This post is inspired by a thread of toots by Daniel Keys Moran, which talks about the connection between oligarchy and fascism.
Political ideology and greed are not independent.
People accept an ideology because they believe it serves their interests. More importantly, people with power push ideologies—which they might not particularly believe—that serve their own interests, not those of the ones being influenced.
Of course, the latter don’t realize they’re being played for suckers. They think they’re clever. They think they’re winners. They’re convinced that they’ve signed on to the winning team and are willing to wear the t-shirt and shout the slogans. Go team!
Traditional politics conceives of interests in a rather sophisticated manner, one that accounts for both personal and societal goals, and the need to balance them.
Populism maximizes its appeal by bypassing all that complexity and instead pandering directly to your basest desires. It promises to shower you with unearned wealth and privilege while depriving your “undeserving” perceived enemies of either. It promises victory in conquest. Go team!
I say all this because, in the case of scum like George Santos, people notice that he’s a grifter and decide that means he’s not really committed to the ideology he sells. This is false.
His commitment is based on grift, and the ideology was always something he sold, not bought. The more committed he is to grift, the more committed he is to being a proponent of the ideology that benefits him. In his case, the benefit comes not so much from the ideology itself as from being a salesman who gets commissions and perks; an influencer.
I’m not saying that the oligarchs who finance fascism are themselves free of bigotry. Not at all. I am saying that the bigotry they sell is meant to be consumed by suckers, and any analysis of whether they’re true believers is a waste of time.
As Mother Teresa showed us, those who harbor serious doubts about their beliefs are the ones who double down on them and act more like true believers than the true true believers do. The cosplay fascists Sieg-Heil all the louder and show their enemies even less mercy, because they have something to prove.
So, did Hitler really hate Jews or was it something he latched onto to enrich himself and attain a position of power? Who the fuck cares? He killed tens of millions! We’re not here to psychoanalyze monsters, just to slay them. Go team.
We speak metaphorically of “getting your piece of the pie” to mean receiving your share of the wealth. The purpose of the economy is to ensure that wealth is both created and distributed so that there’s enough pie to go around and everyone gets enough to eat.
Both of these elements are necessary. If there isn’t enough to go around, then no matter how fair you are in doling out the scraps, people will go hungry. Likewise, even if you have more than enough for everyone, if it’s not distributed well, people will go hungry.
The economic right, meaning libertarianism, brags about its success in motivating the efficient creation of wealth by rewarding those who create it (or at least those who own the means of creation: capital, not labor). The economic left, meaning socialism, brags about its fair distribution of wealth, to each worker according to their need (or at least what the Party decides you need). In this, both are guilty of focusing on their strength while ignoring their weakness.
No matter what free-market fundamentalists claim, laissez-faire capitalism is utterly incapable of ensuring even remotely fair distribution of the wealth it creates. In fact, it’s not even good at creating wealth in the longer term, because without proper regulation, the market becomes mired by collusion.
An economic system that moves too far to the right winds up baking more than enough pies for everyone but handing them out to people who are too full to eat, while others are left to starve. Through the law of diminishing marginal value, the concentration of wealth inherently reduces it. It’s like all those pies piling up and rotting in the pantries of the hoarders. Even this mislaid bounty can’t last, because the workers are too hungry to work.
In addition, wastefully producing wealth requires wasting resources. Under unconstrained capitalism, we get a tragedy of the commons, where the cost is socialized while the profit is privatized. The company profits from the product, but society has to pay for the pollution and depletion.
Of course, no matter what the far left claims, socialism has never worked, either. It’s not even good at fair distribution, because it (unfairly) doesn’t reward the people who create wealth for their efforts so as to motivate them to create enough, and any remaining semblance of fairness goes out the window as soon as scarcity kicks in the front door.
In fact, it’s been so grand a failure each and every time it’s been tried on any significant scale that modern proponents have to euphemistically call it “socialism” just to avoid admitting that it’s communism. Remember the USSR? One of those S’s stood for “Socialist”. That’s what socialism is. To quote Lenin, “the goal of socialism is communism”.
Socialism is not Sweden. The Nordic states have well-regulated capitalist economies and explicitly deny being socialist. Socialism is the USSR or Cuba. This flawed economic system invariably leads to a corrupt political system; a totalitarian regime that is generally impoverished despite the wealth of natural resources, but for the Communist Party officials who horde what little is created. The reality of communism is waiting in line for hours just to get toilet paper, then giving up and buying it on the black market.
The reason that the USSR’s economy was a mess is handily explained by a Soviet-era Russian saying: “They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work”. Without free enterprise, there is no reward for productivity. You can try to squeeze it out of people with patriotic propaganda and harsh incentives, but it just doesn’t work as well as a system that is fair in rewarding those who do more than they absolutely have to.
Also, where the economic right rejects the role of government in regulating the economy, the economic left believes in the opposite extreme: central control. For practical reasons, this can’t work, and it’s what leads to the corruption and violation of civil and human rights by those who have too much power over who gets the wealth.
The Nordic states show that, in contrast, capitalism can be compelled to work towards the goals of society, not those of oligarchy. Capitalism tends towards evil but can be made good; socialism is hopeless.
Ultimately, by overly favoring either capital or labor, by overly focusing either on productivity or fairness, and by demanding either too little government control or too much, these two economic extremes not only fail to deliver what the other promises, but even what they themselves promise. Extremism in economics is no more viable than it is in politics.
P.S.
Economics is the science of managed scarcity. Everything is finite, so there is always a loss when you make one choice over another. But what if this wasn’t so? What if we lived in a post-scarcity world where labor came in the form of machine intelligences? What if capital no longer required people as labor?
This has been explored more by science fiction than economics, but the scariest part is the transition. When workers no longer add to the wealth of the wealthy, why should they be kept around? Or kept alive?
When everyone is rich, how do you create poverty so that people are desperate enough to let you do what you want to them? What’s the point of being rich if you can’t be richer than someone else?
I don’t have all the answers. Just leaving these questions here so that this essay is not obsolete the moment it was written.
