Schama's observations are very interesting. As I was writing to Ed
yesterday, it is a newly prospering part of the population, rather than the
very poor, which will rise against the most privileged. The Peasants'
Revolt in England in 1381 (after lopping off the Archbishop's head, they
almost captured London) was carried out by the most prosperous segment of
the peasantry who could afford weapons.
In the automobile strikes in Coventry in the 1970s which bankrupted one
factory after another (eight major firms all told) it was not so much a
case of workers versus management but of groups of workers striking because
other groups of workers in the same factory were earning more. Or where
workers in one firm were earning less than the workers doing the same work
in another factory. Status is all! Interestingly, exactly the same is going
on now in China where workers in a Honda factory making transmissions
(already earning very good wages compared with the average) are striking
because workers working the Honda assembly plant are earning more.
Getting back to Scharma's example of the circumstances leading to the
French Revolution of 1789, they were somewhat different then than now. In
those days the aristocracy in the countryside were living next door to the
peasantry. In the tall apartment blocks in Paris the very poorest would be
living in the same building (on the top floors) as the very rich living in
the lowest floors. (Even so, it was the new middle-classes which actually
revolted!)
There isn't the same propinquity in modern advanced countries. Different
classes and income earners live and work in entirely different places.
Apart from occasional massive street demonstrations by the low- and
middle-middle classes (as our million-fold anti-Iraq invasion demo was in
2002) I don't see revolution on the horizon. If there is any militancy it
is likely to come from the increasing numbers of unemployed middle-class
university graduates (not the high school drop-outs) who are unable to
enter the same sorts of high-earning jobs that their parents had. If the
present sorts of austerities continue (and will need to intensify) in
advanced countries I can quite see the possibility of frustrated
middle-class young, now equipped with mobile phones and computer know-how,
wrecking Internet systems of government departments and banks. In their
potential ability to organize themselves and to hit vulnerable spots in the
infrastructure they could be far more dangerous than Al Queda.
Keith
At 18:45 27/05/2010 -0700, you wrote:
From: [email protected] (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: May 23, 2010 10:46:07 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <[email protected]>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Schama: Are the Guillotines Being Sharpened?
SATURDAY, MAY 22, 2010
Schama: Are the Guillotines Being Sharpened?
By Yves Smith
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/05/schama-are-the-guillotines-being-sha
rpened.html>
Simon Schama tonight warns in the Financial Times that revolutionary rage is
close to the boiling point in Europe and the US :
Historians will tell you there is often a time-lag between the onset of
economic disaster and the accumulation of social fury. In act one, the shock
of a crisis initially triggers fearful disorientation; the rush for
political saviours; instinctive responses of self-protection, but not the
organised mobilisation of outrage.
Act two is trickier. Objectively, economic conditions might be improving,
but perceptions are everything and a breathing space gives room for a
dangerously alienated public to take stock of the brutal interruption of
their rising expectations. What happened to the march of income, the
acquisition of property, the truism that the next generation will live
better than the last? The full impact of the overthrow of these assumptions
sinks in and engenders a sense of grievance that "Someone Else" must have
engineered the common misfortune..At the very least, the survival of a
crisis demands ensuring that the fiscal pain is equitably distributed. In
the France of 1789, the erstwhile nobility became regular citizens, ended
their exemption from the land tax, made a show of abolishing their own
privileges, turned in jewellery for the public treasury; while the clergy's
immense estates were auctioned for La Nation. It is too much to expect a
bonfire of the bling but in 2010 a pragmatic steward of the nation's economy
needs to beware relying unduly on regressive indirect taxes, especially if
levied to impress a bond market with which regular folk feel little
connection. At the very least, any emergency budget needs to take stock of
this raw sense of popular victimisation and deliver a convincing story about
the sharing of burdens. To do otherwise is to guarantee that a bad situation
gets very ugly, very fast.
Schama knows this terrain cold; his chronicle of the French Revolution,
Citizens, made clear what a bloody affair it was. Even so, his account in
the Financial Times in some key respects understates the degree of
dislocation suffered by many in advanced economies. Schama depicts the
crisis-induced change as merely the end of rising expectations, but the
shock is deeper than that.
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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