Where Are We Now?

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.