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| Carta de Foresta (1217) |
In this follow-up article, we would like to discuss how the Bill of Rights also presupposes a citizen’s direct and active participation in economic affairs. When the Bill is comprehended in its totality, it embodies not simply a list of juridical rights but a whole and organic concept of participatory political-economy.
It may seem obvious to some that the Bill of Rights, as an 18th century political document, reflects and presupposes the economic conditions prevailing at the time it was written; namely, classical, entrepreneurial capitalism. But, as explained in the previous article, the Bill of Rights is not a product of the Enlightment. It embodies a medieval construct that was only restated by the Founding Fathers. If the Bill of Rights reflects a medieval a political-economy it makes sense to examine the economic conditions prevailing at the time of Magna Carta, just as in the preceding article we examined the political construct of those times.
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| Detail of Shearing from Trés Riches Heures |
Caveat. The economies of bygone eras is a complex topic always in peril of yielding the wrong conclusions. The epic studies of Henri Pirenne and Ferdinand Braudel have demonstrated that what is today conveniently nut-shelled as “the Dark Ages” involved varied and contradictory economic currents. The 1000 year history of Europe’s economy between A.D. 475 and 1453 is one of continuous adaptation and transformation. When it comes to english feudalism in the 10th and 14th centuries, the situation is no simpler. There is no single tableau economique of feudal economic rights and obligations.
What can be said, at the risk of a cartoon, is that society was composed of four classes: a peasantry (which was relatively prosperous), a middle-class of tradesmen and merchants, a para-class of clerics and a warrior nobility. To a substantial degree, the king was merely a preeminent member of the nobility although royal activists were always striving to turn themselves into all-embracing monarchs.
The peasantry, nobility and monarch were economically and politically connected by a hierarchy of mutual rights and obligations clustering around interests in land.
The tradesmen and merchants were basically exempt from this core feudal structure. They were free-roamers and free-traders with their own laws, guilds and associations.
Also exempt was the entire army of the Church which was a parallel and separate government providing non-tangible services and with jurisdiction over non-landed interests.
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| Zapotec Weaver, Oaxaca, Mexico (1994) |
.
Neverthless, in the slow but inexorable move toward capitalism, many peasants became dispossessed from their land and were reduced to sharecropping or vagabondage.
Members of the middle class moved both up and down. Most tradesmen became “industrial” laborers while many merchants metamorphosed into factory owners producing the goods they had previously simply bought from others and resold.
The nobility continued to live off the land, but (if they wanted to survive) adapted to changing circumstances by adding “businesses” to their armoury.
The para-class of clerics had included just about anyone who could write so that monks and clerics had acted as a kind of secretarial and administrative class which now came to include teachers, accountants and lawyers.
These changes occurred gradually over the same period that the charters and laws from which the Bill of Rights was drawn were enacted. Although the 13th century appears pivotal in retrospect, strong and vibrant elements of the feudal order persisted in both original and altered forms into the 18th century.
Among these medieval charters and laws, Magna Carta is the chieftest. It gets trucked out on Law Day, as some kind of sacred relic which is oft intoned and seldom read. But there was another document from that era which is equally significant even if it is not intoned at all: Carta de Foresta.
The Forest Charter was in fact a 13th century Economic Bill of Rights. It was first issued in 1217 as a complementary charter to Magna Carta from and provided in pertinent part that,
The “forest,” which included fields, moors, farms and common lands, comprised a resource which was essential for the peasants’ survival. It provided wood for heating, cooking and smithing; it provided pasture for pigs and cattle; and it provided a direct source of captured or hunted food. Without access to “the forest” peasant farming was simply not economically viable.
By most definitions, “capital” includes any natural resource which is put into productive use (e.g. a forest used as resource for making paper). For this same reason King John and members of the upper nobility sought to monopolize these capital resources. While the “foresta” were not entirely used by the peasantry as capital in a strict sense (e.g. to produce paper), they provided the common man with at least an indirect form of capital which was critical to his other productive activities. In particular, wood as a source of energy was as important to industry then as oil is today.
Magna Carta and Carta de Foresta were thus the two pillars of England’s popular political-economy. Just as Magna Carta protected political and juridical rights, Carta de Foresta aimed to protect and insure the common man’s economic survival.
Those familiar with pre-capitalist history would fairly point out that if this Golden Age of Peasantry ever existed it was short lived. While that is true enough,it is also true that, throughout the subsequent class struggles of the 14th and 15th centuries, the working man’s claim is usually conservative -- seeking to retain ancient and traditional rights more striving to gain new ones.
And it was the retained tradition that the Bill of Rights presupposes. The cluster of legal and economic rights, which evolved over a 700 year period and from which the Bill of Rights was drawn, pressupposed not only active political participation in local affairs but also a viable and sustainable economic participation. The role of the individual may have been small, but it was real and direct.
As noted in the previous article, the unique demographic conditions of the United States immediately upon independence, perpetuated or revived medieval living conditions. As the isolated hearth on the heath was disappearing in England, it came to life again in the outbacks of Kentucky or the plains of Nebraska. Similarly as the common lands and forests were enclosed and monopolized in England, the American yeoman had an open continent for his pasture and meadow.
Accordingly, to assert that the Bill of Rights presupposed a "medievalist" political-economy is not to engage in a fantasmagorical appeal to a statu quo ante, because it was, in America, the prevailing statu quo hic et nunc.
Nor is it contradictory to argue that the Bill of Rights presupposed a classical, burgess economy. Whether the Bill's political and juridical traditions are regarded as a reflection of medieval economies or as a manifestation of 18th century social circumstances in either case they presupposed a society in which the free citizen directly and responsibly participated in both his economy and his civic life.
What is added by the longer historical perspective is the understanding that the Bill of Rights does not simply manifest a brief bourgeois “blip” in the historical trajectory but rather reflects an ongoing social tradition that over-arches specific economic systems. In other words, in whatever specific form it may take -- feudal, classically capitalist or other -- the Bill of Rights assumes the existence of direct participatory popular control over political and economic life.
By way of pertinent example, the right to bear arms, carried over into the Second Amendment, is not only a political right in case of tyranny and subversion, not only (as we have argued) a civic duty to participate in local policing it must be viewed as well in its utilitarian, economic context as insuring the means of primitive survival. This is not to say that the Bill of Rights is, in the abstract, an economic document; but rather that it is a juridical document which implies a certain economic vitality.
What has occurred, then, over the past 200 years is a mutilation in which political rights have been severed from their economic correlatives and both have been vestigialized.
Contrary to the social construct envisioned by the Bill of Rights, ordinary Americans have become alienated from direct active political participation. The resort to indirect, representative democracy at the local level and the intervention of professional administrators, managers and police have disassociated the citizen from his “political work”. By reducing civic participation to the occasional passive choice between options presented, man had become alienated from his citizenship.
A similar process has taken place in the economic sphere whereby the average worker has become alienated from his labor. To see how this is so, it is necessary to step back an examine what it means to “work”.
In recent times, it was John Lock who expressed the idea that ownership over something derived from man’s labour put into it. It was a simple proposition. A craftsman who cuts, shapes and sands wood to turn out a carved table quite literally transfers his sweat and skill into the material worked on.
If there is an uneven surface or nick in the table’s leg, it reflects for all time the mis-angled thrust that, in a moment of time, was made by a man working. For better or worse, the worker reproduces himself in the object he creates. The object takes on the properties bestowed into it by its creator which is why it is called his property.
Of course, the craftsman takes his table and exchanges it for some product created by someone else. Because we ourselves have become so alienated from the process of production we tend to think of this exchange as a mere transfer of objects. In fact, what takes place is a species of intercourse in which mens’ labours are shared and incorporated into eachother’s lives. I eat on another man’s back and walk in his hands. It was for this reason that Aristotle said commerce was the first level of friendship.
However, when one man works for another, a principle of alienation is introduced. What the worker sells in this case is not a product but the use of his labor. The object produced is taken away from the worker, given another’s name and disposed of as is expedient for the authorized owner. This severance introduces a subtle sorrow and ultimately despair into work. It is not as grievous as seeing one’s son or daughter being raised in another’s house but the fact of alienation is the same and its effects are evidenced in the well known phenomenon of worker indifference and carelessness.
Those familiar with Marxist theory will also spot the inevitably ensuing alienation of economic value. But the focus of this article is on what might be called the psychology of economic activity.
As an historical and practical matter, the alienation of the worker from his product, took place primarily within the context of the division of labor; but this only rendered matters worse because the worker was not only alienated from the product but even from the act of creative paternity. As noted by Adam Smith, in an oft forgotten passage,
The 20th century saw various attempts at a solution. The allure of National Socialism was that it appeared to many -- capitalists and progressives alike -- to have solved the problem of worker-drone anomie by calling upon Captial and Labor to work together for the Volk Gemeinschaft -- the People’s Community -- of which they were both a part. All life became a National Wagnerian Gesamtkunst (all together art) in which everyone played an “organic” role.
Soviet Communism was similar, with the added difference that in theory at least, everyone, through the state, owned everything and all the profits. If one looked at the picture of Soviet Life, everyone was as happily participatory in the great proletarian community as the Germans were in theirs.
America’s National Capitalism recognized the problem but ultimately sought a solution in promoting a National Community of Junk.
Early progressives like Herbert Croley (The Promise of American Life) and Theodore Roosevelt were inspired by the Bismarckian political-economy which ultimately evolved into National Socialism. In fact, the progressive movement initially called itself the “New Nationalism.”
"The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage.” Roosevelt said. It will “regulate the use of wealth in the public interest” and “regulate the terms and conditions of labor” bearing in mind that coporate profit should be allowed “only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community” and to the end that “the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable.” (Osawatomie, Kansas August 1910)
Less progressively, Woodrow Wilson put forward his “New Democracy” which aimed to promote and revive local entrepreneurship. Although Bull Moose Progressives and the New Democrats moved in opposite directions both platforms were grappling with the same underlying problem: the uneven distribution of wealth coupled to political and economic alienation.
In the end, the United States adopted a model which was a watered down version of both plans. Corporations -- not the State -- were made responsible for providing health care and pensions while the Government took care of the absolutely destitute and provided some incentives for small businesses. The problem of anomie was solved not with Wagnerian gesamtkitsch but with the narcosis of consumerism.
Despite their geo-political antagonisms, each of the three systems ended up looking and being very much alike; and they all suffered from the same fundamental defect: they sought a solution in substitutions without reviving actual worker control of his economic life.
Among professional historians the substitution is known as “false embourgeoisement” -- a tongue twisting term meaning to make labor drones feel like they are “middle class” by giving them the trappings of the bourgeoisie.
Members of the middle class moved both up and down. Most tradesmen became “industrial” laborers while many merchants metamorphosed into factory owners producing the goods they had previously simply bought from others and resold.
The nobility continued to live off the land, but (if they wanted to survive) adapted to changing circumstances by adding “businesses” to their armoury.
The para-class of clerics had included just about anyone who could write so that monks and clerics had acted as a kind of secretarial and administrative class which now came to include teachers, accountants and lawyers.
These changes occurred gradually over the same period that the charters and laws from which the Bill of Rights was drawn were enacted. Although the 13th century appears pivotal in retrospect, strong and vibrant elements of the feudal order persisted in both original and altered forms into the 18th century.
Among these medieval charters and laws, Magna Carta is the chieftest. It gets trucked out on Law Day, as some kind of sacred relic which is oft intoned and seldom read. But there was another document from that era which is equally significant even if it is not intoned at all: Carta de Foresta.
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| Pannage or Pig Grazing on Common Lands |
The Forest Charter was in fact a 13th century Economic Bill of Rights. It was first issued in 1217 as a complementary charter to Magna Carta from and provided in pertinent part that,
"Henceforth every freeman, in his wood or on his land that he has in the forest, may with impunity make a mill, fish-preserve, pond, marl-pit, ditch, or arable in cultivated land outside coverts, provided that no injury is thereby given to any neighbour."
The “forest,” which included fields, moors, farms and common lands, comprised a resource which was essential for the peasants’ survival. It provided wood for heating, cooking and smithing; it provided pasture for pigs and cattle; and it provided a direct source of captured or hunted food. Without access to “the forest” peasant farming was simply not economically viable.
By most definitions, “capital” includes any natural resource which is put into productive use (e.g. a forest used as resource for making paper). For this same reason King John and members of the upper nobility sought to monopolize these capital resources. While the “foresta” were not entirely used by the peasantry as capital in a strict sense (e.g. to produce paper), they provided the common man with at least an indirect form of capital which was critical to his other productive activities. In particular, wood as a source of energy was as important to industry then as oil is today.
Magna Carta and Carta de Foresta were thus the two pillars of England’s popular political-economy. Just as Magna Carta protected political and juridical rights, Carta de Foresta aimed to protect and insure the common man’s economic survival.
Those familiar with pre-capitalist history would fairly point out that if this Golden Age of Peasantry ever existed it was short lived. While that is true enough,it is also true that, throughout the subsequent class struggles of the 14th and 15th centuries, the working man’s claim is usually conservative -- seeking to retain ancient and traditional rights more striving to gain new ones.
And it was the retained tradition that the Bill of Rights presupposes. The cluster of legal and economic rights, which evolved over a 700 year period and from which the Bill of Rights was drawn, pressupposed not only active political participation in local affairs but also a viable and sustainable economic participation. The role of the individual may have been small, but it was real and direct.
As noted in the previous article, the unique demographic conditions of the United States immediately upon independence, perpetuated or revived medieval living conditions. As the isolated hearth on the heath was disappearing in England, it came to life again in the outbacks of Kentucky or the plains of Nebraska. Similarly as the common lands and forests were enclosed and monopolized in England, the American yeoman had an open continent for his pasture and meadow.
Accordingly, to assert that the Bill of Rights presupposed a "medievalist" political-economy is not to engage in a fantasmagorical appeal to a statu quo ante, because it was, in America, the prevailing statu quo hic et nunc.
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| Late Medieval Butcher |
What is added by the longer historical perspective is the understanding that the Bill of Rights does not simply manifest a brief bourgeois “blip” in the historical trajectory but rather reflects an ongoing social tradition that over-arches specific economic systems. In other words, in whatever specific form it may take -- feudal, classically capitalist or other -- the Bill of Rights assumes the existence of direct participatory popular control over political and economic life.
By way of pertinent example, the right to bear arms, carried over into the Second Amendment, is not only a political right in case of tyranny and subversion, not only (as we have argued) a civic duty to participate in local policing it must be viewed as well in its utilitarian, economic context as insuring the means of primitive survival. This is not to say that the Bill of Rights is, in the abstract, an economic document; but rather that it is a juridical document which implies a certain economic vitality.
What has occurred, then, over the past 200 years is a mutilation in which political rights have been severed from their economic correlatives and both have been vestigialized.
Contrary to the social construct envisioned by the Bill of Rights, ordinary Americans have become alienated from direct active political participation. The resort to indirect, representative democracy at the local level and the intervention of professional administrators, managers and police have disassociated the citizen from his “political work”. By reducing civic participation to the occasional passive choice between options presented, man had become alienated from his citizenship.
A similar process has taken place in the economic sphere whereby the average worker has become alienated from his labor. To see how this is so, it is necessary to step back an examine what it means to “work”.
In recent times, it was John Lock who expressed the idea that ownership over something derived from man’s labour put into it. It was a simple proposition. A craftsman who cuts, shapes and sands wood to turn out a carved table quite literally transfers his sweat and skill into the material worked on.
If there is an uneven surface or nick in the table’s leg, it reflects for all time the mis-angled thrust that, in a moment of time, was made by a man working. For better or worse, the worker reproduces himself in the object he creates. The object takes on the properties bestowed into it by its creator which is why it is called his property.
Of course, the craftsman takes his table and exchanges it for some product created by someone else. Because we ourselves have become so alienated from the process of production we tend to think of this exchange as a mere transfer of objects. In fact, what takes place is a species of intercourse in which mens’ labours are shared and incorporated into eachother’s lives. I eat on another man’s back and walk in his hands. It was for this reason that Aristotle said commerce was the first level of friendship.
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| Bartering |
However, when one man works for another, a principle of alienation is introduced. What the worker sells in this case is not a product but the use of his labor. The object produced is taken away from the worker, given another’s name and disposed of as is expedient for the authorized owner. This severance introduces a subtle sorrow and ultimately despair into work. It is not as grievous as seeing one’s son or daughter being raised in another’s house but the fact of alienation is the same and its effects are evidenced in the well known phenomenon of worker indifference and carelessness.
«Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale . . .»
"You are to know the bitter taste
of others' bread, how salty it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
ascending and descending others' stairs . . ."
(Paradiso, Canto XVII (55-60).)
Those familiar with Marxist theory will also spot the inevitably ensuing alienation of economic value. But the focus of this article is on what might be called the psychology of economic activity.
As an historical and practical matter, the alienation of the worker from his product, took place primarily within the context of the division of labor; but this only rendered matters worse because the worker was not only alienated from the product but even from the act of creative paternity. As noted by Adam Smith, in an oft forgotten passage,
"The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it." (Wealth of Nations (1776) Bk V, ch. 1.)
The 20th century saw various attempts at a solution. The allure of National Socialism was that it appeared to many -- capitalists and progressives alike -- to have solved the problem of worker-drone anomie by calling upon Captial and Labor to work together for the Volk Gemeinschaft -- the People’s Community -- of which they were both a part. All life became a National Wagnerian Gesamtkunst (all together art) in which everyone played an “organic” role.
Soviet Communism was similar, with the added difference that in theory at least, everyone, through the state, owned everything and all the profits. If one looked at the picture of Soviet Life, everyone was as happily participatory in the great proletarian community as the Germans were in theirs.
America’s National Capitalism recognized the problem but ultimately sought a solution in promoting a National Community of Junk.
Early progressives like Herbert Croley (The Promise of American Life) and Theodore Roosevelt were inspired by the Bismarckian political-economy which ultimately evolved into National Socialism. In fact, the progressive movement initially called itself the “New Nationalism.”
"The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage.” Roosevelt said. It will “regulate the use of wealth in the public interest” and “regulate the terms and conditions of labor” bearing in mind that coporate profit should be allowed “only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community” and to the end that “the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable.” (Osawatomie, Kansas August 1910)
Less progressively, Woodrow Wilson put forward his “New Democracy” which aimed to promote and revive local entrepreneurship. Although Bull Moose Progressives and the New Democrats moved in opposite directions both platforms were grappling with the same underlying problem: the uneven distribution of wealth coupled to political and economic alienation.
In the end, the United States adopted a model which was a watered down version of both plans. Corporations -- not the State -- were made responsible for providing health care and pensions while the Government took care of the absolutely destitute and provided some incentives for small businesses. The problem of anomie was solved not with Wagnerian gesamtkitsch but with the narcosis of consumerism.
Despite their geo-political antagonisms, each of the three systems ended up looking and being very much alike; and they all suffered from the same fundamental defect: they sought a solution in substitutions without reviving actual worker control of his economic life.
Among professional historians the substitution is known as “false embourgeoisement” -- a tongue twisting term meaning to make labor drones feel like they are “middle class” by giving them the trappings of the bourgeoisie.
The defect did not go unnoticed. In Germany, Otto Ohlendorf, an S.S. economist, collaborated with the later post-war chancellor, Ludwig Erhardt, in drafting an economic model based upon revival of a craft ethic, leaving “mass production” to the United States and Japan. In Ohlendorf's opinion, (cribbing straight from Adam Smith), only skilled, craftwork was compatible with fomenting politically conscious human qualities.
In the United States, Walther Reuther, made worker participation in management one of the demands of his 1946 strike againt General Motors. Reuther, a socialist who had been impressed by soviet worker-councils, wanted American labour to regain some measure of control over its economic life. In exchange for "co-determination" in management, workers' pay would be indexed to company profits. In the end, however, Reuther was bought off with a basket of goodies that was too good to pass up, with the dismal result that the American labour movement ceased ot have any economic ideology other than “Gimme”.
Reuther had been on the right track. In terms of goodies alone, there is no difference between false embourgoisement and plain decent living conditions. What makes the single family dwelling, the Volkswagen, the washing machine, the radio "false" is divorcing the possessing of these goods from involvement in the process of their production. Herbert Croley had been very clear that his "New Nationalism" had to take its shape and impetus from democratic initiatives arising "from below".
But if the economic system renders the worker “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become” it is pointless to hope for a vibrant, democratic political life.
Homo politicus and homo economicus are two sides of the same coin. A mere labourer is not an “economic man” but simply an economic resource which is precisely why corporations and governments speak of “human resources”. But an economic resource cannot be and will not even conceive of itself as a political being. As an ultimate result, the United States has come to epitomize Adam Smith’s predictive warning. It has simply added giggles to the stupidity and torpor by showering the common man with goodies .... and no longer even that.
The reduction of the Bill of Rights to a catalogue of merely personal rights was a necessary part of the economic and political dispossession of the common man. In this respect both so-called liberals and so-called conservatives have got it entirely wrong. The bill of rights does not “enshrine” merely individual rights, but rather the social rights of individuals in their economic and political being.
If the promise of the Bill of Rights is to be realized, it is not enough to demand this or that “right” and it is not enough to demand this or that economic “entitlement.” Without falling into antiquarian or luddite nostalgias, means must be found to reactivate real and substantive political and economic participation and responsibility by all citizens.
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| Butcher Tables, Zachila, Oaxaca |
