As the great Maynard Keynes noted: In the long run we're all dead. And history is very long indeed. Over how many thousands or even millions of years did humanity develop before artifacts were even created, such as sharpened stone tools? No one is around to tell and our speculations are without much foundation. Perhaps in those primitive times small groups lived in communal harmony. By the time of written records we have entered the era of kings and warlords. Early in the history of writing the struggle for democracy (more accurately, a democratic oligarchy) arose, caused, we may suppose, by the establishment of settled communities and an agricultural surplus with the wealth being more evenly spread
than from the hunting or pillage where the strong man ruled. Of course the
trick then was to distinguish those deserving citizenship and suffrage, with
kinship, residence and some minimum of property as criteria. With the arrival of
coined money and its spread through trade money itself came to satisfy the
wealth criterion, and speculation was born. Universal suffrage and the elimination of property criteria are very recent developments, even in the United States, and the definition of democracy varies both between and within societies. As a minimum we might say it requires laws regulating social behavior which are written and chosen
by the mass of the people (perhaps through elected representatives) and where
each person has a vote. In this regard, Dear Leader Dubya (if he gets away
with it) has chosen to destroy democracy in the United States, and throughout
the entire world, in his rather bald assertions that he is beyond the law, or,
even that he is the law. Palestine, Iraq, Iran: they get the government
that Dubya dictates. And in the US, our liberty will be increased and ensured
through its curtailment with things like the Patriot Act. We have
surpassed satire. One doesn't want to get carried away, but I, for one,
wouldn't bet my life that there will even be a Presidential election in
2008. Thus far, the US Congress hasn't evinced any spine for reining in the
clearly impeachable and even criminally indictable acts of the Dear Leader and
his henchmen (and women). Even with our supposed democracy in the US the great
mass of the people are pretty much voiceless as the rules of the political game
are set by the moneyed interests (as designed by our founders, who perhaps
read too much Roman history and too much Montesquieu) and these same moneyed
interests send out the invitations, police the pearly gates and even own the
town criers. Tribunes of the people need not apply; even blogs such as this
are lost in the noise.
Imperial Rome allied itself with the Papal Catholic church and a
millenium of feudalism was upon us, with emperor and pope feeding off each
other in their centralized autarchies. There was never anything democratic about
an episcopal church; even the great Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the
Cistercian order, was a warrior to stamp out Christian democracy as
represented by the Irish Church and monasteries. (As an aside, I've recently
read paeans to Britain's "willingly" giving up their empire; yet, over 8
centuries after landing the British still control one-fourth of Ireland. What
would world opinion have been if the Brits in Rhodesia had insisted on keeping
25% of that country and allowed the remainder to become Zimbabwe? In our
sensory-overloaded and thus desensitized modern world it seems that only the
most blatant of imperialistic chauvinism can be recognized, as in skin
color discrimination).
As we move along towards the 15th century we
encounter nascent capitalism, revolts against Rome, agitation against despotic
rule of kings. This was the return of oligarchic democracy in bourgeois garb and while there have been many changes over the centuries this is still where we reside:
a world of bourgeios sort-of-democracies. Nothing very humanitarian about
bourgeois democracy: it enshrined the ownership and control of property
including the right to its alienation and its protection against the
"predations" of the masses. Few writers over the centuries had anything other
than contempt for the "people" as such. Most certainly Romans such as Cicero didn't; the Jesuits spreading the gospel in the Americas didn't; Montesquieu didn't;
certainly our US founding fathers didn't. Men of the Enlightenment weren't fond of democracy, considering it to be mob rule; the people, if sufficienty free and legally endowed, would take the wealth from the wealthy. Their best hope (they being Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln) was that we would become a nation of yeoman
farmers, where all had independence-guaranteeing wealth. This also was the
dream of citizens of the early Roman republic, but even then the big fish ate
the little fish or, as a 1980's edition of the American Heritage Dictionary
defined capitalism: an economic system characterized by the increasing
concentration of capital. (Notice how Ma Bell is back? Actually, Lily Tomlin
notwithstanding, I was always fond of pre-divestiture, regulated monopoly
AT&T). In modern America home ownership is the measure of wealth but with real
estate and the mortgage industry about to collapse, well.... In any event,
owning one's home isn't being a yeoman farmer: farms produce income; homes
don't. In the USSR the housing stock was depreciated as is normal with capital
assets but in America, where inflation is the elephant in the room noone talks
about, as it's both a no-no and permanent policy, houses are supposed to
appreciate in value. Given the fickleness of human nature great works of art
grow more valuable over time but why would a suburban tract home do the
same? Remember the updated wiring and that new roof: capital depreciation.
Mr. Lincoln was quite open in his contempt for wage
slavery as it was then known. For the essence of
capitalism is a proletariat, a group of available workers dispossessed of
property or other wealth which is forced to work for wages to survive and
which can be pushed out the door into unemployment as capitalists deemed
necessary. The great Theodor Mommsen, in his magisterial History of Rome,
composed essentially at the same time as the Communist Manifesto, refers to
capitalists and proletarians. But his designation therein is mostly rhetorical
for it took the development of industrial capitalism, the creation of
parliaments and courts to enforce property laws, and mass impoverishment and
destruction of peasantry through things such as the English Enclosure Acts to
create a mobile, penniless class of (un)willing workers. Mature capitalism
developed with its own laws concerning capital and profit and surplus value
and rates of return: an entire political economy so elegantly and insightfully
analyzed by Karl Marx. The rise of finance capitalism, the loss of money's
official ties to precious metals, and the total legal victory of finance in
the late 20th century where capital has lost its tether to real property has
in its way also dispossessed capitalists of property as well. Historically,
the one weapon the proletarians had against capital was to withhold labor but
now even capitalists are no longer tied to the soil. They too can simply move
on. A world battle for socialism between propertyless proletarians and
propertyless capitalists (investments having become recently only parking
spaces, not permanent abodes) can unfold. The Marx-Engels dictum, Workers of the world, Unite, now applies to the capitalists as well. Finance capital knows no country as home; it feels and acknowledges no patriotism. Otherwise it wouldn't move factories from America to China, and even, as reported in a late 2006 NY Times story, from China to Vietnam to save labor costs, or even Veep the Creep Cheney's Halliburton move from Texas to Dubai. Obviously this loosening of ties to real property has its limits for it is within the real that we create reality's tokens and representations. For without factories there are no products, no sales, no profits, no capital.
Some recent critics, on the left but within respectable opinion (unlike myself), of our current imperium have woven into their writings some not-too-subtle warnings
that we should avoid looking to socialism, for example, in shifting our
nation's priorities. Some say socialism is dead! Not only the Pope
pontificates. Actually, as important as the economy is, it remains but one
aspect of our lives and to say we cannot choose and make workable socialism is
tantamount to claiming that democracy itself is unwise, unworkable and
impossible. In fact, we don't have a democracy; we have an oligarchy (soon to
change to dictatorship?) with many unsubstantiated claims of democracy. We
don't have a democracy, not because it is indirect but because our government
doesn't represent our interests and we don't have, as those poor businessmen
like to complain, a level playing field. Our masters deal from a marked deck
and we're the suckers. As social unrest grows in a deteriorating economy and
we become further impoverished, those who act should be brave and think up
their own solutions to their problems and avoid "experts" like the plague they
are. Most countries in the past 25 years who followed "expert" western advice
got screwed. And everytime Bush mentions freedom, liberty and our style of
life I look over my shoulder and grab hold of my wallet. Be forewarned.
