The Exception, Part 2; Hayek, Pinochet, neoliberalism, and why libertarianism always becomes authoritarian
In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin claimed – drawing on Naomi Klein & Greg Grandin – that Hayek “admired Pinochet’s Chile so much that...
In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin claimed – drawing on Naomi Klein and Greg Grandin – that Hayek “admired Pinochet’s Chile so much that he decided to hold a meeting of his Mont Pelerin Society in Viña del Mar”, the seaside resort in Chile where General Pinochet’s CIA-assisted military coup against the democratically elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende was planned.
Several years ago, this claim was denounced on Twitter as “made up” by none other than ‘@FriedrichHayek’ himself! (As usual, Hayek’s admirers simply deny his complicity with the Chilean junta, when they can’t get away with just neglecting to mention it. As Robin discovered, they have lots of excuses – he was an old man at the time, etc – all of which turn out to be so much bad faith when you look at them.)
Checking, Robin discovered that it is more accurate to say that Hayek attended the meeting where the decision to hold the MPS’s 1981 conference in Viña del Mar was made and, at least, did not oppose it. His position in the Society was still prestigious enough that, at the very least, an objection from him would carried a lot of weight. No such objection seems to have been forthcoming. And indeed, we’re being scrupulously fair to the point of charity by even being this circumspect. Nothing in Hayek’s behaviour suggests he would’ve been likely to object.
Hayek had already been to Pinochet’s Chile – a laboratory for the experimental free-market neoliberalism of Milton Friedman and the ‘Chicago Boys’ – in 1977 to receive an honorary degree, and to lecture. Hayek spoke to the public and, says Robin, to “businessmen and government officials, including Pinochet himself”.
He described the leaders of Chile under Pinochet as “educated, reasonable, and insightful men”.
The admiration was mutual. Robin uncovered subsequent letters to Hayek from his hosts, business academics who were also high-ranking people in the junta, fawning over Hayek, telling him how influential his ideas were in their country, including in high circles, and proposing that the MPS hold their 1981 meeting in Chile.
And so it came to pass. Numerous luminaries of conservatism, free-market fundamentalism, and the dawning neoliberal counter-revolution attended. They hobnobbed with the top brass and the big bankers of Pinochet’s dictatorship, along with the regime’s fellow-traveller intellectuals. They enjoyed the opera. They drank wine. They pontificated about the much-maligned land of Chile, and – like any starry-eyed communist fellow-traveller of the 30s who’d just visited the Soviet Union and taken care to look at it only through the slim gaps between their fingers – they came away convinced that they’d glimpsed utopia; a utopia in which thousands of political dissidents had been, and continued to be, ‘disappeared’ into a grotesque, institutionalised system of state-run torture, rape, and murder. Not that the MPS people denied the tyranny; on the contrary, they acknowledged and praised it.
The tyranny was, says Robin, “held up as a point in Chile’s favor—at least in comparison to America, whose electoral democracy might prove a major obstacle on the road to Mont Pelerin.”
As to Hayek’s role in choosing the venue, Robin concludes:
A full three years before the MPS meeting was held in Viña del Mar, and a full two years before the MPS Board voted to hold it there, Hayek—who was honorary president of the MPS and a board member—was brought in on ground-level discussions by what seem to be the two originators of the idea. I was not able to find any other record of a high-level MPS official being consulted; from the point of view of the Chileans, Hayek was the man to convince.
It’s no surprise that Hayek should have no strong objection to honouring Pinochet. A few months after the MPS conference was held in Chile, he passionately attacked the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for publishing a cartoon critical of Pinochet’s regime, saying they’d fallen for “socialist calumnies”.
He later wrote to the Times that he’d been unable to find anyone in Chile who didn’t feel more free than they had under Allende. This is unsurprising, given the circles he moved in. Besides, by then Pinochet had already had all the people likely to complain rounded up and shot.
It should be recalled that all of this is around the same time Hayek criticised the British Liberal Party for entering into a pact which kept the Labour government in office in the UK. Writing to the Times, Hayek said, “May one who has devoted a large part of his life to the study of the history and the principles of liberalism point out that a party that keeps a socialist government in power has lost all title to the name ‘Liberal’. Certainly no liberal can in future vote ‘Liberal’”. It could hardly be more revealing. Apparently, a strategic pact with left-wingers within the confines of an electoral democracy is a betrayal of liberalism, but a military government rounding left-wingers up in football stadia and killing them, or setting up entire ministries devoted to sexual torture, isn’t.
In his letter to the Times, Hayek wrote
If Mrs. Thatcher said that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom, while the second is not.
In the same letter he writes that there are “many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies”.
As Corey Robin says after quoting Hayek thus, this “statement is certainly in keeping with much of what Hayek wrote throughout his career” and is an unusually explicit statement of “his belief that capitalism is more important to freedom than democracy”. Hayek was perfectly well aware of the need to be covert about his anti-democratic sympathies, tactfully circumlocuting around his debt to Carl Schmitt even as he quietly praised him. Later in life, as often happens, he began to lose his inhibitions.
Hayek visited Pinochet’s Chile several times. On one visit he accepted the title of Honorary Chairman of the Centro de Estudios Públicos (Center of Public Studies), a Chilean free-market think tank set up in 1980.
Robin quotes an article called ‘Preventing the ‘Abuses’ of Democracy: Hayek, the ‘Military Usurper’ and Transitional Dictatorship in Chile?’ by Andrew Farrant, Edward McPhail, and Sebastian Berger, published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology:
Though Hayek’s 1981 interviews with El Mercurio have attracted much attention, scholars have ignored El Mercurio’s coverage of Hayek’s initial visit to Chile in 1977. In particular, El Mercurio notes that Hayek—quoted as saying that Chile’s efforts to develop and reform its economy provided “an example at the global level” (1977: 27)—had met with Pinochet: “At the end of his visit . . . Hayek . . . was received by President Augusto Pinochet. He [Hayek] told reporters that he talked to Pinochet about the issue of limited democracy and representative government. . . . He said that in his writings he showed that unlimited democracy does not work because it creates forces that in the end destroy democracy. He said that the head of state listened carefully and that he had asked him to provide him with the documents he had written on this issue.”
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According to Hayek, Pinochet had requested copies of Hayek’s writings (“documents”) explaining why unlimited democracy would inevitably lead to the destruction of democracy (1977). Consequently, Hayek asked Charlotte Cubitt (his secretary from February 1977 until his death in 1992) to send Pinochet a draft of Hayek’s ‘A Model Constitution’ (Cubitt 2006: 19). Importantly, Hayek’s chapter—‘A Model Constitution’ (1979b: 105–127)—provides a three-page discussion of the conditions under which the adoption of Emergency Powers (124–126) and the suspension of democracy are supposedly justified: The “basic principle of a free society . . . [“the coercive powers of government are restricted to the enforcement of universal rules of just conduct”] . . . may . . . have to be temporarily suspended when the long-run preservation of that order [the free society] is itself threatened” (1979b: 124).
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When Hayek visited Chile in 1981 he “took time off from his official commitments to walk around and see for himself whether people were cheerful and content. He told me that it was the sight of many sturdy and healthy children that had convinced him.”
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As Hayek notes, “democracy needs ‘a good cleaning’ by strong governments.”
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The Pinochet junta “enacted a new constitution in September 1980. . . . The constitution was not only named after Hayek’s book The Constitution of Liberty, but also incorporated significant elements of Hayek’s thinking.”
As Farrant et al point out, Hayek also had a great deal of sympathy for the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and for similar reasons.
Hayek wrote to Margaret Thatcher herself. She was already a fan of his; she once brandished a book of his at her cabinet and declared “This is what we believe!” In ecstasy, Hayek recommended that she institute Chile-style policies in the UK. She responded – essentially - that she’d love to, but they had this pesky thing called ‘democracy’ in Britain which would get in the way… especially, one suspects, since she was already sinking in the polls and ‘shock therapy’ (let alone bloody repression) wouldn’t help. In the end she found the solution to her electoral woes in some contrived blood-letting abroad, against – ironically enough – a South American country. She used jingoism to get herself re-elected by climbing a pile of corpses, and then used her mandate to declare war on “the enemy within”. This referred specifically to the miners, but more generally to anyone – especially anyone working class and organised – standing in the way of her unleashing as much of Hayek’s Chilean prescription upon the country as possible. What followed is well-known, and is a vital part of how the world got to the point where neoliberalism reigns supreme, free-market orthodoxy is unchallengeable anywhere near significant centres of Western power, and we slide towards the edge of the ecological cliff.
It’s worth noting in passing that, despite still being held up by ideologues as an example of free market economics rescuing an economy, Pinochet’s Hayek-and-Friedman-inspired economic ‘shock therapy’ (to use Naomi Klein’s appealing phrase) actually drove Chile into a catastrophic economic crash. This was only alleviated by a distinct change of policy direction – including re-nationalising loads of the industries Allende had nationalised and which Pinochet had re-privatised after taking power. It was only after this that Chile started to become the success story that the free-marketeers still get the credit for.
But evidence isn’t a consideration for these people, as we know. Instead, the reasoning is from first principles, i.e. democracy leads to totalitarianism. Hayek gets this from Mises and reiterates it throughout his work. It’s in Road to Serfdom. It’s in Law, Legislation and Liberty. It’s where he ends up as a result of the reasoning and assumptions we’ve already looked at in that book. He sees central planning as the result of democracy, central planning as socialism, and socialism as inherently totalitarian. So you support the authoritarian crackdown on the process.
In a 1981 interview with Renee Sallas of Chile’s El Mercurio newspaper, Hayek says this explicitly:
All movements in the direction of socialism, in the direction of centralized planning, involve the loss of personal freedom and end up ultimately in totalitarianism.
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[A]s long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally, I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking in liberalism. My personal impression. . . is that in Chile . . . we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government . . . during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement.
As Robin notes, following Farrant et al, Hayek was trying to offer help to Portugese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar as early as 1962, sending him a copy of The Constitution of Liberty to help inspire “a constitution which is proof against the abuses of democracy”… by which he means those abuses democracy inflicts upon a state which tries to intervene for anything but defence of individual liberty (i.e. property).
Superficially, all this looks like a contradiction with Hayek’s loudly espoused support for liberty, his anti-totalitarianism, etc. But it actually follows from such first principles. It’s what happens when your first principles are abstract and ahistorical, and you apply them without conscience.
Hayek’s position on Chile, and on reactionary authoritarianism generally, is the dollfussian logic of Mises working itself out, i.e. the Left makes a kind of temporary recuperative fascism necessary. Mises developed this view when collaborating with the anti-Nazi and anti-Communist ‘Austro-fascist’ Dollfuss.
None of the assumptions are especially non-mainstream – which tells us something terrifying about the mainstream – but Hayek synthesises them, accepts their implications in a principled way (yes, in his own way he is principled), and takes them to their logical conclusions. If liberty is threatened by democracy leading to socialism leading to totalitarianism (Nazism being socialism too according to Dollfuss and Mises et al – another argument we still live with) then you need authoritarianism to quash democracy when it goes too far. We’ve already seen Hayek adapting the ideas of (ironically) Carl Schmitt to this end. And Hayek is employing the same distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism which provides a moral logic to those ideologues of Western imperialism who advocate supporting ‘strongmen’ against official enemies. It’s the same logic that leads Kissinger and Nixon and the CIA to support Pinochet. And this is just one of many examples. Ironically, it also leads to the same rhetoric that advocates ‘humanitarian intervention’ against (sometimes) the same strongmen when they outlive their usefulness. It’s an ancestor of the arguments of Bush II and the Schmittian-Straussians, of Bernard Henri-Lévy and the ‘Nouveaux Philosophes’, of Hitchens and the New Atheist Islamophobes and the ‘Decent Left’. ‘Islamofascism’, etc. Imperial praxis, in other words. How ironic that the great philosophers of libertarianism provide a ideological bedrock for the wars libertarisns so often to profess to oppose.
Hayek is not the cause of such praxis, but he’s a synthesizer of it, and his syntheses then feed back in as ideology. And the ideology arises from the economic system, hence the axiomatic and foundational belief in the identity of capitalism and liberty. The class nature of the ideology is clear when you remember that Hayek lambasted left-wingers who were prepared to countenance the idea of ‘temporary’ suspensions of democracy as ‘stages’ towards socialism, etc. Particularly egregious, since he justifies his own support for dictatorship by calling it a necessary transitional phase. But there isn’t actually any hypocrisy here. He sees it as fundamentally different to support a tyranny for capitalism than a tyranny for socialism, and he’s right. In its way this is just a recognition of the often-forgotten fact that politics has content as well as form. And he’s right that authoritarianism is necessary to support capitalism. It always has been. Capitalism has always depended upon state violence and the suppression of democracy. Again - the irony! The philosophy of free-market anti-statism reveals how capitalism and the authoritarian state are inextricable.
This ‘inextricability’ has never been more true than under the neoliberal system that Hayek helped pioneer. It is based on Hayek and Schmitt’s extreme right-wing critique of democracy and redistribution. The logically consequent idea that emergency dictatorship may be necessary to preserve liberal society from democracy runs right through neoliberalism.
Pinochet’s Chile is thus a key part of the neoliberal origin story. Beyond its use as a lab for monetarism and ‘disaster capitalism’, etc, it also helps us identify a crucial origin point of neoliberal praxis, via where the ideology of its great intellectual supporter both inspires and justifies it, and then goes on to provide a basic grammar to neoliberal ideas.
“Clearly,” says Richard Seymour,
the ‘liberty’ upheld by the Mont Pelerin Society… is not political liberty. It is not the liberty to participate in the politics of a society. It is the liberty to engage in market transactions, to buy and sell on terms set by ‘the market’. It is the liberty to be at the mercy of ‘the blind force of social process’, as Hayek put it. Yet this ‘blind force’ is only apparent. The phrase implies that the economy is akin to a natural system, driven by brutal, merciless physical laws. And indeed, there is a tendency in neoliberal ideology to explain ‘the market’ as a pitiless evolutionary system, weeding out the weak and inadequate through competition and selection.
The ‘blind force’ is assumed to not be coercion at all, because it is market coercion. That freedom of markets is simply assumed and then used to prove itself. It’s a higher form of freedom than mere political freedom, thus political freedom can be dispensed with in the name of protecting market freedom. Spontaneous order contains a self-justifying Darwinian aesthetic. This aesthetic is exactly the same one that feeds into sociobiology, and reactionary atheism, which is relevant to us because it’s an alt-Right vector. Social Darwinism contains a shrug of ‘that’s just the way it is’, and from there we get to “fuck your feelings”. The ideological benefits of applying this to the market are obvious, and the market invites the comparison because it really does work like a brutal Darwinian system… until, of course, the state gets involved in rigging it… which it has always done, or capitalism wouldn’t be here… and will always do, as long as capitalism exists. (And look, yet another ironic revelation of the hypocrisy and vapidity of the ideology. The libertarians profess to admire capitalism untampered-with, and to despise capitalism ruined by state intervention. But their own system is untenable without state intervention. State intervention thus plays a dual role: eternal buttress and eternal butt of blame. But in reality, free-market ‘anti-statism’ really is like dreaming of evolution without pain, or biospheres without bacteria.) In reality, the state’s fix is almost always in the service of capital. And even when it isn’t, this usually has to be forced on the state by pressure from below. And even then, the state usually only complies when it needs to in order to safeguard capitalism in the bigger picture. But hierarchy always effaces its bigger slice by pointing at someone else’s crumbs and screaming “Not fair!” And capitalist ideologues rail against the state that safeguards them like a stroppy child, furious that Mum and Dad won’t let them have chips absolutely every meal.
Hayek’s metaphysical view of the market as the arena where human morality, value, and worth are manufactured; the social Darwinism entailed by the idea of ‘blind force’; the effacing of the role of the state; the suppression of democracy in the name of freedom via markets, and thus the propping up of the market system through authoritarian statism in every arena other than regulation of capital… these all ended up in neoliberalism’s source code, and Chile was an important early experiment. That it was employed as counter-revolution, and had to be enforced through torture and massacre, tells us a lot. This isn’t the genetic fallacy. This is a material account of speciation.
Corey Robin suggests that Hayek is engaged in a hypocritical “betrayal of his own beliefs” when he supports dictatorships. But surely, if liberty is constituted of capitalism, and capitalism is threatened by democracy, then it is a fulfilment of the most dearly-held beliefs of the libertarian when he crushes democracy.
Robin also seems to think that Hayek is betraying his own theory of society, i.e. ‘spontaneous order’. Easily mistaken for a dialectical account of social evolution as comprised of social forms as emergent properties of blind processes, it actually resolves down into little more than a defence of tradition and inherited values, of the veneration of the accumulated wisdom of forefathers, etc. (In this it is similar to the Austrian idea of ’roundaboutness’ in production, which looks superficially like an introduction of time into the static formulas of marginalist economics, but actually just treats time as another abstraction… and the Austrian idea of ‘lopsided production’, which seems to be an acknowledgement of overproduction but is actually just a way of avoiding the Marxian insight that overproduction is general, by pretending that what happens is that one bit of the mechanism comes out of true.) But the actual claim being made by ‘spontaneous order’ is that it is thus impossible or undesirable (or both) to try to engineer society, to plan it, to change it. This is clearly an ideological manoeuvre designed to foreclose upon the idea of economic planning, and therefore of democracy, and therefore of interfering in the prerogatives of the propertied. Any form of ‘tinkering’ is off limits, from a democratic government trying to control the economy for the public good (or indeed for any aim other than the aims of capitalists), or a revolutionary transformation of society. From this viewpoint, they look indistinguishable. All that can be seen is a plan to impose conscious control. Which is doomed, because social order is spontaneous, and evolved. Which proves that “what is, is right”. What has come down to us is the best that can be. But there are people who want to meddle with it. Paradoxically, then, it must be helped to be itself. This is key. When reactionary authoritarianism is used to reimpose market rule (supposedly, but not actually, because market rule is a mirage as much as equilibrium) that is not intervention… or rather it is, but it is permissible intervention because (supposedly) it puts things back the way they were before the (illegitimate) intervention of others. How do you know their intervention is illegitimate? They tried to plan things, and to redistribute some wealth. It’s a tautology. You know it’s wrong because it is. You then do your own version of the same thing, but in the opposite direction, and you know that’s right… because it is. Why are the efforts of planning not part of spontaneous order? Why is democracy not part of spontaneous order? Social justice is an idea imminent, in various forms, in current society – why is it, in Hayek’s words, a “mirage”? Why are even those aspects of statism which are essential to capitalism – past and present – written out of the ideology? These are all simply glossed over.
Actually, to an extent, Hayek does see democracy as part of spontaneous order. He is not ideologically opposed to democracy per se. He is not, for all his openness to authoritarianism, and the fascist flirtations of his tradition, an actual fascist. He’s a classical liberal. I don’t want people to mistake him for a fascist. I want people to see, in Hayek, how close classical liberalism can be to fascism, how fascism is – in many ways – an outgrowth of classical liberalism, a weaponization of its imperatives.
For Hayek, democracy is a tool that can be employed, or not, as convenient, as and when constructive. Hayek’s critique of actually existing capitalist society is that it accidentally encourages democracy to get out of hand.
It’s core to Austrian dogma that the general good cannot be calculated. You just have to derive what general good is possible from letting the completing claims fight it out. In that fight, some will be advantaged – but that’s because the better claims accrue advantages. You know they’re better because they’re winning. Tautologies again, but what could be a more praxeological statement that “whatever is, is right”? The Austrians are latter-day Panglosses… but scared ones.
The “mirage of social justice” (the subtitle of the second volume of his Law, Legislation and Liberty) arises from the freedom market society brings, and threatens to get out of hand, to become an unbalanced part of the spontaneous order. To him, then, putting democracy back in its box when it becomes dangerous statist-planning tendencies, is just realigning the order. As noted previously, his preferred form of the authoritarian ‘exception’ would be a return to the 19th century liberal state rather than actual fascism. Putting its spontaneity back into place, by hand. The proper alignment, the spontaneity, is inherently and axiomatically, the containment of democracy in the interests of the propertied class. It’s worth remembering that Hayek’s beloved 19th century liberal state was born of slavery and primitive accumulation, built on empire, and bitterly resisted the enfranchisement of the masses. As Aimé Césaire (and Fanon) pointed out, fascism is in many ways just the rule of classical liberalism abroad (i.e. imperialism) relocated to Europe and inflicted upon white people.
This is where we get to the real first principle, the real axiom. It’s not actually that Hayek is reasoning policy from the axiom of spontaneous order, or support for Pinochet from his conception of the distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism, or any of that. Spontaneous order is actually an assembled, reiterated expression of the Calvinistic class-based ideology that we meritocratically end up where we’re supposed to be because, through struggling to succeed, we learn our proper destiny. It is one way in which the rising bourgeois classes ideologically expressed the idea that proper order could be arrived at through market relations. Let the market rip through society, let unfettered competition rule, let the bourgeois class rise. The people who are at the top of the resulting spontaneous order are the ones who worked and fought and believed hardest, which reveals them to be the Elect.
Though it arose in a specific time as an expression of specific class interests, the ideology has carried on, it has been carried forward. It remains useful as a cultural logic. Using it, you can claim that it is possible to tell where someone was meant to be by where they end up. This is central to Hayek’s metaphysical view of the market, drawing on Mises. It is a central logic of the Austrian tradition – hence the entailed support for innate hierarchies amongst people, which will fructify into the bitterly racist and sexist fruit of paleolibertarianism, itself arising from the Austrian trend. The great movers of society are the entrepreneurs, and this assertion is justified by reference to their ‘tacit knowledge’, i.e. their ability to know and choose dynamically, without reference to a wider body of social understanding. The tacitness of their knowledge is mirrored in the tacitness of the rules of society, stemming from their self-assembled, unplannedness. The anarchy of the market is thus fetishized beyond sanity.
Clearly, Hayek sees the world as having developed into an inherently creative state of aggregated individual liberties. But this world is under constant threat – another quintessential trait of conservatism is the eternal fear of losing the valuable world one has, maybe even owing to weakness on your part. Indeed, anxiety about the weakness of the older and better order is a key psychological component of reactionary thinking, as Corey Robin has demonstrated. The Mont Pelerin Society, and the subsequent neoliberal coalition and project, are responses to the threats to the spontaneous order that accreted over time, the vast well of inherited traditions and tacit knowledge, and the relations which enshrines them in power. Hayek’s activist projects are thus variations of what Pinochet did in Chile. Interventions designed to reimpose the natural, evolved, spontaneous order – i.e. the ascendancy of bourgeois relations – after attempts, inherently artificial, have been made to centrally plan that order away. There is no contradiction in the idea that such attempts are also inherently unworkable. The Mises-Hayek side of the Calculation Debate (the argument that planned economies can’t rationally allocate resources) is based on the idea that an existing system of planning is going to decay, and thus we must resist the spread of all planning. The anarchy of market relations is thus enshrined as the only long-term possible system, and one which must be protected. It is not, as Foucault said, that neoliberals don’t really believe in spontaneous order. It’s rather that spontaneous order must be protected by well-planned and well-organised force, both in policy and violent intervention. Such contortions are possible precisely because it isn’t the ideas – the theoretical expressions, the ideology – which drive the practice, but rather the other way around. Because the practice stems from the interests and allegiances, which are material interests, class interests.
The foundational irony is that axiomatic, first principles reasoning is actually an expression of material interests, behind their own back but in their service. The conclusions they draw from their axioms actually go to support Bukharin’s observation (in his critique of Bohm-Bawerk and marginalism) that subjective calculations of value are always in reality not purely individual but actually socially embedded. Hayek derives spontaneous order from class interests, not policy that just happens to serve capital from the abstruse philosophical idea of spontaneous order. He is not even reasoning from the first principles of Austrian economics – nor more than Mises really derived his economics or politics from praxeology. The real first principle, the real axiom from which they argue is the class struggle, from the principles of private property, and thus the material interests of the ruling class. He understands that its capital that rules, and that this has to be enforced. As Marx says “between equal rights,” by which he means competing claims in the marketplace, “force decides.” And the people with the force are, by definition, the people who run the market.
What is really happening here is an elevation – via a fetishized view of capitalism that believes its own myths and elevates the anarchy of production into a universal principle of creation – of the agency of the ruling class. The metaphysics are derived from the material interests, not the other way round.