Veblen’s out of the box critique of Capitalism
To vehemently critique capitalism, more often than not, is to be seen as a raging communist. Much of the global political discourse seems to hold on to Cold War rhetoric and jargon about what capitalism is, and its problems. There is an insistence in perceiving Russia and China as communist superpowers, in opposition to the US and Europe, while the rest is still 3rd world – even though all of these economies have merged into a cesspool of mutually assured destruction in debt, tech and stock. This may sound harsh, but upon observation of the global state of affairs (homelessness, poverty, war, climate change), how can we find its positive spin? How far has humanity evolved since the second industrial revolution? If only there were evidence that the human condition improves at the same rate technology advances.
Thorstein Veblen, a notorious economist from the late 19th century, reveals how stuck western civilization has been when it comes to the issue of economic development, and whether economics has anything to do with human development.
Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science by Veblen follows the late 19th century tradition, which obviously predates social media drama, of utilizing academic, journalistic and printed writing as a vehicle for public debates and vitriol. After all, the twitter-thread mode of attack has only been one of a myriad of methods throughout history for venting frustrations with individuals, institutions and colleagues.
He was an insider from the academic world of economics that showed that the foundations of the principles of this field, “monetary theory”, are quite pathetic. Especially when compared to natural sciences. In fact, he argues, there is nothing natural about money and its theory, and the classical attempts to perceive it as such were quite irritating to him. He denounces coercion in lines of reasoning in the field of economics that have the nocive goal of promoting religious levels of faith into theories which don’t hold up to the scientific methods of arriving at truths.
To him, the classical tradition of economics is academic and religious, as opposed to scientific and natural. It seeks normalcy, although it has little to no evidence for its signifiers. A signifier of normalcy is not evidence of its meaning or its existence. So, a philosophical exercise addressing what is normal about economics in humanity shows that such normalcy is not natural.
This question may come off as convoluted and impractical at first; indeed, the field of philosophy is filled with clichés like these. But if we stop to ask ourselves if we really think there is anything natural about the economic system we are living in, we might realize that, although we may not think it is, we certainly treat it as if it was.
The process of attaching Value to money, wages or financial transactions is normalized under the guise of logic, science, and truth. When, in reality, it’s a barbaric, savage or superstitious thing to do.
Naturally, Veblen doesn’t arrive at this conclusion in the most structured and direct manner. He’s a passionate, intelligent, but a ranting tipsy companion, who proudly raises the flag of a one-man movement. He seeks no base of followers, or a coordinated maneuver by a ‘working class’. He just calls out the incongruence of theories which govern our lives.
According to John P. Diggins in Animism and the Origins of Alienation, Veblen sets himself apart from Marx in one fundamental way: in how animism relates to alienation. Marx argued that it was through labor that humans connected to nature, while Veblen argued that to connect to anything, humans have to comprehend it, and this comprehension doesn’t have to have anything to do with the truth about nature.
Marx assumed that through work man would be able to overcome the dualism that separates man from nature because subjective human activity is itself the process of objective activity through which man "humanizes nature." Veblen doubted that this chasm could be bridged, that man could comprehend the world simply by changing it. Whereas Marx believed that man must act in order to know, Veblen believed that man must apprehend before he acts, and what he apprehends may never be the real world as it really is. Man labors upon matter while at the same time never really grasping the natural world; for a disenchanted nature, so necessary to scientific progress, is so chilling to man that he is compelled to impute anthropomorphic interpretations to objects and institutions of his own creation, thereby rendering what is natural and changeable sacred and immutable. (Diggins, page 129)
To change the world through labor doesn’t bring us closer to the reality of the world. In fact, for us to even begin thinking of the possibility of working to change our world, we need to have concocted some superstitious theory about how the world works.
Animism, in Veblen’s eyes, is the beginning of this superstition about reality, which later developed into organized religion. But to him, animism is projection — Humans projecting themselves onto other worldly elements.
In my view, that is not to say animism is used in this argument to paint conventional economic theory in a bad, ‘primitive’, light. It is used to show that, if we have the ability to materialize the gods of industry and the capitalist market with the power of our “myth-making”, we could also be using this power to materialize something, you know, that works better. In his time, to him, this probably meant women’s, immigrants’ and workers’ rights, less Christianism in educational institutions, less frivolous spending or desperate displays of status.
Animism doesn’t have to mean immutability in our perception or experience of nature. Things can change, and be changed by us. It’s conspicuous that both Adam Smith and Karl Marx centered ‘Workmanship’ in their theories, because the labor they exalted clearly served a purpose to industry. That is not to say that Veblen thought his proposal of focusing on a more scientific method would lead to better results. He just believed in the need to nurture the potential for change. These theorists who tell us that all we are good for is work have not arrived at an immutable truth about the human condition. The truth is still out there, most likely. We just have to keep looking.
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
Mirna is a Brazilian writer, site editor at Gods and Radicals and founder of Plataforma9. She is the author of the book Anarcho-transcreation and producer of several other titles under the P9 press.