I think the state should stay out of commerce altogether. In fact, I think the state should only involve itself as much as to pass safety regulations, then leave the enforcement of those regulations up to the local governments. DC has already proven that it can't even police itself, much less everyone else.
After all, Congress is full of drug-users and occasional rapists. We know they steal money by taxation and illegal stock trading.
This is the clearest analysis of terms I had been taking for granted - and of my own fairly naive criticism of the misuse of the derogatory term “capitalism.” I would say the first half of the essay gives the most food for rethinking all of that. The usual definitions leave the state out, yet the word still lets people treat the state as a mere reflection of private commerce, which is how the state itself gets romanticised. Even the term “capitalism,” and the implicit “capitalist state” that is thrown around all the time - if this were mathematics - would be thrown out as badly defined axioms.
I’ll have to read it a couple more times to make sure I got it - to counter decades of reading all kinds of discourses that appeared meaningful until Lorenzo questioned them.
This is one of the most useful treatments of the term's pathologies I have encountered, and the central diagnosis is surely correct: defining the economic system with the state elided romanticises the state, and the Marxist definition smuggles its verdict into the definiens, "exploitation of wage labour" being a conclusion dressed as a description.
I would resist only the eliminativist ending, and from a position that I think already answers your concern. I have argued at length that capitalism is not an ideology at all but a coordination mechanism, twofold in character: an information mechanism, prices aggregating dispersed, tacit, local knowledge that cannot be fully centralised without significant loss, and a reward mechanism aligning the system's incentives with the operators we actually are. On that account the term names a functional arrangement, not a creed, and the question of whether to keep the word becomes the question of whether the referent does analytical work. It does, and indispensably: Kornai's demand-constrained versus supply-constrained systems, the paired experiments of the two Germanys and the two Koreas, and the divergence between the marketised and planned segments of any hybrid economy all require a name for the price-coordinated side of the ledger. Retire the word and the comparative question, which class of failure does each system generate when its constraints bind, manageable or terminal, loses its subject. That would principally comfort the side that fails terminally. Your own line, "suppress commerce and you elevate the state," is the distinction reinstated in seven words.
Nor does keeping the term require the state's elision you rightly condemn. The mechanism account prices the state in from the start: the pathologies charged to "capitalism," capture, moral hazard, socialised losses, are on inspection recurrently pathologies of the state overriding the mechanism, 2008 being the canonical case, and the accountability asymmetry you describe is one I have pressed in nearly identical terms, BP's tens of billions in Deepwater liability against the precisely zero anyone paid for the Aral Sea. The same account refuses the opposite romanticisation: mistaking the mechanism for a moral framework, as the Objectivists do, is the mirror error of mistaking it for an ideology, as its abusers do. Demotion, not abolition: strip the word of ideological standing in both directions and the state re-enters the analysis exactly where you insist it belongs, as the perennial site of capture, whilst the mechanism-versus-mechanism comparison proceeds with the state's role priced in rather than elided. On the remainder, the insulation of the credentialed from consequence, the welfare apparatus colonising its own pathologies, Communism as the state pattern perfected rather than escaped, we are rowing the same boat.
would you be kind enough to read my latest essay titled; Why Capitalism Remains? this is the shortened version of the main piece of the same title. If you wish to read the main piece, I will gladly send it to you via e-mail.
Your essay demands a lot of the reader. I would recommend italicising key terms. I would also have done it as a series of posts.
What is most obviously missing is a definition of capitalism. It seems to be about corporations—so, large-scale firms—and, implicitly, the consequences of mass energy. I would prefer to call that corporate commerce.
The italics I concede at once, and with thanks; the essay introduces several terms of art and ought to mark them on first use, and it will. On the series, you are likely right about the reader's stamina, and I am unsure you are right about the argument, whose three load-bearing propositions lose their force when separated, but that is a question of craft on which I will reflect further.
The definition I decline, and I should say why, since the refusal is deliberate and not an oversight. Capitalism was created as an umbrella term, and largely by its critics, who assembled beneath one accusing name a whole cluster of distinct things: private ownership, wage labour, accumulation, the large firm, and the market itself. The imprecision is not a flaw in the word; it is the word's function. It permits the critic to condemn the market by naming the ownership order, and the defender to vindicate the ownership order by invoking the market. I am not comfortable redefining a term whose looseness is the very thing under examination, and I do not need to. The argument does not depend on closing the umbrella. It depends only on extracting one thing from beneath it: the market, which is older than capitalism, general to every arrangement that has endured, and not capitalism's creature. That is a distinction, not a definition, and it is the only one the thesis requires.
Your corporate commerce I read as an honest attempt to name a portion of what the umbrella covers, the layer of large organised capital above ordinary exchange, and I think it names that portion well. But notice that it, too, leaves the market where I have left it, beneath and prior. Whether the ownership layer is called capitalism, corporate commerce, or divided further still is a question on which the essay is deliberately indifferent, because its claim is not about that layer at all. It is that what cannot be abolished but at the cost of collapse is the market, and that every arrangement which has lasted, the corporation and the worker cooperative alike, is an alternative in who owns, not in how the thing is coordinated. On that I suspect we agree, and I am glad to have been pressed into saying it plainly.
Way back in 1993 during my university days in Brazil I was taking an evening class in ECONOMICS OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR, where the text being used was Lenin's "The State and Revolution". That class had some of THE HOTEST girls you could possibly imagine.
Well said Lorenzo I have got the same objection to the casual use of the left to right spectrum to specify ideological orientation. It is worse than useless and a free kick to the left, yes there is a central tendency among groups on the left but the same does not apply to the non-left.
After many years, I have given up trying to get my message through. I took a different turn to simply look at five pillars of peace, freedom and prosperity.
Interesting critique, but I think your argument suffers from a fundamental definitional gap. For me, capitalism isn't just "private property + market exchange." It critically must include the limited liability corporation and the credible enforcement of contracts.
You are absolutely right that modern commentators overemphasize ownership and markets while underweighting the legal superstructure. In the West, we take impartial contract enforcement for granted, but this is the historical exception, not the rule. Most countries throughout history—and most countries today—simply do not have credible, predictable contract enforcement. Without that, market exchange is just high-risk haggling between insiders.
This is precisely why the limited liability corporation was the true catalyst for the Industrial Revolution. It wasn't just steam engines; it was the legal technology that allowed massive, high-risk resource mobilization for coal mines, railways, and telegraph networks. No single merchant or loose partnership could have financed that scale of infrastructure. The LLC allowed risk to be pooled and diversified without bankrupting every investor on a single bad bet.
I would even argue that the USA was the first to truly institutionalize this. Before America, England and the Netherlands had limited liability, but only via royal charter or special acts of parliament. These were discretionary privileges handed out at the ruler's whim, often requiring years of expensive lobbying. In contrast, post-independence America moved toward a general, rights-based framework for incorporation—where any group meeting statutory criteria could form a corporation as a matter of right, rather than a matter of royal favor. This meant the US pioneered the democratization of access to corporate status well before Europe adopted similar general incorporation laws.
On a structural note about the article itself: I appreciate the contrarian spirit, but you throw a dozen different concepts into one post—ancient monuments, Marxist regimes, liberal theory, welfare states, and North Korea—and the thread gets lost. As it stands, the piece reads like a brainstorming session rather than a finished argument. Either expand this into a properly structured long-form essay with clear sub-theses, or cut the number of ideas down to two and sharpen the focus. Right now, it tries to cover too much ground and ends up going nowhere concrete.
Risk management is very much part of the deal: the long-term fall in European interest rates very much mattered, as did expansion of mechanisms to handle risk. But that is a pattern that goes back to the medieval period and extends across Europe, especially Western and Central Europe.
A working hypothesis of mine is that UK public debt played a role. Government debt was sufficiently low risk that people could expand their investment portfolio in riskier investments while maintaining an acceptable average level of risk.
The South Sea Bubble acted to discredit joint-stock companies not given explicit royal charters for decades. My view is that falling transport and communications costs, and expanding economies of scale in production, pushed towards the expansion, and then regularisation, of limited liability.
Insightful comment, but it minimizes the importance of the efficiency of the centralized steam engine in creating the industrial revolution and the resulting restructuring of the work environment. This seems less important now that most work is services based, but the increased benefit of scale changed the entire structure of the economy and thus society.
Liberal Democracies (and Representative Democracies) as a whole, are Capitalist Oligarchies; a system for which the more classical term is "Plutocracy." Neo-liberals or Populist Conservatives do not understand that Finances and Capital are a source of Political Power that now actively undermines the raw Political Power of the traditional Political classes — This is the power which these Politicians historically enjoyed in totality under feudal frameworks, or Monarchical Aristocracies.
With the end of Aristocratic-Hereditary obligations-based governments (which needed no electoral nonsense or mass participation because they were legitimized on Divine narratives or downright Monopoly on Violence); the modern Liberal state, where the Electoral system works on Census Suffrage and becomes prone to Herd mentality politics; the system therefore also becomes hijacked by Merchants and Capitalists as they have the financial means to Manufacture Consent (through ownership of NGOs, Think Tanks, and academies, et cetera), or they openly purchase politicians and political parties (lobbying).
All Institutions in a Liberal Democracy are prone to being compromised by the Capitalist class, be it the Judiciary or the Executive. This is the main problem. You can't "regulate" Capitalism as a Statesman without possessing Authoritarian instruments at your disposal. This is America's modern day problem. It is a miracle that it once managed to rein in its Capitalist-class during the 1900s, but that was a different age and things were not so complicated.
Today's America is beyond saving. All of its Politicians and Public are Goys.
A classic use of labels to elide the complexities of historical reality. One of the key features of the evolution of what we now call “Western” civilisation was precisely its long term pattern of bargaining between power centres: that is how and why Parliamentarianism developed.
It is revealing that the only other civilisation with a strong version of the same pattern—Japan—was the civilisation that most successfully responded to the Western challenge.
All of modern political science is naturally a construct of the Europeans; this is nothing new to me. And neither is the similarity of the Japanese feudal order here.
Western Europe leapfrogged in every sphere of governance and technology. But that is now no longer the case, and it will not be the case again. Its problems are too fundamental and incapable of being cured. The Parliamentary system of "handling factions" is itself the reason for its modern-day institutional sclerosis. This is because the Parliamentary state is an instrument of the Bourgeoisie, the money-making classes, or, in Marx's words: the [Liberal] state exists to guard the interests of the Capitalist.
Parliamentarianism, as you mention, is an evolution of the Feudal Assembly, specifically the English. Now, I do not know what your "historical reality" is, but if you delve into the political history of the English Kingdom, then you will observe the rise of the mercantile caste within its socio-political framework. The English Parliament was obviously conceived as an aristocratic institution, and this Aristocracy was the hereditary-patriarchal kind, the 'organic elite.' Its power came from its ownership of swaths of land and lineage. But as England's overseas entrepreneurial activities compounded, so did the power of the un-organic elites.
The Bourgeoisie was first truly born in England, and it maneuvered the Parliamentary system to gradually steer Power and Authority from the King and Aristocracy, eventually puppeting the state.
“... The confiscation of the monasteries’ lands and possessions evidently did not extend beyond these bounds, but the king found that ‘with nearly half the peers and at least four-fifths of the clergy against him, Henry had need of the House of Commons and he cultivated it with sedulous care.’ The rise of the House of Commons, which was dominated by the rising merchant class and landed gentry, was an integral part of Tudor political policy. This dynasty found it necessary to attempt to control parliament rather than to supplant it. The Tudors cannot be considered as other than as opportunistic in their dealing with property rights. They opposed enclosures, espoused monopolies and failed to recognize the gains that were available in extending the market. They sought revenues where they could, without regard to their effect upon economic efficiency.
The Stuarts inherited what the Tudors had sown. The Commons, by the beginning of the Stuart reign, was ready and able to assert itself. The controversy between the Stuarts and parliament is a familiar one. Its importance for our account is that in essence it was a dispute over fiscal matters. The Crown, caught up in the expensive rivalry between nations, needed more revenues and parliament proved intractable. The Crown viewed the government as its prerogative, the parliament saw the Crown as circumscribed by the common law.
The early seventeenth-century history of English government is inextricably entwined with the life of Sir Edward Coke. It was Coke who insisted that common law was the supreme law of the land and repeatedly incurred the anger of James I; it was Coke who led the parliamentary opposition in the 1620s; this group was responsible for securing the common-law control over the development of commercial law; and finally his leadership of the parliamentary opposition cemented the alliance of parliament with the common law.”
— Rise of the Western World, Douglass North, pp. 147
-
What happened is that the constant need of the English Monarchy to sustain its swelling fiscal-military expenditures caused it to sabotage its own Political Authority while simultaneously empowering the bargaining feudal, and later mercantile, elites.
This same phenomenon of power transition is observed in industrializing states, where power shifted from the hands of the hereditary aristocracy to those of the compounding financial Capitalists. This happened to America during and after the Gilded Age, but its political system worsened considerably after World War II due to a set of reasons. Countries like France and Russia, where merchants did not grow powerful due to the mailed fist of Absolutism, faced violent Revolutions instead.
The rise of Liberal Democracy has no Metaphysical force of divinity behind it. It happened because circumstances had aligned in very few, certain countries. As History is proof now, Liberal states are severely prone to institutional dysfunction and self-sabotage, and will eventually succumb, becoming known in History as one of the reasons for the collapse of the West.
I must caution you that I am not a Marxist.
My concern is that the Liberal state was born to be puppeted by an elite class that has no ideological unity, and therefore no vision, to govern their society. The great tragedy of modernity is the erosion of the patriarchal model of Politics and its replacement by this effeminate system where no Great Statesman is ever produced, but which only lets Impish men hijack the state while making an enormous fool of the gullible masses.
What do we mean by Bourgeoisie? Company founders like Bezos, Musk, etc? Corporate bureaucrats? Self-employed professionals? Small business operators? I do not find it a useful term: indeed, I do not find it a helpful term in part because I am a medievalist and am aware how contested medieval urban politics could be an how varied the representation of commercial interests was.
But you seem to continue to miss the point of the post. The state is not just an instrument. The closest it comes to being an instrument is in Party-States, who are a very particular phenomenon. Welfare state apparats colonise their own societies, and the larger they get, the even less of an instrument they become.
Sir, you are living in Modernity. What has happened in the past five hundred years is an irreversible change in our species's composition. Since you're a medievalist I am assuming you are also a passionate Christian, more or less; then the fact that time and historical progression is a strictly linear process in that religion should be of some relevance to you.
I read some of your articles, they contain far more knowledge than I have gobbled up. My only concern is that your belief in these archaic ideas and systems will hinder the organising potential of the Right Wing, which is already a divided and therefore an ineffective political force.
I know that when learned people have such different Ontologies there is no potential of reconciliation. Bourgeoisie, State, Capitalism — We do not have the same definitions, and I am sure you're not interested in spending your time continuing this discussion.
I think the state should stay out of commerce altogether. In fact, I think the state should only involve itself as much as to pass safety regulations, then leave the enforcement of those regulations up to the local governments. DC has already proven that it can't even police itself, much less everyone else.
After all, Congress is full of drug-users and occasional rapists. We know they steal money by taxation and illegal stock trading.
This is the clearest analysis of terms I had been taking for granted - and of my own fairly naive criticism of the misuse of the derogatory term “capitalism.” I would say the first half of the essay gives the most food for rethinking all of that. The usual definitions leave the state out, yet the word still lets people treat the state as a mere reflection of private commerce, which is how the state itself gets romanticised. Even the term “capitalism,” and the implicit “capitalist state” that is thrown around all the time - if this were mathematics - would be thrown out as badly defined axioms.
I’ll have to read it a couple more times to make sure I got it - to counter decades of reading all kinds of discourses that appeared meaningful until Lorenzo questioned them.
This is one of the most useful treatments of the term's pathologies I have encountered, and the central diagnosis is surely correct: defining the economic system with the state elided romanticises the state, and the Marxist definition smuggles its verdict into the definiens, "exploitation of wage labour" being a conclusion dressed as a description.
I would resist only the eliminativist ending, and from a position that I think already answers your concern. I have argued at length that capitalism is not an ideology at all but a coordination mechanism, twofold in character: an information mechanism, prices aggregating dispersed, tacit, local knowledge that cannot be fully centralised without significant loss, and a reward mechanism aligning the system's incentives with the operators we actually are. On that account the term names a functional arrangement, not a creed, and the question of whether to keep the word becomes the question of whether the referent does analytical work. It does, and indispensably: Kornai's demand-constrained versus supply-constrained systems, the paired experiments of the two Germanys and the two Koreas, and the divergence between the marketised and planned segments of any hybrid economy all require a name for the price-coordinated side of the ledger. Retire the word and the comparative question, which class of failure does each system generate when its constraints bind, manageable or terminal, loses its subject. That would principally comfort the side that fails terminally. Your own line, "suppress commerce and you elevate the state," is the distinction reinstated in seven words.
Nor does keeping the term require the state's elision you rightly condemn. The mechanism account prices the state in from the start: the pathologies charged to "capitalism," capture, moral hazard, socialised losses, are on inspection recurrently pathologies of the state overriding the mechanism, 2008 being the canonical case, and the accountability asymmetry you describe is one I have pressed in nearly identical terms, BP's tens of billions in Deepwater liability against the precisely zero anyone paid for the Aral Sea. The same account refuses the opposite romanticisation: mistaking the mechanism for a moral framework, as the Objectivists do, is the mirror error of mistaking it for an ideology, as its abusers do. Demotion, not abolition: strip the word of ideological standing in both directions and the state re-enters the analysis exactly where you insist it belongs, as the perennial site of capture, whilst the mechanism-versus-mechanism comparison proceeds with the state's role priced in rather than elided. On the remainder, the insulation of the credentialed from consequence, the welfare apparatus colonising its own pathologies, Communism as the state pattern perfected rather than escaped, we are rowing the same boat.
I agree with your underlying analysis: however, I do not think the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘capitalist’ can be rescued.
would you be kind enough to read my latest essay titled; Why Capitalism Remains? this is the shortened version of the main piece of the same title. If you wish to read the main piece, I will gladly send it to you via e-mail.
Your essay demands a lot of the reader. I would recommend italicising key terms. I would also have done it as a series of posts.
What is most obviously missing is a definition of capitalism. It seems to be about corporations—so, large-scale firms—and, implicitly, the consequences of mass energy. I would prefer to call that corporate commerce.
The italics I concede at once, and with thanks; the essay introduces several terms of art and ought to mark them on first use, and it will. On the series, you are likely right about the reader's stamina, and I am unsure you are right about the argument, whose three load-bearing propositions lose their force when separated, but that is a question of craft on which I will reflect further.
The definition I decline, and I should say why, since the refusal is deliberate and not an oversight. Capitalism was created as an umbrella term, and largely by its critics, who assembled beneath one accusing name a whole cluster of distinct things: private ownership, wage labour, accumulation, the large firm, and the market itself. The imprecision is not a flaw in the word; it is the word's function. It permits the critic to condemn the market by naming the ownership order, and the defender to vindicate the ownership order by invoking the market. I am not comfortable redefining a term whose looseness is the very thing under examination, and I do not need to. The argument does not depend on closing the umbrella. It depends only on extracting one thing from beneath it: the market, which is older than capitalism, general to every arrangement that has endured, and not capitalism's creature. That is a distinction, not a definition, and it is the only one the thesis requires.
Your corporate commerce I read as an honest attempt to name a portion of what the umbrella covers, the layer of large organised capital above ordinary exchange, and I think it names that portion well. But notice that it, too, leaves the market where I have left it, beneath and prior. Whether the ownership layer is called capitalism, corporate commerce, or divided further still is a question on which the essay is deliberately indifferent, because its claim is not about that layer at all. It is that what cannot be abolished but at the cost of collapse is the market, and that every arrangement which has lasted, the corporation and the worker cooperative alike, is an alternative in who owns, not in how the thing is coordinated. On that I suspect we agree, and I am glad to have been pressed into saying it plainly.
Way back in 1993 during my university days in Brazil I was taking an evening class in ECONOMICS OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR, where the text being used was Lenin's "The State and Revolution". That class had some of THE HOTEST girls you could possibly imagine.
and no doubt the craziest girls
All ready to marry the first guy with a steady income. Not that crazy!
and Brazilian women so beautiful!
crazy like a fox, lol
Well said Lorenzo I have got the same objection to the casual use of the left to right spectrum to specify ideological orientation. It is worse than useless and a free kick to the left, yes there is a central tendency among groups on the left but the same does not apply to the non-left.
After many years, I have given up trying to get my message through. I took a different turn to simply look at five pillars of peace, freedom and prosperity.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/rebadging-the-liberals
Succinct and persuasive. Thanks
Interesting critique, but I think your argument suffers from a fundamental definitional gap. For me, capitalism isn't just "private property + market exchange." It critically must include the limited liability corporation and the credible enforcement of contracts.
You are absolutely right that modern commentators overemphasize ownership and markets while underweighting the legal superstructure. In the West, we take impartial contract enforcement for granted, but this is the historical exception, not the rule. Most countries throughout history—and most countries today—simply do not have credible, predictable contract enforcement. Without that, market exchange is just high-risk haggling between insiders.
This is precisely why the limited liability corporation was the true catalyst for the Industrial Revolution. It wasn't just steam engines; it was the legal technology that allowed massive, high-risk resource mobilization for coal mines, railways, and telegraph networks. No single merchant or loose partnership could have financed that scale of infrastructure. The LLC allowed risk to be pooled and diversified without bankrupting every investor on a single bad bet.
I would even argue that the USA was the first to truly institutionalize this. Before America, England and the Netherlands had limited liability, but only via royal charter or special acts of parliament. These were discretionary privileges handed out at the ruler's whim, often requiring years of expensive lobbying. In contrast, post-independence America moved toward a general, rights-based framework for incorporation—where any group meeting statutory criteria could form a corporation as a matter of right, rather than a matter of royal favor. This meant the US pioneered the democratization of access to corporate status well before Europe adopted similar general incorporation laws.
On a structural note about the article itself: I appreciate the contrarian spirit, but you throw a dozen different concepts into one post—ancient monuments, Marxist regimes, liberal theory, welfare states, and North Korea—and the thread gets lost. As it stands, the piece reads like a brainstorming session rather than a finished argument. Either expand this into a properly structured long-form essay with clear sub-theses, or cut the number of ideas down to two and sharpen the focus. Right now, it tries to cover too much ground and ends up going nowhere concrete.
This is the introductory piece in a series and should be read as such. The complexity that gets elided by ‘capitalism’ is the point.
The history of limited liability is much more interactive than your account suggests. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability#History
Risk management is very much part of the deal: the long-term fall in European interest rates very much mattered, as did expansion of mechanisms to handle risk. But that is a pattern that goes back to the medieval period and extends across Europe, especially Western and Central Europe.
A working hypothesis of mine is that UK public debt played a role. Government debt was sufficiently low risk that people could expand their investment portfolio in riskier investments while maintaining an acceptable average level of risk.
The South Sea Bubble acted to discredit joint-stock companies not given explicit royal charters for decades. My view is that falling transport and communications costs, and expanding economies of scale in production, pushed towards the expansion, and then regularisation, of limited liability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company
Also, I am not really interested in finding a “good” definition of capitalism: I view the term as beyond redemption.
Insightful comment, but it minimizes the importance of the efficiency of the centralized steam engine in creating the industrial revolution and the resulting restructuring of the work environment. This seems less important now that most work is services based, but the increased benefit of scale changed the entire structure of the economy and thus society.
Liberal Democracies (and Representative Democracies) as a whole, are Capitalist Oligarchies; a system for which the more classical term is "Plutocracy." Neo-liberals or Populist Conservatives do not understand that Finances and Capital are a source of Political Power that now actively undermines the raw Political Power of the traditional Political classes — This is the power which these Politicians historically enjoyed in totality under feudal frameworks, or Monarchical Aristocracies.
With the end of Aristocratic-Hereditary obligations-based governments (which needed no electoral nonsense or mass participation because they were legitimized on Divine narratives or downright Monopoly on Violence); the modern Liberal state, where the Electoral system works on Census Suffrage and becomes prone to Herd mentality politics; the system therefore also becomes hijacked by Merchants and Capitalists as they have the financial means to Manufacture Consent (through ownership of NGOs, Think Tanks, and academies, et cetera), or they openly purchase politicians and political parties (lobbying).
All Institutions in a Liberal Democracy are prone to being compromised by the Capitalist class, be it the Judiciary or the Executive. This is the main problem. You can't "regulate" Capitalism as a Statesman without possessing Authoritarian instruments at your disposal. This is America's modern day problem. It is a miracle that it once managed to rein in its Capitalist-class during the 1900s, but that was a different age and things were not so complicated.
Today's America is beyond saving. All of its Politicians and Public are Goys.
A classic use of labels to elide the complexities of historical reality. One of the key features of the evolution of what we now call “Western” civilisation was precisely its long term pattern of bargaining between power centres: that is how and why Parliamentarianism developed.
It is revealing that the only other civilisation with a strong version of the same pattern—Japan—was the civilisation that most successfully responded to the Western challenge.
A useful text is: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/the-gates-of-power-monks-courtiers-and-warriors-in-premodern-japan/
All of modern political science is naturally a construct of the Europeans; this is nothing new to me. And neither is the similarity of the Japanese feudal order here.
Western Europe leapfrogged in every sphere of governance and technology. But that is now no longer the case, and it will not be the case again. Its problems are too fundamental and incapable of being cured. The Parliamentary system of "handling factions" is itself the reason for its modern-day institutional sclerosis. This is because the Parliamentary state is an instrument of the Bourgeoisie, the money-making classes, or, in Marx's words: the [Liberal] state exists to guard the interests of the Capitalist.
Parliamentarianism, as you mention, is an evolution of the Feudal Assembly, specifically the English. Now, I do not know what your "historical reality" is, but if you delve into the political history of the English Kingdom, then you will observe the rise of the mercantile caste within its socio-political framework. The English Parliament was obviously conceived as an aristocratic institution, and this Aristocracy was the hereditary-patriarchal kind, the 'organic elite.' Its power came from its ownership of swaths of land and lineage. But as England's overseas entrepreneurial activities compounded, so did the power of the un-organic elites.
The Bourgeoisie was first truly born in England, and it maneuvered the Parliamentary system to gradually steer Power and Authority from the King and Aristocracy, eventually puppeting the state.
“... The confiscation of the monasteries’ lands and possessions evidently did not extend beyond these bounds, but the king found that ‘with nearly half the peers and at least four-fifths of the clergy against him, Henry had need of the House of Commons and he cultivated it with sedulous care.’ The rise of the House of Commons, which was dominated by the rising merchant class and landed gentry, was an integral part of Tudor political policy. This dynasty found it necessary to attempt to control parliament rather than to supplant it. The Tudors cannot be considered as other than as opportunistic in their dealing with property rights. They opposed enclosures, espoused monopolies and failed to recognize the gains that were available in extending the market. They sought revenues where they could, without regard to their effect upon economic efficiency.
The Stuarts inherited what the Tudors had sown. The Commons, by the beginning of the Stuart reign, was ready and able to assert itself. The controversy between the Stuarts and parliament is a familiar one. Its importance for our account is that in essence it was a dispute over fiscal matters. The Crown, caught up in the expensive rivalry between nations, needed more revenues and parliament proved intractable. The Crown viewed the government as its prerogative, the parliament saw the Crown as circumscribed by the common law.
The early seventeenth-century history of English government is inextricably entwined with the life of Sir Edward Coke. It was Coke who insisted that common law was the supreme law of the land and repeatedly incurred the anger of James I; it was Coke who led the parliamentary opposition in the 1620s; this group was responsible for securing the common-law control over the development of commercial law; and finally his leadership of the parliamentary opposition cemented the alliance of parliament with the common law.”
— Rise of the Western World, Douglass North, pp. 147
-
What happened is that the constant need of the English Monarchy to sustain its swelling fiscal-military expenditures caused it to sabotage its own Political Authority while simultaneously empowering the bargaining feudal, and later mercantile, elites.
This same phenomenon of power transition is observed in industrializing states, where power shifted from the hands of the hereditary aristocracy to those of the compounding financial Capitalists. This happened to America during and after the Gilded Age, but its political system worsened considerably after World War II due to a set of reasons. Countries like France and Russia, where merchants did not grow powerful due to the mailed fist of Absolutism, faced violent Revolutions instead.
The rise of Liberal Democracy has no Metaphysical force of divinity behind it. It happened because circumstances had aligned in very few, certain countries. As History is proof now, Liberal states are severely prone to institutional dysfunction and self-sabotage, and will eventually succumb, becoming known in History as one of the reasons for the collapse of the West.
I must caution you that I am not a Marxist.
My concern is that the Liberal state was born to be puppeted by an elite class that has no ideological unity, and therefore no vision, to govern their society. The great tragedy of modernity is the erosion of the patriarchal model of Politics and its replacement by this effeminate system where no Great Statesman is ever produced, but which only lets Impish men hijack the state while making an enormous fool of the gullible masses.
What do we mean by Bourgeoisie? Company founders like Bezos, Musk, etc? Corporate bureaucrats? Self-employed professionals? Small business operators? I do not find it a useful term: indeed, I do not find it a helpful term in part because I am a medievalist and am aware how contested medieval urban politics could be an how varied the representation of commercial interests was.
But you seem to continue to miss the point of the post. The state is not just an instrument. The closest it comes to being an instrument is in Party-States, who are a very particular phenomenon. Welfare state apparats colonise their own societies, and the larger they get, the even less of an instrument they become.
Sir, you are living in Modernity. What has happened in the past five hundred years is an irreversible change in our species's composition. Since you're a medievalist I am assuming you are also a passionate Christian, more or less; then the fact that time and historical progression is a strictly linear process in that religion should be of some relevance to you.
I read some of your articles, they contain far more knowledge than I have gobbled up. My only concern is that your belief in these archaic ideas and systems will hinder the organising potential of the Right Wing, which is already a divided and therefore an ineffective political force.
I know that when learned people have such different Ontologies there is no potential of reconciliation. Bourgeoisie, State, Capitalism — We do not have the same definitions, and I am sure you're not interested in spending your time continuing this discussion.
Have a good day.