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Historical Anthropology Stephen L Nugent
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Canned The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry Anna Zeide
‘As Sidney Mintz does with sugar, Nugent does with rubber...Illustrated with contemporary images, adverts and maps, the study is a treasure chest of a book. It reminds the reader of the value of an historical anthropology to examine the connections between workers, traders, capitalists, scientists and consumers in different corners of the globe. Yet this book is fundamentally about the Amazon, its people and their contribution to the modern world.’
Mark Harris, University of St Andrews, UK
‘Meticulously researched and rigorously argued, this book rethinks the connections between extraction of natural rubber by peasant producers in Amazonia, international trading and capitalist industry in London. Bringing local production relations into view underpins a powerful critique of rubber “boom and bust” thinking and continuing naturalization of Amazonian “development challenges”.’
John Gledhill, The University of Manchester, UK
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMAZON RUBBER INDUSTRY
In this engaging book, Stephen Nugent offers an in-depth historical anthropology of a widely recognised feature of the Amazon region, examining the dramatic rise and fall of the rubber industry. He considers rubber in the Amazon from the perspective of a long-term extractive industry that linked remote forest tappers to technical innovations central to the industrial transformation of Europe and North America, emphasizing the links between the social landscape of Amazonia and the global economy. Through a critical examination focused on the rubber industry, Nugent addresses myths that continue to influence perceptions of Amazonia. The book challenges widely held assumptions about the hyper-naturalism of the ‘lost world’ of the Amazon where ‘the challenge of the tropics’ is still to be faced and the ‘frontiers of development’ are still to be settled. It is relevant for students and scholars of anthropology, Latin American studies, history, political ecology, geography and development studies.
Stephen L. Nugent is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMAZON RUBBER INDUSTRY
An Historical Anthropology
Stephen L. Nugent
First published 2018 by Routledge
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
5.1
5.2
6.1
7.1
7.2
7.3
8.2
9.1 Rubber tapper
9.2 Limits of steam navigation on tributaries
9.3 An optimistic rendering of the Transamazon Highway network
9.4 Cachaça label
9.5 Detail of Booth map of London poverty
9.6 Intersection of Transamazon Highway and BR-163
10.1 Silvertown, c. 1880
10.2 Synopsis of Thomas Hancock Patents
10.3 Trade advertisement for vulcanite and ebonite
10.4 19th-century
10.5
10.6
10.7 Silvertown Rubber and Telegraph Works, c. 1880
10.8 Rubber shoe made in the Amazon region of best Parà Rubber, middle of the 19th-century
10.9 Sample page, Amazon shoe export data
10.10 Surgical
10.11
10.13
10.14
11.1 Pirarucú
11.2 The Amazon: A New Frontier: wild rubber and plantation rubber exports compared
2.1 Commercially plausible sources of elastic
5.1 Rubber exports from Amazonia (Manaus and Belém)
9.1 Royalties on different mineral substances in the main mining countries
PREFACE: AMAZON RUBBER BOOM, TAPPING INTO THE PAST
FIGURE 0.1 Detail, Amazon valley map
Source: Schurz et al 1925
This book is a mildly revisionist account of what is widely known as ‘the Amazon rubber boom’. The term ‘revisionist’ carries a number of unappealing connotations, so it is important to clarify at the outset what it means here. It could be said, positively, that anthropology is an intrinsically revisionist field in the sense that in its modern form (post-1920s), it has sought to investigate societies/
xii Preface: tapping into the past peoples/ethnies/cultures marginal to, discarded or overwhelmed by the politically and economically dominant social formations of so-called modern civilization. To the degree that anthropology has sought to valorize and legitimize other kinds of societies, against, say, 19th-century views1 about savages, races and primitivism, the field has been decidedly heterodox, and revisionist by disposition.
The term revisionist, however, more often bears a strong negative connotation that rests on the idea that acceptable, received wisdom is being illegitimately challenged. This is a sense of revisionism that is typically, and indignantly, cast aside as unwarranted denunciation, and the resulting disputes turn on incompatible claims about ideological correctness which of course are difficult to resolve. In the social sciences such disputes, turning on epistemological incommensurability, are inevitable and may even be said to be a kind of life-blood.
In view of anthropology’s intrinsically revisionist/critical disposition, the term ‘revisionist’ is not often invoked.2 A rare example was proposed by Alice Beck Kehoe in 1981. There the case made for a revisionist anthropology is presented in a discussion that includes a commentary on the field’s lack of self-consciousness about its own ideological predilections – what today might be expressed as a lack of transparency; at that time articulated as a debate about value-freeness – but mainly concerned with something emphatically revisionist: a denunciation of ‘the cant of conquest’, the self-serving claims of conquering Europeans that the peoples of North America represented a minimalist social template upon which civilization could (and should) be inscribed by conquerors.3 Kehoe writes that: ‘The history of Europeanist conceptions of the peoples of the American continental core is an impressive demonstration of the force of hypothesis over observation’ (Kehoe 1981: 507).
In framing the problem that way, drawing attention to the empirical record as well as the ideological biases of which anthropology was said to be insufficiently aware, she links the latter to a critique that emerged in the 1960s/1970s (well represented in Hymes (ed.) 1972 and Asad (ed.) 1973).This critique focused on a set of arguments concerning the relationship between anthropology and forms of power (global, national, colonial, imperial) that shape both the field itself and the societies that the field takes as its objects of analysis.
Both of these revisionist objects are echoed in The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Rubber Industry in an attempt to depict an Amazonia that is somewhat different from many stereotypical portrayals, and from a perspective of historical anthropology. There is a received view of Amazonia that strongly echoes ‘the cant of conquest’, and there is, in the case of the so-called rubber boom, a strong example of the ‘force of hypothesis over observation’. The ‘cant of conquest’ in portrayals of Amazonia, however, is not confined to the past, to the era of colonial conquest,
1 Although there is much evidence that such views are still entrenched.
2 But that may be because an expressly canonical anthropology is hard to find. More typically, ‘rethinking’ is proposed, more genteel, certainly, and more diffident.
3 The expression is attributed to Francis Jennings (1975).
Preface: tapping into the past xiii
but is also part of an ongoing re-creation and re-conquest of ‘the Amazonian frontier’ such that the ‘cant of conquest’ has also become renewed within the ‘cant of modernization’, especially that version – often glossed as neo-liberal – that views everything through the market and in whose eyes Amazonia is fundamentally and durably a vast resource repository.
The sense of revisionism employed here does not carry the ambition of turning anything on its head. The Amazonian literature has been the subject of concerted re-evaluation in recent decades and this is a small part of that large, collective reassessment. It departs, though, in claiming that the portrayal of the rubber industry as the rubber boom is a key gesture. The rubber industry/boom is acknowledged as a wellformed, Amazonian historical event/period as opposed to the ahistorical idealizations of hypertrophic naturalism, primitivism and ‘green hell’ that otherwise serve to symbolize Amazonia. The ‘rubber boom’ is a key historical marker that continues to shape perceptions of what is involved in the extended attempts – in the still-used, bald phrase – to develop the Amazon. What it is, who is developing it, why they are developing it, are all matters taken up (and critiqued) by a wide set of interlocutors, but regardless of the range of points of view, there is a consensual view that such development – still to come, even if it is, in part, under way – was preceded by a rubber boom that failed to perform the task.
Against the view that the Amazon is still to be incorporated into the modern world, one could point out that the pillaging of Amazonian resources by nonAmazonians is hardly a future prospect, but has been under way for almost 500 years and in advanced, modernizationist form for 50 years.4 The durability of key stereotypes of Amazonia impedes understanding of the character of social change in the region, and while one of those stereotypes is the rubber boom, it belongs to a set of diverse tropes united by the idea that that Amazonia is, basically, a natural domain that has successfully resisted domination by the social. There are, for example, a number of substantive, competing characterizations of the peoples first encountered at the time of Conquest – noble savages or wise forest managers or rapacious predators of slow-moving mega-fauna – but regardless of how such arguments develop, they seem to have little effect on the general, common perception of Amazonia –what might be characterized as the cultural encyclopaedic account – as a vast, relatively unexplored – though harshly challenged by modern incursions – natural domain containing lost tribes, primeval forest and esoteric and malicious beasts.5
4 ‘50’ is somewhat arbitrary. Most accounts of the modern ‘assault on the Amazon’ begin, reasonably enough, with the series of initiatives associated with the construction of the Transamazon Highway in 1970, preceded by the establishment of the Free Trade Zone of Manaus (1967) and other less visible initiatives (radar mapping of mineral deposits, for example) that date from the 1920s and were conducted under the US administrations of Hoover and Roosevelt.
5 As Antunes et al (2016) have recently shown, the now forgotten major assault on wildlife – mainly for hides – took place between 1930–50, such that by the time the official modernization assault began with the Transamazon Highway, the ‘primeval’ river-forest complex was already significantly depleted of once prevalent populations of manatee, otter, alligator, ocelot, jaguar and tapir, to name but some.
xiv Preface: tapping into the past
The kind of revisionist account posed here is necessarily inserted into longrunning disputes of a basically interpretive character. One of the centre-pieces of these disputes dates back 500 years: how were societies of the New World incorporated into the emergent modern world system? The expression ‘the Conquest’ is shorthand for that incorporation, but as Crosby (1972) – who uses the expression ‘the Columbian exchange’ – argues, the scale of what transpired is inadequately captured in the common expression.6 It was the largest biological event in human history in terms of its demographic effects (between an eighth and a quarter of the world’s population quickly disappeared) and in terms of the transfer of domesticated animals westward, and of New World germplasm eastward. These arguments comprise a step-up in an historical/social science notion of revisionism, for they are much more in the character of normal science than they are of social science. They comprise a revised account, not just a new interpretive account. In some quarters a new explanation is not regarded as ‘revisionist’ – it is just the normal advance of explanatory power based on new evidence and analysis.
At the time of publication, Crosby’s work was labelled ‘environmental history’ because of the biological dimensions of his arguments, a telling indicator of resistance to the notion that history and ‘materialist’ history might be the same thing. Similarly, Warren Dean’s (1987) Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber carries the subtitle A Study in Environmental History, in part, it seems, because he argues that the failure to convert ‘wild’ Brazilian rubber into ‘plantation’ Brazilian rubber was a result not just of ‘social’ causes, but of biological ones as well.7 As a result, his analysis of the decline of the rubber industry in Brazil is said to reflect a form of biological reductionism, just as Crosby’s work has been depicted as a ‘biological’ (and by implication, reductionist) explanation for the outcomes of Conquest.8
Such tension between revisionist and revised is, to say the least, unfortunate, but in anthropology perhaps particularly – because of the cross-cultural matrix within which it works – it can be especially pernicious. The rubber boom does not present itself as a benchmark example of the tension between revisionism and revised, but it does have bearing on the representation and misrepresentation of the role of Amazonia as a significant site of contention. The disputes over the anthropogenic origins of the global environmental crisis are non-trivially associated with macrofeatures in which Amazonia – a contested space of biodiversity, natural resources, and climate moderation – features prominently (however much perception of its symbolic value seems to prevail over empirical knowledge), and in that context, the
6 Mann (2005) is a wide-ranging discussion of many of the implications of Crosby’s earlier work.
7 It is the labelling, not the empirical content, that seems vital here. Neither Gootenberg’s (1989) analysis of the Peruvian guano industry nor Grandin’s (2009) book on Fordlândia, to take two examples just as vulnerable to the label, has been received as a contribution to ‘environmental history’.
8 In the ‘Comments’ section of Kehoe (1981: 509–16) it is interesting that her invocation of evolutionary biology is taken by several commentators to be a misguided attempt to over-egg the materialism of her argument.
Preface: tapping into the past xv
‘Amazon rubber boom’ represents an important historical prelude to the contemporary era. It was a 100-year period of integration into the modern world economy, and yet the hyper-naturalistic Amazon appears to have prevailed. That is, as Kehoe notes with respect to North America, perhaps another victory of hypothesis over observation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A number of people offered gratefully received assistance in the preparation of this book.These include librarians at the following institutions: in London, Senate House, Goldsmiths, the British Museum, Docklands Museum, Stratford Library, Docklands Library, London Metropolitan Archives; in Salem, Massachusetts, Peabody Essex Museum. John Loadman offered the benefit of his knowledge of the rubber industry. Gabriel Dattatreyan helped to access some archival materials. Salo Coslovsky of NYU offered insight into Amazonian shoe manufacture. Michael Tarkanian of MIT clarified matters concerning pre-modern rubber chemistry. Mark Nesbitt of Kew Gardens explained some key points regarding plant identification. Henrike Neuhaus and Marc Brown were of great assistance. My colleagues at Goldsmiths were unfailingly tolerant, as was June.
Many thanks to all.
1 REQUIEM FOR THE AMAZON RUBBER BOOM
Looking at the Amazon through the prism of rubber
‘Through the prism of rubber’ may seem an unlikely construction, but it has been carefully chosen and is apposite. One of the themes of this book is that the Amazon is so well known through an apparatus of mythic redundancy and hyperbolic, naturalistic excess that attempts to dismantle the stereotypes are largely ineffective. The Amazon is biodiverse and there is a lot of CO2 absorption, but ‘lungs of the Earth’ and ‘global carbon sink’ are inadequate renderings, much as they continue to be relied upon.
The ‘prism of rubber’ expresses one important, historical example of the way in which general understanding of the Amazon, its peoples and its histories is drawn back to and relies on well-established, if often unsubstantiated, expectations about ‘Amazonian reality’.
‘The Amazon rubber boom’ misidentifies the dynamic of an historical period, yet it is inextricably bound up with what is widely known or recognized about Amazonia, along with head hunters, piranhas, electric eels and blowpipes, all of which do exist but perhaps are not quite as important, overarching symbols as their familiarity suggests. ‘The Amazon rubber boom’ (and its collapse) represents, in the lexicon of Amazonese, a ‘conquest of the tropics’ that went wrong. It was an epoch in which the opening doors of modernity were unexpectedly slammed shut and the region and its peoples were once again overwhelmed by a neo-tropical green hell of the sort depicted by Werner Herzog (2004: 299) in his memoir, Conquest of the Useless, and whose film Fitzcarraldo1 (1982) is a major 20th century restatement of and contribution to Amazonian myth-making:
And there was the jungle, manifesting the same seething hatred, wrathful and steaming, while the river flowed by in majestic indifference and scornful
1 Fitzcarrald was the name of a rubber trader of Iquitos (see Fifer 1970: 132), but Klaus Kinski’s Fitzcarraldo does not appear to have been particularly modelled on him.
2 Requiem for the Amazon rubber boom
FIGURE 1.1 Rubber map
Source: Collins 1872
condescension, ignoring everything: the plight of man, the burden of dreams, and the torments of time.2
The ‘rubber boom’ is a central expression of the Amazonian past that, when unpacked, reveals itself as a flawed depiction. The concept of ‘boom’ itself is not well-defined; the ‘rubber’ of the boom actually refers to the latex of a number of commercially valuable species (out of some thousands of plants, globally, that
2 Burden of Dreams is the name of a documentary film by Les Blank produced while Herzog was engaged in shooting Fitzcarraldo. In BOD, Herzog famously speaks to camera about ‘the jungle’: ‘I see it more full of obscenity. Nature here is violent, base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical (sic) here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation, and choking and fighting for survival, and growing and just rotting away….The trees here are in misery, the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain…’ and so on.
3
produce ‘rubber latex’),3 requiring different modes of extraction (with implications for labour mobilization, processing sequence, environmental impact, and so on); the rubber industry of the Amazon, generally taken to be synonymous with ‘the Amazon rubber boom’, didn’t collapse precipitously with the appearance of plantation rubber in Southeast Asia, but gradually tailed out over decades; and so on.What is identified and understood as ‘the Amazon rubber boom’ is far more complicated, and interesting, than the received version, but the notion of boom is also embedded in a problematic image of a durably exotic Amazonia that has proved highly resilient to modification.
‘Because they diminish complexity, consensus agreements about an era are themselves serious problems.’4
This is not a history of the rubber industry in the Amazon, but an essay about the writing of that history – not historiography, but, for want of a better term, historical anthropology. The frame for the normal anthropological gaze5 is very far in the background, however, although the book follows on from primary field research among Amazonians for whom the rubber industry in its prime (until c. 1910–12) was the precursor to the large, relatively undifferentiated Amazonian peasantry that comprises much of the current Amazonian population, and certainly that fraction regarded as traditional as opposed to colonist.
For that traditional peasantry, often depicted as caboclo, rubber tapping, if pursued at all throughout most of the 20th century after 1930, was just one of a number of forms of petty commodity production amplified throughout the Amazon region as the rubber industry declined. Rubber is now an insignificant product for most Amazonians,6 yet the effects of the rubber industry are inscribed, however faintly at times, across contemporary Amazonia. Even those Amazonians who are currently described primarily as rubber tappers, as in Acre for example, pursue that activity in concert with farming, fishing, ranching, wage labour of various sorts – typical mixed, Amazonian livelihood(s) (see Almeida 1995; Hoelle 2015; Schmink 2011; Vadjunec et al 2011).7
Since 1973, and despite various programmes of price support since World War II, Brazil has imported more natural rubber than it has produced domestically. In 2015,
3 Latex appears in so many plant species that it is assumed to have evolved independently many times and is presumed to be a defence against herbivores (it has no known function in primary metabolism) (Agrawal and Konno 2009: 311).
4 (Lhamon 1990: 1).
5 Ethnographic case study of bounded unit of analysis.
6 The important exception being those working Acrean extractive reserves since the 1990s.
7 According to Sills and Saha (2010) there is in Acre a significant association between receipt of rubber subsidy and cattle ownership, very much in line with Hoelle’s (2015) observations. Such an allegiance is not contradictory – forest conservation plus forest conversion – as much as it is strategic.
Brazil ranked 40th in terms of global rubber production (0.02 per cent of global production) (Workman 2016).
Although there are a number of accounts of the global rubber industry that include important treatments of the Amazon boom, any attempt to write a definitive, regional history would have to confront the intimidating antecedents of Barbara Weinstein’s The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (1983) and Warren Dean’s Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber (1987), both volumes of great authority. Dean complements Weinstein’s pioneering work, a detailed study primarily of the trade in rubber, but is more decisive in presenting a causal account of the collapse of the rubber industry, and is vividly convincing 30 years on.Very much in the spirit of Crosby’s Columbian Exchange (1972), it presents a synthetic account drawing on a variety of sources and disciplines, more concerned with adequate explanation than with deference to disciplinary boundaries.
The present work stands on such shoulders, but tries to task a distinction not often invoked, and that is the distinction between ‘rubber boom’ and ‘rubber industry’. ‘Rubber boom’ is widely seen to suffice as an encapsulation of what happened between 1820 (when rubber export figures were first recorded) and 1910,8 when Southeast Asian plantation rubber came onto the market and ended what had been an Amazonian near-monopoly on natural rubber production, even though most authors would narrow the boom to the last quarter of the 19th-century and the first decade of the 20th.
That distinction between ‘boom’ and ‘industry’ is pursued by considering Amazonian rubber production not as an isolated domain of enterprise, the fruits of which were then exported to manufacturing centres in Europe and North America, but as a node in a commodity chain. To this end, attention is paid not only to the remote and swampy forest redoubts of tappers, but also the factories of Silvertown, North Woolwich, London, where in the swampy estuary of the River Lea, various rubbers – Hevea brasilensis, gutta-percha, gutta-balata, Castilla elastica, Castilla ulei, Landolphia, Funtumia and Hancornia – were moulded into raincoats, tyres, telegraph cable coatings, and vulcanite haircombs and dentures, amongst many other products. These widely separated worlds were both intimately connected through rubber, but also virtually oblivious to each other.
Rubber and its identification with Amazonia
Almost 500 years after Conquest, Amazonia continues to be the setting for heroic posturing. It is said still to await the ‘conquest of the tropics’; its forests are still cast
8 There is disagreement about the year in which the Amazon ‘boom’ or industry collapsed. Prices peaked and fell off markedly in 1910 (Coates 1987: 154–5), but the fall in export tonnage did not begin to decline until two years later and in contrast to the price change – which was abrupt – tailed off gradually over decades.The ‘end/bust’ in terms of export value is reliably described as having taken place within the range 1910–12, but some authors refer to the 1920s, while others refer to the late 19th-century.
as frontiers; many of its plant and animal species remain un-inventoried; its biodiversity represents, amongst other things, a ‘jungle pharmacy’; etc. Even within the scholarly literature, the history of Amazonia is generally fairly brusquely rendered as a series of brutal encounters and successive failures to exploit the region to its full colonial potential: Conquest, desultory colonization, the Directorate, the rubber boom, economic stagnation, the Transamazon Highway. By such reckoning it is a place of relatively few noteworthy historical events (the Directorate, the cabanagem) and it lies well outside the mainstream of more fulsome accounts of Brazil-the-emerging-nation.9 The major historical event that intrudes on largely nature-dominated portrayals of tropical excess retarding ordinary development in the modern period is the so-called rubber boom, though even that singular event produces a range of dates.
Although there is little precise agreement about precisely when the boom occurred and how to characterize it, there is certainty that rubber in volume, and destined for overseas manufacturing processes, began to be exported from Amazonia in the 1820s and that a dramatic collapse in the price of rubber in 1910, prompted by the emergence of competition from Southeast Asian plantation rubber, spelled the end of rubber at the centre of the Amazonian economy.10 Part of the reason for imprecision over the dating of the boom derives from the fact that its end was not anticipated and analysis of the boom came long after the fact. It was old news, a fact confirmed by the paucity of standard works on what was an extraordinary industry: a century-long extractive industry that provided one of three key elements (along with steel and coal) in the 19th-century industrialization of Europe and North America. Writing about the rubber industry commenced in earnest in the early 20th century, not in the form of histories, but as technical manuals and reports concerned with plantation rubber.11
This book looks at Amazonia of the rubber period and is mainly focused on what emerges from stressing the difference between rubber boom and rubber industry. The central argument is that the customary over-reliance on the boom designation serves to mask complex, historical social landscapes in Amazonia past and present, and helps to sustain the idea of a permanent frontier region whose only possible
9 Hecht (2013) notably reconsiders Euclides da Cunha’s role in ‘nation-making’ with Amazonia included.
10 From discussions of attempted ‘revivals’ of the industry it is easy to infer that a resuscitation is within the realms of possibility, but the so-called Rubber Army, mobilized during WWII when Southeast Asian supplies were controlled by the Japanese, produced less than 1 per cent of Allied needs; the extractive reserves movement associated with Chico Mendes is important in terms of West Amazonian livelihoods, but insignificant in terms of global output. Henry Ford’s 1920/30s plantation efforts in Fordlândia and Belterra, documented in Machado (1975), Dean (1987) and Grandin (2009), had inconsequential effects in terms of reviving the industry; see Chapter 7
11 Relatively unheralded in this respect is the heroically rubber-centric H.C. Pearson, editor of the trade journal India Rubber World, as well as author of numerous extended volumes:The Polyglot Rubber Trade Directory of the US and Canada (1916), What I Saw in the Tropics (1906), Rubber Machinery – an Encyclopedia (1936), Rubber Tires and All About Them (1906), The Rubber Country of the Amazon (1911) and Pneumatic Tires: Automobile, Truck, Airplane, Motorcycle, Bicycle (1922).
destiny is as a source of what is obsessively portrayed as natural wealth.12 This vulgar portrayal of a hyper-naturalized Amazonia has served to misrepresent the past as well as the present, and prefigures a dystopian future some of whose major features are already in place: deforestation, species loss, pollution from mining, rural violence and a moving frontier of conflict over land ownership. The precarious position of indigenous peoples, many of whom have only recently acquired recognition as holders of legal territory, is a prominent feature of an emergent dystopia.
A further purpose is to elaborate the relationship between marginal capitalist and core capitalist relations of production. Although rubber production in the Amazon is most frequently described, often with evident misgivings or uncertainty flagged by scare-quotes, as ‘pre-capitalist’, that is a misrepresentation: rubber was tapped in the Amazon because it had value as a commodity. It was not used to any great extent by members of indigenous societies in the Amazon (of which there were, in any event, very few remaining by the 19th-century), but was tapped at the behest of industrial consumers abroad. To call such production ‘pre-capitalist’ is to engage in the standard account that capitalist development was less significant as a global process, rather it was something that happened in Europe while others looked on, waiting for ‘take-off’. By the time rubber production in Amazonia emerged as a keystone substance vital for industrial development elsewhere, Amazonia had long been integrated into the world economy, but until that point (c. 1820) dye-stuffs, pelts, woods, various exotic tropical plant products (the so-called drogas do sertão, or drugs of the interior) had garnered little sustained interest and Amazonia was notably lacking in the silver and gold that attracted attention elsewhere in South America. Amazonia was, in short, hardly pre-capitalist – it was on the poorly remunerated periphery of the capitalist world economy.
Assaults on the Amazon
One measure of the degree to which Amazonia13 was and continues to be subject to hyper-naturalistic projections is the fact that, even within the voluminous critical commentary on Amazonian development over the past 50 or so years, the starting point for discussion often is still a metaphoric invocation of the enormity of a naturalistic dilemma – From Green Hell to Red Desert?, Entangled Edens, Lost Paradise, and so on. Even though long past, the rubber industry continues to have a special place in discussions of the ‘assault on the Amazon’. It continues to provide an example of the challenge of a long-term transformation of nature toward durable social ends14
12 For discussion of the illusion of natural wealth see Hornborg (1998) and Moore (2016).
13 Reflecting vernacular usage, Amazon and Amazonia are used interchangeably throughout.The River itself is designated as such (although in its upper reaches it is known as the Marañón and in the middle reaches as the Solimões). The Amazon basin/forest includes national territory of Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, French Guiana. Legal Amazonia is a Brazilian designation (1948) that covers nine states and includes territory outside the neo-tropical forest basin.
14 The ‘challenge of the tropics’ was replaced by the ‘challenge of sustainable development’ in the 1990s (see the collection of essays in Hall 2000). Of the two faces of ‘sustainable development’ – ‘alternative to development’ or ‘mitigation of development’ – the latter prevails.
other than the narrowly commercial forms of bulk extraction that are now so thoroughly implanted, though also hidden from view.
Whether the explanation for the disappearance of the rubber industry is seen to rest primarily on natural or social causes, the outcome is widely viewed as resting on cardinal features of the Amazonia and Amazonians per se: something wrong with Amazonian nature – ‘counterfeit paradise’ as Meggers (1971) famously framed it; something wrong with Amazonian society – o caboclo indolente (the lazy peasant) as Veríssimo (1878) had it – or Indians themselves, unable to make the leap to civilization. The aim here is to try to look beyond the romantic, consensual rendering of boom-and-bust and consider the Amazonian rubber industry in terms of its place in the flow of commodities that intimately connected Amazonia to the industrial transformation of Europe and North America. Key in that statement of purpose is the flow of commodities, not the transfer of ‘nature goods’ from ‘forest to factory’, but the transfer of products of labour – heavy, malodorous lumps of smoked rubber – into an industrial realm where the rubber becomes the banal – though sometimes exotic – products of industrial society.
The actual scope, then, is defined by the rubber industry as an historical phenomenon that was emblematic of a phase of Amazonian development, but it is also defined by perceptions of the broader Amazonian space – biological and social –that continues to operate, a century after the collapse of the rubber industry, as a still-to-be-integrated realm of raw materials. The rubber boom, in the contradictory consensual depiction, was both the Amazon’s entrée to modernity, but also its failure to realize such a modern ambition. That contradiction is largely maintained by a refusal to recognize that the complexity of an exotic, natural Amazonia does not trump its being an historical Amazonia as well.
Rubber as a commodity chain: a preliminary note
A core concept employed in trying to illustrate the structures of integration of Amazonia into the world economy via the rubber industry is one closely linked with World Systems Theory (WST) – that is the notion of commodity chain. Although WST provides an orientation for the discussion, it is only that, an orientation. The concept of commodity chain came into wide usage through WST, but has, in many commentators’ hands, mutated in meaning since it was first proposed, often standing for little more than ‘supply chain’. The interest here in the concept is less linked to the expanded, global shifts in accumulation than in the initial local transformation of production – from latex to exchange value – that happens in local society at the start of the commodity chain. Put another way, it is an interest in the question: what must be true of the structure of local production to allow one to say that it is part of such a chain?
One of the reasons for my qualifying the use of commodity chain harks back to the concept as first employed by Hopkins and Wallerstein (1977). In that version, the chain metaphor was introduced to illustrate what they had in mind as an abstract world system in which commodity production was generalized – distributed in
myriad form and mobilized under various production regimes – but ultimately contributing to accumulation in the core. Basically, the world system is the commodity chain within which the variable possibilities for remuneration reflect positions in the global division of labour. Amazon rubber tappers, out on the periphery, benefit far less than either intermediary traders in the Amazon or rubber manufacturers (and their employees) in the core. ‘Chain’, at the time first presented, was a metaphor meant to illustrate what was meant by ‘world system’: linked though dispersed commodity production structured by the dynamic of accumulation. The chain notion embodied the idea of a distributed structure, but the chain itself was not the actual structure under analysis. The notion of commodity chain as subsequently elaborated – often, in my view, at variance with what was initially intended15 – emphasizes trade relations, and the popularity of the concept in business history circles indicates that, but the crucial point from the perspective of those interested in the first instance in the local/peripheral/marginal forms of commodity production is not so much the structure of accumulation in the core, but the articulation between remote quarters of social systems – between, for example, Itaituba on the Tapajós River, and London’s workshops. The Amazon is not just the source of a primary material that is an element in a chain, but is the locale of a very specific aspect of commodity production. It represents both a system in itself (in the kind of context of interest at the level of anthropological analysis) and a subsystem of capital accumulation agnostic with regard to whether the commodity is produced through slavery, wage-labour, or debt-peonage; in Africa, South America or the Philippines – or the Amazon.
The Amazon rubber boom versus the Amazon rubber industry
The Amazonian rubber industry under conditions of natural monopoly of Hevea brasiliensis16 was a system whose properties were transformed not internally, in the Amazon, but as a result of external features (accelerated demand and trade for industrial purposes). The transformative effects of those external features are most commonly reduced to trade competition (following the introduction of Southeast Asian plantation rubber), but that reduction – which is the received view of what happened – takes little heed of the Amazonian rubber industry itself, only behaviour in the market. The system of Amazonian rubber production did not collapse along with the collapse of price – it became absorbed into a repertoire of petty commodity production in the Amazon region, in an extensive peasant society. Rubber wasn’t simply effaced when the market turned its back on it, and the hyper-naturalizing inevitability that goes with the Amazonian territory misrepresents the historical
15 See Chapter 9 for further discussion.
16 H. brasiliensis has historically been – and continues to be – the major commercial species of all the latex-producing plants. Production data on other rubbers that were part of the global industry prior to plantations – Castilla elastica in Meso-America, for example, or Landolphia in the Congo – are not very reliable, but probably never represented more than 10–20 per cent of the global market.
record and provides ready-made justification for subsequent industries of primary material extraction (timber, iron ore, bauxite, hydroelectric power)17 according to which Amazonia is said to be playing to its comparative advantage (which is to say offering up materials more cheaply than do other locales).18
While the Amazon-wild-rubber-industry was synonymous with global rubber industry for many decades, since the second decade of the 20th century Southeast Asian plantation rubber has usurped that synonymity. To the considerable degree that plantation rubber was better integrated into a then maturing system of industrial production (standardization, better control of supply, increase in productivity not just output, industrial inputs), rubber has maintained its position as an unequivocally strategic material, but now monitored through an array of commercial trade publications and national materials agencies, and subject to trade controls and policy prescriptions emanating from the core industrial nations (e.g. the Stevenson Plan and the International Rubber Regulation Agreement). As a mature, fungible commodity, and geopolitically highly sensitive,19 its antecedent 19th-century character has been consigned to almost pre-modern status, iconized in the booms of the Amazon and the Congo, but the industrialization of rubber tapping, which is to say the creation of plantations/factories in the field, shouldn’t obscure the industrial character of the first phase, the ‘wild rubber industry’, and its long-term effects on Amazonia.
The book, then, is not about a rubber society or indeed about rubber latex itself as much as it is concerned with the connections forged and broken during the period in which rubber emerged from Amazonia as a key material in the processes of industrialization. In that regard, what happened in the Amazon, commencing in the 1820s, is echoed in developments in the core, particularly in neighbourhoods in north and east London20, where cottage industries based on the use of rubber for novel purposes emerged. Rubberized clothing (generically represented in ‘the Mackintosh’) was one significant early product largely dependent on Amazonian latex,21 and in North America, Amazon-made rubber
17 It is salutary to realize that the aluminium smelter in Barcarena, a suburb of Belém, Pará, consumes more energy than the entre city of Belém (1.2 million inhabitants) (Fearnside 2006: 8); 6 per cent of the Brazilian national electrical energy budget is represented solely in the processing of aluminium, and a third of that expenditure takes place in Amazonia – in Barcarena – alone.
18 Bauxite mining in Amazonia has prominence now because of the availability of hydro-power, not because bauxite has been ‘discovered’ there. Bauxite is found throughout the world, but is concentrated in subtropical zones. It is named after Les Baux, a village in Provence. See Keith and Girling (n.d.) for discussion of the economics of bauxite mining.
19 Shortages during WWI were in part responsible for the creation of various stabilization efforts. WWII shortages were a significant impetus to the development of fossil-fuel based synthetics in Germany and the USA in particular.
20 Although London was not the centre of rubber manufacturing – dominated by the Midlands/North of England – it was the centre of early innovations upon which the industry was based and also included a significant amount of manufacturing.
21 There were other sources as well, as precisely what was meant by ‘rubber’ in the 19th-century is not always clear. Hancock imported rubber ‘latex’ from Tampico, Mexico in 1826 (Norton 1950: 9), which was almost certainly Castilla elastica
footwear (mainly imported to New England, but Europe as well) had very large markets. With the development of vulcanization in 1844, simultaneously in the US by Charles Goodyear and Thomas Hancock, began the era of serious rubber manufacturing.
Loadman’s (2005)22 and Harp’s (2016) histories are recent and estimably sober23 accounts that reveal in different ways the global character of the industry in which London played a significant role represented in the rubber market in Mincing Lane in the City, the series of contributions from inventor and entrepreneur Hancock, and the Silvertown rubber factory, The India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company, Ltd. (aka the Silvertown works). Silvertown was key to the emergence of submarine telegraphy as well as being the site of the first major strike (1889) within the UK trade union movement (explored at length in Tully 2014). Today, Thomas Hancock is little recognized and London rubber factories and workshops are just as much forgotten relics24 as are the rubber warehouses of the Amazon, but the effects of their relationship are still evident.
Objects and subjects of analysis
While the rubber industry in London faded into the general background of national de-industrialization, the kind of Amazonian rural society that succeeded in the aftermath of the collapse of the wild rubber industry became, by most published reckonings,25 a non-society – a peasantry by default, hardly regarded as integral as a distinctive type of society or worthy of much attention, anthropological or otherwise; but that absence of substance is illusory, just as the precipitous collapse of rubber production is an illusion of perspective. From the point of view of the global rubber industry, Amazon rubber lost its cachet just as it lost its price, but Amazonian producers carried on for decades, albeit badly remunerated, and tap to this day, though it would be difficult to characterize rubber production now as a distinct sector. The affinity, however, of Amazonia and rubber is easily renewable through the variant idioms of sustainable development (NonTimberForest Products), extractive reserves (RESEX, in the Brazilian acronym), and so-called FDL products.26 From a position of monopoly until 1910, Brazil’s output now – value $3.9 million per annum – ranks behind that of Malawi. At first position is Thailand (36.5 per cent of global market, value $6 billion) (Workman 2016). That wrenching difference,
22 See also his jointly authored biography of the Hancock family (Loadman and James 2010).
23 I mention this because many of the passing accounts of the ‘rubber boom’ focus on and perhaps exaggerate the decadence and opulence associated with ‘the boom’. See Chapter 5
24 See, for example, Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History (www.gracesguide.co.uk/) to appreciate the scale of the rubber industry in London (until the post-WWII period).
25 There is a dearth of anthropological material on Amazonian peasant societies in the 20th century. The period between WWI and modernizationist development initiatives of the 1970s is generally dismissed as one of economic stagnation
26 FDL = Folha Desfumada Liquida, smoked rubber latex destined for designer/artisanal products such as sneakers.
however, hardly diminishes the power of the historic symbolic association between rubber and the Amazon.
The missing society of rubber tappers of the Amazon rubber boom
The durable union between plant/industry (rubber boom) and place (Amazon) –still potent over a century after the collapse – has provided little space for the Amazonian actors who effected and maintained that relationship between commodity boom and neo-tropical landscape. The generic Amazonian actors whose social moorings were contingent on a grace-and-favour relationship with a monarchical Amazonian nature that allowed the predatory expansion/extraction of latex are simply not seen as part of the durable union: there may have been rubber tapping, but there was not a society of rubber tappers.The mobilization of labour – the social enactment of work27 – in the Amazon rubber industry is rarely accorded recognition as a system representing much more than the technical acquisition of latex from trees. That absence of recognition is not complete, but is subsumed under the powerful notion that in Amazonia, nature rules to a harsh degree. Short of possessing sociality, tappers were merely necessary mediators in the process of extraction.28
Such a portrayal – social actor subsumed under nature – has taken several forms in the description and analysis of various kinds of Amazonians. Pre-historic Amazonians have been conventionally portrayed as so debilitated by the constraints of ‘counterfeit paradise’ that they were hardly present (and hence, by this view, Amazonian history is a history of empty frontiers); extant Amazonian tribes have featured prominently in cultural ecological accounts according to which, via such notions as ‘carrying capacity’, they were restricted to a minimalist hunter-gatherer existence without prospect of advancing; and from the 19th-century onward, the peasantries of Amazonia have been more often depicted as inhabitants, settlers, mestiços, or mere populations than they have been designated as peoples, ethnies, or polities, or any of the other terms used to indicate coherent, self-defined social organizations, a situation not dissimilar to that of primitives, savages, and the rest, before any attempt to reel them in from the land of the anti- or pre-civilizational.
The links between the now ‘absent’ rubber tappers and contemporary peasantries are more than symbolic/analogical. Many contemporary Amazonians are descendants of Northeastern Brazilians who entered the region to join the 19thcentury rubber industry. A second wave – much smaller – entered during World War II. The term caboclo is an imprecise but still useful term for a peasantry that may be regarded as traditional, which is to say without explicit origins within
27 The contrast here is between: a donkey works, a human labours. A tragic expression in Brazilian Portuguese is: o burro qui fala, the burro who can speak – used to describe an impoverished street worker who collects and carts cardboard, standing in for a donkey between the shafts and traces.
28 The most vivid recounting of tappers as social beings is provided in accounts of the subjugation and persecution of Indians. Most tappers are treated as ciphers.
FIGURE 1.2 SEMTA: ‘Special Service of Mobilization of Workers for the Amazon’
Amerindian societies (though many do have indigenous antecedents), and having been established prior to the settler colonists that entered during the era of Transamazon-based ‘national integration’.
Caboclo is unambiguously pejorative in other regions in Brazil. In Amazonia, it is a vernacular term of self-reference, often in an ironic mode (‘I’m just a crazy caboclo with a chainsaw’), but not necessarily disavowed. Historically it has been used to refer to first-generation, assimilated indigenes; it is, for some, a racial rather than sociological designation (a mixture, in folk speak, of various ethnic stereotypes based on skin colour, hair texture, physiognomy, etc.); it is, for some, a synonym for tapuio – which can be a class and racial epithet – or caipira (an Amerind stranded in non-Amerind society).29
These kinds of Amazonian cultural categories, and the ambiguities and clarifications to which they give rise, are important in terms of situating the rubber industry in the Amazon, for they also give rise – as does the missing or invisible society of rubber tappers – to an image of historical Amazonia as a vague, but apparently acceptable, ‘something that happened’. To the degree that ‘the rubber boom’
29 Pace (1997), who is exercised by the caboclo usage, has taken up the definitional matters at length.
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MICHAEL IVANOVITCH KALININ
AND THE PEASANTS
There have been two presidents of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic; only recently we have become vaguely aware of one of them. Ever since the Bolshevik coup d’ état America has spoken of the Soviet Government as “the government of Lenin and Trotsky.” America was right in so far as these men enjoy immense power, and wrong in so far as she imagined it would have been possible at any time, and less so now, for either of these men or both of them to have abruptly changed the government’s policy from right to left or left to right without first receiving indisputable orders from the masses.
Relatively, Lenin has more power than Lloyd George and Trotsky considerably less; while President Kalinin, who began his office as little more than a figure-head, has been saved from the emptiness of such a position because he is so symbolic of the growing power of the peasants. Already more power has been bestowed upon him through the course of events than perhaps he himself realizes. Surely when he set out in his painted train on his first journey through the provinces three years ago, he could hardly have foreseen his place in history as one of the greatest influences in molding the new state.
Kalinin’s growing influence is a true barometer of public opinion or, to be more exact, of the reassertion of public opinion. And it is interesting to note that while many of the stars in the Communist sky are considerably dimmed by the ascendancy of Kalinin, Premier Lenin’s position is only made stronger. This is because the new pressure from below is for compromise, and public men go down under retreat much faster than when their banners are flying
triumphantly in advance. Lenin is practical enough to understand the advantages of a well-ordered retreat above those of a rout; he will save all he can of the Socialist state instead of abandoning it on the fields of battle.
It was the question of private property which became the vital issue in 1920 inside and outside of Russia. The abolition of private property was made possible by a determined, conscious minority. It was re-established by the pressure of a slow-moving, solid, unconscious majority; that majority was the peasants. I do not mean that the peasants are now actually in control of the state. I merely wish to point out that they already hold the balance of power and that they move towards control with the crushing surety of a glacier. They hold, strategically, the same position that the Bolsheviks did under Kerensky, but they will never pursue the same tactics; they will assume power gradually just because they are the majority; it is only a minority which must act with dramatic haste, counting on brains, daring and psychological moments.
It was logical that the first President should have been a man who represented the city workers and the second President, a peasant; for in such wise did the revolution settle itself.
Most of the Communists did not approve of Kalinin’s election. Lenin alone sensed the proper time to place a peasant as nominal head of the Soviets; a peasant who should begin as Master of Ceremonies and who, in his peasant’s garb and with his peasant’s tongue, should bring Lenin’s ideas to the people; a peasant who would never cease being a peasant and who would come back to Lenin and say, “This and this they will have, here they cannot follow and there they will lead.” Lenin gazed at Russia through Kalinin’s eyes as one gazes in a crystal.
In 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized control of the state, a delicate little man called Jacob Michaelovitch Sverdlov, a chemist by profession and a revolutionist by conviction, was Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Workers and Soldiers Deputies; this meant that he controlled the Red Guards, the conscious workers
and the revolting soldiers; it meant he held a position of such tremendous authority that he could not be ignored by anybody. So when the first Council of the People’s Commissars was formed, which is really no other than the cabinet of the Russian Government, Sverdlov was the first person taken into consideration by them. And in order to find a place for him they created the office of President. When he accepted that office he gave up his direct control and became but one voice in a group. Nevertheless, all through the barricade days he continued to act as the spokesman in the cabinet for the Petrograd workers who were, for at least the first year, a power above the cabinet.
In the winter of 1918 Sverdlov died of typhus and was buried on the Red Square in Moscow.
During the time Sverdlov was president the government was in continual difficulty with the peasants. They resisted the government’s requisitioning expeditions, retreated within themselves and almost ignored the central power until the provinces were in a continual state of guerilla warfare. They managed their local Soviets with little or no thought of the Moscow Government. Civil war continued and, with the aid of France and England, grew apace; hard dark days settled over Russia. Sverdlov looked about for an entering wedge which would somehow pierce the way to an eventual understanding and co-operation with the local and central Soviets. In this search Sverdlov discovered Kalinin. Kalinin was already immensely popular with the peasants; he had been on every Land Committee of importance since the beginning of the first revolution, under both Miliukov and Kerensky. During his term of office Sverdlov used Kalinin as a mediator in many difficult situations and Lenin watched his work with interest. An old Communist explained Kalinin’s election in these words: “He was a ‘find’ of Sverdlov’s, but it was Lenin alone who realized that days might come when he would be invaluable in holding Russia together.” Those days have come; they came with the tightening of the blockade and continued with the famine.
Kalinin is a Communist, a brand of Communist differing as much from Zinoviev or Litvinov as Borah differs from Hughes or Hughes
differs from Root; yet Hughes and Borah and Root are Republicans steeped to the bone in party discipline, rampaging now and then, but never dreaming of breaking away from the party. Kalinin believes in a kind of Communism, modified enough to suit the peasants, and Zinoviev believes in a kind of Communism that is suited, at any time, only for the advanced and conscious city proletariat.
Kalinin was born in the little village of Volost and still calls it his home, still has his little strip of land there. He was brought up religiously, and understands what the Church means to a devout Russian and never throws aspersions on it. Though not religious himself, he tolerates religion with the grave tolerance which never offends.
His old mother is outspokenly anti-Bolshevik, yet very much likes to have her say in the Volost Soviet. She is angry with the Bolsheviks because they are not religious. She scolds her son and pretends that she is not at all flattered because he is President of Russia and obviously believes that no honor is too great for him. She is always glad to talk to visitors about him and goes on monotonously repeating the same ideas in the manner of the aged: “No, I am not surprised,” she will say, “that Michael Ivanovitch has gone so far. He was always studious, sitting up reading by candle-light after everyone else was in bed. And he was always saying to me, ‘Don’t bother me, mother, I’ve got lots of work to do.’ That’s the way he talks to me now when I lecture him about religion. But he’s a good son and kind to everybody ... only he certainly ought to think more about God.”
I don’t believe that Kalinin is ambitious; I think he would like nothing so much as to go back to his farm and live there the simple life of the village. When Lenin convinced him that it was his duty to be the voice of the peasants, he accepted the post in the quiet way of a man who has no thought of personal glory There is nothing in his record that would prove him to be anything but entirely unselfish, and I have seen him when he was like one inspired. During the Kronstadt revolt he walked into that hostile city as he might walk into the mouth of a cannon. Yet no one dared or desired to harm him!
Kalinin is an old revolutionist. In his early youth he found himself unable to tolerate, without protest, the tyranny of the Tsar’s government which manifested itself in such brutal cruelty towards the peasants. He has always been desperately poor, a real proletarian peasant, hoping to be rid one day of his endless debts and support himself and his family honorably and decently. He was forced through poverty to go to the city, where he worked in factories in winter; only the summers he spent with his family. These winters in the city, where he was thrown in contact with city workers, gave him an understanding of the psychology and desires of the city workers as well as of the peasants.
He was exiled to Siberia but not to hard labor, and he spent this enforced and only leisure of his life rounding out his education; mixing the classics with his dreams of freedom for Russia.
Kalinin’s wife is an educated, energetic peasant, who has by her own ability become a figure of importance in her village; capable and strong and intelligent, she has managed her tiny farm just a little better than her neighbors and has been elected President of the Volost Soviet. It is a position of which she is immensely proud.
Madame Kalinin is an individualist; a modern feminist of the type of professional woman who, in America, insists on keeping her name and continuing her work after marriage. During the last three years she has been so busy that she has had no time to visit Moscow. Kalinin, on his rare vacations, has had to go to her. If she ever does visit Moscow she will surely wear her kerchief and her sheepskin coat. No doubt supercilious Russians are already saying that “Main Street has arrived in Moscow,” just as we have been saying since March, 1921, that “just folks” are in the White House.
And there is a curious similarity between President Harding and President Kalinin; both were elected to represent the average citizen. In Russia average citizens are peasants—a ninety per cent average. Both presidents go about their home towns slapping fellow citizens on the back. Both were elected as figureheads for a party and both
have already proven themselves a little more forceful and important than the party reckoned.
If Russia continues in the path where it is now, in fifty years the Kalinins will have become Hardings, at home in silk hats and frock coats, as well as in sheepskins and high boots. But it is hard to predict where Russia is going or where the world is going.
When Kalinin rides through the provinces on his propaganda train carrying stocks of literature, a motion picture apparatus and his official seal, with the outside “done” by some futurist artist in garish colors and depicting a millennium in which Kalinin would not be at home, he is “Comrade” Kalinin to the whole train; he takes his meals with the train crew, the porters and the secretaries; all share alike. But the remarkable thing is that when he gets back to Moscow he makes no effort to shake the dust of the provinces from his boots, he rather makes a point of remaining distinctly a villager. He receives you in his Moscow office wearing the same old mended spectacles, the same threadbare coat and, I am sure, the same heart and mind. He brings the country along with him, invades the city with it, permeates it, overcomes it....
This attitude is characteristic not only of Kalinin, it is characteristic of any peasant. I have often noted the delegates at the Congresses. They are neither shy nor bewildered, they sit solemnly in their places in the great hall, pondering all that Lenin says of trade or reconstruction, approving or disapproving; getting closer every day to the idea that Russia is theirs.
It is generally believed that the line between the city workers and the peasants is wide and irreconcilable, whereas there is actually no line at all. The city workers are only peasants who have gone to the city just as Kalinin did, when they could not make a living in the villages. Russian peasants never get over being farmers. Last winter I came upon an excellent example: Some three hundred skilled Russian mechanics from Detroit arrived in Moscow; they were sorely needed in the Russian factories. Without a single exception they refused to remain in the city! And when they learned that they might be
conscripted and forced to stay they fled hurriedly in every direction. With one voice they exclaimed, “We came home to the land!”
Naturally, the government was in despair; officials were at a loss as to what measures could be taken to bring pressure and a sense of duty upon the returning Russians. Orators were sent to argue with the next group, but without success. The only solution the government found workable was to organize them before they arrived; to see that they brought tools from America and came with the definite idea of remaining in the cities for a fixed period; for only the country is real to the peasant, the city is forever an artificial, unhealthy invention.
Kalinin’s office in Moscow is not in the Kremlin. To get into the Kremlin requires too much red tape. Therefore, while the President eats in the Kremlin dining-room which is just an ordinary Soviet mess-room, and sits in the Councils of the People’s Commissars, he receives his army of callers in an ordinary office building in the heart of the city. One needs no pass or credentials to get in; one needs simply to walk up a flight of stairs, open a door and emerge into a large bare reception room full of noisy peasants; here he inevitably turns up.
I have often thought that Kalinin’s office is the most curious place in which I have ever been in my life; it has the atmosphere of a Russian railway train deep in the heart of the provinces where every passenger talks to every other passenger and where formality is not just overlooked or forgotten but has simply never existed.
All day long he receives the never-ending string of peasants in the manner of a village priest, giving consolation and advice—and something more solid and satisfying than a prayer, for he is obligated to make an immediate decision in each case on hand or a promise that it shall be taken up through his office. Under no circumstances can he appear indifferent or helpless.
I remember arriving early one morning to find about twenty peasants ahead of me. When Kalinin came in everyone got up and there was a sudden general stampede in his direction and a sort of clamor
which arises in any Russian household over any sort of argument. Kalinin’s voice could be distinctly heard above the others shouting, “Comrades, comrades, I must take you in turn.” Then, as he crossed the floor towards his private office, a frail, middle-aged woman sitting near the door burst into tears. I can see him now with his narrow Slav eyes, his broad nose and rumpled hair, his work-knotted hands and faded blouse, stopping to look through his spectacles at the woman before him, kindly, sympathetic, puzzled....
I think that he knew even before he began to question her that hers was one of those unavoidable, personal tragedies that are part of change and war and revolution. She had owned a big country house, but the peasants had taken it when they divided the land and they had allotted her but two rooms to live in. She was humiliated, discouraged and resentful. She cried out, forgetting that Kalinin was also a peasant, “I can’t bear to see those creatures using my pretty things, walking with great muddy boots in my house. My soul is in that house!”
Kalinin shook his head. He seemed willing and even anxious to help her but he seemed more like a doctor in that moment than an executive. Very gently he asked her to remember that two rooms were more than most people had now in Russia, that these were difficult times; even so they would go over the case together if she would wait her turn. But no sooner had he closed the door than every peasant in the room began addressing the bewildered woman. They said that she should be ashamed of such petty complaints and accused her of asking for “special privileges.” The widest range of arguments were put forward, from the man who had lost a cow and considered the government responsible to the woman whose two sons had been killed at the front.
I was not so much interested in the arguments as in the remarkably true reflection which the scene presented of what had happened all over Russia. I had never realized before how completely submerged the upper classes had become; how ruthless and inevitable was the vast upward surge of the peasantry. Here was this woman, one time
barishna (lady), crushed and defeated in her own village, finding the same thought in Moscow as in Nizhni-Novgorod or Kazan or Baku.
When Kalinin called her she went forward but one could see that she had already given up hope and would not fight any further; perhaps for the first time the real significance of the revolution had become clear to her.
It is hard for Americans, where a peasant population has never existed, to realize the position of the peasants in a revolution. They are the rock in the whirlpool. They are the great levellers, the great destroyers as well as the great builders. In Russia they pulled down everything about them and they were not always gentle in their wrath. Often they ruined wilfully and needlessly In the cities, practically no buildings were destroyed and no treasures looted, but in the provinces men often remembered the knout with red flames of fire and even with death.
Because the peasants’ desires are simple, the world is apt to give them credit for a deep, political wisdom which they do not possess and while there is no doubt about their taking the business of government seriously, their inexperience often leads them into grave blunders. It was the peasants, and not the Communists, who most stubbornly opposed recognition of the foreign debts. It was the peasants who demanded from every government since the Tsar’s, schools, hospitals and protection from invasion, but who always resented the most ordinary and reasonable tax put upon them by the central authorities. Until Kalinin had educated them they were wont to ask like children, “Aren’t we free now? Can’t we be left alone?”
The great irony about the rising of the peasants is that they were the first to abandon the very equality they fought for. The equalization of property in the provinces was brought about through the workings of peasant proletariat organizations known as Committees of the Poor, which not only divided the estates of the rich landlords but broke the power of the kulaks (rich peasants). When the whole country was reduced to the same status, the peasants were faced with the necessity of a great decision. There were no longer rich peasants or
proletarian peasants but only what is known in Russia as the “middle” farmers. The question of how to maintain such an equality now arose. The Communists urged them to abandon the idea of private property and work the land in communes, pointing out that any other course must inevitably lead to the re-establishment of all the old values and a new bourgeoisie. But the peasants were afraid of this new and untried road of Socialism. Their demands for trade, silver money, the opening of markets and stores, are ample evidence that they have turned back on to the old familiar road of capitalism. If Russia had been an industrial instead of an agricultural country, the decision of the masses might have been quite otherwise.
Even our own presidents know the value of a lecture tour in a national crisis. In our immediate political past, we have the memory of presidents who took “issues” to the people, but it is hard to conceive of a Chief Executive lecturing almost steadily for over two years. Yet that is even a short estimate of the time actually spent by Kalinin in going from one end of Russia to the other, shuttling in and out of Moscow.
His meetings were more like tribunals, people’s courts, than ordinary political assemblies. The peasants gathered at the railway stations, in the village squares or even in the fields. They heard what he had to say and then he heard them. They argued, complained, demanded, compromised. Always some sort of understanding was arrived at. This was partly due to Kalinin’s wonderful tact, his almost divine reasonableness which never allowed an argument to develop into a quarrel. And partly because he knows the peasant mind which is easily touched by stories of suffering, by flattery or tears, but impossible to move by threats. But fundamentally, the secret of Kalinin’s success is due to the fact that he himself is a peasant and no walls of caste can exist between him and the people.
I can illustrate this feeling of complete contact best by the story of an actual occurrence in a remote province. It happened in what are now known as the worst of the “requisitioning days” when the Soviets were holding hundreds of miles of battle front and the peasants were taxed almost beyond endurance.
One day a Lettish officer, who was also a Commissar in some Red Army division, arrived in a remote village and rang the church bell to summon the people. He read a list of the goods to be requisitioned. This village had been taxed only a short time before and there were murmurs of dissatisfaction in the crowd, murmurs which grew into roars. Then happened one of those savage, elemental tragedies which even we in America have never been able to eliminate from our national life. Threats against the Commissar were followed by sudden violence; he was literally trampled to death.
The Lettish officer had been accompanied by a young peasant soldier, who had been a sort of orderly to him for nearly a year In the struggle the boy escaped. All night he lay weeping and thinking of his dead comrade. The officer had taken an interest in him, had taught him to read and write and imbued him with the ideals of the Red Army. The peasant boy had been an orphan, lonely and unhappy and a victim of brutality. He thought now of the dead man as he thought of a saint, and by the time morning came he had resolved on a curiously brave act. Creeping into the church he rang the bell; the crowd gathered, and he mounted the platform and began to tell them of the dead man and the Red Army It was not hard for him to explain that unless the Red Army was supported, the White forces would very soon take away by main force the very food they now refused to their brothers. It did not take very long to convince the crowd of peasants, and not only to convince them but to reduce them to tears. They gave all that the peasant boy asked, and more than that, they went solemnly in a procession to the fresh grave of the man they had murdered, laid wreaths upon it, and paid homage, saying: “Brother, forgive us, we could not see your heart.”
This feeling accounts for the lack of resentment towards Kalinin when he goes into the famine area. He walks among the starving peasants, saying, “Who lies down, dies. I know, I have hungered, I am one of you.”
In prosperous districts he uses the same tactics in overcoming opposition to collections for the famine. Whenever he finds local Soviet officials unwilling to part with their last surplus grain, he
mournfully exclaims, “Ah, well, I am sorry to hear this! Last week I saw with my own eyes thousands dying of hunger. They were peasants like ourselves and they were calling to us to help. Will you send me back now with empty hands?” The peasants can never resist his appeal; it comes too close to them, it is like refusing one’s father.
While the peasants were not able to bring themselves to renounce their title to the land, they have otherwise quite whole-heartedly accepted many broad formulas of the Socialists. They unanimously approved of revolutionary Russia’s offer to the world in 1917 to build a peace on the basis of “no annexations, no indemnities and the right of self-determination.” It is a curious and sad reality that the richer nations become and the more cultured, the less they find it possible to comprehend such a simple recipe for justice and brotherly love. The world was too educated or too selfish or too frightened to accept Russia’s magnanimous offer. And how much agony and bloodshed it might have saved!
The Russian peasants, who for so many centuries have struggled and sacrificed themselves to possess the land, are strangely lacking in national pride, as we know it. They are not envious of other countries. They could not conceive of an aggressive policy If you say to them that America is far richer and more progressive than Russia, they will tell you they are very glad to hear it and are glad you are happy. They ask of the foreigner only to be let alone and not to send any more White generals against them; they ask to be allowed to develop their own political institutions. Obviously our only duty is to help them through their terrible struggle against the great famine which has come upon them like a curse through no sins of their own.
It is no miracle that President Kalinin can go freely about Russia, for no one is thinking of assassinating him. What would it profit enemies of Soviet Russia to kill a peasant like Kalinin? Are there not a million Kalinins? To sweep the Kalinins out of Russian political life would be like sweeping back the sea. To destroy the Soviets would be to destroy Russia. Even Sir Paul Dukes, of the British Secret Service,
agrees that Soviets are the natural offspring of the revolution, conceived years ago under the Tsardom. Michael Ivanovitch Kalinin reflects the new Russia more faithfully than any other Government official.
MADAME ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI
AND THE WOMAN’S MOVEMENT
KOLLONTAI
MADAME ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI
AND THE WOMAN’S
MOVEMENT
Madame Alexandra Kollontai believes that everything which exalts is good; being a feminist, she exalts women. She tells women that they are capable of a new freedom, beautiful and unexampled. She is so carried away by her enthusiasm that she is unmindful of how easily wings are broken in this age of steel. But if her inspiration, which aims to lift women to the skies, lifts them only from their knees to their feet, there will be nothing to regret. Civilization, in its snail-like progress, is only stirred to move its occasional inch by the burning desire of those who will to move it a mile. And when faith is pure enough it does not demand realization.
Kollontai is like a sculptor working on some heroic figure of woman and always wondering a little why the slim, inspired, unmaternal figure of her dreams is forever melting back into a heavy, earthy figure of Eve.
It often happens that a character is best portrayed by conversations which show the manner of mind. In this chapter I have quoted Madame Kollontai at some length because she is the only articulate voice of the new order for women which has been so greatly misunderstood outside of Russia; that order which claims that by consecrating oneself to the state one lives truer to oneself and to others.
As champion of her sex, she cries to the women of Russia: “Cast off your chains! Do not be slaves to religion, to marriage, to children. Break these old ties, the state is your home, the world is your country!”
And who are the women she thus extolls? They are the women of the factories and the fields; the women who sweep the streets, who scrub, who carry heavy burdens, who plow and weave and drudge. Will they be able to follow her to such heights? By our logic, no, but Kollontai preaches a new logic for Russia.
Besides, we must consider just what she means by “casting off chains.” I have heard her say all this another way and it did not sound so lofty or impossible. To an individualist, it did not even sound attractive. Last summer she admonished a women’s congress in this manner: “We must build a new society in which women are not expected to drudge all day in kitchens. We must have, in Russia, community restaurants, central kitchens, central laundries— institutions which leave the working woman free to devote her evenings to instructive reading or recreation. Only by breaking the domestic yoke will we give women a chance to live a richer, happier and more complete life.”
The material which Kollontai is so passionately attempting to mould is the peasant mind. It seems to me that peasant women are naturally slow-moving and stolidly honest and will accept only as much of Kollontai’s philosophy as they find compatible with or necessary to the immediate situation; not because they are lacking in spirituality, for they are capable of deep religious fervor, but simply because much of it would be inharmonious and artificial to their normal development. At present her mission is to awaken them so that they may build a truth of their own which need by no means be a lesser truth than Kollontai’s. If she attempts to make them swallow her formula intact she will certainly fail. If she compromises as Lenin compromises and as Kalinin does, she will perform for Russia a never-to-be-forgotten task. To-day everything has been melted down in the crucible of the revolution. The only banner-bearer who counts is the one who will give to the great mass of those emerging into the new day the broad fundamental things of life.
Madame Kollontai is the only woman who has ever been a member of the Russian Cabinet. She puts forth the argument that women have more conscience than men and therefore do not attempt to
obtain offices which they are not fitted for by previous training, and that this is the reason woman’s influence is so slight in Russia today. But her history refutes her theory. She herself was particularly fitted for the position of Minister of Welfare. Her record was splendid. She lost her post because she was a woman and allowed her love for her husband to interfere with her political judgment.
Early in 1918, Madame Kollontai, who was the widow of a Tsarist officer, married Fedore Dubenko, the picturesque leader of the turbulent Kronstadt sailors. Dubenko is a handsome, daring young man, some years her junior. Shortly after the wedding Dubenko was arrested. He had entrusted certain ships under his command to officers of the old régime who had pretended loyalty to the Soviets, but who had turned the ships over to the Germans without a struggle. Certainly Dubenko had no intention of betraying the revolution, he was merely trying to make use of skilled officers, of whom there was a pressing dearth. Nevertheless, he was held responsible.
While he was in prison awaiting trial, Kollontai made rather violent and conspicuous protests both publicly and privately. As a result she was removed from office. Revolutionists have no tolerance for romance among their leaders during critical moments; they place the revolution far above personal relationship. From the beginning they looked with disapproving eyes upon Kollontai’s infatuation for Dubenko.
When Dubenko was released, Kollontai went abroad and spent some months in Sweden. On her return she threw herself into a new work—that of educating her own sex to take an active part in politics.
Rightly speaking, there never was a woman’s movement in Russia until after the revolution. Equal suffrage came first and political education afterwards. This condition appears particularly curious when one recalls that, during some years before the revolution, even more women than men were sent to Siberia for plots against the Tsar’s government. Yet when the revolution came women sank mysteriously into the background. Russians explain this by various
theories. One was that Russian women possess the fervor necessary to martyrs, but little of the balance needed for practical reconstructive work. Personally, I think it is entirely a matter of experience and education, for it is evident that women enter politics everywhere with great hesitancy. Even in America where equal suffrage has been a fact in some states for many years, we have only one or two women to point to as having attained political prominence.
Madame Kollontai possesses much charm. She is slim and pretty and vivacious. With a little too much the manner of a public speaker she talks so easily on any subject, even to reporters, that it almost gives an impression of insincerity. Her open mind is in reality an evidence of the kind of sincerity which has no fear of publicity. She likes Americans and knows more about this country than most Russians. But she has not always known. Some years ago, when lecturing here, she happened to be in Paterson during the great strike there. When she saw the workers marching through the streets, she rushed into a room full of people and exclaimed: “A revolution has begun!” Last year, in speaking of America, she said it was the country least agitated by revolutionary thought.
Like all enthusiastic Communists, she follows Lenin’s lead in striving to westernize Russia. One day she very greatly surprised me by saying, “Why don’t you write a series of articles about America? Write for Russia about America as you now write for America about Russia.”
“What good will it do?” I asked.
“A great deal,” she replied. “It is time Russia got acquainted with America. Because of the old censorship we never learned the value of reporters. And now that we are through forever with isolation, except when it is forced upon us, we ought to acquaint ourselves thoroughly with other countries. The women ought to know, for example, how American women got suffrage and what part women take in public affairs. We ought to know the status of the immigrants and of the Negroes, how you solve your unemployment problems,
the status of farmers, of city workers, the percentage of wealth controlled by rich people. We ought to know about your schools and colleges. It ought to be explained to us just what the real difference is between the Republican and the Democratic Party and how much influence the Socialist Party has. Yes, there are a thousand things we ought to know.”
I did not write the articles, but in explaining American ideas and institutions to Kollontai it somehow placed my country in a curious new light in my own eyes. I began to realize that things which have grown quite ordinary and familiar to us may appear entirely absurd and unreasonable to foreigners. Kollontai said that she hoped Russia would some day have reporters in America cabling home as busily as our reporters do from Russia. Russians, she thought, have in so many ways remained ridiculously provincial in spite of their ideas on internationalism.
Her feminist heart was deeply touched when I told her about a group of American women who had paraded on Fifth Avenue carrying signs of protest against the blockade. Tears came to her eyes. “You can’t imagine,” she said, “how much courage such a little act of sympathy gives us. What a pity that the story of those women is not known in Russia and not read by every peasant mother.”
She was openly indignant about the stories circulated abroad that Russian women were “nationalized” When we first discussed this rumor she refused to believe that anybody in America could have seriously considered it, but when I explained about the Overman Committee and other official and semi-official affairs, she flew into a rage against the narrowness and prejudices of some of our statesmen. She claimed that the simplest peasant would not believe such indecent lies against American women. “Your senators,” she said, “could very well have acquainted themselves with the real facts about our women, who have always taken such a glorious part in every movement for emancipation.
“American men,” continued Madame Kollontai, “are known the world over as kind and chivalrous. But chivalry can be a little old-fashioned
