With loyal Republicans braying “Socialism!” at the top of their fearful voices, I was reminded of Bertrand Russell talking about the ideas of the early Socialist Robert Owen, who actually implemented them in the factories he owned, and started a utopian community in an attempt to perpetuate them. Imagine saying this in 1833:

Eight hours daily labour is enough for any human being, and under proper arrangements sufficient to afford an ample supply of food, raiment and shelter, or the necessaries and comforts of life, and for the remainder of his time, every person is entitled to education, recreation and sleep.

And this in 1841:

Is it not the interest of the human race, that every one should be so taught and placed, that he would find his highest enjoyment to arise from the continued practice of doing all in his power to promote the well-being, and happiness, of every man, woman, and child, without regard to their class, sect, party, country or colour?

Owen, it turns out, was a friend of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher. Bentham was the leader of the Philosophical Radicals, a group that included John Stuart Mill’s father James, about whom Russell says:

…James Mill was horrified. He wrote:

Their notions of property look ugly; …they seem to think that it should not exist, and that the existence of it is an evil to them. Rascals, I have no doubt, are at work among them… The fools, not to see that what they madly desire would be such a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring upon them.

This letter, written in 1831, may be taken as the beginning of the long war between Capitalism and Socialism. In a later letter, James Mill attributes the doctrine to the “mad nonsense” of Hodgskin, and adds: “These opinions, if they were to spread, would be the subversion of civilized society; worse than the overwhelming deluge of Huns and Tartars.”

“After me the deluge”, said Madame de Pompadour. Without domination by the rich, how would society hold together? The answer, of course, is “not in its current form”, which to those on top sounds like disaster. To others it’s the equivalent of heaven for the medieval peasant. Is it not striking how desperately we hold onto the illusions that mislead us? If dealt a good hand, we consider the game fair for all, and bad hands evidence of lack of grace; if a poor one, we consider the game rigged and good hands unfairly distributed.

If cash is speech, as the Supreme Court declared in Buckley v. Valeo, then those with the most cash get to speak louder than anyone else. “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one”, said A.J. Liebling with customary vigor. Nowadays there are many fewer media outlets with the kind of scope that newspapers had in Liebling’s day — he could find a dozen New York papers on his doorstep in the morning. The owners of modern corporate media are not individuals or families like they were in Benjamin Franklin’s time, or even in Liebling’s; they’re faceless corporations fronting for faces from smoke-filled back rooms, like GE and ClearChannel and Fox, and they have insidious rather than overt agendas.

Namely, they want control, ownership, of everyone and everything everywhere. And if they had it they would need more. Property, and its concentration in the fewest possible hands, is the central tenet of the American religion. Which has led us so close to ruin that no one can still believe completely in the old dogmas. Capitalism unrestrained and unregulated is destructive to humanity and the environment.

As Jay Billington Bulworth said, “Let me hear that dirty word: Socialism!”

Posted by Chuck Dupree at October 20, 2008 01:22 AM

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