Critique of Economy

1. Economy is the theory of management. Management is the activity of managing. Managing is administering, organising, distributing, spending, « using for the best » what is there. One does not just manage: one manages something that is there. The object of management is necessary to management.

Since managing depends on the object that is managed, and since it is about employing this object in the most efficient or profitable manner, the activity of managing comprises a systematic tendancy to want to preserve the object of the management, with the result that managing is sometimes used as a synonym of preserving. Thus, management is an activity that has a tendancy to emancipate itself from the goal one could attribute to its object, to hide the question of the goal: preserving the object tends to become the goal of management.

Management can be characterized by a sort of moderation, reason, control over what is managed. It is about understanding fully possibilities and realities of the object to be managed that go beyond immediate perception. Management, in principle, thus arises out of a plan or a calculus or a form of premeditation, and that is why it is often associated with reason. It is a sum of operations designed to master a sum of complex possibilities. This crystallisation of the object and the activity of its exploitation makes it a peculiar, autonomous activity, which tends to exist in itself.

Unlike work, with which it is often wrongly associated, management is not a necessary activity. It is similar to a way to consider the object. One can compare it to dialectics, which is another way to consider the object, another logic of observation. But just as dialectics, management is only a proposition on the way to consider objects; it can be used or not. Just as dialectics is a part of the world, management is a part of the world, and just as the world is not dialectics, the world is not management.

2. Economy is a recent theory. It seems, according to the economists themselves, that it appears only in the 16th century, and starts developing at the time the debate about the world is moved into the lounge, after 1650. If mercantilism can be considered as the first trend of thought that may be called economist, economy then stems from the relationship of management to state being taken as an object in theory. It is the reflection of a profession specialised in an activity, management, that is emancipating from state and society. At the same time as the question of the state as manager arises, through the question of wealth of « nations », the question of the relationship of the state to the human beings, which are not yet called citizens, or individuals.

Since the English « revolution », merchants and tradesmen come to power, in the state. Merchants and tradesmen are managers. In the society organised around the need for food, they manage the need for food. The lords discuss or do not, the poor eat or do not. The elimination of those who discuss (and sometimes of those who do not eat), following from the great discussions that seem to have happened until around 1650, was made for the benefit of those who manage. This led, on one hand, the discussion of the world not to happen in the world, that is the streets, anymore, but in a part of the world, that is the salon, on the other hand this discussion to become a discussion on management, a bar-room discussion. Through a reversal that quite marks the belief in the eternity of the organisation of the moment, the world is now believed to be the salon, and not only from the salon. The managers, the domestic people of the kitchen, just invaded the dining room. They are then going to tell each other about the world around the great table, as if the world was no longer the salon, but this dining room; salon and dining room, anyway, will soon merge, one pouring into the other through the bar-room discussion. Economy becomes this management delirium which takes management for the generic activity of the world. This both self-centered and pharaonic shift happens as atheism starts to appear publicly in the Western thought. Like at the time of the shift from polytheism to monotheism, the shift from theism to the atheist religion can be seen as a crisis of infinity: the universe of the managerial world is bigger than the universe explained by theism, the being-in-and-for-itself is a greater infinity than the infinity of God. One can also put it this way: the dominant, theist representation of totality has been exploded in the movement of alienation; another representation of totality, a new system of the world becomes necessary, given the progress of commodity, on one hand, and given the unforeseeable anger of the revolted poor, on the other hand.

From Adam Smith, 1776, one finds, even more, in economy, the attempt to claim that some managerial hypotheses are facts, realities. Theses sorts of usurpation have been increasing and maintained until today. Some Jérôme de Boyer thus affirm, in the 2002 Encyclopaedia Universalis: « For Smith, the nature of wealth is real. » This means absolutely nothing: no nature is real; wealth has no « nature » unless one uses an allegory ^[1]; and Adam Smith obviously does not know anything about wealth, if one may trust de Boyer: « Wealth is made up of both industrial and agricultural commodities which are produced by labour »; or, more accurately: Adam Smith only brings back wealth to wealth in management.

This violent colonisation of terms and ideas, in order to confer permanence on them, also comes from the booming of « sciences ». The tendancy to transform management into a science contains the attempt to claim some objects of management as unchanging: value, use, trade, currency, price, supply and demand, growth, labour come to have a new « nature » and, from ephemere categories of consciousness, working hypotheses as it were, they are imported into management, where the economists fiddle with them, before being exported back, thus transformed, into eternal economical categories of the world. With the result that the diverse operations of management are not secondary operations, assumed only by those who are in charge of management, but management, as it becomes the activity of the top of social hierarchy, now claims to take its grounds in reality and in the world.

3. Marx was the main accelerator in the establishment of an economist religion. Jean-Pierre Voyer was the first to point out that what Marx had called the critique of political economy was in no way a critique of political economy. It is indeed only the blame on one particular political economy as opposed to another one. Claiming, however, that one has made the critique of something while simply aiming at reform it, as Marx did with political economy, usually strenghten this thing: as, with Luther, Christian religion – just as it was going to stop being a religion – had split in order to stay the dominant religion, the economist religion – just as it is becoming a religion – has split to become the dominant religion: on one hand classical political economy, on the other hand Marx’s political economy, which takes the world as its object. Marx not only brought back social negation into the economist religion, he extended economy to the whole society, and then to the whole history. He actually attempted to rewrite history according to management, as if the debate of humanity was determined by management, not only in his time, but always was. From Marx, thus, it may be said that economy becomes a religion.

Because, since Marx, everything becomes the object of management, because management is now able to take totality itself as its object, economy has appeared as a religion. It is both an infinite believing in management and an infinite management of believing. It is a new management of believing after the failure of theism, though with an awareness of a larger infinity than the one of theism. Believing and managing can finally be laid down in an infinite reciprocical relationship. All has always been economical and will always be economical. The slightest thing is economical, and all becomes the algebric sum of the slightest things. The economist « concepts » are now presented as realities of the world : from exchange value to use value, through the accumulation of capital or workforce, one forgets it is a way to divide what is perceived through observation, and one makes as if it were reality. In this crusade, reality itself is transformed from an outcome of thought into an essential given, from non-thought into a thought of substance, of matter. Matter itself becomes the new divine hypostasis ^[2], the equivalent of the monotheist God transplanted into economy, its world principle. And even social classes, which are the division of humanity that until then depended on the type of political organisation inherited from Grece and Rome, are reformed according to the economist analysis: bourgeoisie and proletariat are economist divisions of humanity, that the economists then tried to realise, that is to make real in the world, by organising the poor into proletariat, and by calling bourgeoisie those who possessed Adam Smith’s wealth and were opposing this economist organisation of the poor, who did not possess it.

While counter-revolution in France had called into question theist religion, counter-revolution in Russia has established economy as a dominant religion. That is why leninism is the actual restoration, that put an end to the crisis of religion, during all the pragmatic century of the triumphant bourgeoisie and of the loosely managed proletariat. The spectacular division between a capitalist world and a socialist world is, in the economist management of the world, the unity that is eventually realised through division.

4. The critique of economy as a religion starts at the time of the revolution in Iran. The critique in Iran first is the critique of the world of management as a project for humanity. This is why the old theist religions had to come back everywhere, from Shiite Iran to catholic Poland via the western middleclass buddhism. Indeed, the servants of managements, once in power, have no real project for humanity, except for the very unlikely paradise on earth that is communism, which reflects the well-being for all of the capitalist propaganda, which is just as unlikely but is so pathetic and unattractive that it has been a better support for socialism than all the communist daydreams have. The old theist religions, on the contrary, are full of meta-stories, infinite felicities, collective spiritual orgasms. Old theisms are able to appear as a critique only because the poor are not satisfied with the debates about management: theist discourses and programs go beyond. This revolution, which, in its broad meaning, runs from 1967 to 1993 in the whole world, is an attempt of critique, yet formless, of religion. As such, it resumes the project of both of its modern precedents, revolution in Russia and revolution in France.

The Iranian counter-revolution is in process. In theory it has manifested itself in two ways, fabricating a spectacular division, as seems to be the pattern of every counter-revolution. The official counter-revolution claims that economy won over the revolution in Iran. It is the voice that claims not only that all is economy, thereby even implying that economy is a reality, but that the failure of the Iranian revolution is the proof thereof. That belief, in the reality of economy, is very widely shared among the poor today, whether they are managers or not.

The unofficial counter-revolution can be found in Voyer’s theory. Voyer was the first one to show that there is nothing real in the world that is « economy ». But he wanted to reduce economy to what would be a hypostasis in economy. By claiming that « economy does not exist », he then wants to make believe that economy only is a superstition, such as God understood as a commonplace, rather than a way to see the world, to manage believing, to resolve endlessly, that is to give up accomplishing all, like all the religions. The suppression of economy as a « hypostasis » does not suppress economy, since economy has appeared as this « hypostasis » only because it is the dominant religion. The essence of economy is being the religion of management, not being a « hypostasis » as well, which is only one of its distinctive side-phenomena. As Reich ^[3] would say, the fact of believing in the reality of economy in the world is the tumor, not the origin, of this disease that is religion. It is the same as the negation of God: one strengthens religion when one thinks one has made the critique of religion by merely claiming that God does not exist. This is why, by rightly noticing that there is no economy that can be considered as a reality, and by only claiming that economy does not exist, Voyer does not critique economy more than Marx did with what he called, following the economists of his time, political economy. And, like the communist theory of Marx, the theory of infinite communication made by Voyer, in which the principle of the world of management only is deprived of economy, only is a proposition of reform of dominant religion, a spectacular scission, an attempt to reform and save the dominant religion.

The dominant ideology since the revolution in Iran, especially through the progress of dominant information, rather corresponds to a world that thinks that all is communication, instead of all is economic. The revolution in Iran has verified the dissolution of proletariat, the end of the cold war (which was the spectacular freeze of the Russian revolution), the rise of a dominant information, genuine party of infinite communication. But knowing whether all is rather economic, or if all rather is communication, originates in the same worldview, in which matter is the reality, reality is a given, equivalent to existence, and believing and infinity originate in each other through a coherent concept, economy or communication. Voyer’s infinite communication only is the new disguise of economy, seemingly unbaptised and desecrated. Really it is the same discourse, in which the negative is introduced by social critique. Voyer’s negation of economy smartens economy and strenghtens its principle, by mutating its concept. The visible screen of communication has entered the « living room » that combines the dining room and the lounge, in the form of a television set, the spectacle, then of a computer, the « total » communication. That infinity may be mastered by the concept of economy or by the concept of communication, is the same belief. That infinity may extend economy or communication in-and-for-itself is the same belief.

In these theories of the counter-revolution, official as well as unofficial, the world does not change anymore. Revolt, inevitably doomed to fail forever, becomes nothing but the indicator of a principle. Every revolt is brought back to a simple disclosure of a dysfunction, or mocked as a pseudo-revolt. The negative becomes imaginary, is repressed into the imagination. History, which becomes eternal prehistory, evaporates into oblivion and cynism, or freezes in the trivial stories in the news, which are the actual history (without capital H) according to the middleclass, and which intermittently shows its under-economist ardour, its devotion to communication, its religious fanatism.

Although the revolution in Iran did not leave many traces in the consciousnesses, it did in the world: the economic social classes did not hold against the furious attacks of gueux, the revolted poor, and they were not restored. The critique of work as a dominant activity, work being the fetish activity of management, has appeared. The need to talk has reappeared, in spite of the profusion of sound-stopping sounds and noise-stopping noises, in spite of censorship and falsification, in spite of the establishment of a third management unit next to the state and commodity: the dominant information, which manages the word but does not control it anymore since it misses its content. Alienation now ridicules the individual everywhere. Matter starts being questioned as uniting all that exists. And the critique of economy, as the last religion, has begun.

Originally published in Naggh, Nouvelles de l’assemblée générale du genre humain [News from the General Assembly of Mankind], Belles Emotions, 2004 (Part 3, Chapter II, I-B), and on www.bellesemotions.org/naggh/intros/N_som.html

Translated in 2008 by a third party – contact: historyhereandnow@gmail.com

[1] Translator’s Note: « Allegory : a story, poem, or picture which can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one (…); a symbol. » (Oxford Dictionary of English)

[2] Translator’s Note: Hypostasis, « an underlying reality or substance, as opposed to attributes or to that which lacks substance » (Oxford Dictionary of English) ; or, more accurately in this context, « the error that consists in falsely ascribing reality [to something] » (Alliance des ultra-sceptiques optimistes, De l’hypothèse à l’hypostase [From Hypothesis to Hypostasis], Belles Emotions, 2007). « The moment the hypothesis is forgotten as a hypothesis, the moment the certainty of logic suppresses (in the sense « aufheben ») the hypothesis, is the first moment the hypothesis becomes a hypostasis. » (idem).

[3]Translator’s note: Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), author of The Sexual Revolution among others.