What St. Paul and the Franciscans can tell us about neoliberalism

Last night, I presented this paper (PDF) to the Paul of Tarsus Interdisciplinary Working Group at Northwestern University. In it, I try to situate The Highest Poverty in relation to Agamben’s work since The Kingdom and the Glory, and at the end, I address the issue of Agamben’s relationship to Marxism.

Yet another concept that is better expressed in German

This time around, it’s not a ridiculous compound, but a single word: “Blase.” It’s the word used to refer to a financial “bubble,” but it also has another meaning: “blister.” The advantages of “blister” over “bubble” for describing the financial phenomenon in question are manifold. A financial bubble sounds wholesome and fun, as though financiers are blowing soap bubbles in the park. Eventually they’ll pop, but why dwell on that? If we believed that there was a financial blister underway, by contrast, there’d be much less metaphorical incentive to let nature take its course — once it got to a certain point, it would need to be lanced in order to avoid an uncontrolled bursting that could lead to infection. Further, the metaphor of a blister is more evocative of the origin of the phenomenon, pointing as it does toward an excessive amount of friction, rubbing a part of the financial markets raw and causing it to become inflamed. A financial blister in the housing market, for instance, would not indicate that the housing market was doing especially well, but instead that an unsustainable amount of work is being demanded of it.

From the generalized resource curse to communism

Interfluidity has a great post up proposing that technological advances are turning the entire global economy into a generalized resource curse. For those who aren’t familiar, the resource curse is the phenomenon whereby the discovery of lucrative natural resources in a previously poor country produces vast inequality and immiseration, as the number of people necessary to exploit those resources is only a small proportion of the population. The way around this resource curse, it turns out, is to socialize the profits, as Norway and Alaska have done. The shift to a generalized resource curse comes as less and less labor is necessary for actual production — vindicating Jameson’s claim that what capitalism produces that is genuinely new in the grand scheme of things is precisely unemployment. And what is necessary is a pre-distribution of wealth, along the lines of Alaska and Norway’s payouts to all citizens regardless of their connection to the oil industry.

While many have claimed that guaranteed minimum income is still “merely” reformist, I believe that the framing in this post points to the way that it could be a step toward communism. A market economy in which access to resources is not strictly correlated with wage labor for the vast majority of the population is significantly different from capitalism. It opens up new possibilities that are currently foreclosed by our insistence on systematically depriving people of freedom unless they agree to be exploited by a capitalist enterprise. For instance, imagine that someone is content with the minimum income and just wants to edit Wikipedia all day — that potentially produces a vast amount of social value that cannot be correlated with waged labor under the current system. One can imagine similar scenarios with other intellectual pursuits, and I expect that other scenarios would arise that are very difficult for us to imagine under current conditions. Yes, some undesirable labor would still be necessary, but once work and income are decoupled, there would no longer be constituencies opposing automation because it would destroy jobs — destroying jobs and setting us all free would instead be the goal.

So much political discourse is focused on “jobs,” but what we most desperately need is a decoupling of work and income. We may not have created the material conditions for full communism, but surely we’re much closer than we’ve ever been — and as Marx predicted, capitalism is increasingly incapable of managing the productive forces it’s produced. As capitalism undermines the need for constant human toil, the demand that everyone work becomes ever more urgent and yet impossible to insist upon. The U.K. is becoming the North Korea of neoliberalism in this regard — one can envision the entire country becoming a vast work camp, with the poor endlessly rearranging the grocery store shelves…

In short, it’s time to cash out of capitalism. We have the technology — and I would argue that fiat currency is actually among the most crucial technologies in this regard, which is why it has always generated an undercurrent of fear and distrust among capitalist ideologues. We all know that the current system doesn’t work anymore. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the indefinite continuation of capitalism. We owe it to ourselves to try.

An irresolvable paradox

“Man, we keep drilling into kids from a very young age that college is the only path to the American dream, we tell them that the wage premium outweighs almost any amount of up-front cost, and we provide government-backed loans limited only by what a college is willing to charge. And yet somehow tuition keeps rising at an alarming rate! I guess that means we haven’t been aggressive enough in cutting labor costs.”

It’s simple economics, really.

Left behind

When the Rapture comes, we will all be left behind. It is money that will be taken up into heaven — all of it. We all know, deep within our hearts, that the world is not worthy of money, its endless self-replication. We have caused money to suffer, through taxing it, through exhorbitant labor demands, through declaring bankruptcy. At one point it seemed as though money somehow required human beings, or at least natural resources, but now money has finally reached its highest point of development, the point at which it finally breaks free from humanity altogether, revealing what had really been the case all along: money was never “about” us, never “about” the merely human. It alone has turned a profit, and the Father that sees in secret will reward it by entrusting it with greater things — giving compound interest, the only truly new force to have developed throughout the history of the universe, infinite space in which to grow and accumulate value.

Or is it the other way around? Will we all be taken, leaving money to range across the surface of the earth, unopposed by national borders or the antagonism of labor? Will we have been the “vanishing mediator” of the natural world, the accidental site where the “noo-sphere” called money emerged? Freed of the constraints of biology, the economy will be able to expand into the uttermost reaches of the universe, endlessly approaching an infinity of value. Thus God will have saved what was constitutively valueless.

[Note: This is a re-post.]

It’s the economy, stupid!

The New York Times editorial on education from this morning’s paper is better than one might expect, insofar as it compares the US system to other more successful countries rather than postulating that completely untried systems such as vouchers and charter schools will automatically fix things, but there’s still a persistent blindspot, as illustrated in this paragraph:

Teachers in leading nations’ schools also teach much less than ours do. High school teachers provide 1,080 hours per year of instruction in America, compared with fewer than 600 in South Korea and Japan, where the balance of teachers’ time is spent collaboratively on developing and refining lesson plans. These countries also have much stronger welfare states; by providing more support for students’ social, psychological and physical needs, they make it easier for teachers to focus on their academic needs. These elements create a virtuous cycle: strong academic performance leads to schools with greater autonomy and more public financing, which in turn makes education an attractive profession for talented people.

Emphasis added. Of course, there is literally no follow-up on the highlighted sentence.

Like a business

Surely we are all tired of the mantra that everything should be “run like a business.” Surely we all realize that the government, or the health care system, or the education system, or your family are not businesses and should work according to their own immanent logic rather than according to the norms of business.

Yet it occurs to me: is anything inherently a business? We normally think of a bakery as a business, for example, but isn’t it actually a place where people bake things? One can imagine a bakery operating under many different economic systems. The examples multiply. A clothing retailer is a place where people come to get their clothes. A convenience store exists to provide people with easy access to frequently used items. A car factory exists to make cars. Even a bank exists primarily to intermediate between people’s different financial priorities (e.g., saving vs. spending), rather than to make money as such. All of those things are typically “run like a business” in Western countries, but that doesn’t mean that they directly “are” businesses.

Only one type of pursuit is inherently a business: hedge funds.

MOOCs and “The Great Books”

Shimer’s president, Susan Henking, linked this morning to an interesting, if cranky article on the Great Books. The author makes the obvious, if oft-overlooked, point that the Great Books approach is hardly the bulwark against relativism that conservatives make it out to be — rather, in presenting all the Great Books of the Western tradition as equally valid options, it directly inculcates the relativism that conservatives decry. This is actually what I was partly trying to get at, albeit from the opposite direction, in my essay on the Shimer pedagogy, where I basically argue that the reason Great Books are so Great is that they are endlessly discussable.

What really interested me in the article, though, is this historical point:

Political theology and money

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Paul Kahn’s Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. The project provides an interesting lens for thinking through American political institutions, but I have one major reservation that might be at the root of the other reservations I have about the book. The problem arises in his discussion of Schmitt’s idea of a sociology of concepts. The reading he offers of Schmitt’s own usage is similar to what I arrive at in the linked post, but he concludes that Schmitt was wrong to assume that every epoch will have its own correspondence between political and metaphysical outlooks, because our age doesn’t even have a metaphysical outlook:

In the postmodern world, the sources of fundamental belief, the diversity of metaphysical approaches, the conflicts between religious and secular outlooks, and even the conflicts between the biological and physical sciences are just too many and too deep to think that we can offer a single theoretical model to characterize the epoch. Perhaps we should say that we live in a “postepochal” age. We find that people operate with diverse systems of belief, which do not fall into any coherent order. We have discovered that we can live with this incoherence. The center does not hold, but things do not fall apart. (118)

I suppose this is true as far as it goes, but I’m not sure Schmitt is really thinking about explicit metaphysical systems — he’s thinking about the deep assumptions about the order of the world, which will often surface in the most representative metaphysical systems. And in our contemporary postmodern era, that role is filled by economic reasoning. Yes, any particular school of thought has trouble gaining hegemony, but that’s just the nature of our contemporary “marketplace of ideas” (for example).

Kahn can’t see this because he, like Schmitt, has already dismissed economic rationality as a kind of anti-idea. “Follow the money” is his chief example of the kind of reductionism that he and, by his account, Schmitt are trying to avoid — yet isn’t it reductionistic not to think of economic rationality as a form of rationality, one with its own assumptions and values? At the risk of being pedantic: don’t you at least need to concede that the accumulation of money is valuable in itself before you would act in a way that is explicable by means of “following the money”?

Hence I propose that Kahn’s account needs to be supplemented by Goodchild’s Theology of Money.

So…. assessment

Through grad school and my visiting position at Kalamazoo, I was blissfully shielded from the idea of assessment. The veil was lifted when I came to Shimer, and I must confess that after our first meeting to discuss the issue, I was horrified. I remain suspicious of the “education reform” movement in general, but I have come to think that assessment — at least as it is conceived by Shimer’s accrediting body — might not be a bad thing. If I imagine that I’d never heard of Arne Duncan or charter schools and someone came up to me and suggested that my school might want to clarify its goals, gather information about how it’s doing in meeting those goals, and change its practices if it’s not working, I would find it hard to object. It bears a cost in terms of time and energy — but then so does plugging away at something that’s not working. Paying a reasonable number of hours up front in terms of data collection seems like a reasonable “hedge” against wasting countless hours on a pointless boondoggle.

One concern, particularly in liberal arts circles, surrounds the numerical aspect of assessment. I share the skepticism that numbers can really “capture” what we do, but we already use numerical forms of assessment all the time — we just mostly translate them into alphabetical form.