Complexity & alienation

In the day job, I point out that the "Mr Market" metaphor can be be misleading. If markets are complex emergent processes, as Alan Kirman shows, prices and quantities cannot be seen as the result simply of an individual's behaviour writ large, and markets are unpredictable.

Such a conception is consistent with Marxian concepts of alienation and reification. In capitalism, said Marx, "the productive forces appear as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals." Or as Lukacs put it:

A relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.

Insofaras there is a justification within Marx's writings for a centrally planned economy - and, right-wingers please note, Marx wrote very little about central planning - it probably lies here. Central planning is, allegedly, a means of bringing an alien process under conscious human control. In this sense, modern work on complexity helps to buttress classical Marxism.

This poses the question: should we care about alienation in this sense? I don't think we should.

For one thing, as John Roemer says (pdf), for many people, alienated work can be a liberating force. (There's an analogy with urbanism here: many people welcome the freedom that anonymous city living gives them).

And for another, it's not obvious that central planning actually can bring market forces under human control, at least not without huge cost in terms of foregone innovation.

Instead, I suspect that the sense in which alienation mattered most to Marx - and should matter to us - is a slightly different one. It's that, in producing capital and profits, workers saw the products of their labour become means of their domination:

The object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor...Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it.

The problem here, though, is not so much alienation as domination, in the sense of oppressive working conditions, and inequality. These problems, we now know, are not necessarily solved by central planning, but are perhaps soluble by more equitable market processes.

I say all this for two reasons. First, to ask the left: what exactly is wrong with capitalism, and do those problems really need central planning to fix them? Secondly, to point out to the right both that Marx's conception of the economy is consistent with new thinking about complexity, and that one of his concerns was to expand freedom, in the sense of better enabling people to take charge of their destiny. Yes, central planning failed to achieve this, but I don't think this discredits the Marxian project. 

Comments

[GeorgeNYC]

So, in a way, Mitt Romney's "Corporations are people" can be seen as a Marxist commentary on alientation.

[Warren]

What's wrong with capitalism exactly? One barely knows where to begin.
Marx believed that work was an integral part of humanity, but many workplaces are dehumanising, physically and mentally damaging to them. He thought the the repetitive nature of millions of people's work was not in harmony with their human nature. Marx analyses factory work; we might use that example, or people working on supermarket checkouts for hours at a time. He thought that workers were told when to work, how to work, and derived little pleasure or satisfaction in it. Workers are also alienated from what they make because it does not directly benefit them. Capitalism further alienates people from each other by encouraging hyper-competition and not co-operation. The experience of work for the vast majority of humanity is a miserable one or worse. (I did a seven year stint in a almost windowless and very noisy uk factory and much of Marx's Capital rings true to me).

[Boffy]

I don't think for a Marxist thinking about how a future society might work it is just the domination of capital that is important.

Many years ago when I was a City Councillor I visited an old woman who had a problem with a leaking tap flooding her kitchen. The Council, sent a plumber out several times, who failed to deal with the problem. A friend of mine who was the Plumbers Shop steward came as a favour to look at it, and fixed it within about half an hour, and was pretty scathing about his members workmanship or lack of it.

But, that is alienation for you. The plumbers didn't have ownership or control of the means of production, the old lady wasn't a human being and fellow worker, she was just a customer, and whether she was satisfied with the service she got or not was not important.

As well as problems of lack of relevant resources, the same problem explains the lack of even basic decency afforded to our elderly in NHS hospitals, but it would also apply in any future society where workers did not feel that they directly owned the means of production, where they did not feel that there was an imperative for them to produce good quality products for their fellow workers either probably initially pecuniary, or later, because real human relations replaced commodity fetishism.

[Peter Dorman]

Regarding alienation, I think that most of it can be summed up as extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation. The more you are extrinsically motivated, the more alienated you are. Of course, for reasons you allude to it is not possible or desirable to run an economy on intrinsic motivation alone.

[gordon]

"The problem here, though, is not so much alienation as domination, in the sense of oppressive working conditions, and inequality".

That makes me think of Prof. Marmot's work on how powerless employment at the bottom of the traditional pyramidal organisation makes you sick; see his book "Social Determinants of Health" and this summary on the WWW:

http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-publish/abstracts/social-determinants-of-health.-the-solid-facts

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