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.