Fighting Modern Aristocracies or What Occupy Wall Street is Probably Trying to Communicate

The Occupy movement has had a couple of months to organize and communicate its desires, thoughts, and solutions. While I still don’t think there is a coherent set of goals or grievances, and certainly no solutions, there is definitely a passion and belief that something isn’t right alongside general feelings of discontent with the proverbial Bogie Man. Because of poorly defined arguments and largely reactionary (read left wing) ways of communicating ideas, more conservatively minded folks, myself included, tend to roll their eyes when such a spectacle of complaining is set before them. To more traditional Americans, the answer to the 99% (see The 53% Tumblr page) is simple: try harder, work harder, pick yourself up by the bootstraps and quit crying to someone for handouts. But these differences can be reconciled in such a way that even the far right and far left can agree: a common hatred of Aristocracies.

This brings me to my favorite Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America is so freakishly quotable that I have used his writings in nearly every cultural or political conversation I’ve ever had with any European in regards to the US. Relevant to this circumstance is Book II chapter 20, wherein Tocqueville discusses the dangers of Manufactures to a democracy and how it can ultimately lead to the “harshest Aristocracy that ever existed in the world.” The most relevant Tocqueville passages, in my opinion, to American working culture and this modern Aristocracy phenomenon are below along with links to the original text.

What Tocqueville may have underestimated was the power of banking. Indeed, manufactures can certainly create an aristocracy, but for a culture and lifestyle that worships money, it would only be logical that banking poses the greatest threat to democracy and has the most potential of creating a modern Aristocracy. If Occupy Wall Street can effectively equate shadow banking and twisted hedge fund managers not to the 1%, but to what is now our modern Aristocratic Lords, you may find a lot of support for this movement coming from very unexpected places.

Book II Chapter 18 - Why Among the Americans All Honest Callings are Considered Honorable

As soon as, on the one hand, labor is held by the whole community to be an honorable necessity of man’s condition, and, on the other, as soon as labor is always ostensibly performed, wholly or in part, for the purpose of earning remuneration, the immense interval that separated different callings in aristocratic societies disappears. If all are not alike, all at least have one feature in common. No profession exists in which men do not work for money; and the remuneration that is common to them all gives them all an air of resemblance.

This serves to explain the opinions that the Americans entertain with respect to different callings. In America no one is degraded because he works, for everyone about him works also; nor is anyone humiliated by the notion of receiving pay, for the President of the United States also works for pay. He is paid for commanding, other men for obeying orders. In the United States professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling is honorable.

Book II Chapter 19 - What Causes Almost all Americans to Follow Industrial Callings

This spirit may be observed even among the richest members of the community. In democratic countries, however opulent a man is supposed to be, he is almost always discontented with his fortune because he finds that he is less rich than his father was, and he fears that his sons will be less rich than himself. Most rich men in democracies are therefore constantly haunted by the desire of obtaining wealth, and they naturally turn their attention to trade and manufactures, which appear to offer the readiest and most efficient means of success. In this respect they share the instincts of the poor without feeling the same necessities; say, rather, they feel the most imperious of all necessities, that of not sinking in the world.

The Americans make immense progress in productive industry, because they all devote themselves to it at once; and for this same reason they are exposed to unexpected and formidable embarrassments. As they are all engaged in commerce, their commercial affairs are affected by such various and complex causes that it is impossible to foresee what difficulties may arise. As they are all more or less engaged in productive industry, at the least shock given to business all private fortunes are put in jeopardy at the same time, and the state is shaken. I believe that the return of these commercial panics is an endemic disease of the democratic nations of our age. It may be rendered less dangerous, but it cannot be cured, because it does not originate in accidental circumstances, but in the temperament of these nations.

Book II Chapter 20 - How an Aristocracy may be Created by Manufactures

When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but at the same time he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. He every day becomes more adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him that in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded. What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life in making heads for pins? And to what can that mighty human intelligence which has so often stirred the world be applied in him except it be to investigate the best method of making pins’ heads? When a workman has spent a considerable portion of his existence in this manner, his thoughts are forever set upon the object of his daily toil; his body has contracted certain fixed habits, which it can never shake off; in a word, he no longer belongs to himself, but to the calling that he has chosen.

In proportion as the principle of the division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more narrow-minded, and more dependent. The art advances, the artisan recedes. On the other hand, in proportion as it becomes more manifest that the productions of manufactures are by so much the cheaper and better as the manufacture is larger and the amount of capital employed more considerable, wealthy and educated men come forward to embark in manufactures, which were heretofore abandoned to poor or ignorant handicraftsmen. The magnitude of the efforts required and the importance of the results to be obtained attract them. Thus at the very time at which the science of manufactures lowers the class of workmen, it raises the class of masters.

While the workman concentrates his faculties more and more upon the study of a single detail, the master surveys an extensive whole, and the mind of the latter is enlarged in proportion as that of the former is narrowed. In a short time the one will require nothing but physical strength without intelligence; the other stands in need of science, and almost of genius, to ensure success. This man resembles more and more the administrator of a vast empire; that man, a brute.

The master and the workman have then here no similarity, and their differences increase every day. They are connected only like the two rings at the extremities of a long chain. Each of them fills the station which is made for him, and which he does not leave; the one is continually, closely, and necessarily dependent upon the other and seems as much born to obey as that other is to command. What is this but aristocracy?

The territorial aristocracy of former ages was either bound by law, or thought itself bound by usage, to come to the relief of its serving-men and to relieve their distress. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public. This is a natural consequence of what has been said before. Between the workman and the master there are frequent relations, but no real association.

I am of the opinion, on the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous. Nevertheless, the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.