{"id":117364,"date":"2018-09-10T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=117364"},"modified":"2018-09-10T12:32:20","modified_gmt":"2018-09-10T11:32:20","slug":"solidarity-for-full-employment-whole-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/09\/solidarity-for-full-employment-whole-paper\/","title":{"rendered":"Solidarity for Full Employment (whole paper)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read Editorial HERE<\/a><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Contents:<\/em><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Analysis of the Bottleneck Problem<\/em><\/li>\n
  2. Examples (showing how to solve the bottleneck problem)<\/em><\/li>\n
  3. The Road from Here to There (generalizing from the examples)<\/em><\/li>\n
  4. The Imperative to Maximize Profits (blocks the road from here to there)<\/em><\/li>\n
  5. The Fiscal Crisis of the State (blocks the road from here to there)<\/em><\/li>\n
  6. Unbounded Organization (a way forward)<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    *********<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Analysis of the Bottleneck Problem<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      The problems of drug addiction, gangs, crime, ethnic nationalism, racism, sexism, chronic depression, immigration issues, poverty in old age, mental illness, war, inner city schools, taking necessary measures to save the biosphere that cost jobs, and many others will not be reduced to manageable proportions, much less solved, until human life is reorganized so that most people who need decent employment are able to find it.\u00a0 Would you agree?\u00a0 I call employment a bottleneck problem.\u00a0 If it is not solved, many other problems will not be solved either.<\/p>\n

      To solve it, I advocate more non-market employment.\u00a0\u00a0 More non-market employment can be made possible by those of us who have more than we need.\u00a0 We can make it possible by sharing more than we do now with those of us who have less than they need, either voluntarily or involuntarily. \u00a0\u00a0One might also add a third category of \u201csemi-voluntary\u201d sharing (sharing is known to economists as \u201ctransfers\u201d).\u00a0 The third category would cover transfers where decent employment is made possible by moving resources in ways that are neither voluntary (as is donating to a symphony orchestra, helping it to pay musicians) nor involuntary (as is paying taxes, helping\u00a0 governments to comply with Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, establishing the right of everyone to employment with just and favourable remuneration) but somewhere in between (like funding a charitable foundation that subsidizes asset based community development,[i]<\/a> which in turn creates livelihoods where there were none, in order to get favourable publicity and a tax exemption).<\/p>\n

      Although \u201cdecent\u201d implies raising wages and freedom from debt slavery, I will save emphasis on raising wages and easing the burdens of debt for other days and concentrate here on inclusion.<\/p>\n

      The non-market alternative may be purebred, as in the case of a research scientist whose salary is paid entirely by the Rockefeller Foundation; or hybrid, i.e. partly non-market and partly market, as in the case of the coach of a football-4-youth programme whose salary is funded partly by the city government and partly by sales of tickets to games. Whatever the non-market alternative may be in a given case, purebred or hybrid, I want to make it as crystal clear as I possibly can that sales in markets alone cannot<\/em> solve this bottleneck problem.<\/p>\n

      Market employment depends on sales.\u00a0 In the standard case, workers contribute to producing goods and services that are sold at a profit.\u00a0 If they cannot be sold at a profit, they are not produced, and therefore no workers are hired.\u00a0\u00a0 The workers are paid their salaries out of the revenue from the sales of the products.\u00a0\u00a0 Business owners, tax collectors, landlords, executives, bankers, suppliers, advertisers, as well as several other classes of people are also in line to collect their slices of the revenue-from-sales pie.\u00a0\u00a0 Unless they too take their cuts, the business is a no-go, and once again no workers are hired.\u00a0 Do you see what I am driving at?\u00a0\u00a0 I am saying that whether there will be market employment is iffy.\u00a0 There is no guarantee whatever that there will be a job, much less a decent one, for everybody who needs one.\u00a0 There is no guarantee whatever that every child born will have solvent parents who can afford to buy diapers, baby food, a crib and a baby buggy.<\/p>\n

      The picture is somewhat different if the firm is non-standard, like a coop, or a firm owned by its employees, or is owned by its customers (like a mutual insurance or water company); or is a non-profit cemetery or hospital or school; or is an autonomous parastatal like the New York Port Authority or is owned by one or another level of government like the State Bank of North Dakota; or if we are talking about self-employment.\u00a0 Employment in non-standard forms may also be purebred (non-market) or hybrid (partly market and partly non-market).\u00a0 I am saying that to the extent that employment depends on sales to generate the fund from which salaries are paid, we are talking about a market solution to the problem and therefore it is iffy.[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

      The probability that market solutions will reliably provide decent employment for all of the human beings on this planet who need decent employment is the same as the probability of a snowball in hell.\u00a0 Would you agree?\u00a0 Let me explain why that probability is precisely zero, and not some slightly larger number like .01.<\/p>\n

      The reason is structural.\u00a0 It is a consequence of the rules of the game, not just a conclusion derived by induction from the empirical observation of many labour markets.\u00a0 The basic social structure, also known the basic cultural structure, of modern society is the market.\u00a0\u00a0 Theodor Adorno calls it the Tauschprinzip, <\/em>the principle of exchange.\u00a0 He finds that in our times a Tauschprinzip<\/em> mentality, which tends to see everything and everybody as a commodity for sale, affects and infects all of human life.\u00a0 While some cultures live by fishing and fishing sets the tone for everything else, some by raising corn, some by pastoralism, some by slash and burn agriculture, some by hunting and gathering, and some in other ways, the basic rules of our game (the cultural rules that constitute the material relations of our basic social structure[iii]<\/a>) are those of buying and selling.<\/p>\n

      The buying and selling game is a game with losers. That is why the probability of reliable decent employment for everyone provided by markets alone with no help from other institutions is zero and not .01.\u00a0 The losers are those who do not sell enough at a high enough price to make a living.\u00a0 There have to be losers.\u00a0\u00a0 Every player aims to have accounts receivable greater than accounts payable.\u00a0 Similarly, everyone wants to take in more money than they pay out.\u00a0 They want to save some.\u00a0 In John Maynard Keynes terminology, everyone has a liquidity preference; people want the freedom that comes from keeping some liquid cash in their pockets or in the bank without spending it.[iv]<\/a><\/p>\n

      But one person\u2019s receivable is another person\u2019s payable.\u00a0 If some people take in more than they pay out, some people must pay out more than they take in.\u00a0 The sum of receivables and payables must be equal.<\/p>\n

      Given that it takes expectations of profit to motivate producing and hiring; in other words, an expectation that more will come in than goes out; and given that some such expectations must be mistaken, because not everybody can have receivables greater than payables, and given that business cannot run along forever on illusory expectations that are not true, there will be some investments not made and some people not hired.[v]<\/a><\/p>\n

      Some of us religious and\/or ethical types believe there is a moral duty to work.\u00a0 Such a duty seems to us to follow from the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself.\u00a0 You should use your talents to serve others in some way. Thomas Piketty\u2019s data suggests that today most wealthy people agree with us.\u00a0 Today people who do not have to work because they have independent incomes, usually do work.[vi]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Apparently, they work because contributing to society by producing goods or services of some kind is the right thing to do, according to prevailing social expectations, and according to their own consciences.<\/p>\n

      On the other hand, there can be no moral duty to be employed.\u00a0\u00a0 An employment contract is a sale.\u00a0 A sale requires a buyer as well as a seller.\u00a0\u00a0 The ideal of liberty expressed in the rule of law implies that there is no duty to buy.\u00a0 The social realities constituted by the basic cultural rules imply that it would be self-defeating for business owners and managers to hire people when the products of their labour cannot profitably be sold.[vii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Therefore, willingness to sell one\u2019s labour is no guarantee that there exists a willing buyer ready and able to buy it.\u00a0 Some people will fail to comply with making the contributions to society and to supporting a family that religion and social norms expect and will be structurally humiliated.<\/em><\/p>\n

      \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>History confirms this analysis of the implications of the rules of the buying and selling game. What the social structure makes inevitable is what is observed.\u00a0\u00a0 As John Maynard Keynes writes in his General Theory<\/em>[viii]<\/a>, the historical record shows that full employment, or even approximately full employment, has rarely occurred, and when it has occurred it has been temporary.\u00a0 Keynes could have added that there are also times when full employment\u2019s alleged occurrence, in addition to being temporary, is also bogus.\u00a0 Full employment can be and sometimes is defined as fewer than 5% jobless, and then announced as a statistical fact even when everybody can see the homeless people on the sidewalks.\u00a0 For example, the fraction of workers who are unemployed is calculated inflating the numerator by counting beggars trying to sell handicrafts as self-employed, and deflating the denominator by disregarding all who are not at the present time known to be trying to sell themselves in the labour market.<\/p>\n

      All of the above was true even before today\u2019s apparently irreversible trend of technology \u2013exemplified by Toyota manufacturing automobiles with robots instead of workers and Tesco running supermarkets with automated check-outs instead of clerks\u2014 started making most human work redundant.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Work is indeed becoming redundant as a means for producing goods and services to sell.\u00a0 But it is not becoming redundant as a means for making a living, bringing up children, achieving self-esteem, and achieving self-realization.\u00a0\u00a0 Worldwide, economies are requiring fewer workers; but workers are not requiring fewer jobs.<\/p>\n

      It follows that now, and even more in the future, and even when sales in markets and investments in the expectation of sales are doing as well as can reasonably be expected in generating employment; it will still be necessary to rely on non-market employment in order to meet the needs of all our sisters and brothers in the human family.\u00a0 My brothers and sisters stuff here is solidarity-talk, of course; not Economics 101- talk. We need more solidarity talk.<\/p>\n

      \u201cSolidarity\u201d is the word chosen here to play the role of name for the cure for unemployment.\u00a0 Runner-up candidates for the part were \u201cunbounded organization,\u201d \u201cdharmic living,\u201d \u201cstewardship,\u201d \u201cservant leadership\u201d or \u201cservanthood,\u201d and \u201ccommunity.\u201d\u00a0 Among the candidates who did not make the short list were \u201cplanning,\u201d \u201cdevelopment,\u201d \u201cgrowth,\u201d \u201cproductivity,\u201d \u201ctax cuts,\u201d \u201cflexible wages,\u201d \u201ctechnical education,\u201d \u201cinternational competitiveness,\u201d \u201cbusiness-friendly governments,\u201d \u201cinfrastructure investment,\u201d \u201cincubating start-ups\u201d and \u201ccompetency-based education partnering with internships in industry to produce the profiles employers are looking for.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 In a given situation one or more of these also-rans might be useful or it might be counter-productive, but in principle none of them could possibly be the cure.\u00a0 The cure must be something that undoes the cause.\u00a0 The cause is structural.\u00a0 The cure must be structural.\u00a0 The cause, the fundamental cause, is that markets generate losers as well as winners.\u00a0\u00a0 The cure has to turn win\/lose into win\/win.<\/p>\n

      The choice of \u201csolidarity\u201d sets us on the path toward building cultures where everybody is a winner and nobody is a loser.\u00a0 Even so, the choice of the term was not unanimous.\u00a0\u00a0 Some members of the jury voted against \u201csolidarity\u201d because there are parts of the world people have good reasons for never wanting to hear it again. Solidarity has been the rhetoric of unworkable schemes that existed only on paper, while the reality has been inefficient bureaucracies, corruption, the silencing of dissent, and terror.\u00a0\u00a0 When I am conversing with people for whom \u201csolidarity\u201d brings back a nightmare that has shattered their nerves, I never use the word.\u00a0 Let me explain why I do use it here.<\/p>\n

      The word began its career as a player in the discourse of modernity as solidarit\u00e9.\u00a0 <\/em>It was a watchword and an ideal of the French working class in the mid nineteenth century.[ix]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The French delegation brought it into the first socialist international, the International Workingman\u2019s Association, founded in London in 1861, and through it into the world\u2019s main languages.\u00a0\u00a0 Its main meanings were two: Stand Together United, and Mutual Aid.\u00a0 In its early days, it was used especially in raising funds for international aid sent to comrades in distress in other countries.\u00a0\u00a0 Pope Paul VI (1963-1978) did more than anyone else to integrate \u201csolidarity\u2019 into the social doctrine of the Catholic Church.\u00a0\u00a0 For the Judaeo-Christian tradition the word was new but the idea was not.[x]<\/a>\u00a0 On April 3, 1987, speaking at the headquarters of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America in Santiago, Pope John Paul II could say: \u201cMy call, then, takes the form of a moral imperative:\u00a0 Practice solidarity above all!\u00a0 Whatever may be your function in the fabric of economic and social life, construct in the region an economy of solidarity!\u00a0 With these words I propose for your consideration what in my recent message for the World Day of Peace I called a new type of relation:\u00a0 the social solidarity of all.\u201d[xi]<\/a><\/p>\n

      Solidarity is a word historically associated with questioning the system.\u00a0 <\/em>It is associated with questioners coming from a socialist point of view.\u00a0 It is also associated with questioners coming from a pre-modern religious point of view.\u00a0 It is a word that puts structural change on the agenda by proposing \u2013and often the proposals are made by people who practice what they preach\u2014 living by the rules of a different basic social structure.<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Examples<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Before I consider in general terms the path from a dysfunctional present to a functional future, I will give a specific example of how to dignify the structurally humiliated, and then a specific example of how to generate surplus to be used for that purpose.<\/p>\n

        Alexandra, affectionately known by its diminutive \u201cAlex,\u201d is a poor district of Johannesburg, South Africa. As is unfortunately also the case in too many other locations on this planet, the majority of the young people are unemployed and unhappy.\u00a0 Many sink into drugs, into indiscriminate sex leading to AIDS and to gender-based violence, into hustling suckers and mugging those who resist; and if they are female roaming the streets looking for a man who will give them money for favours.\u00a0 But if you visit a certain old church building on the main avenue of Alex on a weekday afternoon you will find twelve young people who are employed and happy.[xii]<\/a><\/p>\n

        They are practicing their song and dance routines: like Black Motion by Imali and Babes Wodumo by Wololo; as well as oldies like Cat Daddy and Bird Walk.\u00a0 They had to audition to get into the troupe.\u00a0\u00a0 Once they are in, they need discipline and self-discipline to learn their steps and their lines and to do them right; as well as the self-discipline required to show up for work, to be on time, to arrive sober, and to stay clean in more senses than one.\u00a0\u00a0 Expressing general agreement with Aristotle\u2019s theory of virtue (arete<\/em>) in his Nichomachean Ethics<\/em>, although I have no hard evidence about the dancers of Alex, I believe their discipline leads them to virtue, and that virtue leads them to happiness.<\/p>\n

        Expressing general agreement with Abraham Maslow, I suggest that their performances in public spaces, mostly schools, satisfy their needs for recognition and their needs for self-esteem.[xiii]<\/a>\u00a0 Their pay checks give them the dignity denied to the millions who are structurally humiliated because they are rejected by labour markets where for the structural reasons just discussed supply perpetually exceeds demand.\u00a0 And at the base of Maslow\u2019s pyramid, a little money in the pocket gives them food, drink and raiment they do not have to beg, borrow, or steal for.<\/p>\n

        The services the dancers provide for the school children who are their main audiences are more than entertainment.\u00a0\u00a0 They provide role models of drug-free youth who are having fun.\u00a0 They keep alive the hope that perhaps, after all, employment might be a real possibility for the children in the audience when they grow older.<\/p>\n

        A main reason why I call the song and dance troupe practicing in the old church on the main avenue of Alex an example of non-market employment made possible by s<\/em>olidarity<\/em> is that it is paid for by sharing the surplus.<\/em>\u00a0 Money and other resources are moved from where they are not needed to where they are needed.\u00a0\u00a0 Thanks to public and private donors, it is possible for non-market employment to step into the breach and save the day when market employment fizzles.\u00a0 Sharing the surplus<\/em> is working for twelve formerly unemployed youth in one building on one street in Alex; and then it spreads its benefits around the city as the dancers fan out to entertain the kids in the schools.\u00a0 Although numbers are small compared to the 12 million who need decent jobs and do not have them in South Africa,[xiv]<\/a> it is a pilot that demonstrates a principle.\u00a0\u00a0 It helps me \u2013does it help you? \u2014to imagine new civilizations in a future when robots will do the heavy lifting and artificial intelligence will do all the thinking for which there is an algorithm.\u00a0 Labour will not be as large a factor of production as it is now.\u00a0 But –compared to now– the percentage of people finding decent employment will increase, not decrease because surplus will be shared and wisely used.<\/p>\n

        The ethical principle of sharing the surplus is not new.\u00a0\u00a0 In the 13th<\/sup> century St Thomas Aquinas wrote that your property was not yours alone.[xv]<\/a>\u00a0 It also belonged to the people you could aid with your surplus.\u00a0 Today Pope Francis incessantly repeats the same message.\u00a0 In the 13th<\/sup> century sharing the surplus was already an old idea.\u00a0\u00a0 It had already been practiced for hundreds of years from the villages of Africa to the igloos of the Arctic and everywhere in between.\u00a0 If our ancestors had not practiced group loyalty and mutual aid, they would not have survived and we would not have been born.<\/p>\n

        I need another example.\u00a0 The singing dancers of Alex illustrate surplus wisely used.\u00a0 I need another example to illustrate where surplus comes from in the first place, and how it is generated by benefactors of humanity who create it not to hoard it but to share it.[xvi]<\/a>\u00a0 I have found no better example than Paul, history\u2019s most famous tent-maker.<\/p>\n

        I will be asking Paul to work two shifts.\u00a0 Here I will ask him to serve as an illustration of basic Christian ethics.\u00a0 Later, not in this paper but in a sequel, I will ask him to work overtime to illustrate the broader norms of reciprocity[xvii]<\/a> and redistribution that social scientists find to be busy at work functioning to meet human needs[xviii]<\/a> in many different cultures past and present, East and West, North and South. Hear Paul in chapter 20, verses 33 to 38 of The Acts of the Apostles<\/em>:<\/p>\n

        33 I have not coveted anyone\u2019s silver or gold or clothing.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

        34 <\/em>You yourselves know that these hands of mine have supplied my own needs and the needs of my companions.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

        35 <\/em>In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said:\u00a0<\/em>\u2018It is more blessed to give than to receive.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

        36 When Paul had finished speaking, he knelt down with all of them and prayed.\u00a037 They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him.\u00a038 What grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again. Then they accompanied him to the ship.<\/em>[xix]<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

        The lessons I draw from this text are three:\u00a0 Paul was not interested in accumulating wealth.\u00a0 He made tents to meet his needs, and the needs of his companions.\u00a0 After he had made enough tents to meet immediate needs, he went on making more tents for the purpose of generating a surplus so he could help others.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

        Following Paul\u2019s example, the generic principle of creating a surplus for the purpose of sharing it, can be articulated as: make more tents.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

          \n
        1. The Road from Here to There<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          The problems of drug addiction, gangs, crime, ethnic nationalism, racism, sexism, chronic depression, immigration issues, poverty in old age, mental illness, war, inner city schools, taking necessary measures to save the biosphere that cost jobs, and many others will not be reduced to manageable proportions, much less solved, until human life is reorganized so that most people who need decent employment are able to find it.\u00a0\u00a0 If this bottleneck problem is going to be solved at all, it will be solved by transferring resources from somewhere.\u00a0 It cannot be solved just by paying people the market value of their labour, out of funds generated by the sale of the products they contribute to making.<\/p>\n

          Many will fear \u2013indeed for many it is an automatic kneejerk reaction to fear– that the road from here to there will be closed because the one percent will close it.\u00a0 People whose labour-power still does <\/em>have a high market value might successfully resist any effort to persuade or compel them to make more tents and hand over the proceeds from selling the tents to people who sing and dance and put on free shows for schoolchildren for a living.\u00a0 The same might be true in spades for rentiers.<\/p>\n

          Indeed, as a matter of history high income people have tended to back free market ideologies that oppose government intervention to transfer wealth from where it is not needed to where it is needed.[xx]<\/a>\u00a0 According to such ideologies, everything would be peachy keen in a pure free market world: price signals alone will determine who gets what; competition will move prices and therefore demand and supply to equilibrium; everything demanded will be supplied and everything supplied will be demanded; everyone who wants to work will find work; prices (including wages, the price of labour) will be exactly what they should be\u00a0 — where what they should be is determined by relative scarcities interacting with the free choices of individuals to buy what they want and not buy what they do not want.\u00a0 In technical jargon: the first theorem of welfare economics is that general equilibrium is a Pareto optimum.<\/p>\n

          History as it has happened has been different.\u00a0 When they are applied, free market policies inspired by orthodox-but-false[xxi]<\/a> theories invariably fail to prevent or contribute to creating the growth of a class of have-nots prone to crime, prone to substance abuse, prone to organizing and expanding demi-mondes<\/em> ruled by violence and by big dirty money, prone to extremism, to terrorism, and to rebellion.\u00a0\u00a0 The same people who make the free choices of buyers and sellers the ethical foundation of their economic theories, when compelled to cope in practice with the demons that applying their theories generates, invariably call for more power for the police and the military, tougher judges, and more awful punishments.[xxii]<\/a><\/p>\n

          History suggests that my proposal to follow the example of Paul of Tarsus may not appeal to prosperous conservatives.\u00a0 They may think creating more surplus and using it wisely support dignity for the humiliated (and therefore dangerous) classes is too high a price to pay for social peace.\u00a0 Or too unrealistic to work.\u00a0 Historically, they have usually preferred crackdowns.\u00a0 In today\u2019s circumstances, the crackdowns would have to become progressively more severe as structural unemployment becomes progressively more severe.\u00a0\u00a0 They would fit the pattern of reliance on force to keep power that Arnold Toynbee in his study of history identified with the terminal illnesses of civilizations.<\/p>\n

          The voice of reason whispers that history is likely to repeat itself. Nevertheless, all things considered, I do not believe that this time around there is no escape from the conclusion that what has usually happened in the past will happen again.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Straws in the wind[xxiii]<\/a> tell me that today\u2019s rich and powerful (like certain minorities among yesterday\u2019s) realize that they could be more safe in a world where they were less privileged. They see that the ship is sinking, that keeping the poor down by force cannot prevent it from sinking, and that when it goes down the first-class passengers will end up with everybody else at the bottom of the ocean.<\/p>\n

          I believe the main obstacles to change today are to be found elsewhere.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Let me close this paper with a three-item list of what I do <\/em>think are two of the main obstacles<\/em> to redistributing the surplus of the haves to create dignity for the have-nots, and one item I do <\/em>think can be one of the main catalysts for change<\/em>, namely: (A) the imperative to maximize the accumulation of profit,(B)\u00a0 the fiscal crisis of the state, and (C) unbounded organization (UO).<\/p>\n

            \n
          1. The Imperative to Maximize the Accumulation of Profit. <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            It is a main obstacle to change that the system has powerful structural tendencies to reward the accumulation of surplus and to punish the sharing of surplus.\u00a0 When I make this first point I assume as part of its background an important point made by J\u00fcrgen Habermas in The Legitimation Crisis.<\/em>[xxiv]<\/a>\u00a0 <\/em>In our times, markets are the primary social reality.\u00a0 Governments are a secondary social reality.\u00a0 Governments operate within markets.\u00a0 Governments must adjust to market forces they do not control.<\/p>\n

            When I write of structural tendencies to reward accumulation and punish sharing, I am not yet asking to what extent governments (the secondary reality) can compel people to share surplus they do not need.\u00a0 I am still at level one.\u00a0 I am talking about the primary social reality. \u00a0I am asking whether the market would or could allow the voluntary <\/em>massive sharing of surplus in many different voluntary<\/em> ways at a scale that would sum up to full employment by bringing joy in the form of money into the lives of thousands of people who would flock to take advantage of opportunities (if there were more such opportunities) to be paid dancers, philosophers, body-builders, installers of green technologies, translators of ancient texts in dead languages, beekeepers and urban farmers who make a little money selling honey and cauliflowers but not enough to live on, sunbeams who bring light into the lives of lonely orphans, sunbeams who bring light into the lives of old people who otherwise would be lying abandoned in rows of beds in dimly lit rooms, speakers fluent in two languages who would love a scholarship to study a third, mountain-climbers, athletes and musicians of all kinds, community psychologists who provide free therapy, astronomers, helpers in zoos, and, everybody eager to do something that has human value with the support of a human economy.<\/p>\n

            The classic negative answer to my question was given in 1867 by Karl Marx in the preface to the first German edition of Capital <\/em>in the following words: \u201cI paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense\u00a0couleur de rose<\/em>. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.\u201d[xxv]<\/a>\u00a0 Milton Friedman, who rarely agreed with Marx, agreed with him on this point.\u00a0 Capitalists who do not maximize profits, avoiding every expenditure that would diminish to any degree the bottom line, will not stay in business for long.\u00a0 They have no choice.[xxvi]<\/a>\u00a0 Therefore, the voluntary funding of dignity for the masses humiliated by the labour market is not possible.<\/p>\n

            On such a view, business-people, who are conceived as the owners of most of society\u2019s wealth,[xxvii]<\/a> never have a surplus.\u00a0 No matter how much money they have, it is never more than they need.\u00a0\u00a0 The reason they need as much as they can get is that they are in competition with other capitalists.\u00a0 Nice guys lose because tough guys accumulate more weaponry in the form of money to fight them with.\u00a0 For example, Mars fought Hershey by paying retailers to put Snickers and its other products front and centre in plain sight and Hershey Bars on back shelves where customers would not see them.\u00a0 Hershey did not have enough money to counter with a sweeter offer to retailers, and it lost market share.\u00a0 Others in similar situations have closed.[xxviii]<\/a> In Marx\u2019s terms, every capitalist is the enemy of every other capitalist.\u00a0 Father Time has decreed that as time goes on the bulk of production will be carried out by firms that are fewer and larger, as the losers drop out of the race and the winners expand.[xxix]<\/a><\/p>\n

            There are many reasons for not seeing as always and necessarily entirely true the Marx\/Friedman thesis that individual ethical convictions do nothing to free people in business from bondage to social structures (social structures are \u201crelations\u201d in Marx\u2019s terminology, and also in the terminology of Pope John Paul II cited above.)\u00a0 Some reframe the social structures from which the ineffectiveness of personal good will is deduced.[xxx]<\/a> Many empirical studies and many theoretical perspectives show that people in business do have options.\u00a0\u00a0 Surplus can and does exist.\u00a0 Some firms stay in business for a long time paying their own staffs and stakeholders enough to sustain the motivation of everybody who has to be motivated to keep the business going,\u00a0 while not maximizing a war chest to fight competitors, but instead choosing to use the revenues that remain after all costs of production are paid in other ways.[xxxi]<\/a>\u00a0 Firms can escape the rigors of competition by forming cartels where it is legal, by differentiating their products,\u00a0 through tacit understandings not to spoil the market for all players in the industry by aggressive price-cutting, by controlling a scarce resource nobody else has, and in other ways.[xxxii]<\/a> Contributions to the common good often\u00a0 increase \u2013not decrease– the prospects for long run survival of a business.[xxxiii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But this is not the place to review those studies.<\/p>\n

            Here I just want to make two points: (A) Economies are open systems.\u00a0\u00a0 In open systems there are no strict causal laws.\u00a0 There are only tendencies.\u00a0 The tendencies manifest causal powers that are at work in historical contexts where other causal powers are also at work.[xxxiv]<\/a> (B) When all is said and done, Marx and Friedman and those who agree with them make an important point. The basic structure of the system does tend <\/em>to punish sharing and to reward accumulation.\u00a0 We need to know this in order to be effective in supporting other causal powers that tend to augment the flow of resources from where they are not needed to where they are needed.\u00a0 (In the past it has been the case that the accumulation of capital was itself among society\u2019s needs, because without more accumulation necessary large investments could not be made.\u00a0 Still today this is part of official economics, and part of specious rationales for no end of bogus public policies favouring the financial services industries and the 1%.\u00a0\u00a0 My view is that today there is much more capital already accumulated than can profitably be invested in the real economy.\u00a0 A sea-change in thinking is needed to catch up with a sea-change in reality. [xxxv]<\/a>)<\/p>\n

              \n
            1. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              A second structural obstacle to change is the fiscal crisis of the state.\u00a0 Now I move on to the second level, asking whether public employment, or civil society initiatives subsidized by public funds, can pick up the slack when the private sector \u2013whatever its good intentions may or may not be\u2014rejects millions of people who need to get a good job to make a living and support a family.<\/p>\n

              My first chief overall point here is that the main problem is not greed.\u00a0 If it were greed the psychology of moral development could teach us how to solve it.[xxxvi]<\/a>\u00a0 The second chief overall point here is that it is not dishonest politicians either.\u00a0 It is not that, as a popular saying in contemporary Africa has it, \u201cthe government is like a violin: you pick it up with your left hand, and you play it with your right hand.\u201d\u00a0 The main problems are the basic structure of the market (the Tauschprinzip<\/em>)[xxxvii]<\/a> and the basic structure of the modern nation-state (its fundamental legal norms).<\/p>\n

              The modern nation-state was born crippled.\u00a0 The first one, Holland, whose year of birth is reckoned as 1648, was from its beginnings a subordinate part of an international trading system whose rules it did not make and could not alter.\u00a0 Further, the point and purpose of being a Republic, and not a Monarchy, was first and foremost to set in stone what the government could not <\/em>do.\u00a0 Forty some years later, when William and Mary ascended to the throne of England, at the invitation of Parliament, on terms dictated by Parliament, the first of the terms was that their government would depend for its funding on taxes voted by Parliament.\u00a0\u00a0 It was to be what Joseph Schumpeter would later call a Steuerstaat,<\/em> a tax-state.[xxxviii]<\/a>\u00a0 A milestone in the centuries long social construction of modernity (what Karl Polanyi called the transformation to a market economy[xxxix]<\/a>) was the formation of the Bank of England in June of 1694.[xl]<\/a>\u00a0 It was a private bank with a royal charter entitling it to issue legal tender.\u00a0 It was to extend credit to finance war with Louis XIV of France, and also to consolidate the government\u2019s previously existing debt. It all became one big loan to the King from the Bank, at the high rate of interest of 8%.\u00a0\u00a0 Long gone were the days when the monarch could summon his nobles to do their feudal duty by following him into battle, and to bring with them their knights on horseback and their vassals on foot.<\/p>\n

              From the first, in modern nation-states the power to create money has mainly been taken over by private banks.[xli]<\/a>\u00a0 Private banks create money by extending credit and by discounting notes.\u00a0 As late as the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, control of money was an integral part of the trade, plunder, and piracy from which the monarchs of England siphoned off money to finance their wars and their governments. They sent the foreign gold and silver they amassed to the Royal Mint to be coined and then kept it for themselves.\u00a0 Not infrequently they raised additional major sums by compelling their subjects to accept legal tender at a face value greater than the market value of the precious metal it was made of.[xlii]<\/a>\u00a0 The rising commercial classes of early modernity were determined to put an end to all of that.\u00a0 They wanted the government on a short leash.\u00a0 They got what they wanted.\u00a0 They bequeathed it to us.<\/p>\n

              The process of subordinating European governments to the economy and its owners began several hundred years before the beginnings of democracy epitomized by the French Revolution of 1789.\u00a0 Much earlier the monarchs dubbed \u201cenlightened\u201d collaborated with the bourgeoisie (literally \u201cthe city dwellers\u201d) in curbing the abuses of the nobility and in promoting commerce. In principle and in fact the enlightened monarchs owed their legitimacy to honouring the civil law, adapted mainly from Roman Law.[xliii]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The civil law (also known as private law) separated the wealth of the country from the government of the country.[xliv]<\/a> Law filled in the content of the social contract.\u00a0 Basic jurisprudence, with or without a myth attributing the founding of society to a contract, provided that the ruler, to be a legitimate ruler, must respect the rights of the ruled\u2014 certainly a good idea in general, but when you get into the specifics of what it means in practice, it means specifically that wealth is protected by principles the nation-state cannot change and must obey.\u00a0 One of the enlightened monarchs, Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, remarked that there were two sets of laws in her Empire.\u00a0 There were her decrees, implemented by her ministers, and there were the civil laws of commerce interpreted and enforced by judges.\u00a0 The latter were eternal and universal.\u00a0 Fast-forwarding to the 21st<\/sup> century, Thomas Piketty recently found that in the countries he studied private accumulated wealth summed to around six times a country\u2019s GNP, while net public wealth was approximately zero because the total of public assets roughly equalled the total of public debts. There is not much governments can do about it. The fundamental legal norms of modernity give the owners of private accumulated wealth an easy out when they do not like a government. They move.<\/p>\n

              In today\u2019s world built on 17th<\/sup> and 18th<\/sup> century European foundations, the key measure of the success or failure of a government is the rate of economic growth; it is whether GNP is growing rapidly or slowly or (this is failure) declining.\u00a0 To succeed, governments devote themselves to wooing investors. Wooing investors is not an easy game to win.\u00a0 There are 195 other governments playing it too.\u00a0 It means keeping taxes low but at the same time providing high quality infrastructure and security; it means\u00a0 offering a skilled work force that does not demand high wages; it means\u00a0 making it easy to take profits out of the country, tax exemptions, and often subsidies.[xlv]<\/a>\u00a0 Although a consequence<\/em> of the fiscal crisis of the state is that most governments \u2013and today increasingly all governments\u2014fall short of complying with human rights to health care, pensions, housing and employment, the cause<\/em> of the fiscal crisis of the state is chiefly the expense and the income forgone to attract investment and –on the flip side of the same coin– to prevent disinvestment and capital flight.[xlvi]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The answer to the question whether the public purse of a modern nation-state can provide enough money to fund dignity for the millions rejected by the labour market is: not bloody likely!<\/p>\n

              Nobody has summed up today\u2019s limits on national sovereignty better than Tshepiso Moahloli.\u00a0 She was a student this year in a course Gavin Andersson and I co-teach in the Executive MBA programme at the University of Cape Town.\u00a0 After earning a degree in economics and mathematics, she had a career as a manager in the private sector before starting her present job as a manager in the public sector.\u00a0 In a paper for our course she asserted that the \u201c\u2026system is entrenched and even threatens the sovereignty of countries. I work for the government and there is no single day one does not hear warning bells of driving away investment when looking out for the 99%.\u00a0 Workers are paid low wages, and in some cases paid with alcohol (dop system).\u00a0 Any legislation to raise the wages of workers (minimum wages) or improvement of labour laws will drive away investment.\u00a0 This is on the back of shareholders and executives earning supernormal profits.\u00a0 Any transformative efforts to get shared ownership of the land (mining industry, land appropriation) will drive away investment.\u00a0 Taxation of large corporates will drive away investment, so individuals must be taxed instead.\u00a0 Something is clearly amiss with the economic system.\u00a0 What is next?\u00a0 The principles of Roman Law make it impossible for democracies to compel the 1% who own most of the wealth to share it.\u00a0 These principles are so entrenched that any threat to them raises eyebrows.\u201d<\/p>\n

              In sum, the power is in the structures.\u00a0 Although greed and corruption exist, neither of them is the main reason why there is money to pay astronomical salaries to bankers, but no money to pay the unemployed to reforest denuded hills.\u00a0 The main reason is that the system works that way.\u00a0 Historically, it evolved to work that way.<\/p>\n

              If humanity has painted itself into a corner where neither the private sector nor the public sector can reliably move resources from where they are not needed to where they are needed \u2013not even if they want to\u2014then how can the system be changed so that it will stop producing results nobody wants like global warming and the eventual death of the biosphere, and so that it will start producing results everybody wants like more equal and less violent societies?\u00a0 Answer: Rethink the system from the ground up, but do it with ideas rooted in practical experience, like Gavin\u2019s idea of \u201cunbounded organization.\u201d<\/p>\n

                \n
              1. Unbounded Organization. (UO) <\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                \u201cWhat we mean by unbounded organisation is, as a first approximation, inter-sectoral collaboration, individuals linking among their own organisations, coalition building, cross-cultural activities and involvement by all segments of society.\u00a0 Organisations see themselves as part of a family of organisations and interlinked.[xlvii]<\/a><\/p>\n

                UO echoes Pope John Paul II\u2019s call quoted earlier: \u201cWhatever may be your function in the fabric of economic and social life, construct in the region an economy of solidarity!\u201d[xlviii]<\/a>\u00a0 UO echoes Evelin Lindner\u2019s call to make inside ethics into outside ethics.\u00a0 What she means by that is: project the love and loyalty to insiders practiced in traditional extended kinship systems to the level of universal human rights.[xlix]<\/a>\u00a0 As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, we are one Human Family living in one World House.[l]<\/a>\u00a0 Once these attitudes are established: do what works.<\/p>\n

                There is a considerable literature available for those who want to learn more about UO.[li]<\/a>\u00a0 Here I only want to make three points.<\/p>\n

                First, although no quantitative projections or studies, have yet been done, an unbounded approach should deliver dignity at a money cost much lower than straight government grants or straight government employment.\u00a0 Simply spending government money to give everyone an income would be very expensive.\u00a0 For example, if there are 12 million jobless people in South Africa, and it costs USD 15,000 to raise just one of their lives to a level one could call decent and dignified, the cost for all of them would be USD 180,000,000,000 per annum.<\/p>\n

                In contrast, Alcoholics Anonymous improves the lives of drinkers at a cost that approaches zero, although it never arrives at zero.\u00a0 In AA a little money goes a long way.\u00a0 Somewhat similarly, when a man (or a woman) \u201cgets religion\u201d there is an inexpensive rise in the standard of living of the person and the family because the saved soul stops spending money on liquor, drugs and chasing women (or men).\u00a0 Evangelical churches frequently have unpaid or barely paid preachers, and it is common everywhere for religions to inspire voluntary participation in choirs, cooking for church dinners, teaching Sunday School or its equivalent in other denominations, and other work that would have to be paid for if they were market-based institutions; and often also to pay Zakat or in other religions other donations to improve the lives of needy people outside the church or mosque or synagogue or whatever.[lii]<\/a><\/p>\n

                Mother Teresa often said that what people want most is somebody to pay loving attention to them, and that is something money cannot buy.\u00a0 But she was not quite right.\u00a0 Perhaps true love cannot be bought, but it is possible to pay skilled community organizers, preachers, group therapists, service club[liii]<\/a> executives, union organizers, political activists and others who can do a great deal to bring people out of isolation and anomie, <\/em>and into the many benefits of bonding and bridging.\u00a0 Small amounts of money, and large amounts of volunteer time and other resources, wisely used, can make a big difference in quality of life.<\/p>\n

                In community development, family, church, school, local government and the somewhat amorphous residual category called civil society organizations blend seamlessly into economics.\u00a0 It is worth noting in this connection, especially since I have stressed that markets cannot be the whole answer and that the sharing of surplus is indispensable, that markets are also indispensable.\u00a0 Specifically, it should be noted than Jean-Baptiste Say while he was not entirely right was also not entirely wrong.\u00a0 It is really true, as Say wrote in 1803, that if, in a given economically undeveloped locality,\u00a0 formerly unproductive people acquire skills and tools and produce useful products, they can raise each other\u2019s standards of living by providing markets for each other.[liv]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 This is especially true (fast-forwarding to now) if public policy boosts local economic development by helping small local producers defend themselves against the economic firepower of high-capital high-tech products brought in from outside. A good example is (or was in 1978) the Farmers Market in Syracuse, New York.[lv]<\/a>\u00a0 People in many other places have also heard E.F. Schumacher\u2019s message that the small can be beautiful –and small can provide more jobs for more people.[lvi]<\/a><\/p>\n

                My general thesis here, which could be supported by many more details, is that if we take a UO approach, starting from the bottom, by the time we get to the top, i.e. by the time we get to the national government, there are comparatively few problems left for the national government to solve.\u00a0\u00a0 On a UO philosophy everybody, not just the government, is working on dignifying the humiliated.\u00a0 Everybody\u2019s resources, not just the government\u2019s, are being mobilized to that end. From the government\u2019s point of view, there should be more benefit at less cost.<\/p>\n

                A corollary of this thesis is that government money is often \u2013not always– better spent on discreetly catalysing community development than on making direct grants to the needy.\u00a0 Indeed, if the objective is dignity, the direct grant of a cash subsidy to the indigent might sometimes be counterproductive.\u00a0\u00a0 A grant just for being, not for doing, might be interpreted as a booby prize for losers, and spent on drowning shame in alcohol.\u00a0\u00a0 It might be far better for a person rejected by the labour market to enrol in an urban agriculture programme discreetly supported by the whole community in ways that help thousands of people to become successfully self-employed.[lvii]<\/a>\u00a0 It might be far better to win in competitive auditions to be paid to dance the salsa or the tango; first winning in the auditions with an unerring sense of rhythm and an inimitable style, and then winning again by being half of the winning couple taking first place, or second place or third place or even honourable mention in a regional dance jamboree.<\/p>\n

                My second point about UO is that it makes the nation-state, and with it human rights, come out winning on both ends.\u00a0 It gives the state both less to do and more means to do it with.\u00a0 Bottom line: it gets done.\u00a0 On one end human rights win because honouring them is everybody\u2019s business.\u00a0\u00a0 At the other end, they win because the fiscal crisis of the state is swept into the dustbin of history.\u00a0 While cutting government down to size was the primary objective of the winners of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it is not the primary objective of any sane person in our age of exponentially accelerating obsolescence of the human being as a factor of production. Today the government has the responsibility of assuring that somebody is meeting people\u2019s needs for employment, health care, education, housing, pensions and other human rights established in international and national treaties, constitutions and laws.\u00a0 And the duty to do the job itself if nobody else is doing it.<\/p>\n

                UO comes to the rescue.\u00a0 Like its twin, solidarity economics, UO makes an epistemological break that lets us think outside the entrenched categories of the European Enlightenment that still rule most of our minds most of the time.\u00a0\u00a0 And that <\/em>allows our minds to venture outside the Steuerstaat, <\/em>back to the years before 1688 (in the case of the UK) when kings and queens and emperors and empresses often financed themselves by owning land, by issuing money[lviii]<\/a>, by monopolizing some easy businesses that can be lucrative (like selling salt), by owning mines and plantations, and in many other ways now forbidden and forgotten.[lix]<\/a>\u00a0 And UO allows our minds to venture forward to a future when there is some kind (or kinds) of social ownership and\/or supervised trusteeship of the marvellous new technologies coming on line that will make it possible to do more with less, creating the technical potential to make all of our lives easier and greener.\u00a0 UO is a name for the good will and the mental flexibility we will need to realize the upside potential of new technologies.<\/p>\n

                My third and last point about UO is that the possible steps we take today, working around the system, doing what we can within the constraints the system imposes on us, can transform the system.\u00a0 What does it mean to \u201ctransform\u201d the system?\u00a0 How would we know when, at last, the system was \u201ctransformed?\u201d<\/p>\n

                Remember Tshepiso\u2019s point that she as a government official is hamstrung when she tries to serve the interests of the 99% because almost anything she tries to do sounds an alarm bell warning that it will frighten away investors.\u00a0\u00a0 There is a bottleneck in the bottleneck.\u00a0\u00a0 How to achieve full employment is a bottleneck problem that must be solved before many other problems can be solved.\u00a0 The bottleneck in the bottleneck is that whether there will be full employment depends on investor confidence.\u00a0\u00a0 (That is to say, on their confidence that investing will multiply their money, turning it into more money.)<\/p>\n

                UO comes to the rescue again.\u00a0 What I just wrote is only part of the picture.\u00a0 There are also many other ways to create employment.\u00a0 There are co-operatives, worker owned enterprises where labour employs capital instead of capital employing labour, small businesses that support a family but do not accumulate, self-employment,\u00a0 public sectors at every level of government, non-profits, social entrepreneurs who are mission-driven and not profit-driven, indigenous knowledge systems and material practices that cannot be accurately described in modern European languages, monasteries, mutual insurance companies owned by their customers, families that run motels together, churches that run farms, universities with endowments, subsistence farming supplemented by seasonal labour elsewhere and by government subsidies, there are all of the ways we have talking about to channel surplus to pay people to do things that have human value even when they cannot be sold for a profit,\u00a0 and so on and on.\u00a0 The list is in principle infinite.\u00a0 There is no limit to the cultural creativity of homo sapiens<\/em> when it comes to inventing material practices to meet human needs in harmony with nature.\u00a0 UO and solidarity economics are about strengthening the innumerable alternatives to capital accumulation.\u00a0\u00a0 They are about working together and sharing resources to liberate humanity from what the Grenoble school of economics calls \u201cregimes of accumulation.\u201d[lx]<\/a> A regime of accumulation is a way of life where everything we do, and even the unconscious mind, is shaped by the overriding necessity of attracting investors and not frightening them away.<\/p>\n

                We will know that transformation has happened when Tshepiso comes to her office one morning and finds that nobody worries anymore about frightening away investors.\u00a0 Leaders have become servants.[lxi]<\/a>\u00a0 The economy is resilient and plural.\u00a0 Surplus is shared.\u00a0 Capital is in the loving hands of a variety of ethical and democratic institutions, all of which are mission-driven.[lxii]<\/a><\/p>\n

                NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

                [i]<\/a> Cormac Russell (2015) Asset Based Community Development: Looking Back to Look Forward.\u00a0 <\/em>Dublin, Nurture Development.\u00a0 Where I refer to something and do not provide a footnote, further information can usually be easily found on the Internet.<\/p>\n

                [ii]<\/a> See Susan Woodward (1995) Socialist Unemployment<\/em>: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990<\/em>.\u00a0 Princeton: Princeton University Press.<\/p>\n

                [iii]<\/a> Douglas Porpora (1993) Cultural Rules and Material Relations.\u00a0 Social Theory. <\/em>Vol. 11 pp. 212-229 (hereafter cited as Porpora footnote 3); Howard Richards (2018) On the Intransitive Objects of the Social (or Human) Sciences.\u00a0 Journal of Critical Realism.\u00a0 <\/em>Vol 17 (pp. 1-18. (hereafter cited as JCR footnote 3) J\u00fcrgen Habermas makes the point that the market is late modernity\u2019s primary institution, and the nation-state secondary in The Legitimation Crisis.\u00a0 <\/em>Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.<\/p>\n

                [iv]<\/a> Keynes, Book III.<\/p>\n

                [v]<\/a> Over the years liberals and neoliberals have had made specious replies to all of these points, to which their critics have in turn replied back.\u00a0 For a more complete version of my own case against orthodox liberal economics and in favour of heterodoxy see Howard Richards (2018) Economic Theory and Community Development.\u00a0 <\/em>Lake Oswego OR: World Dignity University Press. (hereafter referred to as ETCD footnote 4) Paul Krugman (2009) argues that the crisis of 2008 and a series of crises preceding it prove conclusively at a theoretical level that the neoliberals (and all those Joseph Schumpeter (1954) in his History of Economic Analysis <\/em>New York, Oxford University Press, calls \u201chitchless\u201d economists) have definitely lost the argument (and \u201chitch\u201d economists like Keynes have won).\u00a0 There really is a chronic, persistent and structural insufficiency of effective demand.\u00a0 Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics.\u00a0 <\/em>New York, Norton.<\/p>\n

                [vi]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Thomas Piketty (2014).\u00a0 Capital in the Twenty First Century.\u00a0 <\/em>Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.\u00a0 Further references to Piketty refer to this book.<\/p>\n

                [vii]<\/a> See Porpora footnote 3.<\/p>\n

                [viii]<\/a> John Maynard Keynes (1936) General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.\u00a0 <\/em>London: Macmillan, 1936.\u00a0 Pp. 249-50 (Hereafter cited as Keynes.)\u00a0 At p. 304 and elsewhere Keynes notes that for similar reasons there is also a chronic and structural insufficiency of investment.<\/p>\n

                [ix]<\/a> Andy Blunden (2012).\u00a0\u00a0 Selected Writings on the Semiotics of Modernity.\u00a0 <\/em>Kettering OH, Erythros Press.\u00a0 Available on Kindle.<\/p>\n

                [x]<\/a> Pablo Guerra (2018), Econom\u00eda de la Solidaridad: Doctrina Social de la Iglesia y Practicas Pastorales en Am\u00e9rica Latina, in Ra\u00fal Gonz\u00e1lez (editor).\u00a0 Ensayos Sobre Econom\u00eda Cooperativa, Solidaria y Autogestionaria.\u00a0 <\/em>Santiago, Editorial Forja.<\/p>\n

                [xi]<\/a> Search Google for DISCURSO DEL SANTO PADRE JUAN PABLO II\u00a0A LOS DELEGADOS DE LA COMISI\u00d3N ECON\u00d3MICA\u00a0PARA AM\u00c9RICA LATINA Y EL CARIBE (CEPALC<\/em>). The translation above is mine.<\/em><\/p>\n

                [xii]<\/a> The non-market employment at Alex is part of South Africa\u2019s Community Work Programme.\u00a0 It and also public employment programmes in India and in Sweden are examined in ETCD footnote 4.<\/p>\n

                [xiii]<\/a> Abraham Maslow (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation.\u00a0 Psychological Review.\u00a0 <\/em>Volume 50, pp. 370-96.\u00a0 This article concludes recommending that human institutions be organized for the purpose of meeting human needs.<\/p>\n

                [xiv]<\/a> See ETCD footnote 4, chapter 3.<\/p>\n

                [xv]<\/a> Saint Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae.\u00a0 <\/em>II \u2013 II Question 32, Article 5, Reply to Objection 2.<\/p>\n

                [xvi]<\/a> A similar idea has recently been made famous in business circles by Harvard professor Michael Porter.\u00a0 He and a growing number of others promote the idea that the purpose of business is not profit per se, much less accumulation for the sake of accumulation; it is creating value in order to share value.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Michael Porter and Mark Kramer (2011) Creating Shared Value.\u00a0 Harvard Business Review.\u00a0 <\/em>February 2011, pp. 62-77.<\/p>\n

                [xvii]<\/a> Alvin Gouldner (1960), The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement.\u00a0 American Sociological Review.\u00a0 <\/em>Volume 25, pp. 161-178.<\/p>\n

                [xviii]<\/a> Bronislaw Malinowski (1944) argued that whatever else the norms of a culture do, if the culture is to exist at all, its norms must function to meet basic human needs.\u00a0 A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays.\u00a0 <\/em>Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.\u00a0 Marx and Engels (1845-46) made a similar point in The German Ideology.\u00a0 <\/em>The first fact of the social sciences is that human beings exist, and for them to exist the physical organization of the means that make their existence possible must exist too.<\/p>\n

                [xix]<\/a> New International Version.<\/p>\n

                [xx]<\/a> The points made here are documented by, among others, Bernard Harcourt (2012) The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order.\u00a0 <\/em>Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n

                [xxi]<\/a> That orthodox economics remains orthodox not because of any scientific merit but because of the social and economic power of its backers is persuasively argued in Frederic Lee (2009), A History of Heterodox Economics: Challenging the Mainstream in the Twentieth Century.\u00a0 <\/em>London, Routledge.<\/p>\n

                [xxii]<\/a>\u00a0 See Harcourt, op. cit. note 14.<\/p>\n

                [xxiii]<\/a> One such straw in the wind is the typical agenda of a World Economic Forum meeting at Davos.\u00a0 Extreme inequality and poverty are regarded as problems to be solved.<\/p>\n

                [xxiv]<\/a> Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.<\/p>\n

                [xxv]<\/a> Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling.<\/p>\n

                [xxvi]<\/a> Milton Friedman (1953).\u00a0 Essays in Positive Economics.\u00a0 <\/em>Chicago, University of Chicago Press.\u00a0 Chapter One.\u00a0 See also Porpora footnote 3.<\/p>\n

                [xxvii]<\/a> Somewhat mistakenly.\u00a0 Piketty finds that the bulk of the world\u2019s wealth is not owned by people actively engaged in running businesses, but by people who have inherited fortunes.<\/p>\n

                [xxviii]<\/a> A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin (2013). Playing to Win.\u00a0 <\/em>Boston, Harvard Business Review Press.<\/p>\n

                [xxix]<\/a> More recent Marxists have analysed how the scenario Marx envisioned has played out, e.g. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy (1966), Monopoly Capital. <\/em>New York, Monthly Review Press.<\/p>\n

                [xxx]<\/a> A more detailed and historical, and less schematic, view of the social structures of the modern world emerges from the Annales <\/em>historians and the series of books on the formation of the European World System and its expansion to form the Modern World-System by Immanuel Wallerstein.\u00a0 Also, sociological and anthropological studies of the evolution of modernity out of earlier basic cultural structures relativize and destabilize the legal and moral framework that political economy and the critique of political economy assume, e.g. the studies of Georg Simmel, Ferdinand T\u00f6nnies, Karl Polanyi and Marcel Mauss.\u00a0 My conclusion: The way things are is not the way things have to be.<\/p>\n

                [xxxi]<\/a> E.g. Richard Cyert and James March (1992). A Behavioural Theory of the Firm.\u00a0 <\/em>Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.<\/p>\n

                [xxxii]<\/a> E.g. Michael Porter (2008).\u00a0 Competitive Strategy.\u00a0 <\/em>New York, Simon and Schuster. The phrase \u201cnot spoil the market\u201d was used by Alfred Marshall in describing tacit understandings to refrain from cutthroat price competition.<\/p>\n

                [xxxiii]<\/a> E.g. Archie Carroll and Kareem Shabama (2010).\u00a0 The Business Case for Corporate Social Responsibility.\u00a0 <\/em>Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.<\/p>\n

                [xxxiv]<\/a> See JCR footnote 3.<\/p>\n

                [xxxv]<\/a> Already in 1873, Walter Bagehot wrote in his classic account of how the money market works, Lombard Street<\/em>, \u201cwe have entirely lost the idea that any undertaking likely to pay, and seen to be likely, can perish for want of money.\u201d\u00a0 Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street.\u00a0 <\/em>London: Henry S. King, 1873. p. 2.<\/p>\n

                [xxxvi]<\/a> E.g. Martin Hoffman (2001), Empathy and Moral Development.\u00a0 <\/em>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

                [xxxvii]<\/a> Theodor Adorno (2003).\u00a0\u00a0 Negative Dialectics. <\/em>London, Routledge.\u00a0\u00a0 The translator chose \u201cprinciple of bargaining\u201d to translate Tauschprinzip.<\/em><\/p>\n

                [xxxviii]<\/a> Joseph Schumpeter (1918), Die Krise des Steuerstaats.\u00a0 <\/em>Leipzig, Leuschner und Lubensky.<\/p>\n

                [xxxix]<\/a> Karl Polanyi (2001) The Great Transformation; The Political and Economic Origins of our Time.\u00a0 <\/em>Boston, Beacon Press.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

                [xl]<\/a> Glyn Davies (2002), A History of Money.\u00a0 <\/em>Cardiff, University of Wales Press. Pp. 256-271.<\/p>\n

                [xli]<\/a> In the UK today, 97% of circulating money is bank-created, and only 3% government created.\u00a0 The Bank of England was nationalized in 1946, and then in 1997 \u2013like many other central banks– given an autonomous status independent of the elected government.\u00a0 To learn more about all of this, just ask Google<\/p>\n

                [xlii]<\/a> Glyn Davies, op. cit.\u00a0 210, 240-41 and passim.<\/em><\/p>\n

                [xliii]<\/a> Michel Foucault (2003) Society Must be Defended.\u00a0 <\/em>New York, Picador.\u00a0 Especially the later lectures given in March of 1976.<\/p>\n

                [xliv]<\/a> Karl Renner (1949).\u00a0 The Institutions of Private Law and their Social Functions.\u00a0 <\/em>London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.<\/p>\n

                [xlv]<\/a> Most items on this list figure in One Economics, Many Recipes <\/em>(2006) Princeton, Princeton University Press, where Dani Rodrik and his co-authors give advice to governments on how to \u201cget investors excited\u201d about investing in their countries.<\/p>\n

                [xlvi]<\/a> James O\u2019Connor (1979).\u00a0 The Fiscal Crisis of the State.\u00a0 <\/em>New Brunswick NJ, Transaction Publishers.<\/p>\n

                [xlvii]<\/a> Gavin Andersson and Howard Richards (2013).\u00a0 Unbounded Organizing in Community. <\/em>Lake Oswego OR, World Dignity University Press, p. 2.<\/p>\n

                [xlviii]<\/a> I make a case that solidarity economics, born in Latin America, and UO, born in Africa, translated to Spanish as organizaci\u00f3n ilimitada, <\/em>are equivalent in the chapter I contributed to Ra\u00fal Gonz\u00e1lez (2018) footnote 10.<\/p>\n

                [xlix]<\/a> Evelin Lindner (2006), Humiliation and International Conflict.\u00a0 <\/em>Westport CT, Praeger Publishers. P. 66<\/p>\n

                [l]<\/a> Martin Luther King Jr. (1967).\u00a0 Where do we Go from Here? Chaos or Community.\u00a0 <\/em>Boston: Beacon Press.<\/p>\n

                [li]<\/a> The concept of UO was coined by Gavin Andersson in his 2004 doctoral dissertation for the Open University in the UK titled Unbounded Governance: A Study of Popular Development Organizations<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 The dissertation has recently been published:\u00a0 Gavin Andersson (2018). Unbounded Governance. <\/em>Darmstadt, Scholar\u2019s Press.\u00a0 See also Howard Richards (2013) Unbounded Organisation and the Future of Socialism.\u00a0 Education as Change. <\/em>Volume 17 pp. 229-242; Gavin Andersson and Howard Richards (2012); Bounded and Unbounded Organization, Africanus <\/em>Volume 42 (2012), pp 98-119; Gavin Andersson (2003) Looking Back to the Future: Conversations on Unbounded Organization.\u00a0 <\/em>Cape Town, Islandla Institute;\u00a0 www.unboundedorganization.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

                [lii]<\/a> The evolutionary biologist D.S. Wilson (2002), studying a random sample of 25 religions, makes a systematic case showing that religions provide material <\/em>benefits for their members, deploying numerous and varied means for doing so.\u00a0 Darwin\u2019s Cathedral.\u00a0 <\/em>Chicago, University of Chicago Press<\/p>\n

                [liii]<\/a> For example, Rotary International.<\/p>\n

                [liv]<\/a> I discuss Say at greater length in ETCD footnote 4.<\/em> Chapter 8.<\/p>\n

                [lv]<\/a> Vernie Lee Davis (1978).\u00a0 Small Farmers and their Markets: Relic of the Past or Option for the Future.\u00a0 <\/em>Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Syracuse University.<\/p>\n

                [lvi]<\/a> See any issue of Resurgence and Ecologist <\/em>magazine edited at Rocksea Farmhouse, Cornwall, UK<\/p>\n

                [lvii]<\/a> For example, check out agricultura urbana<\/em> in Rosario, Argentina on the Internet.<\/p>\n

                [lviii]<\/a> See Ellen Brown (2013) The Public Bank Solution. <\/em>Baton Rouge LA, Third Millennium Publishers. And the \u201cnew economic perspectives\u201d being developed at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and the Levy Institute at Bard College.<\/p>\n

                [lix]<\/a> Adam Smith in Book Five Chapter Two of The Wealth of Nations <\/em>(1776) reviews the ways in which governments historically financed themselves prior to his time.\u00a0 He finds that the most common way was by ownership of land.<\/p>\n

                Leon Walras believed that the government should own all the land and natural resources, and that its income from rents would be so high that it would not need to impose any taxes. Renato Cirillo (1980).\u00a0 The \u201cSocialism\u201d of Leon Walras and his Economic Thinking.\u00a0 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. <\/em>Volume 39, pp. 295-303.<\/p>\n

                [lx]<\/a> On regimes of accumulation see David Harvey (1987), The Condition of Postmodernity.\u00a0 <\/em>Oxford, Blackwell.<\/p>\n

                [lxi]<\/a> Robert Greenleaf (1977).\u00a0 Servant Leadership.\u00a0 <\/em>New York, Paulist Press.<\/p>\n

                [lxii]<\/a> There are many examples today of mission-driven institutions administering capital for the common good.\u00a0 One of them is NABARD, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development of India.<\/p>\n

                _________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

                \"\"<\/a><\/em>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. He was born in Pasadena, California but since 1966 has lived in Chile when not teaching in other places. Professor of Peace and Global Studies Emeritus, Earlham College, a school in Richmond Indiana affiliated with the Society of Friends (Quakers) known for its peace and social justice commitments. Stanford Law School, MA and PhD in Philosophy from UC Santa Barbara, Advanced Certificate in Education-Oxford,\u00a0 PhD in Educational Planning from University of Toronto. Books:\u00a0 <\/em>Dilemmas of Social Democracies with Joanna Swanger,\u00a0<\/em>Gandhi and the Future of Economics with Joanna Swanger, <\/em>The Nurturing of Time Future, Understanding the Global Economy (available as e-books),\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action (not an e book).\u00a0 <\/em>Hacia otras Economias with Raul Gonzalez, free download available at www.repensar.cl<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>Solidaridad, Participacion, Transparencia: conversaciones sobre el socialismo en Rosario, Argentina. <\/em>Available free on the blogspot lahoradelaetica.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                1.\tAnalysis of the Bottleneck Problem
                \n2.\tExamples (showing how to solve the bottleneck problem)
                \n3.\tThe Road from Here to There (generalizing from the examples)
                \n4.\tThe Imperative to Maximize Profits (blocks the road from here to there)
                \n5.\tThe Fiscal Crisis of the State (blocks the road from here to there)
                \n6.\tUnbounded Organization (a way forward)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":56833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[241],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-paper-of-the-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}