Socialism And The Shape Rotators

What happened to reason in revolt?

I

The Road To Serfdom is a strange, strange book. At his worst, reading Hayek is like ingesting every libertarian forum post ever written, all at once. Progressives venerate the state. Wanting the state to defend a particular conception of the good is totalitarian; also, liberty is the highest good and the state should defend it. Socialism did the Holocaust¹. It’s all right there, fully formed, like a book of hours beneath Pompeii.

And then you find yourself reminded that no, this really is from another age. One where, if Hayek is to be believed, “socialism has displaced liberalism as the doctrine held by the great majority of progressives”, one where “it is worth enquiring why so large a proportion of the technical experts should be found in the front rank of the planners”, and where “If it is no longer fashionable to emphasize that we are all socialists now, this is so merely because the fact is too obvious”. Where, in short, the future is red. The conception of “socialism” he has in mind here is a broad one - Prussian corporatism² and French dirigisme both apparently count - but still: this is not our age, and that is not our future.

Echoes of these sorts of claims can still be heard, but largely from the truly lunatic fringe: Birchers and backwoods militias, unreconstructed McCarthyites and freemen on the land. Not from the Serious People in Serious Institutions; not from the bright young things in what are most certainly not sinecures. Contemporary neoliberals, intent on claiming the apostolic succession for themselves, tend to cast the left as something fundamentally outside and against the Enlightenment project: it’s that same old “collectivism”, it’s populism, it’s the mob rising up against the experts, it’s base emotion rising up against Truth and Reason. Hayek is not immune to this - drink every time he complains about some positive conception of freedom and you’ll die - but I’m inclined to write that off as propaganda: this is, after all, part of his plan to change the political landscape, not just interpret it.

But where the two aims are compatible, where Hayek is at his best, he comes very close to getting it. He’s right about this: Marx dreamed of Man, Controller of the Universe, as Man the Clockmaker. Not today, not before our “real history” begins, but eventually; but soon. Communism solves “the riddle of history” in that it fits the past into a rational order. The past will never be redeemed, but it can be made sensible, made sacred: somewhere under Uruk lies the first of a hundred billion martyrs.

He is right, accordingly, to regard the special appeal of socialism to technical experts as unsurprising, though still in need of explanation. In 1952’s somewhat more serious The Counter-Revolution of Science, he attempts to offer one. The engineer’s mindset, Hayek says, demands that constraints have explanations. If they fail in that, if the engineer cannot “explain why those changes in prices occur which often interfere with his plans” then they are suspect:

any such interference appears to him due to irrational (i.e., not consciously directed) forces

This skips a few steps, at least where modern settings are concerned - the working engineer rarely confronts market forces directly; real unreason has an MBA for a face - but the general idea is right. “Requirements always change” is the sound of a programmer in pain. “The best code is code that meets the business requirements delivered as fast as possible” is the sound of a broken spirit, of resigning yourself to the fact that freeing the form from the marble is not what they pay you for. The natural instincts of the technical expert aim towards higher things: the “purely technical optimum of universal validity”, “which he feels the ‘irrational’ economic forces prevent him from achieving”. It aims, in other words, towards some concept capital-R-Reason, which the market cannot serve.

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II

There are, of course, other sorts of intellectuals. They chafe against the market too, but for very different reasons: no serious historian ever felt themselves called to some competing optimizer; no serious philosopher felt themselves a defender of the obvious right decision against blind unreason. For them, Hayek claims³, the appeal of socialism (which he still sees, apparently, as obviously in need of explanation) is somewhat different. Feeling charitable for a moment, he ascribes part of it to a legitimate demand for

the understanding of the rational basis of any social order and … the exercise of that constructive urge for which liberalism, after it had won its great victories, left few outlets

and calls for an anti-socialist alternative. Less charitably, he cites the usual excuses: fashion, novelty, the natural preference for unproven ambition over battle-hardened pragmatism, but these factors can only explain why “socialism” might win out over Gladstone and Disraeli. Anything new and popular will by necessity be new; the old and popular does not, to the conservative eye, demand an explanation. For Hayek, who denies the distinctness of fascism and the novelty of his own brand of market liberalism, this may be irrelevant, but we know better. There is a possible world where the hot new thing is neoliberal - we’re living in it.

Proceeding, then, by restricting our attention to the particular characteristics of the left and the particular circumstances of that era, Hayek still has one more suggestion to offer: the intellectual, he says, takes sides on the basis of “consistency with his other views and suitability for combining into a coherent picture of the world”; of, essentially, “general principles”. Liberalism owes its rhetorical weakness to the liberal insistence on particulars, to their lack of a utopian horizon against which progress can be judged.

I am not well-positioned to answer whether contemporary neoliberalism, in the eyes of its defenders, has solved this problem: any doctrine that denies that what is possible is possible for us will always seem sad and small to me. But Hayek’s account here strikes me as essentially right. He does not and cannot, without stepping a little further outside his frame, understand exactly what it is socialists object to, but he sees that capital-R Reason is at the core of it. He grasps that the plan is to finish the Enlightenment project, to fulfill the oaths that liberals made in the dawn. As Whittaker Chambers put it, in a characteristic fit of melodrama:

Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.”

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III

This is, obviously, not the sort of ambition that springs up fully formed. There are many, many steps between one Monday morning meeting too many and the rational reconstruction of the world. But I think they share the same basic instinct. The emotional core of this sort of leftist - not the foundation of their worldview, or the linchpin of their strategy, but the instinct that says there’s something here to win - is the sense that the world has failed to justify itself. They’re given incentives when they deserve motives; causal explanations when they deserve principled reasons.

Turning a screw is turning a screw, but turning a screw to make a car is not turning a screw to make money. Turning a screw to liberate Europe from fascism is not turning a screw to make a line go up. And for those who really believe they’re doing work of real social value, who can tolerate the surplus the suits skim off the top, there’s still the threat - if anything more serious than it is for the completely disaffected - that they will one day, for no particular reason, be made to stop. Putting down the screwdriver because you’re no longer trying to make a car is not the same as doing so because a bunch of other lines got shaky.

Losing your job because Ford sells better cars at lower prices and now the company is bankrupt is one thing; machines for turning raw materials into stuff no one wants should not exist. But losing your job because car sales are down because other people lost their jobs because people had been lying and/or mistaken about how risky it was to own - brace yourself - claims on the income to claims on the income to claims on the income from housing sales - appears insane. You can offer a rational explanation, if you try very hard and extend a great deal of charity - but the very fact that you have to says enough. Whether events like these can ultimately be made to fit into some deeper rational order is irrelevant: they are experienced as deeply stupid, and this is a legitimate grievance in its own right.

Hayek, ironically, remarks at one point in an attack on the concept of distributive justice that

Freedom in the choice of activity as we know it is possible only if the reward to be expected from any job undertaken corresponds to the value the products will have to those fellow men to whom they actually are supplied.

But here we have a clear example where reward and value come apart. There’s no less steel in the world, no less oil; no fewer roads, no fewer people. A car is every bit as useful as it’s ever been - and yet, because a bunch of people all of a sudden changed their minds about what certain contracts were worth, far fewer cars will be produced. Who could possibly want this? How could this possibly be justified? How could this be rational? Who, living under the rule of a system that makes decisions like this, could regard themselves as really free?

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IV

Most people, as it turns out. Hayek’s red menace, if it ever really existed, is gone. The dominant affect of the facts and logic crowd today is “centrist technocrat”, not heroic materialism. The left remains “intellectual” insofar as it remains in some loose sense humanist (though even that is slipping), but it is no longer the party of planning. The engineers of the soul have given way to its schoolmarms; the leap to the Kingdom of Freedom is suspended indefinitely. Sand Hill Road is the new heartland of American reaction (South Carolina’s demons were never truly put to rest, but the bodies fit to host them grow weaker and fewer every year) and the class war is, if not over, at least on hold while the War of Resistance against (Bugman/Rightoid) Aggression continues.

The left’s weakness among engineers can be attributed, in part, to its weakness with everyone. To be less appealing to everyone in general is, generally speaking, to be less appealing to anyone in particular. But the collapse of leftist sympathies among the “elites”, among the technical intelligentsia and the bright-eyed young things in Washington, has been profound - not as severe, perhaps, as the collapse of leftist self-identification in the general population, but far, far worse than the collapse of leftist sympathies. Bernie would have won, but Bernie would not have won northern Virginia.

I don’t think this was inevitable. There is no natural tendency that binds Andreessen-Horowitz and their pet founders together with the engineers they underpay in an alliance against the boat salesmen and HVAC specialists, nothing which suggests the urban poor and the useless rich must inevitably unite against the lower upper middle to defend finance against real-estate. If the left is no longer the party of frustrated experts, the center no longer held by “responsible” men of wealth and privilege, the right no longer (visibly) the province of old and thirsting gods baying for peasant blood, it’s because something happened; something changed.

If I knew what, if I knew what to do, I’d be busy doing it. But here are some possibilities.

1: The Right and Center no longer side with the market against “experts”.

I don’t think this can be the whole story, as anyone who has actually worked for SV VC types can attest, but it doesn’t seem entirely false either. They are not benevolent, but their self-interest is a little more enlightened than you might expect; their employees are not free to do objectively good work, but they are, to the extent that Capital can tame the bureaucracy, encouraged to make relatively good decisions. Capital once was blind and mindless, but now it’s merely shortsighted and dumb. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe all anyone ever really wanted was a social order which was not completely, obviously, at-a-single-glance-stupid. But I hope most of us would aim higher; I know firsthand that some of us still do.

2: The Bolsheviks screwed everything up forever

This, too, has some truth to it. The damage done by the purges, by the invasion of Hungary, by the vanguard of history getting itself captured by a bunch of semiliterate thugs, cannot be overstated. We (though really only “we”) had at long last seized the wheel of history - and yet history failed to turn. If this were 1995, I might be able to accept that as a complete explanation. But memories are short; I don’t expect the optimism of the interwar to return without good reason, but there’s no objective reason why “communism bad”, which is all the average American really retained, should be any more effective than “radicals bad” or “anarchists bad” or whatever it was that they were saying in 1918. Propaganda strengthens or weakens tendencies which are already viable; it does not create or destroy them.

3: The intellectuals already got what they wanted

Successful tenured academics are, along with the unusually well-adjusted rich, more or less the only people already resident in the “Kingdom of Freedom”. No surprise, then, that they’re not always so concerned about helping other people reach it. But this does little to explain the journalists, the engineers, the Senior Vice Presidents in Charge of East Coast Marketing (three reports, $90k per year, two years out of school) are not free, not governed by forces that they or anyone else can reliably make sense of, and not reliably in favor of doing anything about it. These are creatures of the center, of the status quo - they haven’t escaped it, they’ve accepted it. This, alone, is not an explanation: it must have become more acceptable.

4: The Left no longer sides with “experts” against the market.

This, unfortunately, is the best explanation I can offer. This is our fault; we screwed it up, we’re screwing it up, we’re incapable of not screwing up without outside intervention. There’s what will one day be a long and noble tradition of noting that the left has abandoned its assault on organized religion to become one, degraded from a social movement into a social club, exploded into a new arena for competition instead of fighting in an old one; I won’t offer any substantial additions to it today. But these discussions usually concern themselves with the working class; ostensibly in the orthodox Marxist sense, but in practice used quite conventionally: red-blooded big-hearted blue-collared workingmen, oil stains and all. The orthodox narrative here - work is work and management is work, but ownership is a legal fiction, and workers have every reason to stake a claim on its return - is a nice one, and I see its appeal. But suppose it’s wrong; suppose that, like the peasant classes orthodox Marxism correctly wrote off, the interests of the lower-middle are tied more to stability than wealth or freedom or power. This still fails to explain why technical elites - secure, but not free - would fail to ask for more.

Here’s one possibility: they’re still asking, but the left no longer answers. “Promethean”, in certain circles, has become a slur; “growth” a delusion. We must, the story goes, come to terms with smallness, diminish ourselves, and live with Brother Wolf and Sister Bird as equals. Not mentioned, but also not denied, are Brother Sun and Sister Moon; Brother Plague and Sister Death. They’re egalitarians, if you squint, but not humanists; intent on defending the world against the blind idiot god of Capital, but not because it competes with their own ambitions. There’s goodness in them, but no ambition, nothing capital-G-Great. They’re leftists, frankly, only by convention. In a more honest world, we would recognize them as the one group of conservatives who actually mean it.

But that can’t be the whole story: this sort of vague pastoral communitarianism is more popular than it used to be, but hardly universal. What of the surviving old left? I have a theory. It’s a heretical one - more cultural than material, more liberal than Marxist, and yet distinctly un-PC - and one I hope is false, but nonetheless one I can’t quite shake.

Contemporary liberalism, as you may have noticed, is fond of rules. Old rules which are reasonable in their context - don’t call black men “articulate” - new rules explicable only with a shrug and a vague gesture at campus politics - out with “hispanics”, in with “latinx” “folx” - and everything in between. They have implicit legal systems that makes the Ottomans look like Jacobins, speech codes that make the Victorians look lax, webs of association that would baffle James Joyce. These are not the native norms of socialism, but socialists have in general adopted them. Socialist institutions have made themselves a comfortable place for western liberals, and, therefore, a deeply hostile place for foreigners.

Certain categories get grandfathered in, exempted from full participation in the body politic on the basis of their insurmountable Otherness⁴. But this is little comfort to the foreigners within, to those with no narrative to defend their clumsiness. To, that is, the kind-of sort-of not quite diagnosably but unmistakably a little bit, on the spectrum. Socialists still promise to conquer the world for Reason, but the reason they offer is, to the outside observer, yet another morass of mindless social forces constituting yet another inhuman will; just another little god reaching up out of the past. If the engineers choose to side with the center, it’s not because they no longer wish to make the world of men to a better plan, or the left no longer promises to do so - it’s because they can no longer believe our plan is better. If they side with the right, it’s because they no longer believe our plan is ours.

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V

Pathology is all well and good, but obsessing over it is part of how we got here in the first place. What do we, if we still believe, do about it? I have no idea. But I think it’s clear that the original assumption, that the structure of their institutions works in our favor, is no longer true. Maybe it never was - the jury will most likely remain out forever. But it’s certainly not now. Liberal democracy does not inherently bend towards justice; the internet does not bend towards freedom.

Whether we can do without institutional support at all is intrinsically less clear - winning and being favored to win look the same in retrospect - but I’m not optimistic. More importantly, “try harder”, even if it would work, is not a real strategy. People try however hard they do, in the ways that they do, for reasons. The institutions that exist might be compatible with the outcomes we want, but they are, clearly, not sufficient to produce them: better institutions might not be necessary, but they would certainly help.

Obviously this is still not really a useful answer. I can offer characterizations - anthropocentric but not callous, ambitious but not suicidal, rationalist but not blind, democratic but not structureless, egalitarian but not naive - but if description were design we’d be living in a very different world. But I’m sure of this: a left that rests its hopes entirely on the “most oppressed”, a “Marxism” that imagines it can do without the support of the rising classes, a “progressive” movement that aspires only to stand athwart history and yell “Stop”, a left that points backwards, is a left that will lose. The arc of history bends towards growth: the moment when we might have resigned ourselves to remaining just another sort of replicator on just another world has come and gone. We’re different, and if we pass the world will be different for our passing. There will be no degrowth; there will be no non-Euclidean cold wet animal place for us to be; there will be no return to Eden. The only choice still on offer is simple: will ye be as gods, or will ye be cancer?

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1. I’ve seen it claimed, though I don’t remember where, that Hayek couldn’t have known about the Holocaust when he called “such a thing happening in Germany … a necessary outcome of [socialist] tendencies”. This is nonsense. Headlines like “1,000,000 JEWS SLAIN BY NAZIS, REPORT SAYS” were appearing in British and American newspapers as early as 1942; The Road To Serfdom was published in 1944. Allied governments were well aware of exactly what Nazi racial policy meant in practice no later than 1941, when the systematic murder of Jews in Poland and occupied Soviet territory began - the first Einsatzgruppen reports were intercepted and decrypted almost immediately. If Hayek didn’t know, it’s because he didn’t want to.

2. Let’s be honest here: proto-fascism.

3. We’re moving on now to The Intellectuals and Socialism; which position belongs to which publication is frankly of little interest to me. I’m using Hayek for my own ends, not writing his biography.

4. Profoundly ironic, yes, but when has that ever stopped anyone?