The Crucible of Neoliberal Capitalism

In which Alan Greenspan lays a wreath on Ayn Rand's grave, a Eucharistic morsel is used in the creation of a love spell, queen Tiye's coup goes horribly awry, and I try neoliberal capitalism on the charge of witchcraft.

Capitalism is an especially volatile form of magic. This has been true since its conception in Early Modern Europe. But in recent years, capitalism has undergone a profound and worrying mutation. Since the 1970s, the last obstacles to capitalism have gradually been torn down or collapsed of themselves, and the rails towards capitalism's worldwide dominance have been greased with friendly words like “deregulation,” “liberalization” and “globalization.” Some of the rail-greasers are greedy, short-sighted and unscrupulous predators. Some of them are idealists, who sincerely believe they are making paths straight for individual liberty and communal prosperity. Most of them are bits both. But regardless of their intentions, the ideology they have adopted as a vehicle—the economic, political, and spiritual outlook known as neoliberalism—has produced a terrifying mutation in the structure of capitalist sorcery. Capitalism has been transformed into a form of magic that is far more volatile, and far more pernicious: witchcraft.   

No seriously: I formally and publicly accuse neoliberal capitalism of witchcraft. This post will carry the accusation through to a conviction or an acquittal, subject to the decision of you, my readers and my jury. But before the trial can begin, I must be sure that you are fully aware of your responsibilities. This means briefly reviewing two points of juridical protocol, and providing you with a clear definition of witchcraft; it is important that you are adequately informed about courtroom procedure and the criterion of conviction.

Protocol Number One: This is not a trial of capitalism or magic as a whole. It’s worse than useless to praise or condemn these phenomena as inherently good or inherently evil. In their broadest meanings, capitalism and magic cannot conduct a moral charge. They exist only as logical forms, as instruments for achieving concrete human goals. Only through their specific applications in pursuit of these goals do they become capable of conducting a moral charge. My accusation is specific. I am accusing neoliberalism—a recent manifestation of capitalism—of practicing witchcraft: a pernicious manifestation of magic.

Protocol Number Two: Unfortunately, most of us do not understand magic as something distinct from witchcraft. Our dominant model for understanding magic is the Star Wars Model. If we use the Star Wars Model during the trial, it will screw everything up. It muddies waters that must remain clear in order for a witchcraft conviction to surface. So before we begin, we need to switch to the Fundamental Forces Model of magic. Unlike the Star Wars Model, the Fundamental Forces Model draws a clear distinction between magic and witchcraft. I need to explain how both of these models work, and why it’s important that we make the switch I’m proposing. Bear with me.

Let’s start with the software most of us are already running: the Star Wars Model. This software segregates every power and principality in the cosmos into either the light side or the dark side of the Force. Two important facts about the model. First, it tends to generate lumbering cosmic showdowns. The Jedi and the Sith, Dumbledore and Voldemort, Capitalism and Communism. Everything has to be filtered through the lens of a cosmic sumo-wrestling match. Second, it splits the universe into opposing sources of power. The Jedi and the Sith do not just work towards opposed goals, they draw on opposing sources of strength. If your power isn’t coming from the light side, it’s coming from the dark side.

There’s a chubby chunk of history at the origins of this model, and it’s worth our time to know the rough outlines. The roots lie in early Christianity and its struggle against paganism. The early Christians didn’t say the pagan gods weren’t real; they said they were demons. These demons were happy to fertilize crops or soothe hemorrhoids in exchange for the bloody horror of animal sacrifice and the enslavement of our wills. But the strength of the Eucharist—the ritual consumption of Christ’s body and blood—gave the early Christians a supernatural edge, it let them ride the lightning. They defied the demons, exorcised them, burned down their temples in the cities and drove them into the desert.

After the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Western Middle Ages, paganism faded into a distant memory, and the demons were conveniently collapsed into the unitary figure of Satan. Satan stalked the brooding forests of Northwestern Europe which replaced the desert as the edge of civilised and Christian space. He was forever eager to strike pacts with those pursuing goals that Mother Church would not approve of. These people needed a source of power to achieve their goals—an alternative to the sacraments of the church. Many chose to steal the Eucharistic host and use it in love spells or execration rituals against their enemies, but this source of power was dangerous, ambiguous, and difficult to attain;  Satan, as the eternal and cosmic enemy of God, provided a more secure alternative.

We can see how this cosmic model reflects the two points I made above. God and Satan are at war, and our cosmos is the battlefield. You can draw on the power of God or you can draw on the power of Satan. You damn well better draw on one of them, if you want any security in this uncertain world, because there are no nonaligned powers. Magic and witchcraft are the instruments of Satan, religion and the sacraments are the instruments of God. The academic term for the Star Wars Model is dualism, because the cosmos has a dual structure. But you can just as well swap the vowels and call it duelism, since daily life is dominated by an endless duel between good and evil.

Whatever you want to call it—the Star Wars Model, the Manichean Universe, the Cold War Cosmos—dualism is still nesting very comfortably in our Western bowels. But we’d better void ourselves and make space for something else, because if we stick with this model, we are stuck doing one of two things. Either we split magic in half and divide it into a light side and a dark side—as Star Wars and Harry Potter do—or we pit magic against an opposing source of power—maybe Religion, maybe Reason. The first option makes a distinct definition of witchcraft impossible—it’s reduced to a word for gendering magic-users. The second option would commit us to praising or condemning magic as a whole. Neither option is acceptable. Time for a conceptual enema. Time to switch to the Fundamental Forces Model.

What is it that we’re making space for? How does the Fundamental Forces Model work? In the interests of respect, I’ll draw my examples from a culture that is respectably dead: ancient Egypt. The ancient Egyptians would have found Star Wars bizarre and incomprehensible. But they could probably identify the Force: it was another word for Heka. Heka, crudely translated as “power to make things happen,” is the god of magic.

Heka has two brothers: Sia “divine perception” and Hu “creative speech.” These three brothers are the eternal components of every act of creation. They were the only gods present with Ptah the creator “before duality had come into being.” All creation is accomplished in the same way that this blog post is being accomplished. Through Sia I perceive the goal I wish to bring about, through Hu I speak the creative words that embody that perception, and through Heka those words receive strength to become reality.

The cosmos depicted by contemporary particle physics has four fundamental forces: strong interaction, weak interaction, electromagnetism, and gravity. This Egyptian cosmos had three: Sia, Hu, and Heka. The fundamental forces of either cosmos are morally neutral. You can use electromagnetism and gravity to light a street lamp and play baseball, or you can drop a toaster into your wife’s bathtub and push your sister off a cliff. This explains why literacy was so tightly restricted in Ancient Egypt—in a cosmos where “perception,” “creative utterance,” and “power to effect” are morally neutral fundamental forces, the written word has dangerous power. Only initiated members of the tiny scribal class were entrusted with the knowledge of hieroglyphs. Even fewer were granted access to the House of Life—the temple archive where the written spells were housed and handed down.

It was critical that knowledge of these spells be accompanied by the wisdom to use them responsibly. The lector priests (literally, “carriers of the book of ritual”) were expected to use their knowledge to benefit the whole community. Lector priests spent only a part of each year at the temple and its House of Life. During the rest of the year they would travel, performing spells for hire. There were spells for communities beset by crocodile attacks, spells for healing boils, and spells for ensuring a safe passage to the afterlife. There were also spells of “execration,” designed to bring ruin and misfortune. Normally these would be written beside the names of Egypt’s enemies—Nubians, Libyans, Palestinians—on wax figurines or on pots. The figurines were then melted, and the pots ritually smashed. Execration spells were an important part of Egyptian foreign policy, and a crucial instrument of the pharaoh in his role as the defender of Egypt. There was no distinction between “white” and “black” magic. Any and all magic was acceptable, as long as it aided the prosperity, health, or safety of the larger community.

What about our definition of witchcraft? There is only one witchcraft trial recorded in all of Egyptian history. It happened in the reign of Ramses III, when queen Tiye initiated a conspiracy in the royal harem, hoping to kill her husband and secure the throne for her own son, Pentewere. According to the trial papyri, one of her co-conspirators used his official position to acquire “a magic scroll of Ramses III, his lord” from the House of Life, as well as wax figurines capable of binding or disabling limbs. The conspirators planned to use these instruments to kill the pharaoh, spark uprisings across Egypt, and bind all those who tried to stop them. But somebody ratted them out. Dozens of conspirators were tried and executed for these “great crimes of death, these great abominations of the land.” Some had it worse than others. Excavators in the 20^th dynasty tombs at Deir-el-Bahri found a curious unmarked sarcophagus among the royal personages. When they opened it, a horrifying smell rolled out. Inside was an un-mummified corpse, wrapped in a sheepskin (a ritually unclean object) and bound hand and foot, his face a screeching rictus. Most Egyptologists believe that this was the corpse of Pentewere, queen Tiye’s son.

But as I said, some had it worse than others. Pentewere was allowed to drink poison, and he at least received a burial. The other conspirators were probably burned alive, their ashes scattered in the streets for the wind to blow, along with their hopes for an afterlife. They were condemned to the Second Death. The Egyptians took witchcraft very, very seriously. And using the pharaoh’s own scroll in a plot to end his life and bring ruinous rebellion to the land of Egypt was the very

Definition of Witchcraft: the use of the fundamental force of magic for self-obsessed ends in a way that harms the larger community.   

This wraps up our trial preliminaries. We now have two protocols and a definition of witchcraft. By taking the Fundamental Forces model I just unpacked and applying to it capitalism as well as magic, we get the following set of trial guidelines.

Protocol One: Neither capitalism nor magic are on trial.

Protocol Two: Both capitalism and magic are to be understood as morally neutral fundamental forces.

Definition of Witchcraft: the use of a fundamental force for self-obsessed ends in a way that harms the larger community.

You are now equipped to judge the truth or falsity of my accusation, so I can transition fully into the role of the prosecutor. I will now demonstrate that neoliberalism bends the arc of capitalism towards self-obsession in a way that harms the larger human community. If you accept my claim, you must join me in convicting neoliberal capitalism on the charge of witchcraft. 

Neoliberalism begins with a small group of economists and political philosophers known as the Mont Pelerin Society. The society was named after the spa in the Swiss Alps where they held their first meeting. The year was 1947, and Europe was besieged. Stalin’s tentacles had Eastern Europe firmly in their grip and were reaching with moist and patient greed for Turkey, Greece, and Berlin. The Mont Peleriners were exhausted—many of them had only recently escaped from the talons of Hitler. The Free Individual seemed destined for extinction. Individual conscience and individual initiative were threatened with suffocation by Fascism, with its brutal group-think of blood and soil, and Communism, with its totalising claim to speak on behalf of the collective will.  This fear pervades the language of the Society’s founding statement:

The central values of civilization are in danger. Over large stretches of the earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. In others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power. Even that most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.  

These were prophetic fears. The 20th century inventory of Orwellian acid-trips—Cambodia’s Year Zero, East Germany’s Stasi State, North Korea’s Megalomaniac Disneyland—fulfills and surpasses the Mont Pelerin Society’s blackest imaginings. So it’s understandable that the founders of neoliberalism and its subsequent flag-bearers chose to apotheosize the Free Individual.

The paradigm example of this 20th century process is Ayn Rand. She was born to an upper middle class family in St. Petersburg, in 1905, and came of age during the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks confiscated her bourgeois family’s pharmacy on the basis of their “class origins,” and the entire family nearly starved. The popular philosophy she later created—Objectivism—is the product of her revulsion for Soviet State Socialism, and the murders and confiscations it undertook in the name of the collective will. Consider the following extract from her collected essays:

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone.   

We already have the tools to understand what is unfolding in this quote. Writing as she is in a Western intellectual environment, Ayn Rand has inherited the Star Wars model. Her early experiences have convinced her that communalism and collectivism sprouted in the sticky black mulch of the dark side. According to the logic of dualism, the light side can now be identified with the polar opposite of extreme collectivism: radical individualism. Ayn Rand didn’t flinch from this conclusion. She pivoted toward radical individualism without remainder or reserve.

Ayn Rand’s pivot was reenacted again and again and again as neoliberalism developed. The history of neoliberalism is essentially the sum of these pivots. We don’t have time to unpack the historical factors that made it possible—they include the collapse of Bretton Woods monetary policy, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and a backlash against the social movements of the late 60s’ and 70s—but in the 1980s neoliberalism achieved critical mass. The elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 signal the change. Trade unions and the welfare state soon felt the hammer blows that were being struck in the name of individual liberty and personal responsibility.  

In 1938, Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem had envisioned a collectivist dystopia in which people could not even pronounce the word “I,” only “We.” In  1987 Margaret Thatcher informed the people of Britain that: “there is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families.” The neoliberal pivot had done its work. In that same year, Ronald Reagan appointed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan was an ardent disciple of Ayn Rand—five years before he was among the group of devotees who attended her funeral and graced her tombstone with an enormous floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign. The history of Greenspan’s tenure—which ended two years before the 2008 financial crash—is the history of neoliberalism’s unchallenged ascendency. In recent years, serious challenges have arisen, but we nevertheless continue to live in the grand imperium of the Free Individual.

What are the circumstances of life under the Free Individual’s beneficent reign? On the one hand, we could examine the concrete actions of policymakers who act in His name: the de-regulation of finance, the liberalization of cross-border trade, and the dismantling of centrally administered benefits. On the other hand, we could examine the abstract values that we are daily compelled to venerate, much as Roman citizens sacrificed to statues of the emperor. These values can be expressed in a holy trinity: Novelty, Innovation, and Self-Obsession. I think the prosecution’s case is better served by bypassing government policy and examining the impact of this holy trinity on daily life. To make sure that we don’t lose sight of the witchcraft charge, I’ll bookend my examinations with further remarks on the nature of witchcraft. (My ethnographic sources are eclectic and my generalisations freewheeling, so take it all with at least three grains of salt).

The first member of the trinity is Novelty. Novelty is an absolute value in consumer society. Every product is required to scream and shake and shimmy its newness. Ever-new products in ever-expanding variety oblige us—as consumers—to display the same pattern. We are obliged to scream and shake and shimmy our uniqueness. Each of us expresses our magnificent individuality through the unique aggregate of products we consume and display—in our homes and on our person. We must consume more, we must consume faster, and we must consume in greater variety, or we risk becoming just another member of the crowd.  We are, after all, all individuals.

We find an analogue in African witchcraft: witches are always hungry. It is their bottomless appetite that compels them to fill their belly with more than their share of the community’s resources. We find another analogue in the Algonquin figure of the Wendigo. If a human being indulges in greed or cannibalism, they are transformed into a gaunt and hulking monster—the Wendigo. The Wendigo is voracious for human flesh, but it grows in proportion with its meals. It is always gorging but forever starving. The shopping mall is thus a kind of spectral panorama—an enormous aquarium for witches and Wendigos—prowling ceaselessly after the latest delicacy or possession.  

As products proliferate, the pace of Novelty increases. There is less and less time before everyone is wearing the new boots and everyone discovers the new band. Attention spans decrease, and restlessness increases. Boredom is neoliberal capitalism’s best friend—it expands the market for new products. The entrepreneur is a sainted figure—and the ultimate entrepreneur is the one who discovers a new need. Who knew how much we needed Facebook before Mark Zuckerberg came along?

This brings us to the second member of the trinity: Innovation. Creative destruction is the name of the game. If we must consume faster, in greater quantity, and in greater variety, then companies and corporations must constantly be innovating—creating new needs and satisfying them at a faster pace than their competitors. The relationship between Innovation and Novelty is reciprocal. Corporations expand by meeting the needs of a Novelty hungry populace, and a Novelty hungry populace demands the services of Innovative and expanding corporations.

A recent example of Innovation for its own sake is the creation of financial derivatives. These complex financial instruments were universally hailed as a breakthrough at the time of their creation. The credit default swap was hatched in the poolside discussions of an elite group of bright young JP Morgan bankers on a paid retreat in the early 90s. They were showered with praise: they had discovered a new need. The credit default swap revolutionized the profit margins of Wall Street, and laid the groundwork for the U.S. Housing Bubble that finally burst in 2008. A huge chunk of the capital that fled from that catastrophe parked itself in the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index—another Innovation of the 1990s—causing spikes in global food prices that have been plausibly linked with the revolts of the Arab Spring. An even larger chunk parked itself in European sovereign debt, throwing gasoline on the brewing European debt crisis.

We find an analogue in African witchcraft: witches despise established norms. In practice, witchcraft accusations frequently fall on those who fail to comply with well-established customs. Craftsmen who refuse to comply with the standards and prices of an established guild structure, and farmers who adopt Western GMO seed stock, may find themselves on the business end of a witchcraft accusation. Western society privileges irreverence and iconoclasm as the engine of prosperity. But in the context of witchcraft, irreverence and iconoclasm represent an assault on customs originally established to ensure the health and sustainability of the human community.   

In this context, it is interesting to note the word most often used to describe American mortgage banking prior to its merger with high risk investment banking during the Clinton administration: boring. Indeed it was boring, predicated as it was on a policy that hadn’t changed since the Roosevelt administration. This policy was based on carefully evaluating mortgage requests on a case-by-case basis and only approving applicants on a sound financial footing. There was very little in the way of Novelty or Innovation. But looking back from the perspective of 2012—on the ass end of an economic collapse created by ditching the old norms to free up space for Innovations like mortgage backed securities based on loans to high-risk applicants—it seems worth entertaining the idea that at least some boring old customs and clichés are old and boring for a reason. After all, the Roosevelt banking reforms were established when memories of the 1929 financial crash that produced the Great Depression was still fresh.

The final member of the neoliberal trinity is also its most fundamental. When the Free Individual is the sitting emperor, we must all make sacrifices before his image: our-Self. Self-Obsession is the brute and basic fact of life under the imperium of the Free Individual. Treat yourself, indulge yourself, pamper yourself: you deserve it. Everything in our environment encourages us to discover our unique and special needs and then purchase the aggregate of products that will satisfy them. Self-denial, in the interests of religious principle, political persuasion, or interpersonal connection, is anathema. Of course, if you’re fasting as part of a colon cleanse, as part of getting healthy and working on yourself, that’s admirable. But if you’re fasting for Ramadan, it’s just an absurd concession to your death-loving and prosperity-denying god. Don’t you know we need to spend if we’re going to stimulate the economy?

The Self-Obsessed hero par-excellence is James Bond. He is blissfully unattached, totally free to choose his pleasures according to his whim. Armed with Q’s marvelous gadgets—(technological objects as the solution to all problems rather than interpersonal relations being another neoliberal theme)—Bond spans the globe, consuming experiences, consuming women—all in the course of protecting the Free Individual from His myriad enemies. We are all encouraged to aspire to Bond-hood. And if we only have enough money, Bond-hood is within our reach. We can go where we please, when we please, and do what we please with whomever we please. And then we can leave. We needn’t be tied down by relational labels like girlfriend or son or nephew or citizen and the responsibilities they imply. We are none of these things. We are only our-Self.

Perhaps the whipsaw alternation between narcissism and self-loathing that is so characteristic of our culture has something to do with this Self-Obsession. We each of us carry the weight of the world. If we succeed, we can take credit for everything. If we fail, we must shoulder responsibility for everything.

We find an analogue in African witchcraft: witches eat babies. They literally devour the reproductive substance of the community. And this is a function of their Self-Obsession. They don’t care whether the community will be able to survive in the future, whether the community will be sustained beyond their own death. When we boil off every scrap of his flesh, the witch is really just a black hole of radical Self-Obsession. He sucks in everything around him, is never satisfied, and does not care about the consequences for his community or for future generations.

As neoliberal capitalism continues to Innovate its way across the globe, devouring the ecosystem in its quest to satisfy our Self-Obsessed demands for Novelty, it’s worth asking the question: what will life look like for our great great grandchildren? Are we devouring the reproductive substance of the human community? Are we eating babies? It's worth noting that the second most common response to peak oil prophets or global warming Cassandras asking us to consume less—after "we'll think of something"—is: "Even if we don't, I'll be dead by then."

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case. Deliver your verdict.