The Gladiators

 Arthur Koestler's The Gladiators is ostensibly a novel about the first century B.C.—Koestler's only "historical" novel, to my knowledge. But it is quite obviously also a novel about the twentieth century. 

Knowing what we do about Koestler's life circumstances and the state of Europe in 1939—when the book was published—this should perhaps not surprise us. 

Filtered through the lens of a 1930s perspective, the Roman dictator Sulla becomes a stand-in for Hitler in Koestler's hands, waging his reign of terror against the democrats and the popular party. 

The latter—whose leadership fled Rome for Spain—sound like an analogue for the generation of anti-fascist refugees to which Koestler himself belonged.

(There's even an episode in which the King of Numidia betrays his promises of hospitality to the refugees by trying to extradite them back to the hands of their political persecutors in Rome—exactly what happened to the anti-Nazi German refugees who thought they had reached safety in France, as Koestler recounts in his Scum of the Earth.)

And Spartacus himself—and the "Sun State" he tries to found—obviously represent the failed experiment of the Soviet Union, with which Koestler had become gradually disillusioned over the course of the previous decade. 

After acknowledging all of that, however, I was surprised to find that the book was not merely the straightforward political allegory that I perhaps expected. Koestler is also genuinely interested in first century politics and social conditions on their own terms—not solely as a "distant mirror" for the present. 

In particular, Koestler's description of the root causes of social conflict in the late Republic goes deeper than merely trying to make it a stand-in for depression-era Europe; though the story he tells here is of perennial relevance, even up to the present. 

In his book The Impact of Science on Society, Bertrand Russell observes at one point that:

"In any history of any period, you will find roughly the following gloomy picture: 'At this time the old hardy yeoman stock had fallen upon evil days. Under threat of starvation from bad harvests, many of them had borrowed from urban landowners [...] 

"Those who had taken this fatal step became, almost inevitably, the slaves or serfs of the new commercial classes. And so the study farmers, who had been the backbone of the nation, were submerged by supple men who had the skill to amass new wealth by dubious methods."

Koestler's description of social conditions in first century B.C. Rome traces almost precisely this same retrogression. Here, though, the immediate culprit was not a "bad harvest," but the influx of cheap grain from Rome's colonies. 

These imports—caused by Rome's imperial expansion and trade—in Koestler's telling—put small farmers out of business because they were not able to compete with their prices. And so, agriculture was concentrated into large latifundia staffed by cheap slave labor. 

The former small farmers were therefore forced to migrate to urban areas to seek work, and often had no recourse but to subsist off of the dole of the public granaries—which conservative politicians then tried to close down, as government debt ballooned to unwieldy proportions. 

At the risk of committing the same kind of "presentism" for which I just praised Koestler for partially side-stepping, I couldn't help but see in this an analogy to more recent events. 

Obviously, the pauperization of the peasantry has been a feature of capitalist development since the days of the "enclosures" movement on. Oliver Goldsmith described an early instance of it in his great eighteenth century poem, "The Deserted Village." 

But the same thing has also happened in more recent times. 

On the one hand, America's small farmers were largely forced out of business in the latter half of the twentieth century through agricultural consolidation. 

In an essay about the Oklahoma City bombings, Gore Vidal traces this ordeal as a root cause of the rise of right-wing extremism and militancy in the American "heartland" at the end of the century—a dynamic that is obviously still distorting our politics well into the Trump era. 

On the other hand, U.S. agriculture has often been the source of the cheap imports driving other countries' farmers out of business. Indian farmers have agitating over the last year or so against the threat of trade deals with Trump that would subject them to unfair competition with heavily-subsidized U.S. crops. 

So too, many a Mexican farmer was put out of business after the advent of NAFTA, because their market agreed to accept U.S. food imports. And much of Haiti's humanitarian crisis today is traceable to U.S. pressure in the 1990s that forced the island's economy open to U.S. food dumping. 

These policies were much to the benefit of Clinton's political base among Arkansas rice farmers. But they drove Haiti's peasantry off their lands and into the crowded slums of Port au Prince, where many then perished in the catastrophic 2010 earthquake.

The mass displacement and pauperization of farmers in Mexico and Haiti obviously contributed quite a bit in turn to the rise of undocumented immigration to the United States in the late twentieth century and up to the present. 

A right-wing populist interpretation of first century B.C. history then—a Steve Bannonite interpretation, say—would probably see immigrant labor as a stand-in for the cheap imported slave labor that put so many Latin small farmers out of work. 

And indeed, because undocumented immigrants are forced to work in a shadow economy off the books, without the protections of labor law, they do in fact come cheaper than legal labor and are often subjected to something close to enslaved conditions. 

The response of the American far right, then (not always of Trump himself—since he has no coherent or consistent ideology—but of many of his "America First" followers)—has been to take aim at all the pillars of late twentieth century neoliberal internationalism—to seal off the country to immigration; to put up trade barriers against foreign imports; to retreat from foreign alliances and multilateralism—in short, to fight a rearguard nativist reaction against all the trends of the modern world. 

This, as Koestler portrays it, was obviously one of the options floated by the first century B.C. Romans as well. 

Several of the characters in his book look back to the reactionary dictatorship of Sulla as a golden age. One of them longs for "a strong man who clears the muddy stable of the State"—just as many American voters in 2016 fell for the illusion that Trump was going to "drain the swamp" in Washington (only to go on now to be the most corrupt and flagrantly self-dealing politician in American history). 

Another character's description of Sulla's reign sounds not only like the fascist regimes of Koestler's era, but of the right-wing authoritarian projects of our own time as well, with their talk of "remigration" and dictatorship: 

"[H]e presumed to turn back the wheel of history: the legendary order of far-back times [...] an age that knew not world commerce or the Rights of Man; whose vision was narrow and devoutly limited; an age of evil, bloodthirsty gods ruling the mind of mankind. Only those who could prove that the blood in their veins was that of the superior She-Wolf-Race were to be the Lords and Masters of this State[.]"

This reactionary response is a pseudo-solution, however. America's agribusiness conglomerates—while they might back Trump's right-wing cultural project—will not actually tolerate losing global markets for our own cheap food exports. Many an American farmer has already expressed alarm over Trump's trade policies because they invite retaliation from foreign countries that now no longer want to buy our grain. 

Nor does the mass expulsion, criminalization, deportation and enforced disappearance of immigrants solve the root causes of why people are leaving their homes in large numbers in the first place—which is that their traditional subsistence agricultural lifestyles are no longer sustainable under the pressure of global competition. 

As we've just seen, the U.S. is unlikely to want to abandon all the advantages of that global competition, so many of which actually tilt in our favor—particularly when it comes to agriculture (though you are not likely to hear this from the MAGA brigade). 

So that means the U.S. government is unlikely anytime soon to ease the pressure on the economic forces that are driving global migration—even as they then seek to hound, persecute, and torment the people who are innocently thrust from their homes by these same dynamics. 

Really, then, the right-wing authoritarian agenda would do nothing more than trap the victims of the current system in a new and even more impossible quandary. Like the events described in Koestler's play-within-the-novel about Buffo the Peasant—today's right-wingers would first expel people from their lands by backing unrestrained capitalist development, and then cut off the grain supply in urban centers in the name of containing excess public debt (see recent MAGA policies that have both eliminated much food aid to the Global South and attached onerous new "work requirements" to health and nutrition safety net programs). 

What, then, is the answer? 

Koestler for a long time in the '30s would have said that the alternative to a right-wing reactionary revolution of the Sulla variety was a left-wing progressive revolution. But by the time he came to write The Gladiators, he had already grown disillusioned, as we've seen, with the leading embodiment of that alternative on the global stage: the Soviet Union. 

Koestler's novel reflects this as well. When Spartacus goes to set up his "Sun State," he soon encounters the same fundamental difficulty that Koestler describes as afflicting the Soviet experiment in his book The Yogi and the Commissar—namely, a breakdown of "incentives." 

Spartacus promises freedom and an equal share in the proceeds of production to anyone who arrives in his Sun State. 

He is then of course immediately confronted by two big difficulties: what to do with the aged and infirm who want to come and receive the benefits of communal property but who are not equipped to contribute to the production of it; and how to incentivize people to keep producing when they cannot add to their own share through labor—and are entitled to still receive a share even if they have not contributed. 

Within the first weeks of establishing his Sun State, then—in Koestler's telling—food supplies have already started to dwindle as a consequence. 

Spartacus's solution to this is to impose "discipline." This typically takes the form of crucifying in public anyone who fails to follow the new laws of share and share alike. 

This state terrorism does indeed create a new "incentive" to labor, in place of the old ones provided by the market economy. But it is the "incentive" of fear of torture and violent death. 

And so, Spartacus—who founded his state in order to free the slaves—has ended up simply re-creating slavery under a new name. 

As one character asks another, while touring through the Sun State: "Isn't it marvelous to be free?"

"What's the difference?" the latter replies, "Don't I have to go on working?"

It's not hard to see in all this a pretty obvious analogy for the decline of the Soviet experiment that Koestler traces in his non-fictional works. In both cases, the root problem was the same: once you eliminate the profit motive or any possibility of individual benefit through market exchange, people have very little incentive to perform the hard work involved in sustaining a modern, complex economy. 

Without incentives, production will trail off—unless new incentives are found. And for many a Marxist-Leninist state, it soon turned out that the "new incentives" were state terror, compulsion, coercion, prison—the violence of the criminal code. 

And so, having ended "wage slavery," as the Marxists called it, all they had managed to do was to replace it with old-fashioned slavery in the literal sense. 

Is there no solution, then, in either direction? Are we just going to have to go on down the path of modern economic development as is—even as it keeps displacing people—because both the right-wing and the left-wing alternatives to neoliberal global capitalism prove in the end to be even worse than the thing they replace? 

This is the perspective offered by the cynical real estate magnate Marcus Crassus, in Koestler's novel (based on the historical figure). 

Crassus offers the best Marxist analysis of any character of the true sources of Rome's social crisis; but he says there is no alternative but to plunge headlong in the same direction, and to hope that one can get one's own before the whole system collapses under its own weight. "Have you ever stopped to consider that a human being lives only for approximately fifteen thousand days?" Crassus asks; "Quite a lot more than that will pass before Rome goes to the dogs." 

Perhaps, then, we too can merely accept that the relentless process of economic growth and displacement—perhaps about to be thrown into overdrive by the rise of AI—is inevitable, and we should simply hope that we profit from it individually in the meantime and perish before it stalls. 

This appears to be Trump's own plan. While so many of his followers mistook him for a Sulla, he is really just a petty brigand, trying to pilfer as much gold as he can from a sinking ship before heading to the life-boats himself. 

Let whoever can live with that as an adequate solution take their chances on it if they will. "Creep, wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind" (Hopkins). I for one wouldn't want that on my conscience. 

Yet, I also can't believe any more than the disillusioned Koestler could that a new "Sun State" will be the answer either. 

Today's DSA progressives, who are merely reviving the utopian hopes of Marxism that failed so spectacularly the last time around—seemingly without alternation—don't appear to have any new ideas that would avoid the obvious traps that ensnared Spartacus and his followers (or Marx and Lenin and theirs) when they set out to establish a similar community. 

Perhaps the only and best answer one can give, then, is the one Isaiah Berlin offers throughout his writings: stop praying for utopias, of either the right- or left-wing varieties, and start working to improve things for human beings in incremental and achievable ways in the here and now. 

We need to aim, not for a utopia that will reconcile all human values, because it cannot be done—some values are mutually incompatible. And so, the best we can do is to aim for an "uneasy equilibrium" as Berlin called it, "which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair." 

That, it seems to me, is what is needed from liberal politics today as much as it was in the 1930s—neither a "revolution" of the right nor left, nor mere mute acceptance and submission in the face of rampaging capitalist development—but a constant tinkering to save as much as we can of human values along the way as possible. 

"A little dull as a solution, you will say? Not the stuff of which calls to heroic action by inspired leaders are made?" Berlin wrote. Not exactly a new Spartacus and a new Sun State, I fear. "Yet if there is some truth in this view," Berlin concluded, "perhaps that is sufficient."