The Distributive Passions

NOTES: There’s a part of a story here, something about the Free Fourierists, the Harmonian Materialists, and the Bomb. Either that, or the kid is leading me on. Not unlikely, but still. The big Encuentro is here, or just a couple of atoll-hops away, in the midst of the “wondrous isles,” in the tropical paradise of the Free Fourierists, in the midst of the Golden Seas. And here I am, by the side of a bubbling bomb crater. Free Fourierists: hippy-dippy infantile disorder? Hell, nobody took any of the Fourierists seriously until after the Revolution.

 But the Harmonian Materialists were always shrewd, always emphasizing the orderly elements of Fourierist doctrine, always capitalizing without looking like they were poised to spring. In the International, when Marx’s machinations threw everything into jeopardy, they were ready to take the initiative, finding allies among the libertarians and individualists, fending off the obvious authoritarians, talking harmony. By the 1890s, of course, all such alliances were cashed in, dissolved, but by then Fourierism had made its transformation. Fundamentalists, Reunionites, and Godinists could complain all they wanted. Nobody was listening. As far as the world was concerned, like it or not, the Butterfly had hatched, and change was upon everyone. After then Revolution, when the People traded the Winter Palace for a multitude of social palaces, the tale was almost believable. When it grew thin, when the mixed economy and “work palaces” appeared, the doctrines still had their apologists in the West. Internal histories became masterpieces of the opportunistic interpretation of “signs,” with the distributive passions trotted on and off stage as required. Which meant the Russians were about like the rest of us, justifying each twist and turn of policy with our various national myths. Death or glory. . . just another story. I don’t have to tell you.

If Harmonian Materialism ever had a sense of humor, it lost it, along with so much else, in the Second World War. Canny politics or opportunistic amoralism, the Nonaggression Pact was hardly sustainable, as the rest of the world was drawn into the conflict. When the Confederated Territories finally agreed to follow the lead of Washington and the States, the Russian Union was about the only player not in the game. Perhaps Hitler thought “harmonians” would make poor soldiers. Clearly he, like most of the rest of the world, was unaware of what the Etzler-engines had become in a hundred years of development. The Japanese learned early on, when they tried to claim the Marshalls, only to find them awash in strange tech and stranger refugees, missionaries from the West. Free-Fors, who fought as lean and smart as the Russians fought hard. The Russian engines were quaint compared to the German panzers, but there was nothing quaint about the power of the phalanx-turned-war-machine, with every member, even the “little hordes” committed to a role in the combat. They bled and drew blood, fought and died, with a frightening efficiency and passion.

By the end of the war, the Butterfly had pretty well been displaced by the Bear, as bizarre a metamorphosis as you could ask for. But the party was over. Harmony from now on meant the lock-step. The phalanx never recovered, and remained, through the Cold War and on until the fall, first and foremore a vast war machine, a modernization machine. The Etzler paradigm gave way to conventional western industrial models, and with economic liberalization, the “shopping palaces” began to sprout like toadstools. Nuclear technology became the chief military-industrial priority, even before the war’s end, and we all know how close the race for the bomb ultimately was. Joe One, on the eve of Operation Crossroads, was a technological leapfrog move that took everyone by surprise. But the Russians raised no objection to Western development at that stage, even after Crossroads-Charlie alarmed nearly everyone. “Pay the price of change,” said Dzhugashvili, in a speech invoking the Butterfly. And the people of the world paid and paid in the decade that followed, at Bikini and Rongelap, at Cheliabinsk and all across the South Urals, in Alaska and in the deserts of Nevada.