Jim Buhler: Review of “Slouching Towards Utopia"

A Twitter thread...

Jim Buhler: Thread by @JimBuhler on Thread Reader App: ‘Last weekend, I read DeLong’s Slouching Toward Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>, an economic history of what he calls the long twentieth century (1870-2010). I liked the book and have thoughts.

A thread where I step even more outside my lane than usual:

It’s a long book but not a hard read even for someone like me who’s not at all an expert in the area. I am most interested in the period however, and I’ve done more than a little historical work on music and entertainment media from the period.

The basic thesis of the book is that around 1870 due to globalization and the formation of corporations focused on invention and research the world saw an unprecedented acceleration of economic growth that would continue throughout the long 20th century. Notwithstanding the wars and revolutions, this acceleration of economic growth, DeLong argues, changed the world and made economic growth the driving historical factor of the period.

Throughout the book works with a play between Hayek and Polanyi as a structuring opposition. From Hayek he takes the idea the market giveth, the market taketh away. Blessed be the market. From Polanyi DeLong takes the idea that the market is made for man but not man for the market. From that he derives a set of Polanyi rights that cannot be reconciled with the market and generally lead to disenchantment with the market. This play between Hayek and Polanyi is an effective structuring opposition for the book. Really it is quite remarkable what DeLong can draw from it and the clarity it brings to the historical account.

One complaint:DeLong is too easy on, even occasionally forgiving of imperial violence compared to fascist and communist violence. That’s not to say the book ignores imperial violence. It’s just that compared to fascist and communist violence it does not get centered the same way in the analysis. Perhaps that is because fascist and communist violence is new whereas imperial violence had its start well before the period under discussion. Perhaps it is because imperial violence during the period is often expressed as part of the process of decolonization, so it is half masked. Since imperial violence is one shadow of the productivity gains of the global north it seems it should have factored similarly in the analysis as fascist and communist violence do in the analysis of those two responses to the disenchantment with capitalism. Again DeLong doesn’t ignore imperial violence, it just doesn’t seem to factor as large in his analysis as does communist and fascist violence.

Second complaint: DeLong notes that Polanyi rights have two edges. And his narrative is less persuasive—doesn’t have good answers—wherever it confronts the anti-egalitarian edge. At least I don't find it as convincing. The anti-egalitarian edge is that unequal should be treated and rewarded unequally. The fruits of the world should be distributed meaningfully, that is neither arbitrarily, randomly, nor equally. The market uses unequal distribution to provide incentive but the market is also capricious—it giveth, it taketh away—so it often fails in terms of Polanyi rights. So the anti-egalitarian edge frequently turns against Hayek’s market principle and DeLong sometimes takes it up himself for unclear reasons to knock “really existing socialism.”

I feel DeLong often putting his thumb on the scale when talking about communism to make the reader always aware of its real failures when his basic historical account makes the point of its inadequacies clear enough. Maybe that disavowal is the price an economic historian who has learned from Charlie and Freddie still has to pay. Maybe our current return to a world where fascism is ascendant is accompanied by rumblings of a reemergence of communism and DeLong wants a marker in place as a reminder of what can go wrong as we look for solutions to our current disenchantment.

The anti-egalitarian edge of Polanyi rights is also used by fascism against the formal egalitarian rights embedded in democracy and so it might have made some sense to draw the monster Carl Schmitt into the conversation. Especially since so much of movement conservatism draws implicitly on Schmitt and binds him to what DeLong calls Hayek’s Mr Hyde. That might have allowed DeLong to offer more clarity about the neoliberal turn, how we ended up where we are, and what we might do about that.

As DeLong recognizes it is with the account of the neoliberal turn that the book is weakest. And it’s not in fact clear that a new phase should not be started there in the problems of the 1970s and the response to that. In which case our current situation is not the beginning of a new epoch of lower growth but more like a response to the failures of that period. Or to follow DeLong: history is rhyming and the period from 1980-2010 bears closer affinities with 1870-1914 than the latter does with the immediate post-WWII period. And our current period is rhyming with the interwar period where the crises of capitalism led to the communist and fascist responses.

DeLong occasionally notes these parallels but the need to call 2010 an endpoint forecloses any careful consideration of the rhyme. The rhyme is also ongoing so it makes for incomplete and tentative analysis. Not nearly as clear because open and we don’t know the endpoint. But it does make me wonder why DeLong felt the need to end the epoch in 2010. Have we had a long enough run since 2010 to say long term global growth of productivity has permanently declined? Or was the Great Recession actually much closer to if not quite as deep to the Great Depression than we care to admit?

As an outsider who doesn’t know enough about the details of economic history to evaluate the choice, I can’t really say. But to me 2010 feels very arbitrary as an end point to the story DeLong tells.

The story DeLong wants to tell in fact seems to end effectively (and tragically) in the 1970s in the West with the inflation cycle and “legitimation crisis,”
which for some reason was sufficient to bring the whole thing down. It finally ended in at the end of the 1980s with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course at that point the fateful neoliberal turn had already been taken in the West. Yes, that’s closer to Hobsbawm’s narrative that DeLong is writing against, but it seems implicit in DeLong’s own account. He freely admits that the post-1980 period is more unruly in terms of fitting to his grand narrative.

In any event, the neoliberal turn itself seems the start of a new cycle, now outfit with covert Schmittian characteristics due to movement conservatism. And we are now entering the second act after its failure (but now with more pronounced Schmittian characteristics, at least among the elites).

Now to step even further out of my lane into speculation that the book prompted but I'm not sure how to assess. Since according to DeLong the market has traditionally solved the problem of getting the rich items they want, there seems a way of thinking about the current situation in terms of a performatively contradictory mass market for elites.

If we take world population as roughly 8 billion, 5% of that is 400 million, roughly the size of the US or EU. The point is it scales as a mass market. Containerization and global networks of communication make possible addressing this 5% global elite as a mass market, and the rest of us, the national mass markets, are perhaps just along for the global ride. My hunch is margins (and so also profits) are higher—and quite a lot higher—on items sold into this elite mass market compared to any national mass markets. At this point workers are still needed to make things for this elite mass market, but robotics—or the fantasy of robotics—seem increasingly prevalent.

One dystopian view on this would be that the market currently seems to be solving the problem of how to make the 5% self sufficient, that is, not in need of the rest of the population, which can therefore be treated indifferently or worse. Arguably this is would be one reason the elite on the whole can be so unconcerned about existential crises like climate change: there seems a half-formed assumption that a radical population reduction will address that, and allow the elites to still prosper. (Yes, the response is both horrifying and unlikely to work at all in practice, but it is a fantasy figure that is not close to be fully articulated. And even the global elite market insofar as it exists at this point still works across and in conjunction with national markets.)

The politics of the elite seem similarly to be concerned with maintaining the power of the elite, changing structure of government to prevent erosion of property rights (and their place among elites) and especially any form of redistribution. Anti-egalitarian Polanyi rights are invoked and politics rewritten according to rule of property rights and power under Schmittian cover.