Ever since Edmund Burke, founder of the conservative tradition,
declared,
“The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to
fill us with disgust and horror,” pundits and scholars have divided the
political world along the axis of time. The left is the party of the
future; the right, the party of the past. Liberals believe in progress
and the new; conservatives, in tradition and the old. Hope versus
history, morrow versus memory, utopia versus reality: these are the
stuff of our great debates.
In “
The Reactionary Mind,” I argued that this view of the political divide is incorrect, at least as it pertains to the right.
Beginning with Burke, conservatives have been less committed to
tradition or the past than to
a hierarchical vision of society.
In Burke’s case, it was aristocrats over commoners; in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, it would be masters over slaves, employers over
employees, husbands and men over women and wives. And so it remains:
the most consistent feature of contemporary American conservatism is the
GOP’s war on
reproductive freedom and
worker rights.
When
it comes to history, conservatives have demonstrated a flexibility
about time best captured by an aristocratic character in “
The Leopard,”
Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s novel about nineteenth-century Sicily: “If we
want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” In defense
of an established order of power, any innovation can be countenanced,
any past disposed of. Time, in other words, is not the key.
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But
if the right’s window does not open onto the past, must the left’s open
onto the future? Not necessarily, claim two fascinating new books:
Steve Fraser’s “
The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power” and Kristin Ross’s “
Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune.”
When it comes to past and future, they show, the left can be as
ambidextrous as the right. What’s more, it may be the left’s ability to
look backward while marching forward that explains its most potent
moments of power and possibility.
Fraser is our
preeminent historian of America as a capitalist civilization. No one is
more attuned to the inner vibrations of our monied culture: the brazen
fantasies of its wildest speculators, the embittered rage of its most
abject victims, how the market both awakens desire and stokes dreams of
revenge. Writing a prose of sinuous beauty, Fraser has brought a sense
of high literature to everything from
labor leader Sidney Hillman to
Wall Street, reminding one of those poets the critic Floyd Dell once described as “
seismographs of social disturbance.”
In ”Age
of Acquiescence,” Fraser pursues a comparison often noted between our
time and what Mark Twain called “The Gilded Age,” those decades of the
last turn of the century when wealth and power were gathered at the top
and powerlessness and poverty collected at the bottom. Why, Fraser asks,
do workers and citizens today accede to the inequalities and injustices
of capitalism that they refused to accept 100 to 150 years ago? After
the Civil War, farmers and workers responded to the explosion of
corporate power and financial wealth with desperate acts of violence and
audacious feats of political creativity. The reason they could see a
utopia beyond industrial capitalism, says Fraser, is that they
remembered a reality before industrial capitalism. Their vision of the
future was fueled by a memory of the past.
In 1820, 80%
of Americans were self-employed; by 1940, 80% worked for someone—or
something—else. “The individual has gone,” declared John D. Rockefeller,
“never to return.” Driven into the mills and the mines or onto the
rails, these refugees from the shop and the farm were injured, maimed,
or killed (35,000 per year) by industrial capitalism. They were the
lucky ones. Many Americans couldn’t get work at all. In the 1870s,
unemployment became a census category for the first time. So desperate
were jobless New Yorkers that they got themselves arrested just to enjoy
a night off the streets, in jail. They also struck, marched, organized,
bombed and killed, launching decades of class warfare, literal and
metaphoric, that would haunt the country’s elites for years to come.
The
fact of unemployment, Fraser writes, struck these men and women “as
shocking, unnatural, and traumatic,” as did the astronomic new wealth of
the nation’s plutocrats. That’s because they remembered a life before
wage labor and their pervasive dependence on—and the compulsion of—the
market. So powerful was this memory of a pre-capitalist past that it
framed the way they understood their enemies: well into the twentieth
century, Fraser reminds us, FDR was railing against “economic royalists”
and “Tories of industry.” Not merely as propaganda but as a residue of
the world not long ago left behind.
But it was precisely
that memory, Fraser argues, that shock of the new, that made these
rebels so ready to demand something even newer: a cooperative
commonwealth, in which production would be collectively managed and
profit democratically shared. Scandalized by the novelty of capital,
they did not opt for an escapist nostalgia. They instead turned to the
state, traditionally an object of opprobrium, and demanded that it
assume new responsibilities: take over industry, tax wealth, supply
credit, store surpluses—all for the sake of a vision drawn from a
pre-capitalist past:
It is undeniable that the
movement owed its fervor and sense of political and moral peril to the
republican, smallholder mentality of the Revolution. Passionate
attachments to immemorial traditions and ancient creeds—one might say to
a useable or empowering past—were conjoined to creative methods of
reconfiguring the future, all as a way of escaping the torments of an
intolerable or even fatal present.
What
Fraser shows, with vivid set pieces drawn from the nation’s most violent
battlefields, is that far from presenting itself as the enemy, the past
was viewed by workers and farmers as a resource and an ally. In part
because the capitalist right so heartily embraced the rhetoric of
progress and the future (no one, it seems, was content with the
present). But more than that, historical memory enabled workers and
farmers to see beyond the horizon of the capitalist present, to know, in
their bones, what Marx was constantly struggling to imprint upon the
mind of the left: that capitalism was but one mode of economic life,
that its existence was contingent and historical rather than natural and
eternal, and that because there was a past in which it did not exist
there might be a future when it would cease to exist.
Like the nation, capitalism rests upon repeated acts of forgetting; a robust anti-capitalism asks us to remember.
Perhaps, a critic might respond, this is a
peculiarly American story. It’s long been noted how devoted Americans
are to the Revolution and the republic it created. It should come as no
surprise, then, that even America’s most violent radicals would resort
to a vocabulary of the past. One must turn to Europe’s revolutions, our
critic might conclude, to hear what a true left sounds like. One must
listen to the wildest voices of French Revolution,
1848, and
the Paris Commune.
Except,
this is what those voices sounded like:
I
must of necessity turn back to past times, and even times a very long
while passed; and you must believe I do so with distinct purpose of
showing you where lies the hope for the future, and not in mere empty
regret for the days which can never come again.
That’s
William Morris, the English socialist who “during the 1880s,” writes
Kristin Ross, “would become Britain’s most vigorous and creative
supporter of the memory of the Paris Commune.” Morris features
prominently in Ross’s book on the Commune of 1871, Paris’s 72-day
experiment with radical democracy that ended with the French army’s
massacre of thousands of Parisian citizens.
The Commune is one of
the most storied events in the history of the European left (just last
year, the Yale historian John Merriman offered a blow-by-blow account of
those fateful 72 days and their bloody aftermath in his “
Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune“).
Ross, a literary critic at NYU, takes a novel approach to that story,
examining what it was that the Communards said they were doing and how
their admirers—particularly Morris, the Russian anarchist Peter
Kropotkin, and Marx—relayed and recast their words in the most far-flung
precincts of Iceland, Siberia, even Idaho.
Ross is the perfect
guide for such a journey: few critics are more attuned to how words and
images can travel. In July 1871, for example, just months after the
Communards had been slaughtered, Morris toured Iceland. Ross follows him
there, to the volcanic countryside, only to find him “reminded by the
loose stones on the edges of the lava fields of ‘a half-ruined Paris
barricade.’”
One of the most visually spectacular acts of the
Commune was the toppling of the Vendôme Column on May 16. Built
originally as a monument to France’s victories under Napoleon, it had
come to represent the despotic regime of his nephew Napoleon III.
Tickets to the event were sold to Parisians, who gathered by the
thousands to watch this assault on a hated symbol of the Second French
Empire. Nearly 20 years later, Ross notes, Morris would replay this
event in his novel “News from Nowhere,” when he imagines London’s
“Trafalgar Square, cleansed of its own imperialist monumentality” in the
form
of Nelson’s Column, transformed “into an apricot orchard.”
Ross has an acute eye for this
juxtaposition of the pastoral and the political, how the vines of nature
can overtake the monuments of empire, how revolutionary events can
interrupt the silence of the countryside. Like Morris, she is drawn to
parables, especially parables about travel across not just space (as in
the lava fields of Iceland) but also time:
Parable,
from the Greek meaning “beside,” plus “casting, putting, turning”: a
“putting beside” or “putting side by side.” A parable is not about going
backwards or reversing time but about opening it up—opening up the web
of possibilities. In this case… as a way of recruiting past hopes to
serve present needs.
Ross does not argue, in the
manner of Fraser, that the memory of pre-capitalist society fired the
imagination of the Commune, whose far-reaching proposals included
daycare centers for working-class children that would house “‘an aviary
full of birds’ to combat boredom, ‘the great malady of young children.’”
She focuses instead on how the Commune prompted a renewed interest,
among radicals like Marx and Kropotkin, in pre-capitalist institutions
like the Russian
obshina, the agricultural property held by a village in common.
We
must “not be frightened of the word ‘archaic,’” Marx writes Vera
Zasulich in a letter that Ross cites as a clue to Marx’s post-Commune
writings about Russian agrarianism. What’s most significant about these
and Kropotkin’s writings, Ross shows, is how much they eschew nostalgia
and romanticism. Neither writer looks for or finds an arcadian past in
the countryside. Both seek instead a source of information about the
capitalist present and insight into a possible communist future: it was
the isolation of the Paris workers from the peasants in the countryside,
Marx was convinced, that had allowed the French state to crush the
Commune so easily. Understanding the countryside would be key to moving
forward, not merely tactically but imaginatively. In turning to the
past, Marx was perhaps returning to one of his earliest insights, which
he formulated in an
1843 letter to Arnold Ruge:
It
will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing
something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in
reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a
great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.
In
his “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” Burke is supposed to
have given voice to the conservative dispensation by describing society
as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between
those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
Yet who in and around the Commune had greater sensitivity to the
delicate and mutual dependencies of past and future: The anarchist
Kropotkin, who spent an entire week in prison tapping out the history of
the Commune to his young neighbor in the next cell, lest it be
forgotten? The Communard geographer Élisée Reclus, who called for
solidarity “between those who travel through the conscious arena and
those who are longer here”? Or the reactionaries in charge of the French
regime, who spent the better part of the 1870s forbidding anyone who
managed to survive the Commune from carving any mention of it on their
gravestones?
