The Centre Cannot Hold
When political philosopher John Gray was asked his views on the post-covid world, he replied that he thought we were in a moment of ‘deep and large change’ and compared the significance of the pandemic to that earlier world changing event in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down and 70 years of communist rule collapsed with it. What Gray thought had not yet sunk in, at least not amongst the ‘secular evangelists of liberalism’, is that the dream of universal liberalism is over. Western Liberal Civilisation is simply one culture amongst numerous others: a particular world-view and not the germ of a singular world civilisation. What he saw arising instead is a kind of ‘Game of Thrones’ world, without a single hegemon. And whatever liberalism’s role within that multi variant domain, its influence would be local rather than global. Although, he surmised that given the self-destructive tendencies of liberalism’s current hyper individualistic turn, it may not even be that.
True, when Francis Fukuyama surveyed the world scene just after the fall of communism, he concluded that liberal democracy had a secure future under global capitalism: the famous ‘End of History’ thesis. However, that view soon changed when revolutions started kicking off in the Middle East and China emerged as a successful capitalist power, thereby exploding the myth that capitalism requires a liberal democracy.[1] Another coupling currently disentangling is the much touted notion that liberalism entails democracy. The two may have long been bedfellows, but are actually antithetical, “Democracy and Liberalism are not twins but opposites” as world systems analyst, Immanuel Wallenstein puts it. And as that antithesis becomes increasingly apparent, society is rupturing: polarising between a liberal class with its allegiance to a future directed by technocracy and shaped by concerns borne out of consumerism, such as the legal protections provided by contract law, individual consumer choice and welfare and improved efficiency. At the other pole are the noisy demands from a discounted working class, clamouring for greater democratic participation and the protection of their rights of citizenship.
We tend to tune in to political philosophers at uncertain times such as these, prodding them to read the runes. Probably because we feel in our bones that something new is coming to pass. Unexpected events may not precipitate change, but they often expose weaknesses in the existing system and accelerate its passing. For talk of liberalism’s demise is not new, Wallenstein was writing about it 30 years ago. In the aptly named ‘After Liberalism’ he prophesised “a new era of disintegration of the capitalist world economy,” followed by an entirely different world order by the end of the 21st century. Like Gray, the post- liberal world Wallenstein sees emerging is a chaotic one: “a period of major political struggle more consequential than any other of the past 500 years.”[2] And to understand the reasons for that degree of upheaval one has to appreciate the pivotal role that liberalism has played since the emergence of collective politics in 1789. That we have all imbibed liberal values to a greater or lesser extent is testament to the success of the liberal project but that should not blind us to its political purpose, which was to prevent the working class from disrupting capitalism. “The problem that gave birth to liberalism was how to contain the dangerous classes, first within the core [European states] and then within the world system as a whole. “ The degree of democratic power demanded by restive workers was unacceptable to the capitalist class, so they were given suffrage and welfare instead and it was the role of liberalism to broker and maintain that compromise. As a result, liberalism has been the essential political pillar of the dominant world order for over two centuries. It offered a centre ground: a buffer between privilege and poverty, absorbing the discontent of the masses by offering hope through the promotion of meritocracy, whilst at the same time providing a bulwark against the abuse of privilege and state power. The liberal solution was both economic and political. There was a trade in effect – we gave up our democratic demands in exchange for a share of the goods and freedom’s vision degenerated from autonomy to consumer choice. Essentially, we were bought off. We chose economic security over liberty and soon we may have neither.
This perpetual postponement of democracy could be sustained only so long as the capitalist system continued to meet the compensatory demands of the disempowered. But as the opportunities for primitive accumulation, such as land grabs, peasant labour, and the freedom to pollute with impunity have dried up around the globe, less and less has been produced. Hence the shift towards financialisation and a rentier economy, none of the benefits of which have been passed down, leading to the greatest imbalances in wealth the economy has ever seen. As Wallenstein reminds us. “To democracy’s demand for equality now, liberalism offered hope deferred. .. To the degree that the dream withers, liberalism as an ideology collapses and the dangerous classes become dangerous once more.” I think can safely say that the dream has withered.
What is surprising is that the ‘dream’ should have survived for so long. True, in ‘68 there was a brief but significant challenge to the world system by prescient activists who saw the ugly trajectory life was taking; and loudly called out the faux-left who had succumbed to the ‘logic of the market’. But the current political left is bereft of ideas. A failing Wallenstein attributes to its becoming permeated by Liberal ideology’s devotion to technology and futurist dreams - a misguided optimism described by Guy Debord as ‘psychotic euphoria’. The Left’s shift from demanding freedom through liberation to waiting for it to be gifted by technology has been disastrous and not just for the working class. Because what has resulted from that political disengagement is a cultural coup effected by an unchallenged liberalism which has embedded capitalism as the societal grund-norm. And it has done this is by normalising commodification and invisibilising the market, largely by disguising its imperatives as personal choice. As Colin Crouch noted in ‘Post Democracy’[3] and Christopher Lasch before him in ‘Revolt of the Elites’[4] the liberal class has effectively abandoned citizenship in favour of consumerism, jettisoning the state for the market. And in so doing it has achieved neo-liberalism’s goal of ‘dethroning politics’. For as Hayek made clear in one of his earliest works back in the 40s, neo liberalism was never about the minimal state, rather, what it sought was an ‘intelligently designed one’. Because ‘ideal markets had to be imposed. They couldn’t just happen.’[5] What neo liberalism needed was a regulating state – unburdened by the demands of citizenship and free to provide an appropriate social and economic system within which the market could operate beyond the reach of the governed. Liberalism usefully provided supportive cultural motifs and identities: largely through its promotion of a malleable individualism and the sanctification of choice. And, by favouring technocracy and governance by supranational institutions over nation states, it also stewarded the ‘hamstringing of democracy’[6] the neo liberals so desired.
In ‘Revolt of the Elites’ – the title of which is a poke at Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset’s 1930s work ‘Revolt of the Masses’, which warned about the danger of extending democracy to the masses, Lasch asserts that it is in fact the liberal class, with their close allegiance to the market and aversion to innate limits, who are the greater threat to the integrity of society. In that work he astutely identifies ‘mobility’, which had already emerged as a synonym for success by the early 80s, as a seminal idea in society’s shift away from democracy and towards consumerism. What Lasch could not have imagined, however, was just how powerful those aspects of the liberal identity would be in dissolving social relations, particularly when coupled with the market’s imperative to maximise profits. The irony is, of course, that following liberalism’s attack on collective identities and the hollowing out of civic notions like obligation, duty and responsibility – all to be replaced by the anonymity of legal regulation – what is left is not a formidable, emancipated individual but an unindividuated, homogenous mass.
When economic historian, Philip Mirowski, explains that neoliberalism is more of a philosophy than an economic system; an epistemology in fact, a way of life, he seems to be making an obvious point. What’s surprising is his assertion that the Left have been slow to notice. It makes you wonder where they live. When just about every crevice of life has been colonised by capitalism, how could anyone think otherwise? In a chapter entitled ‘Everyday Neoliberalism’ Mirowski takes us on a poverty tour to demonstrate his contention that neoliberalism is now effectively mainlined in life. “Its roots are sunk deeply into the cultural unconscious.” It’s unnoticeable, being the ‘ideology of no ideology’. It is the ‘water in which we swim’. Mirowski reports from the world of the under-class, describing the media’s endless churning out of poverty porn- the ‘theatre of cruelty’, as he calls it, revealing wrecked and hopeless lives which we can all watch at a safe distance. Although as Mirowski points out, this is more than ‘rubber necking’. It has a pedagogic function like a government retraining scheme, fore-warning us of our fate and that of our children should we fail to become sufficiently malleable and embrace the market. Trailer parks, derelict factories and crumbling buildings, foreclosed homes in abandoned towns with torn away pipes and roofs. A perfect setting for the apocalypse, quite literally in the case of Gary, Indiana. A town too poor to pay for the demolition of its rusting steel mills, which has been sought out by Hollywood for its ready-made sets. It’s even doubled for Chernobyl. In the UK, Jaywick’s on the itinerary of dark tourism. Not quite in Gary’s league, but a bleak and impoverished seaside town where people come to gawk at inhabitants who still live in flimsy holiday homes following a flood decades ago. We also have teems of TV programmes seemingly obsessed with the lives of people living on welfare – regularly demonised as ‘chavs’.[7] With ethnographic scrutiny we watch them eat and talk and move around. We see them deal with government officials, (often rudely) and social workers and visits from bailiffs. Sometimes we watch them when they get sick from eating their horrible food and refusing to quit smoking. Some programmes follow them doing extraordinary things like getting married or having children – always destined to be described as ‘feral’. Some even keep dogs. Of course, Mirowski is right, the cautionary tale being evoked carries the simple message – don’t resist the market. Don’t become society’s detritus. Whether the accusation is a lack of aspiration or laziness, or a stubborn insistence on belonging somewhere or to someone, or to a dogged search for higher meaning, the sin of the underclass in the eyes of their more pliant betters can be summed up in a single word: intransigence.
Hayek referred to the market as a ‘catallaxy’ - a ‘game’, a ‘spontaneous order’ produced by history. He preferred ‘catallaxy’ to ‘economy’ which he recognised was too narrow to convey the totality of life that the market was now mediating. Because it’s no longer just about trade, it’s about knowledge. Hayek didn’t believe in a society with common ends or goals; he saw it as just a bunch of individuals in the flow of their own choices. But he realised that some medium was necessary to make those choices commensurable and that task fell to the price mechanism. According to Hayek, we can only discern the value of something when we know its price. As individuals we don’t know anything without the market which operates like a great brain - a superior information processor, informing our choices by giving us prices. The basic idea that guides this epistemological project is that people are just an ignorant mass who can’t know anything which is why they have to obey the market - the only validator of knowledge, according to Hayek. With its deepened epistemological significance, neoliberalism has succeeded in presenting the market in a socially and culturally acceptable way – not as an exploiter but as the facilitator of choice, like a kind of helpful adjudicator. The word ‘catallaxy’ comes from the Greek, meaning ‘to bring into the community - to make a friend out of an enemy’ which is ironic given Hayek’s antisocial views. But that then raises the question, in the absence of communal relations what exactly is the ontological conversion that the market is effecting? What are things being made into when they are ranked according to price? Hayek might have preferred the easier sell of the homey ‘making friends out of enemies’, but ‘commodification’ seems the more accurate term.
Margaret Thatcher, Hayek’s devoted acolyte and probably his equal in social animus, provided a benchmark for the upwardly mobile with her infamous remark that after the age of 30 only losers take the bus. But the world was still relatively solid back then and yuppies were a joke, like Gekko’s phone. Now selling ourselves is the norm, the expectation even, as all of life appears mediated through the price mechanism. Every new acquaintance a sales pitch or at least an addition to our social network which we fret over and guardedly compare. Another’s distress? Just a gap in the market. Constantly remaking ourselves, sloughing off the old parts which didn’t quite cut it to remarket our new and better selves as something else. Arranging our lives like balance sheets, investing in the promising bits and outsourcing the rest. Never quite committed to an identity in case it goes under or we find a better one to sell – always on the cusp of becoming someone else.
The position of liberalism has always been an ambivalent one, as Dewey observed back in the 30s, describing a liberal as “one who gives approval to the grievances of the proletariat but at the crucial moment invariably runs for cover on the side of the master of capitalism.”[8] They may be the middle of the proverbial sandwich but they know which side their bread is buttered. Classical liberalism began as a counter movement to the power of the state, but as Dewey recognised, liberalism’s role was to counter whatever forces were dominant in society, wherever they originated. Not only has liberalism not opposed the spectacular growth of the market as it has insinuated itself in all of our lives, it has used its intellectual influence to curate the process, persuading us that the way to success is to be mobile, malleable and unattached. We now appear to be caught up in a process we can’t escape like some macabre dance we are unable to stop.
Marx recognised the kind of magical force late capitalism would wield over life. In the Communist Manifesto he illustrates this hold with an allegorical passage referencing the story of the Sorcerer’s apprentice and describing how, having conjured up forces from the nether world, the bourgeoisie cannot control them. Unfortunately, what Marx didn’t foresee is that neither can the proletariat. “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.” It’s a paradox at the heart of the manifesto, as Marshall Berman explains, for once ‘all that is solid melts into air’ how can that not include Marx’s proletarian weapon bearers? “By the time Marx’s proletarians finally appear, the world stage on which they were supposed to play their part has disintegrated, and metamorphosed into something unrecognisable, surreal, a mobile construction that shifts and changes shape under the players’ feet.” [9] The real significance of the paradox is not that you can’t overturn the tables, occupy the offices, replace the people, tear up the rules, and destroy the vehicles. You can do it all, but it doesn’t make any difference. The tyranny is in the process; reality is a façade and action an illusion.
Liberalism is a cork in a bottle that no longer holds a seal. A flimsy bandage on a festering wound. Having successfully provided cover for the market’s raids on civic life, it’s hardly surprising that it should have brought the very legitimacy of the modern state into question. The ‘Legitimation Crisis’, raised by German philosopher Jurgen Habermas[10] in the early 70s and rumbling on in the background of an expansive global capitalism ever since, poses the simple question, ‘how can a populace show their approval for a state deeply implicated in capitalism when it is responsible for the inequitable distribution of socially produced wealth?’ But, of course, the issue is a deeper one, as Habermas explains. It concerns the continued significance of politics once life is entirely dominated by the market. Liberalism’s erosion of collective identities and socio-cultural boundaries in the promotion of the free and malleable individual has had a devastating effect on the cultural tradition of debate within the body politic. Those same cultural traditions which enabled people to define themselves in terms other than the economic have been erased, swallowed up in Hayek’s cattalaxy and now everyone just wants stuff. As Habermas points out, ‘Bourgeois culture as a whole has never been able to reproduce itself from itself. It was always dependent upon motivationally effective supplementation by traditional worldviews.’[11] Those traditional world views that constrained rampant consumerism by emphasising the importance of normative values about belonging and community and higher meaning are still found in the derided and marginalised working class, struggling to keep a hold on a disintegrating identity in a world liquefied by the market.
The pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns have highlighted the role played by national governments within the global capitalist system, bringing the question of legitimacy again to the fore. Klaus Schwab’s renewed call for ‘global leadership’- the famed ‘Great Reset’ with its nod towards a world government solution has exercised the more libertarian minds. But maybe globalist scholar, William I. Robinson, has uncovered the solution for both global capitalism’s chronic stagnation and the legitimation problem of the unrepresented masses. In his timely work, ‘The Global Police State’[12] Robinson identifies a ‘Repressive Totality’ that is now emerging as a result of huge increases in military expenditure both public and private. He reports on the greatly expanded use of private police forces and mercenary armies around the globe, a spectacular growth in mass surveillance, particularly in geo-tracking using smart phones, the creation of spatial apartheid through zoning and the construction of containment walls for obvious reason, and observes that whilst the pandemic may have further flattened the already stagnating world economy, there has been a growing market for ‘riot contagion systems’.
[1] The Future of History – Can Liberalism Survive the Decline of the Middle Class? Journal of Foreign Affairs 2012, Francis Fukuyama
[2] After Liberalism – New Press 1995, Immanuel Wallenstein
[3] Post Democracy - Polity 2004, Colin Crouch
[4] Revolt of the Elites – W.W. Norton & Co.. 1996, Christopher Lasch
[5] The Road to Serfdom – Routledge 1944, Friedrich von Hayek
[6] Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste – Verso 2014, Philip Mirowski
[7] Chavs, the Demonisation of the Working Class – Verso, 2012 Owen Jones
[8] Liberalism and Social Action – Prometheus Books 1999, John Dewy
[9] All That Is Solid Melts into Air – Simon & Schuster 1982, Marshall Berman
[10] Legitimation Crisis – Polity Press 1988, Jurgen Habermas
[11] Jurgen Habermas and the Idea of Legitimation Crisis- European Journal of Political Research 1982, Raymond Plant
[12] The Global Police State – Pluto Press, 2020 William I. Robinson