Monopoly

All of liberalisms most cherished principles presuppose unbridgeable asymmetries in power. Equal rights, human rights, free speech, voting rights, freedom of association—all of these “God-given” rights depend upon the Leviathan, because none of them could possibly exist if power receded below the level of the state’s “monopoly on legitimate force.” If differing authorities and powers, at different levels of the social order, were continually pressed to maintain and prove their governing capacity, what people say, how they associate with each other, how they provide input into governing decisions and all the rest would be very sharply limited—as has been, of course, the case for most of human history. Liberalism is an anthropological anarchism + the police principle (I’m paraphrasing a remark of Trotsky’s here). The police principle is the source of all the “unprincipled exceptions” constitutive of liberalism, and the anthropological anarchism serves to give free rein to whoever has the reins over the police principle at the moment. But it’s also too easy to be “anti-liberal” because it may be the case that the liberal order was the only one within which the more complex juridical order that we find in the Anglo common law tradition could gestate and reveal its possibilities—a looser hierarchy, I’m guessing, even if merely notional, might have been required for a rich tradition of settling disputes, civil and criminal and, even more importantly, the back-up institutions of credit and insurance to take on quasi-governmental roles. (It is completely unsurprising that England, beginning in the 17^th century, was the earliest to develop an extensive insurance system, followed by the US in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.) In regimes with a more monopolized sovereign power, insurance would be directly promoted, funded and controlled by the state and would therefore have a less rich vocabulary of faults, responsibility, and, more broadly, intentionality. New modes of governance would insist on recouping all this.

Other than the almost universally endorsed state monopoly on legitimate violence, private monopolies are almost universally reviled. Parts of the state monopoly, like the civil service, have their origins in private monopolies, but, of course, all private monopolies have had their origin in some state-granted charter. Hatred of monopoly is a natural part of slavishness towards the state power monopoly because that monopoly must always be ready to prove itself capable of breaking up any other—that’s why the argument against monopolies like Facebook and Google focusing on the political power this monopoly affords them is the more important and honest argument than the themselves transparently political, indeterminate and petty concerns about “market distortions” or “harm to the consumer.” But the tendencies leading to monopoly under capitalism must be powerful if such powerful resentments are aligned against it. Companies deemed monopolies are usually charged with some kind of unfair practice, like using its advantageous position to undersell competitors until they go out of business, then buy them up and raise prices. But there has also been the concept of the “natural monopoly,” for instance utilities, which still seems to carry some weight, even if it’s been eroded with developments in telecommunications and services. There is also the question of whether there is ever a “real” monopoly—somewhere, on the horizon, is some company with a game-changing technology that will either overtake an existing monopoly or render it obsolete. I remember Microsoft being the fearsome monopoly that needed to be taken down in the 90s, but wouldn’t Apple, Google, et al, have come along even without the sustained assault on the monopoly Microsoft by the federal government? And any American monopoly is no monopoly if we take into account its Chinese doppelganger—and China seems to free of anti-monopolist resentment. The argument for monopolies seems to be along lines of superiority regarding scaling up; while, of course, the free trade argument against them is that without competition monopolies become stagnant, rent-seeking obstacles to innovation.

We can narrow the question down to the dual relation of the business monopoly to the state monopoly—the state monopoly will sometimes leverage and delegate responsibility to the business monopoly and sometimes consider it a competitor, powerful enough to align itself with other states or interfere with the state’s relation to its subjects. This might mean that a good way to transform the state is by having monopolies supplement and eventually redistribute the adopted functions of the state and thereby reduce it to its core functions, with the state now just another monopoly. If we’re thinking outside of liberalism we’re thinking outside of the state (and sovereignty), but there does need to be something like a tendency toward a monopoly on data security, upon which other essential governing functions like justice and insurance depend. Every institution sees to its own data security, and let’s reduce those institutions to the juridical, the financial, the stack and the disciplines. There are areas of incommensurability of data across these institutions but also areas of transferability and translatability. There are interfaces articulating them all with each other, modes and degrees of reciprocal infiltration, and protocols governing all of these. Here is where a specifically data security monopoly enters into it: the financial system needs to be certain that disputes can be settled reasonably, the layers of the stack need to be certain of credit and liquidity, all areas need to be sure that the pedagogy and research undertaken in the disciplines is geared toward determining “what will prove to be the case in the long run,” and so on. All companies in these sectors will need to hire other companies to provide such assurances and it is my hypothesis here that the companies they hire will ultimately form a single company, capable of handling data transactions across the board. That’s the residue of what we now call the state. And the monopoly data security firm will prefer to deal with other companies that are as close to being themselves monopolies as possible—it will certainly feel no need to break up companies once they reach some ill-defined monopolistic threshold.

I will now introduce another, extremely important, consideration: anyone working on anything is striving to become a monopolist. A novelist doesn’t necessarily want to be the only novelist (although on some level, I think he kind of does) but he certainly wants to be the only one of his kind of novelist. We can revise Girard’s claim that all desire is for being to all desire is desire for irreplaceability. And irreplaceability is a kind of monopoly. This is obviously the source of mimetic conflict but Hobbes and others were right to see the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence as a way of capping mimetic rivalry and we can say the same thing about all other monopolies. There is a primary civilizational program at work here: let’s say that “deep down” we all want to be king, think we deserve to be king, resent others for not recognizing our apparent kingliness, etc. but, then, a social order is judged by how effectively it transmutes that desire into the myriad forms of irreplaceability that we all invent for ourselves. We might even say this is rooted in, is a form of, and perhaps eventual replacement of private property. We all take on ourselves the dialectic of attracting and deferring violence, of being willing to become sacrifices while not wanting others to bear the burden of committing that sacrifice and so therefore directing them toward their own complementary modes of being irreplaceable. The argument from mimetic theory is that this oscillation is best maintained through the institution of the market, which ultimately makes mimetic theory a neoliberal one, if we define neoliberalism as the transformation of the market contained within the world to the market encompassing the world. So, this question will need to be taken up on new terms.

Instead of starting with an abstraction like “the market,” it’s better to start with ongoing realities like supply chains and credit lines. In this way we’re beginning higher up, with the largest banks and corporations, who set credit terms and organize supply chains, respectively. The credit line is determined by what Colin Drumm calls the “outside spread,” i.e., the money lending and, really, money generating entity that serves as lender of last resort. How much credit is available, what kind, and at what price can be traced back to the credit borrowers confer upon the holder of the outside spread, even if very indirectly, and the credit of the outside spread relies, in turn upon the social orders, the modes of centered ordinality operating through the Stack, and whether succession is expected to continue as expected (yes, we get into tautologies or paradoxes at a certain point here). This means that the way to ensure (or insure) the outside spread is by ensuring succession practices but that also means that credit is tending toward demonetization and coming to reside in what are ultimately pedagogical rituals of succession—and, at a certain point, a break would have to be made, with the occupant of the center converting, more or less violently and disruptively, the outside spread into what I’ve been calling pedagogical futures. Since I am resolutely anti-revolutionary, I would encourage others (and myself!) to give serious thought to how this conversion could be effected as deftly as possible—ideally, so that most people would hardly notice it. Supply chains, meanwhile, are of course mediated monetarily and therefore through the credit lines but are also regularized and preserved as much as possible through negotiations. Maybe someone will correct me here, but I don’t think a large industrial or commercial firm switches suppliers lightly and maintaining reliable chains even at the expense of possible short-term bargains is the rule. A more monopolistic firm will even try to control the supply chains, as many links down the chain as possible, and this is itself only the next step from ensuring their regularity. The tendency to secure credit lines and supply chains, which are really only two components of data security, is then to establish deliberations over the circulation of goods and services. This brings us up against the notorious pricing problem, which is taken to be the doom of non-capitalistic systems: the auto company requires X amount of steel, Y amount of rubber and so on to produce Z number of cars to be sold to (hopefully) Z consumers. The steel and rubber manufacturers in turn need machinery, and the makers of the machinery need… and at each point along the way there is an X, Y, or Z and how are we to know what that should be? Even if we know for certain how many people will need, want and be able to afford cars in the upcoming year, we can’t know whether some technological innovation somewhere along the supply chain will change the numbers or create some brand new desire that makes the existing one obsolete—especially since all of this involves long-term planning. Letting prices fluctuate on the market will not eliminate such waste, but, so the argument goes, they provide you with the information necessary to minimize, insure against and adapt in response to such disruptions—or, for that matter, seize upon such disruptions as opportunities for remaking credit lines and supply chains.

The only way of obtaining the needed information without prices is to close off the system, which is precisely what is deemed either impossible or terrifying (or impossible, with the very attempt being terrifying). How does this not bring us back to the failed planning system of the Soviet Union? My first counter here is to point out how close we already are to a planned global economy, due simply to the scale of credit lines and supply chains—the free market, represented in the fluctuation of prices, already only exists at the margins (and this even leaving aside how much control transnational corporations exercise over prices). Let’s stipulate that small margins can make a big difference, though—a very tightly controlled institution like, say, an elite private school with its own system of discipline a its own curriculum, groups, clubs, school spirit, etc., creating a highly cloistered space still needs the information coming from students choosing to apply to the school or not. The rachet effect of totalitarianism (including mundane leftism) comes precisely from trying to close off such “holes” and, in the case of this example, try something like mandating attendance at the school somehow. My answer to that is that the school has, and can enhance, relations with other institutions, in particular those through which students will circulate after attending, like universities and companies at which students will attend precisely as alumni, aided in such attendance by other alumni who will, in turn, model the results of attending that school and advise parents to consider it for their children. This keeps new information coming in while keeping it at the margins but now in the sense that, e.g., gradual shifts in school practices, as registered slowly by changing futures for its graduates can be processed through the creation of other schools that can enter the supply chain.

The entire “economy,” then, or the paying down of the debt to the center, is operationalized through teams communicating with teams: the companies in the supply chain are also comprised of people at the end of the supply chain—those who deliver steel are also those who buy cars, and teams can look out for their own members. This would leave the problem of those ill-suited to any team, but that problem is hardly unique to this system—if anything, it can be addressed more straightforwardly. And we can identify a specific mechanism that replaces the market in exchanging information across monopolized teams: what I would call “controlled usurpations.” If one monopoly is dissatisfied with the performance of someone on the credit line or supply chain then the head of that team/monopoly can cultivate a relationship with a subordinate within that other monopoly and sustain him as (to reference Drumm again) the “outside option.” All the companies in some proximity to each other on the supply chain or credit line would be leveraging such potential usurpers; needless to say, this is all conducted non-violently, and we don’t even have to assume whispering, defamation or smear campaigns because we still presuppose a data security monopoly (itself subject to such external leveraging) that is vetting information to be leveraged against another company. This is all peaceful and productive rivalry, just like the market is supposed to give us, but here in a much more transparent and “merit-based” form: the head of some team/company is only likely to be at real risk of being “overthrown” if several closely related companies on the supply chain not only intensify their leveraging of the outside option but can agree on who that might be. And we’re not talking about regicide here: the head most probably is either simply demoted, after gracefully handing over the reins to the selected successor or looks for another team to join. (Note that I’m not assuming something like a Board of Directors in this model—those leveraging from the outside serve the equivalent purpose.) This oscillation between rivalry and cooperation across companies implies and would help maintain a very high level of civilization, including the “creative” component of capitalism while minimizing the “destructive” component. The system can be closed because it has its own openings, or “valves,” within it, and those valves are interfacing with the Stack as a whole and with the natural environment. Starting from the problem of securing data, building an increasing reliable and robust flow of information, leads us to this result—and who could be against ensuring that we are obtaining a steady flow of truthful, relevant and open-sourced information, scientific, technological, and anthropological?