Market "freedom" demonizes us all
Western Christian concepts of freedom, choice, and blameworthiness are deeply ingrained in capitalist society
My entire life has been spent under late-stage capitalism. It is the only social and economic system I know. It is the air I breathe. It’s difficult to really envision another system. Those in control of our politics seem uninterested in envisioning or enacting an alternative. Most of the public are also uninterested in alternatives. Many are just too busy working to make ends meet to think seriously about economics or politics. Many seem to be wholly blinkered by ideological doubletalk that casts a system that rapaciously destroys freedom and dignity as the only system that guarantees freedom and dignity. It is an absurd and heartbreaking irony that those most hurt by capitalism are often its most full-throated defenders. This irony is particularly stark in the US, where capitalism is in a particularly advanced stage.
Defending capitalism during the post World War II economic boom was easier, as FDR’s New Deal provided a safety net for Americans and reined in the most greedy impulses of the capitalist class. As a result, the American middle class was created and prospered. Capitalism seemed to be working.
But especially since the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 90s, when the wealthy began to claw back most of the gains made by the working class, defenses of capitalism as a system that brings universal prosperity are harder and harder to square with actual data and lived experience. Sure, capitalism is great at creating wealth, but that wealth is captured by a fraction of the population, and its political influence erodes any democratic protections against capitalism’s worst aspects. Its need for expansion to maintain profits eventually leads to a cannibalizing of the social and economic supports it needs to function, leading to recurrent crises and widespread suffering and misery.
Yet still, capitalism has a hold on us. Even many of those whose lives are destroyed by it don’t blame capitalism per se. They will still swear that capitalism provides the most opportunity for upwards mobility even as all opportunity is foreclosed to them.
A world-ordering moral system
There are likely many reasons for this dogged support for capitalism despite its devastating outcomes. Much of it has to do with a long program of corporate propaganda that has equated freedom and free markets. Any regulation of the market is a slippery slope to totalitarianism. But there is something more fundamental to the moralism in capitalist societies. Something that taps into much more than a natural impulse for competition or self-interest. It’s as if the capitalist system has co-opted something so ingrained in our social and moral consciousness that it cannot be dislodged despite all evidence of it being a hugely damaging and unworkable social and economic system.
To begin to understand, we need to stop thinking of capitalism as merely an economic system. As if our economic lives are ordered by capitalism, but our social lives exist somehow in parallel and would be more or less unchanged under another system. One of Karl Marx’s most influential insights was that the material conditions or modes of production (the way that people produce the things they need to live) will dictate all of the social relations in a society. This means that the economic systems in a society will dictate the way that people interact and live in that society, or as Marx put it “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life.”1
The specific character of social, political, and intellectual life is underpinned by values and morals. These are shaped by a number of cultural and material aspects, but one of the most important is religion. Religion, though it in itself is shaped by material forces and used to justify social and economic systems, is thought to stand outside of political and economic concerns, particularly in the US, where they make a big deal—at least in principle if not practice—about the separation of church and state. Religion orders people’s worldviews, while economics and politics order their day-to-day lives. In other words, religion is a lens through which all other things in life are viewed, while capitalism is just the current economic system.
But it is this relegation of capitalism to the realm of mere economics that leads us to discount the power it has as an almost religion-like lens through which people view the world, complete with its own values and morals that shape what is acceptable, appropriate, and blameworthy.
In his book, Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital, Adam Kotsko argues that one of the most insidious aspects of capitalism, especially in its neoliberal stage, is that it has moved from being an economic system to being a moral framework through which all other things are viewed. Much has been made of the influence of the so-called “Protestant Ethic” on the emergence and impact of capitalism. Furthermore, it’s easy to see how the ideas of competition, or selling yourself, or working on your brand, or using people in transactional relationships has infiltrated the way we view our lives, and this certainly has harmful consequences. But, more insidiously, the specific moral character of neoliberal capitalism has been co-opted from Western Christianity, resulting in a Frankenstein worldview that deploys Christian concepts of freedom and choice to demonize and generate blameworthiness. In this way, it is a powerful “system of legitimacy” that works to “maintain [its] explanatory power and justify the loyalty of [its] adherents.”2 In other words, neoliberal capitalism is a world-ordering moral system that shapes the way that people view all aspects of their lives and behavior. It is not too extreme to say that capitalism is a religion. And its particular longevity and tenacity comes from its co-option of Western Christian morals and values in the service of the market.
Freedom and demonization
To understand the particular moralism of the free market, we need to analyze the logic of demonization in Western Christianity. The key figure here, according to Kotsko, is Satan, that angel created by God who fell from heaven. Theological explanations for Satan focus on the fact that he chose to use his freedom to rebel against God. These explanations run into philosophical and theological issues however, because God is also all knowing and all powerful. For this to be the case—and it is very important that it is the case—means that God offered Satan freedom to make a choice that God already knew he would make. In other words, God knew that Satan would choose to rebel. It is a clear-cut case of entrapment. And because the consequence of rebellion was Satan being cast down to earth to tempt humankind and to introduce evil into the world, this very much looks like God offering the illusion of freedom for the explicit purpose of demonizing Satan.3 The freedom was never real, because the choice, and the demonization, was already known and foreordained. And because God’s divine providence is able to achieve good from fallen and evil humankind, it very much looks like “the first thing God does is induce some of his creatures to “rebel”… to ensure that there will be a reservoir of evil for him to turn toward the greater good.”4
This logic of divine providence holds for modern conceptions of the free market. Many of the ideas about the way the market works and the social relations and outcomes it produces are secularized versions of Western Christian moralism. And just as the Christian God can turn our poor choices into a greater good for his divine purposes, “The virtue of the invisible hand is that it is able to take our specifically self-interested choices and harmonize them into social good.”5
Yet the providential hand of the market, like its divine model, is not content simply to wait around for us to make selfish decisions. It must force us to be selfish in the particular ways it demands, which means seeking open-ended material gain. Any impulse to seek the social good directly, apart from the grace of the market, must be stifled. For the wealthy, ideological discourse is often sufficient, while for the workers themselves, a more powerful form of persuasian is required—namely, the ever-present threat of starvation… If the workers cannot see their own self-interest, then it must be made inescapably clear.6
Forced to be free
This logic of divine providence and demonization is pervasive under late-stage capitalism. Melinda Cooper examines how in the wake of the New Deal, both religious conservatives and neoliberals found common cause—and a common moral framework—in opposing the welfare state. For conservatives, the nuclear family, with its breadwinning father, subservient housewife, and dependent children, represented the ideal patriarchal form of society. For neoliberals, the family represented the ideal unit to transmit wealth from generation to generation, to absorb harmful externalities of free-market capitalism, and was the foundation of economic agency and social reproduction with its surplus of unpaid labor.
Both groups recognized the threat of government welfare to shatter the nuclear family as it had traditionally been composed and cast this threat in moral terms of personal responsibility and freedom. The moral framework of Western Christianity was deployed as a cover for a transformation of social and economic systems. All of the major political moves by both neoliberals and conservatives to gut public services and welfare can be understood as moves to moralize and enforce an approach to poor laws and welfare that emphasizes personal responsibility and freedom for one's own actions within the context of a meritocracy shaped by an invisible hand that gives people what they deserve.
According to this logic, failure to thrive under capitalism is the fault of the individual, because either they did not participate in the game as they should, or they made poor decisions, the consequences of which they are responsible for. For conservatives, this is just the proper moral order of things. For neoliberals the market must be free to operate and people must be free to play the market without any interference from the state, and in some cases, must be forced to play in order to survive. If we will not use our agency to choose to play the market, we must be forced to do so. Capitalism is freedom, we are told. But if you will not choose, you will be forced to be free. As in the case of Satan, the freedom offered by capitalism is illusory and used as a pretext for demonization. Those most hurt by free market reforms are demonized and used to justify more extreme economic restructuring, providing a new crop of victims ripe for demonization.
Welfare queens and witches
While demonization of large segments of the population who were hurt by the neoliberal policies begun by Reagan and continued by subsequent Democratic and Republican presidents became the political norm, the stereotypical example was the “welfare queen”, a black single mother who defrauded American taxpayers to live a lavish lifestyle on her welfare payments. She represented the ultimate rejection of personal responsibility in her failure to choose to work to care for herself and her children, preferring instead to leech off of the hard work of others. She became a larger-than-life representation of all single mothers on welfare, the target of religious and political ire.
It is telling that so much vitriol was reserved for single mothers on welfare. These women represent the ultimate bastardization of the proper state of society for both conservatives and neoliberals, albeit for different reasons. They must be brought to heel. They must be disciplined by the market. This focus on breaking and forcing submission of women is reminiscent of the era of the rise of capitalism in Europe, where mass enclosures were accompanied by an explosion of witch hunts, a practice that literally accused women (mostly older, young and unmarried, or widowed) of deriving their power to destroy their neighbors by having sexual relations with devils. The demonization could not be more explicit.
Silvia Federici shows how the rise of capitalism and the witch hunts were intimately intertwined. For the emerging capitalist class, women needed to be disciplined and made to accept the new social order of capitalist production. This required them to be made to submit, under threat of torture or death, to their roles as subservient wives and mothers, invisible faces behind the necessary social reproduction of the labor required by capital. Western Christian moralism and misogyny was also used during the enlightenment as justification for industrial mining and extraction of resources. Earth, long viewed as a gracious and good mother, was demonized and in need of civilizing and discipline, and capitalism was the tool.
In the modern day, it is no surprise that the “structural adjustments”, the forced implementation of widescale public cuts and privatization required as a condition for loans by the IMF and World Bank, have seen an explosion of witch hunts in places like Nigeria often fueled by hardline evangelical Christian pastors. As they did at the dawn of capitalism, if women stand in the way of accumulation, they must be removed, bent, or broken to fit the new system.
Seeing through the illusion
Here in Aotearoa, this demonization is pervasive in the coalition Government’s messaging. They justify their cuts to social programs with talk of personal responsibility for benefit recipients to look for work. They levy increased means-testing, penalties, and compliance requirements on beneficiaries. They label those on the benefit as lazy or unmotivated. They relax the standards for eviction, blaming tenants’ behavior. They threaten parents whose children don’t go to school. They label striking doctors as irresponsible. And while the coalition between the religious right and neoliberal/libertarians is less established and influential here than in the US, due in large part to NZ being a more secular society, there is a growing concern that international free market interests are pouring money and resources into cultivating such a coalition. In Australia the religious right and the neoliberal/libertarian wing of politics has been forging stronger ties in recent years. While the centre-left fought off a right challenge this election, a more disciplined campaign will likely beat them next election if they settle for piecemeal reforms and tinkering around the edges, as happened here in New Zealand. We only need to look to the US to see how this ends.
Free market moralism and the logic of capitalist demonization are pervasive in our modern world. Most talk of freedom and personal responsibility refers to how we relate to the market. Freedom refers to the freedom to act as an economic agent. Our proper choices are blessed by the provident hand of the market. Our poor choices are punished. Those who succeed deserve their success and wealth. Those who fail deserve their misery. This is a world-ordering system that is so all-encompassing it is extremely difficult to break out of, both politically and psychologically. Its particular moralism is all the more damning because it justifies it as a legitimate system in the face of—or explicitly because of—negative outcomes for those who live under it.
Capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations—the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury—by denigrating the ‘nature’ of those it exploits: women, colonial subjects, the descendants of African slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalization. -Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
Adam Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons.
See also Adam Kotsko, The Prince of this World.
Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons.
Ibid.
Ibid.
I've not come across his work before, I'll be sure to check it out!
Great work, man!