The Fear Of A Just World - The Backlash Against The 1960s

Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.

– George Orwell, 1984

Forget about Trump. Forget about Clinton. There is far more going on than the personalities and flaws of these individuals. There is a far larger frame here and a picture that needs interpretation and possibly curating.
Those of us left who lived through the 1960s, who experienced the upheavals of that era understand that the project of transforming our world towards a more democratic, just, ecologically balanced future has deep roots. Straddling confidently atop the long sturdy roots laid down by labor struggles and previous movements for social justice transmits the possibility and hope that we can indeed change the world. I know this is so because my friends... because we already have. Indeed, the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, women’s rights, LBGT, and environmental movements movements begun in the 60s era successfully challenged the dominant capitalist institutions of the U.S.
So much so, that those institutions have been scrambling for the last 50 years to systematically minimize the possibility of any future freedom struggles. Pretty much that's all the last 50 years have been about...attempting to negate and deny the impact of the 1960s rebellions on society.

There has been an ongoing campaign to denigrate and obscure the democratic promise that the movements of the sixties still hold, while at the same time co-opting the symbols and imagery of that era to trivialize the meanings as well as make Corporate America seem “cool” and sell more products. This reaction has gone hand-in-hand with material forces, such as student debt and coercing the population into inactivity and obedience. The result is a “depoliticized society,” with a diminished ability to make history.  Knowledge of this campaign is a weapon against rootlessness and despair.
This is the product being sold now in every media market...rootlessness and despair.
It's why we see the political campaigns we see today.
It's why we are not talking about Native Americans struggling to protect their water supply, or global warming... but instead the absurd antics of a narcissistic billionaire with the intellect and vocabulary of a carrot or the tired stories of misogyny and alleged 'crookedness" that has been investigated ad nauseum over and over. It's all designed to distract, disgust, repel, and lower the IQs of those outside the power network that revolves around the extreme concentration of wealth and the power that goes with it. It's all meant to make you feel rootless, disparate, and hopeless.  

The 1960s are typically remembered as a time of turbulence and change.
Even if you did not live through it, you know the iconic images of assassinations, war, protests, urban riots, men on the moon, long hair, drugs, sex, pop art, and fantastic music.
The underlying story of that decade was the clash between capitalism and democracy, one in which  millions of Americans participated in social movements and challenged the country to become more just and more democratic.  In some ways it succeeded and in others it failed. The true history of that struggle has been consistently distorted and hidden from view. What the power network and the media they own still cannot comprehend, or perhaps would most like to forget, is the democratic promise that formed the basis of those sixties social movements. In his book, Obscuring The Promise of Democracy; Edward P. Morgan suggests that the surge in democratic empowerment in which large numbers of Americans of all ages organized themselves to confront and transform a range of injustices rooted in American institutions has largely disappeared from memory. 

The sixties’ social movements, at their best, were not just about stopping racism or war on a systemic scale, but also about the self-realization of the millions of individuals involved on a personal level. Morgan calls that“democratic empowerment.” and describes it  as “one’s unfolding ‘freedom to,’ a lifelong discovery of one’s authentic self, the discovery of which progressively frees one from manipulation by others and potentially by the disabling scripts of the unconscious”
You may have experienced this, it's a rush of sorts...perhaps the first time you participated in some type of organizing meeting for a cause you knew was a just one, and realized that in working with others you had the power to impact the world for the better. The meaningfulness and self-confidence that comes from a politically active and engaged life contrasts dramatically from the dominant modes of apathy and self-loathing inoculated into us by capitalism and its occupied mass media appendages. The experience of acting together allows people to see themselves differently and to grow into their full potential, to gain courage in the face of challenges – from registering people to vote, speaking at a meeting, to holding a picket sign, or risking arrest in direct action.  Jim Lawson, the civil rights organizer is quoted as saying, “ordinary people who acted on conscience and took terrible risks were no longer ordinary people. They were by their very actions transformed”. 

In the 1960s we rode a wave of personal and political transformation. It exploded in the black freedom movement as African Americans of all ages stood up against terrorism and oppression and found pride and voice, it contagiously spread out from the South to other areas and populations in the country. White students returning to campus from battles against segregation began to question and stand up against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Women involved in these movements connected their gender experiences with the role of women in capitalist patriarchal society, and fought for a world without sexual inequality. LGBTs, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, Asian Americans, factory workers, prisoners, and many others also joined in to the wave of democratic empowerment, finding  allies & greater confidence and higher expectations for the world around them. 
In concert these social movements pointed the way towards a vision for a radically democratic society, in which capitalism would be replaced by the participation of diverse constituencies in the decisions which affect them. Such a vision was spelled out in many places including Students for a Democratic Society’s famous Port Huron Statement, which coined the term “participatory democracy.” This vision absolutely mortified the ruling class of the time, prompting such responses as the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 publication “Crisis of Democracy,” which defined the “crisis” as an “excess of democracy,” or too much democracy for the correct functioning of the U.S. in its role as “the hegemonic power in a system of world order”

The fear of rising democracy was the prevailing attitude of elites long before 1975.
Corporate power riddled the impartiality of the news way before Reagan came along and removed all the stops. Morgan’s book, (mentioned earlier) in fact, documents media distortions of sixties social movements at the time they happened. Rather than the right-wing myth of a “liberal media” bias, Morgan documents how the mass media in the 60s consistently misinterpreted the democratic surge of social movements in order to discredit them in the eyes of the public and prevent them from picking up too much steam.
This was done much more intently after the 60s on two fronts: a right-wing “ideological backlash” which bore poison fruit in the policies of the Reagan-Bush era in the 1980s (which still continues to this day), and  a “commercial exploitation” of sixties sights and sounds to sell “a feeling of empowerment as a partial compensation for the real thing”.

Anyone who has read Chomsky and Herman’s critique, Manufacturing Consent, will recognize that while the United States has freedom of the press, the reality is that the press is largely in the hands of 3 owners...this corporate media defines “legitimate” points of view and excludes contradictory ones.
They design the public consumption of a limited range of viewpoints that embrace rather than challenge the system’s foundational myths, ideological beliefs, and institutions.
Many of the perspectives and actions of the earlier black freedom movement, which challenged racist segregation in the South, were considered “legitimate” and were covered at times sympathetically by the mainstream press. Yet, once that same movement turned its sights from regional (Southern) to national or economic targets, the press swung against it. For example, The Washington Post reacting to Martin Luther King’s first anti-war speech in 1967, “Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence. He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people. And that is a great tragedy”
MLK had stepped outside the boundaries of "legitimate" discourse. Questioning Jim Crow segregation was “useful,” but questioning a US foreign policy which ultimately killed 3-5 million Vietnamese was interpreted as betrayal.
Many Sixties historians draw a line between earlier civil rights activism, most of which was explicitly nonviolent, and later post-1965 struggles, including “Black Power,” anti-war organizing, the women’s movement, etc. and create a “Good Sixties” vs. “Bad Sixties” mythology. Research highlights how this was entirely a media construction, mostly due to the movements moving their criticisms of American society beyond “legitimate” media boundaries. As the press turned from sympathetic to unsympathetic, the official story got further away from the issues that movements were raising and increasingly focused on the protesters themselves as “outsiders.” Unable to comprehend or transmit growing moral outrage against the war in Vietnam, white supremacy in the North, or male domination of women, the media became fixated on the idea that all this protesting was due to “a new, postwar baby boom generation that was  merely restless, questioning, and ultimately rebellious. The “baby boomer” story or the “family quarrel” frame therefore was used to characterize protesters’ actions as errant and their causes as unworthy.  Similarly, the media sensationalized appearances over substance, constantly revisiting the “dirty hippie” theme as a way to ridicule those involved in grassroots movements.
Other right-wing anti-sixties backlash frames have so thoroughly poisoned much of the media’s coverage of protest and activism that they have graduated to the level of “common sense.” Thus, attempts to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia or other oppressive behaviors are lumped into the belittling term “political correctness” Feminism has become almost a dirty word in much of society, associated with “man-hating” and a completely fabricated, over-sexualized “bra burning” myth. Another commonly-held belief which Morgan’s book reveals to be a total myth is the story that veterans returning home from Vietnam were “spit on” by anti-war protesters. Instead he found, "A search for documentation of spitting incidents found only a few press reports of pro-war people spitting on antiwar veterans” (pg 279 of his book). Nevertheless, this myth serves the larger establishment goal to “shift historical guilt from those who instigated and ran the war to those who opposed it”.
I can personally attest to not only being spit on, but actually being physically attacked by a group of pro-war men in their late 30s in front of the Smithsonian Natural History museum during a peaceful demonstration when I was 17...oddly my 2 companions had been drafted and were off to boot camp the next day...but we looked like "hippies" I guess.  Ironically we weren't even there for the protest on the mall...merely to visit the museum. It was a volatile time. But a time I'd not trade for any other.
I'm thankful to have experienced it. And those experiences inform and enrich my life to this day.

They also make it possible to understand and deconstruct all the backlash that we are still dealing with. When we watch films about or alluding to the 1960s...like CNN's series on the decade or even the backstory in "Forrest Gump". It's sanitized, re-arranged, the message controlled.
It wasn't black and white, but many shades and hues.
It's a fine movie with a wonderful soundtrack mind you, but there is an underlying propaganda message...intentional or merely subliminal.
  The Forrest Gump film  unquestioningly contains and propagates many right-wing backlash frames, reinforcing them in the public mind. The protagonist is a white man from Alabama, home of the most vicious racism and some of the greatest racial battles of the 1960s. The innocent and mentally challenged Gump remains oblivious to this racism  and therefore provides an avenue for today’s viewers to “move past” or “get over” racial conflict by simply ignoring, Gump-like, that it is still a problem  More blatant right-wing themes fill other scenes in the movie, including Jenny’s physically abusive boyfriend being “the President of SDS at Berkeley,” who hangs out with threatening, rhetoric-spouting Black Panthers, and the portrayal of the Vietnam War reduced to one in which invisible Vietnamese inflict gruesome damage on young American men. (One thing about the "real" 60s folks, is news reporters didn't filter footage from the war...how anyone ate dinner back then I have no clue). Most of all there is the incredibly problematic portrayal of the Jenny character herself. Instead of remaining with slow-witted-but-loyal Forrest, Jenny’s crime is in her seeking independence (perhaps an allegory for the women’s movement?) As punishment, Jenny then becomes the butt of a long string of right wing backlash myths. Joining up with hippies she doesn’t know, she then begins to smoke dope, performs naked in a club, is featured in Playboy, gets strung out on hard drugs, and eventually dies of an AIDS-like disease. Along the way, Jenny is also shown with a large number of strange men, and even contemplating suicide. Think of it...Jenny is the one character who happens to be the only sympathetic character involved in any kind of protest or movement activity in the entire film, Jenny embodies not only the myth that 60s activists had too much sex and took too many drugs, but that these behaviors led directly to the social problems of the 70s and 80s, the AIDS epidemic. This history revision is easy to point out in this film, but it's rampant in all forms of media.

History is constantly being revised and sanitized for the benefit of  corporate capitalism. You can recognize this "backlash" against the 60s and positive social change as a crusade in which one's material interests are suspended in favor of vague cultural grievances that are all-important and yet incapable of ever being assuaged.While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues...which is then married to pro-corporate empire economics. And in particular any honest view of the 1960s is purposefully obscured or erased entirely in all of corporate media and indeed even pop culture to a degree.

This is all related to the overall power structure in the U.S.

While Forrest Gump transmits anti-movement backlash messages, the film is remembered more for its heavy dosage of iconic sixties imagery and its classic countercultural soundtrack. This illustrates the second prong of mass media’s reaction to sixties-era social movements which is cultural co-optation. However much the conservatives may froth and moan about the 60s, the truth is mainstream culture was tepid, mechanical, and uniform; while the revolt of the young against it was a joyous and even a glorious cultural flowering, though it quickly became mainstream itself.  It was a time when the gray  cold 50s cracked open and springs of contrarian sentiment began bubbling into the best minds of a generation raised in an era of unprecedented prosperity but well versed in the exquisite existential subversions of the Beats and Mad magazine. The story ends with the noble idealism of the New Left waterboarded and in ruins while the art and music of the counterculture was sold out to Hollywood and the television networks. 
The music industry of the 1960s was wonderfully chaotic and diverse with far too many small entrepreneurs running record companies to control "the message". By the end of the 1970s the corporate world bought them up and controlled "the message" which is why music no longer plays the crucial role in people's lives it once did.  Film industries & TV especially, adapted itself in the late-60s/early-70s to attempt to absorb the attention and market of “rebellious youth,” through such shows as “Mod Squad” and “All in the Family”. While these and other shows communicated various liberal ideas and attitudes prevalent in sixties counterculture, they effectively exploited them in order to sell corporate goods and culture. At the same time, this commercial co-optation took people off the street and plopped them onto the couch, it worked hand-in-hand with the government’s repression of social movements to demobilize  and anesthetize the population.
The corporate mass media’s post-60s adaptation of the tools of the counterculture elevated irony, self-satire, and absurdity in an attempt to stay “hip.” “The introduction of ironic, hip advertising became a magic cultural formula by which the life of consumerism could be extended indefinitely, running forever on the discontent that it itself had produced.
Watching TV commercials in 2016 is a drastically different experience than watching ads from forty years ago. If you go back and watch old commercials, it’s a startling experience. Not only do they run at a much slower pace, without constant cutting from one shot to another, and of course making use of far fewer computer generated effects, but the tone of the commercials was very different.
Older ads tried to convince the viewer that their product was quality, useful, and affordable.
Today’s commercials often have nothing to do with the product in question.
Although they display the company’s logo and deploy clever techniques to slip the brand into dialogue, the vast majority of today’s ads are 30-second comedy routines headlined by celebrities or wacky characters who are involved in some satirical or absurd plot. Corporate brands actively parody themselves in order to present the impression that they are perhaps cooler or hipper than other brands. This transformation is part of a truly subversive dynamic that effectively preempts dissent and criticism because the media themselves are self-parodying.
Interesting to me is that parody, satire, and irony remain the most common cultural weapons utilized by those of us on the left or in the counterculture. It is as if we are attempting to stay one step ahead of capitalism’s cultural co-optation, mocking them faster than they can mock themselves.
Yet, sadly I would suggest that we have entered a race we cannot win.
This is no longer 1968, and the vast majority of youth in the US today are completely plugged in to the mainstream media’s constant hum, while most are probably unaware that a counterculture or left movement even existed in this country.  Thomas Frank speaks of the media as “cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent,” the left’s use of satire reverses this transformation. But yes,  we may know how to use our words and images to break down consent and conformity, but in doing so I fear we may generate more cynicism and despair than we do hope or inspiration, qualities that are absolutely necessary for building a mass movement for any sort of social or economic justice. I don't like saying this...as satire and parody are personally very valuable to me.
But I don't think they work as effectively as they once did, and may actually contribute to the effect desired by our dark corporate overlords.

Sowing The Wind

The prevalent understanding of history is a compendium of more or less unrelated events.

We view it as an annal of wars, battles, and murders. A chronicle of the deeds and misdeeds of a pantheon of kings, despots, villains and heroes. It is a scrapbook of spectacles where the more conspicuous and dramatic occurrences are given a skewed, distorted, and hyperbolized prominence. Little, if any attention is given to either their underlying causes or to their ultimate effects.

"Those Who Don't Know History Are Doomed To Repeat It"

    We have all heard these words. Yet "knowing" history as it is commonly perceived is simply not enough. History is littered with loud-mouthed authoritarian ego-maniacal "leaders" who dupe nations into following them on a conquest of ruin. The cup of history, my friends; "runneth over" with despots who scapegoat  foreigners of any stripe, intellectuals, or any other group who may seem "different" to the local normalcy.  Everyone knows this history, yet still the lackeys come.
Still the followers gather and kill each other in foxholes for one local tyrant or tyrant's ideological propaganda or another.
Knowing the chronology of events in history has little value.
Clearly, analysis of the causes and effects of these events is what matters.

Perspective...It Matters

If you understand the concept of perspective, you know that this woman isn't exactly holding the sun is she?

    We need a clear view of the underlying mechanics and implications of events rather than merely an account of their occurrences. In chaos there is actually order (ask any game theorist or chaos theorist). And it can be understood.  In an unmortgaged view of history, the importance of wars and battles diminishes. The glory of kings, messiahs, and assorted heroes & fools fades away like morning mist when seen in their true light as the pawns of circumstances pimped out in a bit of tinsel. Events, actually are far from being unrelated, but are an ordered sequence interlinked into a vast chain of causation. The great panorama unfolds showing us the human race in its progress from the stinking primordial swamps of the past towards the receding veil of the future. The key to unlocking this honest perspective is most often overlooked or ignored even by historians. It is a lens that brings the whole into focus. It is the lens of  the evolution of human society.  Ever since mankind began to cooperate with others for mutual benefit, we formed societies and they have not been static but have grown and changed over time.
    We are in error to view society now as it ever was, as it has always been, and is now; in a process of growth, the universal law of evolution dictates that it moves from the simple to the complex.   The beginnings of our present society must be traced to each preceding phase unraveling the previous forms back to the earliest tribal communities. If one sketches this out, history takes on a clear and consistent form. In a very real sense, you do need to understand where you are coming from to reach a destination. And you do need to choose a destination...or someone will be choosing it for you. This is one of the great lessons to be gleaned from history.

The Pre-Slavery Period

     The period of human development previous to the appearance of slavery is so far removed in the dim past that it has left little historic trace beyond the scattered remains of primitive handiwork that we unearth from time to time. There isn't a lot that we can ascertain, but there is one characteristic that marks the ante-slavery period (as well as cultures in existence today that managed to develop on their own due to their remoteness)...and that is the non-existence of property in the true sense of the word. Oh they had personal possessions of course, such as his weapons and personal dwellings, but the resources of the earth, were and are of free of access to all, these resources are the property of none. Property is not so much the assertion of the claim of the individual as it's owner as it is a denial of claim of all others to ownership.

The Slavery Period And The Transition To Barbarism

     The tools of this time were simple and crude, and so too were the economics. Human activity and thus production under savagery differs from that of today as everything was a matter of  hand production instead of machine, products were created for individual use instead of social consumption. That is to say, each article produced is completed by one individual instead of being, as it is today, the result of the toil of a whole army of workers, each one doing a little to it. Furthermore, under "savagery", articles are produced for use; whereas in more recent times articles are produced for individual profit. What we can observe about this time, is that if we eliminated the social production, the machinery, and profit we'd see economics reduced to it's lowest common denominator. Its simplest form. In the pre-civilization and early civilization days, exchanges were carried on mostly on whim, but the more civilized we became, the more exchanges became based on the labor required to fashion things. An "uncivilized man" wishing to barter, say, ornaments for weapons, would exchange them upon the basis of the labor it would cost him to produce either. He would know how long it took him to make the ornaments, and he would have a pretty good idea how many of the weapons he could make in the same time, and would therefore insist on just so many in exchange for his ornaments. To accept any less would be foolish, as he would be better off to make them himself. This standard of value has endured through all the succeeding changes in the methods of production and exchange until the introduction of machines and profit. Then we allowed foolishness to prevail. In those times, the earth's resources had no economic value in themselves, they are simply there and accessible to all.They were no one's property. No one claimed to own the water, the sky, or the land upon which one treads. It was understood that only when the hand of labor is applied to those natural resources to convert them into articles of use by mankind, that anything of value is created. Something we have allowed to be obscured in the industrial age.

The primitive's way of life was predatory. It involved hunting and fishing, and relied upon wild fruits and roots. Such a method of life is precarious and becomes more so with the increase of population. There would necessarily be  consequent restrictions of the tribal hunting grounds etc. and as time goes on the people would be driven to domesticate animals and to cultivate the soil in order that this means of life may be more certain. Once this becomes generalized, the door to slavery is opened.
     The primitive kills his enemies on the battlefield – maybe he even eats them. There is no incentive to make them captive, as it would only mean more mouths to feed. He cannot even compel them to maintain themselves by sending them to hunt, as obviously, they would just escape. But with the cultivation of the soil it becomes possible for an individual to produce more than is necessary for his own keep. It then becomes practical to make captives. They now can be compelled to toil in the fields and produce for their masters; their escape can be prevented by armed guards.
    So property, the slave and the soldier make their advent upon the scene of human events together. Through our clear lens of historic causation, we can see this was not an accident and these events are definitely related.  To sum this era up: the savage came upon the scene endowed with power to labor, which he applied to the natural resources, and produced for himself wealth – articles of use to him. Later, the chattel slave was owned by a master, who compelled him to apply his labor power to the natural resources, and then took the wealth he produced.

The Rise Of The Slave Empires

Uncomfortable as it may be, it is noticeable that where slavery of one sort or another did not exist, the societies did not advance much in the arts and sciences. This would indicate that slavery was essential to human progress, and this is actually the case. Why? When man lived by fishing, gathering and hunting he had little leisure for the pursuit of knowledge. His time was taken up with the economic problem – how to provide for his wants. When, however, the agricultural stage was reached, and it became possible for an individual to live upon the fruits of another’s labor, society became divided into two classes, the slaves and their masters, the working class and the leisured class. This master class then had leisure to turn its attention to other things besides its immediate necessities. It was in fact upon this foundation, that the civilizations of the ancient world were built. Upon the labor of slaves Babylon upraised her temples and gardens, Egypt her pyramids and tombs, Greece her colonnades and statuary; the armies of Xerxes and Hannibal, the mighty empire of Rome, were all maintained out of the surplus product of vast armies of chattel slaves. And so upon the backs of toiling millions, empire after empire arose, attained its zenith and crumbled to decay, some of them leaving scarcely a trace to mark their existence in history. The course of each one was in many respects similar. Because they were all slave civilizations, and because they all commenced as bands of rude conquerors  subjugating their neighbors until having overcome rivals, the masters degenerated into a horde of parasites living upon the ever-increasing product of their slaves.

We can readily observe that  in all these cases, wealth accumulated into the hands of the already most wealthy, and, as the wealthy class became fewer, the slaves became more numerous until the disproportion becomes so great that the wealthy few, with all their luxurious extravagance and wastefulness, were no longer able to consume the volume of wealth, and there were more slaves than employment could be found for. As the slave's value declined,  his condition became more and more precarious and miserable. Society was no longer able to provide for the wants or needs of the useful portion of it, and, there was no possibility, at the time, of any new form of society to take its place. So the slave civilization perishes, its extinction generally being hastened by the inroads of some younger and more virile empire. The fall of the last of these ancient chattel slave empires, the decadent Roman empire, marked the dawn of a new era. For thousands of years chattel slavery had been the only form of slavery. An endless rotation of civilizations had been founded on that basis, they had succeeded one another, but conditions were ripe for a change, for which these cycles of chattel slavery had been merely a preparation.

The Institution of Feudalism

Western Europe, formerly one great forest, had now become populous. The incoming races amalgamated with the former inhabitants who had, under Roman rule, been reduced to some semblance of order. Conditions became so settled that it was no longer easy for a slave to escape. It was no longer necessary to own and guard him. Therefore, gradually, a new system of slavery evolved. The slave was attached to the land he toiled; he became a serf.
His master was now the owner of the land – the lord. The serf toiled on his lord’s land, producing wealth for him, in return for which he was permitted to toil on his own behalf upon a piece of land set apart for that purpose. The wealth he thus produced was just sufficient to meet his necessities so that he might continue to live and produce more wealth for his lord.   The difference between the chattel slave and the serf is one of form rather than of reality. Each produced the wealth that maintained both himself and his master. The serf received of that wealth only subsistence...sufficient, at the best, to maintain him in a good enough working condition. While the chattel slave, being generally bought, represented so much cash laid out, and was therefore worth taking a certain amount of care of, the personal welfare of the serf was a matter of little or no concern to the lord beyond that it was to the lord’s interest to protect him from other robbers in order that he himself might get the full benefit of  robbing the serf himself. The reason serfdom displaced chattel slavery was that it was a more economical and less troublesome method of exploiting workers. The point most worthy of remembrance in the feudal system is that the serf worked a part of the time for himself and the rest of his time for his lord, much as the worker today works a part of his working day producing his own wages and the rest of the time producing profit for his employer. We have not yet left the shackles of serfdom in a sense. A particularly nasty irresponsible form of slavery.

The Rise Of Capitalism

It had taken several thousands of years of chattel slavery to prepare the way for serfdom. And it took several centuries of feudalism to prepare the way for a new form of exploitation – capitalism – the kernel of which already existed in the feudal society.
While the agricultural districts were under the sway of the nobility, the towns and cities of the Middle Ages were, to some degree, free from their domination. The merchants, artisans and craftsmen gathered in these places. Their interests were at all times antagonistic to those of the land-barons, who naturally sought to place restrictions on the manufacture and marketing of the city products. This antagonism was accentuated by the discovery of America and of the southwest passage to the Orient, and the consequent expansion of trade. As the wealth and power of the townsmen increased, that of the nobility decreased. The invention of gunpowder sealed the fate of the mail-clad knights and their chivalry. The nobleman became a mere parasite upon society; feudalism ran its course as other forms of  slave society had done. It was dying when the steam engine gave it a death-blow.

That invention threw wide the doors of opportunity to society’s new masters, the townsmen or bourgeoisie. The production of articles of commerce had been carried on by hand until this point. The town worker was a craftsman who learned his trade by a long apprenticeship, who, when he became a journeyman, worked by the side of a master, and had reasonable hopes of becoming a master himself. The tools of production were yet so primitive as to be within the purchasing power of the thrifty workman. Land alone was the sacred property of the ruling class. The coming of the steam-driven engine changed all this. The hand tool grew step by step into the gigantic set of machines we know today. Ownership of these tools became more and more an impossibility for the worker. The master workman left the bench for the office; the foreman took his place. The factory called for more labor – cheaper labor. The new capitalist turned his profit-hungry eyes on the brawn of the agricultural districts. Serfdom stood in the way, so serfdom was abolished. The serf was freed from his bondage to the land that he might take on a heavier yoke, that of the factory. The factory had no use for brains, but “hands”. The hands of the country yokel, of his wife, and of his children, would serve equally as well as those of the skilled craftsman to operate machines. No apprenticeship was needed, no training. Only “hands” with hungry stomachs attached. The serf was not freed from the land, rather, he was driven off it by the closing in of the commons and by other measures. The freeing of the serfs was no humanitarian measure. Greed – and greed alone – was its inspiring motive. This was a power struggle...the new capitalists rose up to take the reins the lords had accumulated.

    The capitalist class had humble enough beginnings. Its progenitors were the townsmen of the Middle Ages. They were a part of the feudal society and yet, in a way, apart from it. They were neither nobles nor serfs, but a species of lackeys to the nobility. Sycophants. From them the noble obtained his clothing and the gay trappings of his horse; they forged his weapons and his armor, built his castles, loaned him money. He stood to them in the relation of a consumer, and, as a consumer, he legislated, defining their markets, prohibiting them from enhancing prices, enacting that wages should not exceed certain figures, insisting that goods should be of such and such a quality and texture, and be sold at certain fixed prices.  Naturally these restrictions were not pleasing to the townsmen.  As trade and commerce increased they found these conditions less and less tolerable. As they grew in wealth and influence they became less and less inclined to tolerate them. In England they had joined with the nobles to weaken the king, and with the king to weaken the nobles. Finally they broke the power of both. In the false name of freedom they crushed feudalism. But the freedom they sought was a freedom that would allow them to adulterate goods, that would allow the workers to leave the land and move where the factories needed them, their wives, and their children. While in other lands the course of the bourgeois revolution was somewhat different to that in England, the result was the same. In France, for instance, the revolution was pent up for so long a period that when it burst forth it deluged the land in blood, through which the people waded, bearing banners inscribed “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”.

The Industrial Age And Beyond

 

Once freed from feudalism the onward march of capitalism became a mad, headlong rush. Everywhere mills, factories, and furnaces sprang up. Their smoke and fumes turned fields once fertile and populous into desolate, uninhabitable wastes; their refuse poisoned and polluted the rivers until they stank to hell. Earth’s bowels were riven for her mineral hoards. Green flourishing forests became acres of charred hideous stumps. Commerce pierced all mountains, fathomed all seas, explored all lands, disturbing the age-long sleep of hermit peoples that they might buy her wares. Capital spread its ever expanding tentacles over the entire world. Everywhere its voice was heard, crying “Work, work, work”, to all the workers; “Buy, buy, buy”, to all the peoples.

The New Slavery

    The essence of enslavement is that one man should be compelled to work for others, and surrender to them the product of his or her toil. Wage-slavery, the present form of servitude, fulfills this condition every bit as much as did chattel slavery or serfdom. The workers of today have no claim upon the wealth they produce.  And while they may not actually be compelled to work for any given master, they must work for some master. They are therefore slaves in the proper sense of the word. They are exploited for more wealth – that is to say, the masters obtain from their labor greater returns than did the masters of the past. Sadly, if this were not so, the other forms would still be widespread. But no feudal serf or chattel slave can compete with the modern wage slave at slaving. Where the masters of old were, to a certain extent, interested in the welfare of their slaves, having, directly or indirectly, a property interest in them. The modern slaver, on the other hand, has no such interest in his slaves. He neither purchases nor owns them. He merely buys so much labor-power – physical energy– just as he buys electric power for his plant. The worker represents to him merely a machine capable of developing a given quantity of labor-power. When he does not need labor-power he simply refrains from buying any. The human....can go to hell. He could care less.
The ages of chattel slavery broke the ground for feudalism. Centuries of feudalism prepared the way for capitalism. In a few decades capitalism has brought us to the threshold of ruin.
     Capitalism has done remarkable work for itself, and done it thoroughly.
It found workers, for the most part, an ignorant, voiceless peasant horde.It found them working individually and with little co-ordination; it has made them work collectively and scientifically. It has abolished their individuality and reduced their labor to a social average, leveling their differences, until today the humble ploughman is a skilled laborer by comparison with the mere human automata that toils at meaningless tasks.
It found the means and methods of production crude, scattered and ill-ordered, the private property of individuals – very often of individuals who themselves took part in production; it leaves them practically one gigantic machine of wealth production, orderly, highly productive, economical of labor, closely inter-related – the collective property of a class, and of a class wholly unnecessary to production, a class whose sudden extinction would not affect the speed of one wheel or the heat of one furnace.   It found the earth large, with communications difficult, divided into nations knowing little or nothing of one another, with prairies unpopulated, forests untrod, mountains unscaled. It has brought the ends of the earth within speaking distances of one another, has ploughed the prairies, hewed down the forests, emptied the mountains, explored all regions, exploited all resources; it has largely broken down all boundaries, except on maps; it has given us an international capitalist class with designs on all lands and nations.  Aristotle, with something akin to prophetic vision, laid down the axiom that slavery was necessary until the forces of Nature were harnessed to the uses of Man. This has been accomplished and the necessity for slavery is past. Armed with the modern machinery of production and technology, the workers, a small fraction of society, can produce more than all society can possibly use or waste – so much more, that periodically the very wheels of production are clogged with the super-abundance of wealth of 1%ers. We see at the pinnacle of prosperity, industry suddenly become disjointed; the wheels all come to a standstill. Furnaces cool off; smoke ceases to belch forth to the skies; the belts stay their eternal round over the pulleys. The workers, from being worked to the limit of their endurance, find themselves unexpectedly without work at all, and soon without means of subsistence having committed their lives to serving faceless corporate overlords who have no interest in their personal survival....one dead peasant, "no problem another will come along and I'll cheat them even more!"  Everywhere where capitalism rules, from all quarters comes the same sad tales. Famine-stricken where food is plenty; ill clad where clothing is plentiful; shelterless among hordes of empty houses; shivering by mountains of fuel. There is no promise of alleviation, but rather portents of worse to come.   So it is imperative that humanity learn from it's history. It is time to end all slavery. It is time to create a society that does not tolerate the greed of capitalism. One that does not tolerate the poverty of the many. One that refuses to let any human being go to bed hungry when there is plenty of food. One that does not deny health care when there is plenty of medicine.  The economic problems, whose solution laid in the advent of slavery, have long been solved. Humanity must step forth free at last from its aeons of bondage. There is no reason we shall not be the master of our own destiny. Our technology and machines have enabled us with little effort to produce all that we need. And with ample leisure to enjoy the fruits of our work, and the legacies of time. The time has come to rethink what the next human society should be. What it should embrace....and what it should reject. The title of this article comes from a 1914 socialist pamphlet...."They have sown the wind – they are reaping the whirlwind."
 The slave of old toiled in his master’s fields and the fruits of his toil belonged to his master; the worker of today toils in his master’s office, factory or farm, and the fruits of his toil belong to the master. The former received for his toil enough for his own subsistence, just what the latter today receives at the best. The slave was bought and sold bodily and, being so much invested wealth, was more or less well cared for whether he worked or not. The worker of today sells himself from day to day, and being a “freeman” and nobody’s property, nobody is under any obligation to care for him or to feed him when there is no work for him to do. The slave was generally an unwilling slave, but the worker votes for a continuance of his servitude.
His freedom lies in his own hands, but he refuses to be free. Which is the baser slave?
What next fellow humans? Why do we continue this charade? It is not necessary.
What sort of world do we really want? One that values human dignity? One that values resources?
One that transcends the shackles of the slaver? Or not?  It is time to move forward.
Going to the moon was hard. Rejecting the "need' for servants isn't.  We really can do this.
No...we must. For the future generations of humans. We must.