Gabe Winant’s recent LPE Blog essay “Marxism and Antitrust: A Provocation” starts from the premise that the argument between Abundance and Anti-monopoly over the future of progressive economic policy is a squabble between different factions of capital: major tech platforms in the former case, small businesspeople in the latter. Neither program, he argues, offers a promising way forward for the left, as neither is aligned with labor. To advance the collective demands of the working class, we already have a useful framework, namely, Marxism, which conceptualizes an irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor. In this struggle, labor is represented in formal politics by unions, the only vehicle to bring about economic democracy in political systems dominated by capital of whatever variety.
I have to admit a certain bemusement at reading this from Winant, because his account of anti-monopolism—as representing the claims of inefficient and exploitative small businessmen—would not be hard to imagine coming out of the mouth of a tech platform monopolization defendant, or at the very least one of its all-too-Abundant factotums in the popular media. Yet this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered such an unlikely alliance between labor and big tech. At a delightfully eclectic conference at Boston University’s law school in the summer of 2018, Hal Varian, then Google’s Chief Economist, and Larry Mishel, who had recently stepped down as President of the Economic Policy Institute (organized labor’s most prominent voice in Washington on economic policy matters), expressed shared skepticism about antitrust as a tool to rein in the power of Big Tech, or even of whether doing so would be desirable at all.
This dim view of anti-monopolism, I argue in what follows, rests on a series of mistakes about how our economy actually operates, as well as a tendentious Marxist historiography that does justice to neither the economic nor the intellectual history of capitalism since the Industrial Revolution. In fact, there is both a radical and a moderate case for anti-monopoly as an ideology of the left, and of antitrust as its most powerful weapon in the political and regulatory sphere. If what we want is “a democratic form that allows multiple and diverse human projects to flourish”—the normative north star of Winant’s economic policy philosophy—then we need the tools of anti-monopolism, specifically limits on the business models and conduct available to the economy’s most powerful firms and the capitalists who own them to control economic production.
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In his brief sketch of the capitalist mode of production, Winant writes:
Capital, representing a particular form of appearance of this direct relationship between owners and producers, is distinguished by its operation as a “real abstraction.” While there are, of course, more and less powerful individuals and institutions, the system as a whole has no central locus of decision or rule, and historically has been distinguished by its unusual preference for the division of economic from political power—indeed, its somewhat anarchic quality. It dominates not by personal authority, as feudalism did before it, but by impersonal, quasi-automatic mechanisms [my emphasis].
Here again, Winant’s account takes me back to my graduate school days, where I endured the lectures of vaunted Chicago school of economics professors with the help of exact type-set transcriptions handed down from one cohort of grad students to the next. A decentralized mechanism operating in unconscious coordination certainly sounds like the Social Planner of First Welfare Theorem fame, the only difference being that, in Winant’s story, the planner’s invisible hand is construed as exploitative rather than welfare-maximizing. And as with the First Welfare Theorem, Winant believes that “the compulsion to participate in turn issues into another compulsion: the requirement of competition, the internal law of the capitalist system.”
Competition is the internal law of the capitalist system? Sure, the First Welfare Theorem requires it, but evidence against that assumption gushes from virtually every empirical economics study of the topic, save those published by antitrust-defendant-funded think tanks and pseudoscholars. No wonder this version of Marxism is so popular among monopolization defendants—if it is true, the very crime they are accused of is assumed to be impossible! And no wonder Aaron Director, Robert Bork, Harold Demsetz, William Baumol, and other leading lights of the mid-20th-century Chicago School tried mightily to instantiate the view that an apparent temporary monopoly is always and everywhere teetering on the brink of being toppled by an out-of-nowhere upstart peddling a revolutionary new production technology. According to this view, the only possible effect of an antitrust enforcement regime that seeks to dismantle monopolies and deconcentrate industries by means of court orders is to preserve inefficient firms in the market that would otherwise have yielded their market share to the competitor with the most efficient production technology, and which will in time itself be replaced by the march of Technological Progress. Antitrust itself is anti-competitive in this telling, because it violates the Natural Law of capitalism in which competition, not courts, picks winners.
There is, it should go without saying, little reason to accept such a view. Consider, for instance, the independent artist or musician looking to make a decent living by making art for a small-but-devoted audience of connoisseurs but confronting a route to market that traverses Spotify, Apple, and Google’s oligopoly on consumer-facing on-demand streaming. Are these gatekeepers really “the most innovative and entrepreneurial sectors and firms,” as Winant would have it? We leftists are supposed to reserve that judgment for the creators, not the tollbooth operators who have figured out how to squeeze all the economic value out of that art and fork it over to themselves.
Like Marx and the Marxist tradition more broadly, however, Winant backs off his cosmic statements about the impossibility of anything other than competition under capitalism. In this telling, monopoly is the crowning apotheosis of capitalism, whose appearance signals the whole system’s forthcoming demise. “The identification of monopoly and its attendant evils is a device for locating ourselves on the cosmic calendar of history, and for identifying what range of possibilities might lie before us,” Winant writes.
The problem with this account is that it ignores the agency of historical actors. It wasn’t the inevitable development of the capitalist system that brought about the collapse of the classical liberal international order in the 1930s and 1940s and its replacement by forms of social democracy throughout the West. Rather, the collapse resulted from deliberate collective action in both the political and economic spheres, taken by mass movements and elite policymakers alike. I know this in part from listening to Fragile Juggernaut, a podcast recounting the rise and fall of the CIO, of which Winant served as one of the co-hosts. One thing I took from that series, and from Winant’s contribution in particular, is that the working class receded from its position of historical protagonism at precisely the moment when the industrial unions representing it stopped fighting for a say over production and investment decisions by the economy’s leading corporations. As a result, the working class was consigned to the status of an interest group fighting for a larger slice of the pie whose baking it ceded to corporate executives.
This is the radical case for anti-monopolism: that it does not surrender to the capitalist’s imperative to control economic production wherever and whenever it occurs, instead reclaiming that right and autonomy on behalf of small producers of all shapes and sizes, often acting collectively. Indeed, collective action by small producers and consumers has been a crucial weapon in the anti-monopolist’s arsenal since the Luddites sought to protect their home production prerogative from the capitalists forcing them to deliver themselves and their children up on the factory floor, right through to the present. As I have argued in these pages before, part of the appeal of modern gig work, and why we should use antitrust to protect the autonomy of self-employment, is that people seek genuine independence and control over their own work.
Ignoring the importance of this kind of autonomy and the collective action that secures it is not only disappointing historiography—an importance brought home by another (typically lucid and rewarding) entry in the Winant podcast archive, his pandemic-era re-exploration of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, “Casualties of History“—but practically de-motivating to very real contemporary movements of small-time entrepreneurs, who do not agree that the best chance of protecting their entrepreneurial interest in economic autonomy is to be had by surrendering shop floor control, acquiescing to employment status, and (theoretically, but not practically) forming an NLRA union, which then negotiates a contract in which the employer cedes back some form of limited autonomy.
This very mistake on the part of today’s labor movement surrendered the opportunity to lead gig workers, whose interest is in genuine autonomy, only for a different faction of elite organized labor to rush in and profit from the failure to address employment misclassification by erecting an ersatz collective bargaining regime that collects union dues in exchange for not very much. The problem here is that some strategists in the labor movement, the ones coded as more left-wing and “principled” in this particular context, agreed too completely with Winant that workers-as-small-entrepreneurs cannot be organized into an anti-capitalist constituency. In my work on antitrust and gig work, I articulate a theory that unites workers’ interest in productive autonomy with consumers’ interest in low prices and honest, non-discriminatory service, achieved by means of an offensive antitrust enforcement campaign. Pursuing such a strategy, I believe, would demonstrate to the disempowered and controlled ersatz entrepreneur that we are on their side. So far, the labor movement has catastrophically failed to achieve, or even to really attempt this, hence the result is across-the-board failure—a failure, I should stress, that is one of our own organization and imagination, rather than pre-ordained by the Forces of Capitalism.
Winant closes on what is to my mind a more promising note: Why is it, for example, that the recent Google Search monopolization remedies ruling concluded that it would be unwise to prohibit the conduct through which the court had already found Google illegally maintained its monopoly, and seemed not even to touch the question of a court-ordered restructuring? This is a failure of present-day anti-monopolism for sure, for not having laid out a practical roadmap by which actually-existing federal judges can seize the initiative to restructure the economy’s leading companies in the public’s interest. Winant rightly suggests it was improbable to imagine this could ever happen, the federal judiciary having been a bastion of capitalist developmentalism from its founding right through to the present. But the thing is, it has happened before, and so any historical theory that finds it to be impossible must of necessity be wrong.
This brings us to the moderate case for anti-monopolism: after more radical New Dealers, in tacit alliance with leading corporate executives (who had been aligned with Democrats), attempted to regulate the entirety of the mid-century capitalist economy by coordinating production and prices from the state, it was antitrust that uniquely achieved a bipartisan, tri-branch consensus to limit the capitalists’ power. This began with New Deal monopolization enforcement in the late 1930s and culminated with Supreme Court rulings for the government in major monopolization cases in the late 1940s—the so-called Second Sherman Act. And in the one significant case from that era where the Supreme Court sided with the defendant, US v. Columbia Steel, Congress intervened with the Celler-Kefauver Anti-Merger Act of 1950 to instruct the judiciary in the proper, enforcement-friendly interpretation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act.
The high tide of legal victories started to recede with the Eisenhower Administration. When its antitrust commission adopted a moderate interpretation of the then-recently-developed case law, abandoning hard-won doctrinal points, several of its pro-enforcement appointees dissented from the commission’s final report and issued their own. Nevertheless, major restrictions on capitalists’ ability to control economic production across firm boundaries survived, to the relative astonishment of Richard Hoftstadter in his 1964 essay “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?” He points out the improbability of the Sherman Act’s revival when wielded by lawyers and economists in bureaucratic and legalistic settings, to the apparent indifference of a no-longer-extant popular movement whose agitation was the force behind the act’s initial adoption.
While the absence of farmers with pitchforks might have been what allowed the Second Sherman Act to achieve something of a consensus at the apex of formal American politics in the postwar era, it was also the absence of farmers with pitchforks that enabled the Chicago School to destroy it, in coordination with the most prominent monopolization defendants and their academic-philanthropic largesse. The popular movements of the 1930s largely did not survive the 1940s, again as recounted by Winant and his collaborators in Fragile Juggernaut, but the structures to regulate capitalism put in place to prevent another Great Depression did, until a resurgent movement of the intellectual right did away with them.
Just as we on the left now recognize the long-term damage to working class power and living standards done by, for example, the Taft-Hartley Act, we must recognize the Chicago School and its intellectual heirs as the enemy whose defeat is a precondition for our success. To read Winant siding with them in his interpretation of tech platform business models gets something big wrong, both as positive interpretation and normative strategy for a left that aspires to replace them and wield power to democratize the economy they ruined for consumers and producers alike. We can only do that by honing and wielding the weapons anti-monopolism bequeathed to us: horizontal collective action by heterogeneous economic producers seeking genuine productive autonomy and consumers seeking low prices on a rich variety of products and services, starting with healthcare, housing, and education, to resist the vertical control constitutive of the capitalists’ gatekeeping power.
