Gillette Went Woke Before It Even Began

Long before ‘go woke, go broke’ became a maxim, plenty of would-be socialist millionaires were proving its truth. In fact, for 4,000 years, elite socialists have tried to impose their top-down planning genius on the market. Whether it was ancient kings or 19th century robber-barons, the result was always the same: economic collapse.

As I’ve written previously, Welsh industrialist Robert Owen poured millions and a boatload of scientists, teachers and intellectuals, into building the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community. In just two short years, it went predictably tits-up: an impressive result, even for socialists.

But Owen was far from the only wealthy socialist to delude himself that the perfect socialist Utopia was just a five-year-plan and a pile of money away.

Consider the case of King Camp Gillette. Yes, the very same fellow who gave the world the disposable razor, a man who possessed enough business acumen to build a global empire, yet seemed entirely incapable of understanding the basic human nature that made his empire possible. Around the time he was tinkering with bits of stamped steel, he penned The Human Drift, a pamphlet proposing that North America should abandon its cities for a single, colossal urban sprawl powered by Niagara Falls.

“Under a perfect economical system of production and distribution … there can be only one city on a continent, and possibly only one in the world,” he wrote. While citizens might temporarily occupy countryside or coastal dwellings for field labour or pleasure, the city, named Metropolis, would be their only permanent home, housing at least 60 million people at any one time.

Bear in mind that the global population at the time was over 1.5 billion. Gillette clearly wanted to eliminate 96 per cent of the world’s population.

Even then, socialist utopias would be built on a pile of corpses.

Gillette’s socialist dream was a high-density hellscape where 60 million souls would reside in mammoth apartment blocks, their lives regulated by a singular, all-encompassing corporation. It was the ultimate technocratic dream: glass-domed corridors, bike-only transport and a total ban on the messy, inefficient business of personal property or coin. He genuinely believed that if you laid out the blueprints clearly enough, the masses would abandon the concept of money in a fit of enlightened, collective ecstasy.

One has to marvel at the disconnect. Here was a man who understood the value of a sharpened edge, yet thought he could sharpen the blunt instrument of human self-interest into a featureless, collectivist monolith. Doubleplusgood, comrades! coos the Guardian, at the same time weeping into its soy latte at the failure of socialism… again.

Whether Gillette had too much faith in humanity – perhaps something his brand could be accused of in 2019 – or too much faith in his own plans, it’s hard to say. Maybe a moneyless city was just too tough a sell for a self-made millionaire.

Or maybe, just maybe, socialism is a bad idea and doomed to fail every time?

Indeed, if even the astute, wealthy capitalists of the Gilded Age couldn’t make the socialist equation balance, why on earth should we trust the modern equivalent? We are currently expected to believe that some unwashed, unemployable arts graduate who likely hasn’t successfully managed a household budget, let alone an entire economy, is going to succeed where a titan of industry like Gillette failed?

Fortunately for the sanity of the world, Gillette eventually realised that reality has a nasty habit of ignoring one’s utopian manifestos. He saw the inherent futility of the socialist experiment and, to his credit, retreated back into the world of hard, cold commerce. He stopped dreaming of moneyless glass towers and started perfecting the very engine of consumer capitalism that keeps the modern world spinning: two-part pricing.

He pivoted from his pipe-dream of a socialist ‘United Company’ to the ‘razor and blades’ model: a scheme so brilliant, and so unapologetically capitalist, that it would make any true socialist weep into their communal gruel. By selling the hardware cheap and hooking the customer on the high-margin consumables, he secured his legacy far more effectively than he ever could have by building a city of glass-domed bike paths.

It is a tale as old as the hills: the socialist bullshit walked but the money talked.