Community Collapse in the West

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Yet the trade-union movement, the obvious example of a reaction against the divide-and-rule methods of mercantile capitalism in the nineteenth century, stands in an ambiguous position with regard to the forces of production. The doctrine of syndicalism, a theory for the total annexation of the forces of production by trade unions which once dominated the thinking of the French Confederation Generale du Travail (trade-union council), is so far forgotten that its leaders, men whose predecessors published a scenario for revolution based on the presence of 100,000 striking workers in the streets of Paris,  themselves prevented such a revolution in May 1968 when already ten million French workers were on strike. An alliance exists not merely between trade unionists but between the trade unions and their traditional enemies the employers. The same alliance extends as far as the government — whether it be socialist or capitalist. In Britain the autumn of 1972 saw lengthy and serious negotiations between government, unions and employees over measures to contain inflation, increase wages and ensure economic growth. All three parties have the same overwhelming interest in common, the preservation of wealth and the dream of affluence.

The advent of consumer societies, in which the worker not only produced goods and services but provided part of the market for them, occurred perhaps half a century after the integration of syndicalist theory and has rendered much of it obsolete. The worker under these new conditions improved his status as mobile victim of the industrial cycle of boom and slump by becoming also a powerful consumer whose purchasing capability is now vital to the continuation of the process of production itself. Workers who had once dwelt in close-packed city tenements and terraces began to find their class solidarity threatened by the accumulation of wealth of their own. Not wealth in the sense of the annexation of the labour of others, but embourgeoisement, the achievement of a status as individuals comparable to that of their middle-class counterparts. Living in their own houses, driving their own cars, their conditions of life conflicted with the role cast for them by such nineteenth-century thinkers as Marx, Engels and Sorel. Once they had been gripped by the vision of prosperity, the lure of revolutionary politics for the working classes in the West faded into a comparative insignificance from which it has not yet emerged.

The premature birth of a consumer economy in the United States during the decade preceding the Depression gave the American working class a taste of private wealth, with over 23,000,000 private cars (75 per cent of the world’s total) owned by Americans in the year 1929. The 40 per cent drop in gross national product which followed the Wall Street crash of that year threw over ten million out of work, and the employment situation only really recovered with the rearmament programmes of the nineteen-forties. Nonetheless, revolutionary politics signally failed to draw the dispossessed away from the images of affluence glimpsed before the deluge. Sustained by the newly invented talkies (the most successful of which during the Depression years dealt with the random access to power and influence in high society of ‘ordinary people’ ), spectator sports, real-life gangster dramas, historical romances and radio programmes, the American working class endured the Depression and more or less patiently awaited the return of prosperity. During the Second World War their liquid assets rose under the influence of high wages and compulsory savings schemes from 45 to 145 billion dollars. Boosted again by the production demands of the Korean War, these assets fuelled the return of prosperity. In 1952 private house construction in the USA reached the record figure of 1,400,000 units; by the end of the decade the percentage of dwellings owned by their occupiers topped sixty-five: government-subsidized low-cost housing, initiated as a ‘socialist’ measure in 1934 during the New Deal, still only accounted for one per cent of the total. By 1955 Detroit was selling to Americans every year as many cars as existed in Britain, France and West Germany combined. By 1970, figures indicated that this outburst of consumer prosperity had resulted in the population of the United States (just over six per cent of the population of the world) consuming forty per cent of the world’s resources.

Such a process of material exploitation is Faustian in its irreversibility. There can be no halt, and, as we have seen, reversal merely lays bare the collapse of social cohesion of the traditional type brought about by prosperity itself. The social inequality which is guaranteed by industrial and commercial enterprise forever rules out any static configuration. Under the conditions described, only growth can act as a social pacifier. Increased production, increased wealth, increased distribution: all three mean that everyone is advancing, and the slower advancement of the majority is not greatly noticed. Besides, affluence involves the inclusion in the process of consumption of a wider and wider segment of society; even those who are moving most slowly become important in the context of the whole economy, no longer so much as producers, but as consumers of products. The recent growth of the Volkswagenwerk in West Germany clearly illustrates this process. In 1948 the company produced 80 cars a day with a work force of 8,000. In 1968, largely as a result of a powerful penetration of the United States market, production had expanded to the point where 5,000 cars a day could be produced by a work force of 43,000. Thus both production and employment increased, but the former at a faster rate than the latter. In 1968 five times as many workers were able to produce sixty times as many cars. At the same time the global expansion of Volkswagen sales had increased the total number of jobs created by car production to nearly a quarter of a million, with perhaps another million dependants supported by the activities of the company. Under these conditions continued expansion is the only viable policy since any attempt to arrest it must decrease the efficiency of production itself by making more people effectively responsible for fewer cars.

Inevitably therefore even those forces in society dedicated to reducing its inequalities are obliged to advocate further growth; and those who oppose them to defend existing in-equalities by pursuing policies which can only exacerbate them. Ironically economic growth does not reduce inequalities but merely masks them by further extending the already broad basis of consumption. The dynamism of the solution is precisely what prevents it from ever being finalized, but in the event ‘perpetual motion’ proves a better tranquillizer than any attempt to arrest the whole process. Clearly, therefore, any impediment to growth such as the economic retrenchment ad¬vocated by ecologists in recent years cannot have a socially stabilizing effect — quite the reverse. Like trying to stand still on a bicycle, the trick is harder than continuing to ride. What will emerge under conditions of arrested growth (wars of course are periods of accelerated growth, like freewheeling downhill) is not an access of patriotism, community spirit and family loyalty, but a social fragmentation so complete that the political forces representing the relatively prosperous are obliged to fight it at all costs — a defence which, in the context of a consumer society, involves the protection of the mass of consumers as well, perhaps fifty per cent of the population. Whatever protests governments may make about refusing to ‘yield to blackmail’ in industrial relations when militant action leads to confrontations on this ground are simply bluff. Organized workers, who are key producers and key con¬sumers, are enormously powerful in consumer societies, simply because they can upset the process of distribution of goods and services and thereby endanger the social cohesion which has become utterly dependent on these supplies. The tiny flutterings of unreliability which resolute industrial action causes to vibrate through the machinery of consumer supply, the days without newspapers, the blackouts and brownouts, the extended delivery times, the delayed correspondence; all these are harbingers of a collapse so total that they deserve to be greeted with the caught breath that accompanies a faltering engine on a lonely road at night. Consumer societies are like cars in that they have one complicated and vulnerable engine upon which all their functions ultimately depend.

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