Walking Away From The Marketplace
Walking Away From The Marketplace
The recent sequence of posts here on lenocracy (from Latin leno, a pimp)—that is, the form of political economy in which productive economic activity gets squeezed dry by various kinds of legally mandated pimping—has fielded a response I find interesting. Next to nobody has tried to argue that lenocracy is an unfair description of the current state of affairs in the United States and its close allies. Everyone seems quite aware of the fact that most of the people who make big money in our grand post-industrial kleptocracies are doing it by exploiting those who actually produce goods and services, in exactly the same way that a pimp exploits sex workers.
No, the question that’s come up over and over again is as simple as it is challenging: what can we do about it? I offered one answer a month ago, discussing the way that modern lenocracies work by dangling various baits in front of you. If you take the bait—and nearly everything that comes oozing out of the orifices of the consumer economy counts as bait—the hook sinks in. Walk on by without falling for the lures and you go free. That’s not a complete answer, though, and it’s worth discussing some of the other possibilities.
We can start by taking a hard look at the realities of modern life. Let’s grant that it’s increasingly hard to make honest work pay these days because a regiment of lenocrats backed by local, state, and federal laws and regulations all demand a cut of the profits. Let’s grant that lenocracy has metastasized so far that the United States can’t do simple tasks like repair a wrecked bridge or provide artillery shells for its proxy wars within a reasonable time or for a reasonable cost. Let’s grant, too, that all this is getting worse as the real economy of nonfinancial goods and services shrinks, leaving an ever-increasing horde of lenocrats frantically trying to extract their habitual take from a society in the early stages of rigor mortis. Given all this, is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from lenocracy run amok, or do we just have to hunker down and wait for the inevitable implosion of the system?
To the extent that this question is meant to justify political activism, I’m sorry to say I have very little hope to offer on the national scale. There’s still quite a bit of work that can be done in local politics, and some on more general levels, but let’s please be frank here. The machinery of representative government in the United States and most of its allies was shunted aside long ago, becoming a kind of sideshow where clowns not quite ready for the Big Top go through their comic routines for an audience of rubes. Most real policy in the modern West is decided within the vast and overlapping realms of government, corporate, and nonprofit bureaucracies, and then pushed through the formalities of the legislative branch as an afterthought. We had a nice clear display of that a little while back, when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson turned on a dime and dropped his opposition to more funding for Ukraine and his demands for more border protection for the US after a quiet little conversation with federal bureaucrats. That showed clearly enough where the real power lies.
That doesn’t mean that nothing can be done. It means that nothing can be done by relying on tools that have long since lost their edge, or playing games that the house has rigged so that it never loses. You don’t succeed in a challenging environment by doing the things that everyone else expects you to do. Nor do you succeed in a challenging environment by competing on the other guy’s ground, where he gets to set the rules and can change them at will. You win by doing the unexpected, and by moving the struggle someplace else, where you can set the rules and tilt things in your own favor.
It’s important here to remember that power is never an abstraction; it is always dependent on context. During the twenty-odd years it spent trying to browbeat the people of Afghanistan into submitting to the will of Western kleptocrats, the United States had far more power in every sense than the Taliban forces arrayed against it. Overwhelming as it was, America’s military, economic and cultural power still turned out to be useless against a nation that’s made a specialty out of humiliating mighty empires since ancient times. Why? Because the Taliban knew how to avoid those situations in which American power could be deployed effectively, and chose instead those modes of combat where the huge but clumsy invader was at a disadvantage.
The same principle is just as valid in the sort of nonviolent contention I have in mind here. Violence itself makes a great test case for the principle I’m discussing here. At this stage in the game, certainly, the vast bureacratic system that runs this country has a hugely disproportionate advantage when it comes to violence. Start shooting at the people tasked with enforcing all those laws and regulations, and the result can be neatly described as “suicide by cop.” Again, you win by fighting on your own terms, not on terms that advantage the other side.
How do you do that in the present case? You start with your own choices and your own life, the realm over which you have the most control.
The great secret of today’s lenocracies, as I suggested a month ago, is that they depend so much on the voluntary submission of their victims. Of course there are ways in which this isn’t true, exactions that can’t be avoided without running great risks, but there are plenty of other ways in which you can opt out if you’re willing to make certain changes or do without certain things. In societies as crowded, as ramshackle, and as decrepit as ours, one of Robert Anton Wilson’s maxims—“government is a delusion in the minds of governors”—is almost true. It would be still more accurate to say that government is a delusion in the minds of the governed. Cure yourself of that delusion, recognize that most of what happens in today’s America goes on unmanaged and even unnoticed by the bureaucrats, and the world becomes a much more interesting place.
The same thing is even more true in nonpolitical contexts. Consider employment, the most common way that people in modern lenocratic societies support themselves. Being somebody’s employee seems so normal and natural to most people these days that it can take a real effort to recognize how complicated and exploitive the system of employment is. Let’s take it from first principles. You have somebody who needs a good or a service, and somebody else who knows how to provide the good or the service. Do the two of them agree on some exchange of value—say, so much money in return for the good or the service—shake hands, make the exchange, and that’s that? In most human societies, they do, but in a lenocratic society they don’t.
No, in a lenocratic society there’s usually at least one person, an employer, who inserts himself into the transaction and takes a cut from it. In a mature bureaucratic lenocracy like ours, there are scores or hundreds of people who each take a cut from the transaction. Consider what happens when someone wants a hamburger and goes into a typically understaffed fast food joint to get it. The harried, overworked kid behind the counter prepares the hamburger, bags it, hands it over and rings up the sale. Of that sale, only a small fraction goes to pay the kid the inadequate wage he receives. The rest gets sucked straight up the corporate ziggurat, shedding bigger and bigger paychecks all the way; an ever-expanding realm of managerial bureaucracy battens off it, with the biggest checks going to the inmates of corner offices, and what’s left spews into the air from the top of the ziggurat and rains down on stockholders.
One of the eternal verities of lenocracy is that nobody in a managerial bureacracy is ever willing to consider taking home a smaller paycheck. Another is that nobody in a managerial bureaucracy is ever willing to consider having fewer subordinates. A third is that the stockholders, too, always expect their shares to gain in value and their income to go up. As a result, year after year, the share going to the people who actually do the work dwindles, while the share going up the ziggurat bloats. This is among the major factors driving impoverishment and immiseration in today’s America, though of course the corporate media doesn’t mention that.
Are there alternatives? You bet there are. Once again, the great secret of lenocracy is that it depends so much on the voluntary submission of its victims. There are plenty of ways to get by that don’t involve being anybody’s employee, and all of them share one huge advantage that employment doesn’t have: the income you receive from them goes to support a much smaller number of bureaucrats. So long as you make any money at all, you’ll have to put up with the exactions that support those who are paid out of tax dollars, but there are plenty of others you can ignore with perfect ease—and that means much more of your income goes to you.
This is why everybody I know who is thriving in today’s American economy is self-employed. The great majority of them have found niche markets that match their personal quirks and aren’t well served by the one-size-neglects-all mentality of today’s corporate managers. This is how I make a living, for example, and how a growing share of other people do the same thing. If you work for yourself you get to keep a much larger share of the value of your labor, and you can also usually provide better quality to your customers at a more reasonable price—after all, neither you nor your customers have to worry about covering the the salaries and benefits of a ziggurat-load of overpriced office fauna, the way employees and their customers do.
This is possible because in today’s American economy there are a huge number of needs that are going unmet because big businesses decided it wasn’t worth their while to meet them, while the government-enforced barriers to smaller business can often be evaded by an enterprising individual who doesn’t mind keeping things on a small and local scale. I certainly wouldn’t want to suggest that anyone break the law, but it may be worth noting that a lot of people these days are working under the table: they don’t have business licenses, they don’t leap through the endless array of bureaucratic hoops that have been set up to shield big corporations from competition, they simply provide goods and services quietly on an informal basis and receive their pay just as informally. Sometimes they don’t receive pay, in the strict sense of the word, at all—and that moves us into an even more challenging dimension of our theme.
Despite the high-grade handwaving of economic textbooks, after all, a market economy using money to mediate exchanges is not the only way to organize an economy. Nor is it always the best way. History shows that market economies emerge at a certain stage in the economic development of any complex human society, right around the time that the society moves from the relative economic stability of its childhood to the growth phase of its adolescence. During those tempestuous years the growth of lenocracy can rarely keep up with the growth in the production of goods and services, and so nobody minds the lenocrats much; very often, too, at this stage they still provide some kind of service or other in exchange for their cut.
As maturity arrives and the production of goods and services slows and peaks, however, lenocracy keeps growing. This produces the illusion of continued economic growth, since there is always more money changing hands and more people busy at allegedly productive work, but services come to predominate over goods. Most of the “services” in question are useless to individuals, and have value only in an ever-expanding bureacratic sphere in which public and private bureaucrats become increasingly indistinguishable. Inflation comes into the picture as the currency is debased to keep money flowing to the lenocrats in the absence of productive activity. So you end up with the classic predicament of a civilization in its terminal years, full of bustling bureaucracies busy with whatever ritual activities occupy their time—making offerings to Isis and Ra in ancient Egypt, circulating memos in modern America—while essential systems come slowly apart under an ever-weightier burden of malign neglect.
It’s the behavior of the ordinary people in terminal societies like these that bears close attention here. The greater the share of wealth taken by the privileged lenocratic classes, the less reason anyone else has to participate in the system at all, and so more and more people stop participating. There are many ways they can do this. Very often they stop having children, since the sheer economic burden of raising a child in a terminal lenocracy becomes a massive disincentive to reproduction. Very often, too, they embrace new religious movements of the sort that glorify poverty, celibacy, and nonparticipation in the cultural and economic life of the lenocracy. It’s not accidental that monasticism, for example, became wildly popular in late Roman times, or at several equivalent periods in Indian and Chinese history; to become a monk or a nun is among other things to extend a decorous but unmistakable middle finger toward a society that demands too much and gives too little in return.
Yet there are less drastic ways of doing the same thing, and most of them amount to finding some route out of market economies that have been rigged to the disadvantage of anybody but the lenocratic elite. There are many kinds of economies, after all, that don’t rely on market exchanges. Any good or service that you provide for yourself is outside the market economy. So is any good or service that members of a family provide for one another. So, in effect, is any good or service that you provide directly to someone else for some nonfinancial consideration. It’s from this latter form of exchange that feudalism, the normal political economy of a post-market society, emerges over time.
All through my career as a blogger I’ve had occasion to roll my eyes at the many people for whom “feudal” is an emotion-laden snarl word rather than a description of a system of political economy. A feudal economy is based entirely on customary contracts. Here’s the peasant who wants to farm his land undisturbed by raiders; here’s the local warlord whose band of young toughs is happy to get out there and fight. The warlord pledges to defend the peasant, and the peasant pledges to support the warlord: so many pecks out of each bushel of grain, so many days of labor in the off season, and when the warlord marches to battle the peasant grabs a spear and an old iron helmet and marches along with him.
The peasant and the warlord don’t bargain over the terms, and that’s what sets a feudal economy apart from a market economy. Those same terms have been in place since time out of mind—tolerably often the peasant’s great-grandfather had the same relationship to the warlord’s great-grandfather, and all parties in the transaction assume the same will be true for their respective great-grandchildren. Static? Sure. Unequal and unfair? That too. Yet the average medieval peasant worked fewer hours each week, had more holidays, and kept a larger share of the value of his labor than you do.
We’re some centuries away from the point at which feudalism can be expected to emerge in the deindustrial world of the future. Already, though, the ordinary people of late lenocratic America are turning away in less obvious ways from a market economy rigged so blatantly against them. The steep decline in birth rates is one telltale sign. So are the “Help Wanted” signs splashed all over most businesses these days—more and more people are doing the math, totting up how much they are expected to pay out of their own pockets for the privilege of being employed, and realizing that they’re better off doing something else with their time. So, finally, are the growing number of people who are working under the table, or who find their own unique ways to earn a little money doing something outside the corporate economy, or who drop out of the paid workforce entirely to become housewives, househusbands, live-in help for an older relative or younger couple with children, or what have you.
Which if any of these options might be suitable to you, dear reader, is not something I can tell you; it’s of the nature of times like these that one size never fits all. You will have to make your own choices and feel your own way. Still, I think you’ll find that the fewer lenocrats you support by the sweat of your brow, the happier and more prosperous you will be. For that matter, I think you’ll find that the more things you do for yourself, or arrange to have done in some way outside the market economy, the easier a time you’ll have of it in our troubled economy, and the more of your purchases you can make from individuals or small local businesses instead of vast lenocratic corporate chains, the happier you’ll be with the results.
There’s another side to this whole issue, of course. Just as a pimp can’t survive without the sex workers he exploits, while they can survive very well without him, the lenocracy depends for its survival on the willingness of ordinary people to keep supporting it by their purchases, their labor, and their loyalty. Whether or not you continue to give it that support—why, that, too, is something you will have to decide for yourself.
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