(c) Copyright 1999: Graham L. Strachan
Corporatism is the theory that because certain lobby groups such as big business and unions are powerful, they should actually be allowed to share in the process of government. There is an obvious principle of expediency involved: that because such groups are powerful, they should be allowed to exert control, a classic case of might becoming right. Government then becomes the now familiar process of back room deal-making, ‘tradeoffs’ and ‘accords’ between various lobby groups and an official government whose power and authority is correspondingly reduced. Politics divorced from group self-interest becomes impossible.
Corporatism is the very opposite of individual democracy. The individual, forced to participate in a war of conflicting group interests, is destined to find themself disadvantaged unless they can align their interests with one of the established power groups. Failing that, they will have no say at all in their own government. Their vote will be worthless.
The antecedents of modern corporatism are to be found in the writings of Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) who is also regarded as one of the founders of modern socialism.
Saint-Simon was born in Paris in 1760 of an ‘impoverished’ aristocratic family. At the age of 16 he joined the French army and was in the regiments sent to aid the American colonies in their war of independence against England. Back in France, he survived the French Revolution by renouncing his aristocratic title, and made himself rich buying up newly nationalized land with funds advanced by a friend. Thereafter, he proceeded to live ‘a life of splendour and license’ until most of his wealth was gone, whereupon he turned to the study of science. By 1808 he was impoverished, and lived the last 17 years of his life mainly on the generosity of friends. In 1823, in a fit of despondency, he attempted to kill himself with a pistol but succeeded only in putting out one eye. He died in 1825 [Encyclopaedia Britannica].
Saint-Simon wrote several treatises on how society should be reorganised. These included ‘On the Reorganization of European Society’ (1814), ‘Industry’ (1816-18) in collaboration with Auguste Comte, and his best-known work, ‘The New Christianity’ (1825), in which his proposed social system took on the form of a religion in which a belief in science, technology and industry replaced belief in God.
Before going into details of Saint-Simon’s system, it is important to note that Capitalism and Socialism are not the great opposites media-generated propaganda suggests. Both share a belief that economics is everything, and that the purpose of human life is to work. They might disagree about how work ought to be organised, and how the benefits should be distributed, but they share a common belief in the primacy of economic interest. Saint-Simon took that belief to its logical extreme.
Like all socialists, Saint-Simon was an historicist. He believed human history was predestined to follow a particular course. That course involved three important phases: a society based on slavery, one based on feudalism, then the final one organised solely for industrial production. This stage would be the culmination, the ‘end of history’, to which all previous human development has been leading. The unfolding of history was ‘inevitable’, ‘unstoppable’, though he still advocated social action to ‘birth the baby’, all of which foreshadows Marxism.
According to Saint-Simon, modern societies would be in equilibrium only when organised on a purely industrial basis. The only possible purpose of this ultimate society was the production of useful things. The only interests the masses could have were economic interests. Since industry was the thing that guaranteed the society’s existence, what was good for industry must also be good for society [P.D.Anthony, ‘The Ideology of Work’ (1977), p. 88, quoting Durkheim (1959)]. It follows that the only purpose of human life is to work, to provide ‘human resources’ for the production process, human grist for the industrial mill.
According to Saint-Simon, the art of government would then be ‘the universal application of the truths of political economy’. Economics became more than just a set of principles, it was ‘the morality of the temporal order in civil society’. ‘The doctrines of work and progress were the driving ethical concepts of the new society’. ‘Man progressed ethically to the degree that industry became perfected. It was therefore moral to spread and inculcate ideas which tended to increase the productive activity....’ [Saint-Simon, in Anthony p. 88, citing Manuel (1956)]. In other words, the moral good was whatever benefited industry. Whatever made a profit was morally good.
In such a society the whole conception of government would change. The economic structure would come to replace the traditional government apparatus. The need for government in the tradition sense would disappear, to be replaced by the planning and administration of trade and industry. The government of people would be replaced by the administration of things. There would be no need for democracy. The administrators would be appointed on the basis of their professional competence.
Since social life would consist essentially of industrial relationships, the only men competent to govern such a society would be men of industry, experts who could interpret the problems of economics and apply the appropriate solutions demanded by the circumstances. These ‘industrials’, as Saint-Simon called them, would be an ‘elite’ which would dominate human affairs. Other classes would be subordinated to the ‘industrials’. It was only natural too that those who organised work would also organise social life because work was social life.
Socialists, who claim Saint-Simon as one of their founders, try to relate all this to concern for the wellbeing of the working class, but that is not easy. As far as he was concerned the working class had to accept certain unavoidable realities about their situation, including the fact they were subordinate to the ‘industrials’ who were richer and smarter than they were [Anthony, p.90, citing Manuel, p. 225]. If the material position of the working class needed improving, then such an improvement would have to come in the general course of things, as a result of the ruling social scientists making the right decisions, based on impersonal, scientific considerations. The ‘law of the situation’ would tell these experts what needed to be done, and that would ultimately be to the benefit of everyone, including the working class.
Anthony points out that while Saint-Simon is regarded as a founder of socialism, “....his view of the new world was of a logical and natural extension of capitalism to its completed state, removed of those inhibitions to its progress which [he] correctly identified as traditional [i.e. morality]. All the ingredients of the protestant work ethic were present....work, measurement, rationalism, materialism....as dominant themes which demand that others be removed. Saint-Simon’s new society would not be a perfect world, but it would be a perfect world for manufacturers and businessmen.”[Anthony, p.92].
In such a society there is no room for alternative views because every problem supposedly has a correct (scientific) solution, and the experts naturally know best. Nor is there any room for arguments based on morality (ethics), because such human values are said to have disappeared with the last vestiges of the old theocratic society.
Saint-Simon attacked traditional morality on the ground that it got in the way of business. “The economists argued that traditionally accepted moral values were a threat to the functionling of the economic system. Saint-Simon argued that there was no other system [than the economic] and no other values. The appearance of alternative systems of thought and belief were, he argued, throwbacks to previous patterns of social organisation....traditional mystifications....and ....essentially irrational.” The next obvious step, observed Anthony, would be to treat critics like dissidents or deviants [ref. Prime Minister Howard calling Pauline Hanson ‘deranged’] and in instances like the former Soviet Union, confine them to psychiatric institutions [Anthony, p. 93].
According to Saint-Simon, politics would become ‘the science of production’. This slogan, according to Anthony, and the conceptions upon which it rests have given rise to the most potent myth of our own industrial society: that politicians, scientists, managers, social scientists and administrators are beyond criticism because their decisions are ‘value-free’. In fact their decisions are not value free at all. First, they believe science and progress are ‘good things’ in themselves, which is a value judgment. Secondly, they are morally convinced that what they are doing is right. What has happened, says Anthony, is that “the scientists and the managers....have simply succeeded in superimposing their values on the whole of society....” [Anthony, p. 95].
While genuine scientists, faced with things like the uncertainty principle and quantum physics, are becoming ever more conscious of what they don’t know, so-called ‘social’ scientists “have become impatient for the established principles which will provide the outline of the new social system”. That ‘impatience’ has led them to fill vast gaps in their knowledge with speculative philosophy (theorising), thereafter tending to ignore evidence which conflicts with the theory because it might delay certainty. According to their view the problems of politics will disappear when science, industry, and reason combine to provide abundance and health, and the absolute knowledge required to do that is ‘just around the corner’. In some cases it has been ‘just around the corner’ for 150 years.
Following his death in 1825, Saint-Simon’s disciples carried his message to the world and made him famous. A movement supporting his ideas began to grow, and by the end of 1828 the ‘Saint-Simonians’ were holding meetings in Paris and in many provincial towns. The sect is said to have included ‘some of the ablest and most promising young men of France’. In the following years however, these ablest and most promising young men quarreled among themselves, and the movement fragmented and broke up, its leaders ‘turning to practical affairs’.
Despite this, the ideas of the Saint-Simonians had a ‘pervasive influence on the intellectual life of 19th-century Europe’. They influenced Thomas Carlyle, Marx and Engels, and are said to have contained in embryo most of the ideas of later socialists. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Saint-Simon’s influence on modern thought, especially in the social sciences, is ‘undeniable’.
But according to P.D.Anthony, whether or not socialists are justified in claiming Saint-Simon as one of theirs, his ideas also anticipated managerialism and the corporate state....the displacement of political government by scientific administration by suitably qualified experts, which is precisely what the Western world is experiencing now. Anthony describes it as “the clean, clinical inhuman socialism of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World”. Welcome to it.