This post kicks off a mini-series on Marxism and Antitrust. See responses from Sanjukta Paul and Marshall Steinbaum.
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Over recent months, an increasingly bitter debate has roiled liberal economic policy circles, pitting the currently ascendant faction identified with “Abundance” against the recently ascendant one associated with antitrust. While my own sympathies lie more with the latter than the former, I admit I have been bemused to read accounts of this debate as one about the future of economic policy on the left. Certainly, both of these political projects are somewhat protean; and both are at times done a disservice by their most voluble spokespeople. But my own view is that it is a mistake to see either as straightforwardly “left-wing economic policy.” For that, we have another ideology, with a different intellectual lineage: socialism, with Marxism behind it as an intellectual tradition.
From the socialist perspective, the debate between Abundance and antitrust is about what economic and political rewards are available from the courtship of different factions of capital: abundance looks to the most innovative and entrepreneurial sectors and firms; antitrust to small producers. For a socialist, each of these approaches has a certain attraction, but both represent a politics of cross-class collaboration. That’s something socialists are often forced to accept even at high points of influence, but it’s not the starting point. The contrasting positive vision—left-wing economic policy, if you like—consists of the abolition of wage labor and capital, as understood in the Marxist sense, and the replacement of a society that mandates the pursuit of profit with a democratic form that allows multiple and diverse human projects to flourish. Its aim is the diminishment of the power of capital over our flourishing, a diminishment which takes the form of the insulation of human life from markets, not its more successful integration into them.
To sharpen this point further: the Marxist view is that capitalist societies are fundamentally unfree not because of this or that way that capital operates or this or that form that it takes, but by the nature of capital itself. There certainly are degrees of this unfreedom: one would generally rather work for a unionized firm than a non-union firm; for a non-union firm in a country where you have citizenship than for a colonial enterprise that has taken over your homeland; for a colonial enterprise over a slave plantation; etc. But these are variations within a single social arrangement, which is the domination of society as a whole by the capitalist mode of production. This domination sets limits on the range of possible forms of social life, since it requires individuals and communities to attach themselves to profitable economic activity in order to thrive; it also degrades over time even those institutional efforts that comply with this requirement but attempt to soften its force, such as trade unionism and welfare state institutions.
The current debate between these factions is useful for bringing out some of the differences in approach that characterize a Marxist method, and perhaps some of the present-day stakes. But in the remainder of this brief provocation, I’m going to set aside the “Abundance” program—it is not really an intellectual program or tradition at all, only a coalitional gambit—and focus on the relationship and comparison between Marxism and antitrust, which have important scholarly as well as practical complexities.
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It is at the level of method where Marxism and antitrust diverge most. Marxism, of course, is a total social theory, which in its strongest form generates an ontology of social life (reproduction of human life as a fundamentally social undertaking, whose requirements ultimately determine other aspects of human existence such as culture and politics) as well as a philosophy of history (class struggle as the engine of historical change, understood through the development and decomposition of modes of production, the largest unit of historical analysis). Relating the ontology of social life to the philosophy of history, Marxism further offers a social metaphysics, which holds that social objects and phenomena must be understood in terms of both essence and appearance. It is important, however, not to draw this distinction in a way that treats an object’s essence as its true nature, while casting its appearance as false or meaningless. Just as the skin of a human being is in fact an important organ that is crucial to the experience and survival of the organism, particularly in its relationship to the world outside itself, the appearance of a historical object is a constitutive part of its overall nature and function.
At this level of analysis, antitrust simply doesn’t participate, as far as I’m aware. Among the academic disciplines, one can’t really imagine a neo-Brandeisian philosopher, literary critic, or anthropologist (or for that matter, biologist); only lawyers, economists, political scientists, and historians. The sciences of structure, which interrogate how one level of existence or form of human activity is causally dependent on another, are absent; only the sciences of contingency are represented.
Capital, in Marxism, is the current form of appearance of the essence of all class societies: in all human civilizations thus far known, ruling classes live off the labor of producing classes. “It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers—a relationship always corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity—which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short the corresponding specific form of the state,” writes Marx in a famous passage of Capital, vol. III.
Speaking of the capitalist mode of production in particular, the Marxist view becomes one level more concrete. 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. Even plantation slavery, the most personally despotic form of capitalism, was subject to market discipline.
As dependence on markets for the means of survival became universal with the rise and expansion of capitalism and the destruction of other bases of subsistence, the impersonal compulsion to participate in capitalist production, through investment and accumulation, or through labor, was correspondingly generalized. The compulsion to participate in turn issues into another compulsion: the requirement of competition, the internal law of the capitalist system. 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. This dynamic of competition in turn unlocks the enormous economic growth potential characteristic of capitalist societies; it enforces the obligation on capital to lower its costs of production, which is conceptualized by Marx in terms of “socially necessary labor time,” the society-wide moving average of how much labor productivity goes into a commodity. This governing obligation endows the capitalist system as a whole with a certain historical momentum and trajectory: to expand; to become more productive; to consolidate market control as opportunities for or returns upon expansion or productivity increase become exhausted; and then to collapse, pending successful reorganization by some new political power.
Each of the above claims could, and should in any specific analysis, be further specified and perhaps qualified, but it is worth stating them in their stark abstract form. Indeed, Marx continues the passage quoted with just such a qualification. “This does not prevent the same economic basis—the same from the standpoint of its main conditions—due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.” Here, Marx gestures toward the process by which friction arises between Marxism and other traditions, such as antitrust: when Marxists attempt to climb down the ladder of abstraction into “circumstances,” they inevitably confront rival analyses of the phenomenon in question.
The high-level theoretical claims of Marxism are, in general, unprovable and often not even immediately useful in the interpretation of specific human events or artifacts. To get from these precepts to an account of anything in particular requires engagement with what Marxists often call “mediations,” examples of which Marx briefly recapitulates above. Or as Leon Trotsky once put it, “Broadly speaking, the entire historical process is a refraction of the historical law through the accidental.”
Marxists, then, attempt a parallax view, seeing a given historical outcome as reflecting simultaneously the forces of history at the highest level and the mediated, conjunctural occurrences that have a specific and contingent quality. The way that the latter refract the former, to use Trotsky’s metaphor, is the crucial question in any particular research problem or political analysis. At one extreme, there is determinism, the idea that the system-logic of capitalism directly produces “necessary” economic outcomes (an idea congenial to both Marxism and neoclassical economics), which are then expressed mimetically into politics. At the other, there is voluntarism (a position not compatible with Marxism at all), in which we imagine that there is an open-ended range of possible economic and political outcomes at any juncture. The path between the two involves the attempt to identify the limited range of historical possibilities inherent to a given moment in the history of capitalism. The logic of the mode of production sets parameters around what is possible and, as it were, weights the dice of events. It does not preselect an outcome.
Thus, on the particular topic at hand, Marxists have been interested in the problem of monopoly since before there was a modern antitrust tradition—but largely as a symptom. “This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction,” wrote Marx in Capital III. “[Capital] establishes a monopoly in certain spheres and thereby requires state interference. It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.” Crucially, for our purposes here, the rise of monopoly represents a historical phase in the history of capitalism; perhaps a culminating one, as suggested by Marx here and echoed later in different ways by Rudolf Hilferding and Vladimir Lenin. 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.
Lest we be too quick to dismiss this, let us note that the theorization of the concentration of capital that ran from Marx through Lenin, predicting intensified inter-imperialist competition, global war, capitalist collapse, and socialist revolution, in fact proved right in crucial respects, and still provides the basis for the best materialist account of the catastrophe of 1914-1945. (One could say the same in a more qualified way for Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s 1966 classic Monopoly Capitalism in relation to the anti-colonial revolutions of that decade and the next.) Let us credit Lenin and company here, too, for generating a social theory profound enough to enable a world-historic intervention in events. At the same time, it cannot be said that capitalism actually was moribund, at least not in the way that Lenin believed it was—beyond political salvage.
There is, in any case, no immediate political upshot that must derive from making such a historical estimate. To reach such an upshot, one must pass through the mediations. From a conventional Marxist perspective, economic concentration or market restriction may solve a problem for capitalists and, at the same time, usher the capitalist system into a moribund phase. (This is what Lenin believed, echoing Marx while attempting to make sense of the world war and the revolutionary possibilities in contained.) The political question a Marxist asks is not first about good or bad policy from a state that is by its nature antagonistic but rather, by what means can the unity and power of the working class be grown in the context of an antagonistic state?
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Let’s turn now to the antitrust position. At its highest level of abstraction, we find the idea that market institutions are products of law and other kinds of human decision, not the pseudo-natural force implied in the metaphor of the invisible hand, or for that matter the Marxist logic of the mode of production. As Sanjukta Paul emphasizes, the question antitrust law asks is about how “private decisions to engage in economic coordination [should be] subject to public approval.” Practices such as pricing and coordination do not contain an intrinsic logic of necessity, and instead flow through institutional channels permitted by law. “We must make our choice,” Louis Brandeis himself famously said. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Methodologically, there is a significant though not total incompatibility with Marxism that announces itself immediately here. While Marxists need not go all the way in for the strong determinism that the tradition’s own rhetorical flights of fancy often have encouraged, it’s difficult to accept the idea that we coordinate economically in one way, and might just choose to do so in another, as anything but voluntarism. Yes, we might choose to do so, viewing our society with an anthropological or philosophical distance, of the kind Marxists enjoy at our highest level of abstraction. In principle, the coordination of labor could enjoy the legal protection that the coordination of capital currently enjoys. But there is a reason we do not see it in this society: the fact that law and state are not neutral, but are rather caught up in, and finally subordinate to, the system-logic of capital. Marxists agree that other forms of economic organization could and should exist, but find law on its own an insufficient tool for bringing them about—seeing law as only one moment of a complex social whole, whose essence is class rule, of which law is only one implement. To move from the rule of capital to something called democracy would involve not a narrow political choice in the sense of a mere election or passage of a law, but the much larger political matter of reorganizing how we live together.
Similarly, on the neo-Brandeisian view, the Marxist idea of monopoly as a phase by which capital solves its own problems—while perhaps worsening others—is difficult to swallow. Is the rise of the Chicago School approach in competition policy since the 1980s better apprehended as something systemically necessary or something contingent and particular? After all, its advocates had names and addresses; we know quite well how they did what they did. Is it not intellectually and politically debilitating to see in general terms an outcome that is so easily apprehended in the specific? They changed the law; so could we. To this, a Marxist responds that an event has not really been apprehended if it is only apprehended in the specific; seeing it this way is just narrating it, not explaining it. And in any case, we will not succeed in changing the law our way if we do not understand the social forces working through judges and policymakers. More subtly, there is a point here where the methodological and the political blur: because the antitrust view tends to see workers and small producers more similarly than Marxists do (who would generally insist that these groups are subject to different, if related and partially overlapping, kinds of exploitation and domination), it is easier for antitrusters to imagine getting their proverbial day in court. After all, their constituency includes elements of the capitalist class, even if subordinate ones.
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Despite these theoretical divergences, in the actual realm of politics and policy, there’s a good deal of practical compatibility between the two camps. I don’t know any socialist who wasn’t glad to see Lina Khan get busy at the FTC, although many perhaps had doubts about how much leash she would be given. In the space between determinism and voluntarism, we can never identify the exact shape of “objective” obstacles and opportunities, and experimentation is necessary. Certainly, where antitrust becomes labor market policy—with respect to misclassification of employment, noncompete clauses, and so on—it speaks directly to the socialist concern with the organization and unity of the working class.
More broadly, Marxists are again in a moment of unresolved debates and a good deal of uncertainty about the nature and meaning of the historical phase of capitalism we are entering. The epochal crisis of liberalism, the revival of mercantilist political economy, and the ascent of the monopolistic tech sector clearly bear some significant implications for the type of periodizing effort that is crucial to the Marxist version of the monopoly question. The effort to generate a concept of “neo-feudalism” or “techno-feudalism” out of these developments, while admirably adventurous, has failed so far to persuade most of the Marxist community. It is likely that Marxists could learn something with respect to this periodizing challenge from the struggle to impose regulatory discipline—on the tech sector in particular.
In turn, the antitrusters could perhaps gain something from an engagement with Marxian class theory. Why did Google brush off serious remedies in the recent antitrust ruling? In his ruling, Judge Amit Mehta seemed to acknowledge the illegality of Google’s search monopoly, but essentially threw up his hands and said capital knows best. How can we make sense of this without some concept of the law as fundamentally non-neutral? And accepting the non-neutrality of the law, where can we look in society, beyond the formal legal arena, for sources of power to challenge the dominance of tech monopolies? It’s possible to imagine a constructive give and take between the two traditions here, where their conflicting methods nonetheless align into a useful division of labor at a less abstract level. I hope this provocation helps open up some conversation about how that might develop.
