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On Monday, I recorded an interview with Robert Stark of the Voice of Reason Network. We discussed Occupy Wall Street and the rich tradition of nationalistic “Third Way” economic thinking, which has never been more relevant.
Beyond capitalism versus socialism is a whole range of options, from National Socialism (which could just as well be called National Capitalism) to Corporatism, Social Credit, Populism, and Distributism.
To get a sense of the richness of this tradition, I urge you to read F. Roger Devlin’s “The Family Way,” a review essay on Allan Carlson’s superb book Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies – And Why They Disappeared, and Kerry Bolton’s series “Breaking the Bondage of Interest: The Right Answer to Usury.”
We will keep doing our small part to get these alternatives before the public as the economic crisis and popular discontent deepen. I just wish we had the ability to compete with sellers of the same old free market versus state socialism snake oil. But we don’t. Not yet.
That is why we are asking for donations. We need to build alternative media and hone our alternative message. And that takes time, energy, and talent that I would prefer that our writers be able to devote to our cause rather than sell to the system that is destroying us, just so they can pay their bills.
Since our last update, we have received $1,315 in additional donations, in amounts ranging from $10 to $700. Again, I want to thank our donors for your continued generosity and faith in our efforts.
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The interview with Robert Stark will air on Friday at the Voice of Reason: http://reasonradionetwork.com/ Please tune in, and be sure to share your thoughts and reactions.
Thank you for your readership and support.
Greg Johnson
Editor
3 Comments
“Beyond capitalism versus socialism is a whole range of options, from National Socialism (…) to Corporatism, Social Credit, Populism, and Distributism.”
From now on, I’m a “distributist”. It’s a good name for white people who would like to defend the lower white class. There is no need to call oneself left-wing. Distributist is much better.
“To get a sense of the richness of this tradition, I urge you to read F. Roger Devlin’s “The Family Way,” a review essay on Allan Carlson’s superb book”
I read his review and would have liked to post a comment, but comments are closed on that blog entry. So, I’ll try here.
From Devlin’s review: “Carlson draws our attention, for instance, to Ellen Karolina Sofia Key [Sweden – 1849-1926]: socialist, feminist, eugenics advocate, disciple of Darwin and Nietzsche. None of these commitments prevented her from laying heavy emphasis on the maternal role and its importance to individual women, their children, and the society of the future.”
Being pro-family is more or less the same as being pro-White. It seems that Allan Carlson would like to prove that you can be a good person, a socialist and an old-school feminist, and still be pro-family. It makes me think of normal, decent people who do not approve of immigration, but still like to think of themselves as left-wing, that is to say, as good people. It prevents them from protesting against their own race-replacement.
I wonder what is Allan Carlson’s position about immigration. His wikipedia entry says that “his articles and treatises have addressed the underlying causes of population decline, the effects of taxation and regulation on the size and well-being of the family”. It isn’t hard to see that the main cause of the white population decline is non-white immigration, and that a huge part of taxation on white people simply goes to finance race-replacement.
Carlson/Devlin: “Analogously, an individual woman entering the workforce undoubtedly improves her own material situation; but if the great mass of women enters the workforce, the overall effect is merely to glut the market for labor, driving down wages for everyone.”
Of course it will drive down the wages, at least in the beginning, but the main effect of women entering the workforce is still to increase the nation’s economic Gross domestic product, to the detriment of family life and the birth rate. It means that people will have miserable family lives, but they will be richer. The problem is that middle class families are not getting any richer, as Elizabeth Warren has documented in the United States. So, where did the additional wealth go? I think it mainly went to finance race-replacement, not to make the rich richer. Some of the money also went into developing the bureaucracy and the army, into the Iraq war, into financing pensions and health care for old people who live longer, and into parasitic activities like advertising, finance and litigation. But, if it was not for the race-replacement policy, I think there would still be plenty of money/wealth around for White people, and much fewer mothers would have to work outside the home.
“As early as 1825, an editorial in a British newspaper declared: The labouring men of this country should return to the good old plan of subsisting their wives and children on the wages of their own labour, and they should demand wages high enough for this purpose. By doing this, the capitalist will be obliged to give the same wages to men alone which they now give to men, women, and children. [Labourers must] prevent their wives and children from competing with them in the market and beating down the price of labour.”
There is some logic to that argument, but it only has limited validity. When both parents are working and not getting richer, the money doesn’t usually go into the pocket of their employer.
I enjoyed listening to this interview. Greg Johnson’s idea of using classical republicanism as a framework for nationalist economics is excellent, and I’ll start using it myself. The political dimension of nationalist economics is extremely important. As I understand it, classical republicanism is concerned with civic virtue, its conception of the common good is not exclusively or primarily economic, and it values citizens rather than consumers. It seeks to balance, through the principle of subsidiarity, both liberty and authority, and individualism and collectivism. It requires an ethnically and culturally homogeneous people with a real stake in society. It thus requires what Karl Popper and George Soros would call “closed societies” (closed to Jews and other foreigners, subversives, and parasites).
I also liked Greg’s criticism of libertarianism. He correctly notes that what libertarians advocate and what they defend are quite different things. As Kevin Carson remarks in Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective:
“Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term ‘free market’ in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate . . . arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because ‘that’s not how the free market works’ — implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of ‘free market principles.'”
Carson cites Sheldon Richman:
“Many self-styled defenders of the free market misunderstand the American system. They believe that under a thin layer of government intervention lies the system they cherish. All we need to do is scrape away that layer, and glorious capitalism will be restored.
“They couldn’t be more wrong. There is no thin layer of intervention. Government has intruded deeply into economic activity from the beginning, most particularly in banking and finance, which is by nature at the center of any economy. The web of privilege and control is pervasive, touching all parts of the economy. Moreover, this intervention was never imposed on bankers, financiers, and the rest of the business elite. It was welcomed — to be more precise, it was invited and sponsored by them. Free enterprise, risk, and loss were for the little guy. Partnership with the state was for the elite. That partnership meant favoritism and protection from competition. It meant exemption from market discipline and exploitation of taxpayers, consumers, and workers.”
As Garrett Hardin summed it up, “commonize costs and privatize profits — but don’t tell anyone.”
I should perhaps elaborate on what I meant when I referred above to “the political dimension of nationalist economics.” This political dimension often appears to be lacking in the literature advocating economic reform. This is what classical republicanism appears to provide.
I believe that nationalist economics should be informed by an identitarian, organicist, and political view of man and society.
It should be identitarian in that it is concerned with the interests of a particular people in a particular place and time. This means that it rejects the individualist and universalist abstractions and monstrosities cherished by liberals and economists, such as those of Homo economicus and the global economy. It is not concerned with “buying the world a Coke” or “sound money for the brown people.”
It should be organicist in that it is oriented at establishing and maintaining a healthy social order. The ideas of tripartition, hierarchic harmony, and subsidiarity are highly relevant here. These are essentially Western forms of social order, as has been recognized by Georges Dumézil, Kevin MacDonald, and Chantal Delsol respectively. The social order should not be organized on an exclusively economic basis.
It should be political in that it is concerned with the independence and power of a particular people. It might be characterized as “social Darwinist.” As Zeev Sternhell has summarized Enrico Corradini’s thought:
“The state of war, he said, was the natural state of relations between nations in all periods: discipline, authority, social solidarity, the sense of duty and sacrifice, and heroic values were all conditions necessary for the survival of the country. Anything that made for unity was positive: a strong government, the individual always at the service of society, and the social classes united in a single effort for the sake of national greatness. Similarly, anything that constituted a factor of diversity was to be eliminated. The philosophy of the Enlightenment and theory of the rights of people, internationalism, and pacifism, like bourgeois or proletarian class egoism, were to be destroyed. The same applied to democracy: democracy was nothing other than the expression of the class interests of the bourgeoisie. As for Marxist socialism, it divested the body of the nation of its substance in order to serve the class interests of the proletariat. And finally there was reformist socialism, which, under the pretext of improving the lot of the proletariat, entered into an alliance with bourgeois democracy. This alliance of the politicians, said Corradini, was the greatest lie of contemporary democracy. To liberal democracy, ‘business’ democracy, Corradini opposed a form of democracy that was an ‘ethnarchy’; to ‘business’ politics and a plutocracy, to ‘class parasitism,’ he opposed a regime of order and authority based on natural hierarchies. This regime was to be a regime of producers, a regime of class collaboration, responsible for the well-being of all.”