Originally published in March of 2022
To me, one of the most interesting aspects of the premiership of Robert Walpole is his brand of isolationism. For the two decades his ministry was in power, they essentially kept Britain’s hands clean of the goings on of mainland Europe. This was popular with the public because it allowed them to keep taxes low and to focus on domestic affairs. Though Walpole was personally a stock-trading capitalist, he was also deeply embedded within the landed gentry. As one might expect, his aristocratic background ultimately determined his economic views: in essence, he wanted to use the reduction of national debt to replace the land tax with tariffs and excise taxes on Britain’s increasingly powerful merchant class.
How would one describe this form of mercantilism today, though? Populist? Nationalist? Reactionary? Indeed, a recent American president comes to mind. What I find fascinating is the extent to which Walpole is praised by British academia. He’s commonly considered to be the first prime minister of the UK– and certainly one of the least controversial – but I think what’s more relevant here is that he was the first Whig prime minister. Because, really, I don’t believe there’s any point in history at which a self-important aristocrat acting in the interests of the aristocracy can be described as anything other than reactionary. Maybe that’s just me though, idk. After all, he wasn’t a Tory.
The implied position here is that the Whigs were the good guys back then, but are no longer the good guys because those ideas are outdated now. Society has progressed past the need for Whigs. I think someone even wrote a book about it. As you’ll no doubt be aware, this understanding of history is commonplace across academia and political discourse today. You know, vulgar progressivism. The Whig interpretation of history. Line go up, etc.
This sentiment is echoed in Jimmy Carter’s infamous 1979 Crisis of Confidence speech:
‘Confidence in the future has supported everything else — public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.’
The ‘crisis of confidence’ here relates to the sense in which American society was confronted at once by stagflation and an energy crisis. Carter attempts to square his (quite literally) religious faith in progress with the reality on the ground; that of falling productivity, rising inflation, high unemployment and low social cohesion.
‘We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom; and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.’
‘In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.’
Thank you, Mr Peterson. I think the following is really the essence of the speech, though:
‘We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure. All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path — the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.’
I really can’t overstate the extent to which this invokes not only modern social progressivism, but also classic Protestant American idealism – and of course, it’s not coincidental that they mech so well. For comparison, this is RW Emerson in the 1830s:1
‘When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, – the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, – and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults.’
If you’ll indulge me just once more, I think Carter makes his understanding of history yet more stark in the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential debate – he puts a full stop on the social security discussion with this statement:
‘These commitments that the Democratic Party has historically made to the working families of this nation have been extremely important to the growth in their stature and in a better quality of life for them. I noticed recently that Governor Reagan frequently quotes Democratic presidents in his acceptance address. I have never heard a candidate for President, who is a Republican, quote a Republican president, but when they get in office, they try to govern like Republicans. So, it is good for the American people to remember that there is a sharp basic historical difference between Governor Reagan and me on these crucial issues – also, between the two parties that we represent.’
Here, he alludes to the legacy of the Democratic Party as it stood in 1980: that of the social paradigm introduced by one Franklin Delano Roosevelt following the Great Depression. The paradigm of social democracy, which was established by New Deal progressivism and maintained by the political establishment from the 40s to the 70s. The social democratic era which began with Roosevelt and ended with Carter.
So, let’s start at the beginning then: the 1930s. Why not? I’d like to draw your attention to a particular ideological influence on the Roosevelt Administration which tends to be swept under the rug by all but the most naïve Republican partisans; an ideological influence which took the world by storm in the leadup to World War Two. Indeed, these days people are often more than willing to acknowledge the extent to which Soviet authoritarianism, Kuomintang nationalism or even good old-fashioned Churchill-style one nation conservatism resembles old school corporatist fascism, but if we turn that cynicism in towards none other than that great bastion of liberty and democracy, the United States, I contend that there’s more than a vague resemblance.
This is the logo of the NRA. No, not that NRA. The National Recovery Administration. This agency represented a significant aspect of the Roosevelt Administration’s goal of bringing labour and industry under the direct influence of the federal government (and later, the subservience of the military). Unrelated, but as we know the administration also set up Japanese American internment camps in the war. Also, the administration worked diligently to promote traditional gender roles and the ideal of the nuclear family, thereby laying the groundwork for the modernist 1950s White America aesthetic we all know and love. Also, FDR ran on a populist political platform against the New York elites and for the American people. Also, FDR was elected four times where previously no president had served more than two terms.
Now, none of these alsos in isolation necessarily mean very much, but if you put all the pieces together, I’m sure you can see what I’m getting at. Like, honestly. I don’t think it was an accident that the United States only entered World War Two after they literally got bombed. But why don’t people discuss this? Why isn’t it ever seriously entertained in mainstream political discourse that the Roosevelt Administration mightn’t have been particularly anti-Mussolini? We all know the answer, at least implicitly. FDR has been retroactively declared a hero of liberal democracy to justify the Whig view of history.
The postwar social democratic consensus was never particularly stable, of course; I’d even contend that it was in a continuous state of breaking down. I think I spent enough time on this issue in the last post, though – something something counterculture May 68 libidinal impulse. Blah blah blah. Let’s move on from there: social democracy’s dissolution into society has allowed for the development of a capital wholly depersonalised, assetless and reliant on speculation. The development of the ‘red tribe blue tribe’ city-country contradiction launches a capital independent of private property. Marx and Engels state that ‘the separation of town and country can also be understood as the separation of capital and landed property, as the beginning of the existence and development of capital independent of landed property – the beginning of property having its basis only in labour and exchange.’2
Whilst the business enterprise is the site of the production process, it also restricts movement of capital – if the fixed character of the enterprise can be overcome, there can arise an autonomous form of capital based on what Camatte and Collu term a ‘mystical yield form of surplus value’3, and on corporate promotion, stock issuance and speculation. The development of a private production independent of private property, and of a capitalism without capitalists. Capital’s valourisation leads it to confront the social ensemble and the rival rackets which it must necessarily compete with to differentiate itself; ‘the state itself had to lose its rigidity and become a gang negotiating between gangs and between the total capital and particular capitals’. They go on to say that ‘all forms of working-class political organisation have disappeared. In their place, gangs confront one another in an obscene competition, veritable rackets rivalling each other in what they peddle but identical in their essence.’
I still find it hard to stomach that Australian Laborites have the tenacity to complain that workers often consider unions to be corrupted, white-collar entities, considering the parliamentary Labor Party deliberately centralised and disarmed them through the bureaucratic nightmare of the ACTU only to render them utterly irrelevant with the introduction of enterprise bargaining and the Prices and Incomes Accord. This is just one side of the coin with social democracy in the modern world, though.
The central premise of economic liberalisation was comprehensively disproven in 2008: economic markets were evidently not self-correcting, for why did the CEOs of banks, brokerages and insurance companies turn to the American Government, and why were world governments bailing major banks out; injecting capital into them and guaranteeing their deposits? These governments were not letting the market sort itself out, they were borrowing heavily and stimulating demand a la John Maynard Keynes. The entire Chicago School mythology of neoliberalism was demonstrated to be paper thin. In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, none other than Alan Greenspan – the very same dude who fervently opposed regulation of the derivatives market because it was central to spreading risk around or some shit – conceded that he was in a ‘shocked state of disbelief’ regarding the ideological implications of the event.
In another text, Camatte opines that capital has escaped its economic confines, and that humans tend to be ‘outstripped by the movement of capital’4. I can hear the nodding of heads here. Indeed, capital is a dynamic subject, and a structure of abstract domination increasingly independent of human will. The compoundingly complex restructuring of reterrritorialisation rendered Leninist planism obsolete. As the productive forces continually developed, and as the commodity form was superseded, Mao and Stalin remained in place, necessarily working with technologies which had already been developed. One might well bring forth the idea that the productive forces eventually come in to contradiction with the existing form of intercourse, resulting in social revolutions which do away with alienation. As Camatte clarifies, however: ‘this was to presuppose that capital would not be able to become truly autonomous, that it could not escape from the constraints of the social and economic base on which it is built: the law of value, the exchange of capital and labour power, the rigorous general equivalent (gold), and so on.’
Related: Marxists would have you believe the categories of Marxian political economy (commodity, surplus value, capital, etc.) are merely economic categories to be used in demonstrating the centrality of class exploitation, and thereby in affirming labour as the source of all social wealth in all societies ever. Capitalism is simply when labour is hindered from becoming fully realised – and when labour is openly treated as the regulating principle of society, that’s socialism. Of course, most wouldn’t necessarily admit to this. After all, anyone that’s done much reading at all will recall that Marx explicitly takes issue with the first proclamation of the Gotha Program, instead attributing wealth to nature5. However, the implication of most Western Marxist worldviews is what I’ve said. Indeed, leftists still have not progressed beyond Stalinism and social democracy.
Social and structural changes in the modern world are grounded by constraints historically specific to capitalist modernity, and the heteronomous dynamic which categorises capitalism is the only one in which the categories of Marx’s political economy are of relevance. Labour is not transhistorical, and it cannot be the source of all wealth. Labour is a concept relevant to all of history, of course, but it takes on a historically particular form in capitalism; a form of social mediation that marks the social relations of capitalism, and isn’t at all intrinsic to labour itself.
History is not dialectical, and it is not progressive. One shouldn’t necessarily take this to mean that I’m willing to put contingency forward as ontologically central, however, as that might well serve to obscure the development of capital through recovering a sense of historical agency. I’m simply on the Postone train insofar as this issue is concerned: I don’t believe one can build a coherent and transhistorically valid theory of history and society from Marx’s mature works. Learned Marxists will argue that their position on feudalism distinguishes them from progressives, insofar as they consider it to be a loss of momentum from previous modes of production. I don’t think that’s really relevant though. At the end of the day, Marxian progressivism defaulting to the Whig position has blindsided communism to a reactionary lurch backwards: the neoliberal turn of capital.
The progressive worldview also entirely fails to account for the hastening superfluity of proletarian labour in the modern world. I think that ‘all labour is skilled labour’ bullshit from a few months back really brings this home. The idea that analytic distinctions between different forms of labour can be confused for moralistic judgements is quite amazing to me, honestly. It’s as though a caricature of a businessman with a monocle and a top hat was attempting to understand the motivations of the working class… ‘well, they surely must enjoy the skills they’ve been made to learn here, otherwise they’d simply buy a house.’ This is the most blatantly moralistic conception of capitalism; that le capitalist pigs are an evil force acting against this virtuous abstraction of a worker we’ve just gone and reified.
In reality:
Capital’s universalisation has resulted in real domination over the individual.
Instruments of production, be they natural, built or digitised, contribute to abstract structures of domination.
Societies of control exacerbate the increasing fragmentation of individual labour and entrench the poverty of alienation of the individual.
The disintegration of consciousness pulls at increasingly individuated strands of critique – be it the Black liberation of Huey Newton, the anti-psychiatry of RD Laing or the cyber-feminism of Sadie Plant.
The informationisation phase of economic development has only consolidated the gains of the Neoliberal Revolution; the phallocratic net of patriarchal social relations was not lasered apart by the maternal glow of digitisation.
Them’s the facts tbh.
Shiny and current bottle-of-easy-answers solutions to the social malaise of the proletariat seem to come into fashion every once in a while– you know the ones. Healthcare pls. A land tax would solve this. Society if universal basic income. Each of these examples, but the first especially, really just come back to arguments about reformism. I’m willing to concede that, as with universal healthcare, the introduction of a land value tax might potentially benefit most people in some way, if you assume that there are exemptions for indigenous peoples and food production and stuff. I don’t know, I’m not an economist lol.
In terms of ‘universal basic income’, the question of what that term actually entails is paramount. Studies such as this one here tend to conclude that a basic income which isn’t conditional or means tested ‘doesn’t seem to provide a disincentive for people to work’ and ‘boosts recipients’ mental and financial well-being, as well as modestly improving employment’. However, this is in a vacuum with no way of accounting for the broader societal response, or even the amount of money which would be doled out. As was exemplified by Andrew Yang’s ‘Freedom Dividend’ proposal, practical implementation of UBI would not simply constitute an additional welfare program, but would act as a blanket replacement – and not a replacement anyone could afford to live off of, either. This from the Yang campaign website:
‘Andrew proposes funding the Freedom Dividend by consolidating some welfare programs and implementing a Value Added Tax of 10 percent. Current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally – most would prefer cash with no restriction.’
So, there you have it. Not only is the basic income not particularly universal at all, but prior to any attempt at implementation whatsoever, it’s quite explicitly a scheme to strip specialised welfare programs down funded by regressive taxation. An excuse to knock off a few more of those pesky lumpenproles and disabled people, because clearly the current lack of medical coverage doesn’t kill enough of them as is. And honestly, of course that’s what it is. Of course it’s a means of streamlining neoliberal austerity and an excuse to jack up the rent and bills. Is it just a coincidence that none other than Elon Musk himself has expressed support for this proposal?
Basic income is commonly advertised as a short-term solution to automation of the workforce, and it makes you wonder whether this apparently spontaneous process is supposed to be a positive development or not. I get the impression a kind of motte-and-bailey antihumanism is the response to be deployed for this line of questioning, at least by more experienced technophiles. They often seemingly fail to comprehend the incompatibility of all of the forms of eugenics they champion too, though. If, as a consequence of automation and scientific development, the workforce will shrink and the retired population will expand, you don’t want a higher birth rate, right? Like to be consistently progressive, you cannot champion fascistic pro-natalist political policies, yeah? Yet, I’ve most certainly seen technological developments such as artificial wombs advertised as potential tools to ‘prop up the birth rate’.
The implied justification of automation – that it would cut work hours down – is intrinsically linked to the implied justification of Western liberalism as a whole: that it would function without inequality. The fact is, the way in which the rights and freedoms of liberalism are expanded, and in which demographics are ‘enfranchised’, necessarily conserves structures of domination. People maintain wealth due to social status, rather than maintaining social status due to wealth. Freed slaves are not quite citizens; third world nations plugged into global trade are not quite democracies.
This brings us to the International Monetary Fund. Frankly, it was a bank set up to lock down the trading interests of the recovering imperial pow– I mean, the democracies which emerged from the ashes of the Second World War. A bank which any emerging nation-state could count on for short-term loans at full interest to finance development wink wink. If we jump forward, the 1973 oil crisis, among other factors, rendered numerous ‘developing’ economies unable to sustain themselves without banking loans, indebting them indefinitely to the IMF. This allowed the developed world, in conjunction with the IMF, to strip down tariff and other trade barriers in these states and to comprehensively integrate them into the emerging global economy (devaluation of currency and decimation of local agriculture and industry being completely unintended knock-on effects, of course).
The immense contraction which the Indonesian economy experienced as a result of the Asian Financial Crisis was, as one might expect, only exacerbated by the deals the government made with the IMF. The rest of East Asia took note of this event, and their reluctance to trust Western financial institutions led to increasingly export-oriented economies and large exchange reserves. As such, by the mid-2000s, there was a storm of several trillion dollars of currency reserve around the world. The developed countries with advanced credit systems weren’t borrowing sufficient savings, and the savings of developing countries were channelled into developed ones via the inconsistently regulated companies involved in doling out securitised mortgages on American housing. As we know, prior to 2008, Americans assumed that house prices wouldn’t fall. Those with mortgages they couldn’t afford were simply expected to refinance, re-mortgage, get into more debt and keep paying it off. The rest is history, really.
We return to malding about how Keynesian intervention is suddenly relevant again when it’s about banks. The interventionist impulse of social democracy has been successfully spirited up and reconfigured to suit control societies. Indeed, the openly authoritarian ideological underpinnings of New Deal progressivism laid the foundations of modern liberalism. Whether your child isn’t learning enough, or your minorities are scary, or your geopolitical rival isn’t complying, or your economy is on the verge of collapse – the answer is never any kind of serious overhaul or restructure, it’s just ‘intervene more’. A bit more control. Just a little more power. Trust me. This is why that specific kind of person I’m invoking is so fond of organisations along the lines of the United Nations and the European Union. Russian proponents of the Soviet Union would never have identified themselves in the same terms, of course, but it was always the same kind of person there as well.
Here, you may be prepared to wheel out the ‘it wasn’t real communism haha’, ‘everyone I don’t like is a liberal’ line of snark, but let me pre-empt you. I will concede right here: not all Stalinists are liberals. No, many are much worse. What we can conclusively state, however, is that all liberals are Stalinists.
Let me turn to a specific instance of liberal democratic social intervention. For the majority of Australian history, Indigenous Australians have been assaulted by a policy of racial assimilation aimed at them. Arguably, this approach was gradually phased out, with the emphasis shifting to ‘cultural integration’ and then ‘self-determination’ in the latter half of the 20th Century. Once or twice growing up I heard people make statements along the lines of ‘the Stolen Generations never ended’, and I didn’t really get what they meant. Now, independent of the way rural Aboriginal communities are treated by the police and the authorities more broadly, and of the fact that racial segregation never really subsided in a number of places, I think the following information really puts things into perspective.
From the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 to the ‘Bringing them Home’ report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in 1997, the impact which decades upon decades of disruption, displacement and desertion of Indigenous people at the hands of the Australian state left on the capacity of Aboriginal communities to support children was highlighted. In spite of this, a sudden storm of media coverage and investigation into abuse and neglect of Aboriginal children in 2006 was what caught the attention of the Howard Government. This frenzy provided them with a prime excuse for execution of a sharp and heavy-handed project of Indigenous exploitation; assimilationist stereotypes about the incapacity of the Black man to care for his children had been reinforced in the minds of the public, and there was a demand for action.
The emergency intervention into the Northern Territory, now commonly known simply as ‘The Intervention’, was an explicitly imperial and paternalistic White supremacist action, as is highlighted when Pat Anderson states that ‘where we emphasised the need for resources and flexible processes of engagement with Aboriginal families and communities, the intervention emphasised external control and blanket provisions affecting all Aboriginal people.’ She goes on to describe specific elements of the intervention:
‘Compulsory health checks of Aboriginal children to check for ‘evidence of abuse’, blanket quarantine of welfare payments to all Aboriginal people, leading to suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, plus the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal townships and the scrapping of the permit system that allowed Aboriginal people at least some control over access to their land.’
You won’t hear a word about this event today, presumably because most Australians still quietly agree with what the government did. This is nothing new, of course. Most Australians implicitly affirm that the Indigenous incarceration rate being almost ten times higher than the non-Indigenous rate is fine. The very same people banging their utensils on the table agitating for lockdown curfews and increased police budgets will signal about how much they care for the plight of marginalised demographics.
This is what I hate about the Whig interpretation of history, though. Why is it that the Indigenous incarceration rate is somehow getting worse? Why is it that whether it’s neoliberal capitalism or the apparent self-determination of Aboriginal people, when you strip back a couple of layers of ‘personal freedom’ crap, the interventionism will start oozing out? Questions science can’t answer.
Endnotes
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