Re: Organising Action from sbicitizen at Yahoo! Groups by devinder singh
gulati
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory,
first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book,
Political Parties. It states that …
The human economy in a revolutionary moment: political aspects
of the economic crisis from The Memory Bank by keith
Jean-Louis and I based our conversation on what
Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi understood by economic change, since we were
looking for a more positive construction than a simple negation; and this is
where the idea of a human economy came from. What makes an economy “human”?
First, it privileges people before abstractions. People
make and remake their economic lives and that has to be the basis for thinking
about economy. Any economics has to be accessible to them as a practical guide
to how they manage those lives. But the economy is human in another sense too
in that we increasingly confront economic problems and dilemmas as humanity.
The future of humanity as a whole is at stake in the economic crises that we
face and not just the world seen through the blinkers of national politics and
media. So the idea of a human economy points in these two directions: towards
what people really do and extending our perspectives to a global level, if
possible…
I have been working quite closely for 5 or 6 years
now with my friend and colleague at Goldsmiths, David Graeber. He is an
anarchist who was prominent from the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS)
movement. His book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is a best-seller.
His politics inform his economic analysis; and he has always taken an
anti-statist and anti-capitalist position, with markets usually subsumed under
the concept of capitalism. That is, he sees the future and the means of getting
there as being based on the opposite of our capitalist states. The core of his
politics is “direct action” which he has practised and written about as
ethnography. I have always been centre-left with a liberal streak, but my
mentor, the person from whom I have learned most, was the West Indian
revolutionary, C.L.R. James and through him I gained a literary interest in the
history of revolutions.
In our book, Jean-Louis and I argued that people
everywhere rely on a wide range of organizations in their economic lives:
markets, nation-states, corporations, cities, voluntary associations, families,
virtual networks, informal economies, crime and war. We should be looking for a
more progressive mix of these things. We can’t afford to turn our backs on the
institutions that have helped us make the modern transition to the world
society that humanity now lives in. Large-scale bureaucracies co-exist with
varieties of popular self-organization and we have to make them work together
rather than at cross-purposes, as they often are now. All of these are
responses to the challenges posed by the modern world and we need to combine
them at a new and more inclusive level.
David and I agree on much of the economics. As
anthropologists, we both claim inspiration from Marx and Mauss in departing
from mainstream economics. Our theories of money are pretty close. Although he
is less explicitly indebted to Polanyi, he too believes that economic life
everywhere may be understood as a plural combination of moral principles – what
he calls baseline sociality or communism, reciprocity and hierarchy – which
take on a different complexion when organized by dominant social forms. Thus
helping each other as equals is essential to capitalist societies, but
capitalism is a terrible way of bringing it out effectively. But at the same
time he believes that a radical rupture with the norms of capitalist states is
necessary if we are to realise out human potential through a new kind of
political economy. At first, I saw our positions as being incompatible, but
recent political developments now persuade me otherwise…
I have not yet come across a civil society movement
capable of launching a communications satellite. So there probably will be room
for mutual accommodation between large-scale and small-scale economic
organization in any imaginable future. The political terms of their cooperation
remain to be settled, of course and there lies the scope for revolution…
Three things count in our societies — people,
machines and money, in that order. But money buys the machines that control the
people. Our political task – and I believe it was Marx’s too – is to reverse
that order of priority, not to help people escape from machines and money, but
to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money. To the idea
of economic crisis and its antidotes, we must now add that of political
revolution. I have argued here that the dynamics of revolution require active
consideration in this context. Revolutions give rise to digital contrasts and
rightly so, but human societies are built on analogue processes. This is not
just an academic debating point. A lot hinges on how humanity responds to the
contradictions of the turbulence ahead.
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