When Even Conservatives Hated Capitalism

By now, we’re all familiar with the Left’s plot to bring to a neighborhood near you a fiscally unsound socialist utopia and/or violent open terrorist gun battles in the streets. (The version being vilified depends on which side of the commercial break Fox News is on). So we know what conservatives don’t want: communism, socialism, or Hobbesian anarchy. But what does that leave us with? Well, they’re always talking an awful lot about capitalism, aren’t they? Near as I can tell, it’s their first love.

But I’m here to tell you it hasn’t always been the case. Historically, leftists weren’t the only ones who had an ax to grind when it came to capitalism. Once upon a time, even the conservatives hated it. Today, I want to explore that forgotten history.

Why do I want to explore that history? Well, given my fear that capitalism, as currently run by neoliberals, is marching us right back into fascism, I’d like to take a look at other ways we might have warded off capitalism, and hopefully, avoided fascist resurgences, too. Grab your pitchforks, folks! We’re going in!

[Original image (sans text) by Dawn Armfield]

Now that I’ve gotten that clickbaity stuff out of the way, I should probably clarify a few points:

1. When I spoke of capitalism above, that was some slight bending of the truth. The conservatives I’m speaking of actually opposed industrialism, not capitalism per se. But industrialism is what enabled the rise of modern capitalism. We wouldn’t have capitalism without it. So conservatives’ later acceptance of industrialism necessarily led to their eventual full embrace of capitalism.

2. When I speak of conservatives here, I mean in the American sense, circa the early twentieth century.

3. We’re going to take as our central focus an essay by Lyle H. Lanier entitled “A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress” in the collection I’ll Take My Stand by the Twelve Southerners, who were a group of Southern Agrarians.

Now, don’t take this entry as my endorsement of the Agrarians. They exemplified problems galore, particularly their willingness to gloss over the abuses and exploitations of slavery. I’m not naive to their abominable positions. That said, what if we peeled back some of the layers of where we are now and investigated where we could have been had we followed the Agrarians’ critiques, at least in part?

So who were these Agrarians and how could their philosophy have averted our course from fascism?

Well, for starters, the Agrarians were not pro-slavery. The text we’re working with was published in 1930. They realized that battle was over and done with. However, that didn’t stop them from pining after some essential essence of that old way of life. A yearning, a sense of loss, permeates I’ll Take My Stand. When the authors speak of the Civil War’s outcome as the abolition of not just slavery, but also of a way of life, they mean it. The loss is personal for them and it cuts all the way even to the basic unit of the family.

With the slavery-based agrarian way of life upended, the Agrarians foresaw the coming turn toward industrialism. Industry, of course, meant greater concentrations of workers on smaller plots of land, bigger cities, more diversity, more capitalist control, and the erosion of the South’s traditional way of life. They knew those changing relations of production meant changes in social organization, and not just the abolition of slavery. You see, they understood their Marx; they weren’t stupid.

And I think they were onto something. As industrialism pushed us deeper into capitalism, we witnessed the unfolding of some of Engels’ predictions from The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. As technology made jobs more accessible to women, for example, more women joined the workforce and thereby gained more autonomy. With increased autonomy and equality, women were now taking on social roles that threatened the very existence of the patriarchal family. This reality was a seismic shift for Southerners.

But the Agrarians’ indictments of industrialism went beyond just changing gender roles. In the next few entries, I’ll examine some of their critiques, again leaning heavily on Lyle H. Lanier’s essay. Here are the specific concerns I’ll be addressing:

1. The myth of progress and the exploitation of the worker
2. The abuses of corporate oligarchy
3. Mass production and mass consumption as isolating social forces
4. The decline of the family
5. Fears of revolution and world war as products of industrialism’s torments and miseries

Again, these are conservative critiques. These days, I’m used to seeing leftists argue these points. I’ve read plenty of libertarian and liberal think-pieces arguing four out of five of those positions. But something strange is going on here. Over the next two or three entries, I’ll be breaking down Lanier’s critiques, and we’ll see where conservatism could have gone, rather than where it has ended up.