New audiobook release: What is Industrial Democracy?

As 2022 comes to a close, several audiobooks are all coming together around the same time. The latest is a little pamphlet written by Norman Thomas titled ""What is Industrial Democracy?

Now why did I record this book? Norman Thomas is a socialist, not a progressive - and even, in this little work, he takes the time to swipe at the progressives. So what gives? Let's start with two things we all know and can easily prove in 15 seconds, and let's look at how those things are connected.

First, nobody would dare call Theodore Roosevelt a socialist. But we have to admit, Roosevelt was in fact America's first Progressive President.

Second, by the time we get to the 1960's, progressivism and socialism (and to some extent communism even) had all kind-of-but-not-really merged.

How did this merger take place? How did we get from anti-socialist progressives like TR(and Wilson as well) to the merger that we saw in the 1960's that still exists to today? To that I respond:

I'm really not kidding about that. The phrase "Industrial Democracy" - I believe this is the keystone. So too is social justice, but that phrase is too vague. It is true that Theodore Roosevelt was a SJW, a Social Justice Warrior. We have his audio, I don't even have to work to re-produce it. It's the whole deal too. In this original audio, he plainly states he wants social justice, and in addition, it's a gripe about how bad ultra conservatives are. All you reactionaries, you and I, who would be in opposition to TR's statist machinations. It's exactly the kind of screed you'd expect from a rotten progressive, it's just 120 years old.

But why Industrial Democracy? What is so important about that phrase? It's because this phrase links so many things together. It's the glue that binds. Industrial Democracy is much more specific than the phrase social justice, to begin with.

One of the most visible groups of the 1960's radicalism is the group SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society. Most people don't take their time to research it, but this group didn't just spring from nowhere. It was renamed. Renamed from what? The SLID, or, the Student League for Industrial Democracy. So what was the LID? The League for Industrial Democracy, the main group, is the group that published this very Norman Thomas pamphlet.

The LID was also where another person can be found, who is not as well known as he should've been, that being Stuart Chase. Chase is important because he was an advisor to Franklin Roosevelt, and FDR is known to have borrowed the phrase "New Deal" from Chase. Perhaps you've heard of that. And I'm only scratching the surface here of how influential this group the LID was. But let's not get too far confusing the group for the phrase. The phrase is the real nugget, the phrase is everything.

There are other reasons also why I chose this book. For one, I'm actively looking for things that would make good audiobooks that also might catch some conservative eyes and increase the conservative mindshare in regards to free open source audiobooks, and Norman Thomas's name will forever be immortalized in Reagan's "A Time for Choosing". So that's good. There's what I mentioned at the outset. Thomas takes a swipe at the progressives. It's good to highlight every now and then the differences between the two(socialism/progresssivism) and this pamphlet does just that.

Finally, there's also the fact that at the time I began recording Thomas's pamphlet, I needed a small work instead of a full sized book with several hundred pages. So that was good for me personally. At just the time when I needed it, I now have the free hand I needed to get started on my next major audiobook and really give it a good focus. Every other audiobook I'm currently working on, they're all closing and becoming ready for use at around this same time. Just what I needed. My next solo is going to be so much fun and it explains just about everything I've wrote about for the last decade.

Without even reading any further I can probably guess what "industrial democracy" is. It's an inevitable manifestation of the basic laws of economics as applied to an industrial society with a democratic form of governance.

The simple rules roughly follow this narrative/progression ...

1. As an industry (or an individual company within an industry) develops, its productivity improves dramatically.

2. Eventually, the capacity of the company or industry to produce something exceeds the ability of its market to consume what it produces.

3. This imbalance between supply and demand puts tremendous downward pressure on prices, and -- by extension -- wages.

4. Eventually, the industries and their workers (the voters in the democratic form of governance) come together to resolve this imbalance through one or more of three ways:

-- (A) The government regulates the industry so heavily that competitors can't enter the market. This enables the existing players to charge excessive prices with little or no competition.

-- (B) The government forces people to buy (directly or indirectly) things through regulation and taxation -- at inflated, non-competitive prices -- that they would never willingly buy on their own. These things range from COVID vaccines to electric vehicles to aircraft carriers.

-- (C) The government subsidizes and regulates the industry so heavily that the number of people employed in government as bureaucrats to regulate/fund the industry exceeds the number of people employed in the industry itself. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is a classic example of this natural progression.

It's easy to see where this all ends. Eventually the nation collapses because it costs too much to keep this charade going indefinitely.

I don't know if I'd go very far with what "Norman Thomas did or didn't realize".

But I would say, that perhaps the person who more than any other got it correct was James Burnham. It's largely a forgotten book these days, but I do own a copy of "The Managerial Revolution". It'll be an audiobook some day.(I do believe that the copyright expires in 2036) It was a big, big deal when it was published. Orwell wrote about the book even.

If we were to give that "arc of history" of yours a name, that's what it would be. Manager, progressives, administrators. "Manager" is just another word for "administrator". Aka, the progressives. The Philip Drus of our country and the world.

And yes, I do believe that one reason why the socialists have always hated the progressives is because, when you get right down to it, the socialists lost and the progressives won.

Nobody likes being a loser.

"You can see the transition from Debs, a railroad worker and union man, to Thomas, an intellectual and a Princeton and Columbia (Union Theological Seminary) man, as part of that bending, and as an indication that “industrial democracy” wasn’t going to happen."

Except, that it did happen and its here right now. It just didn't happen along the lines that the socialists dreamed of. It happened along the lines that the administrators chose.

We ended up with an Industrial Democracy managed by bureaucratic despotism.(To borrow Hillsdale's name for progressivism) Socialists demand total control and ownership over the means of production. What the progressives gave us was NOT that. - it was Nixon's EPA, the FCC, the FDA, DoE(energy), DoE(Education), the Federal Reserve, the USDA, the TSA, OSHA, Medicare, and the other thousands of regulatory agencies. Those agencies all taken together as one represent the Industrial Democracy. It's Frankenstein's monster. It's stitched together, this federal leviathan. But it does the same thing. Ronald Reagan said:

Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the, or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place.

Stuart Chase, FDR's advisor who created the phrase "The New Deal" said:? (In his System X - because they never truely gave it a name)

Not much "taking over" of property or industries in the old socialistic sense. The formula appears to be control without ownership. It is interesting to recall that the same formula is used by the management of great corporations in depriving stockholders of power.

Now, consider the impact of someone saying: "the old socialistic sense". But that is the explanation Reagan was searching for. Stuart Chase was a member of the LID.

That phrase catches me every time I see it. The progressives put a huge whuppin on the socialists. It's not even close here. But consider the real world effect. It is total control. It's Industrial Democracy. That's why in the end the progressives and the socialists came together, to whatever extent, and Bernie Sanders(self-described socialist) has run for president now twice in the party primary of the progressive party. Theodore Roosevelt would've given birth to a cow had Eugene Debs ran for President on the Bull Moose ticket. That's how far we've come. And we do know the date, apparently Reagan didn't know. It all begins with progressivism, so the early 20th century.(give or take 5 years) That's where America failed. Progressivism is destroying everything, Progressivism is America's cancer.

For the most detailed, singular manifesto of progressive beliefs, I always recommend Herbert Croly's "The Promise of American Life". Not a surprise, it was one of TR's favorite books.

This phrase "Industrial Democracy" is the singular reason why progressives can with a straight face call us anarchists. Related phrases to "Industrial Democracy" are "Industrial Despotism". and "Industrial Anarchy". An unregulated market would be, in their view, anarchy.

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