Depending on your capacity to endure small, heated spaces for months at a time, you may judge these miners are either luckier or worse-off than many other miners, since this is just one of a string of often-deadly accidents to strike the mining sector in the last few years. Even in the U.S., where mining is a relatively safe occupation, and where mining is safer than elsewhere, a number of heart-wrenching disasters have killed dozens of miners in the last five years:

• 2006: At Darby Mine No. 1 in Kentucky, a methane explosion killed five miners. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) determined the root cause of the explosion was management’s failure to ensure that prudent seal construction measures were utilized.¹
• 2006: At Aracoma Alma Mine No. 1 in West Virginia, smoke from a conveyor belt that caught on fire killed two miners and injured ten more. In 2009, Aracoma Coal Company pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges related to the accident and was ordered to pay a total of 4.2 million dollars in fines. The widow of one of the dead miners said that executives much farther up the line expected the Alma Mine to emphasize production over the safety of the coal miners inside.²
• 2006: At the Sago Mine in West Virginia, an explosion killed 12 miners and left another miner with life-threatening injuries; his partial recovery took several months. The MSHA later determined that explosion was caused by transfer of energy from a lightning strike to an abandoned pump cable that should have been removed, which then ignited the mine’s unmonitored methane. The seals used to separate areas were also inadequate and unable to withstand the explosion.³
• 2007: At the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah, six miners were trapped by the mine’s collapse. Three men were killed in a rescue attempt. The miners were never recovered. Federal officials determined that the mine was doomed by its owner’s demands that even the pillars that supported the mine be aggressively mined for coal. During the crisis, mine owner Bob Murray alternated between self-aggrandizing media interviews and private meetings with the miners’ families in which he made wives and children cry by yelling and pinning the blame on unions and the media.⁴
• 2010: At the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, an explosion killed 29 miners. In the month before the accident, the mine was cited for no less than 50 safety violations — twelve of which pertained to the ventilation of the mine’s methane. The CEO of the company that owned the mine described mining fatalities as unfortunately an inevitable part of the mining process even though his company has long had a record as being exceptionally dangerous to work for.⁵

All of these mine accidents, from West Virginia to Chile to China (where thousands of miners die ever year), have one thing in common: they were avoidable. In each instance, the inherently dangerous work of mining was made more dangerous by the mine operators’ decisions put profit before safety. But this decision isn’t only made by mine operators. Across the world, workers in every industry needlessly die on the job. The only difference is that miners die en masse.

Is this forsaking of safety for the sake of profit a result of insatiable greed overriding human decency? Both left and right agree there’s no need to look any further for an explanation. For conservatives, it’s man’s nature to be greedy, even to the point where he’ll sacrifice his fellows for his own gain, and nothing can be done about it apart from avoiding greed’s deadly consequences by becoming a capitalist yourself. Liberals, on the other hand, merely modify this position and posit that some capitalists are frightfully greedy and that all will be better when more upstanding capitalists are found (the message behind the Anti-BP movement and hokey business school initiatives) or when the greed is reined in by regulation. Left and right, then, are united in viewing the problem as one of choice — the choice to put profits before safety. Either better choices can or can’t be made, but in the end, no matter how fiery the pseudo-radical harangues against greed, the problem is personal, not systemic.

But there’s another way to look at it. Instead of fretting about the morality of individual capitalists, which would reveal no clear-cut correlation between personality shortcomings and disregard for workers’ safety, we can step back and look at the capitalist system as a whole and consider the role profit plays. On the one hand, the typical capitalist uses a part of his profit unproductively, frittering it away on all manner of frivolities. But if this capitalist wishes to continue to enjoy his unproductive use of profit, an even greater proportion of his total profit must be turned into capital and reinvested into his enterprise. Why? Because the capitalist’s competitors have used their profit to invest in newer machinery that lowers their costs of production, enabling them to sell their products more cheaply while still making a profit. Our capitalist must follow suit unless he has no concern for being edged out of the market. Thus, as Marx wrote, do …the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him. Geoffrey Kay brilliantly elaborates on this in his book The Economic Theory of the Working Class, where he writes the following:

… it would be wrong to underestimate the importance of competition as a means of reminding individual capitalists of their class duty to exploit labour and amass surplus value at the greatest possible rate. Contrary to the view that it is an expression of innate human nature, competition depersonalises the capitalist qua capitalist and reduces him to an individuated element of social capital. Consider the classic individual capitalist, the entrepreneurial hero of orthodox economics. From a juridical point of view the capital embedded in his firm is private property which he can dispose of as he wishes. In so far as capital is property and the capitalist a property owner, the individual is under no particular social pressure to do one thing or another. Apart from liquidating his assets, in which case he gives up all pretence of being a capitalist, he could, in principle, draw out all the surplus value the enterprise generates and use it exclusively for his private pleasure — i.e. he could decided to remain a capitalist but one who does not accumulate capital. But it is precisely this choice which competition denies him, except perhaps for a short period of time and in special circumstances. For unless all capitalists agree to a strategy of non-accumulation, any individual capitalist who decides to follow his bent and eschew accumulation would find his profits reduced, as his rivals introduce new methods of production that undercut him on the market. Hence to survive as a capitalist, as opposed to a mere property owner, the individual has no choice but to compete, and there his no way he can do this except by turning substantial parts of his surplus value into new capital — in a word, by accumulating. Since laissez faire was first celebrated some two hundred years ago by Adam Smith who saw the ‘free market’ and open competition as an ‘invisible hand that leads men to an achieve an end that is not part of their intention’, competition has acted as an objective constraint upon those property owners whose property is capital. In other words. competition determines the action of capitalists as capitalists, reducing the individual capitalist to a mere personal representative of capital, depersonalising him into the functioning agent of a social relation of production which is none of his making. The fact that this determination — the negation of personal individuality — present itself in the opposite guise as a condition of individual freedom, and moreover, makes the accumulation of capital appear the result of choices freely taken by individuals in competition with each other, is yet a further example of the fetishism that pervades capitalist society.⁶

Even if the appropriation of profit for unproductive, hedonistic ends was reduced or even abolished (say by turning factories over to the workers) – in effect, reducing or abolishing greed as a motive force behind accumulation – the need to accumulate capital from profits wouldn’t be reduced one whit. So long as an enterprise wishes to survive, and so long as a competitive market exists, profit must be continually reinvested in enterprises if they wish to survive.

There are thus two different ways to look at these accidents. The first, despite its seemingly radical denunciations of greed, offers no better explanation for the ubiquity of workplace accidents than to say businessmen are bad and no better solution (if any) than to wait for the day when businessmen are good. The second perspective, unafraid to critically examine capitalism as a system, suggests that pious wishes about putting people before profit, however radical they may sound, only obscure (often intentionally) the truth that under the immutable laws of capitalism, and for even the most saintly capitalist, profit must come before any other consideration, be it safety, the environment, morality, etc. For such a perspective, the only solution to the problem of profit before people is to abolish profit entirely, in order to usher in a system of production based on human needs.

1. http://www.msha.gov/Fatals/2006/Darby/FTL06c2731.pdf
2. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Aracoma_Alma_Mine_accident
3. http://www.msha.gov/Fatals/2006/Sago/ftl06C1-12.pdf
4. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26050043/
5. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040503877_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010040505519
6. Kay, Geoffrey. The Economic Theory of the Working Class. Pages 100-101. Palgrave Macmillan, 1979.

Capitalism: A Love Story begins with several scenes steeped in pathos but conspicuously devoid of analysis, but before long Moore attempts to provide some explanation for the economic crisis that loomed so large during the production of his movie. He begins by proffering a jocular definition of capitalism as a system of giving and taking–mostly taking. Viewers are then subjected to a clip from a 1950s propaganda film in which one young American woman defines capitalism as a system of free enterprise. After the young woman’s friend prods her to tell us what free enterprise is! Moore inexplicably cuts to actor Wallace Shawn, who explains free enterprise thusly:

Free enterprise is a form of words intended to conjure up in your mind a little town with different shops, and the guy who runs the best shop has the most customers. … The basic law of life is that if you have things, you can get more things. Pretty quickly, one guy has five times more than anybody else.

As if to distract us from the inadequacy of this definition, Moore immediately launches into a short history of the post-war economy. But by doing so he is only getting himself into a deeper hole. His inability to provide a real genealogy of the crisis, to understand the true misery of capitalism, becomes painfully evident. He begins his history with a wistful look back to his own youth. He claims that his autoworker father was able to buy a new car every third year, was able to pay off his home’s mortgage before the kids entered school, was able to bring his family on vacation to New York every other summer, and so on:

If this was capitalism, I loved it. And so did everyone else. During these years a lot of people got rich, and they had to pay a top tax rate of 90%. 90%? Yeeeep. But they still got to live like Bogey and Bacall. And what did we do with all their money? We built dams, bridges, interstate highways, schools, hospitals, we even sent a guy to the moon. Things seemed to be going in the right direction. Dad had a secure job, mom could work if she wanted — but didn’t have to — middle class families needed one job to survive. Our union family had free health care and free dental. The kids could go to college without getting a loan from a bank, dad had four weeks paid vacation every summer, most people had a savings account and little debt, and dad’s pension was set aside where no one could touch it. It would be there for him when he retired. It would be there when he retired.

Most readers will recognize this as more than a little rose-tinted, but it does raise the question of what changed between the 1950s and today, a time when savings are unheard of for most workers and you’re as likely to have your home foreclosed as you are to pay it off. Moore quickly offers one possible answer juxtaposing images of 1950s America with images of her vanquished foes of a decade earlier: We got all this because our main industrial competition had been reduced to rubble. … I guess you could say it’s easy to be number one when you have no competition. Then Moore shows scenes of German and Japanese autoworkers as he tells us that Germany and Japan rebuilt and reentered the world market as producers (of better cars than what America made). Is increased global competition, absent immediately after the war, the cause for the boom and bust of the post-war economy? Even though Moore has all the pieces in place to explain it thusly, he opts for a completely different explanation. According to Moore, the real reason for the decline of the “golden age” of American capitalism was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 — Wall Street had found their sheriff. The attacks on workers and the deregulation of the economy in the 70s, 80s, and 90s are thus presented as the consequences of a clique of bad men taking power. But why did Wall Street need a “sheriff?”

Moore never says, but answers are forthcoming once we figure out another question: just what is capitalism?

Most definitions of capitalism, particularly those advanced for public consumption, emphasize the freedom of buyers and sellers to interact, to set their own prices on the market, etc., usually without excessive assistance or interference from the state. But none of these characteristics is exclusive to or even inherent in the capitalist mode of production. Under slavery and feudalism, and especially so under the primitive communism which humanity lived its first ninety-nine one-hundredths of its existence as a species, the state either didn’t exist or played less of a role in the economy than it does today. And to one degree or another, the other supposed features of capitalism were apparent, from private ownership to the ability to set prices without coercion. In fact, it was only with the advent of capitalism that the state’s role in the economy became really important for the first time in history. Apart from the period 1850-1875 in Britain, no state has ever really pursued a laissez-faire policy. If the laissez-faire myth is more widely cherished in the United States than anywhere else in the world, then reality and myth diverge more here as well. Between 1783 and 1861, government funding accounted for 70% of the total investment in canals and 30% of the investment in railroads in the United States. The Erie Canal, the largest canal in the world at the time of its construction and a driving force in the development a market economy in the area, was publicly financed. Government assistance to private enterprise also came in the form of loans, protection of domestic manufacturers through tariffs, military “defense” of “American interests,” the upholding of slavery in the Southern U.S., attacks on workers’ attempts to organize, publication education, and so on. Indeed, Henry Charles Carey, one of the foremost American economists of the 19th century, and an economic advisor to President Abraham Lincoln, won his fame as a vociferous critic of British laissez-faire and an ardent defender of the “American system” of state intervention.

Now, if abstractions such as “freedom” and “non-intervention” aren’t characteristics unique to capitalism, then what are the distinct features of capitalism? What sets it apart from preceding economic systems? What gives it its peculiar internal dynamic?

In short, the defining characteristic of capitalism — what sets it apart from other systems and gives it its peculiar internal dynamic, including the tendency to crisis — is the exploitation of wage-labor in the production of commodities. This is also the material basis for the swill about economic (and in turn political) equality, freedom, the lack of coercion, etc, that the capitalist motormouths never cease to preach, since in outward appearance capitalist society consists solely of buyers and sellers (of goods and labor-power) who freely associate according to their own self-interest. Dig a little deeper, however, and you see that things are less idyllic. Why does the worker sell his labor-power (his ability to work) for a wage? Because he has no other means to provide for his subsistence, since he or his ancestors were divorced from the land they once tilled or the small shop they once worked in. Then the capitalist pays this practically indigent worker wages and sets him to work out of the goodness of his heart? Far from it! In reality, the capitalist hires laborers not for charity, and not even for the labor they provide, but for the free, gratuitous, uncompensated labor they provide. This is, as Marx put it, the great secret of modern society: the creation of surplus value.

But why and how does the capitalist obtain this gratuitous labor, this surplus value, from his employees? The answer is found in the nature of commodities, which is where Marx rightfully begins his investigation of capitalism in the first volume of Capital. A commodity is a thing that is produced for exchange on the market. The fact the virtually any two items can be exchanged, albeit perhaps in different quantities, suggests that all commodities have some identical quality. Why are 10 candy bars worth one puppy nursing bottle? Why are three sweaters worth one coat? These items have identical values, we can say. But what is the basis of this value? It can’t be weight or shape or color or texture, since physical properties can differ widely among items of equal value. In fact, the only common property between all commodities is that they are products of labor. In fact, all any commodity ever contains is labor. Even the most advanced raw materials are only products of successive working by human hands. Thus the value of an item is determined by how much labor was expended in its creation. Not labor in specific — then, as the famous example goes, the slow and lazy shoemaker should make the most valuable shoes — but rather the socially necessary labor, the labor required on average in a given society at a given stage of development.

But let us return to the capitalist and the laborer. When we left them, the capitalist was about to hire the dispossessed laborer in order to obtain free labor from him. This is accomplished thanks to the special nature of the commodity labor-power. Like every other commodity, its value is determined by the labor expended in its creation, i.e., the cost to create and maintain the laborer’s ability to work. (Thus doctors are paid more than farmhands because, as a rule, far more labor has gone into the doctors’ education, etc.) But unlike any other commodity, labor-power, when used by the capitalist, creates value. Now imagine that the value of an autoworker’s labor-power comes out to 200 dollars a day. This will be paid to the autoworker as a wage. What does the capitalist receive in turn? First, he makes sure that his laborer adds 200 dollars worth of value to the raw materials he has inside of his factory. Let us further imagine that this is accomplished in four hours. After these four hours, the worker has given the capitalist 200 dollars worth of value — a fair exchange, considering that the worker will receive 200 dollars for his day’s work. Is the worker free to return home now? Heavens, no! The worker must remained dungeoned up in the hellish factory for another four or six or eight hours, during which time all the value he creates is simply appropriated by the capitalist. This is surplus-value, value created above and beyond the value he received in the form of wages for his work. The production of surplus-value is the entire goal of the capitalist system.

Now, with this as our basis, we’ve already gone far beyond Moore (or rather Wallace Shawn’s) tepid attempt at defining capitalism. We know that there is no divide between the capitalism of the 50s, capitalism of the 70s, and capitalism of today. It’s all based on the exploitation of wage-labor in the production of commodities (and all that that entails, from wars to repression to environmental destruction).

Moreover, unlike Moore and the leftist mouthpieces of capital, we need not look for the alpha and the omega of capitalist crisis in the bad behavior on the part of the plunderbund’s leading figures. Deregulation, debt, and financialization were just strategies for the capitalists (and the capitalist state) to cope with the larger crisis of capitalism. For as it turns out capitalism is not essentially static so long as politicians, capitalists, trade unions, or other bogeymen don’t mess it up. Capitalist production invariably leads to crises. (19th century economists recognized that capitalism crisis-prone, though they denied that crises were the fault of capitalism’s logic; thus, one 19th century economist blamed the periodic crashes and busts of capitalism to sun spots — a scapegoat capitalism’s defenders have now revived to explain away climate change.)

First, the value congealed in commodities is realized as monetary profit unless these commodities can be sold on the market. A capitalist has a warehouse full of shoes, imagine, in which each shoe’s value composition can be divided into one third raw materials, one third the wages paid the worker, and one third the surplus value obtained from the laborer’s unpaid work. But unless the capitalist can exchange these shoes for money or some other commodity, that surplus value does him no good — indeed, its creation was a waste of money, since now 100% of his outlays and all of his profits are locked up in some heavily guarded warehouse. Now, as we’ve seen, capitalism’s whole goal is the production of surplus-value rather than meeting human needs. As such, capitalists will flock to industries where profits are great without much thought to demand. Accordingly, crises of overproduction were very common since the inception of capitalism. What’s more, since workers — who by and large are the main consumers in capitalist society — only receive a fraction of the value they produce, more value is produced that can ever be bought. Some have pointed to the disappearance of non-capitalist markets that can serve as outlets for these goods as another kind of overproduction crisis. As mentioned above, Moore seems to inch towards overproduction as an explanation of the wage-cuts and turn to financialization beginning in the 70s, but in the end says no more about it.

Second, competition in capitalist society leads to the use of ever more productive machinery. Because the value of a product is equivalent to the socially necessary labor time embodied in it, the capitalists who can produce commodities faster, thanks to the employment of more machinery, are in a position to realize a handsome profit. Over time, the less productive capitals either die off or modernize, and so the average quantity of labor in a given commodity decreases. Thus there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall over time, which was not lost on Marx or those who have followed the investigative path he blazed.

We can now see just how shallow Moore’s economic thinking is. He presents the “deindustrialization” of America in the 80s as a dastardly conspiracy by corporate America and its friends in the White House to secure short term profits no matter the cost. But with a few paragraphs of instruction in the true nature of the capitalist economy, we can see that capital’s flight to finance and debt was not a choice but a necessity. While Moore is right in pointing to the finance sector as the epicenter of this latest crises, he’s wholly wrong to believe that a return to the capitalism of the 1950s is a solution — since it was this very same beloved capitalism that contained the seeds of decline that led to the current impasse — or even a possibility. The turn to financial speculation and debt is a symptom, not the cause, of the crisis.

This inability to come to grips with capitalism is the source of every error in Moore’s movie. Take, for instance, his idealized description of the prosperity of his family during the 1950s. Love this capitalism as he might, it was still predicated on the exploitation of wage labor; if workers were paid well, it’s only because they were making their bosses that much richer. As soon as profits declined — as surely they must — the capitalists were forced by the lash of competition to attack the wages and living standards of the workers. (To his credit, Moore acknowledges that this relative prosperity for American workers wasn’t incompatible with racial segregation and brutal imperialist wars.) He drops the ball elsewhere, too. At one point in the movie, Wallace Shawn laments that in the last decade capitalists stopped producing the things that everyone loves and began speculating. Trouble is, capitalists don’t set out to “produce the things that everyone loves” — they produce what they can sell at a profit. This is obvious to starving Africans, who obviously would love food but never see it, not now and not in the golden age of capitalism in which Shawn’s capitalists produced material goods.

Furthermore, Moore completely mistakes the nature of labor unions. Throughout the movie unions are represented as the guarantors of prosperity for the working class and as a counterweight to the power of the capitalists. In reality, while unions were once organizations of the working class, in the 20th century economic gains on the terms of the working class were no longer possible. Unions were permitted only as the guarantors of social peace in the factories. Strikes were permitted but only to avoid wildcats and unplanned work stoppages (contracts usually demanded that unions warn the company in advance of any strikes, which enabled the company to adjust its production to avoid losses). Higher wages were granted for the same reason. It is no accident that Franklin Roosevelt’s push to extend the legal rights of unions came during the massive strike-wave of 1933-1934. As Anton Pannekoek said at the time, the capitalist class itself recognized that trade unions are necessary to direct the revolt of the workers into regular channels to prevent them from breaking out in sudden explosions. Sixty years later, the head of the French employers’ association said we have everything to lose if the unions become weaker still … and so we have to find ways of keeping their heads above water. The capitalists understand that the unions are their allies. Many workers who have been in unions see that as well. Why can’t the left, from Moore to the Trotskyists, see the same?

Moore also fails to understand that capitalism can exist even without foremen and even individual capitalists. In one part of Capitalism: A Love Story, he stops by a factory which is owned and operated by workers. He tells us this kind of ownership isn’t some bullshit stock option… they’re the true owners. This, he claims, takes money out of the equation. He has ventured into the absurd with this statement! Even a child could see that the workers are still producing commodities for exchange on the market for money! Moreover, in doing so, they’re forced to compete with other enterprises (self-owned or not). As Rosa Luxemburg wrote almost a century ago, this competition means the workers are faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur — a contradiction which accounts for the usual failure of production cooperatives, which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving. For all the talk of “factories without bosses,” the leftists forget the simple truth that capitalist competition is the true master of whosoever would enter the marketplace.

Moore’s economics are bad, but it’s in the realm of politics where he entertains the most dangerous delusions. He claims that it was only with the election of Reagan in 1980 that Wall Street embarked on a plan to make America serve them. Unsurprisingly, this narrow vision of what it means for the state to serve the ruling class translates into a belief that Obama’s election somehow threatened the capitalists’ interests. Of Obama’s campaign, Moore says, Holy Shit! This was not what Wall Street wanted. What if he won? What would happen to their way of life? Moore presents the first days after Obama’s election as a the beginning’s a worker’s revolt against wall street, pointing to the mayor of Detroit’s decision to end the eviction of owners of foreclosed homes and support from politicians for the workers at Republic Windows and Doors who were staging a sit-down strike to win severance pay.

But Moore’s initial exuberance was misplaced, he concedes. For our director, it was Obama’s support for bailout bills that showed Obama as a friend to big business. Moore explains this “shift” (in reality, Obama was always recognized by big-business and the advocates of American imperialism as “their” candidate) as the result of corporations “buying” Obama by financing his election campaign. Even though Moore resorts to the simplest explanation, and the one least bound to reality, for Obama’s supposed treachery, he still can’t come up with a reasonable solution to the obvious fact that the state is on the side of the rich. Even Adam Smith, the prophet of capitalism, saw this 200 years ago: Civil government, as far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. Despite centuries of evidence that the state is not a neutral instrument of society at large, Moore still claims that the only way to challenge the rich is to return to the ballot booths and remember the phrase “one man, one vote.” Moore even manages to drum up some right-wing writer for a financial paper who states his own uneasiness about democracy.

But here’s a question for Moore: if democracy and voting were all that were required to break the capitalists’ grip on political power, then why hasn’t such a thing happened in all of history? Is it perhaps because democracy, far from being the capitalist class’s nightmare, is actually the perfect ideological reflection of capitalist society? Just as individuals appear to confront each other in the economy as isolated, equal commodity sellers, so with democracy individuals are reduced to the level of citizens, isolated individuals with the same rights and the same say in representation. The very notions of democracy, freedom, and equality are based on commodity exchange, as Marx writes in his Grundrisse:

Out of the act of exchange itself, the individual, each one of them, is reflected in himself as its exclusive and dominant (determinant) subject. With that, then, the complete freedom of the individual is posited: voluntary transaction; no force on either side; positing of the self as means, or as serving, only as means, in order to posit the self as end in itself, as dominant and primary; finally, the self-seeking interest which brings nothing of a higher order to realization; the other is also recognized and acknowledged as one who likewise realizes his self-seeking interest, so that both know that the common interest exists only in the duality, many-sidedness, and autonomous development of the exchanges between self-seeking interests. The general interest is precisely the generality of self-seeking interests. Therefore, when the economic form, exchange, posits the all-sided equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual as well as the objective material which drives towards the exchange, is freedom. Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are merely the idealized expressions of this basis; as developed in juridical, political, social relations, they are merely this basis to a higher power.

But these pure, hollowed ideas obscure the deeper reality:

In present bourgeois society as a whole, this positing of prices and their circulation etc. appears as the surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear. It is forgotten, on one side, that the presupposition of exchange value, as the objective basis of the whole of the system of production, already in itself implies compulsion over the individual, since his immediate product is not a product for him, but only becomes such in the social process, and since it must take on this general but nevertheless external form; and that the individual has an existence only as a producer of exchange value, hence that the whole negation of his natural existence is already implied; that he is therefore entirely determined by society; that this further presupposes a division of labour etc., in which the individual is already posited in relations other than that of mere exchanger, etc. That therefore this presupposition by no means arises either out of the individual’s will or out of the immediate nature of the individual, but that it is, rather, historical, and posits the individual as already determined by society. It is forgotten, on the other side, that these higher forms, in which exchange, or the relations of production which realize themselves in it, are now posited, do not by any means stand still in this simple form where the highest distinction which occurs is a formal and hence irrelevant one. What is overlooked, finally, is that already the simple forms of exchange value and of money latently contain the opposition between labour and capital etc. Thus, what all this wisdom comes down to is the attempt to stick fast at the simplest economic relations, which, conceived by themselves, are pure abstractions…

Economics and politics are thus mirrors in which the fictions of both reinforce each other. Apparent freedom in economics is the basis for the apparent freedom in politics, and vice-versa. In both cases the outward appearance is equality, but the reality is inequality.

As in the realm of production, complete freedom and equality in the sphere of politics is seen as an illusion once we move beyond the simplest relations, which, conceived by themselves, are pure abstractions. In reality, despite the apparent equality of all citizens, the minuscule class of capitalists always has the better of politics in capitalist society. There are a few reasons for this.

First, the capitalists’ control of the media and their tremendous influence on the education system ensure that their candidates are at a disproportionate advantage. Thus while the phrase “one man, one vote” may accurately describe the democratic electoral system, it neglects to account for how the casting of those votes is determined. Second is the fact that politicians cannot simply act according to their own will. Say that to Moore’s delight the American public overwhelmingly votes for a populist candidate who pledges to raise taxes on the rich and increase wages. Should this candidate attempt to turn these pledges into policy, capital will of necessity seek greener pastures and safer harbors. Now, what do we care that those inveterate parasites are inconvenienced? Indeed, we care very little save for the fact that with them and their money would go jobs, tax revenue, and so on, until the reforming policies of our newly elected leader became a threat to the national economy and even the health of the state. No matter his sympathies, no politician could tolerate that. Just such a thing happened in France in the early 80s when the “Socialist” Mitterand was elected on a strongly left-wing platform. Within a matter of years, with the economy in shambles and capital fleeing abroad, Mitterand was forced to adopt the policies of the arch-conservatives Reagan and Thatcher despite his own political proclivities. Finally, the workers’ own reverence for democracy is a major stumbling block. Only through understanding its ideological basis, outlined above, will workers be ready to confront the capitalists and their state. Far from contributing to such a clarification, Moore only adds to the mystification of democracy.

The final great mistake of Capitalism: A Love Story is Moore’s presentation of socialism, which is based on a conception equally as flawed as his conception of capitalism.

When Capitalism: A Love Story was first revealed, conservatives happily decried Moore as a socialist and relished in the supposed contradiction of a rich man attacking capitalism (perhaps not realizing that hypocrisy and contradiction are two different things). But by the end of the movie, it’s clear that Moore’s no socialist. Moore misidentifies and conflates socialism with both Stalinism and Social democracy. When Moore shows a clip of Joe the Plumber decrying Obama’s “socialist policies,” he follows it up with a clip of Mao and Stalin reviewing their armed goons. Shortly thereafter, however, we’re supposed to forget that definition of socialism — after all, there’s actually a socialist in the Senate, Moore informs us. He then cuts to Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator who runs as an independent but caucuses with the Democrats. In a short interview with Moore, Sanders serves up pablum about the government needing to represent middle income and working people rather than just the wealthy and powerful.

All that these two pathetic caricatures of socialism have in common is that they both call for a more powerful state to intervene in, or run, an economy based on wage labor and commodity production; in a word, both are state capitalist ideologies. Moore sides with the “socialism” — in actuality, just watered-down European social democracy — of Sanders. Accordingly, Moore never once advances a genuinely socialist agenda, which would mean calling for the working class to seize power from the capitalists, to institute its own dictatorship with the aim of abolishing private property and capitalist social relations based on production for profit. Rather, in the end all that Moore (like Sanders) can think to demand is for the state to accomplish the impossible: to return capitalism, by way of regulation, to the conditions which existed at the beginning of its last boom, to the conditions of the 50s and 60s.

At every turn in the movie, Moore’s fundamental confusion about the nature of capitalism, detailed broadly in the above review, leads to errors, misinterpretations, and ultimately quixotic demands for reform (rather than a clear demand for revolution). Despite some good content, Moore’s latest documentary has the rare misfortune of being a work that lives up to its billing and thus being the worse for it: this really is a love story. However tortured Moore’s love for capitalism is, it’s clear he can’t envision a world without it.

There was the residue of Marxism, which was still very much alive, kicking in the ’60s, but in the worst possible sense in that Marxists were now young people, with the exception of a few old people, who thought that, well, the West was a lost cause, liberalism was a fraud, the proletariat had disappeared. So let’s focus on blacks or colonial, minority victims or someone outside ourselves. So we never looked hard at ourselves to ask what was wrong with our own society.

Judt’s implication that Marxism is no longer “still very much alive” is demolished by the inability of anyone but Marxists to comprehend the latest capitalist crisis, and his suggestion that all of those who came to “Marxism” in the 60s abandoned the working class is invalid as a blanket statement; yet in those few lines he effectively summarizes the intellectual ghetto that was the “new left.” (“New,” mind you, only in that it traded the concrete-and-steel modernization project of Stalin for the peasant mysticism of Mao’s modernization project.) It reminds me of something Michael Zweig wrote in his book The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret:

In the 1960s even much of the radical left became estranged from the working class. No better symbol of this estrangement exists than the day in 1970 when construction workers beat up demonstrators who had gathered at New York’s City Hall to protest the war in Vietnam as it escalated into Cambodia. Images of the City Hall beatings were broadcast around the world and became emblematic of the mutual hostility supposedly between all unionized workers and all student activists. …

Much was made at the time of the reactionary worker, enemy of social progress, or, from the other side, the patriotic worker, true to the American cause, standing against the communist foe. With anticommunist leadership, the labor movement moved to the right. As class-conscious workers’ voices were silenced, the simple-minded right-wing characterization of the working class was more easily picked up by the media and came to dominate the thinking of many young sixties student radicals. They, in turn, often came to think of themselves as outside the long tradition of progressive intellectuals’ support for the working class.

The new movements of the sixties developed radical critiques [sic] of society and in their analyses often challenged capitalism itself. But, for many, the working class came to be identified as only reactionary white men. Activists in these movements, and those who developed social theories to understand and guide them, often dismissed the working class as a backward, hostile enemy, and recast politics solely in terms of race and gender. Radical politics of the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly dominated by identity politics.

Yet on the campuses, despite the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist talk, the working class tended to disappear from the map, replaced in the theories of many radical opinion leaders by a combination of race and gender. This has happened in one of two ways. Sometimes the working class has come to mean White Men. This is most often the case among those stuck with the images of workers on the construction sites of the sixties and seventies. Other times, in the triumvirate “race, class and gender,” class has come to mean “the poor,” who are in turn said to be Women and Minorities. In these formulations, white men are either irrelevant or the enemy, and white working class men are stripped of their legitimate standing among those who suffer wrongs in this capitalist society. This type of politics is a recipe for alienation and anger among white men, dividing the working class and creating needless hostility towards the justifiable demands of women and minorities.

Sometimes you’ll find Maoists who claim that in the “United $nakes of Amerikkka,” there is no proletariat. This idea — like all of Maoism — isn’t even worth consideration. But even those who admit the existence of a white proletariat can do much to distort reality, Zweig points out:

The media attack on workers has not been the work of conservative political forces alone. In a process paralleling the retreat from the working class by sixties radicals, liberal media personalities have also abandoned or stereotyped workers. The television show that most lampooned the working class in the 1970s and 1980s was produced by Norman Lear and starred Carroll O’Conner, both active and influential in liberal political circles. All in the Family’s Archie Bunker was the worker-as-reactionary-white-male, disrespecting his wife from opposing the anti-war, anti-racist ideas of his son-in-law, whom he called Meathead. Although Meathead was from a working class family, he was never presented as another way for us to think about workers. He had progressive ideas; he became a student. Archie’s buffoonery give him a certain charm, perhaps, but in the popular culture of the time he served to dismiss the working class as a serious or reasonable force.

Note that these perceptions don’t necessarily reflect reality. Zweig, through official statistics, paints a picture of the working class as heterogeneous. For instance, while the largest occupational category for white men was salaried managers, this category was also in the top ten for black men, Hispanic men, and white women. Truck driving was the #1 category for black men and #2 for white men. Zweig writes that the privileged titles usually appear higher and more often for whites, especially men, but there’s no shortage of awful jobs for white folks either.

For a wonderfully enlightening and even entertaining account and critique of the New Left, see Loren Goldner’s “Didn’t See The Same Movie: Review of Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. It’s tempting to say that Goldner’s piece is all the more worthwhile now that some buffoons have decided to reform the Students for a Democratic Society, but it seems unlikely that the new SDS will do anything to disprove Marx’s famous witticism that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

While I was clear that I considered meaningful reform unlikely given the money companies like Wyeth and Merck poured into Congress, it seemed to me at the time that any legislation would have to come at the expense of the “health” sector. Frank Ahrens over at the Washington Post’s Economy Watch says otherwise. He counts the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, along with hospitals (most of which are for-profit enterprises in the U.S.), as the biggest beneficiaries of the health care reform bill. The stock markets seem to agree with Ahrens. After all, the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies just got 30 million new paying customers.

A comparison of Billy Bragg’s 1990 version with a 1910 English translation of a German version:

Billy Brag’s 1990 version of the Internationale

Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Don’t cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all

Chorus:
So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The Internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race

Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We’ll live together or we’ll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We’ve but one Earth on which to live

And so begins the final drama
In the streets and in the fields
We stand unbowed before their armour
We defy their guns and shields
When we fight, provoked by their aggression
Let us be inspired by like and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above

Emil Luckhardt’s 1910 German Version, translated into English

Arise you damned of the earth,
you prisoners of starvation!
the right like a volcanic glow
is about to erupt with force.
Clean out the oppressor!
Arise, you army of slaves!
Bear your nullity no longer
Become everything–unite!

Chorus:
Peoples, hear the signal!
Arise, for the last battle
The International
Fights for the Rights of Man!

No higher being can save us,
No God, no Kaiser, nor tribune
Saving us from misery
we ourselves alone must do!
Empty phrase: “Rights of the poor!”
Empty phrase: “noblesse oblige!”
Dependent, servile they call us,
Bear that shame no longer now!

Chorus

In town and country, you workers,
We are the strongest of parties.
Push the loafers aside!

This world must be ours;
Our blood shall no more feed
the crows and mighty vultures!
Only when we’ve driven them out
will the sun forever shine!

Most of you will immediately recognize just how much of the original spirit of the song Bragg discarded in inventing his new version: all of it. For those of you who don’t understand that, here’s some comparisons.

First verse: By the end of the first verse, it’s already clear that Bragg’s version is more indebted to the ideology of Amnesty International and the likes of Naomi Klein than it is to the struggle of the working class. Thus, for Bragg it’s the “oppressed” who rise up rather than Luckhardt’s “army of slaves.” This difference might seem insignificant, but it’s essential to understanding Bragg’s version. Fundamentally, he’s not talking about a a revolution that would overturn the real foundation of oppression — the relation of labor to capital — but rather some kind of sing-along that leads to a greater appreciation of “freedom” in the abstract. This “respect” and “freedom enjoyed by one and all” somehow “makes the empires fall.” In reality, of course, it doesn’t. And in reality, freedom is just the ideological cloak of bourgeois exploitation, the ideological underpinning of bourgeois society. Freedom in this sense is the freedom of atomized citizens to exploit and be exploited as they please. It is, in Lenin’s phrase, “freedom for the slave owners.”

In contrast, Luckhardt’s first verse doesn’t flow quite as nicely, but it’s infinitely clearer. He rightly identifies the seizure of power as the way forward for the proletariat. The damned of the earth, the “prisoners of starvation,” are called upon to “arise.” The proletariat is identified not only as an exploited class, but a class that must and will fight against exploitation. Bragg, by contrast, echoes the Maoist slander that the Western proletariat has been “bought off” — and in in fact no longer exists as a class — by asking all of us, collectively, not to “cling so hard to your possessions.” Luckhardt calls for the workers to “clean out the oppressors” — Bragg calls for his middle-class audience to demand rights and respect, not for themselves, but presumably for their maids and the like.

Chorus: Luckhardt’s chorus invokes the imagery of an epoch-making showdown between the proletariat, united in The International, and the bourgeoisie. Bragg’s? Well, there’s some cozy language about brothers and sisters struggling (why bother with that “last battle” when you can have the activists’ joy of a life spent lashing out against chimeras?), singing, and the human race being united by a fuzzy kind of idealistic internationalism. Class distinctions are lost in Bragg — we’re left with “the human race” while in Luckhardt it’s clearly the working class that’s envisioned drawing together for its final, glorious assault on the citadels of capital.

Second verse: Luckhardt’s first lines in the second verse brilliantly recapitulates one of the central ideas of the working class, which led to the formation of the First International and guided its activities: the idea that, in Marx’s words, the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself. This verse throws back in the face of reformism the “empty phrases” by which reformism attempts to pacify and derail the working class.

Bragg, unsurprisingly, latches on to just such empty phrases. “Let no one build walls to divide us” — after all, we have to be united in song. The rest of Bragg’s second verse is full of pablum about togetherness and unity — but it’s never clear to what end.

Final verses: Luckhardt concludes by painting the picture of the working class, united internationally, “pushing the loafers aside,” taking control of the world, and once and forever putting and end to capitalist war and exploitation. The sun shines forevermore.

Bragg, on the other hand, as a middle class activist, can’t imagine anything more hallowed than playing the hero, perpetually reenacting the feat of the Tienanmen man — “we stand unbowed before their armour.” There’s a fight — for what, we know not — but it’s only “provoked by their oppression.” This is a far cry from the embrace by Luckhardt, and the proletarian movement as a whole, of bold, strong action against the oppressors.

You’d might think that this would be the most callous, out-of-touch comment ever uttered in Congress, but that’s not so. Probably not by a long shot. Consider this exchange between a factory worker and a Senator in the early 1880s, during a Senate investigation into the relations between labor and capital:

Senator Blair: Why do you not go West on a farm?
Thomas O’Donnell: How could I go, walk it?
Senator Blair: Well, I want to know why you do not go West on a $2,000 farm, or take up a homestead and break it and work it up, and then have it for yourself and your family?
Thomas O’Donnell: I can’t see how I could get out West. I have got nothing to go with.
Senator Blair: It would not cost you over $1,500.
Thomas O’Donnell: Well, I never saw over a $20 bill, and that is when I have been getting a month’s pay at once. If someone would give $1,500, I will go…

In his day, Blair was one of the senators most concerned with the welfare and conditions of American workers.

(Source: Garraty, John A. Editor. Labor and Capital in the Gilded Age. Boston: Little Brown And Company, 1968.)

Does this mean we’re off the hook?

Far from it. In his excellent 2004 book The Monster at our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, Mike Davis examines the industrialization of agriculture and many other structural features of capitalism make a catastrophic pandemic almost inevitable in the near future. Such a pandemic could kill as many as a billion people.

To begin with, it has to be pointed out that given enough time and opportunity, nature herself concocts the superviruses that can decimate species. Around 10,000 years ago, however, humans intervened in the process. Our ancestors domesticated animals, crowding together animals and people in a totally new way. Such close contact facilitated the mutation of diseases within animals herds and the eventual mutation and transmission of these diseases to humans. (Thus, European diseases bred in a land of domesticated animals killed tens of millions of Native Americans, whose immune systems developed in a world largely devoid of domestication). Fortunately, for 100 centuries the scale of farming expanded only gradually.

But today, as Davis points capably shows, this relationship between man and farm animal exists on a wholly different scale. Driven by competition and an increased demand for meat in the third world, where proletarianization has forced hundreds off millions off the land and into cities, capitalist firms have implemented the most remarkable centralization of meat production. Gone are the days of the small farm with a few hundred animals. For instance, in Western Arkansas and northern Georgia, more than 1 billion chickens are slaughtered annually, and one swine megafarm in Milford Valley, Utah, reputedly produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles (page 84). Packing together so many animals means diseases have exponentially more chances to mutate, and more chances to gain an ineradicable foothold. So it was that Swine flu evidently originated in a Mexican hog farm operated by Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork processor.

It’s not only the concentration of farm animals that heralds danger. These animals are transported further and more often than ever before, a practice which expands the radius of potential infection. Increased use of antibiotics and vaccines may also increase selection for hardier strains of viruses and bacteria (page 91). Thus, researchers told Science that swine influenza’s sudden burst of mutational energy has probably been stimulated by parallel changes in herd size, interstate transport of hogs, and vaccination practice (90).

Changes in human population density and transportation habits mirror those of the livestock and poultry used in these giant capitalist enterprises. If the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 100 million people had its origins, at least in part, in the trenches of the Western Front, imagine what diseases might be fostered by the slums of the third world. Slums house (to use the term loosely) a billion of the world’s people, Davis points out. Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai, has 571,000 inhabitants per square kilometer; Delhi has a slum with the density of 300,000 per square kilometer; Kibera, a slum of Nairobi, has a density of 200,000 people per square kilometer; and Cite-Soleil, a slum of the now earthquake-flattened Port-Au-Prince, had a density of 180,000 people per square kilometer (page 154). In Hong Kong, SARS possibly spread because of an apartment building’s faulty sewage system; imagine, then, the possibilities for the spread of disease in slums where the sewage systems are not faulty, but non-existent (pages 72-73). (In Dharavi there is one toilet for every 1,400 people.) Ironically, affluence as much as poverty contributes to the transmission of diseases. Corporate scumbags and yuppie travellers flying ’round the world are capable of spreading disease from one continent to another in a matter of hours.

It might be argued that advances in medical science can match step for step the evolution of deadly, pandemic-causing diseases, but on this point Davis has more bad news. First, the pharmaceutical industry has put profits in front of people — the only possibility in capitalism — and virtually abandoned producing vaccines. Davis presents two reasons for this. First, companies have been found liable for the inevitable side effects of their vaccines, so in the 1970s there was a “rush” to get away from vaccines (page 41). Moreover, vaccines and antibiotics just aren’t profitable: “products that actually cure or prevent diseases, like vaccines and antibiotics, are less profitable, so infectious disease has largely become an orphan market. As industry analysts point out, worldwide sales for all vaccines produce less revenue than Pfizer’s income from a single anticholesterol medication.” Thus, while in 1976 there were thirty-seven companies in the U.S. producing flu vaccines, by 2004 there were only two (one of which maintained a criminally unsanitary vaccine production facility) (pages 140, 143). Davis also notes that pharmaceutical companies spend nearly three times as much on marketing as they do on research.

If capitalist medicine offers little help, can we at least rely on the state and its health officials? Again, Davis paints a bleak picture. In the first instance, the countries in which SARS and deadly influenza strains have appeared are quick to deny that there is any problem. This has been especially true of Thailand and China, but even Canada is guilty as well (page 94). Such a response is the only option open to the state, which is really nothing but the defender of national capital; its only course of action is to protect the sales of the local capitalists producing diseased chickens, as well as the capitalists reliant on tourism, even if this means allowing a small outbreak to turn into a full-fledged pandemic (all the better to hide the disease’s origins, after all!). Some governments find ways to use these outbreaks to the advantage of the big capitalists who finance them. In Thailand, for instance, the government forced a chicken culling that devastated small farmers but exempted the largest producers, leaving them free to take over more of the market. Other countries are blase about the dangers of influenza. In the U.S., more money was devoted to abstinence education than to the development of an avian influenza vaccine (page 128). The U.S. government also made it clear that in the event of an avian flu pandemic, it would first distribute Tamiflu to its “imperial legions” occupying Iraq and Afghanistan (page 146). Even more troubling is that the U.S. only ordered two million doses of Tamiflu, rather than the 100 million recommended by experts (pages 144-145). Other states are no better. India, for instance, spends eight times as much of its budget on defense as it does health (page 157). In Africa, fully one million more health workers are needed to ensure even basic care (page 157). And so on, and so on.

These are the main points of Davis’s book. He very capably lays out the case against the current scale of industrial agriculture and states’ inability to confront incipient pandemics, a course of action which would harm the profits of ‘their’ capitalists and draw resources from military endeavors and the other criminal enterprises of the state. Whether the next would-be pandemic fizzles out and fades from memory, as SARS did and now Swine Flu seems destined to do, Davis’s book will remain relevant, for a catastrophic pandemic is virtually assured by the capitalist mode of production. (Though an updated edition touching on the 2009 swine flu outbreak might be useful.)

David Freeman Hawke’s Everyday Life in Early America provides a counterpoint to such a view. This is not a work of special scholarly merit. It was written for popular audiences and is merely a synthesis of the research of many other scholars. However, in addition to being a book I recently finished (the primary reason I’m discussing it), it does an excellent job of providing a look at an American society that was quite different from ours today, which drives home the point that the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Hawke begins by describing the world of the Englishmen that came to America. He points out that in many places in 17th century Britain, many farmers still tended land in common. Moreover,

youngsters were taught the medieval notion that what they did reflected first on the family, then rippled out to affect the entire community. Whether they became craftsmen, merchants, or farmers, they knew from youth that no man was an island, that their lives and actions were inextricably involved with the welfare of the community. Town fathers regulated the products that citizens brought to market — judging the quality, the weight, the justness of the price — and no one questioned their right to do so. (This is not to say that cheating did not prevail; ideals seldom flourish in everyday life.) When someone died in a seventeenth-century English village, no one needed an explication of John Donne’s lines, “Do not send to ask for whom the bells toll. It tolls for thee.” (p. 8)

In some parts of America (specifically East Hampton, Long Island) community life persisted in much the same way:

All things considered, the life of the town was corporate to a remarkable degree. The citizens were indeed a body, each one integrated into part of the larger whole. Experience came to them in, and by, and through the group; literally and figuratively, they lived in each other’s presence. Their houses lay huddled together along a single street. Their field-lots were scattered in every direction — two acres here, four acres there, but always among a bevy of neighbors. They accepted common tasks and they shared both good and bad fortune. They worked together, they worshiped together, governed together. (p. 20-21, quoting John Demos)

The “profit motive” that the defenders of capitalism present as innate and eternal was little-known in the North:

there was little innovative, risk-taking behavior; there was no determined pursuit of profit. Indeed, the account books of these farm families indicate that they invariably chose the security of diversified production rather than hire labor to produce more wheat or to specialize in milk production. Economic gain was important to these men and women, yet it was not their dominant value. It was subordinate to (or encompassed by) two other goals: the yearly subsistence and the long-run financial security of the family unit. (p. 42-43, quoting James A. Henretta)

While in other regions, particularly Virginia, community was illusory and a cutthroat spirit prevailed:

The worst sides of English life flourished in a brutal, self-centered society that lacked communal bonds of any kind. Manners and morals collapsed. During the “starving time,” some “fed on the corpses of dead men, and one who had gotten insatiable, out of custom to that food, could not be restrained until such time as he was executed for it.” Excessive drinking prevailed. Community cooperation and restraints found in the village vanished. Every man looked out for himself. In the winter of 1631-1632, one entrepreneur collected two thousand bushels of corn in Virginia and sold them to New Englanders while his brethren at home wanted for food. The ideal of the commonwealth, “in which the interest of ever part would be harmoniously subordinated to the larger interest of the whole society,” never appeared. (p. 21)

The community ideal wasn’t entirely abandoned, however. Virginia tried four times to hold down ‘the excessive and immoderate prices exacted by diverse, avaricious … practitioners in psychic and surgery,’ but with little success. (p. 84) Moreover,

most communities tried to impose restraints on the miller. His monopoly usually had a time limit on it which might not be renewed if his performance failed to satisfy the neighborhood. A contract usually restricted charges to customers. The gristmill, in short, was treated as a public utility. The aim was to “adjust private enterprise to community ends.” (p. 147)

Attitudes toward religion also varied by region. To say that early white America was a Christian land may be a stretch:

A pious visitor toward the end of the century found “the lives of the planters in Maryland and Virginia are very godless and profane.” The trend that had set in there soon became fixed in most colonies. “Sunday is very badly kept,” said a visitor to Pennsylvania, “especially in the rural districts, where most country folk pay little attention to it.” (p. 90)

New England was more devout, but their Christianity was quite different from the conservative evangelicalism of today. Their take on marriage might be called progressive in modern parlance: New England departed radially from English custom. The Congregationalists held that nothing in the Bible designated marriage as a religious rite–even pagans got married–and they made it a civil affair officiated by a magistrate. (p. 93)

All in all, Hawke’s little volume does an admirable job of explaining the complexity and variety of lifeways in early British North America. Everyone should be able to find a topic of interest, whether it is his discussion of early American furniture or his comments on linguistic differences, but to me its greatest worth is in its demonstration that society and “human nature” are very much malleable. If America today is indeed marked by hyper-individualism and the complete atomization of individual, Hawke shows that this was not always the case. Those of us hoping for a better future can take heart in that.

At any rate, the Marketplace of Ideas myth is slowly crumbling, at least for the time being. Faced with fanatical opposition to their “plans” for health care reform and slightly slowing the pace of catastrophic global warming, a few liberal commentators have had to reveal the dirty secret that monied interests set the intellectual agenda in the United States (and everywhere else, for that matter). Liberal talk radio has gone on the offensive against astroturfing, the corporate bankrolling of supposedly grassroots activist groups. For instance, Rachel Maddow recently reported on the ties between the billionaire David Koch and the “grassroots” Americans for Prosperity and Mother Jones has named ExxonMobil as number one in its dirty dozen of climate change denial, because of the company’s funding for think-tanks that promote climate change denial. (Climate change legislation might threaten ExxonMobil’s profits, which in 2008 were over 45 billion dollars.) And so on and so on.

But money buys more than attention for the handful of conservative astroturf groups. It even sets the agenda in American universities, as this Reuters article from 2008 points out.

April 11 (Bloomberg) — Ayn Rand’s novels of headstrong entrepreneurs’ battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation.

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.

Ayn Rand, of course, is of no use to anyone but angsty teenagers and the small business owners who receive none of the government’s largess and protection — but all of the taxes and regulations. But it gets one wondering just how many intellectual whores in academia have been purchased by successful businessmen (not that these tycoons ought to bother — by and large, academics are merely propagators of the dominant ideas or purveyors of “revolutionary” distractions).