Abstract
Describing those whom she presumed to represent as “a basket of deplorables” (Lynch 2016) was never likely to be a winning presidential election strategy for Hillary Clinton, but it neatly encapsulated the exasperation of many self-styled “progressives” who cannot fathom why the poor and disadvantaged would reject them in favor of reactionaries so obviously working against their best interests. Analogously, academia is well populated by “critical” successors to Paul Hirst’s (1985: 60) envisioned “Marxist intelligentsia on a mass scale.” Yet despite higher education’s massification of recent decades, it has not produced a cadre of critics sufficient either in size or impact. All this is despite widening inequality and an acute financial crisis, whose ramifications include the rise of the kind of revanchist populism attractive to the putative beneficiaries of Clinton’s greater enlightenment.
Integral to much progressive critique of contemporary capitalism is the concept of the double movement, formulated by Karl Polanyi (1957) in The Great Transformation. In this reading, capitalism produces two contradictory impulses, whereby the disembedding prerogatives of the free market provoke a countermovement in favor of a greater regulation or re-embedding of the economy by the state, and vice versa. Manifestations or analogous representations of this argument can be found in both conventional public discourse, where reference to “pendulum swings,” “corrections,” and “cycles” are commonplace, and academic studies, especially following the decline of Marxism (e.g., Stewart 2010). Even the social structure of accumulation (SSA) literature displays a tendency to rely on the pendulum metaphor, as dominant SSAs oscillate between liberal and regulated regimes (Wolfson and Kotz 2010). But Polanyi’s greatest champion in our time has been Mark Blyth, whose more recent advocacy of alternatives to economic austerity is grounded in a Polanyian framework (Blyth 2002, 2013).
Martijn Konings (2012: 614) has earlier criticized the Polanyian “disembedding narrative” as expressing “a duality that is central to our experience of modern life, but. . . in a rationalized, idealized way, suppressing the element of lived contradiction and the emotional logic associated to it.” This suppression renders it unable to account for what it regards as irrational, with self-wounding consequences: “What cannot be rendered legible within the progressive conceptual framework tends to be judged, dismissed, or condemned as a moral failing” (Konings 2012: 612). It is hardly surprising that such rhetoric fails to engage the wider public. In fleshing out this earlier diagnosis of progressivism’s failure to persuade, The Emotional Logic of Capitalism is less a critique of late capitalism than an exposition of the incommensurability of two paradigms, concluding with a tentative exploration of the possibilities for overcoming that incommensurability.
This is a welcome development within the literature and critical social research more generally. For too long, there has been an ever-expanding litany of complaint about the ramifications of neoliberalism as these impact social justice, broadly conceived. But the one aspect of neoliberalism’s social impact that has remained relatively underexplored is its continuing appeal to those who are its victims. “False consciousness” was dispatched decades ago as an inadequate and thoroughly condescending “explanation” of this phenomenon, as when Louis Althusser (1969: 97–128) grounded ideology in social practices. Stuart Hall’s employment of insights from Althusser and Gramsci in his application of the latter’s concept of “hegemony” moved the debate even further away from false consciousness (Clarke 2014; Hall 1985). Raymond Williams reminded that: A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or a structure. It is a realized complex of experiences, relationships and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits. In practice, that is, hegemony can never be singular. (Williams 1977: 112)
Randy Martin (2002, 2015) has charted new territory in exploring the ways in which the practices of financialization have become socially embedded and thus reinforcing of the conventional wisdom. More recently, Todd McGowan (2016) has applied insights from psychoanalysis to offer further analysis of capitalism’s persuasiveness. Yet, in practice, a default recourse to false consciousness and blaming the victims remains widespread, as epitomized by Hillary Clinton’s utterly unreflexive book-length indignation at being deprived of what she believes was rightfully hers (Clinton 2017).
Meanwhile, in this deceptively slim volume, there is much to unpack. Konings employs insights from sociology, psychology, and semiotics, in addition to history and political economy, to craft a rich account of American exceptionalism as manifest in its long-standing tradition of populist republicanism, most recently in the Tea Party movement. An abundance of literature is employed in the construction of an original synthesis that first seeks to identify the sources of contemporary consumerism’s appeal in the United States. Thereafter, Konings charts the decline of progressivism as an effective response to populist republicanism, and the reasons for its continued, futile recourse to the disembedding narrative.
The key flaw with Polanyian theory in Konings’s reading is its rendering of markets as autonomizing themselves from society (1), when in fact “capitalism operates through their imbrication” (2), impacting all aspects of social life. All that is solid may melt into air, but it is constantly replaced by the “reconfiguration of patterns and the constitution of the new assemblage as an identity that we can relate to efficiently” (2). And while the sacred may be rendered profane, or at least secular, the centrality of belief remains, as the religious icons of earlier eras have been effectively supplanted by money.
While a human creation that rests ultimately on its shared acceptance, money nevertheless has iconic properties because it is performative, affective, and has real material effects (22). Among these is its role as “the point of economic logic through which self and order are internally connected” (27), contrary to the disembedding narrative’s focus on money’s property as a solvent of social ties. That is to focus on only half the story, because in dissolving certain social ties, it facilitates the formation of others—money as icon is both immanent and generative: “we develop meaningful practices and connections that cluster around particular signs, and over time we become sensitized and responsive to these signs. . . Norms ‘sink in’” (38). The unmentioned Althusser would agree.
But how did money usurp the divine? Here the uniqueness of US history comes into play, with the idolatry critique of the Pilgrim Fathers forming the basis of the ascetic spirituality that, following its initial rejection of Old World idolatry and gradual secularization, came to measure success in material terms that were and are easy to grasp intuitively and which are universally applicable. Konings’s earlier study of the development and uniqueness of the US financial sector provides fuller historical background to the struggles that led to the twentieth-century “democratization” of finance, designed and overseen by the same progressives who would later complain of the narcissistic consumerism it unleashed (Konings 2011).
It was not meant to be like this. The early pragmatist philosophers were excited about the possibilities opened up by economic development, specifically the creativity inherent in the new forms of sociality. While Thorstein Veblen was more critical of the narcissistic propensities of consumerism (Konings describes him as “misanthropic” (82)), identifying emulation and invidious distinction as unfortunate and unproductive cultural consequences of the anxiety bred by such unknown potential, others saw a future of technocratic experts designing, implementing, and adjusting policies so that the average citizen could consume, subject to the disciplining effects of credit. Such was the philosophy underpinning the New Deal, remaining hegemonic until it was eclipsed in the 1970s. This was despite already attracting flak from C. Wright Mills (1943), who saw the pathologization of the problems of the social self as fundamentally elitist. The gradual displacement of agency from the public to progressive elites was paralleled by the increasingly “sterile terms of modern economics and sociology. . . coding and rationalizing a developing manipulative ethos” (86). John Dewey’s radical democracy was sidelined and Talcott Parsons’s structural-functionalism became emblematic of the technocratic paternalism of the post-1945 period.
Eventually that elitism caught up with the social pathologists, who were left exposed by the crises and contradictions that climaxed in the 1970s. Their claims to managerial expertise were no longer credible, and meanwhile the beginning of real-income stagnation meant that the possibilities opened up by further expansion of credit were no longer as resistible to those less able to save (107), especially with the innovation of revolving debt, itself both a reflection and accelerant of changing social attitudes (109).
Konings identifies the sources of popular resentment of progressivism and the willingness of many working people to accept the Reagan prospectus, which promised greater freedom, responsibility, and self-reliance. That this was deliberately misleading misses the point. The New Right offered a populist republican means of self-authentication that had otherwise been denied and dismissed by those decrying the narcissism of others but who were themselves guilty of the same sin. As Walter Benjamin wrote already in 1921, capitalism is a “blaming, rather than a repenting cult” (104), and the haughty aloofness of the self-appointed experts was a provocation waiting for suitable retaliation. “The discursive force of neoliberalism was anchored in the emotional needs of the social self as it had evolved by the 1970s: neoliberalism was synched to the affective economy of the capitalist subject in a way that progressive discourses were not” (91).
Repeated recourse to the disembedding narrative fails to gain traction, despite the real phenomena identified in the critique. Its chief failure is to ignore money’s “binding, generative force: the discontents of capitalist life are inextricably intertwined with the more inviting and alluring aspects of money,” resulting in a “productive admixture of hope and disappointment” (62), with always the promise of a better tomorrow and improved self to compensate and inspire. “Do it yourself” sounds a lot more empowering than “leave it to us,” especially after the demonstrable failure of “us” to prevent the unraveling of the post-1945 SSA.
This is an extremely important book that deserves wide and careful reading. Konings is careful to limit his theorizations to the United States, but there is much for readers elsewhere to ponder, given the globalization of much US culture and economy. The subdiscipline of comparative political economy might significantly benefit from studies investigating the interactions of these globalizing forces with local social economies, in a manner analogous to that of Sebastien Lechevalier’s study of Japan’s encounter with neoliberalism (Lechevalier 2014; Takeda 2017). Konings himself suggests various potentially fruitful lines of inquiry across a wide spectrum of Marxian thought that “perceive not a disarticulation of polity and economy but precisely their growing imbrication” (131), including Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Walter Benjamin and Erich Fromm.
Konings has been charting an original and somewhat iconoclastic course in his research, encompassing a breadth of literature that is rare in contemporary political economy. Having recast the history of US finance and explained US progressivism’s persistent failure to persuade, he is scheduled to produce a study of neoliberalism’s embrace of speculative risk as a source of social order (Konings 2018). In this, Konings appears to be continuing along a path similar to the work of the late Randy Martin, whose studies of the financialization of everyday life (Martin 2002, 2007, 2015) also went beyond appeals to reason and morality and instead sought to understand the social impact of phenomena whose anxiety-inducing and exploitative qualities continue to be overshadowed for many by their alluring promises of greater empowerment and self-fulfillment. It is a worthy endeavor.