Daily Kos recently reprinted a popular column that periodically makes the rounds (“75 Ways Socialism Has Improved America”) by someone using the nom de plume TheNewDeal00.
Not just “75 Examples of Socialism,” mind you, but “improvements.” Going down the list, you’ll notice items like “The Military/National Defense,” “War,” “The Pentagon,” “Homeland Security,” and so forth, that mainly involve murdering or imprisoning people at home and abroad. The relentlessly positive spin on each item, including the most authoritarian aspects of the National Security State and Military-Industrial Complex, suggests we’re dealing with the kind of reflexive liberal for whom anything done by government is automatically “progressive.”
It’s a fairly common specimen, unfortunately. There’s a certain kind of liberal whose vision of “progress” deems anything called “regulation” good, because — by definition — it’s a restraint on corporate power. Further, anything funded or controlled by the state is “socialism.” This was the mindset of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who treated big government and big business as diametrically opposed, identifying “liberalism” as an idealistic movement characterized by the use of state power to restrain the excesses of big business.
But state ownership, funding and control do not, as such, constitute “socialism.” In fact a defining characteristic of monopoly capitalism is increased state involvement in the economy. Most state activity, far from restraining big business, actually props it up. If we go down TheNewDeal00’s list, we see that most of the enumerated functions in some way maintain the structural prerequisites for corporate capitalism.
“National Defense” and “War” stuff, it goes without saying, serves primarily to impose corporate capitalism on the rest of the world — guaranteeing transnational corporate access to natural resources, by force when necessary, and serving as enforcement arm for the global legal and political framework of the World Bank, IMF, WTO, GATT, and assorted “intellectual property” accords. The reason the U.S. government spent decades installing dictators in most of Latin America, the Philippines, Iran, South Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Congo was to keep the world safe for corporate power.
The military-industrial complex serves another vital role for big business: It absorbs a great deal of excess production capacity and surplus capital when private demand is insufficient to keep the wheels of industry running.
My favorite, for sheer liberal naivete, is the highway system, “created for all of us to use”: “That’s right, a republican president created our taxpayer funded, national highway system. This was a different time, before the republican party came down with a vicious case of rabies that never went away.”
Would this be the Interstate Highway System created under the supervision of Defense Secretary (and former General Motors CEO) Charles Wilson, famous for the phrase “What’s good for America is good for GM?” The main effect of the Interstates was to lower the cost of distribution, artificially increasing the size and market area of the typical firm, and enabling national big box chains to drive local retail out of business. Or the local freeway systems, the top priority of local governments owned lock, stock and barrel by real estate developers? These subsidized freeway systems are the main culprit behind suburban monoculture, sprawl, and the car culture.
Farm subsidies? Only the most naive goo-goo thinks the USDA serves any interests other than those of Monsanto, Cargill and ADM.
Public schools and prisons? The first state public school systems were created in the 19th century to produce factory workers conditioned to show up on time, line up on command, eat and pee at the sound of a bell, and take orders from authority figures behind desks. Their primary purpose is to process children into docile human resources sufficiently skilled to undertake the labor demanded of them, but not educated above their station in life.
When the schools fail at creating an easily manageable work force, the criminal justice system takes over in maintaining social control. Thanks to the Drug War, one of the most potentially radicalizable segments of the population — inner city blacks — are kept under tight surveillance (something like one third of black males are entangled in some component of the criminal justice system). The United States has a larger prison population than China, much of it providing slave labor for corporations.
As for cops and Homeland Security, who do you think it was firing tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets at Occupy protestors last year?
Naive liberals like TheNewDeal00 who embarrass themselves writing stuff like this just go to show that liberalism has nothing to do with the genuine Left.
Genuine Leftists take a far different view of things. Marx called the state, quite accurately, the Executive Committee of the Ruling Class. Engels wrote that, in the most advanced stage of capitalism, capitalists would operate through their state to manage the economy in cases where they were incapable of doing so through purely private means. The nationalization of railroads, telegraphs, and mines, and the creation of welfare states under so-called “social democracies,” he wrote, was simply a function of the capitalist state.
New Left historian Gabriel Kolko argued that the main function of the regulatory state was to enforce regulatory cartels, restrict competition, and thereby stabilize oligopoly markets against the threat of competition. Neo-Marxist James O’Connor wrote that the state has steadily socialized the operating costs of big business — or, as Noam Chomsky put it, socialized risk and cost while privatizing profit.
Market anarchists, especially left-wing market anarchists like me and my comrades at Center for a Stateless Society, know what the state is about. It’s not a restraint on private power; it’s the instrument of private power. Its central function is to suppress competition, create artificial property, and enable economic ruling classes to extract rents. Our economy, in its fundamental structure, is an alliance between big business and big government. Conservatives who denounce Barack Obama as a “socialist,” and Progressives who praise the corporate state as “socialist,” are just useful idiots for corporate power.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, Se os “Progressistas” Não Existissem, as Grandes Empresas Teriam de Inventá-los.
- Spanish, Si los “Progresistas” No Existieran, las Corporaciones Tendrían que Inventarlos.
- Dutch, Progressieven en het hedendaagse kapitalisme.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, If “Progressives” didn’t exist, Big Business would have to invent them, Addison, Vermont Eagle, 12/07/12
This is excellent, but using "goo-goo" was kind of goofy.
Corporate America and socialists combined to *reinvent* progressivism. The original progressive movement grew out of the abolitionist movement, and focused on abolishing privilege rather than what Clarence Darrow called "the propping up of one side to offset the propping up of the other side.
The original progressives were for abolishing partial-reserve banking and issuing "Greebacks" to maintain a debt-free money supply, for putting all taxes on the value of land and natural resources, and for government owning only "natural" monopolies, which were essentially right-of-way monopolies.
At the turn of the 20th century, progressives and socialists were bitter rivals, as can be seen in this 1903 debate between progressives and socialists:
http://www.savingcommunities.org/docs/post.louisf…
Socialists and corporatists eventually co-opted progressivism and obliterated the original meaning, just as they had done with liberalism, so we now have a form of neoprogressivism that is similar to neoliberalism – a form of milk-and-water socialism that creates nice things for people (constituents) at the bottom while leaving privilege entrenched at the top.
Reactionary anti-socialists responded to socialist half-truths with equal and opposite half-truths. While the left confounded legitimate wealth with privilege in order to attack both, the Austrian and neolibertarian right confounded the two (using Marx's own contorted definitions) in order to defend both. As a result, the left attacks wealth as if it were privilege, and the right defends privilege as if it were wealth.
I wouldn't hang this on the classical progressives (or classical liberals), who took great pains to distinguish legitimate wealth from privilege, defending the former and attacking the latter. Perhaps the biggest error of the classical progressives was the idea that this had to be accomplished at the national level through a mass movement.
A case could be made that "good government types" is contemptuous by itself. But "Goo-goo" is delightfully patronizing.
How about, "self-proclaimed human resource managers"?
Trevor, I suspect that you thought "goo-goo" was an insult (as I originally did). It turns out that this is a historical reference to "good government" activists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goo-goos
It looks like Carson's word choice was esoteric, not goofy.
My recent post When politicians own the city
Yeah, but it reminds me of Paul Weyrich who was real reactionary.
Aside from the fact that, as an individualist anarchist, I would side the socialists, this is pretty eye-opening. I think corporate America did most of the re-inventing, however. As for the socialists, they were crushed BY corporate america and the progressives. Progressives also really had it in for anarchism (see Teddy's "Anarchist" speech).
But, it is good see you Dan Sullivan! An old hand in the left-libertarian world. Very illuminating.
"Genuine Leftists take a far different view of things. Marx called the state, quite accurately, the Executive Committee of the Ruling Class. Engels wrote that, in the most advanced stage of capitalism, capitalists would operate through their state to manage the economy in cases where they were incapable of doing so through purely private means. The nationalization of railroads, telegraphs, and mines, and the creation of welfare states under so-called “social democracies,” he wrote, was simply a function of the capitalist state.'
Speaking as a democratic socialist, I can only hope that most of us live up to these kind words. Thank you, Kevin, for giving a well-deserved smack down to this dithering Wilsonian liberal (was that too harsh?).
I wonder if TheNewDeal00 thought the internment of the Japanese by FDR was also an awesome socialist innovation Iit created jobs, no doubt)? Contrary to this corporate liberal, I think welfare state policies are primarily concessions made to labor through the state in order to protect capital from a potential revolution. So I don't think welfare, workplace regulations or similar policies are the end all and be all and I certainly don't think they should be celebrated as wonderful gifts from the government. They are nothing of the sort. To the extent that these concessions help the truly destitute or provide some kind of buffer for workers, however, I think they should be defended for now.
Like Marx, my view of the state would differ from that of an anarchist like yourself (Though I think I am friendlier to anarchists than Marx was to Proudhon or Bakunin!). As you know, Marx and Engels essentially thought that modern states were products of their (capitalist) environments and were not necessarily evil in and of themselves. Thus, they were inclined to believe that if capitalism fell, the apparatus of governance that replaced it — whether a "state" or something new and unique–might be of a completely different character, since class divisions would not be part of the equation any longer. I think the Marxist view of the state does have merit, and at this point, I am basically agnostic on the issue of anarchism. Nonetheless, your great critiques of the true nature of state capitalism, and the defenders of this system, keep me coming back to C4SS. Keep up the good work!
"Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism."
–Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific"
I COMPLETE AGREE!!!
You absolutely nailed it, Kevin. Your clarity of thought and conciseness are superb.
The liberal project of enshrining and foam-padding the corporation-state is a sad excuse for radicalism, or true socialism (in Tucker's sense).
Many liberals recognize the injustice of the corporation-state, but statist ideology (a remnant of Marxism) falsely blames free enterprise for the injustice. The task of libertarian radicals is the painstaking work of uncovering the shrouded institutions of state-privilege that empower the capital class.
It's better than what Neoconservatives and vulgar libertarians do, though: deny the injustice of the corporation state and blame it on the poor. After all, CEOs are a persecuted minority, according to Rand.
Delegitimizing this kind of Wilsonian liberalism is by retaking the term socialism.
Socialism is paying workers their due.
State socialism attempts to accomplish this by force, inevitably creating a new political elite.
Libertarian socialism (anarchism) accomplishes this goal by revoking state-conferred privilege, allowing the freed market to emerge and by creating competitive mutual institutions within the shell of the crumbling system (local agriculture, worker and consumer cooperatives, credit unions, disruptive technologies, mutual aid societies, et cetera).
Liberalism is not the prize at the End of History. It is a crude facade protecting the corporation-state from the ravages of an informed, empowered populace.
Keep up the great writing, you never miss a beat Kevin!
Actually Marx said under communism, once the dialectic has been resolved and the creative power of humanity is unleashed, "the State will wither away…"
I'm not a Marxist scholar by any means, but I thought that Lenin started using that precise phrase in "The State and Revolution." So I checked out that essay, and though Lenin uses the phrase repeatedly, he attributes it to Engels. Here is Engels, then, quoted at length:
" Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labor). The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its concentration in a visible corporation. But it was this only insofar as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for its own time, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, of the feudal nobility; in our own time, of the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free people's state', both as to its justifiable use for a long time from an agitational point of view, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the so-called anarchists' demand that the state be abolished overnight." (Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science [Anti-Duhring], pp.301-03, third German edition.)
I actually went to and skimmed through the "75 ways…" His list basically awards socialism with the win for everything paid for by government's extortion of the productive class, without going into the negative social and economic costs associated with that method.
I must admit, it was difficult to continue past, "Socialism…. Those three syllables…"