Much relevant social history is devoted to turning out the pockets of these people, and graphing their contents for comparison. This is meaningless, however, when workers were required to rent their shelter and buy their food from employers, or from others who profited from the necessity of their living near the factory where they were employed sixteen or eighteen hours and more, or from the need to buy food daily and close at hand—which made workers the primary victims of adulteration as well as high prices. To this must be added the inflation of the costs of necessities which can always be enjoyed by monopoly suppliers. And then employers had the uncontrolled right to fine for defective work or damaged equipment. All this makes a wage itself meaningless, since by one means or another its real value is susceptible to reduction at any time. Health conditions and length of life are better indicators of how one is repaid for one’s labors. In industrial cities the average length of working-class lives was seventeen years. For reasons touching the profitability of enterprise no wage could buy the mass of people a breath of fresh air or a taste of clean water. They subsidized with their health and lives the profits of industrialists.

  It is a seamless history. The contamination of modern Britain with radioactivity is done by industry, for profit. The health of those affected is an appropriation of property, since, as Adam Smith argued (and Marx seconded him, as he did often), one’s labor and therefore one’s ability to labor is a property and a patrimony. To deplete strength and life is to overstep limits no one should be required to cross. This is an ethical argument, of course, though couched in economic terms. People have always sold their lives along with their labor. To refuse has rarely been a practical option. That is why the American abolitionists, well before the Civil War or the Communist Manifesto, treated chattel slavery and wage slavery, in those terms, as one phenomenon. The fulcrum of the competitive system of capitalism in Britain was the worker and his wage, though this fact reflected peculiarities of the social order rather than any real economic necessity. Britain had, after all, so many varieties of competitive advantage that higher real wages, which would be repaid in a larger domestic market, could have been absorbed, while the loss of discipline enforced by desperation would be compensated for by greater vigor and longer lives among the industrial work force—a body whose skills, virtually unique in the world at that time, were among Britain’s great economic advantages and therefore deserving of consideration, if on economic grounds alone. The uneconomic side effects of the degradation of the work force are as obvious now as they were then, and yet it has persisted, under the pretext of economic necessity.

  Marx was correct in seeing society as roiled to the bottom by “economic relations,” which amounted to the confiscation in whole or in part of the peace, health, beauty, dignity, strength, and span of life of the great majority of people. Just such a high-handed and unembarrassed claim to dispose of others’ lives as was made by industrialists, by agriculturalists, by slave traders and colonizers (both in routing indigenous populations and in dumping unwanted Britons and Irish in remote corners of the earth), is expressed in the conduct of government and industry in Britain today. Now, as ever, there is no sound calculus of interest that will justify, for example, the importation of nuclear wastes in vast quantities by a small country which has presumed to deal with them because its specialists have shrugged off the difficulties involved, choosing financial gain against the risk, if not in fact the certainty, of unthinkable loss. It is a strange abuse, from which financial benefits can be expected only if it is assumed that there will be no unconcealable catastrophe, that other countries will not be shamed out of paying for this disreputable service, that the country will never face boycott or ostracism on account of Sellafield, that its impact on the national health will never become insupportably grave.

  I suggested earlier a moral polarization in British society, which was economically based in the sense that it gave moral value t
o the refinements of life made possible by privacy and amenity. This is not to imply that working-class people were uninjured by the lack of these things. It is only to point to the pattern of a morality grown increasingly “nice” while the lives of most people conditioned them to circumstances this morality would find degrading and presumptively immoral. The conditions which yielded all the imagined and actual vice and the scandalous absence of proper hygiene were created by the very class who could hardly bring themselves to speak of them. The accelerated progress of refined sensibility in the opposite direction from physicality and squalor suggests that goodness is being defined as the opposite, not of evil, but of poverty.

  The Victorians are famous for their rigorous notions of female purity, their exquisite awareness of female delicacy, their lisping attentions to pretty children. Yet industrial labor from its beginning was overwhelmingly the work of women, and of children as well. Women were not recruited into a system designed for endurance greater than theirs. The worker around whom industry developed was a woman. Men, when Engels wrote in the nineteenth century and when Beveridge wrote in the twentieth, were considered unemployable except at odd jobs by the time they were forty, and regularly became the dependents of their wives and children, who, though preferred to men as workers, were paid considerably less (which heightened, one must assume, the degree to which they were preferred). The primary earner in a household having so brief an active life, the incomes of families were pieced together out of the trifles paid to supposed dependents. All in all, the economy of the nineteenth century was as if designed to demonstrate the toughness of women, while at the same time the myth of female delicacy elaborated itself endlessly.

  Again, I am suggesting here a morality of denial, which reached an especially high degree of development and has been put to especially rigorous use, in Britain. I do not think that historically the British upper classes really have not known how the working class lives, though (then, as now, and at frequent intervals between) revelations of poverty were greeted with little shrieks and exclamations such as “Among us! In this land so widely admired for its decency and civilization!” The proof of awareness, highly specific however deeply suppressed, is precisely this mirror-image reality, in which everything is reversed. Sheltered children, sheltered wife, dominant father/husband, leisure, freedom from financial dependency, access to the countryside, the ability to observe a highly nuanced propriety requiring a variety of dress, an array of forks and glasses—all these things were absolutely not characteristic of working-class life. The Victorian home flourished over and against the working-class household in which everyone above the age of five or six might be employed, leaving the littlest ones untended through an endless Victorian workday. “Slum” is cant slang from the word “slumber.” These people must have done little more than sleep in the few hours they had to themselves. It was often remarked that they were deficient in domestic culture.

  Defining one’s values in opposition to the conditions of life of poor people has numerous advantages, especially when merely to admit to a knowledge of such conditions is compromising. One can experience the difference between oneself and those less fortunate as the difference between virtue and vice, and that is comforting. It reinforces the old faith that poverty is the consequence of a degraded character. A more efficient justification of an existing order can hardly be found than the notion that those who enjoy its advantages are, in fact, better, not through any special attainment, though these are extravagantly admired where they occur—but simply as the repository of a particular experience.

  The “clever” of Britain, whose distinguishing marks are verbal first of all, consider themselves their culture’s ornament and justification. Therefore they are very poor critics of the system that has created them or, more precisely, that has decreated the skeptics and competitors who might have dashed their self-confidence or the confidence of others in them. It is the convenient faith of Britain that it is a pure organic growth, whose gifts are for referring great questions to custom and intuition. This belief peripheralizes thinking. Among the whole class of the verbally clever there is a fluency which is social rather than intellectual—though the tendency of the culture is to suppress this distinction. Beatrice Webb declared herself “the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world,” and her faith made her prolific. It also led her to retail and recodify the pet theories of that cleverest class and nation. These theories, whether capitalist or Malthusian or Social Darwinist, have always had the public good as their first object. The problem, of course, is one of definitions. For example, historically and at present the British have seen little benefit in wasting education on the non-clever. Malthus, weary of being seen as an enemy of the poor, advocated education as a means of encouraging religion and sexual abstinence among them. William Hazlitt dismissed his suggestion, pointing out that workers in the North were often literate and religious and it only made them unruly. Cleverness has always been a rationed commodity.

  Since cleverness is overwhelmingly class-associated, certain habits of thought, angles of vision, and styles of articulation have authority without reference to their implications or their consequences. Naturally any reform of the institutions of society will reflect the thinking of its best minds, its “cleverest class,” and this is certainly the case with the British Welfare State. This accounts for the tenaciousness of primitive social ideas, such as the positive value of class itself, and the tendency of the poor to be corrupted by the alleviation of their poverty, and the assumption that the state, in accepting any practical responsibility for the general welfare, has taken on a killing burden, and must decline, and should be honored and venerated in its consequent mediocrity—that is, in the shabbiness of public provision which, on a sort of lifeboat analogy, is taken to reflect the precipitous decline in value of aid extended too generally. There is such a profound bias against generosity in British culture that it is entirely possible for them to argue that where misery is achieved a too melting generosity must have lain behind it. It has been characteristic of British social theorists, from Defoe to Malthus to the writers of the New Poor Law to Herbert Spencer to the Webbs to Mrs. Thatcher, to cry out for an end to generosity on humanitarian grounds.

  All this moaning and groaning creates the impression that some dreadful sacrifice is being made, the pelican is plucking flesh from its breast to feed its children, and these children, cosseted wretches, never see any point in leaving the nest. As a matter of objective fact, ordinary British people have always enjoyed a very small portion of the wealth of the British community. Subsistence has always been considered an appropriate description of well-being as it applied to the general British public. It is the noise these people make—the mandrake groans, the Carlylean tirades and tears—that has led the world to believe a powerful spirit of justice was at work on that island, like Jehovah at Sinai, producing out of darkness and thunder the very tablets of righteous law.

  This great coherency of theory and practice should not be taken to imply that the British world picture could not accommodate another vision of society and economy. As I have said, Adam Smith argued that the wealth of nations should be measured by the productivity of their people, which was enhanced by liberal wages and by relaxation, even “dissipation and diversion,” and by education, to moderate the stultifying effects of the division of labor. Capital accumulated through monopolies and other policies that depressed consumption while raising profits therefore diminished wealth. Foreign trade and manufacturing had created new opportunities for the powerful to engross profits, rather than to share them, and Smith remarks, “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

  Why, or by what means, Adam Smith has been made to seem the apologist for capitalism par excellence I cannot tell. The economy of colonialism, mercantilism, and monopoly which he criticizes at such length clear
ly corresponds to Marx’s capitalism, in which the worst potentialities Smith described are fully realized. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith used the wealth of the American colonies, elsewhere called their “happiness,” to demonstrate his argument that high wages were consistent with low prices and with productivity. He compares the prodigious growth of population in the American colonies, for him the sign as well as the source of wealth and productivity, with Europe and Britain, where “it is not uncommon, I have been frequently told, in the Highlands of Scotland for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive.”

  Marx repeats, more explicitly, the distinction Smith had made almost a century before between an economy designed to promote the concentration of capital in the hands of merchants and industrialists and one characterized by the welfare of the general population, also using America as the example of the second type. While the distinction these writers make is not without complication, it is not particularly subtle either. And yet it has been wholly lost.

  Chapter 33 of Capital is an attack on E. G. Wakefield’s book England and America, published in 1833. Marx is emphatically determined to establish a distinction between capitalism, an economic system in which the working class is wretched and dependent, and its “direct anti-thesis.” Wakefield describes America as retarded in its development by the high cost and status of labor. He calls the wealth of Americans “capital,” and Marx replies:

  Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’ own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct anti-thesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only.