THE HUMAN PARTY

Artwork by Polly Cancro

It’s the end of history
It’s caged and frozen still
There is no other pill to take
So swallow the one that made you ill
-Zach De La Rocha

Adam Smith, one of the fathers of modern American capitalism, believed the development of markets, and the eventual subsuming of society into them, was inevitable. An examination of pre-capitalist societies was therefore “to no purpose,” for Smith saw, at the core of human nature, “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” For Smith and those who accepted this strange and ahistorical view, which seems to have projected his present and near future onto the past, capitalism thus becomes a necessary consequence of human nature and an expression of natural laws.

This view is patently false, but an utter lack of cultural anthropology, combined with a mythological pseudo-history, obscure this truth in Smith’s work. Actual historical and anthropological studies, such as Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, tell us something quite different; namely, that as a rule man’s economy “is submerged in his social relationships…the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives.” This observation runs completely counter to Smith’s claim about the primacy of the propensity to trade with the intent of maximizing personal private gain. In fact, history and ethnography “know of no economy prior to our own even approximately controlled and regulated by markets.”

Rather than being the natural or inevitable progress of history, the development of our present alliance of liberal democracy and free-market economics was a matter of historical contingency. Far from being the natural order of things, the development of this system required the subordination of everything else to market forces, something which was previously unimagined. It required, indeed, the commoditization of human life and all of nature with the goal of increasing the “wealth of nations,” in other words the wealth of those who, by virtue of owning wealth, were positioned to accumulate more of it. Marx wrote that capitalism came “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

However, since we all personally experience the near-complete global hegemony of this system every day, we find it extremely difficult to escape this economic and political naturalism – we tend to see the status quo as natural, even if it is anything but. Particularly here in the United States, the epicenter of corporate capitalism, we tend to accept the current distributional state of affairs as a given, and are able to break from this all-pervading framework only with the greatest difficulty. As Slavoj Žižek points out, it is far easier for us to imagine the end of the world, of life as we know it, than it is for us to imagine what a post-capitalist future would look like. It's true; there are many movies and video games about the apocalypse, but none that depict a future where social relations based on an evolved, conscious morality have replaced capitalist class relations and the deification of material accumulation.

This inability to escape or even recognize the inherent ideology of the society we live in greatly limits the way that we imagine solutions to the gravest problems facing our species. Global trade and bustling economic activity need not result in the most incredible inequalities of wealth or inexorable environmental destruction; the forces that constantly encourage us to think of this arrangement as a necessary, natural outcome have a strong interest in maintaining that illusion. That so many should live and work exclusively to facilitate the blind, frenzied consumption of a few, consumption which draws the very demise of our entire planet ever closer, is absolutely unacceptable, and requires a radical re-examination of our priorities as a society and as a species.

It requires us, in other words, to move beyond “the End of History.” After the fall of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama argued that Western liberal democracy definitively represents the end of our historical evolution and is in fact the final form of government. With all of the pressing global challenges we face as a species, from global warming to water scarcity and desperate poverty, we cannot afford to accept that conclusion. We cannot leave our collective fate in the invisible hands of the market. In the words of Jacques Derrida,

It must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.