Giving Hand

Grameen Bank

In the letters page of The Economist of the 4^th November, Professor Richard Norgaard speculates as to why Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel peace prize rather than the economics prize:

“Perhaps the Nobel peace prize selection committee took so long because they thought someone ought to make the award given the economics committee hadn’t done so. It would be nice if the Nobel economics prize occasionally went to a practitioner instead of only theorists who impress other theorists.”

An alternative suggestion would be that the Grameen bank is a large capitalist organisation predicated on a rule that the science of economics absolutely will not accept: that the revenues of small businesses, hence businesses in competition, tend to be enough to cover materials and labour but not the cost of capital.

golden age

1. Economic theory accounts for the capitalist system as wholly determined by contradictory forces in tension. This theory instrumentally neglects the material product of confluent interests since these confluences strictly negate the premises of the theory itself. From this can be understood the conceit of those incautious affirmations that capitalist development can be neither bizarre nor bureaucratic. The inseparable and mutually determined negations of economic theory: confluences of interest undermining the premises of this theory, and its correlate; surpluses undermining these premises, by their absence affirm the rationality of the theory and by implication the political system it accounts for. In the abstraction of the particular, the rationality of the entire system is underwritten by the corresponding quality of its specific manifestations: the quality of austerity. The value that justifies this society, and consequently that by which this society justifies itself, does not reflect the potential benefits afforded by the technical means at this society’s disposal, but rather the opposite: the very poverty of these means.

2. The formerly persuasive “theory of surplus value” conveniently summarises what this society contends it is not. It is nevertheless retained as a rhetorical device by which one may portray ones opponents as irreducibly alien to this society, in enjoying a surplus product itself apparently alien to this society. The dramatic effect of this argument is not at all diminished by the deployment of a logic that undermines its own premises. So, for example, Senator Norm Coleman can, without the slightest embarrassment, accuse George Galloway of having received capitalist surplus value in the form of Iraqi oil revenues.

3. The mass media, whose ideological basis derives from the contending interests of its owners and consumer base, from an alternative perspective reiterates the ideological premises of economic theory, such that these two systems reciprocally support and reinforce each other. Despite the high level of concentration in its ownership, the orientation of the mass media is basically democratic, and opposed to the irresponsible arrogation of power by elites. The concentrated power with which the mass media is inevitably bound up is never justified outright, but rather not discussed at all.

4. A pervasive abstract necessity accompanies and authorises the particular manifestations of capitalist economy, even as these manifestations become more and more obviously unnecessary and insane, for instance the absurd oversized televisions of the nouveau riches, which attest only to a poverty inflated to grotesque contradiction; or, to give a less picturesque example, a police system where men charged with no particular crimes are wrapped in plastic and drowned by agents of the world’s leading democracies.

5. The rationality of the lives of the general population in developed countries likewise derives from their austerity: the lives of these citizens are rational to the extent that they are involuntary. In this respect cultural values have not changed from the period when the working class was universally subjected to the poverty of production. The principal article of faith demanded of the general population, and encouraged by every kind of media intervention, is the denial of any kind of reduction that would retrospectively present the existing culture in terms of surplus: as richness and not poverty.

6. The ideology of our era offers an involuntary recapitulation of the rococo aesthetic, whereby form and decoration are seen to naturally separate from each other. Since austerity qualifies rationality, a “real” popular ideology finds it’s alternative in a frothy “elitist” system, which no one is expected to give any credence to. Various public intellectuals nevertheless continue to voluntarily identify themselves with this gilded straw man. Politics is constructed according to the same principles. A pseudo popular right wing finds itself opposed to a pseudo elitist left. This is in contrast to the democratic and aristocratic factions that occupied Aristotle’s analysis for instance. Indeed, the elaboration of either of these positions today would present something of a scandal. Because ideology has been developed according to the exigencies of the market economy, the ideology of politics constitutes a secondary system obliged to use the same rhetoric as commerce. For this reason an advert for George W Bush, in its deployment of an abstracted necessity, more or less resembles an advert for pressed ham.

7. The political parties of right and left in the developed countries offer a barely distinguishable programme of fake realpolitik, differing only in their emotional response to the imagined necessity. The rattling of the tin indifferently recalls applause or lamentation. Electoral campaigns are organised as a question of personal spirituality rather than of contradictory political programmes. Do you feel guilty for what you have?  Or justified because you have nothing?

8. President George W Bush is himself the most obvious manifestation of the “popular” right wing.  During the 2004 election the Democratic Party once again organised its campaign on the basis that Bush’s widely reported ignorance and moral tractability would prove to be an insurmountable handicap. In fact these qualities are central to his appeal, no doubt partly because this is exactly how the voters are required to conduct their own lives. These qualities represent a personal austerity entirely in keeping with the national austerity of rationalised capitalism. One can only assume that the Democrats considered it infeasible to dispute George W Bush’s working class credentials. Consequently the Democratic Party organised a campaign effectively complementing that of the Republicans.