Utopian: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 279-289

 

“Democracy is the land of plenty dreamt of by unscrupulous financiers,” Webster quotes Sorel.

This is the kind of comment where we must suspect that Webster either does not understand context is ignoring it because her audience won’t care. At this point in our journey, it should be apparent that Webster’s biggest crime is in committing the informal fallacy of cherry picking. She’s looking for out-of-context soundbites that she can then twist. We can see this from her footnotes where in successive citations she jumps from pg. 320 to 321 (ok, good), then to 186, 233, 112, 101, 236, and then 234.  Sorel, Georges Sorel, is being accused of harboring anti-democracy sentiments in his support of Socialism. Sorel thinks democracy is bad because of the corruption so we should assent to whatever it is that she wants us to think his solution is: probably some kind of dictatorship. We could however do a page hop citation for nearly any book to prove any point, this is why cherry picking is a fallacy.

Sorel’s observation here is that the people can be fooled and that democracy can allow this financial corruption. This isn’t necessarily a clamor against rule by the people rather it’s an identification of a flaw in the system.

She spends a considerable amount of time identifying that the intellectuals in charge of the revolution are not the ones that do the fighting. She’s brought this up in earlier sections and it is a fair point, but it’s a bit like calling the kettle black though since those aristocrats she lauds, as well as Napolean III, didn’t do the fighting themselves either.

Webster then references the Dreyfus affair, which is odd because it’s so out of place for this subject. The Dreyfus affair was a scandal where someone communicated French military secrets to the German embassy. The only reason to bring this up is because the entire affair stoked the fires of anti-Semitism in France and Webster cannot resist any reference to an anti-Semitic occurrence, “In the opinion, therefore, of the great Syndicalist, Jewish finance is largely interested in the triumph of State Socialism.”

The jump to “Jewish finance” is made through Sorel’s reference about corrupt agents in the Dreyfus affair. The historical problem with this is that the Jewish officer accused was actually innocent. A Dreyfusard was a supporter of Dreyfus’ innocence as well as one accusing the French military of corruption. She hammers on this point but there’s no nail for her to hit. The Jews were innocent in the affair.

More reports of infighting between Socialists and Syndicalists without her mentioning that these two political theories spawned because of the defects and abuses in the existing system. It’s uninteresting so I skipped it.

Things get odd. She addresses a new political system: Guild Socialism. Webster does a smart thing here; she points out that there is functionally no difference between Guild Socialism and Syndicalism aside from the Guild Socialists having a state. There’s no difference between Guild Socialism and regular Socialism either in that the former just places the bureaucracy in the name. Webster should point this out and then move on as the entire chapter is about the evil of Syndicalism. Dispense with it as a single line, “Guild Socialism, as championed by Cole, is just Syndicalism in another name, anyway Jews are bad…” or something like that. Instead, she spends the next two pages on how bad it is. It feels like padding before she gets to the solution: the co-op.

You may be familiar with a co-op. Foodwise you have to be a member, work there a little, and you enjoy profit sharing and parts of the decision-making process. It’s similar to Guild Socialism/Syndicalism Webster tells us only without the financial problems of that system. Webster lacks any explanation of why the Co-op is better, she just claims that it just doesn’t have those flaws. The flaws inherent in revenue sharing that would be in both the co-op and the syndicalist system. The only difference (maybe) is that there is a private owner at the top of the co-op.

It has been a while, but we return to Webster’s absurd demands. If the miners are so unhappy with the conditions of the mine, why don’t they make their own mine? This is her attack on Socialism, you never see the miners gather to create their own mine, run it based on their ideals, so we know that they aren’t telling the truth. There are two very large issues with this kind of attack. The most important being that Webster never explains what it would mean if they were telling the truth. What if the Socialist leaders demonstrated strict adherence to their position, would Webster approve? Probably not because she’s a fascist and a state which helps people instead of the other way around is a sticking point. People like her must assume that Socialists are lying because no one really wants to help the poor.

The second problem is lesser but more obvious. The mine isn’t in a random location, it’s where the coal/gold/cobalt is. The miners can’t just make another hole because there won’t be anything there. She has a better point when it comes to factories, but the point of the Socialist movement is that the people working in the factory are the value of the factory. The factory itself is useless without the worker. Whether we are discussing Syndicalism or Socialism there is no need to reinvent the factory. Webster is going to spend some considerable amount of ink wondering why her enemies don’t form their own mine/factory under their principles. She claims it is because everyone knows that it won’t work rather than being a pointless waste of energy.

From this point we are treated with our second attempt to build a socialist utopia. This time we head to Paraguay and William Lane. Our first was Etienne Cabet and the Icarians which failed because Cabet attempted to declare himself king and committed fraud. Lane’s problem, which is also the same problem that Ayn Rand fans face when they start their libertarian island states—no one wants to be the ditch digger. John Galt doesn’t have waiters because the entire point of those types of societies is that there aren’t regulations thus there is no incentive to trust that a person would get paid. In Lane’s world, the problem isn’t the lack of payment rather it’s that there is no incentive to do the very worst jobs. Webster’s observation that the farmer would resent the teacher is probably correct unless there is strong leadership and communal understanding of the roles of everyone in the society.

Lane’s problem was that he read Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” took that as the ideal Socialist society figuring that’s how it would work. I’ve read that book, it’s not bad. What Bellamy skips is the part that Lane didn’t consider: how do you get from A à C. Bellamy describes a little in the book about the Socialist struggle, but importantly, he never discusses the logistics of that process. This is why Lane failed and why Webster is so happy about it. Utopian Socialism is called “Utopian” because it doesn’t exist, perhaps the pure form is impossible. Webster isn’t really making that case though; her issue is that these Socialist utopias are set up and then the leader of it begins to act exactly like the capitalist owners that they were trying to escape. Her criticism becomes another, “do you hear it when you say it?” problem. Socialism is bad because it leads to the same situation you have right now. Ultimately, she is saying just skip the middle and stay miserable.