Economic Science Fictions Read online

  Economic Science Fictions

  Part of the Goldsmiths Press PERC series

  Goldsmiths’ Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) seeks to refresh political economy, in the original sense of the term, as a pluralist and critical approach to the study of capitalism. In doing so it challenges the sense of economics as a discipline, separate from the other social sciences, aiming instead to combine economic knowledge with various other disciplinary approaches. This is a response to recent critiques of orthodox economics, as immune to interdisciplinarity and cut off from historical and political events.

  At the same time, the authority of economic experts and the relationship between academic research and the public (including, but not only, public policy-makers) are constant concerns running through PERC’s work.

  For more information please visit http://www.gold.ac.uk/perc/.

  Economic Science Fictions

  Edited by William Davies

  © 2018 Goldsmiths Press

  Published in 2018 by Goldsmiths Press

  Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross

  London SE14 6NW

  Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Distribution by the MIT Press

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

  Copyright © 2018 William Davies for selection and editorial material. Chapter copyright belongs to individual contributors.

  The right of William Davies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and review and certain non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Davies, William, 1976- editor.

  Title: Economic science fictions / edited by William Davies.

  Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts: Goldsmiths Press, 2018. |

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017039951 | ISBN 9781906897680 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Economic forecasting. | Time and economic reactions.

  Classification: LCC HB3730 .E248 2018 | DDC 330.9001/12–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039951

  ISBN 978-1-906897-68-0 (hbk)

  ISBN 978-1-906897-72-7 (ebk)

  www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press

  To Mark Fisher

  Contents

  Foreword

  Mark Fisher

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction to Economic Science Fictions

  William Davies

  Section I The Science and Fictions of the Economy

  1Economics, Science Fiction, History and Comparative Studies

  Ha-Joon Chang

  2Future Incorporated?

  Laura Horn

  3Currencies of Social Organisation: The Future of Money

  Sherryl Vint

  4Automating Economic Revolution: Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

  Brian Willems

  Section II Capitalist Dystopias

  5‘Feeding Like a Parasite’: Extraction and Science Fiction in Capitalist Dystopia

  Carina Brand

  6Pain Camp Economics

  AUDINT

  7AT392-Red

  Khairani Barokka

  8The New Black

  Nora O Murchú

  9Fatberg and the Sinkholes: A Report on the Findings of a Journey into the United Regions of England by PostRational

  Dan Gavshon Brady and James Pockson

  Section III Design for a Different Future

  10Prefabricating Communism: Mass Production and the Soviet City

  Owen Hatherley

  11Megastructures, Superweapons and Global Architectures in Science Fiction Computer Games

  Mark R. Johnson

  12Economic Design Fictions: Finding the Human Scale

  Bastien Kerspern

  13Valuing Utopia in Speculative and Critical Design

  Tobias Revell, Justin Pickard and Georgina Voss

  Section IV Fumbling for Utopia

  14Shooting the Bridge: Liminality and the End of Capitalism

  Tim Jackson

  15Speculative Hyperstition at a Northern Further Education College

  Judy Thorne

  16The Future Encylopedia of Luddism

  Miriam A. Cherry

  17Public Money and Democracy

  Jo Lindsay Walton

  List of Figures

  Contributors

  Index

  Foreword

  Mark Fisher

  Capitalist realism posits capitalism as a system that is free from the sentimental delusions and the comforting mythologies that governed past societies. Capitalism works with how people actually are; it does not seek to remake humanity in some (idealised) image, but encourages and releases those ‘instincts’ of competition, self-preservation and enterprise that always re-emerge no matter what attempts are made to repress or contain them. The well-known paradox of neoliberalism, however, was that it required a deliberative political project, prosecuted through the machinery of the state, to reassert this image of the human. Philip Mirowski has argued that neoliberalism can be defined by a double (and somewhat duplicitous) attitude towards the state: on the exoteric level of populist polemic, the state is to be disdained; on the esoteric level of actual strategy, the state is to be occupied and instrumentalised. The scope and ambition of the neoliberal programme to restore what could never be expunged was summarised by Margaret Thatcher’s infamous remark that the method was economics, the goal was to change the soul – the slogan of market Stalinism. The libidinal metaphysics that underlies neoliberalism might be called cosmic libertarianism; beyond and beneath the social, political and economic structures that constrain enterprise is a seething potential waiting to be released. On the face of it, then, the goal of politics, according to neoliberalism’s exoteric doctrine, is essentially negative: it consists in a dismantling of those structures that keep enterprising energies locked down. In actuality, of course, and as Thatcher’s remark indicated, neoliberalism was a constructive project: the competitive economic subject was the product of a vast ideological and libidinal engineering project. And, as Jeremy Gilbert, drawing upon Michel Foucault’s work, has observed, neoliberalism has in fact been characterised by a supervisory panic; its rhetoric of releasing individual potential obfuscates its suppression and fear of collective agency. Collectivity is always stupid and dangerous; the market is able to work effectively only if it is a decorticated mass of individuals; only then can it give rise to emergent properties.

  Far from being a system liberated from fictions, capitalism should be seen as the system that liberates fictions to rule over the social. The capitalist social field is cross-hatched by what J. G. Ballard called ‘fictions of every kind’. Ballard was thinking of the banal yet potent products of advertising, PR and branding, without which late capitalism could not function, but it is clear that what structures social reality – the so-called ‘economy’ – is itself a tissue of fictions. It must be stressed here that fictions are not necessarily falsehoods or deceptions – far from it. Economic and social fictions always elude empiricism, since they are never given in experience; they are what structures experience. But empiricism’s failure to grasp these fictions only indicates its own limitations. Experience is only ever p
ossible on the basis of a web of immaterial virtualities – symbolic regimes, ideological propositions, economic entities. We must resist any temptation to idealism here: these fictions are not cooked up in the minds of already existing individuals. On the contrary, the individual subject is something like a special effect generated by these transpersonal fictional systems. We might call these fictions effective virtualities. Under capitalism, these virtualities escape any pretence of human control. Crashes caused by arcane financial instruments, automated high-speed trading … but what is capital ‘itself’, if not an enormous effective virtuality, an inexorably expanding black hole that grows by sucking social, physical and libidinal energies into itself?

  Capitalism has not, apparently, been weakened by the crash of 2008. While right-wing populism has been terrifyingly successful, anti-capitalism has not proved to be a sufficient mobiliser. Provocatively, we might hypothesise that the emergence of anti-capitalism can be correlated with the rise of capitalist realism. When actually existing socialism disappeared – with social democracy soon to follow – the radical left quickly ceased to be associated with a positive political project and became instead solely defined by its opposition to capital. As capital’s cheerleaders endlessly crow, anti-capitalists have not yet been able to articulate a coherent alternative. The production of new economic science fictions therefore becomes an urgent political imperative. Capital’s economic science fictions cannot simply be opposed; they need to be countered by economic science fictions that can exert pressure on capital’s current monopolisation of possible realities. The development of economic science fictions would constitute a form of indirect action without which hegemonic struggle cannot hope to be successful. It is easy to be daunted by the seeming scale of this challenge – come up with a fully functioning blueprint for a post-capitalist society, or capitalism will rule forever! But we shouldn’t be forced into silence by this false opposition. It is not a single-total vision that is required but a multiplicity of alternative perspectives, each potentially opening up a crack into another world. The injunction to produce fictions implies an open and experimental spirit, a certain loosening up of the heavy responsibilities associated with the generation of determinate political programmes. Yet fictions can be engines for the development of future policy. They can be machines for designing the future, and fictions about what, say, a new housing, healthcare or transport system might look like inevitably also entail imagining what kind of society could house and facilitate these developments. Fictions, that is to say, can counter capitalist realism by rendering alternatives to capitalism thinkable. Not only this; fictions are also simulations in which we can get some sense of what it would be like to live in a post-capitalist society. The task is to produce fictions that can be converted into effective virtualities – fictions that not only anticipate the future but that can already start to bring it into being.

  Acknowledgements

  This book originated in a series of conversations at Goldsmiths, University of London, between me, Mao Mollona and Mark Fisher, during which we talked about the shortage of ‘economic science fiction’ in contemporary capitalist societies. On learning that Ha-Joon Chang was a science fiction fan, I invited him to give a lecture on ‘What can economics learn from science fiction?’, which became the launch event for the new Political Economy Research Centre (PERC). An adapted version of that lecture is included in this volume. I’d like to thank Michelle Lo and Sarah Kember from Goldsmiths Press, for supporting this volume and keeping it moving at critical moments, and Roger Burrows for providing a reader’s report on the whole manuscript. I’d also like to thank all of the contributors for their imagination, hard work and patience over the course of this book’s development. I hope you’re all pleased with how it turned out.This project was made possible thanks to the support of PERC and also of the Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). With regards to CUSP, the financial support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC Grant no: ES/M010163/1) is gratefully acknowledged. None of this would have got very far, were it not for Mark’s infectious enthusiasm and intellectual energy. He wrote a short piece on the meaning of ‘economic science fiction’, which was initially to be the start of a collaboration between him, Mao and me. With the encouragement of Zoe Fisher, we decided to include this as a preface here. The book is dedicated to him.

  William Davies

  Introduction to Economic Science Fictions

  William Davies

  In an industrial economy lacking a system of monetary prices ‘there would be only groping in the dark’.1 This claim, made by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in 1920, is one of the most decisive and ultimately influential pieces of economic critique of the twentieth century. It appears in Mises’ pamphlet ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth’, an early and provocative contribution to what became known as the ‘socialist calculation debate’, which rumbled on across Europe until the 1940s and has occasionally stuttered back into life at various points since.

  Within that debate can be found many of the themes and questions that sit centre stage in ‘economic science fictions’, as explored in this volume. Can we envisage a viable alternative to money, as an instrument for the valuation and distribution of goods? How do our hopes and expectations get channelled into the market, and how might they be directed elsewhere? Can a different economy be collectively planned, or is such innovation always a figment of the private imagination (and hence private investment)? How does computational advancement facilitate economic transformation? Could the divergent utopias of socialism and capitalism eventually converge into a single post-capitalist dystopia of ubiquitous surveillance?

  Mises was responding to a 1919 article by the philosopher Otto Neurath, ‘The War Economy’. Neurath had argued that the example of World War One demonstrated that industrial economies could be better run by state planning than by market forces. The extended economic role of the state during a world war was therefore evidence, Neurath suggested, that the future belonged to planned socialist economies. Just as the state could decide on the quantity of munitions or uniforms that a war economy needed, it could make similar ‘in kind’ calculations for the supply of goods in peacetime. A similar argument might well be made about industrial production in our own context of anthropogenic climate change, which may require a similar level of state management if catastrophes are to be averted over the next 100 years.2

  At the time Neurath was writing, the recent inventions of ‘Taylorist’ techniques of business management and behavioural psychology offered new and more advanced means of coordinating complex production processes within factories. Surely similar techniques could be developed for coordinating economic activity across society at large, alleviating the reliance of industrial economies on market forces, with all the peaks, troughs and uncertainties that go with them. This was certainly how Lenin saw things when he predicted that, under socialism, ‘the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labour and pay’.3

  Mises’ purpose was to restate the case for free markets, in the face of an increasingly plausible and popular socialist alternative. Nearly a century on, it is perhaps difficult to imagine how difficult this would have looked at the time. In 1920 laissez-faire economic liberalism belonged to the past. The Victorian era of free trade and entrepreneurial anarchy was long dead, having descended into lengthy stagnation after 1870 amidst a growing sense that progress depended upon bureaucratic welfare states, professionally managed corporations and state regulation of markets. The challenge confronting economic liberals was how to reconceive the free market as belonging to the future rather than to the past. How might spontaneous market forces become an icon of modernity?

  Mises’ argument progressed in a number of steps. First, he argued that the question of value (be it in an economic or moral sense) is necessarily a subjective one. There can be no scientific basis on which to establish what is good or preferable or sati
sfying. We all want and value different (often conflicting) things, but there is no ultimate basis on which to say who is right or wrong amidst this plurality of valuations. In this, Mises echoed arguments that Max Weber had made regarding the moral emptiness of modern reason. It suggests that a central problem for modern society is how to find some device with which to weigh up people’s differing valuations, and factor them into public decision-making. If this pluralism is to be respected, there needs to be some means of calculating how to satisfy as many people as possible, but without lapsing into some arbitrary judgement about whose tastes or preferences or beliefs are the ‘correct’ ones. There can be no expertise regarding the preferences of the public at large, given the dynamism and pluralism of liberal capitalist society.

  In a society of free markets, money solves this problem. The price system offers a way of representing a mass of subjective valuations in quantitative form, providing clear, unambiguous and time-sensitive data to producers regarding what people want and like. By representing values in numerical form, markets allow decisions to be founded in mathematical reasoning, to allow costs and benefits to be weighed up in exact and scientific terms. It makes it possible to respond to a changing environment, in real time. Put simply, it is markets that allow the economy to be a space of rationality.

  Mises accepted that socialist economies would permit some role for markets. Consumer goods would be privately owned, and could therefore be bought and sold in a market. But the defining feature of socialism is that productive capital (factories, machinery, etc.) is collectively owned for public benefit. Investment in publicly owned enterprises would be driven by social need, rather than by the search for profit. Investment decisions could not be ultimately grounded in monetary calculation, seeing as these firms are not oriented towards the market.