Howard Richards, Professor of Peace and Global Studies - Rosario: Chapter One: Defining the Question

                                            Chapter One

                                       Defining the Question

          I hope that whoever reads this will send me an e-mail message. ().   I am not comfortable with one-way communication. Plato was not either. He had his spokesperson Socrates say:

          “You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive; but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you the same thing for ever.” (Plato, 1952, p. 158 [S 275 D])

          If you were here, instead of being an absent person somewhere who picks up a book I wrote, we could have a conversation. You would say something. That would give me a clue how to begin to introduce my subject. You would feel free to ask me questions, or to make comments I could reply to.   We could drink coffee or tea. If we were in Argentina, we could pass around a flagon of mate and sip it through a bombilla. But since you are not here, I have to write for a “kind of reader” who is not any reader in particular. Whatever I say, I feel guilty because you cannot say anything back. I am like a talking head talking at you from a television set, who goes on and on sending you messages to which you cannot reply.

          Since you are not here, and since I have not yet met you in cyberspace either, I shall resort to the stratagem of imagining a dialogue in which a typical reader (Could that be you?) asks typical questions.

Reader: What is this book about?

Writer:   Oh my! I was hoping you would not ask that.

Reader: Don’t be ridiculous! You are the writer. I am just a dummy reader who says whatever you want me to say. You must know what the book is about. You wrote it.

Writer: You make it sound easier than it is. I have to decide what to say first. I have to make a meaningful connection with your mind. It will not do simply to label the subject of the book by putting it in a category everybody knows from the media and from textbooks. I would not have written the book at all if I did not think it had something new to say.

Reader: If I am making telling what the book is about sound easier than it is, then you, on the contrary, are putting on the air of a self-identified genius overly impressed with his private thoughts. You imagine that they are so brilliant that nobody else can understand them. Just give me a brief summary. If you can’t summarize what your book is about, then I strongly suspect that contrary to your own high opinion of yourself you have in fact nothing to say.

Writer: I can’t! I can’t!

Reader:   Normally I would say that was your last chance and you blew it. Any other reader would put your book down at this point. But since I am just a dummy slave forced to say whatever you want me to say, I will give you another chance. Let me ask the questions. Just calm down and give me straight answers. I will start with an easy question. Where is Rosario?

Writer: I can give you a straight answer but I have trouble with the question.

Reader: Give me the straight answer first.

Writer: It is in Argentina. It is located about 200 kilometers northwest of Buenos Aires on the banks of the Parana River. It is the principal city of the Province of Santa Fe. I like to think of it as the City of the Rosary in the Province of the Holy Faith.

Reader: Is that because you are a Roman Catholic?

Writer: Yes. So are you, in my opinion.

Reader: I don’t think so. I would never dream of associating myself with such a toxic organization, the organized essence of all that is worst in western civilization, hierarchy, sexism, pederasty, systematic lying, homophobia, paranoid delusion, to name a few, certainly not in Argentina, a country where church supported state terror has been carried to lengths never seen before in any country on earth. During “The Process” of 1976-82, in which 30,000 people disappeared, most of them killed after excruciating and unspeakable torture. The populace lived in fear, never knowing who would disappear next. The Roman Catholic Church was a cornerstone of the reign of terror, a reign of terror carried out by the army not against foreign enemies but against its own people, in the name of “defending western Christian civilization,” and supported by the church to such an extent that some of the torture chambers were even located on church property.

Writer: It is not easy to acknowledge and to accept responsibility as a human being for history as it has happened. But intellectual honesty, or at least the nearest approach to intellectual honesty I have so far been able to muster, compels us to agree with Immanuel Wallerstein that for the past several centuries the history that has been happening has been that of the global economy. The global economy is an expansion of the European world system. Europe is the new name for what was called earlier (and for good reasons) Christendom. I mean Christendom before the protestant reformation and before the rise of secularism.

Reader: So, do you mean that this picturesque disaster, this leftover from humanity’s ignorant yesterdays, which still manages to attract millions of people to mass every Sunday, is the treasurer of a heritage that constitutes the historical core of the culture we are all a part of?

Writer: I agree with Ludwig Wittgenstein, that in the end we are thinking and acting within a “form of life.” There is no alternative to accepting it, once one becomes sufficiently aware of what culture has constituted the generalized other through which society gave one a self. In terms used by Roland Barthes in his essay, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, we have no place to stand outside our tradition upon which to base ourselves in criticizing our tradition.

Reader:   I find it strange that Wallerstein’s history of the global economy leads you to understand the origins and contradictions and the contemporary crises of the world we live in as understandable only in Durkheimian terms, that is to say, as current developments within a culture that began its historical career in “elementary forms of religious life.” Wallerstein, like Fernand Braudel and the annales historians, and like Samir Amin in his Accumulation on a World Scale, and like Ellen Woods in her recent book Empire of Capital, account for today’s global system as the outcome of a quite secular process, namely the process of capital accumulation, a process to which other writers, such as Anthony Giddens in his Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, insist on adding other important explanatory categories, which they say are just as important as capital accumulation, such as the struggle for political power. Do you mean to say that the very logic of capital accumulation, and the very logic of political power struggle, are themselves variations on religious themes?

Writer: Precisely. And I would add, citing Thomas Berry, that all great historical changes take place at a religious level, because no other level is deep enough.

Reader: when you and Thomas Berry talk about a “religious level” you are not talking just about people who gather in churches, dance there, sing there, and tell stories there about divine beings. You are also talking about people whose stance at a religious level is that they do not practice religion. At a “religious level,” they define themselves as atheists or as agnostics.

Writer: Or, more importantly, they define themselves as economists.

Reader: You say that because you think of economists as the metaphysicians of the present age.

Writer: Precisely.

Reader: If you think we are all today living in an expanded Europe, whose core religious form is Roman Catholicism, why are you not Jewish, since the historical forms of Jewish culture, are, after all, where the so-called West began? Or why not be Abrahamic, counting the Christian, Judaic, and Muslim faiths as all variants of the same tradition. Or why do you not follow Aldous Huxley or Mahatma Gandhi in seeing all religions as one at the core, as branches of a single tree, and consequently all humanity as one at the core?

Writer:   Because of a fateful event which humanity has not, in my opinion, sufficiently understood, and from which it has not yet recovered, which was the conversion of Constantine, and the consequent conversion of Christianity, which until then had been a minority sect, into the official religion of the Roman Empire. Roman Christianity became a religion of empire. It became the cultural matrix of the processes through which the categories of Roman Law, most importantly property law and contract law, were imposed by violence on the rest of the world. The British Empire, with its Common Law and its protestant religion, can be heard as playing variations on themes from the continent.

Reader: Having read some of your other works, I know that you, not unlike Karl Marx; and not unlike Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and the Austrian School; and not unlike Adam Smith himself, regard the laws governing commerce as the framework constituting the premises of the metaphysics of modernity, i.e. of economics.

Writer:   The reason why I have trouble with the question, “Where is Rosario?” is that it raises the question of globalization. At this point in history, there is no place to go. I mean no place to go where you can be somewhere else, separated from where you were before you went to your new location. Every place is inside the global economy. Every place is inside the global spectacle. The people in Rosario, perhaps even more than people in most other cities, are aware that they live in a globalized world. Check out for example the website www.rosariorock.com if you want to see how youth culture there is making contributions that are part and parcel of global youth culture. People in Rosario know they are not in the United States, although everybody either has been there or at least has a close friend or relative who has been there or is there now. They know they are not in the European Union, but about half of them carry Italian passports. They have a right to Italian passports because of ancestors who came to Argentina from Italy and because both countries allow this kind of dual nationality. They know they are not at Paris or at Harvard, but in the bookstores and in the universities people are reading the same books they would be reading if they were in Paris or at Harvard. The activists in the barrios read Hardt and Negri, or whatever the dernier cri among activist intellectuals worldwide may be at any given time. They know they are not in China, but when they look out the windows of their high rises they see boats chugging down the Parana River laden with soybeans going to China, and, if they are poor, they collect a 150 peso a month subsidy from the federal government in return for community service, which is mainly paid for by taxes levied on exports, most importantly soybeans, going to world markets, most importantly to China. So I do not want to rest content with the “straight” answer that Rosario is northwest of Buenos Aires on the Parana River without adding that Rosario is connected with everyplace else.

Reader: Here is another easy question. How many people live in Rosario?

Writer: About 37 million people live in Argentina, of whom about a third live in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. About a million live in Rosario. 909,397 according to the census of 2001. The population is unusually stable for a Latin American city, having been 908,875 in the census of 1991. The reason for the stability is de-industrialization. Most Latin American cities are growing because of the vegetative growth of the population and because of flight to the cities due to the mechanization of agribusiness in the countryside. Rosario, like Chicago to which it is sometimes compared, is an industrial city that lost most of its industries in the 1980s and 1990s. For analytic purposes it is often better not to think of Rosario alone, but to think of the industrial, or ex-industrial, core of Argentina, stretching south of Rosario to San Nicolas in the northern part of the Province of Buenos Aires, and stretching north of Rosario almost to the city of Santa Fe. That city is the capital city of the Province of the same name. The capital is smaller than the metropolis, as Springfield, the capital of Illinois, is smaller than Chicago is. Rosario proper is the center and heart of what used to be Argentina’s industrial belt.

Reader: And you find this southern hemisphere rust belt fascinating.

Writer: You too will find it fascinating when you learn about innovative social practices there that may demonstrate, with facts, keys to a better life for you, your children, and your grandchildren.

Reader: I am not comfortable with this conversation. I feel that you are pushing my mind in a direction it does not necessarily want to go. First you tell me that my culture has been shaped –whether or want it to have been shaped or not—by a religious organization I detest. Now you tell me that to learn how to make a better life for everybody I should study a city that interests you. Why is your opinion so important that you should push it on me? Don’t tell me it is for my own good.

Writer: I want to say three things in reply. I want to believe that the three things do not contradict each other, but I must admit that even if they are not flatly contradictory they are hard to reconcile.

Reader: What is the first?

Writer: First, I agree with what I think you are saying, which is that your opinion is as good as mine is. I have no right to push you to think as I do, even if I am convinced that it would be for your own good. It is a premise of democracy, which I agree with, that major public choices should not be made by experts, but through a series of deliberative and participatory processes that give voice, vote, and weight to each person.

Reader: What is the second?

Writer: I am acutely conscious that whatever I say I may be wrong. Even if the idea I have in my own mind corresponds to the facts, I may be objectively wrong because I fail to communicate successfully. Then what other people understand me to be saying does not correspond to the facts. These are two reasons why I often express myself in dialogues, where my ideas are examined by other voices. Another approach is to discuss the same idea over and over from different points of view, as Joanna Swanger and I did in our book on Gandhi. I also use personal letters, where I try to make clear that what is being said comes from someone’s point of view. It is not the voice of Science, or the voice of Scholarship. It is not the joke already told that C.S. Lewis writes of, intimated to be known to everyone except the novice reader. It is not the voice of the Therapeutic Mask behind which the therapist pretends to know everything.

Reader: What is the third?

Writer: I am a critical realist. I agree with Roy Bhaskar’s criticisms of postmodernism. I agree with Bhaskar that there is a physical reality and that science learns about it. Not all realities are socially constructed. Even the realities that are socially constructed have causal powers. There are facts to be known about them too. In particular, one of the facts to be known is that our global economy is on a collision course with physical reality. There is no way the biosphere can withstand another century or two of the continuation of humanity’s presently dominant institutional arrangements.

Reader: The point where I felt you were getting pushy was when you told me that you were going to tell me things I should know to get a better life for me, my children, and my grandchildren. It felt like a threat. The implication was that if I do not listen to you then I will have a worse life, and inflict a worse life on my children and grandchildren.

Writer: It was more harsh than what I wanted to say. Or at least more harsh than what I wanted to want to say. What I want to want to do is to appeal to people as moral agents, as good citizens. I want to appeal to people’s sense of what is right for the good of the whole. I believe that people do have ethical sense. But sometimes I get tired and exasperated. I feel that everyone is ignoring me in spite of my best efforts. Then I try to get attention by appealing to self-interest. I admit that this may feel like a threat.

Reader: I have read about the various mathematical models that try to predict the human future, the Club of Rome Report, the Mesarovic and Pestel model, the Meadows and Meadows models. They all project that pollution, population growth, and resource exhaustion will cause global systemic collapse in the next century. Such projections were made even before India and China launched themselves full tilt into automobiles for large and growing middle classes, with all that that implies. The specific predictions of the ecological pessimists have, on the whole, turned out to be wrong. Peak oil has not come as soon as they expected. Biofuel and atomic energy may replace fossil fuel more than they expected. The present population of the earth is greater than experts once thought possible, certainly greater than Malthus thought possible. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that the philosophy of the pessimists is right. A few centuries are nothing in geologic time. It is not long in the history of the human species. The general trend is that homo sapiens sapiens is an animal destroying its habitat, the planet earth. This is true whatever the fate of particular predictions made by particular scientists may be.

Writer: Yes. That is why I said the biosphere cannot withstand another century or two of our present global economy without specifying dates.

Reader: But why Rosario? If the question to be answered is how to achieve a sustainable human relationship to mother earth and to the living forms that share the planet with us, then why not study Curitiba, Brazil, or, Oslo, Norway, or some other city notable for its ecological progress?

Writer: The reason Rosario is a place for answering the key question how to get off the path to ecological catastrophe follows from an analysis of why the global economy that we are all a part of is presently on such a path.

Reader: What is your analysis of the reasons why the economy is evolving the way it is evolving, toward a collision with physical reality?

Writer: My analysis does not add much to the well-known ones of Roger Bartra, Pierre Bourdieu, Nestor Garcia Canclini, David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Ellen Meiksins Wood.

Reader: You do not mention any ecologists. I take it that your view is that the main reason why the rainforest is being logged, the main reason why the hole in the ozone layer is widening, the main reason for global warming, and so on, is not that people do not understand nature well enough, and not that human values are self-centered instead of earth-centered, but rather that the economy is driving the destruction of the biosphere.

Writer: Let me read a quote in which Cecilia Flachsland summarizes some views of Pierre Bourdieu.         “In modern societies life is reproduced in fields (the economic, the scientific, the political, the artistic, the religious, sports, fashion, etc.) that do not have a single logic, nor a central conflict, nor an authority that unifies them. They are a set of spheres of play, relatively autonomous, which cannot be reduced to a single logic (although in more than one passage Bourdieu recognizes the primacy of the logic of accumulation of capital).” (Flachsland 2003, p.48)

Reader: Why did you read that quote?

Writer: First because I wanted to distance myself from the idea that there is some single driving logic of the economy which is inevitably driving humanity toward destruction. Second because I wanted to identify myself with Bourdieu’s idea that although there are a number of logics determining the current course of human history, the logic of accumulation of capital is an especially important one. Without being the base, compared to which everything else is superstructure, it is very important. Third, because I want to say that this major force which guides the reproduction of human life on this planet at this time drives not only the destruction of the biosphere, but also just about everything that is bad and just about everything that is good. Conservatives hail it as the mainspring of human progress. Radicals criticize it as a source of systemic imperatives that make peace and social justice as well as ecological sustainability impossible. I want to move our dialogue from the particular issue of how to get humanity off a collision course with physical reality, to the more general issue how to bring history under greater and more ethical human control, for the sake of achieving any desirable goal whatever.

Reader: Tell me more about the idea of “systemic imperative.”
Writer: I got the idea from Ellen Wood. She cites a number of systemic imperatives: the imperative of competitiveness, the imperative of productivity, the imperative to maximize profits, the imperative to lower the costs of production. They can be summarized as the imperative to accumulate capital.

Reader: I think that answers the next question I was going to ask, which was to ask you to explain the logic of capital accumulation. It must be the rational pattern, the explanatory pattern, inherent in a world where the accumulation of capital is commanded by the dominant institutions.

Writer: In case the concept of systemic imperative is not quite clear, let me approach it from another direction, that of the concept of “regime of accumulation” employed by the French school of “regulationist” economists. Let me start by using a simplified version a diagram Marx employs in the second volume of Capital:

               M           →       C       …..P……       C’     →         M’

Marx schematizes production under capitalism as starting with money, M. With money the investors or their agents buy commodities C. Significant among the commodities is a peculiar commodity, labor-power, which is bought by paying wages to workers. Other commodities purchased include raw materials and whatever else it takes to produce. The workers then get to work, engaging in the productive process, which results in more commodities C’.    The commodities C’ are worth more than the commodities C. If it were not so, it would have been an irrational investment, and the investors would not normally have made it. C’ is then sold for M’. The point and purpose of the process is that M’ is greater than M. More money comes out than goes in. In other words, capital is accumulated. If capital is not accumulated, the process stops. There is no work for the workers, nothing produced, and, by the way, looking at the matter from the government’s point of view, nothing to tax.

The concept of “regime of accumulation” starts from the premise that whatever else a capitalist society does, it must accumulate capital. If it does not do that, then it cannot do anything else. Consequently, there must be a legal system, a political order, a culture, and whatever else it takes to keep capital accumulation going. A set of institutions that achieves that objective is a “regime of accumulation.” A number of different regimes are possible. What they all have in common is that they establish the conditions necessary for capital accumulation.

We arrive again at a concept of systemic imperative. The system commands that capital must be accumulated, one way or another. The French regulationist concept of imperative is a little different from Ellen Woods’ concept, in that she refers to certain constant requirements: competitiveness, productivity, keeping costs down, maximizing profits. The French concept puts the emphasis on requirements that can vary; for example, at a certain point in history television becomes part of a regime of accumulation that creates a mass consumer culture. Without television a particular regime of accumulation will not work, even though other regimes of accumulation, which do not require television could exist and have existed.

Reader: The logic of accumulation appears to be a flexible concept, but also one with certain constant concepts. It always refers to a rationality that guides human conduct to produce goods and services to sell in markets at a profit. And this happens over and over again as the profits from one cycle get reinvested in new production cycles.

Writer:   Given that it is the main logic, or, otherwise put, the main dynamic, of the global economy we live in, its imperatives are constraints limiting and driving public choices in general, with respect to the environment, or any other issue.

Reader: Is this why you are brave enough to talk about “the question” as if there could be one key question even in this post modern age when critics are quick to point the finger of “totalizing” and “essentializing” at anybody who makes a general statement.

Writer: Yes. Since there is one main logic, one main dynamic, a question about it could stand out among the infinitely many questions that might be asked, as an especially key question, one that could unlock many doors.

Reader: We were saying earlier that ecology might be regarded as primary. One could say that a priority question is the question whether the human species will destroy the biosphere. It might be said to be the question that should be asked first because without its habitat the species cannot survive. If it cannot survive it cannot do anything else.

Writer: Arguably a priority question, but not a key question. It has all the seriousness of a doomsday prophecy, but it is not a key question. It remains a question of fact. Humanity will either destroy the environment that sustains it or it will not. A key question opens doors. A key question would have an answer that would specify how to turn the economic system around so that homo sapiens sapiens could live in a sustainable relationship to its habitat. A “key” answer shows “how to.”

Reader: I see what you are saying. You are saying that the key to human emancipation is creating operational alternatives to the logic of accumulation. Whatever issue we talk about, ecology or poverty or something else, there is another dimension to the problem. There is a meta-issue. The meta-issue is whether we humans have any choices to make. The meta-issue is whether there is any way to grow rational and ethical institutional arrangements, or whether in each case we must do what the systemic imperatives command us to do. You are saying that if a society did not have to do whatever needs to be done to maintain its competitiveness and to keep investors investing, then it could seriously pursue not just ecological sustainability but also social justice. I see what you are saying, but I do not fully agree with you. I think the so-called systemic imperatives serve the class interests of the ruling class. If I agree with you that the lower and middle classes are trapped by the system, would you agree with me that the upper class ruling elite could change the logic of accumulation if it wanted to, but does not change it because it wants to keep the privileges it enjoys under the status quo?

Writer: No.

Reader: You are being politically naïve. We have seen many cases in recent history when the exploited classes have tried to change the basic rules of modern social institutions, only to be put down by those who benefit from the status quo. The lower classes tried to change the system in Argentina in 1974-76 and in Chile in 1970-73. In both cases, the ruling upper classes called on the military to put them down, and they were put down with unspeakable violence.

Writer: I am looking for a way out of the cycle of limited social progress followed by repression. I believe that to find a way out we need to ask how to modify and supplement the logic of accumulation. In Argentina in 1976 and in Chile in 1973, the short run interests of the upper classes coincided with imposing military rule to impose the conditions required for capital accumulation. But the logic of the system is not identical with class interests. In both cases, the military claimed to be acting in the greater interest of the nation as a whole. In both cases, the military cites as proof of its claim not to be acting in only in the class interest of the upper classes the fact that they instituted economic reforms that drove many businesses to bankruptcy. They opened protected economies to international competition in ways that eliminated a whole class of national entrepreneurs producing for the internal market. They argue that they enforced the laws of the science of economics in ways that benefit the poor as well as the rich. They argue that military intervention was required in 1976 and 1973 because class conflict had brought the economy to a standstill.

Reader:   Nonsense. It may be that capital accumulation had ground to a halt, but it was not because of the systemic imperatives. It was because the USA and the national bourgeoisie deliberately sabotaged the economy to keep the people down. Let us look at what happened in 1972 in Chile. It is true that in that year private investment was zero. But production actually went up in 1972.   It went up because public investment increased to take up the slack. It went up because a redistribution of purchasing power in favor of the people led to increased utilization of existing plant capacity. The reason why the Chilean people were put down with merciless violence is exactly the reason Noam Chomsky gave: the USA and the ruling elites around the world that ally themselves with the USA would not tolerate the threat of a good example.

Writer: It was during 1973 in Chile and during 1976 in Argentina that the logic of accumulation almost completely stopped working. Inflation was out of control at over 300% per year. Even if the military had not intervened, it would have been impossible to continue to violate the systemic imperatives. The populist governments of both countries acknowledged this in their desperate attempts to resuscitate shattered investor confidence.

Reader: You are being ridiculous. You are trying to push a schematic economic determinism when it is obvious that the political logic of a struggle for power drove historical events. Military power was decisive, not economics.

Writer:   Another good example of the interplay between economics and politics is displayed in David Harvey’s analysis of the USA’s global war without end. Harvey finds the neoconservative strategy for a New American Century to be driven both by the current evolutionary state of the logic of accumulation and by the logic of political power, which he calls territorial logic. The governing neconservatives think that the United States needs to control the Middle East’s oil spigot in order to keep power in a world where the USA is no longer competitive with Asia economically.

Reader: Now I feel better, I mean better about our relationship. You are not an economic determinist fundamentalist.

Writer: I believe that loosening the straitjacket of the systemic imperatives is a necessary but not sufficient condition for adjusting culture to physical function.

Reader:   Your view appears to be that all modern societies are more or less dysfunctional, just because they are modern, that is to say just because they are run by what Karl Polanyi called disembedded markets. Besides being dysfunctional, they are homeostatic. They bounce back. They have built-in defense mechanisms. As Charles Lindblom says, markets themselves punish deviations from what markets demand. Modern societies re-establish by hook or by crook the necessary conditions of their continuing dysfunctionality.

Writer: I believe that the most natural and emotionally satisfying way for humans to live is to live as our species lived for several hundred thousand years in the course of its evolution, in extended families and tribal communities. I agree with those who define a community as a human group whose members accept responsibility for each other’s welfare. “Society,” a new concept than “community,” comes from the Latin “socius” which means “partner.” A society, including a nation when a nation is thought of as a society, should be a partnership for the benefit of all its members. It should be thought of as one big family of sisters and brothers and parents and children, or, better, as many little and different families, united in their respect for diversity, with each person in a family and each family embedded in a community, with the exception of people who want to be loners, who should be allowed to be loners if that is what they want. I believe that the evolutionary history of our species teaches that it is possible for people to love and serve one another, as the Bible says we should, especially if we focus on our own families and neighbors, and especially if we have the support of songs and dances and ceremonies that support solidarity.

Reader: Are you talking about a fiesta culture ?

Writer:   It works in Mexico, which has one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, in spite of its poverty. Studies show that Mexicans even recover better after surgery because their relatives come and sit around their hospital beds with them.

Reader: I take it that you are not advocating that everybody be Mexican, or even that everything about being Mexican is good. If I understand you, your point is that what ought to be done is whatever works, and that institutions that reflect human nature as it has developed over several hundred thousands of years are especially likely to work.

Writer: Yes. What ought to be done is whatever assures that everyone has food, health care when needed, housing, raiment, exercise, companionship, dignity, clean air to breathe, and clean water to drink; and that everyone is having fun. I also happen to think that people are happiest when there are lots of trees, gardens, parks, pets, and other natural and quasi-natural reminders of our hunter-gatherer past, but I do not advocate forcing sharing the environment with plants and animals on communities that prefer concrete.

Reader: Pro-capitalist theoreticians make the opposite argument. They say that over several hundred thousand years, people have been self-interested, except for the narrow circle of their own kith and kin, and therefore what they call rational economic behavior is the only kind of behavior that is reliable enough to be the basis of a durable society.

Writer: Adam Smith had a good point when he said benevolence is weak and self-interest is strong, and therefore he relies more on his baker’s self-interest than on his benevolence to get his daily bread. But he both overstated it and drew the wrong conclusion. He overstated it because a thoroughly selfish baker, or cartel of bakers, would find it in his or their interest to bring Adam Smith to the brink of starvation in order to force him to pay more for bread. Adam Smith relearned in his dotage what he knew in his infancy, but somehow forgot in middle age, that real security comes from bonds of human solidarity and not from money in one’s pocket. Smith partly deals with the problem of the baker serving his self-interest by charging whatever he can force the consumer to pay. He deals with it by opposing monopolies. He requires competition among bakers to keep them from gouging consumers. But this partial dealing with the problem draws the wrong conclusion from the premises. The right conclusion, the more consistent conclusion, is that ensuring competition is just one example, just one species of a genus, illustrating a general principle. The principle of the right conclusion is that to whatever extent benevolence is weak and self-interest is strong, then institutional arrangements should be intelligently designed so that self-interest moves people to serve one another as if they loved each other.

Reader: You are leaving whatever that extent may be as an open question. I take it to be a question whose empirical answer depends on how much social capital any given society possesses.

Writer: And thanks to the research work of contemporary developmental psychologists, the answer to that open question is a somewhat movable parameter. Now there is a whole chapter of science, with professional journals and authorized experts, which shows how education can raise the general level of moral judgment and ethical conduct in a population.

Reader:   Would you define a functional society as one organized to meet everybody’s needs in harmony with the environment?

Writer: Yes. And I would add that as long as the logic of accumulation sums up the dominant paradigm societies will never be functional. The reason is simple: Meeting needs is not the purpose of that logic. The purpose is to turn money into more money.

Reader: I am somewhat troubled because you seem to be advocating a nostalgic return to a past remembered as better than it really was, and a privating and localizing withdrawal from the system into the comfort of one’s own family and neighborhood. You seem to be forgetting the great global structural forces that brought us permanent war, the marginalization of whole populations such as those of America’s inner cities and almost the whole continent of Africa, and the burning of the rainforest for profit.

Writer: You are right to recall that collective action is needed to defend people who as individuals are helpless victims of economic forces, and to make it possible to implement rational public policies. But remember what kind of collective action is needed. What is most needed is precisely the development of operational alternatives to the logic of accumulation. To find a way out of the dilemmas history poses we must ask how to modify and supplement the logic of accumulation.

Reader: I take it that you choose Rosario as a research site because you expect to find there operational alternatives to the logic of accumulation. In the long run, the transformation of economic dynamics is going to make it possible to do more for the biosphere than can be achieved with a focus on such things as air and water quality standards or on funding nature conservancies or even with a focus on making manufacturers internalize environmental costs. But your own argument and our analysis of Argentine and Chilean experience show that anybody dumb enough to put a non-capitalist ideal straight into practice is asking for trouble.

Writer:   The socialists in Rosario are not dumb. They are not romantic revolutionaries. They know perfectly well that to transform capitalism they must first successfully manage it. Socialists elected to public office cannot allow themselves the luxury of picking fights with the powers that be   -- the army, the capitalists, the media, the church. And they know it.

Reader:   So is the question you want to ask, “How can a political and social movement be transformative and practical at the same time?”

Writer:   Yes. That question leads me to Rosario. I think it is a good question to ask when there. It is a key question. It is what this book is about.