THE MACROCOSM: FREE-MARKET SOCIETY, DISLOCATION, ADDICTION

Historical research consistently shows causal links between (1) the emergence of free-market society and massive dislocation, and (2) dislocation and addiction. The next sections of this article provide a few examples of both of these causal links, and discuss an apparent counterexample - the drug "crack", which is said to addict everyone who uses it, dislocated or not.

Free market society as a cause of dislocation

Free market societies, by definition, can only be established and maintained by replacement of traditional culture, because free-market societies require that the market for labour, land, currency, and consumer goods be controlled by the laws of supply and demand, without interference from family ties, clan loyalties, guild rights, religious scruples, charity, aesthetics, or tradition. Paradoxically, establishing a "free" market regularly requires coercion on a massive scale to destroy traditional arrangements concerning land, labour, currency, and consumer goods, because previous forms of human society have regulated these activities in traditional ways that maintained greater social cohesion and because most people cling to their traditions (Polanyi, 1944; Hill, 1958, chap. 7; Gray, 1998). Again paradoxically, an established "free" market requires a permanent and powerful control system for both workers and consumers. Management, advertising, and mass media indoctrination keep people performing their market functions at an optimal rate, deliberately undermining the countervailing influences of social structures that spontaneously arise in offices, factories, modern families, etc. (Beniger, 1986; Beaud and Pialoux, 2000). Polanyi's classic study, The great transformation (1944) makes the point concisely: Establishing a free-market society "must cfisjoint man's relationships and threaten his natural habitat with annihilation" (p. 42).

The necessary connection between the free-market economy and dislocation was recognised in early 19th century England, as much by the Whigs who supported it, like William Townsend and Herbert Spencer, as by Socialists who opposed it, like Robert Owen. In contemporary times it has been reaffirmed by historians who celebrate it and those who criticise it. The most enthusiastic advocates of free-market society often justify mass dislocation by emphasising that free-market institutions are sometimes voluntarily chosen (see Hayek, 1944), apparently forgetting that they are more often established by force or seduction.

Systematic dislocation first reached full strength in England. Drawing theological justification from Puritanism and coercive power from the crown, England achieved a full-blown free-market society by the early 19th century through a massive, forced dispossession of the rural poor from their farms and commons (Neeson, 1993) and their absorption into urban slums and a brutal, export-oriented manufacturing system (Polanyi, 1944). Those who resisted these new working environment too strenuously were brought around with whips and branding irons in "houses of correction", forced apprenticeship of their children, official discouragement of charity to the "undeserving poor", and prohibition of unions (Hill, 1958, chap. 7). Forced dislocation spread from England to the rest of the British Isles, e.g., the "clearances" of the Scottish Highlands, and to English colonies abroad, e.g., the settlement of Australia by "transportation" of convict labour. Because England dominated the 19th century, English economics and subsequent dislocation spread across the map of Western Europe (Polanyi, 1944, p. 173). In the wake of later successes, free-market society (and its concomitant "alcohol and drug problem") is being inexorably globalized.

There have been pauses in the advance of free-market society in the 20th century, but as the ideological threat of a Soviet economy disappeared and as new competitive challenges have seemed to require
untrammeled productivity, free-market innovations have accelerated dislocation everywhere. This is equally the case in countries that already had "mature" economies, including Canada, (McQuaig, 1998), and in "developing" countries which must accept the irresistible financial advice of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to modernize ruthlessly (Chossudovsky, 1997). The World Trade Organization, the International Chamber of Commerce and other powerful transnational bodies are committed to dramatically accelerating the spread of free-market principles and expanding their scope to areas, like education and medicine, where previously they were severely limited (George, 1999). The hegemony of free-market principles is extending beyond limits that have long seemed prudent. Adam Smith (1776/1991) warned that national governments must resist the power of manufacturers to "become formidable to the government, and... intimidate the legislature" (p. 415). Smith also feared excessive profits (pp. 109-110) and considered "private luxury and extravagance" to be "ruinous taxes" (p. 72).

Dislocation in free-market societies is not confined to poor people or poor countries. At the end of the 20th century, for rich and poor alike, jobs disappear on short notice; communities are weak and unstable; people routinely change families, occupations, technical skills, languages, nationalities, computer software, spiritual beliefs and ideologies as their lives progress. Prices and incomes are no more stable than social life. Even the continued viability of crucial ecological systems is in question. For rich and poor alike, dislocation plays havoc with delicate interpenetrations of people, society, the physical world, and spiritual values that sustain psychosocial integration. Again, Polanyi (1944) makes the complex point concisely: "... the most obvious effect of the new institutional system was the destruction of the traditional character of settled populations and their transmutation into a new type of people, migratory, nomadic, lacking in self-respect and discipline - crude, callous beings of whom both labourer and capitalist were an example" (p. 128, italics added).

One index of dislocation among the rich is the spreading social problems of middle class America, arguably the pinnacle of success in the free-market world. The pressures of competitiveness, efficiency, overwork, downsizing etc., on the two working parents in American middle class families are such that the children are deprived of adequate time and support. DeGrandpre (1999) has called this a "culture of neglect" and a "trickle-down theory of child rearing". He identifies this dislocation from traditional family supports as a direct cause of the rapid spread of "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder" and the consequent prescription of the stimulant Ritalin to school age children. Official American estimates are that 15% of American children will be on Ritalin by the year 2000 (DeGrandpre, 1999, p. 18). Americans consistently score the highest, relative to all other developed countries, on a plethora of other indications of dislocation, including divorce, single parenthood, children in poverty, economic disparity, and excessive television viewing (Bronfenbrenner et al., 1996). Canada's middle-class plight is not as extreme as the U.S., but the trends are the same.

Another indication of dislocation of the rich is the growing discontent, stress, and workplace violence among corporate managers. Current management literature abounds with discussions about how the army of stressed-out managers should themselves be managed. The cause of this discontent is ingeniously lampooned in contemporary cartoons, like "Dilbert". As Gray (1998, p. 72) puts it, "Businesses have shed many of the responsibilities that made the world of work humanly tolerable in the past".

Futurists predict - and celebrate - more increases in dislocation as the Internet further replaces local ties. New electronic communication systems are expected to even alienate people from their identity as human beings - the ultimate dislocation. Analysing the future for a Canadian policy magazine, Harvey argued that "Introspection is now a luxury, an 'inner life' has become an unreachable illusion. In the future, it is the networks, images, metaphors, and physical systems that will provide the definitive mirror of ourselves" (1998, p. 25).

Dislocation as a precursor of addiction

Dislocation is the necessary but not sufficient precursor of addiction. That is, although only chronically and severely dislocated people become addicted, some of them construct substitute lifestyles that are not reasonably called "addiction". They may, for example, become depressed, hypochondriacal, violent, or suicidal instead.

Historically, the correlation between severe dislocation and addiction is strong. Perspicuous social historians have often identified dislocation as the cause of alcoholism (Charles Dickens, 1835/1994; Hughes, 1987). The destructive use of alcohol was not a significant problem during the middle ages but became a raging epidemic with the spread of free-market society, especially after 1800 (Austin, 1985). Eric Hobsbawm (1962) wrote as follows about the "labouring poor" in the early 19th century:

... faced with a social catastrophe they did not understand, impoverished, exploited, herded into slums that combined bleakness and squalor, or into the expanding complexes of small-scale industrial villages, [most of the labouring poor] sank into demoralisation. Deprived of the traditional institutions and guides to behaviour, how could many fail to sink into an abyss of hand-to-mouth expedients, where families pawned their blankets each week until pay-day and where alcohol was "the quickest way out of Manchester" (or Lille or the Bori-nage). Mass alcoholism, an almost invariable companion of headlong and uncontrolled industrialization and urbanization, spread "a pestilence of hard liquor" across Europe (p. 202).

Opium use, which had been common and unproblematic in England for centuries, first became perceived as an addiction problem in the 19th century (Berridge and Edwards, 1981)¹. Other kinds of addiction spread too, leading to a profusion of newly recognised problems from aspirin addiction to workaholism and to a huge number of treatment and self-help programs.

But was it really dislocation per se that caused the spread of addiction? Could it not also have been poverty, disease, physical pain, or the availability of new drugs? The ideal test would be a historical situation where the dislocation of people was extreme, but was unaccompanied by the other possible causes. I have selected two Canadian examples that come close to this ideal type, and an apparent counterexample.

Canadian Indians

The history of Canadian Indians is unlike the more famous "Indian wars," enslavement, and mass slaughter that occurred in the U.S. and other European settlements in the Americas (Zinn, 1980). Centuries before Vancouver was founded, both British and French trading companies in Canada established formal and mutually beneficial fur-trading relationships with Indian tribes, primarily in eastern and central Canada (Newman, 1985). Few European settlers then sought to settle in the inhospitable Canadian climate, so there was little need to displace the tribes. Later, the English colonial government formed indispensable military alliances with various Indian nations, particularly on the occasions of an American invasion of Quebec in 1775-76, the advance of American settlers into what is now its "Midwest" in 1784-1796, the Anglo-American war in 1812-1814, and the insurrection of settlers in 1837 (Allen, 1992).

After these crucial issues were settled, it would have seemed repugnant for the Crown, as it began to covet the vast Indian lands, to slaughter former allies who had fought loyally and sometimes decisively. Instead, the British and later Canadian governments quietly pursued a policy, later called "assimilation", intended to move Indian lands into the real estate market without killing the people. This policy was explicitly intended to strip the Indians of their culture and land and to integrate them into the lowest strata of free-market society as farm labourers and industrial workers. One manifestation of this policy was a huge network of "residential schools" where children, often forcibly taken from their parents, were taught to despise their own language and customs, frequently alienating them from their own families as well as their culture. Assimilation policy succeeded in nearly eliminating Indian language and spiritual practices, but failed to integrate the Indians into free-market society, thus leaving them utterly dislocated (Chrisjohn, Young and Maraun, 1997; Haig-Brown, 1988).

As wards of the federal government, however, they generally had food, housing, and some protection.

Although Canadian Indians had a taste for "firewater" from the time that Europeans introduced it, it was only during the attempted assimilation that alcoholism emerged as a crippling problem for the Indian people, along with suicide, domestic violence, sexual abuse, prostitution and so forth. The Vancouver area had a relatively minor history of fur trade and no history of military alliance. The Indians were dispossessed of their lands without great violence, but assimilation began immediately and, with it, rampant alcoholism (Kew, 1990).

Throughout the period of assimilation up to the present, Canadian Indians have had an astronomical addiction rate, although the statistics may understate the problem. A number of Native Indians have told me that alcoholism in their reserves is actually 100% in the sense that virtually every adult is either a practising alcoholic or a born-again Christian "on the wagon". Alcohol addiction was only one consequence of this mass-produced dislocation. Other consequences include drug addictions, depression, domestic violence, and suicide.

There is a more popular explanation for the widespread alcoholism of Canadian Indians. They are often said to have a racial inability to control alcohol. However, this seems unlikely, since alcoholism was not a ruinous problem among them until assimilation began. Moreover, if they were handicapped by the "gene for alcoholism", the same must be said of the Europeans, since those subjected to conditions of extreme dislocation also fell into it, almost universally.

Orcadians in Canada

The history of the Hudson's Bay Company, the "oldest continuous capitalist corporation still in existence" (Newman, 1985, p. 3), provides an example where, at least for some of its employees, maximum dislocation was little confounded by other forms of distress. The Hudson's Bay Company was created by a royal charter by Charles II of England, in 1670. Until 1987, a span of more than three centuries, it maintained forts and fur trading outposts on the shores of Hudson's Bay and throughout the Canadian north. Some of the company's traders were volunteers from London and more were from the Orkney Islands at the Northern extreme of Scotland, where the ships from London stopped en route to Hudson's Bay to provision and to augment their complement.

Preferred as employees because they were already accustomed to extreme Northern latitudes and life at sea, and because of their characteristic sobriety and obedience, the Orkney volunteers were mostly poor lads who volunteered for adventure and escape from the confines of traditional Orkney society. Whereas they did gain some of what they sought, they severed their ties to a close, traditional system based on both common land and "cottar labour" which persisted in the Orkneys until the middle of the 19th century (Thompson, 1987, p. 222).

As "Bay men", their only contact with home came once a year from a single ship that brought mail, supplies, and English sailors, and took out the pelts. When the annual ship disappeared, the men were alone again. Although fed and treated as well as the era and circumstances permitted, their lives provide evidence of the long-term effects of dislocation:

... With some exceptions, the Bay men became internal exiles in both their homelands, original and adopted. Never part of any society outside the fur trade, they gradually pruned their ancestral roots, becoming bitterly aware of the true nature of any voluntary emigration: that one is exiled from and never to, and that disinheritance and marginality are all too often the price of freedom. More than one loyal HBC trader faced the end of his days with few close friends or blood relatives he wished to acknowledge and so bequeathed whatever worldly goods he had gathered to the only family he had: the Company. (Newman, 1985, p. 9).

One unmistakable aspect of the lives of the Bay men was intemperance. Alcoholism appears to have been rampant:

... The Company quickly realized that liquor was a greater enemy than the climate to its trade on the bay, no matter how many prohibitions it proclaimed and no matter how often it paid off informers to halt the smuggling of brandy cases on outgoing ships, the booze flowed steadily across the Atlantic. Exceptional was the Company [employee] who failed to organize surreptitious caches of several gallons or so of brandy for his private stock.. .(Newman, 1985, pp. 160-161).

The alcohol related problems suggest widespread alcoholism, although this word had not yet been invented. The following was written about an outpost on Hudson's Bay named "Moose Factory":

Many of the work accidents at Moose were alcohol-related. One man consumed so much "bumbo" - that fur-trade mixture of rum, water, sugar, and nutmeg -that he fell off the sloop and promptly drowned. With some regret and much haste, his mates lost no time in auctioning off the contents of his chest. The chief factors were always afraid that the men on watch, who were too often drunk, would spitefully or accidentally set fire to the buildings. The courage to commit suicide could also be found in the bottle. "Brandy-death" was common ... (Pannekoek, 1979, p. 5).

But could the men already have been alcoholic before they encountered the supreme dislocation of Hudson's Bay? Of course, many of the Londoners could have been, but not the Orcadians. The Orcadians were preferred employees of the Bay in part because of their natural sobriety. Dislocation transformed them. Local ministers in the Orkneys spoke of the returning Bay men and those who had served long stints in the English fishing fleets in similar terms:

... the Rev. Francis Liddell, minister of Orphir, launched into an impassioned diatribe against those who abandoned wives, children, and parents to enter the service of the Company, eventually returning home with enough money to out-bid honest farmers; they brought home none of the virtues of the savage, but all the vices - indolence, dissipation, and irreligion; "My God!" he declaimed, "shall man, formed in the image of his Creator, desert the human species and, for the paltry sum of six pounds a-year, assume the manners and habits of the brutes that perish?" Fishing attracted equally hostile comment, if less colorfully expressed, from other ministers; George Barry of Kirkwood complained the wages of Iceland fishermen were "almost always spent on idleness and often in dissipation", while James Watson of South Ronaldsay condemned "drunkenness, idleness, and extravagance" fifty years later his successor was still bemoaning "the universal appetite for spirits". (Thompson, 1987, p. 220)

Counterexample: "Instantaneous addiction"

If dislocation were the necessary precursor to addiction, then there would be no instances in which addiction occurs unless preceded by dislocation. Yet, popular wisdom teems with apparent counterexamples. For example, between 1986 and 1992 the American media reported a catastrophic epidemic of addiction to crack cocaine among American youth. Far from being limited to dislocated people, crack addiction reportedly engulfed all those who used the drug even once. Respected mainstream American news media reported that addiction was spreading inexorably because smoking crack caused "instantaneous addiction", qualifying it as "the most addictive drug known to man". The resulting "epidemic" was "as pervasive and dangerous in its way as the plagues of medieval times", and "the plague is all but universal". (Quotes collected by Reinarman and Levine, 1997, chap. 1). Neurobiological researchers devised brilliant explanations for the irresistible addictiveness of crack that was being claimed, without seriously testing the validity of the claim itself.

Had the claim about the addictiveness of crack been true, it would have proven that dislocation is not the necessary precursor of addiction. However, it was false. Numerous large scale studies, then and now, have shown that only a small fraction of crack cocaine users become addicts (e.g., Erickson et al., 1994; Peele and DeGrandpre, 1998). Those who do become addicted are concentrated among the visibly dislocated segments of the population and their reasons for continuing crack cocaine use are easily understandable as a response to it.

Bourgois (1997) has described the adaptive function of the "crack economy" of young blacks and Hispanics in New York City. Economically and socially dislocated in the ghetto, young men "struggle for survival, and for meaning" (p. 61). Even a dangerous life of addiction and petty crime at least avoids doing degrading work for pathetic wages. The most successful drug users rise through the hierarchies of drug society and achieve a kind of substitute psychosocial integration with the larger community:

The feelings of self-actualization and self-respect that the dealer's lifestyle offers cannot be underestimated. A former manager of a coke-shooting gallery who had employed a network of a half-dozen sellers, lookouts, and security guards and who had grossed $7000-13,000 per week for over a year before being jailed explained to me that the best memories of his drug-dealing days were of the respect he received from people on the street. He described how, when he drove up in one of his cars to pick up the day's receipts, a bevy of attentive men and women would run to open the door for him and engage him in polite small talk, not unlike what happens in many licit businesses when the boss arrives. Others would offer to clean his car. He said that even the children hanging out in the street who were too young to understand what his dealings involved looked up to him in awe.. .(Bourgois, 1997, p. 71).

¹. Berridge and Edwards (1987) argue that this was more a matter of class persecution and professional ambition than of a major increase in addiction. There was, however, a substantial increase of opium use in 19th century England and indications of at least moderately increased addiction as well. ↩