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In neoclassical economics, market exchange is presented as ‘the central organizing principle of capitalist society’, as Anwar Shaikh puts it. In some variants of modern economics, most notably in the work of Gary Becker, the voluntary exchange of goods between rational and utility-maximising agents on the market is elevated into a prism through which all social phenomena can be understood.
Mute Compulsion
Søren Mau
Capitalism introduces a historically unique insecurity at the most fundamental level of social reproduction, and for this reason the state has to assume the task of administering the life of the population. __Since the aim of capitalist production is the accumulation of wealth in its monetary form rather than the fulfilment of human needs, capitalist production frequently leads to the undermining of the life of the workers on whose lives it ultimately depends.__
Mute Compulsion
Søren Mau
Imagine a horse and its master. ‘The owner of a horse is responsible for it. If the horse lives he must feed it. If the horse dies he must bury it’. What about another relationship, that between a shareholder and the company of which he owns shares? ‘No such responsibility attaches to a share of stock’. The shareholder is not responsible for the company. Often, he has not even set foot on its premises. He has become, in the words of Thorstein Veblen, an ‘absentee owner’. He no longer has the physical possession of a property, only that of a ‘title deed’ – a dematerialized, abstract property, a paper property.
The Ungovernable Society
Grégoire Chamayou
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