Ping Pong 19: Permeable Membranes and Centres of Gravity
It was the great economic historian Polanyi who first pointed out that there is something really very wrong with the idea that free markets are associated with de-regulation. On the contrary, he said that any and every free market necessarily increased the overall regulation, and must do so, in order that the market itself remained ‘free’. Without regulation or perpetual policing he suggests, any and every market would devolve into something else. Nor is this very surprising he argues, as the entire idea of the free market is founded on the oddest of premises. That is, the idea that an institution which originated in the margins of Western Medieval Europe could somehow be taken as the great paradigm within which all of human endeavour could be expressed or at least valued. This move, this enforcing of value, was then, Polyani points out, only possible through violence and policing. The History of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the history of the workhouse, the debtor’s prison, and political oppression, all carried out in the name of and to the glory of the free market. Likewise the history of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and therefore of colonialism, was founded on the oppression necessary to make people free.
In this social engineering of a certain veneer of freedom, three distinct zones are discernible, zones which are only connected by the myth of the free market itself. The first zone relates to the features found in the hub of the market, that is to the nature and pitfalls of the exchange process itself; the second zone relates to the imposition of the market on others; and the third, to the rules and duties of escaping the market, once that imposition has been allowed. Each Zone will then need to be considered in turn.
The hub of the market should of course be the point at which everyone is really free. It is the point after all of choice, the point at which the consumer has power. And yet that power is necessarily bounded in two distinct ways. On the one hand each individual will have only a finite time to engage in market activities, whilst the market itself, as it is free, is necessarily both very large, and constantly changing. What is more, as the market claims to be one of the ways that one allows one a single language to catch globalization within, this complexity and size are constantly expanding. The result is of course, that there is an anathema right at the heart of our modern market places. There is simply too much information for any individual to ever fully assess or know of. Each decision made is therefore necessarily imperfect. What is more, the entire system, in the name of the advertisement, plays with this sheer inability to assess what is actually to one’s advantage. Or perhaps rather, one is spun, in the name of certain products, the idea that they are best, and our ability to choose is then connived with, such that we are persuaded that choosing this product and so ridding oneself of the pesky choice and responsibility thing, is the right way to proceed. From this it follows that the free market will throw up different contours of knowledge. People knowing certain facts (or possessing certain degrees of information) will behave otherwise from others without that knowledge. At the centre of these contours (which are perhaps more isobars, than gradients), lies of course an ‘impossible’ point, the point of absolute knowledge. The problem with this point is not that it is itself not attainable, but rather that it is not legal (as it necessarily involves insider trading). At the heart then of the free market lies as it were a black hole, around which we all orbit, a point in which the very premise that allows the market to stand, and articulates it, destroys it.
On the other hand, the free market itself has a real tension between being an open plane where only goods matter or a series of protected domains, linked to peoples. Take for example the notion of Fair Trade. The standard economic line on fair trade is that it is a bad idea, because it distorts the market. The result, of this distortion is that land that is most suited to growing coffee remains producing coffee or cocoa, or whatever. The argument runs, that the entire system then becomes distorted, as the market stops being able to ensure that the best land is issued for a certain job, and everyone in the end is poorer (even the subsidised coffee growers, whose livelihood depend on other charity). The problem with this argument is three fold. Firstly of course there is a real hard edge to it. In the name of the free market it assumes that it is alright to make people destitute, because in the long run everything will be alright for the majority of the people if we do. Any individual life is therefore expendable in the name of overall individual freedom. Secondly the argument assumes that markets operate well and freely, which as I mentioned above, is unlikely (or even impossible). Thirdly the argument is founded on a fallacy, in that it is ‘consumers’ choice and advertising that is driving ethical trading onwards. One can after all ‘taste the happiness’ in ethically produced goods. The irony is then that the apostles of the free market in attempting to argue that ethical trading is not good, are arguing against that which they mean to defend, that is, people’s choice and the power of the market….
The two elements of the hub of course reflect one another. The point of ethical trading is that it sets up and articulates a certain contour of knowledge, and glorifies this contour at the expense of the black-hole system that the entire process itself would otherwise be bound within. The texture that necessarily goes with the market is then itself valued, rather than the entire process itself. The strength then of the market system is that it allows this texturizing, which is of course merely a formal articulation of something which it always did.
The second zone mentioned above involves the imposition of the market on others, and the falling of elements out of the market system, into its hinterlands. Free markets historically impose themselves in two main ways. Firstly they look in others for echoes of themselves. The free market is never then simply an arbitrary code imposed upon other. It is rather a means or mechanism or perhaps a handbook, to distort other peoples in a certain way. People’s trading practices are then assessed according to the needs and duties of the free market. Those elements of their culture that are then said to already be of the free market are encouraged, whilst others are dampened down or actively suppressed. Peoples are thereby slowly warped into the ways of the market.
Secondly there is in this warping, a tension about everything that cannot be said to be of the free market. If it is not somehow ‘free’, and is not of the family, the assumption runs, it must be in some sense slavery. Southern Africa was therefore for the West, full of slave owning societies. That is, it was full of people who owed their livelihoods to tribal chiefs, and who must do bonded work for that chief. It did not matter that these slaves were actually free to wander off to find new masters, or that they had land or goods themselves. The simple fact that the people were not paid for their services made them deep down, or on some meta level, ‘slaves’. It then became a kindness to free these slaves from their oppression. That is, it became a kindness to simply impose the free market upon other peoples, freeing slaves and deposing chiefs. And being self-consciously kind, the missionaries which drove much of British colonial policy, followed through this abolition. No matter of course that the freed ‘slaves’ were much poorer in the new system. No matter that they were actually bound to the chiefs by far harder bonds or starved in large numbers; all that palled into insignificance in the face of their ‘freedom’.
This universalisation of slavery to include all kinds of bonded labour had a real hard bite to it. It allowed the West, in inventing a single word slavery, which captured a galaxy of different meanings – from the relatively benign political system of Mozambique to the horror and oppression of the slave ships, - all was slavery in one form or another. From which it followed that if the missionaries or anyone else for that matter went a little ‘native’ and took slaves themselves, it did not really matter whether they treated those slaves in the African or the European modes. The Sin was ‘going native’ in the first place, after that all was simply slavery. A nice little get out clause or partial admission that allowed all sorts of evil to sink in…
At the other end of the free market there is always the dream to escape the market place – be that in the temporary holiday or for good. The historical origins of the market are easy enough to define. There existed one body of people, the aristocrats, who did not need to indulge in all that noisy and dirty horse trading. Moreover the reason why they did not need to indulge in such trading was also clear. Their immunity from the market was tied to their ownership of land. To own land was to have an alternative to being in the free market. This alternative has then outlasted the aristocracy, but has become divided into two. On the one hand there is the dream to have an aristocratic mode of living (but not pay for it), and on the other, there is the related hankering after land. Each dream needs then to be briefly tackled in turn.
The dream to live ‘like an aristocrat’ is of course a dangerous dream in the free market. To live this way, and yet not have the means to do so, is to open oneself up to poverty. However over the last fifteen years or so (up to this year) a novel permutation has been developed. If entire countries, which were replete with influence and wealth as an accident or facet of history behaved that way (America or the UK), they could for a while distort the entire system, such that no one felt able to call in the debts and the artificially inflated currencies on which this consumer boom was based. The process becomes that perpetual creation of the free market, the South Sea Bubble, and yet this time with so much wealth caught up in it, that it was really very hard to burst. The only force capable of destroying it was of course the internal greed of the system. Or rather its own tendency to internalize the sub-prime condition on which its own wealth was based, such that those conditions became problematic to its internal system, and exploded into the external (and far harsher) sub-prime world that it had already conjured forth.
Secondly the issue of land haunts the free market. Land in its very permanence and its finite nature, offers a clear counter point to the restless indefiniteness of the free market. The Land becomes then the secure point in a shifting sea. A security which is claimed by those who have relished the system, and those who have sought to remove themselves from it. Of the former, it is notable that many (if not most) business people once they have made their fortune aspire to leave the smoke and mirrors of the market place, for the security of a property ‘portfolio’. To invest in property is therefore to have somehow ‘made it’. Of course the value of that land will go up or down, and yet the rhythms of those changes are somehow felt to be more regulated, more secure – there cannot after all, be more land to play with. Land becomes then the ultimate finite element in the world (a finitude that is however enduring). Of the latter people, that is those who want somehow to escape the market, the LAND has of course a totemic value, as the great answer to the dilemma of how one escapes a system that would otherwise appear intractable, and inescapable. The issue then of ‘getting back to the land’ becomes caught up with the issue of escaping to a degree, the selective-freedom of the free market. It is to be free in another way – free by serving perhaps a different master, that of climate and rock.
The Free market therefore enfolds three rather different elements or processes. It sweeps people up into it, a sweeping that leaves a historical legacy of its own; it spews them forth, and invents ways in which to a degree they might hope or dream to escape it; and it whirls them around with it. These processes are however, distinct from one another (it is therefore a mistake to think going that going ‘back to the land’ has much to do with returning to the pre-market world). Indeed all that perhaps links each of these processes is the same skein of problematic freedom which the market imposes. That is, a freedom that only comes with knowledge, and yet that knowledge is set within a system, where to know all becomes impossible (and therefore freedom becomes a dream or a nightmare). This freedom is powerful enough to corrode existing practices, detaching them into the free market whirlpool, and yet problematic enough to make people want to escape the whirlpool once it is spinning them around, and so look for other ways to be free. That other freedom is then somehow, by the same logic the market allows, tied to a notion of land and through land to nationhood, a move which will be considered in detail next week.
