Economics as politics

A case study in the radical implications of everyday political language

The stock parlance of a particular era can often tell you a whole lot. When it comes to political eras, the phrases and flourishes that are most remembered tend to be the exceptional ones. But it’s in the quotidian speech of an age — its cliches, its recurrent tropes, its rhetorical ticks, etc. — that many of the latent values and most deep-seated assumptions are really buried. When it comes to body language, we communicate a great deal to those around us without always meaning to. The same thing is often true of political rhetoric in that the most passive reflexes of ideology or speech can in some ways be more revealing than the conscious ones.

With that in mind, I’ve been reflecting recently on the relative disappearance of the phrase “economic system” from our political vernacular. I can’t exactly be scientific here, but ask yourself: when was the last time you can recall hearing either an elected politician or any serious candidate for political office — left, right, or centre — say something about our “economic system”? It regularly appeared in earlier eras of politics, and was by no means exclusively the purview of left wing figures either (of which more shortly).

This isn’t exactly scientific either, but I ran the search below using Google Books Ngram tool and you immediately see a pretty clear pattern here. Usage of the phrase “economic system” peaks during the Great Depression era, goes up again in the postwar years, then experiences a last stand towards the end of the 1960s. You’ll also notice a precipitous drop after the 1980s.

The explanation seems obvious. Throughout the middle of the 20th century, even before the Cold War, the basic foundations of economic life were fiercely contested — and, though capitalism remained dominant outside the countries of the Eastern Bloc — it was confronted with numerous challenges and alternatives. These were not just Soviet-style communism, but also the likes of European social democracy and New Deal liberalism. One consequence was that the nature of the capitalist system as a system was made much more visible: its existence historically contingent, its institutions malleable to collective pressure, its foundations political (and thus, in turn, subject to politics).

That’s why Franklin Roosevelt could refer to America’s “economic system” in his fireside chats. It’s why Tommy Douglas could regularly invoke the same phrase in Canada, and even dedicate one of his most famous anecdotes (see the video below) to explaining how class and exploitation were endemic features of the system he was critiquing. But it wasn’t only those critical of the present economic arrangements who referred to the economy in these terms. When Ronald Reagan evangelized capitalism, he still felt the need — because of the Cold War — to frame it as a system. The great ideologues of neoclassical economics, such as Hayek, did much the same.

Sometimes even the most subtle changes in language can signify a transformative shift in the way a society understands itself and the world around it. And, at some point in the not-too-distant past, rhetorical invocations of the economy-as- system gave way, simply, to “the economy” — a far more distant and removed object that everyone speaks about but almost no one understands.

Referring to something as a system has one very important implication. A system, after all, is something you need a mount a case for or against. It has identifiable parts. If we think of an economy like a giant machine — something that was also once quite common — it probably has gears, cogs, and levers. If it breaks down or stops doing whatever it was designed to do, we can examine or fiddle with these to see what’s wrong. Maybe one of the cogs is broken. Perhaps the pistons need to be better oiled. With our hands on the levers, we at least have some control over what happens and whether the machine stays running at all.

“The economy”, however, is more like an opaque monolith. It is something universal and pervasive that, depending on the context, can sound outside the realm of human agency entirely. It is distant and mysterious, yet it is also something politicians refer to all the time, without necessarily knowing (or even thinking about) what exactly it is that they’re referring to. In my book The Dead Center, I wrote the following about the odd phenomenon of neoliberal writers and thinkers rejecting the very idea that something called “neoliberalism” even exists in the first place:

The longer something is part of your reality, the more it tends to fade from your field of focus and blur into the rest of the background. After its initially disruptive incursion in the 1980s, neoliberalism fast became a feature of our collective existence, so indelible many now seem unable to recall a time before it existed, let alone conceive a future that moves beyond it. An ideology secures hegemony at precisely the point it ceases to be considered one: its claims transform into axioms; its theories harden into dogma; its abstruse vernacular becomes the lingua franca; its assumptions are subsumed under “common sense.”

That talk of systems has seemed to vanish from the colloquial speech of economics and politics clearly reflects the same thing. When someone says “the economy” in a political debate or conversation, they almost invariably mean the one that currently exists around us, without any sense that the thing they’re referring to is a political institution at all.

Before she passed away, the brilliant theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood argued that one of the defining features of capitalist ideology is the separation of the political from the economic. To this I’d add that one of the defining features of neoliberal ideology in particular is the corollary mystification of economic life. An “economic system”, however complicated, is something that can be discerned, understood and, if necessary, altered or changed. “The economy”, by contrast, is fixed, permanent, and fundamentally unknowable.

The presence or absence of just a single word, it turns out, can sometimes mean a whole lot.