Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1997 23:05:09 -0800 (PST) From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: BHA: promising I have trouble again comfortably getting my head around Hans' last post (to show a turn of phrase I learned from Chris). There is a perspective I don't have clear. Working through his critique has been enormously fruitful for my thinking, I hasten to add, and Hans I am really grateful for your provocations on altogether fundamental issues. But I find that even sympathetic to his ideas, as I always am, I often get a sense of 'decalage.' I thought there might be a general lesson here. Perhaps we should devote some time to understanding Bhaskar's concept of critique in its various stages, using, as he does, Capital for illustration. This doesn't need to be done now, by any means. But we should put it on the agenda. On the one hand we could all be more critically rigorous in our work; in addition it might build a common language among us and facilitate clarification in these sorts of exchanges. I actually don't understand the stages in Bhaskar's schema very well; I have not worked through my understanding the way Ruth likes to -- line by line. Reading through together would give us a chance to do that. Perhaps at the point we do we could use the section in RECLAIMING REALITY summarizing the levels of critique. Anyway . . . 1. Hans writes that consideration comes across in my article as somewhat a good thing. I doubt that is a moral gloss I have put there. Consideration is what it is. I don't have any stake in it. In fact, as is the case with a bunch of other people around the world, it gets palpably harder for me to live with the market every day. I do think it is a good thing to give a coherent explanation of a 400 year old doctrine considered an irrational historical accident. Maybe my idea of that is the good thing he picks up. But what actually I say is this: "Bargain, therefore, is double- edged. On the one hand it demands from us respect for the autonomy of others; on the other hand it invites us to view them instrumentally." Those are the two sides: on the one hand consideration socially constitutes the other as a center of causal power -- it invites respect for the other as someone who has the capacity to make their reasons causes. It doesn't say anything, of course, about whether an agent has the material capacity to make their reasons causes. One of the indignities of joblessness is that a person is deprived of the other constituting her autonomy insofar as the person without resources has nothing to offer in exchange. If you are on the dole and receive handouts your autonomy as a citoyen is not socially constituted. In bourgeois society it is then possible to deny your humanity altogether, e.g witness Clinton's welfare reform in the U.S. I raise such ideas in the last section of the article in regards to the exclusion from the market on the basis of race. On the other hand consideration requires that we use the other as a means to our end. More than that. Market exchange requires that we use our own activity as a means to an end. Rather than viewing our activity as the primary manifestation of our flourishing, as the principal expression of our richness and wealth as persons, we use it in exchange to obtain a good or service we need. 2. Hans writes, "The question whether someone should be forced to stand by his or her promise should not depend on the formality whether the promise was made in order to obtain something else for it, but it should be decided by the more substantive circumstances of the promise. The state poses as someone who keeps people honest, but it acts on very abstract principles, which disregard the individual situation, and which are such that people must act as if they were things and not people, and even then regualrly cannot meet these abstract criteria." a. Take the first sentence. I can't really support it either as a basis for the critique of things I said or to show how anything I've said is consistent with it, because it seems like a normative moral critique, and I don't understand its intended location. The social institution of promising does not impose standards of what it should or shouldn't be independent of the social relations of production being reproduced. I am not clear whether Hans' critique is based on commodity relations, human nature, or common property. It makes sense to think of a range of the science we do as "united front" work. Moral judgments based on the standpoint of common property are reflected in the framework of social science I use, I hope. Perhaps Bhaskar's big tent analysis of realism is like that. He suggests as much in the first chapter of RR -- the standpoint of socialism is necessary to critical realism and vice versa. But otherwise the only moral judgments I make explicit are challenges to race and gender exclusions from the market. But these are moral judgments I situate consistently *within* the market's own framework of morality. Within the framework of commodity production, promises are necessarily broken, the state and its ideological apparatuses therefore necessarily intervene to enforce them, and, in doing so must abstract from the individual situation. All this flows from an analysis of commodity production: Where two entities reproduce their existence separately, they are necessarily self-interested. If they enter cooperative arrangements, falling apart is inevitable because self-interests change and they will not do so step by step in harmony the one with the other. Now since we have disparate self-interests, in resolving the conflict which individiual situation shall we take into account? Instead society abstracts >from either individual situation and elaborates principles of resolution which function to reproduce the form of social relations presupposed by the parties' interaction and on which the form of their production depends. If we start with an analysis of common property we start with the contradiction between the forces of production which are socialized and the relations of production which are private in form. We project a correspondence (it is correct to say that the relations of production lag behind the forces of production -- we lack yet the associational skills necessary to establish the free cooperation of associated producers), adopt the standpoint of common property, and on that basis can work out differences we might expect -- e.g. where producers share a common interest because they control the means of production and subsistence in free association, then we can work out how the interest of each builds and reinforces the interest of all and, reciprocally, how the interest of all is the foundation on which the interest of each rests. On this basis we can say that failing to take into account the individual situation in resolving conflicts which arise from promising is *bad* because from the alternative perspective of common property if we optimize the flourishing of each we are all richer for it and this is now a material possibility for us. But for the critique to be credible we must provide the analysis of common property to support this. I'd like to write such an article, but that was not part of what I did in this one. b. "People must act as if they were things". Is there a common way things, as distinct from people, have of acting? At what level of analysis is this operating? The commodity form? All value? Capital? In the appropriation of nature? In their organized relations of coercion? At the level of ideology? Fetishism means social relations get attributed to things -- the commodity's price becomes a way of expressing the social form of labor. Reification means we treat social relations as things -- by saying that consideration is some *thing* given in exchange, like a vacuum cleaner or coins, we treat an activity of persons, an exchange of commitments, as a thing. But what does it mean to say that "people must act as things." In what way does the commodity form require people act as if they were things? Actually I think the upshot of my analysis contradicts Hans' assertion in the second sentence from the excerpt of his post quoted above. He claims that the state imposes abstract requirements which force people to act as things. But what I show is that where consideration is concerned, the abstract rules governing the social reproduction of exchange require people to demonstrate precisely their capacities as people, not things: they must act volitionally with an intent to exchange (they must make this the reason and a cause of their action) and in so doing they must recognize the autonomy of another. Recall Bhaskar insists that what characterizes people is the capacity, in a broad sense, for intentional action. All this does not mean I disagree with Hans' emphasis. The requirement of consideration has always been understood as requiring a thing be given in exchange as I explained above. It does mean that we must be precise in the way we construct the categories of analysis and where we locate them. Incidentally, I argue there are essentially two reasons promises are enforced. One is the reason I gave above -- because self- interests change and do so at different tempos, commodity exchange could not be conducted at the level where credit is an integral part of it if promises were not enforced. But that doesn't explain fully the necessity of promising. Here we must have resort not only to the equality of labor, but to the dynamic of capital itself. Promises are enforced because of the tendency to reduce the costs of circulation to zero. This is a tendential law of capital. It is one of the ways capital behaves. If I arrange with you to take delivery as soon as I have finished production of your order, then my goods spend no time in market circulation at all. The moral principles of promising -- the use of moral imperatives such as honesty -- contribute to the reproduction of one or the other of these social relations, that is, value or capital (or patriarchy? or race? etc). In general ideology is a less troublesome form of social reproduction than coercion and that is why so much energy is devoted to it. But the ambiguity of morality on this issue has been exposed by the law and economics folks who have brought to everyone's attention the amorality of contract remedies. We don't care if someone breaks a contract as long as the the injured party is fully compensated. The capacity to compensate also reproduces social relations of value. Whatever the injured party sought in the market, she is as well served by its equivalent in the universal equivalent, a stored up command on anyone else's labor. Howard --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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