Reading Taine or the earlier St. Simon or Zola, one can see an equivalent in another context. There is no reason to imagine that any European country experienced less severe exploitation of the masses of its people than Britain did. But British society was remarkable for the progressive nature of its immiseration — extreme poverty in association with unprecedented advances in science and technology, and in national power and wealth. It was Britain’s inspiration to transform static feudal custom into dynamic capitalist system, to convert wealth into capital; that is, to release its astonishing powers of self-replication. Italian city-states and the Low Countries developed banking and trade to a very high point. But Britain added industrialism, with its special opportunities for the growth of capital through expansion and innovation. Britain’s importance as a center of trade and finance gave it world markets, highly suitable for absorbing its production of staples such as textiles, which were cheap because they came from modern factories whose operatives were as badly paid as any in the world. I am aware of the little charts which show a worker of whatever kind earning however many shillings and pence. Much relevant social history is devoted to turning out the pockets of these people, and graphing their contents for comparison. This is meaningless, however, when workers were required to rent their shelter and buy their food from employers, or from others who profited from the necessity of their living near the factory where they were employed sixteen or eighteen hours and more, or from the need to buy food daily and close at hand — which made workers the primary victims of adulteration as well as high prices. To this must be added the inflation of the costs of necessities which can always be enjoyed by monopoly suppliers. And then employers had the uncontrolled right to fine for defective work or damaged equipment. All this makes a wage itself meaningless, since by one means or another its real value is susceptible to reduction at any time. Health conditions and length of life are better indicators of how one is repaid for one’s labors. In industrial cities the average length of working-class lives was seventeen years. For reasons touching the profitability of enterprise no wage could buy the mass of people a breath of fresh air or a taste of clean water. They subsidized with their health and lives the profits of industrialists.
It is a seamless history. The contamination of modern Britain with radioactivity is done by industry, for profit. The health of those affected is an appropriation of property, since, as Adam Smith argued (and Marx seconded him, as he did often), one’s labor and therefore one’s ability to labor is a property and a patrimony. To deplete strength and life is to overstep limits no one should be required to cross. This is an ethical argument, of course, though couched in economic terms. People have always sold their lives along with their labor. To refuse has rarely been a practical option. That is why the American abolitionists, well before the Civil War or the Communist Manifesto, treated chattel slavery and wage slavery, in those terms, as one phenomenon. The fulcrum of the competitive system of capitalism in Britain was the worker and his wage, though this fact reflected peculiarities of the social order rather than any real economic necessity. Britain had, after all, so many varieties of competitive advantage that higher real wages, which would be repaid in a larger domestic market, could have been absorbed, while the loss of discipline enforced by desperation would be compensated for by greater vigor and longer lives among the industrial work force — a body whose skills, virtually unique in the world at that time, were among Britain’s great economic advantages and therefore deserving of consideration, if on economic grounds alone. The uneconomic side effects of the degradation of the work force are as obvious now as they were then, and yet it has persisted, under the pretext of economic necessity.
Marx was correct in seeing society as roiled to the bottom by “economic relations,” which amounted to the confiscation in whole or in part of the peace, health, beauty, dignity, strength, and span of life of the great majority of people. Just such a high-handed and unembarrassed claim to dispose of others’ lives as was made by industrialists, by agriculturalists, by slave traders and colonizers (both in routing indigenous populations and in dumping unwanted Britons and Irish in remote corners of the earth), is expressed in the conduct of government and industry in Britain today. Now, as ever, there is no sound calculus of interest that will justify, for example, the importation of nuclear wastes in vast quantities by a small country which has presumed to deal with them because its specialists have shrugged off the difficulties involved, choosing financial gain against the risk, if not in fact the certainty, of unthinkable loss. It is a strange abuse, from which financial benefits can be expected only if it is assumed that there will be no unconcealable catastrophe, that other countries will not be shamed out of paying for this disreputable service, that the country will never face boycott or ostracism on account of Sellafield, that its impact on the national health will never become insupportably grave.
I suggested earlier a moral polarization in British society, which was economically based in the sense that it gave moral value to the refinements of life made possible by privacy and amenity. This is not to imply that working-class people were uninjured by the lack of these things. It is only to point to the pattern of a morality grown increasingly “nice” while the lives of most people conditioned them to circumstances this morality would find degrading and presumptively immoral. The conditions which yielded all the imagined and actual vice and the scandalous absence of proper hygiene were created by the very class who could hardly bring themselves to speak of them. The accelerated progress of refined sensibility in the opposite direction from physicality and squalor suggests that goodness is being defined as the opposite, not of evil, but of poverty.
The Victorians are famous for their rigorous notions of female purity, their exquisite awareness of female delicacy, their lisping attentions to pretty children. Yet industrial labor from its beginning was overwhelmingly the work of women, and of children as well. Women were not recruited into a system designed for endurance greater than theirs. The worker around whom industry developed was a woman. Men, when Engels wrote in the nineteenth century and when Beveridge wrote in the twentieth, were considered unemployable except at odd jobs by the time they were forty, and regularly became the dependents of their wives and children, who, though preferred to men as workers, were paid considerably less (which heightened, one must assume, the degree to which they were preferred). The primary earner in a household having so brief an active life, the incomes of families were pieced together out of the trifles paid to supposed dependents. All in all, the economy of the nineteenth century was as if designed to demonstrate the toughness of women, while at the same time the myth of female delicacy elaborated itself endlessly.
Again, I am suggesting here a morality of denial, which reached an especially high degree of development and has been put to especially rigorous use, in Britain. I do not think that historically the British upper classes really have not known how the working class lives, though (then, as now, and at frequent intervals between) revelations of poverty were greeted with little shrieks and exclamations such as “Among us! In this land so widely admired for its decency and civilization!” The proof of awareness, highly specific however deeply suppressed, is precisely this mirror-image reality, in which everything is reversed. Sheltered children, sheltered wife, dominant father/husband, leisure, freedom from financial dependency, access to the countryside, the ability to observe a highly nuanced propriety requiring a variety of dress, an array of forks and glasses — all these things were absolutely not characteristic of working-class life. The Victorian home flourished over and against the working-class household in which everyone above the age of five or six might be employed, leaving the littlest ones untended through an endless Victorian workday. “Slum” is cant slang from the word “slumber.” These people must have done little more than sleep in the few hours they had to themselves. It was often remarked that they were deficient in domestic culture.