Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Political, Economic, Liberty, Tyranny

 From the point of view of the person on the street, does the “ideological” framework of an authoritarian government really matter?  Is the person walking gingerly through the streets of Soviet Moscow any more or less oppressed than the person trembling their way through the avenues of Nazi Berlin?

I suspect that the real problem with both Soviet and Nazi systems is only marginally about the ideology and centrally about the assertion of power by the führer or tsar or caudillo or absolute monarch.

 

I understand that some ideologies require that there be a führer.  Fascism depends explicitly on the centralization of power in the hands of a single “leader.”  So too the absolute monarch, so that as far as I can tell being under the authority of Benito Mussolini is as terrorizing as being under the authority of Henry VIII.  In economic terms the phenomenon translates into establishing a command economy, whether the economy is ideologically of the left or of the right.

 

In that context, I’d argue that the “zi” part of Nazis, derived from the official name of the party, National Socialism, is wrong.  There’s not a hint of “socialism” in a command economy such as Hitler created.  It should rather be called Nacomm, since Soviet communism was as much a command economy as was Nazi “socialism.”  And of course the political direction of any command economy is ultimately towards authoritarianism.  That reality defines the transformation of the Marxist notion of a workers’ paradise into the actual economic model practiced in communist countries, which is perhaps more properly called state capitalism than communism.  But then fascism is also state capitalism.  The difference between the two forms of state capitalism is the fiction, otherwise called the ideology, that says that the source of authority in the state capitalist economy comes from public ownership (“communism”) or from private ownership (“fascism”).

 

Socialism, real socialism, and capitalism share the idea that an economy should be determined by demand, not command.  The two ideologies differ about who should control the means of production.  Capitalism requires that such control should be private, and socialism that it be public.  Both private (capitalist) and public (socialist) ownership respond to what the people want, what they demand, as the people choose one product over another.

 

Capitalism and socialism can both make large scale infrastructure such as major highways publicly owned, although there are cases where capitalism allows roads to be privately owned.  In fact, for capitalism public ownership of infrastructure is often very limited—energy production is privately owned, for instance—whereas for socialism public ownership extends to a greater number of essentials—not just energy production but also the provision of health services, for instance.  For both capitalism and socialism, consumer enterprises such as mom and pop stores or even large industries like auto production remain in private hands.

 

In capitalism the profit derived from an adept response to demand is also private, creating the wealth of the rich.  In socialism profit is invested in the public interest—in infrastructure, services, benefits made possible by that profit.  No one, or very few people are rich, but the community as a whole becomes richer by publicly owned infrastructure and services.

 

With enough intervention on the political side of things, however, both capitalism and socialism can end up in the dictatorial modes of communism and fascism.

 

For capitalism, the pull toward command appears when the wealth of private enterprise comes to dominate the power of government.  The domination of American politics by the richest one percent of the population is a case in point.  Given enough domination of politics, the system becomes an oligarchy, and turns decisively to a command economy when government is not just controlled but effectively owned by the wealthy.  As a result the oligarchy becomes a fascist state.

 

For socialism the equivalent pull is the notion that the voice of the public must be rationalized and therefore channeled, and what better mode of channeling than to have the government via its appointed administrators determine the direction of the means of production, imposing its will on the people rather than having the terms of the economy determined by the people.  When the administrators become the ones who determine what will be produced, become in effect commissars rather than administrators responding to the people, the result is a communist state.

 

For the persons on the street, then, the only issue that keeps them relatively free of domination and fear is the degree to which political power coincides with economic power.  The ideal of capitalism as of socialism makes political power entirely a matter of the voice of the people.  In this context, vox populi is not so much vox dei as it is vox libertatis.  The job of citizens in socialist as in capitalist polities is to keep the single voice, whether channeled by oligarchs or by commissars, as far removed from domination as they can possibly be.

Sunday, December 22, 2024

Hierarchy in My City

Reading, PA, is a highly hierarchical little city.  Geographically that is quite literal.  The city grows along the banks of the Schuylkill River, which meanders through a valley created by a series of mountains.  To the west there are several mountains—Cushion Peak, South Mountain, State Hill.  To the south lies Highs Hill and Neversink Mountain.  In the north Seidel’s Hill, Topton Mountain, and Irish Mountain straddle the only major, relatively major, road north from the city, Route 222.

But the city is built at the foot of the mountain that dominates its geography, Mount Penn.  The entire east side of the city rises from the Schuylkill Valley to the top of Mt. Penn.

 

Maybe needless to say, but sociologically interesting nonetheless, the further up towards the top of the mountain, the more expensive the houses.  That is particularly the case in the north-east section of the city, where beginning at 13th street the geological rise of the landscape begins to gather momentum.  West of 13th street there are row houses; duplexes line 13th street on the west side, and single homes on the east side.  Past 13th street single homes are the rule.

 

The superiority of the east becomes crystal clear once the rising ground reaches Hampden Boulevard, the Boulevard.  The area between 13th street and the Boulevard is called College Heights.  The area between the Boulevard and the mountainside itself, a park of sorts, is called Hampden Heights.  East of the Boulevard, in Hampden Heights, huge homes, some of them grand indeed, are standard.

 

There are also quite odd phenomena associated with the sociological differences in housing.  For a quarter century we lived in a row house west of 13th street.  Something we took for granted was the swarming of pigeons all around us.  They were everywhere, shouldering out almost all other varieties of birds.  Oh sure, there were some house sparrows, but few of them.  About ten years ago we moved into College Heights, into a single house.  And the pigeons disappeared.  There were mourning doves a-plenty, and swarms of sparrows of all kinds; but there was not a single pigeon to see.

 

Having noticed the avian divide, I studied the phenomenon—or rather went walking and noted that pigeons would regularly perch on trees and electric lines along the west side of the Boulevard.  But they would not cross the Boulevard to its east side.  Never did I see even an attempt to fly over to the east side.  The only exception to the rule that pigeons exclude themselves from the Heights, College and Hampden both, is a small flock of almost pure white pigeons that regularly fly around a tree situated squarely in College Heights.

 

There are no white pigeons elsewhere in the city.

 

Trees also represent a significant feature of the hierarchy in Reading.  West of 13th street there are no trees to speak of.  The city has a very generous tree-planting offer for its residents.  So long as a resident pays to have the sidewalk cut so that a tree can be planted, the city will supply the tree small enough so that its leaves do not cause problems in the gutters of nearby homes.  We got a beautiful flowering cherry tree in front of our row house.  When we asked neighbors if they wanted one as well, the response was . . . curious:  “Trees are dirty,” they would regularly say.  So our tree remained the sole green on our block.  And of course, in the summer time the favorite place to park was under that tree.

 

The tree-exclusion zone continues all along the west side of 13th street, but not on the east side.  On that side of the street, and really throughout College Heights, trees grow in abundance.  With some exceptions—a pine here, a flowering cherry there—all the trees in College Heights are sycamores.  Sycamores are particularly messy trees.  They lose branches in the lightest of winds; they shed thick, heavy pollen in May and June; they drop bark in July and early August; they give a deluge of leaves in the fall; and in winter the branches are wide enough so that they retain snow, which then drops in big gobs on the heads of passersby once the snowstorm ends.

 

Some sycamores line the west side of the Boulevard.  But the west side of the Boulevard grows oaks.  In fact, the whole of Hampden Heights, from the Boulevard up to park on the slopes of Mt. Penn, is almost all oaks.  There is a pine here and there, maybe a stray sycamore or even as aspen—one house has a bamboo thicket growing alongside its south side, which cleverly hides the tennis court that lies on the other side.  But oak is dominant, so much so that the last city street, abutting the park, is called Oak Lane.

 

In short, moving west to east:  row home becoming duplex becoming single house becoming near-mansion; pigeon becoming mourning dove; no tree becoming sycamore becoming oak.