Keith Hart on Sat, 12 May 2012 23:24:22 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Another insult of the 1 percent: everybody does it! |
On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>wrote: > A real CEO! What Veblen would've called a "business entrepreneur." That's > a class whose function, with regard to the engineers, is making profit out > of them by any means necessary, most often through what Veblen called the > *sabotage* of productivity in order to maintain market prices and > profitability. Check out the little book he wrote in the wake of the > Russian revolution, during the 1919-1920 recession and the great wave of > strikes that accompanied it: > > http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~**econ/ugcm/3ll3/veblen/**Engineers.pdf<http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/%7Eecon/ugcm/3ll3/veblen/Engineers.pdf> > > Veblen, like OWS, was a genius at inventing new terminology for Marxist > concepts so they could be smuggled into the United States. Veblen deserves more credit than as just a crypto-Marxist. The decades leading up to the First World War saw a fundamental shift in the social organization and technology of industrial economies. We will never make sense of our own times unless we grasp fully what happened then, with all the benefits of hindsight. Fortunately we have a wonderful analysis of the making of the twentieth century in Thorstein Veblen?s *The Theory of Business Enterprise *(1904), a work that is less well-known than his notorious *The Theory of the Leisure Class *(1899), but is better-known than another masterpiece, *Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution*(1915). Marx first drew attention to the importance of machines in modern development. Veblen, a Scandinavian Midwesterner, a half-century later and with the robber barons operating right under his nose, saw how machine production could be hijacked by financial speculators. He recognized the extraordinary implications of the recent legal fiction that would treat huge corporations as if they were individual persons with the natural rights of ordinary citizens. At the same time, he revealed how ?captains of industry? were able to pile up personal fortunes at the expense of society?s real interests while hiding behind this fiction. He was scornfully derisive of the intellectually backward and self-serving platitudes of the economics profession. Explaining why economics did not deserve to be recognized as an ?evolutionary science?, he proposed instead to remake it as the study of institutions. No doubt he would have his own interpretation of the rise of neoclassical economics to the virtual standing of a world religion since the Second World War. Veblen saw a fundamental contradiction between the social discipline imposed by machine production and the motives of businessmen who controlled the industrial system through their ability to make money by selling. Businessmen will promote any useless activity, as long as it brings a profit; they do not care about production or livelihood as such. In consequence, power in industry had passed from the factory floor to the financial managers at head office. The cultural system of business enterprise originated in seventeenth-century England which he described as ?an isolation hospital for technology, science and civil rights?. Its foundation is the institution of private ownership ? the idea that free labour should own the product of its workmanship or ?natural rights?. The system of market competition laid out in the eighteenth century (by Adam Smith) was based on handicrafts and its philosophy was pre-industrial. Machine production transformed the nineteenth-century economy and developments in the legal forms of corporate capitalism were rapidly reorganizing the logic of business enterprise in Veblen?s day. Yet economists still persevered with a preindustrial myth of economy (?a conventional anthropomorphic fact?) that was as relevant to understanding the modern world as Newtonian mechanics or the artisan?s notion of God as a creator. The organization of machine industry had removed de facto natural rights long ago. Its culture is sceptical, matter-of-fact and relativistic; modern science reflects this attitude. The spirit of pecuniary gain that motivates modern businessmen (and that the economics profession slavishly endorses) cannot be reconciled with the material and social needs of machine industry. Veblen predicts that the idea of the economy as free market competition is a transitory halfway house on the road either to socialism based on machine production or to a new barbarism, dynastic politics conducted along medieval lines, with war and games the principal preoccupations of the ruling clas This was not the message that twentieth-century Americans wanted to hear and Veblen's institutional economics, after receiving a boost from the Great Depression, was sidelined into the margins of academia. He got his own back on the universities in *The Higher Learning in America: a memorandum on the conduct of universities by businessmen* (1918). There he asked how a cpaitalist society could tolerate the organized pursuit of truth. His answer was by telling professors that they have high social status and paying them the wages of artisans (then low-paid, but not now). They in turn sacrifice all intellectual principle in order to make up the difference. In this way you can see that the current attack on the universities is not > just a caste issue for academics, it's a societal issue. The structure of > society based on distinct professional fields defined and guarded by > credentials is useless for the business entrepreneurs. The real question, > imo, is not how to defend professional status but rather how to transform > it into something that can have a positive social function for everyone. So > instead of getting a degree to carve out a protected niche in the economy, > you would get both a degree and a profession in order to contribute to a > greater good. > As my brilliant friend Noam Yuran insists, one link between Marx and Veblen is their focus on the *historicity* of the struggle for socialism in the age of capitalist. For Marx industrial capitalism was essentially feudalism in drag, another coercive way of extracting surplus labour through production for profit rather than in the form of rent. As midwife of the transition from agrarian civilization to a just and democratic society, capitalism was Janus-faced, looking both to the past and to the future. This is Veblen's perspective too, with the businessman and the engineer as ideal types locked in a conflict that could go either way. Like John, I feel that Brian's vision of the contemporary threat to the universities doesn't go far enough. Twentieth century national capitalism was, after all, based on Hegel's recipe for a state-made universal class of university-trained bureaucrats that Marx and Engels had already trashed in The German Ideology. The academic division of labour and caste system was explicitly based on the principles of the medieval guild and was tied to the fortunes of social democracy which flourished briefly after world war 2. This is when the idea of a professional job for life took root, but it looks increasingly archaic now. Cue in Mark and his digital economy mantra which is compelling. So I wonder if, instead of harking back to Talcott Parsons' dream of a middle class division of labour where doctors, professors and engineers are valued because they are good for society, we might revive a more romantic vision which holds that, if the world's structures are going to hell in a basket, there is no point in acquiring stable knowledge of their functioning. rather, each of us should concentrate on improving what is between our ears in the hope that it will help us to respiond creatively to the chaos around us, even perhaps to build something new there. Cue in Brian and the politics of art. This to me is more hopeful than pining for a lost age of public higher education that will never return in any form, however socially useful. Keith # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org