Fredy Perlman Archive
Written: 1961.
Source: Text from RevoltLib.com.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
Happy the age and happy the times on which the ancients bestowed the name of golden, not because gold, which in this iron age of ours is rated so highly, was attainable without labor in those fortunate times, but rather because the people of those days did not know those two words thine and mine. In that blessed age all things were held in common. No man, to gain his common sustenance, needed to make any greater effort than to reach up his hand and pluck it from the strong oaks, which literally their sweet and savory fruit. Clear springs and running rivers offered him their sweet and limpid water in glorious abundance. In clefts of the rock and hollow trees the careful and provident bees formed their commonwealth, offering to every hand without interest the fertile produce of their fragrant toil. Spontaneously, out of sheer courtesy, the sturdy cork trees shed their light and broad bark, with which men first covered their houses, supported on rough poles only as a defense against the inclemencies of the heavens. All was peace then, all amity, all concord. The crooked plow had not yet dared to force open and search the kindly bowels of our first mother with its heavy colter; for without compulsion she yielded from every part of her fertile and broad bosom everything to satisfy, sustain, and delight the children who then possessed her. Then did the simple and lovely shepherdesses go from valley to valley and from hill to hill, with their tresses loose, and without more clothes than were needed to cover modestly what modesty requires, and has always required, to be concealed. For were there such ornaments as are in fashion today, all trumped up with Tyrian purple and silk in so many contorted shapes. Yet, with only a few green loaves of dock and ivy plaited together, they must have looked as splendid and elegant as our court ladies with the rare and outlandish inventions which idle curiosity has taught them. In those days the soul’s amorous fancies were clothed simply and plainly, exactly as they were conceived, without any search for artificial elaborations to enhance them. Nor had fraud, deceit, or malice mingled with truth and sincerity. Justice pursued her own proper purposes, undisturbed and unassailed by favor and interest, which so impair, restrain, and pervert her to-day. The law did not then depend on the judge’s nice interpretations, for there were none to judge or to be judged....”[1]
Generous goatherds sat around a rustic table and listened to their eloquent guest, Don Quixote de la Mancha, as he told them of an age long past and someday to return. The goatherds were not as familiar as the Don widi the feudal world of fraud, deceit and malice. To them the description of the Golden Age was a fascinating harangue. They did not know the Don was holding up an ideal to his Western European contemporaries. That the goatherds understood him no better than his other contemporaries is not surprising. Don Quixote himself didn’t fully understand his vision, nor his mission with relation to it. He knew that the world of noblemen and painted ladies was passing away. He hoped this world would give way to an age of creative cooperation and communal sharing. Yet all around he saw an increase of plunder and repression, fraud and deceit. He did not know to whom to address his complaint, to whom to appeal for the realization of his ideal. So he relegated his ideal to a long-forgotten past. He prepared to build the new world by taking up the role of Knight—a version of knighthood that had never existed. He sought to implement a dream and negate the corruption of an era by reviving the era’s most corrupt and repressive institution. And then he could not find the giants who were responsible for the misery and repression. But he was determined to find them and root them out, and in his determination he charged bravely with his horse and lance at indifferent windmills.
Shakespeare’s Gonzago also held up the image of a Golden Age.
... no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of it own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.[2]
But Gonzago, too, speaks to deaf ears and decayed imaginations. The noblemen who listen find only an image of their own reality in Gonzago’s dream.
Sebastian. No marrying ’mong his subjects?
Antonio. None, man; all idle; whores and knaves.
Prospero, familiar with the new knowledge and new power being made available to Western man in the Renaissance, wanted to use the knowledge and power to benefit and educate mankind.
And in Miranda, Shakespeare expressed hope that the New World so visibly replacing the old would fulfill its promise and truly abound with good will, plenty, and beauty.
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
Gonzago and Don Quixote located dieir vision in an age long past. But there were men who, ever since the Middle Ages, had demanded that a just and humane society be established within their own lifetimes. The Anabaptists learned from priests about a Kingdom of God which became accessible to men after they reached their graves. The Anabaptists compared the vision with the misery allotted to living men. Their spokesman Thomas Miinzer spoke of the “courage and strength to realize the impossible,”[3] and the hopeful peasants rose in revolt against the priests who promised salvation but dispensed oppression, the Anabaptists demanded the establishment of the Kingdom of God among die living. When Luther proclaimed that priests and Church were irrelevant to Salvation, the Anabaptists thought they had an important ally. But Luther, rejecting priests, turned to the Princes of the old regime: “Whoso can, strike, smite, strangle, or stab, secretly or publicly ... such wonderful times are these that a prince can better merit Heaven with bloodshed than another with prayer...” “...stern hard civil rule is necessary’ in the world, lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and commerce and common interests be destroyed.... No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.”[4] And Luther praised the brutal and bloody repression of the hopeful peasants. “I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a people doing right.”[5]
In mid-seventeenth century England a group of men who called themselves the “True Levelers” attempted once more to make the Kingdom of God a human reality. At that time, the common lands of England were being enclosed—the lands were taken from the men who used and worked them and given to rich men. However, a small group took some unenclosed land and cultivated it, with the purpose of distributing the fruits of their work among the poor[6] Landlords, lawyers, officials and mobs suppressed this experiment, and the group became notorious under the name of “Diggers.” The spokesman of the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, urged that the experiment be adopted as a model for the government of all England.
Men in the dying feudal society dreamed of “those fortunate times” when men “did not know those two words thine and mine” they dreamed of the “blessed age” when “all things were held in common,” because the society in which they dreamed was one where all things were held by very few men; it was an age when most men knew only unbroken misery and found salvation only in the grave. Most men were condemned to labor their entire lives for a bare subsistence. A small number of men enjoyed privileges, did not work, were sustained by the working majority, and conscripted the people who supported them to fight their wars. Within this feudal context, Don Quixote and Gonzago dreamed of a better world. But to support his dream, the Don could only appeal to goatherds who had never been part of the feudal world, and to implement his dream he could only attack windmills. And Gonzago could find no better audience than two cynical politicians whose familiarity with life beyond state-power extended only to whores and knaves.” The agrarian economy of European feudal ism was not able to support a socialist commonwealth. There was no longer enough wild fruit to go around and feed the entire population: food had to be cultivated. And even then the surplus was so small that it could support only a small number of men not bound to the soil. In order to support all mankind on a high level of material wellbeing and spiritual sharing, the economy had first to be transformed. But the Don was incapable of perceiving what had to be done, and Gonzago had too narrow an audience.
Years before the birth of Shakespeare or Cervantes, Thomas More had analyzed, in much clearer terms, the cause of feudal “fraud, deceit ... malice.” Thomas More was converted into a saint in 1935 by the Catholic Pope. However, in his own time four centuries earlier, in 15 3 5, More was executed and his head was displayed on London Bridge. For Thomas More, author of Utopia, had pointed an accusing finger at the institutions that supported privilege for the few and dispensed misery to the many: “...where every man under certain titles and pretenses draweth and plucketh to himself as much as he can, and so a few divide among themselves all the riches that there is, be there never so much abundance and store, there to the residue is left lack and poverty.”[7] The few who have a monopoly of wealth and power claim, in addition, to possess a “nobility” which “common” men lack. They consider themselves more intelligent, industrious, and virtuous than other men. According to More, however, the virtue and industry reside rather in the poor who are despised and deprived of the fruits of their labor: “...it chanceth that this latter sort is more worthy to enjoy that state of wealth than the other be, because the rich men be covetous, crafty, and unprofitable. On the other part, the poor be lowly, simple, and by their daily labor more profitable to the commonwealth than to themselves.” And yet the noblemen, “not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure, nothing profiting, yea, much noying the weal public, leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all in pastures...” And yet the laws of the land do not condemn the criminal. Instead, it is the victim who is convicted as a criminal, and since it is his persecutor who holds the wealth, the power, as well as the lair, the victim must either submit or die. “Therefore, that one covetous and unsatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else other by covin or fraud, or by violent oppression, they be put besides it, or by wrongs and injuries they be so worried that they be compelled to sell all: by one means, therefore, or by other, other by hook or crook, they must needs depart away, poor, silly, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fadierless children, widows, woeful mothers with their young babes, and their whole household small in substance, and much in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well abide the sale: yet, being suddenly thrust out, they be constrained to sell it for a thing of naught. And when they have, wandering about, soon spent that, what can they else do but steal, and then justly, God wot, be hanged, or else go about a-begging. And yet then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not; whom no man will set a-work, though they never so willingly offer themselves thereto.”
According to Thomas More’s contemporary, Niccolo Machiavelli, “the desire to acquire possessions is a very natural and ordinary thing, and when those men do it who can do so successfully, they are always praised and not blamed...”[8] In the feudal society, fortune (or fate) is the dispenser of reward and misery. By learning to control and manipulate fortune, an aristocracy can derive privilege and push into poverty those whose attention is turned to other things. “...[FJortune is the ruler of half our actions, but... she allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us. I would compare her to an impetuous river that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings, removes earth from this side and places it on the other; every one flees before it, and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it; and yet though it is of such a kind, still when it is quiet, men can make provision against it by dykes and banks, so that when it rises it will either go into a canal or its rush will not be so wild and dangerous. So it is with fortune, which shows her power where no measures have been taken to resist her, and directs her fury where she knows that no dykes or barriers have been made to hold her.” The “dykes and banks” by which an ambitious aristocrat in the feudal society “can make provision against” fortune are enumerated by Machiavelli for the aristocrat’s guidance. First of all, “the Prince” must be aware of good means, but must be prepared to use bad means if it is in his interest to do so, “for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his own preservation. A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good.” Secondly, he must inspire fear in other men, for as Machiavelli said, “one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting.” Thirdly, the “Prince” must be adept in the use of violence—both kinds of violence, the kind known as law as well as the kind known as brute force. “You must know, then, that there are two methods of fighting, the one by law, the other by force: the first method is that of men, the second of beasts; but as the first method is often insufficient, one must have recourse to the second.” He must know when to break faith, for “a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist.” Hypocrisy is another indispensable “dyke” by which wealth, power and privilege are consolidated and maintained, and fortune’s fury is kept out; “it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but you must have the mind so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you may be able to change to the opposite qualities. And it must be understood that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things which are considered good in men, being often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion. And, therefore, he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the w’ind, and as the variations of fortune dictate, and ... not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained.” And above all, the successful “Prince” must be an opportunist, for, as Machiavelli pointed out, “...fortune varying and men remaining fixed in their ways, they are successful so long as these ways conform to circumstances, but when they are opposed then they are unsuccessful.” In short, the virtues of a successful man of wealth, power and privilege are what Don Quixote later called fraud, deceit, and malice.
Machiavelli was concerned exclusively with the “dykes and banks” which, in the feudal era, were designed to protect and benefit an aristocracy of hereditary parasites. Thomas More, however, was concerned with the dykes that would bring comfort, education and political participation to all mankind. The greatest scourge of humanity is privilege, and at the root of privilege is private property. Wherever the laws protect the accumulation of private wealth, there will be public misery. “Wheresoever possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is hard and almost impossible that there the weal public may jusdy be governed and prosperously flourish.”[9] Not only will there be no justice in a realm where possessions are private; there cannot be justice in such a realm. “Unless you think thus: that justice is there executed where all things come into the hands of evil men, or that prosperity there flourisheth where all is divided among a few; which few, nevertheless, do not lead their lives very wealthily, and the residue live miserably, wretchedly, and beggarly.” The only possible way to bring justice among men, to free them from poverty and slavery, to enable each to develop his finest capabilities, is to abolish the institution of private property. “Thus I do fully persuade myself that no equal and just distribution of things can be made, nor that perfect wealth shall ever be among men, unless this propriety be exiled and banished.” With Thomas Miinzer’s “courage and strength to realize the impossible,” such a program could have been carried out in Sixteenth Century Western Europe, and fortune need not have been allowed to protect the few and drown the many.
A century after More’s execution, Gerrard Winstanley led the Diggers to demand the abolition of the dykes that train fortune’s floods on the poor—he demanded new dykes which would control the floods of fortune for the benefit of all. “O you Adams of the earth,” said Winstanley to the rich, “you have rich clothing, full bellies.... But know ... that the day of judgment is begun.... The poor people whom thou oppress shall be the saviors of the land.... If thou wilt find mercy ... disown this oppressing ... thievery of buying and selling of land, owing of landlords, and paying of rents, and give your free consent to make the earth a common treasury.”[10] Winstanley felt it was a crime for some men to be lords and masters on land which is the “common treasury” of all mankind.
“None ought to be lords or landlords over another, but the earth is free for every son and daughter of mankind to live free upon.”[11]
Much later, when the ideals of More, of Winstanley, and of the French Enlightenment, ideals of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, were betrayed by every turn of the French Revolution, Gracchus Babeuf was paraded in a cage for continuing to defend them. He was condemned as a traitor and conspirator for continuing to insist that “If you follow the chain of our vices, you will find that the first link is fastened to the inequality of wealth.”[12] Babeuf pointed out to his murderers that no more had been said by the popular and humane French philosophers Rousseau, Mably, “And Diderot, who said that from the scepter to the crosier, humanity was ruled by personal interest, and that personal interest arose from property, and that it was idle for philosophers to argue about the best possible form of government so long as the ax had not been laid to the roots of property itself—Diderot, who asked whether the instability, the periodic vicissitudes of empires, would be possible if all goods were held in common, and who asserted that every citizen should take from the community what he needed and give to the community what he could and that anyone who should try to restore the detestable principle of property should be locked up as an enemy of humanity and a dangerous lunatic!”[13] For, according to Babeuf, property is a crime; “it is a crime to take for oneself at the expense of other people the products of industry or the earth. In a society which was really sound, there would be neither poor nor rich. There would be no such system of property as ours. Our laws of heredity and inalienability are ‘humanicide’ institutions. The monopoly of the land by individuals, their possession of its produce in excess of their wants, is nothing more nor less than theft; and all our civil institutions, our ordinary business transactions, are the deeds of a perpetual brigandage, authorized by barbarous laws.”[14]
From the late middle ages on, many men knew that misery and oppression lay in privilege and property. And yet, when a new technology was created by men to contribute to their “common treasury,” it was used not only to maintain, but to strengthen the property, power and privilege of the few. Utopia remained an untried dream. Don Quixote addressed himself to a pre-agricultural past, to a time when “the crooked plow had not yet dared to force open and search the kindly bowels of our first mother with its heavy colter; for without compulsion she yielded from every part of her fertile and broad bosom everything to satisfy, sustain, and delight the children who then possessed her,” a time when “No man, to gain his common sustenance, needed to make any greater effort than to reach up his hand and pluck it from the strong oaks, which literally invited him to taste their sweet and savory fruit.” Such an economy, unfortunately, had supported a small number of men—and that, not very effectively, as they had no control whatever over their destiny and were literally at the mercy of their “first mother.” And Gonzago, well-intentioned though he was, could offer his contemporaries nothing but a similar version of a similar age.
... need of any engine
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of it own kind …
But Thomas More did not speak of a past age. Rather he located his ideal society in Utopia—a place whose name means Nowhere. More did not, thereby, intend his Utopia to be a mere literary instrument with which to satirize England, as his interpreters would have men believe. More well knew that all human history consisted of the building of economies that had never existed before, the creation of ideas that had never been thought, the formation of habits that had not seemed possible. He knew that human history was a succession of Nowheres which men tried to realize somewhere. His Church also knew—and feared—the capacity of man to go beyond his condition. So did his king, Henry VIII, who did not want his own convenient innovations to be taken as models by the English population. Both King and Church had privileges at stake, and thus herded into monasteries or burned as heretics those who, by giving men a glimpse of Utopia, undermined men’s faith in the feudal hierarchy of priest, property, privilege and power.
The agrarian economy was limited in the amount of food it could produce. In order that all men gain comfort, knowledge, and that all men participate in the creation of cultural values, the privileges of priests and aristocrats would have to be distributed among the poor. Winstanley urged that, if justice be made available to all men, everyone must do productive work. The just society cannot permit itself the luxury of soldiers, aristocrats or priests. Soldiers do nothing but destroy what other men build. Aristocrats waste other men’s labor on useless ornaments, elaborate clothing, and gigantic castles, all of which serve no other purpose than to demonstrate their wealth. And priests, according to Winstanley, “make sermons to please the sickly minds of ignorant peoples, to preserve their own riches and esteem among a charmed, befooled, and besotted people.”[15] Winstanley urged that priests become schoolmasters, that they teach men of the world in which they live, of human history, of the laws and diversity of nature. In the true commonwealth, there would be no warriors, since there would not be any desire to accumulate private wealth if the world is a “common treasury.” There would be no ornamented aristocracy, as there would be no privilege and thus no need to display it. There would be no priests, as there would be no need to make men submit to the inhuman misery required to maintain the wealth and power of the few.
But Gerrard Winstanley did not know that the productive capacities of human beings were in the process of transformation; he knew no more of engines than was known by Don Quixote or Gonzago. Nor did Babeuf dream of the possibilities of the inventions spreading in his time. Babeuf also urged that all men do productive labor, and he coped with the problem of repetitive and unpleasant tasks by relegating them to everybody—unpleasant tasks were to be done by everyone taking his turn. Neither Winstanley nor Babeuf could foresee the possibility of using machines to do repetitive tasks, thus freeing all men for intellectual and imaginative pursuits. Both confined their communal democratic ideal to the conditions of the agrarian economy.
The agrarian form of society has been praised in many current Western writings because of its “unity” and “simplicity” and “integrity,” and primarily because of its lack of the evils commonly associated with technology. In this praise, even adulation, it is often forgotten that the agrarian economy is not able to support a large number of people who are engaged in other pursuits than food-growing. Such a society would be unable to support all the anthropologists and philosophers who sing its praises in a technological society.
The comfortable philosopher who exhorts men not to stir the happv fanners from their food-growing joy is making a choice for the farmers which he has not made for himself. Agriculture is a highly valued occupation, ^ but clearly not all human beings are inclined to it, and in an agrarian economy they are rarely given a choice. This lack of choice constitutes the “simplicity” of an agrarian economy; its “unity” comes from the fact that most men do much the same thing throughout their lives—a better name for such “unity” is uniformity.
To enable men to follow other pursuits than agriculture, the agrarian economy must either have a very large surplus, or it must transform itself into a machine-based economy. Essentially, the machine is an extension of the human hand: it is a tool which enhances the scope and power of the hand: it enables one man to do the work of five, or a hundred, men. Thus, if a machine on a farm can do the work of five men, then those men are free to follow other pursuits. If the other pursuits available in a society are less attractive and more repetitive than farming, this is clearly not the machine’s fault. A tool is not responsible for the way men use it. Peaceful men will use a knife to carve and sculpt, not to kill. Creative men will use a machine to do the repetitive labor while men devote themselves to original tasks, not to increase the amount of repetitive labor to which men are bound as slaves. Such, at least, would have been the possibilities if men had used the new instruments to abolish, not increase, human misery—if men had truly been as they appeared to Miranda when she exclaimed
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
But Shakespeare was not as hopeful as Miranda. He knew that other forces than Gonzago’s dreams or Prospero’s knowledge would shape the world to come. He knew that among the “many goodly creatures” there was also Caliban, the half-beast, the man with “a mind bemired in fact, an imagination beslimed with particulars.”[16] Caliban, the personification of lust and greed, knew only hatred and destruction. This inhuman undercurrent, ever-present in Western history, was not to become dominant until the middle of the Twentieth Century, when fascism and militarism took Caliban as the model for a “super-race.”
And there is Malvolio the Puritan, earliest representative of the brave new world. Humorless Malvolio. His very presence negates the laughter and debauchery of the dying aristocracy. Sir Toby Belch, the parasitic old Lord who embodies both the enjoyment and the uselessness of the decaying feudal regime, challenged the Efficient Malvolio’s intrusion.
Art any more than a steward?
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall
be no more cakes and ale? [17]
Temporarily no more than a steward, Malvolio was soon to graduate; he was rise to the world of Business and Industry’. And then there were no more cakes and ale—not for a long time to come. English theaters closed down—and when they opened, there were Malvolios everywhere on the stage. Englishmen retained the institution of Monarchy, for old time’s sake, but when they beheaded their last monarch they put a succession of Malviolios on the throne. The Feudal world of fraud, deceit and malice did in fact collapse, but it was not replaced by a Golden Age of music and harmony. The Malvolios brought only drabness, calculation, and the naked search for wealth and power. The writ- ings of Cervantes were carefully channeled to children and pedants. Shakespeare was left to gather dust for almost a century, and when at last he was unearthed, the tragedies were shown with happy endings and the dreams were presented as comedies.
The transition from the agrarian to the technological economy was to pass through the humorless Malvolio. And it literally passed through, for though he was the carrier of the change he neither understood it, nor experienced it, nor enjoyed it. Unlike Don Quixote, Malvolio didn’t have a yearning for Justice; unlike Gonzago, he didn’t dream; unlike Prospero, he had no passion for knowledge. He had little use for reason except as calculation, and his ideals extended only as far as his avarice. Under the tutelage of capitalists, the industrial revolution was born without love, formed without understanding, built without passion.
The small amount of surplus produced by the agrarian economy had gone to support a minority of elaborate warriors and churchmen. The majority of men got little more than misery from those they supported. Imaginative creation is hard put in such conditions. Men whose time and leisure depends on the misery and enslavement of others find their own imaginations shackled. The development of technology made it possible for more men to leave the land—technology in time made it possible for all men to be fully educated and to participate in the sharing and creation of human art and knowledge. Technology changed the human economy: it made man’s oldest dream a possibility. The machine took care of the repetitive tasks and freed men from bondage to economic activity. But capitalism left the feudal structure of privilege intact. The doctrine of private property decreed that the new surplus was not to support mankind, but merely a new minority. The collapse of feudal privilege did not usher in a Golden Age where all the where all the earth’s yield would be shared by men in common, where men would work together to put the finest human ideals into practice. The disintegration of feudal privilege ushered in a new age of privilege, an Age of Gold where “gold” was not a metaphor but a thing. The propelling motive of the new age was greed. The gold filled the coffers of the few and increased the misery of the many. Wealth, knowledge and power opened the gate of the Golden Age, but in front of the gate was built a grotesque obstruction: The Market. Revolutions for liberty, equality, fraternity, did take place, both in France and in America—and men were called on to support them. But the revolutions betrayed their initiators as well as their supporters; they were revolutions that suppressed liberty, increased privilege, sanctioned property, and banished fraternity. In the cafes of Paris men sang a song written by a member of BabeuPs Society of Equals: “Dying of hunger, dying of cold, the people robbed of every right... newcomers gorged with gold, who have given neither work nor thought, are laying hold on the hive; while you, the toiling people, eat iron like an ostrich.... A brainless double council, five frightened directors; the soldier pampered and petted, the democrat crushed: voila la Republique!”[18] The “brave new world” became a ludicrous caricature of Miranda’s expectations. Her outcry of wonder and admiration was taken up at a later date in Western history with bitter irony.
Men were indeed freed from bondage to the soil. But from the land they were pushed into the factories. And there they were not allowed to consciously participate in the exciting creation of a new economy. Nor were they given a share of the new wealth they produced. The men became a “work force.” They were given only so much as would keep them alive—and that much only because dead they were no use to the factories. They were freed from the land, but not from economic activity. Men who only have a bare minimum of what keeps them alive will be constantly preoccupied with keeping alive. Their preoccupation with economic needs was actually intensified in the factory. On the soil they had had “bad years,” but they had also had “good years”: times for reading and ceremony and enjoyment. In the factories there were only bad years—and if they lost their work they starved. Men to whom much had been promised became beasts of burden for new masters.
The feudal world of privilege was replaced by the capitalist world of privilege, not by the Golden Age. The aristocracy of rank was replaced by the aristocracy of wealth. Inequality was increased, violence was glorified, and the limits of misery were extended. Gracchus Babeuf, who had been hunted as a heretic under the old aristocracy, was put to death as a conspirator under the new. Before going to the guillotine, Babeuf accused his accusers: “Diderot... asserted that... anyone who should try to restore the detestable principle of property should be locked up as an enemy of humanity and a dangerous lunatic!—Citizens, ‘dangerous lunatic’ is precisely what you have called me for trying to introduce equality!”
The ideal of the new world was not wellbeing, but accumulation. Through a complex interaction of legality and violence, a few’ men gathered all the new wealth into their hands. Land, even what had formerly been common land, was channeled into the private property of a few. A few men became owners of the factories, the machines, the resources, the food, the knowledge. Whatever could possibly be accumulated was accumulated. The new wealth came from the impoverishment of people all over the world. The new power was used not to benefit men, but to repress them. The new knowledge was put to the service of power.
Thomas More came to be worshiped as a saint: men turned their attention away from his ideal and to his person, away from his spirit and to his body; and More’s Utopia was left to gather dust. Babeuf was guillotined. He was not permitted to see his children before he died. He nevertheless called out to them. “I have only one bitter regret to express to you: that, though I have wanted so much to leave you a heritage of that liberty which is the source of every good, I foresee for the fiiture only slavery, and that I am leaving you a prey to every ill. I have nothing at all to give you! I would not leave you even my civic virtues my profound hatred of tyranny, my ardent devotion to the cause of Liberty and Equality, my passionate love of the People. I should make you too disastrous a present. What would you do with it under the monarchic oppression which is infallibly going to descend on you? I am leaving you slaves, and it is this thought alone which will torture my soul in its final moments. I should equip you, in this situation, with advice as to how to bear your chains more patiently, but I do not feel that I am capable of it.”[19]