Yet, what we see today arising alongside the seeming apotheosis of this predicted process is its opposite: the renewed assertion of nation both as a reaction to this process, but more deeply, in anticipation of its exhaustion. Written in 1848, Marx and Engels rightly foresaw a world in which commodities from one place would be shipped elsewhere, seeking out foreign markets for the import of money or other goods, while other markets would be employed for cheap labor for assembly and production. Their vision - that shared by most mainstream (non-Marxist!) economists today, was premised upon a future of expanding and seemingly endless resources. Nations would gladly rearrange their internal ordering - would sweep away "all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions" and make "new-formed ones antiquated before they can ossify." While there is overwhelming evidence that this is the case, some signs suggest that this theory may be confronting a different reality.
The history involved first strikes me as suspect. Deneen invokes 'Political and economic theory dating from the 18th-century' earlier, and here talks about what Marx and Engels 'foresaw.' But the passage from M&E he quotes begins: "All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed" (italics mine). Whatever was going away, it was already going away in 1848. This is supposed to be the power of the Manifesto: having recognized the trend in a number of forms otherwise ignored, it makes a logical (though false) extrapolation about the consequences of that trend. Capitalism, as we all know, was and is the stage in the development of the means of production immediately following upon feudalism. Keeping on this theme of history, we might well examine when M&E thought the transition occurred:
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in means of exchange and commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
I don't want to make too much of this, as I trust M&E neither as historians nor analysts of history (or economics, but that's another post). However, we can take from them that the impulse to scour the world for resources is very, very old indeed; as much as 250 years prior to M&E, probably more. This historical claim I feel exceedingly comfortable with, as Hugo Grotius makes his name in the first decade of the 17th century by disputing Portuguese methods of trading with peoples far afield.
From this, my second point, which is economic. Deneen:
Consider the current economic system, writ large. While it appears, at least on the surface, to resemble the order that was predicted by thinkers ranging from Smith to Montesquieu to Marx and Kant and beyond, another way of looking at it is that far from representing the growth of cooperation and growing empathy bordering on the transcendence of nations for a cosmopolitan worldview, what we are actually seeing with growing clarity is a system in which each player is trying to use the others to the greatest possible extent before scrambling out of the system to avoid the wreck. It's like a gigantic game of "Chicken" with all of us heading to a point of convergence - cosmopolitan bliss? - while in fact realizing that someone is going to swerve, and that everyone will get burned in the process. Economics is just war by another means.
One extra bit:
For this circulation to work well and readily, those commodities had to be plentiful and relatively cheap.
The last is perhaps excellent logic for the current practice of international trade, but not, I think, a very good explanation for its origin, where it was the rarity of commodities and their expensiveness that justified immense capital outlays with dubious chances of success. It is important to see that there's not just one logic driving trade across nations, lest we think there is just one problem to which one solution might do.
But I want to cue into the sentiment informing the longer paragraph above. The relevant Plato is quoted here. In any political community where one man is not expected to perform all possible economic functions, where he does not have all the resources he needs near-to-hand (that would be near all of them), we accept a division of labor and a means of transporting goods from areas of high concentration (and thus low value) to areas of low concentration. Just so: no one wants to live in the City of Pigs. It's not clear to me that there's anything different between trade across regions within a country and trades across countries, except that trades across regions generally do not raise tariff or currency issues (but I'm not sure this fact hurts the free-trader).
To attempt to bring a close: economics may not be war by other means: it may be a substitute for war. If you want resources someone else has, traditionally you just go to that country, take it over, and take whatever you like.* What is remarkable is that no one does this: everyone just trades instead. But look: even if Deneen is right, there's still a problem to which conservatives in particular should be attentive. The urges driving international trade have been translated into action for almost 500 years, at this point. Much like the (slightly older) Protestant Reformation, both reveal something about human experience which is emphatically not modern, except in the broadest possible signification of modern. And I suspect we will have both until Judgment Day.
*I accept many other criticisms of the Iraq war (though I may disagree with them, but I categorically reject this as an explanation, though invite others to point me towards evidence to convince me otherwise. Not least because, given my understanding of how oil markets work, this would be
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