Ping Pong 25: The Resource Revolution
There is an old old myth about the revolution, that it was a revolution based upon utter poverty, whose target was a clique whose life was cocooned in wealth. This Myth very neatly explains away the otherwise rather worrying political implications of the revolution, in a welter of understanding. It was not about politics, but bread (or cake). Unlike some myths this one was utterly incorrect. The French urban class (the sans cullote) were not particularly poor when compared with the rest of Europe, nor were the Ancien Regime aristocracy particularly wealthy, nor even was France particularly badly governed. Ostensibly therefore there was no real reason for a revolution in France and not somewhere else. Even more perplexing for the ’poverty’ argument was the fact that France at the time of the revolution was getting wealthier and its institutions were being reformed, and abuses removed. Poverty and misgovernment were therefore not the justifying factors of the revolution. But rather it was, as the very great writer Tocqueville said, the case that the regime that fell was the regime that was changing its nature and already reforming and not the one where poverty and abuse were rife. A fact that led Tocqueville to conclude that the most dangerous moment for any bad regime was the moment at which it started to reform.
However, hidden within Tocqueville’s observation is a second dimension to the old poverty-as-cause myth for the French Revolution. Poverty might not have been the direct cause of the revolt, and yet the hope of something ‘other’ than what was, of something better, was no doubt a contributory factor. It was that most modern of revolutions carried out in the name of hope, and not a revolution in the name of poverty and destitution. What is more, this hope clearly has two quite different dimensions. On the one hand it needs to be understood in terms of the Tocqueville axis, that is in terms of the problems which every regime faces the moment it starts to reform; the problem of where to draw the line, where and how to stop reforming. Secondly, lying within the tale of hope, and the myth of poverty, there lies a very real revolutionizing force that would really and permanently revolutionise the world. Each element of which will be examined in turn in this Rant.
The Tocqueville verity, that a regime which was abusive needs to watch its back the moment that it reforms, is one of those complex intricate principles which plague modernity. Such principles are what one might call partial. That is one can very easily list a set of regimes that fell according to Tocqueville, the most spectacular of which is surely the old Soviet Union, which collapsed in the very act of reformation (but the same was, to a lesser extent true of Iran or Pakistan). Tocqueville’s law could be understood from two different perspectives. On the one hand there is of course the entire problem of weakness. The ruler who reforms, looks or at least can look, weak, if the reform is associated with an erosion of their old power base, so that they attempt their reformation in order to bolster up their own position, and not in the name of any real change.
On the other hand, and underpinning the last point, there is always the problem for a corrupt, if reforming regime, of where to draw the line, such that the new regime allows the old or some element of the old, to remain in power. This problem was very clear in the French Revolution, where the exact power of the monarchy was destroyed over a whole series of constitutions, each of which allowed it less and less power, until it was finally abolished altogether. In modern times the same process was clear in the collapse of the old Soviet Bloc, where it was not only the case that no rational barriers could be drawn to the process of Glasnost, but also where the political boundaries of the Bloc itself were subject to debate. And once the obvious countries had gone their own way (Middle-Europe), the republics of the Soviet Bloc itself could make the same demand, as could those internal to Russia (or Georgia). It is interesting to note here though, that the West’s reaction to the dual collapse of political and national consensus was rather different, a difference which had profound implications for the history of Russia. By and large we in the West loved the political collapse of communisms, which we simply assumed would lead to a capitalist Russia (well, we thought, what other systems could there be?). The national collapse was however a little more problematic. We of course welcomed it when the collapse of the Warsaw Pact inaugurated the march of the Western arms (NATO) right to the gates of old Russia itself, and yet found in the collapse of Yugoslavia or Georgia a source of endless agonizing (it was hard to define our advantage in both these cases). The result for this unevenness of policy on our part has then rather interestingly modified the first ‘collapse’. Faced with our arrant hypocrisy, Russia hit back, and became nationalistic again, and determined to put itself first…
However as with all great empirical principles, there are clearly great exceptions to Tocqueville’s law. The shining example of which is surely China. Here was a nation which as it reformed really ought to have collapsed, according to established practice! However China, like numerous absolutist monarchies which still pepper the world, discovered that there was a way to resist the pressure of revolution, by ensuring that the paradigm in which change happened, remains resolutely apolitical. Such that although very great changes might occur in the day to day living of individuals, that this change is not itself seen to be directly linked to political change, and not to imply it. A ‘bad regime’ can survive a reformation so long as it insures that the debate about what to reform and what not to reform remains divorced from the political process itself. Moreover this process is likely to continue as long as the subsequent reforms enrich lives, and therefore the problems of politics remain distant. The crunch of course, will then come when the changes cease to be so productive, and peoples used to perpetual revolutions, frustrated in the economic sphere, turn to the political. A process which seems to be inevitable in the West, although this is not to say that the same must be true of China.
The exception to Tocqueville’s principle lies in decreasing resources. Bad regimes can thrive in reformation as long as their people are enriched in the process. This fact however, was also clear in the French Revolution, and the myth that this Rant began with. What was at issue in the poverty-as-cause myth of the French revolution, was less an absolute fact so much as the creation of the most complex of modern principles. The question to bear in mind was why this poverty suddenly mattered, given that it had in fact been the norm? The answer surely lay that in Britain and in America, but also in France, a rather different vision of a nation had gradually been fostered. In this account of a nation, the old verities about poverty and infant mortality, had been queried in the mane of an agrarian revolution. The role of good government should therefore be to ensure the food supply of the people, and to aid the development of farming practices which might feed the populace. The Ancient Regime’s sin was then that people lost the confidence to believe that it might perform this function. Therefore this sudden and great poverty was then a virtual one. They were not poor as such, but rather poor because they lacked a level of wealth which they had come to assume should have been their birthright. The Ancient Regime therefore fell because the rules of government has changed, and it had failed to listen to that changing. The last fact had (and has) deep social and political ramifications, each of which need to be briefly considered.
The idea that a nation owes its people a level of wealth or a certain standard of living is a complex and troubling phenomenon. On the one hand it is so deeply ingrained in our current way of living that it appears unquestionable. And yet this idea was initially created at the end of the eighteenth century, and confirmed in the fire of revolution. The rationale behind such a move, (or thought) lay in the fact that the real wealth of a nation was said to lie in its people (Machiavelli and Adam Smith).The power of the rulers and the power of the people were one and the same, and therefore in helping the latter, the former would enrich themselves, and open out new possibilities, new ways to govern. A sentiment that also allowed rulers from Napoleon onwards, a far greater right to intervene in their population’s lives, be that in the name of the social policy (the census), law (the Code Napoleon) or the military (conscription and mass war). Moreover the blending of economic and social worlds created a regime that was free to understand one of its functions in terms of all the others. Napoleon waged not just a military but also an economic war against Britain, and the failure of the latter led to the failure of the former.
Once the invisible boundaries between economy, society, and the military had been swept aside, governments arose with far greater power for good or ill. However this power was bought at a cost. The role of the government swiftly slipped into not just ensuring a level of wealth, but also ensuring that that level of wealth continued to increase, and without such progress the system was liable to founder under the Tocqueville Principle. That is, the fact that old elements of the Ancient Regime remained - in particular, differences in wealth and privilege - could unsettle the entire system, unless these differences were hidden or obscured under a wealth of progress. The maxim became: ’Others might be wealthier than oneself, but that difference might not matter much as long as we are all getting wealthier…’ (very New Labour).
However this last move once again changed everything. Once progress becomes hard wired, via economics into the political system, then not only must the society, but also the world, be constantly changed, that is the very fabric of society becomes only possible so long as a certain degree of wealth, and with it a certain range of possibilities, are also found. Our society, with its espoused liberality, is the creation of a certain pitch of wealth and a certain series of expectations about what our lives will be and will become: if then those hopes are dashed, our very liberalism comes under question (the problem with migration).
This last fact then has deep ecological aspects to it. Our society, our very tolerance is tied to our material wealth (and its perpetual augmentation). As a society we simply cannot afford to de-industrialize. Faced then with a world where pollution is a deep problem (that is faced with limits to the type of industrialization that might be possible), we can only respond by finding other technological solutions. The problem then with such solutions is that the logic of our system is that they will need to be carried out on a very large scale, in order to service that vision of society. The logic of our system is such then, that we cannot have one or two windmills, but must rather have an entire wind-farm, and decimate the bat population. And the very deep problem is, that this mass-mechanization of the very solutions, lies right at the heart of how our society functions, and allows for many of the elements that we feel make us special and different from all others (liberal values).
This last fact plugs into the political implications that the society=economy=progress creates. Every government is caught between two unquestioned principles. On the one hand they need to defy Tocqueville’s law by ensuring a story of perpetual progress; while on the other they also need to ensure that the types of progress followed are such that it is the government that can claim the credit for them. The result is that the tendency which our society has, to create single mass solutions is exaggerated (as these are the ones that the government can claim were their own). We get mass ranks of wind farms or the Severn Barrage rather than local and probably more sustainable solutions. Likewise provisions such as funding for insulation are introduced, and yet are not politically worth much, and are therefore vulnerable to being cut back or very quietly shelved.
In very many ways our society is the product of the French Revolution. In this Rant two complex and for us almost intractable strands of this legacy have been traced. On the one hand we live in a society where to defy Tocqueville’s principle, perpetual progress must be the norm; while on the other this progress is at the deepest of levels linked to the way we understand our place in nature. We are committed then to an ethic of finding new ways to use our natural world, new power sources. And the trouble then is that much of what we hold dear about ourselves, including our very understanding of what a human is, is tied to this usage. Justice was suddenly miraculously expanded to include progress and the exploitation of the world, a move which allowed yet other forms of justice to emerge. Perhaps however (as with the English Revolution) there are yet other tales that could be told about the politics created in the French Revolution, stories that might give us another quite different take on our world, ones that might allow us to think our society otherwise. It is to this possibility that the next Rant will turn.
