I want to explore why we live in this strange age of populism – ask where it came from, what is it, and what that means. That’s the only way to understand what would otherwise be bewilderingly diverse; national populism, economic populism, media populism, left and right populism – how does Bernie Sanders, for example, have anything in common with Victor Orban or Nigel Farage? Even consumer brands have described themselves as populist. How can we make sense of all this?

As one scholar – Paul Taggart – puts it, ‘Populist movements have systems of belief which are diffuse; they are inherently difficult to control and organize; they lack consistency; and their activity waxes and wanes with a bewildering frequency. Populism is a difficult, slippery concept.’

To not slip up, we’ll have to go back to the founding of America, to the French Revolution, and think about the expansion of democracy – then we’ll look at populist parties and leaders – from Peron in Argentina to Le Pen in France. We’ll take a detour to look at Fox News and consumer populism, before bringing it together for you – the statistically median, hardworking, heartland, honest salt-of-the-earth YouTube viewer sick of those sponging, corrupt, parasitic elites.

The Roots of Populism

The recurring theme in populism – the central, organising feature – is the binary of the people vs elites. This makes populism a difficult, slippery, somewhat vague concept – as we’ll get to scholars disagree on what populism even is – was Julius Caesar a populist? Robin Hood? The founding fathers? In some ways yes, but modern populism – what we’re really interested in – only makes sense as part of modern democracy – the idea that the people – demos – should rule – kratos – that we the people are the sovereign.

I sat down with professor Paul Taggart – a specialist in populism – and, first, I asked him about this relationship between populism and democracy.

Which is why modern populism only makes sense after, and in reference to, the promises and the ideals of the French and American Revolutions. During the French, the revolutionaries tried to enact the idea of Rousseau’s general will of the people. That, in the words of the declaration of the rights of man in 1789, ‘the law is the expression of the general will’, which – and this is key – was expressed through a single unicameral legislative chamber to represent the people, undivided.

This was in contrast to Britain and America, both having a division of powers between the executive, the upper and lower houses, and the judiciary.

I know we’re going back a bit, but it is crucial to understand that in Britain and America, the prevailing elite belief was a scepticism about democracy, a fear of the mob, and a desire for stability as much as democracy, and so the upper houses in particular were meant for lords, aristocrats, and elites to balance the lower houses. And remember, even after the American revolution, not everyone could vote or was eligible for office.

We already see this tension between what became democracy and a constitutional democracy, or the promise of government of the people, by the people, and for the people – and government with elite checks and balances – whether senators carefully selected by parties or judges with elite qualifications or a president or king with special powers.

From the beginning, the tension is there – people vs elite.

Furthermore, in America there was the debate between Jeffersonians – who believed in democratic state-rights farmer tight-knit maybe idealistic republics closer to the people, and those like Hamilton advocating for a strong central government run by elites.

These debates ran through almost every Western country during the Enlightenment and into the nineteenth century. And we have to remember, that throughout the nineteen century, full democracy only came very slowly – and historically is very new.

For example, an important but now often overlooked debate during  Enlightenment was about whether truth was ‘self-evident’ or ‘common sense’ – in Jefferson and Thomas Paine’s words – accessible to all the people – or whether they were the preserve of a priesthood, aristocracy, the Enlightenment intellectuals and philosophes, the educated. These kinds of debates informed how the philosophes thought about who should govern. That maybe everyone could reach it with the right education, upbringing, or training, but that the masses of normal people would, if given the vote, say, overthrow property rights, could be swayed by demagogues, were unable to restrain their base impulses. Voltaire, for example, believed in the ‘idiocy of the masses.’ That only the Enlightened should rule. Whereas Jefferson – when he said that we hold these truths to be self-evident – believed that ordinary people could govern a republic themselves. That you didn’t need a strong government.

In a way, the history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was one of working out these checks and balances. How much power should an executive have? How long should a term be? When can the people vote again? How easily can laws – particularly constitutional ones – be overturned? How much authority should an elite representative of the people have over the people themselves? The big question – who are the people? Liberals, anarchists, socialists, fascists all answered these questions in different ways.

But what’s often pointed to as the first populist movement came out of Russia. In the 1860s, a group called the the Narodniks (Narod meaning volk) believed that intellectuals and modern students who wanted radical change should go to the people in the country to convince them to rise up against the Tsarist regime.

They made use of printing, pamphleteering, and had a dislike of abstract intellectual ideas, instead believing in Russian peasant communes, which they saw as a site of true authentic volkish populist democracy.

The man who inspired the movement, Alexander Herzen, had a famous rallying cry: ‘to the people, to the people – there is your place, you exiles from seats of learning. Show that you will become fighters on behalf of the Russian people’.

This anti-intellectualism – the idea that truths are self-evident and that people can self-govern – is something that will keep repeating throughout the history of populism.

In his book on populism Paul Taggart writes that  ‘A theme running throughout Herzen’s life was that political life should not serve abstractions. Ideological abstractions were, for Herzen, fundamentally destructive. Populism in many different forms has expressed a hostility towards theory, towards ideology and towards intellectualism.’

The Narodniks, like Jefferson, Rousseau, and many others – were all trying to understand what true democracy meant. As the century went on, government machinery tended to get bigger – militaries, central banks, civil services, lobbyists, political parties, technocrats, bureaucrats, political journalists – all slowly grew into a spiralling unwieldy network of elites.

The movement ended up failing – ironically because the peasantry proved to be much more pro-Tsar, religious, conservative and resistant to change than the Narodniks expected. But is fascinating because it foreshadows so much of contemporary populism. 

Look at this painting by Ilya Repin – I love this as it really has everything in it – the dangerous agitator in red, an outsider, in the authentic heartland, peasant home, side-eyeing the peasants who have betrayed him, the elites represented by the police or military with the man in the suit – or maybe he’s the elite? And a suitcase of subversive literature, much of it ripped up and discarded, intellectualism useless. It really shows the uneasy relationship between some of the themes that will keep coming up.

The Birth of Populism 

In late 19th century America, a series of crashes, depressions, increasing inequality, and conflicts between unions, powers, and governments, all gave birth to a genuinely grass roots bottom-up movement which transformed into the first influential Populist party. The People’s Party of America survived for just seventeen years, between 1891 and 1908, but it’s legacy and influence outlasted it.

This was the period of Robber Barons, the growth of Wall Street, of Rockefeller, of oil and steel – the Gilded Age. But while what were seen as establishment East Coast elites were getting richer, many people – particularly farmers in the south – were getting poorer. In particular, farmers selling their produce in a new national market felt they were being overcharged out of existence by railroad monopolists.

The Texas Farmer’s Alliance formed in 1875 in protest. Drought, railroad bankruptcies, overinvestment in crops, price gouging on the trainlines, and high levels of debt all led to farmers organising for change, joining with similar groups like the Knights of Labor.

Taggart writes that ‘for farmers, the railroads and the Eastern banking establishment were at the heart of a system that seemed to systematically cheat farmers and hold them in thrall to interests other than their own. The railroads, farmers reasoned, should offer an opportunity for farmers to sell their harvests widely, and yet the high cost of the railroads meant that the farmers felt themselves to be no better off.’

Similar movements took off in other states, and they came together to form the People’s Party in 1892. The Party called for government regulated paper currency and silver coinage to counter what they saw as the East Coast banking monopoly on gold, for progressive taxation, the nationalisation or regulation of railroads, immigration restrictions, and higher taxes on trusts and stricter punishments for corporations breaking the law. They pushed for a shorter working day, called for the abolishment of strike breaking agencies, and for the direct democratic election of senators who, until 1913, were elected by the legislature – the politicians – of each state, rather than voted for by the people – emphasising again that duality between a sovereign people’s democracy and the kind of elite control American had inherited from Britain.

They were also not without their racism and nativism. Some were concerned with the plight of poor freed slaves, others in the party were avowed white nationalists. Others saw the establishment as part of a Rothschild Jewish conspiracy. While Chinese, Slavic, and Hungarian immigrants were often blamed for taking American jobs. 

One of their organising focuses was the idea of a producer ethic. That America belonged to the producers.

On their most influential leaders was Ignatius Donnelly, an eccentric figure who verged between genuine radical democratic ideas and wild conspiracy theories. His Wikipedia entry reads like a Joe Rogan episode. He identified the People’s Party producer ethic when he said that  “Wealth belongs to him who creates it,” contrasting the authentic worker and farmer with the money power of banks and Robber Barons. One of the goals of the People’s Party was to build a coalition between the disconnected farmers in the South and industrial workers in the North. 

Ignatius Donnelly’s inaugural People Party Speech is worth reading in full as textbook populist rhetoric. In front of a crowd of 10,000, he rallied about how the ‘the fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few’ – the two great classes – tramps and billionaires. He talks about conspiracy and restoring government to ‘the hands of the plain people’. It’s full of that basic populist organising duality – plain people, producers, heartland, the many – vs the few, the elite. The speech was printed, distributed, and widely read.

The People’s Party was so successful that it became national contenders in the 1892 and 1894 elections, gaining around 10% of the vote share, and winning several seats in the House and Senate. But after that the Party struggled and slowly watered down their demands, while the Democratic Party became more populist.

In 1896, the populist lawyer and politician William Jennings Bryan became the Democrat nominee. Bryan was a master orator, just 36 years old, and like Lincoln before and MLK after, combined evangelical biblical language and zeal with the themes of the democratic promise of America. Bryan admired Lincoln, who he said made “frequent use of Bible language and of illustrations drawn from Holy Writ”, to communicate “democracy’s dream”.

He talked of the “the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day” and “the miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth” were “businessmen” equal to “the few financial magnates who, in a back room, comer the money of the world.”

He rallied that “We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!”

Many People’s Party members and supporters jumped ship to support Bryan. But the Republican – William McKinley – was supported by every newspaper outside the South, the banking establishment, and was funded by industrialists with a unprecedented $3.5m against Bryan’s $300,000-500,000. Bryan was defeated  three times between 1896 and 1908, when the People’s Party disbanded.

However,  the ideas, the platform, and the tradition of ideas provided the foundation for the election of FDR and the New Deal later on. Taggart writes that ‘the populists served as markers of coming change.’ 

And in his book on populism in America, Michael Kazin writes that despite their demise ‘The People’s Party stood at a point of transition for [populist] language.’

A popular poem later eulogised the affectionately nicknamed Boy Bryan’s defeat. The anonymous poet waxed about the defeat of wheat, by those with dollar signs upon their coats and diamond watchchains and inbred landlord stock. And Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi. Defeat of the young by the old and silly. Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme. Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream. Bryan’s famous Cross of Gold speech – another populist speech worth reading in full – ended with the lines – “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

From Dictators to Populists

The many crises and movements of the twentieth century are in many ways – if not all ways – a response to the failures of the elite liberal representational democratic compromise. The Great Depression and the World Wars led to a new post-war consensus that provided a much bigger role for a state to support the welfare and needs of the ‘common people.’ Democracy was deepened by the women’s suffrage movements and extending the vote to all men – it seems like a triumphant story for democracy. But it’s easy to forget that 1941 there only eleven parliamentary democracies in the world. 

It’s easy to look back at the period as the triumph of democracy – but representational democracy was close to crumbling. Everywhere – from the Soviet Union to Fascism to Populist leaders – parliamentary democracy was seen as failing, weak, slow – obstructing the will of the people rather than expressing it.

Populists and Fascists started looking similar – both had forceful charismatic leaders speaking ‘for’ the people, both were against elite checks and balances, existing laws and judiciaries, both for a national people, often excluding, sometimes killing, and at the least marginalising those outside that national community, and both – in many places – became increasingly authoritarian when they got into power.

In his book comparing fascism and populism in the post-war period, Federico Finchelstein says that ‘Unlike fascists, populists most often play the democratic game and will eventually cede power after losing an election.’ He calls populism an authoritarian form of democracy,’ that tends to challenge but not destroy democracy.

Take Huey Long – the so-called dictator of Louisiana who was governor and senator in the late 1920s – a populist who genuinely redistributed wealth to the poor – and an authoritarian who centralised power, intimidated and spied on opponents, and interfered in the judiciary. 

In South America, charismatic figures have frequently drawn on populist rhetoric against an incumbent elite then have been criticized for democratic backsliding once in power. The list of populist figures in South American history is long – but the first populist to govern a country was Juan Peron in 1940s Argentina. 

Since Simon Bolivar led independence movements liberating South America from the Spanish Empire, there has been a recurring tradition of charismatic leaders fighting against incumbent elites, perceived to be draining south America of its rich resources and economic potential.

In the 1940s, Argentina was going through an economic crisis. In 1943, the army, including Peron, overthrew the government in a coup. Peron had been inspired by Mussolini mobilising the labour movement in Italy to seize power. He was genuinely radical, developing and industrialising the country, distributing resources to the poor with his wife Evita, and deepening the rights of workers and indigenous Argentinians. 

So what makes Peron a populist? First, despite his policies, his rhetoric wasn’t direct at the working class, nor was he an ideological intellectual thinker – a Marxist say – nor was he a technocrat, focusing on rights or the law or technocratic government. Instead, his focus was the Argentinian people expressed as an organic whole – a multiclass catholic honest group in the heartland of Argentina. He was anti-elite, targeting Argentina’s wealthy landowners.

Populism could be said to arise out of romanticism and the volkish movement – it doesn’t start from philosophy, or reason, carefully thought through propositions or ideas, from intellectualism – it starts from an organic felt sense of a people – a nation.

Peron captured this when he said “Peronism is not learned; it is felt or not felt.” And it was felt through Peron – he and Eva were both charismatic, almost saintly figures, who were embodiments of the nation.

But he became repressive, curtailing freedom of speech, manipulating the law to get re-elected, preventing opponents access to the media and using a so called ‘law of disrespect’ to censor criticism of his policies. Like the Italian fascists he was inspired by, he concentrated political power through himself, as the embodiment of Argentina itself.

Roger Cohen in the New York Times writes that “Argentina invented its own political philosophy: a strange mishmash of nationalism, romanticism, fascism, socialism, backwardness, progressiveness, militarism, eroticism, fantasy, musical mournfulness, irresponsibility and repression.”

Peron and similar populist South American leaders, along with people like Huey Long, and the ambiguous affinity with fascism represented a break for populism. To many it seemed proof of the view that went all the way back to Ancient Greece, Aristotle, and Plato – that democracy was vulnerable to demagoguery. A similar figure from the period – Father Coughlin – used a new technology – the radio – to use populist rhetoric to support both he nationalisation of industry in support of ordinary Americans and to air antisemitism in support of Nazi Germany to 30 million Americans.

But with the end of WWII and the building of welfare states and new deals across Europe and America, populists were mainly held at the side-lines of politics. But as this post-war consensus began to strain in the 70s, a new type of populism-lite entered the mainstream.

Post-War Conservative Populism

You could broadly argue that in the pre-war period, the populist claim was that the government elites were doing too little, but in the post-war period as the government elites took a more active role in economic and social life a shift happened. Populists began to protest that government elites were doing too much.

In a way, the post-war new deal consensus was inspired by a populist movement that transformed into elitist establishment status quo. The populist complaint about small government became a populist revolt against big government. 

The post-war consensus allowed for further reaching welfare states, social security, and healthcare, wider scope for government intervention in the economy, the redistribution of large inequalities of wealth through progressive taxation, and in many Western European countries the nationalisation of key industries. This expansion of the state meant one thing – an increase in elites to manage the new system. The post-war period was also characterized by larger bureaucracies, more management & lobbyists, bigger militaries, and more government officials from clerks to distribute welfare to the CEOs of military contractors at the head of what Eisenhower warned of as the military-industrial complex. In other words, as illustrated by this graph, the size of government in the post-war compared to the pre-war period ballooned.

Democracy and modernity complicated relationship – progress, technology, regulations – barrier (gatekeeper) between direct unmediated and new elite figures to manage system

For various economic, cultural, and social reasons – from inflation and low-growth, oil shocks, protests at the Vietnam war, and strikes – this consensus began to fracture in the 1970s.

An unexpected populist reversal happened. It was assumed that the post-war consensus was a coalition of liberals and the working-class; that state-intervention was on behalf of the working class. But Conservatives – first in America – discovered that there was a constituency of working-class voters who believed that they didn’t need the state – that the elitist state represented the lazy scroungers on welfare and the snobbish liberal elite who wished to force their ideas about gay rights, abortion, the Church – so-called ‘family issues’ – upon them against  their will. It was a constituency of voters who believed they were hardworking, honest, heartland, Christian Americans, and the sanctimonious elites had become too powerful, and were sticking their noses in where they weren’t welcome.

The figure who most epitomises this change is the conservative author and politician Pat Buchanan, who in 1975 said that:

‘If there is a role for the Republican Party, it is to be the party of the working class, not the welfare class. It is to champion the cause of producers and taxpayers, of the private sector threatened by the government sector, of the millions who carry most of the cost of government and share least in its beneficence.’

He also believed in building a sea wall to keep out immigrants and called homosexuality unnatural and AIDS retribution. Buchanan, in other words, was key in discovering a conservative populism based around an organic idea of conservative family values, hardworking and against welfare, against the incumbent establishment elite.

Buchanan advised Nixon, who coined the term the ‘silent majority’ to refer to this new found block of voters.

Nixon said that Americans should listen “the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the nondemonstrators.” Saying “They’re good people. They’re decent people; they work and they save and they pay taxes and they care.”

In Buchanan and Nixon’s vision, political messaging should aim squarely at that middle constituency of hardworking, in-work, Church-going, non-elite, honest, heartland Americans who were ‘silent’, implying a forceful opposite elite that were loud – forcing their values on everyday Americans. 

Kazin writes that ‘a consuming desire to cleanse sinful institutions led them to chastise judges who forbade school prayer but authorized abortions, television executives whose productions smashed sexual taboos, and school authorities who promoted an agnostic stance toward moral questions.’

Ironically, Nixon – especially by today’s standards – was pretty much a liberal.  Buchanan called hi. the “least ideological statesman I even encountered”. His success was much more reliant on messaging than policy, as the famous 1969 book by Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President, points to. What he represents for the history of populism is the mainstreaming of populist rhetoric, and the coming of the age of television campaigning.

With campaign ads and soundbites, messaging got pithier, how you looked was more important, ad executives and PR times were hired, polling and data slowly became more important. 

All most obviously illustrated by a Hollywood actor becoming the President of the United States.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher both were in a way populist figures.

Reagan’s claim to be cutting the size of government was pitched in a populist style. Increasingly, from FDR’s fireside chats and JFK’s affable style, TV – as Peggy Noonan once said – was the presidency. Reagan was inspired by Roosevelts affable down to earth conversational style. 

The journalist Lou Cannon said that “When Reagan spoke, ordinary Americans did not have to make the mental translation usually required for conservative Republican speakers. He undermined the New Deal in its own vernacular.”

Like Nixon, Regan talked of “a quiet, unselfish devotion to our families, our neighbors, and our nation.”

The similar move in the UK saw Thatcher using the language of populists to cut taxes, deregulate and denationalise industries, and to try to curb the size of government in the name of the ordinary hardworking taxpayers. The people, the citizen, the public, became the taxpayer

Stuart Hall wrote that ‘‘Thatcherite populism … combines the resonant themes of organic Toryism – nation, family, duty, authority, standards, traditionalism – with the aggressive themes of a revived neoliberalism – self-interest, competitive individualism, anti-statism.”

All of this defined a seismic shift in the political axis and set the foundations of the national populist movements that were around the corner. Kazin writes: ‘It was a remarkable shift. The vocabulary of grassroots rebellion now served to thwart and reverse social and cultural change rather than to promote it.’ 

National Populists

That shift was about to change again. If Reagan and Thatcher mark the end of the new deal elites, they were themselves about to become symbols of a new elite that a new generation of populists would rally against – the globalist elite.

As the world became more connected and more mobile, as the EU grew and neoliberal free trade became the default aspiration, both people and capital flowed more freely around the world. Broadly, populists on the right protested the former – the free movement of people – and populists on the left the latter – the free movement of capital – but sometimes both combined. In their own ways, both were a response to globalisation.

In France, the National Front’s slogan was “France for the French”. Initially led by the more overtly racist and antisemitic Jean-Marie Le Pen, protesting immigration from Algeria, Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen aimed to reform the party, distance it from its most controversial views, and move it into the mainstream.

Renamed National Rally in 2018 it opposes immigration, the Islamisation of France, but also advocates for policies seen as on the left: pledging to scrap income tax for workers under 30 years old, increase child support, and raise the state pension. Like Nixon’s idea of a ‘silent’ majority, National Rally portrays itself as the voice of the ‘forgotten’, against the ‘globalist elites’.

In 2022, Le Pen secured 41.45% of the vote in the second round of the presidential election, and in the legislative elections National Rally increased won 89 seats (up from 8 seats previously) in the National Assembly. In the most recent legislative elections in 2024 it increased its representation to 142 seats.

In Germany, Alternative for Deutschland supports a significant reduction in immigration, including from other EU states, proposes a programme of ‘remigration’ – deportations from German, especially of criminals or asylum seekers who originate in countries where the security situation has improved. Like NF, AfD also support some left-wing policies around increasing pensions and the minimum wage.

In the 2017 federal election, it became the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since the Nazi era, securing 94 seats with 12.6% of the vote. In the 2021 election its political fortunes declined slightly, slipping to 83 seats in the Bundestag with 10.4% of the vote, but since late 2022 the AfD’s position in the opinion polls has been hovering between 15% and 25%.

The German domestic intelligence service is currently monitoring the AfD due to its official classification by the German state as ‘extremist’. Bjorn Hocke, the former leader of the more radical Der Flugel wing of the AfD, was prosecuted for using the Nazi slogan “Everything for our homeland, everything for Saxony-Anhalt, everything for Germany!” 

In Hungary, Victor Orbán’s policies and rhetoric became increasingly national populist across the 2000s. Much of his policy agenda has focused on immigration as a threat to Hungarian culture and society, despite the level of immigration to Hungary being relatively low compared to most Western European countries. Under Orbán’s leadership Hungary has constructed fences on its southern borders and refused to comply with EU immigration quotas.

In his second term as prime minister, from 2010 till 2014, he introduced economic reforms such as nationalising pensions and introduced a scheme to offer extra credit to small and medium businesses, which helped spur Hungary’s economic recovery. Orbán also became increasingly illiberal, introducing constitutional changes and democratic backsliding that strengthened the executive branch of the government and electoral reforms that favoured his party, Fidesz. He’s stacked the constitutional court with loyalists and curtailed its jurisdiction and gerrymandered electoral district. He’s undermined press freedom through a combination of regulation, censorship, and economic pressure on media outlets. He consistently portrays himself as the defender of ordinary Hungarians against internal elites. His targeting of groups such as migrants, the EU bureaucracy, and liberal NGOs frames them as threats to Hungary’s national sovereignty and traditional values.

In other countries, populism has been on the rise in different forms – as Taggart says, chameleon-like. In Turkey, Erdogan’s populism against entrenched liberal elites was Islamic in character. And In Italy, populists have become so common and varied that some have called its entire political system a populist one. 

Trump, of course, fits the populist mould but is also focused on China. Boris Johnson in the UK straddled the line between populist and liberal elite, becoming a somewhat hesitant populist figure. And it’s notable that in the period of national populism, left populists like Corbyn and Sanders break through somewhat, but have ultimately haven’t been successful as populists on the right.

Populism: Mainstreamed (The Age of Populism)

As we get today, is it true to say we live in an age of populism? Almost every major country has a populist movement, populism is the dominant style online – as I’ve talked about in this video – Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Triggernometry, the Weinsteins, Russell Brand, Elon Musk and many others are all populists – Fox News, GB News, the tabloid papers – are all populist. 

As far back as 1970, TIME magazines person of the year went to the – Middle Class Americans.  By the 80s, even HP was calling their new printer – ‘populist: the perfect printer for the masses. And Banana Republic had “Men’s 100% Cotton Twill POPULIST pants…steeped in grass-roots sensibility and the simple good sense of solid workmanship…No-nonsense pants for the individual in everyman.” 

What accounts for this shift? Anselmi writes that ‘populism is no longer an extreme hypothesis in the democratic game; no longer a deviation, an anomaly, a degeneration or a pathology of democracy, as it was often defined in the past. Populism today is, to all intents and purposes, a highly probable option of democracy.’ 

Across the twentieth century, it’s become easier to reach people, the role of gatekeeps has diminished, and the techniques of persuasion have got better. Both Clinton and Blair were known for being seen with loosened ties, jackets off, sleeves rolled, Nixon hired a team that included Fox News founder Rodger Ailes to produce campaign ads. Ailes that leaned heavily on American flags and sensationalist iconography, slick presenters, and populist talking points when he started Fox News. 

Before this, as newspaper presses improved, the tabloids could print of millions of cheap working-class newspapers, radio and television then cable meant more and more could get in front of more and more – the measure of success shifted more towards speaking to popular appeal.

Populists have been adept at sidestepping media and political institutions and getting their message out in a different way. National populists have been frontrunners in turning to blogs then podcasts and social media, before Front National relied on pamphleteering. Populists in 1960s America even made pioneering use of direct mail to reach people directly. 

Richard Viguerie, a pioneer in selling conservative views by mail, said that ‘The liberals have had control not only of all three branches of government, but of the major universities, the three major networks, the biggest newspapers, the news weeklies, and Hollywood…. So our communication has had to begin at the grassroots level—by reaching individuals outside the channels of organized public opinion. Fortunately, a whole new technique has become available just in time—direct mail, backed by computer science, has allowed us to bypass all the media controlled by our adversaries.’

I put it to Professor Taggart that we could be living in a new age of populism. (taggart6.mp4)

You could also make the case that the belief in democratic accountability has strengthened. In his book on the democracy, David Stasavage points to the growth of monitory democracy – the growth of pressure groups, reporting about corruption, public scrutiny, watchdogs, tribunals, public inquires, committees, experts, and other forms of monitoring aimed at strengthening democratic process. 

Whether these things have strengthened democracy is, of course, another question. Ironically, these types of democratic checks and balances and inquiries and committees risk becoming the very elite institutions that attract populist ire when they thwart the will of the democratic majority. They can become new elite gatekeepers. However, as technology gives us increasing ways to communicate with each other, the trend is clearly away from having an establishment at the gates. And unless some new set of institutions become the new gatekeepers – online and off (and I wouldn’t rule that out entirely) – populism is here to stay. So what does that mean for us?

Appraising Populism

With its history in mind, we’re now in a better position to think about what populism is, what it means, and what the potential risks and rewards might be. 

There’s always a people vs an elite. A people who are decent, hardworking, pure vs elite that is corrupt, out of touch, gone wrong somehow. The people in the heartland are also often authentic insiders vs bad outsiders – those outsides could be immigrants or NGOs or multinational corporations, or elites that represent them, who have betrayed the real people. The most striking thing here is the Manichean binary – the good vs the bad. 

There are some other recurring features. The emphasis on national identity as a response to the need for a content for what authentic people means. A charismatic – often idiosyncratic – leader that channels that authenticity and represents the true authentic people. Then a battle with the establishment (including the media) – often through an expansion of executive powers, sometimes through democratic backsliding, and worst a slide into authoritarianism. Often this battle has to be waged through alternative media – whether direct mail or podcasts – to circumvent traditional established institutions.

I asked Professor Taggart what Populists tend to do once in power.

The difficulty with assessing populism is how varied it has been. What you think about it will depend on the period, where you are, who you are, what populists are doing, what your ideological beliefs are – in fact, I’ve talked about populism from a left perspective on Substack – I’ll leave a link below. So instead here, I want to try to assess populism on its own terms – as an expression of popular will, of democracy, of popular sovereignty. Doing so allows us to understand populism’s tensions.

First, populism itself often doesn’t do a good job of accurately describing the very ‘people’ it’s meant to represent.

The people are never singular -as in people vs elites – they are plural, diverse, made up of millions with different views, interested in different issues, in disagreement both with each other.

As Taggart writes ‘Political scientists have long argued that a completely coherent, single “popular will” is a fantasy and that no one can credibly claim, as Juan Perón used to do, that “the political leader is the one who does what the people want.”’

As such, ‘the people’ as a concept becomes so vague, ambiguous and flexible as to hollow out any serious debate about details on policy. 

As Kazin puts it ‘The traditional rhetoric pitting ordinary people against the establishment sounds, to many ears, naive if not offensive in its assumption that “the American people” share anything beyond a geographic space.’

Critics of populism then point to the consistent leaning on this kind of rhetoric as being based on a simplification at best and a lie at worst.

Muller says that the ‘the core claim of populism is thus a moralized form of antipluralism.’ It is antipolitics in that it chooses to ignore the realities of political processes – negotiations, judiciary, coalition building, policy planning, etc – and focus instead on rhetoric. As Muller succinctly puts it ‘Antipolitics cannot generate real policies’

This is a tension, but the populist response is to emphasise the necessity of democratic populist language for anyone speaking to large majorities of people with few things in common.

Second, there’s a tension between sovereign will of the ‘people’ and a single populist leader who can often become increasingly authoritarian. This is not always the case, but statistically – Peron, and other South American populists, Huey Long, Orbán, Erdogan, Modi, in Italy, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, some of Trump’s rhetoric – the literature on populism is full of figures who engage in what’s referred to as democratic backsliding. If you include fascists as populists – which some scholars do – then the risk significantly increases.

Muller writes that populists ‘quickly start tampering with the institutional machinery of democracy in the name of the so-called real people.’

Why is this? One generous reason is that populists see the state apparatus as tainted, corrupt, broken, and so on, and so the only way to break through them is through strengthening the executive office. A less generous reason is that to break through the conversation in the first place, populist movements need forceful, charismatic, often eccentric figures, who once in power, continue to drive for more power. In short, populism attracts narcissists. 

This is a fascinating tension with populism – on the one hand, they’re meant to be symbols of ordinary people, but they often turn out to be highly idiosyncratic figures, outsiders, objects of ridicule as much as veneration.

This also poses a difficulty for succession and longevity within populist movements. As Taggart writes ‘Where populism relies on charismatic leaders, it has great difficulty in sustaining itself in the long term.’

The third tension is between the democratic ideal and constitutional or representative democracy.

Muller writes that ‘Populists are supposedly impatient with procedures; they are even said to be “against institutions as such,” preferring a direct, unmediated relationship between the personal leader and the people’

Of course, many argue we don’t have true democracy at all – that the entire system is either controlled, managed, or directed by elites. Others see the civil service, the judiciary, the separation of powers, the media – all as necessary features of democracy. Many will fall somewhere in between.

To take one example, In Hungary, Orbán’s government removed older opposition judges and inserted their own loyalists with long nine-year terms. In the UK, after Brexit, the Daily Mail caused controversy when it printed the faces of judges thwarting Brexit as ‘enemies of the people’. Populists often gerrymander or work with media owners to fix votes.

Taggart says populists tend to ‘colonize or occupy the state.’ Continuing that ‘Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party sought was a transformation of the civil service law, so as to enable the party to place loyalists in what should have been nonpartisan bureaucratic positions.’’

The next tension – or outright threat – is Authoritarianism itself.

Populists run a risky game. Even if they are democrats, in strengthening the executive office, authoritarianism becomes a real risk. Finchelstein argues that populism is not fascism – the difference is that populists are still ultimately democrats and fascists are not – but that geologically the roots, strategies, rhetoric, the aims, have a lot of similarities. After comparing the two he concludes that ‘fascism is always a possibility, but it is very uncommon.’

I asked Professor Taggart about the link between populism and authoritarianism and he was sceptical.

All of this explains why populism often correlates with a rise of conspiracy theories, as fascism did. Because populists tend to demonize elites and those around them, means they’ve been susceptible historically to draw on conspiracies about Jewish bankers, all powerful NGOs, or in the past Popish plots.

Assessing these tensions is difficult, as having an executive office with authority – the root of authoritarianism – a balance between democracy and the processes of democracy, the difficulty in capturing what we should do as a people, the inevitability of demagoguery – all of these aren’t just features of populism, but of democracy itself. Which is why some theorists of populism see it as a threat – a shadow of democracy – while others see it as democracy itself.

The Dialectic of Democracy

Has democracy failed? The polls seem clear: an increasing distrust of politicians, the decline in affiliation and membership of traditional parties, increasing inequality and cultural and social division. If a system is failing, people will obviously seek alternatives. 

But it’s also easy to forget that democracy isn’t one thing – it’s a complex system of processes, institutions, and rules that have evolved over time (secret ballots, campaign funding rules, political parties, legislative process, codes of conduct, regulations, unions, referendums). Study any democratic system and you’ll need to understand hundreds – if not thousands – of these moving parts. Even what’s thought of as a direct democracy like Ancient Greece was a lot more complex than is often assumed. With that in mind, I think it’s useful to think of a dialectic within democracy – a debate, a negotiation, new institutions, new ideas, change. And populism is a part of this dialectic.

There are many scholars that emphasise the dangers of populism – calling populism the ‘shadow’ of democracy, in Canovan’s phrase, or a ‘constant peril’ in Muller’s. 

If you want to listen to the full conversation with professor Taggart, I’ll leave a link to the second channel in the description below

There are those that are more neutral. Like Anselmi who writes that populism at base ‘is a demand for more democracy on the part of citizens; however, once it has taken hold, it can even generate an involution of democratic institutions’ And many who are much more positive, like Chantel Mouffe who argues that populism should aim to ‘deepen and extend democracy.’ Edward Shills argued populism was like an ‘inverted egalitarianism’ because ‘it is tinged by the belief that the people are not just the equal of their rulers; they are actually better than their rulers’

What’s clear is it has to be taken seriously as a force, a demand, a part of a sovereign will, a general will – while also understanding the dangers.

One idea I like comes from political scientists Yves Meny and Yves Surel who start from the idea that popular sovereignty is the source of democracy, and then arguing that that popular sovereignty is, in Anselmi’s words, both ‘a source of legitimacy for the institutional structure and as a delegitimizing force. The former represents an architectural and structuring tendency, while the latter represents a dynamic and de-structuring tendency.’

That is, if democracy has a structure – an architecture –  built up over centuries – in response to the demands for popular sovereignty, and that when it goes wrong, that same force, the same demands pick at that structure too – popular sovereignty can build a house and popular sovereignty can restructure a house if its not feeling homely.

When constitutional democracy veers from the sovereign will of the people, populism will result, increasing a distrust of elites, and potentially creating a counter-elite meant to change things in the name of the people. 

The house building metaphor is a good one because, what do you think will happen when you renovate or neglect or extend or change a house while forgetting the people who live in some of the rooms – the Rust Belt room or the Red Wall, the marginalised room or the A&E wing. The house will inevitably collapse. The idea of the ‘shadow’ of democracy, the ‘silent’ majority, Regan’s idea of those with ‘quiet devotion’, the hardworking real nation – is a perfect representation of the idea of forgotten rooms – the blank spaces, the missed spots, the neglected districts.

It seems to me that there are three general recurring themes of populism in the modern period – post-democracy, inequality, and authority.

The first is that populism is response to post-democracy – the idea that democracy is not in the hands of the people. That no-one is in charge of the system. This is common to the left and the right. 

The complaint from the left is often that democracy undermined by a global capitalism that can jump from tax country to tax country, offshore labour, lobby politicians and so on. The complaint on the right is that institutions like the ECHR or the UN are seen as taking sovereignty from domestic courts, or that global migration is undermining nation states. Both fuel populist anger.

The second theme is that populism is a response to inequality in a broad sense. Meta studies quite clearly show the positive relationship between inequality and populism. The squeeze on living standards for the working and lower middle class, plus neoliberal policies that have increased asset/pension/stock market/housing value for upper middle class/wealthy, combined with higher levels of migration and the erosion of public services is the basis of populist fuel. This is why the young tend to support left wing populists while the older support right wing populists.

Finally, both of these lead to a demand for change that hasn’t been forthcoming from within the system, leading to support for a strong charismatic authority from without. This has often led to genuine reform but hasn’t been without serious authoritarian risks. But Finding ways to radically reform a system doesn’t mean destroying pluralist democratic institutions – and I’ve talked more about this in the links in the pinned comment below. There’s much more to say on all of this, but I wanted to try and stick to what populism means, without veering off into the many, many related subjects. To end, My favourite book on this has been Kazin’s, who sums up populism like this-  ‘Like the American dream itself, ever present and never fully realized, populism lives too deeply in our fears and expectations to be trivialized or replaced. We should not speak solely within its terms, but, without it, we are lost.’

Sources

Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion
Paul Taggart, Populism
Jan Werner-Muller, What is Populism
Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History
Robert Alexander Huber and Michael Jankowski, Populism: An Introduction

The post The Populist Revolt: The People vs The System appeared first on Then & Now.

Are you wearing glasses? Go into your local store and there’s the appearance of choice, right? Oakley? Ray-Ban? DKNY? Sunglass Hut? Prada? Chanel? Ralph Lauren? They’re all made by one company – Luxottica controls 80% of the market.

Or booking a holiday? Where to start? Hotels.com, Trivago, Booking.com, Kayak? Expedia? HomeAway, Priceline? Travelocity? Hotwire? Orbitz? Plenty of choice right. Well, they’re all owned by two companies: Expedia Group and Booking Holdings.

Oil, sugar, banking, tobacco? All concentrated into a handful of corporations. How about the media you consume? If you’re in the US, Comcast controls 70% of the media market. Food? Just four companies control 82% of the beef packing market. The Body Shop? Nescafe? Aero? Felix cat food? And hundreds more brands. All owned by Nestle. Accounting firms since in the 70s have consolidated into four big corporations. Publishing houses, air travel, big tech. Thinking about dying one day? Mergers in 2014 meant two companies now control 82% of the coffin industry.

Everything is getting bigger. We live in an age of the gigantic. The state, bureaucracy, the military, surveillance technologies, big tech, and big business. Things have grown to historic sizes. But the assumption is often that this is automatically bad. The left fears big business, the right fears big government. But if big is automatically bad, then why get big at all? What are the benefits? What are the risks? I think these are some of the important questions of our age. And we don’t really understand it. We don’t often think clearly about what bigness means.

As the historian Charles Geisst has written, ‘the entire period of American capitalism since the Industrial Revolution has been an unrelenting trend toward consolidation.’ And as we’ll see, consolidation, concentration, the authority to control the elephantine growth of modernity, is a story about fascism and totalitarianism too.

A History of the Threat

You cannot understand monopolies without knowing their history. Because the origin of the criticism was not one of corporate power but of royal power. I don’t want to go over this too much again, as I covered it in How Capitalism Conquered the World – only to say that granting an exclusive monopoly on trade was a traditional part of a monarch’s privileges. The monarch would sell, grant, loan the exclusive right to trade in tea for example to one company in the British territories. Thomas Paine described England as ‘cut up into monopolies’ in coal, windows, bricks, iron, tea… the list went on.

As free commerce became more accepted as something that could, in itself, drive growth and innovation, this idea of exclusive monopolies was challenged. This happened at the beginning of the 17th century in England in a famous court battle over whether Queen Elizabeth I could grant a monopoly on the manufacture of playing cards. It was said she was worried about her subjects wasting time gambling, but the most famous lawyer of the period, Sir Edward Coke, said that: ‘The queen could not suppress the making of cards within the realm,’ and that manufacture ‘cannot be suppressed but by Parliament, nor a man restrained from exercising any trade, but by Parliament’.

One member of parliament of the period said, ‘I cannot . . . conceive with my heart the great grievances that the town and country which I serve suffereth by some of these monopolies; it bringeth the general profit into a private hand, and the end of all is beggary and bondage of the subject’.

In the 18th century, the economist Adam Smith – famous for his defence of the free market – warned again the “wretched spirit of monopolies.” He believed that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Monopoly had become a byword for unjust authority and  control, which combined with the same fear of the oppression of religious beliefs, motivated many to leave England for America. This antimonopoly view was baked into the ideology of the pilgrims, and so many of the first legal codes and constitutions banned them entirely.

The 1641 Massachusetts, the Body of Liberties, a set of laws declared by the colony, said that, “No monopolies shall be granted or allowed amongst us, but of such new Inventions that are profitable to the Countrie, and that for a short time.”

Maryland’s 1776 constitution state that “monopolies are odious, contrary to the spirit of a free government, and the principles of commerce; and ought not to be suffered.” North Carolina’s also said that “monopolies are contrary to the genius of a free state, and ought not to be allowed.”

The aversion to monopolies was one of the causes of the American Revolution. While Britain had granted fewer monopolies since the 17th century, there was still a belief that commerce had to be controlled, especially within the Empire, so that wealth didn’t flow out to competitors like France. The most obvious monopoly was the East India Company’s on tea. Americans had to import British tea only, and the British taxed it, so there was a widespread smuggling economy in lots of products that were taxed. Again, monopoly = unjust authority. And so at the outbreak of the conflict 342 chests of East India Company tea were jettisoned into Boston harbour. Thomas Jefferson went as far as arguing that the constitution should include the freedom of ‘commerce from monopolies.’

Thomas Paine said In Common Sense that ‘there shall be no monopolies of any kind—that all trades shall be free, and every man free to follow any occupation by which he can procure an honest livelihood, and in any place, town and city throughout the nation’.

One America jurist said that ‘Queen Elizabeth lavished monopolies, with a munificent hand  [until] All trade and commerce, whether foreign or domestic, was appropriated by monopolists. Industry and the arts languished alike, under these unnatural restraints and fictitious embarrassments.’

Media and tech scholar Tim Wu, who writes a lot about this, writes that ‘the American Revolution in some ways had been foreshadowed by the revolt against Charles I, and that abuse of monopoly by the Crown was one of its great sparks’.

Those early concerns, the values they felt they were protecting, were freedom to choose who to trade with and what line of work to enter, that restraint of commerce was a bad thing for everyone, particularly when backed up by law, and that monarchical authority in retrain of trade was an unjustified abuse of power. But there’s a difference worth pointing out too: that these were monopolies granted by the state, not capitalist enterprises that had grown without the state granting them exclusivity.

Trusts

The first corporate monopolies were different. We’ve looked at the history of how these corporations came about in the last video, so I don’t want to revisit that again. It should be enough just to say that by the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of the industrial revolution, giant national conglomerates – or trusts – dominated their industries in oil, meatpacking, railways, coal, tobacco, lead and steel, sugar, piping, biscuits. Led by the robber barons, the more efficient businesses bought out, swallowed up, or outperformed the less efficient competitors.

These capitalist giants were genuinely new in history, and they controlled anywhere between 40% of the market in biscuits, for example, 90% in oil and 98% in sugar. The end of the nineteenth century saw a spate of mergers. One estimates over 2000 companies merging into 157 corporations. This is the meaning of Charles Geisst’s quote – that the history of capitalism has been unrelenting towards consolidation.

The central reason this consolidation happened was that it was, and is, usually cheaper to produce products at scale. Big business went about this in two ways: by consolidating horizontally and vertically. Horizontal means buying companies similar to yours, and integrating them into your manufacturing capacity and supply lines. While vertical integration means buying companies you use or are reliant on.

Take railroads. The American railroad magnate James Hill –  who is mentioned in the Great Gatsby – was known as the Empire builder. He bought up land, mines, and even banks to vertically integrate them into his business. All of the great railroad tycoons bought up other railroads. Rockefeller bought up mines for his oil refining empire. Whether it’s sugar or oil, the premise of economies of scale is simple: It’s much more efficient to have one system, unified – growing, shipping, transport, refining, packaging, distribution – than it is to have hundreds separately across the country. So as one business gets bigger, it’s product gets cheaper, making it more profitable for competitors to sell out than it is to continue operating.

So far so good, right? Cheaper products are better for everyone. There were four main issues the early critics of these trusts had. Price fixing, influence, autocracy, and controlling labour. The first – price-fixing – was the observation that while prices may have been cheaper at first, once the competition was wiped out, there was nothing stopping them raising prices. The second critique – influence – was that these Robber Barons had outsized influence through lobbying and bribery to shape legislation and business contracts in their favour. The third criticism – autocracy – was a fear inherited from the earlier critique of monopolies – that like monarchs granting exclusivity, one corporation in any industry looked too much like autocracy. Finally, they aggressively banned or punished unions and blocked workers from leaving jobs to work with competitors.

The first muckrakers, people like Ida Tarbel, who saw first hand what Standard Oil had done to her community with hostile takeovers of smaller businesses, described them as dictators and tyrannists. The Economist used similar language when it described the antics of Fisk and Gould at the Erie headquarters: “They are absolute dictators—neither rendering accounts, permitting discussion, nor regarding any interest but their own”.

It’s really crucial I think to get the criticisms right. So that we can see if they still apply today. To do that, we can look at one of the first populist movements in the world, The Grangers, in the US, who protested that the railroad monopolists were pushing up the costs to farmers when using the railways.

The Grangers

The Grangers were groups of American farmers who organised as a protest against railroad costs in the 1860s and 1870s. They were immediately successful, with a peak of 700,000 members into 21,000 of what they called lodges across the country. Because there was only one railroad company serving hundreds or thousands of farms in an area, the railroads could push up the prices they charged, or use discriminatory pricing to get their way.

AT one meeting someone said ‘In 1860 it cost nineteen cents to carry a bushel of wheat from Chicago to New York. In 1873 it costs thirty-seven cents—nearly double! Why? There are now more railroads to carry the produce and more produce to be carried than in 1860. The reason is there is more robbery!’ Another argued that grain purchasers and railroad companies colluded, saying “There is little or no competition between rival buyers,” he said, “because they either agree each morning to pay a certain fixed price that day, or else agree not to outbid each other, and divide their profits in proportion to the amount each man has bought.”’ One politician pointed to how the ‘“The beef trust fixes arbitrarily the daily price of cattle, from which there is no appeal, for there is no other market.” Another said that the sugar trusts were created “for the purpose of controlling or curtailing the production or supply” so that they could “increase their price to the people of the country.” So, when there’s one or two corporations servicing an entire industry who have no choice but to use your service, there is an incentive to nudge the prices up as much as possible, and theirs no countervailing force in price-signals from competitors. This is the price-fixing critique.

But this wasn’t the only complaint. Outright bribery was common too. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son – the Vanderbilts were the first national railroad magnates, said “When I want to buy up any politician, I always find the anti-monopolists the most purchasable—they don’t come so high.’

In building Standard Oil, Rockefeller aggressively lobbied, funded and bribed senators. Railroad man Jay Gould bribed government officials, including Ulysses S Grant’s brother-in-law to help manipulate gold markets.

They would often threaten competitors and bribe them in return for not competing. Two steamship lines admitted in hearings that they paid Vanderbilt half a million dollars per year in return for not competing with them.

So there are two types of bribery or lobbying – one aimed at politicians, the other aimed at competitors.

Finally, there was controlling labour. Unions were often banned. But there was also the problem of monopsony. If monopoly means there is only one seller, monopsony is when there is only one buyer, in this case one – or even just a handful – buyers of labour – in other words, employer. The fewer businesses in control of a market the more they can push down wages. Things like noncompete agreements, naked threats, collusion with other business owners to punish ‘troublemakers’ or whistleblowers, can be used to control workers.

The Minnesota Iron Company in 1884 for example had a policy that read: “No person belonging to any combination or union to control wages or regulate time or manner of service will be employed; and any employee entering such combination or union, or endeavoring to control wages…will be discharged promptly and finally, and will forfeit all money earned by him at the time of such discharge.”’

So autocracy, price fixing, bribery, lobbying, controlling workers, banning unions were seen to be common practices. Some of this was tolerated by the American public and politicians if the benefits were clear, but several crashes towards the end of the century convinced Americans to do something about it. Some have called the last few decades of the nineteenth century the long depression. Two of the biggest railroad companies failed in 1873 leading to a national market crash. There were others in 1896 and 1907. The failure of Jay Cooke’s railroad, Geisst says, caused 1873, ‘another in the long history of financial downturns precipitated by the robber barons and financiers.’ Economic inequality was perceived to be getting out of control.

The Sherman Antitrust Act

The Grangers and the Farmers movements were the first to organise and push for legislation. In 1873, the Farmers’ Anti-Monopoly Convention declared the principles that “All corporations are subject to legislative control; that such legislative control should be an express abrogation of the theory of the inalienable nature of chartered rights (meaning essentially that corporations shouldn’t have rights in the same inalienable way people do) and that it should be at all times so used as to prevent moneyed corporations from becoming engines of oppression.”

Iowa was the first state in the world to pass antitrust laws in 1888, making it illegal to “to regulate or fix the price of oil, lumber, coal, grain, flour, provision, or any other commodity or article whatever” or to “fix or limit the amount or quantity” of goods.

Senator John Sherman had been a lawyer and was the main author of the federal bill that passed two years later in 1890. Sherman was a great articulator of the reasoning for passing antitrust legislation.

He said that no social problem “is more threatening than the inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity that has grown within a single generation out of the concentration of capital into vast combinations to control production and trade and to break down competition.”

He said in another speech that legislation shouldn’t be designed to stifle free enterprise, but  “to prevent and control combinations made with a view to prevent competition, or for the restraint of trade, or to increase the profits of the producer at the cost of the consumer.”’

The key insight or argument was that breaking up or preventing monopoly power wasn’t the suppression of free enterprise. It was the opposite – the promotion of free enterprise.

Section one of the Sherman Act read: ‘Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal.’

Section two: ‘Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor’

The vague language raises some obvious and difficult questions. What counts as ‘restraint of trade’, when everything a company does is in an attempt to beat the competition. Restraint, contract, and combination are keywords here poured over and interpreted by lawyers. Every successful contract that makes your company better than the competition could be seen as a restraint on trade, and every acquisition of a competitor, no matter the reason, could be seen as a restraint on trade.

The broad philosophy, the idea, was easier than the details of where the line is, though that is often judicially the case. The philosophy, Sherman said famously, was that “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”

Demonstrating the cross-party consensus that something needed to be done, the bill passed the house unanimously, which must be a one off for a such a seemingly consequential piece of legislation. It passed the senate 51-1.

But because of those ambiguities, the difficulties of defining it, the imprecise language, the Sherman Act wasn’t acted upon for years. In one case, five years after in passed, in 1895, the Supreme Court rejected the government’s attempt to stop the American Sugar Refining Company buying out four smaller companies, which after it went through gave the company a 98% share in the market.

President McKinley’s administration was a laissez-faire one. Wu writes that the philosophy ‘suggested that economic problems would tend to work themselves out, and hence government intervention would usually do more harm than good.”

The banker J.P. Morgan created the steel trust in this period. McKinley didn’t attempt to block the deal. He did, though, hold a dinner hosting and in honour of Morgan – who was seen as the American government’s banker. It points to a problem we’ll explore more shortly – legislate all you want, what happens when a small number of CEOs and politicians dinner together. How can you protect against that kind of unofficial influence. How can you possibly ever know what Morgan and McKinley, say, promised each other over the dinner table in the White House? So legislation isn’t enough. You need a supreme court, a president, a department of justice, and a political and social culture willing to defend it and enforce it.

When Teddy Roosevelt replaced McKinley in 1901, this began to happen. Over two terms, Roosevelt’s government broke up or blocked more that forty different trusts, including beef and tobacco. The big one was in 1911, when Standard Oil was broken up. Rockefeller’s giant owned 67 smaller businesses including piping, marketing, refining, and transport. Public attention was galvanized by Ida Tarbell’s influential series of articles, turned into a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company, which included copies of exchanges between Rockefeller and smaller producers with Rockefeller writing “If you refuse to sell, it will end in your being crushed.” When it was broken up into several smaller oil companies, prices decreased, and innovation improved.

Like, Sherman, Roosevelt was an articulate defender of the antitrust position. He said that “A resolute and practical effort must be made to correct these evils,” Roosevelt concluded. “It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form, which frees them from individual responsibility, and enables them to call into their enterprises the capital of the public.” “Great corporations,” Roosevelt added, “exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.”

Another of the most influential thinkers of this period was the supreme court justice (or assistant) Louis Brandeis who coined the term ‘the curse of bigness’. He saw capitalism working best as he’d seen it in his hometown Louisville, were small businesses competed with other small stores in the community. There were no huge factories or corporations, and business owners and the community came together democratically face-to-face.

In 1911 Brandeis wrote ‘‘we are in a position, after the experience of the last twenty years, to state two things: In the first place, that a corporation may well be too large to be the most efficient instrument of production and distribution, and, in the second place, whether it has exceeded the point of greatest economic efficiency or not, it may be too large to be tolerated among the people who desire to be free.’’

But the difficulty in interpreting the philosophy remained. In 1914, the Clayton Act was passed, which aimed to clarify some of the details and prohibit certain practices. Robber Barons, for example, had used discriminatory pricing to control the market. For example, Rockefeller struck deals that meant that competitors would pay the railroads more for transport. This type of price discrimination was banned. Exclusivity contracts that would lessen competitors were also prohibited, as well as being a director of two or competing corporations. It also outlined some thresholds at which the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) would have to be notified of mergers and acquisitions. The lesson of the Clayton Act and subsequent acts like it is that the philosophy is one thing, but the devil is in the details, and a whole body of antitrust law slowly gets built up around a philosophy.

Oligopotarianism

I think it might be useful at this point to reflect on what we’re doing here. It’s applied history. We’re trying to use the past to illuminate the present. Now, history doesn’t repeat, at least never exactly. So history doesn’t provide perfect lessons. But it does help us orient ourselves, gives us some models of action, shows us how we got to where we are. In many ways, applied history is about reasons, risks, and results. We look at the reasons people did things in the past. We look at the results. And we assess the risks of acting or not acting. We’ll return to this idea, but I think this is one of the reasons for Godwin’s Law – that given enough time, someone inevitably brings up Hitler. Because fascism is a marker for what many see as the biggest risk. Why did it emerge, what were the reasons, the factors, what are the warning signs.

Fascism and totalitarianism were in some ways philosophies of the big. They required ‘strong’ men because our infrastructure, financial institutions, corporations, weapons, steel production, military, the state, surveillance networks – you name it – had, by the twentieth century grown to enormous historic sizes.

The Sherman Act didn’t stop this. Steel is the paradigmatic example. Demand obviously continued growing, in building, skyscrapers got talker, railways, bridges, weapons, stronger war machines, household appliances. In the twentieth century all of this really took off. And as demand grew it got cheaper to manufacture steel per tonne at scale in a unified network.

This is why a person as true blooded capitalist American as the banker J.P. Morgan, along with many others, came to believe in the virtue of some kind of centralised planning. He thought competition was ruinous. Here is one of the contradictions of modernity. People become freer to pursue their business interests. Things get bigger. We produce more. Business consolidates and concentrates. And we end up having bigger enterprises and fewer in charge of them. What happens politically when rather than thousands of business owners, spread across a geographical area, there are a handful in capital cities. You get a small class of business owners and politicians, who all know each other, with similar interests, thinking in the same way – you get an oligarchy.

This was increasingly the case in the early twentieth century – in the US, business leaders dined at the White House. In Russia, the entire economy was in the control of a few in Moscow.  And in trying to catch up with Britain and America, Germany and Japan both took more top down approaches to the advancing their economies. In Germany, giant cartels like Siemens and IG Farben dominated in steel, armaments, chemicals, and electrics.

These were known as the German ‘rationalizations’, and intellectuals in Germany often saw them as more civilized than the individualistic approach in America because they were rational, controlled, ordered, directed from the centre, rather than chaotic, competitive, scrappy.

One German economist of the period, Gustav Schmoller, wrote that the rationalizations ‘represented a progressive stage in the order of national economy, progress which would inevitably lead to a more highly organized form of the national economy.’

Then, in the 1930s, the Great Depression hit. There is a broad consensus among economists that the highly concentrated German economy made the depression worse. By their large nature, the cartels were rigid and unable to respond by adjusting production levels, experimenting and innovating, or adjusting prices. Even more consequential for German history, the highly concentrated economy made it easier for Hitler to consolidate power himself. He also believed a strong economy required a strong central command – a so-called  ‘capitalist planned economy’.

As one German historian writes ‘Germany’s cartels and monopolies proved ‘agile and dangerous pacemakers for the transformation of a free market into an authoritarian market’.

Instead of being spread out, with different views and values, different incentives, different checks and balances, living in different regions, the Nazi leadership and the Cartel leadership were condensed into a tight oligopoly.

As Wu writes ‘And so, as the Nazi Party tottered in 1932, the industrialists, previously divided and moderate, offered major financial support to the Nazis in their hour of greatest need. This was manifested by the ‘circle of friends’ becoming the main financial backers of the Nazi Party.’

In fact, the chemical giant IG Farben contributed 4.5 million Reichsmarks to the Nazis, and profited from labour at Auschwitz producing rubber, and even operated a concentration camp of its own, most infamously manufacturing the gas used in the Holocaust.

US Senator Harley Kilgore summarized matters in 1944: Germany ‘built up a great series of industrial monopolies in steel, rubber, coal and other materials. The monopolies soon got control of Germany, brought Hitler to power and forced virtually the whole world into war.’

The story was similar in Japan. What were called the ‘Zaibatsu’ were essentially national cartels were run by powerful families with longstanding dynastic heritage. The zaibatsu dominated Japanese economy life, controlling businesses and banking, and even sponsoring their own political parties Unlike the West, Japan had a less of a line between business and politics, public and private.

In an influential study after the war, the economic Corwin Edwards published a study concluding that the Zaibatsu were among the ‘groups principally responsible for the war and. . . a principal factor in the Japanese war potential.’

Like Brandies, who believed that the size of government and the size of business were equally threatening, in Germany a group called the Ordoliberals made similar warnings as the Nazis were coming to power.

In 1947, a leading Ordoliberal, Franz Bohm, write: ‘‘Power concentration within the private market will always create potential for war. It matters not whether the command system is National Socialist, socialist or communist in character: what is decisive is the fact that each command system owns an extraordinarily extensive power apparatus which can be centrally deployed and mastered by a very small number of people, that individual positions of power are necessarily apportioned within oligopolistic procedures that can neither be overseen nor vetoed by the public. . .’’

So In the aftermath of WWII, the Allies broke up German corporations and the Japanese zaibatsu. Forty-two Japanese companies were dissolved entirely, and twenty-six broken up.

In the 1950s, the lesson of the war was well remembered. One senator – Estes Kefauver – speaking in 1950 that he said: ‘I think we must decide very quickly what sort of country we want to live in. . . I am not an alarmist, but the history of what has taken place in other nations where mergers and concentrations have placed economic control in the hands of a very few people is too clear to pass over easily.’

Conservatives were fearful as much as liberals. Conservative economist George Stigler, for example, wrote in 1952: ‘The dissolution of big businesses is necessary to increase the support for a private, competitive enterprise economy, and to reverse the drift toward government control.’

I think Kefauver puts it well. The point of fascism as analogy is not to be alarmist, it’s not to go around calling things we don’t like fascist, but simply use history as a guide as to what could happen, why it happened, to construct as thorough narrative about where we are and where we’ve been as we can.

Technomonopoly

The comparisons with Japan and Germany get even more interesting in the post-war period. Picture the world economy and the advances of the period. West Germany and the West more broadly continued growing quicker the more centrally commanded East Germany and USSR. But a more insightful analogy appears when you compare tech in the US with tech in Japan.

AT&T – the American telecommunications giant – was the biggest company in the world, employed over a million staff, and was created by none other than JP Morgan. Importantly it controlled telephone services, telegraphy, plus the hardware, the installation, most of the phones and equipment, plus it was very close to the US government and military, working on nuclear warning systems and missiles. In other words, it was the at the forefront of innovation and technology.

In computing, IBM had a similar monopoly. In those days you would be buy a computer packaged with both IBM hardware and software, just as AT&T sold you line rental and phone hardware. It was all done by one company.

Across the Pacific, with a newly decentralised economy, Japan was surprising everyone by quickly catching up, with companies like Sony, Fujitsu, Sega, Nintendo. Many in the US saw not Europe, not Canada, not the USSR, but Japan as the biggest competitor.

This is where it gets contradictorily interesting. What’s the intuitive thing to do in this scenario? You have the best tech companies in the world. More successful than any company in history. Surely the intuitive thing to do is to support your innovators, your business leaders, the ones bringing profit into the country, make sure they have what they need, give them more power. The US did exactly the opposite. Drawing on that antimonopoly magna carta, cases were brought against IBM throughout the period and then broke AT&T up into smaller companies in the 80s.

Wu says ‘According to the logic of national championship, the American move was irrational, stupid, even suicidal.’

During the IBM trial the company spent up to a billion dollars on their defence. It lasted for years. One legal journalist wrote in 1982 that ‘‘a farce of such mind boggling proportions that any lawyer who now tries to find out about it. . . will be risking the same quicksand that devoured the lawyers involved in the case’’.

At the same time, Japan did the opposite. It wanted to be the first country to build a giant supercomputer. So what better thing to do than support your big innovative leading companies to do so. Why wouldn’t you? Walkman? Space invaders? Pacman? Sony? So in the 80s, that’s what they did.

But there was one thing that no-one really saw coming. It wasn’t supercomputers that were going to change the world, but smaller personal computers. Innovation wasn’t coming from those big institutional slow-moving mono-thinking giants, but from scrappy start-ups like Microsoft and Apple in garages in Silicon Valley.

What happened next? The US had another tech revolution, while Japan fell behind. Compared with Silicon Valley, no new Japanese tech firms came out of the 90s/00s. Counterintuitively, not supporting the giant dominant seemingly technologically advanced players, is the way to get innovation coming from outside. The big players are focused on what they do. The same happened with Microsoft after grew into the giant it is today. Bill Gates didn’t believe in the internet at first. Innovation came from outside the company – in AOL and Netscape.

AT&T could have dominated the internet industry, as it had a monopoly on long distance wires, hardware, everything to connect. It even tried to crush rivals like MCI who were trying to innovate with microwave long-distance services. Phone rates fell by 40% when AT&T was broken up.

Learning From the Past

Which gets us to today. In particular, the focus on big tech and those conglomerates at the beginning. The point of applying history is to do two things: remember that history doesn’t repeat, so there are no immutable repeatable 1:1 lessons, while simultaneously thinking about how the past is one of the only references point we have. We should use then it as analogy. What might happen? What were the results when it happened before? What are the risks of not acting? What’s the same and what’s changed? It’s useful to have a loose list of concepts, and how they relate to each other, in mind to then apply to present problems.

Let’s think about a few.

Risk One: Exclusionary Practices

This is the big one. Price-fixing, conspiracy, cartels, attempts to monopolise, certain non-compete agreements; in the US, the FTC looks on all of these as exclusionary, as rigging the market. The big fear here is the artificial inflation of prices. The most obvious place this happens is when a company becomes so dominant it can push up prices without the fear of a competitor lowering their own to compete.

Study after study show how prices are pushed up after consolidation. Prices for TVs have gone up more than inflation for every year of the past twenty years. Or take that sunglasses manufacturer, Luxottica. Sunglasses can now be made for a few dollars, and so the margin is often 5000%. One example of how this is sustained: in 2007, Oakley tried to drop their prices to compete with Luxottica. Luxottica responded by taking Oakleys out their stores, which devalued the firm, and them Luxottica bought Oakleys in a very hostile takeover. One study used in court showed that having a Wild Oats store in the vicinity of a Whole Foods caused prices to drop. Then Whole Foods bought out Wild Oats and prices went up.

Risk Two: Corporate Tyranny

Then there’s lobbying, bribing, using market power to skew contracts or regulations. This was the original critique inherited from monarchical monopoly and Sherman’s complaint that: if we won’t accept a King in the political realm we shouldn’t in the economic. The risk here is on an axis between democracy and oligarchy. Do we want to live in a society where concentration moves towards a small group with disproportionate power. The big risk analogy here is Japan and Germany in the 30s but also China today, tightly controlled so-called ‘everything apps’ like  WeChat that not only captures all data but has a close relationship with the state known for dystopian surveillance.

As Walter Bennet wrote, ‘nothing provides a finer weapon for the budding dictator than a concentration of economic power which he can take over at the top.’

Risk Three: Wage Depression

Then there’s the effect monopolisation has on work and wages. Union busting, punitive terms and conditions, and the downward pressure on wages are more common when there are fewer companies to sell your labour too. This was the monopsony issue we looked at.

This isn’t just academic. To take one example, In 2006 Nurses sued hospitals in America who has violated antitrust laws by depressing nurses wages by a secret agreement. Apple and Google have been accused of having antipoaching agreements. Noncompete agreements are common.

Risk Four: Discourages Innovation

This is difficult to measure but I think the evidence is strong that innovation tends to come, not always, but tends to come from individuals and smaller companies. When AT&T was broken-up, the phone network and tech didn’t suffer, if anything there was innovation. The same with IBM. This was the comparison with Japanese companies we looked at. Microsoft has a history of buying, copying, or excluding competitors products. After Standard Oil was broken up, because the smaller companies had to compete, there were innovations in things like surveying, drilling, and transport.

Benefits

Finally, we also have to acknowledge the benefits of being big. Theoretically, buying out smaller companies is profitable for both because of economies of scale which should make products cheaper for all of us. Then there are network effects – which apply to both trainlines, for example, and Facebook – that the more people are connected, the bigger the network, the better it is, and the higher the costs of leaving.

Solutions

Finally, we use the past to look at solutions, approaches, plus how they’ve changed. Each new generation approaches this subject in new ways, as technology, industry, politics changes.

The issues with Meta, say, are not the same as the problems of Standard Oil, although there might be some cross-over. There is the issue that as new regulations are passed because of changing conditions the law becomes so overregulated so as to become too generalised. In other words, regulations passed to address issues with Standard Oil might prohibited a tech company from doing something that is warranted because the conditions are different.

In short though, some of the solutions are Stopping mergers (what percentage share?), breaking up (in the last resort), Microsoft consent decree, which instead of breaking Microsoft up, required it to play by certain rules like not forcing competitors to package Internet Explorer with Windows. Then there are specific laws and regulations prohibiting certain practices – price fixing, exclusionary practices, non-compete practices, and so on.

Monopolies Today

The global economic landscape today is in many ways even more concentrated than it was in the 19th century. The biggest question is how concentrated do you allow a market to get? In many industries – from search engines to microprocessors to shopping malls – where over and over, 3-4 companies have 95% plus market share. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean they’re monopolies, if each has a 25% share.

Take something like toilet paper – dominated by a handful of companies. It’s a simple product that benefits a lot from giant economies of scale. As long as there’s some competition between them that stops us paying big bucks per wipe – I feel there’s so many jokes here I’m just gonna move on – then that’s good, right?

So let’s look at the elephant in the room, Big Tech.

There are a number of antitrust suits against Google, Meta, and Apple going through the US courts right now.

A judge recently ruled that Google had violated the Sherman Act and had a monopoly in search. The ruling argued that contracts with Apple and phone manufacturers to make Google search default was ‘exclusionary’, with the Judge saying that ‘“The prospect of losing tens of billions in guaranteed revenue from Google — which presently come at little to no cost to Apple — disincentivizes Apple from launching its own search engine when it otherwise has built the capacity to do so’.

In other words, Google pays apple $20 billion dollars per year to have Google search as default. The Department of Justice argues that Google uses ‘the power of defaults’ to maintain a monopoly anti-competitively. Google ads exec Jerry Dischler also admitted Google hiked up ad prices quietly.

Importantly, under US law, it is not illegal to have a monopoly, only to obtain or maintain one illegally. As Lauren Feiner at the Verge writes, ‘The DOJ [Department of Justice] argued that Google illegally monopolized the general search advertising market by effectively cutting off key distribution channels for rivals through exclusionary contracts.’

And Meta – Facebook’s parent company – has been accused by the FTC of buying Instagram and WhatsApp as “engaged in a systemic strategy” to “eliminate threats to its monopoly.”

Facebook saw the fast-growing Instagram as a direct competitor. When Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1billion it had around 30 million users. Facebook had approaching a billion. But Instagram was growing at a million users per day, and as TechCrunch reported at the time, was on track to surpass Facebook. Regulators in the UK decided it was fine because they weren’t competitors, as Facebook wasn’t a ‘photo taking app’. WhatsApp was similarly purchased for $19 billion.

One of the issues antitrust law has to deal with is market concentration and how it’s measured. There are no hard and fast rules but they use measures like HHI to work this out, and a rule of thumb is that a 50% market share = a highly concentrated market that will likely be scrutinized.

Another issue is how you classify industries. What counts as a social media platform, for example. Do you include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Reddit, Twitter in the same category. Is WhatsApp fundamentally different, or could it have become a social media platform?

Conclusion

Much of this comes down to calculations of risk, reward, and imperfect solutions. What size do you allow something to get? What counts as exclusionary? What counts as price fixing? How do you measure such a thing as the potential future effects on innovation? What kind of business meeting counts as a ‘conspiracy’?

In a 1963 case, the Supreme Court established an influential precedent that mergers resulting in a 30% market share are unlawful. If you were looking at breaking up Meta into three separate companies – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – the case could quite easily be made that Meta exceeds that market share, and did so when Facebook bought Instagram in 2012.

And breaking up a company in not the only solution. Sure, you can go to DuckDuckGo instead of Google easily, but the DoJ’s (Department of Justice) case is that Google’s deal with Apple stops Apple from creating their own search engine. If that’s exclusionary then you can prohibit deals like it specifically.

All things considered, the risk of not intervening is high enough, and the potential of rewards also high enough, to warrant the intervention. What’s the downside of breaking up Meta? Even shareholders benefit if the individual companies become more innovative.

But we should also remember that Big Tech is new. The solutions that worked for Standard Oil might not be suitable for social media platforms. With such a new technology, radically new thinking is needed. But that’s for another video.

As Wu writes, ‘it is notable that the peak of anti-monopoly enforcement coincided with a period of extraordinary gains in prosperity in the industrialized world, and also gains in wealth and income equality.’

Those Ordoliberals in Germany compared an ideal government to a gardener, cutting back plants that had become too overpowering to let other plant thrive; weeding, tending to the garden, encouraging new flowers to grow.

Sources

Charles Geisst, Monopolies in America

Amy Klobuchar, Antitrust

Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire

Levy, Ages of American Capitalism

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/19/23880275/google-search-ads-competition-auction-prices-doj-trial-antitrust

https://www.theverge.com/23869483/us-v-google-search-antitrust-case-updates/archives/3#stream-entry-8ae890bf-2b55-43fd-b9e4-14dd1886ad7e

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23875342/justice-department-google-antitrust-search-trial-week-one-recap

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2752281 

The post Monopoly World: Oligarchy & Authoritarianism appeared first on Then & Now.

Understanding Marx is key to understanding the political and economic waters that have gotten us to where we are today, and leads to a big question: do we still live in Marx’s world?

He was a towering intellect. One contemporary said, ‘Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person . . . and you have Dr. Marx’.

Another said, ‘Marx himself was the type of man who is made up of energy, will and unshakeable conviction.’

Marx’s life was one of exile, secret societies, intense study, and poverty. Without judgement or bias, we’ll try and unpack his most important ideas, before returning to some common criticisms at the end.

Because many misunderstand Marx or at least don’t understand what he was truly saying. Many associate him with communism, about which he actually had little to say. What he really sought to understand was capitalism, commerce, markets, industrialisation and technological progress, and questions about what makes us truly human.

Marx absorbed and thought through all the trends and ideas around him. But what was most new in Marx was that it wasn’t thinkers that would change the world, but action by ordinary people.

To understand what that really means we have to go on a journey across history – from churches and fields to factories and cities. We need to understand where he was coming from.

Contents:

• Inverting Hegel’s Ideas
• Alienation
• The Economic Turn and Dialectical Materialism
• The Communist Manifesto (1848)
• Capital
• Use and exchange/Commodity
• Labour Theory of Value
• Money: Commodity Fetishism
• Surplus Value
• Forces, Relations, Bases, and Superstructures
• Technology and Productivity
• Class Struggle X Revolution
• Communism
• Conclusion

Inverting Hegel’s Ideas

Marx was a great synthesizer of the trends, movements, and ideas around him. He was born in 1818 in Prussia, modern day Germany, just after the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the spread of new liberal ideas about rights and freedom. New science, industries and factories were spreading across Europe. It was a time of unprecedented dynamic change.

Change is key to Marx. And to understand change there was no better person to turn to than Georg Hegel. He had argued that all previous moments in history were the unfolding of ideas, concepts, truth, dialectically, moving us forward.

I’m simplifying here, but for Hegel, this truth was an idea – idealism – images and words and concepts that led, slowly across history, to a greater understanding of the world and the universe, better political systems, more freedom.

The source of all of this, ultimately for Hegel, was god.

Hegel was still alive when Marx was young. But to young radical admirers, Hegel had become a dull conservative figure. He believed in progress, in rights, in freedom, but he also believed in order, in monarchy, and in religion. To a younger generation, these were oppressive forces.

A loose group of young intellectuals called the Young Hegelians emerged, who were influenced by Hegel but sought to go further than their old master. They were much more republican, liberal, and democratic.

Over time, they mostly got more radical, tending towards revolution rather than reform.

This was a century of reform and revolutions – minor and major, successful and failed, from America to Germany. The problem was many radicals in Europe didn’t really know what to replace the old aristocratic system with.

The Young Hegelians started with religion. They attempted to remove god from Hegel’s system. Two thinkers in particular – Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach – were the most influential critics of religion of the time.

Hegel had argued that the unfolding of history was the product of God revealing himself through time. That we are all products of, the creation of, god, and slowly come to know the universe, science, the world better and so, in a way, return to god expansively.

But to the Young Hegelians, this positions ideas as kind of up there, above us, transcendent, unfolding down to us.

In other words, we imagine a god that is the creator of us, all powerful, that directs and guides us, but is also unreachable. 

Feuerbach argued that when people did this, they were projecting. God is the sum total of the imaginative powers of our species projected onto some all powerful being. Instead, we should recognise this for what it is – our imagination. Religion is ‘the dream of the spirit’ he said. It actually disempowered us by displacing all our thoughts onto some supreme being, instead of attributing them to us as a powerful species.

In his book on Marx, political theorist Alexander Callinicos writes, ‘Feuerbach argued that Hegel had turned something that is merely the property of human beings, the faculty of thought, into the ruling principle of existence. Instead of seeing human beings as part of the material world, and thought merely as the way they reflect that material world, Hegel had turned both man and nature into mere reflections of the all-powerful Absolute Idea.’

In other words, by attributing our ideas to something outside of the world, particularly as supernatural religious phenomena, we alienated something within ourselves. It means our thoughts are not ours – it falsely presents them as coming from god – in the form of commandments, origin stories, church and political authority. It holds us back.

Fredrich Engels – Marx’s lifelong friend and collaborator – wrote that Feuerbach “placed materialism on the throne again”. He reminded us that ideas are the products of real human lives.

Bruno Bauer was even more radical. He argued that by asserting that the world was the product of god’s will, we justified the world as it was. Poverty? God’s will. King’s and despots? God’s will. Religion obstructed change.

From Bauer, Marx would develop his famous idea that religion was the opium of the masses. It says yes life is hard but that’s gods will and you’ll be rewarded in the afterlife, rather than encouraging a more progressive idea of history.

Now, here’s the important part. These young Hegelians were still Hegelians, meaning they were interested in ideas, they believed in the power of ideas. You just need the right ones, the better ones, the more truthful ones, to battle the old, repressive, wrong ones.

Another young Hegelian – the early anarchist Max Stirner – argued that bad ideas were spooks – bad thoughts that haunt the mind.

Marx criticised this approach. There are two significant early works here – On the Jewish Question published in 1843 and The German Ideology published in 1845. 

It’s all well and good advocating for religious freedom, property rights, liberal ideas like freedom of speech– but all of it, in the end, leaves the real physical, material lives of ordinary people untouched.

For Marx that wasn’t enough because, ‘once the holy form of human self-alienation has been unmasked, the first task of philosophy, in the service of history, is to unmask self-alienation in its unholy forms. The criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.’

Many – including Hegel and Rousseau before him – thought the state could be above society, neutral, general, negotiating fairly between different interests. But like the Young Hegelian critique of religion being too up there, Marx saw the same argument applying to the state.

The French and American Revolutions had made the claims that everyone was equal – in freedoms, before the law, in speech – and that this political equality emancipated people.

As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski puts it in his book on Marxism: ‘purely political and therefore partial emancipation is valuable and important, but it does not amount to human emancipation.’

But what does emancipation really mean if some had nothing, were starving, had no land or means or resources, were taken advantage of?

Marx wrote that a liberal revolution would liberate only as, ‘an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprices, and separated from the community’. Instead, a social revolution could offer “human emancipation”.

He thought that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was a ‘big step forward, but is not the final form of human emancipation.’

He continued: ‘just as the Christians are equal in heaven, but unequal on earth, so the individual members of the nation are equal in the heaven of their political world, but unequal in the earthly existence of society’.

Politics must become concrete. Marx asks how can liberty just mean the right to not be interfered with, to acquire as much property as possible? What does this kind of liberty mean if you have nothing?

Marx writes: ‘None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community.’

In our time, all of the inaccessibility of politics, the talking in parliaments, the debates and the distractions, the dramas and sensationalist press, all pull away from the real material issues in people’s lives. This is what Marx was starting to get at.

He was beginning to, in his own words, invert Hegel – bring his ideas down to the gritty, dirty, physical, hard earth.

In The German Ideology Marx criticised his Young Hegelian contemporaries for believing that ideas can change the world. This was ideology – it distorted thinking and concealed the real issues.

Kolakowski writes: ”Ideology’ in this sense is a false consciousness or an obfuscated mental process in which men do not understand the forces that actually guide their thinking, but imagine it to be wholly governed by logic and intellectual influences.’

Again, it ignores material, sensory, physical life.

For Marx, freedom, progress, should be understood as “power, as domination over the circumstances and conditions in which an individual lives”.

Ridiculing idealism, ideology, the idea that ideas are dominant, Marx quips that, ‘Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to get this notion out of their heads, say by avowing it to be a superstitious, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water.’

Summing up his critique of the Young Hegelians, Marx famously wrote: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’

Alienation

The Romantics were another influence on Marx. They had argued, just a generation or so before him, that much about modern life, industry, and politics seemed to separate us from what they saw as a kind of natural wholeness.

In fact, Marx was a romantic in his early years. Like many others now and then, he wrote bad romantic poetry in his twenties. He came to the Romantics primarily through Hegel.

Hegel took the idea of unity and completeness from them. That a person should be able to develop themselves fully – three dimensionally – in relationship with the world around them, rather than feel disconnected from it.

In another words, Romanticism was about a striving towards completeness, towards being at home in the world.

The opposite of this was alienation, feeling estranged, disconnected from the world. Hegel said that individuals are in a “torn and shattered condition.”

Marx had a complicated relationship with this idea. He hated Hegel when he was young, accused him of mystification and obscurantism. But he came back to him, turned him upside down, and some say, as we’ll get to, abandoned him later on.

Either way, understanding alienation is fundamental as it was central to Marx’s development, and to many of the critiques of the modern world at the time and since.

So what is it? In his book on alienation, the philosopher Richard Schacht points to several definitions. According to one, alienation is ‘avoidable discontent’. Another is that it’s a feeling ‘which accompanies any behavior in which the person is compelled to act self-destructively.’ Another is that alienation points to ‘some relationship or connection that once existed, that is ‘natural,’ desirable, or good, has been lost.’

But the word that comes up most in the early Marx is ‘estranged’ – hinting at something that is no longer close.

It comes up in several ways. First money is alienating because it’s a stand-in for the real social relationships that are hidden underneath. It disconnects us from them and hides them. It becomes an ‘alien medium’ instead of people being the mediators – it separates us. Money is ‘men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind’.

But labour is ‘estranged’ and alienated too. What workers do all day is for someone else on something for someone else. What they’re doing is out of their control, they are estranged from it.

Even their own bodies can become alien to them, as they’re forced to sell their own labour to stay alive. I like to think of it as a zombified state, on the factory line, doing something for no good reason except to afford to stay alive. Marx says the object the labourer produces ‘confronts’ as ‘something alien’ something ‘independent’ which stands ‘over and against’ them.

Kolakowski writes: ‘the alienation of labour is expressed by the fact that the worker’s own labour, as well as its products, have become alien to him. Labour has become a commodity like any other’.

On top of that, the division of labour means workers don’t even work on or understand the entire product. They’re divided into small, disconnected parts. 

Marx writes: ‘Not only is the specialized work distributed among the different individuals, but the individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation, thus realizing the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which presents man as a mere fragment of his own body’.

Capitalism he says, converts the ‘worker into a crippled monstrosity.’

In On the Jewish Question Marx writes that while humans are supposedly equal in the political realm, in everyday life, the worker ‘degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.’

But – and here’s the key – according to Hegel we produce, project, and create the conditions of our own alienation as a species, so then by recognising that condition, we aim and work to overcome it. In other words, that progress arises out of the discontent of alienation itself. The bad becomes the good. Negativity drives us forward.

Kolakowski writes: ‘The greatness of Hegel’s dialectic of negation consisted, in Marx’s view, in the idea that humanity creates itself by a process of alienation alternating with the transcendence of that alienation.’

But, remember, Marx flips Hegel on his head. For Hegel that process was in the realm of ideas. For Marx, it’s material – it’s about the real conditions on the ground. Who is doing what, where, for who, in what ways. It’s how alienation confronts us in physical objects and processes like money, labour, in bricks and mortar. Kolakowski writes that the ‘true starting-point is man’s active contact with nature.’

And Petrucciani says that, ‘man is not only a natural sensuous being, but that specific being which self-produces itself through historical labor, and through the dialectic of estrangement and re-appropriation that characterizes it.’

In his early writings, Marx leant heavily on the concept of alienation. Some argue he abandoned it later on as it wasn’t a rigorous enough economic concept. Some – like Louis Althusser – argue that you can divide Marx into an early stage and a latter mature one. Others like David Harvey disagree. Petrucciani, for example says that while the early ideas become more ‘precise, reformulated, and filled with contents’, they’re never abandoned.

Callinicos writes that in the early work, ‘everything is built around the contrast between human nature as it is—debased, distorted, alienated—and as it should be.’

But this begs a question: how do you know what human nature should be? Surely everyone’s different? How can you get an ought – a moral claim about the world – out of an is – how the world is. And isn’t that idealism? Exactly what Marx sought to critique in the young Hegelians?

Marx’s problem with alienation can be imagined like this. You say capitalism alienates us. I say from what? You say from our natural selves. I say, like Adam Smith did, that capitalism is natural because human beings have a natural desire to trade, exchange and barter. You say it’s not natural to work in a factory all day. I say it’s not natural to farm or wear clothes.

This is called the naturalistic fallacy. That we place an arbitrary dividing line between something natural and something not natural, when in fact, everything comes from the earth, everything changes, everyone is different.

Marx tried to get around this problem with the concept of species-being.

For Marx, there isn’t a magical spiritual natural human essence that’s repressed by modern society. Instead, he imagines human society as a whole at any given time – everything humans are doing, arguing, being – and then contrasts individuals with that. 

Marx wrote ‘the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’. Our essence as a species – our species-being – is the totality of our economic systems, cultures, politics, our history.

What he’s saying is that we have an idea of our species in our head, our relationship to it, what’s possible, and so we can become estranged and alienated from that.

A natural society isn’t something cooked up by philosophers – like Plato did in The Republic – designed, laid out, engineered. Society is a process that’s happening right now, it’s always happening, it’s about the development of it and how we relate to it.

The philosopher Lloyd Easton writes: ‘Marx particularly warns against establishing “society” as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is a social being as the subjective, experienced existence of society.’

What you need then is to find a process that moves from alienation to a world in which everyone is connected to, has some control over, is served by our species-being. That the individual and society are not estranged, but in development with each other. And it’s around this time that Marx starts calling himself a communist.

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 – a set of notes not published until 1932, and maybe the least catchy title of all time (if it was a Youtube title it would be something like ‘You wont believe these 10 secrets about wealth and wisdom) – Marx wrote that communism was ‘the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being’.

Communism is the achievement of a “real community”. Under communism the “contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or individual family and the interest of all” will, according to Marx, be overcome.

Communism should be ‘the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.’

Again, many argue the language of alienation and species-being was abandoned in the later works. Although most of the most influential commentators disagree. Kolakoski holds ‘there is no discontinuity in Marx’s thought, and that it was from first to last inspired by basically Hegelian philosophy.’

Social-being estranged, alienated, individual development repressed, then recognition, reconciliation, return, and emancipation.

The Economic Turn and Dialectical Materialism

For Marx, this new focus on material conditions, social relations, and physical life demanded a new method to understand capitalism. The old philosophy wouldn’t do. He’s fascinated by stuff not adequately captured by reflecting on ideas – wood, machines, protests. He borrows from Benjamin Franklin, for example, the notion that we’re a tool making species. That that’s what separates us from animals. Engels studies the working conditions in and around his father’s Manchester factory where he works. Both are working to bring philosophy down from the heavens.

For a long time, peasants in rural France and Germany had a traditional right to collect wood and twigs from the forest for their fires. But in the 1820s, as enclosures were happening and capitalism and property rights were expanding, laws were passed that ended these ancient rights.

Remember, Hegel and Rousseau had argued that the state, the government, could be the neutral representation of the general will, of all interests.

But in these new wood theft laws, Marx saw the obvious problem with that logic. The government, in banning the collecting of wood to keep warm by poor peasants, were taking the side of wealthy landowners over ordinary people.

In other words, the state became the vehicle for the propertied class who held economic power above all else, against ‘the poor, politically and socially propertyless.’

Engels later wrote, ‘I heard Marx say again and again that it was precisely through concerning himself with the wood-theft law and with the situation of the Moselle peasants that he was shunted from pure politics over to economic conditions, and thus came to socialism’.

It was in wood, in tools, in material that the truth of alienation could be found. If peasants and labourers were kicked off the land, if all of the countryside was enclosed in plots to farm, if the peasants had no tools or machines or money of their own, what would happen? They’d be forced to sell their own labour.

Here was a key and classic distinction – between those that had and those that had nothing. That the exclusive ownership of the tools, the means, of ownership and production was one of the keys to prosperity, to flourishing, to overcoming alienation.

This, again, was what was special about humans: we make tools – and that projection of an idea onto a material object that helps us to survive is key to our historical development.

Marx wrote, ‘The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness’.

We till, sow, fence, build, we enslave with chains, we engineer, we innovate. These are the things our lives are quite literally built around. They make up our material lives, they help us overcome our limitations, and they have a dynamic history.

Marx writes: ‘Men have history because they must produce their life, and because they must produce it moreover in a certain way: this is determined by their physical organisation; their consciousness is determined in just the same way.’

This is the basis of Marx’s materialism. That it’s our material, physical, sensory, social, productive life that matters. This may seem accepted, at least in large part, today, but when economics as a field was very new, all of this was very novel.

Most would have argued it was leadership or intelligence or great thought that determined the course of history and people’s lives – Napoleon a great military strategist, Plato the great philosopher, religion as the teachings of divine scripture. Marx was arguing to the contrary – the economy mattered most.

He wrote, ‘Men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness’.

This led him to the nascent field of economics. His brilliance would be to combine economics with philosophy. The newspaper he had edited in Germany had been shut down, he’d moved to Paris but had been kicked out, and now he was in exile in Britain. He spent months in the British Library pouring over Adam Smith and David Ricardo, recording whatever he could find, filling notebook after notebook.

He borrowed several concepts that we’ll come to, but he was immediately critical too. From his Hegelianism Marx believed everything was connected, that no man was an island.

Adam Smith – trying to understand the logic of the new commercially driven societies developing across Europe and America – started from the assumption of natural, individual self-interest. That ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’.

Marx hated this. He wrote ‘Production by an isolated individual outside society . . . is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without human beings living together and talking to each other’.

He called them Robinsonades – that they assumed each person was a Robinson Crusoe on his own little island.

Callinicos writes, ‘Marx criticized the political economists because they tended to treat society as a collection of isolated individuals lacking any real relation to one another, so that “the limbs of the social system are dislocated’.

Another point that immediately dissatisfied Marx was their tendency to naturalise commercial society. Smith, for example, thought humans had a ‘natural tendencies to truck , trade, and batter,’ and so the market was the natural result of that.

Again, drawing on Hegel, Marx saw this as absurd. History changed across time.

He wrote – ‘Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions; those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions.’

They failed to see how there was nothing natural about them – human societies changed over time and human life was embedded in that societal context.

He wrote ‘the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society, and, indeed [a product] in the sense that it is a historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one’.

So this was how Marx proceeded: economics plus Hegel.

This idea of development, change, progress was the fashion of the day. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

Marx later wrote ‘Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention?’.

The key was to understand how history unfolded as a system. It wasn’t that the lion and the deer or the worker and the capitalist were just in competition with each other, separate from each other, but that they were part of the same totality, the same system, and that system had to develop and change in a connected way dialectically.

He summed up his method like this: ‘My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of “the Idea,” is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought’.

The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Ok, there’s a final influence that we haven’t talked about much: the utopian socialists. These were varied movements and thinkers that emerged out of the Enlightenment ideal of progress, reason, and rights – that you could, in short, plan and design a society in which the needs of everyone could be met fairly.

The first was Francois-Noel Babeuf and his conspiracy of equals. Babeuf and his followers planned a coup during the French Revolution.

His Conspiracy of Equals planned to implement absolute equality in France, with the manifesto reading: ‘We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death; this is what we need. And we’ll have this real equality, at whatever the cost’.

Spoiler alert, Babeuf’s conspiracy didn’t end well for him.

After the French Revolution there were Saint-Simonians and Fourierists.

Henri de Saint-Simon, distrusted democracy and the ‘mob’ but was an Enlightenment figure who believed society could be organised in everyone’s interests by men of science – that the state could technocratically plan society from the top down.

Charles Fourier on the other hand argued for rational communes organised around universal principles of psychology based on different personality types who would perform different jobs. Fourier was an eccentric and influential character who thought that ideal communes would have exactly 1620 people.

In Britain and then America, Robert Owen argued that our character was influenced by our environment, and so focused on education, reform, and cooperatives.

It was in Owen’s Cooperative Magazine in 1827 that the term socialist was likely used for the first time.

Finally, during the 1848 revolutions Louis Blanc argued for a ‘dictatorship of proletariat’ – without which the forces of reaction – foreign, aristocratic, monarchical, etc – would simply retake power. He wrote that the provision government should ‘regard themselves as dictators appointed by a revolution which had become inevitable and which was under no obligation to seek the sanction of universal suffrage until after having accomplished all the good which the moment required’.

What made all of these utopian? That you could conceptualise, idealistically, a rational planned commune or society – a utopia, and build it like an engineer designing a building. This ‘utopianism’ is what Marx rejected, but he still had one foot in this tradition.

In 1836, a group of German exiles in Paris and then London formed a Communist League of the Just. Marx joined them and they changed their name to the Communist League in 1847. Marx and Engels worked up a manifesto in 1848. At almost exactly the same time, by complete coincidence, a revolution broke out in Paris, which spread across Europe. These revolutions differed from place to place and were mostly liberal, but communism was just beginning to be taken more seriously.

The Communist Manifesto began with these now famous lines: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.’

It continued: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’.

The Manifesto is short, the best introduction to Marx you can find, pretty easy to read, written to be popular, and contains most of Marx’s most important early ideas, ending with the famous lines: ‘workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!’

In this early period Marx discovered the next big piece of his puzzle: the proletariat.

The bourgeoisie and the ruling classes could never be philosopher kings or just leaders in Plato’s or Hegel’s sense. No-one stands above and separate from the system like god looking down pulling the stings. The rulers are part of the system, they benefit from it, and so change has to come from elsewhere.

The proletariat – workers who must sell their alienated, estranged labour, who understand money as alienation, who work materially physically at the ground level – they are the force of change.

Petrucciani writes: ‘The proletariat is the class that lives through the most complete negation and which therefore becomes itself the subject able to deny all existing relations.’

This is why the call of the manifesto and the Communist League’s slogan was ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’ It was through this that Marx argued that the material conditions produce ideas, but then ideas can then influence material change.

Marx wrote ‘The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.’

For Marx this wasn’t a moral argument. It was a historical, economic, dialectical one – a scientific one, a matter of forces. One class was getting richer, the other immiserated. Reactionary, aristocratic, monarchical, despotic governments were holding on to power across Europe and using increasing suppressive tactics. The continent was a pressure cooker. Marx believed that real revolution would come.

He wrote, ‘revolution is possible only in the periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production, come in collision with each other. . . . A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis. It is, however, just as certain as this crisis’

The Manifesto brought all of these early themes together. However, while it was initially printed thousands of times it fell into obscurity for over twenty years before becoming more influential in the 1870s. And in those twenty years, crises and slumps would come, Marx kept thinking revolution would happen, but capitalism, railways, factories, steamships, and capitalist colonialism kept on spreading.

Trade unions organised for the first time, having been banned in many countries, socialists and anarchists formed the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 – the first International.

As he waited for revolution, Marx settled down to write his magnum opus – an analysis of the entire system.

Capital

At this point, Marx is juggling quite a few of the modern ideas around him. He knows he wants to ground his work materially, but he needs a concrete place to start.

Because for him, capitalism is dynamic, dialectical, in motion. He knows it’s transformative – all that is solid, he writes, melts into air.

For this reason, it’s important to remember that Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, or Das Kapital, or simple Capital, published in 1867 is not meant as a universal truth, but a snapshot of the European capitalism of the period, and the laws that Marx thinks emerge from it.

It’s a hugely ambitious, diverse book, full of references to literature, economic and philosophical ideas, the politics and culture of the period. Furthermore, it’s the first of three volumes, the second and third left in notes at the time of Marx’s death and compiled by Engels. And on top of that, there were meant to be six volumes, looking at land, the state, and the world market.

So its impossible to do it justice. Even most of Capital’s detractors don’t deny it’s a masterpiece. Agree with its conclusions or not, reading it and understanding it is indispensable for understanding the world we live in.

The themes are varied, but the most important are these: The question of what we value, and why, what gives things their monetary value. Labour, work – what motivates it, what’s at the root of it – capital and wealth – how they function and circulate – and the forces, movements, and contradictions that arise from the relationships between all of these.

The simplest way to think of what Marx is saying is this: that capital is an impersonal force – like gravity or meteorology or mathematics – with a life of its own.

Which is why Marx believed what he was doing was science. It wasn’t speculative in the sense of philosophers thinking up ideas in dusty studies. Capital is full of references to statistics, factory routines, rich and dense descriptions of how craftsman use different instruments, pamphlets and parliamentary debates. In this sense, it’s a very modern history – drawing on lots of evidence – of 19th century capitalism.

Marx is a man of the Enlightenment. Maybe one of the last great Enlightenment ‘system builders’, inspired by people like Newton – the idea that there are scientific forces, laws of motion, at play both in the natural world and in human societies.

The key for Marx was to search around, peel away, zoom in, interrogate – like astronomers and scientists do – to find the kernel, the secret hidden truth at the core of history.

Use and exchange/Commodity

So where does Marx begin? With something that’s all around us, that’s at the core of capitalism and all of our lives, that we cannot do without and may contain some secrets – the commodity.

What is it? It’s not obvious from the surface. They’re all so different. Theres almost nothing that unites them – a bus ticket so different from an iphone, a movie on DVD from a carefully crafted table. But Marx wants to find a concept that unites them all.

He realised that first, despite all of their differences – one being food, the other being a toy – they all have a use to someone.

All commodities are useful to someone – they have a ‘use value’.

But they also have a price, an ‘exchange value’.

What Marx finds immediately interesting is that neither of these are in the commodity. They can’t be found anywhere by simply examining it, taking it apart. They’re not inherent in it. So these values must come from elsewhere. Where?

He writes: ‘We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value.’

Ok, everything has these price tags on. So that’s where the price comes from? But where does that come from? Maybe just from that use value – how useful we find each commodity.

But everyone finds different things useful. Diamond rings aren’t that useful but are expensive. Water is very useful but is cheap. I might hate Picasso and not find his art useful, but I wouldn’t turn down someone giving me a free Picasso painting. Because I know it’s worth something else.

So what is the mysterious exchange value based on? Marx points out that if I offer my three apples for your three onions there must be some metric, some common idea, that we’re basing our appraisal of what each thing is worth on. Why is that all commodities are comparable, if they have nothing else in common. We need a kind of ruler, a measuring tape, to understand them.

The simple answer is that the price tag, or the exchange value, is the cost of producing the item. A phone costs more than apple because it’s harder to make, it takes more infrastructure, more machines, more attention, more supply chains.  If I sell you a cake I add up the cost of all of the ingredients.

But we get into an infinite regress. What determines the cost of the flour? The cost of the machines at the phone factory.

Marx says that at the base, what all of the commodities have in common is that they’re ‘products of labour.’ Commodities are ‘congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour’.

Commodities have values ‘only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour’.

What he means is, yes my cake is based on the cost of flour, sugar, bowls, etc. But at every stage in their production, human labour produced each part. Even the factory walls at the phone machines were built by someone. The sugar cane had to be farmed. And so exchange value is the totality of all of that put together.

What Marx has immediately reached is the social value hidden behind the price tag. He says the object has a ‘phantom-like objectivity.’

In his great guide to Das Kapital, David Harvey writes, ‘Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence’.

We can bring this back to Marx’s idea about species-being. The value is something social, not individual, otherwise how would you ever get to a ‘fair’ price, a correct price, something to judge what your offer is made on. When you reject the price of something you often say something like ‘I could have made that for less than that’.

It’s a kind of hidden pattern, that connects me to the rest of society.

Like Hegel before him, it isn’t the thing that has an essential truth within, but it’s the relationships between things that matter.

Labour Theory of Value

Why does this matter? Value is a difficult idea to grasp, but it’s at the heart of almost everything. What we value is what we want more of, what we’re less likely to give away. Does how we value  food differ from how we value friendship or democracy? Does value differ across different political and economic systems? If we can get to the bottom of how and why we value things we can use that as a basis for good arguments, philosophy, economics.

Marx came across the labour theory of value when reading the classical economists. The Scottish economist Adam Smith had first used the idea to describe how wealth came from production and industry rather than land, but that it came from capitalist investment and rent too. Then the British economist David Ricardo went further, arguing all value comes directly from the amount of labour time needed to produce a good. Ricardo, though interested in making sure land and industry was productive rather than wasted, didn’t take the next logical step in asking why, if labour creates value, did capitalists get rich and labourers stay poor? This was left to Marx.

Ok, so for Marx the more effort, the longer and the more difficult it is to produce something, the more people it takes, the more work and labour it takes, the more value it has.

But there’s a problem here. I might be very slow at making this, I might be bad at it, and a competitor might be better, quicker, and do it easier. Despite this, they will likely sell it at a higher price. So despite my labour time being higher, the outcome of my shoddy work is worth less. Surely this contradicts the labour theory of value?

For Marx, remember, value is a social phenomenon.

Things might have different use values – I might find this useful and you useless, but when we’re thinking about what its worth to society, to everyone, on average, what price we can get for it, what’s going on behind the scenes of the calculation?

Value, he says, is ‘socially necessary labour-time’.

Which is, Marx writes, ‘the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society’.

Petrucciani puts it like this: ‘Why socially necessary? Because, empirically, it can happen that a slow or incapable producer takes more time than a skilled and quick one to make the same object, say a chair. It would make no sense to say that an inefficiently produced chair is worth more, and thus Marx makes value equal to the average labor time which is needed to produce a given good’.

When we come together to judge value socially, we’re not interested in how long it took the individual manufacturer, say. Like walking along a line of market stalls selling the same products, we’re comparing them in the aggregate.

Marx writes: ‘The sum total of the labor of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labor of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labor, the specific social characteristics of their private labors appear only within this exchange.’

That value is socially necessary labour time forces producers into a single system. Each has to compare with one another, compete in the market, keep up with the latest innovations. If I take too long to make an inferior product it’s not going to sell, I’ll be undercut by the person on the market stall next to me.

This is precisely Marx’s method, that dialectical reversal, the turning of Hegel on his head. He’s gone and looked at the world materially, at the work, products, physical goods and factories, and from that empirical study taken lots of diverse heterogeneous exchanges and identified one single homogenous abstract concept: the labour theory of value.

He writes ‘concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour.’

And remember, labour itself has a value. If I employ ten workers I need to pay them enough to feed them, shelter them, make sure they have enough energy to work, then that amount paid them has to at least be the price of the product. Their labour goes directly into the product.

So the value of labour is the cost of maintaining it. If all of their food, getting to work, rent cost £100 and I produced 100 mugs, then all other things being equal, the mugs are worth £1 each.

Marx writes ‘if the workers could live on air, it would not be possible to buy them at any price. […] The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards this absolute zero.’

It’s only through the fact that labourers need things, that their ‘labour-power’ costs a certain amount, that the value of it is passed through into a commodity.

Money: Commodity Fetishism

Once there’s a universal measure that unites all commodities – the amount of labour embodied within them – then that unit, that appraisal, that number – can be represented or symbolised by something else – money.

Just like in Hegel, as one shape develops into another, the idea that an object can have an exchange value based in how much labour went into it, can develop logically into the idea of money to represent that value. Importantly, what we have here is movement, dynamism, development.

Marx writes: ‘the money-form is merely the reflection thrown upon a single commodity by the relations between all other commodities’.

But money does something else too. It measures value, but it also provides a kind of lubricant that enables exchanges to happen easier.

Money is both a measure of value and a ‘means of circulation’.

However, just like there’s a contradiction between use value and exchange value, between what an object’s useful is to you and how much it’s worth on the market, there’s also a contradiction within money itself.

It being a measure of value is different to it being a means of circulation. Because money can be saved up, hoarded, hidden and stashed. I could take it all, and there be no ‘means of circulation’ left. 

Harvey writes: ‘what happens to the circulation of commodities in general if everybody suddenly decides to hold on to money? The buying of commodities would cease and circulation would stop, resulting in a generalized crisis.’

Sure you can hoard grain or save up X, but money is different. It’s more efficient, you can do more with it, everyone wants it, and it doesn’t spoil (as much).

It’s here for Marx that capitalism really starts to take off. People want money not just to pay for the necessities of life, but want it for it’s own sake.

Modern society, Marx writes, ‘greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its innermost principle of life.’

Here we have accumulating, the root of some being able to lend money to others, to command interest rates, to get richer – we have what we calls primitive accumulation – the building of capital itself – large amounts of disposable money.

Petrucciani says: ‘The same attitude which appeared manic in the hoarder becomes iron clad rationality in the capitalist. The capitalist incarnates an insatiable desire for gain.’

Marx uses a formula. It used to be that a commodity would be exchanged for money to buy another commodity. Sell an apple to buy a chair. C (for commodity) – M (for money) – into C (for a new commodity).

But under capitalism that starts to reverse. Money can be used to buy commodities to sell for a profit, for more money. Instead of C-M-C we have M-C-M. Instead of a new commodity being the goal – selling the apple to get yourself a chair – money itself becomes the goal.

But Marx points out that if you’re swapping an apple for a chair they can both be worth the same and you get what you want out of the deal. He says, ‘Where equality exists there is not gain.’ But if you’re using money to buy commodities to make a profit, where does the extra money from?

Why would you do it if some gain wasn’t going to come from it? If C-M-C – cup for money to buy food is zero sum – each are worth the same, why is M-C-M positive sum? That the goal of the last M is more than the first M?

Marx says that under capitalism this appears as if a mystery.

He writes, ‘Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.’

Now, remember, all value must come from labour – people putting work into things. But when we start really using money, value becomes mysterious, as if taken over by money, as if money has magical powers and is the source of value itself, rather than being meaningless pieces of paper or chunks of gold.

Marx calls this commodity fetishism. He says there’s a ‘magic of money’ that conceals what’s going on underneath, that conceals the human work. Marx calls it a ‘riddle’ to be solved. With Marx there’s always something going on under the surface of things. He’s always moving from particular stuff to broader universal social phenomenon. Commodities he says are ‘sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social.’

He writes, ‘The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists . . . simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’.

Under capitalism, you can buy a fancy new shirt, but the objective conditions of production can be very hidden – sweatshops, unethical business practices, the devastation of the environment are all happening elsewhere, under the surface. But money can hide it. And commodities can appear on the shelves as if by magic.

Petrucciani: ‘Fetishism would be that attitude according to which commodities are endowed with value as if it belonged to them by nature, rather than because of the specific modality of their production.’

Commodities and money are hieroglyphs to be decoded and understood. They are curtains to be drawn back. There’s always something real, something understandable behind them. But we too easily forget this.

Marx writes: ‘It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities-the money form-which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.’

So what’s behind the curtain? How does the capitalist lay a golden egg? Why does the last M of the M-C-M magically contain more money that the first M?

Surplus Value

To uncover the secret, to peel back the layers, to dispel the illusion of commodity fetishism, we have to go somewhere philosophy doesn’t ordinarily tread. Marx says we have to enter ‘the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘no admittance except on business”. We have to go behind the factory doors.

It’s only here that the riddle of profit can be solved, how value can be miraculously created from nowhere, emerging like a golden egg. After all, value can only be made from people doing work.

If someone has a hoard, a stash, a windfall of money, what can they do with it to increase it? How can they increase that last M in M-C-M.

The capitalist searches around for a commodity that can expand in value and they find it, most obviously, in people themselves.

If I’m putting together a new product, out of wood, nails, wires – whatever – I need labour to help do it too. In this sense, labour-power is a commodity like any other. I can go to the market and buy my wood and I can go to the market, under capitalism, and hire labour.

Marx writes ‘The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour . . . in other words labour-power.’

To buy labour-power, the labourer must be free to sell it. They must be freed from servitude as peasants or slaves. They must then have nothing and need something, need a means of subsistence.

On the one hand, there are those who have access to estates with vegetable patches and fields and forests with wood, and then, after feudalism and slavery is abolished, we have those that are forced from the land, prohibited from collecting wood or using common land to grow food.

Marx writes: ‘Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development.’

Capitalism isn’t natural, but historical. 

Now, here is the core of Marx’s argument. It is that labour-power is a commodity like any other. The labourer, wandering, looking for work needs a certain level of sustenance – food, shelter, welfare – that itself is provided by other labourers.

So the value or cost of labour-power is the value or cost of all producing all of the energy that energises and sustains that labour-power in the labourer. Meaning labour-power is comparable to any other commodity. It has a value and that value is determined by the labour theory of value – how much labour – food production, building shelter, collecting water – goes into energising the worker doing the work.

So the capitalist has capital, and they can spend that money on raw materials, supplies, and they can buy labour-power. They can combine it all together.

And Marx assumes that all of this is purchased at the correct price – that the value of everything is determined by how much labour went into making it. If it cost me $5 to get the energy/sleep/shelter to hammer the nails for one hour, that’s how much the labour-power is worth – $5ph.

That labour-power is combined with the wood and nails and then the capitalist sells. But again, he sells for a profit. He sells for more than the combined value of the labour-power and materials. The second M-C-M must be greater. Where is this extra, this surplus, coming from?

If the labour theory of value is right it can only come from labour.

So here’s the key.

Marx argues there is a gap between what it costs to sustain the labour over, say, a day, and what the capitalist gets out of the labourer in labour-power over the course of that day – and this is where surplus value comes from.

So in the first part of the day, as an example, the labourer is working in return for wages that cover the cost of sustaining them, or what Marx calls reproducing the labour, and in the second part of the day, the labourer is also covering the cost of sustaining the capitalists needs – their food and shelter. But it is here, Marx argues, that the capitalist can suck more value out of the worker than they’re being compensated for. That they can extract surplus value and make a profit.

He writes ‘Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the worker, free or unfree, must add to the labor time necessary for his own maintenance an extra quantity of labor time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production’.

He argues that humans are just capital like everything else – material, muscle, machinery that can be bought, sold, or hired and their energy put to use. But that humans are a special type of capital – variable capital.

Humans are fleshy, muscly, malleable, mouldable and innovative things that are highly variable in the ways they can perform. So the capitalist can push a human to work harder, faster, differently, so as to squeeze more energy out of them.

Unlike nails or buildings, humans have more variability.

Machines, on the other hand – spinning wheels, hammers, lathes, factory equipment, buildings, metals and raw materials are ‘constant capital’ in contrast to ‘variable capital’. They move, spin, weave, hammer, and screw and a pretty constant steady inflexible rate.

So their value is the amount it costs to produce them and they can pass that value into the end product. The nails contribute to the total value of the table. But they cannot magically create value out of thin air – the value they transmit is constant.

New value must come from somewhere else. And it’s human labour that’s variable. It can change in speed, efficacy, length, strength, and dexterity.

Machines don’t vary, or go on strike, or get sick. They can’t be shouted at or disciplined or threatened. They are predictable. But if you can get more work out of a worker, or workers, then you can get more value into the final product. You can extract more surplus value.

Labour – variable capital – can be organised in different ways. They can be made more productive by dividing them up and getting them to perform smaller more repetitive tasks. Working out ways to improve efficiency. Their lunch breaks can be shortened or you could even provide meals if you think it will give them more energy. The point here is that it’s variable.

Harvey writes, ‘Surplus-value arises because workers labor beyond the number of hours it takes to reproduce the value equivalent of their labor-power. How many extra hours do they work? That depends on the length of the working day.’

As we’ll come back to, Marx spends many pages in Capital describing the English working class’s struggles to shorten the length of the working day. In the nineteenth century, the capitalist class in factories here in the Midlands of England did everything they could to lengthen them, to employ women and children in dirty unsafe factories, to cut costs, and to get the most out of labour that they possibly could. Marx calls them ‘small thefts’ of the workers time, the ‘petty pilfering of minutes’ or the ‘snatching of minutes’.

If one capitalist gets more end product – more tables say – from their workers in one day for the same amount of wages, they can either sell them cheaper than their competitors or for the same amount and keep more profit.

But the logic of capitalism – of competition – is such that if you don’t do it, your competitor will. This is fundamental to Marx.

He is not so dogmatic to argue that this happens all of the time, everywhere, or that capitalists are purposefully cruel and evil, only that there is a logic, a motivation, a force, that compels capital to operate in this or else someone else will do it elsewhere and make a cheaper product.

He writes, ‘The influence of individual capitals on one another has the effect precisely that they must conduct themselves as capital’. In other words, capital has a logic of its own, independent of individual capitalists.

There is downward pressure on wages and pressure to increase productivity not to get rich but just to keep up. Marx writes ‘the minimum wage is the centre towards which the current rates of wages gravitate.’

There might be some cultural expectations about the minimum wage, about safe working conditions, there might be regulations and oversight and nosy journalists here and there that push wages up slightly, but ultimately, there is a force putting downward pressure on wages.

If the capitalist pays the labourer more than all of his competitors out of the kindness of their heart then the end product costs more and they go out of business. If they shorten the working day while his competitors lengthen it and become more productive and so make a cheaper product, they go out of business. This is why ‘capital’ becomes an inhuman force, it has a magical effect on all those under its spell, forcing them into the logic of capitalist production.

Capital is full of literary references – Shakespeare and Romantic influences pop up everywhere. 

Marx writes things like, capital has a “voracious appetite,” a “werewolf-like hunger for surplus labor”.

And ‘the vampire will not let go’ while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited’.

And that “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks’.

He’s calling machines ‘dead labor’ because their value comes from the living labour that was transferred into them. Das Kapital is a book of flows, of energy transfer, of how value moves dynamically through the world dialectically, how the workers’ ‘labour-power’ is alienated – taken from that – and how, as we’ll see, that flow of energy and value keeps moving inexorably from the worker into the capitalist class.

Forces, Relations, Bases, and Superstructures 

Ok, we’ll return to that relationship between labour and capital – because that is the crux of it, that is the Hegelian contradiction, one pulls on the other creating discord – but we need to supplement it with a few more basic concepts.

Remember, Marx is trying to be scientific. He looks around and sees what happens a lot, then builds this from the ground up into broader concepts – specifically looking at nineteenth century capitalism.

Two main concepts he identifies are the forces of production and the relations of production.

The forces of production are the material, the buildings, tools, technology, instruments and factories of any given society.

And the relations of production are the social relationships that underpin the division of ownership and division of labour in any given society. The classes, the relationships between them, who owns and who doesn’t, how a society is organised.

Combined, these make up a mode of production.

In The German Ideology, Marx writes, ‘a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force”.’

Importantly, Marx points out how these modes of production have changed across history.

There was primitive communism, where tribes and primitive societies held resources broadly in common. There was slavery. Where one class is held in bondage to labour and another is free to trade them. There was a feudal mode – where peasants are tied to the land and produce their own means of subsistence but are obliged to provide for their lord in return for hypothetical protection. Then there’s bourgeois capitalism.

Each, he writes, ‘is replaced by a new one corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals.’

As contradictions appear one mode is replaced by another in a Hegelian way.

This is why Marx is a materialist, not an idealist. When he looks at the development of societies through history, it’s not the ideas of individuals that matter to the majority, but the type of economic system, the mode of production that has the biggest influence on how they and we live our lives. And classes – peasants, lords, slaves, proletariat, kings, bourgeoise – are at the root of this.

Callinicos writes: ‘Classes arise when the “direct producers” have been separated from the means of production, which have become the monopoly of a minority.’

But what about ideas? They’re everywhere, surely they have their place? Marx calls all of this the economic base, but argues that there is a superstructure over the top. So the base is the economic relations and forces of production – slaves, tools, farming, computers, serfs – the forces and the class divisions. And the superstructure arises from that in the form of norms, political assumptions, laws, even culture and art, and so on.

Marx writes: ‘The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’

The superstructure aims to justify the economic structure. Wages being kept low? We have to be productive or else China will beat us! Capitalism is harmful? Read Ayn Rand! I had no choice but to shoplift the baby food. I understand that but property is property – have you not read your Locke, young lady.

Marx writes: ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas.’

And one of the biggest ideological superstructural myths, Marx says, comes from the bourgeoise having the power to tell tales about their thrift, ingenuity, creative genius – producing the idea that value comes from their endless revolutionising of technology.

Technology and Productivity

Like money, like commodities, we often see machines as magic, we fetishise them, think they can do things, create things, produce things out of thin air. We forget that they conceal social processes and relationships, physical lives underneath.

One compelling advantage Marx’s theory of history has is that it explains technological development. It explains why the industrial revolution seemed to take off at the same time as capitalism. Other theories – that innovations like the X are the result of genius individuals struggle to explain the wider historical trends of technological progress. Instead, technological development is fundamental to Marx.

We’ve seen that one way for the capitalist to extract surplus value is by trying to lengthen the working day, to improve the efficiency of labour by dividing workers up to perform smaller tasks, or to increase the intensity of work through discipline. In short, in finding ways of making labour more productive; by getting more out of workers in the same amount of time. But there’s another way of increasing productivity: technology.

All of the spinning wheels and water frames and engines of the industrial revolution were making labour efficient. You could make more jumpers in the same amount of time, employing fewer workers.

Now, importantly, the machines still need labour. They’re all built by people, need attending, need loading, needs maintenance, need correcting if something goes wrong. But they’re all what Marx calls ‘labour-saving devices.’  They make work more productive and so more surplus value can be extracted from the same amount of work.

Marx writes ‘machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus value’.

Through technological innovation, we get more or better end product out of less labour-power. Less labour-power means lower wages have to paid. Competitors can then be undercut and more profit can flow to the innovative capitalist relative to the others in that particular industry.

Marx says, ‘The individual value of these articles is now below their social value; in other words, they have cost less labour time than the great bulk of the same article produced under the average social conditions’.

Now though, something interesting happens. The competitors either have to copy, keep up, innovate themselves, or go out of business.

When the competitors bring in the new machinery, the first capitalist can no longer undercut them, and they compete for the best price again, bringing the profits back down to where they were originally. So the first mover capitalist has the advantage when they innovate, but this doesn’t last long, and so the search for a new innovation, new technology continues.

Marx writes: ‘This extra surplus-value vanishes as soon as the new method of production is generalized, for then the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value vanishes.’

We can see the dialectical influence at play here. The particular actions of one lead to a generalised universal process that draws all in, which again returns to effect the particular individual, which returns to the generalised universal, and so on.

Marx then says: ‘capital therefore has an immanent drive, and a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself’.

Again, this shows how capital becomes an inhuman, alien, vampire-like force. It compels people to act in a certain way, to search out labour-saving methods, to improve technology, to innovate, to compete, to try to underpay. And it compels others to follow or copy and keep up or go out of business. If you don’t search for productivity, for efficiency, your competitor will. Capitalism becomes a race against the clock.

It’s all about incentives within the total system, which is why Marx believed what he was doing was science in the same way Newton studied gravity – laws of attraction, forces that act on people pushing them to act in certain ways.

Even after the machine is paid for, there is an incentive to use it as much as possible unless it wears out, rusts away, gets replaced by better machines. Imagine the complexity and ingenuity of getting a water frame running or a steam engine working properly in a factory. Once it’s working 24/7, the reflexive impulse to find workers to man it as much as possible, to get as much from the machine as possible, must have been huge.

Marx writes, ‘competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation’.

But notice a new stage of development. As they compete to keep up, we have larger, bigger, more technological advanced companies. As technology improves any industry requires more capital, more initial ‘outlay’ to even get started. The barriers to entry get higher. Some can’t keep up, can’t copy machines, can’t innovate and either go bust or get bought out and incorporated into the more successful bigger business. And importantly, fewer workers are needed to produce the same amount of product as they get replaced by machines.

Callinicos puts it like this: ‘Concentration takes place when capitals grow in size through the accumulation of surplus value. Centralization, on the other hand, involves the absorption of smaller by bigger capitals. The process of competition itself encourages this trend, because the more efficient firms are able to undercut their rivals and then to take them over. But economic recessions speed up the process by enabling the surviving capitals to buy up the means of production cheap.’

I think Marx answers a fundamental question about modernity here. Why does technology – which should save us all time – not make our lives easier? Better? Why are not all fishing and playing guitar while machines do our bidding?

Because machines, owned by a few, extract productivity from the rest. And the motivation to increase productivity is the desire to sell more and sell cheaper. So while capitalism makes some things cheaper, workers – and that’s a lot of us – are also commodities, subject to the same forces, same pressure of wages, on hours, on improving productivity. It’s a vicious circle.

Marx writes simply: ‘the machine is a means for producing surplus-value’.

He compares the old way of handicrafts, pointing to how the worker – like a woodworker – would ‘make use of a tool’, while in the factory ‘the machine makes use of him.’ Machines ‘dominate and soak up living labour-power’.

Technology is a double-edged sword. It can improve our lives but spurs competition, leads to concentration, increases barriers of entry, makes it harder for start-ups to compete, and can put more and more out of work. Where capitalism starts in small scale artisan workshops, it ends in highly advanced, labour trampling, surplus value extracting global technological conglomerates.

Capitalism preys on whatever it can find, sucking surplus into bigger piles, larger factories, seeking out new markets, anything that can be commodified. In short, all that is solid melts into air.

Class Struggle X Revolution

We too often think of history as causal or linear. That one thing causes the next like a row of dominoes. Dialectical thinking takes a different approach. Instead of a linear axis – calculator, microchip, computer, smartphone, say, – or slave, peasant, proletariat, bourgeoise, etc – we have a dialectical one where at any given moment in time – there’s a mutual relationship between elements and that when there is incongruence or incompatibility or friction between them transformation is forced – what Hegel called sublation.

What we’ve seen is how the interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoise are at odds – they contradict one another. One wants higher wages, the other wants lower, one wants to get home, the other wants higher productivity.

In the Grundrisse – an unpublished manuscript and notes of his economic thinking – Marx wrote: ‘The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms’.

The technology owned by the bourgeoisie is at odds with the wages of the worker. Machines put people out of work and create a reserve labour force. ‘The instrument of labour strikes down the worker’, Marx writes. Even if its transitional and more work is found eventually, there is a period of unemployment, a period of crisis for displaced workers.

Not only does this happen because of technology, but this can be good for the capitalist. If there’s a ‘reserve labour force’ then it makes it harder for workers to negotiate for higher wages because there’s always someone over there willing to do it for less just to work.

Capitalists get more and more value out of fewer and fewer workers. Workers are displaced and squeezed.

Now, the bourgeoise can keep revolutionising, building different machines, finding new markets, so new jobs might be created. So it’s not the case that absolute poverty for proletariat is inevitable – although it’s possible. What will happen is that as the bourgeoise acquire more and more capital, machines, technology and as many are put out of work, then the proletariat will be relatively immiserated.

Petrucciani puts it like this: ‘Marx can thus conclude by claiming that the ‘absolute general law of capitalist accumulation’ is to constantly produce, ‘in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent’, an excess of workers, a reserve army whose poverty increases as the power of wealth grows. These conclusions are of course very bleak, appropriately so because Marx aims to show (among other things) how capitalism is socially unsustainable’.

This relative immiseration means there’s more concentration into larger monopolies on the one hand and more fragmentation and discord on the other. Each are incompatible.

Engels wrote: ‘productive forces are concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois whilst the great mass of the people are more and more becoming proletarians, and their condition more wretched and unendurable in the same measure in which the riches of the bourgeois increase.’

Map on top of this the unpredictability of capitalism, its booms and busts, crises, overproduction leading to crises, gluts, market instabilities, contractions, further bankruptcies and buy-outs, mass unemployment, and you have an explosive situation.

All of this is the apex of the argument in Capital: a tendency towards catastrophe.

A key concept here is that the rate of overall profit falls. If value and therefore profit comes from labour and there is increasingly less labour – less people – doing the same amount of work because there’s more and more machines, technology, infrastructure, and so on, the rate of surplus value being extracted decreases over time. Doing business gets harder. Being a proletariat gets harder still.

Again, a contradiction, an irony – that by improving productivity and investing more and more the capitalist class are sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Marx writes: ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable’.

What we have is a pressure cooker on a societal scale.

Let’s just recap and look at the ingredients thrown into this explosive pot:

• Division of labour – workers are fragmented into performing meaningless single repetitive tasks.
• The downward pressure on wages and relative impoverishment.
• A reserve labour army with no work at all.
• Booms and busts – overproduction, layoffs, takeovers, recessions.
• Bigger, more monstrous companies that are impossible to compete with – concentration and monopolies.
• The tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

All of this pulls on two poles. On the one, ‘Accumulate, Accumulate!’ Marx says. On the other, though, is something that emerges out of the chaos – a class consciousness – meaning a privileged perspective – arising out the material conditions of all of this – a perspective, a consciousness, that understands their place in history: the proletariat.

Harvey puts it like this: ‘This is typical Marx: there are countervailing tendencies at work: concentration on the one hand, subdivision and fragmentation on the other. Where is the balance between them? Who knows! The balance between concentration and decentralization is almost certainly subject to perpetual flux.’

The capitalist will outsource, subcontract, layoff, divide and conquer. If the proletariat doesn’t join together all of this will ‘mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy any remnant of attraction in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities[…]; they distort the conditions under which he works, and subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.’

The only option for the proletariat is to join together and fight. Engels wrote ‘for ‘protection’ against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together.’ They have to co-operate, join in union. It is not inevitable, but forces, incentives all push workers into uniting – they will have the numbers, after all, and to overthrow the current system.

There are longstanding debates about whether Marx was a determinist – whether he believed in inevitability – of immiseration, of revolution, of human history itself – that we’re all just puppets on a grander stage. I think he walks a fine line but later on he largely tries to avoid writing in these terms. As Harvey says, there’s not much causal language in Capital, just incentives, pressures, dialectical relationships that create these interesting pressure cookers – but map on culture, politics, or many other things – and it creates a rich but complex picture of history.

Marx says: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’.

But none of this is a universal inevitable schema that we all live under, there’s too much dynamism, too much change, too many variables and contingency.

Marx himself complained of those that tried to turn, ‘my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself’.

True to dialectical form, he says, ‘circumstances create people in the same degree as people create circumstances.’

However, the circumstances, the pressures, the forces are all pushing the proletariat to overthrow the current state of affairs, and replace it with something new.

Communism

Marx famously didn’t write much about what a communist society would look like. He was only emphatic that the proletariat needed to organise and overthrow the current system. He believed that this would likely require revolution, but that it might be peaceful in places. But for much of the rest he left scant details of his thoughts, and there was a particular reason for this.

As we’ve seen, he believed the proletariat had a particularly unique point of view that no-one else in society had. Capitalists are compelled to act in the ways we’ve seen by the imperatives of the market. Politicians are compelled to act by the power of big capital. But the proletariat, in factories, can see all of this, feel their own immiseration, feel their alienation and understand what negates them, understand industry and science, and importantly, because of their proximity to one another, have the capacity to organise.

Because of this, Marx believed that it should be left to the proletariat to establish the best course of action.

He was in a sense a rationalist – with the idea that a better society should be organised rationally to the benefit of all instead of few. But he didn’t believe that a rational society could be planned in advance, like the utopian socialists did. This is another expression of his dialectical thinking. He didn’t believe in dogmatic, rigid systems.

Engels criticised those who did otherwise and tried to reduce, ‘the Marxist theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy which workers are not to reach as a result of their class consciousness, but which, like an article of faith, is to be forced down their throats at once and without development’.

The proletarian had to develop on their own. In The Communist Manifesto Marx wrote that communists should, ‘not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement’, because, ‘They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole’.

And Engels wrote that, ‘The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can have the opportunity only when they have a movement of their own — no matter in what form so long as it is their movement — in which they are driven further by their mistakes and learn to profit by them’.

However, they did leave some clues as to what they thought a communist society could look like.

Marx stated simply that: ‘We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present stage of things’.

First, Marx and Engels famously argued for a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

The proletariat would need to establish, ‘the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally’.

Dictatorship has a particular connotation today that it didn’t have at the time. Their reading of revolution was dependent on the French Revolution, which was attacked by reactionary forces both domestic and foreign, by the Church, the aristocracy, civil war, and the monarchies of Europe. The bourgeoise also held political power, so any immediate popular democratic vote would – and had in places – often just brought the old regime back to power.

Which is why Marx and Engels believed in a limited emergency dictatorship – not of one person, but by the proletariat as a class.

Looking at how revolutions and democratic procedures were repressed across Europe, Marx believed that a bloody revolution was very likely. But he did equivocate and change his mind on this. He wrote for example that, ‘there are countries such as America, England and Holland where the working people may achieve their goal by peaceful means’.

Ok, but what would happen once the revolution was secured? There are a few clues but it should be remembered these are comments here and there – the overarching image is of the proletariat working it out depending on their particular experience from place to place.

Marx pointed to the short lived Paris Commune that existed for a couple of months in 1871 when Parisian workers took control of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.

Importantly, Marx wrote it should be like the Paris Commune: ‘The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms’. He continued: ‘Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible and revocable.’

Wage-labour and capital should be abolished. Marx knew it would be difficult because, ‘in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges’.

Because of these, he believed communism would develop in stages. At first ‘Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society—after the deductions have been made—exactly what he gives to it. . . . He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labor . . . and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as costs the same amount of labor’.

Petrucciani identifies the first steps throughout the writings like this: ‘landed estates are to be expropriated, inheritance rights abolished, strongly progressive taxation instituted, credit and transportation nationalized, public factories built, and ‘equal liability to work for all members of society’ imposed together with ‘education of all children […] in national institutions and at the expense of the nation’’.

So there are a mix of social democratic reforms, equalising of labour and reward for work, and the planning of industry in the interest of all.

Calinacos writes, ‘the decisions about how much social labor would depend, not on the blind workings of competition, but on a collective and democratic assessment by the associated producers in the light of the needs of society’.

But after a while, a higher stage of communism should be developed, which Marx puts like this: ‘In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’

He thinks that at this point people will want to work, instead of being compelled to or incentivised to by monetary rewards – that’s ‘each according to his ability’ – and that each will take only what he needs from the common stock – ‘to each according to his needs’.

The state would then wither away.

Engels wrote: ‘As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary’.

Finally, it’s important to note that Marx never wanted to promote absolute equality over individuality. He believed having access to resources and contributing to how they were produced would mean individuals could flourish and their true creative individuality reached.

He called it, ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. In Engels’s words, ‘it is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom’.

Conclusion

After the First International collapsed in 1876, Marx withdrew from political life, spending his time on further volumes of Capital, which he would never finish but would be published from his note by Engels.

In 1883 his daughter died, Marx caught a cold, and died quietly in his sleep. Engels wrote, ‘Mankind is shorter by a head, and that the greatest head of our time’.

Summing up, analysing, or critiquing Marx’s legacy is a huge task that’s beyond the scope of this video. His influence on the world is testament to the breadth of his insight. Much of it I think is due to the meticulous way he analysed the relationship between labour, capital, and technology in Das Kapital, as a lot of the other insights on alienation, revolution, and socialism were much more common. So what you think of Marx should depend on appraising those big ideas in Capital, and if anything, the jury is still out.

I’ll publish a more comprehensive appraisal on the second channel soon, but for now I’ll point towards some of the most common points of contention. 

First, the labour theory of value is probably criticised the most. Neoclassical economics emphasises the subjective nature of value, to put it simply, and there’s a famous transformation problem in Marxism of ‘transforming’ labour value into actual profits and prices, which should work if the labour theory of value is true, but doesn’t.

All of this means that the labour theory of value is wrong at worst and limited at best. However, even with the criticisms, it’s undeniable that labour is at the core of production and so how much labour goes into making something is at least one part of the answer to value.

Harvey writes, for example, ‘I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs. It is not that at all; it is a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image.’

The falling rate of profit has also relatedly been criticised. This is a key marker of whether capitalism can sustain itself, and Marx’s contention was that because more technology would extract profit from fewer workers, the rate of profit would fall and capitalism would veer from crisis to crisis. The debate over this rages on, as, of course, does capitalism.

And Marx wouldn’t be surprised. Capitalism’s ability to transform is, as we’ve seen, one of its most distinctive features. Yet despite the dynamism, I think Marx would still recognise it today – which goes a long way to showing the enduring influence of his work.

Inequality, crises and banking crashes, squeezed wages, the speed of technological change, automation, global corporations, alienation – were very much in Marx’s world.

There’s also the debate over actually-existing socialism, the failures of centrally commanded economies, the USSR, state-capitalism. Many who follow Marx today would argue these were not socialist in Marx’s sense.

Marxism, Callinicos writes, ‘was socialism “from below.” It foresaw the working class liberating itself through its own activity, and remaking society in its own image. “Really existing socialism” in the Eastern bloc, however, is based on the denial of the self-activity of the workers and the denial of popular democracy’.

There are also criticisms about how little Marx said about the practicalities of communism, how societies could function without money or any state apparatus at all.

But Marx’s relevance is difficult to escape from. And if you drop the idea that you have to be a Marxist or an anti-Marxist, a capitalist or a socialist, it’s undeniable that his work contains still-relevant insights and still-useful analyses of still very present forces. He would want his readers to read and critique, he would want to inspire not followers, but change. In other words, he was emphatically not a dogmatist. He wanted to inspire a different fluid, active, creative thought, and importantly, action. Towards the end of his life he said, ‘All I know is that I am no Marxist, God save me from my friends!’.

I’ll end with a quote from a letter – ‘for a ruthless Criticism of Everything That Exists’. He wrote, ‘we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to’.

——

READING LIST

In the past, I have made reading lists and bibliographies public, but for Marx, I put some time into curating one with comments and a reading order for supporters of the channel on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/marx-reading-112803954

The post Marx: A Complete Guide to Capitalism appeared first on Then & Now.

Russell Brand’s career as an entertainer was based on promiscuity, shock, extravagance, wit, intelligence – but that’s the case with so many comedians. In 2013 Brand did something most comedians don’t – he talked to Britain’s chief MSM political interrogator – Jeremy Paxman.

He said: ‘here’s the thing that we shouldn’t do: shouldn’t destroy the planet; shouldn’t create massive economic disparity; shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people. The burden of proof is on the people with the power’.

Brand told the incredulous Paxman that he didn’t vote, what’s the point? It went viral at the time, not least because Brand is one of Britain’s most recognisable faces, but because it seemed to many people to capture the mood: an ordinary person, telling the truth, up against the establishment.

It was the start of a shift towards politics.

In 2014, after a stint in Hollywood, he wrote a book – Revolution – which he discussed in another much talked about interview on Newsnight in the UK.

The same year, he started The Trews on Youtube, reading and commenting on the UK newspapers, interviewing a range of people, making mostly progressive arguments.

Of course, for many the pandemic changed things. In January of 2021, one subject stands out as getting millions more views than usual – The Great Reset.

It’s a topic Brand comes back to several times, and these videos always have many more views than most others. Around this time, Brand becomes more critical of policies surrounding Covid-19 – much of it reasonable. He shifts to his current, regular format – Stay Free – a full time regular show with millions of subscribers, advertisers, co-presenters, and guests.

A few months later, in the middle of 2021, stories began being published which were mostly drawing on Brand’s tweets: Brand ‘is a conspiracy theorist’.

By 2022, two competing narratives are set: for many, Brand had become a crackpot tinfoil hat conspiracist. For Brand, that there’s a centralising, authoritarian, mainstream agenda, dominated by MSM, the political establishment, big tech, and global corporate interests, to take away our freedoms.

I want to look at several stories as they unfolded – Covid and vaccines, the Great Reset, the Dutch farmers protest, and the allegations against Brand in September of 2023 – and ask a question that I think is fundamental to our information age: what does it mean to be called a conspiracy theorist? Especially if there have been real conspiracies in history – Iran-Contra, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the Holocaust, all the way back to Julius Caesar’s assassination. All of these were the result of a conspiracy.

We’ll look at the history and the psychology too to try and separate fact from fiction, asking what drives Brand? Is there any truth to what he says? How can we think about the establishment, the mainstream media, the global elite – what does all of this tell us about the society we live in?

Contents:

• The Great Reset
• The Dutch Farmers Protest
• COVID-19
• History and Conspiracy
• The Psychology of Conspiracy
• Cognitive Biases
• The Mainstream Media Agenda
• The Recent Allegations and Rumble
• Narcissism News Entertainment
• Public Trust, Private Solutions

The Great Reset

Brand talks about lots of different subjects, in a lot of different ways, but there are a few themes and topics he comes back to again and again.

He is aware he’s been framed as a conspiracy theorist, and frequently points out that he’s just reading facts from a variety of sources, some mainstream – the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post – some more fringe. So how can we disentangle fact from fantasy?

At the beginning of 2021, clips circulated on the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.

‘The Great Reset’ is an initiative from the World Economic Forum to drastically change the direction of the economy after Covid-19 by addressing social issues and, ‘to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world’.

Depending on who you ask, The Great Reset is anything from capitalist propaganda, to a genuine attempt to address the problems with capitalism, to a global conspiracy to exert more control over the population.

In the case of Brand, he argued, ‘there are some people that believe in shady global cabals running things from behind the scenes. Now, I don’t believe that, I believe that there are plain visible economic interests that dominate the direction of international policy’.

The video is reasonable. It criticises those who think the Great Reset is part of an authoritarian plan to take control through the justification of a manufactured fake climate crisis, for example.

The video is a hit, it has a million views, compared to his other videos of the time ranging around 100,000.

Brand makes another video, saying he’s decided to, ‘dive a little bit deeper into what you think, and further evidence, and your legitimate concerns’. The video currently has 2.7 million views.

A year later, he says: ‘bad news, the Great Reset, where you will own nothing and be happy, is being brought about by economic policy decisions made by your government that will facilitate the advance of the most powerful interests on earth’.

Brand continues that: ‘this is not conspiracy theory, I’m going to read you the actual facts here, I’m just using rhetoric that’s appealing, I’m an entertainer’.

Okay, so what is the Great Reset? It began as a book written by the founder of the corporate lobbying group the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, and his co-author, Thierry Malleret.

One review describes three main themes:

1. A ‘push for fairer outcomes in the global market and to address the massive inequalities produced by global capitalism’.
2. ‘efforts to address equality and sustainability by urging governments and businesses to take things like racism and climate change more seriously’.
3. Embrace ‘innovation and technological solutions [that] could be used to address global social problems’.

All of this sounds reasonable enough, admirable even. But, as political author Ivan Wecke points out, Schwab and the WEF’s ideas have something ‘fishy’ about them. The initiative can be seen as an exercise in corporate PR that gives multinational business leaders more power, not less, and that give political elites more power, not less. In another review of the book, Steven Umbrello concludes that the book does point out a lot of problems, but has no substantive solutions. And, of course, liberal elites love this stuff. Trudeau, for example, has used the language of needing a ‘reset’.

So there’s plenty to criticise. But as Brand explores the Great Reset, he connects it to other events – Black Rock buying up houses, for example. Emphasising one video ominously claiming that in the future you’ll own nothing and be happy, increasing government restrictions during the pandemic, Bill Gates, and the Dutch farmers protest.

He seems more aligned with Alberta premiere Jason Kenney, who has claimed the great reset is a ‘grab bag of left-wing ideas for less freedom and more government’, and, ‘failed socialist policy ideas’.

Brand uses the word ‘agenda’ frequently, and as he says, it’s not a conspiracy, he’s just reading the facts. So what is a conspiracy?

One definition is: ‘the belief that a number of actors join together in secret agreement, in order to achieve a hidden goal which is perceived to be unlawful or malevolent’ (Zonis and Joseph).

Another by professor of psychology Jan-Willem Prooijen argues a conspiracy has 5 components:

1. It makes connections that explain disconnected actions, objects, or people into patterns
2. It argues that it was an intentional plan
3. It involves a coalition or group
4. The goal is hostile, selfish, evil, or at odds with public interest
5. It operates in secret

Another definition proposes a simple four criteria model: ‘(1) a group, (2) acting in secret, (3) to alter institutions, usurp power, hide truth, or gain utility, (4) at the expense of the common good’.

There also many types of conspiracy – within government and institutions, without, in the form of another country or nefarious power, above in the form of shady elites, or even below in the form of ordinary people overthrowing capitalism.

By Prooijen’s criteria, the Great Reset can be thought of as a conspiracy. After all, it’s intentional, it involves a group of people, some argue it’s not in the public interest, and it at least in part operates in secrecy at Davos. But Brand points out that it’s not a conspiracy, they’re saying it publicly: https://youtu.be/BXTPzFSx6oI?si=xMQIZ7u4xFfNYEc7&t=213

But I think the most interesting component is the first one – it makes connections that explain disconnected actions, objects, or people into patterns. Brand does this often, hopping between topics. So let’s look at another one topic, the Dutch farmers protest.

The Dutch Farmers Protest

The Dutch Farmer’s movement, beginning in 2019 and continuing today, are protests that argue that farmers are being unfairly targeted in efforts to address climate change.

The Dutch government have passed a range of policies aiming to cut nitrogen pollution and livestock farming in the country.

Brand says, ‘Bloody farmers, protesting, hating the environment. What is it? Are farmers all bastards? Or, are we seeing the beginning of the Great Reset play out in real time?’.

In short, the Dutch government policies are a power grab, taking power from ordinary farmers, and he connects the protest to other stories he covers frequently – the Great Reset, WEF, Bill Gates, and the MSM failing to cover the events appropriately.

Remember: ‘1: It makes connections that explain disconnected actions, objects, or people into patterns’.

So what’s really happening in the Netherlands?

Studies since the 80s have shown that nitrate pollution in the ground, getting into drinking water, and into wider ecosystems, has been an increasing problem. Nitrate pollution can cause blue baby syndrome, increases in bowel cancer, respiratory problems and premature birth.

It causes havoc in rivers, which nitrate-based fertiliser runs into, killing fish. The EU has identified Natura 2000 areas – fragile areas of nature that are home to rare and threated species.

The Netherlands is an agricultural superpower. It’s the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, and the EU’s number one exporter of meat. Unfortunately, being close to the designated Natura 2000 areas, this makes nitrate pollution in the Netherlands a big problem.

It’s also an EU member state – with its freedom of movement, courts, European Parliament, and so on, and support for staying in the EU in the Netherlands is very high – around 75%.

The EU has legislated to reduce nitrate pollution by 2030 and more broadly, worldwide, agriculture contributes to between a quarter and a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

The Dutch government and EU have agreed a 1.5 billion euro package to help 2000-3000 “peak polluter” farmers either innovate, relocate, change business or, as a last resort, buy them out.

Obviously, among many farmers this is deeply unpopular.

‘For agricultural entrepreneurs, there will be a stopping scheme that will be as attractive as possible’, said Van der Wal in a series of parliamentary briefings. ‘For industrial peak polluters, we will get to work with a tailor-made approach and in tightening permits. After a year, we will see if this has achieved enough’.

Is it hypocritical to focus efforts on ordinary farmers rather than industrial peak polluters? On the surface, yes. And none of what I’ve just said is to blame farmers. But it’s obviously a complex problem with a lot of different interests at stake.

And in the middle of the video, Brand makes some reasonable points. In Sri Lanka the outright banning of all fertilisers and pesticides was disastrous. He makes points about focusing on farmers rather than finding ways to shift attention to corporations and the one percent. He says it’s always ordinary people rather than the powerful. All of which I can agree with. But he ignores some of the complexity. The Dutch government has also ordered coal powerplants to close, for example. And the biggest polluter in the country is Tata Steel, which the regulation does focus on, and is one of the country’s biggest employers of ‘ordinary people’.

But what stands out is the framing. It’s about the Great Reset, Bill Gates, the agenda, and the next piece of the puzzle…

COVID-19

There are several ongoing Covid-19 debates. The lab leak hypothesis, the efficacy of vaccines, big tech censorship, the legality or ethics of ‘lockdowns’ – and what should be clear, wherever you stand on a particular issue, is that each of these, while having some crossover, is somewhat different.

Some of the Brand’s many Covid-19 videos, like one on ‘vaccine passports’ for example, have a lot to agree with. However, like with other topics, Brand has a tendency to take a story and spin it into a wider pattern.

We hear it a lot recently – it’s about ‘the narrative’.

The lab leak hypothesis isn’t about laboratory safety precautions or lack thereof, but about a coverup involving world government, the WHO, and big tech censorship. A WHO epidemic surveillance network across the world that monitors the outbreak of communicable disease becomes about an elitist surveillance society that spies on us. A doctor describing helping with outbreaks becomes an object of derision.

Take this video, one of many on vaccines. It’s about Pfizer falsifying the data of vaccine trials – a serious issue. It’s based on a BMJ article in which a whistleblower raised a number of concerns with a trial site they worked at, including:

‘1. Participants placed in a hallway after injection and not being monitored by clinical staff

1. Lack of timely follow-up of patients who experienced adverse events
2. Protocol deviations not being reported
3. Vaccines not being stored at proper temperatures
4. Mislabelled laboratory specimens, and
5. Targeting Ventavia staff for reporting these types of problems’

All worrying concerns. And Brand repeatedly points out that he is just looking the evidence objectively, just asking questions. He describes himself as a ‘glass funnel’ reporting information carefully and unbiasedly, while the MSM report it ‘morally’, telling people what to do.

There are a few points of irony here. First, obviously Brand has a moral position here. We all do – unless we read a story without comment or opinion, which Brand is doing. Second, he says it’s not being reported on by the mainstream media, while using reports from mainstream institutions – the BMJ, CBS, and it’s been reported by the Daily Mail and the Conversation. I find a brief reference to it in the Financial Times.

But, it might be reasonable to ask, should there not be more of an outcry? I can’t find it reported in the New York Times or the BBC, for example.

As the Conversation article points out, the concerns raised are important and worrying but don’t meaningfully undermine wider evidence on Covid-19 vaccines. It involved three Pfizer trial centres out of 150. Those 3 sites involved around 1000 people.

Of course, across the world, hundreds of thousands took part in trials involving many different pharmaceutical companies, third-party trial centres, universities, and hundreds of regulatory bodies.

And most of the whistleblower’s complaints were about sloppiness – photos of things like needles thrown away inappropriately, participants’ IDs left out when they shouldn’t have been. One section reads, ‘a Ventavia executive identified three site staff members with whom to “Go over e-diary issue/falsifying data, etc.” One of them was “verbally counseled for changing data and not noting late entry,” a note indicates.’

Now, all of this is obviously worrying, good reporting, worth investigating, et cetera.

But it’s important to keep a sense of proportion. This is a single third-party trial centre in Texas, but Brand spins it into a wider narrative, claiming in another video, for example, that, ‘the mainstream media are preventing their own medical experts from accurately reporting on potential covid problems. Meanwhile, they continue to repress information about vaccine efficacy’.

As Prof Douglas Drevets, head of the infectious diseases department at University of Oklahoma has written: ‘There have been so many other studies of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine since the Phase III trial that people can be confident in its efficacy and safety profile. That said, Pfizer might be wise to re-run their analysis excluding all Ventavia subjects and show if that does/does not change the results. Such an analysis would give added confidence in the Phase III results’.

Pfizer then reported that they looked into the complaints and said that, ‘Pfizer’s investigation did not identify any issues or concerns that would invalidate the data or jeopardize the integrity of the study’.

I’m not saying Pfizer’s claims should be taken at face value, or that pharmaceutical companies do not have perverse profit incentives, and so on, or that this isn’t worth someone digging into – the point is that this is a very small story, it has been looked into, and I’d imagine if you’re an editor at a TV station or newspaper, with hundreds of other competing stories to present, you’d decide on balance that there are more important stories. News reporting is a matter of emphasis. With only a limited number of positions on, for example, a front page each day, what’s included and what’s not?

Brand says that the mainstream media are censoring information when in fact the opposite is true. There are, again, issues with the mainstream media that we’ll come to, but it’s an endorsement of the press that, unlike in say China or Russia, a relatively minor issue could be reported and investigated.

Brand constantly says things like, ‘this is what happens when you politicise information’, without the awareness that by weaving insignificant details into wider narratives, deciding to give small stories weight, he is himself obviously politicising information.

The whistleblower was also reported to be a sceptic about vaccine efficacy more broadly. Brand also relies on jokes as innuendo to spin it into his wider conspiracy narrative – joking, for example, that the whistleblower was found dead.

He says, ‘individual freedom, individual ability to make choices for yourself, based on a wide variety of sometimes opposing evidence, and sometimes contradictory information, that places you in the position as an adult to make decisions for yourself. That’s not what the mainstream media want, but that’s what we demand on your behalf’.

But he doesn’t use a wide variety of evidence. He selects minor stories and connects them to the narrative. There are many, many, many more sources that report things like vaccines have saved three million lives in the US alone. 96% of doctors are fully vaccinated. Myocarditis has been reported in ten out of a million shots of the vaccine, but is more likely to be caused by the Covid-19 virus than the vaccine.

There are debates to be had, there always are, but what Brand doesn’t have is a good sense of the weight and significance of a story. And what he does have, as we’ll get to, is a good sense of how to tell a compelling, scary and entertaining story.

But wait, just because it’s a small story it doesn’t make it automatically wrong. And yes, there are monied interests, powerful lobbies, values and ideas that are dominant and others that get sidelined. The risk is throwing out the baby with the bath water. And as we saw at the beginning of the video, some conspiracies turn out to be true, and they weren’t reported on either. So is there any other way to separate fact from fiction?

History and Conspiracy

History is full of conspiracies, but they tend to be limited – a small group of people with a limited set of goals.

Most theories, though, have turned out to be wrong, or at the very least, there’s little evidence for them. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Obama was born in the US. The earth is not flat. Witches weren’t conspiring to encourage the harvests fail. Jews weren’t conspiring to take over the world in Weimar Germany.

But the idea that there is an agenda to take over the world, an idea that connects dots between disparate events is as old as time – and they’ve usually turned out to be wrong, or at least, as we’ll get to, miss the real point.

In the middle of the 19th century, it was a common belief in America that the Catholic Church and the monarchies of Europe were not only uniting to destroy the US, but had already infiltrated the US government. One Texas newspaper declared that, ‘It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism’.

Before that, it was the Illuminati, who, according to one book in 1797, were formed, ‘for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE’.

In an influential 1964 article, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter points out that throughout history there have been suspicions of plots that have infected all major institutions, a fifth column, that all in power have been compromised.

The inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, wrote that, ‘A conspiracy exists, its plans are already in operation… we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies’.

Morse, sounding just like Brand, wrote: ‘The serpent has already commenced his coil about our limbs, and the lethargy of his poison is creeping over us.… Is not the enemy already organized in the land? Can we not perceive all around us the evidence of his presence?… We must awake, or we are lost’.

Another article worried that, ‘that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery’.

It was alleged that the 1893 depression was the result of a conspiracy by Catholics to attack the US economy by starting a run on the banks.

WWI was started because the Austo-Hungarian Empire believed the killing of the heir to the throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the result of a Serbian government conspiracy, and so attacked Serbia, setting off a chain of events leading to the war. There was no evidence for this. Historian Michael Shermer calls it the deadliest conspiracy theory in history.

Senator McCarthy famously believed a communist conspiracy had infiltrated every American institution. In 1951 he said that there was, ‘a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men’.

During the resulting Red Scare, influential businessman Robert Welsch wrote that, ‘Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our Federal Government’, the Supreme Court, and that they were in a struggle for control of, ‘the press, the pulpit, the radio and television media, the labor unions, the schools, the courts, and the legislative halls of America’.

The Psychology of Conspiracy

One of the important distinctions here is between phrases like an ‘agenda’ and ‘conspiracy theory’. Brand, while defending himself as not being a conspiracy theorist, tends to use terms like ‘agenda’, ‘they’, and ‘the global elite’. The difference is between purposeful collusion across institutions and a pattern of say, certain values aligning between corporations and neoliberal politicians. Sometimes this is a gradient more than black and white, but another way we can untangle this is to look at studies about who believes in conspiracies and for what reasons.

Firstly, a lot of people believe in them. One third of Americans believe Obama is not American. A third that 9/11 was an inside job. A quarter that covid was a hoax. 30 percent that chemtrails are somewhat true. 33% believe that the government are covering up something up about the North Dakota crash.

Never heard of it? That’s because researchers made it up. They polled people about their beliefs in conspiracies and included a completely made up event in North Dakota, and people instinctively believed that the government was hiding something about it.

People are naturally suspicious of power, which is of course a good thing, but for some people that leads to belief in a conspiracy. Why?

There are several factors that psychologists have looked at. The first is uncertainty. Psychologist Jan-Willem Prooijen points out that at a fundamental level, conspiracy theories are a response to uncertainty.

He writes: ‘Conspiracy theories originate through the same cognitive processes that produce other types of belief (e.g., new age, spirituality), they reflect a desire to protect one’s own group against a potentially hostile outgroup, and they are often grounded in strong ideologies. Conspiracy theories are a natural defensive reaction to feelings of uncertainty and fear’.

Responding to uncertainty and fear by hypothesising a threat is an evolutionary instinct. You’re better off jumping at the sight of a stick in the long grass than be bitten by a snake. The same thing happens when we see shapes in the darkness. We are risk calculating creatures, always on the watch for danger.

And we do this by looking for patterns. Jonathan Kay writes that, ‘Conspiracism is a stubborn creed because humans are pattern-seeking animals. Show us a sky full of stars, and we’ll arrange them into animals and giant spoons. Show us a world full of random misery, and we’ll use the same trick to connect the dots into secret conspiracies’.

Psychologists call it pattern perception. I like to call it patternification.

Prooijen writes, ‘pattern perception is the tendency of the human mind to “connect dots” and perceive meaningful and causal relationships between people, objects, animals, and events. Perceiving patterns is the opposite of perceiving randomness’.

Again, all very reasonable. But sometimes the stick in the grass is just a stick. And sometimes an event is just random, meaningless, an accident, a result of incompetence, ignorance, and so on.

Prooijen writes, ‘Sometimes events truly are random, but most people perceive patterns anyway. This is referred to as illusory pattern perception: People sometimes see meaningful relationships that just do not exist’.

We all do it all the time. But what’s interesting in research is that some people see patterns more readily than others.

In studies, people who see patterns in abstract paintings, random dots, or coin tosses, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, paranormal phenomena, and be religious. People who believe in astrology, spiritual healing, telepathy, communication with the dead, are all more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Belief in conspiracies have also been shown to increase after natural disasters.

Threat leads to the formation of a belief in a pattern in response to that threat.

In many – by no means all, but many – of Brand’s videos, small stories, a small sample of data, a single piece of evidence, are spun into a wider pattern.

In this video, he links the Great Rest and the WEF’s video, ‘you’ll own nothing and be happy’, to movements in the financial markets, for example – a story about Black Rock buying up real estate.

It’s all part of the agenda. He throws in that the mainstream media reports it as ‘good news’ – a housing bonanza that’s going to great for everyone – insinuating journalists are part of the agenda, ignoring the irony that he’s citing the New York Times.

What’s it got to do with the great reset? I honestly couldn’t tell you. I wonder if bitcoin.com – Brand’s source – has an agenda?! In this video, the great reset is linked to the farmers protests. Throw in Bill Gates, vaccines and it all becomes part of the simple good vs evil narrative.

Author Naomi Klein describes it as a ‘conspiracy smoothie’.

She writes, ‘the Great Reset has managed to mash up every freakout happening on the internet — left and right, true-ish, and off-the-wall — into one inchoate meta-scream about the unbearable nature of pandemic life under voracious capitalism’.

Conspiracy theories become, through patternification, totalisers. Everything gets lumped in together as part of the same single narrative. It becomes zero sum, good vs evil analysis. But this doesn’t answer why some people do this and others don’t, nor does it answer when the dots should be connected. To see why people do this, we’ll look at two categories: cognitive biases and the need for control.

Cognitive Biases

Studies have shown that education at high school halves the tendency to believe in conspiracies, from 42% to 22%. Why is this?

It’s kind of counter intuitive, because in many ways education actually teaches you, more than anything, to be sceptical. The scientific method, for example, is built on scepticism of received wisdom. In history, you’re taught to be sceptical of and scrutinise the literature and sources. In politics, many approaches – liberalism, Marxism, poststructuralism, and more – are, at their core, sceptical about the state and institutional power. If you’re sceptical about what you’re told, surely you’re more likely to believe that something is going on behind the scenes.

Except, while scepticism is key, education also teaches you to draw on evidence, being led by evidence as much as possible – and importantly, all of the evidence.

If you only draw on bitcoin.com to make a case you wouldn’t get far. Which is why most undergraduate essays or dissertations and papers to submitted journals require a literature review – show that you’ve assessed and understand the literature, identified weaknesses, made an argument.

In fact, the very basis of the modern scientific method in both the hard sciences and the social sciences and humanities is peer review – you must reference, show you understand the evidence, cite sources in a bibliography, show how the studies can be rerun and submit it to a body of peers to check over the work. This idea – that work is checked and can be responded to – runs through the heart of institutions.

We rely on the work of others, we build upon it, we respond to it. It has its limits, it’s often biased, it’s middle class, it can be wrong, subdisciplines are at loggerheads, criticise one another, but, that’s precisely what makes it work – it’s tentative, it’s open to critique, and it can be checked, it’s how knowledge is built up communally. We’ll come back to its benefits and limits.

Another mistake conspiracy theorists make is proportionality bias: that a large effect needs a large cause to create a sense of ‘cognitive harmony’ – a balance between two ideas.

JKF couldn’t have been killed by a lone assassin, he was the president of the US. Princess Diana couldn’t have been randomly killed in a car crash, it must have been the royals. 9/11 couldn’t have been the result of 19 guys from the Middle East, it must have been the government.

We’re all human, including presidents. But if a US president and your neighbour Ned both died randomly on the same day – which one would there be a conspiracy about?

In one study, two groups were told two different stories about a president of a small country being assassinated. One group were told the assassination led to civil war, in another it doesn’t. People were more likely to believe the assassination was a conspiracy if it led to a war.

Prooijen says the proportionality bias is that ‘a big consequence must have had a big cause.’

There are some other biases. Tribalism leads us to protect our in-group, divide the world into us vs them, good vs evil. Another is the intentionality bias, that leads us to believe that the negative effects of other’s actions were intentional, whereas if we did them it would be an accident or we’d have good reason. Every banker is evil, our own pension fund is necessary. Or in the form of Hanlon’s razor: ‘never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’. A politician does something that we perceive to be evil, really they just don’t understand the topic, and so on.

So there biases of thinking that we all make, and I think in many ways they can be summed up in the way Brand thinks about the mainstream media.

The Mainstream Media Agenda

I think combining these fallacies and thinking about the way Brand takes a small story – like the Pfizer data falsification story – and turns it into a global elite agenda, gives us a good frame to think about Brand’s critique of the mainstream media.

It’s almost always part of the narrative, and even more so since the accusations against him in September.

The mainstream media have lots of problems – they’re diverse problems – not least of which that they tend to be close to elites, institutionalised, cozy with politicians, centred in and overly focused on places like Washington, London, and New York, and have financial interests. The list goes on.

But to paint hundreds of thousands of journalists in the US and UK alone as part of an agenda is not only naïve, it’s dangerous.

Firstly, large media institutions could not get away with relying on small stories to construct speculative narratives like Brand does. They are always going to be led, for good or bad, by the dominant body of evidence available. If 99% of scientists believe that the vaccine is safe and effective, the BBC is going to report it that way. That’s what you get. Media literacy is to read the news widely, know an institution’s biases, and read elsewhere too.

Second, the surge in independent media is a great thing – you’re watching it, now – and obviously I’m an enthusiast. However ‘independent’ does not automatically mean authentic, unbiased, ‘giving the voiceless a voice’, ‘free’, or any other of the superlatives you often hear. Independent media largely rely on stories investigated and first reported by the same mainstream media they go on to criticise. Brand does this all the time. ‘Independent’ media rarely have the budget to execute years-long investigations, report from warzones, get access to archives and data quickly, get to the scene of a disaster or protest while it’s happening. Media institutions are important for this very reason. We need institutions with the budget and connections to do these things. Compare this to Brand reading from bitcoin.com.

Third, to paint everyone in the mainstream media in the same way is to ignore that the media is made up of millions of people around the world doing work passionately, carefully, with varied opinions and interests. To frame the mainstream media as monolithic, and use language like us vs them, is dangerous.

Brand paints anyone who is part of the ‘narrative’ as stooges for a centralising corporate and government agenda to take away your freedom. As any cursory look at a textbook on propaganda will show, that’s not how influence works in authoritarian countries, let alone liberal ones.

Brand relies on a top down model of propaganda in which power and money directs information, education, news, and opinion downwards through the press and the schools into the minds of a mindless population.

But as Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo point out in their introduction to the Oxford Handbook on Propaganda, propaganda is not total, even in totalitarian regimes. Persuasion by information is much more complex. They write, ‘people consume propaganda, but they also produce and package their own information just as they also create and spin their own truths.’

If you think the mainstream media are just propagandists then I implore you to just look at the facts of any of these issues. One million people have died from Covid in the US alone. And vaccine hesitancy has been estimated to have led to 300,000 preventable deaths. That’s a study from Brown, Harvard, the New York Times, and more. If you think the mainstream media are just propagandists, take a look through the Pulitzer Prize nominees at the investigations of the past year.

Again, I’m not saying that there aren’t many, many criticisms to be made. And that obviously the mainstream media are de facto in the centre, and that collective, radical, and socialist solutions or candidates will never get a fair shout and that lobbying and money will always delegitimise solutions that don’t align with their interests, and that supporting independent progressive media is crucial to countering that. But none of these criticisms paints the mainstream media as monolithic, evil, propaganda. It’s simplistic, it’s dangerous, it’s wrong, and as we’ll see, it’s often about narcissism, control, and in many cases outright lies.

The Recent Allegations and Rumble

In September of 2023, Channel Four and the Telegraph in the UK released an investigation into Brand that included allegations of sexual assault and rape. The day before, Brand posted a video denying the allegations.

What happened next, for many, seemed to prove Brand’s point. The media focused its attention on Brand, countless articles were written, news items broadcast, investigations launched at the BBC. He was dropped by his agent, a tour was cancelled, Youtube removed advertising from his account so he could no longer make money from it, a charity he did work for cut ties, and on and on.

One platform stood firm – Rumble – and a letter from a UK MP asking whether Rumble was going to stop Brand earning money was ridiculed and criticised by many, including Rumble, who said in an open letter: ‘We regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our platform or to earn a living from doing so’.

Inevitably it became a story about a story. Free speech, cancel culture, the establishment, the agenda.

There are, again, reasonable debates to be had here. I for one am not sure Youtube should have taken a stance based on allegations alone, no matter how strong. But a week or so after the allegations, the ‘I’ in the UK ran a story about ads on Brand’s Rumble channel. One was from the Wedding Shop, who told them: ‘We are on the phone right now to our agency to ascertain which of these networks is showing our ads on Rumble so that we can actively remove ads from the platform… It goes without saying that we would not be happy to be featured on Russell Brand’s videos’.

They continued: ‘We use a media agency to spend our advertising budget and we have never chosen to advertise on Rumble, which must be part of the Google, Bing or Meta ad network. Where our ads are placed is not something we generally control – it would be for Google, Bing or Meta to decide whether or not to include or exclude particular platforms’.

It also reports that several companies including Burger King, Xero and Fiverr have stopped their ads running on Rumble. The stories are all similar.

A Fiverr spokesperson said, ‘These ads have been removed and our partners and teams have been alerted to ensure this doesn’t happen again. (We have excluded his channel on both YouTube and on Rumble.) We take brand safety and ethical advertising placement seriously, and we do not condone or support any form of violence or misconduct’.

A toy manufacturer said something similar.

In 2017, Youtube went through something called the ‘adpocalypse’. Advertisers pulled out of Youtube en-masse, when they realised that their ads were being played in front of videos that were accused of being anti-Semitic, homophobic, or just ‘scammy’.

All of this points to an obvious conclusion. Charities, agencies, advertisers, and institutions would prefer not to be linked with someone accused of sexual assault and rape – it’s not great PR. Youtube, in particular, has to balance between supporting creators and attracting advertisers, and so the middle ground is to limit ads on videos that advertisers are likely to pull out of, before the advertisers pull out of Youtube.

Of course, for Brand, this quickly became part of the agenda. In a Rumble video he criticises something called the Trusted News Initiative and argues that the mainstream media are targeting independent media in an attempt to control the narrative.

The Trusted News Initiative is an effort by many media organisations to counter fake news, false reports, viral disinformation, and so on. Not dissenting opinions, but purposefully false information, which studies have shown get shared six times as much as real news on sites like Facebook. Fake stories like this one: ‘Ilhan Omar Holding Secret Fundraisers with Islamic Groups Tied to Terror’, which got shared 14k times on Facebook alone.

Brand argues that, ‘plainly the TNI has an agenda, an explicit agenda to throttle and choke independent media’.

He uses a story from Reclaim the Net that focuses on a lawsuit filed in the US by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that claims that dissenting views are being stamped out unconstitutionally by the TNI, violating freedom of speech and anti-trust laws.

It’s a minor story from nine months ago, but it’s useful for Brand because it supports his main point: he’s under attack.

Not only does he rely on a single fringe source to tell a biased story, he either lazily or wilfully distorts it. He reads from parts of the article, then at the end says again that, ‘plainly the TNI has an agenda, an explicit agenda, to throttle and choke independent media’.

But he’s completely distorted the language that even he’s just read a second ago. Again, there may be legitimate concerns about this, but if you look at the lawsuit, available online, filed to the district court, the so-called ‘explicit agenda’ is to find ways to ‘throttle’ and ‘choke’ false news stories. The comments about independent media are separate, and even these are misquoted.

The quote Brand reads out is from Jamie Angus at BBC News, saying: ‘Because actually the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms. … That’s the real competition now in the digital media world’.

This is a misquote. Both Brand and RFK and others reporting this uncritically have conveniently left out the parts of the quote that dilute their point. Anyone can watch the clip, it’s linked below. He actually said that the divide is between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked, incorrect, or in fact, explicitly malicious, nonsense, specifically to destabilise regions of the world’.

How Brand has framed this is an outright lie.

The context is not only left out, its manipulated. The entire discussion is about how much newsrooms need to do now to verify the vast amount of information they’re dealing with; how much newsrooms of changed and the challenges they face; how many more technicians and specialists are required. He’s talking about wars, verifying whether a tiktok from Ukraine is manipulated or useful evidence, employing specialists in things like geolocation verification, using satellite imaging to understand bombings He even praises ‘citizen journalism’ and talks about opening up the news ecosystem – It’s an interesting watch. Brand and his like have to do none of that difficult work. Not only that, but they rely on it, use it, feed off it, while denigrating the many ordinary people who make it possible.You might say, well Brand is just one person, he is just an ‘entertainer’, he’s just commenting on articles and news, not producing it, it’s not his responsibility to fact check every story. And that’s precisely the argument Brand makes too.But if I – with a budget of almost nil can quickly check a source – then maybe Stay Free with Russell Brand might also do a bit of work. I’m not saying they should have a newsroom of fact-checkers, specialists, and technicians sifting through every claim, but with the following, net worth, and status he has, he clearly has the budget to do due diligence, to check sources, to not misrepresent. With a channel that large you have a clear moral duty to. Instead, the laziest and most entertaining interpretation comes first; laziness fosters conspiracy because thoroughness exposes the truth.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be very concerned with big tech being in control of what can and can’t be said. I disagreed with them taking down clips and interviews about vaccines and Covid. I think big tech platforms should be committed to freedom of speech.

But Angus is talking about genuine floods of disinformation, propaganda machines, Russian bot farms, designed to lie to people. And he’s right. Whatever the dangers and criticisms, I think it would irresponsible of the mainstream media not to think carefully about this. It took me a few minutes to search through the court document, watch the clip, to see that Brand and his source had either willingly or lazily misquoted the source so as to spin it into their own narrative, combine it with another quote to make it seem more malicious, and in Brand’s case use it to defend against accusations from many ordinary women of sexual assault. And if that doesn’t make you angry, I think it should.

Narcissism News Entertainment

In his book on conspiracy theories, Michael Shermer writes that seeing patterns everywhere – patternification – is the result of the need for control.

He writes: ‘the economy is not this crazy patchwork of supply and demand laws, market forces, interest rate changes, tax policies, business cycles, boom-and-bust fluctuations, recessions and upswings, bull and bear markets, and the like. Instead, it is a conspiracy of a handful of powerful people variously identified as the Illuminati, the Bilderberger group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Rockefellers and Rothschilds’.

He continues: ‘conspiracists believe that the complex and messy world of politics, economics, and culture can all be explained by a single conspiracy and conspiratorial event that downplays chance and attributes everything to this final end of history’.

Instead of acknowledging messiness, complicated people, and multiple motives, conspiracy thinking sees a pattern as the result of purposeful agency in an attempt to control others.

Psychologists Mark Landau and Aaron Kay looked at studies that show how people compensate for perceived loss of control by trying to restore control themselves by ‘bolstering personal agency, affiliating with external systems perceived to be acting on the self’s behalf, and affirming clear contingencies between actions and outcomes’, and by ‘seeking out and preferring simple, clear, and consistent interpretations of the social and physical environments’.

In one study, participants were asked to think of an incident in their lives where they felt in control, while another group were asked to think of an incident where they weren’t. The latter group were more likely to believe in the conspiracy theories presented to them after.

Psychologists Joshua Hart and Molly Graether did a study and found that conspiracy believers, ‘are relatively untrusting, ideologically eccentric, concerned about personal safety, and prone to perceiving agency in actions’.

One of the most important findings in studies is that narcissism – the belief in one’s own superiority and need for special treatment – is a strong predictor of believing in conspiracies. Narcissists are also more sensitive to perceived threats.

As one paper notes, ‘the effect of narcissism on conspiracy beliefs has been replicated in various contexts by various labs’, and that, ‘narcissism is one of the best psychological predictors of conspiracy beliefs’. It continues: ‘grandiose narcissists strive to achieve admiration by boosting their egos through a sense of uniqueness, charm, and grandiose fantasizing’.

Narcissism arises out of paranoia, that threats are powerful, and narcissists tend to respond with a bolstered sense of ego – the need for personal dominance and control. The need to feel unique makes narcissists feel like they have access to special information that others don’t. (PETERSON IN HIS MAD SUITS)

It’s also been found that narcissists, ‘tend to be naïve and less likely to engage in cognitive reflection’. To put in bluntly, they’re more gullible. Narcissism has been linked to low levels of ‘intellectual humility’ by one study.

Obviously the entertainment industry is full of narcissists, who are particularly suited to voicing ‘special’ opinions and entertaining people. And there is a sense in which Brand knows this is entertainment. He says things like ‘you’re gonna love this story, its right up your ally’ – a strange way to frame a story if you think it’s existential: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjGYsner6oI&ab_channel=RussellBrand

What you get is a kind of narcissistic news porn based on paranoia and a need for control. Brand’s an entertainer. I don’t want to be psychoanalysing anyone, but Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and Brand – three major figures who talk about conspiracy theories a lot – come from a place where maybe they wished they had more agency, more control.

Musk had a very troubled and abusive childhood in South Africa, Joe Rogan has talked about how he moved around a lot, got bullied, and learned to fight to defend himself, and Brand has a well-documented history of addiction.

What this can lead to is a feeling of not being in control, a world of threat, and a sense of paranoia. Mirriam-Webster defines paranoia as, ‘systematized delusions of persecution’.

It leads to the need to form a narrative to help a person feel superior by having access to special knowledge about larger forces out to persecute them that they themselves have overcome.

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Hofstadter points out that the paranoid person sees an enemy that is pervasive, powerful, conspiratorial, pulling the strings, and, importantly, everywhere.

He writes that the proponents of the paranoid style ‘regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade’.

Hofstadter continues that the enemy is, ‘a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving’… ‘He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.’ He controls the press, ‘manages the news’, brainwashes, seduces, has control of the educational system.’

For the paranoid, ‘Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated’.

This is why Brand seems to get on so well with Tucker Carlson. Tucker is well versed in something that his former employer Fox News revolutionised: news as entertainment – flashy graphics, sensationalist language, us vs them narratives, a conspiracy involving every institution.

Fox News realised that it’s the ongoing narrative – good vs evil – that keeps viewers tuning back in, and so Carlson and Brand like him pick a story or study or witness that supports the long-running dramatic narrative that gets the views, rather than the other way around.

It’s not reporting, it’s not journalism, it’s not news, it’s entertainment – they make a few points and the rest is how it’s said, with anger, or charisma, with jokes, with a story of good vs evil. It’s shallow news porn.

Public Trust, Private Solutions

None of this is to defend a political system that’s failing ordinary people. None of this is to deny that inequality is widening, wealth is moving upwards, wages are stagnated, that people are underrepresented. None of it is to deny that lobbying, money, selfish interests, corporate greed all play a central role in politics. And none of this is to argue that there’s anything wrong with looking at big pharma’s financial incentives, criticising the great reset, or emphasising the concerns of farmers in climate policy. None of this is to say that we don’t need radical solutions.

What this is to absolutely reject is the framing. The paranoid style, the good vs evil narrative, the narrow selection of stories and evidence to suit your own dramatic narrative, the linking of every issue together into a totalising agenda.

Brand paints the mainstream media narrative as a lie; his is not only a bigger lie, but also a self-aggrandising and dangerous one.

George Monbiot writes about Brand that, ‘He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand’.

If you’re not selecting the stories, facts, evidence you cover by their wider significance, if you’re picking up perspectives and narratives based on fringe evidence and ideas, then all you’re doing is being led by your own individualistic narcissistic ego. This is why Brand’s criticism of the mainstream media has only increased since an investigation into his very well-known behaviour was released. It’s obvious that this isn’t an objective analysis, it’s driven by his own fragility, his own little world.

And that’s when we get narcissistic news porn rather than careful study and analysis.

To paint the mainstream media as totally propagandised is to miss that people are multifaceted, complex, have competing incentives. What many missed about the investigation in the recent allegations against Brand is that it was as much an investigation into a BBC and Channel Four that facilitated Brand than about Brand himself.

Think about that. Channel Four aired an investigation into itself. Would you ever see that on Brand’s channel?

Brand does no original reporting, he sits in his shed and reads from journalists who have gone out and done the work, while at the same time howling about how terrible they are.

To be clear, again, I’m not saying that there aren’t many critiques of the mainstream media to be made, and more journalism, more independent voices, ultimately, are a great, potentially revolutionary, thing to be supported.

But when you totalise and cram everything into the ‘agenda’, you paint the world in paranoid, apocalyptic terms of us vs them that dehumanises the other as individuals to be gotten rid of, rather than look at real collective, structural solutions to the problems we face.

This is why Brand gravitates towards figures like Tucker Carlson. Carlson doesn’t want collective solutions. What he wants is more of the same but with him in charge. If every institution is tainted, part of the ‘centralising agenda’, you get libertarianism, you get more corporate power, more greed, more unregulated pollution, more inequality. You get the opposite of what we need.

If you portray every institution as part of an agenda then what’s left to do? Revolution, maybe? But then what? Where are your solutions? What’s your theory? What replaces the current system?

Conspiracy thinking is the easiest type of thinking – everyone does it. It’s easy for showmen like Brand because at the end of reading off a few quotes from one source you can just link them to the agenda, the great reset, a ‘centralising agenda’, and Bill Gates.

It’s like having a safety blanket to return to that says don’t worry, the world is evil, but you know the truth, you have it figured in a simple little package, don’t worry, you never have to think again.

Sources

Terry Pinkard, Does History Make Sense,

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-66369532

Jan-Willem van Prooijen, The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/08/great-reset-conspiracy/

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10186363/Researchers-running-arm-Pfizers-Covid-jab-trials-falsified-data-investigation-claims.html

https://theconversation.com/vaccine-trial-misconduct-allegation-could-it-damage-trust-in-science-171164

https://inews.co.uk/news/russell-brand-advertisers-pulling-ads-rumble-site-comedian-videos-2633281?ito=twitter_share_article-top

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_23_2507

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/30/peak-polluters-last-chance-close-dutch-government

Steven Umbrello, Should We Reset?

Michael Christensen and Ashli Au, The Great Reset and the Cultural Boundaries of Conspiracy Theory

Ivan Wecke, Conspiracy Theories Aside, There is Something Fishy about the Great Reset

Michael Shermer, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational

Aleksandra Cichocka, Marta Marchlewska, Mikey Biddlestone, Why do narcissists find conspiracy theories so appealing?

Cosgrove TJ and Murphy CP, Narcissistic susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs exaggerated by education, reduced by cognitive reflection

https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3750&context=historical

https://reclaimthenet.org/rfk-jr-sues-mainstream-media-misinformation-cartel

https://www.bbc.co.uk/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative/role-of-the-news-leader/

https://www.hollandtimes.nl/articles/national/tata-steel-environmental-threat-or-essential-industry/

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25688696/

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