Has the Left given up on Economics? [from
http://thedisorderofthings.com/2011/10/03/has-the-left-given-up-on-economics/
]
3 Oct
With the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression continuing
to slowly unfold, one of the most surprising consequences has been a
non-event: the dearth of high-quality economic theorizing in leftist
groups. [1] This is in spite of the opportunity the crisis presents
for alternative economies, and in spite of the economic conundrum that
developed economies find themselves in: too indebted for stimulus and
too weak for austerity. This differend between austerity and stimulus
indexes the insufficiency of either and yet few have taken up the
necessity of thinking proper alternatives.
The leftist response to the economic crisis has instead been mostly
been to focus on piecemeal reactions against government policies. The
student movement arose as a response to tuition fee and EMA changes;
the right to protest movement arose as a response to heavy-handed
police treatment; and leftist parties have suggested a mere moderation
of existing government policies. The project to bring about a fully
different economic system has been shirked in favour of smaller-scale
protests. There is widespread critique, but little construction.
Admittedly, the left is not entirely devoid of high-level economic
theorizing. Rather, the more specific problem is that those few who do
such work are a relatively tiny minority and are typically
marginalized within the leftist scene. The attention and effort of the
leading intellects of leftism (at least in the UK) are on social
issues, race issues, rights issues, and identity issues. All
important, to be sure, but there is no equivalent attention paid to
economic issues.
The current academic literature on leftist economics is little better.
In the words of Alex Andrews, this body of work can be roughly
separated into three general tendencies:
1. Marxists – tend to operate in a critical mode. They provide the
best analysis of the conditions of capitalism of the other groups. But
in terms of talking about the economics and organisation of a
post-capitalist society, the analysis is rather thin. This is part
because economics was historically associated with a vulgar economism
(which Marxism is not ultimately) that was linked to Stalinism. And it
is part, of course, partially to do with the idea that the democracy
of the workers movement would generate this construct.
2. Critical Realists, “Post-Autistic” school people, Tony Lawson,
Cambridge Social Ontology group – strong critique of neoclassical
economics, but lets be honest, this is shooting fish in a barrel. No
positive project. Unlike mainstream economics that never talks about
methodology, they *only* talk about methodology.
3. Keynesians – no class analysis, no wider politics, no
understanding of why Keynesianism may have failed politically, or how
it is the flip side of current situations.
As Alex notes, none of these approaches is sufficient on their own.
Yet even more worryingly, I’ve been present at a number of events
where it’s argued that leftists needn’t worry about such issues right
now. Instead it’s suggested that all we need is to bring about a
revolution (as though revolutions were some clean cut with the past,
rather than being a complex mixture of diverse social forces). The
presumption implicit in this response is that once leftists are given
the opportunity to create a new society, the answers will just become
clear. Perhaps through consensus decision making we’ll come up with a
sophisticated answer…!
But the risk of relying on such unreflective people power is that when
the opportunity comes to effectuate change, the actors involved fall
back on habitual ideas simply because they can’t imagine an
alternative. This is a crisis of imagination, but also – more
significantly – of cognitive limits. Very few have done the hard work
to think through an alternative economic system. And as a result, we
remain embedded within capitalist realism – unable to think outside
the socio-economic coordinates established by an all-encompassing
capitalist imagination. Slavoj Zizek has been a popular exception here
by consistently arguing for the necessity of thinking “the day after
tomorrow”. Yet few appear to have taken up his call, and he himself
seems to have ignored it as well.
This all raises the question of why this is the case. Here it seems to
me there are three primary reasons for this neglect of economics in
contemporary leftist circles.
In the first place there is the continued adherence to a form of ‘folk
politics’ – the avoidance of systemic and abstract thinking in favour
of immediate and bodily forms of action. Getting struck by a cop at a
protest becomes a sign of success, at the same time that it displaces
the conflict from incorporeal structures to physical individuals. Yet
the systems that determine economic outcomes are complex and abstract,
making them alien to everyday experience. We experience their
outcomes, but only at a deferred distance (see my last post for more
on this). It’s much more intuitive for individuals to protest and
occupy spaces than it is to trace out causal chains and uncover more
abstract spaces of contention (e.g. bank capital reserve
requirements). Yet the latter are exponentially more effective in the
long-run, albeit much less exciting. (This has led some to posit a
protest trilemma between being effective, being risk-free and being
exciting.)
Another part of the explanation for the missing economics has to point
towards the cultural turn of the 1980s in the theory and activist
scenes. Rather than continue to read Sraffa, Hilferding, Baran and
Sweezy, a generation of students grew up focusing more on the issues
of identity politics and the post-structuralist critique of
subjectivity and desire. This is not to begrudge cultural theory for
its achievements, but simply to point out that this became the
dominant pathway for most students during this time. Those with a
broadly leftist sensibility were immersed in this milieu, and
opportunity costs dictated this was at the expense of economics
training.
Yet this leads to the third, and more important, explanation. Because
while most leftist students may have been raised in an era of cultural
theory, one would still expect the current crisis to have brought
about a major turn in leftist circles. One would expect a massive
influx of leftists suddenly interested in economics and the scholarly
work it requires. Yet, for the most part, this shift remains unseen.
It seems to me that, as a result of the training of students in
cultural theory, many leftists consider themselves to be incapable of
doing proper economic work. We can make broad claims about cuts and
austerity, but ask a leftist to analyze the consequences of a change
in eurozone bank collateral and most are lost. Thus, the third major
explanation of the lack of economics in leftist circles is that we
don’t have the institutional basis to grapple with the nuance and
details of modern economies. This, to put it simply, is a major
failing. And moreover, it’s one that can’t be solved overnight.
So there is a massive gap at the heart of contemporary leftism, yet
there is also space for collaboration. There are pockets of
interesting work being done. From modern monetary theory to complexity
economics to ecological economics to Parecon, along with people like
David Graeber, Doug Henwood and Paul Mason, trajectories of innovative
thought are being launched. But in the current conjunction, leftists
in general need to be literate about economic matters and stop
surrendering this ground to the scholars of capitalist realism.
[1] I should be clear from the start, the ‘left’ referred to here
excludes the broadly Keynesian supporters ranging from Paul Krugman to
Christina Romer to Matthew Yglesias. Instead, the term ‘left’ here
indexes a mostly non-Keynesian group of thinkers – typically with
Marxist tendencies, but more generally interested in post-capitalism.
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your
own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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