Brian Holmes:

On 05/05/2012 01:56 PM, Nicholas Knouf wrote:

How does one take a principled stand against the repugnant policies of the Koch Bros., while also holding out the possibility that their philanthropic actions just_might_ cause some positive change in the world?

I reckon it’s close to impossible.

The reason why is that by continuing to admire, in whatever way, the oligarchs of your country or any other, and by refusing to condemn them and the people who support them, one sits on the fence and thereby encourages everyone else to do exactly the same. How to oppose the oligarchy without frankly opposing them? How to be part of and against the ruling class?

This has ever been the dilemma of the so-called “middle classes,”those who mediate between the rulers and the ruled. It is not an easy position when one springs from those middle classes, because as you point out, Nick, our culture, our very subjectivity, is largely given to us by the “gifts” of the rulers. Only by some deliberate effort can the middle-class person actually break out of this position of admiration, this inarticulate belief that the rulers are somehow “the good people.” The great resource whereby the rulers have always legitimated the iniquity of their rule has always been art, culture, philanthropy. Should one be suspicious of those things? Is the culture of the rich a double-edged sword? What does it mean to be cut by it?

To rule is not simply to bestow gifts on the less enlightened. It is to extort one’s wealth and power by means of violence both physical and psychic. And in the case of oil magnates, it is to participate in military imperialism, to support war and to damage the environment irreparably. The case of the Koch brothers is surely the most explicit in this regard. I recall, for those who would somehow not know, that the Koch brothers are in the oil business; that they founded the libertarian Cato institute which has served as an ideological arm of corporate neoliberalism; paid out more to their political action committee between 2006 and 2010 than any other oil industry including
Exxon-Mobile; and have backed since its inception the one organization that has done more than any other to support the Tea Party, namely Americans for Prosperity, which is also pushing climate-change denial. Well, I could go on, but anyone who has not done a minimum of reading about the Koch brothers simply should do so. I will put a few links below, but I think everyone already knows these things.

Under the rule of oligarchs like the Kochs, the US has led the world in the transformation from public cultural funding to private. So isn’t it nice, they pay for your museums. At present this structural transformation is overtaking Europe and other regions under the pressures of austerity, which arise from the very libertarian philosophy promoted by the Koch brothers and so many other corporate billionaires defending their class power. The transformation extends to the formerly public universities, which are now debt-traps for unwitting human prey. The transformation of the formerly public institutions is documented quite well in books such as Academic Capitalism, Unmaking the Public University, and many others which I cite in my text “Silence=Debt.” When this transformation is complete, you will indeed have something like the Carnegie Libraries on which to nourish your subjectivity. You’ll have the Met, Harvard, the MoMA, a militarized and corporatized UC Berkeley, etc. What you will not have are self-governing institutions maintaining a sense of responsibility both to the internal ethics of intellectual disciplines, and to broader regulative ideals of equality. That is to say, what you won’t have is any pretence of a democratic society. The tacit requirement for crossing the threshholds of these institutions will be to bow down before the godlike figures who created them.

I am not sure how to exit from this situation where we “middle-class” people are dominated while serving also as the vectors and relays of domination. I know it’s a fact, because I have seen conditions in both the US and Western Europe degrade over my lifetime, particularly the US, where the existence of what’s called “the oligarchy” or
“the ruling class” is now a reality so patent, so statistically evident, that it is simply undeniable. And yet people accept it, they internalize the competitive, winner-take-all values of the oligarchy, just as they have followed the lead of the oligarchy in increasingly denying the existence of human-induced climate change. Trusting that this rule of the oligarchs “just might” create something culturally positive – that’s naive, Nick. While you’re trusting, or even merely speculating on the possibility, we are headed toward the complete disempowerment of our democracy by billionaire Political Action Committees. One more step and and naivete becomes complicity. Which is
the usual fate of the middle classes.

Help me out, everyone or anyone, if you are interested. I don’t know exactly what to do. At this point, I think it would be politically useful and valuable to publicly tell people that they are wrong when they speak in support of the ruling classes. The first time one can do it very politely, as I did a while ago to Sascha D. People told me privately that I was wasting my time. But it seems to me that one can and should try publicly to tell people why they might reconsider what they say; and one can argue these things at length, it’s a good thing.

However, at a certain point I do believe one also has to say: “Declarations that support the culture, and therefore the influence, of the super-rich, are quite simply declarations in support of the ruling class.” That’s not a simple ad hominem attack. That’s a political argument based on principle.

If my dear friend Mark Stahlman were right, that is, if life in democratic societies were always and ever simply the rule of the powerful minority over the powerless majority, then another consequence must necessarily ensue. We must all, to the extent that we are in the powerless majority, become either hopelessly naive (“Well, every capitalist Armageddon has it’s cultural silver lining”) or we must become hopelessly paranoid (“It’s all a trap, a Matrix, foisted on the majority of zombies by the minority of all-powerful rulers”). To refuse that diabolical alternative, it seems to me that one has to say, “Well, the situation is bad, but because we are capable of something better, we must appeal to those who recognize the danger and begin to struggle together not only against the ruling classes, but also against those who do not recognize the danger and choose instead to promote complicity.”

Translation: At some point, you gotta say to those around you: “Stop defending the rulers for their poison gifts. Start attacking them because they are a clear and present danger.”

Alas, this means accepting the friend/enemy distinction of classical politics, which is not a happy one. At a certain level it means tearing your very self apart, when you are partially the creation of those ruling classes in their more enlightened, gift-bestowing aspects. I don’t find the vocation of the critic particularly smooth. When people start defending the Koch borthers, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or privatized universities and museums because they’re excellent and they have such good art, I admit it, I sometimes freak out: I think I’m be hearing the ventriloquized voice of the enemy. Friend, enemy, dualism, linear, bad. Therefore anyone who has a better solution to this whole problem, go ahead, speak up. Let’s go forward with all this.

best, Brian

***

Oh, and by the way, fuck the Koch brothers:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/reports/koch-industries-secretly-fund

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOCHAv25uTw

Keith Hart:

Brian, saying what you say is an inspiration for many of us. But you ask for a different perspective, so I will try to fabricate one that stands separate from all that I share with you.

The first thing that stands out to me is that you identify your own role with that of a critic. There are other ways of engaging society and perhaps we should start with that. Which critics in history do you think made a difference? Cicero? Milton? Rousseau? Poe? Adorno? How did they do it?

Second, the US has become a blatant plutocracy. All we need is for Mrs Romney to say let them eat cake and the parallels with the Old Regime will be complete (reference to Ed on rentseeking etc). But the American left, from its strongholds in New York, Chicago and LA, rarely identifies other social forces that might help to make things budge, choosing rather to demonize the popular majority, their culture and politics, as dupes. Here is the contradiction, the United States is still the only society where democracy occasionally makes itself felt. The appropriation of old liberal slogans by the plutocracy is so insidious because American institutions and people still embody those ideas to some degree.

Third, all economies combine plural principles and, when the Pentagon is the largest state-run collective in world history, we should think twice before describing the US economy as “capitalism”. Ours is an age of money (Locke and Marx) which is transitional to a more just society, but where is the world in that trajectory today, when for the first time capital has gone genuinely global? If capitalism’s historical mission is to make cheap commodities and break down the insularity of traditional communities, how far has humanity progressed down that road, when a third still work with their hands in the fields and multitudes haven’t made a phone call in their life?

Fourth, the Europeans are in worse shape than the Americans and are nowhere more depressed than in Britain and France, the empires the US had to displace in order to build their own. If your constituency is the West in decline, why would you expect to locate progressive social forces in a population who live beyond their means because they have the world currency and most of the weapons or in another that shelters behind that power to derive unearned income from the rest that is fast running out?

Finally — but not really, this is just the beginning — the political economists identified three classes based on property in Land, Money and Labour, landlords, capitalists and workers. What has happened to those classes by the early 21st century? The first has become Governments, the second Corporations. Their unholy alliance-cum-rivalry took the form of national capitalism (Hegel’s recipe), but is becoming something else, maybe home rule for the corporations (step forward Oliver Williamson and Coase). And the rest of us, the epeople, what, who and where are we? Could the digital revolution support the equivalent of the factory proletariat and how good an example is that anyway? No wonder Karl Marx never finished the sketch of his big book provided in the introduction to Grundrisse.

Whatever the way forward from your impasse, Brian, it has to be grounded in a contemporary perspective on world history and not just the internal whingeing of western populations condemned to the slippery slope of history. I don’t expect this idea to take root soon. After all, the British haven’t woken up to historical reality despite being on the skids for a century. I have made my second home in South Africa and I look especially to Brazil and India rather than China, as well as to the rest of Africa, for progressive social movements. Africa already has 7 out of the top ten fastest-growing economies; its share of would population will be a quarter in 2050 and over a third by 2100. Now there is a revolution to contemplate in our racist world society, one where the value of black, brown and white will be reversed.

Your comrade, Keith

Brian Holmes:

Hey Keith, good to hear from you.

I think there are tons of writers who have made a difference, and it continues today. Your list is pretty literary – and literature is a strong force, much stronger than people usually give credit. I’m also interested in more humble sociologists, economists, philosophers, and of course… art historians. But you know, critic is just one part. I like to be part of social movements and also experimental art-and-politics groups that come to grips with territorial realities. There are few Adornos and less Poes. Baudelaire and Rimbaud are pretty rare too! No use wishing to be a world-historical genius. How to be part of a grounded community that lives its critique and breathes its alternatives? It’s a very good question. That’s why a bunch of us go around asking it in the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor!

What the left is, and what the popular majority is, is a real question in the US (but also France or Germany for that matter). Dan Wang shows in his last post that a broad electoral left has come into existence again through conflict in Wisconsin. That could be a growing tendency nationally, but it isn’t yet. In Chicago I still see a big split between a popular, grassroots left that comes out for a primarily Latino immigrant march like Mayday (and for a thousand other everyday causes) and a middle-class liberal left that frankly doesn’t know what to do in the face of a police-state, finance-friendly, austerity-enforcing Democrat like Rahm Emmanuel (former Obama chief of staff and now our mayor). Who’s the popular majority? There isn’t one, there’s two or three or more. It’s as useless to call people dupes as it is to deny the use of vast machineries for influencing behavior. Proof enough of the latter is the success of the “Kochtopus” — ie the huge multi-headed apparatus that the famous two brothers help to fund, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) whose program Scott Walker has tried to carry out in Wisconsin.

Keith, you are more confident than I that capitalism’s mission has been to bring cheap commodities to the masses. We’re looking arguably at some kind of transnational state capitalism, in which the state itself warps beyond recognition. If the crisis of the 70s produced a trilateral governance (“Triad power” as Kenichai Ohmae said back then) we now see an attempt to widen the hegemony (or stretch the management of “hege-money”) to include the BRICS. The locus of this attempt has been the G-20 finance ministers meeting. But the hedge funds aren’t really cooperating. Moishe Postone has pointed out that under neoliberalism, the classic inability of capitalists to coordinate their efforts globally has returned to plague the whole system. And he said that before 2008 and the Greek debacle! Postone argues for some specific consideration of the greatest critic of Lockean bourgeois property conceptions. I.e. Marx. As a critic I still want to be part of a collective rewriting of Marx for the 21st century. In my view, transnational state capitalism is still failing to deliver the goods we need.

Pretty darn good question! I just happen to live here in the “Heartland.” Where a buncha climate-change deniers, the Heartland Institute, are meeting, hopefully to general scorn, this weekend.

Well, they have become intertwined for better and worse, I’d say. Crucially, the formation of socialist and social-democratic states in the 20th century has confused the working classes with both the territorial nation-state and the money-wielding transnational corporations. For us, the big alternative is, do we fight back to regain power over monetary flows within some territorial container called a nation-state? Or do we go for Exodus and try to create a new formation, “the missing people” or “le people qui manque,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it? I think you have to do both at once. The corporate-state nexus is too powerful and ugly to ignore, and we can’t yet fight it effectively outside the nation-state. At the same time, the national culture it has produced — with workers’ cooperation — is too deadly to make it one’s own. Is it really possible to do both at once? Not for nothing did D&G write about capitalism and schizophrenia!

So you go for Exodus!

Here in the Americas, there is infinitely more to be learned from the South than the North. With all due apologies to my good friends in Canada. Y muchos saludos a los demas!

Thanks for the inspiration, amigo.

Keith Hart:

Michael H Goldhaber wrote: It seems to me that Conard’s text presents those on the left with a rare opportunity –though not enough of one by itself to turn the situation entirely around….In general, the extremes of capital and inequality now, open the whole system for critique in more obvious ways that at any recent time, and finding astute ways to make that critique is a worthwhile endeavor.

Good point, Michael! Come back, Thorstein Veblen, all is forgiven.

I am really just making a plea for the introduction of world history into this discussion. The fastest-growing economy in the world between 1890 and 1913 was Russia with an annual growth rate of about 10%, similar to China’s today. We all know what happened next after the imperialist powers started fighting each other and the revolution was not in Germany. The British thought the world economy was in a Great Depression 1873-1896, but it turned out that returns on middle class savings (consols) were being squeezed by American and German capital, while the world economy boomed (Siberia, South Africa, Brazil).

We are not just witnesses to the self-serving ideologies of the super-rich. (Thomas Jefferson presciently called commercial monopolists a pseudo-aristocracy and wanted to include inhibitions to their growth in the constitution, but the Federalists got round that one. Whether he knew that or not, Veblen made the same point a century later and now it is our turn.) There are massive changes taking place under our noses and, as far as nettime is concerned, you would think nothing much is going on outside the US.

I think the main difference between Brian and me is that he wants to engage personally with the politics of our moment in history and this comes across sometimes as being myopic (which he is not), whereas I want to get a sense of the global picture and that makes me rather detached about the politics. I do think we are entering a period of war and revolution that could be as long as the neoliberal phase and that is why I gobble up what Brian has to say.

I did produce this reflection on revolution and the human economy not long ago:

http://thememorybank.co.uk/2012/02/07/the-human-economy-in-a-revolutionary-moment-political-aspects-of-the-economic-crisis/

Inequality is endemic to this world economy, but South Africa’s detailed profile, as revealed by the following selected indicators, is remarkable:

Security exchange regulation 1

Soundness of banks 2

Efficacy of corporate boards 2

Financial services availability 3

Financial market development 4

Management schools 13

Air transport infrastructure 17

Professional management 18

Home market index 24

Scientific research 30

Firm technology 30

Buyer sophistication 31

Marketing 31

* * * * * * * * * * *

Electricity supply 97

Internet use per capita 105

Supply of scientists & engineers 112

Pay and productivity 130

Life expectancy 130

Education system 133

Crime and violence 136

Hiring and firing practices 139

HIV prevalence 139

TB prevalence 141

Businessmen listed the most problematic factors as inefficient government bureaucracy (20%), poorly educated workforce (17%), restrictive labour regulations (16%), corruption (12%),  crime and theft (10%) and poor infrastructure (8%).

What we have here is a world-class business environment surrounded by some of the lowest human development conditions in the world. It would have been easy to explain such dualism not long ago, when South Africa was notorious as a mining enclave run for the benefit of whites only; and perhaps two decades of ANC rule (with the black union federation COSATU as its principal supporter) are too short to undo the legacy of neglect and harrassment endured by the poor black majority for over a century. But South Africa’s first world corporate capitalism and the third world conditions most citizens live in are both to a significant extent a product of post-apartheid government. Moreover, public discourse in South Africa could hardly be said to reflect these stark contrasts. The arrival of “democracy” in the form of black majority rule in 1994 is still celebrated without any apparent irony.

The social glue for this paradoxical situation is the ANC’s ability to count on the votes of the poor black majority whose interests it systematically neglects. No wonder the South African left is hamstrung by its ideological legacy on race and class. South Africa’s growth rate of an average 3% a year is less than half that of the seven African countries who (with China, India and Vietnam) currently make up the top ten fastest-growing economies in the world. Surely this relative stagnation is an effect of the country’s business-friendly (some would call it “neoliberal”) economic model. The prospect for major social explosions still seems to be low, not least because South Africans have been told they are superior to the rest of the continent and are easily diverted by resentment of other Africans who come there for jobs.

I was asked to report on the project I am involved in which has the same name as The Human Economy book; but, given this course’s focus on social movements, I decided that I should try to insert the perspective on economy I have developed into contemporary political processes and events. I have been writing, editing and researching about alternative approaches to the economy for a long time and blogging about politics more recently, but never the two together. In the last year, as a result of the North African revolutions and then the Occupy movement, I have come to see that the economic and political arguments have to be brought much closer together. Taking our lead from this moment in world history, we need to ask how the work that Jean-Louis and I have long been engaged in – on human economy, économie solidaire, social economy – needs to be modified in order to lend support to what has become a serious political movement at the global level.

I entered our collaboration after Jean-Louis, with Antonio David Cattani, published an expanded version of the Dictionnaire de l’autre économie in 2006. I published an enthusiastic review essay about it. I was staggered by the range of analysis concerning economic and political development that it contained. I have been living in Paris for 15 years and I feel lucky to have been here during what I see as a Renaissance of French economic sociology. The book edited by Philippe Steiner and François Vatin, Traité de sociologie économique, is a testament to the constellation of brilliant economic sociologists that France has produced in the last decade or more. It was equally clear that this work was largely unknown in the English-speaking world and, increasingly under Chirac and Sarkozy, lacked a receptive audience in France as well. So, since my friends in this field were being frozen out of French politics to some extent, we had the idea of selling the project to the English-speakers or at least to those who speak English as a second language. Geoffrey has already introduced the result, The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (2010).

All the predecessor volumes were called, in various languages, Dictionary of the Other Economy. We dropped that particular formulation for reasons that will become the main theme of my talk today. The difference between what are conventionally known as the extreme left and the centre left lies in the concept of change that each of them has. The extreme left conceives of the future as the negation of what it calls “capitalism” in a unitary way and imagines a radical rupture with that system in ways that are not always specified, but are thought to be revolutionary. The centre left, whether it relies on state intervention or the mobilization of voluntary associations of various kinds, tends to emphasize more gradual and continuous developments building on what people are doing already. We felt that labelling our intellectual work as “the other economy” lent itself too readily to radical utopias. Jean-Louis and I based our conversation on what Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi understood by economic change, since we were looking for a more positive construction than a simple negation; and this is where the idea of a human economy came from.

What makes an economy “human”? First, it privileges people before abstractions. People make and remake their economic lives and that has to be the basis for thinking about economy. Any economics has to be accessible to them as a practical guide to how they manage those lives. But the economy is human in another sense too in that we increasingly confront economic problems and dilemmas as humanity. The future of humanity as a whole is at stake in the economic crises that we face and not just the world seen through the blinkers of national politics and media. So the idea of a human economy points in these two directions: towards what people really do and extending our perspectives to a global level, if possible.

Since publishing the book, I have helped to set up a research program on the human economy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa’s capital. UP was an Afrikaner establishment close to government power in the apartheid period; but South Africa is on the move and has been for more than two decades, so the university wants to refurbish its image and expand in more progressive directions. They have generously funded a program of post-doctoral fellowships drawing initially from the global South (with fellows from Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia and Southern Africa), but now linking researchers from North and South in a creative dialogue focused on South Africa. Volumes before The Human Economy were largely a Francophone and Latin American venture, so we widened the range of contributors to take in 15 countries, adding authors from Britain, North America and Scandinavia, as well as translating a selection from the Dictionnaire. But it soon became apparent that Asia and Africa – where most of the people live – were still missing from this impressively diverse international project. The series was launched in Brazil and Argentina soon after the millennium and it was always intended to advance collaboration between networks of researchers and activists. The books are a digest of existing knowledge and experience that might help to inform readers who wish to change the world in a progressive direction. Ours too did not offer much guidance for how to carry out active research on the human economy. So the Pretoria program aims to fill these two gaps: first, to enrol Africans and Asians, alongside Latin Americans and Europeans, into studying how to make a better economy; and second, to foster post-doctoral research that would help to inform and refine this program.

The Dictionnaire that Jean-Louis put together came out in the middle of the credit boom (2002, 2006). Very few people saw much prospect for economic and political change at that time. By the time we published The Human Economy in 2010, after the financial crisis had broken, it was clear that the ideas it contained should find a more fertile reception in the new climate of public opinion. At the very least, the absolute hegemony of mainstream economics has been damaged by the crisis. It really isn’t feasible to argue any longer – although many economists still do – that the best guarantee of improved human well-being is to leave markets free of political intervention and social control. Surely no-one believes that any more. Markets were never free, but the dominant ideology provided cover for siphoning wealth to the top; and that is now very much on the political agenda. Even the Financial Times publishes articles saying that we maybe need a new synthesis of anthropology, history and economics to replace the old discipline. So we were pretty sure that our ideas would meet a more favourable audience in this context.

Even so, we distanced ourselves, in the introduction and in our approach to editing the book, from any “revolutionary” eschatology that suggested society had reached the end of something rotten and would soon be launched on something quite new. The idea of a human economy rested on drawing attention to the fact that people do a lot more than might be imagined if we focus only on the dominant economic institutions. Against a singular notion of the economy as “capitalism”, we argued that all societies combine a plurality of economic forms and that several of these are universally distributed across history, even if their combination is strongly coloured by the dominant type of organization in particular times and places. For example, in his famous essay on The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss tried to show that other economic principles were present in capitalist societies and understanding this would provide a sounder basis for building non-capitalist alternatives than the Bolshevik revolution’s attempt to break with markets and money. Karl Polanyi too, in his various writings, insisted that the human economy throughout history was made up of a number of mechanisms of which the market was only one. We argued therefore that the idea of radical transformation of an economy conceived of monolithically as capitalism into something regarded as its opposite was an inappropriate way to approach economic change. We should pay attention to the full range of what people are doing already and build economic initiatives around giving these a new direction, combination and emphasis, rather than suppose that economic change has to be invented from scratch. Although this might seem to be a gradualist approach to economic improvement, adopting such an approach on awide scale would in fact have revolutionary consequences.

I have been working quite closely for 5 or 6 years now with my friend and colleague at Goldsmiths, David Graeber. He is an anarchist who was prominent from the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. His book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is a best-seller. His politics inform his economic analysis; and he has always taken an anti-statist and anti-capitalist position, with markets usually subsumed under the concept of capitalism. That is, he sees the future and the means of getting there as being based on the opposite of our capitalist states. The core of his politics is “direct action” which he has practised and written about as ethnography. I have always been centre-left with a liberal streak, but my mentor, the person from whom I have learned most, was the West Indian revolutionary, C.L.R. James and through him I gained a literary interest in the history of revolutions. In our book, Jean-Louis and I argued that people everywhere rely on a wide range of organizations in their economic lives: markets, nation-states, corporations, cities, voluntary associations, families, virtual networks, informal economies, crime and war. We should be looking for a more progressive mix of these things. We can’t afford to turn our backs on the institutions that have helped us make the modern transition to the world society that humanity now lives in. Large-scale bureaucracies co-exist with varieties of popular self-organization and we have to make them work together rather than at cross-purposes, as they often are now. All of these are responses to the challenges posed by the modern world and we need to combine them at a new and more inclusive level.

David and I agree on much of the economics. As anthropologists, we both claim inspiration from Marx and Mauss in departing from mainstream economics. Our theories of money are pretty close. Although he is less explicitly indebted to Polanyi, he too believes that economic life everywhere may be understood as a plural combination of moral principles – sharing or “communism”, reciprocity and hierarchy – which take on a different complexion when organized by dominant social forms. Thus helping each other as equals is essential to capitalist societies, but capitalism is a terrible way of bringing it out effectively. But at the same time he believes that a radical rupture with the norms of capitalist states is necessary if we are to realise out human potential through a new kind of political economy. At first, I saw our positions as being incompatible, but recent political developments now persuade me otherwise.

I would bet that 2011-2012 will turn out to be a revolutionary moment in world history comparable at least with the changes that took place in 1989-1990 and maybe more significant than that. The trigger for such a perception has been the so-called Arab Spring, the revolutions that deposed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt during early 2011. I am an Africanist and I have written about Tunisia online (e.g. http://thinkafricapress.com/tunisia/elections-2011-economic-democracy-preeminent). Then uprisings followed in Europe (protests in Greece, Los Indignados in Madrid), the student protests and riots in Britain and the student movement in Chile before OWS captured the world’s attention in New York last September. I felt from the beginning that OWS, whatever its consequences for American society and politics and whether or not it could claim some long-term success there, had profound significance for the global movement. It showed that the American monolith was not fixed in stone and that revolts around the world had a counterpart within the US. We live after all in the American Empire and I always thought that the “Arab Spring” should be seen as a revolt against that Empire. Oil has succeeded gold as the world economy’s principal commodity and control of it underlies the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency. The Middle East, Israel and oil are so central to American influence in the world – not to mention the wars they have launched against Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe soon Iran from their bases and fleets there – that the sacking of Mubarak had immense significance in and beyond the region. But at first there was no sign that anything was moving in the US. All you had was the Tea Party and a stalemate in Congress.

CLR James came from Trinidad and died an old man in the late 1980s. He was saying after 1968 that there were only two world revolutions left – the second Russian revolution and the second American revolution. He wrote a book that I co-edited called American Civilization (1993 [1950]) in which he argued that the contradiction between totalitarian bureaucracy and the struggle to bring democracy into people’s lives was at its strongest in the United States. He always believed that American society must be central to any future world revolution. I am not predicting that the OWS movement will lead directly to mass insurrection in the US. But its cultural example was immediately taken up within the country and across the world; and this reflects the fact that we live in a world unified by the contradictions of American imperial power. I watched Tiananmen Square on TV with James in April 1989. He was 88 years old and died a few weeks later. If you recall, the students were protesting because of an international meeting there to which Gorbachev was invited. The whole world was gripped by the spectacle. He said that the Chinese Communist Party would put down this rebellion easily, but “The Russians will find it hard to hold onto Eastern Europe after this”. The Berlin Wall came down six months later and that was the start of what may or may not turn out to have been the second Russian revolution.

All of this led me to reconsider the perspective we adopted in the Human Economy volume. It now seems that the piecemeal reformist approach to economic change we took there needs to confront the world revolution that we may be living through. This morning, while I was contemplating my talk and wondering how I was going to deal with “Human Economy meets the Occupy Movement” for the first time ever, three documents landed in my lap, or rather in my laptop, and I wish to give you a chance to read excerpts from them. One was an article in Harper’s by Nathan Schneider, “Planet Occupy”, on the principles of the Occupy movement (http://harpers.org/archive/2012/01/hbc-90008434); another was by the same author at Waging Non–Violence, “Is Anonymous our future?” (http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/is-anonymous-our-future/ ); this in turn was based on one by Gabriella Coleman at Triple Canopy, “Our weirdness is free: the logic of Anonymous–online army, agent of chaos, and seeker of justice” (http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_free). In addition, I am circulating among you something I wrote for a list on Lenin, James and revolution, since the perspective we operate with in normal times doesn’t really apply to revolutionary situations where timing is everything. James has a lecture, ‘Walter Rodney and the question of power’, given to California  students in 1981 http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1981/01/rodney.htm. He draws extensively on a letter written by Lenin in 1917 and later published as ‘Marxism and insurrection’: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/sep/13.htm.

In January 1917, Lenin gave a speech to Swiss socialists in Zurich where he said he did not expect revolution in his lifetime, but he hoped that the younger comrades would be able to fight in one. The Russian revolution got going in March, when the soviets took to the streets; in September, Lenin writes a letter seeking to justify why he called for revolution in September, but had not in July; and by October the revolution was a done deal. You should read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution: it takes 1300 pages to cover nine months and some events like a pivotal meeting in which the author’s intervention was decisive get 40 pages. We are talking about speed-up here. The normal pace of talking, writing and publishing that we worked with in our book can’t accommodate this reality. I don’t want to give all this up to join the barricades. I’m an intellectual who wants to train young people to study and work for economic progress, like this seminar. Nevertheless even this more sedate approach has to distinguish between the time frame of revolutionary insurrection and building a more effective economic platform to help people experience a measure of economic democracy in their lives. These piecemeal long-term projects are vital, but the premise of a revolutionary moment puts pressure on that work.

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who has been a participant observer in Anonymous’ 4chan chat rooms since 2008. Anonymous is an occult organization of geeks, trolls and agitators who came to prominence in 2011 with attacks on government and corporate websites in defence of Wikileaks and other causes. If you haven’t heard of them, blame it on the French media who would rather that the digital revolution hadn’t happened. This is not all of France which, with Finland, Korea and Japan, is one of the four countries with the fastest and cheapest broadband and supports the largest blogosphere outside the US. Anonymous started out justifying opaque identities as a cloak for freedom of expression which at times meant being disruptive just for the fun of it. But it has since become an engaged force for social justice. There are important parallels between Anonymous and OWS, but their modus operandi is strikingly different in that one is clandestine and the other transparent. This might be thought to be a contradiction if it were not the case that the pursuit of openness as a political virtue requires a degree of closure also. We might want the banks to be more transparent, but which of us would like our own income an dexpenditure to be made public? So the open/closed dialectic may be less polarised than it is sometimes made out to be. The same may be said of freedom and necessity, perhaps also of revolution and reform. You can’t have one without both. Walk on two legs. It’s better than standing on one foot and falling over…

In winding up her argument, Coleman draws on Ernst Bloch, a favourite writer of mine too:

“Anonymous acts in a way that is irreverent, often destructive, occasionally vindictive, and generally disdainful of the law, but it also offers an object lesson in what Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch calls ‘the principle of hope.’ In his three-volume work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1938-47), Bloch attends to a stunningly diverse number of signs, symbols, and artifacts from different historical eras, ranging from dreams to fairy tales, in order to remind us that the desire for a better world is always in our midst. Bloch works as a philosophical archaeologist, excavating forgotten messages in songs, poems, and rituals. They do not represent hope in the religious sense, or even utopia—there is no vision of transcending our institutions, much less history—but they do hold latent possibilities that in certain conditions can be activated and perhaps lead to new political realities. ‘The door that is at least half-open, when it appears to open onto pleasant objects, is marked hope,’ Bloch writes. The emergence of Anonymous from one of the seediest places on the Internet seems to me an enactment of Bloch’s principle of hope.”

So Bloch’s vision is that this aspiration for a better world is everywhere and inside us, an infrastructure always ready to be tapped into and given more concrete impression. It is similar, at the level of ideology, to what Jean-Louis and I are arguing for the economy – people have always had many different ways of organizing their economic lives and these make up a reservoir of knowledge and aspiration that, given appropriate direction, could lead us to a better economy.

The basic principles of the Occupy movement, as Schneider shows, are quite general and easily understood. One question that immediately comes to mind is how we might account for the similarities between so many movements that sprang up independently or soon after OWS. The Indignados of Madrid predated New York, yet their principles of organization are remarkably alike. Where did these principles come from? Are they an instinctive negation of mainstream political economy? Are they an innate expression of human democracy? Or were they diffused by the new digital media? Perhaps all three or none of these are relevant. Schneider has a good summary which is worth quoting at length:

“The Declaration of the Occupation is addressed not to governments—no hope there—but rather “to the people of the world,” urging communities everywhere to “assert your power.” “We are creating an exemplar society,” states Occupy Boston’s Declaration of Occupation… “No one’s human needs go unmet,” [it] continues. Planet Occupy, like last fall’s occupations, provides food and shelter for everyone, no questions asked. It also ensures health care, mutual education, childcare, legal representation, and a large, meticulously catalogued library. Sounds like a good social democracy—except that, in the words of Occupy Wall Street’s Principles of Solidarity, the basic unit of political life is not the ballot box but ‘autonomous political beings engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy.’ Though they might be wired to the teeth, the political beings of Planet Occupy carry out their democracy face to face, in well-coordinated small groups that operate by consensus. It’s ‘participatory as opposed to partisan,’ suggesting that the aim is for all voices to be heard, rather than for one party to prevail over others. Those with ‘inherent privilege’ defer whenever possible to others. The consolidation of power is discouraged, and resisted when necessary. Policing troublemakers becomes the job not of cops, but of assertive, well-trained listeners.

“Even with its inhabitants’ passion for local autonomy, though, Planet Occupy is a globalized place. People and their ideas travel freely, creating new opportunities and partnerships wherever they go. Assemblies share their plans and innovations over Interoccupy. (The movement’s conference-call network will have supplanted the original Internet, which was overrun by corporate advertising.) Following the urge in the Principles for ‘the broad application of open source,’ all ideas are common property, and these collective resources are, according to the Statement of Autonomy, valued more highly than money—if money still exists at all. SOPA-style censorship in the name of ownership is not okay. Also not okay is using violence to resolve conflicts. Almost every Occupy document makes some statement to this effect. Occupy Boston’s Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples envisions ‘a new era of peace and cooperation that will work for everyone.’ When conflict occurs, as is inevitable, people resist injustice through ‘non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance and love,’ in accordance with the Principles. Every such struggle is both local and global.

“Is this anarchist utopia realistic, or even desirable? It’s at least a little out there, perhaps a lot out there. But the Declaration of the Rights of Man, drafted while Louis XVI still had his head, wasn’t easy to comprehend in its time. The circumstances of our world exceed the politics we’re used to imagining for it, and the politics that are really necessary might therefore seem impossible. ‘We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual,’ explains Communiqué 1, an article in the movement journal Tidal. ‘We seek to rediscover and reclaim the world.’

“The movement’s documents contain fewer hints about economy. The Principles of Solidarity calls for ‘redefining how labor is valued,’ which may look something like the worker-owned cooperatives currently being developed at the Freedom Plaza occupation in Washington, D.C. Broadly speaking, human needs prevail over claims on profit. Companies are chartered for the public good, not private gain. Participatory democracy prevails in workplaces, neighborhoods, and other productive groupings. Many aspects of the economy—food, especially—remain local. This is necessary partly in order to preserve and sustain the natural environment. Everyone on Planet Occupy knows, after all, that if they don’t protect the planet, there will be nothing left to occupy.”

There must be no divisions, no exclusions. Goods must be shared on the basis of to each according to their needs. There are obvious links in the above to économie solidaire or human economy. What we have here is a version of a common revolutionary eschatology based on the negation of how capitalist states appear to be run. Production is of public goods, not for profit. This contrasts quite starkly with our approach in the international human economy project. We believe that limited markets can be fair distributors of goods and that states are good for redistribution and guarantees of social rights, as long as they make room for people to help themselves drawing on the mutuality that comes from living together, not just contracts and citizenship. I have been impressed by recent developments in Brazil. Alternative economic organization in Europe tends to be conceived of as bottom up initiatives that are independent of government and large corporations or against them. The Brazilian government, however, has played a major role in promoting and coordinating the solidarity economy. They have introduced a system of community banks, for example, which is organized by the government, but combines community currencies and microcredit in a locally accountable and participatory way. It is possible to imagine something similar in France under a socialist president. We might call this social democracy revisited and it is not to be sniffed at.

We do not subscribe to the capitalist model of markets or to governments imposing themselves in undemocratic ways; but we do expect the movement from below to be supported and even coordinated by the powers. I have not yet come across a civil society movement capable of launching a communications satellite. So there probably will be room for mutual accommodation between large-scale and small-scale economic organization in any imaginable future. The political terms of their cooperation remain to be settled, of course and there lies the scope for revolution.

It is thus possible to discern in the Occupy movement and the work of their most visible spokesmen, such as David Graeber, two competing visions of economic change, each with its counterpart in constructions of the idea of a human economy. One is “the world turned upside down”, a complete break with the past which might be envisaged as a return to a simpler and more wholesome way of life before the state and capitalism. The other insists that we can rely on people to be who they are, to find ways to come together and develop their mutual interests without violence or coercion. These two visions are struggling with each other in the politics of this revolutionary moment. That is why we have to think seriously about what revolutionary situations are like. It’s a very different world from one where we plan and build programs that people can live by in the long run. That is why I refer to James’s remarks on Lenin in a speech to students about the Guyanese academic-turned-revolutionary, Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), who was blown up by an agent provocateur he trusted. He tells the students that they don’t understand what revolution is and neither did Rodney who lost his life as a result. No competent revolutionary organization should have left its leader unprotected in this way. (James himself was a Trotskyist dodging the bullets of Stalinist assassins while researching The Black Jacobins in Paris during the 1930s).

James quotes from Lenin’s letter of September 1917 where he talks about “insurrection”. It is important to have discriminating vocabulary rather than call everything a revolution. The events of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt were insurrections, not revolutions. Lenin identifies three components of any revolution and the party has nothing to do with any of them. James lists these as “Firstly, there must be a clash, a revolutionary upsurge of the people. Then, secondly, there must be a turning point, when the activity of the advanced ranks is at its height; and thirdly, the enemy must be vacillating.” Lenin is often misrepresented as an advocate of the vanguard party, He himself abandoned all those ideas as soon as he arrived at the Finland station and found the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets in the streets. Until then, he said, I was just another bourgeois politician. Revolutions change people. Lenin also said that insurrection is an art, not a science. At the end of his speech, James recalls a conversation with Trotsky in Mexico in 1938: “But how come, time and again, the revolutionary party – this is the party, not the mass movement — was wrong in its analysis of the situation and Lenin turns out to be right and set it the correct way? How did that happen?” And I expected him to tell me how Lenin knew philosophy, how he knew political analysis, how he knew psychology, or how he knew the revolution. He did not. He said, “Lenin always had his eyes upon the mass of the population, and when he saw the way they were going, he knew that tomorrow this was what was going to happen.” The prophet as anthropologist! And Gabriella Coleman is there in these hackers’ conversation rooms trying to figure out what they are doing.

So what are the implications of all this for the idea of a human economy? Like Jean-Louis, I seem to have spent the last few years producing books. It is a very different enterprise writing for educational purposes in the long run from trying to understand the moment we are living through. The best methodological statement on this I know is by Marx in the introduction to Grundrisse, the notes he compiled from 15 years of reading in the British Museum library which he completed in 1859. We must start, he says, from our concrete moment in world history, whatever that is. We start with the conditions we encounter and study them. Then we build analytical concepts and propositions using the results of what we have studied. Analysis is making sense of what we find out there. Some people — Marx here nodding rather unfairly in my view towards Hegel — think that the task finishes there, with the ideas. Once you have the analysis, you can rest happy, publish your book and get tenure. But the point of the analytical tools we have developed is to insert them back into the moment we are living in; and you can do that in many ways, through writing, propaganda, political parties, controlled experiments, social networking, blogs, whatever. The test of their validity lies in this dialectical process. Only then might we generate an analytically informed and empirically tested account of our moment in history seen as a synthetic whole. He plans to do this in Capital; but actually he never got there. He lists five prospective volumes culminating in a historical account of the world economy as a whole; but he hardly made it to three.

We all, if we are honest and realistic, have to locate ourselves at some point along the path that Marx charted. The core of the human economy project lies in dealing with the two approaches I have mentioned. I find it really fertile to juxtapose my own work with that of David Graeber, taking account of the similarities and differences in ways that change subtly over time. David arrived at the term “human economy” more or less when I did, in the last decade. He uses it to refer to an earlier period of human history, the world we have lost that survives in ethnographic accounts of primitive, exotic peoples, when people were purer than we are, living in a natural state of humanity. It’s an old story, but a powerful one and he tells it well. For him, the human economy is one whose objective is the social reproduction of people. It takes the form in Africa, for example, of cows being exchanged for women in marriage as a source of legitimation for children. This version of the human economy is based on principles diametrically opposed to those of capitalism, the market and the state.

Jean-Louis and I take the view that the human economy exists everywhere in some kind of dialectical tension with the dominant economic institutions of our day. It is not incompatible with money and markets. These can be made to serve human interests and needs, as they always have in varying degree, and they don’t have to take the exploitive form that they currently do in our societies as a source of unequal power and wealth. I for one like ordering books and apps online and don’t want to spend my days haggling over my daily bread without a means of payment or standing in line for a handout. We take our lead from Mauss’s insistence that markets and money rest on what Durkheim called “the non-contractual element in the contract”, a body of customs, laws and history that is obscured, marginalized and repressed by bourgeois ideology, even as it contains the living potential to humanize our economic institutions.

A counterpart to these competing constructions of the human economy may be found in the two visions of revolution I touched on earlier – a digital one that envisages a radical switch to the negation of what we know and an analogue version that expects to mobilize people by building on what they know and do already. A lot hinges on our ability to see a way towards combining these approaches rather than opposing them. I would argue that David and I already do that, each in our own way. The tension between them is to be found in all the current protest movements from Tahrir Square to OWS and Anonymous. We cannot afford to go back to the polarized and often sectarian politics of the twentieth century, when “revolution” and “reform” defined opposite sides in a destructive and partisan conflict. If we were aiming for anything in articulating the human economy idea, it was to get beyond the extremes of state socialism and free enterprise that misleadingly identified the sides in the Cold War. What is the Pentagon after all if not the largest socialist collective in world history?

I sum this up in the chart below. The human economy is conceived of as mediating between two paired antinomies – state and market, home and world – which helped to define the twentieth century’s dominant social form, “national capitalism” — the attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation though central bureaucracy in the name of a cultural community of national citizens. The economic crisis of our time may be understood as the collapse of this system. Rather than oppose the poles of either pair to each other, the aim is to synthesize them through a pragmatic focus on what people really do.

Three things count in our societies — people, machines and money, in that order. But money buys the machines that control the people. Our political task – and I believe it was Marx’s too – is to reverse that order of priority, not to help people escape from machines and money, but to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money. To the idea of economic crisis and its antidotes, we must now add that of political revolution. I have argued here that the dynamics of revolution require active consideration in this context. Revolutions give rise to digital contrasts and rightly so, but human societies are built on analogue processes. This is not just an academic debating point. A lot hinges on how humanity responds to the contradictions of the turbulence ahead.

                                                                                                       THE HUMAN ECONOMY

                                                                                                                  WORLD

                                                                                EMPIRE                                                        GLOBALIZATION

                                                                                                                   People

                                                 STATE                                                      SOCIETY                                   MARKET

                                                                                                Machines                             Money

                                                                              NATION                                                           CAPITALISM

                                                                                                                    HOME

“What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page.” -Harold Bloom

I can not speak for the global Occupy movement, but I think we here in
the US have done a poor job of representing ourselves. We are not
professional media spinners, and it is unfair to judge this movement
by what is shown on the television news stations. Even those
sympathetic to our cause, such as the John Stewart Show or the Colbert
Report, while often painting Occupy Wall Street in favorable light,
have been unable to avoid widespread misconceptions.

Please allow me a few words to attempt a more clear painting of what
Occupy is and is not.

First, our movement is radically inclusive. There are many supporters
from the right, center and left of the political spectrum. We have
many Tea Party-ers who are unhappy with how that movement has
developed. We have many Ron Paul supporters who do not believe he has
been treated fairly by the Republican party. We have Veterans
concerned about healthcare, and Green party supporters concerned about
environmental issues and genetically-modified foods. And yes, there
are some students, hippies, and anarchists; some homeless people
looking for a handout, and soccer moms looking for a cause.

But Occupy does not support any particular political party. Instead
this movement has focused on the things that bring people together.
The Occupy protesters have latched on to the “99%” moniker because it
is a statistical number that appears very infrequently. The US’s two
party system focuses, both in the media and in Washington DC, on
issues which divide the populace into two halves. The media only
covers controversial issues and pollsters only measure the divisions.

For instance, you will never see Occupy approach the issue of
abortion. It is too derisive. Rather than championing one side, the
huge innovation of the Occupy movement is its focus only on issues
which unite people. We care most about people and care what most
people support.

Rather than asking if government regulation should be increased, a
complicated issue on which many people have different opinions, the
Occupy movement seeks a language that describes the frustrations of
people on both sides of the regulation debate. While Republicans and
Democrats differ on their solutions, most people agree that corruption
in the financial sector has lead to a crisis which should have been
avoided.

Yet, Occupy has no shortage of real-world solutions, and we do not
shrink from an intelligent conversation of both the problems and
solutions, but that is not the conversation currently represented in
the media or in Washington DC. As John Stewart said, the “well” of
political debate has been “poisoned” with the “toxic language” that
indicts anyone who questions corporate greed as “freedom hating.”
Once the conversation has been framed as pro-Amercian vs
anti-American, it becomes nearly impossible to return the subject to a
constructive and realistic debate about the issues.

Occupy has not defined their demands because they refuse to allow our
concerns to be dismissed out-of-hand by sound bites and the curt
one-up-man-ship that pervades political discourse in the popular
media.

Secondly, the Occupy movement is far from disorganized. Our inclusive
nature does not mean we give equal weight to everyone, regardless of
the merit of their ideas. Radical inclusion simply means we are
willing to listen. We still have goals, rules, process, critical
evaluation and all the systems required to be successful.

The rumors of Occupy’s demise have been grossly exaggerated. The
Occupy uprising in America united many people with common interests
and there is nothing that could happen to dispel our common
connection. We have collected in small groups that meet regularly in
coffee-shops, salons and restaurants, far from the tent cities and
violence which appears in the TV news. And until there is some outlet
for our common concerns, until our demand is met, we will continue to
organize, build and convert more to our circles.

In conclusion, our efforts to find those things which concern All of
US, our attempts to find language to articulate the most popular of
reforms, we have found one thing that seems nearly universal across
all demographics within the US and likely beyond: nearly everyone
agrees that there is a problem. Everyone agrees that things can not
continue as they have been.

The only question is what to do about it. The answer Occupy offers,
and its amazing innovation over the last 20 years of politics and
activism in America, is the simple statement: doing nothing is not an
option, and we will hold vigil until something is done.

—–

The Occupy Flowchart:

Q1. Do you think there is a problem?

A. Yes, goto Q2
B. No, stay home

Q2. Do you know what should be done about the problem?

A. Yes, Come to Occupy
B. No, Come to Occupy
C Unsure, Come to Occupy

——

Harris Poll. Feb. 16-21, 2010.

“And now a question about the power of different groups in influencing
government policy, politicians, and policymakers in Washington. Do you
think [see below] have/has too much or too little power and influence
in Washington?”

__Too Much
87% Big Companies
83% Big Banks
83% Lobbyists
85% PACs
75% News Media
70% Celebrities

__Too Little
71% Non-profits
82% Public Opinion
93% Small Business

—–
93% believe GE foods should be labeled (10/10,Thomson Reuters PULSE™
Healthcare Survey, “National Survey of Healthcare Consumers:
Genetically Engineered Food”)
96% believe genetically modified foods should be labeled (6/11, MSNBC)
95% of consumers believe GE foods should be labeled (11/08, Consumers
Union, “Food-Labeling Poll: 2008,” p. 13)
94% believe genetically modified food should be labeled (9/10, Washington Post)
93% of the American public wants the federal government to require
mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods (6/11, ABC News)

—–

ABC News/Washington Post Poll. Jan. 13-16, 2011

“I have some questions about the political discourse in this country
– that is, the way people talk about politics. Overall, do you think
the tone of political discourse you hear is very positive, somewhat
positive, somewhat negative or very negative?”

82% Very Negative or Somewhat Negative

—–

CBS News/New York Times Poll. April 25-29, 2008

“Do you think foods that contain genetically modified ingredients
should be labeled indicating that or don’t you think that is
necessary?”

87% Should be

—–

CBS News Poll. May 20-23, 2011

“Who do you think benefits most from the policies of the federal
government: the rich, the middle class, the poor, or do they all
benefit equally?”

66% Rich

—–

United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll
conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. July
28-31, 2011

“This year, have Republicans and Democrats in Washington been working
together more to solve problems, or have they been bickering and
opposing one another more than usual?”

82% Bickering more than usual

—–

CBS News/New York Times Poll. Oct. 21-26, 2010

“When it comes to reforming the way political candidates raise and
spend money, how important is it that the amount of money campaigns
can spend be limited: very important, somewhat important, not too
important, or not important at all?”

86% Very or Somewhat Important

“How important is it that campaigns be required by law to disclose how
much money they have raised, where that money came from, and how they
have spent the money: very important, somewhat important, not too
important, or not important at all?”

92% Very or somewhat important

—–

Polling Data Source:
http://www.pollingreport.com/

Well, Ed, that was worth waiting for, as Brian said. It may seem churlish, after your generous remarks, to harp on the one point of apparent difference between us, but I do so because, while I share many of your views on monopoly capitalism and bureaucracy, I believe that sharpening our historical vision and conceptual apparatus to grasp the changing composition and strategies of capital is important.

I start from the idea that we are going through the early stages of a world revolution as profound and far-reaching for humanity as the invention of agriculture. I also reject any linear evolutionary model of human history, which means that a shift as major as this calls into question the relationship between many modern revolutions of the last half-millennium whose legacies remain with us in an unstable mixture. So you are right to point out that many of the elements of today existed 150 years and vice versa. Making comparisons between periods involves judgment, not clearcut contrasting definitions or the idea that there is nothing new under the sun.

I stopped citing Marx as an authority long ago, but I do feel that his take on the Great Transformation of the mid-19th century is potentially fruitful for us. Das Kapital is difficult to interpret since he seems to have decided for rhetorical and political purposes to accept a number of propositions of liberal economics (which he had already refuted many times) so that he could reach the opposite, revolutionary conclusions while starting from shared premises. The opening chapter of Volume 1, which he wrote last, is an egregious example of this. Even so the book is a critique of political economy and there is a lot there about the relationship between the three components of surplus value — profit, rent and interest — which accounts for why he was unwilling to reduce capital to profit.

The idea of surplus value in turn rests on a homology between feudal and capitalist exploitation which gives the lie to any notion of capitalism as the revolutionary negation of its precursor. Even so, Marx held that capitalist profit in his time subordinated rent and interest to its logic and that is what matters for us here. In case anyone thinks this is a minor quibble, it is the main reason why Marx and Engels considered that what was going on in Victorian England then was the future of the entire world economy, one of the better predictions. It goes without saying that ever since we have tried to identify new phases of capitalist development and decline. We need to do so again now.

I find the notebooks of Grundrisse more helpful than Capital in some ways, partly because Marx was talking to himself and not to a public for complicated reasons. The introduction to this work is particularly illuminating. Here he tackles relations between the main economic categories — production, distribution, exchange and consumption — as well as offering some remarkable insights into his dialectical method of history. Of particular interest are his comments on production and consumption, on how distribution had been collapsed into exchange and why it was never the case that distribution dominated production (the main idea of agrarian civilization or the Old Regime). This is the crunch for any meaningful comparison between different phases of capitalism or with its precursors. It boils down to this, forging an iron bond between Marx and Locke’s labour theory of value: the way to get ahead in the past was always to use political power to extort value from its producers (if you wanna get ahead, get a gun). But what if producers got to keep what they made rather than hand it over to licensed bandits? Locke made no distinction between the owners and workers in enterprises, while Marx aimed to show that the difference was crucial. At the same time, he remarked famously that you can’t steal from a nation of shepherds in the same way as from a nation of bankers. So the mode of production conditions distribution.

The 1860s saw a transport and communications revolution (steamships, continental railways and the telegraph) that decisively opened up the world economy. At the same time a series of political revolutions gave the leading powers of the coming century the institutional means of organizing industrial capitalism. Capitalism has always rested on an unequal contract between owners of large amounts of money and those who make and buy their products. This contract depends on an effective threat of punishment if workers withhold their labour or buyers fail to pay up. The owners cannot make that threat alone: they need the support of governments, laws, prisons, police, even armies. By the mid-nineteenth century, it became clear that the machine revolution was pulling unprecedented numbers of people into the cities, where they added a wholly new dimension to traditional problems of crowd control. The political revolutions of the 1860s and early 70s, from the American civil war to the Meiji Restoration and German unification, were based on a new and explicit alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class to form states capable of managing industrial workforces and of taming the criminal gangs that had taken over large swathes of the main cities (Scorsese’s Gangs of New York!).

Before long, governments provided new legal conditions for the operations of large corporations, ushering in mass production and consumption through a bureaucratic revolution. The national system became general after the First World War and was the dominant social form of twentieth-century civilization. Its apogee or ‘golden age’ (Hobsbawm) was the period 1948-1973. This was a time of strong states and economic expansion when the idea of ‘development’ (poor nations growing richer with the help of the already rich) replaced colonial empire for most Third World countries. When, shortly before his downfall, Richard Nixon announced that “We are all Keynesians now”, he was reflecting a universal belief then that governments had a responsibility to manage national capitalism in the interests of all citizens. We all know what happened next. But neither Marx nor Polanyi (who had less excuse to miss it almost a century later) saw the social consequences of converting the class struggle that animated the liberal revolutions into a form of bureaucratic capitalism based on an alliance between the capitalists and the enforcers. But Weber did, with the Prussian junkers and Rhineland capitalists under his nose. And Hegel envisaged it in The Philosophy of Right as urban commerce and the family/land complex mediated by the state.

Selling stuff for profit means adding value through production. As Marx insisted, there is nothing intrinsically productive about tangible rather than intangible commodities (a mistake that Adam Smith made a century earlier). Productive labour under capitalism is anything that generates surplus value for capital, which could be teaching services (an example he uses). Rent-seeking is “an attempt to derive economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by adding value” (Wikipedia). Marx claimed that rent and interest (banking) in his time took their scale, form and function from industrial capitalist production for profit; and this could probably said of the main capitalist countries before the 1980s, but no longer. Of course all three sections of surplus value co-existed then and now. I believe it is quite criucial to establish if the emphasis of political economy has tipped away from industrial production (in the broadest sense, not just manufacturing) towards rents derived from political privilege rather than adding value. It is hard to see how the richest 1% have done so well in the last three decades otherwise.

The digital revolution is highly relevant to this question, since many intangible commodities can be copied easily at no cost. It is also the case that, whereas if you steal my cow, I can no longer milk it, no-one loses out if I copy your song. The entertainment industry is the fastest-growing sector of the world economy after finance, so what happens there matters. Your emphasis on oligopoly and restrictions on competition is correct, Ed, but again a lot hinges on whether, under the stimulus of national capitalism, markets became more monopolistic in the last heyday of financial imperialism from the 1880s to the first world war than in the mid-19th century. We also need to be aware of what happened when that period ended if we wish to understand the economic crisis today.

It may be akin to angels on a pin head theology to worry about how profit and rent account for the spoils in the today’s market for DVDs as opposed to the cinema of the 1950s. But the crazy DRM regimes being installed around the world point to importance of political and legal coercion that follows the relative dominance of rent-seeking over value-added by production.

The war over intellectual property escalates to ever new levels of absurdity, but, when it comes to internet-based products, a powerful competitive sector based on principles diametrically opposite to those of corporate command and control, is no longer the pitiful loser that Brian takes from James O’Connor’s book, published in 1973. If I didn’t believe that the people have some powerful forces and principles on their side in the fight against states and corporations, I would have given up long ago. So would Marx and Engels if they hadn’t believed that the machine revolution was potentially a force for greater economic democracy.

Keith

The money crisis in world history

I take the ‘financial crisis’ to mean the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 with the subsequent attempts of leading governments to stave off economic collapse by printing money to save the banks. Now that their capacity to do so has been almost exhausted, the world is in the grip of a growing sovereign debt crisis and risk of government defaults. Although there is talk of a ‘double-dip recession’, the world economy has not recovered since 2008 and its future continues to look bleak indeed. This is a turning point. Its denouement may be global depression, world war, fascism or democratic revolution, but eventually the contours of a new era will become clearer. One way of approaching this moment of transition is to ask not what is beginning, but what is ending. This is not straightforward.

World history since 1945 falls into two distinct periods divided by the 1970s (Hann and Hart 2011: chap. 6). In the first, developmental states generated economic growth through extending public services and increasing the purchasing power of ordinary people. The second saw the unfettered expansion of money, markets and communications and a general increase in economic inequality. We may label these periods, respectively, as social democracy and as neoliberal globalisation or one-world capitalism, and the rich benefited from the switch. Some think that the neoliberal paradigm still best describes our world. I believe that free market economics, as a matter of public ideology rather than academic science, has been holed beneath the waterline by the financial crisis. But the current break in history goes far deeper.

The 1970s were a watershed. US expenditure on its losing war in Vietnam generated huge imbalances in the world’s money flows, leading to a breakdown of the fixed exchange-rate system devised at Bretton Woods (Gregory 1997). America’s departure from the gold standard in 1971 triggered a free-for-all in world currency markets, leading in 1972 to the invention of money futures in Chicago to stabilise export prices for Midwestern farmers. The world economy was plunged into depression in 1973 by a hefty rise in the price of oil. ‘Stagflation’ (high unemployment and inflation) increased, opening the way for neo-conservative liberals such as Reagan and Thatcher to revive the strategy of giving economic priority to ‘the market’ rather than ‘the state’.

In 1975, all but a minute proportion of the money exchanged internationally paid for goods and services purchased abroad. Three decades later, payments of this kind accounted for only a small fraction of global money transfers, the rest being devoted to exchanging money for money in another form. This rising tide of money represented the apotheosis of financial capitalism, with the production and sale of commodities and the political management of currencies and trade virtually abandoned in favour of feeding an autonomous global circuit of capital. In the process, from having been tied to gold bullion, money quickly became once more a form of virtual credit (Graeber 2011).

We are witnessing the end of the social form that dominated the twentieth century. I call it ‘national capitalism’ and its origins lie in the political and technological revolutions of the 1860s (Hart 2009). Its historical trajectory includes two phases of financial imperialism, from the 1880s to the First World War and from the 1980s to the financial crisis. To understand these, it is important to distinguish between money and finance. Whereas money is a universal system of human communications on a par with language, finance concerns public- and private-sector institutions specialised in the management of money, typically banks. The financial crisis is only superficially a question of credit boom and bust. At bottom it is the unravelling of a social organisation of money that the world has come to live by since its inception a century and a half ago. Even so, we persist in thinking of money as just one thing, national monopoly currency or legal tender. As always, folk models lag behind social realities.

Money in the national community

Money expands the capacity of individuals to stabilise their own personal identity by holding something durable that embodies the desires and wealth of all the other members of society. The modern system of money provides individuals with a vast repertoire of instruments to keep track of their exchanges with the world and to calculate the current balance of their worth in the community. In this sense, money’s chief function is remembering (Hart 2000). People learn to understand each other as members of communities, and money is an important vehicle for this. They share meanings (cultural symbols) as a way of achieving their practical purposes together. If wealth was always a marker of identity, then the shift to wealth in the immaterial form of money, a process accelerated and expanded by the digital revolution, contributes to the growing volatility of identity. Once fixed or ‘real’ property was dominant as its marker, but this function has now been split between value realised in consumption and hierarchies of value expressed as abstract quantities. Money is intrinsic to both of these. In this way, money defines each of us by articulating relationships between individuals and their communities.

National capitalism is the modern synthesis of the nation-state and industrial capitalism, the institutional attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation through central bureaucracy within a cultural community of national citizens, and its prophet was Hegel in The philosophy of right (1967 [1821]). It is linked to the rise of large corporations as the dominant form of capitalist organisation in a bureaucratic revolution late in the nineteenth century. Its main symbol has been a national monopoly currency (central bank money). The nation-state has become the dominant model for thinking about society, and it is hard to imagine society in any other way even though society itself has been leaking across its boundaries for a while now. I identify five ideal-types of community, all represented by the nation-state:

• political community: our link to the world and a source of law at home
• community of place: territorial boundaries of land and sea
• imagined or virtual community: a constructed cultural identity of citizens
• community of interest: subjective and objective (shared purposes in trade and war)
• monetary community: common use of a national monopoly currency

The rise and fall of single currencies is one way of approaching national capitalism’s historical trajectory.

A framework for studying money

In an early paper that borrowed from Polanyi (2001 [1944]), I (Hart 1986) identified two strands of Western monetary theory: money as a token of authority issued by states and as a commodity made by markets. I saw the coin as a metaphor for the two sides of money. One carries the virtual authority of the state; it is a token of society, the money of account (heads). The other says that money proper is itself a commodity, lending precision to trade; it is a real thing (tails). The two sides are related to each other as top to bottom; but, rather than acknowledge the interdependence of top-down and bottom-up social organisation (‘heads and tails’), economic policy in the Anglophone countries swings wildly between the two extremes (‘heads or tails’).

Money is at the same time an aspect of relations between persons and a thing detached from persons.[i] Anthropologists and sociologists have long rejected the impersonal, detached model of money and markets offered by mainstream economics, even as they long steered clear of studying banks and firms. People everywhere personalise money, bending it to their own purposes through a variety of social instruments. Increasing awareness of this neglected dimension is surely significant, but the economy exists at more inclusive levels than the person, the family or local groups. This is made possible by the impersonality of money and markets, where economists remain largely unchallenged. Money is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between every day, personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal. Money, as a token of society, must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong, but people make everything personal, including their relations with society. This two-sided relationship is universal, but highly variable. Impersonal markets have historically undermined traditional social identities and hierarchies, while generating inequalities of their own. Money is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.

The reality of markets, then, is not just universal abstraction, but this mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete. If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment lends concrete finality to your choice. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination. Georg Simmel (1978 [1900]) had something like this in mind when he said that money is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society.

Money and markets, according to Polanyi (2001 [1944]), have their origin in the effort to extend society beyond its local core. He believed that money, like the sovereign states to which it was closely related, was often introduced from outside, and this was what made the institutional attempt to separate economy from politics and naturalise the market as something internal to society so subversive. For him, ‘token money’ was designed to facilitate domestic trade, ‘commodity money’ foreign trade; but the two systems often came into conflict. Thus the gold standard sometimes exerted downward pressure on domestic prices, causing deflation that could be only partially alleviated by central banks expanding the money supply. The tension between the internal and external dimensions of economy often led to serious disorganisation of business. The final collapse of the international gold standard was thus one consequence of the ruinous attempt to separate commodity and token forms of money.

In ‘Money objects and money uses’, Polanyi (1977 [1964]) approaches money as a semantic system, like language and writing. His main point is that only modern money combines the functions of payment, standard, store and exchange, and this gives it the capacity to sustain those functions through a limited number of ‘all-purpose’ symbols. Primitive and archaic forms attach the separate functions to different symbolic objects, which should therefore be considered to be ‘special-purpose’ monies. Here Polanyi is arguing against the idea that money is only a medium of exchange, and in favour of a multi-stranded model of its evolution.

The breakdown of all-purpose money

Polanyi pointed out that the era of national monopoly currencies to which we have grown accustomed is very recent. Before the 1850s the circulation of several currencies within a given territory was normal (Guyer 2004; Kuroda 1987) and it took half a century after the Civil War for the dollar to secure a domestic monopoly in the United States (Zelizer 1994). ‘All-purpose money’ in the sense of one symbol combining the four functions of exchange, payment, store and standard has been breaking up, ever since the US dollar went off the gold standard in 1971 (Dembinski and Perritaz 2000). One possible explanation for the financial crisis, then, is that it was precipitated by the separation of functions between different types of monetary instruments. The currency wars of today are vivid proof that the world economy has reverted since the break-up of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates to the plural pattern of competing currencies that was normal before the modern era.

National capitalism has been in decline since the 1970s, but it still dominates popular and, to some extent, professional thinking about the economy. How can we conceive of society as plural rather than singular, as a federated network rather than as a bounded and centralised hierarchy? Before the era of national monopoly currencies, and already for some decades now, multiple currencies have been the norm. Central bank control has been undermined by a shift to money being issued in many forms by a global distributed network of corporations, not just states and banks, as Horacio Ortiz (2009) has demonstrated. The formation of world society as a single social network has been driven by money, markets and telecommunications for several decades (Hart 2009). After a period of convergence of a highly unequal world as a result of Western imperialism, ours is now a multi-polar, divergent world whose plurality of associations and centres of influence resembles the Medieval period more than anything since. The digital revolution in communications has been transforming money and exchange through a radical cheapening of the cost of transferring information. This has introduced new conditions for engagement with the impersonal economy (Hart 2000).

The apparent triumph of the free market after the Cold War induced two massive blunders based on the illusion that the design of specific political institutions was not an indispensable prerequisite of economic progress. Radical privatisation of Soviet bloc public economies ignored the history of politics, law and social custom that shored up market economies in the West (Durkheim 1960 [1893]). The new European single currency, introduced by the treaty of Maastricht, was to provide the social glue for political union without prior development of effective fiscal institutions or economic convergence between the EU’s North and South. This error took longer to be exposed than the first, because it was masked by the credit boom.

The biggest mistake was to replace national currencies with the euro without the necessary institutional change. An alternative, the ‘hard écu’, would float politically-managed national currencies alongside a low-inflation European central bank currency. Countries that did not join the euro, like Britain and Switzerland, have in practice enjoyed the privileges of this plural option, since they participate in Eurozone markets but retain the flexibility of manipulating their own currency. That flexibility is important, because the debt crisis can only be addressed through devaluation, managed defaults and the unpleasant alternatives of deflation and runaway inflation. The first option is denied Eurozone countries, with the results we have seen in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The euro was invented as an expanded single currency after money had already broken up into multiple forms and functions. The Americans centralised their currency only after a civil war; the Europeans hoped that centralising theirs would be a means of achieving political union, even though it is difficult to see how a single currency could serve the interests of 300 million Europeans (Hart 2002).

The euro may not be a national currency, but it does aim to be federal, like the US dollar, and the participating countries represent in effect a league of states. Joining a larger currency bloc is a way of trying to cope with ‘the markets’, the global tide of virtual money that threatens to swamp the independence of national economies. However, the euro is still a form of state money and its management is even less democratically accountable than its national precursors. The euro is in principle a throwback to the Bretton Woods era of fixed exchange rates; and the Europeans are paying now for its rigidity. The EU is a community, not a state, and its founding principle of ‘subsidiarity’ ensures that there is room for many levels of community underneath. There is plenty of scope, therefore, for less inclusive monetary instruments to complement the euro, as long as Europeans can break with the outmoded idea of a national monopoly currency. However, the Europeans hoped for political union as a result of centralising their currency. This was a mistake.

Alternatives to national monopoly currency

The nation-state is such a powerful and enduring social form that, although single currencies have been with us for only a short time, were only partially realised and have been breaking up since the 1970s, it is very hard to dislodge the idea of money as legal tender in a sovereign territory to which its users belong. There are alternatives to national monopoly money in the form of thousands of community and complementary currencies (Blanc 2010), but most people are initially reluctant to embrace new approaches to money (Hart 2006).

The situation is psychologically complex, however. On the one hand, conventional money flatters our sense of self-determination: with some money, we can exert power over the world at will. On the other hand, there is comfort in the notion that money is not in our control at all. As an exogenous force of necessity, it serves, in a manner analogous to number, to promote clarity of judgement and action, whereas otherwise things might be frighteningly wide open. If they issued their own currencies, people would not only be freer, but would have greater responsibilities also. There is a parallel with slavery: the monopoly claimed by national currency is felt to be inevitable, since no one would freely choose it; to be told that there are viable alternatives makes nonsense of a lifetime’s enslavement to an unrewarding system. So, we cling to what we know as the only possibility. We often talk about wanting to be free, but we choose the illusion of freedom without its responsibilities. This is perhaps why we prefer money not to be of our own making. People have to be sold the idea of making their own money, and this involves challenging their most cherished beliefs.

One reason it is difficult to persuade people consciously to adopt new ideas is the unconscious use of old models when they form new associations. The nation-state has successfully represented society for a century or more, so that we have internalised its principles and reproduce them whenever we construct new forms of community. It is not surprising that, when people come together to make alternatives to the national economy, they often replicate it in their design for a new association – as a stand-alone multi-purpose community of like equals rather than, say, as a federated network of unequal social entities (Hart 2006).

A stand-alone community currency is like a radio or TV that can only tune to one station, a computer with just one programme.[ii] Supporting trade between people who keep their accounts in different currencies requires some sort of clearing network. This would be operated primarily through the internet, with each community or complementary currency having its own unique domain name. Such a system would be further enhanced by ‘multi-cc’ smart-card systems, which currently can carry up to 15 different currencies at a time, off-line and anonymous, and are designed to make community money systems easily adopted in the retail sector. The card system allows participating businesses to have their own loyalty loops if they choose. Of course, co-ordination is difficult when there is no one body concerned with establishing standards. In order to provide a genuine alternative to national monopoly money, community currencies should mimic what mainstream money has already become, a multitude of monetary instruments issued by a distributed network of institutions including far more than governments and banks.

There is, however, an alternative to plural currencies or to the global distributed network of specialist money instruments that I have described earlier, a single currency divided into compartments by a political authority. Thus, not everyone can use the Chinese renmimbi for the same purposes and its circulation is restricted in several ways. For example, the ability to purchase shares in domestic stock markets requires a licence, as does participation in foreign markets through Hong Kong banks acting as a port-of-trade. It is conceivable that, if the eurozone broke up, one form this might take would be for France and some of its smaller neighbours to impose controls on foreign exchange and capital flows, in much the same way that France and Italy re-introduced passport controls within the Shengen area in response to the North African crisis. This represents an attempt to return to the 1970s and it probably requires a political economy as large and controlled as China’s to achieve a measure of success. Meanwhile, some economists are contemplating a return to capital controls.

The evolution of money today

Simmel (1978 [1900]) argued that money’s substantial form (precious metals, then coins and paper) would wither away and be replaced by social institutions. Its functionality (the ends to which it is put and the technical means of its organisation) would be emancipated from its substance and money’s essence (what people use it for in society) progressively revealed. Money, according to Simmel, always introduces a third party to bilateral exchange, the community that shares its use. Polanyi, as we have seen, identified the four functions of money conventionally as means of payment, standard of value, store of wealth and medium of exchange. ‘All-purpose money’ unites these four functions in one symbolic form, ‘modern money’. Special-purpose monies and plural currencies were always in circulation before central banks learned how to impose the system of legal tender and this pluralism is rapidly becoming the case again.

‘Financialisation’ (Epstein 2005) describes the situation since the 1970s when institutions specialised in money management grew in size and influence while the money circuit became detached from production, trade and political oversight. The digital revolution in communications has vastly accelerated and cheapened electronic transfers, allowing many more institutions specialised in particular monetary instruments to join governments and banks in a distributed network supplying money in multiple forms.

So Simmel’s prophecy of the triumph of function over substance has been realised, thanks in part to technical innovations of the last few decades. But if the essence of money is its use within a community with shared social institutions, this too is in bad shape. Central bank currencies helped crucially to define where society and the state are, but this is no longer so. At the same time money has become much harder to define, since it is breaking up. Yet the idea and practice of national money remain strong. Globalisation has stimulated the formation of new supra-national groupings like the EU and ASEAN, while two-thirds of the 100 largest economic units on the planet are now corporations, not countries. Digital communications support new forms of commerce and association world-wide. Local currencies have sprung up in their thousands; corporate loyalty systems (e.g. air miles) multiply (Blanc 2010).

At one level, the financial crisis of 2008 was the bursting of a credit bubble that took a quarter century to build up. The larger states moved to bail out the banks, while promising to rein in their profligacy (split up investment and retail branches, curtail bonuses etc). But this did not last and the use of financial means to solve intransigent economic problems has left the world on the edge of deeper systemic failure, now manifested as a sovereign debt crisis. Nothing has yet been done to restore consumer demand in the leading Western economies and all of them look vainly to exports as their salvation. In the meantime, the banks and other corporations exploit the plurality of national jurisdictions to ensure that they are not held accountable for their financial recklessness, while seeking to influence supine governments to preserve a political framework favourable to them.

When it comes to money, one size does not fit all and it never has. But the national moment in history established the illusion that it could. If Simmel was right, if money, having lost its anchorage in substance, must be shored up by a community’s social institutions, there will have to be as many monies as there are communities. The digital revolution has begun to make that technically feasible. But there is clearly a contradiction between the technical possibilities for organising money today and the idea of society as a closed hierarchical community rather than as a decentralised egalitarian network. Society has escaped from its former home and has not yet found another one. The infrastructure of money has already become decentralised and global, and attempts to squeeze it back into a national straitjacket can only lead to international breakdown, at best economic depression, at worst world war.

Money in the making of world society

It is no longer obvious where the levers of democratic power are to be located, since the global explosion of money, markets and telecommunications has exposed the limitations of national frameworks of economic management. A return to the national solutions of the 1930s is bound to fail. We seem to be aware of the lessons of the 1930s, but are pushed by the cultural logic of national capitalism into repeating the same mistakes. There are substantial parallels between the last three decades and the similar period before 1914. In both cases, market forces were unleashed within national societies, leading to rapid capital accumulation and an intensification of economic inequality. Finance capital led the internationalisation of economic relations and people migrated in large numbers all over the world. Money seemed to be the dominant social force in human affairs, and this could be attributed first to its greater freedom of movement as the boundaries of society were extended outwards, then to colonial empire, now to the digital revolution and transnational corporations. The main difference is that the late nineteenth century saw the centralisation of politics and production in a bureaucratic revolution, while now public bureaucracies are being dismantled by neoliberal globalisation.

I have suggested that money has reverted to a plural form where specialised monetary instruments are now issued by a distributed network of disparate organisations that go far beyond just governments and the main banks. The functions of exchange, store, standard and payment are now performed by money instruments that few people understand. The history of credit default swaps, for example, and AIG’s under-capitalised role in insuring banks against loss was only revealed after the financial crisis broke. This case highlights how inadequate government regulatory pressure is when the money force has escaped its national bounds. Yet politics is a dialog of the deaf, between those who deny the need for political regulation of markets and others who remain trapped in the outmoded discourse of central bank money. I do not know how this impasse can be transcended.

Reversion to national protectionism would be a disaster, but social thinkers are not yet offering a more inclusive alternative. The idea of world society is still perceived by most people as at best a utopian fantasy or at worst a threat to us all. We need, however, to build an infrastructure of money adequate to humanity’s common needs. One response in this direction goes by the name of the ‘alter-globalisation’ movement (Pleyers 2010). This is a loose network of initiatives seeking to coordinate global development from below. The idea of a ‘human economy’ (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010) may offer a bridge to that movement for progressives of an interdisciplinary bent. Meanwhile the tragedy of the euro drags the world economy into a terminal crisis of Sophoclean proportions. Even if the Germans come round in the end with proposals to save it, they will fail since human intentions cannot undo mistakes made in the past. The Europeans will cling to their notions of national interest while thinking of the crisis as one of debt when it is a turning point in the history of money.

References

Blanc, J. 2010. Complementary and community currencies. In K. Hart, J-L. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds) The human economy: a citizen’s guide. Cambridge: Polity.

Dembinski, P. and C. Perritaz 2000. Towards the break-up of money: when reality driven by information technology outshines Simmel’s vision. Foresight 2: 483–97.

Durkheim, E. 1960 (1893). The division of labour in society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Epstein, G. 2005. Financialization and the world economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: the first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House.

Gregory, C. 1997. Savage money: the anthropology and politics of commodity exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood.

Guyer, J.I. 2004. Marginal gains: monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hann, C. and K. Hart 2011. Economic anthropology: history, ethnography, critique. Cambridge: Polity.

Hart, K. 1986. Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin. Man 21: 637–56.

Hart, K. 2000. The memory bank: money in an unequal world. London: Profile; republished as: 2001. Money in an unequal world. New York: Texere.

Hart, K. 2002. A tale of two currencies. Anthropology Today 18: 20–2.

Hart, K. 2006. Richesse commune: construire une démocratie économique à l’aide de monnaies communautaires. In J. Blanc (ed.) Exclusion et liens financiers – Monnaies sociales: Rapport 2005-6. Paris: Economica.

Hart, K. 2009. Money in the making of world society. In C. Hann and K. Hart (eds) Market and society: The great transformation today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hart, K., J. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds) 2010. The human economy: a citizen’s guide. Cambridge: Polity.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1967 (1821). The philosophy of right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kuroda, A. 2008. Concurrent but non-integrable currency circuits: complementary relationships among monies in modern China and other regions. Financial History Review 15: 17–36.

Ortiz, H. 2009. Anthropologie politique de la finance contemporaine: évaluer, investir, innover. Doctoral thesis, l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales.

Pleyers, G. 2010. Alter-globalization: becoming actors in a global world. Cambridge: Polity.

Polanyi, K. 2001 (1944). The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our times. Boston: Beacon.

Polanyi, K. 1977 (1964). Money objects and money uses. In K. Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man. New York: Academic Press.

Simmel, G. 1978 (1900). The philosophy of money. London: Routledge.

Zelizer, V. 1994. The social meaning of money. New York: Basic Books.

[i] David Graeber, in his path-breaking new volume (2011), takes the contrast between credit money (its original form) and currency (notably bullion) as the basis for a wide-ranging analysis of world history over the last 5,000 years.

[ii] I learned most about the potential of community currencies from Michael Linton and his associates in 2000–02. See http://www.openmoney.org/.

Over at the “Democracy in America” blog at The Economist, M.S. has a new post that replies to Florida Governor Rick Scott’s recent “we don’t need no anthropologists” statement.  The author provides a rehash of the whole debacle, and then quotes Arizona State University president Michael Crow’s response to the situation:

[R]esolving the complex challenges that confront our nation and the world requires more than expertise in science and technology. We must also educate individuals capable of meaningful civic participation, creative expression, and communicating insights across borders. The potential for graduates in any field to achieve professional success and to contribute significantly to our economy depends on an education that entails more than calculus.

Curricula expressly tailored in response to the demands of the workforce must be balanced with opportunities for students to develop their capacity for critical thinking, analytical reasoning, creativity, and leadership—all of which we learn from the full spectrum of disciplines associated with a liberal arts education. Taken together with the rigorous training provided in the STEM fields, the opportunities for exploration and learning that Gov. Scott is intent on marginalizing are those that have defined our national approach to higher education.

M.S. argues that Crow’s statement is “a solid response,” but that something more is needed: “What it lacks are rhetorical oomph and concrete examples.”  So what can provide that extra OOMPH and rhetorical power?  Actual examples of anthropologists putting their training and knowledge to work:

Some of the best analysis of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and of the ongoing follies on Wall Street these days, has been produced by the Financial Times‘ Gillian Tett. Ms Tett began warning that collateralised debt obligations and credit-default swaps were likely to lead to a major financial implosion in 2005 or so. The people who devise such complex derivatives are generally trained in physics or math. Ms Tett has a PhD in anthropology.

M.S. then links to a 2008 profile of Tett by the Guardian’s Laura Barton.  Here’s a key selection that quotes Tett speaking about how she put her anthropology background to work:

“I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,” she reasons. “Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.”

The Economist article ends with a little chiding of our dear Governor Scott, saying that it’s never too late to learn, and that maybe he should take a course or two in anthropology for good measure.  He could, of course, just ask his daughter.  Sorry, I couldn’t help that one.

The broader point here is about liberal arts education, society, and anthropology.  Interestingly, what a lot of this comes down to is a perceived clash between SCIENCE and other perspectives that are, according to some, less worthwhile and meaningful.  If you take a look at the comments section for the article, you’ll see evidence of this version of events (some comments mention the supposed division in anthropology about the whole “science” issue).  The basic argument for folks who make this sharp science vs humanities division is that the former is useful and important to society (because it supposedly produces jobs directly) and the latter is nice, but not really all that necessary.  I think Rex did a pretty good job of explaining why a well rounded liberal arts education does indeed, matter.  And he used Thomas Jefferson’s words to do it.  Nice work, Rex.

So what does Gillian Tett add to the picture?  I think she’s an excellent example because her work illustrates what anthropology can bring to the table when it comes to everyday processes and behaviors that get taken for granted.  Economics is just one area where anthropology has a lot to add to the discussion–the discipline has a deep history of empirical and theoretical research on human economic systems (Malinowski was, after all, questioning arguments about “Economic Man” way back in the 1920s).  Business, finance, and economics are all issues that get a lot of attention, day in and day out, from the general public, politicians, and pundits.  The financial crash of 2008 has made these issues even more important.

But if you look at a lot of business and economics and finance books, theories, and models, there’s a lot missing.  History is one key ingredient, as Jason Antrosio argues.  A recent article called “Economics has met the enemy, and it is economics” points to other glaring issues in the discipline.  Anthropology is certainly well-placed to contribute to a rethinking of economics…in theory and actual practice.  There are, in fact, lots of economic anthropologists doing just that.  It would be nice to see more of their names in the pages of publications like The Economist, for starters.

But there’s another important point here.  In their 2011 book Economic Anthropology, Chris Hann and Keith Hart write, “The project of economics needs to be rescued from the economists.  Economic anthropology, in dialog with neighboring disciplines, as well as with more flexible economists, could be part of that process of intellectual reconstruction” (2011: 162).  Hart also argues that anthropological critiques and contributions to economics have to move beyond simply bashing on individual economists or the discipline as a whole:

It is convenient to beat up on the economists, but I wouldn’t be an economic anthropologist if I didn’t believe in the historical project of economics which has been debased by the economists, especially in the last half- century. We should not allow our disgust with the blatantly ideological uses of neoclassical economics in producing undemocratic outcomes in our societies to lead us to discount the marginalist revolution (Hutchinson 1978) which launched modern economics in its present form. We should remember that economics was the first social discipline to introduce a subjective theory of value. There are all kinds of problems with this particular theory, especially its reliance on prices as a proxy for value. Nevertheless, it provoked and encouraged some of the most progressive social thought that we still rely on today, such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Talcott Parsons and others (Hart 2011: 7).

What this means to me is that increased engagement from anthropologists requires something more than just critique.  It requires actual participation in debates, and well-argued contributions.  For me, this is a crucial point, and it applies across the board.  Anthropologists can and should add to wider, more public debates about issues like economics–and other critical subjects such as race, culture, human nature, and so on.  Jason Antrosio makes this case pretty powerfully in a recent post about how a critically informed and yet morally optimistic anthropology can challenge many contemporary economic assumptions.  Absolutely.

I appreciate Antrosio’s combination of critical anthropology with the morally optimistic arguments of Michel-Rolf Trouillot.  In his 2001 book “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value,” David Graeber makes a similar argument when he balances the relentless criticism of Marx with the moral optimism of Marcel Mauss (Graeber 2001: 255-56).  Unending critique, Graeber argues, can lead to “a picture of the world so relentlessly bleak that in the end, criticism itself comes to seem pointless” (2001: 256).  Hann and Hart focus their argument on the idea of interdisciplinary dialog and–the part that I find most appealing–intellectual reconstruction, rather than critique alone.  Teaching, as Alex Golub and many others point out, is a fundamental part of that reconstructive project.

Politicians such as Governor Scott wave the banners of science and technology in the name of producing jobs.  Scott seems particularly enamored with engineering, technology, and mathematics.  Anthropology, which is uniquely positioned between the so-called hard sciences and the humanities, can illustrate the fact that science does matter.  Engineering matters.  Physics and biology matter.  Mathematics is indeed important.  The larger point here is that it’s not an either/or choice that we need to make.  Science is fundamentally important…but that’s not all we need.  Economists, for example, love to spend their time with numbers, statistics, and complex models. What anthropologists can add to the discussion is not just a critical assessment of how such models play out on the ground, but also what those numbers actually mean in particular social, cultural, political, and geographic contexts.

Anthropologists can add to these discussions through teaching, and through their research.  The main objective is to find ways to share such discussions about both of these aspects of the discipline with wider audiences–and to do this in creative, dynamic, informative, and challenging ways.  The best counter to ill-informed, instrumentalist arguments against liberal arts education, social science, and anthropology is, as the post on The Economist blog illustrates, with concrete evidence.  The proof, the saying goes, is in the anthropological pudding–all the way from Franz Boas to Gillian Tett.

References

Graeber, David.  2001.  Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value.  New York: Palgrave.

Hann, Chris, and Keith Hart.  2011.  Economic Anthropology.  Malden: Polity Press.

Hart, Keith.  2011.  Building the human economy: a question of value?  Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society.

The Great Recession has mostly hit Europe and America. It is in Spain
and now in the States that indignado/occupy movements have sprang most
forcefully against so-called financial dictatorship, i.e. more than 30
years of monetarist policy in Europe and of neoliberal deregulation of
financial markets everywhere, a way to echo the 2011 uprisings in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain that have toppled (or not
yet) all-too real dictatorships. Other hubs of discontent have been
Greece (basically rioting and striking non-stop since 2008) and Chile
(the huge and hardy student movement against the privatization of
college education shares many traits of the young-precarious-led
Spanish indignad@s movement).

However it is Occupy Wall Street, started in September 17, that has
sparked the global imagination, prompting similar protests all across
the Anglosphere (#OccupyVancouver, #OccupyMelbourne, #OccupyLSX etc)
and reinfusing life in the European indignado movement, most notably
in Brussels and Rome, two polar cases of what happened on October 15,
or #15o in twitspeak, being Twitter the medium of choice for political
mobilization against the crisis. The revolution might have not been
televised, but it is being tweeted. Anonymous and its hive mind have
managed to set off a swarm of political agitation unseen since
Seattle-Genoa and most likely to be the historical equivalent in the
Great REcession of popular front politics and sit-down strikes during
the Great Depression.

I was in Brussels, while the bulk of MilanoX (a free weekly which was
decisive in making the present left-of-center mayor of Milano, a man
with a radical past, win the primaries; he went on to humiliate
Berlusconi and the League in municipal elections last May) was in
Rome. We had set up a twitterbox for comparative viewing of the
so-called #europeanrevolution and #globalchange being triggered on
October 15 (http://www.milanox.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/TwitterBox1.html).

Rome was an Athenian large-scale riot. Anger for the precarious
present and future reserved to the youth by most gerontocratic society
in the world, and especially at the Berlusconi government, whose ass
had just been saved once more the day before, erupted during but
especially at the end of the demonstration in the worst riots since
the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands of spaghetti neoindignad@s, mostly
students, interns, temps, young precarious employees, joined by the
metalworkers’ union, NoTAV, SanPrecario, and the remnants of the
noglobal movement, were sidelined by media discourse, which
predictably focused on the 2-3000 baddies (many of them girls!) who
threw rocks at carabinieri and police for hours and hours, threw a
fire extinguisher and burned a carabinieri van (a kind of symbolic
vengeance for Carlo Giuliani’s death a decade before) in piazza San
Giovanni, normally used by the political and union left for staid
political speeches. The choice made by the respectable radical left to
constrain the demo in an itinerary that did not pass by the symbols of
political and financial power was probably not a wise one, given the
pent up anger (students had rioted a year ago when the political and
economic rot had barely started). Likewise, the outburst of blind
violence prevented the blooming of indignado movement in
Spaghettiland, with its now customary proliferation of tents and camps
in symbolic squares for weeks and months on end, until power is
defeated or at least ridiculed.

By contrast, the spontaneous manif in Bruxelles was sunny, creative,
joyful, peaceful and unexpected in its success (the night before we of
Precarious United formerly EuroMayDay were hotly debating with fellow
activists why this was a movement we had to contribute to, but
uncertainty hovered about how local people would respond to it). Led
by a Spanish and French core of activists (German and English were
also widely spoken) it was amazingly diverse in its political
expression against financial domination in Europe. It ended near
Schuman Square, next to the buildings of European Commission and
European Council (where EU summits are held, now frantically this
Sunday and Wednesday), and set up camp in the nearby park. Brussels
had been prepared by a month-long march of indignados form Barcelona
to Brussels through Marseille, Paris, Lille, which arrived in the EU
capital on October 8, tried to occupy a park and was given an
abandoned university building from where it started stirring things up
in the European/Belgian capital. The experience of the 15 May movement
in Madrid (acampada Sol) and then Barcelona (plaza Catalunya) was that
of a wide mobilization against the austerity peddled by all political
parties. The majority of Spanish and Catalan civil society sided with
the protesters in the Spring of Discontent. In Barcelona, the
parliament was assaulted on June 15. Zapatero, after losing the local
elections, called early elections and said he’d step down after that.
The protesters correctly concluded that the cuts (recortes) were being
decided elsewhere. That the whole of Spain and the rest of Europe had
to strike at El Pacto del Euro, i.e. the Maastricht Treaty forcing
austerity, deflation and unemployment down the throats of the people
in all countries of the eurozone. The austerity strategy was being
formulated in Brussels and Frankfurt, following the diktats of the
Merkel-Sarkozy diarchy, in order to appease financial markets and
rating agencies, which after Greece, were targeting Spain and Italy
and could undermine that beautiful monetarist creation called the
euro, the first currency in history based on a single monetary policy,
but 17 different fiscal policies, now all restrictive. US economists
like Krugman had long said it: a monetary union without a fiscal union
is a recipe for disaster, should a major crisis hit.

European policymakers are still living in the dreamworld of the Great
Moderation (1989-2008), where inflation and balanced budgets are the
most pressing concerns. Only unavowedly and half-heartedly is the ECB
practicing quantitative easing, which the Fed is doing again to rescue
the US economy from the double-dip and, arguably, help Obama’s
re-election. Fact is, we live in the world of Great Depression
economics, we have fallen into a liquidity trap and only aggressive
keynesian fiscal policy can get us out of mass unemployment and
escalating inequality. What the indignado movement in Europe and the
occupy movement in America are saying in macroeconomic terms is the
same: stop cuts, invest in society. In Europe, there’ll be no
political will to do so until Sarkozy and Merkel (and Berlusconi..)
are unseated. In America, Obama is finally distancing himself from
Wall Street, but is constrained on the right to do another stimulus,
which would presumably be more oriented toward the unemployed and
investment in social capital.

To conclude, a brief analysis which clashes with Bowles’ and that of
other traditional red leftists. Luckily, this is not the
anti-globalization movement, insofar as it is unaffected by 20th
century revolutionary marxist dreams and nightmares. It is resolutely
postcommunist and nonviolent, unlike the Seattle-Genoa movement. It
shares with the 1999-2007 movement two aspects: it is intrisincally
anarchist, i.e. horizontal, networked, direct-democracy oriented,
mistrustful of organized politics, and it despises neoliberalism. But
while in the late 90s neoliberalism seemed to be a viable economic
discourse to the eyes of the majority, it is now totally discredited,
while neoliberals are still in power. Thus the Occupy Wall Street is
strongly anti-elitist: “We Are the 99%”, in a way the previous
movement (more preoccupied with systemic critique) wasn’t, and has a
much wider social appeal. In terms of social composition, the
occupy/indignado movement is mostly young and middle-class. They are
the downwardly mobile children of the middle class. I’d argue that all
postwar movements (nuclear disarmament, civil rights, may ’68,
feminism, gay+lesbian liberation etc) have been middle-class and that
the educated middle classes have been bastions for the defense and
conquest of real democracy from Johannesburg to Cairo, from Lisbon to
Hong Kong. The occupy/indignado thing is about democracy, something
despised by some as “bourgeois illusion”, but very real in the hearts
and minds of those presently rocking the secluded world of politics
and finance. The movement of the Teens is about radical democracy,
this is the “revolution” it aspires to. It uses revolutionary ends for
reformist means. I find this perfectly reasonable, in the context of
Great Recession politics, which, like during the Great Depression,
favors big social coalitions on the left to defeat economic élites
and, in Europe, the ever-present danger of slides to the populist,
racist, facist right. If you read the decidedly lefty Occupy Wall
Street Journal, you will find not only hope for radical change about
the economy, but also doubts about whether the indignant movement will
be able to revitalize climate activism, which has been on the wane
since the failure of the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, while the
consequences of global warming have worsened. But, surely,
environmentalism is a middle-class concern;)

Alex Foti        Posted on nettime-l, 23 October 2011

I can’t speak for Mark Stahlman, but I don’t imagine that anyone who can write so interestingly would dream of a world without machines. “Machines” should rather be taken as a metaphor for the organized attempt to reduce human beings to working on machines or like machines. Will machines serve people or people serve machines? At some risk of oversimplification, Marx’s project was based on the observation that what matter in our world are people, machines and money. As things stood then and still do, money buys machines and people work on them. The political task is to reverse the order, to put people in charge of machines and money. Marx hoped that machine production might generate the social conditions for this revolution and so do we. Maybe we can dispense with the apparatus of party, classes etc, but that is history.

Philip Mirowski’s cumbersome but essential book, Machine Dreams: How economics became a cyborg science, explains how operations research (OR) in World War 2 spawned a family of social models built on an analogy with machines: cybernetics, game theory, systems theory etc. These were incorproated into the management of production and of society more generally, nowhere more than in the United States. The economists, building on a mathematical revolution of the 1940s, launched by Tinbergen and Koopmans during the war, happily adopted this family of approaches. Their version of it was “rational expectations” theory or the “efficient market hypothesis” and we all know what happened next. In this sense the twentieth century, and especially its last half, saw the machines win.

But not irreversibly. Thomas Sargent was just interviewed about his Nobel prize this year. Even the economists are no longer triumphalist in the face of the damage done to the world economy by governments and corporations blindly following the dictates of the rational expectations model. Sargent admitted: “We experiment with our models, before we wreck the world.” If I share the aspiration to build a human economy fit for all of us, it would not be one without machines or money. It would just put human interests first.

You can read this long and interesting article from the Globe and Mail, “Economists have met the enemy and it is economics“.