Virtualism

A New Political Economy

James G. Carrier, Daniel Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323931
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

We live in a time of economic virtualism, whereby our lives are made to conform to the virtual reality of economic thought. Globalization, transnational capitalism, structural adjustment programmes and the decay of welfare are all signs of the growing power of economics, one of the most potent forces of recent decades. In the last thirty years, economics has ceased to be just an academic discipline concerned with the study of economy, and has come to be the only legitimate way to think about all aspects of society and how we order our lives. Economic models are no longer measured against the world they seek to describe, but instead the world is measured against them, found wanting and made to conform.This profound and dangerous change in the power of abstract economics to shape the lives of people in rich and poor countries alike is the subject of this interdisciplinary study. Contributors show how economics has come to portray a virtual reality - a world that seems real but is merely a reflection of a neo-classical model - and how governments, the World Bank and the IMF combine to stamp the world with a virtual image that condemns as irrational our local social and cultural arrangements. Further, it is argued that virtualism represents the worrying emergence of new forms of abstraction in the political economy, of which economics is just one example.

1 Abstraction in Western Economic Practice

James G. Carrier

As virtualism is the attempt to make the world conform to an abstract model, so abstraction is virtualism's foundation. But it is important not to restrict attention only to systems of abstract thought like neo-classical economics. Such systems are important, but so is practical abstraction, abstraction in daily life and practice.

If abstraction can be taken as the removing of something from the social and practical contexts in which it previously existed, then one can talk about practical abstraction. That is, people can find that their practical activities have, for reasons beyond their control, been changed in a way that makes them more abstract: from the perspective of those who confront the changes, those practical activities have become more removed from the contexts in which they had existed. A simple example is when an organisation that had hitherto identified people by name decides to identify them by number. It is a good bet that, from the perspective of those who have them, names are more enmeshed in social life and activity than are the numbers that replace them. Those who deal with the organisation that stops using names and starts using numbers, then, confront practical abstraction, whether they will it or not: the practical activity of identifying themselves to the organisation has become more abstract than it was previously, more governed by the logic of the organisation (with its desire for numbers) than pre-existing social usage (with its names).

From the point of view of this collection, a particularly important sort of practical abstraction is that which takes place in the economic realm. It is this sort of practical abstraction that helps remove economic activity from the broader social contexts in which it had existed, and so helps it become a more distinct sphere, understood in its own peculiar terms and governed by its own peculiar logic, a sphere I call 'commerce' in this chapter. In saying this I do not mean that this distinct sphere is without social content or that it is divorced from practice. Economy is, after all, the land of practical social beings. However, from the perspective of those confronted with the sort of practical abstraction that concerns me in this chapter, the practice and social content are relatively alien.

It is this practical abstraction that encourages the sort of distinction between social and commercial life that David Schneider (1980) describes for the Americans he studied. Put in other words, one lesson to draw from the history of practical abstraction that I sketch here is that the separation that Schneider describes in American Kinship is not simply a feature of American culture - simply an aspect of how Americans see the world. Rather, that conceptual separation has a practical basis in the ways that people act, and are obliged to act, in different areas of their lives. Some time ago, Talcott Parsons (1959: 262), one of Schneider's teachers, pointed to this practical dimension, when he described important aspects of the distinction between the domestic and occupational realms in terms of the practical questions of rights, duties and obligations, of who is expected to do what.

In this chapter I present a brief sketch of practical abstraction in two important economic areas, production and circulation, especially in the period from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. My focus is on production and circulation that are commercial, only a part of the whole but one that became increasingly important in people's lives during this period. As well, and partially to keep the task manageable, I restrict myself to Britain and the United States. This is partiality, but not, I think, debilitating: the trends that I describe were hardly unique to these two countries, which were the pre-eminent Western societies for the bulk of the period that concerns me. In spite of these restrictions, what I present is only a sketch, and one drawn with a broad brush rather than a fine pen. My purpose is not to provide a detailed description and analysis, but only to indicate general trends. And those trends are clear enough. During this period economic activities changed in important ways, becoming increasingly abstracted from the social contexts and relationships in which transactors existed. This is not to say that economic activities became stripped of social meaning or content. However, that content and meaning became purified, came increasingly to spring solely from the commercial organisation of the economic activity itself.

Production

I start with production, which I will describe relatively briefly, as the story I tell is likely to be familiar in its general outline. In the period that concerns me, there was an increasing divergence between the organisation and social relations that characterised production and those that characterised the rest of social life, particularly the household. The effect of this divergence on people's experience of economic life was magnified by the fact that, during this period, an increasing proportion of the population was entering paid productive work. One manifestation of this divergence is the growing distinction between the forms of relationships that characterised commercial activity and the household; another is the growing tendency for commercial and household activities to take place in distinct institutions and places.

I will approach this divergence by describing a sequence of four ideal types of production: cottage industry, putting out, early factory production, modern factory production. Although I describe these as a sequence, they are not a set oi uniform stages through which all branches of production necessarily progressed uniformly. Equally, I do not take this sequence to reflect some inherent dynamic or search for objective efficiency (Sabel and Zeitlin 1985). However, these steps do identify the increasing abstraction of commercial production that people experienced over this period.

Cottage Industry

Cottage industry is production carried out and controlled by the household, of objects intended for sale. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, for almost all commercial production 'the basic unit of production remained the household' (Swanson 1989: 148), but textile production has been studied most, and I focus on it. This type of production was widespread and durable. It is the cottage-craftsman system that Esther Goody (1982: 12) describes in Yorkshire woollen manufacture in the eighteenth century, and it was still being used in France long after the bulk of textile production had been mechanised (see Tilly 1984).

This economic activity was enmeshed in broader social relationships. For instance, the needs of household members, rather than the demands and rhythms of the market, governed the pace and timing of production, though households certainly were aware of changes in the prices paid for cloth of different sorts. Partly this was because weaving families did not only weave. Commonly they had farm holdings as well, and produced cloth as one of a number of occupations, some for money and some not, that together provided for their subsistence (see Thirsk 1978; Thompson 1967). More notably, perhaps, production tended to be undertaken within the household by household members using household tools, equipment and raw-materials. As Neil Smelser (1959: 54-55) describes it, 'the father wove and apprenticed his sons into weaving. The mother was responsible for preparatory processes; in general she spun, taught the daughters how to spin, and allocated the . . . [subsidiary tasks] among the children.'

In other words, production relations were household relations. The obligation to labour was a family obligation and the discipline used to coordinate and regulate production was family discipline. The son who helped his father weave was helping the man who had produced much of the food the child ate, who oversaw his upbringing and who was training him in his craft, who would have a say in his marriage, who would bequeath property to the boy in his old age and who, in time, the boy would help bury.

Not all those who engaged in cottage industry were family members. Paid workers who lived with their employers were extremely important at this time. But even these were likely to be enmeshed in sociable and even household relations in their work. They

were incorporated in the family, being housed, ted, and clothed, as well as paid wages, in return for their 'fidelity' and 'service'; and the developed Puritan (and Catholic) morality of the post-Reformation period required the householder to treat them as he would his children, and be responsible for their moral and spiritual, as well as material, welfare (James 1974: 23; see also Beier 1987: 24-25).

Here, Mervyn James is describing employees in middling farming families in County Durham in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but the incorporation of paid workers into the family was common throughout Britain through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth.

Putting Out

Putting out differs from cottage industry' in that households produced at the direction of, and using materials supplied by, a merchant capitalist. In textiles, it emerged because cottage producers did not subordinate their work to the demand for cloth sufficiently to satisfy merchants, who sought to circumvent this by gaining greater control over production in order to assure a more regular and uniform supply of cloths. However, it had a longer history. It had appeared in the more crowded London guilds by the middle of the sixteenth century, as artisans with retail shops began to put work out to poorer artisans without shops (Davis 1966: 61; Earle 1989: 27), and it appeared sporadically even earlier, in crafts that involved intensive use of labour (Swanson 1989: 31). Equally, merchant capitalists were not alone in putting work out. Prosperous cottage weavers themselves put work out to other households, particularly carding and spinning (Smelser 1959: 55 56: for other industries see Rule 1987: 102-104). Also, like cottage industry, it was not simply a passing phase of production. It remains important, not just in the making of objects that carry an aura of craft production (see Ennew 1982), but also in many ordinary branches of industry (Benson 1989: 57-58; see generally Allen and Wolkowitz 1987; Boris and Daniels 1989; Pennington and Westover 1989), and some modern putting out retains a distinct family air (Beach 1989; Benson 1989: 60-63).

Responding to a commercial environment relatively alien to weaving households, the merchant who put work out brought about a degree of differentiation of production and control that helped remove production from the family context that was so important in cottage industry. Thus, the merchants gained control of the timing of production, one of the attractions that putting out had for them. Likewise, the merchant dictated the nature and quality of the cloth to be produced. Similarly, though not strictly relevant to the activity of production, the merchant disposed of the cloth without regard for the interests of the producer or the relationship between the producer and the eventual consumer. This contrasts with cottage industry, much of which was for local consumption, bought and sold in regulated local markets in a web of long-standing personal relationships.

Production under putting out was ordered by a logic and set of relations that were more removed from the broader social context of those doing the work than was the case with cottage industry. However, this abstraction was only partial. Even though raw materials belonged to the merchant, most producing households continued to own their tools and equipment. Even though obliged to produce within the time specified, producers were being paid to perform a task, and so were able to exercise some discretion about the pace of the work. And, of course, the immediate social relations of production remained household relations. The increase in abstraction, then, was gradual, and it continued in early factory production.

Early Factory Production

With factories, production moved out of the household to a separate place more directly under the supervision of the capitalist and hence more directly influenced by factors that did not spring from the social relationships that linked producers. However, the degree of control by the capitalist was restricted: in important ways, work was carried out by sets of people ordered by pre-existing social relationships. Commonly, capitalists employed contractors to produce a specified number of items by a certain date. These contractors then hired their own assistants, 'mostly - though not exclusively - family members or relatives' (Staples 1987: 68; see also Blauner 1964: 76-78; Hareven 1982: 113; Penn 1985: 65; Smelser 1959: 185). Typically, then, production occurred within the personal or familial relationship that linked contractor and assistant, though this itself existed within the context of the more purely commercial relationship between capitalist and contractor.

Early factories of this sort amounted to centralised workshops where workers carried out just about the same activities using the same equipment that they had under the putting-out system. However, centralisation facilitated the subordination of work to a commercial logic, as it allowed the owner to introduce new productive technology, especially powered machinery, more readily than could the merchant who put work out. This undercut the ability of workers to order production in terms of their social relationships, and so increased abstraction. Most notably, it tended to convert individual producers from workers shaping what they made by the exercise of their skill into routine operatives.

But even without mechanisation, the early factory brought other important changes in the relationships in which production took place. For instance, the factory-owning capitalist could oversee work more closely than the putting-out merchant (this is discussed in Marglin 1974). Indeed, the emergence of industrial capitalism was associated with a general concern with observation, supervision and control (see Thompson 1967; Foucault 1979). This oversight allowed the capitalist to see and try to undercut practices that may have been necessary for the social survival of the work group but that slowed production, such as the time contractors spent training their relative-assistants in their trades (cf. Grieco 1987: 11-14).

At the same time, the system of craft control of apprenticeship was being threatened by the growing advocates of the notion of free labour, a notion that was to lead to greater abstraction. This threat culminated in 1814 in the repeal of key sections of the Statute of Artificers of 1564, thereby allowing ap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Abstraction in Western Economic Practice
• 2 The Triumph of Economics; Or, 'Rationality' Can Be Dangerous to Your Reasoning
• 3 Abstraction, Reality and the Gender of 'Economic Man'
• 4 Development and Structural Adjustment
• 5 Cash for Quotas: Disputes over the Legitimacy of an Economic Model of Fishing in Iceland
• 6 The Transnational Capitalist Class
• 7 Virtual Capitalism: The Globalisation of Reflexive Business Knowledge
• Conclusion: A Theory of Virtualism
• Notes on Contributors
• Index