The document that follows, therefore, is not designed as a blueprint for the entire economy, but only for those areas which are naturally suited to decentralisation and personal or co-operative private ownership. Farming and retailing are the most obvious examples with which to start, and these alone, approached with determination by a radical but sensibly cautious nationalist government, would go a long way to giving our future society the Distributist ‘stamp’.
Capitalist cancer across Europe
By the end of the nineteenth century, every country in Europe was suffering, to varying degrees, from the ravages of capitalism. This cancer was most advanced in England , where it had first emerged some three hundred years earlier, and where it was first aggravated by the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution.
Only a few generations before, the “average man” had been either an independent craftsman or a small-holding free farmer, tilling land passed down through his family for centuries. Now the “average man” was not even called a “man” anymore, but a “hand” — he was a mere cog in the giant industrial machine, owning little more than the clothes he stood up in, and having no choice but to work for someone else to earn his daily crust. The rooted peasantry had become the root-less proletariat. The ‘sturdy yeomen’ who typified Elizabethan England were reduced to a half-starved, diseased rabble which drowned its sorrows in cheap drink and watched as nearly half their children died before they reached the age of five.
Naturally, such a terrible situation produced a reaction. As more and more wealth was concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals, the idea grew that the solution to the misery and alienation this produced was to abolish private property altogether. All productive wealth should be “owned by the people in common” and administered on their behalf by the State.
From the very beginning, this idea — that the solution to the evils created by the concentration of ownership was even more concentration of ownership — was clearly flawed. In place of a giant and centralised system owned by a handful of Capitalists, we were to be happy with a giants and centralised system owned by a handful of party bosses. The “alternative” was in fact a mirror image of the original problem.
Capitalist banks helped Red Coup
Once this is understood, it is easy to see why Wall Street banking houses were quite ready to bankroll the Bolshevik coup; Why “American” capitalists like Armand Hammer helped Lenin design the New Economic Policy, and went on to finance the growth of Soviet power without break for more than fifty years. The “class enemies” liquidated in their millions were the little people — peasants, bank clerks, perhaps even bank managers — but the communists continued to be subservient to the bank owners, with the Soviets making no attempt to break away from the international banking system.
The close and profitable economic links between the Reds and their supposed “arch enemies” of Western Capitalism” may well be little discussed, but they are well documented. The “Vodka-Cola” relationship was an inevitable development when the socialist “solution” was so similar to the capitalist “problem” all along. Both were wholly materialistic, both looked for salvation to ever-growing industrial production. Neither had any real regard for Man and certainly no regard for God or Nature.
From a simplistic point of view, Communism — more accurately termed “State Capitalism” — was worse than its private capitalist twin. Without in any way wishing to underestimate the suffering involved in the naked bestiality and incompetent insanity of Communist (mis)rule, radical nationalists believe that “Western” capitalism is even more deadly than Bolshevism.
Capitalism’s moral rot
With Bolshevism, the enemy could be immediately identified — the KGB squad, the Red Army tank, even the sneaking informer (although the latter is becoming ever more prevalent across all Europe) — and the enemy threatens the entire family, the entire community, the entire nation. With Capitalism the enemy is greed, and greed can be stimulated in all of us by subtle and manipulative advertising. The enemy becomes the older generation who won’t let us “do our own thing”; the youngsters who show no respect; the man down the road who is undercutting your prices; the public who must be conned into buying the rubbish you produce.
The soft seduction of consumer global capitalism reduce the nations of the West to a rootless mass of Americanised consumers, without identity, without pride and without a future.
Children identify with the grotesque and vulgar instead of noble heroes and beautiful princesses in castles. Teenagers ape the antics of degenerate pop-stars whose example leads hundreds of thousands into the living death of drug addiction, not to mention the tragedy of the image conscious girls (mainly) who feel compelled to starve themselves to get “the look” and of course the spiraling number of abortions. Adults perform meaningless jobs, in conditions of mind-destroying boredom, to earn enough money to buy the latest needlessly created want to be pushed on television as the thing without which their neighbours will regard them as worthless failures. Old folk die unnoticed and lie rotting for weeks, even months, in barred and bolted flats in inhuman tower blocks, unofficial prisons which become tombs for those who no longer have any economic value.
Do not be fooled by the glossy packaging of the consumer society. Where state socialism was a creed of terror and stagnation, capitalism is one of apathy and death.
”The Victory of Capitalism”
The prophets of this repulsive system have spent the time since the Fall of the Berlin Wall gloating that we have now seen the definitive “Victory of Capitalism.” A more accurate word might be “consumerism”, because most of us have no chance whatsoever of becoming “capitalists” — that is, individuals who live without working, through the labour of others who own nothing and who must therefore labour on productive equipment, land, or in some ways today even knowledge, which the capitalist owns. But all of us are consumers.
In fact, as far as the advertisers — the bureaucrats of capitalism — are concerned, we only exist when we consume their products. We are here to buy what they want us to buy; whether we need the rubbish involved is of no concern to them. We are targets for salesmen in everything. TV advertisements sell toys by equating the love of the child with buying the child the toy. From this early age, we are taught to judge our own needs, and the status of other people, according to norms set by television, newspapers and the cinema, and especially by the lives of fictitious television characters.
Blurring of fact and fiction
Ideas and immorality are sold in the same manipulative way. For example, liberal or homosexual television producers cast popular actors as homosexuals in parts which portray them in a sympathetic light. There is clear evidence that millions of people watching such programmes are unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. This explains the growth in the belief that homosexuality is a normal and acceptable thing, a matter of personal choice rather than the disorder which shortens life expectancy by decades, and has brought the world one of the most deadly plagues since the Black Death.
In the same way, the mass media is used to control — and hence negate — democracy. The press and broadcasting media set the parameters of political debate, deciding which issues are to be discussed during an election campaign, and which are to be ignored. For example, Britain, in common with virtually every nation in Western Europe, has been subjected to an influx of huge numbers of Third World immigrants since the 1950s. Public disquiet about this has been substantial, yet it has never been permitted to be discussed in detail at a parliamentary General Election. Opinion polls have shown a huge majority of ordinary people opposed to the policy, but the main political parties have pursued it regardless of the wishes of the people.
Small opposition parties which oppose immigration have either been ignored or lied about by the mass media, which have thereby effectively denied the people the right to vote, let alone make an informed d
ecision, on whether it is a good idea to change the make-up of our nations for ever in the quest for a few years’ cheap labour to maximise capitalist profits.
There is no doubt that mass immigration has also been deliberately encouraged as a way of breaking down national and cultural barriers to globalism. A people which is proud of its culture and sure of its identity is unlikely to fall for the lure of tasteless and carcinogenic McDollar junk food, or to adopt American blue jeans and denim as its national costume. However, a country where community identity has been replaced by rootless individualism presents an ideal and easily exploited market. We describe this as the spread of “Coca Cola culture”, although in fact there is nothing cultural about it whatsoever.
Atomisation of society
On a smaller scale, the break-up of the family has been deliberately encouraged. Children who learn their values from their parents will automatically assimilate traditional concepts. This is no use to the purveyors of capitalist rubbish, who have therefore assiduously promoted the idea of a “generation gap”, to encourage a “rebellion” based on spending money on things of which parents do not approve.
In every area of life, the capitalist trick is to encourage the atomisation of society. The isolated individual has no source of values, no set of priorities, other than those pushed at him or her by the mass media. Man, the thinking, sociable being, becomes an unthinking, conforming consumer. The support of the small group is replaced by the overwhelming pressure of the herd.
Resistance to this destruction of personality and freewill through the ant-heap policies of state socialism failed, dying in 1989. With this failure there was unleashed, first on Eastern Europe — and more recently on the Middle East — a massive onslaught designed indeed to bring about “the final victory of capitalism”. Socialist millionaires like the late mass media baron Robert Maxwell wasted no time in beginning the drive for control of information. International companies have been buying up “golden opportunities” to acquire pools of skilled but cheap labour. American fast food chains have moved into this huge and previously unexploited market. And US tanks have rolled into the heart of the Islamic world, in a scheme openly announced by its Zionist neo-Con originators as intended to remake the Middle East on liberal-capitalist lines.
As we see from these examples, the onslaught comes in many different forms, but apart from the specifically tribal/racial motivation of some within the neo-Con clique to benefit Israel, it has one key aim: to force the entire world to become the consumers of filth: Spiritual filth, such as abortion on demand and genocide through integration; cultural filth, like MTV; intellectual filth, like the claim that parliament is sovereign in a land where banks create credit and the mass media create governments; physical filth, like fast foods which have no nutritional value whatsoever.
It was not always so
Depressing though this picture of all-pervading consumerism may be, the victory of this system would only be certain if it was true that the collapse of socialism means that there is no alternative to capitalism.
This is not true. The alternative to a society where the majority of productive wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few private bosses, never was a society in which the wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few Party bureaucrats.
The real alternative to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the Few is, and always has been, the widespread distribution of productive property in the individual hands of the Many.
Nor has this always been a theoretical solution. In mediæval Europe , in Christendom, it was the normal arrangement for centuries. What now seems an impossible ideal was, to our ancestors, so much taken for granted that they never even coined a name to describe it.
Basic notion of freedom
Over generations, the ancient and once socially acceptable institution of slavery was modified. An ever-growing number of slaves became serfs — still tied to the lord, but with their duties to him balanced by rights of their own to their plots of land. And, just as steadily, more and more serfs became semi-free villeins and then independent yeoman farmers. In periods when manpower was scarce, such as after plague epidemics, there were attempts to “turn the clock back” and strengthen the disintegrating feudal obligations to compulsory labour. Such attempts were, however, in every case, at least in England, short-lived failures. The notions of freedom and the right of ordinary individuals to own and work their own property were too strongly established to be overthrown.
Much land continued to be held in common by the inhabitants of each village, but this right too involved the individuals in a form of extended ownership with corresponding responsibilities, and was the basis of a co-operative association of men who also held land as personal property.
Vast areas of land were of course owned by religious institutions and old noble families, but the underlying principle behind the agricultural economy was an ever-widening distribution of private property.
Craft guilds
Side by side with the growing independence of the peasantry, went the growth of guilds of free artisans and craftsmen in the towns. Every kind of industry, service and craft had its own guild. This was a self-governing society, partly co-operative in that its meeting rooms, relief funds and religious endowments were owned in common by the whole organisation, but with the means of production owned privately and separately by its members.
Each guild regulated the quality of the goods produced by its members, established a just price for their labour and checked competition between them; preventing the growth of one at the expense of others. Above all, the guilds safeguarded the division of property, so that there should be formed within their ranks no proletariat on one side, and no monopolising capitalist on the other. Before any man could become a member of a guild and practice its trade, he had to serve an apprenticeship and produce for the inspection of the senior members his “masterpiece” which showed that he was worthy to join the guild, and that his work was of sufficient quality to deserve the “just price” which the public would be expected to pay for it.
It must be stressed that these corporations, founded on the idea of well-distributed private ownership of the means of production, regulated by custom and co-operative decision of the owners themselves, were the normal units of industrial production in mediæval Europe . The idea of entrusting the economy to meddling bureaucrats was as unthinkable as leaving it to the anarchy of “market forces”, with their cutthroat competition, shoddy goods and unbridled greed.
What went wrong?
Thus by the end of the mediæval era, European civilisation in countries such as England, was moving steadily towards what is best described as the distributist society. While private ownership of the means of production and distribution was by no means universal, a sufficient and growing number of individuals were owners to make private property the normal arrangement. Yet within a few generations this had changed completely. A tidal wave of dispossession and alienation turned the property-owning peasantry into a property-less proletariat. How did this disaster occur?
It is common in orthodox (i.e. Capitalist) economic circles to argue that this lurch from private ownership to monopoly capitalism was the natural and inevitable result of the Industrial Revolution. That our freedoms and rights were destroyed by steam engines and power looms, rather than by the conscious actions of greedy men. This is a lie, concocted to conceal the fact that capitalism, from the very beginning, was based on fraud and theft on a massive scale. The truth is that the growth of capitalism in its English nursery predates the Industrial Revolution by several hundred years.
The first practical steam engine was not built until 1705, and it took a further sixty or so years before refinements to steam power, iron smelting and cloth-making came together to spark the industrialisation of the world from still tiny beginnings in still rural England. Had these inventions been made in a society where economic power and control of existing
capital were still widely distributed among co-operatives and guilds, the course of the incredible changes which followed would surely have been very different. But the character of ownership in England had already been changed by the most sweeping, drastic and long-lasting expropriation of land known in the history of Europe.
Land ownership
In 1534, ownership of the land — which in those days effectively meant the entire economy — of England was divided roughly in three equal parts. One third was owned by a mass of small but free farmers. Nearly a third was owned by great landlords, either the old feudal families established since Norman times, or men who had made their fortunes more recently in trade. The remaining third was owned by religious institutions, principally the great monasteries. One year later, this balance was destroyed at a stroke when Henry VIII confiscated the monastic lands, which made up two thirds of all church land, or around twenty percent of the total productive capacity of the land of England.
Had the crown retained control of this enormous wealth, the power of the monarchy would have been unchallengeable (as democrats, of course, we do not for one moment think such an outcome would have been good, but it would have been different from what actually happened). But the King failed to keep what he had seized. The already powerful landowners insisted on vast tracts of land being granted to them, for ridiculously small sums, or even for free. And they were strong enough in Parliament and local government to get their way.
Rich got richer
As a result, the small group of men who already owned nearly one third of the land, ploughs, barns — the productive property — of England, in a matter of just a few years gained control of another twenty percent of the means of production. They became at a single blow the owners of half or even more of the existing capital and potential production of the country. The crown, relying mainly on traditional, and hence fixed, income, whose real value fell year by year, could not stand against the new oligarchy. Nor could the smaller land owners and commoners, who saw their lands systematically stripped from them in acts of theft legitimised by a parliament firmly in the pockets of the new masters.
Winds of Change Page 2
