Book: The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide. Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani Editors. Polity, 2010

Introduction

Keith Hart:

"The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani Editors, to be published soon by Polity, Cambridge) is the first expression in English of a project that began a decade ago at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Much of this theoretical and practical work is unknown in the English-speaking world. There has been a series of publications: Brazil, Argentina, France (with support from Belgium and Quebec), Italy, Portugal and now Britain, with a mix of academic researchers, political activists and social networks (both national and international). Our authors are drawn from Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Peru, South Africa, Switzerland and the United States. Maybe Asia next?

The human economy is not a dream. It exists theoretically and practically, but it has been obscured by the economic models and approaches that dominate the media and universities. There are five sections: ‘World society’, ‘Economics with a human face’, ‘Moral politics’, ‘Beyond market and state’ (social economy), ‘New directions’. The movement is from our common predicament in today’s world, through the human economy as a moral and political project, to attempts to build a new institutional synthesis in practice, while always being open to imagining a better world in future.

Neoliberalism has been wounded, but is not yet defeated. One victim so far has been democracy. This book is about plural approaches to rebuilding economic democracy. Neoliberalism is at its core an Anglophone phenomenon. The US and Britain gained most from the credit boom and lost most when it went bust. The “French social model” looks better now. But I don’t just want to celebrate another swing of the pendulum from state to market and back again. It is time for the people to have their say.

The central concept is “the human economy”: an emphasis on what people do for themselves and on the need to find ways forward that must involve all humanity somehow. For in the second half of the twentieth century, we formed a world society – a single interactive social network – for the first time. Ideas alone are insufficient. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association.

The economy, which had been represented as an eternally benevolent machine for growth, was suddenly pitch-forked by the financial crisis into the turmoil of history. One result is probably an acceleration of the global shift of economic power from the West to Asia. One certain victim is free market economics which has been holed below the water. The project of economics needs to be rescued from the economists.

Humanity is a collective noun; it is a quality of kindness, of treating all people as if they were like ourselves; and it is a historical project for our species to assume stewardship of this planet. There are two prerequisites for being human: we must each learn to be self-reliant to a high degree and to belong to others, merging our identities in a bewildering variety of social relations. One goal of the new human universal will thus be the unity of self and society.

In order to be human, the economy must be at least four things:

1. It is made and remade by people; economics should be of practical daily use to us all.

2. It should address a variety of particular situations in all their institutional complexity.

3. It must be based on a more holistic conception of everyone’s needs and interests.

4. It has to address humanity as a whole and the world society we are making.

The human economy is already everywhere. People always insert themselves practically into economic life on their own account. What they do there is often obscured, marginalized or repressed by dominant economic institutions and ideologies. Whenever we speak of “capitalism” or “socialism”, we are referring to just part of what goes on in an economy. But there is a lot more going on and economies are a lot more like each other in practice than polarised ideal types might suggest. Any program to make an economy more human is not in itself revolutionary. It builds on what is there already and seeks to gain recognition and legitimacy for what people do for themselves. The economy could take on a new direction and emphasis through many initiatives that are already established, but could do with more room to grow. But the potential of what we propose, when taken together, is a revolution.

The object of an economy was always the reproduction of human life and beyond that the preservation of everything that sustains life. It has become to make money through producing and selling things, with human life secondary, a means to that end. Traditional African societies supported economies whose object was the production of life embodied in human beings. The fastest-growing sector of world trade today is in cultural services such as entertainment, education, media, software and information. The predominant focus of the world economy may be reverting to the production of human beings.

We must rely on practical experience for information and analysis. Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi showed us a concrete road to “other economies” based on the field of possibilities already open to us. The human economy is a vision more than a social recipe, or many social recipes articulated by a unifying vision. It embraces at once what each of us does in daily life and what all of us might become as a species. Economy ought to be capable of spanning these poles in a fluid way.

First, market society sustained by a concern for individual freedom generated huge inequality; then submission of the economy to political will on the pretext of equality led to the suppression of freedom. Each of these Cold War protagonists called democracy itself into question. We must seek out new institutional forms anchored in social practice with a view to reinserting democratic norms into economic life. The goal of democracy in a complex society remains to reconcile freedom and equality. The market economy is legitimate, but a market that knows no limits poses a threat to democracy. We reject an over-determined view of our societies as being merely “capitalist”.

We identify three principles:

1. The economists’ view of human beings as calculating machines over-estimates the market’s ability to allocate resources, with devastating social and ecological consequences.

2. There is a need for solidarity within and between generations: horizontal and vertical. We have to tackle inequality now and care for the future.

3. Practical and theoretical work must be closely articulated. Democracy and science are the twin pillars of modern civilization.

Neoliberalism is reductive: the market was withdrawn from the domain of political action (even as it invaded public life); and the modern economy came to be confused with capitalism. Contemporary politics also sustains economic inventiveness based on a premise of democratic solidarity. This book is an exploration of that premise.

We should avoid the two pitfalls of progressive politics. The centre-left has adopted neoliberal economic policies, moderated only by less restrictive social policies. The far left wants to break with capitalism, but has no definite programme for the transition. The social rights of citizens guaranteed by the state must be consistent with encouraging forms of self-organization where solidarity has a greater role. Market contracts are not the only way of delivering equality and freedom. These also come from people living together, from the mutuality and egalitarianism of everyday life. We also need to curb the power of the capitalist corporations. This requires a new alliance of public policy aimed at regulating capitalism and coordinating redistributive institutions with grassroots movements, harnessing the voluntary reciprocity of self-organized groups.

You may doubt what difference these instances of “the human economy” might make to the world. The last section of the book considers new approaches to money, digital democracy, mobility after cheap oil, renewable energy and the struggle for emancipation from inequality. The Human Economy has come out of a dialogue between successful social experiments in many parts of the world and theoretical reflection on them. We invite you to advance knowledge along the lines we have begun and to dare to build a better world."

Discussion

Money in a human economy

Keith Hart:

"To call the economy ‘human’ is to insist on putting people first, making their thoughts, actions and lives our main concern. Such a focus should also be pragmatic: making economy personally meaningful to students or readers, relating it to ordinary people’s practical purposes. ‘Humanity’ is a moral quality, implying that, if we want to be good, we should treat other persons, people like ourselves, kindly. Since theoretical abstraction is impersonal and leaves no room for morality, a human economy would have to pay attention to the personal realm of experience; but it would be a mistake to leave it there. Humanity is also a collective noun, meaning all the people who have existed or ever will. So the human economy is inclusive, in the sense reinforced by our contemporary witness to the formation of the new human universal that is world society.

Anthropologists and sociologists have long rejected the impersonal model of money and markets offered by mainstream economics. Viviana Zelizer (1994), for example, shows that people refuse to treat the cash in their possession as an undifferentiated thing, choosing rather to ‘earmark’ it -- reserving some for food bills, some as holiday savings and so on. Her examples generally come from areas that remain invisible to the economists’ gaze, especially domestic life. People everywhere personalize money, bending it to their own purposes through a variety of social instruments. This was the message too of Money and the morality of exchange (Parry and Bloch 1989). When money and markets are understood exclusively through impersonal models, awareness of this neglected dimension is surely significant. But the economy exists at more inclusive levels than the person, the family or local groups. This is made possible by the impersonality of money and markets, where economists remain largely unchallenged. Money, much as Durkheim (1912) argued for religion, is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal.

Money is often portrayed as a lifeless object separated from persons, whereas it is a creation of human beings, imbued with the collective spirit of the living and the dead. Money, as a token of society, must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong. But people make everything personal, including their relations with society. This two-sided relationship is universal, but its incidence is highly variable (Hart 2007b). Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control (the market). Relations marked by the absence of money are the model of personal integration and free association, of what we take to be familiar, the inside (home). This institutional dualism, forcing individuals to divide themselves every day, asks too much of us. People want to integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between their own subjectivity and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge between the two. That is why money must be central to any attempt to humanize society. It is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.

Money thus expands the capacity of individuals to stabilize their personal identity by holding something durable that embodies the desires and wealth of all the other members of society. Money is a ‘memory bank’ (Hart 2000), a store allowing individuals to keep track of those exchanges they wish to calculate and, beyond that, a source of economic memory for the community. The modern system of money provides people with a wide repertoire of instruments to keep track of their exchanges with the world and to calculate the current balance of their worth in the community. In this sense, one of money’s chief functions is remembering. If the proliferation of personal credit today could be seen as a step towards greater humanism in economy, this also entails increased dependence on impersonal governments and corporations, on impersonal abstraction of the sort associated with computing operations and on impersonal standards and social guarantees for contractual exchange. If persons are to make a comeback in the post-modern economy, it will be less on a face-to-face basis than as bits on a screen who sometimes materialize as living people in the present. We may become less weighed down by money as an objective force, more open to the idea that it is a way of keeping track of complex social networks that we each generate. Then money could take a variety of forms compatible with both personal agency and human interdependence at every level from the local to the global.

The reality of markets is not just universal abstraction, but this mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete (Hart 2007b). If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment lends concrete finality to your choice. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination. To turn our backs on markets and money in the name of collective as opposed to individual interests reproduces by negation the bourgeois separation of self and society. It is not enough to emphasize the controls that people already impose on money and exchange as part of their personal practice. That is the everyday world as most of us know it. We also need ways of reaching the parts of the macro-economy that we don’t know, if we wish to avert the ruin they could bring down on us all. Perhaps this was what Simmel (1900) had in mind when he said that money is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society.

The two great means of communication are language and money. Anthropologists have paid much attention to the first, which divides us more than it brings us together, but not to money whose potential for universal communication is more reliable, in addition to its well-advertised ability to symbolize differences between us. We cannot afford to neglect money’s potential for universal connection, choosing rather to demonize it as the source of our vulnerability to people with a lot more of it. It is high time for anthropologists to return to an earlier philosophical tradition, building on Kant’s (2006) example, but also on the early twentieth-century neo-Kantianism of Durkheim (1912), Mauss (1924) and Simmel (1900). I have been driven to this conclusion by studying how money and markets extend society at our moment in history. This constitutes the most tangible manifestation of the new human universal that is our shared occupation of the planet." (http://thememorybank.co.uk/2012/06/06/exchange-in-the-human-economy/)

Human Economy

Contents

Introduction

Table of Contents

Discussion

Money in a human economy

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