But in the real world, the constraint the market imposes on you is that you can’t spend more today than the money available to you today. Which, in the most extreme form, means that the income you’ve collected in the past is the hard limit on how much you can spend today. That’s the ultimate form of market discipline and, in that sense, the whole function of finance is to remove that discipline — to allow spending today based on future income that hasn’t yet been received, and may not be received.

In a fundamental sense, the reason we have finance is to allow money-losing enterprises to operate. The money-losing enterprises are the ones whose current activities don’t fully pay for themselves, which is why they need to raise finances in the first place. That’s what it means, in a cash-flow sense, to be carrying out investment: you’re carrying out activities which, in the current period, don’t pay for themselves. You believe, you hope, that they will pay for themselves in the future, but at the moment they don’t.

The purpose of finance is to allow that to happen, to allow people’s beliefs and hopes about the future to take precedence over the actual results that have been achieved in the present. But then, on the other hand, the judgment of finance is supposed to be enforcing market discipline, even on actors who otherwise might not be subject to it — like states, and, potentially, large corporations whose existing profits are already more than they need to maintain themselves and achieve their desired level of growth.

[...] if you can’t conceive of social life organized in any terms except commodities, if you can’t conceive of any right that isn’t a property right, if you can’t conceive of any sort of goal or organizing principle of collective productive activity except maximizing profit or some kind of stand-in for profit, then the term neoliberalism isn’t going to make much sense to you. Because the extension of market logic can’t be parsed by someone with a worldview where everything is already organized as markets or might as well be.

I suppose you could say that neoliberalism is broader than financialization in the sense that the growth of finance is about enforcement of market logic on other domains of human activity. But it’s not the only instrument for that. You can imagine and you can point to other methods of enforcing that logic that don’t really consist of anything you would call financial institutions or the development of financial markets or anything like that.

Today, the dominant discourse governing discussion of markets, states, and companies is neoliberalism, and Mackey’s free-market business model and historical narrative fit neatly within this framework. In this vision, the economic sphere is “an autonomous, self-adjusting, and self-regulated system that [can] achieve a natural equilibrium spontaneously and produce increased wealth.”

But the free-market historical narrative lacks empirical weight. As economic historian Karl Polanyi argued decades ago, capitalist markets are a product of state engineering, not nature.

The history of industrial development in the United States, often considered the epicenter of free markets, demonstrates the political nature of markets. The history of market formation in the United States reveals an industrial structure supplied by goods and capital extracted from slave labor and facilitated through a state-sponsored, genocidal land grab.

Far-reaching government legislation protected domestic markets and infant industries from external competition, and federal and state governments played a central role in the development of physical infrastructure (canals, railways, telegraphy) and the creation of huge bodies of agricultural and industrial knowledge — all essential elements in the genesis of American industrial capitalism.

At the same time, society’s greatest inventions and innovations of the past two hundred years — rockets to the moon, penicillin, computers, the Internet — were not bestowed upon us by lone entrepreneurs and firms operating in free markets under conditions of healthy competition. They were the work of institutions: CERN and the Department of Defense created the Internet, while Bell Labs — a subdivision of AT&T, freed from market competition by federally granted monopoly rights — generated transistors, radar, information theory, “quality control,” and dozens of other innovations central to our epoch.

Designating the market as natural and the state as unnatural is a convenient fiction for those wedded to the status quo. It makes the current distribution of power, wealth, and resources seem natural and thus inevitable and uncontestable.

But of course this isn’t true. States shape, sustain, and often create, markets, including neoliberal markets. The complexion of those markets depends on the balance of class forces at any given point in time. Capitalist markets, and the inequality and degradation they engender, are a political creation not a product of nature. Nature and society (and states and markets) are inseparable — simultaneously produced by humans through ideological, political, and economic processes.

Understanding this enables us to challenge the dominant idea of natural, free markets and the emancipatory potential of the firm promised by Mackey.

It is, then, increasingly clear that Facebook is far from a neutral space in which users’ timelines are organically shaped by their networked interactions. Facebook is a publisher; it’s just a giant monopolistic one, driven at base by market incentives. As Zeynep Tufekci puts it, at its core, the tech giant’s “business is mundane: They’re ad brokers.” Indeed, as liberals focus the debate on user privacy and data harvesting they obscure the capitalist logics driving these practices, and what the alternatives might look like when data and global connectivity are free from private control.

It is spurious to respond to legitimate criticisms of Facebook by saying we can simply opt out if we don’t like it, or, like the Adam Smith Institute claims, that what Corbyn is saying amounts to a call to waste public money on building a “knockoff” alternative. Precisely Facebook’s biggest strength (also for users) is its critical mass; we use it because “everyone” is there and because we don’t want to — and in some cases, can’t afford to – “miss out.” Facebook functions as a public utility by sharing a mass of information and connecting as many users as possible. Its critical mass makes it a natural monopoly and that alone is bound to undermine users’ freedom of choice. But far from it thereby simply serving a public interest, it is governed by a business model centered on advertising, decisive to everything we see and do on the platform. [...]

[...] when the logic of capitalist competition is applied to media, public alternatives will struggle in an aggressive market for popular attention. Alternatives to Facebook already exist, but none have achieved the critical mass to make them viable. Even if Zuckerberg’s monopoly is broken up, the capitalist incentives driving the media environment could sustain Facebook, or platforms like it, indefinitely by constantly revolutionizing the means of addiction. It seems that without tackling these incentives head-on, the effect could be to create a tiered internet, with a healthier public sphere for some while leaving the most vulnerable to suffer the most pernicious effects of an online obsession.

Going further than Corbyn’s own proposals, for some the answer is to nationalize Facebook. Yet the resources of a tech giant — mainly data and active users — are not like a coal mine fixed in some specific territory; they are transferable. That’s why liberating the ideal of online connectivity and the power of big data demands that we kill off Facebook’s business model and ensure it is replaced by something better. To that end, we can suggest another policy that would instantly undermine the commodification wrought by the giant platforms, and level the playing field for alternatives: to ban online advertising, whether commercial or political.

Such a policy of seems a long way off, for now. Yet as with any reform that reclaims human activity from the control of markets, it raises a timeless political question — in this case, who controls access to information. By banning advertising, Facebook’s business model would cease to exist. Out of the picture, the media giant could be replaced by a publicly funded platform. [...] how could this happen on a national scale without an enormous, and likely both unpopular and unenforceable, national firewall?

Jeremy Corbyn’s Edinburgh speech provides some of the answers. A Facebook after capitalism could combine an open-sourced approach with democratic oversight. Like Wikipedia, networked technology can allow an alternative platform to be a collective endeavor, whether in terms of the coding itself, producing and regulating its content, and participating in its governance. However, it would be naive to swallow the Silicon Valley dream wholesale; algorithms shaped in an entirely open way are vulnerable to manipulation, as when Microsoft invented a Twitter bot that became a white supremacist in less than a day.

In The New Spirit of Capitalism, social theorists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have argued that in the world after the protests in Paris in 1968 (and the countercultural revolution of the sixties more broadly), capitalism’s growth has become predatory. It preys on the people, ideas, things, and movements that are in direct opposition to it.

By mobilizing the creative industries of advertising, branding, and public relations, contemporary capitalism actively seeks out those who are opposed to it and offers them fame and fortune. In essence, capitalism stabilizes those movements, people, and ideas that are “outside” it by naming them. It brings them into the “mainstream” and the broader public consciousness.

But this kind of branding exercise is a perfect example of how capitalism transforms its opponents into its promoters. Drawing on an advertising and technology industry that scours the social world for images, movements, and experiences yet to be commercialized, capitalism’s “creative” edge leaches any semblance that these could be utilized to create alternative social worlds. Any movement (be it a countercultural group, protest movement, meme, or activist ideology) that is looking to destabilize capitalism is viewed as a potential market to exploit.

Hence, capitalism’s “creative” power does not create — it appropriates.

It offers dissenting voices financial incentives, recognition, or even simply a rest from the emotional and physical exhaustion of constantly fighting. But in doing so, those anti-capitalists stop destabilizing capitalism: instead, they become fertile grounds to harvest more profit.

Capitalism is an effervescent elixir. People clamor to catch a lift upward on the latest bubble even though deep down, most know there is only air beneath them. Stocks, tech valuations, real-estate speculation — it’s not the stuff of the economy that really matters, but rather, the timely exit from each overvalued market. A few people win, most lose, and the victors tend to be those already advantaged by their class position. Nevertheless, we suppress that knowledge, because facing the truth is too painful. It’s nice to have something to hope, and to work, for.

[...] there might be an alternate ending to this story. Recently, twenty thousand Google workers around the world walked off the job for a few hours. Spurred by anger at the multimillion-dollar payouts given to high-level executives accused of sexual harassment, the global organizing effort came together in under a week. Some of the San Francisco contingent expressed solidarity with the city’s striking Marriott workers, a marked disavowal of the industry’s typical hyper-individualism. If tech workers keep traveling down this road, and manage to elicit class consciousness in America’s white-collar professionals — a cause long thought to be hopeless — now that would be a true innovation.