Letter 61
Who Will Change the World?
I. IntroductionMany people, even many of those who have the most good will, even many of the people most actively concerned with social issues, even many whose personal lives and day-to-day relationships prepare the new society in the shell of the old; even they, the harbingers, find it difficult to conceive that economic society has failed irrevocably. Nor is it easy to conceive that here and now, before our very eyes, in our hands, a post-economic society is being created.
Many even of those who are living in ways not dominated by economics, find it difficult in thought to imagine a world not dominated by economics. In the four centuries that economic society has existed, it has become a social second nature; many people do not question that the use of money as the principal intermediary between human needs and their satisfaction is natural, as if it were a part of humanity's genetic endowment. Others regard it as a socially constructed reality, but cling to it because the alternatives of which they are aware (serfdom, slavery....) are too awful to contemplate.
This letter will suggest a way to articulate the transition from economic to post-economic society.
If this letter achieves its aims, then the readers of it will gain a not-altogether-new but perhaps unusually comprehensive way to think and talk about their participation in cooperative activities; that is to say, in the kinds of activities which, even now, are preparing a sustainable future. They will not learn new facts; those seen on the streets everyday by everyone, reported in newspapers and on television, and encountered in daily business and personal relationships, are sufficient. I hope to help one reader or another to articulate thoughts she or he has already had.
II. Some Common MisunderstandingsAmong the reasons why people find it difficult to accept that economic society must be transformed into something else if humanity and its environment are to survive and prosper, some may be regarded as common misunderstandings. My focus in this paper will be less on them than on other, more subtle mistakes. Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness, I offer below a list of what I take to be common misunderstandings.
1. The economy is thought of as having seasons and cycles like the weather. As a farmer must cope both with the weather and the market, so (it is thought) everyone must learn to cope with "hard times" while waiting for the "good times" to come again, just as the rain will eventually come even when a drought is prolonged.
2. The economy is thought to be managed more or less competently, more or less ineptly, by the elected and appointed officials of government, by the central banks, by the International Monetary Fund and other Bretton Woods institutions. When the economy is felt to be working badly, there is a presumption that it has been badly managed. The prescription is to change managers, or else to persuade the managers currently in office to follow wiser policies.
3. The normal functioning of the economy is thought to be benign, and its malfunctioning to be a distortion caused by wickedness. Promoters of investments have engaged in fraud; unethical accountants have concealed the losses of banks and corporations; drug cartels and other organized criminals have surreptitiously taken over legitimate businesses; the government has been bribed to show favoritism to certain business interests .... In general, the wealthy are suspected of having come by their wealth dishonestly, and the prescription for restoring the economy to normalcy is honesty.
4. The problem with the economy is taken to be prejudice against one or more minorities (e.g. blacks) or majorities (e.g. women). It is presumed that if unjust discrimination could be rooted out, so that persons of all genders, races, ethnic groups, and classes had equal opportunities to compete in the labor market, then everyone could prosper.
5. The economy is thought of as a well-meaning and basically healthy creature, who periodically suffers traumatic shocks. The wounds may be so deep that recovery is prolonged, and there may be permanent scars. Examples: a bad harvest, an expensive war, a rise in the price of a key import.
6. The economic problem is thought to be only or mainly a problem of setting priorities, and the only or main solution to it is thought to be quite simple: shift funds from military budgets to social service budgets. Or the solution is taken to be giving the environment priority over jobs and profits.
7. The ambiguity as to whether "the economy" refers to "the world economy" or to "the national economy" is resolved in favor of the latter. The economy is then compared to other national economies in search of prototype successful solutions to problems, along the lines advocated by Karl Popper as "piecemeal social engineering." If, for example, Singapore has learned how to attract investment, or Switzerland has learned how to fund adequate health care for all citizens, then these "cases" must be studied empirically, and experiments must be done to find out how to do here what they have done there. It is implicitly assumed that since every problem has been solved in some economic society or other, the way to solve all problems in all economic societies is to replicate and to expand the partial successes which are observed.
III. The Subtler MistakesThe maladies for which this letter will suggest a cure are subtler errors. My diagnosis is that subtle mistakes persist, in part at least, because of a lack of alternative conceptual frameworks, and the suggested cure will be to propose an alternative conceptual framework. (But this way of putting the matter makes my project sound too grandiose: my "alternative conceptual framework" will actually consist of a few slightly-novel sentences and phrases.) Some mistakes which I take to be easy to make and hard to avoid, and therefore subtle are:
8. The ambiguity of "the economy" is resolved in favor of "the world economy" --the modern world-system described in the works of Immanuel Wallerstein and his colleagues. It is recognized that this economy is a failure, both because of its inability to meet human needs, and because it is not sustainable. Nevertheless, it is presumed that its successor will be some other economic system. If this economy does not work, then, it is supposed, its successor must be another version of economic society, one that does work. For example: worldwide socialism, or the freedom of each nation-state to choose socialism for itself within the framework of the New International Economic Order, which has been approved by the United Nations but not implemented.
9. "Economics" is often defined in such a way that all societies must be economic. The impossibility of a post-economic society is asserted not with evidence but by certain choices concerning the meanings to be assigned to words.
10. Alternatives to economic society, such as "the civilization of love," or "bioregionalism," are suggested without any plausible account of how they might supplant economic society's ways of motivating effort, allocating resources, and allocating revenue. If the alternatives lack plausibility to the extent that the space in one's imagination where there should be transformative visions is entirely filled with what appear to be pipedreams, then one may be inclined to conclude that the presently dominant social structure is the only realistic possibility.
11. It is recognized that economic principles need to be transformed into something else in order to produce justice and sustainability. But when one tries to think of how transformation will come about one asks primarily the question, "What potentially cohesive groups have an economic interest in change?" Thus economic modes of thought, although recognized as inadequate, dominate thinking about how to overcome themselves.
IV. Toward Defining "Economic Society"Several distinguished scholars have developed, in one way or another, the idea that there exists an entity properly called "economic society," which had a beginning in time and which since that beginning has expanded in space so that it now functions planet-wide. The phrase occurs in the title of Robert Heilbroner's book, The Making of Economic Society (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962). Heilbroner does not consistently use the phrase to refer only to modern society; nevertheless, he points out that it is only when modern market society comes on the scene that there is economic thought, and it is mainly what he calls "market society" which is studied with the use of the conceptual tools of economic science; the older command economies and traditional economies being, respectively, of greater interest to the student of politics, or to the cultural anthropologist. (pp. 16-17) Moreover, Heilbroner notes that, "In medieval society, economics was a subordinate and not a dominant aspect of life." (p. 38). For Heilbroner any society which must mobilize and allocate human energies, and distribute the social product, in order to assure its continued existence, is, in a broad sense, an "economic society." (see p. 232) But it would not be an exaggeration to say that on his account the latter-day types of society called "market society" or "industrial society," where economics is no longer subordinate, where there are people called "economists" who consciously look upon society, "...as an elaborate mechanism for survival, a mechanism for accomplishing the complicated tasks of production and distribution necessary for social continuity," (p.9) preeminently deserve the name "economic society."
Another source of the idea of "economic society" is Louis Dumont's work, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Dumont takes "ideology" to be "...everything that is socially thought, believed, acted upon..." whether or not it is true." (p. 22) He assumes the ideology of a civilization to be a living whole, whose parts are interrelated and interdependent.
Dumont's earlier scholarly work concerned traditional civilization in India. He came to the study of the origins of modern, western society with his background in the study of India, and with the conviction that the higher civilizations of India, China, Japan, Egypt, Persia, Islam, and to some extent medieval Europe, represented the usual, normal, type of civilization, which he characterized as holistic and religious. The problem, from the point of view of the scientific study of comparative culture, was to explain the exception; modern, western society; which he characterized as individualistic and as the creator of the secular nation-state.
The explanation is economic ideology, a "revolution in values" through which modernity constituted itself. "The economy" is a system of interpretation, physical only in the sense in which everything, words and images included, is physical; but it is not without causes or consequences in such heavier physical objects as grain, iron, wool, human bodies, farmland, cattle, and pastures. For example, it was only after lordship over a tract of land ceased to be linked to power over the lives and property of the people living on the land, and only after movable wealth (the stuff of commerce) became predominant, that it made sense to think of "politics" and "economics" as two separate categories. Nevertheless, this fact of social evolution, itself made up of an uncountable series of events in which discourses and practices were intertwined, could not create "economics" until people composed texts which articulated economic ideology. "It should be obvious that there is nothing like an economy out there, unless and until men construct such an object." (p.24) The particular ways in which writers like Francois Quesnay, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and others formulated Europe's break with its past were only possible once certain social conditions existed, but their texts, in turn, interpreted and shaped social conditions --not only in Europe, but, as the European world-system expanded, everywhere.
Prominent among the predecessors relied on by Louis Dumont's work is Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. (New York: Rinehart, 1957, first published 1944) Polanyi charted the gradual emergence of the institutions of economic society which we take for granted today, and emphasized, as Dumont did after him, that to live as we do today in a market economy is - in the great scope and sweep of all human societies that have ever been - an unusual situation for a human being. It is normal for humans to be organized in their socially useful labor, and to be motivated, by noneconomic motives. I quote Polanyi at length:
"The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end. Neither the process of production nor that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interests which eventually ensure that the required step be taken. These interests will be very different in a small hunting and fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic system will be run by noneconomic motives.
"The explanation, in terms of survival, is simple. Take the case of a tribal society. The individual's economic interest is rarely paramount, for the community keeps all its members from starving unless it is itself borne down by catastrophe, in which case interests are again threatened collectively, not individually. The maintenance of social ties, on the other hand, is crucial." (p. 46)
Citations could be multiplied in support of the idea that there exists an entity which can properly be called "economic society," which had a beginning in time and which since that beginning has expanded in space so that it now functions planet-wide. Some pertinent works are mentioned in Letter 23. Some others are: Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (3 volumes), New York and San Diego: Academic Press, 1974 ff; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century, New York: Harper and Row, 1981 ff (French editions 1979 ff); Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society, New York: Harper and Row, 1963 (first German edition 1887); and the discussions of the origins of modern society found at a number of places in the works of Karl Marx and Max Weber.
V. Sitz im LebenBefore culminating my movement toward defining "economic society" by actually defining it, I want to mention that I conceived the idea for this letter and wrote the first sentence on a visit to Spanish Harlem, one of the poor sections of New York City. This fact may not have any logical relevance to the ideas I am developing, but, then again, it may. There was a famous school of German scholarship in the 19th century which held that no document should be interpreted without knowing the "place in life" of its author; so perhaps I owe it to my readers to explain if not everything about my place in life then at least the immediate context of this text.
It struck me in Harlem that the streets and sidewalks were full of trash, and that dozens of people were standing around doing nothing. I was reminded of a time when my older daughter, then seven years old, and I had occasion to walk down a street in inner-city Cincinnati, and she exclaimed, "Why are all those people just standing there ? Why don't they pick up the trash ? Why don't they paint the buildings ?" I remember thinking to myself at the time, "If what ought to be done is obvious to a seven year old girl, why is it not obvious to Milton Friedman ?" (Friedman is an influential neo-conservative economist.)
Any adult member of our culture knows the answer to my daughter's questions. It is that people do not ordinarily do what needs to be done just because it needs to be done; outside the family people ordinarily are expected to do just what they are paid for. The people on the streets for the most part have little money, because nobody is paying them to do anything. They are not happy, and the work that needs to be done is not being done. My daughter's observation that people were idle while needed work remained undone was not, of course, unique; Heilbroner wrote, "For example, in the United States in 1933, the energies of nearly 13 million people --one quarter of our work force-- were not directed into the production process. Although these unemployed men and women were eager to work , although empty factories were available for them to work in, despite the existence of pressing wants, somehow a terrible and mystifying breakdown short-circuited the production process, with the result that an entire third of our previous annual output of goods and services simply disappeared." (op. cit. p. 6) I agree with Heilbroner except for the word "mystifying." As I have indicated in Letters 6, 60 and elsewhere, and as other authors such as Frances Moore Lappe have pointed out, the combination of unemployment, idle resources, and unmet needs is worldwide and normal. There is no reason to expect our global society as it is now organized to match resources with needs and needs with resources; it would be mystifying if it did.
The immediate problem of trash in the streets is a relatively simple one because all that would be needed to solve it would be a change in social expectations leading to changes in behavior, given that the streets are already provided with trash cans, and that the city already sends trucks to remove the contents of the trash cans. Painting buildings poses additional problems because resources in addition to labor would have to be supplied - paint, brushes, ladders, perhaps instruction in painting techniques, perhaps medical help for people who fell off the ladders. The question what eventually happens to the trash, the question how to reduce the production of trash in the first place, and the question how to promote the use of non-toxic paints, pose further complexities. Nevertheless, a similar principle applies to the simple and to the complex cases: life would be a lot easier if people would do what ought to be done because it ought to be done, instead of doing only what they are paid for.
However - this, too, my visit to Spanish Harlem brought home to me - the converse is also true. My hosts in Harlem were Amy and Tim. She is a social worker; he is a nurse-practitioner, specializing in HIV and AIDS prevention and treatment. She was brought up in the United Church of Christ in North Carolina; he in a Catholic family in Denver, and both now attend Riverside Church. They seemed to know everybody on their street, and to go out of their way to be friendly, to cheer people up, and generally to be good neighbors. What struck me about them was that they were not unusual. I have known hundreds of people, in every walk of life, who were just as devoted to meaningful lives serving others as Amy and Tim.
The converse to which I refer is that life would be a lot harder if people did only what they are paid for, and did not also do what ought to be done for social motives.
In Harlem I was moved to reflect on economic society because I saw a small instance of its failure, and a small example of its ideology's failure to fully explain human behavior. Because the trash was not picked up. And because Amy and Tim's behavior was not economic. I do not claim any originality for either insight; concerning the latter point, that the Rational Economic Man model does not fully explain how people really behave, even in business, many studies have been done, for example Richard Cyert and James March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963; Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence, New York: Harper and Row, 1982.
I do not wish to say precisely that economic theory, with its model of the Rational Economic Man, the profit-maximizer and loss-minimizer, represents an excessively pessimistic view of human nature. I do not want to use the Amys and Tims of this world just as evidence that human conduct is often better than would be supposed if one predicted human behavior on the assumption that people are self-centered. Because it can also be argued that people are often much more evil than they would be if they rationally calculated their economic interests. What I do want to say is that concerning the deep springs of human motivation economic theory has not a clue. Not because economists lack erudition or sensitivity, but just because qua economists they happen to be in a field whose subject matter comprises neither holiness nor rage.
VI. A Definition of Economic SocietySince I will propose my alternative conceptual framework as a philosopher, I think I need to state briefly what sort of proposal I am making, as contrasted with a conceptual proposal that might be made by a scientist. None of the authors mentioned so far in this letter, except John Locke, are philosophers. They have all been social scientists or historians of one sort or another, who can be expected to approach defining a vast and diverse entity like "economic society," or "market society," with aims-in-view somewhat different from those of philosophy.
Braudel, for example, found that his need to distinguish the market economy from "material life" was imposed upon him by his subject matter. He did not set out to make that distinction, but as he reviewed enormous quantities of documentary evidence and studies by other scholars concerning the period from 1400 to 1800 in Europe, he found that the market economy, i.e. production of goods in order to exchange them for money in a market, was the exception rather than the rule for most people most of the time; what people as a rule did in order to live, "the volume of which is truly fantastic," he found it convenient to name "material life," or "material civilization." (op. cit. p. 23) The merit of his distinction is to be tested by how well it fits and helps to organize the data.
The difference between work in the historical social sciences, or in any science, and philosophy is sometimes taken to be that philosophers deal with general conditions of human knowledge that are supposed to apply everyplace and always, and not to require any experimental or observational verification - Locke's theory of knowledge, for example. Since it is now usually believed - quite correctly, I think - that there are no general conditions of human knowledge which apply everyplace and always, it is often concluded that philosophers have no subject-matter to study at all, except the history of the errors made by their predecessors in the field.
Another look at what philosophers have been doing through the centuries - here again Locke can serve as an example - will show that what they have been doing can be regarded instead as composing rather comprehensive worldviews for the cultures in which they lived, sometimes but not always in connection with what purported to be statements of the necessary conditions for any possible knowledge.
It is as a facilitator of worldview-making that I see myself as continuing the tradition called "philosophy" by composing a definition of "economic society" and a corollary. The merit of my proposals is not to be judged only by how well they fit and help to organize the data - although they should not contradict the facts - but also by the more pragmatic criterion whether it is good for people to view the world as I shall propose.
My definition of "economic society" is: economic society is that society which with respect to the production and distribution of the basic necessities of life, sets out systematically to harness self-interest to make it serve the common welfare, and does so in this particular way among others: by obliging (most) people to work for money in order to live.
Notice that my definition refers to a particular historically-existing society, what Wallerstein calls the European world-system, and hence it refers to characteristic features which that society had and has, whether or not they are specifically mentioned in the definition itself. However, I want my definition to include both capitalism and socialism, insofar as hitherto-existing socialist planning has, like capitalism, set out systematically to harness self-interest, and has obliged people to work for money in order to live. I retain the ambiguous word "society," which is sometimes taken to be a synonym for "nation-state," even though I take it to refer, for the most part, to the global economy in which we all now live.
In favor of my definition I would point out that the authors of the early economic ideologies often viewed the distinctive feature of what they were advocating to be the glorification of self-interest. They had to defend themselves, in the light of the condemnations of egoism and the identification of virtue with selflessness found in traditional European culture (and also found, by the way, in other cultures around the world), and in the light of the critiques of the nascent doctrines of the economists made by their contemporaries. Thus Adam Smith: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." (Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, New York: The Modern Library, 1937, first edition 1776. p. 14) And Bernard Mandeville: "I flatter myself to have demonstrated that, neither the Friendly Qualities and kind Affections that are natural to man, nor the real Virtues he is capable of acquiring by Reason and Self-Denial, are the Foundation of Society; but that what we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without exception." (quoted by Dumont, p. 66)
The economists did not, however, in the end describe themselves as emancipating humanity from the old morality. As Dumont puts it, "There is actually an emancipation from the general or common run of morality, but it is accompanied by the recognition that economic action is by itself oriented to the good, that it has a special moral character of its own.... In other words, there is only a specialization of morals; or again, economics escapes the fetters of general morality only at the price of assuming a normative character of its own." (p. 61) In Adam Smith's other great work, Theory of Moral Sentiments, moral sentiment in general is said to be based on sympathy, but in the sphere of economics there is no need for anything but self-love, because due to a natural harmony of interests, Nature (or God, the two tended to be identified) has decreed that as if guided by an Invisible Hand, the person following self-love serves society.
From such considerations, and from the terms in which I have stated my definition of economic society, I deduce as a corollary the moral unity of humanity.
By "the moral unity of humanity" I mean this: our global economy is so designed, according to the terms in which it was first legitimated, and for the most part according to the terms in which it has always been legitimated, for the purpose of serving the common welfare. Economics may not succeed in its purpose, but its intentions - -as stated by its apologists, and as accepted by the masses who have believed the apologists - has always been, to vary the language slightly, to advance the prosperity and to satisfy the needs of all. This same idea is implicit in the words of Heilbroner quoted earlier: for the economist "society" is a vast "mechanism" designed to produce and allocate the goods people need to survive.
VII. Some DisclaimersMy aim is not to prove that my way of defining economic society is best. I only want to suggest the concept for consideration.
Nor is the proof that economic society has failed part of my brief. My aim is to suggest an alternative conceptual framework, which might indirectly help people to overcome whatever reluctance they may have to acknowledging the failure of the modern world-system, by showing a viewpoint from which an alternative can be seen.
Let me say, however, that it is not my opinion that economic society first succeeded and now, later, is failing. It never did a good job, at any point in its history, of matching resources to needs, needs to resources, and both to environmental constraints. Unnecessary misery has always been enormous, although it has been concentrated at different locations on the planet at different times. (Wallerstein estimates that economic society has never lifted out of poverty more than ten to twenty percent of the total population of the world.) Immanuel Wallerstein, "Development: Lodestar or Illusion," in Unthinking Social Science. Oxford: Polity Press, 1991, pp. 104-124) Part of the economic stagnation now evident in the United States is due not to a global trend toward increasing poverty, but rather to changes in the roles this particular nation-state is playing in the world-system.
Nor to I mean to advocate or to predict regression to pre-economic society. Having featured in my definition of economic society, the systematic channeling of self interest to serve the common welfare in characteristic ways, I would define a pre-economic society as one which has not yet learned how to organize into a productive social system the free expression of self-interest, either through markets or through planning. They tend to rely on kinship structures, religion, and brute force to organize work. (Max Weber says they depend on "custom" - but I find this to be a catchall category, and to be applicable to all societies traditional or not inasmuch as in all societies most adult behavior is conventional). At this point in history markets and planning have arrived to stay; they have been invented, and they will not be forgotten. (Nor will kinship, religion, or brute force be forgotten.)
Since I do not in this letter define economics in terms of making decisions under conditions of scarcity, I would not define post-economics as a condition where life is no longer dominated by the need to cope with scarcity. (as Heilbroner would, p. 235) This would be a legitimate meaning for the phrase "post-economic society," but it is not the meaning I wish to express here.
VIII. A Definition of Post Economic SocietyMy definition of "post-economic society" is: post-economic society is that society which with respect to the production and distribution of the basic necessities of life, sets out systematically to harness both self-interest and social motives to make them serve the common welfare, and does so in whatever ways prove to be best able to satisfy the needs of humans as members of the community of life on earth.
When economic conditions worsen, to be sure, some people return to what I call pre-economic modes of behavior, and my definition does not rule them out as component parts of the post-economic paradigm, insofar as they make constructive contributions to welfare. Thus Braudel observes: "...in the wake of the economic depression following the 1973-74 crisis, we are beginning to see the development of a modern version of the non-market economy: hardly disguised forms of barter, the direct exchange of services, `moonlighting' as it is called, plus all the various forms of homeworking and `odd-jobs.' This layer of activity, lying below or alongside the market, has reached sufficient proportions to attract the attention of several economists; some have estimated that it may represent 30 or 40% of the gross national product, which thus lies outside all official accounting, even in industrialized countries." (op. cit. p. 25)
Crime occupies an ambiguous position in my conceptual scheme, inasmuch as it is the systematic pursuit of self-interest, directed to a considerable extent toward attaining a lifestyle glorified by consumer society, but it is not economic society at its best, nor is it characteristic of well-organized pre-economic societies, nor is it the even-better social organization I call post-economic. It is economic society's alter ego, self-interest run amok; it is at the same time a sign of its breakdown, a shortcut to competitive success which evades participation in the "wonderful bread machine" which is supposed to harness the animal spirits for the benefit of everyone.
I would, however, count as post-economic the critical return to and the systematic improvement of those ancient pre-economic survival strategies whose institutional frameworks are kinship and religion. We can observe with respect to families and churches mass movements in the world today, generally regarded as right-wing and reactionary, and small often-university-based new movements of thought, critical of the former and generally thought to be left-wing and progressive - but I see them both as responses to the same reality: the failure of the economy and the search for alternatives. The strong back-to-family-values, religious revival, addicts support group, and ethnic identity movements, not just in the USA but around the world, I see as mainly responses to poverty and the threat of poverty, especially if one defines "poverty" broadly to include the emotional poverty associated with drugs, drinking, and loneliness - which are, in turn, features of an economic society which is not working. The appeal of family-therapy and family systems psychology, and novel theologies (women's, gay, liberation...) I see as post-economic, insofar as the old forms of being-in-community are being reworked and made suitable for these times. Even though feminist critiques of patriarchy often criticize (constructively, I think) the family, which for most people is the great alternative to relying on the economy for a livelihood, I see them nonetheless as part of the post-economic pattern rather than as a counter-current, inasmuch as women's ways of knowing and feeling are characteristically more relationship-centered and less thing-centered. (Dumont, op. cit. finds thing-centeredness to be at the heart of economic ideology.) Much of feminism is a paradigm of post-economic thought inasmuch as it criticizes the pre-economic and the economic, and criticizes both for the sake of more caring relationships.
Here is a post-economic lesson people are learning: (Methodological note: my license for saying the following is borrowed from the psychoanalysts, who have for decades reported as scientific "clinical findings" the trends they notice working with their clients in their professional practices; in my case the professional practice is that of a bankruptcy attorney.) People are finding that in scaling back their lifestyles to live within their means, the bottleneck problem is not lack of enough money to live. The key problem is in the area of human relations. It is to find a group of people who are sufficiently close and compatible that they can live together collectively, sharing space and pooling resources so that all can survive.
A growth of volunteering and private charitable resources - soup kitchens, homes for the homeless, shelters for the battered... - has accompanied the decline in government-sponsored social services. Volunteering has grown as an ideology, and has become better organized. The public services, which in the wealthier countries continue to be, along with crime, the lifeblood of the poor, are learning to enlist the systematic participation of their clients in the service of the common welfare - for example, in patrolling pubic housing projects to protect them against vandalism.
Among the systematic approaches to harnessing noneconomic motives there should be mentioned new advances in religious education and moral education. A whole technology has developed, with a vast technical literature and thousands of prototype experiences, developing the art and science of helping young people to become caring and responsible adults. (See, for example, the annual bibliographical reviews published in the journal Moral Education Forum).
Community activists working with Non Governmental Organizations and International Non Governmental Organizations systematically organize people for mutual aid - perhaps most notably with respect to housing, planting trees, and water supply. There are now several ways to get a Ph.D. in how to facilitate such post-economic activity.
Other forms of systematic cooperation for the good of all are mentioned in the previous letter, Letter 60, and scattered throughout many others.
It might be objected that most of the cooperative organizations are not post-economic because they work "inside the system" rather than "outside the system," by doing such things as soliciting contributions from governments and businesses, selling handicraft products, and training people for private sector employment. For example, the Church of the Savior in Washington D. C., which is a prototype of building the new society in the shell of the old, trains people so that they can eventually get jobs as bakers in the private sector of the economy. (For a general account of the Church of the Savior see Elizabeth O'Connor, The New Community. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.)
But I did not define post-economic thought as averse to the systematic channeling of self-interest through market mechanisms. What makes the Church of the Savior post-economic, while dwelling in the midst of a collapsing economy, is its systematic pursuit of a love ethic. It prepares people to be bakers because since there are jobs for bakers, people can meet their needs in that way - but if it should turn out that there are no jobs for bakers, or no jobs at all, the Church would not abandon them. It uses (and criticizes, and reforms) the labor market as one of several instruments of a care ethic, that ethic which Carol Gilligan has defined as attending to and responding to needs. (in a talk given at the University of Toronto in 1988) A care ethic is the only truly rational ethic, if to be "rational" means patiently and perseveringly to find ways to meet needs.
IX. ChoicesThe post-economic, like the economic, is a frame of mind intertwined with a set of institutions.
The influence of frame-of-mind on institutional decisions becomes evident when institutional choices must be made. If the economic frame-of-mind prevails, then people will see no alternatives to self-interested behavior, and the solutions to problems will be limited to those which are possible by designing more intelligently-planned competition.
Often the choice is this: try to solve the problem by making the competition more intense, or try to solve the problem cooperatively. The latter type of solution requires the systematic harnessing for the common welfare of social motives.
For example, concerning the pharmaceutical industry, one can raise the question whether it is possible to achieve voluntary ethical standards in product advertising and labeling, or the question whether stockholders and managers will voluntarily (or, if not voluntarily, under less pressure than would be required if they were purely self-interested) authorize corporate contributions to higher wages, pensions, ecological sustainability, research, community organizations, and so on. The metaphysical prejudices of economic ideology imply that the answer is necessarily negative - but this is a consequence of a frame of mind, not a consequence of facts of human nature verifiable by psychology and the social sciences.
It is, however, a frame of mind intertwined with a set of institutions. Pharmaceutical firms exist in a national and international competitive environment. How competitive the environment becomes, or how non-competitive it can be made, depends to some extent on governmental decisions, which are in turn influenced by economic and social ideologies. More choices. In this case: choice of ideology influencing whether to make the institutional environment more intensely competitive, or to a greater or lesser extent shield the industry from competition.
We are now living in a global society in which a great deal of goodwill is wasted, due in part to the basic structure of economic society, and due in part to the especially virulent form taken in certain nation-states and in the International Monetary Fund by the neo-conservative variant of economic ideology. People cannot do good things even when they want to - pay employees more, contribute to protecting the environment more, devote more resources to basic research - because the costs would make their businesses uncompetitive.
However, relief from competition does not automatically create goodwill - it only creates the opportunity to act on good will if it exists. Nor does it simplify choices: even where there is great good will, the question how to balance low prices for consumers against high wages for producers, for example, has no simple answer. The same considerations (i.e. those considering whether the market allows scope for choices, and if it does the perplexities confronted in making choices) apply whether we consider an enterprise owned by an individual, by stockholders, by a bank, by a charitable foundation, by its workers, a public utility governed by an elected board, or a nationalized industry run by government-appointed engineers and accountants. Being provided with the freedom and resources with which to do what ought to be done makes it possible, but neither necessary nor easy, to do what ought to be done.
Thus a characteristic dilemma: whether to (1) design institutions so that people have discretion, and at the same time design a culture of accountability which expects, encourages, and rewards the socially responsible use of discretion, or (2) design a culture in which a combination of intense competition and law severely limits discretion, on the assumption that people will act from self-interest, and that they can only be harnessed to act for the common welfare by rules of the game which make it to their interest to serve the common interest.
I am proposing an alternative conceptual framework which favors the first horn of the dilemma. It can be summarized as follows:
1. Pre-economic society: When it functions at its best, there are social norms, virtues inculcated in the population by education, which guide individual conduct toward socially useful ends.
2. Economic society: the best of the traditional virtues are in principle kept, but in the sphere of economic activity self-interest is given free reign, on the expectation that the capitalist free market or socialistic planning will guide individual conduct toward socially useful ends.
3. Post-economic society: freedom is successfully combined with responsibility, shaping toward the service of the common welfare more human motives than society had previously successfully mobilized, and in greater depth.
X. Answers to Some Subtle QuestionsThis letter began with a list of misunderstandings and mistakes, some of which were called subtle. Here is how my proposed conceptual framework facilitates seeing that they are errors, even though they are easy ones to make:
8. It is an error to think it sufficient to replace one economic society with another one. Self-interest is not a strong enough or comprehensive enough motive for building or maintaining a sustainable society which meets human needs. In particular, it is not a sufficient motive for productive behavior under socialism. To say that a socialist economy would be in principle better than a capitalist one is, I think, true, but misleading, insofar as socialism is regarded as just another economic model.
9. Although people are free to define any word, including "economics," however they choose, and although many prominent writers indeed define "economics" in such a way that all societies have economies, the question whether a "post-economic society," as discussed in this paper is possible, is not a matter of definition. If the world succeeds in organizing itself so that needs are met and people are happy, by utilizing social motives as well as self-interest, then the "post-economic society," as defined in this letter, will be a fact.
10. "The civilization of love," "bioregionalism," and some other proposals which might be mentioned, are good ideas, which should not be dismissed because people do not yet know how to implement them. I have tried to show that the presently dominant social structure is not the only realistic possibility, because (1) there was a time not very long ago when it did not exist, and (2) we can define what it would mean to change it, and (3) it is changing.
11. "What potentially cohesive groups have an economic interest in change ?" This is a good question, but there is something wrong with it. The change we need is toward more cooperation; hence economic interest, defined as self-interest, is not all we want in the agents of change. We should instead or also ask questions like, "What grassroots projects can change values, can show that cooperation works, and can build the solidarity which will prepare the new society in the shell of the old ?"
XI. Who Will Change the World?Although we should all do what we can to make the world, or at least our little corner of it, better in every way, the "change" I have in mind here is structural change. Like many others I am looking for the successor to the proletariat.
The proletariat was conceived by classical socialists to be a class capable of acting as a class in its own self-interest, and by pursuing its self-interest to build a better society for everyone. It was economic society's hope to redeem itself in its own terms, by the systematic harnessing of its own characteristic motivations. As an organized and self-conscious class the proletariat was to be the "subject of history" who would "act" in history to change social structures by taking control of the means of production, by improving them, and by redirecting them to serve need, not greed.
The dimming of hopes for a proletarian-led social transformation has brought a number of suggestions concerning who might be instead the "subject of history" who would change the world. Candidates for the role have included the "socially unattached intelligentsia" (Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harvest, 1936, first German edition 1929. p. 155), students (Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society. New York: Random House, 1971, first French edition 1970. p. 91) and the "new social movements" such as the greens and the feminists. With the advent of deconstruction, however, the very idea of a "subject" as a fixed, unified, constant subjectivity (of an individual person, and, with greater reason, of a whole social class) has been denounced as a creation of bourgeois ideology, which must be deconstructed before radical change can take place (Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. p. 150) Two recent authors propose that the subject of history does not exist but must be constructed, in order to create that not-yet-existing entity which will change the world. "...the constitution of the very identities which will have to confront one another antagonistically becomes now the first of political problems." (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso, 1985. p. 134).
I still believe in the validity of the general principle that the victims of unjust social structures, proletarians or whoever they may be, can be motivated to organize and to change the structures. But so many qualifications and caveats need to be added to this general principle, that I do not see any clear answer to the question, "Who will change the world ?" I do, however, see an unclear answer - unclear, in the sense that the group it identifies is not well-defined; it consists of people scattered around the world doing different things in different ways, and could include anybody. More functional and more just institutions are on the whole and usually feasible only if people are caring and responsible. Consequently, anybody who contributes to the process of systematically strengthening social motives and orienting them toward the service of the common welfare is helping to change the world for the better, by helping to make it possible for post-economic structures to work.
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