Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 02:59:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: BHA: cooperation


 
 
I do think the issue of collective agency is a bit where push comes
to shove on the structure agency question.  It tests whether we
have really fought free of the residues of methodological
individualism and also methodological collectivism.  (Poor
Durkheim, incidentally.  It is not so clear he held any organicist,
group mind type conceptions.  There were, however, plenty of legal
theorists, like Gierke, who did.)
 
One place to start is with the concept of action itself.  It
occurred to me in returning to Marx's chapter in Capital I,
"Cooperation," (required reading, I found, for the discussion) that
part of the problem is that we lack the language to speak
meaningfully about what people do when they act in common.  Reading
Marx's chapter while fumbling with the problem underscores that. 
The fact that the corporation acts and the state acts and the drama
club acts and that we have no other word to express the collective
character of such action is a reflection of the social relations
which frame our debate.  Of course there is such a word --
cooperation; when we act together we co-operate to produce a
result.  But we don't know how to use the word and it sits
awkwardly on the tongue.  Individualism impoverishes the language.
 
But the concept of action.  Bhaskar defines it as "embodied
intentional causality" and "the transformative negation of the
given."  Plato, ETc. 100.  "Embodied" because it is a phenomenon of
the embodied world, "intentional" because intention is analytic to
the concept of action (PON), e.g. to act means you could have done
otherwise (not shoveling snow, Tobin, counts as an act if I could
have done otherwise), and "causality" because the given is
transformed, made different than it would otherwise have been.  In
other words, as one of nature's forces we do what we do
purposefully and change the world.   This is an existential point. 
It is how we exist.  
 
Now if social forms are real because they cause the material world
to be other than it would be without their operation, and, in
addition, if they exist only in virtue of the agency of living
persons, then the social forms within which we act are going to
have to adapt themselves to the intrinsic elements of action.  
 
In the chapter on Cooperation Marx at least is clear.  When people
cooperate, at first the difference is purely quantitative.  But
then changes take place which underscore that the social form
within which persons labor produces results.  No group mind need
apply.  Just gathering everybody under one roof, for example,
economizes on means of production.  "The economy in their
application is entirely owing to their being consumed in common by
a large number of workmen."  Continuing, "In such cases the effect
of the combined labor could either not be produced at all by
isolated invidiual labor, or etc. . . . Not only have we here an
increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-
operation, but the creation of a new power, namely, the collective
power of the masses."  A page or two along:  "the special
productive power of the comnbined working day is, under all
circumstances, the social productive power of labor, or the
productive power of social labor.  This power is due to co-
operation itself.  When the laborer co-operates systematically with
others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and
develops the capabilities of his species."  (!)  
 
Marx goes on to explain that where labor is cooperative it must
have a directing aim and control must be exercised to realize that
goal.  This is an accommodation of the social form of labor to the
intrinsic elements of action -- action is intentional.  But the aim
and control of this new power created by social combination is
appropriated by capital, which sets the end and aim of production
and controls it.
 
>From this I conclude that there is not much question as to the
reality of the social forms within which we "co-operate," whether
it be corporations, drama clubs or governments.  New powers are
created with actual effects.  The powers have their source in the
combination.  Consider for example forms of co-operation which give
rise to hierarchy and those which don't.  But are such forms of co-
operation agents?
 
Here I think Colin is right to emphasize the ambiguity of our uses
of the word.  We speak of a human agent and a chemical agent.  If
an agent is that which engages in action, then the powers of co-
operation are not agentival because they are embodied only in
individual human beings.  If an agent is anything that causes an
effect, then they are agents.
 
But I think it is probably clearer to say that individuals act,
intentionally, and that cooperation takes place in forms which have
powers.  They are also forms adapted to the intrinsic elements of
action.  
 
On this point it seems we can distinguish the intentional component
of action from the behavioral component having in mind always the
second thesis on Feuerbach -- "The dispute over the reality or non
reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely
scholastic question."
 
Among the social forms within which we act are meanings, and
intentions seem intrinsically meaningful.  Thus it doesn't seem
like a major stretch to say that a corporation can mean or intend. 
A political party can adopt a political line, a party platform,
etc.  Justice O'Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court said recently "Of
course only natural persons can decide anything."  True or not?  A
decision is meaningful, but is the taking of it an act?  O'Connor
had to explain how a corporation could "amend" a pension benefit
plan.  
 
I think only natural persons can *act*, because only natural
persons are *embodied*.  What an organization can do is mobilize
co-operation, which is the conjoint action of individuals.  Co-
operation is emergent from individual action when it occurs within
particular social forms.
 
"The Government of the US cooperated to blockade Cuba today."  A
strange way to talk.  So until we have a different set of social
relations, metaphorical reference to action will have to do.  
 
Incidentally, Tobin, I don't see much problem with referring to the
corporation as a legal person.  First of all the usage is
engrained.  Beyond that, the person you say it ain't is also
socially constructed.  Recall the second chapter of Capital:  "The
persons exist for one another merely as representatives of, and,
therefore, as owners of, commodities.  In the course of our
investigations we shall find, in general, that the characters who
appear on the economic stage are but the personifications of the
economic relations that exist between them."
 
This means that the persons who appear in the drama we act everyday
keeping ourselves fit for the next day's performance is a
representative of the value relation -- that is, the person is a
personification of a social relation.  Another role the person
takes on is juridical; she's an owner.  These historically
contingent forms of personality need to be distinguished from the
abstract and general existential concept of an agent who acts. 
Given the nature of both value and capital, it would be impossible
for them not to give themselves personality in forms other than
that of the natural person.  
 
 
Howard
 
Howard Engelskirchen
Western State University
 
    "What is there just now you lack"  Hakuin
 
 
P.S. to Colin --  yes, please, the black hole bibliography, and
especially the reference to Peter French and anything else on the
corporation as a person.  

PPS -- sorry this goes in without the chance to review your lastest.


     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---