Allan Carlson, The Servile World

Came across another fine article by Allan Carlson called SERVILE WORLD:HOW THE BUSINESS GOVERNMENT,THE LOATHSOME THING CALLED SOCIAL SERVICE AND OTHER DISTRIBUTIST NIGHTMARES ALL CAME TRUE”. There is a lot of good stuff here even if I might not agree with every jot and tittle of his proposed solutions. One thing that stands out is just how wrong thinking in “left/right paradigm” or the “capitalist/communist paradigm” is. This I think is one of the major stumbling blocks for the masses in having any understanding of what is at the core of the economic crisis. The Money Power is just as happy to use the communist system as they are to darwinistic capitalism. As Carlson points out…

The winner in all this, of course, will be the Servile State: Hilaire Belloc’s label for a system where monopoly capitalists, financiers, and government bureaucrats merge into an entity practicing state capitalism. Under its terms the capitalists and bankers gain order and protection of their wealth and property while property-less workers receive welfare benefits specifically tied to their wage labor, such as unemployment insurance, which provides security but also confirms their servile status. Indeed, Belloc offered the odd warning that this system would tend toward a form of compulsory labor, a modern version of slavery. For his part, Chesterton called this arrangement a “Business Government” which, he says, “will combine everything that is bad in all the plans for a better world…. There will be nothing left but a loathsome thing called Social Service.”

and…

This is the Servile State. The model of Business Government – not Capitalism nor Communism, nor Socialism, nor Fascism – this model won the great ideological contest of the 20th Century. We also see this victorious system in contemporary Russia, where “Mafia capitalism” and state-favored oil and gas companies have grown among former KGB agents and their ilk, to create a class proudly self-labelled “the oligarchs.” Meanwhile, a crude welfare state inherited from the Communist time keeps the Russian masses alive… and propertyless.

Journey to China, and there you find still another iteration of the Servile State. Western corporations have moved their production lines to the Peoples’ Republic, where an authoritarian regime – a reliable Business Government – keeps the laborers cheap, docile, and strike free. Indeed, in 2002, the Communist Party of China actually invited capitalists to join its ranks, cementing another kind of partnership. Neither Belloc nor Chesterton would have been surprised over this merger of Capitalism and Communism, finding it the predictable consequence of a common materialistic world-view.