The Public Policy/Nothing for Everyone
Howe, Neil
"The Public Policy/Nothing for Everyone" go to the movie as a revolutionary act; rather, they go primarily to belong. They want to belong, in part, because Rocky Horror offers elements of religion, hedonism, and outright...
...Redistribution is desirable, not so much to enrich the poor, but r a t h e r to impoverish the rich...
...And though the rhetoric of progress has done its best to deny this, our very success in pillaging the earth of its resources has now made the t r u t h inescapable...
...I | F, #6 GoreVidat | | " #7 Isaac Bashevis Singer I #8 Richard Nixon I ' #9 Leonid Brezhnev | I r" #10 HenryKissinger I I '- #11 Jimmy Carter I | ' " #12 Teddy Kennedy I I I I Volume 12, 1979 | #1 Jerry Brown | I #2 Douglas MacArthur I #3 Irving Kristol | I r " #4 FTC vs...
...Here his theories are, in fact, pure mercantilism, transforming every economic declsmn into a question of raw politics and raw resources...
...This sort of tirade against the unboundedness of modern civilization bears an eerie resemblance to an old school of radical reaction whose influence we have almost forgotten...
...The growth-oriented institutions of capitalism are nothing less than the most recent engines of this destructive trend...
...They want to belong, in part, because Rocky Horror offers elements of religion, hedonism, and outright immorality With a tinge of revolution to it...
...Only a few years ago it was widely believed that, by taking up the idea of scarcity, the Left was simply being opportunistic, hoping to find in scarcity the basis for a new anti-establishment fervor (the causes of the sixties having passed) or, at the very least, an expeditious way of furthering the government's regulatory powers...
...depopulation of the cities...
...The "underconsumption" that follows this "scarcity" (it sounds more like a glut than a scarcity) portends chaos and mayhem, needless to say...
...So did his Party apostles...
...For many of us, this ideological shift on the Left is baffling...
...Individualism, according to Rousseau and his descendants, inculcates desires far too extravagant and innovations far too wasteful for civilized man ever to be satisfied within the limits of Nature...
...Capitalism is still held in as much contempt as it was during the sixties, but ~'or new reasons...
...As for water resources, Sarnet cites so many exotic examples of parching and scorching that he is forced to conclude that "given the worldwide distribution of t h i r s t . . . there is something faintly obscene about the extravagant use of water in the American home...
...Should we not desist and accept some sort of socialized austerity regime, the penalty will be far worse than a proletarian revolution: Nature herself will strike back with tempests, famines, poisons, and conflagration--in short, with the Four Horsemen...
...It is a seldomrecalled fact that the first translation of Kapitalinto Russian was published on Czar Alexander I I I ' s official presses...
...Indeed, those whose writings provided the origins of leftist ideology, especially utopian socialists such as Condorcet, William Godwin, and Robert Ower~, saw in man's destiny a world of Cornucopian plenty...
...Barnet wants tomove us with his own modern t r a n s l a t i o n : " s c a r c e . " Left as our society moves into the eighties, the attack on capitalism will become increasingly parochial, entropic, and reactionary...
...He seems to believe, for instance, that capitalists both rob future consumers by exploiting resources too quickly, and at the same time rob p r e s e n t consumers by forming cartels and exploiting them too slowly...
...We associated socialism with cybernetics, with Futurist painting, with endless rows of tractors and tanks, with vast bureaucracies figuring out GNP statistics to the tenth decimal place, with the hissing and thumping steam pistons of the battleship Kropatkin...
...Whoever controls resources controls the world...
...Had he considered them, he might have seen how markets do indeed induce resource preservation, resource substitution, and resource recycling...
...As socialism's official position, the "New World" (with its denial of scarcity) has usually won out, because it melded more easily with the powerful, progressive spirit of western liberalism...
...So do Sovietpropagandists today...
...Because he understands all wars and regimes to be based on nothing but the mindless quest for resource gratification, he is driven to observe that (even today) " p o l i t i c a l power still comes out of guns...
...The planet is indeed finite," Barnet says...
...Simply use this form, or a | | reasonable facsimile, and send with | | your check or money order...
...It is a "symptom of social pathology" and the pathogen is the West's ceaseless desire for betterment...
...Barnet pursues the " s c a r c i t y " theme so r e l e n t l e s s l y that he sees everything mankind has ever done in different shades of the same color...
...Worse still, many of its details are simply wrong...
...Suffused as it must be witl4 a s e n s e of "religion" and "community," it is a vision that inspires Barnet to bucolic contemplation: In a traditional society where nothing changes, most people accept their place with a certain grace...
...But for Barnet the market is, predictably, a mere "metaphysical abstraction...
...and the delicate ecological balance of the earth is jeopardized...
...Though "scarcity in one commodity or another" is a familiar problem, he remarks, "the notion of systemic limits is t h r e a t e n i n g to capitalists and socialists alike...
...That now, in America at least, so much of the Left's fervor seems to be pointed in the opposite-direction should prompt us to wonder what the real c,,gins of the new popularity of " s c a r c i t y " are and, more importantl where it will lead the Left from here...
...That the landlord should live in luxury and the tenant farmer in a hovel was as natural as the sunrise...
...He tells the same story about food supply, but with a d i f f e r e n t twist...
...Hostility toward private economic activity is of course manifest in nearly all the proposed solutions for scarcity as well: zoning and land-use statutes at the local level, legislation and resource boards at the s t a t e level, agencies, taxes, and subsidies at the federal level, and UN resolutions for the world...
...Our real and perceived declining economic performance during the seventies, of course, made clear what the consequences would be: submitting, perhaps forever, to material dirth...
...This is a book," Barnet declares on page t h r e e , " a b o u t physical resources and political power...
...Because of its very unruliness, it inadvertently reveals themes which a more cautious t r e a t i s e would have kept hidden...
...Yet here too perhaps Barnet can find a way out...
...The history of energy and minerals, needless to say, is a history of picaresque entrepreneurs, followed by shameless cartels, followed in turn by faceless, insatiable multinationals and t h e i r lackey governments...
...Barnet's explanation stands as a sort of "scarcity" credo: S c i e n t i s t s have promised to b r e a k t h e bonds of human f i n i t u d e , to open t h e s e c r e t s of t h e cell, and to u n v e i l t h e mystery of t h e p l a n e t s . I n s t e a d of t h e bmmdless horizons they had promised, limits popped up everywhere...
...Because he regards all human culture--knowledge, taste, and technology--as reducible to resource environments, he retailors sociology and history into crude deterministic dress...
...Although here the U.S...
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...nations "bleed" from high import bills...
...and s t r i c t local, even communal, control of "capital" and of all natural resources...
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...come to believe that it describes an essential and timeless relationship between man and Nature...
...And Barnet, to his credit, fully acknowledges his departure from traditional socialism...
...With or without markets, Barnet's economics often strain the barest rules of logical consistency...
...local "protectionism" and "self-sufficiency...
...He is also convinced that "speculators" as a rule "magnify the cyclical effect of the market" (even if such behavior must logically force them all into bankruptcy...
...The key idea here originally found its most eloquent expression in Rousseau, and has been maintained by romantics and humanists (often outside the Left) ever since...
...The competition between these two casts of mind--one denying scarcity and the other affirming it--parallels another old debate on the Left, over whether socialism's primary goal should be the "New World" or the "New Man...
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...A mere hint of ordinary supply-and-demand cons t r a i n t s would, of course, topple a great many of his arguments...
...Box1960 | Bloomington, Indiana 47402 | ing glimpse at how the " s c a r c i t y " movement interprets world affairs...
...The "New Man" (or "new consciousness") became the primary goal, no matter what the consequences...
...Land, air, water, fuel, food, or even (in the more sophisticated accounts) leisure, time, labor, and s p a c e - - a l l , we are told, are growing " s c a r c e " because of the irrationality of our capitalist institutions...
...Burn.coal...
...Accordingly, he suggests that the "organization of the planet" be thought of as comprising "five resource systems": energy, minerals, food, water, and labor...
...John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, and (most recently) John Kenneth Galbraith have all written of a forthcoming " e n d of economic s c a r c i t y " which will heraid the dawn of new forms of social organization...
...It depends on whether we b e l i e v e that a socialism for which "scarcity" is an explicit rather than an implicit premise can still lay claim to liberal goals...
...The symbol of the new world without options was t h e Energy C r i s i s . Burn g a s o l i n e , and cities choke in fumes...
...For example, socialists found Malthus's contention that food supply could not keep pace with burgeoning populations reactionary, since it tended to avert man's attention from solving his woes in This World rather than in Another...
...Scientific socialism makes this point also, albeit implicitly: Since man's needs and by Neil Howe powers are directly shaped by Nature, his only choice is to define objectively the relation between these needs and powers (i.e., natural scarcity), and then to remake himself in accordance with the definition...
...NOTHING FOR EVERYONE There is no question that the concept of "scarcity" is now exerting a profound and unprecedented influence on the American Left, the best evidence being the Left's energetic association with almost any political issue involving an alleged "scarcity" of resources...
...Our language, our orderly intellectual habits," he suggests, "all conspire to keep us from integrating, comprehending, and fitting in with the natural order...
...In this sense the practice of socialism-whether the ritualized economy of the artists' commune or the input-output matrix of the Soviet ."Gosplan"--is predicated upon the anticipation of, and submission to, scarcity...
...Chapter by chapter, resource by resource, Barnet builds his theme out of anecdotes and numbers...
...it is a compulsion and hence it is the problem...
...These seem s t r a n g e p r o s p e c t s but it may soon become evident once again that the greatest threat to sound liberalism is not (as many believe) the overly ambitious pursuit of progress, but rather the denial of progress altogether...
...Labor, lastly, is the strangest scarcity of all, and Barnet r e q u i r e s a full 56 pages to explain how it works...
...To be sure, Barnet says that he once accepted "the promise of the industrial age" along with the rest of us...
...Take the nuclear route, and you c o u r t c a t a s t r o p h e . . . . There is a misfit between politics and the natural order...
...One would have to amend his words today merely in light of the existence of The Rocky Horror Picture Show: "We are living now in an age of moral disease...
...Particular scarcities of this or that kind may persist for a while, they say, but our final challenge will be to cope with affluence...
...Barnet is equally single-minded when he'turns to economics...
...The answer is unclear...
...Explorers " r a p e " the land...
...We are living now in an age of moral mediocrity," Emile Durkheim wrote in reference to the West's loss of religious passion over 60 years ago...
...T h i s new attitude is at the heart of Richard Barners new book, a massive gospel intended to initiate the r e a d e r into the " s c a r c i t y " world view...
...But when the principle of mobility is introduced into a society and envy is stimulated to induce people to work harder and to consume more, the pain of deprivation becomes more intense and gaps begin to matter . . . . It is the monumental social problem of the planet, the cause of mass starvation, repression, and crime, petty and cosmic...
...Apparently, he is fearful that useless multinational technology will so plunder the primitive societies of t h e i r traditional activities that " g l o b a l unemployment" will engulf us all...
...The Czar's plan backfired, of course, but at least we are beginning to understand what was on his mind...
...Officially, the Left has consistently heaped scorn on the notion t h a t " s c a r c i t y " is somehow inseparable from the human condition...
...Likewise, managed economies are desirable, not so much to create wealth, b u t r a t h e r to make us succumb to a ' 'rediscovery of limits...
...Some of the errors are trivial ("a Princeton undergraduate . . . could build a nuclear weapon with materials available from the local hardware store") and some are not (the Department of Defense has an "ever-expanding military budget...
...The same hostility informs the best-known general books on the subject (The Costs o f Economic Growth, Limits to Growth, Small is Beautiful, The End of Affluence, among others) and the many political and economic tracts that h'ave followed from them, including, now, Richard Barnet's The Lean Years: Politics in the Age of Scardty...
...A socialist economy "succeeds" when the state has managed to institutionalize scarcity indefinitely, when it can decree...
...Marx followed suit...
...businesses " p l u n d e r " their mines...
...They include varying d e g r e e s of national " a u - tarchy...
...Should our economy continue to stagnate for many more years, the defense of capitalism will probably find itself in many ways allied with the rump of the progressive Old Left...
...Still, his book offers a fascinati Send for your favorite back issues I today...
...If it were not, what else could the Left use to justify its need for esoteric forms of political authority...
...This last option was in fact taken by our own New Left of the late sixties, and it abruptly changed socialism's official position...
...As such, "scarcity" has now become for THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 29 the Left no longer an unpleasant fact to be vanquished, but rather an awesome truth to be welcomed, publicly at least, and propitiated...
...Starvation is not simply a lack of food...
...and markets "suck in" their participants...
...It is now clear, however, that, whatever their original intentions, many on the Left have come to embrace the concept of"scarcity" in a more fundamental sense, have *Simon & Schus,er, $11.95...
...The animus is directed not so much against the ways capitalism violates social justice or provokes class war as against the ways it violates certain quantitative boundaries of the material world...
...Yet a crucial option always remained open: What would happen if socialists came to despise liberalism...
...His text meanders hopelessly, its flow clogged at every turn by heaps of irrelevant detail...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 The details of Barnet's suggestions here a r e eye-opening...
...To answer the f i r s t question we have to step back a bit and recall that, t r a d i t i o n a l l y , t h e Left has always maintained a highly ambiguous attitude toward "scarcity...
...Should the concept of "scarcity" strengthen its grip on the THE AMERICAN SPI",("IATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 31...
...But, one must distressingly conclude, it is just a movie, and a bad one at that, and that there is a kind of social madness in the air which has led these people down the street late at night to these theaters so they can humiliate and degrade themselves in the company of others who are doing the same...
...However, the revolutionary fervor seems to have died slightly...
...Barnet even relishes in the language of mercantilism...
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...It may well be the issue on which a true 'converg e n c e ' of market economies and centrally-planned economies takes place...
...Unofficially, however, the premise of enduring natural scarcity has always been a necessary cornerstone in the Left's social theory and practice...
...for example, that in ten years it will make exactly 2.5 million shoes while suppressing the desire for any other quantity by deeming it illegitimate and unnatural...
...l, (please pr'int) Name Address City State Z i p _ _ m i THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR I | P.O...
...This point, recently restated at length in the newest works of Frank and Fritzie Manuel (Utopian Thought in the Western World) e, nd Robert Nisbet (History of the Idea of Progress), was well understood in the nineteenth century...
...Man needs these resources: He organizes to acquire them, he arms to fight for them, and he founds civilizations to revere them...
...stranglehold on the world food market cannot be blamed for depleting food once-andfor-all (not even Barnet can say this), we are nonetheless responsible for world starvation (as responsible as ou~ last generation was for "Hitler's Holocaust") by corrupting impoverished societies with inefficient "agribusiness" methods and with wasteful tastes...
...So what is to be done...
...What if they no longer cared to direct their message to the poor, creative, and striving dispossessed...
...Unfortunately, as Barnet is forever pointing out, as time goes by man's needs become more p r e s s i n g , his organizations more powerful, his arms more deadly, and his civilizations more materialistic...
...the movie no longer commands the audience it did in its heyday a year or two ago...
...Why, for instance, proliferate the automobile, if all it does is pander to "our mania for motion" while consuming the last of our iron, bauxite, chromium, and hydrocarbon resources...
...But now, having looked more deeply into the matter, he has come to share "the growing belief that our civilization is out of control," that it is, in fact, on a collision course with the limits of Nature...
...From this he concludes: "The fundamental philosophical choice--can human beings dominate n a t u r e or are they limited by nature--now divides both capitalism and socialism...
...Nell Howe is a program officer with the Smith Richardson Foundation in New York...
...The ethos of the b a z a a r " is, a f t e r all, just a n o t h e r term for "the law of the jungle" and "what we call progress is a mysterious marriage of plunder and creativity " According to Barnet, it is time for capitalism to realize that it too can lose in "the global struggle over resource d i s t r i b u t i o n " just as other civilizations have in the past...
...We remember a time not so very long ago when t h e L e f t ' s enthusiasm for technology, growth, and abundance knew no bounds...
...Given Barnet's hatred of capitalism, his recommendations are familiar enough: the redistribution of global wealth and the management of the global economy...
...It has always been so...
...For Barnet, modernity is not voluntary and hence problematic...
...It must be said at the o u t s e t that Barnet, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies, is not a talented or careful writer...
...Barnet's forecast may not be entirely fanciful...
...A key political question is whether the holders of the p r e s e n t resource system will control the next," Barnet says, and when he points out that " t h e accidental distribution of resources opens up possibilities of radically new alliances and axes in the world," he is not exactly predicting a happy f u t u r e for capitalist societies...
...Marx, to be sure, ridiculed the Barnets of his own day (there were many) as "feudal socialists...
...reversion to pre-_ modern "family farming...
...Does B a r n e t ' s ideol0gy--which h e a r t i l y denies the p o s s i b i l i t y of human progress in the context of the material world--still merit the name "Left" at all...
...Two c e n t u r i e s ago the West was shaken by such politically-charged adjectives as "primitive," "organic," " n a t u r a l , " " r u d e , " and even "gothic...
...Thus, Barnet can easily repudiate any objection to his thesis based on enlightened free w i l l - - f o r example, the suggestion that some Third World societies might choose to join the world market for a purpose and might have control over how they join it...
...It consumes too much, grows too big, runs too fast, makes us travel too far, involves too much complexity, and gives us too much power...
...The Czar was desperate to divert his own intelligentsia from the slogans of anti-modern Pan-Slavic radicals and to get them to think more about economic growth...
...Barnet's intention is to reinterpret politics and economics so that they " f i t " the natural order...
...The history of i m p e r i a l i s m , " he even declares at one point, "is the story of the domination of the rice and root eating cultures by wheat-eating carnivores from the North...
...Even many liberals have found in this rather "progressive" strain in socialist aspirations little with which to disagree...
...Yet given Barnet's belief in "scarcity," both of these agendas cut w i t h a new edge...
Vol. 13 • September 1980 • No. 9
