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austrians

Summing Up, Part 3

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Last time in ‘Summing Up’, we talked about how the right-libertarian “views the horror of socially-arranged altruism as worse than the horror of letting people die for want of medical care” because “libertarianism is against individual freedom for all because it depends upon collective liberation”.  This, of course, raises another issue.  Where does one draw the line?  If socialised medicine is totalitarianism for doctors, why is the tacit threat of destitution which lies behind the wage labour system not considered equally bad?  The answer to this question is the same brute and vulgar answer we gave already.  It comes down to which side you’re on… which, most of the time, in an instance of capitalism creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of the selfish and cynical actor of its own ideological account of human nature, comes down to which class you’re in, or which class your interests are aligned with.  

Let’s pause again to notice all those ‘vons’ in the names of the great Austrians.  And let’s also pause to again notice that, in applying such cynicism about human nature, such distrust of democracy, such a strategic splitting of the concept of freedom, and such naked class interests, the libertarians are, indeed, the heirs of the Founding Fathers – not just of the United States but also, as we’ve seen, of Ireton and Cromwell and the equivalent bourgeois revolutionaries in England.  They carry many of the most fundamental imperatives of the founders of the bourgeois state into the present era.

The libertarians’ philosophical rationale for this partiality to the rights and privileges of the ruling class, and the attendant indifference to those of the working class, is that private property is the basis of liberty (to the extent that some have taken to rechristening them, far from unjustly, ‘propertarians’).  But this philosophical rationale manages the impressive feat of being both a tautology and a contradiction.  It’s a tautology because it assumes the point under question.  It’s a contradiction because if private property, while conferring liberty on its possessors, also structurally curtails the liberty of the propertyless, then whither the concept of liberty… except as a luxury to be enjoyed by a few?  From here the libertarian is inescapably pushed towards somehow justifying the inequity, towards explaining why yes, liberty is a luxury to be enjoyed by a few – and quite right too!  And hence we get the various distinct but similar ways in which the different strands of this tradition of bourgeois thinking (libertarianism, classical liberalism, etc) have imported justifications in from outside, from conservatism.  The justifications are easy to find.  You need only look at the many and drastic specific inequities generated by capitalist society, generalise from them, and amputate history and context so that they appear to have no cause.  That’s how you end up with libertarians and liberals enthusing over The Bell Curve, etc. 

(The necessary amputation of context is actually especially striking in the case of the libertarians, because a whole host of the inequities they seize upon to justify hierarchy are based on the imperialism – or at least war – they profess to be against.…

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Summing Up, Part 2

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In an article entitled ‘Democracy Isn’t Freedom’, Ron Paul wrote:

Americans have been conditioned to accept the word “democracy” as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good.

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this, as evidenced not only by our republican constitutional system, but also by their writings in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. James Madison cautioned that under a democratic government, “There is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” John Adams argued that democracies merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights. Yet how many Americans know that the word “democracy” is found neither in the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, our very founding documents?

Now, an important thing to note here is that Paul is absolutely right.  Most of the Founding Fathers did not envisage their new republic as a democracy.  Indeed, Madison (as Chomsky is fond of reminding us) explicitly saw the task of designing the new government as one of designing a system which would protect “the minority of the opulent against the majority”.  Chomsky also likes to quote John Jay as saying “The people who own the country ought to govern it”. As he writes in The Common Good,

Madison feared that a growing part of the population, suffering from the serious inequities of the society, would “secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of [life’s] blessings.” If they had democratic power, there’d be a danger they’d do something more than sigh. He discussed this quite explicitly at the Constitutional Convention, expressing his concern that the poor majority would use its power to bring about what we would now call land reform.

So he designed a system that made sure democracy couldn’t function. He placed power in the hands of the “more capable set of men,” those who hold “the wealth of the nation.” Other citizens were to be marginalized and factionalized in various ways, which have taken a variety of forms over the years: fractured political constituencies, barriers against unified working-class action and cooperation, exploitation of ethnic and racial conflicts, etc.

This is nothing surprising.  We can go back to the dawn of bourgeois democracy in England, the Putney Debates, and see the bafflement which enveloped Ireton and the other Parliament Men when Rainsborough and the Levellers demanded that every man should have a say in the government that ruled over him, even if he lacked a “permanent interest” (i.e. property).  Ireton and his fellow propertied gentlemen not only didn’t agree with such a concept – they couldn’t even comprehend it.  It was utterly alien to them.  The very radical ideas thrown up by the revolution they had led were now confronting them, shouted from the mouths of the common men they’d relied on as their muscle, and they might as well have been speaking a foreign language.…

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The Gateway Drug

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Paleolibertarianism was a consciously devised mutation of Austrian-influenced libertarianism, concocted by the late-20th century’s most prominent devotee of Austrian dogma, Murray Rothbard (and his fawning cohorts).  

Libertarianism today draws on several sources.  Ayn Rand is the best known, but the more influential is arguably Murray Rothbard.  (Rothbard’s attitude to Rand fluctuated.)  Rand is more influential for her ‘ideas’.  Rand is more accessible, despite putting up a superficial show of intellectualism.  Rothbard is harder to get a handle on.  Unlike Rand, he is a genuine intellectual – which is often a question of how one couches ideas rather than the ideas themselves.  And he develops.  And he writes long, involved, serious articles (though they get less serious-minded as he gets older).  I would argue that his influence is less in actual ideas and more in the surrounding spheres of aesthetics/style and tactics/strategy.  After all, in fusing libertarianism with conservatism to create paleolibertarianism, the libertarians consciously submerged certain libertarian ideas.  What succeeded – from the libertarian point of view – was arguably less the fusion than the style: the strategic attempt to use populist reactionary politics to further the ends of liberal economics.

Paleolibertarianism aimed to promote the relatively unpopular extreme free-market dogmas of libertarianism by joining them tactically to America’s powerful trends of post-60s reaction.  It succeeded to a great extent.  It pandered to, and (as far as possible) absorbed, extreme American cultural conservatism, racism, sexism, etc.  It took a powerful place in the ecology of American reaction.  It fed on the discontents of neoliberalism, and US imperialism, to achieve a quasi-rebellious presence in the mainstream of US politics, most of all in the person of Ron Paul.

We’ve talked about Ron Paul in previous instalments, and mentioned the publication under his name, or at least his ‘brand’, of infamous racist newsletters.  People familiar with the content of those newsletters will have been unsurprised by Paul’s recent slip up on Twitter, when he explained the troubles of modern America with a cartoon which featured racist caricatures of various ethnicities (Jew, African American, etc) uniting to punch Uncle Sam with one massive fist made of ‘Cultural Marxism’.

 

 

Some libertarians have defended Paul over the years, but others have denounced him, asserting that the contents of the newsletters is paleoconservative rather than libertarian, and that it has no connection to the great pantheon of libertarian thinkers.  There is certainly some truth to this.  Our own Daniel Harper has suggested to me, in discussion, that Paul is actually not a libertarian but rather a paleoconservative (if, I’d say, an eccentric one) with an opposition to federal regulation rather than regulation per se.  So, he’s maybe ideologically inclined towards a ‘states’ rights’ perspective which paleolibertarianism has, in my view, tended to flirt with opportunistically.  Paul, of course, formally rejects the contents of his own newsletters and new tweets.  But then a great many racists these days formally claim to not be racists.  (I often wonder if the people citing that fake Churchill quote about “the fascists of the future… call[ing] themselves anti-fascists” have ever listened to the leading lights of today’s fascist movement steadfastly and indignantly deny that they are fascists.) …

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Summing Up, Part 1

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As we know, the Austrian School is – but is not limited to – a heterodox branch of bourgeois economics.  It is, however, founded upon a more-or-less explicitly political project.  And this project continues to animate its zombie, and its zombified victims, infected by its bite.  But then the Austrians’ iteration of the new (in the 1870s) bourgeois economic doctrine of marginalism was always a political project, even in its dry theoretical basis. 

Marginalism itself arose as a way to escape the increasing obviousness of the fact that capital exploits labour.  This was a necessary project as capital spread across the globe.  It took the conscious form of an attempt to address genuine weaknesses in the classical labour theory of value.  These weaknesses were interpreted as evidence that the theory needed to be discarded precisely because the class position/alignment of the theoreticians addressing the issue pushed them towards a view of value which did not derive from labour.  It became an even more necessary project after the Paris Commune scared the shit out of the bourgeoisie. 

The Austrian School, in the person of Menger, helped create marginalism.  But it continued to exist as a distinct trend within marginalism because of the nature of Menger’s iteration of marginalist ideas – namely his rejection of mathematics; vociferous and foundational opposition to what was called the ‘Historical School’, basing himself on “general laws” and “typical phenomena” rather than historical specifics – which he passed down to a succession of thinkers which formed the Austrian tradition.  For contingent historical reasons (the intellectual climate of fin de siècle Austria, the existence of Austro-Marxism, etc), the Austrian marginalists were the ones who concerned themselves most especially with attacks on Marx in particular and socialism in general.  They made the political (i.e. class) aspects of marginalism relatively explicit, at least in terms of what they attacked.  The Austrian trend within marginalism was the most consciously ideological.  This approach is inherently ideological.  Bohm-Bawerk develops Menger in direct response to Marx, and this as a result of combat with Austro-Marxism.  But the emphasis on the subjective and the general is political in itself.  It is based on a class position, and on interests.

I think there is a question as to what extent the Austrian School actually exists in any coherent form rather than as a broad tendency or aesthetic, with its opposition to Marx and socialism as its most important markers.  There are delineable basic intellectual principles, but even they tend to be quite flexible.  Thinkers within the Austrian tradition will disagree about many things, some of them quite fundamental.  This is worth mentioning because it can cause trouble as one generalises – which one needs to do unless one is engaged in a detailed account.  What is true of one ‘Austrian’ is not true of another.  The Austrian School has a built-in defence mechanism which makes it hard to take aim at: it doesn’t really exist.  That’s a somewhat cheeky and overstated way of saying that its members believe all sorts of things, many of which are contradictory, some at a fundamental level.…

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Islands and Beaches

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A Fragmentary Digression on Individualism, Freedom, Necessity, and Utopia.

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Individualism is a key part of reactionary dogma.  It is relentlessly fetishized by the right, by libertarians, by conservatives, by the YouTube ‘rationals’ and ‘sceptics’, etc.

Murray Rothbard, Austrian School dogmatist and founder of right-libertarianism in America, gave “individual human beings act” as the foundation of his entire philosophical system.  But, aside from the question of whether or not one can logically derive from it what Rothbard does, what does this mean? What can it possibly mean? Apart from anything else, what even is an individual?  The concept, at least in the way that it is asserted by bourgeois ideology, is not supported by the evidence. 

Not only is no man an island, but it appears that people are actually more like beaches. 

A beach is a liminal zone.  Liminality is its essence. It is defined by its lack of definition.  It is sometimes long and sometimes short, depending on the time of day, and the time of year.  Its very nature as a location is that it lies at the edge of the entire concept of location.  It is undeniably a place, but a place at the outermost reach of two different ways of measuring, experiencing, conceptualising location.  It is a place where one kind of human idea of place ends and another begins. It is a place where different kinds of mapping space begin and end.  It is a place with huge, variant, but overlapping significance to both human and physical geography.

It is a place conceivable in different ways.  Even within one language, it will take on very different connotations depending on whether we choose the words ‘beach’ or ‘coast’ or ‘shore’…  Its quiddity lies in its lack of fixity.  It will move, creeping inwards across the land, and yet never arriving anywhere because it always brings itself with it.  A beach is a constantly moving interplay of sand and temperature; of gravity pulling and pushing on waves that crash and recede, which slowly grind rocks into sand, sand that is then shaped into dunes and flats by the waves.  And the patterns change day by day, hour by hour.  Sand is the result of a process of slow erosion; temperature is always fluctuating.  Both have an independent essence which may be measured, but we inevitably bring subjectivity in measurements.  As we know, the act of measuring something changes it.

At a different phenomenological level, a beach is a site of joy or melancholy, or even war, depending upon history, context, the given moment, the quality of the light, the culture that sees it.  A beach means something very different to an island hunter-gatherer looking out from the forest and a European colonialist wading ashore.

There is, of course, such a thing as determinism acting on beaches.  Some things are determined. The existence of the beach itself is determined by material realities which are accidents of history, natural or sometimes social, but no less real for that. …

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Return of the Irrepressed (Part 2)

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The glue which gums Rothbard’s libertarianism, with its supposed veneration of personal liberty, to the politics of tyranny (white supremacy, anti-semitism, etc) is the baked-in project of conservatism, according to Corey Robin: the defence of privilege and hierarchy which is, or feels itself to be, threatened. 

Libertarianism, via its ideological justifications for the hierarchy of employees and employers (as worked out in Hayek, for instance, in a passage we looked at), is also a general theory of capitalist hierarchy. It full-blooded libertarianism (which nonetheless takes its cues from the more polite and measured coded-savagery of Hayek) tells a story of supermen and parasites. Rand – much mocked as if she is a uniquely bizarre irruption – is just an idiosyncratically unhinged, pathological, and libidinous version of this. It’s a form of panglossianism, in that everyone gets what the deserve – or at least the best any world is capable of affording them (in general). Hierarchy thus isn’t just something apologised for – it is something rhapsodised. It isn’t just unavoidable – it’s actively good. Laudable. A mark of civilisation (in the moral sense). Libertarianism fetishises commodity relations to the point where it makes its politics from an aesthetic category error: confusing the value form (in its ascendancy) with value in the moral sense (as we’ve seen elsewhere).

As we’ve seen, in ‘Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature’, Rothbard makes the quintessentially reactionary jump from the widespread historical fact of womens’ subordination to the implied conclusion that they are inferior. This same manoeuvre is practiced again and again – with sex and class and nationality – by reactionaries. Indeed, Rothbard practices it several times in the same essay. 

Libertarianism is just one mode of a wider approach which is common to all forms of bourgeois thought, but which is most vociferously practiced by the right, and more vociferously the further right you go. Celebration, reification, defence, and extension of all forms of existing hierarchy and privilege is the sine qua non of reactionary thought. Libertarianism is thus revealed (as if anyone were in any serious doubt) as a species of conservatism, or reaction. Indeed, in its degree of vociferousness it is the close neighbour to fascism. And this is hardly surprising because of libertarianism’s roots. Libertarianism draws many of its currents not only from Austrian thinkers who made accommodation (on anti-Marxist, anti-socialist grounds… i.e. counter-revolutionary grounds) with authoritarian regimes including various species of fascism (i.e. Mises and Dollfuss’ ‘austrofascism’, Hayek and Schmitt, and his alignments with Pinochet, etc.). But it also – as noted elsewhere – draws on the economic policies of the racist imperialist Andrew Jackson, and upon the rhetoric and ideology of the Old South and the Confederacy. (Remember Rothbard’s defence of John C. Calhoun, and Rothbard’s own invocations of ‘states’ rights’, and the links between today’s Mises Institute and various neo-confederates, etc.). The Confederacy was one of the precursors to fascism, just as surely as were the counter-revolutionary White armies unleashed on Bolshevik Russia by Churchill, Wilson, and Western ‘democratic’ capitalist regimes.…

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Rothbard’s Conflationary Universe

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‘Return of the Irrepressed’, my overview of Rothbard, will probably return next week.  It occurred to me that I should get more specific in my response to Rothbard, as I have been with Hayek and Böhm-Bawerk.  So I decided to critique something of his in detail.  Here’s what happened. My Patreon sponsors got advance access to an earlier draft.  Sorry about the length. I would have broken this up into several posts but it’s too unitary for that.

 

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In his essay on conservative thought, Karl Mannheim argued that conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom. It threatens the submission of subordinate to superior. Because freedom is the lingua franca of modern politics, however, conservatives have had “a sound enough instinct not to attack” it. Instead, they have made freedom the stalking horse of inequality, and inequality the stalking horse of submission. Men are naturally unequal, they argue. Freedom requires that they be allowed to develop their unequal gifts. A free society must be an unequal society, composed of radically distinct, and hierarchically arrayed, particulars.

– Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind

 

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One of the things that has always driven institutional racism is the notion that underlying these socially defined categories are real fundamental biological and genetically determined differences, which make certain groups of people superior and therefore more likely–and more justified–to be those in charge of society. And others who are genetically incapable of leading society and are therefore subordinated to those with genetic superiority.

This argument goes back to the Greeks in different forms. It appeared in ancient Chinese writing in different forms. It’s always been a chief ideological tool in the arsenal of those who are wedded to the notion of a social hierarchy which feeds the wealthy and powerful and opposes and oppresses those who work for a living.

– Joseph L. Graves Jnr, in a recent interview with Danny Katch, responding to David Reich’s recent New York Times article ‘How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of Race’

 

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In his famous and beloved (by nasty people) 1973 essay ‘Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Human Nature’, Rothbard argues the thesis in the title with a roundelay of fallacies, bald assertions, and eternally begged questions. (Again, I don’t link to crypto-fash site LewRockwell-dot-org, but that’s where you’ll find it.)  His most fundamental manoeuvre is to wrongly conflate inequality and difference, claim that equality thus necessarily entails uniformity, and then point to the lack of uniformity in people as proof that equality is impossible and undesirable. He strawmans egalitarians as claiming that humans are all the same, and wishing to forcibly impose uniformity on humanity in the name of equality.  As it happens, these two propositions are actually contradictory – do egalitarians think humans are all the same or do they want to make them all the same?  In the course of the essay he claims that “egalitarians begin with the a priori axiom that all people, and hence all groups of peoples, are uniform and equal”, which showcases the sneaky move openly.…

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Return of the Irrepressed (Part 1)

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We all float down here, Georgie… no government to hold us down, you see…

With thanks to@gerofalltradesfor creating this post’s accompanying cursed image for me.

This article has been amended to remove an inaccurate claim that Reason magazine gave Milo’s book Dangerous a flattering review.  I got them mixed up with Skeptic magazine.  My bad.  Sorry.  BTW, for interest’s sake, the review in Skeptic was written by Dr. George Michael who received his degree from George Mason University.

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Whereas many of today’s libertarians and ‘classical liberals’ like to present their doctrine as somehow above or beyond the left-right divide (even as they enable fascists and agree with everything they say), Rothbard indulged in little such pretence.  He was cynical and opportunistic.  He was inconsistent and incoherent.  But he wasn’t confused.  For him, libertarianism was, essentially, a reiteration of what he called ‘the Old Right’.

For more on this, see a flatulent, blithering essay he wrote in 1992 called ‘A Strategy for the Right’.  You can read it at LewRockwell-dot-org.  I won’t link to it (because, while the SPLC might not come right out and say it, as far as I’m concerned LewRockwell-dot-org is basically fash) but you can find it… if, y’know, you want to.

In this essay he praises the extreme libertarian anti-New Dealers such as Garet Garrett and H. L. Mencken.  Garret was a conservative who thought the New Deal was a neo-Marxist revolution against American individualism.  Praised by Mises, one of his books – an anti-government, pro-gold standard screed – was chosen to be one of the ‘twelve candles’ of the John Birch Society.  (The JBS, in case you don’t know, is an ‘anti-communist’ and ‘limited government’ advocacy group, co-founded by the Koch Brothers’ dad.  These days it gets classified as paleoconservative, but has always been as close to being American fascism as makes little odds.)

Rothbard is enamoured of the Old Right partly because, according to him, “they would have been horrified and incredulous at the accredited victimology that has rapidly taken over our culture”… which is presumably why Garret, as Executive Editor of the New York Tribune in 1918, was furious at one of his reporters for sending the paper to press featuring a photograph of a lynching in Georgia.  Too victimological, no doubt.

Mencken, of course, was – amongst other things – a social Darwinist, a militarist, a racist, and an anti-semite who admired Hitler.  Mencken disdained democracy in similar – if more vociferous – terms to the ones that would later be used by Ron Paul, saying it was a form of domination of the superior by the inferior.  He also considered all higher mathematics to be “hogwash” – a very Austrian sentiment.

Rothbard manages to work the essay around to… well, um…

And while I’m on this topic, this is the year 1992, so I am tempted to say, repeat after me: COLUMBUS DISCOVERED AMERICA!

Even though a fan of diversity, the only revisionism I will permit on this topic is whether Columbus discovered America, or whether it was Amerigo Vespucci.

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The Ron Paul Revolution (Part 2)

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Like any emerging ideology, the alt-right didn’t just materialize out of nowhere. There were forerunners crying in the wilderness who were generally viewed as harmless kooks. “The paleo-libertarian seed that Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, and Lew Rockwell planted in the 1990s has come to bear some really ugly fruit in the last couple of years as elements of the alt-right have made appearances in various libertarian organizations and venues,” writes Steve Horwitz, an economist who writes at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

The Ron Paul Revolution might not have amounted to much electorally, but it would be wrong to underestimate the impact he has had on libertarianism and the alt-right. “In a way, Ron Paul is the guy who lit the fuse,” Nick Gillespie says. “And he embodies some of those contradictions [between libertarianism and the alt-right].” Gillespie tells me that Richard Spencer came up to him at the Republican National Convention in 2016 and said that he was activated into politics because of Paul. Gillespie sees Paul’s legacy as very mixed, as someone who was “simultaneously… positing this very libertarian worldview, but then he’s also speaking to people’s fears and anxieties.” If one were looking for the missing link to explain this phenomenon, Ron Paul (and his paleolibertarian allies) would be a good place to start.

–  ‘The Insidious Libertarian to Alt-Right Pipeline’, Daily Beast 23/8/17

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No report on Paul would be complete without mentioning certain ‘newsletters’.  And this is where we start to see Paul’s significance as a liminal, bridging figure between the ‘respectable’ and intellectual libertarianism of Austrian-inspired economic theorizing, which he has popularized in several books, and the racist far-Right.  In the process, we find a ‘way in’ to paleolibertarianism… a service Paul has rendered for many, though in a different way.

In the words of Mother Jones:

Published as far back as the late 1970s, under various mastheads bearing Paul’s name (Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, the Ron Paul Survival Report), the newsletters are, at times, virulently racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and conspiratorial.

Jonathan Chait managed to make himself useful – for once – by writing a handy little summary of (some of) the bile in these newsletters:

As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled “What To Expect for the 1990s,” predicted that “Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities” because “mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white ‘haves.’” Two months later, a newsletter warned of “The Coming Race War,” and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, “If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it.” In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, “Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo.” “This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s,” the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter’s author–presumably Paul–wrote, “I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense.

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The Ron Paul Revolution (Part 1)

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In my opinion, any account of the rise of the alt-right, especially one which emphasizes the role of libertarianism, and thus the distal causal role of the Austrian School of economics, must begin with Ron Paul.

In his essay ‘On Social Sadism’, published in the journal Salvage, China Miéville recounts an occasion when

[a]t a debate between Republican candidates in September 2011, Wolf Blitzer, the chair, mooted the case of a hypothetical thirty-year-old uninsured man who becomes sick. ‘[C]ongressman,’ Blitzer asks Ron Paul, ‘are you saying that society should just let him die?’

‘Yeah!’ comes a shout from the audience. A smattering of applause. The shout is repeated, and again, and the applause grows.

Paul retired from politics in 2013, but his shadow is long on the libertarian Right.  After the above exchange, Paul – a former medical doctor and a fervent libertarian, indeed a ‘paleolibertarian’, a follower of the syncresis of libertarianism and far-right conservatism invented by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell – suggested that the hypothetical man in the question should have a private medical plan.  “We’ve given up on this concept that we might assume responsibility for ourselves, that our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it,” opined Paul sententiously. He later clarified his position on Twitter saying that “[t]he individual, private charity, families, and faith based orgs should take care of people, not the government.”  Recognisably a species of the same weaselly ‘Big Society’ argument employed around the same time by the coalition government in the UK as its Tory leaders tried to find a way to reconcile lethal austerity with their claim to no longer being ‘the nasty party’. Charity as a moral imperative, supplanting the need for socialised care. Chilly Victorian workhouse morality, dressed up as a plaintive cry for us all to be nicer to each other (so no surplus value has to be diverted anywhere useless).  Paul’s iteration has a more overtly Christian flavour, as befits American politics, and a tang of his ostensible anti-authoritarianism, but it boils down to the same thing: a thoroughly neoliberal impulse to relieve the state of its responsibilities to its subjects, while framing this as asking the subjects to take back control of their responsibilities. In Cameron’s version, the emphasis was more on countering a supposed culture of dependence, whereas in Paul’s the emphasis was more on encouraging individual liberty.  But we’re splitting hairs. The difference here is, as I say, a matter of emphasis. And we learn a lot from the fact that the same argument, with tweaks for tone, can be advanced from what are supposedly ideologically distinct varieties of conservatism.

Neoliberalism is a broad church.  This has been true since its birth, since the Mont Pelerin Society included Austrians and monetarists, neoconservatives and ordoliberals.  It is key to its success. The collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas speaks to its status as a class project rather than a distinctly ideological one.  It’s one of the tragic ironies of history that the revolutionary projects of the ruling class are (or at least can be) marked by tolerance and cooperation between different branches of ruling class ideology, whereas the revolutionary projects of the working class have tended to be marked by the exact opposite.…

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