[This is Chapter 22of Murphey's book Socialist Thought.]

22

PERCEPTION OF ECONOMIC HISTORY

 

One of the great successes of anti-capitalist thought has been the extent to which the society at large has been induced to accept a certain perception of modern economic history.

 

This perception was fostered first by aristocratic intellectuals such as Robert Southey, John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle; and then it was continued and extended by the rising socialist intelligentsia after the middle of the nineteenth century.

 

According to this critique, capitalism was horribly inhumane during its early stages.  It has become better, the critique says, only because social and legal pressures from the Left have forced it to.  Even then, the well-being currently associated with capitalism is largely illusory, since it is based on false values, rampant waste and the exploitation of sizeable have-not groups, such as the peoples of the Third World.   In comparison to the age of capitalism, the Middle Ages looks considerably better than historians pictured it during the Enlightenment.

 

In this chapter I will illustrate each of these points as it has appeared in socialist writing.  

The perception of the "inhumanity" of early capitalism.  George Lichtheim tells of the viewpoint, which he says was held by "writers of all views and parties," that "invariably referred to social conditions under the Industrial Revolution as a veritable abyss of human degradation":

Before the process had advanced very far, the laboring people had been crowded together in new places of desolation, the so-called industrial towns of England; the country folk had been dehumanized into slum dwellers; the family was on the road to perdition; and large parts of the country were rapidly disappearing under the slack and scrap heaps vomited forth from the "satanic mills."¹

Lichtheim says the aim of the new industrial system had been to "keep the wheels going at all cost, on pain of condemning the newly created urban proletariat to starvation."   

G. D. H.. Cole wrote that “the Industrial Revolution was the greatest act of dispossession in history.”  The villager, he said, was forced off the land by enclosures; and "the creation of factory industry (was a) dispossession of the industrial worker.”²

Edward Bellamy wrote that “perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road.  The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging . . . .”³

Sombart has written that “with every apparatus, with every machine, labor was driven from a more or less open atmosphere, in which the individual could move about freely, into the hell of great industry with its deadening forced labor and its largely unbearable labor conditions.”⁴

In Das Kapital, Marx said that “capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power."   The capitalist "usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body . . . steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight . . . higgles over a mealtime . . . (seeks) the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be . . . .”⁵

Frederick Engels devoted an entire book to the subject.  In The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, he wrote that “everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch  . . . The proletarian is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single day.  The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence . . . Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving . . . The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself.”⁶

More recently, Michael Harrington has written that "the standard of living of the masses fell as capitalism triumphed."⁷  Norman Thomas says that “the process . . . was grim.  Hours were long, the wages were so low that children were forced to go to the factories instead of to schools . . . Factory hands and their families were crowded into ugly slums in smoke-drenched air.”⁸

These passages illustrate what has been a constant litany from socialist authors since the middle of the nineteenth century.  It is a perception that has accordingly permeated the public consciousness as indisputably true.  This in turn has enhanced the public's acceptance of the entrapment and exploitation theories, and of the social changes that are put forward as ways to overcome such problems.

The intellectuals for aristocracy, incensed about the changes that were occurring in society because of the incoming individualistic system, had earlier been making the identical critique of early capitalism.  Thomas Carlyle wrote that "I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us."⁹

Classical liberal thought, weakened for almost a century and a half by the drain of intellectual resources to the left, has had the materials readily available for a rebuttal, but has used them with little effect.  Friedrich Hayek has put together a book of readings entitled Capitalism and the Historians that discusses the issue, giving considerable rebuttal; and Joseph Schumpeter has written that "there never was so much personal freedom of mind and body for all, never so much readiness to bear with and even to finance the mortal enemies of the leading class, never so much active sympathy with real and faked sufferings, never so much readiness to accept burdens, as there is in modern capitalist society."¹⁰

The most telling rebuttal that I have read, however, comes from the English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was a contemporary of Carlyle, Marx and Engels.  His remarks were addressed to Robert Southey's denunciation of early capitalism:

Mr. Southey does not bring forward a single fact in support of these views, and, it seems to us, there are facts which lead to a very different conclusion.  In the first place, the poor-rate is very decidedly lower in the manufacturing than in the agricultural districts . . . As to the effect of the manufacturing system on the bodily health, we must beg leave to estimate it by a standard far too low and vulgar for a mind so imaginative as that of Mr. Southey -- the proportion of births and deaths.  We know that . . . there has been a great diminution of mortality -- and that this diminution has been greater in the manufacturing towns than anywhere else . . . We might with some plausibility maintain, that the people live longer because they are better fed, better lodged, better clothed, and better attended in sickness; and that these improvements are owing to that increase of national wealth which the manufacturing system has produced . . .

The improvements of machinery have lowered the price of manufactured articles, and have brought within the reach of the poorest some conveniences which Sir Thomas More or his master could not have obtained at any price. 

The labouring classes, however, were, according to Mr. Southey, better fed three hundred years ago than at present.  We believe that he is completely in error on this point . . . If what was formerly a common diet is now eaten only in times of severe pressure, the inference is plain.  The people must be fed with what they at least think better food than that of their ancestors. The term of human life is decidedly longer in England than in any former age, respecting which we possess any information on which we can rely.

With regard to child labor, Macaulay said that "the practice of setting children prematurely to work, a practice which the state . . . has, in our time, wisely and humanely interdicted, prevailed in the seventeenth century to an extent which, when compared with the extent of the manufacturing system, seems almost incredible."

He described several amenities that Englishmen enjoyed in the early nineteenth century, but that had been unknown earlier.  And he described the growth of a sense of compassion, saying that "the more we study the annals of the past the more shall we rejoice that we live in a merciful age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred."  Elsewhere, he wrote that "the more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils.  The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old.  That which is new is the intelligence which discerns and the humanity which remedies them."¹¹

By way of surrebuttal, Ferdinand Lassalle didn't accept comparisons that would match the nineteenth century against earlier times.  He noted that an improvement in conditions causes some things to be considered necessities that previously were not.  Then he argued that “an increased minimum of the absolute necessities of life brings also sufferings and deprivations which former times never knew.  What deprivation is it to the Hottentot that he cannot buy soap?  . . . All human suffering and deprivation, and all human satisfactions (are) to be measured only by comparison with the situation of other men of the same period and their customary necessities of life.”¹²

We should notice, though, that this is an argument by way of "confession and avoidance."  Lassalle admits to the improvement, even though finding grounds to debunk it.  Most of the popular impression of the early industrial revolution, created by the literature of alienation, makes no such admission; it holds closely to the perception that conditions were frightful.

Anyone seeking to make a balanced evaluation of this set of issues will do well to notice that socialist thought has generally shown an odd reluctance to draw necessary distinctions and inferences in this area.  There were several factors that were keeping progress from occurring even more rapidly than it did; but even though Engels demonstrated an awareness of their presence, he refused to assign them any causal significance, preferring to blame capitalism for the conditions that he did not like.

Engels was aware, for example, of the enormous influx of Irish immigrants to the English factory towns.  He wrote that "from the time when it became known in Ireland that the east side of St. George's Channel offered steady work and good pay for strong arms, every year has brought armies of the Irish hither.  It has been calculated that more than a million have already immigrated, and not far from fifty thousand still come every year, nearly all of whom enter the industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there from the lowest class of the population . . . These people having grown up almost without civilization . . . ”^l3

And yet, even after recognizing these facts, Engels did not see in them any reason to praise the capitalism that was offering the Irish this improved opportunity.  Nor did he see that such an influx would have a major depressive effect on wages, augmenting the supply enormously compared with the demand.

He also recognized that "the population of the British Empire has increased with extraordinary rapidity, and is still increasing."  Whereas Macaulay would have inferred from this that the industrial system must have been providing the sustenance for the increased number of people, Engels had no such thoughts.

At various points in his book, Engels showed that he was aware of the "drunkenness," "sexual license" and "neglect of domestic duties" of the English working class of that day.¹⁴   But instead of seeing in this an explanation for poverty, he preferred again to blame capitalism and to explain away the behavior, using the socialist version of the "environmentalist assumption" as his reason.

In Das Kapital, Marx described in detail the process of "enclosure" that, beginning as early as the sixteenth century, forced English peasants off the land:  "The great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by forcible driving of the peasantry from the land."  He said that this continued into the nineteenth century, speaking of "the 3,511,770 acres of common land which between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and by parliamentary devices presented to the landlords by the landlords."¹⁵

This, too, caused a migration that was bound to have impacted adversely upon conditions under the incoming industrial system.  Just the same, neither Marx nor Engels saw in it any reason to mitigate their criticism of that system.

Marx's failure here reflects his more general failure to differentiate between conditions produced by the policies of the aristocracy that ruled England until the Reform Act of 1832 shifted power to the upper middle class and conditions that prospectively were going to come about under classical liberal leadership.  This distinction is essential.  Without it, capitalism is tarred with the faults of the still-continuing feudal aristocracy, which is particularly ironic since capitalism was doing so much to overturn that aristocracy.

Marx saw aristocrats and the middle class as just two parts of one large "ruling class."   There is a passage in Capital in which Marx describes the fight over repeal of the Corn Law (the tariff on grain, not just corn, imposed by the aristocracy) as a "noisy, passionate quarrel between the two factions of the ruling class."¹⁶   Engels said that "in speaking of bourgeoisie I include the so-called aristocracy."¹⁷   Marx even thought of the statist interventionism of Mercantilism as a part of capitalism, ignoring the adversary relationship between that statism and the free-market liberalism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

This simplistic lumping-together of opposites led to much confused thinking and fed the fires of an all-too-reflexive alienation.  Neither Marx nor Engels appreciated classical liberalism as a larger philosophy of a free society.  They weren't motivated to give it a chance.  Instead, they condemned capitalism on the basis of carry-over feudal manifestations, just at the time when the middle class was first gaining political ascendancy and before classical liberalism had had an opportunity to complete its revolution within English life.

There is irony in Marx's lumping of aristocrats and capitalists together, but this irony is compounded when we realize that the alienated perceptions of Marx and Engels flowed from, and had their counterparts in, the same alienated views of aristocratic intellectuals.  In my book on Burkean conservatism, I said that "Carlyle bore down heavily on the 'conditions' under the Factory System"; and I referred to the intense social criticism leveled by John Ruskin.¹⁸   Certainly Charles Dickens contributed immensely to our heritage of pessimism about an age that was actually working wonders for the well-being of the average Englishman.

 

The rehabilitation of our perception of preindustrial conditions.  Historians during the Enlightenment took a decidedly unfavorable view of the Middle Ages, which they saw as an age of superstition, squalor and tyranny.

Since the early nineteenth century, this perception has become far more favorable.  In part, the change has reflected the tolerance that modern social scientists extend to all forms of culture as a result of the relativism that is second-nature to them.  In part, too, it reflects a valid appreciation of the contributions that the Middle Ages made, since it is a mistake to see that time as totally sterile.

But there is a third source.  The more favorable reassessment stems from a tactical need that has been shared by the anti-bourgeois ideologies.   These ideologies argue that capitalism and the industrial revolution brought "horrible" conditions.  That argument would be seriously vitiated if they were to admit that conditions had been worse before the industrial revolution, so that the so-called "horrible" conditions were actually an improvement.   The attack on early capitalism only makes sense if conditions are perceived to have been better and as having been worsened by the manufacturing system.

This has virtually forced socialist thinkers to reevaluate the precapitalist era in a more favorable light.  They have often done so half-heartedly, though, carrying out their logical obligation, but seeming to realize full well that conditions were not good prior to capitalism.  The intellectual mentors of "conservatism," in the sense that conservative means support for the medieval consensus, of course, were also very much engaged in rehabilitating modern man's perception of the Middle Ages.  This is a major thrust of Burke's rationale in England, and it permeated the thinking of the Romantic movement in Germany in the early nineteenth century.   This is reflected in Lichtheim's statement that "the romantics (and the conservatives generally) looked back to the lost harmony of the Middle Ages."¹⁹

In Chapter 3 I have discussed the continuities that exist between socialist and medieval thinking, so I won't devote space now to an extensive quoting of socialist authors to show their favorable inclination toward the pre-capitalist period.  Suffice it to say that Guild Socialism held up as its ideal the "autonomous medieval guild, with its emphasis on craftsmanship and group solidarity," according to Fried and Sanders.²⁰   Russian socialists looked to the medieval mir.  Mumford has looked back with favor to the medieval commune, which he has seen as representing the "normal pattern of communal life" that has been broken down by modern influences.²¹   Sombart wrote of "the middle ages (as) a particularly illuminating period," citing a "consciousness of God" that made it truly a "community."²²  Lassalle argued that "we are in the habit of giving ourselves airs and of looking down on the Middle Ages . . . But in doing so we are frequently in the wrong."²³  Marx, though exulting in the historical movement from one level of the historical dialectic to another, took pains to point out that the medieval serfs became freedmen only through a process that "robbed them of all their own means of production" and turned them into “sellers of themselves.”²⁴  These are just a few of the examples that appear in socialist writing.

 

Inferences about the reasons for the later improvement.  Both Marx and Engels admitted that conditions improved by the second half of the nineteenth century.  One of the problems for socialist ideology is to explain the causes of this improvement in a way that is consistent with the continued denunciation of capitalism.

Kirkup denied that capitalism caused the improvement, attributing it to such innovations as "trade unions, cooperative societies and factory legislation, (all of which are) inconsistent with competitive economics."   If the Iron Law of Wages did not prevail to keep wages at a subsistence level, this was not because of capitalism but because "capitalism is passing away."  The social legislation shows “the decline of capitalism.”²⁵  The giving of credit to social legislation and unions for the improved quality of life is characteristic of reformist socialism, just as it is of modern welfare liberalism.  When Norman Thomas speaks of "'the good old days' of long hours, unsafe working conditions, low wages, (and) strikes of desperation," and then says "thank God for the unions," he is demonstrating his inference that unions caused the improvement.²⁶   In like fashion, Laslett and Lipset refer to improved conditions today and then say that “that was something we had to work for and fight for and bleed for.”²⁷   The assumption is that the conditions would not have improved in the absence of that bleeding.

This is, of course, very much at odds with the classical liberal perception that the improvement in living standards for the general run of the population is overwhelmingly the result of the greater and greater productivity and innovation under a system that combines competitive enterprise with science.   To this view, people would not be better fed if it were not for a vastly more efficient agriculture; they would not be better housed if it were not for a building industry that constructs hundreds of thousands of new homes every year.  The essence of mass production is to turn out goods for the so-called "masses" rather than custom-made goods for the rich.  Accordingly, the main credit must go to capitalism and science.  Social legislation is seen as either having gotten somewhat in the way, or as having addressed peripheral issues.

In the chapter on the exploitation theories, I indicated my own agreement with the theory that relates to imperfections in markets.  I believe, as a classical liberal, that social legislation has helped in some of these areas; but I also agree with the main thrust of the classical liberal viewpoint, which is that capitalism improved conditions initially and has been the prime mover in the continuing improvements that have been so momentous ever since.

Some socialists do not confess that there has been improvement and then avoid the implications of that confession by attributing the cause to legislation.  Instead, they argue that the "improvements" are either not worthwhile at all or amount to less than we usually think they do.  Robert Heilbroner, for example, argues that conditions have improved, but not as much as they would have if "capitalist privilege" had not stood in the way.²⁸   This turns capitalism into an obstacle to well-being.

Michael Harrington characterizes the affluence in American society as consisting in part of "waste, reduplication and pseudo-needs."²⁹   This reminds me of the New Left's categories of "underdeveloped" and "overdeveloped" and "properly developed" societies.  All such arguments, while having a degree of merit, are ways of debunking the visible successes of capitalism.

 

Understanding of cause-and-effect on many other matters.   Before I conclude this chapter, it will be worthwhile to show that the ideologies draw different inferences about historical cause-and-effect with regard to a great many other aspects of modern history.  Here are some examples:

The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it are attributed to the chronic dislocations inherent in "unplanned capitalism."  Classical liberalism understandably has far more empathetic explanations and seeks solutions to the problem of the trade cycle that are compatible with a free market ethos.

From the point of view of the far Left, the inflationary interventionist policies promoted by John Maynard Keynes were mere “bourgeois Keynesian theory.”³⁰   Supporters of a market economy have hardly seen them that way.

The poverty in the so-called Third World of Asia, Africa, and Latin America is attributed by much recent socialist thought to capitalism.  The Dolbeares tell about recent Marxist thought: “Claims that credit capitalism with creating affluence are, in Marxist eyes, narrow-minded chauvinism; growth rates in the Third World are declining, and in world terms, the capitalist economies are generating not affluence, but poverty.”³¹  This is very different from a classical liberal explanation, which would look to such factors as the lack of protection given to investment property on those continents and the failure to accumulate capital.

In Marxist writing it has been commonplace to blame the United States for the “Cold War” that followed World War II.   It is seen as "an ideological cover under which the United States assumed global responsibility for the maintenance of an empire.”³²  [Note in 2002: Now that the Cold War is over with the demise of the Soviet Union, the dominant view in the West is that the United States should lead an international program to, in effect, serve as the world’s policeman and social worker.  This meliorism is not “imperialist” in the sense that Marxists mean it, but it does constitute a form of cultural imperialism or neo-colonialism, ironically validating to some degree ex post facto the Marxist perception of the Cold War as having simply been a cover for American domination.  American conservatives are divided over the globalist program, many welcoming it and some, such as Patrick Buchanan, warning of its presumption and dangers.  I count myself among the latter.  See my book Out of the Ashes on this Web site.]

 

NOTES

1. George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), pp. 10, 5-6.

2. G. D. H. Cole, Labour in the Commonwealth (London: Headley Bros. Publishers, Ltd., no year given), p. 74.

3. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: Signet Classic, 1960),  pp. 26-27.

4. Werner Sombart, A New Social Philosophy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969, p. 21.

5. Karl Marx, Capital (New York: The Modern Library, 1906), p. 291.

 

6. Frederick Engels, The Condition of  the Working-Class in England in 1844 (London. George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1952), pp. 53, 76, 79, 80.

 

7. Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1970), p. 39.

 

8. Norman Thomas, Socialism Re-examined (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1963), p. 34.

 

9. Quoted in Dwight D. Murphey, Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism: Modern Social and Political Philosophies (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), p. 87.

 

10. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1947), p. 126.

 

11. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 47, 48, 69, 70, 71, 332, 333. 

 

12. The German Classics (Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1914), pp. 504, 506.

 

13. Engels, Working-Class, p. 90.

 

14. Engels, Working-Class, pp. 126, 128, 129, 77.

 

15. Marx, Capital, pp. 789, 800.

 

16. Marx, Capital, p. 742.

 

17. Engels, Working-Class, p. 276.

 

18. Murphey, Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism, pp. 87, 88.

 

19. Lichtheim, Short History, p. 69.

 

20. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders, Socialist Thought (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1964), P. 364.

 

21. Leonard I. Krimerman and Lewis Perry (ed.s), Patterns of Anarchy (Garden City: Doubleday & Comany, Inc., 1966) , p. 347.

 

22. Sombart, New Social Philosophy, p. 217.

 

23. The German Classics, p. 439.

 

24. Marx, Capital, p. 787.

 

25. Thomas Kirkup, History of Socialism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909), p. 106.

 

26. Thomas, Socialism Re-examined, p. 23.

 

27. John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.s), Failure of a Dream?  Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1974), p. 22.

 

28. Robert L. Heilbroner, The Limits of American Capitalism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966),  pp. 77, 78. 

 

29. Harrington, Socialism, p. 350.

 

30. Ralph Miliband and John Seville (ed.s), The Socialist Register 1976 (London: The Merlin Press, 1976), p. 169.

 

31. Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Patricia Dolbeare, American Ideologies (Chicago: Markham Publishing Company, 1971), p. 197.

 

32. Laslett and Lipset, Failure of a Dream?,  p. 700.