The rule of centralized state and bureaucratic machines is one of those things that the cultural reproduction apparatus teaches people to accept as “natural” or “inevitable” (“it must be more efficient, or it wouldn’t be this way;” “the people in charge make these rules for a reason”).
But in fact it is very much the result of human agency. In the U.S., it was deliberate collusion between the state and big business, especially in the 1850s and the Gilded Age, to set up a centralized corporate economy. There simply wouldn’t have been an economy dominated by large manufacturers and wholesalers serving a single national market, were it not for things like railroad land grants and other subsidies to make long-distance distribution artificially cheap, and the pooling or exchange of industrial patents to cartelize markets. Not to mention gunboat diplomacy to make sure overbuilt U.S. industry could operate at capacity.
This was a top-down revolution, in which the state was very much involved. The groundwork for intensifying the process was laid by the “Great Betrayal” of the Hayes election, in which the landed aristocracy of the South acquiesced in Republican corporatism on a national level in return for a free hand to reinstitute Apartheid in their own region.
According to John Curl, in “For All the People,” the Great Betrayal turned into a civil war when labor and farm populist movements — what he calls the “Great Uprising” — tried to reverse the corporate coup. The climax of this civil war came with the Knights of Labor’s nationwide general strike for an eight-hour day (the original, 100% American origin of May Day as a workers’ holiday) and the ensuing post-Haymarket repression.
Grover Cleveland’s military intervention to suppress the Pullman Strike was one of the last big battles in defeating the counter-revolution, after which the alliance between big business and big government was able to fully reshape the country in its own image. The Left attempted rearguard actions on the eve of World War One — most notably the Wobblies’ Lawrence strike — but was liquidated during the War Hysteria and Red Scare.
The managerial/professional New Class of corporate managers was first recruited from industrial engineers after the Civil War, and around the turn of the 20th century the new corporate-state alliance gave rise to other centralized institutions (bureaucratic charitable foundations, universities, large urban public school systems) that served as auxiliaries to the corporate state either by processing human resources for it, or by mitigating the human casualties of corporate rule (e.g., managing the underclass through the welfare and prison systems).
And now, after 150 years of this, people see the administration of every aspect of life by centralized bureaucratic machines as natural and inevitable, the only conceivable way of doing things. But it’s not. It’s not only the creature of deliberate human design; it requires deliberate, ongoing intervention by the state for its very survival.
More importantly, it’s in the process of being dismantled by human action. Despite the system’s attempts to indoctrinate us to the contrary, we are not powerless. We’re in the midst of another Great Uprising — fought by The Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, Anonymous, and a thousand other networked insurrections around the world as in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. And unlike the last time, this time the technological revolution has put the advantage on the side of the Uprising. This time it’s us building the revolution, and the corporate state finds itself fighting a desperate rearguard action to stop us.
“Other worlds are possible.”
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Romney’s “Free Enterprise System”: As Statist as Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, Pensacola, Florida Voice, 03/02/12
There were no east-west 'land grants' east of the Mississippi. Mr Carson is misleading you.
The Illinois Central RR built from IL to MS and LA. The Civil war changed the IL-Gulf commerce
route irrevocably. IL to NY won and there were zero land grants on that path. ZERO!
"pooling or exchange of industrial patents to cartelize markets" Which patent's, Mr. Carson? Those
we stole from England to make steel? Do you know what you are talking about?
"set up a centralized corporate economy" – Hello? The Fed Gov had zero power before 1887 when
the ICC was created and the ICC was impotent from the word go. How could a 'corporate economy' be set
up by colluding with 33 states? Do you have any evidence or are you just surmising?
Any who reads beyond the 2nd paragraph in this article is accepting Mr. Carson's word on faith,
not facts. To prove my point
Google 'grodinsky iowa pool' to find out how difficult it was to run a business and make everyone
happy in the 1870's and 1880's. Grodinsky's book is available free on Google Books and archive.org.
Mr Carson's article deserves no further attention beyond paragraph #2 unless you simply want
to believe in him without any facts. If that is the case, I congratulation Mr. Carson for fooling
"some of the people all of the time". In addition, I want you to also read Gustavus Myers' books.
He was an acknowledged socialist and wrote many anti-capitalist books with a significant amount
of reference material to confirm his statements.
"There were no east-west 'land grants' east of the Mississippi."
Um … how does the fact (if it is a fact) that there were no land grands in one particular direction, in 1/3 of the country, disprove Carson's claim that "There simply wouldn’t have been an economy dominated by large manufacturers and wholesalers serving a single national market, were it not for things like railroad land grants and other subsidies to make long-distance distribution artificially cheap?"
"IL to NY won and there were zero land grants on that path. ZERO!"
So the land grant bonds sold by e.g. the Ohio Valley Rail Road were forgeries?
Here you go…
Chronology of the Northern Pacific http://www.landgrant.org/history.html
& Related Land Grant Railroads
1862 Lincoln signed the first Pacific Railway bill. The Union Pacific-Central Pacific land grant (12 Stat. 489, Ch. 120, July 1, 1862), amended in 1864 (13 Stat. 356, Ch. 216, July 2, 1864), resulted in the Credit Mobilier scandal. The Union Pacific got more than eleven million acres and $27 million in bonds; the Central Pacific got eight million acres and $24 million in bonds.
1862 St. Paul & Pacific incorporated (Minnesota state grants in 1857 and 1862 gave ten sections per mile of track, for a total of 3,256,790 acres).
1864 Pacific Railroad Act doubled the CP and UP land grants from 10 to 20 miles of alternating sections for each mile of road built, and arranged for earlier release of federal loans of $32,000 to $48,000 per mile of road (Time-Life, The Railroaders, p. 68).
1864 Lincoln signs Northern Pacific land grant (July 2, 1864, Ch. 217, 13 Stat. 365).
"The Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, Anonymous, and a thousand other networked insurrections around the world as in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements"
Yes. And third-positionists, alt-righters, paleocons, paleolibs, european nationalists, the Tea Party, identitarians et al. A lot of very different movements. But they are rightists, fascists, "xenophobes"! They are not the good guys from the Left (terrorism, gulags, genocide…
All egbegb did was cast doubt on carson's lack of facts and evidence. egbegb made 1 assertion without evidence. where carson made over a dozen at least.