#sleeppolitics

[inherentsleep-blog]

A small rant about a random post P1

General warning: this is going to be BM. When I was poking around a few tags yesterday I saw a post that sort of got my sarcastic ire up. This isn’t a response because it’s kind of dickish and therefor I feel no need to tag the original author, let negativity stay in it’s little corner. I’m making this post because I was thinking about it and I’m trying to put everything I think about ‘on paper’ right now to improve my writing skill.  The post was  ‘7 reasons why solarpunk is the most important speculative fiction movement in the last 20 years’ My first though was ‘that’s a strong assessment’  My second was ‘no, you’re probably right actually, what speculative fiction movements started in the last twenty years?’  It’s sort of a strange award to request, because speculative fiction isn’t that large a genre, and movements within it aren’t *that* common. Really, I wasn’t sure what sub-genres it was even in the running against. 

So I did a little bit of googling, and off the top of my head I’m pretty sure It’s in the running against Dieselpunk and Nanopunk. While fun, I think most dieselpunk fans can agree it’s not really an *important* sci-fi movement. I thought that pitch for Solarpunk was pretty terrible, but we can still open up the little award letter. If you’re talking about sci-fi movements at all, I think I would have to disagree. You’re running against the arrival of the Chinese hard-scifi scene in force, the expansion of the biopunk movement (and the important inter-connectivity with things like Crispr) and the slow rise of the African sci-fi scene (west African, mostly out of Nigeria in particular) , all of which help build and imagine a less western world (which our world is very much going to be.) None of these are new movements however, and started before the last 20 years. If you had made that statement about the last 30 years there would be a lot more debate, but sci-fi movements really haven't impressed in this new millennia, no matter what matrix fans would tell you. So fine solarpunk, I present you the ‘Fuck Kathleen Ann Goonan Award for most important new sci-fi movement from 1997 - 2017′ I’m hope you’re happy you animals. 

[inherentsleep-blog]

Commentary on ‘Socialism and man in Cuba’ p1

START (note - this is VERY old, from when I was in HS. It’s here only to preserve it)

Guevara starts this by going right into the defence of socialist states.

“A common argument from the mouths of capitalist spokespeople, in the ideological struggle against socialism, is that socialism, or the period of building socialism into which we have entered, is characterized by the abolition of the individual for the sake of the state. I will not try to refute this argument solely on theoretical grounds but rather to establish the facts as they exist in Cuba and then add comments of a general nature.”

I don’t think, after reading all of this, that Guevara actually understand the criticism that’s being leveled against transitional socialist states. In fact, he doesn’t seem to actually understand what individualism is, or what is meant by ‘a society is forced to give up individualism’. To start, very basically, having named and personally powerful leadership within a government is not individualism.

“We put our trust in him — individual, specific, with a first and last name — and the triumph or failure of the mission entrusted to him depended on that individual's capacity for action.” While he is correct that this is collective action based on an individual’s capacity for action (henceforth agency) this is not what a society refers to as individualism. If it was, cults of personality with high ranking army figures gaining their own cults would be considered the most individualist of societies. While dictatorships can be individualistic, they are plainly not inherently so.

What is described is instead the personalisation of politics, wherein powerful people protected by networks of support, personal charisma, force and wealth are the leaders of society and control greater portions of it, contrasted do depersonalised politics where institutions run the country, and in a final stage no single person holds leadership, but instead the bureaucracy rules. A democratic version of this could have people simply voting for a given ‘party’ or ‘action platform’.

Depersonalisation of politics was an important movement through the 19th and 20th centuries, and it allows more stable government as the institutions hold far longer-term networks of patronage without the personal dominance or connection.

Guevara continues in the same vein.

“Every one of the combatants of the Sierra Maestra who reached an upper rank in the revolutionary forces has a record of outstanding deeds to his or her credit.”

Right, and that’s lovely, but that’s actually describing a mediocratic society, where competent actors who do good things are promoted. Perhaps you’re describing an ideal military society. It still isn’t individualism, or an individualist society. Mediocracy is not an inherent requirement of individualism.

Whatever, the defence just seems weird. While he didn’t have Wikipedia or Google to help him confirm in 1959, anarchist and liberal concepts of individualism were very well established by this time, and his lack of understanding of them seems just strange. It’s ok not to be an individualist, Marxist-Leninist isn’t traditionally an individualist movement and I would say that any movement that builds itself on collective action probably is less individualist then one that doesn’t.  Moving on.

FIRST HEROIC STAGE

“This was the first heroic period, and in which combatants competed for the heaviest responsibilities, for the greatest dangers, with no other satisfaction than fulfilling a duty.” You know, that sounds a lot like bullshit. A claim that something is done just for the fulfillment of a duty, especially something not routine, very dangerous and requiring a massive time investment instantly sets off alarms in my head. There can be altruistic reasons, there can be selfish reasons, there can be reasons that are both but to claim it’s for duty is… yea.

“In the attitude of our fighters could be glimpsed the man and woman of the future.”

Lying to themselves? Because like… I really don’t think it’s a real attitude.

“Finding the method to perpetuate this heroic attitude in daily life is, from the ideological standpoint, one of our fundamental tasks.”

Right, and I’m back to thinking there is a particular problem in that the utopian ideal of man doesn’t actually exist.

“In the history of the Cuban Revolution there now appeared a character, well defined in its features, which would systematically reappear: the mass. This multifaceted being is not, as is claimed, the sum of elements of the same type (reduced, moreover, to that same type by the ruling system), which acts like a flock of sheep.”

Right, and you’re back to talking about collectivism, because you’re doing the whole in-group/out-group thing where even actors taking individual actions, if done for a group goal instead of a personal goal are back to being not individualists again. That isn’t to say that collective gain can’t be the same as personal gain, but it’s about the reasoning to the action.

Wait, I think I see what he’s thinking. He’s thinking that a bunch of people all doing something on their own (their duty) towards a collective goal is individualist. I suppose that could be true, so long as membership of the mass isn’t dictated by that very collective action. If membership to the group is based on doing group activities, you’re not longer looking at individualists because inherently at some point group gain and personal gain are going to come into conflict.  

“It is true that it follows its leaders, basically Fidel Castro, without hesitation. But the degree to which he won this trust results precisely from having interpreted the full meaning of the people's desires and aspirations, and from the sincere struggle to fulfill the promises he made.”

…right then. You are very much not individualist, and either don’t know what the word means or are just spewing bull, but I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt.

I think, however, something is missing from this.

There is no mention of dissent, anywhere. What if two members of the mass want something different, or have different “desires and aspirations”? It is, of course, ignored.

PARTICIPATION OF THE MASSES

“…it [the mass] was hardened in the battles against various groups of bandits armed by the CIA;…”

That’s some high level Latin America right there, your political opponents are both CIA tools AND bandits? He’s probably right about CIA armed though, I just found the full accusations funny.

“Nevertheless, the state sometimes makes mistakes. When one of these mistakes occurs, one notes a decline in collective enthusiasm due to the effect of a quantitative diminution in each of the elements that make up the mass.”

Wait, has he redefined individualism to mean having moral now? No one expresses dissent, they just work at what they don’t want to do less hard. I can’t see any way for this to backfire, especially with small or compounding mistakes. But we know Cuba never made those, right?

“Clearly this mechanism is not enough to ensure a succession of sensible measures.”

Great, he understands that suppression of debate and conflicting opinions means that you can end up missing small problems, particularly when you only react by critical mass of outrage (which is expressed only by lack of enthusiasm, as Guevara is implying.)

“In this Fidel is a master. His own special way of fusing himself with the people can be appreciated only by seeing him in action. At the great public mass meetings one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate together in a dialogue of growing intensity until they reach the climax in an abrupt conclusion crowned by our cry of struggle and victory.”

You’re right back to ignoring dissenting opinions. This isn’t to say you should listen to them every time, but most better systems, like you describe you need, understand that the ‘will of the people’ can be split or contradictory or whatever else. More then ignoring it, Guevara is just literally pretending it doesn’t exist. Maybe he’s just going a little deep on rhetoric.

“Some phenomena of this kind can be seen under capitalism, when politicians appear capable of mobilizing popular opinion. But when these are not genuine social movements — if they were, it would not be entirely correct to call them capitalist — they live only so long as the individual who inspires them, or until the harshness of capitalist society puts an end to the people's illusions.”

…literally what? There are all kinds of social movement in society in general. Some are, as suggested, broken up, but there are many that are successful or make changes of a kind you don’t seem to care about. Does he just define social movement exceptionally narrowly? Even then, many reform based social movements stuck under capitalism. Or does he not consider literacy and print culture a social movement, does he not consider religion, does he not consider things like veganism?

It’s also somewhat funny in hindsight, as Marxist-Leninism prove to be one of the less durable ideological movements.

I have to be done for now, and Holy Christ I’m like 1/6th of the way done.

[inherentsleep-blog]

A small rant about a random post P2

General warning: this is still BM. I really hate have a general dislike for just about everything about post-scarcity in speculative political though and science fiction.

Once again, this is not a reply for the same reason as the other part.

The ‘seven reasons’ post I mentioned in the last part of this prompted this post too, but it’s been on my mind for a while. In particular, one of the reasons it’s ‘important’ according to the author is

“Individuality still matters. In a post-scarcity society, ingenuity and self-expression are not sacrificed on the altar of survival…”

The fundamental lynchpin of politics, economics and humanity in general is based off a simple concept: resources are scarce. It’s the economics problem, it’s the bane of utopians everywhere and it’s the concept that informs the human condition.

Post-scarcity exists as a speculative concept where that very axiom is rejected.

That’s an interesting concept.

The problem is that post-scarcity as it’s traditionally represented in just about all conceptions doesn’t actually do that.

Originally, I wanted to make a pithy comment about ‘if you asked 10 economists what is the most important resource, what do you think they would say’ but I quickly realised that 10 economists probably couldn’t agree on the colour of blue.

My point, regardless of that digression, was that human labour is the most important single resource within an economy. Human time, labour and opportunity cost make up the human facet of the economy, and the fundamental equation that you do not have unlimited time, unlimited effort and can only do one thing at once is unchanged by the conception of human scarcity. Human resources, in just about any post-scarcity society, remain scarce.

A real post scarcity piece of speculative fiction would involve some really strange stuff, where time moves at a chosen variable speed, effort is unlimited, and experiences are not singular.  None of that exists in most ‘post-scarcity’ conceptions. To be frank, I think most post-scarcity is just devoid of real deep though about a society totally based on human labour would run (especially one with near-unlimited human mobility) and instead tries to just remove all mediums of exchange and just put social norms in place of market norms in some weird utopian conception of a sharing economy. Most conceptions of the ideology are anti-capitalist in one way or another. That’s why I’m sort of surprised that an economy based on humanity with the addition of unlimited materialism (because that’s what most ‘post-scarcity societies’ within science fiction are) is then end of human imagination and advancement. You can ask any two year old: sometimes, just because there are a functionally unlimited amount of Lego, that doesn’t really matter. Because he wants that one. Maybe I should just write a post-scarcity criticism where everyone is represented by toddlers in a vast daycare run by impossible powers (AIs or the teachers, it’s really your choice.)

This is probably long enough for a ‘short rant’ and so I’m going to split my thoughts on individuality in a true human economy into it’s own post.

[inherentsleep-blog]

On vertical integration in the past and future.

The first question I should probably answer is ‘what is vertical integration?’ Vertical integration is when a company takes over all levels of the supply chain and production for a product. It’s not a new concept by any means. In the history of corporations, older examples like the VOC (Dutch East India company), United Fruit Company and even the nominally non-profit (and utterly evil) Association Internationale Africaine are all examples of this in the largest possible form of action. It started even with Italian merchant companies in the 1200s, and it’s an idea older then capitalism as a real institution. It is also, as can be seen by the kind of notoriety of these places, a very scary concept.

These are just some of the most high-profile examples, usually for the fact that their ‘vertical supply chains’ or otherwise corporate run nations can be quite terrible. They are corporate states, where a single corporation becomes a monopoly on a region of land. These companies in particular are imperialistic, not just in the ‘doing bad things’ use of the word, but in the sense that the home or headquarters of the company is not based within the company territory that makes up the de-facto state. Sometimes, like with the United Fruit Company, locals are left in power under a puppet government. Other times, like with the ‘Congo Free State’, a lax overarching and non-corporate government is put in place as a political tool but the government is run by the company and sometimes the company takes and administers lands in the name of a home country (like with the VOC and the Netherlands.)

Some companies are less total in their efforts to manage their supply chain, and don’t really seek political control. The reasoning is simple: bribes, administration and infrastructure (among other tools of control) are expensive.

Why then might a company choose to ‘go vertical?’

It is the only way to fully implement total control, total quality standards and manage resources in places that otherwise would not be able to host a company of that style. When done wrong, it tends to be a total failure, as many colonial companies ended up where the expensive. Why do it then?

Because when you do it right, it’s very, very profitable.

From small examples like mining and mill towns that built fortunes during the industrial age and on past the gilded age, there is profit in both monopoly and vertical growth. Even back to the largest company of all time (The VOC) you can see the potential benefits, with companies of a large enough size and power able to bring forth military support. The United Fruit Company and their Great White Fleet grew profits by six times over in seven years (1913 to 1920) and helped build the very term ‘banana republic’ when they became a true vertical company. Coups, underhanded negotiations and bulling tactics are all valid ground for a company too large to stop.

The disadvantage is that more specialised companies may be better at some aspects of production when compared to a vertical company. The advantage lies in control and quality, and therefor is naturally more beneficial when a monopoly can be maintained.

What about companies who operate in their own country? One famous case, that of Standard Oil, was hit with the anti-trust push of the gilded age. Company towns, built for shipping and mining and milling have long histories within North America of being dangerous organisations for their workers.

Some are seen as beneficial, especially the ones that built and developed infrastructure or education, but by-and-large they are not particularly beneficial for the state they intertwine with.

What happened to them then?

In the modern era, tax laws and competitive markets have seen a general decline in the vertical companies, with monopoly and anti-trust laws lurking in the background to dissuade new expansion. Both the economic and social conditions are generally resistant to their formation.

Yet we still imagine them. Why?

What of futuristic and imagined corporate states and powers? We impose things that we imagine and things from our history into our fiction, and corporate states are no different. In Sci-fi, space-based ‘mega corps’ are a mainstay, with corporate towns and cities re-imagined as entire corporate planets and systems (as space sci-fi often does, lacking the scope to present meaningful differences from world to world, but instead treating planets as cities in a new age of discovery and sail.)

Space, science fiction and the interrelation as (often unintended) commentary on the ages of colonisation, sail, empire and both the Victorian and guilded age interrelated our history and an imagined future based on our experience. Corporations, corporate nations and vertical companies operating in places without the ability to control them all are apart of that.

Closer to our modern world, different kinds of dystopian fiction imagine a world ruled by corporations, with impossible power and strength. Genres of fiction born at the dawn of the information age, most notably cyberpunk, imagine different kinds of corporate futures, some vertical and some simply with massive power.

What then, amid a need for great villains and the un-nuanced world of storytelling and the literary nature of the excesses of science fiction, might a true future ‘corporate state’ look like?

I think you have to go to the only true vertical company left, one that still runs its own towns, influences government and tries to monopolise its trade with impunity.

Saudi-Aramco is the largest company in the world. It is held privately, partly by the actual Saudi government and partly by the Saudi crown. It is probably the last true vertical corporation that exists today, and operates mostly within its own country under the control of its government, which enables it a local monopoly.

It also understands that oil cannot sustain it forever. The company is planning a small (five percent, perhaps) IPO. It may offer up to ten percent.

This is still, at minimum, a 170 billion dollar offering. For a company from a country with a general GDP of about 650 billion, that’s stunningly massive.

The company is also growing in power. The reforms within the country, the push to modernize business and attract trade, and most of all the Saudi 2030 plan all have the hallmarks of the company, and its growing influence. It is a personal estimation that by 2040 Saudi Arabia will be being run behind the scenes by the company at the behest of the royal family. Direct power will be replaced with indirect power as the company diversifies and tries to build itself into a larger company. Saudi Arabia, strangely, might very well be the first cyberpunk style ‘mega corp’ of the next era. With the power of traditionalist and draconian laws to crush opposition and a monopoly on economic might, it will be unrivaled within its nation. It already does much of the construction, why not the education and administration too? While costly, the ownership of the company and that of the country are one in the same, and the company profits are used to fund those things through taxes and then re-distributed.

Who will one day have more power, the owner of Aramco or the king?

Why couldn’t they be the same man.

When the country and the company come up against one another, why not support the beast that lets you profit more deeply? It has all happened before.

There are other ways, partly by the same model, that another company might grow in much the same style. As smaller nations in Africa and Asia really strike the development curb and start to protect themselves from the diseases ravaging their country (perhaps reliant on western medical advancement, but something that I imagine happening nonetheless, a company wishing to create a new ‘banana republic’ with a new kind of good that can benefit from African conditions, be it vast, cheep labour, good climate or weak regulations and a willingness to protect its own may very well emerge.

I think it more likely then not that such a company will show up in the next eighty years. Both international ability to enforce regulations and anti-trust laws are growing more and more toothless as western governments fail to adapt to new technological changes fast enough. Vertical integration, monopolies and a new gilded age, one where information is the new oil (and oil is the old oil, for a while longer at least) are something I can’t help but imagine in the future. Like all things, this is nuanced and not so clear cut as I might make it sound, but I think it’s something to consider.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Was the Civil War ‘treason’ and was it about slavery.

When you're talking about massive actions as treason, I think you have to look and allowable actions within a nation. While things like the Whiskey Rebellion might walk the line Arron Burr proved that treason requires a pretty strict amount of evidence, and not just what the president wants (even if the man in question is planning to invade Mexico and set up a monarchy, the Civil war is something pretty different.Treason doesn't mean inherently bad after all (though I might argue that the confederate positions were about as close to inherently bad as you can get in a binary debate), but I think the civil war was pretty clearly treason on the part of the confederate leadership. Their thoughts and intentions are very well recorded. Hamilton talked about being able to withdraw from the union right at founding. "a reservation of a right to withdraw […] was inconsistent with the Constitution, and was no ratification." He said. (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-05-02-0012-0099 source). What he was saying was that the Constitution would not have been ratified with a ‘leave clause’. Madison in a letter (http://www.constitution.org/jm/17880720_hamilton.txt) expressed similar feelings, and Washington shared the opinion, saying "In all our deliberations on this subject [the perpetuity of the government] we kept constantly in our view that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence". While an anti-federalist argument is that the states should be able to freely leave the union, as Madison noted, the anti-federalists were never able to ratify that opinion and states would not have been accepted if they insisted on the right to be able to leave.  "This idea of reserving right to withdraw was started at Richmd. & considered as a conditional ratification which was itself considered as worse than a rejection."

there was no point an ability to leave.

After the 1819 Missouri Crisis, southern politicians started swinging their political power around and pushing against the union. Secession was eventually brought up in a more serious fashion after years of union compromises to southern interests eroded federal power enough that it seemed like a reasonable option. The response to this 30 years of pushing by southern business interests, the founding and election of the republican party (an anti-slavery party). Southerners were terrified that their economic and political free reign was going to come to an end, even if absolute abolition was a very minority position. The slave states had HUGE disproportional political power thanks to the 3/5th compromise, but with the loss (and the upcoming future losses, as forced by demographics) mad them realize that things were going to get uncomfortable for them. The Nullification Crisis, and the fear in the Carolinas of northern economic pressure on their slave empire was then worded as an encroachment on 'state rights'. As the free states started to throw up resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, the south however did not support that. In fact, they used every tool they could to try and force the northern states back into line with the federal government. When they were unable to force the issue (due to a loss in power at the federal level with the rise of the republicans) , the talk turned to threats of succession. For over a decade, with things like the Georgia Platform in 1850, compromise was attempted, but the refusal of the northern states to send members of it's population into slavery came to a head with Jeff Davis's resolution that "sooner or later [that refusal would] lead the States injured by such breach of the compact to exercise their judgement as to the proper mode and measure of redress"

In other words, the southern states were threatening succession not over their own 'states rights' but because the free states were acting on their own, and it was hurting southern economic power.  When Lincoln, the republican was elected, South Carolina acted instantly to leave the union after both holding the election and refusing to list Lincoln on their ballots. You might then say 'It could not have been about slavery, because no one actually proposed emancipation, and they were just acting on their rights, but they neither had the right, the mandate nor the moral grounding to act to secede. This is only true in the national sense, it was still very much a slave-holding issue.

As a very old Madison put it, "[Secession at will] answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged," (full source http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch3s14.html). The southern generals and politicians were traitors who were acting in bad faith to attempt to preserve a system rigged in their favor because other states wished to exercise their right to have no part in slaving.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Liberalism and Rationality, 1

A short additional defense of freedom. Now that two rounds of edits have more then doubled the post in length, the title is somewhat tongue in cheek.  Nevertheless, this is a post about an additional benefit to multiple government systems (in this case looking at it applied to democracy)  that doesn’t really get enough talk, while dipping into (like most political posts must) my greater thoughts. Advocates and critics of democracy have debated for centuries about the various benefits and problems democratic rule. One feature of functioning democracies that I think is overlooked is the natural benefit of occasional shifts in policy as new parties are elected.

One of the stranger parts of modern economic theory is that while it’s known that as an individual people do behave rationally, there is some relatively strong evidence that they behave in ways approximating ‘rationally’ in larger groups like the markets. The idea of perfectly rational markets at this point I think has been fairly well debunked for a variety of reasons, with examples like the sudden spike of the CUBA stock (which is pretty well unrelated to the country Cuba) at the loosening of trade restrictions on the country serving as good demonstrations. How can this be, you might ask? The simple answer is that firstly, humans are not rational in the economic sense, but they are maximizers. This means they will attempt to do things in the way that best allows them to achieve their goals. Second, in large numbers those individual goals that people peruse start to look very ‘rational’. Thirdly, and most importantly, humans can learn from the observed mistakes of others.

The best way to discover if something is a good idea is not, in fact, to test it. If you have low ability to absorb risk, the best way to test something is to let someone else test it, and observe the result because this allows you to test more then one thing, or have more then one repeat of the test.  The risk of testing things yourself and the fact that humans are maximizers mean that when someone finds a system that works, or in many cases is personally profitable, they like to stick to it. An unfortunate part of this is that along with systems that provide actual innovations, some of the most profitable systems are the ones that exploit social rules and laws, and many of the most profitable do both. When someone (be it an individual or a company) finds a loophole to exploit as apart of their system, they will both use it, and importantly, test it for other people. If the first person to use it is not punished, the larger community will begin to adopt it, and after a generational turnover (so about 20 years, in my estimation) a loophole will propagate through the entire community.

This is the disadvantage of freedom, the same way that it is the advantage. People are able to attempt new things, and as some work and some fail, natural adaptation makes the greater community become more efficient in the given environment. Without that freedom though, it becomes far more difficult for people to behave in rational ways, because the constant test cases appear less often. Even if eighty percent of tests fail, the greater community will still grow more efficient, and faster then a system that just attempts to make singular good choices with less information. Because bad choices are an inevitable part of being human, a collection of smaller bad choices that do less damage are preferred to a longer one that may do catastrophic damage. This is the very source of the idea that a freer market is a more efficient market, because a freer market has more information and tests to work with. The much misinterpreted ‘invisible hand’ is a series of a lot of small failure and successes that add up into greater information.

The benefit of a democratic system that goes undiscussed is the idea that peaceful rule changes will invalidate at least some of the holes in the system, while not destroying actual innovation or capital. Even if a government party makes decisions that are non-optimal, if they are ‘good enough’ to not crash the system and shed the fat they fulfill a hidden objective. The natural aversion in most democracies to corruption also acts as one of many tools to helps to cut that fat (thought very clearly does not do it on its own). People are also able to recognize in many cases when a loophole is being exploited, if not what loophole it is. As far as I can see, anger over this exploitation of systems means that very few systems last very long after propagation really starts, a twenty-year generational shift usually being about the limit people are willing to bear. This natural anger and dislike of other people’s corruption and cheating means that democracies are able to get rid of at least a portion of the broken systems that plague complex human societies.

A system doesn’t have to be perfect to serve a purpose, and it better not need to because no system is perfect. This is partly because humans are maximizers, and if you give them long enough just about any static system will end up broken.

The boat has sails

Part of a response that I received (more then once) to this was well summed up by the idea that the democratic elections I was talking about “…just [take] funding, or manpower, or legislative processing time and directing it towards what that specific party wants the country to be like – it’s never going to work long-term…”. I think this feeling is echoed by a whole group of people. I would counter that was is being described is a revolution. Elections of course to take a level of financial commitment and time, but in most cases, this should be a mostly nominal amount of the funding and manpower of the country. I am not arguing for total direct democracy, but instead that these very changes that are being talked about both cost far less then a revolution, civil war or even a mass crackdown. More relevant though is the fact that they help dislodge a portion of the corruption both in the economic system and in the political system (the former being far more important for this example.) The gains from dislodging that corruption, which I have argued is at a certain level inherent to economic systems and will grow in a static system more then otherwise, provide a major boon to the country that doesn’t get talked about.

To talk with metaphors, the response described that “…compare the nation to more like a boat, and the party members and the government are the oarsmen. Each time they swap over to another party, the oarsmen try to paddle in the other direction. This means that the net displacement of the boat is going to be close to 0.” This seems like a compelling point, until one realises that with or without those oarsmen, technology is still advancing, quality of life is still growing in most places, GDP and productivity still see rises, the list goes on. A large and particularly competent government isn’t needed for growth, though a non-obstructive one is helpful. I would say that the wrong type of boat is being described altogether. The boat is moving along at a fair pace, and the part of the crew working the sails (as I made a point before) work those sails more effectively when they can make many small adjustments. Meanwhile, the ‘government’ side of things is a collection of drunk, rowdy sailors who are attempting to steer the boat. To use an example from Belgium, the central government was unable sit at all for several years following the financial crisis due to a hung parliament. The country preformed better then the average eurozone member, if not the best. The changing in course of the boat, to run this metaphor into the rocks, may slow it down or give it a rougher ride but barring someone destroying parts of the boat or totally obstructing the travel of the ship, the ship doesn’t have to sail perfectly straight to keep sailing.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Why Distributism, and why not?

There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the state, and the present capitalist system, in which the state is run by the big businesses.” – G. K. Chesterton

Distributism is an economic ideology that attempts to answer the serious fundamental problems with capitalism, particularly industrial era capitalism, while also not embracing the various issues with socialism.  It’s an interesting concept, and it’s something of a response to English liberalism, combining several ideas from that school with the social teachings of Catholicism into a hybrid ideology. It was first ‘popular’ in around the turn of the last century, and slightly after with 1910s What’s Wrong with the World coming at it’s height. A hundred years later, it has seen a something of a resurgence, with the internet functioning to connect several distributist communities and introduce new people to the ideology.

This essay is not an attempt to dismiss the ideology, rather it is an attempt to look at my basic problems with some of the more common ideas within the ideology. I hope that it will explain the reasons on why I don’t consider myself a distributist despite strong interest in the ideology.

“The problem with capitalism is too few capitalists, not too many.” – G. K. Chesterton

The general concept of distributism is a simple twofold concept: spread the means of production in a market system onto a so that every person can create their own products, and then have that growth drive success to local communities, in a major attempt to rebuild atomized social networks and strengthen local bonds. It also has a major social component which it seems as goals linked to the greater economics. It sees itself as a practical, realistic ideology based around local realities.

Most major distributists have been essayists, who broadly argue in favour of this concept and state that it ought to be executed, rather then lay down specific blueprints to be followed (if you disregard ideas like anti-trust laws, which are linked but not necessarily a core part of a distributist execution.)

For the people on the libertarian left that don’t reject markets entirely, it’s a compelling argument. The best parts of capitalism, but with an ethical base that focuses on the restoration of community bonds and natural restrictions on government powers. It sounds interesting, so what are the problems? If you agree with its goals, why is distributism not the answer? In short, distributism doesn’t actually do what it says it will. There’s no one distributist bible or manifesto, but the books and essays I’m choosing to examine are the 3 Papal Encyclicals, Chesterton’s ‘What’s Wrong with the World’, ‘The Outline of Sanity’, ‘Utopia of Usurers’, the major essay The Restoration of Property from Belloc, and differing theories from C. H. Douglass and Dorothy Day. I’m also going to be using looking at modern distributist interpretations of these works.

When it comes to modern distributism, there seem to be two main contemporary schools of thought. The first, presented most clearly in Jobs of Our Own by Race Mathews, is exemplified by the Mondragon corporation, and is a kind of hybrid shareholder mix. The second school of thought seeks to be more radical, relying on guilds as a way of providing a totally different alternative to global capitalism. I’m going to be addressing the second kind here, but the first is worth addressing as well.

“The means of production constitute two parts of this equation, namely land (facilities) and tools used to produce goods and deliver services.” Ownership of property is a core discussion of any basic economic system, and distributism is no different. What is ownership then? Belloc defines ownership as “the right to utilize, and direct utilization of, an item, particularly in production of economic goods or services.” This is an eloquent definition, but misses an important element: ‘the right to utilize, without payment and without conditions.’ I don’t think that anyone who has rented an apartment has thought that just because they have the right to use the apartment therefore means that they have ownership of it.

In Britain, the distributist slogan was ‘Three acres and a cow’, and was used as a summary by Chesterton. It also highlights a core problem in distributism. How do you allow the use of advanced production methods while still having ‘democratic’ ownership? Renting these tools to use, even under a form of self employment, doesn’t actually count. A modern factory farm that sees a profit of a couple million dollars a year requires a minimum of 12000 acres, and for larger farm three or four times that. ‘Three acres’ is a non-starter to farms like that, but the major point is this: the concept of productive property is an intensely fuzzy one, and it often operates on a scale much larger then a single person. How then, should a distributist organise the hierarchy of production?

This challenge is one that distributist theory has asked since its inception. Some modern proposals for different hybrid systems seem interesting and have promise. However, an ‘old school’ distributist proposal that has regained popularity in the last few years is that of guilds. Whenever any form of hybrid model involving distributism is suggested, I have found, a distributist attempts to point out all the inherent problems of capitalism, and puts forth the idea of guilds. I wish to argue that after consideration, guilds are simply a fairly terrible idea.

“My own reading of the evidence is that a common theme underlies guilds’ activities: guilds tended to do what was best for guild members.” – Ogilvie

Guilds are not a new institution, by any means. Most proponents of a guild system seem to want a more modern take on the older guild system. So, what does this mean? A guild system generally works like this: an organisation is formed at a local level to try and produce a single product, good or service where members of the guild share some level of resources, train and induct new members. They generally have some form of common ownership or method to acquire the tools to work, a concept of internal apprenticeship, and have a majority of the members ‘run the business’ which, to give a modern comparison, functions more like a restaurant chain where different members run different stores, with the number of stores is usually based around how many members it takes to make a particular product (and the demand, of course).

Proponents of guilds like to point out the positive economic effects that they had in some areas in the past. This ignores a massive amount of information we have on how organisations like guilds function. Guilds, like almost any organisation, will attempt to do what it thinks is best for its members. More then that, it will attempt to do what is best for its most powerful and influential members. This fact becomes a problem because once a guild is in place, it has an advantage of capital in a limited market and therefore becomes extremely hard to dislodge. The guild can then, as they did in the past, act to protect and enrich their members at the expense of consumers and non-members. One needs only to look at the various problems people had with public sector unions or other similar organisations to get an idea of what that could look like in a wider market. When someone can co-operate and take higher profits, if they can simply co-opt anything that could force them to compete, they will naturally attempt to act in their own interest and make the highest profit possible.

One may point out that a guild is not actually a monopoly but instead is an oligopoly, and oligopolies naturally like to collapse into competition. The reason why this isn’t the case can be found in game theory. In a relatively closed market with the same main participants, especially among co-workers and other guild members, people are no longer playing a ‘prison game’, where the rational decision is to betray the other participants, but are instead playing an ‘extended prison game’, where the rational choice is to co-operate and if betrayed, respond in kind. This means that while there would be occasional outliers (as people don’t behave rationally at all times, and there are other factors as to why they might not co-operate) and occasional price wars (as people find what actually is the rational choice through observation and testing) the oligopoly will trend back towards an exploitative monopoly style of pricing.

The natural problems of guilds get worse. Guilds are not only a collection of members, but an organisation onto its own, and will naturally attempt to protect itself. Because guilds are local to an area, a large guild will wield a proportionally larger amount of local political power. Like how corporations must naturally have the goal of maximising profits (in the short and/or long term) guilds must naturally have the goal to protect and enrich its members, since that’s the reason the entity exists in the first place. A guild cannot, by nature, diversify, so new technological innovations, that would force some of its members into frictional unemployment, would naturally be combated with the political and economic power of the guild. Innovation and technology cannot be delayed forever, but a guild can certainly attempt to delay the adoption or use of a new technology for as long as it can. The nature of an economy composed almost completely of actors who don’t want to see innovation in their field is therefore one that will struggle to both innovate and act in its best interest in the long run. As the individual actors only see the general benefit of a larger economy when things are innovated, and may see a loss of economic and political status within that economy, the cost vs benefits of allowing and funding innovation is discouraging to said individual actors. This forces a guild economy to be sluggish and resistant to change by nature.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely. – Pournelle

Guilds also have a natural problem for new members, namely the buying in and buying out problem. This problem is that guilds, by nature, have major issues with people both entering and exiting the guild. Guilds the world over have had different methods to enter the guild, but these guilds have often relied on the law to enforce their right to do business as a monopoly. To enter a guild, someone must either make a financial contribution equal to what the other members have contributed to the guild, eventually receive equal status after being an apprentice (and receive tools and training in return for years of service to the guild), or be allowed to enter the guild as a normal member without making the same contributions as normal members. These solutions (and several less popular ones, which I won’t go into detail here) have serious problems, which are inherent to them. Buying in requires a large reserve of capital, and would often place a less experienced member as if they were of equal experience and status as senior members. Apprentice training means that the senior members of the guild make decisions about the future of the guild without the influence of the youngest members, meaning choices that give the most benefit to the senior members will naturally first considered. It also means that rapid expansion of any kind to meet a rise in demand is very difficult, as rapid introduction of new members both dilutes the power of the current members and creates problems in both the training and power structure of the guild. Entering as a normal member with no buy-in means the guild is functionally damaged by new members, and if this is attempted to be diluted by a government program it simply functions as a way for the guild to exploit the greater public.

Guilds within distributism as an ideology suffer a further, more conceptual problem which I like to call the capitalist problem. Distributism wishes to suggest that the problem is not too may capitalists, but too few. I would suggest that a tradesman that produces a single good within an existing framework, even if working for his own benefit, is not really a capitalist at all. He or she has little investment in the overall success and growth of the economy, and have few incentives to behave ‘rationally’ for the growth of the greater economy. Friedman said, “The overthrow of the medieval guild system was an indispensable early step in the rise of freedom in the Western world.” While many distributists may roll their eyes at Friedman, his point is not just one of social freedom, but also one of economic freedom. The guild system is a major block for people attempting to behave in a way that benefits the greater society, even tangentially. While perhaps the rich and the large corporations within capitalism need to be forced to ‘internalise their externalities’, actors within a guild system have near to no incentive at all to attempt to benefit the greater whole, because they, like a worker with no stake, is not enfranchised to the success of anything but himself and those directly connected to him.

The problems with a guild economic system are many, inherent and varied. Further, I fail to see how a guild system addresses most of the problems that are posed about a capitalist system. None of the problems presented here are insurmountable, but the number of problems ‘requiring surgery’ to fix, which can then lead to more problems of their own, lead me to think that guilds are not a good solution. The question I must pose about guilds is this: what problems do they suggest to fix? They seem to be designed to decrease the power of international corporations, and the supply chain mentality of capitalism, but guilds are, in my eyes, the unholy combination of some of the worst parts of both unions and corporations, in a system designed for political exploitation.

“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” – Shakespeare

This entire discussion, however, is somewhat moot. Much like most discussions of relatively fringe economic and political ideologies, it ignores the dragon in the room. This is the capitalist problem, the very existence of capitalism as a system. Capitalism exists, and what it is undeniably very, very good at disrupting traditional, sluggish and closed economies, because they are very much ripe for profit at the hands of the capitalists. To be very blunt, I have yet to see any aspect of a guild distributist system, that even if it managed to be implemented, would be able to resist the return and collapse to capitalism for more then a couple of generations. The guild capitalist system is building a system that’s almost as vulnerable as possible to capitalist takeover to the first political or economic collapse.

The alternative proposals of distributists are much more functional, and as I mentioned before, things like anti-trust laws, co-ops and the corporate model put forward by Mondragon all provide new avenues for the ideology. I question why, then, a reasonable number of distributists seem to shun these ideas despite their clear ability to improve the lives of people. I came up with two real answers that question. First, there are several distributists, and left wingers in general, who don’t seem to care much at all for the reality around us and instead want to build disconnected theoretical systems without regard for practical problems (such as, for example, the problem that the existence of capitalism presents). To this I can only ask that people look to real problems, and real solutions instead of ideological platitudes. Second, some feel that disregarding a near revolutionary attempt to modify capitalism goes against the social teachings of distributism.

Distributism is more then just a left wing economic ideology. It contains a major social component, and emphasises things like moral economics and strong community bonds. This social aspect is also what differentiates it from other ideologies in the same ‘political sphere.’ Partly because of this differentiation, the more practical side of distributism, the part with collective corporations and some social compromises can be sidelined in favor of a more ‘pure’ ideological expression of distributist social policy. In some ways, even this more practical side fails to propose usable solutions. With some adjustment and work however, I think this side of the ideology could turn into something useable. Like all things however, it will require compromise and hard work.

“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.” – G. K. Chesterton

There is a social world idealised by distributist thinkers, and fundamentally many of the economic institutions are linked attachments to this vision. Like all men will, I find some aspects of the various theories that I disagree with, but others that I find more problematic in a general sense, in the sense that there are internal problems within them that will need to be addressed to at least make a best effort to avoid internal collapse. This is by no means a complete discussion or criticism of distributist social ideas, but more some simple problems that I find most social proposals face.

At the very core of the distributist social policy (I at least will argue) is an idea that comes from catholic social teachings. Subsidiarity, the idea that decisions should be made at the lowest level they can realistically be made at. This very concept is both difficult to implement because it requires balancing a constantly shifting power base wherein government must not be too strong nor too weak. It is however, interesting because it is a very good idea at the core of many western ideologies: the idea that by allowing people to make their own decisions, they are best able to see and address their own needs. More then that, the ability to use the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ or constant testing and adjustment from people making decisions and observing results allows constant improvements in efficiency. The larger problem presented is then how to protect that ideology.

But however extensive and far-reaching the influence of the State on the economy may be, it must never be exerted to the extent of depriving the individual citizen of his freedom of action. It must rather augment his freedom while effectively guaranteeing the protection of his essential personal rights. – Pope John XXIII

A system built on subsidiarity has a basic problem where economies of scale mean that large scale production is often more efficient, and that comparative advantage implies the way that something should be created. The second problem is by far easier to address. As has been said “If Brittan used comparative advantage to decide how to expand, it would still be farming sheep as it’s main industry.” In short, comparative advantage ignores a whole bunch of other aspects of production and society, and letting it dictate policy (China should make us goods because they do it cheaper, for example) has so many internal flaws that its hard to even cover all of them. The efficiency problem is a larger one. When the problem is raised, others are quick to decry the cause of materialism, talk about how we simply do not need all the goods we consume. This entirely misses the point, because the most dangerous part of economies of scale to a society on subsidiarity is the fact that it can apply to social and cultural phenoms. The internet is a very pertinent example: it is more influential and useful for it’s size, because more, better and cheaper information and goods are available. No ‘local internet’ can ever match it for it’s raw capability or production of any sort of culture. Material goods are related to materialism, but the mass production of attractive ideas is harder to deal with.

This is the multinational problem. Many of the most valuable companies on earth right now deal far less with physical goods and far more with social and cultural goods. A major portion of the value provided by smartphones and TVs is not the hardware, it is what they give access to. Multinational in general have for a very long time been better able to produce everything from culture to international polities. To give an example that may be somewhat on the nose, the Catholic church is the original multinational. Its production of ideas, culture and language acted as a unifying element in Europe while society was far more disunited. The Church however is no longer the only ‘kid on the block’ and partially by design, subsidiarity is badly vulnerable to a multinational culture engine. In the same way that the church may fill this role in society, so can Disney and with clearly worse intentions. Churches, for any disagreement with doctrine, are usually societies with the goal of helping people. Encouraging worship of the ‘mouse god’ has no such compunctions.

“To create what it does, Hollywood has to draw young people, often of unstable temperament, from all over the world. It plunges them into exacting work—surrounds them with a sensuous life– and cuts them off from the normal sources of living” – Max Lerner

A concept that seems to be popular to distributist is the ‘society of artisans’ as a solution to replace the ‘much-hated’ mass media. Distributist are almost by nature at least somewhat counter-culture and I think that nature has blinded the community to the reality of how culture and entertainment are produced. The promotion of local culture is something that should be celebrated, but there is no reasonable reality where a society of artisans are able to compete with mass culture, partly because culture is strengthened and improved (or ‘improved’) on by sharing and working with it. A fairly large number of cultural consumers are required to support an artisan of any kind, and just by nature not everyone will enjoy a local culture even when promoted. A society of artisans as a basic concept is an interesting idea that deserves support. A society of artisans as a tool to replace mass culture with local culture is a pipe dream. Local culture can be nurtured and supported, but in many cases, it requires a community to foster it, which is why there have been ‘cultural centers’ for hundreds of years. Hollywood and it’s ‘linked’ culture industries are not some weak, stupid entity that will simply be pushed aside by stronger social bonds. People study their art for years, and Hollywood is the worlds single largest cultural center. An actual (well designed, detailed and adaptable) social plan is required for any real attempt to deal with culture centers to have a chance of succeeding. We do not have one.

In an entirely different direction, the society that distributists imagine is one with great social capital. This social capital will be a driving engine of the distributist society. There have been a good number of studies covering the benefits of high social capital, but there are also a few noted drawbacks. The one that is concerning here is a basic problem when a society trust all its members. In a society where there is a great deal of trust, the society begins to be less able to judge the risk of both economic bubbles, and of social extremism. In a society where this trust is core to the very bonds of society, a dangerous scenario for collapse appears. An asset class or investment begins being overvalued by the community. It becomes tied to things like civic pride, and national adventure, and even as some people realise that heavy investment may be a bad idea, community trust keeps the assets propelled forward. The asset, as it was doomed to, then collapses. Angry and unwilling to blame themselves (as most societies are), a form of political extremism promising to fix the problems they have is presented, and is able to take hold. The distributist society is damaged, and may never recover parts of its former social capital. This is not a random scenario. I would characterise a more common example of this being the Scottish colonial expedition to Darien, which bankrupted the country and eventually lost both Scottish independence to the Articles of Union and damaged the social capital of the country so badly that is has never fully recovered. The rise of fascist states is another example, if a very tired one at this point. A distributist society need some major plans to help deal with this potential, and while it is by no means impossible, I have seen little to no discussion about it. No one wants the collapse of the distributist experiment to the Darien of Mars.

Others welcome the teaching on the “option for the poor,” the duties of government to protect the weak, the warnings against unbridled capitalism, but seem to ignore the centrality of family, the emphasis on economic initiative, and the warnings against the bureaucratic excesses of a “social assistance” state. – National Conference of Catholic Bishops

The problem of social security is one that must be asked about distributist societies. I have seen several good suggestions for what should be in place when we have finished building a distributists society, but the actions of the now there seems to be far fewer good suggestions about. Clearly, different elements of welfare do not function as one would want them too. Modern suggestions of different kinds all show up, but as I first read about them the distributist suggestions seemed strangely lacking. I later realised what was missing: distributist were making a usually implicit assumption that the church would be the main instrument for local charity. This problem doesn’t show up everywhere, but some thinkers seem to ignore both the fact that some places do not have a strong church to fill this role, or the problem (one that can be accepted or ignored, but still a problem) that charity from organisations like a church is highly variable, and that’s dangerous to those most in need. Past however you want to implement further charity, there is an absolute minimum that needs to be maintained, and just ‘remove and replace with a variable system’ may not fill that gap. While a dependency on the ‘servile state’ maybe be very much less then optimal, the solutions presented and embraced by distributism do not seem to yet fill that gap.

In many cases, I don’t really disagree with the stated aims of distributism. Every ideology has inherent problems within, and implementation is a matter of ‘picking your poison’ and doing your best to mitigate the known problems and find solutions to the new ones as they arise. Distributism however, seems to have a fundamental problem wherein those within the ideology both refuse or fail to understand the strengths of the system they are combating, and give desired results instead of proper policy suggestions. This flaw is by no means unique to the ideology, but distributist literature consistently (partially, probably because the authors are influenced by one another) fails to provide an actual account of what should be done, though it enjoys talking both about where we should go and how we got here.

For example, distributists often wish to see a proliferation of “people’s banks” in place of the larger institutions, and enjoy giving examples like their expansion in Lombardy or the attempted programs in eastern Canada. What seems far less common is actual accounts of how to do this. The solution is clearly not easy, in part because one must play a balancing act between what the government must do without giving government too much power to do it and at the same time decrease reliance on the very government required to execute this plan. This type of solution will therefor by nature must be one of compromise and tailored to a local environment, and may lack most to all the elegance normally in distributist writings.

“Somebody said to me, ‘But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.’ That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool.” – Paul McCartney

I expressed the fact that distributists do not appear to recognise the main strengths of both globalism and capitalism. The strength of ‘global capitalism’ applies in three main places. First, it allows vast concentrations of capital to be applied to places where they will be most ‘efficiently used’ through things like the stock market. Even if unequal or imperfect, the growth driven by capitalism is undeniable, and the material gains offered by the system are tantalising. Second, the rapid exchange of ideas brought by immigration, working together and shared assets which allows improvement. At any time and with a relatively nominal amount of effort, an American can invest or do business in a Japanese company if they feel that new ideas, practices or concepts are better and may learn from that experience. Thirdly, it offers these major systematic gains (of material resources and new, efficient ideas) to the individual as apart of their participation in the system, without strings attached. Gains in the system are unequal, by nature and this allows someone to regardless of problems, traditions or circumstances a chance to fully participate in the system.

A most recent example of this, and why I think the basic proposition of traditional distributism without alteration is doomed to failure happens in Mongolia. Socialist society in the country was never truly able to take hold in the face of nomadic individualism. Global capitalism, on the other hand is rapidly evolving the culture. Capitalist expansion there is mostly unplanned and spontaneous, but material goods and global ideas are changing the culture. Shepherds are using motorcycles instead of horses, and the Bukhanka is becoming the preferred way to travel the steppe. While business was once done entirely with people you at least may have trusted and sealed with a handshake, more and more the nature of capitalism is substituting capital for relationships. Consumerism and the allure of new goods has taken hold in the country, driven partly by mass media and partly by observation of societies with more things. This transformation is able to happen because society doesn’t have to fully change to allow these modifications: if a former horseman wants to buy a motorcycle, he can. Traditional culture of a business by handshake, just like in the west and like promoted by distributism is under slow but inevitable siege by capitalism. I don’t see a distributist policy that can stop this spread.

When talking about protentional solutions that could be embraced, I think you cannot ignore the major catholic component to the philosophy. The very nature is intertwined with Catholicism, as it really is half of the basis for the ideology. This is not an inherent problem, but it is something that must be noted. Major portions of the suggested implementation that to just have holes. These, in reality, are not holes but instead places where a strong catholic church would fit into. The international connection, much of the charity, one of the main uniting forces for the much talk about community trust roles that are left to be filled by the church. If you are not catholic, or more distrust any church having that much social power as they once did, this must present an problem. More, I feel that this gap can be filled to less ‘wholesome’ intentions by different kinds of international organisation, which the ideology is by design quite vulnerable to. This presents another major issue when trying to combat global capitalism, who is defined by it’s powerful international organisations.

“All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.” – G. K. Chesterton

My problem is one both of distributism, but more then that, of distributists. Nearly all distributists live and write about the west, the very heartland of capitalism. For all the rhetoric, western states have a high standard of living, mostly functioning institutions, complex economies and a falling number of Catholics. Distributism was born ‘once upon a time in the west’ and has developed with (at least a form of) western values and ideas. I fear radical distributist are picking just about the hardest battle they could fight, against what is probably the world’s most successful ideology to it’s most fortunate children in its homeland. There are other places in the world however, many places in both Latin America and Africa with many Catholics, vulnerable governments and a population base that has been damaged badly by the different forms of international capitalism. Yet I see almost no work, no ideas on how the ideology could be adapted to both the places that need it most, and the places where it has a chance to be attempted. The ideology is restricted by its nature. To restrict it only to its places of birth is to prevent it from having anything near its best chance to succeed.

Distributism is not a dead ideology by any means. Before a problem can be fixed, it must both be identified, and it must be decided if it is the problem that needs to be fixed at all. To me, the number of problems I see within the ideology, and the only solutions that I can suggest probably would no longer make me a distributist at all. I am not, however, the most brilliant thinker or do I believe I have even a basic portion of the possible answers. For distributism to move forward however, it must recognise where it has failed in the past, and where it is likely to fail in the future. Like most fringe political communities, many distributists have become more attached to the rhetoric and romance in the ideology then the reality of trying to build a distributist state. If distributism is ever going to be more then a collection of very pretty essays, and a footnote of capitalist policy, it needs to change that.