by M. LaFave
http://c4ss.org/content/28609
Orwell, Orthodoxy and Organization
This summer, I joined the reading group for Kevin A. Carson’s daunting, 600 page tome Organization Theory. In the first section, Carson presents a compelling mass of research and careful criticism of cross-ideological views of economies of scale. He argues that top economists, from Ronald Coase to John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Schumpeter, “accept ‘economies of scale’ as a sufficient explanation for the rise of the large corporation from a supposedly ‘laissez-faire’ economy”, failing to consider the systemic effects state intervention has on the architecture of large firms that would otherwise bow to real market forces.
Five pages in, Carson takes a heavy swing at the Austrians over this issue. “The irony is that the Austrians”, he scolds, “who consider themselves such iconoclasts in savaging so much of the received wisdom of neoclassical economists and liberal managerialism, also accept without critical awareness many of its implicit assumptions… So it’s somewhat jarring to see them… become ardently triumphalist enthusiasts for the sheer Hegelian ‘is-ness’ of things when it comes to Wal-Mart and sweatshops. It’s a bit odd to be so anti-Hamiltonian, and yet so fond of an economy founded on Hamiltonianism.” – Ouch.
Bad theory has an unfortunate tendency to slip between the cracks of active thought and critical inquiry, and Carson is not the first libertarian to bring it up. Henry Hazlitt warns us in the first sentence of the preface to Economics in One Lesson, “This book is an analysis of economic fallacies that are at last so prevalent that they have almost become a new orthodoxy.” Here, Hazlitt uses “orthodoxy” to refer to a generally authorized doctrine that includes both accurate and inaccurate insights, like subjective value theory and the broken window fallacy, respectively.
George Orwell, however, takes the meaning of orthodoxy even further in 1984, defining it to refer strictly to subversive ideas that have become the mainstream via their uncritical reception. In this passage, Winston is speaking with Syme, a dedicated and passionate agent of the state, who is tasked with compiling the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary:
Even the literature of the party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
This sort of Orwellian “unconsciousness” is precisely the state of mind that allows bad ideas to fester. Like a virus, these bogus theories permeate the uncritical mind and feed on passive acceptance, reproducing to latch onto new generations of economists, psychologists, scientists, and all other manner of inquiring minds who seek valid answers to key questions.
This tendency of orthodoxy is important to recognize, because a passive thought process is unlikely to stop after letting just one unchecked notion skate by. Liability to let anything at all past the threshold of intellectual scrutiny could be indicative of a more systematic problem. As William Gillis put it, preferring the term “faith” to orthodoxy,
Faith is innately unethical. Ethics without vigilance is meaningless and faith is defined by an abdication of cognitive vigilance… a mind filled with hardened tumors of faith and the rot of lazy habits is a mind always at risk of more proactive cancers.
Orwellian orthodoxy is a threat to all ideologies and fields of study and a potential menace to the development of inquiring minds, which is precisely why libertarians ought to oppose it most fervently.
As libertarians, we take pride in logical discourse and ethical rigor. We condemn the hypocrisies and failed policies of the statist left and the nationalist right. Turning our gaze inward, we are relentless when discussing matters of what is “truly libertarian”, be that tactics, tastes, culture, and other thick conceptions of liberty. Rational thought led us to our conclusions about free markets and individual liberty, and, if exercised consistently, should keep us on the right track with more complex issues that crop up the further we delve into economic and philosophical theory.
But despite our general steadfastness, Carson’s insight teaches us that we are not even safe from orthodoxy within the borders of libertarian thought. We too are liable to let an unexamined notion pass by unchecked, maybe because it confirms our preexisting feelings about the way something works, or perhaps because an idea simply carries the banner of “libertarian”. Either way, allowing these malignant manifestations of orthodoxy in is thoroughly un-libertarian.
The pursuit of truth for truth’s sake is a constitutive part of libertarianism, and for this reason, libertarians qua libertarians owe it to themselves to form an intellectual climate that promotes perpetual scrutiny of all ideas, regardless of whether those ideas were forged by hand-wringing statists or well-intentioned fellow libertarians. This intellectual climate should resemble important features of the economic arrangements that Jason Lee Byas describes in his essay Toward an Anarchy of Production, Pt. I. Calling for markets and the profit motive as agents of social change, he explains that,
by constantly approaching equilibrium yet never reaching it, unchained economic activity is exactly the kind of social dynamic that radicals desire: permanent revolution.
Market forces are robust because they are unyielding in adaptation and growth. By “constantly approaching equilibrium”, markets continuously reach to perfect allocation of resources both material and immaterial. This profound dynamic, which simultaneously optimizes productive efficiency and social flourishing, must be mirrored by any ideological community that wishes to grow into the best version of itself. Through unforgiving intellectual resilience in the face of propositions both pleasant and precipitous, libertarianism can stand athwart orthodoxy and achieve the kind of intellectual dynamic that the liberty-minded deserve: permanent cognitive revolution.
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“permanent cognitive revolution”
The only real way forward.
I will leave the 500 page “Organisational Theory” to Ian (he owns a copy – I do not, and I am not going to buy one).
I can only judge Kevin by his shorter works – and these show no sign of sound economic reasoning.
This review produces no argument that Kevin is correct – I do not know of the reviewer holds him to be correct or not.
In reality if (for example) it was more efficient to produce pottery on an individual potters wheel than it one of Mr Wedgewood’s 18th century factories, then that is what would be done.
And if it was more efficient to produce steel in your backyard than in a steel mill – then people would be doing that.
On retail – there is no need to go down the road of the National Socialist German Workers Party and denounce department stores (promising that Mom and Pop stores or cooperatives will dominate – by some sort of magic), it is not a good road to go down.
As for “permanent cognitive revolution” – would even Trotsky have gone for language like that?
In economics a theory it is either true or it is false – and one judges with the use of ordinary reason.
Reason is not dependent on historical period – any more than it is on “race” or “class”.
As for George Orwell – a tragic figure.
A man who detested the results of socialism – but remained wedded to socialism.
Thus he was locked in a terrible mental dead lock – that ended only with his own death.
I find the concept of a “reading group” rather comical. I imagine them all sitting there saying, “and now, we will read page 257, the parable of the talents”, and oh my, this is all rather religious isn’t it? What on Earth is a reading group for?
Anyway. The problem Carson has (in OT and other works) is the same problem as Marx; he goes wrong on page 1, and thus renders everything following unavoidably worthless. One can struggle through the whole of Das Kapital, but there’s not much point when it went wrong on page 1.
Kevin is a communist. He is an anti-state communist; but then so was Marx, who promised the withering away of the State in due course. Both believe that the evil of the world is caused by the ownership of the means of production, and both have tried to prove that something else would be better. Both fail on page 1. There hardly needs to be any more said.
Except that Carson’s supposedly devastating attack on the Austrians is simply an ad hominem that claims that they were shills for the capitalists. I pointed this out, I remember, in a long comment a long while ago; Carson’s technique in all his books is a frustrating and obfuscatory technique of literary (critical theory); he wheels out quotes, and quotes of quotes, and a quote of A attacking B quoting C, without ever presenting any economic theory that one can directly criticise (or rarely, anyway). So you get, “Austrian A said X, but B criticised A thus, and C commented…” and so on. THus any attempt to engage with it forces one to engage with all these disparate quotes; you end up arguing with the shades of the dead rather than Carson the literary critic.
Hence, it’s usually not worth the effort. Carson’s theory- labour value based anarcho-communism, heavily infused with idealistic greenism and the usual current progressive fetishes- is a mish mash of error and nonsense, and Libertarians would be better spending our time presenting our own position rather than wasting it arguing with the belief system of somebody who goes wrong on page 1.
Damm’t, Ian, you’re always so coy….
Anyway, don’t you remember from being a kid: “Do the worst first”? So, make sure you go wrong right up front, on P. 1. That way it’s out of the way, and you’re free to say whatever you like after that. :>)))
Thanks Julie 🙂
This, by the way, might arguably be the money-shot of Organisation Theory, the point where Carson is at his most plain as to his real intentions. It’s in the section on the Green Revolution (and how much he hates it)-
“One can afford to be a lot less efficient in the use of inputs that he gets for free. Capital-intensive techniques that increase output per man-hour, but reduce output per acre, aresuited to the interests of American-style agribusiness.[…]In areas with underutilized land and unemployed
population, on the other hand, where millions of unemployed people would ratherbe working the land than squatting in the streets of Calcutta or the shantytowns of MexicoCity, it makes a lot more sense to increase output per acre by adding labor inputs.”
In other words, here we have as clearly as possible Kevin’s model for an economy- low efficiency (he spends many pages ridiculing “efficiency” in sneer quotes) to provide “work”. He does not understand the most basic thing about economic growth. It’s all about giving labour more stuff to do, even if- indeed in the hope that- less actual stuff is produced.
This is so far from anything recognisable as Libertarian that applying to the term to his primitivist, anti-economic, back to the land Utopianism is ridiculous. It’s the Khmer Rouge, American style.
It’s also worth adding that Carson doesn’t like the internet either. On page 72, we get-
Anyone who remembers the old days before international direct dialling (as a child, I remember my parents booking phone calls to my aunt in Canada, and then we all sat round the phone waiting for the operator to connect us) might wonder why on Earth Carson would find this preferable. In the next paragraph we get our (predictable) answer-
In other words, all these things of modernity- roads, rail, telecoms, everything he looks at- are a Bad Thing because they allow capitalism. Thus, he wants travel as difficult as possible so that goods cannot travel. He wants communications as difficult as possible so that capitalists cannot communicate. And so on.
The really weird thing is Carson’s theory of Corporations. In a nutshell, he says that-
1) Capitalists produce by inefficient means.
2) Therefore they use State subsidies to compensate.
What he never gets around to explaining is why they don’t use the efficient methods, take the subsidy anyway, and make an even bigger profit. FOr instance, Kevin insists that myriad small workshops are more efficient than factories. Okay then, why don’t large corporations use the myriad small workshops then? Why are they deliberately producing by inefficient methods? Are they both évil and ludicrously stupid?
If Kevin is trying to be the American Pol Pot he may get sued by Bill “I am as much an anarchist as I am a Marxist” Ayers – who seems to have a prior claim.
Dear old Bill and his lovely wife (the one who admires Charles Manson) sitting around with their Comrades, talking about how many tens of millions of “tools of the capitalists” they were going to kill when victory came…….
Still neither Bill or Kevin believe in intellectual property – so a civil action for violation of the prior claim would be hypocritical.
As for Kevin himself…..
I am reminded of a Hollywood film I once watched.
A group of noble scientists were on a space mission to save the Earth from being destroyed by the Sun – but an agent of an evil corporation was out to sabotage the mission and have the Earth destroyed.
Why? Errrr the film never really explained that bit.
The managers of companies (“corporations”) are just like that – they do evil things for the sake of being evil (and they twirl their capitalistic upper lip whiskers as they tie the young lady to the railroad tracks).
If any further explaining is needed – the A. Baldwin character in “Team America: World Police” will provide it.
You see the Corporations do corporation things, because they are all corporationist and thingy……