Moral conservatism–capitalism

Moral conservatism–capitalism names a contradiction in which moral conservatives condemn the permissive consumer culture of capitalist society while supporting the economic order that continually generates new consumer demand. The critique is not simply that conservatives fail to notice a cultural problem: it is that, by treating that problem as an external moral threat, they obscure its place within the capitalist system they defend.

The Contradiction Between Moral and Economic Positions

Moral conservatives oppose what they see as the dissolute permissiveness of liberal culture, yet their economic commitments support the unrestrained capitalism that helps produce it. The result, in the book’s Hegelian formulation, is a struggle against the obverse of one’s own position: the cultural enemy appears external, although the economic order embraced by the conservative helps sustain that enemy.

This contradiction becomes difficult to see when cultural decay is treated as a self-contained moral problem. The argument instead connects the consumer demand for supposedly degraded entertainment to capitalism’s need to expand reproduction by creating newer demands. A moral campaign against consumerist decadence therefore confronts a tendency generated by the economic system its proponents support.

Robert Bork and the Displacement of Cause

Robert Bork’s account of the market for depravity makes the displacement especially clear. He acknowledges that entertainment companies do not impose such material on an unwilling public: there is demand for it, and that demand does not absolve those who supply it. But he locates the underlying fault in human nature, which, without strong external restraints, tends toward depravity and requires control and censorship.

The book identifies this move as an ideological short circuit. By explaining the demand through human nature, Bork avoids treating the capitalist economy’s own expansionary logic as a cause. His proposed remedy consequently targets permissiveness and the people who consume or supply cultural material, rather than the economic dynamic that continually stimulates new demand. The moral diagnosis and the economic allegiance remain side by side without being reconciled.

Capitalism Beyond the Opposition of Production and Consumption

The critique draws on a broader account of capitalist value and exchange. In the reading of Karl Marx developed through Kojin Karatani, value cannot be assigned exclusively to production as its substantial truth, nor reduced to the relations of circulation alone. Marx’s account holds these perspectives together as a parallax: value originates outside circulation, in production, and also takes form in circulation.

That distinction matters here because it resists treating consumer culture as a detachable surface that could simply be corrected while leaving the economy beneath it untouched. The commodity’s social form is not a mere disguise over an independent essence; the form itself is essential. A product becomes a commodity through its relation to other commodities, and money serves as the general equivalent because it occupies that structural position, not because its material substance naturally makes it money. Capitalist consumption and production thus belong to a connected process, rather than to a moralized opposition between corrupting appearances and an innocent economic core.

The same analysis rejects the comforting separation of speculative finance from a supposedly substantial productive economy. The productive process can function as a detour within money’s self-expansion, while speculative profit also sustains the drive to revolutionize and expand production. On this account, the demand that moral conservatives denounce cannot be cleanly assigned to an alien cultural sphere while capitalist economic activity is treated as morally neutral.

The Historical Irony of the Culture War

The tension also appears in the history of opposition to Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The forces that overthrew those regimes included youth culture, intellectuals of the 1960s generation, and laboring classes that still favored Solidarity over individualism. This coalition complicates the Cold Warriors’ moral crusade: opposition to Communist rule did not simply express the conservative values invoked against it.

Bork’s reaction to Michael Jackson’s performance at the Super Bowl sharpens the irony. A fellow panelist pointed out that desire for such manifestations of American culture had helped bring down the Berlin Wall; Bork replied that this seemed an argument for restoring it. He recognized the awkward implication but, in the book’s account, missed its deeper force: the consumer culture he deplored could also serve as an attraction of the political order whose victory he otherwise welcomed.

Political Significance

The relation is therefore more than an inconsistency in personal opinion. It shows how a moral critique can identify real disquiet about consumer culture while misrecognizing the economic conditions that organize it. By blaming human nature and seeking stronger restraint, moral conservatism turns a structural contradiction into a problem of individual appetite and censorship.

The book’s analysis does not erase the difference between the moral positions held in cultural disputes and the economic system that shapes demand. Instead, it insists that the two cannot be separated without distortion. The conservative campaign against liberal permissiveness is directed at an apparent external enemy, but its economic commitments tie it to the capitalist order whose expansion helps reproduce the culture it condemns.