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| American Common-Wealth De-Centralist Coalition ~ January 20th, 2017 |
Why Decentralism? Assorted Rejoinders to the Idea
that Bigger is Better
by David S. D’Amato ~ January 14, 2015
Stressing the anti-centralization impulse in libertarianism, D’Amato envisions a future without bureaucratic central planners—socialist or corporate.
In her book Decentralism: Where It Came From – Where Is It Going?, Mildred J. Loomis, close friend and acolyte of the consummate do-it-yourselfer Ralph Borsodi, encapsulates the decentralist impulse: “Decentralists heed Ralph Borsodi’s recommendations to keep units of production, ownership, control, education, government, and population small enough to allow persons involved to meet face-to-face, to know the facts, to really understand and deal with the issues at hand.”1 Decentralists desire a radical reduction in the power and prerogatives of large, hierarchical organizations, hoping to contract our political and economic forms in order to make them accountable to the actual, flesh-and-blood human beings they are supposed to serve. Our reasons for desiring this diminution of the size and scope of institutions is not arbitrary or mysterious, but based on a recognition of historically identified problems with massive, monolithic bodies—be they “public” or “private.” We are localists because we have observed the disconnect and polarity between those in power, the world’s ruling classes, and those subject to power. Today, libertarians ought to take great care to identify our political and economic outlook as distinctly “decentralist,” perhaps more even than we embrace labels such as “anarchist” or “libertarian” or “free marketeer.” In the last century, elites in centralized, hierarchical society, with its vertical, command-and-control relationships, accomplished their goal of abstracting the individual out of her own life, removing her mentally, physically, and emotionally from the things she must do to live—everyday activities like eating, working, moving about, and friendly engagement with her neighbors. Indeed, centralized, authoritarian institutions have attempted to destroy the very notion of neighbors, that unique identification with and affection for the groups of people with whom one interacts most closely and familiarly. Likewise, the huge multinationals of the corporate economy have increasingly rendered work a detached, wearisome affair, an exercise in the ability to stomach a soul-destroying, achromatic world of sterile “best practices” wherein genuine individuality, originality, and innovation are conspicuously wanting. Decisions revolve around small focal points of institutional power, removed from criticism or feedback, often enthralled to still larger hierarchies, or so interconnected to them as to be practically dependent. These impersonal and lifeless bureaucracies under which we live out our lives have left us alienated, wondering if there’s a point and increasingly convinced that there isn’t one. Libertarianism presents a resonant alternative, but only insofar as we hold dear its indispensible decentralist character, the part of our tradition which submits the possibility and potential of another way of living.
The Haymarket anarchist Adolph Fischer summarized anarchism’s opposition to “centralistic society” in a letter to Dyer Lum from Cook County Jail in early 1887, writing that “the real issue” is “centralism vs. decentralism,” with both “State Socialism and capitalism” representing the former, anarchism the latter.2 Today’s free market libertarians ought not summarily dismiss Fischer’s insight. In the middle of the twentieth century, Paul Goodman likewise noted commonalities evincing the kinship between the various “socialist alternatives” of the time and the capitalist, “corporate liberal societies”—“gigantic statism” and “dangerous and dehumanizing” top-down authority. Goodman was not taken in or mislead by the idea that there were meaningful, substantive differences between systems that all relied decisively on such “excessive centralization of decision making” (whether denominated progressivism, socialism, or communism).3 Identifying a pervasive “centralizing style of organizing” as the theme running through the twentieth century’s account of progress and modernity, Goodman’s anarchism suggests a return to voluntary association, to cooperative forms that give each member a stake and a say. No exception to the centralizing principle, capitalism as it exists today (and indeed always has existed) is a highly centralized, bureaucratic phenomenon, concentrating wealth and power where a free market would tend to disperse and disintegrate them. Rather than deviating from mainline libertarian thought, proceeding on some eccentric departure from its basic precepts, anti-capitalist libertarians are in fact continuing a long tradition that binds libertarianism to decentralism, arguably making anti-capitalism a necessary condition of libertarianism. “Capitalism,” of course, is an equivocal term used in different ways in different sectors of the libertarian tradition. The American individualist anarchists, for example, championed laissez faire and regarded unfettered free market competition as a form of socialism; these libertarians saw capitalism as a statist system of class rule which coercively privileges the owners of capital.
Discussing decentralist pioneers such as Herbert Agar, historian Dona Brown observes that, like Fischer at the end of the nineteenth century, twentieth century decentralists refused to give credence to the mainstream narrative, which pitted totalitarian fascism or communism on the one hand against American capitalism on the other.4 For decentralists, this was a false choice, a shallow and deliberate dismissal of the more interesting, penetrating claim that indeed “neither fascism nor communism was truly opposed to capitalism,” both epitomizing “a greater concentration of power and resources as the top.”5 Libertarians are taught to laud capital accumulation as the route to productive investment, and thus to innovation and general prosperity, but in doing so we have neglected those aspects of our tradition that demonstrate the dark side of accumulated wealth. This unfortunate tendency to commend concentrated wealth and economic power—and accordingly great disparities in wealth—glosses over the historical connections between economic power and its political twin, a close analysis of which disillusions the idea of the capitalist as a creator and engine of creative transformation.
Decentralists have always addressed the need to return purpose and meaning to human lives at once trapped and cast adrift in a regimented, stratified world of centralized power and what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.” The anarchistic egoism of Max Stirner offers an incisive analysis of modern society. “Stirner was concerned with the alienation of the person from self,” with the innumerable, intertwined social forces estranging an individual from her own reality, interests, and desires—from self-realization and -fulfillment generally.6 Following Stirner, extrapolating his egoist ideas, post-left anarchists have made opposition to work itself a centerpiece of their thought. Repudiating the language and tactics of leftists, preoccupied as they are with the traditional labor movement and its assorted ideologies (e.g., socialism, syndicalism, communism, collectivism), egoists such as Wolfi Landstreicher have named work “the theft of life.”7 For most of us, the life-devouring reality of work in the corporate economy is a far more direct and palpable tyranny than are any of the actions of the formal state. The advent of work as we now understand it—a discrete object of study containing such elements as, for example, careerism, professionalism, credentialing, specialization—is a relatively recent affair.
New scholarship from political scientist Daniel Just continues to develop a “genealogy of the modern conception of work” and “the invention of work,” arguing that work has gradually taken on a new character as the cynosure of social life and the focus of a wholesale “recalibrat[ion] of individual existence.”8 The modern idea of work reinvents it as something more than merely those activities undertaken to provide ourselves with nutriment, raiment, and shelter. Rather it is the principal device, defined through job titles, relationships, emoluments, and academic degrees, through which we appraise our worth, character, and rank in society. Speaking of ourselves in the language of “branding,” we carefully curate and cultivate our various incarnations, overlapping versions projected through social media, résumés, and membership in both social and professional clubs; always at the center of all this careful posturing is the question “what do you do?,” that is, the question of one’s placement within the endless bureaucratic pyramids of the centralized, corporate economy. Largely passively or unconsciously, giving into the powerful undercurrent of centralized culture and values, we have relinquished the chance to self-define, to choose our own values and projects.
Relatedly many decentralists have criticized technology a force for centralizing and systematizing daily life, for disengaging us from one another and extending the control of large institutions. As philosopher Peter Kreeft observes, “[T]he chief effect upon our lives of all those millions of time-saving devices with which technology has enriched our lives has been to destroy leisure rather than to enhance it. No one has any time anymore.”9 Recent studies confirm that “Americans [are] working longer hours than at any time since statistics have been kept,” and that our economic system’s workaholic ways are linked to “a greater risk of heart disease, stroke and even diabetes.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that the twentieth century’s totalitarian statism, and the unthinkable slaughter and devastation it meant, followed (and attended) periods of great technological and industrial development. The marriage of war and technology gave way to a nightmare of mechanized slaughter, the deaths of tens of millions in two world wars.
Moreover Stirner’s insights on alienation are necessarily connected to ideas explored in Ivan Illich’s “Disabling Professions,” notably, the delusion that experts and technocrats in “monopolistic oligarchies” know best, the rest of us falling in line behind accepted wisdom enunciated from on high.10 Widespread confidence in and reliance on privileged experts depends perforce on the individual’s alienation. Only with such pervasive self-denial and alienation can a centralized, hierarchical society such as our own perpetuate itself, with its abysmal chasms separating individuals and communities from self-determination, self-sufficiency, and self-actualization. As a practical matter, inert, centralized institutions have made us childlike, their wards or dependents, our lives and livelihoods determined by a complex of top-down structures we had no say in building. Such institutions are naturally refractory to the forces of change and innovation; where horizontal organizational forms are flexible and capable of responding to external stimuli that affect their collective missions, rigid hierarchies are inherently, structurally incapable of such responses. Law professor Butler Shaffer has employed ideas from the study of chaos to analyze common assumptions about organizations and firms, revealing the “creative change and growth” which result from the turbulence and disequilibrium of seemingly chaotic and disorderly nonlinear systems.11 Shaffer shows that, perhaps counterintuitively, the fate of all “stabilized systems” is inevitable “entropic death,” the breakdown that occurs as a consequences of the system’s inability to “develop[] more complex patterns of orderliness,” to “respond creatively by moving to higher levels of order.”12 The Panic of 2008 offers just one recent example of the vulnerabilities created by the centralization and bureaucracy of the United States economy, its susceptibility to the processes of entropy Shaffer treats. For all of the obsessing and focus on “the economy,” crisis after crisis seems now to be an inevitable aspect of modern life.
Discussing the work of political economist Maurice Dobb, Timothy Shenk notes the emergence (or perhaps “invention”) of the economy as something that “existed apart from society,” an independent item that “could (and should) be measured, modeled, and managed by economists.” The birth and development of this notion of the economy, a departure from the tendency of classical economists to treat economic issues as aspects of broader social, moral, or political philosophy, corresponds with the more general trend of specialization in the academy. Academic specialization, in turn, proved useful to the growing central state and to modes of social planning that more and more implicated collaborations between the formal state and corporate power.13 Such collaborations have been a feature of the way that the centralist idea has developed in the “liberal democracies” of the Western world. Centralization is thus also closely wedded to what political scientist James C. Scott calls “high modernist ideology,” the coopting or misappropriation of “the legitimacy of science and technology” in the service of a new faith in the ability to comprehensively and centrally plan human society.14 High modernism embraces a specific understanding of progress and order, one in which human beings—leaders and experts in particular—are capable of calculatingly mastering nature and social institutions, bringing them into conformity with distinct, utopian designs.15 High modernists, typifying centralists of all stripes, believed that science could replace the political process and its traditional questions, that with an adequate level of technical knowledge, expertise could obviate the very need for politics. In a similar way, the invention of the economy removed inquiries traditionally regarded as political or philosophical to the demesne of economics experts, an attempt to reduce political economy to the “hard science” of economic models and blueprints.
Describing the growth of centralized modern government and its expansion into ever more areas of life, C.S. Lewis remarked that now “[o]ur whole lives are their business,” all of us “tamed animals” and subjects of a government run by technocrats “in the name of science.” Lewis thought that we are so fully tamed indeed that we “should probably starve” if we ever were to escape the cages of the modern state. James C. Scott wonders similarly if the state has succeeded in fully destroying the natural, decentralist impulses of mutual aid, cooperation, and horizontal association, if it is possible today to successfully break away from hierarchy, bureaucracy, and authority.16 But decentralists nevertheless have reasons to be optimistic. Decentralist arguments and insights transcend traditional political divides, pointing to a way out of an alienating existence spent negotiating the passages of huge anonymous corporate and government bodies.
Source: https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/why-decentralism-assorted-rejoinders-idea-bigger-is-better
Why Decentralism? An Exit and a Promising Alternative
by David S. D’Amato ~ April 2, 2015
D’Amato examines the arguments presented by a range of advocates for decentralism in government and the private sector.
Starting with my previous column on decentralism, I have been considering the idea of decentralism as it relates to the philosophy of liberty and investigating the practical implications of this connection. Libertarians ought to carefully evaluate the claim that our principles, once enacted, would lead to smaller organizations with more horizontal management structures. The historical and ideological ties that bind decentralism and libertarianism are strong, the two being close kin, complementing and underpinning one another. Given the degree of political and economic centralization existing today, libertarians must make a close reassessment of decentralism a priority; indeed, it is a necessity if libertarianism is to provide relevant answers to today’s social, economic, and environmental problems.
The American individualist anarchists regarded economic centralization and, in Josiah Warren’s terminology, “artificial combinations” as obstacles to genuine independence and thus to equitable economic relations; they saw capitalism not as a system of private property and free competition, but as fundamentally a system of middlemen, rent-seekers, and rent-takers taking a toll on commercial transactions as a result of privileges granted to them against the principles of free markets and free access to natural resources. Fully free markets would, they argued, have a dispersive and distributive effect, a centrifugal force whose results would, by definition, be the fairest distribution of wealth. Through his own experiments, reactions to his experiences with Robert Owen’s hierarchical and centrally planned utopianism, Josiah Warren was dedicated to “showing how competition is converted into being a regulator rather than a destroyer,” to ending the conflict between labor and capital that was the focus of the socialist project during Warren’s life.
Warren’s socialism was always ultimately built around the principle of individual sovereignty, and he expressed an aversion to a language of class conflict that reduced individuals to their membership in certain vaguely defined groups. In a letter to a friend shortly before his death, Warren rejected the “wholesale denunciation of ordinary business men as ‘thieves and robbers’ because they live on profits,” revealing the determinism inherited from Owen in adding that “[i]t is philosophically wrong to punish people for being what their birth, training and surroundings make them.” Foreshadowing future divisions in the anarchist movement, particularly those between communists and individualists, Warren furthermore regarded his friend’s desire to see labor expropriate wealth from its current owners as “ridiculous” and “def[ying] all rational criticism.” He worried that if such expropriations and attacks on private property in general were the goals of labor reform, it would “repel many of the best of men,” proclaiming, “If this is reform, I refuse to be classed as a Reformer.” For the victory of equity for the producer to be true and complete, Warren thought, it must be the result neither of a revolutionary uprising against proprietors nor of any other momentary or political cataclysm. Rather, the ends of equitable commerce must be reached by the means of equitable commerce, by the gradual evolution initiated through decentralized economic arrangements.
Thus is Warren, despite his association with socialism, ideologically far closer to today’s free market libertarians than to today’s libertarian communists or socialists. His thought made private property in land “the first step in Civilization,” and he made no apology for his view that the opposition to such property among socialists “looks to me…like insane fanaticism.” Was not the goal of socialism, Warren argued, to make of each individual a property owner, and thereby to end the exploitation of the many by the few? In Warren’s life and work, then, we find a trenchant criticism of concentrated wealth and power undertaken by way of a plea for, rather than an attack on, private property and market exchange. His defense of private property is analogous to Benjamin Tucker’s later apology for wage labor, “the purchase and sale of labor,” so deeply reviled by other currents in the broad movement of socialism. In an 1888 number of Liberty, Tucker arraigned the anarchist communist Johann Most for objecting to the existence of the wage relationship itself, calling Most’s communism “pseudo-Anarchism.” Tucker writes, “Labor should be paid! Horrible, isn’t it? Why, I thought that the fact that it is not paid was the whole grievance.” For Tucker, no particular economic relationship or organizational form was necessarily problematic, at least insofar as no one invaded the individual sovereignty of another.
Though he made certain very specific predictions about what the economy would look like under a libertarian political system, Tucker never wanted to use the power of the state to achieve the conditions he desired. Still, he anticipated the views of many contemporary decentralists on economies of scale—or diseconomies of scale, as the case may be. He thought that, in a true free market, firms would tend to be smaller and more local. Accordingly, he saw state socialism, communism, and capitalism alike as embodying the principle of centralization and concentrated wealth. Again responding to arguments from Most, Tucker argued that the centralizing tendency was “but a phase of progress,” destined to be reversed as processes “become cheaper, more compact, more easily manageable, until they shall come again within the capacity of individuals and small combinations.” The giant trusts of his day, he contended, were not creatures of open competition, but parasitic institutions existing for their own sake rather than for that of either consumers or stockholders. Law professor Butler Shaffer argues that the institution, as such, is defined by the fact that it places “the preservation of the organization” above the goals, practices, and projects out of which it first emerged; the people inside the institution become secondary, an afterthought, swallowed by the grinding gears of the machine itself, mere fuel in the furnaces of the administrative apparatus.
Among many libertarians, the prevailing ideas about corporations tend to treat them as embodiments of free enterprise and therefore as well-oiled machines, their competitive environment simply demanding that they run efficiently. Arguing that, in fact, “smaller businesses are far more efficient than big businesses,” the nonprofit Saving Communities points out that insofar as corporations are also gigantic bureaucratic swamps, they are just as susceptible to inefficiency and management self-serving as government bodies. Despite the gospel of economics of scale, then, the claim that efficiency simply demands large size and highly integrated firms, there are reasons to doubt the viability of huge, centralized corporations. For as E.F. Schumacher writes in Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, “[A]s soon as great size has been created there is often a strenuous attempt to create smallness within bigness.”
Just as Benjamin Tucker once did, contemporary libertarians such as Roderick Long have argued persuasively that genuine free markets would mean significantly smaller firms, less hierarchically structured and more likely to be owned and controlled by those who work in them. Were we to more closely inspect the methods through which the largest multinational corporations escape competition, libertarians might not be surprised that big business and big government come out looking quite similar as centers of waste. Indeed, such a close inspection may lead us to join individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker in regarding capitalism as chiefly characterized by its privileges rather than its adherence to what libertarians actually consider free market principles.
The ideas of Catholic thinkers G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc recall individualist anarchism in hoping for a society of free and independent peasants and artificers, in which property is widely and relatively evenly distributed. Catholic philosophical thought going back to St. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes the importance of individual conscience, carefully safeguarded to allow free will to operate outside of arbitrary commands, to discover the natural law by applying independent judgment and reason. Chesterton, of course, was a great student of Aquinas and wrote what is often considered the greatest of all books on the philosopher monk whose work would become so important in Western thought. Following Aquinas and his emphasis on freeing the reasoning power of the individual, Chesterton and Belloc examined the social and political aspects of subordination, the elements of modern life that yoked the individual to dominating institutions and prevented independence and self-sufficiency. They saw capitalism, no less than socialism, as one such dominating influence. Further, their belief in a Thomistic “Science of Man,” through which we are able to answer fundamental questions about human nature and man’s role in the cosmos, led them to suspect that the kind of centralized economic subjugation furnished by both capitalism and socialism was deeply unnatural. Their alternative to both, distributism, was implied in the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. “Put simply,” writes Joseph Pearce, “the principle of subsidiarity rests on the assumption that the rights of small communities—e.g., families or neighborhoods—should not be violated by the intervention of larger communities—e.g., the state or centralized bureaucracies.”
Critics of distributism, particularly advocates of free markets, have argued that its quaint longing for village communities of small-holding peasant farmers and artisans would itself require the introduction of stifling coercion, governing bodies that would forbid, as one distributist puts it, “the frivolity of modern city life.”1 Worries about the use of political force to achieve the distributist ideal are not entirely unfounded. Belloc himself argued in The Restoration of Property that insofar as capitalism had used violence and the power of the state to institute “servile conditions,” distributists were quite justified in the use force. We might therefore distinguish between political distributism—distributism as an end goal in itself—and distributism merely as the (now speculative) practical result of more libertarian political and economic structures. In its “attempt to socially nurture the ethic and spirit of the bourgeois,”2 distributism shares rather obvious commonalities with early anarchist thought, particularly as we find it in Tucker and in the first self-styled anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In contrast to later iterations of anarchism that were explicitly communist, and thus execrated bourgeois values, Proudhon’s anarchism was profoundly shaped by his early experiences with country artisans, skilled craftsmen operating independently. These experiences persuaded Proudhon that the pathway to political and economic liberation was a network of self-organized, worker-controlled bodies, a decentralized federation with its own bank of the people.
The distributist aspiration “to construct institutions appropriate to the human person” in turn evokes Kirkpatrick Sale, whose decentralist work has argued for such libertarian ideas as secession and the devolution of government powers. Like the distributists, Sale and his contemporary decentralist movement have explicitly described their ideas as a “third way,” indeed, identifying the distributists as important forerunners. And again like the English distributists, Sale understands the coadjuvant relationship between political and economic power. Rather than seeing large-scale modern governments as curbing the abusive power of global corporations, Sale regards the former as the “handmaidens” of the latter. Today, the supposed left and right wings of the American political class are essentially united in embracing centralism in all of its aspects, whatever the various labels they fancy. Democrats and Republicans compete for a narrow sliver at the authoritarian center of politics, both parties equally devoted to a set of institutions and policies that are never up for debate and can never be changed through the electoral process.
Similar to the individualist anarchism and distributism that preceded it, the decentralism of Kirkpatrick Sale and others defies the oversimplified and too often hollow false dichotomy of left and right, liberal and conservative, that obtains in the United States and elsewhere. Decentralists want to transform the debate itself, to place socialism and capitalism together on one side—the side of “centralizing, big-government twentieth-century forces”—and a genuinely free society on the other. As the Center for a Stateless Society’s Kevin Carson observed over ten years ago, “Today, as much as ever, the good guys on the left and right fringe have more in common with each other than with the bad guys in the corporate center.” In our relations with what Wilhelm Röpke phrased the “cult of the colossal,” the reverential submission to gigantic, cheerless bureaucracies, decentralists are iconoclasts. We want to change the way people think about what role the state and other massive institutions ought to play in our lives.
Sale’s work demonstrates that proposing secession as a political strategy is not just for right-wingers or neo-confederates. A permanent egress from the American empire now appeals to both right and left, however defined, as opposition to costly and precarious foreign entanglements and collusive corporate welfare and favoritism bring together Americans with very different views and backgrounds. A desire to find a permanent exit from what the historian of anarchism George Woodcock termed “the soulless world that was developing around them” led radicals throughout the nineteenth century to reexamine the decentralist impulse and to establish small, experimental communities wherein they might put their ideas to the test. At least on a very small scale, theirs were secessionist experiments. Peaceful secession asks nothing of taxpayers or governments; it furthermore comes with no necessary set of public policy proposals or aims, each community being allowed to determine these for itself. Just as decentralism itself is a “third way,” so too is secession as a political strategy a workable alternative to both violent revolution and futile reformism through the traditional political process.3 It is probably beyond any serious doubt that electoral politics does not and cannot work to bring about liberty and community self-determination, that participation in politics ultimately reinforces and offers the appearance of legitimacy to the existing status quo. Revolution, too, is untenable as a strategy. As a historical matter, it has meant the substitution through violence of one conspiring criminal band with another, often worse than its predecessor. As Proudhon and others have observed, genuine social change and progress must result from an evolutionary process in which authoritarian institutions are gradually replaced by libertarian arrangements.
Decentralists perceive that bigness contains the seeds of its own destruction. We have observed that destruction all around us, widespread poverty and environmental spoliation plaguing the world. Libertarians tend to have a firm grasp on the problems of political centralization while too often defending economic centralization and its aftereffects as the workings of the free market. When we hear environmentalists or Pope Francis, for example, lambaste libertarianism, we ought to pause and take note. There are usually important truths and legitimate worries contained in such critiques, even if they are embedded in misconceptions and vaguely defined ideas. We must have a firm grasp of our own philosophy to address worries, to show that private property and genuine free markets are the solution, not the problem. The key insights of distributism, decentralism, and libertarianism necessarily entail and compliment one another. We must continue to explore these connections, drawing conclusions for better policy and refining our understanding of the philosophy of liberty.
Why Decentralism? Beyond Left and Right
by David S. D’Amato ~ June 29, 2015
An emphasis on decentralization unites radicals on left and right in American politics, while moderates support central power.
As I have attempted to show in the previous two installments, decentralism defies the popular conceptions of both the political right and left. The right will identify with the decentralist resistance to big government and the growth and power of executive branch bureaucracies, as well as decentralism’s stress on respecting the sovereignty of smaller political units. The left will also appreciate the decentralist emphasis on the merits of localism, especially apropos of economic and environmental sustainability, and the principled opposition to big business dominance of politics and culture. The most destructive and baleful aspects of American politics today belong to “moderates” who are not only centrists, but also centralists. Decentralists, in contrast, are to be found mostly on the outer extremes of right and left, despite the fact that they share more similarities than differences.
In 1996, at the E.F. Schumacher Society’s International Decentralist Conference, Society co-founders Kirkpatrick Sale and John McClaughry observed the way in which decentralism transcends the traditional left-right spectrum. In his talk, McClaughry remarked that, at first blush, a former speechwriter for, among others, George Romney and Ronald Reagan1 may not seem to have much in common with a former “mainstay of the Students for a Democratic Society,” for whom “left anarchist” was likely a completely unobjectionable label. Sale’s lecture similarly confronted “the flat-earth delusion of politics,” submitting in its place the idea that there’s really not much daylight between “the anarchocommunalists and communitarians and communards and anarchists on the Left, and the libertarians and Jeffersonians and individualists on the Right.” And just as decentralist principles are capable of crossing party lines and political divides, so too did the opposite principles transform American politics and overtake both major parties in the twentieth century. In his history of the period from 1877 to 1920, Robert Wiebe chronicles “the emergence of a new system” in America, the transition from a decentralized “society of island communities” to a system “derived from the regulative, hierarchical needs of urban-industrial life.” The Progressive Era produced profound changes in social, political, and economic life. Increasingly centralized, governmental power incorporated “a variety of flexible administrative devices” that were previously unknown to the United States Constitution in theory or practice.
In his book Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, legal scholar Philip Hamburger argues that the powers currently vested in the administrative state represents a dangerous departure from traditional legal and constitutional principles, that the administrative agencies of the federal government now exercise law-giving and judicial functions that ought to be reserved for the Congress and the judicial branch, respectively. The problem as identified by Hamburger is fundamentally one of centralization. Roles that are meant to be neatly partitioned, performed by specialized bodies, have converged in the executive. Describing the problem “in terms of off-road driving,” Hamburger shows that the executive branch, charged with executing and enforcing the law, has for a long time arrogated to itself the unlawful power to bind subjects legislatively and judicially. Exploring the lineage of contemporary administrative law, Hamburger finds its origins in the “absolute prerogative” power enjoyed by the Crown in England, “a power outside the law,” essentially unconstrained by traditional legal limits. In the United States, the recrudescence of this kind of arbitrary power is a direct legacy of the Progressive Era’s subversion of the concept of the rule of law and the Constitution’s separation of powers. Progressives determinedly rejected the Enlightenment ideas of natural, inalienable rights. They believed that political decision-making could be understood as an exact science, one to be mastered and administered by experts in central government bodies dedicated to specific policy areas (for example, the Departments of Education, Agriculture, and Labor).
Trained bureaucrats, devoted to specialized, empirical study, were to exercise far more policy power, with the traditional separation of the three branches increasingly seen as an outmoded, needless limitation of genuine progress. As Hamburger points out, progressive reformers worried that elected lawmakers and the legislative process would move too slowly and would prove insufficiently progressive, unable to accomplish the sweeping changes they envisioned. Academics such as Frank Goodnow, a Progressive Era administrative law expert, wanted to insulate important policy questions from the rabble of popular politics and “urged the consolidation of government as a means of achieving the consolidation of society.” For the progressives, centralization of power was the route to reform and genuine social advancement—both centralization in Washington, drawing power and autonomy away from state governments, and centralization in the executive branch, usurping the constitutional functions of the legislature and the judiciary. The accomplishment of the desired goals, progressives believed, required a government that was not held in check by passé legal principles from a bygone era, before the discovery of the true, scientific understanding of the proper role of the nation-state in shaping society. Where the Constitution was designed to make the legislative process slow and deliberative, the progressive embrace of administrative law’s prerogative power would allow the government to circumvent such retarding obstacles to the transformation of politics and thus society.
Resisting the progressive attitudes that now characterize so much of both the political left and right, decentralists see rigid hierarchies and government controls as obstructing the processes of experimentation and discovery that lead to a healthy, prosperous society. Rather than a static system of uniformity, decentralism counsels, with John Stuart Mill, “that all economical experiments, voluntarily undertaken, should have the fullest license,” that only force and fraud should be prohibited. Centralized control and the resultant social and political homogeneity are to be avoided, dynamic pluralism encouraged. Here, the insights of Friedrich Hayek will prove illuminative. Decentralism as a philosophical approach denies neither that human societies require planning, nor that people must associate and act together in order to accomplish such beneficial plans. As Hayek writes in The Use of Knowledge in Society, it “is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done,” but rather about “who is to do the planning.” Centralized in a small group of bureaucrats, planning is susceptible to the difficulties that naturally attend both limited information and the inability to correctly sort even the information that is available. As Hayek teaches, “Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons.” Political and economic centralization are natural concomitants. Limiting the discretion—that is, the prerogative power—of economic rule-makers necessarily limits the kinds of favoritism and special privilege that lead to monopoly or oligopoly conditions. In the absence of such privilege, a company participating in the market can achieve great size only through maintaining exceptional value and service to consumers.2
In Organizing Locally: How the New Decentralists Improve Education, Health Care, and Trade, education and public policy professor Bruce Fuller paints a picture of how “top-heavy firms and feckless public institutions found themselves on the ropes, beset by lagging performance and fading legitimacy, now seen as potent only in eroding the human spirit.” The ideological momentum of modernism, with its preference for large, integrated institutional forms, seems to be decelerating in favor of a reconnection with community-oriented, locally rooted ways of producing and organizing. Witnessing this trend toward smaller, more autonomous bodies, steeped in an informed suspicion of the maladroit giants of twentieth century modernist ideologies, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ideas on federation and the Swiss political structure are brought to mind. Proudhon’s anarchism recommended “reciprocal and equal commitments” between local governing bodies. Proudhon’s idea of the political contract wants decision-making organizations to “remain within reasonable limits and to become profitable and convenient for all,” in which the smaller units “reserve for themselves more rights, more liberty, more authority, more property than they abandon.” In Switzerland’s system of Kantonligeist, similarly, the diversity of the Swiss population and the devolvement of power have produced not disorganization, but remarkable stability and order. In Organizing Locally, Fuller observes that it is no longer a question of “whether to decentralize massive firms and public institutions, but how to” do so effectively. Both political theory and practical examples such as that of Switzerland ought to play a role in the development of workable solutions. Careful to create distance between his “new decentralists” and libertarianism, Fuller contrasts their organizations to both government bureaucracies and market institutions. He assures his reader throughout that the decentralists he is discussing “hold little naive faith in markets alone,” distrustful of “textbook notions of pure markets populated by unregulated firms.” Fuller thus frequently falls into a familiar pattern, mistaking American corporatism, deeply shaped by government intervention, for a principled free market system. He presents “Enron’s corrupt implosion” and “Wall Street’s massive greed” as exhibits in an indictment of “pure markets.” Organizing Locally often reveals a frustrating, yet selectively applied, inability to distinguish between decentralized free market and an existing political economy of cronyist subsidies and regulatory barriers to entry. At the same time, Fuller occasionally seems keenly aware of the fact that a true, decentralized free market—the kind libertarians actually espouse—has never obtained in reality. Rather, the relationship between political and economic institutions leaves us with a messy hybrid system, the result of politics and the interplay of interests more than any neat ideological system. Furthermore, he notes that valuable decentralist contributions have come from both the left and the right, and acknowledges that “less fettered markets” have often “sparked fresh thinking.” Even within a given firm or organization, we see that a “regulation-light” approach, taking seriously horizontal forms of interacting and organizing, presents several advantages, resources and information passing more fluidly. Like so many other decentralist thinkers, Fuller deliberately and appealingly portrays “the drive to decentralize” as a novel alternative turned to “after hierarchies and markets disappoint.” And despite the confused and inconsistent perceptions of markets that litter the book, we might forgive non-libertarians for wrongly associating markets in and of themselves with the abuses of giant corporate monopolies. Discerning the differences often requires a trained eye, schooled in public choice theory and acquainted with the unintended consequences of meddlesome regulations. If markets are to be understood correctly as instantiations of—rather than departures from—decentralist principles, libertarians must be careful to avoid the trap of the false choices that are so often at the center of political dialogue (for example, the individual vs. the community, and, in Hayek’s example above, planning vs. non-planning).
The most important of Organizing Locally’s insights is the general claim that “unrelenting forces” will make the survival of “big bureaucratic organizations” increasingly difficult. Throughout political and economic life, there seems to be a growing estrangement with what Fuller calls “mammoth hierarchies.” Having witnessed a parade of failures from both, many Americans want no part of big business or big government. Cynicism and ennui are natural and, it must be noted, rational reactions to politics, to the remoteness of power and the inescapable fact that the ordinary citizen can have little or no real impact on policy and the political process generally. New technologies, particularly in the information and internet spheres, have made the small competitor more viable and more dangerous to the establishment economy. In government and public policy, people want more choice, fewer nonnegotiable directives from on high—more say in how they live their lives and the rules that govern them. Perhaps without any awareness of the fact, these people, who place more faith in friends and neighbors than in politics, are natural decentralists, creating communities and project for themselves, without permission or hesitation. In the spirit of Kirkpatrick Sale and John McClaughry, of Murray Rothbard in his Left and Right days, decentralists and libertarians of all sorts ought to search each other out and start conversations about reshaping our politics and culture around genuine, human-scale communities. The colorless politics of modernism and progressivism have had their time. The exciting heterogeneity of network culture has started us down the path toward a vibrant, tolerant system of free people and independent organizations, decentralized and libertarian in principle.
How to start Deconstructing the Inter-Corporate State from a Grass-Roots Level ~ JDHWB-R
One Tin Soldier - The Original Caste [Original]
~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTBx-hHf4BE ~
