No More Learning

For this reason, we do not pretend to offer a general theory of capitalist society. We limit ourselves to the study of the capitalist creorder only, the dynamic order of those who rule. To rule means to see the world from a singular viewpoint, to be locked into a unitary logic, to be subservient to your own architecture of power. Dominant capital cannot deviate from the bound- aries of this architecture, even if it wants to. Its individual members are forced to accept the very logic they impose on the rest of humanity. And the more effective they are in imposing that logic, the more predictable they themselves become. This is why their world can be theorized and to some extent predicted.
Over the past century, the power logic of capitalism has been incarnated in the process of differential capitalization; that is to say, in the belief that there is a 'normal rate of return' and that capitalists are obliged to 'beat' it. This is the gist of the new capitalist cosmology. Instead of the Holy Scriptures, we now have the universal language of business accounting and corporate finance. The power of God, once vested in priest and king, now reveals itself as the power of Capital vested in the 'investor'.
And as the capitalization of power spreads and penetrates, the world seems increasingly 'deterministic'. The determinism of capitalization is now the 'natural state of things', the benchmark against which one can estimate 'devi- ations' 'distortions', 'risk' and 'return'. It is a logic that looks unquestionable to those who rule and omnipotent to those who are being ruled.
But this determinism of capitalization has nothing to do with 'laws of nature', or the 'inevitable' progression of history. It is the determinism of the ruling class, and only of the ruling class. It works only insofar as the ruling class rules. Admittedly, that happens most of the time. However, human beings do have the capacity to understand the autonomous nature of this 'determinism'. And when they realize that the rules are imposed on them by other human beings, determinism disappears, replaced - if only for a histor- ical instant - by the humane promise of autonomy-democracy-philosophy.
Part I
Dilemmas of political economy
2 The dual worlds
He was so eager to know what was going on in heaven, that he could not see what was before his feet.
--Socrates on Thales, Plato's Theaetetus
The bifurcations
Capitalism is characterized by several related antinomies and contrasts, basic dualities that resemble the ancient paradoxes of Hellenic philosophy. Of these dualities, the most important are the distinction between politics and economics and the separation of the real from the nominal.
The first duality - the bifurcation of politics and economics - is hardly new. Pre-capitalist history was marked, almost invariably, by a socio- ecological reality that separated political rulers from their producing subjects. The concepts of course were markedly different. There was no such thing as 'the economy', and the notion of 'politics', although dating back to ancient Athens, had little meaning in an authoritarian context. But terminology aside, there was a fairly clear separation between social rule and material provision. The common pattern of power consisted of state or quasi-state entities using organized military force to control dispersed agricultural culti- vators. Politically, production was subjugated to state rule; but ecologically, the two spheres were by and large distinct - and, in the extreme case of oriental despotism, entirely alienated.
This duality was heightened by the rise of the autonomous European bourg beginning in the twelfth century. The bourg - although initially embedded in and dependent on feudalism - offered a new alternative. It fash- ioned a peace-seeking civil society of merchants, artisans and industrialists, a model that stood in sharp contrast to the violent, war-making feudal fiefdoms and states. Bourgeois production and trade, much like feudal agriculture, remained distinct from princely politics. But the bourgeoisie demanded more. It wanted its 'new economy' to be not only distinct from but also independent of princely and feudal rule.
26 Dilemmas of political economy
This original demand still echoes today. Whenever we contrast civil society with state authority, free contract with organized hierarchy, horizontal markets with vertical power, or, more broadly, economics with politics - we reproduce the early demand of the bourgeoisie: the demand for particular libertates. This quest for personal exemptions, individual immunities and specific protections from the organized violence of feudalism is the forerunner of modern liberalism and its assertion of universal liberty. 1
The first to openly challenge the alleged separation of production from power was Karl Marx. This separation, he argued, was a manifestation of bourgeois 'false consciousness'. Liberals emphasize the voluntary nature of market exchange, which makes their economics seem like the domain of freedom. But under the gloss of market exchange lies the reality of produc- tion - and in the realm of production, it is exploitation, not equality, that rules. In this way, the market merely serves to conceal the underlying power nature of capitalism.
This challenge was important but ultimately insufficient. According to Marx, capitalist power works through two mechanisms: economic exploita- tion and political oppression. The first mechanism is responsible for extracting the surplus, the second for sustaining the capitalist mode of production as a whole. The crucial point here, which we explain in the next section, is that, according to Marx, capitalist power requires that the two mechanisms be related - yet distinct. In this sense, Marx's insistence that power pervades the system does not reject but rather necessitates the liberal duality of politics and economics.
The second capitalist duality occurs within economics proper. The ancient ontological distinction between the Thing and its Idea is resurrected here in the two parallel worlds of liberal economics: the real and the nominal. The real world is the material sphere of production and consumption; the nominal world is the mirror image of prices, money and credit. Capital in this context has two faces: a real face made of capital goods and a nominal imprint called finance. The material means of production are recorded on the left-hand side of the balance sheet; the nominal symbols of debt and equity are entered on the right-hand side. The Thing on the left faces its Idea on the right.
1 It should be noted that this historical description, written in the spirit of Marx, is very much out of style - particularly when compared with the fashionable hype of postmodernity. For the typical postist, our historical view here is no more than 'Eurocentric' arrogance, a remnant of the imperial mindset and its postcolonial successor (see for example Turner 1978). Although we'll occasionally mention it, we have no intention of arguing with this fashion. There is simply no point. The postists deny the possibility of a universal logic - which pretty much eliminates the possibility of debate. And they are hostile to scientific thinking - which makes impossible if not meaningless any attempt to examine, verify or reject their slogans, narratives and battle cries (including those lifted gratis from past Marxist studies).
? The dual worlds 27
Marxian economics, although very different from its liberal counterpart, adopts a similar conceptual division. Here, too, we find the contrast between the real and the nominal - a distinction between the material base of value, where labour, production and exploitation occur; and a monetary superstruc- ture of prices and credit through which politics, ideology, the law and sheer force penetrate and reshape the accumulation process.
Let's examine these two dualities of capitalism a bit more closely, begin- ning with politics versus economics.
Politics versus economics
The liberal view
For the neoclassicists, politics lies outside the realm of capital. The insti- tutions and organizations of the state, electoral parties, the legal system, the organized use of force and international relations certainly impact capital for better or worse (mostly for the worse). But the impact is inherently external. The common language speaks of exogenous 'shocks', of political 'interven- tion' and 'interference' that 'disturb', 'distort' and 'constrain' the economic system. These external shocks may hold back the pace of capital accumu- lation or change its direction; but whatever their impact - and here we come to the critical part - they cannot alter the basic meaning of capital. According to the neoclassicists, capital is the utilitarian manifestation of multiple individual wills, expressed freely through the market and incarnated in an objective productive quantum. As a voluntary, material substance, capital itself is orthogonal - and therefore impermeable - to power politics, by defi- nition.
This view is complemented by the liberal theory of politics. According to neoclassical historiography, the logic of capital accumulation, although inherent in the human psyche, was manifested only after civil society began its revolt against feudal and state tyranny. Gradually, the flat principle of free will, the relentless mechanism of the market and the new creed of growth undermined deference to political hierarchy and the stationary economy of feudalism. In this context, it was only natural for the utilitarian calculus of capital accumulation to become the blueprint for political democracy.
In this blueprint, the ideal political system is one that intervenes the least, and the best way to guarantee minimal intervention is to make politics itself operate as a free market. That is the gist of liberalism.
The metaphors of political liberalism - like those of neoclassical economics - are clearly Newtonian (a point to which we return in Chapter 3). The various political particles - interest groups, electoral parties, coalitions, NGOs and contending state organs - all act and react on one another. Each particle tries to maximize its own utility. But because the particles are all relatively small, the political bourse remains competitive, the different
28 Dilemmas of political economy
demands tend to countervail each other, and the result converges to the least
harmful political equilibrium. 2
The Marxist perspective
Despite their mutual hostility, Marxists share with neoclassicists the view that capital is an economic magnitude. The difference is that, in contrast to the neoclassicists, Marxists deny that capital can exist independently of politics. The relations of production, they argue, are not separate from, but inter- twined with politics and the state - and have been so throughout history. The interesting question is not whether politics affects economics, but the way in which their interaction has evolved over time. And here capitalism indeed seems unique.
Capitalism, argue the Marxists, is the first social order to introduce a clear legal and ideological demarcation between public politics and state on the one hand, and private economy and market on the other. Liberal politics is based on the belief in universal equality: a society governed by the voluntary exchange of private property presupposes and implies equality before the law. By contrast, the accumulation of capital, despite its voluntary appearance, requires inequality. This necessity, argue the Marxists, is inherent in the very nature of capitalism: the means of production are owned by capitalists who
2 A typical view of politics as a free market is portrayed by Anthony Downs (1957). According to Downs, politics is a form of competition among firms (political parties) over the hearts, minds and pockets of sovereign consumers (voters). Just like in every other market, here, too, each actor seeks to maximize his or her own utility. The voters try to maximize their net political utility (or minimize their net political disutility) by choosing the optimal ratio of public services to taxes. Similarly for the politicians. Their purpose is to maximize their net political assets: more votes, more seats, more spoils.
This vision of politics as a free market is now deeply embedded in the everyday practice of liberalism. Political parties in the United States and elsewhere make extensive use of the Voter Vault, a massive collection of up to 50,000 databases packed with detailed consumer/ voter information. According to the Financial Times, this information, filtered through various algorithms, enables politicians to tailor their messages to the 'preferences' of specific groups of voters:
The technique, known as 'micro-targeting' on the right and 'modelling' on the left, is a sign of how far modern political campaigning has become a marketing exercise, with techniques that were traditionally used in broadcast advertisements applied to polit- ical communications. Nowadays political consultants tout 'turnout scores', 'clusters' and 'micro-targeted messages'. In the US, generic electoral constituencies such as 'soccer moms' and 'Reagan Democrats' are broken down into even more forensic clusters. There are different algorithms to weigh cultural differences between West and East Texas. Strategists target finer demographic slices such as 'high-income, God- respecting, terrorism-fearing Republicans' or 'white women aged 35-45 with college educations, who are Catholic or Protestant and pro-life, with median incomes over Dollars 35,000 and live in Dollars 150,000-plus homes'.
? (Financial Times October 13, 2006, p. 11)
The dual worlds 29
do not work, while labour is performed by workers who do not own. Since value is produced only by workers, capitalists can extract, appropriate and accumulate the surplus part of this value only through exploitation. And exploitation, by definition, negates equality.
This duality of political equality and economic inequality produces a destructive contradiction. Recall that, according to Marxists, capital accu- mulates in the economic-productive sphere. This is where class conflict is generated, labour exploited and surplus value expropriated. But the economic process cannot occur independently of politics. Accumulation, because it is based on exploitation, cannot be sustained at the level of the individual producer-employer alone. It requires legal, ideological and cultural institu- tions; it needs state organs and other power organizations; it has to be framed, shaped and contained from above. In short, it requires the political power of a (nation) state. In this way, the institutions and organizations of power - although unproductive in the direct economic sense - are nonetheless indis- pensable for maintaining and reproducing the economic order as a whole. At the same time, these very institutions and organizations are nourished by and depend on the surplus extracted in the economic sphere. In this sense, the economic base of exploitation can exist only under a political superstructure of oppression, and vice versa.
But that requirement makes capitalist politics inherently contradictory: liberal politics has to be equal in ideology and theory, yet unequal in practice. And since this contradiction is produced by the very nature of capitalism, the only way to resolve it is to overthrow the system altogether. Eliminating the exploitation of workers by capitalists will simultaneously eliminate the duality of politics and economics. (Marxists, of course, express both the contradiction and its resolution dialectically rather than mechanically as we have done here, and certainly with far greater finesse; but their political conclusion is essentially the same. )
Capitalism from below, capitalism from above
To sum up, then, both neoclassicists and Marxists separate politics from economics, although for different reasons. The neoclassicists see the separa- tion as desirable and, if handled properly, potentially beneficial. By contrast, Marxists view the distinction as contradictory and, in the final analysis, destructive for capitalism. Yet, both conclusions, although very different, are deeply problematic - and for much the same reason.
The difficulty lies less in the explanation of the duality and more in the widespread assumption that such a duality exists in the first place. Even E. P. Thompson, a brilliant historian who was otherwise critical of Marxist theo- retical abstractions, seems unable to escape it. Writing on the development of British capitalism from the viewpoint of industrial workers, he describes the class socialization of workers as 'subjected to an intensification of two intol- erable forms of relationship: those of economic exploitation and of political
30 Dilemmas of political economy
oppression' (1964: 198-99). In this dual world, the industrial labourer works for and is exploited by the factory owner - and when he organizes in opposi- tion, in comes the policeman who breaks his bones, the sheriff who evicts him and the judge who jails him.
Now, this bifurcation is certainly relevant and meaningful - but only up to a point. From the everyday perspective of a worker, an unemployed person, a professional, even a small capitalist, economics and politics indeed seem distinct. As noted, most people tend to think of entities such as 'factory', 'head office', 'pay cheque' and 'shopping' differently from the way they think of 'political party', 'taxation', 'police', 'military spending' and 'foreign policy'. Seen from below, the former belong to economics, the latter to politics.
But that is not at all what capitalism looks like from above. It is not how the capitalist ruling class views capitalism, and it is not the most revealing way to understand the basic concepts and broader processes of capitalism. When we consider capitalist society as a whole, the separation of politics and economics becomes a pseudofact. Contrary to both neoclassicists and Marxists who see this duality as inherent in capitalism, in our view it is a theoretical impossibility, one that is precluded by the very nature of capi- talism. To paraphrase David Bohm (1980), from this broader perspective, the politics-economics duality is not a useful division, but a misleading fragmentation. It cannot be shown to exist - and if it did exist, profit and accumulation would cease and capitalism would disappear.
The consequences of this entanglement for capital theory are dramatic. As we shall demonstrate, without an 'economy' clearly demarcated from 'poli- tics' we can no longer speak of quantifiable utility and objective labour value; and with these measures gone, neoclassical and Marxian capital theories lose their basic building blocks. They can observe that Microsoft is worth $300 billion and that Toyota pays $2 billion for a new factory, but they cannot explain why.
Real and nominal
The classical dichotomy
As noted, underneath the broad duality of politics and economics lies the further bifurcation of the economy itself. Following the so-called Classical Dichotomy, first suggested in the eighteenth century by British philosopher David Hume, neoclassicists separate economic life into 'real' and 'nominal' domains. Of the two, the real sphere is primary, the nominal secondary. The real sphere is where production and consumption take place and relative prices and distribution are determined. The nominal sphere is the domain of money and absolute prices, and it both lubricates and reflects the input- output processes of the real economy.
At the root of this duality lies an attempt to justify capitalist profit and wealth. The liberal claim - first voiced in the European city-states of the thir-
The dual worlds 31
teenth and fourteenth centuries and later formalized in John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690) - is that private property emerges from one's own labour. This claim makes the bourgeoisie unique: earlier dominant classes looted their wealth and therefore needed religion to sanctify it; the capitalists, by contrast, produce their wealth with their effort and hence have a natural right to own it. 3
Nominal income and assets, therefore, are derivative not of mercantilist plunder but of actual production with real capital goods, and that makes them fully justified. The productivity of the capitalist, intertwined with his existing capital goods, results in monetary earnings. These earnings in turn are ploughed back into producing more capital goods, leading to more mone- tary wealth, more capital goods, more earnings, and so on in an ever- expanding spiral. In this way, the money value of finance, measured in dollars and cents, reflects and manifests the physical capital stock created by the capitalist.
Of course, the correspondence is far from perfect. As it turns out, the ups and downs of the stock and bond markets are rather difficult to correlate with changes in the capital stock - particularly since, as we shall see in Chapter 10, the two measures tend to move in opposite directions. But this mismatch hasn't been much of a concern. Liberals have solved it by putting into work an army of 'distortionists' - theorists, strategists and analysts who pry on 'insti- tutional imperfections' and 'exogenous shocks'. The theory, argue the distor- tionists, is perfectly fine. The problem is with the extra-economic forces - the shocks that constantly besiege the otherwise pure economic system, contami- nate its real and nominal spheres and fracture their pristine correspondence. Once you account for these distortions, it becomes clear why finance is always dependent on - yet forever delinked from - its true material essence.
The Marxist mismatch
Although the Marxist logic on this subject is radically different, its conclu- sions are surprisingly similar. Contrary to the liberals, Marx sought to annul the bourgeois justification for profit. He agreed that value is created in the material sphere - but instead of multiple factors of production, he insisted that there is only one: labour. The value of all commodities - including that of capital goods - is determined by productive labour alone.
3 Perhaps the first to explicitly associate income with productivity were the university profes- sors. Knowledge (scientia) was the gift of God and therefore could not be sold, but the new urban intellectuals found a better leverage: the notion that all work deserves a salary. 'We find it irrational that the worker not profit from his work', argued the doctors of law in thir- teenth-century Padua, and then went on to conclude that 'the master may accept the money of students - the collecta - as the price of his work, of his trouble' (quoted in Le Goff 1993: 94-95).
? 32 Dilemmas of political economy
In this scheme, not all capitals are created equal. The so-called industrial capitalist, the employer of productive labour, does possess real capital. But the commercial and financial capitalists - insofar they employ only unpro- ductive labour and therefore produce neither value nor surplus value - do not own real capital. Although they accumulate moneyed capital, they do so merely by appropriating some of the surplus value generated by industrial capitalists. The resulting intra-capitalist redistribution creates a mismatch. It means that the nominal magnitude of any particular capital is likely to differ from its underlying real magnitude: for the industrialist the nominal will be lower than the real, while for the commercial and financial capitalist the nominal will exceed the real (which may well be zero).
The nominal-real mismatch is further amplified by the forward-looking nature of financial markets. Stock and bond prices represent the present value of expected future earnings. Because we deal with expectations, these future earnings may or may not be 'realized'. And since the earnings are merely tentative, there is no reason why finance should be equal to - or even corre- late with - capital goods that already exist here and now. For this reason Marx considered financial assets to be 'fictitious capital' - in contrast to the 'real capital' anchored in the dead labour of realized surplus value.
And, here, too, the Marxists find themselves stuck in a liberal duality. They portray a world in which the parasitic capitalists of commerce and finance suck in surplus from the productive capitalists of industry, where speculative market bubbles inflate and deflate around the fundamentals of production, where the fiction of finance distorts the true picture of real accumulation. The specific categories and theories differ from those of the liberals, but the real-nominal bifurcation that underlies them is the same.
Quantitative equivalence?
Separating the real from the nominal enables the theorist to play both cards. On the one hand, he can stand by the theory, insisting that in the final analysis nominal finance derives from the reality of capital goods. On the other hand, when the difference between finance and capital goods gets too larger, he can suspend the theory - at least temporarily, until the 'distortions' go away.
This convenient doublespeak serves to conceal a deep ontological diffi- culty. At issue here is the very assumption of quantitative equivalence. Both neoclassicists and Marxists believe that capital has two quantities - one nominal, the other material. And they further believe that, under ideal circum- stances - without intervening factors and other extra-economic distortions - these two quantities are equivalent.
As we shall show, this assumption rests on foundations of sand. Its first component - the belief that capital has two quantities - falls flat on its face. Capital certainly has a nominal quantity. We know its price in dollars and cents. But capital does not have - and indeed cannot have - a material
The dual worlds 33
quantity. The second belief, namely that the two quantities of capital are equivalent, is also seriously problematic.
Even if capital goods did have a material quantity, why should this quantity have anything to do with the nominal value of capital? Capital, this book argues, is not a productive economic entity; it is a broad power institution. And if that is the case, what could the 'mass' of machines - even if it had a calculable quantity - tell us about the social dynamics of power?
3 Power
Force is nothing apart from its effect.
--Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution
The pre-capitalist backdrop
To understand the origin and rationale of the capitalist dualities, it is useful to begin with some observations on the pre-capitalist world. As we have seen, prior to the emergence of liberalism all state and quasi-state regimes - or 'cultures' in today's lingo - were marked by a binary structure: an inescapable conflict between mastery and slavery, between rulers and ruled. The material bedrock was agricultural. In economic parlance, there were two 'factors of production': land and labour. Politically, these factors corresponded to two classes: the nobility and the peasantry. The nobility owned the land and imposed its rule. The peasantry - save for the occasional revolt - passively submitted to the nobility's rule.
This early mode of production, to use Marx's language, unfolded through multiple forms of authoritarianism, despotism and tyranny - from the Carolingian state of Europe and the Caliphates of the Middle East to the Moguls of India and the empires of China and Japan. The histories of these dictatorships varied greatly. Some relied on peasant-slaves, as in the ancient empires; others were based on farmer-tenants, as in the Middle East; and still others were built on serfs tied to princely fiefdoms, as in Europe and Japan. But the underlying principle was always the same: redistribution through confiscation. The nobles would rob the peasants, each other, or both. 1
1 The dominant postmodern fashion loves to reject this universal history (or should we rather say 'narrative') - in favour of a much more politically-correct protestation. The postists not only decry the oppression of the 'East' by the 'West', but also insist that the so-called 'Western scientific revolution' in fact originated in the . . . 'Orient' (see for instance, Hobson 2004).
According to this universal Orient-centrism, it turns out that the 'West' (in its totality) took off largely thanks to the knowledge of the 'East' (in the aggregate). The 'East' gener- ously made its 'knowledge portfolio' available to the 'West'; the 'West' used this precious portfolio in order to industrialize and capitalize (which amount to the same thing); and then,
? Power 35
There was no alternative. The agricultural cycle was slow, productivity low and innovation shunned. There wasn't any growth. The only way to get ahead was to deprive someone else. 2
Appropriately, the rulers' worldview was static and circular. It glorified the past and idealized the present. Happiness, riches and glory, it claimed, depended on miracle and magic. Any change - for better or worse - was to come from outside society, delivered by extra-terrestrial envoys (such as the Persian-Jewish-Christian Messiah), supercharged emissaries (like the Jewish- Muslim-Christian Satan/Devil), or resurrected dead (another Persian tech- nology).
In order to legitimize their naked violence, the rulers needed a mediating factor, an external force that would justify and conceal their inherent conflict with their subjects. This external force usually appeared as an awe-inspiring, superhuman entity - Baal, El, Aton, Zeus, Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, Inti, Itzamna. In due course, the rituals associated with these deities would develop into ruthless, centralized religions that sanctified the status quo and punished deviations. Although often wrapped in a language of blessing, compassion and generosity, these religions served to terrorize and oppress the peasants and slaves. Their promise to the laity was surprisingly uniform: suffer and pay in this world, get reimbursed in the next. No wonder insurance companies found this scheme inspiring.
The tillers of the land were left with little choice. Faced with rulers who owned not only the land and the weapons, but also the keys to Heaven and Hell, what else could they do but obey? 3
toward the end of the process, the 'West' turned back to take over, oppress and eviscerate the 'East'.
There is no doubt. Albania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, the Baltic countries and other such 'Western' states grew and prospered largely due to the scientific methods and knowl- edge given to them by Genghis Khan, the Indian Mughals and the enlightened Ottoman tribesmen that took over Asia Minor, Greece and Hungary. Similarly, it is crystal clear that the Indian caste system, much like the abject poverty that debilitated much of South and East Asia for generations, is all due to the oppression imposed by the 'West'. Finally, it needs no mentioning that the 'East' - and particularly 'Islam' - developed pristinely. There was no oppression, indoctrination, confiscation, robbery, looting and mass murder. There were no armies and there was no centralized power. The tolerant Islamic culture emerged just like that, out of nowhere, to bring democracy, science and freedom to one quarter of the world.
2 For more on the early emergence of stratification and redistribution, see the debate in Gilman et al. (1981).
3 These patterns seem to cut across the monotheistic religions. The word 'Islam', for example, denotes acceptance of and surrender to God's power as administered by his exclusive repre- sentatives. Refusal is blasphemy, leading to punishment, humiliation and subjugation.
The contemporary rabbinate church may seem less demanding, but that wasn't always the case. During its early phase of kingship in the first millennium BCE, the Judaic religion held a rather uncompromising position, demanding exclusivity backed by force. This position was modified after the destruction of Judah and Israel in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Having lost the institutionalized backing of state violence, the rabbinate church could no
? 36 Dilemmas of political economy
The new cosmology
The binary structure of the land-labour regime was first broken in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A new social formation had emerged. The hallmark of this new formation was a third 'factor of produc- tion' - the industrial machine - and a new class of owners - the capitalists. The owners and their factories marked the beginning of a new political order - the regime of capital.
The new capitalist order was an outgrowth of a triple revolution: the scien- tific revolution, the industrial revolution and the French revolution. The forbearers of this revolution were Nicolo` Machiavelli, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Rene? Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Gottfried Leibnitz and, most importantly, Isaac Newton. These thinkers offered a totally novel staring point: a mechanical worldview. The cosmos, they argued, is like a machine. In order to understand it - kosmeo in ancient Greek means to 'order' and to 'organize' - you need to take it apart, identify its elementary particles and discover the mechanical forces that hold these particles together and regulate their interaction. For the first time there emerged a secular understanding of force, one that stood in sharp contrast to the earlier, religious manifestations of force. 4
This secular cosmology developed hand in hand with a new vision of society. Human consciousness, says Friedrich Hegel (1807: 183-88), cannot grasp force in the abstract. Force is not an isolated thing, but a relationship, and as such it can be understood only through its actual, concrete manifesta- tions. The main relationship is negation: we comprehend force through its specific contradictions and forms of resistance. Perhaps the most important of these is the negation of subject and object. Stated simply and without sounding pompous, we can say that human beings understand themselves as subjects by investigating the world around them. And as they discover/create
longer use force to keep the laity in line and instead had to resort to indirect manipulations and virtual threats (a subject on which Spinoza's 1690 Theological-Political Treatise remains unparalleled). But the statist void did not last forever. After the establishment of Israel, the rabbinate church, realigned with its former Zionist enemy, showed little hesitation in resur- recting its original version of violent ethno-tribalism.
Similarly with Christendom. Christianity began as a submissive oriental religion in the Roman Empire. Three centuries later it already operated as a full-fledged imperial church, complete with violent diplomacy, deceit and mass murder. During the millennium of the so-called Middle Ages, Christian priests and monks helped ensure that European peasants accepted the rule of their kings and princes - or risk the wrath of God and his servicemen. The lot of the indigenous peoples of the Americas wasn't much better. Beginning in the sixteenth century, they were compelled to abandon their local deities in favour of the Christian Lord, whose superior power was convincingly demonstrated by the lethal effi- ciency of his Catholic soldiers. The massacres committed by these soldiers of faith surpassed anything previously seen in the empires of the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas.
4 The mechanical worldview, its history and heroes are examined with great imagination by Arthur Koestler in The Sleepwalkers (1959).
? Power 37
their own social being, they articulate nature based on the power relations of their own society. In this sense, their cosmology is the politicization of nature. The power relations that organize their society also order their universe. 5
Thus, in pre-statist societies force took the form of naming natural objects and phenomena - moon, thunder, birth, flood. In 'anarchic' cultures, these objects and phenomena got embedded in a plethora of rituals and gods. Hellenic legends speak of relatively egalitarian cities, some with popular, communal rule. Pre-historical hunters and gatherers lived in similarly flat structures. In such societies, the gods tended to be relatively equal, more familial, often matriarchal, and not particularly vengeful. They were neither all-knowing nor terribly rational. They were more like capricious bullies who demanded respect and occasional appeasement. 6
The transition to centralized, statist societies brought a new cosmology of force. Hierarchical political rule introduced a rigid pantheon of god-kings and, eventually, an omnipotent god-emperor. Multiplicity gave rise to singu- larity and the rituals became centralized and exclusionary. Nature was increasingly objectified and the gods grew alien. Although their logic was still mysterious, the gods now began to plan and calculate. They threatened, blamed and retaliated. They demanded complete obedience and punished with unforgiving violence.
The emerging scientific approach of the sixteenth century, along with its new creature - later to be named 'scientist' - challenged this religious cosmology. 7 Although many of the new scientists continued to believe in the guiding hand of God, that guidance was considered a singular event. When Laplace presented Napoleon with his magnum opus on celestial mechanics, System of the World, the emperor inquired why it did not mention God. Laplace replied: 'Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis'. God may have invented the universe, but once the blueprint was finished and the cosmos assembled, he locked the plans and threw away the key.
For the new scientists, God was universal force. This force - whether embedded in Machiavelli's secular Prince, in Hobbes' Leviathan or in the celestial movements of Galileo and Newton - is concentrated, deterministic and balanced. It never disappears. It is embedded in the mutual attraction and repulsion of all bodies. As universal force, God has no interest in princely politics and statist diplomacy. It doesn't care about the church and needs no representatives on earth or elsewhere. It has no quirks and doesn't act on impulse. God is permanent rationality and eternal order - or simply law. The
5 We prefer to bypass in silence here Louis Althusser's post-Stalinist interpretation of the dialectical method of Hegel and Marx, as well as his writings on power institutions and polit- ical organizations.
6 A feminist interpretation of the archeological evidence is given in Stone (1976). The myths are narrated and analysed in Graves (1944; 1957).
7 The term 'scientist' was coined only in the 1830s, by William Whewell, but the early scien- tists understood the novelty of their position well before it was given a special name.
? 38 Dilemmas of political economy
purpose of science is to discover this abstract rationality and order, to uncover the universal 'laws of nature'. And since the harmony of natural laws is the invention of God, the best society is the one that reproduces those laws in its own politics. 8
The new science of capitalism
The science that articulated this new society was political economy. The term itself had already been coined in the early seventeenth century, but it was only in the late eighteenth century that political economy came into its own. 9 Its founding text, The Wealth of Nations, was written in 1776 by Adam Smith. It is easy to discover Newton in this text. Smith treats human beings as isolated bodies. They relate to one another not organically, but mechanically, through force and counter-force. The process is energized by scarcity, the gravita- tional force of the social universe, and is mediated through the mechanical functions of demand and supply - the earthly manifestations of Newton's attraction and repulsion. To the naked eye, the interaction seems accidental, a matter of chance for better or worse. But in fact, there is logic, and indeed order, in the chaos.
The hierarchical, dependent structure of the ancien re? gime is replaced here by the flat mechanism of inter-dependence. Social order, which previously had been imposed by God through the clergy and the royalty, is now created by the 'invisible hand' of competition. It is just like in nature. The anarchic interaction of natural bodies leads not to chaos but to equilibrium, and the same holds true in society. In the natural state of things, human beings constantly collide and act on each other through production and consump- tion. Like natural bodies, they, too, are numerous and relatively small, and therefore none can take over and swallow the others. There is no visible guid- ance, and none is called for. The system functions like clockwork, on its own. Indeed, it is outside intervention - particularly by monarchs and commercial monopolies - which upsets the spontaneous social order. And since this spon- taneous order is the ultimate source of wealth, government intervention and
8 This notion that there exists an external rationality - and that human beings can merely discover this external rationality - was expressed, somewhat tongue in cheek, by the number theorist Paul Erdo? s. A Hungarian Jew, Erdo? s did not like God, whom he nicknamed SF (the supreme fascist). But God, whether likable or not, predetermined everything. In math- ematics, God set not only the rules, but also the ultimate proofs of those rules. These proofs are written, so to speak, in 'The Book', and the mathematician's role is simply to decipher its pages (Hoffman 1998). Most of the great philosopher-scientists - from Kepler and Descartes to Newton and Einstein - shared this view. They all assumed that the principles they looked for - be they the 'laws of nature' or the 'language of God' - were primordial and that their task was simply to 'find' them (Agassi 1990).
9 The term 'political economy' first appeared in 1611 in a work on government by Louis de Mayerne-Tuquet, and again in 1615 as part of the title of a French book by Antoine de Montchretie? n (see King 1948).
? Power 39
other restrictions are necessarily harmful and should be minimized. The best system is one of laissez faire.
And so Newton's horizontal notion of force and counterforce became the substitute for vertical hierarchy - in the heavens as well as on earth. In France, Voltaire and Montesquieu found in his ideas a powerful alternative to the oppressive French monarchy. Benjamin Franklin and other tourists and exiles imported these ideas to the United States under the guise of 'checks and balances', which later reappeared as 'countervailing powers'. 10
During the nineteenth century, Newton's notion of a 'function' invaded every science, natural and social. More and more phenomena were thought of in terms of a mutual interdependency between two otherwise distinct bodies. In neoclassical political economy, the key function became the rela- tionship between price and quantity. The discipline, which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and later consolidated into a new orthodoxy, anchored the relationship of price and quantity in Jeremy Bentham's 'calculus of pleasure and pain', turning it into the main tool for understanding the fate of human societies.
It was a complete cosmological break. Instead of visible, hierarchical power, legitimized by wilful gods, there emerged a new ideology based on invisible, horizontal force, anchored in objective science.
The promise was huge. Socially, the new order undermined authoritarian rule. From now on, everyone - that is, every bourgeois citizen - could own property and be elected to public office. Materially, the new order helped break the uncompromising limits of nature. Wealth no longer depended on religious sanctity and princely robbery. It no longer hinged on redistribution. Instead, it was generated through a totally novel process: economic growth.
For the first time in history, society did not have to cycle in a closed loop. The material envelope, previously defined by fixed resources, stationary tech- nology and subsistence reproduction, was finally breached. Science and mechanized production created a new possibility: the expansion of the pie itself. Improving one's lot no longer required conflict, war and violence - or, alternatively, compliance with Confucius' 'Third Way'. On the contrary, growth was most likely to occur in the context of equilibrium, peace and mutual interest.
The principal agent of this revolutionary change was capital. It was in capital that the new sciences, the new techniques and the new political promise were jointly embedded. Capital was both the engine of growth and the vehicle of liberation.
But in order for capital to deliver, the political regime had to be entirely transformed. Divine right had to give way to natural right, sanctified
10 Of course, the metaphors go both ways. Smith's imposition of Newton's natural cosmos on society was subsequently re-inverted by Darwin, who imposed Malthus' social selection on nature.
? 40 Dilemmas of political economy
ownership to private property, religion to rationalism, paternalism to indi- vidualism, obedience to self-interest and utility, hierarchical power to compe- tition, absolutism to constitutionalism. It was a massive transition, and it could be realized - at least in theory - only through laissez faire. The new private economy had to be liberated from the shackles of the old politics. That was the mission of political economy.
Separating economics from politics?
Unlike the mission of the natural sciences, though, the mission of political economy was finite, by definition. If the purpose was to isolate the economy from the intervening hand of political rulers, it follows that once that purpose was achieved political economy would no longer have reason to exist. Independent of each other, economics and politics could now be studied and analysed separately, as two distinct spheres of human activity.
But that was easier said than done. As it turned out, political economy cannot self-destruct - and for a reason that, paradoxically, lies in its very purpose.
The explanation is simple enough. Conceived of independently of politics, the economy is a closed system. It has its own units of labour time and commodities; it has its own structure of inputs and outputs; and it comes with a theory that fully explains the level of production, consumption and relative prices. This self-contained description, though, holds only for a stationary economy. But capitalism is anything but stationary. As political economists themselves emphasize, capitalism is a growing system. It generates an ever- increasing 'surplus' - an output that is over and above what is necessary to merely reproduce society at a given level of production and consumption. And this ever-growing surplus creates a huge theoretical problem: it cannot be fully explained by the economy alone.