Realizing the Aristocrat’s Dream: Universal Slavery

Following up on that last post regarding slavery and the Civil War, it’d be nice to think that now – as we deal with issues of vast inequality and as the 1% circle their wagons and start calling up their lobbyists, their political donors, and their congressmen – the idea of democracy will once again win out over America’s de facto aristocracy.  But perhaps it will go the other way.  After all, America’s aristocracy is doing great right now.  How long before they reinstate a de facto slavery too? 

Maybe not too long at all.  Marie Diamond at ThinkProgress  had a post on Tuesday catching up on what is happening in Alabama now that its “stop and show your papers, schnell!” anti-immigrant law has gone into effect and most of its farm labor has abandoned the state.  Turns out, Alabama’s got a two word solution to that little problem:  prison labor.    

 And as Diamond reports, Alabama isn’t alone:

Replacing skilled workers with virtually free (and sometimes actually free) prison laborers has become a trend in Republican-led states.  Under Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) anti-collective bargaining law, at least one Wisconsin county replaced some union workers with prison labor.  And Georgia is considering replacing firefighters with prisoners to save money. (emphasis added)

So there you have it.  The Party of the 1% is destroying the unions (their political enemies) and replacing skilled workers with free prison labor.  They are driving out the immigrant work force that makes their agricultural industry so profitable and then – rather than allow free market forces to drive up labor costs and cut into that industry’s profits – they’re replacing that work force with free prison labor. 

And the next time you need to be rescued from a burning building, remember that the guy who’s supposed to run in and get you knows that he isn’t getting paid for risking his life; sure, it might impact his motivation a little, but rest assured that the money the state saves will more than make up for your subsequent death and/or severe disfigurement.

Of course, this is an old story in American history.  After slavery was legally abolished, the Confederate states created Black Codes that criminalized “vagrancy,” “loitering,” or simply being on the street without written proof of employment.  Convicted blacks were sentenced to prison, where their labor could be sold off to the same plantation owners for whom they originally had worked as slaves and for whom they now would continue to toil under slave-like conditions.

So I guess my only questions are:  (i) How long before the Republican-led states start handing down 360-day jail terms for jaywalking or for driving without a seatbelt? and (ii) Will 21^st-century America finally realize the 19^th-century South’s dream of the universal enslavement of poor people?

Progress!

Aristocracy and Slavery vs. Democracy and Freedom

In The Atlantic’s special issue commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, Ta-Nehisi Coates has an article titled “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?”  Coates is an amateur Civil War scholar and he devotes the article in large part to refuting the convenient fiction that the Civil War was fought over anything other than the issue of slavery.  It really is very good and I highly recommend clicking over to read it. 

This passage in particular caught my attention:

The Civil War marks the first great defense of democracy and the modern West.  Its legacy lies in everything from women’s suffrage to the revolutions now sweeping the Middle East.  It was during the Civil War that the heady principles of the Enlightenment were first, and most spectacularly, called fully to account.

In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved – to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people – is to compromise the comfortable narrative.  It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise.  (emphasis added)

No doubt that this resonated with me because I am still working my way through Colin Woodard’s American Nations. 

AsI mentioned when I first started reading the book, Woodard argues that from the very start the country was divided by the northern states’ Germanic idea of “Freiheit” and the southern states’ Latin idea of “libertas.”  Essentially, Freiheit (“freedom”) held that all people are born free and equal before the law, that they all possess at least certain minimal rights that have to be mutually respected, and that they are capable of self-governance.  Conversely, libertas (“liberty”) held that most people are born into bondage, that liberties are granted as a privilege, that most people are not capable of self-governance, and that only a very few, governing elite could or should enjoy the full blessings of liberty.

Woodard returns to this theme in his chapter outlining how the states subsequently split over the issue of slavery.  Woodard shows that the secessionist states most wedded to the concept of libertas had embraced it in order to justify their slaveholding, and this embrace inexorably led them to the idea that even more people should be enslaved:

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive.  Slavery, they argued ad nauseum, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states.

When nineteenth-century Deep Southerners spoke of defending their “traditions,” “heritage,” and “way of life,” they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the centerpiece of all three.  Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower-class people should be enslaved, regardless of race, for their own good.

. . . .  James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published  a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers were happier, fitter, and better looked after than their “free” counterparts in Britain and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists.  Free societies were therefore unstable, as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up, creating “a fearful crisis in Republican institutions.”  Slaves, by contrast, were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist, or testify, ensuring the “foundation of every well-designed and durable” republic.  Enslavement of the white working class would be, in his words, “a most glorious act of emancipation.”

[snip]

George Fitzhugh, scion of one of Virginia’s oldest families, became the [Tidewater] region’s proslavery standard-bearer.  In his voluminous writings, Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people.  Aristocrats, he explained, were really “the nation’s magna carta” because they owned so much and had the “affection which all men feel for what belongs to them,” which naturally led them to protect and provide for “wives, children, and slaves.”  Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular, declared he was “quite as intent on abolishing Free Society as you [Northerners] are on abolishing slavery.”

Placed within this historical context, Coates’s statement that the Civil War called the very principles of the Enlightenment into account by requiring that violent action be taken against bondage and in favor of self-governance seems all the more exact.  The Civil War was the most violent conflict in the eternal political struggle between – in Jefferson’s words – “aristocrats and democrats,” and in 1865 the idea of democracy won by sheer force of arms.

The 1%’s European Coup

The last thing the world needs at a time like this is democracy.  That is what got us into this mess in the first place.  People wanting stuff, and voting for people who said they’d give ‘em that stuff, without showing they’re working. 

            --Comedian Andy Zaltzman to John Oliver

            The Bugle, Ep. 173a

           

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Harold Meyerson wrote about “The Growing Tension Between Capitalism and Democracy.”  Meyerson pointed out that

Over the past year . . . capitalism has fairly rolled over democracy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Europe, where financial institutions and large investors have gone to war under the banner of austerity, and governments of nations with not-very-productive or overextended economies have found that they could not satisfy those demands and still cling to power. The elected governments of Greece and Italy have been deposed; financial technocrats are now at the helm of both nations. . . .  It’s as though the markets throughout Europe have had enough with this democratic sovereignty nonsense.  (emphasis added)

Essentially, Meyerson is arguing that the entwined financial system of the Eurozone now gives “financial technocrats” more power to dictate any particular Eurozone country’s fiscal policies than that country’s own citizens have. 

But as much as Meyerson’s description should be enough already to give one pause, I think framing the situation in this way actually understates the significance of what we are witnessing:  a European political and economic coup by the global 1%.