The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers (39 page)

Kant concluded: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” Indeed, Berlin even titled a 1991 collection of his essays
The Crooked Timber of Humanity
.

Perry Anderson took Berlin to task for his appropriation of Kant’s metaphor:

By dint of repetition—it is cited once in
Russian Thinkers
, twice in
Against the Current
, three times in
Four Essays on Liberty
, and twice more in
The Crooked Timber
itself—Berlin has virtually made of this a saw. Here, we are given to understand, is a signal expression of that rejection of all perfectionist utopias which defines a humane pluralism. But what was the actual force of the text from which the sentence is taken?
The Idea for a Universal History in a Cosmopolitan Perspective
is a terse, incandescent manifesto for a world order still to be constructed, and a world history yet to be written.
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Russell Jacoby went further, noting that Kant’s meaning was the inverse of Berlin’s. Kant was writing at a time when the Germans were pioneering what purported to be scientific forestry. The state saw the forests “through its fiscal lens into a single number” representing potential revenue from timber and firewood:

Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been useful to the population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts. Here I have in mind foliage and its uses as fodder and thatch; fruits, as food for people and domestic animals; twigs and branches, as bedding, fencing, hop poles, and kindling; bark and roots, for making medicines and for tanning; sap, for making resins; and so forth. Each species of tree—indeed, each part or growth stage of each species—had its unique properties and uses.
¹⁰

The fiscal foresters adopted an almost economistic perspective, ignoring the larger environment. They grew straight but unhealthy trees. This effort to control the forests proved counterproductive:

A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora—which were, and still are, not entirely understood—was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest.
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For example, Rosa Luxemburg, an important revolutionary leader, wrote to her friend Sophie Liebknecht about the destructive nature of scientific forestry:

Yesterday I was reading about the reasons for the disappearance of song birds in Germany. The spread of scientific forestry, horticulture, and agriculture, have cut them off from their nesting places and their food supply. More and more, with modern methods, we are doing away with hollow trees, waste lands, brushwood, fallen leaves. I felt sore at heart. I was not thinking so much about the loss of pleasure for human beings, but I was so much distressed at the idea of the stealthy and inexorable destruction of these defenceless little creatures, that the tears came into my eyes.
¹²

Similarly, the Procrusteans may be able to enforce discipline, but only at the cost of strangling more productive capacities that could make life better. John Maynard Keynes was one of the few economists who occasionally grasped the unhealthy nature of the Procrustean system, although not from the perspective of this book.

A Non-Procrustean World for Our Grandchildren

In the midst of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes published an engaging essay titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”
¹³
Keynes was not just some woolly-minded intellectual, isolated in an ivory tower. He was the editor of possibly the most important professional economics journal in the world. People in the
highest levels of government and business also regularly turned to him. During the Second World War, Keynes was the most important representative of his government in coordinating British and American economic policy.

In a sense, this essay prefigured Keynes’s later work, where he explained how depressions occurred because market forces were unable to produce enough jobs. This article, however, went much further, striking at the very heart of economic theory, which purports to be an analysis of how to deal with scarcity.

Although Keynes was relatively conservative, he adopted a revolutionary position for an economist, launching a powerful attack on Procrusteanism. He suggested that the overriding problem that the world faced was not scarcity, but abundance. Keynes realized that, at least in the developed world, society would soon possess more than enough means to produce a good standard of living for everybody with a minimum effort.

Almost two decades before, just after resigning from the British delegation for the international negotiations following the devastation of the First World War, Keynes had already speculated about his hope for the post-Procrustean future:

Perhaps a day might come when there would at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labours. In that day overwork, overcrowding, and underfeeding would come to an end, and men, secure of the comforts and necessities of the body, could proceed to the nobler exercises of their faculties.
¹⁴

In effect, Keynes was speculating on the possibility of going beyond Adam Smith’s vision of four stages, moving into a fifth and higher stage of human development in which traditional methods of control have no justification. With the commencement of this new stage, modern technology could provide a good standard of living with a minimum of effort.

At the same time, Keynes seemed to accept that, for the time being, the inelegant and inefficient Procrustean basis of economic growth
would have to remain in place. A decade and a half after the publication of “Economic Possibilities” Keynes stepped down from his longstanding position as the editor of the Royal Economic Society’s
Economic Journal
, Britain’s premier economics journal. On the occasion of his retirement in 1945, the society gave a dinner in his honor. Keynes gave a speech apparently calling upon economists to make sure that people continue to keep their noses against the grindstone, ending with a toast: “To economists, who are the trustees, not of civilisation, but of the possibility of civilisation.”
¹⁵
Unfortunately, this trusteeship has fallen short of its obligation. At least Keynes, while he was congratulating his fellow economists for having played such a key role in promoting economic progress, had the good sense to realize that this current progress was something different from what he considered to be civilization. Unfortunately, his idea of civilization, like his rejection of Procrusteanism, was largely cultural.

Even earlier than Keynes, his teacher Alfred Marshall, who set the tone for much of the narrow, formalized, early twentieth-century economics, wrote in a similar vein:

Now at last we are setting ourselves seriously to inquire whether there need to be large numbers of people doomed from their birth to hard work in order to provide for others the requisites for a refined and cultured life; while they themselves are prevented by their poverty and toil from having any share or part in that life.
¹⁶

Keynes and Marshall both anticipated that this new stage of development would permit all people to enjoy the opportunity to develop their human capacities. Although they looked forward to the disappearance of crude Procrusteanism in the future, neither gave any hint that society was ready to ease the discipline at the time they were writing.

In the case of Keynes, this narrow vision is understandable. Besides being a great economist, he was an upper-class snob. In his essay, as well as in most of his work, Keynes never really seemed to be thinking about the actual lives of working people or their preferences. Although Keynes was formally somewhat solicitous of the material
welfare of the working class, he certainly held himself aloof from workers, whom he contemptuously regarded as “boorish.”
¹⁷
He wrote to a friend, “I have been having tea with working men; I suppose that they’re virtuous enough fellows, not as ugly as they might be, and that it amuses them to come to Cambridge and be entertained for a fortnight—but I don’t know what good it does.”
¹⁸
Except for such brief moments spent with workers on farms that his college owned, Keynes seems to have had almost no later personal association with those who were obliged to work for wages.
¹⁹

Instead of a positive vision of multifaceted human flourishing, Keynes’s vision reflected an aesthetic revulsion toward unattractive elements of his world. As a close colleague noted, “He hated unemployment because it was stupid and poverty because it was ugly.”
²⁰
The hard business values of untrammeled capitalism also repulsed Keynes. In the concluding remarks to
The General Theory
, Keynes justified private business only on the tenuous grounds that it allowed otherwise “dangerous human proclivities” to be “canalised into comparatively harmless channels … It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.”
²¹
In the same spirit, he belittled “the management of stock exchange investments of any kind as a low pursuit having little social value and partaking (at best) of the nature of a game of skill.”
²²
Despite his contempt for what he presumed to be the present personalities both of the working class and the capitalists, Keynes, like Marshall, believed that a better society could produce better sorts of people—at least the sort of people with whom Keynes enjoyed associating.

Keynes gave no hint that he was sensitive to the main point of this book—that the economic policies intended to spur economic development may actually impair the rate of economic growth by failing to take advantage of the potential of those the Procrustean economy typically leaves behind. Although Keynes looked forward to a time when people could flourish, his vision of flourishing almost seemed to be limited to those already living in a more refined manner.

In the end, despite their limited concern with the broader possibilities of human flourishing, over and beyond cultural niceties, neither
Keynes nor Marshall ever did much to challenge the Procrustean thinking. Instead, they only dreamed about a time when humanity could move on to the next stage.

Keynes even indicated that for the time being the Procrustean path was humanity’s only choice and that path would be a long one:

For at least a hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
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This reluctance to challenge the existing system is not surprising. People like Keynes or Marshall were hardly revolutionaries. They were not about to make common cause with the unwashed working class. Nor were they likely to risk ostracism by the comfortable elites, who were unlikely to welcome the new stage of society that Keynes and Marshall imagined.

The Recalcitrance of the Elites

Keynes was realistic enough to recognize that the transition to the post-Procrustean stage of development would be met with stiff resistance. In particular, the most desirable aspects of the transition for the majority would threaten the position of the powerful minority—whom Keynes strangely enough calls “ordinary men.” Here Keynes’s words are worth citing at length:

I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard in a few decades…. For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy his leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread.
²⁴

Surely Keynes would have known that the elites would resist losing something far dearer to them than their work habits—the prestige and authority they held over others. The elites would not welcome an egalitarian society that would whittle away at their status. Why should anybody else have the same opportunity that the elites now enjoy? What gives common people the right to participate in activities that are now the exclusive domain of the better sort of people? How could such people expect equal access to the elevated positions in society? Here again, Keynes’s concern was largely cultural, with little thought to the potential contributions of the “boorish” masses.

Even more seriously, the erosion of the work habits of the masses would be a matter of great concern for the elites. To imagine that their authority to order other people around would no longer exist would be a bitter pill for the elites to swallow.

Although Keynes was not explicit about the class-based nature of the resistance he expected, his description of the dread of the new stage of development does not ring true for poor working-class people. We could reasonably expect that most of the less fortunate people would not put up much resistance to the opportunities Keynes described—more leisure and a higher standard of living for everybody, including the working class. Even so, Keynes’s negative assessment of the cultural dimension of Procrusteanism actually went much further than Sen: