Mastering the Market State

Postliberal economist Philip Pilkington argues that we can’t simply dispense with a market state, but must give it new purpose in a postliberal political economy.

In the wake of the Brexit and Trump votes some of us started to sense that something was wrong. Little did we know how correct we were.

The direction things have taken since the mid-2010s is shocking on just about every count. The culture has soured completely and seems to have entered a nihilistic death spiral. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you if you had told me where we would be today; today I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw publicly celebrated cannibalism in another ten.

I recently watched an early live music performance by the pop punk band Blink 182. It must have been the mid-2000s. The band is playing by a pool party. Everyone is having fun. The bassist is wearing no clothes and is using his guitar as a loincloth of sorts. But the mood is light, and everyone is having a good time—this is the era of Fred Durst rockin’ the set, newly liberated F-bombs, and Spring Break. A generation of misfits and messers—the Jackass generation. Our generation.

Little did we know what would come after the party. The heavily tattooed drummer of Blink 182 has now been elevated by our media overlords from fringe oddball to aspirational figure—if you look like him you can marry into the Kardashian monarchy simulacrum. A causal relationship has been established in the public mind between quantity of tattoos on the body and social worth. Our societies are reverting to primitive barbarism. People are becoming increasingly unmoored and, not just irrational, but post-rational. It is starting to feel like you could convince them to tolerate—or perhaps even do—almost anything.

Postliberalism has come a long way in this time. The trends are now undeniable. But what can we do about them? Much energy so far has focused on cultural discussion. This is no bad thing. In the past few years, a genuine counterculture has started to emerge. The craziness is becoming seen not just as evil and destructive—but as cringe. A meme I saw recently captures the mood of the counterculture perfectly. It has an online Wojak character in a confessional: “Bless me father, for I have cringed” the caption reads.

After the cultural shift will be followed, one would hope, a discussion of legal changes. I can already catch a whiff of legal cordite in the air; full-scale lawfare seems almost certain to follow. But will it be enough? I increasingly do not think so. What we are witnessing right now is world historical, almost civilizational. The response will need to be comprehensive enough to meet this challenge.

Consider the collapse of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Christendom. If the Roman Empire collapsed and was simply replaced by the Christian communities that lived under it, we would have seen the proliferation of small self-sufficient Christian communes. Instead, we got the Holy Roman Empire.

Why? Because the Christians took what was there and built on it. They had no choice. The Roman Law—the Lex—was all-encompassing. You could not simply rewind the tape and create a new Christian Lex from scratch. The only way out was through—and so Christians mastered Roman law. Had the Christians not embraced the Lex they would have lost and been superseded by a group that would. We could well have had, not a Holy Roman Empire, but a Gnostic one.

Today we have something far more comprehensive and all-encompassing than the Roman Lex. We have the enormous machinery of the market-state. That is, the corporate sector that operates on monopolistic market-based principles; and the state bureaucracy that pursues goals through law and diktat. The market-state is today loosely integrated and becoming increasingly tight.

What is the ideology of the market-state? I think it can accurately be described as something between neoliberalism and ordo liberalism. That is, liberal market forces are used to pursue certain ends. Even the state uses incentive-based market structures to achieve many of its ends. This is not surprising. As a tool of social engineering there is nothing like incentive and disincentive—a fact that would not have surprised St Augustine.

What is the telos of the present market-state? What does the “Blob” want? This, it seems to me, is the core problem of a potential postliberal statecraft. And the answer is quite simply that the Blob wants . . . nothing in particular. We banished telos during the Enlightenment. We replaced it with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism worked so long as the institutions of the market-state Blob had to be forced to conform to the precepts of utilitarianism.