Okay, so I'm Alex and this is the second part of the anti-accelerationism hour, as it were. This is my paper, Economics in the Wild. What I'm going to attempt to do, I don't really want to be a Yabu kind of polemic too much. You hear it a lot from people, for example, Zizek, who's got his famous story where he kind of dismisses Deleuze because he sees, you know, an account of a stockbroker reading White's philosophy on a on a subway car and of course he says like well isn't every element of Deleuze's philosophy in fact you know the circulation of effects you know the unleashing of liberal energies all these kind of things aren't those in fact
what capitalists do in fact what marketers do and so forth and you also get stuff like Malcolm Bull who says about Harden Negeri's empire that you know it's impossible to tell the difference between an anti-capitalist social movement for example the anti-globalisation movement on one hand and capital itself because they both believe in open borders and so on. Despite the fact that these kind of polemics are quite thin they don't go into a lot of sociological analysis of the actual actors involved and the differences between them. I am going to attempt quite a similar move when talking about the work of Manuel de Landa and his place within the kind of accelerationist paradigm. So what I'm going to be trying to suggest is that many aspects of de Landa's work could be located in the world of
what Philip Mirowski has called the neoliberal thought collective. So what do I mean by this notion of neoliberal thought collective? There's a really good paper you can read online. It's called Neoliberalism, New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan. It's by Taylor C. Boas and Jordan Gaines Morse. And what they did is they looked through the citation records of hundreds of papers which had the title Neoliberalism in, or Neoliberalism somewhere in the synopsis. And they looked through and saw how many of these papers actually defined neoliberalism in any substantial way, or had any, you know, a kind of citation to something which would define it for them. and they found that in the majority of cases it was completely undefined and their point is what is this actual thing neoliberalism
that everyone always talks about and everyone is always concerned about so I think even though they end up with quite a right wing talking point about the power of markets and how ace they are I think it's an important thing to actually try and get to the heart of what neoliberalism actually is and I think Ben's talk is very much when he was talking about the birth of biopolitics. The birth of biopolitics is certainly an influential book for this kind of approach, looking at actually what the neoliberals said and more importantly, the kind of social networks they inhabited. So what are we not doing? Okay, is this going to work? Yeah. Okay, so we're not doing the various approaches you can have to neoliberalism. What is it?
Now, a lot of people, you hear this a lot. Oh, we go back to Adam Smith. you know there's a direct gene analogy we can link to adam smith we stick in a special utilitarianism and we end up with friedman hayek and company okay so we've got that model we've also got like the kind of additional model so we've got adam smith we've got alfred marshall's neoclassical economics and you know uh an opportunity a shock doctrine we whack them all together and we get neoliberalism now this is this is quite similar to in fact it is kind of the account that David Harvey's very popular book, Brief History of Neoliberalism, gives. When trying to define what is neo about neoliberalism, he says that, OK, it's a combination between Adam Smith and marginalist neoclassical economics, as found in Alfred Marshall.
Now, the problem, and then he goes on to mention something else which is important. He mentions the institutional context of neoliberalism. He mentions Montpellerian society, he mentions the movement towards think tanks and he mentions Frederick Hayek. The problem is though that he's defined neoliberalism as a form of neoclassical economics with Smith and in fact for Hayek is the complete polar opposite economically in terms of his economic methodology in terms of the way his form of Austrian economics is structured to neoclassical economics. Yet despite this the main the most important well-known kind of figurehead of the neoclassical approach in the 20th century perhaps, Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek are both part of the Montpellerin Society and are both involved in the kind of creation of neoliberalism.
So we can see it can't just be boiled down to this kind of thing. So what we need to adopt with Foucault is looking at the actual texts that they wrote and looking at the kind of networks of think tanks that they were part of. And this approach has been used by Philip Mirowski in his recent book, The Road to Montpellerin, which is absolutely excellent it's quite expensive but I reckon you get it there's Raymond Plante's book Neoliberal State there's Jamie Peck who's a geographer a lot of geographers do great stuff on this and there's Rachel Turner's book on neoliberal ideology all of which are really interesting works and what they tend to suggest is that there is a real plurality in neoliberalism in terms of approaches in terms of discourses even and all these are kind of tied together within these
institutional context they set up montpelier in society um it has its forebears in the colloquium for walt lipman which was in france in 1938 has its forebears there but the first actual meter was in 1947 and during that hayek gave a speech called the intellectuals and socialism where he said the comparative success of socialism in his eyes um which in which he included marxism and keynesianism and all these kind of things was that they kind of ingratiated themselves intellectually in all discourses, that intelligent people in 1947 thought that socialism or some form of socialism was perhaps the only route out of the problem society had faced. So what he suggests is they form this collective, Montpellier and Society, to attempt to battle this kind of leftist socialist thought
on as many fronts as possible. So you have economists, you have journalists, so-called second-hand dealers and ideas So we're supposed to go out and propagate these ideas in the popular press. And people are intended to set up their own think tanks. So through this, we have different types of economics. This is just economics. You've also got different types of sociology, even different types of philosophy, even different types of theology feeding in. So you've got, you know, auto-liberalism, which is the German movement of neoliberalism that Ben mentioned earlier, which is perhaps central because, unlike say Harvey's account where it all kicks off you know in Chile and all kicks off in New York in the kind of like internal structural readjustments in New York in fact the reconstruction of
Germany after the Second World War is the first neoliberal laboratory where Ludwig Erhard who was the first, I can't remember the exact junior way I went through but he was essentially economic advisor then later economics minister and then actually later and 70s Chancellor, basically put these policies really quickly into place. And if we look at these networks, we can actually see how widespread they are. So this is the first Mark Pelerin meeting in 1947. We can see it's already an international movement. It's not just, as someone like Tromsky thinks, something coming out of the US to kind of retain a US hegemony over the world. It's actually, you know, it's already international. It's also very strongly European, which a lot of people miss out.
because neoclassical economics has a strong foothold in the USA, but it's also a very strong European network. And then if we come up to 1991, we can see that the neoliberal, the members of the Mont-Pelerin Society, can be found almost in every continent, apart from Antarctica and all over the globe. And it's not only important how they're involved within the society, it's also important what they set up, which is the network of think tanks. Now this map shows think tanks with a direct one movement relation to Montpellerin society and its members. Obviously the most famous one in the UK is the IEA, the Institute of Economic Affairs, which was established by Anthony Fisher, who also established battery farming, just by the by.
Anyway, so you can see it was an intention to propagate neoliberal thought. it's not just neoliberal thought, it's an idea that fell to earth pristine, it's something with a messy history something with a lot of discourses driving into it and it's shown this that I hope to show that Delander owes rather more to it than he would like to think so we've got influences on accelerationism which thankfully Ben has kind of gone through, so we've got systems theory, complexity, chaos theory that sort of thing we've got cybernetics being quite important then we've got you know in certain senses some kind of notion of evolutionary theory certainly in delander's kind of stuff and we see also that we've got this plurality if you remember there was auto neoliberalism
over here and there was uh neoclassical economics here and there was kind of austrian economics here and as we see like almost not precisely but in quite a strong way each of them maps on So in Delanda you get this thing about markets versus anti-markets And you see that very strongly in auto-liberalism The idea that capitalism in fact has never happened In fact capitalism is a bad thing What we need is markets You see this quite strongly in their very boldly anti-monopoly So they're against monopolies in the market But for the sake of the market And so forth In neoclassical economics you've got cybernetics Which was a huge influence as I'm going to go through the history of and then in Hayek you have this notion of cosmos versus taxes which I'll go through in a second.
Okay, so first off, just to get you grounded in where I'm coming from we've got to go into this thing called the Hans-Murowski thesis. Now, Wade Hans and Philip Murowski are two economists, historians of economics ideas and their kind of big idea is that there is a very strong relationship between the history of science and the history of economics and this relationship is manifested in something that loads of people have heard about certainly neoclassical economics, physics and the idea that in an attempt to become a rigorous a priorised science, economics copied physics as much as possible and you know, Morowski doesn't just state this, for a series of books, More Heat Than Light, which came out in 1989 and what's it called? Machine Dreams, Economics
Become Cyborg Science, which came out 2004 he uh he's developed this thesis um so so basic thesis where the parallel development of physics and economics so it kind of comes in three stages uh and it's important to avoid these kind of things as i've talked about like firstly we don't want to go back to smith uh economists don't just talk to economists there isn't this uh there's two notions of history an intrinsic history of economics where economists just only talk to economists right so you know smith is read by mill or you know ricardo is read by marx and so on and you know there's this hermetically sealed place where economics goes on but this suggests actually you know there are relationships to
other disciplines and moreover neoclassical economics because it looks at scientific precision looks the science for the metaphors that constructs the equations and then of course this is a bi-directional thing, we get mutual influence of science and economics going on particularly the most recent one which is game theory which is developed into evolutionary game theory and biology and so on. So we've got three stages, I'm going to deal with two today, the marginal revolution and cyborg science. The middle stage also follows a similar pattern in a series of papers that Morawski did with Hans. And all throughout it's the idea that economics copies physics in certain ways. So we've got the marginal revolution, started by these guys, occurs about 1870. And what we
find there is we see there's, like you often see in science, a simultaneous discovery of this kind of notion of marginality in the 1870s. And Mirowski traces this not to all these guys coming up brilliantly with the same idea at the same time, just happening to agree, but the fact that the dominant science of the day, well, actually the dominant science of 20 years ago which is one of the problems with economics was energetics and this is important um a lot of people you hear occasionally say the problem with modern economics is it's it's based on atomistics based on you know newtonian you know balls hitting each other and so forth in fact it's not based on that at least the muralski argues it's based on this the science of energetics the movement of energy kind of like a proto-thermodynamics and also um what's it called
kind of like notions of balances and those kind of things. Notions of essentially machines. Okay? So what we have happening is all that happens is we have utility is just is just patterned. The idea of utility, diminishing utility and so forth is patterned after energy and classical dynamics. And the economy is thought of mechanical in a kind of pre-thermodermatic way. And we get the kicker statement from page three of the book, progenitors of neoclassical economic theory boldly copied the reigning physical theories in the 1870s. They copied their models term for term and symbol for symbol and said so.
So we see things going on like this. This is Will Ferdo Purito writing to another neoclassical economist. And it's important to note the neoclassical economists really think they were breaking with classical economics. A lot of histories of economics have this kind of forward path where it was a simple extension of previous ideas. But they really thought, because of their mathematics, because of their borrowing from physics, they were really changing. So I have that statement, which you can read. I've seen these go into the equations that determine evolution. I've seen them before, and so on. These people, and Mirowski shows extensively, admitted as much in their texts. Okay, so then we have coming in about post-war period, we have skipping over the second one where he talks about thermodynamics. We had this idea of cyborg science.
Now, what happens here is instead of economics being the optimum allocation of scarce resources and given ends, we move to an idea of the economic agent as an information processor. And this is at every level. So the individual economic actor, like me going to the shops, is an information processor, taking information, processing it, but also the market itself. And Ben talked about the heeing of the market. You know, we imagine it's kind of quasi theological. We imagine the market as a thing, right, that wants to do things, that has motions and movements and so on. But it's still a mechanical metaphor. but now the economy is now a computer and not a machine
and as Ben also mentioned which is brilliant there was a real influence of the military development on economics so it was the Cold War they were trying to work out what the Russians were doing they were trying to work out the most innovative technologies that possible and so they came up with these various these terms command, control, communication and information as being key to how they would understand the strategy If anyone's seen The Trap, Adam Curtis, this is basically one of the theses about Nash and the notion of Nash equilibrium game theory and so forth. So we get this big reorganisation of sciences after World War II, and we get all these funded by the military stations for neoclassical economics.
We get MIT, the Cowles Commission in Yale, Chicago School. They're all into this idea of operations research, which is developed in the Second World War, but perfected afterwards. It's this idea that you can make these optimal decisions in particular situations under constraints of information. And then we have game theorists, as I've said. So what is cybernetics? Okay, cybernetics. Norbert Weiner? cybernetics is about the paper, the defining paper in 1947, cybernetics control the communication in the animal and the machine now as important as cybernetics if you think about a cyborg is the blurring of nature and culture, the attempt to
understand culture in terms of science and vice versa, so you get all these breaking downs of natural and artificial, made and found blurring of boundaries in general, but a central concern with information and how it moves and how this information is modeled after certain physical processes in physics i.e the cyborg sciences so eventually they they abandoned general equilibrium theory which is you know the idea that markets kind of like have this invisible hand that goes to a to a certain point and they in the 90s they start talking because they realize this is kind of like a fruitless endeavor and they start talking about game theory and this kind of stuff. And what this kind of cyber organisation of science has created a real tension in neoclassical economics, between an attention you can see in Dallander's text, where he dismisses the
neoclassical approach, but he doesn't realise the neoclassical approach has very much come on. And this is a tension between, on one hand, the original neoclassical economics, where it was kind of, you know, mathematical axioms on which you built, you know, your theorem and after Godel and you know the various kind of ideas of like the volubility of mathematics and the inability to you know define axioms for a system and so on um there becomes this other thing you know this cyborg thing which is kind of indeterminate statistical and so forth and this kind of this kind of like parts it apart so they try and keep them really strongly together they try and keep the two poles together they kind of they're kind of splitting because you know on one side you've got complexity chaos and so on on the other side you've got rigid formalism and so forth
okay so now we're just going to have a quick look at hayek and then we're going to talk about delander so hayek obviously hugely important for neoliberalism you know the main guy the go-to guy underrated for his importance of even setting up for example the chicago school he was the guy and this is the lesson for the left he was the go-to guy he was more leninist than lenin he went out he got all these people, he put them together he changed the world in a completely fundamental way the fact that no one can, you know Ed Miliband can say things slightly against the market and it's huge news at least, and the people on the left nod their heads and yeah this is great you know it's or not the very fabric of everyday life has become part of his arguments
but So I think that's the lesson for the left. But Hayek basically goes through kind of three theoretical stages. And, you know, if you know DeLanda's work at all, you can already see where I'm kind of going for this. So first off, he talks about, there's this, you know, 1930s when he's first starting off. There's this kind of normal science, Austrian economics. And if you search for Hayek accelerationism, you get an example of the kind of discourse that he was doing. He's talking about the economy as a system of flows. These flows were stopped, cancelled, and the worst things that possibly cancelled these flows of capital were the government and so forth, and this is why you're against the state. And then the second stage, you have this kind of mystical or kind of neo-Kantian idea that individual human knowledge is kind of very, very limited.
So we can't possibly know everything that we need to know to become a planner in an economy. we can't be a socialist we can't be a kind of we can't have a command economy as Dallanda calls it because not any person in the economy knows enough to be able to plan it but on aggregate everyone's minds together in this kind of soup of the market people are able through the price system to distribute resources not maybe justly but correctly so you get the second period that comes from about 1945 onwards and this is quite a very anti-scientific period it comes with like Michael Polanyi who's the brother of Karl Polanyi you know weird historical thing and so you've got the arch anti-neoliberal
avant-lector with the arch neoliberal anyway so you've got this kind of idea about tacit knowledge science can't explain everything and so forth and you know he sets up this he sets up this Society with Plani called the Society for Freedom in Science and the big problem is here all these arguments are successive arguments against socialism or the left it's just like which it's a question of which would be the effective battering ram to claim that the markets are for the good and the left should be shunned off and so it's a very opportunistic successive thing and the reason why he went to this anti-scientific stance in the 40s or so was because basically the Vienna circle were positivists and all socialists.
Marxism was at the time scientific socialism and so on. So there's a kind of association of science with socialism. Eventually, he kind of like shaves off this idea and he goes for instead of saying the, instead of saying, you know, planning is anti-natural, he says it's, sorry, instead of saying planning is kind of impossible, he says it's kind of, in a kind of version of the naturalistic fallacy, he says it's actually against nature in some way and then he moves into talking about cybernetics and about evolution hold on one second and at this point using the work of Warren Weaver he embraces the sciences of complexity and he kind of has this notion of evolution is how the market goes about and this is why we can't interfere with it
it's kind of like firms they've evolved to win in the market environment and therefore we can't interfere and this also doesn't apply just to economics it applies to law as well there's a kind of conservatism here in a kind of Burkean mode and if you read Philip Blonde you can see him making this argument the reason why we keep these inherited traditions is because they've evolved in this very organic way and this is the important thing in a way he's making, in the 19th century anti-capitalists, certainly with the Romantic bent always made the idea that capitalism is machinic, mechanical we want a more holistic idea But this is exactly the opposite of what Hayek is doing here. He's saying, actually, it's capitalism that is the organic, you know, kind of dreamy, hippie stuff. And it is the planning of socialism or any intervention in the market, which is kind of the anti-natural, rationalist predator and so forth.
And in this final stage, he sets up this kind of versus match between his two forms of social organisation, Cosmos and Taxis. so on the good side you have cosmos right and i hope i've got this around the right way if i haven't forgive me and taxes right so on cosmos sides we have basically the spontaneous order that he finds in the market he finds evolution and so on we have this idea of which is kind of his his notion of a market of markets that emerges spontaneously and is spontaneously ordered and it's organic it's self-corrected and to some degree it's open and it's decentralized and on the other side we have taxes which is like the socialist and all this socialism is always very totalitarian it's the road to serfdom any planning is essentially
the road to serfdom and you know fascism and so forth so which is so we have taxes it's centrally organized it's planned welfare state totalitarians it's artificial rationalistic it's compromised so it's always intervening in the natural order in a kind of extraneous way and most importantly it's kind of monopolised, there's a monopoly of control now we move to Delanda and here's what I'm calling invisible neoliberalism I actually like Delanda quite a bit in many ways, that thing called uncanny valley where you see a kind of face which is so similar to a human face it's actually quite disturbing. That's kind of what I see in Delanda
because I like cybernetics, I program computers and so forth. I'm attached to wires all through the day. I like open source software and so forth. So I'm really myself as a huge geek, but never mind. And so there's something in Delanda that I really like, but there's this unfortunate infinity with many of the ideas that Hayek came through and this kind of neoclassical genealogy as well. So we have this notion of anti versus markets, sorry, markets versus anti-markets. So he says that capitalism is always being monopolistic. Capitalism is defined by monopoly. The market might be small, but there's certain elements within that market monopolising it.
As you can see, this maps quite neatly onto kind of auto-liberal themes. where you have monopoly, either state power or market power, is bad, but for the market. So he says things like this. When approaching the subject of economic power, one can safely ignore the entire field of linear mathematical economics, so-called competitive equilibrium economics, since their monopolies and are all of our piece are both ignored. And as I've tried to at least gesture towards, and Marasky's done far harder work than me, this kind of notion that that is all neoclassical economics is, is kind of a notion that kind of died a death in the 60s with this kind of cybernetic stuff that he is actually into. So we talk about these markets are indeed self-organised
decentralised structures. I've highlighted the bits which sound suspiciously like someone else would be talking about. They rise spontaneously without need for central planning. As dynamic entities they have absolutely nothing to do with the invisible hand. Since models based on Adam's misconduct, blah, blah, blah. Asians have perfect rationality and information froze freely. But the point of Hayek's economics and in fact the whole of the Austrian paradigm in different ways is that you don't have perfect knowledge in the market and that's the reason you can't control the market and that's why you can't have any kind of planning or socialism because you never have enough information to get on with it. So we can see that he's concentrating on this neoclassical thing without seeing that there are other parts of this neoliberal thought collective that are very similar to what he's saying.
So we have the spontaneous emergence of order, which depends crucially on friction, delays, bottlenecks, and so forth. As I said, Hayek says all this. So you have this idea of command hierarchies versus meshworks. And there's a few fairly lengthy quotes about what's going on here. So you've got this kind of dichotomy. now what he says is that he wants to junk basically the whole of Marxism about he doesn't want stages in capitalism he thinks that modes of economic exchange can co-exist for example a financial mode can co-exist quite happily with an industrial mode and so on there's no definite stages in capitalism and so
where else is going with that so anyway as you can see we have this notion of this kind of meshwork being heterogeneous and never coming to rest and always moving and then it comes striated into this kind of state form and it's this state of phobia this kind of fear of coming to that where he kind of comes in. So we set up why he thinks this and I've already mentioned this certain developments in economics are made as obsolete by Brodell's empirical research into the subject. And moreover, it's really important now that he's shown that the distinction is no longer between left and right, but between market and anti-market.
Okay. So, and this is from an interview with him where he gives a very simple argument about socialism being top-down and so forth. and he uses this model which is what all all like kind of, it kind of reminds me of a little bit of like if you've ever met anyone who's a disciple of Ayn Rand has anyone met anyone? Yeah you know, you'll say to them, well what about this particular instance of capitalism, you know, being really bad, you know, there's a stock market crash and they'll always say, well actually that wasn't capitalistic enough, you know, the market wasn't there were certain state interventions, if you know we just don't actually let it be then everything would kind of work out. And, you know, as I said, I do like Dallander, but sometimes when you read this,
you kind of get this impression that he's treading the same kind of boards. You know, he says that capitalism never had markets. Well, this seems to be very much a kind of, well, where do markets exist? And like the Ayn Rand supporter, who apparently always talk about Iceland, I seem to recall from my teenage years, was talking about there's some time in Iceland where they had anarcho-capitalism and everything worked out fine. He always goes to this example of the third Italy and textile companies and so forth. And so obviously we get to the kind of kicker, there's another long quote, about unintended consequences of markets where he wants a small market versus a large market. So we get this kind of like very similar, in fact, I've just copied and pasted it,
similar idea of mesh work versus control economy. So we have blah, blah, blah, spontaneous organics, open, centrally planned, welfare state, artificial, and so on? Why? Good question. How long have I got? How long have you been? Not much longer? How long have I spoken for? Okay. So again, this is kind of, as I said, notion that markets are everywhere imperfect, apart from certain situations. So now we come on to the kind of big question. What are the kind of stakes in this? Now, Delander says quite often that he wants a combination between meshwork and hierarchy.
He sees them in kind of opposition to each other, but you know, you want a strategic approach to these kind of things. And I guess that's kind of an advance from Hayek, in a sense. You know, we want a combination of the two in assemblages together. however when you actually read his work you can't help feeling but there's a tendency in in a similar way to when you read um kind of like anarchist delusion's and such like there's always a tendency that the mesh work always is is the right one now he he cautions against this in many times he says you know the thing about a mesh work is it's a drift right so it might not drift towards what you want it to do it's you know out of our control in a certain way but also we can't interfere in a certain other way. He also says we shouldn't romantically just say
we want a meshwork and we don't want this. But when you find out how he views the interaction, he often says things like meshworks can be bad when they're propping up hierarchies. It's always a kind of notion that meshwork is always inside the good unless it's propping up a hierarchy it's other, if you see what I mean. And I think kind of coming to it, I think an important, just really quickly, an important moment is in what Delandra is trying to do comes about when he's talking about open source software. Now, just really quickly, basically when he's talking about open source software, he sees it as this kind of mesh work thing. He sees it
as not at all kind of voluntaristic and not at all normative. It's not like a notion that this is a good way to produce software. And in open source software, there's two sides. There's Free Software Foundation and there's Open Source. Now, I'm drawing on the work of Tony Progg here. He's got all his work online, so you can all go and check it out. Now, Tony Progg, who's much more on the communist side of these things, favours free software because free software says it's actually an ethical imperative, as well as being the best way to produce software, to have open source software and kind of a collaborative environment. Whereas he says that, he says, in contrast, open source as a movement was a kind of a capitalist capture of this kind of notion, an attempt to kind of,
you didn't do it for the ethical reasons, you know, because, you know, the fact that I can't give other Alex my copy of Photoshop is illegal, and that prevents Alex from actualising his brilliant designs or whatever. It's just simply that this is a quicker development model, the bugs get squashed easier. And it doesn't take a genius to work out precisely which side of the equation Delanda comes on here. He comes on the side of the open source movement as opposed to the free software movement. And I think this is where it comes really. There are these ideas in Delanda about self-organisation and so on that are important, but it's kind of the way that you read them. And this is kind of a weak conclusion, but... But, you know, it's the way you read them.
So we should be talking about open networks and open source and these kind of notions, but we should try and talk to them without having this constant other that we're trying to avoid. It's a bit like that famous feminist pamphlet, which I think is called The Tyranny of Formlessness or something like that, where the idea that you have these open flowing meetings is actually counterproductive so I think in political terms it's really interesting to read this guy but we need to kind of be conscious of the proximity of his ideas to certain neoliberal ideas of information and organisation and in addition whilst he'll take some of the ideas