Things seem to be pulling apart in Britain right now, and it has to be said that the problems the country faces are not simply the result of cost-push inflation from fuel imports or post-COVID fiscal irresponsibility. The rot runs deeper. The implications of living in the hinterland of a metropolitan city-state in an era of highly mobile finance capital are not to be taken lightly. If an appropriate political response is not forthcoming from the political nation, there are long-term consequences.
There has been a persistent underinvestment across Britain for decades. This is especially striking, given the vast quantities of financialized capital that have been lingering underemployed in the financial system since 2008 and before.1 Alongside this contradiction in British society there is the story of de-skilling in a skills-obsessed economy, rising accommodation costs in parallel to vanishing housing accessibility, preclusive education costs in a proliferating ‘knowledge economy’, rising debt burdens in a dominant neoliberal discourse of ‘free choice’, and rising national income amid stagnant real wages for most income percentiles. Together, these implicit contradictions have two things in common: 1) they collectively make up a developmental crisis in the British state; and 2) they are all connected to the chronic impasse evident in British political life.
Quite simply, the productive powers of our society, understood in the broadest and most generous sense, are being wasted and retarded, in order to perpetuate the existing social relations of production centered around metropolitan high finance.2 It is time to challenge the projected image of a robust, culturally resurgent, and economically dynamic Britain that is presented in the instrumental statistics conjured up by status quo apologists to reassure themselves. Accumulated national income does not give an accurate indication as to the wealth of a nation.
Way back in the fin-de-siècle period of financialization and monopoly capital (1890-1914), the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner saw how ‘no longer is the per capita wealth of the Nation a real index to the prosperity of the average man’.3 Though it is over a century old, this insight is just as true today of the British polity as it was in the American belle époque. Historical illustrations can be helpful, and the distance from our own context can be stimulating. To get an idea of how and why the relations of production in a society/state can be devastating for the advancement of its productive forces and the wealth of a country’s citizenry, maybe we should look across the Atlantic to another time and place for perspicacity.
Frederick Law Olmsted – architect of Central Park – toured the antebellum South shortly before the Civil War. Looking back at his fairly extensive jaunt, it became apparent to him that the Cotton Kingdom had gone to war with the Union on a catastrophically false but widespread assumption. They had taken it as read that the society and culture of the South was surely superior to the gauche states of ‘free labour’, and that their society was more prosperous as a result.4 That the cash crops of the Southern plantations, upon which its economy was almost entirely based,5 derived enormous revenues was automatically assumed to lend a progressive and general enrichment to Southern society in its own version of Manifest Destiny. As Olmsted recounted…
Recently, a banker, who is and has always been a loyal union man, said, commenting upon certain experiences of mine narrated in this book: ‘The South cannot be poor. Why, their last cotton crop alone was worth two hundred million. They must be rich’: ergo, say the conspirators, adopting the same careless conclusion, they must be powerful, and the world must feel their power, and respect them and their institutions.6
Needless to say, the Banker was wrong. He had fallen for a classic misapprehension, which Lewis Mumford succinctly put in Technics & Civilization (1955).
No society can escape the fact of change or evade the duty of selective accumulation. Unfortunately change and accumulation work in both directions: energies may be dissipated, institutions may decay, and societies may pile up evils and burdens as well as goods and benefits. To assume that a later point in development necessarily brings a higher kind of society is merely to confuse the neutral quality of complexity or maturity with improvement. To assume that a later point in time necessarily carries a greater accumulation of values is to forget the recurrent facts of barbarism and degradation.7
Just because your society appears prosperous in its conspicuous consumption or in its aggregated metrics, doesn’t mean that it is wealthy in substance. Irrespective of the superbly tailored and genteel legions of ambassadors, admirals, attorneys general, and vice-presidents that might be produced from the limited ranks of the South’s elite stratum, its political economy set it on the road to ruin. The structure of its political economy baked into the southern states a progressive impoverishment relative to the northern and western states in a manner instrumental to their ultimate downfall at the hands of Lincoln’s armies.
The political economy of the Southern States, the social and economic structure that established the conditions for the continuity of the ‘peculiar institution’ of the slave-power, was mutually connected to its political superstructure. The particular combination of plantation organization, cash-crop production, slave labour, and a history of social politics reproduced through the device of race, all coordinated in a martial aristocracy increasingly at odds with a rapidly modernizing industrial continental economic system.8
At the very moment of their apparent cultural and political ascendency, the planterocracy simply could not muster the productive force to sustain its existence as a political formation. This false sense of superiority was doubtless assumed among the French agrarian aristocracy of the 1780s, or perhaps in the late city-principalities of the Italian Quattrocento. It is a historically recurrent story. At the time of Olmsted’s travels, to point romantically to the civilization, greatness, and largesse of the Planter class was not only an easy contemporary fiction, but a fatal distraction all too historically common to plutocratic oligarchies.
In relation to the wider continental system, southern political society fell into increasingly acute contradiction, crisis, and ultimately internal colonial subordination within the wider American system. The Civil War brought these contradictions to a disastrous head. However, the long-term effect of the societal domination by the planter class, and the broader consequences of the enduring positions of surplus appropriation that sustained and characterized that domination, had resulted in increasing instability,9 as well as the gradual impoverishment of that society outside its upper echelons.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has summarized the salient features of the post-bellum American South, the South of the ‘Reconstruction’, that of a ‘dependent system resembling the classic pattern’ that cannot simply be put down to defeat and occupation in war.
A relatively small, rich elite of consumers wasting resources on fancy imports, with little incentive to diversify or industrialize; a racially differentiated class of poor, condemned to poverty by the surplus of labor; a highly vulnerable and unstable pattern of exports based on a few key crops; and reliance on foreign merchants and shippers with consequently prolific leaching of the export-trade profits.10
This is an interesting picture, because it is surprisingly familiar. To what extent does it resemble the British state of the 2010s-2020s? We have to think in the current British context on how our basic political economic structure of timocratic oligarchy – metropolitan and liberal in our case, rather than agrarian and martial as in Dixie – is actually a recurrent species of capital accumulation regime. We need to grasp how that regime emplaces a patterned dynamic of relative impoverishment upon the state-territory as a whole, and likewise what kinds of contradictions and crises this might engender that make the polity more and more unstable through time.
Just consider today how higher Olympic medal tallies, the resurgent international broadcasting of British TV shows such as Downton Abbey or The Crown, as well as the renewal of the Trident-submarine fleet, are all declared as symptoms of prosperity and greatness in the British State post-Thatcher, while the provinces degrade and disintegrate. Greatness and prosperity of the state is not the same as greatness and prosperity in the state.
Ask people outside of the South East, and they will tell you. Among the metropolitan establishment, Britain couldn’t be doing better.
In the Mississippi Delta, that great synecdoche for Southern society generally, examples teem with this kind of delusion, not a few of them brought to life in James Cobb’s The Most Southern Place on Earth (1992). Members of the "Delta’s antebellum aristocracy" might well have waxed assuredly of "educated, cultured people… whose chief aim was to build up a country worth living in, and enjoy it to the fullest”.11 This "enjoy it to the fullest" signals for whom exactly this worthy country was to be built. This society was not to be for those "wholly outside the pale of this charmed circle", that is to say, the population of the Delta at large, whether white or black, but to the peculiarly capitalistic "feudal aristocracy" that "reigned supreme" across the Deep South.
It is telling that the "mean total wealth per freeman" in the four richest counties of the Mississippi Delta in 1860 stood at $18,438, in comparison with a ‘Southwide’ mean of $4,380. This places those four richest counties among the 36 richest of the 2,080 counties in the US at that time.12 This is impressive. It is a true oligarchy, matched only by the one we have currently at the hub of City-State Britain. However, these self-congratulatory statistics seemingly so valedictory of the slave-power "reflected not so much the value of Delta lands, the size of landholding, or their remarkable productivity, as the value of the slave property held by Delta planters".13 It was through this kind of capital that the larger planters of the Delta held a distinct advantage (by a fair margin) over most of the rest of the Southern economy.
However, the striking statistic of wealth and prosperity is wiped out in an instant, when the “slave-value component” is factored out, a value ultimately derived not from the prosperities of labour productivity and entrepreneurial ingenuity, but from conquest and proprietorial control. Of course the ratification of the 13th Amendment did indeed factor this value out with the stroke of a pen, exposing the imperial nudity of the South’s claims to great prosperity. This kind of unilateral de-capitalization would be much harder to achieve in a productive economic system, where the production of wealth is embedded much less conspicuously in the population at large. How easy do we think it might be to wipeout the capital gains hoarded in a financial system, rather than defused throughout a productive economy? Well, we saw how easy in 2008.
The predominance of cotton cash crop production resulted eventually in a "hollowing out of the entire economy",14 and the capitalization bound up in slave property gave a false impression of the wealth of the South. Slaveholders and advocates for the Southern section might well have considered cotton and slavery to be "structural strengths", and by so assuming warded off "any fatalist assumptions that the regional economy faced long-term doom",15 but this was not the case. Monoculture had weakened the political economy of the south as much as it had strengthened the martial aristocracy that presided over it. When the capitalization in slaves was rubbed out, there was little of substance left, opening the door post-bellum "for Northern capital to command the productive power of the South".16
Is it so far fetched to see a parallel in the way that the ever-more crisis-prone regime of financialization in Britain has opened the way for ‘foreign’ predatory capital to take more thorough command over the dispositions of the British state. Since the 1980s, this has been the story of the British economy from North Sea oil to automobile production. The statistics and metrics of accumulation look more and more impressive with each passing year, yet the wealth, well-being, and social integrity of the population falls in real terms.
This is the technological advancement and the economic maturity of the financialized society that we are exhorted to accept by the contemporary ideology of The City in the context of a highly articulated semiotic period of capitalist civilization. Maybe it is worth thinking on how financialization in the case of the British polity has profoundly affected the political structure and social fabric of our State, just as Cotton monoculture and slave-labour did for the American South. If there is no necessary structure of social obligation in the state to bind the political economy to the society, bonds of the kind eroded by the deracinated command and control function of financialization, then there is no necessary connection between the amassed revenues of capital ‘captured’ from the global flow, on the one hand, and the prosperity of the state-territory at large, on the other.
In sum, what Olmsted and Fernandez-Armesto were getting at is that the particular social anatomy and physiology of the plantation political economy, predicated on its infamous peculiar institution of chattel slavery and cash crop production, had turned the South into an internal colonial economy within the continental United States and the capitalist world-system beyond, ruled by and for a rent-seeking domestic oligarchy. As such, its people suffered the fate of all who are subjugated to colonial conditions – domination, immiseration, regression, dependence, humiliation, social inertia, decline, vulnerability, instability, and reaction.
When Olmsted toured the South, the general prosperity he expected was entirely absent. Instead, he found oases of accumulated wealth deployed into socially particular spaces (mansion houses, civic buildings) that was matched only by an arid desert of crumbling productive forces and wastage among the general population. The long-term consequence? Sven Beckert…
As we in the Western economies know only too well, nations rise and fall, new and developing economies emerge, global capital and trade moves to wherever production costs are cheapest, and once powerful economic kingdoms wither on the vine’.17
For productive relations to change, and for the technological potentials of post-industrial societies to be unlocked, a reformation in the social relations of production is necessary. Without it there shall be no investment, no development, and no prosperity. These social relations are nothing less than the enlargement of the space for self-government in our polity, and that is a matter of political action directed against the political formation that retards our productive forces. In Olmsted’s case, it was the planter class. In the British case, it is the financial metropolitan establishment. In both cases, it is the oligarchy.
Social relations that keep a ruling class in power will not be reformed by that class, even if the state is to be run down as a consequence. As Eugene Genovese noted about the planter class of the South, nothing was more important than their ascendency.
Nothing essential would be lost to the South by underdevelopment; the South as a whole was underdeveloped. In short, the question of political power necessarily had priority over the strictly economic questions.18
Après moi, le déluge! Sound familiar?
Endnotes
Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur (London: Zed Books, 2015); David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2015).
Nicholas Shaxson, The Finance Curse: How Global Finance is Making Us All Poorer (London: Vintage, 2018).
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1986 [1920]), p. 318.
Fredrick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853-1861 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996 [1861]), p. 8.
Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Vintage Books, 1967); Richard Follett, “Introduction” In Richard Follett, et al. (eds.) Plantation Kingdom: The American South and its Global Commodities (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016), p. 1-11.
Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom. p. 8.
Lewis Mumford, Technics & Civilization (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 184.
Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966).
John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1860 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas: A Hemispheric History (New York: Modern Library, 2005), p. 145.
James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 16-17.
Richard Forstall (ed.) “Population of States and Counties of the United States: 1790 to 1990,” US Department of Commerce: Department of the Census, Washington DC, March 1996. p ix.
Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, p. 31.
Sven Beckert, “Cotton and the US South,” in Richard Follett, et al. (eds.) Plantation Kingdom: The American South and its Global Commodities (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016), p. 60.
Beckert, “Cotton and the US South,” p. 60.
Eugene Genovese, “The Origins of Slavery Expansionism,” in Edwin C. Rozwenc (ed.) The Causes of the American Civil War (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath & Co, 1972), p. 265.
Richard Follett, “Introduction” In Richard Follett, et al. (eds.) Plantation Kingdom: The American South and its Global Commodities (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016), p. 11.
Genovese, “The Origins of Slavery Expansionism,” p. 258.