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| Subject: | [socialcredit] Alan W. Dyer | | Date: | Sunday, July 1, 2007 11:22:40 (-0700) | | From: | MODERATOR <socredus @.....com>
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FAIR___USE___CLAIMED
Social Credit as Economic Modernism: Seven Theses
Alan W. Dyer*
a.dyer@neu.edu
http://www.economics.neu.edu/people/dyer/
* Associate Professor, Department of Economics,
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115.
USA
DRAFT, SEPTEMBER 2002. NOT TO BE QUOTED
WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR(S).
The views expressed in this paper are those of the
author(s), and do not necessarily represent the views
of BIEN or BIEN-Suisse.
Abstract
This paper makes a case for social credit on the
grounds of economic democracy, using ideas from
Thorstein Veblen, William James, and William Carlos
Williams. Social credit is defined as the belief that
the provisioning capabilities of a nation are a result
of collective effort and should be used in a democracy
as a fund from which each citizen receives an equal
share in the form of a basic income. The paper
discusses Veblen's analysis of the development of the
U.S. economy and how this creates a need for a social
credit policy. It then examines psychological and
aesthetic impediments to its adoption through the
works of James and Williams. Recommendations are
offered for overcoming these obstacles.
1. Thesis one. Social credit, economic democracy and
the self
The aim of this paper is to make a case for social
credit on the grounds of economic democracy, using
ideas from Thorstein Veblen, William James, and
William Carlos Williams. I use a very simple notion
of social credit throughout the paper. Specifically,
social credit refers to the belief that the
provisioning capabilities of a country are a
collective phenomenon based on the accumulation of
generations of experience and accomplishment and
should be used in a democracy as a fund of credit from
which each citizen is guaranteed an equal share in the
form of a basic income.
While I begin with a consideration of the economic
landscape of social credit, I end up on psychological
and aesthetic territory that may seem far removed from
the political economy of the idea. But that is not the
case. The conceivable effects of social credit can be
used as a measure of the distance between corporate
capitalism and economic democracy. However, it is not
clear how this gap can be bridged, using democratic
means, since this would require many people valuing
social credit as an uncertain belief and an unrealized
experience. What is clear to me, however, is that this
uncertainty and unreality can be addressed by
exploring psychological and aesthetic aspects of
making the choice of social credit.
I do not consider questions of how such a system
should be designed nor engage in technical arguments
about the economic efficiencies of a social credit
scheme. Instead, I show how Veblen, James, and
Williams have influenced my thinking in two ways.
First, they have played a role in my understanding of
social credit as a way to advance the goal of economic
democracy at a time when even political forms of
democracy in the United States are under pressure from
powerful economic interests. Second, they have taught
me the importance of defining a concept of the self
that neither retreats into romantic nostalgia nor
capitulates to the modern assault on the self. In
other words, they have taught me the necessity of
clarifying the boundaries of the self in a corporate
sponsored "collectivist" world.
I show how social credit is relevant to what a number
of recent authors describe as a loss of faith in the
meaning of our economic efforts.1 Economics
contributes to this loss of meaning when it fails to
engage seriously with issues like the loss of a clear
distinction between luxury and necessity, the United
States' disproportionate per capita consumption of the
world's resources, and the near impossibility of
defining a life outside the precincts of the
corporation. If economists do not help us understand
better the dissonance between whom we say we are and
how we act, it contributes to the mystification of
what our actions mean. In order to correct these
shortcomings the focus of economics needs to be
shifted away from the further elaboration of
mathematical models of the economy and towards the
institutional examination of the corporation. Modern
economic relations, options, and actions must now be
understood in the language and rhythm of the
corporation, not through those of the market. The way
economists linger on the meaning of the market has
only stretched the meaning of phenomena like market,
choice, and price until they blur into mathematics. To
use Williams's language, modern economics fails to
make contact with the flesh and bones of the
corporation; it has lost touch with the modern
economy.
The idea of social credit is relevant to developing
what I call "economic modernism", therefore, because
it acknowledges several important facts of
contemporary society. First, the modern economy is
based on corporate and not market relations. Second,
the corporation is essentially a financial
organization that operates through an ingenious method
of manipulating public credit for private gain. Third,
society has lost its bearing, in part, due to the loss
of meaning associated with the ways in which effort
and reward are linked. Fourth, prolonged existence
under these conditions produces a crisis of faith
among people in their institutions and themselves.
2. Thesis two. Economic modernism
The single most influential person in my education as
an economist has been Thorstein Veblen. The reasons
for my attraction to him are, first, his critical
stance towards the neoclassical dominance of economic
thought, second, his belief that the corporation and
not the market is the institution of primary economic
importance in the modern era, and, third, his attempts
to replace the hedonist and associationalist
psychology introduced into economic analysis by the
marginalists with a pragmatist social psychology. In
turn, my own work explores the connections between
Veblen's analytical style and assumptions with wider
intellectual trends in the twentieth century.
To be honest, my work also shares Veblen's general
reluctance to draw concrete policy conclusions from
his analysis. This is why it seems a bit strange to be
talking to you about a subject that is extremely
policy oriented. My only explanation for my presence
here is that if there is any policy implication in a
Veblenian economics, it is a desire for democratic
economic institutions. It is this desire, I believe,
that motivates every explicit policy recommendation
Veblen makes, whether sublime or ridiculous, ranging
from his support of a General Strike in the United
States to his controversial suggestion that the
credit-based commercial control of industrial
investment be replaced with a soviet of technicians.
In the interest of keeping this paper a manageable
size I am leaving out some of the thinkers who have
influenced my attempts to revise the social psychology
that grounds my Veblenian approach to economics. These
thinkers include Norman O. Brown, Otto Rank, Ernest
Becker, Harold Rosenberg, Philip Rieff, and
Christopher Lasch. I am drawn to each of them because
of their interest in the question of whether or not
there can be a meaningful concept of the self in
modern social theory and, if there can, what exactly
we mean by the self. From Rosenberg's un-Marxian
proletariat to Rieff's therapeutic man and Lasch's
elite in revolt, each of these thinkers has searched
for a modern notion of the self as an integrated and
self-determining phenomenon (Rosenberg, 1983; Rieff,
1987; Lasch, 1996). Their efforts have helped me to
understand the difficulty of talking about a
self-determining subject in a world of ever-present
yet largely inaccessible technological know-how, large
scale corporate enterprise, and a culture in which the
balance between Yes's and No's (control and remission
mechanisms, as Philip Rieff calls them) no longer
seems to provide sure answers to what we want as
individuals and as a society.2
Veblen was one of the first economists to make a clear
distinction between the industrial and financial
aspects of the United State's economy (Veblen, 1942).
He wanted to distinguish clearly those provisioning
activities that contribute to the physical and
conceptual manipulation of nature from the elaborate
and, in his opinion, irrelevant pecuniary rituals we
undertake in order to permit these provisioning
activities to occur. In various writings he describes
the psychological differences between people engaged
primarily in industrial occupations and those engaged
primarily in pecuniary ones.
The fundamental psychological difference is that
industrial occupations instil an awareness of the
impersonal and interdependent nature of productive
activities. Pecuniary occupations, however, create
specialists of the "main chance" who seek better and
subtler ways of manipulating property claims in order
to enrich themselves (Veblen, 1964B, ch. IV; 1975, p.
270). Clearly, Veblen has simplified drastically the
social psychology of a modern commercial industrial
economy. But even if one thinks of these two
personality types as the end points of a continuum, he
or she can still find merit in the idea that there is
a schizophrenic quality to the economy. The financial
Jekyl is in control of the actions of the industrial
Hyde. At times, their lives coexist in peace. At
others, as we are learning once again in the United
States, the response of the financial side to economic
exigencies ends up sabotaging life on the industrial
side. Veblen's point is that the economy has become
too complicated and too much of a collective
enterprise to allow this sort of commercial
buccaneering to continue to disrupt the industrial
provisioning processes of society.
Veblen saw clearly that the evolution of these games
of pecuniary one-up-manship required a larger role in
the economy for the credit system.3 The increasingly
sophisticated use of credit was instrumental, he
argued, to the growing dominance of the corporate form
of business enterprise and shifted control of the
economy, in his words, from the Captains of Industry
to the Captains of Finance (Veblen, 1964A, ch. XII).
He was under no illusion that new institutions, like
the Federal Reserve in his day and later, the
Securities and Exchange Commission, could contain for
long the financial psychoses that inevitably break out
in a commercial economy (ibid., pp. 369-71; Veblen,
1975, pp. 164-74 and ch. VII). It is not long, Veblen
asserts, before novel and ingenious methods of
"getting something for nothing" are devised. Needless
to say, he would have been quite sceptical that the
recently legislated public regulation of the
accounting industry in the United States will provide
a lasting pecuniary therapeutics.
Veblen's criticism of the pecuniary control of
industry is clear and unwavering. His alternative to
this way of organizing our provisioning activities,
however, is vague and tentative (Veblen, 1964B, pp.
156-7 and 179-83). He sounds, at times, like a
sixteenth century Anabaptist, calling for an end to
pecuniary credit claims, or a twentieth century
Sorelian, supporting the idea of a General Strike. And
his one sustained argument for an alternative to
finance capitalism -- the creation of a soviet of
technicians whose responsibility it would be to
determine the most efficient way of producing the
things society wants -- today sounds more than a
little naive.
The one claim that safely can be made is that Veblen
was not an advocate of social credit. Still, the
spirit of his criticism is very much in the spirit of
social credit. Behind the greed and masochism of
pecuniary rituals, Veblen is bothered by the fact that
modern credit institutions are designed to limit
access to society's "usufruct" of technical know-how
to profit-making enterprises (Veblen, 1942A). By
implication he favoured a new form of distributing the
productive potential of this social inheritance
(Veblen, 1964A. p. 413). Yet, at this point Veblen
falls silent.
I have always wondered about Veblen's silence once he
reaches the point in his analysis where the next
logical question is, "What's to be done?" After years
of stewing over my frustration with him I quite
independently learned about the social credit
movement. My understanding of the history of this
movement matured with the help of Walter van Trier's,
Every One a King (van Trier, 1995). When I came to
wonder if social credit could serve as the logical
policy conclusion that Veblen fails to draw, however,
William James pulled me in a different direction.
Namely, my goal cannot be to find the missing piece
that "completes" the logic of Veblen's analysis.
Instead, James helped me to see that if I accept
Veblen's diagnosis of the modern corporate economy and
feel an attraction to the spirit behind social credit,
I need to examine what makes social credit a "genuine
option" for someone? How does a person whose life has
been shaped by the experience of living in the
schizophrenic economic world described by Veblen come
to entertain social credit as a meaningful
alternative?
3. Thesis Three. Pragmatism and the problem of the
self
So far I imagine this paper sounds typically academic
by raising an esoteric question like, "How would a
Pragmatist like William James make the case for social
credit?" By the end of the paper I hope to have
convinced you otherwise, showing that a Pragmatist
case for social credit has very practical things to
say about the psychological aspects of the political
economy of social credit. As a start, let me discuss
William James's place in my arguments.
Let me start with a riddle: What creature legally,
politically, and economically constitutes an
independent and self-acting bundle of rights and
responsibilities yet, according to the best minds and
research of its species, is largely defined by
impersonal and largely uncontrollable forces of
history, genetics, social class, and language? Answer:
the human being.
The problem, as Harold Rosenberg argues in The Act and
the Actor, is that "the act" is the 20th (now 21st?)
century's "outstanding riddle (Rosenberg, 1983, p.
6)." He means that developments in philosophy,
biology, psychology, and political economy have
undermined our sense of action as the result of
self-determining actors. Applying Rosenberg's
diagnosis to the problem of social credit means
acknowledging that while it promises a more democratic
way of distributing access to the material grounds for
self-exploration, the absence of a clear notion of a
self-determining actor raises serious psychological
questions about its contemporary relevance.
Another way of making this point is to say that the
act has become problematic because modern culture no
longer grounds the self in the actions of, take your
choice, a Christian sinner, a capitalist climber, or a
class hero. For a being with the singular distinction
of being conscious of its own death this is a serious
psychological malady. It means that this culture no
longer provides, in Rieff's words, those instruments
that make us "capable . . . of controlling the
infinite variety of panic and emptiness to which [we]
are disposed. It is to control their disease as
individuals that men have always acted culturally, in
good faith (Rieff, 1987, p. 3)."
4. Thesis Four. James on truth, belief and action
Hopefully, you better understand now why I am more
interested in the question of how someone would come
to believe in the desirable effects of social credit
rather than in refining the theoretical details of its
form. Obviously, no one can know beforehand if these
effects will come to pass. Therefore, though theory is
important in imagining the effects of social credit,
we must not confuse the certainty of theorizing with
the uncertainty of acting on our beliefs in order to
create a reality. Consequently, an important part in
making the case for social credit is addressing why
anyone should have faith in the idea of social credit.
I suspect that you are intrigued with my interest in
the question of faith. Perhaps a quote from James
will help to explain why I feel it is important to
consider the role of faith. The quote is a concise
summary of his view on the relation between faith,
action, and fact. Making the case that social theory
must acknowledge that each member of society performs
his or her duty in the faith that others will do the
same, James concludes:
"There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at
all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.
And where faith in a fact can help create the fact,
that would be an insane logic which should say that
faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the
'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking
being can fall." (James, 2000C, p. 214).
James has studied the relation between faith and
religion in a variety of works. But he uses faith
here to refer to a motivation that leads us to act
when neither impulse, compulsion, nor reason will do
the job. You may disagree with him that there are
instances when action is not due either to impulse,
compulsion, or reason. But James responds with the
observation that each of us can recall examples from
our own lives in which a "fact" we desire comes about
only if we first have faith in our desire and the
actions necessary in order to realize it. "Faith"
means the capacity to "stay the course" of action
designed to realize an aim for which we have no prior
assurances.
From a pragmatic perspective it is impossible to
compile enough arguments and evidence to prove a
priori that the idea of social credit is true. As
James argued, this is because truth is neither an
object nor a static quality of objects. It is,
instead, a quality of a "moment of experience through
which we are led to other moments to which it is
worthwhile to be led." (James, 2000B, p. 90) Thus,
truth is a process that leads us to more and wider
experiences that continue to respond to our cares and
concerns. It is neither the universal and absolute
quality of an object nor an agreement between an
object and our thoughts about it. In this sense the
"truth" of social credit can only mean a process
through which it becomes clear over time that by
acting on the idea of social credit its conceivable
effects either do or do not ensue. Truth, for a
pragmatist, is always a work-in-progress. Thus, a
pragmatic case for social credit will focus less on
the "truth" of it and more on the conditions necessary
for people to take it seriously, which means much more
than that they find it reasonable. It is only when
enough people accept social credit as a serious option
for organizing economic life that we begin to discover
the truth of it.
In one of his more famous essays, "The Will to
Believe," James wondered what makes a hypothesis a
serious concern for someone. He calls this kind of
hypothesis a "genuine option" and says that for an
option to be genuine it must have three
characteristics: it must be live, forced and
momentous. (James, 2000C, p. 199) James means that
only those hypotheses are genuine for which we cannot
find an alternative to either accepting or rejecting
the hypothesis, the results are unique, irreversible,
and hold a significant stake for us, and we are
willing to act upon it.
We need to dip a little deeper, at this point, into
James's notions of truth and belief. It is one of
those quirks of intellectual history that William
James's ideas about truth and belief should be so
appropriate to a discussion of social credit. The
quirkiness arises from what is called his credit
theory of truth. (Livingston, 1994, pp. 199-200)
James explicitly says, in his essay "Pragmatism's
Conception of Truth,"
"Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit
system. Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as
nothing challenges them, just as bank notes pass so
long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to
direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without
which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial
system with no cash-basis whatever." (James, 2000B,
p. 91)
"Closely related to truth are our beliefs, which...at
any time are so much experience funded...so far as
reality means experiencable reality, both it and the
truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process
of mutation..." (ibid., p. 107)
James's says that the beliefs we are willing to act
upon are based upon unfinished truths that develop
only as our action progresses. He was aware that this
position would be criticized as implying, "believe
what you will, so long as nothing or no one forces you
to change your mind you can make your own truth." As
he argued on many occasions, such a criticism misses
the subtlety Pragmatists are trying to catch in the
relation between belief, action, and fact. He says:
"In the realm of truth-processes facts come
independently and determine our beliefs provisionally.
But these beliefs make us act, and as fast as they do
so, they bring into sight or into existence new facts,
which re-determine the beliefs accordingly. So the
whole coil and ball of truth, as it rolls up, is the
product of a double influence. Truths emerge from
facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add
to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth
(the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The
'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They
simply are." (James, 2000B, p. 99).
Let me bring the discussion back to social credit.
Surely the "fact" of credit may go through such a
process of mutation. Why should our beliefs about
credit be limited to those based on commercial
"truths?" What would happen if we broaden the range of
possible "facts" through which the truth of credit
develops, for instance, that the ultimate "cash-basis"
of credit is society's collective technological
know-how? Couldn't this fact move us further in the
direction of the "truth" that a democratic society
distributes this credit equally?
Despite the hope contained in questions like these, my
earlier discussion of the self and the act should
temper our enthusiasm. Namely, if people act on the
basis of truths "in progress," then part of what moves
them must be faith in their beliefs, which are made up
of these evolving truths.4 Yet, if the modern self is
ungrounded, as Rieff and others argue, isn't it
unrealistic to hope that people will treat the
hypothesis of social credit as living, i.e., be
willing to act on it?
These kinds of questions interested William Carlos
Williams. I turn to him now in order to illustrate how
one can make a Pragmatic case for social credit.
Poetry is Williams's vehicle for making social credit
a "genuine option" for people living at the start of
post-industrial America. In his effort to present an
alternative form of credit that would release greater
experimentation in economic lifestyles, Williams
realized that one of the challenges he faced was
whether or not the reader was willing to join him in
his creative labour. He realized that he needed a
form, as well as diction, that would make contact with
his readers and encourage them to sort out the
political, economic, and social mess symbolized by
Paterson, New Jersey.
5. Thesis Five. Williams and the problem of measure
Before getting into the purely intellectual aspects of
Williams's modernist case for social credit, it is
useful to point out that he was an active supporter of
the social credit movement in the United States. And
though he and Ezra Pound exchanged ideas about social
credit, Williams apparently first learned about the
movement from Gorham Munson, editor of the social
credit journal New Democracy (Mariani, 1990, ch. 8;
Weaver, 1971, ch. 6). Williams was more than an
"armchair" supporter of social credit, joining the
American Social Credit Movement and giving public
lectures on the subject.
According to Kenneth Burke, an influential literary
critic and friend of Williams, "each great poetic
form...[has] its own peculiar way of building the
mental equipment (meanings, attitudes, character) by
which one handles the significant factors of his
time." (Burke, 1984, p. 34) Alec Marsh's recent study
of the connections between Williams's experiment with
poetic form and his various political commitments
details the "significant factors" he felt the need to
"handle" by changing the measure of his poetry (Marsh,
1998, chs. 5 and 6). Specifically, Williams is
suspicious of the effects that the increasing
dominance of the corporation has in shaping people's
imaginative possibilities. In turn, he is convinced
that through the commercial allocation of credit
corporations are able to widen their scale of
operations and, therefore, their dominance of American
life.
Williams, according to Marsh and others, sought a
measure for his poetry that was appropriate for people
who live and work in a corporate society (ibid.;
Weaver, 1971, chs. 5 and 7). His search for this form
eventually paid off in Paterson, his epic poem about
the local history of the post-industrial city of
Paterson, New Jersey, and a fictitious citizen of that
city, Dr. Paterson (likely a symbol of his life as a
physician in nearby Rutherford, New Jersey). In
addition to its content, Williams believed that the
form of Paterson must speak to his listeners.
Who were these listeners? Perhaps Williams's friend
Kenneth Burke has captured best the character of this
audience:
"If food, comfort, and pleasant intercourse are
desirable, and if money procures them, and if some
dismal, unmuscular, unimaginative, and unbalanced kind
of drudgery will procure money, one may actually see a
person' eyes light up with hope when told that
drudgery is to be permitted him. He 'got the job.'
Eventually, he rounds out his values in keeping with
such contingencies: He develops the emphases,
standards, desires, and kinds of observation,
expression, and repression that will equip him for his
task. This is his occupation psychosis, a moral
network, complex beyond all possibilities of
charting." (Burke, 1954, p. 238)
This "drudgery" today consists of the filing and
recording done in the cubicles of a typical
corporation. The qualities of this "work," to both
Williams and Burke, do not demand adventure, risk, or
initiative. They represent instead a loss of contact
with the work performed and the wider world in which
the worker functions. Williams's similarly
discouraging image of these citizens of the
corporation sounds like this:
"At the
sanitary lunch hour packed woman to
woman (or man to woman what's the difference?)
the flesh of their faces gone
to fat or gristle, without recognizable
outline, fixed in rigors, adipose or sclerosis
expressionless, facing one another, a mould
for all faces (canned fish) this.
Move toward the back, please, and face the door!
is how the money's made,
money's made
pressed together
talking excitedly . of the next sandwich."
(Williams, 1995, p. 164)
Williams uses several devices, according to Marsh, in
order to make Paterson appropriate to a corporate age.
These include packaging his truths in discrete chunks
of experience chipped from the local landscape, giving
sound to the many strange and often conflicting voices
he hears around him, and refusing to end up at any
absolute and universal truths about society. He
intersperses prose with poetry, newspaper facts with
psychotic fictions, and makes line breaks that are
exhausting to follow. Williams works out of the
conviction that a good measure creates sharp new
boundaries that assist the self in differentiating its
cares and concerns from foreign or imposed beliefs. In
Paterson this meant serving up a wealth of local
detail in a form that spoke to the citizens of a
corporate society.
Generalizing, what does it mean to design a form that
improves the comprehension of what we are trying to
communicate? On one level, anyone who has tried to
teach a group of moderately bright economics
undergraduates the meaning of opportunity cost knows
that giving them an abstract (i.e., inhuman) "measure"
of the concept often produces little meaning. Tell
them, "If you give up two widgets in order to get one
more phalange, the opportunity cost of the phalange is
the widgets you give up," and most of their eye's
glaze over. However, change the "proximity" of the
"units" in the example to something more local to the
student's experiences, like turning widgets into "ten
exam points" and phalanges into "all night beer
parties," and the difference in comprehension is
remarkable.
On another level, one may show the importance of
measure through historical example, as Williams does
in his idiosyncratic American history book, In the
American Grain (Williams, 1956). Many of the
characters in this book illustrate the conflict
between those who saw the new American landscape as
grist for commerce on a massive scale and those who
saw it as an opportunity to experiment with more
democratic forms of contact with themselves, others,
and nature. The clearest example of this conflict
between different "measures" of economic life in
America, according to Williams, is the contrast
between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
The differences between them go beyond their
conflicting views of the role of the central
government and the proper uses of the raw natural
forces found here. Williams shows how the
personalities of these two men are metaphors for the
impersonal and insatiable appetite of a mercantilist
society (Hamilton), on the one hand, and the erotic,
heroic, and democratic preferences of an "aesthetic"
society (Burr), on he other hand.
Hamilton, a rather cold and socially inept person,
embraced commerce as the surest means of guaranteeing
the new country's growth and sovereignty and favoured
a stronger central government than many of the other
revolutionaries wanted (ibid., pp. 195, 197). A
stronger central government was needed, according to
Hamilton, in order to advance the country's commercial
interests. Williams's conclusion is that the
quantitative and calculating nature of commerce, as
well as the bureaucratic routinization of local laws
and customs to fit the central government's broader
interests, produced a more abstract and impersonal
measure of the economic experiences of people in the
new nation.
Burr, an outgoing and personable fellow, could not
escape fast enough from the routinization of political
and economic life he felt was spreading along the
eastern coast of the country. These developments
represented abandonment of the values of the
revolution, according to him, limiting the range of
local experiments in building democratic communities
(ibid., pp. 196, 202-6). His attempts to start over,
somewhere west of the Mississippi River made him a
pariah among the political establishment in the Untied
States. Many consider Burr a throwback to the era of
military aristocracy. Williams, however, emphasizes
his interest in preserving the crude, unfinished
nature of life in the new country so that people might
experiment with a form of society nobler than one that
simply copied Europe's mercantilist obsession with
economic growth. (Williams, 1969, pp. 146-57)
6. Thesis Six. A poetic measure of social credit
Williams's point in comparing Hamilton and Burr is to
illustrate the importance of measure in the
assumptions of political economy. One measure, call
it the Hamiltonian, passes over the unique and
untested potential in an experience and forces it into
an existing measure for interpreting economic
possibilities. The other measure, call it the
democratic, pays careful attention to the qualities of
the here and now, taps into local cares and concerns,
and devises a new measure that articulates all these
aspects of the experience. Williams's explanation for
the pollution and poverty he experienced in Paterson
was that they are the long-term consequences of
Hamilton's failed dream of creating an ideal
mercantilist enterprise along the Passaic River.
Interpreting the experience of the Passaic through the
"foreign" measure of government supported commercial
development, the virgin lands and waters around
Paterson followed the typical commercial pattern of
benefiting the few and leaving the many a sad and ugly
place to call home.
Marsh shows how Williams shared the concern of other
artists in the first half of the twentieth century
with the effects of corporate society on the self.5
However, unlike Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Williams
does not bemoan the loss of a romantic, historical
ideal of self. Instead, he works to plumb the
possibilities for the self in a corporate era and to
identify sources of "blockage" that keep this new self
chained to outmoded nineteenth century liberal beliefs
about the economic foundations of the self.
(Heinzelman, 1980, pp. 267-75) These beliefs, which
ground the self in the rights and responsibilities of
private property, are dull measures for marking the
boundaries between the self and others, as well as
between private and public spheres of care and concern
in a corporate era. Williams's view of the effects of
trying to live this spent vision of individuality is
that it produces only ennui, resentment, and
perversion in the corporate self.
Paterson can be read as Williams's paean to the
relativism, pluralism, and, frankly, homelessness of
the corporate self. He does not run from these
"local" conditions of modern life, but invites the
individuals of a corporate society to learn all they
can about their new station in society through contact
with his poetry. It also serves as a reminder that we
must perform for ourselves, as earlier generations
have, the work of defining what it means to be
virtuous, how we shall be "married" to one another and
the world, what we mean by "labour," and, only then,
answering William James's question, "Is life worth
living?." Paterson is "credit" issued by Williams on
the basis of the truths of the poetical and historical
experiences that "fund" his composition. This credit
is "good" to the extent that it generates the
"interest" of his audience. That interest, in turn,
is what sparks new beliefs and actions, new
experiences.
Williams's interest in the effects of the corporation
on the self is not to find reasons to resurrect an
earlier version of the self. Rather, he engages this
time of confusion about the self and looks for new
measures in order to define a modern self. And he
insists that in order to avoid the Hamiltonian error
of importing a foreign measure to help us find our way
out of this confusion we must first look at the
contorted face, limbs, and psyche of corporate man.
It is only from the "truth" of this reality that a
meaningful alternative can be created.
If one problem for Williams was to invent a poetry
that gave voice to the experience of everyday life in
urban America, another problem was to invent an
economics in which the accumulated wealth and know-how
of society is expressed in a more democratic form.
Just as he found Classical measures inadequate to the
task of writing a modern poetry that was relevant to
the everyday experiences of people, he found
commercial measures of credit inadequate to the task
of democratizing society's collective economic
inheritance. Just as a monopoly over the use of
language can limit the amount and variety of poetry,
it is obvious to Williams that monopoly control of
credit limits access to society's fund of wealth and,
consequently, limits the growth and variety of
individual projects of self-expression. Finally, as
Williams lent his voice to democratizing the number
and types of voices in the commonwealth of poetry, he
lent his voice as well to telling people that credit
was a public possession, like their language, and not
an object that belongs to private individuals for
their private profit.
The evidence is that Williams did not put his labour
as a poet in a different category of productive effort
from his work as a physician. (Heinzelman, 1980;
Mariani, 1990) His attraction to social credit
measures his disappointment that so many local and
idiosyncratic expressions of creative effort are
denied a voice because the credit of society is
channelled so completely into action that, literally,
pays. His interest in social credit is ultimately an
aesthetic one. It represents a chance to make up for
the initial defeat of a vibrant local culture in the
United States caused by the adoption of mercantilist
beliefs about the proper form of a national economy.
Social credit, he insists, could provide the economic
independence that would encourage people to experiment
with their lives, based on the "local" truths they can
discover from living in closer physical and psychic
proximity to their cares and concerns. The kinds of
experience social credit might encourage could provide
a self-awareness and self-confidence that make people
unwilling to tolerate any longer economic lives in
which:
" ...in the
tall
buildings (sliding up and down) is where
the money's made
up and down
directed missiles
in the greased shafts of the tall buildings .
They stand torpid in cages, in violent motion
unmoved
but alert!
predatory
minds, un-
affected
UNINCONVENIENCED
unsexed, up
and down (without wing motion) This is how
the money's made . using such plugs."
(Williams, 1995, pp. 164-5)
7. Thesis Seven: Conclusion
If sixty years of history are any judge, Williams's
attempt in Paterson to present social credit as a
genuine option must be called a failure. Yet it is
difficult to put an expiration date on the interest
that may accrue to a poem. Certainly, American
capitalism and the global economy have both changed
from the time the poem was composed. Yet it is also
true that Paterson was, in a negative sense, ahead of
the curve in the United States, experiencing the loss
of its industrial base in the first half of the
twentieth century, ahead of cities like Flint,
Michigan, and Youngstown, Ohio, in the second half.
Paterson, among other things, makes a pragmatist case
for social credit. It does this by exploring truths
"in progress" about the effects of the corporate
organization of economic experiences on local natural,
social, and psychological environments. Written with a
measure that he believed would convey the dissonance
of modern life, Williams aimed to set people thinking
about the need to choose a new direction, their stake
in economic change, and their willingness to act on
the uncertain promise of greater economic democracy
under social credit.
The fact that social credit and basic income have not
been forgotten, but resurfaced with new vigour in the
past twenty years means that it still resonates in the
imaginations of some. The next step for those of us in
whom these ideas resonate is to find the words and
measures that will make social credit a "genuine
option" for a wider circle of people. The idea of this
paper is that the work of enlivening the hypothesis of
social credit must include defining a concept of the
self that emphasizes the importance of
self-determination and experimentalism while
acknowledging that the individualism of nineteenth
century liberalism has died a corporate death.
-
Bibliography
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Brown, Norman O. 1970. Life Against Death: The
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Burke, Kenneth. 1954. Permanence and Change (Los
Altos: Hermes).
______. 1984. Attitudes Toward History, 3rd ed.
(Berkeley: University of California Press).
Greider, William. 1989. Secrets of the Temple: How
the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York:
Touchstone).
Heinzelman, Kurt. 1980. The Economics of the
Imagination (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press).
James, William. 2000A. "Is Life Worth Living?" in
Pragmatism and Other Writings Giles Gunn, editor (New
York: Penguin).
______. 1968. "The Moral Equivalent of War," in
Memories and Studies. Reprint (New York: Greenwood
Press).
______. 2000B. "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" in
Pragmatism and Other Writings.
______. 2000C. "The Will to Believe," in Pragmatism
and Other Writings.
______. 1961. The Varieties of Religious Experience:
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Collier).
Lasch, Christopher. 1991. The True and Only Heaven:
Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton).
______. 1996. The Revolt of the Elites and The
Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton).
Livingston, James. 1994. Pragmatism and the
Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
Mariani, Paul. 1990. William Carlos Williams: A New
World Naked. Paperback (New York: Norton).
Marsh, Alec. 1998. Money and Modernity: Pound,
Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press).
Rank, Otto. 1958. Beyond Psychology. Paperback (New
York: Dover).
Rieff, Philip. 1987. The Triumph of the Therapeutic
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
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University of Chicago Press).
Saul, John Ralston. 1993. Voltaire's Bastards: The
Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New York:
Vintage).
van Trier, Walter. 1995. Every One A King.
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Veblen, Thorstein. 1942A. "On the Nature of Capital:
I. The Productivity of Capital Goods" in The Place of
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______. 1942B. "Industrial and Pecuniary
Employments," in The Place of Science in Modern
Civilisation .
______. 1964A. Absentee Ownership and Business
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Augustus M. Kelley).
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______. 1975. The Theory of Business Enterprise.
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-
1 Christopher Lasch, in The Revolt of the Elites, and
John Ralston Saul, in Voltaire's Bastards, analyze
from different angles the breakdown of faith in the
character building effects of economic behaviour as
the corporate phase of capitalism developed in the
United States. However, both emphasize how nineteenth
century beliefs about economic independence had turned
into little more than cynical advertising copy,
rhetoric used by CEO's at stockholder meetings, or
political sound bites by the end of the twentieth
century (Lasch, 1996; Saul, 1993).
2 Some claim that there is no need for a stable notion
of the self in order to discuss or defend traditional
western values like justice, rights, and freedom.
Thinkers like Richard Rorty, for example, are
suspicious of universal or absolute notions of the
self because of the risk they pose for a return to
political philosophies and movements that sacrifice
the individual to social processes supposedly needed
to "safeguard"" the self. As James Livingston argues,
however, debates about democracy are empty (Bush's
"democratic" Palestine?) unless the question about
where to draw the line between private and public
cares and concerns is a central part of the debate.
What sense does it make, he asks, to get worked up
about rights and responsibilities unless one has a
clear notion of a self in whom these rights and
responsibilities supposedly reside? (Livingston, 1994,
pp. 386-7, endnote 40).
3 See William Greider's Secrets of the Temple for an
extensive and lively analysis of the evolution of the
credit system in the United States from the 1890's to
the 1930's, in particular. This evolution is closely
tied to the rapid spread of the corporation as the
dominant form of business enterprise during the same
period. Greider also discusses the gradual eclipse of
the idea of "democratic money" during this period
(Greider, 1989, ch. 8).
4 This seems to me a serious issue for advocates of
social credit. Given the generally deflated cultural
grounds on which people make decisions of political
economy today we risk responding to this apathy (or
worse, nihilism) by resorting to existing means of
psychological and political persuasion. Means that are
of questionable democratic intent in my opinion.
5 Livingston calls this the problem of identifying a
post-capitalist "moral personality" (Livingston, 1994,
Part 2).
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