The Death of Homo Economicus

Peter Fleming is surely an outlier in the cohort of university business school academics. A professor on the faculty of management at the Cass Business School, City University of London, Fleming is the author of The Mythology of Work and Contesting the Corporation, among other books, and a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian. Working in proximity to the City of London financial district, Fleming has developed his newest study,The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt, and the Myth of Endless Accumulation, as a polemic against mainstream economics in all its forms. Its thesis is that the notion of human species being as one of self-interested rational calculation, continuously seeking to maximize utility and profit, has always been a falsehood. It has been propagated to hide capitalism's true identity as an apparatus for exploiting the land and labor to the detriment of the vast majority of us for the advantage of a select few.

Fleming takes up the metaphor of the tsunami to describe the 2008-2009 financial crisis and its aftermath. The tsunami metaphor has been invoked, particularly in the media, Fleming notes, as a way to frame discussions of the economic devastation and subsequent austerity that the crash has wrought on economies around the world. There is a problem with the metaphor, however, in that it hasn't been applied thoroughly enough. Typical evocation of the tsunami metaphor captures the first two elements: the cataclysmic triggering event—in this case, the subprime lending meltdown—and the wave of devastation—collapsing financial institutions, rising mortgage foreclosures, evaporating equity, the Great Recession—but misses the final stage, the backwash in which the receding deluge sucks back into the abyss all that was destroyed in its wake and more. It is this final stage of turbulence that we continue to endure whereby the neoliberal capitalist regime, which rightly should have disappeared in 2008, has perhaps mutated into something worse.

Fleming terms this something worse "wreckage economics." It seeks to appropriate all aspects of what's left of the commons, a twenty-first century enclosure of the already tattered public domain. It polices its economic pillaging assiduously, leaving no stone unturned in the interest of unlocking value. It disdains democracy. It perpetuates and exacerbates inequality—indeed, as opposed to the 1930s when the global elite lost a significant portion of its wealth, wreckage economics has enabled those at the very top to greatly expand their share at a rate that has only increased since 2008.

Fleming documents his thesis with examples taken mostly from around the English-speaking world. They include Dawn Amos, a 67-year old woman with chronic lung disease who was certified to return to work by the UK Department of Work and Pensions, only to receive that notification on the very day she died in the hospital from complications of her condition. Others include the rash of suicides that have occurred in the face of mounting debt. On a less fatal level is the plight of those members of the precariat who have been casualized, rendered redundant, and otherwise dispossessed from the means of making a decent living, much less securing a future. Through it all, homo economicus has roamed unchecked as a kind of undead, relentlessly devouring those who are least able to resist.

If the situation for the average worker is dire, the impact on the environment is of even greater concern. The environmental degradations visited upon the planet under capitalism are well documented and don't need to be recounted here. Nature is retaliating against this threat by shutting down biodiversity, increasing climatic instability, and generally rendering the habitat ultimately uninhabitable.

Against the prospects of mass extinction, the left, in Fleming's eyes, has offered some solutions that may be at least ineffective if not counter-productive. One of these is accelerationism, in particular as articulated by Steven Shaviro in his book No Speed Limit. Accelerationism of the left variety proposes to push the contradictions of capitalism to the point where they completely break down, thereby opening up a horizon of new possibilities. The problem with that idea, according to Fleming, is two-fold. First, history has shown that oppression can reach epic proportions without sparking violent revolt. (Indeed, the Frankfurt School of critical theory took up as one of its core agenda items the task of explaining why the revolution never took place in the advanced economies of the West even in the darkest days of the Great Depression.) Second, pushing the capitalist mode of production to its breaking point may well unleash an eco-apocalypse from which there would be no one left to fashion a brave new post-capitalist world.

Another apparently limited option is the politics of exodus, where the objective is not to exacerbate the contradictions of capitalism, but instead to collectively withdraw from them into networks of self-reliance and communal interdependence. (A model of this notion at the grassroots level can be found in Grace Lee Boggs's book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism in the Twenty-First Century.) While the outlines of how this might work can be discerned in some of the practices of the DIY movement, capitalism has proven time and again quite adept at capturing value in even these diffuse precincts, most recently through regimes of governmentality and biopower.

In lieu of these alternatives, the question to coin a phrase, "So then what is to be done?" The first step, according to Fleming, is to demonstrate the irrationality of so-called rational choice and its underlying free-market fundamentalism, which as evidence of the last few decades has shown does not lead to greater productivity and growth but only serves to redistribute economic gains upward. Second, the state must perforce be reinvigorated in order to restore a more just balance in the relationship between capital and labor and promote a revitalization of what constitutes the public good. While much has been done in terms of exposing the former, the latter, unhappily, appears to be receding farther and farther from view.

Minding the Gap of "The Great Divide"

In the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the anti-austerity protests in Spain, Greece, and elsewhere around the world, economic inequality has emerged as one of the more hotly debated issues in the public sphere. One of the more prominent voices in the discussion is economist Joseph Stiglitz, whose May 2011 Vanity Fair article "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" provided the rallying cry of what became a global social movement. That essay and others that have appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and other publications over the last few years are collected in Stiglitz's latest contribution to the debate, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them. The book follows up on his previous bestseller The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future in which Stiglitz examines the forces, market and political, that have contributed to America becoming the most unequal of the world's advanced countries.

Like that earlier book, The Great Divide argues that inequality is not the natural result of market efficiency but instead is due to "rent seeking" on the part of economic elites who have gained control of income-producing resources that have enabled them to become richer and richerer not by creating any new wealth but by greatly increasing their share of the wealth that already exists. An example Stiglitz cites several times in the book is Big Pharma, which makes minor adjustments in prescription drug formulas in order to keep them from becoming generic, thereby keeping prices high. Another example are the entertainment industry conglomerates, which for the most part have succeeded in extending copyright monopolies far beyond a work's original creation in order to reap economic rewards without  contributing much new to the marketplace of cultural production. At the same time, marginal tax rates on top incomes have dramatically decreased, from 50 percent in 1980 to 39.6 percent today with rates on capital gains and dividends, the sources where the wealthy derive most of their income, slashed even further to 15 percent. This has allowed the top 1 percent of earners to rake in some 95 percent of the nation's pretax income growth since the Great Recession of 2008 whereas the incomes of the vast majority of Americans have barely budged. This not only stifles growth and opportunity for the broad swath of people and by extension society overall, but has serious political implications for the democratic system as well, especially evident in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United.

A 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Stiglitz is recognized for his contributions to what is known as information economics, in particular the idea that markets are as a rule inefficient—contrary to the claims of neoclassicists—based on unequal access to information between buyer and seller. (The circulation of "lemons" in the used-car market is a prime example of "information asymmetry" whereby the seller knows more about the commodity being sold than the buyer and therefore has a comparative advantage in negotiating the price.) He is also a recipient of the John Bates Clark medal, which some consider more prestigious than the Nobel. He is a former Chief Economist of the World Bank and ex-Chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors. Current Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Janet Yellen is one of his doctoral students. Hardly a rogue economist, he is also a staunch critic of free-market fundamentalism (the notion that any interference with market processes diminishes their effectiveness), especially as it pertains to policies of neoliberalism, both domestic and international.

Stiglitz at Forum Invest FINANCE 2009 (CC-BY-AA 3.0)

As a compendium of articles written over a period of several years, there is a lot of repetition in the individual entries, oftentimes down to the same phrases. That is a bit distracting but it doesn't necessarily diminsh from the larger point being made. And to be sure, it cannot be repeated enough that our current travails are due to the malfeasance of certain vested interests (read: the uber-rich and their lackeys) who have handsomely rewarded themselves at the expense of everyone else and have for the most part escaped bearing any responsibility for what they have wrought. As the aforementioned Vanity Fair essay maintains, the 1 percent have rigged the system for their own benefit and to hell with the rest of us, in no small measure by buying up whatever political influence they have needed along the way. The examples include bailing out the money-center banks and their CEOs who engaged in predatory lending while allowing their unsuspecting borrowers to flounder in underwater mortgages and lose their homes to foreclosure, and making whole hedge fund investors—who given their supposed financial acumen and sophisticated economic forecasting tools surely knew the risks they were taking—while allowing pensioners to lose their life savings in imploding 401k valuations.

Stiglitz is essentially a Keynesian, and as such, sees a role for public-sector intervention into the economy during times of weak demand, such as the one many persuasively argue we are currently in. Stiglitz does not call for the end of capitalism as we know it, as Naomi Klein pretty much does in This Changes Everything. Rather, he calls for a mixture wonkish tweaks—increased taxes on corporations and the wealthy, tighter regulation of financial services, greater public investment in infrastructure, education, and technology, plus campaign finance reform—to mediate the deleterious effects of what he terms "ersatz capitalism" (which is a funny concept in that elsewhere in the book Stiglitz claims that there are no inherent laws of capitalism, so then how does one decide what constitutes the "inauthentic" kind?).

(Photo: Vince Carducci)

The more radical of Stiglitz's progeny within the 99 percent are not likely to be optimistic about the effects of these prescriptions, seeing them at best as whistling past the graveyard. And I must confess to being among the discontented. Although I concede that Stiglitz's remedies have a better chance than Thomas Piketty's call for a global wealth tax, if only because enacting something within the confines of a nation-state seems perhaps more feasible, if extremely unlikely given the current political environment, than transcending international borders into the realm where capital rules unrestrained.

On Art and Gentrification

The online journal ∞ Mile has embarked on a six-month series of articles on the subject of art and gentrification. Besides publishing articles, they are working with the University of Michigan Penney Stamps School of Art and Design to also present a panel discussion on March 21, 2015, at the Carr Center in downtown Detroit. My article on art and gentrification appears in the January 2015 issue now available. (Click here to read it.) The other essay is by the redoubtable (and fellow Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow) Marsha Music. It's titled "Just Say HI! (The Gentrification Blues)," and it provides an excellent counterpoint to my more academic piece. Where my essay traces external conditions, Marsha's reveals the internal experience. So much collective memory embedded in her piece. Thanks to stephen garrett dewyer, Jennifer Junkermeier, Ryan Harte, and Nick Tobier for putting it all together. The schedule of upcoming contributors looks really good.

Scott Hocking's Garden of the Gods

The long-abandoned 3.5 million square foot Packard Automotive Plant, production site of one of America's premier automotive luxury brands, has been recently slated for demolition (photo: Albert Duce, Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 3.0).

It was recently announced that after more than five decades of abandonment and neglect, the sprawling, decrepit Packard Automotive Plant on the east side of Detroit will be demolished by its ostensible current owner Dominic Cristini. (For news coverage, click here, here, here, and here.) Designed in the early 1900s by industrial architect Albert Kahn, the 40-acre, 3.5 million square foot complex was once the headquarters and main production site for the Packard Motor Car Company, one of the premier American luxury automobile brands of the 20th century. The plant was the first large-scale reinforced concrete industrial construction project in the world and at its opening in 1907 was considered to be the most advanced facility of its kind anywhere. The plant's opening preceded by three years Henry Ford's legendary Highland Park Plant (also designed by Kahn and immortalized by Louis-Ferdinand Celine in Journey to the End of the Night -- for $5 a Day) and the moving assembly line by six.

Since its closing in 1958, the complex has progressively fallen into decay with several sections in collapse as a result of exposure to the elements and a succession of fires; although, most of the buildings remain structurally sound due to their reinforced concrete construction. Much of the wiring and other building materials have been stripped by scavengers over the years. In recent times, the plant has also served as an enclave for so-called urban explorers, graffiti artists, and purveyors of the photographic genre known as "ruin porn." Without question, the most significant work done in this environment is that of Detroit artist Scott Hocking.

Born in Detroit in 1975, Hocking has been surveying the postindustrial landscape of Detroit for more than a decade. His project Relics, begun in 2001 in collaboration with Detroit artist Clinton Snider, has collected thousands of found objects and organized them into various grid configurations, which are exhibited from time to time. The result of an ongoing series of Situationist-like derives (drifts) through the city's wastelands, Relics gathers up the castoffs of modernity's material culture and presents them as metonyms of lives and livelihoods ruined in the transition from the Fordist to the post-Fordist mode of production, a tidal wave of creative destruction under which vast sections of Detroit have been literally and figuratively washed away. Permeated with the smell of grime and decay and odors of chemicals whose half-lives will persist into future centuries, the assemblages of broken toys, appliance fragments, rotted clothing, rusted machine parts, architectural remnants, and other abandoned ephemera, register the psychic realignment that has taken place in the migration from the age of mechanical reproduction to the regime of neoliberalism, of all that was once solid melting into air.

Scott Hocking and Clinton Snider, Relics, 2001, mixed mediums (original installation view at the Detroit Institute of Arts). (All Hocking images courtesy of the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery.)

Hocking's installation in the Packard Plant, Garden of the Gods (2009-2011), is among his most remarked-upon works, and it is arguably one of the most significant. Situated in a section of an upper floor where the roof has collapsed, the piece uses columns still standing amidst the rubble as pedestals upon which are perched old TV consoles retrieved from elsewhere in the building. (At one point in its devolution, the plant was used in part as storage space. One loft area was apparently used by a television repair and recycling service, the remains of which are still there.) 

Taking its title from a sedimentary rock formation in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, Garden of the Gods takes each of its 12 monuments as a member of the Greek pantheon. Over time some of these have also fallen over and other pieces of the structure have collapsed. The process of entropy has been photographically documented periodically since the TVs were first installed in 2009.

Top: Scott Hocking, Garden of the Gods, West, Summer.
Middle: Garden of the Gods, West, Winter.
Bottom: Garden of the Gods, Northeast, Snow.

Hocking readily acknowledges the site-specificity of this and other works, yet at the same time he gestures toward a broader historical view. From a mythological perspective, Garden of the Gods is a meditation on the hubris and repeated failure of humankind's stratagems of control over nature, a mytheme that goes back into distant times. (For an excellent interview with the artist on this and other aspects of his work, see Sarah Margolis-Pineo's "Seeing Beauty in All Stages.")

Closer to the present, Garden of the Gods can be read as a dystopian reflection of the effects of spectacle society. Hocking talks of thinking about the site originally as reminiscent of a classical amphitheater, a stage upon which to present a cast of epic characters. Coming then upon the trove of abandoned televisions sets, he instantly made the connection between the upright pillars and  the TV consoles as the appropriate dramatis personae. "It is almost too simplistic that the TVs are new gods," the artist has said. But I would argue that in this regard Garden of the Gods is in fact quite astute.

In his classic study Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Raymond Williams asserts that the rise of TV as the quintessential mass medium of the postwar era is inextricably bound up in its ability to communicate over large distances via the broadcast signal. In the United States, television worked in concert with the personal automobile and the suburban single-family housing development to demassify the urban core and construct a national imaginary based on the concept of "mobile privatization," the idea that one could the survey outside world from the comfort and security of one's own living room. (An excellent study on the effects of this process in American society during the 1960s and beyond is Joshua Meyrowitz's No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior.) And while the inner city has been substantially abandoned and thus devastated, the suburbs surrounding Detroit are actually quite the opposite. (Oakland County, just north of the city, is one of the nation's most affluent areas.) Mobile privatization became the means by which the public sphere imploded only to be replaced by the isolation of a domestic simulacrum whose only respite is consumerism, the true god being worshipped through the medium of TV.

The physical and psychic traces of the repercussions of mobile privatization and its consumerist orientation are stunningly apparent in Detroit. In light of the recent, and some say terminal, crises of the modern capitalist world-system, Garden of the Gods is a harbinger of what the future may hold.

Above: Scott Hocking, Zeus Summer.
Below: Zeus Destroyed.