Excellent piece, Luke. Seems relevant to me also (with the necessary caveats about generalizing in this way) that political economy as a discipline is much more left wing than political science or economics.
I think you’re making an important point, Luke. There is a tendency for many on the left to correctly identify material conditions in the equation, but to incorrectly assume that material conditions exist in a vacuum, acting as a discreet value in the equation rather than a variable and simultaneously a product of the equation.
That probably doesn’t make any sense but what I mean is, our built world and material reality reflects the material conditions we experience. A city designed to serve capital begets an world in which we build things to serve capital. And we live in that and our minds map ideology on to the city and the city maps the ideology on to our minds. And that city informs us that we should serve capital to access the higher end areas.
This is apparent in Berlin where West Berlin is full of major shopping streets with glossy windows and big office buildings, offset with nooks and crannies and gritty alleys that are obscured from view and light. The city transformed organically and buildings appeared at the whims of capital.
Conversely East Berlin is uniform in height, a much more human scale, the buildings themselves dominate the landscape with broad boulevards and a defined hierarchy of purposeful streets.
Still, in a post 1989 world, one is where business deals happen and one is where people push kids in strollers to the speilplatz and the cafes are breezy and never crowded. Even the stores in Alexanderplatz feel kinda shoehorned in there and don’t really lend themselves naturally to a Bundesliga kit store.
What am I saying? To the idea of political economy - the end of history presupposes that any physical or material environment is serving capital and liberal democracy. There’s no concept of material conditions beyond the material conditions as they relate to serving capital. This is my problem with the Abundance movement - the abundance they’re describing is the abundance of extremely limited possibilities. Office park. Subdivision. Shopping center.
How often do we discuss workforce development along side economic development alongside land development? There’s a complete absence of any political discussion in that world. It’s totall divorced as you describe in the separation of the journals. Somehow we are expecting a politics that is divorced from actual material reality to somehow influence material reality. This is how you end up with one side that offering feelings-politics via a “politics of joy” and the other side offering feelings-politics of “pissed off about my neighbor getting a bigger above ground pool than me and so I blame immigrants.”
We live in a world where material conditions that support availability and affordability of healthcare is based on how much money you can make off land development. Identifying universal healthcare as improved material conditions is fundamentally inconceivable when you can’t imagine a world where access to healthcare is based on equity rather than municipal incremental tax financing programs.
I don’t know. This probably doesn’t make sense. I have a point. Maybe there’s more specific writing on this but I haven’t read it to apply any sort of language to it.
This is a great observation! It resonates strongly for me with Dan Davies's The Unaccountability Machine, which looks at that nature of economics to simplify the world for the sake of measuring it and through that lens examines why the modern shareholder-driven corporation so often makes decisions that are bad for the world and even itself in the long run.
It’s interesting to see an episode from the dawn of neoliberalism. It didn't spring out fully formed from Milton Friedman’s head.
I think that realizing political science and economics are intrinsically linked was a critical moment for me on my political journey. In my early 20s before I had formed my own political opinions I read a book where a guy would take a road trip though the Deep South to learn about racism and while he was an earnest and smart guy, it kind of couldn’t be more than superficial because politics divorced from economics will only get you so far. I’m really grateful for books like “The open veins of Latin America” and “How Europe underdeveloped Africa” because they were great gateways into Marxist economics if you’re coming to politics from a social justice perspective.
I haven’t really used social media in years, but I remember a pretty vocal outcry against people that said you need to “read theory” and I think that stems from cutting politics and economics as well. Which was sad, because you can’t just read it, you need to talk about it to fucking understand it!
The problems with academic economics goes deeper that just relying on things they can measure. The assumption that the things they can measure are indeed measurable is mostly false.
Excellent piece, Luke. Seems relevant to me also (with the necessary caveats about generalizing in this way) that political economy as a discipline is much more left wing than political science or economics.
Very true, and I suppose on some level that’s part of what’s informing my view here.
I think you’re making an important point, Luke. There is a tendency for many on the left to correctly identify material conditions in the equation, but to incorrectly assume that material conditions exist in a vacuum, acting as a discreet value in the equation rather than a variable and simultaneously a product of the equation.
That probably doesn’t make any sense but what I mean is, our built world and material reality reflects the material conditions we experience. A city designed to serve capital begets an world in which we build things to serve capital. And we live in that and our minds map ideology on to the city and the city maps the ideology on to our minds. And that city informs us that we should serve capital to access the higher end areas.
This is apparent in Berlin where West Berlin is full of major shopping streets with glossy windows and big office buildings, offset with nooks and crannies and gritty alleys that are obscured from view and light. The city transformed organically and buildings appeared at the whims of capital.
Conversely East Berlin is uniform in height, a much more human scale, the buildings themselves dominate the landscape with broad boulevards and a defined hierarchy of purposeful streets.
Still, in a post 1989 world, one is where business deals happen and one is where people push kids in strollers to the speilplatz and the cafes are breezy and never crowded. Even the stores in Alexanderplatz feel kinda shoehorned in there and don’t really lend themselves naturally to a Bundesliga kit store.
What am I saying? To the idea of political economy - the end of history presupposes that any physical or material environment is serving capital and liberal democracy. There’s no concept of material conditions beyond the material conditions as they relate to serving capital. This is my problem with the Abundance movement - the abundance they’re describing is the abundance of extremely limited possibilities. Office park. Subdivision. Shopping center.
How often do we discuss workforce development along side economic development alongside land development? There’s a complete absence of any political discussion in that world. It’s totall divorced as you describe in the separation of the journals. Somehow we are expecting a politics that is divorced from actual material reality to somehow influence material reality. This is how you end up with one side that offering feelings-politics via a “politics of joy” and the other side offering feelings-politics of “pissed off about my neighbor getting a bigger above ground pool than me and so I blame immigrants.”
We live in a world where material conditions that support availability and affordability of healthcare is based on how much money you can make off land development. Identifying universal healthcare as improved material conditions is fundamentally inconceivable when you can’t imagine a world where access to healthcare is based on equity rather than municipal incremental tax financing programs.
I don’t know. This probably doesn’t make sense. I have a point. Maybe there’s more specific writing on this but I haven’t read it to apply any sort of language to it.
This is a great observation! It resonates strongly for me with Dan Davies's The Unaccountability Machine, which looks at that nature of economics to simplify the world for the sake of measuring it and through that lens examines why the modern shareholder-driven corporation so often makes decisions that are bad for the world and even itself in the long run.
https://earnestnessisunderrated.substack.com/p/book-review-the-unaccountability
Exelent, thank you!!!
It’s interesting to see an episode from the dawn of neoliberalism. It didn't spring out fully formed from Milton Friedman’s head.
I think that realizing political science and economics are intrinsically linked was a critical moment for me on my political journey. In my early 20s before I had formed my own political opinions I read a book where a guy would take a road trip though the Deep South to learn about racism and while he was an earnest and smart guy, it kind of couldn’t be more than superficial because politics divorced from economics will only get you so far. I’m really grateful for books like “The open veins of Latin America” and “How Europe underdeveloped Africa” because they were great gateways into Marxist economics if you’re coming to politics from a social justice perspective.
I haven’t really used social media in years, but I remember a pretty vocal outcry against people that said you need to “read theory” and I think that stems from cutting politics and economics as well. Which was sad, because you can’t just read it, you need to talk about it to fucking understand it!
The problems with academic economics goes deeper that just relying on things they can measure. The assumption that the things they can measure are indeed measurable is mostly false.
Highly recommend
"The Physics of Capitalism"
https://monthlyreview.org/9781685900915/