Economies connecting local and global humanity
A chapter from Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes
Keith Hart Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes (2022: Chapter 15)
Preface
“Only connect” (E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910). A much longer draft essay in five parts, “Economics and the human sciences”, locates this short synthesis of my personal research in the context of the leading dissenters from modernism in the early twentieth century, whose example should inform our attempts to build the next intellectual synthesis for this century.
Self and world, individual and society, personal and impersonal, local and global, often seem to be far apart even antagonistic, unreachable one from the other. These dualisms are useful and must not be abandoned, but they always form a single whole and overlap closely. Our task is to find what is universal in these pairs and constantly revise their connection in the light of experience.
In my life work so far, I have consistently addressed this dialectic in relation to economy. After the millennium I searched for a way of bridging the gap between human actors on the ground and the sense we have of being one humanity. The idea of a human economy was the result. I briefly sketch this sequence here.
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Chapter 15 of my Self in the World: Connecting life’s Extremes (2022).
“Only connect” (E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910).
A much longer draft essay in five parts, “Economics and the human sciences”, locates this short synthesis of my personal research in the context of the leading dissenters from modernism in the early twentieth century, whose example should inform our attempts to build the next intellectual synthesis for this century.
Self and world, individual and society, personal and impersonal, local and global, often seem to be far apart even antagonistic, unreachable one from the other. These dualisms are useful and must not be abandoned; but they always form a single whole and overlap closely. Our task is to find what is universal in these pairs and constantly revise their connection in the light of experience.
In my lifework so far, I have consistently addressed this dialectic in relation to economy. Reflecting on my Ghana fieldwork, I found the formal/informal pair to link the economic activities of poor migrants to government bureaucracy. Much later, the internet led me to explore virtual reality. It seemed now that the informal economy had gone global through a combination of neoliberalism and the digital revolution.
Studying money and national capitalism revived my teenage compulsion to bring together the personal and impersonal dimensions of social life, while keeping the poles separate (Money in a Human Economy, Berghahn, edited collection, 2017). Corporate personality has collapsed the distinction between real and artificial persons in economic law, with profound consequences for democracy in thought and practice. After the millennium, I searched for a way of bridging the gap between human actors on the ground and the sense we have of being one humanity. The idea of a human economy was the result. I briefly sketch this sequence here. But first I will tell a story.
In Ghana, I once visited a remote village in the northern savanna, 500 miles from the coast. Land shortage had pushed people to settle too close to the Volta River. They were now dying from river blindness. It had stopped raining when I arrived; but the thatched roofs were damp, and the air was hot and humid. I saw no-one. It felt like the end of the earth. I imagined that I was bringing the outside world into these villagers’ drab lives. It was 1967 and I was 23 years old. I found the chief under an awning, wearing only a jockstrap. A woman and child played a bead game. He invited me to play with them and I won. He agreed to talk, I was quite fluent by then. After a while he asked,
Chief: What do you think of Vietnam?
Keith (surprised): How do you know about Vietnam? —
Chief: My son is at secondary school and listens to the BBC World Service. Which side will win?
Keith: The Americans of course, they have all the money, weapons, machines.
Chief (shaking his head): I don’t think so—too many trees. The people will hide behind the trees.
Keith: How do know about the trees?
Chief: I fought the Japanese in Burma with the British army. We drew them into the jungle and killed them there.
My bubble burst. Most of my news came from Time magazine. This guy had seen more of the world than I had. But he wouldn’t let me go yet:
Chief: You know how long it took you British to get us out of our hills, when all we had were bows, arrows and jockstraps? 25 years! In the end, they brought up heavy artillery to get us out. I don’t think the Americans will stay in Vietnam for 25 years, do you?
My host, as was customary, gave me a live guinea fowl to strap onto my scooter handlebars and I left, much chastened. Ghana taught me that, for all my democratic pretensions, I was an educated snob. Global and local are not separate. We all live in the world and have our points of local anchorage. Some of my academic colleagues are the most parochial people I know. The working-class autodidacts I have met would put them to shame.
How the informal economy took over the world
Soon after the millennium I learned of an illegal trade that had grown up in the southern French port cities of Marseille and Montpellier. It supplied stolen cars and car parts to Africa and was staffed mainly by North Africans. Some of them dreamed of reclaiming the Mediterranean for Islam and they all ignored official paperwork, relying on word-of-mouth agreements, mainly within a religious brotherhood. This traffic grew so big that industrial plant in the French car industry was drawn South to meet a demand from something absent from official records. An army of corrupt policemen, customs and tax officials were allegedly part of this remarkable machine. Russian and Latin American mafias became involved; and the gang added Brussels and Hamburg as bases for their global strategy.
Mainstream French politics has its criminal side too. President Mitterand’s office ran a slush fund supplied by petroleum companies and licensed traders in Africa, from which he illegally transferred election funds to Helmut Kohl in Germany. When Jacques Chirac ran for president against Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front, the schoolkids in our Paris street marched with placards saying (Votez l’escroc, pas le fasho, “Vote for the crook, not the fascist!”). Chirac’s prosecution for corruption from his days as Paris’ mayor continued long after he left the Elysée Palace. Money scandals still beset the political class, ranging from tax evasion by the controller of the government budget to allegations of corruption against Christine Lagarde, then Minister of Finance, later head of the International Monetary Fund, now President of the European Central Bank. In 2021, former-president Nicolas Sarkozy received three years imprisonment for bribery and suborning officials. He is still disputing the case.
Meanwhile, the Tuareg tradition of smuggling everything from smartphones to bazookas across the Sahara on camels was interrupted by a recent (and failed) French military invasion in the name of the “war on terror”. All this pales into insignificance next to the City of London which converted a dismissed colonial empire into a network of tax havens that would probably surpass even Swiss private banking, if either could be measured—N. Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (2011). At the other end of the world in 2006, a major Japanese information technology corporation NEC discovered a parallel criminal company using the same name, accountancy methods, suppliers and customers, while paying no tax because it was off the books. This is known as “brand-jacking”—A. Johns, Piracy: The intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gate (2009).
The economy has now escaped from all attempts to make it publicly accountable. What are the forms of states that can regulate the lawless world of money? The idea of an informal economy was born when the postwar era of developmental states was nearing its end. The 1970s were a watershed between three decades of US management of the world economy through developmental states, and the free market decades of one-world capitalism after the Cold War ended.
What are the forms of state that can regulate the lawless world of money? The informal economy started off as a way of talking about the “Third World” urban poor living in the cracks of a rule system that could not reach down to them. Now the rule system itself is in question. Everyone ignores the rules, especially the people at the top—the politicians and bureaucrats, the corporations, the banks—and they routinely avoid being held responsible for their illegal actions.
We need to analyze the contemporary world economic crisis at a several levels. Above all, the core problem is not narrowly economic, but one of political failure, both national and international. Money and markets have escaped from public control and cannot be put back in that straitjacket. What democratically accountable structures might be capable of regulating the world economy, and under what social conditions?
An uneasy alliance of governments and corporations is now sometimes classified as the “formal sector”. On the surface they share being subject to regulation and conformity to the rule of law. In the last decades, national money and power have been united, with capitalists and autocrats around the world variably in power. How might unregulated economic activities, “the informal economy”, relate to the formal order? I have identified four ways: division, content, negation, and residue.
The moral economy of capitalist societies is based on an attempt to keep separate impersonal and personal spheres of social life. Money is the means whereby the two sides are brought together, so that their interaction is an endless process of separation and division. The male/female pair is the master metaphor for this.
For any rule to be translated into human action, something else must be brought into play, such as personal judgment. Informality is built into bureaucratic forms as unspecified content. Some activities break the law, through theft, fraud, embezzlement extortion at the top and breaches of safety regulations, smuggling, child labour, selling without a license and low life ciriminalty at the bottom. Informal activities also relate to foation as negation.
Some activities exist in parallel, as residue. They are separate from the bureaucracy. It is a stretch to include peasant economy, traditional institutions, and domestic life as “informal”. Yet their social forms often organize informal economic practices.
The informal economy’s improbable rise to global dominance results from the mania for deregulation since 1980. This is linked to the wholesale privatization of public goods and services, and the capture of politics by high finance. Deregulation provides a fig leaf for corruption, rentier accumulation, and public irresponsibility. Yet, while the credit boom lasted, criticism was drowned by celebrations of unending prosperity. Even after the bust, the political ascendancy of finance has not been challenged.
Apart from the main financial houses, the shadow banking system—hedge funds, money market funds, and structured investment vehicles beyond state regulation—is out of control. Tax evasion is an international industry that dwarfs national budgets. The criminal behavior of transnational corporations is blatant—J. Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004). Where to stop? The drug cartels from Mexico and Colombia to Russia, the illegal armaments industry, the global war over intellectual property (“piracy”), fake luxury goods, the invasion and looting of Iraq, the Congo scramble for minerals with its four million deaths. The informal economy was always a way of labeling the unknowable, but all this defeats comprehension.
Online worlds and virtual reality
The digital revolution is driven by a desire to replicate at distance or by means of computers experiences that we associate with face-to-face human encounters. All communications, whether the exchange of words or money, has a virtual aspect in that symbols and their media of circulation stand for what people really do together. It usually involves the exercise of imagination, an ability to construct meanings across the gap between symbol and reality. The power of the book long depended on sustaining faith in the possibility of human connection, despite the fact that we are all ships passing in the night, absorbed in whatever passes between our own ears.
In that sense, capitalism was always virtual. Karl Marx’s intellectual effort was devoted to revealing how the power of money was mystified through its appearance as things—coins, commodities, machinery—rather than as relations between living people. Both Marx and Max Weber were at pains to show how capitalists sought to detach their money-making activities from real conditions obstructing their purposes. Moneylending, the virtual practice of charging interest on loans without production or exchange, is the oldest form of capitalism. The idea of the money circuit becoming separated from reality is hardly new.
The point of “virtualism”—J. Carrier and D. Miller, Virtualism: The new political economy (1998)—is abstraction, and this is a function of the shift to ever more inclusive levels of exchange, to the world market as principal point of reference for economic activity, rather than the nation-state. But reliance on more abstract forms of communication carries the potential for real people to be involved at distance in very concrete ways. The idea of “virtual reality” expresses this double movement: on the one hand, machines whose complexity their users cannot understand; on the other, live experiences “as good as” real. It is the same with money. Capitalism has become virtual in two main senses: the shift from material production—agriculture ,manufacturing and construction—to information services and the detachment of money circulation from production and trade. This is the latest stage of the machine revolution.
Daniel Miller and Don Slater, in The Internet: An ethnographic approach (2000), have good news for traditional ethnographers: the internet does not make any difference. In their fieldwork-based monograph on Trinidad, they rightly argue that cyberspace should not be treated as a separate sphere; but, instead of exploring the dialectics of virtual and real experience, they reduce the former to the latter, claiming that the location of internet users in everyday life, as observed by ethnographers, is all that matters. They ignore business-to-business exchange and approach e-commerce solely through business-customer interaction on websites. They also assert the unity of Trinidadians as a national group in defiance of a century’s debate in the Caribbean about the race and class composition of creole society. Bronislaw Malinowski is alive and well in the insular Caribbean.
If we would make a better world—rather than just contemplate it—we need to think creatively in terms that reflect reality and reach out for imagined possibilities. This in turn depends on capturing what is essential about the world we live in—its movement and direction, not just its stable forms. The idea of virtual reality goes to the heart of the matter. It expresses the form of movement that interests me—extension from the actual to the possible. “Virtual” means existing in the mind, but not in fact. When combined with “reality”, it means a product of the imagination that is not quite real. In technical terms, “virtual reality” is a computer simulation enabling the effects of operations to be shown in real time.
The word “real” connotes something genuine, authentic, serious. In science and philosophy it means existing objectively in the world; in economics actual purchasing power; in law fixed, landed property; in optics an image formed by the convergence of light rays in space; and in mathematics, real numbers are, of course, not imaginary. Reality is present in both time and space (“seeing is believing”); and its opposite is imagined connection at distance, something as old as storytelling and books, but given new impetus by the internet. The experience of near synchrony at distance, the compression of time and space, is transforming how we think of social relations, place, and movement.
How does what we do offline influence what we do online and vice versa? For Martin Heidegger—in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, 1983 [1929]—“world” was an abstract category that did not correspond to any objective reality. Between writing Being and Time in 1927 and coming out as a Nazi in 1933, he gave a lecture course at Freiburg on “the fundamental concepts of metaphysics”. Here he focused on three: solitude, world, and finitude. “Solitude” celebrated a fiction, the isolated individual; every human being makes a subjective “world” whose center is the self.
This egocentric universe opens only when we recognize that we start from “finitude”, concretely when and where we live. “World” is thus relative both to an abstract version of subjectivity (solitude) and to our particularity (finitude)—position and movement in time and space. Quantum mechanics showed that position and movement cannot both be measured at the same time; but this never became part of common sense or social science in the last century. Although finite existence is primary, ideas about “self in the world” influence what we do there.
The internet is often represented as a self-sufficient space with its own distinctive characteristics, as when Manuel Castells writes of The Rise of Network Society (2000). The idea that each of us lives alone (solitude) in a world of our own making seems more real when we go online. But both terms are imagined as well as being reciprocal; they are equally abstract and untenable as an object of inquiry. We approach them relatively from where we live, as Miller and Slater say. The social forms of the internet include what people bring from their lives elsewhere.
This social life of people off-line is an invisible presence when we are online. It would be wrong, however, to deny any autonomy to “virtual reality”. Would we dream of reducing literature to the circumstances of readers? And this too is Heidegger’s point. “World” and “solitude” may be artificial abstractions, but they do affect how we behave in “finitude”.
Money is always personal and impersonal
My starting point is a legendary remark made in a movie by a professional killer to his victim, “Don’t take this personal, it’s just business.” (The Hit Man’s Dilemma, 2005). But, according to my favorite American dictionary, a “person” is “a living human being” and what could be more personal than taking his life? Perhaps the hitman is referring to his own attitude, not to the effect. Killing people is a matter of routine for him, a “business”. Why should business be impersonal and, if it is, how can that be reconciled with the person who practices it?
Morality concerns the principles of good behavior. Although we can express “the good” abstractly as a rule—“always be kind to children and animals”—morality can only be expected of persons who face the choice to be good or otherwise in complex situations that cannot be reduced to simple rules. What politics, law and business have in common is that they define “the good” in a collective sense. A group must be protected from subversion, disorder, or loss and this more general good may require leaders to sacrifice personal morality to that impersonal end.
It costs too much if people must always be forced to do what you want. It helps if they can be persuaded to do something because they believe it is right. Often that means believing that a leader is a good person; but authoritarians make do with terror. It is not easy to separate the impersonal ends of society from their personal instruments.
The crisis in Company (2000)—a Bollywood movie about organized crime in Mumbai—comes when Mallik, the big boss, tries to limit his reliance on Chandu, a young lieutenant he raised from nowhere. He delegates a hit to Chandu, the assassination of a politician, but the former decides to abort for operational reasons. He tells Mallik. “I am about to do what I think is right; if you suffer any losses, don’t take it personally.” Mallik moves swiftly to have him killed; but, thanks to the friendship of their women and the mobile phone, he escapes; a gangster war breaks out, spreading as far as Nairobi.
The resulting mayhem fragments the Company and lends strength to their enemies, including the police. Someone says, “whatever’s happening is the fault of the business, not one man.” But the business can only operate with one big boss, or it fragments into impotence, as here. Chandu is trying to salvage morality from the mess. The hit man’s dilemma is between morality and politics. Chandu is a classic individualist, in a line of American westerns and comic strips, the loner who doesn’t believe in justice unless he does it himself. He thinks official society is as corrupt as he is, but less honest; in any case he is excluded from it.
Chandu meets his match in the clever and basically decent policeman, Sreenivasan who knows that the police can’t be effective if they always stay within the law. The law does not measure up, but it is all we have to save us from rule by the mob. Morality is what we ought to do, the law is what we can get away with. The lines between official politics, law and crime are blurred in practice, but we the public prefer to believe that they are separate. One recurrent Hindi jingle chants, “Yes, it stinks, but it’s business.”
Cops and gangster movies allow us to see society from outside the self-protective cocoon the middle classes live in. By evoking normal capitalism, the gangster “firm” offers a metaphor for capitalism’s dark side. Tony Soprano crosses the thin line between hoodlum and suburbanite many times a day. Impersonal society in its official guise can be just as immoral as criminal enterprise, except that thieves have personal lives and morality of a sort, whereas impersonal abstractions have no room for morality at all.
Every human being is a unique person who lives in society. Society is personal when it is lived by each of us in particular; it is impersonal when it takes the form of collective ideas. It is just as damaging to insist on a radical separation of individuals and society or of life and ideas as it is to collapse the difference between them.
Max Weber—in Economy and Society (2 volumes) 1978 [1922], writing in the full spate of a bureaucratic revolution powered by machine industry—saw no social force capable of resisting a highly centralized version of impersonal society. For us, looking back at the last century, bureaucratic capitalism has evolved to a highly mobile form operating on a global scale, while national bureaucracy and its industrial base seem to be endangered species. Before public bureaucracy is killed off, we should ask how the hopes it embodied might be preserved, if only as an alternative to the transnational corporations now dominating world economy.
For all my criticisms, I believe that some economic functions can best be performed by corporations or governments—with ordinary people’s interests and participation in mind—and capitalism’s historical mission to bring cheap commodities to the masses is far from complete. Progressive capitalist firms should join insurrectionary popular movments in dismantling the resuscitated old regime that we call “neoliberalism”.
Society now operates at global, regional, national, and local levels. We need new impersonal norms to guide our social interactions in this world; but individual personalities are also recognized to be significant. The stage is set for a new humanism capable of uniting these poles—I call it Humanism 2.0. We are still primitives; but eventually we will make society on our own terms, if we master the means of its development—people, machines, and money. We will encounter immense forces denying us genuine democracy; but there is more to this than class war.
In the last few decades, the idea of government has been replaced by talk of “governance”, acknowledging that social order is no longer the nation-state’s monopoly. “Good governance” speaks to a desire to fill the gap between politics and morality left by impersonal society. The remarkable strength of religious feeling in the US, its Islamic antithesis and Africa is not an anomalous hangover from the past, but evidence of the need for meaningful connection when the secular state’s grip on society weakens. It was never strong in the United States.
It seems that science has driven religion from the governance of modern societies, but the search is now on for new forms of religion capable of reconciling scientific laws with personal experience. Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitan moral politics offer one vision of such a religious revival. The hitman’s dilemma contains the seeds of a general human crisis.
See Berghahn Books’ Human Economy series. A movement of economics students, calling itself “post-autistic economics”—J. Earle and others, The Econocracy (2016)—s6oon took the form of the Real-world Economics Review. Legions of heterodox economists formed the interdisciplinary World Economics Association in 2011, soon acquiring 15,000 members, including fellow-travelers like me. Their priorities are to reconnect the study of the economy to the real world; to make its findings more accessible to the public; and to place economic analysis within a framework that embraces the world we live in.
A century ago, Alfred Marshall—in his synthesis of the marginalist revolution Principles of Economics (1890)—defined economics as “both a study of wealth and a branch of the study of man”. Marshall was Keynes’ teacher at Cambridge, a cooperative socialist—like Marcel Mauss and his friends, Sidney and Beatrice Webb—who developed a Hegelian theory of the welfare state and was best-known for his contribution to the economics of trade and industry.
The “human economy” approach shares these priorities. It is not an exclusive concept or method, but an umbrella term for a conversation between people who draw on many intellectual and political precedents. We encourage work pitched in dialog with related approaches such as moral economy, global commodity chains, health economics, popular and informal economies.
We hope to launch many nodes of enquiry united by a desire to make the economy more humane than we currently find it. We do not aim for an exclusive monopoly (“our side”), but to build a plural, inclusive and decentralized network. The economy is not a remote object reported online and in the TV news. It concerns how people should manage their lives to get by or improve their lot. The economics tradition has a variable history of answers to this question.
World society now undermines the national vehicles for living that dominated the last century. Professional economists’ discourse seems increasingly impersonal and remote from daily life. The human economy approach seeks to bring together scholars, activists and practitioners for whom connecting what people do and human interests as a whole is of urgent concern. We trace our own origins to the “alter-globalization” movement—G. Pleyers, Alter-globalization (2010)—launched by the first World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre around the millennium.
Our aim is to build a conversation among ourselves and with other specialists, ultimately with the public. This is based on empirical investigation and comparison as much as on developing a theoretical and methodological framework for planning research. Our basic method is inspired by the ethnographic revolution that launched social and cultural anthropology in the last century. The economy is always plural and people’s experiences of it across time and space have more in common that the use of contrastive terms like “capitalism” or “socialism” would suggest. We focus on the multiple institutions that mediate experience of economic life, and promote economic democracy by helping them to organize and improve their own lives. Our findings should be presented to the public in a spirit of pragmatism and made understandable for ordinary readers’ own use.
This is all compatible with a humanist perspective. It must be so, if the economy is to be returned from remote experts to the people most affected by it. But humanism is not enough. A human economy must be informed by a vision bridging the gap between everyday life (what people know) and humanity’s common predicament (what they don’t know). This is inevitably impersonal and lies beyond the actor’s point of view. For this purpose, a variety of ideas and methods could be drawn from local traditions and philosophy, world history, literature, and grand social theory.
We need to make a world society where eight billion people can live together. Small may be beautiful and a preference for initiatives grounded in local social realities is unchallengeable; but large-scale bureaucracies—whether governments, business corporations or international organizations—are essential too if our world is to embrace economic democracy.
This dialectic of small-scale humanism and large-scale impersonal institutions is illustrated in Chapters 3 and 19 of Self on the World. Since we should anchor economic strategies in people’s everyday lives, local circumstances and hopes for wider connection, the movement will ideally be one of extension from the local towards the global, not the other way rond (imperialism). We cannot arrive instantly at a view of the whole, but each of us should try to engage more with the world that lies beyond local and national institutions.
Money and markets are intrinsic to our human potential, not anti-human as they are often depicted. They should take forms more conducive to economic democracy. It helps to recognize that money and markets span the social extremes of our lives. Human motivations for economic action are more holistic than economists allow for, taking in wellbeing and the good life, for example. These have traditionally been shaped by organized religion. A human economy approach must revisit the complex interaction between religion, economy and political education.
Economic principles should be conceived of as specific strategies to be discovered, articulated, and disseminated. To be useful, they should be based on general guidelines for what people do already. This is not just an ideology or a call for realism. The social and technical conditions of our era—urbanization, fast transport, and universal media—should underpin any attempt to implement these principles of human economy. We do not assume that people know best, although they usually know their own minds better than those who presume to speak for them.
In its ancient Greek origin, “economy” privileged budgeting for domestic self-sufficiency; political economy promoted capitalist markets over military landlordism; national economy sought to equalize the chances of a citizen body. “Human economy” could be a way of envisaging the next stage, linking unique human beings to humanity. It would bring together an extended sequence—self-house-market-city-nation-world—whose typical social units do not replace each other, but rather co-exist in history.
The human economy idea has its origins in small-scale informal activities and a humanist ideology; but effective resistance to world war or a global takeover by transnational corporations will require alliances between self-organized initiatives on the ground and large-scale bureaucracies of the public and private kind. It will also require global social networks such as those we drew our own impetus from.
As Albert Camus told us in The Plague—La peste (1947)—the human predicament is impersonal; there are powerful anti-humanist forces in our shared lives. We must build bridges between local actors and the new human universal, world society. To be human is to depend on impersonal social conditions (Humanism 2.0). In confronting the dictators and corporations, we must be sure that we are human, and they are not. The drive for economic democracy will not be won until that confusion has been cleared up.
Some forms of economy and their principles
Domestic economy: budgeting for household self-sufficiency, anti-market.
Religious economy (Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Hindu): city and country in God’s natural plan; for commerce against usury.
Political economy: capitalist markets against military landlordism.
Urban economy: independent cities trading with the world.
National economy: moderating capitalist inequality in a citizen community (macroeconomics).
Market economy: rational individual choice in a free market (microeconomics)'.
Socialist economy (cooperative social democracy, state socialism and communism); control by the workers in a workers’ state.
Capitalist economy: one-world capitalism, free flow of money, financial globalization.
Human economy: self-house-market-nation-world; human beings for all humanity; economic democracy.