A Social Contradiction

Social Contradiction

The contradiction between America's promise of opportunity and freedom on the one hand and its inherently unjust capitalism system on the other plays itself out in literature, both fiction and non-fiction, as a seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two sides of any capitalist endeavor, namely, management and labor. This divide appears so insurmountable precisely because the moral and political legitimacy of one side (management) ultimately depends upon an insistence that such a divide does not exist. Because there is no way to justify the inherent exploitation of capitalism without an appeal to some kind of divine right on the part of the privileged, capitalism and its representatives in management have simply been forced to pretend that no such exploitation actually exists. Both the appeal to divine right and the seemingly willful disavowal of any injustice in capitalism can be seen in the work of Benjamin Franklin and Herman Melville, because one of the central arguments of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography depends upon a kind of divine right, while the narrator of Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener is woefully unaware of his own privileged position and the inherent injustice of his position. By discussing Franklin's autobiography alongside Melville's Bartleby, one is able to see not only how American capitalism attempts to justify itself, but also the somewhat counter-intuitive way in which this form of capitalism has been challenged.

Capitalism is inherently unfair, in that profit is by definition the product of an unequal transaction, and capitalism is dependent on profit as both its means and end. However, modern capitalism finds itself deeply rooted to representative democracy, and thus there has always been a kind of dissonance between the rhetoric of democracy and liberty and the exploitative reality of capitalism, a dissonance that America's earliest capitalist leaders attempted to explain and ultimately dissolve. Benjamin Franklin implicitly makes the defense of capitalism one of the central goals of his autobiography when he explains his motivations for writing it, and the specific explanation of his motivations embodies the appeal to divine right that paradoxically characterizes the economic system of a country explicitly founded in opposition to the supposed divine right of kings. In short, Franklin, like so many of his American descendents, believes in the Protestant myth of American meritocracy, and thus equates financial success with the benediction of an interventionist god (Franklin, 2008, p. 3).

He reveals as much when he tells his son that one of the major "inducements" for writing his autobiography is the fact that he, "with the blessing of God," was able to find economic success, and thus feels a kind of duty to subsequent generations to share with them the secrets of that success (Franklin, 2008, p. 3). While Franklin was obviously quite successful, not only in business but in politics and philosophy, he misidentifies the source of his success, simply because he attributes it to a god, rather than the fact that he was a relatively well-positioned white male in a society created by and for white men. While Franklin undoubtedly worked hard for his success, the fact remains that any challenge he faced was immeasurably lessened due to the fact that he happened to be born a white male, and as such he represents the quintessential white male American capitalist success story, which equates the institutional privileges and benefits of being born a white male with the blessing of a (based on all available evidence) fictional character. Franklin's autobiography demonstrates a truly American kind of businessman, because he so neatly embodies all of the assumptions and logical fallacies that American capitalism depends on in order to justify its dominance in an ostensibly equitable and representative society.

Where Franklin's autobiography demonstrates the peculiar appeal to divine right that is used to justify the inequity of American capitalism, Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener demonstrates the almost willful obtuseness necessary for any apologists of capitalism who must interact with the exploited lower classes on a regular basis. The narrator of Bartleby the Scrivener is entirely unaware of anything outside the extremely limited range of his own preconceived ideas, which is both why Bartleby's passive resistance stuns him so much and he is ultimately unable to come to terms with Bartleby's death. He practically admits as much when he says "the easiest way of life is the best," because the easiest way of life for any white male living in America is to go along with the political and economic hegemony enjoyed by white males, rather than attempt to disrupt that system of injustice (Melville, 1856, p. 3).

The narrator cannot see any reason why Bartleby might not want to perform the rote, low-paying, ultimately meaningless job he has been hired for, because in the narrator's mind, maintaining the status quo by seamlessly fulfilling one's obligations to the larger economic system is the best kind of life available. In other words, the narrator is careful to never let himself see the world outside of his own, management-centric perspective, because otherwise he might begin to question his own status and comfort. This is why Bartleby's refusal to take action to the point of starvation can be seen as a kind of protest against the hegemony of management within a capitalism system; in a space where every action is subject to the surveillance and commentary of a higher-up, the only means of exercising free will is to not exercise it at all.