Tolstoy on the Picket Line
The Slavery of Our Times is incredibly relevant as America goes on Strike.
A transportation hub buzzes with activity, frantically trying to keep up with demand. Workers move cargo throughout the night, loading and unloading under the watchful eyes of management. They’re motivated to acquire a few small luxuries like a night out at the bar. As a group they fear but ultimately give into moral requirements that are supposedly “good for them”.
This is not a description of a Biden era port or air terminal pushed to the breaking point. This’s not an Amazon shipping center. Leo Tolstoy made these observations about a late 19th century Russian train station. These workers, according to Leo Tolstoy, “had exhausted, weary eyes, as if the men were drunk.”
While he is known primarily for his epic novel War and Peace, from the 1870s onward Tolstoy was a leader in the Christian Anarchist movement, best expressed in his pamphlet The Slavery of Our Times. He believed that there was little difference between wage slavery and the bondage of actual slavery. According to the Russian master, governments used the violence of taxation, legislation, and policing like the slave master used his whip, hounds, and stockade.
“Slavery exists in full vigor, but we do not perceive it, just as in Europe at the end of the Eighteenth Century the slavery of serfdom was not perceived.People of that day thought that the position of men obliged to till the land for their lords, and to obey them, was a natural, inevitable, economic condition of life, and they did not call it slavery. It is the same among us: people of our day consider the position of the laborer to be a natural, inevitable economic condition, and they do not call it slavery.”
Tolstoy looked to the past as his antidote. He saw independent farmers and artisans, totally in control of production, as the only men living a free life. Governments, even democratic ones, were nothing but an expression of violence, using force to subjugated populations to the cruel will of a small elite.
In the 18th and 19th century the means of production, whether farm land or factories, was owned and guarded by the elite. Modern governments and societies are no different. They give preferential access to capital so that corporations can create efficiency through scale, thus maintaining a grip on the means of production.
The global supply chain is the ultimate extrapolation of this. In its simplest form, Adam Smith describes the division of labor to make pins. According to Tolstoy, a southern kitchen slave, a Scottish pinhead maker, and a Chinese IPhone assembler are all equal victims to the system.
While I love Tolstoy’s frame of argument, I don’t agree with his conclusions about capitalism. He is wrong headed about the role private property as a driver of slavery.
I think today he would be a Libertarian, that he was correct to see government coercion as the root of this evil.
I also think he would support today’s striking workers.
Vaccine Mandate Strikes: Standing up Against Political Violence
Last month Joe Biden ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to write rules requiring private companies with 100 or more employees to vaccinate their staff against Covid-19 or test those who aren’t at least once a week. These new rules didn’t have to pass even the bare minimum of democratic process because of “emergency conditions”. This is the essence of State violence. Tolstoy see’s it clearly:
“There is but one general characteristic of all these laws – namely, that if any man does not fulfil them, those who have made them will send armed men, and the armed men will beat, deprive of freedom, or even kill the man who does not fulfil the law.”
My favorite part of Tolstoy’s Christian anarchist philosophy is the rejection of violence. Using violence to change the social order only begets a new more violent social order. He recommends striking, disengaging from a society that is immoral. The moral man “in order not to do the evil which produces misery for himself and for his brothers, he should, first of all, neither willing nor under compulsion take any part in governmental activity”
The author reminds us that without the population's consent to govern it’s impossible for the elite clique to maintain its grip on power. His teachings deeply influenced everyone from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr and have been one of the most potent tools against authoritarians. Tolstoy understood this style of resistance was not always easy.
“In order that the state of things may be improved, both the well-to-do classes and the workers must understand that improvement cannot be affected by safeguarding one's own interests. Service involves sacrifice, and, therefore, if people really wish to improve the position of their brother men, and not merely their own, they must be ready not only to alter the way of life to which they are accustomed, and to lose those advantages which they have held, but they must be ready for an intense struggle, not against governments, but against themselves and their families, and must be ready to suffer persecution for non-fulfillment of the demands of government.”
Right now workers across the country are shouldering this difficulty. Pilots are on the picket line to fight the vax mandate, and it looks like they’re winning. Because of pressure from workers bravely taking on the mandates, Southwest Airlines has dropped plans to put unvaxed staff on unpaid leave. Delta Airlines is also refusing to ruin the livelihood of workers who object to the vaccine.
The state can hear the boards creaking beneath them. This is one of the first times corporate America, normally deeply entrenched with the state, has defied an order. The root is the employees moral courage to stand up for what they believe in.
Public sector workers are in a tougher spot. Rather than question the mandate, cities are firing much needed essential workers like police and firefighters. In Seattle dozens of first responders went to city hall to turn in their boots. In a move that would make Tolstoy smile, they protested by feeding the homeless.
It’s hard to escape the irony that the Biden administration is firing people who served us throughout the pandemic. Notice that there is no vaccine requirement for a welfare check or government assistance. Leaning on Ayn Rand is a bit of a cliche, but what happens when the productive members of society have had enough, who will be our John Galt?
The point is not to question the marginally effective vaccines. At this point people know it sort of works, even though pass through cases are becoming less the exception and more the rule. In the end, it's probably worth taking the jab.
The point is this’s another instance of the government using coercive force to tell people what to do with their bodies. The media and political elite have one message, get vaxed or else.
They are, however, facing resistance. This is part of a general movement of workers standing up to the corporatist system.
Strikes for Higher Wages: Better Late than Never
American workers, vaxed and unvaxed, have had enough and are going on strike. Tolstoy may see abstention as a means to bring down society, but a strike for higher pay is a step in the right direction. From Hollywood writers to John Deere assembly line workers, citizens are taking action.
The elite only have themselves to blame. During the pandemic the implored grocery store workers and delivery drivers to “take one for the team”, keeping the Whole Foods and pepperoni pizzas coming. Most workers courageously did their part, accepting that they had to take risks to feed their family and keep society running.
Did they get higher wages? Did they get long needed benefits? Did they get a more accommodating schedule? Almost uniformly the answer to these questions was resounding no. They got a pat on the back. Corporate America played them for suckers.
Now we get to an important distinction that is not made enough, between corporatism and capitalism. The local shop had to shut down while Walmart was an “essential service” keeping the toilet paper hoarder’s butt wiped. FANG kept people entertained and saw record share prices as a reward.
The true capitalists are being squeezed out. Low federal interest rates make borrowing so cheap for large companies they can acquire upstart competitors before they pose a threat. They have the budget to lobby for regulations that only large organizations can meet. With the ability to bid on and get large government contracts, they have a source of perpetual income. Corporations use the government to kill their competition in the cradle.
Tolstoy understood how the elite classes could manipulate lower orders into doing their bidding. He intuitively grasped how they use the system’s temptations, and its moral justifications, to their advantage. In modern society, workers are slaves to consumerism. No matter how much they earn, the culture conditions them to spend more. This addiction serves as their shackles
“Workmen living near rich people always are infected with new requirements, and obtain means to satisfy these requirements only to the extent to which they devote their most intense labor to this satisfaction. So that workmen in England and America, receiving sometimes ten times as much as is necessary for subsistence, continue to be just such slaves as they were before.”
Tolstoy never envisaged what we have today. Big tech has a window into our minds that it ruthlessly deploys. The KGB could only dream of the tools at Facebook and Google’s disposal, to track all of our communications and movements.
Where Tolstoy and I Part Ways
There’s a big area in which I disagree with Tolstoy, and that’s on private property rights. He sees them as the cause of man’s enslavement. I see them as fundamental to liberty.
Tolstoy’s heart is in the right place but he is a bit naive about human nature. As a devout Christian, he believed this moral system, if fully adopted and embraced, will lead to harmony. One of the reasons I admire Tolstoy over other anarchists is precisely because of this. He sees utopia as only possible with deep moral restraint through faith and material sacrifice.
Looking back on history, however, it’s difficult to be that optimistic.
Nature abhors a vacuum, even when it comes to something as nebulous as power. The natural rights of the individual are the only true bulwark against the state. Without property owning, armed citizens, we will only see a rotating dance card of tyranny, not true liberty. Tolstoy himself sees this as a likely outcome of revolutionary movements.
“attempts to abolish violence by violence neither have in the past nor, evidently, can in the future emancipate people from violence nor, consequently, from slavery.”
A free exchange of services for money is not the same as slavery. It’s only slavery if you buy his premise that owning the means of production is an abstract form of political violence. I have a hard time lumping what governments do to protect the individual with what they do to harm the individual, such as war and taxes. We have the right to be left alone, ensuring that right is one of the few true responsibilities government has.
Conclusion: Opposites run into each other
Right now there are two major protest movements. The anti vaxxers are largely right wing while the labor movement is primarily left wing. What do they have in common? Both movements are rebelling against the current elite and the violence it employs.
The Biden regime is forcing people to do something they don’t want to with their own bodies. Our own flesh and blood is the last line of individual sovereignty and they’re determined to cross it. Make no mistake, threatening one’s livelihood is coercive force.
Workers across the country are fed up with our corporate cartels. In their eyes these elites make billions while most workers barely make ends meet. In an increasingly automated world they are worth less and must accept less, or so they are told. They take their rage out philosophically against capitalism. Instead, worker should blame government for the situation.
Both the political and corporate elite grow more powerful by the day. They are intertwined and increasingly entrenched. Big Tech is constantly consolidating. We saw with Parler how quickly upstarts are crushed. The Democratic Party is using its hegemonic control of the media to dominate the national outlook as well as our predilections at the polls.
Tolstoy described all of this over a hundred years ago. As an astute observer he saw political power reinforced corporate power in an industrialized modern world. While we disagree on some of the conclusions, his work is powerful reading for anyone interested in questioning elite orthodoxy.