artisans helped raise class consciousness, one of their most useful organizing concepts. As the nation-state grew in stature national unions followed, but this made socialism vulnerable to nationalism’s rightward turn. Migration, created by capitalism’s advances, was a major contributor to nationalism: when you are in a different land you either suddenly cherish your heritage, or suddenly disregard it. You may take up the new heritage with desperate zeal. How to deal with the volatile nature of nationalism, and the increasing power of the right, was debated hotly among socialists. Fabian or evolutionary socialists took the view that through gradual compromise they could head towards socialism. Revolutionary socialists felt that progress could only come quickly at a ripe opportunity, and that the Fabians would end up losing all sight of socialism. This debate was paralleled by one within biology over the speed at which species evolved. As proto-industry was swept away by factories, domestic production transformed from a family enterprise into underpaid work for women. Factories separated household from place of work, keeping women at home and out of the “recognized” economy. In the days of subsistence agriculture no one would have claimed women’s work unimportant, but in this age even domestics doing the same housework as wives were considered employed. Factories made wives into unregarded slaves. This was an age of unusual missionary zeal to convert the “primitives”, usually the victims of the overtly celebrated Imperialism. Despite slavery's undoing, official racism continued unabated, and became incorporated into purity myths, like that of the white Anglo-Saxon cowboys (the chief contributors to cowboy culture and vocabulary were Mexican). From the colonies came the evolues, “the evolved colored ones”, who learned that there was much support for indigenous revolutionaries at center of the empire. A young Gandhi wrote a guide to English life for fellow Indians, and when he went to Britain he hung out with local vegetarians, who tended to be progressive types. Making his way around the Empire, he learned to successfully organize in South Africa, fighting there for the rights of Indian workers. Gandhi was able to do all this partly because of his formal education in English. Primary education was slowly broadening in Britain, but formal education’s main function was not utilitarian: no one needed Greek and Latin. The point of a higher education was to prove that your children came from a background that gave them leisure to postpone earning a living. Eratemities, leagues and colleges were popular because they allowed a child to enter the right social groups. It meant a cultural change for the aspiring European: sports for the upper class meant riding and hunting, but the first mass working-class spectator sport was cycling. Among educated liberals involved in philosophy, science and art, there was much disposal of old ideas. Einstein is an example of someone starting from scratch, doing very well without makeshift physical notions such as “ether” if it couldn’t make sense in theory or be seen in practice. If the liberal business class that made the world was disappearing, everything could be questioned. The industrial powers were carving up the world into economic colonies, searching for markets. As competition heated up, the Empires at home could play at “social imperialism”: reduce domestic discontent through mass propaganda promising prosperity through war. Empire made good ideological cement both within the country and the commonwealth; The developed countries played risky games with each other: military brinksmanship. ‘Don’t do that or we’ll start a war’, and other threats. More territory came under dispute, and powerful alliances coalesced. By building a shiny new fleet with the latest industrial technology, Germany implicitly challenged England’s precious navy. Tension mounted. No one wanted war, since most royal families were related, and from all signs they didn’t expect it. But the objectives of Nations had changed. F*ushed by economic growth, states no longer had limited demands that could be met through royal marriages. Territorial demands grew testier, and with the availability of armaments it became tempting to forget the diplomatic solution. These were the conditions that led to the unprecedented violence of the first World War. Hobsbawm writes, ‘ ‘What distinguishes the various members of the ideological family descended from humanism and the Enlightenment, liberal, socialist, communist, or anarchist, is not the gentle anarchy which is the utopia of all of them, but the methods of achieving it.” A magazine like Rain, sympathetic to the new left, left- greens, anarchists, social ecologists and decentralists, should spare a word on Hobsbawm’s politics: he has trouble with anarchy as strategy, because of his traumatic experience during the war Spain lost against Fascism from 1936- 39 (from his book Revolutionaries, Quartet, 1973): “I still recall in the very earliest days of that war, the small town of Puigcerda in the E^renees, a little revolutionary republic, filled with free men and women, guns and an immensity of discussion. A few trucks stood in the plaza. When anyone felt like going to fight on the Aragonese front, he went to the trucks. When a truck was full, it went to the front. Presumably, when the volunteers wanted to come back, they came back. The phrase C’est magnifique, mais ce n’estpas la guerre [“it’s great, but it’s not war”] should have been invented for such a situation. It was marvellous, but the main effect of this experience on me was that it took twenty years before I was prepared to see Spanish Anarchism as anything but a tragic farce. “It was much more than this. And yet, no amount of sympathy can alter the fact that anarchism as a revolutionary movement has failed, that it has almost been designed for failure.” Of course, all revolutions have failed in some monumental way. But small disagreements over what constitutes anarchist strategy could never make Hobsbawm a less important read for all social activists. Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2 Page 47
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