The Marx of the Monopolists

A little ambition is a pitiful thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Promethean spring.

They came bearing consolations for us, when the surging waters stopped - when future perfect open sea turned imperfective tide. The tree of knowledge bore bitter rot, they said; you’re better off without. There will be other goods - fruiting bodies bursting forth from the fields and factories, older interests blooming back where once Reason passed. Eat of them, and rest a while here. Rest easy in the knowledge that there are no more commons and no more tragedies. Unhuddle yourself, and breathe deep: let the free air make you free. Stop and smell the hydrocarbons on the breeze. Be sated and be still.

And in our wake - but you need not concern yourself with wakes. There will be no more contemplation of our compromise with sin. We can make the ugly beautiful; we can make the bloodstains shine. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be wanted, and it’s well such wants should be. In a single storefront can be found all the secrets of the world: want is like; price is value; greed is good. This is what we offer to you; we offer it at cost. We want only a little surety, a little mark upon the flesh - nominal consideration, to bind us to this covenant and bear witness to your trust.

Trust that the brambled thicket of the welfare state is the root of its own need; trust we do only what must be done as we root that poison out. Trust that the motive force of industry might remake the world again, if we would but let its captains loose; trust us to unleash them. Trust that sheltered from the senseless thrashing of the mob, the market's blind robustness-justice would set our line-go-upness free; trust us to put the demos down. Trust that you’ll be better off four years from now than you could hope to be today.

But even the market-Faustians did not quite get their way. Even that frenzied downward spiral retains a sort of future, an outgrowth of the suspicion that history cannot end in so dull a place as here. It is an alternative - and fifty ever-shriller years insisted there were none. But that single voice is shattered; those triumphal years are gone. And as the old hegemon lies dying, old conflicts echo back in mockery of all who went before. Roosevelt’s desperate deathgrip upon the wheel of history, his first mate faced with mutiny when their captain, their captain! broke at last beneath the strain; Biden’s life ambition, stripped of all dead weight but I will be, reached and rendered worthless as his self dissolves into the sea. George McGovern contra mundi, sworn to fight the long defeat; Candidate Obama’s easy turn, turn, turning, a season to every thing. Richard Nixon’s sweaty face and the terrible horrible no good very orange man - to each world-historic tragedy, its narcissistic farce.

The propertarians are a special case, as they’ve always known themselves to be. Once it was just infantile self-expression, kept locked beneath a bolted hatch at the National Review. No longer. The internet will accept no seal; it permits no quarantine. It insists: thou shalt not suffer secrecy to live. For thirty years now, more or less, some morbid thing has festered there, feasted and grown firm, slouching towards the real. It has found itself a face now; it has mantled Peter Thiel.

II.

Thiel has taken many stances, in many venues. He has taken many sides, and claimed many values. He has called himself a libertarian, a national conservative, “not interested in politics”; for the sake of freedom, for the sake of progress, for the love of humanity. I am not naive enough to insist isolated claims must mean. He once called a moment “Straussian”. He is involved in politics; he is bound by his context to engage in speech-acts. But there are recurring themes, well-worn epithets in his epic tale of one. Above all else: he resents his binds.

“Competition”, for instance, “is for losers”. This is not conventional wisdom, except in certain segments of the left. Even our language is loaded: we speak of perfect competition and market failures; allocations are efficient and loss is deadweight. This is because we, too, are losers - or high time-preference consumers, who might as well be. We tell ourselves that our ambitions are exhausted by newer toys and lower prices; we think free markets make us free.

Thiel is under no such illusion; he wants things, and knows his wants are his. In other minds this might have been a tightening of all those binding ties: no accounting for taste, and to each his own. Different folks, different strokes, god is dead and has endowed us with certain unalienable Rights. But if you want the world you want, come what objections may, if you know and do not care that there are bigger systems here which do not want the same, there is but one conclusion left to you: those systems must be changed.

In Thiel there are the makings of a second “master class’s Marx”, a Calhoun for technocapital (may it meet no better fate). He is not blinded to his class position by the silicated gem-garb of his make-more-capital-machine, as his peers so often seem to be. They go about their business without interference, and think themselves without constraint. In truth, they have simply failed to look beyond the limits of their leash. But Thiel, say what you will, has vision. He has followed the logic of venture capital down towards its final end - towards the terminal conclusion that his projects aim past mere consumption, towards things larger and less perfect; that the mercy of the market would bring them to an end.

Perfect competition is a euphemism; denoting correctly, connoting all wrong. It is how we, when privileging our part within the aggregate consumer-mass, describe a perfect tyranny of form. It summons up an infinitude of firms, and permits them each one thing: be well and truly marginalized, or else simply cease to be. Perfection is rewarded with just enough financial feedstock to meet implicit costs; imperfection is preempted by instant fiscal death.

Real markets, like all real tyrants, have their lapses of attention, and the odd indulgence of free will. Brief concavities of profit play across their convex plains, trailed by minor capitalists gathering their alpha while they may. In the fluted softstone relict-walls where the old laws still hold sway, a million cottage industries eke out their local-social-suprarational rewards, while little redoubts of private law hide the gentry-parasites and their fetid rent-pools, as they trade yeoman-masks for guttered mandibles and maxillae and drain their bondsmen dry. In a thousand such refugia, a thousand shards of former things are shielded from the scouring modern winds - until the landscape shifts again, and a world-storm tears through. And behind the largest outcrops, from an older world still - thrown up by frictions and fixed costs, by market sizes too small to bring much capital or market structures too sharp and strange to simply bulldoze flat, by that vast and cratered moonscape where the market meets the law - there, even true monopolies might endure. There alone could one and one alone be truly free.

III.

Capitalists want economic profit; perfect efficiency can permit them none. To the capitalist, therefore, efficiency is bad. The capitalist who simply owns things, who does not allocate and does not manage and does not keep the books, whose whole role in the economy is to hold the face matched to certain scribbled names - this purest form of capitalist is a parasite on their capital; they claim the right of the monopolist to let some social surplus burn. They, like the monopolist, can stake no abstract claim upon their role; it is an insult to society, until proven earned. Thiel, at least, admits to this; he asserts he’ll earn his keep. In other minds this might have been ambition. But Thiel is become an appetite; Thiel is yet unsated.

He called himself a libertarian once; once there was a deal struck with which the libertarians could live. They could have their progress; they need not suffer plans. I leave it to you to judge whether that bargain has been honored. Do the seventies seem a foreign country to you, as the twenties did to them? Is the slow retreat of bezeled screens the march of progress you were promised? Or, more charitably - because it might have always been beyond us to answer otherwise than no - have we done what we could do, in the conditions we’ve received? If the hour is late, and the unplucked fruits hung high - has our twilight gleaning spent the evening well?

Perhaps. But if things have gone as best they can for us it’s through no fault of our own: we’ve stumbled twice to land at last on baseless true belief, and stumbled on from there. Capitalism, they say, is the greatest engine of value creation human history has ever seen. Capitalism has thrown us further clear of Malthus than other systems had ever hoped to see. And all of this is true. There’s no clever reversal waiting here, no “true, except” - precapitalist states are extremely poor, without exception. But there are complications with the “why”.

Capitalism, they say, has trimmed the fat from market squares; it has liquefied the fast-frozen fixtures of the past, and set the human spirit free. The whole world has been paved for us, from here to the efficiency frontier; it scrapes every scrap of value out of every shattered jar. We are rich because our grip can squeeze. And this is not entirely wrong.

Capitalism, they say, has lifted up the best and brightest, and put them at the helm. Capitalism, they claim, broke the stranglehold of caste and clan, and slipped free of crown and guild; flush with displaced peasant fuel, it crushed the crowned heads of Europe beneath its feet and fed them right back in. We are rich because our touch is light. And this is sort of sometimes true.

And it is these two virtues, they say, working hand in hand, which have made history a hockey stick and delivered us from need. Entrepreneurs seed the fitness landscape with new and different things; the market gives succor to the best of them and ensures the failures are destroyed. The steady march of eight billion blindly flailing agents aggregated into one; the sudden glimpse of unseen things by one single personality - that, they say, is the engine of the world. That blood-rusted key has opened up all the earth to us, and will yet take us further on. It will take us through the future’s portal, across the desperate winter sea.

But there is a tension here. Those virtues are at odds. The impersonal logic of the market was meant to deliver us from the ever less than optimal wills and whims of man; from the paper chains of public interest, the singularity of genius was meant to be set free. There was not so much discussion of what genius might go unregarded, amid the market’s din; of how that ruthless logic’s last survivors might use their breathing room.

IV.

The core conceit of the reflexively “pro-market”, prior to all their oft-implicit value claims, is that this is a meaningful axis of policy. Their conceit is wrong. There are always market failures; we only ever choose which ones. There was nothing efficient about Ma Bell, and there can be no defense of Samsung on grounds of Econ 101. But neither can freshman economics explain the existence of Bell Labs, or precisely what distinguished Park’s regime from the rule of Syngman Rhee. There was Xerox PARC, and there is PG&E. There was Bell Labs, and there is Comcast. There is the slightly better mousetrap, and there is the computer mouse. And then there is the computer, which in the longue duree will be the thing that counts.

Anti-trust is a rare point of something like consensus, in principle if not as enforced in fact: monopolists are parasites, by almost all accounts. This is a reasonable heuristic, but not a certain fact: monopolies are symbiotes, for good or for ill. A monopolist lays waste to short-run surpluses today, and gives nothing back tomorrow - but the surplus that it slurps up, minus all the waste, pooled together for a month, a year, condensed down for an age - with that, things are possible that incremental means could never have attained. There are processes in play here too large and slow to make much note of short-run surplus, too charged up with inertia to be redirected for its sake - and a market that can hold back the urge to grind the seed corn is distinguished not just by making more or less, but by being able to do different things.

A perfect antitrust regime would have strangled programming as we know it before it hit the crib. There are pros and cons here, admittedly: there are certain “innovations” which simply should not be. I have had this fantasy; I have had it often. No PARC, therefore no OOP. No Bell Labs and therefore no C. No C, therefore no Java, therefore no Javascript; therefore a thousand years of perfect beauty here beneath the finger-trees. Only paren-slinging cowboy coders microdosing in the weeds, while the gardener-algebraists tend their program-proofs beside the rising theorem-sea. I return to it more often than could possibly be wise.

There is a ingrained inclination when we think of busting trusts to take the consumer stance: maximize quantity and minimize price, though the world should perish. This is natural enough, and reasonable. Almost everyone pays out for higher oil prices; precious few of us reap windfalls when they spike. We are all consumers in a hundred little ways, but most of us produce, so far as the market can discern, nothing more than labor - sold to one buyer, in one way, for one fixed price. The same single solid lump of labor, hour after hour, or else sections of our lives packaged up in bulk, one n-week at a time. When concentrated interests are advantaged by default, a bias towards the diffuse buying public is most likely for the best. But total indifference to all other interests is not - not least because those other interests are almost always bound up, when all is said and done, with ours.

The more important point, however, is that we are principally neither consumers nor producers, buyers nor sellers - we are citizens everywhere and always, market participants only in a place and for a time. And we are people necessarily, and citizens of our particular states by mere brute contingency. And so on this point I must insist: the rights of man and of the citizen are prior to the interests of the consumer and the firm. There is no sacred right of surplus; the consumer has no perfect claim to it, nor does the producer - there are no grounds on which to justify that it must be permitted to exist. There are only ever tradeoffs, and all interests must be weighed.

And so I cannot in good conscience wish to make a tyrant of my taste. Its dictates would all be beautiful and true, or would so seem to me; they would not be wise. I cannot deny that “worse is better”, though spectres of The Right Thing still linger in my dreams. I cannot pretend my ends always level with my wants; my soul is not quite small enough to stoop to place my wants on top. I am not Peter Thiel.

V.

Thiel, I suppose, must also dream; Thiel surely sleeps. He is in the end a mortal man, and I will not begrudge him hopes fit for his condition - however distant, however bold. To have it in your power to watch the stars go dim; to die by choice, or else to live - until all ends converge in that last night’s awful chill. To look upon your works, and see that they were good; to see some wrongness in creation, and remake the world right. To supplant the is with ought to be, and the accidental with the good. To be faber, ludens, sapiens - but never economicus again. These are far beyond the possible, or at least the possible for us; nonetheless, there’s something lost in the settling-down of yearning, a servile groove carved out by our consignment of the might-yet-be to the merely might-have-been.

Thiel, I suspect, does not deepen that groove often. Thiel’s doctrine does not belong to the present age. His ambition reaches far enough to be at odds with circumstance; he knows the lessons of frustration - he knows we’re not quite free. No gods, no masters; no dead hand out of history, no more desperate races that death demands we win. It leaks through to us out from a brighter place; all will and aspiration, no soft warm fuzzy dream.

It disdains to conceal its views and aims; it is out to do away with the present state of things. It has concluded that the ruling class is no longer fit to rule, that the growth of society’s productive forces is no longer desirable to them. It has seen them forge the means of their destruction; it has no shortage of motivation. The opportunity, it suspects, is close at hand - and off there in the distance, it has seen a truly human history begin.

Here is heard once more that brightest blazing tragic theme; here reason thunders in revolt against nature’s god again; here within the music of the spheres can be heard hints of more than human voices; here is that secret song for which Sophocles wrote The Ode To Man, though he never heard it sung. But there is one last awful burst of dissonance, one perfect note of farce, one last word for the monkey-mind which damns the whole thing at the end. Marx marks the end of history when “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” - but the free development of Peter Thiel means the free development of none.

It is fitting, then, that he looks fondly on aspiring monopolies: they too hope to break free from their contingent social world, and answer only to an older code of law; they too must make their play alone, lest a resumption of the struggle fuel another forward lurch of history - and leave them bound by law again. A lone monopolist is free; a monopolist among monopolies is made a castellan, compelled to walk the walls again. Thus the royal charter gave way to corporate competition; thus the market’s anarchy was meant to reach its end in bright red roses’ bloom.

This is, obviously, not what happened; socialism does not describe the thing we ushered in. What spurred the productive forces on, when the market seemed to gutter out, was not the working class but the developmental state. Or the private monopoly, closely held and unconstrained - a dictatorship in miniature, with a purpose much the same. They exist, if you prefer a more conventionally economic phrasing, to coordinate investment - and also to compel it. Homo economicus does not plant trees which take a century to grow; the role of central power is to break said model down.

But it’s precisely when the state grows beyond its predatory origins and starts to play its proper role that Thiel’s contempt spills over: “the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics”, he tells us, was the 1920s. He despairs for “capitalist democracy” even as he lauds central planning when the plan’s in private hands. He spits bile at corporatism in Swedish or in red even as he sings the praises of the implicit liberal corporatism of a Google-Meta-Thyssen-Krupp. The virtues he observes in a monopoly breaking loose from competiton are precisely the warning signs of tyranny he detects in the 20th century - in that one brief golden age when it seemed the state might slip the surly bonds of class; in that reign of terror when men like Thiel felt it slipping from their grasp.

VI.

To see a threat to freedom in the state is utterly mundane; to see the threat posed by the market is a rare gift so far right. But there is one connection Thiel still has yet to make: he will not see the threat that’s posed by property; it does not threaten him. Thiel’s is not the cause of human freedom; his thoughts of freedom end with his.

This is first among his flaws: for all that his ambition stretches far beyond the stars, it spans just one him across. For all that he can see the tyrant-market clear, he is blinded to the past. His vision penetrates; it does not grasp. His hopes are high; they are not broad. Faced with the “unthinking demos” and the Norwegian horror that it’s wrought, Thiel hopes at most to find an exit; an “escape not via politics but beyond”. Into hermetic isolation far from the madding crowd - or else very far above. There is politics wherever free persons live together; only anchorites and sovereign tyrants could hope to count themselves beyond.

That escape, he supposes, will be to somewhere “truly free” - “a new space for freedom” in a world where no untainted spring remains. That freedom will of course be his: the freedom of the owner, not the employee. But “this is tyranny’s disease, to trust no friends” - the crown is still a sort of exile; the sovereign is not free. We have a world to lose. Thiel has nothing to win but our chains. And yet, come what may, he still hungers for a crown; he still dreams himself our master.

That last grasping leap, from corporation to single corporate state, can have no legal basis: it is the end of statute law. It can in no sense be a blow for human freedom: it is the end of the republic and its citizen, from which sprang the means by which we judged ourselves freely-bound - and therefore bound-but-free. And Thiel dreams himself Augustus, the last mere principal executive, the first of eighty sovereign un-kings, self-interred forever upon a Herman Miller throne.

Of course we have seen princes come and go before. The modal state - by victim-weight, not count - is empire, a bandit gang in crowns. The modal market power is that exercised by ownership of land - banditry by proxy, coercion once removed. The strictures of procedure - the logic of the market, of civil service reform, of technocratic management and liberal democracy in decay - are meant to mitigate this. If we cannot trust the will of persons - set an impersonal will upon the throne; if we cannot trust the “public” interest is one - dispose of interests altogether, and make this ship a shore.

This is corruption’s proper countermeasure, used in moderation; this is slow collective suicide, if applied to every last suspicion of corruption that we see. The virtue of the market is that it cannot distinguish between interests; the madness of the price mechanism is that it cannot distinguish between ends. In its blinded sight, plans that touch on priceless things are plans untouched by reason. In its judgement, value which cannot be captured is value which need not be produced. In its accounting, to plant a tree in whose shade you will not sit is to incur one acorn’s worth of loss.

Peter Thiel knows this - this makes him something more, in the final analysis, than a man and a brother and an unconsenting thermocouple in the great big soft machine. He wants almost precisely what he ought to want: freedom in full bloom, the agent sprung from the arena, the spandrel conquering the replicator, the hope of mind and will and value outlasting mere gross matter.

He would build a city and a tower, and make himself a name; nothing would be restrained from him. He would seize the future which once we thought was ours: one language cannot be confounded, one man cannot be scattered all abroad. He wants to break the back of Moloch, and claw our birthright back from hell. He wants to storm the gates of Heaven and put history on trial. He does not want to die. And all of this is virtue; I am entirely sincere. But our inheritance will not be returned to us; crimes against humanity will not be the charge.

He thinks himself “on the side of transformation and not just taking the world as it is”; he helps men in black make sure “his” side does not win. He would name himself the overman, whose overture were we; he would make himself a coda to cut off all bolder themes. “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end”; what is small in Thiel is that he has bridged the way to nothing.

He points the way to a future flush with means to any end - but the way is a way for him; he will not promise you their use. That would be political, and politics is not among his interests. He will gesture at the what for of it, on occasion - he makes certain sorts of value claims, firmly and with verve. But they are not new ones, or made newly - a show of skill, but not of greatness; nothing far beyond the reach of clever hairless apes.

Even at his most original - he’s Marx in a mirror darkly, dredging up the out-of-fashion but not the truly bold. He can smash the abstract market’s idols with as much zeal as he likes; the delusion that the marketplace’s social meanings are simple facts about dead things still has him firmly in its grip. Or perhaps it doesn’t; perhaps that’s exactly what he wants us to believe. I don’t know why; I don’t know whether. It is impossible to infer Thiel’s real intentions; it is impossible to distinguish between worldview and deliberate choice of frame.

Every point he makes comes pre-tainted by the public eye; every seeming shift in thought is perhaps a tactical maneuver. Every word I’ve written here is suspect; I wrote them based on his. Only Peter Thiel knows all of Peter Thiel’s ends. He is not interested in politics only in the sense that his politics reserve all speaking roles for him. In his retreat from high modernity - the late antique seeps in. In resolving our prehistory - his diary begins. There will be no happy ending.