Socialism creates scarcity then leverages it for social control

The Campfire Theory

The main lesson of behavioural psychology is that we change much more slowly than we like to think. Technology may create the illusion of faster evolution, yet neuroscientists believe that over 97% of our brain is still given over to hum-drum animal processes: fear, feeding, fucking, and the like. Yet the grandiose syllogism between technological advances and anthropological change is too alluring to discard.

As Polish politician and philosopher Ryszard Legutko puts it in the opening of The Demon in Democracy, ‘a cult of technology translates itself into acceptance of social engineering as a proper approach to reforming society’. But such engineering ordinarily promises not a futuristic, transhumanist man, but rather returning us to ‘what is simple and elementary’. Freud, too, once thought he could improve mankind by editing out the bad stuff. Progressives always seem to arrive at the same paradox: to go forwards means first going backwards and asking evolution to discard those aspects of itself, such as religion, where nature went off-script.

The claim to be returning man to his intended, ‘natural’ state by removing various errata we have acquired on the way — neuroses to Freud, ‘False Consciousness’ to Marxists — is clearly dishonest. Such progressives are actually trying to create a new man in support of a new society. They have more in common with Soviet pseudoscientist Trofim Lysenko, who seduced Stalin with the claim of being able to ‘educate’ new characteristics into species — and starved millions into the bargain.

The goal of this short essay is look past the transformative promises of Socialism, and towards its more perennial features. How and why does it take hold? And to whom do its benefits accrue? For this purpose, let us strip away the illusory accretions of recent history, and delve into our prehistoric self.

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Human beings evolved as social animals — not because we like each other, but because we depended on each other for survival. The quest for shelter, warmth, food, and physical protection was, until very recently, not a solitary pursuit. Although ‘the cult of technology’ has given us an unprecedented amount of individual autonomy, this has not — as Legutko points out — yet translated into any great anthropological change. Our deeper instincts still instruct us that to survive, we must have a place close to the campfire; for in the outer darkness, starvation awaits.

From such a perspective, Socialism appears to be little more than the effort of a minority to seize control of the life-giving campfire, then act as gatekeepers to control the wider group as they see fit. In return for access to resources, two particular demands are made.

The first is that group members must also become followers by publicly subscribing to its dogmas. Vaclav Havel famously described this when he wrote about the expectation that a Czechoslovak grocer must, regardless of his private belief, display a Communist slogan in his premises. The same dynamic is true of modern ‘cancel culture’, which trades gainful employment — let alone advancement — for publicly voicing the tenets of various extreme-left, ‘liberationist’ ideologies.

The second is that others must continue to collect wood to feed the campfire. Socialist leaders have rarely worked — or, more accurately, ‘worked’ — other than in political organisations. An ever-greater proportion of the group naturally follows this example by becoming politically active, yet economically inactive, for the simple reason that it is more attractive to consume resources than produce them. Here we bump up against Elon Musk’s favourite concept, the ‘Fixed Pie Fallacy’: If the pie is fixed, the only way to have more pie is to take someone else’s.

Some part of the Left might believe that under their system, the pie remains the same size. But in fact, its practical result is that the pie shrinks — and so the process becomes self-reinforcing. The circle of firelight contracts; the leaders narrow access to it; and the outer darkness consumes the politically undesirable or socially unaware. For all the soi-disant egalitarian justifications which can help bring Socialists to power, this is always the logical endpoint.

So far, so obvious to most readers. But what is less obvious is that reducing supply is not merely a by-product of the system. In fact, it is its central motor. A framework that is capable of increasing total wealth will also usually distribute it more widely, reducing the leverage of the central authority. And when wealth escapes under the net, so too does belief. And as no system ever remains static — not least one involving human ingenuity — the availability of resources must, therefore, be reduced over time. Only recently have Leftists become explicit about this, coining the phrase ‘de-growth’. We must applaud them for being so unusually candid.

In practice, such resource constriction happens via two distinct types of process. The first, as mentioned above, is passive. A system in which uncreative administrators domineer over the creative innovators gives rise to a vicious cycle of lassitude and indifference. And as the resource base dwindles, the empowered-yet-passive section of society must expropriate more and more to assuage its own growing insecurity: you can see this happening in Britain, where public sector pay and welfare payments have been growing much faster than GDP per capita.

But sometimes even the ineluctable, intrinsic process of Socialist impoverishment needs a helping hand — which is where we arrive at the active mechanisms. The most stark example of active Socialist impoverishment was the engineered famine in Soviet Ukraine, known as the Holodomor (the memorial day of which passed this weekend). If you wanted to eat — even food grown by yourself — political loyalty was paramount. Anna Reid’s Borderland recounts a story of a woman being arrested for picking a single ear from her own burgeoning wheat field — while commissars gorged themselves, and the balance rotted in the barns, all under the watchful eye of our old friend Lysenko.

Now dignified with the name ‘de-growth’ — lest we should mistake it for a bad thing! — the same tendency to restrict resources is increasingly prevalent today at both a national and international level. Food production is in the cross-hairs across the globe: whether via tax, as in Britain; or via production regulation, as in Europe. Energy seems likely to be rationed to a certain degree — to the private users, at least. Mobility, the most basic form of freedom, is being gradually eroded and controlled, whether by the imposition of low-range electric cars, or by ULEZ and other charges or taxes that target drivers. Other parts of the free market are now due for interference which will also drive down affordability: the very actuarial basis of the insurance sector is being attacked as ‘prejudiced’. The result will be insurance premiums increasing for everyone, reducing affordability and quality of life.

Yet, even as life becomes more insecure for regular taxpayers, it becomes outwardly more secure for the public sector, following the familiar pattern of redistribution not to the needy, but to itself. As inflation finally falls to within striking distance of 2%, the Civil Service enjoys pay increases of between 5% and 9% (the latter for the Home Office, which owns mass migration, the most undemocratic of all government activities). The overwhelmingly Labour-supporting public sector is being rewarded with its place next to the campfire. Unproductive public sector jobs are on the way to becoming more stable and attractive — and, eventually, also higher status — than genuinely productive private sector ones. As they say in ex-Communist countries, ‘Government job: work less, earn more’. As if the point wasn't clear enough, public sector unions have been pressuring the government for four-day working weeks — all while such luminaries of the Labour Party as Harriet Harman jump at any chance to reintroduce ‘work from home’ for MPs themselves.

Lockdowns were, of course, a key inflection point — not only in the economic inversion of public and private sector, but also in their social inversion. Who wouldn't want to be an ‘NHS hero’ rather than an unaltruistic private sector wageslave (regardless of the actual declining performance of the NHS)? You can still see ‘Key Worker’ stickers on some cars in the UK, indicating a continued demand, at least from some, for preferential treatment.

Wrapped up in the inversion of civil society and the state is the unspoken transition from negative freedom — the basis of British liberty — to positive freedom, which allows the state to mandate the limits of our lives. If that is to be the case, who would not want to be on the mandating side? As the healthcare justification for the lockdowns has retrospectively crumbled, the political ones have become more apparent.

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The Campfire Theory is a crude, yet transferable model of how the parasitic element of society gradually takes control of the whole — reducing itself to a saprophytic element by slowly killing off the organism entirely.

The modern situation is complicated by the advent of vast stores of intergenerational wealth. Yet much of this is no longer directed according to the value-maximising principles that created it in the first place, but rather towards social-engineering goals: so-called ‘Woke capital’. Such capital can be divided between that seeking a mixed return — for example, large corporates aligning their core business with left-wing ‘values’ — and that which socially engineers without any explicit financial return. The former encompasses almost all major corporations to a greater or less degree; the latter is concentrated in large foundations — The Gates Foundation, The Open Societies Foundation, The Omidyar Foundation, and so on.

I believe the Campfire Theory also applies in its own way to the above groups. While large corporates might not actually like economic contraction, its impact on them is noticeably lower than for new entrants — ever tried starting or funding a new business in a recession? It suits them to lock in their part of the pie — be it market share, brand value, or technology — via a reduction in competition. Lockdowns delivered a huge advantage to incumbents: not only by the shift to online retail, but also by making it much harder for consumers to change providers in the service sector. The reader will recall the frustration of trying to get customer service attention while being bombarded with self-congratulatory corporate messages about Covid compliance. Such companies were able to leverage sclerotic government action to guard access to their campfires. As in a Leftist state, the consumer found themself begging for attention from producers, rather than the other way round. Customer — and shareholder — interest is now further suppressed by the growth of groups of politicised functionaries such as HR and DEI. Like the commissars of old, they are pure, self-serving economic dead-weight and yet, by their own actions, are also the hardest people of all to remove.

An even greater resonance of the Campfire Theory is to be found in the relationship between foundation money and the state. Such foundations are often set up for — and sometimes directly controlled by — the second-generation progeny of entrepreneurs who made massive fortunes during the deregulatory boom periods towards the end of the last Millennium. These scions — take Alex Soros as an example — are not wealth-creators, but wealth-retainers. As such, de-growth disadvantages them much less relative than those attempting to break into the circle of wealth — or, in our metaphor, approach the campfire. Like corporates, they will accept a lower return if it means suppressing competition and shutting out the type of disruptor typified by Elon Musk. As economic and political disruption go hand-in-hand, their eyes meet those of big government across the table. A shrinking consumer-voter base, which is simultaneously atomised and paralysed by collective thinking, allows both sides to maintain their relative position. Inflation — the other great impoverishing by-product of Big Government — affects them far less than the working man. And so an elision of interests takes place whereby political causes are funded by private money, and private interests are offered deep access to state decision-making.

To judge by Keir Starmer’s photo with Blackrock, Labour is now intensely relaxed about some people staying filthy rich while social mobility disappears for others. Although mature pools of capital are susceptible to being co-opted in this way, the life-blood of democracy — which also carries the platelets of capitalism — tends to find a way out. Hence why Donald Trump’s come-back has struck such terror into the above nexus of vested interests. ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ will reduce energy costs, allowing people to roam further from the collective campfire. The Department of Government Efficiency promises to attempt to destroy the vast edifice of clientelism which exchanges political loyalty for a federal salary. (In developing countries — which the West always sees more clearly than it sees itself — this is referred to as 'state capture’.) Perhaps the most stark example of politicisation of access to state resources across the Atlantic was the alleged rationing of FEMA assistance to those supporting the governing political party.

The recent examples of the US and Argentina show the Campfire Theory working in reverse — encouraging one fire to become many. Britain has only ever had one such moment in its history, under Mrs Thatcher. Until the core mission she bequeathed the Conservative Party — to face down the Civil Service — is recalled in place of the current corporatist 'partnership' approach, we cannot have another.