The rise of authoritarian regimes across the world in the 21st century has to do with the complicated relationship between markets and morals. The arrival of market-oriented societies in the 20th century was not just about growth. Markets were also seen as a panacea to the moral crisis in human societies.
Both Liberals and Marxists viewed morality as problematic — Liberals for freedom, Marxists for class politics. While Liberals saw the resolution in law, Marxists did it in class conflict and working-class rule. However, neither succeeded in sidelining morality.
Markets emerged as a new consensus in such a context as they seemed to extend freedom through exchange relations and undermined the centrality of moral judgement. Michel Foucault approved of neoliberal processes (not order) as inaugurating the centrality of liberty where power acknowledged its dependence on freedom to exercise itself and gain voluntary consent. Foucault also argued that markets foregrounded the logic of efficiency that replaced the need to control the moral behaviour of individuals. Foucault pitched for the shift from disciplinary power to neoliberalism as the paradigmatic form of bio-power where morality was replaced by a transactional idea of efficiency.
However, with the rise of populist-authoritarianism after the ‘neoliberal consensus’, we now realise neither the logic of efficiency nor the spread of markets replacing morality. The philosopher, Michael Sandel, argues that liberalism brought with it a regime of liberal-technocracy that promised to avoid moral problems. However, the vacuum created by the hollowing out of public life of moral registers was replaced by demagogues and ultra-nationalists. In the course of replacing morality, markets also put in place regimes of ‘moral relativism’ with populists brazenly justifying sexist dialogues and majoritarian sensibilities. Incidentally, the critical thinker, Herbert Marcuse, had forewarned us that by making truth contextual in the name of tolerance, liberalism ends up justifying undesirable elements.
It is commonplace to argue that moral relativism as pragmatism is a pre-condition for markets to flourish. To achieve growth, there is no place to hang on to moral shibboleths. M.K. Gandhi was thus deemed impractical and outdated with his moral practice producing weak nations. One then wonders why Gandhi had to pay with his life by standing up for a certain moral/political world view.
Moral relativism allowed faceless institutional mechanisms to take over crucial decisions. Machines make better decisions because they do not suffer from prejudices and markets alone can allow machines to flourish and relieve us from the moral dilemmas of modern life. This is also part of the argument advanced in favour of Artificial Intelligence. But the cultural sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, laments that what this kind of thought process does is put in place a dominant sensibility of ‘ad hoc commitments’ that break life into compartments. Bauman went on to argue that modernity did not create the ghost of Holocaust; what it did was to allow us to feel that what was happening was neither terrible nor violent by breaking down the colossal tragedy of the Holocaust into a series of disconnected and technical decisions. This growing sense of ‘ad hoc commitments’ and a compartmentalised life brought back authoritarian regimes with their leaders emphasising a civilisational nostalgia and a new sense of self.
We seem to have come a full circle. What is the way out? Disengagement and hyper-separation from the collective stood for the modern-liberal idea of freedom. Surely that is squarely behind why liberalism is facing a terminal decline. Markets cannot satisfy our need for engagements or meaning. Markets have thrown up global authoritarianism. We will do well to burst the myth of the market in order to inaugurate a renewed search for alternatives that will also liberate us from demagoguery.
Ajay Gudavarthy is Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, JNU