Political Econ of Growth. Paul A. Baran

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СКАЧАТЬ between productive and unproductive labor, between actual and potential surplus. Nonessential consumption is justified as providing indispensable incentives, unproductive labor is glorified as indirectly contributing to production, depressions and unemployment are defended as the costs of progress, and waste is condoned as a prerequisite of freedom. In the words of Marx, “as the dominion of capital extended, and in fact even those spheres of production not directly related to the production of material wealth became more and more dependent on it, and especially the positive sciences (natural sciences) were subordinated to it as means towards material production—second rate sycophants of political economy thought it their duty to glorify and justify every sphere of activity by demonstrating that it was ‘linked’ with the production of material wealth, that it was a means towards it; and they honoured everyone by making him a ‘productive worker’ in the ‘narrowest’ sense—that is a worker who works in the service of capital, is useful in one way or another to its increase.”⁵

      Yet “capitalism creates a critical frame of mind which after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own: the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole system of bourgeois values.”⁶ Thus from a standpoint located outside and beyond the capitalist frame of reference, from the standpoint of a socialist society, much of what appears to be essential, productive, rational to bourgeois economic and social thought turns out to be nonessential, unproductive, and wasteful. It may be said in general that it is only the standpoint which is intellectually outside the prevailing social order, which is unencumbered by its “values,” its “practical intelligence,” and its “self-evident truths,” that permits critical insight into that social order’s contradictions and hidden potentialities. The exercise of self-criticism is just as onerous to a ruling class as it is to a single individual.

      As can be readily seen, the decision on what constitutes potential economic surplus, on the nature of nonessential consumption, waste, and unproductive labor, relates to the very foundations of bourgeois economics and in particular to what has come to be called the economics of welfare. Indeed, the purpose of this—perhaps most ideological and apologetic—branch of economic theorizing is to organize our knowledge of the conditions that determine the economic welfare of people. Needless to say, the first and foremost prerequisite for such an effort to be meaningful is a clear notion of what is meant by economic welfare and of the criteria by which states of economic welfare may be distinguished. The welfare economists meet the issue (or, rather, believe they meet it) by referring to the utility or satisfaction experienced by individuals. The individual himself, with his habits, tastes, and preferences, is taken as given. Yet it should be obvious that such a view of the individual is altogether metaphysical, in fact misses the most essential aspect of human history. As Marx remarked in a passage devoted to Bentham: “To know what is useful for a dog, we must study dog nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticize all human acts, movements, relations, etc. by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. What is useful to this queer normal man and to his world is absolutely useful. This yard-measure then he applies to past, present and future.”⁷

      Indeed, in the course of history the individual with his physical and psychic requirements, with his values and his aspirations, has been changing with the society of which he is a part. Changes in the structure of society have changed him, changes in his nature have changed society. How are we then to employ the utility or satisfaction accruing to an individual at any given time as a criterion by which the conduciveness to welfare of economic institutions and relationships is to be judged? If we refer to the observable behavior of an individual, we are obviously moving in a circle. His behavior is determined by the social order in which he lives, in which he was brought up, which has molded and determined his character structure, his categories of thought, his hopes and his fears. In fact, it is this ability of a social constellation to produce the mechanism of such personality-molding, to provide the material and psychic framework for a specific type of human existence, that makes this social constellation a social order.

      Economists, nevertheless, try to appraise that social order, its so-called efficiency, its contribution to human welfare, by criteria that it has itself evolved.⁸ What would we think of judging the welfare contribution of homicide by the code of behavior established in a cannibalistic society? The best that can be attained in that way is a judgment on the consistency of the cannibals’ behavior with their own cannibalistic rules and regulations. This kind of inquiry may be useful to an effort to devise arrangements needed for the preservation and better functioning of the cannibalistic society—but what is there to be deduced from such an investigation in terms of human welfare? Assuming, indeed, that the life of the cannibals fully conforms to the precepts of their society, that their headman gets exactly as many scalps a year as are called for by his wealth, his status, and his connections, and that all the other cannibals consume exactly the number of foreigners that corresponds to their marginal productivity and never in any other way but through a free purchase in a free market: do we then have a state of an optimum, can we then say that the cannibals’ welfare is well looked after? It should be obvious that nothing of the sort follows. All we have established is that the practice of the cannibalistic society corresponds more or less fully to the principles evolved by that society. We have said nothing at all about the validity or rationality of those principles themselves or about their relation to human welfare.

      Thus welfare economics engages in what comes very close to compulsive brooding on the extent to which the existing economic organization satisfies the rules of the game laid down by the existing economic organization, on the degree to which the productive apparatus of a capitalist society is “efficiently” organized for the production of an output the size and composition of which are determined by the structure of that productive apparatus. Furthermore, it laboriously inquires into the degree to which the existing socioeconomic organization allocates resources in such a manner as to correspond to consumers’ demand which in turn is determined by the distribution of wealth and income, by the tastes and values of people which are themselves shaped by the existing socioeconomic organization. All this has absolutely nothing to do with the exploration of the conditions that are conducive to welfare or with the study of the measure to which the economic and social institutions and relationships of capitalist society further or impede the well-being of people.

      But a conventional practitioner of welfare economics will stop us here, and ask what other criteria of welfare do we have.⁹ If the actual, observable performance of the individual in the market is not to be accepted as the ultimate test of what constitutes his welfare, what other test are we to use?

      The mere fact that this question is raised indicates how far we have traveled along the road to irrationality and obscurantism since the days of classical philosophy and classical economics. In truth, the answer to this question is simpler than one may think—at once simpler and more complicated. The answer is that the sole criterion by which it is possible to judge the nature of a socioeconomic organization, its ability to contribute to the general unfolding and growth of human potentialities, is objective reason. It was objective reason that underlay the criticism of the then existing society undertaken by men like Machiavelli and Hobbes, and it was objective reason that inspired Smith and Ricardo to call feudal lords, courtiers, and the established clergy of their time parasites because they not only did not contribute to the advancement of their societies, but drained them of all possibilities of growth.

      Not that the substance of objective reason is fixed immutably in time and space. On the contrary, objective reason itself is embedded in the never-resting flow of history, and its contours and contents are no less subject to the dynamics of the historical process than nature and society in general. “One cannot step twice into the same stream,” and what is objective reason on one historical stage is unreason, reaction СКАЧАТЬ