This is not mere (ontic) description, but illustrates rather an existential-ontological tendency of human existence to achieve a relative state of security, i.e. to relieve itself as much as possible of its cares. If human existence is in essence care (Sorge), this tendency implies a weighting toward removing negative cares that arise from the unreliability (cf. Chapter 7) of social power interplays of all kinds, thus being freed to care, in the positive sense, for those matters and those others that are closer to home and heart. Since specifically market exchange relations of all sorts, with their inherent, irremediable uncertainty, lie paradigmatically at the core sociating practices constituting society, there is necessarily a tendency for human existence to secure itself against this uncertainty in particular. Secure employment enables individual employees to plan, i.e. to cast their existences in the future and forecast what means will be available for their self-chosen casting. It also provides a space for an inherent tendency of human practices to become habituated, thus gaining an inertia of their own. Human existence, which consists on a quotidian plane of a multiplicity of practices, has an essential inherent tendency to inertia by virtue of the everyday practices and their overall structure and intermeshing becoming, or already having become habituated as usages. Individuals both understand and practise their existences in a frame that tends to relatively fixed habituation. An essential aspect of existential security, of being without care, is not having to care, bother or worry about changing one’s understanding, practices and habits in order to get by in life. Existential security consists in part of having a constant and steady ‘formula’ for leading one’s life and, in particular, for earning one’s livelihood. This ‘formula’, which is a kind of habituated understanding and structure of practices, allows each individual to ‘calculate’ and reckon with its existence. Human existence likes a life which is secure, without cares, whilst plodding along straight ahead and persevering in a rut unless acted upon by and thus having to suffer the forces of momentous external circumstances. Newton’s first axiom or law of motion (Axiomata, sive leges motus) for physical bodies can also be interpreted existentially in the social context: “Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.” (Every body perseveres in its state of rest or in moving uniformly straight ahead as long as it is not compelled to change by forces impressing upon it.) One could even say that the ‘law of inertia of social life’ is the true origin in social living itself of the physical law of inertia.
This could be called a conservative or inertial tendency of human existence to prudently conserve and secure its livelihood, to remain stalwartly within the usages of a given, reliable way of life, to resist change and stick to the path that one already knows. Prudence (φρόνησις) here consists in the insight into the insecure nature of practical human interplay, including especially that mediated via markets, along with precautionary action to counteract this insecurity. The conservative tendency of human existence makes it risk-averse. It tends to turn away from the risks inherent in shifting valuation by the market and to prudently build a hedge against the risks of economic life. Such hedges can take many different forms, such as savings accounts, insurance policies of diverse types, superannuation, investments, or dependency on a spouse, etc. The former kinds of hedges all employ reified value in its function as a store of value, and thus of social power, to counter insecurity.
Everything saleable on the market has a quantitative value put on it consisting in the amount of money, i.e. the price, to be had for it. This holds in particular for an individual’s labour power which it hires out to earn a living. Everything that is (exists) in a social world shows itself also from the aspect of having a market value. Since what can be traded in today’s world is virtually unlimited, everything that is, including even the most intangible of entities, has potential monetary value. Being worth something in monetary terms on some market or other is an essential aspect of social being, i.e. being-in-the-world-with-others, Mitwelt. The all-pervasiveness of tradability and monetary value in the social world has assumed global proportions today, but that things show themselves off in the social world as being worth something is a phenomenon familiar from ancient times whose socio-ontology has intensively occupied us in previous chapters. Reified value as medium of sociation is today ubiquitous. This means that the household management of human existence, its economy, is embedded in a totalized market economy and is thus dependent on the shifting sands of how the myriad markets put values on things.
Critics of laissez-faire or let-it-happen capitalism are not satisfied with Adam Smith’s reasoning for the maximization of value-generation. Instead of value-maximization they want to posit other, qualitative objectives for total social economic activity, such as social security (an unconditional hedge against the insecurities of reified-value interplay guaranteed by the state) and preservation of the so-called ‘quality of life’, which override the ‘one-dimensional’ striving for monetary gain. They point, for instance, to the social dislocation caused when the economy is forced to structurally readjust under the impact of massive market forces. In this section we shall consider only the supposed imperatives of state interference in the economy for the sake of securing a people’s way of life.175 Value-generation itself, because it only comes about through the interplay of countless individual forces on myriad markets, is a fickle thing that changes direction unpredictably, leading perhaps even to the obsolescence of entire industries. This reallocation of resources through market metabolism may indeed be efficient for maximizing monetary value-creation, they say, but it costs the price of social disruption and upheaval. People have to change their way of life. The settledness of a way of life with its customs and ingrained, but cherished habits (say, of a coal-mining community) is then put at the disposition of anonymous market forces that seem arbitrary and brutal in their effects.
Much of the critique of the invisible hand comes from the quarter of the inertia of social life, i.e. from its tendency to persist without change in the course of its customs, habits, routines and ruts unless disturbed by intervening forces. As already noted, this is the social equivalent of Newton’s first law of motion. The preservation of a given way of life in a specific locality or province, interpolated ‘linearly’ and ‘endlessly’ into the future, is posited as an end in itself, as an ideal of living well and comfortably, against the quantitative end of the striving for monetary gain, thus furthering total social value-generation for the sake of raising material standards of living, and against the claimed ‘injustice’ of rough, disruptive market capitalism. A qualitative end is set against a quantitatively measurable end (such as growth in gross domestic product). The satisfaction of living within the customs, usages and routines of a way of life is weighed up against the opportunity of ‘ruthlessly’ increasing the wealth-generation of a nation by obeying market forces, flexibly taking advantage of market opportunities, or responding to competitive challenges from other national economies by maintaining and improving a competitive edge, both of which require change. A tendency to conservatism in an established, self-contained, social environment and set of customs counterweighs the incessant dynamism of capitalist markets not only with their opportunities for enhancing wealth whilst demanding a willingness to adapt one’s way of living, but also with their compulsion to continually adapt to continually changing competitive conditions of economic survival. The settledness and satisfaction of routine everyday living that poses no challenges to good living is counterposed to the demands of flexibility and adaptability on pain of going under in capitalist competition which today is a global interplay of powers.
The competitive state of play is continually changing, and this change is not simply for the sake of maximizing economic wealth generation under shifting circumstances, but rather, the market competition is a cybernetic feedback loop that responds sensitively to shifts in demand (value estimation) and available resources, i.e. supply as estimated in reified value. The markets aggregate countless individual economic movements on the part of all those engaged in economic interplay on both the demand and supply sides. They do this of themselves, without any conscious, intentional control by a superior social power. Such aggregation is the resultant, or rather multiple, multifaceted outcomes of power plays, of economic movements initiated by countless individuals pursuing their own particular interests, whether it be as income-earners or as consumers, thus engaging in interchanges with each other. The changes in these aggregate outcomes manifest themselves as economic changes that in turn force the adaptation of economic players. The ever-changing interplay between demand and supply, when it takes the form of opening new markets, translates phenomenally into new goods appearing on the markets, and these new goods must be understood ultimately as new ways in which the economic players exercise their abilities for each other’s benefit, which leads to an enhancement of the quality of life, even though, in some cases such ‘enhancement’ is dubious or double-edged.
The question arises as to whether these enforced changes are benign or malign for social living. No matter how this question is answered, it can be seen that markets as the socio-ontologically simplest and most rudimentary form of social interchange bring individuals from diverse places, and even worldwide, willy-nilly into social interplay with one another. This social interplay of countless social forces emanates from individuals as sources of power and will, i.e. as individual, dynamic ἀρχαί, whose ongoing, dynamic outcome is an aggregate response to polyarchic social movement.
The inertial tendency of a way of living is therefore invariably manifested as a resistance to the web of market relations that enmesh and entangle a local or regional community in dynamic, global, social interchanges mediated by sociating value-things (commodities, money, money-capital, finance capital) that bring change. The conservative inertia of a local or provincial or even national way of living is thus an aversion to the dangers and risks of having to change that all social interchanges with others, no matter whether on a small or large scale, bring. It is not merely ‘big multinationals’ ‘hungry for profit’ that force change worldwide on people and their ways of life, but rather, these large capitalist corporations are only the entrepreneurial nodal points, themselves embedded in the web of economic social interchanges in which humanity is today enmeshed worldwide. One may lament that this is so, but one must also learn to see that it is the socio-ontological fluidity of social interplay with others itself (laid out in Chapter 5) that underlies the continual economic changes with which all are challenged to cope. All the defensiveness against changes induced by social interplay with the ‘outside’ is ultimately a kind of provincialism. And the obverse side is that all change also harbours the challenging possibility of the world opening up for understanding and practice in a more life-enhancing way. The question of social conservatism and inertia thus turns upon how open a community or society is to the open horizon of the future on which more or less historically momentous possibilities for human living appear.
Since the necessity and/or enjoyment of earning a living is embedded in a market economy, it is necessarily buffeted by the winds and storms occasionally whipped up by groundless, unfathomable and therefore unpredictable changes and upheavals in the markets. The market economy opens up, i.e. reveals itself, as a possibility of casting one’s self both in the sense of offering the opportunity of gain, but also in the sense of exposing oneself to the risk of loss. Those enterprising spirits who set out on the seas of unfathomable, uncertain markets must be prepared to accept risk for the opportunity to also make a good profit. Enterprise as a basic existential possibility could be understood in this sense of a casting into the uncertainty of human interplay in the widest sense. Such an existential possibility demands flexibility and agility, that is, the willingness to adapt one’s practices and the alertness to see the necessity of modifying or even completely changing one’s ‘formula’ for personal gain in response to ever-changing katallactic seas.
The conservatism of a way of living makes itself felt also once the state has intervened in the economy for political reasons, that may even be well-justified in terms of overall social well-being, to protect certain markets by means of subsidies, import duties, restrictions and prohibitions, quotas, state monopolies, or the like. The market barriers erected by the state for whatever political reason (e.g. maintaining the nation’s self-sufficiency in the production of some commodity or industry deemed to be in the national interest or for national security) afford a protective wall behind which some of the nation’s wealth-producing resources are diverted by particular interests that there seek and enjoy an economic advantage and security. Economic resources are diverted from where they otherwise would be allocated without the protection of trade barriers. Once these barriers exist, a whole industry and an associated way of life can prosper artificially and become comfortably ensconced within a protected, ‘greenhouse’ economic and social environment.
The state’s economic policy then becomes hostage to those (usually democratic voters; cf. Chapter 13) whose living depends crucially on the trade barriers, and any subsequent attempt on the part of the state, when circumstances and political priorities have in some way altered, to do away with or modify the trade barriers will be met with stiff resistance born of conservative self-interest. In any even vaguely democratic system of government, vested interests will lobby the state (i.e. the government of the day) to prevent any change whatsoever, and they will bemoan the threatened loss of a way of life. What may have once been a policy introduced genuinely in the national interest (at the cost of a less than optimally efficient allocation of the nation’s economic resources measured in monetary terms) thus becomes a factor in protecting merely the self-interest of a particular social group under changed circumstances, which depends on the trade-protected industry, and a fetter for which society at large has to pay. The general well-being of society is then infected by particular self-interests, and the state, especially through its democratically elected politicians, becomes the agent for upholding these vested interests. The immovability of a way of living then translates into the political immovability in the state’s trade-protection policy. This immovability is the (socio-ontological) viscosity of the medium of political power itself (and democratic political power in particular; cf. Chapter 13) that in turn is rooted in the tendency to inertia in ways of living. In contrast with the (socio-ontological) fluidity of the reified sociating medium of value that enables continual adjustments according to countless ‘molecular’ market movements which, as has been shown above, are only a particular, rudimentary manifestation of the essential socio-ontological fluidity of social interchanges as a whole, especially when they are the interchanges among free individuals in power interplays with each other.
It is this kind of protectionist anomaly which Adam Smith has in view when he uses the felicitous phrase “invisible hand” in referring to the beneficial effects of the profit incentive acting in free markets as opposed to trade protectionism initiated and upheld by the nation state. Today, however, the notion of the invisible hand is taken to mean, much more broadly, the open slather of market forces without any state intervention whatsoever. The terms ‘liberalism’ and ‘neo-liberalism’ are often used these days as derogatory appellations purportedly signalling ‘profit before people’, as if it were not people themselves who strove for monetary gain.
Adam Smith’s use of the notion of the invisible hand, however, does not exclude the necessity that the state ensure that markets work in an orderly and above all, fair fashion. Nor does it simply reject a political ‘visible hand’ as anathema. As already noted, state regulation to prevent, say, the formation of monopolies, cartels or some other manipulation of the market, is absolutely necessary to ensure that the invisible hand has room to move. Other markets may get into an unsustainable, speculative fever driven by gainful prospects whose eventual collapse severely disrupts the entire economy due to the interdependence of all sectors mediated by finance capital whose gainful activities require stricter regulation. Furthermore, rules of play to protect, say, the populace’s health are indispensable, and these may include restrictions on weekly working hours, child labour, etc. The notion of the invisible hand represents rather a caveat regarding the dangers of interfering with the largely beneficial market medium of sociation driven by the inner spring of the striving for monetary gain and replacing it with some sort of visible hand in the shape of conscious state policy that rests upon the interplay like a lead weight and iron hand. For it has to be asked: i) Is the visible hand of conscious policy posited by the state really in the best interests of society as a whole or is it instead, precisely because it is visible, open to political manipulation and horse-trading and to political-social inertia under the effects of social lobbies and even corruption by powerful individuals and corporations? ii) Can a consciously posited state economic policy match the efficiency in allocation of economic resources achieved by market cybernetics under the individual incentive of monetary gain in guiding privately dissociated economic activities which are associated only via the market-place? and iii) Is the diversion from the presumed outcome of the workings of the invisible hand for the sake of important universal, overarching political goals, which are thus given precedence, justifiable, purdent and necessary? There are therefore constant tensions between justifiable state interference and judicious state guidance of the economic interplay.
State policy on market intervention to direct the allocation of the economic resources of society is invariably justified in terms of the general good and, more often than not, in the name of social justice. For instance, the national defence is indisputably part of the general good, and the defence budget could in this context be regarded as an economic intervention for the general good, even though the concrete details of the defence budget and defence policy will always remain a contentious political issue, also favouring a particular sector, viz, the defence sector. The visible hand of state economic policy is supposed to rise above the merely particular interests of social groups that are self-interested in policy taking a certain direction. Such justification of state or government economic policy takes place and is fought out in the arena of political debate and dispute in which all sorts of viewpoints and arguments are brought forward, especially by associations representing sectoral interests (for, any state policy whatsoever, even that of the highest national interest, affects also particular interests one way or another). Whether these viewpoints and arguments are genuinely for the general well-being of society or are merely camouflage for vested self-interests is often unclear and is inevitably a contentious political issue.
Even assuming that the debates and conflicts over state economic intervention policy are fought out in the spirit of a genuine interest in social well-being as a whole, the political disputes and conflicts inevitably remain infected by particular economic interests. Every issue in social-political life has elements of both particular and universal interests. Universal interests concern das Allgemeine, τὸ καθόλου (literally, ‘the on-the-whole, the toward-the-whole’) that is above particular interests. Given the inevitable infection of the universal interest by particular interests, in particular, by the tendency of social groups to want to persevere in an established way of life, it can be beneficial for the social whole if the viscous sociating medium of political power is complemented and balanced by the more fluid, change-friendly invisible hand of the reified power of markets that not only compels individuals to change the way they live, but also enables them to do so, often for the better.
The infection of the universal interest of a society by particular interests is achieved above all through the specious notion of universal social justice in whose name a ‘just’ distribution of the goods of living is demanded (cf. Chapter 6.5). Vested interests become embedded in the social welfare state whose policy represents a concrete conception of internal social well-being. The outcomes of the competitive game of earning income through market interchanges are ‘corrected’ in the name of such social justice. The particularized strivings of all players in the gainful game to have more (πλεονεξία) that have room for play in the game of economic competitive katallaxy are now thwarted and diverted to the competitive political struggle over shaping state social policy so that the concretely realized conception of social justice, which putatively aims at caring for the populace, is in truth shaped by various particular social groupings of differing strengths, each striving to have more, or fighting at least not to have anything less than what it has already achieved. Mass egoism goes under the sheepskin of social solidarity.
9.9The manifestation of the visible hand in the shape of bureaucracy
Once a policy of state economic intervention has been resolved on, it still has to be implemented by means of knowingly social, and therefore politically visible organs and institutional organs distinct from the un knowingly sociating, value-mediated market interchanges which sociate dissociated economic activities solely through the market-place. The imposition of import duties, for instance, represents a relatively simple economic intervention, because only a protective trade barrier is erected behind which a domestic industry can seek shelter. The only executive organ required is a customs bureaucracy to collect the duty on the relevant imported goods entering the country. If a more qualitative objective is posited for the state’s policy of economic intervention, such as furthering certain kinds of energy sources deemed to be socially desirable, say, for the sake of protecting the environment, or supporting agricultural use and cultivation of the countryside or providing services deemed to be a universal right of all citizens independently of their financial means, then an entire, elaborate bureaucratic apparatus has to be conceived and set up to execute and administer the policy. What the economy achieves through the interplay of self-interests has to be implemented instead through executive organs of state carrying out, and above all enforcing, a political will.
Such an execution of will through bureaucratic organs can only be had at the price of multiple frictions, because in the place of market-mediated, individual strivings for economic gain driven by nothing other than each individual’s estimation of its best earning opportunities must step a bureaucratically regulated process that ensures that the state’s will is indeed being properly executed. The conduct of the economic players must be explicitly regulated by numerous regulations that have to be overseen and enforced. Individual economic players have to make applications on forms to the bureaucracy which then have to be processed through more or less lengthy and elaborate procedures. The bureaucracy’s clients have to provide detailed relevant information about themselves which then has to be checked and evaluated. Their privacy as private citizens thus has to be breached to this extent, and the state encroaches on the private sphere. All this regulation must be performed in some way through the medium of the λόγος in its guise as ‘paper-work’ and ‘red tape’. Such paper and tape represent sources of friction to social movement that may even strangulate it, and, finally, the entire bureaucratic process of execution and regulation represents a social cost because it requires resources of all kinds. State economic intervention that sets goals, purportedly for the general good, that differ from the direction in which the economy would head under its own estimating power interplay therefore needs to be carefully considered and weighed against its costs in resources and bureaucratic friction.
Whether and to what extent the ‘visible hand’ policy is cleverly conceived, and effectively and efficiently implemented in a given bureaucratic apparatus and whether and to what extent the bureaucratic procedures can be abused by clients who now engage in power play with the state are important questions. Even granted, against all likelihood, that the visible hand of government economic policy is adequately implemented by an efficiently conceived and functioning bureaucratic apparatus, this visible hand remains a social cost demanding political justification and furthermore, any subsequent change in government economic intervention policy is then exposed to multiple sources of inertia deriving from the state bureaucracy itself with its own vested interests, political institutions with their power struggles, the formation of public opinion, and especially the inertia of a given way of life in certain sections of society that has adapted to and ensconced itself comfortably behind a given state policy of economic intervention. Such multiple sources of inertia and ‘perseverance of motion’ (cf. Newton’s first law of motion adduced in the preceding section) have to be contrasted with the oft-noted flexibility of markets which, under the guidance of the invisible hand of the income-earning motive, can (some would say: ruthlessly) compel changes in economic activity in short periods of time. Such market compulsion, as has been mentioned, is standardly criticized as causing social dislocation. (cf. section 9.8 above). Bureaucratic complacency and the leaden inertia with which state bureaucracy, in its viscous creep and impenetrable lianas of red tape, can and do weigh upon the dynamic interplay of civil society. These features speak to that side of human existing that tends to hang on to old ways simply because they are well-known, familiar and therefore present no challenges.
9.10State intervention as a visible helping hand for the invisible hand – An asserted unconditional right to be cared for – Caring-for that “leaps in” vs. caring-for that “leaps ahead” (Heidegger)
A third possible variant for state intervention in the economy is situated ‘midway’ between the state intervention already adumbrated and unfettered market interplay. It consists in providing assistance in the transitions enforced, sometimes suddenly and drastically, by the markets mediating the economy’s movement. Such economic policy could be called a visible helping hand for the invisible hand. Since the markets change unpredictably through the groundless interplay of sociating interchanges and sometimes with surprising rapidity, in some cases state economic intervention could be justified on a temporary, transitional basis to ease the pain of social adjustment whilst at the same time encouraging economic change rather than merely reinforcing ‘second-nature’ resistance to it. Such a transitionary visible hand is a political force to overcome social inertia and works in alignment with, rather than against, the direction in which the workings of the market economy are pushing at a given time. The dynamism of capitalist economies is then not simply negated, but conceded, and the social dislocation of people having to change their livelihoods is ameliorated. The sociating medium of political power thus seeks an alignment with economic life that is mediated by reified value and driven by self-interests partly in mutual co-operation and partly in competition with each other. A vision of the social good has to be cast that is compatible with the sometimes unpleasant rigours of capitalist market dynamism. Social inertia and movement in the customary movements of social life themselves have to be mediated with each other by a state policy of social transition.
The classic example of the visible hand of state intervention in the economy as a transitional corrective for the workings of the capitalist economy is that protective trade barriers are set up to give an infant domestic industry time to adapt to the rigours of competitive conditions on the world market. Another policy option is to pay subsidies to the domestic industry for a transitional period. Such economic policies are of course well-known, but the question here is how their deeper “speculative” (Hegel), socio-ontological meaning can be brought to light. The character of state economic intervention as transitional indicates a mediation between two extremes. On the one hand, there is the liberal conception of social living that is based on a conception of individual freedom of interplay and its associated economic self-reliance. The individual members of society have the freedom to find a niche in the capitalist markets and earn a living and are, at the same time, also responsible for looking after themselves and their own life-worlds. This is the much touted freedom of private property wedded with self-reliance. Such an individual strives for economic gain within the forms of freedom enabled by private property, i.e. more deeply by reified value as sociating medium, and may either prosper or fail. The world opens in this socio-ontological casting of individual freedom as a gathering of opportunities for gain through social interplay (cf. Chapter 6.8). The state has only the role of guaranteeing and preserving the proper, just forms of (especially contractual) social intercourse and interplay through law. The ‘downside’ to this liberal conception of social life is that the dynamic and ever-changing workings of the capitalist economy itself themselves produce ‘failures’, i.e. those who do not manage to gain a viable foothold in the economy.
This leads, on the other hand, to an opposed conception of social life according to which the individual member of society has a more or less unconditional right to be cared for by society as a whole insofar as the disruptions in social life brought about by the dynamics of capitalist market interplay also inevitably generate those who cannot earn a living. Self-reliance and independence are thus substituted by unconditional conceptions of social security and social solidarity as a counterweight and correction to the “indifference” of reified social relations (cf. section 9.1 above). The transitionary conception of state economic intervention as a helping visible hand to smooth out the dislocations of social life caused by the continually shifting sands of capitalist economic metabolism mediates between the liberal and solidaric conceptions of social life and is their Aufhebung or sublation.
The socio-ontological condition of possibility of a free individual at all is the sociation via the medium of reified value which appears on the surface as the market-mediated sociation of owners of private property (including labour power free to be hired out by labourers who enjoy the liberty of their own person). There is a social individual only where there is also a private sphere, i.e. a sphere of life into which the individual can withdraw and to which the rest of society and especially the state is deprived access. Such an ‘access-depriving’, private individual whose private sphere is protected from interference is only possible because the pecuniarily reified social interchanges of markets provide a form of sociation apart from regulating social life through explicit exercise of social power in the guises of political struggle and deliberation, positive state legislation, enforced religious-ethical prescription, etc. etc. Sociation is performed primarily through reciprocating, estimating interplay free individuals governing their own life-movements rather than through submission of free, individual self-movement to a superior authority and power. Sociation through the medium of reified value goeshand in hand with the abstract rights of personhood which guarantee the individual’s freedom to be indifferent to others’ individual ‘truths’ (Chapter 10.6) on how one ‘should’ live, whilst at the same time making it more difficult for the individual to become its self, lacking as it does the orientation provided by traditionally prescribed ethical usages when shaping its own individual existence.
In the context of an individualized society, which is enabled in the first place the sociating medium of reified value, the opposite conception of social solidarity arises as a palliative for the essential indifference, isolation, competition and ups and downs of fortune in market-mediated competitive life. Not only the risks of fluid, social interplay in a reified medium are to be shared through social insurance schemes, but the cold anonymity and isolation of reified social interaction are to be ameliorated by a social disposition akin to, and historically derived from Christian ἀγάπη (brotherly love and charity). To be an individual self shaping one’s own life-world in the midst of an uncaring society is regarded as a fate too harsh, and even ‘inhumane’, so that solace and shelter are yearned for and sought illusorily in a notion of social care and solidarity that is to become institutionalized in the state’s bureaucracy, especially in its social-work apparatuses to care for the weak.
Accordingly, a genuine conception of the good of living well is said only to be realized when the individual member of society has a claim to be supported if it loses its footing in the money-mediated competition, which mostly means that it becomes unemployed. The state is then called on to ‘leap in’ to help those individuals who have fallen by the wayside in the economic competition. The individual is said to have a rightful, just claim to being cared for temporarily by society, regardless of its ability (δύναμις) to earn its own livelihood. One speaks of social security as a safety net for those who have fallen through the web of market-mediated interchanges in the effort to earn a living. A society of individuals striving to get by without the safety net of social security is said to be a society set up as a ruthless Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest and therefore unworthy of basic human dignity. As has been shown in Chapter 6.4, however, to provide a social safety net for those temporarily unable to help themselves need not stand in contradiction to individual freedom; the social safety net becomes problematic when it becomes a permanent way of life for welfare-benefit recipients. Furthermore, the polemicism of a so-called ‘ruthless Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest’ calumniates freedom overlooks the dilemma of the inherent tension between individual freedom and subjugation to social power, i.e. being cared for by society — today: a social welfare state — is itself a social power play to which the state’s welfare clients must submit (cf. Chapter 10.1 and 10.2). Once more as a reminder: preceding chapters have shown through a socio-ontology of freedom that it resides first of all in individual powers and abilities as origins of self-determined movement in shaping one’s own life and thus casting one’s self. Such individual powers and abilities are energized, i.e. put to work, in mutually estimating power interplay with others through which the individual gains his or her own self-esteem.
There is a further, related dilemma hiding in the conception of an individual being unconditionally cared for by society because the creation of social wealth (a universal aim) is only spurred on by the incentive of individual striving for gain (a particular aim), which in turn depends upon the self-reliance of individuals exercising their powers who will to shape their own lives in a social sphere of privacy that is protected against outside interference. Even if employment is regarded as being beholden to an irksome relations of dependency, these relations i) are at least based on mutually estimating interchange, ii) are not absolutely without alternative among the possibilities opened by market interchanges, iii) are themselves malleable through (collective) power plays, and iv) enable through monetary reward the free shaping of a private life-world. If the spur to earn a living through exercising one’s own abilities is blunted, self-reliance recedes and the individual becomes dependent on being looked after and thus dominated by another power, which in itself attacks self-esteem, i.e. the estimation of one’ own powers and abilities. The individual’s existence is then no longer accepted as its very own, free existence which it itself has to lead and shape together with those dear to it, but rather, the individual passes on responsibility for its self to another, in this case, the state in its function of providing social security. Social security support as an existence without care (se-cura) is an enticing but dangerous, potentially ruinous situation for human being since human freedom is only grasped in its possibility through individuals accepting the challenge of casting their own, individual shared life-worlds. Social security as transitional assistance to help an individual again find its feet arises from the insight that an individual’s self-reliance should not be undermined or even extinguished by receiving social welfare benefits but, on the contrary, it should only be helped to get back on its own self-reliant feet by finding a niche in which to earn its own livelihood.
Such a conception of social security as transitional, temporary assistance can be taken back to two different basic positive existential possibilities of caring for others (Fürsorge) which, according to Heidegger in Being and Time, stake out the extremes of the spectrum of caring for others.
Die Fürsorge hat hinsichtlich ihrer positiven Modi zwei extreme Möglichkeiten. Sie kann dem Anderen die ‘Sorge’ gleichsam abnehmen und im Besorgen sich an seine Stelle setzen, für ihn einspringen. Diese Fürsorge übernimmt das, was zu besorgen ist, für den Anderen. Dieser wird dabei aus seiner Stelle geworfen, er tritt zurück, um nachträglich das Besorgte als fertig Verfügbares zu übernehmen, bzw. sich ganz davon zu entlasten. In solcher Fürsorge kann der Andere zum Abhängigen und Beherrschten werden... Ihr gegenüber besteht die Möglichkeit einer Fürsorge, die für den Anderen nicht so sehr einspringt, als daß sie ihm in seinem existenziellen Seinkönnen vorausspringt, nicht um ihm die ‘Sorge’ abzunehmen, sondern erst eigentlich als solche zurückzugeben. Diese Fürsorge [...] verhilft dem Anderen dazu, in seiner Sorge sich durchsichtig und für sie frei zu werden.
Martin Heidegger
Sein und Zeit 1927/1984 § 26 S. 122
Caring-for has two extreme possibilities with regard to its positive modes. It can, so to speak, lighten the other of his ‘cares’ and put itself in the other’s position in taking care of things, leap in for the other. This caring-for takes over what is to be taken care of for the other. The other is thrown out of his position; he steps back in order to subsequently take over what has been taken care of as something completed and available, or to completely disburden himself from what has to be taken care of. In such caring-for, the other can become dependent and dominated... Opposed to this, there is the possibility of a caring-for that does not so much leap in for the other, but rather leaps ahead of him in his existential ability-to-be, not to lighten him of his ‘cares’ but to properly give them back to him for the first time. This caring-for [...] helps the other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it.
This is said in Being and Time with regard to the fundamental existential possibilities of human being (Dasein) in its relations with other human beings (Mitdasein). Care is the ontological structure of human being as it exists in the world of everyday life, taking care of its affairs. This caring involves both taking care of things and caring for others, both dimensions being conceived in the broadest possible sense as encompassing also the negative, privative and deficient modes of caring for one’s own existence in sharing a world with others. For instance, caring-for is “at first and for the most part” in daily life in the mode of indifference to the other, i.e. of not caring less about the other. Note that caring-for that leaps ahead gives back to the individual its own care for its self and thus its freedom. Our purpose here, however, is not existential analysis of human being, but existential-ontological investigation of social being on the level of society and state in a Western modern society based on a capitalist economy. In such a society one is faced with the dilemma that the dynamics of the capitalist economy itself generates through its uncertainty failures. For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that these failures are the unemployed who, for whatever reason, cannot find gainful employment in the economy.
As members of social welfare society (which is first and foremost a way of conceiving sociated existence as such-and-such, i.e. an hermeneutic ‘mind-set’, and not a real, ‘thingly’ set-up of state apparatuses actually doling out benefits), the unemployed not only have the aim of earning a living but also even an ostensible guaranteed right to have enough to live on, i.e. a so-called ‘livingwage’. The conception of well-being in such a society includes that not only a part of society should win in the competitive struggle for income, but that some acceptable standard of material well-being of the entire population must be a component part of ‘living well’ for society as a whole. Such an all-encompassing, all-inclusive conception of social well-being is the basis in understanding for the social security benefits provided by the welfare state. Here we are considering only unemployment benefits for those potential members of the workforce who are out of work. These unemployment benefits are a way of caring-for the other which the welfare state takes upon itself through a redistribution of created wealth. This caring-for can be either a caring-for that leaps in for the other or a caring-for that leaps ahead of the other. On this distinction hangs the circumstance whether the one helped is made dependent and is dominated and thus becomes unfree, or whether the social welfare recipients are helped to become free for their own individual existence in taking care of it on their own responsibility through the exertion of their own powers.
9.11The paternalistic ‘all-caring’ state – Taxation and its tendentially asphyxiating hold on civil society
Caring about and caring for one’s own, self-cast existence, as we have already considered earlier, does not mean that the individual human being is cast as a selfish egoist. Caring about (Sorge) one’s own existence means caring about one’s own life-world both in taking care of (Besorgen) things and in caring for (Fürsorge) those with whom one lives.176 Moreover, caring about one’s own existence necessarily requires intermeshing with others on mutually agreeable terms, whether it be for economic benefit or estimating interchange in some other sense. The underlying understanding of human being is that each individual human being as a freely deciding point of origin governing its own self-movement is free in taking care of and shaping its own existence within its given possibilities, and that, by giving up this care and responsibility to another, whether it be another human being or a state institution, the individual thereby becomes unfree, dependent and dominated, perhaps only to some degree and gradually, in a scarcely noticeable encroachment on the individual’s self-standing and hence self-esteem. Being-cared-for, especially when it becomes (regarded as) a human right, as in modern welfare states, is a way in which individuals will their own unfreedom and domination by the state, their own subjection to the state, which thereby becomes a paternalistic state that ‘knows better’. Such a putataive human right is bereft of anchoring in sociating existence.
To the extent that a social welfare recipient becomes unfree and dependent, the welfare state that administrates this dependence becomes more powerful. Even and especially those citizens who are not welfare benefit recipients become dependent on and dominated by the welfare state through their expectations of being secured. The institutions of the welfare state themselves, as apparatuses ostensibly for the good of the whole of society, become consolidated and entrenched in their existence with their own inertia and momentum, and they achieve this by being underpinned by a ‘socially minded’ way of pre-ontological thinking. Their social welfare clients serve as their raison d’être, and they unfold their power over the lives of these clients, who lose not only their independence but even the desire to be independent and self-reliant. Instead a symbiosis is nurtured and unfolds between social welfare institution and client in which, on the one side, the client learns to manoeuvre within its dependent power relationship and to gain from it and, on the other side, the welfare state apparatuses consolidate their ‘indispensability’. The welfare client by no means gives up his or her striving for gain, the appetite to get more thus rendering even life within the social welfare apparatuses a derivative kind of gainful game.
In the course of time, the social welfare state thus has the tendency to perpetuate its own existence and to thoroughly undermine and destroy the self-reliance and independence of sections of the population. This is the look assumed by the existential of caring-for that leaps in, now transposed to the context of the modern social welfare state. The welfare-benefit recipient (and, through its expectations and orientation in thinking, also the population at large) loses its independence, its stand within itself, and its self-standing, or lack thereof, is mirrored not only in its self-image, i.e. its ἰδέα of itself, but also in its social interchanges with others, all of which are kinds of estimation. The social welfare state, in unfolding its power over its clientele, undermines the self-esteem of those whose welfare it ‘manages’. It provides social security and renders the individual social welfare recipient se-cura, ‘without care’. But since human being itself — as the free origin of its own life-movements — is structured ontologically as caring for one’s self in the 3D-time-clearing for as long as it is exposed to it, to be disburdened of one’s cares, especially the care of having to earn a livelihood, by another agent is to be robbed of one’s own existence and standing in it. The social welfare state that guarantees social security as a citizen’s ‘right’ is therefore rightly called a paternalistic or a ‘nanny’ state that regulates and interferes with its citizens’ lives in reducing them to the status of dependent children, and that without the citizens even noticing their loss of independence. On the contrary, the citizens clamour to be cared for even better and better as an unconditional right.
This state paternalism is reflected in the conception of law itself. The very conceptions of Sozialpolitik (social policy) and Sozialgesetz (social welfare law) are products of 19th century German legal positivism, that is antithetical to a conception of inviolable individual liberty and self-reliance (Selbstverantwortung):
Für eine individualistische Rechtsordnung ist das öffentliche Recht, ist der Staat nur der schmale schützende Rahmen, der sich um das Privatrecht und das Privateigentum dreht, für eine soziale Rechtsordnung ist umgekehrt das Privatrecht nur ein vorläufig ausgesparter und sich immer verkleinernder Spielraum für die Privatinitiative innerhalb des all umfassenden öffentlichen Rechts.177
For an individualistic legal order, public law, the state is only the small protective framework that revolves around private law and private property. Conversely, for a social legal order, private law is only a provisionally spared and continually diminishing room for play for private initiative within an all-comprehensive public law.
By contrast, state unemployment benefits to the unemployed conceived as strictly transitional assistance toward finding one’s foothold again in the economic interplay can be booked under the heading of a caring-for that leaps ahead and gives back to the individual its responsibility in caring for its own existence and leading its own life. The transitional, temporary nature of this assistance must be apparent in clearing the way for the unemployed individual to see for itself a viable way of getting back on its own feet, especially by developing its own potentials, also for the benefit of the greater society. The unemployed individual must be motivated to re-establish its independence, to bolster its self-standing and thus self-esteem, and not develop the comfortable expectation of being cared for by the welfare state. This way of understanding its world makes the individual defensive of its welfare-state-derived benefits, and the moves of other, independent players in the economic competition seem all the more threatening, so that it calls for even more protection (say, against ‘foreigners’) from its all-protecting state whose subject it is.
When society is conceived first and foremost as a whole that must provide securely for its members, including all the social welfare benefits that are regarded as making up a socially acceptable way of secure living such as (social) housing, health care and old-age pensions, economic activity to earn of living in market rivalry is regarded as some kind of necessary ‘asocial’ evil to acquire the means for financing ‘genuinely social’ living away from the workplace. The expectation of being cared for by the welfare state becomes an anchor-point of orientation for living, a purported ‘achievement of social progress’, thus affirming a dependency on the social welfare state, which, in turn, not only assumes a paternalistic stance toward its clients, but also has to finance its tasks of providing social welfare through taxation (including social security contributions of all kinds). The more that is expected from the state, the more it becomes a matter of course that the state has the ‘right’ to tax and otherwise siphon off and hijack more and more wealth from civil society for the sake of financing its welfare and other activities for the ‘universal good’, otherwise known today as so-called social solidarity.
The gainful outcomes of competitive economic interplay are thus subject to greater or lesser revision by how the state intervenes in the economic game through imposing taxation policy (above all in the name of social, ‘redistributive’ justice; cf. Chapter 6.5). Paying one’s taxes becomes a social duty for the sake of contributing to universal social welfare. With the growth of dependency on social welfare benefits of all kinds, and under the constant pressure of all wanting to have more, the greater the burden of taxation and the intricacy of taxation legislation and regulation, along with the inevitably ever-increasing incursions into the private sphere, become. The tendency of the state to augment its power, that goes hand in hand with the tendency of society’s members to increase their dependency and demands upon the welfare state, assumes the particular form of a tendency of the state tightening its stranglehold on the economic interplay of civil society through the tax burden and the intricacy of a taxation system designed to catch every possible tax dollar.
Every dollar earned in economic activity is subjected to state inspection and control, because the state has a ‘taxation stake’ in each and every dollar earned, and so has to constantly increase its surveillance of economic activity to prevent personal income from ‘disappearing’ tax-free. Every new technological possibility of financial surveillance of its citizens inevitably, sooner or latter, becomes a means of state control over civil society formulated in positive law. The tendency of political power toward totalitarianism (that must be countered by counter-powers — hence the liberal conception of a ‘division of powers’ and democratic scrutiny of all taxation; cf. Chapter 12) assumes under the particular constellation of sociation mediated by reified value in the interplay of private property owners, the form of an evermore asphyxiating stranglehold of taxation legislation, regulation and bureaucracy that successively hollows out the private property rights of citizens, thus undermining their individual freedom and their ability to care for themselves through their own efforts. It turns out that what is my property is, strictly speaking, not my own, but the state’s. In its thirst for taxes and social security levies, under the impetus of the populace’s unquenchable thirst to have ever more, the modern welfare state bloats into a kind of Frankenstein that demands its ever greater taxation tribute. The state itself thus becomes a kind of player in the gainful game, enjoying an unfair monopoly advantage of being able to legislate its interventions in civil society, purportedly justified by its role as agent for the social good. With its voracious appetite for taxation revenues, the state is perhaps the most avaricious player. The populace at large, in turn, acquiesces so long its expectations of being cared for are more or less fulfilled. Otherwise, a so-called crisis of the welfare state develops.
The diametrically opposite understanding of state welfare benefits is that they are not justified, because the individual must remain unconditionally responsible for itself, no matter what its social predicament is. Any state welfare is then regarded as unjustified and as undermining the individual’s self-reliance in fending for itself within the context of its own life-world, which includes its family and other loved and close ones. The individual is conceived as unconditionally responsible for its own success or failure, thus overlooking that the individual itself is socio-ontologically itself an historical form of sociation. Situated between these opposed ways of understanding state welfare benefits there is a whole range of possible amalgams with the mean being that the state must only assist in emergency situations and on a temporary, transitional basis, and that, for the sake of its own freedom, the individual must remain responsible for regaining its own independent stand in social life, which is also of benefit to the larger society, which profits from individuals exerting their own powers.
Insofar as the visible helping hand of state assistance is conceived as a temporary corrective to the workings of the invisible hand through the markets, an understanding of caring-for that leaps ahead has the upper hand, giving back to those individuals suffering distress their independence (Ger.: Selbständigkeit = lit. self-standingness). Such a pre-ontological conception corresponds knowingly or unknowingly to the deeper-lying socio-ontological conception of freedom. Caring-for that leaps ahead can consist of training, retraining and reeducating the social welfare client, thus developing his or her own potentials, with the aim of improving his or her prospects of finding an appropriate job in which his or her own abilities are estimated and valued (monetarily). Education is indeed the paradigm for such leaping-ahead because all learning is necessarily self-learning (and not ‘knowledge-transfer’ from one to another), an activation of one’s own powers. The teacher only has the role of arousing and encouraging and guiding the pupil’s or student’s self-learning in which they have to work through and appropriate what is to be learned for themselves by exerting themselves. A welfare state can assist its clients by retraining them in such a way that they are able to again find a niche in the interplay of capitalist economy. It may also prime a start in economic life by providing grants to start an enterprise or a career. Such a state policy can and must be complemented by state economic policy that aims to structurally shape and further the kinds of industry with which the nation’s economy will do well in the competitive economic power play both domestically and internationally. Such shaping does not have to amount to overbearing state intervention in the economy, but can be more a ‘helping hand’ that propels the economy in a propitious direction.
In contrast to state welfare, the estimating interplay on the markets, including especially the hire relationship for labour power are based on mutual gain. The contractual parties meet each other with their respective interests and negotiate some sort of contract acceptable to both. There is a mutually beneficial interchange. In the case of an employment contract, the inclusion of company welfare benefits for employees does not indicate a caring-for on the part of the employing company, but is rather a matter of negotiation in which the prospective employee is estimated and esteemed in relation to his or her potential contribution to the enterprise’s own striving for profit. Paradoxically, both sides are caring for themselves in caring for the other; the estimating power play is mutually beneficial.
When employees are laid off for economic reasons, this is done from a position of neutrality or indifference within the spectrum of caring-for on the understanding that an employment contract can only be maintained on the basis of mutual gain for both parties in the gainful game. The ethos of a capitalist market economy, its habitual mode of life and stance toward living, is that each economic player has the possibility, liberty and responsibility of looking after him- or herself, and insofar, the social relations of capitalism correspond to a deeper understanding of human being itself as individually mine, i.e. jemeinig, associated with a prevalent mode of caring-for that must be described as calculating indifference, i.e. as a deficient mode of caring-for but also, remarkably also as mutually estimating and beneficial. Within this basic indifference, interchanges of mutual benefit and usefulness nevertheless continually take place, and such reciprocal usefulness is not an injury to human dignity for they are also an interplay of genuine mutual estimation. Being useful to each other in the gainful game may be precisely the bond that holds social life together in a satisfying, peaceful way, despite the ongoing competitive struggles and the conflicts that arise. The movement of social life, because it is a movement of interplay, is maintained by the tension of contradictions, of conflicting opposites, of opposed but nevertheless co-operating powers.