Chapter 14: Critique – New York, September 1, 2018

In a set of recent writings, I have attempted to expose both the ideological forces and the strategic factors that have shaped our perilous political condition in the United States today. I am embarrassed by the self-reference, but a lot of the groundwork has already been done.

In The Illusion of Free Markets (2011), I traced the rise to dominance of neoliberal ideas—from divine notions of orderliness tied to natural law in the work of the first economists in the eighteenth century, through the more secular ideas of self-interest, expertise, and informational advantage reflected in more conventional nineteenth-century laissez-faire ideologies, to cybernetic notions of spontaneous order elaborated by Friedrich Hayek in the mid-twentieth century, and ultimately to the more scientific and technical economic theories of the Chicago School concerning the efficiency of competitive markets.

I demonstrated that the myth of the free market was born hand-in-hand with a punitive state—that the illusion of natural order was from its inception joined at the hip, and remains today tied to the need for the strict policing and punishment of those who are viewed as “disorderly.” I exposed the fundamental paradox of neoliberal politics—what I and others refer to as “neoliberal penality”: in the country that has done the most to promote the idea of a hands-off government, we run the single largest prison complex in the entire world.

I revealed how these illusory beliefs in free markets have had devastating effects on our contemporary politics, by hiding wealth distributions, by making them seem natural, and thereby by reducing our willingness to critically examine our political condition. By obscuring the rules and making the outcomes seem natural and deserved, neoliberal politics make it easier for certain market players to reorganize economic exchange in such a way as to maximize their take, which ultimately augments social inequality. Increased social inequality, in turn, has its own dynamics that tend to demand heightened punitive repression to maintain that social order. It facilitates the police state and mass incarceration by making it easier to resist government intervention in the economic sphere but to embrace aggressive forms of policing and punishing that result in even greater inequality and mass incarceration.

In Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (2015), I analyzed how the digital age has transformed the circulation of power in society. In particular, I showed how our own desires render us transparent to social media, corporations, and the intelligence services of the government—and the new ways in which the government and commerce know us and shape us. The important point here is that we live in a new digital era that has profound affects on how politics function and on how power circulates in society. I call it an “expository society,” since it is our own expositions and exhibitions that are disarming us. But the central implication is that relations of power are changing dramatically as a result of technological innovation and centralizing knowledge in the hands of a digital elite. It has created a space of total information awareness.

In The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (2018), I then exposed our contemporary, dominant paradigm of governing: the counterinsurgency method, which we have embraced in the United States and now turned against our own citizens. I showed how we govern today, at home as well as abroad, by a mode of political engagement infused with counterinsurgency theory. It is a strategy of governance that creates, out of whole cloth, a fictitious internal enemy—Muslims, Mexicans, police protesters, “radical Black extremists,” and other minorities—and then puts in place tactics of total information awareness, elimination, and pacification, in an effort to win the hearts and minds of the ordinary and passive American masses, and control our political condition. When, as today, there really is no domestic insurgency or insurrection, the counterinsurgency mode of governing becomes the American Counterrevolution: a counterrevolution without a revolution, a counterinsurgency without an insurgency. This Counterrevolution has, today, successfully concentrated political power in the hands of a small minority of guardians—of counterrevolutionary elites—composed of cabinet members and national security advisors, congressional leaders, high-tech chairmen, and captains of industry. These elites control the flow of digital data, the direction of drones and special operations, the repression of internal protest, and make possible an unprecedented concentration of wealth.

Those prior writings serve to clear the ground of different illusions that operate to render tolerable today’s inequalities and attacks on minorities and immigrants. Other ground clearing—on the liberal rule of law and problems of violence—has been directly addressed in earlier chapters. They set the stage for the most pressing issue: Where shall we turn? What kind of politics do we need?

Any contemporary answer—even the beginning of an answer—must take into account the inexorable fact that, today, both the far right and the Republican party have embraced a conservative vision that rests on ideals of natural hierarchy and, in large part, white supremacy—a vision that not only eschews equality, but even abandons basic notions of sufficiency: one that does not even aspire to universal health care, subsistence benefits for the unemployed, or other basic welfare safeguards. As a result, it is patently clear that right and conservative ideologies will not advance the cause of equity. They will not only not promote equality, they would not even provide for basic needs for everyone.

By the same token, most centrists and center Democrats have embraced a style of neoliberalism that also essentially has given up on robust equality. That was true of President Obama, who explicitly and openly endorsed Chicago School notions of free market. As a result, it is only on the critical Left more generally that issues of equality can come to the fore.

In other words, one must look to the critical Left, and the critical Left alone, to find answers for a more equitable and just society. To be sure, at a theoretical or philosophical level, there may be fruitful coalitions with centrists who espouse for instance a capabilities approach, like Amartya Sen; or those who argue for a “maxi-min” principle, by which fairness is determined by whether it will maximize those who have the least; or philosophical egalitarians; or even those, like Parfitt, who are prioritarian on sufficiency, but believe that the priority of a sufficient life for all will lead to greater equality. It is even conceivable that some of these philosophical approaches may be as productive as more leftist philosophical stances. It is possible that if one digs deep, Marx was not exclusively concerned with equality; and Stalin, at least according to Sam Moyn, thought that equality was a hobgoblin—not worth worrying about, something that would come about eventually. And there may even be times when there can be coalitions on particular issues—such as criminal justice reform and the Right on Crime movement, which includes people like the Koch brothers—that reach across the political spectrum at times on certain discrete issues.

But our concern here is not to with philosophical arguments or temporary coalitions. The goal is not simply to make the argument for a more equal society. Nor is it to rehash the merits of the sufficiency versus equality debates, or bridge differences. The type of inequality that we face today, in the United States and around the globe, is simply intolerable and there is no point arguing about the merits of redistribution. Redistribution would only improve the lives of the have-nots—we are past those debates. Moreover, the marginal utility of wealth, past a certain number of millions of dollars, diminishes, and even those who argue for self-interest as the only way to “increase the pie” for everyone must concede that above a certain level of accumulation, there is little benefit to be gained from continued accumulation for the system as a whole. These are all theoretical or academic questions—and we are past those. On the question of political engagement, then, the only place to look today is on the critical Left.