12/20/2017 An Introduction to Political Economy - Ecosophia

ECOSOPHIA
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An Introduction to Political Economy

 December 20, 2017

 John Michael Greer
 9 Comments

Last month, when I looked across the vast gray wasteland of

the calendar page ahead and noted that there were five
Wednesdays in November, I asked readers—in keeping with a
newly minted but entertaining tradition here on Ecosophia—to
suggest a theme for the fifth Wednesday post. This blog being
the eccentric phenomenon that it is, it probably shouldn’t
have surprised me that the result was a neck-and-neck contest
between a post on nature spirits and a post on alternatives to
capitalism and socialism, with a focus on democratic

syndicalism. Nature spirits won by a nose, but there was

enough interest in the other option that I decided to go ahead
and write a post on that as well.

Nature spirits and democratic syndicalism may not seem to

have much in common, but I’ve discovered one unexpected
similarity: it’s very difficult to discuss either one in a single
post. To make any kind of sense out of the ancient belief that

the forces of nature are best understood and most truly

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experienced as persons rather than things, it turned out to be

necessary to delve into the entire tangled mess our culture has
made about the concept of personhood, and what does and
doesn’t count as a person. Only when that was cleared away
could we go on and talk about what it means to experience
nature as composed of persons rather than things.

In the same way, if we’re going to make any kind of sense of

the alternatives to capitalism and socialism, it’s going to be
necessary to talk for a while about capitalism, socialism, and
the third and usually unmentionable system of modern
industrial economics—yes, that would be fascism. In the

process, we need to pay attention to the thing that

conventional economics systematically ignores—the mutual
entanglement of political power and economic wealth—and
that requires us to revive a science that has been dead and
buried for well over a century now.

If you take an introductory course on economics, you can

pretty much count on being told that the modern science of
economics was launched by Adam Smith. Like so much
conventional wisdom about history these days, this is false,
and it’s false for at least two different reasons.

First of all, economics isn’t a science. What sets apart a science

from other kinds of human knowledge is that the assertions of
a science are tested against what actually happens. When a
scientist makes a claim, at least in theory, other scientists run
the same experiment or observe the same phenomenon and
see if they get the same results. If they don’t, the claim made

by the first scientist—again, at least in theory—goes into the

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wastebasket alongside such discarded notions as phlogiston

and the luminiferous ether. Nowadays, this doesn’t always
happen, and that’s one of the core reasons that the sciences
these days are facing a catastrophic crisis of legitimacy, but
that’s an issue for another post; when a science does what it’s
supposed to do, every claim is tested to see if it can be
replicated. That’s what makes it a science.

Economists don’t do this. They don’t even pretend to do it.

Mainstream economists like to make claims about what will
happen when their preferred policies are put into place, mind
you, but the mere fact that those claims simply aren’t true
never gets considered when repeating them. Consider the way
neoliberal economists to this day rehash David Ricardo’s claim
that free trade will make poor countries rich. They’re wrong;
history shows that when poor nations embrace free trade,
they become even poorer, while poor nations that reject free
trade schemes generally prosper. Yet the total disconfirmation
of free trade theory in practice has yet to register on the
economic mainstream. As far as economists are concerned,
Ricardo said it, they believe it, and that settles it.

So economics isn’t a science. It also wasn’t founded by Adam

Smith. What Adam Smith founded, rather, was political

economy. You won’t hear much about that field of study these
days, and that’s not an accident. Political economy, as the
name indicates, explores the relations between wealth and
power in a society. For reasons that I suspect my readers will
have no trouble understanding, this is something that a great
many wealthy and powerful people in today’s industrial 
nations don’t want to discuss—and that, my children, is why
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we don’t have courses on political economy in universities

today. We have courses on political science, which claim to
study power without taking wealth into account, and courses
on economics, which claim to study wealth without taking
power into account, and both of these highly praised, well-
funded fields of study by and large duly churn out vast
amounts of poppycock instead of offering useful insights into
the societies in which we live.

We’re going to talk about political economy in this week’s

post. We’re going to do that because it’s not really possible to
understand why the world’s industrial nations are running
themselves into the ground without understanding the self-
destruct button hardwired into capitalism, and it’s impossible
to understand that latter bug—or is it a feature?—without
talking about the ways that wealth and power form feedback
loops in an industrial society.

The most important thing to understand, if you’re trying to

make sense of political economy, is who owns the means of
production. Means of production? That’s a convenient bit of
shorthand. Every human society produces goods and services;
the means of production are the sum total of the
arrangements made to do this necessary task. Now of course a
category this diverse is going to include things owned by an
equally dizzying array of people, but in most societies,
ownership of the most important means of production tends
to follow specific patterns.

Examples? Consider a feudal society—early medieval England,


let’s say. It’s an agrarian society in which most people are

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employed in farming, and the means of production that matter

most can be summed up in one word: land. Who owns the
land? That’s a simple matter. The king owns all the land; he
grants the right to use it to his immediate vassals, the great
dukes and earls of the kingdom, in exchange for their loyalty
and obedience; they pass on the same right to barons, the
lesser fish of the feudal system, on the same terms; the barons
then do exactly the same thing, and we proceed straight down
the feudal pyramid to Higg son of Snell in his peasant hovel.
Higg has his hovel and the farmland that goes with it because
he’s a vassal of Sir Hubert de Ware, who is a vassal of Baron
Fulk of Lewes, who is a vassal of Duke Geoffrey of Sussex, who
is a vassal of the king. Understand that pattern of ownership of
the means of production—that pattern of political economy—
and you understand early medieval English society.

Okay, let’s consider another example: early twentieth-century

America. It’s an industrial society. and factories and offices are
the means of production that matter most. Who owns the
factories and the offices? That’s also a simple matter. The
factories and offices are owned by corporations. Who owns
the corporations? Their investors. How do you get to be an
investor? By having enough capital to purchase stocks and
other investment vehicles. How do the investors exercise their
ownership? By electing boards of directors in elections in
which each share of stock has one vote; the boards of
directors then hire and fire the people who run the factories
and offices. (Remember, this is early twentieth-century
capitalism; things are different now.) Understand that pattern


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of political economy, and you understand early twentieth-

century America.

Notice, before we go on, that there are two crucial differences

between the political economies of feudal England and
industrial America. The first has to do with the relationship
between power and wealth. In feudal England, that’s totally
explicit: the king is the head of state and also the landowner of
last resort; the dukes and barons are political officer as well as
economic magnates. In industrial America, it’s not explicit: in
theory—mind you, only in theory—the government is entirely
separate from the economic sphere. In practice the wealthy
buy and sell political offices and voting blocs the way they buy
stocks and bonds, and since there’s no explicit relationship
between power and wealth, there’s nothing to keep them
from doing whatever they want.

The second difference has to do with the distribution of

wealth. In both societies, wealth is very unfairly distributed—

the rich are very rich and the poor are very poor—but the
feudal system has a counterbalance to the tendency of wealth
to flow uphill. If you, dear reader, were a duke or a duchess in
early medieval England, and you had the brains the gods gave
geese, you would know that your influence, your security, and
your survival depended on having plenty of vassals who would
come running with drawn swords any time you needed them.
How do you get vassals? By granting them landholdings—that
is, transferring wealth down the ladder.

But your vassals are in the same situation you are. They need

vassals of their own, and their vassals need vassals, all the way

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down to Higg son of Snell, who will not only come running
with a billhook in his hands when Sir Hubert needs him in
battle, but puts in the daily labor that puts bread on
everyone’s tables. Thus feudal societies constantly move
wealth down the pyramid. As a direct result, they tend to be
extremely stable—so much so that when complex societies
collapse, a feudal system is almost inevitably what takes shape
amid the ruins.

Capitalist societies don’t do this. Quite the contrary, in a

capitalist society like early twentieth century America, all the
incentives keep wealth flowing up the social ladder, and
nothing brings it back down. The investors who own stock in
corporations have an understandable interest in maximizing
the return on their investment, so they reliably vote in boards
of directors who will hire management who will force down
wages as far as possible. The investors who own stock in
corporations also have an understandable interest in keeping
as much of their wealth as possible out of the clutches of the
tax man, so they reliably pressure and bribe government to
spend as little as possible for the benefit of anybody outside
the investor class.

As a result, capitalist societies are anything but stable; they

suffer from savage cycles of boom and bust. The process at
work here is quite easy to understand, and in fact it was very
widely understood three quarters of a century ago; regaining
that understanding is a crucial step toward making sense of
the mess we’re in today.

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Here’s how it works. Since working class wages get driven

down, and government expenditures aren’t allowed to rise to
take up the slack, people in the working classes can’t afford to
consume the value of the goods and services they produce.
Sales accordingly falter, and so do profits in productive
industries. Since the investor class is interested solely in
maximizing the return on its investment, in turn, investment
money flows out of productive industries and into financial
instruments of various kinds, where it drives speculative
bubbles. As the bubbles inflate, they suck even more money
out of the productive side of the economy. When the bubbles
pop, in turn, so does the economy, and down we go into a
depression.

That’s what happened all across the industrial world in the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over and over again,
until the Great Depression hit and the investor class realized
that something had to give. What convinced them of that? The
rise to power of two rival economic systems that rejected the
basic presuppositions of capitalism, and—ahem—worked.

The first of these systems was socialism. Let’s stop right here
for a moment and explain the meaning of the word, shall we?
Plenty of people, especially but not only in the United States,
have been using that moniker “socialism” to mean any number
of randomly chosen things, but the word does actually mean
something specific. Socialism is the system of political
economy in which the means of production are owned by the
national government. That’s what it is, and that’s all it is. (Most
of the things that currently get labeled “socialist” in the 
English-speaking world are actually social democracy, which is
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an entirely different system that we’ll discuss in a moment.) If

it doesn’t have to do with government ownership of the
means of production, it’s not socialism, full stop, end of
sentence.

Socialism has its problems. In its most popular form, the

version that more or less follows the recipe laid down by Karl
Marx, it so consistently produces bloodthirsty dictatorships
that a good case can be made for chucking it into the rubbish
heap of failed ideologies. The fact remains that as an economic
system, it works about as well as capitalism—that is to say, not
well, but well enough to stay in power—and it does a much
better job of distributing wealth to the working classes than
capitalism does, which is why capitalists hate it so much. On
the other hand, given a choice, the working classes favor it, for
the same reasons capitalists hate it: if you’ve got a choice
between two dysfunctional systems, why not choose the one
that benefits you most?

Then there was the other rival system, which has been so
obscured by shrill rhetoric over the last three quarters of a
century or so that we’re going to have to approach it by a
roundabout route. Suppose, then, that some charismatic figure
in today’s American scene—somebody toward the center of
our overheated political spectrum—were to propose a new
system of political economy to replace the mess we’ve got
now. We’re going to keep capitalism, she says, but it’s going to
have its excesses curbed and its abuses prevented, not by the
government, but by an organized movement of citizens under
my leadership. Each year we’re going to sit management and 
labor down at the bargaining table, everybody in a given
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industry all at once, and make them bargain in good faith, with
the citizen movement watching both sides to make sure a fair
settlement is reached; there will be no more strikes, no more
lockouts, no more labor troubles, just a new contract every
year, and the citizen movement will enforce that by whatever
means happen to be necessary. What’s more, she tells adoring
crowds, the citizen movement will take on the same role in the
political sphere, and be ready to yank the chains of officials
when they get out of line. Of course the citizen movement will
have to have special powers to do this, she says, and here’s
the enabling act to give it those powers, just as soon as I
become Chancellor…

That is to say, we’re talking about fascist economics. Yes, I’m

aware that this isn’t the sort of thing that comes to most
Americans’ minds when you mention the word “fascism,” but
that just shows how thoroughly ignorant most Americans are
about history. Fascism was never about the unrestricted rule
of the capitalist investment class—that’s a falsehood originally
manufactured by Stalin’s flacks back in the days of the Third
International, and repeated by the misinformed ever since.
Fascism attracted the masses in the 1920s and 1930s because it
offered an alternative to unrestrained capitalism with its lethal
boom-and-bust cycles. Did it work? Not very well, but then
neither did unrestrained capitalism, and here again most
people forced to choose between dysfunctional systems will
choose the one that benefits them personally.

It was in response to the popularity of the socialist and fascist

systems that social democracy came into being. (This, 
remember, is the thing that Republicans these days call
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“socialism.”) Social democracy was an attempt to take the best

parts of fascist economics and combine them with
constitutional government and the rule of law. In place of the
“citizen movement” of my sketch above—that’s spelled “The
Party” in its historical examples—social democracy puts the
elected government of a constitutional representative
democracy. In a social democracy, capitalism still exists, but at
least in theory, it has to put up with legal checks that keep it
from running too far off the rails: laws against monopolies,
laws against insider trading, laws forcing banks to have
deposit insurance, and so on.

It’s not a bad system, all things considered—which is to say it’s

dysfunctional, but slightly less so than any of the three other
alternatives we’ve discussed. Its great weakness was that it
came into being because the investor class realized that they
would end up dangling from lampposts if they tried to keep
unrestrained capitalism going much longer, and it could only
survive so long as the investor class stayed scared. Once the
Great Depression and the age of rising fascist states faded out
of historical memory, though, a new generation of capitalists
convinced themselves that all this social-democracy stuff was
a useless hindrance to their God-given right to engage in a
kleptomaniacal orgy of profiteering at public expense.

That was when the Republican Party in the US, the

Conservative Party in Britain, and their equivalents elsewhere
embraced the view that the sole business of government was
to make rich people richer while kicking the poor in the face,
and when the Democratic Party in the US, New Labor in 
Britain, and their equivalents elsewhere embraced the
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supposedly opposite view that the sole business of

government was to make rich people richer while mouthing
vacuous feel-good verbiage at those of the poor who were
sufficiently politically organized to be annoying. The results are

predictable: in Britain, a resurgence of old-fashioned socialism

under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, who will probably
become Britain’s next prime minister if the clown car that
passes for a Conservative government keeps bungling things
as badly as they’ve done so far; in America, a crisis of
legitimacy that’s already catapulted a populist demagogue
into the White House and may well replace him with
something much worse in the years ahead.

There are alternatives. Next week, in place of the usual ask-

me-anything open post, we’ll talk about some of them. The
following week? 2018 will have arrived, and it’ll be time for the
annual round of predictions about what the new year will hold.
Stay tuned!

************

As just mentioned, there will be no ask-me-anything post next

week. Instead, I’m going to be trying out a version of the same
thing in a different place. My Dreamwidth account at
ecosophia.dreamwidth.org is active again — apologies for the
long dry spell — and next Monday I’m going to post an ask-
me-anything post on occultism. Call it Magic Monday; a lot of
my readers seem to have questions about the theory and
practice of occultism, and I’ll be fielding those and answering
them there. See you then!


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December 2017 Book Club (plus reflections on the Bitcoin
bubble)

9 Comments

Pedro says:
December 20, 2017 at 7:48 pm

Good article, as usual, but you made a conceptual mistake

when talking about socialism. Socialism is defined as an
economic system where the economy is planned (rather than
driven by marked forces) and where the means of production
are owned by the state OR by the workers themselves (worker
cooperatives, etc). Libertarian socialists (left-wing anarchists)
have always represented a signifcant part of the socialist
movement (although state socialists overshadowed them 
through the 20th century, specially after the end of the
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Spanish Revolution) from the time of Bakunin. And yet, what

they advocate doesn’t fit under your definition of socialism.

That being said, looking forward to your next post(s) on

political economy.

Cheers from Brazil ç)

Dean Myerson says:

December 20, 2017 at 7:56 pm

Gosh, there is so much I could go on about here, this post is so

central to a lot of what I do and think about. But for now I will
just offer this story. Back when I was in university in UCLA, I
was majoring in engineering but taking only political science
for my “social sciences” classes. One course I took was an
upper division course called Political Economy. My professor
said he had never had an engineering major in his upper div
political economy class. He also described the struggle he had
to get the division to accept calling his course Political
Economy, since all economists of the day believed that
economics and politics were unrelated to each other, which of
course he considered rubbish. Maybe that was the last course
with that title at a major university? It was about 1980.

Also, when it comes to what you might call alternatives, I think

the term “municipalism” needs to be considered. Maybe it
doesn’t qualify as a full-fledged alternative since, well, it
focuses on the municipal level. But considering the broad 

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challenges we face, it is the movement that I think offers the

most realistic offering for the future: for real employment and
a practical way to get the goods and services we need to
survive. And despite being widely ignored, it’s bubbling up
everywhere for those who know where to look. Populism too
is important, though there are important variants.

philsharris says:
December 20, 2017 at 8:07 pm

JMG
Hooray! I have barely got into this post and I read that
‘economics is not a science’. Galileo was not in a position to
change the rules of gravity at Pisa. Routinely economics
supplies feedback to the complex systems of trade and
production that changes the game. I remember trying to
discuss this in the very early days of econometrics. I foresaw
that they would attempt to devise a ‘control system’.
I will now read on!

best
Phil H

Daniel Najib says:

December 20, 2017 at 8:07 pm

Re: economics isn’t a science. 

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Ha, very true. Max Hastings put out a wonderful book on the
first year of the Great War, “Catastrophe 1914!”, and in that
immense book, one of the lines that stuck out to me and
continues to stick with me after all these years was his
comment on how French economists were virtually all
convinced that a global war would never break out due to the
immense trade links, and Hastings concluding “Economists,
with their accustomed paucity of judgement, assured Europe
that Europe would swiftly run out of money [and prevent a
protracted war].”

I’m curious as to what the alternatives are. On a slightly related

note, do you have any definite opinions on Mercantilism? I
know, not a ‘modern’ economic system per se, but there are a
lot of modern day monarchists I find extolling either
unrestrained ‘free-market’ capitalism, libertarianism, or a
return-to-the-1630s-mercantilism, and I don’t find myself liking
any of them rather well.

Nicholas Carter says:

December 20, 2017 at 8:20 pm

“[W]hen a science does what it’s supposed to do, every claim

is tested to see if it can be replicated. That’s what makes it a
science.

Economists don’t do this. *Mainstream* economists like to

make claims about what will happen when their preferred

policies are put into place, mind you, but the mere fact that

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those claims simply aren’t true never gets considered when

repeating them. ”
So I wanted to share a fact I’d been told about the emphasized
bit of this claim.
Something I was once told is that, when you think about it,
there aren’t nearly enough talking heads about the economy
to justify the number of schools which offer economics
degrees. This is because most economists don’t actually have
much to do with the national economy.
The academic and professional object of most economists is
individual companies, industries and communities. The best
comparison I can think of is to the science of managing a
green-house. And within these narrow bands, economic claims
are tested.
The relationship between Economics and “Economics” is as if
the science of managing green-houses was called
Meteorology in addition to that fields ordinary meaning.
Basically any economic talking head is a man with a certificate,
and maybe even long accomplishment in the field of some
kind of greenhouse, thinking that means he can predict the
rain because “The climates just a big greenhouse, right?”.
Economists as a guild possess an odd sort of toxic humility:
Knowing how little they know about things outside their own
greenhouses, none of them feel confident enough to call out
their presumptuous co-Guilds-men for making wild predictions
outside of the greenhouse.
(As an aside: Does anyone know of a reputable program for
generating charts of secular astrology?)

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Aloysius Snuffleupagus says:

December 20, 2017 at 8:20 pm

I’m working with a small farming cooperative at the moment

and am butting heads with the board over how things are
being run. It might be either lack of insight or imagination but
the model they are choosing to follow is crony capitalism and
the results so far aren’t very inspiring to the members. What’s
interesting is how comfortable everyone seems to be with
that kind of model and continue to justify it with varying
amounts of denial and apathy.

To me it’s fairly obvious things are broken and the end of the
line is rapidly approaching if we don’t change our internal
culture. Fortunately I’ve met a few people who are willing to at
least consider alternatives. Will have to see if they rise to the
challenge, though.

Anyway thank you for writing about this now. Hopefully it will
also help on the micro scale.

Nicholas Carter says:

December 20, 2017 at 8:23 pm

Correction: In the aside, ‘secular astrology’ should read

‘mundane astrology’.


AuntLili says:
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December 20, 2017 at 8:35 pm

It’s great to have you writing about political economy. Do I

sense a discussion about worker cooperatives coming on? If so
I look forward to hearing what you have to say. I’m a big fan of
them.

John Michael Greer says:

December 20, 2017 at 8:46 pm

Pedro, the political system in which the means of production

are owned directly by the workers is syndicalism, not
socialism. Yes, I know the word “socialism” has been used very
broadly for a while now, but it’s important to keep these
things clear; it was precisely the claim that “owned by the
workers” is somehow the same as “owned by the government”
that the Soviet Union was able to justify its totalitarian ways.
The people you’re talking about are more generally called
anarchosyndicalists; we’ll be talking about them in more detail
next week.

Dean, okay, what do you mean by municipalism? A system of

political economy in which the means of production are
owned by local municipalities, or what?

Phil H, excellent! Yes, precisely — and the way that

contemporary science ignores its own propensity to generate
feedback loops, and so ends up paying more attention to the 

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artifacts of its own manipulations than to the processes that

happen in unmanipulated systems, is a major reason why so
many of the sciences are in such trouble these days.

Daniel, mercantilism pursues unbalanced trade relations with

other countries, so by definition leads to trade barriers and
usually to war. A more detailed analysis will probably have to
wait for a later post, but you know, that would be worth
considering.

Nicholas, okay, fair enough. Would it be fair to describe what

I’m criticizing as macroeconomics, as distinct from
microeconomics? (As for mundane astrology, if all you need is
a chart, any program ought to do; just choose the capital city
of the country you have in mind for your location, and choose
the time based on your favorite ephemeris — it should tell you
exactly when the Sun enters Aries, or whichever other ingress
chart you have in mind.)

Aloysius, I hope it works out! Getting people to think about

alternatives to a dysfunctional status quo can be hard, but it’s
worth doing.

AuntLili, why, yes — those and other forms of worker-owned

businesses. Stay tuned!

Courteous, concise comments relevant to the topic of the

current post are welcome, whether or not they agree with the
views expressed here, and I try to respond to each comment 

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as time permits. Long screeds proclaiming the infallibility of

some ideology or other, however, will be deleted; so will
repeated attempts to hammer on a point already addressed;
so will comments containing profanity, abusive language,
flamebaiting and the like -- I filled up my supply of Troll Bingo
cards years ago and have no interest in adding any more to my
collection; and so will sales spam and offers of "guest posts"
pitching products. I'm quite aware that the concept of polite
discourse is hopelessly dowdy and out of date, but then some
people would say the same thing about the traditions this
blog is meant to discuss . Thank you for reading Ecosophia! --
JMG

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
About JMG

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John Michael Greer is a widely read author and blogger whose work
focuses on the overlaps between ecology, spirituality, and the future
of industrial society. He served twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the
Ancient Order of Druids in America, and currently heads the Druidical
Order of the Golden Dawn. He currently lives in East Providence,
Rhode Island, with his wife Sara.

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J M G o n D re a m w i d t h

For shorter pieces, book reviews, announcements of new JMG

publications, and occasional catcalls aimed at the clueless, follow
JMG's posts at ecosophia.dreamwidth.org.

T h e A rc h d r u i d R e p o r t

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All the essays

from JMG's previous blog, The Archdruid Report, are being published
by Founders House Publishing in a ten volume set. The set can be
ordered in advance at a considerable discount from the cover price.
Click on the image or on this link to go directly to the publisher's
website.

Into the Ruins

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The
premier quarterly magazine of deindustrial SF, Into the Ruins
publishes speculative fiction that explores futures defined by natural
limits, energy and resource depletion, industrial decline, and climate
change -- you know, the kind of future we're actually going to get.
Click on the cover image to go directly to the magazine's website.

J M G ’ s Fo r t h c o m i n g B o o k s

For a complete list of my books, including translations and

anthologies, see the JMG Fiction and JMG Nonfiction pages on the
top menu. The following titles are forthcoming and most may be
ordered now.

Fiction:


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An Archdruid’s Tales

The collected short stories and narrative fictions from The Archdruid
Report — available for preorder soon!

Non ction:

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