I have recently beome more involved in reading Zygmunt Bauman and discussing his ideas, particularly with respect to the contribution of sociology to understanding contemporay society and what a leftist agenda and programme might be – the practical contribution of his sociology. This is in addition to returning more explicitly and systematicall to a marxist account of capitalism and the current finacial crisis and a renewd discussion with my colleague, Richard Kilminster, on Norbert Elias’s theories. Which of these three, Bauman, Elias or Marxs, gives us the best understanding of our prblems – social, economic and political – and the best basis for developing political and personal strategies ? It seems to me that there is no simple answer and in any case it may be a mistake to assume any one social thinker is sufficient. This is my current position – Bauman for his continued belief in the values of socialism and his coherent account of how sociology should still be politically engaged, Elais for theoretical and conceptual rigour, and Marx for his diagnosis of capitalism.
The ‘new’ sociology of Zygmunt Bauman
I am writing ans article on Zygmunt Bauman’s view of what sociology could and should be, its value and function, in conditions of liquid modernity. Zygmunt sees sociology’s role today, in conditions of liquid modernity, as supporting civic society and servicing a continuous dialogue, a dialogue with no predetermined outcome, that clarifies issues and accommodates multiple voices. Our job is to “defamiliarise the familiar and make the familiar unfamilar”, to make visible the invisible links and connections that lie behind the life world and to keep the conversation going. However “we cannot stay neutral or indifferent when the future of humanity is at stake”. See post at http://sociology.leeds.ac.uk/blogs/zbi/2010/09/08/conference-day-two-%E2%80%93-first-reflections/
Where does this leave socialism as a valid project? Is it just one set of ideas and a vision that some voices can bring to the discussion but without any claim to legislative privilege? Socialisms project to legislate and administer a particular sort of society (no doubt a good and egalitarian society)? I think the answer is to see socialism as a establishing a set of conditions for the conversation rather than an end point itself in a particular society. Socialism is a process rather than a fixed goal or outcome – the project of socialism should be development and the nurturing of the conversation, perhaps the creation of the sociality of the social state (not necessarily in conflict with elements of the bureaucratic and market state).
Great description of what the conversation should be like in the last paragraph of page xxi in the introduction to Intimations of Postmodernity.
Companies as legal ‘persons’ and the personification of capital
Heads of cabbage and mouths full of water by Mark Neocleous. Radical Philosophy Nov/Dec 2003
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=14329
“The law which shaped the modern corporation as a new form of legal person has been reluctant to admit that the same persons can commit illegal acts and recognizable harms. The law, in other words, has been structured in a way that is far more accommodating to corporate subjects than to human ones. In this way the ruling class has more or less defined capital as beyond incrimination: the ‘harms’ committed by corporations are treated as the result of a failure to follow regulations and procedures and thus are not ‘crimes’ in the way that laypersons might think. Apropos of right-wing attacks on ‘welfare scroungers’ and ‘the idle poor’, one might say that it is the corporation that has acquired plenty of rights but few responsibilities. Capital has used the corporate form to its advantage by avoiding some of the most obvious disadvantages of being a legal subject, namely responsibility for one’s acts”.
STAGING POWER: MARX, HOBBES AND THE PERSONIFICATION OF CAPITAL by Mark Neocleous.
Law and Critique 14: 147–165, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
“The law which granted the modern corporation fully-fledged status as a juridical person has been reluctant to admit that the same persons can commit illegal acts and recognisable harms; the corporation is a person when it comes to the advantages of law, but a ‘nonperson’ when it comes to crimes seemingly committed by it. The individualizing nature of bourgeois law constructs the corporation as a person but then resists punishing it on the grounds that it is not a person at all but a collective which has no mind per se. The state personalizes capital, but doesn’t punish it as a person. It punishes it (when it does) as capital – as something different to (human) persons. A propos of attacks on ‘welfare scroungers’ and ‘the idle poor’, one might say that it is the corporation that has acquired plenty of rights but few responsibilities. In Marxist terms we might say that the unity of the corporate persona created by the state has helped consolidate the domination of capital over everyday life. Capital has used the corporate form to its advantage by avoiding some of the most obvious disadvantages of being a legal person, namely responsibility for one’s acts. The outcome has been the tendency to treat ‘crimes’ committed by corporations as mere failure to follow regulations and procedures and thus not ‘crime’ at all: the ruling class has defined capital as beyond incrimination. But then this should not surprise us: as with bourgeois law in general, the corporation is, after all, constituted as a person for purposes of capital accumulation and not for the purposes of justice.
There is a tendency among writers on ‘corporate crime’ to argue that “while . . . the charge of corporate manslaughter remains a highly difficult one to pursue successfully, there are no insuperable problems intrinsic to law to the effective criminalisation of such offences; . . . what is commonly lacking is political will”. Maybe so; but the implication of my argument is that any such ‘political will’ would have to be rooted not in the current structures through which mainstream politics is organized – political parties and reformist groups – but in a movement that would be willing to challenge the whole edifice on which political and social power is structured – the state and the individualizing tendencies of bourgeois law as well as capital itself. Moreover, any such challenge would have to take on board the fact that capital uses the persona in bourgeois law as the veil of its power”.
Both articles via Joss Winn http://stuck.josswinn.org/
Troubles ahead for world economy
Troubles ahead for world economy the 7.30 Report. Transcript of interview with Joseph Stiglitz.
Extract:
Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate, a former chief economist of the World Bank and he chaired Bill Clinton’s presidential council of economic advisors. His latest book, ‘Freefall’, is a worrying critique of the root causes of the Global Financial Crisis, and despite President Obama’s recent banking reforms, he says it could happen again. He’s also predicting another US economic slowdown. The veteran economist is on a lecture tour in Australia and I spoke with him in Brisbane today.
Joseph Stiglitz, if we can start with an up-to-date appraisal of the US economy: what is the state of the economy right now?
JOSEPH STIGLITZ, GLOBAL ECONOMIST: In a single word, weak, ah, and probably going to get weaker.
Hedge funds accused of gambling with lives
Hedge funds accused of gambling with lives of the poorest as food prices soar refers to a report on how trading in food commodity derivatives inflates and destabilises food prices with devastating consequences for the poorest communities globally.
Deborah Doane, WDM director, said: “Investment banks, like Goldman Sachs, are making huge profits by gambling on the price of everyday foods. But this is leaving people in the UK out of pocket, and risks the poorest people in the world starving. “Nobody benefits from this kind of reckless gambling except a few City wheeler-dealers. British consumers suffer because it pushes up inflation, because of unpredictable oil and raw material prices, and the world’s poorest people suffer because basic foods become unaffordable.” The group used figures in Goldman Sachs’ annual report to estimate that the bank made a profit of $1bn (£650m) through speculating on food last year.
This report follows the issue blogged on here on July 2nd – How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world’s poor – and won.
David Harvey calculates that the global capitalist economy has to aim, for a variety of structural and systemic reasons, for about 3% growth per annum. As a result capital is always looking for forms of investment to achieve this. As one set of opportunities collapses or becomes exhausted – for instance the dot.com boom and bust 1995 to 2000 – capital looked elsewhere. When the dot.com bubble burst capital moved into property eventually leading to the toxic debts underlying the current economic crisis. More recently it has moved into commodity futures, destabilising markets such as energy and food. Regulations to control speculation on food prices were dismantled about 5 years ago spawning the food derivatives industry. Perhaps the latest money spinner for the speculators and casino capitalist will be carbon cap and trade. The full story has a number of components that need investigation – commodification, marketisation and financialisation, deregulation and the development of speculative derivatives markets. All of this is connected with privatisation, the loss of accountability and the erosion of democratic controls.
For a brief history of bubbles and burst see The Great American Bubble Machine.
The depersonalisation of capitalism
I have been in email correspondence with my colleague Richard Kilminster following on from some very interesting and constructive comments on a draft article I am writing on critical pedagogy. The discussion concerns various issues around the marxist underpinnings and the normative basis of critical pedagogy as developed from the Frankfurt School Critical Theory and its successors, Habermas for instance. Richard’s main issue is that it all still depends to some extent on Kantian transcendental categories and a prioris that act as founding assumptions rather than empirically substantiated concepts. To this extent sociology generally is still in the thrall of philosophical forms of thinking, to its detriment. Richard strives for a post-philosophical sociology and to this end is developing the work of Norbert Elias who recognised the problem and made significant progress towards this goal.
Richard pointed me towards an article by Godried Van Benthem Van Den Bergh where he demonstrates how in practice sociological analyses and diagnoses often look for the causes of the state of affairs of interest in order to produce an explanation and, perhaps, help develop a plan of action or set of policies to alter that state of affairs. Often, in practice, these diagnoses and explanations take the from of finding something to blame for the condition. This can then lead to a ‘personalisation’ of the causes in a manner not dissimilar to other sorts of pre and non-scientific orientations to the world. From a scientific point of view this is an obstacle to knowledge as this form of attribution of cause and explanation “implies that one has to isolate the action(s) of one identifiable entity, whether individual, group or reified (and at the same time often personalised) ’cause’, from a complex sequence of events”. He gives examples of ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernisation’ being used in this way. This form of thinking, or at the very least this style of writing, is still prevalent in contemporary sociology. In a forthcoming article Richard gives a number of examples of this quoting from well known and influential current sociologists, for example – “modernity ‘is coming of age’ and is now ‘consciously abandoning what it was unconsciously doing”; “Post-modernity may be conceived of as modernity conscious of its true nature – modernity for itself”; ” What happens when modernization, understanding its own excesses and vicious spiral of destructive subjugation begins to take itself as object of reflection”? – and others.
With respect to ‘capitalism’ Richard points out that ‘capitalistic’ social relations cannot exist without being embedded in “a whole socio-genetic complex of interdependencies that makes them possible. The specifically ‘capitalistic’ aspects may not in fact be the most instrumental in producing what are perceived as the undesirable consequences of contemporary global developments”.
This implies that ‘capitalism’ cannot be a singular foundational unit of analysis based on the notion that ‘it’ is the primary cause of what appear to be, or are assumed to be, ‘its’ effects and consequences. If this is a mistaken orientation than solutions may be misdirected and may exacerbate conditions rather than improve them, amounting to, perhaps at best, an amelioration of the condition rather than changing the system – like an aspirin ‘cures’ a headache without having any transformational effect on the underlying causes. In fact it can make things worse by developing new forms of subjugation, dependence and the reproduction of the very system we are seeking to change.
What is the broader sociological context that must be factored into an analysis of globalising capitalism for activists who want to do something about inequality, exploitation and the destruction of the environment? It will be interesting to see how Norbert Elias’s sociology conceptualises and constructs ‘capitalism’, its apparent contradictions and contemporary neoliberal ideology. If the analysis is too general and too synthetic it may be difficult to draw political and policy conclusions from it. In which case, pragmatically, where do we go?
Godried Van Benthem Van Den Bergh (1986) The Improvement of Human Means of Orientation: Towards Syntheses in the Social Sciences in Development Studies: Critique and Renewal Eds R Apthorpe and A Krahl
Most, but not all, of this article is available on Google Books
Austerity drive will hand billions to private sector
Austerity drive will hand billions to private sector guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 July 2010 21.50 BST
This report seems to confirm that the outcome of the ConDem’s budget and economic policy, intentionally or otherwise, will be the front door, back door and side entrance privatisation of everything the corporations can lay their hands on that will turn a buck for their directors and shareholders. This surely compromises even more the fragile political democracy we still have with more and more services being managed from the unaccountable private sector. This has already taken a hit with the proposed integration of (unelected) business leaders directly into a business friendly and private profit orientated government. Why the former BP boss’s new government job is beyond parody Independent Friday, 2 July 2010.
Austerity: Why and for Whom? by Rick Wolff
Austerity: Why and for Whom? by Rick Wolff. On-line article at Commondreams.org. Links austerity programmes across Europe to conditions set by banks lending to governments due to fears of defaults on government debts. For instance the high rates of interest imposed on Greece in return for bail out loans by European banks. If governments default on loans then their credit rating may prevent them borrowing more, the banks will collapse and the Governments will not be able to borrow form banks to bail them out! Is this right? The banks have lent money to governments to bail themselves, the banks, out. Presumabley these are not the same banks – it is the banks not crippled by bad investment (the ‘national’ banks’?) that are lending to governments who then use the money to bail out the failing banks. The public funding cuts are to ensure governments can service these debts to the bank, maintain their credit ratings so that, if necessary, the governments can bail out the banks in the future. If the national banks lent the money to governments to bail out the failing banks, why couldn’t the banks have lent directly to other banks? I assume they want governments, their tax streams and assets, to guarantee the loans. It is generally recognised that European national banks will make significant profits out of lending to Greece as the interest rate is significantly higher than the banks can borrow money themselves.
All this leaves open the question – why do the austerity measures punish the poor and, despite everything, wealth still grows and concentrates? That’s because for the wealthy, every problem is an opportunity. And for the political right, ironically, via neoliberal policies, it is an opportunity to enact barely masked ideologically informed policies. Given the high profits banks will make out of loans to Greece, for instance, this looks like a direct transfer of money from the poor to the financial institutions that got us into the mess in the first place.
Reading 15-7-01
Considering the importance of liberalism in the current government’s economic and social policies, the restructuring and deficit reductions being undertaken throughout Europe voluntarily it seems and being forced upon less developed countries by the IMF etc. my reading over the last month, and still ongoing, has been an attempt to understand liberalism and how it is being ‘oerationalised’ across the globe in pursuit of state goals in general and the USA’s hegemonic project in particular. Apart from fairly abstract and theoretical readings I have been looking at concrete examples of neoliberal policies in accord with the principle “through their actions shall you know them”. This also looks at ways countries, areas and indigenous peoples have with varying degrees tried to resist the external neoliberal globalising forces. I will post here short reviews and comparisons of these readings in due course.
Currently reading:
Ray Bush (2007) Poverty and Neoliberalism: Persistence and Reproduction in the Global South Pluto Press
G Collier and E Quaratiello (1999) Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas Food First Books
David Harvey (2005) A Brief History of Liberalism OUP
David Harvey (2010) The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism Profile Books
John Holloway (2010) Crack Capitalism Plot Press
J Johnston & G Laxer ( 2003) Solidarity in the age of globalization: Lessons from the anti-MAI and Zapatista struggles in Theory and Society 32: 39-91
Mihalis Mentinis (2006) Zapatistas: The Chiapas Revolt and What it Means for Radical Politics Pluto Press
The Johnston and Laxer article is particularly interesting as it focusses on the central role of the Internet for linking national and global communication and resistance and the way that national governments have been unable to control the flow of information as they have in the past.
I will be looking at John Holloway’s other writing when I can get hold of the books. He has written specifically about the Zapatistas and is referenced in Mentinis’ book.
Suggestions are welcome.
Caving in to the corporations?
“Health” Secretary Andrew Lansley seems to be in process of abandoning every health initiative taken by the previous Labour government, often based on a pretty near consensus of health professionals and social commentators and vigorously opposed by the food industry. Under the ConDems the corporations have won by the look of it, providing more evidence that pro business and private sector policies is all too often anti people and society policies. Mr Lansley, junk food and idiocy.
Perhaps a clue to why pro business is so often anti-people and society can be found in Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN’s investigation into how to stop the destruction of the natural world, recent claim that modern businesses are “soulless corporations” that are in danger of becoming a “cancer” on society. He claims companies usually take a short-term view of the importance of the environment, and this short-term thinking is seen in their lobbying against new policies that could slow environmental devastation, he said. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/12/soulless-corporations-hurt-environment-pavan-sukhdev
This short-termism and unrelenting profit and growth orientation applies underpins a relentless and powerful resistance to all forms of regulation that create obstacles to ‘share holder value’. Things seem to have moved on very little since Friedman’s statement in the 1970s that in a “free-enterprise system” business’s only concern is with profit and has no responsibility for achieving desirable social ends (The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits).
Lansley has killed off traffic-light labelling, which exposes hidden salt, fat and sugar against the advice of the British Medical Association, the British Dietetic Association, the British Heart Foundation and dozens of other health and consumer groups. He has rejected a plan by National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to prevent 40,000 deaths from heart disease, calling for a ban on trans fats, no TV junk-food advertising before 9pm and restrictions on takeaways close to schools. He plans to close the Food Standards Agency (although there is evidence this was already heavily influenced by the food industry and agribusiness).
His answer to all of this is that the food producers are in the best position to educate the public about healthy eating and diet. This is about as useful as saying casino financial interests are in the best positon to advise people on savings and pension schemes.