Maynard and Iris

Geoff Mann has written a tremendously thoughtful, complex and provocative paper, my first reaction to which was a kind of stunned silence. Perhaps I should have stopped there, but I will soldier on. There are two angles of approach that I want to take, and I hope by the end to show why they go together. The first is what I will call ‘environmental Keynesianism’, and the second is what Iris Marion Young calls ‘deep democracy’.

Mann argues that the key economic problem in Keynes’ view is that the continual accumulation of capital, by making it super-abundant, will drive its rate of return below the rate of interest, thereby choking off any incentive to invest in productive enterprise. He argues further that what really concerned Keynes was not the economy per se, but civilization. The relationship between the individual and society, for Keynes and many others, is fraught with contradiction. Neither the economy nor civil society can be self-regulating because neither can resolve the tensions at their core. Indeed, because the economic has unfortunately bled into the realm of civil society, they share an inability to resolve an issue that challenges each in different ways: poverty.

Keynes famously proposed that the state could usefully hire people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up again. This works, as Mann points out, because for Keynes it is not the productivity of capital that regulates its use, but its yield. It must be able to command at least the interest rate in order to be invested in productive assets and create more employment. If the normal tendency of capitalism is towards overaccumulation, the economy will eventually hit a wall and the richer it is, the faster it will arrive there. Thus, capital must be made scarce because only greater scarcity will drive up its yield. Diverting capital into hole digging makes it scarcer.

Unfortunately, having the state directly employ people to do make-work tasks is unlikely to help that much. This is, by definition, a labour-intensive operation that may absorb quite a bit of surplus labour, but not all that much surplus capital. Debt financing of labour-intensive projects might help absorb some of the capital surplus, but it might also drive up the rate of interest, thereby recreating the whole problem.

The special virtue of state spending, however, lies elsewhere. The state’s investments are not regulated by yield or by productivity. It is not just the fact that state spending can absorb the unemployed that makes it so useful in a depression. It is that the state can invest in quasi-capital assets even when their yield is zero. Hiring people to dig holes and fill them in again with dirt only addresses the employment problem. Hiring people to dig holes in order to pour the concrete foundations of bridges, schools, dams and hospitals is a way of literally sequestering surplus capital in the ground. The effect of doing this on a very large scale – as with the New Deal – is to make capital scarcer and therefore more usable.

As David Harvey pointed out some time ago, this is only a temporary spatial fix because the likely longer run result is to increase the productivity of capital, thus recreating the overaccumulation problem (Harvey, 1982). On the other hand, the state can keep at it in a big way for a reasonably long time.

One of the consequences of the long wave of neo-liberalism is that all of that capital that was sunk into the ground during the New Deal is coming to the end of its physical life. The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the state of infrastructure in the United States as D+ and calls for an investment of US$3.6 trillion by 2020 in order to bring it up to a satisfactory and safe level (ASCE, 2014). ¹ That’s just to fix or improve what is already there. Plainly, there is plenty of opportunity for capital-absorbing state investment.

There’s more good news. Mitigating, adapting to or remediating the awful environmental mess we have made could absorb heaps more capital. Something like carbon sequestration could be like an environmental New Deal – absorbing capital and carbon together. Carbon sequestration, in truth, may not be a good idea, but you get the point. We invested a huge amount to make the environmental mess we are in. We need to invest a huge amount to get out of it. And these investments are classic public goods that ought to be made by the state. In doing so, the state will absorb masses of surplus capital: environmental Keynesianism.

What will get us to do that? Will it be Keynes’ technocrats or the mob or something else again?

The work of social theorist Iris Marion Young helps us through this tangle. In her book Responsibility for Justice, she offers a way of thinking about the agency of the individual within larger, impersonal social structures (Young and Nussbaum, 2011). She sets the problem this way. How do we deal as individuals with injustices that arise through the normal workings of our social system? Her example is the homeless. None of us is personally responsible for creating the situation. Nor can any of us as individuals solve the problem of the homeless. Nevertheless, as we go about our daily lives, we are willy-nilly contributing to the reproduction of the social system that produces homelessness. Accordingly, we are in some meaningful way responsible for this harm. This is so even if we would strongly prefer a good solution to the problem, and even if we make large donations to habitat for humanity. We can’t help it.

This existential dilemma can easily be translated into the problem of environmental degradation. Short of living in a cave and eating algae, I contribute to our environmental problems simply by being alive. I can be the most ecologically conscious person in the world, and I will still contribute my small share to the problem. Just using the Internet implicates me in the production of huge amounts of electricity, plastics, cement and all the other things that go into building and running the gigantic server farms that constitute ‘the cloud’. If I dropped off the grid tomorrow, that wouldn’t change. On the other hand, I didn’t personally cause climate change. My responsibility is not to fix the problem. It lies elsewhere.

Now, let’s think back to the anxiety about individual liberty that Mann describes as one of modernity’s central problems. What is the nature of individual liberty that is being imagined? It is anchored by the market because the market, it is thought, provides absolute freedom of choice and freedom to choose is the essence of liberty. Two issues arise. The first is the degree to which the market guarantees – or even allows – freedom of choice. The second is that individual liberty must imply individual responsibility. We must be responsible for the consequences of our choices.

Markets do provide choices, but the range of choices they can provide are limited by any number of factors. Rich people have more degrees of freedom than poor people. White people have more degrees of freedom than people of colour. Most people cannot choose not to enter the labour market, although they may have some choice of jobs within it. Some people may get to ‘choose’ among a range of part-time jobs with no benefits whose wages will not lift them above the poverty line. Some people get to choose between paying the rent, heating the house or taking the kid to the doctor.

That much is obvious, but I want to show that even well-functioning markets can limit choice in ways that are not so easy to see. For one thing, many choices entrain other ‘choices’ as a necessary consequence. Have you chosen to live in Los Angeles? You have to own a car. In fact, you need to own a car in order to drive to the ‘auto mall’ to buy a car. Now you have to buy gas, no matter the price, insurance and repairs. You have to do the repairs because if the car doesn’t run you can’t get to your job so you won’t be able to afford the car or your home.

Scale economies in production and purchasing also constrain choice by limiting the number of producers and retailers who can enter into competition. Scale economies are astonishingly widespread in industry. They affect all the usual suspects such as plastics and automobiles, but also frozen vegetables, breakfast cereals and the supermarkets they are sold in.

Economies of scale are not eternally effective barriers to entry. In the United States and Canada we did manage to expand from the Big Three mass market automakers by adding three Japanese, one German and a couple of Korean firms, and perhaps the Chinese are on the horizon. On the other hand, in the midst of all the fantastic, annually renewed choice of body style, colour and amenities, engines, drive trains and chassis are shared across any number of brands and they stay the same for years on end.

Moreover, for the better part of a century, we had only the ‘choice’ of an internal combustion engine to move the car, despite the fact that electric cars were preferred for some uses and some users from the dawn of the automobile age. Henry Ford bought an electric car for his wife in 1908, the same year that he introduced the Model T. Unfortunately, the Model T itself bears a large responsibility for doing in the electric car. This was not because everyone wanted an internal combustion engine, or even a Model T, but because they wanted a car and the Model T was the one they could afford. We all know that Ford drove down the price of his cars by introducing the modern assembly line and true mass production. But to appreciate how thoroughly he crushed the competition and how completely he owned the low-price segment of the global car market requires looking closely at how he designed the Model T for manufacturability even before the assembly line was introduced. Ford won in the market fair and square, but that had the effect of eliminating choices about how to power your car (Schoenberger, 2015).

Technological lock-in also constrains choice. Who believes that Microsoft created the very best operating system in the world? True, you can buy a Mac if you can afford it or you can write your own code if you know how. But mostly the choice is made for you.

In sum, even well-functioning markets do not guarantee choice, as Keynes surely knew. Personal liberty is unavoidably constrained, even in the most unregulated markets imaginable.

Earlier I suggested that the necessary concomitant to individual liberty is personal responsibility for the choices that we make. Who are we responsible to and what are we responsible for? This brings us back to Young’s existential dilemma: as an individual in society, we are and are not responsible for social – and, I would add, environmental – harms. We are and are not responsible to society as a whole. There are larger social processes at work that produce injustice and harm despite our personal intentions and actions.

Young proposes that everyone who shares in creating and reproducing structural injustice by virtue of being a member of society shares responsibility for that injustice. She argues that we must join with others who share that responsibility to change the structure that produces the harm. In other words, we must come together to change society (Young and Nussbaum, 2011).

How, you may be wondering, will we do that? This is where Young invokes the idea of deep democracy (Young, 2002). She envisions a sustained political engagement at different scales, in different venues, with different interlocutors about different issues. This kind of engagement would be so variegated and fluid that it would be extremely difficult to appropriate decision-making power, no matter how wealthy you might be.

Politics would not thereby become easy or harmonious. Actually, it would be harder because we would have to be more deeply involved in political work and conversation more of the time. It would not be free of conflict, but Young proposes that it is a kind of political practice that forces people to pay attention to one another, to actually listen to each other’s concerns and needs, and in doing so arrive at outcomes that are perceived as fair and fairly arrived at.

Deep democracy would not replace representative democracy or the state, but these would be far more accountable. Would it deliver us into the hands of the mob, as Keynes feared? That is difficult to judge. Young, I think, is counting on people to recognize their own interests – both what they are and why – and to be open to new information and new ways of thinking. In the US context, that takes quite a leap of faith.

Americans famously do not vote their interests. Despite Romney’s contempt for the 47% that he thought would never vote for him because they were lazy, irresponsible and dependent on government largesse, he won the ten poorest states in the nation (Schoenberger, 2013). Why should we imagine that deep democracy could produce a more rational outcome?

One reason is that issues get bundled together in elections. If you vote for Candidate A because he is anti-abortion, you get the lunatic fiscal policy and the groundless invasions of other countries whether you want these or not. Deep democracy, as Young envisions it, would unbundle these issues and allow people to consider many of them on their individual merits.

Further, Young’s version of democratic practice involves a lot of time spent talking things over which implies a greater possibility of learning through engagement and, plausibly, the ability to arrive at more reasoned decisions. Instead of knee-jerk rejection of, say, environmental policy, people might be better able to see how environmental changes are affecting their lives.

We can acknowledge the difficulties of radical democratic practice, however, without being absolutely stymied by them. At least I hope so. My thinking about how to make the necessary leap of faith involves organizing. Organizing political action requires a huge amount of tedious, time-consuming detail work. We can’t expect masses of ordinary people to be permanently engaged in it. I think we need to be able to pay people to do that so everyone else is freed up to participate more substantively. You could hire a lot of organizers with the money that goes into political campaigns these days. Perhaps a $10 surcharge on everyone’s taxes would help get us from here to there.

The risk here is that it is impossible to predict where we would end up. Mann quotes in sympathetic despair an otherwise radical leftist friend who frets about all those morons with guns. As we know, the National Rifle Association basically has veto power over all attempts to legislate even the tiniest aspect of gun ownership in the United States and threatens to visit destruction on the head of any legislator who supports gun control. Accordingly, gun control is politically impossible in the United States, despite the fact that most people want it.

In April 2013, 83% of Americans polled by Gallup said they would vote to require background checks on all purchasers of guns. Fifty-six percent said they would vote to reinstate the lapsed ban on private ownership of automatic weapons and 51% would vote to limit the sale of ammunition magazines with more than 10 rounds. This suggests that a different form of politics, one that was not absolutely driven by large amounts of money, could rather rapidly bring more effective regulation of guns in the United States. That it would take a big effort over a long stretch of time is certain. When asked the most general question – do you think laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, less strict or left unchanged – only 47% of those polled in October, 2014 said ‘more strict’, down from a high of 78% in 1990 (Gallup Organization, 2014). ² But it really was 78%. It could work.

I admire the way Mann acknowledged his own uncertainties and fears about what a real revolution would entail. We might end up one day talking it over in re-education camp. At this juncture, in my view, revolution and not-revolution are both scary in different ways. The option of a technocratic, Keynesian solution is appealing in part because people like us could hope to be among the technocratic elite, and because it seems way more efficient. With the prospect of environmental catastrophe upon us, efficiency seems even more to be desired. But I live with technocrats. I know how much they don’t know, how much they are guessing and how much they get plain wrong. I don’t believe the technocratic option can work.

I also don’t think the deep democratic path can work, exactly. I do believe that when we get down to brass tacks, as it were, people are pretty sensible and generally of good will. I think sensibleness and good will might lead people, eventually, to fashion a more democratic kind of market economy – one that does not run on profit alone, that is not owned by capitalists and where a larger share of the surplus might be directed to housing the homeless and not wrecking the environment. And I think they might fashion a more democratic kind of democracy – one that does not run on money.

Things could turn out badly. But they are turning out badly right now. My last refuge is Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts about pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. We know we’re not going to succeed, but if we don’t keep at it, the failure will be even more terrible.