Populism, Fascism, Socialism

And Democracy

You can quote me on this. Populism is almost invariably an anti-capitalist movement because it is intent upon reinstating the market structure and cultural norms of bourgeois society. Some populists are not anti-capitalist, of course: Donald Trump is a perfect example. But a MAGA Nation animated by the quite populist beliefs of J D Vance stands a good chance of becoming the majority in the US, because that is where the majority of Americans stands. A Left that doesn’t understand these simple facts is doomed to failure. (For background, see my previous Substack columns on [1] Steve Bannon’s reading of Christopher Lasch and [2] the appeal of patriarchy.)

There is no way to understand the anti-capitalist tenor and appeal of populism unless you grasp the difference between bourgeois society and capitalism. To do so, however, you must relinquish the idea that capitalism exists where money, merchants, markets, and commodities appear; for these are dimensions of almost all recorded history, including the ancient moments. You must also recognize that a social stratum of small property holders—variously known as yeomen, mechanics, artisans, freeholders—is a trans-historical reality of post-tribal, sedentary civilizations that practice both agriculture and urban-industrial arts.

This stratum was in fact the social groundwork and political bulwark of Athenian democracy, and of early modern republics, from Florence to the Commonwealth, on toward the first modern nation-state in North America. (You don’t have to believe me—go ask Hesiod and his resentful interlocutor, Aristotle, or sample Machiavelli’s Discourses.) In other words, the bourgeoisie, like the poor, we have always had with us. The proletariat, a propertyless working class, is by contrast a strictly and specifically modern phenomenon, a social stratum that you might even say is a mere blip on the radar that scans human experience.

How, then, to distinguish between bourgeois society and capitalism? One way is to recognize the means by which the inhabitants of modern market societies defined freedom—as the kind of self-mastery that derived from control of one’s own will as this was manifest in labor-time, a “self-control” that serfs, slaves, and wage laborers did not have because they owned no property except their latent capacity to produce value through work. If you were not a proprietor, if you did not own yourself because you controlled your waking, productive hours, you were not, by definition, a free man. (There was no such thing as a free woman, only wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers, who were dependent, at the law and according to custom, on husbands, brothers, or fathers.)

Another way to distinguish between bourgeois society and capitalism is to notice the difference between simple commodity circulation [C-M-C] and the formula for capital [M-C-M^], as Marx did in Volume 1 of Capital. Under the first monetary regime, in bourgeois society, money (M) is merely a means of exchange, not the purpose of producing commodities (C). Production of both agricultural and industrial goods is conducted mainly by households, by small holders, not in factories employing wage laborers. Production as such presupposes a certain level of consumption, because the point of producing commodities is not to accumulate great wealth but to validate the self-mastering status of the head of household, the paterfamilias, by maintaining, not enlarging, his claims on productive (income-generating) property. “Safety first” is his motto.

Under the second monetary regime, capitalism, money becomes both means and end of producing commodities. Production of industrial goods is conducted increasingly and then mainly by large proprietary establishments, then corporations, employing wage laborers. Any limits on the accumulation of wealth in the abstract (money in the bank) or as consumer goods disappear, accordingly, because the point of producing commodities is to get rich, not to maintain the social standing of the household and its head, nor to bequeath that same standing to succeeding generations. “Self-control” now gives way to unlimited possession, to seeking control not of one’s own will, but that of others, and as many as possible. The will to power, once a phrase meant (by Nietzsche) to signify the urge to individual freedom, now means self-realization through domination of whatever the world has on offer.

Marx’s formulation is ratified in the language used by Maurice Dobb in Studies in the Development of Capitalism (rev. ed. 1963), where he distinguishes between a “petty mode of production” and what follows during the industrial revolution, when wage labor becomes the dominant relation of goods production; by C. B. Macpherson in Possessive Individualism (1962), where he defines a simple market society as one in which commodities flourish, but there is no well-developed market in labor; and by historians who study household economies, peasant culture, and what they call “proto-industrial” societies, finding in all cases that necessary labor is understood by the producers themselves as the condition, not the negation, of their freedom, but that wage labor, or proletarian status—working for another—is tantamount to slavery.

With these distinctions and definitions in mind, you can see how and why there is no paradox or contradiction in the combination of beliefs that has long characterized American culture—on the one hand, a faith in free markets as the equalizer of economic opportunity and the engine of social mobility; on the other, a fear of concentrated market power and the greed that fuels it as the elemental forces of political evil, the agents of inequality and social stagnation. As a household economy composed of small holders freely competing with each other as producers, and as a polity composed of proprietors, self-mastering individuals beholden to no one for their livelihood, bourgeois society delivers on the promises of the American Dream as capitalism cannot.

That is how and why it was the social ideal of the Puritans, the Workingmen’s Party, the National Labor Union, the Knights of Labor, and the Peoples Party—the Populists themselves. That was the dream, anyway. But if you believe in free enterprise as the best means of efficient resource allocation, there’s not much you can do about the concentration of market power that the large corporations currently represent and exercise—except by “trust-busting,” the strict enforcement of anti-trust law, which might reinstate some semblance of a “fair field and no favor,” the condition of open competition between firms that is the premise of neoclassical economic theory. This is the outer limit of J D Vance’s populist radicalism—it’s why he so fervently supports Lina Khan, the trust-busting chair of the FTC. Steve Bannon would go further. Donald Trump would do anything to enrich himself.

What follows is an email exchange between my old friends and erstwhile colleagues from the Rutgers English Department, John McClure and Bruce Robbins, between July 19 and 20, all three of us having absorbed the beating of the Republican Convention in Milwaukee. I hope it illuminates the thinking that must go into constructing an alternative to the populism that has seized that party, turning it into an anti-corporate, even anti-capitalist social movement. Our shared assumption: socialism or barbarism.

As an appendix, I have added the comment from Tim Dunlop, the proprietor of the great Substack site, “The Future of Everything,” and my response, to clarify the periodization at issue here.

John, 7/19:

I think J.D. Vance just hit one out of the ballpark.  In his Acceptance speech he tells a compelling and pretty persuasive story about himself. Then he offers a sharply drawn account of Americans' economic crises and grievances; repeated assurances that all races and many new immigrants will be included in the rebirth of the country; and a romantic nationalism that holds up "the working man" (oops) and denounces the corporations. I'm amazed Trump dared to give him the podium. 

My response:

I can't help thinking of the difference between—or is it the convergence of?—J D Vance and Mike Davis, he of Prisoners of the American Dream.  The former, the hillbilly, thinks the American working class suffers from a shortage of the bourgeois virtues (too much indolence or interdependence = not enough work ethic or ambition) and the latter, the pseudo-longshoreman, thinks it suffers from a surfeit thereof (too much ambition or work ethic = not enough solidarity or interdependence).  

Which is it?  Either way, the working class must blame itself for its lack of what would get it ahead in this world.  Vance, like Josh Hawley, is willing to blame the C-Suites, which is to say the big corporations, the monopolies in Leninist terminology, for exporting jobs and making social mobility impossible.  What's the solution that follows?  It can't be cancelling private enterprise, because that would tip the project over into socialism.  

Anti-trust thus becomes the battle cry.  In Bannon's terms, which are Lasch's—and Vance's when he lavishes praise on Lina Khan at the FTC, who wants to turn Amazon into a public utility—redistribution will result from stern enforcement of the Sherman Act and its corollaries.  (Varoufakis comes close to this formula for success, as do many other avowed socialists.)  Break up the monopolies, make room for the little guy, the small holder, the bourgeois proprietor of himself!  The alternatives to anti-trust are socialism or state capitalism.  You know where the Catholics will land on that question.

Kenneth Burke's gentle scolding of the comrades in the CP [at the American Writers Congress, 1935] never sounded better.  When you call on "workers," you enlist the sympathies of some of your potential constituents, but not their ambitions.  Call on them as "the people" and you got a word that allows for solidarity and great achievements, all at once.  You invoke a cross-class coalition, which is what it's gonna take, anyway.

John’s riposte:

Vance seems more ready to blame the Corporations and their lackeys in government than feckless workers here; a shift from “Hillbilly Elegy”.  We re left with feckless drug dealers facing vigilante justice while his mother gets to celebrate ten years clean and sober at a party in the White House. 

 Is it fair to say that no Democrats,  including Sanders  or the Squad, are likely to address  white and conservative, or non-white working and lower-middle  class cultural and economic grievances as successfully as Vance?  Even if his prescriptions are mostly wrong?  That would be my prediction.  

My response:

I don't think it's a shift.  He was quick to blame the RR corps. for the disaster in Palestine, Ohio, and sympathetic to talk of getting jobs back into the rust belt, where they'd do most good.  But now I see what you mean—there is a shift from blaming workers for their lack of the bourgeois virtues to blaming the CEOs in the C Suites. 

But how do you get those jobs back?  If you believe in self-reliance, private enterprise, etc. (a.k.a. capitalism, but maybe you mean its groundwork in bourgeois society), it's gotta be tax breaks and tax cuts, incentives from government, and then you get government out of the way of the entrepreneurs.  That's what the Tech Bros. want (Hong Kong is the template), as per Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, et al., after the Hayek/Friedman model of capitalism.  The so-called neoliberal model.

So the lowest common denominator becomes anti-trust again, the project of reinstating competition between small forms as the condition of equality in the marketplace, the only place where that circumstance can be created without recourse to collective means.

It's a very progressive project, but the last presidential candidate who really meant it was WIlliam Howard Taft, in 1912.

When Vance speaks that language, he sounds progressive—so does Lina Khan, so did Brandeis—but it's the language that Lasch and Bannon speak as well.  It's the language of populism in the American dialect, and by now it ain't progressive. 

Bruce responds to me and John, 7/20

Another way to think of the sudden prominence of Vance here is that this is no longer about Trump. Yes, the Republicans are the party of Trump, but it's not just a cult of personality. It has legs. Serious long-term strategists of the Republican Party are going all in on a new image of the party: not the party of the WSJ and the Heritage Foundation, but the populist party of the angry working class. The rest is detail. Vance is the long-term face of the party. As we know, the long-term trends have already been going in that direction. The Democrats are successfully painted as the party of the educated liberal elites and their "diversity" clients. According to this Republican strategy, they can also shoot for more inclusiveness (Black and Latino men) and maybe get a fair amount of it as long as they keep playing the populist (national/economic) card. Populism has never been seriously anti-capitalist, has it? I say this, not knowing the history and not having thought this through at all, because it feels like there is a more serious challenge here for us progressives, and not only in the US. Look at the right in Europe. We've said all this before. But Vance makes it real in a different way.

My response to Bruce:

Populism here and abroad has always been deeply anti-capitalist in the Leninist sense, shared by Thorstein Veblen (as in The Engineers and the Price System), et al., animated by the idea that "finance capital" had seized control of industry in the "monopoly" stage of capitalism.  Vladimir Ilych made the case in Imperialism (1914), borrowing wholesale from J.A. Hobson's book of 1902, which borrowed likewise from Charles A. Conant, the principal theoretical architect of the Fed in the good old USA.  

This is the overlap between the populists, the fascists and the socialists, the part of the Venn diagram where anti-semitism and the fear of effeminacy become the central area of the larger configuration.  At bottom these anti-capitalists share an argument against exchange value—the money power, the bankers, the "international financial elite," who are often enough the Jews—on behalf of use value, that is, the sturdy yeoman, the mechanic, the small businessman, the entrepreneur, the guy who makes things, who doesn't just consume the value produced by real men.

And that argument on behalf of use value can be turned against all kinds of modernity's traits—in the name of "a sense of place" as against rootless cosmopolitanism, artisanal craft and care as against wage labor and mass production, Nature as against anything "human," productive labor as against consumer culture.  And so on.

Here is J D Vance on the evil effects of an international financial elite.

John responds to me:

Great job lining up the oppositions. But wouldn't the best approach be to try to accommodate aspects of both positions  under a "big tent" progressivism? Modernity isn't perfect, and surely there's room to be made for those who criticize it. (As we do in literary studies.) Wouldn't it have been better, for instance, if marxism hadn't spent so much time fighting belief? 

My response to John:

Fuck yeah!  That's the beauty of pragmatism, it seems to me—its pliability, by which we can see that it works as a method of sketching, actually inhabiting, the relations between positions that are apparently opposites, or at least tend to exclude the alternative(s). 

Faith is at odds with reason only insofar as you assume that rationality excludes belief.  Pragmatists can't go there because they know that "the absence of faith is a mental nullity."  [James at "Will to Believe"]

Fascists aren't anti-modern, as Moishe Postone points out, they're all for industrial strength.  But they're against commodity fetishism, reification, financialization, etc.  Pragmatists follow Whitman (and the later Marx)  in taking this extremity of the commodity form for granted.  They think of it as the human condition, which entails alienation, objectification, etc.

Bruce responds to me:

To back up a little: what I was trying to say is that the Vance position could well be a winning one for the Republicans, once the cult of Trump has gone, and that that's terrible news for us, since there will NOT be any real anti-capitalism in it. What there will be includes them trying to shut down or take over the universities, hotbeds of leftism that they supposedly are. Etc etc etc.

My riposte to Bruce:

I thought you were saying that populism is never seriously anti-capitalist.  I think it always is, in the "producerist" manner of the people who take Wendell Barry, Christopher Lasch, Terence Powderly, Tom Watson, et al., seriously.

You can be all for private property, commercial society, commodity circulation, money, prices, markets, blah, blah, and be anti-capitalist.  Like the Puritans, like the Knights of Labor, like the Populists, like those Progressives who believed anti-trust law would restore competition and let the little man compete on an equal footing with all other producers.  Like the present-day trust-busters at the FTC.

Again, it all comes down to the differences between bourgeois society and capitalism.  In Marx's shorthand form, C-M-C as against M-C-M^.

Bruce responds to me:

Ok, so yes, I did say that. But what I meant is that we are not going to get any of the anti-capitalism we want out of Vance's version of populism. On the contrary. If the Republican party goes this way and does so seriously, all that stuff we were saying about how they can never win a popular majority and that's why they are attacking the electoral institutions of democracy, all that goes out the window. They CAN win a popular majority. They can even be pretty (relatively) inclusive, as I take it Vance tried to sound. But we are not going to like the results of their version of anti-capitalism wins.

My response to Bruce:

Agreed, 100%.  I neglected your point about how Republicans can indeed forge a majority on their anti-capitalist grounds.  That needs to be stressed, because it's the scary part.

Tim Dunlop, 7/22:

So, when Nancy Pelosi says, “We’re capitalists and that’s just the way it is,” what does she mean? What version of capitalism is she invoking?

My response to Tim:

Hey Tim, thanks--that is the question, ain't it? I think when Pelosi or your typical pol says such a thing, she means "We believe in markets as the groundwork of democracy, but we also know that self-regulating markets destroy everything--including themselves--once set free. As Alan Greenspan says, market are social constructions with social purposes, and must be treated as such, as subject to democratic control." For the rest of us, we know that capitalism has an internal history. Its stages are (1) simple market or bourgeois society, (2) proprietary capitalism [on which see Phil Scranton's endless stream of books], (3) corporate capitalism. But there's no guarantee that the transition from one to the other will happen: some societies get to (1), but not to (2), and these are concentrated in what we used to call the Third World. The anti-corporate agenda of Vance, Hawley, et al., is actually an attack on "finance capital," which is why it fits so well with the (racist) rhetoric of anti-immigration, fear of the foreigner, etc.

John’s new comments, 7/22:

(1) To distinguish bourgeois society from capitalism itself seems to fly in the face of common Marxian usage—and Marx himself.

(2) Don’t these two modes coexist, with differing degrees of ascendancy, in the 19th century? Residual, dominant, emergent?

My response to John:

Yes, my distinctions seem to contradict Marx's own usage, until you take his formulations (C-M-C, etc.) seriously, and link them to the "law of accumulation" as he sketches it in volume 1 of Capital, then really develops it in volume 2, and finally gets down in the weeds, at volume 2 of Theories of Surplus Value.  

And then you realize that his usage is clarified and amplified by cognate readings in economic and religious history, as in Weber, Tawney, Dobb​, Brenner, Landes, blah, blah, blah.  The example of American history, as Marx himself reads it—not to mention the specialists—​only verifies and magnifies the periodization I'm proposing.

To demonstrate all this would take even more of my seemingly unnecessary rhetoric.  And to add that, of course, these are interpenetrating modes of production, as per Williams, Hall, et al., so that the stage of bourgeois society is never erased, nor the stage of proprietary capitalism, and that corporate capitalism has led to the social death of the capitalist class . . . well, that would require even more exposition.

But you’re right, it would clarify things if I said, look, the reason that bourgeois society remains as an ideal for MAGA Nation as well as a large swath of the Left is that its remnants survive as a residual mode of production in the form of small business, as the “garage bands” of our time. Even in the absence of this battered social bulwark, the bourgeois virtues remain as a retort to the insane excesses of the traders and the speculators and the CEOs, and, especially for the Left, as a refuge from the ugly idiocies of consumer culture.

In Volume 3 of Capital, Marx talks about the abolition of capitalist property "within the bounds of capitalist production itself," leading to a "socialised mode of production."  [Kerr ed. pp. 516-19]  He's describing the intersection of modern credit (banking) and what we know as modern-industrial corporations, and he's already compared this stage of development to the erosion of feudal society, ca. 1400-1700.  Does that contradict his own usage? 

Bruce’s new comment, also 7/22:

I'm not sure your (our?) readership needs M-C-M' variants right now, or the capitalism vs the market discourse that goes with them, but maybe I'm being too... um..pragmatic, in this moment of big decisions and position-takings. 

Can the Republicans get away with being the party of venture capital (Thiel) as well as anti-elitism, the two so neatly combined in Vance?  What did it mean that the head of the Teamsters spoke at the RNC--and said things about support for labor the Republicans CANNOT agree with? Can Harris avoid doing  the Hilary Clinton thing of saying, when accused of taking $200,000 for a talk on Wall Street, that "everybody does it"? Has the party moved on from all that?  

My response to Bruce:

Good questions.  The escape hatch for Vance, Thiel, Andreesen, Horowitz, and the Tech Bros in general is the covering law conveyed by the word "entrepreneur," which in the vernacular goes by the name of "garage band," and which once was conjured by the image of the "self-made man" and the "inner-directed individual."

You may be right about my painstaking efforts to differentiate capitalism from bourgeois society.  For you they are by now simply boring, possibly because you've heard me rehearse it so often.  But I can't tell you how many times people have just dismissed me when I lay this out.  

Professional historians are the worst: they don't want to hear that markets and money do not capitalism make, because then they'd have to think seriously about what kind of market society would serve democracy.