A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (9 page)

The automobile industry shapes the whole country. At one end of the spectrum it fosters the development of steelworks, mines, oil companies, and glass factories. At the other, it leads to expansion of the highway system, of banks and of trade. It is accompanied by new forms of alienation for assembly-line workers.

Yet French carmakers still dominate the world market in 1907. They produce 25,000 in that year (as many as the United States and ten times more than in England). Two-thirds of cars exported worldwide that year are still French.

Everything changes very brutally between 1908 and 1914. In the United States, assembly-line production of Ford’s Model T cuts its price in half. In France, still in love with ancien régime ideals, the automobile industry sees cars as luxury items and designs them like carriages. Thus, when the first mass automobiles (taxi-cabs) appear in Paris, Louis Renault and his workers, veterans of the horse-drawn carriage trade, refuse to mass-produce them.

In 1914, France produces eleven times fewer automobiles than America, while seven years earlier it built the same number. Ford builds 250,000 vehicles a year and commands almost half of the American market. Britain, bogged down by its empire and unable to control its financial crisis, produces only 34,000 cars, Germany 23,000, and the United States 485,000. Game, set, and match.

The engine of growth is henceforth clearly American, in both the automobile and the oil industries. The world market is now increasingly open, and everywhere democracy gains ground along with the market. In 1912, more than 12 percent of gross industrial production is handled through external trade. One year earlier, the last Chinese dynasty (the Qing) gives way to a republic.

Sometimes this soaring growth creates tension and rivalry over control of the markets and sources of supply. In 1914 a war — seemingly inherited from an earlier time — closes all frontiers. Everything happens as though British, French, and German traders are exhausting themselves in squabbles over a power that no longer belongs to them. Oil shapes the fate of armies
and fashions the postwar era. While millions perish in the trenches, the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916 aspires to divide the Middle East (the property of Germany’s ally, the Ottoman Empire) between the two great European powers. The United States enters the war following the Zimmermann Telegram, in which the Germans announce their intention to wage all-out submarine warfare; propose that Mexico declare war on the United States in return for the reacquisition of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona; and urge them to incite Japan to join the side of the Central Powers as well.

By the time it closes with an influenza pandemic and Communist revolutions in Russia and Germany, the First World War has hastened the transfer of power to America, just as the Napoleonic Wars had guaranteed Great Britain’s victory. Yet another lesson from history: the victor in any war is the one who does not wage it — or in any case, the one who does not fight on his own territory.

European exhaustion thus reinforces the power of the northeastern United States, from Washington to Chicago, from New York to Boston. Strengthened by the war, the automobile industry triumphs. Now new technologies appear. They include radio and the electric motor. The 1919 Versailles Treaty — its economic clauses essentially written by American financiers — redraws Europe’s frontiers. It cuts the Ottoman Empire up into digestible morsels, assents to the creation of the Soviet Union, and burdens defeated Germany with an unbearable debt. All-powerful, the American president can even try to lay down rules designed to avoid war
through the creation of a “League of Nations” — first embryo of an illusory world government.

But in America as in Europe, production costs soar, salaries increase, and profitability rates sink: the vision of the future blurs, demand collapses, investments grind to a halt, joblessness bursts its bounds, protective measures harden, and freedom takes a backward step. The creation in 1928 of a cartel of the great oil companies — the “Seven Sisters” — raises the price of gasoline, makes car production collapse, triggers the Great Depression, and puts an end to the seventh form — as the eighth is already poised to take off.

As with the seven preceding forms, the birth of an eighth presupposes uniting the cultural, political, and economic conditions for replacing services, whether paid for or free, with new mass-produced machinery. Following the industrialization of farm, clothing, and transport production, it is the electric motor that will now replace — via electric household equipment — the domestic services provided by women in the home or in domestic employment.

As with all prior mutations, the eighth crisis of the mercantile order is resolved even before it flares. Electricity’s victory has already been discernible since the turn of the century. Lesson for the future: the time separating an innovation (even one that is socially
necessary) from its entry into widespread acceptance always takes something like forty years.

Nikola Tesla’s invention in 1889 of the small electric motor first permits the use of this energy source to raise the productivity of earlier machines, which include agricultural and industrial productivity and the automobile. Thanks to Thomas Edison, its second use is lighting: by the end of the nineteenth century, most of America’s leading cities are well lit and safer. And in 1906 the federal government takes in hand the creation of a national electric grid.

Then the electric motor permits the building of elevators — and therefore the construction of skyscrapers, a boon to the concept of vertical city planning. The electric motor thus plays an indirect role in rural migration and in the trend toward smaller families. It creates a market for machines capable of replacing a large proportion of domestic chores in apartments steadily shrinking in size. Tasks like cleaning, making preserves and conserving food, cooking, and entertaining other family members are now partially eliminated by mass-produced articles (bathtubs, toilet bowls, washing machines, refrigerators, blenders, radio, and — later — television).

America is particularly well placed to succeed in this migration to its giant cities. Women’s magazines and the feminist movement also prepare women, better than elsewhere, to accept their new status as consumers. And advertising, just beginning to spread its wings, ceaselessly reminds them (sometimes in very explicit terms) of what it calls their “special relationship” with the habit
of cleanliness. Thus, under the guise of “liberating” women, the market proclaims their servility.

Like its predecessors, this eighth format again transforms farmers and craftsmen into risk-prone wage-earners. It increasingly concentrates more and more wealth into a restricted number of hands. It turns women’s lot upside down. It creates greater freedoms for consumers and citizens and fresh hardships for workers.

In 1910, the electric motor first serves to power ventilators and then radios, initially for military purposes. In 1920, the first washing machines and refrigerators appear. By now, half of America’s homes are electrified, boasting running water and sometimes gas: the bathroom becomes a major factor in middle-class comfort. At the same time, the Federal Water Power Act looks into the sources of hydraulic energy. In 1921, American industry produces 2.5 million sanitary appliances, doubling that figure in 1925. Production of sanitary appliances, barely slowed by the crash of 1929, reaches 3.5 million in 1941. By 1930, 80 percent of American homes are electrified. Household equipment progressively replaces domestic employees (chiefly black heirs of the recently liberated slaves): their number dwindles from four million in 1920 to 300,000 in 1940, while the rest go to swell the numbers of the jobless. In 1935, Congress passes the Public Utility Holding Act, aiming to give cities access to the low-cost electric power they need to use the new machines.

This eighth restructuring of the mercantile form — this time around the nuclear family — is particularly well suited to American social logic. It also shows up in
Europe, and coincides with the dictatorial upheavals occurring in Italy, Spain, and Germany. Indeed, the family is also at the heart of the Nazi and Fascist ideologies. In 1935, German industrial production is far ahead of that of France, Great Britain, and the United States. From 1933 to 1938, its production of steel, cement, and aluminum triples. But since it needs a workforce, raw materials, and agricultural land, and cannot count on trade alone to acquire them in sufficient quantities, war becomes indispensable to Germany. The Soviet version next door also appears to have succeeded in organizing itself as a war economy — without anyone being able to verify the statistics provided by Soviet propaganda.

The war, yet again willed into being by Germany, once more helps the United States — immune on its own territory — to master the technologies and production levels needed for industry and finance, henceforth based in New York.

Here again, the role of energy is crucial. Hitler marches on Stalingrad to obtain the reserves of the Caucasus (once he has broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that had guaranteed him the oil essential to his first victories). It is because of the embargo on its oil supplies that Japan attacks Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And finally, it is on his return from the Yalta conference in February 1945 that Roosevelt takes over Saudi Arabia — and the world’s biggest petroleum reserves — from Britain.

At the end of this new world war (it cost about fifty million dead — five times more than the first), the world has utterly changed. Nuclear weapons have appeared;
the Holocaust has happened; the Middle East has been splintered into ten sovereign states; communism is triumphant. Now an eighth mercantile form recreates itself in one half of the world (which also includes the former Fascist and Nazi dictatorships), while the other half, from Budapest to Beijing, enters the Soviet orbit. Yesterday’s allies become “cold war” foes.

This time, the new mercantile form is structured around New York and electricity. It is the second format whose core is in America. It will not be the last.

From 1945 onward, electrification, family allowances, and housing aid produce a mass demand for household appliances invented in 1920, reviving the world economy much more effectively than major public works.

In the twenty years from 1945 to 1965, and thanks to the electric motor, New York becomes the world’s greatest metropolis. The price of household equipment falls fivefold, while production increases by a factor of ten. New consumer appliances intensify the evolution of the market economy in the direction of nomadism (another term for individual freedom). In 1947, the electric battery and the transistor (two key inventions) make radio and record players portable. This is a major revolution, for it allows the young to dance outside the ballrooms and therefore be free of parental supervision — liberating sexuality, opening them to all kinds of music, from jazz to rock, and thus announcing youth’s entry into the world of consumption, of desire, and of rebellion. Lesson for the future: the link between technology and sexuality underpins the whole dynamic of the mercantile order.

While the poorest of Americans rise in revolt in the ghettos, the middle class saves instead of consuming. Now the number of people whose profession consists of spurring consumers to spend increases — banking, insurance, advertising, marketing, the media. Between 1954 and 1973, bank loans to American households rise fivefold.

The rest of the world settles into the “middle.” While the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States increases 3 percent per year between 1959 and 1973, Great Britain, France, and Germany (bled white since the Second World War) struggle to make up for lost time, thanks in part to American aid. Japan’s GDP progresses from $300 per capita in 1956 to $12,000 in 1980. Outside Europe, the world seems wholly under the control of the United States or the Soviet Union. In 1954, for example, when Iranian prime minister Muhammad Mossadegh nationalizes his country’s oil industry, he is immediately overturned in a coup fomented by the CIA: an international consortium, made up of French, Dutch, British, and American companies, takes control of Persian oil production. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev sends Soviet tanks into Budapest without any reaction from the West. Control is the order of the day.

And now, as in every previous case, the core exhausts itself in military costs abroad and policing costs in its own ghettos. After the Korean War and Vietnam, the U.S. confrontation with the Communist world demonstrates that the capitalist superpower is militarily fallible and financially fragile.

Throughout the West, service activities (whether private or public) cannot yet be automated, and there
fore demand an increasing share in the surplus. In the absence of automation of the services provided by white-collar workers in industry, the productivity both of work and of capital stagnates — as military and social spending steadily rises. The profitability of capital declines. Financial circuits direct loans to traditional industries rather than to innovative businesses; toward foreign public lenders rather than private domestic lenders; toward big companies rather than small ones. The steel industry now invests only half of what would be needed for it to compete with Japan and Korea.

In 1973, the rise in raw-material prices, particularly oil, reduces still further the disposable income of wage-earners without raising either production levels or demand. Savings levels sink; debt soars. Inflation follows, reducing the value of the debts and easing the burden of indebtedness, which in its turn spurs and accelerates inflation. The rise in joblessness and the pauperization of part of the population then generate insecurity.

By 1980, the United States seems on the verge of decline; it loses its place as the leading automobile exporter; its share in the world market for machine tools falls from 25 percent in 1950 to 5 percent in 1980 — while that of Japan, a brand-new player, moves from zero to 22 percent. The external debt of the United States rises massively, outstripping its foreign holdings. To finance it, American leaders tolerate the increasing use of the dollar by foreign creditors. New York is no longer the only place where the world’s finances are organized. The City of London (where a German emigrant, Simon Warburg, launches the first loans in eurodollars and the first public offering) seems to have
recovered a rank it had considered lost forever. Japan becomes the leading creditor for the United States, where it makes spectacular purchases of “iconic” U.S. businesses and real estate. America seems on the verge of becoming nothing more than the breadbasket of a flourishing Japan, just like Poland and Flanders in the eighteenth century.