Pieces of Samir Amin, 2009, Conventional
Economics
Conventional Economics:
An Ideological Instrument That Is Central to
Capitalist Reproduction
The
discourse of conventional economics refers to the current system as the
"market economy." It is inadequate,
even deceptive: as we have already pointed out, it could equally well describe
England in the 19th century, China of the Sung and Ming dynasties, and the
towns of the Italian Renaissance.
The theory
of the "market economy" has always been the backbone of "vulgar
economics." This theory immediately
and wholly eliminates the essential reality: social relations of production
(particularly, ownership as the immediate expression of these relations, promoted
to a sacred principle). It is replaced
by the hypothesis of a society constituted by "individuals" (who, in
the final analysis, become active agents in the reproduction of the system and
its evolution). These
"individuals" (homo œconomicus)
are ahistorical, identical with those who, since the origins of humanity
(Robinson Crusoe), have possessed the same, unchanging qualities (egoism and
the capacity to calculate and make choices that benefit themselves). The construct built on these foundations --
the "market economy" -- therefore does not correspond to a stylized
formulation of the world of historical and real capitalism. It constructs an imaginary system into which
it integrates almost nothing of the essentials of the capitalist reality.
Marx's
Capital unmasks the ideological nature (in the functional sense of the word) of
this construct of vulgar economics since Frédéric Bastiat and Jean-Baptiste
Say, whose function has been simply to legitimize the existing social order,
likening it to a "natural and rational order." The later theories of value -- utility and
the general economic equilibrium, developed in response to Marx in the last
third of the nineteenth century, as well as those of their heir, contemporary
mathematicized economics, described as classic, neoclassic, liberal, neoliberal
(the name does not really matter) -- do not diverge from the framework defined
by the basic principles of vulgar economics.
The
discourse of vulgar economics helps to meet the requirements of the production
and reproduction of actually existing capitalism. It promotes, above everything else, a eulogy
of "competition," considered as the essential condition of
"progress." It denies this
attribute to solidarity (in spite of examples from history), which is confined
to a straitjacket of compassion and charity.
It can be competition between "producers" (i.e. capitalists,
without really taking the oligopolistic form of contemporary capitalist
production into consideration) or between "workers" (which assumes
that the unemployed, or the "poor," are responsible for their
situation). The exclusivity of
"competition" is reinforced by the new language ("social
partners," instead of classes in conflict) as well as by practices -- of,
among others, the European Union Civil Service Tribunal, which is a fierce
partisan of the dismantling of trade unions, an obstacle to competition between
workers.
The
adoption of the exclusive principle of competition also invites society to
support the aim of building a "consensus" that excludes the
imagination of "another society" based on solidarity. This ideology of the consensus society, which
is well on the way to being adopted in Europe, destroys the transformative
impact of the democratic message. It
conveys the libertarian right-wing message that considers the State -- of
whatever stripe -- as "the enemy of freedom" (which should be
interpreted as the enemy of the freedom of enterprise of capital) and divorces
the practice of castrated democracy from social progress.
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