7.1Securing the polity of civil society – An initial determination of government (Schmitt, Locke, Kant) – The rule of law

Government, and democratic government in particular, is about securing and enhancing the quotidian, customary way of life of a given community or society as a whole, on the one hand, by protecting it from detrimental effects, and on the other, by enhancing it through forward-looking policies that meet the ever-changing challenges gathering and shaping up from the horizon of the future. The practical issues of everyday life in which government policy and government decisions are involved are limitless, ranging from the local level to the national and international levels. Government provides the framework within which the life of a society is lived, i.e. government erects, guides and protects a state of living and is in this sense a state of affairs which stands as a solid framework, a ground on which social living can stand. As Carl Schmitt notes, the Staat is first of all the “state of affairs of a people” (Zustand eines Volkes131). The state maintains the state of affairs of a way of societal living and is in this sense a bulwark against the contingency which besets human living and human endeavour and, above all, human enterprise. Seen in this way, the state exists for the sake of a people and its way of life, and not, as totalitarian thinkers such as Carl Schmitt have proposed, the people for the sake of the state and its power, of which more later (cf. Chapter 13).

All human undertakings as social movements are exposed to contingency, especially and essentially all those economic undertakings in which more or less freely working markets mediate. The socio-ontological underpinnings for this statement have been provided already in Chapter 5. Human existence has to take care to counter contingency, above all that contingency which arises from social interplay with other, free human beings who can act one way or another. The state erects and upholds a state of affairs in which existence is relieved of some of the care of contingency by making life secure in many and various ways, such as preventing and redressing crime, providing necessary infrastructure and social services, or alleviating poverty. Security means being without care, Latin: se cura.

John Locke puts security at the heart of his reasoning why “men” in a “State of Nature” consent to put “on the bonds of Civil Society” (p. 375) “by setting up a known Authority, to which every one of that Society may Appeal upon any Injury received, or Controversie that may arise, and which every one of the Society ought to obey” (p. 369) when he states that men “joyn and unite into a Community, for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure Enjoyment of their Properties, and a greater Security against any that are not of it.” (p. 375) In short, “Government has no other end but the preservation of Property” (p. 373), a man’s property being “his Life, Liberty and Estate” (p. 367). The security of the individual’s life, liberty and estate is the raison d’être for the state of civil, law-governed society. This is a first, fundamental determination of a concept of state from the viewpoint of liberal individualist understanding of a free society, and its validity is not merely an historical curiosity, but applies wherever individual liberty is taken as the starting-point for thinking about government and its legitimacy, a theme that will be taken up again in Chapter 10.

The securing of property in Locke’s broad sense is the securing of the framework of civil society, i.e. the polity, within which individuals act on their own account, interplaying with others to take care of their everyday concerns, especially their economic concerns to earn a living. The state is the guarantor of this formal framework by protecting property rights and thus securing basic individual freedom of interplay against incursions by others. This is a restricted, provisional but fundamental understanding of security as the rule of law. The core of the rule of law is to remove the insecurity relating to individuals not keeping their contractual word (cf. Chapter 5.6) by the state’s enforcing contracts under law. Exchange contracts, which are the medium in which, the mediation through which the life of civil society moves, thus become secure once they have been entered into by free property-owners to a degree more secure than the mutual trust on which contracts already are based.

In the more expanded state, the concept of security is extended to cover also guaranteeing the basic material welfare of individual citizens. The state then not only guarantees a legal framework for individual interaction but positively intervenes in the distribution of the total wealth created by commutative economic interplay as a whole. This intervention of the welfare state is only seen to be necessary because earning a livelihood, even when the forms of property, namely “life, liberty and estate”, are guaranteed, remains insecure. This kind of insecurity lies deeper and cannot be remedied simply by the state’s erecting a secure welfare-state of affairs. Why not? Because, as we have seen following Hegel (RPh. § 245; cf. Chapter 6.5), a welfare state contradicts the principle of civil society, which is individual self-reliance in the ongoing interplay of powers. The dilemma is that freedom of property and the rule of law cannot provide for every single individual’s well-being because earning a livelihood through the exercise of individual freedom is subject to the uncertainties of income-earning social interplay, which inevitably includes sudden, marked changes in the general interplay of the economy.

The state securely providing welfare benefits for its people is as contrary to individual freedom as the beneficence of an autocrat. As the great representative of German Enlightenment, Kant, puts it:

Denn mit Freiheit begabten Wesen gnügt nicht der Genuß der Lebensannehmlichkeit, die ihm auch von anderen (und hier von der Regierung) zu Teil werden kann; sondern auf das Prinzip kommt es an, nach welchem es sich solche verschafft. Wohlfahrt aber hat kein Prinzip, weder für den, der sie empfängt, noch der sie austeilt (der eine setzt die hierin, der andere darin); weil es dabei auf das Materiale des Willens ankommt, welches empirisch, und so der Allgemeinheit einer Regel unfähig ist. Ein mit Freiheit begabtes Wesen kann und soll also, / im Bewußtsein dieses seines Vorzuges vor dem vernunftlosen Tier, nach dem formalen Prinzip seiner Willkür keine andere Regierung für das Volk, wozu es gehört, verlangen, als eine solche, in welcher dieses mit gesetzgebend ist: d.i., das Recht der Menschen, welche gehorchen sollen, muß notwendig vor aller Rücksicht auf Wohlbefinden vorhergehen, und dieses ist ein Heiligtum, das über allen Preis (der Nützlichkeit) erhaben ist, und welches keine Regierung, so wohltätig sie auch immer sein mag, antasten darf.132

For beings gifted with reason, the enjoyment of the agreeableness of life apportioned to them by others (here, by the government) does not suffice, and the crucial point is the principle according to which they procure such agreeableness. But welfare does not have any principle, neither for the one receiving it nor for the one apportioning it (one person will posit it to be such, the next will posit it otherwise); because it depends on the material will, which is empirical and is thus incapable of the universality of a rule. A being gifted with freedom, therefore, conscious of its distinction from the reasonless animal, and according to the formal principle of its arbitrariness, can and should demand no other government for the people to which it belongs than one in which the people contributes to making laws; that is, the right of people who are supposed to obey must necessarily precede all consideration of well-being, and this is something sacred that is above any price (of usefulness) and that no government, no matter how beneficent it may be, may touch. The sense of this passage changes in today’s context when read against the backdrop of the rampant, debt-ridden welfare state and the ubiquitous political demands of so-called (distributive) social justice. The protection of individual freedom and its associated self-responsibility under the rule of law is a “formal principle” of universal applicability, arising as it does from a casting of human being itself as free, whereas enjoying an agreeable life and being cared for by the government, is “empirical”, and can be posited to include all kinds of material comforts for human living. The agreeableness of living is like an endless shopping list that cannot have the dignity of a universal human right and must not be played out against human freedom, which is always also necessarily individual and risky, no matter what other guises it may assume. The inviolability of human freedom (which is manifested in social interplay as investigated in Chapter 5 and only visible socio-ontologically) and its precedence over material well-being have long since been violated not only in historical political struggles, but also and above all in a kind a ‘social’ thinking that has mixed up material well-being with individual freedom and sacrificed the latter to the former. Not only that: individual freedom has been defamed as mere individualistic arbitrariness, on the one hand, and as merely the freedom of a particular, purportedly privileged social class to the exclusion of the less well-off, on the other.

Freedom demands also that the people have a say in the laws that rule them which gives precedence to a form of government that Kant, in a time before the massification that democracy brings, calls “republicanism”, but which today would be called democratic government. These laws are in the first place “formal” in Kant’s sense of the term: pure, transcendentally a priori (to experience) and therefore ontological, capable of a universal formulation without favour or prejudice to any particular individuals or social groups, and having precedence over empirical government measures providing concretely for material wellbeing which may also be posited in the form of (administrative) ‘laws’ which are simply acts of the government’s political will. Formal laws in Kant’s sense are universal rules of play for individuals exercising their freedom in interplay with one another. They are “sacred” in the sense that freedom is “infinite” in the Hegelian sense, and cannot be compared or traded off with material well-being and security, which is a ‘finite’ state of affairs that can be set up by a state. The ‘arbitrariness’ of individual freedom so strongly denounced by critics of ‘bourgeois freedom’ or ‘market consumerism’ is only one side of the coin of individual freedom, which is always insecure and groundless through being exposed to social interplay. The other side of the coin is that the individual learns to exercise its powers and freedom in casting and caring for its ownmost course of existence across the seas of social vicissitudes.

7.2Exchange as the starting-point of social living (Plato, Hegel)

Civil society is based on a division of labour which necessitates the exchange of the products of labour in some form or other. Earning a livelihood depends on offering something on the market, whether it be goods or services, including one’s own potential to labour. Recall what Plato says about the ontic genesis of the polis:

Γίνεται τοίνυν, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, πόλις, ὡς ἐγῷμαι, ἐπειδὴ τυγχάνει ἡμῶν ἕκαστος οὐκ αὐτάρκης, ἀλλὰ πολλῶν ἐνδεής· ἢ τίν’ οἴει ἀρχὴν πόλιν οἰκίζειν; (Rep. 369b)

which is standardly translated something like:

A city arises therefore, I said, it seems to me, because it happens that each individual one of us is not self-sufficient, but lacks much; or do you think that a city is established from some other beginning?

This translation takes the passage as the argumentation about an historical, chronological beginning and genesis of a city, but there is a deeper meaning embedded in the text if “polis” and “beginning” are understood in a more essential, ontological way. Polis stands for humans living together in some sort of community, a way of Mitsein, of togetherness, constituting a shared everyday life-world. Beginning (ἀρχή) is also the principle, which is a point of origin governing what proceeds from that origin. The principle here is that each individual is not self-sufficient and autonomous but, like Eros, lacks much, which can only be overcome through some sort of sociating intercourse among humans. This lacking of much should be understood not only more broadly than humans needing means of subsistence such as food, clothing and shelter (such needs being derivative of certain particular usages that determine, for instance, what, specifically, is food, clothing and shelter in a given society), being extendible to everything that humans lack which they can set their heart’s desire on as enabling some agreeable, customary practice or other of social life, but above all more essentially as that human being as social is intrinsically interchange in both the sense of mutual estimation as somewho and also the intertwining of desiring wills in exchanges of all kinds, including giving, exchanging, trading, buying and selling.

Hegel puts it thus, “If for their consciousness it is need in general, benevolence, benefit, etc. that lead them to contracts, intrinsically it is reason, namely, the idea of real (i.e. existing only in the will) determinate being of free person-hood” (Wenn für ihr Bewußtsein das Bedürfnis überhaupt, das Wohlwollen, der Nutzen usf. es ist, was sie zu Verträgen führt, so ist es an sich die Vernunft, nämlich die Idee des reellen (d.i. nur im Willen vorhandenen) Daseins der freien Persönlichkeit. RPh. § 71 Übergang vom Eigentum zum Vertrage). In Hegel’s thinking, Reason, Vernunft is the (ontological, i.e. speculative) “conceptual knowledge” (begreifendes Erkennen, RPh. end of Vorrede, Werke Bd. 3 S. 27) of the Gestalten of being which, when realized in a “conscious identity” (bewußte Identität, RPh:27) of reason and reality, constitutes the “philosophical idea” (philosophische Idee, RPh:27). The concept of freedom essential to human being itself demands that it be realized also in contractual intercourse.

The most elementary ‘look’ of intercourse is the exchange of goods, which, beyond the more primitive form of barter, is generally mediated by money. Money as medium is therefore constitutive of human society and human intercourse on a fundamental, practical level by facilitating the rudimentary social nexus. A more fundamental, socio-ontological level presupposed by human beings labouring within a division of labour and exchanging with each other is that human beings share the openness of 3D-time in its identity with mind, and therefore are able to labour on the basis of an understanding, to share an understanding of world including what is involved in exchanging one good for another, and also have intercourse in language with one another in which their understanding of the world is articulated and expressly shared. Aristotle says this most famously in his Politics by fundamentally linking human social being (ζῷον πολιτικόν) with human beings’ having language and understanding (ζῷον λόγον ἔχον). As beings with understanding, humans are at play, buying and selling on the market to gain through interchanges what they lack for living within their usages.

Goods are always already understood as being able to remedy some lack or other and therefore as being good for this or that. As such, goods are valuable and show themselves off as such to human understanding. This has already been discussed (cf. Chapter 4.1). This game with commodified valuables, this interplay of exchange-values, is essential to everyday life both in earning a livelihood and enjoying it by consuming what can be purchased. Everyday life is negotiated on the market, with money serving as the conventional mediator for exchanging valuables. Money has to be earned to lubricate the movement of living by spending it to support a given way of life. The polyarchic interplay on the markets — which is more basically the interplay among free, individual human powers (δυνάμεις) — is subject to all sorts of contingencies and vicissitudes which are played out in supply and demand and ultimately in the prices of commodities of all sorts.

No matter what is done by the state to hem the contingencies of value-play in the market-place, say, by controlling prices or, more generally, in guaranteeing certain levels of income for the population, any such policies do not and cannot suspend and abolish the interplay of value-estimation through market exchange. Where total control is attempted, as in state socialist regimes, the market asserts itself nevertheless behind the state’s back as a black market, driven by the motive force of individual self-interests and the simple social possibility of exchange, regardless of what the state determines to be legal prices and acceptable social practices. This is because value itself is a socio-ontological category, i.e. a look of being that shows itself already in things themselves showing themselves to understanding as being-good-for... Such a look of being cannot be effaced even by harsh state coercion, but simply goes underground.

Any scheme for managing value-interplay, which are expressed quantitatively in prices, works only as long as the unforeseen does not happen. Why is this so? To cite Hayek, “Surely Samuel Butler (Hudibras II, i) was right when he wrote, ‘For what is worth in any thing, But so much money as ’twill bring’”133, for value-estimations have no ground, but only an empirical validity which, however, can evaporate if the circumstances of social interplay on the markets change considerably all of a sudden. The exchange-value of things is not reliable because, as has been shown in Chapter 5, exchange-value only comes about through a bi-archic and polyarchic interplay. Nevertheless, the exchange of goods is a ‘natural’ elementary form of sociation that actually enables practical, everyday life. It is natural in the sense that, just as it is natural for human beings (i.e. corresponds to the way the world opens up for human understanding) to know how to make or do certain useful things for living and to use and enjoy them, it is also natural for them to exchange these goods one for the other to acquire what they cannot make or do themselves.

7.3The reliability of things (Heidegger)

Let us return to the statement that the exchange-value of things is not reliable. The qualification is necessary because, in the sense of use-value, the value of things is entirely reliable, so much so that reliability can be said to constitute the being of things. How so? The value of the practical things of everyday life is their usefulness for quotidian uses in customary usages. Things are useful for, i.e. good for, a specific purpose or purposes, and this constitutes their being, i.e. their mode of presencing. Their being is thus a valuableness in the sense of being-good-for some purpose or other in existence’s movement. Being-good-for is how Heidegger famously determines the being of pragmatic things (Zeug) in Being and Time (1927). In his similarly famous study on The Truth of the Work of Art a few years later (1935/36), Heidegger roots this being of things in a deeper “essential being” which he calls “reliability” or “dependability” (Verläßlichkeit). Through the reliability of things in everyday life, a certain world as a customary way of life is dependably kept open. Heidegger explicates this reliability in discussing the peasant woman’s boots said to be portrayed in a painting by Van Gogh:

Das Zeugsein des Zeugs besteht zwar in seiner Dienlichkeit. Aber diese selbst ruht in der Fülle eines wesentlichen Seins des Zeuges. Wir nennen es die Verläßlichkeit. Kraft ihrer ist die Bäuerin durch dieses Zeug eingelassen in den schweigenden Zuruf der Erde, kraft der Verläßlichkeit des Zeuges ist sie ihrer Welt gewiß. Welt und Erde sind ihr und denen, die mit ihr in ihrer Weise sind, nur so da: im Zeug. [...] die Verläßlichkeit des Zeugs gibt erst der einfachen Welt ihre Geborgenheit und sichert der Erde die Freiheit ihres ständigen Andranges.

(Holzwege S. 19)

The thingness of [practical] things consists in their serviceability. But serviceability itself rests in the fullness of an essential being of things. We call it reliability. By virtue of it, the peasant woman is let into the silent call of the Earth; by virtue of the reliability of things, she is certain of her world. World and Earth are only there for her and for those who are with her in her way thus: in [useful, practical] things. [...] only the reliability of useful things gives security/shelteredness to the simple world and secures the Earth the freedom of its constant surge.

Here Heidegger refers explicitly to security, the security of living in a world and belonging to the earth as a way of life. The peasant’s boots are good for working in the fields, and they are dependably good for this labour as one crucial practice in a way of life. The peasant woman understands the boots as part of her peasant way of life and she has the boots under her own control. In this simple, rustic world, the boots can hardly fail to be reliable.

But it could be said that the being of technological things, too, consists in their reliable functioning in a certain context, which is presumably more complex than the simple world of the countryside. Perhaps boots can be said to be more reliable than a piece of electronic equipment such as a personal computer, but the being of a computer lies nevertheless in its being reliably serviceable for certain functions embedded in the interconnections of a modern way of living with the cyberworld.134 In the modern world too, reliability of function is essential to the being of technological things, and such reliability is guaranteed by both quality control procedures and a service network of service providers who are supposed to speedily fix any function failures.

The reliability of things, both simple and complex, resides in their dependable use within a way of life, thus keeping a world open. Their reliability pertains to usefulness and usages in everyday life. Such reliability secures a world. The peasant woman can be sure of her peasant world, even if she has to worry “about securing bread” (S. 18) because of the dangers of bad weather and is therefore glad when she “once again survives hardship” (S. 18). The simple world described here is a world of quasi-self-sufficient production. The reliability of the peasant’s boots is paralleled for us in the modern world by the reliability of the electricity grid: when we flick the switch, the power is reliably on.

7.4Exchange essentially unreliable

But what if the elementary sociating practice of exchange is introduced to the simple peasant world? This is a phenomenon entirely overlooked and suppressed by Heidegger for thoughtful consideration throughout his entire writings. Even the simple peasant way of life is based on a division of labour and requires that the peasants exchange their grain for other things they need for their way of life, such as boots. How well this way of life succeeds and is kept open with its characteristic usages and ways of experiencing and understanding depends not only on whether the harvest is good, but on the value of the harvest on the market. If prices are depressed, this endangers the security of the peasant world just a much as bad weather — or even extremely good weather producing a bumper harvest and therefore a market glut — does. The market value of the peasant’s grain is not dependable because there is no thing that can reliably fulfil the function of ‘sale’. Sale is not a technical act, but depends on two parties reaching agreement on an exchange. Moreover, this exchange in turn depends on general market conditions, in which guise ‘the others’ penetrate into the peasant world. This dependency means that sale is essentially, i.e. in its very mode of being, not dependable, since the parties are just as free to enter into an exchange relation as they are to refrain from one. A sale has to be clinched in a moment of reciprocal interplay, and the bargaining over price may lead even to the peasant’s way of life being threatened by insufficient grain prices being attained.

Whereas in the functioning of a useful thing by a single person for a purpose others are present mostly indirectly in securing that function, exchange relations of their essence involve direct interchange between humans. Even in a simple, largely self-sufficient peasant world, exchange interplay, and thus the exchange-value of things, plays an essential part in keeping that world open and liveable as a way of life. But the sale of a harvest on the market, which is a social interplay rather than a practical thing, is not essentially reliable like a pair of peasant’s boots. On the contrary, sale is an essentially unreliable social movement of relational interplay, and this unreliability means that even the simple world of the peasant is exposed essentially to insecurity. The peasant woman can only be sure of her world in being aware of the unreliability of the selling prices for grain. Security is essentially wedded with insecurity in any world in which social relations of exchange are part of the social fabric. Or rather: there is insecurity in any way of social living because there is no guarantee that others, as free beings, can be depended upon in the ongoing social interplay of all kinds. In a market economy, this insecurity of sociating interplay is mediated significantly via the reified relations of the marketplace.

It is safe to say, however, that most human society is characterized more or less by commodity exchange, including simple peasant societies and those socialist societies in which the state imposes a total social production and distribution plan. Even state socialism has not been able to elude the uncertainty of exchange relations. Insofar as things are always essentially of themselves doubled as use-values and exchange-values, i.e. in being good for a certain use and in being good-for-exchange and therefore abstractly worth a certain amount of money, it must be said that their mode of being resides both in reliability and unreliability. The social being, i.e. the sociating interplay, is unreliable. That is, the being of practically useful things spans the entire gamut of the dimension of reliability from reliability in use to its negation in the unreliability of exchange-value. The unreliability of things is essentially related to the nature of human being as being-in-the-world with others. The other as a free origin is essentially unreliable. The ontological source of this unreliability is the essential, groundless character of market exchange interplay which in turn is rooted more deeply in the essential freedom of individuals in power plays with each other (cf. Chapter 5.6). Here we will deal only with the first aspect.

7.5Free market exchange as both an unreliable and reliable form of sociation

A closer look at exchange interplay shows that it is not only unreliable as social interchange, but that, if not reliable and dependable, it at least forms the basis for mutual relations of reliance and dependency. For, the very unreliability of exchange interplay in the quantitative sense of prices to be had on the market and fluctuations in supply and demand is embedded, in turn, in an essential interdependence among social members in maintaining a way of life. In being based on a division of labour, a way of life is only supportable and sustainable as a network of dependable exchange relations constituting a viable economy. The fluctuations in prices in such an economy are only the creaking of the living movement of interdependency that dovetails in an organic, albeit ever-changing division of labour that constitutes some sort of overall economic household.

As Plato points out, no individual is autonomous in providing for him- or herself what he or she lacks. This makes the individual dependent on others without the relations of exchange being dependable in the sense of guaranteed or even predictable, calculable availability or prices. Nevertheless, motivated by self-interest, each player will strive to be dependable in its interchanges with others, thus building a basis of trust with those (customers, employer, etc.) on whom she or he depends. Whether Heidegger’s peasant woman can make ends meet even in her relatively sheltered, simple peasant world depends not only on the capricious weather that affects how the crops grow in the field but, among other things, also on the prices for grain on the market.135 For, the boots she wears to the field and myriad other things that serve her dependable peasant way of life have to be bought with the proceeds from selling at least part of the grain harvest. Without market interplay being quantitatively dependable, those living in society, that is, all human beings who are not “useless or better than a human being” (φαῦλος ἢ κρείττων ἢ ἄνθρωπος Aristotle Pol. 1253a5), are necessarily dependent and reliant on that very market interplay (on which even the weather has an effect) that, for the most part, is dependable enough for enabling and keeping open a way of life in habits and routines of living.

This dependency on undependable exchange interplay which is played out routinely within dependable forms of property transactions secured by the state’s rule of law is itself a source of insecurity. In a society based on a generalized, free market economy, the nexus between buyers and sellers, suppliers and consumers becomes the linch-pin holding the social fabric together. This nexus is the nodal point of both relations of necessary interdependency and incalculable undependability. Each member of society alternately takes on the role of buyer or seller, hirer and lender, supplier or consumer in earning a livelihood and enjoying a level of material comfort, but this social interplay shifts and twists, creaking and groaning of its own accord, depending on the anonymous movements of the myriad markets.

An enterprise supplying a certain kind of product can never be sure that the market prices attained will be sufficient to allow the business to prosper, or even survive in the long run, but nevertheless has its rules of thumb derived from what usually happens. Consumers, too, have to flexibly adapt their material standard of living to their available income and the prevailing prices of the goods and services they wish to purchase. This unpredictability and unreliability of a market-based economy derive ontologically not from the (ontic) complexity of the conditions of reproducing a total economic process, but arise originarily from the inherent, essential groundlessness of the simple exchange interplay itself in which one human being meets and has an interchange with another.

Because the reproduction of a total economy is built on the shifting sands of groundless exchange interplay in which exchange-value is reified in money as means of exchange, this reproduction, too, is always at risk and subject to continual disequilibria which are in a constant process of correction through a kind of negative cybernetic feedback loop that weeds out (negates) attempts at gain that fail to be valued, i.e. estimated and validated, sufficiently on the markets in hard cash. This cybernetic, exchange-value-based feedback loop is nothing other than the simple, disciplining principle of a market economy that could also be called its boundary condition of movement. Each economic agent or group of economic agents pursues its own interests in entering into exchange interplay, the motive for each individual exchange being self-interest. But the totality of this exchange interplay bracketing the production and consumption of an entire economy constitutes a universal connection in which the particular interests are entwined, disciplined through the simple principle of value-gainful striving, and thus raised to a higher, social-universal plane. The pursuit of self-interest has to contend with the uncertainty of market interplay and adapt continually to it, with each economic agent making some contribution or other to total social wealth.

If, alternatively, a modern mass society is set up in such a way that the state attempts to lay down a total social plan for production, exchange and consumption, this project is not only fraught with having to precalculate every detail of a highly complex economic process, but, more essentially, the execution of such a total social plan does not accommodate the particular self-interests that are the motive force in a market economy. Particularity can then find its degree of freedom of movement within a universal, perhaps even democratically state-imposed blueprint, only by subterfuge. In this case the unreliability of social interplay no longer resides quintessentially in the simple exchange relation between two parties and its generalization in legal, reified, money-mediated markets, but directly in illegal negotiations of whatever kind, including deals, favours, bribes, kick-backs, etc.

These considerations indicate that, given that society as a totality of intermeshing everyday practices is constituted on the most fundamental, mundane level by the social interchanges necessitated by a multitude of wants and desires corresponding to a more or less refined division of labour, the essential kernel of the insecurity inherent in human co-existence has to be located originarily already in the simple social interchanges among individual human beings, i.e. in the simple interplay of human freedom between two individuals (analogous to how Marx discovers the secret of exchange-value already in the simple exchange relation between two commodities). Even though the forces of nature make human living uncertain, it is social interchanges among human beings that are most unfathomable.

7.6Money-mediated exchange abstract and reified (Marx)

Through market exchange, the unfathomability of the encounter between free beings as origins (ἀρχαί) of power (δύναμις including the power to act and powers in the sense of abilities) is at least reduced to a giving and taking of things, and the potential complexities and opacity of the interchange between human psyche and human psyche are left aside (cf. Chapter 5.6). All that matters is that an amount of money is handed over as compensation for giving something valuable. The particular qualities (we leave aside here the wage-labour relation for which particular qualities in the form of abilities are essential) and the singularity of the individuals giving and taking play no role in such an exchange interplay. It does not matter of what race or creed or worldview the exchangers are, and it is irrelevant that it is precisely this singular individual exchanging with that singular individual. Exchange is an abstract relation between humans in which things, money and commodities, mediate. It is this abstractness that makes exchange interplay practically simple and workable for daily life and capable of spanning the globe. The bearer of money has in his or her hands the universal key to the world of all useful things. Each of the parties involved in an exchange has a particular interest in the exchange, either to gain money, or some useful good (including service), and exchange takes place on the basis of a mutual satisfaction of the interests of the parties involved. The abstract relation of exchange provides a framework for the pursuit of particular interests and their mutual satisfaction, encompassing and subsuming all individual singularity, and it is this abstractly universal, flexible quality that makes exchange into the suitable, strong nexus constituting a large society, even a rudimentary world society, practically on its most rudimentary level.

The abstract simplicity of exchange interplay, the so-called cash nexus, is often maligned as alienation and reification because personal relations between humans are replaced by impersonal relations between things. On the one hand, reification is indeed an apposite term for money-mediated exchange. It is another matter, however, whether reification is a category implying critical rejection of a type of social interplay or whether reification per se represents a perversion of the human social essence. The notion of alienation, on the other hand, from Latin alius, ‘other’, implies that the products of labour confront the individual member of society as an other, a strange other, thus preventing individual belonging to society as a world in which individuals can constitute an identity. The supposedly cold, impersonal, estranged, reified relations of commodity exchange are contrasted with warm, personal, familiar, dependable human relations, say, in a village community. However, in such critique it is invariably overlooked not only that human being, as social being, is necessarily being with the other, but also that the warmth of personal, familiar relations harbours also the possibility of the heat of enmity, mistrust, prejudice and other destructive human passions as well as the entanglements of personal dependency. Abstract exchange abstracts from such entanglements without, on the other hand, having to totalize to exclude sociation of other kinds, such as friendship and intimacy. Some critics of commodity relations as the alienated, reified glue of society even suggest that social life, liberated from the exchange of products as private property, could have room for love in the practice of production and exchange. Thus the young Marx writes:

Gesetzt, wir hätten als Menschen produziert: Jeder von uns hätte in seiner Produktion sich selbst und den andren doppelt bejaht. [...] In deinem Genuß oder deinem Gebrauch meines Produkts hätte ich unmittelbar den Genuß, [...] sowohl in deinem Denken wie in deiner Liebe mich bestätigt zu wissen.

Karl Marx, Excerpts from James Mills’ ‘Élémens
d’économie politique’ in MEW Erg. Bd. 1 p. 462

Assuming that we had produced as human beings [instead of exchanging our products as private property ME], each of us would have doubly affirmed himself and the other in his production. [...] In your enjoyment or your use of my product I would have had the direct enjoyment [...] of knowing that I am affirmed in your thinking as well as your love.

Where there is room for love, there is also room for hate. Marx casts his conception of production “as human beings” against the foil of the production and exchange of private property in which things are the mediators of human relations. Under such social relations, “Our reciprocal value for each other is the value of our reciprocal objects. Thus, the human himself is reciprocally worthless for each other.” (MEWErg1:462) Exchange relations abstract from the persons exchanging, making them mere bearers of property relations. The act of exchange is indifferent to the particularity of the exchangers and also to their singularity as these unique individuals. It is the value of the objects exchanged, their being-good-for a particular use, that shows itself and motivates the exchange, not the value or worthiness of the human exchangers, which is irrelevant here and abstracted from. Their value can be at best only the reflection of the value of the goods exchanged.

To want to imbue exchange interplay with an appreciation and estimation of the other as such in his or her concrete particularity or even unique singularity would mean introducing the whole gamut of intricate interplay of estimation possible between two free beings, which would multiply infinitely the unreliability of simple market exchange relations. If exchange were practised on the basis of love, which is a deep human relation involving an appreciation and acknowledgement of the other in their totality as this unique individual, there would be little exchange and the social fabric would tear and cut into small, uneven patches based on personal dependency (such as clans and tribes) and the narrow radius of personal inclinations, dislikes, proclivities, fancies, etc. which abstract interplay leaves to one side. Even requiring brotherly love as a prerequisite for exchange would put the social nexus of exchange on a shaky footing, for it would make the business of exchange dependent on morally overcoming human likes and dislikes, inclinations and disinclinations, which are manifold and capricious. The exchange of the products of labour on the basis of their respective use-values as transformed in the medium of exchange-value and motivated by the reciprocal self-interests of the parties exchanging, puts social intercourse on an abstract, minimal, workable footing.

It could be a blessing for human social living that exchange interplay is reified and abstract, guaranteeing a certain distance and indifference. It is irrelevant whether I like or dislike the vendor from whom I buy a newspaper or the taxi-driver who drives me to the airport, or whether national economies trade with one another on the basis of a warm bond of friendship between peoples. Whether a commodity exchange transaction takes place depends on the respective self-interests of the parties involved. If these self-interests complement each other and each can be satisfied with a transaction, a deal is done to mutual satisfaction; if not, it can’t be helped, and no love is lost. The parties remain independent of and indifferent to each other, and the exchange, if it takes place at all, is an act performed by free, independent, self-interested individuals who function in the exchange relation only as the bearers of goods and money. Even if the seller attempts to persuade the prospective buyer to make a purchase, this persuasion is directed at the buyer’s imputed self-interest and is not, say, an appeal to the buyer’s generous heart. Since a transaction may depend on the whim of a moment on the part of either party, there is no reliability or calculability in exchange relations despite all the attempts to manipulate the prospective buyer’s desires. Even for the staple necessities of life, for which demand is highly inelastic, the prices at which goods are sold can swing wildly, depending on overall supply. Economic agents therefore not only cannot find personal warmth and comfort in economic relations, but they also cannot rely on their constancy. But neither, as a rule, will they find enmity and personal rejection in economic interchanges. Rather, economic life is an interplay of uncertainty requiring flexibility, adaptability, perseverance and even a tough skin to weather the indifference. Is such toughness a perversion of human nature or just one of its facets? (Cf. Chapter 9.1ff.)

7.7Risky enterprise and secure jobs

Because economic life is a game, and therefore uncertain, there are losers as well as winners, and therefore also an inherent tendency of players in the economy to build hedges against risk as far as they are able. Prudent caution is one of the principal precepts of economic life and this can only be so because it is essentially risky, i.e. exposed to contingency, even apart from the minimum of trust required to engage in exchange interplay at all. The agent in modern economic life most exposed to such contingency is the entrepreneur, i.e. literally, the one who undertakes an undertaking whose success or failure depends on how a product finally fares on the market, how much revenue is generated and how much is left as net profit. But all the economic roles in a capitalist economy depend on the entrepreneur’s success, whether it be the employees who have hired their power to labour to the entrepreneur at fixed, agreed wage rates, the financier whose has lent money at fixed interest rates, or the landowner who has leased land for a fixed rental.

The new value that comes about through the entrepreneur’s operations in the process of market validation has to be sufficient to cover the costs of wages, interest, rent and means of production and also leave a residue of profit of enterprise. Whether sufficient new value gains market recognition as the validation of the enterprise’s operations remains necessarily and essentially open, uncertain. It is not in the interests of employees to recognize the risk to which the enterprise for which they work is exposed. Their interests are rather to strive for secure, guaranteed jobs with assured income, regardless of the company’s fortunes, and to call on the state to pass legislation to protect their jobs. Such protection is then regarded as a ‘victory’ for the working class and for ‘social justice’. Bargaining on the market over jobs is then tendentially displaced or at least supplemented by state regulation and legislation that lay down a framework for employment that is as secure as possible and often even denies the company’s risks of surviving in the economy. The state once again assumes its essential role of erecting a state of affairs, to be maintained by force of law, which keeps dangers to its subjects at bay. The core dangers to be warded off by the state, however, are those threatening the “life, liberty and estates” of its citizens, and this prime function and raison d’être for the state — the rule of law — is fulfilled in its guaranteeing the lawful form of fair interplay in civil society.

But the risks of losing out in the interplay of self-interests in civil society even within the lawful rules of play, in which citizens pursue their individual self-interests, can also be transferred to the state which thereby becomes a welfare state with the role of cushioning the impact of the risks of economic activity, of providing a social safety net, of spreading risk in a social security scheme of so-called social solidarity (paradoxically based on a collective self-interest — or rather, mass egoism — to being cared for). Through the exercise of state political power, the free play of economic interplay is suspended or curtailed, not by being subjected to lawful rules of play (which rather enable the interplay), but by certain market exchanges, such as the dismissal of workers (which is the termination of an exchange contract), being declared illegal by state will. The value criterion — according to which an enterprise must make money rather than losing it, and enhances its chances of survival in the market-place by making a comfortable profit, sufficient also for investments to maintain competitiveness — is thus insofar made ineffective as the principle guiding and disciplining the enterprise’s strategy. In its place steps the uncertainties of the political power struggles, because a law posited by the state’s will and under the political pressure of employees seeking job security can also be repealed or replaced by another law. Moreover, the cost of providing job security through state fiat is that the economic market interplay can no longer discipline the enterprises to adapt to changing exchange-value relations, thus enabling other economies to gain a competitive advantage. The respite from competitive interplay attained through job-securing legislation is a Pyrrhic victory for the organized employees, turning into its opposite, because international competition lessens the potency of domestic enterprises, lowering economic growth and perhaps, after all, inexorably endangering jobs through the bankruptcy or simply poor economic performance of domestic enterprises. We shall return to this theme in Chapter 9.

In the meantime, it is important to note that the ontological origin of the tension between risk and security lies in the nature of (social) movement itself, i.e. between the ontological plane of δύναμις power, potential, potency, ability, on the one hand, and the plane of the ἐντελέχεια, actuality of the material goods people actually have, on the other. Any movement at all, proceeding as it does from potential, potency to actuality bears within itself the possibility of missing its end, its τέλος, but the movement of social interplay, in particular, is doubly, or exponentially, exposed to risk, proceeding as it does from at least two free starting-points (ἀρχαί). Put succinctly, since all human living is socially shared, life itself, at its socio-ontological core, is risky. Like all deep ontological truths, this sounds like a platitude, but no matter, for it is destined for certain, highly receptive ears only.