The Uber algorithms, perfectly embodying the spirit of market forces, make all value beholden to fluctuations of supply and demand. Here, nothing is fixed. Everything is relative. It’s a metaphysics, of sorts. Or perhaps – because it’s so wholeheartedly materialist – an anti-metaphysics. Capitalism represents the triumph of the immanent – that there is nothing to human value except the ebb and flow of human behaviour. Value is not rooted in anything transcendent, beyond the continual drift of human desire. [...]
I mention this little story only because it sits neatly alongside a movement that seems to be gathering force, especially in the US, in which conservatives – and often religious conservatives – are ousting socialists as some of the most thoughtful critics of capitalism. Last year Peter Kolozi, an academic at the City University of New York, published a timely historical survey of the long tradition of anti-capitalism within US conservatism. To those who have become used to conservatives being capitalism’s most high-profile cheerleaders, this notion may seem odd. But there is no necessary connection between conservatism and capitalism: indeed, there is a strong case that they are antithetical. And that case is re-emerging. [...]
As Kolizi explains, this tradition came to be obscured by the Cold War. Given the threat posed by communism, anti-capitalist conservatives threw in their lot with free-market conservatives, united against a common enemy. But the end of the Cold War, the 2008 financial crash, worries about globalisation, and the collapse of faith in the market’s ability to sustain community life – often code for church and family – has exposed old divisions within the conservative family. Thus people like Fox news presenter and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson are beginning to say things like this: “Market capitalism is not a religion. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families isn’t worth having.”
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