Sunday, March 20, 2016

(economists) Get a Job

Job and his friends
Industrialization, buy imposing an economic structure on productive social relations, created the modern era of political revolution. Industrially transformed economic relations, integrating what had been local craft production distributed through local credit into a national monetary/market based system, required political transformations of equal scope to be sustainable, even in the short term: wherever market values manifest they externalize onto the weak and the environment the negative consequences of the changes they impose, they make of populations and the planet, "sinks", reservoirs to absorb unintended consequences. Without revolution markets will eventually exhaust these "sinks". Change always contains both good and bad, the bigger the change the more of each. Economists call the bad that can't be monetized "externalities"(and there is a current vogue to calling the bads that can be monetized "profits" when they are nothing of the kind, "liquidating" as they are the world's stock of real wealth). Revolutions reallocate the distribution of both good and bad in order that the larger political organism, including both beneficiaries and victims, or at least most of them, can continue to exist.

Because sinks are finite, for market based systems there is no alternative to revolution but collapse. A properly functioning Political Economy has as many feed back channels as required to mediate between winners and losers, profit streams and sinks. It ensures frequent revolutions, the smaller and more frequent, the less painful. The more nimbly adjustments are made, accounting for needs of the weak and ecology, the healthier both the economy and underlying environment are. Should such adjustments not be made, as they haven't in the last forty years, the weak, a majority of the population, and the environment, on which we all  depend for life itself, will simply die.  After four decades of choked feedback from the weak and the environment, willfully ignoring both, revolution approximately commensurate with those constipating forces resisting change is now required to prevent collapse.

What the Sanders campaign proposes as revolution is close to being the least that could possibly succeed, and probably among the best precisely for that reason. Excess cannot cure excess. Periodically dammed up to change, as we are now, the process of economization, of rationalizing life around the logic of markets through revolutions of technology and Political Economy, externalities and all, started with a population of around 600M in 1700 in a world about two degrees cooler, and now involves a warmer 8B souls. Along that exponential demographic curve, our unaccounted ecological externalities have been tracking: nature won't necessarily find a new equilibrium with us in it.

In these decades, the political forces stifling adjustment have benefited enormously making an ideological point of denying that the ecology can be harmed, and even in the event it might be that there could be no important consequences, or in the event there are, there's nothing to be done anyway. They call this suicidal stupidity "conservativism" and hold it at the center of our politics with the Republican front runner promising the elimination of the EPA while the Democratic front runner has been an active participant in neutering it since 1992. This willful ideological blindness, an Orwellian abuse of the word conservative, is propagandized by abstruse rationalizations of academic and professional economists.

A useful Economics would be a sociology of money. It would be the study of how people achieve the power to command resources, including other people, through the manipulation of credit relationships, i.e. money, a socially constructed power relationship between people. As sociology, the most it could hope to explain would be how distribution of life's essentials, as mediated by accruals of power in increasingly asymmetrical credit relationships, is political: if honest
, it could tell a frank story about power. Because the credit relationships that underlie the existence of money are power relationships, this sociology of money would be meaningless without reference to politics.

Because in modern industrial societies the vast majority of people are isolated from the ecological means to sustain themselves, the power inherent in money relationships is to them an existential reality and threat. To be clear, I enjoy my isolation from the daily production of my food but understand that for this condition to remain sustainable, both in terms of my appetite and the environment, the issue of the command of resources through money, externalities and all, needs to be held firmly in focus. A useful economics would do this by supporting the politics of ameliorating sinks, allocating surplus value to repair damage and prevent more, seeing to it that power was deployed as necessary to re-balance the essentials of sustainablity.

Such an Economics would tell me that I need power to see to it my needs are met and that some collective needs to account for ecological impacts. This process of meeting the needs of individuals both in mass and one by one, according to individual expressions of need, combined with investment to prevent ecological externalities would create all the demand necessary for full employment: there are no shortages of things needing to be done to meet the needs of the poor and the environment. To the extent markets can be beneficial, they are by expressing needs in the form of money demand, creating price signals to which market participants can respond to fill the needs so expressed. This will only happen to the extent people can express their needs with money, requiring they either have access to incomes, or adequate stocks of liquid wealth. It clearly can not happen at all for the environment which, obviously, has no bank account. Political Economy would force this distributive issue to ensure markets are beneficial and externalities are contained.

Economics as practiced today does virtually none of this. Contemporary economics mostly ignores money and credit relationships of all kinds. To deny the centrality of money to its object of study economics denies both the essential power relationships of commercial activity and the central tool of that power as well. It imagines that people just have money. Assuming they do, their needs are expressed and market agents create products and services that satisfy them. It is an ideological given of economics that people who don't have money are behaving incorrectly by not having it. This misbehavior must be disciplined with hunger until these miscreants relent and subject themselves to wage labor or assume responsibility for their own demise.

To deliberately starve people is transparently wrong, appallingly immoral. Within the mythology that is contemporary economics, for them to starve for lack of money can be and is their own fault because they have not found the right place or price at which to sell their labor. That the counterparty to such a transaction exists is, again, simply assumed. But how can someone in desperate straights for lack of money cause another person to need the desperate to do something? And even if that, then with what bargaining power could they claim some surplus beyond slave survival? The essence of money, the asymmetry of all credit relationships, IS one of POWER, the history of Capitalism is the history of pretending that this form of POWER is natural and Capitalists are simply doing the work of Nature, even as they despoil Nature itself. It's transparent bunkum when you think about it, and yet here we are with a true global system wedded to this obvious fraud even in the face of of mass poverty and the obliteration of our supporting ecosystems.

Contemporary "economics" has become an increasingly elaborate, and increasingly transparent, fiction that is supposed to somehow tell me "technocratically", without recourse to politics, how to be in the world and how the world should be. The notion of "free markets" is a McGuffin used since Thatcher and Reagan to drive the plot of "economics" away from the centrality of greed to Capitalism. It changes the subject by pretending a fictitious "self regulating" phenomenon which has some mystical and benevolent agency will "naturally" mediate the creation and exchange of goods and services for the betterment of everyone and everything so long as this phenomenon is unencumbered by "politics".  It is a holy ghost that makes a virtue of and naturalizes greed. This is how economists can talk about a "natural" rate of unemployment or "natural rate of inflation. When I need a benevolent God, I'll go to church, not MIT or The University of Chicago where they teach this bullshit pietism. When my needs need to be met, I need money and these postmodern bullshit mythologists tell me I must sell my labor to get it while I have no power over who may or may not want that labor, as if my labor had a social power behind it equal to that of the State enforced credit relationship we call money. They want me to have faith that if "the market" doesn't want to pay me enough to exist, this is a somehow "natural", my burden, like Job's to bear in devotion, as their Inamorata tests me.

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