Capitalism and despotism
How idolatry of the market is ushering in a new authoritarianism
There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses. — G. K. Chesterton
Capitalism is the chief idol of the liberal order. The other idolatries of our age — nature-worship and the myriad forms in which “equality and diversity” are manifested — are subordinate to the ideal of the market.
In fact, it is the corporate behemoth itself that lends these other liberal movements their shape and position in the wider cultural fabric. It is through the bank, the high street and the Netflix series that the dogma of the Pride movement, for example, is fully imparted. The intellectual origins of these movements lie in the Academy; but their doctrines are articulated and imposed via the corporate complex.
“Go woke, go broke” is not only untrue — it is the opposite of the truth. The protest against Bud Light’s repulsive Dylan Mulvaney advertisement was a notable exception, not the rule. Parroting the ideological delusions of the hard-left is essentially detriment-free for major enterprises. There is no point in deserting your bank over its political activism, since all the banks behave in the same way.
Indeed, wokery is now a core channel through which businesses signal the relevance and moral properness of their brands to the wider corporate network. The boardrooms conform to these agendas not because their leaders are committed ideologues, but because that is how money is made and status is acquired in a civilisation that has become Sovietised by compulsory left-liberal dogma.
Chesterton warns that, in the modern capitalist order, big business becomes the state, mirroring Marxism. In the communist society, the state swells to engulf the market. In the hyper-capitalist society, the market swells to engulf the state.
Importantly, Chesterton is not attacking free trade or private property, both of which are indispensable to human liberty. Rather, he is referring to the modern condition in which monopoly and excessive wealth have become the ideological foci of culture, worth, and power.
In such a society, the economy — money — becomes the sole pillar of political meaning and purpose, and the central rubric through which societal and personal success are understood. Material prosperity is sublimated from a mere means into a moral end, the sister-virtue of which is the worship of human power.
Thus as the state, the culture and the market have morphed into one another, we see that the world of business has begun to assume governmental responsibilities. Disturbingly, financial corporations have started to enact forms of trial and punishment against the left’s political opponents.
An omen of this was seen when the Canadian truckers had their bank accounts frozen for protesting against Trudeau’s authoritarian covid measures. Then when Kanye West launched a senseless tirade on social media in November 2022, leaked court documents revealed that Adidas, one of his sponsors, used J. P. Morgan to temporarily freeze $75 million of his money without reasonable justification.
Even the man on the street is not immune to these blatantly-immoral reprisals and example-settings. An English vicar wrote a polite note to his bank of seventeen years, explaining that its endorsement of “trans” dogma was both irrelevant and jarring. His bank ordered him to remove his money from the account within fourteen days.
It is commonplace among the neoconservative-neoliberals to argue that private enterprise can do as it pleases. This is of course nonsense. It is theoretically possible that every bank denies the vicar a private account and the means with which to pay for goods and services. And what if energy or water companies wished to play this same trick on the vicar? The logic of this new principle implies that corporate managerialism has carte blanche to debilitate innocent people on the grounds of alleged thoughtcrime.
It is only in the totalitarian state that material needs are conditional upon ideological conformity. The government is the guarantor against such overreaches: that is its purpose. Yet in a culture that has learned to fear and venerate big business and the hard-left ideology to which it subscribes, a system of political discipline enforced through corporate reprisal seems set to rise unchallenged.
Our new corporate demigods have spawned from a deeper malaise: the supplanting of specifically Christian virtue with the worship of temporal wealth and human power. Indeed, these idolatries are built into the inner logic of post-Enlightenment liberalism.
I am not sure that I would agree that “only the state” can prevent abuse. This seems a rather narrow frame through which to view the situation. Why would private enterprise collude to do such a thing that would clearly drive away customers? It is theoretically possible that such a thing could happen — but certainly unlikely. However, a state that could prevent it is a state that could enforce it. Thus, to create the conditions in which a state is positioned to prevent such activity necessarily means creating and empowering a state that could enforce it.