[PEN-L:30619] Re: RE: Moussolini's Corporation

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

RE: [PEN-L:30591] Moussolini's Corporation
----- Original Message -----
From: Devine, James



My understanding is that the more pleasant part of the ideology of fascism
was "corporatism," in which tri-partite boards were set up that united
business, government, and labor, as a way of avoiding class conflict and
managing the common concerns of society. Something similar appeared during
World War I in the U.S. and (more famously) in Franklin Roosevelt's National
Industrial Recovery Act.  (It is not the same as a "corporation," which is
simply a way of organizing business.)

=======================

An excellent text on how that process played out in the US is "Labor's Great
War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern
American Labor Relations, 1912-1921. Some scholar - I can't remember who -
described  the contemporary US system as "corporatism without labor."






Of course, in practice, Mussolini's corporatism was severely biased against
labor, because the "bully boys" broke up unions, especially the commmunist
and socialist ones, encouraging those that survived (especially craft
unions) to be company unions or collaborators of other sorts. As usual, a
pleasant ideology covered up a nasty reality.

=====================

European corporation law and corporatism have their roots in the Protestant
Reformation [see JB Schneewind's "The Divine Corporation and the History of
Ethics" in "Philosophy in History" edited by Richard Rorty et al, as well as
Morris Cohen's classic essay].

Coming closer the present, it was Pareto's approach to political economy
that inspired Mussolini and his gang of thugs, even though Pareto denounced
Mussolini's clampdown of free speech; even so, Pareto had abandoned
liberalism before the turn of the century. The 'twist' is that Pareto
optimality is a form of the Lockean proviso within Locke's labor theory of
property, which in turn is a variation on some of the ecclesiastical
precepts put forth by Richard Hooker.

While Locke's approach to property and enterprise is a desert based theory
of entitlement, corporatism revived an older, delegative theory of property
as a power to coerce; since property was nothing more than what the State
said it was, the links between corporatism and rent-seeking and notions of
the State as a protection racket came into rather sharp relief in Italy as
the American Legal Realists were starting to make some impact on US
jurisprudence.


Ian