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03 November 2006
The New Frontier: Suburbia Addendum.
Thanks to Zach for this revision.
For better or worse, the American national identity was shaped by the frontier experience. The economic life and the growth middle class, the ‘rugged individualism,’ and the high degree of social mobility can all be traced to the availability of cheap land. Before everyone freaks out, I know where the land came from. I’m not arguing the morality of the westward expansion, I’m only analyzing its economic and sociological effects.
Marx’s understanding of Capital and Labor assumes that those who have the money to buy capital have enough money that they do not really need to labor. Those who labor do not have enough money to buy capital. Hence the dialectical materialism and the like. And hence the extreme dislike of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are kryptonite to the workers revolution. They own capital, yet provide labor. Sometimes, they may even labor with their own capital to produce their own profit. These people have no interest in government nationalizing everything, because they’d rather keep their house. So if you have a country where nominal amounts of capital are available to anyone, you end up with a really big middle class.
Social mobility is tied to economic life, and the same governing dynamics exist. If someone from any class can acquire nominal capital within a generation, then they or their children will be able, at least in principle, to do whatever they want. Hard to maintain a caste system when the untouchables can ignore the Brahmin and go and get their own stuff. Consider England. Somebody owned the land since forever. So if you worked the land, and you didn’t like your landowner, you’re screwed. You can’t just stake out a claim in the North Sea. So you just deal with it, and accept the premise being shoved down your throat that the nobility who happened to be born with a certain last name got to do whatever they wanted and you couldn’t. But imagine now that there’s a ton of cheap land that you can just move to and claim. If your landowner is a jerk, you can tell him to screw off and jump on the Oregon Trail (the bears give you like 2000 lbs of food. At least on the Apple 2e.) So social mobility is high, and class consciousness stays low.
18-whatever America. Big frontier. Not like the Russian frontier, where Sarmatians and Mongols and Covenant Elites just come through and kill everybody every once in a while. You don’t have to live in a fort and obey some dude with armor and swords. You have your gun and pretty much nobody messes with you. So you get to do your own thing. This works out really well in an agrarian economy. You own land. You work land. You get food and you eat it and sell some. You are the proto-small-business man, the proto-bourgeoisie except without the snootiness. Socially mobile, middle class, all that stuff.
Problem hits when we move from away from the Agrarian Economy. So we move into industrialism… problem is that you can’t just go west and stake out your own textile factory. You have to work at some dude’s factory. Now were back to the landowner thing. Especially when you consider that now you have to live near where you work, which means that you’re not going to be able to buy land, you’re gonna have to rent. You’re doubly screwed cause you have to rely on public transportation, and you’ll have a hard time getting the population densities on the outskirts of the city high enough to get lines out to the ‘burbs. So the previous dynamics start changing: class consciousness develops and Marx is taken seriously by somebody other than spoiled Cambridge rich kids. Remember that the IWW ‘Wobblies’ were alive and well during this time period. So we start turning into a European country, something like an England with a second person plural in its language (y’all.)
There’s cheap land out there, you just can’t get to it practically and still get to work daily. Beyond the outskirts of the city is the new frontier, but there’s no Oregon Trail (or Apple 2es.) So the limfac is transportation. Once that limfac is removed, the frontier is accessible again. So the car hits, the frontier opens up. Eventually, you get into mass stock ownership and the like, but the initial nominal capital investment starts with the home. (Which may imply some sort of internal dynamic in the traditional domestic economy where the male purchases and finances the capital with his external labor, while the female provides the internal labor. This remapping of production might start to recognize the tremendous and largely unrecognized economic contribution of females in traditional families. But that's beyond my current scope.) Anyways, cars allow nominal capital ownership. Nominal capital ownership kills Marxism. So the car killed the Wobblies, not Stalin or the New Deal or anything like that.
So this works until that new frontier hits practical carrying capacity. Then you need a new means of transportation. Which brings us back to the rest of the post. Ibid., Q.E.D. and all that. See ya. Peace out. Or something.
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