One strain of argument in the great debate about the future of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement is one that I will call the “Beware of Insidious Threats” position (hereafter: BIT).  This view is neatly expressed in a recent essay by Ismael Hossein-zadeh (“An Insidious Threat to the Occupy Movement”), which appeared in various places online, and in the URPE Newsletter (Vol. 43, No., 1, Fall, 2011).

Hossein-zadeh writes of the “threat of preemption, or cooptation, posed by the Democratic Party and union officials.”  He is wary of all approaches from liberals and labor that propose alliances with the occupiers: “. . . the Democrats are trying to utilize the Occupy movement the way the Republicans do the Tea Party.”  Liberals are “trying to build bridges between the Democratic Party and the Occupy movement in an effort to channel the protesters’ energy to the party’s electoral machine.”  Citing the Democratic Party’s “record of cooptation and betrayal,” he urges OWS to “chart a political movement of the working people and other grass-roots independent of both parties of big business.”

This is an old argument.  It was around (even dominant) in New Left circles in the 1960s.  Of course, just because an argument is old doesn’t mean it’s false; my counterargument was also around back then.

In the BIT scenario, the “energy” of the protest movement is a fixed quantity, which can be captured by some force outside the movement by means of trickery and sly manipulation of ideas and feelings.  But this separates OWS’ energy from the actual crisis and its impact.  If the crisis is profound, and if it points toward radical social transformation for its resolution, it will reach ever-new layers of the working population and draw new energy from deepening responses to it.

That is a lot for Democrats (and “union officials”) to “coopt”; they will be able to use their deadly wiles to harness that energy only if their view of the crisis, and the society that spawned it, is valid.  That view is the reformist one: the crisis is an aberration of the financial system and can be overcome by wise policy, entirely within the existing structure of power and privilege ‒‒ in other words, without confronting, let alone replacing, capitalist social relations.

To the extent large numbers of working people share this reformist view ‒‒ or at least do not (yet?) have the foundation to oppose it consistently ‒‒ they are indeed susceptible to cooptation.  Now suppose the coopted Occupiers help Obama win a second term in November, and the Dems get secure control of both houses of Congress.  If, and only if, the reformist view is indeed correct, government will then pass new financial regulations, progressive taxes, full-employment legislation, comprehensive health care, fully funded education, housing guarantees, etc.  The crisis will be over.  The era of shared capitalist prosperity will begin.  The Occupiers will go home, vacate Zuccotti Park and all other occupied locations, because their goals will have been met.  Capitalism will have solved its crises within itself, and socialism will be left out in the cold.

In the BIT view, therefore, socialism only has a chance if we somehow prevent capitalism from reforming itself.  The chain of reasoning is inescapable: capitalism can solve its problems.  The BIT position thus coincides, fatefully, with the official (liberal) Democratic Party view of the world.  The Dems try to fix capitalism; our job is to oppose these fixes, even if this means that we place ourselves in opposition to struggles and demands for things that the 99% really need.  Socialism is then an Idea, one that can only come from outside of the massive reality of life within capitalist society.

Of course, if the OWS Movement were to help Obama & Co., and get coopted in the process, it could also be betrayed.  The Dems could say: “Hey, our fingers were crossed!”  No progressive legislation, no financial regulation, no end to the crisis.  Then the BITers will say: “See, we told you so.  They can’t be trusted.”  Who, then, can the Occupy Movement trust?  Why us, of course!  It is like a Biblical commitment of faith: place your trust in true prophets (the prophets of socialism), not false ones.  Of course, when facing two opposing claims to true prophesy, one is well advised to heed the old Biblical advice: “By their deeds ye shall know them.”  And, let’s face it, if the BITers have their way, our deeds will not come off so well.  Working people are suffering, and we say: “Don’t listen to those who claim to be able to fix things.  Wait.  The Idea of socialism will eventually triumph.”  You can hear the likely response to this: “The Idea of socialism and $2.20 will get me into the subway.  Ideas don’t pay the rent.”  It is hardly surprising that many working people listen to the left and to the political mainstream, and say “A plague on both your houses.”

The BITers are worried about illusions concerning the Democratic Party.  Hossein-zadeh:  “The Democrats are as much responsible for the economic problems that have triggered the protests as their Republican counterparts.”  This formulation speaks volumes.  Neither Democrats nor Republicans “are responsible for” the crisis.  Capitalism is.  Again, we see the deeply rooted assumption: if only morally and intellectually worthy political forces were at work, there would have been no “problems.”  The crisis could be solved within capitalism, if only the will were there.

But what if the assumption shared by both the Dems and (implicitly) the BITers ‒‒ that stable and final solutions can be found within capitalism ‒‒ is false?  This is where political economy must play a role in the OWS Movement, going forward.  What if, as someone once said, the contradictions are immanent, inherent, irreconcilable?  What if shifts in the balance of power between the 1% and the 99% (in favor of the latter) generate new pressures and tensions, creating the need for more advanced demands and proposals, ones that encroach further upon the prerogatives of wealth and privilege?  What if the massive effort to organize to win new people-supporting and -empowering institutions ‒‒ think of the New Deal ‒‒ and to staff those institutions, once created, and implement their purposes, generates more of both the experience underlying a stable shift of consciousness toward socialist values, and the capacity to actually carry out the transfer of power to the 99%?  Then, over time, socialism becomes not just an Idea, but the result of living history.  The revolutionary will that we seek develops within the existing society.  This is, at bottom, just another way of saying that capitalism is inherently and structurally flawed, and that its core nature is the best source of the agency for its eventual transformation.  One wonders how many people on the left who give advice to OWS believe that.

The energy of OWS, then, is not a fixed quantity.  It can’t, ultimately, be coopted, for the simple reason that the crisis that created it, and continually re-creates it, will remain unsolved.  This is so even if partial victories are won, and steps in the direction of a humane society achieved.  Socialists should embrace all of those legislative victories mentioned above, which the BITers fear, not because they will result in a glorious and permanent new stage of soulful capitalism, but because they will not do that; because they will place new, more comprehensive, restraints against capitalist prerogatives on the political agenda.

All of this clearly depends on our view of capitalist society, and that is why critical political economy ‒‒ which has been, and remains, essentially Marxist, even while it draws on many other sources ‒‒ is essential.  If capitalism is basically sound, requiring only some reformist tinkering, then nothing we do will stop OWS from eventually climbing into bed with the Democrats.  If capitalism is a monolithic system in which subaltern social forces are entirely powerless, change can come only from outside, that is to say, from an Idea.  In that case, by all means warn the occupiers of the danger of cooptation; urge them to be wary of getting involved with movements and programs that do not fly exclusively anti-capitalist banners.  If, by contrast to both of these accounts, capitalism is a system in which ruling and subordinate social classes are locked in an ever-present conflictual embrace; and if capitalism necessarily and always creates the tensions that are the source of its transformation from within, then build the widest possible alliances of people who are mobilized against its abuses, because this mobilization itself is the ultimate source of the consciousness of the capitalist social system as such, and of the agency to transcend that system, which we seek.

Now of course the Dems will try to coopt and channel OWS.  That is their role, and it is to be expected.  It is based on their belief that stable and final solutions within the system are possible.  We, on the other hand, can enthusiastically both cooperate with reformist political forces and independently build OWS (and a revitalized trade union movement, and much else), always fortifying the mass activism, grass-roots mobilization and open-ended militancy that must be the signature of a genuine movement from below.  Our arguments for radical imagination and for eventual revolutionary transcendence, however, will not be decisive, no matter how clever we are.  What will finally convince our base, and the millions of working people who must join that base, is their own experience in the struggle to win small victories in the battle for a dignified life, and to contain the predations of capitalist power in the present.  And this experience accumulates over long stretches of time during which the concepts “capitalism” and “socialism” will not yet be available to many of them, and in places, such as the base organizations (not the leaderships) of the two major parties, where progressive activists will almost certainly be found.  (Yes, I am thinking that we can even go after parts of the Republican base, especially the Tea Party.)  It is the actual confrontation itself, the practical engagement with capitalist society on every terrain, that matters most for transformation of understanding.

So if this is on target, we need not fear cooptation, and betrayal.  If we are betrayed (and we will be, from time to time), that will help lay foundations for greater political independence.  If we are coopted (and certain individuals and organizations that are part of our coalition will undoubtedly fall into reformist and naively electoral traps), the crisis and the need to mobilize against it will not go away as a result.  Much then depends on how we pursue the multi-front struggles for reforms, which are at bottom nothing other than small shifts in the balance of social power, in the right direction.  These can divert the energy of OWS, leading to discouragement, cynicism, fragmentation, etc. and postponing socialism.  But, with imaginative and militant leadership, they can also create new energy and possibilities, especially since ‒‒ as we know ‒‒ capitalism cannot deliver complete and stable solutions to its “problems,” which are in fact central to its functioning.  Ultimately, it is the nature of the society that we must take charge of and transform that will determine our growth path.  And eventually we will be the ones doing the coopting.

David Laibman (dlaibman@scienceandsociety.com) is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the City University of New York (Graduate Center and Brooklyn College), editor of Science & Society, and a world-renown guitarist.

Those other nations of Europe may maintain that they have at heart a common aim and a common ideal. In fact they are divided among themselves by a thousand interests, territorial or other. Each pulls his own way with ever-growing determination. It would seem that every individual nation aspires to the discovery of the universal ideal for humanity, and is bent on attaining that ideal by force of its own unaided strength. Hence, each European nation is an enemy to its own welfare and that of the world in general.

– Julius Bramont (summarizing Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s views on Europe)
in Dostoyevsky, F. The House of the Dead or Prison Life in Siberia
(Kindle Locations 29-32)

This weekend, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), an organization exclusive of Canada and the United States, concluded its foundational summit meeting in Caracas, with interesting speeches by a host of chiefs of state.

Latin America has grown to one tenth of the global economy and population and sits on a substantial share of the world’s primary natural resources.  As a result of the price cycle of raw materials, the expansion in Asia (and Africa), the crisis in the North, and (partly) their policies, the economies in the region have been growing at a decent pace.  This meeting is a preliminary yet significant step in their process of economic and political integration.  The initiative comes — without a doubt — from the left in Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly from the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.  It also seems clear that Argentina, Brazil and above all Mexico, Chile, and Colombia — a list that includes the three largest economies in Latin America — are being dragged along.  (To be fair, the governments of Argentina and Brazil are involved, but it is doubtful that the economic powers in these two countries are well aligned behind them.)  This process is viewed by Latin Americans and Caribbeans as a continuation of their struggles for independence (historically ushered by the victorious slave revolution in Haiti in 1791), against European colonialism, and more recently against U.S. imperialism.

I should digress at this point to say that the term imperialism is not typically used in Western economics and other social sciences nowadays, except in mocking ways.  However, in its widest sense, the term is particularly adroit to refer to the international status quo.  It is properly descriptive of the ongoing economic, political, and military abuse that small and economically vulnerable countries suffer at the hands of the economically-rich and militarily-powerful nations, most prominently the U.S., the UK, France, and Germany.  The fact of this abuse — with deep roots in world history — can be easily documented in its manifold  forms, even if its specific nature is subject to ongoing controversy among social thinkers.

Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) is in a rout that makes its dissolution a concrete possibility, as its leading nations (Germany and France) demonstrate an utter incapacity to assist their partners in distress — a distress which is, by the way, caused by the very (skewed) economic architecture of the European economy (hint: it is capitalist).  The countries of the EU have 6 percent of the global population, produce about twenty six percent of the world’s product, own a substantial stock of accumulated global wealth (physical and human) — in no meager part the fruit of their colonial and imperialist exploits.  Geography, the principle of economies of scale, the formation of competing regional blocks, and — to some extent — history would make it appear as if the project of European economic and political integration were a slam dunk.  But, as it has been traditionally conducted — under the aegis of the large capitals of Germany and France — this process of integration has been half-baked, politically superficial, and laden with contradictions.  The economic and political myopia that the European leaders have exhibited and continue to exhibit is staggering.  The European right, led by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, either by action or omission, seem bent in leading the disintegration of the EU.

It is up to the European people to decide whether, as a result of the vices inherent to its formation, the EU deserves to die.  But, at some point, the European left will have to spearhead an effort to rebuild a truly united Europe — except that, this time around, from the grassroots, articulated around the interest of the European working people.  (Here’s a step in the right direction: http://bit.ly/uHe1lI).  Similar tasks are ahead of us in the United States and Canada.  The Occupy movement is offering us an opportunity to jump start the construction of new and functional economies and polities that put people first, all in the face of the evident failure of the existing social structures.

This requires further elaboration, but — for now and for the record — I wanted to hastily call attention to the effort in Latin America and the Caribbean to upgrade their level of economic and political cooperation, at a time when the North is grappling with crisis and confusion, but also (let us not forget) the hopeful harbinger of the struggles to come: the Occupy movement.

UPDATE: I just read this in the New York Times, and makes my point like nothing else.  Note the symbolism — the chiefs of state of the two “leading” (yeah, right!) EU nations caucused unilaterally (okay, bilaterally) on reforming the EU treaty, and are then calling the affected ones to come around: “Here it is, take it or leave it!”  The gist is — “You profligate ones, tighten your belts: Austerity, austerity, austerity.”  I just cannot imagine Merkel or Sarkozy (or Obama, for that matter) sitting and listening to the speeches by each and every chief of state member of the EU on how they view their situation; say, as the presidents of Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico did with their peers in Caracas.  Merkel and Sarkozy didn’t even bother bring Monti and Zapatero (and Rajoy, the incoming prime minister in Spain) for the photo op.  Why bother when capital rules?

http://nyti.ms/rCbbuu

When truth is too weak to prevail, it must go on the attack.
– Bertold Brecht, Life of Galileo

Of course, the ultimate outcome of the Occupy Wall Street struggle will depend on the popular energy propelling it, which depends in turn on the breath and depth of our aspirations, on our hunger for a better world.  Viewed as a beginning (humble yet promising), the logic of Occupy Wall Street  is radical, in the sense of not contenting itself with addressing mere symptoms, but seeking to uproot the ultimate sources of social misery against which it is reacting.  Comparison with the beginnings of other episodes in world history in which masses of people raised up to direct the course of history is appropriate.

Yes, it is a baby — and as it often happens with babies, we project in them our own aspirations, fascinated by the scope of human possibilities, by the promises that they embody.   But this baby has already exhibited a measure of energy and commitment that presages endurance and effects beyond its humble beginnings.  Taken at face value, Occupy Wall Street originates as an attempt to rebuild social life from its foundations.  As a result, it is heading into a direct and total clash with the status quo.  It raises immediately the question of political power: Who is in charge, who rules society, who directs the course of social life.  And the movement appears to have an instinctive understanding of the ultimate nature of political power.

Superficially, we view political power as the ability of an individual, group, or social class to set up the laws and policies of the land, and then enforce them.  Political power appears as the ability of the rulers to make others obey or conform, if not willfully consent.  Clearly, a social order is most stable when people consent to it, when they conform without being forced or induced to act against their own will.  Outright manifestations of political power are required when people are not willing to act as the social order dictates.

But the ability of the rulers to write and pass laws, and then have them enforced — in a phrase, their ability to organize the political and legal life of a society – depends on their ability to effectively command and deploy actual economic resources.  Since, as Adam Smith suggested, the ultimate economic resource any society relies on is the conscious time of its individuals, then the organization and application of political power is in the last analysis a fierce battle for our hearts and minds.  A battle that we wage as much in our interactions with others as we do introspectively.

How far are we personally willing to go to change our society?  How much are we willing to risk?  What sacrifices are we willing to endure?  How fed up are we really?  What compelling vision of our social life, in contrast with the existing social order can we imagine, and how vividly? How much human potential do we feel we are squandering as a result of our de-facto compromise with the current state of affairs — inequality, war-making, unemployment, an economy and a state ran amok?

We need that gut check.  And, again, since this is a battle for hearts and minds, ours should be both a raw emotional appeal to the struggle and a sharp intellectual case against the status quo accompanied by the proposal of an alternative to it.  In the actual world, our emotions and intellect are intermingled.  But, at the end of the day, if we are to remain true to our humanity, the most compelling argument will be the rational one, the one that shows our respect to one another’s intelligence, to our desire for genuine freedom.

I will say one or two things about the emotional element.  Whatever one’s net assessment of Steve Jobs’ life, his words here make our case:

Remembering you’re going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

While Jobs’ creativity and energy were admirable, it is hard to sleight the fact that when — as he did — we accept and reinforce a social order that pits us against one another, as we do when we pursue the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth (even if by developing well-engineered products — and there are certainly worse ways in which people accumulate wealth, as Halliburton’s Cheney or Goldman Sachs’ Blankfein demonstrate), we remain trapped by the vacuous compulsion to fill with things our existential voids.  Crises, like the ongoing one, force us to confront the glaring fact that these voids can only be filled with meaningful relations with other human beings.  Using private wealth to extract more wealth from others, using others as mere instruments to one’s end, and having the accumulation of things be such end, is a trap, a costly illusion — an illusion with deep social roots, but an illusion nonetheless.  It is costly because it undermines the basis of all social life — cooperation.  The only life worth living is that spent helping and being helped by others, directly, with no proxy in between; using things as means, but one another as ends.   To that extent, Jobs was more a part of the problem than a part of the solution.

So James Carville was wrong.  It is the economy, stupid, but only because “the economy” (i.e. our jobs, our income, our wealth, the stuff we acquire, etc.) acts as a poor substitute for social interactions that suck.  However, if we go radical and demand the real thing rather than the phony one, and act to produce it, then: It is our social relations, stupid!  What is it about the existing social relations that sucks?  Well, they are not ours!  Yes, we produce them and reproduce them, by action and omission,  but they remain estranged from us — they escape our control as individuals and oppress us.  The premises, processes, and results of our reproduction as a society become alien forces that degrade and crush our humanity.  That is the main characteristic of our social life: Alienation!

But, human beings are problem-solving animals.  We immediately problematize our condition.  Not sooner we see the world as exists than we are already envisioning the world as we need it and want it.  Our problem is to go from the world that exists to the world that we need and want.  The problem, alienation, suggests its solution: Appropriation!  We need our social life to be fully ours.  We need the wealth that we produce to be a vehicle for the free development of our human powers.  We need the social relations that we build to promote our freedom as individuals.  We need a civic and economic life that is responsive to our needs, not a private profit-making machine that chews us up and despoils our natural environment under the protection of a political and military apparatus turned against us.  We need our productive resources, those that nature has endowed us with and those we’ve produced historically (our physical productive infrastructure and we ourselves as producers), cared for and deployed to meet our needs.  We need a social life of the people, by the people, and for the people.  It is this promise, the opportunity to struggle for its realization, that Occupy Wall Street gives us.  That is the basis of its ongoing success.  If we can preserve and expand on that promise, in spite of the formidable obstacles to come, we will prevail.

To wrap things up, let me return to my suggestion above that, if the movement is to make any progress in rebuilding our social life, then it has to win the hearts and minds of people way beyond those originally involved in the protests.  This relates to the issue of “demands.”  At the current stage in the political cycle, there is very little evidence indicating that the political system is going to become genuinely sensitive to the needs and concerns of the 99%.  But even if it were, it would be for the wrong reasons — to pacify us, to send us back to our routines, to perpetuate the social order.  No, we don’t want back to business as usual.  We are rejecting the social order.

Now, if we are indeed committed to the radical course, there is no way to avoid a clash with the political establishment.  We cannot expect that the entrenched vested interests that give us wars, financial and economic crises, a corrupt political process, gaping inequality, environmental destruction, and mind-numbing propaganda will just fold and go home.  But at this point, they may not consider us as a serious threat to their rule.  That is fine.  At this point, we are not talking to them — or, at least, they are not our main audience.  We are mainly talking to one another.  We are learning together how to build a different type of social relations, a different type of power.  We want to involve more and more people, we want to be the 99% in motion, we want us all to think beyond the next political cycle — and act accordingly.  To involve more and more people, we must retain the moral high ground and focus on strengthening our organization, self education, committed effort, and numbers.

At 4:30 in the afternoon, we will march in solidarity with #occupywallstreet from Foley Square to the Financial District.  Some of the organizations joining this march:

• AFL-CIO (AFSCME)
• United NY
• Strong Economy for All Coalition
• Working Families Party
• TWU Local 100
• SEIU 1199
• CWA 1109
• RWDSU
• Communications Workers of America
• CWA Local 1180
• United Auto Workers
• United Federation of Teachers
• Professional Staff Congress – CUNY
• National Nurses United
• Writers Guild East

And:

• VOCAL-NY
• Community Voices Heard
• Alliance for Quality Education
• New York Communities for Change
• Coalition for the Homeless
• Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP)
• The Job Party
• NYC Coalition for Educational Justice
• The Mirabal Sisters Cultural and Community Center
• The New Deal for New York Campaign
• National People’s Action
• ALIGN
• Human Services Council
• Labor-Religion Coalition of New York State
• Citizen Action of NY
• MoveOn.org
• Common Cause NY
• New Bottom Line
• 350.org
• Tenants & Neighbors
• Democracy for NYC
• Resource Generation
• Tenants PAC
• Teachers Unite

It will sound strange, but economists as a crowd are — just like the rest of us — human beings crushed by the existing social order.  Since their role as the secular priests of capitalism is to rationalize the status quo, then they are crushed twice.  Not that they will get much sympathy from us for it, but they are crushed by the social order and — on top of that — they are crushed by the crippling belief that markets embedded on a ground of social inequality constitute the best of all possible worlds.  Economists suffer the fate of a person who not only believes in gravity, but who also believes that his body is so heavy that, over time, he’ll suck himself inwards and turn into a black hole.  Needless to say, it will not be easy to persuade this fellow that gravity can be defied and that, with the assistance of certain props (e.g. an airplane), he could even fly.

Like the rest of us, the economists are full of… false consciousness.  It is worse in their case, because they are very actively and joyfully producing and reproducing all that… false consciousness.   But we know that false consciousness is not a bunch of illusions lodged in our heads for no particular reason, but illusions and confusions that the existing social order fosters, reinforces, and turns into a crusty objectified social reality — again, because it justifies the social order and thus helps to perpetuate it.  As these illusions and confusions harden as social objects, we cannot dispel them by simply changing our minds individually.  Instead, we need to uproot them through collective action, by overthrowing the social order and building a new one.

Needless to say, the emancipation of the economists will be the work of the economists themselves.  But given their peculiar — complicit, in fact — situation they will need much help from the rest of us.  More like tough love, but tough love is a form of help.  Yet, one may ask: Is that a good use of our conscious time (and what is a human being’s ultimate scarce resource, but the conscious part of our brief stay on earth)?  So, should we spend our dear short lives trying to help the economists liberate themselves?  Well, let us think like mainstream economists, i.e. selfishly.  What is in it for us, who radically reject the status quo as antithetical to the preservation and development of our humanity?

Personally, I have spent a serious chunk of my life studying the ideas, the mode of thinking, and the behavior of this strange sub-species, so you won’t be surprised with my answer:  Yes, I believe it is worth the time of at least some of us.  By way of an analogy, let me explain to you why there is much in it for us and what we can obtain as a result.

But, before I do that, I shall connect my remarks with other things discussed in this conference.  Yesterday, David Howell recited the famous Keynes’ quip about the imagination of politicians being trapped by the ideas of deceased “academic scribblers.”  We know that ideas become a material force when they grip the minds of people.  That the ideas of dead and living economists have become a material force is hardly controversial here.  Today, Chris Rude alluded to the significant role that economists play in the management of the state, central banks, international organizations, etc.  The analyses that back up the policy proposals under consideration by town councils, congresses, governments, and international organizations are invariably couched in the language of economic benefits and costs.  Large portions of the public itself channel the prejudices of dead economists.

Charles Darwin showed that all vegetable soil was poop from worms, i.e. that all vegetable soil had gone through the digestive system of worms at least once.  Similarly, all economic policies that we now see crystallized into hardened and oppressive social conditions, all economic policies that the powers-that-be implement, often with catastrophic consequences for the rest of us, are the intellectual poop defecated by a certain sub-species of human worms.

I am not saying this just to offend the worms gratuitously: without worms agriculture and the food on our tables would not be what they are.  No, I am saying it to reinforce David Howell’s point yesterday about the momentous importance, the consequential nature, the life-wrecking character that the ideas of economists have in the real world.

But saying bad things about the economists is not particularly controversial at a URPE meeting.  The next thing I will say may well be.  I’ll say that the ideas of the economists would not be as consequential, as practically important, in fact as harmful as they are, if they simply were a bunch of absurdities without connection to the society we live in.  No, the ideas of the economists — insofar as they have become a material force that shapes up or, more clearly, messes up our lives, have a certain connection to the society we live in.  Therefore, when we take a tabula rasa approach to rejecting economics, we sleight this connection at our own peril.

As an analogy to this, think of the production of weapons.  Military production is as constrained by the laws of physics, by technological possibilities, as the production of civil goods.  Therefore, to produce a modern drone or a piece of radioactive artillery, we need a certain mastery of physical laws, a measure of control over physical processes of incredible subtlety and complexity, just like we need them to produce a truck to carry wheat or a CAT scanner for medical uses.  In fact, because our social order is antagonistic, because social conflict is oozed by our social order, the development of means of destruction leads the development of means of production.  In terms of sheer innovation, the production of goods lags behind the production of bads.  To a not insignificant extent, civil production progresses by its late adoption of technologies originally developed for military purposes.

I am not saying anything novel here.  Radicals in the past have noticed this: In Grundrisse, Marx says that, in the history of capitalism, “war developed before peace”; not only that the productive forces of capitalism were an adaptation of destructive forces that had been developed first to meet the needs of war-making, to enable primitive capital accumulation, but that the very social structures that characterized capitalism had been tried and tested first in the organization of the military.  So, not only — Marx noted in Grundrisse — mechanization developed first in war-making before grabbing and revolutionizing “the interior of bourgeois society,” but so did wage labor.

To repeat: the development of the forces of production under capitalism is largely a byproduct of the development of the forces of destruction.  Now, socialists are not trying to develop the forces of production of civil goods from scratch.  We cannot go back in time and prevent what already happened.  Instead, what we are trying to do is appropriate, take over, and then refit or transform the human powers that now exist to meet our purposes, which are the purposes of building the most peaceful, cooperative, and free society we can possibly build.

I think you all see where I am going: The economists, especially those occupied with the development of theoretical economics, lead in the production of intellectual weaponry under the guise of social science.  However, the production of socially destructive ideas abides by the same epistemological laws that regulate the production of constructive ideas.  To be less cryptic, I shall refer to the mathematical language in which a large chunk of modern theoretical economics is now recast.  This is what I view as the most encompassing trend in the field with regards to its abstract theoretical structure.  To be clear: I am referring here not to economics as it appears to us in undergraduate textbooks, but theoretical economics as it is being developed at the cutting-edge, a work that percolates into applied or policy-oriented fields like macroeconomics (let alone textbooks) with a several-year delay.

In its latest reincarnation, these destructive ideas are being recast in the framework of measure theory, the mathematical theory of measure spaces and measurable sets.  Set theory, particularly the theory of convex sets, as well as real analysis (the analysis of relations among variables whose values are real numbers) and optimization, which used to be among the most general frameworks used by the economists a couple of generations ago (e.g. in the development of general equilibrium analysis and its derivations), have been completely absorbed as pieces within the broader mathematical framework of measure theory.

The study of stochastic processes, which underpins much of the empirical research in macroeconomics and finance economics, used to stand separate from — if not at odds with — abstract economic theory.  But as things have turned out, the mathematics of stochastic processes, which resulted from the development of axiomatic probability theory, is precisely measure theory.  In the language of measure theory, random variables (a generalization of the notion of a variable to account explicitly for the shifting limits of one’s cognition) are instances of measurable functions over a peculiar algebraic space, while probabilities are measures, i.e. a generalization of the intuitive geometric notion of length.

But, aside from probabilities, the concept of measure is so general — and the mathematical results established in the field are so intellectually potent — that virtually every conceivable notion in economics (e.g. space, time, quantities, prices, etc.) can be all elegantly subsumed under it.  With the help of measure theory, probability theory being — again — one of its special cases, the whole mathematical paraphernalia that economists use today has now been placed within this new, unified mega-framework.

This is another one of Hegel’s historical ironies.  Although the rudiments of measure theory began with the work of Borel and Lebesgue in early 20th century’s France, Soviet mathematicians elevated it to higher levels of rigor and generality.  (Let me remind you here that, originally, the soviets — like Occupy Wall Street today — were emergent, vibrant civic structures that plain workers and soldiers in political motion during the 1905 Russian revolution forged to collectively direct the course of history.)  Building on those rudiments, and on the work of Russian mathematicians (e.g. Andrei Markov), the Soviet academic Andrei Kolmogorov developed the modern axiomatic edifice of probability theory, on which he built his analysis of stochastic processes.  Kolmogorov himself, as well as Vladimir Smirnov and a bunch of lesser known Soviet mathematicians built a spectacular edifice that, paradoxically, by this Hegelian historical twist, got appropriated by, among others, Western economic theorists, who then used it in the development of modern finance and macroeconomics.

The development of financial derivatives (nothing but pieces in the structure of capitalist private ownership over the productive wealth of our global society), spanning gigantic markets in which trillions of dollars change hands in a given day, hinged on methods of asset valuation that would have been unthinkable without these mathematical developments.  Now, turn around and look at the catastrophic effects that the deployment of these (Warren Buffett dixit) “financial weapons of mass destruction” unleashed on us!

I could suggest here a few of the multiple ways in which, I believe, the apparatus of measure theory and critically re-engineered insights from modern economic theory could be redeployed to illuminate and confront challenges facing the historical construction of socialism.  But that is a topic better left for another conversation.

I shall close my remarks now by saying that, in my view, the ultimate task of radical economists is, well, the expropriation of the expropriators.  But just like a thief who steals a car does not as a result become a mechanical engineer, we cannot limit ourselves to a superficial understanding and uncritical adoption of the “models” and “tricks” of mainstream theoretical economics.  I am not advocating for any sort of facile eclecticism — that  would be not only useless, but in fact dangerous.  No.  Our work is much more challenging: We need to grasp and understand the material as we make it our own.  We need to engage it, digest it critically, discard the elements of ideological rationalization lodged in it, and refit whatever useful is left to serve our purposes.  We need a true critical synthesis guided by the need to overthrow the social order and replace it with a society where the development of each is premise of the development of all.  The synthesis will be a richer radical understanding of social life.  And we ourselves will emerge changed: a more formidable revolutionary force.

* Presentation at the membership meeting of URPE, October 2, 2011.

The Union for Radical Political Economics will hold its conference “The War on the Working Class” on Saturday October 1, 2011 at St. Francis College, in Brooklyn, New York.  For more information on the event, go here:

http://urpe.org/conf/brooklyn/brookprog.html

You may register online:

http://urpeatbrooklyn2011.eventbrite.com/

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I keep another blog that helps me communicate with my students.  As the demands on my time at work increase, my output here approaches zero.  I will resume work on this blog as soon as I have a chance — in January 2012 perhaps.  Meanwhile, if you want to follow me, go here:

http://sfchuato.wordpress.com/

Venezuela anunció hoy su disposición a nacionalizar la extracción y refinamiento del oro.  Es una acción que merece aplauso.  Los precios actuales la vuelven necesaria.  Esos recursos pertenecen al pueblo de Venezuela.  Está bien que el gobierno de Venezuela tenga reservas que le sirvan como seguro en caso de que la economía global entre en un período caótico prolongado.  Pero más allá de esas prudentes reservas, insisto en que la acumulación de oro es un desperdicio.

Digo esto con todo respeto hacia el presidente Chávez.  En mi muy modesta opinión (no solicitada), si se va a acelerar la extracción de ese oro (algo que se debe hacer con debida consideración de todos los costos que eso impone, costos medioambientales y humanos, pero que — sin duda — es algo que los precios actuales hacen posible y racional), más allá de esa reserve prudente a que me refiero, el oro resultante debe venderse y utilizar los ingresos para importar del mundo occidental los bienes (ahora a buenos precios) que sean necesarios para reforzar las bases de largo plazo de los sistemas de educación, salud, arte y cultura, deportes, ciencia y tecnología e infraestructura de comunicaciones y transporte locales.  También tiene sentido usar esos recursos para financiar, en cierta medida, las iniciativas de integración regional que el presidente Chávez está impulsando.

Ahora bien, si los signos de que la economía occidental va a entrar en un período de franca desintegración aumentan — una expectativa que, ciertamente, la pésima calidad del liderazgo político actual en EE.UU., Japón, el Reino Unido, Alemania y Francia justifica ampliamente — entonces la necesidad de acumular más reservas de oro aumenta en consecuencia.  Admito que mantengo un optimismo — quizás infundado — en la capacidad de las luchas de la izquierda en el mundo occidental para alterar la dirección en que las cosas están marchando por acá.  Por supuesto, América Latina no puede depender ni fiarse de que las cosas nos salgan bien por acá.

En cualquier caso, esos son mis 2 centavos de consejo no pedido.