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Political Philosophy, Competition, and Competition Law: The Road to and from Neoliberalism, Part 3

Lazar Radic —  10 October 2022

This post is the third in a three-part series. The first installment can be found here and the second can be found here.

As it has before in its history, liberalism again finds itself at an existential crossroads, with liberally oriented reformers generally falling into two camps: those who seek to subordinate markets to some higher vision of the common good and those for whom the market itself is the common good. The former seek to rein in, temper, order, and discipline unfettered markets, while the latter strive to build on the foundations of classical liberalism to perfect market logic, rather than to subvert it.

This conflict of visions has deep ramifications for today’s economic policy. In his classic text “The Antitrust Paradox,” Judge Robert Bork deemed antitrust law a “subcategory of ideology” that “connects with the central political and social concerns of our time.” Among these concerns, he focused specifically on the eternal tension between the ideals of “equality” and “freedom.” In recent years, that tension has been exemplified in competition-policy debates by two schools of thought: the neo-Brandeisians, whose jurisprudential philosophy draws from the progressive U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, and another group represented by the Chicago School and other defenders of the consumer-welfare standard.

But this schism resembles similar divides that have played out countless times over the history of liberalism, albeit under different names and banners. Looking back on the past century and a half of economic and philosophical thought can help us to make sense of these fundamentally opposed visions for the future of both liberalism and antitrust. This history can also help us to understand how these ideologies have sometimes failed to live up to their ambitions or crumbled under the weight of their own contradictions. 

In this final piece in the political philosophy series, I explain the genesis, normative underpinnings, and likely outcome of the current “battle for the soul of antitrust.” The broader point that I have tried to make throughout this series is that this confrontation hinges on ethical and deontological considerations, as much as it does on “hard” consequentialist arguments. Put differently, how we decide to resolve foundational and putatively “technical” questions regarding the goals, standards, and enforcement of antitrust law ultimately cannot help but reflect our underlying views about the values and ideals that should guide a liberal society. In this vein, I argue that there are compelling non-utilitarian reasons to prefer a polity with an in-built bias for negative freedom and that is guided by a narrow economic-efficiency criterion, rather than the apparently ascendant alternatives.

The Birth of Neoliberalism

The clearest articulation of the philosophical schism between the two visions of liberalism that we see today came with the 1937 publication of “The Good Society” by American author and journalist Walter Lippmann. Lippman—who, like Brandeis, came out of the American Progressive Movement and had been an adviser to progressive U.S. President Woodrow Wilson—sparked the birth of “neoliberalism” as a separate strand of liberal political philosophical thought. The book invited readers to critically reexamine and, where appropriate, update the tenets of classical liberalism with a view toward “stabilizing and consolidating the course of an intellectual tradition that was otherwise bound to tumble straight into oblivion” (see here).  

This was the objective of the “neoliberal collective,” a loose affiliation of liberally oriented thinkers who convened for the first time at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938 to discuss Lippmann’s seminal book, and from 1947 onwards more formally under the auspices of the Mont Pelerin Society. 

Neoliberals grappled with questions that went to the very heart of liberalism, such as how to adapt traditional small-scale human societies to the exigencies of ever-widening markets and economic progress; the causes and consequences of industrial concentration; the appropriate role and boundaries of state intervention; the ability of markets to address the “social question”; the interplay between freedom and coercion; and the tension between the individual and the collective. Like Lippmann, the neoliberals were convinced that the failure to reckon with such fundamental issues would result in the inevitable displacement of liberalism by some form of “authoritarian collectivism,” which they believed provided emotionally appealing (but ultimately illusory) solutions to the full range of liberal problems.

It quickly became apparent, however, that there existed two main currents of neoliberalism.

The first, which I will call “left neoliberalism,” was a relatively conciliatory version that sought to strike a “mostly liberal” balance with socialism and collectivism. It postulated that markets are embedded in a broader social and political context that may include a strong and activist state, aggressive antitrust policy, robust social rights, and an emphasis on positive freedom. In this respect, their views resembled those of the Progressive Movement of Wilson and Brandeis, which was carried on into the mid-20th century in the United States by such figures as President Franklin Roosevelt, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, and economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The “left neoliberals,” however, were primarily European, and included the likes of Wilhelm Röpke, Walter Eucken, Franz Bohm, Alexander Rüstow, Luigi Einaudi, Louis Rougier, Louis Marlio, and Jacques Rueff (and, arguably, Lippmann himself). 

Adherents to the other strand, “right neoliberalism,” were more conservative and less willing to compromise. They championed a strong but minimal state tasked with (and limited by) facilitating efficient markets, posited a lean antitrust policy, and emphasized negative liberty. Thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Lionel Robbins, James Buchanan and, arguably, the more libertarian Ludwig von Mises and Bruno Leoni would fall into this group.

The Price Mechanism and the State

The two groups of neoliberals shared several basic postulates. 

First and foremost, they agreed that any revision of Adam Smith’’s “invisible hand” had to respect the integrity of the price mechanism (what Wilhelm Röpke referred to as the “sacrosanct core of liberalism”). The argument rested on utilitarian, but also political and ethical grounds. As Friedrich Hayek argued in “The Road to Serfdom,” the substitution of the free market for a centrally planned economy would lead to the loss of economic freedom, and eventually all other freedoms, as well. This meant that neoliberals were, on principle, harsh critics of any type of state intervention that distorted the formation of prices through the forces of supply and demand.

At the same time, however, neither strand of neoliberalism professed a doctrine of statelessness.  To the contrary, the state may, in hindsight, be neoliberalism’s greatest conquest. The question at hand is what kind of state is optimal. 

For the left neoliberals, a strong state was needed to resist capture by interest groups. It also had to exercise good political leadership and discretion in juggling goals and values (markets, after all, had to be “embedded” in the social order). These views were underpinned by a relatively sanguine set of expectations the left neoliberals had of the state’s willingness and capacity to protect the general interest, as well as their shared belief that the core institutions of liberalism (including self-regulating markets) were prone to degeneration and in need of constant public oversight. The state, not the private sector, was the ultimate ordering power of the economy. As Alexander Rüstow said:

I am, indeed, of the opinion that it is not the economy, but the state which determines our fate. 

The right neoliberal position was more ambivalent, due to its heightened skepticism toward state power. The bigger threat to freedom was not unfettered private power, but public power. As Milton Friedman put it in “Capitalism and Freedom”:

Government is necessary to preserve our freedom […] yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. […] How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat to freedom? 

The answer was a revamped Smithian nightwatchman that acted more as an umpire determining “the rules of the game” and overseeing free interactions between individuals than as a helmsman tasked with channeling society toward any particular variety of teleological goals. Like the left neoliberal position, this one, too, rests on a set of theoretical underpinnings.

One is that public actors are not any less self-interested than private ones, with the corollary that any extension or deepening of the powers of the state must be well-justified. The idea relied heavily on the public choice theory developed by James M. Buchanan, a member of Mont Pelerin Society and its president from 1984 to 1986. Thus, left and right neoliberals advanced almost completely opposite responses to the problem of capture. While left neoliberals believed in strengthening the state relative to private enterprise, the right’s critique led them to want precisely to limit state power and reshape institutional incentives.

This is not surprising, as right neoliberals were also more optimistic about the potential of markets and deontologically more preoccupied with negative freedom, a combination that added another layer of suspicion to any putatively progressive measures that involved wealth redistribution or meticulous administration of the market by the state.

Economic Concentration and Competition

Another important difference lay in the two sides’ views on economic concentration and competition. Some left neoliberals, particularly in Europe, internalized much of the Marxist and fascist critiques of capitalism, including the belief that markets naturally tended toward economic concentration. They argued, however, that this process could be reversed or prevented with robust antitrust and de-concentration measures. While essentially conceding Marxian arguments about the intrinsic tendency of competition to degenerate into monopoly—thereby fostering inequality and “proletarizing” the masses—they denied the ultimate implications upon which Marx had insisted—i.e., the inevitable “cannibalization” of capitalism through its inherent contradictions.

Right neoliberals, by contrast, insisted that, where economic concentration was not fleeting, it was generally the result of state action, not state inaction. As Mises argued, cartels were a consequence of protectionism and the artificial partitioning of markets through, e.g., tariffs. Similarly, monopolies formed and persisted because of “anti-liberal policies of governments that [created] the conditions favorable” to them. This implied that antitrust had a secondary position in securing competitive markets.

Each strand’s reasoning as to why competition was worthy of protection also differed. For the right neoliberals, who saw the legitimate goals and boundaries of public policy through the lenses of economic efficiency and negative freedom, the case for competition was principally a utilitarian one. As Hayek wrote in “Individualism and Economic Order,” state-backed institutions and laws (including antitrust laws) that “made competition work” (by which he meant, made competition work effectively) were one of the ways in which right neoliberals improved on the classical liberal position. 

Left neoliberals added political, social, and ethical layers to this argument. Politically, they shared the standard Marxian view that concentrated markets facilitated the capture of the state by powerful private interests. Marxists had, e.g., always asserted that Nazism was the product of “monopoly capitalism” and that the Nazis themselves were the tools of big business (the idea of “state monopoly capitalism” stems from Lenin). Left neoliberals largely agreed with this view. They also counseled that a centralized industry was more readily prone to takeover by an authoritarian state. In addition, they rejected “bigness” because they considered it an unnatural perversion of human nature (though such critiques surprisingly did not seem to translate to the state). As Wilhelm Röpke notes in “A Humane Economy”:

Nothing is more detrimental to a sound general order appropriate to human nature than two things: mass and concentration.

“Bigness,” Roepke thought, had come about as a result of one particularly harmful but pervasive trend of modernity: “economism,” a frequent target of left neoliberals that refers to a fixation with indicators of economic performance at the expense of deeper social and spiritual values.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that left neoliberals viewed competition as a panacea. Private property, profit, and competition (the foundations of liberalism) were as socially corrosive as they were beneficial. They were, according to Wilhelm Röpke:

justifiable only within certain limits, and in remembering this we return to the realm beyond supply and demand. In other words, the market economy is not everything. It must find its place within a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition.

Competition, in other words, was as Luigi Einaudi put it, a paradox. It was beneficial, but could also be socially and morally ruinous. 

The Goals and Boundaries of Public Policy

The perceived failures of liberalism guided the contrasting notions of what a reformed neoliberalism should look like. On the one hand, European left neoliberals and American progressives thought that liberalism suffered from certain inherent deficiencies that could not be resolved within the liberal paradigm and that called for mitigating policies and social-safety nets. Again, these resonated with familiar criticisms levied by the right and the left, such as, e.g., excessive individualism; the loss of shared values and a sense of community; a lack of “social integration”; worker alienation (in an essay titled “Social Policy or Vitalpolitik (Organic Policy),” Alexander Rüstow starts by citing Friedrich Engels’ 1945 “The Condition of the Working-Class in England”); and the socially explosive elements of competition and markets. These spiritual dislocations arguably weighed more than any material or economic shortcomings, and were at the root of the liberal debacle. As Walter Eucken argued:

Quite obviously, the reasons for the anti-capitalistic attitude of the masses cannot be found in any deterioration of the living conditions brought about by capitalism. […] The turning of the masses against capitalism is rather a phenomenon that can only be understood in terms of the sensibilities of modern man.  

In response, the left neoliberals called for an “organic policy” that would approach markets and competition as not purely an economic, but also a social phenomena (a similar view was expressed by Justice Brandeis). In this new hybrid vision of liberalism, “there would be counterweights to competition and the mechanical operation of prices.” Competition and the market’s other imperatives would be tempered by balancing considerations and subordinated to “higher values” that were beyond the law of supply and demand—and beyond mere economic utility. As Wilhelm Röpke summarizes:

Competition, which we need as a regulator in a free market economy, comes up on all sides against limits which we would not wish to transgress. It remains morally and socially dangerous and can be defended only up to a point and with qualifications and modifications of all kinds.

Conversely, right neoliberals believed that the downfall of liberalism had been the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of its true ethos and an overabundance of conflicting rules and policies. It was not the inevitable upshot of liberalism itself. As Lionel Robbins posited:

It is not liberal institutions but the absence of such institutions which is responsible for the chaos of today.

Classical liberalism had stopped short on the road to exploring the full range of laws and institutions needed to sustain and perfect the “natural order.” But the prevalent social malaise—which had, no doubt, been adroitly instigated and exploited by collectivist demagogues—was not the result of some innate incompatibility between markets and human society. It had instead come about because of the failure to properly adjust the latter to the exigencies of the former. 

Additionally, right neoliberals rejected “organic” or “third way” policies of the sort favored by the left neoliberals, because they believed that it was not within the remit of public policy to answer existential questions or to provide “meaning” or “social integration.”  Granting the state the power to decide on such matters was a slippery slope that required it to override the preferences of some with its own. As such, it got dangerously close to the sort of collectivism that neoliberals rallied in opposition to in the first place. They also doubted the state’s ability to resolve such complex, value-laden questions. It was insights such as these that underpinned Friedrich Hayek’s theory of the gradual march towards serfdom and Ludwig von Mises’ quip that there is no such thing as a “third way” or a mixed economy. 

In consequence, the solution was not to restrain, mollify, or limit the spread or depth of markets in order to align them with some past ideal of parochial life, but to improve markets and to acclimatize societies to their workings through better laws and institutions.

Two Different Visions for Liberalism For Two Different Visions of Antitrust

In keeping with the theme of this series, the prescriptions for antitrust policy made by each strand of neoliberalism are not doctrinally extrapolated from their broader vision of society.

Left neoliberals and American progressives took Marxist and fascist attacks on liberalism seriously, but sought to address them through less radical channels. They wanted a “mostly liberal” third-way social order, in which markets and competition would be tempered by a host of other social and political considerations that were mediated by the state. This meant opposing “big business” as a matter of principle, infusing antitrust law with a host of non-economic goals and values, and granting enforcers the necessary discretion to decide in cases of conflict. 

Right neoliberals, on the other hand, sought to improve on the classical-liberal position through a more robust legal and institutional framework that operated primarily in the service of a single goal: economic efficiency. Economic efficiency—itself not a value-free notion—was, however, seen as a comparatively neutral, narrow, and predictable standard that, in turn, cabined enforcers’  scope of discretion and minimized the instances in which the state could override business decisions (and thus interfere with negative liberty). In the context of antitrust law, this tethered anticompetitive conduct and exemptions to the threshold requirement to find harms to consumers or to total welfare.

Conclusion

The pendulum of neoliberalism has swung in the past, with momentous implications for antitrust. The “Chicagoan” shift of the 1970s, for instance, was a move toward right neoliberalism, as was the “more economic approach” of EU competition law in the late 1990s. Conversely, more recent calls for the condemnation of “big business” on a range of moral and political grounds; “polycentric competition laws” with multiple goals and values; and the widening of state discretion to lead market developments in a socially desirable direction signal a move in the opposite direction. 

How should the newest iteration of the neoliberal “battle for the soul of antitrust” be resolved?

On the one hand, left neoliberalism—or what Americans typically just call “progressivism”—has intuitive and emotional appeal, particularly in a time of growing anti-capitalistic fervor. Today, as in the 1930s, many believe that market logic has overstepped its legitimate boundaries and that the most successful private companies are a looming enemy. From this perspective, a “market in society” approach—in which the government has more leeway to restrain corporate power and reshape markets in accordance with a range of social or political considerations—may sound more humane to some. 

If history teaches us anything, however, this populist approach to regulating competition is problematic for a number of reasons.

First, the overly complex web of mutually conflicting goals and values will inevitably require enforcement agencies to act as social engineers. In this position, they may use their enhanced discretion to decide whom or what to favor and to rank subjective values pursuant to personal moral heuristics. Public-choice theory and historical examples of state-led collectivist projects, however, counsel against assuming that government is able and willing to exercise such far-reaching oversight of society. In addition, as enforcers inevitably prove unfit to discharge their new role as philosopher-kings, and as their contradictory case law increasingly comes under contestation, activist attempts to widen the scope of antitrust law likely will be checked by the courts. 

Second, like the non-economic arguments against concentration raised today by progressives such as Tim Wu and Lina Khan, the left neoliberal position is largely based on aesthetic preference and intuition—not fact. Röpkean complaints about big business ruining the bucolic landscape where men are “vitally satisfied” in their small, tight-knit communities rests on a very idiosyncratic vision of the good life (left neoliberals romanticized Switzerland, for instance), and it’s one many do not share in the 21st century. Equally particular were Justice Brandeis’ own yeoman sensibilities, which led him to reject bigness as a matter of principle (unlike today’s neo-Brandeisians, however, he was also skeptical of big government). 

As to the persistent argument to curb “bigness” on political grounds: this would be more convincing if there was a clear, unambiguous relationship between market concentration or company size and the quality of democracy. This does not appear to be the case. In fact, the case for incorporating democratic concerns into antitrust seems unwittingly to rely on discredited Marxist theories about the relationship between German big business and the rise of Hitler. Unfortunately, these ideas have been so aggressively peddled by Marxists—who had a vested ideological interest in demonstrating that private corporations were the main culprits behind Nazism—during the 1960s and 70s that today they enjoy the status of dogma.

Alternatively, one might argue that the very existence of large concentrations of private economic power is antithetical to democracy because having the potential to exercise private power over another (without any actual interference) is anti-democratic (see here). But this lifts a particularistic vision of democracy—so-called republican democracy—over others. According to the more mainstream notion of liberal democracy, which gives precedence to negative freedom, any such interference with property rights may, in fact, be seen as deeply illiberal and undemocratic, especially as the inherent ambiguity of the “democracy” standard is likely to invite reprisals against political opponents.

Alas, right neoliberalism appears to be falling out of favor, as anti-market rhetoric seeps into the mainstream and politicians and intellectuals look to the past to find alternatives to a neoliberal system seen as too narrow and economistic. Ultimately, however, this may be precisely what we want public policy to be in a liberal world: focused on predictable and quantifiable standards that subject enforcers to the rigorous discipline of economic theory and leave them little space to act as social engineers or to exercise arbitrary authority. More than a century of intellectual effervescence and dangerous intellectual escapades has proven this to be the superior way to achieve both measurable policy outcomes that improve on the classical-liberal position and to avoid the Charybdis of state collectivism. In antitrust law, it has meant embracing economic analysis of the law and a narrow consumer-welfare standard to discern anticompetitive from procompetitive conduct. 

In the end, today’s “battle for the soul” of antitrust is a proxy for a much wider conflict of visions. Changing the consumer-welfare standard and the architecture of antitrust enforcement along lines preferred by progressives and left neoliberals would be both a symptom and a cause of a broader philosophical shift toward a worldview that makes some of the same deleterious mistakes it purports to correct: excessive government discretion in overseeing the economy; the subordination of individual freedom to an array of collectivist goals mediated by a public aristocracy; and the substitution of evidence-based policy for emotional impetus.

While the inherent contradictions and incongruence of that vision mean that the pendulum is likely to eventually swing back in the right direction, the damage will already have been done. This is why we must defend the consumer-welfare standard today more vigorously than ever: because ultimately, much more than the future of a niche field of law is at stake.

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Political Philosophy, Competition, and Competition Law: The Road to and from Neoliberalism, Part 2

Lazar Radic —  3 February 2022

This post is the second in a three-part series. The first installment can be found here and the third can be found here.

In just over a century since its dawn, liberalism had reshaped much of the world along the lines of individualism, free markets, private property, contract, trade, and competition. A modest laissez-faire political philosophy that had begun to germinate in the minds of French Physiocrats in the early 18th century had, scarcely 150 years later, inspired the constitution of the world’s nascent leading power, the United States. But it wasn’t all plain sailing, as liberalism’s expansion eventually galvanized strong social, political, cultural, economic and even spiritual opposition, which coalesced around two main ideologies: socialism and fascism.

In this post, I explore the collectivist backlash against liberalism, its deeper meaning from the perspective of political philosophy, and the main features of its two main antagonists—especially as they relate to competition and competition regulation. Ultimately, the purpose is to show that, in trying to respond to the collectivist threat, successive iterations of neoliberalism integrated some of collectivism’s key postulates in an attempt to create a synthesis between opposing philosophical currents. Yet this “mostly” liberal synthesis, which serves as the philosophical basis of many competition systems today, is afflicted with the same collectivist flaws that the synthesis purported to overthrow (as I will elaborate in subsequent posts).

The Collectivist Backlash

By the early 20th century, two deeply illiberal movements bent on exposing and demolishing the fallacies and contradictions of liberalism had succeeded in capturing the imagination and support of the masses. These collectivist ideologies were Marxian socialism/communism on the left and fascism/Nazism on the right. Although ultimately distinct, they both rejected the basic postulates of classical liberalism. 

Socially, both agreed that liberalism uprooted traditional ways of life and dissolved the bonds of solidarity that had hitherto governed social relationships. This is the view expressed, e.g., in Karl Polanyi’s influential book The Great Transformation, in which the Christian socialist Polanyi contends that “disembedded” liberal markets would inevitably come to be governed again by the principles of solidarity and reciprocity (under socialism/communism). Similarly, although not technically a work on political economy or philosophy, Knut Hamsun’s 1917 novel Growth of the Soil perfectly captures the right’s rejection of liberal progress, materialism, industrialization, and the idealization of traditional bucolic life. The Norwegian Hamsun, winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature, later became an enthusiastic supporter of the Third Reich. 

Politically and culturally, Marxist historical materialism posited that liberal democracy (individual freedoms, periodic elections, etc.) and liberal culture (literature, art, cinema) served the interests of the economically dominant class: the bourgeoisie, i.e., the owners of the means of production. Fascists and Nazis likewise deplored liberal democracy as a sign of decadence and weakness and viewed liberal culture as an oxymoron: a hotbed of degeneracy built on the dilution of national and racial identities. 

Economically, the more theoretically robust leftist critiques rallied around Marx’ scientific socialism, which held that capitalism—the economic system that served as the embodiment of a liberal social order built on private property, contract, and competition—was exploitative and doomed to consume itself. From the right, it was argued that liberalism enabled individual interest to override what was good for the collective—an unpardonable sin in the eyes of an ideology built around robust nodes of collectivist identity, such as nation, race, and history.

A Recurrent Civilizational Struggle

The rise of socialism and fascism marked the beginning of a civilizational shift that many have referred to as the lowest ebb of liberalism. By the 1930s, totalitarian regimes utterly incompatible with a liberal worldview were in place in several European countries, such as Italy, Russia, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Romania. As Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises lamented, liberals and liberal ideas—at least, in the classical sense—had been driven to the fringes of society and academia, subject of scorn and ridicule. Even the liberally oriented, like economist John Maynard Keynes, were declaring the “end of laissez-faire.” 

At its most basic level, I believe that the conflict can be understood, from a philosophical perspective, as an iteration of the recurrent struggle between individualism and collectivism.

For instance, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies has described the perennial tension between two elementary ways of conceiving the social order: Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft refers to societies made up of individuals held together by formal bonds, such as contracts, whereas Gemeinschaft refers to communities held together by organic bonds, such as kinship, which function together as parts of an integrated whole. American law professor David Gerber explains that, from the Gemeinschaft perspective, competition was seen as an enemy:

Gemeinschaft required co-operation and the accommodation of individual interests to the commonwealth, but competition, in contrast, demanded that individuals be concerned first and foremost with their own self-interest. From this communitarian perspective, competition looked suspiciously like exploitation. The combined effect of competition and of political and economic inequality was that the strong would get stronger, the weak would get weaker, and the strong would use their strength to take from the weak.

Tonnies himself thought that dominant liberal notions of Gesellschaft would inevitably give way to greater integration of a socialist Gemeinschaft. This was somewhat reminiscent of Polanyi’s distinction between embedded and disembedded markets; Karl Popper’s “open” and “closed” societies; and possibly, albeit somewhat more remotely, David Hume’s distinction between “concord” and “union.” While we should be wary of reductivism, a common theme underlying these works (at least two of which are not liberal) is the conflict between opposing views of society: one that posits the subordination of the individual to some larger community or group versus another that anoints the individual’s well-being as the ultimate measure of the value of social arrangements. That basic tension, in turn, reverberates across social and economic questions, including as they relate to markets, competition, and the functions of the state.

 Competition Under Marxism

Karl Marx argued that the course of history was determined by material relations among the social classes under any given system of production (historical materialism and dialectical materialism, respectively). Under that view, communism was not a desirable “state of affairs,” but the inevitable consequence of social forces as they then existed. As Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Thus, following the ineluctable laws of history, which Marx claimed to have discovered, capitalism would inevitably come to be replaced by socialism and, subsequently, communism. Under socialism, the means of production would be controlled not by individuals interacting in a free market, but by the political process under the aegis of the state, with the corollary that planning would come to substitute for competition as the economy’s steering mechanism. This would then give way to communism: a stateless utopia in which everything would be owned by the community and where there would be no class divisions. This would come about as a result of the interplay of several factors inherent to capitalism, such as the exploitation of the working class and the impossibility of sustained competition.

Per Marx, under capitalism, owners of the means of production (i.e., the capitalists or the bourgeoisie) appropriate the surplus value (i.e., the difference between the sale price of a product and the cost to produce it) generated by workers. Thus, the lower the wages and the longer the working hours of the worker, the greater the profit accrued to the capitalist. This was not an unfortunate byproduct that could be reformed, Marx posited, but a central feature of the system that was solvable only through revolution. Moreover, the laws, culture, media, politics, faith, and other institutions that might ordinarily open alternative avenues to nonviolent resolution of class tensions (the “super-structure”) were themselves byproducts of the underlying material relations of production (“structure” or “base”), and thus served to justify and uphold them.

The Marxian position further held that competition—the lodestar and governing principle of the capitalist economy—was, like the system itself, unsustainable. It would inevitably end up cannibalizing itself. But the claim is a bit more subtle than critics of communism often assume. As Leon Trotsky wrote in the 1939 pamphlet Marxism in our time:

Relations between capitalists, who exploit the workers, are defined by competition, which for long endures as the mainspring of capitalist progress.

Two notions expressed seamlessly in Trotsky’s statement need to be understood about the Marxian perception of competition. The first is that, since capitalism is exploitative of workers and competition among capitalists is the engine of capitalism, competition is itself effectively a mechanism of exploitation. Capitalists compete through the cheapening of commodities and the subsequent reinvestment of the surplus appropriated from labor into the expansion of productivity. The most exploitative capitalist, therefore, generally has the advantage (this hinges, of course, largely on the validity of the labor theory of value).

At the same time, however, Marxists (including Marx himself) recognized the economic and technological progress brought about through capitalism and competition. This is what Trotsky means when he refers to competition as the “mainspring of capitalist progress” and, by extension, the “historical justification of the capitalist.” The implication is that, if competition were to cease, the entire capitalist edifice and the political philosophy undergirding it (liberalism) would crumble, as well.

Whereas liberalism and competition were intertwined, liberalism and monopoly could not coexist. Instead, monopolists demanded—and, due to their political clout, were able to obtain—an increasingly powerful central state capable of imposing protective tariffs and other measures for their benefit and protection. Trotsky again:

The elimination of competition by monopoly marks the beginning of the disintegration of capitalist society. Competition was the creative mainspring of capitalism and the historical justification of the capitalist. By the same token the elimination of competition marks the transformation of stockholders into social parasites. Competition had to have certain liberties, a liberal atmosphere, a regime of democracy, of commercial cosmopolitanism. Monopoly needs as authoritative government as possible, tariff walls, “its own” sources of raw materials and arenas of marketing (colonies). The last word in the disintegration of monopolistic capital is fascism.

Marxian theory posited that this outcome was destined to happen for two reasons. First, because:

The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labor, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capital beats the smaller.

In other words, competition stimulated the progressive development of productivity, which depended on the scale of production, which depended, in turn, on firm size. Ultimately, therefore, competition ended up producing a handful of large companies that would subjugate competitors and cannibalize competition. Thus, the more wealth that capitalism generated—and Marx had no doubts that capitalism was a wealth-generating machine—the more it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Hence:

While stimulating the progressive development of technique, competition gradually consumes, not only the intermediary layers but itself as well. Over the corpses and the semi-corpses of small and middling capitalists, emerges an ever-decreasing number of ever more powerful capitalist overlords. Thus, out of “honest”, “democratic”, “progressive” competition grows irrevocably “harmful”, “parasitic”, “reactionary” monopoly.

The second reason Marxists believed the downfall of capitalism was inevitable is that the capitalists squeezed out of the market by the competitive process would become proletarians, which would create a glut of labor (“a growing reserve army of the unemployed”), which would in turn depress wages. This process of proletarianization, combined with the “revolutionary combination by association” of workers in factories would raise class consciousness and ultimately lead to the toppling of capitalism and the ushering in of socialism.

Thus, there is a clear nexus in Marxian theory between the end of competition and the end of capitalism (and therefore liberalism), whereby monopoly is deduced from the inherent tendencies of capitalism, and the end of capitalism, in turn, is deduced from the ineluctable advent of monopoly. What follows (i.e., socialism and communism) are collectivist systems that purport to be run according to the principles of solidarity and cooperation (“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”), where there is therefore no place (and no need) for competition. Instead, the Marxian Gemeinschaft would organize the economy around rationalistic lines, substituting cut-throat competition for centralized command by the state (later, the community) that would rein in hitherto uncontrollable economic forces in a heroic victory over the chaos and unpredictability of capitalism. This would, of course, also bring about the end of liberalism, with individualism, private property, and other liberal freedoms jettisoned as mouthpieces of bourgeoisie class interests. Chairman Mao Zedong put it succinctly:

We must affirm anew the discipline of the Party, namely:

1. The individual is subordinate to the organization;

2. The minority is subordinate to the majority.

Competition Under Fascism/Nazism

Formidable as it was, the Marxian attack on liberalism was just one side of the coin. Decades after the articulation of Marxian theory in the mid-19th century, fascism—founded by former socialist Benito Mussolini in 1915—emerged as a militant alternative to both liberalism and socialism/communism.

In essence, fascism was, like communism, unapologetically collectivist. But whereas socialists considered class to be the relevant building block of society, fascists viewed the individual as part of a greater national, racial, and historical entity embodied in the state and its leadership. As Mussolini wrote in his 1932 pamphlet The Doctrine of Fascism:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience of the universal, will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism […] liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts.

Accordingly, fascism leads to an amalgamation of state and individual that is not just a politico-economic arrangement where the latter formally submits to the former, but a conception of life. This worldview is, of course, diametrically opposed to core liberal principles, such as personal freedom, individualism, and the minimal state. And surely enough, fascists saw these liberal values as signs of civilizational decadence (as expressed most notably by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West—a book that greatly inspired Nazi ideology). Instead, they posited that the only freedom worthy of the name existed within the state; that peace and cosmopolitanism were illusory; and that man was man only by virtue of his membership and contribution to nation and race.

But fascism was also opposed to Marxian socialism. At its most basic, the schism between the two worldviews can be understood in terms of the fascist rejection of materialism, which was a centerpiece of Marxian thought. Fascists denied the equivalence of material well-being and happiness, instead viewing man as fulfilled by hardship, war, and by playing his part in the grand tapestry of history, whose real protagonists were nation-states. While admitting the importance of economic life—e.g., of efficiency and technological innovation—fascists denied that material relations unequivocally determined the course of history, insisting instead on the preponderance of spiritual and heroic acts (i.e., acts with no economic motive) as drivers of social change. “Sanctity and heroism,” Mussolini wrote, are at the root of the fascist belief system, not material self-interest.  

This belief system also extended to economic matters, including competition. The Third Reich respected private property rights to some degree—among other reasons, because Adolf Hitler believed it would encourage creative competition and innovation. The Nazis’ overarching principle, however, was that all economic activity and all private property ultimately be subordinated to the “common good,” as interpreted by the state. In the words of Hitler:

I want everyone to keep what he has earned subject to the principle that the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State. […] The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners.

The solution was a totalitarian system of government control that maintained private enterprise and profit incentives as spurs to efficient management, but narrowly circumscribed the traditional freedom of entrepreneurs. Economic historians Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner have characterized the Nazis’ economic system as a “state-directed private ownership economy,” a partnership in which the state was the principal and the business was the agent. Economic activity would be judged according to the criteria of “strategic necessity and social utility,” encompassing an array of social, political, practical, and ideological goals. Some have referred to this as the “primacy of politics over economics” approach.

For instance, in supervising cross-border acquisitions (today’s mergers), the state “sought to suppress purely economic motives and to substitute some rough notion of ‘racial political’ priority when supervising industrial acquisitions or controlling existing German subsidiaries.” The Reich selectively applied the 1933 Act for the Formation of Compulsory Cartels in regulating cartels that had been formed under the Weimar Republic with the Cartel Act of 1923. But the legislation also appears to have been applied to protect small and medium-sized enterprises, an important source of the party’s political support, from ruinous competition. This is reminiscent of German industrialist and Nazi supporter Gustav Krupp’s “Third Form”: 

Between “free” economy and state capitalism there is a third form: the economy that is free from obligations, but has a sense of inner duty to the state. 

In short, competition and individual achievement had to be balanced with cooperation, mediated by the self-appointed guardians of the “general interest.” In contrast with Marxian socialism/communism, the long-term goal of the Nazi regime was not to abolish competition, but to harness it to serve the aims of the regime. As Franz Böhm—cofounder, with Walter Eucken, of the Freiburg School and its theory of “ordoliberalism”—wrote in his advice to the Nazi government:

The state regulatory framework gives the Reich economic leadership the power to make administrative commands applying either the indirect or the direct steering competence according to need, functionality, and political intent. The leadership may go as far as it wishes in this regard, for example, by suspending competition-based economic steering and returning to it when appropriate. 

Conclusion

After a century of expansion, opposition to classical liberalism started to coalesce around two nodes: Marxism on the left, and fascism/Nazism on the right. What ensued was a civilizational crisis of material, social, and spiritual proportions that, at its most basic level, can be understood as an iteration of the perennial struggle between individualism and collectivism. On the one hand, liberals like J.S. Mill had argued forcefully that “the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.” In stark contrast, Mussolini wrote that “fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the state and of the individual within the state.” The former position is rooted in a humanist view that enshrines the individual at the center of the social order; the latter in a communitarian ideal that sees him as subordinate to forces that supersede him.

As I have explained in the previous post, the philosophical undercurrents of both positions are ancient. A more immediate precursor of the collectivist standpoint, however, can be found in German idealism and particularly in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In The Philosophy of Right, he wrote:

A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence, if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it. All the worth which the human being possesses […] he possesses only through the state.

This broader clash is reflected, directly and indirectly, in notions of competition and competition regulation. Classical liberals sought to liberate competition from regulatory fetters. Marxism “predicted” its downfall and envisioned a social order without it. Fascism/Nazism sought to wrest it from the hands of greedy self-interest and mold it to serve the many and the fluctuating objectives of the state and its vision of the common good. 

In the next post, I will discuss how this has influenced the neoliberal philosophy that is still at the heart of many competition systems today. I will argue that two strands of neoliberalism emerged, which each attempted to resolve the challenge of collectivism in distinct ways. 

One strand, associated with a continental understanding of liberalism and epitomized by the Freiburg School, sought to strike a “mostly liberal” compromise between liberalism and collectivism—a “Third Way” between opposites. In doing so, however, it may have indulged in some of the same collectivist vices that it initially sought to avoid— such as vast government discretion and the imposition of myriad “higher” goals on society. 

The other strand, represented by Anglo-American liberalism of the sort espoused by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, was less conciliatory. It attempted to reform, rather than reinvent, liberalism. Their prescriptions involved creating a strong legal framework conducive to economic efficiency against a background of limited government discretion, freedom, and the rule of law.

In Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, Constitutional Law, International, Monopolization, Truth on the Market , , , , , , ,
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