Friday, November 9, 2007

Revised Introduction: The Invisible Handcuffs

I very much appreciated the comments from my first posting of the introduction. Please indulge me for posting another version. I have changed it radically, especially after the first paragaphs. Any more comments would be appreciated:

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism:

How Market Control Undermines the Economy by Stunting Workers

Setting the Stage

The Invisible Handcuffs makes the case that the modern economy has matured to the point where markets do not and cannot harness anything near the full productive potential of society; and even more seriously, that markets significantly undermine economic performance. Even though purely monetary incentives may appear to work effectively when one takes a narrow view of their operation, from a larger perspective, the invisible hand turns out to be akin to invisible handcuffs for the economy, as well as for society as a whole.



Other books address the cultural, social, and ethical shortcomings of markets. But The Invisible Handcuffs is unique because it will emphasize the way that markets affect people in their lives as workers in contrast to the usual perspective that judges an economy by how well it serves people as consumers.

Certainly, the current U.S. economy falls short on a maddening array of counts. Here is the most powerful economy in the world, yet it seems powerless to meet the most pressing needs of society. The list of pervasive problems includes excessive poverty, inadequate health care, environmental damage, pervasive toxins, just to name a few. Although the United States policymakers pay insufficient attention to such problems in order to nurture the market, the relative economic strength of its economy still seems to be eroding.

The contradictory nature of the U.S. economy raises a host of relatively obvious consumer oriented questions: Surely, an economy with a communication system that would have been unimaginable only a few years earlier should be able to foster a sense of community or at least create a satisfying culture. Why has a widening circle of poverty begun to engulf more and more people, even after the pace of technological change began to accelerate in the late twentieth century?

Although the majority of the population may have access to considerable material goods, the current economic system fails miserably in creating a satisfying quality of life. For example, social scientists have found that happiness in the United States has not increased since the 1950s, despite enormous economic growth (Layard 2005, p. 29).

This book will argue that the producer oriented perspective suggests promising answers to such problems. For example, a major cause of the lack of satisfaction is an inattention to the quality of people's working lives. Most of all, The Invisible Handcuffs emphasizes that even though the rationale of the market system is to create an efficient economy, market control undermines the economy by stunting workers and ignoring their potential.

The stakes are far higher than just the ability to supply consumers with more commodities the purported purpose of the economy. At a time when the world faces difficult threats, such as global warming and scarcity of vital materials including water and petroleum society cannot afford to waste a resource as valuable as human potential. In this sense, the importance of looking at the economy from the perspective of workers becomes undeniable.

Overview

The first chapter begins with the theological defense of markets, by people as far apart in time and in stature as Edmund Burke and George W. Bush. According to such people market relations ensure not only efficiency, but higher qualities, such as freedom and justice. Questioning markets become akin to blasphemy. The Invisible Handcuffs suggests that a more appropriate theology of markets might come from Greek mythology in particular, the legend of the sadistic Procrustus, whose story is introduced in this chapter.

The second chapter introduces the subject of labor, both direct discipline in the workplace and macroeconomic discipline by creating unemployment, what Alan Greenspan referred to as the traumatization of labor. Ironically, policy makers pretend that all other objectives whether higher wages, better working conditions, environmental protections, or the quality of life must give way to the creation of jobs, at the same time as the maintenance of unemployment is necessary to sustain labor discipline. The two concluding sections of the chapter offer quantitative estimates of some of the human and economic costs of labor discipline and a brief discussion of the path that led economists to adopt the narrow perspective that makes them uncritical of the present form of labor discipline.

The third chapter turns to the motives for why economic theory pays no attention to working conditions. Instead, work becomes nothing more than the absence of leisure. In addition, relations between workers disappear from consideration in economic theory. Perhaps, the greatest defect of all is the reduction of workers into a factor of production, comparable to coal or steel.

Even when economists treat workers' skills, they do so by conceptualizing abilities as "human capital." This perspective is especially destructive because it blocks economists (and those whose vision is shaped by economists) from seeing people as anything more than a commodity.

The fourth chapter discusses what policy based on the narrow market perspective means for everyday life, including the amount of time that jobs consume as well as the extension of controls on people's behavior outside of the workplace. At the same time, these controls interfere with people's opportunity to improve their own capacities.

The fifth chapter briefly extends the subjects treated earlier to the international economy.

The sixth chapter puts the subject in historical perspective by looking back at the economic perspective bequeathed by Adam Smith. The chapter emphasizes Smith as a harsh disciplinarian. It shows how Smith eliminated any discussion of modern industry in order to allow him to offer a vision of freedom and liberty.

Smith realized that the harmonious society he advocated depended upon a prior coercion of labor to accept the discipline of the workplace. At that time, violent measures were often required to leave people with no option but to accept the new conditions of wage labor. Even after people became corralled into wage labor, Smith realized that controls had to go deeper into people's lives, including state regulation of religion. In short, for all his positive rhetoric about freedom, Smith's concern was to control people in order to make them obedient workers.

The seventh chapter analyzes the consequences of Smith's work. It describes how later economists simplified Smith's writings and removed its uncomfortable ideological implications. The result was an effective, but unrealistic, propagandistic shell.

The eighth chapter looks at the concept of the Gross Domestic Product, a seemingly straightforward measure of the success of an economy. The chapter reviews the evolution of this highly political concept, showing how, just like with Adam Smith's theory, the Gross Domestic Product focused on convenient matters that put the market in the best possible light.

The chapter ends by contrasting the Gross Domestic Product with the results of a recent field of "happiness studies," in which social scientists, including economists, recognize the disconnect between the Gross Domestic Product and a satisfying quality of life.

Chapter 9 surveys some of the innumerable ways in which capitalism even fails in its narrowly conceived objective of increasing the Gross Domestic Product. In keeping with the theme of this book, this chapter only looks at ways in which the control of labor is self defeating. For example, unwieldy bureaucracies driven by purely financial motives are incapable of efficiently organizing and inspiring people.

These shortcomings fall into two classes. In the first one, efforts to control labor are wasteful, even though they seem necessary given the present capitalist system. The more interesting second class emphasizes the way that the present this organization of production stunts workers potential.

The final chapter offers some hints about the future possibilities of people working together to create a better life.




9 comments:

Robert D Feinman said...

I think you should leave the introduction alone at present. You have a nice outline, but as you complete the book you may find yourself going off in unplanned directions.

Once you have completed the rest of the book go back and reconcile the book and the introduction.

You certainly have set yourself an ambitious task...

Michael Perelman said...

Thank you very much. The book is more or less complete. All that is left is cleaning up the style & adding a few flourishes.

Myrtle Blackwood said...

At the risk of being perceived to be annoying I offer some comments:

The creation of the producer-consumer dichotomy is one of the problems with market theory. People are more than either. The latest example - Aerial spraying for apple moth over Californian towns. No compensation or consideration partially due to lack of either status for the inhabitants below.
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_7422751?nclick_check=1

Economic strength relies on their being adequate health care, a clean environment, broadly-based prosperity and the meeting of social needs in general. Yet the economy as it operates destroys all of these things.

What is 'market control'?

Who decided that the purpose of an economy was to supply consumers with commodities?

What is 'labor discipline'?

A rephrasing:
The greatest defect of our economic system is the reduction of people to either factors of production or consumers and all else to commodities.

I don't see policy based on a narrow market perspective. The policy veers away from this whenever market policy is to the detriment of powerful vested interests and where there is a perceived threat of losing power.

Who decided that the aim of capitalism was to increase GDP? I perceive that the aim was, like other political systems, to support the interests of those in power.

I would rephrase the last line in the 2nd last paragraph to:
"the way that the present organisation of production AND SOCIETY stunts HUMAN potential."

This would shift the focus away from workers per se.

Why do 'workers' deserve so much focus?

Michael Perelman said...

Brenda, thanks. You have given me some very good ideas.

Anonymous said...

Brenda,

'Why do workers deserve so much focus...'

Which class produces; which class appropriates..

Is the appropriation through extra-economic or economic means... Each type has a distinct logic and history, each part of different sets of social relations of production and reproduction,,,no necessary brite line border but, depending on time and location, even centuries of transitional yet asymmetric coexistence...

Which class is potentially the most revolutionary...

“Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.” (Thomas More, 16th c.)

“thus were the agricultural people, firstly forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.” (Marx)

'My land is addicted to fertilizer that I can no longer afford'. (Mayan peasant turned capitalist farmer)

Myrtle Blackwood said...

'Why do workers deserve so much focus...'
Juan: Which class produces; which class appropriates.

They ALL do.

The workers I know would love to be capitalists. This strong feeling occurs even when many workers are aware that they are being subject to 'appropriation' themselves.

Women, slaves and forests all provided ample opportunities for the appropriated to appropriate.

Anonymous said...

I'm not talking of feelings.
To say that they all do is ahistoric, misses who in fact does, the mean through which this is accomplished and at the same time conflates necessary with productive until class structure and exploitation have effectively been pretended away into a mythological classless capitalism.

You had also asked 'who decided that the aim of capitalism was to increase GDP?'

Which is at the same time to ask what is capitalism, how did it come into existence, neither of which can be understood without consideration of those social relations of production/reproduction which characterize it, without which it would not exist, and have become so internalized as to never be questioned and, through neoclassical ideology of individual preferences, led straight into such fallacious notions as 'consumer' and market uber alles, as though that being marketed never required production, as though the system is so purely one-sided as to not even be a system.

Myrtle Blackwood said...

Juan said: "To say that they all do [appropriate] is ahistoric, misses who in fact does, the mean through which this is accomplished and at the same time conflates necessary with productive until class structure and exploitation have effectively been pretended away into a mythological classless capitalism..."

I'm don't know what you mean by the term 'ahistoric'.

Let me clarify how I see the capitalist system as operating. Workers appropriate. So does every other class. The appropriation in capitalism varies by degree, not by who does it. The workers are not at the bottom of the human social ladder. Those that can't work (nor be capitalists) are.

Capitalism is an economic and social system based on unequal exchange and, as you say, one that involves ongoing expansion and deepening of exchange relations and the use of money. Thus the economy relies on an ever-deepening level of exploitation that ultimately ends in the failure of nature and man - the very foundation that supports capitalism - to reproduce.

In regard to: "..social relations of production/reproduction which characterize it [capitalism], without which it would not exist, and have become so internalized as to never be questioned and, through neoclassical ideology of individual preferences...

Yes, I think that capitalism has become 'internalised' and that most people are not fully aware of their position in the hierarchy of this system of exploitation.

I see that Government, industry and the media play a large part in ensuring that this low level of awareness amongst the masses continues.

As capitalism has deepened and expanded so has the 'spin', the advertising industry, the propaganda, the flak campaigns, the distortion of educational systems.

Anonymous said...

'ahistoric' means without or not-history, or, relating to the mentioned internalization, beliefs that capitalism has always existed, will always exist, that it's particular relations are not but general through all of history.

For example, my use of the term 'appropriate' can be considered ahistoric since we, people, have always appropriated from nature, even if merely reaching to pick a fruit or scavenge after a large carnivore's kill. From this, it's an easy step to 'production-in-general' or a substituting of the the general 'production' for specifically capitalist production, transforming the latter into an ahistoric history-less 'always been', by extension 'always will be' -- and a type of 'why fight it' ideology that might even justify and be justified by some kinds of bourgeois economics and other social sciences.

So, I was either being too 'cute' or too dumb with my use of the word 'appropriate' when exploit would have been better, but even this is subject to the same generalization.

The Thomas More quote above had to do with creation of the English working class which, while it had begun earlier, became more evident as formerly self-subsisting peasants were forced from their means to subsist, forced off the land in favor of sheep and their wool. 'Sheep eat people'?

No. the developing class of capitalists did. The two sides went, unevenly, hand in hand but only one had nothing to sell but its labor power which was becoming a commodity, only one, through the sale of its labor power was/is able to produce more value for the purchasers than the cost of its reproduction, a surplus value without which the purchaser of that labor power, the developing capitalist class could not turn a profit other than within the processes of circulation, lending and trade, both of which have most to do with distributions/redistributions than production. Both of which were/are, though, as part of the development and generalizing of commodity relations and market, absolutely necessary to the rise of a revolutionary class of capitalists able to stand against, finally overthrow, the old feudal nobilities and the social relations which they helped personify.

One social political system based in production for use and extra-economic coercion died, another with its base in private property, a class with nothing other than its labor power to sell, another class dependent on the purchase of that particular commodity came to life, took state power, became dominant. One class whose 'Moses and prophets' was/is 'accumulate, accumulate, accumulate', spread its religion over the planet. But a religion which, in order to survive, has no option but to create its own negation as it disposses more than its own become decrepit expansion can absorb, as it unconsciously must destroy the very working class it depends on for both creation of surplus value and realisation of this as profit. Reaching the end of its rope, it turns to finance and retrogresses...but its gravediggers have yet to attain sufficient consciousness and organization. Almost a liminal period from which either more barbarism or socialism.

Very long winded way of saying that capitalism is not only to do do with unequal exchange since from my perspective, that process has most to do with looting, resistribution, circulation and pays insufficient attention to how what is looted and redistributed was/is produced, how surplus is appropriated and who creates it.