Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (61 page)

The reforms that Deng and his party comrades unleashed in 1979 have been described as the largest poverty-reduction program in human history. This is just. Over the past three decades, China’s embrace of markets has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of impoverishment. As one of Deng’s biographers notes, China’s trade with the world totaled less than $10 billion in 1978. Over the next three decades, it expanded a hundredfold.
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This has not gone unnoticed in the rest of the world. China’s success has been a major factor in the global “market revolution” and the rejection of collectivist approaches to economic development. To be sure, the Chinese model has retained a large role for the state; the government still steers many investment decisions through the vast Communist Party bureaucracy and the state-dominated financial sector. Yet for many of those around the world who admire China’s success, it is precisely the rejection of state planning that is most worth emulating. China’s runaway growth—9 percent per year—represented yet another persuasive argument for the power of markets and the failures of central planning. “Having become accustomed to being harangued by the Chinese for their lack of Marxist ideological purity, Third World socialists watched in disbelief as in the 1980s China itself embraced the market with almost pornographic enthusiasm,” writes historian Odd Arne Westad. The fact that the Chinese managed to adopt this market-driven system while rejecting
the accoutrements of democracy and retaining one-party control made it even more attractive to many countries where the elites were not prepared to relinquish their privileged political status.
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In this respect, it seems safe to say that it was Deng Xiaoping, the man who devoted his life to the ideals of Communism, who has done more than any other individual to ensure its demise as an idea.

In January 1888, Sidney Webb made an appearance before the Sunday Lecture Society in London. The society was the brainchild of T. H. Huxley, a dogged defender of Darwin’s theory of evolution and a firm believer in the enlightenment of the working classes; they were supposed to constitute the primary audience for the lectures. Webb was a charter member of the Fabian Society, which had been founded four years earlier with the aim of persuading Britons to embrace social democracy. It was on just this subject that Webb had been invited to speak. He entitled his presentation “The Progress of Socialism.”

Even today it makes for a lively read. Though Webb harshly criticized the many social ills of Victorian society, the program he presented was stirringly redolent of the strong belief in scientific and technological progress that characterized his age. “The tide of European Socialism is rolling in upon us like a flood,” he proclaimed. The course of history, the development of industry, the recent discoveries in biology (meaning, presumably, Darwinism)—all these things attested to the truth of the socialist idea. “There is no resting place for stationary Toryism in the scientific universe,” he told his audience. “The whole history of the human race cries out against the old-fashioned Individualism.”

History was driven primarily by economics: “The student of history finds that the great world moves, like the poet’s snake, on its belly.” Moreover, Webb contended, all economic trends were moving clearly in the direction of collective or public ownership. As proof of this, he led his listeners to a long catalog of all the social and economic functions that were once performed by “private capitalists” but had since been taken over by various levels of government. The list, which goes on for a good three pages, spanned such disparate activities as surveying, coinage and
regulation of the currency, “the provision of weights and measures,” and shipbuilding. Webb lovingly enumerated all the areas that had come to be regulated or otherwise controlled by the state. If this trend toward government control continued, he concluded, private property was on the way out—and this was as it should be. Public ownership of the means of production was the only effective way to raise the “material condition of the great mass of the people.” The technological and social advance of history inevitably led toward the embrace of socialism; socialism and progress, indeed, were interchangeable. Webb concluded on a suitably uplifting note: “The road may be dark and steep, for we are still weak, but the Torch of Science is in our hands: in front is the glow of morning, and we know that it leads to the mountain top where dwells the Spirit of the Dawn.”
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With remarkable brevity, Webb’s Sunday lecture concisely anticipated one of the most powerful strains in the political thought of the century to come. He and his wife, Beatrice, went on to transform the Fabian Society into an institution that paved the way for the triumph of social democratic ideas in early-twentieth-century Britain; they have been described as the “godparents of the Labour Party.” The Webbs were not Marxists; they were opposed to class warfare, though they viewed it as unavoidable if the condition of the working class was not bettered by the kind of gradual measures they promoted. Yet, like many other relatively moderate “progressives” of the twentieth century, they still felt deep sympathy for decidedly more radical visions. In 1935, after visiting the Soviet Union, they published a book entitled
A New Civilization?
that concluded that Stalin’s Russia was a model for the kind of collectivist society that ultimately awaited us all. The Webbs, in short, shared their beliefs in the desirability and inevitability of state-led modernization with many other twentieth-century reformers.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb are rightly celebrated today as progenitors of the modern welfare state; Clement Attlee’s post-1945 vision of the “New Jerusalem” can trace its origins directly to them. The modern-day observer will see much in their thinking that is heroic—but also a great deal that is almost frighteningly naive. We no longer share that faith in the unconditional goodness of technological and scientific progress that characterized so many members of the educated elite in the early twentieth century. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of the earth’s population today lives under conditions that would have been barely imaginable on a comparable scale just a hundred years earlier. Yet we are also only too aware of the price that humankind has had to pay for these achievements: mass slaughter, traumatic social turmoil, ecological damage on a vast scale.

The idea of progress carries within it the seeds of arrogance. The engineers of social and material advancement can easily succumb to the certainty that their program is scientific, inevitable, indisputable—that progress is, essentially, an end unto itself. But this is true only as long as an overwhelming majority of people within a particular society are willing to accept this vision. The story of 1979 can be seen as the story of those who rejected it.

To be sure, they sometimes did so simply to defend their economic or social status—out of “class interests,” as the Marxists would put it. But the cautionary tale of 1979 should also serve to warn us that the reactions of societies, classes, or individuals to technological and economic challenges cannot be reduced solely to technology and economics. Simple impoverishment is a poor guide to political stability; there are many poor countries that never experience revolutions. The economic slowdown of mid-1978 in Iran was not as severe as the one that occurred two years earlier—but 1976 passed with nary a hint of social disturbances, while the shallower recession that followed inspired a full-scale revolt.
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Meanwhile, social inequality in contemporary China is close to the levels that plagued Iran in the last decades of the shah’s rule—yet this does not necessarily mean that systemic collapse is just around the corner. Because Communist rule in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe in the 1980s literally bankrupted itself, we tend to regard the 1989 anti-Communist revolts as inevitable. Yet identical systems in North Korea and Cuba endured for decades more—the former by virtue of a continued and unstinting commitment to brute force and ideological uniformity, the latter thanks to a combination of sophisticated oppression and tactical economic reforms.

Economic determinism is not particularly good at explaining why events happen precisely when they do, why people are willing to sacrifice their lives and livelihoods for their beliefs, or why the ideas of one powerless priest can bring an entire nation to its feet and a ruler to his knees. Economics certainly shapes politics, but politics is ultimately a category unto itself. And we cannot understand political dynamics without recourse to the ideas that motivate people to action.

No one demonstrated this better than Margaret Thatcher, who set out to dismantle a philosophy of government that owed a great deal to the Webbs and their ilk. Some of her more blinkered opponents liked to depict her as a defender of class interests, a willing tool in the hands of conniving capitalists. But it is precisely Thatcher’s 1979 electoral victory that shows why this interpretation falls short. The Britons who chose her in that election were not voting for monetarism or stock market deregulation. They were motivated by more general concerns. The majority
embraced Thatcher’s argument that Britain was in a state of terminal decline and that it could be stopped only by limiting the reach of the state. More specifically, voters opted for Thatcher as a way of rejecting the most obvious manifestation of that decline: the overweening power of the unions, viewed by many late-1970s Britons as a kind of unelected government that was contrary to the very spirit of the democratic system. There were undoubtedly many who also believed that Thatcher’s promised revival of entrepreneurship and personal responsibility would benefit them economically. But polling from the period convincingly shows that those who voted Tory did so based on a broader understanding of the country’s problems. Thatcher appealed to voters precisely because she promised a corrective to the expansion of the state, an end to a postwar consensus that was now seen as more stifling than emancipatory. She appealed to their sense of agency and freedom rather than treating them as cogs in the impersonal machine of progress. In so doing, she demonstrated that the “old-fashioned Individualism” derided by Sidney Webb was perhaps not so old-fashioned after all.

Of course, it is much easier to indulge in individualism when you know that you can visit a doctor for free, count on regular payments from the state in the event of unemployment, and receive a guaranteed pension when you retire. For all her determination to change the way Britain worked, Thatcher showed little inclination to return to the laissez-faire world of the Victorians. She understood very well that certain innovations of the postwar welfare state—above all the entitlement programs that Britons had come to regard as their birthright—were there to stay, and she did little to challenge them in any fundamental way. As a true counterrevolutionary, she acknowledged some of the achievements of the revolution that preceded her. But in stark contrast to the Tory “wets”—the true conservatives in the Conservative Party—she did not shirk from confrontation on the fronts where she spotted opportunities for radical change. Margaret Thatcher was not a technocrat. She defined her politics through values, ideals, and moral categories. Some commentators have taken issue with her self-description as a “conviction politician,” but there can be little question that she saw herself this way.

Thatcherism
is often defined as an economic credo, but there was a great deal more to it than that. Though this point tends to be glossed over by commentators, Thatcher was a woman of strong religious beliefs. Her personal Christianity owed a great deal, of course, to her strict Methodist upbringing. (Contrary to some accounts, however, her father was not a fundamentalist, but a thoroughly modern believer who accepted the teachings of science and even conceded a significant role to the state in the fight for social justice.)
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That she went over to the Church of
England later in life changes some of the details in this picture, perhaps, but not its substance. Her belief in individual responsibility and the primacy of personal freedom had its roots in a spiritual stance rather than an economic theory.

We tend to forget that modern politics has its roots in religion. For most of human history, the rulers of society have called upon the realm of the supernatural to legitimize their ascendancy. The notion of politics as a distinct and secular sphere of human activity has a rather shallow pedigree. Though the roots of this idea are much older, it is really only since the Enlightenment that politics has established itself as a business involving only human beings. Try as it might, though, even modern political movements have never quite managed to shrug off their scriptural and spiritual origins.
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The Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—shared the belief that history is the product of a single and unified divine being that is pushing humanity forward toward a particular end; once that end is reached, history will end, and a community of purity and justice will be established for eternity. The European religious wars in the wake of the Reformation, and especially the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, showed how millennial longings for justice and equality gave rise to organizations that had remarkable similarities to twentieth-century revolutionary movements. The syntheses of Marxism and religion attempted by Ali Shariati and the theorists of Catholic liberation theology in the 1970s show that Marx’s thinking was, in a deeper sense, more congenial to Abrahamic prophecy than he might have been willing to acknowledge.

So perhaps it should come as little surprise that those who defined themselves as the militant avant-garde of “material progress” should have met with particularly bitter resistance from the forces of organized religion. For many twentieth-century modernizers, the proper “progressive” was an atheist, someone who rejected supernatural explanations of events in favor of a “scientific,” materialist analysis of history. Religion, in this reading, was a backward superstition, its defenders the cynical allies of the propertied classes. “Law, morality, religion, are to [the proletarian] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests,” Marx and Engels wrote in
The Communist Manifesto
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Marxists had a near-religious confidence in their own ability to transcend superstition—an attitude so infectious that even traditional monarchs like the shah of Iran felt compelled to design his reforms so that they echoed Communist models.