Adam Smith would be far less popular today were it not for
his indolent generalizations about the march of progress in America and his contempt for Asia . Nearly 240 years later, as we watch as the
economies built on his perfunctory musings crumble despite the most impassioned
interventions, it is ironic that we still blindly follow our Hobbesian
Narcissism to his Echo. Wealth is Power, we hear in the romantic
distance and gaze longingly into the pool of our reflection puzzling over the
beauty of our own projection. Like the
woodland nymphs of antiquity, European leaders intervene in Spain this
weekend while the U.S. Congress and the sparring presidential campaigns
blissfully ignore the 'fiscal cliff' looming at year's end.
In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
writes:
Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which
he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniencies, and amusements of human
life. But after the division of labour has once thoroughly taken place, it is
but a very small part of these with which a man's own labour can supply him.
The far greater part of them he must derive from the labour of other people,
and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he
can command, or which he can afford to purchase. The value of any commodity,
therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume
it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity
of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour therefore, is the
real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.
It is ironic that this Spring and Summer of European
discontent is emanating from economies that have long shunned the very labor
celebrated by their economic demigod. Far
more insidious is the abject failure with which U.S. economists and their operators
adequately price the cost of our economic dependency built on our militarized
extreme of the "command" of labor.
Our "fiscal cliff" is looming larger than all estimates given
the fruit borne of our unconsidered resolution to violent control of
commodities which, having yet again lurched into military campaigns in Iraq and
Afghanistan from which we will have no quantifiable gain, we will seek to
repatriate our soldiers and repurpose our industrial complex only to find that
we've built nothing of transferrable value.
While at the end of the Great Wars we were able to forge a civilian manufacturing
base, exactly how do you repurpose unwitting mercenaries and nation-building
consultants who failed to build what they were handsomely paid to build? Bringing our soldiers home to unemployment
and having austerity hit our defense budget in January leaves the U.S. in the
unenviable position of adding violence to austerity. And we thought that with our wealth came power. Hobbes didn't see
that with violent power comes moral poverty.
The fallacy of historicism so richly imbued in Smith's view
and so warmly embraced by his protégés is built upon a linear regression that
suggests that:
Free Natural Resources + Commanded Labor = Colonial Wealth.
Now we clearly don't wish to think of ourselves as still
living in the bigotry of colonialist models.
However, as I pointed out in last week's post, the shareholders of Rio
Tinto's Bougainville Copper Limited celebrate surrogated cannibalism when they
turn a blind eye towards the death of 20,000 people so their company can
enforce a mining concession granted by the U.N.-sanctioned
colonial
administration of Bougainville by Australia ! When Smith's 'command of labor' is taken to
the militarized extreme, we find ourselves building an entirely unsustainable
order of affairs which is sure to collapse - most probably in the most
inelegant of ways.
In my presentation tomorrow (the manuscript will be
published in the Proceedings and is
available upon request), I will be suggesting that wealth needs to be
redefined and liberated from its dominion-based, colonial empowered
moral bankruptcy. In an argument
suggesting that sustainability is a function of the ability to enjoy
non-destructive utility of matter and energy while preserving as much essential
optionality as possible, I propose that:
wealth = utility x retained optionality∞
where ∞ = ∫ of all users across all value dimensions
When one considers this formula, one can readily see that
the greatest wealth is experienced when the maximum benefit can be derived (in
number of participants) from the least phase and state alteration (for more on
this, take a look at my previous postings on Phase and State Coherence). And the more value (in terms of integral
accounting) dimensions can be simultaneously appreciated by the more
participants, the greater the momentary and residual wealth.
In future posts, we will broaden the inquiry into this expansion
of Buckminister Fuller's view of wealth which he described as the, "organized capability to cope effectively
with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both
the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives." By liberating this definition from its
linearity, one can see that a Common Wealth can emerge, be characterized, and,
in application, be the basis for a More Perfect Union.
bravo, David - is it me, or does your voice become more clear with each new post?
ReplyDeletegood luck tomorrow and I would definitely like to have access to the manuscript of your presentation. I especially look forward to sharing Buckminster Fuller inspirations. I keep running into more and more references to his work, happily so.
David,
ReplyDeleteLast night I began to write about coherence and dissonance in a discussion of money in politics. I like that I was also considering human futures when we ‘don’t know from Adam’ Smith, addressing Phase, via incrementalism, imagining recovery from collective tailspins induced by too long at stall speeds, hidden by artificial momentums.
From late last night:
“Once it is realized, from within the current structures, that the long term lucrative depends on integrating multiple bottom lines [on integral accounting], in opening the processes of influence to the relevance of greater common good(s), we may actually begin to see transitions to forms of political responsibility which tend inherently to be more unifying than divisive.”
“The accommodation of effectively inclusive interests will need to be shown to also hold greater fiscal promise than goals defined by mere market-state profitability. In other words, the deadlock of the stranglehold of money on politics requires an aikido in terms of radically accepting the state of affairs and turning it into what else it can become. Otherwise, further divisions, and their polarizing/centralizing of power, remain the norm.”
“…I look for alternative and intermediary steps to undo undue influence. …corporations, being one of our main institutional forms, are entitled to a certain voice in policy in accord with their responsibility toward the whole of the nested societies which they're embedded in. A reciprocity of endorsement isn't necessarily unhealthy either. When sectors refrain from locking interests into narrow reciprocity, and commit to non-privileging strategies (something we haven't seen yet) the legislation of separations [church/state, public/private] may no longer apply. True separations seem to depend on that differentiation of motivation and of behavior. Until then, as Senator Dick Lugar told me in '91, 'we can no longer rely on morality. So we need the rule of law'. Today I'm positing a Second Morality, one coming after the parental interventions of legislation.”
(trusting this pertains more directly…)
ReplyDeleteIn light of one of Bucky’s more succinct definitions of wealth, “Wealth is know-how”, we could read ‘wealth’ where ‘power’ is written in Hannah Arendt‘s lecture, Reflections on Violence:
“…it is not enough to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course its end is the disappearance of power. This implies that it is not correct to say that the opposite of violence is nonviolence: to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”
Recourse to violence results where ‘know-how’, or optionality, is insufficient to achieve an assumed end without it. The longer an adopted ‘internal logic’ operates, such as in Smith’s adherents, the greater the incidence of external disconfirmations. Long views still indicate that self defeat is predicated on other defeat. Whereas (to paraphrase Fuller) ultimate private success depends on universal success.