Josephus Bidenus Gracchus

 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 2^nd 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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