[p2p-research] the imperialism of market reason

[Michel Bauwens]

via http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/07/imperialism-of-market-reason.html

Harvey says that the academics are refusing to learn from the capitalist
crisis, that they are still retailing the same vulgarising neoclassical
theories that they have been for a century, and especially since the
Seventies. The theories don't work, don't explain anything, reduce complex
historical processes to dicta of vicious circularity, but they continue to
be orthodox. Proof, surely, that the purpose of higher education is to
indoctrinate more than it is to educate, encouraging intelligent people to
believe that in studiously internalising capitalist ideology, they have been
inducted into a caste of rational beings from which the great unwashed are
excluded. If you've had a read of Dan
Hind<http://thethreattoreason.blogspot.com/>'s
book The Threat To Reason, you'll remember that it is his argument that a
primary threat to reason arises from the corporate annexation of
Enlightenment. This takes place in two ways: first, in the sense that the
tools made available by the scientific revolution are hoarded and deployed
solely in order to accumulate capital, in strict secrecy (this is Occult
Enlightenment); secondly, in the sense that capitalists denounce their
opponents - be they environmentalists, opponents of nuclear energy,
peaceniks, or anticapitalists - as counter-Enlightenment forces. In this
Folk Enlightenment view, as Hind calls it, the forces of reason are on the
side of markets, big business and - let us not forget - war. I mentioned the
recent example of BA boss Willie Walsh describing BASSA workers as
"reactionaries" opposing the rationalisation of the airline industry.

One aspect of this specious conception of "reason" is the encroachment of a
set of analytical principles established by marginalist economics into other
fields of social science. Though specifically concerned with the workings of
markets, it is assumed by their advocates that these could apply
universally. And, as Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis argue (From Economics
Imperialism to Freakonomics, Routledge, 2009), the 20th Century saw a
growing tendency for various authors, including the writers of such ordure
as Freakonomics, to extend them as universally as possible.
Freakonomics(and its
Super- sequel) discovers a market logic behind a bewildering variety of
social phenomena. Gary Becker finds that market logic explains a wide range
of phenomena including crime and punishment. For Robert H Frank, "economics
explains everything", and he encourages his students to find ways to apply
market laws to all manner of questions. Everything up to and including
romantic relationships can be understood in terms of utility maximization.
Thus, the search for a partner can be interpreted as a petty entrepreurial
activity in a competitive market, in which - acting on information and
incentives - couples form property-based relational contracts as a means for
effectively utilizing resources, and the relationship is only sustained for
as long as each maximises the utility that the other receives.

Underpinning this approach is three basic analytical principles. The first
is individualism. The individual is taken to be the self-sufficient unit of
all forms of behaviour, the real basis of all fictitious corporate entities.
The second is rational self-interest. The individual behaves in ways that
will maximise utility to herself, on the basis of a rational assessment of
the information available in the market. Here, utility is purely subjective
- whatever is useful to an individual is whatever she thinks is useful,
while there is an assumption of an "implicit market" in all walks of life,
even where there are no commodities, no price signals, and no currency. The
third principle is exchange. Utility maximisation optimally takes place
through the act of exchange, and that exchange can take place between the
drug dealer and the addict as much as the lover and the pursued. This
kookiness, where it is not merely circular and vulgar, descends into
absurdity when the suitability of the theory can only be established through
an ad hoc proliferation of conceptual innovations, as when - for example -
Becker explains criminal recidivism in terms of a "preference for risk".
This naturalises and universalises the cut-throat self-advancement of
career-minded bourgois WASPs, distilling it into a set of puerile
anthropological axioms.

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