Steven Shaviro, who blogs at The Pinocchio Theory, has written an excellent piece on the Global Financial Crisis. Shaviro captures how capitalism is lived – and how it produces a demeanour of fatalism. He emphasises the way in which the economy constructs itself as natural, and in so doing, acts as something which is quite inimical to the freedom it is supposed to foster.
There are some juicy quotes from Hayek in Shaviro’s piece. The market, Hayek wrote, subjects “man” [sic] to “the bitter necessity of submitting himself to rules he does not like in order to maintain himself against competing groups.” We are “force[d] to be free”, according to Hayek.
Shaviro’s is the sort of critique of neo-liberalism Kevin Rudd would never write.
It makes clear the deep continuity between the project of neo-liberals such as Hayek and the Enlightenment urge to control and discipline – to remake new humans who are ‘rational’, and thus ‘free’. It would be interesting to compare the sorts of dispositions and attitudes which underlie this logic of governmentality with those of Soviet Marxism.
The real question here is the one of our relation, as individuals, to the economy as a whole — or to the so-called “free market.” We are told that the market is made of individuals just like us. We are told that it consists in nothing more, and nothing less, than the summation of billions of decisions made by billions of autonomous individuals, each of us making choices for ourselves. And yet, we actually experience the market as a vast, ineluctable force. It feels like something entirely alien to us, over which we have no power, and from which there can be no appeal. This is why economic catastrophe is something invisible, impalpable: it affects every aspect of our lives, yet we are unable to “see” it in itself, to discern it as an actual force, behind its all-too-evident effects.
We bitch at the government all the time, because we can more or less see how it works, and because it gives us specific people to blame when something goes wrong. That is why so many Americans agreed with Ronald Reagan when he said that government was the problem — despite the fact that Reagan himself was the government. The market, in contrast, seems to be something that’s just there — like the weather, perhaps, or like an earthquake. We complain about the economy all the time, of course — but only in the way that we complain about a rainy day. Anything further would be a waste of breath — since we know that we cannot do anything about it. Americans get mad about having to pay taxes; but, even if they grumble, they basically accept the fatality of outrageously high interest rates on their credit cards. This is why there are no riots, and no street protests, in the United States today.
Indeed, the very purpose of the “free market” is to instill this kind of fatalism in people. The market is largely an instrument of discipline and control.
freely???Limitations???
Err. Read the post and the article.
It was, of all people, Milton Friedman who famously observed that political democracy is based on the principle of “one person, one vote” whereas the market is based on the principle of “one dollar, one vote”.
Purpose or accidental side-effect?
Apply this thinking to the CPRS and you can see why it is bound to fail in its stated task of Reducing Carbon Pollution. Instead it will massively enrich some market “players” and impoverish others. “Ethics, aesthetics, sympathy, solidarity, and care for others are all simply excluded, except to the extent that they can be packaged as commodities and put up for sale.”
Commoditizing “human survival” for all humans is not possible with this outlook.
The only “free market” answer to the looming environmental crisis is to provide safe enclaves for those who can afford to pay. That is the rational solution once you take out trivia such as “Ethics, aesthetics, sympathy, solidarity, and care for others”
Huggy
And indeed, as with the weather and the climate for early holocene hunter gatherers, “the market” is presented by the theoreticians of the system in ways analogous to a conscious deity — an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent dispenser of just desert and reason, complete with invisible hands and all.
“The market is largely an instrument of discipline and control.”
Well, in a sense, yes. But those who are thinking of alternatives have to explain how their systems actually motivate people to go to work in the morning.
You saw in the last days of communism what happens without incentives. The stuff the factories produced was rubbish, the quality control was garbage, no one in the Eastern Bloc or elsewhere wanted it. The system just had no incentives for producers to meet consumers’ wants, or for workers to work.
So, how did the regimes manage to keep people (moderately) content? They took out huge loans from Western banks in order to to buy stuff from the market economies of the West.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/07/theaccidentalheroof1989
You can wave this problem away, if you like. Maybe Guy Rundle’s communal set-up would somehow motivate all the happy kibbutzniks to put in a hard day’s work, just for the love of their fellow human being.
Or maybe not. Me, I’m voting for staying with the current economic system, and just tweaking it a bit.
The problem with the idea of the market as instrument, Paulus, is the implication that some musician or orchestra stands behind it and that someone(s) consciously devised it.
The market is neither more nor less than a manifestation of human relationships, but which, for that reason, ought to be evaluated by the standards we think apt for other kinds of human interaction.
“Shaviro captures how capitalism is lived …”
No he hasn’t, all he has done is emit the same dull left-wing mewling sound I’ve been hearing since I got my sociology degree 20 years ago.
“This is why economic catastrophe …”
What catastrophe? Unemployment is well below the ten and twenty year averages and mortgage interest rates have almost never been lower since WWII. I know plenty of people who are now working less hours but are still better off because their mortgage repayments have been cut!
“Indeed, the very purpose of the “free market” is to instill this kind of fatalism in people. The market is largely an instrument of discipline and control.”
FAIL. This statement is called reification- sorry dude but the market is not a social actor. Students learn not to write this way in sociology 101, at least they did when I studied the subject.
Thanks to living in a robust market economy, I’ve been able to make enough money to retire from work after less than 20 years and live the life I want to lead. Never before in history has this sort of thing been possible.
We should all thank the good Lord nobody with their hands on the leavers of power take any notice of the sad sacks and paranoid androids in our sociology departments!
Intriguing post, thanks Mark. Much of the Shaviro article resonates but I feel like he’s left something out. He hints at and uses the term the “materiality of money” but I’m not convinced he’s done anything more than say money has its own intrinsic properties without actually exploring what they are. On the other hand his analysis of the capitalist system and its impact on the individual is much more definite.
Maybe pinning down the properties of money is a bit like holding onto a handful of water yet his point that money is not a transparent featureless medium deserves much closer inspection. Of course Rudd wouldn’t be interested…
Fran,
I think you are misreading the fundamental ‘invisible hand’ concept that lies at the foundations of capitalism.
There is no musician or orchestra. That was Adam Smith’s point. No one — human or supernatural — is directing things for society’s good. But things do turn out well in a market system — or at least, better than in any alternative scheme.
As an analogy, consider what Richard Dawkins would say about evolution. No musician or orchestra there, as he would see it, but nonetheless an emergent system that ultimately leads to homo sapiens.
“the very purpose of the “free market” is to instill this kind of fatalism in people.”
This is like saying that the purpose of gravity is to make you sad about not being able to fly.
Can he at least distinguish between the market and ideologies about the market?
Salient @ 9 – I’m not sure that the article intends to portray money or the emergent property of the free market as a concrete object but I think its still valid to explore the properties of both as if they exist as things in the world, which clearly they do or how else would you be able to retire after twenty years of work?
How’s this for world-class exaggeration:
“No State apparatus, no “governmentality,” no measure of surveillance, and no form of education or propaganda has been able to constrain human freedom as comprehensively — or as invisibly — as the “discipline of the market” has done.”
It’s a lot of fun to write sentences like this! For example:
No dictionary, no grammar teacher, no spelling bee, and no form of spellchecking software has been able to constrain orthographic freedom as comprehensively as the “discipline of the keyboard” has done.
No shaggy-dog story, no “tall tale”, and no sophistical oratory has been able to exaggerate its points as extravagantly – or as seductively – as Steven Shaviro’s essay has done.
Paulus, the problem with the current economic system (growth capitalism) is that it’s about to hit its limits. No amount of tweaking will compensate for the fact that we’re running out of stuff (particularly, but not limited to, oil).
This is relevant to David Irving’s comment.
Mark, “forced to be free” is Rousseau’s phrase. Shaviro may just be using it to provide an ironic paraphrase of Hayek.
I suspect you misread my claim, Paulus.
@7
Paulus, there’s an enormous amount of literature demonstrating that in our present setup, right here and right now, a lot of people have motivations for working far more important than monetary remuneration. What conclusion you draw from that is perhaps up to you, but that’s just a flip statement.
Also, I’m sure you know that Soviet Marxism is not the *only alternative* to capitalism. In fact, it’s its mirror in a way.
@9 -
Um. Global financial crisis, dude. Checked out how things are going elsewhere in the world? I don’t necessarily think a lot of people in the UK and America, just for a start, would agree with you.
Yes. And that’s Shaviro’s point. The market, or rather the set of arrangements which structure behaviour and affect associated with that phrase, is not a social actor because it constrains action and shapes it.
And just to reply to a lot of people’s point in one hit. Shaviro might definitely have done better to have made clear that “the market” in the sense of the neo-liberal form of governing societies is not the same as “markets”. Those have always been around – or at least forms of exchange (not necessarily mediated through money). The point about Smith is precisely that his work is, among other things, an argument for a market based society, which did not then exist, and which needed active government will to come into being.
Nevertheless Mark, Salient’s point is err … salient. The idea of the market having a “purpose to …” is right from the bowels of functionalist sociology, and implies a kind of hidden agency. The article does tend to reify the market. Perhaps Shaviro doesn’t hold this view, but if that’s so, the language was careless.
There’s an alternative construal Fran. The idea could be that ‘the market’ (as a shorthand for society arranged on a particular version of market principles) had to be instituted, which required an imposition of political power. This has become so completely infused into the legal/political tissues of the family of European-derived democracies that it’s barely visible except when reading history. “The market” appears natural, rather than the expression of political power in the interests of a particular ideology (which libertarians like to pretend it isn’t). It’s a real live issue in many parts of the world nevertheless (PNG, etc). The “purpose” can be read as that of those who have exerted power to subject people to “the market”. The Hayek quote expressed that pretty well, I thought; no reification needed, because there are/were real agencies doing the constraining.
Shaviro offers some interesting insights. However, it does seem as if the wheel is forever being reinvented. An excellent summary of the treatment commodity fetishism by Marx and marxism can be found at:
http://science.jrank.org/pages/9364/Fetishism-Overview-Commodity-Fetish.html
There is an attached bibliography.
The fetishisation of the market is part of a spectrum of delusional practices associated with commodity fetishism. The religiosity of neo-liberal attitudes towards the market has already been identified by Marx who treats the commodity fetish as “the conceptual basis of a strategy for reading both religion and the secular religion of capital.” The author notes that “Marx’s choice of words reflects his argument that economy had arisen in the place that religion had occupied in earlier periods, where it functioned as the institution from which law seemed naturally to emanate.”
As to Shaviro’s concern with the ubiquitousness and simultaneous invisibility of the economy as a source of both value and oppression it has already been established that:
“the capitalist mode of production … is the mode of production in which the economy is most easily recognized as the ‘motor’ of history,” and, on the other, it is the mode in which “the essence of this ‘economy’ is unrecognized in principle” (Althusser and Balibar, p. 216)”
One of the problemns with the north-American left is that it is still a captive of cold war intellectual fear. Sssh. Don’t mention class.
When will Liberal voters stop lying about the free-markets that don’t exist?!? This is why they are up the creek….. I’m not worried about them exploding in on themselves of course! Ignorance must be funny when you own a quiver of houses but somehow I think they know better!!! Methinks the ex-John-Howard Party is getting very worried about a “Green” revolution!
Indeed, Mark, “a lot of people have motivations for working far more important than monetary remuneration”. Yes — a lot of people in the public sector, in academia and health and non-profits.
But my point wasn’t about them. It was about the people who do the boring, dirty, unpleasant jobs, for which the only reward comes with a dollar sign in front of it. Therein lies the crucial “discipline” of the market economy.
Who would ever want to become a plumber if there were not significant monetary remuneration?
What incentives would a collective system incorporate to get people to do the nasty jobs? I note that Guy Rundle avoided this question in his articles, and I haven’t seen too many other anti-capitalist theories that provide a compelling answer.
“Who would ever want to become a plumber if there were not significant monetary remuneration?”
Am I the only person who thinks this sentance is a bit strange? Work isn’t a one way deal but from where comes the idea of judgement of quality of life as it applies to another’s trade or profession?
On the subject of motivation for work and money I sometimes regret having been a teacher most of my working life.
Might have been better if I had chosen to be the son of a billionaire mass media company owner.
@20 and @21 – Fran, I’m with Crispin. And I don’t think it’s functionalist sociology at all. His comment expresses Shaviro’s point elegantly.
@24 – Paulus, what murph the surf said. There’s actually lots to like about being a plumber, aside from dosh, I’m told by people I have known who are plumbers!
The other point here is that the existing division of labour and how people are selected into various occupations (as well as selecting them) are themselves artefacts of particular social choices. It’s very valid to question what the claim about “bad jobs” rests on. However, a lot of those bad jobs need not be bad ones. You don’t need to be a socialist to understand that making yummy fresh hamburgers in a little shop is more fun than working in Maccas. That’s precisely Rundle’s point – or rather one of them. You seem to have missed the bit where he referred to the desirability of the freedom to own a flower shop. Compare that to the freedom to work in alienating conditions for low wages. Well, I’d have thought it’s obvious.
Again, we need to think outside some silly notion that the opposite of capitalism is communism. Ain’t so.
The great irony of the current set up is that those who would want to defend “initiative, enterprise” etc. end up defending insecure and badly paid work for massive corporations in the name of freedom.
Human beings aren’t included in modern capitalism. Go check out any of the modern theories and their formulas. The closest we get is to be inclused as labour units. LOL Thats why the Chicago boys were thrilled to try the experiment in the cruel inhuman dictatorship of Chile under Pinochet. Or in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet empire and they were in dire straits looking for loans and help.
And how did those two experiments go? Not too well.
In small doses capitalism is a benefit to society. Too much, and you can end up like America which has been slowly shrinking over the past near 40 years. Far too much and you end up like Russia did in the late 90′s: an economic basketcase.
“In small doses capitalism is a benefit to society”
Very elegantly put Brendan and says it all for me. What we have now is ‘morbidly obese, rampant, super capitalism’. It is dehumanising, ultra-selfish, divisive, socially and environmentally destructive capitalism.
How to rein it in? All I know is that it will be reined in by some getting of wisdom, either just before disaster or after.
“Again, we need to think outside some silly notion that the opposite of capitalism is communism. Ain’t so.”
Yes, agreed, and just to clarify — I was using communist examples above simply because they are available as historical data.
Those who propose other approaches have an unfair debating advantage, given that the real problems of capitalism are known, and the real problems of communism are known, but the real problems of any alternative are yet to be discovered. Unknown unknowns, to quote the great philosopher.
Hannah’s dad @26: “Might have been better if I had chosen to be the son of a billionaire mass media company owner.”
Nah, don’t wish that on yourself.
They are probably ruthless, self-centred, relentless, controlled, driven individuals who aren’t much fun to live with… Those would probably be some of the traits they needed, to focus all their lives on becoming billionaires.
Focus on money is half our problem – most of us have bought into the idea that we need heaps and heaps more money, to buy heaps and heaps more stuff. The marketing guys have figured out how to push people’s “I want, I need, I buy…” buttons, so that we beaver away like our lives depended on it.
There comes a point where you wonder if most of the population have hit the 80/20 mark, such that we have 80% of the billionaire’s lifestyle without the expensive brand label?
A car or house that costs orders of magnitude more, is still only a car or a house. Slightly snazzier, perhaps, but still the same basic functionality?
There is no correlation between net wealth and happiness over a certain point. Yet the advertising people relentlessly suggest that there IS a correlation. We are being conned – the data doesn’t support the proposal.
Ah Rumsfeld, ever apt!
Sort of.
I’m not sure that there should be an obligation to specify some sort of totalised alternative to capitalism – that sort of search for a universal is kinda what led to Soviet Marxism. I think we need to ground the sorts of alternatives that might exist in what is already occurring, both in a critical fashion and by extrapolating from existing exemplars. There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening in Latin America, for instance (and I’m not talking about Chavez, but ground up stuff).
Any utopia has to be provisional, capable of being further worked out, etc. – otherwise there’s no point and you do end up with all sorts of tendencies towards authoritarianism.
And it’s very important to attend to problems, frictions, inconsistencies.
Incidentally, I think some of what underlies the defences of liberal capitalism is the old “best of all possible worlds” saw. It’s quite analogous to a theodicy really. You know, a certain amount of drudgery and pain must exist so that blah blah can flourish. Hayek and that mob really do have a fundamentally theological mindset.
Mark: ‘Dictatorship Over Needs’ by Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller and Gyorgy Markus deals magnificently with the way that Soviet socialism substituted a state/bureaucratic mechanism for the capacity of people to articulate their own needs. One of the reasons that political liberalism has been so successful is that it allows for the articulation of varying and apparently undending configurations of needs as people discover them. In so far as these needs can be met by markets they frequently are. Markets, of course, cannot meet all needs or meet some needs more poorly than others.
Nevertheless, as the search for non-totalising options quickens, mainly to avert ecocide, the state option, by which I mean the tendency to look for the state to service needs but which will inevitably lead to the establishment of a dictatorship over needs, will probably look more and more applealing. A dilemma, to say the least.
Yes, anthony, I agree with that. In a related way that’s how Kevin Rudd puts his argument – incoherent as it is – to work. Only the state can save us.
“Never before in history has this sort of thing been possible.”
Ah the sweeping generalisation, welcome, enjoy your stay, please take the yellow pill when you want to return to reality.
“As an analogy, consider what Richard Dawkins would say about evolution.”
Fail, evolution is based on physical forces that ignore the fancies of human whimsy. Economics on the other hand would appear to be largely based on the moment to moment brain farts of all of us.
If markets cannot meet all needs (demonstrable) and meet other needs badly or unfairly then it seems obvious that the state must intervene. But why should all needs be met? Is this the libertarian position, we are free to want whatever and our wants become needs. It reminds me of an old slogan, the world has enough for our needs but not our greed.
But how are needs conceptualised? The point is that they need not be commodified.
Perhaps it is best left to those “in need” to articulate those needs rather than be drawn into a theroetical investigation of what we might rule in or out as legitimate. I fancy Honneth’s emphasis on respect and recognition as a good starting point. Perhaps the very wealthy might not to consume so much if they had adequate self respect?
Yes, indeed. What’s problematic about the concept of “need” in most Marxist thought (of almost all stripes, as far as I know) is that it rests on a distinction between true and false needs.
What’s problematic about the concept of “need” in most Marxist thought (of almost all stripes, as far as I know) is that it rests on a distinction between true and false needs.
Well, any saleable commodity can have a use value, irrespective of whether it serves ‘true’ or ‘false’ needs, so I don’t think that this distinction is Marxist. The shift of emphasis from production to consumption is probably better understood as ‘post-Marxist’ or something like that. Think Baudrillard’s ‘System of Objects’, for instance.
Speaking, Mark@40, as someone who has taken Marxism as the starting point for my engagement with public policy for much the better part of my life, I’ve not come across a distinction within Marxism between false needs and true needs. I have heard more eclectic radical liberals utter such things, and it’s easy, if one is sloppy, to mistake them for Marxists, much as a casual observer might mistake an ass for a horse.
Sure they may look superfically similar and have occasionally been pressed into similar service, but when they open their mouths, the sound is very different.
Crispin said:
Who decided this Crispin, when, and through resort to what means? Are there minutes of the meeting?
This claim is circular, or if it isn’t, requires more specification. As it stands, it simply evades the key issue of human agency and its relation to the material world, the interplay between forces and the relations of production etc. This is not a Marxist account, but some sort of functionalist sociology
Mark, I agree “needs” are problematic. Usefulness is slightly less so but something that is useful only has value when you need it. I might have a shed full of useful things but most of the time they just collect dust, unless I need them to do something.
It seems to me that equating usefulness with needs is problematic, because something that is useful is only useful because it enables you to do something, to get something you need. But it seems that in the present consumptive model the focus is on useful things rather than needs, we have to buy the latest car because we need to save on fuel economy. At some stage in the nearish future questions of what we all need may well become more sharply defined.
Just winding back to what Crispin said @21 which seems to be a point the free market idealists cling to is that no agency is behind the “market” hence it cannot be conceived as a social actor. How then did the “system” come into being? There must have been political intervention somewhere (say) around the time of the industrial revolution that allowed capitalism to grow from its mercantile ancestry. That political intervention in society would have been directed and purposeful and it would have to represent the will of those in power. It seems obvious that those in power aren’t going to institute a system that has the potential to undermine their power.
Fran
@42 -
Fran, it’s implicit in the notion of commodity fetishism and alienation, and parallel to Lukacs’ notion of false consciousness.
http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~delittle/iess%20false%20consciousness%20V2.htm
Marxism is supposed to be a project of demystification. Social relations appear as things, etc. You might like to take a look at Capital, Volume 1.
@43 -
Where do you think the centrality of the market to human relations in particular societies came from? Polanyi’s The Great Transformation traces in great detail how particular legislative and political changes had to be made in order to institute a capitalist mode of social arrangements. Again, all this is basic to Marx as well – cf. Capital, Volume 1 once again.
http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/polanyi
@44 – David, yep. And the comment about political intervention in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also goes to Polanyi’s idea.
And re THR @41 – Baudrillard’s early stuff is quite useful for rethinking notions of use value, exchange value etc.
Mark@45
I don’t agree that it is “implicit in the notion of commodity fetishism and alienation, and parallel to Lukacs’ notion of false consciousness”.
For the record, I’m not persuaded that false consciousness fits neatly into Marxist methodology either, but putting that to one side, insofar as the misapprehensions people may harbour associated with their relationships with the polity, the means of production and their own line of cognitive development may drive sub-optimal choices from a purely personal perspective, these aren’t usefully described as false needs at all, unless one can take the view that the deployer of this phrase can accurately evaluate those needs from the position of the individual or group in question. The choices that individuals and classes make are themselves the foundation of what is possible and thus desirable at any given moment and none of us stands outside of this.
At most we leftists can respond to one assertion of wants and one paradigm of human collaboration with a contrary one, asserting that this more surely and swiftly approaches the ideal than that which it displaces without asserting that this is the end of all human possibility.
Well, there you go, Fran, we pretty much agree.
Fran: Yes, such notions need specification, but not by me, and not in a reply to a blog post. There are enough histories of clearances, colonialism and enclosures, and enough present-day minutes of the various institutions legislating for and governing national and international markets, for it to be pretty damned obvious that nothing so ethereal or circular-ideational subjects us to ‘the market’. Hard political force (projected by people with ideas) does the job very thoroughly.
Without wanting to be drawn into a dialogue about Maxist interpretations of species being in relation to needs: needs are of course historically contingent. What might be called requirements, those that address the basics of survival through production and reproduction, are obvious enough.
The dictatorship over needs that emerged within all socialist states did so partly as a consequence of Marxist ‘over-reach’ in terms of attempts to limit and/or direct human activities according to Marxist understanding. To avoid totalitarian prescriptiveness it is necessary to emphasise people’s capacity for the self articulation of needs.
Within a democracy this will vary according to the specificity of the individuals and groups making demands. These demands, frequently for an allocation of state resources, are simultaneously demands for recognition of the legitimacy of the identity of those making the demand in relation to the state’s resources. I’m thinking of Th Marshall, for example, in relation to worker/parent/soldier citizen as sites for the construction of legimitate citizenshipidentity.
After that, however, I draw back from even considering what other’s needs may be except in so far as other’s activites impinge on my freedoms. Generalised ecocide is a problem, of course, but it is attributable to the depravity of the wealthy more than the poor.
All of which is a round
…about way of saying that discussion of needs within the left often blurs into the realm of the consideration of freedoms about which I feel that citizens ought to be free to discover their own freedoms on their own terms once specific guarantees to material security habve been met.
Cheers
There is an economy not based on “commodity fetishism”, “material incentives” and “alienation”.
Its called the patriarchal family.
Not sure if Left-liberals want to encourage globalisation of this kind of “division of labour”.