Mises’s Human Action stands side by side with Stalin’s Economic Problems in the USSR among great works written by great idiots who nonetheless had an outsized impact on the most cartoonish variations of state ideology. It’s perhaps in these oft overlooked texts that the most pernicious myths and pathologies of today’s discourse took coherent form. As a materialist, I can scoff at their relevancy in describing the material and economic realities that we encounter out in the world, but perhaps there is something yet we can learn from them.
Neither Mises nor Stalin are original thinkers. They are instead the distillation and vulgarization of the handful of great thinkers in their given schools. For Mises, that would be Adam Smith, Carl Menger and Leon Walras; for Stalin it would be Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. To grasp the great insights of Marxism or the Austrian School of economics, you’d be better off reading their forebearers who came before them or much smarter men who preceded them (Althusser and Hayek respectively). But its precisely because of their stunning lack of originality that they are so valuable. It is in unoriginality that we best understand ideology and the associated tropes of human thinking.
It is partly for that reason that I believe a Stalinist-Miseian Synthesis is necessary to understand the future of ideology and human experience under capitalism. Mises, to understand the methods by which commodity relations and markets ethically consider atomized subjects, and Stalin to understand how managers, professionals and the state will attempt to obscure class struggle.
Capitalism, like all systems, has its individualistic and collectivist tendencies. Mises and Stalin may be said to represent the two sides of these tendencies ideologically. Mises, stuck in the seemingly intractable pinnacle of modern collectivism, built with irrational vigor an ethics/science of the atomized individual which was yet to fully form psychologically. Stalin, perhaps speaking in the most historically consequential moments of the 20th century, imagines the socialist end of history, the concrete realization of the final phase of communism. These twin circumstances make these musings extremely pertinent to a post-historical, fully atomized capitalism.
Before we get into the ideological and psychological aspects of these theories we must first cement their status as pure ideology, rather than the scientific theories they claim they are.
In the case of Stalin, this is quite easy. He says very little of theoretical substance, and in some cases openly lies (e.g. with regard to the divide between town and country)[1]. His interpretation of Marx is oft strained in the distinctions he makes between essence and totality of different concepts like mental vs physical labor, which also misses the mark of Marx’s understanding of exploitation.
To be sure, Mises is also shaky with his grasp of the authors he references, especially Marx, but he does so with more philosophical pretense and verbiage. Mises’s philosophy rests intimately on two connected ideas: praxeology and methodological individualism.
Methodological individualism refers generally to using the individual as the beginning point of analysis. On the face it this doesn’t sound too offensive, this, after all, is the basis for experimental economics and psychology, as well as the field of computational economics which employs simulated human agents. But Mises explicitly disputes such approaches. Why? Because empirical human action is too complicated, according to Mises. It is subjected to all manner of distracting historical phenomena, and even the statistical averages which emerge from such empirical phenomena are therefore not universal in nature[2], unlike praxeological categories which are implied by humans taking action in the world. Notably, this is the exact opposite of the premise of equilibrium in classical political economy, which takes the emperical long run average as its object of investigation.
Why then is praxeology, which claims to be a universal science of human action, incapable of being detected in any given empirical examination of history? Because any and every action is capable of being explained via praxeological handwaving, even those which seem on their face completely contradictory. The essence of the theory of praxeology and its insight is essentially the same as that of Economics 101 in its claim that “Economic Profit” is always zero, as this is defined not by the difference between formal cost and price, but by opportunity cost: the profit must be great enough in the long term to compensate capitalists sufficiently that they would undertake the enterprise. The capitalist does what he does because he cannot find a higher profit somewhere else. But unlike Econ 101, praxeology wishes to make this insight even more nebulous and devoid of meaning.
Hence, praxeology claims that any given world state is merely the result of people’s preferences, that if there were a better outcome possible people would have taken it. Even a monarchal, absolutist dictatorship is explainable via praxeology: it is the result of subjects deeming revolt to be worse than subjugation[3].
The reason praxeology is not a science is not merely because of its lack of falsifiability, it is because it shies away from central questions in the very field it proclaims to explain. It shies away from the question of equilibrium, value in the terms classical political economists spoke of it, the rate of profit. Perhaps most ridiculously at all, because of its methodological blinders, it cannot explain any social phenomena on the basis of its own reproduction. Buried in the logic of methodological individualism and praxeology is the idea that not only are individuals the basis for scientific understanding of the social world, but the rationality of these actors is premised on the fact that they must already know the consequences of their actions. That is merely to say, it presumes the reproduction of all actions: nothing is new, the consequences are already anticipated[4].
Precisely because of this, praxeology will never have the explanatory power as a social science as it cannot even remotely come to terms with a society whose reproduction brings about material changes which necessarily bring about actions that cannot normally be anticipated by human actors.
One may be forgiven for thinking that praxeology’s idealism rests in its employment of axioms, but this is only partly true. Every phenomena must occur according to some logic, even if the logic is that of contradiction, as with dialectics, or that of randomness, as with the science quantum mechanics and the movements of gaseous molecules. Perhaps praxeology goes too far in imposing axiomatic categories on human life, but it is at least possible in theory to be able to learn something from such methods.
No, what is the most idealist aspect of praxeology is its exclusion of any material causes in explaining human behavior: material conditions are taken for granted and human reason is necessarily given primacy in order for Mises’s direct connection between rationality and action to take hold. If it is a science of human action it can only explain human action in a perfect vacuum, a utopia where nothing ever changed no matter how much people acted: a world where any given action has the same predictable consequence no matter how many times it is performed. It is forced to be, in sum, a static model.
This is one of the major reasons why Praxeology cannot be accepted as a science, the other is its inherent moral as opposed to scientific understanding of rationality. Mises’s defines reasoning and rationality in such a way that it can be entirely divorced from abstract thought and planning, it is only that thought, however brief, which is the impetus for action which is rational, precisely because of its expression[5]. To Mises, our actions show us what we “really want”. Therefore the result of these actions (in a situation where everyone is free to choose, such as in the market) must be rational by definition. It’s what we wanted all along, even if we say just the opposite.
Zizek would call this kind of action, which operates according to a different logic than our stated goals, an unkown known: the reasoning behind the action is a kind of knowledge which is unknown to us on a higher, more formal level[6]. Zizek makes this distinction to show, contrary to Mises, just how irrational our actions under capitalism are. We all, on an explicit level, know just how exploitative and destructive capitalism is, and yet we still act as if we are voluntary atomistic actors, we go along with it on the most fundamental levels.
What then is rational? Our highest theoretical understanding of our reality, our greatest aspirations? Or the most base actions which maintain the basis for the reproduction of society?
Conveniently, Mises’s big mistake of leaving out any regard to the material nature of this reproduction gives us the answer. The actions cannot be considered rational because they presuppose that their reproduction can be continued ad inifinitum, even as these very actions make that impossible. It is irrational and a categorical error to assume the perfectly reproducible properties of action that praxeology does. In essence, it assumes away the material aspect of material actions.
As Althusser pointed out, Marx’s critique of capitalism in his landmark work Kapital, wasn’t, at its most basic level, a critique of capitalism failing to live up to the ideals of political economy; it was the beginning of a method of critiquing material reality using material reality. Using the very methods of political economy he showed that capitalism’s tendencies would lead to its own undermining.
The use of rationality in Mises, given that it has no objective properties, nor any way to apply it in a logically coherent way to an actually existing society, is deeply unscientific. Once knocked off its shiny throne of scientific pretense, we can treat praxeology as the pure ideology that it really is, and the individual of methodological individualism as a moral rather than scientific subject.
Stalin too maintains the unity of theory and action, but unlike Mises who reserves such unity for the individual, Stalin reserves it for the Communist Party on the basis of its historical mission. Both maintain such unity for the purpose of defending the state ideology of the societies in which they lived. For Mises, the ideology of rational capitalism. For Stalin, the ideology of the rational planned economy.
Mises, of course, is not an anarchist, his defense of capitalism even extends the unity of theory and action to the state. While it does not hold the same privileged place of rationality, he believes that the state faithfully implements the theories of its leaders. His chief compliant about the state, in a very Platonic vein, is that it doesn’t listen to him or his “scientific” theories[7].
Here as well there is surprising agreement between the two, their understanding of scientific laws as they apply to the nature of society are nearly identical. Neither claim to be so bold as to defy such laws, but they claim that such laws can be known by state actors, and that the state can act according to that knowledge to get the results its desires within the limits of those laws.
Unfortunately, neither Mises nor Stalin escaped from the transhistorical force of ideology. Indeed, Mises’s understanding of ideology in Marx’s theory, that it operated on a biological level, was so absurd that it is almost laughable. Contrary to Mises, Marx did not think that self-serving ideology made one’s thought totally wrong or invalid, or that one’s class determined whether one could think scientifically or ideologically. His critique of the ideology of political economy was not that the underlying methods of political economy were wrong (they were right)[8], but that their framework of creating a scientific defense for capitalism introduced their own biases and desires improperly into the theory. By exposing and correcting these hopes for an ethical justification for profit and exploitation, Marx brought political economy to its logical conclusion, rather than totally rejecting it in favor of some yet to be designed “proletarian science”.
Ideology, by introducing these blindspots to our understanding of the world, necessarily creates a break between the unity of theory and action. Marx himself was not free from ideology, and his hopes for the proletariat providing a deep dialectical negation to capital, as well as his admiration for the underlying methods of Ricardo, most likely proved to be handicaps as well as the source of insights.
Theories, when confronted with harsh material reality, often create different actions than originally intended. The IMF rarely ever succeeds in turning states into free-market, low-debt, corruption free havens for capital. Nor did Lenin succeed in creating the liberated society he outlined in The State and Revolution. The connection between ideology and our material reality and our actions is overdetermined, and where theory and practice are in fact aligned it is often the result of an accident of fortune. And they are sometimes overdetermined in the original sense of the word, that is with regard to psychological blindspot produced by ideology.
Given this disjuncture, if the individual and the communist party are not really embodiments of such unity, what kind of subjects are created in the moral fiction created by the two writers?
Mises’s individual and the freedom that Mises advocates for them is the experience and the freedom of Pavlov’s dog. The dog knows what the consequence of its actions are, if he rolls over, he gets a treat, if he does not roll over, he receives nothing, and he acts accordingly. This is the rationality and freedom of action which Mises supports.
Equally important, is the emphasis on the individual in methodological individualism. Though Mises acknowledges that individuals can have any sort of sentimentality and connection to others driving their actions, his emphasis on individual action creates an ethical framework for social actors. Firms and governments should then only be concerned with the atomized individual, any betterment of a community or society must then be assumed to occur only indirectly through these atomized actors.
For Stalin, the communist party would set out the ideology of the working class. It was the party of intellectual leaders of the working class, those who know better about what must be done. The internalization of this ideology was not meant to be an idle acceptance of belief, like Protestant worship, but a further unity of theory and action within the Soviet subject[9]. That is to say, what Stalin demanded, on the basis of the communist party’s historical connection to the working class, was obedience.
These two subjects may, on the face of it, seem very different, but they are actually not mutually exclusive. I would argue, when combined into the same subject they create a picture of the individual not too different from the contemporary individual under capitalism. On the one hand, we are expected to experience freedom only in the choices of commodities laid out for us by capitalist firms and our experience as buyers and as wage workers are as atomized individuals. On the other hand, especially within large firms, discipline and obedience evoke the dictatorship of Stalin. There is an official ideology decided by the higher ups, a set of “shared values” and directives which few are foolish enough to defy.
Elon Musk is perhaps the best embodiment of this synthesis of Mises and Stalin. A CEO billionaire who demands absurd standards of his employees and forces his own ideological fetishes upon them even while pretending to be their friend[10]. It is not just his employees and customers who are atomized individuals, this seems to be how he sees society as a whole. Why else create a company that builds tunnels for only self-driving cars instead of trains[11]? And of course, Musk sees it as his mission to provide consumers the choice of saving the world with his electric cars.
And also like Stalin, Musk has claimed the mantel of socialism and decided that we’ve abolished class distinction. It is of course nothing new to claim that class was abolished with feudalism, bourgeois ideologues have been doing it for centuries. What’s so unique here is the brazenness of both Musk and Stalin in their claims. Just as Musk says we’ve abolished class and even flirts with anarcho-syndicalism, he threatens to punish workers seeking a union by denying them stock options.
Zizek has helped define the neoliberal father/boss as the archetype of our current moment, often placing it adjacent to the paternal figure of Stalin in his lectures. For good reason, I believe. While Stalinism was characterized by uncompromising obedience to the party, as opposed to the emotional manipulation of the neoliberal father, Stalin did well to portray himself as “one of the comrades”. Those workers stuck in the gulag even had to send him birthday cards.
This I think is the future of the neoliberal father, an ideological construct that was only really tenable to the extent employers could actually develop personal relationships with their employees. As consolidation bustles along, precariousness entrenches, and atomization increases, the friend-father-boss will be replaced more and more with the Stalinist Musk.
And this new man will bring more of the cult of personality, the lip service to socialism and the celebration of post-history. To that extent, this new man is nothing new.
But for us down here who have to live in their shadows, those of us who have to suffer through the pretense of Pavlov’s freedom and Stalinist corporate values, our new lives will be that of intensified loneliness and inauthenticity.
If one was to read the whole archive of my essays one might walk away with a strong sense of pessimism. The dystopian future I have outlined is one where the human atom has fully taken hold, where those two twins of loneliness and inauthenticity send us into a deeper spiral of reaction, violence, and suffering. But what I am doing is merely extrapolating current trends into the future. It is this same sort of extrapolation which was behind the concept of the “Garrison State”[12], which extrapolated the total war footing of society in the 40s into the future. This, of course, did not come to pass (even though the Soviet Union still operated under the assumption that it would), but it was still useful from a social science perspective.
It is my expectation and my hope that these trends will at one point be interrupted.
I don’t want to see what the farce of Elon Musk ends up
being.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch05.htm
[2] https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Human%20Action_3.pdf pg 31, 44
[3] https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Human%20Action_3.pdf pg 197
[4] https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Human%20Action_3.pdf pg 23
[5] https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Human%20Action_3.pdf pg 92, 102
[6] https://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm
[7] https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Human%20Action_3.pdf pg 67
[8] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf
[9] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1905/01/01.htm
[10] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/
[11] https://www.inverse.com/article/51912-the-boring-company-why-elon-musk-tunnels-will-only-take-self-driving-cars
[12] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/218693
bunkermundo 