The Telos Press Podcast: David A. Westbrook on Social Capitalism

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with David A. Westbrook about his article “Social Capitalism: A Descriptive Sketch,” from Telos 194 (Spring 2021). An excerpt of the article appears below, and we are providing free open access to the full article at the Telos Online website. To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 194 are available for purchase in our online store.

From Telos 194 (Spring 2021):

Social Capitalism: A Descriptive Sketch

David A. Westbrook

I wish to discuss political economy in some rather idiosyncratic ways. For those of you with jobs in finance or related fields (in which I teach), please do not take anything said here too seriously, as that would be professionally irresponsible. That was a joke, sort of. There are basic ways that we as a society think about, and professionally certify, participation in our economy. Normative political thought, and therefore teaching, proceeds on a generally implicit presumption that the terrain (topoi) is fairly well mapped, the topic understood, not least by the teacher, and the questions concern what is to be done and how our goals, either for would-be practitioners or for society writ large, are to be accomplished by well-meaning mandarins.

Like any orthodoxy, such understandings of political economy entail a series of imaginations about our world. Many people are happy with the world as they perceive it, for whatever reason, and justify it in conventional ways. Most, but not all, of this happiness is nowadays called conservative or politically “right.” Many other people are not so happy about this state of affairs. Whatever their actual reasons—which, again, need not concern us here—such people, dominant in certain precincts of the university, tend to express their discontent, also in familiar ways called “left.”^[1] Thus, a great deal of political discourse proceeds on a politely assumed description of the economy, what we learned in graduate school, read in the Economist, whatever. Our political differences are largely explained by our convictions, allegiances, identities—feelings.

Suppose, à la Jonathan Swift, that our description of our own economy is a well-mannered joke, or at least would be funny to an alien visitor?^[2] Suppose we think it all wrong, and so what we say is more or less nonsense? The imagery of “left” and “right,” used as self-evident and transcendent conceptual categories in arguments today, is an artifact of the French Revolution, now almost a quarter millennium old.^[3] Most of the thinking that we now recognize as “left” or “right” is nineteenth- or early twentieth-century thinking, which used more or less refined descriptions of a different world to make very different arguments. None of which is to say that historical thought is not important—good thinking is always important—but it is to say that one should be careful. If the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) taught anything, after “the entire edifice collapsed,” it should have taught that much received “wisdom” is just silly, that even very educated people often have no real sense for what they are talking about and simply do not know how familiar language links up with our strange world as it is, somewhere “out there” beyond the morning’s media intake.^[4] Learning is hard and memories are short, however, so faith in ordinary science has made a comeback over the last decade, and the mediasphere is a cacophony of received ideas. Things now confidently expressed on both the “right” and the “left” are not so much wrong or illogical as inapt and awkward, like rumors of conflicts in another country. These are things we know how to say, however, and things other people know how to hear, and so argument may proceed apace. Indeed, moralistic argument and hence self-presentation in the face of alienation may be the point, as recent elections in the United States and elsewhere, and the pious effusions of the middlebrow press, suggest.

If contest is the point (reason is the slave of the passions, with a vengeance), then it would be foolishly intellectual to ask: what might a better imaginary for contemporary political economy look like? Fools rush in, so this essay introduces and roughly summarizes my thinking on these matters for many years now, mostly since the GFC. While a full description and defense of these ideas would require a long book, I hope the following four interrelated terms are enough to suggest a better map for our economy, and therefore put us in a better position for simple understanding and maybe even—to dream—more reasonable if not classically enlightened policy discussion.

The four terms are:

• social capitalism (a sociological description)
• abstract economies (an operational description)
• from contract to status (resulting class structure and identity)
• custodial regulation (political norms)

I. Social Capitalism

In “modern” political thought since at least Hobbes, society has commonly been imagined in terms of cognate oppositions: the king and the people; the state and the individual; the law, with its power to tax and spend for defense and other aspects of social welfare, vis-à-vis the market, which produces goods and services.^[5] Sticking with the English, we see this opposition institutionally expressed by the King, who borrows, and the City, the goldsmiths, bankers, and later the Bank of England, who lend to him.^[6]

In the nineteenth century, Marx sought to dissolve this opposition—the means of production, hitherto largely private, would be owned by the state in the name of the proletariat, and in the sweet by-and-by, the state itself would wither away. But even Marx started from the traditional political assumption of an opposition between those who own and rule (the bourgeoisie, sometimes expressed as a state, sometimes not) and those who labor and are ruled, the people writ large.^[7] The Marxian dream was to dissolve this antinomy, and the Soviet Union, China, and other places tried to achieve that dream, or at least professed to. At the end of the last century, the dream was abandoned even in name, and countries that had espoused Marx became openly capitalist, albeit in various ways. In the West, this was widely seen as a triumph of “the market” over bureaucratic planning, and it was.

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Notes

1. I have been told that this essay reminds some readers of the late Martin Sklar, the very influential yet relatively obscure historian of and political thinker on the United States. Theretofore, I was largely unaware of Sklar’s work, certainly did not study it, but some subterranean influence might be possible. Having since looked into the matter, I do see affinities between what I am attempting and various arguments made by Sklar, particularly his notion of the “disaccumulation of capital,” i.e., at some point in a technological society, growth is no longer logically related to inputs of either labor or capital and may occur without more substantial investment. There are of course also differences. Sklar was much more committed to the conceptual grammar, and especially to the vocabulary, of the traditional left than I am. More deeply, Sklar seems to me an ideological thinker, in the literal sense of starting with ideas (e.g., “the left” or “capitalism”) and searching for the ways such ideas are expressed in social practices at this or that time and place. I tend to work in the other direction, “critically” perhaps, by examining social practices, usually contemporary, and asking what ideas are implicitly entailed. Sklar’s death prompted a number of appreciative assessments, notably “Symposium on Martin J. Sklar,” Telos 186 (Spring 2019): 97–185.

2. See Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, vol. 36 of The Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), pp. 1–184. Any section would do.

3. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1989), p. 479.

4. See David A. Westbrook, Out of Crisis: Rethinking Our Financial Markets (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers/Routledge, 2009).

5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2017).

6. For an amusing account of relations between the King and the City in early modern England, see Moshe Arye Milevsky, The Day the King Defaulted: Lessons from the Stop of the Exchequer in 1672 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

7. Any number of places, but very clearly: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” [1888 ed.], in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton & Co., 1978), pp. 469–500.