Richard Swedberg (Markets as Social Structures)

February 16th, 2012

Richard Swedberg (Markets as Social Structures)

in The Handbook of Economic Sociology, 1994, pp.255-282

The Complexity of the Market Phenomenon.

  • To look at market as a specific type of social structure (some kind of recurrent and patterned interactions between agents that are maintained through sanctions). 255
  • To view markets in terms of exchange. 255
  • The term “market” was introduced into the English language in the twelve century (from the Latin mercatus - trade or place to trade). 255
  • Many meanings of the term “markets” over time. 255
  • It is uncertain when market first appeared – archaeological findings indicate that external trade existed by at least 5000 BC. National markets were created first through the political revolutions of these centuries in England, France and the United States. 256
  • Four  types of markets had made appearance (first in the United States and some European countries):
  • The financial market
  • The mass consumer market
  • The labor market
  • The industrial market. 256
  • The market economy was first mainly national in character, but as the twentieth century it has become international. 257

The Market in Economic Theory.

  • In the economics literature a surprisingly small amount of attention to the market. 257
  • The market in classical political economy (from Adam Smith to Marx):
    • Classical economists saw the market as synonymous with either a market place or a geographical area. In their eyes the market was something concrete as opposed to the abstract market of latter-day economists. Second, the main emphasis in classical political economy had been on production rather than on exchange. Third, it was argued that incidental factors would typically result in a market price that was different from the natural price. 257
    • Adam Smith – saw as central to any analysis of market the relationship between the market and the division of labor and how the market influences price. 258
    • David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill – political economics became more abstract (Mill talks about “the laws of Production”). 258
    • Karl Marx – production was more important than the market when it came to deciding the price of a commodity. Market consists of social relationships (the merchandise fetishism is an example). Markets have a distinct history. There is a legal and ideological dimension to the market. 258
    • The marginalist revolution and the creation of the modern concept of the market.
    • The market became an abstract concept. The emergence of the concept “perfect market”, characterized by perfect competition and perfect information. The economy was centered increasingly around markets. All markets in an economy were interconnected. 259
    • Alfred Marshall – five factors were important in the understanding of markets: time, space, formal regulation, informal regulation, and familiarity between buyer and seller. 260
    • The Austrian School (Mises and Hayek). The most important contribution of neo-Austrian economics – the theory of the market as a process, “actuated by the interplay of the actions of the various individuals cooperating under the division of labor” (Mises). The market emerges spontaneously being the result of human action rather than human design. 260
    • Keynes’s Critique of the Law of Markets – his solution for matching demand and supply was the intervention of the state. Keynes did not believe that markets by themselves can ensure a high level of productivity. 261
    • Industrial Organization and the concept of market structure (Edward Chamberlin) – conceived of the market as being an industry.  Chamberlin criticized the theory of perfect competition because it did not take into account product differentiation. Reputation of the seller and personal links between buyers and sellers also could make difference. The structure-conduct-performance paradigm. 261-262
    • Postwar developments – general equilibrium theory, game theory (introduced the idea of intersubjectivity), the Chicago School (a more central place for the market), the economics of information, market clearing (Dennis Carlton), New Institutional Economics (transaction costs, property rights, search costs, enforcement costs, measurement costs). 263-264

The market in Sociological Theory.

  • The market in classical sociological theory
  • Max Weber – emphasis on conflict/struggle in the market, social action in the market begins as competition and ends as exchange, exchange in the market represents the most instrumental and calculating type of social action that was possible between two human beings, competition as a peaceful conflict, monetary prices are always the result of a power struggle between the parties on the market. 265
  • Parsons and Smelser – the market as a distinct social system in its own right.
  • Polanyi – markets were created by the state, commodification of land, misery of the common people, the idea of counter-movement. 266-267
  • Granovetter (networks approach), Wallerstein (the world system approach), a social structural approach, a social constructionist approach, a historical-comparative approach etc. 267
  • Harrison White – markets consists of structures that are reproduced through signaling or communication between the participants. 268
  • Howard Baker – markets as networks. 268
  • Zelizer – the cultural dimension of markets. She analyzes how things become commodities (life insurance or the reverse process of removing commodities from the market – child labor, for example).
  • The role of the state. 270

Integrating the economic and sociological approaches to the market.

  • I suggest that the core of the market phenomenon does not consist of one element – exchange, but of two elements – exchange in combination with competition. The social structure of the market is characterized by a special type of interaction that begins as competition between a number of actors (buyers and/or sellers) and that ends up with an exchange for a few of the actors. 271
  • Competition in production and competition in exchange. Incorporating the element of competition in the exchange. “When the competition for opportunities of exchange starts to penetrate most of society outside the market the market progresses from being a nondynamic force in society to becoming a dynamic one”. 272
  • Simmel – competition as a form of “indirect conflict”. 272

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James Scott: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

September 27th, 2011

James Scott (1998), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press

Much of early modern European statecraft seemed similarly devoted to rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format.” (p.3)

Bad state engineering originates in a combination of four elements:

1. The administrative ordering of nature and society

2. A high-modernist ideology – a version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws…It was, accordingly, uncritical, un skeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.

3.  An authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being.

4. A prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist. (pp. 4-5)

Legibility

“In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.” (p.5)

The book is a case against the imperialism of high-modernist, planned social order.

“Schematic, authoritarian solutions to production and social order inevitably fail when they exclude the fund of valuable knowledge embodied in local practices.” (p.6)

Motives for legibility – simplification, legibility, control, appropriation and manipulation.

The radical simplification of the forest to a single commodity – “an exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora-which were, and still are, not entirely understood-was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences.” (pp.19-20)

“No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification.” (p.22)

Local measurements are interested, contextual, and historically specific. (p.27)

According to Witold Kula (Measures and men) three factors made the “metrical revolution” in France possible:

- The growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures.

- Both popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France.

-  The Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire. (p.30)

“At one stroke the equality of all French people before the law was guaranteed by the state; they were no longer mere subjects of their lords and sovereign but bearers of inalienable rights as citizens.” (p.32)

From collective taxation (of communities) to individual taxation. (pp.37-38)

The construction of cadastral maps.

Redesigning cities ( at the center of Haussmann plans for Paris lay the military security of the state – to made the city safe against popular insurrections.) pp. 60-61

The creation of surnames – to create legible people.

The creation of a standard, official language.

The centralization of traffic patterns.

Simplifications have at least 5 features:

- State simplifications are observations of only those aspects of social life that are of official interest. They are interested, utilitarian facts.

- They are also nearly always written (verbal or numerical) documentary facts.

- They are typically static facts.

- Most stylized state facts are also aggregate facts. Aggregate facts may be impersonal (the density of transportation networks) or simply a collection of facts about individuals (employment rates, literacy rates, residence patterns).

- For most purposes, state officials need to group citizens in ways that permit them to make a collective assessment. Facts that can be aggregated and presented as averages or distributions must therefore be standardized facts. (p.80)

The process by which standardized facts susceptible to aggregation are manufactured:

- The creation of common units of measurement or coding

- Each item or instance falling within a category is counted and classified according to the new unit of assessment.

- One arrives this way at synoptic facts that are useful to officials. (p.80)

“The modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage.” (pp.81-82)

“Until recently, the ability of the state to impose its schemes on society was limited by the state’s modest ambitions and its limited capacity.” (p.88)

“Many of the great state-sponsored calamities of the twentieth century have been the work of rulers with grandiose and utopian plans for their society.” (p.89)

“The discovery of society as a reified object that was separate from the state and that could be scientifically described.” (p.91)

High-modernism implies:

- a truly radical break with history and tradition.

- tends to devalue or banish politics.

- authoritarianism.

- the temporal emphasis is on the future.

- progress is objectified by a series of preconceived goals.

- it appeals greatly to the classes and strata who have the most to gain – in status, power, and wealth – from its worldview (bureaucratic intelligentsia, technicians, planners, and engineers). (pp.93-97)

Obstacles to high-modernist planning:

- the existence and belief in a private sphere of activity in which the state and its agencies may not legitimately interfere.

- the private sector in liberal political economy.

- the existence of working, representative institutions through which a resistant society could make its influence felt. (pp.101-102)

“The most rigidly planned economies tend to be accompanied by large “underground, ‘gray,’ informal,” economies that supply, in a thousand ways, what the formal economy fails to supply.” (p.261)

High-modernims vs metis.

Metis – cunning intellingence, indigenous technical knowledge, practical skills, a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment. The practice and experience reflected in metis is almost always local (p.313)

“What proved to be dangerous to us and to our environment is the combination of the universalist pretensions of epistemic knowledge and authoritarian engineering.” (p.340)

The case for institutions that are multifunctional, plastic, diverse, and adaptable. (p.353)

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Lynn Hunt Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution

September 14th, 2011

Lynn Hunt

Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution

University of California Press, 1984

The re-invention of the notions of political and ideology.

The very notion of “the political” expanded and changed shape. The structure of the polity changed under the impact of increasing political participation and popular mobilization; political language, political ritual, and political organization all took on new forms and meanings. P. 2

By the end of the decade of revolution, French people had learned a new political repertoire: ideology appeared as a concept, and competing ideologies challenged the traditional European cosmology of order and harmony; propaganda became associated with political purposes; the Jacobin clubs demonstrated the potential of mass political parties; and Napoleon established the first secular police state with his claim to stand above parties. (p.2)

Paradoxically, while multiplying the forms and meanings of politics, the most revolutionary of the French acted out of a profound distrust of any thing explicitly political. Leading political figures never called themselves politicians; they served “the public good” (la chose publique), not a narrow “partisan spirit” (esprit de parti). Politics and politicking were consistently identified with narrowness, meanness, divisiveness, factionalism, opportunism, egotism, and selfishness. (p.3)

Three major interpretive positions of the French Revolution:

- the Marxist interpretation – revolution served as a touchstone; it fostered the development of capitalism by breaking the feudal stranglehold on production, and it brought the bourgeoisie as a class to power.

- the revisionist interpretation – there was no conscious class conflict between bourgeoisie and aristocracy; a crisis of social mobility and status anxiety within an amalgamated elite made up of nobles and bourgeois (Furet).

- the modernization account (Tocqueville) – the Revolution represented the aggrandizement of state power and centralization rather that the triumph of capitalism: revolutionaries ended up creating an even more powerful state modeled on that same absolute monarchy. (pp.3-7)

The aim of the book is the politics of revolution, the political culture of the Revolution. (p.10) revolutionary political culture cannot be deduced from social structures, social conflicts, or the social identity of revolutionaries…Revolutionaries worked to reconstitute society and social relations. (p.12)

As disagreement over the nature of the rearrangement (between society and politics) became apparent, different ideologies were invented in order to explain this development. Rather than expressing an ideology, therefore, revolutionary politics brought ideology into being. (p. 13)

In order to reconstruct the logic of revolutionary action and innovation, it is thus essential to examine both the politics of revolution and the people who practiced them. My contention is that there was a fit or affinity between them, not that one can be deduced from the other. (p. 13)

The chief accomplishment of the French Revolution was the institution of a dramatically new political culture. (p. 15)

Political clubs as political schools.

Political clubs proliferated at every level, and electoral assemblies seemed to meet almost continuously during the revolution’s first years. (p.20)

Certain key words served as revolutionary incantations. Nation was perhaps the most universally sacred, but there were also patrie, constitution, law, and, more specific to the radicals, regeneration, virtue, and vigilance. (p. 21)

The revolutionary oath of loyalty created sovereignty from within the community. (p.21)

The reading of revolutionary language commonly follows from some prior assumption: that language is an instrument of social conflict (the Marxist position), that language is a vehicle of political self-deception (the Tocquevillian position), that language is a carrier of cultural integration (the Durkheimian position)… I propose to look at language more horizontally, in term of its internal patterns and its connections to other aspects of political culture…Revolutionary language did not simply reflect the realities of revolutionary changes and conflicts, but rather was itself transformed into an instrument of political and social change…revolutionary political discourse was rhetorical; it was a means of persuasion, a way of reconstituting the social and political world. (p. 24)

To treat revolutionary rhetoric as a text in the manner of literary criticism. (p.25)

As a consequence of the constant displacement of political authority, charisma came to be most concretely located in words, that is, in the ability to speak for the Nation. (p.26)

The Nation and the Revolution were constantly cited as points of reference, but they came with no history. (p. 26)

The French harkened to a “mythic present” (p.27)

The obsession with conspiracy became the central organizing principle of French revolutionary rhetoric (Furet). (p.39)

Conspiracy became a systematic obsession when the revolutionaries confronted the novelties of mass politics…everyone seemed to fear back-room politicking, secret machinations, and factionalism. (pp.42-43)

Distrust of factions.

French political orators were speaking in two registers at once: one political and the other sacred…factional politics was synonymous with conspiracy, and “interests” was a code for betrayal of a nation united. (p.44)

French revolutionary rhetoric broke through the confines of past politics by positing the existence of a new community (rather than the revival of a purer, former one) and by insisting that it could be realized through politics (rather than through the true religion, a return to past tradition, or an adherence to some previously made social contract). (p. 49)

Politicization of everyday life – costumes, standardization, holidays.

Different costumes indicated different politics, and a color, the wearing of a certain length of trousers, certain shoe styles, or the wrong hat might touch off a quarrel, a fistfight, or a general street brawl. During the Revolution, even the most ordinary objects and customs became political emblems and potential sources of political and social conflict. (p.53

The politicization of the everyday life (p.56)

Symbols of the Revolution:

- the cockade

- the liberty cap

- the patriotic altar

- the liberty tree (p.59)

The officials of the revolutionary regime tried to discipline popular political festivity. Officials incorporated popular symbols into organized festivals and ceremonies, and they devised their own symbols for popular consumption. (p.61)

Revolutionaries could only hope to win their “symbolic” battles if they succeeded in educating their public. An intense course in political education was necessary to teach the people to distinguish between the Liberty of their republican present and the Black Virgin of their royalist past. (p.68)

National education, propagandizing in the army, and the enforcement of bureaucratic routine were strategies for the extension of power. They contributed to the “perfectioning of the political machine” by incorporating officials and ordinary citizens alike into the republican state… But now even the measures of space, time, and weight came into question. Everyone should speak the same language, use the same weights and measures, and turn in the old coinage. (p.70)

The standardization of costumes (made by David) – On the one hand, the deputies or representatives of the people were supposed to be simply a transparent reflection of the people, that is, just like them, because part of them. For this reason, everyone was supposed to wear a new national uniform that would efface differences. On the other hand, the representatives were obviously other, different, not like the people exactly because they were the teachers, the governors, the guides of the people. Accordingly, the uniforms of officials were to be just distinct enough to permit recognition. (p.77)

The masculinization of the Revolutionary imagery (the symbolical battle between Hercules and Marianne) – In the eyes of the Jacobin leadership, women were threatening to take Marianne as a metaphor for their own active participation; in this situation, no female figure, however fierce and radical, could possibly appeal to them. Hercules put the women back into perspective, in their place and relationship of dependency. The monumental male was now the only active figure. (p.104)

The persistence of the left-right division (p. 133)

The rhetoric of revolution appealed to the peripheries of the nation, to people who lived in the economic, social, and cultural backwaters. (p.148)

The professionalization of bureaucracy – p. 152

City professionals seized the opportunity to develop political careers. P. 155

In the villages – continuity of leadership between old regime and new, the continuing hegemony of the same local notables. (p.166)

Layers dominated national and regional politics; merchants, artisans, and shopkeepers were prominent in the cities; and a mixture of peasants, artisans, and small merchants ran the villages. (p.167)

The Revolution opened political access to groups that previously had been excluded for social reasons – modest merchants, artisans and  shopkeepers, and minor professionals. (p.170)

General cultural patterns that shaped the workings of revolutionary politics:

- mobility

- migration

- opportunities to religious minorities (pp.181-183)

The Revolution was, in essence, the multiplication and diffusion of culture and power. (p.188)

The most obvious centers for local officials were the Jacobin clubs. (p.201)

In terms of social origins, the new political class was heavily urban. (p.205)

The French Revolution did promote the rationalizing of authority, the development of new political institutions, and the increased participation of the people through an expanded electoral process. (p. 209)

The creation of a new political rhetoric and the development of new symbolic forms of political practice transformed contemporary notions about politics. Politics became an instrument for refashioning society. (p. 213)

The new men and the new political culture came into being together. (p. 216)

Three strands in French political culture that were in formation during the Revolution: democratic republicanism, socialism, and authoritarianism. (p. 224)

[Revolution] was the moment in which politics was discovered as an agent for conscious change, as the mold for character, culture, and social relations. (p.236)

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A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

April 11th, 2011

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

Oxford University Press, 2005

Neoliberalism – a theory of political economic practices proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.

The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. (p.2)

Neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs’. (p.3)

‘Time-space compression’ (p.4)

‘Embedded liberalism’ – market processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained but in other instances led the way in economic and industrial strategy. (…) Redistributive politics (including some degree of political integration of working-class trade union power and support for collective bargaining), controls over the free mobility of capital (some degree of financial repression through capital controls in particular), expanded public expenditures and welfare state-building, active state interventions in the economy, and some degree of planning of development. (p.11)

The rise of neoliberal theory – A small and exclusive group of passionate advocates––mainly academic economists, historians, and philosophers––had gathered together around the renowned Austrian political philosopher Friedrich von Hayek to create the Mont Pelerin Society (named after the Swiss spa where they first met) in 1947 (the notables included Ludvig von Mises, the economist Milton Friedman, and even, for a time, the noted philosopher Karl Popper)… This movement remained on the margins of both policy and academic influence until the troubled years of the 1970s. At that point it began to move centre-stage, particularly in the US and Britain, nurtured in various well-financed think-tanks (offshoots of the Mont Pelerin Society, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs in London and the Heritage Foundation in Washington), as well as through its growing influence within the academy, particularly at the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman dominated… The dramatic consolidation of neoliberalism as a new economic orthodoxy regulating public policy at the state level in the advanced capitalist world occurred in the United States and Britain in 1979 (Reagan and Thatcher).  Pp.19-23

Neoliberalization as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites. (p.19)

Neoliberalization has meant, in short, the financialization of everything (p.33).

While neoliberalization may have been about the restoration of class power, it has not necessarily meant the restoration of economic power to the same people. (p. 31)

Nevertheless, there are some general trends that can be identified.

The first is for the privileges of ownership and management of capitalist enterprises––traditionally separated––to fuse by paying CEOs (managers) in stock options (ownership titles).

The second trend has been to dramatically reduce the historical gap between money capital earning dividends and interest, on the one hand, and production, manufacturing, or merchant capital looking to gain profits on the other.

A power shift away from production to the world of finance (pp. 31-33).

How was neoliberalization accomplished, and by whom?

The ‘long march’ of neoliberal ideas through these institutions that Hayek had envisaged back in 1947, the organization of think-tanks (with corporate backing and funding), the capture of certain segments of the media, and the conversion of many intellectuals to neoliberal ways of thinking, created a climate of opinion in support of neoliberalism as the exclusive guarantor of freedom. (p.40)

The constructing (manufacturing of the consent):

- Powerful ideological influences that circulate through the corporations, the media, and the numerous institutions that constitute civil society––such as the universities, schools, churches, and professional associations.

- Appeals to traditions and cultural values under the pretext of an attempt to advance the cause of individual freedoms.

- Once the state apparatus made the neoliberal turn it could use its powers of persuasion, co-optation, bribery, and threat to maintain the climate of consent necessary to perpetuate its power.

- The penetration of universities

- The alliance with the Christian Right and the moral majority (pp.40-49).

But we must look beyond these infinitely varied ideological and cultural mechanisms––no matter how important they are––to the qualities of everyday experience in order to better identify the material grounding for the construction of consent.

And it is at that level––through the experience of daily life under capitalism in the 1970s––that we begin to see how neoliberalism penetrated ‘common-sense’ understandings. The effect in many parts of the world has increasingly been to see it as a necessary, even wholly ‘natural’, way for the social order to be regulated. (pp.40-41)

Neoliberalization required both politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism. (p.42)

Corporate welfare substituted for people welfare. (p.47)

In the US – the unholy alliance between big business and conservative Christians backed by the neoconservatives (p.50)

The commonality between the US and the UK cases most obviously lies in the fields of labour relations and the fight against inflation. (pp.58-59)

The neoliberal state in theory:

According to theory, the neoliberal state should favour strong individual private property rights, the rule of law, and the institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade.

While personal and individual freedom in the marketplace is guaranteed, each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and well-being.

The free mobility of capital between sectors, regions, and countries is regarded as crucial.

Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties…Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites. (pp.64-66)

Contradictions of neoliberalism:

There is the problem of how to interpret monopoly power.

The second major arena of controversy concerns market failure.

Asymmetries of power or of information that interfere with the capacity of individuals to make rational economic decisions in their own interests.

A contradiction arises between a seductive but alienating possessive individualism on the one hand and the desire for a meaningful collective life on the other. (pp.66-69)

The neoliberal state in practice.

There are two arenas in particular where the drive to restore class power twists and in some respects even reverses neoliberal theory in its practice.

The first of these arises out of the need to create a ‘good business or investment climate’ for capitalistic endeavours.

The second arena of bias arises because, in the event of a conflict, neoliberal states typically favour the integrity of the financial system and the solvency of financial institutions over the well-being of the population or environmental quality. (pp.70-71)

Internally, the neoliberal state is necessarily hostile to all forms of social solidarity that put restraints on capital accumulation. (p.75)

Neoliberalism does not make the state or particular institutions of the state (such as the courts and police functions) irrelevant, as some commentators on both the right and the left have argued. There has, however, been a radical reconfiguration of state institutions and practices (particularly with respect to the balance between coercion and consent, between the powers of capital and of popular movements, and between executive and judicial power, on the one hand, and powers of representative democracy on the other). p.78

Contradictions of the neoliberal state:

1. On the one hand the neoliberal state is expected to take a back seat and simply set the stage for market functions, but on the other it is supposed to be activist in creating a good business climate and to behave as a competitive entity in global politics.

2. Authoritarianism in market enforcement sits uneasily with ideals of individual freedoms.

3. While it may be crucial to preserve the integrity of the financial system, the irresponsible and self-aggrandizing individualism of operators within it produces speculative volatility, financial scandals, and chronic instability.

4. While the virtues of competition are placed up front, the reality is the increasing consolidation of oligopolistic, monopoly, and transnational power within a few centralized multinational corporations.

5. At the popular level, the drive towards market freedoms and the commodification of everything can all too easily run amok and produce social incoherence. (pp.79-80)

Neoconservatism = some neoliberalism (elite governance, mistrust of democracy, and the maintenance of market freedoms) + a concern for order + a concern for an overweening morality as the necessary social glue to keep the body politic secure (p.82)

The general progress of neoliberalization has therefore been increasingly impelled through mechanisms of uneven geographical developments. Successful states or regions put pressure on everyone else to follow their lead. Leapfrogging innovations put this or that state (Japan, Germany, Taiwan, the US, or China), region (Silicon Valley, Bavaria, Third Italy, Bangalore, the Pearl River delta, or Botswana), or even city (Boston, San Francisco, Shanghai, or Munich) in the vanguard of capital accumulation. But the competitive advantages all too often prove ephemeral, introducing an extraordinary volatility into global capitalism (pp.87-88).

Forces and fluxes at work.

- Power of neoliberal ideas (held to be particularly strong in the cases of Britain and Chile).

- The need to respond to financial crises of various sorts (as in Mexico and South Korea).

- A more pragmatic approach to reform of the state apparatus (as in France and China) to improve competitive position in the global market.

- An interplay of internal dynamics and external forces.

- Contingent geopolitical considerations (pp.115).

Neoliberalism on trial.

Neoliberal achievements:

- Capital accumulation – Its actual record turns out to be nothing short of dismal.

- The reduction and control of inflation is the only systematic success neoliberalization can claim.

- A number of spectacular shifts of emphasis under neoliberalization – the rise of finance and of financial services, paralleled by a remarkable shift in the remuneration of financial corporations as well as a tendency for the larger corporations (such as General Motors) to fuse the two functions.

- An extraordinary burst in information technologies.

- The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income.

- The commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations.

- Conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China).

- Suppression of rights to the commons.

- Commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption.

- Colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources).

- Monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land.

- The slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry).

- The use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession (pp.154 – 159).

Accumulation by dispossession comprises four main features:

1. Privatization and commodification.

2. Financialization.

3. The management and manipulation of crises.

4. State redistributions. (pp.160- 164)

The Commodification of Everything.

Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over processes, things, and social relations, that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract (p.165).

Environmental degradations.

Attacks on rights.

Freedom’s Prospect.

The emergence of diverse oppositional cultures that from both within and without the market system either explicitly or tacitly reject the market ethic and the practices that neoliberalization imposes:

- environmental movements

- anarchist movements among the young

- religious communities

- discontent within ruling policy circles as to the wisdom of neoliberal propositions and prescriptions.

- A revival of academic and institutional interest in the cosmopolitan ethic (‘an injury to one is an injury to all’) as a basis for global governance (pp.186-188)

Alternatives.

But we first need to initiate a political process that can lead us to a point where feasible alternatives, real possibilities, become identifiable.

There are two main paths to take. We can engage with the plethora of oppositional movements actually existing and seek to distil from and through their activism the essence of a broad-based oppositional programme. Or we can resort to theoretical and practical enquiries into our existing condition (of the sort I have engaged in here) and seek to derive alternatives through critical analysis (pp.198-199).

The idea is to work through the whole of civil society in a more open and fluid search for alternatives that would look to the specific needs of the different social groups and allow them to improve their lot (p.199).

The first lesson we must learn, therefore, is that if it looks like class struggle and acts like class war then we have to name it unashamedly for what it is (p.202).

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Pierre Bourdieu. The forms of capital.

March 5th, 2011

Pierre Bourdieu 1986. The forms of capital.

Capital is accumulated labor.

- a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures.

- a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world.

Capital is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible.

The structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e., the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.

CAPITAL can present itself in three fundamental guises:

- as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of property rights;

- as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications;

- and as social capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of a title of nobility.

Cultural capital exists in three forms:

- in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; it is linked to the body and presupposes embodiment. Its aquisition is called Bildung, cultivation – presupposes a process of embodiment, incorporation, which, insofar as it implies a labor of inculcation and assimilation, costs time, time which must be invested personally by the investor.

a) it cannot be transmitted instantaneously (unlike money, property rights, or even titles of nobility) by gift or bequest, purchase or exchange.

b)it cannot be accumulated beyond the appropriating capacities of an individual agent.

c) it declines and dies with its bearer (with his biological capacity, his memory, etc.).

d) it is predisposed to function as symbolic capital (ecause the social conditions of its transmission and acquisition are more disguised than those of economic capital).

- in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.;

a) is transmissible in its materiality (but what is transmissible is legal ownership and not (or not necessarily) what constitutes the precondition for specific appropriation, namely, the possession of the means of ‘consuming’ a painting or using a machine, which, being nothing other than embodied capital, are subject to the same laws of transmission).

b) remains irreducible to that which each agent, or even the aggregate of the agents, can appropriate (i.e., to the cultural capital embodied in each agent or even in the aggregate of the agents).

c)  it exists as symbolically and materially active, effective capital only insofar as it is appropriated by agents and implemented and invested as a weapon and a stake.

- and in the institutionalized state - in the form of academic qualifications.

Social capital:

It is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a ‘credential’ .

a) The volume of the social capital possessed by a given agent thus depends on the size of the network of connections he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural or symbolic) possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is connected.

b) the profits which accrue from membership in a group are the basis of the solidarity which makes them possible.

c) The existence of a network of connections is the product of an endless effort, at institution, of which institution rites – often wrongly described as rites of passage – mark the essential moments and which is necessary in order to produce and reproduce lasting, useful relationships that can secure material or symbolic profits.

d) the reproduction of social capital presupposes an unceasing effort of sociability, a continuous series of exchanges in which recognition is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed.

e) every group has its more or less institutionalized forms of delegation which enable it to concentrate the totality of the social capital, which is the basis of the existence of the group (a family or a nation, of course, but also an association or a party), in the hands of a single agent or a small group of agents and to mandate this plenipotentiary, charged with plena potestas agendi et loquendi, to represent the group, to speak and act in its name.

Conversions of capital:

The different types of capital can be derived from economic capital, but only at the cost of a more or less great effort of transformation, which is needed to produce the type of power effective in the field in question.

Economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital.

In accordance with a principle which is the equivalent of the principle of the conservation of energy, profits in one area are necessarily paid for by costs in another (so that a concept like wastage has no meaning in a general science of the economy of practices). The universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other than labor-time (in the widest sense).

Every reproduction strategy is at the same time a legitimation strategy aimed at consecrating both an exclusive appropriation and its reproduction.

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