Neo-liberalisms architects, the myth of Capitalism and the “West”: or, how we must refuse to let the market define our lives
In 1944, Karl Polanyi, the famed political economist and anthropologist wrote in his seminal text the “Great Transformation” “No society could, naturally, live for any length of time unless it possessed an economy of some sort; but previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets. . . . Gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important part in human economy.”
For those of us whose life has been subsumed by the marketplace, this statement leaves a profound impression. Surely it makes sense, for most of us, the only capital that we control is our labor, a majority of our lives are spent working for a wage, and our provisioning of goods and accumulation of wealth must take place through the acquisition of money, unless we are fortunate enough to own ( or more likely inherit) property, land, or own means of production. Polanyi’s great observation however, is that the status quo we find ourselves in is neither natural nor destined to happen. It is based upon, as Polanyi would call, “Fictious commodities”, ie the commodification of land, labor, and money, none of which are natural in themselves, but rather monetized usually through extreme violence, coercion, and dispossesion.
This process of commodification however, has evolved and moved through numerous spaces and environments. Through mercantilism in the early renaissance era as the slave trade grew and expanded and European powers sought to grow their export markets, through early industrialization in England which saw the massive and often traumatic proletaritization of its citizenry into wage laborers and , through colonization and empire which sought to maintain a global periphery that provided slaves, minerals, and raw materials for the metropole. Into the twentieth century, where through multiple world wars, decolonization, and the fall of empire, and most terrifyingly, Socialism and redistriburtive mechanisms of democracy, new schools of thought sought to insure the marketplace retained global hegemony, to make the flow of capital the duty of the new World Order.
The early 20th century saw a host of European intellectuals, namely Ludwig von Mises, one of the fathers of Neo-liberalism , Frederik Hayek of the much renowned Austrian School and a student of Mises, begin to advance an economic philosophy that would seek to remove the marketplace from the control of nation states, to make it supranational. Having borne witness to the destruction of the First World War, the resulting collapse of empire, and most importantly, the vast pillage of private property and interruption in the flow of captial, the post world war era saw the birth of organizations like the League of Nations and International Chamber of Commerce seek to instill a global order of norms and practices to assure the sanctity of capital and property rights. Depspite Hayeks association with the American Right and Libertarian movement, (Rush limbaugh has been known to espouse his famous “Road to Serfdom) the writings of Hayek and his intellectual brethren such as Mises reflect a far different vision of capitalism and societal order than we might think, one where workers cross a borderless world in order to fulfill the dictates of the market, and a powerful government seeks to insure, above all, the rights of private property and the hierarchy of capitalism.
Milton Friedman once said that capitalism is an imperfect method of achieving freedom, but that it is, however, the only option we have. All other options as Hayek would say, lead to serfdom, misery, and death.
These brave apologists of capitalism, empire, and “Western” thinking, tend to speak of Western Europe as the sole heir of democracy, a tradition borne in Ancient Rome and Classical Greece, revived by the brave freedom fighters of the American Revolution, and endowed today with Kantian Reason, the rationality that Weber alludes to in Protestant Ethic that is only seen in the “West”, and the idea of the sovereign self as described by Mill. With this deep epistimological underpinning in which Achille Mbembe says “ Europe…has tended to conceive of identity less in terms of mutual belonging (cobelonging) to a common world than in terms of a relation between similar beings — of being itself emerging and manifesting itself in its own state, or its own mirror..”, the existence of capitalism, markets, and wage labor becomes not only logical, but the only rational state in which the noble tenants of classical liberalism and the soveriegn individual can be expressed.
The inevitability of Capitalism and its deep connection with something referred to as the “West” is a common feature of many writers such as Weber and Hayek, and more modern writers like Niall Ferguson, who refer often to this monolithic and exceptional entity with books like “The West and the Rest” as if Europe and the North Atlantic world are endowned with some speical character which places it in some sort of hegemonic ontological category. The rise of the characteristics of “Modernity” with its increased consumption, lifespan, quality of life, are a highly recent phenomena in most of Europe and in America, with the rise in lifespans and quality of life not really occuring until the late 19th century. If we remove Britain and the Netherlands, which for most of the 17th and 18th century were the only countries to truly have industrialized to a high degree, the figures fall precipitously. The modern conditon of what we might think of as Western exceptionalism is a truly 20th century phenomena, and it has been achieved only through massive violence, resource extraction, subjugation, brutality against workers and children, and constant warfare of imperial and colonial nature. Seeing through the eyes of the Global South, the only think truly exceptional about the “West” and most specifically the North Atlantic world, is its violence.
There is much to critique, and indeed, to be deeply afraid of in our current era of predatory surveillance capitalism, rampant financial speculation and economic precarity, but we should remember also that these socio economic arrangements were no more destined to happen than any other, and there is no reason to think that they will continue in perpetuity. The “West” as a sort of hegemonic Omega point or unit of analysis in any of the social sciences begins to collapse under any critical examination, the “Logic” and “Rationalism” of markets and capitalism as ideal systems of order or as systems operating usually in equilibrium is farcical, and the idea of democracy as being the sole product and prodcut of an imaginary “West” is a Eurocentric fictitious fairy tale, that ignores the constant and emergent democratic trends arising the world over througout history. In short, the cult of capitalism, Neo-liberalism, and the myth of the West, linked through generations of Eurocentric thinkers and writers, is flawed, lacking, and has failed the test of time, and now it is up to us to explore and to imagine the world that comes next.