The France/England Parallel

Here again, showing great originality, Wallerstein moves away from the still-dominant discourse that contrasts the evolutions of France and England in the nineteenth cen­tury. In counterpoint, he proposes, with convincing arguments, a parallel reading of the evolutions in the two major countries of centrist liberal modernity.

I certainly share Wallerstein's viewpoint that the comparative advantage of England results not so much from its advance in the industrial revolution, but more from its control of a gigantic colonial empire, founded on the conquest of India, in particular.

For all that, however, should the specificity of the industrial revolution be reduced to nothing by limiting it to a bunch of technological innovations similar to those that had taken place in other times and places? I do not think so. The new ‘machino-facture’ should be contrasted with the ‘manufactures’ of earlier times. It begins the massive deskilling of labor that, as it grows worse, leads right to the Taylorism of “modern times” described by Harry Braverman (and Charlie Chaplin!). The new industrial revolution is structured, in turn, around a particu­lar type of agricultural development based on the rapid expropriation of the rural majority. The development of this model of capitalism would have been unsus­tainable without the safety valve of massive emigration to the Americas. The ‘European’ capitalist model (which could not be exported) was certainly not the only historical path for possible advances.

Be that as it may, the triumph of the European model has completely trans­formed history and, consequently, given rise to a series of simplifications to which Wallerstein calls our attention. The English economy was still widely based on agriculture in the middle of the nineteenth century and the French industrial sys­tem was not behind that of its English competitor, Wallerstein reminds us.

Yet, while the similarity of the changes in England and France appear to be obvious in areas concerning the economic progress of capitalist development, the same cannot be said about the political struggles that accompanied these developments. The English path is characterized by the successive compromises between the bourgeoisie, thus described as middle class, and the aristocracy of the Ancien Regime—in that way softening the effects of the entrance of the work­ing classes onto the political scene. In the French Revolution, the confrontation between the latter and governments established for the benefit of the bourgeoisie is infinitely more visible. The ‘Irish’ factor, the result of a particular type of inter­nal colonialism unique to England, contributed, in turn, to delaying the maturation of a radical socialist consciousness in England. It is not by chance that the most advanced moment in the expression of this radi- calization is the Paris Commune, difficult to imagine in England.

In the United States, the radical popular component has failed, up to now, to distinguish itself from liberal democracy. In my opinion, the reason is the devastat­ing effects of the successive waves of immigration, in which the construction of ethnic communities (Communautarismes), themselves arranged into a hierarchy, is substituted for the maturation of a socialist consciousness.

Yet, despite the differences on which I have focused my attention here, the final result is identical: the same liberal center and the same historical compromise between capital and labor that determines the existence of that liberal center tri­umphed, above all else, as the form of managing modern society at the end of the nineteenth century, not only in England, France and the United States, but even elsewhere in Europe, although in attenuated forms.

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