'Network Society' Seems Anti-Individualistic

It would seem natural to think that a phrase like the 'network society', even capitalized, would merely refer to a world connected by the links of computerized networks. To some extent that is true. Ericcson, the Swedish technology company, says on its website that the network "will fundamentally change the way we innovate, collaborate, produce, govern and sustain." 

But something called the Centre for Personal Sovereignty claims that this network society "resembles laissez-faire capitalism combined with the better promise of Marxism."

First I would ask what the 'better promise' could possibly be if it is not the individual existing free of government interference in the market-workings of his enterprises. The term 'free market'...means free of government's aggressive force, said Reason Magazine. 'Regulation' of industry is often necessary, such as in labeling, where we don't want two products called 'aspirin', one of which is not acetylsalicylic acid; where we want to be assured that our meat is properly handled before packaging; where a Doctor has the necessary knowledge and competence to practice what we believe he says he can. But regulation of the market place, ala Marx, helps no one and hurts all.

This "network society" in general is not an economic system: "The impact of this revolutionary political system," the Centre says, "though today existing only in theory, can already be calculated."

Of course it can. I can calculate that because it is a political system that it will contain government interference, legal plunder and legally aggressive force. After all, it "maximizes market efficiencies" instead of letting the market finds its own way of doing that.

"Unlike capitalist systems," the Centre says, "in a Network Society the 'people' as individuals fully own their personal means of production. One's compensation is directly proportionate to one's value as we all become economic and political 'free agents'." 

They also say "it also represents control over your own means of production - that is, you will learn to reap the full economic value derived from what you do, rather than giving that value to your boss. A business owner that earns a profit from the efforts of her employees will be reaping the excess rewards derived from the synergistic efforts of the entire group (1 + 1 = 3). This excess value represents the value of the owner's ability to orchestrate the efforts of independent parts towards a productive end."

This gobbeldy-gook of twisted language leave me with questions:

• If you can still have a boss who "reaps the excess rewards", how is it different from capitalism?
• If you still have a boss, how do you "fully own your personal means of production", and if you do, why pay anything to a boss, let alone have a boss?
• How is the "synergistic" efforts of "the entire group" (what group?) any different from a normal workplace today?
• If an employer is the one who knows how to "orchestrate the efforts of independent parts towards a productive end," why is s/he reaping "excess rewards"? How can they be "excess" when s/he is doing essentially what the owner of his "personal means of production" will be doing; is that person not also reaping "excess rewards"? In excess of what? In excess of who's rewards? Why can't someone keep all his own rewards?

It all reminds me of Ayn Rand's criticism of Kant, when she said he "originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age." We are living in such an age, and the technique keeps going and going.

After all, it would seem that my blogging and authoring a book to be sold only on line for E-readers would be the very thing Ericcson and the Centre and others are discussing. But it scares me to think that they want to include what I do in their crazy scheme of "the better promise of Marxism."

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© Curtis Edward Clark 2012

Goulash Collectivism in the US

It doesn't matter how large government becomes, when it's doing only what is proper to its powers according to the Constitution.

'Goulash collectivism' is the hodge-podge of the various political policies we live under, from LBJ's 'Great Society', from FDR's government employment of the unemployed, from JFK's altruistic "ask what you can do for your country"; to social security, to unending unemployment payments, to phony 'green' energy programs that destroy the oil and coal industries we still depend on, to our new insurance program of 'buy-it-or-get-taxed-for-not-doing-it' policy, to the over-all dogged and ferocious meddling by government in our lives.

That we are employing this goulash collectivism "is not just a fringe view," wrote Mark Trumbull, in The Christian Science Monitor. In a poll, "A majority said it should not be the government's role to redistribute wealth, and a majority said they prefer 'a smaller government providing less services'."

No, it is not just a fringe view, though it may be said that it isn't the left wing progressives who are going to admit it. But it is odd how those progressives can turn and twist the message of prior leaders to fit their own agenda. President Lincoln, said President Obama last year, told us "that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves." He wanted to establish that the redistribution of wealth (his words, not mine) was something we cannot do at all for ourselves--as if it was something that ought to be done in the first place.

While we should not even be trying to do such a thing for ourselves, should we doing it through government, and should a political leader turn the words of other leaders into what they were not meant to say? The things that people "cannot do, or cannot well do, for themselves, fall into two classes," Lincoln said. The first class "embraces all crimes, misdemeanors and non-performance of contracts. The other embraces all which...requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself."

In the last few years the case has been made that Lincoln was a socialist. Even the politically libertarian Congressman Ron Paul has gotten into that act. But it is clear from the quote that our current President used Lincoln's words out of context. Lincoln also said, "I believe that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other men’s rights." That is libertarianism, not socialism; it upholds the Ninth Amendment and the idea of individual sovereignty.

It's clear that the progressives could throw as many progressive-sounding quotes from Lincoln as anyone else could throw freedom-loving quotes, but it is another thing altogether to use a quote out of context.

And what is really out of context is a debate over the size of government versus its proper purposes, as were described by Lincoln. If a government is doing only what is proper to it according to the Constitution, it doesn't matter how large it becomes. If the Federal and State governments were doing only what is proper and Constitutional, governments would be larger than they are now if we had the same number of citizens as mainland China.

Yet, the very things that progressives advocate are social programs which Originalist readings show the Founders were entirely against. Until the "Affordable Health Care for America Act" was passed, the biggest social overhaul of government services and of social justice programs was the Great Society, the various acts passed by the progressive President Lyndon Johnson. His anti-poverty program was the most far-reaching piece of socialism in US history.

"Because it is right, because it is wise, and because, for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty," LBJ told us to justify his meddling. Through his "Economic Opportunity Act of 1964" he began to transfer money from those who had, to those who had not, from "each according to his ability, to each according to his need," just as Marx said ought to be done.

This is not the original purpose of any part of the Constitution, as described by any of the Founders, yet the poverty of those who receive it no worse than it was in 1776--except in comparison to those who are not impoverished. Poor is poor. Yet, the poverty guidelines for 2012 are $11,170 for an individual, while the average income for all Americans is $47,000. So 'poor' is measured as one-quarter of the average, while in the first years of our nation one-quarter of the average would have been a God-send. And yet James Madison said, "Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." He saw the black-and-white of the meaning of the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson, forecasting what Marx would later say was the proper thing, was more more on the moral mark than Madison, when he wrote, "To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”


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© Curtis Edward Clark 2012

A Brief, Brief Exam of the Modern Counter-Enlightenment

    Someone recently asked if we have passed through the postmodern era into a new period of cultural and social history.

    No.

    "Marxism and postmodernism: people often seem to find this combination peculiar or paradoxical..."[1] They are neither. It was the 'modernists' who led us from Lockean/Jeffersonian individualism into the 'Beat Generation' of artists who came, post-WWII, from the indoctrination of the socialist elements of the unionist movements of their parents' and grandparents' generation.

    The tenets of the movement, its belief in progress, freedom, and equality, had been sustained from the outset by artists and intellectuals, and embraced by those who reaped the material benefits it brought.[2]

   Those were the individualists like Alexis de Tocqueville, whose historic first-hand description of Americans showed us to believe that "all values are human-centered, the individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally equal. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on privacy, and on mutual respect. Negatively, it embraces opposition to authority and to all manner of controls over the individual, especially when exercised by the state."[3] And so it included writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Washington Irving.

    But envy of men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, A. A. Talmadge, and others led to a form of anti-industrialism where the forerunner of today's lobbyists were the so-called competitors of those men. 

    "Intense lobbying began between 1869 and 1877, during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. The most influential lobbies wanted railroad subsidies and a tariff on wool. At the same time in the Reconstruction South, lobbying was a high intensity activity near the state legislatures, especially regarding railroad subsidies. The term itself came from Britain to describe approaches made to Members of Parliament in the lobbies of the House of Commons..."[4]

    Lobbying as it was practiced then does not 'embrace opposition to authority', it used authority; nor did it despise 'all manner of controls over the individual, especially when exercised by the state'. It wanted the intervention of the State, because then the lobbyists gained power over those who could manage quite nicely without any government assistance.

    In other cases it was quite the opposite: those who could do quite nicely without government interference or 'assistance', were forced to pay-off men in high places who could create interference with tariffs and subsidies to their competitors who were seen as being unable to 'compete' without running interference on their behalf.

    'Modernists' were therefore anti-industrialist anti-individualists. The violence of the unionist movement is rampant with people more interested in wresting power from the industries, than with the plight of the poor working class who needed someone to speak for them, to help them raise their wages and gain benefits. "The Russian Revolution had seemed at the time, and for a long time after, to be the answer to the progressive modernist's dream."[2]

  We are--and have been since the age of Rousseau and Kant--in the age of the counter-Enlightenment. To think of 'modernism' or 'post-modernism' while stuck in one era (in which we are going backward toward Plato's Cave) is ridiculous. Until we overthrow the counter-Enlightenment that spawned Napoleon and Trotsky, Eugene V. Debs, the Industrial Workers of the World,  and "the anti-modern, ideological religious right"[5]--until we do this and get back to thinking in terms of negative rights rather than positive rights, (not to be confused with 'negative liberty' and 'positive liberty') will we actually be in the 'modern era'. Only then, someday far in the future, can we ever look to a 'post-modern' era---and I hope it's rational.

[1] New Left Review
[2] Modernism and Politics
[3] Britannica Precise Encyclopedia
[4] Lobbying in the United States: History
[5] American conservatism as Counter Enlightenment

© Curtis Edward Clark 2011

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