9.1Social democracy, reified sociating interplay and caring-for in a capitalist economy – Caring for one’s own world and indifference to others (Heidegger’s Being and Time)

As we have already seen briefly in Chapter 7.6, ever since the early Marx, capitalism has been damned as an economic set-up in which humans, in particular, the working class, are ruled by things: money and capital. Economic imperatives compel people to adapt to undesirable options. Politics, it is lamented, is not in charge, but itself is subject to and subjugated to the compulsions emanating from a reified capitalist economy. A cornerstone of social-democratic politics is that the capitalist ‘market economy’ should be managed by a collective will for the sake of the citizens’ welfare, that enterprises should be socially ‘responsible’, etc., and not the other way round.

To see what is at issue here, I turn first briefly to look at the idea of social democracy via a work of social theory rather than social ontology.149 If, as one commentator on Berman’s book, Henry Farrell,150 claims, “she decisively demonstrates the importance of ideas to politics”, this could perhaps be turned into an argument for a socio-ontological approach to the question of social democracy, for it is ideas as the looks of beings qua beings that have been at the vital focus of philosophy ever since Plato. It is the looks of beings as being that shape our shared mind and thus guide any of our actions. To practise social ontology, however, would be to renounce the explanatory ambitions of social theory to provide an account of the “causal power of ideas” (Farrell, 2006) in underpinning the emergence of social democracy, stepping back from explanation in favour of thinking through the ideas themselves under the aegis of the lead question, Who are we human beings? This would allow an approach to the question of human freedom itself. Philosophy as social ontology is prior to social theory because it aims to clarify the prejudicial preconceptions that the latter has always already tacitly activated to even start a coherent discourse that expounds causal explanations for ontic-historical happenings such as the rise of social democracy. Considering all that apparently needs to be explained in the world, what social ontology has to offer seems to be too little, and indeed, what philosophical thinking has to offer is the precious little that is nonetheless indispensable. This precious little is invariably swamped by the putative wealth (or rather: poverty?151) of empirical facts that call for being ‘analyzed’ and worked up into cogent explanations for social developments such as social democracy.

The purported recipe for success of post-WWII social democracy of “using markets for their clear economic benefits, while protecting citizens from their worst depredations” (Farrell summarizing Berman, 2006) certainly has plausibility, but it leaves out of account the issue of human freedom in its singular individuality that can never be swapped for economic prosperity. How can singular individuality be saved, if at all, despite the necessity of sociation? Following on from Berman’s account, Farrell points out that “If social democracy and fascism are cousins-german, then there’s a very plausible risk that social democracy, if it goes too far in this direction, can lapse into a sort of fascism-lite”, by which he understands a kind of xenophobic nationalism that he would like to see avoided by a “a social democracy that at the very least leavens its communitarianism with a broader, more international set of solidarities” (Farrell, 2006). But this consideration, too, leaves out of account an inherent tendency of social democracy toward social totalitarianism that extinguishes the individual per se as singularly free. I will return to this crucial issue in Chapter 11. Is it not this tendency that makes “social democracy and fascism [...] cousins-german”?

In the same collection of short commentaries on Berman’s book, Mark Blyth asks, “If social democracy was a species of fascism (or vice versa), do we need a re-born fascism now to (re)energize the ‘dead-men walking’ parties of social democracy in the present?”. The same worry could also instigate a radical rethinking of liberalism — rather than merely a polemic against so-called neo-liberalism — that would descend into the socio-ontological depths of the question of freedom, thus becoming unrecognizable to those versed in the habits of thought of social theory, and of liberal social theory in particular, by questioning the apparently self-evident, but tacitly socio-ontological, preconceptions on which it rests: the question of free sociation itself. In Berman’s own response to her critical commentators in the same collection, she claims that “the heart of classical liberalism, both ideologically and as a matter of historical practice, was an emphasis on the rights and interests of individuals[...]”, and this, indeed, is the nub of the issue, viz. that social democracy willingly surrenders individual freedom, replacing it with an illusory surrogate of freedom, namely, freedom understood as democracy. It also does not pose the question concerning the individual as a ‘look’ of human being itself and how the individual is itself a form, i.e. a look, of sociation.

With regard to Berman’s own “notion that social democracy has an inherently communitarian nature”, she claims that “if you want an order based on social solidarity and the priority of social goods over individual interests, some basic sense of fellow feeling is required to get that order into place and keep it politically sustainable”. (Berman 2006) Is it matter in the first place of what we want, what we will? Apart from the issue as to whether “fellow feeling” in truth turns out to be the totalitarian creep of bureaucratically administered state care, this makes individual freedom in its essential and therefore indispensable singularity dispensable for the sake of setting up a controllable order, for which purpose, refractory, idiosyncratic singularity has to be tamed and averaged out into a “sense of fellow feeling”. Hence, freedom in its singularity (which is not to be calumnied as mere individual egoism or consumerist capriciousness) is sacrificed on the altar of solidarity (which turns out to be in political struggle a mask for mass egoism), instead of bearing the rending, contradictory tension in human being itself between its free singularity and its sharing of the world with others, for which latter a feeling for others’ predicaments is not out of place. Is individual singularity reconcilable with social living in a kind of sociation that allows room for singularity to move while at the same time also allowing individuals to care for each other on a quotidian basis? This question will continue to occupy us in the following.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum to social democracy, the proponents of liberal free enterprise point to the problem-solving cybernetics of unfettered markets which are said to be superior to bureaucratically implemented, conscious political policy worked out through the complex institutional mechanisms of democratic government with all its inertia and distortions through political power plays (cf. Chapter 10 on the ontology of social and political power). The implication is that the markets unknowingly ‘know’ better than the politicians what is good for society. Through a kind of corrective or negative cybernetic feedback loop that governs social interplay, sifting out failures, they purportedly can deliver better results, viz. prosperity, more efficiently and with less friction and resistance than deliberate government policies with their unavoidable concomitant of bureaucratic regulation and lobby-driven protectionism. The much maligned laissez-faire or ‘neo-liberal’ approach to economic life relies on the corrective cybernetics of market interplay, whereas a state charged with positively delivering good living to its population through its complex of intentionally organized apparatuses is operating teleologically toward some end that it has posited, through a political power play resulting in a compromise, as the general good of society as a whole (or merely a compromise reached among the mass egoisms of various interests?). This topos of conflict between left and right in capitalist democratic politics is very familiar (cf. Chapter 13).

Allowing markets to bring about what they bring about is rejected by the left as social Darwinism, a charge that is not without irony.152 The topos is also reflected in works of sociology, economics and political philosophy going back at least to the eighteenth century, when the term ‘laissez-faire’ was coined as the maxim of French free-trade economists.153 Despite the familiarity of the topos and its persistent controversial rehearsal throughout the decades and centuries, it can still be asked whether it can be taken deeper into the socio-ontological grounds of possibility of such a conflict between opposed conceptions of the socio-economic set-up. What is to be said socio-ontologically about reification and of the invisible hand, two sides of the same coin, the one implying something deleterious about so-called market mechanisms, and the other implying something benign and beneficial about market interplay for living well in society?

The paradigm for and core of reified sociation is money-mediated commodity exchange. As a thingly mediator and medium of commodity exchange, money is itself a thing, i.e. a reified sociating medium that brings people together in com-merce, i.e. that sociates through bringing goods together. But the commodity goods offered on the market, too, are things that refer in their being qua commodities to others, namely, to potential buyers, and are therefore also reified sociations as potentialites. Commodity services, too, however, (and the ‘service’ of wage-labour power in the present context could also be considered as a commodity service) are reified by being subject to the reified, mediating medium of money.

One option for investigating the social ontology of reified social interplay is to take the social ontology implicit or only sketched in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), unfolding it into an explicit social ontology of commodity exchange. This is what will be attempted first here in rough outline. Later on, we will investigate briefly the capitalist wage-labour relation in particular.

Sein und Zeit offers a fundamental ontology of human being, which is conceived as Dasein. The foundation here is not a universal anthropology of humankind, but Western thinking on the beingness of beings, starting with the Greeks. The being of humans, or simply, human being, is existence.154 With the determination of human being itself as existence, Sein und Zeit introduces already a deviation from the Western tradition of ontology, for which existence is that of things, i.e. that they exist, i.e. are, in their whatness, rather than in their whoness (Wersein in Sein und Zeit). The phenomenological interpretation of Dasein’s existence results in the ontological-existential analyses of Sein und Zeit whose culmination at the end of Part I, Division 1 is the three-dimensional ontological structure of care (Sorge), whose details will not be further elaborated here. (I note here only that the three-dimensional existential-ontological structure of care maps isomorphically onto the three-dimensional ontological structure of temporality itself in Part II.) Human beings’ everyday existence is a taking-care-of..., a Besorgen. This taking-care-of the ‘business’ of everyday life involves human beings with practically useful things that are used within the possibilities for existing that Dasein has chosen in leading its life, i.e. its existence. The being of these practically useful things (Zeug, equipment, stuff, πράγματα) resides in their being-good-for a definite application or range of applications within the context of Dasein’s shaping its existence, i.e. these practically useful things offer themselves to Dasein as enabling a possibility of its existence, thus enhancing it. Only in understanding (albeit pre-ontologically and self-evidently) the being of useful things, i.e. their specific being-good-for..., their use-value, can Dasein exploit the possibility offered by them in enabling a concrete option of existence. Everyday existence is an involvement with taking-care-of everyday affairs employing useful things for doing so, such as shoes for walking and telephones for talking.

But everyday existence involves not just taking-care-of affairs by using practically useful things. It involves also involvement with others, human beings who are also Dasein. Sein und Zeit terms the being of the others who are also human beings Mitdasein. The others are also (mit) there in the Da in which the world itself is located, i.e. takes place. Since Dasein shares the world in its temporal openness with others, all Dasein is Mitsein with others, or Mitdasein. The ontological-existential structure of sharing the world with others is worked out in Sein und Zeit as caring-for... (Fürsorge) which is the ‘social’ complement to taking-care-of... (Besorgen) in using things. Caring-for... has to be read here in an ontologically neutral and broad way, without restricting it to the ‘positive’ connotations of nurturing, looking after, etc. Sein und Zeit introduces the concept of caring-for as follows:

Das Seiende, zu dem sich das Dasein als Mitsein verhält, hat aber nicht die Seinsart des zuhandenen Zeugs, es ist selbst Dasein. Dieses Seiende wird nicht besorgt, sondern steht in der Fürsorge. [...] Die ‘Fürsorge’ als faktische soziale Einrichtung zum Beispiel gründet in der Seinsverfassung des Daseins als Mitsein. Ihre faktische Dringlichkeit ist darin motiviert, daß das Dasein sich zunächst und zumeist in den defizienten Modi der Fürsorge hält. Das Für-, Wider-, Ohne-einandersein, das Aneinandervorbeigehen, das Einandernichts-angehen sind mögliche Weisen der Fürsorge. Und gerade die zuletzt genannten Modi der Defizienz und Indifferenz charakterisieren das alltägliche und durchschnittliche Miteinandersein.

Martin Heidegger
Sein und Zeit 1927/1984 § 26 S. 121

The being toward which Dasein comports itself as Mitsein, however, does not have the mode of being of useful things at hand (zuhandenes Zeug), but is itself Dasein. This being is not taken care of (besorgt), but rather is cared-for (steht in der Fuersorge). [...] ‘Caring-for’ (Fuersorge as social welfare) as a factual social institution, for instance, is grounded in the ontological constitution of Dasein as Mitsein. Its factual urgency is motivated by the circumstance that, at first and for the most part, Dasein keeps to the deficient modes of caring-for. Being for, against, without one another, passing each other by, having nothing to do with each other, are possible modes of caring-for. And precisely the last-named modes of deficiency and indifference characterize everyday, average being-with-one-another. Is this last statement that deficiency and indifference predominate in everyday life as modes of caring-for merely an empirical observation? Is it ideological, i.e. deceptive? Or do such deficient and privative modes of caring-for have the upper hand only in a certain kind of society, such as, or, above all, capitalist society? Marxists never tire of employing the argument that bourgeois thinkers ‘eternalize’ and proclaim as ‘natural’ social relations that are merely historically specific to the capitalist mode of production. What, then, speaks in favour of giving the above assertion of the everyday predominance of deficient and privative modes of caring-for socio-ontological weight? Does this weight arise only with the historical rise of the possibility of mass sociation that, in turn, requires its own historically specific medium? It should be underscored here once more, that socio-ontology does not aim at the ‘eternal truths’ of a philosophia perennis, but at insight into the socio-ontological casts of an historical age within Western history.

Human being (Dasein) exists in leading its own life, an ontological-existential characteristic designated in Sein und Zeit by the term Jemeinigkeit, i.e. individual my-ownness. Its own, individual existence is an issue for it about which it cares, and has to care for as long as it leads and shapes an existence in the Da. The world opens for Dasein in the twofold of understanding and mood first of all individually, from an individual perspective rooted ultimately in Dasein’s individual bodiliness, even though this individuality is embedded in an historically universal, shared opening of world. The individual perspective should therefore not be understood as merely ‘subjective’ in today’s thoughtless sense of the word. This does not mean at all that Dasein is essentially egoistic, selfish, etc., but that its truth of the world, although necessarily also shared, universal, is at the same time, individual, and has to be mediated with others through interchange of all kinds including, crucially, exchanges of views in dialogue.

Furthermore, it means that Dasein builds and cares about its own world to which certain others belong whom it positively cares about and therefore cares for. Each human being has an individual world around it, i.e. an Umwelt, to which certain other individuals belong — “not only we ourselves, but all the objects of our kindest affections, our children, our parents, our relations, our friends, our benefactors, all those whom we naturally love and revere the most”155 —, and the perspective and focus that a given human individual has on the world is given by the individuality of its individual, practically shared world with its changing situations.

Certain features of the world show up as having an effect on its individual world, whereas others remain in the background. To lead its life, individual Dasein has to take care of matters which concern it and care for those who are close to it. Each individual human being is an individual opening of a perspectival view on the world that defines also the proximity of those few who are close to it. Because of this essential focus of the world-opening of each individual, most others do not belong to individual Dasein’s world; rather, they are in the background, and therefore the caring for others is, for the most part, a matter of indifference, a “passing each other by”. We have to bear looking at the disclosive truth of the existential-ontological statement that, at first and for the most part, I couldn’t care less for you. This ‘at first’ indifferent mode of caring-for, however, can quickly change within a situation to a positive mode when, for instance, you notice an anonymous passer-by on the street who has inadvertently dropped something and kindly call his attention to it. Such practised kindness, of course, is not so-called social solidarity.

A collectivity of caring for others in a more abstract manner, i.e. caring for those who do not belong to one’s own everyday world, has to be constituted through a mediation (such as a social institution which is a Gestalt of shared human being or, in Hegelian terms, ‘objective spirited mind’; cf. Chapter 11) that gives even those at one remove from one’s own circle a weight in caring-for. This accounts for the predominant privative mode of indifference in caring-for in everyday existence, which amounts to a kind of ontological-existential bias, a ‘default setting’ of socio-ontological self-centredness of each individual’s world that should not be confused with selfishness. At first and for the most part, the others hardly even appear on the horizon of one’s own world and are not understood as being part of one’s care for one’s own circle. They remain for the most part inconspicuous, taken for granted (Unauffälligkeit und Selbstverständlichkeit Sein und Zeit § 26 S. 121), and do not elicit any positive mode of caring-for. In its everyday ‘default setting’, Dasein is more or less inconsiderate. Even when others who ‘need’ caring-for do present themselves in one’s own world, outside of a personally experienced, concrete situation, these others are levelled to an anonymity, thus making even any altruistic response itself anonymous, general, abstract, as exemplified by making cash donations to an established charity.

The principal positively deficient mode of caring-for is being-against-one-another (Wider- oder Gegeneinandersein). This implies that there is a clash between individual human beings in caring about their daily affairs for they are moving existentially in opposed directions. Everyday life is essentially concerned with acquiring the goods for living, no matter whether these goods be material (ranging from the so-called basics of food, clothing, housing to the endless array of goods, including services, that contribute to agreeable living) or more intangible (such as honour, reputation, prestige, seniority, social status, political power, etc.). We have discussed these goods of living copiously in preceding chapters. This acquisition of goods has to be negotiated with others in a kind of interchange understood in the broadest sense, and such interchange is inevitably marked by competition, not only because the supply of such goods may be limited (in fact there may even be a surfeit), but because one’s own standing as somewho is only defined in comparison to others’ who-status. Here, at first, material, economic goods will be considered.

Whatever kind of society, the finite wealth of what is good for living (produced by the exercise of that society’s sum total of human abilities in combination with the other natural, produced and financial factors of production), has to be distributed in some fashion, either via some distributing power or as a factual result of interplay, among its members. Such distribution, even if carried out according to some principle of equality of the members of society by a powerful superior instance, gives rise to difference in the material interests of the members of society, either individually or collected together into communities of interest. The distribution of the goods for living, no matter how egalitarian it may be, is essentially contentious, if only because, even if there were solid agreement that the distribution of wealth in society should be egalitarian (in some sense or other of ‘equal’), the understanding of what, concretely, is egalitarian and how this egalitarianism should be particularized would still remain an eternally contentious issue for a shared way of living in a given society.

Apart from the essential differing of individual perspectives in understanding the world, there is therefore also the essential differing and conflicting and rivalry among self-interests (which may also be collective self-interests) in sharing the material goods of society. This makes caring-for in everyday life also a rivalry, a conflict of interests, a being-against-one-another, i.e. a deficient or negative mode of caring-for. The self-interested particularity of human being as outlined here does not depend on assuming a market-mediated society. The point to note is that the self-interested situation of Dasein’s existence implies necessarily conflicts of interest with other Dasein, i.e. with Mitdasein, even in an egalitarian society based upon an ideal or ethos of material equality.

If other, more intangible societal goods beyond material, economic goods and their distribution in society are included, then it can be seen all the more clearly that vieing for the goods of life brings individuals and interest groups into competition and conflict with one another. (We have already discussed in extenso the (im)possibility ‘just distribution’ of that social called esteem in Chapter 6.7). Because human being understands what is good for living, and because it is individualized, the striving to gain what is good for living must be, at first and for the most part, an everyday being-against-one-another, i.e. a competition, which may or may not be resolved by some kind of social mediation, negotiation and ‘elevation’ (Aufhebung) into a compromise. Caring for one’s own, individual world inevitably (i.e. as essential to the socio-ontological structure of human existence sharing a world) implies also conflict, or at least rivalry, with others caring for their own respective worlds, a conflict or rivalry that can assume and has assumed countless phenomenal forms throughout Western history — and presumably all over the Earth. The vieing against one another, under the impetus of personal ambition, for position in the social hierarchy assumes phenomenal forms in all kinds of social practices and rituals, but all such vieing emerges socio-ontologically from the whoness of human being, i.e. from the existential challenge to bring oneself to a self-stand and to be estimated as having such-and-such a social standing as somewho within the social clearing.

The more basic, latent, quotidian mode of sharing the world with others is the privative mode of indifference in which others do not figure in one’s caring for one’s own world, not even as rivals. They remain inconspicuous and invisible, even though they are implicitly, subliminally understood as also being there in the world — in the background. There is a socio-ontological predisposition toward the self-centredness of world, whereby this self-centredness is to be understood neither merely as naturally determined in the sense of a biological given (since human being always has a self-reflective distance from its bodiliness and is not merely instinctually driven), nor as a kind of egoism or inconsiderateness, but rather as a focus of Dasein’s caring about its own world that, of itself, leaves the others in an indeterminate, background inconspicuousness. Dasein is absorbed with its world as its own casting of self in which only certain others figure as ‘mattering’, i.e. as having weight in the valency of caring for one’s own world, and most others figure as not ‘mattering’.

Dasein’s selfhood consists in its choosing and grasping (including failing to do so) its very own possibility for existing in casting its self in a definite direction, into a particular, individually chosen project. This means that you are not concerned and involved with most others, and that, if at all, they mostly figure in your own world under some collectivity that draws your attention. The inconspicuousness of the others in your world is a neutral ‘basic setting’ for caring for others, and does not yet amount to an inconsiderateness in failing to behave adequately toward an other who has entered your world (usually understood as ‘common decency and politeness’), or ruthlessness, which consists in positively riding roughshod over others who presence in your world, which is a deficient, negative mode of caring-for.

But it would be wrong to envisage social relations merely as ‘dog-eat-dog’ competition and rivalry among opposing self-interests because, although individuals are necessarily against each other in some respects and by and large indifferent to each other, social living, as has been shown in Chapter 5 within the historical specificity of a market-mediated society, is, in its socio-ontological structure, also an estimating interchange with others from which, in particular, my own self-standing is derived or confirmed in estimating interplay. Sociation through interchange means that none of my projects for living well with those who are close to me can be realized or even attempted without social interchange with others based not merely on rivalry, but on mutual benefit and mutual sympathy. In particular, economic exchange relations of all kinds are based on mutual benefit to both parties. They are a win-win situation of some kind or other. Exchange transactions are entered into because there is a mutual advantage to be had on both sides, and individual interests can only be furthered by sublation (Aufhebung: elevating) through some kind of interchange, including mutually advantageous co-operation with others. The sociation of self-centred individual human being intertwines self-interests in such a way that they are elevated of themselves to mutuality, a kind of ‘we’ (cf. Chapter 11) which could be regarded as a kind of Aristotelean mean between selfish egoism and selfless altruism.

9.2Self-interest and mutual caring-for in exchange interplay

What, more particularly, is the situation with caring-for in a market economy in which the material goods (including services) for living are produced for a market? We will consider a specifically capitalist market economy based on wage-labour later. On any market there are buyers and sellers. What kind of caring for one another are they engaged in? Clearly, the participants in a given market are not indifferent to each other, although they figure in each other’s worlds only abstractly as one of many buyers or sellers who are understood merely as such buyers or sellers of a certain kind of good, leaving aside all else that makes up each individual’s concrete particularity. Moreover, when a particular buyer and a particular seller perform a sales transaction for a certain good, each is taking care of daily affairs, the one by acquiring something useful for living, the other by earning money as part of the business of everyday life. For the buyer, the seller figures not in his or her full, concrete particularity but only insofar as the buyer is focused on acquiring the good in question. Conversely, for the seller, the buyer does not figure in the seller’s world in his or her concrete particularity, but only abstractly as a bearer of money, as a potential customer. Buyer and seller care for each other (and are therefore not indifferent to each other) in the first place only as the bearers of a particular good and the abstract, universal equivalent, money, respectively, with the aim of acquiring what the other has.

In order to actually make the sale, however, the seller must care at least for the buyer’s motivation to buy the product (either a good or a service), which is to realize a possibility for the buyer’s living well, since the good for sale offers itself in its being as being-good-for..., i.e. as a use-value. The seller (even when aiming at a mass market) endeavours to make the good, valuable qualities of the product plain to potential buyers and thus assumes a definite positive mode of caring-for vis-à-vis the latter, bringing into focus of his (the seller’s) attention at least a segment of the potential buyer’s concrete particularity. This endeavour is a kind of rhetoric that attempts to win the buyer over to a positive decision in favour of purchasing the product on offer by presenting all the persuasive ‘selling arguments’ to the potential buyer that speak in the product’s favour. Insofar, the potential buyer is no longer in the seller’s sights merely abstractly, as the bearer of a certain quantitative purchasing power, and the (potential) market interchange has already entangled buyer and seller in a more concrete engagement with one another.

If the product is presented to the potential buyer as that which it is not, then the caring-for exercised by the seller is deficient (fraud, misrepresentation). Since what a product is good-for, i.e. its being, can be presented in the medium of the λόγος in many different ways, whether the seller presents the product as that which it genuinely is in truth — as a use-value — may become a contentious issue. Since the seller’s interest is to acquire the buyer’s money, there is always a potential divergence and discrepancy between this interest (a caring for oneself) and caring for the potential buyer in presenting the product’s qualities as enabling a possibility for the potential buyer’s existence and therefore as being valuable for this potential buyer (customer satisfaction). The potential buyer, on the other hand, is interested only in the product and what it enables within the context of taking care of his or her own daily existence. The product must show itself as being good for the sake of the buyer’s existence. It must reveal itself to the potential buyer as being valuable in this regard, and the seller’s motivating rhetoric in favour of a purchase is supposed to match how the use-value in question shows itself of itself. Otherwise, the good is misrepresented to the prospective customer.

The seller figures in the potential buyer’s world only as the bearer of the product, and thus the potential buyer’s comportment toward the seller is only a neutral, indifferent mode of caring-for. The potential buyer is indifferent to the seller’s caring about his or her own existence by earning a living, whereas the seller cares for the buyer’s existence only insofar as this is a mediating step to gaining the buyer’s money. The seller therefore cares whether the customer is satisfied or not, albeit mediatedly as a way of maintaining the buyer’s custom and keeping the door open for further sales in future. And the buyer, in being directly interested in the good offered for sale for his or her own use, indirectly contributes to the seller’s well-being. Self-interest is thus mediated via the reified exchange interplay with caring for the other in a positive, albeit restricted sense.

Buyer and seller each enable the other to take care of him or herself in acquiring what is good for living: either a particular, useful product, or money-income as the universal means for acquiring goods. Each mediates the other’s well-being in striving, in the first place, directly or im-mediately only for his or her own well-being, namely, taking care of his or her own being-in-the-world. In this way, each individual is raised willy-nilly out of its merely self-interested particularity to a universality that is more than merely the sum of two particularities.156 In the quid pro quo of exchange, each enables a possibility of the other’s taking care of his or her own existence. Paradoxically, in each pursuing their self-interest lies unintentionally — and, so to speak, behind their backs — the opposite of a mutual caring for each other, no matter how limited; neither has to have the immediate intention of acting altruistically in a positively caring way for the other, but through the mediation, each becomes the agent of the other’s self-caring.157 Strictly speaking, each is indifferent to the other, but through reciprocal, intermeshing self-interests exercised in exchange, each unintentionally becomes mediator of the other’s well-being by contributing to the other’s taking care of daily life. In the unintentionality lies the invisibility of the “invisible hand”. Thus, from one perspective, an indifferent mode of caring-for on both sides of the exchange relation enables nonetheless, through interchange, each side to take care of itself and is beneficial for both sides. In particular, out of self-interest, the seller has, mediatedly, an interest in caring for what the customer wants, i.e. in cultivating customer care. This may be contrasted, for instance, with the situation of a bureaucrat exercising power within a hierarchy of political power, which has to be distinguished socio-ontologically from the powers at play in market interplay (cf. Chapter 10).

The mediation of furthering one’s own self-interest only by catering to the other’s self-interest, so that a mutually satisfying transaction comes about on the basis of intermeshing self-interests, even though there may be struggle and haggling over the terms of the transaction, gives the lie to the well-worn, not to say, hackneyed moral dichotomy between egoism and altruism so firmly anchored in Western thinking like second nature, mainly through the Christian tradition, according to which a ‘good person’ can only be an altruistic person, whereas all ‘self-seeking’ is more or less bad and sinful and subject at least verbally to opprobrium as ‘greed’. However, a look at the phenomena of daily practice immediately shows how inadequate this moralistic dichotomy is. For the most part, at least in average everyday life, we get along well with each other in exercising our abilities for each other’s benefit on the basis of mutual self-interest, which is neither purely egoistic, nor purely altruistic, but a mutually beneficial and satisfying relationship, despite the opposed interests that are necessarily part of the interplay for, if the two parties did not opposed (but complementary) interests, no transaction at all would come about. Even apart from market exchange in which money serves as the yardstick of equivalence, sociating customs, too, invariably have the structure of give and take even when at first they seem to be based one-sidedly on generosity. Consider, for example, customs of hospitality, according to which the guest unavoidably becomes ‘indebted’ to his or her host and later issues a return invitation.

The interchange based on mutual self-interest in which each provides the other with a useful good is situated in the middle between the extremes of altruistic self-sacrifice and ruthless, egoistic self-interest, and such an intermeshing of self-interests that cater to each other, albeit that they sometimes also clash, is the fabric of market-mediated, economic life. Social interchange based on mutual self-interest is certainly mundane and mediocre rather than heroic or otherwise positively praiseworthy, and thus accords with life as it goes on for the most part. Market interchange is a practice that of itself lifts mere self-interest beyond itself to a kind of mutuality and thus represents a form of sociation in which particularity is unspectacularly mediated with universality, or self-interest with the common good. Such mediation has to be clearly distinguished from the suppression of particularity in favour of universality, whether it be by morally castigating egoism in favour of altruism or by moralistically rejecting ‘bourgeois’ individualism in favour of ‘socialist’ solidarity. If particular self-interest belongs essentially to human being, then its condemnation by moral opprobrium is an impotent, merely moralistic act that not only inevitably ends up in a dichotomy of its own making, viz. hypocrisy, but, more significantly, refuses to look more closely at the contradictory, torn nature of human being itself, just as it is.158

Advertising is a good example showing how self-interests have to intermesh in everyday life. The rhetoric of advertising is directed at making the product desirable for potential customers in fulfilling an attractive possibility of existing, and this is not altogether disingenuous. Advertising aims at presenting the product as providing a valuable service to the potential buyer. In attempting to arouse the potential customer’s desire to acquire, advertising is a mixture of genuine disclosure of the product’s use-value, and disingenuous pandering to customers’ supposed desires, i.e. a kind of flattery consisting in associating an uplifting mood with the product. To characterize advertising as mere manipulation of the consumer amounts to denying the consumer’s freedom, i.e. the possibility that each free individual is able to assess for itself whether a use-value on offer is genuinely useful, rather than being taken in. The denial of freedom corresponds to the standpoint according to which human beings are thought as manipulable objects, i.e. in the third person. Such a denial of freedom is indeed, for the most part, a self-denial of freedom according to which the individual understands and explains itself in terms of the circumstances it finds itself in which ‘force’ it to (re-)act in a certain way.

Because the exchange between buyer and seller involves money, the transaction always essentially has also a quantitative dimension, viz. price. The good offered for sale is always good-for a certain application or range of applications in living; that is, the good’s mode of being resides in its applicability and aptitude, and that is what makes it valuable. This is its use-value, its value in the primary sense. But its value in the secondary, derived or second-order sense, (as already discussed in Chapter 4.1; cf. Aristotle Pol. Book I iii 1257a7) consists in its being exchangeable for money, the universal means of exchange that enables its owner to acquire any of the myriad goods offered for sale on the countless markets. The exchange-value of a good is thus necessarily quantitative and measured in the monetary dimension; its exchange-value is simply an amount of money, a price.

What a good is worth in money terms is determined by the market interplay. The ongoing transactions on the market always provide a range of prices for the good in question which sets the going rate or market value. The market price of a good is set as a (changeable) brute fact as the ongoing outcome of an anonymous process and it can be found out by all those engaged in the market, both buyers and sellers. The price set by the market, as a quantified, reified social relation, is indifferent to the well-being or otherwise of the market’s participants. Assuming that a ‘caring’ (welfare) state does not intervene in the market, the price is not set by some caring agent so that certain sellers in the market will earn enough to support their families; nor is it set sufficiently low by force so that certain buyers will be able to afford it. Rather, the going price is a given fact that may fluctuate from day to day and even hour to hour, independently of either buyers’ or sellers’ endeavours to take care of themselves. The going market price, expressed in money, is a reification of mutually indifferent caring-for and caring about one’s self.

Nevertheless, precisely in this indifference, it enables participants in the market to go about their daily business, i.e. to take care of their daily lives in mutually beneficial exchanges. The facticity of going market prices forces all participants in the market, buyers and sellers, to adapt and adjust their daily practices. Structural market anomalies such as monopoly or cartels, however, will give certain participants (in this case, the monopolist or cartel member) the power to set market prices to their own advantage, thus positively harming the others. Although buyer and seller have opposed interests with respect to the price to be paid for a given good, they can nevertheless reach agreement with an eye to the going market price, thus mutually furthering each other in taking care of their own individual worlds.

The buyer purchases the product because it offers something good for, i.e. valuable to, the buyer’s own existence. The product itself is produced by a kind of labour or labours, more or less complicated. The price paid for the product is therefore always also an abstract, quantitative validation and estimation of the labour provided by all those contributing to producing the product, and the exchange relation is a kind of relation of estimation and validation of the labour represented by the product as being valuable for a concrete use in the purchaser’s existence. The exchange relation abstractly mediated by money, may therefore be regarded as an abstract relation of social estimation of the labour involved in providing the product, thus serving the customer. Providing a product is hence equivalent to providing a service to the consumer. The price the consumer pays is ultimately an abstract form of estimation of the labour of providing, of performing some kind of service. Thus, although the exchange relation is abstract and reified (through the abstractly social thing, money), it is nevertheless a relation of social estimation of the provision of a more or less valuable service to the consumer mediated by a mutually beneficial furthering of self-interests in exchange. As touched upon in Chapter 8.3, the so-called labour theory of value is a disguised and distorted way of seeing in the exchange relation an interplay of abstract mutual estimation in providing services to each other, i.e. of exercising labouring abilities or individual powers in favour of each other. These services may be immediately beneficial to consumers leading and enjoying their lives, or they may be mediatedly beneficial by providing the means of production for providing those services.

9.3Reified sociating interplay and purportedly ‘inhuman’ alienation of human being

The lament about the ‘uncaring’, reified sociating interplay on the market goes back at least as far as Karl Marx’s thoughts on alienation in the 1840s. It is important to note that, strictly speaking, the lament is independent of the critique of capitalist exploitation of the worker and therefore also has to be assessed independently of the latter critique. With regard to exchange relations of one good for another (and not for money, as has been assumed above) Marx writes:

Ich habe für mich produziert und nicht für dich, wie du für dich produziert hast und nicht für mich. Das Resultat meiner Produktion hat an und für sich ebensowenig Beziehung auf dich, wie das Resultat deiner Produktion eine unmittelbare Beziehung auf mich hat. D.h. unsere Produktion ist keine Produktion des Menschen für den Menschen als Menschen, d.h. keine gesellschaftliche Produktion.

Karl Marx, Auszüge aus James Mills Élémens
d’économie politique, transl. by J.T. Parisot,
Paris 1823, in MEW Erg. Bd. 1 S. 459

I have produced for myself and not for you, just as you have produced for yourself and not for me. The result of my production has in itself just as little relation to you as the result of your production has an immediate relation to me, i.e. our production is not production of humans for humans as humans, i.e. it is not social production.

In producing a good for the market, each of us is taking care only of his or her own world and the interests that arise within it. We are indifferent to each other. There is no directly intended caring for the other in our productive activity and therefore, according to Marx, “it is not social production”. Nevertheless, the exchange of the products is indeed a social relation that sociates us via the market, but in an indifferent mode of caring-for that, behind our backs and willy-nilly, is mutually beneficial and therefore in this sense mutually caring. Hence — pace Marx — our production is also “social production”.

Die einzig verständliche Sprache, die wir zueinander reden, sind unsre Gegenstände in ihrer Beziehung aufeinander. Eine menschliche Sprache verständen wir nicht, und sie bliebe effektlos. [...] So sehr sind wir wechselseitig dem menschlichen Wesen entfremdet, daß die unmittelbare Sprache dieses Wesens uns als eine Verletzung der menschlichen Würde, dagegen die entfremdete Sprache der sachlichen Werte als die gerechtfertigte, selbstvertrauende und sichselbstanerkennende menschliche Würde erscheint. (MEWErg1:461)

The only understandable language that we speak to each other are our objects in their relationship to each other. We would not understand a human language, and it would remain without effect. [...] We are mutually alienated from human being, so much so that the direct/unmediated language of this being appears to us as a violation of human dignity, whereas the alienated language of reified values appears as justified, self-assured human dignity recognizing itself. (MEWErg1:461)

The exchange relation between us is not primarily that of talking to each other in the medium of the λόγος, thus exchanging views and perhaps directly catering to and caring positively for each other, but rather, the social interplay between us is mediated by things and is thus a reified social interplay. Each of us is interested only in acquiring the other’s product which offers itself in its being as being valuable, i.e. useful, for some application, thus enhancing a way of life. Hence our mutual understanding of each other’s products is primarily at play as motivation for the exchange in the first place. We may even, and mostly do, talk with each other about the possibilities in use offered by the other’s product, thus entering into an interchange on how each other’s product could enter into each other’s taking care of everyday existence. Nonetheless, each of us has his or her own interest in the exchange and is not motivated by being able to help the other care for his or her own existence. The exchange, if it takes place, is predicated on a mutual satisfaction of what each of us sees as beneficial, and the exchange itself is a reciprocal interplay of estimating the other’s product, and thus the labour embodied in the product, as being valuable for a possibility of living.

Marx claims that this mutual self-interest amounts to an alienation from genuine human being, from the human essence and thus as a “violation of human dignity”, genuinely understood from its essence in human being. The appeal of one of us to make the exchange because one of us urgently needs the product in question would be “without effect” and would amount to a loss of “human dignity” because commodity exchanges take place only on the basis of reciprocal, complementary self-interests. But Marx suggests that this state of affairs is beneath human dignity once human being itself is understood in its genuine, non-alienated, ‘authenticity’. The call here is for a positive mode of caring-for that would make our social relation of exchange genuinely dignified by acknowledging neediness.

Unser wechselseitiger Wert ist für uns der Wert unsrer wechselseitigen Gegenstände. Also ist der Mensch selbst uns wechselseitig wertlos. (MEWErg1:462)

Our mutual value is for us the value of our mutual objects. The human being himself is thus for us mutually worthless.

Within the context of exchange, each of us is focused on the use-value promised as a possibility of living well by using the other’s product. This use-value makes each of our products valuable, estimable and therefore worthy of acquiring in exchanging some other value for it. Given this focus, we are indifferent to each other as worthy human beings per se who may possess many other excellences or human qualities. The exchange relation is not the place where we undertake a mutual and comprehensive appraisal of each other’s merits as human beings. Nor is it the place where a recognition of the other as ‘one of God’s creatures’, independently of any merits and merely by virtue of the fact of being a human being, takes place. Nor is it the place where the other’s neediness is recognized and compensated (as if neediness itself were the hallmark of human being). Despite this lack of interest, this disinterest in the value or otherwise of each of us as human beings, in exchanging products we can be mutually beneficial to each other. Moreover, we mutually estimate the products as valuable, and thus also the labour embodied in the products, and hence also the exercise of the human abilities required to make the products.

Gesetzt, wir hätten als Menschen produziert: Jeder von uns hätte in seiner Produktion sich selbst und den anderen doppelt bejaht. [...] 2. In deinem Genuß oder deinem Gebrauch meines Produkts hätte ich unmittelbar den Genuß, sowohl des Bewußtseins, in meiner Arbeit ein menschliches Bedürfnis befriedigt, als das menschliche Wesen vergegenständlicht und daher dem Bedürfnis eines andren menschlichen Wesens seinen entsprechenden Gegenstand verschafft zu haben, 3. für dich der Mittler zwischen dir und der Gattung gewesen zu sein, also von dir selbst als eine Ergänzung deines eignen Wesens und als ein not-wendiger Teil deiner selbst gewußt und empfunden zu werden, also sowohl in deinem Denken wie in deiner Liebe mich bestätigt zu wissen, 4. in meiner individuellen Lebensäußerung unmittelbar deine Lebensäußerung geschaffen zu haben, also in meiner individuellen Tätigkeit unmittelbar mein wahres Wesen, mein menschliches, mein Gemeinwesen bestätigt und verwirklicht zu haben. (MEWErg1:462)

Assuming that we had produced as humans: Each of us in his production would have doubly affirmed himself and the other. [...] 2. In your enjoyment or your use of my product I would have had directly the enjoyment as well as the consciousness of having in my work satisfied a human need, of having objectified the human essence and therefore of having created the object corresponding to the need of another human being, 3. to have been the mediator for you between you and the species, that is, to be known and felt by you yourself as a complement to your own being and as a necessary part of your self, that is, to know that I am affirmed in your thinking as well as your love, 4. in my individual expression of life of having directly created your expression of life, that is, in my individual activity of having directly affirmed and realized my true essence, my human essence, my communal/political essence. (MEWErg1:462)

According to Marx, what stands in the way of this genuine expression of the true “human essence” is “private property” (Privateigentum, MEWErg1:459), under the “basic presupposition” (Grundvoraussetzung) of which “the purpose of production is to have; [...] it has a self-interested purpose” (der Zweck der Produktion ist das Haben. [...] sie hat einen eigennützigen Zweck. MEWErg1:459). In having produced to satisfy the need of another human being and in knowing that the other affirms me in his “thinking” and “love”, a positive mode of caring-for would be constitutive of economic life in general. Economic life would be a theatre of universal love driven by (mutual?) need-fulfilment. Self-interest as the motive for exchange would give way to knowing that I have “satisfied a human need”. Our exchange would then be “the mediating movement in which it has been affirmed that my product is for you because it is an objectification of your own being, your need” (die vermittelnde Bewegung, worin es bestätigt wurde, daß mein Produkt für dich ist, weil es eine Vergegenständlichung deines eignen Wesens, deines Bedürfnisses ist. MEWErg1:459).

As it is, however, abstract, reified exchange interplay is nevertheless in truth a form of social estimation of each other as providing something valuable to each other as a possibility of existence. The exchange relations of products are relations of mutual recognition and estimation in providing services to each other. This does not amount to relations of total concrete recognition of each other as human beings resembling a love relation, but it does constitute a social nexus and enable a social way of living in which self-interested actors nevertheless mutually benefit each other. Why should it be alienating? Indifferent self-interest is willy-nilly mediated with caring for another and thus raised up dialectically, whereas the above-quoted passage from Marx is undialectical in failing the think the mediation of opposites with one another. Just as any service can be regarded as a product, so too can any product be regarded as a service, i.e. the purchaser purchases the exercised abilities embodied in the product as a kind of service and thus abstractly esteems in the purchase the labour of service-provision. This falls short of love, nor is it a one-sided satisfaction of the other’s neediness, but it is no injury to human dignity. Moreover, as has been shown in Chapter 4.5, neediness is not a fundamental category of human existence but derivative of the usages which people habitually practise.

The barrier to the realization of “true human being” in Marx’s view are private property relations, which distort this “true human being”. This barrier could be overcome through an act of political revolution in which private property were abolished, thus also revolutionizing historical human being itself into a way of sharing the world with others in which a positive, affirmative mode of caring for others purportedly would become ‘natural’ in everyday sociation with one another. Against this assertion we have a fundamental socio-ontological structure of human being as care and of shared human being as caring-for in which social relations such as private property have to be thought as being more fundamentally rooted. As we have seen above, the predominant modes of caring-for arising from everyday life are deficient and privative modes, not because of private property relations but, more deeply, because human being itself is individualized and cares in the first place about casting and shaping its own existence and its own world in a small, familiar circle, whether it be a nuclear family, an extended family, a clan, a neighbourhood, etc. It exercises its powers and abilities, in the first place, for its own sake, i.e. for the sake of its own world. Only those who are close to me are part of my world; others figure in my world “at first and for the most part” in a background mode of indifference. This prevailing indifference, however, in no way precludes mutually beneficial interplay driven by self-interest from arising and thus an interplay of mutual estimation of each other as being valuable to and appreciated by each other (rather than being weak and needy, and therefore pitied).

The ‘wanting to have more’, the πλεονεξία, the Habsucht discussed in Chapter 4 is — pace Marx — not a consequence of private property, but rather conversely, private property, which deprives others of access to what I have got for myself and for those close to me, corresponds to a deeper proclivity to take care of one’s own first and to exclude others from using and benefiting from those material goods acquired that contribute to living well. Is this merely a proclivity of the historical Western world? At least in Western traditions, it is not beneath human dignity to care for oneself and one’s own first, but wholly in line with a deeper socio-ontological structure of human being as experienced and thought through in Western history.

The socialization of property therefore presupposes another, ‘higher’, historical fundamental — and more than merely self-deluding, Utopian — recasting of human being itself (a ‘new’ human being) in which some positive, more inclusive, non-indifferent mode of caring for others would become a ‘natural’, ubiquitous human condition, a condition of ethical “second nature” (RPh. § 151). Marx and other socialists have regarded such an elevation of human nature to a higher plane to be historically possible, whereas a more sober and insightful view of how human beings fend for themselves in the world — which can be clarified by ontological-existential concepts forged from everyday life — suggests that Marx’s alienation is Utopian, i.e. that it has no place on this Earth and therefore amounts to positing a mere Ought that can only wreak havoc in history by suppressing the self-interested particularity of human being. Rather, social interplay of mutually beneficial self-interest arises of itself (and in this sense is φύσει, i.e. ‘natural’) from individuals and groups of individuals striving to take care of themselves in going about the business of everyday life. Caring for oneself thus becomes of itself, i.e. naturally and willy-nilly, a mutual, although restricted, caring for each other, and the abstract, reified interplay of the market is nonetheless a social interplay in which we estimate each other abstractly, and in part even concretely, through money as being mutually beneficial to each other — despite and precisely because this mutual estimation is mediated through our self-interests.

When the young Marx strikes the theme of love in social relations, he is of course taking up a motif of Christian discourse, the ἀγάπη, ‘charity’ or ‘brotherly love’ which makes a Christian a good person pleasing in God’s sight. The virtues of liberality, generosity and beneficence, too, have been regarded since ancient Greek philosophy as most praiseworthy, whereas stinginess, miserliness and meanness have been among the most blameworthy traits of human nature that were to be overcome by becoming virtuous. With the advent of Hobbes, however, the bar was lowered. Since men were after glory, were self-interested, did not keep their word, did not trust each other, etc., the best that could be hoped for was that a Leviathan be set up to “keep them all in awe” (Lev. p. 62 cf. Chapter 10), so at least they did not kill each other. The social ontology developed in the present inquiry, however, has asked what the nature of human sociation is and uncovered that the bland term, ‘social relation’, has to be regarded more deeply as sociating, estimating interchange and interplay, whose ontology has been analyzed in Chapter 5.

The ubiquitous nexus of everyday life is a mutually beneficial and mutually self-interested interchange which is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy. Everyday life is a give and take. This contrasts with the altruistic virtues of giving without taking, up to the extreme of sacrificing one’s life for others (as a soldier may do to defend his country or for the sake of fulfilling one’s own ideal ‘look’ of oneself). And it contrasts also with egoistically taking without giving as happens in phenomena such as stealing, fraud (taking whilst pretending to give), robbery (taking under the threat of physical violence) or the extreme case of murder (taking another’s life), or in simply being egoistically ruthless in all one’s dealings. All these phenomena, from one extreme to the other, may be regarded as social interchanges, from the most praiseworthy to the most blameworthy and punishable. The mean is constituted by the mundane exchange of estimated equivalents, the give and take of everyday life in which most people earn a livelihood in a society characterized by a division of labour which thus motivates exchanges on the basis of what we, through the exercise of our diverse abilities, can do for each other to enhance each other’s lives by providing something useful that serves one or other of the usages that go to make up our habitual quotidian lives. This is the socio-ontological middle ground, which is neither imbued with Christian virtue, nor stained by the violence of a Hobbesian state of nature.

9.4The wage-labour relation and caring-for – Co-operation and conflict – Hierarchy and reified discipline – Economic democracy and total economic control

We turn now to capitalism and the relationship between capital and wage-labour to consider it from the perspective of the socio-ontological structure of caring-for. Marx conceives wage-labour as alienated human activity in which, moreover, the labourer is sorely exploited. The alienation is said to stem from i) the labourers’ not owning and therefore controlling their means of production, which are the private property of the capitalist and ii) the reification of social relations in money-value which, once it is set into motion as the movement of capital, subsumes wage-labour beneath it as a mere factor of production. The exploitation is said to originate in the appropriation by the capitalist of a portion of the product value as surplus value, the basis for this claim being the labour theory of value, according to which the product’s magnitude of value is determined by its labour content. If the claim that capitalism is based in its essence on the exploitation of wage-labour through the extraction of surplus value is disposed of in refuting the labour theory of value (cf. Chapter 6.3), the alienation-reification critique of capitalism still has to be considered.

Seen from the opposite perspective, the alienation-reification critique of capitalism is Adam Smith’s felicitous “invisible hand”, since this latter means nothing other than that economic activity is undertaken via the market under the guiding facticity of reified sociating interplay that functions as a simple, ubiquitously applicable, disciplining, social filter, i.e. as a kind of ingenious cybernetic feedback loop that sifts out failed attempts, and validates, esteems and rewards the best attempts.159 When the production of use-values, i.e. of what is good for living, is undertaken privately but for the market, the product’s use-value becomes exchange-value and, quantitatively, price, a reified expression of what the product is worth in sociation. But reified social interplay does not stop there.

Once the valuableness of goods attains a reification in money, this thing itself becomes the embodiment of value and, as universal equivalent, is itself able to acquire all else that human being values, i.e. everything that is good for living including, for instance, even honour, social prestige, public office, political influence, etc. etc. In particular, and essentially, reified value can be employed gainfully, i.e. money can be employed self-reflexively, i.e. invested, to make more money M—C—M + ΔM, thus setting itself into a peculiar kind of movement, a social, sociating movement which, through its movement, sociates. This gainful, self-reflexive, self-augmentative movement of money-value is capital in its primary and fundamental determination as expressed in the above simple formula for the movement of value as capital. As mercantile capital, money-value is put into motion to bring goods together on the market, i.e. com-merce, but as productive capital, money-value is set into movement, bringing together or sociating the factors of production (labour power, raw materials, means of production and land) into a production process.

Essential to setting up a capitalist production process is the wage-labour relation between the capitalist and the labourers (where the labourers in this general context can be anyone who works for money, i.e. employees, including managers, and not just ‘blue-collar’ workers. The capitalist here is nothing other than the personification of money-capital, i.e. of a reified social relation, and is therefore not necessarily a natural person but perhaps merely a legal entity, a non-natural person. This legal entity can even be a co-operative in which the owner-workers as capitalist owners employ themselves as wage labourers. Such owner-workers therefore wear two character-masks. Money-capital has the power to purchase an essential ingredient of the production process, labour power, which is embodied in the labourers. For this to happen, the capitalist and the workers do a deal, an exchange: wages for labour power expended for a certain time. Of course the capitalist also has to purchase raw materials, means of production and lease land, but that is left to one side here. We are concerned here only with considering the capitalist wage-labour relation from the perspective of caring-for.

The wage-labour deal is an exchange between two parties. The capitalist hires the labourer as the bearer of labour power with the aim of making money. The employees hire out their labour power with the aim of earning wages to support their way of living. The employees are making a living, and the capitalist is making money, and indeed, only remains a capitalist for as long as he is making money, i.e. augmenting money-value rather than diminishing it. The capitalist (who, on a more concrete level, could be, say, shareholders living off dividends, or employees themselves as part-owners of a co-operative for which they work) will live off the money made, but also reinvest the money made to make even more money, thus enhancing the enterprise’s chances of survival in the competitive economic interplay. Both sides of the wage-labour hire transaction are therefore interested in making money, at least in part, for a livelihood. They are not directly interested in each other’s welfare or in supporting a comfortable way of living for the other. They are both self-interested. Moreover, each side has opposed interests with regard to the amounts of wages paid since, for the capitalist, the wages are a cost and therefore a deduction from potential profit, whereas for the employees, the higher the wages or salaries, the better. Thus, to start with, the capitalist wage-labour relation could be characterized as a mode of indifferent or — with respect to their opposed interests with regard to wage levels — even deficient, negative or antagonistic caring-for mediated by the reified sociation via money-capital — but only to start with.

Why? Because, although each side is (self-)interested in earning money and these interests are quantitatively opposed, the wage-labour relation brings the two sides together in some sort of ongoing production process in which labour power is expended in a labour process (which may be also a service-provision process). This ongoingness amounts to a way of everyday working life in whose continuation both sides have an interest. The capitalist must be interested in the quality of the product produced; the employees must be interested in the quality of the working conditions. These interests may be aligned (in which case there is an easy mutuality of interest) or they may conflict (in which case there is a caring-for as Gegeneinander, as opposition). Maintaining product quality or enhancing productivity may entail paying higher salaries and wages, and providing good working conditions and auxiliary benefits, or it may entail cooperative, minimally hierarchical organization of the labour process in teams, or it may entail paring costs by sacking employees, or strict labour discipline in ‘sweatshops’ enforcing a high intensity of labour at low wages.

The essence of capitalism, the gainful game (cf. Chapter 6.8), which for the present purposes may be defined from the capitalist side as the striving for monetary gain through advancing money-capital, does not, however (pace Marx’s immiseration theory), necessarily dictate poor wages and poor working conditions as in inevitable outcome of the interplay of opposed interests. The (abstract, simple) essence of capital is infinitely more versatile, more Protean than that. Above all, where employees embody special skills, these skills are worth something to the capitalist which is acknowledged in the level of wages and salaries and in enhanced working conditions, side benefits or even bonuses. Moreover, the organization of wage-labour into labour unions (and, assuming a democratic public sphere, the formation of public opinion) is an alternative way for employees to improve the outcome of their struggle with capitalist employers over wage levels and working conditions when the capitalist’s money-making strategy is to ruthlessly minimize costs. The bargaining advantage of the employing capitalist in negotiations over wages and conditions is then weakened by workers presenting a united front in negotiations (or bringing public opinion behind them on the issue of what is regarded socially as fair conditions of employment). The employees’ bargaining position can also be improved (or worsened) simply by the conditions of capitalist competition, such as a shortage (or surfeit) of labour power.

The ongoing capitalist production and circulation process therefore involves both positive and negative modes of caring-for, i.e. there can be both mutual co-operation and sharp conflict between capitalist and workforce in concretely shaping the production or circulation process and how it is remunerated. Thus, reified social relations (money, capital) by no means entail merely indifference or conflict among the participants in the economy but may elicit also positive modes of mutually caring-for in the way the two sides comport themselves toward each other. The wage-labour relation with capital is thus socio-ontologically ambiguous, containing both the possibility of mutual cooperation and benefit and even satisfaction, on the one hand, and that of bitter conflict, on the other. Those with highly prized skills on the employment market, for instance, will more easily enjoy an employment relationship describable as a mutual caring-for in the positive sense. Others, who are less skilled and in abundance on the job market, will experience employment as dreary or a hard slog.

Furthermore, the continuity of the production and circulation process160 and the mutual dependence of capitalist and workforce on each other mean that a way of working life arises around the capitalist enterprise. Each side, in taking care of its self-interest in earning money, indirectly cares for the other side’s taking care of everyday working life on a continuous basis. As long as the capitalist enterprise remains profitable by conforming to the simple value-form conditions of the movement of value as capital, the production or circulation process can continue, and both capitalist and workforce can earn their livelihood and mutually benefit from each other. The enterprise’s profitability constitutes the ‘boundary conditions’, the reified value-parameters for whether the enterprise’s production process can continue in its present shape or at all. Maintaining or enhancing profitability, enforced by competition among the capitalist enterprises, dictates continual changes to the enterprise’s production and circulation process, which may include retrenchments of the workforce, intensification of the labour process, a worsening of working conditions or wage cuts.

The continual struggle over jobs, wage levels and working conditions with the capitalist employer is waged within the boundary conditions of the enterprise’s overall profitability, i.e. if the employees’ side pushes too far to assert its self-interests, it may bankrupt the enterprise altogether, thus terminating a possibility of working life altogether. The pursuit of self-interest by both capitalist and employees is thus mediated with the other side’s interests, so that there is both co-operation and conflict, i.e. both positive and negative modes of caring-for. Moreover, the reified, money-mediated social interplay enforces mutations in the enterprise to secure or enhance its chances of survival, i.e. the enterprise is a mode of movement of social life that is not decided by political institutions and the eternal interplay of negotiating political powers, but by the anonymous workings of market cybernetics that is able to dislodge the entrenched inertia of an habitualized way of working life for the sake of enhancing the value of the enterprise’s product that is achieved on the market. The term ‘market mechanism’ or, more properly, ‘market metabolism’ is justified only as a term for reified social interplay, i.e. for sociation accomplished through things, above all, through money. The movement of prices on the various markets, which is itself a reified sociating movement, has a cybernetic feedback effect on the production processes and the way of working life in the enterprise.

The criticism of capitalist-waged employee labourer interplay — that the waged employees do not control their own working conditions but are subject to the capitalist’s command — can be answered as follows: First of all, any modern production (or circulation, which will here be left to one side) process in the broadest sense (including service provision) that has even a moderate scale must have some sort of hierarchy that structures the productive organism. A thorough-going ‘direct’ democracy in the production process is unworkable. Secondly, large or medium-sized production processes can be organized with more or less steep hierarchies, and productivity may well be enhanced by instituting team-work organized in shallow hierarchies and by encouraging individual employee responsibility. Such measures will give employees more control over their own work processes, but within an overall working structure that aims at efficient, productive production as measured ultimately by success in quantitative value terms. Thirdly, capitalist enterprise allows also the variant of a co-operative in which the employees own their own company but, even in this event, there must be some sort of hierarchy and chain of command to organize the production process, and the co-operative, too, is subject to the discipline of the boundary conditions of self-augmenting value. Fourthly, the lack of control over working conditions is not merely a matter of a capitalist boss dictating how the employees are to work, but is due above all to the capitalist enterprise being exposed to market conditions and especially to the competition with other capitalist enterprises. The value-reified conditions of markets and competition enforces discipline in the company’s production process itself, and the capitalist entrepreneur or the managers are only the mediators or ‘messengers’ who pass on the necessary adaptations down the chain of command in the hierarchy. Even a co-operative is exposed to capitalist competition.

Fifthly, any kind of sociation of a single production process in an overall economic system, whether it be mediated by reified market relations or whether it be controlled politically through political power play as in state-owned enterprises, takes away autonomous control of the production process and how it can be organized. Even a totalized system of economic democracy in which normal employees would have a say in how the overall economy is organized and what and how it is to produce would not do away with relations of domination and subordination, i.e. with the social power play. The politicization of the production process on a total social scale would mean that the struggles that are carried out via the medium of reified value on competitive markets under capitalism would assume the form of ongoing political power struggles within the enterprises and the political institutions themselves. This would amount to an intensification of political power struggles, since the cybernetic functioning of reified market interplay would no longer provide some externally imposed, reified and therefore neutral discipline and dispensation from continual, internal struggle. No matter how the sociating interplay of production may be historically modified and reconstellated, social power play remains a predominant, ineradicable phenomenon in countless and ever-changing forms of manifestation. We shall return to a consideration of the ontology of social power in Chapter 10.

9.5The invisible hand and the ontological possibility of a caring capitalism – Unlimited economic growth through caring for each other

Undoubtedly the most famous turn of phrase from Adam Smith’s pen is that of the “invisible hand” which works mysteriously in markets purportedly for the general good of society. The phrase occurs in a chapter of The Wealth of Nations headed “Of restraints upon the importation from foreign countries of such goods as can be produced at home” (Book IV Chapter II) in which Smith discusses the detrimental effects of trade protectionism by means of import prohibitions and customs duties, etc. which allow a domestic industry to thrive behind artificial trade barriers erected and maintained by the state in its exercise of political power. Political power therefore in this case trumps the power interplay among the various economic resources, each with its own potential when sociated via the medium of reified value.

The basic idea is that protectionism distorts the allocation of wealth-creating resources of a nation in favour of protected industries from how they otherwise would be allocated if the profit-making self-interest of entrepreneurs alone were to direct their allocation. A protected domestic industry can afford to be less efficient in its use of economic resources than foreign competitors. The removal of protectionist barriers would lead to a reallocation of resources toward what that nation’s domestic economy does better, i.e. more productively and efficiently, which it could then trade to gain the goods produced in foreign parts more efficiently, and therefore more cheaply, than the domestic economy is able to produce, thus bringing about a win-win situation. Smith writes:

But it is only for the sake of profit that any man employs a capital in the support of industry; and he will always, therefore, endeavour to employ it in the support of that industry of which the produce is likely to be of the greatest value, or to exchange for the greatest quantity either of money or of other goods. [...] He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security, and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.161