> What do today's advocates of "conscious social reproduction" propose
> to do with the market -- the primary medium of "unconscious social
> reproduction" under capitalism? Abolish it? If so, how? If not,
> why not, & what's the alternative?
>
> Yoshie
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Excellent questions. I think we should try to speak of markets, rather
than 'the market', because we get into the one/many problem in the
realm of political economy and that presents problems of motivating
collective action. There needs to be a division of labor in our
resistance even as we try to gain greater coherence to our projects
via thinking systemically. Also, there is an intense consciousness
that goes into the creation and sustaining of markets by
lawyers/legislators/business managers etc. that the production of
'the consumer identity' obfuscates. That 'settled' markets [for
everyday stuff like soap, dog food, cars] are social habits was
suggested long ago by Thorstein Veblen, who took great pains to point
out how markets are constructed via property and contract; once those
are in place citizens don't question them too much unless they
breakdown or, as in the current case of Firestone, product defects
afford the opportunity to enter the hidden abode of production.
Diane Elson suggests that we should socialize markets via knowledge practices that make 'firms' more porous, that citizens have greater voice in markets rather than mere exit from one type of dog food or can of chicken soup to another. A certain Doug Henwood suggests something along the same lines, if I recall. This means hyper-educated consumers that are as finicky as cats with regards to how stuff is made and how the makers treat one another and the non-human realm that is transformed in production. It also means more 'rights' for workers in enterprises to speak up without fear of reprisal when hierarchical power relations are used to hide law breaking etc. We know the litany of abuses of hierarchy, but until we come up with better models of knowledge diffusion and power sharing in enterprises and share them with fellow citizens, lots of workers will be soporifically acquiescent to exploitation/domination. Small steps for now, to be sure, but we create circular firing squads if terms like reformism and wanker are tossed about in the absence of more comprehensive proposals that can withstand intense scrutiny. Communicating these concerns and ideas in bread and butter terms that relate to our fellow workers and citizens is doable in a way that hasn't been possible in quite a while, so agit work oughta be combined with kitchen style conversation--radicalism as common sense.
It would seem that at the present conjuncture sustaining public attention on the actual institutions that do the exploiting and creating defective products is a way to bring up the 'social unconscious' for some intense 'therapeutic interventions' into how the law engages in containment policies [regulating corps.] while at another level attempts to create an even more comprehensive containment policy of limiting the form of criticizing, as in "let's not question the corporation as a legalized form of organized unaccountability." That is clearly an issue we need to make more noise on. The quest for agentlessness is at the heart of limited liability. There have been some very tiny legal encroachments on this topic [holding actual managers criminally accountable]; whether and to what extent that can be enlarged and what effects it will have on creating risk averse behavior that may be 'out of place' is another question that should be addressed. Organization theory as democratic practice is an enormous challenge and trying to understand how the American Management Association, the International Standards Organization and all those other corporate acronyms create the parameters of markets is every bit as important as watching how States continuously construct and shape markets with laws.
I know there's tons I've missed,
Ian