Historical materialism as a sociological theory of all human relationships - The interdependent markets of capitalism

 

I: INTRODUCTION

 

            Historical materialism (also known as “dialectical materialism” or simply “Marxism”) was the method of analyzing social relations invented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, inspired by Hegel’s speculative idealism – it posits that each socio-economic system that humanity goes through is made up of a certain number of contradictions that create tensions that will eventually “snap in two”, causing a revolution, moving onto the next economic system. It is marked primarily by analyzing social trends by putting them in a historical context and by the materialist viewpoint taking priority over the idealist one. In summary: materialism posits that ideas, beliefs and ideologies are created by the material conditions that the human lives in, while idealism posits the opposite. An oversimplified example would be how an idealist could say “racism causes poverty” while a materialist could say “poverty causes racism”. Of course, in reality it is way more complicated and nuanced than that.

            In this article I want to provide an extension of historical materialism by extending our way of viewing “relationships” and “markets” to include the ones that are not usually studied by most schools of economics, thus extending historical materialism into a general sociological theory that makes us of all social sciences: economics, sociology, psychology, political science – but that can use the tools of philosophy and semiotics as well.

Marx was right on some things and wrong on others, and since Marx’s analysis was primarily an analysis of history that tried to detect trends and patterns in order to predict the future, it will naturally fall under the limitations of any theory that attempts a prognosis: the further in the future you try to make a prediction, the more your accuracy decreases. This is why Marxism must not be abandoned but revised (or “sublated”, to make a throwback to Hegel’s philosophy), in order to take into account the newer discoveries in the social sciences as well as to include in the analysis all the socio-cultural events that have happened ever since his death.

            The premises of my theory are the follows:

1.     Humanity goes through multiple systems of social organization. Each system is like a chapter in a book, a level in a video-game or an episode in a TV show, no system is inherently “good” or “bad”, it is simply where we are at now. You cannot skip systems just like you cannot skip chapters in a book, you must take them in order. On one hand, each system of social organization relies on the technological, scientific and cultural developments on the previous one, therefore, it is impossible to jump into a system without first “finishing” the previous one. On the other hand, the relationship is two-fold: once humanity has “finished” a system, it must progress to the next system out of necessity.

2.     Each system of social organization has a certain “archetypal” form or pattern of organizing all social relationships. Therefore, all human relationships have a thing in common whenever they are put in the proper historical context.

3.     All human relationships are interdependent in an economic system. This means that changes in one type of relationship will cause a change in all of the other ones. My theory will attempt at being rigorous not only from a purely theoretical/abstract and philosophical point of view (“logically consistent”), but also scientific from the point of view of empirical evidence insofar as I will try to give historical examples and case studies in order to prove my assumptions (although to a lesser extent in this article, since this is only an introduction).

 

II: CAPITALISM – THE CURRENT SYSTEM OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

 

The current system of social organization is based on the logic of markets and is usually what we call capitalism.

All human relationships in the current system are organized by the logic of markets: you are free to choose anyone as long as they choose you back. Hence, the main ideological concept tying together relationships today is consent.

The main form of oppression in the current system is being indirectly pressured to give your consent by the lack of alternatives, “circumstances” or “context”. The main illusion is the illusion of freedom of choice. In capitalism, you are paradoxically forced to “freely” do something. For instance, you are “free” to quit your job if you don’t like the way your boss treats you, but if you do, you might not find another job and you might starve to death, and therefore you are indirectly forced to continue working “out of your own free will”.

Capitalism is divided into multiple markets which are inter-dependent. Not all markets are analyzed by economists, some are analyzed by other social sciences like psychology, sociology and political science.

Each market has a certain type of primary relationship.

Each market today has a certain form of forming the bond of its primary relationship, each coming with its own power dynamic. It is what I call “seduction” – by seduction I am referring to changing another person’s desire. I am not talking about seduction in the strict sexual/romantic sense, but I am talking about any social process of changing what another person wants. Seduction is not about giving someone what they want, but changing what they want in the first place. It is a form of “soft power”.

Let’s give four examples of the most important markets that need to be analyzed:

THE LABOR MARKET: Its defining relationship is the employer-employee relationship (or the employer – “potential employee” relationship, in some cases). The commodity that is bought and sold on this market is labor. The seduction process of this market is found inside the job-interview process.

THE GOODS & SERVIES MARKET: Its defining relationship is the buyer-seller relationship. The commodities that are bought and sold here are goods and services. The seduction process of this market is found inside marketing and advertisement of the sold-products.

THE DATING MARKET: Its defining relationship is the romantic relationship. The commodities that are bought and sold here are romantic partners. The seduction process of this market is found in, well, “seduction”.

THE LIBERAL-DEMOCRACY: Its defining relationship is the voter-politician relationship. This is the “free market” of politicians. The commodities that are bought and sold here are politicians and political parties. The seduction process of this market is found in electoral campaigns.

Only the first two markets are usually analyzed by “economics”, leaving the other two for other social sciences. This is why I propose a theory of social sciences that extends the idea of “market” to include more social relationships. Of course, there are more markets and relationships than the four ones I’ve mentioned, but let’s stick to these four for the moment.

All markets have certain characteristics that unite them. They all conform to the laws of the markets: supply and demand, etc. They are all marked by the ideological category of consent – you are “free” to choose someone only as long as they choose you. The power struggle is a struggle of “soft power” in which you convince the other party to choose you over someone else on the market. The limitations and oppressive mechanisms of each market consist in the environmental conditions, circumstances and “context”: you may be indirectly forced or pressured into choosing the other party by lack of alternatives, for example. Everything that I said in this paragraph is inherent to the current system of social organization (“capitalism”), and thus, next to nothing that I said in this paragraph applied to previous systems, such as feudalism.

All markets have a two-fold intervention with the state. In each stage of capitalism, the state had a certain type of intervention in the markets, but at the same time, the markets had a certain intervention with the state as well. The state intervenes in the dating market with the regulations over marriage, or it intervenes in the labor market through certain regulations, but so do the markets regulate the state through lobbying, etc.

All markets and their respective type of relationship are at least partially interdependent. The aim of my method is to use historical analysis in order to give as many examples as possible of how changes to the markets happen simultaneously: that is, a change in the liberal-democracy “market of politicians” will cause a change in the other three ones I’ve listed as well, for example. Whenever the markets change, all four ones I’ve mentioned (as well as others I haven’t mentioned) change at once.

 

III: THE FOUR PHASES OF CAPITALISM

 

Capitalism itself is divided into multiple “phases” or “stages”. Each transition between two phases is marked by multiple revolutions around the globe all happening at the same time and sharing a common theme (a “global revolution”, let’s say). I’ve identified four phases so far, but this theory is prone to change and I welcome feedback, especially since history is my weak point right now, having focused more on psychology and philosophy until now.

The first phase of capitalism is what is usually called “mercantilism” (cca. 1650-1800). Note that some historians consider this as a separate system, different from capitalism. I think it is fair to consider it the first phase of capitalism. The transition from feudalism per se to mercantilism was marked by the glorious revolution of 1688.

The second phase of capitalism is cca. 1800-1900 (the 19^th century). The transition from mercantilism to the second phase was marked by the French revolution of 1789 (which quickly after spread around Europe), as well as the American revolution of 1763-1783, and the Haitian revolution of 1791.

The third phase of capitalism is cca. 1900-1990 (the 20^th century). The transition from the second to the third phase was marked by the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the establishment of the Soviet Union.

The fourth phase of capitalism is 1990-present. The transition from the third to the fourth phase was marked by the fall of the Berlin wall, the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the USSR.

With each phase of capitalism, you notice an increase in globalization. Feudalism was marked by static, fixed, stable social relationships. The master-signifier of feudalism was “land” and there was no such thing as fear of abandonment inside feudalism since we can’t speak of the possibility of abandonment, the fear was the other one: “I will be stuck with the same serf/landlord/spouse all my life”, etc. Fear of abonnement can only exist in capitalism, which promotes social relationships based on markets which rely on a connectivity between people at a distance. To find “distance in closeness” or “to keep in touch at a distance” is what we call in psychoanalysis alienation and it is not the same thing as separation. Alienation is the primary defense mechanism of capitalism and it goes hand in hand with globalization. The more you progress inside capitalism, the more alienation and globalization increase.

Each revolution had a major change to all markets of human relationships, including the four ones I’ve previously mentioned. All four of those changed around the same time and around the same way. Let us take a closer look at a concrete example:

 

IV: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION – A CASE STUDY

 

The French revolution was the transition from the first to the second phase inside capitalism, and thus, it marked an increase in alienation. The more alienation increases, the more the markets are “free” in the libertarian sense of “unregulated”. Alienation is marked by connectivity along long physical or psychological distances.

      Mercantilism (first phase) was marked by minimal alienation. We can still speak of markets, but with very strict restrictions and little freedom, we speak of local markets. Mercantilism was still a progress from feudalism in which there were virtually no markets in the true capitalist sense. In mercantilism, the primary policy was one of protectionism: the belief in the static nature of wealth, the need to maintain a trade surplus (maximize exports while minimizing imports), etc. Hence, the use of the “direct, brute force” of feudalism was still used more than the “soft power of seduction” that was invented by capitalism. The more you advance in capitalism, the more “hard power” is replaced by “soft power”. Any phase of capitalism is still marked by both since hard power was a marker of feudalism that is very slowly and gradually replaced.

Hence, each market was “sort of free, but not really”:

1.     The military intervened in the goods and services market to ensure that local markets and supply sources were protected.

2.     Family heavily intervened in the dating market to ensure a similar control, that “local markets” were protected from “outsiders” from various different social classes, with the same logic. Hence why I nickname this phase “arranged dating” in my previous books and articles, at it was a transition between the arranged marriages of feudalism that were done for strict economic reasons and the “free market of potential partners” marked by modern dating. In mercantilism, the parents decided who you should marry, but they left their children to mingle together under their supervision and they gave them some light freedom of choice.

3.     The “free market of politicians” was also strictly regulated through brute force by the state. Hence why in mercantilism (~18^th century), a very light percentage of people had the right to vote, but absolute monarchy was still the primary form of government, without constitutional monarchy.

The French revolution marked a simultaneous transition in all three of these markets in the same way. The goods & services market was further liberalized and strict-protectionist economic policies were reduced or abandoned in favor of the “lassies-faire” capitalism promoted by economists such as Adam Smith. The dating market was further liberalized and the exact same “strict-protectionist” policies of parents supervising their children at dinner were similarly reduced or abandoned, adopting a “lassies-faire” model of dating. The “market of politicians” (democracy) was also liberalized after the French revolution, with the introduction of a constitutional monarchy in order to replace absolute monarchies.

 

V: IDEOLOGY – THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS

 

To the four examples of markets that I discussed above we must add a fifth market: the marketplace of ideas. Under this market, ideas, beliefs and political ideologies are a commodity to be bought and sold. I argue against the common interpretation (John Milton, John Stuart Mill, etc.) of the “marketplace of ideas”, that suggests that open debate and competition between beliefs on a “free market of ideas” will usually lead to the truth – this implies that there is a correlation between the popularity of an idea and its truth-value. Instead, I argue that the most popular and mainstream ideologies are not the most “correct” ones, but the most profitable ones. In other words, ideologies are a commodity to be bought and sold and mainstream political ideologies are mainstream because:

1.     They generate capital

2.     Their conflict generates capital

This is what makes this theory “materialist” in the Marxist sense, that people’s ideas are caused by the material conditions they live in.

We must argue against the popular “immunological” attitude towards dangerous ideologies and beliefs that we disagree with. The immunological paradigm supposes that bad ideas are like a virus: they appear “out of nowhere” in a person, that person tells his friends, his friends tell their friends and so on the bad idea spreads like a virus. The conclusion of this way of thinking is that we should treat dangerous ideologies like a virus as well, and this easily leads to authoritarianism, censorship of ideas we disagree with, etc. I argue against this – I believe this immunological attitude towards ideology is inherently linked with reactionary thinking. We usually associate “reactionary” with “conservative”, but nowadays we see reactionary thinking almost just as often in so-called “socially progressive ideology” as well.

Reactionary conservatives treat dangerous (from their point of view) ideologies as viruses that appear “out of nowhere” and are contagious, infecting our youth and destroying our civilization: “gender ideology”, “post-modern neo-marxism”, etc. Reactionary liberals have the exact same attitude towards white supremacy, the alt-right, Trumpism, etc. as if those ideas popped out of nowhere and infect our youth through brainwashing and we must simply censor them (“quarantine the virus”). The reactionary attitude, both in conservatives and liberals, is a message of “return to normalcy” – they invoke a return to some pre-mythical past, back when things were “normal”, to return to their “natural state” when things were “in balance”. This pre-mythical past does not exist. Reactionary conservatives always talk about “making America great again”, returning to “normality” in regards to “back in the days when there were only two genders”, etc. Reactionary liberals talked about returning to “normal politics” before Trumpism infected America, etc.

Both of these attitudes completely ignore everything we learned from both Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan. Ideologies are not only created but also sustained by market forces: the reason such ideologies exist is because they contribute to the accumulation of capital in society. There is something structural in society itself, some material conditions that exist per se, that contribute to the development of ideology. This idea is both Marxist and Lacanian in many ways. It is Marxist  because it posits that people’s ideas are caused by the material conditions they live in more than the other way around. It is Lacanian because, like Jacques Lacan said, “the unconscious is outside”, “the unconscious is structured like a language”, “the unconscious is the discourse of the big Other” and so on. You can also find similar ideas in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guatarri. For Lacan, you cannot separate the individual’s psychological symptoms from the structural conditions in the society in which they appear – if the unconscious is structured like a language, then the language and culture in which we are born in can morph and shape the way in which psychological symptoms and mental illness manifest. This is why the biological reductionism that “mental illness is all in your head” is so dangerous. A banal example: a phobia of airplanes couldn’t have existed before the invention of airplanes. So, if you change something about airplanes, you might change the ways in which the phobias manifest as well. Or, take financial anxiety: just like your individual symptom of anxiety about your finances may say something about the society in which you live in, just like that you can also analyze society and find something about your own individual problems. This may seem obvious, but we forget to do it in cases of more “abstract” psychological conditions in which the relationship between society and individual is not so obvious: depression, fear of abandonment, gender dysphoria, ADHD, anxiety, psychosomatic illness, etc.

To return back to ideology: let us take a concrete example of the marketplace of ideas. There is an idea in the “dirtbag left”, the left-wing against intersectionality (which I am also part of) that identity politics are a way to divide the working class, such that we end up fighting against each other instead of going against the elite/bourgeoise. This idea is on the right track, but the way it is presented is most often incomplete: we must add that this doesn’t manifest as a conspiracy. It is rarely the case that a bunch of rich people gather around a table and discuss ways in which they can conspire against the working class in order to increase their profits. Even in the cases in which it does happen, it is secondary and only a by-product/symptom of the pre-existing material conditions that would have caused a similar behavior even if they were to act individually. What most often happens is the existence of what Alenka Zupancic often calls “the invisible handjob of the free market” – the idea that if every individual on the market acts selfishly, in their own interest, the market will end up regulating itself in a way such that it will lead to the accumulation of capital. Capital is circular and serves its own interests: wealth generates more wealth, the rich become richer while the poor stay poor. This is why leftists must not blindly attack Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand of the free market. The proper answer is to insist that the invisible hand does exist, that there is indeed some truth to the self-regulating aspects of the market (supply and demand, etc.), but the end-result is not that it serves the people, but its own interests. It is like the Uroboros snake that bites its own tail:

 

“Adam Smith’s “capital” idea starts out from positing a social non-relation as a fundamental state also on another level: as elements of social order, individuals are driven by egotistic drives and the pursuit of self-interest. But out of these purely egotistic pursuits grows a society of an optimal general welfare and justice. It is precisely by ruthlessly pursuing one’s own interest that one promotes the good of society as a whole, and much more efficiently so than when one sets off to promote it directly. (...) What is interesting about this idea in the context of our previous discussion is how it takes a first step in the right direction and then stops short. To put it in the terms we were using earlier, the idea is that what we find at the very core of the most selfish individual enjoyment is actually the Other (looking after a general welfare). What is missing is the next step: and what we find, at the same time, at the core of this Other, is a most “masturbatory” self-enjoyment. Adam Smith’s mistake is not that he saw the dimension of the Other possibly at work in the most selfish pursuits of individual interests—all in all, this thesis is not simply wrong: we never do just what we think we are doing and what we intend to do (this is even a fundamental lesson of both Hegel and Lacan). His mistake was that he did not follow this logic to the end: he failed to see where and how the Other and its invisible hand also do not do only what they think they are doing. … This is what becomes obvious with every economic crisis, and became overwhelmingly clear with the last one: left to itself, the market (the Other) is bound to discover “solitary enjoyment.” At some point in his comments on Platonov’s “Anti-Sexus,” Schuster uses the expression: “the invisible ‘handjob’ of the market,” which I am borrowing here, since one could hardly find a better way of putting what I am trying to articulate. The invisible hand of the market, supposedly looking after general welfare and justice, is always also, and already, the invisible handjob of the market, putting most of the wealth decidedly out of common reach. Adam Smith’s idea could indeed be formulated in these terms: Let’s make the non-relation work for everybody’s profit. And one could hardly deny the fact that what we consider as wealth has increased in absolute (and not only relative) terms since the eighteenth century. Or, as we often hear, that everybody, even the poorest, is living better than two centuries ago. Yet the price of this modern economic higher Relation is, again, that the differences (between rich and poor) are also exponentially greater, fed by the non-relation in its “higher” form.”

(Alenka Zupancic, “What is sex?”, Chapter 2.3)

 

If we now return to the idea that identity politics exists in order to divide the working class, we can now see a theoretical model for how such ideologies could develop. A lot of “anti-PC / anti-woke” leftists are slightly wrong in the way in which they implicitly frame the causality of the relation: it is not that first we have the idea of identity politics that was created by some conspiring group in order to divide the working class. We must think in reversed order: precisely because it divides the working class, the ideologies became popular. The marketplace of goods and services “regulates itself” like an evolutionary machine-learning algorithm: the “free” market of capitalism tries out multiple options and whoever is the “fittest” survives on the market the most. This is the idea of Adam Smith: the invisible hand of the market assures us that whoever is most successful on the market is the one providing the best product at the lowest price by virtue of the fact that everyone can try out multiple options and the “bad options” in a competitive market will survive less. This is also how evolution works: the genes which allow an individual to survive (natural selection) and reproduce (sexual selection) the best will end up perpetuating themselves further down the gene pool.

Adam Smith’s mistake is not that this idea was too radical, it was not radical enough. Like Alenka said, he took a step in the right direction. What survives on the market is not necessarily the best product, but the product that assures the evolution of the pre-existing market forces themselves. In this way, we can say that unregulated markets suffer from a sort of “inertia” due to their inherent contradictions (what modern economists call “market failures) that create infinite feedback loops (example: see the Network Effect).

This is how we must think of ideology in society. It is not how right-wing/libertarian thinkers think of the marketplace of ideas in a similar way to the marketplace of goods and services, that if we allow freedom of speech and open debate and competition between ideas, the “best idea” will survive and become popular. And it is also wrong how reactionary thinkers think of ideas like viruses/mutations that “appear out of nowhere” and spread exponentially. There is a third way to think of ideology, it is through the idea of the “invisible handjob of the market”: ideologies survive because they are profitable and monetized, because they continue the infinite self-perpetuation of capital itself. Hence, multiple ideas are “tried out” on the “free market of ideas” and the ones who survive are the ones who maintain the conditions of capitalism indefinitely. It is only normal that the mainstream ideologies which survive in “mainstream politics” are precisely the ones which serve the interests of capital the most, hence why they survived. Thus, it is because identity politics generates capital that we see it so often on both the left (“positive discrimination”, cancel culture, political correctness) and right (nationalism, ethnic pride, etc.).

To take a cliché and a bit edgy, but still popular example of how identity politics is profitable on the marketplace of ideas, take a look at this meme:

 

We must think of nationalism and immigrant fear-mongering (“right-wing identity politics”) as a way to divide the working class – it is so popular because it can be monetized by corporations and billionaires that can maintain their power. Multiple ideas are tried out on the “free market of political ideologies” and the political ideologies that survive and become “mainstream” are the ones which survive on the market forces that spread and maintain these ideologies: social media algorithms, advertisement, etc. We see the same problem in the so-called “left-wing identity politics” in regards to, for example, the “wage gap debate”. In the previous meme, replace the black worker with a woman and the white worker with a man and the billionaire would say “Look at the wage gap between men and women!”. This idea becomes popular/mainstream because it survives on the privatized means of spreading ideas themselves (social media, television, etc.), these means of spreading ideas being owned by those exact same wealth-hoarders.

 

VI: CONCLUSIONS

 

To conclude: we have looked at five markets that exist inside capitalism, only two of which are analyzed by economics: the labor market, the goods & services market, the dating market, the liberal-democracy and the ideology-market. My assumption is that those five markets (and many more which I haven’t yet mentioned) are all inter-dependent and my method employs historical analysis in order to fixate in history the moments in which all five of those markets change “at once” and “in a similar way”, me giving the French revolution as a simple example of empirical evidence.

Questions for further research/future articles:

-What is the way in which ideology (the marketplace of ideas) changed during each of the four phases of capitalism, along with the other four markets I’ve listed?

-What is the role of dogma in capitalism, and can we say that in feudalism only dogma existed, while capitalism plays with a mix of dogma and ideology (as Zizek defines the two terms)?

-What are the ways in which all five of the listed markets changed inside each of the four revolutions I’ve listed in regards to the four phases of capitalism?

-What is the way in which popular ideologies of sex and sexuality perpetuate themselves and become mainstream because they serve the interests of capital? What about popular ideologies in regards to love and dating?

-Has mental illness turned into a form of identity politics and what is its relation to the factors of production inside modern society?

FURTHER READING:

1.     The politicization of sexuality – an article about the relationship between ideology and sex in modern politics.

2.     Your money or your (love) life! – an article about the way love becomes a commodity to be bought and sold inside capitalism, maintaining the self-perpetuating nature of capital (the invisible “handjob” of the market)

3.     The real, the fantasy of dating, of the obsessional and of capitalism – a more general analysis of how the dating market and the very idea of dating is inherent to the idea of markets inside capitalism

4.     The internet and the social life under capitalism – an article analyzing the relationship between the material conditions that society (especially with the rise of the internet) is in and the way we view friendships, relationships, abandonment, objectification, alienation, together with the rise of dating apps, echo chambers and certain mental illnesses (depression, ADHD, psychosomatic illness).