Lobaczewski describes his concept of logocracy as a system "better than democracy." Like the Italian school of elite theory, he criticized modern western democracies as facade systems in which power is in fact held by small groups, usually hidden from public view and scrutiny. But he wasn't against democracy per se, as many understand it. His biggest criticism was reserved for universal suffrage, rooted in a faulty view of man that ignores natural human inequality in intelligence, character, and abilities.
Additionally, for Lobaczewski, democracy facilitates the rise of mediocre, demagogic, and psychopathic leaders. Not only are those with ability and character pushed out of politics; democracy also breeds a generalized contempt for wisdom and foresight among the general population and incentivizes short-term thinking and policymaking from their elected leaders. This opens such a society to manipulation and subversion from organized minorities (domestic or foreign), creating the facade mentioned above. Because it lacks any firm foundation in human nature, and thus violates natural law, democracy creates the seeds of its own destruction.
That is not to say that democracies cannot be successful. They self-evidently have been. Lobaczewski ascribes this not so much to democratic forms of government, but more to some combination of their respective cultures' historical traditions, moral criteria, and pre-existing social structures (e.g., in Western/Northern Europe). When those are lacking, an attempt to impose democracy usually degenerates to open oligarchy, coups, or more autocratic forms of government (e.g., in post-independence Africa).1
Despite his criticisms, however, he imports features of liberal democracy directly into logocracy. This is understandable, as he conceptualizes logocracy as an evolutionary development of current forms, such as present-day democratic republics and constitutional monarchies. Specifically, he imports a traditional tripartite separation of powers, consisting of a bicameral legislature, independent judiciary, and executive branch. This system, proposed by Montesquieu in 1748 and first implemented in the early U.S. state constitutions, clearly won in the marketplace ideas. Today it is almost universally adopted by democracies and non-democracies alike, though the degree of actual separation is variable in practice.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu developed the modern separation of powers of government functions
Such enterprises are usually subject to intense political meddling, breeding corruption, inefficiency, and waste. As Lobaczewski put it:
The concentration of capital and the ability to employ a multitude of workers in the hands of political power must lead to a degeneration of that power and an inefficient economic administration. It is therefore in conflict with natural law.This is almost always the case with SOEs (not to mention state-capitalism writ large). Even here there are successes, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule: the best examples are those SOEs designed to have professional operational independence from direct political interference, managed like private companies while still being transparent and accountable to the government. Many Canadian Crown corporations were — and some still are — highly successful in this regard. Others became inefficient and unprofitable as a result of the political influence that crept in over the decades. (Others just couldn't compete on the market.) Examples of failing and collapsing SOEs are legion in recent years, with massive industrialized corruption schemes, political favoritism, and incompetence bleeding state entities dry or leading to systemic failures and massive inefficiencies in countries like South Africa, Nigeria, Bosnia, Pakistan, and Brazil.
PDVSA, Venezuela's state-owned oil and gas company
After nationalization in the 1970s, PDVSA was structured with decentralized control among several competing national companies with professional managers, supervised by a board of directors and an executive-appointed president. After opening up to foreign investment in the 90s, this structure was changed such that control was centralized in the board, and its president became the board's chairman and CEO. Chavez gained control by replacing the board with revolutionary loyalists. He proceeded to fire around half of its personnel (18-19,000 employees) from all departments: procurement, planning, human resources, finance (this department approached 100%), operations, maintenance, marketing and exploration. These included its best trained and most experienced employees in management, finance, and technology.
Now under direct control, Chavez removed PDVSA from any existing independent oversight or checks on its operations and spending, which bypassed the Central Bank and elected officials at local and national levels. With no such controls in place, its operations were opaque, its policies highly arbitrary, and its spending largely unaudited and even unauditable.
Chavez also used a technique on PDVSA that served him well in other political areas: expanding and merging functions previously (or concurrently) held by other institutions. In this case, he merged the company with the Ministry of Energy and gave it responsibilities having nothing to do with its actual purpose as an oil company. In part, it became something like a parallel social welfare ministry, both for Venezuelans and foreign leaders — Chavez's personal checkbook for massive social spending — as well as an employer of last resort for chavistas. Cronyism and clientelism ran rampant, with positions awarded to friends and family of party members, and support among private entities bought through government contracts and oil rents.
Chavez spent around $23 billion on social programs over the oil boom years of 2003 to 2008. This brought him similarly massive popular support, as poverty dropped dramatically. However, these programs were explicitly conceived as short-term assistance. They did not attempt to attack underlying conditions, so when the boom ended, the level of overall spending couldn't be maintained. Many of the services offered were of poor quality (such as in the educational programs) or soon failed and were shuttered (like healthcare posts); by the end of his presidency, poverty alleviation had stalled and then reversed under Maduro. The massive and unaccountable overspending was predictably accompanied by a commensurate amount of corruption and waste.
This was also the case with his foreign assistance. Chavez offered oil discounts and social investments to foreign governments and officials. Normally such investments come with strict conditions and audits to ensure the money is spent on what it was intended for. Chavez doled them out with no strings attached. While enamoring him to the officials in question for such generosity — and thus creating a successful network of international support, one of the highlights of his foreign policy — it was arguably not the wisest or most prudent form of spending and resulted in several fraud scandals in recipient countries.
Meanwhile, stripped of its talent and now in the hands of party loyalists, PDVSA entered a period of steady, systematic decline from which it has never recovered. Chavez neglected to invest in things like maintenance, infrastructure, technology, and exploration, and as profits contracted, PDVSA was increasingly unable to service its local and foreign debts. Its production fell to a fraction of its previous capacity. But whereas productivity declined, the business of rent capture boomed. This arrangement bought patronage from those who came to depend on government contracts for oil rents and greatly helped Chavez maintain his electoral appeal to remain in power until his death.
Chavez's other economic policies and regulations didn't help and were some of the most severe in the world, including extensive price controls (often monitored and enforced by the military), multiple exchange rates (easily exploited by insiders to make large profits by buying at one rate and selling at another), and extensive expropriations of large and small businesses. These policies were aimed at producing immediate results to combat inflation and make goods affordable. Predictably, while indeed successful in the short term, these same policies resulted in shortages, more inflation, capital flight, and inefficiency. To change course would have meant reversing such decisions — for example, Venezuelans would no longer have some of the cheapest gas prices in the world. And faced with the certainty of public discontent over such "economic adjustments," Chavez opted instead for more of the same, as did Maduro.
Jeff Kazin, former head of trading with Cargill, a large staple food producer, gave a personal account of the expropriation process on X:
- The government took over our "minute rice" facility at gunpoint because we were "gouging" the nation's poor. The government was never able to run the plant. It never ran again. It was returned years later with no equipment inside.
- There are 1000's of generals in the army. They are each given a slice of the economy to loot. The large number of generals made it difficult to organize a coup against the regime.
- The government opened grocery stores and sold staples below the cost we sold them to the government. In theory they used petro oil money to lower grocery prices. Our regular grocery outlets were forced out of business. When the government demanded we sell them products below cost we simply had to shut down. The popul[ace] became ever more dependent on the government handouts. (PS this is the mayor of New York City's proposal.)
- Dollars- We needed dollars to go buy raw materials like wheat from places like the US and Canada. The government would periodically allocate us some dollars that could only be spent for raw materials and freight. Eventually only the local companies that can and would pay bribes got dollar allocations. We had several facilities closed for lack of raw material.
I worked in/with Venezuela in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and I heard so many versions of this, in all industries, from locals — the government and party were a giant local thug operation that had gone national: shakedowns, bribes, taking what they wanted.Property rights in logocracy are categorized in a tier-based system. The lowest tier (Class V) includes strongly protected personal property, e.g., a small home, tools and equipment necessary to earn a living, a small amount of savings, that is not subject to legal proceedings or seizure by creditors. The next tier (Class IV) covers private property as usually conceived in market economies: personal wealth, buildings, businesses, investments, etc., with standard legal protections. Class III, however, is a new category: leased property, e.g., land, forests, and farms, with strong tenancy rights. Class II is already mentioned above, and Class I is the sole tier of property able to be controlled and owned directly by the government, consisting solely of historical and cultural "assets of exceptional significance to national culture and historical identity — and possibly other similarly important assets, including means of national defense." Judging Chavez's economics against logocratic principles, they clearly fail in practically every regard.
The Chavistas won then, legitimately, because the prior ruling class was seen as the same thing, but more refined about it, with their bribes not extracted at gunpoint on the streets, but in offshore bank accounts, like a proper modern crime gang.
The Chavistas also showered some of their gifts on groups who rarely got gifts showered on them, and arguably deserved far more — mostly the poor high up in the hills around Caracas.
By the late 2000s the thuggery had gone from "above average" to endemic and systematic, and coupled with an exodus of anyone with any expertise, all the basic stuff that keeps a country running began falling apart.
His erosion of the separation of powers was similarly anti-logocratic. He stacked the judiciary with loyalists, bypassed the elected congress by turning the constituent assembly into a parallel legislature — also stacked with loyalists — and eliminated term limits for the executive, whose powers he naturally expanded. (His vice-president in 2007, Jorge Rodriguez, called it the "dictatorship of true democracy.")2
All of these moves were arguably perfectly rational when judged in revolutionary terms. The Bolivarian Revolution was always a long-term project, necessitating control over all institutions. Opposition to many of its policies from at least portions of the populace was thus a certainty, and so any time the opposition exploited an opening, Chavez plugged that weakness. And as he lost popularity in later years, that opposition grew, requiring more and stronger measures. Chavez went from a massive base of support from all classes of Venezuelan society in his early years to one primarily drawn from the rural poor and the boliburgueses (the "new bourgeoisie" rent-seekers who got rich through government contracts and patronage), losing support even among the extreme urban poor.
But revolution is not a logocratic principle, and revolutions tend to violate basic logocratic principles. They have that in common with most democracies, which makes sense, as the Bolivarian Revolution was a democratic revolution. In this case, it violates the principles of competence, public sovereignty, and property ownership, as well as aspects of its position on political parties.3
The principle of competence forms the basis for the selection process in a wide variety of fields. It is widely accepted to the point of second nature by most today, especially in high-stakes fields. No one wants an untrained neurosurgeon; they want the best, if possible, which in today's world often means the most educated and qualified, with a lot of experience and a proven track record. A recent failure of this principle was in the news last year: the issuing of commercial driver's licenses to unqualified immigrants, leading to several fatal road accidents in the U.S. But one area where its implementation is often explicitly verboten is democratic politics.
This is where Lobaczewski's fundamental criticism of universal suffrage comes into play. Competence should play a role both in the selection of elites as well as that of the electorate. In a logocracy, therefore, voting is restricted to those citizens able to pass exams on a range of subjects (e.g., economics, psychology, national history, economic geography, law), effectively disqualifying about 10-20% of the population from the possibility of voting in most western countries, either due to low intelligence or lack of interest. Candidates for higher offices would require more advanced preparation. The logocratic ideal is for competence to guide all aspects of social life, with each individual finding work in a field and in a position suited to their aptitudes and degree of education.
Underlying this selection mechanism is the principle of public sovereignty, which stresses that sovereignty belongs to the capable, knowledgeable, and psychologically healthy portion of the population that can exercise sound judgment, prudence, and consideration for the common good. While competence excludes the mentally incapable, sovereignty also excludes the psychologically deviant. It contributes to the structure of the party system in logocracy as well. The main feature of this is an apolitical organization, the logocratic association (something like an explicitly apolitical or nonpartisan party), designed to collect independents, ni/nis (to use a Venezuelan term for those who support neither chavismo nor the opposition, which polling indicates could range from 20-40% of the population or higher), and perhaps the more reasonable members of existing parties who would like a third option but end up settling on what's available.
Thus, a certain range of political directions, groupings and parties will emerge due to the properties of human nature, the rights of the individual, and the principle of the sovereignty of society. ... Freedom of speech and difference of opinions, with the observance of appropriate customs, is a necessary condition for the development of every social and political system.A logocrat might agree with a chavista about the moribund state of many pre-existing party systems, like the one that preceded Chavez in 1990s Venezuela. Lobaczewski even predicts that existing parties will mostly die off or reinvent themselves in a logocratic system. But where the logocrat would differ is in the solution. Tolerating opposition parties benefits populist revolutionary movements only so long as the revolutionaries maintain electoral competitiveness, e.g., when the opposition is fragmented into several competing groups and easily defeated at elections. When they lose that edge — for instance, if the opposition is able to unify — they become increasingly creative in how to ignore and stifle any outside criticism. Negotiations with those holding dissenting views or with legitimate grievances become rare or non-existent.
Revolutionary parties in power tend to polarize the opposition, who are outraged with each new revolutionary change, which benefits the revolutionaries, because steps taken to curb the opposition's extremism are perceived by party supporters and ni/nis as justified.4 Even if this may arguably be so in any given case, it has the negative effect of blocking the emergence of any reasonable opposition. While opposition parties are technically allowed, they are highly disincentivized from competing, while the ruling party is incentivized to vote, e.g., through vote-buying policies such as those mentioned above. For example, among the steps taken by Chavez to limit the effectiveness and competitiveness of any Venezuelan opposition (a hodgepodge of far-right, centrist, and far-left factions, including former chavistas) are the following:
- The 1999 Constitution bans funding to political parties, a law asymmetrically applied to opposition parties.
- The 2004 Law for Social Responsibility bans broadcast of any material deemed to "incite or promote disobedience of the current legal order," or to "refuse to recognize the legitimately constituted authority."
- The 2005 Reform of the Penal Code makes it illegal to be "disrespectful of government officials" and restricts the use of public space for protests.
- The 2010 Reform of the Organic Law of Telecommunications allows the government to revoke broadcasting licenses to companies if it deems their coverage to be against the "interests of the nation," leading to media self-censorship in some cases and buyouts in others.
- Laws governing the funding of unelected "communal councils," superseding local elected officials.
- Four enabling laws from 1999 to 2010 granting Chavez the authority to legislate by decree, bypassing the legislature.
- A 2010 law banning NGOs from receiving foreign funding (the only reasonable one on the list, in my opinion, at least in principle).
- Another 2010 law granting the government a monopoly on all currency trades.
- A 2011 law banning deputies from any conduct that deviates from the party line.
Leftist social programs do have the positive effect of potentially lifting gifted individuals out of poverty, but lack any targeted program to identify such individuals and nurture them.5 Rather than exploit the competence of the "opposition" for the benefit of the nation, revolutions turn them into enemies. As former Minister of Education Hector Rodriguez said: "It's not that we're going to take people out of poverty to bring them to the middle class so that later they aspire to be escualidos [chavistas' paramoralism for opposition members]."6 If a country does not exploit its citizens' talents to the highest degree, it will never live up to its full potential.
The economy of exploiting human aptitudes is the basis of all economics in the broad sense of the word.Another achievement of Chavez's social programs was to bring more of the rural poor into politics. For supporters, this expansion of the participatory element of democracy was a sign of chavismo's truly democratic nature. Critics, meanwhile, observed the degeneration of other democratic features with concern, creating a "two movies" scenario in which each side perceived a different reality: one in which democracy was expanding, another in which it was contracting. Both were right. But again, logocracy is not equivalent to democracy.
It should be emphasized that a normal person experiences his correct [socio-occupational] adaptation as social justice towards himself.
The participatory element in logocracy limits the franchise more than existing democracies, though not to the extent of some historical elite democracies. A universal franchise ends up empowering the intellectually incapable. It also produces a kind of regression to the mean in terms of political understanding. Lobaczewski argues that the majority of citizens lack the ability to understand complex, long-term issues like foreign policy, economics, unintended consequences, and covert elite activities — though they are decent judges of character. Democratic voters tend to focus instead on short-term, personal matters and are prone to manipulation.
An effective socialist populist will play into this, identifying real issues that concern a significant number of people, like high poverty. This was Chavez's great strength. However, despite his apparent sincerity, he was economically and organizationally incompetent, with no deep understanding of human nature guiding his decision making. The results of his policies were always predictable, but he appealed to the electorate's short-sightedness and delivered flashy but temporary results dependent on unsustainable overspending dependent on high oil prices, planting the seeds of future crises.
Unfortunately for Venezuela, Chavez's successor, Maduro, had none of Chavez's skills and all of his flaws. Here's how a former supporter and friend of Chavez, French left-wing and anti-imperialist journalist Thierry Meyssan, characterized Maduro recently. Maduro once invited Meyssan to Venezuela to attend a meeting of intellectuals. Meyssan was not impressed:
I met with numerous diplomats and officers, all of whom struck me as highly competent and dissatisfied with the president. I met him and felt like I was speaking to an actor, not a politician. This visit led nowhere.He continues [with some of my comments in brackets]:
Although not a charismatic figure, he has proven effective in many areas, including law enforcement tactics. [Though not actual law enforcement. Violent crime, which rose significantly under Chavez, skyrocketed under Maduro. It only dipped with emigration as the economy collapsed.]To sum up, Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution, followed by Maduro's stewardship of it, exemplifies many of the social and political pathologies Lobaczewski warned would plague systems disconnected from natural law and human psychological reality. Despite short-term gains — primarily lifting millions from poverty through redistributing oil profits — these came at the expense of a healthy social/psychological structure of society founded on the economy of human talents. It became just another failed experiment in policies known to be unsustainable and ultimately destructive. This is the kind of failure that inspired Lobaczewski to envision something better. Maybe Venezuela could try it out.
Yet his country has sunk into crisis. He left the oil infrastructure in ruins and did nothing to rebuild it. [He inherited this situation from Meyssan's friend, Chavez.] Prices have continued to climb, with inflation reaching 130,000% in 2018. Feeding oneself has become difficult.7 Millions of Venezuelans have emigrated, or even fled, their country. Some have returned later, but the majority has remained abroad. [The number approaches 8 million, some 20-25% of the entire population, the equivalent of something like 80 million people fleeing the U.S.] He then liberalized the economy and established casinos. This country, where Hugo Chávez had fostered a sense of national identity, had taught literacy even in the most remote villages, had created a genuine healthcare system, and had established a level of equality that existed nowhere else in Latin America, has become, under his presidency, a haven for all kinds of traffickers and has experienced an explosion of social inequality. [The decline in these areas had already begun under Chavez, but plummeted under Maduro.] Many long-time Chávez supporters have gradually distanced themselves from Maduro.
Nicolás Maduro established a police state, issuing identity cards, the "Carnet de la Patria" (Fatherland Cards), and linking the granting of social assistance to political affiliation. [Chavez had done this as well, though not as extensively.] The years 2017-2019 were marked by a brutal repression of domestic terrorism. Law enforcement agencies practiced torture, without it being clear whether this was on personal initiative or part of state policy.
Notes:
- This applies to most state systems. Political scientists today use terminology for a continuum of state types ranging from democracy through hybrid (soft or hard authoritarianism) to autocracy. I find nothing wrong with this classification, but they always use it with democracy as the moral criterion — something Lobaczewski criticized. Some countries' historical traditions and values may be better suited to autocracy than democracy, and some autocracies may be better run and more respectful of competence than some democracies and hybrid systems.
- Lobaczewski envisioned a maximum tenure of 13 years over 5 consecutive terms for the head of state (3, 5, 3, 1, and 1 years, respectively), if elected; for a monarch, until death or old age robbed him of his fitness to lead. "Such an arrangement would allow for both a relatively quick replacement of a less successful president, and a fairly long reign by one who had earned well-deserved popular respect."
- It also somewhat violates logocracy's religious principles. Venezuela is at least two thirds Catholic, yet chavismo, while making a show to be consistent with "Christian socialism," as Chavez put it, did not get along well with the Church due to the latter's criticisms. Maduro went so far as to call Evangelism, which represents perhaps 20% of the population, "the true church of God." A logocracy maintains constant dialogue with its religious leaders and respects the dominant faith within its borders: "the social system of a logocratic country will take on more of the content of the ruling religion, as a result of the rights of citizens to enact their beliefs. In principle, however, religious matters should remain the responsibility of institutions set up for this purpose."
- Economic policies and practices which force private businesses to underperform are also useful, since they create demand for additional state intervention. If an industry cannot match price controls, for instance, and fires employees or reduces production to survive, the government can use this as an excuse to expropriate. Corrales and Penfold discuss this and other features of Venezuela's political economy discussed here in their book Dragon in the Tropics.
- In a logocratic party system such social programs might be championed by a socialist party in cooperation with the logocratic institutions. Lobaczewski even allows for a communist party to compete in elections, provided all its members have earned their parliamentary rights, as required.
- As I wrote in the Introduction to Political Ponerology: "[John Connelly] writes: "After universities had been emptied of enemies, they had to be filled with ostensible supporters: students from underprivileged social strata who would reward the regime with loyalty for upward social mobility. During the early breakthrough periods in Soviet history, preference was given to students of 'worker and peasant background.'" The communists instituted a program of what we in the West call "affirmative action," actively seeking to enroll students from the "worker-peasant" class, the underprivileged who were numerically underrepresented in the education system. Remedial courses were set up to prepare such students for university. However, in the Czech lands, for instance, the Party had to enforce downward mobility on middle-class aspirants in order to make room for working-class students (a policy familiar to many Asian [and White] Americans today). While a success in many regards — worker students performed on par in many subjects, and excelled at others — in a reflection of affirmative action today, many of these students found themselves in over their heads, especially in technical fields, and dropped out at higher than average rates. Many suffered nervous breakdowns from the stress. But this was communism, after all, and quotas must be met! So Polish and East German functionaries solved this problem by simply lowering standards and graduating students early."
- American sanctions significantly contributed to this crisis. However, they did so by accelerating the already existing, severe decline, which was evident by 2015, two years before the first sanctions, and four years before intense sanctions had their effect.
Reader Comments
One of the directions of logocracy, "Underlying this selection mechanism is the principle of public sovereignty , which stresses that sovereignty belongs to the capable, knowledgeable, and psychologically healthy portion of the population that can exercise sound judgment, prudence, and consideration for the common good."
The assumption is that education provides the necessary reasoning abilities to deal with current events in a productive manner for society.
However, education itself in the USA has become indoctrination. Everyone was trained on "All vaccines are safe and effective" for example. In Edward Dowd's book on the covid-19 vax deaths, Cause Unknown, notes that the educated chose being vaxxed and they died. Clearly Woke ideology and training and DEI have no merit based foundation.
Our current educational system in the USA does not create critical thinkers. It creates followers of the current "narrative" and believing the "experts".