“It was not till the kings had been shorn of power and the interregnum of sham democracy (operative in the political but not the economic arena) had set in, leaving no virile force in the state or the world to resist the money power, that the opportunity for a world-wide plutocratic despotism arrived. …When international trade and financial relations had broken down national barriers and the world had become one field of economic enterprise, (then) did the idea of a universally dominant and centralized money power become not only possible…(but) had already so far materialized itself as to cast its shadow before. If the Revolution had not come when it did, we cannot doubt that something like this universal plutocratic dynasty or some highly centered oligarchy, based upon the complete monopoly of all property by a small body, would long before this time have become the government of the world.” Equality (1897)
Well over a hundred years ago, Edward Bellamy explained in two novels what the modern world would look like if the Kingdom of God arrived in its midst. He also explained what that world would look like if it did not. Wealth would accumulate in the private economic arena to the point where it could buy and control the public political arena, and then would come the plutocratic strangulation of the human race. So it has happened before our eyes. The numbers shift a bit from year to year, but recent estimates are that 80% of humanity struggles to survive on $10.00 or less per day, 50% on $2.50 or less, and seven million children die annually from malnutrition and preventable or treatable disease. Meanwhile, a handful of billionaires have become richer than the poorer half of the world’s population, and globalized financial and corporate monstrosities dictate the one-sided terms under which entire nations must live. Not only has this insane, obscene wealth concentration corrupted politics and plunged the masses into crippling austerity, but even more dreadfully, it has plundered and polluted our planet to the point of mass species extinction and looming ecocide.
Small wonder that we drown in dystopian thought, swallowing the poisonous TINA water that There Is No Alternative. Although Bellamy was spot on in predicting plutocracy absent a revolution, the revolution he saw coming never came. His untimely illness and death sapped the initial momentum of his movement, but the coupe de grace of Bellamy’s “impending” revolution was delivered by a confluence of foreign and domestic events he did not foresee. On the foreign front came two world wars, the rise of authoritarian communism, and the resulting Cold War. On the domestic front came the New Deal, the post-WWII surge of American industry, and its following decades of global dominance. The foreign events were all-consuming crises; the domestic events allowed much of America’s fragile working class to move into the seemingly-more secure middle class, fostering the false assumption that the evils of capitalism had been constrained. Now that the near-collapse of the global capitalist system has mired us in the consequences of the Great Recession, and the scarcity of stable work for steady pay is again the stark reality in America and across the world, attention should be paid to how Bellamy believed the Second Great American Revolution would unfold.
The process would begin with growing public awareness of its dire predicament, since the dawn of civilization, under “the rule of the rich.” What had begun with the slaves of ancient empires and continued with the serfs of feudalism had culminated with the wage-slaves of capitalism caught in the vise-grip of global plutocracy. The growing awareness of this perpetual plight would be energized by a widespread spiritual awakening to feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood long suppressed by ruthless competition. Universal moral values like the Golden Rule—and what Schweitzer would later call “reverence for life”—would come to be seen not merely as personal guidance in a fallen world but as bedrock principles upon which to build a better, more beautiful one. The nature and purpose of democratic government would again be understood as defined in America’s founding document: as an institution, called into being by the people, to ensure equality by enabling every citizen to exercise inherent rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When it became clear that those rights could be secured only in the economic arena, democracy would move boldly into it.
The mechanics of that move—successive flanking and pincer maneuvers by which a revitalized, rapidly-expanding public sector would first out-compete, then surround, then absorb what had become a dwindling, profit-starved private sector—is beyond the scope of a short two-part essay. A piece like this can only point to Looking Backward and Equality, sequentially read and pondered, as a path up the mountain to gain a clear and comprehensive view of the utopian shore toward which today we either swim or perish. Fortunately, Bellamy left a glimmering wake to follow, and his 19th Century vision readily lends itself to 21st Century revision. Included in that task would be the removal of lingering Victorian attitudes in Bellamy’s thought, the balancing of his large-scale mechanistic mode of progress with the small-scale organic, and the re-imagining of an “eco-industrial army,” one which not only produces goods and services in accord with environmental constraints but which also works directly, like FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, to protect nature and begin to heal the immense harm we have done to her (and thus to ourselves).
Desperately we long to feel again the thrill of hope, the possible fulfillment of Jesus’ prayer that the Kingdom of God come on earth. A forgotten genius named Edward Bellamy deserves to be remembered, for he enables us, persuades us, impels us to believe that it can and it must. Let his words, not mine, close this essay. “The great enthusiasm of humanity which overthrew the old order and brought in the fraternal society was not primarily or consciously a godward aspiration at all. It was essentially a humane movement. …But ‘if we love one another God dwelleth in us,’ and so men found it. It appears that there came a moment, the most transcendent moment in the history of the race of man, when with the fraternal glow of this world of new-found embracing brothers there seems to have mingled the ineffable thrill of a divine participation, as if the hand of God were clasped over the joined hands of men. And so it has continued to this day and shall for evermore.” Equality (1897).
Note to the reader: For those who deem Bellamy’s emphases on nationalism and patriotism either dated or dangerous, attention is called to the nurturing and inclusive form of nationalism recently proposed in “Reclaiming the State” by Mitchell and Fazi (Pluto Press, 2017), a proposal which includes both a universal jobs guarantee and a “socio-ecological transformation of production and society,” funded via Modern Monetary Theory. For those who seek a more scholarly approach to Bellamy’s work, please search the net for Dr. Nora Willi’s insightful dissertation (UIC, 2018), “Looking Back to Bellamy: American Political Theology for a New Gilded Age.”