What Is the Question?
EDITORIAL, 21 Jan 2019
#570 | Howard Richards – TRANSCEND Media Service
“The question is whether finance will promote economic growth and rising living standards or create unproductive credit and use government to enforce creditor claims by imposing austerity and reducing large swathes of the population to debt peonage.”
This précis of the pickle that is our prison was written by Michael Hudson. It could have been written by Yanis Varoufakis; or, perhaps slightly altered, by Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders’ advisor Stephanie Kelton, or any of the distinguished scholars committed in their hearts to serving the common good, which I shall call “the Economists on the side of the Angels.” (EA)
Let me start by fleshing out the sort of point of view I take the quote to epitomize with a seven-point telegram. It aspires to highlight typical elements of an EA rap:
- The history of economics is no longer part of the curriculum, because if it were taught the students might learn something.
- Steady social progress was being made in some of the old days, where “old” designates, for example, the thirty glorious years of social democracy in Europe after World War II, the Progressive Era in the USA, and the first-generation post-colonial regimes headed by progressive intellectuals (Kwame Nkrumah, Milton Obote ….)
- Since around 1980 (when Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl were elected) the rentier class has succeeded in rewriting the rules of the economic game in its own favour.
- The global economy has been deliberately (and often secretively) designed to lower wages and to extract rents.
- A neoliberal ideological juggernaut has been imposed on the world, privatizing public assets and decimating human social rights, seeking to reshape virtually every institution in the service of an ultra-individualist political and ethical philosophy, and at a practical level in the service of what Karl Marx called fictitious capital (i.e. bankism, finance capital with no productive function). The juggernaut has been imposed by force and fraud, elaborately and pretentiously disguised as reason.
- The economics justifying unlimited accumulation by the few, austerity for the many, often militarism, and often ecological irresponsibility, has been in the best cases bogus. In the worst cases it has been non-existent. In the worse cases it has sometimes been pure fabrication, not supported by any credible research or by any credible theory.
- A moral imperative flows from the sort of point of view I am telegraphically sketching, prescribing what we should do to right a world governed by wrongs. It is: Throw the thieves out of the temple! Usher in the angels! Democratize Europe! Political Revolution!
Now I will send a second seven-point telegram. It does not pretend to express anybody’s point of view other than my own. However, it also does not pretend to say anything new that others have not said better sooner. It summarizes what I have concluded so far from my reading of other people’s writings and my experience (perhaps most importantly my experience living in Chile before, during and after the military coup that deposed Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973).
- In the old old old days (per Marcel Mauss) humans could relate to each other as friends or as enemies, but it took many centuries of cultural evolution for us to learn to relate to each other as customers and vendors. The creation of the deep structure of market society (per Karl Polanyi) has been slow, uneven and painful, proceeding at different paces in different places.
- Once established, simple exchange (the starting point in Chapter 1 of Marx’s Capital) leads inexorably, speeded or slowed by the causal powers of many other structures, to a physical organization (körperliche Organisation) of the production of the means of subsistence driven by capital accumulation, extracting surplus (Mehrwert) and repeatedly re-investing it to produce more surplus. (Chapter 25)
- The basic deep structure, simple exchange is called la séparation marchande by André Orléan, “institutionalized irresponsibility” by E.F. Schumacher, and das Tauschprinzip by Theodor Adorno — echoed by Charles Taylor’s characterization of modern society as “bargaining society” and anticipated by Sir Henry Maine’s (1861) definition of the principle of modernity as “contract.” It is the e = mc2 of the social sciences. Its consequences never stop.
- In a regime of accumulation every institution must serve the overriding objective of attracting capital by making investment profitable. Accumulation trumps justice and ecology. The path from simple exchange to regimes of accumulation is illumined by Alfred Marshall’s “law of substitution.” It states that more efficient methods for making products (and therefore for making money by selling them) drive out and eliminate the older less efficient methods. The path is illuminated by Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk’s law of the superiority of roundabout production. It entails that more highly capitalized production with more sophisticated technology and marketing usually ends up winning in the marketplace. The path is illumined by John Locke’s observation that wealth and power reinforce each other. With more wealth you can hire more soldiers and build bigger fleets. You can use military power to acquire more wealth. Per Paulo Freire and Leo Tolstoy: behind economic exploitation, guaranteeing it when not directly creating it, there is always violence.
- The post World War II social democracies (per Jürgen Habermas) were never stable or sustainable. They could not reconcile a welfare state with the need to cut taxes to attract capital. Such defeats of justice at the hands of the imperatives of accumulation have a deep structural cause, namely das Tauschprinzip.
- Contemporary bankism is built on the ruins of social democracy. The preceding regime of accumulation, based in part on raising wages to make investment profitable by increasing consumer demand, has been replaced by a new regime emphasizing turning money into more money by extending credit. The transition from one regime to the other was driven by the structural need to make investment profitable so that the vital processes of life could continue –quite apart from any economic theory or political victory or deliberate plan.
- The war economies featuring government deficit spending that finally brought the world out of the depression of the 1930s have become permanent under post-war social democracy and under bankism. Permanent deficit public spending’s (and spiralling private debt’s) initial deep cause was the depression; the cause of depressions (per Hyman Minsky) is the inherent instability of the system; the cause of the system’s inherent instability is its deep structure: institutionalized irresponsibility.
My second telegram suggests amending the first, adding another key question. Per Bucky Fuller the new question might be: “Can humanity graduate from class-two (entropically selfish) evolution into class-one (syntropically cooperative) evolution?”
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Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. He was born in Pasadena, California but since 1966 has lived in Chile when not teaching in other places. Professor of Peace and Global Studies Emeritus, Earlham College, a school in Richmond Indiana affiliated with the Society of Friends (Quakers) known for its peace and social justice commitments. Stanford Law School, MA and PhD in Philosophy from UC Santa Barbara, Advanced Certificate in Education-Oxford, PhD in Educational Planning from University of Toronto. Books: Dilemmas of Social Democracies with Joanna Swanger, Gandhi and the Future of Economics with Joanna Swanger, The Nurturing of Time Future, Understanding the Global Economy (available as e-books), The Evaluation of Cultural Action (not an e book). Hacia otras Economias with Raul Gonzalez, free download available at www.repensar.cl. Solidaridad, Participacion, Transparencia: conversaciones sobre el socialismo en Rosario, Argentina. Available free on the blogspot lahoradelaetica.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 21 Jan 2019.
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Telegram # 3 (for the professor): Obviously, you’re erudite and well-read. Now, having asserted and confirmed your credentials, could you possibly focus on a few salient economic points (a la Ellen Brown, for example), and bring the rest of us seekers along with you?
What good is being one of the “EA” (“economists on the side of the angels”) if the angels are constructing a Tower of Babel (as so many of our economists, academicians, media-hipsters and hype-sters are doing)?
Focusing on, and developing, one theme–the success and/or failure of Socialism in Latin America (in your bailiwick Chile, or in Cuba or Venezuela, for example)–could be much more instructive for the uninitiated among us.
I was heartened by the first sentence in your Telegram # 1:
“The history of economics is no longer part of the curriculum, because if it were taught the students might learn something.”
Fine. I looked forward to a contrapuntal approach. What need to cite a dozen or more “experts” as you clarify your objectives? After all, this is not a term paper, not a Grad School exercise. You’re credentialed; you’ve proven yourself over the years and decades. Stake out your territory and state your case.
I did not mean the references to establish my credentials I meant them as leads for people who want to know more.
I cannot say everything at once every time I speak. If you check out my published writings, I think you will find that I have already answered your questions.
Some of my writings are very simple, although admittedly others require some background knowledge My book with Gavin, Unbounded Organizing in Communiy was tested on South African teenagers to be sure they could understand it.
Letters from Quebec was tested on first year university students. HR