The Politics of Dependence

Economic Parasites and Vulnerable Lives

Patrick J. L. Cockburn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319789088
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The central claim of this book is that the dichotomy between economic dependence and economic independence is completely inadequate for describing the political challenges faced by contemporary capitalist welfare states. The simplistic contrast between markets and states as sources of income renders invisible the relations of dependence established in our basic economic institutions such as the family, property, and money. This book is a work of political theory that attacks narrow conceptions of dependence and identifies distinct senses of dependence that might allow political communities to make clearer decisions about the justice of our economic institutions and practices. Inheritance, for example, is as much a form of dependence as support by a welfare state, but these are never compared in debates about economic justice. This book begins the work of comparing forms of economic dependence, and argues that economic dependence is always an issue of both vulnerability and parasitism. It builds bridges between political theory and social science, and is of relevance to those concerned with social and economic justice in and beyond contemporary capitalist welfare states.

© The Author(s) 2018

Patrick J. L. CockburnThe Politics of Dependencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78908-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Patrick J. L. Cockburn¹

(1)

Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Patrick J. L. Cockburn

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In 1933, the British author George Orwell wrote the following comment on begging:

People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary “working” men . They are a race apart – outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men “work,” beggars do not “work”; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not “earn” his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic “earns” his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course – but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. ¹

Apart from being quite funny, Orwell’s comment on begging is also disorientating: do we really have so little reason to think of some activities as ‘real work’ and others as ‘parasitic’? Is the difference between ‘productive’ activities and ‘unproductive’ ones really so arbitrary? Are there really so many ‘reputable trades’ that are ‘quite useless’? The power of Orwell’s observation comes from a stubborn empiricism: he ‘looks closely’ at the world of people doing things and can’t find the source of our normal value -laden distinctions there. We begin to ask: where do these distinctions come from then, if they are not somehow to be found in the activities themselves?

These are questions that probably produce different reactions in different people. On the one hand, we might be tempted to brush Orwell’s comments aside: while some respectable trades are quite useless (bonus-soaked CEOs?), these are exceptional; most work is useful (or value -producing) in a way that begging is not. We even have a science that helps us to work out what is productive and what isn’t: it is called ‘economics .’ On the other hand, we might hop on board the social constructivist train and ride to the end station: yes! All normative distinctions are more or less arbitrary products of power struggles and cultural prejudice so let’s stop believing in the sense of any of them. A third option, which this book will pursue, is to get onto the social constructivist train a bit less enthusiastically—but get on nonetheless—and to try to take seriously the reasons that people have for going to the effort of making these distinctions at all. The distinction that this book is concerned with is that between ‘dependence ’ and ‘independence .’ Why does dependence matter to people? What do they mean by it? And how should we speak about it?

Every political and theoretical account of what a just society and economy would look like is built upon assumptions about which social actors are dependent upon which others, and which forms of dependence are legitimate and which are not. These assumptions can be strikingly different from one another and can support radically different conclusions about what laws, policies and practices provide fair and efficient ways to organise the production and distribution of society’s resources . For this reason, it is important to ask why and how people go about making distinctions that condemn others as ‘dependent,’ as ‘unproductive,’ or even ‘parasitic.’ What view of economic and political relationships do these distinctions rest on? And do different starting points for describing economic institutions, practices and relationships lead us towards different views of who is problematically ‘dependent’ on who?

The answer to this last question is quite simply ‘yes.’ The claim that welfare recipients suffer from a kind of immoral dependency on the state (the view of the conservative Right) only makes sense against a background picture of economic life that makes the labour market look fair, makes recipients look lazy and makes other forms of dependence (e.g. on family ) seem less problematic, or indeed, makes them invisible. On the other hand, the claim that financial capitalists are a kind of economic parasite (the view of many on the radical Left) rests on the idea that property rights in capital goods are unjust, that the task of allocating capital should not be counted as productive work, and that there is a distinction between the ‘real’ economy of goods and services and the ‘merely’ financial economy of credit and rent . When the welfare state or contemporary capitalism (or both) is under attack in political debate, it is often stereotyped figures like these that encapsulate and summarise the criticisms directed at a wider system of laws, institutions and practices.

Where people are accusing one another of being ‘parasites ,’ it is clear that economic dependence has become synonymous with immorality and injustice. Those who are dependent are to blame. But economic dependence is a topic that also raises a very different set of political and moral issues: not about parasitism , but about vulnerability . To be dependent is also to be vulnerable to the withdrawal of support, and this kind of vulnerability is something that particular social groups have suffered much more than others. Feminists criticising the patriarchal structures of past and present societies have often seen dependence as a condition forced onto women by the institutions and informal power structures of these societies. They have also pointed out that some people are inevitably dependent upon others (e.g. children on adults) in ways that have important consequences for the social division of labour . Dependence , then, is a social issue that puts both vulnerability and parasitism on the agenda of political debate and theory. These two normative poles run through the debates that this book examines and tries to push forward.

Where, then, do we find these debates about dependence ? The present book is primarily focussed on the politics and political theory that surrounds the institutions of modern capitalist welfare states. This means that the public and theoretical debates that it looks at have mostly taken place in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and often continue in the present. They are debates about specific social institutions (or sets of institutions), like the welfare state , and about the concepts that we use to understand economic life: like ‘productivity’ and ‘unearned income .’ They are thus primarily about economic dependence in modern capitalist welfare states. But worries about dependence have a long intellectual history stretching back much further. Civic republican political theorists have for centuries argued that we need a sufficient degree of (economic) independence from others in order to be responsible political actors, and property qualifications for suffrage have often been justified with the claim. But even those who have wealth are faced with another question about dependence —where did that wealth come from? Criticism of some ways of making money is almost as old as history itself, ² and more specific worries about ‘unproductive ’ activities have been a key theme in modern political economy . The eighteenth-century French school of economic thinkers known ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Who is Dependent?
• Part II. Instituting the Economy
• Back Matter