Currency War: An Extremely Short Introduction

John Maynard Keynes once wrote that “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.”^[1] Bretton Woods, hyperinflation, and stagflation have increased this view’s sway, and some would argue that Keynes’ own economic theories have given his statement a veracity that it would not possess otherwise. Nevertheless, this statement is capable of being combined in a fruitful way with the notion that “the way a society makes war reflects the way it makes wealth.”^[2] These two theses become crystallized in the concept of a currency war, the implications of which will first be outlined historically, then contextualized within contemporary discourse on international politics, and discussed in terms of how it problematizes typical discussions of security.

Prior to Bretton Woods, the value of money was pegged to the price of gold, i.e. the gold standard. This led to phenomena such as ‘Gresham’s Law’, where if the price of bullion was higher than the value of a coin made of a precious metal, people would melt down the coin and sell the bullion, pocketing the difference; this tendency can be observed even today with respect to the penny. More importantly, as Lyotard argues, this structured international trade into a zero-sum game. As he comments:

[T]he quantity of metallic money which is ‘circulating in all Europe’ being constant, and this gold being wealth itself, in order that the king grow richer he must seize the maximum of this gold. This is to condemn the partner to die, in the long or short term. It is to count the time of trade not up to infinity, but by limiting it to the moment when all the gold in Europe is in Versailles.^[3]

This was not, however, a currency war per se, but rather a ‘wealth war’—the difference will shortly be made clear. In 1933, facing the Great Depression, the United States finally abandoned the gold standard, and soon after devalued its currency 40 percent, which greatly boosted the US economy as well as that of the rest of the world.^[4] Deprived of a ‘universal’ numeraire, the currencies of the world subsequently became valued relative to each other, creating a competitive atmosphere of an entirely different kind. The lower a state’s currency is valued, the more businesses in other countries will be incentivized to import their products, and this fact (particularly in the case of Japan) is explicitly taken into account in monetary policy. The picture is complicated further when it is considered how the US dollar is a reserve currency—i.e. the ‘default’ currency which states use to allow for current account surpluses (i.e. countries importing more than they export) or to purposively modify exchange rates (particularly in the case of currencies pegged to another currency, such as China’s yuan to the dollar). As one article^[5] describes: “the effect of a devaluation of a non-reserve currency…is implicitly to put upward buying pressure on the USD,” and conversely,^[6] “every time the Fed debases the US Dollar it forces the Euro and other currencies higher, hurting those countries’ exports.”

Alessandro Bellini on Sraffa and The ‘Capital-World’

{The following is excerpted from Bellini’s dissertation (supervised by François Laruelle), entitled “Suspension of the Capital-World for the Production of Jouissance” (pp. 35-41; abstract here), shittily translated from the French by moi. I’m interested to hear what philosophers (e.g. Lyotard) have to say about Sraffa, but although Bellini’s description is initially quite interesting it eventually resorts to shameless straw man arguments, as well as rejecting Sraffa’s position purely on the basis of metaphysical preferences. I’ve added a couple of translator’s notes specifying the most egregious distortions of Sraffa’s work, and my more lengthy criticisms can be found at the bottom of the post, above the endnotes.}

§ 3. Production of commodities by means of commodities

The interpretation that the Italian economist Claudio Napoleoni has given of Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities^[20] is a very radical interpretation, in disagreement with both the apologists of the Cambridge economist and their neoclassical adversaries, and it is rooted in a vision of political economy as critical knowledge that seeks always to emphasize the philosophical issues that relate to the theory and that constantly pushes its way forward with inexhaustible political authority.^[21]

What should first be noted is the way in which Piero Sraffa places himself in the classical tradition of the history of economic thought, which follows from the perfect circularity of his model, and unfolds through the role played by surplus; yet “the fact that the image of the economic process based on the concept of surplus is presented in the classics in a way logically untenable but historically significant, whereas in Sraffa it is presented in a way that is logically rigorous but historically silent” was for Claudio Napoleoni one of the fundamental features of the theoretical context in which the 1960 Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities appeared.^[22] A solution such as Sraffa’s must therefore be interpreted as a break with the Marxian structure – in its Classical sense – rather than as its extension.

Let us try then to go a bit into details of the book, despite its level of abstraction, paying very specific attention to its use of the language of classical economic theory, of which we have already given an overview [in §2]. According to Claudio Napoleoni, what the Sraffa model presupposes is a given configuration of production – that is to say, a system of algebraic equations which represent the contributions that each branch of the productive system provides to the aggregate of economic processes, without including demand for goods – through which we may define a “net product” or a surplus in physiocratic and Ricardian terms. Sraffa’s theoretical aim is to show that if one separates the determination of price from the general problem of equilibrium one performs an operation endowed with meaning, because it is precisely by this link that prices are determinable.^[23]

Indeed, the operation performed by Sraffa is a revival – through its definition of surplus – of Ricardian theory, though abandoning the pretension to link price-formation to quantities of labor objectified in commodities. It consequently eliminates any circular reasoning, thanks to the simultaneous determination of the rate of profit and of prices.

In particular, according to Claudio Napoleoni, the Sraffian “reduction to dated quantities of labor” can be used as a critique of the labor theory of value, although Sraffa does not make explicit his criticisms of Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of capital. From the ‘reduction equation’ used by Sraffa, it seems clear that in fact the price of a commodity depends not only on the amount of labor contained in it, but it also depends on the distribution of labor between direct and indirect labor: therefore, if there is a change in the distribution, the reasons for exchange between commodities vary, even if the quantities of work contained in the commodities does not change.^[24]

It is then possible to state that “Sraffa’s system is the first theory of price that is formulated entirely outside of a theory of value, or at least the two theories of value that had previously been presented in the history of economic thought.”^[25] In this way, the possibility of developing a theory of economic foundations vanishes. From this there arises, in fact, a definitive fracture between scientific analysis and the philosophical dimension, in the sense that Sraffa’s model no longer refers to any philosophical position; it simply adapts to the reality of capital to explain its pure functionality.

§ 4. Economic science

In the beginning of the century, in fact, Gustav Cassel had posed the problem of breaking free from the metaphysics which, in both theoretical traditions, sought a foundation in value as separate from price.^[26] Sraffa was not the only one to realize the goal of Cassel, since at the same time a rigorous formulation of the theory of general economic equilibrium was achieved by Debreu.^[27] The latter, through the explicit assumption of an axiomatic method, also obtained results leading to “a perfect conceptual identity, or a nullification of value by price.”^[28] That’s why, starting from Gustav Cassel, both Sraffa and Debreu “seek to construct a non-founded economic theory—that is to say, one which does not require a foundation outside itself.”^[29]

Consequently the idea that with Sraffa there is a definitive solution to the problem of a stable measure of value as the basis of relative prices – which according to Claudio Napoleoni takes the form of a suppression and not a solution to the question of value – represents unequivocally the final term in the history of political economy, as a science founded precisely on its decision as regards the problem of value: if we recognize that Sraffa’s theoretical proposal overcomes all non-empirical or purely metaphysical presuppositions so as to obtain full formal coherence, one is forced to recognize at the same time the end of political economy.

Laruelle Bibliography (English & French)

{Someone needed to compile this, so I did. Let me know if I missed anything. I took two French bibliographies (1, 2) and put the English versions in bullets, adding links to online material (whole or partial). Essays with English translations are bolded. Some repeated publications were omitted. My own citations are in APA style, but French citations are not.}

Laruelle’s “Fragments of an Anti-Guattari”

[This may be cited as Laruelle, F.; Wolfe, C. (trans.). (1993). “Fragments of an Anti-Guattari.” Long News in the Short Century 4, pp. 158-164. Retrieved from linguisticcapital.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/laruelles-fragments-of-an-anti-guattari.

The following is reproduced with permission. A pdf version is available here.]

1.1   It was the Post-Modern times
        Unlimited becoming-cinema
        Image-debris in a state of fixed surview
        Thinkers were then producing the Real
        A bachelor philosopher a bachelor analyst
        A dyad of bachelors was inventing
        The reversibility of desire and the concept
        The “D-G” desiring-machine
        Consider the following diagram

1.2    About-face inversion of the Greek horizon
        Great Desirers they went down to the Heraclitus stream
        Bathed once-for-two in the same flux
        Foreswearing the One-logos of the hospital-schizos – The Sensible
        In the Collective-logos of schizo-processes – The Senseless
               “The right to madness, superhuman right of the human”
               “Take into consideration desire in its entirety”
               “A thousand Oedipuses do not make one incest”
               “The Same is the Desired and the Desiring—by one machine more or less”
               “The stream is the self-production of the stream”

“Heraclitus! Heraclitus!
Only one ‘flash’ can set fire to a thousand plateaus”

“Emblem of necessity
Supreme constellation of Desire
Eternal Yes of Desire
Forever I shall be your Yes”

         Thus they spoke of the eternal and cunning speeches
         Tautologies linking past and future
         New theory of indiscernables – the concept as bridge

1.3    Transcendental cartographers of the thousand eternities of Being
         To the proximity constellations Mythos and Logos
         Their extinction has not yet reached us -
         They have added shining-obscure
         The so-called “Chaos” constellation
         A stream of neighbouring stars
         “Chaosmos”, “Chaosmosis”, “Chaology”, “chaosmology”
         And the most recent “Ecology-of-Chaos” also known as “Echaology”

         - Its birth has not yet been announced

1.4    A philosopher – an analyst up to one auto-position
         An analyst – a philosopher up to one unconscious
         Reversible up to an “up to an X”
         Naming their common non-sense “Desire”
         The archaic originary One-Two of “desiring Desire”
         Oh mythology which never ceases to bring back
         The D(i)eux [D(y)ei] of grammar

1.5    We have loved these transcendental tautologies
         Stretched out like a temple over our heads
         Worlding World/nullifying Nothingness/speaking Speech/desiring Desire
         Merry-go-round spun around by a Leibnizian ritournelle

“The philosopher, turning, so to speak, the general system of these tautologies that he deems suitable to be produced to manifest his thought, from side to side and in all ways, and looking over all the facets of this ‘fourfold’ in all possible ways, since there is no relation which escapes his omniscience; the result of each view of this system, as seen from a certain place up to a turn, is a philosophy which expresses this total, if the philosopher deems it suitable to render the thought effective and to produce this philosophy.” From which 12 founding statements [follow]: “take into consideration …
                the nullifying world
                the speaking world
                the desiring world
                the worldifying nothingness
                the speaking nothingness
                the desiring nothingness
                the worldifying speech
                the nullifying speech
                the desiring speech
                the worldifying desire
                the nullifying desire
                the speaking desire … in its entirety”
        For 12 new philosophers among the thousand
        Coming up from the bottom of the Future

.

2.1   I call “One (of) desire” desire as One rather than One as desire

        Consider the One (of) desire …

(up to a point, more or less, up to a being more or less, not
   approximating “as close as X”, not on the basis of any
      desire, before it disjoins itself into desired and desiring,
          and blends in the concept and the unconscious)

        … What is called thinking?

2.2   I call “Desiring desire” the doublet which opens analysis
        and the difference which implodes it in super-analysis

Either it desires itself
Inverts reverts itself into super-analysis
Big with a thousand desired-desiring amphibologies

Either it ceases in the One (of) desire to desire itself
Emerges to its own manifestation
As three states (of) desire
Categories of a non-analysis

           - The One (of) desire
                       - or the Desired-without-desire
                               - the order of the real
           - The Being (of) desire
                       - or the Desirings which are [the] multitude
                                                                                of desire-thinking
                               - the order of the symbolic
           - The Entity (of) desire
                       - or desiring Desire
                               - the order of the imaginary

2.3   I call “One (of) desire” or Desired the Enjoyed (of) jouissance

The One (of) jouissance rather than the jouissance of the One
That which in desire is enjoyed from both ends
That to which desire does not give its share
That part of desire which appears to desire alone
Its absolutely un-desirable and just so desired phenomenon

The Enjoyed suspended in its own immanence
What begins and completes itself with no circle
Begins there without departing from it
Completes itself there without return

Deserted without desire
Too simple the desert is not rare

Desired, absolute past of desire
Enjoyed, absolute past of enjoyment
As the Lived
Precedes the living the Affected
Affection the Enjoyed
Jouissance
Solitude of closed eyes before
The confinement of solitude

Reduced form enjoyment spark of desire
The Ir-reduced of the Enjoyed, the intense Extinguished of the Desired
Are a mystical razor
An ante-essential rather than supra-essential state

2.4   If as Desirings it is still possible to say of desire that it desires
        Being (of) desire
        It is suspended in-
        Desired
        The Desirings remain

I call Desirings the multitude (of) axioms
Inhabitants
Of the void beyond the Desired
On this side of the desire-Entity

Think in-Desired
Make Being void of desire
Prepare the dwelling of the Desirings

Of the Desired the axiom is never stated
Unless it is also the cause of the axiom
And insofar as it is

The axiomatics of Desirings adds nothing to the Desired
Just itself to itself
The axiom seen-in-full

Consider the fluxion of desired-desiring connections
Its suspension like a photograph
Reveals to the unclear side of the stream
A strict identity between the source and the mouth
The frozen flux of an eidetic Heraclitus
Frozen-in-One like a sky of eternal axioms

Desired is the non-moved and the non-moving
Desirings are the mobile or the flying moved once each time
Desire-desiring is the moved motor

.

The One (of) desire gathers without division all possible (undividable)
The Being (of) desire gathers without division all possible division
Being is particular – oh Desirings
Particle is the partition with nothing to part
A partition from one end to another
Without mixing with the Desired as is
The undiscernable molecule
of desiring Desire

Desire receives thinking not from thinking itself
From the grace of the One (of) desire and then thinking
Thinking receives desire not from desire itself
From the grace of the in-Desired and then of desire

.

Translated by Charles Wolfe^†

.

Author’s notes

“Desired”: past participle of ‘desire’, which I make into a noun.

“in-Desired”: en rather than dans, indicating an interiority or a radical inherence/immanence.

“Sensés”-Senseless: translation of Heraclitean terms.

“Fourfold”: Heideggerian term (Cf. “The Thing”).

“Jouissance”/“Enjoyment”: Lacanian term. I extract from it the past participle Joui (Enjoyed) which I make into a noun.

“Reduced”-“spark”: mystical terms. (Cf. Meister Eckhart).

“Ir-reduced”: not opposed to “Reduced”; cf. “irreducible”.

“Extinct”/“Extinguished”: past participle of ‘extinguish’, which I make into a noun.

“razor”: Cf. Ockham’s razor.

“ante-essential”: cf. the mystical term ‘supra-essential’; before Essence (=Being), above or beyond Essence (=Being).

.

---

^†: Editor’s notes:

I have emended the second term in §1.3’s antepenultimate line. It originally read ‘Chaosmose’, while Laruelle doubtless means ‘Chaosmosis’, the title of one of Guattari’s books. Cf. the French osmose, which translates to the English ‘osmosis’.

In §1.4, ‘self-position’ has been changed to ‘auto-position’, in keeping with standard translations of Laruelle.

“Nullifying nothingness” (1.5) refers to Heidegger’s statement “The nothing nothings.” Laruelle clearly has in mind the meaning ‘nothinging nothingness’, which unfortunately does not parse well into English.                                                                     — G.J.

水仙

水仙死的时候，田野里的百花充满了悲伤，乞讨河给他们几滴水，让他们为水仙哭泣。

河回答说：“假使每滴我的水都是泪水，也没有足够的泪为他哭泣。我爱了他。”

花儿们说：“怎么能不爱上他？他是那么俊美。”

河问：“ ……他俊美吗？”

花儿们问：“谁知道得比你更清楚？他每天都躺在你的岸边，你的水面映出了他的俊美。”

河潺潺地说：“我爱他，在他俯身我的时候，我看见了他的眼中我自己的美。”

— 奥斯卡·王尔德

Fragments of a Non-Economic Lexicon

From Fradin, J. (2006). La voie pauvre de la rébellion. Préambule de la science des pauvres [The Poor Way of Rebellion: Preamble to a Science of the Poor]. Paris, L’Harmattan; part of the series « Nous, les sans-philosophie » Excerpts originally compiled by Didier Moulinier.

{Noëlle Vahanian describes Jacques Fradin‘s project as follows:

In “Prolégomènes à la science des pauvres & à la rebellion non-éco-nomique,” what Jacques Fradin terms la non-économie is a science of the poor as practice of Laruelle’s non-philosophie. Here non-economics and non-philosophy are allied to construct a radical science that can think from the Real (rather than explain it away), according to ordinary Man and the Poor. This, then, is set in contrast to and against the world economy and its philosophy which is without conscience and which produces a reified world—“un monde riche de ses pauvres! Puissant de ses esclaves!” [“a world rich with its poor! Powerful with its enslaved!”] (p. 129).

The radical science of non-philosophical non-economics could study the relative autonomy of the world economy in order to understand conformism, and the mechanization of society. It would tie these findings to some basic structural elements of philosophy, such as, for instance, the idea of a natural law of the social. Finally, this radical science of the poor would also function as an ethic: as a subversive science according to the poor. In this, it would be a partial introduction to the non-religion of theorists (p. 129).

The following is my own, rather poor, translation of a blog post by La Non-Philosophie which collected various excerpts from Fradin’s book. It was made by struggling with Google Translate until some semblance of a grammatical sentence could be parsed into English, so corrections are welcome. My only alterations were rearranging the sections to be in alphabetical order after being translated to English, and separating excerpts from different pages.

Intrigued that someone else had started to think about Non-Economics, I soon found that Fradin’s work really has very little to do with economics (or, for that matter, Non-Philosophy) at all. If one were to be very charitable, one might call it Anti-Economics. There are some interesting ideas—otherwise I wouldn’t post this at all—but these get bogged down in Fradin’s pretentious wordplay, ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, and dislike of writing in full sentences.

In his use of the word ‘economics’ and its variants, Fradin likes to play off of the French word “économisé’ (saved, in the religious sense) and the Greek word nomos (as in ‘eco-Nomic‘), meaning ‘law’. A few of his neologisms are ‘historial’, ‘de-propriation’ (cf. expropriation), and ‘objectalize’ (cf. reify), as well as Réal, to be contrasted with the normal French Réel.}

ACCOUNT

Domination - (p. 122) The measurements of economics are firstly social productions [...]; its accounting/measurement structures are firstly formations of domination, geo-mastrical impositions [impositions géo-maîtrisantes], ‘politico-police’ dimensions which are then re-made by ‘research-(eco)nomists’, re-made ​​and re-commented (but not transformed, the case of price being symptomatic). The economist comes in second place, with the function of the hermeneutician. But he can lie to himself and imagine being in the scientific-creative position of the physicist.

(p. 123) The man submitted to the accounting system is a monetary fool […]. A madman whose alienation is so deeply inscribed (into account) that it has become absurd to want to separate the man from his dream of coppers [fr(l)ic]. Whence comes this monetary alienation? Simply this: accounting does not count anything. Accounting, as a measure [...] is a political mode of the constitution of a disciplined world. This why accountants are subjected beings. This is why those who are accounted are depressive beings.—To count is never to count something, something exterior to the account, something ‘natural’ that would be accounting’s ‘real referent’.—For what counts is not the account, let alone its ‘results’, but the possibility of imposing techno-logical procedures, the possibility of imposing a mode of language [...].

(note 43) From the ‘technical’ point of view it must be noted that accounting is not a ‘neutral technique’, but a politico-constituent process; and subsequently, the whole ‘technique’ is not a disciplinary assembly; its technology has nothing of ‘technique’ which constitutes a(n aletheio-logical) ‘mode of unveiling’, a formation of authoritarian structuration.

(p. 124) So if accounting does not count anything, the monetary-accounting system is nevertheless a fine example of a disciplinary institution, perhaps a policing invention decisive for the history of an enslaved humanity.

(p. 126) The (eco)nomic world (value, price, currency, accounting structure) is the result of a cobbled-together war of control, of a policing structure—always at work. To understand price involves reconstructing the militarized genea-logy of accounting; accounting remains still and always a center of confrontation—already for its continuing existence.

AUTHORITY

Rebellion – (p. 10) It is just, it is always just to rebel, to revolt & incite (revolutionary) subversion: the state of exception in which we live cannot bear the name of (ecoNomic) dictatorship and does not accept that it is the alternation which enforces it. It is just to revolt; because that way, because only in this way will Man (not subject nor agent, nor homo economicus) be respected.

Prelude to a Non-Standard Economics

{I recently received the following question on my tumblr blog:

Hi. You seem to have a better understanding of economics than most of the people here on tumblr, an understanding of how misrepresentations of how economics works can lead to misrepresentations of the actions/attitudes we should take to solve the problems of our current economic system.

Admittedly, I sympathize with the leftist and Marxist sentiments espoused by those on tumblr and with authors such as the one you just ridiculed, but that’s mostly due to my cursory understanding of economics and the fact that when one has such sentiments, leftism and Marxism are the first theoretical positions one comes across. I think you agree that capitalism leads to Huge Problems, but could you shed some light on what you take to be the proper route of critique?

The following is my answer. I’m cross-posting it here because due to midterms it will probably take me quite some time to write a full post fleshing out all my arguments.}

I’m working on a lengthy blog post in response, but it’ll unavoidably be very dull and tedious, and I don’t want to act like I expect people to read it. The question of an alternative to Marxism is one I’ve been puzzling over for several years now, and what I’ve found is that the question is inherently problematic, and needs to first be deconstructed before the practical result it hopes for can be provided. The main problem is the necessarily philosophical nature of the answer it expects: I’m supposed to provide a philosophical theory of economics which can reconcile its different schools of thought and which somehow fits within the Continental tradition. But I don’t think that this can be done. Yahya Madra, for example—a very intelligent guy—has for some years been trying to apply Lacanian psychoanalysis (plus Derrida and D&G) to economics, but hasn’t been able to come up with anything substantial. So the following will first talk about philosophy’s inability to meaningfully speak about economics, then point toward how philosophy caricatures economics in order to speak about it at all, and finally offer some rules of thumb for getting beyond such caricatures.

Laruelle writes in Mystique non-philosophique that “The identity of the with (the One with the One, God with God), is the true ‘mystical’ content of philosophy, its ‘black box’.” (His examples are stupid, but you get the point.) My claim is simply that the statements comprising marginalist economic theory are not conceptual per se, but rather, they operate within the prepositions of a philosophical sentence (in, with, by, to, from, etc.): that is, within the black box of philosophy. As such, economic statements are constitutively inaccessible to philosophy as a discourse. All philosophy can do is to latch ahold of an ‘object’ used in economics (e.g. labor, utility, commodity-form) and try to relate it to other philosophical concepts—but from the point of view of economics, this is just to just to create an alternate model, one which can say nothing about the model it’s ostensibly ‘critiquing’ unless it can hold up to economics’ standards of operativity. (For more on the latter, see below, paragraph five.)

In short, economics is a form of antiphilosophy. This should be clear even historically, since marginalism (contemporary orthodox economics, the kind that uses calculus to measure ‘marginal’ increments between abstract ‘units’ of things such as ‘utility’ or ‘marginal propensity to save’) was designed specifically to circumvent the problems (e.g. exploitation) that Marx raised. For example, due to marginalism’s theory that value is determined solely by the intersection of supply and demand, this implies that all wages are at their proper value—thus eliminating the possibility of exploitation a priori. Likewise, dispensing with the inverse relation of profits and wages undermines the foundation of anyone who would argue that class struggle constitutes a fundamental component of the business sphere.

Of course, the results of economic theory are apparently susceptible to critique. But are they? I can attest from long, frustrated experience that to write about economics (without writing in economics) is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible—unless you resort to some form of pre-packaged philosophical discourse (or journalistic tripe). The main quasi-conceptual ‘discourses’ about economics are Marxism and Austrianism, and I argue that this dyad is symptomatic of the structure of philosophy, particularly when viewed through Laruelle’s concept of philosophical decision. Put in way-oversimplified terms, the Decisional structure is when philosophies invent a third term of ‘immanent transcendence’ to mediate between two objects, one of which is transcendent, the other immanent. In economics, however, the economy is both transcendent and immanent, thus screwing up this neat little pattern and forcing certain reductionisms on the part of each theory. There’s not much of substance that one can say without getting immensely technical (since it’s not just a cut-and-dried case of each theory favoring one over the other), except that when you compare Mises’ and Marx’s conceptualizations of the economy in terms of immanence and transcendence, there are distinct differences, and once these are straightened out (which I haven’t yet had the chance to do rigorously), it will help us to analyze these discourses as forms of thought, as well as to pinpoint why they have become as entrenched as they have in political discourse.

The main point of the latter paragraph is that we need a unified theory of philosophy and economics, of how the two ‘work’ in relation to one another. But to make this accessible to people who aren’t economists is very difficult. Let me be clear here that the problem is not just one of technical knowledge, but also that economists (even moronic econ undergrads like myself) are trained to view theories in terms of their operativity: all economic statements must be capable of being converted into mathematics, and of being used in a mathematical model of an economy. (Continental Philosophers, on the other hand, have no demarcation criteria to distinguish sense from nonsense, and they’re trained to take even the most whacked-in-the-head ideas seriously.) This is the main reason why the paper on “Darwin metaeconomics” is so self-evidently stupid to any economist. He takes freshman-level economic theory and dresses it up with grandiose (but completely vacuous) concepts in order to ‘prove’ a thesis (which he presupposes from the start, giving no evidence whatsoever) that any crackpot or art student at Occupy might make. There are plenty of respectable studies corroborating the idea of Wall Street corruption, centralization of power, and so on, but there’s an unwritten rule in economics that the more one’s conclusions go against mainstream ideas, the more rigorous your study must be—and for the pragmatic purposes of saving one’s resources for important matters and of weeding out crackpots, this is a reasonable rule to have.

Even the notion of a ‘critique’ of capitalism is very problematic, and Lyotard goes into better detail about this than I could in his Libidinal Economy. But since economics is the science of non-discursive social relations, and philosophy is discursive, to begin to critique capitalism from a philosophical starting point is, to a large extent, to determine one’s conclusions from the outset. Much philosophical hostility toward neoliberalism can be attributed to the latter’s inability to be thought philosophically. (And this besides the obvious bad faith of being a Humanities student.) What I don’t want to advise you is to read more about economics—this is the most banal thing in the world to say. Not that it wouldn’t help, but it’s ridiculous to expect that of someone who has no professional interest in the field (and I include due diligence in this clause), especially since laypeople will just gravitate toward books that confirm their preconceived notions anyway. But if you’re a philosopher and are curious about the economy, I recommend that you look at it through antiphilosophy, e.g. McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (only the first few chapters though; as soon as he starts talking about racial theories, stop reading), or Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. They aren’t perfect, but they aren’t autopositional in the same way as typical philosophical texts are. This is to a large extent because they don’t rely on concepts: implicit in every concept is a choice to emphasize some aspects of a thing over others. This is what I take Foucault to have meant when he called Anti-Oedipus “a book of ethics.” Hume’s Law holds absolutely—but only when we confine our purview to sensations and intuitions. In his radical empiricism, Hume denied that ‘other aspects’ of phenomena existed besides those which we immediately perceive; this is why (in its own terms) his argument is valid, but doesn’t hold in real life. So economic models do contain implicit values both positively (prioritizing things like efficiency) and negatively (the aspects of things they ignore).

So let’s get a bit more concrete. One of the things that Tumblr Marxists love to do is to attribute all the evils of the world to “capitalism.” Taking after Marx, they attribute a primacy of the economic sphere over the political sphere (even if they spend all the rest of their time insisting that culture is more important than economics). Yet, people like Chomsky make an excellent case for the primacy of the political sphere over the economic sphere, and thus can meaningfully argue that we’ve never had capitalism. Then again, every single economic argument Chomsky makes that isn’t either trivial or repeated verbatim from his friends (e.g. Ha-Joon Chang) is not only wrong, but really stupid. Much as I love Chomsky, he just has no understanding of economics whatsoever—yet, he’s absolutely brilliant when it comes to politics, and he’s a rigorous empiricist. And of course, Marx is hardly infallible either, despite being a genius. So I think that to think about the question of primacy in terms of being correct or incorrect is to look at matters the wrong way. Rather, the disparate discursive structures of philosophy and economics force any philosophical critique of the latter to be in the form of a model of one’s own; most people just don’t think of it that way. So the real question is what our conceptual model lets us say that other’s can’t (and perhaps more importantly, what our model can’t say that others can).

Hopefully the above doesn’t just seem like unnecessarily abstruse nitpicking about your question. It would be nice if I could just drop a weltanschauung in your lap, but that’s not how economics (or non-economics) works. That said, here are some rules of thumb that I’ve found helpful:

1. Try to view the concepts you use in their contingency as models.This is the basic idea of what Laruelle calls ‘cloning’, where (political) philosophies are made into material, and one’s focus becomes how the form of an argument determines its conclusions. The conclusions of all models are tautologies, derivable from their premises (the aspects of the world they focus on), and what separates a good model from a bad model is the extent to which it relies on ad hoc provisions and ‘deus ex machina’-like axioms that lie dormant for a while, then tie everything together in the last minute. What studying economics lets you do is see how ‘economic facts’ (e.g. statistics) are constructed—and this, again, is the meaningful content of economics that takes place within the black box of philosophy. So since philosophy has no way to explicitly speak of its tautologous (or: autopositional) nature, it becomes doubly important to make the effort to interpret issues through more than one theory, jumping from one view to the other the way one does with a duckrabbit.
2. Avoid thinking in terms of linear causality. In the social world, X rarely ever causes Y on its own: rather, multiple lines of causation converge together thanks to certain conditions, occasionally leading to positive feedback loops and other nonlinear behaviour. This is George Soros’s big insight, as well as that of Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. A corollary of this is that we should separate the goal we have in mind (e.g. support the working class) from the means of reaching it. It’s not that everyone who isn’t a communist wants to fuck over the working class: people like Milton Friedman just argue that Leftist measures like unions are counterproductive. It’s easy to treat political issues emotionally, e.g. that it isn’t ‘fair’ to give corporations tax breaks. But even a liberal like Robert Reich can agree with Milton Friedman (though for different reasons) that corporate income tax should be abolished. This is why I think that it’s useful to distinguish between the ‘letter’ of a partisan position (the typical goals it advocates) and its ‘spirit’ (the emotions and values it evokes to support its position). Iain Murray’s book The Really Inconvenient Truths uses original and data-focused arguments to back up conservative prescriptions traditionally supported by appealing to religion and other arbitrary value judgements. I haven’t come across any books supporting the letter of Leftism but not its spirit, but think that this would be an excellent technique to avoid falling back on stale tropes.
3. Accept that philosophy is limited in its applicability. Philosophy’s inability to accept its non-transferability to certain domains is what Laruelle calls the “principe de la suffisance philosophique,” which may be translated as ‘principle of sufficient philosophy’ or ‘principle of philosophical arrogance’. As the Austrian economists argue quite well, markets are able to take account of tacit knowledge and inarticulable desires in a way that discourse (and central planning) just can’t. To a large extent, accepting that many social structures have evolved as they have for a reason (cf. Taleb, 2012: 212) is enough to start sympathizing—at least a little bit—with conservatives. If you believe that biosemiotics has no effect on your behaviour, dye a bowl of oatmeal with blue or black food coloring and then explain to me why it’s the bourgeoisie’s fault that you’re filled with an overpowering sense of aversion as you try to eat it. Not that these social structures are all desirable, but unless one holds a naïve base-superstructure theory, any practical efforts for social change have to keep these in mind, and try to find a way to reroute them.
4. Make a point of avoiding paranoia. What I mean by paranoia in the context of social theories is when behind appearances is postulated some sort of absolute agency that controls everything (what Lacan calls the Other of the Other). This tendency is common among intellectuals, and I’ll give some examples. In Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, once you remove the presupposition of malicious agency by the USA, her argument degenerates into the claim that regime changes tend to happen during economic crises—which is quite trivial. Likewise, Chomsky’s lecture on Colombia (entitled “An American Addiction”) degenerates into vacuous conspiracy theory once the reader takes into account that coca ≠ cocaine. Coca is, of course, a staple agricultural product in South America precisely because of all its useful applications, and Chomsky attributes its pervasiveness solely to the malevolent interests of the Colombian government (backed, of course, by the USA). This is NOT to say that the USA doesn’t use its hegemonic power for the sake of coercion, or that theories of a paranoiac form are always invalid. After all, people like Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald show over and over the naïveté of denying that the USA behaves in many respects like an Empire. What I am saying is that one’s personal pathologies influence the type of data one seeks out, and also that by indulging one’s pathologies one is apt to make shitty arguments. Moreover, any social theory should allow for the possibility of contingent events influencing an outcome—and Marxism rarely does. This is why things like falsification criteria and scientific method are so important—they’re constructed specifically to avoid all-too-human tendencies of adopting pet theories, or of convincing yourself that you’re valiantly fighting the capitalist beast.

Sargam Griffin – The Economy (2010)

So if I had to sum up all of the above into one little catch-phrase, it would be this: it is absurd to expect one kind of economic policy to hold for all countries and situations; instead, policies should be chosen on the basis of each country’s unique situation. This isn’t a crazy thing to suggest. There are some scenarios where the tenets of neoclassical theory just doesn’t hold, just as there are others (e.g. stagflation) where those of Keynesianism don’t hold; conversely, there are scenarios where communal business practices work very efficiently. As I’ve argued before, this perverse desire (reinforced by party politics) to impose one policy everywhere can be thought of as the ‘principle of sufficient economics’. Economics since Keynes has focused on developing a general economics—instead we need to develop a Riemannian economics. This is what I think a non-standard economics inspired by Sraffa can do.

Peter Lichtenstein, in fact, presents a very interesting Sraffian model of a pluralist domestic economy. It does become problematic when you consider its relation to global finance, plus how zero-growth would make it into a zero-sum game between capitalists and communes, and this is something I need to think more about. But it should be obvious that austerity is not generally applicable—if all countries cut consumption at once, the world would go into another Great Depression. So, much as I’m annoyed by Richard Wolff’s populist rhetoric, I’m fully in favor of his attempts to draw attention to scenarios in which communal business practices are more efficient than capitalistic ones. (And of course, we need not confine ourselves here to overly narrow definitions of ‘efficiency’ which, as Taleb [2012: 44-5] argues, leave much to be desired.) All that matters is what works best. But one should be suspicious of any political theory or policy that says it will only work when it is applied to the whole world at once. And if you object to the notion of economic pluralism by the Marxist fallacy of lumping together disparate economic policies under the heading of ‘capitalism’ or ‘neoliberalism’, then this is what happens.