MEMORY LANE SERIES - #4
A Case for Applied Sustainability: Why I Am Not a Marxist or a Capitalist (Part 2)
Welcome to the “Memory Lane Series”
This series will take the form of both short notes and longer posts like this one. They will typically reflect on various aspects of my past work as a new materialist to help historically frame-up the final book Seven Storey Garden: Memoirs of a Redeemed New Materialist. Some reflections in this Memory Lane Series will serve as a historical archive of various documents, reports and written works that will be cited in the final work. This said, lets dive in…
This particular piece is the second to last part of a three part series that was written in 2014 as a critique of both Marxism and Capitalism from the perspective of new materialism.
PLEASE NOTE: I only made minor edits to these works to ensure they accurately reflect the history of the Appalachian Transition movement…
A Case for Applied Sustainability: Why I Am Not a Marxist or a Capitalist (Part 2)
“By the way, I wonder who you mean when you say ‘radical organization theorists’, given that what passes for radicality today is so deeply affected by linguistic idealism that it is really conservative, not radical.”
- Manuel DeLanda
“Beginning in the late nineteenth century, and especially after 1930 in the United States, the term liberalism came to be associated with a very different emphasis, particularly in economic policy. It came to be associated with a readiness to rely primarily on the state rather than on private voluntary arrangements to achieve objectives regarded as desirable. The catch words became welfare and equality rather than freedom.”1 Friedman goes on to say that “the nineteenth-century liberal was a radical, both in the etymological sense of going to the root of the matter, and in the political sense of favoring major changes in social institutions. So too must be his modern heir…”2 So now that we got that out of the way, that is, defining what a radical liberal was and perhaps should be today – a strong supporter of the free-market; let’s move on to further analyze the terms in question: Marxism and Capitalism.
As a radical in its purest form, that is, not existing on the fringes where actions either takes the form of symbolic “take it to the streets” campaigns, self-centered acts of “speaking truth to power,” or a call for the complete dissolution of the state in its entirety, I would like to propose a simple casting away of the term “Capitalism” and with it the self-identifier of “Capitalist” all together. By doing so we would adopt a distinction – markets and anti-markets – that I find helps one to navigate through the complex world of the political economy in order to revive the once forgotten “nineteenth-century liberal” that Milton was so fond of.3
The normative concept capitalism, for the most part, has been corrupted as a term where the multiple meanings attached to it vary so much that I find it almost impossible to convey any meaning whatsoever to others (i.e., a locutionary act so to speak). I typically have to locate the source from which I am building my meaning from (Friedman, Marx, Smith, etc.) in order to ensure that “the download” or translation is complete between all parties participating in said conversation. Unfortunately, this becomes more of an inefficient nuisance than an efficient exercise in creativity – often times the primary purpose of the conversation in the first place.
My objective here, as alluded to in part 1, is to identify patterns of centralized power and in turn critique it. In the case of the ambiguous term “capitalism,” centralization manifests in a discursive manner which essentially renders the process of conveying meaning as exclusive as opposed to inclusive, that is, it almost requires a Master’s degree in economic history or a lot of free-time and independent research in order to fully convey what one means when using the term “Capitalism.”
DeLanda further elucidates this problem when assessing Fernand Braudel’s distinction between markets and anti-markets (i.e., capitalism). He states that…
“if capitalism has always relied on non-competitive practices, if the prices for its commodities have never been objectively set by demand/supply dynamics, but imposed from above by powerful economic decision-makers, then capitalism and the market have always been different entities. To use a term introduced by Braudel, capitalism has always been an ‘anti-market’. This, of course, would seem to go against the very meaning of the word "capitalism", regardless of whether the word is used by Karl Marx or Ronald Reagan. For both nineteenth century radicals and twentieth century conservatives, capitalism is identified with an economy driven by market forces, whether one finds this desirable or not. Today, for example, one speaks of the former Soviet Union's ‘transition to a market economy’, even though what was really supposed to happen was a transition to an anti-market: to large scale enterprises, with several layers of managerial strata, in which prices are set not taken. This conceptual confusion is so entrenched that I believe the only solution is to abandon the term "capitalism" completely, and to begin speaking of markets and anti-markets and their dynamics.”4
Manuel… I could not agree more! Now that I have provided a brief description of why I am not a Marxist or a Capitalist and have aligned myself with Friedman’s flavor of “radical liberalism,” I would like to bring Friedman’s traditional concept into the 21st century by outlining a potential roadmap for steering the concept of “sustainability” in a direction that also aligns with DeLanda’s flavor of new-materialism (which is explicitly anti-Marxist).
In my present work, I am specifically informing this new discipline with emerging economic theories which may help define how this concept (while its reflexivity still remains dynamic) takes root within the fertile grounds of the free-market in what I have come to call applied sustainability. Applied sustainability can be understood as the practice of linking the theory of sustainability to the real conditions found in a given social setting through the merging of both symbolic and connective community action, that is, a (connective) real-world action informs a (symbolic) interpretative action from which we generate meanings. Simply, to recall the American proverb of “hell is full of good meanings, but heaven is full of good works,” I propose a synthesis of “good meanings” and “good works” where reality keeps our perceived truths in check – in a word, realism.
This proposed synthesis would function in the following manner for say, the conspiracy theorist alluded to in part 1:
Reality generated by a field of meaning: Conspiracy theorist assumes the emergence of a one-world government that is essentially rooted in an anti-market “planning” methodology of implementing said conspiracy;
Field of meaning informing reality: Conspiracy theorist realized he/she has discounted the necessity of markets and their re-generative qualities in providing much needed revenue for “one-world” government;
Reality generating meaning: Conspiracy theorist becomes a realist and turns their critical gaze to real-world problems and engages in developing viable solutions.
With this in mind, perhaps the contemporary distinction between Marxism/Capitalism or Left/Right, should be replaced with a more appropriate/pragmatic distinction that carries just as much if not more political weight than the above (to be cliché) false dichotomies. I propose the simple distinction of realism versus non-realism or realist versus non-realist as this distinction seems to both define a tendency I see among my fellow entrepreneurs when they assess what can (real) and cannot (not real) happen within market dynamics (#3 above) as well as allows for us to define the parameters of when ideologies/myths are or are not influencing a particular decision as in the case of Marx/Engels ignoring a host of market forces in favor of one single force from which all surplus value emerges (#2 above).
To end, Manuel DeLanda clearly makes a distinction between what is real and non-real within social theory when he states that…
“to say that social entities have a reality that is conception-independent is simply to assert that the theories, models and classifications we use to study them may be objectively wrong, that is, that they may fail to capture the real history and internal dynamics of those entities. There are, however, important cases in which the very models and classifications social scientists use affect the behavior of the entities being studied…accepting that the referents of some general terms may in fact be moving targets does not undermine social realism…the problem for a realist social ontology rises here not because the meanings of all general terms shape the very perception that social scientists have of their referents, creating a vicious circle, but only in some special cases and in the context of institutions and practices that are not reducible to meanings…acknowledging the existence of troublesome cases in which the meanings of words affect their own referents in no way compromises a realist approach to institutions and practices. On the contrary, a correct solution to this problem seems to demand an ontology in which the existence of institutional organizations, interpersonal networks and many other social entities is treated as conception-independent.”5
Thanks for taking the time to read this FB note and I encourage you to comment below but before doing so I would like to ask you to consider creating a collaborative dialogue that seeks to transcend differences and begins identifying creative synergies that may begin to rebuild the fragmented landscape of the American dream.
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Manuel DeLanda, “Markets and Antimarkets in the World Economy,” Alumut, August 16, 1998, https://www.alamut.com/subj/economics/de_landa/antiMarkets.html
Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (Continuum, 2006), 1.