Showing posts with label CAT_structure. Show all posts
Thursday, September 15, 2016
Guest post by Dave Elder-Vass
[Dave Elder-Vass accepted my invitation to write a response to my discussion of his recent book, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy (link). Elder-Vass is Reader in sociology at Loughborough University and author as well of The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency and The Reality of Social Construction, discussed here and here. Dave has emerged as a leading voice in the philosophy of social science, especially in the context of continuing developments in the theory of critical realism. Thanks, Dave!]
We need to move on from existing theories of the economy
Dave Elder-Vass
Let me begin by thanking Dan Little for his very perceptive review of my book Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy. As he rightly says, it�s more ambitious than the title might suggest, proposing that we should see our economy not simply as a capitalist market system but as a collection of �many distinct but interconnected practices�. Neither the traditional economist�s focus on firms in markets nor the Marxist political economist�s focus on exploitation of wage labour by capital is a viable way of understanding the real economy, and the book takes some steps towards an alternative view.
Both of those perspectives have come to narrow our view of the economy in multiple dimensions. Our very concept of the economy has been derived from the tradition that began as political economy with Ricardo and Smith then divided into the Marxist and neoclassical traditions (of course there are also others, but they are less influential). Although these conflict radically in some respects they also share some problematic assumptions, and in particular the assumption that the contemporary economy is essentially a capitalist market economy, characterised by the production of commodities for sale by businesses employing labour and capital. As Gibson-Graham argued brilliantly in their book The End Of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, ideas seep into the ways in which we frame the world, and when the dominant ideas and the main challengers agree on a particular framing of the world it is particularly difficult for us to think outside of the resulting box. In this case, the consequence is that even critics find it difficult to avoid thinking of the economy in market-saturated terms.
The most striking problem that results from this (and one that Gibson-Graham also identified) is that we come to think that only this form of economy is really viable in our present circumstances. Alternatives are pie in the sky, utopian fantasies, which could never work, and so we must be content with some version of capitalism � until we become so disillusioned that we call for its complete overthrow, and assume that some vague label for a better system can be made real and worthwhile by whoever leads the charge on the Bastille. But we need not go down either of these paths once we recognise that the dominant discourses are wrong about the economy we already have.
To see that, we need to start defining the economy in functional terms: economic practices are those that produce and transfer things that people need, whether or not they are bought and sold. As soon as we do that, it becomes apparent that we are surrounded by non-market economic practices already. The book highlights digital gifts � all those web pages that we load without payment, Wikipedia�s free encyclopaedia pages, and open source software, for example. But in some respects these pale into insignificance next to the household and family economy, in which we constantly produce things for each other and transfer them without payment. Charities, volunteering and in many jurisdictions the donation of blood and organs are other examples.
If we are already surrounded by such practices, and if they are proliferating in the most dynamic new areas of our economy, the idea that they are unworkably utopian becomes rather ridiculous. We can then start to ask questions about what forms of organising are more desirable ethically. Here the dominant traditions are equally warped. Each has a standard argument that is trotted out at every opportunity to answer ethical questions, but in reality both standard arguments operate as means of suppressing ethical discussions about economic questions. And both are derived from an extraordinarily narrow theory of how the economy works.
For the mainstream tradition, there is one central mechanism in the economy: price equilibration in the markets, a process in which prices rise and fall to bring demand and supply into balance. If we add on an enormous list of tenuous assumptions (which economists generally admit are unjustified, and then continue to use anyway), this leads to the theory of Pareto optimality of market outcomes: the argument that if we used some other system for allocating economic benefits some people would necessarily be worse off. This in turn becomes the central justification for leaving allocation to the market (and eliminating �interference� with the market).
There are many reasons why this argument is flawed. Let me mention just one. If even one market is not perfectly competitive, but instead is dominated by a monopolist or partial monopolist, then even by the standards of economists a market system does not deliver Pareto optimality, and an alternative system might be more efficient. And in practice capitalists constantly strive to create monopolies, and frequently succeed! Even the Financial Times recognises this: in today�s issue (Sep 15 2016) Philip Stevens argues, �Once in a while capitalism has to be rescued from the depredations of, well, capitalists. Unconstrained, enterprise curdles into monopoly, innovation into rent-seeking. Today�s swashbuckling �disrupters� set up tomorrow�s cosy cartels. Capitalism works when someone enforces competition; and successful capitalists do not much like competition�.
So the argument for Pareto optimality of real market systems is patently false, but it continues to be trotted out constantly. It is presented as if it provides an ethical justification for the market economy, but its real function is to suppress discussion of economic ethics: if the market is inherently good for everyone then, it seems, we don�t need to worry about the ethics of who gets what any more.
The Marxist tradition likewise sees one central mechanism in the economy: the extraction of surplus from wage labour by capitalists. Their analysis of this mechanism depends on the labour theory of value, which is no more tenable that mainstream theories of Pareto optimality (for reasons I discuss in the book). Marxists consistently argue as if any such extraction is ethically reprehensible. Marx himself never provides an ethical justification for such a view. On the contrary, he claims that this is a scientific argument and disowns any ethical intent. Yet it functions in just the same way as the argument for Pareto optimality: instead of encouraging ethical debate about who should get what in the economy, Marxists reduce economic ethics to the single question of the need to prevent exploitation (narrowly conceived) of productive workers.
We need to sweep away both of these apologetics, and recognise that questions of who gets what are ethical issues that are fundamental to justice, legitimacy, and political progress in contemporary societies. And that they are questions that don�t have easy �one argument fits all� answers. To make progress on them we will have to make arguments about what people need and deserve that recognise the complexity of their social situations. But it doesn�t take a great deal of ethical sophistication to recognise that the 1% have too much when many in the lower deciles are seriously impoverished, and that the forms of impoverishment extend well beyond underpaying for productive labour.
I�m afraid that I have written much more than I intended to, and still said very little about the steps I�ve taken in the book towards a more open and plausible way of theorising how the economy works. I hope that I�ve at least added some more depth to the reasons Dan picked out for attempting that task.
Monday, September 5, 2016
Capitalism as a heterogeneous set of practices
A key part of understanding society is making sense of the "economy" in which we live. But what is an economy? Existing economic theories attempt to answer this question with simple unified theories. The economy is a profit-driven market system of firms, workers, and consumers. The economy is a property system dependent upon the expropriation of surplus labor. The economy is a system of expropriation more or less designed to create great inequalities of income, wealth, and well-being. The economy is a system of exploitation and domination.
This way of thinking about economic life is very consistent with several streams of thought in Understanding Society -- the idea of social heterogeneity (link), the idea of assemblage (link), and a background mistrust of comprehensive social theories (link). (Here is an earlier post on "Capitalism 2.0" that is also relevant to the perspective and issues Elder-Vass brings forward; link.)
The central new element in contemporary economic life that needs treatment by an adequate political economy is the role that large digital enterprises play in the contemporary world. These enterprises deal in intangible products; they often involve a vast proportion of algorithmic transformation rather than human labor; and to a degree unprecedented in economic history, they depend on "gift" transactions at every level. Internet companies like Google give free search and maps, and bloggers and videographers give free content. And yet these gifts have none of the attributes of traditional gift communities -- there is no community, no explicit reciprocity, and little face-to-face interaction. E-V goes into substantial detail on several of these new types of enterprises, and does the work of identifying the "economic practices" upon which they depend.
In particular, E-V considers whether the gift relation familiar from anthropologists like Marcel Mauss and economic sociologists like Karl Polanyi can shed useful light on the digital economy. But the lack of reciprocity and face-to-face community leads him to conclude that the theory is unpersuasive as a way of understanding the digital economy (86).
E-V shows a remarkable range of expertise in this work. His command of recent Marxian thinking about contemporary capitalism is deep. But he has also gone deeply into the actual practices of the digital economy -- the ways Google makes profits, the incentives and regulations that sustain wikipedia, the handful of distinctive business practices that have made Apple one of the world's largest companies. The book is a work of theory and a work of empirical investigation as well.
Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy is a book with a big and important idea -- bigger really than the title implies. The book demands a substantial shift in the way that economists think about the institutions and practices through which the global economy works. More fundamentally, it asks that we reconsider the idea of "economy" altogether, and abandon the notion that there is a single unitary economic practice or institution that defines modern capitalism -- whether market, wage labor, or trading system. Instead, we should focus on the many distinct but interconnected practices that have been invented and stitched together in the many parts of society to solve particular problems of production, consumption, and appropriation, and that as an aggregate make up "the economy". The economy is an assemblage, not a designed system, and reforming this agglomeration requires shifting the "ecosystem" of practices in a direction more favorable to human flourishing.
In Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy Dave Elder-Vass argues that these simple theories, largely the product of the nineteenth century, are flawed in several fundamental ways. First, they are all simple and unitary in a heterogeneous world. Economic transactions take a very wide variety of forms in the modern world. But more fundamentally, these existing theories fail completely to provide a theoretical vocabulary for describing what are now enormously important parts of our economic lives. One well-know blindspot is the domestic economy -- work and consumption within the household. But even more striking is the inadequacy of existing economic theories to make sense of the new digital world -- Google, Apple, Wikipedia, blogging, or YouTube. Elder-Vass's current book offers a new way of thinking about our economic lives and institutions. And he believes that this new way lays a basis for more productive thinking about a more humane future for all of us than is offered by either neoliberalism or Marxism.
What E-V offers is the idea of economic life as a jumble of "appropriative" practices -- practices that get organized and deployed in different combinations, and that have better and worse implications for human well-being.
From this perspective it becomes possible to see our economy as a complex ecosystem of competing and interacting economic forms, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and to develop a progressive politics that seems to reshape that ecosystem rather than pursuing the imaginary perfection of one single universal economic form. (5)
The argument here is that we can understand the economy better by seeing it as a diverse collection of economic forms, each of which can be characterised as a particular complex of appropriative practices -- social practices that influence the allocation of benefits from the process of production. (9)
Economies are not monoliths but diverse mixtures of varying economic forms. To understand and evaluate economic phenomena, then, we need to be able to describe and analyse these varying forms in conjunction with each other. (96)Capitalism is not a single, unitary "mode of production," but rather a concatenation of multiple forms and practices. E-V believes that the positions offered here align well with the theories of critical realism that he has helped to elaborate in earlier books (19-20) (link, link). We can be realist in our investigations of the causal properties of the economic practices he identifies.
This way of thinking about economic life is very consistent with several streams of thought in Understanding Society -- the idea of social heterogeneity (link), the idea of assemblage (link), and a background mistrust of comprehensive social theories (link). (Here is an earlier post on "Capitalism 2.0" that is also relevant to the perspective and issues Elder-Vass brings forward; link.)
In particular, E-V considers whether the gift relation familiar from anthropologists like Marcel Mauss and economic sociologists like Karl Polanyi can shed useful light on the digital economy. But the lack of reciprocity and face-to-face community leads him to conclude that the theory is unpersuasive as a way of understanding the digital economy (86).
It is noteworthy that E-V's description of appropriative practices is primarily allocative; it pays little attention to the organization of production. It is about "who receives the benefits" (10) but not so much about "how activity and labor are coordinated, managed, and deployed to produce the stuff". Marx gained the greatest insights in Capital, not from the simple mathematics of the labor theory of value, but from his investigations of the conditions of work and the schemes of management to which labor was subject in the nineteenth-century factory. The ideas of alienation, domination, and exploitation are very easy to understand in that context. But it would seem that there are similar questions to ask about the digital economy shops of today. The New York Times' reportage of working conditions within the Amazon organization seems to reveal a very similar logic (link). And how about the high-tech sweat shops described in a 2009 Bloomberg investigation (link)?
Elder-Vass believes that a better understanding of our existing economic practices can give rise to a more effective set of strategies for creating a better future. E-V's vision for creating a better future depends on a selective pruning of the more destructive practices and cultivation of the more positive practices. He is appreciative of the "real utopias" project (36) (link) and also of the World Social Forum.
This means growing some progressive alternatives but also cutting back some regressive ones. It entails being open to a wide range of alternatives, including the possibility that there might be some valuable continuing role for some forms of capitalism in a more adequate mixed economy of practices. (15)Or in other words, E-V advocates for innovative social change -- recognizing the potential in new forms and cultivating existing forms of economic activity. Marxism has been the impetus of much thinking about progressive change in the past century; but E-V argues that this perspective too is limited:
Marxism itself has become an obstacle to thinking creatively about the economy, not least because it is complicit in the discourse of the monolithic capitalist market economy that we must now move beyond.... Marx's labour theory of value ... tends to support the obsessive identification of capitalism with wage labour. As a consequence Marxists have failed to recognise that capitalism has developed new forms of making profit that do not fit with the classic Marxist model, including many that have emerged and prospered in the new digital economy. (45)This is not a wholesale rejection of Marx's thought; but it is a well-justified critique of the lingering dogmatism of this tradition. Though E-V does not make reference to current British politics in the book, these comments seem very appropriate in appraisal of the approach to change championed by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
E-V shows a remarkable range of expertise in this work. His command of recent Marxian thinking about contemporary capitalism is deep. But he has also gone deeply into the actual practices of the digital economy -- the ways Google makes profits, the incentives and regulations that sustain wikipedia, the handful of distinctive business practices that have made Apple one of the world's largest companies. The book is a work of theory and a work of empirical investigation as well.
Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy is a book with a big and important idea -- bigger really than the title implies. The book demands a substantial shift in the way that economists think about the institutions and practices through which the global economy works. More fundamentally, it asks that we reconsider the idea of "economy" altogether, and abandon the notion that there is a single unitary economic practice or institution that defines modern capitalism -- whether market, wage labor, or trading system. Instead, we should focus on the many distinct but interconnected practices that have been invented and stitched together in the many parts of society to solve particular problems of production, consumption, and appropriation, and that as an aggregate make up "the economy". The economy is an assemblage, not a designed system, and reforming this agglomeration requires shifting the "ecosystem" of practices in a direction more favorable to human flourishing.
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