Common good, common goods (Part 1)

The Festival of the Italian Distributist Movement, committed to disseminating the economic thought of the great Catholic writer Gilbert K. Chesterton, is being held in Bergamo. It is an opportunity to reflect on a central concept of the author of The Tales of Father Brown and his companion Hilaire Belloc, the dioscuri of Distributism. We speak of the common good, to which we add the protection of the commons. This is not a play on words, but the two main links in the chain of a finally just economy (and society). It is puzzling that the economic debate, after the end of 20th century real communism, revolves around a single, proclaimed science, economic liberalism.

Marxists have fallen back on individual rights, forgetting the social sphere and the defence of the weak classes. There is no longer a proletariat, but an endless desiring plebs made dependent on consumerism, manipulated by the immense advertising machine. Liberalism devours the whole of society with its selfish, violent individualism, with competition in every sphere of life that invites the war of all against all. A conflict in which the strongest wins, i.e. the one with the most money, the one who owns the means of production, and above all, in the 21st century, the technological and computer networks as well as the communication and entertainment apparatus that shapes the current mentality.

We need to give battle, to reopen the economic and financial debate, anchoring it in values other than the “let do, let pass” of liberalism. There is an urgent need to restore ethical breath to economic thinking, to re-humanise it. The key concept is the common good, declined in a manner opposed to the madness of the market as the measure of all things, without falling into collectivism, the bad evidence of which has decreed its historical failure. Defining the common good is a difficult task. To simplify, it can be defined as the pursuit of the general interest in ethics, politics and economics, and social life. According to Thomas Aquinas, the notion of law is linked to the common good, since “it is nothing but a prescription of reason, in order to the common good, promulgated by the subject at the head of the community” (Summa Theologiae). The common good is also the common end, so much so that “since the law is constituted primarily by reference to the common good, any other precept over a particular object has no reason for law until it refers to the common good”. Liberal individualism thinks the opposite, going so far as to theorise that the pursuit of individual success magically determines the general interest.

There is an urgent need to react against an ideology - liberal liberalism - that sets men against each other, producing intolerable injustices. In its current form, the differences with communism fade: private property is in fact declined as the triumph of a few economic-financial potentates who own everything, but really everything - even consciences - making the overwhelming majority serfs or even slaves. A world of precarious atoms with no possibility of becoming owners of their homes or farmland, unable to realise a life project other than that of the nomad who - they say - will have nothing but happiness.

Chesterton stated that the problem with capitalism is that there are too few capitalists. He sensed its totalitarian, bulimic, unlimited nature. As an Englishman, he could not ignore the violence of the first and second industrial revolutions, the forced uprooting of millions from the countryside as a result of the infamous laws that closed the commons (enclosures), driving men, women, and children to starvation and to work in the fledgling industry. He was the first to realise that the crisis of the family was the responsibility of the capitalist system, which distanced men from the natural community. Physical distance, because the workplaces were, for the first time in history, far from their homes and countries of origin; spiritual distance, because of the gruelling hours that made relationships with parents, children, spouses and siblings residual; existential distance, because individualism reached every stratum of society.

If this was true a century ago, our time has brought to completion the crisis of all natural communities, pulverising society. Every technological revolution - the first industrial revolutions were daughters of the steam engine, the third of automation and mass production, the present of technosciences replacing man - coincides with an ideological revolution. Today we experience the seizure of totalitarian power by globalist financial and technological oligarchies. Western man in the 21st century is ordered to be an isolated subject adrift, unattached, indifferent to others, confined to a hypertrophic and yet minimal ego, a desiring machine addicted to vulgar pleasures (Tocqueville) and compulsive consumption.

The notion of the common good is erased, replaced by self-interest at the bottom and the omnipotence of universal masters at the top. They have masculinized women in order to insert them into the mechanism of wage labour and feminised men: both transformed into monads dedicated to consumption, removed from common destiny, encounter, family, community. No common good, only the pursuit of immediate individual interest. In the economic sphere, this means disinterest in the Other, in the collective dimension, in any form of social justice and shared project. Worse than communism.

We have entered the servile state of which Hilaire Belloc spoke. “We define the servile state as the order of a society in which the number of families and individuals forced by law to work for the benefit of other families and other individuals is so great that this work imprints itself on the entire community like a brand”. The dominant players are the top echelons of finance, large multinational corporations, investment funds, and the holders of electronic control, communication, and surveillance technologies. According to anthropologist Ida Magli, “there are two pillars that support the construction of the New Order in view of world government: the first is the centralisation of power in the hands of bankers, with the production of money and the creation of public debt; the second is the network of associations created by the richest and most powerful men to prepare and implement, with the homogenisation of all peoples, a single system of government, with a single currency, a single language, a single religion”.

The tragedy is that this Luciferian system does not even work, except for its top, the one per cent of the population, assisted by service classes (technological, cultural, bureaucratic, police) that reach perhaps ten per cent. And the ninety per cent, the negligible majority (Ennio Flaiano)? We are the victims - happy as long as the multiple dependencies they have locked us into are satisfied - blood donors of a minority, the “extractive” oligarchy that sucks resources, labour, blood and life from all of us. Dysfunctional, as it fails to deliver on its promises and spreads pockets of poverty, underdevelopment and outright regression. Even Germany, Europe’s largest manufacturer, is thinking of closing its Volkswagen plants, a national shock.

In return, the extractive oligarchy continues to accumulate power without paying taxes to the powerless nation states. Google had been sentenced to a fine of one and a half billion in the European court, but the Court of Justice (the inverted words of the inverted world...) overturned the decision. He who commands makes or interprets the laws. Non veritas, sed auctoritas facit legem. Not truth, but authority makes the law (Thomas Hobbes). The concept of the common good - absent from the liberal-liberal horizon - is expunged from legislation, which has become ordoliberal, mere instruments for codifying oligarchic interests.

One example is the EU regulations prohibiting state aid, that is, the possibility for governments to carry out economic, industrial, and financial policies in harmony with the common good. Everything must be left to the free play of economic forces. This is a lie, for that game is nothing but the law of the strongest, the richest, the omnivorous shark that can drive less powerful economic actors out of the Temple (the market), engulfing them or driving them out of business. Think of the EU’s infamous Bolkenstein directive (2006/123/EC) that liberalises (“deregulates”) market access, i.e., opens up prairies for the big players while allowing all others to be stifled. In particular, the services sector - the most important in the globalist economic and financial set-up - is disfigured, expelling from the market, i.e. throwing an incalculable number of activities onto the slab.

In Italy, the directive is best known for its impact on seaside businesses, but the irruption of large groups spares no economic sector. Thus, the small and medium-sized enterprise (and widespread ownership) is destroyed, then the large one, to the benefit of a minority of interconnected giants, whose ownership, amidst complex shareholding crossovers, is in the hands of a few hundred giants. A privatised super-state, a Moloch from which we are defenceless. Where are the great European political cultures, particularly the socialist and Christian-social ones? All or almost all of the European political families and ideals have become currents of a single party that is liberalist in economics and libertarian in morals.

Chesterton was right: there are too few capitalists. Very few own too much and decide for everyone. They have succeeded in rendering representative democracy, the pride of liberal thought, residual, by transforming parliaments into notaries of the oligarchic will, expressed politically by the alternation without alternative (Jean Pierre Michéa) between indistinguishable parties and groups, executors of what suits the high plane of economic, financial, technological power. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to reweave the thread of non-liberal economic thought. For self-defence, for decency and moral sense, as well as to promote the recovery of well-being. The category of common good becomes the ethical and practical compass. The common good is a complex of values, civil norms, organisational practices, and concrete conduct, aimed at expanding material well-being, civil order, and commonality of principles.

The common good is nourished by common goods. Some are immaterial: life, peace, an order based on justice and not on constraint, freedom of expression, participation in common decisions, autonomy, property and widespread private initiative. Others pertain to the practical sphere and economic-social organisation. Common goods contribute to the common good and have one characteristic: extraneousness to the market. They are the temple around which the community thrives. The temple is sacred because it is not for sale, wrote Ezra Pound. There is no market for it; not everything has a price, not everything can be subjected to the logic of exchange for money dominated by the hyperlords.

In the second part, we will attempt to indicate areas and sectors that, in the name of the common good, must be removed from the logic of the market and become common goods.

Original column by Roberto Pecchioli:

https://www.ereticamente.net/bene-comune-beni-comuni-i-parte-roberto-pecchioli/

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo