- Introduction by Betty Reardon
- Table of Contents
- Detailed Table of Contents
by Howard Richards
7. Post-Marxist
(Post-Structuralist) Theories
"Post--structuralist" is a name for a subset of the
"postmodern."
Although it does not capture the full range of meaning of
that amorphous and ubiquitous term, I adopt Jean-Francois Lyotard's definition
of the "postmodern" as "incredulity toward metanarratives." "Metanarrative"
names something which all postmodern writers, and therefore all
post-structuralist writers, do not believe.
The "meta" in "metanarrative" is a synonym for "grand,"
"global," "big" or "comprehensive." The writers in question might, then, believe
petite, local, small, or partial narratives. There is here an important
presupposition. It is that if they were going to believe anything, it would be a
narrative (a story) of some size. (They would not, however, necessarily
characterize what they were doing as "believing;" they would indeed be more
likely to characterize it as "taking a position.") For the thinkers in question
it has been several decades since the time when social science was about testing
hypotheses, models, or theories by assembling data (data = "the given." It is
derived from the Latin dare, to give.) The context of incredulity toward
metanarratives is already an intellectual climate where discourse is no longer
transparent.
Within postmodernism, people who call themselves, or are
called by others "poststructuralists" are people who, if they had not embraced
postmodern incredulity, would have structuralists. They work in a tradition
where the voice of the 20th century French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser,
and the voice of Michel Foucault, are never silent.
Within the class so designated, and not counting works which
make important methodological points but do not bear directly on trade theory, I
have only two books about the global economy to discuss: Encountering
Development by Arturo Escobar, and The End of Capitalism by J. K.
Gibson-Graham (the pen name of Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson).
7a. The
Disintegration of Social Science
Richard Wolff spoke for many when he wrote:
"The word `explain' is just too implicated in essentialist
thought. It connotes fullness, completeness, fixity, closure, and the image of a
statement about an object of interest that is not contradictory, particular, and
evanescent. It should be displaced in favor of `intervention,' `position,' or
`story.'" (Wolff qualifies his own position with nuances that I will not discuss
here.)
A few pages earlier in the same article Wolff (interpreting
Althusser) gave another reason for eschewing what used to be the main aim of
science, explanation in terms of cause and effect:
"That concept [Althusser's concept of history as a dense
network of overdeterminations, a process without a subject] holds that every
aspect of history --an individual, an event, a social movement, and so on-- is
constituted by all the other aspects of the social and natural totality within
which it occurs. It has its existence (and each specific quality of that
existence) only insofar as it is overdetermined in and through (constituted by)
the relations that bind it to them all. The logic of overdetermined
constitutivity displaces that of causes and their effects." (p. 153)
Anti-essentialism and overdetermination. These two key words
name reasons why post-structuralist writers deliberately do not offer
explanations.
Wolff lists some motives that inspire
anti-essentialism.
"Many of the contributors to anti-essentialism, including
Althusser, rejected the sorts of essentialist thinking that they associated with
existing social conditions, capitalist and other exploitative class structures,
racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. to which they were deeply opposed." They saw
capitalism and the patriarchal family as strengthened by essentialist claims
that capitalism alone conformed to human nature; or that market incentives alone
could make the economy work; or that the patriarchal family alone could produce
mentally healthy children.
With evils so many and so great attributed to essentialism,
and such great hopes for liberation from oppression pinned on anti-essentialism,
it is no wonder that many social scientists want anti-essentialism to be true.
The anti-essentialists are, like all the economists considered in these pages,
on the side of the angels.
"Essence," that which anti-essentialists do not believe in,
is defined in standard dictionaries as, "that which makes a thing what it is."
It is derived from the Latin esse, to be. Its current and philosophical meanings
can be traced to esse and to ousia, a Greek word for "substance"
or "being" that was the principal term Aristotle sought to define in his
Metaphysics. Essentialist claims are sometimes called universalist
claims, because if there is some essence that a thing essentially is, then it is
that essence always and everywhere.
Richard Wolff's discussion of the proposal that social
scientists stop using the words "explain," "cause," and "cause and effect,"
because they are too closely tied to essentialism, lists some connotations of
"essence" that anti-essentialists find false and undesirable: fullness,
completeness, fixity, closure. "Essence" is also accused of obscuring what
anti-essentialist writers do want to bring to their readers' attention: the
contradictory, the particular, the evanescent.
Whether it is really the case that philosophers and
scientists necessarily fall into error when they employ the term "essence" (and
related terms like "substance," "reality," "cause," "explains," and "cause and
effect") has been debated for several thousand years. Circa 500 BC. Heraclitus
succinctly stated an intellectual case for anti-essentialism: panta rei, "all is
flux." It is old news that language itself, by its very nature and structure,
impels humans to speak and write as if the world and their experience were more
full, complete, fixed, and closed than they really are; and as if the world and
experience were less contradictory, particular, and evanescent than they really
are.
Nevertheless, through the centuries, the realists (defined
here as people who make the sorts of conceptual moves that anti- essentialists
call "essentialism" and hold to be mistaken) have held up their ends of the
debates --from Plato and Aristotle down to Carl Jung and his followers, Willard
van orman Quine, Marie Mies (cited above), Fredric Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Mario
Bunge, and Rom Harre. The general trend among anti-essentialists (e.g. Jacques
Derrida) is to attribute to essentialists a view that is not plausible (in
Derrida's case, in his Grammatology, a "metaphysics of presence") and then to
deconstruct it. People who still advance philosophies of science where
"explanation" and "cause and effect" play important roles; or who still talk
about "nature" or "the real" as something that social constructions of culture
ought to take into account and adjust to, generally do not call themselves
"essentialists." They are more likely to call themselves "critical realists,"
"materialists," "deep ecologists," or advocates of a "naturalized epistemology."
Without adopting the "essentialist" label as a self-description, they
nevertheless hold views incompatible with a radical anti- essentialism -- but
their "essentialisms" are more plausible than the "essentialisms" that
anti-essentialists identify as their targets. Such more plausible views include,
for example, Rom Harre's view that things have causal powers; the use by Fredric
Jameson and others of Spinoza's idea of an "absent cause" which is at work in
history even though in the nature of things human reason cannot fully grasp it;
and Jacques Lacan's philosophy of psychoanalysis in which in addition to the
Symbolic and the Imaginary, there is also a Real which resists symbolization
absolutely. I think it is fair to say that neither Jacques Derrida nor Michel
Foucault nor any other recent anti-essentialist has come up with any new and
decisive argument, which proves that after all these centuries the contemporary
heirs of the nominalists and skeptics have decisively won, while the
contemporary heirs of the ancient and medieval realists have decisively lost.
Anti- essentialists have indeed shown that there is no Truth with a capital T;
and they have indeed shown in great detail that hidden (not obvious) platonic
unities, hidden ideologies, and hidden machinations of power have often deluded
people by making them think that socially constructed realities were natural
realities. But they have not advanced decisive arguments for the proposition
that all reality is socially constructed reality. On the contrary, in academic
epistemology, critical realism has not lost ground in recent decades; if
anything, it has gained ground.
(This is not to say that mechanical, Cartesian, Newtonian,
or statistical versions of cause and effect reasoning have gained ground.
Indeed, advocates of realism, myself included, are generally allies of the
anti-essentialists when it comes to criticizing the excessive, often
surreptitious, use of mechanical root metaphors.)
I conclude that anti-essentialism, in the strong form in
which it requires abandoning scientific explanation as a goal of social science,
is not for the contemporary social scientist an obligatory epistemological
stance. The rejection of "causal models" of any and all kinds is not a rejection
imposed by virtue of the outcomes of scholarly debates in which essentialism has
been refuted, deconstructed in such a way as to be shown to be without merit or
groundless, or unmasked as an ideological distortion of reality. Radical
anti-essentialism is a political strategy. Some aspects of its merits as a
political strategy will be considered in 7b and 7c below. Now I will turn to a
second key argument in favor of deleting talk of "causes" from social science,
the argument that social effects are "overdetermined."
The idea of overdetermination comes from Sigmund Freud. He
introduced it to denote a confluence of subconscious representations. The
representations condense in a single dream image (or in a neurotic symptom)
governed by an emotion. The leading instance of the use of the term is Freud's
analysis of his own dream known as "Irma's Injection," which he dreamed the
night of July 23-24, 1895. Irma in the dream was a representation of herself, a
patient who had frustrated Freud by refusing to accept his analysis of the
causes of her hysteria. The same dream image, Irma, also represented another
woman who had not been Freud's patient, whom Freud had wanted to come to him for
treatment, whom Freud supposed would have been more cooperative, more willing to
accept his analysis. The same Irma (I am referring to the elaborated image,
which includes, at one point, her appearing to have false teeth, at another her
appearing pale and puffy .....) represents yet a third woman, and, collectively,
children at a children's hospital where Freud had previously been employed. A
Dr. M. In the dream was also both himself and a stand-in for several persons
with whom Freud had interacted in real life. The emotion (Freud called it a
wish-fulfillment) governing the dream was Freud's frustration over his analysis
being rejected in the particular instance of Irma. A triggering incident the day
before the dream reminded him of the rejection and, so to speak, touched the
button that set him off. Frustration over Irma flowed together with frustration
over other failures, and with resentment over being regarded as a quack by
professional colleagues. (What made the dream a wish-fulfillment was that, as
the dream turned out, Freud got support from allies and vindication. Part of the
vindication was that the dumb idea of giving Irma a thoughtless injection with a
dirty syringe was someone else's mistake, not Freud's.)
It was Louis Althusser, in his essay "Contradiction and
Overdetermination" who "borrowed" the idea of overdetermination in order to
explain --or rather, to decline to explain-- historical events.
The reason why I wrote, "or rather, to decline to explain,"
is this: The paradigmatic Enlightenment notion of explanation, which
postmodernists are concerned to deconstruct, is a Newtonian one: A causes B as
cause to effect is a mechanical relationship in which the impact of force A
produces phenomenon B. As applied to international trade theory and economics
generally, this paradigm suggests that the aggregate of self-interested acts of
economic actors will produce predictable results. As applied to Marxist
economics, this paradigm suggests that accumulation will lead to
revolution.
The historical event in question in "Contradiction and
Overdetermination" is the Russian Revolution of October, 1917. When he borrowed
the idea of overdetermination from Freud, Althusser declined to explain the
revolution in the paradigmatic Newtonian sense of "explain." The coming of the
revolution was not determined by the economy, not even in the last instance. It
was not determined, either, by any quasi-machine analogous to an economy. It was
"overdetermined."
It is important to acknowledge that neither Althusser nor
anyone else needs the concept of overdetermination to make the point that for
any social phenomenon there are many factors that contribute to causing it.
Mainstream social science research (which predominates even today, even while
debates about postmodernism preoccupy the avant-garde) uses statistical
regression analysis to quantify the many factors found to be associated with the
phenomenon under study. For example, a study of violent acts committed by
children might find:
15% of the variance explained by children seeing violence on
television. 25% of the variance explained by learning violence from parents at
home. 5% explained by learning violence from video games. 10% by learning
stereotyped gender roles and machismo. 45% "error variance" not explained yet,
although presumably further research would show what the rest of the explanation
is.
That in reality there are many factors (also known as
"variables," or "forces") at work, and that sophisticated mathematical
techniques may be needed to sort them out, is not a proposition that requires
dissent from the metaphysics of the Enlightenment. Complexity in itself does not
require any abandonment of the sorts of explanations that rationalists and
empiricists have been refining, amending, affirming, and denying for the last
several centuries. (Indeed, Freud himself probably did not intend to abandon the
Newtonian paradigm --even though, as Jacques Lacan has shown, he
did.)
I think I have already shown in previous pages that although
complexity does not require abandonment of Enlightenment metaphysics (i.e. of
economic metaphysics), an appreciation of the fundamental roles that ethical
premises play in economic explanations does. I will not belabor the point here.
My question here is, rather, why Althusser, having decided, for whatever reason,
that economics (which is part and parcel of Enlightenment metaphysics) does not
determine the course of history, did not choose to revert to the older
metaphysical traditions of the West, to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas ..... Hegel,
in which, in one form or another, human action is characterized by deliberate
choice in an ethical context. Acts embody concepts. Ideas do things.
Althusser chose, instead, to borrow the idea of
overdetermination from Freud.
Althusser answers my question: "Je ne tiens pas
expressement a ce terme de surdetermination (emprunte a d'autres disciplines),
mais je l'emploie faute de mieux a la fois comme un indice et un probleme, et
aussi parce qu'il permet assez bien de voir pourquoi nous avons affaire de toute
autre chose que la contradiction hegelienne."
I believe that a fair reading of Althusser's essay, and of
his work as a whole, will show that he desired to serve the cause of Marxism,
and therefore of materialism, by extirpating idealism. When Marx praised the
"rational kernel" in Hegel, he was not to be understood, according to Althusser,
as endorsing any sort of dialectic in which ideals function as causes in
history.
Those of us who do think that ideals function as causes in
history can see, in this light, why Althusser does not agree with us. We can
also see why Freud's concept of overdetermination served Althusser's
purpose.
"Overdetermination" does not function at the level of
consciously chosen human ideals. It does not function at the level of
cultivation of agreements, and of cooperative action, in public social space. It
does not function at the level of the ego, the integrating element of the
personality. It functions at night, in the rapid-eye-movement periods of sleep,
when the emotions assemble images. Extended to history, faute de mieux,
as the index of a problem in the social sciences, overdetermination is a
confession that we really do not know why history happens as it does. It is also
a profession that whatever the course of history may be, we should remain loyal
to materialism, and we should reject the ancient metaphysical
hierarchies.
7b. Escobar's
Ethics
"The global economy must thus be understood as a decentered
system with manifold apparatuses of capture --symbolic, economic, and political.
It matters to investigate the particular ways in which each local group
participates in this complex machinelike process, and how it can avoid the most
exploitative mechanisms of capture of the capitalist megamachines." Escobar
calls his perspective "poststructuralist."
Escobar's excellent book can be thought of as proceeding at
three levels.
At the ground level, Escobar gives an account of particular
programs and projects carried out by development professionals in the third
world; especially in his own country, Colombia; and within Colombia especially
the anti-hunger programs; and among the anti-hunger programs especially one
called Integrated Rural Development (Desarrollo Rural Integral,
DRI).
At the global level, programs like DRI are placed in the
context of development discourse. Development discourse was called into being by
the challenges faced by the United States after World War II. It was created by
a few senior government officials, academics, and bankers, all of whom were
white, male, and from the first world. They were almost all economists. Backed
by the power of the World Bank and allied institutions, development discourse
became a required language that the third world had to learn.
At a philosophical level, Escobar treats development
discourse as knowledge that is power, and as power that takes the form of
knowledge. He calls for a reformed social science in which a reformed
poststructuralist anthropology rather than economics would set the tone. But the
leading role of the new anthropology does not consist of creating an alternative
theoretical hegemony, which would vie to replace development discourse in
particular or economics in general. "To think about alternatives in the manner
of sustainable development, for instance, is to remain within the same model of
thought that produced development and kept it in place. One must then resist the
desire to formulate alternatives at an abstract, macro level; one must also
resist the idea that the formulation of alternatives will take place in
intellectual and academic circles, without meaning by this that academic
knowledge has no role in the politics of alternative thinking."
I believe that Escobar's choices at the philosophical level
respond to his desire to make a useful contribution toward alleviating the
enormous and endless human suffering endured at the ground level. Escobar's
posteconomic deconstruction of "development" is, like postmodernism generally,
an epistemology motivated by an ethics.
The earliest of Escobar's ground-level Colombian development
stories is about rice. Early in the 20th century, the Colombian elite realized
that in order to compete in the international market it would have to exploit,
as its comparative advantage, access to cheap labor. The people who were going
to be the cheap labor force to whom the entrepreneurial elite and their
financial backers would have access had to move from the countryside to the
sites of industry, and, once there, they needed cheap food. Without cheap food
they could not survive on low wages. The government pioneered and protected the
rice agribusiness because it had the potential to produce high calorie food for
the workers at low unit cost.
Why are we not surprised? I will answer this question myself
instead of paraphrasing Escobar, but I do not think I will say anything Escobar
would deny, or anything he is not aware of. First, we are not surprised because
the Colombian rice story is similar to many stories we have heard before. It
repeats with variations an oft-told tale, classically stated in the early in
19th century in Ricardo's argument that the British corn laws should be repealed
in order to decrease the price of food, and thus cheapen labor, and thus
increase profits. (In the Colombian case a tariff was imposed, to protect rice
agribusiness to get it started; in the British case a tariff was repealed; what
makes them variations of the same story is that food policy was a function of
the profit imperative.)
Second, we are not surprised because the basic cultural
(ethical) structure of modern society implies that such things will happen, and
keep happening, again and again. Given, private ownership of the means of
production. Given, that the incentive for production is the expectation of
profit. Given, that profit can only be realized by the sale of the product,
which can most effectively be accomplished, other things being equal, by
bringing the product to market at a price that beats the competition. It follows
that capitalists will seek profits by lowering the costs of production, and that
they will seek them, other things being equal, by lowering labor costs.
Escobar's Colombian rice story, in some form, will be told many
times.
The most up-to-date of Escobar's ground-level stories from
Colombia appears to be the one about the ladies who pack shrimp in the port city
of Tumaco. "The feminization of the labor force in some industries continues,
and it is linked to development schemes; such is the case, for instance, with
women in shrimp packaging plants in the port of Tumaco in Colombia. The vast
majority of women working in these plants come from rural families who have lost
their lands; they now work under precarious conditions."
Why are we not surprised? First, because the feminization of
the labor force, and the feminization of poverty, are a well-known aspect of the
worldwide current trends commonly known as "neo-liberalism," or "flexible
accumulation." These current trends themselves are similar to what Andre Gunder
Frank in the 1960s called "the development of underdevelopment;" which is in
turn similar to accounts of the destruction of African cultures by the slave
trade and by the forced incorporation of Africans into European money economies;
which are similar to histories of the driving of peasants from the land that
Engels called "...the progressive pauperisation of the English countryside;"
which are similar to the descriptions of the enclosure movement in England given
by, among others, Marx in Capital....
Second, we are not surprised because the basic cultural
structures of modern society set the stage for market behavior, and for the
enlargement of markets. Markets, and especially larger markets, imply a drive
toward more cost-effective profit- seeking. There is, for this reason, a
systemic bias in favor of creating classes of workers who can easily be
exploited, and therefore a systemic bias against the modicum of security enjoyed
by small farmers, and indeed against any modicum of security enjoyed by
anybody.
The centerpiece of Escobar's ground level series is a pair
of Colombian programs, PAN and DRI, which flourished in the heyday of
development discourse; during the period after the invention and imposition of
development discourse after World War II; and before today's disillusionment,
which is leading to a decline of classical development discourse and its partial
replacement by new forms of power/knowledge.
PAN was a program for alleviating hunger, to a large extent
by giving away food, although it included other components, such as nutrition
education. A structural trap. Given the basic cultural and ethical structure of
modern society, it could have been predicted that free food would depress food
prices and discourage food production.
PAN's companion program, DRI, proposed to spend public money
(provided by the World Bank and allied institutions) with the principal
objective of increasing food production. This was to be achieved mainly by
introducing more scientifically advanced farming techniques. In the abstract,
the increase in production due to DRI might be imagined as compensating for the
decrease in production due to PAN. In reality, a complex series of political
struggles, structural constraints, economic forces, illusions, and errors
produced some net winners, some net losers, and, overall, no significant
alleviation of hunger in Colombia.
It could have been predicted that in the absence of a major
surge in effective demand for food (i.e. purchasing power) the food supply would
not significantly increase. It could have been predicted that treating food
production as a scientific, physical, problem would result in favoring some
farmers, and in damaging others, without significantly augmenting the total food
supply, and with undesirable environmental and social side- effects. That is
what happened. By the 1990s, DRI had largely been abandoned. It had proven the
obvious: that there are no profits to be made in producing food for sale to
people who have no money.
I have embroidered Escobar's stories about ground level
development projects in order to make crystal clear the operations of economic
quasi-mechanisms to which he only alludes. He has a good reason for only
alluding to them: from his perspective explanation in terms of economic
quasi-mechanisms is universalizing, essentialist; his scholarly project is to
show that a poststructuralist anthropological approach is more adequate than one
which relies on a theory of political economy that is supposed to be universally
applicable. His achievement consists of "making visible local constructions side
by side with the analysis of global forces" so that the ground level facts are
seen from a new perspective and in a new light, after having been seen for
decades in the light of economics in general and development discourse in
particular. "From the classical political economists to today's neo-liberals at
the World Bank, economists have monopolized the power of speech." Now, with
Escobar's help, the actions of development agents in remote third world hamlets
are shown to be dramatic performances scripted by local discourses which are in
turn shaped by the powerful texts of the development discourse promoted by the
World Bank and its allies. It is the discourse that creates the actors and the
objects. The actors are lived by powers they do not understand (or, in some
cases, do understand, but are required to pretend not to understand in order to
keep their jobs).
Although Escobar does not offer explanations in the
traditional sense; that is, he does not detect cause and effect mechanisms and
relationships; he does use the word "explain" in the context of discussing why
development discourse arose. An example concerns a famous speech the American
president Harry Truman gave in 1948, in which he proposed to lift the poor
people of the world out of poverty by sharing American know-how, by sending
American technical experts to every corner of the globe to teach everyone else
what to do to solve their problems. In retrospect, Harry Truman's "point 4"
speech was naive and arrogant. What needs to be explained, the explanandum, is
why what he was saying made sense to him and to his audience at the time. The
explanans is development discourse.
I should have said that development discourse is a quasi-
explanans, which quasi-explains why Harry Truman and many others thought as they
did. The story Escobar tells to "explain" why development discourse arose is
more like a genealogy, a la Foucault, than it is like bringing a
particular phenomenon under a general causal law, a la Newton. Further,
it is important to Escobar's argument to insist that there was nothing
inevitable about the rise of development discourse. Although it was an
understandable response of the first world elite to the challenges posed by the
times, it was not a result compelled to happen by factors that caused
it.
"The free enterprise system was in peril after the Second
World War. To save such a system, the United States was faced with various
imperatives to keep the core nations of the capitalist system together and
going, which required continuous expansion and efforts to avoid the spread of
communism; to find ways to invest U.S. surplus capital that had accumulated
during the war (particularly abroad, where the largest profits could be made);
to find markets overseas for American goods, given that the productive capacity
of American industry had doubled during the war; to secure control over the
sources of raw materials in order to meet world competition; and to establish a
global network of unchallenged military power as a way to secure access to raw
materials, markets, and consumers...."
In such a context, development economics was an idea whose
time had come. After World War II it took off as a subdiscipline within the
science of economics, building on theories of economic growth written earlier in
the century (some of which used the word "development"). It offered itself as a
general scientific theory showing how to create a desired world, and how to
avoid an undesired world. Its major prescriptions, as commonly advocated in the
1950s, were "...(1) capital accumulation, (2) deliberate industrialization, (3)
development planning, and (4) external aid."
Development discourse, regarded as a normative framework for
public policy (supported by development economics as its academic legitimation
and theoretical backup) was created after World War Two by a small first world
elite, composed of government officials, academics, and bankers. Escobar names
names, and gives the dates and places of the meetings where the language of
development discourse was crafted, and where institutions that would play key
roles in spreading the discourse were founded. "Development" was conceived by
many to be a companion to the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan had saved Western
Europe from Communism by rebuilding its economies; similarly, "development"
would save the rest of the world from Communism.
Created in the first world, the ABCs of development formed a
curriculum that the third world had to learn. In every field -- health,
education, agriculture, industry, water, electricity, transportation, women's
rights.... -- new programs and projects were touted as keys to progress, and
they required funding. The principal sources of funding communicated only with
people who spoke their language.
Power begat cosmology. Development discourse oriented the
human spirit in space, in time, toward objects, and toward ideals. Spatially,
the planet was divided into developed and underdeveloped regions. The arrow of
time pointed from less development to more development; the poor majority of
humanity was invited to see its own future in America's high paying union jobs,
and in Western Europe's welfare states. The objects of the world were physical
objects, to be manipulated by engineers applying science to produce abundance
for all. The negative, what ought not to be, was underdevelopment; the positive,
the ideal to strive for, was development.
It took about two decades of bitter experience for
"development," as Harry Truman and the founders of the World Bank conceived it,
to lose its charm. Already in 1970, the World Bank, USAID, and the other leading
funding agencies, were sponsoring the "basic needs approach," "growth with
equity," "integral development," "grassroots development," and, later,
"sustainable development." To remain credible, development discourse had to
reform itself in order to focus directly on extreme poverty, on environmental
degradation, loss of cultural identity, and violence against women; it had to
include popular participation in struggles against oppression.
During the 1980s Latin American countries experienced the
harshest social and economic conditions since the conquest. A similar assertion
could be made about Africa. A number of voices, of which Escobar's is one,
called for the rejection of the term "development" altogether, seeing it as the
name of a concept that was fatally flawed from the beginning, which could not be
rehabilitated by any adjective one might select to write in front of
it.
The rise and decline of development discourse illustrates
--yet again-- the absurdity and the tragedy of the situation of the human
species on the planet earth. Physically --as the late R. Buckminster Fuller
tirelessly repeated-- there is no reason why the resources of the earth cannot
be mobilized to meet the needs of every member of a human species living in
harmony with all living systems. But at this point in history humanity has not
invented the cultural structures and the ecological practices it would need to
enjoy the happiness that mother earth promises. (One need not romanticize the
past to see the present as a tragedy; the gap between potential and reality is
tragic, regardless of whatever consolation one might derive from comparing the
relative magnitudes of the sorrows of today and the sorrows of
yesterday.)
It is important to try to articulate truthfully the reasons
why "development" has done little to alleviate human suffering, and has probably
made it worse. If Escobar is right in saying that the (or a) principal sin of
development discourse was that it was essentialist, universalizing, then the
last thing we will want is a postdevelopmental era guided by another
essentialist discourse. Further, if Escobar is right, then we will expect major
improvements to flow from the growing influence of poststructuralist
perspectives. But what if he is wrong? or only partly right? or what if he has
made it impossible to assign a meaning to the word "right"?
Escobar is thus compelled, willy-nilly, contre coeur, to
make judgments about causes and effects. If the widespread adoption of Escobar's
poststructuralist theoretical position causes life to become more harsh, not
less harsh, then the results will be inflicted (not just inscribed) on
bodies.
I cannot pretend to know whether, all things considered, the
current trend toward poststructuralist scholarship like Escobar's will prove to
bear delicious fruit; or whether it will prove to be un engano mas, another nail
sealing the coffin of hope. Time will tell. But I would like to express two
reasons why I do not believe that the results will be optimal.
The first is that Escobar's poststructuralist approach puts
him in an awkward position regarding non-western cultures and regarding
traditional western values.
One might have expected that a book calling for the
empowerment of ordinary people in the third world would have included more than
passing references to liberation theology (which Escobar mentions only in two
footnotes), to Islam, and to Gandhi, and that there would be some discussion of
progressive Buddhism, as found, for example, in the Sarvodaya movement in Sri
Lanka. Although there are poststructuralists who have written at length on
religion, Escobar's neglect of religion is typical, and, moreover, it is
symptomatic of an inherent conflict between poststructuralism, which is an
ultramodern philosophy; and traditional societies. Traditional societies, in
their splendid variety, are not infrequently profoundly religious, and also not
infrequently collectivist, hierarchical, patriarchal with carefully
differentiated gender roles, homophobic, puritanical, xenophobic, and
superstitious. (These are all, of course, western terms, and mainly pejorative
ones used to describe others; the people who actually hold such views describe
them in their own ways, and not pejoratively.)
It does not take much reading between the lines of the works
of authors Escobar cites with approval, such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, Michel Taussig, Garcia Canclini, Dorothy Smith....; or much
reading between the lines of Arturo Escobar himself; to see that their values
are secular, individualist in the positive sense of favoring personal autonomy
and what Carl Jung called individuation, democratic, feminist and tending toward
gender equality, opposed to compulsory heterosexuality, sensual,
internationalist, and critical.
Poststructuralism is thus in an awkward position. There is
no problem as long as it is a matter of criticizing mainstream modernist liberal
thought for pretending to be universal and eternally rational. There is no
problem as long it is a matter of citing attractive examples --of which there
are many in Encountering Development-- of small and little known cultures
which have their own ways of seeing things and doing things, which are just as
legitimate, and often happier and more in harmony with nature, than the ways of
the modern West.
The problem is that although Escobar and poststructuralists
generally do not believe that whatever the oppressed say must be right, it is
built into their approach that it is hard to legitimate the fine tuning criteria
needed for telling the difference between valores de rescate (values to
be rescued), and temas superables (themes best forgotten and left
behind). They have a wholesale ethical criterion for valuing whatever "the
other" has to say; namely: no one should have a right to define someone else's
reality for them; it is time for the voices that have been excluded and silenced
to name their own worlds; it is time for "the other" to speak out and be heard.
They also have a wholesale ethical criterion for rejecting many of the things
non-Western and traditional people say when they speak; namely, to summarize in
one word, freedom.
The awkward mixed message ("the intellectuals from the
university insist on our right to name our own reality as long as we agree with
their corrupt, individualistic, materialistic, permissive, and effeminate
values") is not an incidental feature of postmodernism, that can easily be
corrected by noting oversights. It is intrinsic in the implicit and sometimes
explicit reasons given for honoring everyone's right to have a voice. For
example, Islamic fundamentalists are granted the right to a voice because they,
like everyone else, are entitled to it according to a radicalized ethics of
autonomy. But when Islamic fundamentalists begin to speak, those who hear them
learn that "Islam" does not mean "autonomy." It means "submission." And when
fundamentalist Muslims speak it is not to name their own reality, but to spread
the teachings of the Holy Qu'ran. The ethic of autonomy, in turn, which
is the source of the awkwardness involved, is intrinsically connected to
Foucault and Escobar's central concept: power. Since the 17th century "power"
has been, and it still is, the principal root metaphor with which western
philosophy has erected secular alternatives to the older and more traditional
religious worldviews of the West. Autonomy is what you have when you are not
oppressed by power. (Thus Kant: autonomy is the principle of all genuine
morality; heteronomy is the principle of all spurious morality.) Escobar's story
of the rise of development discourse is a story about power and speech, and
therefore it is a story about oppression and silencing, and therefore it leads
to the conclusion that the oppressed should speak. And then, when they speak:
confusion.
Secondly, taking a poststructuralist philosophical position
makes it unnecessarily difficult to talk about objective physical reality. In
principle, there is supposed to be no such thing. The discourse defines the
objects.
This principle sometimes seems to be a philosophical opinion
with no practical consequences, since poststructuralists are able to cope with
objective physical reality in everyday life the same as everyone else. But
sometimes it does have consequences. It makes a difference --at least so it
seems to me-- when Escobar criticizes Samir Amin.
Amin sees no hope for his continent, Africa, without major
capital investments in agriculture. For Amin, as for economists generally, it is
axiomatic that there can be no serious attack on poverty without capital
accumulation. The relatively comfortable peoples of the first world are only
able to enjoy their comforts because of the work of people in past generations
whose savings and investments made it possible to create advanced technologies,
install equipment, and build infrastructure. Whether capital is accumulated by a
puritan ethic, by exploiting colonies, by extracting surplus value from workers
... or by forced industrialization under five year plans a la Stalin or a la Mao
... no people emerges from poverty without somebody voluntarily or involuntarily
postponing present consumption for the sake of investing in future productive
capacity.
Given that Africa will be prosperous only after Africa makes
capital investments in agriculture and industry; given that capital-poor Africa
has for the last several centuries been to a great extent at the mercy of
capital-rich foreign powers; given that the capital accumulation processes that
history has seen so far have been cruel, destructive, and unjust: Amin has
devoted himself to elaborating proposals for what he calls "autocentric
accumulation." He wants to put the accumulation process under humane,
ecologically-conscious, and democratic control. He wants Africans (and all
peoples) to control their own destinies. He wants to use new appropriate
technologies to achieve shortcuts that will make the tooling up process less
painful than it was in the 19th century. He wants the burdens to be shared
equitably by all, and in particular to redress the balances between towns and
countryside, and between members of different ethnic, racial, and tribal
groups.
Amin's project would appear to be a wholly laudable one, but
Escobar raises an objection to it. In principle. "It is necessary to emphasize,
however, that Amin's prescriptions are written in a universalistic mode and a
realist epistemology, precisely the kinds of thinking criticized
here."
Why does Escobar care so much about the issue of realist
epistemology vs. poststructuralism that he finds it necessary to criticize
Amin's constructive project on philosophical grounds?
The answer is, I believe, that Escobar has written a two
hundred and fifty page book which continually berates development discourse for
being based on a realist epistemology.
As Michel Foucault showed that prisons have indeed served
their real purpose --extending power-- even though it was clear from the
beginning that they would not serve their declared purpose --rehabilitating
criminals--; so Escobar was able to show that development discourse has served
its real purpose -- extending power-- even though it was clear from the
beginning that it would not serve its declared purpose --lifting the suffering
masses of the third world out of poverty. Development discourse pulled off the
sleight-of-hand trick necessary to disguise its real purpose, and pulled it off
in such a way that it was able to de-politicize poverty. What had been a
conflict of interest between exploiters and exploited became a technical problem
to be solved by experts. All of the problems were (supposedly) about objective
physical reality. A realist epistemology guaranteed the credentials of the
development economists and the other technical experts who were employed to
solve, for example, "the problem of hunger," as development discourse had
defined that "problem" into existence.
Amin draws Escobar's fire because he agrees with his
professional colleagues that the need to accumulate capital is indeed an
objective physical problem. The concept "accumulation" is bifurcated. It is,
first, another name for exploiting colonies and workers, and for the
quasi-automatic machine-like global extension of capitalism; it is also,
secondly, the name for the tooling up process without which no people can enjoy
prosperity. Under its second name, it represents a fact of Nature. Lack of
accumulation is a fact too, and a brutal one; it is like the swarms of locusts
that God sent to devour the grain of the Egyptians. All of the priests of Egypt,
with all their syntax and semantics, with all their synchrony and diachrony,
with all their breaks and sutures, story and ritual, texts and subtexts,
semiotics and grammatology, genealogy and deconstruction, could not stop the
locusts from eating the grain. In Africa today the physical need to bring water
to the land, before the seeds will germinate, grow, and produce edible fruit
represents the irreducible resistance of Nature against the hegemony of Meaning;
it represents the revolt of objects that refuse to allow any discourse to define
them out of existence.
Amin offers an alternative physical solution to a physical
problem. His realist epistemology does him (and humanity) no harm at
all.
In the end Escobar and Amin are allies on the democratic
left; Escobar recognizes the merit of Amin's work even though he thinks it must
be "continuously destabilized." Nevertheless, Escobar's criticism of Amin's
realism overshoots the mark. Showing that mainline development discourse rests
on false realist epistemologies does not rule out the possibility that the work
of Samir Amin and many others might rest on true realist
epistemologies.
In expressing the view that poststructuralism's consequences
are likely to be suboptimal (because it makes it hard to discriminate better
traditions from worse traditions; and because it emphasizes discourse too much,
facts too little) I do not mean to be unappreciative. I do mean to suggest that
the achievements of poststructuralism do not need to be purchased at the expense
of discrimination and realism.
7c.
Gibson-Graham's Metaphysics
The tradition that takes its name from Aristotle's
Metaphysics constructs first principles; or first archai, as Aristotle
called them. Its inquiries into the first principles and causes of all things
concern, above all, being or substance (ousia).
Explanations of the global economy presuppose that the
global economy has being; the global economy is assumed to be something that is.
Even the most excellent explanation is stultified if the phenomenon that it
purports to explain does not exist.
The criteria for distinguishing being from non-being,
existence from non-existence, become crucial when somebody thinks it important
to deny the existence of something whose existence somebody else thinks it
important to affirm. Famously, in the history of metaphysics, the first
principles governing the concept of being have been invoked to prove, or to
disprove, the existence of God. The present question, however, concerns not
whether God exists, but whether the global economy exists.
In The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist
critique of political economy, the author argues that there is no global
economy. "Like many political economists I had heretofore theorized the US
social formation and `the global economy' as sites of capitalist dominance, a
dominance located squarely in the social (or economic) field. But a theoretical
option now presented itself, one that could make a (revolutionary) difference:
to depict economic discourse as hegemonized while rendering the social world as
economically differentiated and complex." (pp. x-xi)
It becomes crucial to ask what sorts of reasons would count
for or against the theoretical option that Gibson-Graham embraces, which
includes denying (or declining to assert) that global capitalism or the global
economy exist. "Metaphysics" is the usual name of attempts to discern why one
should, or should not, attribute being to the entity allegedly or putatively
designated by a contested concept like "God," or, now, "the global economy," or
"capitalism."
Taking Aristotle as a source and a representative of the
mainstream ancient and medieval metaphysical traditions of the West, two salient
differences between traditional metaphysics and the postmodern metaphysics of
Gibson-Graham can be succinctly stated.
First, Aristotle tends to favor attributing being to
generalities; Gibson-Graham tends to favor attributing being to
particulars.
Thus Aristotle: "If there is nothing apart from individuals,
there will be no object of thought, but all things will be objects of sense; and
there will not be knowledge of anything, unless we say that sensation is
knowledge." It is typical of Aristotle to think of a characteristic substance,
or being, as a seed (which has intrinsic to it the form of the plant or animal
it will become), or as a product produced by an artisan who had in mind the form
of what was to be made before making it, or as a person with a continuing soul
self-identical through its transient states (his favorite example is Socrates).
"...we say the Hermes is in the stone, and the half of the line is in the line,
and we say of that which is not yet ripe that it is corn." Ousia, finally, has
two senses: "(A) the ultimate substratum, which is no longer predicated of
anything else, and (B) that which being a `this' is also separable --and of this
nature is the shape or form of each thing."
Thus Gibson-Graham: "...a capitalist site is an irreducible
specificity. We may no more assume that a capitalist firm is interested in
maximizing profits or exploitation than we may assume that an individual woman
wants to bear and raise children, or that an American is interested in making
money.... When Capitalism gives way to an array of capitalist differences, its
noncapitalist other is released from singularity and subjection, becoming
potentially visible as a differentiated multiplicity." Generalities, such as The
Global Economy, and Capitalism, appear in Gibson-Graham's book as false and
oppressive. A discourse that celebrates protean variety, proliferation of
differences, performs the service of making visible many things which ought to
have been seen long ago; which the "hegemony" of the discourse of Global
Capitalism has made invisible.
Second, Aristotle thinks of his inquiries as discovering
truth. Gibson-Graham "...invoke the constitutive or performative force of
economic representation."
For Gibson-Graham "the global economy" is an economic
representation constituted by other people's performances, by the acts they
performed in and by speaking and by writing. The global economy was called into
being by discourse. Her own performance, the writing of the book The End of
Capitalism, is designed to constitute a different discourse. "In the
hierarchical relation of capitalism to noncapitalism lies (entrapped) the
possibility of theorizing economic difference, of supplanting the discourse of
capitalist hegemony with a plurality and heterogeneity of economic forms.
Liberating that possibility is an anti-essentialist project, and perhaps the
principal aim of this book."
Gibson-Graham's aim is similar to that of most writers on
the topics of capitalism and the global economy, in the respect that, like most
others, she seeks to understand the way the world works in order to change the
way the world works. But she takes the view that the very concepts most
employed, viz. "capitalism" and "the global economy," have backfired. By
attributing to the capitalist global economy an essence, a monolithic nature,
they have contributed to its strength. It seems all-powerful because the
theories of left-wing political economists tell us it is all- powerful. "For if
capitalism's identity is even partially immobile or fixed, ... if it is the site
of an inevitability like the logic of profitability or accumulation, then it
will necessarily be seen to operate as a constraint or a limit. It becomes that
to which other more mutable entities must adapt. (We see this today in both
mainstream and left discussions of social and economic policy, where we are told
that we may have democracy, or a pared-down welfare state, or prosperity, but
only in the context of the [global capitalist] economy and what it will
permit.)
Gibson-Graham proposes a new anti-capitalist strategy. She
deconstructs the concept of capitalism. She denies that it exists "as we knew
it," i.e. as it has been conceived. This theoretical move serves to refocus
vision, making what was previously invisible visible, making what was previously
impossible possible. "Theorizing capitalism itself as different from itself --as
having, in other words, no essential or coherent identity-- multiplies
(infinitely) the possibilities of alterity."
She borrows from the writings of other feminists, and from
queer theorists, tactics for discourse analysis that deconstruct stereotypes.
The same philosophical arguments that demolish the idea that there is such a
thing as a typical woman, and which do battle against compulsory heterosexuality
by demolishing conventional stereotypes of gays, are deployed to prove that
there is no Capitalism, and no global economy. Never generalize.
Hazel Henderson and others had already pointed out that if
we count how many hours the people of the world work, we will find that the
majority of the work done in the world is either unpaid household labor and
child care, or work in the nonprofit or public sector, or production for direct
use (such as gardening or do-it- yourself home improvement). Only a minority of
the world's work is wage or salary labor done for capitalist firms.
Gibson-Graham cites the same facts, and also counts the self-employed as non-
capitalist. The middle level business executive who loses her job to downsizing
and ekes out a living as a consultant, and the paupers who sell chewing gum on
the streets of third world cities, count as part of the noncapitalist total. The
informal sector, which Marx characterized as the industrial reserve army of the
unemployed, is seen in a different light, since it produces a series of
instances of economic diversity --as do the elements of feudal agriculture,
household slavery, and patriarchal sweatshops which are found in one place or
another of our diverse world. Gibson-Graham is not in favor of all this
variegated misery, but she does use it to buttress her case that any general
thesis which postulates that there is a world capitalist economy must be
wrong.
A considerable part of her book is about the "blokes" who
work in Australian coal mines. Highly mechanized Australian mines are able to
deliver coal to the world market at competitive prices; the workers are
organized in militant unions with left ideologies. The blokes make good money;
their wives, who may be nurses or teachers, sometimes make good money too; they
may own several houses; they are likely to fly to Europe for vacations.
Gibson-Graham's ethnographic account of "blokeland" reinforces her image of the
world as a crazy-quilt of diverse economic forms, which does not at all resemble
the world portrayed by Marx in Capital, where capital grew and
accumulated through extracting surplus value from workers who were paid just
enough to make it possible for them to survive.
At this point I would like to engage in an imaginary
dialogue with J. K. Gibson-Graham, running the risk that the words I attribute
to her may be different from what she would say if she spoke for herself in a
real dialogue.
Critic: Surely you do not mean to say that capitalism
is such a minor component among the rich variety of economic forms found in the
world that if it were to crash again, as it did in the 1930s, there would be no
problem, because humanity with all its rich variety of noncapitalist forms could
get along quite well without it.
Gibson-Graham: Of course not.
Critic: So you do recognize that capitalism is an
important institution in the world as it exists today?
Gibson-Graham: If I didn't, I would not be writing a
book about how to change it.
Critic: You do not mean, either, that the economic
policies of the world's governments are mistaken when they seek to attract
investment, foster a favorable business climate, provide incentives and security
for investors, build confidence in the economic stability and profit potential
of whatever part of the world they govern, and generally work to keep up profits
so that capitalism will run smoothly?
Gibson-Graham: I think that profits could be
considerably lower without the dire consequences that even supposedly leftist
economists threaten will follow if workers and governments do not cave in to all
the demands of capital.
Critic: But you do recognize that in order to
function capitalism requires some rate of profit?
Gibson-Graham: Yes.
Critic: And do you recognize that as a general rule,
and other things being equal, entrepreneurs will seek the highest profits they
can get? And that other economic actors, such as workers and bankers, also seek
to maximize their returns?
Gibson-Graham: No.
Critic: Why not?
Gibson-Graham: You are not understanding me very
well. I am writing about political economy as discourse. I am not conducting an
inquiry within that discourse about the phenomena of economics and how to
explain them. I am not saying that Ricardo, or Marx, or Paul Samuelson, got the
laws of profit wrong. I am critiquing the discourse that constructs "profit" as
a category, defines "economic actor" as an entity seeking to maximize something,
and makes it meaningful to talk about "laws of profit."
Critic: So you think that economists should not even
be trying to write general laws which explain and predict that under such and
such conditions profits will be such and such?
Gibson-Graham: It's disempowering.
Critic: What do you mean by that?
Gibson-Graham: Social reality is constantly being
contested and renegotiated. If we think there are some supposedly scientific
laws that determine how much the workers are paid, and how much profit capital
has to get, then we will passively accept social reality as defined by someone
else, instead of participating actively in creating social reality.
Critic: The laws of economics may be disempowering,
but I can't help thinking that they are to some extent true. Does it help the
victims of the system when intellectuals convince them they have power that they
do not really have, so that, like the rooster Chanticleer who thought he could
make the sun rise by crowing, they think that if they talk tough and go on
strike they will get high wages and benefits?
Gibson-Graham: I do not deny that it is to some
extent true that capital has power. The question is the extent. If you write
economics as if the world economy were a monolithic system governed by
inexorable laws of capital accumulation, then you create a myth that capital is
all-powerful, the rest of us powerless.
Critic: It seems to me --correct me if I'm wrong--
that you advance two types of reasons for concluding that capital is less
powerful than most people think. First, you attack the concept of a monolithic
global economy governed by inexorable laws, saying that the very idea of a
capitalist global economy makes invisible the world's diversity of economic
forms. This is a sort of negative proof of your thesis; you are telling us that
"believing is seeing." All the evidence we think we see is filtered through the
lenses of an essentialist discourse, so that if it were true (and you think it
is true) that the social world is infinitely diverse and constantly under
renegotiation and reconstruction, people would not see the truth.
Gibson-Graham: I recognize (pp. 5-9) that in my book
I am attacking a straw man, although not a straw man I have constructed by
myself. There is probably nobody who holds that the capitalist global economy is
as monolithic and powerful as it is in the image of it that I attack.
Critic: But your straw man resembles the views of
Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein .... and others, and it also
resembles your own former views, since you yourself used to write about "the
global economy."
Gibson-Graham: My theoretical target is simplified in
order to make my point, but it is relevant to what ordinary people and social
scientists actually say and think.
Critic: So part of your argument is that any theory
as general as the straw man you attack must be wrong. But you do not
specifically refute any thesis actually advanced by anyone.
Gibson-Graham: I would not put it that way. It is
true that I do not specifically refute anything that Fredric Jameson, for
example, affirms, as if it were a matter of scoring points in macho intellectual
combat, or a matter of one mathematician finding an error in another
mathematician's proof. But I do elaborate an alternative to a Jamesonian vision.
If you go back and read Jameson again after reading my book, you will find him
less persuasive.
Critic: So your work is illuminating. It makes
real-live facts visible that, strictly speaking, could not possibly happen
according to the straw man who thinks everything happens according to simple
laws of capitalist accumulation. The straw man's discourse is similar enough to
discourses that are actually employed --indeed, are dominant-- that by helping
the reader to see its flaws, you also help the reader to see flaws in discourses
that actually exist, like Jameson's.
Gibson-Graham: I would not have put it exactly that
way, but I won't object either.
Critic: Apart from saying that the straw man must be
wrong because in principle essentialism is always wrong, you also fill your book
with anecdotes.
Gibson-Graham: You mean facts, cases.
Critic: Yes, for example, in the 1990s, after a
protracted struggle, the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), Local 5668, won
a three year contract with Ravenswood Aluminum Company, in spite of the
company's effort to use its bargaining advantage as a multi-national company to
break the union by locking the workers out. The union's researchers established
that the new owner of Ravenswood was a global commodities trader who had been
indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on 65 counts of tax fraud and
racketeering. The union's tactic (which you call a "non-standard response") was
to portray the company as an international outlaw, damaging its public image and
triggering investigations by government agencies. "Terrier-like, the USWA
pursued the company relentlessly around the globe yanking and pulling at it
until it capitulated." (p. 129) Logically, this one case refutes the straw man
(or perhaps a straw man even simpler than the one you construct); since if labor
wins even once in a conflict with capital, then it is not true that capital
always wins.
Gibson-Graham: This is one of the stories that shows
the value of my anti-essentialist approach to social theory. If the steelworkers
union had believed the myth of the global economy, it might have given up
without even trying. As it turned out, the workers met internationalism with
internationalism of their own, and won.
Critic: But you do not attempt to use a statistically
significant sample of similar cases. You don't test a hypothesis about how often
and for what reasons labor wins. You do not propose a causal mechanism, or a
model, to explain the observed facts. You do not design tests that deliberately
compel your theory run the risk that it might be shown to be false. You do not
do any of the things that mainstream social scientists do to test their
theories.
Gibson-Graham: I don't.
Critic: You do not even use descriptive statistics.
You do not tell us how often the sorts of cases you describe occur.
Gibson-Graham: I do think social reality is
overdetermined, and I do not believe in causal models. Descriptive statistics
are less objectionable, although they are often misleading because they mask
differences among the cases grouped together. But anyway, quite apart from what
I think about what positivist social scientists do or do not do, what I myself
do is something different. I show how the dominant discourse about the global
economy has defined capital as powerful, labor as weak, and thus has made
invisible many things which actually happen.
Critic: So the point of your discourse analysis is
not to define a different causal mechanism (different from the mechanism of
accumulation) which can be expected to regularly produce similar results. The
point is not to claim that the cases you cite are typical, or even numerous. The
point is not to identify the objective conditions under which labor's chances of
winning improve. The great advantage of your poststructuralist postmarxism is,
rather, that victims of oppression who accept your approach see more
possibilities and have more confidence. Your theory is like a pep talk. Don't
just assume that capital can move production wherever it wants! Don't just
assume that it is impractical for labor to organize multinationally! Look at X!
Look at Y! They had courage, fought back, and won!
Gibson-Graham: "Pep talk" is a shallow way to
describe what I do. A better way to describe the process of encouraging people
to try what Paulo Freire called the "untested feasibility" is to think in terms
of changing scripts. "The global economy" is not just a false generalization. It
is a script, like the script for a play or a motion picture. It defines the
roles of the actors. My book is an attempt to rewrite the script, so that people
will transgress the present rules, and act in (now) non-standard ways, which
will eventually lead to new standard ways, new scripts.
Critic: Do the non-standard transgressions exercise
power that people really have, but which the hegemonic script of the capitalist
global economy leads them to believe they do not have?
Gibson-Graham: I will answer with an example. I
compare the rape script to the global economy script. (pp. 120-144) There is a
standard script about men raping women, in which the role of women is defined as
passive, powerless; the woman is a victim who lets herself be raped in order to
save her life. By analogy, a similar script governs the rape of the third world
by the MNC's (Multinational Corporations).
Critic: Before we discuss the analogy, tell me why
you know that rape is governed by a rape script. Have you interviewed a
significant sample of rapists and rape victims and coded the interview
data?
Gibson-Graham: I borrow the "rape script" concept
from other feminist writers. It is a concept that rings true to me, but not
because there is a lot of empirical data verifying hypotheses about it. It rings
true because it is an accurate interpretation of meanings that prevail in our
culture. I think the "rape script" concept rings true to my readers for the same
reason. We are all participating members of our culture, and we all know that
"man" is defined as "strong," while "woman" is defined as "weak."
Critic: You cite an example of a woman who refused to
play the role assigned to her by the rape script. She grabbed the penis of her
would-be rapist while he was hitting her head. He lost his erection and ran
away. (p. 129)
Gibson-Graham: Similarly, there is a prevailing
script which defines MNC's as strong and third world people as weak.
Critic: Is the implication that if people in the
third world --or poor people generally-- would follow a different script, then
they would be powerful?
Gibson-Graham: I don't want to be backed into a
position where I am obliged to defend the absurd thesis that all victims are
more powerful than they think they are. Some victims are less powerful than they
think they are. My point is that certain essentialist scripts define roles in
which people are defined as powerless regardless of the facts; the script itself
has performative force --it makes people less powerful than they otherwise would
be.
I shall conclude and stop now, my talk with Gibson-Graham.
My imaginary speculations about what she would say, have been, I hope, not
distant from her thought.
Speaking now just for myself, I find, and I think the
imaginary dialogue above illustrates, that J. K. Gibson-Graham, and
poststructuralists generally, have an awkward relationship to the ancient
question, "Why?" "Why do things happen as they do?" Their awkwardness is due to
rejecting mainstream and Marxist paradigms of scientific inquiry, without
sufficiently developing new (or reviving old) ways to answer "Why?" questions.
(I have said above that the idea of "overdetermination" is, when applied to
conscious waking social life, not so much a way to answer the question "Why?" as
a way to justify not answering it. I will later suggest that ideas like
"constitutivity," "script," and "performative performance" are more promising.)
Their diagnoses and prescriptions necessarily seem haphazard as long as their
allusions to the sources of problems, and their grounds for believing that the
conceptual reforms and the courses of action they advocate will solve problems,
remain inchoate.
Aristotle thought that there were four archai, four main
types of principle or cause, four main ways to respond to the question
"Why?"
--the material cause, what the thing is made of, as a vase
is made of bronze.
-- the efficient cause, the source of movement, as the
vase- maker who makes the vase, or as love or desire considered as a principle
initiating motion.
-- the formal cause, the form, shape, pattern, definition,
or essence, that which makes the thing what it is, as the shape which causes
the bronze so-shaped to be defined as a vase.
-- the final cause, that for the sake of which the thing
is made, the end or goal the vase-maker serves in making the
vase.
By the time Louis Althusser and the post-structuralists took
up the critical examination of science, Aristotle had become identified with
traditions that were erroneous and undesirable. The idea of final cause was
thought to falsely attribute human purposes to nature. The idea of formal cause
was thought (quite rightly) to confer the status of natural facts on social
conventions by treating accepted definitions as hallmarks of true being; thus
being-as-form favored aristocracy, divinity, and masculine privilege. Although
efficient causes were what mechanistic science was all about, the "impacts,"
"forces," "impressions," "effects," and "variables" to which it attributed
(efficient) causal efficacy and/or explanatory significance were not the sorts
of sources of movement that Aristotle had in mind.
Gibson-Graham cannot be expected to sympathize with a
traditional anti-democratic worldview. As an anti-essentialist, she cannot be
expected to sympathize with Aristotle's treatment of social conventions as if
they were natural essences. She might, however, have some sympathy with
regarding human action as praxis, and as a paradigm for explanation. Aristotle's
vase-maker is not making a revolution, but at least he is making something.
"`Cause' means ...the form or pattern ... [and that] from which the change or
the resting from change first begins, e.g. the adviser is a cause of the action,
and the father a cause of the child, and in general the maker a cause of the
thing made, and the change- producing of the changing.... `Beginning' means
...that from which change naturally first begins, as a child comes from its
father and its mother, and a fight from abusive language ... that at whose will
that which is moved is moved, and that which changes changes, e.g. the
magistracies in cities, and oligarchies and monarchies and tyrannies are called
archai, and so are the arts... for all causes are beginnings."
2500 years ago, in his primitive, patriarchal, and naive
way, Aristotle expressed some observations about why things happen the way they
do that are in accord with Gibson-Graham's desire to encourage victims to become
activists, and not to be misled and discouraged by mechanistic causal
models.
Any number of contemporary approaches to social science are
reviving Aristotelian notions of deliberate human action, praxis. Once again, a
human choice is a source of movement that explains an action. Formal causes, the
patterns and implicit definitions built into language and accepted by common
sense as the framework of action in everyday life, have returned as (for
example) constitutive rules, institutional facts, symbolic interaction,
dramaturgic social analysis, emic viewpoints, plans, performatives,
phenomenology, language-games, scripts, ethnomethodology, act/action structures,
and cognitive structures.... Meanings are causes. Again. Gibson-Graham is among
the social scientists who offer explanations in terms of causes Aristotle would
have classified as formal. (Or as efficient in a sense later centuries deleted
from the idea of efficient cause-- as when he takes a human decision to be a
source of movement; for example when a raid triggers a decision to go to war.
For example: in The End of Capitalism a woman's submission to rape is
explained by a rape script which defines her as powerless. However,
Gibson-Graham is not mainly in dialogue with Martha Nussbaum, Alasdair MacIntyre
or any contemporary neo-Aristotelian; she is not mainly in dialogue with Milton
Friedman or any mainstream positivist economist; she is not mainly in dialogue
with Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Rom Harre, or any social scientist influenced
by recent mainstream Anglo-American analytic philosophy. She is mainly in
dialogue with other feminists, with Althusserians and with Marxist political
economists. She stands in a tradition shaped by Marx, and for that reason
encounters a special conceptual impediment standing in the way of accepting a
neo-Aristotelian model of human action. Marx begins Capital by writing
that he is about to analyze, "that form of society where wealth appears as a
vast collection of commodities." ("Commodities" is Waren in the original German;
in the cognate English it would be "wares," things offered for sale.) Already in
his first sentence Marx telegraphs the structure of his discourse. Capitalist
common sense is an intrinsically illusory discourse. Wealth only appears as
commodities; it appears in what Marx later calls commodity-form. But the
commodity-form is not, for Marx, what Aristotle would have called a formal
cause; for Marx commodity-form, i.e. exchange, is not the pattern of what truly
is and not the source of movement; it is an illusion masking the deeper reality.
The real essence of the commodity is not found on the surface of society; its
essence is the quantity of labor embodied in it, its value. Marx's analysis
asserts that as long as we remain at the formal level, at the level of
circulation, we will never understand capitalism. Capitalism is essentially
something that happens beneath the surface, at the level of production, where
workers are exploited and surplus value is produced.
For this reason anti-essentialist left intellectuals can
regard themselves as remaining within the Marxist tradition only with great
difficulty. Anti-essentialism cannot follow Marx in his move from surface to
depth, from circulation to production, from formal appearance to material
essence.
If anti-essentialist left intellectuals would take just one
more step --and I am not saying that they will-- they could undo not only Marx's
demotion of circulation to the level of mere appearance, but also undo
modernity's (e.g. Descartes', Locke's....) demotion of appearance to mere
secondary qualities. They sometimes take this step in practice, e.g. in
Gibson-Graham's recognition that the rape script has causal powers. Culture
shapes vision so that one person appears as (is) the powerful man and another
appears as (is) the weak woman. Meanings are causes. Perhaps they would consider
recognizing in theory that what Marx called the "commodity-form," i.e. the
meanings at work in the ritual of exchange, functions as an explanatory
principle, a cause.
It would follow that there really is a capitalist global
economy. If one is accustomed, coming out of a Marxist tradition, to define
capitalism in terms of the production relationships between owners and workers,
then the variety of production relationships in the world might lead one to be
more impressed by the differences than by the similarities, and to insist that
there is no worldwide capitalism, only many capitalisms alongside many
noncapitalist forms. If, however, one recognizes that Aristotle was not entirely
wrong to attribute being to forms; then money, accounts, debts, investments,
wares offered for sale, exchange relationships, markets ... everything that
"appears" at the level of circulation, is among the "things that are." The
global market, the commonality worldwide of the use of money, does not
constitute a universal truth valid in every place and in every respect, but it
does constitute a major feature of the world we live in. It is justifiable to
say of the capitalist world economy that it has being, it exists --even if this
means that "capitalism" is not defined in any way that Marx would have defined
it.
However, it does not follow that we are all powerless
victims of a monolithic system governed by inexorable laws. If (pace Aristotle,
and in agreement with Gibson-Graham) we see forms as (or mainly as) social
constructions; then it follows that the capitalist global economy has been
socially constructed. It can be socially reconstructed.
8.
Recommendations:
How to Work for Justice in the Global Economy
At this point, instead of prefacing my recommendations with
a statement of my own theory, I will go straight to recommendations. And instead
of starting from scratch to answer the practical question, "What shall we do?",
I will offer commentaries on the excellent answers to this question already
given by Professor Jane Kelsey of Auckland University in New Zealand. She has
written extensively on how multinational corporations --supported
philosophically by free market economic theory-- have undermined the security of
the people of her country. From her scholarship and from her experience as an
activist she has produced a series of practical "tips". Twenty-six of her tips
have been circulated worldwide by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
By standing on her shoulders, augmenting her tips by writing commentaries on
them, I hope to produce advice that is superior to what I could produce
alone.
My aim is to show that in the light of the preceding
theoretical efforts to understand the global economy, practical efforts to
change the global economy can be both supported and improved. Further, although
it may not be apparent on the surface, underlying my comments on Jane Kelsey's
recommendations is a search for positive cultural norms suitable for guiding the
construction of an ethical global economy. In that search I have been especially
helped by four thinkers, mentioned above either slightly or not at all --M. K.
Gandhi; M. L. King, Jr.; Carol Gilligan; and Riane Eisler. Gandhi proposed that
those of us who own property regard ourselves as "trustees," and he viewed his
own life as a series of "opportunities for service". King's stated purpose was
to build a "beloved community". Gilligan identifies a "care ethic," which she
defines as attending to and responding to needs. Eisler extols
"partnership".
These are Jane Kelsey's tips:
Tip
1: Be skeptical about fiscal and other "crises." Examine the real nature of
the problem, who defines it as a crisis, and who stands to gain. Demand to know
the range of possible solutions, and the costs and benefits of each to whom. If
the answers are not forthcoming, burn the midnight oil to produce the answers
for yourselves.
Commentary: A few decades ago it was easy for some
people to believe that the countries of the world were gradually moving in the
direction of high wages, social security, and a high level of social services
for all; the West European social democracies were imagined to be models of what
could be everybody's eventual future. The reversal of the trends that made such
optimism plausible has been marked by a series of crises, such as those
characterized by oil price shocks, unpayable debts falling due, and sudden
currency devaluations. Such crises reflect structural problems that are there
all the time, but it is not until a crisis that a government (or other actor)
acknowledges the structural problems, albeit in a form subject to distortions by
the interests of those who define the crisis. Dependency on oil is a structural
problem. Debt that is unpayable is a structural problem --and it is a structural
problem that reflects a deeper structural problem, namely: the instability of
capitalism. John Maynard Keynes, who was typical of those who wrote economic
theory for West European social democracies, proposed to remedy capitalism's
instability by counter-cyclical spending --but, unfortunately, the cycles nearly
always cycled downward, and eventually it became obvious to all that some day
the deficit spending incurred to counter them had to stop. Currency devaluations
reflect the structural fact that not every nation can win in international
economic competition, for the same reason that not every basketball team can win
100% of its games.
The existence of fundamental crises --moments when
structural problems can no longer be ignored-- creates a climate where it is
easy to manufacture bogus crises. In any crisis --a real one, a bogus one, or a
real one made bogus by exaggeration-- the decisions made are likely to be
unwise, and are likely to be biased in favor of those who have the most power to
influence public opinion. It would be true wisdom to avoid the crises altogether
by eliminating their deep structural causes; namely (in the cases of the three
examples mentioned here) dependence on fossil fuels, capitalism, and an
international economy that is more competitive than cooperative.
Tip 2: Don't cling to a political party
that has been converted to neoconservatism. Fighting to prevent a social
democratic party's capture by right-wing zealots is important. But once the
party has been taken over, maintaining solidarity on the outside while seeking
change from within merely gives them more time. When the spirit of the party is
dead, shed the old skin and create something new.
Commentary: A political party is not normally in a
position to transform society, because its primary task is to seek votes. The
party normally accepts as given that public opinion, and the moneyed and other
interests that shape public opinion, are as they are. If, nevertheless, a party
advocating socialism or some other form of social transformation achieves
control of the executive, legislature, and judicial branches of government, then
it is still not in a position to transform society. The national government is
part and parcel of the modern world-system. It protects property; it encourages
business. It creates conditions favorable to the growth of prosperity by helping
the (capitalist) system work smoothly. Each state helps the entrepreneurs of its
nation succeed in international economic competition. The first national
government --that of Holland in the 17th century-- set the pattern that most
national governments have conformed to ever since. Jane Kelsey is quite right to
say that parties that chime in with neoconservatism are not worthy of support,
and that there is a need for political parties that advocate real alternatives.
Parties can be educational. They can exercise some degree of political leverage.
But we should not expect too much of political parties or of government; neither
will be able to implement real, workable, alternatives, without the support of
social movements.
Tip 3: Take economics seriously.
Neo-liberal economic fundamentalism pervades everything. There is no boundary
between economic, social, environmental, or other policies. Those who focus on
narrow sectoral concerns and ignore the pervasive economic agenda will lose
their own battles and weaken the collective ability to resist. Leaving economics
to economists is fatal.
Commentary: Economics is not a science that applies
universally; it is not like chemistry, which appears to apply even on other
planets and in other galaxies. It is not even a general science of human
society; like anthropology, which attempts to study all forms of human culture.
The data of economics come mainly from accounting and bookkeeping, and its
models apply mainly where there are accountants and bookkeepers. Instead of
saying that every society has an economic base, we should say that every culture
has an ecological context. The general science of humanity's interaction with
the earth and other living systems is ecology, not economics. Culture is homo
sapiens' overall survival strategy, its ecological niche. Economic society is a
particular form of culture. We must take economics seriously because it is a
basic cultural structure of today's societies, and if, with Immanuel
Wallerstein, we hold that today there is only one society, the global one, it is
a basic structure of society. Economics is basic because it governs the meeting
of basic needs. It determines (or is an ideological reflection of the structures
that determine) which members of the human species eat and which do not. Even
problems that are not on the surface economic problems --like the motivated by
ethic hatred in massacres in Bosnia and in Rwanda-- have an economic dimension.
An economic solution is a prerequisite to any viable solution to any social
problem, even where the problem is ostensibly a non-economic one. But --this is
a big but- - there are no economic solutions. Solutions come only from a broader
vision that sees economics as a part of culture and culture as a part of
ecology. That is why leaving economics to economists is fatal.
Tip 4: Expose the weaknesses of their
theory. Neo-liberal theories are riddled with dubious assumptions and internal
inconsistencies, and often lack empirical support. These right- wing theories
need to be exposed as serving rationalizations which operate in the interests of
the elites whom the policies empower. (Note: as the word "football" is used in
most of the world to name what Americans call "soccer," so the term
"neo-liberal" is used in most of the world to name ideas Americans call
"conservative.")
Commentary: Exposing dubious assumptions and internal
inconsistencies of free market economics needs to go hand in hand with building
alternative communities and cooperatives. Mainstream economics is the ideology
of mainstream institutions. The shelves of university libraries house many books
that refute it. Yet it remains mainstream; it is the standard doctrine taught in
most introductory economics courses; although it has many times been shown to be
false, it is assumed to be true in television news analyses and in newspaper
editorials. Practitioners of neo-liberal economics generally do not take the
trouble to reply to their academic critics. They do not need to, because they
have power. They do not have the time, because they are busy running
governments, corporations, the media, and the international agencies.
Building alternative communities, cooperatives, nonprofits,
and other institutions that actually function according to principles that
differ from those of free market economics is essential. Post-economic living
proves in practice what the books on university library shelves prove only in
theory.
Tip 5: Challenge hypocrisy! Ask who is
promoting a strategy as being in the "national interest" and who stands to
benefit most. Document cases where self-interest is disguised as public
good.
Commentary: But it is really true that when high
taxes drive businesses out of business, then the employees lose their jobs. It
is really true that when the government fixes prices so low that bigger profits
can be made elsewhere, then production falls and with it employment
opportunities.
To a considerable extent it is true that there can be no
business without profit, and no business means no jobs.
Hence when moneyed interests assert that what is in their
interest is in the national interest, their hypocritical assertions are
convincing and partly true. They have more than arguments. They have power. To a
considerable extent it is true that if capitalists choose to invest, then there
are goods produced, services rendered, jobs, and incomes that governments can
tax. And if not, not.
Capital is not above bluffing. Often its advocates threaten
dire consequences if wages are raised, profits are taxed, or safety or
environmental regulations are passed. And then the wages go up, the profits are
taxed, the regulations are enforced, and capital adjusts; the dire consequences
never materialize.
But the power behind the bluff is not imaginary. Sometimes
the dire consequences do materialize.
Therefore, when we challenge hypocrisy, we should also
challenge power. The way to challenge power is to disarm it, to dismantle the
quasi-mechanism through which it operates. The way to disarm economic power is
to build alternatives. So that it will be less and less true that if there is no
profit, there will be no business and no jobs. So that it will be less and less
true that human societies must sweeten incentives to investors in order to
produce goods, render services, work, and join together for the common
good.
Tip 6: Expose the masterminds. Name
the key corporate players behind the scenes, document their interlocking roles
and allegiances, and expose the personal and corporate benefits they
receive.
Commentary: Identifying individuals can sometimes
help to unmask the true nature and intentions of a movement. For example, in
Italy during the 1920s Olivetti was secretly funding Mussolini. Meanwhile,
Mussolini --like many opportunists before and since-- was saying whatever he
thought would please multitudes; he spoke in favor of John Dewey's progressive
philosophy of education, and at one point he even came out for feminism. The
consequences of Mussolini coming to power could have been more accurately
predicted by studying who his backers were than by listening to what he
said.
On the other hand, it is not generally true that social
problems can be solved by using a discourse that traces the economic benefits
particular people pursue. Since the principal causes of poverty and insecurity
are deep cultural structures, it is unfair and misleading --and, worse, it is
contributing to the problem, not to the solution -- to assume that individuals
are and always will be vicious automata of egoism. The reality of the human
condition is that we are all actors on a stage we did not make; as children we
learned to play the roles society prescribed for us. Those of us who are trying
to improve society need to work on improving society's role designations and its
assumptions about human nature. Human action will improve when society defines
humanity in ways that bring out the best in people.
The liberation theologians of Latin America have a good way
to express the need to both hold people accountable for their actions and to
call people to act according to higher standards. The buena nueva (good news)
encompasses both denunciar (denouncing evil) and anunciar (announcing the coming
of a better world). The Jewish Yom Kippur liturgy puts it: "If you do not both
praise and revile, then I have created you in vain, sayeth the Lord."
Tip 7: Maximize every obstacle.
Federal systems of government, written constitutions, legal requirements and
regulations, supra-national institutions like the ILO and the UN, and strong
local governments can provide barriers that slow down the pace of the corporate
takeover.
Commentary: The corporate takeover is a recent
version of the relentless pursuit of profit that Adam Smith in The Wealth of
Nations sometimes depicted with water metaphors. Money flows into profitable
channels of trade as water flows downhill. Expanding on Smith's hydraulic
images, we can caricature the neo-liberal global corporate takeover by saying
that the pursuit of profit by self- interested individuals is like a
never-ending flood. The forces of the market are like rain that never stops.
Whatever obstacles stand in the way of the floodwaters --federal systems of
government, written constitutions, legal requirements, ILO standards-- the water
will seep through, soak, flow around, submerge, and finally wash
away.
According to the metaphysics of neoliberal economics, the
market forces are natural, like water, and whatever impedes them is artificial.
The barriers that inhibit them from flowing where they naturally flow (toward
profits) are like dams. Since the rains never stop, no dam will last.
At the same time that we counter-strategize by maximizing
every obstacle, in order to slow down the pace of the corporate takeover, we can
do something more humane. We can cooperate on a not-for-profit basis to meet
each other's needs. A new light dawns. The rain stops, the flood waters
recede.
Tip 8: Work hard to maintain
solidarity. Avoid the trap of divide and rule. Sectoral in-fighting is
self-indulgent and everyone risks losing in the end.
Commentary: It is hard to maintain solidarity. People
who have everything to gain from solidarity, fall out and divide over social
issues, such as religion or the lack of it, sexual morality or the lack of it,
abortion, homosexuality, generation gaps, race, gender, ethnicity, unforgiven
past wrongs, language, addictions, and mental illness.
I will explain the last two items, addictions and mental
illness, because they are not usually thought of as issues that divide social
movements. It does not seem to me to be possible to organize a mass movement (at
least not here where I am, in Southern California) without including people who
suffer from depression, recovering alcoholics, people who never got over bitter
divorces, people with odd beliefs and odd delusions, people who are chronically
irresponsible and undependable, people with sexual obsessions, self-destructive
people, control freaks, deeply angry people, desperately lonely people, and
people who occasionally hallucinate and hear voices. A solidarity movement
confined to people who are unquestionably sane cannot be a mass movement; it
will always be a minority movement.
Mental health issues put solidarity in jeopardy because
mentally healthy people generally do not feel obliged to stay in organizations
where they have to put up with the foibles of neurotics and borderline
psychotics. Also because mentally ill people find it notoriously difficult to
bond with other people, and to work in solidarity with others for a common
cause.
Given the standard divisive social issues (religion...etc.),
and given the two I have added, I conclude that it is not possible to achieve a
high degree of solidarity in heterogeneous groups. It was a theoretical illusion
--homo economicus-- that created the parallel illusion that a mass solidarity
movement could take political power and build socialism. Real people, whatever
their economic interests, cannot achieve cohesion without sharing values; the
exception proves the rule in communities like my own, where our very love of
diversity is a value we share. It follows that the only way to achieve
solidarity on a large scale and across social barriers, is to form coalitions
that combine the powers of many grassroots face-to-face groups, each of which
meets the need-to- belong of a more-or-less homogeneous type of
person.
The role of the organic intellectual, the leader, is
crucial. To maintain solidarity, there must be key people who can lead their
kith and kin into broad functional coalitions with people their kith and kin
would not like and would not agree with, if they got to know them
well.
Solidarity becomes more doable if it is thought of as
concentric levels of commitment, or as Nel Noddings puts it, as concentric
circles of caring. It is futile for one person to try to be in complete
solidarity with all humanity and all the animals and plants that share the
planet with us --even though some of us try. But it is a practical possibility
for one person to be in complete solidarity with a lover or with a family; and
it is practical to be in very close to complete solidarity with a circle of
close friends. If everybody could be in a family, and in a loving community
larger than a family, then, step by step, building on the elements of solidarity
that already exist in the world wherever they are found and in whatever language
they are expressed, then, after much trial and error, we might be able to
achieve the goal announced by the slogan, "Workers of the world, unite!" It
could be achieved.
Tip 9: Do not compromise the labor
movement. Build awareness of the corporate agenda at union local and workplace
levels. Resist concessions that tend to deepen co-optation and weaken the
unions' ability to fight back.
Commentary: First I will make a general suggestion
about how to build a strong union, drawn from my experience with Cesar Chavez.
Second, I will argue that labor unions alone cannot transform the global
economy. Third, I will state reasons why unions are essential (although not
sufficient.)
Once when Cesar Chavez was asked how he organized the union
he answered, "First I organized one person, and then another person, and then
another person, and then another person, and then another person .... " When he
and a few others started organizing in California's Central Valley, the first
thing they did was to listen to whatever farm workers wanted to desahogar
(express from the heart). They found that many were afraid they would die an
unknown death, with no funeral and no one to mourn. Thus Chavez arrived
independently at a method used by the first working people's associations in
Europe. One of the first things the new union did was to assure that every time
a member died there would be a funeral.
Although I have not said very much about Chavez, I think I
have said enough to lead up to the general suggestion I want to make. It is
this: the solidarity needed to solve economic problems will come to a great
extent from non-economic motives.
My second point is that labor unions alone cannot transform
the global economy. Unions do not produce any goods or services (except for the
services rendered in administering the union itself). They produce no food, no
housing, no clothing, no medical attention or child care. Their ultimate weapon
is the strike, which is a non-action, a not-showing-up-for-work. The strike is
stop-power, not go-power. The strike is, in principle and for structural
reasons, a weak weapon. Refusal to work is always subject to the risk that
someone else will be hired, and to the risk that the business will close, or
move somewhere else. Moreover, even when it may be successful, the strike must
be used sparingly, because shutting business down offends not just business, but
also the public and the government. Labor is caught in a structural
trap.
The transformation of the economy requires the
transformation of go-power. It cannot be done with stop-power alone.
There is a traditional division of opinion in the labor
movement between those who favor unions closely allied with socialist parties
that aim to deliver control of the means of production to the working class; and
those who favor labor unions that focus on wages, benefits, and work rules in
business enterprises working people will never own or control. In this dispute I
sympathize with the former, with those who view union action as complementary to
political action.
However --and this is a big however-- I have concluded above
that political parties cannot transform the global economy even if they achieve
governmental power, because national governments (either singly or in concert)
cannot. Hence neither unions, nor governments, or the combination of the two,
can transform the global economy's structure. (Do not even ask about violence;
it has as much chance as the proverbial snowball in hell.) Something more is
needed. I call the something more the growth of a culture of
solidarity.
One might ask then, whether labor unions are unnecessary as
well as insufficient. If the global economy can be transformed at all, perhaps
it can be transformed without labor unions. Not so. Unions (not counting the
corrupt ones) augment the power of working people. A world where the masses of
working people were more powerless than they already are, would not be a world
where social transformation could occur. Empowerment of the people, in many
forms, including labor unions, is needed to make change feasible.
Further, a collective bargaining contract is in itself a
positive cultural transformation. A union contract embodies respect. It is not
just about wages; it is about human rights in the workplace. It is about
replacing arbitrary power with social norms, and with grievance procedures for
the adjudication and enforcement of the norms. Neither the norms or the
procedures are ever perfect; improvement is always possible. But it is
nevertheless a step forward in principle to establish procedures for governing
relationships in the workplace (or anywhere else) according to a pattern of
standards, an ethics, which seeks, in principle, to take into consideration
everybody's needs and everybody's rights. It is a step away from the rule of
force, and a step away from the rule of the quasi-force of the quasi-machine
called "the economy." It is a step toward a world where human beings cooperate
to meet needs, and treat each other with mutual respect.
Tip 10: Maintain the concept of an
efficient public service. Resist attempts to discredit and dismantle the public
sector by admitting deficiencies and promoting constructive models for change.
Build support among client groups and the public which stresses the need for
public services and the risks of cutting or privatizing them.
Commentary: The concept of an efficient public
service needs to be maintained because it is a concept under attack. There are
people who deny the validity of the concept. They do not just criticize
government program A or B for being inefficient; they criticize the very idea
that there could be such a thing as efficient public service.
That governments are always and necessarily inefficient is a
metaphysical proposition. However, it is a metaphysical proposition that is
given an aura of plausibility by reports on concrete historical experience. For
example, P. T. Bauer, a leading anti-government pro-market writer, reports that
government programs in India that were supposed to help the poor in fact wasted
time and favored the middle class. Instead of farming, farmers spent their time
currying favor with government officials and going to political meetings. Those
who mainly received the benefits of the programs were not the neediest; they
were the ones who could afford to offer bribes and near-bribes; the ones who
could find time to develop contacts and learn the art of grantsmanship; the ones
who knew how to negotiate their way through the official procedures required to
obtain a share of the government's largesse.
Similarly, horror stories about failures of planning in the
USSR and elsewhere are used to suggest, if not to prove, that the "planning
model" is always wrong and the "market model" always right.
The metaphysical proof that the concept of efficient public
service is a contradiction in terms proceeds by defining "efficiency" in such a
way that only free, competitive markets can be efficient. The price fixed by
such markets reflects, by definition, an optimal allocation of society's
resources. Other criteria for allocating resources are, in principle,
inefficient.
From this argument it follows that not just modern public
institutions, but also humanity's older institutions --family, kinship, and
religion-- are inefficient; as are innovative modern institutions, such as
cooperatives, nonprofits, charitable foundations, volunteer agencies,
intentional communities, neighborhood associations and fraternal lodges. It
follows that they are all by definition inefficient, insofar as they operate
according to an ethic that diverges from the norms that govern "rational"
behavior in free competitive markets.
A more convincing metaphysical argument can be made for the
opposite conclusion: public service (and other institutions responsive to
ethical criteria that override market "rationality") may be efficient, but free
competitive markets are never efficient. The argument starts by defining
"efficient" in a standard way: to be efficient is to achieve the objective at
the least cost (or to a higher degree at the same cost). Next, it defines the
objective: to meet the physical and spiritual needs of humanity, in sustainable
harmony with the living systems of the earth.
On the basis of these plausible definitions, it can be
argued that in principle the concept of an efficient free competitive market is
mistaken. In such markets money and the self-interested decisions of economic
actors always intervene between the objective and its achievement. The real
measure of efficiency in achieving the objective --meeting needs long term--
does not necessarily coincide with any outcome the actors in the market seek,
i.e. not with the goal of maximizing money returns for self-interested
actors.
There are at least three reasons for concluding that
efficiency and the market not only do not necessarily coincide, but, indeed,
necessarily do not coincide.
1. Markets are always biased in favor of effective demand,
i.e. in favor of the demands of people with money. A market may be Pareto-
optimal, but it can never (except in the imaginary abstractions of
mathematical welfare economics) be Pigou-optimal, i.e. it will never allocate
the necessities of life to those who need them the most.
2. Markets never internalize external costs. Two actors
who strike a market-rational bargain between themselves need not consider the
consequences of their bargain for other people outside their bargain, nor the
consequences for the earth.
3. Markets always discount the value of the long term
future. A payment to be made 1,000 years from now (a mere speck in geological
time) has a market value of virtually zero according to any commonly used
discount rate.
It follows that public service (or any enterprise or
institution that takes meeting real needs as its objective) has at least a
chance to be efficient; but the concept of an efficient free competitive market
is a contradiction in terms.
But what should we say about the historical experiences with
inefficient public service, which lend empirical support to the (false)
generalization that government is never efficient? We should say that those
experiences are so many reasons to maintain the concept of an efficient public
service, admitting deficiencies and promoting constructive models for change.
(And, of course, we should say that recognizing the inherent inefficiency of
markets does not imply that we should go to the extreme of trying to build a
world with no markets at all.)
Further inspiration comes from emphasizing the positive. For
example, biologists find that the single most important factor explaining the
increased longevity of the species homo sapiens sapiens in recent centuries is
improved public health programs -- cleaner water, better treatment of sewage,
control of infectious diseases, etc. The hard physical fact is that people now
live longer because of an alliance between science and efficient public
service.
Tip 11. Encourage community leaders to
speak out. Public criticism from civic and church leaders, folk heroes and other
prominent "names" makes corporate and political leaders uncomfortable. It also
makes people think. Remind community leaders of their social obligations, and
the need to preserve their own self-respect.
Commentary: When the consequences of globalization
violate deeply felt human values, then the conscience of the people, expressed
by community leaders of various kinds, is available as a weapon of the
resistance. There then emerges an ad hoc protest coalition. Whether a local ad
hoc protest coalition can be part of a global transformational social movement
depends --in part-- on whether it is possible to transform the world system
through a diverse alliance whose constituent elements do not share a common
ideology.
Whoever encourages them to speak out on an issue, community
leaders will not speak with the voices of their encouragers. They will speak
with their own voices. A priest will reflect some version of the social
teachings of his denomination, modified by his own prayers and reflections.
Ethnic, tribal, and racial leaders will speak from the matrix of their communal
identities. Economic interest groups will usually argue for the compatibility of
their particular short term interest with the long term common good. A woman may
speak on behalf of women or she may express a view that articulates some other
dimension of her participation in society. (This point applies to the others
too, since everybody has multiple group affiliations.) As long as the ad hoc
protest coalition has no common philosophy, each community leader will speak in
a specific voice, that is hers or his; and not in a general voice that expresses
the aims and the spirit of a unified global transformational
movement.
For Plato, as for many others, ancient and modern, western
and non-western, it was obvious that social transformation would require
cooperation, and cooperation would require likemindedness. Plato's ideal city
was to be united by a single shared philosophy. For Karl Marx it was obvious
that the working people should be unified in practice through sharing in theory
a common socialist ideology.
Liberalism does not agree. For liberalism the variety of
voices in an ad hoc protest coalition is an asset, not a liability; and, indeed,
the very fact that people speak as community leaders rather than for themselves
alone is already suspect. It is a sign that there may be too much conformity.
According to liberalism, each person should think and advocate for herself, or
for himself.
I believe that Plato and Marx had good reasons for seeking
likemindedness, but liberals also have good reasons for fearing likemindedness
and valuing diversity of thought. I hope that it will be possible to transform
the global economy through unity-in- diversity.
If we adopt the idea of the classical anthropologists, that
human cultures can be understood as diverse adaptations to diverse environments;
and if we think of the global economy as certain features of modern European
culture writ large --as European economic practices expanded to a global scale--
then we can see global economic transformation as cultural transformation.
Ultimately it will be an adaptation to just one environment, planet
earth.
Cultural transformation does not necessarily or usually
proceed by the conscious adoption of a single coherent philosophy, belief
system, or religion. Diverse subjectivities can be functionally equivalent. What
people do is ultimately more important than what they think; and harmony of
action need not require unity of thought. The social conflicts that prevent
successful adaptation to the physical environment can be worked out differently,
on different occasions, in different places, among different kinds of people,
with different personalities, speaking different languages.
This is not to say that humanity would not benefit from more
connectedness and bonding than it has now. We need community. Beyond community
we need resonances across community boundaries that help us to feel the common
human energies that fuel diverse cultural forms; those who work for global
transformation need to capture a variety of positive energies; we need to share
in the dream of a multicultural earth.
As we build community, and as we network our community with
other communities, we can celebrate both unities and diversities. We can
treasure the likemindedness that exists in the world; we can help it to grow,
and to grow in the appreciation of diversity. We can encourage likemindedness to
be ecumenical. Not everybody should be a Buddhist, but the fact that there are
likeminded Buddhists who understand each other's spirituality, and who can act
cohesively because they think cohesively, is an asset for all of humanity.
Wherever there is trust; wherever there is a functioning set of shared norms and
beliefs; wherever there are sacred rituals and stories; wherever there is an
ethnic identity; wherever there is solidarity; there, in those places, there is
empowerment. Wherever there is empowerment there is the capacity for resisting
and transforming global economy.
Tip 12. Avoid anti-intellectualism. A
pool of academics and other intellectuals who can document and expose the
fallacies and failures of the corporate agenda, and development viable
alternatives in partnership with community and sectoral groups, is absolutely
vital. They need to be supported when they come under attack, and challenged
when they fail to speak out or are co-opted or seduced.
Commentary: The people's movement --conceived as a
movement to make the world work for 100% of humanity without ecological damage-
- should avoid anti-intellectualism because it requires intellectuals (1) for
technical expertise, and (2) for humanitarian conceptualization.
(1) A transformation of the economy can only take place
with the support of people who know how to make technologies work. In this
respect --as possessors of knowledge-- intellectuals have power; indeed they
have more tangible power than the power capitalists have, because the
knowledge of intellectuals is a physical requirement of production, while the
rights of owners depend on legal fictions.
Against point (1) it can be objected that those who wait
for technical experts to make common cause with the people will wait in vain
because (a) most experts are not intellectuals, and (b) most intellectuals
support the status quo. I would reply to these potential objections as
follows:
(a) Technical expertise leads to general intellectual
culture insofar as it requires mathematical reasoning and the logical use of
language --and it leads to general intellectual culture to an even higher
degree at the higher levels of technology, where creativity, philosophical
reflection, and the interfacing of different disciplines are also
required.
(b) General intellectual culture will lead to commitment
to participating in practices that transform cultural structures as
competent thinkers become aware of the objective reality of the situation of
the species homo sapiens on the planet earth.
(2) Intellectuals are also needed to facilitate the
evolution of social norms toward more solidarity and cooperation. Given that
moral evolution is possible and necessary, then intellectuals will be needed
to facilitate its accomplishment. It will not be easy or automatic. It will
require cross-cultural and cross-faith humanitarian understanding,
psychological and spiritual study and practice, and artistic
talent.
(Note that the need for more cooperation does not mean an
end to healthy competition. Even Gandhi played soccer --with a team called the
Pretoria Passive Resisters-- and Martin Luther King Jr. loved a good pillow
fight.)
(P. S. Although I do not object to Jane Kelsey using the
phrase "corporate agenda," it is not a phrase I would have used myself. My own
emphasis is on the deep structural causes of human problems, and I hesitate to
identify any group of people as impeding progress and desiring
regress.)
Tip 13. Establish an alternative
think-tank. If one already exists, make sure it is adequately funded.
Neo-liberal and neoconservative think-tanks have shown how well-resourced
institutes on the right can rationalize and legitimize the corporate agenda. The
need is obvious for one or more equally well-supported think-tanks on the left.
Uncoordinated research by isolated critics will not suffice.
Commentary: Since it is cultural structures that need
to be changed, there is no substitute for grassroots action projects, where
norms and values are transformed. If this premise is accepted, the role of
think-tanks should be seen in the light of it.
I am grateful for the existence of alternative think-tanks.
Having worked for two of them, I perceive three of their limitations to
be:
(1) their survival depends upon funding, which is always
precarious;
(2) obtaining funding requires devoting a great deal of
time and energy to seeking the favor of rich and powerful people;
(3) legal restrictions often prevent close connections
with political parties, unions, churches, social movements, cooperatives, and
self-help groups.
I suggest that in addition to think-tanks there should be
support for other ways to build the intellectual infrastructure for alternatives
to the present global economy. This would include the systematic sharing of
tasks among tenured academics, who already have salaries. I believe that Jane
Kelsey particularly has in mind the systematic dissemination of ideas that would
reply directly to the intellectual products of the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, the Ministries of Planning, the Institutes of Strategic Studies,
and the well-funded conservative think-tanks.
Tip 14. Invest in the future. Provide
financial, human and moral support to sustain alternative analysis,
publications, think-tanks, and people's projects that are working actively to
resist the corporate agenda and work for progressive change.
Commentary: Help! I do not have any discretionary
money; I can barely keep up with paying my bills and my taxes. The
philanthropists who give to progressive causes are already overwhelmed with
valid calls for funding.
What can people in my position do? (1) We can organize
productive communities like Gandhi's ashrams, which generate food, other
necessities of life, and money --and thus do not depend so much on asking donors
to donate. (2) We can reduce our personal expenditures, simplify our lives, so
that we can give more time and money for the good of humanity.
Tip 15. Support those who speak out.
The harassment and intimidation of critics of the corporate takeover works only
if those targeted for attacks lack personal, popular, and institutional support.
Withdrawing from public debate leaves those who remain more exposed.
Commentary: Also speak out in favor of other people's
good work. Building community requires food, music, and praise. Perhaps there
should be a rule that for every protest there should be at least one award for
outstanding service.
Tip 16. Promote ethical investment.
Support investors who genuinely respond to social and ecological concerns.
Expose unethical investors who don't. Boycotts have proved a powerful force in
environmental, anti-nuclear and safe product campaigns. Companies that ignore
social and environmental concerns can be embarrassed and called to
account.
Commentary: It is cultural structures that need to
change, and cultural structures are composed of conventional norms;
therefore:
(1) It does little good if workers or government officials
take over businesses, and then operate them with the same conventional norms
and/or the same corruption;
(2) It is a step in the right direction if people who
already have positions of influence in business use their influence to conform
behavior to higher ethical standards.
Tip 17. Think global, act local.
Develop an understanding of the global nature of economic power, and those
forces which are driving current trends. Draw the links between these global
forces and local events. Target local representatives, meetings and activities
which feed into the global economic machine.
Commentary: I can act locally for global structural
transformation by starting with just one act. If I keep just one promise,
abiding by just one commitment to meet some need for somebody, and I keep the
promise not because it is in my self- interest to do so but because I promised,
then I am making some person a tiny bit more secure because that person can
count on someone else, namely me. I am undoing the damage done by the global
market economy, which, in principle, makes people insecure because people's
needs cannot be met without the help of others, and nobody motivated purely by
market incentives will do anything to meet somebody else's needs unless it is in
their self-interest to do so.
I can act locally starting with a connection to just one
person. If I can establish solidarity with one person, then there are two of us
outside the market (as far as the relationship between us is concerned). If we
are in a family, and the family (or surrogate family) is part of a kinship
system or tribe or its equivalent and if the process continues with people in
different types of human alliances --families, unions, cooperatives, towns,
nations, etc.-- providing different degrees and types of support for one
another, then it will become clear that what began on a local level was a change
of principle that transformed the global economy.
Tip 18. Think local, act global.
Actively support international strategies for change, such as people's
tribunals, non-governmental forums and codes of conduct, and action campaigns
against unethical companies and corporate practices. Recognize that
international action is essential to counter the collaboration of states and
corporations, and to empower civil society to take back control.
Commentary: With the help of the Internet,
countervailing idealistic organizations are catching up with the globalization
of business. It is easy to get on listserves and visit websites that will keep
you up to date on precisely what you can do to act globally.
Tip 19. Develop alternative media
outlets. Once mainstream media are captured by the right it is difficult for
critics to enter the debate, and impossible to lead it. Alternative media and
innovative strategies must be put in place. Effective communication and exchange
of information between sectoral groups and activists are essential, despite the
time and resources involved.
Commentary: As far as I can, with my limited means, I
try to support people who run alternative publications, alternative radio, and
public access TV. In addition, I think there is an important role for personal
communications or mini-media; the samizdat, the tiny publications that
played such an important role in the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.
Samizdat includes, for example, local church bulletins, which people tend
to read and trust because they know the authors personally. The following is a
mathematical calculation, which tends to show that messages that people read and
repeat will spread widely at low cost.
Suppose I send 100 of my friends a personal newsletter,
communicating a justice message that bears repeating, and suppose
that they, in turn, send a similar message to 100 of their
friends (not counting repeats to the same people I wrote to). That would reach
10,000 people.
If the same pattern is then iterated three more times, it
reaches, successively, 1,000,000, then 100,000,000, and then 10,000,000,000
people --which exceeds the population of the earth.
Although the assumption that each recipient will in turn
send 100 messages to new people is false, I think this calculation has some
tendency to show that if I send out a message that people in general find worth
passing on, then the message is likely to spread widely. A practical suggestion:
when I send a message, I should accompany it with a request that it be passed
on.
Tip 20. Raise the levels of popular
economic literacy. Familiarize people with the basic themes, assumptions, and
goals of economic fundamentalism. Convince them that economic policy affects
everyone, that everyone has a right to participate, and that alternatives to the
corporate agenda do exist.
Commentary: Raising popular economic literacy can be
done a propos of current events. When reporting current events, the mainstream
media regularly make the neo-liberal assumptions of comparative advantage
economics, such as the assumption that whatever price the market fixes is
natural and right, and the assumption that a free market will meet everyone's
basic needs. Assuming that through the alternative media advocated in (19) above
it is possible to comment publicly on current events, the alternative
interpretations of events can introduce alternative philosophical
principles.
Tip 21. Resist market-speak. Maintain
control of the language, challenge its capture by the right, and refuse to
convert your discourse to theirs. Insist on using specific terms that convey the
hard realities of what is going on.
Commentary: Market-speak treats an abstract number,
profit, as the bottom line. Real bottom lines have some physical or spiritual
substance, like a tree that bears fruit, a loaf of good bread, a drink of clean
water, someone who cares about you.
Tip 22. Be realistic. Recognize that
the world has changed, in some ways irreversibly, and that the past was far from
perfect. Avoid being trapped solely into reacting and defending the status quo.
Defending the past for its own sake adds credibility to the claims of the right
and wastes opportunities for genuine change.
Commentary: There are several reasons why there has
been a global sea-change since 1973 or so, in favor of neo-liberal market
economies; a stance against planning, against labor unions, against the welfare
safety net. The deepest and principal reasons are due to the working out in our
times of the basic causal mechanisms that have governed the global economy since
its inception in the 16th century. Consequently the deepest and principal
methods for working for justice in the global economy are contributions to
replacing those basic causal mechanisms. The principal method for replacing them
is to build alternatives that work, i.e. alternatives that succeed in producing
and distributing food, housing the homeless, caring for the sick....
Tip 23. Be pro-active. Start
rethinking visions, strategies, and models of development for the future. Show
that there are workable, preferable alternatives from the start. This becomes
progressively more difficult the longer you wait to respond to the corporate
agenda.
Commentary: The only way I can show that there is a
workable, preferable, alternative is to join a group. Alone I might be able to
read books about alternatives, or even write one, but I cannot show one
working.
If the group's purpose is to show that there are workable,
preferable alternatives, then it needs to be a model of one. Nobody will believe
us if we say the world could function differently if we cannot run our own lives
differently.
Tip 24. Challenge the TINA ("there is
no alternative") claim. Convince people --individually and collectively-- that
there are real and workable alternatives. Present options that combine realism
with the prospect of meaningful change. Actively promote these alternatives and
have them ready to be implemented when the corporate agenda fails.
Commentary: I will comment on a scenario where it
might seem to be really true that there is no alternative.
Such a scenario is a national debt crisis. The nation cannot
make current payments on its debts. Nobody accepts payment in the nation's
currency; only dollars or hard European money will do. The nation's airports,
its port facilities, its gold reserves, and other tangible assets are already
mortgaged as security for its debts.
It appears that the only thing to do is to sign a letter of
intent with the International Monetary Fund, and thus get funding and a
reprieve, conditioned on accepting the principles of neo- liberal philosophy. In
practical terms this means reducing public services, freezing wages, freezing
hiring, producing for export, and making the nation even more tightly bound than
previously to the global market.
In such a situation the progressive intellectual is backed
into a corner. What does she or he propose? To turn the world overnight into a
socialist commonwealth where money is not needed? That the nation close its
borders and go it alone? Do I really have any advice to offer to the president
of a third world country when debt currently falling due cannot be refinanced,
and three IMF economists fly in from Washington to draft a letter of intent for
his signature?
I can take cold comfort in treating the TINA situation as
proof of my theory. "I always said that if you played the rules of global
capitalism, it would come to this, but you would not listen. Now will you
listen? Now are you ready to play a different game by different
rules?"
But, specifically, what would I say to President Arias of
Costa Rica when the New York bankers are knocking on his door and the IMF sends
a rescue mission? I would say I really don't know what would persuade the
bankers and the IMF to give Costa Rica some leeway, but that I am sure he will
negotiate the best deal he can get under the circumstances. Then, assuming that
the president's interest in philosophy is only moderate, I would hazard the
suggestion that he encourage self reliant community development, permaculture,
and the use of sustainable technologies, as feasible steps in the direction of
reducing the probability of another TINA situation arising in the
future.
If he seemed at all open to the idea, I would suggest that
he threaten bankruptcy, and, if necessary, not only threaten it, but do it. The
ancient biblical principle of Jubilee could be invoked to cancel debts,
reorganize, and get a fresh start.
Tip 25. Promote participatory
democracy. Build a constituency for change through alternative information
networks and media. Use community, workplace, women's, church, union, First
Nations, and other outlets to encourage people to take back control. Empower
them with the knowledge they need to understand the right-wing forces affecting
them and how they can fight back most effectively.
Commentary: Let us call it participatory social
democracy. My motive for adding the word "social" is to emphasize the building
of what Riane Eisler calls "partnership" relationships, thus bringing out the
dimension of working together cooperatively to meet needs already implicit in
"participation" (being part of one another) and "democracy" (rule by the
people). The word societas from which the English "social" comes is Latin for
"partnership." My second motive is that "social democracy" is a general name for
a progressive political trend, which was --with all its limitations-- in many
countries around the world, building a social safety net for all citizens,
before it was reversed by the present conservative and neo-liberal trend, which
is dismantling the social safety net.
The practice of participatory social democracy,
"partnership," at grassroots levels can build political leverage at higher
levels. Then when the tide of free market ideology crests and begins to recede,
and social democracy reasserts itself as the politics of the future, civil
society will be stronger, happier, and greener. As a result social democracy at
the national and global levels will take hold sooner and work better.
Partnership relationships can often be expressed by taking
the ancient pre-capitalist meaning of a word to be its real meaning, the meaning
the word had before it was debased by market individualism. Thus a real
community (Greek koinonia, Latin communitas, German
Gemeinschaft) is one where there is common property, in addition to
private property. A real workplace (Greek ergon, work) is a place where
vital social functions are performed, such as the work of providing food, or the
work of providing medical attention. Mater, the Latin word for "mother"
is the root of "material" and "matrix" (womb), suggesting that the substance and
source of life is feminine. A church, to be a real church, should be an
ecclesia (Greek and Latin), a gathering like the house churches in The
Acts of the Apostles where the members bear one another's burdens. A union
(from unitas, oneness, as also in German Vereinigung and
Bund) makes one of many. First Nations often have words reflecting
ancient traditions of respect for the land, for animals and plants, and for
other people, such as, for example, the Quichua expression ayni ruway,
which names social relationships as pacts of mutual obligation, as owing to one
another.
Participatory social democracy can provide solutions to the
everyday problems of the participants --where to find a babysitter, how to get
an old person to the hospital, how to find food and lodging for the unemployed.
Love as the law of our species, as Gandhi put it, can grow by being
practiced.
Tip 26. Hold the line. The corporate
takeover is not yet complete. Social programs have not been entirely dismantled.
Unions have not yet been destroyed. Not all environmental protections have been
eliminated. There is still time, through sustained and co-ordinated action, to
hold the line.
Commentary: The forces that are rolling back the
gains made by social democracy in the middle decades of the twentieth century
have their roots in the basic cultural structures of modernity, i.e. in market
relationships. Welfare states using Keynesian social accounting to macro-manage
the economy could only go so far, and could only last so long, before
encountering limits imposed by the very structure of the global capitalist
economy, i.e. unpayable debt, bureaucratic inefficiency, individualist ethics, a
tendency for the rate of growth to falter, the power of capital to shut business
down and move somewhere else, etc. Further, even if New Zealand style social
democracy could have continued indefinitely and could have been generalized to
the rest of the world; even then, in this best-case scenario, it would have been
physically impossible. The earth cannot bear the resource-intensive standards of
living --the cars, the free-standing houses, the cornucopia of consumer goods--
attained by the middle masses who were the primary beneficiaries of 20th century
macro-managed economies.
At the same time that we hold the line, we should cut off
the forces of neo-liberalism at their roots. To use another metaphor, the forces
that are rolling back labor gains (and also rolling back environmental gains)
should be dissolved. This (cutting off at the roots, dissolving) can be
accomplished by reviving old ways of life, and creating new ways of life, that
are governed by ethical principles of solidarity.
There is not just one future-viable ethic. Perhaps I should
not have chosen "solidarity" as a general name for them all; "caring" or "love"
or "empowerment" or "ministry" or "spiritual enlightenment" might have been
better. Throughout the world there are many cooperative practices, and many ways
of talking about them and celebrating them; there are many alternative
technologies. Together, they can make the world's peoples less dependent on
capital; therefore less subservient to it; therefore better able to regulate it,
to govern it, to socialize it, and to channel it in constructive
directions.
(Jane Kelsey's tips are taken from the Canadian Centre
for Policy Alternatives Monitor, April 1996)
9. Concluding
Scientific Postscript
1.
In the first volume of Capital,
published in 1867, Karl Marx wrote the following passage. It is helpful to bear
in mind while reading it that the German word translated as "commodities" is
Waren, which can be equated to our English word "wares," as in, "Said
Simple Simon to the Pie Man, `let me taste your wares.'" The word translated as
"labor power" is Arbeitskraft, the energy, strength or power that makes
it possible to do work.
"For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore,
the owner of money must meet in the market with the free laborer, free in the
double sense; that as a free man he can dispose of his labor power as his own
commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, is
short of everything necessary for the realization of his labor power.
"The question why this free laborer confronts him in the
market has no interest for the owner of money, who regards the labor market as a
branch of the general market for commodities. And for the present it interests
us just as little. We cling to the fact theoretically, as he clings to it
practically. One thing, however, is clear --Nature does not produce on the one
side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but
their own labor power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social
basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of
a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the
extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.
"So, too, the economic categories, already discussed by us,
bear the stamp of history. Definite historical conditions are necessary, that a
product may become a commodity. It must not be produced as the immediate means
of subsistence of the producer himself. Had we gone further, and inquired under
what circumstances all, or even a majority of products, take the form of
commodities, we should have found that this can only happen with production of a
very specific kind, capitalist production."1
These words seem optimistic today. Their implied message is
that in earlier periods of social evolution there were different forms of social
relations and different forms of property; in those times the buying and selling
of commodities, and the buying and selling of labor power either did not exist
at all or were not dominant. Karl Marx was one of the writers who sought to
restructure the ordinary person's perception of the everyday world of common
sense, so that budgets and bills, wages and debts, bank accounts and taxes, and
all the many economic institutions that the ordinary person takes for granted
would be seen as the outcomes of an historical process that had taken thousands
of years to get Europe to where it was in 1867. Once the everyday world is
perceived as a temporary configuration of human practices, it can be projected
that social evolution will continue. If the institutions of the past were, on
the whole, different and worse than the institutions of the present, then it
could be anticipated that the institutions of the future would be, on the whole,
different and better.
Nearly one hundred fifty years later, however, little has
changed. The owners of money still confront in the market masses of "free" men
and women possessing nothing but their own labor power. Moreover, the economic
categories Marx articulated have in the intervening century and a half become
more firmly established outside Europe. The masses of Africa no longer live in
tribal groups on their own lands; they live in townships and teeming cities. The
masses of India and of China are more, not less, under the sway of commodity
production and they work --if they can find jobs-- for wages.
Since Marx wrote, the rules that govern everyday life in
market economies have remained the same. For a time revolutions inspired by
Marx's concepts controlled areas that were home to one third of humanity, and
seemed likely to conquer the areas inhabited by the remaining two thirds. But
instead of expanding further, they shrank, and today only a few isolated
governments, such as those of North Korea and Cuba, fly Marxist banners. The
global trend today is that increasingly, not decreasingly, the owner of money
meets in the market with the free laborer, "... free in the double sense; that
as a free man he can dispose of his labor power as his own commodity, and that,
on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything
necessary for the realization of his labor power."
Yet Marx's analysis --a thousand times discredited and
refuted in theory and in practice-- refuses to go away. Its basis and beginning
--if I may be permitted an interpretation of Marx at variance with those of some
eminent scholars, but nonetheless in my opinion clear from the plain meaning of
Capital-- is the analysis of the commodity and of exchange. That
(together with the labor theory of value conceived as a principle for planning
the efficient deployment of human energy) is what is central and what does not
go away.
Marx showed that the alienation, the mass poverty, and the
instability of modern society are rooted in the basic cultural forms that govern
its leading institution, the market. "The simplest form of the circulation of
commodities is C - M - C, the transformation of commodities into money, and the
change of money back again into commodities; or selling in order to buy. But
alongside this form we find another specifically different form: M - C - M, the
transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back
again into money; or buying in order to sell. Money that circulates in the
latter manner is thereby transformed into, becomes, capital, and is already
potentially capital."2
Marx will not go away not because he solved the problem --in
many ways he was mistaken-- but because he identified the problem. The problem
he identified is a deep source of structural constraints ("contradictions" in
Marxist terminology), rooted in the cultural forms that define both everyday
life and the global economy. They frustrate even the most well-intentioned
efforts to make the world work for 100% of humanity without ecological
damage.
A root of the problem is that the masses of the world are,
and are still, "...short of everything necessary for the realization of their
labor power." They still face capital in the labor market with no commodity to
sell but their own vital energy.
And capitalism is still --not by accident but due to the
very nature of the exchange process that is its basis and beginning-- inherently
unstable, compelled to pursue its never-ending fatal addiction to "growth" in a
series of desperate efforts to stabilize itself. Until a sustainable
steady-state economy is achieved, Marx's analysis of the inherent tendency
toward infinite expansion of the exchange process will not go away. (Marx quotes
Aristotle, who regarded the circulation of money to produce more money as
unnatural because it is in principle infinite and unlimited, "...there are no
bounds to its aims, these aims being absolute wealth.")3
I have been suggesting throughout my review of scientific
theories that purport to explain the global economy, that the problems of the
world economy cannot be solved when they are defined as economic problems. As
Fritjof Capra might put it, poverty is not a problem that can be solved in the
(economic) terms in which it is posed.4
Marx helps me to make my point. Poverty is an inherent
feature of a global economy where the owner of money meets in the market with
the free laborer, "...free in the double sense; that as a free man he can
dispose of his labor power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he
has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the
realization of his labor power." And poverty is inherent whenever, the "economic
categories" are those characteristic of historical conditions such that all, or
a majority of products "take the form of commodities."
It follows that poverty is not a problem economics can
solve. Because the very data of economics are prices, sales, investments, loans,
rates of interest, wages, etc. That is to say, the facts economics studies,
records, and frames explanatory hypotheses
about, already presuppose the existence of the economic
categories of commodity production; the capitalist as homo economicus going out
into the market to buy labor power with money, the worker as homo economicus
going out into the market to sell him or her self. These very basic categories
are the ones Marx showed to contain the germs of contradictions that will not go
away until those very basic categories themselves are restructured. Hence using
economic thinking to frame a solution to the problems of the global economy, is
like trying to lift yourself by pulling upward on your shoes.
Perhaps I underestimate the diversity of "economics" as a
vast and varied field, which includes thousands of economists I have never met
who have written thousands of books I have never read. I should perhaps limit
the assertion that economics cannot possibly solve the problem of poverty
(because it presupposes the use of concepts within whose ambits poverty is
inevitable) to those economists who in fact do presuppose the use of those
concepts. Maybe. Or maybe it would be better to decline to apply the term
"economist" to the mavericks, radicals, and alternative thinkers. In any case, I
think that socialist planners, as well as capitalist economists, have advanced
theories that, in principle, cannot possibly solve the problem.
The same conclusion I just drew --or rather the converse of
the same conclusion-- can be used to argue that a capitalist economy is the only
possible economy. Given that the worldwide expansion of capitalism is the
context in which economics as a science arose, and from which it derives its
data and its concepts, if it is then postulated that economics is a universally
valid science, it follows that a capitalist market economy is the only possible
economy. This is the sort of argument that Ludwig von Mises and Eugen von
Bohm-Bawerk made after the October revolution in Russia, when they argued that
socialist planning could not be done. As they conceived the matter, economics
requires that goods have prices derived from values. Values are set by the
market, that is to say, they thought, by the value preferences, or utilities, of
consumers. Therefore, no market, no values. No values, no prices. No prices, no
economy.5
In reply to von Mises, in an effort to show that socialist
planning was possible, the Polish economist Oskar Lange employed the concept of
"opportunity cost." It was not necessary to have private property in the means
of production to set prices for goods. The Central Planning Board could
construct a functional equivalent for a capitalist market mechanism by (1)
setting some initial price, (2) ordering managers of state-owned enterprises to
produce quantities based on the assumption that they will sell the product at
that initial price, while minimizing the costs of production, and (3) letting
consumers spend their incomes as they see fit. If it turns out that there are
shortages, then the planners can increase the prices. If it turns out that there
are surpluses, then the planners can lower prices. The costs of production,
which the managers are supposed to minimize, could be set, in quantitative terms
that planners could use, by counting as the cost of an input a number measuring
what had to be given up to get it, i.e. the alternatives sacrificed or
opportunities foregone, i.e. the opportunity cost. Hence --here Lange might seem
to refute, along with Mises and Bohm-Bawerk, my claim that the very categories
of economics preclude overcoming the contradictions Marx analyzed-- it is
possible to plan socialist economies.6
Piero Sraffa went even further. In The Production of
Commodities by Means of Commodities he generalized David Ricardo's "corn
model" in a way that shows that an economy could run (in principle) with no
human beings at all. The "corn model" idea is that in a one-product economy,
producing and consuming only corn, a certain quantity of corn is needed for
seed, and a certain amount of corn is needed to supply energy to do the work of
growing corn. Thus corn could reproduce itself using corn to produce corn.
Sraffa showed that in an economy with any number of commodities, the necessary
inputs could be calculated to produce the necessary outputs, which would in turn
be the inputs of the next cycle of production. The quantity of an input needed
for a given output is a "technical coefficient," which can be supplied by an
engineer or an agronomist. Neither consumers maximizing preferences nor
investors maximizing profits are needed to provide the signals telling the
economy what to produce when.7
(Both before and after Sraffa, a number of input-output
computer models of national economies and of the world economy have been
created. The outputs of some processes are inputs for other processes, which in
turn produce more outputs, which become new inputs. Assuming that observed
ratios will continue to hold in the future, models using input-output principles
can project forward in time the operation of the present world economy. Assuming
that past and present ratios and relationships will continue to hold, often
amounts to assuming that there will be positive feedback loops, so that a trend
now will be an even stronger trend in the future, like compound interest. The
almost uniform result of such future modeling is that projecting present trends
forward shows that the future of the world economy is system collapse, as
pollution, resource depletion, and population growth combine to create disaster
scenarios. Projections show sustainable scenarios to be possible if and only if
there are radical social and environmental changes soon.)8
Lange and Sraffa have indeed shown that it is possible to do
economics without capitalism. Lange, Sraffa, and others invented ways to build a
non-capitalist economic system by organizing production according to principles
that depend less on the voluntary consent of the owners of factors of
production. They thus made great progress in the physical planning of socialism,
but not in the human planning of socialism. They showed how to partly dispense
with homo economicus, while partly relying on consumer choices and on monetary
incentives which presuppose the same homo economicus presupposed by capitalism.
They do not show how to transform homo economicus.9 Marx himself, if he were
alive today, might well join those who argue --with arguments illustrated by
many horror stories drawn from history-- that opportunity cost and input-output
planning lend themselves to a net regress -- backward from misery under
capitalism toward misery under slavery.
I am drawing support for my view that transformation of
basic cultural structures is needed from Marx, who showed that there are
intractable problems built into the formal structure of the social relations
that provide both the framework of everyday life and the framework of the global
economy: the free laborer, the market, the commodities that are bought and
sold.
Marx knew that the exchange of commodities was the stuff of
everyday life throughout the capitalist world, and that the world economy was a
single system, and that the governments of nation- states were its local
administrators, not its lords and masters. He has been vindicated in recent
years by the decline of the power of the nation-state in the wake of the
globalization of production.
Encouraged by the flourishing of West European social
democracies after World War II, and incautiously underestimating the
significance of temporary features of that historical period and of the
privileged role West Europe then had in the international division of labor,
many people had taken Sweden, or Denmark, or Holland to be the image of the
ideal future of human society, give or take a few blemishes. If Sweden could
have full employment, high wages, and universal health care, then (people
fallaciously reasoned) every other nation could do the same; what is possible
for one national element of the world economic system (people mistakenly
thought) must be possible for all. Marx was thought to be a pessimist, who had
been disproven by the ability of essentially capitalist nation-states to
redistribute income through elected labor governments and strong labor
unions.
I actually do think that Marx was overly pessimistic in
underestimating the possibilities for using political power to shape and mold a
national economy, and I actually think that Anthony Giddens in his book A
Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism has given good reasons for
seeing Marx's vision was not entirely right in this respect.10 But Marx was not
entirely wrong, as is brought home by the present crumbling of West European
welfare states under the relentless pressure of global economic competition; and
as is brought home by the fading of the dream that some day the poor of Guyana,
Botswana, and the U.S.A. will achieve the level of security enjoyed by the poor
of Holland. I will not repeat here the arguments of Part Two, The
Globalization of Production, but only note that the quasi-mechanism
identified there as the explanation of the success of global capitalism's end
run around labor governments and labor unions is precisely the basic cultural
structure that is the basis and beginning of Marx's analysis.
Although politics is important, and it does matter who is
elected and what programs and policies governments implement, nevertheless, on
the whole, it is not true to say that humanity is ruled by governments. A modern
government, like any other modern institution, and much like an individual
person, has bank accounts, income, expenses, and a budget. It struggles to pay
its bills, and it has to pay interest on its debts. A government cannot simply
rewrite the rules of the system it depends on and is part of. On the other hand,
humanity's existing economic institutions are not, either, merely the creations
of a privileged class of powerful people, who made them up, and who could make
up different ones whenever they might choose, or might find it in their
interest, to do so.
What we need, however, is not so much insight into who and
what does not rule the world, as insight into who and what does.
One would like to hope that it would be possible to achieve
a better understanding of who and what rules the global economy, and to learn
how to contribute more effectively to solving humanity's and the earth's
problems, if one had a better theory. I have been suggesting that a fatal flaw
in most economic theory is its metaphysical alliance with the natural sciences,
borrowing most of its metaphors and mathematical tools from mechanics. I have
been suggesting that we might do better by treating economics, or planning, as a
human science, which would be closer to linguistics, to philosophy, and to
cultural anthropology. If indeed, cultural forms are, as Marx and others have
shown, root causes of the phenomena to be explained, it would seem logical to
seek a methodology for explaining them in those sciences which have devoted
themselves to the study of cultural forms. At this point I would like to add
more detail to some particular suggestions I have already made, beginning with
the suggestion in the Introduction to Part One, that a market can be thought of
as a language, and that the scientific explanation of international trade and
other economic phenomena could proceed by considering a market as a system of
meanings.
2.
Two of the ideas that linguists of the
twentieth century have found most helpful for understanding language
are:
1) The distinction between the diachronic study of
language and the synchronic study of language; and
2) The distinction between the signifier and the
signified.
Without exaggerating the similarities between economics and
linguistics, and without pretending that linguistics is a field where scholars
have reached consensus concerning the nature of their subject, I want to suggest
that these same ideas are useful for scholars seeking to understand the global
economy, and for activists seeking to change it.
By a lucky coincidence, when Fernand de Saussure, in his
Course in General Linguistics, introduced the ideas of "diachrony,"
"synchrony," "signifier," and "signified," he drew on analogies with markets and
prices. Consequently, there is a convenient procedure available to show the
bearing of these key linguistic ideas on economic institutions. It is to comment
on Saussure's text, reversing the direction of the analogies, using linguistics
to shed light on economics where Saussure used economics to shed light on
linguistics. Saussure introduces the distinction between diachronic and
synchronic linguistics in the following passage, at the beginning of Chapter III
of his Course:
"Few linguists doubt that the intervention of the time
factor creates special difficulties for linguistics, and that it places their
science before two routes that are absolutely divergent.
"Most sciences know nothing of such a radical duality; time
does not produce any special effects. Astronomy has established that the stars
undergo notable changes; but she has not been obliged for that reason to split
itself into two disciplines. Geology reasons almost constantly about successive
states; but when it comes to occupy itself with fixed states of the earth, it
does not make of them the object of a radically different study. There is a
descriptive science of law and a history of law; nobody opposes one to the
other. The political history of states moves entirely in time; nevertheless if
an historian describes an epoch, one does not have the impression of making an
exit from history. Conversely, the science of political institutions is
essentially descriptive, but it can well, on occasion, deal with an historical
question without disturbing its unity.
"On the contrary the duality of which we speak already
imposes itself imperiously on the economic sciences. Here, contrary to what
happens in the preceding cases, political economy and economic history
constitute two disciplines clearly separated in the heart of the same science;
the books recently published on these subjects accentuate that distinction. In
proceeding in this way, one obeys, without properly taking notice of the fact,
an interior necessity: and it is an entirely similar necessity which obliges us
to separate linguistics into two parts, each having its own principle. It is the
case that there, as in political economy, one confronts the notion of value; in
the two sciences, it is a matter of a system of equivalence between two things
of different orders: in one work and salary, in the other the signified and the
signifier.
"But to better mark that opposition and that crossing
between two orders of phenomena relative to the same object, we prefer to speak
of synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics. The synchronic is
everything that refers to the static aspect of our science, diachronic
everything that deals with evolutions. In the same way, synchrony and diachrony
designate respectively a state of language and a phase of
evolution."11
Thus Saussure finds that linguistics and economics are
unusual among sciences in the extent to which part of their subject matter is
immersed in the flow of time (diachronic) while another part is outside of time
(synchronic). The part of linguistics that is synchronic includes what those of
us who are unsophisticated in linguistics call the study of grammar and the
study of the meanings of words. One could write a dictionary showing how the
meanings (the values) of all the words in a language relate to each other (are
defined in terms of each other) without any reference to the dynamic temporal
processes that caused the meanings to be what they are. In economics one could
write a list of the prices (the values) of all the goods for sale in a market,
thus giving the ratios at which they can be exchanged for money and for each
other --as a report about a given moment of time, without regard to the passage
of time.
Perhaps Saussure overestimated what he called the "inner
necessity" to separate diachronic and synchronic studies as "absolutely
divergent" in linguistic and in economics. Perhaps he underestimated the extent
to which a similar distinction might apply to other sciences. But for present
purposes it is not as important to determine whether Saussure was exactly
correct, as it is to see what it is about human life that gives his view
whatever plausibility it has, i.e. what led him to say that "values" are outside
the flow of time, while system change is immersed in the flow of time. However,
before looking more closely at the synchronic/diachronic distinction, let us
turn for a moment to the other key distinction Saussure uses in the passage
quoted, the distinction between the signifier and the signified.
A common sense model of language regards a language as
mainly a set of words standing for things. Thus "table" is a word standing for
the thing called a table. Similarly, all or most words are thought of as
standing for the things which they name. This common sense model quickly proves
inadequate for the scientific study of even one language, let alone the study of
many languages. Linguists have replaced the word/thing distinction with more
accurate technical distinctions, among which one of the most famous is
signifier/signified.
When Saussure introduces the notion of "signifier," he
identifies it with the "acoustic image." That is to say, the signifier is the
pattern of sounds, which the speaker speaks and the hearer hears.
Thus the signifier is identified with spoken words and with
other entities that play a similar role. The suffix "ier" ("iant" in
French) indicates that the signifier is what is active. It acts. It does. It
corresponds to the verb, the active part of the sentence; and to the will, the
active part of the human soul. The spoken word can do the signifying, but
something else could signify --a footprint, a drumbeat, a kiss, a tassel on a
hat ....-- and then it would be a signifier. It was the active, controlling,
responsible side of the notion of "signifier" that enabled Jacques Lacan to
diagnose paranoid psychosis as a "disorder of the signifier," when he was
working as a psychiatrist charged with treating criminally insane prisoners
referred to him by French courts. (Lacan's diagnosis is also fitting because it
alludes to the imaginary voices that psychotics hear.)12
There is another, related, way to think about signifiers.
The question, "What is a signifier?" can be answered, "A signifier is not
anything." To say that something is (one can say) is to say that it is identical
with itself. But a signifier is constituted by performing its function, and its
function is to direct the hearer beyond itself to something else. The being of
the signifier might be said to be, so to speak, exhausted by pointing outward.
Once the pointing is done there is nothing left, or --what comes to the same
thing-- whatever is left is not a signifier. A corollary of thinking about
signifiers this second way, and then thinking of language as a system of
signifiers, is anti-essentialism. On such a view the signifiers do not vanish;
indeed free-floating signifiers relating to each other become what language is
all about; what vanishes is the strong sense of the word "is," according to
which it implies that we live in a world of stable essences, identical with
themselves.
According to Saussure, the signifier does point to
something; what the signifier points to is the "signified." (signifie).
He initially identifies the signified as the "concept." In other words, what the
signifier points to is an idea, a meaning, or, as Saussure says, a "value."13
The spoken word "tree," functioning as a signifier, does not directly signify a
particular solid, real- live tree with some pine needles fresh and others dusty,
roots that curl deep in the ground around pieces of rock, and gum oozing from
joints in its trunk.
That the signifying process is about social values, not
directly about brute facts of nature, is not an arbitrary principle Saussure
dreamed up for no reason. It is a principle imposed upon linguists (although
they do not all use Saussure's terminology) by the subject matter of their
science. It leads to an important philosophical point: The human species is not
a species in direct contact with reality. As a social, language-using species,
we operate in terms of curtains of meaning interposed between us and
reality.
To return now to the text quoted above, there Saussure draws
an extended analogy as follows:
Signified is to Signifier
as
Diachronic is to Synchronic
as
Work is to Salary
If we change our focus, and recast this set of three
parallel distinctions as two sets of three, then we have:
All the first terms --signified, diachronic, work-- have
something in common.
All the second terms --signifier, synchronic, salary-- have
something in common. Saussure tells us what it is they have in common. They are
all about "values." (valeurs). They are all socially-defined counters,
which can enter into transactions with equivalent counters, and be exchanged for
their equivalents. Thus a salary (or a wage), according to the classical
economists, represents the exchange-value of work.
The first three of each pair --signified, diachronic, work--
are, in Elizabeth Anscombe's terminology, relatively "brute;" they are brute
relative to the second three of each pair.14 Without boasting of any miraculous
unsullied contact with nature uncontaminated by any human interpretation of it,
they are closer to nature. The orderly systems found in the second three of each
pair --signifier, synchronic, salary-- are paradigmatic of what is meant by
"socially constructed reality."
The first three of each pair --the signified, the
diachronic, work-- are socially constructed also, but they play different sorts
of roles in the social construction. They float free of nature to a lesser
degree; they are closer to the pine needles and the roots; closer to history;
closer to expenditures of energy, efforts, sweat, and toil.
3.
Jean Baudrillard has written some very helpful remarks
on the two passages from Saussure on which I have commented (the one I discussed
in the Introduction to Part One, and the one I just discussed immediately
above). They are as follows:
Saussure offered two perspectives on the exchange
of language terms when he compared them to money: a piece of money can be
placed in relationship to all the other terms of the monetary system; and it
can be exchanged against a real good of some value. It was for the former
dimension that Saussure increasingly reserved the term "value": the relativity
of all the terms among themselves, which is internal to the general system and
composed of distinctive oppositions --as opposed to the other possible
definitions of value: the relation of each term to what it designates, of each
signifier to its signified, as each monetary unit has something against which
it can be exchanged. The first type of relationship corresponds to the
structural dimension of language; the second to its functional aspect. The two
dimensions are distinct, but articulated, which is to say, they work together
and cohere -- a view that characterizes the `classical' configuration of the
linguistic sign, which can be placed with the commodity law of value, where
the function of designation always appears as the goal or finality of the
structural operation of language. At this `classical' stage of signification,
there is a complete parallel with the mechanism of value in material
production as Marx described it. Use value functions as the horizon and
finality [finalite] of the system of exchange value: use value qualifies the
concrete operation of the commodity in (the act of) consumption (a moment of
the process that is parallel to the sign's moment of designation); while
exchange value refers to the interchangeability of all commodities under the
law of equivalence (a moment parallel to the structural organization of the
sign). Use value and exchange value are organized together dialectically
throughout Marx's analyses and define a rational configuration of production
regulated by political economy.15
So far so good. "Use value functions as the horizon and
finality of the system of exchange value...." This is just what Adam Smith
proposed when he wrote the first great work of economic science. The whole point
of economic activity, Smith said, is to supply in ever greater quantity and
quality the necessities and conveniences of life. The free market is preferable
to the rigid institutions of bygone times and distant places because through
exchange among self-interested individuals, powerful human motives are harnessed
to achieve the common good. Smith noted with satisfaction that the relatively
high degree of market-driven capital investment devoted to "improvement" of
lands and "stock" in his 18th century Britain had produced greater general
prosperity than had been found in the kingdoms and empires of yore, or among
distant peoples he, ethnocentrically, regarded as rude savages. The market, i.e.
the system of exchange value was for Smith a social quasi-mechanism which
functioned to produce goods that were useful by nature.
In the 18th century, the leading progressive thinkers of the
time did not doubt that social institutions could be reformed in order to serve
natural functions better. As the 21st century begins, we need to reassess and
refine that premise, as well as other founding premises of modern western
civilization that we have inherited from Adam Smith and other great 18th century
thinkers. We can see now that in some ways the 18th was a demented century, full
of violence clothed in incoherent ideals --such as Nature conceived both as
savage and (simultaneously) as the source of true norms; and Freedom conceived
both as liberation from the constraints of an ethics of virtue, and
(simultaneously) as the source of the moral legitimacy of contracts. Saussure's
distinctions may help. Helped by a better theory, the difficult process of
discernment --deciding which among the ideals of modern western civilization are
the ones that should be treasured as a precious heritage and carried forward
into the future-- may (and, I think, will) show that what is best in western
civilization is what it has in common with eastern civilization; and that what
is best about modern civilization revises and improves the achievements of
ancient civilization.
"Use value functions as the horizon and finality of the
system of exchange value...." Further applying Saussure's terminology, this
thought can be revised and expanded to say: the purpose of the synchronic
structures of language, of words, money, and of economic exchange (the
signifier-synchronic-salary triad) is to make life better in the real world
(pointed toward by the signified-diachronic-work triad). Looking at life in the
light of this thought, two corollaries immediately follow about how not to be a
social activist.
The first corollary is that society cannot be transformed by
violence. This is a way of expressing the thought that improving the cultural
forms that guide life necessarily means working with cultural forms; with the
process of negotiating social reality; with the signifier-synchronic-salary side
of the three Saussurean distinctions just discussed. Brute force cannot produce
a new society; it cannot produce a society at all.
I should admit that although I have called the proposition
that society cannot be transformed by violence a "corollary" following from the
idea that social life is organized by signifiers, which function in a synchronic
world of social ritual and meaning, there will be readers who will see no
logical connection between the symbolic character of social reality and the
necessity of using nonviolent means if one aims to transform it. I cannot help
but suspect that if such readers meditated longer on the subject, and perhaps
considered Hannah Arendt's way of distinguishing "power' from "violence" in her
essay On Violence, then they would see what I see. But I cannot rule out
the possibility that if I thought about the matter longer and were properly
instructed, then I would realize that I am imagining a logical connection that
is not there.
The second corollary is that society cannot be transformed
by action that is superficial. This is a way of saying that transforming
cultural structures to adjust them to physical reality can only be done by
working with physical reality, which lies behind the signified-diachronic-work
side of the three Saussurean distinctions just discussed. Ecology is necessarily
the framework of any real transformation --not economics; economics is a piece
of the system of social values to be transformed; it is not the natural
framework defining the physical context where social transformation happens. To
understand the natural framework it is necessary to coordinate the findings of
physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy, and thus to grasp the
interrelated systems of the biosphere. That, by definition, is
ecology.
Baudrillard himself, unfortunately, is among those thinkers
who are in principle committed to a superficial philosophy. Immediately after
the passage from his works quoted above, he goes on to assert that there has
been a 20th-century revolution in thinking that has eliminated production,
use-value, and all reference to real things. He uses the passage quoted above
only as a jumping-off point, in order to describe the modern worldview (in the
specific forms it assumed in Marx and Saussure) which post- modernism has now,
in his opinion, deconstructed and destroyed.
I do not want to argue that anything of substance is shown
to be true simply because once certain definitions are laid down certain
conclusions logically follow. However, I think it is worth noting that the
Saussurean concepts I have been defining are not simply arbitrary definitions,
but definitions that have much to recommend them because of their capacity to
facilitate the scientific understanding of the phenomena of linguistics,
economics, and, in general, as Saussure says, all those areas of culture
essentially concerned with values. And I think it is worth noting that it
follows from the non-arbitrary conceptual framework that I have been developing
that the only possible route to the solution of humanity's and the earth's
problems is one that can properly be called nonviolent transformation. I have
already explained why only nonviolence will work. My reasons for pairing with
"nonviolence" the word "transformation" are two. First, using the word
"transformation" is a way of saying that the forms of human life, the cultural
structures, must be changed ("trans" "form" comes from Latin roots meaning to
"change form"). (There is no point in trying to change the laws of physics or
chemistry or the other natural sciences; it is culture that must change.)
Second, the word "transformation" carries the implication that the changes
needed are deep and profound; poverty and other human problems will not be
solved by anything short of restructuring the basic structures identified by
(among others) Karl Marx. By the same token, superficial change is not enough;
change must be practical and physical, relating to the earth and the human
body.
The conclusion that nonviolent transformation is possible
and desirable can be drawn from many different considerations; perhaps most
important, it can be drawn from the practical experience of those who have lived
it. It is, nevertheless, not unimportant to notice that it follows as a
corollary from widely accepted principles of anthropology, linguistics, and the
human sciences. The congruence of nonviolence with science tends to validate
both; it shows nonviolence to be scientific and science to be
nonviolent.
Before going on, in the next section, to say more about the
theory of nonviolent transformation, I will give an example.
It happens that in the same city where the world
headquarters of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are located,
there is another organization, with a different philosophy, called The Church of
the Savior. It meets the physical and human needs of people whom the system has
rejected. In its goals and in its methods it is not unusual. Although I have
chosen it as an example, what I will say of it could be said, with variations
from case to case, of thousands of organizations around the world, many of which
I have observed. One thing the Church of the Savior does is to run bakeries,
where people from the streets learn job attitudes and job skills and find
employment. The Church takes donations. It seeks and uses volunteer help. It
takes in interns as volunteers and provides a modest stipend. It recycles
donated items. It gets a certain amount of funding from public and private
agencies. In terms of the Saussurean analysis I have been using, it has a clear
grounding in the real world: the aim is to meet people's needs. In the social
world of economic values it is eclectic. It doesn't seek to accumulate profits,
it does not stop an activity before needs are met because there is no profit,
but neither does it shrink from running a business; it organizes whatever
pattern of human action gets the job done.16
There is nothing remarkable about the Church of the Savior,
and just because it is not remarkable it represents a practical approach. I do
not think my theory (of which the Church of the Savior is an illustration) is
remarkable either, and just because it is not remarkable it is likely to be
true. But there is a remarkable consequence: if everybody in the world followed
the practices of the members of the Church of the Savior, then the world would
have no poverty; it would have ecological balance; it would have gender
equality; it would have respect for diversity; the world would have no wars. In
the Church of the Savior, as in the base community movement generally, creative
alternatives and empowerment go together. Positive alternatives show the way to
a positive future; at the same time they build leverage to influence and reshape
the system that is now in place.
4.
My confidence that the
generalization of the practices of the members of the Church of the Savior will
solve humanity's problems is based on seeing them as a particular illustration
of a general theory that is true. Since I am not a member of that Church myself,
I do not know about the petty quarrels among the members and the personality
quirks and foibles of some of them, which make day to day life in it different
from the ideal picture of it that I have used for purposes of my example. I have
assumed that with all the failings I know they must have, but which I have
mercifully been spared knowledge of, they are committed to a spiritually-
inspired love ethic, and they are putting their commitment into
practice.
Above I noted that the signifier does not refer directly to
things, but to signifieds, which, roughly speaking, are concepts. More broadly,
the human species does not relate directly to reality. Instead, culture --words
and money, images and rituals-- mediates between the human species and the
earth. Certain forms of culture --namely the free market, property rights, and
the self- interested individual-- sustain the global economy. Worldwide trade
according to comparative advantage; the globalization of production; the choice
of unsustainable technologies; accumulation, instability, the private
appropriation of the social product; and the balancing of social accounts that
Keynesian economists struggle with, are operations proceeding according to the
regular exchange of equivalent values. The value exchange process is governed by
the signifier-synchronic-salary side of Saussure's extended analogy.
I have assumed that the members of the Church of the Savior
have bypassed the market. They have achieved a direct insight into the
relatively brute nature found on the signified-diachronic-work side of
Saussure's extended analogy. They have done this by sympathetically observing
the homeless people huddled on the streets of Washington DC (some in the very
shadows of the buildings that house the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank). They have observed that they are cold at night and hungry in the
morning; they need medical attention; they need some regularity in their lives;
they need love and human bonding; they need a place to take a shower, a change
of clothes, and a clean place to sleep. I have also assumed that the members of
the Church have been reading about global warming, acid rain, holes in the ozone
layer, and the exhaustion of fossil fuels. Unlike Adam Smith, who believed that
the more use-values were produced the better, they know that the objective
reality of our species is that it must become a responsible family within the
larger community of the living systems of the earth.
While economists have developed very sophisticated
quantitative methods for choosing the optimum use of scarce resources, the
members of the Church of the Savior have made some simple observations that
bypass economic calculations as well as the market: they have observed that some
needs are not being met at all. They have also called on people to be committed
to stewardship of their treasures and talents, and insofar as they have thus
called forth resources that would otherwise be idle, they have put to work
resources that otherwise would not be used at all. In the light of their
practical demonstration of values in action, the mathematical models used at the
World Bank to determine precisely what would be the optimum way to use a scarce
resource to meet an unmet need are convicted not so much of erroneous
mathematics as of erroneous metaphysics. They are convicted of operating within
a worldview which assumes that the socially constructed reality of economic
metaphysics is a natural and inevitable reality.
(This is not to say, of course, that when what Elizabeth
O'Connor, a member of the Church of the Savior, called "servant structures"
become the accepted global economic structures, it will not be necessary to do a
great deal of calculating to value the opportunities foregone when a resource is
put to one use instead of to another.)
Taken by itself, the ability of a group of church members to
bypass the circulation of commodities, and gain direct insight into objective
reality, might lead to practices like those depicted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag Archipelago. The Stalinists in Solzhenitsyn's novel say: you must obey me
because I know the objective truth. But I believe that the members of the Church
of the Savior have not made this mistake. They know that there is a cultural and
spiritual reality alongside physical reality. The signifier-synchronic-salary
side of Saussure's extended analogy can be eliminated only by eliminating the
human species; there is no alternative to transforming it; there is no
alternative to treating means as ends. Hence they work, as Gandhi worked, not
just with truth conceived as objective scientific fact, but also with truth
conceived as respect and faithfulness in relationships; with truth as
satya, openness to the being of the other. (from the Sanskrit sat,
"being," ya, "open")
If we travel half way around the world, from the streets of
Washington DC to the rural villages of Sri Lanka, we will see another movement
that illustrates respect for, and transformation of, the meanings found in local
culture. Unlike the Church of the Savior, which is Christian, the Sarvodaya
Shramadana movement works with the concepts of a people steeped in Buddhist
philosophy. Examples are: karuna (Sinhalese for "compassion"),
metta (loving kindness), muditha (sympathetic joy, joy in the joy
of others), purushodaya (personal awakening), artachariya
(constructive activity).18 Thus my confidence in the sort of thing the people at
the Church of the Savior are doing stems from what I see it as an example of. I
see it as an example of meeting objective needs in spiritually inspiring and
culturally appropriate ways.
The Church of the Savior and Sarvodaya Shramadana are just
two particular examples of what intelligent people of good will are doing
worldwide, with or without pay, drawing resources from wherever they can be
found, to meet needs, to save the environment, and to build peace. As the
mainstream careens toward oblivion, there are creative minorities everywhere who
are responding to felt problems in ways that contain the elements of a positive
future. They are found not just in churches and grassroots movements, but also
in political parties, government offices, labor unions, international agencies,
foundations, and in all of the professions, including even the management of
for-profit businesses. Standard forms of economics are not working, and by trial
and error people who see a need and act to meet it are inventing alternatives
that do work. The alternatives that work turn out in practice to be alternatives
that depart from and modify the metaphysics of economic society, i.e.
materialism, private property, the self- interested individual looking out only
for himself, production if and only if there is profit to be made.
5.
I would like to comment on the logical status of some
of the statements I have just made. The statement, "The alternatives that work
turn out in practice to be alternatives that depart from and modify the
metaphysics of economic society," might appear, somewhat misleadingly, to have
the logical status of an empirical generalization. Although almost every word in
the statement,
"...there is a spiritual and cultural reality alongside
physical reality," would benefit from a clarification of its logical status, I
would like to comment (first and briefly) only on the word
"spiritual."
The status of "spiritual and cultural," as opposed to
"physical," here is that of one more restatement of the distinctions I have been
drawing from Saussure, where the "spiritual and cultural" is associated with the
synchronic side, with the mental (in German, geistliche side).
"Spiritual" is, however, a controversial term that lends itself to evasions and
abuses, and the objection might be raised that it would have been wise policy to
avoid using it, even though it has a legitimate logical status. The following
three reasons seem to me sufficient to tilt the balance of policy in favor of
taking the risk of speaking of spiritual realities: (1) Spirit-talk invites
communication with the wisdom of ancient, medieval, and non-western sacred texts
and practices, which modern western secular philosophy has too often
deliberately decided not to try to understand. (2) Spirit-talk acknowledges that
the transformation of the global economy must be in large measure a
transformation of the will. In many languages and contexts the word "will" and
the word "spirit" are so closely allied that they are nearly synonyms. For
example, in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola the stated
purposes of the exercises is to purify the will, and to bring the will into
harmony with the divine will. (3) Speaking of "spirit" is a token acknowledgment
that dreams and myths move the world at least as much as concepts.19
"The alternatives that work turn out in practice to be
alternatives that depart from and modify the metaphysics of economic society."
If this statement were to be regarded as having the logical status of an
empirical generalization, and if a team of social scientists were to design a
research methodology to test it, then its meaning would have to be spelled out
in terms that could be measured. Criteria would have to be established for
deciding what counts as "alternatives that work" and what counts as "departing
from and modifying the metaphysics of economic society." ("Transformative" for
short) If proper studies were done, using appropriate research methods to gather
information logically tied to appropriate criteria, then, I am sure, studies
would show that it is the transformative policies, programs, and projects that
are successful. Why am I sure?
That workable alternatives are at the same time
transformative alternatives, departing from mainstream western worldviews, is
suggested by studies that have already been done. In Dharma and
Development, a study of Sarvodaya Shramadana, Joanna Macy shows in
detail how that transformative movement is rooted in values distinct from those
of the modern western secular culture in which economic thinking has its
context. In my own empirical study The Evaluation of Cultural Action, an
evaluation report on the Parents and Children Program (PPH) in southern Chile, I
engage in a long dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor called The Reasonable
Social Scientist, in which I show that even procedures that seem to be
impeccably unbiased and objectively scientific persistently let the realities of
a social movement with a transformative ideology slip through their conceptual
nets.20 In Cultural Expression and Grassroots Development, a collection
of eleven case studies from Latin America, the editor, Charles Kleymeyer, coins
the phrase "cultural energy." The phrase names a power foreign to the
explanatory categories of what I have been calling economic metaphysics.
Cultural energy revitalizes and empowers communities, but in order for the
observers who see it working to believe what they see, it is necessary for them
to depart from and modify economic ideology.21
Nevertheless, it is misleading to assign the logical status
of an empirical generalization to the statement, "The alternatives that work
turn out in practice to be alternatives that depart from and modify the
metaphysics of economic society." That there is something wrong with thinking of
it as an hypothesis to be tested would become clear if a serious attempt were
made to test it. I said above that I was sure the truth of this statement would
be confirmed if proper studies were done using appropriate criteria. However, it
is a foregone conclusion any attempt to carry out a comprehensive empirical
study designed to asses it, would quickly become embroiled in controversies over
what criteria would make the proper links between the evidence and the concepts.
Some would say that the West German post World War II finance minister Ludwig
Erhard's Sozialmarktwirtschaft ("social market economy" --in which the
government encourages business and then skims taxes off the top of profits to
finance a welfare state) was an example of remaining within the framework of the
worldview of economic society, and of doing so successfully; while, conversely,
the genocide in Cambodia under Pol Pot was an example of departing from the
concepts of universal human rights which are part and parcel of the metaphysics
of economic society. I would have said, however, that people like the Christian
Democrat Ludwig Erhard,22 and his British counterpart the Labor Party's Sir
Stafford Cripps,23 shaped economics in directions guided by social conscience,
and that the West European welfare states that blossomed under their stewardship
were, with due regard for their limitations, transformative steps forward for
humanity. (I might add that the leading philosopher of Christian Democracy was
Jacques Maritain, and that the author identified as most influential in their
thinking by Labor MPs coming into office at the close of World War II was John
Ruskin --two writers whose dissent from the metaphysics of economic society was
the raison d'etre of their lives and works.)24 As to Pol Pot, I would concede
that he departed from modern western ideals, but he departed in the wrong
direction, not in a positive direction that could correctly be called
"transformative." At some point, some of the members of the panel would begin to
suspect (correctly) that the reason I was sure that a study would confirm my
statement was that it was not an empirical generalization at all. They would
notice that whenever they came up with evidence that would prove it false, I
would come up with reasons for counting the same evidence as proving it
true.
"The alternatives that work turn out in practice to be
alternatives that depart from and modify the metaphysics of economic society."
This is not a statement which just happens to be supported by all the evidence
because I am a clever person who knows how to massage data. It is a statement
with a built-in tendency to be true by definition. We could analyze it with a
Venn Diagram, drawing one circle to represent "alternatives that
work."
alternatives that work
Another circle could represent, "departures from the
metaphysics of economic society in a positive direction."
positive departures
We could then draw the circles as overlapping and cross out
the parts outside their intersection:
The areas crossed out are empty because there is nothing
that is an "alternative" that is not also a "departure;" further, there is
nothing that "works" that is not also "positive." In view of the ease with which
evidence that might falsify the statement can thus be conceptually disqualified,
it would be better to regard the statement as only secondarily an empirical one,
and as primarily what I have been calling a "metaphysical shift." It is a call
to look at facts already known in a new way. It is already known that in the
world there are people who are loving, cooperative, intelligent, and zestful;
they are more interested in solving the problems than in making profits or in
holding on to received ideas. It is already known that they are implementing
alternative solutions, while standard solutions are proving unworkable. The
logical status of the proposed new way of looking at these known facts (that is,
the status it would occupy if the call to look at the world as it proposes were
accepted) is similar to that of the central assertions of the great metaphysical
systems of the past. Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant unified the categories and
cosmologies of western civilization, at three different periods of its history.
When studying their writings one comes to recognize that once the conceptual
framework the philosopher is operating within is understood and accepted, the
central statements of the metaphysical system become necessary
truths.
In Chapter Two I suggested that to make a metaphysical shift
today, in order to transform the metaphysics of the global economy, we could
benefit from using Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of "language games." I also
endorsed Charles Taylor's proposal to make "constitutive rules" fundamental to
research in the social sciences. Now I want to spell out these suggestions in
more detail, and to use them to explain the logical status of "The alternatives
that work turn out in practice to be alternatives that depart from and modify
the metaphysics of economic society."
The first language game Wittgenstein discusses in his
Philosophical Investigations is a vehicle for criticizing the simple view
held by St. Augustine, that the essence of language consists of names for
objects. Wittgenstein wrote:
"Let us imagine a language for which the description given
by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between
a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are
blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the
order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of
the words `block,' `pillar,' `slab,' `beam.' A calls them out; --B brings the
stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. ---Conceive this as
a complete primitive language."25
Even more than Saussure's, Wittgenstein's language-game
model of language sees words as embedded in activities, in social roles, in
norms, in the interaction of humans with physical things. The idea of "game,"
already introduces the notion of "rule," a notion Wittgenstein examines at great
length. Thinking of human actions in terms of "language-games" already
introduces the consciousness- raising idea that the way things are is not the
way things have to be. Unlike Saussure's, Wittgenstein's model is not based on
the exchange of equivalents. In some games equivalents are exchanged; in some
not.
Following Wittgenstein, we could say that the general
pattern of humans interacting with each other and with nature is to get some
sort of game going; when the game works people get their needs met and find joy.
Adam Smith's account of living by exchange, starting from what he called "the
natural tendency to truck or barter," is a more specific account of what humans
do, as Newton's theory is a special case of Einstein's. Marx's general formula
for capital, buying in order to sell, C - M - C', is one among many basic kinds
of language game people can play, which happens to be the dominant one in
capitalist society. What about Keynes' fundamental observation that the sum of
sales must be the sum of purchases because what is a sale (a revenue) for the
seller is a purchase (an expense) for the buyer? Is that just a way of saying A
= A, a thing is identical with itself, and therefore not subject to the
variation through human creativity that is implied by the game model? Listen to
Wittgenstein: "`A thing is identical with itself.' --There is no finer example
of a useless proposition, which is yet connected with a certain play of the
imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and
saw that it fitted. We might also say: `Every thing fits into itself.' Or again,
`Every thing fits into its own shape.' At the same time we look at a thing and
imagine that there was a blank left for it, and now it fits into it exactly."26
So --we play with identity too, as Keynes himself did when he played with that
most self- identical of all things, the unit of currency, suggesting, among
other things that after the October revolution the Soviets could have just
inflated away debts by printing lots of money, and that employment could be
created in Western countries by burying money so that there would be profit in
paying people to dig it up.27
One might object that the language-game model does not apply
to the proletariat. Life might be a game, albeit a serious game, for the
businessperson who "plays," the stock market, but for the person, "who has no
other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realization
of his labor-power," the necessity to find a job in order to earn the money to
buy the necessities of life is, so to speak, "not a game." Well, the usefulness
of every word, even "game," comes to an end at some point, as Wittgenstein
himself insisted. But there is another way to look at the violence committed
against the poor by the laws of property and contract. It is a violence masked
by the common sense of the victim-in-the-street who has not yet realized that,
"Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on
the other men possessing nothing but their own labor power. This relation has no
natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical
periods." Helping people to become aware that their oppression is not natural,
but is the consequence of mutable social rules is called "consciousness-
raising." Consciousness-raising could even be defined as shifting from the
metaphysics of economic society, which classically defines the economy as a
social machine, to a language-game model, which defines the economy as a game
people play. One of the main results of consciousness-raising, Paulo Freire
says, is becoming aware of what he calls the "untested feasibility." The
untested feasibility is made up of the feasible things you can do to change the
world, which you have never tested, because you have been imprisoned in a
worldview which has made you believe that the world cannot be
changed.28
Regarded as observed regularities in human behavior, in some
given group at some given time, social rules are like the regularities observed
in nature. Spring. Summer. Autumn. Winter. Day follows night. Bed time follows
bath time. The passenger pays the fare, and then takes a seat on the bus.
Regarded as norms, rules have a feature natural phenomena do not have: breaking
them exposes the rule-breaker to criticism. Rules can be regarded in yet a third
way: They have what H. L. A. Hart in his analysis of rules calls an "internal
aspect." That is to say, the normal citizen not only behaves with a certain
degree of predictable regularity, and not only joins in the general disapproval
of those who violate the cultural norms; she or he also is self-directed, using
a conscientious awareness of the accepted rules to monitor and guide the
self.29
Of particular interest among social rules are those that
define the background in which human action takes place. They create social
objects and relationships, which would not exist without them, and which set the
stage on which social actors act. These are the constitutive rules; they create
the social world. John Searle suggests that the general form for a constitutive
rule is, "X counts as Y in C," where X is some brute or relatively brute fact, Y
is an institutional status conferred by the rule, and C is a context.30 Searle
excludes from the category of constitutive rules cases where the Y term just
assigns a name or label; thus "This sort of object (X) is called a `chair' (Y)"
is not constitutive, because you could sit in X whether you called X a chair or
not.31 To be really constitutive, the rule has to set up the rules of the game;
the game (chess is a favorite example with Saussure, Wittgenstein, Taylor and
Searle, among others) would not exist and could not be played at all without its
constitutive rules.
Searle writes, "If it has a certain kind of shape, we can
use it as a chair regardless of what anyone else thinks. But when we say that
such and such bits of paper count as money, we genuinely have a constitutive
rule, because satisfying the X term, `such and such bits of paper,' is not by
itself sufficient for being money, nor does the X term specify causal features
that would be sufficient to enable the stuff to function as money at all without
human agreement. So the application of the constitutive rule introduces the
following features: The Y term has to assign a new status that the object does
not already have just in virtue of satisfying the X term; and there has to be
collective agreement, or at least acceptance, both in the imposition of that
status on the stuff referred to by the X term and about the function that goes
with the status....
"Our sense that there is an element of magic, a conjuring
trick, a sleight of hand in the creation of institutional facts out of brute
facts derives from the nonphysical, noncausal character of the relations of the
X and Y terms in the structure where we simply count X things as Y things. In
our toughest metaphysical moods we want to ask `But is an X really a Y?' For
example, are these bits of paper really money? Is this piece of land really
somebody's private property? Is making certain noises in a ceremony really
getting married? Even, is making certain noises through the mouth really making
a statement or a promise? Surely, when you get down to brass tacks, these are
not real facts."32
I have been showing that to understand the global economy it
is necessary to understand its constitutive rules, their history, and their
effects. I do not entirely agree with Searle when he writes that constitutive
rules are noncausal; they have consequences, which are profound. Without the
institutional facts (the constitutive rules) presupposed by the metaphysics of
economic society, the quasi-mechanisms that explain international trade
according to theories of comparative advantage would not exist. Theories of the
globalization of production, which explain the exploitation of labor in the
third world, accompanied by unemployment and de-industrialization in the first
world, rely on the same quasi-mechanisms as their explanatory principles.
Theories of technological change deal with only half the problem; the other half
is culture. Ecological design solves only half the problem; the other half of
the solution is the transformation of cultural forms, most notably the
transformation of the constitutive rules that govern economic relationships. In
our times the steady forward march of social democratic welfare states guided by
Keynesian macro-economic principles has encountered both physical and
institutional limits; the latter take the form of unpayable debt, and they
cannot be overcome without revision of what Marx called the capitalist "economic
categories," in other words, without revision of the constitutive rules. Marx
himself pioneered methods for following out the consequences of those
constitutive rules of economic society which produce "accumulation," which
necessarily (i.e. necessarily as long as the constitutive rules are not
transformed) exacerbates "contradictions." Historians like Braudel, Wallerstein,
and Polanyi have spelled out in exhaustive detail the story of the processes by
which market structures defined by the constitutive rules of capitalism became
over time an interlocking set of interrelated quasi-mechanisms, which expanded
outward from Europe to become today's global economy. The post- structuralists
have deconstructed the guiding and legitimating ideas of socially constructed
realities, including "development," "global economy," and "capitalism," among
others. They have unmasked the pretensions of mainstream economists who treat
poverty as a quasi-physical problem to be solved by economists who are
quasi-engineers.
Those who really do solve social problems are not quasi-
engineers, trained to operate conventional quasi-mechanisms. The real
problem-solvers are those who march to the beat of a different drummer --the
Gandhis, the Jane Addamses, the Eugene Debses, the Dorothy Days, the Hazel
Hendersons, the Martin Luther Kings, the R. Buckminster Fullers, the Paulo
Freires, the Mother Teresas, the Helena Norberg-Hodges .... the thousands and
millions of people, some famous and some unknown, whose lives transform the
conventional rules of economic society because they live according to
alternative rules, which are unconventional now, but which foreshadow a positive
future.33
Notes and
References
Notes to Preface
1. Paulo Freire, "The Adult Literacy Process as
Cultural Action for Freedom," Harvard Educational Review. Volume 40,
number 2. May, 1970.
2. Tomas Valdivia, "Gramsci y la Cultura,"
Mensaje (Santiago de Chile). Volume 28, number 285. December,
1979.
3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Modern Library Edition. New York: Random
House, 1937. p. 13.
4. Jerry Mander, The Case Against the Global
Economy, and for a turn to the local. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books,
1996.
Notes to the Introduction
1. See the discussion of alternative theoretical
frameworks for understanding the world economy in Helzi Noponen, Julie Graham,
Ann Markusen (eds.), Trading Industries, Trading Regions: International
Trade, American Industry, and Regional Economic Development. New
York: Guilford Press, 1993.
2. See Chapter 4, "The Fading of the West: Power,
Culture, and Indigenization," in Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1996.
3. "This [instability of family life] is not just an
American phenomenon, but a global one, with worldwide competition to drive down
labor costs creating economic forces that press on the family. These are times
of financially besieged families in which both parents work long hours, so that
children are left to their own devices or the TV baby-sits; when more children
than ever grow up in poverty; when the one-parent family is become ever more
commonplace; when more infants and toddlers are left in day care so poorly run
that it amounts to neglect. All this means, even for well-intentioned parents,
the erosion of the countless small, nourishing exchanges between parent and
child that build emotional competences." "International data show what seems to
be a modern epidemic of depression, one that is spreading side by side with the
adoption throughout the world of modern ways." "Troup [school] is in a decaying
working-class neighborhood that, in the 1950s, had twenty thousand people
employed in nearby factories, from Olin Brass Mills to Winchester Arms. Today
that job base has shrunk to under three thousand, shrinking with it the economic
horizons of families who live there. New Haven, like so many other New England
manufacturing cities, has sunk into a pit of poverty, drugs, and violence."
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam, 1995. p. 234,
p. 240.
4. Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: a
journey to the dawn of the 21st century. New York: Random House,
1996.
5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General
Linguistics. London: P. Owen, 1974. p. 115, cf. p. 79. (first published in
French, 1915).
6. "It's very difficult to judge the disciplining
pressure that world trade places on national economies," explained Marcus
Noland, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for International
Economics. "The logs don't have to leave Norway. If everyone knows they're
sitting there, they can affect prices here in the U.S." Evelyn Iritani, "Global
Glut Bringing Asian Chaos to Stable Economies: How Crisis Spreads." Los
Angeles Times, Sunday, October 25, 1998.
Notes to the Introduction to Part 1, Comparative
Advantage
1. Candace Howes, "Constructing Comparative Advantage:
Lessons from the U.S. Auto Industry," in Noponen et al. op. cit. pp. 48
ff.; Candace Howes and Ann Markusen, "Trade, Industry, and Economic
Development," in Noponen et al. op. cit. pp. 12 ff.
2. This is the Pareto criterion for optimality. It is
discussed by William J. Baumol in Economic Theory and Operations
Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965, chapter 16,
especially p. 376.
3. David Ricardo, The Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation. London: J. M. Dent, 1911 (first published, 1817), p.
82.
Notes to Part 1a, Comparative Advantage as
Explanation
1. See Helzi Noponen, "Scale and Regulation in an
Innovative Sector: Jockeying for Position in the World Pharmaceuticals
Industry," in Noponen et al. op.cit. pp. 175-211.
2. The introduction to a United Nations statistical
report on the world economy notes that at first, when analyzing comparative
advantage, economists dwelt on a country's relative factor endowments, such as
labor and capital. Later, economists realized that education, research and
development, technology transfer, the availability of raw materials and
feedstocks, cross-border mobility, political constraints on (or incentives for)
restructuring, and other realities also needed to be taken into consideration.
"...the interaction between determinants of comparative advantage is more
complex than they had originally thought. Comparative advantage itself has come
to be regarded as a constantly changing, or dynamic, concept." p. 5. In the end
comparative advantage refers to whatever determines "costs." p. 6. United
Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Changing Patterns of
Trade in World Industry: an empirical study on revealed comparative
advantage. New York: United Nations, 1982. pp. 4-6. Thus instead of
describing an explanandum, which explains why prices and trade flows are as they
are, "comparative advantage" becomes a name for whatever the explanations may
be.
3. Thus Jacob Viner, after an extensive review of the
attempts of 19th and early 20th century economists to quantify the "consumer
surplus" or "gain from trade" produced by the operation of the principle of
comparative advantage in international trade, concluded: "The theory of
international trade, at its best, can provide only presumptions, not
demonstrations, as to the benefit or injury to be expected from a particular
disturbance in foreign trade, for it deliberately abstracts from some of the
considerations which can rationally be taken into account in the appraisal of
policy, and it never takes into account all the variables which it recognizes as
significant and within its scope, either because they are out of reach or
because to take them all into account would make the problem far too complex for
neat solution." Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International
Trade. New York and London: Harper, 1937. p. 593.
4. Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday
Life: the limits of the possible. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. pp.
125-26.
Notes to Part 1b, Comparative Advantage as
Prescription
1. The notion that the market (and therefore
comparative advantage as a principle guiding international trade) is good
because it is natural seems to have been advanced first by the French
physiocrats in their doctrine of "natural order." It was later adopted by Adam
Smith. See Sir Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought. London: Faber
and Faber, 1973, pp. 135-37, pp. 144 ff.
2. Sometimes reliance on higher motives is said to be
a recipe for disaster. Thus Karl Popper, criticizing the application of a love
ethic to politics and economics, writes, "...the attempt to make heaven on earth
invariably produces hell." Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. p. 422. Sometimes the problem with
higher motives is said to be that they are less reliable than self-interest.
Thus Adam Smith: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or
the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own
interest." Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (various editions, first
published 1776), Book One, Chapter Two.
3. See Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic
Radicalism. New York: Macmillan, 1928.
4. Jeremy Bentham was a classical proponent of the
view that since the purpose of life is pleasure, and since each person has both
the necessary expertise and the necessary motivation to pursue his or her
pleasure effectively, the market rather than the government ought to be
society's principal ruling institution. Bentham wrote, for example, "What the
legislator and the minister of the interior have it in their power to do towards
increase either of wealth or population, is as nothing in comparison with what
is done of course, and without thinking of it, by the judge and his assistant,
the minister of police .... With the view of causing an increase to take place
in the mass of national wealth, or with a view to increase of the means either
of subsistence or enjoyment, without some special reason, the general rule is
that nothing ought to be done or attempted by government. The motto, or
watchword of government, on these occasions, ought to be --Be quiet." Jeremy
Bentham, Manual of Political Economy in Works of Jeremy Bentham.
Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843. Vol. III, p. 33.
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract.
(various editions, first published in French 1762). Book III, part 9. Like all
the thinkers associated with the rise of economics, Rousseau was in conscious
rebellion against ancient and medieval philosophy. Thus he wrote, "...no people
has ever been made into a nation of philosophers, but it is not impossible to
make a people happy." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political
Economy (first published in French as an article in the Encyclopedie
edited by Denis Diderot, 1755) in Great Books of the Western World.
Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1994. Vol. 35, p. 374.
6. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. London:
Longmans, 1879.
7. The point that overall utility is increased,
ceteris paribus, by transferring wealth from the rich to the poor is made
by A. C. Pigou in The Economics of Welfare. London: Macmillan, fourth
edition 1932.
8. William Baumol describes how economics became more
scientific by avoiding basing its analyses on "introspective utility." "Towards
Observeability: Revealed Preferences and Expenditure and Cost Functions," which
is Chapter 14 of his Economic Theory and Operations Analysis. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, fourth edition, 1977. The general idea was
that economists should separate "positive" and "empirical" research from
utilitarianism, the labor theory of value, and any other ethical framework. With
respect to the study of comparative advantages in international trade, this
general idea was pursued by Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin, among others. See
Bertil Ohlin, Interregional and International Trade. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1935.
9. Hazel Henderson, Paradigms in Progress: life
beyond economics. San Francisco: Bennett-Koehler, 1995. Hazel Henderson,
The Politics of the Solar Age: alternatives to economics. Garden City,
New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981. Hazel Henderson, Creating Alternative
Futures: the end of economics. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1980.
10. Thus for Ludwig von Mises a great merit of the
market is that it requires no consensus on ethics. "The market economy makes
peaceful cooperation among people possible in spite of the fact that they
disagree with regard to their value judgments." Ludwig von Mises, Human
Action: A Treatise on Economics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949. p.
689. Von Mises holds that, in addition to its practical defects, socialism is
ethically defective because it does not respect the rights of individuals to
make their own choices.
11. Regarding Pareto optimality see Note 2 to the
Introduction to Part 1, above.
Notes to Part 1c, Comparative Advantage as
Metaphysics
1. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: the
genesis and triumph of economic ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1977. See also, Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: modern ideology
in anthropological perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986.
2. Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, op.cit. p.
6. Some of the works to which Dumont refers are: Karl Polanyi, The Great
Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1944. Maine, Sir Henry, Ancient
Law; its connection with the early history of society and its relation to
modern ideas. London: Murray, 1897. Tonnies, Ferdinand, Community
and Association (a translation of his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft).
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955.
3. Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences
of Man," Review of Metaphysics. Vol XXV, pp. 3-51. September, 1971. This
essay has been reprinted in several anthologies.
4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1956.
5. "Scarcely a writer on economics omits to make some
comparison between economics and mechanics. One speaks of a `rough
correspondence' between the play of `economic forces' and mechanical
equilibrium. Another compares uniformity of price to the level-seeking of water.
Another (Jevons) compares his law of exchange to that of the lever. Another
(Edgeworth) figures his economic `system' as that of connected lakes of various
levels. Another compares society to a plastic mass such that a `pressure' in one
region is dissipated in all `directions.' In fact, the economist borrows much of
his vocabulary from mechanics. Instances are: Equilibrium, stability,
elasticity, expansion, inflation, contraction, flow, efflux, pressure,
resistance, reaction, distribution (price), levels, movement, friction." Irving
Fisher, Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925. (Originally written as a doctoral
dissertation, 1892, reprinted in the Reprints of Economic Classics series New
York: August M. Kelley, 1965).
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, op. cit. paragraph
193.
7. Samuel Huntington, op.cit. in note 2 to the
Introduction, above. pp. 225-26.
8. Larry Naylor, Culture and Change. Westport,
Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1996. p. 116.
9. Howard Richards, Letters from Quebec: a
philosophy for peace and justice. San Francisco and London: International
Scholars Press, 1993. Letter 16.
10. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Food
First: beyond the myth of scarcity. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1977.
Note to the Introduction to Part 2, The Globalization of
Production
1. Folker Froebel, Jurgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye,
The New International Division of Labor: structural unemployment in
industrialized countries and industrialization in developing countries.
London: Cambridge University Press, 1980. (first published in German 1977). "For
the first time in human history, anything can be made anywhere and sold
everywhere." Lester Thurow, The Future of Capitalism. New York: W.
Morrow, 1996. p. 115. "The `globalization' topic arises from a cluster of
empirical data which show how in many branches and areas of activity, there is a
small number of relevant firms operating and there are no national boundaries to
competition. So in sectors like finances, telecommunications, aerospace,
semiconductors etc. there exists real world-wide competition among a reduced
number of firms." Jose Molero (ed.), Technological Innovation, Multinational
Corporations and New International Competitiveness. Singapore: Harwood
Academic Publishers, 1995. p. 7. "...the changing pattern of international
competitive advantage integrate[s] production operations across national
boundaries. Such an internationalization of industry is based on the
complementarity between factors of production in developing and developed
countries, with unskilled assembly being performed in low wage areas ...."
Joseph Grunwald and Kenneth Flamm, The Global Factory. Washington D.C.:
Brookings Institution, 1985. p. 1.
Notes to Part 2a, The Globalization of Production as
Explanation
1. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Capital
and Communities: the causes and consequences of private disinvestment.
Washington D.C: Progressive Alliance, 1980. p. 3.
2. Id.
3. Ibid. p. 7
4. Ricardo, Principles, cited above in the
Introduction to Part One. p. 83.
5. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The
Deindustrialization of America. New York: Basic Books, 1982. pp.
129-30.
6. Ibid. p. 130.
Notes to Part 2b, Globalization of Production as
Prescription
1. Rehman Sobhan, in Mihaly Simai (ed.), Global
Employment: an international investigation into the future of work. Tokyo:
United Nations University Press, 1995. p. 116.
2. Ibid. p. 119
3. [The social contract] "...far from despoiling them
[individuals] only assures them legitimate possession, and changes usurpation
into a true right and enjoyment into proprietorship." Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Social Contract (various editions), Book I, part 9.
"The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into
commonwealth, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of
their property...." John Locke, Concerning Civil Government (Second
Essay) (various editions). Chapter XI, paragraph 124.
Spinoza's version is similar to Rousseau's. Ethics
(various editions). Part IV "Of Human Bondage," Proposition 37, note
2.
For Bentham the main moral justification for freedom and
property is that their protection is conducive to security, and security is
conducive to industry. "Who has renewed the surface of the earth? Who has given
to man the domain over nature --over nature embellished, fertilized, and
perfected ? That beneficent genius is Security." Jeremy Bentham, The Theory
of Legislation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950. p. 119. (first
published 1802)
For Mill too respect for freedom and property is obligatory
because "The interest involved is that of security, to everyone's feelings the
most vital of all interests." John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. London:
Longman's, 1879. pp. 80-81.
For Kant the categorical imperative, "...leaps to the eye
more obviously when we bring in examples of attempts on the freedom and property
of others." (Paton translation) Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the
Metaphysics of Morals (various editions). Chapter Two, review of four previously
given examples, example two.
4. For contemporary accounts of globalization which
stress the false and misleading ideas used to justify it, see, e.g. Hans-Peter
Martin and Harald Schumann, The Global Trap. London: Zed Books, 1997;
Steven Solomon, The Confidence Game: How Unelected Central Bankers are
Governing the Changed World Economy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. The
difference between my approach and theirs is subtle. My emphasis is rather on
the basic structural quasi- mechanisms at work, and the worldview or
metaphysics, and the ethical premises, which legitimate those basic structural
quasi- mechanisms. Thus Martin and Schumann recommend, in the end, a series of
policy measures, such as (p. 242) a European Union "Tobin tax," i.e. a tax on
foreign currency transactions, which do not require or lead to changes in the
basic metaphysical or ethical structures of modern western (now global)
civilization.
5. Karl Marx penned a classic account of how the
circulation of commodities and the exploitation of labor are justified according
to standard precepts of modern western ethics. "This sphere that we are
deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour power goes
on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule
freedom, equality, property, and Bentham. Freedom because both buyer and seller
of a commodity, say of labour power, are constrained only by their own free
will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to is but the
form in which they give legal expression to their common will.
Equality, because each enters into relation with the other,
as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for
equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And
Bentham, because each looks only to himself." Karl Marx, Capital (various
editions) at the end of Volume One, part two.
6. William J. Baumol, "On the Appropriate Discount
Rate for Evaluation of Public Projects," in Harley Hinrichs and Graeme Taylor
(eds.) Program Budgeting and Benefit-Cost Analysis. Pacific Palisades CA:
Goodyear Publishing Co., 1969. p. 203.
7. "...social efficiency involves an attempt to take
into account all individuals' evaluations of all consequences of economic
acts...." Peter Bohm, Social Efficiency. New York: John Wiley and Sons,
1973. p. xiv.
8. See my discussion of the concept of "efficiency"
in Howard Richards, The Evaluation of Cultural Action. London: Macmillan,
1985. Chapter 4.
9. See R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for
Spaceship Earth. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.
10. Howard Richards, Letters from Quebec: a
philosophy for peace and justice. San Francisco and London: International
Scholars Press, 1995.
11. Boulding and Spivey remark that economic
optimization is always a matter of maximizing or minimizing some mathematical
function. See the introduction to Kenneth Boulding and W. Allen Spivey,
Linear Programming and the Theory of the Firm. New York: Macmillan,
1960.
Notes to Part 2c, The Globalization of Production as
Metaphysics
1. Thus for the young Carnap metaphysics was theory
without theoretical content, expressing attitudes that should rather have been
expressed through artistic media or in the practical conduct of life. Rudolf
Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1967. (first version written in German 1922-25).
However, Carnap later came to understand philosophy as a normative discipline
concerned with making pragmatic choices among alternative conceptual frameworks.
He thus left the door open to regarding a metaphysics as a deliberately chosen
cosmology or worldview. See the discussion of Carnap's later views in the title
essay of A. J. Ayer's Metaphysics and Common Sense. London: Macmillan,
1969.
2. Jacques Derrida's enigmatically illuminating
Spurs/Eperons, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, bilingual edition,
1978, is subtitled Nietzsche's Styles/ Les Styles de Nietzsche. It is a
deliberate rejoinder to Martin Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche (see
Spurs, pp. 122-23). Heidegger had argued that although Nietzsche claimed
to be destroying the western metaphysical tradition, his Will to Power (Wille
zur Macht) in fact was the culmination of the metaphysical heritage
bequeathed to the West by Plato. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche. San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979. (Stuttgart: Neske Verlag, 1961). Spurs
can be read as claiming that Nietzsche escaped the fate of those who are
condemned by language itself to unintentionally erect another metaphysics when
their intention is to refute and abolish metaphysics once and for all. Nietzsche
escaped writing another metaphysics because of his style. "...there is no
totality in Nietzsche's text, not even a fragmentary or aphoristic one."
Spurs, pp. 134-35. Nietzsche concludes, according to Derrida, not with a
statement, but with a peal of laughter. Id.
3. The word "metaphysics" began with, and necessarily
always refers to, the work by Aristotle which was the first to bear the title
Metaphysics. It is a book about key terms like ousia (substance,
existence), archai (beginnings, principles, rulers, ultimate underlying
substances) and energeia (functioning, activity, act), which, like
"market," are fundamental ideas from a matrix which generates both explanations
and prescriptions. See Howard Richards, Letters from Quebec, cited above,
Letter 16.
4. See Note 3 to Section 2b above.
5. Letters from Quebec, cited above, Letter
8.
6. In Carnap's terminology, the questions economists
ask are "internal questions," i.e. questions within a conceptual framework,
rather than "external questions" about choice of framework. See Ayer's
discussion referred to in Note 1 above. I concede that there are economists who
think of themselves as moving freely from one conceptual framework to another,
and as offering alternative economic stories, whose narrative structure might be
one where comparative advantage does not fit at all; their categories might come
from Buddhism or from deep ecology or from some other radical source. I prefer
to think of such writers as not economists at all, but as post-economists, who
have freed themselves from the metaphysical limitations that are part and parcel
of the history of the discipline.
7. Rom Harre, Social Being: a theory for social
psychology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974, p. 237.
8. "Language-game" (Sprachspiel) is a concept
introduced by Ludwig Wittenstein in paragraph 21 of his Philosophical
Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. "Imagine a language-game in which A
asks and B reports the number of slabs or blocks in a pile, or the colours and
shapes of the building-stones that are stacked in such- and-such a place. --Such
a report might run: "Five slabs." Now what is the difference between the report
or statement "Five slabs" and the order "Five slabs!" ? -- Well, it is the part
which uttering these words plays in the language-game." Earlier (paragraph 2)
Wittgenstein had suggested that a practice in which different building materials
have names, and the builder calls the names out to an assistant, who then brings
the appropriate one to the builder, might, tentatively, be conceived as a
complete primitive language. My reason for alluding here to Wittgenstein's idea
of "language-game" is that it emphasizes that language (such as the terminology
of economics) and actions (such as the buying and selling made possible by the
institutional facts formalized in contract law and property law) are
interconnected.
9. For more on project evaluation that is oriented
toward assessing what contribution a project is making to social transformation,
see "Evaluation for Constructive
Development," the second of my Nehru Lectures given at Baroda University
in India.
Notes to the Introduction to Part 3, Theories that Regard
Choices of what Technology to Use as the Creators of the Global
Economy
1. See generally, Fuller, R. Buckminister, The
Buckminister Fuller Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. "Ninety-nine
percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to `make it'
economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do. It can only be
accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological
revolution." R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1981. p. xviii.
2. "Ecological Design: inventing the future." A film
directed by Brian Danitz, written by Phil Cousineau. Brooklyn NY: Ecological
Design Project, 1994.
3. "Ancient Futures: learning from Ladakh." A film
co-directed by Helena Norberg-Hodge, and based on her book of the same name.
Oakland CA: Video Project, 1993. Ancient Futures: learning from Ladakh.
San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991.
4. "Planet Neighborhood." A film. Washington DC:
WETA-TV and National Academy of Engineering, 1997.
5. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second
Industrial Divide. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Notes to Part 3a, Choice of Technology as
Explanation
1. Piore and Sabel, cited just above, page
38.
2. Piore and Sabel, page 184.
Notes to Part 3b, Choice of Technology as
Prescription
1. Generalizing a premise taken from Piore and Sabel,
I arrive at a principle typical of the green movement, namely: given the premise
that technology choice has far-reaching consequences, we should choose
sustainable technologies. And, generally, we should choose technologies
conducive to building the world we want to see. Here I am characterizing as
"green" those who, like Buckminster Fuller, tend to explain the world as we know
it as due to high- energy-use and heavily-resource-consuming technologies, and
who advocate improving our world by choosing renewable energy resources and
resource-recycling technologies. However, the green movement has become a
multi-faceted and diverse social movement, which often embraces ethical
principles only tangentially connected with technology. Thus Paul Ekins takes it
to be a green principle that, "Whether the free market is socially desirable ...
depends on whether the distribution of property is fair, and whether
externalities have been internalized into the market. [i.e. whether
decision-makers pay for the consequences of the decisions they make.] When this
is not so, the state has cause to intervene in the name of social justice and
economic efficiency on behalf of those against whom the market is
discriminating." Paul Ekins, The Gaia Atlas of Green Economics. New York:
Doubleday, 1992. p. 34. On another page Ekins praises the "enabling state of
Kerala [India]." p. 79. One could believe in internalizing costs, redistributing
property, and an enabling state without necessarily believing that following
these principles will favor solar and wind energy, small organic farms, and
bicycle paths. Although I do not mean to ignore those aspects of green thought
that are only loosely connected with choice of technology, I do not specifically
discuss them in this chapter.
2. Nobody argues in favor of unsustainable
technology. "...everyone agrees that sustainability is a good thing." T. F. H.
Allen and T. W. Hoekstra, "Toward a Definition of Sustainability," in Covington
and Lebano (eds.) Sustainable Ecological Systems. Fort Collins, CO: USDA
Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1993. p. 98. "One of the
most significant political achievements of our time is the international
adoption of principles of sustainable development as a guiding philosophy for
global, national, and local economies." Peter Miller, "Canada's Model Forest
Program: the Manitoba experience," in Lemons, Westra, Goodland (eds.),
Ecological Sustainability and Integrity: Concepts and Approaches.
Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998., p. 135. On the other hand, there are whole academic
departments, policy research centers, and professional journals devoted to
treating the achievement of sustainability as a technical problem for scientific
and economic analysis, which does not require reconsideration of the rational
bases of science and ethics (i.e. of metaphysics). See, for example, the
proceedings of the First International Conference on Ecosystems and Sustainable
Development, of which King Juan Carlos of Spain was honorary president,
published as Uso, Brebbia, and Power (eds.) Ecosystems and Sustainable
Development. Southampton: Computational Mechanics Publications, 1998. For a
sustained argument showing that market rationality and the other types of
rationality commonly employed in public policy analysis really do need to be
fundamentally reconsidered, see John Dryzek, Rational Ecology: environment
and political economy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
3. The views of Todd, Soleri, Lovins, and Bateson
reported here are recorded in the "Ecological Design" film cited above. See
also, John Todd, Reinhabiting Cities and Towns. San Francisco: Planet
Drum Foundation, 1981. Paolo Soleri, Arcology. Cambridge MA: MIT Press,
1967. Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths. Cambridge MA: Ballinger,
1977.
4. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: economics
as if people mattered. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. "Those old-fashioned
enough to believe that the chief sources of gratification are to be found in
intimate personal relationships and the sense of belonging to a community cannot
view the advance of an all-embracing technology without misgivings." E. J.
Mishan, 21 Popular Economic Fallacies. New York: Praeger, 1970, p.
245.
5. "While most economists find the ethical standing
of preference obvious, philosophers and other social scientists (for example,
Sagoff 1986) generally find revealed choices uncompelling as a standard of
welfare, much less as an overall theory of the good." Tyler Cowen, "The Scope
and Limits of Preference Sovereignty," Economics and Philosophy, Vol. 9,
No. 2 (1993), p. 253, reprinted in Charles K. Wilber (ed.), Economics,
Ethics, and Public Policy. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. p. 357.
The reference to Sagoff is to Mark Sagoff, "Values and Preferences,"
Ethics vol. 96 (1986) p. 301.
6. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, cited in
note 4 above, p. 46.
7. Lovins in "Ecological Design," cited
above.
8. That free choices are not always choices conducive to
sustainability is a logical consequence of green premises that green thinkers
sometimes overlook. It is easy to overlook it where it makes no difference to
the conclusion, i.e. where the outcome criticized is both ecologically
unsustainable and the result of unfree choices --for example, being forced to
drive a car to get to work because no energy-efficient transportation is
available.
Notes to Part 3c, Choice of Technology as
Metaphysics
1. "...all science has ever found out is that the
physical Universe consists entirely of the most exquisitely interreciprocating
technology." R. Buckminister Fuller, Critical Path, p. xxvii.
2. Howard Richards, Letters from Quebec, cited
above, repeatedly, starting with Letter Three.
3. The allusion to Clifford Geertz is to his essays,
The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. However,
apart from the idea that culture is the human species' adaptation to its
ecological niche, the ideas in these paragraphs are my own and are taken from
Letters from Quebec (passim).
4. David Korten is among those who find that the
traditional worldviews of non-western peoples were more conducive to a
sustainable relationship with the earth than the liberal scientific metaphysics
of the modern west from which economics springs. He finds that traditional Asian
cultures were shaped by metaphysical monism. David Korten, When Corporations
Rule the World. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995. See also,
P. A. Payutto (Phra Ratworamuni), Buddhist Economics. Bangkok, Thailand:
Buddhadhamma Foundation, 1994. And see Schumacher's Chapter, "Buddhist
Economics," in Small is Beautiful, cited in note 4 above.
5. Plato, Laws, discussed in Letters from
Quebec, Letter Fourteen. Plato opens the Laws with a reference to the
common idea that the laws of the city have been instituted by the gods, but then
proceeds, as in The Republic, to develop rational criteria for
instituting laws.
6. When Polanyi (in The Great Transformation,
cited in note 2 to section 1c above) speaks of the "disembedding" of economic
relations from social relations, he is speaking of the historical genesis of the
institutional structures (i.e. the world market and its concomitants) which
produced modernity. It is not that modernity existed first and then produced the
global economy; on the contrary, the extension of markets worldwide was a major
causal factor in the genesis of modernity. Conversely, the Chilean green
post-economist Manfred Max-Neef writes, "It is necessary to counter a logic of
economics that permeates modern culture with an ethics of well-being." Manfred
A. Max-Neef, Human Scale Development: conception, application, and further
reflections. New York and London: Apex Press, 1991. p. 64. Max-Neef calls,
in effect, for a metaphysical shift reversing the shift Polanyi describes, one
re- embedding economic relations in social relations. However, Max- Neef does
not endorse just any social relations; instead he proposes a conceptual
framework for social relations governed by an ethics of care, one that organizes
life to meet needs. The idea of "re-embedding" economics in society was advanced
by Charles K. Wilber and Kenneth P. Jameson at the end of An Inquiry into the
Poverty of Economics. Notre Dame IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983. See
also, by the same authors, Beyond Reaganomics: a further inquiry into the
poverty of economics. Notre Dame IN: Notre Dame University Press,
1990.
7. These ideas are also taken from Letters from
Quebec, cited in note 9 to section 1c above.
Notes to the Introduction to Part 4, Kaldor's "Circular
and Cumulative Causation"
1. Helzi Noponen et al (eds.) Trading
Industries, Trading Regions. New York: Guilford Press, 1993. p.
21.
2. The very idea of physical or brute facts has been
criticized on the ground that any observation whatever is theory-laden, not
independent of the framework in which it is interpreted. Among philosophers who
have argued that it is nevertheless possible and useful to distinguish facts
that are relatively "brute" from those to be regarded as socially constructed
are Elizabeth Anscombe and John Searle. G .E. M. Anscombe, Causation and
Determinism, an inaugural lecture. London: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality. New York, Free Press,
1995. p. 190 ff.
Notes to Part 4a, Kaldor's Explanations
1. Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama, an inquiry into the
poverty of nations. New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1968.
2. That, as Kenneth Boulding used to say, Keynes's
theory depends essentially on accounting identities, can be seen from his basic
equations, such as the following which he describes as the essence of his
general theory of employment:
D1 + D2 = D
where D1 is what the community can be expected to spend on
consumption.
where D2 is the amount expected to be devoted to
investment.
where D is effective demand.
Keynes then goes on to say that D = f(N), i.e. that
effective demand is a function of the volume of employment.
Since D1 (consumer demand) is also a function of N, the
volume of employment, it follows as an accounting identity that D2 (investment)
is determined once each of the other unknowns is assigned a value.
These identities are set out in Chapter 3, following Chapter
2, which is devoted to arguing that orthodox economics is wrong to predict wage
levels using the mathematics of the derivative (borrowed from mechanics), i.e.
the marginal utility of labor and the marginal disutility of
employment.
Later, in Chapter 6, Keynes puts some key accounting
identities into words:
"Income = value of output = consumption +
investment.
Saving = income - consumption
Therefore saving = investment."
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment
Interest and Money. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936. p. 63.
In spite of what would seem to be an obvious departure from
the root metaphors of classical economics, economists have tried to synthesize
Keynesian thought, with marginalism (borrowed from mechanics) and also with
notions of "equilibrium" (borrowed from mechanics) that are incompatible with
it. "The General Theory is, however, independent of the concept of equilibrium,
in the sense that it is founded methodologically on an analytical philosophy ...
which is completely alien to the neo-classical notion of equilibrium." Fausto
Vicarelli, in Alain Barrere (ed.), The Foundations of Keynesian Analysis.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. p. 113.
It is crucial to Keynes' analytic framework that "A decision
to consume or not truly lies within the power of the individual; so does a
decision to invest or not to invest." General Theory, op. cit. p. 65.
Thus the classical simplification of human nature, homo economicus, the
homo who is predictable because he acts to maximize his gain, is
complicated a bit, by acknowledging the freedom of the individual, which is,
itself, presupposed and honored by the legal and institutional frameworks of
modernity.
3. Nicholas Kaldor, Causes of Growth and
Stagnation in the World Economy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1996. p. 63.
4. Ibid.
5. Id. Kaldor, Causes, p.
65.
6. Helzi Noponen, "Scale and Regulation Shape an
Innovative Sector: Jockeying for Position in the World Pharmaceuticals
Industry., in Helzi Noponen, et al., (ed.) Trading Industries, Trading
Regions, cited above.
7. Kaldor, Causes, cited in note 3 above, p.
66.
8. Ibid.
9. Kaldor, Causes, cited in note 3 above, p.
70.
10. Karl Marx makes this point in Part Two Volume One
of Capital (various editions) when he says that selling in order to buy,
represented as C - M - C (Commodity - Money - Commodity), where one exchanges
something for money in order to use the money to buy something, is a process
aimed at a concrete satisfaction, a use- value. Marx cites Aristotle, who called
this process "natural," and gave it the name "economics" (oiko-nomos),
which he distinguished from "chrematistics," the pursuit of money for the sake
of money, which Aristotle called "unnatural."
11. Keynes, General Theory, cited in note 2
above, p. 27.
12. Kaldor, Causes, cited in note 3 above, pp.
83-84.
13. Id.
Notes to Part 4b, Kaldor's Prescriptions
1. For another, somewhat similar, set of Keynesian
prescriptions for the global economy, see Paul Davidson and Jan Kregel (eds.),
Improving the Global Economy: Keynesianism and the Growth in Output and
Employment. Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar, 1997. In this volume the Brazilian
economist Fernanda Lopes de Carvalho accepts the Keynesian growth prescription,
but calls for, in addition, what she calls "structural" policies to aid the
poor. "...economic growth in itself is a necessary, but not a sufficient
condition to solve the problem of the extremely poor in Brazil, to improve their
living conditions, and to bring them up from below the absolute poverty line."
p. 175
2. Nicholas Kaldor, Causes of Growth and
Stagnation in the World Economy. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press,
1996. p. 87.
3. Id. Kaldor, Causes, p.
88.
4. Kaldor, Causes, p. 90.
5. Kaldor, Causes, p. 78.
6. Ross Perot's well-known view that a nation cannot
go on running up debt forever can be found in Tony Chiu (ed.) Ross Perot in
His Own Words. New York: Warner, 1992.
7. Kaldor, Causes, p. 85.
8. Jurgen Habermas, The Legitimation Crisis.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. (A translation of Legitimationsprobleme im
Spatkapitalismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.)
9. See, for example, the testimony of Robert Reich
before the United States House Subcommittee on Economic Stabilization, An
Industrial Policy for America --Is it needed? Washington DC: Government
Printing Office, 1983.
10. Anthony P. Thirlwall, Nicholas Kaldor.
Brighton UK: Wheatsheaf Books: 1987. p. 183.
11. Joan Robinson and John Eatwell, An
Introduction to Modern Economics. London: McGraw-Hill, 1973.
12. Kaldor, Causes, cited in note 2 above. p.
69.
13. John Maynard Keynes, quoted by E. F. Schumacher,
Small is Beautiful. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. p. 20.
Notes to Part 4c, Kaldor's Metaphysics
1. Kaldor, quoted by Thirlwall, cited in note 10 to
Part 4b above, p. 186.
2. Howard Richards, Letters from Quebec. San
Francisco and London: International Scholars Press, 1995.
3. Nicholas Kaldor, Causes of Growth and
Stagnation in the World Economy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1996. p. 3.
4. Id. Kaldor, Causes, p.
69.
5. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, cited in
note 13 to Part 4b above, Part One.
6. Pat Barr, The Coming of the Barbarians: the
opening of Japan to the West. New York: Dutton, 1967.
7. "The chief end of trade is Riches & Power,
which beget each other. Riches consists in plenty of mooveables, that will yield
a price to foraigner, & are not like to be consumed at home, but espetially
in plenty of gold and silver. Power consists in number of men, & ability to
maintaine them. Trade conduces to both these by increasing yr stock and yr
people. & they each other." John Locke, MS in Bodleian Library c. 30, f. 18,
quoted by C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism,
Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. p.107.
8. J.S. Crush, South Africa's Labor Empire: a
history of Black migrancy to the gold mines. Boulder, Colorado: Westview
Press, 1991.
9. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of
Employment Interest and Money. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936. p.
27.
10. Kaldor, Causes, cited in note 3 above, pp.
32-33.
11. Max Weber, Economy and Society. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978. p. 24. (A translation of Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft)
12. Ibid. p. 86.
13. Ibid. p. 337. Kaldor, using terms
reminiscent of Weber, once wrote that the real explanation of the failure of
many poor countries to develop is to be found in their "traditionalism" as
contrasted with our "rationalism." He thus implicitly acknowledged that the
modern metaphysics in which economics is rooted is one worldview among many,
and, indeed, one whose adoption by the poor countries he apparently (at the time
he wrote at least) recommended. See his 1954 paper, "Characteristics of Economic
Development," in Nicholas Kaldor, Essays on Economic Stability and
Growth. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1960.
14. "We might say that economics does not stand on
its own feet, or that it is a `derived' body of thought --derived from meta-
economics." "As we have seen, economics is a `derived' science which accepts
instructions from what I call meta-economics. As the instructions are changed,
so changes the content of economics. In the following chapter, we shall explore
what economic laws and what definitions of the concept `economic' and
`uneconomic' result, when the meta-economic basis of western materialism is
abandoned and the teaching of Buddhism is put in its place." Schumacher,
Small is Beautiful, cited in note 13 to part 4b above, p. 47.
15. Thomas, Hobbes, Leviathan (various
editions). (first published 1651) Hobbes, following Galileo's physics, calls his
method "resoluto-compositive."
16. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of
Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1962.
17. Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the
English Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. pp. 24-25.
18. Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica
(various editions) (first published 1687). Gideon Freudenthal, Atom and
Individual in the Age of Newton: on the genesis of the mechanistic
worldview. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1986. (Translated from
German.)
19. David Hume called his Treatise of Human
Nature (various editions; the earliest version was published in 1740) an
attempt to apply the experimental method of reasoning to the moral sciences.
Hume was a close personal friend of Adam Smith.
20. See Hill, Intellectual Origins, cited
above note 17, and my Letters from Quebec, cited above note 2.
21. "...it is not in breaking the laws of commerce,
which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to
place our hope in softening the divine displeasure to remove any calamities
under which we suffer." Edmund Burke, "Thoughts and Detail on Scarcity," quoted
in Peter Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1958. p. 58.
22. In his early economics training Kaldor was
preoccupied with the questions that concerned economists in his milieu at the
time, such as, "...if there are increasing returns associated with expanding
production, what prevents the disappearance of pure competition ? If there is no
pure competition, then how does the Unseen Hand work?" In 1943 he described his
ethical views as, "...fundamentally ...based on a belief in human equality
--which I regard as a postulate more in the nature of a religious belief, than
the outcome of a rational philosophy...." Marjorie Turner, Nicholas Kaldor
and the Real World. Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. p. 10, p. 15.
Notes to the Introduction to Part 5, Theories of the
longue duree, or Historical Discontinuity
1. Charles Lindblom, "The Market as Prison,"
Journal of Politics, May, 1982.
2. Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social
Theory: an analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Max Weber.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
3. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life
1400 - 1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. (translation of Civilisation
Materielle et Capitalisme). See also other works by the same
author.
4. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System
I: Capitalist Agriculture and Origins of the European World-Economy in the
Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press: 1974. This is the first of
three volumes on the origins of the modern world-system. See also other works by
the same author.
5. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1944.
Notes to Part 5a, Historical Discontinuity as
Explanation
1. Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday
Life: the limits of the Possible. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. p. 335.
(translated from the French)
2. These matters are discussed in my Letters from
Quebec, cited in note 9 to Section 1c above.
3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the
birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. (translation of
Surveiller et Punir)
4. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System
III: the second era of great expansion of the capitalist world-economy 1730 -
1840s. San Diego CA: Academic Press, 1989. The facts regarding The
Netherlands are taken mainly from Wallerstein's The Modern World- System
I, cited above in note 4 to the Introduction to Part 5.
Notes to Part 5b, Ethics and Historical
Discontinuity
1. Perhaps the best single source for an account of
ethical precepts characteristic of medieval Christendom is the second part of
the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, where the angelic doctor
analyzes the virtues. This is the source of the remarks here on
caritas.
2. The facts are taken from Braudel, cited above in
note 1 to part 5a.
3. John Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the Just
Price. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1959.
4. Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and
Association. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955. (translation of
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft)
Notes to Part 5c, Historical Discontinuity and
Metaphysics
1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations. (various editions) (first published 1776).
The page references below are to the Modern Library edition edited by Edwin
Cannan. New York: Random House, 1937. The phrase "early and rude state of
society" occurs in Book I, chapter 6, p. 47. "Improvement" is found on the first
page and frequently thereafter.
2. H. and H. A. Frankfort, Before Philosophy: the
intellectual adventure of ancient man, an essay on speculative thought in
the ancient near east. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961. pp.
5-6.
3. Jean Piaget, The Child's Conception of Physical
Causality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. p. 242 (translated from
French, first published 1930)
4. These are examples given under "rent" and "render"
in the Oxford English Dictionary.
5. Smith, Wealth of Nations, cited in note 1
above, p. 49.
6. Smith, Wealth of Nations, p.
149.
7. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation (various editions, first published 1817). Vol. 1, p. 67
in the edition of Ricardo's Works edited by Piero Sraffa. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1951.
8. Id. p. 75.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Jose Hernandez, Martin Fierro (various editions,
first published 1872) Part VIII.
Notes to the Introduction to Part 6, Marxist Theories and
the Feminist Theory of Maria Mies
1. See Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial
Revolution, a social and economic history of Britain 1530-1780. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968.
2. See Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves, Critique and
Enlightenment: Michel Foucault on `Was ist Aufklarung' . Barcelona: Institut
de Ciencies Politiques i Socials, 1996.
3. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a
World Scale: women in the international division of labor. London:
Zed Books, 1986.
Notes to Part 6a, Marxist Explanation
1. Among the works which show the key role of
accumulation in Marxist explanations of the global economy are: V. I. Lenin,
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which the need to keep
profits up (i.e. to keep accumulation going) was said to require the partition
of Africa by the European powers. Imperialism abroad went together with the
domination of finance capital (e.g. ownership of big business by banks) in
Europe. Lenin built on the earlier work of Rudolf Hilferding. Somewhat
similarly, Paul Baran argued in The Political Economy of Growth that
drawing the poor countries of the world ever more tightly into the capitalist
orbit has been a way of subsidizing first world profits by exploiting the third
world. Rosa Luxembourg makes a similar argument that the accumulation process of
capitalism is stabilized by expanding geographically, by incorporating into
international markets the "natural economies," i.e. The previously
non-capitalist areas. Samir Amin in Accumulation on a World Scale uses
"accumulation" as the thread that ties together a narrative history of the
origins of today's global economy.
2. "The profits of stock, it may perhaps be thought,
are only a different name for the wages of a particular sort of labour, the
labour of inspection and direction. They are, however, altogether different, are
regulated by quite sufficient principles, and bear no proportion to the
quantity, the hardship, or the ingenuity of the supposed labour of inspection
and direction. ....there is no country in which the whole annual produce is
employed in maintaining the industrious. The idle every where consume a great
part of it .... though in common language what is called the prime cost of any
commodity does not comprehend the profit of the person who is to sell it again,
yet if he sells it at a price which does not allow him the ordinary rate of
profit in his neighborhood, he is evidently a loser by the trade; since by
employing his stock in some other way he might have made that profit.... Unless
they yield him this profit, therefore, they do not yield him what they may very
properly be said to have really cost him. Though the price, therefore, which
leaves him this profit, is not always the lowest at which he is likely to sell
them for any considerable time; at least where there is perfect liberty, or
where he may change his trade as often as he pleases.... The consideration of
his own private profit, is the sole motive which determines the owner of any
capital to employ it either in agriculture, in manufactures, or in some
particular branch of the wholesale or retail trade." Adam Smith, An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations Chapters 6 and 7 Book I and
Chapter 5 of Book II. (various editions) pages 48, 54, 55, 56, 355 of Modern
Library edition.
3. "The stock which is lent at interest is always
considered as capital by the lender. He expects that in due time it is to be
restored to him, and that in the mean time the borrower is to pay him a certain
annual rent for the use of it." Adam Smith, Id., Book II, Chapter 4
(various editions), p. 333 of the Modern Library edition.
4. See, for example the near identification of
"spirit" (animus) and "will" (voluntas) in Saint Ignatius Loyola,
Spiritual Exercises (various editions).
5. See, for example, Book III of Aristotle's
Nichomachean Ethics (various editions).
6. Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1959. Echoing Aristotle, Hampshire writes, "A sincere
declaration of intentions is the most reliable of all sources of information
about a man's future action, if he is a free agent, which entails that he is not
at the mercy of forces that he does not himself recognize and that are outside
his control. This is a necessary truth. If the most reliable basis for
prediction of his future actions is the record of similar people in similar
situations in the past, and if his own announced decisions afford no basis at
all, then he is not free to guide his own activities; he is driven by forces
outside his own control." pp. 177-78.
7. Stephen Toulmin, Knowing and Acting: an
invitation to philosophy. New York: Macmillan, 1976. Toulmin discusses "the
human standpoint" in a way that characterizes humans as rational creatures who
typically act "for reasons". "The least we can demand of a satisfactory
philosophy of individual action, at this point is a clear account of the manner
in which we are going to tell theses two types of situation [acting rationally
vs. being overwhelmed by emotion] apart. How does the individual human being
recognize where some compelling reason indeed exists for acting in this way
rather than that? And how does the relevance for him of such considerations
differ from the influence on him of those factors that are casually
compulsive.?" p. 305.
8. Rom Harre and Paul Secord, The Explanation of
Social Behavior. Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973. See also the
discussion of the need for a more adequate theory of human action to replace the
methodological individualism of orthodox Western economic science in Martin
Hollis and Edward Nell, Rational Economic Man. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1975.
9. The traditional doctrine concerning the reight use
of money follows principles summarized by Saint Thomas Aquiunas in the Summa
Theologiae 2a, 2ae, the second part of the second part, especially in the
treatment of the virtues of charity and justice. "For we should make loans and
indeed do any good deed not because we expect anything of men, but because of
what we expect of God." Id. Question 78, "The Sin of Usury," reply to the
4th objection. P.239 of volume 38 of the Blackfriars Latin-English edition. New
York and London: McGraw-Hill and Eyre & Spottiswood, 1975.
10. "As Augustine says, Baptism has this effect that
the baptized are incorporated into Christ as his members. But the fullness of
grace and virtues derives from Christ the head to all his members, From his
fullness all have received. [John I:16] Thus it is clear that through
baptism a person receives grace and virtues." St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Theologiae 3a, reply in article 5 of Question 69 "Effects of Baptism." p.
135 of volume 57 of the Blackfriars edition. "...charity (caritas)
directs the acts of all the other virtues to our final end. Accordingly it
shapes all these acts and to this extent is said to be the form of the virtues,
for virtues themselves are so called with reference to 'formed' acts.....
Charity is likened to a foundation or a root... charity is called the mother of
the other virtues." Summa Theologiae 2a 2ae, answers in Article 8 of
Question 23 "The Nature of Charity," pl 33 of volume 34 of the Blackfriars
edition.
11. Richard M. Cyert and James G. March, A
Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
The title of this book is somewhat misleading. This is not "behaviorism" in the
sense of treating the mind as a "black box," to be known only by studying its
inputs (stimuli) and its outputs (responses). The book is "behavioral" rather in
the sense that is an empirically- based study of what people in business really
do, as distinct from what economic theories deduced from the behavior of a
hypothetical homo economicus suppose they do.
12. "Pure economics has the advantage in fact of
being able to draw its inferences from very few experimental principles; and it
makes such a strict use of logic as to be able to state its reasonings in
mathematical form --reasonings having the further very great advantage of
dealing with quantities." "If the science of political economy has advanced much
farther than sociology, that is chiefly because it deals with logical conduct."
Vilfredo Pareto, The Midd and Society. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935. (A
translation of the last edition of Paretos's Trattato di Sociologia
generale, published in Italy in 1923) Sections 825 and 263. Pareto explains
what he repeated many times over and in great numbers that human beings perform
in order to acquire things satisfying to their tastes." Footnote to Section 825.
Pareto writes disparagingly of "literary" economists, and compares them
unfavorably to his own "mathematical" economics, even though he recognizes that
his mathematical models have only a very rough and approximate relation to the
real world, and even though he recognizes that their logical precision is
possible "...merely by definition, and that to a certain extent arbitrary."
Ibid.
13. Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive
Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. p. 22.
14. Cite Braudel "wander like dead men in the land of
the living
15. "Our capitalist stares in astonishment. The value
of the product is exactly equal to the value of the capital advanced. .... Our
capitalist, who is at home in his vulgar economy, exclaims: "Oh, but I advanced
my money for the express purpose of making more money." The way to Hell is paved
with good intentions, and he might just as easily have intended to make money,
without producing at all." Karl Marx, Capital volume I, Part III.
(various editions) Pages 212-213 in the Modern Library edition. New York: Random
House 1936. Subsequent page references are also in this edition.
16. Marx, Capital volume I, pp.
181-182.
17. Marx, op. cit. pp. 195-196.
18. Matthew 25:40.
19. Marx, op. cit. p. 636.
20. Marx, op. cit. p. 643.
21. Marx, op. cit. p. 649.
22. Marx, op. cit. p. 652.
23. David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. p. 121.
24. Harvey, op. cit. p. 124, p. 147
ff.
25. Harvey, op. cit. pp. 141-197.
26. Harvey, op. cit. p. 196.
27. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a
World Scale. London: Zed Books Ltd., 1986. p. 1.
28. Mies, op. cit. p. 2.
29. Mies, op. cit. pp. 66-67.
30. Mies, op. cit. p. 83.
31. Mies, op. cit. pp. 78-88.
32. Mies, op. cit. p. 92.
33. Mies, op. cit. p. 110.
34. Mies, op. cit. p. 136.
35. Marx, op. cit. p. 15. That Marx made
simplifying assumptions, and that as a result his theoretical framework
necessarily applies to the real world only indirectly and partially is brought
out by Louis Althusser in Lire "le capital". Paris: Francois Maspero,
1965. English version, Reading Capital. London: New Left Books,
1970.
Notes to Part 6b, Marie Mies' Prescriptions and
Marx's
1. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a
World Scale. London: Zed Books, 1986. Chapter 7, p. 205 ff.
2. Mies, op. cit. P. 93, quoting p. 264 of
Fielding Hall's A People at School.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Mies, op. cit. P. 216.
6. Mies, op. cit. p. 222.
7. Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and
Scientific. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970.
8. Marx, op. cit. P. 41.
9. John Locke, quoted by Marx, op. cit. P. 42.
Besides "use-value" one might cite the ideal of a "human society" or a
"socialized humanity" from Marx's Theses on Feurbach. Or the goal of realizing
the Gattungwesen, or species-being of humanity as a social animal from
Marx's early writings. Or one might cite the concept of "alienation" (a word
used in English to translate two German words Marx used, Entfremdung and
Entausserung) and suggest that the opposite of alienation, whatever that
may be, is what Marx prescribed. I would submit (1) that the realization of any
such Marxist prescriptions would at least overlap with and perhaps coincide with
producing for use, and (2) the conclusion would stand that Marx proposed only
the bare outline of the general character of a better society, not an ethics.
See, in these connections, Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man. New York:
F. Ungar, 1961; John Torrance, Estrangement, Alienation, and
Exploitation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Notes to Part 6c, About Metaphysics
1. Among the accounts of the ventures into uncharted
territory of those who undertook the arduous tasks involved in the planning of a
post-revolutionary economy are Maurice Dobbs' Soviet Economic Development
Since 1917. New York: International Publishers, 1948; and Arthur MacEwan's
Revolution and Economic Development in Cuba. New York: St. Martin's Press
1981.
2. "Philosophical theories give organized expression
to concepts and theories already embedded in forms of practice and types of
community." Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. Notre
Dame Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1988. p. 390.
3. At the end of his two-volume Marxist Economic
Theory. London; Merlin Press, 1968 (first published in French in 1962),
Ernest Mandel agrees with Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, and others that the science of
political economy will disappear when the institutions it describes and
prescribes disappear. Mandel speculates on a future communist society in which
there would be a "positive natural science" that would be, in effect, a
metaphysics, or if you prefer, a comprehensive rational framework articulating
the categories in which social life would be understood and guided, which would
be a surrogate playing the role historically played by metaphysics. "This
'survival' of political economy will be a 'positive natural science', a science
which will undoubtedly integrate the laws of individual and social psychology,
mental and physical hygiene, etc. It is difficult to prophesy what will be the
forms assumed by this 'positive science.' Wheat is certain is that by virtue of
the questions it will seek to answer, it will have little in common with past
and present economic theory, with bourgeois political economy, or with the
Marxist criticism of it. Marxist economists can claim the honour of being the
first category of men of learning to work consciously toward the abolition of
their own profession." Mandel, id. p. 730.
Notes to the Introduction to Part 7, Post-Structuralist
Theories
1. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern
Condition: a report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984. (first published in French in 1979). "Simplifying to the extreme, I
define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is
undoubtedly a product of the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes
it." P. 24.
2. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: the
making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995.
3. J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as
we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. Cambridge (Mass.) and
Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Notes to Part 7a, The Disintegration of Social
Science
1. Richard Wolff, "Althusser and Hegel: Making
Marxist Explanations Antiessentialist and Dialectical," in Antonio Callari and
David F. Ruccio (eds.), Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist
Theory. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996. p.
166.
2. Id. p. 153.
3. Id. p. 151.
4. Aristotle, Metaphysics, especially Books
III and VI-XI (various editions).
5. Jungians affirm the existence of archetypes in the
myths and dreams of the species, which are common across classes and across
cultures. That Jungian thought is alive and well and able to hold its own in
post-Foucault intellectual life is shown, for example by Andrew Samuels, The
Political Psyche. London: Routledge, 1993. p.8.
6. As I read Quine's views, they propose to combine a
hard-nosed no-nonsense logic with an equally hard-nosed no-nonsense realism. For
example, "Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a
conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggering of our
sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.
The triggering, first and last, is all we have to go on. In saying this I too am
talking of external things, namely, people and their nerve endings. Thus what I
am saying applies in a particular to what I am saying, and is not meant to be
skeptical. There is nothing we can be more confident of than external things
--some of them anyway-- other people, sticks, stones. But there remains the fact
--a fact of science itself-- that science is a conceptual bridge of our own
making, linking sensory stimulation to sensory stimulation...." W. V. Quine,
Theories and Things. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1981.
pp. 1-2.
7. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Like
David Harvey, cited in note 23 to part 6a above, Jameson turns the tables on
postmodernism. Instead of admitting that historical materialism is no longer
believable because it is a meta-narrative, Jameson (like Harvey) argues that
historical materialism is a meta- narrative capable of explaining not only the
general course of history, but also the recent cultural phenomena known as
"post-modernism."
8. "Its [the psychoanalytic method's] means are those
of the Word, in so far as the Word confers a meaning on the functions of the
individual; its domain is that of the concrete discourse, insofar as this is the
field of the transindividual reality of the subject; its operations are those of
history, insofar as history constitutes the emergence of Truth in the Real."
Jacques Lacan, "The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis," in Jaques Lacan,
The Language of the Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968.
(Translated with notes and commentary by Anthony Wilden.)
9. Mario Bunge, Causality and Modern Science.
New York: Dover, 1979.
10. Rom Harre, Causal Powers: a theory of natural
necessity. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978; Jerrold
Aronson, Rom Harre, and Eileen Cornell Way, Realism Rescued: how scientific
progress is possible. Chicago: Open Court, 1995.
11. For example, Derrida attributes to Jean-Jaques
Rousseau the view that presence "..is always the presence of pleasure." This
full pleasure (jouissance) is a fictive instantaneity" compared to which
(for Derrida's Rousseau) all articulation is superficial and likely to be
deceptive and corrupting (therefore "dangerous"). Language is a mere ersatz for
"living self-presence." Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Corrected
edition, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997. P. 280. Derrida is surely correct to find in Rousseau
(and in early modern thinkers generally) a tendencey to see articulated language
as an artificial add-on, not properly regarded as part of reality. But the
converse has not been proven; humanity is not left with nothing but its own
articulated signifiers, and no nature.
12. See, for example, John R. Searle, The
Construction of Social Reality, New York: Free Press, 1995, and works there
cited.
13. Thus Terry Eagleton writes: "The political
differences which matter, surely, are not those between those who historicize
and those who do not, but between different conceptions of history. There are
those who believe that history on the whole is a tale of progress; those who
consider that it is by and large a story of scarcity, struggle, and
exploitation; and those who hold that, like many a post-modern text, there is no
plot at all." Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996. P. 34.
14. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of
Dreams (First Part), in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
London: The Hogarth Press, 1958. Volume IV, pages 106-121, 292-296,
306-308.
15. Louis Althusser, "Contradiction et
Surdetermination," in Pour Marx. Paris: Francois Maspero, 1980. p.
100.
Notes to Part 7b, Escobar's Ethics
1. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995. p. 130.
2. Escobar, op. cit. p. 22.
3. Escobar, op. cit. pp. 127-129.
4. "The whole value of their [the farmer and the
manufacturer's] commodities is divided into two portions only: one constitutes
the profits of stock, the other the wages of labour. Supposing corn and
manufactured goods always to sell at the same price, profits would be high or
low in proportion as wages were low or high....but if, as is absolutely certain,
wages should rise with rise of corn, their profits would necessarily fall.... in
all countries and at all times, profits depend on the quantity of labour
requisite to produce the necessaries of the labourers...." David Ricardo, The
Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter VI, "On Profits."
(various editions Ricardo makes a further point not germane here: that the rate
of profit is determined by the labor needed to produce necessaries on the
marginal land that produces no rents.
5. Escobar, op. cit. p. 175-176.
6. See the collection of studies edited by Lourdes
Benaria and Shelley Feldman, Unequal Burden: economic crises, persistent
poverty and women's work. Boulder: Westview Press 1992.
7. Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America:
Underdevelopment or Revolution: essays on the development of
underdevelopment. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.
8. A. A. Boahen, General History of Africa.
Volume VII, "Africa Under Colonial Domination." Berkeley: University of
California Press and UNESCO, 1990.
9. Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working
Class in England. New York: Macmillan, 1958. (first published in German in
1854). p. 296. "We have seen how the growth of large farms forced the peasants
off their holdings, turned them into wage-earners and then in some cases drove
them into the towns." Id. p. 88.
10. Escobar, op. cit. p.100.
11. Escobar, op. cit. p. 71.
12. Escobar, op. cit. p. 74.
13. Escobar, op. cit. p. 217.
14. Catherine A. Odora Hoppers, Structural
Violence as a Constraint on African Policy Formation. Stockholm, Sweden:
Institute for International Education, 1998. See also Kaplan, op. cit.
Note 4 to the Introduction, above.
15. "...it is eminently feasible to design to triple
the mechanical-efficiency level and thus take care handsomely of 100% of
humanity." R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion. New York: Bantam
Books 1969. p. 182; "...we are committed to the design science revolution by
which it is possible bloodlessly to raise the standard of living of all humanity
to a higher level of physical and metaphysical satisfaction than that hitherto
experienced or dreamed of by any humans." Id., Earth, Inc. Garden City
NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973. p. 175; Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins,
Food First: beyond the myth of scarcity. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1977.
16. In support of the claim that postmodernism has
values, and that they are, in the end, those of modernity, see Anthony Giddens,
Modernity and Self-Identity:self and society in the late modern age.
Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: towards a radical democratic
politics. (London: Verson, 1985) attempt to articulate a socialist politics
synchronized with anti-essentialist postmodern thinking, inter alia by utilizing
chains of equivalence linking democracy as a political ideal with democracy in
economics, democracy in the family etc. The result is a postmodern ethics
constructed by radicalizing the liberal ideals of modernity.
17. See Letter 21, "The Construction of the
Metaphysics of Economic Society," in my Letters from Quebec. San
Francisco and London: International Scholars Press, 1995.
18. "Autonomy of the will as the supreme principle of
morality. Autonomy of the will is the property the will has of being a law to
itself (independently of every property belonging to the objects of volition.)"
Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. (Translated by
H. J. Paton). New York: Harper and Row, 1964. (first publiched in German in
1785) p. 108. "Everything in nature works accordance with laws. [i.e. Newton's
laws, which are laws about vis, force and therefore about power] Only a rational
being has the power to act in accordance with his idea of laws that is, in
accordance with principles- and only so has he a will." Id. p. 80. See also
Gideon Freudenthal, note 18 to part 4c above.
19. Amin, Samir, Maldevelopment: anatomy of a
global failure. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1990.
20. Escobar, op. cit. p. 100.
21. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the
birth of the prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. (translation of
Surveiller et punir)
22. Escobar, Ibid.
Notes to Section 7c, Gibson-Graham's
Metaphysics
1. Gibson-Graham, J.K., The End of Capitalism (as
we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. Cambridge (Mass.) And
Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. pp. x-xi.
2. Aristotle, Metaphysics 999b (various
editions). The words quoted are from W. D. Ross's translation, which itself has
various editions.
3. Id. 1017b.
4. Ibid.
5. Gibson-Graham, op. cit. p. 16.
6. Id. p. 7. 7. Id. p. 11.
8. Id. p. 14.
9. Id. p. 15.
10. Id. pp. 5-9.
11. Id. pp. 120-144.
12. Id. p. 129.
13. Aristotle, op. cit. 1013a.
14. For further discussion of these points see the
Concluding Scientific Postscript.
15. Aristotle, Physics 198a (various
editions). I quote W. D. Ross's translation.
16. Although I think it worth noting that
Waren in German is related to "wares," in English I do not deny that the
English word "commodities" was adopted by Marx from Ricardo. Hence Waren
is a German word Marx used to translate the English term "commodities" just as
much as "commodities" is an English word Marx's translators use to translate
Waren..
Note to Section 8, Recommendations: How to Work for Justice
in the Global Economy
Professor Jane Kelsey's "tips are taken from the Canadian
Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor, April, 1996. See also Jane Kelsey,
Rolling Back the State: privatization of power in Aotearoa/ New Zealand.
Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books, 1993; Jane Kelsey, Economic
Fundamentalism. London: Pluto Press, 1995; Jane Kelsey, Setting the
Record Straight: social development in Aotearoa/New Zealand, a response
to the New Zealand government's paper to the Social Development Summit,
Copenhagen, March 1995. Wellington, New Zealand: Association of Non
Government Organizations of Aotearoa, 1995; Jane Kelsey, The New Zealand
Experiment: a world model for structural adjustment? Auckland, New Zealand:
Auckland University Press, 1997.
Gandhi's ideas of trusteeship and service are explained in
his own words in the UNESCO compilation of his writings, publiched as M. K.
Gandhi, All Men are Brothers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
On M. L. King's concept of "beloved community" see John Ansbro, Martin Luther
King, Jr.: the making of a mind. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Press, 1982. On
Carol Gilligan's findings see not 33 to section 9 below. For Riane Eisler's idea
of partnership see her "Women, Men, and Management: Redesigning our Future," in
Pat Barrentine (ed.) When the Canary Stops Singing: women's perspectives on
transforming business. San Francisco: Berrett- Koehler Publishers,
1993.
Notes to Section 9: Concluding Theoretical
Postscript
1. Karl Marx, Capital Volume One, Book Two. p.
188. (various editions). Page references are to the Modern Library
edition.
2. Id. p. 164.
3. Id. p. 170.
4. "Following the elections of Reagan, Thatcher, and
Kohl, pollsters discovered that in each of their victories, the promise of
economic recovery had been the primary factor. ....While all these politicians
did receive mandates to solve the economic crisis, they have been unable to do
so except for some fluctuating improvements in a few areas. The reason they and
other political leaders --whether left, right, or center- cannot find
appropriate solutions is that they and their economic experts subscribe to
narrow perceptions of the problems." Fritjof Capra and Charlene Spretnak,
Green Politics. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984. Pp. 82-83. "What economists
need to do most urgently is reevaluate their entire conceptual foundation and
redesign their basic models and their theories accordingly. The current economic
crisis will be overcome only if economists are willing to participate in the
paradigm shift that is now occurring in all fields." Fritjof Capra, The
Turning Point. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. p. 193.
5. Ludwig von Mises, "Economic Calculation in the
Socialist Commonwealth," in F. A. von Hayek (ed.), Collectivist Economic
Planning. London: Routledge, 1935. According to Bohm-Bawerk, "The
fundamental proposition which Marx puts before his readers is that the exchange
value of commodities --for his analysis is directed only to this, not to values
in use- finds its origin and its measure in the quantity of labor incorporated
in the commodities." Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His
System. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949. p. 66. Bohm-Bawerk points out
that this :fundamental proposition" is erroneous as an accurate account of how
prices are actually set in markets. He further points out that after beginning
Capital with the observation that the wealth of capitalist societies appears as
a vast collection of "commodities," Marx later narrows the definition of
"commodity" to include only products capitalists produce for the market by
exploiting labor. Bohm-Bawerk finds that on a correct view the exchange value of
commodities (broadly, not narrowly, defined) is established by supply and
demand. He further finds that the existence of capital, pace Marx, is not the
result of exploitation, but rather the result of time. Time-consuming roundabout
methods of production yield more. Therefore capital (as future means of
production) has a price; namely, interest. Since both supply and demand, and the
need to pay interest on capital, are, on Bohm-Bawerk's analysis, rooted in the
nature of things, they cannot be avoided by a socialist state; a socialist state
will be compelled, in effect, although Bohm-Bawerk does not use the phrase, to
adopt state capitalism. See "Interest under Socialism," pp. 339-344 of Eugen von
Bohm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest, Volume Two. South Holland, Illinois:
Libertarian Press, 1959.
6. Oskar Lange, On the Economic Theory of
Socialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938. For the history
of the idea of "opportunity cost" see Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic
Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. P. 917.
7. Piero Sraffa, Production of Commodities by
Means of Commodities. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press,
1972.
7a. Arendt argues that power and violence are
phenomenologically and conceptually distinct, although mixed in practice. Power
is the human ability to act in concert (p. 44). She associates power with
consent.... Violence employs instruments (p. ). Violence is associated with
force, weapons .... It seems to me that on Arendt's plausible account, the
concerted action that constitutes power requires communication and meeting of
minds. Violence cannot create power, since its instrumental nature excludes
communication and meeting of minds. For the same reasons that Arendt finds
violence incapable of producing power I find it incapable of producing cultural
transformation. No doubt guns and bombs can destroy a people physically, killing
everybody and therefore destroying the cultural meanings that give their life
coherence and make communication and cooperation possible. But violence cannot
create a positive cultural transformation. At most it can create a setting where
cultural processes can happen; for example, people might be compelled to attend
classes or therapy sessions. But the cultural process itself, the classes or the
therapy, has to proceed through communication, not through violence See Hannah
Arendt, On Violence. New York: Harper and Row,
8. Dennis and Donella Meadows, The Limits to
Growth. New York: Universe Books, 1974; by the same authors, Beyond
Limits: confronting global collapse, envisioning a sustainable future. Post
Mills, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 1992. Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard
Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point. New York: Dutton, 1974.
9. "What the Soviet economic planners are actually
trying to find is a system of automatic response, of self-regulating factors
which would make it possible to obtain optimum results independently of any
conscious human intervention." "It is obviously less important to writers like
Kantorovich, Novozhilov, Nemchinov, Malyshev, and so on, to discover the
'economic laws' of the epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism than to
find solutions to practical problems. Among the latter the problem of rational
fixing of prices is clearly the most outstanding." Russia was led gradually [and
later, as we know, rapidly] to "rehabilitate to an increasing degree the
automatic functioning of the market." Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic
Theory. Volume II, pp. 726-727. London: Merlin Press, 1962.
10. Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of
Historical Materialism. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1981.
11. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General
Linguistics (edited by Ch. Bally and Alb. Sechehaye, translated by Wade
Baskin). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. p. 79. (first published in French, 1915).
The quotation above is my own translation from French, which differs slightly
from Baskin's. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Generale.
Paris: Payot, 1971. pp. 114-115.
12. Lacan characterized paranoid psychosis as a
disorder of the signifier in his doctoral dissertation. Jacques Lacan, De la
psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalite. Paris: Seuil,
1980. (presented as a doctoral dissertation in 1932)
13. Part One, "General Principles," Chapter 1, "The
Nature of the Linguistic Sign," in Saussure, op. cit. n. 11
above.
14. G. E. M. Anscombe, op. cit. note 2 to the
Introduction to Section 4 above.
15. Jean Baudrillard, "Symbolic Exchange and Death,"
in Selected Writings (edited by Mark Poster). Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1988. pp. 124-125 (first published in French 1976)
16. See Elizabeth O'Conner, The New Community.
New York: Harper and Row, 1976, and other books by the same author.
17. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago:
an experiment in literary investigation. (three volumes) New York: Harper
and Row, 1974-78.
18. Joanna Macy, Dharma and Development. West
Hartford, Connecticut: Kumarian Press, 1973. Although I recognize that the
sarvodaya movement has suffered some reverses, I still believe that the
successes Macy describes illustrate the proposition that positive alternatives
depart from and transform the secular metaphysical framework of economic
society.
19. "For as strolling, walking, and running are
bodily exercises, so every way of preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself
of all the disordered tendencies, and, after it is rid, to seek and find the
Divine Will as to the management of one's life for the salvation of the soul, is
called a Spiritual Exercise." Saint Ignatious Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises
of St. Ignatius of Loyola. (translated by Elder Mullan, S.J.) New York: P.
J. Kenedy and Sonss, 1914. p. 3.
20. Howard Richards, The Evaluation of Cultural
Action. London: Macmillan, 1985.
21. Charles Kleymeyer, Cultural Expression and
Grassroots Development. Boulder and London: Lynne Riener Publishers,
1994.
22. "We are running a grave risk of becoming bogged
down in a morass of ultra-individualism. The reason is, quite simply, that we
misconstrue the idea of freedom and would like to believe, out of sheer egoism,
against our better judgement and indeed against our own conscience, that freedom
implies the right to do or not to do whatever pleases the individual or the
group, without regard to the community and the state. This I call misconstruing
freedom." Ludwig Erhard, in "Render Unto the State What Belongs to the State,"
an article published in Die Zeit, November 21, 1957, translated and
reprinted in Ludwig Erhard, The Economics of Success. London: Thames and
Hudson, 1963. p.213.
23. Sir Stafford Cripps, Towards Christian
Democracy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946.
24. Jacques Maritain, Christianity and
Democracy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. See also other works by
this prolific and influential author. On Ruskin see Edward Alexander, Matthew
Arnold, John Ruskin, and the Modern Temper. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State
University Press, 1973.
25. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical
Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1956. paragraph 21.
26. Wittgenstein, op. cit. paragraph 216.
Wittgenstein's idea of language game has been used by Jean-Francois Lyotard to
support a postmodern view defined as "incredulity toward metanarratives." J-F
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993. p. xxiv, pp.9-11. Using the method of
language games to deconstruct grand and overarching theories of all kinds,
Lyotard says, "Science possesses no general metalanguage in which all other
languages can be transcribed and evaluated. This is what prevents its
identification with the system and, all things considered, with terror."
Id. p. 64. Somewhat contrary to the spirit of Lyotard's work, I am
suggesting that there is a global and very widespread human practice, exchange
for money, which can be thought of as a language game.
27. Keynes was quite aware that money could be
created by fiat, and devalued by deliberate policies. Hence his views support
the concept that the entire existence of the signifiers that organize the global
economy depends on moral custom, or convention, i.e. on cultural structures.
"...money is simply that which the State declares from time to time to be a good
legal discharge of money contracts. ...The power of taxation by currency
devaluation is one which has been inherent in the state since Rome discovered
it. The creation of legal tender has been and is a government's ultimate
bankruptcy or its own downfall, so long as this instrument still lies at hand
unused. ... The tendency of money to depreciate has been in past times a weighty
counterpoise against the cumulative effects of compound interest and the
inheritance of fortunes. ...By heirs...." John Maynard Keynes, "A Tract on
Monetary Reform" reprinted in Collected Writings. London: Macmillan,
1972. Vol IV, pp. 8-9. "Lenin is said to havae declared that the best way to
destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency.... As the inflation
proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to
month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the
ultimate foundation or capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost
meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into gamble and a
lottery." Keynes, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," Collected
Writings, Vol. II, pp. 148-149.
28. Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1982. (translated from Portuguese by Myra
Ramos)
29. H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law. Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1961.
30. John Searle, The Construction of Social
Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995. p. 28, p. 44.
31. Searle, op. cit. p. 44.
32. Searle, op. cit. p. 45.
33. The people on my short list of names are intended
to be well- known examples of what I am calling "positive alternatives" and of
what psychologists often call post-conventional moral judgment. My belief that
there are thousands and millions of people whose behavior represents a shift
away from the norms of economic society is supported by research in moral
development, as I interpret it. Although Aristotle observed long ago that "most
men wish what is noble (kalos) but choose what is profitable" (Aristotle,
Nichomachean Ethics VIII, xiii, 8), nevertheless, judgment and action are
found to be significantly related. Lawrence Kohlberg's well-known studies of the
development of moral judgment place homo ecnomomicus (individualism,
instrumental purpose, exchange) at stage two of moral development. The majority
of adults are found to be at stages three and four (which Kohlberg, following
Piaget, designates as "conventional"). They conform to the conventional norms of
society, which happen to be, at the present stage of human moral evolution, to a
considerable extent the norms of market capitalist societies. However, their
conformity to conventional morality is not due to reflective judgements on the
comparative merits of contemporary institutions and possible alternatives, but
rather to mutual interpersonal expectations, wanting to be a good person in
relationships, and interpersonal conformity (stage 3); and to conscientious
support of the social system (stage 4). See Thomas Lickona (ed.) Moral
Development and Behavior: theory, research, and social issues. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973; see especially therein pp. 34-35 in Lawrence
Kohlberg, "Moral Stages and Moralization: the cognitive-developmental approach."
Parallel to Kohlberg, but relying on other researchers, John Rawls argues that
human beings naturally have a "morality of association" (comparable to Piaget
and Kohlberg's conventional stages) such that improved, fairer, and more just
social arrangements, such as those Rawls advocates, would be (once they became
the norms) kept in place by "...moral sentiments [that] are a normal part of
human life." John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1971. p. 489. Kohlberg identifies Rawls himself along with
Socrates, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, as examples of pos-conventional moral
judgement, which is characterized by a philosophical stance that critiques
social norms in the light of broad principles. Carol Gilligan is among those who
have criticized Kohlberg for putting too much emphasis on principles of justice,
and not enough emphasis on a care ethic. Carol Gilligan, In a Different
Voice: psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982. On Gilligan's view the prospects for a metaphysical
shift to a post economic perspective are even stronger, because in addition to
complementing justice ethics as moral theories, her care perspective finds roots
for the growth of cooperation and solidarity in common human experience. "The
experiences of inequality and interconnection, inherent in the relations of
parent and child, then give rise to the ethics of justice and care, the ideals
of human relationship-- the vision that self and other will be treated as of
equal worth, that despite differences in power, things will be fair; the vision
that everyone will be responded to and included, that no one will be left alone
or hurt." Gilligan, op. cit. pp. 62-63. Since the normal and natural
tendency of human moral development appears to be toward post-conventional
thinking, or a care ethic, or both, it seems probable that people like those on
my short list of names are fairly numerous throughout the species. This is a
ground for hope that amalgams of inspired moral leadership, conventional
conformity, and enlightened self-interest may be able to guide our human species
--imprisoned as we are in cultural structures of our own making- toward
sustainable and happy adjustments to physical reality.