Last time, in this series, I left three questions hanging:
Should we - can we, even - re-industrialize in the West? Is it practical or just nostalgic wishful thinking?
What’s this stuff about the Market-State and what does it mean for the Customer-Supplier Interface?
What is the relationship of all this, if any, with military strategy and warfare?
To be honest, when I started this thread it looked clearer to me than it now does. The writing process forced me to test various ideas and assumptions and, as a consequence, I have come to the conclusion that the issue of The Customer as Enemy requires us to consider some very, very basic considerations of human existence. Let’s start with what is perhaps the most basic of them all.
Struggle for Existence
Fundamentally, life is a never-ending battle for survival against different and ever-changing geological, geographical and climatic conditions (plus, for humans, add political and social conditions), and against other species of all kinds. So, in that sense, warfare is baked into the very fact of our existence. For long periods of time the struggle for existence goes on in the background, so to speak, but on occasion dramatic changes trigger mass extinctions. A consequence of all this is that it is generally estimated that 99.9 per cent of all the species that have ever existed have become extinct.
The sub-head is a chapter title in Charles Darwin’s seminal work, On The Origin Of Species. In it he makes the point:
I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.1
Progeny as a KPI, huh? Well, as we know, homo sapiens has, in the last century and a half, been astonishingly successful in this regard. Up until 1800, the world population never topped one billion. Then, progress in cutting infant mortality and finding new ways to extend adult life changed everything. By 1850, there were about 1.2 billion human beings but that was just a beginning. Thereafter, spectacular lift-off occurred so that, on 15 November 2022, the UN was able to announce that the world population had risen to eight billion.
What enabled this truly astonishing eight-fold increase? It was driven by scientific advances, industrialization and free trade led by the West … and the fact that the West won what Philip Bobbitt, an American legal scholar and political theorist, terms The Long War (1914-1990) of the 20th century2. And these drivers went hand in glove with the constitutional order that we know as the Nation-State.
On The Origin of Species was published in 1859 and you may recall that, in the previous post in this series, I listed the constitutional orders that have governed the West, as identified by Bobbitt, and that he identifies 1861 as the start date of the Nation-State. Which is to say, the two concepts, Evolution through Natural Selection and Nation-State, are coterminous, sharing a common time and constitutional order.
And yet, despite - or, perhaps, because of? - it’s success, just 130 years later, in 1991, the Nation-State was, in Bobbitt’s estimation, replaced by the Market-State. What’s that all about?
The Market-State
Here is Bobbitt’s encapsulation of the Market-State:
In the market-state, the marketplace becomes the economic arena, replacing the factory. In the marketplace, men and women are consumers, not producers (who are probably offshore anyway).3
The West had invested vast quantities of brainpower, musclepower and treasure to gain dominance … then just changed the game-board. Why?
Communications technologies, Bobbitt asserts, played a focal role. And I think he is right, indeed perhaps more right than he thought!
The most critical role played by these technologies … came at the endgame of the Long War. It was the irrefutable comparison between life in the West and in the Soviet bloc, made possible by modern communications, that utterly demoralized the communist leaderships and so alienated their peoples.4
The fact is, of course, Soviet leaders and their people were not the only ones to see the inequalities. The whole world did. And that gave rise to what is surely the largest ever migration of humans, that continues to this day.
Bobbitt used scenario planning to outline what he saw, from the viewpoint of 2002, as the three most likely forms the Market-State might take. Here is just a flavour of each:
The Entrepreneurial Market-State
Local industries unprotected from foreign competition, making them “hardy, agile and attractive to foreign capital.”5
Immigration of high- and low-paid talent
Libertarian - “the conviction that it is the role of society to set individuals free to make their own decisions.”
To survive, enterprises recognize that they need to behave well (e.g with regard to environmental issues) but the role of assessing their performance in these regards moves away from government and more towards NGOs and the media.
The Mercantile Market-State
Government protects national industries and promotes the continuance and success of some of them.
Promotion of indigenous population as workers.
State control - Singapore is a model for this approach.
This model has limitations when it comes to, for example, opening up domestic markets to foreign competition, making bank services more equitable, granting cheaper credit to smaller firms.
The Managerial Market-State
“[T]hree basic elements: free and open markets within a regional trading framework, a government that provides a social safety net and manages a stringent monetary policy, and a socially cohesive society.”6
“The ‘stakeholder company’, a key concept in this model seeks to reflect the priorities of workers, managers, communities, vendors, and environmentalists on something like parity with the interests of shareholders.”7
Inevitably, with the passage of two further decades since these capsules were constructed, we can see some elements that were not available to Bobbitt at the time.
“Come together, right now”
My personal opinion - and I admit to being a social conservative! - is that, had we early enough recognized what was kicking off, it might have been better to propose some programme or other to help the world ‘catch up’ without all of the moving around. A sort of Burkean Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna (‘Make the best of what you have and improve it’) approach. However, it is way past time for that to happen so we have to make the best of things. Anyway, that probably would have had a whiff of colonization about it!
My own idea of what happened goes along these lines …
After the Second World War, people were understandably sick of warfare and destruction. The UN was formed and the idea of world peace appeared to be an accessible goal. (I wrote more about this here.)
One surely inevitable outcome - well, someone was bound to think of it - was the idea of ‘going global’ using business and commerce as a ‘foundational stabilizer’. Business & Commerce is one of very few theoretically uncontentious universal activities that the human race possesses. Niklas Luhmann defined the Economic system as a ‘function system’:
The traditional concept of the nation-state hardly applies to the complexity of the political reality in Europe. The political system also seems to be unable to avoid the “globalizing” effects of functional differentiation. Other systems, such as the economy and science, have already stepped beyond geographical borders. Economic communication is global communication.8
Separate cultures and religions are bound to disagree (i.e. risk engaging in warfare) because they depend upon dogmatic beliefs, but surely everybody can find a way of agreeing on buying and selling stuff? And, lo and behold, in 1973, the World Economic Forum came into being.
I recall reading something in the 1980s - I think it was by Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull - where warfare had been supplanted by sporting contestation. “You hate those bastards over there? Okay, we’ll fix a sports tournament to decide it.”
Indeed, I don’t doubt that there has always been an earnest desire to find a less violent way of resolving disputes than outright warfare - particularly as our powers to destroy have increased to the extent that they threaten the survival of our species. But the fact that there are multiple conflicts going on in the world right now surely points to the difficulty of achieving this goal. Rather, doesn’t the evidence of history point to the fact that armed conflict is hard-wired into human existence?
To sum all of this up, it seems to me that the struggle for existence is a fundamental universal issue and, counter intuitively, killing a lot of people is one of the oldest methods that homo sapiens has continuously used to try to perpetuate itself. But there was this bright idea that the economic system might be deployed as a universal binding mechanism: love, peace, and the fulfilment of Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Come together, right now’. But, in 2024, the outlook is not looking very optimistic.
A civilizational spasm …
There’s something else going on here, too. By the millennium, the West was losing its will to survive. Even before the end of the Long War, Sir Kenneth Clark noted it and made the point that …
[I]t is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.9
Indeed, perhaps the seeds of it all had been sown much earlier. Consider, for example, Joseph Conrad writing at the end of the nineteenth century. Sure, it’s fiction but he’s presumably writing about the world as he saw it:
This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition … Their talk … was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware that these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.10
“The horror! The horror!” so memorably conjured in Heart of Darkness stems from the ivory trade. It’s all different now of course. Except it bloody well isn’t! The West has simply outsourced this issue. Here in the West we are on course for some supposedly virtuous (but, actually, highly questionable) emissions targets, but all we have really done is outsource the dirty work: “Nothing to do with us, guv. Look, our hands are clean.” And, all the while, we blithely ignore the fact that, for example, the mining of lithium ore in Africa is almost totally controlled by China.
To quote just one example, according to the German international media outlet, Deutsche Welle (DW),
Zimbabwe Defence Industries, a military-linked company subject to US and EU sanctions, has been granted a special exemption to export lithium ore to China. The director of the Harare-based Centre for Natural Resource Governance, Farai Maguwu, is appalled by this development.
"Even though they don't own a single lithium mine," he told DW, "they were given an export permit."
Maguwu is pessimistic when asked if lithium mining brings any benefit to Zimbabwe.
"Not at all," he answered. "If anything, this abundance of lithium deposits in the current system of governance is actually a curse to the country."
… and the continuation of war
So, what happens next?
First, can we turn the clock back? No, I do not think that the steps the West has taken are reversible - at least, not in the sense that we could go back to the industrialized status that once we had. That said, some manufacturing may be brought back and increased threats to the security of the West may lead individual countries to reintroduce some manufacture of basic items - for example, steel - within the remnants of Nation-States.
So what about the Customer-Supplier Interface? A Big Idea that supposedly underpins the New Society is Equity - that is, equality of outcome for a range of life stages and functions. This seems to me to be nonsense. Quite apart from the fact that it goes entirely against the grain of human behaviour, it must, if anything, bring down the general level of attainment within a population. It is axiomatically impossible to have Equity and Meritocracy: they draw upon diametrically opposed viewpoints.
The Customer-Supplier Interface is where, consciously or subconsciously, a Customer makes an assessment of the value of a product or service. It is a subjective assessment. For reasons outlined below, that assessment is not improved by making it include extraneous (to the product/service) issues.
And what about Business and Warfare? I do believe that the changes that are happening are disproportionately empowering large enterprises and being seen by them as a go-ahead to preach to people. The fact that some techniques of Hybrid Warfare are being transferred to some marketing situations is, I hope, a short-lived mis-step.
Now, let’s briefly address this dangerous diversion .
On a recent webinar that I attended, a London-based senior marketer with a bank, expressed her lack of comprehension when talking about the feedback from some people in an Asian country who criticized her company for trying to lecture them on how to behave and how to run their lives. “How could they!”, she objected.
So, yes, it does appear that marketing efforts, particularly by large companies, are being devoted to lecturing people and sometimes unequivocally stating that they do not want customers who do not align with their self-defined, self-righteous Righthink.
But this Righthink is already so embedded that it appears in an increasing number of corporate purpose or mission statements. My bête noire, as my regular followers will know, is the instance of outdoor clothing company Patagonia which states as its mission, “We’re in business to save our home planet.”
And it’s not just because I think the application of Righthink in Marketing is fatuous. It is actively dangerous. Vivek Ramaswamy put the point well:
On its face, the idea that corporations shouldn’t just make products and provide services for profit but should also address other social and cultural issues sounds pretty benign. But on deeper inspection, it demands that we blur the lines between out two most fundamental institutions: capitalism and democracy. It demands that companies concern themselves with the moral questions that America is supposed to adjudicate through its democracy - racial justice, gender equality, whether and how to fight climate change. And in doing so, it gives capitalist leaders an outsized role in our democracy.11
Evolution, as we know, experiments all the while, which means that there inevitably are some wrong turns - changes that do not lead to growth and fruitfulness. Business enterprises should be assessed by the extent to which their products and services add growth and fruitfulness (value) to the lives of their customers. They should, of course, behave morally and legally. But, in my opinion, they should not start promoting beliefs and motives that properly belong in the broader Society, which also means they are best advised not to exclude those who may not agree with some point of view or other.
Not least, this will ensure that Business stays in its own lane rather than swerving into the Politics and Society zones - which would also represent a pull-back from the wartime-mimicking propaganda that is increasingly being spewed forth.
Thanks for reading.
Darwin, Charles. On The Origin Of Species (1859)
Bobbitt, Philip. The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002)
Which is to say Evolution and the Nation-State were recognized at the same time - not that they existed solely during that time.
Bobbitt, Philip.
Bobbitt, Philip. Ibid.
Bobbitt, Philip. Ibid.
Bobbitt, Philip. Ibid.
Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained (2006)
Bobbitt, Philip. Ibid.
Clark, Kenneth. Civilisation - a personal view. BBC TV (1969)
Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc. (2021)