History never repeats itself, but Mark Twain noticed that it often rhymes.
We are
currently distracted by the new Biden government slowly taking shape, and with
so much being reported and opined about that process, I haven’t been moved to
add yet more verbiage. But after listening to an episode of Mike Duncan’s delightful
History of Rome podcast, I saw how a bird’s-eye view of broader structural
changes might give us not only important insights into what is taking place
around us, but also some relief from the relentlessly divisive pseudo-debates
that, in important ways, entirely miss the point.
Tiberius
Gracchus was consul twice during the late Republic (in 177 and 163 BCE) and was
a key figure in the first actions that eventually led to its demise and
replacement by an absolutist monarchy in all but name. (He is not to be
confused with Emperor Tiberius who shows up nearly 200 years later.) Power in
Rome had changed hands more or less peacefully and by election for centuries,
but within 100 years of Tiberius G, that tradition would crash with the coup by
Julius Caesar followed by the civil wars that squeezed the last breath out of
the Republic.
TG was
a “populist” reformer (and the term rightly applies to him as that’s where it
comes from). He promoted land reform and antagonized the hoary elites of Roman
society who had grown rich and fat from the empire’s triumphs in North Africa,
Spain, and Greece.
That’s
where our own reality offers an intriguing parallel: the Romans had remained
unified throughout the middle period of the Republic, despite their often
deadly internal power struggles, because they had plenty of external enemies to
keep them focused. But once settled as the undisputed masters of the
Mediterranean, Rome found its domestic stability wrecked by success. The
massive import of slaves won in their victories drove free Romans into penury
as landowners could reduce labor costs to zero while also buying up—or forcing
out—small-holders by using the vast riches gained in foreign conquests. They
were, in short, early globalizers albeit not of the neoliberal variety.
The
United States enjoyed the bounty of the post-Cold War period as the only game
in town and promptly used the advantage to impoverish its own citizens by
shifting labor costs onto Chinese, Cambodian, or Mexican quasi-slaves toiling under
their respective dictatorships. Any corporate manager who didn’t rush to cash
in on the neo-feudal conditions available for exploitation if he dismantled his
factories and shipped them to China or wherever would be promptly undersold by
the competition who did. Why pay factory workers in Indiana $20 an hour when
you can replace them with overseas peons for that much per day?
The
political opportunities for an ambitious 2nd century BCE Roman leader
were obvious. The ruined citizens were primed for the rhetoric of a leader
promising them relief. As consul, Tiberius forced through a cap on the amount
of land a single owner could amass, bypassing the Senate dominated by these very
owners of giant estates in their sweaty togas. When the Senate got a tribune to
block the measure with a veto—which tribunes could do by law—Tiberius staged a “Stop
the Steal” moment that succeeded: he had the offending official physically
carried out of the Senate. As consul, Tiberius was immune to prosecution for
this breach, but once his consulship ended, he was legally exposed—and so had
to get himself re-elected, which was yet another break with tradition.
Tiberius
ended badly, Roman-style: when his partisans clashed with opposing mobs, he was
clubbed to death. But Rome saw how easily its centuries of tradition could be
tossed aside and how useful the suffering masses could be when recruited to anti-elitism.
In addition, despite everyone’s fervent rhetoric about respecting the
republican traditions and rules, no one really cared all that much about them
when pursuing their immediate self-interests, neither the patrician poohbahs defending
their estates nor the demagogues whipping up support from people unsure of where
they would get their next meal.
The
solution, obvious enough in hindsight, would have been to break up the
oversized estates, stop driving landless workers into near-slave status, and
otherwise adjust to the sudden influx of untold riches to improve everyone’s
lot rather than making the fattest cats even fatter. But that would have
required a radical overhaul of the Roman economy and its ideological
underpinnings.
Instead,
the unequal distribution of income and wealth weakened the core foundations of
the state, and Rome lumbered into oligarchy. Career-minded citizens always had
to have money, but soon leadership would be dictated by wealth at levels of
magnitude far greater than ever previously known. The republic could not resist
the ruins of an economic polity distorted beyond recognition.
We have
left behind our glory days as a powerful industrial capitalist society and now
dedicate the bulk of our national income flows to the financier class, the FIRE (Fire, Insurance, Real Estate) sector that extracts rent in the form of housing costs, insurance, pension
taxes, and interest on debt while a huge slice of available resources is
diverted into the maintenance of the Imperium. Because the cost structure of
our economy makes it entirely uncompetitive with the new industrial states of
Asia, there is no road back to being a nation that produces goods and provides
its workers with the means to purchase them.
As the
master economist Michael Hudson told Consortium News in a recent
interview, China has adopted the strategy of the long-gone industrial America: “[The
government] funds basic infrastructure. It provides low-cost education. It
invests in high-speed railroads and airports, in the building of cities. So,
the government bears most of the costs and, that means that employers don’t
have to pay workers enough to pay a student loan debt. They don’t have to pay
workers enough to pay enormous rent such as you have in the United States. They don’t have to pay workers to save for a
pension fund, to pay the pension later on. And most of all the Chinese economy
doesn’t have to pay a banking class because banking is the most important
public utility of all. Banking is kept in the hands of government.
“When
workers have to go into debt in order to live, they need much higher wages to
keep solvent. When they have to pay for their own health insurance, they have
to earn more. The same is true of education and student debt. So much of what
Americans seem to be earning—more than workers in other countries—goes right
through their hands to the FIRE sector. So what seem to be “low wages” in China
go a lot further than higher wages in the United States.”
These
are the structural forces at work that operate far above the petty squabbles
between reds and blues playing out in our national politics. Neither Biden nor
his rivals in the Trumpian camp have any intention of taking a lesson from
history by whittling the mega-fortunes of today down to size or forcing
redistribution onto our senatorial toga-wearers and the plutocrats behind them.
As they fight over the spoils, they will recruit partisan plebes to their respective
camps and even offer us occasional concrete rewards while emitting hurricanes
of patriotic rhetoric. Power may alternate between and among the rivals, but in
the long run all are equally likely to prove incapable of dislodging the
oligarchic power and will be equally discredited. We should not mourn their
loss of legitimacy out of clannish loyalties to red or blue teams.
Instead,
we should set our sights on a new social contract, perhaps even a global one,
based on a radical rethinking of the role of our species on our planet. The collapse
of this or that band of visionless tinkerers should not alarm us unduly,
despite the very real possibilities of ugly death throes during the failed
imperio-capitalist experiment.
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