Fixing the System

A History of Populism, Ancient and Modern

Adrian Kuzminski

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781628924015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

In the current climate of dissatisfaction with "democratic" Western political and economic systems, this is a timely book that demonstrates a true political Third Way.
Populism is distinguished from other political movements by its insistence on two things conspicuously missing from modern systems of political economy: genuine democracy based on local citizen assemblies, and the widespread distribution among the population of privately-owned economic capital. Fixing the System offers a comprehensive historical account of populism, revealing the consistent and distinct history of populism since ancient times. Adrian Kuzminski demonstrates that populism is a tradition of practice as well as thought, ranging from ancient city states to the frontier communities of colonial america-all places where widely distributed private property and democratic decision-making combined to foster material prosperity and cultural innovation.
In calling for a wide distribution of both property and democracy, populism opposes the political and economic system found today in the united states and other Western countries, where property remains highly concentrated in private hands and where representatives chosen in impersonal mass elections frustrate democracy by serving private monied interests rather than the public good. As Kuzminski demonstrates, as one of very few systematic alternatives to today's political and economic system, populism, offers a pragmatic program for fundamental social change that deserves wide and serious consideration. Populism is a genuine "third way" in politics, a middle path between the extremes of corporate anarchy and collective authoritarianism. As America takes stock of her current situation and looks toward the future in the 2008 election year, Fixing the System offers a trenchant and timely study of this deep-rooted movement.

Chapter One

The Insight of Phaleas

The word democracy literally means the rule of the people, from the ancient Greek kratio, to rule, and demos, the people. This popular self-governance is achieved in its fullest sense, I shall argue, by more or less equal citizens meeting in local, face-to-face, decision-making assemblies in which they are free to participate equally, fully, and directly. The word democracy is widely misused in our time, most commonly to indicate any kind of political system claiming popular sovereignty on the basis of elections or plebiscites, even though such periodic mass voting reduces citizen participation to a minimum while giving elected officials wide latitude for action with minimal accountability to their constituents. I use the word democracy in its original, stronger, and fuller sense of direct rule by the people; that is, the right of unimpeded participation—minimally, historically by heads of households, and maximally, by all adult community members—in self-government through empowered face-to-face assemblies of the kind found, among other places, in most kinship clans and tribes worldwide, in numerous ancient and medieval city-states, and in various modern assemblies such as New England town meetings. Direct democracy was arguably the first form of human polity, the natural embodiment of social justice, a once universal condition manifest in kinship societies around the world. It is essential to democratic societies, I shall argue, that their members do not differ significantly in personal wealth and power, not enough for some to control others. But democracy has been uprooted almost everywhere by thousands of years of war, conquest, and appropriation, with wealth and power conspicuously concentrated in relatively few hands. Though democracy in the postkinship state societies we call civilizations has been a rare exception, it remains an ever-present possibility, provided that the inequalities in wealth characteristic of war-based state societies can be significantly narrowed. This work hopes to contribute to that possibility.

Direct democracy is possible only on the local level, where citizens can meet and act personally in face-to-face assemblies. It can be extended over a broader area only if local assemblies are somehow confederated through wider representative bodies, whose members also meet face-to-face, and if these wider bodies are in turn made accountable to their constituent assemblies by ensuring that their members are elected by those assemblies and recallable by them. Assemblies for still larger areas, such as regions and nations, can similarly be constituted with regard to the regions and nations they represent. Thus, for example, if the United States were a democracy in this sense, we can imagine that county councils would represent local assemblies, state legislatures would represent county councils, and a national congress would represent state legislatures. This combination of local democracy and accountable representation, a democracy of individuals at the grassroots and of communities and regions beyond the grassroots, is the hallmark of confederal democracy. Although some kinship societies evolved into strong confederal democracies, such as the Native American Iroquois,¹ there have been relatively few confederal democractic state societies. Among these can perhaps be included the Aetolian and Achaean leagues in ancient Greece, and the Lydian and Etruscan leagues, among others.² The United States under the Articles of Confederation and the Swiss Confederation are, at least in part, more recent examples.³ Confederal democracy would be the realization of democracy on a large scale; it would constitute not only its actual institutionalization locally but also its integration across a variety of communities and regions.⁴ It would replace that oxymoron “mass democracy”—the system under which we live—with an integrated series of democracies of individuals, communities, and regions. The relative absence of confederal democracies in the historical record reflects the relative absence of democracy itself. Why this should be so, and how it might be remedied, are among the questions before us.

It is the principal thesis of this work that democracy so understood can be achieved and sustained only if its citizens are economically independent of one another to the degree necessary to allow them to come together more or less as political equals, not as masters and slaves, nobles and peasants, patrons and clients, employers and employees, bosses and workers, and so on. Economic independence means each citizen’s personal or direct ownership of resources, sufficient to establish a degree of material self-sufficiency not absolutely but relatively vis-á-vis other citizens. It presupposes the right to private property per se, not just the right to an opportunity to struggle for private property. To insist upon economic independence is to claim the right to direct and full control of some fair share of the wealth of the community—that is, the resources or capital adequate for the realization of minimal personal economic self-sufficiency through one’s own individual labor and investment, not just the right to claim economic benefits from property controlled by others, including the state. This work will consider how the direct right to property might be realized. My thesis is that a direct right to property is a necessary condition of genuine democracy, and that this presumption lies at the heart of the political movements we call “populist.” The political economy of populism, which this work hopes to help revive, is based on the twin pillars of a right to private property by all and a right to democracy by all.

My thesis is not original. The term populism comes out of postbellum nineteenth-century American politics, but the insight it represents goes far back into ancient times. It was first articulated in the West, as far as I can determine, by an ancient Greek thinker, Phaleas of Chalcedon, who has come down to us only through a discussion in Aristotle’s Politics. In Phaleas’s view, as reported by Aristotle, for any democracy to be successful its citizens must have neither so much personal wealth and power as consistently to be able to dominate others, nor so little as to be dominated consistently by others. In Aristotle’s words:

For some persons think that the right regulation of property is the most important; for the question of property, they say, is universally the cause of party strife. Therefore the Chalcedonian Phaleas was the first who introduced this expedient; for he says that the citizens’ estates ought to be equal, and he thought that this would not be difficult to secure at the outset for cities in process of formation, while in those already settled, although it would be a more irksome task, nevertheless a leveling would most easily be effected by the rich giving dowries but not receiving them and the poor receiving but not giving them.⁵

If Phaleas is right, free and full participation in democratic governance depends upon each citizen personally commanding resources sufficient to maintain his or her relative economic independence vis-à-vis other citizens. This command of personal resources can be established only by somehow ensuring the availability to all of some fair share of societies’ resources, some part of the “common wealth.” Phaleas is no socialist advocating common ownership; he speaks rather of “citizens’ estates.” This does not have to mean, as we shall see, taking resources away from anybody; it does mean equal access by each person by right to some equal portion of the wealth available to society as a whole. We shall explore, in what follows, some overlooked ways this might be done. If such a circulation of resources could be established it would have the effect, over time, of reducing the extremes of conspicuously rich and conspicuously poor, gradually melding them into a broad middle class of citizens. Justifiable differences of wealth would and should remain. If honestly earned wealth can only reflect honest differences among individuals and their endeavors, it seems such wealth should be retained by individuals and their families on a personal basis, but not necessarily institutionalized and perpetuated through corporate entities and special economic privileges. It is these latter, as we shall see, that allow for concentrations of wealth and power incompatible with democracy. A partial but steady diffusion of wealth throughout the citizenry, as Phaleas seems to have argued, is necessary to sustain the diffusion of political power in a democracy. This balance of democracy and property, to be struck in each individual, is the heart of Phaleas’s insight, the core of his political economy, and the essence of populism.

In any society, there can and should be richer and poorer, given natural human differences in productive talents, skills, energies, motivations, and knowledge, all of which deserve their suitable rewards. But in a populist democracy there would be neither dramatically rich nor dramatically poor, neither those powerful enough to constitute a coherent and self-perpetuating ruling class nor those dependent enough to constitute a coherent and self-perpetuating client class. To avoid these all-too-familiar extremes, property, Phaleas tells us, must continuously be recirculated through an established, ongoing system of distribution. It must not be diverted and concentrated into the hands of authorities and bureaucracies, bypassing the people, but rather distributed individually and personally in equal shares to all. This distribution should allow those with productive talents to enjoy a generous return for their efforts, to become relatively richer, but not overwhelmingly so. It must be great enough to ensure that those who find themselves relatively poor can maintain a level of material self-sufficiency adequate to exercise independent and uncoerced judgment as free citizens. The point is not to strive for an impossible goal of absolute material equality, but to dampen the extremes of wealth and to broaden out the middle class. To this end, it is only necessary that citizens enjoy access to an equal share of such capital as is currently available to the community, a kind of ongoing minimal grubstake, or claim against the future resources of society, by personal right.

Part of the purpose of this work is to explore some unusual ways of circulating wealth devised by populist thinkers with the conscious intent to avoid the evils of direct taking or appropriation while fulfilling the promise of the populist equation of property and democracy. If Phaleas is right, true democracy—collective decision making by otherwise more or less free and equal private citizens meeting together in committees of the whole—can be successful only to the degree that citizens personally are materially self-sufficient enough to be economically independent of one another, or any other power. For only then can they hope to achieve a measure of objectivity and responsibility on social issues free of the biases inherent in being rich or poor—the fundamental source of political faction. Private property widely distributed is, in this view, an indispensable requirement of democracy, just as private property narrowly distributed has been democracy’s worst enemy. A responsible democracy is impossible without the ability of each person to command as personal property his or her share of the resources necessary to develop freely the fruits of his or her own labor, and—paradoxical as it may sound at first—there can be no lasting security for personal property and the fruits of one’s own labor without democracy. Indeed, it is their combination—the merger of public accountability with private production—that defines the democratic populist political economy envisioned by Phaleas.

By wealth or property I mean the right to command some equitable share of the resources of nature and society as a matter of effective personal (not merely token or symbolic or indirect) ownership. This is not merely the “right” to labor for others who control resources, where one is reduced to selling the property of one’s own body or mind. It is rather the right of each individual to claim direct ownership of a fair share of the resources acknowledged by right as necessary to carry out one’s own productive labor for one’s own purposes. Ownership here means full personal control, including the freedom to wholly alienate (to sell or otherwise transfer) the distributed capital in question. This claim to private resources means that some resources must somehow continuously be circulated more or less uniformly to all, rather than disproportionately appropriated by a relative few. Such uniform circulation, modern populists have argued, can best be achieved through an alternative monetary system based on low-interest loans available to individual citizens with good collateral. Unike other critics of the shortcomings of corporate capitalism, populists have zeroed in on the established debt-based financial system as the principal culprit driving unsustainable economic growth and unduly concentrating wealth; the serious alternatives to that system they have proposed are well worth considering in our troubled economic times. The fullest idea of such an alternative system was developed in the nineteenth century by the American protopopulist Edward Kellogg in A New Monetary System and other works. A government obligation to offer citizens low-interest loans was seen by Kellogg as the best means of equitably distributing future capital, and we shall examine his views in detail later in this work.

Socialists have sought to abolish private property and the market, while capitalists have sought to reify private property into an independent force. Phaleas and the populists point out a third way: the combination of full public, democratic rights with full private, resource rights, with democracy and property for all, not just for some at the expense of others. They offer a new path toward establishing a just social and economic order, one hitherto only marginally explored. This combination of property and democracy is no more or less than the balance of private pursuits with public responsibilities. It allows for the maximum freedom possible, with freedom understood as the mutual range of activity that you and I and our fellow citizens allow ourselves in our individual and collective pursuits of happiness. The false reduction of freedom to individual freedom (as found in corporate capitalist ideology) tends to anarchy, just as the false inflation of freedom to collective freedom (as found in socialist and fascist ideology) tends to tyranny. Freedom, it is here proposed, might better be served by the sustained balance of private individual resource rights with public collective democratic rights. A just society, in this view, can be established only when all citizens have full and direct access to both the political process and the resources necessary to maintain a level of relative personal economic security adequate to sustain an independent outlook on public issues.

The promise of a populist program speaks directly to our political and economic failures, and to the bankruptcy of our misrepresentative system of government: a plutocratic oligarchy perpetuated through manipulated mass elections or plebecites that insists upon calling itself a “democracy.” Populism holds out the hope of dissolving, peacefully and over time, the domineering personal and corporate concentrations of wealth and political power that characterize our society, so as to free and advance, rather than hinder and exploit, the private energies of labor, talent, and ambition. The populist program, first envisioned by Phaleas, proposes to establish and sustain democracy by economically empowering ordinary citizens. In our day that means transforming them from dependent wage earners into property owners personally controlling significant resources, and thereby independent and responsible enough to be truly and successfully self-governing. It is an old vision once more worth taking seriously, a vision perhaps more relevant than ever in the twenty-first century.

***

We live, of course, in a very un-Phalean, unpopulist world. It is the world of corporate finance capitalism where political accountability is minimal, the operative forces not personal but controlling abstractions backed by force, the influence of oligarchic ruling elites indirect but decisive, and wealth highly concentrated in few hands, leaving most people as clients of one sort or another. The state is the ultimate corporation, set off against the people, the one by which all others are sanctioned. The private corporations sanctioned by the state have in many instances gone on to accumulate sufficient powers to influence, even dominate, the state itself.⁶ Corporate entities are highly various, and include, for instance, the federal government, Microsoft, the States of the Union, the IRS, the Catholic Church, the Farm Bureau, General Electric, the Sierra Club, the Rotary Club, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Teamsters Union, Exxon, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among countless others, including family trusts, nonprofits, many small businesses, and so forth. The United States and most modern industrial countries are essentially corporate oligarchies. They are ruled by shifting corporate coalitions of governments, businesses, and related institutions, dominated by a peculiar system of private finance; taken together these institutions constitute the principal instruments for perpetuating vast discrepancies of wealth, blocking the possibility of a populist political economy.

These various corporate financial entities are controlled by relatively small numbers of individuals—including, variously, politicians, lobbyists, public officials, donors, directors, executives, board members, CEOs, and trustees, among others—most of whom are only indirectly accountable, if at all, to most of those affected by their decisions. The social and political power of any corporate institution is determined mainly by its relative size, its legal standing and regulatory force, its assets and financial influence, and its productive power—that is, by the various means at its disposal to appropriate and control resources to its own ends. Whether private enterprises or governmental bodies, corporations have become the premier means of concentrating enormous power and wealth in few hands. With minimal public accountability, these curious abstract entities, large or small, are in a special position to reward those who control them. The vast majority of people (citizens, consumers, stockholders, employees, the self-employed, and so on, as the case may be) control no such entities. They remain social and economic dependents, atomized and isolated for the most part, whose decisions in the marketplace or voting booth are all too often predetermined by the mass advertising of the corporate media, or the fear of losing one’s job.

Leftish-liberal critics of the status quo in America traditionally have seen private corporations, or “big business,” or Wall Street, as the main source of social injustice, while looking favorably upon government as a key instrument of social virtue. Rightish-conservative critics of the same status quo traditionally have seen “big government” as the main source of social injustice, while looking favorably upon business and the marketplace as key instruments of social virtue. Both accept corporate structure (one public, the other private) as fundamental. The ideological dovetailing is nearly perfect. The Left tells us that business is bad (exploitation, injustice, etc.) and government is good (social programs, environmental protection, etc.). The Right tells us that government is bad (regulations, high taxes, etc.) and business is good (profits, jobs, etc.). This is an oversimplification, to be sure, but it highlights a key fault line in American political discourse, a fault line that has long obscured a deeper, pathological, common structure. The radical left-wing tendency to endorse government and distrust private corporations, and the radi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: The Insight of Phaleas
• Chapter Two: Kinship Precedents
• Chapter Three: European Populism
• Chapter Four: American Populism
• Appendix: Jefferson’s Ward Republics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint Page