Manchester is a city of warehouses, we read in our guidebook on the train north. And what warehouses! The ones closest to the centre were built in the style of palazzi of Renaissance Italy, the new merchant princes of Manchester seeing themselves as descendants of the Italian princes of the city-states.
The Florence of the nineteenth century: that's what they called Manchester back then, W. reads in our history of the city. The money that was once here! The confidence! Cottonpolis: that's what they called Victorian Manchester. The city of cotton, the city of banking, the city of the vast Royal Exchange, in which 10,000 traders could buy and sell stocks and shares on the foreign market. The city of the department stores, of the new retail chains …
'From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows' (de Tocqueville). And it was filthy. It was squalid, along the old Medlock where the casual workers lived: the car men and porters, the builders and decorators, the messengers and warehousemen. The old Medlock, Little Ireland: that's where Engels saw 'a horde of ragged women and children swarm about as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles', W. reads in our history book. He saw the cellars in which the Irish immigrants slept ten to a dark, damp room on beds of straw, scarcely above the level of the water flowing in the river …
And Engels brought Marx north to show him for himself, the city where the revolution might begin. For wasn't it the reality of capitalism that revealed itself in the grime and squalor of Little Ireland, even as it was concealed itself as ideology in the men of Manchester, the self-made merchant princes with their faith the free exchange of goods and labour?
For a time, Manchester was a Chartist town, a town of mass protests, W. reads. The people demanded universal suffrage, annual elections … All Governments, not immediately derived from and strictly accountable to the People, are usurpations and ought to be resisted and destroyed: it was in the name of that Declaration, sent to the Prince Regent, that 100,000 reformers gathered at St Peter's Field. And it was there so many were injured and killed by the military forces arraigned to prevent another French Revolution …
Ye are many – they are few (Shelley). But soon, they were many, too. The army was brought in to put down the revolt. And so in Manchester, garrison city, they broke the first sustained working-class movement in the Europe of the industrial era …
Ah, what do we know of political movements?, W. says. What of the politics of mass protest? As soon as the worker's movement comes to an end, we have the end of politics: that's Tronti. And he thought it ended just after '68, after the revolt of '68.
W. goes back to his reading. In the end, they didn't need the garrison, W. says. The Manchester men, the merchant-entrepreneurs, borrowed new models of internal organisation from the military. They brought in bureaucracy, and the chain of command. Each worker was assigned a place, and hence a function in the institutional whole.
In the end, it was all about time, W. says, summarising. The worker was encouraged to take the long term view – to understand his life in terms of his service to a firm. Time was predictable, certain. The worker learned to defer gratification, to develop long-term goals and self-discipline, in view of future rewards … And in return, they were granted a free weekend from midday Saturday. They were given time to shop in the new department stores, and to take to the streets, making a night of it …
And so when mass unemployment came, after the mid-century boom, there was no disorder. When famine came, no mass protest. The working classes joined the anti-immigrant, anti-Irish, anti-Catholic Tory party, and railed against the 'Yids' and the 'sheeneymen' driven from Eastern Europe by the pogroms …
Divide and conquer, W. says. They set one faction of the working class to fight against the other like rats. And above them all, Manchester man, buying and selling shares in Cottonpolis …
When did the labour movement come to an end? When did the new order begin? Das Manchestertum: that was the word the Germans coined for this new kind of economic individualism, which saw off the rebellion of the workers. But it depended nonetheless on the predictability of time. It belonged to those firms whose names you can still read on the side of the warehouses. They thought they'd be here forever …
Once it was a city of material labour, of the import and working of cotton, of the oil trade, of engineering … It was the home of old Labour, the home of municipal socialism, with workers with their eye on their betterment. And then what happened? Deindustrialisation, of course. Which meant deunionisation. Which meant the destruction of the labour movement. Which meant the demolition of every leftist hope and dream …
They sold off the housing stock quickly, to make sure it was irreversible. They broke the miners, the steel workers, the shipbuilders. They destroyed the car industry. They opened the markets to foreign competition and foreign investment. And production was allowed to became transnational, spreading across the world, plugging into and plugging out of this or that territory, even as the financial sector was almost completely deregulated …
'Economics are the method', said Thatcher, 'but the object is to change the soul'. They changed the soul in the '80s, W. says. They changed our souls, and what did the worker become? Flexible workers, one man or woman entrepreneurs selling their labour to Capital, which now encompasses the whole of their lives. And consumer-entrepreneurs, for whom commodities have been diversified and differentiated. Entrepreneur-consumers looking to sell their soul to Capital and then to buy it right back …
Ah, there's no long-term, for the worker, not now. Deferred gratification need bring no reward. For the new elite, it's all about contacts, about their network, not about the firm. Self-discipline without dependency: that's what they show, the editors of the new media, the advertising creatives, living in converted warehouses. Free-wheeling initiative: that's what they exhibit, the floor traders in brokerage firms, the internet entrepreneurs who buy apartments redeveloped by Urban Splash.
And for the rest of them, the non-elite, around whom their firms are constantly changing? For those for whom work means constant insecurity, the constant re-engineering and restructuring of their workplaces, constant delayering and outsourcing, constant downsizing and networkisation? Casualise your labour pool: that's what the consultants recommend. It's what the market wants, they tell their clients: labour flexibility impresses the investors.
And '68 is nothing in the midst of all this, we conclude. '68 is finished just as politics is finished. Because there's no more time. Because time has been broken up into short-term contracts. Time is for consumption, and commercialised leisure. There's no long term, not for the worker, nor the consumer. Nothing connects. Experience no longer accumulates. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships dissolve into the air …
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