C.L.R. James on Moby Dick & State Capitalism
One day oil is leaking from the vessel and Ahab, intent on his pursuit of Moby Dick, refuses to stop to repair the leak. Starbuck, as usual, protests: 'What will the owners say, sir?'
Ahab consigns the rights of owners to perdition.
‘Let the owners stand on Nantucket Beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if owners were my conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander...’
It is obvious that whatever Moby-Dick is, it is no mere adventure story. If it was such, it is no longer so. If Captain Ahab were to express these opinions today, he would not only be blackballed from any kind of job by every employer in the country, but he would be rigorously investigated by the F.B.I.
* * *
For generations people believed that the men opposed to rights of ownership, production for the market, domination of money, etc. were socialists, communists, radicals of some sort united by the fact that they all thought in terms of the reorganization of society by the workers, the great majority of the oppressed, the exploited, the disinherited. Some there were, of course, who believed that the experiment, if made, was bound to result in tyranny. Nobody, not a single soul, thought that in the managers, the superintendents, the executives, the administrators would arise such loathing and bitterness against the society of free enterprise, the market and democracy, that they would try to reorganize it to suit themselves and, if need be, destroy civilization in the process... It is the unique and solitary greatness of Melville that he saw and understood the type to the last degree and the relation to it of all other social types. How he was able to do this a hundred years ago, we shall also show but the first point is to understand the totalitarian type itself.
Source: Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, the complete text, with an introduction by Donald E. Pease (Hanover: Dartmouth College / University Press of New England, 2001), p. 6, 9.
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