A Plague on Both Houses
Some Reflections on the Market and the State
“Modern corporations are flexible and innovative. They are accustomed to sensing and meeting and evoking the changing desires of the public. Above all, they practice the difficult act of mobilizing specialized knowledge for action--i.e., the act of managing change.” — Max Ways, “The Deeper Shame of the Cities,” Fortune, 1/68
“The proper goal of communism is the domination of nature by technology, and the domination of technology by planning, so that the raw materials of nature will yield up to mankind all that it needs and more besides.” — Leon Trotsky, Permanent Revolution
“The gross national product and the corporate bottom line are utterly meaningless as measures of the prosperity or health of a country.” — Wendell Berry
***This piece was written as part of a class I’d taken at Shimer College addressing “the idea of the market.” Works referenced include those by Jacob Schmookler, E.F. Schumacher and Christopher Lasch.***
I confess to taking this class for largely selfish reasons. Prior to my arrival at Shimer, I had been spending good-sized chunks of my spare time engaged in what I’d like to believe was a fruitful venture in self-education. And, as fate would have it, I had made familiarization with the well-worn debate on the welfare state part of that education. I was and still am particularly interested in arguments that dealt with/deal with how the left and right of the U.S. political mainstream have converged in their acceptance of the welfare state as an inevitable mediator of the market. Thus, left statism admits to the assistance of the poor, disenfranchised, marginalized, etc.; while right statism admits to the assistance of corporations.
This insight led me to believe that, for all intents and purposes, the distinction that had historically been configured as left vs. right was no longer helpful in terms of understanding present-day American society’s problems or deriving solutions to them. The ideologies of both the left and right seem obsolete and largely discredited. The right, for instance, while purporting to defend traditional values and institutions (that is, Judeo-Christian morality, the family, respect for the law, etc.), has in practice contributed to the decline and crisis of these very same things. In its role as cheerleader for Dow Jones and the Fortune 500, the right has done little to forestall the institution of the two-paycheck household, corporate gangsterism, the promotion of sex and violence, and consumerism as a way of life. The left, on the other hand, has fared no better. While purporting to stand for “the people” (that is, the weak, powerless, disenfranchised), the left has in fact historically practiced the defense of the interests of a particular class of left intelligentsia and those of its dependent clients. This practice is conducted at the expense of the interests of other classes, long-abandoned by the left. To this day, these classes of people and their interests are continually dismissed, when not made the object of condescension.
Taking this class was meant as a means to flesh out these themes and thus further my education.
By way of experience as a political activist and further study, I came to the conclusion that much of what the left and right stood for was bunk, and what was needed was something new, some form of politics that parted company with the “agony” of the left but also steered clear of the so-called right (when the U.S.S.R. began to crumble). I found myself agreeing with Christopher Lasch, when he noted that the “current mood” dictates that the old political ideologies have exhausted themselves in their capacity to either explain contemporary events or to “inspire men and women to any constructive action.” Both left and right have been thrown into confusion as they search for a raison d’etre in light of events in Eastern Europe.
The left, as Polanyi unintentionally shows, seemed to have history on its side. The market created intense dislocation and other conditions that seemed ripe for a vanguardist, Lenin-inspired revolutionary party to take full advantage of. Instead, the inevitable “distortions” created by the market were “corrected” by an interventionist state that managed to co-opt most of whatever discontent the market’s excesses (or the left) had fomented. As Alasdair MacIntyre once put it: “All power tends to co-opt; and absolute power co-opts absolutely.” The left here in the U.S. struggled under similar conditions during the Great Depression and ended up with strikingly similar results: a muddled model of the European welfare state, complete with many of its most debilitating aspects and few of its saving graces. The sixties’ rebellions brought about L.B.J.’s “Great Society” and furthered the bureaucratic entrenchment of what Gouldner has termed the “New Class” of liberally-minded bi-coastal intelligentsia. The radicals of the sixties would have done well to have heeded the following warning of Adorno’s: “Against those who control the bomb, barricades are ridiculous; one therefore plays at barricades, and the masters temporarily let the players have their way.”
Despite the right’s “victory,” the U.S. and most of the West continue to reside in moral chaos and still lack a sense of collective purpose. Worse, with one leg of the deadly dialectic of the nuclear arms race out of commission, the West is beginning to show the early signs of an acute case of an identity crisis, which the right is seeking to cure with vapid cliches like “New World Order.” The new right continues to fail to live up to its promise of being able to halt our slide into apathy, hedonism and immorality. As Lasch notes, “Spiritual despair, the perception of which furnished much of the popular animus against liberalism, is just as evident today as it was in the seventies.” The right seems to be in as much disarray as the left, as neo-, paleo- and libertarian conservatives fight tooth and nail for the privilege of setting the ideological agenda for the Republican Party.
The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and the establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition, which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, and fierce fanaticism. — John Calhoun
Pseudo-deference to “traditional values” fails to obfuscate the right’s commitment to progress, unlimited growth, and acquisitive individualism. The left, for all intents and purposes, stands committed to the same agenda. Neither side, Lasch claims, “wants to admit that our society has taken a wrong turn, lost its way and needs to recover a sense of purpose and direction.”
Lasch argues that neither the left nor right want to appear as pessimists or doomsayers; for key to the advancement of either side’s program--which, again, amount to essentially the same thing--is a fundamental belief in progress, a fundamental belief in progress, a fundamentally optimistic concept. In short, Lasch explains, neither side addresses the “overriding issue of limits.” Echoing the work of Schumacher, limits is for Lasch a reference to how the earth’s finite natural resources do not have the capacity to support an indefinite of industrial civilization, that is, progress. Neither maintaining our “riotous” standard of living at the expense of the rest of the world, nor attempting to extend our standard of living to the rest of the world, nor attempting to extend our standard of living to the rest of the world are viable options in that they produce the same dire consequences: the exhaustion of non-renewable resources; irreversible pollution and destruction of the earth’s atmosphere; a widening gap between rich and poor nations; increased amounts of terrorism against the West. In sum: a deterioration of both the political and physical climates of the planet.
Moving beyond the gridlock just outlined — beyond left vs. right, beyond state capitalism — requires the study of the sort that we have done here in this class. Understanding “the idea of the market” is of critical importance to any intellectual or practical project that has as its goal a “third way” between statist- and market-oriented politics. But so is an understanding of what I’d like to term the “idea of the state.” Key to that study might take into consideration the words of A.V. Diaz, who once quipped that “State-help kills self-help.” Perhaps this could be the basis for the formation of a future class. And following that, another class could address the very notion of what a third way could look like. Schumacher and Schmookler provide us with some valuable insight into just what this alternative might take shape as.
Personally, however, I find both Schmookler’s and Schumacher’s work lacking. Neither, it seems to me, appreciates the more subtle aspects of the coercive tendencies of the state. Nor do either men posit alternatives that are any less utopian than the long-discredited Marxist or anarchist models. As an alternative to these men’s alternatives, I recommend the reading of Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven. His historical treatment of the critique of progress, defined largely by his preoccupation with progress’s opposite, could be viewed as a friendly rejoinder to the work of Schmookler and Schumacher. In my opinion, Lasch’s whole career has been geared towards showing how and why various social movements have run aground and run afoul of the very people these movements purport to speak for. The True and Only Heaven, his magnum opus, is important for this very reason. To fail to understand and to come to terms with our history, to paraphrase the old saying of that great, old philosopher, is to risk being condemned to repeating the same mistakes made in our past.
“The hope of the 21st century must be based on another model altogether, a model that seeks universality at the smallest scale; a model that recognizes that the fullness of existence is contained in the tiniest of spaces. The spirit of man doesn’t require the vast expanse of an Alexanderplatz to reach the sublime.” — Leopold Kohr
