“Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.” - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
One part of our mission at The Broken Binnacle is fostering dialogue about perennially important topics. This week, I want to invite our subscribers into such a dialogue between myself and John Jakubisin, who in his recent essay, The Three C’s, on capitalism, corporatism, and communism, proposes that our capitalist system, despite its early history of opposition to government interference with business (specifically mercantilism), is uncomfortably close to evolving into corporatism, in which corporations in partnership with those in political power are the primary social and political actors, essentially becoming a de facto government. John further states that it is not a huge leap from corporatism to communism. I would contend that if corporatism catches a breath of nationalist populism, that leap becomes a mere step. Although I agree that the progression which John hypothesizes is legitimate, I disagree with his implication that this evolution is inevitable. Capitalism is an economic system antithetical to communism, making it a stretch to say it only takes one catalyst, corporatism, to form an inevitable chain reaction.
I submit that there are several social circumstances and moral principles that need to be in place for capitalism to become corporatism, and likewise for corporatism to become communism. Corporatism requires a collectivist view of society: people under a corporatist system are organized into political blocs (corporations) that make synchronized political moves driven by the oligarchy of owners. At this point, you might think the next question is what principle in capitalism can counteract such an amalgamation of people, but I think that taking such a view of the matter is narrow-minded.
Capitalism is an economic theory, but this social amalgamation is not a matter of economics, but rather of sociology. Capitalism is not, nor has it ever been rightly understood as, a full set of guidelines along which a society can operate solely. The switch from capitalism to corporatism is a result of collectivism, a sociopolitical ideology, not an economic one. Therefore, the search for an antidote to the slide from capitalism to corporatism solely within the economic sphere is doomed from the start.
The challenge now before us is how to combat collectivism in the social and political spheres. Our own society has reduced us to radical individual consumers in an increasingly corporatist marketplace, and all the while our craving for community increases. It is natural for people to want to be a part of a community, which is why nationalist and populist movements can be so powerful. From our own nation’s history, we see an example of this: in the wake of the McKinley corporatist-leaning administration which had essentially been purchased by magnates Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller, we saw the rise of Roosevelt’s progressivism and “New Nationalism.” But when the desire for community becomes the platform for a revolutionary regime after corporatism has consolidated the power structures across the various societal spheres, totalitarianism seems to follow logically. The real crux of the issue is this: when capitalism is pursued so zealously that it becomes a replacement for societal values, two things tend to happen:
1) corporations grow and conglomerate (e.g., J.P. Morgan’s business empire) beyond the control of even the government, resulting in a total consolidation of power by a shrinking elite class, and
2) regular people are forced into the role of individualist consumers who still naturally crave a sense of community, thus setting the stage for communism.
Here is where I would like to propose a fourth “C” to add to this discussion: Conservatism. The values necessary to stave off this devolution of capitalism are the values that are necessary to maintain the kinds of natural societies to which we all wish to belong. I will list a few, but all of the so-called “family values” would bear mentioning here.
1) Men need to value their children more than themselves, which is the first step toward establishing not only a healthy and secure family, but an entire society in which the decisions of the present are made in a way that accounts for future generations. Such a mindset is more natural for women (evidenced by the fact that 74% of teachers are women1), but without men who think this way, any attempt to build a lasting society is a non-starter (just look at how communities with mostly absent fathers fall into disrepair).
2) A consistent moral/ethical framework needs to be present at least across the entirety of the local community (such as a neighborhood or parish.) These communities develop organically from shared mores and geographic proximity2 as opposed to the “community” aimed at by collectivism, which is imposed, and which contains a full set of substitute mores implicit within (e.g., a utilitarian way of prioritizing the many over the one).
3) It is necessary to be proud of one’s family and community, and to want to perpetuate their values. This principle is most fully lived out in the virtue of honor, a concept so lost on our culture today that we reflexively see it as an Eastern value with little current bearing on the Western tradition. Papers caricaturing western honor, and then reciting how our society has “advanced” from an honor society to an “equality” or “dignity” society are quite common (and make for good conversation fodder.)
Only a conservative society that upholds values such as these can prevent the sliding of capitalism into corporatism, and so we find ourselves at a crossroads today: as corporatism has taken at least a partial hold of our political order, and populist movements on both sides of the political aisle are gaining momentum, the three Cs seem to be converging on this moment in history. Will we recover the family and local communities that have been sidelined in the rat-race of corporatist-oriented capitalism? Or will we push ever more toward collectivism, proving Marx and Hegel right as we inevitably face the rise of the proletariat and embrace communism? Which of the three Cs will prevail depends very much on whether collectivism or conservatism becomes the fourth “C”.
Teacher Demographics and Statistics [2023]: Number Of Teachers In The US (zippia.com)
The abundance of such communities in the 1800’s as attested to by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America I believe is why the populist pushback against the corporatism of that era did not result in collectivism and communism, despite other countries (particularly Russia) following that path at the time.