The Bad Faith in the Free Market

195 Pages·2018·1.58 MB·English

by  Peter Bloom

THE BAD
FAITH IN THE
FREE MARKET
The Radical Promise of
Existential Freedom
Peter Bloom
The Bad Faith in the Free Market
Peter Bloom
The Bad Faith in the
Free Market
The Radical Promise of Existential
Freedom
Peter Bloom
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-76501-3 ISBN 978-3-319-76502-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76502-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936141
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Preface
A Preliminary Intervention: Confronting Our
Bad Faith
It has taken less than two decades since the start of the new millennium
for the end of capitalist history to begin. The idea that liberal democracy
would reign supreme and free markets would rule the globe is crumbling
fast. In its place is a popular revolt that filled with both progressive light
and retrogressive shadows. Perhaps the most crucial question of this tran-
sitional era is whether we can once more have the courage to reimagine
our world in theory and practice. Or will we sacrifice the potential to
create a radically new society on the altar of old ideologies or impassioned
desires for destruction for its own sake?
At the heart of these urgent and fundamental questions is whether we
have the courage to move on from a bad faith in the free market. What
though is precisely meant by bad faith? For the famous existentialist
French philosopher Sartre—who coined the term—it stands for more
than simply believing in a false objective truth. It was the maintaining of
this belief despite our knowledge that it was indeed not worthy of such
idolatry (as nothing in fact is). It is a deep and often brushed aside form
of personal and collective self-deception, the embrace of a divine force to
direct our lives even after it has become all too readily apparent that this
v
vi Preface
God does not exist. It is a bad faith in that it is a continual rejection of
the faith in our freedom to choose the existence we desire, a forsaking of
our agency to transform our reality.
In the present era, there is the danger of our intensifying our faith in a
free market system that clearly does not deserve it. Despite decades of
experts publicly extolling its objectivity and inevitability, the 2008 near
global meltdown represented a profound existential crisis for capitalism.
It supposed inherent meaning, its infallible reflection of human nature,
was in an almost an instant torn asunder and revealed to be hollow. The
market emperor was shown firmly and finally to be wearing no clothes.
And yet our belief in it persists for so many, our embrace of austerity as a
cure-all ticket to economic recovery, our faith that with just a few tweaks
we could hold at bay our looming economic and social catastrophe.
This book is not a naïve call for us to merely stop believing in capital-
ism—as if the abstract rejection of the free market would be enough to
concretely give birth to a different and better society. By contrast, it is to
highlight the importance of recapturing our existential freedom to shape
our historical destiny. It asks why we continue to take the free market or
any system so “seriously”. In the words of Sartre (1956: 627), we must
repudiate the spirit of seriousness. The spirit of seriousness has two charac-
teristics: it considers values as transcendent givens independent of human
subjectivity, and it transfers the quality of “desirable” from the ontological
structure of things to their simple material constitution.
Instead of searching desperately for a permanent and universal truth,
rather than looking upwards for a God to save us, we should bask in our
freedom to create, to experiment, to explore the vast possibilities of our
individual and shared existences.
Milton Keynes, UK Peter Bloom
Contents
1 The Bad Faith in the Free Market: The Need for 
Existential Freedom 1
2 B reaking Free from the Free Market: The Existential
Gap of Freedom 19
3 C apitalism’s Existential Crisis: Producing
Existential Freedom 41
4 T he Facticities of Neoliberalism: Demanding
Existential Freedom 65
5 Capitalist Being and Nothingness: Enjoying
Existential Freedom 91
6 S ubjected to the Free Market: The Subject of 
Existential Freedom 117
vii
viii Contents
7 Deconstructing the Free Market: The Spectre of 
Existential Freedom 145
8 Reinvesting in Good Faith: The Radical Promise
of Existential Freedom 171
Index 187
1
The Bad Faith in the Free Market:
The Need for Existential Freedom
It seems impossible to even conceive of a non-capitalist society. As the
social philosopher Jameson (2003: 76) famously declares, “it is easier to
imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Yet
the complete assumption of freedom as exclusively linked to capitalism is
being increasingly challenged. The 2008 financial crisis once again
brought into sharp relief the limits of market freedom. The dream of
meritocracy mixed with personal liberty had turned into a present-day
nightmare of rising inequality, economic insecurity, debt bondage, and
mass downward mobility. It also raised renewed questions of whether the
free market specifically and capitalism generally can provide for a fulfill-
ing personal and social existence.
Emerging from these challenges were fundamental existential con-
cerns. Notably, if the promise of the free market was hollow, then was
freedom even possible? Was this truly the “end of history”—a once opti-
mistic claim about capitalism and liberal democracy that had turned into
a resigned lament? To this end, the social liberty and personal aspirational
impulses previously central to the legitimization of neoliberalism has
transformed into an acceptance over its supposed inevitability and deeper
almost divine truths about human nature and its possible future. Hence,
in place of freedom, free marketers have offered the solace of religion.
© The Author(s) 2018 1
P. Bloom, The Bad Faith in the Free Market,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76502-0_1
2 P. Bloom
There was, of course, always an element of the objective and natural
about capitalism. It represented human nature at its most pure and essen-
tial. It was based on objective economic laws that defied any and all
attempts at human control. Yet as the actual rationale for modern capital-
ism began to falter, its reasonableness weakening in light of actual evidence,
the current free market ideology of neoliberalism became increasingly
supernatural. It now demanded dogmatic belief from its human followers.
Required was an inviolable religious faith in the free market orthodoxy.
A crucial question of our time then is whether we can give up our bad
faith in the free market. The degree to which individually and collectively
we can dramatically reimagine the meaning and practice of freedom. If
we no longer accept that capitalism represents the limit of social possibil-
ity, can we wake up from our dogmatic capitalist slumber to embrace and
explore new potentialities for our personal and shared existence?
Aim of the Book
This book boldly reconsiders the free market. Innovatively combining
existentialist philosophy with cutting-edge post-structuralist and psycho-
analytic perspectives, it argues that present-day capitalism has robbed us
of our individual and collective ability to imagine and implement alter-
native and more progressive economic and social systems. To this effect,
it has deprived us of our radical freedom to choose how we live and what
we can become. In place of this deeper liberty, the free market offers sub-
jects the opportunity to continually reinvest their personal and shared
hopes in its dogmatic ideology and policies. This embrace helps to tem-
porary alleviate rising feelings of anxiety and insecurity at the expense of
our fundamental human agency. This work exposes our present-day bad
faith in the free market and how we can break free from it.
Challenging Freedom
This work attempts to move beyond the existing social limits of market
freedom. The goal, in this respect, is to show the concrete limitations and
ideological narrowness of currently dominant understandings of liberty