2019 VOTE Poster Times Square NYC with a They Live Touch, Brecht Bug (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment […] would result in the demolition of society.
–-Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
Have you noticed lately how strangely liberalism has been behaving? At least I think it’s behaving strangely. Maybe it’s just me. I was an American Cold War kid, you see. I grew up with some pretty crazy ideas about how liberal democracy and free market capitalism work, so I can’t really say for sure.
I know from liberalism’s Cold War hagiography, for example, that the free market, left completely to its own devices, is far more efficient than government at providing for human needs. It’s also superior to all other possible economic arrangements. This is an axiomatic truth, so there’s no point in arguing about it. It became really popular after Ronald Reagan became President. If you’re from the UK you’re familiar with it as well. Reagan’s work-wife, Maggie, used to be your Prime Minister.
Cold War hagiography also taught me that Anglo-American liberalism crushed fascism in WWII. I learned this from old Newsreel footage of the beach landing at Normandy, and from a plethora of Hollywood WWII movies like The Longest Day, The Sands of Iwo Jima, The Dirty Dozen, and Patton. In my recollection the allied victory was mostly a tag-team effort on the part of John Wayne and George C. Scott, with a smattering of supporting actors: Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland, a man named Red Buttons, and to bring it all back home, a grainy photo of your great uncle Henry. There was a smattering of Brits involved as well. Sir Richard Burton of the RAF, and David Niven, and Michael Caine, and Richard Dawson before he hosted Family Feud. No Soviets were involved whatsoever. How could they be? The Cold War was already well underway by the time Adolph and Ava snuffed it in the bunker (as troops of unspecified origin approached Berlin). The 27,000,000 Soviets who died in WWII had to be written out of the script (and the American psyche).
Speaking of the Soviet Union, as a Cold War kid I also learned that market liberalism is a global champion of democracy and a sure-fire path to a high standard of living. This was the whole point for having a Cold War in the first place. The Soviets were against free market capitalism because they knew it was a giant engine of freedom and democracy and prosperity, which they hated for some reason. So instead, fueled by a communist mania for universal human misery, they suffered under an oppressive one party system that offered a dearth of consumer goods. They lived in cramped gray apartments, which they had to share with a family of strangers who spied on them for the KGB. Most of them didn’t even own a car, and if they did, it was a piece of shit. This is what my middle school social studies teacher told our class.
We in the liberal West on the other hand—and especially we Americans—embraced free market capitalism because we love freedom and democracy and prosperity. As a result, everybody in America was middle class and lived in a ranch-style home with a two-car garage, and every two years everyone enjoyed the freedom of stepping into a voting booth to vote for either Coke or Pepsi.
I am quite serious when I say that these are the kinds of ideas I grew up with. Cynics might describe them as so much Cold War propaganda, but we don’t have propaganda in America. Nazis and communists have propaganda. In America we have advertising and Public Relations. I like to think of these Cold War ideas as brand promises. They were drilled into my head by my teachers, my community, and a near-seamless virtual reality of market-driven American popular culture.
That said, I fully realize that these ideas aren’t necessarily reflective of reality. I’m self-aware enough to recognize that I grew up in The Matrix. I grew up in The Truman Show. I grew up in John Carpenter’s They Live, but I don’t have the special sunglasses that reveal to me that the earth has been subjugated by alien elites and that money is my god. Pick your cinematic Cartesian nightmare. You get the idea.
I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubblegum.
—John Nada, They Live
Despite this recognition I still often have difficulty distinguishing between reality and liberal realism. This is what I want to write about. I want to write about it because I suspect that you may suffer from the same difficulty—or worse still, that you may be in deep Truman-mode a la The Truman Show.
I mean liberal realism here in the same Lacanian psychoanalytic sense that critic Mark Fisher talked about Capitalist Realism. Realism here is not reality but an ideologically-mediated understanding that serves as reality’s substitute. A set of ideological values and beliefs are “naturalized” in a manner of speaking, such that they no longer appear as values and beliefs, but as simple facts about the nature of reality itself.
Liberalism in America works this way. A few outliers notwithstanding, nearly everybody in the United States is some flavor of liberal. Even liberals who claim to hate liberals are liberals. Liberalism functions as an unofficial state religion here, and like other Americans I was born into the faith. I internalized the precepts and dogmas long before my critical thinking skills had reached maturity. Like racism, Fahrenheit, and the planet Pluto, that shit is rooted deep in my psyche. Many millions of my fellow Americans are in a similar predicament.
Unlike many countries, which allow a plurality of political ideologies to participate in their electoral politics, in the United States we only allow one ideology (liberalism), albeit with roughly three “orientations.” We have Conservatives (conservative-leaning liberals who eschew the liberal label), we have Liberals (progressive-leaning liberals who embrace the label), and we have Centrists (non-committal liberals who, like Buridan’s Ass, stand unmoved in the narrow in-between). The differences between these orientations are mostly cultural. What unites them is their deep ideological commitment to the market economy, and by extension, to market society. In the United States, to borrow a famous Thatcherism, “There is no alternative.” Not in any politically-viable sense anyway. In the odd electoral system that passes for democracy in the United States, this single ideology—liberalism—is strongly enforced by two private corporations that run America’s political duopoly (the Democratic Party and the Republican Party). Liberalism is also enshrined in our constitution, which is, as sociologist Karl Polanyi once noted, the only constitution on earth to exclude the economic sphere from its jurisdiction, thereby enshrining market society in law.
It’s market society, which a market economy relies upon for its existence, that lends The Matrix-style liberal realist quality to life in the United States. Its pervasiveness. Its seeming naturalness and inevitability. In a market society all values reduce to market values. Human relationships are market relationships, relationships of exchange between putatively sovereign individuals. This is true whether an individual is shopping in the market as a consumer, or selling his or her labor in the market to make a living. It’s an incredibly weird kind of society, but when you grow up in it, it can be hard to imagine that society could be organized any other way.
In recent years, as you’ve probably noticed, our common lived experiences align less and less with this liberal realist simulacra. The two are out of phase like a glitchy VR headset. This is what I meant when I wrote earlier that liberalism has been behaving strangely. Everything feels kind of surreal, but it’s not. It’s real. It’s these interesting times we’re living in. The immediate aftermath of the harrowing Trump Presidency, the middle of a globally devastating pandemic, and after the summer of the largest protest movement in US history (against police violence and in support of black lives).
What I want to suggest to you is that as long as we remain under the spell of liberal realism, we’ll remain ill-equipped for addressing, or even understanding, the challenges of our time.
Blue Pill v. Red Pill
As a first good-faith effort to break out of the liberal realist spell, consider the current status of those liberal ‘brand promises’ I enumerated above.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Americans realized that, like a broken ‘invisible hand’, the unencumbered free market was incapable of meeting human needs. The entire global economy found itself crippled to a degree not seen since The Great Depression. Governments had to intervene. They had to breach liberalism’s sacred firewall between politics and the economy.
There are many examples, but I want to mention what is perhaps the most remarkable one. President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act. This act grants the government the power to direct the productive activity of private corporations. As Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek gleefully noted, this is just what it sounds like: War Communism. Soon GM and Ford began producing ventilators under government contract, in much the same way that Ford, GM and Chrysler manufactured planes, jeeps, and tanks during WWII. Despite decades of Cold War “public relations” efforts to help us forget, a long-forgotten lesson from WWII was suddenly relearned: when the stakes are very high, things simply cannot be left to “the free market.”
I’m reminded here of a famous bit of neoliberal snark from Ronald Reagan: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help!’” In 2020 those nine words no longer sounded very terrifying. To the contrary actually. Rest assured that Reagan’s neoliberal descendants will now be working overtime to help you re-forget what you saw here.
On January 7th, 2021, one day after American citizens stormed their own Capitol in an attempt to overturn their own democratic election, Elon Musk overtook Jeff Bezos as the richest person on earth, with a net worth of $185 Billion. This is sublime wealth. We can’t even picture it. A single, solitary individual has personal wealth in excess of the GDP of countries like Qatar, Morocco, Hungary, and Ukraine. Bezos is right up there too. Meanwhile, in 2020 over 50 million Americans—including 17 million children—were so poor in that they sometimes couldn’t afford food. So much for America’s famous highest standard of living in the world. So much for everyone in America being middle class.
Billboard advertisement behind Louisville Breadline, 1937 CC BY-NC 2.0
As for owning those Soviet losers by living in a ranch-style home with a two-car garage? A dozen years ago, the last time the global market failed spectacularly during The Great Recession, the very banking sector that caused the failure foreclosed on at least 8 million American homes, wiping out great swaths of generational wealth. Back in 2014, when Musk and Bezos didn’t have nearly as much money, economist Thomas Picketty already noted in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century that income inequality in the United States was, “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.”
Much to the chagrin of George C. Scott, Red Buttons, and your grandparents (the people who defeated fascism during WWII), a little over four years ago we Americans elected an aspiring autocrat for our President. And by “we” here I sure as hell don’t mean me. We’re not the only ones, by the way. This is happening all over the world. It’s important to add—especially for those liberals who view the Presidency of Donald Trump as as a one-off fluke—that some 74,000,000 Americans voted to reelect this Proud Boy dog-whistler. That’s more than the number of people who voted for him the first time.
Self-identified nazis and other Brown Shirt types now feel emboldened to march in our streets. Police in America regularly assassinate black Americans with total impunity. In 2020, when people finally began protesting this horrific practice in large numbers, rather than taking measures to stop the murders, the police simply began brutalizing the protesters as well. They crack their skulls, pepper spray them, kidnap them, and gas them with chemicals banned in warfare. Sometimes the Brown Shirt types show up to help.
Rather than championing democracy, our legislative bodies, drunk on corporate donations, refuse again and again to enact (or even support) urgently needed social protections backed by democratic majorities of the citizens they reputedly represent. American citizens no longer even expect elected representatives to support proposals they favor.
In the middle of a global health crisis, in a country where 27 million people have no health coverage, and where medical debt throws 530,000 families per year into bankruptcy, polling suggests that 69% of American voters (including 88% of Democrats) support Medicare for All. Despite all of this, President Joe Biden has promised to veto the legislation if it miraculously (it would indeed require a miracle) wins House and Senate approval. How is this democracy?
Everything is quite fucked up now. It’s all very disconcerting and disturbing. In reaction, and quite understandably, a lot of people these days are wondering desperately how we might put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. And yet, if they grew up under the deep spell of liberal realism like I did, they’re largely at a loss as to what to do. As sociologist Karl Polanyi once noted, liberals “fail conspicuously” to understand change, suffering from “an emotional faith in spontaneity.” This faith in spontaneity, coupled with the market fundamentalism of liberal ideology, means liberals fail again and again to see the interrelation between economics and politics. They fail again and again to see the interrelation between market forces and social reality.
To carry on with our The Matrix metaphor, we’re not taking the blue pill so we can all get back to brunch. We’re taking the red pill.
Somehow, regarding the crisis of democracy, the rise of authoritarianism, and our inability to meet fundamental social challenges, liberals simply wish for the scary genie to go back into the lamp. They want “the orange man” to go away without considering where he came from in the first place. They hope things will “go back to normal” without any fundamental political or economic change—that is to say, without any change to the liberal order they take for the fabric of reality. I want to suggest to you that this is a terrible strategy. That’s not what this essay is about. To carry on with our The Matrix metaphor, we’re not taking the blue pill so we can all get back to brunch. We’re taking the red pill. If you’re a deeply committed liberal, let this be your trigger warning.
A Critique of Liberal Freedom
Given that we don’t have a pair of those sunglasses from John Carpenter’s They Live, how can we see through the spell of liberal realism? There are a number of approaches we might take, but the one I want to explore is one that was employed by sociologist Karl Polanyi in his (now classic) 1944 critique of market liberalism, The Great Transformation. Polanyi offered a focused critique of liberalism’s theory of freedom as the keystone, so to speak, of the entire liberal project. Liberalism, after all, purports to be a philosophy of freedom. It’s right there in the name. Liberal – liberty – freedom.
For those of us who grew up in Liberaland, the liberal idea of freedom will be very familiar, perhaps even ‘commonsensical’. Upon further scrutiny, however, we’ll see that it’s actually quite odd. We’ll see in a fairly straightforward way that liberalism’s current struggles with protecting society (vividly illustrated during the pandemic), with nurturing democracy, and with addressing the rise of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism is directly related to its odd understanding of freedom.
It’s largely on the basis of its ideal of freedom that liberal theory, in defense of liberal economy, starkly isolates the economic sphere from the political sphere. As we’ll see, this economic retreat from politics is decisive and devastating. It’s in the political realm that human beings act in concert to intervene in their own fate. As we’ve hopefully begun to recognize in confronting the coronavirus pandemic, acting politically, planning and organizing, working in concert to shape our own destiny, will be increasingly crucial to the fate of the human species as we confront the pending dire consequences of the climate crisis. Liberal freedom is opposed to this kind of human action. In this regard, liberal freedom is a kind of ruse designed to oppose political freedom (including its manifestation as democracy) and human action under conditions of pluralism generally.
We can ill-afford to ‘humor’ this philosophy any longer. It’s a literal life-and-death issue at this point. My hope behind writing this, therefore, is that we’ll all take leave of liberal philosophy once and for all, as Karl Polanyi once hoped back in 1944.
Liberal Freedom and Human Sacrifice
A central theme of The Great Transformation is Polanyi’s claim that market liberalism is an unrealizable utopian project. By utopian here, Polanyi means impossible. The utopian ideal fueling market liberalism is the idea of the self-regulating market. This is a market that’s left to do its own thing, free from any external intervention. The self-regulating market is the economic expression of liberal freedom. There is an individual expression as well.
That said, I should mention that this isn’t my first pass on this subject. Last summer I wrote a piece entitled Freedom and Life in an Age of Contagion. In that piece, inspired by philosopher Agnes Heller, I explored the dialectical tension between the modern values of freedom and life. Freedom and life, Heller argued, are co-ultimate values in modernity that sometimes come into concrete conflict. Because these values are co-ultimate, when they come into conflict there is no ultimate resolution.
The coronavirus pandemic provoked just such a conflict. Champions of the value of life demanded self-quarantine, masks, social distancing, and temporary lock-downs. Champions of the value of freedom insisted that these demands were insufferably tyrannical and must be rejected.
In that piece I identified the concept of freedom at play as negative or liberal freedom. This is freedom understood as the right of the sovereign individual to go through life unmolested (by anyone, but especially by the government). Again, the self-regulating market is the economic expression of this same ideal of freedom.
The defenders of liberal freedom in this instance were mostly right-wingers, ranging from garden variety conservative Republicans to far-right militia types. They demanded not only that we not wear masks or socially distance, but that we keep the country open for business as usual, contagion be damned. They had no compunction about potentially infecting and killing others.
Since the virus was disproportionately killing the elderly, some on the right (including the Lt. Governor of Texas), suggested that the elderly should willingly sacrifice their lives to save the economy. By April things escalated further still when a group of protesters armed with rifles stormed the Michigan state Capitol and demanded that the legislature, which was in session, reopen the state for business. Across America, mayors and governors who enforced stay-at-home measures in an effort to contain the virus received death threats.
Anti-social behavior also escalated, replete with people not only refusing to wear masks or social distance in retail marketplaces, but intentionally spitting on people and coughing in their faces. It’s hard to fathom what would motivate people to engage in these latter behaviors. I can only assume that the intent was to ‘virally punish’ those who would dare to intervene in cherished free-market consumer habits. The immediate interventionists in question, those on the retail front lines, were of course precarious working class people. “Essential workers,” we now call them, holding the line against so many Republican ‘Karens’ and whatever you call Karen’s male counterpart.
I’d never personally seen militant liberalism escalate to such a level before. These people were contemplating homicide. They were intimidating democratically-elected office-holders with threats of violence. All to defend the unencumbered liberal economy against political interventions designed to protect society and its members from a deadly pandemic.
I’d never personally seen militant liberalism escalate to such a level before. These people were contemplating homicide.
The contempt for protecting society and the lives of others in the name of freedom. The hostility towards democratic rule wherever it conflicts with the self-regulating market. The willingness to intimidate or disenfranchise anyone who would presume to intervene in the activity of the self-regulating market. This is liberalism. This has always been liberalism.
The demand for human sacrifice of the elderly is particularly telling. In this version of the dialectic of freedom and life, the sanctity of the individual (a Christian moral precept embraced by political liberalism) is pitted against the free market. The preference is clear, but problematically so. Here the problem is not simply that life is pitted against freedom. Liberal freedom of the individual is pitted against the liberal freedom of the market. For a liberal, this self-contradiction cannot stand. The ask therefore cannot be mandatory. Instead, like some liberal-geriatric episode of Logan’s Run, the old are supposed to voluntarily ‘run to sanctuary’ for the sake of their grandchildren’s future. We can all read between the lines easily though. The self-regulating market is the sandman.
The Mask-Optional Utopia of the Self-Regulating Market
To better understand how the liberal ideal of a self-regulating market is impossibly utopian, let’s unpack Polanyi’s case in a bit more detail. Here we’ll focus more clearly on liberal freedom’s economic expression as the self-regulating market.
Polanyi went to lengths to illustrate that in traditional and pre-capitalist societies the economy (including markets if they had them), was embedded in society and subject to politics. An economy is simply an aspect of society that functions in service of society’s needs. By contrast, market liberalism’s utopian project aims at establishing a “self-regulating market.”
The very attempt to establish a self-regulating market thus requires disembedding the market from society and politics. Society must become an “adjunct to the market,” Polanyi writes, such that, “[i]nstead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.” There is nothing “natural” about this. It entails a devastatingly destructive transformation of society, and requires huge amounts of government intervention to set up and to maintain. “Laissez-faire,” Polanyi provocatively claimed, “was planned.”
Since government intervention is anathema to the utopian idea of the self-regulating market, liberal ideology cannot recognize an interventionist beginning to the self-regulating market. This isn’t supposed to be a utopian project. It’s supposed to be real. The fully disembedded market therefore had to have been there all along. This presents a ‘realist’ requirement in liberalism’s market fundamentalist ideology. Liberals are able to believe in and invest in the liberal project only by denying the reality of society, which is messy, full of historical causes and effects, full of human agents meddling in their own and others’ business, and in which, most importantly of all, the economy is inextricably embedded.
Per liberalism’s ur-myth, the market may be ‘discovered’ like an unknown species of flora or fauna or a previously unexplored island, but it cannot be created (other than by God). That is to say, it cannot be an artifact. It must be posited as natural, and therefore independent of the historical institution of society.
While the self-regulating market purports to constitute an economic sphere wholly separate from the social and political spheres, it nevertheless requires the resources of society to function. It needs society to be organized in a certain way. Investing in factories during the rise of industrialism, for example, is an expensive and risky proposition. You need to make certain that there are ample necessary resources on either side of the production process. You need ample capital, ample natural resources, an ample supply of people willing to sell their labor to work in the factory, and ample marketplaces with customers willing to buy whatever goods you produce. To this end, a self-regulating market must “subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market.”
It’s in this regard that Polanyi argues that a market economy cannot exist except in a market society. Society must consist mainly of commodities and commodity relations. Regardless of what cultural traditions and institutions, folkways, community or neighborhood allegiances, or religious or familial obligations dictate, the primary relationship between human beings must be a relationship of barter between sovereign individuals exchanging commodities (goods, services, private property, their own labor, etc.). “In practice” Polanyi writes, “this meant that the noncontractural organizations of kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed where to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and thus restrained his freedom.” An empirically sovereign individual is an atomized individual.
There are several important implications that follow from this. I want to emphasize three in particular.
First, in order for the self-regulating market to exist, it must be allowed to be the organizing principle of society. What this means is that the self-regulating market, rather than politics, ultimately governs not only the economy but also society (at least where social factors impinge on the market). And by direct inference, we should note, that means that the economy and economically-salient social relations cannot be governed democratically. Democratic majorities, especially under conditions of universal suffrage that include poor and working class people who are immediately exposed to the market mechanism, tend to support legislation that is protective of society or that favors the public (common) good. Almost invariably this entails intervention into the self-regulating market, which is not allowed. If people are intervening, then the market isn’t sovereign. For this reason, market liberalism demands a clean separation between the economic sphere and the political sphere.
In order for the self-regulating market to exist, it must be allowed to be the organizing principle of society.
To illustrate the point: a ‘progressive’ liberal can, for instance, support anti-racism by kneeling in kente cloth, consuming certified vegan ice cream, or participating in corporate diversity and inclusion training (which treats racism as a psychological problem). However, paying reparations for slavery, returning control of lands to indiginous peoples, dismantling the for-profit prison-industrial complex, or any other proposal that requires political intervention into economic life beyond protecting private property and the enforcing contracts is, strictly speaking, Verboten. To borrow the 19th century language of Herbert Spencer, these latter behaviors are “anti-liberal”.
Second, a primary reason why the self-regulating market is an impossible utopia is, on Polanyi’s telling, that several of the essential commodities needed for production in a market economy aren’t commodities at all. The “fictitious commodities” he has in mind are land, labor, and money. Polanyi has a conventional understanding of what a commodity is: something that was produced in order to be bought and sold. On that definition, land, labor, and money are obviously not commodities. Rather:
- Land is “only another name for nature.” It wasn’t produced for sale.
- Labor is “only another name for human activity that goes with life itself.” It’s not produced for sale, but “for entirely different reasons.”
- Money is just “a token for purchasing power” and isn’t “produced at all,” but “comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance.”
Since land, labor, and money are not true commodities, the utopian aspirations of a self-regulating market require commodifying them. This can never be fully successful, nor would we want it to be. Indeed, turning human activity and the natural environment into pure commodities is the stuff of nightmares. This leads right into the third consideration.
Third, because economic liberalism presumes to organize society based on this commodity fiction, movements towards implementing the self-regulating market are regularly met with completely spontaneous and necessary protective counter-movements. These counter-movements are necessary because, as Polanyi puts it, “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment would result in the demolition of society.” Inevitably, like self-quarantined mask-wearers in a viral pandemic, society attempts to protect itself.
In a sense, protective counter-movement constitutes the antithetical component of a dialectic of market society (where the self-regulating market is the thesis). In fact, if we construe freedom as liberal freedom, we get an account of a conflict between competing social organizing principles: the principle of the self-regulating market and the principle of protection of society.
The conflicting relationship between these competing organizing principles, we might add, mirrors the tension in Agnes Heller’s account of the co-ultimate values of freedom and life in conflict. No maskers versus mask wearers. Open for business versus lockdown. Protecting the elderly versus sacrificing the elderly to the self-regulating market. Polanyi, however, doesn’t use the language of dialectics. Instead he describes this as a double-movement. The market attempts to disembed itself from society, further exposing society to the market mechanism, and society spontaneously counters with attempts at self-protection.
The market doesn’t consider, for example, that “labor power” cannot be used—or neglected—indiscriminately, because “the bearer of this particular commodity” is a human being. Market forces alone don’t stop people from being killed or maimed in hazardous work environments, sickened and killed by overwork, and starved to death by lack of work. “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions,” Polanyi notes, “human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation.” Not surprisingly then, people endeavor to protect themselves and these institutions. They form labor unions. They support workplace safety protections, pension programs, paid sick leave, healthcare and child care provisions, and so on.
Regarding nature, anyone concerned about the climate crisis today understands full well that to treat the natural environment solely as a commodity subject to the market mechanism will eventually result in the destruction of the natural environment, and with it, human civilization. But it’s not just this grand existential threat. It’s also more immediate damages: polluted rivers and air, denuded forests, defiled landscapes, neighborhoods, and habitats.
Liberal Freedom as Anti-Freedom
We’ve dug deeply enough now into liberal ideology qua liberal realism to reveal what an odd notion of freedom liberal freedom is. Liberal ‘freedom’ amounts to submitting to the sovereignty of nature. This isn’t freedom in the moral sense, and it’s certainly not freedom in the political sense. As negative freedom, it’s freedom from these other forms of freedom.
In the history of liberal thought we see this clearly going back at least to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Via speculative thought experiments (which we might characterize as the original foray into liberal realism), Locke transports us to a State of Nature prior to and independent of the advent of society, of politics, and of government. Here, miraculously, Locke “discovers” the essentials of market liberalism: the sovereign individual, the market, and private property. Market liberalism, like Newtonian physics, is a manifestation of the laws of nature. In such an arrangement, freedom means being protected from human agency so you can nestle deeply in a world of natural determination. The idea of human beings employing their free agency to intervene in their collective fate is antagonistic to this ‘natural’ liberal order.
Polanyi scholars Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers illustrate this point well in their book The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique. “Those who believe, even a little, in the sovereignty of nature,” Block and Somers write, “cannot simultaneously accept the causal powers of human artifice, reason, and political institutions. If the laws of nature rule, then social and political laws cannot; there can only be one sovereign per ideational regime.”
Those who believe, even a little, in the sovereignty of nature cannot simultaneously accept the causal powers of human artifice, reason, and political institutions.
If you ‘grew up liberal’ like I did, this revelation regarding liberal freedom as a firewall against politics and human action in the plural will likely strike you as more conservative than what you’ve imagined liberalism to be. Here I’m thinking especially of the many self-identified liberals I know who equate liberalism with progressivism or, in short, who think of liberalism as “the left”. Unhelpful juxtapositions like liberal v. conservative or liberal values v. traditional values only muddy the waters here.
In this regard I want to share something that, to my delight, I stumbled across in doing some recent research. I had occasion to re-read large sections of Fredric Jameson’s 1991 classic, Postmodernism. Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In this seminal work, which I hadn’t read since the 1990s, Jameson seemingly veers off topic to addresses, briefly, this very issue of liberal freedom from a classical economics perspective.
Jameson sees common cause between Thomas Hobbes’ fear, in the aftermath of the English civil war, of “bellum omnium contra omnes,” and both Adam Smith’s classical liberal “invisible hand” and Milton Friedman’s neoliberal/libertarian definition of a liberal: “A liberal is fundamentally fearful of concentrated power.” It’s worthwhile to quote Jameson at length here:
“The market is thus Leviathan in sheep’s clothing: it’s function is not to encourage and perpetuate freedom (let alone freedom of a political variety) but rather to repress it; and about such visions, indeed, one may revive the slogans of the existential years—the fear of freedom, the flight from freedom. Market ideology assures us that human beings make a mess of it when they try to control their destinies (“socialism is impossible”) and that we are fortunate in possessing an interpersonal mechanism—the market—which can substitute for human hubris and planning and replace human decisions altogether. We only need to keep it clean and well oiled, and it now—like the monarch so many centuries ago—will see to us and keep us in line.”
Liberalism, Fascism, and Democracy
Earlier in this essay I promised that we’d see in a fairly straightforward way how liberalism’s odd understanding of freedom is directly related to its struggles with protecting society, with nurturing democracy, and with addressing the rise of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism. I think we’ve already addressed the first two points—liberalism’s antagonistic relationship to society and to democracy. What we haven’t yet addressed is liberalism’s relationship to the threat of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism. As you might suspect, it’s relationship to fascism and authoritarianism is tragically related to its poor relationship with democracy and society.
This topic is best addressed from a historical perspective, as Karl Polanyi, writing during WWII was able to do with a sense of immediacy. I intend to engage in the stronger treatment this topic deserves in another essay. For now though, we can conclude with a thematic sketch.
Following on his account of liberalism’s rejection of politics and fanatical refusal to address (or even recognize) social needs, in the final section of The Great Transformation Karl Polanyi offers us a warning that might be summarized in the form of a simple conditional: if we don’t want to see society succumb to fascism in a desperate attempt to shield itself from exposure to the market mechanism in times of great crisis, it behooves us to find a democratic alternative to market liberalism.
The democratic alternative Polanyi has in mind is socialism. Here we should bear in mind—especially in light of the negative connotation that the word ‘socialism’ bears for Cold War kids like me—that for Polanyi socialism and democracy are nearly synonymous. This is clear from Polanyi’s definition: “Socialism is, essentially, the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society.”
Of course this stated intent—subordinating the self-regulating market to a democratic society—is what makes socialism, democracy, and politics in general the mortal enemy of market liberalism. As a result, what we see throughout the history of market liberalism is push-back against democratic reform, whether in the form of legislative opposition to universal suffrage, or opposition to organized labor. “Inside and outside England,” Polanyi notes in discussing the rise of market liberalism in the 19th century, “from Macaulay to Mises, from Spencer to Sumner, there was not a militant liberal who did not express his conviction that popular democracy was a danger to capitalism.”
The victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control.
Here the import of the Polanyian conditional I expressed above becomes clear. This constant push-back against democracy and democratic institutions in an effort to protect the self-regulating market ultimately leads the utopian ideal of liberal freedom, in time of crisis, to degenerate into freedom’s antithesis in the form of fascism. Indeed, fascists are more than happy, in times of crisis, to help liberals with their “democracy problem,” and with democratic institutions eroded, this can end up being presented as “an offer liberals can’t refuse.” This is, Polanyi argues, what happened in the 1920s and 30s: “the victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control.” Deprived of access to political solutions, and exposed to a market mechanism that no longer functioned, leading to dire social conditions, people turn in desperation to authoritarian solutions.
In the end, the challenge that Polanyi asks us to address is a project in its own right: how do we acknowledge the reality of society and continue to uphold our commitment to freedom? For the reality of society includes the reality of conditions of human life lived in the plural, with its inherent relations of power and elements of compulsion. The untenable liberal utopian solution to this condition is to pretend to exit and live outside of this reality or, since this is impossible, to refuse to acknowledge reality. Hannah Arendt, certainly in another context, expressed this dilemma well in her The Human Condition. “If it were true that sovereignty and freedom are the same,” Arendt writes, “then indeed no man could be free, because sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to the very condition of plurality. No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth…”
In this same spirit, Polanyi provocatively suggests that we find ourselves at a certain crossroads, “The discovery of society is thus either the end or the rebirth of freedom. While the fascist resigns himself to relinquishing freedom and glorifies power which is the reality of society, the socialist resigns himself to that reality and upholds the claim to freedom, in spite of it. Man becomes mature and able to exist as a human being in a complex society.”
This last sentence is perhaps aspirational, but certainly worthy of our aspiration.
