3,114 words
Critique of the Mercantilist Society
The mercantilist society is characterized by the hypertrophy of the economy—a society in which mercantile values have invaded non-economic and non-mercantile structures. In the tripartite social system of the Indo-European world, the economy was closely tied to the third function—production—yet remained subordinated to the warrior function and, above all, to the sovereign function. The three functions are complementary in Indo-European societies, but they are hierarchized, each in its place: the social depending on the economic, and the economic depending on the political. [1]
In today’s society, we witness an inversion of this subordination; society as a whole is dominated by consumerist demands, and the mercantilist society turns the economy into the instrument of a global development driven by a false conception of happiness—an illusory blend of material abundance and more or less organized leisure.
This mercantilist society rests on the idea that there exist only individual material needs and desires—always quantitative and capable of being satisfied. This economistic totalitarianism spreads a ferocious individualism, Gehlen’s “hyper-subjectivism,” which destroys social and organic bonds while making any historical or national project impossible. It also produces a whole series of social pathologies: among them pleonexia [2], a kind of psychological alienation in which the satisfaction of an egalitarian claim provokes an increase in egalitarian desire; each quantitative rise in the standard of living does not calm desire but reinforces it, making the individual dissatisfied and disenchanted. There is the phenomenon of domestication, since the expectation of an automatic, mechanically acquired progress turns men into slaves of the system and prevents them from using their will and imagination. There is the phenomenon of neophilia, which leads consumers to want to possess everything they desire immediately. This hypersensitivity to deprivation renders them incapable of enjoying the joy of possession, for immediately afterward they dream of obtaining what they do not have.
Mercantilist civilization [3] has its origin in a philosophical and social project as well as in the evolution of technique and relations of production. What liberalism and Marxism share is having constructed a project of society and world organization centered on the economic and the social. Economic liberalism is based on a methodological individualism that consists in extending to the whole of society the idea that human reality derives from the sum of individual strategies. Liberal schools of economic science postulate that each behavior is identical with the maximization of individual advantages, which presupposes a premeditated morality of quantitative interest. Socialists likewise view society as a mechanical addition of rational homines oeconomici, except that these are not, as in the liberal model, wage-earning consumers or company individuals, but assisted free wage-workers. These contemporary ideologies are fundamentally economistic: men are considered as economic agents, whether private or public. Social relations are compared to the rules governing the market’s functioning. In liberal ideology, private forces act in the market. In socialism, the “social market” is not in private hands but falls under the regulation of the administrative state, distributor of gratifications.
Another point common to economistic ideologies is the morality of needs common to all men, whatever their origin, reduced to Western-style consumption criteria.
Liberal ideology lies at the origin of this mercantilist social model by transforming the State into an economic agent and inaugurating a vision of society in which all institutions are nothing but transactional. In practice, the growth of the interventionist managerial state proceeds from the economistic concern to intervene in society in order to realize society’s egalitarian normalization. Pure liberalism leads to restricting the power of the political state in the economy, but the State reappears in the form of managerial bureaucracy. Moreover, left unmonitored, large private firms behave like public monopolies and use the market’s supposedly “neutral laws” to limit the number of their competitors. Pure liberalism is also perfectly ineffective at providing collective goods that are not measurable in terms of short-term economic profit and profitability. Only a political state is capable of such a decision, for it can see farther than the market and take into account advantages and disadvantages over the long term.
Socialist mercantilism merely prolongs and accentuates liberal mercantilism by reducing human relations to mercantile relations of calculation and interest. The multiplication of taxes and exemptions, the development of forms of redistribution and assistance—all this entails transforming social mechanisms into financial masses.
One may say that liberalism is a body without a brain, because it allows the productive and mercantile function—and the values of profit—to impose themselves upon the whole of society, neglecting other values. The various socialist and Marxist economic forms are brains without a body, because they neglect the values of profit and gain and fail to recognize private interest. Believing they are imposing an economic policy through planning by regulating in detail production, investment, and distribution, Marxist planning has done nothing but subordinate the political strategy of the economy to administrative bureaucratic tactics. Thus, an economy without a politically sovereign State, and a State without a private economy, lead to similar results. There is an incapacity—both intellectual and social—on the part of liberalism to reconcile an active economy with a sovereign State, and a socialist impotence to consider public and private together.
Socialists and neo-liberals treat the economy as a scientific theory, whereas in truth it is essentially an adaptable, revisable practice that should be determined by circumstances and the orientations of general policy.
Economic strategy concerns the setting of major macroeconomic objectives, using instruments more decisionist than managerial in outlining the main lines of action. Economic tactics concern the execution of the strategy, that is, the development of the economic apparatus. Economic strategy should belong to the State and depend on politics, while tactics should belong to firms and depend on the productive and commercial forces of the economic sphere.
In both Western and communist conceptions, these two levels have been confused. The State has meddled in economic tactics—in the details of management and economic regulation—and has neglected economic strategy, thus paralyzing the productive apparatus.
Bureaucratic socialization does not eliminate the logic of the consumer society, for it places the mercantile function and economic tactics at the summit of the State and develops in the public mind a psychology of dependency that reinforces the materialism of consumption, egalitarianism, and the ideology of well-being.
Nationalizations increase the burdens weighing on the State’s economic policy. The State can scarcely master, financially and socially, this enormous mass of public enterprises. Moreover, nationalized firms appear to be administered by a public technocracy more or less financed by public subsidies, yet they remain private in their ends, following partitocratic or trade-union interests whose incivism is no less than that of industrialists. A public company can act according to the law of short-term profit just like a private company—that is, preferring its financial or commercial interest to its national mission. Nor have nationalized banks launched any large-scale macroeconomic operations, contenting themselves with seeking their own expansion.
Since officials will be placed at the head of these nationalized groups, they will be indebted to those who put them in such posts. Accordingly, they will have to come to terms with union satraps and the chieftains of ministerial cabinets. Because of nationalizations, the weight of partitocracy and other pressure groups (unions, media) will be reinforced in society, since the new technocratic baronies must pledge fealty to these groups, which will control the top leadership posts as rewards or sanctions. This will indirectly mean governing by compromise. Moreover, for these technocrats—whose careers scarcely depend on their firm’s success—it will be more comfortable to let union corporatism set the direction of public enterprises, now doubtless more concerned with personnel-management measures than with winning industrial battles.
Another drawback of nationalizations is that compensating shareholders will impose a considerable extra burden on the State. It would be far better to use taxes on individuals and private firms—which will have to finance this sharp increase in credits destined for the public debt—as aid to job creation or funding for research efforts.
For some, the economic alternative would be to challenge industrial society, which entails a critique of industrial labor and production. These ideologies forecast a post-industrial society with high technology and low human activity. These neo-biblical positions—which link happiness to inactivity (leisure) or to the free activity of an individual without obligations—are utopian and catastrophic for Europe’s future. We are entering an era in which survival rests on the ever-greater perfecting of techniques, which implies maintaining growth and labor productivity. Technology allows the organization of work but not its reduction. Technology does not destroy employment; it shifts it. Economic history also shows that a mechanized sector that saves labor creates other industrial needs that require a new kind of work. Establishing a limited-work society would lead to pauperization, higher unemployment, deindustrialization, and greater dependence upon those who retain dynamism and mastery of industrial techniques.
On the sociological plane, the effects of unemployment are dire: first, it de-habituates the active population from productive work and allows habits of systematic state assistance to take hold; second, it destroys learning capacities, especially among unemployed youth, thereby damaging the technical quality of the labor force for an entire generation; third, it activates the consumerist mentality based on comfortable passivity and strengthens the bureaucratic, providentialist economy, since an unemployed society expects everything from the fiscal, redistributive state. The welfare state avoids the notion of risk and de-responsibilizes economic agents, who do not perceive the relation between their work and the advantages deriving from it, since these are automatic; thus all spirit of initiative is lost.
The ills of industrialism should not be fought by suppressing or reducing work but by reorganizing it and giving it a different general orientation. Only those peoples who mobilize their labor force to the maximum of their capacities and who maintain a very broad industrial panoply and relative economic autonomy will overcome the challenges at the end of the century.
Neither neo-liberalism, nor social democracy, nor ecological alternatives view economic activity for what it really is: a combat in the form of economic war among spaces—a war waged with long-term vision in the name of political and geopolitical imperatives that individuals do not perceive but from which no people escapes.
Europe’s productive apparatus is seized up. The structural causes, roughly speaking, are the competition of newly industrialized Third World countries; the disorder of the international monetary system, dominated by uncontrolled floating capital and by the dollar’s exclusivity, which in periods of economic stagnation triggers artificial inflation that raises production costs; and, finally, the fact that a large share of European incomes is spent on energy, while governments prefer to defend the currency and fight inflation rather than relaunch the productive apparatus—which would eliminate the two chief effects of recession: unemployment and deindustrialization. The two most visible causes of this crisis are Europe’s insertion into a world economy and market, and the installation of a bureaucratic capitalism managed by the welfare state.
Europe’s insertion into a planetary organization of consumer and production markets entails industrial policy orientations worked out apart from national interest; a process of decapitalization, since the outflow of capital exported by foreign firms exceeds the inflow received; and productions planned according to ends other than the real needs of the population. Moreover, since the dollar is the keystone of the international monetary system, a devalued dollar facilitates American exports, while a revalued dollar helps its imports of raw materials and energy.
Globalist free trade is above all a doctrine whose primary function is the control of world markets by certain countries which, defending their dominant position, oblige the others to open their markets.
In parallel, free trade favors state interventionism and the transformation of the State into a manager of nations administered like commercial enterprises. An economy model subjected to the international market and to monetary fluctuations obliges the public power to intervene massively to correct errors.
If the objective of a state is to secure a people’s historical dynamism and political balance, then the economy must be restored to its proper place—considered a secondary strategy rather than the privileged means of human development. The ND’s general conception of the economy can be termed an organic economy. Societies are organisms composed of living beings and functions in constant interaction. This conception describes economic relations as sites of conflict-cooperation over scarce resources and as a living system of energetic interactions. It likewise presupposes the principle of any balanced economy: compatibility between the State and the economic function. The synthesis of a strong state and a powerful economy is not impossible. The economy is a subsystem of society’s general system, which functions according to its own rules: the pursuit of profitability and of financial and productive rationalization; but the economy remains subordinated to the sovereign function, and its purpose is determined by a brain—the political state. A politically directed economy would adopt principles that stimulate competitiveness and entrepreneurial dynamism and would limit bureaucratic interventions. Ultimately, the ND argues for a light but strong State that does not intervene in the economy but does direct it; that does not replace civil society but governs it. An economy based on de-taxed and de-socialized firms; a flexible economic system composed of units of every size, organized around national areas sufficiently elastic to escape the fragility of any world-economy. A national economy subordinated to politics and directed by a sovereign, strategist state.
This organic economy is doubly revolutionary [4]: first, because it tends toward the progressive disappearance of mass production of individual goods in order to put an end to the domestication of man by well-being. This does not mean falling into an economy of shortage, but rather diversifying production without concentrating exclusively on consumer goods. Second, because it entails the birth of new economic elites (the creators of enterprises charged with renewing the industrial fabric). The notions of macro-economy and micro-economy are replaced by the concepts of intra-economic and supra-economic behaviors. The first designates the economic behaviors necessary to any economy. The second refers to behaviors that take into account the interests of the whole economic system and even interests not exclusively economic. This is the notion of “suppletoriness.” This concept completes the traditional one of profit. In this case, profit regulation is an additional means of directing the economy, for economic strategy may, depending on its aims, limit or extend profit to stimulate economic activity. The notion of “suppletoriness” evaluates, according to global criteria, the medium- and long-term social cost of an operation. Handling this concept belongs to the State’s political strategy. Suppletoriness makes it possible to integrate numerous variables (economic, social, geopolitical) to anticipate the direction of an entire economic evolution. This criterion is imperative the moment macroeconomic decisions are at stake. This concept—political in nature, not economic or juridical—concerns above all the transformation of the State’s ideology, not a simple economic reform. Unlike other doctrines, the organic conception of the economy is non-dogmatic and employs very different tactics in the service of national policy (the simultaneity of a public sector and a private sector). The organic economy also proposes distinguishing not a public sector and a private sector, but a sector of national interest and a sector of economic interest.
Another concept introduced by this vision of the organic economy is the notion of economic space: the autarky of large spaces, or autocentered development. For this theory of expansive autarky [5] I refer to the article “Pour l’indépendance économique” by Guillaume Faye. I will, however, add a few clarifications from the same author that complete its ideological development.
Expansive autarky protects the domestic market, establishes strong competition among domestic firms, secures energy independence, organizes its own technological pathways, and stimulates the geo-strategic conquest of external markets or resources within the limiting imperative of non-dependence with respect to clients or suppliers. Economic dynamism is stimulated by investments in substitute energies and by the incorporation of new technologies into industry, as well as by the “boiler effect,” that is, the multiplying effect of powerful, organized internal competition across a vast space. Internal competition is secured by a strategy of targeted public demand, sectoral protectionism, and a strategy of preferential purchases. To this must be added rigorous planning of the framework of inter-industrial exchanges and voluntarist public investment through monetary creation decided by the sovereign function. Through a massive budget deficit based on monetary creation, the State can finance a plan for energy autonomy and a program of industrial relaunch.
This autarky of large spaces would allow each ethno-national ensemble to define its own economic, political, and cultural path independently. It would mean an economy placed at the service of the nation. Applied progressively, it is the only solution that would allow the cycle of underdevelopment, demographic imbalance, endemic indebtedness, and the Westernization of the world to be halted.
Finally, in the ND’s view, two societal models confront one another today: a passive society and a society of producers. In the first, the principal project is the realization of egalitarian mass comfort; in the second, it is the development of a nation’s energy. The mercantile spirit is not essentially productive and is based on mass hedonism. This stands in contradiction with productivity and technique, whose supporting pillars (organization, rigor, work) are definitively opposed to a consumerist psyche in which passivity, speculation, domestic spirit, and unproductive individualism predominate. Moreover, the consumer economy hampers innovation, for producers of consumer goods—so as to minimize risks—prefer to dress up an old product as new rather than launch an unknown one that would be costly and sell poorly. For the ND, economic values are not harmful in themselves if subordinated to a political and communitarian project.
To desire the destruction of an industrial apparatus, as anti-industrial ecologists do, is absurd, because it can be used in the service of another societal project. What ecologists criticize is not so much the economy and technique as providers of wealth, but as instruments of power and of sacrilegious transformation of nature, in the line of Rousseauianism and biblicism. Moreover, economic and technical power forms part of Europe’s cultural heritage and has always supported cultural and political dynamism. The economy and technique must be recognized as possibilities to “re-enchant” the world through a Faustian overhumanism capable of building a new civilization.
Translated into English by Francisco Albanese.
Notes
[1] Benoist, Alain & Faye, Guillaume: “Contre la société marchande,” in: Pour une renaissance culturelle, op. cit., pp. 47-66.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Faye, Guillaume: Contre l’économisme—Principes d’economie politique, Le Labyrinthe, Paris, 1983, pp. 5-67.
[4] Faye, Guillaume: “L’economie organique,” in: Pour une renaissance culturelle, op. cit., pp. 54-66.
[5] Faye, Guillaume: “Faire éclater le Système,” in: La Troisième Voie, op. cit., pp. 23-24.