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Rescuing the Market from Communal Criticism

2023; Wiley; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/papa.12235

1088-4963

Harrison Frye,

Political Economy and Marxism

The market is the dominant form of organizing economic activity today. This does not mean that the market is without its critics. Some question the market's compatibility with freedom. Others focus on how the market contributes to inequality. Still others worry that the market is irrational. While these are important challenges to the market, this paper focuses on a different set of worries about the market. A growing concern in the scholarly literature is that the market colors the way we relate to one another in unbecoming and unattractive ways. Specifically, the market corrodes the value of community, or betrays a lack of care for one another, or alienates us from each other.1 While the concern that markets are incompatible with communal or caring relationships appears in the literature on contested commodities, such as commercial surrogacy,2 this recent scholarship suggests that markets do not just infect our relationships with respect to specific goods and services, but that the market taken as a whole corrupts the way we live with one another. Importantly, this complaint does not merely attach to the actual markets we find ourselves in on a day-to-day basis, but to the very institution of the market no matter how it is instantiated. As G. A. Cohen remarks, “Every market, even a socialist market, is a system of predation.”3 This is not a new worry. Long ago, Marx described the market as a vehicle of alienation, noting how it creates the “estrangement of man from man.”4 While many have developed various strands of this communal criticism of the market, fewer have taken stock of the whole. This is what this paper seeks to do. Anti-Social Motives: The market uses fear and greed to motivate people. Instrumentalization: The market requires us to instrumentalize one another. Contingency: The market makes our relations of mutual benefit conditional or contingent on material interest. Exclusion: The market pushes individuals to exclude interests from consideration that are not marked as salient by any particular market exchange. An important element of my strategy is to make explicit what is too often implicit in this discussion. Many of these arguments implicitly rely upon a particular idea of what a market is, how it functions, and what the value of community requires. But there are different ways of modeling the market for the purposes of normative theorizing.5 Consider a proposal by Joseph Carens where people act just like they do in our actual market, only that their income is taxed at 100% and redistributed equally.6 This is recognizably a market, as people are guided by the price mechanism, but it is a market very far from our own. Further, such a market dodges many of the worries raised by the communal critic, at least prima facie. Because of this, for any given communal criticism of the market we can ask how robust it is against the range of different models of the market. Once we think of the communal criticism in these terms, it becomes clear that at least some of the criticisms do not apply as broadly as the communal critic's ambitions suggest. Just as the communal criticism of the market may be more or less robust, so may particular models of the market be more or less robust against the various communal criticisms of the market. A Carens market, for example, appears particularly robust against many of the communal criticisms. However, stopping at this observation would be a Pyrrhic victory for the defender of the market. A Carens market is explicitly utopian, perhaps even in a pejorative sense as I will argue later. Because of this, a communal critic of the market may happily concede that a Carens market satisfies community.7 Thus, part of my task is not just to evaluate the robustness of the communal criticism of the market, but also to find a model of the market that is itself robust against the communal criticism of the market and feasible in a way that Carens's proposal is not. I cannot offer a comprehensive model of the market here (Carens's own proposal is book-length after all!), but I can sketch out some features of a working model of market exchange that will suffice for testing against the communal criticism. After rejecting a proposal by Hillel Steiner as too weak to respond to the communal criticism, I will draw on work by Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden to argue that a mutual benefit model of market activity fits the bill. On this view, market exchange involves joint intentions to benefit one another within a limited domain. This Bruni-Sugden model provides a particular, though not comprehensive, vision of market arrangements that weakens many of the communal criticisms of the market while not being too utopian. However, it does fall prey to Exclusion. Nonetheless, once we see how Exclusion works, it becomes clear that the problem is not that the market damages or is incompatible with community. Instead, we should focus on how other institutions that make up our social life may promote community. This might require understanding when and how particular markets crowd out those opportunities for community, but this is a very different set of concerns from the more sweeping challenge to the market that the communal critic seeks to advance. Prior to turning to the communal criticism of the market, I believe it is helpful to begin with a model of community that will likely be familiar to many readers: Cohen's camping trip.8 Cohen asks us to think about how friends behave when going on a camping trip. On such a trip, friends freely play their part in the activities of the trip, contributing where they can to ensure each is able to enjoy the trip together. Alternatively, if you prefer, each abides by the Marxist principle “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” For example, Harry engages in fishing to help contribute high-quality food for the campers. In this way, each camper contributes to the camping trip without an expectation of compensation, though each is nonetheless compensated in that each benefits from the contributions of others. The point of Cohen's example is to model an ideal of socialism off of a small-scale mode of life with which we have at least some familiarity (if only from the testimony of others for those of us averse to spending time in the apparently great outdoors). Cohen derives two principles from the camping trip: a principle of equality and a principle of community.9 We can set aside the principle of equality and focus on the principle of community. For Cohen, the principle of community boils down to the requirement “that people care about, and, where necessary and possible, care for, one another, and, too, care that they care about one another.”10 You can see this on the camping trip. Everyone seems to be doing their part out of a genuine sense of comradery and care that everyone enjoys themselves. Cohen contrasts his ordinary camping trip with a market-based camping trip where each camper makes his/her contribution conditional on receiving special remuneration.11 For example, Harry the fisherman demands the best selections of fish in order to continue fishing. For Cohen, this market-based camping trip is inferior on all fronts to the ordinary camping trip. Cohen (rightly I think) believes that Harry's fellow campers would balk at this sort of behavior. It seems obvious that this purportedly market-based trip damages community, but we should ask: what exactly makes Harry's behavior uncommunal? And (the less asked yet equally important question) what exactly makes it market-like? Anti-Social Motives: The market uses fear and greed to motivate people. There is something surely right about this story about fear and greed. Consider the desperate salesmen in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, driven to extremes to make the sales they need to keep their jobs. While Mamet's play is fiction, it should not take too much memory or imagination to think of how it matches reality. Because of this, I agree that real, existing markets do give rise to both fear and greed. But fear and greed are ubiquitous in human life. Why should we see these vicious motives as built into the market as an institution, as opposed to just something that actual markets draw on, but need not draw on, to function well? If markets as we observe them standardly give rise to these motivations, why is the conclusion that markets are uncommunal rather than we need to think through how to make markets more communal? These sorts of questions lead to our first methodological question: What should we see as a part of the market as a social institution as opposed to a contingent feature of real-existing markets? What should guide our modeling decisions about the market in this context? A shared view in this literature is that the market is a social institution well-suited for efficiently allocating goods and services.17 Markets achieve efficient allocation through the price mechanism. By signaling relative supply and demand, the price system coordinates the decentralized decisions of production and consumption in such a way as to limit both shortages and gluts. Thus, at a minimum, our model of the market should involve the price mechanism and whatever makes that function properly. There is a further question whether or to what degree actual markets live up to the model, but that is a different question than the one we are entertaining: does the market as a possible way of organizing economic activity impair community in a worrying way? Based on this minimal constraint on modeling the market, I worry that Anti-Social Motives simply begs the question. Building into the account of market behavior patently uncommunal motivations forecloses any critical evaluation of whether or not markets lack community.18 More importantly, Anti-Social Motives makes no effort to link fear and greed to the valuable functions that markets perform. In fact, Cohen himself discusses Carens's previously mentioned market socialist ideal, which contradicts Anti-Social Motives.19 As a reminder, Carens asks us to imagine a market society where income is taxed at 100% and redistributed equally. If the market depended on fear and greed, it would be difficult for such a market to function. This is because a guarantee of equal returns independent of contribution would not mobilize such motives. But Carens argues that people could participate in such a market—they would simply do so out of pro-social motives, or what Carens calls “moral incentives.”20 If a Carens market is recognizably a well-functioning market, which I posit it is even if such a market may not be feasible, this suggests that a well-functioning market is compatible with a wide-range of motives, many of which seem communal on their face. However, even if this is correct, we should not be satisfied with the claim that a Carens market dodges Anti-Social Motives. The reason for this is that a Carens market makes it too easy to mount a defense against the communal criticism of the market. Whatever complaint the communal critic raises against the market, we could simply say, “In a Carens market, they would not do that! The price mechanism acts like the lines in a play—just as the lines do not reflect or express or embody the true attitudes, beliefs, deliberations, etc. of the actors, neither do the market behaviors of participants in a Carens market.” If I were to stop here, this would make my argument trivial by idealizing away the problem that the communal critic raises. This sort of idealization is vicious as it leaves intact the communal criticism when leveled against a wide-range of possible market arrangements.21 And so, we encounter a second methodological question: what degree of idealization should we opt for in our model of the market compared to actual markets? I cannot answer this question with any great specification here, but I can gesture toward an answer with just enough clarity to guide my investigation. Whatever idealization involved should not be solely motivated by a problem raised by the communal critic. Otherwise, the model will run into a similar issue as a Carens market does: it idealizes away the problem as opposed to engaging it. Because of this, I propose to come at the problem of idealization in an oblique manner. I will start from observations about at least some behavior on the actual market. From these sorts of observations, I can describe a model that, while idealized, is not viciously so as it is grounded in observation as well as constrained by the first methodological criterion that the market is well-suited for a particular social function. Then, I can test this model against the communal criticism of the market. This is how I will pursue my inquiry in the remainder of the paper. Even in our actual, decidedly non-socialist, market, some of the most successful marketeers are driven by the interests of others. For example, one way people participate in the Effective Altruist movement involves “Earning to Give.”22 These people seek to earn as much money as possible for the purposes of giving most of it away for the good of others. While such individuals are outliers, these examples reveal a pedestrian truth about market life. Many of us engage in market behavior not just for our own good, but also for the good of others. Effective altruists are an extreme case of this, but even those of us who are less saintly often seek to benefit our close relations such as family and friends.23 I may receive a salary for my teaching and research, but I do not take myself as primarily motivated by fear and greed when I am at the front of the classroom teaching my students or in front of my computer typing out this paper. I find myself motivated by a genuine interest in both activities for the sake of my students and the (far fewer) readers of my work as well as the knowledge that my work helps me support my family and friends. This remains true even though I am paid for these activities. The idea that market behavior can admit of multiple motives is not unfamiliar in the literature. Steiner, for example, uses the case of Andrew Carnegie to make a similar point.24 For Steiner, Carnegie's ruthless marketeering was in the service of his greater philanthropy. The question that follows from this observation is, if market behavior is not necessarily about the baser human motivations, what exactly is it about? Steiner suggests that the core of market behavior is not fear nor greed, but instead what Philip Wicksteed calls non-tuism.25 In Wicksteed's words, “The economic relation does not exclude from my mind everyone but me, it potentially includes everyone but you.”26 This way of thinking about the market shifts the conversation from one about motives to one about the deliberations of participants in the market and how those deliberations may differ from other contexts. On the Steiner-Wicksteed account, market exchange should be modeled as a deliberation where each participant does not place independent weight upon the interests or ends of other participants in a given exchange. Each participant may care quite a bit about other people such as the Effective Altruist earning to give. They just do not care about their market partner beyond what is necessary for making the transaction go through. In this model, a grocer puts food on their shelves not because I am hungry and want certain foods, but rather because they are trying to get me as a customer to part ways with my hard-earned cash. This does not mean the grocer does not take an interest in my interests as a customer. Only a soon-to-be-out-of-business grocer does not take an interest in her customers’ interests.27 Wicksteed's point is that market-partners’ interests only figure in a limited, instrumental sense. The non-tuist model limits the application of Anti-Social Motives as the non-tuist model suggests that there is no reason to see anti-social motivations as built into the market. Thus, if fear and greed appear, they are contingent features rather than necessary features of market activity—just as when fear and greed appear among campers occasionally, as surely they do, we would not say that such passions are built into camping as a way of organizing social life. A stronger version of Anti-Social Motives does not claim that market exchange requires fear and greed, but instead such motivations are a correlate of market activity. On this view, anti-social motives are more prominent in market exchange than in more communal forms of social relations.28 I do not disagree that actual markets may often draw out motives we find unbecoming. When that happens, we can lament these motivations from the perspective of community. Further, we ought to pay attention to when and how markets give rise to these motivations. That being said, a non-tuist model of the market allows us to appreciate the wide space of possible markets and market exchanges compatible with various motivations, ranging from the altruistic to the mildly self-interested to the despicably greedy. The question is not whether markets run on fear and greed or even whether markets correlate with these motivations, but rather when do they do so.29 The non-tuist model focuses our critical attention in a more fine-grained way than the communal critic who sees “every market, even a socialist market” as an affront to community. The non-tuist model also appears to satisfy the methodological criterion of not idealizing away the problem viciously. This is because the non-tuist model arises not as an ad hoc amendment, but rather as a way of trying to capture the apparent fact that markets appear compatible with various motives in achieving their valuable economic purposes. Further in its favor is that, while it remains an idealization, the non-tuist model requires fewer idealizations regarding human motivation than a Carens market does. Non-tuism does not involve strong, moral incentives to weaken the scope of the communal criticism of the market, at least in the guise of Anti-Social Motives. However, the non-tuist model remains vulnerable to other forms of the communal criticism. Instrumentalization: The market requires us to instrumentalize one another. While the non-tuist model may be vulnerable to Instrumentalization, I do not think the non-tuist model of the market is the best model of market life. Further, I can motivate a change in models without referencing the problem of community, but instead by appealing to both observation and the market's underlying economic rationale as outlined in Section III. This way, I can avoid the problem of vicious idealization faced by the Carens market. The non-tuist account of market behavior is both overinclusive and underinclusive in the sorts of behavior it captures. Let me explain. The non-tuist model is overinclusive because it fails to distinguish market behavior from other forms of instrumentalizing behavior that may bring benefits to all parties. In particular, the non-tuist model includes behavior that is incompatible with the allocative function of the market. It is instructive to think about what Steiner in other work calls “throffers.”33 You run a shop in a dangerous neighborhood and need protection from thieves. I come to your store and say, “I see you need some help. How about this? You pay me to protect you. Otherwise, maybe I will come back later with some friends and smash your place up.” This looks like standard market activity when viewed from a certain angle. After all, you do need the protection, and I can offer it for a price. Nonetheless, this sort of activity has no place in a well-functioning market because it undermines the ability of the price-mechanism to track relative scarcity. If I make it costly for you to say no to my offer by threatening you, it is hard to see your “yes” as evidence that there is demand for my services as opposed to fear of my threat. Because of this, most economies actively try to prevent this sort of racketeering, as well as related phenomena such as blackmail. The non-tuist model of market exchange struggles to make sense of the distinction between racketeering and market behavior.34 The racketeer is indifferent to the interests of their victim, but their actions are not purely detrimental like theft. Unlike the thief, the racketeer offers a service that often does benefit the target of their muscling: protection.35 Similarly, the person purchasing protection is under no illusions that their protector is doing anything more than using them. In this way, there is a non-tuist structure to these criminal interactions. The non-tuist model is underinclusive in that it appears to exclude actions that play an important role in maintaining the market. The image one often gets from the non-tuist model is that the market is just basically dealing with Amazon—faceless transactions among individuals who never acknowledge one another beyond the transfer of funds and the shipping of the purchased good.36 While these sorts of transactions are common, there remain a diversity of ways in which we economically relate to one another, from long-term partnerships to regulars at the local coffee shop to dedicated luthiers who craft instruments to a customer's specification. Participants in such relations are often not mutually disinterested but have an interest in each other's success. The non-tuist reading would see these people as making a mistake about how the market should work. But there is no mistake. The success of these market relationships as market relationships depends in part on not merely instrumentalizing the interests of one another. This is because of the key role that trust plays in maintaining the market.37 Trusting relations involve a partly non-instrumental attitude toward one another.38 Non-tuism, however, excludes such non-instrumental thinking vis-à-vis market partners’ interests. Because of these considerations, I believe the non-tuist model of market exchange mislabels behavior in ways that matter for the functioning of the market. So, even if the non-tuist model can work in some contexts, we have community-independent reasons to look for a different model. The next section describes such a model. Bruni and Sugden argue that market exchange should be modeled as a form of joint intention. In their words, “a market contract between Alice and Bill constitutes those two individuals as a collective agent with the intention of joint benefit within a certain domain.”39 This model of market relations is distinct from both the motive-based model and the non-tuist model. In this model, market exchange is idealized as a particular form of mutual benefit. It is not merely agents seeking their isolated self-interest. But neither is market exchange a generalized form of mutual benefit in that participants in a market exchange do not expect mutual benefit beyond the narrow transaction. When I pay the baker, I am done with that particular relationship of mutual benefit. It does not matter if we could benefit each other in more ways than we already have. That was not a part of the deal. The mutual benefit model of market activity differs from the non-tuist model in two respects. First, each party in such a market exchange intends the mutual benefit of all parties. This is not an altruistic intention. It is not that I intend for the baker to benefit. It is instead an intention that we benefit.40 On a non-tuist reading, in contrast, the fulfillment of the interest of the other is an unintended side-effect of our individual intentions. Because of this difference, the mutual benefit model can capture the structure of long-term business partnerships as well as more transient forms of market exchange, avoiding the problem of underinclusiveness. Second, the mutual benefit model can differentiate market activity from racketeering, avoiding the problem of overinclusiveness. The racketeer does not intend that we benefit. The easy way to see this is to think about what happens if you say no to the racketeer. Rather than taking no as evidence that the protection offered was not in fact mutually beneficial, the racketeer proceeds to smash windows and merchandise. More abstractly, a mutually beneficial relationship in this model requires that the would-be participants in an exchange would be no worse off for interacting than not interacting.41 If the baker says no to my offer, I am no worse off than before.42 This is not true for saying no to the racketeer. Prior to considering how the mutual benefit model of market life may be insufficiently communal, it is worth noting that such a model satisfies the value of community, albeit in a limited, thin sense. The mutual benefit model describes each participant in a given exchange as taking on the end of jointly satisfying each other's interests. It is not merely incidental to my getting meat that the butcher gets paid. Similarly, it is not merely incidental to the butcher that I receive his wares. We both can endorse the mutual satisfaction of these particular ends. Indeed, the mutual benefit model sounds like Marx's claim that an unalienated society would be one where “our products would be like so many mirrors, out of which our essence shone.”43 This is a kind of community, albeit a thin one. Because of this, the mutual benefit model suggests that Instrumentalization is not a core feature of the market. It is of course possible for markets to give rise to instrumentalization. It is even possible that many markets may tend to be robustly correlated with such instrumentalization. Because of this, Instrumentalization does pick out a truth—there are markets that require us to instrumentalize each other in ways incompatible with the value of community. Nonetheless, the mutual benefit model provides an ideal of market relations that can evade such instrumentalization or not require such instrumentalization in a wide range of contexts. Or, at least, the type of instrumentalization at play is not that different from other forms of instrumentalization that most would be comfortable with in their close relationships. When a couple sets up a new apartment together, there is a kind of instrumentalization at play, but, assuming a well-functioning relationship, it is not the sort that raises concerns. This is because, as a couple, we intend to paint the living room together. Yes, we each get something out of it, but the important point is the mutual benefit is jointly intended. This is not the same as simply using another person to get what one wants, as Instrumentalization rightly sees as incompatible with communal relations. It is important to stress that the mutual benefit model is an ideal, and real-life markets may depart from this model in all sorts of respects, even if we can catch glimpses of it in individual exchanges. But I take this model to be the sort of thing we have been looking for: an account of how the market can fulfill its valuable social function of allocating goods and services efficiently while making room for the value of community. Further, it is not a model of the market that is viciously utopian in the way the Carens market is. The model of mutual benefit is an idealization not arising from the demands of trying to solve the problem of community, but instead as a better alternative to the non-tuist model to capture how a market can generate economic gains through the price mechanism. One might worry that the mutual benefit model in this sketchy form obscures conflict over the benefits of cooperation.44 In any given exchange, we might intend some benefit for one another, but there are multiple possible ways of distributing that benefit. For example, you need money, and I need someone to mow my lawn. Mutual benefit is possible, but first we must negotiate. I agree this generates conflict between us, but this sort of conflict by itself is not inimical to communal relations. Even the friendliest of campers are going to negotiate how best to divide up the task of setting up the campsite, clean pots and pans, and so forth. That being said, the character of negotiation on the market changes if it is the case that I have significantly more market power than you, and I can dictate the terms of our deal. Even if market competition is fierce enough (more on this in the next section) and there is no room for negotiation, it may be the case that the price of your labor is insufficient for you to live a fulfilling life. In these scenarios, we can get to mutual benefit, but the way we get there or perhaps even ultimately where we land seems suspicious from the perspective of community as it appears to betray a lack of care. What these cases suggest is that the mutual benefit model in the skeletal form described here will necessarily raise further questions about the preconditions for a more communal economy, requiring a more comprehensive model of market life and activity than I can offer here as well as considerations about what sorts of policies beyond the market can serve the end of community. But my point is not that this simple model clears the market of all charges of being uncommunal. In fact, I will argue in the next section that even the mutual benefit model falls short of what full community requires on its own terms. My purpose in this section is to think through the best case of how it could be that market exchange, abstracted away from many of the problems our actual markets face, could satisfy the value of community. Back to our lawn mowing case. Assume we negotiate a price with which we are both satisfied (maybe one of us is slightly advantaged by the deal, but so what?). There is no worrisome deployment of market power. Assume that neither of us are in a situation where we are struggling to keep afloat, suggesting we are not engaging with each other out of fear nor greed. In such a situation, we both intend a benefit for on