Contrary to
what Lenin is said to have quipped, politics is not a concentrate of
economics. It is the other way round: economics is a concentrate of politics.
In other words, it is not politics that "boils down" to economics; it
is economics that can be reduced to a bundle of politics. The important thing
is to focus on the meaning of the phrase "a concentrate of" and the
phrase "boils down to". What is it that we mean when we say that
"in the final analysis" politics is economics or the opposite, that
economics really is politics? What kind of "reality"
do we refer to when we speak of the ultimate foundations of economics or
politics? As we all know, necessity is not just "the mother of
invention" - meaning that there are some needs that are so fundamental
that they stir up human imagination and inventiveness. Necessity can also be
camouflaged and disguised or simply be rationalised away as "virtue":
this is what we do when "we make virtue out of necessity".
Differently put, we recognize that there are situations in social relations
when we are coerced into doing things that either we would rather not do or
else "concentrate the mind" to the point of inducing virtue - the
acquiescence to necessity as virtue - or inventiveness, the desperate search
for alternative solutions. But in all these cases, in all these instances, what
we call ‘necessity’ is a function of social relations, not of physical or
physiological necessity. If we accept that our environment offers sufficient
resources for human societies to reproduce themselves, then it is evident that
economics - which as "the dismal science" is often confused with
"the sphere of necessity" - has little to do with physical or
physiological necessity but must instead have everything to do with
"coercion". The necessity of economics intended as a
"science" is therefore in reality the necessity of
political coercion. That is why it is correct to insist that
"economics is a concentrate of politics", in the sense that what we
describe or circumscribe as a separate field of human activity - "the
Economic" - is a specific form of coercion imposed by some people on other
people in the sphere of the production of and for human needs and their
satisfaction.
To accept
with Lenin that "politics is a concentrate of economics" would be
tantamount to asserting that economic activity is dictated by a
"necessity" that is independent of "coercion", that is
physical or even physio-bio-logical in nature – and therefore
independent of "the Political". This may make sense in terms of
the economic determinism – indeed, an eschatology or even a “theodicy”
of communism – that Lenin inherited from Marx’s labour theory of value and is implicit
in the conception of human history expounded most explicitly in The
Communist Manifesto and in the “Preface to A Contribution”.
Bourgeois
economic theory, which includes Classical Political Economy and Neoclassical
Economic Theory, has always sought to draw a nexus, a substantive link, between
the freedom involved in the production of things by human beings and the
necessity that limits the quantity of that production given a certain level of
technological means. Thus, the value of goods produced has always depended for
bourgeois economic theory on the strict link between unbounded human needs and
wants, on one side, and the clear limits on our ability to satisfy them. In its
effort to present itself as “economic science”, bourgeois economic theory has
always presented the value of production as dependent on this interaction
between unlimited demand and strictly limited supply.
Consider
these two statements made by Joan Robinson in her “Freedom and Necessity”
intended as an anthropological introduction to “economic science”:
In so-called civilized societies, it
is the poor who spend their days in an anxious search for the means to live and
the rich who can indulge in gratuitous activities; but when we compare rich and
poor societies, the reverse often appears. The isolated communities, when they
were discovered and brought into the frame of reference of ‘national income per
head’, were placed very low on the scale, yet for many of them the proportion
of energy, skill and mental activity devoted to non-economic aims was much
greater than it is with us.” (J. Robinson, Freedom and Necessity, p.25.)
[Cf. also the asinine remarks
Robinson makes on adaptation on p.10.]
The survivors of each generation are
those whose genetic make-up is propitious to survival, that is, well suited to
finding nourishment and avoiding enemies in the particular environment in which
they grow up. Thus the pressure of technical conditions has carved out the
multiplicity of creatures who appear to us to be so marvellously 'designed' for
the life that they lead.¹
For a species, variability itself is
propitious, within limits, to survival. The species capable of adaptation are,
for the most part, the ones that have survived till today, though there are
some which have proved successful with remark ably little variation.
The habits of a species are just as
much subject to the pressure of evolution as its physical form. A great variety
of types of family life exist in nature - monogamy, polygamy, and group
marriage; continuous association, pairing during a limited breeding season or
casual mating. The style of life of a species must be consonant with its way of
getting a living. (Op.cit., p.10)
The
immediate problem with this understanding of value is that it presupposes the
existence of property rights whereby the exchange of products between independent
producers and, consequently, the settling by these producers of the exchange
values of their production can be determined. But it is just as immediately evident that there
can be no necessary link of any kind between the human production of goods and
the proprietary and legal rights to which producers can lay claim over that
aggregated production!
This is quite
clearly and incontrovertibly the rock against which all bourgeois economic
theory must founder! The presumed and claimed objectivity of bourgeois economic
science founders against the rock of the abject arbitrariness of all legal
proprietary rights and claims over production by presumed independent
producers!
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