#hobsbawm

Identity Politics and the Left

My lecture is about a surprisingly new subject. We have become so used to terms like ‘collective identity’, ‘identity groups, ‘identity politics’, or, for that matter ‘ethnicity’, that it is hard to remember how recently they have surfaced as part of the current vocabulary, or jargon, of political discourse. For instance, if you look at the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which was published in 1968—that is to say written in the middle 1960s—you will find no entry under identity except one about psychosocial identity, by Erik Erikson, who was concerned chiefly with such things as the so-called ‘identity crisis’ of adolescents who are trying to discover what they are, and a general piece on voters’ identification. And as for ethnicity, in the Oxford English Dictionary of the early 1970s it still occurs only as a rare word indicating ‘heathendom and heathen superstition’ and documented by quotations from the eighteenth century.

In short, we are dealing with terms and concepts which really come into use only in the 1960s. Their emergence is most easily followed in the usa, partly because it has always been a society unusually interested in monitoring its social and psychological temperature, blood-pressure and other symptoms, and mainly because the most obvious form of identity politics—but not the only one—namely ethnicity, has always been central to American politics since it became a country of mass immigration from all parts of Europe. Roughly, the new ethnicity makes its first public appearance with Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963 and becomes a militant programme with Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics in 1972. The first, I don’t have to tell you, was the work of a Jewish professor and an Irishman, now the senior Democratic senator for New York; the second came from a Catholic of Slovak origin. For the moment we need not bother too much about why all this happened in the 1960s, but let me remind you that—in the style-setting usa at least—this decade also saw the emergence of two other variants of identity politics: the modern (that is, post suffragist) women’s movement and the gay movement.

I am not saying that before the 1960s nobody asked themselves questions about their public identity. In situations of uncertainty they sometimes did; for instance in the industrial belt of Lorraine in France, whose official language and nationality changed five times in a century, and whose rural life changed to an industrial, semi-urban one, while their frontiers were redrawn seven times in the past century and a half. No wonder people said: ‘Berliners know they’re Berliners, Parisians know they are Parisians, but who are we?’ Or, to quote another interview, ‘I come from Lorraine, my culture is German, my nationality is French, and I think in our provincial dialect’. [1] Actually, these things only led to genuine identity problems when people were prevented from having the multiple, combined, identities which are natural to most of us. Or, even more so, when they are detached ‘from the past and all common cultural practices’. [2] However, until the 1960s these problems of uncertain identity were confined to special border zones of politics. They were not yet central.

Eric J. Hobsbawm, Il Secolo breve - 1914/1991, (traduzione di Brunello Lotti) B.U.R., 2006, pp. 453-54.

I like the way Hobsbawm sets up his problems here, that the British industrial revolution wasn't obviously going to happen (like there isn't a reason to assume private interest will lead to perpetual technological development), and that as the first such revolution it couldn't be explained using external factors (like capital import or technology transfer). It's pleasingly Maoist, insofar as the contradictions leading to the revolution are principally internal, rather than external. And why Britain, when other European maritime powers were also increasingly enmeshed in a semi-global economy of advanced and dependent economies?

He rejects on various grounds explanations based on geography, climate, population, contingency and pure politics. The basics explanation is the existence of accumulated capital, a national market, and three factors.

"Exports, backed by the systematic and aggressive help of the government, provided the spark, and -- with cotton textiles -- the 'leading sector' of industry. They also provided major improvements in sea transport. The home market provided the broad base for a generalized industrial economy and (through the process of urbanization) the incentive for major improvements in inland transport, a powerful base for the coal industry, and for certain important technological innovations. Government provided systematic support for merchant and manufacturer, and some by no means negligible incentives for technological innovation and the development of capital goods industries."

What I really like here is the way Hobsbawm highlights that the first factor was itself dependent on the division of the world, even at the time, between the rise of a mass market for overseas goods, and the creation of economic systems to produce these goods (plantations and colonies). Furthermore, at various points he highlights that Britain's military played a big role in securing these markets and systems.

"Our industrial economy grew out of our commerce, and especially our commerce with the underdeveloped world. And throughout the nineteenth century it was to to retain this peculiar pattern: commerce and shipping maintained our balance of payments, and the exchange of overseas primary products for British manufactures was to be the foundation of our international economy."

And this keeps going on! Later he talks about how this pattern gets ossified, and it fucks over Britain as newer industrial powers arise.

I think this book really benefits from having read/listened to some of the work by Utsa Patnaik on British colonial extraction in India, since it deals heavily with this issue of balance of payments.

This is a long-read version of her argument.

Introducing us to Britain in 1750, Hobsbawm gives contemporary tourists' contrasting descriptions of London as the biggest city in Christendom, versus the green and orderly countryside. Our tourist can't visit any comparable cities in England but Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow are rapidly growing due to a burgeoning trade in slaves and colonial commodities.

Britain has 6000 mercantile ships with tonnage of half a million, nearly 6 times bigger than its nearest rival, France. This private merchant's fleet forms 1/10 of all fixed capital investment, with 100,000 seamen forming the largest group of non-agricultural workers. There is some machinery, basic lifts and steam engines, but was the country was better known for artisan manufacturing.

The overall impression is of a powerful, rich country, based on commerce and its navy, with a comparatively prosperous common people.

"Economic and technical progress, private enterprise, and what we would now call liberalism: all these were evident. Yet nobody expected the imminent transformation of the country by an industrial revolution -- not even travellers who visited Britain in the 1780s, when we know it had already started."

Importantly, Britain also had a national "monetary and market economy", with London providing a giant internal market for agricultural products and coal, little regional variation in prices, and a lack of famine outside of the Scottish Highlands and Ireland

There was little peasantry in the sense of small cultivators, villages had a cash economy with consumption of colonial goods like tea and tobacco, and land ownership was largely concentrated: "a few thousand landowners, leasing their land to some tens of thousands of tenant farmers, who in turn operated it with the labour of some hundreds of thousands of farm labourers..."

Manufacturing was largely rural, with villages starting to specialize in certain artisanal crafts. This meant that the big landowners had a direct interest in the mines and manufactures on their lands, and thus industry had a major influence on domestic politics in comparison to commerce, unlike the situation in other European countries

The British ruling class, due to the influence of the English Civil War, was much more interested in austere money-making compared to the more archaic and feudal aristocracy of the Continent, allowing them to adapt better when things did change.

A lot of what Hobsbawm is pointing to here -- the condition of town and country, the relative balance of industry and commerce, the concentration of land, and the essentially bourgeois nature of the aristocracy are all this that are about to rapidly change, or are relevant for understanding the politics of what is to come.

One thing I really like is Hobsbawm explaining the preconditions for the Industrial Revolution in fundamentally economic terms of land and production, and their attendance social relations, without too much appeal to national character or a kind of pure contingency. Those show up -- they aren't irrelevant -- but they play a mediating role rather than a basic one.