24 Post-Capitalism
24.3 3 ways of transcending Capitalism
Milanovic
1 Roemer
In a new paper ”What is socialism today: Conceptions of a cooperative economy”, John Roemer starts with three essential pillars of all economic systems: an ethos of economic behavior, an ethic of distributive justice, and a set of property relations. In capitalism the three pillars are (1) individualistic ethos, (2) laissez-faire (no redistribution), and (3) privately owned means of production with profit accruing to capitalists. Until now, Roemer argues, all attempts to transcend capitalism focused on element No. 3, replacing privately owned capital with state or socially (collectively) owned capital. They have all failed.
Instead, our emphasis should be, according to Roemer, on developing solidaristic ethos. Using the terminology from the game theory, Roemer contrasts Nashian ethos where each individual behaves as to maximize his or her gain (and which in some cases, like the prisoner dilemma, may lead to perverse outcomes) and the Kantian ethos where we behave in the way in which we wish that everybody else would behave. This is a form of a golden rule (behave towards the others the way you wish that they behaved toward you), or, in more narrowly economic language, we try to internalize (account for) the behavior of everybody else.
In a presentation given recently at the Graduate Center CUNY in New York, Roemer gave the example of the “tragedy of the commons” where Nashian (narrowly profit-motivated individuals) maximize own fishing with the result that eventually no fish remain vs. a Kantian type of solidaristic behavior where one needs to think that if he increases his fishing everybody else would do the same. The person would thus “internalize” the behavior of others and presumably avoid the tragedy of the commons.
Roemer argues that, as societies get richer and as a conscious effort is made, the percentage of “Kantians” would increase compared to the “Nashians” and we would gradually move toward more solidaristic and cooperative societies. A nice example that Roemer used to buttress his case is the increasing attention given to environment where many people make an extra effort to adjust own consumption or sort different types of trash even if neither is monitorable and defections are costless. Still many do it the way they wished everybody else did it too.
2 Piketty
A different way of “transcending capitalism” was recently proposed in Piketty’s new book “Capital and Ideology”. In the last part of the book, Piketty, after reviewing on some 800 pages, the ways in which various hierarchical and property relations that seem abhorrent to us today (slavery, patriarchy, racism, serfdom etc.) have been ideologically justified, argues for ending the ideology of private property fetishism. In terms of Roemer’s taxonomy, Piketty is clearly back to the pillar No. 3 but unlike Marxists and the Soviets Piketty does not require a dogmatic thorough-going elimination of all private property but looks at the ways in which the economic power held by property holders could be limited. To that objective, he deploys a radical yet realistic proposal whereby all enterprises after a certain size would have obligatory workers’ shareholding with workers holding 50% of the shares, and no single capitalist (regardless of the amount of capital he has invested in the company) could hold more than one-tenth of the capitalist half of shares. (Thus even the largest owner would be limited to 5% of total voting power). Piketty would allow small enterprises to be managed as they are now with capitalists holding the full power and workers being a hired labor, but as soon as such enterprises would go over the threshold, obligatory workers’ shareholding would kick in.
This two-tier system at the production level would be combined with the system of the so-called “temporary ownership” consisting of severe annual taxation of private wealth and progressive taxation of inheritance.
The aim of the two systems (at the production stage and fiscal) is to fundamentally alter the relations of production in favor of labor and to limit the accumulation of private wealth. The latter will not only change levels of inequality that currently exist but would structurally constrain the ability of the rich to control the political process and to transmit their wealth across generations. It would thus significantly change inter-generational mobility. But even more importantly, perhaps, it would change the intra-enterprise hierarchical relations between owners and workers.
3 Milanovic
A third way to envisage the change in the modern capitalism is somewhat different and I briefly mention it at the end of “Capitalism, Alone”. It is materialistic and grounded In the “objective” relationship between the two factors of production (labor and capital), or more exactly in their relative scarcities. It is based on a standard Marx-Weber tripartite definition of capitalism (used in the book): (a) production is carried using privately-owned means of production, (b) labor is legally free but hired (that is, the entrepreneurial function is exercised by owners), and (c) coordination of economic decision-making is decentralized. Now, as I argue in “Capitalism, Alone”, the current apotheosis of capitalism is largely due to the weakening power of labor, brought about by the doubling of the global labor force that works under capitalist conditions following the transition to capitalism of the Soviet-bloc countries, China, Vietnam and India. Furthermore, the digital capitalism of today has enabled commercialization (“commodification”) of many activities that have never been commercialized before and has thus made further inroads into our private life. The dominion of capitalism has become extended both geographically (to encompass the entire globe) and “internally” to move to our individual private sphere.
But if the underlying relations of relative scarcities between labor and capital change in this century or the next, if the world population reaches its peak and remains there (as all projections indicate) and if the capital stock keeps on increasing, we might face an entirely different situation between capital and labor—very much the reverse of the one the world is facing since 1990. The relative abundance of capital may allow individuals to become entrepreneurs by simply borrowing capital and not letting the suppliers of funds have a decisive role in management. This is what we currently observe in the start-up world. It might seem not important, but it is: the agency which is now almost exclusively vested in capitalists would be transferred to “workers”. The component (b) of the standard Marx-Weber definition of capitalism –the existence of wage labor—would disappear. The system would still maintain the private ownership of the means of production and decentralized coordination: it would be a market economy, but it would not be a capitalist market economy.
This “transcending” would be different from the other two. Unlike Roemer, it would not rely on the change in our ethos, and unlike Piketty, it would not depend on constructivist change in the rules but would arise “organically” from the changed relationship between the two factors of production. Being “organic” would make it stronger and more durable.
Milanovic (2020) Transcending capitalism: three different ways?
24.4 Global Governance
Bak-Coleman Abstract
Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technol- ogies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.
Bak_Coleman Memo
Collective behavior historically referred to instances in which groups of humans or animals exhibited coordinated action in the absence of an obvious leader.
Over the past few decades “collective behavior” has matured from a description of phenomena to a framework for understanding the mechanisms by which collective action emerges - how large-scale “higher-order” properties of the collectives feed back to influence individual behavior, which in turn can influence the behavior of the collective.
Collective behavior therefore focuses on the study of individuals in the context of how they influence and are influenced by others, taking into account the causes and consequences of interindividual differences.
The multiscale interactions and feedback that un- derlie collective behavior are hallmarks of “complex systems”—which include our brains, power grids, financial markets, and the natural world.
When perturbed, complex systems tend to exhibit finite resilience followed by catastrophic, sudden, and often irreversible changes in functionality.
Anthropogenic disturbance—technology, resource extraction, and population growth —is an increasing, if not dominant, source of systemic risk
Research on how complex systems are impacted by hu- man technology and population growth has largely focused on the threats that these pose to the natural world (11–13). We have a far poorer understanding of the functional consequences of recent large-scale changes to human collective behavior and decision making.
With increasingly strong links between ecological and socio- logical processes, averting catastrophe in the medium term (e.g., coronavirus) and the long term (e.g., climate change, food security) will require rapid and effective collective behavioral responses—yet it remains unknown whether human social dynam- ics will yield such responses.
Neither the evolutionary nor the technological changes to our social systems have come about with the express purpose of promoting global sustainability or quality of life. Recent and emerging technologies such as online social media are no exception—both the structure of our social networks and the pat- terns of information flow through them are directed by engineer- ing decisions made to maximize profitability. These changes are drastic, opaque, effectively unregulated, and massive in scale.
The basic debate is an ancient one: Are large-scale behavioral processes self-sustaining and self- correcting, or do they require active management and guidance to promote sustainable and equitable wellbeing? Historically, these questions have been addressed in philosophical or normative terms. Here, we build on our understanding of dis- turbed complex systems to argue that human social dynamics cannot be expected to yield solutions to global issues or to promote human wellbeing without evidence-based policy and ethical stewardship.
The situation parallels challenges faced in conservation biology and climate science, where insufficiently regulated industries optimize profits while undermining the stability of ecological and earth systems.
Crisis disciplines are distinct from other areas of urgent, evidenced-based research in their need to consider the degrada- tion of an entire complex system—without a complete description of the system’s dynamics.
We begin by framing human collective behavior as a complex adaptive system shaped by evolution, a system that much like our natural world has entered a heavily altered and likely unsustainable state. We highlight how commu- nication technology has restructured human social networks, expanding, reorganizing, and coupling them to technological sys- tems. Drawing on insight from complexity science and related fields, we discuss observed and potential consequences. Next, we describe how a transdisciplinary approach is required for ac- tionable insight into the stewardship of social systems. Finally, we discuss some of the key ethical, scientific, and political challenges.
On an evolutionarily miniscule timescale, cultural and tech- nological processes transformed our species’ ecology (36). These changes that have transpired over this period have come about largely to solve issues at the scale of families, cities, and nations; only recently have cultural products begun to focus on solutions to worldwide problems and wellbeing. Our ability to detect and measure global challenges has coincided with an acceleration in the rate at which we are able to develop and adopt cheaply scalable communication technology.
Yet we lack the ability to predict how the technologies we adopt today will impact global patterns of beliefs and behavior tomorrow. Reliable prediction of social systems is among the more elusive challenges in science. The key hurdle to pre- dicting and managing emergent behavior is that social interac- tions and external feedback make it difficult, if not impossible, to reason about cross-scale dynamics through argument alone (i.e., these are complex adaptive systems).
The remarkable capabilities of animal groups are not granted by supernatural forces but rather arise through the adaptation of collective behavior to ecological context.
Across the natural sciences, under- standing and responding to the impact of human activity on complex systems are at the forefront of scientific inquiry.
We argue that the changing functional properties of our global social network are unlikely to foster human wellbeing or ecological function and stability in the absence of evidence- based intervention.
The speed of recent changes to our society has largely pre- cluded evolution by natural selection from altering our innate behavior and physiology in response. Hard-wired aspects of our individual and collective behavior are largely relics of earlier ecological and sociological contexts.
Strong dependence on network structure: In many formulations, changes in network density, clustering, or the presence of influential individuals determine transmission dynamics.
Research in statistical physics and opinion dynamics demonstrates that group size can impact the tendency of collectives to settle on decisions. Work from the collective intelligence literature suggests intermediate optimal group sizes in complex environments and high- lights the difficulty of wise decision making in large groups. Evolutionary mechanisms that encourage cooperation or coordination may be scale dependent, requiring institutions such as religion and governance to maintain these properties as group size increases. Heterogeneous adoption of these in- stitutions may further create conflict and erode cooperation. In short, changes in scale alone have the potential to alter a group’s ability to make accurate decisions, reach a clear majority, and cooperate.
We are offloading our evolved information-foraging processes onto algorithms. But these algorithms are typically designed to maximize profitability, with often insufficient incentive to promote an informed, just, healthy, and sustainable society
We have little insight into how the millions of seemingly minor algorithmic decisions that shape information flows every second might be altering our collective behavior.
Offline changes to how we share information may require years to percolate through the commu- nity, whereas changes in the digital world can be implemented and imposed in a matter of seconds. In this sense, online com- munication technology increases the urgency of stewardship while providing opportunities to enact evidence-based policies at scale. For these reasons, we expect that stewardship of social systems will require increased focus on digital technologies.
A consolidated transdisciplinary approach to understanding and managing human collective behavior will be a monumental challenge, yet it is a necessary one. Given that algorithms and companies are already altering our global patterns of behavior for financial reasons, there is no safe hands-off approach.
Bak-Coleman (2021) Stewardship of global collective behavior (pdf)
24.5 Expropriation of the Expropriators
Blumenfeld Abstract
The ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ is a delicious turn of phrase, one that Marx even compares to Hegel’s infamous ‘negation of the negation’. But what does it mean, and is it still relevant today? Before I analyse the content of Marx’s expression, I briefly consider contemporary legal understandings of expropriation, as well as some examples of it. In the remainder of the essay, I spell out different kinds of expropriation in Marx and focus on an ambiguity at the core of the notion of ‘expropriating the expropriators’, namely, whether it describes an immanent and objective tendency within the development of the capitalist mode of production or else actively prescribes a form of revolutionary political praxis for the working class. My answer is that it does both, though not without tension. Finally, I develop some implications of these reflections by showing how the concept of expropriation can be put to use today, in struggles around housing, climate and work.
Blumenfeld Memo
Marx characterizes expropriations as forms of unequal appropriation, which, under capitalist legal relations, are carried out under the guise of equal exchange. The idea that only the state has the authority to rightfully dispossess owners of their title ignores how private actors and collective agents have coerced the state to recognize their takings as retroactively valid. Expropriation for Marx is indifferent to the law, can be accomplished without com- pensation, and describes a social process occurring over time by classes rather than discrete acts by states or individuals.
At least three distinct forms of expropriation exist in Marx:
Expropriation of surplus labour through direct (extra-economic) coercion, which characterizes the appropriation of the surplus product in pre-capitalist economic formations, such as slavery or feudalism; 15
The expropriation of land from direct producers, which marks the phase of so- called ‘primitive accumulation’, and forms the key precondition of capitalist private property, that is, the separation of the producer from their means of production; and
The expropriation of unpaid labour from legally free workers through the ‘mute compulsion of economic relations’, 16 which characterizes the appropriation of surplus value in capitalist societies.
It is the latter two which are key for Marx: expropriation as dispossession of the direct producer from the land and expropriation as the theft of alien labour time. All three are expropriations in the sense of ‘appropriation without equivalent’, but only the last has the guise of equal exchange.
The second form – expropriation as dispossession – establishes the fundamental condition for capital accumulation, what Marx calls ‘capitalist private property’. This fundamental condition is the separation of labour from property – both in the sense of the separation of the direct producers from their conditions of production and in the sense of the separation of the producer from the product of labour.
Strikingly, Marx describes all these processes of expropriation in highly normative terms, such as ‘robbery, plunder, theft, looting, usurpation, parasitism, spoliation, dissolution, confiscation, enslavement, colonialism, patriarchal domination, squandering, and blood-letting’. Expropriation is both robbery (of land, title and product) and separation (of producer from their conditions of production). But if expropriation is so negative, and so fundamental to capitalist social relations, then how can it also be the path towards overcoming capitalism and creating a society of free human beings producing in common? This is the puzzle that needs to be resolved.
Is it possible, in a sense, to counter-expropriate or to re-appropriate one’s own conditions of existence? The expropriation of the expropriators would negate capitalist private property and realize individual, true property for all – not by returning to some pre-capitalist condition but by collectively reappropriating and transforming the already socialized form of production underlying capitalist property relations today.
There must be a fourth kind of expropriation in Marx, distinct from the previous forms:
- The expropriation of capitalist private property as the process by which the producing class takes ‘possession in common of the land and means of production produced by labour itself’, transforming them from means of exploitation and enslavement into ‘instruments of free and associated labour’.
This process of expropriation is made possible by the ‘immanent laws of capitalist production’ itself, which centralizes capital and socializes labour, thus making capitalist private property a fetter on the production and distribution of social wealth. That is to say, the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ is already happening within the present as a tendency of the laws of capital, but not yet actualized, not yet carried through to the end by the proletariat.
The task, paradoxically, is not to abolish private property but to ‘make individual private property a truth’ – to negate the ‘class property’ based on the expropriation of alien labour time and transform it into individual property based on the socially recognized labour of all.
Marx specifies two transitional forms of producing and appropriating social wealth, both intrinsic to capitalist production, which nevertheless represent elements of a new “associated” mode of production: capitalist stock companies, which ‘negatively’ resolve the antagonism between capital and labour by socializing private enterprises through stocks and credit, and cooperative factories, which ‘positively’ resolve the antagonism by turning associated workers into their own capitalists. These ‘transitional forms’ have not carried us beyond our current mode of production.
Marx both enthusiastically calls for expropriating the expropriators and, at the same time, soberly declares that the expropriators are, in fact, being expropriated.
The ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ describes an un- conscious economic tendency and even ‘aim’ of the capitalist mode of production itself: the consolidation of total social wealth by fewer and fewer individuals, and ultimately, by no one at all.
The idea is that capitalism increasingly socializes labour and ownership through various transitional forms (co-ops, joint-stock companies, credit system, etc.), so that the inherent tendency moves towards eliminating individual ownership of means of production altogether, which would ultimately be more efficient, dynamic and rational. This is expropriation as the gradual socialisation of the means of production
It seems like the time has passed in which one can reasonably believe that capitalist monopolies will expropriate themselves into common property in order to become more efficient and rational forces of production. Waiting around for the expropriators to expropriate themselves seems just as likely as waiting around for the planet to cool itself.
The expropriators themselves must be undergoing their own self-expropriation
What needs to change is not only the form of ownership – from private to public or common – but the content of ownership itself. What would it mean to shift the function of property from separation to solidarity, from profit to need, from exchange to use, from extraction to renewal, from exploitation to care? Answers to those questions are not to be found in Marx or the law, but rather in the content of the social struggles that are taking place all over the world today – for better, or for worse.
24.6 New structural change
Roberts on Robinson
So gaping is the chasm between fictitious capital and the real economy that financial valorization appears as independent of real valorization. This independence, of course, is an illusion. The entire financial edifice rests on the exploitation of labor in the “real” economy. If the system came crashing down, the crisis would dwarf all earlier ones, with the lives of billions of people hanging in the balance. The unprecedented injection of fiat money into the financial system may result in a new kind of stagflation, in which runaway inflation is induced by such astronomical levels of liquidity even as acute inequality and low rates of profit prolong stagnation.
Capitalism can only endure if it can find some new structural change. This Robinson sees coming possibly from “digital restructuring and through reforms that some among the global elite are advocating in the face of mass pressures from below”. That could unleash a new round of productive expansion that attenuates the crisis for a while. So capitalism could manage to “catch its breath again” through digitally-driven productive expansion that becomes strong enough to restore sustained economic growth and launch a new long boom.
However, Robinson counters, that any such expansion will run up against the problems that an increase in the organic composition of capital presents for the system, namely the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, a contraction of aggregate demand, and the amassing of profits that cannot be profitably reinvested. “But before such a time that a crisis of value would bring the system down, it is certainly possible that restructuring will unleash a new wave of expansion.” Robinson makes the pertinent point that “the breakdown of the political organization of world capitalism is not the cause but the consequence of contradictions internal to a globally integrated system of capital accumulation.”
But a new boom to happen, the state would have to intervene to build new “political structures to resolve the crisis, stabilize a new global power bloc, and reconstruct capitalist hegemony, given the disjuncture between a globalizing economy and a nation-state-based system of political authority.” And that seems unlikely, given the break-up of the US hegemony and the rise of a multi-polar world.
Robinson’s pessimism about the ability of capitalism to find a way out is compounded by the ecological crisis, which “makes it very questionable that capitalism can continue to reproduce itself as a global system.” Never before have crisis and collapse involved such matters as human-induced climate emergencies and mass extinction.
As Robinson sums it up: “the literary critic and philosopher, Frederic Jameson, once observed that: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” But if we do not imagine the end of capitalism—and act on that imagination—we may well be facing the end of the world. Our survival requires that we wage a battle for political power; to wrest power from the multi-nationals and their political, bureaucratic and military agents before it is too late.”