Zoom out
“God is watching us”, sayeth the poet “from a distance”. From a distance- abstracted away from abstract concepts of law and justice which seem so important to the participants- focused on carnal concerns of power and desire- what does the economy look like?
What I am proposing here is not so much another theory of capitalism, or even an ethical critique, although I suppose it could be used to fuel both. It’s a way of looking at things that changes either nothing or everything. The facts remain, even the predictions of future states of the world remain the same, but the whole is different(1).
The economy as a flow of pain: A modified Roemerian system
John Roemer has a line of inquiry that looks quite like the Labor Theory of Value at first glimpse but, on inspection, is quite different. Roemer suggests we abstract away from price and value and just look at the flow of labor between people. Some people are net producers of labor, other people are net consumers of labor. A capitalist consumes more labor than they contribute, and a worker contributes more than they consume. Exploitation for Roemer is the status of consuming more labor than you produce. It captures, I think, some of the intuition behind the labor theory of value, while completely severing the connection with an attempt to explain price.
Roemer does all sorts of things with this model, and I think they’re fascinating but more than any sort of specific conclusion he draws from this I think it’s just a neat way to see the world. People make all sorts of excuses and narratives, but the flow of time still tells its own story.
I want to extend the model and make it about thwarted desire rather than time lost in laboring. For example, I might do half as much work as you, but maybe that work is very dangerous. There’s a sense in which you then might be exploiting me!
If we make the following assumptions:
People have cardinal and interpersonally comparable preferences [that is to say we can quantify how much a person wants something and compare it from person to person. There are empirical procedures that have been developed for cardinalisation, and there are reasonable and non-arbitrary ways to interpersonally compare.]
People make sacrifices (laboring or giving up resources) that they wish they didn’t have to make in production. These sacrifices make commodities, and we can, at least in principle, using the methods alluded to above, quantify the total sacrifice that has gone into each commodity
People consume these commodities, and hence people are sometimes both consumers and producers of sacrifice.
Society now appears to us as a flow of sacrifice, human sacrifice if you want to be dramatic.
Why care? What’s the intuition here?
Suppose an alien came to earth, and wanted to look at the flow of resources in society, particularly with regard to this question of political economy. They were interested in understanding ‘social metabolism’ from the point of view of who is powerful and who is not.
From this point of view, an alien might be attracted to our model. If you abstract away from our legal systems, ideology, political thought etc., and just want to figure out who’s getting the most out relative to what they put in.
It is a flip side of a more common model of the economy- an approach that describes it primarily in terms of the fulfillment of desire and the search for its fulfillment (e.g. a tradition starting with Robbins, a tradition starting with Lyotard and Deleuze & Guattari). Of course, all these authors were well aware of the frustration of desire as a factor, but this approach makes it the center.
Some suggested rules of thumb for identifying elite economic actors
Where:
(Sacrifices consumed/Sacrifices made) is very high you’re probably either looking at an elite, or you’re looking at someone who is very much not elite- a child, an elderly person, a disabled person or someone forced onto unemployment. To exclude this latter category of the disenfranchised, we can simply add a requirement that total sacrifice consumption must exceed, say, at least twice the average.
But what about parsimoniously consuming but still powerful elites? So far we’ve defined economic elites in terms of consumption, but technically one could consume vast amounts of suffering without really having much ‘power’ per se- or at least not much by way of actualized power.
Potential economic power can be defined as the capacity to induce ‘voluntary’ suffering, actualized economic power is actually inducing economic suffering. I say voluntary in scare quotes because merely holding and defending property in effect coerces others (e.g. see Hale’s essay on the subject here). Nonetheless, there is a sense in which people ‘agree’ to their economic suffering under capitalism. Actualized economic power is the extent to which you really do induce voluntary suffering.
The model we’ve created is a bloody one, in the sense that it is zero-sum. Humans, hopefully, get more joy and eudaimonia from life than we get suffering, but our model necessarily sums to zero. No more suffering can be consumed than is produced through, well, suffering. You might say this is unrealistic, but it is perfect for our target concept- exploitation- the extent to which some people win out more than others.
Capital’s contribution to production
So now the bit we’ve all been waiting for for- are capitalists parasites, from the point of view of the sacrificial economy?
It’s been remarked (maybe by Machlup?) that the question of whether or not capital is ‘productive’ is far less interesting than the question of whether the capitalist should be accredited the produce of ‘his’ capital.
But let’s grant for the moment that the capitalist ‘rightfully’ owns his capital, and the expenditure of capital is ‘his’ sacrificial contribution to production (the use of the male pronoun is deliberate given the gender composition of the capitalist class). Presumably, the sacrifice the capitalist makes is abstaining from consumption. How does this figure in terms of a sacrificial economy?
Well, not much really. A million dollars worth of capital investment is almost always going to involve much less personal disutility than a million dollars worth of labor investment, even though both will receive roughly the same returns.
Certainly, the disutility of capitalist investment is going to be much smaller as a proportion of total utility than returns to the capital as a proportion of all income. Capital income in Australia is about 40%. Do you really think that 40% of the blood sweat and tears in the economy comes from capitalists abstaining from consuming their capital? It might not even be one-tenth that.
Disability
It’s important to be clear that our metric is not a scale of morality. Some profoundly disabled people may not perform much labor, but they are not exploiters.
But an interesting consequence of our framework -in contrast to Roemer’s original framework- is that many disabled people are actually super contributors from the point of view of suffering. Many, perhaps most, disabilities make work harder, but not impossible. Given my own disability, for example, I’m a super contributor to the suffering economy.
Because capitalism grades us on output (sort of- not even really that tbh), not blood, sweat and tears put into the job, the result is that capitalism expects the disabled to suffer more than ordinary people in the process of production in order to receive the same wages. The bible and Marx alike might be united in agreeing: To whom much is given, much will be required (Luke 12:48) or from each according to his ability (Critique of the Gotha Program), but capital makes no such allowances and even advanced welfare states often fail to recognize and deal justly with reduced as opposed to absent work capacity [tbc- they also do abysmally with respect to absent capacity].
An inequality metric for comparing societies on suffering input-output
Define a unit of suffering or loss. Perhaps the unit could equal the forgone value of having an hour simply disappear from your life. Or the pain of a pinprick. It doesn’t really matter.
Call this the suffering unit.
Now, for each individual, work out in suffering units the value of:
(Suffering consumed) - (Suffering endured in production)
This gives us each individual’s ‘suffering balance’
Assuming a closed economy, and abstracting away from investment, the total suffering balances, will by definition, sum to zero across the whole economy.
How do we define inequality and compare it between societies relative to our definition of a unit of suffering?
Take the absolute value of everyone’s suffering balance
Sum them together
Divide by two
Divide by the total units of suffering consumed
This will give us a suffering inequality metric closely related to the Theil measure of inequality. Call it the Latty index of suffering inequality, in honor of my friend Kieran Latty.
1 means perfect inequality and zero means perfect equality.
Note that this metric- because of the division- is unit neutral
Are these statistics practically quantifiable?
We can probably approximate them, yes. We have ways of working out how much a dollar means to a person depending on their income. As a result, have ways of working out how much an hour of work means to a person (look at how much they demand in pay for it, and how that varies over the income schedule).
Footnote
1- When interacting with the world, it’s easy to change moments and hard to change wholes, in thought, it’s easy to imagine different wholes out of the constellation of moments, but the moments are harder to change.
A couple questions about the “suffering economy” model (which may just be due to my non-expertise):
1. Doesn’t using the suffering balance as a way to define capitalists vs workers not really work? Consider a highly paid professional (e.g. a doctor) who spends all their income on consumption (thereby not accumulating any capital). Their suffering balance is almost assuredly negative (as long as their work is not abnormally unpleasant to them), but it seems wholly wrong to consider them a capitalist in any sense. Am I missing something here?
2. The suffering metric (in either the subtraction or division forms) also doesn’t seem to account for people having substantially lessened suffering from their work. Consider a moderately successful musician whose passion is music (so producing music itself causes no suffering to them). There will still be some suffering from e.g having to run the business side of their music career, but they would overall show up on the suffering measures much the same as a mid-scale prototypical capitalist.
Neither of these break the usefulness of the construct of course, but they seem like important limitations to it. Is there work addressing these limitations?