NEW-COMM

Author: M.G.

  • The End of Democracy Has Been Cancelled

    The End of Democracy Has Been Cancelled

    The Deportation Order is still coming.

    By M.G.

    The AfD, whose election manifesto has set its sights on a national reordering of population and institutions, has won its second state election, this time in Saxony-Anhalt. The European right is delighted, while the left is consumed by a single question.

    Has fascism arrived?

    The question would be legitimate if the point were to examine which political programme is succeeding here, how it differs from its competitors and what use it intends to make of state power. But the alarmed public debate, set off by the most loyal defenders of the national cause and frightened pop-leftists alike, is only meant to settle whether the existing order still works or already needs defending. The verdict on the right becomes a verdict on how endangered democracy is. The deportations and the rearmament are then argued over chiefly in terms of whether they still belong to the good order or already herald its opposite. The question of what people are being subjected to, and to what end, is crowded out by worry over what to call the rule that subjects them to it.

    Point of Departure

    The AfD’s victory does not reveal how many voters want a dictatorship, which of its demands they particularly value, or how many are “protest voters” who put up with those demands as part of their protest. Anyone who votes for the AfD, for whatever reason, adds to its political power. Their vote does not go to some cleaned-up version of the party they might wish for, but to the organisation that is actually on the ballot. That holds even for the voter who rejects particular demands or expects just one specific improvement from the party. Voters turn their real grievances into grounds for a wrong-headed political decision, and they do so without necessarily holding a coherent worldview. The state, which by protecting private property makes exclusive control over the means of social life binding, also organises the conditions under which opposed interests may be pursued. It regulates the wear and tear on its workforce, manages the consequences of unemployment and poverty, and demands that its tasks be paid for. As a national economy, this whole nexus becomes the basis of state revenue and international power. The population’s well-being is thus subject to a proviso: it has to be compatible with the success of the economic order on which its livelihood has been made to depend. Conditions in which a worker loses their job and cannot pay the rent, while rising corporate profits are celebrated as the economy’s success, already contain reasons to criticise the separation of livelihood from social wealth. It takes political judgements to turn this into a reason for blaming migrants, of all people. People measure the damage done to them against what they are supposedly owed as decent members of the nation. Allegedly work-shy immigrants and other minorities then appear as undeserving beneficiaries. The question of which social relation makes one’s own existence insecure is replaced by the demand that the state favour the right people. That is why it is a mistake to treat the right’s success as a mere communication problem: the voter can find a promise precisely in a programme designed to harm others. To act as if one had merely explained one’s own policies badly (“But the Left has the better policies for workers!”) is to treat the content as uncontested and the dispute as a matter of getting the message across. Concede, on top of that, that people’s concerns were not taken seriously enough, and the right’s account of what is troubling them has been accepted. All that remains in dispute is who represents these concerns more credibly. In that contest, the answers are soon taken over along with the concerns.

    Nationalism’s achievement is to turn dependence on the success of other people’s property into a claim on one’s own state to be better looked after. The person affected declares his belonging to the country a credit that the government has to honour against the claims of others. In response to what competition imposes on him, he calls for it to be sharpened along national lines. The nationalist clings to the state as the means of his advancement and therefore looks for reasons why it withholds the service he expects. Too many independent claims, too many organised special interests, too much consideration for people of doubtful usefulness and loyalty. Suspicion falls on an incompetent or treacherous leadership and on those it allegedly lets get away with too much. The political order is what keeps the nation from getting its due.

    This is why the formula that capitalism produces insecurity and fascism grows out of it does not explain the decisive process. A crisis founds no party and demands no Volksgemeinschaft. It changes living conditions and the terrain of political action. What conclusions are drawn from this is decided by actors and their judgements.

    Aim

    Fascism regards the democratic form as a scandal. It sees a state that needs its citizens yet grants them rights against particular impositions. Instead of leading, the government wrangles with opposition and procedure. Citizens are allowed to make claims and to fight for changes in policy. Officeholders, too, are bound by law; the separation of powers and formal procedure ensure that the established order decides, not the whim of some functionary. The government has society at its disposal, but its own competences only within limits. And political competition is part of how this rule reproduces itself: another team may come forward with the promise of governing the same nation better. What the democratic state has set up as its way of functioning appears to fascism as organised weakness.

    Whether farmers take to the streets over cut subsidies or care workers over their rotas, fascism will find its verdict confirmed in every conflict: the failure of a government. From the protest it keeps only the call for an authority that cracks down, and it turns that call against the very interest that protested. Anyone who insists on their own cause instead of calling for a firm hand is, in its eyes, part of the problem. That citizens as such already ask too much is a complaint democratic governments make themselves, regularly finding it necessary to point out that the welfare state is no longer affordable and that people work too little. Their challengers respond with the reverse accusation. Those in power, they say, abandon their own people, are too soft on criminals and foreigners and squander taxpayers’ money. The country is in crisis, and anyone making demands now only makes it worse. What distinguishes the fascist from the democrat is not this opinion but the fact that he acts on it. He mobilises against the existing state power because it buckles before foreign powers and fails to get anything out of its own people. The remedy is to be a leadership that sweeps away whatever relativises national power. The existing state power is to be replaced by one that organises society directly as service to the state. Citizens may then assert their interests only as contributions to the national mission. Independent dissent no longer counts as a legitimate antagonism that a government has to cope with; it proves the bad attitude or harmful activity of those who voice it. The leadership claims to carry out the will of the nation, and anyone who does not go along is suspected of not belonging to the real people at all. The nation becomes the title under which a party directs its claim to state power against the very existence of legitimate opposition. This also abolishes the worker’s right to fight out the antagonism independently of the national mission. He has to prove his performance and willingness to sacrifice; his organised resistance to the conditions under which he is used counts as an attack on the community. The fascist “critique of capital” is of a piece with this. It berates owners who fail to live up to their supposed responsibility, take their money abroad or put their business above the nation. The state is to free the property order from the considerations that hamper its national use and to bind its beneficiaries to that use. Capital keeps its property and is obliged to put it at the nation’s service; its business is to secure the country’s power and its ability to prevail. To this day, bourgeois antifascists cite this plank of the programme as proof that National Socialism was a variety of socialism. The argument is so serviceable that in January 2025, in conversation with Elon Musk, Alice Weidel turned it against the charge of fascism and declared Hitler a communist. As if Krupp, Flick or IG Farben had lost their property under Hitler instead of profiting from rearmament, “Aryanisation” and forced labour. The real antagonisms of capitalist society are thus to be made controllable through the unconditional subordination of those who bear them, and through selection. Any shortfall in returns appears as a lack of willingness to sacrifice. The less the national calculation adds up, the more urgent it becomes to purge the people and eliminate those who supposedly harm it. What makes a claim fascist is that it treats the existence of legitimate social and political opposition as a national defect and makes its removal part of producing the Volksgemeinschaft. The same yardstick is turned outward. A nation that allots its members their entitlement according to their service to its power does not treat its relations with other states as the peaceful recognition of equal ends. Success in the international struggle becomes proof of national right and national prowess. In fully developed fascist logic, war is the nation’s ultimate test. Fascism wants to free the state from having to consider its citizens, so as to harness them all the more thoroughly for the nation. Nothing that state power would be obliged to respect is to stand between state and society any longer. A fascist movement anticipates this state by exercising violence on its own account. It persecutes leftists and assaults foreigners because the responsible authorities are supposedly failing. With its terror it recommends itself as the force that takes the national mission seriously and does not shrink from its consequences. The deed proves a readiness to serve a harsher state power, and it does so before the movement itself governs. Anyone who waits for an unambiguous historical signal, such as the seizure of power, before reading these hallmarks ends up in an endless loop: as long as the attack on the political order has not fully succeeded, the obstacles still in its way are supposed to prove that it is harmless.

    Development

    The AfD does not campaign on the claim that the government is making this or that mistake. Its charge is that the “old parties” as a whole are in the process of ruining state power and the people. What it is after, then, is a redefinition of what the nation is and what it has to do. And because the population’s loyalty is not supposed to stop at its legal and economic obligations, the rest follows: Leitkultur (a national “guiding culture”) instead of multiculturalism, along with the devaluation of every other way of life, and the purging of curricula and universities. Who does not belong is easier to determine than what belonging consists of — a programme that can be grasped more precisely by its exclusions than by its content, and therein lies its capacity for escalation. The same ambitions can be observed in France, and in Italy. The “Citoyenneté-Identité-Immigration” bill introduced in 2024 by Marine Le Pen and the RN parliamentary group comprised fourteen articles aimed at making human rights conventions inapplicable to migration policy. The existing constitutional framework, so the argument runs, restricts the capacity of political power to act, and the people are to empower their government to rid itself of certain considerations for those affected. Italy has seen similar legislative developments, with criminal measures against protest expanded in recent years.

    Anyone who takes the liberal constitutional order as the measure of all things has seen enough by now. But the question is not whether these programmes look frightening by its standards; it is what they want to change in the relationship between state power and people — and that is where the decisive finding lies: proposed constitutional amendments to be pushed through by referendum. Security decrees passed by parliamentary majorities. The Italian government criminalises forms of protest; it does not declare the opposition a pest whose removal will establish the unity of the people. The RN wants to clear away judicial review in one policy field and seeks the voters’ consent for doing so; it does not abolish the competition for power, it wants to win it. Of the three, the AfD formulates the most comprehensive programme, and it takes its cases to the courts of the very state it wants to remake. In 2025 the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified it as “confirmed right-wing extremist”, chiefly because of a concept of the people that distinguishes Germans by descent from mere “passport Germans”; the Administrative Court in Cologne has provisionally halted the classification in interim proceedings. Under this concept of the people, belonging hinges on origin rather than legal status, and the “deportation and remigration offensive” in its Saxony-Anhalt manifesto draws the practical consequence. Whether the party also treats the competition of interests and parties as a national defect need not first be demonstrated in government, though that is where it would be hardest to miss.

    In the United States, the separation between movement and authority is particularly ill-suited to grasping what is politically at stake. On the first day of his second term, Trump granted sweeping pardons and commutations for the offences connected with 6 January 2021 and ordered the remaining indictments to be dropped. His proclamation declared this the end of a grave national injustice. The president gave the connection between movement and state a national justification: the state’s prosecution of his supporters’ acts was declared a wrong to be righted in the name of national restoration. The executive order of 18 February 2025, meanwhile, aimed to place even independent federal agencies more firmly under the president’s political direction by centralising regulatory decisions and the legal interpretations that bind the executive branch. Shortly afterwards came the order exempting numerous agencies and subunits of the federal service from the statutory system of union labour relations on grounds of national security. These measures did not raise the claim to treat independent opposition as illegitimate in principle, or to equate the leadership with the nation. More importantly, though, it will not do to object that the American right is no stand-in for a negligent authority on the grounds that the authority is acting itself. Access to state power is exactly what changes the means of a political programme. What a movement previously demanded, threatened or carried out by its own hand can now become an agency’s mandate. Trump himself wrote: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” A presidential memorandum of September 2025 lists “anti-Americanism” and “anti-Christianity” among the indicators of domestic terrorism and sets the FBI’s counterterrorism apparatus, together with the IRS, on networks and funders. Independent opposition thus counts as a threat to the nation, and the leadership declares itself entitled to override the law when it is saving the country. The administration also wanted to redraw the boundary of belonging: an executive order was to deny citizenship to children born in the country if neither parent is a citizen or a permanent resident. At the end of June 2026, the Supreme Court struck it down. The institutions can dig in their heels; the claim has been made all the same. The agencies are to function as organs of the elected ruler, and their fitness is measured by whether they stand in his way. The impositions ultimately in dispute do not presuppose a fascist seizure of power. The coalition in Berlin, which rules out any alliance with the AfD, has had asylum seekers turned back at the borders, deports people to Afghanistan and is arming for confrontation with Russia. All of this is pursued by an elected government with a parliamentary majority, backed by parties that draw a line against fascism. In short: democracy.

    Firewall

    Drawing a line against the right in no way obliges a democratic party to reject the right’s national definitions of the problem. The German government demonstrates as much, and it is not alone in this. In October 2025, Geert Wilders and his right-wing populist party came close to winning the Dutch general election. The government that has since taken office consists of three bourgeois parties of the centre. In its own account of its asylum policy, it states that fewer asylum seekers should come and that applications should in future be lodged outside Europe. At the same time, it stresses faster procedures and quicker integration for those allowed to stay. The guiding consideration is the state’s selection of a desirable population, sorting people by residence status and by the burden they place on the community. To do this, the government need not be called Wilders, nor adopt his entire programme. That is exactly when competing parties can outbid one another: the democratic centre promises to be the one that finally remedies the weakness the right decries. Whoever wants to save the nation from the right is thus drawn into a peculiar competition with it and has to prove that their administration serves national interests better. This standpoint has no objection in principle to measuring people by their usefulness to the country. What it disputes is who should be in charge and which methods are fit for purpose.

    National Salvation

    That the differences between democratic rule and the fascist programme are considerable is beyond dispute. Paradoxically, though, they are blurred time and again by precisely those who appoint themselves special guardians against fascism, and who accordingly want to find proof of fascism in every restructuring within democracy. Whether they mean to or not, they give themselves a mandate for the political rescue of the nation. Democratic antifascism demands that the “democrats” close ranks. This closing of ranks is also to be aimed at those who reject the term fascism and point to functioning institutions and parliamentary procedure. It makes the endangered order a common purpose and subordinates the complaints against it to that purpose. Those affected are to set aside their reasons for opposing a policy because its personnel, they are told, must keep the worse competitor out. The government thus derives a claim to allegiance from, of all things, criticism of what might follow its replacement. Talk of the “lesser evil” gives this imposition its sober form. The citizen is to make his dependence on state decisions the reason for empowering whichever administrator of that dependence will probably do less harm. His intention may well be to avoid a particular harm, but the political act remains participation in deciding who wields state power, and it certainly creates no binding mandate to realise his particular interest.

    The question “Is this fascism?” has its proper place: in examining a political programme and its form of rule. It becomes the wrong question as soon as a negative answer serves to exonerate what is happening, or a positive one to commit people to the existing order. One has to be able to determine what fascism is without acquitting democracy. And one has to be able to criticise democracy without taking its fascist opponents for merely more consistent specimens of the same. It is not people who owe the nation a useful existence. A society that sorts them by their usefulness to business and state power is the object of their critique.

    Scientific critique, not worldview. Analysis, not appeals. Rupture, not reform.

  • Two Billion People Without Safe Drinking Water — If Only They Had Placed an Order!

    Two Billion People Without Safe Drinking Water — If Only They Had Placed an Order!

    A Brief Critique of Market Apologetics

    By M.G.

    So much has been written over the past hundred years about the market and the information it provides that it is remarkable what desolate stretches of economic discussion one enters as soon as the subject comes up. Apparently, the only method of determining needs ever to have been refuted by the facts is the most centralized one. Thanks to the market, after all, there are no empty flats standing next to people without homes, and no grain ever leaves a famine-stricken region because buyers elsewhere offer more for it.

    People buy what they need. What else are firms supposed to produce except what people buy? Everything beyond that is the social romanticism of those who refuse to accept supply and demand, which govern our daily lives. Anyone impertinent enough to ask how it comes about, then, that billions of people urgently need goods essential to life and still receive nothing is answered with a reference to the Soviet Union. A question about how the market economy works is answered by pointing to the failure of something else. In another science, one would rarely get away with that. Instead of rejecting the trick, the left has taken to offering it a friendly alternative: the market is chaotic, after all, and with today’s computing power all of this could be done better. Anyone who asked about the purpose of the economy will be none the wiser. The dispute has simply been moved onto a field where the Austrian School sits enthroned, and it is at least partly understandable why it considers itself the grown-up side of the debate. The way it presents itself, however, is a subject in its own right. From the fact that human beings act, this school has fashioned an axiom from which it derives a method capable of evading every empirical test. One can admire the construction the way one admires a well-built clockwork that tells no time. Then there are its devotees, who would deserve an article of their own — one I will spare the reader here.

    A word in advance. One term appears as a self-evident premise in almost every defence of the market: scarcity. Human beings, we are told, have by nature unlimited needs, to be satisfied with finite means. From this it is supposed to follow that economic activity as such consists in economizing scarce means. The quantity of goods produced — which can, after all, be increased precisely by production — is then offered as the explanation for why those goods do not suffice for a given need, as though produced goods belonged to the same natural condition of scarcity as genuinely finite natural conditions. Sometimes productive possibilities exclude one another, and sometimes certain materials and areas of land exist at a given moment only in limited quantities. If a plant can produce only one of two products at the same time, or a stock of raw material is insufficient for two intended uses together, then of course a decision has to be made. But knowing that such situations occur is one thing; the claim that human needs are infinite and therefore condemn humanity to the market economy — to the permanent administration of shortage by producing additional wealth — is quite another.

    Three Arguments for the Market

    The claim that only the market can coordinate a complex economy is assembled out of at least three arguments.

    The knowledge argument goes back to Friedrich August von Hayek. No central authority can fully possess the knowledge dispersed among the various participants in the market. The individual decision-maker must also learn how conditions relevant to his own activity are changing. The achievement of prices is supposed to lie in transmitting such changes in condensed form, without every participant having to know their causes.⁹

    A modern economy must moreover choose between heterogeneous means of production and alternative uses, since tons of steel, hours of different kinds of labour and machines of various sorts cannot simply be added together. Money prices — market prices — provide a uniform measure for calculation and thereby the basis of rational economic calculation.

    Distinct from this is the motivation argument. Even where the information is available and the calculations can be made, someone must have an interest in handling resources carefully. Profit and loss are supposed to tie decision-making power to its consequences. Whoever decides wrongly loses his fortune; whoever decides rightly is rewarded.

    What binds the three arguments together is that, in treating the market as a procedure for solving a problem of coordination, they all presuppose the same thing: that things belong to someone who is entitled to exclude others from them. Wolfgang Möhl and Theo Wentzke bring this connection sharply to the point. Property, “forcibly instituted,” first separates needs from the objects that would satisfy them; access is made dependent on paying the owner the price he demands. The state that guarantees this property order and makes money the general means of access does not thereby make the satisfaction of needs the purpose of the economy, but subordinates it to purchasing power.¹ The technical difficulty that money is supposed to solve — how to distribute goods — is inseparable from a form of access already socially constituted as access to someone else’s property. That explains how unsatisfied needs and unsaleable commodities can exist side by side. Where access to a reproducible good is restricted by patents or other exclusive rights, a high price registers a real market scarcity of access. With digital goods, an additional copy costs next to nothing in material terms, yet access can still command a substantial price. In this case the information supplied is accurate: it tells us how expensive access is under the prevailing property relations. What must not happen is for this relation then to be passed off as a natural scarcity of the object itself.

    What the Market Calculates

    The standard business-school praise of the market runs as follows: thanks to the market, to supply and demand, nobody has to know how many shoes a society needs. No one has to collect knowledge about productive possibilities and changing wishes in a central office. When something becomes scarce, its price rises. Where there is demand, profit beckons. Producers react, resources move into the right uses, and the result is an order no planner could have designed. Fine. Prices therefore tell market participants the monetary terms on which their own purposes can prevail against competing claims. On the demand side, a need registers insofar as it is backed by purchasing power; on the supply side, a use of social labour registers insofar as it pays for a producer. For the claim that the market determines needs, this means that two people can need the same medicine with equal urgency, but if one can pay and the other cannot, their needs enter the market with unequal weight. Economic demand theory does not even dispute this: willingness to pay is already determined by preferences and budget constraints. It is therefore impossible to derive from the market price what share of observed willingness to pay is due to the intensity of a need and what share to command over money. Social need, insofar as it makes itself felt as market demand, is determined by the relation between the classes and their respective economic positions — among other things by the relation of wages to surplus value and by the distribution of surplus value. Supply and demand therefore do not explain their own social basis.

    The vast majority of the population can access social wealth essentially in the form of wages, while capital commands the means of production and the products of the production it directs. For the worker, the wage is the means of subsistence. What he can buy with it is a result of the capitalist relation of production and class, and of the struggles conducted within it. Capital has an interest in limiting or reducing this cost item insofar as competition and the requirements of the business permit. On the supply side, the same antagonism appears in inverted form. The purpose of production is not the satisfaction of needs, and yet a capitalist enterprise has to serve needs. “Whatever provision of needs takes place, or fails to take place, is the dependent variable of the business. The supply of goods and the satisfaction of needs are the by-product of capitalist competition.”² The firm advances money and produces commodities in order to get more money back by selling them. The use value of the product is indispensable to this process — as the vehicle of a piece of business. The customer and his need are conditions the firm has to make use of for its profit-making; great need therefore produces no correspondingly great supply. What matters is which effective demand can be served at prices at which the capital advanced pays off. What economics calls consumer sovereignty accordingly consists in a very specific freedom: the buyer may choose among the commodities offered by other owners, insofar as his money reaches. He is sovereign neither over the social distribution of the means of production, nor over the conditions of production, nor over the size of the means with which he can make his wishes count on the market. The business world assesses the purchasing power at hand, designs offerings intended to attract it, and turns the needs of the public into the field of a competition for sales. If market demand is treated as information, therefore, the competing suppliers themselves participate in producing, shaping and redistributing it. What is produced, how much of it, and by what means is decided by separate firms according to their own calculations. Whether these private decisions fit together becomes apparent afterwards in sales, profit rates and possible losses. Private labours carried on independently of one another are continually brought into a social relation, but not through prior common decision. Their own social movement confronts the producers as a movement of things, and socially necessary labour-time asserts itself, as Marx puts it, “as a regulative law of nature” — like the law of gravity when a house collapses over one’s head. That is the material basis of what today is fondly described as the market’s “learning.” Society certainly does correct the proportions of its production, but it does so post festum. If, capitalistically, “too much” of a commodity has been produced while people could still make use of it, that does not mean too much measured against the need. It means too much measured against the sales through which the capital advanced can successfully be realized. The commodity is devalued, plants are shut down and workers are dismissed because continuing production does not pay. Society may then possess labour-power and needs at one and the same time and still fail to bring them together because the mediating purpose of profitable valorization drops out. Crises arise from considerably more causes than insufficient consumer demand alone. They concern the entire nexus of production, accumulation, credit, profitability and the proportions between branches of production. Credit pushes the testing of private calculations further into the future: it makes production and sale possible before payment has finally been made, drives the elastic process of reproduction to its outermost limit and expands accumulation. A socially unsustainable disproportion can thereby persist for longer, and its subsequent correction becomes all the more violent.

    Price Signals

    What Hayek’s famous reflection on dispersed knowledge is driving at can be seen in the example of tin. If tin becomes less available for its existing uses, those who use it need not know whether a mine has failed or other buyers are demanding larger quantities. They learn what matters for their own calculation: tin has become more expensive.¹⁰ The price translates the effects of manifold changes into a single monetary relation. Why another use is drawing more heavily on the tin, what purpose that use serves, and whose need is being served ahead of one’s own need not be known by the individual user. For his separate calculation, the change in his monetary conditions is enough. According to cost and profit, he decides whether his own application can still bear the increased price, whether to economize on tin, or whether to substitute something else for it. The cause can remain a matter of indifference to him because the social priority of the competing purposes is not decided in common. The price system does not merely spare people superfluous knowledge; it dispenses with a common comparison of purposes by allowing the result to emerge from their competition for the material. The condensation performed by the price is therefore the appropriate information for a system of production in which separate operators dispose of their means of production according to the success of the property they have advanced as capital. It should be noted in passing that the example is loaded — and not only with tin. First we are told that part of the tin is now “more profitably employed elsewhere”; immediately afterwards Hayek speaks of the “more urgent need” in favour of which other users are to economize on the supply. That a particular use can bear a higher price for tin under the given market conditions, or is more profitable for the capital concerned, demonstrates its greater ability to prevail economically. It does not demonstrate that the purpose served by that use is socially more urgent. A well-funded demand for a scarcely urgent use prevails just as surely over an existential need without the corresponding purchasing power. The higher price is a material condition of access. The producer has to bear the higher costs; for the consumer, the price limits what his income still allows him to buy. Take two competing uses of the same material — medical devices and beverage cans, say — without presupposing that either deserves priority. The medical-device manufacturer knows the requirements of his product; the can manufacturer knows his. Each examines what the new price means for his own capital calculation. The social result emerges from which capitals can continue using the material under these conditions and which are pushed out. Which needs go unmet, and what consequences the allocation has, need not be objects of these separate decisions. The proportions that arise in this way are the result of capitals competing for successful valorization and of a demand whose economic weight depends on command over money. Hayek subsequently describes the adjustment thus enforced as movement in the “right direction.” “Right” here is measured solely against the market’s task of adjustment. The intensified competition for tin is translated into substitution and altered uses. That the uses pushed aside are those a social comparison would consider most dispensable has not thereby been shown. For such a comparison the market possesses no standard independent of purchasing power, property and profitability. Its fetish character consists in this: the relations among competitors producing independently of one another take on, for them, the form of properties and movements of things — of their products and monetary magnitudes. Rising raw-material prices, falling selling prices and declining profitability confront the individual firm as objective conditions to which it must adapt. In later lectures Hayek expressly describes competition as a procedure through which economically relevant knowledge is first discovered. For the form of coordination at issue here, however, that changes nothing about the fact that market participants also react to conditions that have themselves resulted from the previous market decisions of others. Purchases, investments, credit decisions and speculation in turn alter prices, and with them the conditions of subsequent decisions.

    Hayek’s initial problem is more general than the capitalist form of his solution. Knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place is distributed, and those making decisions must at the same time take account of changes beyond their immediate horizon. Both remain true where the means of production are collectively controlled. From the decentralization of knowledge, however, what follows is the need for correspondingly distributed decision-making powers — not private property and competition. Those add a further barrier to the problem, since firms have reasons to withhold technical procedures, accumulated experience and productive innovations from one another wherever their exclusive use forms part of a competitive advantage. Collective control at least removes this systematic reason for secrecy. Among associated producers, the flow of information would follow the material division of labour: particular knowledge remains with the particular activity, while common accounting is required wherever activities share common preconditions and consequences. This opposition recurs in the critique of the Soviet economy of levers. Against an “accounting” intended to stimulate and control production through value magnitudes stands the planning of labour “according to natural and technical conditions”; for this purpose, technological knowledge and considerations of health are more directly relevant than calculations of value.³ How common decisions are to become practically binding in such an association without the coordinating function establishing itself as a separate power over the producers is a question of its own. It does not alter the substantive distinction between the necessary binding force of common decisions and an autonomous authority of rule that dictates the producers’ purposes to them. The informational economy achieved by prices rests on the fact that social production is organized as a competition among private calculations of valorization and income, and that its interconnection therefore need be known to the participants only in the form of its repercussions on those calculations.

    Economic Calculation

    Only the exchange of the means of production produces the common monetary denominator to which their possible uses can be reduced. There are, to be sure, numerous large capitalist corporations in which departments and productive processes are coordinated according to plan without these sub-units buying and selling means of production from one another. Mises objects that the corporation’s internal accounting nevertheless rests on market prices formed outside the firm. The corporation gets its valuations from the market; it organizes the material interconnection of its production itself. In Human Action Mises develops this objection against conceptions of a socialist quasi-market. For him, the managers of existing plants perform only a subordinate part of the task. By founding and closing firms, and by allocating and withdrawing capital, capitalists and speculators alter the structure of production under conditions of uncertainty. The allocation of the means of production among the various branches of production is the real task, and it goes beyond the administration of enterprises already in existence.⁴ Under uncertainty, trial and error counts as a procedure only if there are criteria, independent of the procedure itself, by which a successful attempt can be recognized. In capitalism, profit and loss deliver this verdict. Without market prices for the means of production, socialism, according to Mises, lacks the independent standard by which trial and error could be evaluated at all.⁵ Profit and loss can indeed be established independently of the individual attempt; that does not make them a standard independent of the market order. Success here means that the money value advanced yields a return at the prevailing market prices. Mises himself explicitly explains what counts as “better” from the standpoint of consumers buying on the market. A socially decided project of production can determine its criteria of success — quality, effort and resource use, say — before it is carried out and test the result against them afterwards. Where such criteria conflict, a problem of weighting arises. That this problem can be solved only by profit and loss does not follow from the general conditions of trial and error. At the same time, the market’s procedure of correction is supposed to generate responsibility on the part of capitalists. A manager without property can ultimately be held responsible for a wrong decision only in a moral sense; the owner, by contrast, bears the loss of assets himself.⁶ But before it can be settled what consequences a wrong decision is to have for him, it must first be settled by what criterion the decision is recognized as wrong. Mises answers both questions in one stroke: wrong is whatever produces a loss, and the loss is at the same time the material consequence that disciplines the owner toward the right decision. What has thereby been posited is simply that the preservation and increase of the property advanced counts as the success of production. The owner bears “the consequences of his decision” in the specific form of a change in his assets, and it is to this that his responsibility is directed. As long as the consequences do not appear as corresponding costs to his property, the calculation was in fact correct. A productive undertaking that fulfils a socially desired purpose is a wrong decision if the outlay required does not pay off. Profit and loss connect the disposal over property with the consequences that this disposal has for the property itself. The fact that the owner can lose his own assets gives him a material reason — quite apart from any sense of responsibility — to employ resources in such a way that his fortune is preserved and increased. Whether this interest coincides with an economical use of resources or with the satisfaction of urgent needs is a different question. The motivation argument therefore presupposes precisely the standard of success whose general reasonableness it is supposed to prove. Money prices measure no social weight of the means of production independently of property and valorization. For capital, they make otherwise heterogeneous conditions of production commensurable because these conditions confront it as costs of a monetary advance. From the necessity of weighing heterogeneous preconditions and consequences against one another in complex processes of production, Mises infers that they must be reduced to a common quantitative denominator — a function performed in the market economy by the money price. In this way, the commensurability produced under private property and exchange becomes the necessary form of rational economic calculation as such, and the description of one particular mode of economy becomes the standard for every other without any proof being supplied for that step. If, among technically suitable alternatives, one requires more labour and less material while another requires less labour and more material, this initially shows only a conflict among material consequences. Where one variant is superior in every respect relevant to the purpose, no additional “economic” valuation is necessary. Where advantages of different kinds conflict, however — less expenditure of labour against greater consumption of material — it has to be decided what weight these consequences are to carry. They become comparable through the purpose for which the comparison is being made, not through a denominator to which they must first be reduced. Whoever knows what is to be produced and to what end also knows what counts in judging a variant; the magnitudes need not first be rendered commensurable for that purpose.

    A number expresses an economic ability to prevail that has arisen under definite social relations — relations of property and of the market. The money price is no exception to this rule but a particular case of it. It is the rule by which consequences are weighted within a particular form of production: each consequence counts to the extent that it appears as a cost of an advance or as a return on it. Insofar as a consequence affects neither the money advanced, nor property values, nor liability, nor costs imposed by the state, it does not appear as a cost item in the private calculation of profitability.

    The commensurability that Mises presents as a condition of calculation is its result. It arises because production has already been subordinated to a purpose against which everything is measured. What profit and loss test after the event is valorization. The owner’s interest determines not only who answers for a decision, but also what result counts as its success: from the standpoint of this calculation, a responsible decision is one that preserves and increases the assets advanced. Mises says openly what his monetary calculation calculates — private fortunes, costs, proceeds, profits and losses in an economy based on private property. That rational decision-making and monetary calculation are not identical is something Mises himself expressly acknowledges. For him, health and life can be either means or ends of human action without therefore entering into monetary calculation. As an example, he discusses a town council that has to choose between two projects for the water supply. The cheaper alternative would demolish a historically significant structure; the more expensive one would preserve it. The fact that the historical or artistic significance of the building cannot be measured in money in no way prevents, for Mises, a rational decision between the two possibilities.⁷ A consciously organized social production can distinguish the decision about purposes from calculation without separating the two. Calculation makes the preconditions and consequences of different productive possibilities known; which of these consequences are to be weighted, and how heavily, is decided in light of the respective purposes of production. The critique of monetary calculation does not deny the trade-offs that arise when choosing between procedures or when means are limited; it disputes the monetary denominator as the necessary form in which those questions must be settled. Mises and Hayek arrive at the asserted indispensability of the market from different starting points. One declares the monetary calculation produced under private property and exchange to be the necessary form of economic decision-making. The other begins from the general premise that knowledge is incompletely distributed in every complex social division of labour and identifies the market price as the necessary form of information for dealing with that fact. In both cases, the necessity of the capitalist form of the solution is derived from a general problem of social production. The form in which private property is defended thereby changes: presented as a theorem of knowledge, property turns every objection to the purpose of profit into a confession that one does not know how to calculate.

    The Socialist Label

    Whether state or central planning is automatically oriented toward needs is a question to be settled case by case. The fact that production is planned says nothing yet about the purpose the plan serves. Nor does the history of the Soviet Union prove that every form of non-market coordination is impossible. From the failure of one particular historical form of planning, a general impossibility follows only if it can be shown that the failure necessarily resulted from features that must belong to every form of planning. The critique of actually existing socialism is directed, among other things, against the fact that the political leadership did not simply organize production around material needs to be met, but sought instead, through indicators and material incentives, to induce enterprises to produce the desired overall result out of their own partial calculations. In the reforms of perestroika, this orientation was pushed further in the direction of enterprise autonomy and profitability. Products that were needed in material terms but scarcely profitable for the individual enterprise could consequently disappear from the range on offer.⁸

    The communists’ critique of the Soviet Union, however, is an entirely different one. Against the supposed critics of communism, it should be noted that there is no need here to demonstrate in detail what such a system would look like. The burden of proof lies first with whoever makes the capitalist market a fundamental precondition of economic activity as such. That proof has yet to be supplied, which may well explain the desolate state of the discussion. One may remain curious as to what arguments the successors of the Austrian School will come up with.

    The Answer

    There are two billion people in the world without safely managed drinking water. One might be tempted to think that some failure has occurred here. But a failure of what, exactly? A failure presupposes a task that has gone unfulfilled. What task would that have been?

    It cannot be a lack of knowledge. Where these people live has been recorded; the World Bank keeps statistics on it, and the World Health Organization publishes them annually. The relevant procedures are older than the debate itself. There is no dispersed knowledge that a central office lacks, no man on the spot whose particular knowledge of time and place has not been called upon.

    Everybody knows.

    That is the remarkable thing about it.

    The calculation, then? Not that either. Pipes, pumps, filters and hours of labour are entirely calculable, and engineering offices perform precisely those calculations. There are tenders, cost estimates and feasibility studies. The common denominator is ready, the figures are in, and compared with what is spent each year on far more dispensable things they are unremarkable.

    That leaves responsibility. But nobody has been irresponsible. No water utility has squandered its assets, no investor has fallen for a foolish bet, no balance sheet contains an item that would give cause for complaint — quite the contrary. Anyone who had invested in regions without effective demand would rightly have been called to account for the resulting loss. The absence of supply is the result of nothing but responsible decisions.

    So the market has done its job. It has delivered the answer it is designed to deliver, and it has delivered it precisely.

    The answer was: no business.

    One may consider that a scandal. One should not mistake it for a malfunction.

    And the question why a society that knows everything, can calculate everything, and in which every decision has someone answerable for it nevertheless gives two billion people no water is, according to its own leading theorists, not an economic question. It merely shows that the person asking it has failed to grasp the elementary conditions of rational economic activity.

    They should have placed an order, then.

    Scientific critique, not worldview. Analysis, not appeals. Rupture, not reform.

    1. Wolfgang Möhl and Theo Wentzke, Das Geld. Von den vielgepriesenen Leistungen des schnöden Mammons [Money: On the Much-Praised Achievements of Filthy Lucre], GegenStandpunkt Verlag, p. 9.
    2. Alexander Melčok, Kritik der Betriebswirtschaftslehre. Planungsregeln für erfolgreiches Wirtschaften in der kapitalistischen Konkurrenz [Critique of Business Administration: Planning Rules for Successful Economic Activity in Capitalist Competition], GegenStandpunkt Verlag, p. 18.
    3. Karl Held (ed.), Das Lebenswerk des Michail Gorbatschow. Von der Reform des „realen Sozialismus“ zur Zerstörung der Sowjetunion [The Life’s Work of Mikhail Gorbachev: From the Reform of “Real Socialism” to the Destruction of the Soviet Union], GegenStandpunkt Verlag, p. 35.
    4. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, “The Quasi-Market.”
    5. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, “Trial and Error.”
    6. Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth [Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen], sec. 4.
    7. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, “The Limits of Economic Calculation.”
    8. Karl Held (ed.), Das Lebenswerk des Michail Gorbatschow. Von der Reform des „realen Sozialismus“ zur Zerstörung der Sowjetunion [The Life’s Work of Mikhail Gorbachev: From the Reform of “Real Socialism” to the Destruction of the Soviet Union], GegenStandpunkt Verlag, p. 210.
    9. Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review, vol. 35, no. 4.
    10. Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review, vol. 35, no. 4.
  • Beyond Slogans: Structural Derivation as the Standard of Materialist Critique

    Beyond Slogans: Structural Derivation as the Standard of Materialist Critique

    By M.G.

    Note: This text forms the basis of our series on the critique of revisionist dialectics and our understanding of Marxism.

    Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters — where the concept falls asleep, slogans awaken.

    The Left is not short of radical words. A war is called imperialist before anyone has said which power is pursuing which interest, and by what means. What is striking is that the concept does not appear as a question — whether this determination applies to this particular case and, if so, by virtue of what — but as an answer that precedes the case itself. One may share a judgement and still dispute that it has been substantiated. It is true that the determining purpose of a government does not consist in the welfare of those dependent on wages. The explanation that it has been bought by corporations is not true. It reduces to the will of individual interested parties what ought to be explained from the bourgeois state’s relation to capitalist reproduction: the state secures the conditions of property, contract and competition, and its means of power depend on the success of the capitalist economy based within its territory. Anyone who accepts the former explanation must assume that different personnel would produce a different policy. A correct condemnation has thus been transformed into a false expectation.

    Conversely, a controller who calculates the level of capacity utilisation at which a workforce of 400 employees becomes profitable for a company may sometimes say more about the purpose of that company than an essay in which the word “surplus-value” appears three times. The controller knows the company’s requirements because they calculate and enforce them. They do not need to be able to explain why these requirements possess social validity. Which questions are asked at all depends on the interest of the person asking them; anyone who is content with the existing relations has no reason to investigate what lies behind their apparent self-evidence. Yet the conclusion is the opposite of the one commonly drawn. Anyone who wants to abolish an order must understand it more precisely than someone who has settled into it. Partisanship is a reason for precision, not an exemption from it. False determinations are paid for with wasted effort and political defeats.

    The error has a recognisable form: capital crosses borders, the military secures transport routes, banks are large and few in number — therefore, imperialism. The characteristics are included in the determination and assigned to one another. What remains unexplained is why capital expands beyond national borders, what benefit state protection provides to internationally operating capitals, and what purpose of its own the state pursues through this protection. As long as nothing has been said about these questions, one has a list of characteristics, but no explanation.

    The unpleasant thing about this procedure is that it always produces a result and therefore cannot fail. If one characteristic is absent, the case is declared an exception; if several are absent, it becomes a transitional case; if most are absent, the matter is simply declared contradictory.

    An investigation can only begin with what is visible, and what is visible rarely arrives in silence. The state declares itself responsible for the common good. The employment contract presents itself as an agreement between two legal subjects who owe each other nothing before they have signed it. An election is regarded as an act through which a people determines its own affairs. The same operation as in a subsumption, merely with the sign reversed, is also at work in statements such as: “The state talks about the common good, but what it really means is capital.” A judgement is derived from the state’s self-description by simply negating it, without examining the relation from which both emerge. An exposé of this kind assumes a hidden intention behind the appearance, where what ought to be determined is instead a social form that sets the conditions and social criteria of success for the intentions of the agents involved.

    From appearance to social form

    Critique begins with the suspicion that visible processes do not carry their own explanation within themselves. This can easily lead to a distorted idea — as though behind prices and public authorities there were a second, hidden level on which the real decisions are made. Those who search for this hidden level in their employment contract will be disappointed, since a contract is not the disguise of something else. It is the actual enactment of a relation that comes into being through it. What must be determined is what brings this relation about.

    What is called essence is the connection from which appearances arise and which asserts itself through them.

    When a factory is closed, what can be observed may be a management decision or an investment decision that was delayed four years earlier. Such information explains why this particular factory was closed and why it happened in this particular quarter. There is, however, a difference between that information and an explanation of why the employment of human labour-power depends in the first place on whether it expands an advanced capital. Business administration does not turn this into a problem because its investigation already presupposes profitability as the purpose. A discipline that helps companies calculate has no reason to ask why calculation takes place at all; the question is therefore displaced. The question is no longer: Why did this management dismiss workers? It becomes: In what social form is labour performed only insofar as it is profitable? The first question seeks the cause of an event. The second determines the relation within which events of this kind are normal. The second does not make the first superfluous — it identifies the framework within which its answers operate.

    The route to this determination passes through abstraction. One common misunderstanding of abstraction is that it consists in eliminating whatever distinguishes individual cases. A worker, a landlord and a shareholder: all of them engage in economic activity and make decisions under conditions of scarcity. The general category produced in this way has been obtained by eliminating precisely what distinguishes the participants from one another — and is then expected to explain their relation. Anyone proceeding in this manner has methodologically erased the difference between the person who must sell labour-power and the person who buys it before the investigation has even begun. This kind of generality is, incidentally, the fundamental operation of economics. Materialist abstraction, by contrast, captures the relation that produces the difference. One party controls means of production and can purchase labour-power; the other depends on selling labour-power in order to reproduce their existence. Abstraction separates the social determination of the participants from their contingent particularities in order to grasp their necessary connection.

    A second misunderstanding is the classic objection to Marx: theory supposedly invents a conceptual order and subsequently imposes it upon reality. Value is nowhere to be seen, whereas prices are visible everywhere; it therefore appears to be a construction one may or may not accept. This objection would only be valid if the equation at issue took place inside the theorist’s head. People care for the sick, bake bread, assemble gearboxes, write software and drive trains. Whether an activity produces value, however, is not decided by its concrete content. The same care work or transport work can be performed under different social relations. As concrete activities, these forms of labour are qualitatively different. They are socially equated because their products are related to one another as commodities. The producers work privately and independently of one another, even though their labour forms part of a social division of labour. No one has decided in advance how much baker’s labour society will require this year. Baking is carried out for one’s own account. Whether and to what extent privately expended labour counts socially is determined only afterwards through competition, exchange and sale. For the individual producer, this becomes apparent in whether and under what conditions the commodity can be sold; the individual sale does not, however, create its value. What is decisive is the socially necessary labour time under the prevailing conditions of production. In value, this social validity assumes an objective form. The product belongs to a private owner who excludes others from its use and surrenders it only in return for an equivalent. As value, the commodity is therefore not merely socially valid labour, but also a socially valid power of access to the wealth of others.

    That private labour must prove itself through exchange applies to commodity production in general. Under capitalism, a second condition is added: the labour must prove itself as a means of valorising the capital advanced. The successful sale of a commodity and the sufficient valorisation of the capital advanced are not the same thing. A business may promise a surplus and nevertheless not be undertaken if capital expects a higher return elsewhere.

    Derivation and transition

    There is a useful test for presentations that claim to develop their subject conceptually: try reversing two successive determinations. Wherever this can be done without any substantive loss, and nothing becomes unintelligible because a presupposition is missing, there is at least reason to suspect that no derivation has taken place. There may merely be an arrangement according to importance or thematic proximity. Even correct judgements may simply stand alongside one another. A derivation, by contrast, must demonstrate why the determination reached so far is insufficient and why precisely the following determination becomes necessary. Its sequence is therefore not based on the order in which individual aspects occurred to the author, but on their conceptual connection.

    The relation between commodity and money illustrates what is required. The analysis of the value-form need not be presented in full for this purpose; it is sufficient initially to follow its movement. As a commodity, a product possesses value in addition to its use-value. This value cannot be seen by looking at the product — no more can one tell what a chair is worth by looking at it than one can tell what bread is worth. The value of one commodity can only be expressed in another: a certain quantity of chairs is worth a certain quantity of bread. Every commodity can express its value in every other commodity. The result is an endless series of changing expressions of value in which no commodity provides, by itself, a universally valid form of value. Commodities can represent their value universally only by expressing it collectively in one commodity. This particular commodity is thereby separated from the remainder of the commodity world as the universal equivalent. In it, value acquires a universal and independent form of appearance. This is where money belongs in the argument.

    The familiar explanation is that barter is cumbersome because everyone must find someone who possesses precisely what they want and wants precisely what they possess, and that a medium of exchange was therefore introduced. Anyone defining money in this way has made it impossible to answer why people want money even when they do not want to buy anything, and why a society with full warehouses can simultaneously suffer from a shortage of money. The barter story explains a practical use of money, but not its necessity arising from the commodity form. Not everything that follows something else in a presentation follows from it in the same manner. Many disputes concerning derivations arise precisely because conceptual transitions, historical presuppositions, institutional guarantees and concrete courses of development are mistaken for one another. Only the first is an immanent conceptual derivation. The others refer to different ways in which a social form is historically produced, institutionally guaranteed or concretely realised. A transition is conceptual when the existing determination necessarily produces a further one because it can neither fully exist nor adequately appear without it. In the relation between commodity and money, this is demonstrated by the fact that money is not an external addition to the commodity, but the universal and independent form of appearance of its value.

    A historical presupposition is a different matter. The movement of advancing money in order to receive more money in return is very old and can already be found in commerce and usury. It can be determined conceptually. For money to subordinate production in general to the purpose of its own expansion, however, labour-power must be available as a commodity. There must be producers who have been separated from the means of production and are therefore dependent on selling their labour-power. They must confront owners who possess money and means of production and can employ the labour-power they have purchased. This historically produced class condition does not follow from the concept of money. Primitive accumulation is the history of producing a condition that capital presupposes. On one side, control over the means of production is accumulated; on the other, the mass of producers remains dependent on selling its labour-power in order to reproduce itself.

    A third relation concerns institutional guarantees. Property must be universally binding. This level is frequently confused with conceptual transition. The state then appears as a consequence of property in the same sense that money emerges from the commodity form. Yet the statement that property and contract require a universal guarantee merely poses the problem of deriving the state.

    Whether the competition arising from the capital relation is conducted primarily through joint-stock companies, family businesses, state funds or other forms of enterprise is not thereby decided. Nor does the crisis-prone character of capitalist accumulation determine when a particular crisis will occur or which political response it will receive. Which of the possibilities opened by the general form and the compulsions it establishes actually becomes reality depends on further political mediations. Anyone confusing this level with conceptual derivation is practising a philosophy of history. History then appears as the unfolding of something already fully contained in the concept. What actually happened could, according to this view, never have happened differently.

    The most frequent false transitions are easier to recognise when placed beside one another. The first turns temporal succession into necessity. Industrialisation preceded social insurance; therefore, industrialisation produced social insurance. The second infers the cause from the benefit. The state performs a service for accumulation; therefore, it must have been established by those who benefit from that service. The third transforms a possibility into a necessity. Economic crises can favour authoritarian politics; this becomes the proposition that crisis leads to fascism. The fourth allows a general determination to substitute for an investigation of the particular case. Crude labelling operates with a word. Pseudo-derivation operates with a correct determination but applies it at a point for which it was not established. It is therefore the more durable form of the same error. A conceptual transition must explain which limit or unresolved requirement is contained in the existing determination, why this limit cannot be overcome within the same form, why precisely the new determination provides the required mediation, and what has and has not thereby been explained.

    At the end of this process, the order of reasons emerges. It is the result of the investigation. In practice, the distinction between research and presentation is sometimes invoked for the opposite purpose: as an admission that the necessity of the sequence could not be demonstrated and is not supposed to be demonstrated. The investigation may take detours. The presentation must arrange its results so that the connection between them becomes visible.

    Contradiction and dialectics

    Everything is dialectical. When two quantities influence one another, that is dialectical. When an object changes over time, that is dialectical. When one’s own presentation contains two statements that do not fit together, dialectics is responsible. It is rather convenient to evade every definite answer by using dialectics as a retrospective mark of distinction. Every objection can be accepted without anything having to be changed. When two statements are accused of contradicting one another, the accusation can be transformed into a compliment. The error is no longer an error, but analytical depth.

    If someone asserts both A and non-A in the same respect, without stating in which relation the one applies and in which relation the other applies, then there are initially only two incompatible propositions. The same applies when money is determined in one place as the social form of abstract wealth and treated elsewhere as a mere unit of account, depending on what the immediate context requires. Anyone invoking different respects is obliged to identify them and explain their connection. The following applies to the kind of social contradiction meant here: a social form necessarily produces opposed determinations and unites them within itself. The opposites must arise from the same form, presuppose one another and nevertheless be directed against one another. Their relation must produce a determinate movement.

    There are abbreviated accounts of the commodity. One says that production is not about needs but profit, and cannot explain why useful things are produced at all. The other says that the market satisfies needs, and cannot explain why a need without purchasing power does not count for production. The opposition is already present in the commodity form itself: the product must be a use-value, but for its producer it is manufactured as the bearer of value; privately expended labour must subsequently prove itself to be social labour. Only on this basis is the valorisation of the capital advanced added under capitalist conditions.

    The material constitution of the commodity is the condition of its sale, but not the purpose of its production. For its producer, its usefulness is the means through which the value represented in it is realised by means of sale. The two do not exclude one another. On the contrary, a commodity can only be a bearer of value if it is useful. Its usefulness does not, however, decide whether the private labour expended upon it possesses social validity. A useful commodity may remain unsold even though people need it. Production is guided by the prospect of a successful realisation of value — and, under capitalist conditions, by the prospect of sufficient valorisation. Where need and effective demand diverge, things for which no one will pay may be destroyed.

    The wage worker belongs to no one. They must nevertheless sell their labour-power because they lack the means of obtaining their livelihood in any other way. Anyone who declares the wage worker’s freedom to be merely an illusion cannot explain why this society could not function without that freedom — why it regards forced labour as a regression and prefers its workers to be mobile, dismissible and personally responsible for themselves. Conversely, anyone who concludes from the signature on the contract that no coercion is present mistakes the form for its condition. Freedom is the form in which dependency is enacted. Coercion does not operate against freedom, but through it. Because no one directly drives the seller of labour-power to work, they must search for employment themselves, accept the worse contract where necessary, and assume responsibility for not having obtained the better one. A serf did not need to be mobile. Nor did the serf personally have to secure the successful sale of their capacity to work.

    Every individual capital attempts to reduce its individual production time and its costs below the socially valid level. If it succeeds, it temporarily obtains a competitive advantage. Once the more productive method becomes general, socially necessary labour time falls; the special advantage disappears and must be produced anew. Technical relief may emerge in the course of this process, but it is not the determining purpose and may be accompanied by the intensification of labour, stricter control and the elimination of jobs.

    It does not follow from an internal contradiction that the thing containing it will perish because of it. Crises do not abolish the contradictions of accumulation, but act them out in a destructive form: capital is devalued, workers are dismissed and competitors disappear. This can establish altered conditions for further accumulation without abolishing the mode of production. Crisis is therefore not an automatic bridge to socialism. Greater participation and higher wages can alter the material conditions under which labour-power is sold and employed. They do not, however, abolish the compulsion to sell labour-power.

    Anyone expecting a collapse has had to postpone it for more than a century and requires, for every failure of the collapse to arrive, an explanation that preserves the next date. In this way, the philosophy of history that had previously been expelled from economics returns: the course of events is fixed; only its timing remains uncertain.

    Six questions for every alleged contradiction

    1. Which two determinations are opposed to one another?
    2. Do they belong to the same form, or are two different objects being compared?
    3. How does each side presuppose the other?
    4. Through which forms and mechanisms are the opposites practically mediated?
    5. What movement arises from their opposition?
    6. What transformation of the social form would abolish this contradiction?

    Ideology and Necessary Semblance

    The most widespread conception of ideology is that of the lie: those above know the truth and withhold it, while those below believe what they are supposed to hear. It should not be denied that governments lie; this does not, however, explain the persistence of these ideas. The wage-form does not first become plausible through propaganda. Because the wage is paid as the price of a particular period of labour, the relation itself suggests that the labour performed is being remunerated. Science, law, political institutions and public opinion take up this interpretation, consolidate it and give it a general form; they do not invent its raw material. Reducing ideology to deception, by contrast, requires a circle of insiders people who know better, followed by an explanation of why none of them ever reveals the truth. This account also underestimates the tenacity of the matter: a mere lie could be eliminated through enlightenment.

    Alongside the lie, ideology is also interpreted as an arbitrary system of beliefs, a system of beliefs that everyone is said to possess. There are then no longer any false explanations, but only standpoints between which one chooses according to personal inclination. Marxism is supposed to be one of these standpoints — which sounds like recognition, but in fact functions as the burial of its claim to truth.

    When money is transferred at the end of the month, the appearance is the real manner in which a relation exists. We should speak of semblance where this form of appearance presents the connection in an inverted manner. Because payment is made by the hour, the wage looks like the price of the labour performed. Because both sides are regarded as free and equal legal persons, their relation looks like one between parties possessing equal powers of disposal. When the semblance contained in the form of appearance is retained as an explanation of the relation, ideology is reproduced: the wage remunerates performance. Everyone is equal before the law; therefore, they interact as equals. Whether the participants explicitly believe this interpretation is of secondary importance. What is necessary is the form of appearance from which the error repeatedly emerges as plausible. As long as the relation exists in this form, it continually produces the same inverted information about itself. This information can be seen through; otherwise, every investigation would be pointless. Yet the form of appearance does not disappear through insight.

    The wage-form

    Through the employment contract, the buyer obtains, for a specified period, the right to employ labour-power within the agreed conditions. Its particular use-value for capital consists in the fact that its use can create more value than it itself costs. Labour-power is purchased and employed in the production process solely because of this possibility. Since payment is made for time, the value of labour-power appears as the price of an hour, a day or a manufactured piece. Under piece-wages, it even appears as though the product itself were being paid for. The difference between what labour-power costs and the value created through its use is not visible in this transaction. The most immediate criticism is therefore directed at the price of labour-power. Exploitation appears as a deviation: as an excessively low wage or as an employer’s violation of the rules of the contract. The fair wage is the idea corresponding to the wage-form: it presupposes the sale of labour-power and directs criticism towards the adequacy of its price. A struggle for higher wages can remain within this form without the participants considering the wage relation as a whole to be just.

    There is no need to attribute a special error of thought to the participants here.

    The forms of appearance are practically binding and make the ideological explanation plausible. Ideological consciousness persists because its categories provide a usable orientation within the relation that they falsely explain. Anyone who fails to calculate the return on employed capital within competition will fail in that competition. This does not prove that capital produces a return by itself. Practical usefulness in dealing with a thing and truth about that thing are two different matters. From this follows the thanklessness of enlightenment. One can explain to someone what is taking place in the wage relation, and on the first of the following month they must nevertheless calculate with their hourly rate once again.

    Legal equality treats the participants, independently of their social means, as owners and bearers of valid declarations of will. They can conclude contracts and enforce them in court. The fact that the law disregards the unequal means available to different persons is not an oversight, but its achievement. A legal system that made the wealth of the parties a condition of their legal capacity could not enforce contracts universally. It must abstract from the social power of its subjects in order to treat them as equal legal persons.

    Impersonal Constraint and Personal Responsibility

    Wages and market prices confront the individual entrepreneur as circumstances they did not create. What confronts the company as an external structural constraint is the result of a particular way of organising social production through mutually separate owners and competing capitals. In the opposite direction, profit appears as an achievement: the achievement of the founder, of innovation, of the risk assumed or of capital itself. Yet ownership of value and means of production grants command over the labour-power of others and thus the possibility of appropriating the surplus-value it produces. This social relation disappears behind the sum invested and the return obtained. The inversions move in opposite directions and support one another. Social relations appear as properties of things, while their compulsions appear as decisions made by persons. This is why the propositions “the market demanded it” and “the executive board failed” can coexist in the same newspaper without any friction.

    Academic Economics

    Economics defines the wage as the remuneration of the factor of production called labour. It can work honestly, reason rigorously and collect data accurately — within the forms of appearance whose presuppositions it does not investigate. Once fixed in textbooks, laws, administrative procedures and political programmes, ideology itself becomes a moment of this practice. When the determination of the wage as remuneration for performance structures collective bargaining and social law, the semblance acquires institutional forms that act back upon the relation from which it arose. Not every ideological conception can, however, be derived immediately from the same economic form. Political, legal, religious, national and media ideologies each possess particular mediations that must be determined. The statement about ruling ideas should not be understood in a personalistic manner. These ideas derive their plausibility from the fact that everyone buys and sells, everyone needs money, everyone appears as a legal person, everyone is subject to state decisions and every company must operate according to profitability.

    Ideas that connect with these everyday forms of practice already possess a persuasive force of their own. Propaganda and political institutions take up this plausibility, organise it and give it a general form. They do not need to invent the material they process. Describing racism or sexism as necessary appearances of capital evades the object that ought to be explained. The state constitutes the population subjected to its rule as its people, presents the success of its national economy as their common cause, and sets them in opposition to the members of other states. This requires a different derivation with different mediations, and that derivation must actually be carried out rather than replaced by a single word.

    Standpoint, interest and knowledge

    The bourgeoisie thinks in a bourgeois manner because it is the bourgeoisie; the proletariat sees through capitalism because it must endure it. Understood in this way, social position would have an epistemological side effect, and those directly affected would possess a shorter route to the truth. The idea of privileged access has an unpleasant reverse side that regularly catches up with its proponents. If social position produces consciousness, then the actual views of wage workers must be declared inauthentic as soon as they differ from what was expected. The compliment paid to the class becomes an accusation of false consciousness, and the correct view is henceforth possessed by someone who administers it in trust on the class’s behalf.

    The fundamental class position under capitalism is determined by a person’s position within the process of social reproduction: do they control capital and means of production and purchase labour-power, or do they permanently depend on selling their own labour-power in order to reproduce their existence? Anyone who lives by selling their labour-power belongs to the wage-working class, regardless of which social middle they identify with or how high their salary may be. Class position determines the material conditions of reproduction and thereby makes certain recurring practical purposes likely. Consciousness is the interpretation people form of their purposes, their experiences and the social conditions underlying them. The same material conflict can therefore be processed in a resigned or a revolutionary manner.

    The expression “objective class interest” has both a meaningful and a problematic use. In its meaningful use, it initially describes a material relation: the abolition of the wage-labour relation eliminates wage workers’ dependency on selling their labour-power, while for the owners of capital it means the loss of their command over the labour-power of others. Abolition becomes a conscious political purpose only when it is recognised and willed. The term becomes problematic where a political mandate is derived from the difference between material position and actual consciousness: the workers supposedly do not know what they want, while their representatives know their real interest. The analysis of a class position is thereby transformed into the self-authorisation of a leadership that acts in the name of the class.

    A capitalist must know whether their advance returns and expands. Their practical knowledge begins from capital as a presupposed purpose. The fact that business calculation asks how valorisation can succeed, rather than why social production is subordinated to this purpose in the first place, does not restrict the capitalist’s capacity for thought. It identifies the object of their economic practice.

    The proletarian class standpoint therefore designates a practical standpoint: the critique of the relation with the purpose of abolishing dependency on the sale of labour-power. The living conditions of wage workers provide a material point of departure for this purpose. It does not follow that the purpose will be recognised and adopted. Critique is partisan when it determines a relation in which the reproduction of one class serves as a means for the valorisation of another and draws a practical purpose from this explanation: the abolition of wage labour’s dependency. The class conflict may repeatedly end with an acceptable settlement, with strengthened confidence in the organisation that achieved it, and with renewed attachment to the national economy that preserves the jobs. Its institutional processing regularly encourages precisely this outcome. Those who experience a limitation without receiving an explanation of it may draw the most immediate conclusion and turn it into the standard governing their own demand.

    Marxist concepts are the results of an explanation. The statement that people themselves produce their social relations is not sufficient. What must be explained is why these relations confront them in forms over which they have no collective control. Only from this does the determinate content of their abolition emerge. There is no historical automatism that guarantees this outcome, and no agency that can think, formulate political aims and act in place of the class. To think in a Marxist manner means determining social forms in such a way that their explanation reveals what must be abolished and why this abolition lies in the interest of those dependent on wages.

    Scientific critique, not worldview. Analysis, not appeals. Rupture, not reform.

  • The Algorithm Needs the Nation

    The Algorithm Needs the Nation

    Alex Karp’s Technological Republic and the Remaking of the West

    From M.G.

    For several months Alex Karp seemed to be everywhere. I first noticed the interviews, then the conference appearances, and after that the business-magazine covers. Chief executives usually speak in a language designed to make power sound harmless. Karp does the opposite. He talks about weapons, decline, cowardice and the possibility that the West might lose because its ruling class no longer knows what it wants. The performance can be ridiculous. It can also be revealing. That was enough to make me read The Technological Republic, which Karp wrote with Nicholas Zamiska.

    The book reads like a dark commentary on a machine whose performance no longer satisfies its authors. What they diagnose above all is a loss of responsiveness. The classical instruments of civilian administration and military power projection are, in their account, suffocating under an obsolete architecture, while any state that tolerates this condition falls behind in the race among powers. This diagnosis deserves to be taken more seriously than the genre might suggest, because it identifies real contradictions of American state power. For precisely that reason, it is worth following step by step until the point at which it becomes a political programme. When the Pentagon, as the book recounts at one point, failed during the Gulf War to procure simple Motorola radios on the open market because a Byzantine procurement system encased every action in regulations, the episode is more than an anecdote about administrative failure. For the authors, it is a symptom of a state power gradually losing the capacity to enforce its global claims with “technologically obsolete instruments of force.” The traditional arms industry belongs to the same picture, embodied by giants such as Lockheed Martin, whose systems spend decades in development and have long since become detached, they argue, from the realities of the front. While Washington debates compliance, ethical guidelines for algorithms, and the pacifist qualms of its own tech workers, competitors, China foremost among them, are investing in autonomous drone swarms, facial recognition, and AI-assisted warfare. The United States, so the diagnosis goes, risks losing the competitive struggle of the future to the administrative inertia of its own apparatus.

    “A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West. The loss of national ambition and interest in the potential of science and technology […] have created an innovation gap. The state has retreated from the pursuit of the kind of large-scale breakthroughs that gave rise to the atomic bomb and the internet […]. Silicon Valley, meanwhile, turned inward, focusing its energy on narrow consumer products, rather than projects that speak to and address our greater security and welfare.”
    — Alex C. Karp/Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic, Preface.

    Here, the fraction of tech capital building the architecture of algorithmic warfare reformulates the conditions under which American-led Western power is to be preserved. The separation that Silicon Valley imagined for itself over decades—civilian innovation here, state violence there, market and military as separate worlds—is to be abolished. Karp supplies the theory of a software-shaped raison d’état: the state is to loosen its bureaucratic restraints, tech capital is to overcome its consumerist self-absorption, and the two are to be wired together in a republic whose legitimacy derives more strongly from technological superiority, the provision of security, and geopolitical capacity for action. Given this thrust, one should avoid the shortcut of treating Karp as simply anti-liberal. The book declares its commitment to individual rights, the market economy, and democratic legitimacy. His programme does not abandon the liberal order but reorganises it along authoritarian and national-strategic lines. The ordinary operation of the republic is to be permanently aligned with geopolitical performance; what serves the nation is to be expanded, while whatever impedes its responsiveness is to be shortened, rebuilt, or technologically superseded.

    The Slow Death of Consumer Ideology

    Roosevelt writes to Vannevar Bush, the Manhattan Project gathers an entire generation of physicists under a military purpose, and the research programmes of the 1940s give rise to precursors of artificial intelligence and eventually the semiconductor industry itself. Fairchild builds reconnaissance technology for CIA spy satellites, while for a time every ballistic missile of the US Navy is manufactured in Santa Clara County. From these names and episodes emerges a genealogical claim: the myth of the garage conceals the barracks. The Valley likes to present itself as the child of individual genius, yet the technological power on which it rests emerged from the state, from public financing and from grand national state projects. Where one might accuse the founders of hypocrisy, the book asserts an objective belonging to American state power even where they understand themselves ideologically as its opposite. As such, whoever emerged from the military-state complex is to place themselves once more at the state’s disposal.

    Lee Felsenstein wanted personal computers as a way out of institutional constraints, while Stewart Brand saw in the counterculture’s contempt for central authority the philosophical foundation of a leaderless internet. Through Apple’s “1984” advertisement and the heroisation of the individual against the mainframe, this narrative ultimately culminates in consumption: the user replaces the citizen, the consumer the nation, the app the grand project. Under orientation towards profitable markets, capacity for valorisation determined the further shape of the industry, and the language of individual liberation became the ideology of a sector whose business models rested on data extraction and platform monopolies. Intellectual property transformed technical knowledge into exclusive conditions of business, network effects rewarded the companies that converted communication into private infrastructure, and the free use of many services was paid for through the commercial measurement of their users. Meanwhile, the state guaranteed the conditions of this field of business, even as its research programmes continued to provide essential technological foundations. The political language of the counterculture accompanied the capitalist appropriation of a technology whose social purpose was decided by the profitability of the companies that controlled it. Karp and Zamiska state the result without euphemism: the modern Valley detached itself from its direct relationship to government and concentrated its energies on online advertising, social media, shopping, photo apps, and food delivery, while medical breakthroughs, educational reform, and military progress were left waiting. What interests Karp in this finding is less a moral complaint about habits of consumption. He leaves the question of whether too much is bought or enjoyed to others. What concerns him is a weightier category: the strategic misallocation of social intelligence.

    “The criticism of that early generation of startups focused on their lack of discipline and reckless spending, as well as the abandonment of any rigor or scrutiny from their investors. But there was a far more fundamental misallocation of resources, of capital and talent. The failing of that early internet era was its rush to serve the needs of the consumer at the expense of those of the nation-state or public.”

    — Alex C. Karp/Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic, Chapter Nine, Lost in Toyland.

    A capital operating in the technology sector behaves rationally on its own terms when it develops platforms for markets backed by effective demand, because there its advance promises a profit. Competition among capitals sorts technological possibilities according to their expected valorisation. Social needs and strategic state purposes must first appear as effective demand: the former through income or public provision, the latter through guaranteed contracts. A medicine serves the treatment of illness; a military targeting system organises violence. For private investment, both can become vehicles of profit. The state has a set of tools that alters the conditions of valorisation, translates strategic needs into secure business opportunities, socialises risks, and creates markets that would not exist without its demand. Palantir is the model case: what constitutes surveillance or warfare for the state becomes revenue in the company’s accounts. The Valley’s old doctrine ran as follows: build what users want, scale globally, let the market decide, and keep the state at a distance. Karp reverses the final clause. The state is to create the profitable opportunities through which the most advanced companies can develop while serving national power.

    “But why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy? We seem to have unintentionally deprived ourselves of the opportunity to engage in a critical discussion about the businesses and endeavors that ought to exist, not merely the ventures that could. The wisdom of the crowd at the height of the rise of Zynga and Groupon in 2011 made its verdict clear: these were winners that merited further investment. Tens of billions of dollars were wagered on their continued ascent. But there was no forum or platform or meaningful opportunity for anyone to question whether our society’s scarce resources ought to be diverted to the construction of online games or a more effective aggregator of coupons and discounts. The market had spoken, so it must be so.”

    — Alex C. Karp/Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic, Chapter Fifteen, Into the Desert.

    In this sense, his position is post-neoliberal from the right. It does not return the state to an economy from which it had previously been absent, but it explicitly rejects the market as the sole authority over social purpose. National security and technological sovereignty are to direct private investment wherever its spontaneous calculation of profitability neglects the foundations of state power. Venture capital is to be brought into close connection with the military while private property and private profit remain the basis of that connection. The question is how social production can be withdrawn from the control of private owners and the competition of state powers. Karp’s diagnosis brushes against this connection because it notices the indifference of private investment towards particular contents. His political problem begins where that indifference damages American power. This also includes the familiar but underestimated point about the moral constitution of the engineers who measure human behaviour and convert attention into advertising revenue, yet draw a moral line as soon as their software is to serve the military. Karp replies that they enjoy the peace and freedom provided by that very military. For him, this is the hypocrisy of an elite able to afford its purity because others pay for its security. The engineers imagine that they can remain civilian in advertising, platforms, and consumption and become political only with drones, targeting, and weapons systems, as though a clean line separated harmless from serious applications of the same procedures. What appears as a character flaw of programmers rests on the false idea that civilian technology stands outside the political and military architecture of the society in which it is developed. The distinction between civilian and military applications is real, but it does not separate socially innocent technology from systems that become political only when fitted to a weapon. Data repositories, computing centres, and communications platforms are already shaped by property, surveillance, and state power. This does not give technology a political essence independent of its concrete form. An algorithm does not by nature bear the character of domination, but its architecture embodies the purposes, requirements, and risks for which it was developed. A system for biometric identification, targeting, or the automated prioritisation of military decisions cannot be detached from its context like a neutral tool and subordinated at will to another purpose.

    The purpose and form of the productive forces are to remain determined by private control and interstate competition, and civilian technology should cast off its supposed innocence and openly insert itself into the strategic infrastructure of the state. Artificial intelligence makes this diagnosis acute because it gives the older complaint about the consumer internet a strategic object. What AI adds is not the military significance of software as such, but a new degree of operational integration between computation, perception, targeting, and autonomous action. The twenty-first century, the authors write, will be the software century, and the decisive task is to transform the Pentagon from an institution for kinetic war into an organisation capable of designing and procuring AI weapons. As long as software primarily organised the internet, the Valley could misunderstand itself as a civilian consumer industry; with AI, this self-description loses its plausibility because related models, computing infrastructures, and procedures of pattern recognition can be used both in commercial applications and in military reconnaissance and warfare. Karp therefore calls for the transition from the consumer internet to war AI. For this union of private valorisation and the competitive purpose of the state to function, however, the state apparatus itself must change.

    The Operational Remaking of the Procurement State

    The raison d’état to which Karp wants to return the productive forces must assume an institutional form. He illustrates why the state is not too weak but too slow with a story of lost intimacy. In the workshops of the Second World War, American fighter pilots visited Grumman’s factory floors on Long Island to tell the designers of the F6F Hellcat what worked in aerial combat over the Pacific and what failed. Builders and users stood beside one another, and the machine improved. Half a century later, in Afghanistan, that proximity has been broken. While soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division sit over laptops in Kandahar at night preparing a special operation for the next morning, Lockheed Martin develops an intelligence system in a Virginia suburb through a procurement process lasting years and consuming more preparation and planning than actual programming. The result is an abstract conception of what software ought to look like, largely indifferent to whether the unit in Kandahar can work with it. The troops want something else: they want Palantir, and they want it immediately. Applications pile up at the specially created Rapid Equipping Force, which was supposed to deliver within three to six months where the procurement system otherwise required years or decades. Officers bypass the channels and write directly up the chain. One notes that the in-house analysis system makes the work more difficult while Palantir provides an intelligence advantage; another writes that the lack of access has led to missed operational opportunities and unnecessary risk for the troops. The complaint from the front becomes a legal campaign. The Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 required federal agencies to examine commercially available solutions before developing new specifications and building their own systems. Palantir invoked this provision in 2016 and sued the US Army before the Court of Federal Claims. Judge Marian Blank Horn ruled in the company’s favour because the Army had not adequately investigated whether products available on the market could meet its needs. The appeals court upheld the ruling in 2018. The following year, Palantir prevailed over Raytheon in the competition for a tactical expansion of the Distributed Common Ground System-Army. For the first time, a Valley company assumed the leading role in a central Army procurement programme. The book narrates the episode as a victory of reason over the apparatus. More precisely, Palantir successfully used procurement law to force open a market whose established procedures had favoured incumbent contractors and internally developed systems. From it, the authors distil a structural picture in which hundreds of thousands of federal employees manage government purchases while the governing rule of conduct is to make no waves and avoid anything unusual that might endanger one’s career. Risk aversion is inscribed in an apparatus that rewards its employees for protecting themselves and punishes them for daring. Compliance, in Karp’s diagnosis, has devoured performance.

    Palantir is the embodiment of this operational ideal of the state. Small teams work close to the problem, iterating where the apparatus plans and improvising where it executes regulations. Its employees go to the front instead of waiting in the suburbs for the specification, and Karp recommends the model to the entire republic: to policing, medicine, schools, and everywhere else he sees a desert untouched by progress. The American procurement system transforms the avoidance of personal responsibility into a professional virtue, producing delays and protecting established suppliers. The traditional arms industry has entrenched access over the long term, while technical errors can be carried forward for years because cancelling them would create new responsibility.

    This account conflates different causes of institutional slowness. Legal mediation, budgetary control and bureaucratic self-absorption appear as equivalent obstacles, although they arise from different functions of the state apparatus. The state’s expenditure is an exercise of public authority financed through compulsory revenues and carried out in the name of the political community. Procurement law separates office from personal possession, recognises competing suppliers as legally equal owners, and subjects their competition for public contracts to general procedures. Documentation requirements and oversight are meant to ensure that an award counts as an act of public administration rather than the private favour or spoils of an officeholder. This generality is the political form in which the bourgeois state restricts the immediate access of particular interests. No particular procurement timeline or organisational form follows from it. The state can permit direct awards, create exceptions, favour national suppliers, and organise strategic projects outside ordinary procedures. Karp attacks less the legal form itself than its weighting. Results are to be upgraded relative to control. Commercial suppliers are involved earlier, systems are developed continuously, and companies are integrated more closely into the practical work of public agencies.

    The operational mode of the state consists in this reconstruction within the existing state form: agency, user, and supplier work more closely together so that decisions can be translated into technical capabilities more rapidly. The extent to which this direction has already been institutionalised is shown by the Enterprise Agreement through which the US Army consolidated a total of 75 existing contracts with Palantir in 2025. The state uses the legal form to concentrate its software and data requirements with a private platform provider. Here lies the irony of Palantir’s ascent. The company used a piece of procurement law against the established procurement bureaucracy to break open a state market dominated by traditional corporations. The liberation of the state from bureaucratic inertia and the embedding of a security-tech company in the executive are two sides of the same process. Palantir uses law to impose a procurement logic in which the supplier at a distance becomes a continuously integrated part of state practice. This proximity creates speed and a new dependency. Palantir’s platform remains tied to data models and the manufacturer’s knowledge. Whoever controls this technical infrastructure helps shape what an apparatus can base its decisions on. The state gains agility by handing part of its technical form of perception and decision to a capital that works inside its apparatus without becoming identical to it. The efficiency being preached has an owner and a balance sheet. Interstate competition makes this reconstruction urgent. China’s speed appears as an argument against domestic procedure; democratic and administrative mediation becomes a potential cost centre of power. The specification becomes the platform, the tender becomes continuous integration, and the supplier becomes an operational partner.

    Why the Algorithm Needs the Nation

    The operational mode of the state is a machine, and machines have no will. They aim and strike, but others set the target, and someone else dies for the result. The technological republic therefore needs engineers willing to build weapons and a population that regards this as legitimate. Karp’s answer to the problem of political will is the nation, or more precisely its conscious reconstruction. An entire educated stratum, he argues, has trained the West out of believing in itself. Canonical courses in Western civilisation, once an initiation rite of university life, came under suspicion until the West as a concept was itself called into question. Allan Bloom’s lament over an openness that dissolves into arbitrariness and Edward Said’s critique of the Orient as a European construction of power are assigned to the same movement. Karp treats conservative cultural criticism and the analysis of imperial knowledge production as two stages of self-dissolution because both undermine an unbroken positive identification with the West.

    The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT provide him with the latest image of an elite that dissolves political judgement into procedural language. At the congressional hearing of December 2023, they refused to give a categorical yes-or-no answer to the hypothetical question of whether a call for the genocide of Jews, as such, violated their codes of conduct, and referred instead to context and the threshold for sanctionable behaviour. The demand to abolish the police, in turn, serves as a model of what Rob Henderson calls a luxury belief: a conviction whose costs are borne by others rather than by the person who holds it. From these examples emerges a diagnosis: the West has subjected its own convictions to criticism without producing a new positive purpose, and into the resulting void have stepped the market, private life, and the administration of competing values. Against this, the book summons the nation back, drawing, of all things, on theories that described it as a historical construction. Benedict Anderson’s imagined community and Ernest Renan’s phrase about the nation as a daily plebiscite become a blueprint. In 1882, Renan defined the nation as a great solidarity created by the feeling of sacrifices already made and sacrifices yet to come. Karp needs precisely this formula because it builds sacrifice into the concept of the nation: if the community is imagined, it can be politically renewed; if a common myth is missing, one should write it. Alasdair MacIntyre’s admonition to build new forms of community against an all-consuming pluralism provides the philosophical cover. Karp explicitly defends Palantir’s name, taken from Tolkien’s seeing-stones, against the suspicion that such borrowings are politically contaminated.

    At one point the argument becomes unusually candid. Attachment to capitalism and individual rights will never be enough, the authors say, because it is too thin to carry the human soul. For centuries, the liberal democracies of the West lived on the borrowed capital of the Church; if the elite continues its assault on organised religion, the question is what will sustain the state in future.

    There is a difference between the private purposes whose pursuit the bourgeois order imposes on its members and the global purposes of state power. Individual rights direct individuals towards private success; commitment to a political whole requires an additional identification. This political unity is produced by the state. It gathers wage workers and capital owners as citizens of the same polity, legally orders their antagonisms, and represents society externally as a nation. In nationalism, the shared dependence on this power appears as belonging to a common cause: the state becomes one’s own state, its victories and defeats those of its citizens. Promises of protection and enemy images give this identification points of attachment; schools, armies, public holidays, and political rituals condense it into an imagined community. The common myth is to animate the existing political unity consciously, place its antagonisms within a common history, and produce a willingness to sacrifice before the emergency arrives. Karp’s figure of the consumer is inadequate to this task. A consumer pursues their own advantage; a citizen is supposed to be capable of setting that advantage aside in the name of the nation. To die for gross domestic product or for Palantir’s share price would be a bad joke. Nation and political community therefore translate the needs of state power into a cause for which sacrifice is meant to appear meaningful.

    The algorithm needs the nation because on its own it finds no one willing to die for it. Technology does not demand death. The state does, when it decides to use these instruments of force. The firms involved supply those instruments for profit.

    The Technological Republic

    Karp has written his book three times: as a critique of market allocation, administrative mediation, and liberal individualism. Only together do the three versions form a programme. What the West’s self-narration celebrates as freedom appears as weakness under the pressure of interstate competition: competition among capitals distributes the productive forces according to expected valorisation, law mediates state action and limits its immediate access, and individualism binds subjects to their personal success. Against an opponent such as China, the book argues, this threefold autonomous logic becomes a risk. Karp’s answer is the technological republic. The book proudly cites a graph according to which founder-led companies outperform the market; these founders, with their proprietor’s instinct and readiness to build, are to enter public service, while the public servant in turn is to be paid and treated like a founder. Its models are Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, which paid its senior officials handsomely, and unbending makers in the mould of Admiral Rickover, who forced the nuclear submarine through against the apparatus. Palantir is both model and beneficiary in this arrangement: the company that demonstrates the interconnection of software and state power, and the company that profits from it. This connection also has a subjective reverse side in which the programme’s anthropological core becomes visible.

    “An ownership culture must be allowed and encouraged to take root in our society. […] Silicon Valley went much further, and the strategy proved essential to its success.”
    — Alex C. Karp/Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic, Chapter 18, An Aesthetic Point of View.

    In the book, the old type of civil servant is bound to the rule and for that very reason lacks personal commitment. They administer an office that is not their own, bear little personal liability for its success, and derive security from following procedure. The indignant question of why a general entrusted with soldiers and materiel should be valued and paid less than a mediocre manager points towards this new type: the servant of the state who treats office with the commitment of an owner. Karp transfers the entrepreneur’s relationship to the company onto public office, so that the success and failure of the institution appear as the personal affair of its leadership. The impersonality of the civil servant has a specific purpose in the liberal state form: it separates office from person, binds decisions to rules, and limits the access of particular interests. The entrepreneurial relation of responsibility shifts this boundary. Karp understands these tensions as a problem of steering. Private property, wage labour, competition, and the state power separated from society stand at the end of his programme where they stood at the beginning; what changes is the form in which they are organised into world power. Such a repair can succeed by its own standard. The state can direct capital into strategic sectors, create new markets, accelerate procurement, and bind private companies more closely to its apparatuses of force. It can also cultivate nationalist loyalty and mobilise its citizens for geopolitical competition. Karp retains democratic legitimacy and reweights the forms of legitimation that already coexist in bourgeois democracy. The public, it claims, will forgive the political class almost anything, but ultimately not the failure to use available technology to provide essential goods: security, infrastructure, medical care, and military striking power. Democratic rule, too, justifies itself through security, growth, provision, and the successful representation of the nation. Procedures count as proven insofar as they sustain the state’s capacity for action; where they appear as obstacles, they are to be reconstructed.

    Karp thus presents a political programme in which the democratic and administrative mediations of the bourgeois state are subordinated to geopolitical performance. They are not abolished, but shortened, exempted, or reconstructed wherever they appear to obstruct the state’s capacity for action. Those parts of the programme already realised in industrial policy mark an institutional shift whose reach remains open. They reveal the standard according to which existing institutions are being reconstructed. To classify the whole thing as fascism substitutes a label for the determination of the programme. Palantir’s project touches motifs historically radicalised by fascism: contempt for slow mediation, the priority of national capacity for action, the cultural animation of rule, and sacrifice for the nation. Karp’s concrete political form is an authoritarian, national-liberal reconstruction of existing institutions from above, carried by founders, engineers, military officers, and security officials. A fascist mass movement, a racially defined national community, and one-party rule are not part of this design. This makes Karp’s programme significant beyond Palantir. The stronger the rivalry for markets, technologies, and military superiority becomes, the more readily a state power comes to regard the slowness of its procedures, the private allocation of strategic resources, and the limited willingness of its population to make sacrifices as obstacles. Yet it does not act on every state in the same way. A world power, a dependent ally, and a small national economy possess different economic, military, and political means; they do not stand beside one another as equivalent competitors but form a hierarchically structured world of states. Karp’s proposals are the American and especially systematic expression of a general pressure towards strategic industrial policy, military acceleration, and the closer integration of technological capitals. The sharpness of this programme becomes visible on another front opened at the beginning of the book. It cites Thomas Schelling, for whom the capacity to inflict damage on an opponent constitutes the real power of negotiation, and turns this into the accusation that the West has forgotten this truth. Because it imagines itself the historical victor, it mistakes moral superiority for power and trusts that law, values, and discourse can replace the material capacity for violence. The book reverses the relation. Hard power is the precondition for liberal values to carry weight in world politics; violence is not a regrettable instrument of the rules-based order but its foundation. The force of its rules always depended on the power to enforce them, while the appeal to values dressed the competition among Western states in the language of a universal human order.

    The book bears an American signature: Pentagon, Palantir, China, and the West form its self-evident horizon. It would be convenient to read it as a report from a distant great power whose problems scarcely touch Europe. Yet the underlying tendency extends beyond the United States. Capitalist states depend on successful accumulation within their jurisdictions for tax revenue, public credit, employment, and the economic basis of their power. They therefore seek to secure strategic supply chains, technological capacities, investment, and military leverage against competing states. From this standpoint, domestic procedures and inherited industrial structures appear as obstacles wherever they delay access to the means of international competition. This pressure assumes different political forms according to each state’s position in the international hierarchy. The United States formulates it as a world power seeking to defend its technological and military primacy. European states and EU institutions translate the same pressure into their own programmes from a weaker and more dependent position: as US allies, as participants in an incomplete power bloc, and as national locations seeking to overcome military and technological deficits. Across the EU and its leading member states, this complaint appears under the headings of strategic autonomy, technological sovereignty, and Zeitenwende. It is fed by the rearmament of the continent and the NATO decision at The Hague, under which the member states are to allocate by 2035 at least 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product to core military requirements and a further 1.5 per cent to defence- and security-related expenditure.

    Its German face is Helsing, a company founded in Munich in 2021 that has risen within a few years to become one of Europe’s most valuable technology companies. Helsing describes itself as a firm creating sovereign AI capabilities to protect democracies. It was founded on the thesis that the West was losing the race for military artificial intelligence and that only a European company presenting itself as “ethics first” could close the gap. Karp’s manifesto appears here in the language of the community of values. The parallel extends into the details. Helsing participates in the AI backbone of the Future Combat Air System, produces AI-assisted combat drones for Ukraine, and has integrated its Centaur air-combat agent into Gripen E test flights. The company now develops its own autonomous combat aircraft, reconnaissance and targeting systems, and combines software, platforms, and hardware production. Its sales argument corresponds to Karp’s diagnosis: such capabilities can be developed and integrated within months where conventional procurement would take years or decades. The established arms corporations respond as partners, suppliers, investors, and competitors within the same new armaments architecture. Behind the suppliers stands the same interconnection of tech capital and the apparatus of force found in California. Helsing has been financed substantially by Spotify founder Daniel Ek, while Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has invested in the Berlin competitor Stark; Thiel himself was one of Palantir’s co-founders. The latest financing round, which valued Helsing at eighteen billion dollars in July 2026, shows how attractive the state-guaranteed market in rearmament has become to international capital. Anyone who treats Karp as a distinctly American phenomenon in order to idealise the European model as a civilian, social, and peaceable alternative is deceiving themselves. The community of values and the peace project now supply a substantial part of the language in which Europe’s rearmament and technological competition are legitimised as the defence of its particular civilisation. Beside them stands the welfare state, whose benefits, burdens, and budgets are being reweighted under the new standard of security, as the material organisation of national reproduction. The underlying pressure arises from the reciprocal relation between the international competition of capitals and the rivalry of sovereign states, each of which seeks to secure the economic, technological, and military means of its own power. What Karp describes as a disease of the West belongs to the normal functioning of the order he wants to save: private property, competition, and political unification by the state produce the indifference and separation that his technological republic seeks to correct only where they weaken national power.

    A communist conclusion begins with control over the productive forces. Data centres, research infrastructure, databases, industrial facilities, and scientific labour would have to be withdrawn from the exclusive control of private owners and states and organised by the producers as common conditions of their reproduction. The consequence reaches beyond a more peaceful investment policy. Technical systems created for surveillance, targeting, and automated warfare would have to be materially reconstructed or abandoned; data models, production facilities, and workflows would have to be redefined according to the needs of provision, health, transport, energy, communication, and the reduction of necessary labour.

    “The reconstruction of a technological republic […] will require […] shared purpose and identity […]. We should now build something together in its place.”
    — Alex C. Karp/Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic, Chapter 18, An Aesthetic Point of View.

    Karp wants to build something common. The decisive questions, however, are who owns the conditions of this common work, what purpose they serve, and who decides that purpose. His technological republic answers them unequivocally: property remains private, political power remains separated from society, and the common purpose is national self-assertion. Founders and servants of the state decide; the population supplies consent, labour, and, in an emergency, its life. In an emancipated society, the common purpose would lie in the conscious organisation of its own conditions of life; a national myth that transfigures the purposes of state power into the natural common cause of its members would thereby lose its object. The defence of soft liberalism against its hard form misses this connection. Both belong to the same social order and dispute the most expedient form of its power. The technological republic wants to repair the West.

    Scientific critique, not worldview. Analysis, not appeals. Rupture, not reform.