File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-03-08.181, message 15


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


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