Economy, Commodity, Exchange, Gift



John Mayall, Portrait of Karl Marx, 1875.

As stated in an earlier post, electracy is a philosophical shift that happened during the late 18th century among the social upheavals of the industrial revolution. The political revolutions of this era erased the hierarchy of class distinctions and created a new proletarian class. The new industrial city due to advances in technology came about very quickly. It was Marx’s ambition that proletariat class would establish themselves as their own social entity. Answering an interview question on the politics of social identity at the University of Washington in 2006, Alain Badiou states that Marx saw the proletariat as a generic category with no pure identity—their identity formation comes from the catch-all term “humanity,” which is the same as non-identity. I’ve quoted how whole answer to the question below because it has relevance to our project, and I would like to refer back to it.

The question of the political process is always a question that goes beyond identities. It's the question of finding something that is, paradoxically, a generic identity, the identity of no-identity, the identity which is beyond all identities. For Marx, "proletariat" was the name of something like that. In the Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes that the very nature of the proletariat is to be generic. It's not an identity. It's something like an identity which is non-identity; it's humanity as such. That's why for Marx the liberation of the working class is liberation of humanity as such, because the working class is something generic and not a pure identity. Probably that function of the working class is saturated. We cannot substitute a mere collection of identities for the saturated generic identity of the working class. I think we have to find the political determination that integrates the identities, the principles of which are beyond identity. The great difficulty is to do that without something like the working class. Without something that was a connection between particularity and universality, because that's what the working class was. The particularity of the working class was its location in a singular place; the working class was generic. The solution of the problem for Marxism was the human group which is not really an identity, which is beyond identity.

We have to do the same thing, but probably without that sort of solution. We cannot say that today this group is the generic group and that the emancipation of this group is also the emancipation of us all. So we have to find something more formal. Why formal? Because it's less inscribed in the singularity of a group. It's a relation between principles, between the formalism of the new discipline and all identities in the social field. It's a problem now for which we don't yet have the solution.

Marx's solution is a sort of miracle: you find the group which is also the generic group. It was an extraordinary invention. The history of this Marxist invention, in its concrete political determination, was not so much the history of the generic group, of the working class as such, but rather history of the representation of this generic group in a political organization: it was the history of the party. The crisis now is the crisis of representation, and also the crisis of the idea of the generic group.

When you see that a sequence of politics of emancipation is finished, you have a choice: you can continue in the same political field, or you can find the fidelity to the fidelity. It's the same thing here: If the idea of the working class as a generic group is saturated, you have the choice of saying that there are only identities, and that the best hope is the revolt of some particular identity. Or you can say that we have to find something much more universal, much more generic. But probably without the representative generic group. (George, Interview with Badiou 2006, pars. 18-21)

Gustave Doré, Over London by Rail, 1870.

The notion of identity and the sense of selfhood are part of the experience of literacy. The idea of a collective or group subject came into being with the industrial revolution and electracy. The possibility of a collective consciousness was part of this electrate shift. People became aware of themselves through the notion of the proletariat class and their role in a new group subjectivity. This phenomena of group behavior is called effervescence—an “effervescence comes over the people” (class notes). Kant was fascinated by the effervescence of people during the French Revolution:

If a revolution is successful, citizens have as much obligation to obey the new regime as they had to obey the old one (6:323). Since the new regime is in fact a state authority, it now possesses the right to rule. Further, in his theory of history, Kant argues that progress in the long run will come about in part through violent and unjust actions such as wars. Kant even takes it as a sign of progress that spectators of the French Revolution have greeted it with "a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm" (7:85). Kant is not pointing to the revolution itself as a sign of progress but to the reaction of people such as himself to news of the revolution. The spectators endorse the revolution not because it is legitimate but because it is aimed at the creation of a civil constitution. Revolution, then, is wrong but still contributes to progress (Rauscher, “Kant's Social and Political Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008), par. 29).

ECONOMY

Our CATTt, perhaps, Dressed Up for a Night on the Town

The notion of prioritizing the civic outcome of radical change because it contributes to progress is entangled in the distribution of wealth and the economy. Of course, due to investment and the accumulation of capital, industry is an economic mode of production. Adam Smith developed the new social context of the industrial revolution and the proletariat’s collective “non-identity” in terms of economics. He posited that collective identity works with an invisible hand (class notes). Smith argued that an individual's establishment of well-being is achieved purely by one's self interest. If everyone systematically looks out for him or herself, then an economy will continue to prosper—this logic has obvious parallels to game theory. Kaushik Basu elaborates further in the following passage from Beyond the Invisible Hand (2011):

An outsider viewing a modern economy, with goods changing hands and workers toiling away to produce goods in which they themselves have no interest, may be tempted to think that there is an outside agency or divine will that organizes this huge machinery. But Smith argued that this is not the case; the market is like an invisible hand that can guide producers that have goods delivered where they are most needed.

The same view of the central opinion in mainstream economics was described more eloquently by the British Marxist economist Joan Robinson (1979, 43), in a commencement speech at the University of Maine in May 1977: 'The philosophy of orthodox economics is that the pursuit of self will lead to the benefit of society. By this means the moral problem is abolished. The moral problem is concerned with the conflict between the individual interest and the interest of society. And this doctrine tells us that there is no conflict, we can all pursue our self-interest with good conscience. . . . This doctrine is attributed to Adam Smith.' (Basu, p. 9)

Smith's theory of the invisible hand was unacknowledged

for close to two centuries after the appearance of the classic, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. . . . It took a considerable machinery of mathematical economics . . . for it to be given formal shape and proof. It was well into the twentieth century that the conditions under which a competitive equilibrium exists and is optimal were formally demonstrated. That is, it was formally proved, given some condition, all individuals pursuing their respective self-interest leads society to an optimal state. This has come to be known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics and is the formal statement of the invisible hand conjecture. (pp. 9-10)

The tension that is enabled between two or more players when they play a game to win is the same enabling space of Smith’s invisible hand: the players playing the game both create and mold the space without affecting the logic or substance of its composition—it exists in a state of entelechy. History as an idea follows the same invisible spatial logic—like a sort of charged space enabled by the actions of the “non-identity” of “humanity as such” (George, Interview with Badiou, 2006, pars. 18-21). Adam Smith, through Hegel, suggests that  “there is an entelechy to history” (class notes). For the purposes of our project, the notion of the economy should be conceived as a kind of relationship. The market economy creates two new experiences of being human in society: 1) the feeling of alienation and 2) the relationship we have with the commodity or the relationship it has with us.

ALIENATION

Käthe Kollwitz, Die Mütter (The Mothers), 1921.

Positive
The modern relationship between a person and their work can be traced back to the industrial revolution. Traditionally, people used tools to make things. Work itself in is an alienating activity because the relationship of the self to work is a singular relationship. "You have to alienate yourself to interact with the world, and, in doing so, you become at one with the world" (class notes). Alienation, in this context, is a good thing; it's a positive alienation. Homer's Odyssey is an example of a positive alienation: Ulysses adventures on the way home from the Trojan war is an example of a spiritual roundtrip (an image of becoming that allows experience home again for the first time) (class notes).

Victor Turner, Scene from Homer's Odyssey, 1829.

Negative
The negative aspect of alienation is the "break between a person's sense of agency and the products of their work" (class notes).  People feel alienated when they fail to recognize their own agency and sense of purpose in the world; when we become alienated from our own causality in the world.  Alienation of this kind is a failure of experience.  The effect of disinterestedness, deracination, is called anomie.