The ongoing generational churn of the plurality of stakeholders who make up the present world, peer to peer, ensures that the ongoing accomplishment of equity-in-diversity is endlessly renegotiated, re-enacted, re-figured. What tends to be called “capitalism” and “socialism” are historically unrealized, logically unrealizable derangements of either the diversity dimension or of the equity dimension of the democratic value of equity-in-diversity.

Republished from Dale Carrico:

“The metaphor of the “mixed economy” is absolutely mystifying. The idea of sustainable consensual equity-in-diversity, of democratic commonwealth, is the unmixed expression of civitas. Civitas would guarantee equitable lawful recourse for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes (including disputes over what properly constitutes violence and equity and democracy); would ensure nonviolent transitions in authority through periodic elections, universal enfranchisement and office-holding and freedom of assembly and expression; would provide a scene of informed, non-duressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce through the provision of generous welfare (education, healthcare, social support, living wage, unemployment benefits) paid for by steeply progressive income, property, and transaction taxes; and would eliminate the violation of common and public goods through their accountable administration in the service of commonwealth. All of these ideas have been implemented in comparatively democratic welfare states — many of them have been implemented less well lately due to the influence of facile, falsifying capitalist and socialist ideologies, and most of them could be implemented incomparably better simply if the process and spirit of stakeholder compromise were to prevail (which you might say is another “mix” that isn’t actually a mixture at all, but the substantial if interminable accomplishment of reconciliation of which the political actually, essentially, consists). The ongoing generational churn of the plurality of stakeholders who make up the present world, peer to peer, ensures that the ongoing accomplishment of equity-in-diversity is endlessly renegotiated, re-enacted, re-figured. What tends to be called “capitalism” and “socialism” are historically unrealized, logically unrealizable derangements of either the diversity dimension or of the equity dimension of the democratic value of equity-in-diversity. The contractual arrangements to which moral cases for capitalism are devoted will always depend for their actual legibility as consent on a substantial provision of general welfare and socialization of common and public goods typically denominated socialism from those argumentative vantages, just as anti-authoritarian cases for (eg, democratic) socialism will inevitably allow for differences of preference and outcome typically denominated capitalism from those argumentative vantages. This is because civitas, the democratization of the struggle for sustainable equity-in-diversity, is the political base from which capitalist and socialist abstractions are strained and deranged. It is what passes for capitalism and socialism in thought that is mixed up, the “mixed economy” is not a mixture of these two derangements from good sense. Civitas is all.”