I don’t quite have a complete post on either of the following points, but thought I’d toss them up as free associations for the day…
(1) Thinking What We Know
One of my recurrent struggles, in writing about social theory, is communicating how someone’s formal theoretical system often doesn’t “allow” them to think things that, in practice, they “know” are true.
My recent conference paper, for example, gestured at some of the problems that derive from trying to define capitalism in terms of the institutions of the market and private property: my argument is that, once you accept this definition, you lose the ability to explain theoretically certain things about capitalism that many people assume are true – e.g., that capitalism is global in scope, or that the rise of capitalism and the rise of “modernity” are intrinsically bound together in some meaningful way. The market and private property are not appropriate concepts to enable us to ground these sorts of insights or intuitions into capitalism – they are simultaneously too expansive in their historical scope (“markets” of various kinds have existed well back into history) and too narrow (private property has been suspended or diminished in importance at various points in recent history without this undermining other trends that we would regard as “capitalist”).
It may, of course, be the case that the definition is correct – that capitalism should be defined in terms of the market and private property – and that it is our historical intuitions that are wrong: perhaps we shouldn’t be trying to capture the “globalness” of our contemporary history, or the distinctiveness of modernity, via a concept such as capitalism.
I am interested, though, in the issue of how we could ground these sorts of historical intuitions – what kinds of theoretical concepts might make it possible to grasp and make sense of these sorts of historical insights. I am also interested in preventing the sorts of conceptual mistakes that I think sometimes occur when people move, often without realising it, from what their theoretical categories logically allow them to say, into broader claims that are grounded on historical intuitions that cannot be grasped within their theoretical system.
I find it very difficult, though, in practice to convince someone that a theoretical system in fact does not ground insights that are historically plausible for other reasons. I find myself in situations where, for example, I will note that the common definition of capitalism can’t really make sense of the mid-20th century as capitalist, where my interlocutor will respond, e.g., that of course they know that the mid-20th century is capitalist – what gives me the impression they aren’t aware of this, etc. I’m trying to work out a better vocabulary for expressing that my critical target is the logical implications of the theoretical categories, rather than the historical awareness of the theorist…
(2) How Do We Value Labour?
I’ve recently been playing with alternative definitions of capitalism, trying to stumble across a good vocabulary for describing what I suspect is best understood in terms of a long-term, unintended pattern of social practice – a pattern that can be (and, historically, has been) replicated via a range of concrete social institutions, and that therefore should not be defined in terms of any specific configuration of concrete social institutions.
In recent papers, I’ve been toying with describing this long-term pattern of social practice in terms of “growth”. For many reasons, though, I’m not particularly enamoured of this term – among other things, it troubles me to use a “fashionable” term of critique (not because I have some principled objection to fashionable concepts, but because fashionable concepts tend to become freighted with a blurry range of meanings, increasing the chances for someone to read extraneous content into what I’m trying to communicate – and my concepts are fuzzy enough as it is, without loading them with a range of unintended meanings…), and I’m finding that, in practice, some readers are inclined (not unreasonably) to interpret my references to “growth” in terms of quantitative expansion – of stuff, of population – and thus to assume that I’m making some kind of argument about the psychological consequences of exposing humans to quantitatively more and more, e.g., wealth, population, etc. – when what I’m actually after are the qualitative dimensions of the pattern: a better understanding of how our perceptions and thoughts are shaped in specific qualitative directions through our practical exposure to this dimension of our historical experience.
Ironically, I’ve gotten myself into this situation by trying to avoid speaking in terms that I thought would be even more freighted – specifically, to avoid what might otherwise be a tempting move to reappropriate and reinterpret the phrase “labour theory of value”. This move would be tempting because, I suspect, one useful way to describe the long-term pattern of social practice that characterises capitalism would be in terms of social pressures and incentives to reconstitute the expenditure of human labour, regardless of how high productivity or material wealth becomes. From this standpoint, one can then examine particular institutional configurations of capitalism to, e.g., identify the feedback loops and incentives that, in a particular context, help to perpetuate this pattern – but one can also abstract from concrete feedback loops and incentives, recognising that it is theoretically possible to transform a wide range of social institutions and practices while retaining “capitalism” – as long as capitalism is understood in terms of the underlying pattern of practice…
I’m by no means the only person who has suggested that the “labour theory of value” might mean something like this. But the overwhelmingly more common interpretation of the phrase “labour theory of value” sees the term as a claim about how, in spite of appearances, labour inputs have some determining role in the creation of material wealth or in setting the prices of goods – and that then sees critique as a process of “unmasking” these misleading appearances, in order to reveal the true social centrality of the working classes. It would be something of an understatement to say that I find such claims empirically problematic and, in any event, I am not generally trying to construct an “unmasking” or debunking critique – I therefore regard this conventional vision of the labour theory of value as beside the point for my work, and have avoided using the term to prevent my claims from being distorted by the conceptual gravitational field exerted by this much older and better known theoretical tradition.
Still, the question remains as to whether, in trying to avoid the particular historical freighting of terms like “labour theory of value”, I’ve fallen into an even more loaded terrain by invoking the fashionable, but fuzzy and ill-defined, notion of “growth”…
Rough Theory 