Page 18 - Culture Society and Economy

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BRINGING THE ECONOMY BACK IN

a progressive view has to contend with today is the dismal history of over
70 years of failure of many standard socialist economic remedies. The
view that socialist economic policies simply do not work in practice –
whatever one may think of them ethically – is deeply embedded in popu-
lar consciousness and is a political fact of the first order. It constitutes a
powerful base of passive support for existing economic arrangements.
Any constructive approach to the manifest injustices of the modern world
therefore requires a confrontation with these failures and a deep under-
standing of modern production relations.
This work is, therefore, devoted to critiquing the theories which have
encouraged the rupture with the abode of production. The aim is to bring
production relations back into cultural and social theory without dismiss-
ing the value of cultural critique and the insights of sociological theories.
My contention is that far from this ‘productionism’ nullifying the role of
culture, consciousness and politics, it in fact encourages a strong role for
intellectual and political work. This is because it requires intense intel-
lectual and political effort in order for the tendencies underway in the
economy to be unearthed and to be brought before public consciousness
in a comprehensible and convincing manner. At the same time, one
should not lose sight of the simple materialist fact that what makes
doctrines convincing to masses of people is only partially their logical,
emotional and cultural force. The decisive element in developing a broad-
based conviction in an ideology is the extent to which this ideology proves
in practice to be able to deal effectively with the challenges facing people
in society. It is praxis – the unity of theory and practice – which is decisive,
not rhetoric, not abstract logical consistency.
It should be stated immediately that in returning to an emphasis on
the system of production, I do not conceive of the economy as a ‘base’ or
a ‘mechanism’ or any other metaphor which reifies and removes it from
the sphere of human agency. As with any other sphere of social life, the
economy is an arena of personal and social agency in which millions
of individuals in definite and changing social relations act to invest,
produce, circulate, distribute, exchange, speculate on and, on occasion, to
destroy wealth. But, as Marx pointed out, they do not exercise this agency
as they wish. Their own political and economic actions have created a
mode of production which has definite characteristics and which allows
for some possibilities and not others. All agency is constrained by these
objective factors and is not simply a matter of voluntaristic will. In the
most general sense this wide-ranging economic activity is no different
from activity in politics, the arts or the sciences: they are all forms of
more or less conscious human activity. What is distinctive is the sphere

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