For liberal reformers, this is the latest attempt to affix a human face to capitalism; for financial market purists, it is a serious breach of fiduciary duty. This combination of sudden adoption and partisan ideological interpretations has led to ESG becoming a serious political issue. Both these narratives fundamentally misunderstand the role of the finance industry in production, and what little power it actually has to direct such goals at all.

For decades, the question of externalities plagued institutional investors and threatened the ideological line that maximizing value for shareholders produces the greatest social good. For years, the intellectual and legal networks around academia, supranational working groups, state regulators, and the investors themselves struggled to reconcile fiduciary responsibility with other ideological commitments like environmentalism and funding “civil society” groups. It was in 2004 that the UN and major global financial institutions first created the ESG framework to serve this purpose.

Implicit in the ESG framework is the idea that investors can discipline firms and whole economies to be more aligned with social and political goals. But the finance industry does not possess the ability to discipline firms in this way. In practice, ESG funds do not move financial capital towards different goals: not only do these funds underperform on the market, but the amount of capital they are able to raise already appears to be slowing after the initial period of excitement.

Theoretically, the primary mechanism to discipline business decisions would be the voting power of shareholders, especially in replacing board members and executives. But shareholders rarely exercise such disciplining power: in the most recent voting data, Blackrock supported 90 percent of directors standing for election, and Vanguard supported 91 percent. In other words, institutional investors tend to go with the flow of company leadership decisions.

Even in high-profile exceptions, such as the time Exxon lost three of its board members to shareholder activism in 2021 due to environmental concerns, the actual impact is muted. Despite long-term pledges to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Exxon plans to continue expanding oil production for the next decade and has been rewarded by stock price growth that’s beaten the market and the oil industry as a whole since 2021.

Despite this ineffectiveness in reaching its stated goals, the world’s largest investors continue to institutionalize ESG in both business practice and ideological marketing. Its rise does not mark a departure from the finance industry’s interest in the maximization of value extraction, nor does it represent a serious attempt to deal with any of society’s supposed ills. ESG should instead be understood as a pure and simple luxury commodity for those who need ownership of financial assets to maintain their position in society, with a new language of justification for the same decisions. Central to it is the conspicuous consumption of the bourgeoisie—owners, investors, and shareholders—as well as high-earning professionals.

This means that ESG is neither an improved concept of fiduciary duty nor a veiled attempt to impose a planned economy. Rather, it is yet another symptom of an ossified society that is primarily centered around conspicuous consumption. Capitalism may still be dominant, but the individual capitalists have become averse to direct action. In reality, desirable social outcomes are achieved by taking on risks to build organizations and mobilize people and resources toward them. ESG is the perfect luxury financial good for those who fear taking on the challenge of acting on the world directly.

Financial Institutions Don’t Plan Production

At its most basic, the finance industry circulates funds to facilitate production and consumption. Businesses and households receive money and put it toward their own ends: an IOU or loan, an ownership stake in a company, or purchases of hard assets whose value may increase, such as land or metals. Transferred from financial institutions outwards, this money is exchanged for promises of future cash flows. Finance capitalists must therefore make their money in one of two ways: either by ownership of claims to future income, such as bonds and stocks, or through fees on financial services. In short, the finance industry spends money to make money. This usually comes in the form of a percent of returns on financial assets, but not always. ESG activities are funded in the same way.

But making money has a cost of its own. It is not the social cost of increasing the money supply—whether that be inflation, financial market bubbles, or people literally toiling in a mine in the days of the gold standard. Instead, it is the cost of doing business in the finance industry: the labor of analysts and general managers, as well as the specific labor of risk managers who ensure that a lack of cash doesn’t result in bank runs and defaults. Analysts, including those who are dedicated to ESG-related activities, estimate the value of investments to provide useful information for market participants. The financial industry does not produce goods in its own right. Instead, its output is the market activity itself: buying, selling, underwriting, and even shareholder voting all fall into this category.

The nature of the finance industry creates two basic limitations with regard to the power of ESG: a limitation of knowledge and ability, and a limitation of desire and interest. Apart from certain hands-on private equity firms, the vast majority of the finance industry does not carry out the actual planning and undertaking of production. Analysts may worry about supply chains and production techniques, but they do so as outsiders judging where to put their money. Ultimately these parts of the economy exist outside of the finance industry’s direct control. The productive role of finance is to assess whether a particular plan can make money and then provide the liquidity necessary for someone else to make the relevant decisions.

Unlike states or firms with sophisticated logistical operations, this means that banks and fund managers lack the direct capabilities to deliberately alter the material economy. This is even true in areas in which many people would expect finance to have an important impact, such as fixed investments. In fact, bonds and loans more often make up for the loss of funds from servicing equities: paying out dividends and owner withdrawals.

Since the 1980s, these equity outflows have greatly outnumbered inflows from owner capital contributions or selling shares. The really important liquidity source for most companies comes from retained earnings, and firms rely on this to create the internal funds that drive most fixed investments. This means that the individual holder of a bond—or of an ESG stock ETF—is often not contributing to production but rather offsetting the payouts of other investors. While extracting value from a company is the whole point of investment in general, servicing this turnover is a priority that many companies now have without any benefit to their actual investments in production.

In order for financial goods to provide cash flow to investors, firms must have an operating surplus on their income statement; they must be making more money than they are spending on costs of production. One thing which does not go towards that operating surplus is depreciation, the method for accounting for the cost of replenishing the firm’s capital stock. The more that firms invest in fixed capital, the larger the capital stock they must maintain, and the less money is available for dividends and owner withdrawals. From a cash-spending perspective rather than an accounting one, gross investment is usually a direct tradeoff with the profits which are extracted financially and are available to be consumed by investors.

By being in control of their retained earnings, however, firms also keep the freedom to make decisions about their production techniques and internal investments. They have the ability to do so based on objective estimates of profitability as well as subjective decisions about hiring, production techniques, and strategy. For enterprises with complex logistical operations, this internal knowledge and infrastructure for coordinating decisions can be quite sophisticated. This is where the real freedom to act on the world lies and is where the actual decisions on what goals matter take place, even when investors are involved in the company too.

A similar dynamic occurs with states, which often have to make decisions about the material economy. While governments tend to be behind the curve in adopting the best practices for coordinating and planning, their logistical tools have to grapple with the same issues as productive enterprises, whether it be in managing contractors, the inputs of military preparedness, or carrying out industrial policy. Governments also explicitly share some of the goals held by the ESG framework regarding the environment and society. For example, the 2016 Paris Climate Accords required big investments in renewable energy and associated infrastructure by signatory states. In the U.S., a wide variety of subsidies and incentives for this purpose were signed into law with the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The method of applying these subsidies varies widely—federal tax credits, contracts, grants, and so on—but what is important is that the state’s role here is to directly intervene in the economy to make investments and alter production. Sometimes, governments use regulations to mandate that companies change their practices, such as with car fuel efficiency standards. Government contracting officers, commerce department officials, and other policymakers grapple with the practical problems of how to materially change the economy, even if they don’t always have the same expertise as the private sector.

If someone with a large amount of money truly wished to make a difference in the stated goals of ESG investing, they wouldn’t turn to financial markets. They would start a company or some other kind of organization—theoretically, even a state—and base it entirely around working directly towards those goals, instead of trying to push things indirectly on the margin. But this would require financial sacrifices and a high degree of creativity and effort, which are precisely the kinds of discomforts that large investment funds are supposed to help their clients avoid.

There is nothing abnormal about this. An investor who takes a bet on an entrepreneur is attempting to create value even if their role is limited to the judgment that this project is worth giving money to. But ultimately, ESG even outsources the need to form personal beliefs on what goals are worth pursuing. For this reason, critiques of ESG on the basis of its goals—say, that efficacy rather than diversity should be the goal of a workforce—focus too far downstream even when they are correct in essence. The broad goals of ESG are not novel ideas coming from the minds of ESG analysts.

Consider the question of investing in Russian oil companies: once, this was often a preferable option to investing in a more polluting industry like coal. After the invasion of Ukraine, ESG funds scrambled to divest from Russian companies but also faced heavy criticism for not having done so years earlier, after the annexation of Crimea. Divesting at this earlier period would have been a more contrarian move, and thus one that would have violated the logic that ESG metrics themselves held at the time. The invasion also saw a total reversal of the previous trend of excluding the defense industry from European ESG standards.

In practice, ESG priorities reflect the net consensus an industry shares at any given time, which itself reflects the general ideological consensus of bourgeois society. Insofar as conflicts occur about the particulars of ESG goals, these reflect the conflicts happening within the class ESG primarily serves. Internal updates might help entrench one set of ideas within that consensus, as when divesting from Russia financially suddenly outstripped clean energy in importance. But departing from that consensus entirely cannot occur within the ESG framework at all.

Luxury Consumption Does Not Change the World

As ESG changes the concept of fiduciary duty to include explicit value judgments on desirable outcomes, opponents of ESG tend to see it as opening the door to a planned economy oriented around progressive political goals. Ironically, this critique makes exactly the same false assumption as the ESG narrative itself: that it is able to set novel goals or alter investment at all.

The reality is that ESG finance does something much more basic: it produces commodities. Financial instruments are just as much commodities as the cans of fruit you can pick up in the grocery store. Instead of feeding you to reproduce your ability to thrive in society, financial instruments serve to reproduce the position of the capital-owning class. Ownership of financial assets is what grants the right to claim the income—the relationship to wealth that defines the capitalist class position.

But the buying of access to future cash flows, much like the experience of buying calories from a grocery store, is not a purely emotionless, calculating affair. People experience the world through their own frameworks of understanding—that is, through ideology. For people shopping for food, a label that says something about how it’s made with renewable energy or produced locally might influence their decision to buy the product.

Investors also have ideologies, and when they go shopping they are not just trying to make more money. Instead, an investor looks to satisfy the things their ideology says they should do. They have heard all the debates about externalities, global warming, and diversity in the workplace. Buying into ESG funds serves those ideological needs, even if, like products advertised as “plant-based” or “naturally flavored,” there is little material substance to the claims.

This desire allows the finance industry to sell the extra services like special fund management, analysis, and reporting that go into making ESG investing possible. Such activity breaches fiduciary duty only in the most mundane sense that managed funds have been breaching it for many years: by soaking up more of the returns made by the finance industry itself. They do not, however, make intentionally bad or misleading investments. The finance industry can never be truly opposed to the creation of more profit in the overall economy. It is from the operating surpluses of ordinary companies and households that it gets its income, and that is something that it would not intentionally put in jeopardy.

While financial institutions have not tended to discipline companies to conform specifically to ESG goals, this does not make them incapable of such measures. Financial markets do react, and rather quickly, to new information about companies. A company’s stock and bond prices will change almost instantaneously in response to an alarming earnings call, for example. Such discipline exists, but it is reserved entirely for ensuring the creation of surplus value.

When it comes to the stated goals of ESG, even judging whether action would be warranted is a more difficult job. Because ESG is a purely marketing and ideological phenomenon, it can be used to justify a wide umbrella of otherwise contradictory positions. The holdings of major ESG funds do not differ much from generic ETFs. When asked about including companies like Exxon in such a fund, Invesco made vague noises about the benefits of wielding investor influence before bluntly admitting Exxon ensured the fund’s position in the top 75 percent of the S&P 500.

Similarly, China’s sovereign wealth funds and state-owned enterprises have publicly embraced ESG, despite concerns about human rights and increasingly opaque financial reporting. The Chinese government previously used environmental concerns about meeting its Paris Climate Accords commitments to justify the industrial shutdowns in mid-2021; the reality was that it was forced to do so by international shortages and skyrocketing energy prices. ESG operates as a similar measure: a way to put a spin on things that are already happening.

Beyond what ESG means to the finance industry and investors as market participants, there is a broader historical significance to its rise to prominence. The investors—that is, the bourgeoisie—were once a class that revolutionized the social relations and instruments of production of the entire globe. The industrial revolution and the rise of bourgeois states were matters of world-historical heroism. But having accomplished a total victory over their enemies, doing things that might revolutionize the way we handle production is no longer desirable.

With the ebbing of communism, the largest geopolitical threat to Western capitalism was gone, and the entrenchment of neoliberalism rolled back the domestic power of organized labor. Without these combined pressures, the intense capital development these forces spurred went into decline. New nonresidential fixed investment has been a decreasing share of surplus for the past 40 years. After hitting a peak of 25 percent in 1979, it hit lows unseen since the Second World War in 2009 at four percent. It should be no surprise that capital intensity in the U.S.—particularly in manufacturing—began to stagnate after 2008, and the country experienced its first sustained decline in manufacturing labor productivity on record. Industrialization and economic development has largely stalled outside of East Asia.

These trends are linked to the structural role of finance in providing the goods which reproduce the capitalist class. If ordinary financial assets are what reproduce the position of the capitalist class in the modern economy, then ESG finance is effectively a luxury consumption good. It comes about after the necessities of reproducing the class have already been met.

With new investment hovering around an average of 17 percent of surplus since 2009, and real surplus at all-time highs, there is plenty to go around for those whose living depends on financial assets. The share of wealth of the one percent is also a good indication of this abundance, reaching record levels at 32 percent of all wealth. This is what financial markets really discipline firms for: homogenization for the sake of maximizing the potential consumption of the investor class. When the wealth to fulfill physical desires is secure, the obvious next step is purchasing a new symbolic world as well.

The financial innovation of ESG incorporates the ideological desires of investors into the very same financial assets which sustain them. Actually achieving these goals would require taking the risk of building the organizations to carry them out, and evaluating whether they are worth pursuing at all demands independent judgment. Purchasing the commodified feeling of doing good for society demands neither. ESG mollifies investors into believing they are changing the world while making money at the same time. All they are buying, in reality, are various claims to future cash flows with feel-good marketing attached, eliminating the need to actively take steps to directly achieve their goals.

Ironically, the theory that ESG is a gateway to a planned economy assumes that the will to mobilize national wealth and labor power toward well-defined goals of production still exists in an organized, large-scale way. But the ephemerality of ESG would make it a completely useless tool for such a project. Vague metrics do not work on the level of planned economies for the same reason they do not work in individual businesses: clear goals and clear procedures for getting there are how you actually get things done. They do, however, make perfect sense for a luxury financial instrument whose primary purpose is vicarious philanthropy.

Karl Marx once called religion the “opium of the people,” a numbing agent that brings a semblance of joy in an otherwise desolate world but prevents serious attempts to change one’s circumstances. ESG finance operates as opium for the bourgeoisie: the ultimate symbol of their degradation from historical agents into passive consumers. The existence of ESG signals the final exhaustion of this class. In changing the finance industry so dramatically, nothing has changed in the real world at all. The future of the environment and of society will be decided without input from ESG funds and their investors, even as they continue to seek out the streams of money which insist on their importance.

On its face, the Mao cult is just hardheaded political opportunism. The materialist, Marxist analysis of society that the party embraces doesn’t seem to have room for it. No one person created the material conditions into which Mao was born at the end of the nineteenth century. Nor could any individual claim credit for the rising value of labor that pushed imperial powers to seek it in Asia. Mao himself did not create the global contradictions of capitalist imperialism which led to China’s century of humiliation, nor the economic underdevelopment that rendered a focus on the urban proletariat ineffective.

But there is some truth to the personality cult: circumstances and material conditions are not the agents of history. They did not formulate the guerrilla strategies of Protracted People’s War, fend off Nationalist troops from the fledgling base at Jinggangshan, or lead a breakout through enemy lines to begin the Long March. 

These actions, and the many others that allowed China’s revolution to succeed, were the decisions of people. They plotted, strategized, built parties, led armies, ran governments, kept some loyalties, and broke others. 

In numerous moments in the long war for China, history turned on the individual decisions of the Chinese Communists. When Mao chose to lead Red troops to safe haven at Shaanxi—even as his rival lost nearly 80,000 men en route to Tibet—history turned on him as well. Mao’s personality cult may not give us a fully truthful reading of history. But his decisions and personality had world-historic consequences. History could not escape the contingencies of human agency.

Material analysis shows us why one social order came crashing down, and defines the constraints of the next. But when disorder increases, so does the power of contingency, and therefore the consequences of the right man meeting the right moment. There is a reason that the stories of heroes often begin in a time of decay. It’s an observation often attributed to Mao himself: “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” 

The Battle With Fortune

In China’s case, the right man found the right circumstances to change history. One of those circumstances was the imperial trajectory of capitalism, driven by northern European powers. But this trajectory too once rested on the fate of a particular individual with world-historic ambitions. That man was Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI who secured a small kingdom in central Italy. At the time of Borgia’s ascent, Italy was divided by ongoing conflicts between numerous city-states and familial dynasties.

Niccolo Machiavelli gives us an account of Borgia’s personality and goals. The young ruler had made it his mission to create a unified Italian state. He embodied many of the aspects Machiavelli isolated as ideal for a prince: a two-sided ruler who was cruel but also knew how to appear benevolent, usually by targeting his cruelty at rival leaders hated by the populace. He was a crafty schemer. He was aware that much of his authority was reliant on his father, the pope, and had made many plans for the eventuality of his father’s death. 

We can imagine a world where Borgia had succeeded in unifying Italy, securing his own place as a heroic prince and state-builder. Italy had many of the same material preconditions for capitalism and the industrial revolution as Britain did. Italy had landless peasants, making for a ready labor force. It had many great scientific and technical minds, as well as traditions of experimentation and research inherited from the Renaissance—Borgia himself was at one point the patron of Leonardo da Vinci. Italy was undergoing a massive accumulation of resources through many wealthy families, along with well-developed property rights due to its historic role as a center of global commerce and trade. Given these conditions, a unified Italy might well have overtaken northern Europe in mercantile and industrial production. 

But in Borgia’s case, circumstance overcame the man. Cesare found himself deathly ill at the time his father passed. As Borgia himself told Machiavelli, this twist of fate left him too weak to outmaneuver his enemies at the critical moment. They overcame him and stripped him of his domains. He was killed in battle not long after. The next attempt to unify Italy would be the Risorgimento, centuries later—an attempt that was successful, but far too late to change history in an era when others had already set the terms of industrial society. The fated moment of contingency for the trajectory of European development may have been that unfortunate day for Borgia. 

Borgia served as the example for Machiavelli’s ideal prince. Like China at the time of Mao, Italy was a country with great instability and upheaval. Divided city-states were unable to create any large-scale political order for the country, and most could barely even keep their own regimes together. In such a landscape, a prince could assume very little to be stable and predictable. The landscape was constantly in flux. 

This high level of political contingency also presented many opportunities for ambitious young lords like Borgia to overturn an existing order and make their bid for power. Machiavelli particularly admired Borgia’s cunning. This, the diplomat believed, was necessary for a prince to successfully make use of contingent circumstances—or as he put it, to deal with the uncertainties of fortune.

One circumstance which posed a structural disadvantage for Borgia was the familial origin of his power. Being the pope’s son gave him many opportunities, but also put him in a position of reliance. His Spanish father’s battles with the Italian aristocracy allowed him few natural allies and made him dependent on foreign support. 

Borgia possessed the right mix of intelligence, ambition, and ruthlessness to overcome a number of these adverse circumstances. His ability to rapidly plan and carry out his military operations allowed him to conquer the cities of the Italian Romagna with minimal bloodshed. His willingness to court influence outside of Italy—such as by marrying the sister of the king of Navarre—won him vital military backing and kept him unchained from domestic loyalties beyond the Papacy. Machiavelli observed that when surveying Borgia’s life, he “would not know how to reproach him,” and that he should be “put forward…to be imitated by all those who have risen to empire through fortune and by the arms of others.”

It was the uncertain and tumultuous landscape of Italy itself that allowed Borgia to put these traits to good use. Like others of his ilk, his aims would likely have been impossible in a stable or unified Italy. Equivalent figures do not exist in the France or England of his time, where ambitious men had to find their place in established regimes—or at best, contest reigning kings through their own familial ties and royal claims, rather than through brute conquest.

Material analysis can explain why a figure like Borgia can come to exist. But his impact on Italy greatly depended on unpredictable chance events and highly contingent elements like his personality and intelligence. On the level of social science, there are certain things that are impossible to predict in a deterministic way. For example, though we might be able to create a probabilistic model for how often leaders might die unexpectedly, we will never be able to predict something as specific as Borgia’s fatal illness from a structural perspective. Only retrospective histories can tell us the fate of would-be heroes with confidence.

When a Warlord Builds a Kingdom

Fortune left Borgia among the failed state-builders of history. But a century before Machiavelli, the Chinese writer Luo Guanzhong recorded the story of a more successful prince in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the classics of Chinese history.

Its story is set in the collapsing Han dynasty, whose rulers once presided over a golden age that had lasted for four centuries. Like Borgia’s Italy, late Han China saw a crumbling regime and increasing chaos. Inequality, driven by increasingly consolidated land, had undermined state capacity. Then a plague wrecked the popular legitimacy of the government, leading to the rise of Taoist spiritual healers, culminating in the Yellow Turban rebellion. In the ensuing chaos, the empire was divided into dozens of warlord-controlled fiefdoms. 

This history recounted in the Three Kingdoms was one of many stillborn attempts to break from the logic of the past in order to uphold the stability of a unified, central state, and the ultimate impossibility of this while clinging to the ideological legitimacy of the Han state. The circumstances for unification existed, but no one seemed able to actualize this process. Attempts like those of Wang Mang, who briefly usurped the Han throne in the first century A.D., failed because of the deep opposition of the rentier class of wealthy families to land redistribution reforms. 

The grand villain of the story is Cao Cao, a relatively unimportant bureaucrat who comes to dominate China’s prosperous and developed north. Cao Cao built a state that, after his death, would go on to conquer the other two kingdoms and ultimately become the Jin Dynasty. He was a cruel man and a brilliant schemer, repeatedly escaping death. 

The historic Cao Cao was also a great reformer. In order to beat his rivals, including the political and military representatives of the great well-established landed families, he greatly expanded the establishment of state-controlled military-agricultural colonies. Previously, these had been a minor innovation of the Han. Under Cao Cao’s leadership, these colonies provided supplies for his campaigns and absorbed much of the surplus population thrown into poverty by the Yellow Turbans’ revolt. This strategy brought stability to the population and cemented his control. 

The Three Kingdoms, however, touches little on Cao Cao’s historic innovations. Rather, we encounter the cruelty and cunning of the man himself. One scene describes how Cao Cao arrives at the very same principles of deception that Machiavelli later taught to secure both love and fear. Having just killed his host out of the misplaced suspicion that he was an enemy spy, and then covering it up, Cao Cao is betrayed by his traveling companion out of disgust. From this point on, he swears to hide his cruel nature in order to present himself as a ruler capable of benevolence. Later, he retreats to prevent the suffering of his troops—thus staving off potential mutiny—and creates new universities and monuments for the public. 

One reason that Cao Cao is portrayed as the villain is because of the ideological contradictions of his rule. All of the Three Kingdoms claimed to be successors to the Han: one did so through possession of the imperial seal, one through blood relation to the emperor’s family, and Cao Cao did so through holding the young imperial heir hostage.

The fact that this ideological power was not formally his meant he was at a disadvantage, one reflected in his fictional legacy as a two-faced scoundrel whose main source of success was not skill or virtue but luck and the sheer power of fate.

Cao Cao, Borgia, Mao, and other such figures tend to share traits like intelligence, charisma, and hubristic pride. Such characteristics help in leading movements and organizations. A leader operating in a chaotic landscape must be smart enough to overcome obstacles, charismatic enough to convince others in a risky cause, and prideful enough to believe that they are the one who can and should be doing this in the first place. 

They are also often capable of great cruelty and betrayal under the right circumstances—this allows them to wield the forces of a chaotic time of destruction while making it dangerous for others to do the same to them. Mao himself was even willing to countenance nuclear war in pursuit of his goals. Noting that the human population at the time stood at 2.7 billion, he once told Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru that if “half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground…in a number of years, there would be [2.7 billion] people again and definitely more.”

But cunning cruelty is a double-edged sword. In his writing on the topic, Machiavelli likewise recognized the dangers inherent in the process of deception. Unrestrained sadism—a frequent flaw of those seizing power—could easily become a strategic weakness for heads of state. Although Machiavelli’s intended audience for The Prince was largely one of aristocrats and royalty, he himself was a committed republican. He advised the prince to appear benevolent to the people, even if he was not so benevolent at heart, or was forced to commit immoral deeds to hold onto power. This mimicked, within the prince’s own person, an important aspect of republican government: the failings or immorality of individual politicians are outweighed, even obscured, by the overarching authority of the state.

In situations where the vast mass of people are subjugated, appearances remain important for staving off revolts and having a population willing to resist foreign influence. In order to rule on the basis of anything other than pure power—an unstable situation—the ruler must have some connection with those who are being ruled as conscious subjects who have their own wants, needs, and understanding of reality. 

Machiavelli believed that it was only in a republic that merciful individuals could rise to great power and esteem. The republic allows a division of labor in both the creation of legitimacy and the administration of violence. As a result, it depersonalizes them as well. The failings of particular rulers do not threaten the state overall and the failings of the state do not tar the individual. 

By building up his own regime, Cao Cao was ensuring that his achievement in securing power would outlast him. For this to work, future successors could not follow the same path to power as Cao Cao himself had—they would have to adapt themselves to his existing regime. Cao Cao was not much of a political theorist on his own, unlike one of his rivals, the Shu Kingdom’s regent Kong Ming. He was situated squarely in the legalist Chinese tradition, and it was he who would go on to copy many of Cao Cao’s most successful policies. The Three Kingdoms period was read as the defeat of the landed aristocracy and the rise of legalist military-administrative states, the most successful of which was Cao Cao’s. 

The legalist tradition was essentially the ideology of the centralized, bureaucratic state in its most pure form, centering around meritocracy in bureaucratic appointments, the rule of law, good administration, and opposition to the aristocratic sentimentality of Confucianism, which itself was the ideology of the landed elite. 

Many centuries later, the Chinese Communist Party carried out a historical re-evaluation of the villainy of Cao Cao on the basis of legalism, as well as its own materialist analysis. Because of its anti-elitist critiques of Confucianism and its embrace of the bureaucratic state, there was a natural marriage between legalism and Maoism. Mao even favorably compared himself not only to Cao Cao, but also to the famous legalist Emperor Qi Shi Huang. While Emperor Qi had buried 460 Confucian scholars alive, Mao noted that his regime had “buried 46,000 scholars alive…We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold.”.

The Chinese Communists also recognized Cao Cao’s wisdom in building up a regime that could outlast him. While the Chinese Communist Party saw its roots in the long history of peasant revolts in China, it recognized the Yellow Turbans as being fundamentally incapable of rule. They viewed Cao Cao, with his agricultural colonies and military dominance, as a progressive economic and political force.

This victory over the wealthy land-owning families, however, was ultimately temporary. After Cao Cao’s family was removed from power and the Jin Dynasty took on their legacy, the agricultural colonies were privatized and the power of the landed families returned. A coup without a broad popular base has a hard time fundamentally transforming society in the long run. 

Cao Cao’s China was chaotic and divided by war, but the power of the landed families survived these circumstances. His experiments did not yield a system powerful enough to outcompete and displace the traditional aristocracy. The defeat of his family and the rise of the Jin Dynasty saw the return of the landed elites as the political ruling class, and accordingly the privatization of the agricultural colonies. Cao Cao had made history in laying the political foundation of a new dynasty, but he could not overcome the material foundations of aristocratic power. China’s conditions bounded the scope of his heroic action even as they made it possible.

Rising From Chaos

It is in moments of great contingency and uncertainty that the details of plots, ambitions, interventions of fortune, battles, reversals, and counter-reversals can change the future. This is history in its political aspect, the one most familiar to Machiavelli, rich with meaning and geared towards an audience. The characters of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms refer to this audience as “the people”, who exist primarily not as producers or even soldiers, but as an augur of legitimacy. The work itself was only possible because their stories were recorded and constantly retold by future unifiers and dynasties seeking to establish themselves as the successors of ancient heroes.

However stable China’s imperial dynasties might be, it was the victories of heroic predecessors—recognized and praised even by commoners—which proved that they had the mandate of Heaven. 

The loss of this legitimacy by the Han underlies the whole story of the Three Kingdoms. This loss was accomplished by the hands of the Yellow Turbans, who brought chaos and division, but could not realize the content of a new logic, a new state. Only someone in a position to properly act on the political contingencies of the age could achieve that. Cao Cao lacked the idealism of the Yellow Turbans, but the ambitious bureaucrat was able to leverage the existing infrastructure of the failing Han dynasty and put it to work as he created a new regime.

A world in chaos is the ideal backdrop for world-historical heroes to arise. It is only when the logic of a given social system, in its political, economic, and ideological capacities, begins to break down that such heroes can arise and change the course of history itself. It is through the struggles created by the breakdown of order that heroes take the spotlight. 

When figures larger than life emerge, it is rarely because their genius is, in fact, so mythically immense. Rather, they apply their talents in a way that exposes and exploits the contingencies of history, reordering them into something new. The great fait accomplis of history defy all the logic of the everyday world, not by doing something impossible, but by showing how a part of that world was a fiction. They comprehend possibilities that are beyond the existing order but inherent in its circumstances and realize them.

In the telling of this ancient wisdom, the perpetual cycle between order and chaos, unification and division, will always necessitate the entrance of such heroes. So begins The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: “Empires rise from chaos and will fall back into chaos; this has been known from the beginning of time.” 

The structural role of the kinds of people we call great men or heroes is to catalyze that transition and give it a particular form. Once a new form of political order becomes hegemonic, it is much harder for ambitious people to challenge it. Most find ways to adapt, and the level of contingency in society decreases. The result is a new equilibrium, a new world with a life of its own. It makes sense, then, that the Three Kingdoms ends its tale at the beginning of the new Jin Dynasty, after all the familiar characters have passed away—the age of heroes and villains had come to an end.

Critics read the early scientific declarations against mask-wearing by the government, as well as later bureaucratic decisions around halting distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, as fumbles that could be avoided if only the administration had a truly scientific, rational, and objective understanding of the facts.

But this just doubles down on the error: using state authority to govern society on one hand, and reproducing and extending scientific knowledge on the other, means working with two very distinct kinds of logic. Conflating them brings political corruption to science, confusion and indecision to state action, and dishonesty and loss of trust to state justification. The inconsistency on the message of masks from experts and governments did great damage to the credibility of the public policy response to the crisis, precisely because it was billed as a matter of scientific truth, rather than state tactical decision.

To get this right, we have to understand how these different epistemologies—science, state ideology, and state action—work in detail, how they interact with each other, and how they constrain the thoughts, speech, and action of elites.

Ideologies of Thought and Action

Being able to analyze a situation is different from being able to act upon it. This is especially important when we are talking about the state, where the realm of possibilities for action is much smaller than the realm of possible ideologies. Functionally, a state actually has two distinct ideologies: one of thought and one of action. What a state formally professes is not always the same as what it actually does. But a state’s actions reinforce and perpetuate its power. The ideology of action might be implicit, in contrast to the more formalized ideology of thought, but it is one of the state’s core epistemological bases.

We can see this difference play out, for example, in democracy-promotion. Formally, the U.S. has a firm commitment to moving the world towards liberal democracy; in practice, intelligence and security services have historically carried out interference in both foreign and domestic democratic processes in order to secure other interests.

This is not mere hypocrisy. America’s national security and intelligence agencies form a core part of American power, but this role is not entirely reflected in America’s ideology of thought. They are part of its ideology of action: the logic behind what it actually does. Neither are these justifications necessarily in conflict; one of the reasons democracy-promotion is so adaptive is precisely because foreign democracies can be more easily manipulated by the habitual methods of American power than other regime types.

The state generates an ideology of action because it has a structural role that takes precedence over all else: it must preserve the foundations of the existing society. In the modern liberal society, that means it must uphold private property, civil society, the education system, the media system, the electoral system, and so on. It also oversees the more general needs to maintain security, military, and economic power. It must ensure the continuation of the existing incentives, power differentials, goods distributions, and institutions that keep people cooperating and in their place. This is the inherent rationality of a given political and economic system. It is a rationality emergent from the necessity of social reproduction, not one verbalized in any textbook or theory.

Politicians and other agents of the state cannot take actions that jeopardize this rationality unless there are other, imminent threats to the reproduction of a particular society. This means that the ideology of action has inherent stability to it.

An ideology of thought has a similar purpose. A ruling ideology, the ideology of elites, must also work to reproduce existing society. But it does so on a more immediately formal level, in giving justification for the state, its policies, and the relations between social classes to each other and to production.

Unlike its counterpart, the ideology of thought is far less stable. Ideas and rhetoric can change far faster than entrenched policy frameworks and factional interests. Multiple lines of justification can co-exist at the same time, even with some contradictions between them. The major constraint is that the ideology of thought must justify the actions of power, and significant enough changes in policy will demand a change in formal ideology. These two kinds of ideology may seem to be two sides of the same coin, the same sort of distinction as with theory and praxis; however, while there is a relationship between the two, it is an indirect one, because the ideology of thought is about the rhetorical and motivational justification of action, not the planning of action itself.

To understand the logical limits of an ideology, we have to come to an understanding of the necessary characteristics which define it. Ideologies don’t arise out of a vacuum. Rather, some kind of major upheaval collapses the previous set of norms and forces state elites to adopt new ones. This means that the existing ideological paradigm must have overcome the contradictions of the particular crisis that the old paradigm was unable to overcome.

That this is a necessary condition is not necessarily intuitive; a ruling ideology presents itself as a neutral description of what is, often presenting itself as the natural description that any reasonable person would arrive at. One of the necessary conditions of ruling ideology is its very birth as a ruling ideology: the period when it went from being merely one idea among many to becoming the paradigm that situates society’s elites more generally. To do this it must have overcome the particular contradictions which brought the last paradigm crashing down. This is why a state’s ideology of action is generally upstream from its ideology of thought. New norms of action generally develop first, with formal intellectual justifications developing afterward.

This is not too dissimilar from the concept of a paradigm shift in the field of philosophy of science, but there is one crucial distinction. Ideally, a scientific paradigm shift demands that the new theory also be capable of solving all the old problems; Einstein’s equations were capable of solving the same problems as Newton’s, as well as new ones. An ideological paradigm shift only needs to solve the problem of the latest crisis. Political regimes are quite capable of suspending contradictions.

Despite this important distinction, our society’s ideologies of thought and action claim to be building on the epistemology of science. From a historical perspective, it’s easy to see why this occurred. Scientific epistemology played an important role in expanding human knowledge and creating the preconditions for the industrial revolution. Early social scientists tried to apply this same lens to human society itself. The increasingly prominent theories about human society necessarily lent themselves to naturalistic explanations of existing social institutions and distinctions, and thus to becoming ideologies—tools for justifying political power.

But once those theories obtained political power as ideologies, they now found themselves under the same constraints as their predecessors. The paradigm might have changed, but the political imperative of defending and reproducing the ruling paradigm remained. This produced a confused mixture of scientific and political epistemology, as the logic of politics, of the state, and even of simply reproducing society overrule any attempt of scientific objectivity. This is the situation of our own society, which is among the most advanced in this process.

The Case of the Social Sciences

The history of paradigm shifts in mainstream social sciences is a history of responses to changes in material reality, rather than the conclusion of formal dialectical debates. Who wins and loses technical debates here has little bearing on the reproduction of elite ideology. In other words, they function just as we would expect if they operated in response to the logic of state ideology, despite the use of apparently scientific norms like theoretical models and peer review.

The result of the Cambridge Capital Controversy, a mid-century debate between British and American economists over the relationship between capital and production, is an excellent example of this. It also wasn’t the long debates over Say’s Law, which states that production itself creates demand, or over whether general overproduction was theoretically possible, that forced economists to reconsider their commitments to laissez-faire policy. Rather, it was the Great Depression. And unlike those in the rigorous physical sciences, when the British economist John Maynard Keynes put forward his general theory, he did not bother to solve the same problems which had been solved by Malthus: the problem of pre-industrial wage rates. Despite this, he cited Malthus as a pioneering critic of Say’s Law. Unlike Einstein with Newton, Keynes could use Malthus’s analysis opportunistically, without caring about whether his own model could solve the same theoretical problems.

This is not to deny that economic theories and academic work often focus on these older questions in addition to the new ones. It is only to say that the reason that Keynes could even call his theory a “general theory” was because the whole field of problems he was attempting to deal with was particular to the historical crises of his time. His was a general theory of markets in an industrialized capitalist economy, not of human economic activity as such. His theory only had to solve the problems of the current crisis, not those of previous paradigms overall. In other words, the debate played out according to the logic of state ideology, not that of science.

Economics is regarded as “the queen of the social sciences.” It is the only social science with its own White House office. It is this royal aspect of economics, its integration into the state apparatus, which defines its existence as a state ideology despite its naturalistic aspirations and apparent reliance on mathematical rigor.

This status reveals another one of the limits of maintaining a scientific epistemology in political power: the relationship between a ruling and an insurgent class ideology. This tension is best illustrated by the transition between classical political economy and modern economics.

By 1890, Karl Marx’s Capital: Volume 1 had been out for about 23 years. From the perspective of its advocates, it had brought together the full sum of classical political economy’s knowledge up to that point, critiqued it, and brought it to its logical conclusions. It had found, in the basic assumptions and models of the field, its theory of value—why a car would be more expensive than an onion—the theory of exploitation, which awkwardly showed how profits were directly determined by the labor of workers. The theory of exploitation, which was founded upon assumptions that political economists previously understood to be naturally and scientifically true, became the justification for the attempted usurpation of the capitalist class by the proletariat.

That same year, Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics was published in England. Historians later called this the victory of the marginal revolution. Several economists had independently come to the math of marginal utility, but it was only with Marshall that the labor theory of value was fully ejected from the mainstream. He accomplished this feat only by throwing out the question of value entirely. Marshall attacked the theory of exploitation put forward by Marx. But unlike the classical political economists, he no longer had to honor the assumptions on which it was based. Marshall’s Principles of Economics became the primary textbook for economics in the Anglosphere for generations.

The marginal revolution never did solve the problem of value: to this day, mainstream economics struggles to mathematically describe, on a macro equilibrium level, why a car is worth more than an onion. Before this move, value theory was a central point of investigation for political economy. It was a major aspect of the field, going back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo. But when faced with an insurgent faction that made previously apolitical theories about economic value the basis for their claim to power, the ruling faction responded with a new paradigm within economics that stripped those precepts from the discipline.

The social science of economics did not update in response to new information, but in order to sever those aspects of its work which had become tools for a dangerous ideological challenge. A ruling ideology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It must fend off threats from other factions too. And in order for those other factions to become the new ruling elite, they must have their ideological base of power in turn.

There must be a distinction between the ruling ideology and the insurgent ideology. An insurgent faction needs its own justification for its rule and wealth. While we can discuss the content of a particular ideology, we cannot make any real assumption about insurgent ideology in general. All we can say is that the ruling class ideology cannot be identical to it and that the ruling ideology must necessarily reject whatever specific logic is central to this insurgent claim to power. It must attack whichever assumptions make the usurper’s rule appear like a natural consequence.

The marginalist revolution is far from the only example in the modern era. The adoption of race science played out similarly after African slaves began to be taken from primarily Christian populations rather than “heathen” ones, as did the later, final rejection of that same race science when it was used to justify white insurgent movements like those defending segregation. A similar logic also played out during the suppression of independent worker organizations in China and the USSR following their initial role as supporters of those revolutions.

To the extent that scientific theories become relevant to the ideological justification of state power, they will start operating according to ideological logic, rather than scientific. Social science is especially vulnerable to this corruption because modern states have come to justify themselves in social-scientific terms. Physics and other hard sciences are much less prone to this problem because modern powers no longer justify themselves in terms of physical cosmologies—though they did in the Middle Ages, as illustrated by the debates around heliocentrism.

The Scientific Epistemology

Science, and the reproduction of scientific knowledge as a process, require a subject–object distinction. It is well-known that true objective knowledge is an impossibility. We can never come to terms with things in of themselves as doing so would require a God’s-eye view.

To experience this world, it is necessary to have an ideology. This is true whether we are speaking of individuals, or society more generally. When we first come to grips with external objects, we understand them only as they relate to us. This goes far beyond babies lacking object permanence. When a young girl is asked to write down a description of or draw her family, she will not do so on the basis of purely material facts. Indeed, she may reduce their physical bodies to stick figures in art and to an odd adjective in prose. What she emphasizes instead is whatever attributes are central to their relationship with her.

The materiality of things, their existence independent of their relation to us, is something that we must slowly, painfully learn. As we do so, we begin to understand that there is more to the world than how it relates to us individually. This kicks off the process of gaining more objective knowledge. Scientific epistemology, unlike state ideology, exists to guard against the natural error modes to which our subjective minds are prone. But even when we attain relative objectivity, we are still ultimately dealing in concepts that shape our own perception and engagement with the world, and thus with a subjective perspective.

Naive empiricism, attempting to simply describe the world we perceive, would appear to give us access to an objective view—but let’s not forget that the stick-figure drawing is actually such an empiricism. Similarly, measuring the minutes of angles of stars in the sky does not give us knowledge about what stars are as they exist out in the universe. We incorporate these measurements, as phenomena we experience, into our subjective frameworks.

Science is not beyond ideology; nothing is. And yet, scientific discourse accepts paradigm shifts differently than other kinds of discourse, specifically in a way that is designed to move beyond the subject. While modern political elites certainly have more use for science than elites of other eras, they are always on the outside of this process, looking in. While the social sciences are first in the business of creating a ruling ideology, they also attempt to produce knowledge about social reality that is valuable beyond the scope of justifying power.

What of those elites that do take hold of the scientific content of the social sciences? Or even those that are able to overcome their individual biases? Take, for example, those who became aware of the fat-tailed nature of financial markets, such as Nassim Taleb, who gave warnings about the possibility of extreme events shaking the economy before the 2008 crash, and who were ignored by banks and governments.

Or we might consider the fate of Michael Kalecki, a Marxist economist who, after independently discovering key insights of Keynesian economics, returned to his native Poland after it had fallen under communist rule and took on a job in the economic planning bureau. Kalecki was perhaps the foremost expert on state-socialist economic growth at the time. He immediately identified that the planning targets were so ludicrously ambitious that they would cause substantial waste and inefficiency and that the state could not meet them. He was quickly sidelined by more patriotic comrades who believed that by virtue of abolishing capitalism they would achieve miraculous levels of social wealth.

In these cases, both the overall system and the majority of elites within the system kept going with business as usual. This shouldn’t be surprising: the necessary aspects of their positions demanded the reproduction of the existing ideologies of thought and action. These took precedence over a potential update to the ideology of thought that had no spurring change in social conditions behind it. Those who care about the objective, scientific knowledge about society find that they have become gadflies the moment that their studies bring them to conclusions in opposition to the ruling ideology—the moment the ruling elite hears ideological bad news from them.

We Must Build New Epistemologies

What are we as individuals able to do under these circumstances? Should we just complacently accept that there are some areas that elites will never be able to deal with rationally and objectively due to their specific ideological blindspots? This stance seems absurd on the face of it. What if a threat is actually existential in the long run? How do we come to terms with what real serious problems are in our society?

The professionals in our media and politics seem quite content that there is nothing left for us to do other than provide funding and support for the existing centers of expertise. Now, more than ever, it is unacceptable to try and push beyond existing paradigms of knowledge outside their walls. And it seems reasonable: the experts can point to contemporary social movements driven by various conspiracy theories as examples of what happens when people foolishly take matters into their own hands and ignore professional wisdom. The mantra of the Qanon conspiracy theorists, after all, was “do your own research.”

But the kind of democratization that conspiracy theories provide is still one of consumption of new and different facts, images, and narratives, not a full epistemic update. This approach is not so different from the kind offered by official media. The median conspiracy theorist only updates their sources, not their method. Rather than uncritically accepting whatever the talking head on cable news says, they now do the same with an alt-media personality, a WhatsApp chat, or a Facebook group. They function like naive empiricists, not like scientists. Instead of updating their theory of society in response to information, they absorb information as it fits their subjective lens.

It’s not enough to do our own research. We must also do our own epistemology. As individuals engaged in the world around us, we have to build our personal theories of knowledge. This means investigating the subjectivity of those who present information to us and investigating our own subjectivity and biases, just as much as it entails seeking out new information.

It is precisely in the making of accomplished facts that individuals can have their impact felt. To take a larger example, consider the history of the Volcker shock. The decision by Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve to dramatically raise interest rates in the heavy inflation of the 1970s is exactly one of these accomplished facts. It also had a lot more to do with Paul Volcker himself than with the structural forces moving society at the time. The tepid policy failures to curb inflation that had preceded him could have continued and the offensive by capital against labor that accompanied the shock could have happened regardless, in response to the more general crisis of low profitability. Moments of crisis like this necessarily create historical contingencies, creating opportunities for individuals to leave a broader impact on history, for better or for worse. They can move beyond the limits of a given systemic logic on the strength of their own private epistemology.

Any attempt at a more objective study of society immediately creates questions about what issues are worth intervening on and how someone could do so. This includes the question of how we could move beyond our own paradigm in the face of an existential threat. Historically, this either means finding a way for the elite class to transcend itself—as in the case of the German nobles and Soviet nomenklatura who refounded themselves on capitalism—or to take the side of a usurper faction.

Some intellectuals who see themselves aligned with the lower classes and oppressed populations believe that there is an inherent higher rationality possible in their thought and potential political power. Being out of power, they assume that they are free of its ideological distortions. However, this is an optimistic error. When you are among the ruled, you are even more subject to the ideology of the ruling class; when you usurp the ruling elites and replace them, you are then subject to the systemic logic of having to reproduce society and your own ideology of justification.

Even if you have somehow sustained an existence outside of regular social reproduction, as many social critics have through patronage or wealth, you are not immune to ideology. Your outsideness can just as easily blind you to the material nature of reproduction and economic necessity. There is no easily identified position in society that exists as a point of easily successful resistance to ideology and power. Likewise, there is no easy substitute for scientific epistemology in the work of statecraft.

You, as an individual, are also not immune to ideology and propaganda. Your personal biases are just as difficult to isolate seeing as they come from the same place as rational thought. There is no guarantee that your intervention in society would be any more rational than the status quo, even if you got the opportunity.

But this doesn’t mean effort towards a paradigm-transcending superior understanding of society is futile.

Individuals and small groups, while ultimately bound to their own perspective, are able to overcome existing ideology. If we do the hard work with care and good judgment, our private discourses can become a coherent alternative paradigm. Any alternative paradigm will still be faced with the same structural constraints, but it can handle them better by being more consciously careful in how it works around them.

For example, just as modern states mostly transcend physical cosmology as a line of ideological justification, future states could transcend social science by drawing on other claims for legitimacy. Such a state could then admit a far harder social science—one that it could operationalize to solve problems and understand our subjective historical position—just as today’s hard physical sciences are oriented to investigation and problem-solving rather than political justification.

Even in the absence of an established regime in that pattern, its very possibility is a powerful framing device for individuals and small groups to ground their own theories of society.

By studying society and our own limits, and paying careful attention to our epistemic foundations, it becomes possible, though far from guaranteed, to overcome established ideology and make our own superior judgments and paradigms. No one else can do it for us.

As it stands, the line separating America from fossilizing into one of these historical relics is precariously thin, and more so than it has ever been. But there’s a great irony to this fact. Around 40 years ago, the U.S. and Britain embraced the political commitments of what we call neoliberalism, a decision which was supposed to spark growth and disrupt stagnation. But instead of leading to increased dynamism and innovation, this regime presided over and even accelerated the very stagnation it warned against.

The role of political elites is to produce state ideology that is received as legitimate, one that can find support in a coalition of social classes. Throughout the post-war social democratic period, this coalition had mainly been a compromise between large business owners, often exercising a degree of monopoly power, and the working class. The social democratic period, which lasted from the New Deal to around 1980, was a period where capital—as the abstract motor of the economy—had absolute power, rather than any particular social class. It stands in stark contrast to what came both before and after. This was the nature of the compromise: both workers and capitalists yielded to the rationalization of production, to ever growing investment in fixed capital, increasing the ability to produce a great mass of commodities.  

Capital, after all, isn’t reducible to the simple commodity, nor markets, nor even profit. Marx called capital the “dead labor” which subsists on the living—congealed in the machinery of production, and coming to life in the cycle of creating value by employing labor. Capital owners serve the purposes of its development through their competition and profit seeking. But there are also times where the expansion of capital as such can conflict with the interests of its owners. In this case, that conflict arose in the profitability crisis of the 1970s. Caused by supply shocks and strong wage growth pressures, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After years of fixed capital investment taking up larger and larger shares of surplus, at the expense of capitalist consumption, the compromise exploded. 

The state response to the profitability crisis wasn’t simply an immediate regulatory adjustment. It created a change that rippled throughout state ideological apparatuses, especially the political parties and the universities. The state and its appendages recognized the crisis of legitimacy which rocked the social democratic consensus. In response, they sought a new base for legitimacy on business alone, through a political economy which drove down wages and undermined organized labor. In the framework of this ideology, those who did not belong to the capitalist class became consumers rather than workers, still selling their labor but benefiting from low prices to maintain their lifestyles. 

The neoliberal reformers didn’t really have any other choice if they wanted to preserve the system of value expansion and circulation of commodities that underpinned the state itself, and this consensus grew to encompass the entire Overton Window in America, Britain, and other Western nations. Despite conservative elements like the Thatcher and Reagan coalitions sparking this process, many reformers ultimately sided with the ongoing cultural changes in the Western world. Economic interests took precedence over moral conflicts, which were relegated to performative squabbles in election seasons.

This was a decisive change from the settlement based on developing capital as such. In doing this, pro-market reformers also cemented the small business owner as a real economic and political entity—a byproduct of atomization. This played into breaking the back of organized labor, and the lowering of real wages. 

But that new class has now come back to haunt political elites. The promised dynamism, and subsequent explosion of productivity and innovation, never came. Even the computer, the internet, and their related technological wonders have done little to boost productivity of industry. This phenomenon was famously identified by economist Robert Solow who noted in 1987: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Indeed, average productivity growth since 1977, when the first personal computers were mass produced, has dropped to around 60% of what it was from 1949 to 1977. While the first period also saw a number of productivity bursts reaching over 5% growth, these became far rarer in the second one.

But the neoliberal settlement did not just affect the system of production. It also fundamentally undermined how we reproduce and utilize scientific knowledge. Without overturning it, America is set to face an ever greater material decline, accelerated by the class conflicts which continue to beset it.

The Making of Neoliberalism

The political economy of this settlement can only be understood through two major economic shifts that formed its preconditions: a consolidating financial industry and an atomizing non-financial industry. The 1970s profitability crisis that broke out across the developed world made the old regulatory regime untenable. Its chief causes were trade union power, supply shocks, and the end of post-war redevelopment. The real cost of inputs—including both labor and natural resources like oil—rose dramatically in this period. Fixed capital investment, and with it capital consumption costs, had also been rising as a share of output, a signal of lower capital productivity. All the while, American net exports went increasingly negative due to competition from the newly redeveloped Western Europe and Japan.

The goliath conglomerates which formed the base of the U.S. economy in the postwar period began to bleed. They shrunk, broke apart, and began subcontracting instead of directly hiring. By 1985, Fortune 500 companies employed 2.2 million fewer people than they did in 1980, despite the working age population growing by roughly 8 million in that same time. Soon after, the U.S. faced what was at the time the biggest banking crisis since the Great Depression. From 1980 to 1989, the U.S. lost more than a quarter of its savings and loan institutions, and around a third by 1995. At their peak, the number of annual bank failures reached triple the height seen in the depths of the Great Depression. These two trends of atomization and consolidation shaped the destiny of the American economy for the next half century.

Consolidated finance was instrumental in the globalization of production. Without highly liquid derivative, currency, bond, and stock markets, you could not have truly global supply chains. These markets, in turn, were made possible by large banks centralizing all these different market-making activities, in turn providing these markets with access to deep wells of liquidity. 

Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin observed this development most intimately in the Peso Crisis of 1995—what Rubin called the first crisis of the 21st Century. Unlike the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, when all the U.S. government had to do was organize talks with the banks and their debtors, suddenly the fallout was potentially much larger for the U.S. Now it wasn’t just banks, but also ordinary American investors—both retail and institutional—who took advantage of these newly liquid international markets and owned stock and bonds in Mexican companies. The U.S. government was forced to fund the majority of a $50 billion dollar bailout to guarantee Mexican bonds. Preventing this economic collapse from spreading also preserved the basis for the newly minted NAFTA trade agreement.

The savings and loan crisis, while predictably caused by dramatic shifts in the rate of interest, was made substantially worse by a response grounded in deregulation and lower capital requirements. This hands-off attitude was one of the major shifts brought about by the new political settlement. Deregulation not only hurt the small banks, but allowed the big banks to merge and grow, and to freely engage in international markets.

These measures were seen as necessary to spur dynamism, flexibility and competitiveness. The move to these Schelling points as the justification for radical reforms was effectively the move toward a new ideological frame, namely neoliberalism as such. The same justifications were used in the non-financial sector. The destruction of unions was deeply connected to this atomization of production, as many workers were forced to move from life-long relationships with employers to self-employment. In 1985, there were roughly 1.4 million new enterprises created, comparable to the 1.4 million private jobs being created on average.

Economic theory suggests that monopolies and oligopolies have the power to set prices on more favorable terms for themselves. Theoretically, more businesses could be assumed to be good for workers, as they would have to compete for labor.

The reality of the situation was quite different. Many of these new small businesses were simply enterprises formed as methods of self-employment, a trend fueled by economic desperation. As one writer put it at the time, “We are practically carrying our jobs around on our backs”. This new era of labor dynamism led to a decline in real wages—around a 20% decline from 1973 to 1995. The benefits of America’s new “competitiveness” would be captured elsewhere.

The Hollowing Out of American Innovation

As workers felt the bite of these deep reforms, they were joined by another sector. Direct government funding for research and development fell by around 23% in real terms in the decade after 1987, only reattaining its prior height in the late 2000s. The cost of public universities was precipitously transferred from the government to families, with government spending going from around two-thirds of the cost in 1981 to less than half by 2006, just as tuition prices began to skyrocket. Regulators and policymakers also overhauled intellectual property to expand the scope of what could be patented, including such things as living organisms and mathematical algorithms, often at the behest of the specific companies that would benefit most. This new intellectual property regime was in part sold to the public as a means to replace direct government funding. It would supposedly allow universities, private inventors, and small startups to better monetize their discoveries.

This was always a farce. In truth, much of our groundbreaking private innovation still rests on public research available to all. Privatizing this knowledge through more intensive intellectual property makes it so only the biggest companies can afford to purchase these disparate pieces of knowledge and place them into an actual use. The hopes of small tech startups was based on the success of such firms in Silicon Valley; however this success was itself built upon connections, both formal and informal, to larger institutions like the federal government, major universities, and large corporations. As these sources of funding began to wane, so did the valley, ultimately reaching a low point in the mid-eighties when it was nearly subsumed by the Japanese tech industry. 

But both Silicon Valley and American R&D more generally found a savior: the consolidated finance industry. Global capital flows allowed much of the production process to be outsourced by American corporations, including to China after 2000. Falling interest rates and bloated investment banking firms, along with the structural changes in corporations geared at pleasing shareholders, made the tech stock bubble in the 1990s possible. This speculative period allowed the growth of many new technology firms. This financial speculation was an elaborate and expensive method of funding long-shot and high risk technologies in the private sector that otherwise would have been passed over by investors. It was a method which hardly favored the technologies with the most positive social impact.

The result of this speculation was to create a new social strata: the tech billionaires, patrons of vast industrial and philanthropic networks. These billionaires provide a source of funds for research and development, even if the innovation itself continues to be done by engineers and scientists on the ground. They also embody a contradiction within the neoliberal settlement. On the one hand, these billionaire networks are the result of the trade off made by reformists in the 1980s. But, importantly, their necessity shows just how to what degree these reforms came at the cost of undermining the very foundations of wider prosperity—and not just on purely material grounds. 

With the hampering of basic sciences in universities, and the cutting of direct government research funding, the sorts of billionaire networks centered around the tech industry have become one of the only remaining sources of American innovation. We hear all the time about the newest breakthroughs by such corporations in AI, quantum computing, spaceflight, renewable energy, and so on. Meanwhile, universities and governments chase the diminishing returns of fundamental particle physics and astronomy. The delicate nature of this corporate research was exposed when one of its biggest facilitators, Google, was put on trial for antitrust allegations. What would happen to DeepMind if Google was broken up and its parts put up for sale? Perhaps it would eventually find itself in the hands of a foreign competitor, as the famous Bell Labs did after its parent company was broken up. 

Google is not unique in the tech world for its monopolistic practices. One could make similar cases against Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, all of which are also major funders for cutting-edge R&D. But if the federal government were to pursue these cases to the fullest extent—without reversing the neoliberal trends in defunding and privatizing science—the long term consequences for the U.S. economy would be disastrous. 

Our contemporary reliance on this handful of companies and billionaires puts us on a precarious perch as all our other social institutions hollow out. Unfortunately for monopoly capital, its rise created deep political grievances. These are now coming to a political head which threatens the last remnants of American dynamism.

Revenge of the Boaters

It is no coincidence that these antitrust cases were pushed forward under the Trump administration, with the backing of a coalition of mostly red states. There has been much talk recently of the implications of the high education realignment towards the Democratic party, but we should also consider the other side: the reorientation of the Republican party away from the educated. This is not a realignment of the Republican party towards the working class—at least, not anymore than it was in the days of Reagan. The Gipper was never able to win union households or the lower income brackets; instead, he improved his showing compared to previous Republicans. Trump too, only won a majority of voters with income above $100,000, and lost a majority of union families. 

However, the Republican party of Reagan was very much a party of intellectuals, and of the educated professionals who represented business interests. It prided itself on being receptive to the efforts of the Mont Pelerin Society and William F. Buckley. Its current internal conflicts have been the overturning of this older party culture by the coalition of high income, low education voters. This coalition is centered in the small business class—the same class that saw massive growth in numbers under the very neoliberal settlement that Reagan and his allies enthusiastically forwarded. It was this base, and their class basis, which incubated the uncouth culture so despised by the Republican establishment in 2016 and which was embodied in Trump. 

This class—the car dealership owners, the “Boaters”, the shopkeepers—benefited greatly under Trump’s tax reforms, and the roaring stock market he shepherded. The administration effectively bridged the gap between the small and large capitalist classes. The latter is embodied in the likes of the McMahons, Sheldon Adelson and Timothy Mellon—regional big players, and even national players in more competitive industries like the Koch brothers. But there was always one issue where its interests differed from the big business interests of America’s high capitalist class: the issue of monopoly power. Competition, after all, implies winners. One competitor can destroy many rivals and consolidate his market share. If antitrust measures aren’t consistently applied, we see handfuls of oligopolies and monopolies naturally consolidate across many markets. Indeed, this has been the natural state of American industrial capitalism for most of its existence. It is often the Boaters and their small businesses who find themselves getting outcompeted by these larger rivals.

This small capitalist class cannot govern on its own. Notably, Trump staffed his administration with big business alumni and focused on areas of agreement in his economic policy—with the glaring exception of trade policy. But it was with trade policy that the true nature of this compromise reveals itself, as it’s here that the ideology of this class is distilled beyond its pure self interest. 

As tariffs became a weapon of the trade war with China, a division became apparent. The majority of people, as well as the majority of businesses, were unaffected by the changes in tariff law. The tariffs were never an economic issue as such; they were a way to signal a hard stance against both China and a cosmopolitan elite. Big business is well-represented among that cosmopolitan elite: globe trotting, Ivy League graduates, readers of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. As the trade war took off, even Fox news was accosting them to accept lower profits for the sake of the nation. With the expansion of global economic integration, the only truly national bourgeoisie we can still speak of are their erstwhile partners in the small business class. 

The compromise, then, goes something like this: a populist like Trump comes along with a foul mouth to attack these international enemies. He fights a culture war on behalf of the Boaters, but domestic economic policy accommodates both the larger, established business class and the national bourgeoisie reliant on small enterprise. Importantly, the monopoly capitalists aren’t a part of this compromise: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest. Moreover, the small business interests, which were uniquely created by the hollowing out of real institutions, have no positive political project. The gentleman’s agreement which unites these two factions is to accept inaction about our ruptured civil society and government, so long as the corporate behemoths which pose a political and economic threat to them are also hollowed out. It is this relative atomization that allows these small capitalists to thrive, a capitalism where the only excess permitted is for business itself. All pains are taken to preserve its ability to consume ever more luxury—high returns on property, consumer goods, access to atomized labor markets, and so on—even at the very expense of all real economic development.

This would hardly be the first time that a class consolidated the political power to shut down the threat of rising, economically dynamic new elites. One classic example is that of Venice, which in the middle ages was the most wealthy and prosperous European city. Venice effectively controlled trade between Europe and the Arab world, and it could only do so due to commercial and financial innovations. Venice saw the creation of rudimentary joint-stock companies, banking systems and other new forms of financial contracts which enabled the great expansion of trade. However, all these financial innovations came at a cost to the existing elite by empowering new families, for example via commenda contracts which allowed less established merchants to share in the profits by taking risky journeys, even as a more established merchant would front most of the capital. 

Much like the U.S., Venice was a republic. These “new men” could and did enter into the political process, and often held positions of power in the legislative bodies. The economic dynamism didn’t just reduce profits for established merchant families, it also reduced their political power. All this changed when the legislature, including a number of former “new men”, voted to make entrance to its body hereditary. The only exceptions required permission from the established families. The commenda contracts were outlawed, and trade was regulated in a way to make it the exclusive domain of nobility. Ultimately, it was northwestern Europe that would spur the rise of economic modernity, while Venice and the rest of Italy languished.

Rebooting the American Settlement

Institutionalist economists point to historical moments such as these to suggest that inclusive economic and political institutions are necessary for a dynamic and innovative economy. But the practical application of this hypothesis exhibits a great deal of ideological hubris; they suggest that this is the reason why the U.S. will succeed, and why China will fail to innovate. What gets ignored is that economic dynamism does not always mean churning out ever more new capitalists, or that it could be in the interests of business owners—small and large alike—to shut down innovation. 

When we produce real innovations in production, and so automate new aspects of production itself, the results are not evenly spread. This is because those industries which adopt new technologies to reduce labor inputs are the first to see real prices fall. And the more fixed investment is required to produce things, the more economies of scale make sense. In turn, the rate of profit decreases, along with the level of consumption those profits can support. This was the reality of production in the post-war social democratic period, and the reality of most of the history of industrial capitalism. Since small businesses endure far greater instability and lower margins than their bigger cousins, they are the first to feel the impact of falling profit rates in an industry. 

This is a concrete disadvantage and a flashpoint for conflict within the business class itself. Small business owners now see large corporations undercutting their prices and devouring their customer bases. And failing an economic solution, there is a political response in the wings: if you can’t beat them, trust-bust them and tariff their international markets and supply chains.

This political economy, including its iteration in post-populist America, presents one of the greatest obstacles to the major breakthroughs projected in the futurism of the mid-twentieth century. It systematically opposes the kinds of innovation which would be necessary to create fully-automated manufacturing or flying cars. Our framework for R&D has totally been subsumed into a system of austerity which restrains the excess necessary for deep, groundbreaking invention. Only those projects with easy commercial applications make sense in this framework, in a world which has stopped rationalizing production—that is, only those projects which can dazzle consumers rather than actually make it easier to meet human needs. Everything else is held suspect, and subject to intense scrutiny. The only exceptions are those individuals or upstart companies that gain access to a scale of capital which can buck the trend, often by gaining state support, giving us the SpaceX exception that proves the rule.

Real invention depends on investing significant resources in capable people while expecting that most will fail, because the value from the few successes outstrips the rest. But as David Graeber wrote in 2012: “[I]f you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.”

What is the end point of this trend? First to go is the U.S.’s economic edge in innovation. We are already witnessing this being lost to China, where R&D funding is expanding at an incredible rate and intellectual property is weak. Next is the military edge, which has always depended on technological and industrial superiority. And last to go is dollar hegemony and the U.S.-backed global financial system, which rests upon America’s military might and empire. This is an old story, one we saw play out most recently with the UK in the 20th century. 

How could this process be reversed? The political return of the status quo, and former Big Tech executives finding their way into government positions, might decrease the likelihood of the antitrust cases against Google and Facebook being pursued. However, this is only a return to our old stagnation. To truly reverse this trend would require two things.

First, monopoly capital would have to truly comprehend the reality of the barbarians at its gate. The threat posed by the atomized small-capitalist class coalition is an existential one to Big Tech, and this threat has not disappeared with Trump losing an election. Already we are seeing reports that a totally new, more aggressive orientation of antitrust enforcement has achieved institutional status.

Second, monopoly capital would have to politically mobilize the working class which atomization left in an economic spiral.

What could a new compromise between monopoly capital and the working class to ward off this threat look like? Big corporations already offer more in salary and benefits than small or medium sized firms can, and are even sought out by startups wanting to be acquired by a bigger player. Leveraging this and promoting pro-worker legislation would serve both to win over the working class and drive out of business the low-productivity, labor intensive competitors which lack economies of scale. This would reverse the previous trend, slowly reabsorbing this demographic into a well-compensated labor force and, to a degree, into larger business interests, which combined can drive the investment levels demanded by American social and economic renewal.

From the perspective of the state, the kind of intellectual property which has facilitated the success of the new tech monopolies—that of software and end-products—is not the same which is currently wrecking the reproduction of scientific knowledge. A new model is possible based on the communal sharing and ownership of all other forms of information—especially scientific and technological information. The goal here is to fuel the innovation and commodification of end products from American titans of industry. 

Platforms like Sci-Hub and Libgen have been the greatest assets modern scholars and scientists have, maintaining illegal databases and online downloads for almost every book and scholarly article that has ever been digitized. The official sources of open source research are diminutive in comparison. The government could create a more functional version without undermining funding for research by expropriating the major journals and private Ivy league universities, and automatically uploading their papers to a central database free to use. They could even take a page out of Big Tech’s book, and copy Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program. A fund paid for by some mix of taxes, university tuition, and corporate subscriptions could be dealt out to authors according to how many people download and cite their work. 

We have at our disposal the ability to make the whole corpus of scientific knowledge available to every single person, an ability which would have made the ancients green with envy. It was, after all, the great difficulty of reproducing this knowledge which allowed science to be nearly wiped out in Hellenistic Greece and the Medieval Arab world through war and other social strife. We have no similar excuse.

The thorny question is what can get us to this compromise. If we are to look towards transitions to previous paradigms, it will require an ideological shift among state apparatuses. Social Democracy had Keynes, while neoliberalism had the Mont Pelerin Society and the Chicago School of economics. Unfortunately, much of the discussion about how to preserve dynamism and innovation remains trapped in the neoliberal framework, and heterodox voices on the topic are largely marginalized. From Big Tech’s perspective, they should be funding think tanks combining a critique of antitrust regulation with an ideological escape from decaying neoliberal framework, with the conscious goal of boosting innovation.  

Similarly, labor and its aligned political and media organs should launch broadsides against these ideological opponents, with the goal of avoiding the further atomizing of production. A long tradition of thought exists which identifies the centralization of production as a progressive force. The modern left has several theorists who have effectively criticized neoliberalism’s failure to generate innovation, such as David Graeber and Philip Mirowski. But these ideas have failed to be translated into an economic school of thought or pro-innovation ideological movement. Such an ideology is simply waiting to be made: shorter working days and higher wages, along with greater institutional excess, are closely related to what is needed for the rationalization of production in the firm, and the creation of new technologies. 

We would do well to remember you don’t get scientific advancements by shutting down the sharing of scientific knowledge. And you don’t get economic dynamism and innovation without allowing excesses, both in terms of funding and permissiveness, for the real innovators—not the capitalists who will ultimately profit. To the extent we are at last seeing movement in key fields, it has been the extent to which our giant tech monopolies have generated this excess. If we want to preserve this source of innovation, and regain those we’ve lost, we will need to find alternatives to the antitrust regulatory regime, and reject our sentimentality for our atomized system of production. 

Liberal platitudes about the inherent superiority of our economic-political system serve to lull us into complacency. To recover and change our fate, we must set out to change our economic system. If both American monopoly capital and the working class fail in this historical contingency, the end result will be that American capitalism and the utopian hopes of its radicals are consigned to the dustbin of history.

It was July 1971, the thick of the Cold War, when Stafford Beer, a management consultant based out of London, received a letter from Chile. The South American country had recently elected one Dr. Salvador Allende to power through a coalition of left-wing parties, and he had begun a program of sweeping nationalization. The authorities in charge of the newly nationalized sectors had made a firm decision against copying the Soviet system, whose worrying inefficiencies were even then getting critical analysis from top thinkers and leaders in socialist movements. Instead, they wanted to create a new, modern system of economic planning. Allende and his ministers had turned to Beer to do just this.

Beer was an expert in the field of cybernetics, the science of automatic feedback and control mechanisms. He viewed this framework as having the potential to develop the most advanced methods in scientific management. The letter he received was from an academic, Fernando Flores of the Technological Institute of Chile, who had been teaching cybernetics in Santiago. Flores had been appointed by the new government to oversee the total reorganization of Chile’s public sector, and he saw it as the perfect chance to apply cybernetic principles on the level of a whole national economy. Beer jumped at the opportunity.

Beer and Flores’ team tirelessly drafted up a series of ambitious plans. Besides creating the physical infrastructure for digitally connecting the whole economy, new software had to be created from scratch, as well as the user interface.

It’s important to keep in mind that Chile was considered a Third World country at the time. While ideally they would have procured a computer for each factory and economic institution, much like we would today, the fact is that it was not financially feasible. Instead, they had to make do with a handful of Telex machines that a previous government had acquired but did not know how to use, and two central computers in Santiago.

The idea was that managers in factories would send statistics on inputs and outputs using an index that would record all the connections between industries and enterprises, such that a flowchart for the whole economy could be produced. Sales information and orders for goods, coming both horizontally and vertically, would use the network for transmission. Much of the effort of the Cybersyn designers was put towards creating instantaneous feedback mechanisms  to control production from the bottom-up.

The user interface was carefully crafted to ensure that ordinary workers could utilize it, and there were even sociological experiments conducted to document what people responded to best. From Beer’s perspective, the human brain itself was a key participant in the cybernetic recursion, and all the information feeding into it had to be regulated according to what the brain could biologically accept.

All these digital and practical designs were intended to be integrated into a series of ‘Opsrooms’ where controllers—committees of ordinary workers at the lowest level, and state managers at the higher levels—would monitor production. If any identified issue couldn’t be solved by one Opsroom, it would automatically be passed up the chain to the next one. The photograph of the Opsroom commonly associated with Project Cybersyn was the experimental prototype which was designed to exact specifications before it was built. No existing government office could meet the dimensions of the Opsroom, so they were forced to lease the building formerly used as the headquarters for Reader’s Digest in Chile.

The fledgeling network, running on incomplete software, would prove invaluable to the socialist government as the country came under economic siege. International trade was sharply cut off, and sabotage from the CIA and small business owners increased in intensity. Various retailers and distribution centers were already organized into associations called Gremios, many of which owned small trucking fleets. Unlike the oligarchs and foreign managers who had long-since emigrated and formed the basis for Allende’s international isolation, these more local business owners formed the basis for internal political opposition. In particular, they feared the nationalization of their logistical networks so they could be integrated into a planned economy. A trucking strike by these Gremios nearly paralyzed the country, putting the government at risk, but Project Cybersyn allowed Allende’s administration to mobilize all available transportation to move resources where they were needed most. Although the Opsroom was not yet ready, the infrastructure was ready to facilitate a network of communication centers relaying information and transmitting orders across the country in real time. This instantaneous flow of information for economic coordination was a monumental feat, and in some ways surpassed even the most advanced war-time logistical systems of developed countries at the time.

After a military coup led to the death of Allende and put General Augusto Pinochet in power, Cybersyn was destroyed. Chile’s constitution was suspended, and the country became the testing ground for the infamous free market Chicago School boys. The technologically innovative and unprecedentedly democratic system sketched on paper was never fully implemented.

But its logic did not die alongside Allende and the dreams of the Chilean socialists. Within a couple of decades, similar technologies, logistical structures, and forms of economic planning were being constructed by the giants of American capitalism themselves.

Walmart was among the biggest success stories. The company began to pioneer a system of planned coordination among its suppliers through databases of information on costs, demand, and location for its inventory at every level. These ensured suppliers could coordinate production to meet demand as soon as it was registered.

This was no easy task. A single commodity on the shelves of Walmart could, for example, have a dozen different components, each with a different manufacturer. Say you want to buy a lawn-chair with a seat cushion. There could very well be a different supplier for the tubes of metal and plastic, the screws, and the rubber bands that make the back of the chair, not to mention the cushion itself. Each of these suppliers in turn have their own suppliers for various raw materials, further multiplying the number of inputs. Walmart has made a wildly successful model out of cybernetic planning: harnessing huge amounts of data to update their supply chain with the goal of being able to provide any customer requirement at any time.

Much like how the computer proposed by Charles Babbage in 1837 laid out the future path of computation over a century later, despite never itself being fully materialized, Project Cybersyn has its counterpart in the most advanced logistical systems on earth today. It wasn’t that the successors of Beer and his collaborators sought out to emulate these visions, but that those who came afterwards were forced to rediscover their insights independently. The course of scientific and economic development demanded it.

Up to the appearance of Cybersyn, the economic planning of socialist and capitalist countries alike was done largely by quotas. The USSR would begin a planning period by drafting budgets for its enterprises, both in terms of material resources and money, and demand a certain amount of output. The information fed to planners by enterprises had to be clawed back through a network of party operatives overseeing production at every level, and even then consistently adjusted for misinformation.

Compared to planning, the market made for a much more effective automatic feedback mechanism—if a commodity did not have sufficient demand, the price could fall below the cost of production, forcing less to be made and vice versa. Plans, on the other hand, were generally only adjusted either on far longer timescales, or when necessity demanded otherwise. But primitive market pricing was also imperfect as a feedback and control mechanism.

Markets similarly create miniature cycles of over and under production if they rely solely on price signals for information; the more complicated the final good, with the greater number of inputs, the greater these cycles can be. If a retailer sees a sudden increase in sales of lawn chairs and decides to put in a larger order to the final manufacturer, this information will not reach the parts makers until the final manufacturer makes their own purchases. If the supply of parts is not increased to meet the retail demand in time, then the retailer could be faced with the embarrassment of empty shelves.

Retailers respond by planning and coordinating with suppliers. This solves the problem and also makes them far more competitive against rival retailers who rely on the open market. Walmart built its empire by using data collection and logistical strategy to keep its suppliers responsive and low-cost. Other companies will often end up simply acquiring or creating supply chains outright, a process called vertical integration.

The giants of capitalist economic planning now dominate the contemporary landscape, whether Walmart, Amazon, or Alibaba. But there is a key problem with applying cybernetic principles to social organization: humans ultimately control all the inputs and outputs. When a single team of people organizes production and information, the relationships are direct and face-to-face. A high trust team will more easily work toward the same goal. Even if the team is low trust, it is easier to find out when someone is acting in bad faith. But as these systems scale up, managers and bureaucratic middlemen become necessary. Manipulating even these human systems is easier than manipulating a close team. In a system of metrics, automation, and digital feedback, the incentives to game the system are even higher.

To overcome these misaligned incentives, many of these firms have opted to use the same technologies to introduce new metrics to control the old ones. This increasingly takes the form of new and invasive methods of surveillance. For example, Walmart’s database system is in part based on the data pulled directly from cash registers. To ensure this information is being reported correctly, Walmart has an AI monitoring agent that watches the registers. However, this AI is notoriously error prone—it’s more likely to disrupt innocent interactions and cause headaches than actually catch shoplifters.

Amazon maintains even more stringent surveillance of its own employees in order to maximize speed and hit its targets. By tracking the rate of scanned items per minute for each employee in its distribution centers, Amazon can automatically issue warnings when workers fall behind the breakneck pace. This surveillance is more successful. But instead of breaking the feedback loops, the feedback loops break the human beings with exceptionally large numbers of serious injuries in the workplace. When you cannot expect people to cooperate naturally with the cybernetic system, the only choice is to reduce them to almost literal machine-cogs with minimal agency.

Walmart, Amazon, and their cohort managed to solve half the problem. Their technologies are more effective at economic planning than anything Cybersyn had access to. What they have not managed to solve is the tendency of these systems to escape human judgment. The result is gaming, cheating, and the creation of alienated workers and managers alike—be it on a Muscovite assembly line or at a Walmart supercenter.

If the surveillance systems and sophisticated methods of social control employed by these firms are not effective, the whole basis of the system is in jeopardy. Workers, consumers, and managers will find glitches that they can exploit. However, if the systems are effective, then we will begin to see a return to the Fordist era of production, a mechanistic world with new forms of the assembly line. Observing the development of the factory system in its infancy, Marx noted that the organizing of workers and the rise of trade unions was a natural consequence of this “socialization of production.” Bringing so many workers together into a central location, linking them together in direct cooperation, and forcing upon them intolerable conditions naturally spurred an organized response. It was no coincidence that the end of Fordism oversaw a vast reduction in unionization.

This uneasiness of cybernetic planning and dictatorship also applies to the state, and for the same reasons. China is one of the biggest pioneers in cyber-systems of social control, especially as wildcat strikes have become far more common since 2014 compared to the previous decades of its industrialization. The implementation of these cybernetic systems has also, on occasion, broken in spectacular fashion. The most notable of these breaks occurred when local officials in Wuhan undermined the system which health authorities used to monitor novel pneumonia cases, hiding the initial COVID-19 outbreak. The system was state of the art, and was supposed to be automatic, feeding information to central authorities from hospitals much in the same way Chile’s Opsroom would receive production statistics directly from factories. But instead of inputting information into the system, hospitals turned towards local officials—probably aware that their necks were on the line as well if they caused an embarrassment for Beijing.

The driving force behind this kind of digital securitization is not the technology itself, but the class dynamics in which its development plays out. Owners, users, regulators, and developers all participate in these lines of conflict and respond to them. Just as Cybersyn was intended to reproduce the values of Chilean socialism, the technologies of Amazon and Walmart ultimately reproduce those of capital.

It is no wonder, then, that the original theoretical work which elevated cybernetic planning to a vision for the future integrated it into a political system of direct worker control over the use and management of these technologies. Beyond Cybersyn, this is reflected in the work of computer scientists and Marxian economists Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell in their 1993 book Towards a New Socialism. It describes a society with all the same science as ours, with all the same desires for consumption. One might go to work, have a family, and shop at the local supermarket just as they would today. It is a world of direct worker control over the cybernetic apparatus and where class divides between owners, users, and creators no longer define their development. The book was originally written in the late 1980s as a program of reform for the communist bloc and would have been translated into Russian soon after, had it not been for the fall of the Soviet Union.

The cybernetic socialist commonwealth is, on paper, a difficult system to cheat. The algorithms that govern it are seemingly free of the systemic errors of Soviet Communism. But we can assume that if there are incentives to cheat it, people will find a way. This is the same principal-agent problem we have observed in capitalist cybernetic planning systems.

Instead of relying on Orwellian surveillance and social control methods to solve this problem, Cockshott and Cottrell look to find ways to put ordinary workers in the driver’s seat. They admit that previous theoretical and practical attempts—whether based around parliaments or parties—have failed. They propose a new political form based around classical, direct democracy on both the macro and micro levels. While these mechanisms likely require vigorous development in their implementation, it is a first step towards reconciling human control with the possibilities of cybernetic systems-building.

Cockshott and Cottrell sketched out a basic set of structural changes in how such a system might operate. On the micro-level, the committee members and administrators who would run institutions and enterprises would be chosen by sortition—that is, random selection—to prevent the emergence of an economic elite. Your average worker would therefore be expected to hold several important positions in their workplace, community or government in their lifetime, much like how every Athenian citizen would be expected to serve as a member of the assembly at some point. On the macro-level, economists would draft multiple plans and craft budgets for sectors not subject to the consumer market—such as healthcare, education, R&D and investment—which would be subject to approval by larger representative bodies.

The control mechanisms of such a society would be designed with the same goals as Project Cybersyn: to streamline and simplify such that anyone could wield them. Institutions based on sortition have a similar educational outlook as a successful bureaucracy. Instead of relying on particular geniuses to come along to lead in some spectacular fashion, everyone must be trained and prepared to take on leadership roles at a standard level. This is not a new notion, but similar to changes affected by the historical Prussian bureaucracy to improve it against its French rivals. Although more specialized roles could only be filled with a more limited number of people, the overall ethos nonetheless changes as a result. Within the organized body working toward a particular mission, everyone has the ability to replace or be replaced by someone else.

Compare this ethos of administration by those doing the actual work with administration in a standard company. A simple concrete example: anyone who is familiar with popular business software—whether a database, accounting, or correspondence—can attest to the clumsy and confusing user interface so common to all of them. The interests expressed in these tools are not ones of accessibility or ease of use for those working with them, but the incentive for ongoing profits from a service relationship.The expectation is that professionals and managers be specially trained, as well as possessing superior intelligence, and therefore perfectly capable of wading through any obtuseness.

While the cybernetics approach of both capitalist firms and authoritarian states have hardly mastered the worker as a node of feedback, we can be certain that a cybernetic society remains the future. China’s high-tech systems were unable to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic, but they were robust enough to contain it domestically. U.S. policymakers had access to fairly advanced systems in theory, but acted in accord with factional political incentives in practice, as well as outsourcing decisions to international bodies. Our epoch is commonly referred to as the Information Age; but what makes the information of our present period unique is its integration into cybernetic systems. Our history is the history of the computer, of Cybersyn, of Walmart’s database, Amazon’s warehouses, China’s health reporting, and even Cockshott and Cottrel’s utopian vision.

It is a truly odd situation where the political economy of cybernetics is repeating itself. For small- and medium-sized businesses, the threat of massive computerized enterprises swallowing them up is no longer embodied in socialist projects like Allende’s Cybersyn, but rather in their multinational corporate rivals.

Business owners, including those with small businesses, were essential to the rise of neoliberalism both in Chile and the U.S. In both cases, their chief program was the atomization of production and the disruption of unions. However, the return of consolidation and the Fordist production framework is already a reality. The pressure on consumption caused by a falling rate of profit was arrested by the neoliberal era, but only partially. A return to the era of working class agitation and industrial titans will doom the class status of small and medium business owners, weakened as they already are by the fallout of COVID-19.

Should these business owners gather enough political strength to shut down this development, they will be remembered much like those classes of bygone eras who shut down technological progress in order to preserve their lifestyles and their power, whether it be the Roman emperors, the merchants of Florence, or the medieval guilds. The future where local and national-level business interests succeed in using anti-trust to break up what they perceive as technological threats, manage to collect further subsidies from the government to fund their existence, or secure special exemptions for the hyper-exploitation of labor, is the future that will be handed to Chinese planners on a silver platter.

What if they should fail in this endeavor? In that case, an opportunity might arise to let the needs of human labor shape the future of these technologies. Rather than serving as a band-aid solution to surveil, discipline, or replace labor, it can be harmonized with it. Technological development can be conditioned by something other than the dynamics of class self-preservation. The question will then be who dares first to integrate the cybernetic economy with the worker, rather than the other way around.

This reinterpretation can fall into two camps: analysis that exists in relationship to the contemporary realm of debate and ideas, or an analysis which exists in relationship to the historical and economic facts. Since talking about ideas is more natural and cheaper for media outlets, these analyses tend to dominate. Even the nature and interests of classes are transmuted into the realm of ideas.

This brings us to the debate about the New Class, also known as the professional and managerial class. To the populist right, the rhetorical purpose of the New Class is to identify an economic base for globalism and the liberal elite. To the populist left, it is the supposed economic basis for neoliberal technocracy. The theory has seen four major waves in its history: first in anarchist critiques of Marxism, then in Trotskyist analysis of the USSR, before being picked up by neoconservatives and socialist critics of the New Left. In the past five years, it has finally experienced a revival among populists of all stripes.

This should come as no surprise; the culture of educated professionals is highly visible in our elite institutions. These people are the Beltway thinkers, the punditry, the liberal intelligentsia, the libertarian think-tankers, the Brooklyn podcasters, the business school frat bro executives, the NGO lobbyists, the heads of corporate HR, the New York Times columnists, and the San Francisco start-up financiers. They are an amorphous mix of everything ordinary people are supposed to despise about how our system works. What they have in common, besides participating in elite institutions, is simple: they are college-educated and engaged in intellectual labor.

But while their cultural impact is salient and distinct, the question whether they actually constitute their own economic class is often overlooked. This leaves the analysis fundamentally incomplete. If the New Class is in fact a distinct economic entity, then any current set of ideas surrounding it is, to some extent, merely a reflection of its current interests. In order to not be fooled by changing circumstances, we would have to understand the enduring basis of its power. On the other hand, what if it has no basis in economic reality at all? In that case, we would be dealing with a cultural phenomenon which needs explaining. If the New Class only exists in the realm of ideas, then it is something of a spook. It might reflect a real identity or a cultural dynamic, but the real power structure beneath all this is something else entirely.

What are the fundamental attributes of class? To fit educated professionals into the larger social theories of economic classes, they need two major characteristics: a unique stream of income and a distinct class ideology. The first is necessary to establish them as an economic class, the second to understand them as a political actor.

In terms of income, there are the typical forms: wages, salaries, and investment income through stock options or 401Ks. The higher one traverses the ladder of corporate professionals, the more monetary incentives there are to align one’s interest with shareholders. At the very top, they are indistinguishable from the capitalist class. But this class, as popularly conceived, includes all fields of white collar knowledge work, such as fee-earning lawyers and doctors, tax-funded bureaucrats, and tenured professors.

Most of these positions could just as easily be placed into traditional economic categories of working class and petite bourgeoise—that latter group being small business owners, managers, and professionals like lawyers. But critics who uphold the New Class status of these professionals and managers instead focus on the type of work done, rather than the form of income. Right-populists today point towards the professional managerial class’ role in coordinating production in a way that undermines the roles of capitalists and capital markets.

However, this is not a new idea. Adam Smith and Karl Marx both foresaw the same managerial revolution with the emergence of joint-stock companies. In fact, the pinnacle of this administration seems to have come in the 1950s, rather than today. During this period in industrial capitalist economies, the corporate bureaucracy ran the show as a member of a triumvirate with unions and government. After the dominance of neoliberalism and the Chicago school of economics from the 1970s onward, corporate government and capital markets alike underwent numerous changes at the hands of Congress and corporate raiders to ensure the sanctity of shareholder value above all else. Hostile takeover bids, private equity, and tying executive pay to share price were all part of a process designed to overcome the principal-agent problems between the corporation and its owners.

While corporate executives were instrumental in off-shoring jobs and globalizing supply chains, big investors were also key. They flooded money into the Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese capital markets and pressured corporations to deliver growth. Indeed, the most administratively advanced companies are those not controlled by professionals at the top, but which have powerful owners exercising direct control: Jeff Bezos for Amazon and the Walton family for Walmart.

In contrast to a conspiratorial fear of the New Class as a new ruling elite, the populist left identifies the professional managerial class not with its management of capital, but of people. Like the right, this method of identifying the New Class with its work is done to separate it from groups such as nurses and teachers, who generally command more sympathy and whose work could be seen as a necessity in a way that a lawyer’s is not. Amber Lee Frost stands in contrast to her more academic forebears when she presents the most articulated version of the populist left attack on the managerial class, identifying them with the same paternalism of an HR department. Barbara and John Ehrenriech, two examples of these forebears, instead define this class precisely on its social status as a class of professionals.

This focus on professionalization as justification for a truly new class also has its drawbacks, particularly when looking back on the history of professionalization itself. Professionalization as a process was born from the secularization of scholarship and the emergence of liberal universities as the place of training for professionals. This process was key in breaking down the barriers of feudalism which restricted clerical work to the church and work in the state bureaucracy and military officer corps to the aristocracy. In this way, professionalization was a central part of the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the old order. Indeed, early professionals like lawyers were instrumental in bourgeois revolutions like the American and French Revolutions.

Previous interpretations of this theory focus on the monopoly of knowledge bestowed upon this class, focusing on scientific knowledge in the 19th century up until the 1950s, and then on cultural capital after the 1960s. It is true that these are intellectual workers, doing specialized intellectual labor. But then, all human labor requires intellectual work—thinking abstractly about a task and its challenges. What makes educated professionals unique is their training in fitting their task into more abstract theoretical formulations and modifying those theories in turn. They are trained in the methods which society uses to reproduce both scientific knowledge and ideology.

This distinction between scientific knowledge and ideology is a slippery one, even in the most academically rigorous fields. Unsettled debates often mean wide-ranging ideological interpretations until new evidence can be pointed to for clarification.

Marx, in his critiques of the philosophers of his time, identified the work of intellectuals as the ideological defense of the current state of affairs and its ruling class. But, to take a more neutral view of the historical role of intellectuals, it’s clear that all classes in society rely on intellectuals for the production of ideology. In ancient Athens, the learned rhetoricians were just as much the ideologues of the demos as the oligarchs. The universities of Europe which produced the greatest defenders of liberalism in the 19th century also produced its revolutionaries. This is why theories of the New Class often struggle in articulating the distinct ideology of this class. Emphasis on the rationalization of production, maximizing efficiency, and technocratic management are not so different from the ideological traditions of early utopian republicans via the perfection of the law. We may even consider West Coast futurism as the logical end point of Adam Smith’s analysis of the division of labor increasing efficiency.

There have been attempts to make this distinction more empirical by conceptualizing intellectual labor as profit-maximizing labor. But a better formulation might be “surplus-maximizing labor”; most of these workers still see their income come via wages and salaries, incentives which put them in an adversarial relationship with profits. Thus, while the high level executive will push for anything to boost stock prices, the analyst, accountant, and engineer underneath them might feel contrary. Surplus refers here to a broader category than profits; it includes all income generated above the wages of workers directly engaged in production and the cost of other inputs. We have empirical data showing that from the 1980s to 2000, the rate of profit remained mostly flat almost entirely due to the pressure of rising wages for supervisory labor, that is, “management.” 

Ironically, these intensely critical New Class theories have tended to be the only attempts educated professionals have made to be conscious of themselves as a class. It has not produced any form of collective ideology which educated professionals identify with; Frost admits as much but nonetheless wishes to preserve the status of this group as a class. This presents a crucial problem for applying class analysis to this group: the ideology they produce is for the defense of existing classes in society, not themselves. This is what both Frost and Ehrenriech refer to when they speak about the “opportunism” of this supposed class.

The two authors draw rival conclusions, writing as intellectuals of the working class. Frost suggests that the professional managerial class cannot be trusted due to its self-interest in management, while Ehrenriech believes educated professionals are beginning to side with workers and a more egalitarian society as the benefits of meritocratic capitalism have started to break down. There is some evidence for this. Up until the 1990s, college graduates had much higher wage growth than normal workers. This higher rate of growth began to slow before stopping completely after the 2008 financial crisis. The Great Recession was also a turning point that instigated a renewed interest in working class politics by these intellectuals, a trend which was super-charged by Bernie Sanders’ 2015 presidential campaign, and which Frost herself is a part of.

Frost finds herself incapable of coming up with a structural explanation for why any members of this class, like Ehrenriech, would take the side of the workers, since she has enclosed such academics into their own self-interested class with corporate executives and managers. And yet, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization  full of educated professionals suddenly very interested in working class struggle, demands such a structural explanation.

The theoretical background of the New Class hypothesis, which is shared by a number of similar democratic socialists and left-wing populists, helps to explain these limits of imagination. Whereas 19th century anarchists feared the rule of intellectuals, what is ingrained in the memory of contemporary leftists is the failures of the New Left in the 20th century. This is a narrative about radical organizations abandoning class politics over cynicism towards labor movement and instead embracing identity-based movements. In the realm of academic radicalism, the language of Marxism was slowly phased out in favor of post-structuralism.

One of the most identifiable characters in this transition was Herbert Marcuse, sometimes called “the father of the New Left.” The German-American theorist worked for the precursor to the CIA during the ‘40s and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He critiqued the unfreedom he saw at the heart of American social democracy and Soviet communism while rejecting theories of class struggle. In his time, Marcuse was one of the most well-regarded academics and found his home in a number of elite institutions such as Columbia, Harvard, and UC San Diego. Many members of the New Left would go on to be incorporated into elite institutions themselves.

Contemporary socialists would critique the New Left, both for careerism and their penchant for taking on radical ideologies like fashions. Seemingly unmoored from any material tendency or economic class, the New Left destroyed itself and cleared the way for neoliberalism by taking on absurd positions and insular organizational practices. But this leaves a similar difficulty for structuralist theory as Frost mentioned before, a difficulty she seemingly solves only by asserting this radicalism as the result of unique class interests.

Perhaps it is better to turn the problem around if we want to understand it in a structural way. Why does our political and economic system permit, and even encourage, such radicalism in these institutions? Why not simply make universities the site of pure propaganda and indoctrination designed to defend the status quo?

One important feature of a fully developed capitalist economy is its tendency for disruption. Competition demands that our methods of production, our ways of working, and the technologies we employ, be constantly revolutionized in order to make greater profits and edge out competitors. The business cycle and its periodic crises ensure that our frameworks for regulating and understanding the economy shifts under our feet every few decades. What happens when the world that the ideological guardians of the current state of affairs have spent so much effort defending is no longer recognizable? Theories which justify the existing world necessarily come into conflict with a dynamic material reality that is indifferent to them.

Radical critique of the existing order, then, has a special place. Consider the immeasurable value that Keynes’s General Theory provided to capitalism by transforming the material critique of the Great Depression against capitalism itself into the theoretical critique of neo-classical economics. Now, imagine the tremendous opportunity presented here for universities: by training their students in radical critique, their alumni become the ideological representatives of the elites who revolutionize production and write the new regulatory frameworks. With representation in the upcoming elites comes further money and prestige, an investment for the future—assuming, of course, that this radical critique doesn’t undermine these same elite institutions. In this way, radicalism is institutionalized just as much as orthodoxy.

The original problem of the New Class—that is, for the anarchists and Trotskyists who first drew attention to it—was how to critique a state that was not controlled by the capitalist class. Over time, the object of critique moved from the state to ideology: the question became what class was behind the empty radicalism of the liberal elites and the New Left. Rather than paying attention to power structures, thinkers began to focus on the discourse and ideas they generated.

But these are not such very different things. Recall the history of professionalization which made secular, liberal education what it is today. This process is the very same one which opened up the state bureaucracy and military officer corps to meritocratic selection, as opposed to relying on aristocratic privilege. The state and these institutions have overlapping roles in generating legitimacy for the political and economic system we live in, and this generation of legitimacy requires intellectual labor. So, we get the cycle of raising the new intellectuals who work to critique the world of today to justify the world of tomorrow.

For today, however, educated professionals remain a cross-cutting group representing all of the major economic classes in our society, increasingly so the proletariat. Their cultural pathologies and highly visible role in crafting ideology make them an easy target, but they have no structural autonomy or agency—so far, anyway. Classes are not eternal categories of our universe; they are historically contingent and the result of  complicated processes. It is possible to imagine we are living through the pre-history of the professional and managerial class. Something genuinely new might come about if educated professionals and intellectuals find a unique way to benefit from their position and begin to structure society according to their own logic. There are already signs that this kind of reimagining is ongoing. Why were young educated professionals so firmly behind Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns? Besides reaping the outputs of universal government programs, it may be worth it to think where these professionals might find themselves in a Sanders regime—with comfortable government jobs in the newly nationalized industries and welfare administrations.

The consequences of this analysis for our contemporary politics is simple. The extent to which the cultural divisiveness and material incentives of capitalism keep educated professionals from forming a cohesive whole is the extent to which they are not a class; the right and left populists will be proven correct. However, to the extent to which they do become a political agent for themselves, they make possible a new world, and a new kind of political and economic governance, the contours of which are currently unimaginable even to those who desperately search for a horizon beyond our present reality.

A need is something we require to sustain ourselves. A want is something we desire but can only consider consuming if we have our immediate needs met first; we could live without it. Karl Marx remarked somewhere that a society which does not reproduce itself—a society which does not have its needs met—will not last a year. This should be common sense, but a sense, nonetheless, those in charge of our economy seemingly lacked until very recently. Suddenly, in the midst of a global pandemic, we have been quickly forced to rediscover just what is essential and what is not. This distinction has thrown millions of Americans into unemployment virtually overnight.

Modern economists and laymen alike tend to get caught up in the minutia of the role of money in political economy, rather than the underlying hard necessity to prudently allocate economic capacity. As in the case of household budgeting, beyond the veil of debt and money, the allocation of real resources first to needs and then to wants is inescapable.

In a society, there are needs that must be met in order for it to continue to exist in its current form. The process of meeting these needs is known as social reproduction. These needs include literal reproduction, the costs of maintaining family households to keep the population relatively stable. In a capitalist society, these costs are mostly paid through wages. For social reproduction, wages and other sources of income making up household budgets must be sufficient to raise children, participate in upkeep of the social fabric, and allow for time for household chores. Beyond the household, the institutions and infrastructure that make up society must also be reproduced: the state, civil society, schools, churches, police, businesses, etc. Roads must be paved, sewers unclogged, peace kept, and necessities manufactured and shipped. Workers must be paid sufficiently to be able to fulfill these duties sustainably. Only after these needs are met can we collectively consider saving for the future, investing in growth, and consuming luxuries.

Classical economists were deeply concerned with this issue of necessity and its logical counterpart: surplus. As the world was just barely emerging from feudalism, this dichotomy was obvious. Peasant farmers and wage laborers worked primarily for bare subsistence. Thomas Malthus’ hypothesis of population growth trapping society in an equilibrium wage of bare subsistence was based upon thousands of years of empirical data. In this salient context, it was clear to these economists that the cost of social reproduction for a pastoral society was precisely the cost of necessary tools, animals, and natural resources on the one hand, and the cost of subsistence for its population on the other. Production capacity in excess of these needs was surplus.

Early classical thinkers recognized that this model was too simple. Industrial workers require very different sets of tools from pastoral peasants. German workers require beer, while the French require wine. A modern worker must pay for such machines as a refrigerator, a car, and a cell phone in order to fully participate in society and the modern economy, whereas their great-great-grandfather 150 years ago did not. If they live in the city, some may substitute a bicycle or public transit for the car. Our ancestors ate the life cost of disease and injury. We consider modern medical care an essential good.

It’s not the bare biological needs of human life, nor the needs of a particular pastoral mode of life, nor even the sum of needs of every individual, that make up the needs of social reproduction. The cost of social reproduction is determined by the needs of the whole particular society to continue in its current form.

While you cannot exhaustively determine what exactly is a necessity for a particular society, it is only after having met that cost of subsistence that we can allow for all the grandeur of luxury and investment in growth. From surplus above subsistence, we get the whole mass of profits, savings, investment, and consumption of luxury commodities. In capitalism, ownership of this surplus, much of which is spent on luxury, has been used as an incentive to increase production and boost growth; it is what encourages investors to invest, savers to save, and landlords to rent. The disproportionate power of billionaires and the effort of those who aspire to such levels of wealth is this incentive in action.

But like all things in economics, this incentive is a tradeoff.

There are costs to this luxurious incentive mechanism: the production costs of the luxury goods themselves, the free time afforded to those who have secured the means of their substance without labor, the redundancies of production demanded by market competition and consumer choice, the power and talent directed into the zero-sum games in the financial industry which must manage this accumulated wealth, and the speculative bubbles which naturally result from such accumulation.

It seems strange to think about luxury in these terms after hearing the rhetoric of austerity government since the 2008 financial crisis. In the logic of sterile government budgeting, it was social services which were the unnecessary luxury to be cut back, despite helping provide basic necessities for millions. Meanwhile every pain was taken to consolidate further surplus into the hands of financial elites.

The luxuries of supposedly austere government have come back to bite us. Our national stockpiles of essential goods, such as masks and ventilators, are insufficient. Our healthcare system sees the closure of hospital after hospital. With little safety net, many face financial ruin. Health agencies faced bipartisan funding cuts for decades. Expensive health insurance and health care discouraged the sick from seeking help, and likely lead to excess deaths. Decrepit public and subsidized housing programs have enabled a homeless population which could be a hotbed of viral spread when crowded into shelters.

Hence the tradeoff. The reason we do not have these resources and safeguards, and the necessities of a robust economy and state capacity in general, is because we chose to treat the luxuries that compete with them as sacrosanct.  Our popular orthodoxies around economics have made us forget the distinction between needs and wants.

There is nothing wrong with luxury as such. We can and should have the good things in life, from the humble peace of mind in knowing that your people are not desperate for necessities, to the beautifully luxurious trim of our most important spaces and vehicles, to especially the higher luxuries of great collective achievement. The problem is that as a society we have fixated our attention on the wrong luxuries at the expense of the necessities of social reproduction. We have neglected the basics while treating the uninspiring luxuries of our current economic system as fixed.

All luxury, and all property, is premised on the existence of society reproducing itself. If we choose to value things which are in fact luxuries over those things which are in fact necessities, we may find ourselves having neither. Those moments where social reproduction totally breaks down are the object of fear for civilization itself: plagues, wars, famines, and general economic and political collapse.

The Soviet Failures to Meet Necessities and Luxuries

One of the last great lapses in social reproduction was the destruction of the Soviet Union. The depression that followed this collapse was significantly more severe than the Great Depression in the U.S.

The collapse of the USSR offers some valuable lessons for economic necessity, surplus and planning in catastrophes.

During World War II, political scientist Harold Lasswell hypothesized that the level of economic mobilization from the war footing in the U.S. and USSR would continue on in what he called the “Garrison State.” The threat of total war was considered so all-encompassing that mass conscript armies supported by rationing and state-coordinated full employment would be upheld indefinitely.

The USSR bought into this hypothesis and prepared for a conventionally fought World War III, a war where nuclear bombs would merely be extra-large mortars. Machine designs were often kept suboptimal in order to preserve their ability to switch to wartime production—even Soviet cigarettes were slightly larger than their western counterparts so that the machines that created them could also produce bullets in a pinch. Despite having a relatively small economy compared to other great powers, the USSR put all its weight behind military production and innovation so as to compete with the U.S. in conventional battlefield equipment. In contrast, the U.S. relied on its nuclear deterrent to scale down state-led economic mobilization after WWII. Rationing ended and the private sector–led growth.

It’s often been declared that the USSR fell because it failed to innovate, or that the planning system couldn’t adequately allocate capital and resources without price signals. But this explanation is more drawn from the theoretical logic of markets than on studying the actual history of the country. In reality, the USSR had one of the best-educated populations in the world, and scientists who produced many cutting-edge advancements. But there is an important distinction between scientific innovation and innovation in the production process. That distinction makes it clear why a tradeoff exists, and just why incentive systems matter.

While Soviet scientists did innovate in technology, there was no incentive to implement innovations in the production process. Enterprises would reject using the latest, most efficient machines because doing so would mean fewer resources allocated to the enterprise, which would mean less power and wealth for the managers and bureaucrats in charge of it—not to mention, for those they could bribe. More efficiency meant that an enterprise could make do with less, and therefore the planners would ratchet back those resources. This led to systemic hoarding.

Soviet planners, while always in a battle with enterprises for accurate statistics, were generally good at allocating capital and labor to high productivity sectors of the economy. This was how the USSR was able to achieve such high growth up until its stagnation in the 70s. But after the easy gains of industrialization were won, the tendency against changes to the plan won out. The more changes that were proposed, the more computational adjustments would be required, and the more mistakes became possible. This is where focusing on necessity alone can go awry.

The economic plan could secure the necessities of social reproduction, but the incentives to use surplus production for growth existed on paper only. The flaw in the Soviet system was that the mere existence of surplus does not necessarily imply growth. A society can maintain the same level of surplus by simply consuming or squandering all surplus beyond what is required to replace existing capital stocks. This is what happened in the USSR but in a very unusual way. The planners were well aware of the need to implement new innovations to grow, and allocated some 25-35% of GDP towards investment (the all-time U.S. high in the postwar period is roughly 20%). But because much of this investment was not utilized, it was merely consuming surplus. Hence, the stagnation of the late USSR.

But take careful note: social reproduction as such did not break down until there was an attempt to transition towards more liberal, market-based institutions. The severe depression was not directly caused by the failures of Soviet economic planning, but by the breakdown of social institutions and the systemic theft of formerly state-owned enterprises by Russia’s rising oligarchs. It was only when the planning system was replaced by an incentive system that demanded a much higher level of immediate luxury for the oligarchs that society could no longer hold together. An economic system that lacks growth may be maladapted for great power competition and economic development, but one which ignores the requirements for social reproduction will fail spectacularly in both the short and long term.

The New Demands on Surplus

The Garrison State theory was overfitted to a particular problem in a particular time: the immediate threat of total war. But the idea that we may need to mobilize the economy and sacrifice luxury to prepare for crisis is now more pertinent than ever.

We live in a world characterized by big numbers and non-linear systems. Don’t let civilization and all its technological and moral trappings fool you; the threats presented by our own growth are just as existential as those faced by our ancestors. We have never been above nature; we will never escape our war with her.

With a higher population and urbanization comes the ever-increasing possibility of the evolution of new highly transmittable, highly deadly diseases. A one in a ten billion mutation, which would have been near impossible 1,000 years ago, is now near inevitable. Likewise, the exponential growth of industry—molding natural resources into our every desire—has come at the cost of disrupting vital ecological and human social systems. Climate change, widespread extinctions, threatened ecosystem collapses, and pollution more generally can quickly spiral out of control. Technological development and more powerful tools and weapons increase the risk that these new inventions may be turned back on society at large with devastating consequences. Runaway AI, terrorist attacks like 9/11, and nuclear proliferation are all threats of this nature, as are catastrophically misused mass social control technologies.

With ever lower interests, stagnating or falling rates of profit, higher cost of scientific innovation, fossil fuel extraction becoming non-economical, and fewer new markets to colonize, global capital promises even more intense financial speculation and instability going forward. While perhaps not as intrinsically existential as the other threats, the periodic crises of global capitalism may degenerate into larger political crises.

States and societies must find ways to prepare for and deal with all these risks and the crises they generate. There is no single strategy for all of them, but inevitably they all demand the allocation of surplus, and the reliable procurement of necessities.

Luxuries and redundancies do have an important role to play in confronting these risks. Market competition, while necessarily wasteful from an unattainable ideal of perfect distribution, allows for the distributed creation of novel solutions. A quirk of production in a single firm, or a piecing-together of shop-floor insights, can quickly turn into an innovative solution in a way that no government strategist can predict. The profit mechanism automatically allocates surplus to scale up those firms most able to find them. Financial bubbles from out-sized private wealth can help fund risky and expensive innovation, as the dot com bubble in the 90s showed with Amazon and eBay, and the recent tech boom has been showing today. Incentives for growth can lead to great productive powers to be swiftly marshaled in times of need and can increase the amount of surplus overall.

How ironic that meritocratic and naturalistic arguments about market societies hide these benefits. With the death of the rational market hypothesis, the justification of profits of many speculative investors are left on shaky ground; just as the replacement of hard budgets with soft budgets through government bailouts makes a mockery of the idea that those who take the risk reap the reward. Those businesses which wisely save for hard times, not splurging on withdrawals for stockholders, must now compete with those who do not but are still propped up by cheap loans and government bailouts indefinitely. It is better to be lucky than skilled in American capitalism. Large zombie firms, overhyped startups, and financial bureaucracy are taking resources away from those industries and workers which the day-to-day realities of quarantine are proving “essential.”

The first step to confronting the economic necessity of our situation has already occurred, whether we are conscious of it or not. We have been forced to confront the line between our needs and wants. Now we must prepare and act accordingly.

How We Prepare in the American Regime

The next step is to recognize this is a problem whose solution cannot continue to be lamely handed over to private industry acting alone. The consequences of state impotence are clear in the ever “essential” defense industry. While private contracting has always been a cornerstone of American war-making, it used to be that our government could design and produce weapons to meet its strategic needs at institutions like the Springfield Armory—one of the country’s oldest military institutions, founded during the Revolutionary War by General Washington. The resulting hardware could compete in military trials alongside private designs. The Armory was chiefly responsible for the design and production of the M1 Garand during World War II, what General Patton described as “the best battle implement ever designed.” During the height of the war, the Armory produced 164 M1 rifles per hour.

Despite its monumental history and success, the Armory was decommissioned by Secretary of Defense McNamara in 1968, in the midst of the Vietnam War, on the belief that its function could easily be replaced by private industry. One possibly related result has been a stagnation in weapons design, with modern M4 rifles being essentially a refined and modernized M16, first introduced in 1969, based on the 1959 AR-15. Attempts have been made to replace the design using external contractors, but none have yet succeeded.

The closure of Springfield Armory represented a shift in our approach to how we prepare for crisis, a foreshadowing of the coming neoliberal turn. Whereas President Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned us about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, the defense contracting world would swiftly become overtaken by the logic of profit-seeking private enterprise, with higher levels of surplus allocated to luxury.

Private equity entered into the defense sector and slimmed down many large conglomerates, breaking off their consumer businesses from their defense businesses. It used to be that the consumer sides of the business could be used to spark innovations for national defense, especially when it came to cutting edge technologies. But by making defense companies more profitable, this has also shepherded these innovations into the hands of foreign-owned companies, where the expertise and capacity they develop now work against the United State’s exclusive technological edge. It is either that, or expecting the CIA to pay incredible sums to take control of these technologies before they’re lost.

At the same time, government contractors and congressional dysfunction pushing for the state to pay top dollar for the latest gadgets has produced the most expensive weapon system in the world, the F-35 fighter jet. This weapon system continues to underperform in testing and would likely be overwhelmed in a great power hot-war, due to its complexity and inability to be mass-produced.

On the subject of our latest crisis of necessity, the pre-history of the coronavirus failure shows just why we shouldn’t rely on government contractors to pull us out of calamity. Thirteen years ago, the government attempted to procure millions of dollars worth of newly designed, cheap ventilators from a small, California-based company. The endeavor had even produced several working prototypes. Despite everything, the project fell apart when the contractor was bought out by a much larger company that deemed it insufficiently profitable. The replacement contractor, who was paid millions of dollars more, refused to deliver the ventilators to the government stockpiles despite selling them for higher prices to foreign buyers. As for the few ventilators the government did stockpile, thousands were unusable due to a lapse in the contract after a protest from a third party. In total, the federal government has spent nearly $20 million on 30,000 new ventilators that never arrived, all while spending another $38 million to allow thousands of our 10,000 ventilator stockpile to go into disrepair.

Private industry isn’t friendly to the logic of economic necessity. Effective stockpiling is expensive for the government in normal times due to the need to rotate supplies. Large corporations could effectively stockpile, using consumer demand to rotate out the stock, but then they would be forced to give up control of supply when demand is at its height in crisis.

Some commentators have suggested that stockpiling and preparedness for risks such as those mentioned here are unnecessary or even wasteful. In their analysis, the lack of emphasis on the national stockpiles and planning in countries such as South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan shows that the competency of key leadership is the most important factor in crisis outcomes.

It is, of course, correct that competent leadership is a requirement for a good crisis response. It is also true that the American political and bureaucratic systems lack such competent leadership, while East Asian governments have been shown to be much more flexible and forceful in their response. But it is not the case that planning and stockpiling have been superfluous in these countries.

It is easy to mistake the absence of evidence in Western reporting for the evidence of absence. While the failures of American stockpiles and planning are well known, and thus the existence of such plans and stockpiles, the utilization of stockpiles and long term plans by South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan has been less well understood.

In fact, the approvingly cited responses of these governments were as much the result of decades of preparing and building upon existing systems as they were of competent leadership. Each of the three countries maintains significant stockpiles of Personal Protective Equipment, as well as antiviral treatments. Their stockpiles allowed them to meet the high demand and rationing requirements even as China began to pressure exports early on and while attempts to use surge capacity were still just beginning. The highly praised digital transparency and surveillance measures were built upon similar measures pioneered in the SARS outbreak in 2003 as well as H1N1 outbreak in 2010. Emergency preparedness is one of the fundamental responsibilities of competent leadership.

However, it is quite right to critique U.S. leadership for lacking competency. The most basic demand for containing the epidemic has been to vigorously test and track down infected persons early on. In this, we have totally failed and failed for reasons that have a great deal to do with competency. In the key month of February, there were multiple points of failure at the FDA and CDC, including the refusal to use tests already developed by the World Health Organization and labs overseas, not moving quicker in allowing those labs which received the CDC test to throw out the unusable portion, and not removing bureaucratic hurdles for third party labs to produce diagnostic testing.

Had any one of those points of failures been avoided, the American testing capacity would have been greatly improved and perhaps allowed us to detect community spread as it occurred. The FDA had all the legal authority required to waive the regulatory red tape around any of these problems, but those in charge of the coronavirus response were complacent and lacked the imagination to take drastic action. Reports have now emerged that HHS Secretary Azar severely underestimated the threat, and charged a 37-year-old former dog breeder with no medical or bureaucratic background to lead the day to day management of the crisis.

The federal bureaucracy, too, shares some of the blame, but not in the way most of its adversaries claim. We cannot blame the bureaucracy for following bureaucratic rules and regulations; it is their fundamental imperative to obey such orders. We know we’re in truly hot water once the bureaucracy starts acting autonomously, as an agent with its own independent interests.

Rather, the true failure of the bureaucracy was that no intelligent civil servant identified the severity of the problem and alerted leadership before the media—for example, by understanding that the lack of applications for Emergency Use Authorizations was the result of red tape and not lack of interest. The failure of leadership is a fundamental political problem, but it is entirely plausible to imagine a more competent federal bureaucracy through stricter hiring standards, no longer allowing veterans to cut in line in the hiring process, and reducing the number of political appointees. On the agency level, congressional pressure has generally tended to create more paperwork, mainly so that the bureaucracy has a paper trail to cover for itself when under review. Agencies not subject to appropriations are generally much more flexible. The public corporation model pioneered by the FDIC is much more functional in many cases, and has even been proposed elsewhere.

But, more fundamental to the critique that America lacks competence rather than preparedness is the wariness of “Maginot Line” planning. The concept comes from the famous WWII-era French plan to stall invasion by Germany with a series of walls and fortifications, which came apart as the German army simply circumvented them by going through Belgium. While it may seem like a ridiculous oversight in retrospect, it was quite easy to understand why the French planners could not have foreseen the problem in advance. Belgium was, after all, an ally, and they couldn’t simply put up military encampments on their border. The French had also expected cooperation with the Belgians in defending an extension of the Maginot Line, cooperation which collapsed in 1936.

All planning is, at its most basic, a model predicting future events. The problem with Maginot Line-style planning, which has many examples in history, is that either the model is overfitted to specific past experiences, or that the model, by attempting to be comprehensive, becomes unstable. Its very complexity and scale can make it liable to disproportionate changes in outcomes when encountering the unexpected.

In military history, the failure to procure sufficient logistical support has killed far more campaigns than over-planning. At the same time, the most effective plans are not the plans where everything follows its expectations. The most effective plans are where the estimations are so conservative and the goals so ambitious that enormous resources are marshaled to overcome even multiple points of failure.

The U.S. invasion of France in WWII illustrates this well. Here, too, the plans were too comprehensive, too complicated, and failed in multiple places. But, after the initial landing on Normandy, all the failures were on the side of conservatism: supplies were being offloaded into France far faster than the plan accounted for. If the generals had stuck to the plan the invasion would have proceeded at a snail’s pace. It took competent leadership to assess the situation and charge ahead as far as the logistic supply chains would allow, which is precisely what General Patton did.

Good planning is simple and aims towards providing general capabilities, not specific ones. The political situation in 1936 caused the U.S. to begin to plan for war in this way, ramping up production of the M1 Garand at the Springfield armory so as not to be caught flat-footed. In the USSR, Stalin framed the rapid industrialization drive as necessary preparation for war as early as 1931, at a time when the contours of WWII could scarcely be comprehended. But industry was an instrumental goal, since it could be used in many flexible ways necessary for defense.

A New Kind of Austerity

Today, the United States does have industry, atrophied as it is by decades of offshoring production. But it would still be more than sufficient if our leaders had the competency and will to use it. Imagine if, instead of allowing private industry to extort for the privilege of utilizing precious medical supplies, we took control as South Korea or Taiwan did early on. The framework is totally within the executive’s legal authority at this juncture. At minimum, we could have avoided the worst shortages of masks and ventilators. Even better, we could have a civilian version of the Springfield Armory, a state manufacturing R&D center that could design, create, and coordinate production for essential goods in a crisis. Such a proposal is not new at all, but a renewal of a great American tradition.

But now we are too cowardly to dare impede the luxuries afforded to private industry. Private actors and organizations who control crucial supply chains become indignant at the thought that they are not the most essential link, or that anything more needs to be done. The logic of social reproduction is above their heads, just as it is and has been recently for the White House. If we should get through this crisis intact, it will be in spite of these actors, not because of them.

The contingencies of this crisis remain unpredictable; the risk of things getting out of control is very real whether in biological, political, or economic terms.

Current medical estimates state that the world will face more and more of these crises. And novel viruses are only one of the supreme contingencies which can realize the threat of a breakdown of social reproduction on a previously almost unthinkable scale.

To meet these challenges, we must first upend the primacy of the luxury incentive in our society, and begin to think about how to use the surplus at our disposal in the most strategic way. We must use the unique properties of our increasingly developed world to our advantage in coming crises.

We must conceptualize a new kind of austerity, one premised on the allocation of total surplus away from luxury and towards maximizing our ability to respond to immediate and future crises. And if we have run out of crises to prepare for, our surplus could be allocated to great public striving for new heights of development. Above all what must be avoided is the fatal complacency that sacrificed essential preparedness and public well-being and achievement to an overextended commitment to liberal incentive mechanisms.

We might begin by restructuring or even slashing the rents associated with intellectual property and academia, and so start to fully utilize the scientific capacities of our country. State imprimatur would go a long way toward normalizing important but currently underground institutions like libgen and scihub as the legitimate media for reproducing knowledge.

Measures of such a program might include the rationing of pollutants like carbon, expansion of public or regulated monopolies, greater strategic stockpiles, backstop public labor programs to provide a productive wage floor, public investment in market housing to decrease passive rents, breaking of regulatory capture in stagnant or overgrown industries like health care, artificially scarce luxury goods as public fundraisers, industrial policy to track and increase productive capacity, and creatively strengthened tax policies to reward productivity and discourage passive speculation. Much can be imagined, given the will to see surplus as something to be allocated strategically, and see beyond luxury as the sole motivation for production.

This new kind of austerity regime would make certain goods more expensive in the short-term as well as put downward pressure on profits. That is the price we would have to pay. Economics is about trade-offs, after all.

But it also comes with its own luxuries for normal people, those who are essential for the reproduction of our society. Job security, healthcare, and education, which have increasingly become essentials for reproduction of our society, could cease to be treated as privileges.

But such a program would require the development of a state consciousness among the powerful quasi-governing segments of American society that currently conceive of themselves as private actors without public duty. Without a change in consciousness, to see that their interests are intimately tied to the public interest, they may find themselves more comfortable with the continued decline of American civilization.

To those concerned with its preservation, among the elite and in the general population, there can be nothing more misguided than the clutching at private wants against public needs with such pathological drive. Americans tend to have a certain contempt for those who spend away their earnings on frivolous things; this has been the driving political force behind neoliberal austerity. Let us hold up a mirror to our economy in this crisis and recognize that same failure on a national scale.

For too long, across the political spectrum, we have been overcome by fantasies that amount to extravagant luxury. It is time to start thinking of economic necessity once again.

This loneliness, taken in sum, is an ever growing trend going back not just decades but centuries. It is also a cause of radical violence today: from far-right attacks, to radical street brawling, to incel shootings, to ISIS terror. Violence turned outward, rather than inward. To understand it, we can’t allow pity or moral outrage to cloud our judgment, as we consider what loneliness is, and what people seek out in radicalness.

Loneliness is, after all, the lack of love, of intimacy and friendship. It is the frustrated desire, the longing, to seek out those things. In the hierarchy of basic human needs, love and belonging are one step removed from bare physical homeostasis in their immediate importance. People who cannot find love, or more generally cannot find belonging in intimate and meaningful human social fabric, in a directly personal way will find other ways to channel that desire. They will adopt more desperate schemes for its eventual fulfillment. Extreme variations of how people abstract their love are well-documented. People become obsessed with the likenesses of famous actors, animated and fictional characters, or other inanimate objects. This one-sided love, abstracted further, can also find a home within ideology, as the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm suggested more than half a century ago as he struggled to come up with explanations for the disastrous rise of nationalism in the buildup to World War II.

In this telling, far from being driven by a primal hatred and distrust of the other in the first instance, nationalism was motivated by love. But not the kind of intimacy that can exist between two actually existing people: love abstracted. Love focused on something which exists mostly in the framework of their ideology: the organic community of the nation or race. From here comes the introduction of hatred of the other, and the most vehement kind of hatred. Hatred borne from the perceived slight against the object of their affections, the jealousy of a lover.

In another possible telling, the desperately unfulfilled need for human belonging produces a radical dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a lack of social bonds tying one to the status quo. The lonely person can easily come to believe that a radical upheaval is necessary to produce the kind of world which would be acceptable to them, and which would accept them. If that upheaval would be brutal and violent, without bonds of love they have no particular reason to care. Beyond radicalism, the desperate yearning for belonging can power all kinds of otherwise unconvincing narratives of promise, like consumerism, lifestyle choices, and the rat race itself.

These motivations apply to radicalism across the board, whether violent or not, and many things not normally considered radical. The resurgence of socialism and nationalism, much like in Fromm’s time, are two highly visible symptoms of this. More mundanely, you can see it in everything from increasingly tribal identity politics to simple consumerist fandom. It need not be any kind of radicalization at all. It could be the familiar mainstream desperate clamor for promotion, wealth, status, and success.

The question of radicalism or normalcy here has little to do with the accuracy or level of consciousness of the ideology. It’s not just that person who turns to radicalization out of frustration has adopted some kind of false narrative, or that the mainstream normalcy is correct or healthy. Rather, the important feature is how the unfulfilled need for belonging or other basic psychological and social needs can motivate radicalization. Sometimes, the implied plan in the ideologies we turn to out of loneliness may be completely out to lunch. But sometimes the radical ideology is in fact a much more rational, healthy and accurate perception, that society as it is will in fact never work for that person, whether because it is simply dysfunctional, or actively hostile.

There is an important distinction, however, between the radical violence of the early 20th century in Europe and the radical violence of the early 21st century, even if we allow the loneliness hypothesis. The working class radicalism that Marx was so interested in, developed as it was in the factories where workers were alienated from one another, had its roots in a certain loneliness. But it was still a communally experienced loneliness. Thus, it gave rise to radical organizational forms such as the workers councils, militant trade unions, communes and Soviets, etc.

Despite the wide girth of difference, the anti-semitic explosion of violence in Germany in 1938 did share something in common with the explosion of anti-capitalist working class violence in the revolution just 20 years earlier. It was also a communal experience.

Relatively recent scholarship on Kristallnacht has highlighted just how the violence was a social affair, one that, while carried out by the Nazi Party and state apparatus and eventually sanctioned by Hitler, also included a large amount of involvement from non-politically affiliated actors. Neighbors who harbored grudges from mundane humiliations or arguments involving Jews in their community would use the opportunity to torment them. Factory employees, often organized by their employers, and children released from school, were brought into the frenzy. One account describes a man playing the organ for the Nazis and rioters sacking a synagogue as if it were a celebration.

Fromm contends that herd conformity, which is often brutally enforced in totalitarian societies as in Nazi Germany, is a method of solving the problem of aloneness. He suggested that the socialization of the means of production, the consolidation of capital and labor into massive corporations and unions during the 20th century, were the source of this conformity. The highly mobilized totalitarian conformity is a way of pretending, via imitation, that we are not truly separate, that we are all unified in the same multi-cellular organism. The desire to be a meaningful and valued part of a larger social organism is deeply natural, and deeply motivating. Despite not actually offering the substance of such an organic community, the mass totalitarian movements of the 20th century could use its allure as a motivator for their supporters. The intense need for belonging would be abstracted and redirected into participation in the mass conformity rituals.

This is the fundamental difference between then and now: loneliness is no longer a communal experience. But to understand why that is the case, why this communal experience has expired, we have to first understand precisely why loneliness has seen a dramatic increase.

There are several theories.

One theory is that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s should receive the blame for our current predicament. The socialist cultural critic Angela Nagle, French provocateur Michel Houellebecq, and disparate right-wing anti-feminists are among the major promoters of this narrative.

The argument goes something like this: the sexual revolution, by destroying the nuclear family, monogamy, and traditional cultural norms, inadvertently increased social isolation as the usual methods of finding and keeping companionship and close relationships broke down, and the notion of free love was discovered to be vapid.

There is an element of truth to this theory. Capitalism, with its constant need to innovate, find new markets, and place the capture of monetary value above all else, will tend to uproot traditional institutions, customs, and mores, in order to bring more transactions into the market sphere. All that is solid continues to melt into air. This includes the nuclear family and monogamous relationships.

But this doesn’t explain why loneliness trended upward far before the sexual revolution. The American 1950s, in particular, was a time of self-recognition of this loneliness. 1950 was the year that The Lonely Crowd was published, a widely read critical sociological and psychoanalytical analysis of American society. The automated, mechanistic working breadwinner in Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, consumed by big business, big unions, the accompanying bureaucracies and Fordist production framework, was a socially isolated figure, alienated from other workers and society as a whole. These men, even though their jobs were secure and their prosperity the object of envy for contemporary workers, were slotted into an anonymous machine that left them without the dignity that comes with power in their own social environments.

As was the archetypal housewife of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, for whom social mobility was severely repressed after marriage and who was expected to suffer through her side of the division of labor alone, in a household structure that had itself been alienated from work and extended family. Where traditionally a woman had a meaningful domain at the center of a household that was embedded in a thicker social fabric and in economic production, in the new nuclear family structure she was now left alone in a glorified bedroom.

Yes, these were complaints of a largely well-off middle class, one that was the beneficiary of a wide ranging social safety net and decades of successfully entrenching their position. But these kinds of problems are often first problems for the upper classes, first and foremost the bourgeoisie. They are the first adopters of the new, the destroyers of the old. They are the guinea pigs of their own social experimentation.

The bourgeoisie welcome revolutionized commodity relations with open arms, because at least in the short-term it is in their interest. They thus will be among the first to feel the consequences of disruption, besides those workers who are trapped in such precarity that they have no choice but to embrace marketized relations.

The nuclear family itself was one such innovation, which atomized, standardized, and commodified the relationships that used to be embedded in the extended household. I’ve felt the history of this innovation in my own family, through the stories of my grandmother, now 98 years of age. She grew up in a crowded, poor, multi-generational home in South Texas, with grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, all together, supporting each other and enmeshed in mutual relations. A common experience among Latinos at the time. When the war started, she went to work as a welder in the shipyards—the kind of job that allowed her to support her family and move into the middle class. She’s told us so many stories about these times in her life, stealing walnuts from the trees in town with her cousins, estranged hobo relatives coming to visit, watching her mute aunt reenact the movies she saw. In the shipyards, she earned the respect of her male supervisors as one of the best welders they had, a Latina version of Rosie the Riveter. Every time we sit down to eat together, she tells us about the time the whole shipyard went down with food poisoning from bad chili and people got to thinking the Germans had attacked. But those stories stopped once she settled down with my grandfather, who became an accountant after returning from the war. This is when she started her life in the nuclear family, and her social circle became much smaller. As for my grandfather, he won an award for never missing a single day of work. Once he was finally forced to retire, he lost a lot of meaning in his life. He died when I was still young, but now Grandma lives with us—an echo of the sort of multi-generational home that used to be.

Loneliness as a secular upward trend cannot be said to begin with the sexual revolution. In fact, the sexual revolution was a reaction to the already existing loneliness of society in the 1950s.

The sexual revolution, after all, was built upon the ideas of psychoanalysts such as Wilhelm Reich and J.L. Moreno who wished to solve people’s anxieties and hang-ups with either new methods of releasing sexual repression, or find ways to cultivate personal relationships through acting out and making explicit emotions. They, and others, spoke against the conformist and repressed society they found themselves in. Moreno in particular, by inventing the sociometric diagram (the web-like graph which displays relations between individuals), put the focus on connections between people. He believed that this mapping out of relations would eventually allow clinicians, which he called Sociatists, to diagnose and treat disorders within our “social atoms,” the constellation of emotional connections we uphold—the geography of our friendships and companions. When we grow older, we begin to lose more and more relationships without any easy means of replacement. For Moreno, “A man dies when his social atom dies.”

No profession like Sociatists ended up being created. Instead, sociometry was only much later put to work in digital marketing as the internet and social media took off.

Reich, on the other hand, attempted to solve the problem of aloneness in one of the less direct time- honored methods: eroticism and the communion of the flesh. The Hippy Free Love movement was one such outgrowth of this instinct.

Both Reich and Moreno were influential in the promotion of forms of group therapy to solve society’s ills, such as “Encounter Groups” and “T-Groups.”

As one might guess, these attempts ultimately failed. Finding oneself participating in restrictive social relations that have lost their purposes and larger material context, which thus no longer make the sense they once did, it is easy to idealize less restrictive alternatives like free love. But the loosened alternatives cannot solve the actual problem, which is structural. They amount to just another reactive symptom.

Both Nagle and the anti-feminists, however, insist that such loosening morals have led to the emergence of contemporary reactionary movements and violence. The phenomenon of incels (involuntarily celibate men, often in the same ecosystem as those earlier mentioned anti-feminists), as well as the violent outbursts and shootings at the hands of ideologically driven incel perpetrators like Elliot Rodger, is taken to be an especially visible consequence of this. But when broken down empirically, the direct cultural explanation doesn’t work. The first generation of men to come of age after the sexual revolution did so in the 80s and 90s. But virginity rates among young people did not begin to significantly trend upward until 2008, the Great Recession, thus suggesting a material economic and not cultural cause. The 2008 recession created a much more intensive rat race for a shrinking pool of positions, and changed much in the economic landscape to make healthy relationship formation harder.

More mainstream academic theories tend to shift the focus towards broad forces, such as individualism. Individualism as a source of loneliness in the Anglophone world was documented as far back as the early 19th century, where narrow self interest and social isolation dominated life in Britain and the United States. Modern academics sound a similar note, suggesting myths about rugged individualism, containing figures such as the lone gangster, businessman, or cowboy, have an unhealthy grip on the American consciousness. People strive to find success on their own, at the expense of isolation and bitter disappointment in failure. But this emphasis on individualism versus collectivism risks falling into a kind of ahistorical and Anglo-centric dead end. Loneliness and social isolation are just as prevalent if not more among Japanese society as American, all while still maintaining formal collectivist traditions. And loneliness hardly decreased in those periods of American history where collectivist attitudes were at their strongest, whether the conformist 50s or the eroticist 60s. The connection is, at best, tangential and contingent, at worst, spurious.

What, then, is the ultimate cause of this trend?

The cause is the commodification of social relations and the growth of atomization more generally. As was mentioned earlier, commodification breaks up traditional social relations, replacing them with the dizzying arithmetic calculations of exchange and price. Instead of friends, family, neighbors, and patrons, there are buyers, sellers, employers, and employees, who are, on a structural level and oftentimes on a personal level, either mutually alienated from each other or outright adversarial.

To explain what I mean by atomization, I think it’s best to refer to two illustrative metaphors.

In economics, atomization is the opposite of socialization or integration in terms of production. If socialization integrates different aspects of production into a single enterprise with direct coordination/cooperation, atomization is the dispersion of production into a multitude of different actors who only coordinate/cooperate indirectly and transactionally. Near the end of feudalism in Britain, textile production was originally atomized and undertaken by individual households who would then have their products taken by merchant guilds to markets. This production was slowly integrated as the economy of scale in factories and the invention of the power-loom made such atomized production obsolete.

Individuals can also become atomized on this simple material level. Commodification is one way this sort of atomization proceeds, but so can, as we’ve seen, changes in the organization and economic role of households. And the historical record in this account is startling. In large cities, those households composed of one person living alone has increased at an almost exponential rate in the West since the 1500s, not surprising considering that it seems to correlate linearly to economic development of the type we have experienced.

Of course, living alone doesn’t not mean that you are lonely or “alone” emotionally. To understand that emotional distance, it’s important to return to the social atom of Sociometry. The lines of connections in a sociometric diagram, informed empirically by whom we communicate with, for how long, and with what level of intimate language, are representations of that emotional bond. If we were to produce a time series of the Sociometric diagram for one individual experiencing atomization, it would reveal the ever decreasing number and strength of these connections.

On the internet, it is possible in theory to maintain intimate personal ties even though geographic distance remains large, and yet, despite the ability to close thousands of miles, social media does little to replenish our social atoms. It doesn’t take much to realize just why. Consider, for example, how social media data is used: to provide analytics for advertisers. Rather than using such data to understand and develop the relations between individuals, something which is only done as a purely theoretical activity for researchers, this data is commodified itself and every effort is put towards directing our attention and emotions towards products, rather than people. The same data which could be put to use in a Sociometric analysis on the health of our social atoms is instead used to form social relations with commodities.

The alienating, atomizing nature of today’s internet landscape has been credited as a major radicalizing force, but what is unique about the internet is not the degree of radicalization it cultivates, but rather the level of abstraction of that radicalism. For lone wolf ISIS or incel terrorists, the organic community they profess their allegiance to is immaterial compared to those of radical movements of yesteryears; the German Nazis who carried out anti-semitic violence on Kristallnacht at least lived among an “Aryan” race (even if the contours of this race was an ideological fiction), the socialist revolutionaries in 1918 still had a real connection to the Worker Councils and the labor movement (even if that movement lead to the establishment of a Social Democratic Republic, rather than direct rule by the Councils). Modern day violent radicals, who have grown up in the information age, have no such connection. What is the community of betas and virgins to the incel? There is no such community. What is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to the ISIS terrorist or supporter in the West? Nothing but a faraway symbolic fantasy. Not even a fantasy with a material representation in their lives.

It is this level of abstraction that makes our current experience of atomization so dangerous. It used to be the case that violent, radical movements had the end goal of either influencing policy or taking state power themselves. Totally atomized radicalism throws such assumptions on their heads. Without intimate personal relations, and concrete goal-directed organized form, traditional methods of social control break down. Material carrots and sticks lose their value along with the dearness of life itself. Suicidal violence projected outwards is a threat that states are not, and cannot, be prepared for. It’s the only kind of violence that can fully actualize the possibility of a war of “all against all,” which was previously only hinted at in the threat of civil war.

This threat of atomization, through the replacement of relations between people with relations between quantities, has been the lingering horror of all civilization up until our present epoch. Some anthropologists suggest that the creation of patriarchal religions among nomadic and early agricultural societies was a reaction against the simultaneous creation of money and prostitution. The Nigerian Tiv, who isolated themselves in the mid-1750s as the African slave trade menaced the region, are well known for their horror stories of mystic creditors coming due. The restriction of commerce and debt to Jews in medieval Europe has often been cited as one of the historic reasons for anti-semitism, but one should also consider the opposite side of the question: why did commerce and debt have to be so restricted to a single ethnicity for easy scapegoating and containment?

Post-structuralists called this historic fear the fear of “decoding,” the negation of all social formations into an unnamable, horrifying Thing. Primitive societies required this fear to reproduce. It demanded people cling to familial and tribal relations all the more dearly, in order for those relations to re-form when they became impearled by shocks, whether from within or without.

But now that fear has been realized.

The modern secular state itself was an attempt to bring these tendencies of atomization and decoding, of capitalism and its prehistorical seeds, to heel. To bring order to the chaos of social disruption, innovation, and economic development, so that society may not suddenly and vehemently undo itself. This state presupposes a certain level of atomization. Indeed, when Thomas Hobbes began his justification of the social covenant that demanded Leviathan, he constructed a model of human atoms and the characteristics of these atoms that caused discord and cooperation. Taken in its most abstract form, it’s not too different from the empirical and specific sociometric diagramming Moreno would do hundreds of years later: looking at who in a community was attracted to whom, and who was repulsed by whom.

The reason the state requires this atomization is simple. In order for the modern state to have authority, it must formally take people as atomistic political actors: citizens, voters, subjects, etc. These actors, who may or may not form organic political communities on their own, must ultimately see their unity in the state. They must acknowledge the state’s laws as having some authority above them, beyond both their own ideological pretenses and the physical military power backing such laws up.

However, this necessity exists only on a structural level; it is necessary for its reproduction. Historically, it came about as a contingency. The first instance, in that of Britain, this atomization was a socio-economic fact on the ground. Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan not long after the economic process of primitive accumulation was formalized by the state, whereby the British peasantry was removed from their lands to make room for pasture, creating a large mass of landless peasants. With them came the fear of “masterless men” more generally: ephemeral, impoverished creatures who’d wreak havoc wherever they went with no social ties to hold them in check, and no home to return to. With the de facto break down of the old feudal authority structures, such as the church and tying of the peasants to the land, a new justification for authority was required, especially after the earthquakes of the English Civil War. Gone was piety, in was necessity.

But the unity of interests in the state was always a mere ideological convergence. It cannot solve the problem of atomization and aloneness any better than tribalism, radicalism, or a life-size cardboard cutout of Chris Evans. Fundamentally, Hobbes’s model still depended on there being relations between these atoms, attractions and repulsions. But what if no such relations exist?

Consider atoms in a void, falling in parallel. Without collisions, there can be no relationship between them. It is a totally static system, without anything you could ascribe meaning to. Humans in such a situation, trapped, for example, in an eternal labyrinth doomed to wander forever without encountering another soul, missing a potential companion in an infinitely expanding tragedy of errors, every desperate turn the wrong one, would lose all things that characterize us as humans, including language. And this is the horror of atomization.

The possibility that this labyrinth could be of our own creation is just more cruel irony.

But atomization is just a historical tendency, and a feature of the way we have organized ourselves so far, not an iron law of the universe. Counter-tendencies exist.

For example, multi-generational homes are on the rise again in the U.S. This is due in part to an influx of immigrants who are more likely to maintain such arrangements, partially changing economics, and partially a conscious reaction to the horror of atomization. It’s possible to imagine Internet services, at least on a purely technical level, that use the power of data and algorithms and design to boost human intimacy and community and productive relationships, rather than advertisements. The economic precarity and rat race unleashed after 2008 for young people, especially in the drive to get into good colleges, can be reduced. A focus on a more traditional liberal/humanist education methods as opposed to testing could make the experience less artificial and abstracted. A return to education having to justify itself as such, rather than as monopolized credential-issuance, could radically reduce the forced demand of degree inflation. Economic reform to provide a more certain living, with less hours spent working and buying, and more participation in growth for most people, could make healthy relationship formation much more natural and viable.

But of course, it is easy to come up with solutions to tackle atomization among those whose familial status is set. Children and teenagers were among the few groups who up until recently were able to escape this trend for this very reason; they had their families and well maintained social institutions to socialize them. While self-reported sufferers of loneliness grew generally from around 15% to over 40% the past 50 years, the very young have only started experiencing such estrangement over the past 10 years. Likewise, the most dangerous kind of atomization is not evenly distributed; it’s among that group of youth which is expected to leave their family and set out on their own.

What awaits this cohort is what will be the biggest determination of the damage atomization will bring. It is with regard to them that we should consider the ultimate causes, which, of course, are those same forces which fester the very loneliness inherent in the human soul. But loneliness is always the absence of love and belonging. That’s the one thing to remember in all of this. Unlike the promise of ontological completeness implicit in the siren song of abstract devotion, human intimacy and the contentment that comes with it is actually possible. It is a possibility at hand for everyone willing to reach out for those around them, and create thicker social fabric for their friends and neighbors. And that desire for intimacy, rather than the fear of losing something we’ve already lost, is the only path forward.

But the problem is ultimately structural. It wasn’t caused by individual or moral failure. It’s not the kind of thing that was caused by or could be solved with individual action or even a moral or cultural shift. It can only be solved with reorganization on the level of institutions, to understand the precise nature of our problems and build a society that creates more moments of real human contact, more decommodified spaces, and more possibility for intimate meaning and thick social fabric. Ultimately, the struggle is to find redemption in one another, not in fictional abstractions, nor in mere commodified quantity.

All four of us grew up in a liberal culture, are well-educated ethnic minorities, and work in an urban environment. And yet, the talk of guns, disaster preparation, and bunkering down isn’t a joke—it’s serious, if still largely idle. Things we would certainly do if we had the time and money.

It’s a fantasy that can tell you something about the cynicism of the up-and-coming state elites. There is a sense of threat, the radical possibility of a lapse of state authority, which has settled like a hazy tornado sky upon the bureaucratic professional class. And it’s an exceptional idea when you consider that there is no major power capable of seriously undermining the American state from the outside, as there was in the Cold War. It’s an attitude much closer to that of Russia during the 1980s than America in the 1950s: total underlying disbelief that this system will last as it is.

At the same time, the federal bureaucracy has come under attack, and the country is experiencing a crisis of civil-military relations not seen since the Truman presidency. Op-eds from former RAND advisors call for the disobedience of military officers, and bureaucrats resign on behalf of their conscience at the highest and lowest levels.

When I took the civil service oath, I swore to defend the Constitution. It is this oath which forms one of the major tenets of the authority of the state. Above the Congress, above the president, there is the supreme law of the land: law distilled. It is the most powerful foundation of the American state ideology.

But the American state is undergoing a crisis, and so it’s time to return to the basics. What precisely is the state, according to its most hard-nosed critics and proponents? Under what logic does it operate? And can it be considered an autonomous force relative to the rest of society and its social classes? What can we learn from studying past attempts to understand the state?

Without understanding these questions, it’s impossible to locate the source of malaise, terror, and doom which seems to be occupying our minds. If the American state is more or less identifiable with its ruling class, then all this is presumably the result of some crisis within that class itself. A renewal of the American elite might serve as the great American course correction. But if the state operates in some sense independently—if the whole exercises a structural direction or control over its parts—then its internal crisis might imply that we are in the thrall of a more all-encompassing force. In that case, it would be much more difficult to legislate away, or even defeat politically.

The greatest theoretical understandings of the modern state have necessarily come in times of crisis, when its authority is being fundamentally questioned, when its power is most naked: Hobbes in the heels of the English Civil War, Lenin in the midst of the Russian Civil War, and Huntington in the breakout of the Cold War. More recently, there was Louis Althusser during the “crisis of Marxism”: that precarious moment for intellectual leftists when the USSR’s crimes and stagnation, as well as the rise of neoliberalism, forced them to revisit their theories of the state. But to get to Althusser, we need to understand the debates within intellectual Marxism that serve as background for his interpretation.

There are many popular theories of the state which depend on either naivete or cynicism, rather than historical analysis. The state is not an expression of the popular will, nor is it the result of a social contract. It does not exist to maintain peace as such, nor is it a racket which exists purely to extort.

In each case, the actions of the modern state itself repudiate the mythos which it has attempted to conjure up as its foundation. The state is more often forced into taking popular measures when not doing so risks undermining its authority, or even when it itself has manufactured that popularity for some other purpose. While states generally provide for some kind of order, they are also everywhere the biggest sponsors of violence and terror. And if states were pure extractive rackets, their overriding logic would be to increase taxes such that they would absorb all social surplus beyond the working population’s subsistence. In reality, the most extractive states are also those with the most delicate authority—these are countries where coups, palace intrigue, and the threat of revolt are ever-present. If you could be ousted at any moment, your incentive is to extract as much as possible first and maintain political order by any means necessary, including extraordinarily harmful means.

From out of this milieu emerged two theories of the state which held a higher grade of intellectual heft: the classical Marxist state, defined by class domination, and the post-anarchist critique most closely associated with Foucault.

In the Foucaultian interpretation, the state is merely one of a multitude of actors—in addition to churches, parties, academies, corporations, oligarchies, unions, and myriad others—that seeks dominance and power. It does so through a system designed to produce knowledge and tactics which enforce bodily discipline.

In fact, it is those familiar with the state bureaucracy who are best placed to understand the inherent weaknesses in this theory. The reality is an institution where the greatest lack of discipline is tolerated, and which facilitates the greatest shelters from market discipline. Desk work requires no specific sort of body, and the advent of telework means that one’s body does not even have to enter the workplace proper. Public sector unions and labor laws mean that a government job is as good as tenure, and you are set for life regardless of competence. Slouched in a Waffle House booth, my dad, a bureaucrat since Bush Sr., once recalled how the higher-ups considered eliminating an entire class of positions just to get rid of one offensively bloated and lazy worker.

The power of the government bureaucracy—taken separately from the police and the army for a moment—is often used more to undermine discipline than to enforce it. Those familiar with the work of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, itself the most undisciplined and chaotic of all agencies, will know just how it can facilitate undisciplined lifestyles. Life in subsidized housing is not easy, nor luxurious; but it certainly isn’t disciplined. It facilitates a life with less frantic, never-ending labor than would otherwise be necessary. The same goes for Social Security, Food Stamps, and other such services.

The government bureaucracy—both the public and private sector versions—are a sort of pernicious proof that the highest stage of communism envisioned by Marx is feasible. Even in this incredibly undisciplined environment, work still gets done. Those with ambition take up the torch, those with a passion for serving the public put in the hours, and everyone else goes along with it because following orders blindly is actually quite easy. The average civil servant could probably go twenty years without thinking too much about what they’re doing, but it is those slightly above average ones who make the whole system go-round.

The only real discipline put on the bureaucracy has nothing to do with the body and everything to do with information. Incredible efforts are put towards data security, with specially made computer systems and overbearing information security protocols. The most high-profile cases of the state attacking its own are those whistleblowers who have exposed its secrets: Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, etc. The ferocity unleashed against these few is many times greater than that faced by government workers who have committed any other crime, from embezzlement to murder. Just last year, an FBI agent living in the exurbs of DC was acquitted of shooting his wife to death by claiming self-defense. He now works at a post office.

The less information is available, the less transparency exists, and the greater the resulting autonomy for the bureaucracy. Censorship, redaction, unfreedom of the press: these things ensure the freedom of the professional state. Nevertheless, there is an inherent tension between this impulse and the broader interests of private capital which wield outsized power in the American state apparatus. The state places limits on its own secrecy, so that it cannot become strong and autonomous enough to represent a threat to business and its accumulation of wealth, or to the other various factions of powerful special interests that comprise American politics. But the state, while influenced by these interests, can never eliminate that secrecy, for doing so would entail the state at once losing both its autonomy and the appearance of liberal neutrality. Therefore, it is in both the public interest of the state and the nominally private interests of entrenched power to maintain a certain level of informational discipline, even if the bureaucracy carves out a lack of discipline in other spheres.

The Pentagon and more recent Afghanistan papers are excellent examples of how secrecy helps maintain the autonomy and public image of the state, and transparency ruins it. After Daniel Ellsberg and The New York Times collaborated in releasing the Pentagon Papers contents in 1971, it became clear that both the Johnson administration and American military and security personnel had systematically misled Congress and the public as to the cost and nature of the Vietnam conflict. Internally, the war was seen as only one part of a larger strategy to contain Chinese ambitions in Asia. Likewise, the 2019 release of the Afghanistan papers by The Washington Post detailed an internal view of the war very different from public propaganda. Despite consistent negative feedback from those facing on-the-ground operations, both local U.S. military command and Washington itself maintained secrecy around these facts. Even within the hierarchy itself, bureaucratic pressure to report progress led to distortion of the facts surrounding the conflict. Both examples reveal a state apparatus able to use secrecy to maintain a kind of institutional autonomy from popular and political scrutiny. Nevertheless, the personnel themselves were not neutral in the tasks they carried out, and their professional roles still bound them to domestic political struggles.

However, discipline of both the mind and body does have its adherents within the state: the military officer corps. This discipline is both tactical and ideological—tactical in the sense that it was born of necessity in the struggle between states, and ideological in the sense that it is also a part of the collectivist ideology of professionalism. This history of professionalism and the state is one best laid out by one of its staunchest proponents: Samuel Huntington, more famous for his predictions of a post-Cold War international conflict between broadly defined civilizations. We’ll draw more on him momentarily.

These forces within the American state have hardly been a quiet sideshow to the civilian bureaucracy. The start of the Cold War, for example, was a tumultuous time for American civil-military relations. Truman started off the 1950s with a mass resignation of Navy admirals over his decision to cancel the construction of the USS United States, a super-carrier meant to deliver the nuclear deterrent to the USSR. This aptly-named Revolt of the Admirals was a turning point. Compared to the power and respect afforded to military leaders during World War II, this curtailment of their autonomy was significant.

It was around this time, too, that Truman fired General MacArthur for his stance on Korea, prompting a public outcry whose magnitude is largely forgotten today. When MacArthur arrived in New York after being dismissed, he was greeted with confetti and packed streets. He was speculated as a potentially unstoppable presidential contender, all the way up until he finally opened his mouth to explain his disagreement with Truman.

MacArthur could not come to terms with limited war in Korea, so caught up was he in the old glory of World War II and that of “total victory.” In a blockbuster speech before both houses of Congress, MacArthur laid bare this ideology of total victory, and in the coming days and weeks, the public began to slowly realize precisely what this entailed: total nuclear war with the USSR. How ironic that just a few years earlier, as the American appointed dictator of Japan, MacArthur had been the greatest advocate of world peace and the abolition of war, going so far as to inscribe it into the Japanese Constitution.

Huntington pointed to military professionalism and autonomy as cures to such breakdowns of civil-military relations—a theory which he outlined in his first great book, The Soldier and the State, which has since become something of a bible for military officers. A professional officer will opt to resign in grace, like the admirals; MacArthur’s grab for political power could only be considered unprofessional.

But what exactly is this professionalism, and how did it come about? On the one hand, Huntington directly compares this professionalism to the categorical description of professions such as doctors and lawyers, who consider themselves an organic body separate from society and with a higher duty to it. On the other, he describes this professionalism as the result of a process where the bourgeoisie forced the state, via their struggle against feudal aristocracy, to make the bureaucracy meritocratic—at least in the sense of abolishing aristocratic right or seniority as the primary standard for claiming elevated positions. The result was a modern bureaucratic culture increasingly open to all classes, at least theoretically, and requiring liberal arts education and training for aspiring members.

This analysis exposes something about the MacArthur incident which even Huntington is reluctant to realize. If we take professionalism to be an ideology of the bourgeoisie, then we see that there is no ideological autonomy of the state. The alien and seemingly arcane bureaucracy is instantly demystified; its ideology is indistinguishable from other forms of bourgeois collectivism in the community of lawyers and doctors. The state doesn’t have its own ideologies distinct from the broader base of ruling class power; even in those cases when both the state and civil society are so atrophied that a single individual can impose their idiosyncrasies, such as in Bokassa’s Central African Empire and Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea, they are uniquely vulnerable. Indeed, in both those examples, the dictator was swiftly overthrown by outside forces.

MacArthur’s ideology of total victory represented an ideology which, though once shared by America’s elite during the struggle of World War II, was now decisively rejected due to the novel danger of nuclear war. It was now too much for both the general population and the state elite. After all, nuclear annihilation has never been in anyone’s class interest. Thus, despite his opportunistic political position and heroic image, MacArthur’s battleship was sunk with his opening salvo.

Had MacArthur been willing to bend to such ideologies, he was equipped to be incredibly successful, as Eisenhower would be just a few years later when he won two landslide elections. Eisenhower used the strategic threat of nuclear weapons to bring the Korean War to a halt, rather than using these weapons tactically to achieve victory. Eisenhower also happened to directly counter Huntington’s theory with his vocal opposition to the military-industrial complex, a complex which Huntington presumed was impossible due to the clash of ideology between business liberalism and military conservatism. To him, the comradery between the military and corporations could only be temporary and ephemeral.

Huntington’s analysis showed that bureaucratic and military professionalism was a bourgeois ideology, but he could not follow this discovery through to its conclusion, due to his personal conservative commitments. He believed that only a conservative public ideology would maintain good civil-military relations, and thus maintain the autonomy and professionalism of the military. In truth, this was never necessary (and not just because professional ideology can easily lead to poor civil-military relations). Despite all the fear of military control and expropriation among business, they worked just fine together to make a buck and arm the state apparatus. But if we believe that there really did exist formal contradictions between the respective belief systems and motivations of military and business interests, how can this be possible?

The Marxist theory of the state has one answer. In the simple version, based upon the Communist Manifesto, postulating a class dictatorship of the capitalists would suggest such a differentiation between the capitalist class interests and that of the military was impossible within the context of the capitalist state. Some facts may support this interpretation, namely the war profiteering of the military industrial complex and the threat of foreign domination. And yet, the narrow interests of capitalists were also bludgeoned by the state efforts of World War II by social democracy and unprecedented levels of state control. This was not the case everywhere; in Nazi Germany, equivalent production for civilian markets was not disrupted until much later for the war effort when compared to the U.S., to the severe detriment of its strategic positioning.

A more sophisticated version of the Marxist theory is expressed in Marx’s historical articles on French politics, and in Lenin’s The State and Revolution. It goes like this: the state, as a special group of armed men dependent on taxes for income, is an instrument of the dominant class, but has greater autonomy in periods of intense class struggle. The state then uses this autonomy to preserve its foundations, namely private property, and so defends the capitalist system even to the immediate detriment of capitalist class interests. Implicit in this is the division of society between civil society and the state, as well as communities into atomistic political actors which then see their unity, now ideologically, within the state.

This theory of the state has several notable features which would come back to haunt it; the magnitude of state power is largely irrelevant beyond its most immediate and obvious effects, namely the increase in taxes and control of information. It claims that the potential world-historical significance of a particular state comes down not to how the state operates as a system, but to the class which controls it. Indeed, Marx was almost completely agnostic in the 1844 Philosophic Manuscripts about whether the transitionary state to communism was a dictatorship or democracy. It was only with the advent of the Paris Commune, a radical uprising of Parisian workers, that Marx took the side of democracy and small government, and only on practical not theoretical grounds. The commune, with its elimination of the bureaucracy and standing army, was taken to be the particular historical form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, thereby permitting general questions of structural effects of state power to be brushed aside.

For Marx, the key distinction between a proletarian state and a capitalist one was the existence of a divide between civil society and the state, between legislative and executive functions. Marx and Lenin, too, saw in the Paris Commune’s government a “working body” as opposed to a legislative one, which had ordinary people themselves implementing the law they themselves created. The Soviet Union would go on to claim the legacy of these working bodies. And in a sense, it succeeded. There was minimal distinction between the state and civil society, between the executive and legislative. But rather than civil society and the legislature devouring the state and executive, quite the opposite occurred. The state subsumed all community and economic functions within itself, and the executive bureaucracy became the supreme law makers. The state, it seemed, had a certain logic to it that Marxist theoreticians had not fully understood.

After the crimes of Stalin were unmasked, and the USSR began to fall behind the West in economic growth and innovation, a crisis of Marxism took hold, particularly in France where orthodox Marxism was once a major intellectual force. It was a period of introspection which introduced a whole host of theoretical innovations, including one which helps to better explain the conundrum which faced down Huntington some 25 years earlier. The traditional Marxist explanation, that the superficial ideological differences between the bourgeoisie and the officers fell away with financial self-interest, treats these ideological differences as an ethereal byproduct of class society and state control. But this was a misconception.

Nicos Polantzas, one of the leading structuralists and Marxists in France during this period, explained it most elegantly when he described the state as “overcoded.” That is, the state simultaneously, at any given time, is the conduit, mirror, and reproducer of a plethora of different ideologies which can and often are in total formal contradiction. The state is not merely the reconciler of interests in the old-fashioned parliamentary way. Rather, because of the fundamental disconnect between conscious ideology and political and historical action, it can reflect the desires of multiple mutually exclusive ideologies. The state acts as something like a Rorschach test.

Consider the military-industrial complex, a nexus of entrenched business interests that profit off the war industry while maintaining social and civil liberalism. This complex sees its project as that of protecting such liberalism from foreign threats. Meanwhile, officers like Eisenhower, though they may well see how this profiteering is deteriorating overall state preparedness, will still advocate for the most elaborate and expensive technologies in the belief they will provide a military edge. Both are quite sincere, and are still in conflict vis-a-vis their loyalties to corporation versus state, but both still believe that the state (and, in our case, the U.S. Constitution) is the unity of their interests.

Louis Althusser, having lived through the Communist Party’s defense of De Gaulle from the threat of a coup in the Algiers crisis, the failed revolt of workers and students in 1968, and the slow disintegration of academic Marxism as a political force, would go on to craft perhaps the most elegant theory of the state in his later years.

He took Lenin and Marx’s formulation, the state as “a special group of armed men” and turned it on its head in search of a solution to the theoretical crisis of Marxism. Rather than “special” referring to the opposite of “general” (as in a proletarian state in the style of the Paris Commune would be generally armed), Althusser took this to refer to the special nature of state authority. It acts distinctively and with a different ground for legitimacy than those forces which are formally in the private sphere.

But why does the state need authority? Why is an armed subgroup of society insufficient on its own to maintain a system? The answer is quite simple. The state, in order to maintain social control is interested in the relative, rather than absolute, maximization of its violence.

Theoretically, the civilian population—particularly those whose work ensures production—hold the power to grind society to a halt. The general strike, the mass revolt, the civil war—these are existential threats to the state. Therefore, it is not enough for the state to accumulate an overwhelming magnitude of violence. It must minimize the amount of violence of all other actors in society, including social classes—ultimately, even other sections of the class from which much of this “special group of armed men” are drawn. So, it has to convert its violence into legitimate authority. Legitimacy exists, and always has existed, in a purely superficial sense, in that we believe we are alienating our sovereign power through the law of the state. The law possesses authority which validates its defence through violence, while the individual’s lack of sovereign authority invalidates his use of violence in all but the most restricted circumstances of personal defence.

This observation unveils the truth behind one of the most central conceptual myths of liberal thought: the state of nature.

Thomas Hobbes, the premier proponent of absolutism and conceptualizer of the modern state, suggested that the state’s purpose was to maintain order at all costs. He was, of course, engaged in a bit of rhetorical trickery in referring to the absence of state authority as “the state of nature.” This conflates the pre-state situation with the collapse of state authority. But the latter situation already presumes the existence of the state itself. The state of nature should then be considered not some primordial era, or some purely theoretical structure, but rather the concrete—and, for Hobbes, very real—threat of civil war. It does not exist prior to the era of the state, but only as a result of its preeminence as the source of political order, having defeated, cannibalized, or otherwise outcompeted all alternatives.

Modern civil-military relations literature has uncovered a wonderful example of just how this threat of “the state of nature,” and thus the need to maintain political order, motivates the state, just as Althusser predicts. In many developing countries, where the risk of coups is great, precarious leaders will systematically make moves which would raise the risks of civil war—both in likelihood and cost—in the event of a coup. Why? Because there is nothing the military officers fear more than the specter of fratricide and the sudden self-destruction of the armed forces. But we can go a step further. This logic extends to the whole of the professional state, the officer corps, and the bureaucracy.

Both Marx and Foucault failed to grasp this, eager as they were to use the metaphor of civil war for class struggle and oppression in society. But here, Clausewitz won out: war is politics by other means, not the other way around. Civil war is precisely the breakdown of legitimate authority as an ideological power—the breakdown of law as a power above people in general. Such a collapse precipitates the rise of violence on the part of actors outside the state, and can threaten not only the elite classes but society as a whole. This ideology of legitimate authority is not some superficial byproduct of the state. It is the whole purpose of the state.

Importantly, this power of authority, while traditionally belonging to the legislature or the head of state, does not necessarily belong there. It can shift over time. The military or the bureaucracy has at times taken on this mantle of legitimacy when these traditional powerhouses fail—a fact which is important to remember in our current context of disobedience within these bureaucracies. Within the American structure, current tactics surrounding opposition to the Trump administration gives some clue as to how this works. Locked out of many of the elected structures, opponents are looking to bodies within the security state, the diplomatic services, and the military to provide a Schelling point for resistance.

In more dramatic breakdowns of authority—civil war or coup—such bodies may decisively assert themselves as Schelling points not just for resistance, but for sovereignty over the state apparatus.

Examples abound throughout the 20th century. The counterinsurgency war in Algeria, which caused the French generals to learn the tactics of social control, facilitated their interference in politics, just as MacArthur’s appointment as governor of Japan did. The Vietnam war, by forcing the Pentagon to develop non-lethal weapons and methods of winning “hearts and minds,” would lead to the deployment of the same tactics against students protesting the war. With civil-military integration, the development of methods of social control domestically and in wars abroad have become the very same development.

The U.S. has been in a counterinsurgency war for nearly two decades now, and so the military-bureaucratic apparatus of the state has the most advanced methods of social control at its disposal. The best example of this is the development of the modern digital surveillance state. Post-9/11 initiatives by DARPA were geared towards domestic information gathering and processing, and were picked up by both the NSA and the military. Edward Snowden blew the lid on the domestic spying operation, but these same systems are deployed even more invasively on the battlefield. Sensor modules and cameras were blanketed across roads and buildings; satellite, internet, and phone surveillance were combined with traditional recon to develop three-dimensional maps of cities across Iraq. It’s a solid guess that other tactics, such as the bribing of village elders and respected locals to achieve political goals, will also come home to roost.

At the very same time, Congress and the Executive branch are losing their authority and legitimacy at a startling pace.

When I worked in government, the cheery liberals who joked like Jon Stewart about lawmakers’ exploits were all unanimous in their belief in just how the policies they were implementing were going to fail. There was nothing to be done, they concluded. But now, it seems as though the ground is shifting beneath us. Maneuvers like impeachment have effectively very little impact on public sentiment, radical ideological undercurrents are stirring, and we are faced with immense collective action problems in our fight against ecological catastrophe. The threat of the internal collapse of authority, at least in the traditional elected locus of that authority, is now a serious hypothetical. This threat alone, rather than its realization, will be the prime mover of politics in the coming historical moments.

The state of nature—the horrors of the civil wars of days long past in England, Russia, France, and even here in the United States—is a trauma that we might think we are above in this day and age. Who dares defy the supreme law of the land?

I’ve sworn my oath. Congress, too, swore an oath. As did President Trump.

Out of the three of us, where do you spy Leviathan?