Alas, as my fictional namesake said somewhere, time has a habit of turning all our lies into truths. It turns out Karl Marx was right after all. Who, I ask you, is more cartoonishly evil, more like the caricature capitalist of paranoid Communist fantasies, than Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? Tim Cook? Jack Dorsey? Sundar Pichai?
We’re actually living, comrades, in the class-warfare world Marx preached in the 1840s. Everything Marx said about the factory owners of the First Industrial Revolution, that seemed so luridly absurd that even other Socialists criticized him for it, is true of the tech fascists of the Biden-Harris Revolution. Solzhenitsyn cites Russian writers from the late nineteenth century noting that Marxian socialism would end up as nothing more than dialectically-constructed feudalism, and lo, here we are. America in 2021 looks almost exactly like the USSR looked upon Lenin’s death …
… that was 1924, gang, and in case you’ve forgotten, what happened next was a vicious intra-Party civil war, in which Stalin crushed his enemies. AOC makes a pretty unlikely Trotsky, but it’s no less ludicrous than the thought of Nancy Pelosi as Koba … but that’s just the thing, isn’t it? We’ve been noting here for years that the modern Left is dedicated to being the Hollow Men in all things. They’re Revolutionaries without a Revolution — they go on and on (and on and on and on) about fighting the power and sticking it to the Man, even though they, themselves, have been the Man since at least 1974. They’re moralizers without morality — you’ll be scolded for not being as perverse as humanly possible. And, of course, their politics is a cult of personality without the personality — not even Orwell or Kafka could’ve come up with the Party installing an obvious dementia patient as its figurehead, not even if you’d dropped LSD in their tea.
As always — and yes, even in the depths of Stalin’s terror — the real rulers are the nomenklatura, the apparatchiki. Not even Koba the Dread can be everywhere. Being Hollow Men, our Postmodern Leftist masters have decided to dispense with the whole Kremlin thing. Who needs the NKVD, the gulag, the dreaded Lubyanka? The Junior Volunteer Thought Police “fact checking” everything on social media will do it for free, and much more efficiently, at which point their fellow travelers in the banking system will simply cut the badthinkers off. The only reason the gulag persisted after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” was that the Soviets, those fools, wanted to exploit their natural resources themselves, to build things themselves; labor camps were thus integral to the Soviet economy. Our masters don’t care about that, and their masters, the Chinese, certainly don’t. Much more efficient, and psychologically effective, to let the unperson simply starve in the middle of the town square, pour encourager les autres.
But hey, at least we’ll have some fun figuring out who the new Trotsky is. Again, my money’s on AOC — she’s so stupid that she’s bound to do something irrecoverably dumb sooner or later, after which she gets the digital icepick. That’ll be a hoot. Enjoy what parts of the spectacle you can, comrades – if you’re a student of human folly, you’re going to love the next few decades, because Marx was right about that too, the bastard — second time as farce.
Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.
September 5, 2023
June 2, 2023
The idiocy of trying to portray political systems on a single spectrum
Lawrence W. Reed explains why trying to illustrate the similarities and differences of political systems using only a single axis conceals more than it reveals, especially for students:
In classes on Government and Political Science, with few exceptions, students in both high school and college are taught that the so-called “political spectrum” (or “political/economic” spectrum) looks like this: Communism and Socialism reside on the Left, Capitalism and Fascism dwell on the Right. Various mixtures of those things lie somewhere in between:
This is not only false and misleading, it is also idiocy. Toss it into the trash bin and demand a refund from the teacher who presented it as fact, or as any kind of insightful educational tool.
At the very least, a spectrum that looks like that should raise some tough questions. Why should socialists and fascists be depicted as virtual opposites when they share so much in common — from their fundamental, intellectual principles to their methods of implementation? If a political spectrum is supposed to illustrate a range of relationships between the individual and the State, or the very size and scope of the State, then why are systems of Big State/Small Individuals present at both ends of it?
On any other topic, the two ends of a spectrum would depict opposites.
[…]
My contention is that if Communism, Socialism, Fascism and Capitalism all appear on the same range line, it is terribly misleading and utterly useless to place the first two on the left and the second two on the right. The placement that makes the most sense is this one:
The perspective represented in this sketch immediately arouses dispute because its implications are quite different from what students are typically taught. The inevitable objections include these three:
1. Communism and fascism cannot be close together because communists and fascists fought each other bitterly. Hitler attacked Stalin, for example!
This objection is equivalent to claiming, “Al Capone and Bugs Moran hated and fought each other so they can’t both be considered gangsters”. Or, “Since Argentina and Brazil compete so fiercely in football, both teams cannot be composed of footballers”.
Both communism and fascism demonstrate in actual practice an extremely low regard for the lives and rights of their subject peoples. Why should anyone expect their practitioners to be nice to each other, especially when they are rivals for territory and influence on the world stage?
We should remember that Hitler and Stalin were allies before they were enemies. They secretly agreed to carve up Poland in August 1939, leading directly to World War II. The fact that Hitler turned on Stalin two years later is nothing more than proof of the proverb, “There’s no honor among thieves”. Thieves are still thieves even if they steal from each other.
2. Under communism as Karl Marx defined it, government “withers away”. So it cannot be aligned closely with socialism because socialism involves lots of government.
Marx’s conception of communism is worse than purely hypothetical. It is sheer lunacy. The idea that the absolutist despots of the all-powerful “proletarian dictatorship” would one day simply walk away from power has no precedent to point to and no logic behind it. Even as a prophecy, it strains credulity to the breaking point.
Communism in the sketch above appears where it does because in actual practice, it is just a little more radical than the worst socialism. It is the difference between the murderous, totalitarian Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and, say, the socialism of Castro’s Cuba.
3. Communism and Fascism are radically different because in focus, one is internationalist and the other is nationalist (as in Hitler’s “national socialism”).
Big deal. Again, chocolate and vanilla are two different flavors of ice cream, but they’re both ice cream. Was it any consolation to the French or the Norwegians or the Poles that Hitler was a national socialist instead of an international socialist? Did it make any difference to the Ethiopians that Mussolini was an Italian nationalist instead of a Soviet internationalist?
Endless confusion persists in political analysis because of the false dichotomy the conventional spectrum (Sketch 1) suggests. People are taught to think that fascists Mussolini and Hitler were polar opposites of communists Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. In fact, however, they were all peas in the same collectivist pod. They all claimed to be socialists. They all sought to concentrate power in the State and to glorify the State. They all stomped on individuals who wanted nothing more than to pursue their own ambitions in peaceful commerce. They all denigrated private property, either by outright seizure or regulating it to serve the purposes of the State.
April 17, 2023
Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier
Daniel Nuccio on one of George Orwell’s early works that prefigured the bestsellers he is best known for today:
Written for a group of British socialists known as the Left Book Club, the oeuvre is part documentation of the life of Britain’s impoverished working class with particular focus on the dignity and importance of coal miners and part autobiographical account of Orwell overcoming his own class prejudices, united by themes developed throughout regarding the economic commonalities of and social distinctions between Britain’s low-level bourgeoisie and working class, as well as the downside of industrialization and hypocrisy of fashionable socialism.
By Orwell’s account, Britain’s class system at the time, partly based on economic stratification, partly in an unofficial caste system, fostered a seemingly contradictory world in which middle-class bourgeoisie and the working class might experience little difference in income, but drastic differences in their respective places in British society. Yet, even as unemployment and poverty festered and spread, with the middle class eventually “feeling the pinch”, social distinctions, Orwell reported, naturally won out over the narrowing economic gap between classes. Lower-level middle class Brits, despite being working class by any objective economic metric, still chose to identify as bourgeoisie.
Rampant industrialism likely exacerbated these problems as it fundamentally transformed Britain into a machine society, likely to its detriment, according to Orwell’s description. Consequently, these and other factors, Orwell argued, positioned Britain at a crossroads at which the country and its people inevitably would be forced to choose between socialism and fascism.
From his depiction of 1930s British society, it would seem fascism was perhaps going to win out (and perhaps would have if not for later events unbeknownst to Orwell at the time). His prescribed antidote was socialism. Yet, Orwell claimed, the hypocrisy, offensiveness, and buffoonish self-satirizing nature of many socialists tended to drive most normal people away.
Reading The Road to Wigan Pier as an American more than eighty years after its publication, the world Orwell depicts in some ways seems foreign. In many others it is amusingly, if not unsettlingly familiar.
Although not as ingrained as in Britain, the United States maintains its own version of a class system in the form of a superficial yet meaningful distinction between middle class and working class that many Americans yoke to personal character and economic reality.
Nowhere is this more obvious than America’s approach to higher education and the jobs afforded to those with a college degree versus those without. Attaining a degree from a four-year college or university, at least to many members of the American middle class, is seen as something of a sacrament that affirms one’s position in the American middle class. Receiving the sacrament of higher education signals one’s position along with one’s sophistication, respectability, and intelligence. It saves one from the indignity of blue-collar work and the impecunious state with which such work is associated.
March 3, 2023
Progressives have steadily transitioned to the movement that denies that any personal conduct rules should apply
Freddie deBoer challenges his fellow leftists to identify who were the theorists that introduced the notion that personal responsibility is an anti-socialist position:
The woman whose account appears at the top of this picture started a Twitter storm, somehow, by publicly wishing that she could take her child onto the subway without exposing them to secondhand smoke. She was beset by a certain online species of ostensible leftist who is against ever trying to enforce any kind of rule, anywhere, ever. See, rules are the hand of oppression, or something, and since most of society’s rules are meant to be enforced by the police, trying to enforce them (merely wishing that they be enforced) is an endorsement of the police and their violence …
I find this attitude has become inescapable. It’s not just the attitude that the enforcement of societal rules and norms is bad, but that this is the default assumption of all right-thinking people — it’s not just a left-wing perspective but the left-wing perspective. Like so much else in contemporary left-of-center discourse, it demonstrates the total ideological poverty we’re working with. Nobody has read anything, so nobody knows anything, so you’re constantly getting yelled at by self-described radicals who have no solid footing in any systematic approach to left politics at all. Like I said before, we’re living in definitional collapse; the struggle right now is not merely that socialism can’t win but that so many self-described socialists have no deeper ideological moorings than whatever they’ve absorbed from Tumblr and “breadtube”. They think that to be a socialist means to disdain all rules because there is no substance to their socialism at all.
Chris Hayes considered the subway smoking problem last year.
Conceptually, I don’t think these problems are hard at all: the left, the socialist left, has never advocated for a system in which there are literally no expectations on personal behavior. It’s quite bizarre to suggest that this was ever a thing! Only certain extreme forms of anarchism have ever implied that society should have no rules. Go back through the history of socialist theorists and number all of the ones who believed that there should be no laws and no police to enforce them. You won’t find many! Instead you’ll find people who believed in the need for both laws that govern human behavior and constabulary forces to enforce those laws. That’s the solution to the conundrum, my friends — you have rules and you have police that enforce those rules. The belief, and the hope, is that a socialist society is one with far less need for aggressive policing, thanks to far greater economic equality, and maybe someday, after the end of material need, we can consider a policeless society. But not having any social rules or people who enforce those rules is not a socialist concept and never has been. What I would ask Chris Hayes and people like him is … what is the leftist tradition that you’re drawing from that implies that there should be no enforcement of behavioral norms? What thinker? What book? What philosophy? Or, could it be that you’ve developed this totally substance-free approach to basic order because you’ve been habituated to talking this way through exposure to people on social media who know nothing about anything in particular?
Of course, there’s big problems with American policing. Very big problems indeed. So what we do is reform policing. (I address this at length in my next book, coming this fall from Simon & Schuster.) Alternatively, if you’re really committed to this “no rules, no enforcement” thing, you become an anarchist of a very particular stripe — most versions of anarchism have both rules and enforcement mechanisms for them — and you and your compatriots can try to change the system. All twelve of you. In the house your wealthy parents bought for you.
November 21, 2022
QotD: Socialism is nihilism
That seems bizarrely wrong, considering how much effort Socialists put into saving the world. But look at it objectively, comrade (heh heh), and you’ll see that Save-the-World-ism, of whatever flavor, always boils down to Destroy-the-World-ism. Always. It doesn’t matter how the world gets “saved;” it always gets blown up in the process. You still can’t find a better primer on chiliastic psychology than Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. The specifics of each loony doctrine changed, but the underlying presumption was always the same: Kill everyone, destroy everything, and then Jesus comes.
This is true even of millennialists whose doctrines don’t obviously entail killing everyone. Calvinists, for example. I spent decades trying to explain Calvinism to undergrads, and never once succeeded. The gulf between their words and their actions is too vast for the adolescent mind. There are only two logical responses to the doctrine of “double predestination”: quietism, or hedonism. They knew it, too, which is why they started burning people at the stake the minute they got any real power. Look at what they did, not what they said, and you’ll see nihilism plain as day. Calvin’s Geneva was the nearest thing to a police state that could be achieved with 16th century technology. The ideal Calvinist would say nothing, do nothing, think nothing, as he sat in the plain pews of his unadorned chapel, waiting for death and the Final Judgment. Calvinists wanted to grind the world to a halt, not blow it up, but once again the mass extinction of the human race is a feature, not a bug.
Take Jesus out of the equation, and you end up at pure shit-flinging nihilism in less than three steps. Marxism is perhaps the most exquisitely pointless doctrine ever devised. It’s more pleasant to have than to have not, I suppose, but no matter how much everyone has, we’re still just naked apes, living the brief days of our vain lives under an utterly indifferent sky. Marxists are a special kind of stupid, so they don’t realize it, but … they won. Modern Western “poor” people keel over from heart disease while fiddling with their smartphones in front of 50″ plasma tvs. While wearing $200 sneakers. We’re so far from being “alienated” from the fruits of our labor that “labor” is an all-but-meaningless concept for lots of us — and the further down the social scale you go, the more meaningless it gets. The modern ghetto dweller simply is Marx’s ideal proletarian. Does he look self-actualized to you? Ecce homeboy.
I assure you, the SJWs know this. Calvinists to the core, they know better than anyone the utter futility of all human effort. So they do what the original Calvinists did: Displace, displace, displace. Don’t take it from me, take it from a card-carrying Marxist. The end result is the same: Whether you’re a Puritan or an SJW, the only way to escape the crushing meaninglessness of your condition is to spend every moment of every day contemplating your pwecious widdle self.
Throw in the transitive property of equality, and you’ve got people like Hillary Clinton. If Socialism is Nihilism, then Nihilism is Socialism. Far from arguing against the idea … that Hillary et al are motivated solely by hatred, I’m 100% behind it. In fact, I’d argue that the Nihilism comes first — people who have convinced themselves that life is pointless always, always, embrace the biggest and most all-encompassing form of collectivism on offer. What could be crueler, than to be given all this for nothing? It’s not even a sick joke, since a joke implies a joker.
How can you not hate this world, then, and everything in it? More to the point: how can you not hate yourself, for seeing the world as it really is? Ignorance is bliss … but how can you not hate them, too, those poor deluded motherfuckers who still think stuff like God and love and family and the designated hitter might somehow mean something? Vanity, vanity, all is vanity … and if I have to face the existential horror of it all, then fuck it, so do you. “Capitalism,” the “free market,” “representative government” — call it what you will, it’s all just vanity, just another way for the sheeple to keep deluding themselves. Fuck it, and fuck them. Burn it down. Burn it allllll down.
Severian, “A Tyranny of Nihilism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-10-22.
October 28, 2022
“Real Trussnomics” has never been tried, cry the disgruntled free-marketeers
Kristian Niemietz investigates the economic theories that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng attempted to implement during their very brief moment in power:
British Prime Minister Liz Truss, 1 May 2022.
Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.
Over the past couple of years, I have written a lot about how socialists always disown every socialist project as soon as its failures become apparent, and then go on to claim that the project was never “really” socialist to begin with. The idea of socialism is pure, noble and flawless. It cannot fail. It cannot be refuted by real-world evidence. It can only be “badly implemented”, “distorted” or “misappropriated”.
In recent weeks, however, the rhetoric of “Yes, but … not like that!” has not come from socialists talking about Venezuela or Nicaragua, but from disgruntled free-marketeers [https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/trusss-demise-ends-revival-thatchers-libertarian-economics-2022-10-20/] talking about the ill-fated Truss/Kwarteng government.
Whenever this happens, inevitably, within a few minutes, my Twitter notifications fill up with comments like “Oooh, so what you guys are saying is, Trussism-Kwartengism wasn’t real free-market economics? Real free-market economics has never been tried? Hmmm, what does this remind me of? An idea for your next book there, eh, Herr Niemietz?”
Fair enough, I suppose! It would be a bit rich of me to complain about that. My work on socialism was, after all, was not just about socialism per se, but also, more broadly, about the lack of accountability in the world of ideas. If you argue that people should be held to account for the track record of the ideas they advocate, you cannot credibly complain when you find yourself at the receiving end of that.
And, yes, admittedly, in recent weeks, disgruntled free-marketeers really have sounded very much like Continuity-Corbynites. “Truss and Kwarteng had the right ideas, their plan was just terribly executed”; “Truss and Kwarteng were never given a chance, the entire media establishment immediately ganged up on them”; “Truss and Kwarteng were undermined by their own party at every step of the way” – we have heard this all before, just substitute “Corbyn” for “Truss”, and “McDonnell” for “Kwarteng”.
So I cannot blame people for making this comparison. But that does not mean that I have to accept it: I believe that this is a fundamental false equivalence, and I would like to explain why.
(I should, at this stage, make clear that the IEA has no corporate view, so I cannot speak for any of my colleagues or ex-colleagues, or people from other pro-market think tanks. Where I refer to what other people have said, I will specifically say so.)
October 12, 2022
The two traditions of the American political left
Chris Bray responds to a post by Leighton Woodhouse that declares that “left libertarianism” has won the battle for the soul of the American left:
I see two traditions on the American political left.
One is a tradition skeptical of authority, or aggressively hostile to it: Striking miners battling Coal and Iron Police, or Pinkertons, or Colorado sheriffs, or the National Guard; Wobblies fighting cops in the street; Great War-era socialists attacking the military draft, and going to prison for it; the Weatherman planting bombs in police and military offices. This tradition on the left views government as authority, a repressive servant of the status quo — “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie”. Leftists in this tradition say that of course government serves capitalism and corporate power, and of course the government isn’t on our side. Go back to the Coal and Iron Police to see how radical labor activists saw them: state-sanctioned police, with badges, on the private payroll of the industrialists. The young radical George Orwell, writing about his time fighting in Spain: “When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
The other is a tradition centered on the supposedly inherent decency, wisdom, and fairness of government, a tradition that runs through the capital-p Progressive Era and Woodrow Wilson, to the New Deal, and onward into the Great Society. In this tradition, state power is benevolence itself, and points its kindness downward. Government interposes itself between the downtrodden worker and the power of the wealthy, ensuring the dignity of the poor. Tax the rich! In this tradition, government represents our best selves, our highest yearning for a better world. Why, just look at how much more equitable the progressive income tax made our social order, back when marginal tax rates were so much more fair at the top. Government serves, protects, nurtures: It’s the tool of the ordinary man, offering the noble guarantees of Social Security and Medicaid. Of course government is on our side, fellow downtrodden, and we need more of it.
Those two traditions don’t fit together, though the obvious way to square the circle is to say that a Bill Ayers opposes the power of the state when it opposes him, and embraces it if he thinks his side has come to control it. This would mean that there aren’t two ideological traditions — just two different instrumental postures. But no one who survived the Ludlow Massacre thought the government was a benevolent servant of the working man.
As Leighton Woodhouse notes, we have a good deal of what looks like anti-authority leftism in our cities, in the form of movements that call for the end of mass incarceration, the defunding of the police, and the transition to a social services model in response to homelessness and drug addiction. In this view, rising crime and growing homelessness are signs of urban leftists rejecting authority as a tool. Homelessness is not a crime, you fascists!
But I’ve written before about the incredible strangeness of progressive political columnists denouncing Donald Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, and then proudly pivoting to an expression of their approval of the warm and caring Justin Trudeau — who cracked down on incipient Trumpism in his country by boldly freezing the bank accounts of dangerous participants in the evil right-wing truck convoy. When government freezes the bank accounts of protesters, government is fighting against authoritarianism, obviously. More government power means less authoritarianism!
August 17, 2022
“It’s weird what happens when you choke off people’s ability to make a living”
Elizabeth Nickson offers to decode the latest war cry from the great and the good, the well-meaning, the deluded, and the modern-day fellow travellers (who are still useful idiots):
The political circus is gripping, the play before us hypnotic. Audience members drop in, forswear the brutalism of it and go back to their lives, refusing engagement, refusing to look. That’s what it’s for, to alienate you from the real stuff that goes on in the middle of nowhere, where I live.
[…]
This is a slogan that has been picked up by every operative in every western democracy. State legislators appear on MSNBC frantic with fear, wall-eyed, saying the right is stealing democracy.
Expect to hear this ceaselessly for the next three years. Every hour of every day.
This is what they really mean:
When I moved to the middle of nowhere twenty years ago, I became fascinated with local politics. It seemed that there were a lot of little groups, attached like sucker fish to the giant tax eating behemoth that slid through our lives. Their aims were simple and seemingly good hearted, more waterbird protection, more water protection, more tree protection, more protection of the other sexed, more goodness towards and immigration of the huddled masses in South and Central America, more legislated feminist demands, endless demands of the schools by advocacy groups funded by teachers unions, and of course, stopping all development and industrial production because of climate change. They all had groups, they all lived on little bits of money, they were always harried and despairing. They fought a tight game. Small advances, lots of setbacks. Mostly innocent, though the enviro people had deep-buried terrorist groups who created lovely fires for any developer who particularly crossed them. But otherwise, you could invite them to tea with the Queen.
Twenty years on, they flourish with budgets of seven or eight figures, most of which they receive from the various governments they lobby, but also from the world’s greatest foundations, not to mention substantial funding from the EU, the WEF and the UN. And they are in every capital, waking up every morning for one reason: to force the government to cave to their needs. They are always attached to the bigger of the left-wing parties, who fund them big time. In the US it is the Democrats. In Canada, the Liberal Party. They are paid to act as political action committees, while posturing as neutral advocacy groups. They write legislation. And boy, have they written legislation. They developed a thousand, thousand committees which have methodically re-written laws from the extreme local to national.
The ones I met were upper-middle-class, from nominally Christian households, who had been captured by the socialist dream. They called what they did a new iteration: participatory democracy. Leaders were from Britain or the US. Those seemed the most aggressive. More connected. Very little work has been done on their unnerving connectedness. Most reporters agree with their task, don’t want to dig.
The reason they called it participatory democracy was because they were participating. It seemed no one else was, other than business needing a rule change or permit, so they had free rein. And, to give them credit, they did change the culture. It is rare to find a soul who does not support equality of the sexes, the protection of the environment, acceptance of the other-sexed, pity for the huddled masses in the south and an anxious wish for people of colour to do well.
But then … the German Malthusian Eugenicists at the WEF realized they could fund them and bend them to their purpose. With 100x the power, the good kids went rogue. The goal was to break the power of the American middle class in order to save the climate. To disenfranchise them, to de-legitimize them, to identify them as racist, sexist, homophobic and patriarchal. To de-pluralize them. To drive them to the margins. It was, frankly, an adoption of evil, an adoption of kill-to-save.
June 14, 2022
QotD: Generation snowflake
So no, no surprises here. Their collective personality makes the Millennials unusually suited for the flirtation with socialism. They are a great match; if this was Tinder, Marx would be getting super liked all the time.
Socialism is the response of a spoiled child when faced with the world that does not genuflect to its every wish the way their parents did – the world as it is must therefore be evil and has to be changed to something radically different. Gen Y, of course, did not just magically became the way they are – they were brought up like that, so we all bear the blame and the responsibility for a generation who resents not being managers in their 20s and not being recognised as special anymore by all their elders. Clearly, the capitalism has failed when I’m not showered down with money after I graduate from my double in media and gender studies.
Arthur Chrenkoff, “Socialism as a Millennial religion”, The Daily Chrenk, 2019-02-19.
May 25, 2022
QotD: The “social responsibility” of business
Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, New York Times, 1970-09-13.
May 18, 2022
From “Software as a Service” to “Property as a Service” then to “Hypercapitalism” aka Neo-Feudalism
Whenever I could, as the software I used to depend on switched from the old-fashioned “purchase a license” to “Software as a Service” model, I found something else to use or I didn’t bother “upgrading” from the last iteration before it went SaaS. My Microsoft Office installation is the 2007 version — after that I used Open Office (and now LibreOffice) for anything Microsoft-related. Even working in the software business, I hated SaaS and I try as much as I can to avoid products distributed that way. Imagine how I feel about the expansion of that toxic idea to other areas of life, as Chris Bray discusses here:
Twenty-two years ago, the economist and social critic Jeremy Rifkin warned about the emerging commodification of human experience. Markets have always exchanged private property, he wrote, and people have grown accustomed to the act of holding it personally – that is, of owning things. But in a new “hypercapitalist” world, he warned, ownership would be concentrated in a few corporate hands, and most people would pay to access property, “in the form of short-term leases, rentals, memberships, and other service arrangements,” rather than owning it. Remember that description about leasing all of your stuff in a series of service arrangements, because you’ll be seeing it again in a minute or two.
The man was not wrong about the degree to which businesses would aspire to turn one-time sales of stuff into endless monthly purchases of a service:
And then comes the politics:
The shift from a propertied regime based on the idea of broadly distributed ownership to an access regime based on securing short-term limited use of assets controlled by networks of suppliers changes fundamentally our notions of how economic power is to be exercised in the years ahead. Because our political institutions and laws are steeped in market-based property relations, the shift from ownership to access also portends profound changes in the way we will govern ourselves in the new century.
And this, and look closely for the most important sentences — two of them, short and adjacent:
In a society where virtually everything is accessed, however, what happens to the personal pride, obligation, and commitment that go with ownership? And what of self-sufficiency? Being propertied goes hand in hand with being independent. Property is the means by which we gain a sense of personal autonomy in the world. When we access the means of our existence, we become far more reliant on others. While we become more connected and interdependent, do we risk at the same time becoming less self-sufficient and more vulnerable?
The shift in the structuring of human relationships from ownership to access appears to invite a trade-off of sorts whose outcome is far from certain. Will we liberate ourselves from our possessions, only to lose a sense of obligation to the things we fashion and use? Will we become more embedded in networks of relationships, only to become more dependent on powerful networks of corporate suppliers?
Property is autonomy. That was a warning about your own life: less autonomous, more dependent. And it was, specifically, a warning about corporate capitalism on the subscription model, and the social and political effects of a concentration of property in increasingly few hands. Hypercapitalism would be the new feudalism, a system of lords and serfs.
March 29, 2022
A leading source of incompetence
My contacts on social media have probably gotten tired of me pointing out that any big organization will perform less well than a smaller one in the same activity, and governments across the western world have been growing bigger and less competent every year. Sarah Hoyt recalls the time she saw an almost Soviet display of big government incompetence on a visit to her native Portugal:
The last time I was in Portugal I got to witness (actually the time before last, while running through the Lisbon airport) something I’d only previously read about as being normal in the Soviet Union: structures that were being built and decaying, simultaneously, which seems impossible, but I assure you it’s not.
[…]
The question is: competence has existed, and had high marks. We know it existed at various times, because their works survive: the landscape of Europe is still littered with Roman bridges and aqueducts, not to mention Roman roads. Cathedrals and monuments abound. Our own country has marvels of engineering and construction still standing and you don’t have to fix daily.
So, where did that competence go? And why does no one seem to know how to do anything. (Here as an aside, almost everything I learned to do competently had to be learned on my own, and often against massive resistance.)
Well, for about a hundred years now, we’ve been under the ideological ascent of socialism. And socialism — international socialism, to be precise — is only good for creating picturesque ruins. (The romantics would have loved them.)
Note that I’m not defending national socialism. As I’ve pointed out before, when the government takes over the economic life of a country, and directs what the companies can or cannot do, the tendency is to quash innovation, and as a rule everyone becomes very poor.
It’s just that it depends. Like empires (which to an extent they are) national socialist regimes can do okay under an extraordinary ruler. I had a mini-dispute with Herb in the comments on whether Franco was or was not Fascist. He absolutely was, both in the economic, and in the repressive, take over every minutia of life aspect. He was also better than the average bear at directing the economic life of the country which is why before his death we used to go shop in Spain, where more and better goods were available than in Portugal.
Relatively speaking, Salazar was a softer leader. Or at least, he stomped less on the opposition (while making more noises about stomping. It’s the Portuguese way.) But as an economic leader (director of the economic life. Führer if you will. Or where did you think that came from?) he sucked. He sucked upside down and sideways and with his head in a sack. And that’s because he was raised by Jesuits, and got his economic theories from them. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. So over his rule, everyone became increasingly poorer. But weirdly not incompetent. (In fact, as a person who — there and here — likes to follow craftsmen around watching how they do things, the average craftsman who learned his trade under national socialism, was probably way better than anyone else.)
Which brings us to: how does international socialism/communism not only destroy competency but introduce incompetency and corruption to the degree it is enforced/implemented.
March 22, 2022
QotD: Epitaph for Yugoslavia
Maria Vivod, “A Late Obituary for a Country: Yugoslavia (1918-1991)”, Quillette, 2021-12-12.
March 10, 2022
QotD: Orwell on Capitalism, Socialism, and Fascism
However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralized ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.
But what then is Fascism?
Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and – this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize with Fascism – generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.
But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognize any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have “proved” over and over again that only Nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the idea that non-Nordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc., is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the “semi-apes” as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery.
However horrible this system may seem to us, it works. It works because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
March 2, 2022
QotD: George Orwell was a dedicated socialist
What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism – that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit – does not work. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.
When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle-steamer of equal horsepower stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened on the fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
