Fromm Frankfurt to Austria
The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.
– Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 1, Section 4
1. Two Schools
Pretty much everything seriously wrong with the world stems from the fact that capitalism is our global economic system. Capitalism cannot function without ideological justification. One of the ideological justifications it has engendered and prolongated is libertarian reaction. Libertarian reaction stems from various sources but one of the major ones is the Austrian School of economics.
This ‘school’ - actually more a loose and heterogenous continuum of intensely reactionary liberal philosophers - began around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, supposedly as a response to theoretical problems with the labour theory of value - an idea accepted widely in one form or another from Aristotle to Adam Smith, but more actually as a response to the concatenation of crises and revolutions which wracked the burgeoning capitalist system in the late 19th century. Among these crises was the Paris Commune, a workers’ uprising which took over Paris and began to construct a new social order based on radical socialist democracy before the bourgeoisie drowned it in blood. Marx - who had just issued his devastating critique of capitalism and bourgeois political economy - called the Commune the first sign of an oncoming new form of society which would replace capitalism. The Austrian School, the most extreme form of the new economic theory of marginalism, is best understood as a radically subjective form of social philosophy in the manner of Freud, and a directly reactionary philosophico-ideological project.
The Austrian School lurks in the background of so much of today’s ideology of reaction not so much for its economic theorising as for its social philosophy, in that it inaugurates the extreme form of reactionary liberalism which has been identified as the link point between liberalism and fascism, supposed deadly enemies in the liberal mind but actually cousins in their joint adherence to capital. Austrian dogma is the origin point of libertarianism, paleolibertarianism, paleoconservatism (arguably), and so-called anarcho-capitalism. These are the currents of reactionary thought which, via real world fuel like ‘the Ron Paul Revolution’, have bred online and created a funnel which churns reactionaries into Trumpism, into the alt-right, and thus into their continuing and evolving movement.
One of the key ideological notions which this tide of reaction adheres to is ‘replacement theory’ in various forms, and this in turn relies upon various versions of inherently antisemitic conspiracy theories about elite leftists. The emblematic bogey of this notion, apart from George Soros, is the Frankfurt School. This is the pseudo-empirical grounding upon which the modern internet-adapted versions of the ‘cultural Marxism’ theory rests. This theory draws from ex-Trotskyist turned crypto-fascist Lyndon Larouche’s adaptation of a Nazi conspiracy theory called kulturbolschewismus. The Nazis postulated a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy to destroy German culture by soaking it with degenerate, pornographic art and demoralising theory. Today, the entire discourse about CRT and DEI and 'woke' and groomers is explicitly - just ask James Lindsay - based on claims about ‘cultural marxism’ going back to the Frankfurt School, which was - in reality - a heterogenous coterie of left-wing thinkers who originated in Germany, fled Nazism (or tried to), and ended up as cultural critics in the United States.
These two schools, the Austrian and the Frankfurt, represent the opposing ends of the horizon of our political moment, less for anything real about the applicability of the ideas of either than for the influence of the idea of both. So let’s be cheeky and try to understand something about the Austrian School using the ideas of the Frankfurt School. The two are now permanently locked-together in a Reichenbachian struggle... or at least, the bastard ideological descendants of the Austrian School seem to imagine this. So let’s ignore the fact that this is actually a delusional notion (at least as it is generally meant), and see what happens when they fight.
2. Fromm and Freedom
In his 1941 book Fear of Freedom, the Marxist-Freudian Erich Fromm - part of the so-called Frankfurt School, and now most famous as the originator of the diagnosis 'malignant narcissism' to describe people like Adolf Hitler - elaborates a dialectical account of human consciousness in late modernity through the prism of a dichotomous conception of the concept of freedom. For Fromm, freedom can be divided into the very dyad of ‘freedom from’ (negative freedom) and ‘freedom to’ (positive freedom) that should be familiar from its more famous ‘discoverer’ Isaiah Berlin.
Friedrich Hayek, the greatest son of the Austrian School, is (ostensibly) concerned for the most part with ‘freedom from’, that is: absence of coercion.
Fromm says that freedom from (hence ‘FF’), while desirable and often fought for, carries dangers within it. It is not a guarantee of happiness. Indeed, it can generate unhappiness, and from thence destruction. (To be clear: Fromm is not offering this view as an apologia for tyranny.) Essentially, Fromm’s idea boils down to saying that the absence of political or social coercion can be deeply unsatisfying because FF, being essentially negative (one does not, for instance, actively experience the absence of a policeman’s boot in the teeth as a pleasure), leaves us without ‘freedom to’ (hence ‘FT’). In capitalist society, we remain alienated.
Fromm goes on, in Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), to describe humanity, alienated in capitalist society, as having a self-orientation which he calls a “marketing orientation”, in which
man experiences himself as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. He does not experience himself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. He is alienated from these powers. … His sense of self does not stem from his activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from his socioeconomic role. If things could speak, a typewriter would answer the question “Who are you?” by saying “I am a typewriter,” and an automobile, by saying “I am an automobile,” or more specifically by saying, “I am a Ford,” or “a Buick,” or “a Cadillac.” If you ask a man “Who are you?”, he answers “I am a manufacturer,” “I am a clerk,” “I am a doctor–or “I am a married man,” “I am the father of two kids,” and his answer has pretty much the same meaning as that of the speaking thing would have. That is the way he experiences himself, not as a man, with love, fear, convictions, doubts, but as that abstraction, alienated from his real nature, which fulfills a certain function in the social system. His sense of value depends on his success: on whether he can sell himself favorably, whether he can make more of himself than he started out with, whether he is a success. His body, his mind and his soul are his capital, and his task in life is to invest it favorably, to make a profit of himself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the “personality package,” conducive to a higher price on the personality market. If the individual fails in a profitable investment of himself, he feels that he is a failure; if he succeeds, he is a success. Clearly, his sense of his own value always depends on factors extraneous to himself, on the fickle judgement of the market, which decides about his value as it decides about the value of commodities. He, like all commodities that cannot be sold profitably on the market, is worthless as far as his exchange value is concerned, even though his use value may be considerable.
According to Fromm, even if all coercion from tyrants and institutions is removed, humanity in capitalism remains anxiously trapped in the corrosively hopeless condition of commodification. Fromm sees humans, thus semi-freed, increasingly afflicted with the malaise of FF, as fleeing to authoritarianism, destructiveness, and conformity. He sees Nazism as, essentially, a response to the predicament of FF.
For Fromm, this dialectical and circular process repeats through history. He brings up the rise of Protestant theology during the Reformation – particularly the ideas of Luther and Calvin – as examples of the development of ideas which express and respond to increases in FF. As the old feudal order crumbled and capital arose, increasingly people felt less constrained by socioeconomic bonds and more aware of themselves as individuals with subjectivity.
Growing individuation means growing isolation, insecurity, and thereby growing doubt concerning one’s role in the universe, the meaning of one’s life, and with all that a growing feeling of one’s own powerlessness and insignificance as an individual.
Freedom – that is FF – grew, and security was sought in beliefs which expressed the greater freedoms and also offered an explanation for feelings of anxiety. As Fromm puts it: “Protestantism and Calvinism, while giving expression to a new feeling of freedom, at the same time constituted an escape from the burden of freedom.” Lutheranism contextualised anxiety in the doctrine of sin, in Luther’s conviction of the essential evil and powerlessness of humanity, and then offered freedom in individual abasement to the ultimate authority of God, even as it expressed the class interests of the rising middle classes against declining and decadent feudal and Catholic authority, with its rejection of Catholic salvation. To quote Fromm:
[In] Luther’s picture, [m]an is free from all ties binding him to spiritual authorities, but this very freedom leaves him alone and anxious, overwhelms him with a feeling of his own individual insignificance and powerlessness. This free, isolated individual is crushed by the experience of his individual insignificance. Luther’s theology gives expression to this feeling of helplessness and doubt. The picture of man which he draws in religious terms describes the situation of the individual as it was brought about by the current social and economic evolution. The member of the middle class was as helpless in face of the new economic forces as Luther described man to be in his relationship to God.
But Luther did more than bring out the feeling of insignificance which already pervaded the social classes to whom he preached–he offered them a solution. By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to the utmost, by giving up every vestige of individual will, by renouncing and denouncing his individual strength, the individual could hope to be acceptable to God. Luther’s relationship to God was one of complete submission. In psychological terms his concept of faith means: if you completely submit, if you accept your individual insignificance, then the all-powerful God may be willing to love you and save you. If you get rid of your individual self with all its shortcomings and doubts by utmost self-effacement, you free yourself from the feeling of your own nothingness and can participate in God’s glory. Thus, while Luther freed people from the authority of the Church, he made them submit to a much more tyrannical authority, that of a God who insisted on complete submission of man and annihilation of the individual self as the essential condition to his salvation. Luther’s “faith” was the conviction of being loved upon the condition of surrender, a solution which has much in common with the principle of complete submission of the individual to the state and the “leader”.
Luther’s awe of authority and his love for it appears also in his political convictions. Although he fought against the authority of the Church, although he was filled with indignation against the new moneyed class–part of which was the upper strata of the clerical hierarchy–and although he supported the revolutionary tendencies of the peasants up to a certain point, yet he postulated submission to worldly authorities, the princes, in the most drastic fashion. Even if those in authority are evil or without faith, nevertheless the authority and its power is good and from God, Therefore, where there is power and where it flourishes, there it is and there it remains because God has ordained it.
Similarly, Calvin’s ‘Doctrine of the Elect’ or 'Unconditional Election', with its teaching that the salvation of a few is preordained, expresses the ascendant feelings of isolation and anxiety while also allaying them with an extreme form of determinism, which then also permits an expression of individualism within the limits of an authoritarian cosmic schema. If the damnation or salvation of each individual is pre-decided and unalterable, all that remains is for each individual to labour as hard as they can to discover their own degree of holiness. An expression of individualism within a comfortingly rigid hierarchy.
These, like Nazism in the C20th, are expressions of Fromm’s thesis that
if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality … while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.
3. Ethic of the Elect
Now, something rather extraordinary emerges here. The Austrians, for all their ostensible rejection of statism and authoritarianism, begin to look like a heterodox sect of radical Protestantism. This outrageous statement clearly requires some justification, as amusing as it would be to simply leave it there.
In his essay ‘Nietzsche’s Marginal Children’, Corey Robin identifies certain profound assumptions on the part of the Austrians (or at least recurrent in the most prominent exemplars of their trend) which relate to their conception of value. Having reiterated that, being among the originators and extremists of marginalism, the Austrians view (economic) value as radically subjective, Robin goes on to point out the deep ways in which they – most particularly Mises and Hayek – make “the market the very expression of morality”.
To quote Robin:
Moralists traditionally viewed the pursuit of money and goods as negative or neutral; the Austrians claimed it embodies our deepest values and commitments. “The provision of material goods,” declared Mises, “serves not only those ends which are usually termed economic, but also many other ends.” All of us have ends or ultimate purposes in life: the cultivation of friendship, the contemplation of beauty, a lover’s companionship. We enter the market for the sake of those ends. Economic action thus “consists firstly in valuation of ends, and then in the valuation of the means leading to these ends. All economic activity depends, therefore, upon the existence of ends. Ends dominate economy and alone give it meaning.” We simply cannot speak, writes Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, of “purely economic ends separate from the other ends of life.”
It would be hard, by the way, to encounter a more forceful backhanded admission of the truth of Fromm’s view of human alienation mired in commodification, nor of the Marxist view that ideology arises from underlying economic structures and class position. Indeed, the only such admission more near-suspiciously perfect is the Doctrine of Unconditional Election itself.
Moreover, the development of this viewpoint comes as a result of the Economic Calculation Debate. This was an argument between economists (and others) between the world wars which ensued from Mises’ contention that planned economies cannot work because, without a market, and therefore without price signals expressing demand, they can’t rationally allocate resources. Hayek’s contribution was to argue that the sheer number of calculations required of a marketless society makes planned economies prohibitively complex. When Lange et al developed the response of what was effectively the first idea of ‘market socialism’, they were effectively arguing (wrongly) that socialism could, essentially, just be capitalism but completely state managed. (At least that is how Marx would view their plan, because Marx saw capitalism’s essence being the self-expansion of value via competitive accumulation, which would conspicuously be retained in Lange’s model.)
The consequences of such thinking for the liberal capitalist order was what concerned Hayek. Might Western civilisation be convinced to discard what it had been persuaded to see as a needless, extraneous aspect of the system: personal, private interest? Hadn’t that dreadful process already begun?
As Duncan Foley puts it in Adam’s Fallacy:
Hayek saw disaster looming for the liberal cause in this episode. He did not believe that socialist managers could ever mimic capitalist entrepreneurs well enough to make socialist markets function. Thus he was led to shift the focus of this debate in a profound, fateful, and fruitful direction. It is not, according to Hayek, the market form that is critical to organizing the division of labor; it is the content of the market as a clash of personal interests that actually drives things forward. … The antagonistic relations of the market are no longer a necessary evil to be tolerated for the sake of getting our dinner (and a better one) out of the butcher and the baker, nor even an ingenious game we might play to squeeze out potential economic surpluses. In Hayek’s vision the antagonistic relations of the market are the existential core of human existence, the ground from which everything else emerges.
Hayek did not put his point in quite this way. He argued that the real metabolism of the market rests on its ability to force everyone to reveal their private information about needs, technology, and resources, whether they want to or not, and whether they participate in the market enthusiastically, seeking profit, or grudgingly, to defend their conditions of existence. … Hayek puts this informational aspect of the market in the central position. The capitalist market now appears as a critical component of a complex system of information revelation and exchange. The division of labor itself becomes a by-product and side effect of this play of information. The reason the socialist managers cannot mimic the capitalist market is that they have no direct existential interest to defend and assert in making market exchanges. Socialism imagines that economic life is a means to an end, a method of supplying the material needs without which human life and social life cannot function. The conceit of socialism is that supplying this material basis is just a matter of getting necessary productive work done. In fact, according to Hayek’s way of thinking, the central problem is to know what the necessary productive work actually is. Even the best-intentioned and most self-disciplined socialist worker-citizens would find themselves helpless to know where to expend their labor effort, or even to know whether what looks like an obvious social need (building a steel mill) may not be doing more harm than good.
[My emphasis.]
Hayek has some points to make about command economies. For instance, the managers have no personal interest in efficiently allocating resources, if we take ‘efficient’ to mean ‘best fulfilling the common good’. But, contra Hayek, it is the absence of democracy in a command economy which causes this problem, just as it is the absence of democracy in, say, a corporation, which causes essentially the same problem. The absence of democracy is the most fundamental thing negating the possibility of socialist co-ordination. In a corporation, the undemocratic manager already has self-interest as his goal. In a command economy, self-interest soon appears where the absence of democracy leaves the state manager without orientation. Hence the endemic corruption and inefficiency of such systems. The fact that the Right endlessly go on about this doesn’t make it untrue, and socialism won’t get anywhere sticking its fingers in its ears and pretending. Socialism cannot be about authoritarian statism, not just because authoritarian statism isn’t nice, but because it doesn’t work – at least not for any purposes which can meaningfully be called socialist. (Social-democratic or reformist, perhaps.)
Robin notes in passing that sentiments such as Mises’ view of wider human needs being satisfied by efficient market provision (see above) can be adapted to Left arguments. As he also notes, it’s worth remembering that several early marginalists viewed their theory as bolstering some left-wing ideas, and that marginalism was put into the theoretical service of welfarism, liberalism, and social democracy in the C20th. Even today there are left-libertarians, and most economists who are liberals or leftists embrace some form or other of marginalism (Keynesianism is marginalist). Similarly, bits of Hayek’s occasionally very pertinent critique of command economies can actually be adapted by anti-authoritarian variants of socialism. (Remember, there were even lefty(ish) currents within the early Austrian School.)
But we’re straying into another subject. Here I want to emphasize the way Hayek’s insights lead him deeper and deeper into an escalating fetishism of private property relations and thus, whatever his protestations (and he does protest), of the market form.
Marginalism’s rejection of any real element to value is taken to an extreme by Hayek, and is part of a wider semi-mystical belief in what Corey Robin calls, in The Reactionary Mind, “an almost hyperactive subjectivity – comparable to Freud’s anarchic id”. (Hello again Freud.) It’s true that this is Robin’s description of John Gray’s picture of Hayek, but that picture was endorsed by Hayek himself in glowing terms.
Mises and Hayek are fundamentalist in their rejection of reason and rationality. Hayek sees rational, conscious understanding as being a mere thin layer on top of a vast, submerged well of tacit knowledge. His belief in the free market’s ability to express such mysterious gnosis is religiose. And at the center of it are his chosen caste of divine sensitives, the ‘entrepreneurs’, who he fetishizes as having special qualities, special style and timing and creativity, special abilities to express themselves and thereby remake the world. The horror of state planning is that it will, like repression or oppression, cramp the style of these artistic creatives. In its peculiar way, it’s a deeply Romantic vision. (Rooted in fin de siècle Europe, it might even be possible to describe it as a form of last-minute counter-modernist mechanically-recovered-Romanticism… another respect in which it has some similarities with fascism.) For Hayek, the entrepreneurs, if set free, create the world anew as they express their unique visions. They are capitalists as artists-as-heroes.
According to Robin, the Austrians – with, as I’ve said, their avowedly and a priori anti-socialist intent – push to the extreme of arguing that, since all decisions about ends and means are value-judgements, and since the essence of economic judgements is deciding on ends and means in the context of finite resources, then economic choices are revelatory of our highest and most fundamental moral values. (They, of course, take it as read that resources will always be scarce because they silently take it for granted that class will always endure, because no society can achieve generalised abundance – a self-fulfilling prophecy that is key to their project.)
The economics of the marketplace – the battleground in which we work out our desires and methods against ourselves, unforgiving nature, and others – is thus where morality comes from. It is where we make our economic choices, which are based on values, which are how we separate our higher and lower ends. The essence of morality, then, is the market. It is not that we achieve our highest ends via our market behaviour, but rather that we separate higher from lower ends via the market’s provision of the lower. Moreover, for Hayek, it is our very freedom to make the lower, economic choices which forces us to make them, and thus which forces value and values into our lives in the first place. As Robin puts it: “While the economic is, in one sense readily acknowledged by Hayek, the sphere of our lower needs, it is in another and altogether more important sense the anvil upon which we forge our notion of what is lower and higher in this world, our morality.” It is the hardscrabble, the suffering, the husbandry, that makes us capable of good. A profoundly (if fragmentarily) Protestant, even Puritan view of human life.
4. In the Market we Trust
Though today they seem to embody a view of life dear to the moralistic Right, the Puritans were the ‘Left’ in the great political debates of the era of the European transition from feudalism to capitalism. While ironic, this is hardly accidental. They were expressing the views and imperatives of the rising class of bourgeois, this class being both product and inheritor of what is now the capitalist system. This is, of course, the very market system the Austrian Economists (and those like them, because they are by no means as distinct as they might like to think) are committed to defending as ‘moral’.
In the essay from which we have been drawing, ‘Nietzsche’s Marginal Children’, Corey Robin quotes Hayek saying:
Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created.
Ironically, for all his ostensible rejection of authority, Hayek is revealed as subscribing to the Protestant Misery Ethic, and for very good historical reasons which (in yet another delicious irony) are revealed by the Marxist class-based view of the Reformation and the rise of capitalism.
Robin also quotes Hayek thus:
So long as we can freely dispose over our income and all our possessions, economic loss will always deprive us only of what we regard as the least important of the desires we were able to satisfy. A “merely” economic loss is thus one whose effect we can still make fall on our less important needs…. Economic changes, in other words, usually affect only the fringe, the “margin,” of our needs. There are many things which are more important than anything which economic gains or losses are likely to affect, which for us stand high above the amenities and even above many of the necessities of life which are affected by the economic ups and downs.
A fascinating paragraph, which reveals staggering complacency amongst other things. He essentially disregards either the existence or the moral sentience of those portions of the human race who can never regard economic losses as “merely” anything.
Meanwhile, Hayek’s loathing of government intervention (at least in the interests of the propertyless) stems from this idea of values, ends, and morals. Government’s interference to make provision can only deprive us of the choice of ends and means to pursue on the market, and thus of our opportunity to create subjective values (what we value highly, what is lowly, etc), and thus of our very capacity to be moral.
Robin goes on to suggest correspondences – or “elective affinities” – with Freud and Nietzsche, which needn’t detain us here… except to note that both, like Mises and Hayek et al, emerge from the fin de siècle bourgeois intellectual culture of Western mitteleuropa… a culture which responded to the fractured modernity of the early 20th century with a version of modernism based on a reactionary form of relativism, and which ultimately gave rise to the counter-revolutionary forms of postmodernism in the late 20th century. As Daniel Zamora has contended, Foucault, for all his criticisms, was ultimately a friend to neoliberalism. ‘Postmodernism’ isn’t all one thing, and some of what is gathered under that umbrella term is insightful, even radical. But for all that, and contra the blithering claims of an ignoramus like Jordan Peterson (who is himself just the latest in a line of people, whose ideas he regurgitates), the main import of, say, Foucault is profound anti-Marxism. It wouldn’t be going too far to call Foucault the most influential anti-Marxist thinker – at least in the academy – of the 20th century. Far more influential than any Austrian.
But we digress again.
The cult of money has its asceticism, its self-denial, its self-sacrifice – economy and frugality, contempt for mundane, temporal and fleeting pleasures; the chase after the eternal treasure. Hence the connection between English Puritanism, or also Dutch Protestantism, and money-making.
- Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Money
For Hayek, then, the market is analogous to life itself in the old Christian response to theodicy. It is by evil that we may have free will, and only be free will that we may be good at all. Just as God supposedly allows us to do evil so that our good actions may have meaning, so the market allows us to pursue that which we want and thus create goodness itself. (Just as ‘free will’ is actually a very poor response to evil as a devastating objection to the idea of a moral God, so is Hayek’s response very unsatisfactory… and for the similar reason that, just as ‘God’, who is presumably cleverer than us, ought to have been able to devise a better moral system, so should humans be able to devise a better economic one.) It’s worth remembering, in connection with the idea that Hayekian thought is theodicic, the Austrian School’s obsession with Marxism. Marx is literally forced into the role of their Satan, eternally advocating against the market – but at the market’s behest, and so that the market may ultimately work its purposes out.
Robin notes that this business about the market being the bedrock of morality is a distinctively Austrian position because, unlike most mainline marginalist economists (many of whom really do seem to buy their own rhetoric about informed consumers and rational actors, etc), the Austrians have tended to understand (at least formally) that humans are irrational, capricious, opaque to others and to themselves. In the same way that their ideas of ‘the roundaboutness of production’ supposedly give them a greater awareness of temporality than mainstream marginalism, so also their view of the market as an information-carrying system supposedly gives them a greater ability to incorporate human irrationality. Both are, in fact, little more than trivial and retrofitted ‘add-ons’ to marginalism, containing little that meaningfully helps marginalism escape its static and idealist (in the philosophical sense) view.
Rather, these Austrian elaborations are recoded versions of Protestant ideas (which were, in the Reformation, the rising expression of individualist, atomised, marketised, bourgeois relations as against the old feudal ideas of the great and integrated chain of obligations). Roundaboutness boils down (eventually) to a notion that profit is a reward for deferred gratification and faith. Meanwhile, we are radically separated from each other, as are the individuals of Protestantism, and our essential moral relationship must be an individual one with a higher power. In the case of the Austrians, this higher power is the market. Protestantism squared the circle by rejecting the established power of the feudal Roman Catholic Church, which was also communal and familial; substituting for it the individual’s personal relationship with God. So, similarly, the Austrian School ostensibly rejects the state, with its potential for communal provision; substituting for it the individual’s personal relationship with the market.
It’s of no use to point out that Protestantism had – and has – its own institutions and establishments, even its own authoritarianism (as Fromm and Engels and others pointed out). Of course it did… and so did Hayek smile upon Pinochet, and Mises ally himself with the Austro-Fascism of Dollfuss, etc. In the cause of individual freedom, its powerful champions are justified in putting down communal rebellion. Luther championed the violent suppression of rebellious peasants when they threatened the interests of the rising classes his ideas represented. It is no surprise that this correspondence should exist, precisely because Protestantism originated as an expression of the decline of feudalism and the ascendancy of market relations in Europe.
That Hayek should choose ‘serfdom’ as the ultimate horror, to which socialism might return us, is deeply revealing.
Both Rothbard and Hayek insisted with peculiar intensity on their intellectual origins lying with Catholic medieval theologians, the ‘late scholastics’ of Salamanca - an idea that continues to exert a fascination upon many of today's libertarians. This is an attempt to evade the actual origins of their tradition in the fearful, authoritarian, bourgeois Protestantism of the Reformation.
In his proto-manospherean tirades about the Clarence Thomas / Anita Hill case, Rothbard railed at feminists and the “Monstrous Regiment” of women in general. He got the term from Reformation-era Protestant woman-hater John Knox. Rothbard once described himself as a “a pro-Christian Jew who thinks that everything good in Western Civilization is traceable to Christianity”. When he says “everything good in Western Civilization” he means capitalism, so the “Christianity” to which he thinks it is traceable is the Christianity which arose with it and helped it ascend. In his way, he is reiterating Weber’s claim that capitalism arose from the ‘Protestant ethos’, which of course puts the cart before the horse. Rothbard’s entire moral philosophy is based not on Mises’ utilitarianism (that’s one bit of Mises he rejects) but on Locke’s idea of ‘natural rights’ or ‘natural law’, and we’ve already seen that this puts Rothbard in an implicitly Christian tradition. Locke’s upbringing was Puritan.
Moreover, if we go back to Fromm and remember Calvinism, then we see even more fundamental correspondences. In the Calvinist ‘Doctrine of the Elect’, the saved and the damned are already chosen, the fate of each preordained. If we believe Fromm, this authoritarian and determinist view is chosen as a comforting refuge from the ‘fear of freedom’… but may also, in Fromm’s dialectical analysis, express the very rising individualism against which it then becomes a refuge. Indeed, it may only be capable of the former because it can do the latter. As noted, individualism can be expressed, but within the confines of a comforting authoritarianism. Clearly, then, there is something of Calvinism in the Austrian worldview – and, as noted in passing above, for solid reasons best illuminated by historical materialism. The judgements of social class are impersonal and unknowable in advance, yet preordained and unalterable. One’s success (or otherwise) on the market is how one knows the extent to which one’s choices and ends are realisable, and thus the extent of one’s own value. As noted, it’s a neat way of having one’s inborn superiority and eating one’s meritocracy cake as well.
Accepting that Fromm has a point about the fear of freedom – especially the atomised and alienated individual freedom offered by bourgeois society – leading us to embrace authoritarianism, destructiveness, and conformity, it is tempting to see the Austrians as fleeing from the very liberty they claim to champion, back – furtively – into an encoded form of obeisance to destructive tyranny. It is just that the God they have chosen to flee to is the market. All-powerful, destructive, creative, apparently immortal, the source and bearer of all information, harbouring preordained judgements that are only revealed to those who have practiced the self-denial of investment and thus worshipped to the best of their ability.
Really, when it comes right down to it, this is just another form of commodity fetishism. (The opening quote is from Marx’s chapter on the fetishism of commodities.) It might be unfair to single out the Austrians among the ranks of free-marketeers and capitalist apologists; any such orientation could be seen as inherently based on treating the market like an (omni)potent creature. As noted, the Austrians have less distinctness than they’d like to believe.
Yet, as usual, the Austrians take it further. They don’t just fetishize commodities, or even the market, but the value form itself. As marginalists, they are radically subjectivist about value (i.e. economic value is purely based on subjective, individual wants), but their emphasis upon human irrationality (our flawedness as actors in the world) puts much of the onus of subjectivity onto value rather than onto us. They alienate value again, to the extent that rather than us judging it, it judges us. Value becomes the mechanism whereby human actions achieve the possibility of morality. Being forced to choose between values on the market, and in the lower things of life too, we are thus forced to have free will, and thus to be capable of goodness. It is the watchful gaze of God, evaluating us according to our choices. Not our ‘good works’ (nothing so Catholic), but rather by our faith to the value god. That faith, in the face of the fallenness of the world (and the Austrian version of human unpredictability is ultimately pessimistic rather than optimistic), is whence our savedness or damnedness arises.
Of course, such a subscription to the Protestant Misery Ethic does not imply that all must suffer. It is enough that the suffering be there as a possibility, endured by many, but not by the Elect (whom we shall know precisely by their success, as in Calvinism). Hayek, like Mises, is quite clear that it is the wealthy, the successful, the well-heeled, the educated, the ‘independent’ who create and preserve culture. So, of course the Austrians find themselves bound to Marxism from the very beginning, constantly tearing and snapping and biting at it, growing up in response to it, always trying to kill it – though it is the host upon which the Austrian School lives and feeds. The project of Marxism is nothing less than the destruction of value, of the value form. This is the problem, far more than any issue anyone has with where value comes from, and far more than any issue the Austrians supposedly have with ‘statism’ or curtailment of ‘liberty’.
And we’re left with the suspicion that the great Austrian anti-Marxists understood this on some deep level, that it lurked beneath their surface misunderstanding of socialism as capitalism-with-managers. Maybe they (wrongly) assumed, with the Stalinists, that the attempted authoritarian management of value was itself the destruction of value. Maybe, as some Marxists and socialists thought, capitalism-with-managers was a way to get to the destruction of value. Maybe they were fooled by the greatest trick commodity fetishism ever pulled, much like most of the 20th century’s state socialists… including, in a mordant irony, Salvador Allende.
The abolition of the law of value (the domination of society by value as exploitation of labour) that Marx hoped for, presents, for some, nothing less than the extinction of all morality, all possibility of goodness, through the destruction of scarcity, the abolition of the abstraction of labour and hence the subjection of human time to productivity, and thus of the compulsion of the market. The misery of forced decision-making is annulled, and thus is our free will – just as if, in some views, God were to intervene to prevent evil. The socialist manager displaces the market-god as the boss of moral life. Rather than there being a moral objection, the problem is actually that he just isn’t very good at it. He’s inefficiently godlike.
I don’t wish to stray into idealism, and imagine that the Austrian School is fundamentally and consciously motivated by such high-flown considerations. It is true that, looked at one way, the Austrian view of value is almost magical. But even this quasi-magical view of value arises unconsciously from hard, solid, social-material-historical processes – namely, the ideological expression of the ideas of the rising bourgeois class during the process of epochal transition in Europe. Austrian economics is ultimately nothing less than a historically-grounded form of counter-revolutionary class-war conservatism, an ideological expression of the material interests of the capitalist ruling class, inflected through one of its branches. But that doesn’t preclude the Austrian School having interior dimensions of their own. One of the dimensions of the Austrian School is surely its lineage, from which it inherits an occluded religiose view of the value form itself. This is the basic organising principle of its objection to Marxism, the node around which its antagonism revolves. The surest sign of its mystical view of value (which Rothbard, for instance, projects onto Marxism… thus pulling the quintessential reactionary move of projecting one’s own monstrousness onto one’s enemy) is surely its inability to conceive of socialism as the destruction of the value form, even though this possibility terrifies it. It persistently views socialism as the ascendancy of state control of an essentially capitalist economy rather than a fundamentally different kind of economy, while imagining it to be a fundamentally different kind of economy. The socialism it forever attacks is not socialism at all but state capitalism, precisely because actual socialism – the destruction of the value form, owing to the destruction of the social relations which give rise to the value form – is inconceivable to it.
And yet that which is inconceivable to it is there, lurking in its subconscious, being projected onto the interventionist state. For the Austrians, the value form – expression, as it is, of human free will, of our tragic coercion to make hard choices and to thus find value and the possibility of goodness – is eternal. It must be. How can it be otherwise? Yet they fear its death. The very prospect they recoil from in terror is one which they choose to be incapable of conceptualising. But, of course, in order to choose to be incapable of conceptualising something, you have to already have some idea of it.
The Austrian heterodoxy is economics’ version of the Weird.
And just as the burghers from the beginning brought into being an appendage of propertyless urban plebeians, day laborers and servants of all kinds, belonging to no recognized social estate, precursors of the later proletariat, so likewise heresy soon became divided into a burgher-moderate heresy and a plebeian-revolutionary one, the latter an abomination to the burgher heretics themselves. The ineradicability of the Protestant heresy corresponded to the invincibility of the rising burghers. When these burghers had become sufficiently strengthened, their struggle against the feudal nobility, which till then had been predominantly local, began to assume national dimensions. The first great action occurred in Germany -- the so-called reformation. The burghers were neither powerful enough nor sufficiently developed to be able to unite under their banner the remaining rebellious estates -- the plebeians of the towns, the lower nobility, and the peasants on the land. At first, the nobles were defeated; the peasants rose in a revolt which formed the peak of the whole revolutionary struggle; the cities left them in the lurch, and thus the revolution succumbed to the armies of the secular princes who reaped the whole profit. Thenceforward, Germany disappears for three centuries from the ranks of countries playing an independent active part in history. But, beside the German Luther appeared the Frenchman Calvin. With true French acuity, he put the bourgeois character of the Reformation in the forefront, republicanized and democratized the Church. While the Lutheran Reformation in Germany degenerated and reduced the country to rack and ruin, the Calvinist Reformation served as a banner for the republicans in Geneva, in Holland, and in Scotland, freed Holland from Spain and from the German Empire, and provided the ideological costume for the second act of the bourgeois revolution, which was taking place in England. Here, Calvinism justified itself as the true religious disguise of the interests of the bourgeoisie of that time, and on this account did not attain full recognition when the revolution ended in 1689 in a compromise between one part of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The English state Church was re-established; but not in its earlier form of a Catholicism which had the king for its pope, being, instead, strongly Calvinized. The old state Church had celebrated the merry Catholic Sunday and had fought against the dull Calvinist one. The new, bourgeoisified Church introduced the latter, which adorns England to this day.
- Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
5. But what of Fromm?
We can infer his idea of ‘freedom to’ as the absence of what he lists in the above passage about alienation. But he gives a fuller picture of his idea of real freedom in Fear of Freedom. Viewing the growth of freedom as inherently dialectical, involving the growth of isolation concomitant upon the growth of freedom from constraints and weakness, Fromm says that
once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it. There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.
However, if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden.
He goes on to elaborate a view of real freedom connected to the full realisation of the individual; he does this through the concept of spontaneity.
Does our analysis lend itself to the conclusion that there is an inevitable circle that leads from freedom into new dependence?
Does freedom from all primary ties make the individual so alone and isolated that inevitably he must escape into new bondage? Are independence and freedom identical with isolation and fear? Or is there a state of positive freedom in which the individual exists as an independent self and yet is not isolated but united with the world, with other men, and nature?
We believe that there is a positive answer, that the process of growing freedom does not constitute a vicious circle, and that man can be free and yet not alone, critical and yet not filled with doubts, independent and yet an integral part of mankind. This freedom man can attain by the realization of his self, by being himself. What is realization of the self? Idealistic philosophers have believed that self-realization can be achieved by intellectual insight alone. They have insisted upon splitting human personality, so that man’s nature may be suppressed and guarded by his reason. The result of this split, however, has been that not only the emotional life of man but also his intellectual faculties have been crippled. Reason, by becoming a guard set to watch its prisoner, nature, has become a prisoner itself; and thus both sides of human personality, reason and emotion, were crippled. We believe that the realization of the self is accomplished not only by an act of thinking but also by the realization of man’s total personality, by the active expression of his emotional and intellectual potentialities. These potentialities are present in everybody; they become real only to the extent to which they are expressed. In other words, positive freedom consists in the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality.
We approach here one of the most difficult problems of psychology: the problem of spontaneity. An attempt to discuss this problem adequately would require another volume. However, on the basis of what we have said so far, it is possible to arrive at an understanding of the essential quality of spontaneous activity by means of contrast. Spontaneous activity is not compulsive activity, to which the individual is driven by his isolation and powerlessness; it is not the activity of the automaton, which is the uncritical adoption of patterns suggested from the outside. Spontaneous activity is free activity of the self and implies, psychologically, what the Latin root of the word, sponte, means literally: of one’s free will. By activity we do not mean “doing something”, but the quality of creative activity that can operate in one’s emotional, intellectual, and sensuous experiences and in one’s will as well. One premise for this spontaneity is the acceptance of the total personality and the elimination of the split between “reason” and “nature”; for only if man does not repress essential parts of his self, only if he has become transparent to himself, and only if the different spheres of life have reached a fundamental integration, is spontaneous activity possible.
Fromm’s discussion of spontaneity is quite long and involved, but the most basic things to notice are that it is based upon an unconstrained individualism which can only be reached through a different kind of social existence.
There are three points I want to bring out:
Fromm’s spontaneous individualism is the negation of alienation as he elsewhere describes it,
It is startling the extent to which the “compulsive activity, to which the individual is driven by his isolation and powerlessness… the activity of the automaton, which is the uncritical adoption of patterns suggested from the outside” resembles the kind of spontaneous individualism promoted – even necessitated – by being part of a market society, and is thus the kind of activity that some (see above) see as giving meaning to life,
Fromm’s idea of freedom is one possible iteration of Marx’s idea that socialism is the state in which “the free development of each becomes the condition of the free development of all” and in which a development of the productive forces finally permits the free expression of the “powers and capacities” of all people, rather than of some at the expense of others.
The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated in three great, decisive battles.
The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in Germany. The war cry raised against the Church, by Luther, was responded to by two insurrections of a political nature; first, that of the lower nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants' War, 1525. Both were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most interested, the burghers of the towns – an indecision into the causes of which we cannot here enter. From that moment, the struggle degenerated into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out Germany, for 200 years, from the politically active nations of Europe. The Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasant of North-east Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs.
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin's creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith – the value of gold and silver – began to totter and to break down. Calvin's church constitution of God was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remains subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried.
- Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
6. Final Marx
The great myth about Marx is that he was a ruthless collectivist. In fact he was deeply enamoured of individual freedom. He simply refused to accept the limited view of individual freedom offered by bourgeois civilisation, individual freedom as freedom from direct coercion for most and freedom to develop oneself creatively for only a few. He saw no reason why, the productive forces being developed to the point where they can satisfy all human needs (thanks to capitalism), they cannot be made to do so if directed democratically. This situation would then lead not only to freedom from direct coercion but from indirect coercion, and thus to the generalised and collective freedom to develop our individual potential.
Marx’s idea of unalienated humanity – free of value, of the reduction of labour to a homogenous and abstract substance that is entailed by the time discipline of the market – involves the end of the compartmentalisation that Fromm talks about. This would have to be the end of class society, based on a lower development of the productive forces. In one of the places where he hints at what socialism or communism (he uses the terms interchangeably) would be like, Marx says that
as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Well, where’s the virtue in that? To a certain kind of mind, there’s none. No frugality, no self-denial, no testing of oneself, no sharp rocks below to make you cling on all the harder, no hierarchy to show you when you’re of the Elect. No negative sanctions built into social life to force you to decide what you value and how much you value it. There’s just the free expression of human powers and capacities. Fromm’s spontaneity. Profound individualism stripped of egoism because it’s no longer based on coercion and hierarchy. Freedom so extreme it could seem terrifying.
Of course, Marx is working from an earlier view of morals, a pre-bourgeois one inherited from Aristotle, which sees virtue as being about living the good and fulfilling life. Marx just refuses it until it is generalised, until everybody gets that life – whatever they think it is.