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TRANSFORMATIONS

There have, of course, been other historical moments in other countries, when the psyche of whole peoples has been re-formed, the structures of feeling and thought re-made; usually as a consequence of domination, conquest and forced conversion; but in recent times, as a consequence of accelerating technological change. The early industrial era was such a time in Britain; although since it was accomplished under the doctrine of laissez-faire, it cannot be said to have been a self-conscious effort to transform people; although the imposition of the disciplines of labour upon the rural sensibility of a wasting peasantry was certainly experienced as violence. The exigencies of manufacture compelled the labourer to observe accurate time-keeping, to adapt to the rhythms of industrial life, as against the pace of the seasons, the more leisurely needs of sowing and harvest. The criminalisation of recalcitrants, a draconian penal code, the new Poor Law, the workhouse and the lunatic asylum were characteristic institutions of the age. In the late 19^th century, there were about 40 lunatic asylums in England and Wales. By the 1840s, there were 400. This alone is suggestive of the coercive violence of industrialism, of the confusion and destabilizing of whole peoples, as they forsook the impoverished countryside for the new sites of manufacture, where new forms of livelihood might be obtained, even though these reduced them to a mere fragment of humanity, ‘hands’.

The making of industrial society was brutal, as it recreated human lives according to the needs of a national division of labour. Although the disciplines were broadly similar in each industry, the process produced some contradictory phenomena, as E.P. Thompson chronicled in his Making of the English Working Class. Thompson writes how the indisciplined 18^th century ‘mob’ became transformed into the ‘revolutionary crowd’, how working people, as they learned the rules of the capitalist game, organized their own psychological and institutional resistance to it. People were both victims and agents of their own transformation.

Beyond schooling people to work and want, to accept poverty and insufficiency as a natural state against which they were free, as individuals, to seek to better themselves, there was no purposeful intent to restructure the psyche of the people; even though the subjective experience was one of discontinuity, upheaval and often, of piercing loss, whether or not the ‘standard of living’ can be proved to have risen in monetary terms. The conditions in which people laboured, their hours of work and the tasks expected of them were scarcely redeemed even by a significant rise in the amount of money in hand.

Now it is one thing for the sensibility of peoples to be transformed accompanied by a feeling of impoverishment, and forcible eviction certainly characterized the early industrial era. But it is another matter when equally epic shifts in the human personality are required under a period of rising affluence. This has been the more recent experience of the people of Britain, and much of the Western world, as the industrial base has collapsed. When whole industries upon which British wealth and power had been built fell into ruin – coalmining, shipbuilding, steel-making, the manufacture of daily necessities- only those thrown out of work in the manufacturing districts protested. Or most, it seemed no great loss that we should now buy in our clothing from Bangladesh and Indonesia, our children’s playthings from China, our ships from South Korea, our footwear from Brazil or Taiwan. With a rising income, the snuffing out of industry did not appear to be the same traumatic experience that its imposition had been 150 years earlier. And yet, the loss of function and purpose, the loss of faith in the future of an ageing population, the diseases of excess, obesity and self-indulgence, addictions and obsessions, the breakdown of continuity in relationships of kin and community – suggest that a higher price has been paid for the growing prosperity than the mere cover price of the bewildering array of consumer choices which the free but far from happy people of the West are assailed by. But the spirit and sensibility of a manufacturing population has been dismantled and re-made in the image of a global market: the social disorders that stem from this suggest that no transformation which is imposed upon people by others can ever be wholly benign.

A far more self-conscious effort to re-make the psyche of the people occurred in the Soviet Union, with the making of the new Soviet man and woman. The re-shaping of humanity according to the necessities of ideology was a very different experience from the imposition of an industrial system which permitted the sensibility of the workers to follow such patterns as chance might dictate. Stalin said, at a speech in the home of the writer Maxim Gorki in 1932, ‘The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks…And therefore I raise my glass to you and writers, the engineers of the human soul.’ This was a far more coercive experience than anything promoted by capitalism: after all, it was only behaviour that capitalism required, habits of industry and diligence; while socialism promised nothing less than the creation of a new type of human being, an heroic embodiment of the socialist system, who would be selfless and tireless in the promotion of the values of the ideology which he or she was both product and proselyte. The State propounded the fiction of happy women and men, heroines and heroes of Soviet Labour, devoting their lives to the glory of the Party. When the ideal society failed to appear, scapegoats had to be found to account for the faulty application of an ideology of revelation: first the kulaks had to be eliminated as enemies of socialist, and then saboteurs had to be found who were undermining the economic success that should have followed the prescribed path; and finally, backsliders and class enemies inside the Party had to be unmasked in an orgy of bloodletting, since the people had shown themselves unworthy of the ideology of human perfection which the leaders of the Soviet Union thought Marx had bequeathed them. They claimed that History was on their side, that hope and the future belonged to them; and created the great gulags of despair for dissenters and all who denied the eternal truths which they propounded under the pretence that they alone had discovered the true meaning of ‘scientific socialism’. Indeed, so effective had Stalin’s terror been, that even when he had had clearly collapsed with his final stroke, none of his subordinates dared to approach him, in case he was only sleeping and his anger at being wakened by him might lead to their downfall. It was the failure of the Soviet version of humanity that led directly to the rehabilitation of the capitalist version of laissez-faire, and the demand that people believe, not this or that ideology, but that they behave in conformity with a set of economic ‘laws’ which would deliver their own rewards.

It should not be imagined that capitalism learned nothing from the Soviet experiment. Quite the contrary. It absorbed many of the lessons of the doomed Soviet effort, and has used them to great effect in the grandiose project of globalization. The peoples of the South have been on the receiving end of a more subtle transformation than that which occurred in 19^th century Britain. It has been, not labour, but the great spectacle of affluence, the shining iconography of commodities, with which the peoples of the South have been wooed: the mall and the five-star hotel, the gleaming Mercedes on its revolving platform in the showroom window, expensive clothing draped around elongated models of scarcely human dimensions, the concealed lighting illuminating the jewellery nestling on its velvet cushions, the idealised sketches of realtors promoting paradisal villages in unearthly landscapes. How much easier it is to beguile people with promises than to coerce them with punitive discipline; even though such discipline has certainly not lapsed! People will freely accept ideologies of wealth, and will readily suppress all the disagreeable consequences, the hidden costs; consigning the downside of developmentalism into the toxic waste dump called human nature. India has been on the receiving end of a mixture of the Western system and the lessons it has absorbed from a defunct and dead – though far from buried – Marxist theory. A more subtle approach has been required in India, because Indian civilization is a so powerfully rooted and ancient, it cannot be overturned by a few trinkets – no matter how expensive or luxurious; but must also be re-crafted so that its peoples will accept the fundamental tenet of belief which underlies the great experiment of globalism – that human wanting is inexhaustible and that the economic growth which alone can answer it is infinite. This must supplant the ancient wisdom of sufficiency and sparingness. Restraint and joyful austerity have to be swept away, and spaces opened up for a culture of cupidity which is without limit or end. The assault upon the psyche of India is a more profound and delicate operation, either than the re-making of the peoples of the West in the interests of industrialism, and certainly more subtle than the crude construction that demanded universal assent to the greatest absurdities of Communism.