For me, right-wing thought is thought which tends to support hierarchy, authority, power, expansion of power, dictation over people’s personal lives and the enforcement of heavily bounded social categories. It reduces all liberty to the right to buy the products you can afford. Thus the right tends to hate egalitarianism, feminism, anti-racism and so on. They rarely support liberation movements that openly oppose capitalism. As I have argued previously they tend to use quite a lot of force to suppress free-speech, and then suppress awareness of the suppression, just as they suppress awareness of the general political shift rightwards. Right-wing thought has very little to do with conservative thought.
The left tend to favour relative egalitarianism (no one thinks everyone will be completely equal in everything, just that superiority in earning money or inheriting money, should not lead to massive inequalities of power and opportunity). They tend to favour people reclaiming their power and being treated as important politically. They tend to think that the State should not regulate your sex and recreational life, and so on.
I’d add that both modes of thought, tend to be non-systemic and have only a few solutions to problems, and they tend to think that if their policy is not working this must be because:
- Somebody is deliberately working to prevent the policy being successful.
- They have not applied the policy strongly enough.
They both tend not to think that unintended consequences are normal and need looking out for, and adjusting one’s actions for. They tend to think knowledge is complete and causality is obvious. The left tends to value looking at a diversity of solutions more than the right does, but this is a fragile virtue, and easily overthrown.
Libertarians tend to think that they understand complexity issues, but they seem completely unaware of the (hopefully) unintended, but expectable, consequences of imposing ‘free markets’ in the context of corporate dominance.
Of course many people on the right are actually more leftish than they believe, and its fair enough to protest against this particular categorisation of politics, but if you look at actual Right wing politics, it tends to nanny the rich and boot the poor, or give more liberty to the already powerful and curtail the liberty of everyone else. At the best it promises to restore the exclusionary power of people who felt they were dominant, but have lost that dominance.
Is it possible to separate this kind of hierarchical and authoritarian thinking from capitalism? I suspect not. After all, libertarians, and social-democrats, have been trying for years, and capitalism has not changed. It has in fact got stronger and more severe in its politics over the last 40 years of constant chatter about the benefit of free markets. There is certainly less liberty, less ability to influence politics, less protection at work, less equity in wealth distribution, less support in misfortune, less interest in protecting essential infrastructure, unless someone makes a profit out of it. Capitalism is not incompatible with dictatorship, although that support then distorts it’s official ideology still further.
I suspect this authoritarianism occurs because capitalism is primarily about the reduction of all values and morality to profit and wealth. This always becomes support for the wealth hierarchy, disciplining the work force, keeping ordinary folk down and assuming that protecting profit is better than protecting survival and continuance. Capitalism seems to suppress empathy for others, unless there is a buck in it, as capital accumulation can generally only occur if you separate yourself from the needs of other people.
In capitalism wealth controls all the modes of power: it can buy politicians, it can buy laws, it can buy the police, it can buy the military, it can buy the media, it can buy ‘knowledge’ that suits it, it can buy the economics that suit it and so on. Almost nothing is beyond purchase, and capitalism spreads its managerial modes of organisation everywhere, even into Churches. Consequently, capitalism becomes unchallengable, taken for granted, part of our sponsored common sense. The only movement that is officially acceptable, and that has much chance of winning out, is to strengthen capitalism and intensify its effects and spread.
In this process, support for authority is so great, that unintended consequences, such as ecological destruction tend to be ignored. If destroying ecologies is what keeps the system going, then that is what the system will do to preserve its power structures. Hence, the ability of free market leaders to encourage destruction, and to try and lower the legal consequences of destruction. They do not see how they themselves are part of a bigger system they need for survival and which they are destroying, or they think that wealth and authority will protect them. Everyone else, all ordinary people, are just rubbish and should be culled, as it is their fault for having too many children or being relatively poor or something. Hence the population line they continually push.
In the contemporary world, capitalism has no serious challengers except for Islamic fundamentalism, and it is doubtful that Islam will ever have much appeal in the West in the short term, so there is no incentive whatsoever for capitalists not to support their own hierarchies and authority and impose it everywhere so as to cement that lack of opposition, their wealth and their power.
Tags: Anthropocene, economics, free markets
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
October 6, 2019 at 4:41 am |
[…] Is capitalism inherently authoritarian? […]
October 6, 2019 at 4:43 am |
[…] This idea they must be right, and dissent must be punished, is fundamental to their understanding of the world. It is like the request that religious people should have the right to sack or namecall anyone because of that person’s differences, but maintain the right to be protected from being sacked or namecalled for their own differences. Indeed the issue may even originate in Christianity’s persecution of heretics and people of other religions. Perhaps, this monotheism cannot accept that any deviance can be anything other than satanic, and to be purged? Perhaps it is just that Capitalism as a monotheism that makes profit its only value is authoritarian? […]