Capitalism, a uniquely Western concept and practice, wedded to democracy, was supposed to be the panacea to the world’s ‘ills’.
In combination, the ‘capitalist nirvana’ would usher in a world where the individual would reign supreme, his (her) needs supplanted by pleasures and desires, all determined by the market forces of supply and demand.
The ‘equilibrium’ ensuing from this schema would lead to ‘a settled’ and a ‘global society’. All conflicts, cultural, identity, ideational, and so on, would dissipate and disappear into the vortex of market forces. The free movement of capital, people, and goods would complete the process and mark ‘history’s end’.
The attendant homogeneity of the world and ubiquity of consumption, and the sameness inhering in that, would entail a ‘world’ or ‘global culture’. Identity and belonging would no longer matter, both dissolved in the miasma of market forces.
The sameness of airports across the world, and shopping malls that would sell similar goods and services, similar urban patterns, embeddedness of technology into the sinews of society, and so on, would lead to an economic paradigm where only experience and titillation mattered.
In the entire framework, identity and belonging would be a matter of ‘choice’.
While the ‘identity menu’ was almost endless, mostly and in the main, it was a Western one, with other identity and ethnic matrices tacked on to it. American-Indian, African-American, Indian-American, Pakistani-American, Lebanese-Australian, British African, and other hyphenated identities comprised this menu.
But while identity and belonging may or may not be layered concepts and even practices, primary, secondary, and tertiary, it appears humankind is wired for seeking certainty.
This is evidenced by the remarkable and tenacious quest for the same in the United States, the ‘second home’ of capitalism and industrialism.
Emblematized by the electoral victories of Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024, most Americans, the descendants of ‘pioneer-settlers’ and even many others, chose the ‘identity first’ mantra over the crude and vulgar promise of neo-liberal economics.
Regarding layered identities of individuals, one may hold himself or herself to be an AI expert, a technocrat, a doctor, an artiste, a family person, or a member of a micro-community, an ethnic group, or a larger community.
But key here is the larger political community, we can even call it a tribe, that has clear and decisive boundaries.
That’s what gives certainty and other markers to individuals. And this was the clear signal and message of the faith reposed in Donald Trump by the people of America.
Contrarily, neo-liberal informed globalism sought to render the market forces of supply and demand the arbiter of humanness and human welfare.
For example, if person A from a certain context, say the third world, had a certain skill, and if this skill had demand in the US, he or she would get preference over an unskilled or blue-collar American. Given the absence of generous and vigorous social security in the US, the blue-collar worker had to suffer and take refuge in the cold and callous fake success and unsuccess metrics devised by Ayn Rand.
In other words, he or she, by choice, accepted that something was wrong with him or her, not the context or the dominant economic paradigm.
That is, he or she accepted that he or she was a failure or, in the voguish term, ‘loser’, thus dropping out of and from the system.
Howard Roark, Ayn Rand’s hero, who epitomized strength, valour, courage, and non-conformism, became the ideal of a few. This false ideal may have been distilled and repeated through ‘soft power’ subtle propaganda soaps like ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’.
While the illusion was internalized by many, the ‘ideal’ remained elusive for all, except perhaps the ‘Davos Man’.
The Davos Man, glorified by the high priests of untrammelled capitalism like Thomas Friedman of the The New York Times, was the quintessential rootless billionaire, who socialized and networked among his own ilk.
Delphic Oracles for the same, the late Alan Greenspan, were the real powers behind the ‘scheme’.
The Davos Man had access to power, political networks and, by virtue of the mobility made possible by the multiple passports he had, was called the ‘cosmocrat’.
While the old aristocracy that often derived its power and perks from land ownership and allied feudal titles had been killed, the Davos men (women) were the new aristocrats or feudal lords.
The Davos man (woman) loathed any form of identity. He or she had no sense of belonging or fidelity to a given identity. His cosmos lay in capital markets, and his or her fundamental yearning was the Rate of Return and the gyrations of the yield curve.
The sleeping pill, or the soporific, for the rest was ‘trickle-down economics’ allied to ‘middle-class’ status. But both remained aspirations for many, if not most.
An aspirational matter, middle-class status in America meant incurring student debt, getting a ‘good job’, usually in the corporate sector, working for the rest of life to pay debts and mortgages, and sending kids to college.
Again, this was restricted to a narrow subset of persons. The ‘rest’, or as Democrats called them, ‘deplorables’, had to wallow in misery, struggles, and at times take refuge in opioids.
All this may be traced to the loss of an anchor and an identity. Because the United States had taken the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in denuding people of identity and rendering them as objects who only sought ‘pleasure maximization and pain avoidance’, the proverbial chicken came home to roost there.
Does the discussion delineated in this essay mean a critique of capitalism?
Yes, indeed.
Should capitalism be jettisoned then? Should ‘workers of the world liberate themselves from the shackles of capitalism’?
This is a very difficult question to answer.
While capitalist modernity in and across the Western world, in varying forms, loosely led to the ‘rule of law’, even civil society, neither can be a surrogate for identity and belonging.
Property rights, for example, can sate the ‘homo economicus’ side of human nature. And the great American philosopher John Locke’s ‘social contract’ may be an intervening variable here.
But it is, given perhaps the abiding features of human nature, the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who wins.
Hobbes’ bleak assessment of human nature and the context can perhaps best be given short shrift through an identity matrix.
What does this mean and imply for capitalism?
It entails putting the extreme variant and form of the capitalist genie back into the bottle.
It also means restraining market fundamentalism, putting people first and their well-being, not just welfare.
In practical terms, it may mean the primacy of the ‘regulatory state’, the state as the carrier, semiotically, symbolically, and in real terms, of people’s identity and political communities with clear boundaries.
It surely should not mean the market forces of supply and demand inflating people as mere ‘utils’ who seek pleasure and avoid pain, and deflating identity and its markers.
It also means balanced trade, and correspondingly balanced capital flows.
How, the question is, can this be achieved?
To borrow a phrase from ‘market economics’, the world needs equilibrium to attain equipoise.
How can this be attained?
By setting new standards and norms in the nation from where the wellsprings of the primacy of market fundamentalism emerged, the United States!
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