Economic Science Fictions

by Davies, William;

  Under these conditions, the search for and construction of ‘enclaves’ takes on a new urgency. It is often the super-rich who are at the forefront of these efforts, as they seek out ever more elaborate ways of separating themselves from the public and the ecological disasters that are unfolding. As the very wealthy seek to secede from the rest of us, it is they who are now closer to realising a form of communism, albeit one that rests on vast concentrations of private capital that insulate insiders from the threat of everyone else. With this paranoid mentality, utopia and dystopia dissolve into what Frase terms ‘exterminism’, in which the dreams and ideals of the very few rest on the possibility of excluding, surveilling, imprisoning and eliminating an ever larger share of the mass public. In our new post-neoliberal age of rising resentments, racisms and walls, the utopian desire to escape can be subverted in all manner of dark directions.

  1L. von Mises (1920) Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47: 86–121.

  2E. Silk (2014) The Case for Climate Mobilization. Brooklyn, NY: The Climate Mobilization.

  3Quoted in D. Steele (1992) From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing.

  4P. Mirowski & D. Plehwe (2009). The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  5F. Hayek (1945) The Use of Knowledge in Society, American Economic Review, 35(4): 519–30.

  6E. Medina (2011) Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  7N. Dyer-Witheford (2013) Red Plenty Platforms, Culture Machine, 14.

  8See E. Morozov (2014) The Socialist Origins of Big Data, The New Yorker, 13 October.

  9D. Graeber (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House.

  10See T. Honore (1987) Making Law Bind: Essays Legal and Philosophical. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  11See W. Davies (2009) Reinventing the Firm. London: Demos.

  12Y. Benkler (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  13This route towards ‘communism’ is one of the four ‘futures’ mapped in P. Frase (2016) Four Futures: Life after Capitalism. London: Verso.

  14See A. Burgin (2012) The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  15See, for example, R. Blackburn (1991) Fin de Siècle: Socialism after the Crash, New Left Review, 185: 5–67.

  16W. Davies (2015) The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. London: Verso.

  17W. Davies (2015) The Return of Social Government: From ‘Socialist Calculation’ to ‘Social Analytics’, European Journal of Social Theory, 18(4): 431–50.

  18See W. Streeck (2016) How Will Capitalism End? London: Verso.

  19E. O. Wright (2010) Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.

  20See W. Davies (2016) The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition. London: Sage.

  21F. Berardi (2011) After the Future. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

  22F. Jameson (1982) Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future? [Progrès contre Utopie, ou: Pouvons-nous imaginer l’avenir?], Science Fiction Studies, 9(2): 147–58.

  23F. Jameson (2016) An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. London: Verso.

  24C. Miéville (2016) Introduction, in T. More, Utopia. London: Verso.

  25J.-F. Lyotard (1979) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 4.

  26G. Deleuze (1992) Imagined Futures, October, 59(Winter): 3–7.

  27E. Esposito (2011) The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

  28S. Zuboff (2015) Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization, Journal of Information Technology 30(1): 75–89.

  29L. Amoore (2013) The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security beyond Probability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  30Jameson, An American Utopia, pp. 54–5.

  31J. Beckert (2016) Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 61, emphasis in original.

  32Quoted in R. Levitas (2013) Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 87.

  33See D. Beer (2016) Fiction and Social Theory: E-Special Introduction, Theory Culture and Society, 33(7/8): 409–19.

  34P. Frase (2016) Four Futures: Life after Capitalism. London: Verso, p. 27.

  35F. Jameson (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.

  36N. Srnicek & A. Williams (2015) Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. London: Verso.

  37A. Malm (2016) Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.

  I

  The Science and Fictions of the Economy

  What we call ‘the economy’ is a mixture of empirical facts, expectations, fantasies and shared narratives. It is both an object of ‘science’ (primarily economics and management) and the stuff of fictions. How might we read social sciences and science fiction together, as overlapping fields? And what might this overlap reveal in relation to economic life in particular?

  This section begins with a reflection on the entangling of economics and science fiction by economist Ha-Joon Chang, who suggests that neoclassical economics is itself a set of fictions, the central one being that the economy is a type of natural artefact, subject to firm laws that can be discovered. Against this, science fiction itself might be deemed to provide an account of the economy with its own truth value aside from its role in critique and utopian reimagining. This point is picked up in the second piece, by political economist Laura Horn, who questions why science fictional visions of corporate power tend so often towards the dystopian: the corporation is a type of autonomous, domineering monster. But what if we channelled the utopian power of science fiction towards the corporation, describing emancipatory alternatives, the like of which are also being explored in experimental ‘real utopias’ such as worker co-operatives?

  Another fundamental instrument of modern capitalism is questioned via science fiction by Sherryl Vint, in this instance money. Vint shows how the science fiction of money is mirrored in certain respects by its diverse anthropological histories. The most controlling, depressing mechanism of financial capitalism is amenable to an infinite variety of rethinking and reorganising. The final chapter in this section, by Brian Willems, considers the role of automation in contemporary post-capitalist utopias, but does so by engaging with one science fiction in particular: Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. This novel, in which the central protagonist seeks to trigger revolution through cybernetic control, provides a way of exploring questions about the role of performativity, automation and computing in engineering a better world, but also the role of algorithms and automation in the constraints of contemporary capitalism.

  1

  Economics, Science Fiction, History and Comparative Studies

  Ha-Joon Chang

  This chapter is about the relationship between economics and science fiction (henceforth SF). Economists are notoriously unimaginative people, while the writers and the readers of SF tend to reside at the other end of the creativity spectrum, so this may seem to be a very odd pairing. I believe that a greater interaction between the two fields can improve both fields, however, thereby ultimately enhancing our understanding of the world.

  Before I get into the main theme of the chapter, let me first point out that much of economics – especially, but not exclusively, neoclassical economics, which is the dominant school of economics today – is SF in two senses.

  First of a
ll, many economists believe in the fiction that they are practising ‘science’. In talking of ‘iron laws’, classical economists, such as David Ricardo, implicitly argued that economics can be like physics, chemistry and other natural sciences. Karl Marx styled his approach as ‘scientific socialism’, denouncing other socialists, such as Robert Owen, as ‘utopian’. Today most neoclassical economists operate with the notion that economics is a science. They are at pains to separate what they call the ‘positive’ aspect of economics, which allegedly does not involve any value judgement, from the ‘normative’ one, which does. Most of them say that, insofar as they practise positive economics, economists are scientists.

  Of course, these economists know that economics isn’t quite like physics; it is said that many neoclassical economists have ‘physics envy’. They are very cocky about the ‘scientific’ progress that they have achieved, however; for a very embarrassing example, Robert Lucas, a leading free-market economist, declared back in 2003 in his presidential address for the American Economic Association that ‘the problem of depression prevention has been solved’, only for the world to experience a few years later the biggest economic depression since the Great Depression of 1929.1

  The second sense in which economics is SF is that many economists believe – at least implicitly – that progress in science (and thus technology) is going to – or at least can – solve virtually all economic problems. Free-market economists say: ‘Give people the right incentives by, say, giving them stronger property rights, and they will come up with the necessary technologies to solve any economic problem we face, such as climate change or water shortage.’ Marx and some of his followers imagined a world in which science and technologies are so advanced that capitalism is abolished and people can ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner’. Unfortunately, these views are highly misleading.

  First, as for the view that economics is a science that does not involve ethical and political judgements, this is downright wrong. It is not simply that all government regulations are often based on ethical and political considerations. It is also that the very definitions of economic actors and markets have ethical and political foundations. For example, before the rise of capitalism, people didn’t exist as ‘free-contracting individuals’ but members of communities. For another example, today we may think that the corporation as a separate legal entity from its shareholders is a natural thing, but many people, including Adam Smith himself, objected to the very idea well into the nineteenth century.

  For the ultimate example, the markets themselves are not as ‘natural’ as neoclassical economists believe them to be. Markets are fundamentally political (and ethical) constructs, as their boundaries and their legitimate participants are politically and ethically determined. A most telling example is that, when the first reforms were proposed to regulate child labour in the early nineteenth century, many people objected to them on the ground that they undermined the very foundation of a free market economy – namely, the freedom of contract.2

  The fact that markets are political and ethical constructs confirms my assertion about the second sense in which economics is an SF, namely its belief that scientific progress will ultimately solve all economic problems. If markets have political and ethical foundations, economic problems will not disappear even with sufficient progress in science and engineering, as political and ethical disagreements will never disappear – unless you live in the world of George Orwell’s 1984, in which all dissents are stamped out. Indeed, as I will discuss later, many SF writers imagine worlds in which scientific progress has created a very high level of material prosperity but made people miserable, or has even destroyed their very humanities in one way or another.

  To say that much of economics is science fiction in the negative sense of the word doesn’t mean that the relationship between economics and science fiction has to be negative. As I mentioned at the beginning, both science fiction and economics can benefit from greater interaction with each other.

  First of all, SF writers could do with a more solid understanding of economics. For example, brilliant though it may be in many ways, Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee failed to totally convince me, because its alternative future starts from the utterly implausible premise that the South won the American Civil War.

  Contrary to what most people think, the American Civil War was more about the country’s economic development strategy than slavery as an ethical issue. The early economic development strategy of the United States was dictated by the then economically more powerful Southern states. It was a strategy based on exporting agricultural products – especially cotton and tobacco produced by slave-using Southern plantations – and importing manufactured goods from Britain and other European countries. In this environment, it was very difficult for the American manufacturing industries to develop, because European manufactured goods were not only better but also cheaper, even including the cost of transportation, which was very high at the time. The Anglo-American war of 1812 persuaded many Americans that their country could not even guarantee its own safety without a strong economy, however. A strong economy, they realised, could only be based on a strong manufacturing sector, which was what was then allowing Britain to power ahead of other countries. The Northern states used this shift in national sentiment as an opportunity to introduce a new development strategy, based on the idea of ‘infant industry protection’, namely the idea that the government of an economically backward country needs to protect and nurture its young manufacturing industries against superior foreign competition. Very interestingly, the idea was invented by none other than Alexander Hamilton, the first ever Treasury secretary of the United States.

  As a result, over the next half a century the Northern manufacturing industries grew rapidly behind the wall of high protective tariffs, reaching 30 to 40 per cent on average. And by the 1860s, when the civil war started, the disparity in economic power between the North and the South was so large that there was no way the South could win the war. Rhett Butler, the leading male character in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, put it brilliantly when he told his Southern friends that the Yankees would win the war because they had ‘the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines – all the things [we the Southerners] haven’t got’. Given this economic reality, Ward Moore imagining the South winning the civil war is seriously deficient, even as a fictional plot device.

  Having said that SF writers would benefit from having better knowledge of economics, I would hasten to add that the main beneficiaries from the interaction would be economists. From the beginning SF has been a very powerful way for us to imagine alternative realities in which very different technologies have changed our institutions and thereby individuals, forcing us to rethink the assumptions about institutions and individuals that economists take for granted in analysing the economy.

  So, for example, countless dystopian SFs depict a world in which the destruction of modern technologies by some disaster has destroyed modern institutions, such as the state (democratic or not), democracy, the ban on the class system or other explicit forms of discrimination, or moral norms restraining aggressive or apathetic behaviour by individuals. The technological retrogression is most frequently the result of a nuclear war, as in John Wyndham’s Chrysalids, Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines series or Hayao Miyazaki’s animation, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. But it can be also by other man-made disasters, such as the depletion of oil and climate change, as in David Mitchell’s Bone Clocks. Almost invariably, in these alternative worlds, life is very harsh, because the destruction of modern institutions has made people closer to the self-seeking rationalists that are idealised in neoclassical economics – the most extreme depiction of this being the Mad Max movies.

  Of course, more science fictions depict a world in which technologies are far more advanced than they are when the SFs were written. Indeed, for many, that’s the whole point of SF
: exploring how more advanced science and technology change social institutions and human nature, or imagining an alien world, usually with much more advanced technologies than humans have, in which our usual assumptions about human institutions and moralities do not hold.

  As I pointed out earlier, however, unlike what many economists would say, most of these SFs actually do not say that these technologically more advanced worlds are better. And we are not even talking about worlds in which technologies are so advanced that they get out of human control and destroy humanity, such as The Terminator or The Matrix movies. Many of these SFs tell us that, even when superior technologies are apparently serving humans better in some ways, they can make people unhappier, because they have been developed on a faulty understanding of human nature or human institutions.

  For example, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano imagines a world in which technological progress in production has reached such a level that we don’t need human workers any more, except for a very small number of engineers and managers. So, in that world, no one has to work while not wanting in any material need. According to today’s dominant (that is, neoclassical) economic vision, in which people strive to maximise their income (and thus consumption) and leisure time, this should have made people ecstatic. In Player Piano, however, people are desperately unhappy, because they feel bored and useless. Thus, Vonnegut is saying that work is a key aspect of our life, unintentionally criticising the neoclassical view of human goals and social life.