Posted by
Andrews on Friday, July 03, 2009 6:59:56 PM
I was skimming through some of the "libertarian left" sites, things like Boing Boing and some book review sites, and I discovered a bizarre intellectual mistake I never thought I would see.
Let me start by saying this is not going to be a post explaining why the words "libertarian" and "left" don't work together. It is a common enough perspective on the internet, probably the official philosophy of most "geek" sites and many teen and twenty-something pages, that strange mix of liberty worship, including and almost obsessive fascination with open source code, and a fear of "power". Unfortunately, by not distinguishing between economic and political power,t hey often try to take power form government with one hand, while giving it back in spades with the other, in order to "fight corporate power". I wrote about it once or twice in passing ("
The Failure of Wikipedia", "
Copyright as Politics", "
Some Libertarian Analogies"), but I have yet to really delve into it and explain why it is a nonsensical position.
But this is not that post. Instead, this is a post about another error that seems to have become somewhat popular on the left, the use of the phrase "corporatism" to describe modern society. The term itself is unobjectionable, I think it is meaningless and provides no essential or meaningful insights, but it is not, in itself, offensive. However, the term does have one problem. Thanks to Mussolini's use of the term "stato corporativo" (formed form ideas taken from Gesell and others), many have tried to join their image of modern "corporatism" with mid 20th century fascism, and, indirectly Nazism as well.
What this misses is the simple fact that the coincidence of names is just that, the same way the word "magazine" sounds similar tot he Russian word for "store". There is a link, of course. In the case of Russian, a shared source in the French word "magasin", which was adopted into both English and Russian, though in English it came to be used more often in the publication context of "a storehouse of information".However, this in no way implies a connection between
Elle magazine and boutiques in Omsk.
Similarly, the "corporate" in both
stato corporativo and
corporation comes from the same source, the Latin word for body, but that is where the relationship ends. corporation is a "body" because the entire venture is treated, legally, as an individual, a "body" and thus the term
corporation. The
stato corporativo is a state which acts as a single body, and this is
corporativo. So, both are "corporate" in the sense that they are "like a body", the corporation int he sense of a venture being treated as a single individual, the fascist state as it is an economic which, theoretically, acts as a single body.
The use of the same word, or words which sound "kind of close" means nothing more than that. They have a common origin, that's it. Corporations, and the free market, have nothing to do with fascism.
Of course those on the "libertarian left" already bought into the "Nazis were conservative" trope, so it is not surprising that they would confuse the free market and fascism. Still, you would think that their "best and brightest", their "leading lights" and "intellectuals" would know better. But that too is the topic for another article. For now let me just say that a coincidence of terminology really proves nothing. And when a theory bases some sort of causal connection on nothing more than an accident of language (see
Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the discussion of "King Bela" for a prime example), then that is a theory of which one should be most skeptical.
POSTSCRIPT
I know I have been promising a lot lately, mainly my lengthy post on the free market, and my argument about utopianism/ perfectionism and disasters, but I am now adding two more. In the immediate future I will try my best to write a sensible analysis of fascism and Nazi philosophy and point out how little they have to do with anything conservative, especially in the modern American, rather than early 20th century European meaning of that term. I also hope to write an analysis of the "libertarian left" philosophy so common on the internet, and so impossible in practice.