The Revolution Ends: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 154-174

When we ended last week, Webster was trying to explain that the Revolution of 1848 failed because it didn’t instantly fix the problem of unemployment. Instead, what it did, was set up a council which then created employment camps that helped people find jobs. This was bad for the reason that the state should not do this. Why? Well, let’s see if she can explain it this week.

We get a quote from a character named “Mermeix,” aka Gabriel Terrail; a mediocre journalist and person who accepted bribes in order to change the story. The quote is, “a government cannot guarantee work since does not depend on it to provide customers.”

This is a pseudo profound bullshit. It sounds good at first glance, but any inquiry into this idea shows how vapid it is. The entire thing is based on a false premise; not all work is based on the idea of a transactional relationship. You don’t need customers for work. No one built a road for “customers,” educated children for “customers,” or led the police for “customers.” Yet these are all jobs, and they are all performed by the government.

Webster breaks from the quote to add, “Moreover, the funds with which it pays out unemployment doles can only be raised in the form of taxation which automatically reduces the spending power of the community, thus creating further unemployment.”

The problem here is that Webster is appealing to the readers of the book who are comfortably employed. They nod along because they don’t want to pay more taxes; but what they do not consider, and what Webster is ignoring is that the employment level in 1848 post revolution France is between 30-60%. Webster, and people like her are arguing about unemployment assistance in worlds that have 5%. When she talks about how taxation lowers the spending power of the community, she wants us to think about today not when 1:3 is out of work. There is no spending power in a community when the unemployment level is that high.

She claims that no government has been able to enforce the “right to work” (i.e. supplying work to the population) without “aggravating the evil it has set out to cure.”

What is this evil? She hasn’t said because she’s employing a rhetorical trick. We, the reader, are going to fill in the blank here with whatever bad thing happens next even if those two things are not actually related. We get some talk of negotiations and then back to the story of how Louis Blanc just wanted Socialism! Webster has to confine her discussion of this to just the workhouses. She can’t expand it to the larger French situation because that would show Blanc’s missteps were not because the idea was bad but because decisions made in other spheres had detrimentally influenced everything else. I’m not an economist so I don’t know the ramifications of some of Blanc’s decisions; what I do know is that decisions like the creation of the workhouses, or a nationalized tailor shop which made the French army uniforms are not just the responsibility of the person who runs it. The most important aspect that Webster is hiding from the reader is that Blanc is the not the President of France, nor is he the Prime Minister, or the Premiere; he’s a guy running one department in the post-Revolutionary government. Webster needs him to be the sole person responsible because he’s a proto-Socialist and the inventor of the phrase, “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.”

The problem I have with this section is that it’s not telling us the story that Webster is supposed to be telling. It’s all post-revolutionary trials and travails. Blanc tried something to alleviate unemployment, it kind of worked, there were people that didn’t like it, and then there was some more revolting. Once in awhile Webster throws in a phrase like this, “acting under orders from the secret societies…” but I’m beginning to read that as her filler phrase.

What happens in France is that the national workshops become dissolved and instead, the army occupies the country and takes over the large unemployed population. We don’t get there for a bit. Instead, Webster indulges in some historical fiction by writing speeches for Blanc while discussing how France really wanted to fight against the Communists…the Communists that don’t exist yet.

She likens the creation of the workhouses to a Duke that creates a poor drainage system and then forces everyone to use it who then die of diphtheria. We wouldn’t consider the Duke’s failing to be one of zeal, she claims, so why do we do so with Blanc and his workhouse experiment? The problem with her analogy is that we don’t do this. The Duke failed because he was an idiot, but he is going to fail upwards help up by people like Webster who actually do think that the Duke had the right idea. Today, she would just blame immigrants. Blanc failed because of opposition to his idea that voted against funding his plan.

She ends this rather boring chapter by discussing how the World Revolution never gained a foothold in England. It also didn’t gain a hold in France either. At least when Cooper did this kind of thing we had an understanding of some kind of threat. Here all we are getting is that some people tried a proto-socialist experiment concerning employment in France and then the Revolutionary government of 1848 didn’t work out.