WHAT'S LEFT OF WHAT'S RIGHT, PART 4

STATE VS MARKETS, THE ULTIMATE KABUKI THEATER

For a general introduction to this series, see here.

The last post concluded by acknowledging that the complicated nature of the left to which Michéa introduced us has implications that go beyond what I’ve been able to identify even in his analyses. One avenue into the topic was to recognize that Marx’s effort to coopt socialism into the ranks of the left was an expression – maybe the most famous and impactful one – of managerial class ventriloquism (discussed in my book, The Managerial Class on Trial) on behalf of that class’s play for increased power. However, a careful parsing of Michéa’s analysis draws our attention to something even deeper implicit in Marx’s effort to merge socialism and the left. This ventriloquism can be interpreted as a ploy in a still more fundamental conflict, within the left, over diverging (as I’d suggested, phenotypic) strategies for achieving the left’s desired ends. This instalment tackles that thorny topic. 

So many people – who are willing, even keen, to acknowledge that the electoral party duopoly is a mere illusion of choice, or that all governments (in whatever mantle of self-aggrandizing virtue they wrap themselves) are self-serving gangster organizations, nonetheless somehow – stubbornly cling to the ultimate myth: the one unassailably true and essential conflict that is never subject to cynical refutation is that between the free market and the state. They may see virtue entirely on one side, or indeed on the other. But this dichotomy is unquestionably the rock-solid foundation of irreducible, transcendent truth. I’m here, with this post, to blow up that most powerful of myths.

In my (must read!) book, The Managerial Class on Trial, I explain how differences in managerial class strategies are portrayed as not only the existential conflicts of our time, but the limit of – not just acceptable, but – even acknowledgeable opinion. The most far-out ideologies – from communism to fascism to Nazism – even as they’re dismissed as unacceptably extremes, are “acknowledged” as the full, terrifying range of political possibility. What is glossed over in such a framing is that all of these are just different strategies of the managerial class – operating within different historical, cultural, economic, and national contexts. So, while managerial class adherents of one of these strategies gets all in a tither about the evils of one or more of the other strategies, the one thing they all agree upon is that our options are intrinsically limited to some brand of managerial class strategy. Other political arrangements, which might threaten managerial class hegemony, are simply off the table as acknowledgeable options.

Again, I’ve discussed all this at greater length in my (must read!) book, The Managerial Class on Trial, for anyone who wants to dig into this typical managerial class symbolic sleight of hand. What I didn’t appreciate while writing that book, but has become clearer to me since reading Michéa, and as I’ve more thoroughly explored the implications of his theory, is that there is a highly similar sleight of hand ploy that has been used by the left. In broad strokes (because you can always get more into the weeds): the left has developed two strategies to achieve its ends. And, again, it’s pretended that these strategies – or some mix of them, perhaps – constitute the absolute limits of the Overton Window.

And, again, as the mid-20th century political strategies deemed acknowledgeable are limited to those which assume the rule of the managerial class, so the structural system strategies deemed acknowledgeable over recent centuries has been those geared to achieve the left’s goals. To appreciate those goals, and thereby the pseudo nature of our standard options, we must remind ourselves about the fundamental nature of the left.

As I’ve elaborated in earlier posts (see here and here), the left has been about the advancement of the implicit political and philosophical agenda of the French Enlightenment, advancing the values of universalism, progressivism, (monadic) individualism, and rationalism. This agenda was most famously advanced during the French Revolution, from which the left derived its name, la gauche, associated with the side of the national assembly upon which they gathered. While certainly at least elements and manifestations of l’ancien régime could be credibly portrayed as being the enemy of the left’s agenda, in fact, any element or manifestation of particularity, of organic community, any surviving social norms, customs, traditions or ways of life, that expressed and defended local identity, communal bonds, or Schmitt’s concrete institutions, served objectively as obstacles to the left’s agenda.

Any people who refused to be homogenized, commodified, or engineered constituted objective obstacles, barriers, failures, of the left’s agenda. That agenda only could be advanced by eradicating those obstacles and barriers. But there’s almost always more than one way to skin a cat. Even when the competing strategies appear to be at odds with each other.

But, in fact, those strategies never have been truly at odds with each other. That’s all just part of the left’s (embryotic-managerial class’s) standard sleight of hand at work. The two strategies under consideration here then are, first: the managerial liberalism discussed so frequently in my book and the posts of this substack, along with its emphasis upon the administrative state, social engineering, and bureaucratic paternalism. The weaponization of grievance identities, in the name of advancing the endless progress of supposedly universal human rights – from all manner of racial and sexual groups to newly invented categories of diverse pan or trans identities – are used as excuses to erode/smash traditional cultures and organic communities that resist such bureaucratic impositions upon their values and norms, to engineer them into being standardized monadic individual units within the homo-globo leftist ethos. Regular or long-time readers of this substack will recognize all those points, made here frequently in the past. What they may have a harder time accepting is next.

The second left strategy, which has been used to smash traditional culture and organic communities, has been the unfettered “free market.” I know, I know; I hear the Austrian economics crowd shrieking in horror. I feel your pain. I was of your tribe for many years. But my job, such as it can be called a job, is to follow the evidence and logic where it takes me. The fact is that the creative destruction of Sombart was the destruction of the established, the traditional, the customary, the communal, to make way for the endless creation of the next new thing. Creative destruction at its very core is an endless assault upon tradition and organic community.¹

This of course is even true of commodities markets. Giant box stores, situated within massive parking lots, on town edges, kill off historic small-town centers and their traditional main streets. Shoppers, subjected to relentless in-store traffic flow, lighting, and shelf-placement marketing techniques, are themselves reduced to being consumer-products. The purchase “choices” of such people are continually manipulated by the same kind of behavioral psychology nudge methods employed to generate the fear and anxiety so critical to the mass conformity exhibited during the COVID experience (see here and here). The emotional comfort of heritage architecture is displaced by the cold functionality of the industrialized space. Pedestrians and neighbors, who once encountered each other within a historical context, which connected them to the ancestors of their town, are displaced by scientific customer management into processed bulk-buying consumers.

And that’s to say nothing of how so many specific products seem designed to incite deracinated and isolated individualism, corroding the communal bonds that tie together the concrete institutions of organic community life, as I discussed at more length in my post on the culture industry. But, in fact, the unfettered market society unleashed by the left was far more destructive of tradition and community than this analysis reveals. To fully appreciate just how much has been at stake, it’s helpful to bring into our discussion the much-neglected historical analyses of Karl Polanyi.²

Polanyi, particularly in his seminal (though much neglected) book, The Great Transformation³, sets out to specifically refute those epigones of the unfettered free market who take the intellectual posture that such an arrangement is the normative state of nature. As long, the story goes, as nasty characters – from the state to cartels – don’t interfere with the free market, this is how nature works out our needs and differences. There’s no coincidence in the popularity of the phrase laissez-faire in referring to such idealized arrangements. The phrase laissez-faire literally means to “leave alone.” Let the market take its objectively natural course. As we’ll see though, the most charitable characterization of this trope is mass self-deception.   

A common example of this naturalistic trope is to draw a parallel between the incremental, trial and error, improvements of the market’s creative destruction and Darwinian processes of selective retention. In fact, though I won’t go into the matter at length here, treating either of these processes as creating a normative good has a bias built into its logic. Such assessments presume to speak for some transcendent position – God, the Archimedean point of view, the common good, and especially future generations, or whatever – but of course in fact they do not do so; such a rhetorical positioning is always just more ventriloquism advancing the interests of a particular subject position. And in the case of the unfettered market, it’s a manipulative, furtive defense of the left’s agenda for remaking the world in its universalist, progressivist, individualist, and rationalist ideal.

In his book, Polanyi goes to great lengths to demonstrate that there was nothing “natural,” nothing laissez-faire, about the creation of unfettered markets. He of course does not deny that markets are ancient, but he also demonstrates that such markets have historically been constrained – largely restricted to urban centers, which themselves usually grew specifically around such markets – and that such markets have been restricted to the selling of commodities: i.e., goods specifically produced for exchange. Here “market” then refers to an actual place where people go to exchange for specific commodities. This is a radically different proposition from the idea that an entire society should be one giant market. This rise of – what Polanyi calls – a market society only becomes possible when unprecedented goods are treated as commodities.

The three key goods in question are land, labor, and money. Polanyi argues that it is only when these three come to be widely regarded as commodities that a truly unfettered market has displaced communal society. The problem, he observes, is that of course these three are not commodities; they are not produced for exchange. (In the case of money, I’m not entirely convinced of his argument, but it seems to me obviously true of land and labor.) It’s only when these essential forms of human life – e.g., human action and work in the form of labor, and the human natural environment – are reduced to commodities do we have an unfettered market. And it is only then that is laid bare the social cost of such an unfettered market economy, as was discussed in earlier posts in relation to the history of the enclosures (see here and here): centuries of tradition, social norms, and common law overthrown, with massively destructive impacts on people’s live and communities, to push ancient common lands into the market economy.

More to the point being made in this post, as mentioned, Polanyi repeatedly emphasizes that there was never anything natural or laissez-faire about these unfettered markets, and the market societies they produced.⁴ On the contrary, within England, the home of purported laissez-faire markets, centuries of struggle occurred between the marketizing and commodifying forces and those trying to preserve communities and their traditions. These conflicts were manifest in the battles over the countervailing impacts of the various iterations of the Poor Laws, the infamous Speenhamland system, the Act of Settlement, the Statute of Artificers, the Anti-Combinations Laws, among other legal struggles, as well of course as numerous extra-legal actions (e.g., ad hoc enclosures, Owenism, Luddism⁵).⁶

The supposedly laissez-faire markets were only established after the resolution of these numerous conflicts resulted in the successful repeal of laws and bulldozing of traditions which had protected traditional communities and their concrete institutions from the radical dislocations of market forces. Only when those laws and traditions had been replaced by the legal and administrative regime of the aspiring left could the legal fiction of land and labor as commodities be enforced, and the unfettered market unleashed. Polanyi primarily focuses upon the English context, but as we saw in the second post to this series, it was precisely this use of legal and administrative intervention by the revolutionaries that was so resented and rejected by the peasants during the French Revolution (the original right!), precisely for the creation of land commodification which they considered so illegitimate and contrary to their ancient customs and traditions.  

These observations draw our attention to two important points. First, the distinction between “free markets” and the social engineering of government regulation is not the grand dichotomy that so many partisans of each position would have us believe. A couple passages from Polanyi’s book give a flavor of his analysis in this regard:

The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism. To make Adam Smith’s “simple and natural liberty” compatible with the needs of a human society was a most complicated affair. Witness the complexity of the provisions in the innumerable enclosure laws; the amount of bureaucratic control involved in the administration of the New Poor Laws which for the first time since Queen Elizabeth’s reign were effectively supervised by central authority; or the increase in governmental administration entailed in the meritorious task of municipal reform.

the introduction of free markets, far from doing away with the need for control, regulation, and intervention, enormously increased their range. Administrators had to be constantly on the watch to ensure the free working of the system. Thus even those who wished most ardently to free the state from all unnecessary duties, and whose whole philosophy demanded the restriction of state activities, could not but entrust the self-same state with the new powers, organs, and instruments required for the establishment of laissez-faire.

So-called free markets were themselves only made possible by legal and administrative social engineering to break down the communal and traditional obstacles to unfettered markets, with the latter's commodification of land and labor.⁷ And, indeed, the maintenance of unfettered markets required continual social engineering intervention, hindering or preventing the human tendency to combine to protect one’s class, group, community, and even society, from the effects of unfettered markets: e.g., cartels, trade unions, tariffs, subsidies, etc. So, this much ballyhooed dichotomy, as it turns out, is nothing of the sort. Unfettered markets and the social engineering, regulatory state, it turns out, are just two sides of the same coin.

Further, this realization should hardly be surprising considering the point I’ve frequently made on this substack in relation to the objective objective of populism: it is only the intermediary institutions of what some call civil society – e.g., family, community, church, and civic and neighborhood association – that shelters the individual from the deracinated and monadic existence that leaves such people helplessly dependent upon the state. It’s no surprise that radical laissez-faire free marketers and libertarians are always wringing their hands about the danger of the state encroaching on their precious “free markets” and individual liberties; it is the very world of such atomized individualism whose values promote this ideal breeding ground for just such state-dependent individuals. “Free market” libertarians insist that their individualist worldview constitutes the essential bulwark against state incursion upon the individual, when in fact it is their worldview that cultivates the optimum conditions for such incursion.

So, yes, unfettered markets are constantly in conflict with both the regulatory state, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the traditions and customs, communal bonds, and concrete institutions of people who resist the unfettered penetration of markets and commodification into their communities and families. The difference is that such unfettered markets exist in a symbiotic relationship with the former. As much as there can be conflict between them, in that the administrative state’s social engineering may constrain unfettered markets at times, such unfettered markets are equally dependent upon such social engineering to exist at all. It is only the latter though with which unfettered markets and social engineering both are locked into the mortal combat of a Schmittian-style existential conflict.

Neither unfettered markets nor the administrative state’s social engineering can succeed in their expansionist goals as long as there remain organic communities, determined to protect their traditions, customs, and concrete institutions from these forces which erode those values and ways of life. Such traditions, customs and institutions persist as the obstacles and barriers to French Enlightenment inspired aspirations to progressivism, universalism, individualism, and rationalism. These practices of an organic community contribute to what – specifically in relation to the commodification of land – is described in Polanyi’s book as the “territorial character of sovereignty.”⁸

It is the entailment of such progressivism, universalism, (monadic) individualism, and rationalism which both unfettered markets and the administrative state’s social engineering share. Both conceive themselves as engines of progress (prosperity or fairness); both believe the virtue of such progress demands universalization (arguing only over which universalizing mechanism, market or state, is preferable in any given context); they both are dependent upon reducing people to deracinated, monadic individuals (as customers/laborers or clients/subjects); both presume a kind of fundamental rationalism in their system – whether that rationalism be implicit in the supposedly “invisible hand” of the self-regulating system or explicit in the “scientific” virtues of expert planning and social engineering.

Therefore, it should be becoming increasingly evident that both unfettered markets and administrative state social engineering are just different strategies for achieving the agenda of the left, which is to say the politicized expression of the French Enlightenment. They share a common set of values and a symbiotic historical relationship. And they share a common foe – common obstacles and barriers – in the persisting organic community, with its obdurate norms, traditions, customs, and concrete institutions.

So, yes, contrary to how those on both sides of the divide, as framed by the Overton Window, tend to frame the discussion, the unfettered market strategy is very much an expression of the left. Just as there are genuine differences between different factions of the managerial class, there are certainly differences – phenotypic and genuine, no doubt – between those of the left who prefer unfettered markets and those who prefer social engineering. As we’ve seen though, the difference, in history and theory, aren’t quite as much as they’re made out to be. And the free marketers are nonetheless objective agents of the left.

So, now that we finally have a clearer, more realistic, understanding of what constitutes the left and the right, we’re finally in a good position to look at the ultimate question I set for myself to address in this series: what is the difference between left and right socialism? And, along the way, we should gain some insight into what this analysis can teach us about the new populism. That’s coming next, so if you haven’t yet, please…

And if you know anyone else who you think would be interested in these ideas, please…

1. A hint of this was already evident in my discussion of the culture industry. Though, my bias in that treatment was to regard the culture industry damage as the product of managerial liberalist corporations – vehicles of managerial class social engineering. In fact, of course, though unfettered markets have the same impact.

2. Incidentally, though there is certainly some room to quibble, I think there’s a case to be made that Polanyi is a 20th century member of Michéa’s anti-left socialist tradition. Despite the damage done to that tradition by Marx and Marxism, Michéa acknowledged that it had been continued during the 20th century in the likes of George Orwell and Christopher Lasch. I’d inclined that the likes of Polanyi, and also Murray Bookchin and his followers, as well as many in the perhaps misnamed “French New Right,” such as Alain de Benoist, and obviously Piccone and many in the Telos circle, all should be considered part of that anti-left socialist school, or maybe better we should say tradition.

3. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2 edition (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 2001).

4. This passage from Polanyi’s book nicely captures the market’s corrosive impact on communal bonds as related to commodification of labor: “To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one…Such a scheme of destruction was best served by the application of the principle of freedom of contract. In practice this meant that the noncontractual organizations of kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed were to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and thus restrained his freedom.”

5. Few cases more clearly illustrate the absolute hegemony of leftist social axioms than the ubiquitous, entirely uncritical, and thoughtless, dismissal of Luddism. On few topics do more people reflexively fall into the NPC category. The Luddites, contrary to leftist mythology, were not against machines or technology – or, God forbid (gasp!), progress; they were against machines or technology being used to deskill and impoverish workers, including to circumvent labor laws. For a clearer understanding of Luddism: Kevin Binfield, ed., Writings of the Luddites, Reprint edition (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

6. For those interested in exploring these topics in greater detail than even Polanyi provides, the classic work for getting deep into the weeds is E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Classic, 2013). However, for our specific purposes, here, the even more focused book, exploring these conflicts in both the fields and the courts, is his essay collection: E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 2015), particularly chapter 3. Though there is great relevant insight throughout the essays in this collection.

7. As Polanyi emphasizes, this relationship was baked into the cake from the beginning, with the Benthamite utilitarian defense of unfettered markets. Utilitarian assumptions of there being an objective greater good assumes that there is a determinable uniquely correct calculation of such an equation. So that even in the defense of unfettered markets a kind of technocratic oversight is implicit. No irony then that Bentham’s other great claim to fame was his hyper surveillance practices and institutions associated to the panopticon (see here).

8. “It is they, the cleared and cultivated lands, the houses, and the other buildings, the means of communication, the multifarious plant necessary for production, including industry and mining, all the permanent and immovable improvements that tie a human community to the locality where it is. They cannot be improvised, but must be built up gradually by generations of patient effort, and the community cannot afford to sacrifice them and start afresh elsewhere. Hence that territorial character of sovereignty, which permeates our political conceptions.”