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.

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.

Income Redistribution vs. Grade Redistribution: An Economic Sophism

This argument tends to crop up every once in a while. Young America’s Foundation, which is responsible for the above video, describes it thusly (emphasis in original):

[W]hen students at Carthage where asked if they would be willing to sign a petition to redistribute GPA points from the top 10% to the rest of the college, most of them said NO. One student said, “No, because I worked hard for my grades!”

Another said, “At Carthage, each student has an equal opportunity to get the GPA they desire.” And another, “I don‘t want my GPA being taken away from me if I had an ’A’.”

When the petitioners told students that oftentimes outside factors leave students at an unfair disadvantage, a student said, “No. I’m low-income and a minority, and I have a fairly decent GPA, so…” 

Fittingly, some not in the upper 10% welcomed the free points. “Why not? I’m down,” said one student with a low GPA  (eagerly signing the petition), but then the student’s friend standing next to him said, “It takes away from people working hard… and obviously it’s paid off with their higher GPA.” Later in the conversation, when the first student told his friend to sign the petition, the friend responded, “How about trying harder for a semester?”

The main purpose of the study is to point out the ‘hypocrisy’ of being in favor of income redistribution while refusing to redistribute one’s own grades. The fact is, however, that this entire argument is based on fallacious reasoning, or more specifically, a false analogy.

To make it easier for people living in countries that do not use the GPA system, let us stick with percentage points. Typically, grades are assigned a value between 0 and 100%. What this means is that if one’s percentage points were to be ‘redistributed’, this would detract from one’s final grade the exact amount of percentage points that were redistributed. This should be obvious. Let us think of the matter in utilitarian terms, with the assumption that each person assigns the same value to each percentage point. What this means is, that the top 10% lose utility in exactly the same proportion that the others gain that utility. This, however, goes against one’s natural sense of justice: why should one person be harmed so that other, undeserving, people gain? In economic terminology this sort of situation is known as Pareto optimality, which means that no one can gain without someone else losing.

Now let us imagine a slightly different, but still plausible scenario. Occasionally some schoolwork allows for bonus points, where if one scores over 100%, the extra percentage point(s) can be transferred to another paper. It is quite common for students to calculate exactly the grades they need on the remaining assignments and/or tests in their class in order to get the grade they want. So imagine that a student has amassed a very large number of bonus points—so many that even if she receives a zero on all of her subsequent assignments and tests, she will still receive a final grade of 100% in the course.

It is this latter case which corresponds to the acquisition of income in the real world, rather than the case presented in the video. It is no doubt the case that anyone with a net worth of a million dollars would be able to live a relatively comfortable life without working, provided they do not concern themselves with extravagances. Even if a disaster occurred, e.g. one’s house caught on fire, one would still be able to make up the loss without needing to fear for one’s future financial security. In the same way, if a student has exactly the amount of bonus points to guarantee that he will have a final grade of 100%, he will be indifferent about any more bonus points that he is given; he loses nothing by having his extra percentage points redistributed, so he has no reason to object to redistribution. To return to economic terminology, the state of our fictitious economy prior to redistribution is not Pareto optimal: because the redistribution of extra bonus points (above the aforementioned threshold) does not harm the high-grade student, other, low-grade students can be made better off without making the high-grade student worse off.

To drive home the point, the only way that the analogy expressed in the video would be applicable to real life would be if there were a maximum income, after which point taxation became 100% (with, perhaps, infrequent ‘bonuses’), which is obviously not the case.

Hence, the only relevant questions remaining to be asked about the data in our imaginary scenario are 1) whether the bonus points are the property of the top-grade student, to be used any way s/he wishes, as, e.g., in a scenario where bonus points can be spent on luxury goods; and 2) whether it is people’s own fault that they are unable to become wealthy, or whether society is ultimately to blame—i.e. to whose agency a given person’s poverty should be attributed. These, however, are at root metaphysical questions, the kind that philosophers have thought about for millenia, and for which no solution is likely forthcoming. So it would seem that much of the public debate about welfare revolves around different attempts of patching up various gaping holes in philosophy. Moreover, the particular type of attempt to which one gravitates is typically chosen without any conscious contemplation, but often more or less out of habit, i.e. by what views one has previously been exposed to.

Suffice it to say, then, that appeals to metaphysical concepts are insufficient to convince people of whether welfare is justified. In other words, the vast majority of public discourse on the topic of welfare can safely be thrown in the garbage without a second thought. If we hope to say anything meaningful at all about such issues, our best best would be to focus on empiricism, i.e. such questions as whether the value added by such measures (in terms of increased productivity, decreased need for health care, etc.) is sufficient to justify their cost.

On the Vacuousness of ‘Neoliberalism’ as a Political Category: A Dialogue

Marxist: You want to know why the economy is in such dire straits these days? It’s because of this damn neoliberalism that all the countries of the world are uncritically accepting!

Capitalist: Whoa, now. That’s a really broad statement. Let me try to see if I fully understand what you mean. So you think that stimulus is a neoliberal policy?

M: Absolutely. All the Fed is doing is making more financial gimmicks in an attempt to help a structurally broken economy.

C: Okay, that’s a legitimate point of view, I suppose. So given that the USA has to somehow pay off its deficit, you must be in agreement with the people who say that austerity is the way to go.

M: Absolutely not! If the government tried that, me and my friends would be up in arms! Austerity is neoliberalism in its worst form!

C: Hmm. Well to me it seems like those are two very different policies, but you’re lumping them together under the same category?

M: Yes.

C: Okay, then. Let’s try a different tack. What would you say isn’t neoliberalism? Is North Korea neoliberal?

M: Of course not.

C: So dictatorships like Ethiopia and Guinea aren’t neoliberal either?

M: No.

C: What about communist countries like China?

M: Yes. They are neoliberal, or at least they have been ever since Deng Xiaoping took over. Besides, China shouldn’t be considered communist anyway.

C: Why not?

M: Because it’s not what Marx actually intended communism to be! Full communism and actually-existing communism are two completely different things.

C: Okay then. Let’s accept your definition of ‘full communism’. Now, it seems to me that what you mean by ‘neoliberalism’ encompasses any sort of social arrangement that might call itself capitalist, even if on the surface of things, different neoliberal countries seem to have strong disagreements. Is that accurate?

M: Yes.

C: So we could just as well say that in your definition (and excluding dictatorships), neoliberalism is any point of view that isn’t communist.

M: I suppose so.

C: That seems to make sense. So why do you insist that neoliberalism, in all its various guises, is a bad thing?

M: Well that should be self-evident! It’s because of the inherent contradictions in the commodity-form, plus the exploitation of workers’ surplus value inherent in the act of a capitalist purchasing labor-power from the proletariat!

C: Hm. I was never taught these sorts of ideas in business school, so could you tell me who came up with them?

M: Karl Marx, of course! Just as Darwin discovered the laws inherent in organic development, Marx discovered the laws inherent in capitalism!

C: ‘Inherent’ is a strong word, you know. I assume you’re aware that there are other ways of thinking about economic phenomena that don’t involve these sort of concepts.

M: Yes. But they’re wrong. It takes a refined eye to notice these sorts of things, not the sort of thing a vulgar capitalist like you would understand. *sententious tone* There are more things in this world, my dear capitalist, than are dreamt of at your business school.

C: *quizzical expression* Fair enough. Now what should I do if I want to learn about this point of view?

M: Read Das Kapital, of course! It’s hard going at first, but once you read it through about four or five times, it will be obvious to you that this is the truth. But after that, if you still insist on debating with us, you’ll have to be familiar with the literature! I’ve seen plenty of cases like yours. At first the thousands of books and articles on Marxism may seem so rife with confusions and question-begging that out of despair you may be prepared to believe anything, but once you’ve made your way through the basic authors (Althusser, Balibar, Deleuze & Guattari, Hardt & Negri, Poulantzas, Castoriadis, Adorno & Horkheimer, Debord, Gramsci, Eagleton, Callinicos, Jameson, Lukács, Luxemburg, Marcuse, and Žižek), you should be all set to think critically about the world! (And of course, by thinking critically I mean denouncing all existing conditions!)

C: *ponders for a minute* I think I finally understand.

M: That’s the spirit!

C: Let me sum things up: neoliberalism is bad because of the contradictions inherent in capitalism, as shown by Marx, which can only be grasped by a Marxist point of view, since all other perspectives take neoliberalism for granted.

M: By Jove, you’ve got it!

C: So in other words, any relatively successful form of social organization except communism is bad because it isn’t communism, and it’s impossible to see the truth of this unless you’re a communist, since all other positions besides communism take neoliberalism (again, defined as everything that is not communism) for granted.

M: Eureka! You’re one of us now!

Mapping the Horizons of Employee Potential: A Counterintuitive Approach

Not long ago I was watching videos in the ‘Shift Happens’ series, and unfortunately came across a troll video with entirely made up statistics (even though it was very professional looking). Given my proclivity for rationalizing anything unfortunate that happens to me, I soon had the epiphany that in a way, made up statistics tell more than actual statistics. By identifying the limits of plausibility, made up statistics reveal the extent of what is possible (good or bad) about the subject in question, be it a society, business, or demographic.

For instance, I could inform a firm’s board of directors that 67% of its employees confuse the words ‘loose’ and ‘lose’ in company emails, and if they reject that statistic outright then we know how high is the expected education calibre of the employees; if, on the other hand, they entertain its possibility, then we know that there is a problem. Made up statistics allow us to quantify the margins of error inherent in managers’ conceptions of their company—an eminently subjective frontier, but one that is, in a way, far more important than the actual performance data of a company. In the tradition of economic graphs, this allows us to compare the actual productivity of a company with the counterfactual horizons of its potentiality, and ask—in a much more objective way than before—what a business can do to make itself better.

Some provisos: first, this method can be applied to any portion of the social sphere, but not to the natural sciences. Second, its practical application opens up the (somewhat amusing) possibility of ‘modal terrorism’ on the part of managers: “The probability that you’ll slack off is higher than the probability that X will slack off! Shape up or ship out!” With some misgivings, one could sympathize with the purpose of such a policy, but it could easily degenerate into what might be called the ‘Caesar’s Wife problem’. The book How To Build a Better Vocabulary (p. 220) explains the origin of the phrase “like Caesar’s wife” as follows:

The phrase is especially applied to public officials whose conduct must be free not only from actual misdeed but from any suspicion of wrongdoing. Plutarch tells us how the expression arose. A young nobleman Publius Clodius was accused of a religious crime in which Pompeia, the wife of Caesar, was implicated. Caesar divorced Pompeia, “but being summoned as a witness against Clodius, said he had nothing to charge him with. This looking like a paradox, the accuser asked him why he parted with his wife. Caesar replied, ‘I wish my wife to be not so much as suspected.’”

The very idea that such a policy may be implemented on a large scale should strike the reader as being quite silly, but fittingly, the fact that we can imagine it at all tells us something important about capitalism that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Worldly Non-Philosophy, pt. 1: The Principle of Sufficient Economics

[I’ve decided to write the intermediary steps of my interpretation of Economics through Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy, rather than wait until completing the sequel to my Sraffa essay.]

The key component of François Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy is its identification of the ‘Principle of Sufficient Philosophy’, which he claims has been presupposed by all philosophies throughout history. It is surprising, then, to see how simply it can be formulated: “Everything is philosophizable.” The PSP adopts its name from the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’ propounded by Leibniz, which stated that everything has a reason for being the way it is. The ‘sufficiency’ of philosophy, then, lies in its purported ability to apply itself (as a discourse) to every element of the Real: with philosophies of  ’culinary materialism‘, the human voice, and even economics, the list of possibilities for “philosophy of x” seems limitless.

Laruelle’s innovation lies in his denial of the PSP: he states that the structure of philosophy is so constituted that it precludes itself from accessing certain elements of the Real, or more simply, that its methodological presuppositions lead to an overly constrained definition of what constitutes thought. Thus Laruelle posits that there exists a Non-Philosophy going beyond philosophy’s boundaries: his project aims to create new forms of thinking, as well as to comprehend the structure of philosophy by means of examining it from an outside perspective.

As this brief essay will endeavour to show, there also exists a Principle of Sufficient Economics (PSE), one identical in content with the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy (PSP), albeit different in its linguistic form. The following will describe why it is that the PSE takes a different linguistic form from the PSP (rather than being the simple transposition ‘everything is economizable’), how Sraffian theory demonstrates that the PSE is false, how Keynesian theory provided the initial break with the PSE, and how Austrian economics’ tacit assumption of the PSE entirely invalidates their criticism of Keynesian macroeconomics.

Piero Sraffa’s Non-Economics: An Introduction, part I

In its secession from political economy, economics as a discipline was able to make use of the most sophisticated mathematical techniques of its time. However, in adopting this form (doubtless to achieve the status of a science), it has come under fire for its tactic of applying an effectively closed system of mathematical relations to a set of market phenomena which, as contemporary microeconomists show, is growing ever more comprehensive. This in itself would not be a problem if this did not run the risk of distorting its objects: economics is lambasted for many of its heuristic presuppositions (and ‘metaphysical’ concepts such as utility) which appear blatantly untrue in practice, but nonetheless work well in making sense of empirical data. Milton Friedman famously declared that as long as a methodology works, it does not matter whether its presuppositions are correct, but to those who remain unsatisfied by this claim, the question arises of why the theorems of economics, despite their deficiencies, work as well as they do—whether it may be possible, by means of a new perspective, to gain an almost meta-economic view by way of starting from the phenomena themselves and only from there building a theoretical edifice. The first steps toward an answer may be found in the economic theories of a man who not only convinced Ludwig Wittgenstein to change the views propounded in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus but who also provided the pens and paper (not to mention much of the reading material) with which Antonio Gramsci wrote his Prison Notebooks—namely, an economic methodology which does not require marginalist concepts of supply, demand, equilibrium, or capital. The initial part of this essay aims to outline in brief the life and work of Piero Sraffa (1898-1983), to unravel some of the theoretical implications of his work for the research programme of marginalist economics, and to portray in a new manner the import of his research programme: as a Non-Economics.

 1.    Sraffa

“Mr. Piero Sraffa, from whom nothing is hid…” ~John Maynard Keynes^[1]

Sraffa was born in Turin in 1898, his father an influential Professor of commercial law and his mother a highly cultured woman from a distinguished family. He was given a liberal education, being taught French, English, and German by his mother, in addition to his first language of Italian. He was characterized, in a polemical paper by his friend Gramsci, as having a “democratic-liberal intellectual background, that is to say, normative and Kantian, non-Marxist and non-dialectical” (Potier, 3-4), though this account cannot be accepted without reservations; the intellectual milieu of his day was “dominated by ‘neo-idealism’ or neo-Hegelianism, represented by the thinking of Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944)” (ibid, 3). He went on to study Law at Turin University, near the latter portion in his studies (1919) striking a friendship with Antonio Gramsci, who studied linguistics at the same university, which would continue until the latter’s death (ibid, 5). Shortly after this meeting, Sraffa joined the editorial team of the journal L’Ordine Nuovo and had friendly relations with the main journalists.

During the same period, Sraffa worked on his doctoral thesis on inflation in Italy since the first World War, a text which “reveals a profound knowledge of the literature on monetary and banking problems; not only the Italian…but also the English and American…and Swedish literature” (ibid, 6). The research for Sraffa’s thesis eventually led to a polemic against the banking practices of his time, then under the fascist policies of Mussolini. This rather “salty” essay (as described by the Italian committee which later awarded Sraffa the status of professor) enraged Mussolini, who demanded a retraction, which was not given because, Sraffa told his father, the paper was based on verifiable facts. Sraffa is also known to have debated via an exchange of letters with Gramsci at that time in matters of politics, one exchange being published in L’Ordine Nuovo. Sraffa’s trenchant criticism was not only directed at the fascist government of his day, however, but also at the methodological orthodoxy beginning to pervade economics departments throughout Italian universities; this culminated in an essay entitled “On The Relation Between Cost and Quantity Produced,” revealing several flaws in the work of Alfred Marshall, at that time the paragon of mainstream economics.

Jean-Pierre Potier (13-14) provides a summary of this essay^[2] (which was to earn Sraffa a full professorship at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia) that is fairly lucid even to the layperson in economics:

Between 1924 and spring 1925, Sraffa worked on a major essay that attacked the foundations of the orthodox analysis of the great English neo-classical theorist, Alfred Marshall…. Sraffa examined the law of non-proportional returns in Marshall’s model of static partial equilibrium, which established a symmetry between relations of demand and supply as regards the value of commodities. Previously, classical economists had given prominence to two separate laws of returns. The law of increasing returns was created by Adam Smith and associated with the process of the division of labour in industry―a problem of dynamics, in the category of ‘production’. The law of diminishing returns, on the contrary, set forth by Turgot, then by David Ricardo in connection with the problem of agricultural rent, is also a problem of dynamics, but in the category of ‘distribution’. Marshall tried to combine these two orientations in a single law of non-proportional returns, to set up his theory of prices. This law can be represented by a U-shaped curve, connecting average cost and output. The situation of a firm is studied, independently of that of other firms, in a framework of free competition. In this model, the normal case is that of diminishing returns (or increasing costs).

Sraffa foregrounded how Marshall’s explanation concerning the exceptional existence of increasing returns (diminishing costs) evolved ‘internal economies’ followed by ‘external economies’ of the firm. He nevertheless developed his attack to focus criticism on the problem of diminishing returns. In Marshall’s theory, the supply curve of a firm is independent of the supply curve of other firms and moving from the firm to the industry, the aggregate means a simple transposition. According to Sraffa, this analysis is unacceptable, because it does not take the interdependences into account: the conditions of production of a firm necessarily have an effect on those of its competitors. After having shown the incompatibility between the case of diminishing returns and the conditions of particular equilibrium, Sraffa concludes by considering, for the particular industry, ‘the case of constant costs as being normal, rather than that of increasing or diminishing costs’, in keeping with the opinion of Ricardo. This situation is, to his mind, the only one compatible with the equilibrium of free competition, or at least a ‘first approximation of reality’.

Sraffa was later invited by Keynes to write a summary of this essay in the Economic Journal―a prestigious opportunity granted due to the quality of an English version of his paper on the Italian banking crisis published several years before―which he entitled “The Law of Returns Under Competitive Conditions.” It is worth noting that Arthur Pigou was willing to reconsider his whole position in the light of this paper (Potier, 17). In addition to his summary, Sraffa attempts in his paper to “reformulate and rehabilitate” the concept of ‘surplus’—first developed by William Petty in the 17th century—and the notion of the economy as a circular process, first introduced by the physiocrat François Quesnay in the 18th century (Roncaglia, 31-2).