Nothing but a Revolution can save Us, Part II : The Cycles of Empire, Applying Plaster to Rot

A hope is abroad in the land that occupying public places is a harbinger of coming change. I am loathe to sour anyone’s apple but these smattering protests will not alter the nation’s trajectory. At most, they will wrest some economic emollients from the gorgons that rule. True revolution comes only from the great cycle of history.

In the Calculus of 99 Percent, we discussed how political movements arose less from platforms than from a confluence of popular impulses in a given direction. We concluded that the success of any confluence depended on whether it engaged into the prevailing historical trend -- what Hegel called the Zeitgeist. In this woodchip we will look at the two halves of the historical cycle.

For, if there is a singular lesson to be learned from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) it is that the past cannot be revived and the future cannot be avoided. While this might seem too obvious for words, Gibbon’s three volumes is testament to how persistently the obvious is ignored. Mankind follows its hopes not the winds.

Reviving the Past

One of the most hilarious statements in all of history was the opening line of the official biography of Caesar Augustus,

“At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the Republic which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.”

Of course, as a master of deceit, Augustus never quite lied. He did not say that he had “restored the Republic” but rather “liberty” to a republic which was simply presumed to exist. The presumption, completely unfounded in fact, was the cornerstone on which was erected the majestic edifice of Augustan statesmanship.

Although the Augustan constitution lasted for near 500 years, it was not a Republic. As Gibbon inimitably put it,

“The system of the Imperial government ... may be defined an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth. The masters of the Roman world ... concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed.”

The Caesars understood that “the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”

But some were not content with the assurance of a farce. At periodic intervals over the next 500 years some reactionary would stir things up with a cry and clamor to “restore the Republic!” One of the most energetic attempts took place in 275 A.D. when, in default of an Emperor, the Senate reclaimed its ancient prerogatives and with ostentatious hustle and bustle occupied itself with the business of governance. Its future pretensions were soon deflated.

“On the slightest touch, the unsupported fabric of their pride and power fell to the ground. The expiring senate displayed a sudden lustre, blazed for a moment and was extinguished forever.”

Well, not quite. It continued to sit, like cows taken out to graze, for another two hundred or so years. But it became so irrelevant that no one knows when it finally closed up shop. One day, it just wasn’t there.

That did not stop people from seeking to revive a dream. A millennium later, some fellow named Rienzi got it into his head to restore the republic even though Rome had by then been reduced to a town of 30,000 and the Forum to a goat pasture.

If the word “Libertarian” comes to mind, that is the point.

The American Republic ended with Franklin Roosevelt. Although the New Deal sounded the death knell of a delimited federal government, it was the World War which actually instituted a bureaucratic imperium. In either event, the Republic ended because economic, social and historical forces were pushing it beyond its 18th century confines. As Roosevelt put it in his inimitably homiletic way, we couldn’t continue living under “horse and buggy” law. (Press Conference 31 May 1935)

Up through John F. Kennedy, presidents dutifully played the part of a republican first magistrate. Since then, they have made Caligula and Commmodus their showier models. But whatever the facade, the functional fact is that the country’s political and economic policies are determined by and for a military-industrial-financial complex. Democratically electing officials does not equate with electoral control over policy.

In striking down FDR’s modern legislation, Justice Sutherland ominously warned that “every journey toward a forbidden end begins with a first step.” Sutherland was indisputably right; he only omitted to note that the first step had been taken during the French and Indian Wars. Back then, Spain’s Count of Aranda, who was a far more astute soothsayer than Sutherland, warned of the threat posed by the England’s “pygmy” which he said would grow into a voracious giant. With crisp clarity, Aranda foresaw what the astigmatism of American self righteousness has seldom grasped: that the country always was about expansion and exploitation. Now, in 1945, the pygmy stood astride the world like a colossus. The raucous and expansionist energies of a republic had achieved empire; and, Empire achieved, there was no returning to the Republic.

Restoring the Future

The Roman Republic’s achievement was likewise Empire -- the unification of the ancient Mediterranean world. Augustus supplied the administration for a reality that the Republic had accomplished.

In critical respects the Empire was as much a sham as the pretence of a republic. It never was a unitary commonwealth existing under universally applicable constitutional norms. That had been Caesar’s goal and the reason for his assassination. Romans were not about to share their rights and status with conquered others.

Augustus dispensed with any notions of multi-cultural egalitarianism. He granted Roman citizenship only as a reward for compliance and service. Under his stewardship, the “Roman Empire” became the formality of a supra national middle class urban band that participated in a certain “international style” and that sponged off the countryside while excluding a massive subclass of slaves, metics, under-employed, unemployed and rural poor. Most excluded of all were the German “barbarians” --- illegal immigrants seeking a better life within Roman confines.

Thus, the Augustan achievement came with a problem: how to protect the homeland from barbarian “assaults” while maintaining cohesion and prosperity in the “civilized” (i.e. urbanized) part of the world. Roman policy became one of containment and stability. It aimed at a vital stasis, the great image of which was Mother Rome, uniting East and West within the winds of trade and amidst a cornucopia of plenty.

Frieze from Ara Pacis (the Roman Twins reflected in the Tradewinds of East and West)

A curious bifurcation arose. The stability of the system reduced politics to the farcical squabble of ambition. The two last contenders of the dying Republic, Marius and Sulla, had both been ruthless and ambitious men, but they each represented divergent interests and real political choices. But Augustus had settled everything. Real political choices did not exist. What other policy could there be but the maintenance of the status quo?

On the other hand, the structural weaknesses of the system meant that no matter who clawed his way to the top he was faced with dealing with the same perennial fissures: the failure of the center to hold while the peripheries gave way militarily, economically and culturally.

In the beginning of empire, Rome plundered the provinces sucking wealth toward the center. However, armies create their own ancillary economies. The maintenance of legions on the frontiers stimulated the growth of cultural hybrids and local economies which drained wealth from the center even as the vital stasis of the center was defended.

The balance of economic vectors was not helped by the massive concentration of wealth in Italy itself. The Roman family farm disappeared with the Republic. Thereafter, the equivalent of “agribusiness” sought ever quicker profits in cash crops displacing more labor-intensive forms of production such as olive oil and wine.

If the word “globalization” comes to mind that too is the point, although the analogy ought not to be pressed too hard. The lesson behind the shadow of analogy is that events are less the products of choice than of cyclical processes at work. The centrifugal forces which ultimately collapsed the empire were not the result of “wrong” choices but rather of choices dictated by circumstance, which were logical and usually necessary at the time they were made.

The Protestant Reformation as well as the so-called “Scientific Revolution” have convinced us that the structure we choose to live in is a matter of choice. It is not. It is a question of the inevitable processes of generation and decay applicable to all things under the sun.

Throughout Gibbon’s work the theme is repeated. A crisis arises, the emperor repairs, revives, reforms, repels. Things look good for a while until another crisis arises and things start to fall apart again. Repeat. From time to time an emperor undertakes to repair matters by launching a major war of conquest, which after an initial success, recoils and leaves matters worse off than before.

The pessimistic lesson is that if the Republic could not be restored, neither could the Empire be saved. Gibbon’s tale cautions us that no movement will succeed if the direction of its impulse goes contrary to the prevailing historical flow.

In the Shadow of Ozymandias

Around the world, people grow up in the shadow of past civilizations. That the American Empire would fall was a fact as certain as her supremacy acquired in May 1945. The question was never “if” but always merely “when”.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

However, there are no such shadows in the United States and this has allowed for a curious disconnect in the American mind. Although Americans were fairly candid about their imperial (“expansionist”) impulses throughout the 19th century, at the moment we conquered (“liberated”) Europe and achieved empire, we relapsed with charming insouciance into thinking we were just a basically “inward” looking nation which was beholden nonetheless to defend others against nefarious aggressions at great sacrifice to ourselves.

Historical accidents in the United States lent credence to the republican fantasy. The Civil Rights Movement allowed the impression that fundamental political choices yet remained to be made and could be brought about democratically. In fact, civil rights for blacks was carried on the back of the Commerce Clause. As the Supreme Court made clear (Katzenbach v. McClung (1964) 379 U.S. 294), national economic integration required social integration. Although the conflict had the appearance of a political choice, segregation embarrassed the flow of commerce and fell before the same necessity which drove the empire itself.

It is somewhat debateable whether the United States could have chosen to be a different kind of empire than it has been. John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Inaugural Address proffered that hope, as did the prospect of a “peace dividend” upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. But assuming such choices were possible then, that water has passed the bridge. The U.S. is on an historical trajectory which is by now unalterable. The United States is not going to “change” direction and become a republic again. Nor is it (as we said when Obama was elected) going to “go Swiss”.

However, it was precisely to that nostalgic republican sentiment that Obama played to during his presidential campaign. Obama could provide emollients both in the pursuit of hegemony abroad and in the maintaining a semblance of equity at home. His betrayal, within the greater fraud, was that he provided not even that.

And, it seems to us, that those same nostalgic sentiments drive the Occupiers whose demands net down to calling for the system to be other than what it is.

Some circumspection is in order. The other day we chanced on a photo of an oil rig in the gulf -- a giant crustacean like creature arisen from the deep. As colossal as it was, its size was but a distilled reflection of the vast economic and political complex that produced it. It did not require a Marx to caution that attacking such a giant windmill was an act of folly.

The military-capitalist interests, together with their ancillary camp-followers in academe, the media and cultural institutions are so deeply “invested” in America that they are America. Others are simply tenants in passing.

Occupiers might well look into their own wallets. In it, the majority of them will find a Visa or MasterCard, promoted as “passport to the world” -- an entré into the very supra-national middle-class “band” that was called the Roman Empire. The real 99 percent are lucky if they have a plastic bucket to fetch water with.

If change truly came, we would not recognize ourselves or our surroundings or anything we have come to think of as natural and normal.

This is not to say that the 99 Percenters should not do what they have to do, which is to protest. We chipsters too did our duty; but we did so with the consciousness that what is called “democracy” is simply a cheap (if noisy) way to maintain social peace and compliance; that the financial institutions which raped the world economy and the military-corporate interests that maintain trillion dollar wars are not going to be shamed into peace and equity by a few thousand protestors.

Practically speaking, there is nothing wrong with upping the price for selling one’s vote. If the ruling gorgons can be forced to disgorge a thicker stream of trickle out, we’re all for it. But true political change will not begin to occur until corporations are de-personalized and the Senate, whose sole purpose always has been to thwart the popular will, is abolished. Even that, would only get us up to the European starting line; and, although European political mechanism are far more responsive to democratic impulses, they too have bowed before the gorgon.

In the end, Obama had he tried and Occupiers were they to prevail can only apply plaster to rot. The good news is that in rot there is regeneration.

©Woodchipgazette, 2011
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