Volume 28 Issue 1 January 2016
We open the first issue of this volume with a symposium on George DeMartino's book, The Economist's Oath: On the Need for and Content of Professional Economic Ethics, which comes at a very appropriate time when discontent around the discipline of economics is growing in waves across the world: among its practitioners, in policy circles, in academia, and among those who teach and those who are students. The waves of crises experienced in the past few decades have provoked questions that call for deeper reflection not only on the nature of the discipline—especially for those perspectives that represent the mainstream—but also on the ethics of economists.
In his essay entitled “The Question of Ethics: One Marxist Take on George DeMartino's The Economist's Oath,” Antonio Callari argues that DeMartino's book represents a courageous achievement by raising in important ways the question of professional ethics and by reaching an audience—the consumers of economic knowledge—beyond its main target, the producers of economic knowledge and the economics profession. Callari's main point concerns the adequacy of this reach, that from a Marxist perspective this reach has to be reconstituted to include the “putative ‘objects’ of economic knowledge”—the communities and lives that economics affects and transforms—thus opening the door to economic democracy. But democracy, argues Callari, “is something of an empty signifier” that does not guarantee a workers' democracy, the formation of which requires giving a class content to the subjectivity of economic agents. For him, therefore, emancipation from the hubris that characterizes the economics discipline goes beyond the question of professional ethics and into the realm of economic democracy, the signs of which are by now becoming visible.
While Callari raises his concern on the content of economic democracy suggested in DeMartino's work, Jonathan Diskin focuses on a different aspect of the book in his essay, “Ethics and Epistemology in The Economist's Oath.” He emphasizes the dialectical relation between the production and circulation of (economic) knowledge, pointing to his concern that DeMartino's emphasis is more on the latter and less on what he calls the products and mechanisms of knowledge: the models, theories, techniques, and other practices put to use to decide which forms of knowledge qualify as “expert” knowledge. At stake for Diskin is to ask whether challenging the certainty of the discipline and its failure to acknowledge the harm it causes also poses a challenge to the value-neutral, positive-science posturing of economics. Underlining the case for pluralism as an integral part of economic ethics, Diskin states that DeMartino's argument for economic ethics can be extended to “a demand to expand the nature of the basic comparisons that mainstream economic knowledge entails,” especially in relation to cost-benefit analysis. The redefinition of cost and benefit through practices that also include the community in question has the potential to unsettle mainstream theory. In this sense, Diskin like Callari believes that the epistemological questions raised by DeMartino can be expanded in directions the book does not take on.
Alan Freeman emphasizes the timely nature of DeMartino's book in the context of growing discontent within the discipline and takes the analysis offered in a related yet different direction by extending the analysis of how exactly economists do harm. In “Economics and Its Discontents: Comments on George DeMartino's The Economist's Oath,” Freeman argues that harm is done when economists “present as true that which they cannot with certainty know to be true.” Freeman emphatically notes that pluralism is an inherent part of ethics, as all alternative ways of looking at a problem need to be discussed as part of economic theorizing and economic policy making. He notes the great irony in the economics discipline's claim to scientificity without its also following the well-established practices of the positive sciences, such as the consideration of a range of ideas on any given question. Thus, one of the unethical dimensions of economics is its “monotheoreticism.” For Freeman there is a very direct and strong connection between pluralist conduct and ethical conduct. Freeman concludes his comments by discussing his disagreement with DeMartino on the necessity for a codification of ethics in economics. He believes that codification, “regardless of agreeing on how it may be used,” has a regulatory function, but he adds however that this might not have a radical impact. The reason for this, Freeman adds, is that regulation from either within or outside the profession will not solve the problem of monotheoreticism built into the selection mechanisms operating within the discipline by which the social function of economists is to produce justifications for what their employers want to do. So, Freeman concludes, the fundamental problem is in the social contract between economics and society, and this is where our systematic thinking should be directed for fundamental changes.
In the final commentary, “The Antimodernist Challenge in George F. DeMartino's The Economist's Oath: A Call to Humility,” Serap A. Kayatekin, like Callari and Diskin, notes the epistemological question at the heart of the argument that DeMartino raises in his book and argues that the notion of “epistemic insufficiency,” the inherent unpredictability of the future, undergirds the antimodernist challenge of the book and is the fundamental reason for the profession's need to get rid of the hubris that has characterized it. Similar to Callari, Diskin, and Freeman, she also supports the necessity of pluralism as an imperative dimension of a fundamental change in the practices of the discipline. Kayatekin underlines the complexity of the notion of harm and attempts to extend DeMartino's analysis in the direction of how harm can be conceptualized by economists. While taking as a very serious contribution of his analysis DeMartino's point that economic ethics is politically agnostic, she states that what is considered to be harm without a doubt will differ according to the particular theoretical perspective economists use. In the final part of her comments, Kayatekin develops a beginning example of how econogenic harm can be conceptualized from a class-analytic perspective in the context of the crisis of Greek debt and of Greece's negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the European Commission (EC).
In his response to these comments, entitled “The Economist's Oath: On Economic Agency, Economic Theory, Pluralism, and Econogenic Harm,” George DeMartino agrees with Callari's concern about the potential of a professional campaign for economic ethics to unsettle the enormous influence of the profession. DeMartino's reading of the institutionalization of the economics profession confirms that this history is one of denying the “putative objects” of economic knowledge their subjectivity. DeMartino responds to Diskin's comments by first stating that critics of mainstream economics should not expect much from the challenge of economic ethics, and he insists on the political agnosticism of economic ethics. He adds that his view on this issue would not change were the mainstream of the profession committed to social democracy, socialism, cooperative enterprises, and other economic models. DeMartino ends his response to Diskin by adding that he agrees with the view that the circulation and production of economic knowledge are dialectically related and that, as Diskin queries, the changes in the circulation of economic ideas may indeed lead to changes in their production, as the crises in mainstream economic theory seem to indicate in the last few years. DeMartino agrees with Freeman's objection to monotheoreticism and argument for pluralism. He states that it is a “cardinal professional sin … to present as ‘Truth’ what is not and even cannot be known.” He extends his argument by adding that “a profession that thinks it already knows” is prone to privileging “abstract knowledge—episteme—over applied knowledge—techne.” But a profession that is responsible in fact should include both, disallowing “savants” detached from practical knowledge from blaming communities for the failure of their models. DeMartino calls for phronesis, practical wisdom, in addition to techne and episteme for an ethical economics. Finally, in his response to Kayatekin's comments, DeMartino states that Kayatekin is right to bring up the issue of the conceptualization of harm and that the book had replicated an error of the profession by “treating harm as a commonsensical concept.” He argues that harm is a complex notion to conceptualize because it is “internally heterogeneous”: communities are harmed in different ways. Harm also compounds: those affected by any one dimension of harm may be affected by many.
The complexity of harm, claims DeMartino, without a doubt poses a major problem for a profession that pursues hegemony in the domain of policy, and he embarks on a critique of the notion of moral geometry used by mainstream economics. Harm is too complex an entity to be reduced to a mathematical calculation, as is the practice of welfare economics. DeMartino ends his response by repeating his call for economic ethics, which is necessary not only to undermine the arrogance that has become a fixed feature of the profession but also to create a space for economic self-governance. This is a call not to eliminate economists from the conversation but to dethrone them as the ultimate source of economic wisdom and truth. And it is a project, he claims, that holds for all persuasions within the political spectrum.
DeMartino's book issues a call to reflect deeply on the ways in which economists practice their profession, thus laying grounds for alternative modes of practice, which is a theme that also undergirds the next article. In “Rewiring the Apparatus: Screen Film Theory, Media Activism, and Working-Class Subjectivities,” Chris Robé, Todd Wolfson, and Peter N. Funke draw upon concepts from screen theory to examine alternative cinematic practices and productions. As a way to rethink aspects of cinema, the authors analyze the practices of the Philadelphia-based Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) and its production of the documentary film Taxi Workers: A New Era. In collaboration with taxi workers, the MMP helped create the film as a way to support the unionization drive of taxi drivers in Philadelphia. The film, as the authors argue, embeds the camera in the working conditions of the taxi drivers, presenting images of their everyday lives and working conditions as well as highlighting possibilities for change. The film captures the gradual transformation of the subjectivity of the drivers from isolated workers to a more class-based vision of collectivity. The authors argue that the film's alternative modes of production, distribution, and reception demonstrate how the documentary form can be utilized by contemporary social movements for progressive social change. The implication of the authors' analysis is that the activist documentary form has the capacity not only to foster the formation of class-based identities but also to disrupt the ideological interpellation of the capitalist order by opening a possibility for envisioning alternative political imaginaries and new forms of everyday life.
Just as Robé et al. examine noncapitalist possibilities that can be created within the artistic medium of film making, the next article focuses on the noncapitalist economic possibilities that have been created amid a capitalist context. Rhyall Gordon's article, “Radical Openings: Hegemony and the Everyday Politics of Community Economies,” is a theoretical contribution to the emerging scholarship of the Community Economies Collective (CEC). To provide tools to examine the theories and practices of everyday postcapitalist politics, Gordon offers a synthesis of Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxian conceptions of hegemony and radical democracy with J. K. Gibson-Graham's concept of community economy. In particular, he attempts to resolve the apparent contradiction between Laclau and Mouffe's notion that hegemonic processes produce unavoidable exclusion and the ethico-political notion of “being-in-common” at the center of Gibson-Graham's postcapitalist community economy project. Drawing on fieldwork with food-sovereignty collectives in the Asturias region of northern Spain, Gordon illustrates the dynamics of hegemony within the everyday politics of a community economy. His specific focus is on the Cambalache Collective, which arose in response to the consolidation of large-scale farming in Europe after the implementation of Spain's Common Agricultural Policy in the mid-1980s. Through examples from his fieldwork, Gordon demonstrates how practices of radical democracy in horizontal assemblies provide the means not only to collective decision making but also to negotiating the normative foundations of hegemony, opening new territories for everyday politics and the specificities of being-in-common.
The Marxist scholarship of the last few decades has been diverse, one thread of which has been a growing set of reflections that study capitalism as a social system that embraces, affects, and shapes all existence—human and nonhuman—on the earth. The next contribution to this issue is conceived in this vein. In “Living in a Parasite: Marx, Serres, Platonov, and the Animal Kingdom,” Oxana Timofeeva traces connections between the use of the metaphor of the animal kingdom and analyses of society and nature. The animal genus is characterized by the hostile behavior of one against another. Marx, who likens feudalism to the “spiritual animal kingdom,” wrote that like the stomach of the beast of prey, nature is the “battlefield of union” where the different animal species are connected. Feudalism is similar. Under it, one species feeds at the expense of the other. This reference to the animal kingdom, argues Timofeeva, is widespread in traditional political thought, as oppressors always justify their rule as natural. When the sovereign in political thought is considered as the one who “embodies” the state or the nation, argues the author, this can be read as the people being literally “devoured” by the sovereign, like cattle by a wolf. But in the animal kingdom the one that devours looks different from the one devoured. So too, Timofeeva continues, in the human world those who don an animal skin by referring to the world around them as being dictated by “natural law.” The sovereign pretends to be part of the flock but wears both sheepskin and wolf-skin coats, also pretending to play the part of the hostile animal kingdom. He is both prey and beast of prey. Timofeeva, borrowing from the work of Serres, moves on to the complex and ambivalent notion of parasitism for understanding social existence, where the relationship of each to the other and to nature itself is not predatory but parasitic. Weaving a thread through Heidegger, Derrida, and Lacan, Timofeeva reflects on how the parasite lives inside the host, sometimes killing as it is devouring it. In this journey, human society is depicted as part of a parasitic chain, capital, which represents a concrete parasite: a vampire that sucks the life out of labor. Living labor becomes dead labor in capitalist exchange. Laborers give not only their labor but also their bodies, muscles, and souls in this exchange. In depicting this, Timofeeva draws from the powerful and lyrical work of Andrey Platonov's work, Soul. The marginalized, deprived, and outcast peoples of Central Asia come to represent the precarious laborers of then and today. While these masses are represented as parasites on the body of mainstream society, Timofeeva shows them to be the hosts of which capitalism is the parasite. Going back to Platonov's Chevengur, in which even the animals have an unconscious desire for communism, Timofeeva suggests that a social movement in relation not only to human societies but also to those of animals, plants, and nature at large—a movement that does not accept nature—will gain its efficacy to the degree that it is able to articulate this unconscious desire. The desire for the alternative social imaginary of communism is one that is felt by all beings, and its fulfillment similarly needs to include all.
In the next article in this issue, Laikwan Pang returns to the texts of Mao Zedong in order to challenge a particular reading of his notion of dialectics, articulating an argument in favor of an open-ended vision of an alternative social order. In “Mao's Dialectical Materialism: Possibilities for the Future,” Pang examines Mao's understanding of dialectics in relation to recent interpretations so as to show the importance of Mao's understanding of history and of conceiving the future. As a starting point, Pang examines and criticizes Slavoj Žižek's characterization of Mao's thought as a form of “negative dialectics.” According to Žižek, Mao's dialectic denies the “dialectical synthesis” of opposites, resulting in a process of endless negation or “bad infinity” in which revolution is incapable of creating the “new.” In response to such interpretations, Pang presents an incisive textual analysis of Mao's corpus, ranging from his early philosophical writings to his poems and drawing out Mao's utopian and antideterminist reflections on history and politics. As Pang shows, Mao's dialectical materialism is rooted in praxis as a unity of knowledge and practice in which the human subject is understood as the agent of historical change. Thus, according to Pang, Maoism contains an implicit heroism in which the acting subject is understood as the agent of negation, of historical transformation. In contrast to teleological understandings of Marxian dialectics, Mao's dialectical materialism assumes history is indeterminate, dependent on the heroic will of the people in determining their future. To make this point further, Pang draws from Benjamin, Althusser, Buck-Morss, and Agamben to bear on Mao's thinking of time versus messianic time. As Pang argues, the development of future political imaginaries requires separating from the idea of a “master chronology” of history and moving toward a collective understanding of the past in order to determine the future.
Revolutionary processes and alternative political imaginaries have been at the forefront of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's collaborative work since the publication of Empire in 2000. In an interview with Ceren Özselçuk, Hardt discusses some of the key concepts and ideas that have developed out of his collaborations with Negri. On the topics of Empire, sovereignty, and new struggles, Hardt discusses the relation between state, sovereignty, and global system that he and Negri attempted to capture with the concept of Empire. Broadening the terrain of politics, Hardt explains that their recent work in Declaration attempts to move beyond sovereign politics with processes such as democratic autonomy. Reflecting on the European debt crisis, current and future struggles, Hardt explains, will continually confront problems of scale, addressing local issues while also recognizing their interconnection with regional and global structures. Moving on to topics such as the politics of the multitude and to populism and love, Hardt explains how the concept of multitude attempts to capture the multiplicity of identities that are often excluded from the notion “the people.” For instance, a notion such as “national people,” Hardt argues, primarily represents dominant subjectivities and excludes subordinated subjectivities in different forms, such as religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and so on. At its foundation, the concept of multitude recognizes the radically heterogeneous nature of the social, but unlike Ernesto Laclau's understanding of populism, for instance, Hardt and Negri do not embrace the idea of identifying a hegemonic signifier as a point of unifying the multitude of diverse identities. Elaborating on the discussion of love in Commonwealth, Hardt explains how posing love as a political concept addresses the question of affects and also forces one to confront identity in terms of sameness and difference. Addressing the themes of capital, the common, and temporality, Hardt discusses the ways in which capital has conceived time, from specified work and nonwork time to an unspecified temporal mentality of 24/7 production and consumption. The Left, in contrast, according to Hardt, is divided by two concepts of time conceived around reformist and revolutionary temporalities. The first is characterized by the linear chronological time of building and transforming in terms of reforms, and the second does not foresee transformations but sees change as an event—what Hardt calls “event temporality.” Hardt argues that the Left needs to work across both temporalities, in the sense that the struggle for reforms works in coordination with the construction of events. Concluding the interview, Hardt describes how his collaborative work with Negri represents a manifestation of their friendship in diverse dimensions.
The idea of envisioning a political imaginary that moves beyond the colonial project of genocide and land dispossession is one of the themes presented in Glen Sean Coulthard's recent book, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. In a review of the book, Peter Ives explains how Coulthard draws upon the work of Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx to provide a critical assessment of settler colonialism in Canada, and by extension in the United States and other settler colonies. In addition to presenting a critique of Charles Taylor's notion of the “politics of recognition,” Coulthard shows that, despite their contentious history, much can be gained from an engagement of Marxism with Indigenous studies, to understand the ongoing practices of colonial rule and capitalist accumulation in the contemporary period. Coulthard's theoretical work, Ives argues, provides a foundation to examine Indigenous struggles in Canada, including the recent Idle No More movement. For the readers of Rethinking Marxism, Ives argues that Coulthard's critical analysis and extension of Marx's notion of “primitive accumulation” is especially insightful for understanding capitalism's continual dispossession of land and resources. In contrast to Fanon's reservations regarding the revolutionary potential of precolonial culture, Coulthard argues that “critically revived Indigenous cultural practices” have the capacity to define the features of a decolonial political project that presents alternatives to ongoing genocide, land dispossession, and capitalist accumulation.
Finally, Rethinking Marxism is deeply saddened by the passing of Rosalyn Baxandall: one of the founding members of the radical feminist movement in the United States, an outstanding feminist historian, and an activist-academic whose lifelong commitment to social change was not confined to the classroom but extended to a much broader social space, including women's prisons. Ros, who has been a member of the advisory board of our journal, has left an indisputable mark on radical feminist scholarship and activism and will be remembered as a personal embodiment of that alternative social imaginary which runs through all the contributions in this issue. Amid the deep social convulsions defining our world, where the choice of those who try to flee war-ridden areas sometimes seems to rest between military execution or drowning, and where those who attend peace rallies are shredded to pieces by bombs, political lives such as the one lived by Ros, committed to something different, something more just, and something that brings peace, will be remembered and will continue to inspire.
—The Editors |
