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Jose Luis Coraggio: Another Economy is Happening |
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Page 8 of 27
Let me now return from this slight digression about holism to the theme of capital and labor. But perhaps it was not a digression at all, since in the complex socioeconomic wholes that we are talking about, the relationship of capital to labor is a central feature of the way the parts relate to the whole, as the steel framework is a central feature of the way the parts relate to the whole in a large building. “We require…” Coraggio writes, “alternative forms of social thinking that make labor and not capital the central category of economic life.” (20) We must challenge the dominant paradigm in which, “labor is seen as a cost and not as the form of realization of the human person and of social integration.” (21) Coraggio often calls his proposals an economy of labor. (22) The list above of twenty-six items may at first seem disparate, but it is a coherent list when viewed with Coraggio’s criterion for distinguishing a people’s economy from an entrepreneurial economy. It is a list of items where labor is the central resource, and the central objective is making a living. A different list of items (which would include some of the same items looked at in a different way) would catalogue the assets of an entrepreneurial economy, where capital is the central resource and the central objective is investing money to make more money. (23)
As Coraggio construes the world, the taxi driver who owns her or his own taxi is more like a worker with a tool than like an investor with a portfolio. The hole in the wall family laundry is not miniature capitalism. It is the struggle of a family to get by. The basic unit of the people’s economy is not the individual, but the family, the household, also called the domestic unit. (24) The domestic unit’s main resource is labor, which it employs to preserve and enhance the life of its members. Mainstream economics leads to policies designed to promote, above all things, creating a favorable climate for investment. A business-friendly environment is complemented on “the social side” with relief carefully prioritized to reach only the poorest of the poor, and often targeted specifically to improve a nation’s score on the indicators that make up the human development index published annually by the United Nations. Coraggio’s socioeconomics (he denies that there is such a thing as economics separate from the other social sciences) leads to policies designed to empower majorities. It leads to a people’s social movement in which the industrial worker, people who are chronically unemployed, the taxi driver who owns a taxi, the family that owns a house, the farmer who owns a little land and works it, etc. all think of themselves as on the same side --on the side of those whose main resource is labor, and whose economic activity has as its objective making a living. (25)
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