Thank Heavens for Orlov…
Sharon January 12th, 2009
Ok, I got up, I went back to the blog, I read all that I missed this weekend. Many things that might be blogged upon presented themselves and…let’s just say all that was produced is better off staying in my draft box. Nope, need one more day before leaping back into the fray.
But I must present my patient readers, who have gotten a steady diet of food storage class stuff, reruns and etc… with some elegant prose. I just can’t make any.
Thank Heavens for the Incomparable Dmitry Orlov, who produces the sort prose with his breakfast cereal that could make Emerson weep with delight. So I leave you in his capable hands for one more day.
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/01/that-bastion-of-american-socialism.html DO NOT MISS THE REST!!!
A nationalization of the private sector can indeed be called socialist, but only when it is carried out by a socialist government. In absence of this key ingredient, a perfect melding of government and private business is, in fact, the gold standard of fascism. But nobody is crying “Fascism!” over what has been happening in the US. Not only would this seem ridiculously theatrical, but, the trouble is, we here in the US have traditionally liked fascists. We had liked Mussolini well enough, until he allied with Hitler, whom we only eventually grew to dislike once he started hindering transatlantic trade. We liked Spain’s Franco well enough too. We liked Chile’s Pinochet after having a hand in bumping off his Socialist predecessor Allende (on September 11, 1973; on the same date some years later, I was very briefly seized with the odd notion that the Chileans had finally exacted their revenge). In general, a business-friendly fascist generalissimo or president-for-life with no ties to Hitler is someone we could almost always work with. So much for political honesty.
As a practical matter, failing at capitalism does not automatically make you socialist, no more than failing at marriage automatically make you gay. Even if desperation makes you randy for anything that is warm-blooded and doesn’t bite, the happily gay lifestyle is not automatically there for the taking. There are the matters of grooming, and manners, and interior decoration to consider, and these take work, just like anything else. Speaking of work, building socialism certainly takes a great deal of work, a lot of which tends to be unpaid, voluntary labor, and so desperation certainly helps to inspire the effort, but it cannot be the only ingredient. It also takes intelligence, because, as Douglas Adams once astutely observed, “people are a problem.” In due course, they will learn to thwart any system, no matter how well-designed it might be, be it capitalist, socialist, anarchist, Ayn Randian, or one based on a strictly literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation. However, here a distinction can be drawn: systems that attempt to do good seem far more corruptible than ones that have no such pretensions. Thus, a socialist system, inspired by the noblest of impulses to help one’s fellow man, quickly develops social inequalities that it was designed to eradicate, breeding cynicism, while a capitalist system, inspired by the impulse to help oneself through greed and fear, starts out from the position of perfect cynicism, and is therefore immune to such effects, making it more robust, as long as it does not become resource-constrained. It seems to be a superior system if your goal is to keep the planet burning brightly, but when the fuel starts to run low, it is quickly torn apart by the very impulses that motivated its previous successes: greed turns to profiteering, draining the life blood out of the economy, while fear causes capital to seek safe havens, causing the wheels of commerce to grind to a halt. It could be said that an intelligently designed, well-regulated capitalist system could be made to avoid such pitfalls and persevere in the face of resource constraints, but the US seems laughably far from achieving this goal.
Taking intelligence itself as an example, if having more of it is a good thing, then a bit of socialism could have helped a lot. Let us start with the observation that intelligence, and the ability to benefit from higher education, occur more or less randomly within a human population. The genetic and environmental variation is such that it is not even conceivable to breed people for high intellectual abilities, although, as a look at any number of aristocratic lineages will tell you, it is most certainly possible to breed blue-blooded imbeciles. Thus, offering higher education to those whose parents can afford it is a way to squander resources on a great lot of pampered nincompoops while denying education to working class minds that might actually soak it up and benefit from it. A case in point: why exactly was it a good idea to send George W. Bush to Yale, and then to Harvard Business School? A wanton misallocation of resources, wouldn’t you agree? At this point, I doubt that I would get an argument even from his own parents. Perhaps in retrospect they would have been happier to let someone more qualified decide whether young George should have grown up to incompetently send men into battle or to competently polish hub caps down on the corner.
In my dreams, I write like that. Then, of course, I wake up 
.
Sharon
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I hadn’t been keeping up with Club Orlov because Dmitry had pointed out that all he had to say had come to pass and what more was there to say? It was sheer happenstance that I visited the site yesterday and ran across this gem. Just the right amount of thoughtfulness and humor. I can’t tell you how many times I bust out laughing reading it.
Thanks for bringing this to the attention of others. I’m thankful Dmitry hasn’t stopped writing!
Kerri in AK
I love Orlov! This is just what I’ve been saying…the whole socialism thing is a red herring. But every time I point out that there’s more than one way to nationalize, and the other way starts with an F, I get a tolerant chuckle. Me, I’m not pushing a political agenda of any sort, really, but I think that if being more socialist is the worst thing coming to us, then we’re a whole lot better off than I thought.
I think that most people in this country don’t actually know a decent working definition of the word socialism…for example, it’s pretty obvious from the discourse that socialism is conceived as being opposed to _democracy_, rather than capitalism. Sigh…
“there’s more than one way to nationalize, and the other way starts with an F”
That’s fabulous, squrrl! I might just start going around, quoting you on that one.
BTW, I too am very glad to see Orlov back. I’ve been checking his blog every few days for a while now, hoping to see him post again.
“The other way starts with an f” – for sure.
You can also use the more specific term “corporatism” (Mussolini’s term) for the economic aspect of fascism.
It’s unfortunate that the term “fascism” has been so promiscuously tossed around for so long that it’s devalued, so that to try to use it nowadays where it really is indicated incurs the fate of the boy who cried wolf.
It’s b.s., of course, especially the part about intelligence being randomly distributed.
But high-class b.s. Say something nonsensical authoritatively and with panache, and voilá, you’re a pundit!
I happened to read Mr. Orlov yesterday too and while I do agree (and have been pointing out myself for some time) that it’s really facism, not socialism we’re dealing with in our government’s transformation, I do have to completely disagree with his point that intelligence is randomly distributed. While I get his point, in my opinion he exaggerates the randomness, perhaps greatly.
fascism
There are other options. For example, some enterprises – transit systems or utilities, for example – could be PUBLICLY OWNED, but NOT GOVERNMENT OWNED. How would that work? By setting up a board of trustees to own and operate the system. This board of trustees would be directly elected by the public in the service district of the system. This is key. The big problem with government ownership of these things is that the temptation is to either use the enterprise as a political tool to pander to the electorate, or to use it as a cash cow to finance other government programs. Either way, the enterprise ends up being managed poorly, and ultimately the public ends up with overpriced, crappy service. In contrast, if the public elected the trustees directly, then the trustees would be responsive to the public, and would have to strike a balance between affordability and service quality that best corresponded with public preference.
There would obviously need to be government involvement initially to front the money to buy out the shareholders and set up the trusteeship. The government needs to then get out of the way as quickly as possible.
What I have just described in not what most knowledgeable people woould describe as “socialism”, and it certainly isn’t “fascism” or even “corporatism” or “capitalism”. It really doesn’t have a name, because what I describe hasn’t really been tried anywhere. But it should be.
Sharon, you wrote: “In my dreams, I write like that. Then, of course, I wake up
.”
Me too.
[...] Casaubon’s Book » Blog Archive » Thank Heavens for Orlov… Ok, I got up, I went back to the blog, I read all that I missed this weekend. Many things that might be blogged upon presented themselves and…let’s just say all that was produced is better off staying in my draft box. Nope, need one more day before leaping back into the fray. [...]
WNC, I thought the word for that was “anarchism”. Or maybe I’m reading my anarchist theory wrong.
But when you do that with workers collectives, instead of nonprofit corporations, the phrase is “anarchist collectivism” or “anarcho-syndicalism”. Doing it by democratic election instead of direct democracy might make some anarchists queasy, but not all.
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It’s a nice blog. As I begin the final push on _Making Home_ my book on Adapting in Place (out next spring).