The original article is available here: La morale douteuse du capitalisme triomphant | Les Echos
By Paul FABRA
Published 26 March 2004 – Updated 6 August 2019
In a recently published book from Albin Michel titled Is Capitalism Moral?, the philosopher and lecturer André Comte-Sponville develops a thesis that may be summarised as follows. Capitalism is in itself neither moral nor immoral; strictly speaking, it is amoral. One should not expect some alleged self-regulation to contain the inevitable encroachments of the market upon society as a whole, threatened as it is by the tyranny of the market.
Comte-Sponville also says this: just as biology will never be in a position to set any sort of limit to reproductive cloning applied to human beings, so economic science is unable either to delimit the field of the market (everything should not be for sale) or to determine the extent to which the market’s law imposes its sole authority wherever it applies. Above the market stand democracy and the law: these are the authorities—Comte-Sponville, drawing on Blaise Pascal, prefers to speak of a “juridico-political order”, after having dealt with the “economic-techno-scientific order”—that are competent in such matters.
Here I shall stop, although Comte-Sponville himself does not stop at this stage of his ascent through the “orders”, the third being the moral order and above it (with a reference to Spinoza, as one would expect) the order of the ethics of love. His analogy with biology does not hold water. It rests on a completely mistaken—though unfortunately widespread—conception of “economic science” (the author does not once use the expression “political economy”, which might have set him on the right path…). As a result, he loses his subject.
Biology, in fact, is not required to formulate a theory that would make human cloning admissible or inadmissible. It is not a human science. Its object is not human action. It is not so with political economy, even if it has been renamed “economic science”. The proper object of this science has as its point of departure exchange, which is a “trans-action” between two co-exchangers. It is no surprise that, as it took shape, the discipline clarified which objects, on a market, must be involved in a transaction if it is to count as an exchange.
It fell to Ricardo (1771–1823) to establish that the laws of exchange applied strictly only to commodities—goods and services—reproducible virtually at will, provided that one is willing to devote to their production the quantity and quality of labour required. In our societies, almost all goods exchanged fall in fact into this category. Neither cars, nor software, nor tourist travel are, strictly speaking, “rare” goods or services. For such commodities, there exists a price regulator. Competition operates solely among producers. Its effect, to put it simply, is to bring the exchange-value (price) of the products offered toward their cost of production.
Because there exists an objectively calculable value, the model implies that each co-exchanger must “get his money’s worth”. It thereby produces honesty. It reduces price volatility—the principal source of purely speculative gains. The tragedy is that the market for the products of labour, as a properly regulated domain, is no longer the supreme reference.
Theorists have been unceasing in their attempts to devise a general explanation that would account for exchange-value in all situations, including exchanges involving “rare” goods, that is, those not reproducible at will. Thus, through a few logical contortions that need not be detailed here (they concern the all-too-famous marginalist theory), “utility”—analysed as the desire to possess something—was made the universal and determining factor of value.
By itself, this new utility-based approach to the market economy offers no argument for excluding prostitution from it. The marginalists’ invention is a theory in which the black-market economy has ceased to appear as the absolute antithesis of a market economy (1). It legitimises the blackmail exerted by the possessor of the coveted good over the demanders, all of whom are bidders. The financial markets of our time proceed directly from this vision. The real issue in mergers and acquisitions is ignored. It is to shift competition from sellers to buyers.
Around 1925, this led to a new definition of the “economic problem”, formulated by the very liberal Lord Robbins in terms still taught today. The problem consists in deciding “between several possible uses, which one shall be chosen for the allocation of scarce resources”. But that is the definition of an administered economy! James Buchanan wrote in 1991 (The Economics and the Ethics of Constitutional Order): “This way of conceiving economics breeds confusion and misunderstanding because it focuses attention on scarcity, alternative choice, and value maximization. My argument is that economic thinking, as a social science, must start from exchange in order gradually to encompass all the complexities of the contracts of our time.”
As for the supposed maximisation of utility by the consumer—the keystone of the new construction, imagined 130 years ago (a myth underpinning the pricing of electricity and of rail and air transport!)—it appears, in the eyes of another Nobel laureate, Ronald Coase, in his book The Firm, the Market and the Law (1988), as a “non-existent entity that plays a role similar to that played by the ether in medieval physics”.
A regenerated political economy—after a return to its sources—would be well equipped, contrary to what Comte-Sponville maintains, to determine in principle the field of application of the laws of exchange. It would then fall to political authority (here the philosopher is right) to delineate its boundaries.
PAUL FABRA