Well burrowed, old mole!

Juvenal’s Satires are conservative.  However, they are also anti-capitalist.  Juvenal has nightmares of capitalism as a sort of nihilistic obscenity, those are his Satires they are his intuitions of the rise of the bourgeoisie in Rome, these intuitions fill him with horror.  His satires have as their object a society where the only value is wealth where nothing else matters.  This sort of a critique of capitalism worries me because it coincides with an affirmation of Aristocratic values, if Juvenal is holding Rome’s past up to glory I cannot agree with him at all.  He is a master of the critique in terms of a deviation from a nonexistent past, this trope has been used many times since he employed it.  His criticisms of Roman Society are very acute, he sees the incursion of capitalism and he denounces it, yet he does not denounce it in terms of exploitation he denounces it in terms of degeneracy and corruption.  He does not get to the root of the issue, he complains that offices can be bought or that masters mistreat their slaves, but he never questions the offices or the institution of slavery.    

Juvenal’s verses are dotted with just as many traditional allusions as they are with proper names.  Juvenal would like to see a return to traditional values, and these traditions to which he refers are all aristocratic myths of heroes and so on.  He achieves humor by way of juxtaposing the degenerate person in the capitalistic atmosphere- the one who has no values who cares for nothing –with the great figures of myth and legend.  In Juvenal’s day his verses did have some subversive value, but all too often people are lead to see them as satires on a monarchical or aristocratic society which had become corrupt, and to miss the criticism of a pre-natal capitalistic order which was beginning to hold sway in Rome.  He is what Marx would call a ‘feudal socialist’ criticizing capitalism in its emergence from the aristocratic perspective, for this reason, he is not going to criticize exploitation because it is the very cornerstone of feudalism as well as capitalism. He may criticize miserliness but never inequality, he dislikes the capitalist for subverting an even older system of inequality. 

Despite the conservative origin of this type of critique, many progressives radicals and artists have given voice to the spiritual vacuity of capitalist society.  This Juvenalian moralism and all of the talk of spiritual emptiness and cultural malaise and meaninglessness are many ways of not focusing on the naked reality of exploitation and enslavement which are the foundation of the current capitalist order.  Can one appropriate such a conservative critique without becoming conservative? If I say capitalism is not cool because under capitalism all people care about is money, it is easy to point to a person who does not care about money like a philanthropist and thereby justify the system, but if I say that I oppose capitalism because it is based on enslavement of one group of people by another, or if you prefer, the theft of surplus value, one can point to a hobo who is not caught in that surplus-value cycle and he does not justify the system.  When we denounce another for only caring about the bottom line what we truly denounce him for is excusing enslavement using the authority of the idea of the bottom line.  Similarly, if I denounce America for becoming an Empire and ceasing to be a republic, I may miss the point that the republic was based on exploitation too.