Movement is life
The act of moving
changing places
tendency or trend
material flux or flow
political effort to a common goal
section of a musical composition
suggested motion of a design
evacuation of the bowels
military manoeuvre
mechanism of a watch
poetic rhythm or structure
emotion, a feeling of excitement
process, a series of actions with a result
The state is a state,
a fixed idea;
movement is life.
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1. What is the difference between animals and plants?
Animals move to where the food is; plants expect it to come to them.
2. The basic human right is free movement
The whole world was open to our ancestors until they discovered agriculture
3. For 5,000 years unequal territorial states have tied the masses to the land
Bronze Age agrarian civilization based on urban elites and manorial estates; unfree workers received diminishing returns on their labor
4. Movement is the opposite of inequality; force was used to keep them tied to the land
5. Wars and revolutions between landed power (aristocrats) and the money of trading cities (democrats) lasted for one millennium BC and 1500-2000
6. The industrial revolution was made in Manchester 200 years ago
7. The workers came from unfeudalized Celtic regions
8. Slaves, serfs, tied peasants, women, youth and ethnic minorities moved to the cities
9. Free Trade in 1840 undermined the landed aristocracy around the world
10. Manchester people support free movement and free speech
11. My favourite things: music, maths, money and movies
12. Why is immigration the top political problem today?
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1. Animals move to where the food is; plants wait it to come to them
2. Our nomadic ancestors had free use of the world for 100,000s years
3. This was the ‘urban revolution’ of Bronze Age agrarian civilization
4. Margaret Thatcher’s TINA: there is no alternative, based on centralised territorial power (London)
5. Greeks v Troy, Persia v Greece, Athens v Sparta, Macedonia v the South and East, the Hellenistic empire, Rome v Carthage; the Roman Empire made the world safe for landlords for 1500 years in the West
6. 10,000 people signed Clarkson’s petition for the abolition of slavery in Manchester; he was beaten up and thrown in the sea at Bristol and Liverpool
7. Pennines’ water-borne textiles; migrants from Ireland, W. Scotland, and N. Wales
8. World population was 1 bn in 1800, 8 bn today; half or more living in cities. The poor rural masses vote with their feet and rich countries can’t keep them out
9. The Tories split in two; free trader Sir Robert Peel led the new Conservatives
10. That is why we are transparent (blunt) and speak with a flat accent that is easier to understand than tonal dialects elsewhere
11. They all teach us to move fluently back and forth between the extremes of experience, the greatest and the most intimate
12. The main institutions are from agrarian civilization with machines. See below.
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World society as an Old Regime (2002)
For some time now, I have been aware that, to all appearances, I belong to the world’s ruling class: white, middle-aged, middle-class men, the men in suits or just ‘the suits’. The existence of this term means that we recognise the polarising tendencies of our world in terms of social categories. I would go further. The world as a whole is now in much the same situation as were the advanced centres of agrarian civilisation before the modern revolutions which thought they had swept them away. It is hard for us to grasp that 300 years of political struggle and economic development have left world society in an analogous condition to that of the ancien régime in France during the 1750s, when Rousseau (1984) wrote his famous discourse on inequality. But how else can one describe a world in which a socially exclusive minority holds so much power over an impoverished mass whose powerlessness is now measured by how little money they have to spend? Who would have believed that the latest wave of mechanical invention would grant one man disposal of $ 60 billions and potential control of the global information industry, while billions of people lack material essentials, never mind the means of getting wired?
The project of imagining national communities, largely by means of statistical extrapolation, is little more than a century old. Even so, we now accept without question the idea that the Italians and the Spanish have the lowest birth rates in Europe or that Britain has sunk to being the 18th richest country in the world. Since the second world war and the formation of the United Nations, it has become normal to collect statistics on the global population; but thinking about human society as a single entity has not yet taken hold. It is about time that it did. For ours is the moment of the formation of world society in a meaningful sense; and the fragmentation of perspective produced by national consciousness prevents us from imagining the human community as a whole. Numbers are one way of beginning that process.
There are two pressing features of our world: the development of markets, transport and communications since the second world war has led to an unprecedented integration of global society as a single interactive network; and polarisation of rich and poor within national societies has been extended to huge and growing inequalities between continental regions. Becoming closer and more unequal at the same time is an explosive combination, since the normal method for dealing with inequality is to put distance between the classes, not to reduce it.
According to the United Nations Human Development Report (UNDP 1998), the world’s 225 richest men (and they are men) own more than one trillion dollars, the equivalent of the annual income of the world’s 47% poorest people. Three of them have assets worth more than the Gross Domestic Product of the 48 least developed countries. The West spends $ 37 billions a year on pet food, perfumes and cosmetics (‘let them eat Pedigree Chum’), almost the estimated additional cost of providing basic education, health, nutrition, water and sanitation for those deprived of them. The rate of car ownership in industrial countries is 400 per thousand, 16 in all developing countries. The rich pollute the world fifty times more than the poor; but the latter are more likely to die from the pollution. World consumption has increased six times in the last 20 years; but the richest fifth account for 86% of it.
Even though relative deprivation is striking within nations (Bill Gates owns as much as the annual income of the 106 million least affluent Americans), solutions to the obscene inequality and ecological risks facing world society require us to focus on the global picture first. As a thought experiment, we could conceive of humanity as a unit stratified by wealth, race, age and gender. Women everywhere are struggling with the legacy of patriarchy. The world’s poor, however, are concentrated in what came to be called the Third World and latterly the South, the outcome of western expansion over the last 500 years and particularly of imperialism in the19th century. The ideology sustaining this expansion was racism, the belief that the power of ‘white’ people derived from a biologically founded superiority to the ‘darker races’. Although racism is nowhere officially sanctioned today, it still plays a major part in organising cultural responses to global inequality. Then also the world’s young people are to be found predominantly in the South owing to a lag in the fall of birth rates there. For the age distributions of rich and poor countries are skewed heavily towards the old and young respectively.
There are, as I have said, tremendous inequalities within countries and regions; but it is not difficult to summarise the above description in terms of a two-class model. A rich, mainly white, ageing minority (about 15%, if we take North America, Western Europe and Japan together) is surrounded by a majority (five-sixths of the total) which is on average a lot poorer, darker in colour and especially much younger. Seen in terms of the reproduction of humanity as a whole, we can say that a stagnant western elite is about to be replaced by a hugely proliferating generation of non-westerners from whom it is separated by a tradition of cultural arrogance and by ingrained practices of social exclusion.
The situation is not unlike that found in agrarian civilisations, where small urban elites sought to maintain control over rural masses condemned to drudgery and political impotence. The main difference between the two cases lies in the fact that modern world society is supposed to be organised by an ideology of human freedom and equality. This is the legacy of a democratic revolution, begun in the 17th and 18th centuries, which aimed to install rule by the people in general as the only legitimate form of government. The industrial revolution, which closely followed its political counterpart, implied that humanity might now be released from material as well as social constraints on its development. But the evidence of global inequality today shows that this emancipatory rhetoric is an illusion.
World society today is at base as rotten as the aristocratic regimes which preceded the modern age. Power has been concentrated into forms held against the people, first in the hands of owners of big money (capitalists) and then in a revived and strengthened state apparatus. In the second half of the 19th century, no major thinker envisaged the possibility of imposing state control on the restless energies of industrial/commercial society. Yet in the course of the last century, the rule of elites has been restored: state bureaucracy is absolute; and world society is divided into national fragments. There is no popular government anywhere; and most people have forgotten when they last took an active interest in such a possibility.
The confusing part lies in the widespread use of a rhetoric derived from the democratic revolutions to cloak the purposes of those who reserve effective power to themselves. Western states are no more liberal than the Soviet Union was Marxist. At least the old regime of agrarian civilisation called itself what it was. The vast majority of intellectuals are complicit in the lies needed to sustain this latterday revival of the state. Behind a smokescreen of democratic slogans, the bureaucracy relies on impersonal institutions to maintain grotesquely unfair levels of inequality.
One method for an anthropology of the contemporary human condition would thus be to conceive of world society as a single population divided into rich and poor or, if you like, polarised between a remote elite and the undifferentiated masses. This society is unsustainable, in that most of its members are exposed to conditions of poverty and violence that are humanly unacceptable, while a few enjoy the benefits of wealth in forms that were unimaginable before the industrial revolution. Moreover, a society so cruel and indifferent to the general human interest is heading for ecological disaster. Ours is a corrupt ancien régime which must soon find a new democratic revolution, if human intervention in the life of this planet is not to end in catastrophe.
The form of social organisation underpinning this universal crisis for humanity is national capitalism, the attempt to manage markets and money through nation-states. In whatever guise local elite cultures appear to us, we must first understand the general form before proceeding to analyse its variants. We know that agrarian civilizations ruled the earth for 5,000 years before the machine revolution altered the conditions of human life irreversibly. In 200 years the world’s population has multiplied six times, the proportion living in cities has risen from 1 in 40 to 50% and energy production has grown at twice the rate of the people. This last statistic accounts for the fact that many people now eat more, work less and live longer; but the benefits of mechanisation are distributed most unevenly, with Americans consuming on average 400 times more energy than Ugandans, for example (World Bank 1998). [3] Up to three billion people, mostly Indians, Chinese and Africans, still work in agriculture with their hands; but the other half of humanity lives in the modern city or the urbanised countryside.
It would not be surprising if the latter, especially, held that we are now living in a world which has made a decisive break with the past. And this is indeed the case. Today’s societies everywhere claim to rest on science and democracy, the twin foundations of modernity and the lasting legacy of the 18th century revolutions. This modern religion is similar in many ways to older claims made on behalf of God, and with the same plausibility: if society is omniscient and good, how can there be so much suffering in the world? The obvious answer to this question is that society is not run by and for the people and, whatever its principles, they are not based on effective knowledge. Perhaps we are less emancipated from the past than we imagine and are further from a desirable future than we hope for.
The breakout from agrarian civilisation was led by urban middle-class elements in a few places beginning with the Italian renaissance. This was not the first time: for a thousand years class coalitions based on property in land and money respectively slugged it out for control of Ancient Mediterranean society, before the Romans made the world safe for landed aristocracy. In the modern period, it did seem as if what its detractors call the bourgeois revolution was home and dry when mechanisation was married to capital accumulation. But this was precisely the moment when, fearful of the proletarian monster they had made, the middle classes shrank back and embraced an alliance with the military land-owning class. Society was reconceived as nations whose origins were shrouded in a rural past; and the counter-revolution took off with a vengeance. Marx was right to rely on a feudal metaphor for the new wage-labor system, since everywhere old forms of property and power were harnessed to the task of holding the workers down.
Even so, as the 19th century drew to a close, the issue was in the balance. The world was drawn together by a revolution in transport and communications (steamships, railways, the telegraph). The workers were concentrated in smokestack industries. Could they seize power from the owners and their allies? The issue was settled by the first world war, when governments discovered that they now possessed unprecedented powers of social mobilisation and control. Society was centralised at the top and 20th century national capitalism was inaugurated. Since then, until recently, when another revolution in transport and communications has begun to undermine territorial states, the question was not whether the people would win out or their rulers, but to which form of state people all over the world would be made subordinate. The middle classes abandoned their previous commitment to commerce in order to sup copiously at the trough of national bureaucracy, relying on their university diplomas for a life-time of privilege as experts in social reproduction.
The result is that the middle-class revolution with which the modern age began has stalled, even regressed, first allying itself with landed power and then assuming the form of rule traditional for agrarian civilisation. As I have pointed out, no serious mid-19th century social thinker imagined that industrial/commercial society could be controlled from the top by a remote centralised mechanism. Yet a century later, most of us are conditioned to think that no other form of society is imaginable. The institutions of agrarian civilisation, developed over five millennia with a passive rural workforce in mind, are, in form if not in content, our institutions today: territorial states, landed property, warfare, racism, embattled cities, money as objects, long-distance trade, an emphasis on work, and of course world religions and the family.
Consider what happened to all the wealth siphoned off by western industrial states since the second world war, the largest concentrations of money in the history of humanity. It went on subsidizing food supplies and armaments, the priorities of the bully through the ages, certainly not those of the modern urban consumers who paid the taxes. No, we have never been modern, as Bruno Latour (1993) says. We are just primitives who stumbled recently into a machine revolution and cannot yet think of what do with it, beyond repeating the inhumanity of a society built unequally on agriculture.
Pierre-Philippe Rey (1973) sought to bring the West African colonial experience of capitalism and the original British case within the scope of a single explanation in Les alliances de classes. He argued that, wherever capitalism developed, the new class was forced into making compromises with the old property-owning classes in ways which made the resulting hybrid something specific to that society. Thus the British industrialists had to make an alliance with the land-owning aristocracy in order for the factory system to flourish at the expense of feudal agriculture. Similarly, in West Africa the indigenous lineage elders made an alliance with the colonial authorities to supply the labour of young men to plantations and mines.
This kind of class alliance is depressingly familiar. It offers an example of the institutional complexity which more abstract economic theories tend to ignore; and which social anthropologists are trained to look for. In Britain, the industrial bourgeoisie was separated from the traditional landed aristocracy by region (North vs. South); but their influence on national government was always limited by its location in London, the home of the mercantile and colonial elite. In the late 19th century, the industrial civilisation of regional cities (led by Manchester’s cosmopolitan liberalism) was undermined by nationalism and financial imperialism based in London. The British economy never recovered from this process of political centralisation.
It is not hard to tell a similar story about Rhineland capitalists and Prussian Junkers in Germany. Each national class compromise was historically distinctive and this is why the capitalism of a country (Italy, Japan or wherever) is always different. There is no difficulty in tracing the local roots of elite cultures. It would be sad, however, if this ethnography of difference, like all the other ethnographies of difference which have become our professional stock-in-trade, ended up obscuring the social form which underlies the profound economic inequality of our world.
Humanity is caught between mechanisation and agrarian institutions; and the combination is potentially lethal. Its most striking pathology is the polarisation of rich and poor at every level of society. Nothing less than a world revolution is adequate to redressing such a situation; and it will not succeed without an appropriate explanation for the phenomenon in question.
My first observation is that we are living with the consequences of 5,000 years of agrarian civilisation (Childe’s urban revolution, 1981) which cannot be discarded overnight. Agriculture as a mode of production relies on intensification of labor inputs, making people work harder for less; and the institutions we still live by were formed by small urban elites bent on controlling populations tied to the land. Half of the world’s people are still living under conditions of traditional agriculture which do not afford them the means of participating fully in a capitalist economy driven by machines and money. They can join the rush to the cities or they can produce for the world market. The cities are themselves organised to sustain vast material inequalities between those who enjoy the benefits of machine civilisation and those who are largely excluded from it. And the latter are the majority in regions which have not yet mechanised production.
The second explanation for global inequality lies in capitalism itself. The system of money-making favours those who already have a large capital fund. Left unchecked, the rich will always get richer and the poor will stay poor. Modern capitalism has flourished when linked to machine production. These machines have hitherto been huge, centralised complexes (factories), so that power has gone to those capable of launching enterprises on a large scale, the owners of lots of money (capitalists, banks) and, more recently, states. Mechanisation too, in order to take root, requires cultural and social institutions (science, education, work discipline, finance, property law) which are unevenly spread between and within societies.
A major corollary of the above is the established tendency for labor markets to take on a dualistic character: two streams of workers, one highly paid in jobs using sophisticated machinery, the other performing tasks of little skill for low wages and in poor working conditions, often no better than those prevailing in traditional agriculture. Marx (1970) identified these trends in terms of the concepts of relative and absolute surplus value. Although squeezing profit out of sweat shop workers is a naked form of exploitation, he considered that mechanisation allowed workers to be paid an even smaller share of the value of their production, despite their higher wages. This, after all, was why capitalists invested in machines.
The migration streams of Europeans and Asians which ushered in the 20th century world economy entrenched this dualism at the global level (W.A. Lewis 1978). Subsequently both national and international institutions were developed to maintain the division in the interests of the rich and powerful. The chief function of these institutions, located in states and associations of states, is to justify inequality and to keep the poor in their place by controlling any movement which might undermine the separation of rich and poor. In a word, apartheid.
There is a cultural explanation too. If, as Max Weber (1981) insisted, it takes a cultural revolution to join the historical development known as capitalism, the means of altering the shape and dynamic of world society would seem to be even more daunting. A society formed by western imperialism and served by an enduring legacy of racism is now governed by international institutions, dominated by the United States, whose chief purpose is to maintain the free flow of money (capital), to the benefit of those who already have lots of it. A world whose most inclusive body is the United Nations has enshrined national consciousness at the core of efforts to co-ordinate world economy. The territorial state and nationalism effectively reinforce indifference to others, leaving the world stage to be ruled by the most powerful, while undermining whatever sense of our common humanity might lead us to want to alleviate the horrors of poverty.
That the world economy in based on inhuman principles is a commonplace. Quite apart from whatever active role states and markets may play in promoting inequality, as impersonal institutions they place economic life on a footing where it is difficult for ordinary human beings to feel meaningfully involved with what is going on, even if they understand it, which is unlikely. Compassion and similar human qualities are unlikely to be influential in economic life when power seems to be concentrated in remote, faceless centres. The normal response to problems is to let “them” (the powers that be, les responsables) get on with it. When confronted with the consequences of their own actions, people shrug their shoulders: it is nothing really to do with us. The case for a more human economy is this: that society will only be democratic and fair when people can assume meaningful responsibility for what they do.
Finally, we must turn to the specific developments in world economy of the last two decades, which I summarise as the rise of virtual capitalism. Virtual in two main senses: the shift from material production (agriculture and manufacturing) to information services and the corresponding detachment of the circulation of money from production and trade. This in turn is an aspect of the latest stage of mechanisation, the communications revolution culminating in the 1990s (Hart 2001a). The question is whether the same developments which have led to the recent integration of world society are the cause of its increasing polarisation. The answer, of course, is yes.
Long-distance trade in information services requires a substantial technical infrastructure. The internet has its origins in scientific collaboration between America and Europe during the Cold War. Its main language is English. The countries which led the industrial revolution in its first and second phases are thus well-placed to take the lead in this third wave. Every stage of mechanisation has been initially concentrated in a narrow enclave of world society; and this one is no different. But diffusion of the new techniques has been quite rapid and decentralised. Mobile phones and videotape have brought telecommunications to many parts of the world where the old physical infrastructure was underdeveloped. Already some of the simpler processing tasks have been devolved to where educated labour is cheaper; equally the destruction of old manufacturing industries in the West has often been brutal. But the short conclusion is that many poorer regions appear to be stuck in phases of production which have been marginalised by this latest round of uneven development.
Spiralling markets for money in countless derivative forms have injected a new instability into global capitalism. The Southeast Asian bubble of endlessly rising stock markets has burst, wiping out paper assets and devaluing currencies overnight. Mismanagement by the banks has reached colossal proportions. This apotheosis of capital, its effective detachment from what real people do, has made many huge fortunes, often for individuals controlling sums larger than the annual income of a dozen Third World countries.
Here is certainly one of the motors of global inequality, money being made with money. Moreover, the money system has now reached a social scale and technical form which make it impossible for states to control it. This may be good news for democrats and anarchists in the long run; but in the meantime Hegel’s recipe for state moderation of capitalism has been subverted, with inevitable results: rampant inequality at all levels and appalling human distress without any apparent remedy.
We are obviously at a turning-point in human affairs. The present situation cannot continue indefinitely. It is no longer self-evident that being inside the virtual economy is a privilege. If the bubble bursts, people sitting on little plots of land in the countryside will count themselves lucky to have missed the bonanza. Development is no longer a linear process describing unequivocal winners and losers in the global economy, advanced and backward producers. The rules of the game are being rewritten so fast and with such uncertain consequences that it is no longer apparent who is best placed to benefit from them. The populations of America, Europe and Japan which have grown passively dependent on the impersonal institutions of national capitalism may be less well-placed than many others to learn patterns of economic activity adapted to a new age. But then the world’s rural and urban poor are unlikely to be able to afford the price of participating in such an economy.
The word elite means the pick or flower of the crop, perhaps even the chosen few. It is a term redolent of an agrarian society run by those who believe themselves to be naturally, socially and spiritually superior to the masses. In other words, a form of society such as the one identified by de Tocqueville (1856) as the old regime, supposedly buried by the French revolution. Contemporary world society has more in common with the old regime of agrarian civilisation than it does with the modernist rhetoric inaugurated by the democratic revolutions. This is not just because of the sheer gap in lifestyle and prospects between rich and poor; but because the ideology justifying global inequality is still identifiably racist, explaining difference as the expression of innate superiority and inferiority. The European empires have collapsed, but the people have not yet inherited the earth.
The intellectual tradition we know as anthropology should be capable of helping us to understand this anomaly and to remedy it. I have suggested that the methods of ethnography and global generalisation might be adapted to such a task. The term elite is a crude, even reactionary concept, not unlike peasant; but if it helps social anthropologists to focus on the causes of persisting human inequality, it will serve a useful purpose. I have concentrated here on sketching an approach to society conceived of in universal terms. This is in self-conscious contrast to the particulars of 20th century anthropology’s cultural relativism. But the point of having a sense of what humanity faces in common is to help us identify the particular trajectories of individuals and collectives within it. The global picture does not exist independently of our interactions with it. We alter society whenever we study it; and this is why, in the first part of this paper, I have described ethnography as a form of intervention, one perhaps of little overall consequence, but an active engagement with others nevertheless. In such a world, the universal and the particular need not be opposed and the contradiction between 19th and 20th century versions of anthropology might be overcome.
Notes
[1] https://thememorybank.co.uk/papers/world-society-as-an-old-regime/ Part 2. Part 1 tells of adventures among the criminal elites of the development industry in Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea.
[2] These opening paragraphs draw on an account produced for a volume on African enterprise edited by Stephen Ellis and Yves Fauré.
[3] In 1995 Americans each consumed 8,000 kgs of oil equivalent, compared with 22 kgs in Uganda.
