In the recent exchange about Marxism and antitrust, questions of determinism have loomed large. For both Sanjukta Paul and Marshall Steinbaum, Marx’s central objection to antitrust (or any reform movement) appears to be that legal interventions are futile in a “deterministic” economic system. In reply, Paul emphasizes that the organization of capitalist markets are as much a product of contingent rules as any deterministic laws, while Steinbaum argues that not only is such legal intervention possible, but “it has happened before,” as when mid-century courts restructured the economy’s leading companies in the public interest.
But that reading of Marx is mistaken. For Marx, the central issue was not the antinomy of voluntarism and determinism, but rather how society constitutes an economy that subjects itself to deterministic forces beyond its control. In that light, the real question is not can we revive antitrust but why would we want to? Or better: why should we? I mean this as a practical question, not an abstract, moral one. In that register, antitrust raises questions about efficacy and sustainability that I will briefly address the first two sections of this post.
More importantly, however, I will argue that antitrust exhibits an unresolved tension around voluntarism. It is both too voluntarist and not voluntarist enough. In its excess, it succumbs to a certain intellectualism about norms that privileges the law and state, with their hierarchical and technocratic tendencies, over other ways of expressing society’s normative commitments. Yet this same prejudice also reinscribes core assumptions about “the economy,” which, practically, perpetuates the subordination of workers and society to capital’s domination. If antitrust were as voluntarist as it claims—Paul rightly asserts elsewhere that “private decisions to engage in economic coordination [should] always [be] subject to public approval”—then why stop with antitrust? Why not make coordination decisions fully public, why not “a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common”? The voluntarism underwriting antitrust points to antitrust’s own irrelevancy.
What is Capitalism, Again?
In his opening salvo, Gabe Winant offers an excellent description of capitalism, but one feature deserves emphasis. Capitalism differs from prior modes of production because market dependency imposes a new, obligatory goal on its exploiters: the pursuit of wealth in general, for its own sake. Marx called this form of wealth value, a kind of wealth in the abstract, whose visible appearance is money. He illustrated it through two circuits of exchange, C–M–C and M–C–M. But rather than diving into Marx’s arcane theory of the value form, I’ll unpack it more colloquially.
Every economist knows that firms maximize profit—measured in money—rather than wellbeing or utility, however one might measure that. Yet if firms are composed of utility-maximizing individuals, why do firms maximize profit? Marx and modern economic theory agree that part of the answer is that competition, in some part, enforces the goal of profit-maximization.
From there, the two diverge. Economic theory, rescued by the modern corporate form’s separation of ownership and control, says that firms maximize profits and return the receipts to their owners, who then use that money to maximize wellbeing. The hidden premise is that the wealthy actually do pursue utility. While that may be true for fortunate members of the working class who defer consumption and save through a 401(k)-plan that they spend down during retirement, the fortunes of the wealthy—vast, intergenerational, and ever-growing—cannot be rationalized this way. (The top one percent own approximately 50 percent of corporate stock, while the top ten percent own more than 85 percent.) Alternative explanations, like bequest motives or risk aversion, amount to just-so stories.
A handful of economists (citing the safer Weber rather than Marx) admit the evident conclusion: capitalists seek wealth for its own sake. Combined with the profit-maximizing firm, this behavior reveals capitalism’s distinctive logic—an economy organized for accumulation, not the satisfaction of needs or efficient allocation of resources. Totally homogenous and possessing a solely quantitative quality, production for value exhibits a remorseless indifference to what is produced and how its fruits are allocated. This logic produces what we do not like about capitalism: inequality, unemployment, pauperization, environmental destruction, the degradation of work, and so forth.
I offer this summary to aid in the remainder of the discussion. But one thing should already be clear: unless antitrust changes this specific logic of capital—and I don’t see why it would—it doesn’t really address the underlying issue. Marx’s criticism of capitalism inherits the republican tradition of liberty: regulation or redistribution “no more abolish the exploitation of the wage-labourer, and his situation of dependence, than do better clothing, food and treatment, and a larger peculium, in the case of the slave.” Unless it changes this specific logic of capitalism, even the best version of antitrust would not free us from the compulsion that obligates people work for a goal that is antagonistic to their needs.
Marx on Competition
Seizing on Winant’s description of capital as operating through “impersonal, quasi-automatic mechanisms,” both Paul and Steinbaum misconstrue Marx’s idea of competition. Winant identifies this mechanism as “the requirement of competition, the internal law of the capitalist system.” Specifically, “While individual capitals seek to avoid competition and to establish market restriction as much as possible, they scramble to achieve this goal through the process of competition; a successful competitor is one who escapes competition.” In short, and contrary to the Chicago school, market rivalry leads to monopolization, not to an ideal of perfect competition.
Marx identified two channels for this tendency: concentration, the growth in investment and productivity that enlarges firm size relative to the economy as a whole, and centralization, the merger or displacement of rivals. Both stem from competition itself: “The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities.” Firms cut costs by scaling up production, thereby enlarging themselves; meanwhile, “the larger capitals beat the smaller.”
Marx also understood the self-defeating logic of monopolization. Without competition, “the vital flame of production would be altogether extinguished. It would die out.” Yet as competition drives monopolization, monopolization extinguishes this “vital flame”: but for critical “counteracting tendencies,” “centralisation of existing capitals in a few hands … would soon bring about the collapse of capitalist production.”
Yet it is important to also note that competition is not capitalism’s absolute foundation. Marx sees capitalism’s aggregate tendency to accumulate wealth as the starting point. This is the significance of Winant’s remark that competition is the “internal law” of the capitalist system. Economists regard competition “as the collision of unfettered individuals who are determined only by their own interests.” “Nothing can be more mistaken,” Marx remarks. Instead, he says, “It is not individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free.” Competition is the “internal law” of capitalism in just this sense: “Competition executes the inner laws of capital.” It turns what is capitalism’s defining macro tendency (if you will), the production of abstract wealth for its own sake, “into compulsory laws towards the individual capital.”
Everyone in this debate therefore rejects the Chicago model of competition. The question then is what to do about it. Antitrust’s efficacy and sustainability look doubtful. Some critics rank antitrust as a fifth-best remedy for economic power, after price controls, regulation, collective bargaining, and taxation. Even antitrust’s golden age of the 1940s–1970s presided over the rise of the behemoth multi-divisional, or “M-form,” corporation, exemplified by General Motors and DuPont—not exactly a smallholders republic. That age was undone effectively overnight by the Reagan–Chicago counterrevolution. Whatever successes antitrust had, it neither prevented capitalism’s crisis of the 1970s nor proved resilient against political reversal. If this represents the high-water mark of antitrust, does it inspire much hope for the future?
Marx’s critique encourages this skepticism. If production continues to be based on profit maximization, even the best version of antitrust will face strong headwinds. If one of the goals of antitrust is to reduce market power, with the concomitant consequence of increasing capitalism’s competitive constraint, that will only supercharge some of the tendencies Marx identifies. Perhaps stricter policing of the market will shut down the centralization tendency, monopolization through merger and acquisition. But the identical policy will only reinforce the concentration tendency, monopolization through investment and internal firm growth. While there may be some reason, such as increased productivity, to favor the latter over the former, it is difficult to see how this will redound to the wage laborer, or even the small producer.
Marx on Social Form
My hesitations about antitrust’s efficacy may lead some to charge that I am simply a determinist in disguise. So let us come to the voluntarist-determinist issue directly.
Marx starts from neither voluntarism nor determinism but from a theory of social practice. He rejects the “contemplative materialism” that places reason, including practical—that is, normative—reason, outside of society. Along with Hegel, Marx conceives of reason and norms immanently, rather than transcendently. They are found in the social world, in the normative structures that constitute and guide our social interactions. “Such normative structures are necessarily embodied in material conditions and activities, but they cannot simply be identified with naturalistically (i.e., non-normatively) described activities of material bodies.”
Consider, for example, the twofold character of the commodity, which founds a distinction that runs through the entirety of Capital. “In direct contrast to the coarse, sense-perceived objectivity” of commodities as use values, “not a single atom of natural material” enters into them as exchange values (my translation). A commodity’s character as an exchange value is “purely social.” Social relations always give form to their material content. It is the same for capital. Hence, capital is a “social relation,” neither a fact of nature nor the production process conceived solely from a technical standpoint.
Grounding norms in social practice requires that we think about norms implicitly, based in the ways our social practices presuppose certain norms, before we explicitly assess or evaluate actions based on such norms. Marx’s analysis of capital comprehends norms in just this way: capitalism’s normativity is practiced or presupposed in the purpose of production for exchange and profit. How we judge that practice is something he leaves to us.
Marx’s concept of social practice differs from two common preconceptions. The first is a certain intellectualism about norms. This is the idea that, as philosopher Robert Brandom explains, our “activity institutes norms, imposes normative significances on a natural world that is intrinsically without significance for the guidance or assessment of action.” This also applies to a social world perceived naturalistically. This is a venerable view, “central to and characteristic of the Enlightenment project of disenchanting the natural world and humanizing values.” Economists naturalize the economy by invoking universal, law-like models of behavior, but they also naturalize it by endorsing a disenchanted view of society, revealed most conspicuously in hard-and-fast fact-value distinctions.
This institutional or intellectual model of norms is pervasive. It is prominent in LPE classics, both old and new. A particularly marvelous example is Samuel Moyn’s assertion that “there is no such thing as capitalism.” Like Marx, Moyn challenges a naturalistic view of society (governed by inviolable, universal laws), but, unlike Marx, he assumes that norms come exclusively from the explicit rules we impose through formal legal institutions. Luke Herrine’s work on consumer protection law also exhibits this perspective. Here, markets’ only normativity is that which different observers impose on it from the outside, whether that purpose be a Chicago-style “consumer sovereignty” view or Herrine’s preferred “moral economy” view. He never pauses to consider whether markets already have a purpose embodied in existing social practices, namely, production for its own sake, the self-valorization of value.
It is in this respect that antitrust is not voluntarist enough. By refusing to acknowledge the wrongly normative nature of capital, like modern economic theory generally, it treats capitalist production as disenchanted nature, as a merely technical process. But the consequence of that refusal is that it also produces a practice that reproduces capital’s domination. From this view, Marx’s concern is not that antitrust cannot intervene to change the “laws” of capitalism. Rather, antitrust refuses to see capital as something historical and social and therefore norm-based and changeable. As a result, antitrust chooses to fight capital with one hand tied behind its back, changing some of the constitutive rules of capitalism but not others.
Antitrust and the Administrative State
The second preconception that Marx avoids is about the basis of authority that norms have over us. Coming from the same Enlightenment tradition, this preconception says that norms—or laws—derive their bindingness from a relation between a superior and a subordinate. As Brandom explains, this idea of norms’ authority is a natural consequence of the intellectualist view: “To see the question of authority in terms of who can command, make a rule binding, or lay down the law is another bit of fallout from the origin of thought about norms in thought about the institution of explicit positive laws.”
Antitrust exhibits this conception in its privileging of law and the state as the basis for norms’ authority, and with that a commitment to hierarchical and technocratic modes of governance. But as Beau Baumann has recently urged us, we desperately need to “reexamine [our] preoccupation with administration that has become divorced from a constitutional politics rooted in democratic self-rule.” In this respect, antitrust is overly voluntarist, placing too much faith in rule by expertise and in an administrative state whose legitimacy, continually in question since its founding, is now evaporating before our eyes.
By comparing different ownership forms, we can see how the logic of capital both frustrates the ideal of self-governance and requires an external, administrative form of governance. Consider a privately owned firm versus a “publicly” owned one—public not as state-run, but as socially owned, perhaps through Meidner-style wage-earner funds or a network of “public” banks. The most salient difference is that while work is paid according to contribution in both cases, private firms must finance incomes from their own revenues, while incomes are paid from society’s collective fund in the public case.
Now imagine that both firms face a merger decision that would increase the firm’s revenues but harm society—reducing output, raising prices, while saving no or few resources. The private firm, following a profit logic, would proceed. The public firm, whose members’ incomes derive from society, would not. Because its members’ shares of total social output would fall, the merger offers no “profitable deviation.” Public ownership thus releases economic coordination from capital’s imperative.
Public ownership also gives us a truly democratic alternative to the administrative state. Freed from the compulsion of private accumulation, the public firm’s members can weigh efficiency alongside other desirable social or environmental criteria. When firms are no longer driven by the goal of private wealth accumulation, the administrative state and its external, coercive form of regulation is no longer necessary.
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This post has aimed to show that antitrust’s voluntarist objection makes no difference to Marx’s critique of capital nor his prescription for it. There remain two avenues open for the antitrust adherent. On the one hand, the antitruster can continue to treat capital, like modern economic theory, as a merely technical process, beyond our capacity to alter it, changing some of the rules of capitalism without addressing its fundamentally normative nature. If so, we can at best anticipate a repeat of antitrust’s golden age: perhaps a better “balance” of economic power and the distribution of its rewards, but not much hope for lasting or fundamental change, nor any relief from capital’s accumulation imperative.
On the other hand, the antitruster can fulfill the underlying promise to subject economic coordination decisions to public approval, but only by making itself irrelevant. If we want to fulfill our deepest democratic aspirations, one freed from capital’s imperative as well as the necessity of administrative tutelage, the only path forward is a truly public form of production—an association of free individuals, working with the means of production held in common.
