Distributism and it’s Antithesis

[zerubabel]

<> Distributism values an economic/social system where the means-of-survival are owned, as widely as possible, by naturally-occurring-groups.

<> The antithesis of Distributism is Centralization. It is the centralized ownership of the means-of-survival into artificial groups independent of the naturally occurring groups.

“Means-of-survival” is the real action which provides the necessities and luxuries of life. It is farming, manufacturing, research, education, entertainment etc.

“Naturally-occurring-groups” are groups of people which form without any outside influence such as the recruitment efforts for employment in a business or military service. It is most widely seen in family, but also in friendships and in neighborhoods and in voluntary social groupings such as a Church. “Artificial” groups, as I use it, are simply any unnatural group.

Distributism in it’s purest form is most easily seen in the family farm; in the family run cottage industry; or in entrepreneurial friends doing a “start-up” in their garage. In it’s more abstract forms it is seen in Credit Unions and Cooperatives. These abstract forms begin to stretch the “natural” aspect of the groupings and the essence of distributism is lost once the naturally-occurring-groups are no longer central to economic life. Distributism is not a rich/poor class conflict. The rich aristocratic family who lives off of their investments is also a distributist ideal.

Centralization is most robustly seen in employment by artificial groups, e.g. large, perhaps multi-national, corporations in the capitalist model, or in State-owned industries in the socialist model. The employee does not own any of the necessary tools of his survival. The individual employee is entirely reliant for his survival upon the artificial group, and the relationship is entirely individualistic. No company hires a family or a group of friends. They hire individuals, exclusively individuals.

Distributism seeks the best-interest of the naturally-occurring-group. The naturally-occurring-group is central, and prime to distributism. By extension (because we are social animals) it seeks the spiritual or psychological/humanistic best-interest of the individual. It does not seek the individual’s material best-interest.

Centralization seeks the material best-interest of the elite stewards which preside over the centralized means-of-survival. This is, and always has been throughout history, the prime goal of any movement towards centralization. Industrialization/technology has created a secondary “trickle-down” material benefit to the consumer. Centralization relates to the functional individual either as an employee or as a consumer. Centralization has no relation to the naturally-occurring-groups, and in fact is in competition with these groups for the services of the functioning individual.

Commentary:
Distributism was once the accepted norm of human life. With industrialization, centralization became the norm of human life. Centralization is about one and a half centuries old. In the US it was the era of the Civil War that saw the simultaneous centralization of big-business and big-government, what Chesterton called Hudge and Gudge. Today in the US the Tea Party protests the abuses of big-government. Occupy Wall Street protests the abuses of big-business. Because they are fooled by the false dichotomy that Chesterton clearly saw (as their names imply there is no essential difference between Hudge and Gudge) they do not realize that they are both protesting the principle of Centralization. And because we have lived our entire lives in this centralized paradigm we do not know that there is an alternative - the third way … which actually is the first way.

.

 

[Columba_Tom]

Thanks for this.

You give your religion as “distributist”.
I guess I am distributist too, but I give my religion as “Catholic”. That is because, amid all the material troubles of this world, I hold that there are spiritual truths that override them in terms of importance to the human state. I can’t really imagine “worshipping” a material purpose. Oddly, I can imagine fighting for such a cause, but in the name of Social Justice, which in turn springs from spiritual hope.

One of the centrist positions I found worth fighting against was communism. The Social Justice aspect of that was important, because it gave visible justification to the battle. But deep down I was motivated by the scandal of what I saw in communism as a false religion based on money-values.

I would be horrified at myself if I had then adopted another ownership picture as a faith. Nothing is absolute in this world, which will all pass away.

 

[openmind77]

<> Distributism values an economic/social system where the means-of-survival are owned, as widely as possible, by naturally-occurring-groups.

<> The antithesis of Distributism is Centralization. It is the centralized ownership of the means-of-survival into artificial groups independent of the naturally occurring groups.

“Means-of-survival” is the real action which provides the necessities and luxuries of life. It is farming, manufacturing, research, education, entertainment etc.

“Naturally-occurring-groups” are groups of people which form without any outside influence such as the recruitment efforts for employment in a business or military service. It is most widely seen in family, but also in friendships and in neighborhoods and in voluntary social groupings such as a Church. “Artificial” groups, as I use it, are simply any unnatural group.

Distributism in it’s purest form is most easily seen in the family farm; in the family run cottage industry; or in entrepreneurial friends doing a “start-up” in their garage. In it’s more abstract forms it is seen in Credit Unions and Cooperatives. These abstract forms begin to stretch the “natural” aspect of the groupings and the essence of distributism is lost once the naturally-occurring-groups are no longer central to economic life. Distributism is not a rich/poor class conflict. The rich aristocratic family who lives off of their investments is also a distributist ideal.

Centralization is most robustly seen in employment by artificial groups, e.g. large, perhaps multi-national, corporations in the capitalist model, or in State-owned industries in the socialist model. The employee does not own any of the necessary tools of his survival. The individual employee is entirely reliant for his survival upon the artificial group, and the relationship is entirely individualistic. No company hires a family or a group of friends. They hire individuals, exclusively individuals.

Distributism seeks the best-interest of the naturally-occurring-group. The naturally-occurring-group is central, and prime to distributism. By extension (because we are social animals) it seeks the spiritual or psychological/humanistic best-interest of the individual. It does not seek the individual’s material best-interest.

Centralization seeks the material best-interest of the elite stewards which preside over the centralized means-of-survival. This is, and always has been throughout history, the prime goal of any movement towards centralization. Industrialization/technology has created a secondary “trickle-down” material benefit to the consumer. Centralization relates to the functional individual either as an employee or as a consumer. Centralization has no relation to the naturally-occurring-groups, and in fact is in competition with these groups for the services of the functioning individual.

Commentary:
Distributism was once the accepted norm of human life. With industrialization, centralization became the norm of human life. Centralization is about one and a half centuries old. In the US it was the era of the Civil War that saw the simultaneous centralization of big-business and big-government, what Chesterton called Hudge and Gudge. Today in the US the Tea Party protests the abuses of big-government. Occupy Wall Street protests the abuses of big-business. Because they are fooled by the false dichotomy that Chesterton clearly saw (as their names imply there is no essential difference between Hudge and Gudge) they do not realize that they are both protesting the principle of Centralization. And because we have lived our entire lives in this centralized paradigm we do not know that there is an alternative - the third way … which actually is the first way.

.

Interesting, but it does not sound like a religion.

In any case, how do you plan to manage economies of scale and complexity?

Are you planning to build a family owned and run car factory without salaried employees?

Or churn out millions of iPhones in your backyard?

The point is that you can not do without Big Business or corporations, you just need to regulate them enough so that they don’t control and own us as well as the government.

 

[captainrick]

Interesting ideas for small societies. Highly unlikely to succeed in large nations.

 

[MrSnaith]

It seems to me that you’re misidentifying the problem. Even in naturally occurring groups, there is a visible “head,” a leader. In business, the issue of centralization versus decentralization is dependent upon the nature of the business and the circumstances surrounding it.

You identify “distributive” as naturally occurring. But not all artificial groups are “centralized,” and not all natural groups are “distributive.” Indeed, in nature, you have centralized groupings, decentralized groupings, and purely individualistic non-groups.

The issue isn’t whether the groups are centralized or decentralized, natural or unnatural. What you’re identifying in your OP is how these groups are used. You argue that centralization occurred with the dawn of industrialization, but that’s false. Empires, kingdoms, sultanates, theocracies… these are all centralized authorities. Tribes are too. In fact, all the way down to the basic family unit you will find centralized authority. That is the norm.

A centralized grouping may at the same time be distributive. The centralized family unit should function to the greatest benefit of every member of the family. This model really should flow all the way up to big government. That you have centralized government that abuses its populace can be explained in exactly the same way that you can explain an abusive parent: selfishness.

So, the problem is what it has always been: corruption. But corruption can be curbed and managed. A good case study for this is the employer-employee relationship since the formation of corporations.

Prior to the formation corporations, businesses were all privately owned, either independently or through partnerships. As an owner, you had a certain amount of buying power, and it was usually limited to how much money you had, or how much money you, as an individual, could acquire by loan. If you couldn’t afford expensive employees, you got cheap ones. What this implied is that employees had equal footing in terms of selling power. There was a balance of power, and likewise a more balanced distribution of wealth. This was gotten around by use of slavery. However, with the abolition of slavery, business owners (who are the buyers of labour) needed a new solution, a new means of tipping the balance of power.

The solution was to form a grouping of owners who could share their wealth to give them deeper pockets. This was accomplished through the “share” system of “splitting” ownership for a price. This meant that business owners could either hire a small amount of highly competent employees, giving them a market edge in quality, or they could simply hire a large amount of cheap labour giving them a market edge in quantity.

But it wasn’t until the development of the assembly line that employees really lost their selling power. Managers figured out that after so many hours of work in any given field, you become an expert at that task. If you could break a task out into several really simple, basic steps, and hire one low-competence employee per step, you could very quickly produce high quality at low cost. This was true because you could take a completely untrained person, assign them a single task to work day in and day out, and they would very quickly become experts at that task. This meant you could easily replace them if needed, giving the business owner even more power, and the employee even less.

The natural response to this was for employees to form groups of their own, unions, which could address the concerns of individual employees as a collective. The collective threat of employees quitting en masse, gave a lot of power back to the employees. This is why unionized employees consistently earn higher wages, and receive better benefits, than non-unionized employees, except in cases of highly specialized, technical professions.

But corporations are middle-men, so to speak. Corporations are the “in-between” step between production and consumption. That’s what businesses do. They organize labour into a means of production (or distribution) in order that consumers can get the products they want to consume. So there are two relationships that a corporation has: the employer-employee relationship (buyer/seller), and the producer-consumer relationship (seller/buyer).

Corporations have also tipped the balance of power in the producer-consumer relationship into their favor. This is because corporations have a competitive edge against sole proprietorships and partnerships due to their deeper pockets. Because of this, business owners have a vested interest in incorporating. Thus, since the formation of corporations, there has been a steady decline in the number of sole proprietorships and partnerships, and a steady increase in the number of corporations. What this means is that there are fewer businesses from which to shop than there used to be, since businesses are grouping. And with fewer business from which to shop, the seller (corporation) has more power than the buyer, and can set their prices higher.

 

[MrSnaith]

The effective solution to this problem, for the low-income buyers, is to unionize in some fashion, as employees were forced to do, in order to restore the balance of power back to the buyers. I don’t have a working model for this yet, but you could imagine how a corporation would respond to a group of buyers who have the ability to threaten the corporation with a collective loss of business in favor of a lower-priced competitor.

But the benefits wouldn’t stop there. What such a collective group of buyers could accomplish goes beyond prices. Consider the kind of corporate responsibility such unions could effect. If, for example, Catholic consumers formed a union of buyers, and this would be a massive union, such a union could threaten collective loss of business based on unethical business practices, like child labour, or the use of aborted fetuses in R&D processes.

Rather than simply relying on government regulations, and bloating both our laws and the government bodies needed to write, enact, enforce, review, litigate, and amend such regulations, we could simply take the matter into our own hands.

 

[Cathoholic]

I don’t think zerubabel is arguing against cell phone companies, etc.

I think zerubabel is merely trying to apply the principle of subsidiarity to a “company” (which would most often but not exclusively be a family farm, a family carpentry business, or some such entity).

QUOTE:
Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.

Please correct me if I am wrong on what you are saying zerubabel.

God bless.

Cathoholic

PS Why is your “religion” listed as “distributist” though?

 

[zerubabel]

Thanks for this.

You give your religion as “distributist”.
I guess I am distributist too, but I give my religion as “Catholic”. That is because, amid all the material troubles of this world, I hold that there are spiritual truths that override them in terms of importance to the human state. I can’t really imagine “worshipping” a material purpose. Oddly, I can imagine fighting for such a cause, but in the name of Social Justice, which in turn springs from spiritual hope.

One of the centrist positions I found worth fighting against was communism. The Social Justice aspect of that was important, because it gave visible justification to the battle. But deep down I was motivated by the scandal of what I saw in communism as a false religion based on money-values.

I would be horrified at myself if I had then adopted another ownership picture as a faith. Nothing is absolute in this world, which will all pass away.

I apologize to you and everybody else for having categorized myself in the wrong column. I’ve deleted that mistake I made in my clumsy attempt to self-label. I normally prefer no labels.

I agree with you that life is a spiritual question, not a material one. Yet material survival is an unavoidable precondition to spiritual growth. Even with-in the Christian ideal of the contemplative ascetic, material survival was essential (Greek etymon for ascetic means hardworking, rigorous exercise) So I juxtaposed two different way to address our material needs and suggested that *"(distributism) seeks the spiritual or psychological/humanistic best-interest of the individual. It does not seek the individual’s material best-interest." *

Indeed the well-timed post by Open-mind that follows yours gives the most common critique that distributism is not the most effective way of supplying man with the greatest material affluence.

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[zerubabel]

I don’t think zerubabel is arguing against cell phone companies, etc.

I think zerubabel is merely trying to apply the principle of subsidiarity to a “company” (which would most often but not exclusively be a family farm, a family carpentry business, or some such entity).

(“Google”):
Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.

Certainly size does matter… and certainly distributism addresses the question of how to best-order society… but what I find most compelling in Chesterton’s writing is his constantly bringing social questions back down to the common man on a human scale.

Man is the tool-wielding animal. Without his tools man has no chance of survival. Should he not own the tools that he wields? Should another own the tools that a man needs to live? That is to say that another man owns your very life. Hyperbole? It wasn’t to the depression era unemployed and displaced. It was very real.

Capitalism says that Gudge (the rich elite) should own the tools you use. Socialism says that Hudge (government-run collective) should own the tools you use. Distributism says that YOU should own the tools you use.

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[Columba_Tom]

Golly, there’s quite a few different things going on here.

I don’t think zerubabel is arguing against cell phone companies, etc.

I think zerubabel is merely trying to apply the principle of subsidiarity to a “company” (which would most often but not exclusively be a family farm, a family carpentry business, or some such entity).

.

There certainly is a thread of subsidiarity rolling through this. An excellent principle adopted by political systems from the Holy Mother Church. (The politicians haven’t a clue!)

Capitalism says that Gudge (the rich elite) should own the tools you use. Socialism says that Hudge (government-run collective) should own the tools you use. Distributism says that YOU should own the tools you use.

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Under Common Law, no man may be deprived of the tools of his trade. This is perhaps a good example of how Christian principles can and should shape and restrain the potentially lawless desires of capitalism. I would go so far as suggest that without the church, Capitalism could never have flourished. It would have been dog-eat-dog all the way to hell.

 

[zerubabel]

how do you plan to manage economies of scale and complexity?

Are you planning to build a family owned and run car factory without salaried employees?

The point is that you can not do without Big Business or corporations, you just need to regulate them enough so that they don’t control and own us as well as the government.

I am not a social engineer designing a utopia. I am championing certain principles. It is my inclination (as a Rightist) that once the principles are accepted that one should follow them regardless of the perceived outcome. “Fiat justitia ruat caelum” (Let justice be done though the heavens should fall)

That being said, I’ll address your criticisms of efficacy. Economies of scale are limited to manufacturing processes. Equipment and tooling can reduce costs and the investment on this is payed back over larger quantities of production runs. But for any type process there is an optimum system of lowest cost. To increase production beyond that we merely duplicate the facility. I don’t know if you know anything about manufacturing, or how to explain it, but I’ll give you an example. I one time had a tour of a Lego factory injection molding millions of little plastic bricks. It is common to build large multi-cavity molds that might spit out a 100 bricks in a shot. But they chose 4 cavity molds and had 200 machines making the same part of different colors. Obviously they studied costs and chose 200 small machines over 8 larger ones. Distributism would suggest that why shouldn’t Lego have purchased bricks from 200 families with a molding machine in their garage? (the whole set-up for a single machine would be about $150-200K)

Economies of scale end at the point of duplication and become power of scale, such as buying power. Walmart can demand lower prices on everything they buy. Bussiness’s want to hitch their carts to big wealthy companies. And of course as you have noted power of scale becomes much more effective at buying political favors.

The criticisms against cottage industry rely on is/ought fallacies, that industry ought to be large of scale because it is large of scale, there is no other way otherwise it would be that other way. Spurred by the gas crisis of 1973 the Japanese auto industry quickly overtook the Americans despite protectionist legislation and cultural forces to “buy American.” Little known is that in WWII the Japanese government widely dispersed all industry to eliminate the targets for bombers that centralized manufacturing creates. (Imagine how easily River Rouge could have been destroyed.) in 1973 the vast system of cottage industry was still in place. The highly “vertically integrated” American auto industry had their butt kicked by the cottage industry Japanese.

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[zerubabel]

Under Common Law, no man may be deprived of the tools of his trade. This is perhaps a good example of how Christian principles can and should shape and restrain the potentially lawless desires of capitalism. I would go so far as suggest that without the church, Capitalism could never have flourished. It would have been dog-eat-dog all the way to hell.

“No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge: for he taketh a man’s life to pledge.” Deut 24:6

Yet our problem is not that someone takes a man’s tools … it is that the man no longer wants them. Given excess money in our pockets we buy toys, not tools.

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