American Gracchi

By Nick Partyka

Foreword

When I originally conceived this essay in the fall of 2015 Donald Trump was merely one candidate for the Republican party nomination, and at the time perhaps not even the most outlandish. His surprising electoral college victory this fall prompted me to reconsider this essay, or rather some of its questions. In brief, my argument, or rather suggestion, is thus; If the Roosevelts are the American Gracchi, then, Whither an American Marius, or an American Sulla? At the close of the essay that follow I ask, What would a 21st century American Marius or Sulla look like? The election results, as well as the political and social atmosphere around the election have caused me to wonder, Might Donald Trump be an American Sulla?

As for a comparison between the men themselves, I think that would not come off. Donald Trump is a narcissistic short-fingered vulgarian whose scandal ridden, legally checkered career speaks for itself. What kind of analogy might we be able to make between Donald Trump and Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix? Well, we must first examine the political career of Sulla. Sulla was from a very blue-blooded Patrician family, but not a wealthy one. He made a late entrance into politics due to his penury, which he overcame thanks due to receiving a couple fortuitous inheritances. He then became a successful military commander serving prominently in important Roman wars. It is, for example, Sulla who actually tricks Jugurtha into surrendering. He also distinguishes himself in the Social wars, as well as the wars against Mythridates. Sulla is best remembered for leading his troops into Roman and establishing a dictatorship. A position he used to ruthlessly suppress his enemies, brutally slaughtering any who opposed him, as well as re-shape the Roman constitutional order in a way that restored the supremacy of the Senate, and thus, of the optimates.

The social and political consequences of the economic dynamics that had been playing out in Roman society since the Punic Wars had given birth, at a certain point, to a spectacularly new kind of politician in the Gracchi brothers. The populist tumult fostered by, and exploited by these revolutionary siblings was one of the main ingredients that eventually caused the fall of the Roman republic. The other big ingredient is the client army. The pioneer of the client army is a man taking a page from the Gracchi brothers' book. This man is Marius. Sulla is best understood in comparison to Marius; for indeed, through much of their lives these men were political opponents. Sulla was an optimate with a power base in the Senate, while Marius was a popularis with a power base in the Assembly, and among the people. Marius, much like Napoleon centuries later, was endeared to his soldiers because of his egalitarian policies. Rome had been faring poorly in the Numidian War for years, due to a stubborn persistence of inappropriate tactics and policies. On big problem was the populating of officers positions from among the nobility without regard for military skill or experience. One of Marius most popular reforms was to base promotions on merit. This had the dual effect of making for a more effective fighting unit, but also, and not insignificantly, made his soldiers extremely loyal since under him they could achieve more social mobility through a more meritocratic system of promotions.

Sulla, like most of his Patrician counterparts, did not like the way Marius was so popular with the people, nor do they like that he was enabling the use of the army for social mobility. The last thing conservative elites tend to like is to see members of the lower classes rising in the social hierarchy. Sulla's vision of reform then was one of restoring the senate to its traditional position of superiority. The main vehicle for achieving this end was the castrating of the office of Tribune, which Sulla was able to do in his capacity as dictator. His other main vehicle was proscription. Sulla adopted a practice of posting lists of people who he deemed enemies of Rome, and who then had twenty four hours to leave Rome or else be executed as a criminal. Most of these people killed themselves so that they could keep property in their families. Just to give a complete picture of Sulla, before adopting the practice of proscription he simply had his enemies arrested and summarily executed. He saw his work as to secure the superiority of the Senate over the Equites, and the Assembly by the most direct means. In fact, once he had done what he considered a sufficient job he retired as dictator and decamped to his country estate never again to interfere with politics in Rome.

Sulla is thus remembered as a brutal and reactionary figure. And, ultimately, a failure. This is because the constitution he put in place ended up lasting only a decade or so before being overthrown by former lieutenants of his. If anything, the bloody vigor that was required for Sulla to reform the Roman constitutional order as he did acted to accelerate the political decomposition that caused the ultimate collapse of the republic. Perhaps this then is the similarity between Trump and Sulla. Both represent violent outbursts of reactionary classes struggling to retain their grip on power as the society they preside over drifts out of their control. Indeed, in the end, the Roman Senatorial class was only able to retain its social power by sacrificing its political power under the Principiate and the Empire. In making himself primus inter pares Ceasar Augustus abolishes the republic in practice while retaining many of its forms and trappings. Might not Donald Trump's election signal such a turning point in American history?

One might, as many do, see Trump's victory as an outburst of an aging, angry, white America feeling itself being left behind; feeling itself losing grip on its monopoly of social, cultural, and political power; losing its grip on its ability to understand the forces at play that shape the course of modern life. Even in Trump's very campaign slogan one hears echoes of the intentions of Sulla; "Make the Senate Great Again". This then is the similarity, a society wracked by inequality and violence, & marred by poverty and deprivation in which traditional elites, against the tide of history, attempt to put the old order on newer, more solid footing, hoping vainly that it will withstand the forces of change. In the end, Sulla's programme was doomed to fail, and the scale of the violence needed to do it was a major clue. In just the first few days after Trumps' election we saw hundreds of incidents of hate-based intimidation, harassment, and attacks. Might this also be a futile struggle against historical, and economic forces that is doomed to be a mostly Pyrrhic victory? Can we see in the success and popularity of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump alignments of political forces akin to those that marshaled behind Marius and Sulla respectively? If the Roosevelts are the American Gracchi, and Sanders and Trump are the Marius and Sulla, then Whither our American Ceasar? Is our American republic on a similarly downward trajectory as the Roman republic? Do we live in the age of a moribund republic?

I don't know the answers to these questions. I ask them because of the thought they provoke or inspire in the reader. This is, or at least ought to be, a sobering moment for citizens of all political ideologies given the immense unpopularity of both candidates. Given the many and repeated, and unabashed, instances of the President-elect saying or doing something grossly offensive or insensitive, mocking or dismissive, demeaning or bigoted against every group in America save white people during his entire campaign it is critical to reflect on the health of our republic. It is essential for all to reflect on what the results of this election mean for our country, and its future, and, perhaps most ominously, with the divisions laid bare in this election, whether or not it has one.

N.Partyka

11.2016

Introduction

The crisis of 133 B.C. certainly seemed highly significant to those involved in it and those observing it. However, it was to take on much larger significance as time went on. For this crisis signaled the rising momentum of social, political, and economic forces that would undermine the Roman republic within a century. For only thirty years after the crisis of 133 B.C. (and even fewer years after the crisis of 121 B.C.) would be born the man who rode highest on the tide of these forces, and who would ultimately kill the republic, Gaius Julius Caesar. Thus, the crisis of 133 B.C. has come to be seen as the opening salvo in the process that results in the fall of the Roman republic, and the rise of the Roman Empire.

The great crisis of the 20th century, the Great Depression, also seemed a momentous event to those caught up in it. Might it not also come to take on a higher historical significance in decades not too distant from our own? Might not future generations of Americans come to see the first third of the 20th century A.D. as similar to the last thirty years of the 2nd century B.C.? Might perhaps a future American Marius look back and see in the Roosevelts, Teddy & Franklin, the American Gracchi?

When we look at the political careers of the Gracchi and the Roosevelts in parallel we will notice some striking similarities. Similarities that I think illuminate important aspects of the contemporary political landscape. Often, it is only with the clarity of hindsight, afforded by examination of history, that larger features of contemporary political reality can be put in a spotlight. Though analogies can, and should, only be pushed so far, the commonalities we will see ought to be somewhat unsettling, that is, if one is concerned for the fate of democracy and democratic citizenship in America.

I must note here the perilous nature of comparisons between modern America and Ancient Rome. Such comparisons are made often, and usually quite poorly. Most often such comparisons come down to a very broad analogy between the political, economic, and military hegemony each possessed in its era of dominance. We must, with Marx, emphasize the important differences between capitalist and pre-capitalist economic formations. Though a model of class struggle may be applicable to the ancient world, as G.E.M de St. Croix adroitly demonstrates, the Roman Empire is not capitalist. Though it may contain capitalistic elements, as indeed Marx was clear that some features of capitalist economies pre-date capitalism, one must not confuse the oligarchy of the wealthiest Romans with a bourgeoisie.

This note of caution registered, I must point out that what is at issue here is not a comparison between modern American and Ancient Rome as empires, or as the international hegemon, or even the nature of that hegemony. What I want to focus our attention on here is a comparison between economic and social dynamics, and the political forces they create or unleash. We'll see that in different eras, dissimilar as they undoubtedly are, interesting similarities emerge that might incline us to see ourselves, and our modern conflicts, in the history of Ancient Rome. It is upon noting these similarities that we come to the unsettling questions about the future of democracy in America. If the Roosevelts are the American Gracchi, then is an American Marius, or more ominously an American Sulla, in our future? Indeed, just like Marius and Sulla, many former US Presidents have parlayed military success in war-time into political careers; perhaps most notably, Washington, Jackson, Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower. And, in the heart of the Great Depression many Americans wondered aloud whether or not an American Mussolini, a man who modeled himself on Roman strong-men of the past, could lift the nation out of depression. Is the American republic declining? Do the similarities of the economic and political forces at play, and underlying, the crises of 133-121 B.C. & 1929-1945 A.D., signal that our republic is as sickened as the Roman republic? Is there a cure for what ails our republic?

I must pause here to make an important note. Though I have spoken of the "Roman republic", and of "American democracy", one must recognize that these terms are highly problematic. Ancient Rome was indeed a republic of free citizens, but, of course, citizenship was very heavily restricted. Modern America is a democracy, which co-exists with high levels of economic inequality, racial and gender injustice, widespread socio-political exclusion and alienation. I will continue to employ this terminology throughout, but always cognizant of the limited scope of their meaning within the economic and political contexts of their respective epochs.

Lex Sempronia Agraria

Yes, 133 B.C. was an eventful year for the Roman republic. But the crisis that was ignited that year, and which smoldered until flaring up again in 123-121 B.C., and then again from 50-44 B.C., did not just spring into existence. Rather, the crisis that erupted was the result of years, decades, of slowly accumulating forces and pressures. It will do us well then to take some stock of the situation the Romans faced in the years before, and leading up to, 133 B.C.. If we are to understand the political career of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, then we must know something of the texture of the economic and political scene into which he inserted himself.[1]

The source of the economic and social problems that created such political tumult was, in a word, the latifundia. These very large, slave-worked estates owned by the wealthy Patrician elite of Rome. The growth of these displaced many small farmers, Plebians, who typically would re-locate to the city of Rome itself. Outside of the resident plebian population of Rome and the freedmen, they were the major contributing source of the classical Plebs Urbana. As part of the severance package from military service, troops were usually given land to farm as small farmers. The Roman ideal was that a Roman man would produce enough in the way of agricultural products on his small-farm to meet his families' consumption needs, and hopefully a surplus to sell.

However, many former soldiers turned out to be terrible farmers; others found out they hated farming; others were pushed off their land against their will by more powerful neighbors; others lost their farms while away on extended military service in the Punic wars or the subsequent Roman wars of conquest. In any event, more and more good Roman land in the Italian peninsula was being consolidated in the hands of fewer and fewer land-owners. This was all in spite of the Lex Lincinia Sextia, passed circa 367 B.C., which limited Roman citizens to the possession of not more than five hundred jugerum (one jugerum is approximately ½ acre). Aside from the illegal dispossession and displacement of small-holders, the latifundia grew larger and larger as a result of the illegal appropriation of public lands, the ager publicus, by wealthy aristocrats.

Thus, in the years up to 133 B.C. what one sees in Roman society is the growth of the large, slave-worked plantations, which causes increasing unemployment among a class of persons who are Roman citizens and veteran soldiers, and who flock in increasing numbers to Rome itself, swelling the ranks of the "urban mob". These are the folks who come more and more to make up the ranks of the Plebian Assembly, the Concilium Plebis. This group became increasingly restive as their economic plight worsened. The spoils of military hegemony brought a flood of slaves into Rome, while Patricians used their social and legal privileges to illegally acquire very large, very profitable estates. As has been common throughout history, the tumult and disorder engendered by a century of warfare from the First Punic war in 264 B.C., through the end of the Third Punic war and the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 B.C., provided the opportunity for many wealthy Romans, Patricians and Plebians, to become even wealthier. In the wake of these wars, which saw Rome rise to preeminence in the Mediterranean world, it looked to many Roman citizens not among the Roman Patrico-Plebian oligarchy that the benefits of the conquests were going mainly to the elites, not to those who did the fighting and the dying.

This then is the environment into which Tiberius Gracchus emerges when he is elected Tribune of the Plebs in 133 B.C. But who is this Tiberius? First, he is of an old and distinguished Patrician family. His mother, Cornelia, was the daughter of the great Scipio Aemilianus, victorious general of the Third Punic war who destroyed Carthage. Thus, to be elected Tribune was deeply shocking to many, especially other Patricians. Remember that to be elected Tribune one must be a Plebian, and so Tiberius had to legally renounce his Patrician status in order to stand for the position at all. Had he been older he could have run for Consul, a more traditional position for someone of his background, but he apparently decided he could not wait to begin his political career, so urgent were the problems facing Roman society.

Second, he is a Popularis, that is, one of the Populares. This is to say that Tiberius' political base was among the Plebians in the Assembly, and not among the optimates in the Senate. This was a fairly new development in Roman political life. Cynical observes will dismiss Tiberius as a political "adventurer", a power-seeker. The upper-class bias found in much of the writing of and on classical history reaffirms this perception of the elder Gracchi. And yet, in fragments of the speech with which he introduced his bill paint a different picture. In describing the plight of dispossessed Roman citizens he says,

"Hearthless and homeless, they must take their wives and families and tramps the roads like beggars…They fight and fall to serve no other end but to multiply the possessions and comforts of the rich. They are called masters of the world but they possess not a clod of earth that is truly their own". [2]

As Tribune in 133 B.C. Tiberius undertook political action to address what he saw at the crisis in Roman society. In seeking solutions to this crisis he enacted measures that directly challenged the power of the established Senatorial elite. As a Popularis, he acted to bring more legal and political rights, economic benefits, and social privileges to Roman citizens, as well as working to extend citizenship rights to more of Rome's Italian allies. He also acted to directly attack the basis of aristocratic power, land ownership. In the ancient world, when land was the main means of production, as well as the basis of economic independence, and with it social prestige. Tiberius was able, through much resistance, to pass his Lex Sempronia Agraria. This was a land-reform measure designed to break-up the illegal latifundia and redistribute land to dispossessed Roman citizens. Knowing that the aristocrats in the Senate would be hostile to his proposals Tiberius, much as a Popularis would, took the unorthodox action of appealing his case to the Plebian Assembly, which was much more receptive to his ideas. As a result of Lex Hortencia, passed circa 287 B.C., legislation passed by the Plebian Assembly was binding on Patricians too; which it had not been up to that point.

Then, late in the year, Tiberius caused a constitutional crisis with his appropriation of the legacy of Attalus III of Pergamum. Attalus, King of Pergamum, died without an heir and bequeathed his entire estate to the Roman people. Traditionally, this kind of matter was handled by the Senate. It was one thing to redistribute land, which even many elites grew to accept, but in order to give the re-settled farmers a chance they would need capital to stock the farms with the necessaries of farming. In order to pay for this, Tiberius decided to appropriate the Attalus' legacy. He got the Plebian Assembly to vote to do so, and as a result of Lex Hortencia, there was nothing the Senate could do. This was, even for a person like Tiberius Gracchus, a stretch of constitutional authority, and indeed for many it was an outright breach. Tiberius had already acted haughtily in - probably illegally- dismissing a fellow Tribune, a man named Octavius, in order to remove the last obstacle to the passage of his land-reform bill.

In order to see why Tiberius' appropriation of Attalus' legacy caused a constitutional crisis we must take a look at the institution of the Roman Senate. In the period directly after the kings, the Roman senate, which had been merely an advisory body, seized control of the reigns of the Roman state. The Patrician and the Plebians had together expelled the odious Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, or Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome, and circa 509 B.C. founded what we now call the Roman republic. The slogan around which this new regime coalesced was "SPQR", which translated into English means in essence, "the Senate and the Roman people are one". On one level it announces the fact that Patrician and Plebian unity drove out the hated kings, and that their combined strength under-pinned the new regime, whose legitimacy was predicated on preventing kings from ever returning. On another level it very clearly announce that the Patricians, the Senatorial class, were a group separate from and superior to the "people of Rome", i.e. the Plebians and freedmen. It also very clearly announces the order of precedence in the new regime. The Senate and the Roman people are one, but the Senate comes first. Thus, the Senate, or the Senatorial class, came to dominate all or most of the major positions in government, especially the consulship. Until the time of Tiberius Gracchus the political primacy of the Senate was little in doubt.

So, when news of Attalus' bequest reached Rome in late 133 B.C., the Senate took its time discussing what to do at its own leisurely pace. It never occurred to them that someone would do what Tiberius Gracchus was about to do. They were just as shocked as they were earlier when Tiberius renounced his Patrician status to become Tribune, something it never occurred to anyone, Patrician or Plebian, that anyone would even think of doing. So, while the Senate dithered, Tiberius acted. But his action directly challenged the Senate's traditional prerogatives, threatening to take away some, perhaps in the long term all, of their power. By the time of Tiberius Gracchus the example of democratic Athens was well known. Pericles, Ephialtes, and others had successfully broadened to scope of the power of the Assembly at the direct expense of that of the Athenian version of the Senate, the Areopagus, stripping it all functions save adjudicating murder trials by 462 B.C..

By these actions, and others, Tiberius Gracchus made plenty of enemies for himself, enemies with important positions in the Roman state. Once Tiberius was no longer Tribune, his enemies could, and in all likelihood would, exact some revenge on Tiberius; the direct and obvious implication being that they might murder him. As Tribune, Tiberius' person was constitutionally sacrosanct. All Plebians swore an oath to protect the tribune from any physical attacks. So, when his term of office expired he would be vulnerable to his enemies, many of whom would likely be able to legally use state powers to pursue their ends. Thus, Tiberius forced further constitutional crisis on the Senate by running for re-election, the legality of which was by no means settled and obvious. Roman law at this time prohibited certain senior magistrates from being immediately re-elected to their post. Tiberius' argument was that since the office of Tribune was an office of the Roman people, i.e. the plebs, not of the Roman state, i.e. the patricians, and thus this prohibition did not apply to him. Despite vigorous resistance to his re-election campaign from the optimates it looked likely that Tiberius would be re-elected Tribune.

On election-day, Tiberius was allegedly seen pointing to his head. This news was carried to the Senate, which was meeting close by, where it was universally agreed that Tiberius was attempting to make himself king. For, again, per Lex Hortencia, any bill the Plebian Assembly passed, was law. So, if they voted Tiberius king, then he would be king. And if "SPQR" meant anything, it very much meant, "no more kings". Now Tiberius' supporters have claimed that his pointing to his head was a pre-arranged signal to some of his closest allies that he felt his life in danger, and they should rally to him. In any event, the Senate was so enraged, and perhaps after under-estimating Tiberius more than once already, they decided to act swiftly to prevent the sentina urbis (the bilge or dregs of the city) from destroying their republic. The Senators broke up their furniture to make bludgeons, and stormed off as a group, around 300 persons armed with rocks and clubs, towards where Tiberius and his supporters were. They felt they had little choice as the sitting Consul refused to lead the Senatorial army against a sitting Tribune. When the dust cleared, Tiberius and hundreds of his followers, those who had not successfully fled the scene, had been clubbed to death in the street by the Senate.

The bitter irony is that, as provocative as Tiberius' actions may have seemed to the optimates, the best men, the terms of his Lex Sempronia Agraria were fairly generous towards them. In fact, Tiberius inserted a compensation clause in his bill. He was going to have the state pay some of the illegal holders of public land to give it up. Senatorial elites, who monopolized land ownership, especially land in and around Rome itself, were going to be paid for land they had stolen in the first place. Not too bad a deal. And in hindsight, taking it might have been preferable to the century of internecine civil strife and violence that followed from not taking it.

Theodore Rex

Theodore Roosevelt was the first United States President to be born in a city, to go by his initials, first to leave the country during his term of office, he was the youngest President, he was the first to win the Nobel Peace prize, first American to win any Nobel Prize, first President to own and automobile, first to do down in a submarine, first to use transatlantic cable to send diplomatic messages, first to grasp the potential of publicity and the burgeoning mass media, and first to dine with an African-American in the White House, among many other firsts. He was an author, naturalist, historian, conservationist, hunter, imperialist, and progressive, among other things. Clearly, these were revolutionary times, and clearly Theodore Roosevelt represented a new force in American politics. The world was changing, that is, being changed, ever more radically and seemingly at an increasing pace, by the economic and political forces of capitalism and liberalism. The early part of the 20th century saw the emergence of a unified national market in America, mostly through the agency of the consolidation of firms. The world most of us today consider "modern" was quickly coming into being, with all the attendant social dislocation and duress for those on the bottom o the social hierarchy.[3]

Teddy, like Tiberius Gracchus, had a Patrician upbringing, enjoying the benefits of upper-class privileges. They both entered politics in a time of high corruption, high economic prosperity, as well as constitutional transformation and crisis. Both also had a popular political orientation. Teddy Roosevelt championed many progressive causes during his tenure as President, resulting in many important benefits for working-class Americans. Teddy fought corrupt political machines, tired to get a "Square Deal" for the American people, who he saw as too often being taken advantage of by predatory capitalists. Lastly, like Tiberius Gracchus, Teddy's main political nemesis can be summed up in a single word, trusts. This was the height of the age of the Robber Barons, and of the monopolistic consolidation of America's largest industries. Much like the times of Tiberius Gracchus, the era of T.R. was one of economic prosperity, but mainly for the wealthy. There was a widespread sentiment that the benefits of industrial capitalist society were accruing principally to one class, namely, the capitalists. The predations and manipulations of the giant trusts, reported often in the increasingly frenzied world of competition between newspapers, were perhaps the most glaring symbols to many of this fact. That this problem of trusts and their growing power was recognized can be seen in the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890.

After the close of the Civil War, American capitalism came increasingly into maturity.[4] It was in this period that some of the most famous as well as infamous names of American business history tread the scene. This was the era when the likes of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Fisk, Gould, Vanderbilt, and later Ford, dominated the business world, and constructed their corporate empires. As American capitalism continued to mature, this process of maturation quickly became characterized by the large-scale consolidation of firms in many of the nations' largest, and most important, industries; e.g. railroads, steel, banking, and oil. By the turn of the twentieth century this process was far along in its work, and yet still not finished. The consolidation of individual wealth at the apex of the income scale, and of the ownership of firms via ownership of stock, in the hands of the so-called "captains of industry" gave these men near total control of the American economy from top to bottom. These new large-scale monopolistic firms were able to determine, almost at will, workers' wage hours, and benefits; they determined the prices consumers -especially urban ones- paid for almost everything they bought; they set the rates the farmers had to pay to ship their produce to market, thus determining in large part the earnings of farmers.

Theodore Roosevelt was without a doubt America's most popular President since Abraham Lincoln. Not only did the development of mass media, and a national market for such media, make whomever was going to be a President in this era more accessible to journalists, and thus to the American people, but Teddy in particular connected with the American people in deeper way. Perhaps it was his blend of east and west, or his combination of patrician background and working-class energy, that endeared him so much to the populace. His legacy in the American imagination testifies to the lasting impact he made on the American social and political psyche. The sheer volume of his personal correspondence over his life also testifies to the interest, and indeed fascination, he inspired in many. His landslide victory in the 1904 election also shows how taken Americans, from all across the nation, were with Roosevelt.

And yet, Roosevelt was an avowed patrician. He was a seventh generation New Yorker whose family originally immigrated to New Amsterdam in the middle of the 17th century and prospered. Over generations Theodore's forebears made a fortune, which they successfully passed on to their descendants. This money was made by practices, or in industries, which would be dis-tasteful to modern sensibilities, to say the least. In particular, the trade in sugar was the source of much profit for the early Roosevelts. The almost unfathomable human suffering entailed in the production of sugar on European sugar plantations in the Caribbean is well-documented.[5] Teddy was educated at Harvard, where he had a servant to attend to him, and was elected to one of its most prestigious clubs. He was quite conscious of his elite status, refusing to allow journalists to photograph him playing tennis as he thought it a rich man's pastime, or at least, thought voters would see it that way.

And, just like Tiberius Gracchus, this deeply patrician individual took up a popular political orientation, and challenged the political and economic power of established elites. Now, Roosevelt did not have to legally renounce his social status as Tiberius did, but he nonetheless faced vigorous resistance from elites whose power he was threatening. In the New York State Assembly, as Governor of New York, and as President of the United States, T.R. fought often for reforms which would benefit working-class people, often in the face of opposition from bosses in his own party. During his time in the New York State Assembly, that Roosevelt could be so aloof from the bosses that controlled the party political machines testifies again to his patrician status, as he did not need the pecuniary favors and inducements party bosses used to maintain discipline and loyalty. After his tenure in the Assembly, Teddy served as a civil service commissioner appointed by Benjamin Harrison, where he fought the spoils systems. So scrupulously did he do his work that Grover Cleveland asked him to stay on at his post, despite Roosevelt being a Republican. In 1895 he was appointed one of three commissioners charged with reforming the NYPD. In 1897 party bosses facilitated his appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy so as to prevent him from returning to politics in Albany.

As President, Roosevelt continued to champion progressive causes, and win important victories for those not of elite backgrounds, and with elite means. This was the essence of the "Square Deal" he campaigned on in 1904, favoring neither the rich nor the poor, neither capital nor labor. He thought that the government should certainly not redistribute wealth or property, but it also should not align itself with the elite and aid them in preying on the poor. It is in this spirit one can see his efforts towards legislation like the expansion of the national parks system and the creation of the United States Forrest Service, the Pure Food & Drug Act, the Antiquities Act, the Meat Inspection Act, and the Hepburn Act. Also in this spirit one must see T.R.'s trust-busting actions. During his term in office the old Rough Rider initiated at least forty anti-trust actions, the most notable of which being his break-up of J.P. Morgan's Northern Securities Trust, which effectively controlled the nation's railroads, and Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust, which effectively controlled the refining of oil. Lastly, and very importantly, Roosevelt was the first President to formally recognize organized labor, by including the voice of organized labor in labor disputes; something which appalled the more patrician elements in American society.

Of course, Roosevelt's progressivism had limits. He was not anti-business, he was not in principle against the large corporations. Roosevelt thought that large-scale firms, like the trusts, might be useful, but needed to be regulated so that they did not take advantage of consumers. He was a friend to business, and to transnational capital insofar as he successfully completed the Panama Canal, the importance of which to modern capitalist globalized world-economy cannot be overstated. Roosevelt's actions in the case of the Brownsville riots demonstrate the limits of his racial progressivism. He may have invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him in the White House, but he discharged all the black soldiers accused despite a Texas grand jury not returning indictments against any for lack of evidence. T.R. was also an unabashed imperialist; fighting in Cuba during the Spanish-American war, supporting the subsequent U.S. occupation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, as well as supporting the annexation of Hawaii, and announcing the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Also, similarly to the elder Gracchi brother, Theodore Roosevelt would resort to the threat of constitutional crisis to achieve his ends. One must note that unlike Tiberius, Teddy only threatened constitutional crisis, never quite pushing beyond the bounds of constitutional legality and forcing a full-blown political crisis. And, like Tiberius, Teddy was accused of expanding executive authority at the expense of more constitutionally appropriate bodies. The title of Edmund Morris' biography, Theodore Rex, testifies in part to this perception of Teddy as a usurper of Congress' powers, as someone acting more like a classical Greek Tyrannos, as opposed to a Basileus. One salient example is found in the Coal Strike of 1902. Heading into the winter coal miners' went out on strike for better wages and hours, and recognition of their union. The mine owners refused to meet with the miners, or even listen to their demands. A national crisis of immense proportion was clearly in the offing if no resolution could be found.

Expanding the role of government, Teddy decided to intervene in the dispute. Intervening at all in a labor dispute in this era meant doing so in support of the workers, as the lassiez-faire policy which had dominated was an implicit, if not sometimes very explicit, choice to side with owners. Thus, intervention at all in this case meant the de facto recognition of organized labor's political legitimacy. In the face of the owners' continued recalcitrance T.R. threatened to turn an economic and political crisis, into a full-blown constitutional crisis. If the mine owners would not accede to Teddy's request to submit the dispute to federal mediation, Teddy claimed he would take over the mines and use the army to run them. Roosevelt did not have the explicit constitutional power to do this, even if he could have in practice carried out this threat, which he probably could have. The issue with this move was the appropriation of private property for public purposes without due process, or without just compensation, as required by the constitution. Whether or not Roosevelt could have gotten away with this move if it had made it to the Supreme court, which it almost certainly would have had Teddy followed through on his threat, is unclear and beside the point.

In the face of Roosevelt's threat, the mine-owners caved in and accepted federal mediation. The resulting settlement averted a national crisis, and saw the workers win a 10% pay increase and a nine-hour day. In the end, the threat of a constitutional crisis was enough for Teddy to achieve what he wanted despite the organized resistance of an economically, and thus also politically, powerful clique. Two years later, after Roosevelt's re-election, he once again threatened a constitutional crisis, but not intentionally. His resounding victory in 1904, and his continuing national popularity, gave many observers a good reason to think he could handily win another election in 1908. The issue in this case being that of the political precedent of Presidential term limits, which was an informal constitutional practice until codified into law after the death of Franklin Roosevelt. T.R. could have argued that since he merely finished out the term of the assassinated William McKinley, his first term was not really his, and thus he could run for President in 1908 perfectly legally. Whether this argument would have stood up with the Supreme Court, or with American voters, we will never know. Rather than force such a constitutional crisis, Roosevelt committed political suicide by announcing on election-night that he would not seek another term as President.

During his 1912 run for President under the Bull Moose banner there was an attempt on Teddy's life;. However, unlike that against Tiberius Gracchus in 133 B.C., it was not was not organized, lacked elite support, and thus was not successful; indeed, the attempted assassination was carried out by a man, John Flammang Schrank, who claimed to be inspired by the ghost of William McKinley. The potential mental instability of the would-be assassin notwithstanding, he was angered by what he saw as Roosevelt's tyrannical hunger for power, as evidenced in his bid for an unconstitutional third term. Despite having certainly made enemies among the wealthy and propertied elite of America, however, as much as he stretched the law or the limits of his powers, he didn't push the existing order into full-blown crisis. Like most other early 20th century 'progressives', Teddy was for gradual reform as a way of preventing a larger, potentially disastrous, social revolution. Though he fought against the abuses of the capitalist system, its replacement was nowhere on his agenda. Like Tiberius Gracchus with his land reform, Theodore Roosevelt sought not to radically alter an economic and social system, but to alter it so as to make it generate a more broadly-based prosperity. This was the aim of T.R.'s anti-trust actions, as well as the progressive items on his domestic policy agenda.

Facing the Forum

In 123 B.C., ten years after the assassination of his brother Tiberius, Gaius Sempronius Gracchus embarked on a political career by following closely in his brother's footsteps. Gaius renounced his Patrician status, by a legal process called transitio ad plebem, in order to be elected Tribune. As Tribune, just like his brother, Gaius was a Popularis, continuing Tiberius' un-finished programme of land re-distribution. Also like Tiberius, Gaius' actions as Tribune made for him many enemies among the optimates of the Senate, whose distaste for Tiberius would have ill-disposed them to Gaius from the beginning. And lastly, just like his brother, when Gaius pushed the Senate too far, threatened their power and privilege too much, they accused him of trying to become king, Rex, and they assassinated him.

Picking up the political legacy established by Tiberius, Gaius was a reform-minded politician who advocated for the needs of 'the Roman people', the same people referenced in the slogan "SPQR". Gaius supported increasing the rights of Plebian Roman citizens, as well as granting citizenship rights to more of the Italian allies. He continued to work of the land commission established by his brother. That Gaius could make political hay with the same economic and political issues as Tiberius had, shows that the fundamental problems in Roman society had not be addressed in the decade between the Tribunates of the Gracchi brothers. Indeed,

"The ten years which separate the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus from his brother form a sort of twilight interval, such as sometimes separates two important periods of history, full of half-articulate cries, broken lights, and shadows of great events to come. Much is begun, nothing is ended, and the course of events seems to hang in suspense, as if in waiting for some master-hand to give the decisive impulse". [6]

Gaius popular political orientation can be seen in his effort to found a colony on or near the site of the former Carthage, a colony he was to call Junonia, after the goddess Juno. While Tiberius mostly confined himself to the issue of the monopolization of land, and his programme of land redistribution, Gaius was far more wide-ranging in his attempts at reform. He introduced significant reform measures into the judiciary, the military, and the economy. He tried to limit the power of the Senatorial class by transferring some of their judicial powers to the Equites, or Knights, trying to drive a wedge between these classes. In the military, Gaius passed laws requiring the state to clothe and equip soldiers, reduce their term of service, and he forbade the conscription of boys under the age of seventeen. He also introduced price-controls for wheat, in effort to limit and regularize the price of bread, the main staple of the diet of the Plebs Urbana. Indeed, as if the Senate would not be hostile to Gaius already on account of their disgust with his brother, as well as the reforms he himself proposed, Gaius introduced what seems to us on its face a minor reform. This was a reform whereby, against long-established custom, speeches would now be delivered while facing leftward instead of rightward. By having speeches delivered while facing the Forum, the meeting place of the Plebian Assembly, instead of the curia, the Senate's meeting house, Gaius was delivering a none too subtle message to the Senate about where he thought power in the Roman state resided.

That the Senate felt threatened by Gaius after his first term as Tribune can be seen clearly in their recruitment of a political stooge to do their bidding in the Plebian Assembly, one Marcus Livius Drusus. It can also be immediately perceived in their use of propaganda - a new development at this time- against Gaius Gracchus by the optimate class, while he was away supervising his colony at Junonia. In the first case, the Senate used Drusus to out-do, or one-up any legislation proposed by Gaius Gracchus. If, for example, Gaius proposed to get increased rights for the Italian allies, the Drusus would propose a bill with even more generous rights and privileges, e.g. immunity from 'scourging', i.e. flogging, by a Roman military commander, or ability to appeal the sentence of a Roman magistrate. If Gaius wanted to settle 1,000 people in colonies, then Drusus would propose settling 3,000 people in colonies, et cetera.[7] Drusus even passes a law cancelling rents.

In the second case, the Senate's hostility to Gaius can be seen in the malicious rumors playing on Romans' superstitions that were spread far and wide in effort to cast Gaius' colony, as well as his person, as cursed. Gaius' enemies wanted to try to turn the people away from Gaius, to make him less popular, and therefore less powerful, by making him out to be impious, by insinuating that the many ill omens surrounding Junonia were clear signs of the dis-favor of the Gods. One might see this aggressive push against Gaius by the Senate as their having learned something of a lesson in under-estimating Tiberius' audacity and ambition, and being conscious about not making the same mistake with Gaius. They feared, and perhaps not so unreasonably, that Gaius might be planning to use his new North African colony to stage and then launch an invasion of Rome, in revenge for the Senate's murder of his brother; for which only a few nominal executions of relatively minor Senators took place.

Gaius, like his brother Tiberius, pushed the Senatorial elite too far, and forced a violent reaction from them. Arch-Patrician Scipio Aemilianus intervened in the early part of Gaius career to undermine the Gracchan land commission by transferring the commissions' powers to the Consul, effectively ending land re-distribution. Senatorial hostility and use of propaganda rendered the long-term success of the Gracchan colony at Junonia doubtful at best; indeed, the colony only survived for 30 years. Questions about the feasibility of practicability of Drusus' proposals notwithstanding, for it is unclear where he would or could have acquired the land necessary to settle such a large number of colonists, the people took the bait, and Gaius found that his power had been diminished. Upon his return to Rome, Gaius mis-read the political climate and took the provocative action of moving his residence to the Aventine hill in Rome, the well-known long-time strong-hold of the Populare faction. After he failed to win a third Tribunate, largely through the machination of his political enemies, many of whom held important political posts, the stage was set for a confrontation.

After his return to Rome in 121 B.C., and the deterioration of his political position, Gaius became increasingly wary about his personal safety and hired a bodyguard. The Senate would have seen both Gaius' moving to the Aventine and his hiring a body-guard as highly provocative actions. To the Senate, they were certainly not the kind of honorable actions befitting an up-standing and law-abiding Patrician Roman citizen. They looked like the action of a dangerous radical, who, like his brother before him, threatened to cause disruption to the pattern of business as usual for the Senatorial aristocracy. For Gaius, cognizant of his brother's fate, these were reasonable measures of self-protection. Unfortunately for Gaius, his bodyguard got into a drunken fight with a slave, who happened to be a servant of the sitting Consul, as a result of which the slave was killed. The Senatorial elites lost no time in spinning this incident into a conspiracy to kill the Consul which had only barely missed its target. This obviously could only further exacerbate the hysterical paranoia among the Senate directed against Gaius Gracchus, and deepened the elite's sentiment that this was a dangerous individual.

With a number of his political enemies elected to prominent political positions, including one Lucius Opimius elected Consul, in addition to Livius Drusus as Tribune, the time had come for the elites to try to un-do the mischief wrought by Gaius Gracchus. On the day set for the repeal of much of his reforms, this Opimius sent an attendant to perform a sacrifice. Let us not forget that religion and politics were far less divorced than they are now. On his way back this servant, Quintus Antyllius, carrying the entrails of the sacrifice tried to push his way through a crowd. Most accounts agree that it was Quintus Antyllius' efforts to get through the crowd, composed of supporters of both Gaius Gracchus' faction and Opimius' faction that sparked a row between the groups resulting in Quintus' death. On Plutarch's account, it was Quintus' rudeness in pushing through the crowd that caused the Gracchan supporters to attack him. According to Appian, Gaius' supporters mis-understood his dis-approving countenance when approached by Quintus as a sign to act.

The death of Quintus Antyllius gave Opimius and his optimate faction all the pre-text they needed to mobilize against Gaius Gracchus. Here was a man who, like his brother before him, had renounced his Patrician status to obtain a political career pandering to the Plebians and freedmen. He had rocked the boat by continuing his brother's land reform project, but then moved much beyond that issue to make sweeping changes to the Roman constitution in many areas. He had founded a colony on cursed land and persisted in building it despite many ill omens - a potential staging point for an invasion aiming at an anti-Senatorial coup de etat. Gaius had shown his contempt for the Senate in giving speech facing left, and moving to the Aventine hill. He had acted openly, through his political reforms, to acquire power for himself at the expense of the Senate. He had allegedly plotted to kill the Consul with his bodyguard, was rumored to be involved in the death of Scipio Aemilianus, had appeared to sanction the impious action of his followers in killing Quintus Antyllius. In the eyes of the Senatorial aristocracy, Gaius Gracchus was clearly a very dangerous man, from a now suspect family.

The Senate mobilized the next day behind the Consul Opimius, to pass a declaration of martial law, called a senatus consultum ultimum, and to seize Gaius Gracchus and put him on trial; the eventual outcome of which no one, least of all Gaius, would have been in doubt about. After a few unsuccessful attempts at making peace, unsuccessful largely because the Senatorial faction refused anything but unconditional surrender, Opimius led a well-armed group to confront Gaius and his supporters, who had barricaded themselves on the Aventine hill. After a brief skirmish most of Gaius' supporters fled or were killed. The encounter was so brief largely because Gaius' supporters were mostly Plebians, and they were very likely to be less well armed, and especially less well-armored, than their opponents. We are told that Gaius' supporters were armed mainly with the spoils of the Gallic campaign of the former consul, and Gracchi supporter, Marcus Fulvius Flaccus. Having not taken part in the fighting, and having refused to arm himself with anything but a small dagger, Gaius fled the scene. After being hotly pursued as he tried to make a desperate escape across the Tiber River, and with no options remaining, Gaius instructed his slave to kill him rather than be taken alive by his enemies; suicide being a more honorable death in the eyes of an upper-class Roman like Gaius Gracchus.

A final note about the Gracchi is important. Like many popular politicians there are questions about whether the Gracchi were real reformers, or whether they were simply using the power of the Plebian Assembly to advance their own political careers and objectives. Are the Gracchi simply power-seekers, or were they more akin to social revolutionaries? Most likely, they are somewhere in between. The Gracchi provide another first in this regard. They form one of the earliest links in a long chain of aristocratic elements taking the lead in the fights of slaves, serfs, and proletarians over the ages for a society based on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Individuals in this lineage have always faced such charges. For example, Fidel Castro and his revolutionary cohort in Cuba faced such charges in the 20th century.

A New Deal and a Second Bill of Rights

We could easily imagine, and not unreasonably so, that Gaius Gracchus looked up to and was inspired by his elder brother Tiberius and his political career. We know for certain, thanks to documentary evidence, that Franklin Roosevelt looked up to and was inspired by his fifth cousin Theodore and his political career. And, just as the younger Gracchi took up the spirit of his brother's political ideals, so too did the younger Roosevelt adopt the spirit of his cousin's progressive political ideals. Where T.R. offered Americans overwhelmed by the size, scope, and pace of modern industrial society and the enormous corporate entities that controlled and profited from it a "Square Deal", F.D.R. offered Americans crushed under the weight of the most colossal episode of market failure yet recorded, the Great Depression, a "New Deal". The metaphorical deal had to be new with F.D.R. since the political and economic environment had changed so dramatically in the interval between his cousin's Presidency and his own. In offering such a deal, Franklin became the most popular President since his cousin; even winning the largest electoral victory in American history up to that point in 1936, taking forty six out of forty eight states.

Like his cousin Theodore, Franklin Roosevelt had a distinguished Patrician pedigree. He was raised on his family's aristocratic country estate, Springwood, in Hyde Park New York. Franklin received the kind of education one expects for the scion of a Patrician family. He was first educated by private tutors at home, then attended the prestigious Groton School, and after that, Harvard. His ancestors on his mother's side, the Delano family, were a very wealthy Huguenot family that had been in, and prospered in, America even longer than the Roosevelts. Even his childhood pastimes, much like T.R., bear the marks of upper-class privilege. The young Franklin collected stamps, coins, and books; did photography; hunted and collected bird specimens. And yet, also like his cousin Teddy, Franklin adopted a distinctly popular political orientation, challenging the power of elites, and threatening constitutional crises in order to push through legislation he thought necessary. The many public works and employment programs enacted, and experimented with, during the New Deal era demonstrate this concern for the plight of working Americans. F.D.R.'s lasting political legacy, adored by some and loathed by others, testifies to the significance of his impact on American society. It was under his watch that Congress passed, for example, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Wealth Tax Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the National Industrial Recovery Act. He also created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve Board.

Franklin Roosevelt, idolizing his cousin T.R. as he did, followed closely in his political footsteps, just as the younger Gracchi brother had. Franklin was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1910, where tried to emulate his cousin's anti-establishment politics, fighting the Tammany Hall machine bosses that still dominated New York politics. He followed Teddy again when he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Then in 1920 he was tapped by the Democratic Party to be the nominee for Vice President. As his political career was gathering much momentum, despite the Democrats losing the 1920 election, F.D.R. was to leave the scene, much as T.R. had done after the death of his mother and wife. Where Teddy headed west to be a cattle rancher, Franklin was to be afflicted with polio. In this way, Franklin once again imitated his cousin and hero by enduring a period of, metaphorical, political exile. F.D.R emerged again later to win the Governorship of New York in 1928. It was in part his term as Governor, and part the effects of the Great Depression, that positioned Franklin Roosevelt to be the Democratic Party's nominee for President in 1932.

In 1929, the Great Crash, as it came to be known, changed the political and economic landscape of America in ways no one was prepared for. In the aftermath of the Crash there was however near universal agreement about who had caused it, and who was to blame. Wall-Street, the banks, and speculators were all the target of a raging torrent of public obloquy. The scope of this tsunami of condemnation is in its own way a measure of the scope of the crash itself, and the social an economic dislocation that followed in its wake. In 1929 unemployment in the US was about 3%; by the later part of 1932 it was 25%. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined precipitously. It was $87.4 billion in 1929, but by 1933 it had fallen to $39.7 billion. Workers' earning fell from $50.8 billion in 1929, to 29.3 billion in 1933. In 1929 there were 25,000 banks in the US, but by 1933 there were less than 15,000. Between 1929 and 1932 farmers lost about 2/3rds of their income. Most strikingly 3/4th of the people eligible for assistance were unable to obtain any. [8] Homelessness, starvation were widespread, suicide rates rose dramatically. These figures provide some idea of the scale of the crisis produced by the Crash of 1929 and its aftermath.

As if the economic crisis was not enough, Roosevelt also had to confront the growing threat posed by fascism. This threat posed more than one problem for Roosevelt. Not only did the militarism of Italy, Germany, and Japan threaten peace and security, but their example threatened further political instability in America. At a time when the American economy was in dire straits, as were many of the leading European industrial economies, the economies of fascist Germany and Italy, and of the communist Soviet Union, were performing much better. These examples, combined with the economic and political tumult brought on by the effects of the Depression, made fascism and communism, seem like very real alternatives for America. The idea of dictatorship, or of dictatorial powers, was not universally, or unambiguously negative in the eyes of many Americans. Before the out-break of the war, Italy and Germany were not reviled enemies, but potent competitors with a radical new model of political-economic organization, one that was turning in a better performance than the economies of the leading democracies in a time of globalized economic depression. A reporter is said to have commented to F.D.R. about the New Deal that because of it he'd go down in American history as the best President or the worst President. F.D.R. is said to have replied something to the effect of, "no, if I fail, I'll be the last President". This statement provides some insight into how real the threat of fascism and communism felt, even in the highest reaches of American government.

As President, Franklin Roosevelt inherited a chaotic, and indeed dire, social and economic situation. In response, he undertook decisive, and in the eyes of critics radical, action in order to lift the economy out of the depression. In so doing he saw himself as trying to save American capitalism from itself, and thereby save American democracy. Though in the end it was war production that brought the American economy back to life, and to prosperity, Roosevelts' pre-war efforts to combat the Great Depression are not one bit less heroic. Though he enjoyed unprecedented popular support, he also faced much resistance to his proposals from established elites. Like his cousin, Franklin was accused to over-reaching executive authority, of radically altering the constitutionally ordained relationship between the state and the economy, and between the state and its citizens. Many in the American aristocracy felt that the "New Deal" Franklin Roosevelt was offering the American people was far too generous, and involved far too much government intervention, to the point that he was accused of being a communist, or a dictator. This is especially true in regards to the National Labor Relations Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board, and the Social Security Act. The first provided a federal guarantee of workers' right to organize and to bargain collectively, the second provided important benefits for the retired and the unemployed. This conviction that Roosevelt was a despotic tyrant was only confirmed when he stood for and won a third, and then later a fourth, term as President, in contravention of one of America's most revered informal political traditions.

Under the influence of new thinking in economics, especially in macro-economics, in particular the work of John Maynard Keynes, Roosevelt and his advisors designed a myriad of programs and initiatives designed to prime the economic pump by putting money in the hands of workers. Where T.R.'s "Square Deal" aimed only to prevent business from unfairly trampling the consumer, Franklin's "New Deal" aimed beyond just assuring fairness, and towards more directly improving workers' level of material welfare. The alphabet soup of New Deal agencies and administrations testifies to the extent of the efforts undertaken by the Roosevelt administration to fight-off the Great Depression. Thus we have, for example, the T.V.A., the P.W.A. the W.P.A., the C.C.C., the F.E.R.A., the C.W.A., the F.S.A., and the R.E.A., among many others. Some programs or policies were more successful than others, and F.D.R. showed a great deal of pragmatism in moving from one to another, and when one failed, he simply tried something else. His radical expansion of government, in terms of its size, the scope of its powers, and the fields of its action, earned Roosevelt and his "New Deal" the undying enmity of many American capitalists. They saw his expansion of the scope and scale of government intervention in society as unconstitutional, as un-American, and even as a communist take-over. His New Deal employment programs were seen as re-distribution of wealth and his push for increased regulation as an abrogation of private property.

In order to enact his reform programme F.D.R. had to threaten a constitutional crisis, his well-known "court-packing" plan, that is, formally, the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. The Supreme Court had been working to undermine his attempts to enact the kind of legislation needed to being economic recovery, relying heavily on its decision in Adkins v. Children's Hospital. In response, Roosevelt threatened to add several new justices to the court, one for every current justice over 70 years of age. The implication was very clear. If the court did not stop undermining Roosevelt, he would pack the court with judges who would vote the way he wanted, and thus over-ruling the recalcitrant conservative jurists. If seems very clear that Roosevelt could have followed through on his threat, and had such legislation passed through the Congress if he needed to. The issue in this case is less Roosevelts' ability to do what he threatened, or even the legality of this tactic. The issue has more to do with the spirit of democracy and of the constitution. The threat Roosevelt made certainly appears inconsistent with the spirit of democratic governance, and respect for its mechanisms. His ends may have justified his means in this case, as the threat of fascism was indeed very real at the time, but his threat certainly would seem to violate the spirit of fair play in a democratic polity. We will never know now what might have happened if Roosevelt had carried out his threat. The Supreme Court would no doubt have weighed in, and thus the stage would have been set for a confrontation between the executive and legislative branches and the judicial branch.

Out of this experience, both his own and the nation's, with the Depression and then the war, came Roosevelt's commitment to the idea of a second Bill of Rights. This would have been Roosevelt's most significant reform to the U.S. constitution, the introduction of social and economic rights into the American constitutional order. Had he lived longer he might have seen more of his idea brought to life. As it is, several aspects of his proposal for a second Bill of Rights have become part of the American constitutional order in the form of what Cass Sunstein calls "constitutive commitments". For example, social security is not a constitutional right, and yet any politician, from any either current party, would be hard pressed to get elected calling for such a policy, or, if elected, to get such a policy passed through the Congress. Discrimination on the basis of sex, for instance, is not explicitly forbidden in the Constitution. However, the constitution has been so interpreted that such a prohibition is today considered consistent with, necessary for, or even implied by, the rights enumerated in it. Indeed, as Sunstein argues, if not for the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 the American constitutional order would contain social and economic rights. Nixon, as President, was able to appoint several justices to the Supreme Court, and as a result, to stop the Warren Court's momentum toward recognition of the kind of social and economic rights outlined in Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights.

Part of Roosevelt's vision with the second Bill of Rights was to guarantee the exercise of democratic citizenship. The age-old republican principle that economic dependence make for political subjugation, was clearly at work in F.D.R.'s thinking.[9] "Necessitous men are not free men", Roosevelt once said, thus, providing for all citizens to have access to the most basic necessaries of life is the essential pre-requisite for the exercise of democratic citizenship.[10] In order for a democracy to truly flourish, citizens must be liberated from what F.D.R. called "fear" and "want".[11] Persons who do not enjoy the freedom from fear or freedom from want could never fully realize the ideal of democratic citizenship. Such a Bill of Rights, the inclusion of social and economic rights in the constitutional order, would very obviously be anathema to American oligarchs, who would deride such an inclusion as socialist re-distribution of wealth, as the subsidization of the idleness of the lazy by the industriousness of the productive. That many American aristocrats, and optimate politicians, still decry the New Deal as the death of the American republic, shows just how radical were Roosevelt's actions, and how radical they were perceived as being by contemporaries. We know, for example, how shocked and traumatized the Athenians were during the Second Peloponnesian War, because in the surviving literary sources, it is constantly referred to as the worst thing to have ever happened to anyone. [12] The continuing enmity against Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal from some elite quarters likewise demonstrates the depth of feeling of people at the time. The same could be said about Southern elites in regard to Abraham Lincoln and his actions during the war and for imposing the Reconstruction regime.

Legacies

In thinking about the political legacies of both the Grachhi and the Roosevelts, one, I think, very striking similarity that jumps to mind is that all of them left their political work unfinished. All envisioned, and attempted to enact -with varying success- significant changes in the constitutions of their societies. All reacted strongly against large concentrations of wealth and power -both economic and political- that left the vast majority destitute and all but formally disenfranchised. In the case of the Gracchi since the problem was caused by the latifundia their reforms was focused first on land redistribution, and only later on about issues like extension of citizenship rights.

In the time of the Roosevelts, the problem was the trusts, the large corporations, and the immense concentrations of financial and productive assets they controlled; and also with the social, political, and economic power that control bestowed. Thus, the Roosevelts' reforms were focused in the first phase on trust-busting and consumer protections, and then in the second phase on unemployment relief, social security, and labor rights. While Theodore Roosevelt was the first President to give organized labor a voice at the bargaining table. Franklin Roosevelt formally codified labor rights into law as President. Yet, despite the success both pairs of politicians undoubtedly did have, they all left - or were forced off- the scene before their work could be completed.

We know Tiberius' work was left undone, given that he was violently assassinated, and his land commission effectively neutered after his death. Moreover, that his brother Gaius could make a political career, ten years later, on many of the same issues, shows very clearly that the same problems existed, and that Tiberius' reforms were not sufficient to address the full scale of the problem. Much of the reason for this was that Tiberius' reforms were systematically undermined by the optimate faction after his assassination. Though it would have been politically dangerous for the elites to immediately abolish Tiberius' land commission, they did the next best thing, they defunded the project. The Senate was able to deprive Tiberius of sufficient funds to effectively administer the project while he was alive, and then to tighten the purse strings even further after his murder. Later on, in 129 B.C., most of the powers of the commission were transferred to the Consul. The dithering allowed by this maneuver enabled the Senatorial elites to in-practice halt the work of the land commission.

That Gaius was forced, in the end, to choose between suicide and a violent assassination, shows that he was also forced off the scene while his reforming project was not fully consolidated, let alone finished with its work. Again, moreover, that Gaius Julius Caesar later on also made a political career with many of the same political issues as the younger Gracchi, shows once again that the underlying dynamics causing the problem had not been remedied. Perhaps, if the Gracchi had been successful their reform project, there never would have been a Caesar. Nonetheless, it was not until 118 B.C. that Tiberius' land commission was formally dissolved. Then in 111 B.C. even the rents that owners of public land were supposed to pay were abolished, effectively completing the privatization of the ager publicus. Thus, the legislation of both the Gracchi was in the main repealed formally, or informally undermined. All Gracchan reforms were ultimately cancelled under the ultra-conservative constitution imposed by Sulla and his proscriptions, and enforced by his client-army.[13]

Teddy Roosevelt himself thought he left his work unfinished, and that he quit the scene too soon. He regretted almost immediately his decision on election-night in 1904 to not seek another term. In exchange, his party did allow him to pick his successor. T.R. had much confidence in William Howard Taft when the latter took office. Taft would however prove a disappointment to Teddy. This was one reason, among others, that Theodore Roosevelt decided to run for President again in 1912, his now famous "Bull Moose" campaign. T.R. may be remembered as a trust-busting President, and indeed he was quite active; at least relative to other Presidential administrations, both before and after. However, T.R. was not an anti-business politician, not even an anti- corporate politician. He was a progressive, and fought business leaders, and the "captains of industry", but he was not anti-capitalist. He may have busted some trusts, may have slowed the development of some others for a time. But, that the Crash of 1929 happened shows very clearly that the reforming work of T.R. was not finished; even if it was capable of adequately addressing the problems in the American economy that ultimately caused the Crash.

That right-wing politicians today continue to gripe about the New Deal, and the "welfare state" it created, demonstrates without a doubt that F.D.R.'s work was left unfinished. Towards the end of his Presidency he advocated for a second Bill of Rights, which would include social and economic rights. Though this proposal formed one the major bases of the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and as a result an important part of dozens of national constitutions around the world, only small parts were adopted in the United States. His experience with the Great Depression had convinced Franklin Roosevelt that these social and economic rights were essential. They were needed to alleviate the massive human suffering caused by Depression induced unemployment and deprivation. They were also necessary to guarantee a secure foundation upon which citizens could depend, and thus achieve the kind of liberty needed to exercise democratic citizenship. This, very obviously, has not developed; quite the opposite in fact. But that the legacy of the New Deal and the proposal for a second Bill of Rights are still controversial shows that the transformative work F.D.R. begun had also not yet been fully consolidated, and was not yet fully finished.

Conclusion

The crisis of 1929-1945 was a watershed event, not only in American history, but in world history. It was responsible for unleashing perhaps the largest wave of suffering the human world has ever seen; I am including in this wave the Cold War of the subsequent period, and its attendant proxy wars and "disappeared" dissidents; I am also including in this wave the undeclared war of "underdevelopment" that kills through malnutrition and treatable diseases. This crisis occasioned some of the largest movements and exchanges of populations, both voluntary and involuntary, and their attendant cultural mixing. These were extraordinary times, unprecedented times, to the people living through them.

In 1932 A.D. Franklin Delano Roosevelt began a project of radical constitutional change, expanding the powers of the federal government and the executive branch, in response to an extreme crisis. This is much the same as what Tiberius Gracchus did in 133 B.C. in response to the economic crisis of the Roman republic after the Punic Wars. Both were derided as dictators during their careers. Both had their work attacked by factions of the aristocratic elites of their societies. In the long-run, both had big parts of their work undone by political opponents. Like the Grachhi then, could the Roosevelts' political careers be the signal of a new phase in the development of the American republic? Are we heading, like the Romans of the Gracchi's era, towards the destruction of the republic?

If we can venture one broad conclusion, it is that plutocracy and extreme concentrations of wealth foment crisis. And, it is out of moments of crisis that revolutions emerge. Often times, revolutions which are not successful are followed by reaction. Reaction, especially in the ancient world, could be extremely cruel, as the aftermath of the repression of the Gracchan revolution demonstrates. Worries about vast accumulations of wealth undermining democracy also underlay the 'progressive' political agendas of both Roosevelts. And, just like the Gracchi, attacking these concentrations brought unceasing scorn upon both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt from the elites, but adoration from the masses.

Ancient historians like Plutarch, Livy, Dio Cassius, Cicero, Appian, Tacitus, and Polybius all have distinct upper-class biases. And all roundly condemn the Gracchi as political 'adventurers', as radicals using unconstitutional methods, and as largely responsible for getting themselves murdered. Modern historians, who typically share an upper-class bias, differ more in opinion, but there remain many who decry the Roosevelts as closet-socialists who radically changed the American constitutional order for the worse, in effect undermining the American republic. Conversely, just as the Roman people had erected statutes of the Gracchi brothers throughout Rome, so too during the Depression did people -often with few material possessions and living in ramshackle housing- hang up pictures of F.D.R.. Moreover, Franklin Roosevelt's role as victorious wartime leader - in a war that made his nation a super-power - blunted much of the vitriol some had had toward Roosevelt because of his New Deal policies before the war.

This bring us back to our original question, or questions: Are the Roosevelts the American Grachhi?; If they are, What does this mean for the American republic?; Should we be looking out for an American Marius, or an American Sulla? What would either of these even look like in the 21st century? It was less than a century after the death of Gaius Gracchus that Caesar was himself assassinated, and we are now drawing up closely towards a century since the New Deal era. Perhaps the ancient world and the modern world are too different to draw meaningful parallels? I don't necessarily have the answers to these questions. My main goal was simply to pose the first question about the American Gracchi. I leave the rest of the questions be conjectured about by the reader.

Notes

[1] For excellent resources on Roman history for this period see; Havell. H.L.. Republican Rome. 1914. Oracle Publishing, 1996. Also see; Scullard, H.H.. From the Gracchi to Nero. 1959. 5th edition. Routledge, 1982. Also see; Parenti, Michael. The Assassination of Julius Caesar. The New Press, 2003. Also see; Titchener, Frances. "To Rule Mankind and Make the World Obey". Portable Professor Series. Barnes & Noble Audio; 2004.

[2] Quoted in; Parenti (2003), 61.

[3] For excellent resources on the life and political career of Theodore Roosevelt see; Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. Random House, 2002. Also see; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. Dir. Ken Burns. PBS, 2014. Also see; Brands, H.W.. T.R.: The Last Romantic. Basic Books, 1998.

[4] For an excellent history of this period, up to 1900, see Brands, H.W.. American Colossus. Anchor Books, 2011.

[5] See; Abbott, Elizabeth. Sugar: A Bittersweet History. The Overlook Press, 2011.

[6] Havell (1914), 367.

[7] Colonies were a great tool for the Romans to relieve social pressure accumulating among the Plebs Urbana at Rome. Being re-settled in a colony gave the colonist a second chance, which many wanted, even at the cost of re-settlement far from Rome, the idea of which would have abhorred a true Roman. This was thus an easy way for politicians to win acclaim and popularity with the people.

[8] These stats come from Sunstein, Cass. The Second Bill of Rights. Basic Books, (2004): 36-38.

[9] I mean "republican" in the classical political sense here. The republican tradition has a long history in political philosophy. Excellent modern work in this tradition has been done by Philip Petit. See Republicanism. Oxford University Press, 1997.

[10] Sunstein (2004), 90.

[11] These are two of F.D.R.'s "four freedoms". See Sunstein (2004), 80.

[12] See; Hanson, Victor Davis. The Other Greeks. 1995. University of California Press,1999. Also see; Hanson, V.D.. Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece. University of California Press, 1998.

[13] Proscription is a process whereby Roman citizens were declared 'outlaws', 'traitors', or 'criminals' by the state, i.e. the Senate. Once a citizen was declared a criminal they effectively had a bounty put out on their head. If one was a victim of proscription, one would have twenty hour hours to either flee or face trial; the outcome of this trial would not be much in doubt. In response to proscription many Roman citizens chose suicide. This was because if they either fled or were convicted in court their property would be forfeited to the state. Thus, in order to keep property in the family, many proscribed individuals chose suicide to exile or execution.

The Science of Corrosive Inequality

By Nick Partyka

Pictured: "Sharing the Wealth" (Oil on Canvass 66" x 48") by Mark Henson

As the Presidential campaign season begins to get into full-swing, inequality will become a prominent topic, and misleading conventional narratives will abound. Both the presumptive nominees of the two major political parties have addressed this topic at length already, and will certainly have much more to say as the general election phase kicks-off. Inequality is a prominent topic because we are still dealing with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis that spawned the Occupy Wall-Street movement, which did much to put the issue of economic and political inequality back on the table for discussion. This is why the topic came up in the 2012 Presidential election cycle, and why during this election cycle one candidate in the Democratic Party's primary was able to attract a very large following by focusing predominantly on this issue. The success of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump shows that the issue of inequality, and its various social, political, and economic effects, still resonates deeply with large portions of the electorate on both sides of the mainstream partisan divide. This is the case, principally, because a great many non-elite Americans are still living with the economic consequences of the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession.

Inequality, political and economic, not only helped to inflate the bubble whose bursting caused the crash, but it also determined in large measure who benefited from the bailouts and the "recovery". Rising inequality from the 1970s on helped funnel more and more wealth to the top of the income scale. These people spend their money very differently from others. When this group has surplus income, they are very likely to purchase financial instruments. As more and more wealth was channeled into their hands by the economic and political policies of neoliberalism, as championed by the likes of Reagan and Thatcher, the demand for financial products grew correspondingly. Further, after the financial sector was deregulated in the late 1990s, this process of financialization only picked up speed. Once home mortgages were securitized, that is, made into financial instruments, the stage was set for the collapse. After the crash, elites used their political and economic clout to divert bailout funds from America's proverbial 'main streets' to Wall-Street. This, combined with fiscal policy choices, that is, the choice by bourgeois politicians not to use it as a tool to combat unemployment, is why the so-called "recovery" has not extended all that far down from the top of the income scale.

In order to know what kinds of solutions are necessary to address the problem of inequality it is important to know what kinds of problems it produces, as well as their scale. Scientists and scholars studying inequality, and its various impacts, have revealed a number of striking conclusions about the nature and extent of the social, political, and economic, impacts of inequality. When taken together these various research results paint a very clear picture of the corrosive effects of economic inequality on society, economy, and democratic politics. The totality of these wide-ranging effects constitutes a significant threat to a society aiming to be democratic and egalitarian. In what follows, we will examine some of these interesting studies and their results to see what they reveal about the multifaceted impacts of inequality on persons, societies, and democracy. What we will find is that the scale of the problem far outstrips the scale of most of the mainstream solutions proposed; even those put forward by the self-proclaimed (though quite incorrectly)"socialist" candidate in the Presidential primaries.

Piketty on Inequality

It seems a safe bet that few would have predicted the overwhelming success that a hefty tome on economic inequality by a French economist would achieve in the spring of 2014.[1] The 2011 Occupy Wall-Street movement did much to bring the issue of economic inequality in society, as well as its many social and political effects, into the public consciousness, as well as into political debates. Nevertheless, Thomas Piketty's book, and its success, caught many totally by surprise, and set off a vigorous debate, and vitriolic reaction, upon its translation into English. Both liberals and radicals pointed to his work as evidence, as confirmation, of what they have been saying for many years. On the other side, conservatives seemed wither to accept his findings, but dismiss his policy suggestions, or to find technical "flaws" with his data or methodology as a way of undermining all his conclusions. Using mainly tax-return records, from several countries, Piketty's work presents the most comprehensive view of the historical evolution, and structure, of income inequality throughout the industrialized world. Several highly significant, and well-established, conclusions result from his research.

First, Piketty confirms empirically several notions the left has asserted, namely, income inequality in the United States has returned to a historic high level, and it has been rising since the 1970s. The level of income inequality in the United States, especially the growth of incomes at the very top of the income spectrum, has, according to Piketty, revived the social significance of capital in the 21st century, and is bringing back the more patrimonial economy that dominated earlier centuries, until the period between 1914 and 1975. That is, once dynamic and equalizing societies are now increasingly reverting to the kinds of more rigidly defined, and largely hereditary, social relationships and attitudes that dominated the economy and society of the Gilded Age, as well as preceding centuries.

Second, and very importantly, Piketty's research provides much needed context for perceptions of growth, both of capital and wages. What Piketty's historical research reveal is that average annual growth rates, even in this most recent and most fecund epoch, are actually rather small. Average annual growth rates for the most productive societies, in the most productive era, are still only about 1 - 1.5% per annum. Capital, on the other hand, has grown on an average of 4-5% per annum over the same historical period. This observation gives rise to one of Piketty's fundamental conclusions, namely the law (r>g).[2] This law is the biggest source of divergence in market economies, because it directly implies that a capital, however small, will with time invariably become a large capital; exogenous shocks, natural catastrophes, and acts of God notwithstanding. What this law also implies, and very significantly, is that the economic and social landscape of the mid-20th century is an economically and historically unique, and likely non-replicable period.

Why did economic inequality decline in the United States during the middle part of the 20th century? Piketty's answer is that this decline was largely the result of the confluence of historical events, namely the World Wars and the Great Depression. It is the historical conjuncture of these events in this period, as well as the political and social response to them, that accounts for the uniqueness of this era. Piketty's fundamental law (r > g) was able to be broken in this period because of the exigencies of combating foreign military foes and domestic economic woes. One of the most significant results of the efforts to combat both is that working people in the Unites States accumulated during the war years the largest stock of disposable income ever. It was the spending of this money, as well as exploiting the United States' position as global hegemon, that fueled the post-war economic boom up until the mid-1970s. When the economic effects of the 1914-1945 period wore off, inequality began to rise again.

Inequality & Social Mobility

One of the major implications of Piketty's conclusions was on the topic of social mobility in the United States. Many on the left have been arguing for some time that social mobility in America is much lower than commonly thought, and Piketty's data on inequality seems to support just such an argument. If economic inequality in a society is very high, and growing, then social mobility is likely to be low. The reasons for this are that as economic inequality increases, so the economy comes to be more and more patrimonial, and thus economic divisions come to settle more and more into sharp caste divides. This is, of course, because in a capitalist society, income determines the extent of an individual's, or a family's, ability to consume, that it, their income determines the range of their consumption choices.

One thing Piketty's work demonstrated clearly was just how stark income inequality is in America. What he also, very importantly, showed that the growth of inequality in the United States since the 1970s is due principally to the rise in the incomes of the wealthiest 1%, and .1% of income earners. [3] This increasing concentration of wealth among the wealthiest certainly bodes ill for high levels of social mobility. One of the main features of a patrimonial economy is that, at least from the point of view of social mobility, it is not dynamic. Piketty appeals to interesting evidence from 19th century Victorian literature to demonstrate this fact. In a highly patrimonial economy the ability of individuals at the very bottom of the economic scale to advance into the "middle-classes", let alone into the top 10% or 1%. A patrimonial economy also makes it very easy for those who have accumulated wealth to be fairly confident of never falling below the "middle classes", if one falls out of the elite classes at all. One of the most striking features, at least to modern readers, of Piketty's use of the economic evidence in Victorian novels, is that with conservative management an accumulated fortune is unlikely to be dissipated, and thus to be transmitted to the next generation.

The notion that classes, or castes, define American society is anathema to many pundits and commentators. Thus the vigorous attempts to rebut, dispute, and discredit Piketty's work and conclusions. This image of a patrimonial economy does not square well with the cherished nostrum of capitalist society as dynamic and highly socially mobile. To some extent this belief in mobility is evidenced in empirical studies. What these studies often compare are the economic, or educational, outcomes achieved by parents and their children. What they reveal is a strikingly low-level of social mobility, at least as defined by the "rags to riches" mythos of America. Indeed only .2% of those born into the bottom 20% of the income scale will end up rising into the top 1% of income earners. And, as one might expect, the picture is more bleak for persons of color, and other marginalized groups.

What some researchers found is that the picture of social mobility in America is much more complex than simplified narratives from right or center-left suggest. The reality for the majority of Americans is rather fluid, in that people enjoy bouts of relative prosperity and affluence, as well as bouts of relative poverty and deprivation. If such a picture of social mobility were not shocking enough, research taking a different tack suggests that social mobility is actually much lower that the picture presented by inter-generational studies mentioned above, and has been very low throughout history. [4] Economist Gregory Clark studied the prevalence and endurance of 'elite' surnames in elite institutions as a way of measuring social mobility with societies.

Using a variety of sources, including Census records, tax returns, death records, graduation records, and others, Clark makes a case that the rate of social mobility in the United States is much lower than contemporary estimates suggest. He argues that the common perception of very slow long-term mobility is more accurate than the estimates presented by social scientific research. For the case of the United States, Clark first identifies certain elite surname groups, as well as underclass surname groups. Then, he looks to test the prevalence of both groups among occupations identified as high status. Clark uses membership lists, mainly from professional associations, of doctors and lawyers as the high status occupations. Among the elite surname groups in America Clark lists Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, what he calls the 1923-1924 rich, and pre-1850 Ivy League graduates. The underclass groups are black Americans, and a groups Clark terms New French settlers. What his research concluded was that elite surnames show a very strong persistence, between 0.7 and 0.9, over the long-term, that is, for Clark, at least three generations.[5]

Another very interesting body of research suggests that humans have innate physiological and physiological reactions to the particular stresses induced by scarcity, by having less than is needed to make ends meet. Researchers found that these reactions impair humans' long-run decision making faculties, even if boosting short-term focus, resulting in patterns of behavior that lead the poor to be likely to remain in poverty. [6] The experience of scarcity causes people to 'tunnel', that is, focus on immediate goals and concerns, and thus to neglect many other important goals or other things one values. While this focus does yield an important benefit in increased productivity, the long-run consequences can lead to what researchers call a 'scarcity trap'. As one tunnels in on pressing immediate goals, the things that fall outside ones view are neglected, and thus become shocks as they suddenly appear on the tunnel of the person experiencing scarcity. As one reacts to each successive shock, even when "shocks" are predictable and routine events, one resorts to increasingly dodgy schemes to make ends meet. This is how people end up in, and unable to extract themselves from, one or another of the many kinds of scarcity trap.

This is only compounded by the fact that the experience of scarcity imposes a kind of tax on humans' cognitive capacities, such that as scarcity increases one comes to have less and less of the most important mental resources for escaping scarcity. Will-power is a finite resource, and the effects of scarcity are such that this resource is heavily depleted by scarcity, and the tendency of humans to psychologically obsess about their deprivations. Moreover, scarcity erodes intellectual capacities, in some studies the effect was the equivalent of as much as 13 or 14 IQ points. Thus, as scarcity taxes one's cognitive capacities, shocks continue to arise, and one must constantly react, always seemingly one step behind. Thus, one will end up making poorer, more impulsive decisions that meet short-term needs, but at the expense of the individual's long-term goals and interests. Scarcity, in this way, perpetuates scarcity, leading people to remain locked into debt and poverty. Unfortunately, even when poor people do escape poverty, or debt, they often fall back in because they lack any kind of buffer or cushion. The truth is that the poor tend to stay poor because of the physiological and psychological effects of the experience of scarcity, and the rich tend to stay rich because of the effects of abundance.

Inequality and Personality

Beyond its effects on the rates of social mobility, and how this affects people's lives, inequality also seems to change who people are on a deeper level. Inequality has some interesting, and disquieting, impacts on what people think, their attitudes, their moral values, their perceptions of situations and of other people, and more. Wealth, or the lack thereof, impacts on individual's personality in many ways. It directly provokes the question of whether the wealthy and the poor are qualitatively different sorts of persons, or whether they are constructed that way by their social environment. The results of empirical research suggest that the experience of inequality, from the top or the bottom of the economic scale, has profound effects on our personalities. The clear implication is that our personalities are in some very significant ways shaped by the contingent realities of the social environment.

In the wake of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, and its aftermath, came much scorn, and condemnation of Wall-Street's recklessness and greed. The Great Recession brought increased scrutiny to the 1% as a class, and to the mis-deeds and cupidity of the finance industry and financial institutions in the lead-up to and during the 2007-2008 Crisis. The treatment of the whole matter by the federal government angered many citizens, and further fueled the public's fury and indignation. One of the threads that emerged from this storm of vitriol that was poured on Wall-Street bankers was comparing corporate CEOs to sociopaths. The callousness, selfishness, and nonchalance with which many in the financial industry profited from the crash which they themselves had both created and precipitated, even as others were being fired en masse, made many Americans think of corporate CEOs as basically sociopaths. Some pundits took this to the logical conclusion and compared clinical symptoms of sociopathic behavior to the characteristics of successful CEOs. As it turns out, a growing body of empirical research is suggesting that the wealthy are indeed very different from others, e.g. morally and emotionally, as a result of their wealth.

A series of creatively designed studies by researchers Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner, Michael Kraus, Stephane Cote, and a host of collaborators, has revealed some very interesting results about the moral and emotional differences of rich people from persons of lower social class. Piff and Keltner, et al , demonstrated in both naturalistic and laboratory settings that those of higher social class, i.e. the wealthy, are more likely to lie, cheat, steal, and break the law than their counterparts in lower social classes.[7] On the naturalistic side, they found that wealthier drivers, as determined by the model of the car, were more likely to illegally cut-off both other drivers at intersections and pedestrians at crosswalks. On the laboratory side, they found that in experimental simulations those of higher social class, even if artificially created, were more likely to lie, cheat, and steal in order to win prizes. Moreover, in experimental simulations, even those whose position of wealth and dominance had been engineered as part of the experiment, showed the signs of feeling entitled to their totally un-earned wealth. Other research found that those who had attitudes characteristic of social dominance were found to be more likely to come to feel entitled to their position in the inequality hierarchy, or to believe the "legitimizing myths" of inequality. [8]

Other studies have produced similarly striking results. One study showed that lower-class individuals were more "empathically accurate" than their wealthier counterparts. 'Empathic accuracy' here refers to the ability of persons to correctly judge or predict the emotional states of others. [9] They hypothesize that since poorer people have to rely more on others to get by, they become more accurate at judging other people's emotional states, since their success in obtaining cooperation depends on managing the emotions of others. In another study, Kraus & Keltner demonstrated that the wealthier subjects in their experiments were less likely to pay attention to others, as demonstrated by a prevalence of "disengagement cues", e.g. looking at one's cell phone while others are talking.[10] A further study revealed that the wealthier subjects were more likely to have a predominance of "self-oriented affect", that is, the rich are more likely to think about themselves before others. [11] In yet a further study, Stellar, Keltner, & colleagues, demonstrated that wealthier subjects were not only slower to feel compassion, but reported feeling less compassion, for others experiencing suffering.[12] Higher social status individuals were also shown in one experiment to be stingier than their less wealthy counterparts.

Inequality, in addition to warping the perceptions and sensibilities of the rich, also distorts the perceptions of the working-classes. Kraus, Piff, and Keltner found in one study that those of lower social class position were more likely to favor contextual explanations over dispositional ones, because of a perceived lack of personal control over the outcome.[13] This means that poorer people tend to explain, or rationalize, their own choices, or the events of their lives in terms of external causal factors, that is, factors over which they as individuals do not have control. This perceived lack of control is characteristic of how researchers Melvin Kohn, Carmi Schooler, and their collaborators, understand the concept of alienation.[14] Their research demonstrated important connections between inequality in levels of alienation between high and low status groups in the workplace. The difference between the high- and low-status positions in the workplace roughly matches the colloquial "blue collar", "white collar" distinction, where the latter type of jobs contain an abundance, and the former a paucity, of opportunities to exercise "occupation self-direction", that is, control over their work. Each of these groups was found to have a distinct set of values and social orientations associated with it.

The correlation between the social stratification position of lower-status workers within the firm, and the personal values, social orientations, and psychological functioning that predominate among these workers is troubling.[15] The results obtained by Kohn and Schooler, et al, demonstrate that the more alienated low-status group are more likely to have specific set of values, attitudes, and social orientations. In particular, more alienated, "blue collar", workers tend to take on personality traits like authoritarianism, conformity to authority, resistance to change, and a focus on the letter rather than the spirit of the law. This is in turn related to the lower levels of psychological functions, or intellectual flexibility, observed among the high-alienation, low-status workers. This research also shows that the observed connection between these traits and social-stratification position within the firm are mediated by the division of labor in the typical capitalist firm, whereby the low-status workers are denied opportunities to exercise self-direction at work. Of course, we should note that an individual's social-stratification position with the firm is in many ways correlated with, and even determined by, that individual's social class in society generally. This latter is not a conclusion issued by the research we've been discussing, but rather a more general observation about the fit, under capitalism, between low-status persons and those who perform the low-status work in society.

One very telling, and worrisome, result of the work of Kohn and Schooler, et al, is that alienation experienced in the workplace spilled over into the non-work life of workers, effecting their leisure time preferences. The rate of interest in discussing non-political matters was found to be consistent across both the high- and low-alienation groups. However, interest in discussing political topics was distinctly lower among the high-alienation group. Moreover, the intellectuality of the preferred leisure time activities among highly alienated workers was seen to be much lower than among their counterparts in the low-alienation group. As a further kind of informal test, the researchers conducted their survey in two separate parts. One part of the survey covered non-political topics, the other political topics. After controlling for Swedes' cultural tendency to comply with researches requests, they found, quite suggestively, that the political part of the survey was returned later on average by the high-alienation group. This specifically political withdrawal by the high-alienation, low-status workers will have profound implications for the well-being of political democracy.

Inequality & Health in both Individuals and Societies

A growing body of research in public health has shown that economic inequality is highly related to certain significant socials ills, e.g. high levels of violence, as well as higher rates of illness and early death among those of lower class position in society. Building off this work on the "social determinants of health", Richard Wilkinson presents an argument that societies with more inequality are also, e.g. less trusting, less cohesive, less sociable, more prejudiced, and more violent. [16] He begins by noting an apparent paradox. Modern societies are more wealthy and productive, and with more luxuries readily available, than most of our ancestors would have ever dreamed. He cites the example of indoor plumbing and hot and cold running water as luxuries often taken for granted. And yet, modern societies also appear rife with unhappiness, e.g. high rates of suicide and depression, illness, violence, and early death. Wilkinson links the sources of these manifestations of unhappiness with economic inequality and its social, as well as physiological, effects.

Wilkinson's work successfully showed that almost all the social problems that are indicators of unhappiness, are more concentrated in poor areas, and more common among poor people. He argues that, as a result of the "epidemiological transition", the most common causes of death for all in developed countries shifted from infectious diseases to degenerative diseases. What he found is that health is graded by social status, that is, largely by income. His results demonstrated that as income increased so did health, according to a range of metrics, and vice versa. He appeals to a range of studies to help show that social problems indicative of unhappiness are caused by the same sources of stress as chronic diseases. Wilkinson points to three main categories of psychological risk factors, namely, early childhood social and emotional development, being more socially isolated, and high or low social status.

As inequality in a society rises, Wilkinson argues, the social relationships of that society increasingly become characterized by relations of dominance and subordination, that is, by increasing social distance. The more this latter is the case, the more the sense of autonomy, or of self-direction, decreases for the proverbial have-nots as their dependence on the haves increases. In Wilkinson's causal mechanism, increased inequality leads to increased competition for social status, and subsequently the adoption of anti-social values and attitudes as people become more detached from and less reliant on others. These latter values progressively erode social relations and community life, and thus contributing to the social problems afflicting society. Basically, the psychological factors that create unhappiness, produce ill health and other social issues through increases in stress associated with inequality, and deprivation. For, indeed, as Wilkinson acknowledges, the connection between economic inequality and ability to access consumption goods will play a large part in explaining the connection between inequality and ill health.

On the one hand, inequality makes societies less healthy. For example, one study based on data from the U.S. General Social Survey by Kawachi and Kennedyet al, Wilkinson cites, demonstrates that states with higher inequality were less trusting than in more equal states. [17] Two studies by Robert Putnam and colleagues, one conducted in the U.S. and the other in Italy, found that the strength of community life varied with the level of inequality. The more inequality there was, the less likely people were to be involved with social, or civic organizations or activities.[18] Building off others' data for ten U.S. cities, the more inequality there was the more hostility three was.[19] Moreover, as Wilkinson notes, there are more than fifty studies showing a relationship between inequality and homicide rates.[20] Other studies have shown that higher rates of economic inequality were related with increased racial prejudice, as were lower social status for women. [21] Lastly, but by no means least, studies have shown that where inequality is greater political participation decreases, when participation is measured by propensity to vote.[22]

On the other hand, inequality also makes individuals less healthy, resulting in the early death of those on the short-side of social inequalities. All three of the main psychological risk factors for unhappiness and stress, and thus illness, that Wilkinson identified are directly related to economic inequality. Pre-natal and early childhood stress have been linked by studies to a range of later life health problems. The scientific evidence points to the stress hormones like cortisol as an important influencing factor.[23] Social isolation, that is, lack of embeddedness with a robust network of friendships, and other social connections, has been shown to be related to higher mortality rates. [24] Low social status has also been shown to be related to higher rates of mortality. What may be the most striking thing about what some of the research in this area suggests that, yes the material conditions attached to poverty matter, but that the position of inequality, of subordination and deprivation, itself produces negative consequences for health.[25]

Compounding these effects of inequality on health is the visibility of inequality, which research has found further increases inequality. [26] Subjects were experimentally manipulated into higher and lower status groups, the higher the status the more the initial endowment of the participant. The subjects participated in a game designed to test their choices given specific incentives. Basically, the experiment consists of a turn-based game where fake money is waged. The participants can choose to act cooperatively, i.e. contribute to a common pool or bank. Alternatively, players can also choose to act selfishly, and defect from cooperation, and thus gain more money for themselves than if they had cooperated. The outcome of each round depends on the choices of each of the players, and each of the player's choices effects the choices of each of the other players. The researchers found that when the levels of inequality were more visible in these experiments the outcomes of the games were more unequal distributions of wealth than in games where the levels of inequality were invisible to the players. If the visibility of wealth increases inequality in the distribution of wealth, then it stands to reason that, given the link between inequality and social health, visibility of inequality will exacerbate the negative health effects of inequality.

Inequality is Anti-Democratic

I am in deep agreement with Wilkinson when he asserts that the surprise should not be so much that inequality is as harmful to ourselves and to society as it is, but rather that we should have forgotten this. For, indeed, when we look back into the history of our modern democratic political culture, we see that the concern about economic, and thus social and political, inequality has been a major one. Both the ancient Greek and Romans had important laws, not always scrupulously abided, that limited land ownership by individuals. The idea behind these laws was to attempt to preserve a wide distribution of land-ownership, because owning land and political and social independence were linked. Indeed, in ancient minds, the former was the necessary material foundation of the latter.[27] For the Greeks , someone who depended on another for work, for a livelihood, would be thought of as an unreliable citizen. This was because the relationship between employer and employee, patron and client, is one of domination and subjugation. If one's ability access important subsistence goods hinges on the disposition of another, then one is unlikely to oppose that other politically; especially in a time when political debate and voting was done face to face, and in public. The rise of patron - client relationships was in part responsible, in the case of the Romans, for the fall of the republic.

Consider the classic slogan of the French revolution, "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité", or liberty, equality, and solidarity. As Wilkinson rightly notes, each one of these values, is a demand, and is addressed or related to inequality. We've seen already that inequality lead to subordination, which is the anti-thesis of democratic political relations. Solidarity has to do with our understanding of social relations themselves, and their quality. A robust democratic culture must maintain a certain level and quality of social cohesion, built on relationships that affirm liberty and cooperation. We've see already that research shows that as inequality increases the quality of social relations decreases, importantly, inequality was found to decrease levels of participation. Equality can thus be seen as the basic pre-condition for liberty and solidarity. This is because of the importance of the material bases of liberty and solidarity, and the link between access to these material bases and income. Thus, the most essential foundation of any democratizing reform must be a change in the distribution of levels of access to the material pre-requisites of a decent life, the enables substantial political participation.

Inequality is also anti-democratic because it skews the outcome of public political deliberative institutions and processes, as well as "competitive" elections. A recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated that that the majority of the U.S. electorate had little or no control over the legislative outcomes of their "democratic" institutions. That is, as their research shows, there is no statistically significant connection between the preferences of the majority of voters and the legislative outcomes of their political institutions.[28] The wealthiest elites have a statistically significant lead over the rest of the American citizenry in the likelihood of their preference being realized in public policy and law. The recent Citizens Untied ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court only further entrenched the role of money in the contemporary American political system, by legally equating money with speech. It is very likely because people perceive the way that their political elites serve economic elites and their interests much more than those of the proverbial "common man". This is also very likely behind the deep decline in voter participation in America over a period of many years. It is also almost certainly part of why other research found that a full one third of survey respondents replied "not at all" when asked, "(H)ow democratically is your country being governed?"[29]

Conclusion

Economic inequality is thus highly corrosive of democracy because it limits social mobility, creates ill health and social problems, warps the personalities of those involved in un-democratic ways, and distorts the outcomes of the political process in favor of the wealthy. Inequality lowers mobility and results in more rigid social hierarchies divided by class, that is, by income. The result of this is a society in which a great gulf opens between these classes as their social, political, and economic experiences become increasingly divorced from each other. Further, because of the link between income and consumption, there is a connection between income inequality and health; both in persons and in societies. Inequality makes people more stressed, triggering physiological reactions, that when sustained over long durations produce consequences leading to more illness and earlier death. Inequalities in societies, in particular inequalities in income, resources, and opportunities, help produce unhealthy social maladies like increased violence and crime, reduced levels of compassion, higher levels of hostility, reduced levels of trust. In essence, inequality tends to decrease social cohesion, and the robustness of participation in community life, leading to increased levels of social isolation. Inequality also leads to the creation of social and economic conditions, and structures of work, under which individuals are incentivized to become persons with anti-democratic values, attitudes, and preferences. Increases in exposure to relationships of domination and subordination lead those subordinated to taken on adaptive preferences, e.g. the specifically political withdrawal noted in the work of Kohn & Schooler et al.

What we can see now is that the responses to the problem, really problems, of inequality are woefully inadequate to address the wide range of maladies created or exacerbated by inequality. Raising taxes on the rich, and spending that money on social programs sounds like an appealing solution. But, from what we have just seen, this strategy is not capable of providing real solutions to the variegated social, economic, and political problems related to high levels of inequality in society. Tackling the problem of inequality will require much more robust measures. What should be clear from what we've discussed here is that the political and economic problems of economic and political inequality cannot be addressed singly or in isolation. Only a comprehensive strategy addressing them all simultaneously will suffice to effect real change. The economic power of capitalists gives them political power, which they use to preserve and even enhance their economic power. Unless the very social and economic foundations of this feedback loop are extirpated, the hold of bourgeois elites on both economic and political power is unlikely to be broken. This is why even a successful "political revolution" would be ineffecti ve in combatting inequality; let alone reversing the four decade old trend towards rising inequality. The only effective means of combatting inequality, and its myriad of detrimental consequences, is the seizure of political and economic power from the capitalist class by a working class that is conscious of itself as a class both in-itself and for-itself.

Notes

[1] Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the 21st Century. Tr. Arthur Goldhammer. The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2014.

[2] In this equation r = average annual rate of growth of capital, and g = average annual rate of growth of income, or output. See Piketty, (2014), 25.

[3] See Piketty (2014); figs.8.5 - 8.10

[4] See Clark, Gregory. The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Princeton University Press, 2014.

[5] See Clark (2014) ch.3.

[6] See Mullainathan, Sendhil & Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. Picador, 2014.

[7] Piff, Paul, et al. "Higher Social Status Leads to Increased Unethical Behavior". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Vol.109 no.11 (2012): 4086-4091.

[8] See Wilkinson (2005), 196.

[9] Kraus, Michael W., Stephane Cote, & Dacher Keltner. "Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy". Psychological Science. Vol.21 no.11 (2010):1716-1723.

[10] Kraus, Michael W., & Dacher Keltner. "Signs of Socioeconomic Status: A thin Slicing Approach". Psychological Science. Vol.20 no.1 (2009): 99-106.

[11] Kraus, Michael W., Paul Piff, & Dacher Keltner. "Social Class as Culture: The Convergence of Resources and Rank in the Social Realm". Current Directions in Psychological Science. Vol.20 no.4 (2011): 246-250.

[12] Stellar, Jennifer, V.M. Manzo, Michael W. Kraus, & Dacher Keltner. "Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Response to Suffering". Emotion. Vol.12 no.3 (2012): 449-459.

[13] Kraus, Michael W., Paul Piff, & Dacher Keltner. "Social Class, Sense of Control, and Social Explanation". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol.97 no.6 (2009): 992-1004.

[14] Kohn, Schooler, and their colleagues take their conception of alienation from work done by Melvin Seeman in the early 1960s. See; Seeman."Alienation and Social Learning in a Reformatory". American Journal of Sociology. Vol.69 no.3 (1963): 270-284. Also see; Seeman, & John W. Evans. "Alienation and Learning in a Hospital Setting". American Sociological Review. Vol.27 no.6 (1962): 772-782.

[15] See; Kohn, Melvin. Class and Conformity: A Study in Values. 1969. University of Chicago Press, 1977. Also see; Kohn and Schooler, et al. Work and Personality. Ablex Publishing, 1983.

[16] See; Wilkinson, Richard. The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier. The New Press, 2005.

[17] Kawachi, I., B.P.Kennedy, K.Lochner, &D.Prothrow-Smith.1997. "Social Capital, Income Inequality and Mortality. American Journal of Public Health. Vol.87 no.1: 21-32.

[18] See; Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster. 2000. Also see; Putnam, R.D., R. Leonardi, & R.Y. Nanetti. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton University Press, 1993.

[19] Wilkinson (2005), 51.

[20] Wilkinson (2005), 47-50.

[21] Kennedy, B.P., I. Kawachi, K. Lochner, C.P. Jones, & D. Prothrow-Smith. "(Dis)respect and Black Mortality. Ethnicity & Disease. Vol.7 (1997): 207-214. Also see; Blau, F.D. & L.M. Kahn. "The Gender Earnings Gap - Learning from International Comparisons". American Economic Review. Vol.82 (1992): 533-538.

[22] See Mahler, V.A.."Exploring the Subnational Dimension of Income Inequality". Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper 292, January, 2002. Also see; Blakely, T.A. B.P. Kennedy, & I. Kawachi. "Socioeconomic Inequality in Voting Participation and Self-rated Health". American Journal of Public Health. Vol.91 no.1(2001): 99-104.

[23] Wilkinson (2005), 81-85.

[24] Wilkinson (2005), 78-81.

[25] Wilkinson (2005), 73-76. Also see; Shively, C.A., & T.B. Clarkson. "Social Status and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis in Female Monkeys". Arteriosclerosis & Thrombosis. Vol. 14 (1994): 721-726.

[26] Nishi, Akahiro, Hirokazu Shirado, David G. Rand, & Nicholas A. Christakis. "Inequality and Visibility of Wealth in Experimental Social Networks". Nature. Vol.526 Oct., (2015): 426-429.

[27] See; ; Havell. H.L.. Republican Rome. 1914. Oracle Publishing, 1996. Also see; Hanson. Victor Davis. The Other Greeks. University of California Press, 1999.

[28] Gilens, Martin & Benjamin I. Page. "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens". Perspectives on Politics. Vol.12 no.3 (2014).

[29] See World Values Survey Wave 6 (2010-2014).

The Price of Utopia: Abundance & Injustice

By Nick Partya

This is the third part of a multi-part series on "The Value of Utopia."

Part One: The American Tradition of Radical Utopianism

Part Two: The Bosses' Utopia: Dystopia and the American Company Town

On The Value of Utopia

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates it most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place, is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort on need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. What is so valuable about thinking about utopias is that it allows us to both critique present societies, but also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must be first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

One important value of utopian thinking is that it permits one to think about themselves in relation to society, their place in the social order, to reflect on basic commitments and values of their societies, to consider the proper aims of their society. Few take time to consider the basic structure of the societies they live in, few notice the myriad of inter-connected systems of coordinated behavior, sometimes voluntary sometimes coerced, that create the often seamless appearance of the regularity and orderliness of society. In order for society to reproduce itself, certain kinds of work must be performed, and the more complex the society, the more sophisticated the system of internal coordination required to successfully reproduce the necessary elements of that reproduction. It is the duty of citizens to confront this basic structure, this way that society re-creates itself, and once confronted, one cannot help but adopt a moral attitude toward this basic structure. Utopian thinking allows us to think about our most basic moral orientations toward society and its mode of reproduction.

Ursula Le Guin's short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, offers an excellent opportunity for such reflection. [1] The main point of describing this utopian society as she does is to pose to the reader the questions, Would you stay or go? The point is to make the reader confront a moral dilemma, and test their moral intuitions, to see what kind of a person the reader is. The analogy to the dominant capitalist world economy is very clear. And the question posed in each case is very stark, How comfortable is one with enjoying a prosperity predicated on the intentional creation of suffering and injustice? This question is a kind of test, wherein one's answer reveals s deeper elements of one's character. In some ways the moral dilemma Le Guin constructs is similar to that in Robert Nozick's famous experience machine thought example. Nozick imagines a virtual reality machine that could be programmed to give you any set of experiences you wanted. You could live your ideal life in a virtual space that is identical to the real world in all sensory respects, one might think of the popular film The Matrix. Every five years or so, you would be woken up, so to speak, and asked if you wished to continue. Nozick asks, would you choose to stay in the machine, or not. If you choose not, the implication is that this must be because you value things other than hedonistic physical pleasures. One's response to this dilemma reveals something about one's underlying character, and in this case, what one values.

The Ones Who Walk Away

When Le Guin first introduces the reader to the town of Omelas an ostensibly important festival is set to begin. And people from a network of communities are making the journey to Omelas to participate in this festival, such is its importance to the community. The town is full of dancing, music, and gaiety. Young and old, everyone is joyful, thankful for the prosperity of the community, and everyone indulges in delicious food, festive music and dancing, as well as amiable conversation with family, friends, and neighbors. The residents are described as amiably conversing with each other, while various processions move through the city towards a field outside of town. In this field a kind of ceremonial horse race is to take place as a key part of the festival being celebrated. Le Guin describes a quaint, well-kept town by a bay, and with bountiful fields stretching out beyond. The general impression of this festival, and of the town celebrating it, is unmistakably one of universal joy and celebration of prosperity and abundance. What comes to mind is the New England, or Pacific Northwest fishing town on the coast. Indeed, 'Omelas' in reverse is 'salem O', and the town of Salem, Oregon is where Le Guin resides. In one's mind, one conjures the image of the kind of bucolic small town, the aesthetic of which many Americans continue to crave and to drape themselves in, and which loom so large in the American cultural imagination. The image conjured here is of the kind of place many Americans would associate with a "simpler" time, with a more virtuous and un-corrupted country both physically and morally.

And indeed, Omelas has many characteristics which have been typical of utopian communities since the time of Thomas More. The reader is given the impression of Omelas as an egalitarian, and democratic community, one that eschews violence, hierarchy, luxury, and avarice. The reader is told that in Omelas there are no police, no military, no wars, no civil conflict, there are only a few simple laws and so there is no need for lawyers, and there is full gender equality. The citizens of Omelas reject significant aspects of the capitalist economy, its structural imperative towards endless growth; its self-destructive pursuit of extreme luxury and decadence; its relentless exhortations to consume; its rationing of access to consumption goods by income. In Omelas, in contrast to the dominant characteristics of capitalist societies, there is no poverty, no homelessness, no one goes hungry, no one lacks medical care, access to education, or to productive employment. Everyone enjoys enough leisure time to be able to cultivate their talents, so that the arts, and other cultural productions, thrive in Omelas. The people of Omelas are rational people, spiritual without being rigidly moralistic, e.g. they seem to be less obsessed with guilt and shame the same way the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions are, or about the same things. The prevalence and acceptability of public nudity, at least during the important festival, is a sign of a less repressive, more enlightened attitude towards body image and sexual morality.

Early on in Republic Glaucon and Adiemantus disagree with Socrates about his initial characterization of the best kind of community. Socrates describes a simple society with few needs, and Spartan sensibilities about décor, utensils, diet, et cetera. This kind of life, where virtuous people subsist on their "honest cakes and loaves" fails to appeal to Socrates' younger interlocutors, who insist on adding important elements to the ideal city, elements necessary for living the best kind of life. Yet, introducing these elements of luxury creates all the social and political problems that the Philosopher-Kings have to be created to solve. So too does Le Guin understand that when it comes to utopia, tastes will differ. Thus, while she offers important details, and creates a vivid impression of the life of the community at Omelas, she leaves much of it open ended, so as to suit individual tastes. She can do this since, what she wants is to get the reader to imagine Omelas in whatever way they need so as to think of it as the ideal kind of life, and the ideal kind of community. If an orgy would be necessary to make Omelas appealing enough to attract some, then add one in is Le Guin's attitude. Prefer less technology, less urban hustle-&-bustle, a more abstemious community, then so it is. Prefer the opposite of these, then that's fine too. For those who like intoxication, Le Guin describes Drooz, a kind of wonder-drug that offers all the appeal of psychotropic substances without being habit-forming or destructive to the body. She is also happy to have beer in Omelas. Omelas is to be the home of all good things, in whatever measure one thinks appropriate.

Yet, Omelas is not the place that many will have imagined it to be thus far. There is a dark side to the prosperity of Omelas. In the basement of one of the buildings in the town there is certain room. It is small, dark, and dank. The room has a bare dirt floor, a small window covered in grime and filth, and a couple of rusted buckets and old mops fouled by rot and mold. This is a room most do not visit, but that everyone in town knows about and thinks about. All things being equal the dilapidated condition, and lack of maintenance for this room would be unremarkable. Yet, all other things are not equal in this case. This is because a child lives in this room behind a locked door, and has lived in this room all its life, and will live the entirety of its life in this squalid little room. Periodically someone comes to empty the buckets filled with the child's excrement, and re-fill the child's water and food bowls. As one might imagine, as any child raised in such conditions, the child in this room in Omelas is malnourished, intellectually stunted, cannot read, write, has no conception of the world beyond that basement room. In short, the child lives a horrible and degrading life, full of deprivation, fear, and isolation. And to top it all off this child is as innocent as any, there are no circumstances that might be adduced to mitigate the sympathy the reader very likely naturally has for the child.

When each citizen of Omelas comes of age, between eight and twelve years old, they are told about the room, some even go to see the room. All are fully aware that there is a causal relationship between the child's suffering and the town's prosperity. Le Guin never specifies what this mechanism is, and does not need to. First, this is a work of utopian fiction, so it is not essential to include this, and second, the point of the story is to pose the reader a moral dilemma, not to describe how this mechanism could work. She is content to leave it to the reader's imagination as to how this causal connection works. Perhaps it is a kind of sacrifice to whatever god exists, or whatever, the details on this point are not essential. Without the suffering imposed on this child the town would not, indeed could not, be the place of joy and abundance that it is.

Some people are unable to live in Omelas, to enjoy its prosperity and abundance, knowing what the true cost of it is. These are the titular 'ones who walk away'. Sometimes the young children who go to see the child do not adapt to the necessity of its suffering, and they leave the town. Other times older adults, as Le Guin tells us, will suddenly become quiet for a couple days and then walk right out of town. All these people could not reconcile the joy and abundance enjoyed by all but one in Omelas, and the suffering of that one, when the latter is the pre-condition of the former. These people leave Omelas, and never return. Where these people go, the citizens of Omelas do not know. Le Guin tells us it is a place that would be even less imaginable for us than Omelas, a place that might not even exist. Are the ones who walk away going to their deaths? Are they going to a place where they can live without imposing suffering? All Le Guin tells us is that those who walk away seem to know where they are going.

An Omelas in the Modern World?

What makes Omelas unique is that everyone who lives there is acutely aware of the price of their prosperity. And each has made a deliberate and conscious choice to stay. Our modern world is very different from Omelas in this regard. Though not secret, the source of and true price of the material prosperity of those in the so-called "first" world, are usually hidden. Few Western consumers see behind the neatly arranged items on the shelves of their local stores, to the often long and sophisticated chains of interconnected operations that unite the production of raw materials and the consumption of finished goods. This is because many people do not care to know, others do not care how much others have to suffer for them to enjoy the things they want, and also because the large firms which produce these goods deliberately try to obscure the morally dubious origins of the ingredients that make their products possible. If we look at only a couple of some basic products that many people consume on a routine basis will expose the immense quantities of suffering that is produced in order to furnish these products to consumers. We can look to the basic cotton t-shirt, the cellular telephone, and the chocolate bar, for ample evidence of the outsized costs of 'simple' luxuries.

Consider the common t-shirt. They appear ready-made on store shelves, but in fact have a complex history. At every step in the production-process of a simple t-shirt involves many kinds of hidden costs, both human and ecological. Ecologically, cotton is a very greedy crop in terms of water requirements. Devoting vast tracts of land to cultivation of cotton can have serious effects on water supplies. In an era of climate change, when large-scale drought is quickly becoming a significant problem, this strain on water resources will become increasingly problematic. As with other kinds of farming, the use of pesticides and other chemicals to increase crop yields causes problems as it leeches into the water supply. Turning picked cotton into fabric involves a series of complex operations, many dispersed by thousands of miles geographically, and linked by the ability to cheaply ship bulk commodities using fossil fuels. Many of these operations are largely automated. The environmental costs of burning fossil fuels, the main source of energy for the machines that produce yarns and fabric, as well as the ships and trucks that transport the semi-finished product as is progresses through the production process, are well known.

The disaster at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh 2013 brought many in the world face to face with some of the most morally troubling aspects of the production of their clothing. The use of young children in sweatshops, the unsafe and unhealthy conditions in most factories, the low wages, long hours, and abuses by supervisors that workers experience were brought to the attention of a public that is all too eager to look away. The sub-contracting relationships that dominate the garment trade, that large retailers use to shed responsibility for the wages and work conditions of the workers who produce their products, enable a culture of don't ask, don't tell on the part of the retailers and the suppliers. These kinds of abuses have been documented over and over again by NGOs, human rights groups, investigative journalists, et cetera, in the third world countries where most of the world's garment production takes place. And despite the high-sounding pledges made by retailers, the kinds of abuses that lead directly to the Rana Plaza disaster, and many other tragically similar incidents, are still routine practices.

Think about your cell phone. It is probably in your pocket or purse right now, or maybe on a table or desk within one's reach. This item has become so ubiquitous in the last few years that we now taken them for granted. The so-called "smart" phone has established itself with the same ubiquity even faster. Yet, some of the basic components that make these devices work have rather problematic histories from a moral perspective. Most people use their cell phones every day, and hardly ever, if at all, think about the Rare Earth Minerals (REMs) that make them work. The production of these essential components causes much ecological and human damage, in both their mining and refining, as well as their recycling. Elements like Neodymium, Terbium, Cerium, Lanthanum, and Yttrium are all essential materials for making the components that make our "smart" phones work. And they all must be dug out of the earth, and processed into a form useable by industry.

Mining, for rare earths, or merely for gold and silver, is an inherently a physically destructive endeavor, and whole landscapes can be, and have been, wiped away in the quest for what lies underneath. In many poorer countries around the world, where the agents of trans-national capital extract much of the raw materials for their products, regulation is lax and corruption high. This combination leads quite naturally to wholesale environmental degradation through unrestrained avarice, as well as often crude technologies. These same conditions lead to large human costs, as mining techniques are both inherently dangerous, carried out with dilapidated and inadequate equipment, with no safety regulation or precaution, miles from medical help, and undertaken by desperate people willing to take risks others would deem unacceptable; in all too many instances mining work is done by slave labor, child labor, or child-slave labor. Mining is, of course, done differently in different places, and yet even in America mining is a dangerous occupation. Moreover, the use of toxic chemicals, especially mercury for gold mining, also contributes to both ecological damage and ill-health in humans. Once mined, these mineral must be transported, the same way cotton had to be, to the locations where they are to undergo the next stage of their transformation into products one will find in a store. This transportation process, as one that relies on burning fossil fuels, adds to the burden being placed on the earth's ecosystem.

Refining rare earth minerals is not only highly energy intensive, but also causes widespread harm to human beings, as the rare earths are toxic, as they are always found in nature next to radioactive elements. Exposure to radiation effects workers in, as well as the communities surrounding refining facilities. Moreover, irresponsible, if not in all cases illegal, dumping of the radioactive waste products of refining rare earths causes a myriad of health effects on the human beings exposed. In one community in Malaysia near a rare earth refining facility run by an Australian company, residents exposed suffered from a range of ill effects ranging from skin disorders, to high rates of miscarriages and birth defects including blindness, severe retardation, and leukemia.

Most rare earths are mined and refined in China and other Asian countries. Most are then sent to other Asian countries to construct sub-components, which are in turn shipped to another production facility, where they are fitted in larger sub-components, and so on, until all the sub-components reach the final assembly facility, from which the final product is shipped again, and not for the last time, on its way to the final destination on the shelves of local retail outlets. The human costs exacted during the assembly of the various sub-components of the myriad of electronic gadgets and gizmos that dominate our lives are appalling, and the rash of worker suicides at Foxconn factories testifies to the draconian nature of the work regime there. The companies, now notorious, response was to place nets around the factory buildings to prevent workers who successfully made it out the window from dying. Workers in China, and other low-wage, low regulation Asian countries are routinely subjected to brutal treatment, long hours, low wages, unsafe and unhealthy conditions, not to mention predatory behavior by the company in the form of mandatory residence in company housing -often cramped, ill maintained, and lacking basic amenities- the rent for which is automatically deducted from workers' pay.

One might think that the troubles involved in mining and refining could be mitigated if only we all recycled more of our electronics. Yet, even recycling has a nasty after-taste, once one looks into. The net flow of new products is into the developed world, but there is also a reverse flow of obsolete products back to the Asian countries, again predominantly China, from which the rare earths originated. The unfortunate reality is that the recycling process of obsolete electronic from the first world is very crude. Most "e-waste" is shipped, again using fossil fuels, to small Chinese villages where elderly people break down the components by hand, often using little but their bare hands, an open flame, and toxic chemicals, especially acids. This is how the people involved in this recycling work are exposed to the chemicals that result in detrimental health effects, including much higher rates of cancer. The link between the recycling work and the cancers is so strong that the places where this work is done have come to be called " cancer villages".

Even the unassuming, seemingly innocent, and above all delicious, chocolate bar has a decidedly bitter side, and a morally problematic history. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the production of chocolate is the apparent pervasiveness of child-slave labor on cocoa plantations in the West African countries where most of the world's cocoa is cultivated. Making the matter worse is that many of the child-slaves on these plantations have been kidnapped or hoodwinked by middle men and trafficked from neighboring countries for exactly this purpose. The world's major chocolate companies are aware of the presence of child-slave labor on these plantations, and continue to buy from wholesalers in these countries. Much like the garment industry, sub-contracting relationships allow the chocolate giants, like Nestle, to evade responsibility for and scrutiny about the nature of the labor practices of the producers.

These three examples are by no means the only products which most Western consumers use on a daily basis, taking entirely for granted, but which have a morally dubious origin and history. The amount of harm caused to both the environment, and to other people during the process of producing the goods we consume is hardly ever considered, let alone factored into the price of those items. From the frozen veggies in our freezers, to the coffee makers and sugar packets on our countertops, to the cleaning agents we use, to the paper products we over-utilize, we find that the production process that ends with our individual usage contains significant abuse of both the environment, and of the human workers at every stage. It is clear now that the modern world is an Omelas of sorts. The prosperity of the developed world is intrinsically linked with the under-development and poverty of the rest of the world, the latter being the pre-condition of the former. Our world has the equivalent of the dank, dark, neglected basement in Omelas. It is the sweatshop, the maquiladora, the Export Processing Zone factory, the illegal mining or logging camp, the plantation, the company town, the cancer village, the ghetto, and the favela.

What Does it Mean to Walk Away?

In Omelas, the ones who stay are able to rationalize the suffering of the child, those who cannot walk away. For the ones who stay, their rationale, as reconstructed by Le Guin, is very similar to the 'There Is No Alternative' (TINA) style argument. Indeed, Le Guin says that the place those who walk away go is almost unimaginable. Those who decide to stay, even if they recognize the child's condition as a bad thing, as deeply regrettable, as morally troubling, seem to eventually accept that there is nothing to be done. To let the child out now would do it no good, so they reason, since it is so stunted and maladjusted it could not possibly live anything like a flourishing life. This child has simply been too abused and neglected, too maligned and degraded, to live a decent life even in more comfortable circumstances. No one individual possess the power to abolish the mechanism linking the child's suffering to the communities' prosperity. So it is that after a period of days, or maybe weeks, those who stay come to reconcile the enjoyment of abundance with the price paid for that abundance. We have here another parallel with our modern capitalist world economy. Many Western consumers feel powerless to change the capitalist-imperialist system that delivers them the necessities and luxuries they require, even if they see this system as morally problematic. They feel that since there is no alternative to capitalist-imperialism, there is no choice but to just accept it.

The ones who walk away from Omelas are not able to reconcile the child's suffering with their own individual prosperity. But, What does it mean to walk away? Le Guin tells us that those who walk away seem to know where they are headed, but is very cryptic about the place they go. Clearly, if those who walk away are not simply going off to die, then wherever they are going it must be a place where the relationship between suffering and prosperity in Omelas no longer obtains. Perhaps the ones who walk away are going nowhere, as they would rather die than live a morally corrupted life. This would of course imply that there is indeed no alternative to the rule linking suffering and prosperity, and that the only real choice individuals have in deciding whether or not to walk away from Omelas is one between life and death. Thus, it seems terribly pertinent to ask, Is there an alternative? If there is another way of life possible, that severs the connection in Omelas, and in capitalist-imperialism, between the suffering of some and the prosperity of others.

The TINA argument that supports the decision of some to stay in Omelas, as well as the decision of people in our world to accept capitalist hegemony, simply does not hold up. One has little reason to think that there is no alternative, or that the only alternative is death. There is another way to live, and because there is an alternative, the choice to stay becomes less a bit of Stoic equipoise, or the British stiff upper lip, and more a self-serving excuse for complicity in imposing suffering. What is this alternative? How can we live, but at the same time, not depend on impoverishment, degradation, and oppression to furnish a standard of living most contemporary Westerners would consider minimally decent? The answer, in short, is socialism. In particular, a non-market participatory socialism centered on a scheme of de-centralized, participatory, democratic economic planning. One such model is called Participatory Economics, or Parecon, and has been developed by Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert.[2]

Many will still wonder whether such an economy is feasible. It is, of course, not possible here to fully describe and defend this model. Let me offer then a few words on feasibility. First, "free" markets are not only not free at all, but are much less efficient than is often supposed. [3] Even the notion of "efficiency" is not what it seems on its surface. The technical meaning of efficiency in a competitive, capitalist economy differs importantly from the colloquial usage most are familiar with. Markets are in fact rather inefficient. Not only are markets inefficient, but the achievements of planned economies have been consistently, and significantly distorted or ignored entirely. Today, the historical example of the former Soviet Union is massively misunderstood in America; the example of Yugoslavia all but forgotten in the wake of the wars of the early 1990s; and the example of Cuba has been so thoroughly ignored, it is as if maintaining the blockade erased its existence for most Americans. If the technical challenges to send human beings safely to, and then return from, the Moon, can be overcome, then constructing a economic system that meets at least the basic subsistence needs of everyone in terms of food, clothing, shelter, education, and healthcare can be overcome.

What may perhaps come as a real surprise to many is how close we are already to a planned economy. The oligopolistic firms which have increasingly dominated, through mergers and "creative destruction", the U.S. economy since the end of the Second World War already engage in large-scale economic planning; mostly it is a product of co-respective behavior, and long-term planning for the management of capital assets in the interest of shareholders. During the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the First World War, the U.S. economy was entirely re-made, and in the interests of capital and capitalists. Between the exigencies of fighting two World Wars sandwiched around the greatest economic crisis of the 20th century, forced the government and the private sector to come to terms with each other and cooperate to save liberalism and capitalism. Coming out of the Second World War the stature achieved by these firms was immense, and their ability to control, regulate, and manipulate all markets was unprecedented. Most importantly for today, the data these firms have accumulated over decades, on everything from production rates to consumer habits, et cetera, makes the technical challenges of economic planning much less daunting. Moreover, the kinds of inventory tracking systems that make retailers like Wal-Mart so efficient, are exactly the kinds of systems that will also make the technical challenges associated with production and distribution easier to manage. For now, all this data is propriety information, that is, it is the private property of the various firms themselves.

At present, the economic planning that occurs is planning for the enrichment of capitalists. That is indeed the raison d'être for firms in keeping records, and collecting data on consumers, and engaging in long-term planning. When this data is nationalized, when it all can be collected, the problems that many still see in the idea of a planned economy become far less formidable. Indeed, many of these problems become more issues of calculation rather than issues of conceiving how a solution could even be possible; as was the case in the 1930s, when the original socialist calculations debates took place.

Conclusion

Our world, like Omelas, is a place where prosperity and abundance co-exist with horrific and structural injustice. Indeed, things are much worse in the real world, as injustice here is not confined to a single individual in a single room. Quite the opposite, the majority experience toil and deprivation so that a minority may indulge in opulence. Even in Omelas, where brutal and unjustified suffering is imposed on only one individual, some cannot bear the price of their abundance and must walk away. Now let us revisit the question implied by the story, Would you (the reader) walk away from Omelas? Could you stay and live a utopian life, all the while knowing its true cost? If yes, if the thought of the child in the basement, abused, alone, half starved, and naked, makes you unable to enjoy the cornucopia on offer, then the same moral intuition applies a fortiori in the case of our modern capitalist economy.

The dark basement of contemporary capitalism can be found in the sweatshops, the favelas, and the factories of the so-called "developing" world. Only because the commodity chains, whose final link are the shelves of the local stores of Western consumers, are so internationally dispersed, that they are largely hidden from consumers. The moral imperative felt in the case of Omelas is in fact only more intense in the real world. We face a moral crisis many times the scale of the hypothetical choice in Omelas every single day. Every day one chooses to uncritically accept and consumer the goods on offer from capitalist imperialism, then one too become complicit in abuses far worse than anything described in Le Guin's story.

If yes, if one would walk away from Omelas, What then? Where would you go, and How would you get there? Walking away from Omelas, walking away from capitalism, does not mean choosing death, it does not mean refusing to eat because everything you can buy is tainted by association with the capitalist mode of production. Walking away from capitalism does not mean forsaking technology, or innovation, or even incentive. What is clear already is that the productive forces that nineteenth and early twentieth century socialists worried about not being insufficiently developed, are now quite ripe. The main question is no longer about production, that is, how to make enough, but rather, it is about distribution, or how to make sure everyone has enough. What is also very clear is that markets are a lot less efficient than they are alleged to be, and that the alternatives to markets are much more practicable than is commonly supposed. Given that markets fail in many important respects, and that more democratic alternatives are feasible, the destination of those walking away should be a form of participatory socialism incorporating democratic economic planning. Knowing that there is a place to walk away to, might hopefully give some the courage needed to leave Omelas, to reject capitalism.

Notes

[1] Le Guin, Ursula. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". The Wind's Twelve Quarters. 1975. William Morrow Paperbacks; 2004.

[2] See, Albert, Michael. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Verso; 2004. Also see, Albert, Michael & Robin Hahnel. The Political-Economy of Participatory Economics. Princeton University Press; 1991.

[3] See Donnaruma, Colin & Nicholas Partyka. "Challenging the Presumption in Favor of Markets". Review of Radical Political Economics. Vol.44 no.1 (2012):40-61.

The Bosses' Utopia: Dystopia and the American Company Town

By Nick Partyka

This is the second part of a multi-part series. Read Part One here.

On The Value of Utopia

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates its most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place, Is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort on need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - recognize as a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and as such not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. The value of this is that thinking about utopias allows us to both critique present societies, but also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

In another part of this series I discussed the American tradition of radical utopianism. Owenites, Fourierists, as well as various and sundry religious sects, all attempted experiments in communal living inspired by utopian political or spiritual ideologies. By removing themselves from the world, these groups sought to re-make society in miniature, as an example that could be replicated throughout the country as an alternative to the ascendant bourgeois society. American history also contains a dystopian tradition. Some individuals who came under the sway of certain utopian idea also happened to have large amounts of money, and or were proprietors of large business concerns. Several very wealthy businessmen cum would-be philanthropists embarked on many now forgotten utopian experiments. In some ways their schemes resemble Owen's original New Lanark project, in that a firm's profit-motive was used to argue for less abusive working conditions for workers. I am talking, of course, about the company town.[1] A term now, and for good reason, loaded with connotations of anti-democratic forms of dependence and surveillance, a modern industrial feudalism, that galled observers and greatly angered many worker-residents.

At many points in American history wealthy capitalists saw it as beneficial to construct planned communities for their workers. These ran the gamut from unsanitary ramshackle slums and ghettoes with little planning or services, to highly elaborate planned communities designed according to the proprietors' ideology of choice, in which even small details were prescribed and regimented. In some of these capitalist-inspired utopian experiments, designed to 'elevate' workers, one can see clear examples of many dystopian themes manifested in real-life. Looking at the experience of company towns one readily discerns significant dystopian elements, e.g. some rather reminiscent of George Orwell's now famous Big Brother. The high-handed, obtrusive, and moralistic scrutiny of private life; the regimentation of work and social life; the uniformity of living standards; strictly imposed and enforced moral codes, are all dystopian elements one can find in the work of the most well-known dystopian writers, e.g. Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin.

The United States has had a unique experience with company towns, quite different from the experience of European countries. America saw both a greater number of company towns, as well as greater diversity among them. The uniqueness of the American experience has to do mainly with the size of America and the prominence of the frontier, and the small-government sensibilities of the founding generation. That the country was expanding geographically, and that the government was typically disposed to take a laissez-faire stance on interference with the private undertakings of businessmen and entrepreneurs. These factors combined to allow private sector actors wide latitude in their ability to construct ideal communities, that is, communities that were ideal for the bosses in that they served the bosses' interests more than those of workers. This freedom for the private sector has sometimes resulted in neo-feudal conditions, e.g. like those that were found in many Appalachian coal towns, and other times in the more bucolic and rural utopian project of magnates like Milton Hershey.

In the Beginning There Was Lowell

The Pilgrims who came to North America had designs to create a 'city on a hill', a symbol to all the world of how to live justly and righteously. There is a certain obvious utopian aspect to this view. The chartered basis of these colonies, and their need to make a profit gave them some of the shades of the company town. They remained for many years trapped in a cycle of debt, always needing to consume more in supplies to sustain themselves than the value of their exports would purchase. This is one reason that the early colonists pursued whaling, as well as fur trading and trapping right from the start. Beaver pelts in particular were extremely lucrative, and it was the expressed intention of many colonial leaders to use export of pelts to pay for not only the debts incurred for the initial transportation to the American continent, but also the provision, supplies, and other goods the colonists would eventually want and need to import.

A famed British historian writes, "Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton".[2] Thus, we should not be surprised to see cotton, the company town, and utopianism come together in the early phase of American industrialization. As such, one must look first to Lowell, Massachusetts where its eponymous founder Francis Cabot Lowell established one of America's first water-mill operations, as well as one its first well-known company towns. Indeed, the town, famous for its past, continues to drawn large numbers of tourists year after year.

Francis certainly had some utopian ideas behind his designs in business, and community building plans. A wealthy Boston merchant, Lowell, toured England in 1811 where he saw first-hand the conditions in the mill-towns of industrializing Britain. What he saw there, especially in places like Manchester, shocked him, as it would many others including Friedrich Engels. The poverty, degradation, squalor, misery, disease, and "moral corruption", which was perceived to run rampant in the new large urban industrial city, disturbed Lowell. Those few capitalists who did have qualms about industrialization, and the rise of industrial society, tried to find ways to achieve the social benefits of industrialization, but to avoid the crushing desperation of life in industrial cities like Manchester. This is the inspiration for Robert Owen's brand of utopian socialism. His New Lanark mill-town was a model of reform, and saw the material improvement of workers and their living conditions as the basis of the transformation of society. It is in this same spirit that Francis Cabot Lowell conceived his American mill-town. Lowell sought to create the opposite of what he saw in Manchester, a bright, healthy and virtuous community. Yet, he also certainly sought the immense profits to be made in the textile industry. He certainly had no intention of operating his business at a loss. Owen, for instance, while certainly a prosperous businessman, had a moral and ideological mission, which balanced his quest for profits, and New Lanark was profitable.

Lowell imagined his mill-town as an intellectually and morally uplifting community, which would fit into the needs of American society at large, and in this way help form the economic basis of an American capitalist utopia. His community would help create that 'city on a hill' so many different groups had hoped to turn America into. Lowell's plan was to recruit his workforce from the younger women living and working on the farms in the area. These young New England ladies would come to work seasonally in Lowell, not become full-time proletarian toilers. In order to attract these workers Lowell advertised the intellectually stimulating, culturally vibrant, and moral upright way of life that characterized the community. He wanted these young women, and especially their parents, to think of their time in Lowell as a kind of preparation for adult life and for marriage. Francis was always keen to point out in his pitch that his lady workers had access to such essential icons of "middle class" life as books and pianos. He also highlighted the presence of older women who acted as supervisors of the boardinghouses where these young women were housed, and who enforced a strict 10pm curfew. Between studying music, or literature and poetry, attending free lectures or other amusements, life in Lowell was supposed by Lowell himself to be as good for the workers, their families, and even the country, as it was profitable for himself and his business partners.

The reality of the life of the town, and the experience of the people who resided in it, differed in several large respects from Cabot Lowell's intentions. Some aspects of the life of the community at Lowell we will see re-appear in company-towns throughout American history. The most important of these is despotism, in one or another of its many forms. The control wielded over the life of the town, and thus over the residents, by the company's owners would work to foster several dystopian and despotic elements in Lowell, as well as in later company towns. The company regimented the rhythms of life in town, fitting it to the needs of the production process, and it announced the progression of each day's routine through the sounding of bells. Workers were woken at 4:30am, and required to be to work by 4:50am. The working day ended at 7pm, and there was a 10pm curfew in town. The bells marked the transition from each part of the day to the next, when to get up, when to work, when to eat, when to rest. This regime was no doubt onerous to many. Lowell's vision of where his workforce would come from soon crumbled, as he failed to attract as many young New England ladies as he hoped. Thus, very soon Lowell and his partners had predominantly immigrant workforce in their town.

On the job, workers were subject to the personal discipline of the foreman. This was usually entirely arbitrary, and workers lacked any recourse against such depredations. Off the job, workers were subject to the scrutiny and censure of a system of "moral police" operating in the town. The older women boardinghouse-keepers were some of the main agents in this network of spies and informants, of which other workers might well also be a part. The company, i.e. its officials, could fine or fire any workers for immoral conduct, like consuming alcohol. Any employee that failed to fulfill their contractual one year of service, because they quit without the contractually mandated two weeks' notice or were not "honorably discharged", would be blacklisted from employment in the area. Workers were required to attend church services, and to pay a mandatory fee to support this church. They also had to pay a fee to stay in the boardinghouses, which apparently not lacking in food, were over-crowded, poorly ventilated, and lacking entirely in privacy. Workers came to live and work at Lowell despite these kinds of conditions because the pay was too good to pass up.

A striking vision of the lives of the women who toiled in the factories like these in antebellum America can be found in a lesser-known work by famed American author Herman Melville. In his short-story, The Paradise of the Bachelors & the Tartarus of the Maids, Melville paints a vivid picture of the drudgery of the actual work of producing cotton textiles in these early factories.[3] Though the workers in his story are making paper and not textiles, the main outlines of the workers' experience would have been much the same. Melville describes the entrance to his fictional, yet all too real, mill in the most daunting imagery, invoking the idea of "Dantean gate" one must pass through. In describing the operations, and workers of this mill Melville uses language that evokes the toil, degradation, over-bearing foremen, the sexism, being beholden to the whims and demands of the company on whom one depends. Melville is just one rather famous example of a common view at this time, that factory work, wage work, was a kind of slavery. At a time of rising sentiment of opposition to slavery, this was a potent objection to capitalism, and to the plans of capitalists, that it was slavery by another means, and not acceptable treatment for white people. This sentiment was also part of the inspiration for two strikes in Lowell in 1834 and 1836 largely in response to wage cuts announced by the company in reaction to falling prices for textile goods.

Utopian Paternalism

Francis Cabot Lowell was not to be the last American capitalist to dream of creating a model community where the vices and sins of the rapidly modernizing world would be excluded, and a more idyllic life re-created. First and foremost of these new modern ills, in the minds of capitalist utopian visionaries like George Pullman, Milton Hershey, and Henry Ford, among others, was labor strife, that is, labor unions. Thus, one of the main foci of the efforts of capitalist utopian was preventing workers from organizing and bargaining collectively. What we will see in each of the examples mentioned above is that these attempts at creating a more ideal kind of life within modernizing, and industrializing American society share certain dystopian elements. The most apt way to characterize the main themes of these capitalist - led efforts at building and operating planned communities is as utopian paternalism. Capitalists like Pullman and Ford certainly saw themselves as advancing the workers' own good, even when those workers' views about their own good were to the contrary. These men thought they knew better than workers what was in their best interests. Unsurprisingly, none of these utopian experiments was successful from the point of view of their founders, since they all failed to prevent the rise of labor unions.

In 1880 George Pullman, maker of the famous Pullman Palace Car, the ubiquitous sleeping car which made transcontinental rail travel more comfortable, began to construct an ideal community on the outskirts of Chicago.[4] The town of Pullman would feature several lavish public buildings, including a library and theater. The residences were supposed to be more commodious, most were connected to natural gas and running water, some even featured bathrooms. There was a wide array of shops housed in public buildings to accommodate the needs of the town's residents. Much effort was made to create a pleasant aesthetic in the town, from the design of the buildings to the layout of the community. Pullman desired to re-create a more bucolic atmosphere to contrast with the grit and grime of the cities. Pullman, based on a firm profit motive, believed that treating workers better would make them more loyal, harder working, and less likely to want to join a labor union. His model community would not only save money by locating workers near their place of work, but also would help to forge a new kind of worker. This new worker would be more dependable, more docile, more compliant, et cetera. This change would of course be more conducive to capitalists' accumulation of wealth.

One thing every building in Pullman had in common, from the work buildings, to the residential buildings, was that they were all owned by the Pullman company. Workers were compelled to be renters, and not permitted to own their homes. The rent payments for which were deducted automatically from workers' paychecks. Not just workers, but also all community organizations, were prohibited from owning buildings, and anyone could be evicted with a mere ten days warning. Moreover, what came to pass for a municipal government in the town of Pullman was completely under the control of the Pullman company. The foundations of community life were only further eroded by the use of "inspectors' by the Pullman company in its town, whose job it was to report on the workers, their activities, affiliations, and opinions. These inspectors were to report any resident who was found to have undesirable or immoral views, attitudes, or habits. The atmosphere of the town of Pullman was best described as a kind of, "benevolent, well-wishing feudalism" with George Pullman as its king.[5] Discontent with conditions in the town of Pullman contributed to the desire of workers to unionize, and helped spark the famous 1894 strike of the Pullman company by the American Railway Union led by Eugene V. Debs. [6]

Inspired to some extent by the example of Pullman, the man and the town, in 1903 Milton Hershey began work on his own planned industrial community. [7] His was to be modeled to a degree after the Mennonite villages familiar in the area of Pennsylvania Hershey chose. The area had one key virtue for him, lots of dairy farms nearby to provide the critical ingredient he needed for his chocolate, i.e. milk. Like Pullman, and others, Hershey was a critic of the growing urban society. The urban environment was seen as morally corrupting and physically unhealthy for the people who lived in them. Thus, Milton thought that by re-creating a more pastoral, healthier kind of life workers lives would be improved. What could also be improved was his profits, by reducing labor agitation. In the same profit-first motive of Pullman and Lowell, Hershey thought that contented works would be more productive, more loyal, workers. In a further echo of the Amish who lived in the area, Hershey envisioned a prosperous community full of clean-living residents. Even more than Pullman, Hershey invested in public buildings in his town, including the now famous Hershey Industrial School which housed and educated orphaned boys. His eponymous town would in this way, and others, serve as a living advertisement for his product, the wholesomeness of the one reinforcing that of the other.

The town of Hershey would also experience many dystopian elements, despite it is founders' intentions, though perhaps less intensely than in Pullman. In contrast to Pullman and Lowell, the high-handed moral despotism in Hershey would be doled out by the proprietor himself. In the town of Hershey, Milton was the moral police; he was also the mayor, chief of police, and fire chief, as there were no elected officials. The comfortable life available to worker-residents of Hershey came as part of a trade-off in which one sacrificed democracy. In exchange for having no control over their community, worker-residents received several benefits, medical coverage and a retirement plan; free garbage pick-up and snow removal; public buildings like churches and schools, including a junior college with free tuition for workers; and, despite having all this, there were no local taxes.

In many ways Hershey's plans came to fruition, and the town enjoyed a fairly harmonious existence for many years. Indeed, it was not long before the town achieved notoriety as a tourist attraction, both the chocolate factory as well as the "Hershey Park" amusement park. The modern world caught up to Hershey eventually, leaving a large black mark on the town's reputation. In 1937 labor violence in the town made all the wrong kind of headlines. Local dairy farmers dependent on selling to the Hershey factory brawled with striking workers. Outnumbered four to one, the strikers were badly beaten and chased away from company grounds by the mob of dairy farmers.

Henry Ford also fancied himself a philanthropic businessman, someone who could help educate workers and elevate their lives. His famous $5 a day plan was built on the same kind of hard-headed, profit-oriented logic we've seen in both Pullman and Hershey, as well as the capitalist utopian visions of the moral improvement of workers. And just like both of these others, Ford's generosity came at price. There was a rather dark side to Ford's desire to improve the lives of his largely immigrant workers. In exchange for a higher wage, workers had to pledge to live wholesome lives, that is, conduct themselves both on and off the job according to Ford's moral precepts. Just as we saw with Lowell, higher than average wages attracted an enormous glut of applicants. Workers came and they stayed, despite the brutish tactics of Ford's anti-union henchmen in the Service Department and the condescending racism of Ford's Sociological Department, because of the higher pay and benefits offered.[8]

The infamous Service Department at Ford was headed by Harry Bennett, a vicious enforcer whose egregious abuses of workers remained mostly secret from the public. He used fear, intimidation, and a paramilitary gang to pressure workers into doing as they were told. The main job of this secret police force was to prevent and disrupt and potential union organizing activity by Ford workers, by any means necessary. Surveillance and beatings were to main tactics Bennett and his thugs applied to suspected union activists. Bennett also constructed a huge network of spies within the company, so that potential agitators never knew if they were talking to one of his informers. Ford's Sociological Department was responsible for turning his immigrant workers into "real" Americans. In a racist and very insensitive way, workers were to be stripped of their foreign customs and beliefs, and then re-made to be as American as apple pie. Employment was conditional on workers learning English and American civics at company provided classes. Intentionally symbolically, the highly choreographed graduation ceremony for the Ford school began with workers in their native dress, and ended with them in American-style clothes. After graduating workers were supposed to have gotten rid of their old ways, and completely adopted American ideals and values.

Ford's Sociological Department was also responsible for a highly intrusive regime of surveillance of workers and their personal lives. Members of the Sociological Department interviewed workers, and their family members, often several times, asking extremely invasive questions about many different aspects of workers' lives. Though billed as a project aimed at social reform, the operatives of this department collected massive amounts of information about Ford employees and their families. How many times they were married, how much debt they had, how much money they remitted to relatives, and whether they had bank accounts, were all questions Sociological Department agents asked workers. These interviews were not one-off affairs. Two, three, even four, interviews would not have been uncommon, and this applies to the workers' family members as well. Workers were lectured by these company-men to maintain a certain standard of cleanliness and order at home. Naturally they were heavily discouraged from the vices of drinking, smoking, and gambling.

Industrial Feudalism

The darkest side of the American experience with the company town can be found in the example of coal and steel towns, as well as oil boom-towns. Hardy Green concisely describes this variety of the company town as, "exploitationville".[9] This title is largely self-explanatory. This is because the image of the coal town, especially the Appalachian coal town, has remained such a vivid part of America's popular consciousness. The reign of the company, its officials and its store, is legendary for its ruthlessness, brutality, arbitrary punishment, and oppression through debt. The famous song "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford affixes in the popular imagination the tyranny of the company in the coal town; the drudgery of the work; the inadequate pay; company theft of that pay; reliance on debt, and corresponding servitude to it, as well as the despair and despondency this way of life created. Often times these 'towns' were little more than camps or agglomerations of shacks, shanties, and hovels. There were often few or no public services, and when they did exist workers were usually forced to pay exorbitant prices for the most basic services, e.g. garbage collection and sanitation infrastructure.

Like other company towns, workers in coal towns were not allowed to own property, and thus forced to rent from the company at the prices it set. Workers were often paid in 'scrip', a form of local money only good at the company store. They were thus dependent on the company for everything they needed. As one might expect, workers were routinely bilked of their hard-earned wages by their unscrupulous employers through inflated prices for staple goods, as well as taxes and fees for basic services. Like in other company towns, there were usually no elected officials, and all law enforcement was overseen by the company. The 1871 Coal Creek War in Tennessee is a prominent example of the kind of reaction workers had to the many ways their employers dominated, oppressed, and robbed them. It is also a characteristic example of how employers in many different sectors dealt with organized labor in similar ways. Nor were such practices limited to the coal mining industry. Mining communities all over the country endured conditions, to one degree or another like those of the coal towns, from the omnipresent surveillance and spies, to the tyrannical foremen and threats of violence.

In many cases steel towns were not much better, though the housing might be better than the notoriously poor housing afforded workers in mining towns, particularly the coal towns. Gary, Indiana, and Homestead, Pennsylvania are two prominent examples of company towns in the steel industry. Both projects were motivated by the same utopian capitalist logic about making workers materially better off enough to reject union membership. The broad outlines of the story in both communities are familiar: inadequate, unsanitary, and or over-crowded housing; housing allocated by status; housing dependent upon employment; over-priced rents automatically deducted from wages; abusive foremen acting with impunity; workers forced to sing "yellow dog" contracts promising not to join a union as a condition of employment; no independent stores; workers paid in company 'scrip'; over-bearing moral codes imposed on workers by "moral police". Conditions at Homestead, in addition to issues like wages and hours, were one of the most significant factors in sparking the infamously bloody strike in 1892. Labor strife would come to Gary in a big way in 1919. Workers striking for improves wages, and reduced hours, were certainly also very upset about the living conditions in town. In both cases, the owners, with help from the state, used violence to disperse the workers and repress their demands and their organizations.

American Dystopias

It should be clear, after a look at the historical experience of company towns in America, that, in many, if not most, instances this experience contains many distinctly dystopian elements. Indeed, the experience of workers in company towns across America forms a unique American dystopian tradition, which contrasts sharply with its robust utopian tradition. When we look to the works of some of the great dystopian writers, we will notice the same themes that we saw in the real-life, historical experience of American company towns. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Evgeny Zamyatin, all present visions of future dystopian societies which embody - in some cases to a fantastic extreme- the abusive treatment and horrible living conditions that characterized the life of many American company towns.

All three dystopian authors depict future societies in which an authoritarian government, composed of an elite minority, rules despotically over the rest of the population. Moreover, in all three, the activities of the dominated population are structured in a way that furthers the social, economic, and political aims of the ruling elite. All three of these dystopian societies make use of some particular combination of omnipresent surveillance, brutal and violent repression and torture, or some form of psychological conditioning to compel the population into compliance with the government's policies. The people of these dystopian societies are led, or forced, to believe that the current order of things is actually for everyone's benefit; though clearly some benefit more than others. All three are portrayed by their leaders as peaceful and harmonious societies, despite the fact that violence and repression, of one kind or another, are needed to maintain order in society.[10]

Whether Orwell's Big Brother in Oceania, Huxley's Alphas in the future London, or The Benefactor in Zamyatin's the One State, features from all three of these dystopian societies find analogs in American company towns: a single-minded and ideologically motivated founder or leader; the enforced dependence of the population on the state, that is the elite minority who run it; the abusive treatment of the population by the officials of the state; an unrelenting and intrusive propaganda offensive against the enemies of the state; monopoly on the press, and censorship of rivals as a form of persecution; universal surveillance of the population by the ruling elite, including an extensive network of spies and informers; unhealthy and degrading living conditions for the majority of the population, but opulence for the elite; systematic theft from, or exploitation of, the population to meet the needs of the ruling elite; thoroughly rational, totally invasive, and frustratingly stultifying regimentation of life both on and off the job.

Conclusion

The company towns in America all seem to share one thing in common, a pattern of boom and bust. This might be separated by decades, but all company towns seem to share a common fate. Namely, when the business dries up, or the industry collapses, the town dies. Sometimes the death is quick, other times long, drawn-out, and painful. The oil or gold boom-towns would be on one extreme, as they could disappear entirely over-night, and re-established at the next site in rapid order. Closer to the other end of the spectrum, company towns collapse because the industry changed or relocated, e.g. Lowell or Pullman. Other company towns collapse because their reason for existing disappears, e.g. the coal seam, or silver vein is tapped out. Sometimes company towns survive the collapse of the firms that dominate them, but as mere ghosts of their former selves, e.g. Gary. Only a very small successful few remain in operation, like Hershey. It is in light of this history of the company town in America that one should see the collapse of Detroit. One industry so dominated employment in that city, that as it fortunes flagged, so too did those of the city. Just as the industry declined, and resorted to new methods to remain competitive and continue to generate the profits shareholders expect, indeed demand, so too did Detroit decline. And, as a result, the city was forced to resort to measures that accelerated the city's decline by encouraging disinvestment, diminishing public services, and eroding quality of life.

To many Americans, fascism, as represented in regimes like Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, is the ultimate real-life dystopia. Many Americans also think that this is a foreign problem, something embedded in the cultural DNA of the Old World. Many think of this kind of ideology is not, and cannot be, indigenously American. Hence the extreme xenophobia that arose during both world wars, and the antipathy many Americans felt towards the early labor movement. Yet, the historical experience of the company town in America demonstrates that these conceptions are quite misleading. When given freest reign, capitalists, have created social environments that resemble quite closely the kinds of literary dystopias that most haunt our imagination. Fascism, in fact, has an American pedigree in the legacy of the company town. The legacy of the company town also quite nicely illustrates that fascism is not only bigoted hate-groups waving swastika flags. It also comes in more patriotic, more benevolent and well-meaning forms, like the kind of utopian paternalism that was evident in most company towns. It can also be seen, naked and direct, in the violent and authoritarian regimes that dominated some company towns, especially those associated with the mining industry.

Notes

[1] For an interesting history of the company town, see; Green, Hardy. The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy. Basic Books, 2010.

[2] Hobsbawn, Eric. Industry & Empire. 1968.The New Press, 1999; 34.

[3] Melville, Herman."The Paradise of the Bachelors and the Tartarus of the Maids". 1849. Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Perennial Classics, 2004.

[4] See Green (2004): 27-35.

[5] Richard T. Ely quoted in Green (2004):31.

[6] For an interesting insight into the living conditions in Pullman, and the how they contributed to the 1894 strike see; Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross. 1947. Haymarket Books, 2007.

[7] See Green (2004): 35-41.

[8] See Grandin, Greg. Fordlandia. Picador, 200: Ch.2 & 4.

[9] Green (2004); Ch.3

[10] See Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949.; Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932; Zamyatin, Evgeny. We. 1924.

Capitalism as a Form of Human Sacrifice: The Comedy of Innocence and The Comedy of Guilt

By Nick Partyka

The mention of human sacrifice is likely to conjure a bevy of fantastic notions, images of exotic locales, and perhaps visions of pre-historic peoples dancing around a fire or an altar. For some, the idea may even trigger a visceral disgust. Despite killing untold numbers of persons for heresy or apostasy, the main religions of the Western world reject human sacrifice as a part of their practice of religious worship. The God of Abraham, that little episode with Isaac notwithstanding, does not require the shedding of human blood as a feature of the way He proscribes being worshiped. Many things may still be sacrificed as part of Christian religious practice, but blood, human or animal, is not one. Certainly this God, through the medium of his Earthly spokespersons, has commanded, or at least endorsed, the shedding of others' blood, e.g. that of Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and heretics. But, even here, the shedding of blood is not a mainstay of conventional worship. We rational, modern, scientifically minded people are quick to dismiss the idea of human sacrifice. Though the form has changed, we still practice human sacrifice, and it remains an important part of how society and community are reproduced. Moreover, we preserve significant features of sacrificial rituals as practiced by ancient people.

Among Marx's first words in the Manifesto are his famous, and oft quoted, line, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".[1] But, importantly, he continues, "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another".[2] Class society is based on hierarchy, that is, on social relations of domination and subordination. And this social relationship of domination is not an end in-itself, but rather it is the means by which wealth, resources, status, and opportunities are funneled into the hands of the dominating class. Class society has always functioned in this way, as a fundamentally predatory mechanism whereby the wealthy exploit the poor. And, as long as class-based society persists, so too will this mechanism of predation and exploitation, as well as the inequalities and divisions that come with it. This is one of Marx's most essential points; wealth and poverty go together, because poverty is the direct result of the accumulation of capital.

Ritual sacrifice is typically thought of as a relic of the ancient past, something barbaric or ignorant peoples engaged in, as something enlightened societies eschewed once they developed a truly scientific, i.e. modern, way of thinking. Unfortunately for the victims, ritual human sacrifice is a widespread practice in contemporary society. It is the very foundation of how the dominant class reproduces its wealth, power, and position. We share with our ancient peers the need to justify human sacrifice, to rationalize our actions, and thus to appease our conscience. It is in this vein that while the ancient Greeks made use of a "comedy of innocence", we modern Westerners have adopted the "comedy of guilt". The ancient Greeks needed their sacrificial victims to be willing in order to appease their guilty conscience. Perhaps the most salient example is Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis. We moderns also need our victims to be responsible for their own murder, that is, they must be the authors of their own demise. Thus, for example, the string of incoherent, blatantly racist, exaggerated, and downright preposterous legal excuses given for the murder of unarmed citizens by police, especially people of color.

Just as with the ancient Greeks, myth helps sustain our preferred justifications for ritual sacrifice. Myth is essential because at the heart of ritual sacrifice lies the deadly contradiction. Namely, the question, as Walter Burkett asks it, "Can what is not a gift really be a sacrifice?" If society can't get the victim to agree to be sacrificed, then the act is much more a murder than a sacrifice, and hence an unworthy form of offering for a God(s). Complicating the matter is one major difference, namely, that unlike the ancients, we specially select, and then groom for the purpose, the eventual victims of sacrifice. In their ritual comedy, the ancient Greeks only had to trick an animal into a performing a simple gesture, our modern ritual comedy requires highly elaborate, sophisticated, and inter-connected social, economic, and political institutions. Within these institutions lurk apparitions like the welfare queen, the food-stamp surfer, the ghetto gang-banger, the lazy immigrant, et cetera. These are myths created by the dominant class to rationalize and justify the ritual sacrifice of some members of the community.

The Comedy of Innocence

For the ancient Greeks, ritual sacrifice was an integral part of the practice of their religion.[3] The sacrificial ritual consisted of the killing, butchering, and eating of the sacrificial animal. Blood sacrifice was one the most important ways in which the ancient Greeks connected to their Gods. The obvious similarity of animal blood to human blood, the sense of worshiping a God in animal form, the wearing of clean clothes, the wearing of animal masks during the ritual, all point to the way in which the animal sacrificed stood in for human sacrifice. The Gods required sacrifice in order to be propitiated, and thus provide the things Greek people needed in order to flourish. There is a certain quid pro quo about this practice. The Gods want things, and human wants things. So, humans give the Gods what they want, and thus the Gods will give humans what they want. Humans, of course, want things like good weather for growing crops, calm seas for sailing and trading, for favor in battle, et cetera. Human sacrifice, despite appearing in Greek literature, was certainly considered to be taboo by the ancient Greeks; in fact, the Furies are thought to hunt down and wreak vengeance upon those who commit blood crimes. Indeed, there remains no archeological evidence for human sacrifice among the Greeks. Thus, the sacrificial animal stands in for humans, and also for the God, in the ritual sacrifice.

The sacrificial ritual was an important way that community was re-created by the Greeks. Most members of the community had roles to play in the ritual. This ritual was an elaborate process, and it would begin with cleansing, and festooning the chosen animal. Because the Greeks made use of animals like cattle and sheep, the most important sacrificial animals, for their secondary products, they would have been older animals, chosen based on having a suitably healthy and unblemished appearance. The Gods demand a good looking sacrifice, not an ugly or deformed one. The process then moved on to a ritual procession to the sanctuary which included singing and dancing, and invocations to the particular God the sacrifice is intended for. Once the procession reached the sanctuary the comedy of innocence would then be performed. After this, the clan chief, a person of political and thus also religious power, would kill the animal, catching its blood in a basin, then spatter some over the altar, and the rest being burnt. Then the animal would be skinned and butchered, the inedible bits set aside for reconstituting the animal symbolically. These innards, the splanchna, are then burned on the altar. Lastly comes the cooking and eating of the meat.

The offerings to the Gods must be burnt, for it is in the form of smoke that the sacrifice rises to the sky, that is, to a place where the Gods can consume it. If the blood of a sacrifice was allowed to drain into the ground, this would be a sacrifice to chthonic Gods, that is, the Gods of the underworld. Moreover, the Gods require sacrifice because without it, they cease to exist. Indeed, there is no God where there is no sacrifice, no ritual observance of the God. The Gods thus depend on sacrifice to sustain their own existence. This comes out in Aristophanes' The Birds, where two disaffected Athenians defect to form a new kingdom in the sky with the birds, after which they begin an embargo on humans' sacrifices to the Gods, in effect threatening to starve the Olympians. Whether the offering is burned up or poured out, if the Gods do not receive sacrificial offerings, and in the appropriate form, they will eventually perish.

Even without potential embargoes, as described in Aristophanes' play, the mechanics of the sacrificial ritual posed problems for the Greeks. They utilize myth, and the comedy of innocence to alleviate the moral dilemmas their form of religious worship created. Consider again Walter Burkett's question, How can something that is not a gift be a sacrifice? The Greeks get the meat of the animal, all the useable pieces, and the rest is symbolically reconstituted, and then offered to the Gods. Why, one might reasonably ask, are the Gods satisfied with what they receive? Here the myth of Prometheus helps the Greeks have their cake and eat it too. In one form of the myth Prometheus tells the humans to sew up innards and entrails, the inedible bits, back inside the skin. He then helps the humans by tricking Zeus into choosing the "reconstituted" animal instead of a pile of meat. In a different version of the myth Zeus intentionally picks to get the worse end of the deal, no doubt because of his benevolence. In fact, in the first version of the myth, it is precisely because Prometheus tricked Zeus, that Zeus took fire away from humans. This is why Prometheus then has to do what he becomes best known for, namely, stealing fire from Mt. Olympus and giving it back to humans. This is how, through myth, the Greeks could answer Burkett's question in the affirmative.

The other problem that had to be confronted was that the idea of a cow, sheep, ram, or pig consenting to be sacrificed by a human in the name of a God is laughable. Humans and animals possess no reliable means of communicating, especially for such a complex notion as ritual sacrifice. Moreover, even if a machine enabled humans and animals to communicate, it is by no means clear that we could sufficiently explain to them notions like God and ritual sacrifice for them to make a suitably informed choice that could alleviate humans' guilt. Thus, the Greeks made use of the comedy of innocence to resolve their feelings of guilt at killing an animal they have raised, and have a relationship with, and stands in symbolically for humans. As we saw above, this process would occur at the beginning of the sacrificial ritual. The human participants would stand in a circle, water would be brought in a vessel, and there would be a ritual washing of hands. Water would then be offered to the animal, or perhaps sprinkled on its head, inducing the animal to make a gesture that the humans could interpret as it giving its assent to be sacrificed. In another variation of this process a select few animals might be arrayed around the altar, upon which were places some food item cows would find hard to resist. The first animal to move in for a taste of the treats displayed before it could then be interpreted as assenting to be sacrificed. Since the animal could be said to go "voluntarily" to the sacrificial altar any feelings of guilt the Greeks had would be assuaged.

One can see now how the practice of ritual sacrifice in ancient Greek religion made a comedy, a mockery, of the innocence of the sacrificial animal by conducting a sham of a ceremony through which the animal agrees to be killed. This is how the Greeks again answer Burkett's question in the affirmative. Something which is not a gift can be a sacrifice, if the sacrifice itself consents to be sacrificed. The sacrificial animal in effect makes a gift of itself. And then, since the animal stands in for both God and human, each makes itself the sacrifice, giving itself as a gift to the other. This reciprocal giving formed the basis of the on-going relationship between humans and the Gods. It also helped re-create and reinforce the sense of community through participation in the ritual sacrifice and meal. Thus, through myth and comedy the Greeks were able accomplish two important tasks in how they rationalized their practice of ritual sacrifice. First they were able to obtain important elements of reproducing their community, that is, meat products, and at the same time to appropriately honor the Gods.

The Comedy of Guilt

Ritual sacrifice is no less a part of contemporary society than it was ancient Greek society. One important difference is that while the ancient Greeks may or may not have actually engaged in human sacrifice, contemporary capitalist society definitely does.[4] And, where the ancients situated their comedy at the beginning of their sacrificial ritual, we moderns place our comedy at the end of our sacrificial ritual. Unlike the ancients we select our sacrificial animals more or less at birth, and then groom them assiduously for their role. The most important difference between us and our ancient Greek counterparts is that while they made a comedy of the innocence of their sacrificial victim, we moderns make a comedy of the guilt of our sacrificial victims. Only if presented with "choices" at the beginning, and then voluntarily making the wrong choice can we moderns revel in the joy of the punishment of the sacrificial victim. We go out of our way, quite a ways out sometimes, to establish the guilt of the sacrificial victim. For, indeed, there can be no joy in punishment unless the victim is guilty. However, the institutional structure of capitalist society is such that the mechanisms for establishing guilt are so decisively flawed that it constitutes a comedy of guilt.

Capitalist society precisely structures inequality so that those on the bottom have the least wealth, the fewest resources, the fewest opportunities, the worst schools, the worst healthcare, the unhealthiest neighborhoods, are destined for the worst jobs, for social marginalization, mass incarceration, political disenfranchisement, and for an early death. These people try to make their ends meet as best they can, and when this requires bending or breaking the law, they are punished severely. A society based, most fundamentally, on private property delights in seeing people punished for crimes against property. This makes the observers feel more secure in their property holdings, and helps reaffirm the basic notions and prejudices of a form of community based on the ownership and exchange of private property. Just like with the ancient Greeks, the comedic aspect to our modern sacrificial rituals helps assuage our collective guilt, it helps us to answer Burkett's question in the affirmative. The comedy of guilt, just like the comedy of innocence, makes the voluntary action of the would-be sacrifice the key element. Modern capitalism needs its sacrificial victims to be willing, or, as it is in our case, unwilling to abide by the eminently reasonable prescriptions of a system of law designed to uphold the bourgeoisie as a class, and thus the system of social relations that sustains their position of ideological hegemony.

One particularly dark variation on this ritual comedy of guilt can be observed in the extremes to which authorities, pundits, and everyday people on social media, will go to place blame for their own death on those unarmed, mostly people of color, killed by police. Legally speaking, we simply allow the police to claim that they felt that their lives were in danger, thus excusing the use of deadly force. In these instances one can observe the comedy of guilt being played out as predominantly white officers try again and again to explain how and why they felt so threatened that they had to kill an unarmed civilian. Darren Wilson, in one particularly ghastly instance of this ritual, went so far as to make Michael Brown out to be a demon, to imbue him with super-human qualities, and thus perceive him as posing a deadly threat to Wilson's life. In another, rather macabre, instance of the comedy of guilt there is the case of Tamir Rice. Many attempted to place the blame on this little boy because the officer perceived him as older, and as more threatening. Many even tried making his own murder Tamir's fault by blaming him for playing with a realistic-looking toy gun in public, which he should not have been doing in the first place. In this same vein one can observe the comedy of guilt being played out in cases like that of Trayvon Martin & Dontay Ivy, Eric Garner & Freddy Gray, Laquan MacDonald & Jamar Clark, Sandra Bland & so many many others. "If only the now deceased citizen hadn't done x when confronted by the police", or "if they had only said y when stopped by the police", "if only they hadn't been engaging in z low-level criminal offense at the time, or just prior", are the refrains sung during the ritual comedy of guilt.

More mundane variations on this sacrificial ritual, and the comedy that accompanies it, occur on a daily basis. Indeed, they form the very foundation of capitalist society. Without ritual sacrifice, the form of community which is most central to reproducing bourgeoisie society cannot be sustained. For the Greeks, ritual sacrifice was also about sustaining community. In their case the sustenance is more physical in nature, that is, they needed the calories. The Greeks sacrificed animals because they needed to eat, but also to honor the Gods. Today, we also need to eat, but the way we feed ourselves is much more complex than it was with the ancient Greeks. The sustenance derived from ritual sacrifice is, however, much more financial in nature today than in more distant epochs. The plain truth is that capitalism profits from the use, exploitation, and destruction of the poor, in particular black and brown bodies, and the bodies of women. This is as true today as it was in the halcyon days of the Atlantic slave trade. After slavery there was Segregation, after Segregation there was Jim Crow, after Jim Crow there arrived mass incarceration. Mass incarceration is the modern form taken by the capitalist machine which feeds on the poor, on black and brown bodies, and on the bodies of women, and profits from their poverty, captivity, marginalization, and also their deaths.

Poverty and inequality are the structural products of capitalism. They are also the main drivers of the feelings of desperation and exclusion that incline many to engage in illegal activities. Simply put, capitalism is a pyramid scheme whereby the opulence of the few is subsidized by the exploitation of the many. Thus, the kinds of material and social circumstances that studies have routinely shown to be criminogenic are the direct result of the "healthy" operation of a capitalist economy. Thus, capitalism can never be without crime, since it creates so many potential criminals, and incentivizes the rewards of successful crime so heavily. This is the main reason why the search for guilt, after certain kinds of individuals commit certain kinds of crimes is so comedic, to the point of being a mockery, a sham. Capitalist society chooses, almost from birth, those it will subject to the kinds of social and material pressures that drive people to crime in order to meet their needs, either for material resources or for social status. Then, after some of these people succumb to the pressures and incentives arrayed before them, capitalists utilize their power to organize public rituals of sacrifice, or as we call it, the criminal justice system. Capitalist elites intentionally dis-invest in public social services, e.g. education and healthcare, then when people find it impossible to live with dignity, they resort to any means necessary to provide. Capitalist elites criminalize this behavior, then apprehend, try, and if convicted, punish those who refuse to accept the social station assigned them. One grotesque example of the comedy of guilt in this connection is the widespread criminalization of homelessness.

One other prominent, and almost Kafkaesque, example of the way capitalist society makes a comedy of the guilt of its sacrificial victims is the insidious school to prison pipeline scholars have done much work to illuminate. The poorest students - usually people of color - are crowded into the worst neighborhoods, are segregated into the worst schools, and are suspended, expelled, and otherwise disciplined at an alarmingly disproportionate rate. These students are, without a sufficient education, left to fend for themselves in an economy we're constantly being told is globalizing and shifting to reward highly educated, high-skill workers. These people, again, mostly people of color, are increasingly caught up in the criminal justice system, where they are stopped and questioned, arrested, charged, tried, and convicted much more often than their white peers. Then they are given more sever treatment at sentencing, less lenience at parole, few to no resources for re-integration upon release, then thrust into the same job market for which they were originally poorly suited, only now at a further disadvantage; and also likely formally politically disenfranchised. Capitalist society condemns an entire segment of the population, the working classes, to systematic deprivation of resources and opportunities, and then punishes these people when they do whatever they have to in order to get by. Once these poor and marginalized persons have been caught-up in the criminal justice system their labor is exploited for profit by the prison-industrial complex. Dis-investing in resources for the re-integration of former convicts into their communities ensures that recidivism rates will be high enough to produce a reliable pool of labor to exploit. The privatization of prisons, which are proliferating in America, only exacerbates these incentives by cutting out the middle-man of the allegedly impartial "democratic" state.

Outside of, though certainly many times in conjunction with, the prison-industrial complex, the poor and marginalized are preyed upon and exploited by other elements of the capitalist ruling class. Sub-prime loans, student loans, and payday loans are all ways that the desperation, humiliation, and aspiration of the poor and marginalized are used against them for profit. The dominant neo-liberal narratives about education and the job market, for example, endlessly repeat how essential a college education is for success. And yet, poor students who reach for a better future by getting a college degree are finding that education is not a silver-bullet for social mobility, nor a panacea for income inequality. Large debt loads, a recession weakened labor market, structural changes in the capitalist global economy, as well as racism, patriarchy, and elite privilege all combine to sharply limit the avenues of social mobility truly open to graduates from the lower classes. Even those who major in highly remunerative disciplines, get excellent grades, and graduate, often face significant obstacles to success in their chosen field, e.g. the prospect of years of unpaid internships in order to have a resume appropriate to the job one ultimately wants, that they simply cannot afford. Payday loans, with their egregiously high interest rates and heavily punitive system of fees and fines, have been decisively shown to be nothing more than economic traps to bilk the poor of what little they may have. These companies take advantage of poor people, whose delicate economic equilibrium are easily disrupted by exogenous shocks, and who typically have insufficient savings to absorb those shocks; if they have any savings at all. Payday loans offer a quick fix to the cash-strapped poor, which quickly and reliably spiral into a mountain of crushing debt the poor borrower has little to no chance of ever paying off.

And then, after the poor and marginalized have fallen victim to the trap set by predators in our rigged economy, the elite, and of course their sycophants, blame the victims for their victimization. Recent college grads should have not gone to college if they couldn't afford to pay back the loans, debtors should have forgone whatever luxury they borrowed money in order to maintain. In this elite narrative it is always the moral failings of the individual that produce their impoverished, and desperate situation. The sub-prime loan crisis at the bottom of the housing collapse in 2007-2008 is a perfect example. Poor families were targeted by the big banks for risky loans that the banks assumed, even without a financial crisis, those families could not pay back. In the boom stage, elites and their institutions proclaim to the poor that prosperity is within reach; "easy credit can get you that home in the suburbs with the good schools". When the securitized debt instrument trend caught fire the incentives for financial institutions to create debt only multiplied. Then, after the crash, all the blame was placed at the door of those greedy poor families trying to live beyond their means, i.e. live with dignity outside the ghettos assigned to them. If only those people hadn't fallen for the insidious trap set for them by the sophisticated con-artists and loan sharks on Wall-Street, then the economy wouldn't have collapsed. This is a great example of the comedy of guilt being played out before our eyes.

Conclusion

Over the years, elites have developed an elaborate lexicon and discourse that they use to condemn the poor and justify the violence visited on them. The prejudices of the bourgeoisie against the poor are reified in formal law codes, sometimes approved by "representative" governments, and then used to justify the brutality needed to harness the labour-power of the poor to the apparatus of capitalist accumulation. These prejudices can be millennia old. Interestingly, this ancient pedigree can be seen in the very word at the heart of the controversy. "Democracy" is an oft invoked concept these days, but one about which there is not always a great deal of clarity. The word comes from the Greek words, Demos, meaning 'the people', and kratos , meaning 'power'. In the ancient world the term 'democracy' would have been used by elites as a pejorative for a kind of polis where the "common man", especially those with no property, had a voice in the government. Thus, 'democracy' translates as "the force of the people". Though, one must mention here that Demos does not refer to "the people" in the way modern readers will likely infer. The demos refers to the body of native-born adult male citizens of the polis. And, even more specifically it is used to refer to those native-born adult males wealthy enough to afford the hoplite panoply.

In the ancient world, 'demokratia' was invoked by elites in much the same way that the term 'anarchy' is used by elites today. However, the word 'anarchy' comes from the Greek 'an', a prefix implying the negation of what follows, and 'archos', meaning 'ruler'. Thus, 'an archos' translates as "without a ruler". The difference is that a ruler has some kind of legitimacy on their side, whether they are a tyrannos or a basileus. A demokratia, on the other hand, has no, and can have no, legitimacy at all; it is by definition an illegitimate regime, based on use of force by the majority of the worst people against the minority of the best people. One finds this echoed in the Romans' use of the concepts of libertas and licentia. The former refers to the legitimate power of the senatorial class to make the law, and to dominate the most important functions of the state. The latter referred to the illegitimate use of force by the lower classes against the nobility. A political regime imposed by, and for the Plebian order, in the eyes of the Patricians, could never be said to act with or from libertas, even though they were acknowledged to be free men and Roman citizens. A political regime dominated by the Plebian order could only ever be said to act from licentia, that is, from wantonness, lust, and instinct. The Plebians could never act from freedom, because they are led around by their dominant pursuits, pleasure and luxury, thus they can only act from licentia.

Suchlike forms of prejudiced language are still an integral part of the acting out of the comedy of guilt in capitalist society. This is because these vocabularies help elites ritually express their rationalizations for sacrifice, and thus absolve themselves of guilt. Only once they have been self-absolved can the moral guilt of sacrificing an unwilling victim be dissolved in the mind of the elite, who have always been the ones who organized and performed sacrifice. The comedy of guilt must be continually re-performed in order for the ruling class of capitalist society to square the circle implicit in Burkett's question; How can that which is not a gift be a sacrifice? By shifting blame for the problems and peril associated with poverty and precariousness onto the poor and exploited, the elite are able to turn unwilling victims into consenting sacrificial animals. So, when the process of capital accumulation requires the consumption, degradation, and exploitation of human life, as it inherently does, elites are ready with a bevy of convenient rationalizations that deflect blame; and, in a way that allows elites to continue to feel good about enjoying their opulence, even amidst appalling poverty. The ideology of the elite has always been flexible enough to accommodate the needs of the ritual comedy of guilt. Medieval Christian rulers found a way to rationalize the exploitation and persecution of Jews for profit; early modern Europeans found a way to rationalize the Atlantic slave trade; contemporary Americans have, in this illustrious tradition, found a way to rationalize a school to prison pipeline and prison-industrial complex that continues the super-exploitation of black and brown bodies which has fueled the capitalist development of the, now, "developed" countries.

Notes

Marx, Karl. "Manifesto of the Communist Party". The Marx & Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker.:473

Ibid, 474

For excellent resources on the religion of ancient Greece see Burkett, Walter. Greek Religion. 1977. Trans. John Raffan. Harvard University Press, 1985. Also see Meineck, Peter. "When Gods Walked the Earth: Myths of Ancient Greece". Barnes & Noble Audio. Portable Professor Series: 2005.

Scholarly opinion is divided on this question. Though there are literary references to human sacrifice, e.g. Achilles' sacrifice of Trojan captives during the funeral of Patroclus, there is as yet no archeological evidence of the practice of human sacrifice among the Greeks.

The Value of Utopia: The American Tradition of Radical Utopianism

By Nick Partyka

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates its most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place? Is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort one need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - call a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. The value of utopia is that thinking about utopias allows us to both critique present societies, and also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

Brief, but spectacular. That is how I think of the Occupy movement. An article I read recently lamented that the anniversaries of this movement seem to come and go now with but a murmur, a faint echo of the voice that all too briefly seemed capable of shaking American society out of complacency, of opening up new possibilities. There have by now been enough autopsies of this movement, and its failures, that there is no need for another. One thing that stands out is of course the fact that the movement never coalesced around a set of demands, never formulated a coherent political programme. Whether or not the Occupy movement did a good job distilling its critique, and its vision, neither were sufficiently theoretically developed or promulgated. Occupy in many senses seem to try to be a leaderless and theory-less movement. Of course, the main reason for the end of the Occupy movement was the physical clearance of the encampments by the thugs of the ruling class, that is, the police.

Much more fruitfully, when we look to the practice of Occupy, and the many encampments around the country, and indeed around the world, we can see that there is certainly a clear political, and moral ethos animating the activity and structure of the movement. What emerged from the Occupy encampments was an ethos of self-organization, free association, of de-centralized participatory democracy, and non-market modes of distribution. In Occupy encampments around the country people organized themselves to provide many kinds of basic, and some more advanced, services and community infrastructure, e.g. free meals, free educational opportunities, free healthcare, and much more. The diversity of services offered by different Occupy encampments was truly an amazing display of cooperation, solidarity, and self-organization. And indeed, this is what was really threatening about the occupy movement, it offered a robust vision of a more participatory, more solidaristic form of community, and worked diligently to create this, first within the bounds of its camps, and then the communities around the camps. Building up a vision of a new society, and a physical representation of that vision, became a major challenge to the ruling class because of the speed with which this movement grew and gathered strength.

Occupy was not the first time "utopian" ideas of more democratic, more participatory, more egalitarian, forms of community captured the imagination of Americans, and threatened the ruling class by becoming a movement. This has happened several times in our history, but, as one might expect, these lie outside the mainstream narrative of U.S. history. Thankfully, in the wake of Howard Zinn, much work has been done to recover and disseminate the knowledge and memory of the existence of radicals and revolutionaries, not to mention their important role, in American history. Utopian ideas, and vision of better societies have captured the imagination of Americans, and become large movements more than once. These largely forgotten episodes include the Bellamyite movement in the 1890s, and the Fourierist movement of the 1840s. These latter two represent the more secular and political end of the spectrum of utopian experiments in American history.

Looking Backwards, on Bellamyism

While it is almost totally forgotten now, at the end of the 19th century, the only American works of fiction to sell more copies than Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards were Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Ben-Hur. His book, and the ideas and vision contained in it, was so wildly popular that is spawned an intense, but short-lived political movement in the form of Bellamyite "Nationalist Clubs"; indeed they were often called "Bellamy Clubs". These clubs arose quickly following the release of Bellamy's novel, and while the first club originated in Boston, chapters soon popped up in cities across the nation. These clubs, via coordinated activity, became a political force as a movement in the first half of the last decade of the nineteenth century, before disappearing after merging with the Populist movement. They turned Bellamy himself into a politician, although he was perhaps not well suited to the role of leader of a socialist political movement.

When Looking Backward was published in 1888 its popularity owed much to its readability, engaging narrative, but especially to its grand vision of a utopian future. Another big part of its popularity was conditioned by the times in which its author lived. Over the course of Edward Bellamy's forty-eight years he saw a great deal of turmoil, indeed, he would have been around fifteen the year the Civil war ended, and not quite twenty five when the Long Depression began in 1873. After the war American society experienced the rise of giant integrated capitalist firms - the infamous trusts - to positions of monopoly power; it had experienced a series of sometimes devastating economic recessions and depressions; it was experiencing increasing labor militance and strikes, for example the Great Strike of 1887; in conjunction with the latter, there was much radical socialist political agitation, see for example the 1886 Haymarket Affair and its highly controversial aftermath. Over this time the social effects of capitalism and industrialization became more pronounced. As is the still the case, it was workers, and the poor who bore the costs of material "progress". From the end of the Civil war to the turn of the century was when American capitalism really came into its own, when it rose to social and political dominance. As material prosperity of society increased, it looked to increasingly many Americans that, economically and politically, the decked was stacked against them, and that the lion's share of these gains were being accumulated by the wealthy.

Bellamy adopts the Rip Van Winkle trope and has his protagonist fall asleep in then present-day 1887, and wake up over a century later in the year 2000. Bellamy's hero, Julian West, finds himself in a utopian future society in which the evils of the world of 1887 have been rectified through application of reason, science, and technology. The book takes the form of a kind of guided tour of the future given to Julian by his host, a Dr. Leete, who is caring for Julian after he wakes up. Dr. Leete and his family take turns escorting Julian around, showing him different aspects of the future, and answering his many questions about how the world of the future works, and how things came to be that way. Long story short, the Unites States of the future has been transformed by a rational and irresistible bloodless revolution into a socialist utopia, as one giant national trust, operated for the public benefit. All industries have been nationalized, and are democratically controlled by their workers; there is centralized distribution of important goods; there is gender equality; the economy has been reorganized as a rational and egalitarian "Industrial Army". As Bellamy describes this future, there are no wars, no government, no bankers, no corruption, no jails, and no more "buying" and "selling".

The social revolution that brings about the society of the future, as Bellamy presents it, occurs much like Marx describes. The revolution is a natural occurrence, and as such irresistible, that happened once society developed to a certain level of rationality. Once people become sufficiently rational they simply perceive the need to radically transform society, and then do so in the form of a revolutionary mass social movement that peacefully takes power and then restructures society. Bellamy, like many of his age, was not keen to abandon the benefits of industrialization, and mass production, but wanted to change the composition and distribution of what is produced. Thus, his vision of the future economy is one where society takes the form of one large trust, but because it will be run democratically by worker-citizens, it will pursue their interests. Bellamy's vision is a kind of syndicalism, in which a congress of industrial unions forms the core of the national government. Moreover, because the people of the future are so rational they organize their society along the most rational, and thus egalitarian, lines. This is why, for example, in Bellamy's utopia social classes are not abolished but re-organized on rational lines, which for him means according to age. This there is a course of age-based classes, or stages, all persons pass through. All the stages are designed to maximize the development of citizens' personal talents and capacities, to effectively train people to be competent workers fit for important jobs, as well as to be active and engaged citizens.

The application of reason to social problems results, in Bellamy's utopia, in progressive policies like equal educational and occupational opportunities for women; everyone must work between 21 and 45; universal basic education for all until 21; occupations decided, as much as possible, by aptitude; remuneration based on effort; college open to all, with admissions based on social need and individual merit; free universal healthcare. In keeping with his syndicalist vision, Bellamy's utopia has a political structure framed around industrial unions. Bellamy's novel envisions the future President of the United States as the general of the Industrial Army, and serving a five year term. This person is to be elected by a vote of all those worker-citizens who have retired, i.e. those over forty five years of age. In this utopia there would be ten industrial departments, or unions, each with its own head, or chief, elected by the retied members of the individual departments; the group of these chiefs serves as a kind of cabinet to the President. There is a national congress, which meets every five years to pass or revise laws. He proposes a separate entity he calls, the Inspectorate, to pursue consumer complaints, fraud, abuse, misconduct, et cetera. The job this agency is to seek out graft, inefficiency, or waste, as well as health, safety, or environmental hazards.

The central metaphor of Bellamy's novel is presented in his analogy of the General and the Balloon. Dr. Leete in trying to explain the reasoning behind the organization of the society and economy of the future tells Julian, "It is easier for a general up in a balloon with perfect survey of the field, to manoeuvre a million men to victory then for a sergeant to mange a platoon in a thicket". [1] It is most rational to organize society into one big corporation because this will facilitate macro-level social and economic planning in the public interest. The idea is to harness the power of the large trusts, because their centralization afforded them a larger view of the economic landscape, and allows them to plan accordingly. Under capitalism this planning took the form of the great trusts trying to manage competition between oligopolists to keep prices and profits high. When all the nation's industries were organized under centralized control, like in a trust, and all these trusts nationalized, society would be able to engage in the kind of economic planning that can create the utopian society Julian West encounters.

The idea for the Bellamy clubs emerged very soon after the novel debuted. A reporter in Boston, Cyrus Field Willard, is credited with coming up with idea, as there is a surviving letter in which he ask Bellamy for permission to found a club to promote Bellamy's ideas. Bellamy assented, and the ball began rolling. In the fall of 1888 Willard's "Nationalist Circle", merged with the independently organized "Boston Bellamy Club" of Charles E. Bower & Arthur F. Deveraux to found the first permanent Bellamyite group. The Bellamyite movement was at this point more a moral association than a political party. In 1889 they began publishing a magazine, The Nationalist. Groups were very quickly founded in large Eastern cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C.. The movement was particularly strong in California. That state had sixty five local clubs, whereas, even a large and populous state like New York had only sixteen local Bellamyite groups.

The early Bellamyite movement eschewed political action, that is, participation in a 'democratic' political process they felt was rigged. They focused instead on propaganda, e.g. organizing public lectures, printing and distributing pamphlets and periodicals. As the fever pitch of labor and socialist militance and agitation, combined with events like the Great Strike of 1887 and the Homestead Strike of 1892, the Bellamyite movement reversed course and engaged furiously in political activity focused on more immediate gains, with a particular emphasis on the elections of 1892. The economic and political climate of the age created other reform minded groups in addition to Bellamyites, groups which would cooperate and compete with each other as they often had large segments of over-lapping memberships. Economic depression, political corruption, financial speculation and market manipulation, all fueled the rise of the Populist movement, and of the People's Party. Bellamy, and many other members of the Nationalist clubs were so supportive of the People's Party that eventually the Bellamyite movement merged into the Populist movement. The failure of Bellamy as a political candidate did not help the situation, as the alliance of the People's Party and the Bellamyites rendered most of the latter's organizational functions redundant. In the wake of the 1892 elections the Bellamyite movement began to dissipate as it was largely subsumed by the Populist movement.

In early 1894 Bellamy's own journal, The New Nation, was forced to close due to financial difficulties. Later in this same year Bellamy ceased his political activity on behalf of the movement that bore his name. Other Bellamyite periodicals continued to be published over the next couple years, but in dwindling numbers. By 1896 there were only a handful of Bellamyite groups still active, for example those in Wisconsin which were organized enough to run candidates for state offices that year. After this, the Bellamyite movement basically vanishes as a movement, save for a scattering of die-hards. Bellamy himself would die only two years later, on May 22nd 1898. Though he claimed that he did not write his novel with the aim of providing an explicit plan of economic and political reform, his utopian vision of a more democratic, more equal future resonated deeply with a nation weary of the effects of capitalism.

Political Utopias in Antebellum America

The populist and reform movements of the 1880s and 1890s, as well as the socialist movement emerging in this era, had important precursors in American history. Indeed, the success of a radical utopian inspired movement like Bellamyism will not surprise one acquainted with the utopian movements of antebellum America. There was a very limited Owenite movement in America during the 1820s, the culmination of which was the experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana. Much more extensive and successful was the Fourierist movement that emerged in the 1840s. [2] This movement attracted a fairly large following, and was able to establish a number of experimental communities, called Phalanxes. In contrast to Bellamyism, which was an American movement, both Owenism and Fourierism are European movements which crossed the Atlantic. The success of Fourierism, and relative lack of success of Owenism, in transplanting to America is explained in part by the differences in the economic climates in which they came to America. Fourierism resonated more deeply with Americans than Owenism mostly because they were more open to radical utopian experiments in the wake of the economic crisis of 1837, and the depression that followed. If not for the economic crisis of 1873 and the ensuing depression, the 1886 Haymarket Affair, the Great Strike 1887, the crash of 1893 and the depression that followed, Bellamyism may not have emerged as a mass movement.

One major difference between Owenism and Fourierism, and a factor in their respective levels of success, is in the manner of their transplantation to America. While Owenism was brought to America by Owen and his sons, Fourierism was brought back to America by an American disciple of Fourier's, Albert Brisbane. Owen purchased the town of New Harmony in Indiana from its previous occupants with the intention of founding a utopian community there based on his philosophic principles and the lessons learned in operating his mills at New Lanark in Scotland. American Fourierists began with editing Fourier's ideas into a coherent form, and then propagandizing on behalf of these ideas. When these agitation efforts combined with economic depression in the wake of 1837, with the lingering effects of the second Great Awakening, the example of successful utopian communities in America, and the sympathetic affinities of various immigrant groups Fourierism became a rather large movement. At its high point the Fourierist movement could boast of dozens of Phalanxes across America.

Owenism

The Owenite movement in America was comprised almost entirely of the experimental utopian community the movements' founder Robert Owen established, and his efforts to acquire funding and attract personnel for this community. Though there were other Owenite communities in the U.S., the story of Owenism in America is largely the story of the New Harmony colony. Unfortunately, Owen found little success in America, less than some of the experiments within Great Britain, and his utopian experiment lasted only four years before the colonists abandoned the Owenite philosophy. The community at New Harmony persisted, but they were no longer an Owenite utopian project. Owen had originally purchased the land, and a few buildings, from the previous residents at New Harmony. These previous occupants were Rappites colonists, a mostly German Protestant religious sect, which had moved to Indiana from Pennsylvania to more freely practice their beliefs and communal way of life. After establishing the first group of settlers at his community, Owen left his son William in charge at New Harmony and returned east to find more funds and colonists for his project. When Owen returned in April of 1825 he found the community of several hundred residents in chaos. He did his best to put matters in order, and succeeded fairly well, he departed again in June 1825 in search of more funds and colonists. In all, Owen spent only a few months residing at New Harmony.

Within two years of its founding as an Owenite utopian experiment the New Harmony community was an economic failure, that is, it was not financially or materially self-supporting. There are a host of reasons that account for the failure of the Owenite experiment at New Harmony. The colony had trouble attracting residents, and those who did come were not always of the highest caliber. While New Harmony did bring in many ideologically committed Owenites, it also welcomed in many types of people. In a letter, Robert Dale Owen, one of Robert's sons, describes the population of New Harmony as, "a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in".[3] In another letter, William Owen, another of Robert's sons, says that besides committed Owenites, New Harmony had attracted, "crackpots, free-loaders, and adventurers whose presence in the town makes success unlikely". [4] There was a laundry list of complaints about why the New Harmony project failed; not enough skilled craftsmen; not enough unskilled laborers; insufficient and inexperienced management and supervision; not enough housing; not enough land; not enough privacy; too much freedom; not enough freedom.

Robert Owen was often away from the colony and, like him, many colonists only stayed a few months. This high turnover, as well as the problems listed above, seemed to doom this project from the outset. Between the motley collection of colonists, the factional infighting, and the lack of economic viability, the New Harmony settlement ended as a failure for Owen. The lack of economic success and factional squabbles over questions of theoretical principles and practical organization led to a large schism at New Harmony in 1826. A group carried on the Owenite project for another couple years, but finally gave up the ghost in 1829. In 1827, Owen severed ties with the community he founded, transferring ownership to his sons. After 1829 the town abandoned Owenism, and converted their community to a traditional capitalist private property system.

While the town was a failure as a utopian experiment, it did produce some very interesting and significant results and persons. Under Owenite leadership New Harmony could boast of the first free public library, and the first free public school. It also became a leading center of scientific discovery in the natural science, in particular in geology where Owen's third son David Dale achieved prominence. Robert Dale, the oldest son of Robert Owen, in addition to publishing many books and pamphlets, served in both the Indiana state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives. He advocated for women's rights, for free public education, and opposed slavery. It was in fact Robert Dale Owen who introduced the bill which founded the now world famous Smithsonian Institution.

Fourierism

Like the Owenites, the practical activity of the Fourierist movement in America was directed towards the founding of utopian communities. In the minds of the Fourierists these communities, or rather the network of these communities, would form the basis of the new society, and the transformative effects would radiate out from these communities. Though the Fourierists did much to expound and promulgate their theories in writing, their main energy was directed at founding and linking Fourierist phalanxes. A working example of their vision of a utopian way of life would, in their estimation, be the best piece of propaganda they could have. An operational model Phalanx was more likely to attract actual converts than hundreds of pounds of printed literature. One quite decisive advantage of the Fourierists was that they, unlike Owen, were not intensely skeptical. Indeed, the embrace of religious arguments, appeals to religious morality, and the use of religious modes of presenting Fourierist ideas very much helped Fourierism gain a large following in America.

The Fourierist movement was more successful than the Owenite movement in America, and thus it was larger and more diverse. It was however, more distant in its ideology and practice from its founder than the Owenite movement was from Owen. The experience of the movement is not so directly tied to any one individual community. This movement was, like Owenism, short-lived, despite many Fourierists being intensely passionate. Albert Brisbane, an American traveling in Europe, became a votary of Charles Fourier and his utopian socialist philosophy. In the early 1830s Brisbane returned to America and eagerly set to work proselytizing for Fourier's ideas; edited and parsed by Brisbane for American audiences. By 1840 he was publishing The Phalanx, a Fourierist journal, but his big break came in 1842 when Horace Greeley allowed Brisbane to purchase a front-page column in his popular newspaper The New York Tribune. This platform allowed Brisbane to bring Fourier's ideas to the huge audience of the Tribune's readership. Running for about a year and a half, and reprinted in dozens of other newspapers, Brisbane's column, helped ignite the spark of the American Fourierist movement. We should note that Brisbane was not alone in working to advance Fourier's ideas in America, nor was his journal the only Fourierist publication, though it was among the earliest.

Over the next decade, Fourierist phalanxes sprung up across the country, perhaps the most famous of which was the Brook Farm community in Massachusetts. The organized Fourierist movement established at least thirty phalanxes, and at it height, the movement consisted of perhaps as many as fifty Fourierist communities. One must be cognizant that there were several strains of Fourierism in America, and so deciding which communities count as Fourierist can sometimes be a matter of debate. The "phalanx" was the name Fourier gave to his ideal utopian communities. They were largely agricultural, but did not reject machinery. They were designed to self-sustaining communities in which all participants would have a chance to prosper. Fourier's phalanxes were not communist, since they were supposed to contain inequalities, that is, individuals were to be rewarded both for their effort as well as their contribution of capital. By the mid-1850s however, all but a hardy few phalanxes remained. What few did survive the collapse of the movement, were wiped out by the Civil war. Most Fourierist phalanxes lasted, on average, only a couple years; indeed, critics labeled Fourierists, 'four-year-ites'. The longest lasting community was the North American Phalanx of Colts Neck, New Jersey, which was in continuous operation for twelve years.

There is one very important way that the experience of the Brook Farm community was characteristic of the larger Fourierist movement. The Brook Farm community was originally established as a utopian community by Transcendentalist-inspired reformers. In the spring of 1841 George Ripley, and a small coterie of fellows, decamped to Brook Farm and established an experimental utopian community. Their aims were to counter the effects of a depersonalized and unequal society by removing themselves from that society, and forming a more ideal communal way of life. The Brook Farmers rejected Emerson's more individualistic, more isolationist, vision of Transcendentalist "self-culture". After four years of disorganization, factional quibbles, and lack of a cohesive vision, inhibiting the communities' prosperity, the Brook Farmers decided to adopt Fourierism in1844 because it offered a more concrete plan and structure. This is what attracted many, beyond Transcendentalists, to Fourier's system, and to Fourierist phalanxes, in this era. It was a detailed plan of action for forming communities in an age when so many utopian schemes were vague and ill-defined.

The Fourierist movement, brief as its life may have been, as well as the legacy of its example, made important contributions to later American political movements. Several important legacies of the Fourierist movement stand out. First, in the 1840s the Fourierists were among the earliest and strongest critics of the nascent industrial capitalist order. The Fourierists criticized capitalism as an anti-democratic system of "industrial feudalism" which subordinated workers to employers. Fourierism, and indeed the whole communitarian movement, achieved its prominence at a kind of tipping point in American history, and its failure to stop the advance of the burgeoning industrial capitalism set American society on different path than had this movement had more success. On a longer view, the legacy of the Fourierist movement continued to be seen in the communitarian aspects of the American socialist movement, as well as in the American labor movement, especially in its advocacy of producers' and consumers' cooperatives. The Fourierist movement has an additional interesting legacy in the way that it influenced the thinking of Edward Bellamy. Indeed, several important elements of Fourierist philosophy appear in Bellamy's utopia.

Conclusion

The utopian alternative was very much alive in 19th-century America. The threat various utopian movements constituted can be seen in the sheer numbers of people who flocked to religious or secular utopian communities all over the country. From the 1820s through the 1850s thousands and thousands of Americans experimented with utopianism, joining one or another experimental community. Over these decades nearly one hundred different utopian communities and projects were launched in America. Some lasted just a few months, others only a few years. Others, however, enjoyed some longevity. In general, the utopian communities that tended to last longer were the religiously inspired ones, which also very often had the advantage of being ethno-religious groupings. Many utopian groups like the Rappites or Harmonists, the Amish, and the Hutterites, were largely German Protestant sects. Though there were religious groups, e.g. the Shakers, who were successful at converting many different kinds of people to their way of life. Other utopian groups attempted to create new religions, e.g. the Mormons, and the Oneida community.

In a fairly common pattern, people turned to utopian communities when economic hardship became most acute, and then left when conditions improved. The very existence of alternative, non-for-profit, ways of living posed a threat to the nascent capitalist order in America. It was only in the decades after the Civil war that most kinds of utopian communities became economically unviable as corporate consolidation, mechanization of production, and economies of scale replaced durable hand-made goods with cheaper but less durable factory-made goods. Utopian communities, as small-scale industrial producers of craft goods could simply not compete. Though many of these communities continued to be self-sufficient and survived as communities, their prosperity at first slowly, and then rather quickly, diminished, making attracting new followers and maintaining their communities difficult.

What the experience of utopian communities, both religious and secular, testifies to is the ability of possibility to capture the imagination, and to inspire action. Their many different aims and principles notwithstanding, these utopian movements all sought to transform the lives of human beings through radically transforming social relations. Beyond utopian experiments in communal living, utopian thinking provided some inspiration for more practical movements like the early women's suffrage movement, the abolitionist movement, and the prohibitionist movement. The Occupy movement, brief but spectacular, is part of this utopian tradition in American history. Its memory is worth preserving, its anniversaries worth noting, because of the utopian aspect of its existence. Even for a brief time, just as with our 19th century forebears, a utopian political movement allowed a great many people the freedom to participate in the dream that a better world is possible, to experience the thrill of feeling that such a possible better world could be realized.

Notes

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887. 1888. Quote from Claeys, Gregory & Lyman T. Sargent. The Utopia Reader. New York University Press, 1999.

For an excellent history of the American Fourierist movement see; Guarneri, Carl J.. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in 19th Century America. Cornell University Press, 1991.

Quoted from; Clayton, Joseph. Robert Owen: Pioneer of Social Reforms. A.C. Fifield, 1908.

Quoted in; Wilson, William. The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony. 2nd Ed. Indiana University Press, 1967.