International Karl Polanyi Society

             Perhaps even more frightening is that this tells us something about the deeply fragile nature of the popular commitment to democracy–that so many of his supporters will vote for him in the context described above where he has outlined his planned coup indicates that they are participating knowingly in a scenario that will potentially end democracy as we know it. Thus Timothy Snyder… “It’s a vote for a future in which voting does not matter…a vote for Trump is to traduce the meaning of voting, which is a normal part of the transition to authoritarianism…”

John Hultgren: So stepping back from the election for a moment to think about how we got to this point… Your recent work has focused on explaining and critiquing the idea of market justice. Does market justice persist within an American Right increasingly defined by the ideological oddity that is Trumpism? To put it differently, how do you make sense of the relationship between the neoliberalism and the hypernationalism of the American Right?

Margaret Somers: Market justice, just like meritocracy, maintains its credibility by its claim to being nonpolitical, free of power, reflecting the pure neutralism of market rewards equaling the exact amount that was inputted in contributions—i.e. unequal wages simply reflect unequal work effort and lesser market value. That’s the theory of marginal productivity. The hatred for democracy stems from it being seen as a political force that disrupts and violates the neutrality of the supposedly nonpolitical unbiased processes of market justice. It “politicizes” the market in the interest of “special interests,” and so threatens market justice. (This is also the logic of hatred for affirmative action and for the conservative racism of “color-blindness”—it pretends to neutrality while it exercises the power of exclusion.)

            Market justice tells us that what the market spits out is by definition completely fair: The value that goes into the market is exactly what you get in return. The instrument that translates the theory of naturalized market justice into a social practice is the ascribing of “moral unworthiness” to those who lose out on market outcomes. There is a precise parallel between market justice and the dominating coercions of the alt-right. For the most energized enforcers of what I call the “tribunal of moral worth” are white supremacists…they define nonwhite people as “undeserving” and “unworthy” in equally naturalistic and biologized terms as that of market justice.

            If you look at my Guardian piece on how Malthus uses market naturalism to justify cruelty and exclusion, you can easily transpose what he applied to the “poor” onto race. In Malthusian terms, “Nature” decides who is economically worthy and not worthy. For white supremacists, Nature is translated into race in biological terms. So, it parallels exactly marginal productivity theory which says  – the famous quote – that “the distribution of income in society is controlled by a natural law, and this law if it works without friction would give to every agent of production the amount of wealth that that agent creates.” This readily converts into a tribunal of racial worth and unworth, in which social value is determined by ascribed—natural—racial identities .

            But the alt-right takes it one step further: It’s not merely that non-white people don’t contribute enough to be worthy of inclusion; they are also supposedly stealing from the worthy (white) people. They (unworthy and undeserving non-whites) are undeserving social parasites who are taking away white males’ naturally privileged place in the social hierarchy. The alt-right’s hatred toward liberals is driven by their belief that liberals are facilitating this theft by the unworthy, which in turn generates a culture of enraged aggrievement of the entitled convinced they have been wronged. This is why they love Trump for his casual cruelty…Trump is saying for them what they felt they weren’t allowed to say for too long. They thrill at his sadistic transgressions of “political correctness,” especially against women and people of color.

            For plutocrats, the currency of worth and unworthiness is defined by marginal productivity; for white supremacists, the currency is race. It’s very convenient that these two systems of evaluation converge on the same people: Immigrants, women, and people of color.

David Bond: From Clinton’s welfare reform to Obamacare and “cap and trade,” the Democratic Party has long toyed with its own versions of market justice (and, to a lesser extent, social naturalism). To what extent has the liberal embrace of a “free-market” logic contributed to the predicament in which we currently find ourselves? Do you see signs that Biden/Harris are willing to shift to something resembling a social democratic taming of the market? 

Margaret Somers: Let’s start with the most damning evidence that confirms how the Democrats participate in the policing of market justice and accept the social naturalism on which it’s based. Consider that the most dramatic rollback of the social state in 40 years of neoliberalism took place under Bill Clinton, the so-called 1996 Welfare Reform Bill, which was orchestrated entirely through Malthusian discourse of both social naturalism and the perversity thesis: Namely, that relief of poverty to the poor has the perverse consequence of disincentivizing them to work. Why? Because of the foundational biologization of working people, which reduces them to their bodily instincts of “thinking through the body”—Work when hungry; hibernate when full. In this biologized naturalistic world, removing scarcity by providing social provisioning to the needy is what causes poverty in the first place; it frees workers from taking personal responsibility by removing the scourge of hunger.

            In Piketty’s new book, Capital and Ideology, he documents extensively the degree to which the social democratic embrace of neoliberalism, especially their embrace of austerity, in Europe and the U.S. contributed enormously to the extreme increase in inequality. Their unwavering commitment to globalization led to today’s alliance of what he calls hypercapitalism with ethnonativism—a term that captures those who were left behind by neoliberal policies who have now turned to right-wing populism.

            Lest anyone think I’m exaggerating when I say that the Democrats (and Labour) believe in market justice and social naturalism, consider Clinton’s view of globalization: “[It is] the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water.” As Tony Blair declared defending his policies in the globalization debate: “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

            Now, to be fair, let’s stand back a minute and take a Polanyian look at the situation and we see that these were not merely perverse choices of wannabe Conservatives—these were/are social democrats trying to navigate the shoals of the basic incompatibility of capitalism and democracy, and face resistance to the “intrusion” of the democratic populace into the supposedly private sphere of the economy. Polanyi reminds us that when faced with a choice between supporting democratic socio-economic reform on the one side, and authoritarian protection of capital on the other, economic elites and global capital have almost always chosen the latter. As he reflected on the collapse of civilization in the 1930s: “[T]he victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the [market utopians’] obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control” (Polanyi 2001, 265). It couldn’t be more clear: Protecting capital against democracy is the historical norm.

            Polanyi’s analysis helps explain why the American Republican Party, as the primary carrier of neoliberalism, so determinedly protects, enables, and advances Trump’s authoritarianism. The more that Democrats move in a progressive direction with social democratic goals at the top of their platform, the more we witness the Republicans’ embrace of Trump’s strong state, weak democracy project—authoritarianism, in short.

            As for Biden and Harris…how far they can go in the direction of socioeconomic reform will depend on how far capital will let them go before threatening to pick up their marbles and go elsewhere in capital flight. They will also be impeded by the rage that Trump (even if no longer in office) will continue to foment among his supporters with his faux populist discourse. Above all, they will have to contend with the American institutional structure of de-democratization –the severely undemocratic Senate, the multiple veto points to suppress the “mobocracy,” the antidemocratic Electoral College, and the reigning juristocracy, which at this point is the most dangerous of all. In America, it is the judiciary that has the last word on how successful the plutocracy will continue to be, and lest we forget, the judiciary has been seized by the extreme right for generations to come.

John Hultgren: You end with a warning, echoing both Polanyi and Luxemburg, that the future will be one of either democratic socialism or fascism. Which path do you think we’re heading down? From a Polanyian perspective, do you see cause for optimism?

Margaret Somers: At the macroeconomic level we are faced with the same conflict between capitalism and democracy. Polanyi explained 1930s Europe as both the apogee of their incompatibility and the nadir of the consequences: Capital’s commitment to the global Gold Standard crushed national democratic efforts to enact social reforms to protect against the extreme privations of market inequality and mass unemployment from the Depression. To ensure the forces of democracy were thoroughly tamed, global economic liberals turned to authoritarianism and fascism to achieve their ends. As Steve Klein (2019) has recently reminded us, Polanyi understood that the initial “antidemocratic virus” (Polanyi’s words) made it all too easy for capital to find succor with a movement committed to “a structure of society which would eliminate the very possibility of its reversion to Democracy.” That should haunt us today.

            At the same time, Polanyi made clear that fascism was a contingency, not an inevitability. He lays out what is necessary for democratic forces to subordinate the deceits of market justice to an egalitarian and just society built on individual and social rights and freedoms. These are the necessary steps to achieve democratic socialism, which Polanyi defines as “transcend[ing] the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society.” They include first and foremost, the decommodification of humans, of nature, and of money, which entails taking out of the market the fictitious commodity of “labor.” Some of this can be facilitated by fighting for newly constitutionalized socio-economic rights, and some even by redistributive policies of the social state. But above all it requires tearing open the hidden world of predistributive market power. (Incidentally, in the context of the American failure to contain Covid19, it would require, as Fred [Block] and I recently wrote on Polanyi and Covid19, decommodifying the necessities of the democratic public good of public health.) Following Polanyi again, much of this is going to depend on the strength of the progressive left, and on the willingness of Democrats to make alliances with the left. That will demand that Democrats be willing to fight for power and democracy as a substantive goal.

            In closing, as I wrote at end of my article on the “Moral Economy of the Capitalist Crowd”: