the formation of organic intellectuals were not fully established. British leadership came to an end at the turn of the century, and the period of
‘mixed imperialisms’ began.
Urbanisation was a major phenomenon of the final decades of the nineteenth century. Population numbers rose rapidly in European cities.
Modernisation was fuelled by the expanding labour markets. The growth and density of urban populations created new possibilities for joint collaboration during a war of position that can occur during non- hegemonic times in history. Penetrated countries of the earlier phase of liberal expansion recognised their subordination in the capitalist world order and began to react. Elite relations at this time were not hegemonic in the Gramscian sense, because expansive nations took on a directive leadership role over the peripheral nations. Globally, colonisation, such as Japan’s colonisation of Korea, and expansion of struggles for industrialis- ation proliferated with unprecedented vigour, perhaps leading to a crisis of capitalism resulting in what has become known as the Great Depression.
Beaud (1983: 117) characterises the crisis leading to the Great Depression in this way. There are four contradictions of capital which cause crisis situations:
• Contradiction between capitalist companies and working classes.
• Contradiction between capitalists in same sector or between sectors.
• Contradiction between national capitalisms.
• Contradiction between dominant capitalisms and dominated peoples, countries, or regions (117).
The Great Depression occurred predominantly as a result of the first and third contradictions. First, the working classes were placed in a position of extreme oppression during depressed economic circumstances resulting from the expansion of capitalist norms. In the third category, German and North American capitalism rose to challenge British capitalism. While Britain managed ¼ of the world’s overall trade in the year 1880, this proportion fell to ¹⁄ by 1913, to ⅛ in 1948. North American, Japanese, and German trade accelerated. While Britain had surpassed the world of steel and coal production in the 1870s and 1880s, American production in these industries surpassed Britain’s drastically by 1913.
Mixed Imperialisms: Production Relations and Social Forces
From the 1870s–90s, a change in the nature of work was evident that occurred as a result of the change in the point of production. Work no longer occurred in workshops but was transferred to the assembly line.
This led to changing qualifications required for employment, new modes of organisation of labour and unprecedented methods of control over labour. States were faced with the ‘labour problem’ for the first time. The labour force was weakened through unprecedented divisions between skilled and less skilled arenas of work required in large industrial organis- ations. Social forces emerged out of changing relations of production in the form of trade unions and co-operatives, but labour-led political parties also emerged from the skilled worker units, while other areas of labour struggled for a voice. Only skilled workers were permitted Union involvement. In the US, two major unions emerged at this time, both of which were ideologically intertwined with the Cold War-influenced foreign policy. Both anti-Communist, the American Federation of Labour (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) were established. The AFL emphasised ‘voluntarism’, which is an ‘ideology of self-help emphasising an economically oriented brand of “pure and simple” trade unionism for skilled workers organised along craft lines’ (Rupert 1995: 47).
Any other forms of unionism were discouraged and given Communist- leaning status.
The formation of organic intellectuals became an issue for a hegemony- seeking state and education began to reflect this urgency. Jarvis writes that adult vocational education of the nineteenth century in Britain was directed by an ‘enlightened bourgeoisie for the mass of people … who were expected to receive rather than participate, and to be passive recipients of the bourgeoisie’s well-intentioned offering’ (1993: 12). The bourgeois were thus in charge of directing production relations and they changed the very nature of work during the era of mixed imperialisms.
Beginning in the 1880s and 90s in the advanced industrial countries, production was transformed. A fundamental aspect of this change is that workers were quite suddenly expected to carry out work in an assembly line environment rather than in the workshop environment. Qualifications were increasingly required for employment, and new modes of control over the process of work simultaneously changed the nature of work. As a result, workers began to organise differently and to behave differently politically. This completely changed the way labour was carried out and perceived. Henry Ford (1863–1947) is known for his role in this transformation of the social forces of labour. The first moving assembly line opened in 1913: Ford’s Highland Park in Michigan. Craft based work was soon to become a thing of the past. The industrial division of labour in such assembly line production processes was designed by Frederick
Winslow Taylor around the idea of scientific management which defined tasks in detail and essentially rejected the creative process of production altogether. Workers in this way were alienated from the mode of production and were subordinated to management control in the workplace.
This new model for production was adopted across the USA and in industrialising countries, including Korea during Japanese colonisation.
Over time however, there was a backlash from labour. Governments responded to the threat of the labour problem in Europe by invoking nationalism and revamping society’s state loyalty by kindling national support for foreign policy. This steered the sights of labour to another direction to some extent, but did not prevent the increasing tendency toward the welfare state of the early twentieth century. Until the Great War, social policy was increasingly ‘from below’ rather than completely elite led.
In Britain in 1906, the Liberal Party enacted several social reforms for labour. In the United States, the Progressive Party saw increased success in elections, and in Germany the Social Democrats in 1912 were victorious in elections. Militant labour unions emerged in the 1930s and it was only when those unions were de-radicalised and incorporated into the social infrastructure of economies that labour relations stabilised. Despite a history absent of socialism or welfarism, even the US showed signs of social protection through the legalisation of such unions. During the early years of the Cold War, the CIO in the spirit of anti-Communism eliminated any ‘Communist’ labour unions; an action that complemented the emerging powerful role of the USA in the global context (Rupert 1995). The Pax Americana era of history was in bloom.