The human in political economy (1942) by Wang Yanan
1 Problems of general knowledge in scientific research methodology
The human can, as an object of research, be approached from any number of perspectives.Footnote 1 In actual fact, varied fields of scholarship and learning have already posed the human as an object of research and study. The human has been categorized according to a range of specific characteristics and traits across the fields of anthropology, biology, different forms of science, as well as philosophy and theology. Yet, across all these varied fields, research concerning and approaches to the figure of the human only relate to a partial aspect of the totality of human life; even while the scientific character of the discipline in question is directly proportional to the fragmentary character of human life described by said discipline. If, in the pursuit of research on the organization of human physiology, we were to amalgamate the different conceptions that the fields of politics, ethics, and even theology have to offer with respect to the problem of the human, we would, as a result, have no means of discerning the biological functions and specific characteristics that belong to the human by virtue of his physiological organization; nor, consequently, would we be able to constitute modern physiology as a field of learning. The same is true of each of the other sciences.
This is already a matter of common knowledge with respect to the methodology of scientific research. Yet this common knowledge has not always received adequate attention from a great many of those who regard themselves as scientific researchers. In the field of the economic sciences, this form of common knowledge has often emerged as a problem.
2 Human nature as expressed in economic activity
While certain fundamental laws of modern economic science (such as the law of value) may originate with William Petty, their true founder is generally said to be Adam Smith. Smith’s entire economic theory takes, as its point of departure for research, the instinctive self-interest and self-advantage of the individual with respect to economic affairs. He argued,
In almost every other race of animals, each individual, when it is grown up to maturity, is entirely independent, and in its natural state has occasion for the assistance of no other living creature. But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.Footnote 2
This extract comprises both Smith’s philosophy of the individual and his social philosophy. Yet if we pursue the origins of this philosophy of self-interested utility, we quickly discover that it is simply a reproduction of the following extract from the portion below of “the wickedest book that ever was,” which is to say Mandeville’s Tale of the Bees: “So they that examine into the Nature of Man, abstract from Art and Education, may observe, that what renders him a Sociable Animal, consists not in his desire of Company, good Nature, Pity, Affability, and other Graces of a fair Outside; but that his vilest and most hateful Qualities are the most necessary Accomplishments to fit him for the largest, and according to the World, the happiest and most flourishing Societies.”Footnote 3 That which Mandeville understands as the happiest and most flourishing society is the society of economic development, and the human agent that acts within this economic society must therefore be possessed of the “vilest and most hateful qualities” in order to meet the demands of that society. These “vilest and most hateful qualities” are precisely those that Adam Smith emphasized as the basis of the human instinct to self-interest. That Mandeville saw self-interest and self-gain as amongst the vilest and most hateful qualities indicates that he regarded such qualities in a negative light, yet because he undertook to abstract from art and education, and also place moral qualities of the “desire of company, good nature, pity, affability” beyond the bounds of economic calculation, he came to be regarded as an evil person “injurious to public morals,” and his book was castigated as “the wickedest book that ever was.”
Moreover, as economic development gradually yielded the “happiest and most flourishing societies” of which Mandeville spoke, so too did those “vilest and most hateful qualities” or the “instinctive self-interest” come to operate. As economic science, which takes the economic affairs arising from “instinctive self-interest” as its object of research, came to develop its scientific character, so too did it become necessary to place art, education, morality, and their accompanying social ideologies to one side. The eventual result was that the human who engages in economic activity was turned, in the words of Professor Andrew Marshall, into “an ‘economic man,’ who is under no ethical influences and who pursues pecuniary gain warily and energetically, but mechanically and selfishly.”Footnote 4 The economic theories of David Ricardo mark the height of the classical school, and yet, precisely for this reason, the concept of the “economic man” takes on an exceptionally clear shape in Ricardo’s work, especially his On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. This economic man seemingly only pursues one kind of activity in society; that is, the activity of seeking advantage; he possesses only one need, which is the need for livelihood; he only possesses one aim, which is to become a rich person. The economic man is hypothesized as having no morality, no truth, and no art; his ideal is not the good, or the true, or the beautiful, but only wealth. The society in which this purely economic man undertakes his activities likewise becomes a society based purely around the market and the pursuit of interest. For exactly this reason, across Ricardo’s works, there is scant mention of any kind of “spiritual culture.” In actual fact, there is no need for such language in the society that he describes, or in the market driven by self-interest that he examines. Yet, for precisely this reason, he has generally been castigated as an amoral materialist on the part of those who concern themselves with the world of man.
In actual fact, to abstract any characteristics of the human relating to forms of society and spirit beyond economic life is by no means rare in economic science, and serves to facilitate research, or acts as a necessity of scientific research. The same is true of the way in which physiology disregards the spirit and social characteristics of man. Moralists or believers in the omnipotence of spirit who do not wish to approach science have the “freedom” to speak in outraged tones on this matter, but it is rather more surprising when economists “descend” to the level of not being able to comprehend even this basic form of scientific knowledge.
3 The “economic man” is rejected by the historical school
The romanticists of German economic science have long fantasized about incorporating all forms of social life beyond the economic into the research framework of economics. Yet precisely because they acknowledge that “where there is politics or economics, there is no morality” (Schlegel), their ideal is fundamentally Romantic, and hardly worthy of consideration. This tradition of Romantic thought has, however, been carried on in altered form by the economists of the new and old historical school. They believe as follows: the research object constituted by economic realities must not only encompass the elements of the perceptible real, but must also encompass those immaterial elements of the human personality that are not accessible to immediate experience, which is to say the spiritual activities of man. In their imagination, provided that man is possessed of free will, albeit with economic behavior as the conclusion, then this free will shall necessarily engender a rich series of changeable phenomena that are not bound to any strict set of rules. Therefore, in the words of Knies, “in the sphere of phenomena concerning economic life, apart from natural laws and historical relations of cause and effect, there are also relations of cause and effect that depend on humans of ethics together with free will.”Footnote 5 This understanding on the part of the old historical school has been accepted without reservation by the new historical school, without any additional elements whatsoever. Schmoller therefore earnestly expresses the view that “the aim of the historical method is to bring about the correct relations between economic research and the general causes of morality, law, the state and cultural development. This means: in addition to conclusions derived from the individual and their pursuit of self-interest, people must be re-instructed to research collective phenomena; moreover, beyond the analytical method, people must be re-instructed to pursue questions via a correct process of synthesis.” Precisely because he does not recognize the existence of any such “economic man,” Schmoller believes that national political economy is, in one respect, located in the midst of applied natural science, engineering, mechanics, forestry, anthropology, ethnology, and meteorology; in another respect, it is also amongst the most important sciences of spirit; that is, psychology, ethics, political science, and sociology. In Schmoller’s vision, national political economy is not only a natural composite object crafted by human beings, so too is it a sociocultural composite object formed by sentiment, thought and action on an ongoing basis. In simple terms, economics for him is an “all-encompassing” field of learning, being both a science of psychology and a science of ethics.
In pursuing this intellectual method in economic science, just as they talk about ethics and psychology, so too is it necessary to find a reason to mix in the economic element, or the element of economic consciousness, and so yield conclusions that belong to psychology, to ethics as well as to economic science. As a consequence, all fields of learning are mixed up with one another, making it impossible to establish an independent science.
In the eyes of the historical school, “economic man” does not exist, and neither, therefore, should economics. Yet they put on a show of earnestness in founding their own economic school. The first to oppose their arguments were known as the economic scholars of the Austrian school. Let us, then, take a look at how this school has addressed the problem of the human in economic science.
4 The question of the social basis of the “economic man” of the classical school and the Austrian school
With respect to methodology in economic science, the Austrian school largely inherits the positions of the English classical school. It was Ricardo who posed the figure of “economic man” as a hypothesis to serve as the point of departure for his research. At exactly the moment when the ethicists of the historical school expelled that figure from the “scene” of economic science, it was retrieved by Karl Menger. Karl Menger emphasized what he called an “exact” economic science, and in doing so provided a definition for economic science, one which demanded the use of exact methods to pursue and understand the human beings who engage in economic activity. The basis of this human consists of the pursuit of self-interest that human agents manifest as they seek to satisfy their desires.
Menger’s formulation was, in the eyes of Knies of the historical school, wholly inadequate, for the reason that human agents, when they engage in economic activity, do so under the influence of the whole of the human personality, rather than solely on account of economic motives alone. That is, for Knies, when human agents pursue economic goals, they hardly forget their life objectives. Yet Menger came to refute this position, which seems quite sensible on the surface, as follows: economic activity is admittedly one component of the totality of human activities, yet this fact alone cannot inhibit or negate the rational content of research method, whereby economic science proceeds to abstract and isolate the specific contents of economic activity, in order to discern the specific laws of this activity. Such an exact research method demands that one locate the actual simple element, without necessarily being concerned with whether this element is actually a phenomenon that exists on an independent basis, and whether it is totally in accord with reality. Menger believed that those phenomenal forms that comprise problems in theoretical economic science, such as the form of human that exclusively pursues economic objectives, comprise a partial entity within the framework of our mental conceptions. We do not seek to research the totality of human life, but rather to research a specific mode of life on a compartmentalized basis. Moreover, in any given society, the effort to realize economic desires or what we call economic motives is ultimately the most universal and most common form of life activity. For this reason, for Menger, to isolate the economic life that comprises economic motives and desires, and to further investigate this life on that basis, is ultimately both possible and necessary.Footnote 6
Menger’s method of abstraction is the research method of the whole of the Austrian school. The “economic man” that they describe is a “reproduction” of Ricardo’s “economic man.” Across both the English classical school and the Austrian school, “economic man” exists as something bifurcated from the influence of ethics, politics, and other dimensions of social life, which is to say that “economic man” is always already the product of a process in which the phenomena of social life beyond the economic have been discarded. Yet according to the total theory of this school, the abstraction of “economic man” exists independently of history, and on no account has it ever been understood as the product of a specific society, including modern capitalist society. This being the case, not only is the “economic man” characterized by a stripping away of all those forms of social life apart from economic life, so too is there a discarding of any specific content of that economic life itself. The result is that the most concrete, the most straightforward, figure of the “economic man” emerges as a “specter” without any social basis whatsoever. Naturally, the economic phenomena as researched by the classical school and the Austrians are consistently the economic phenomena of the capitalist economy, and thus the “economic man” that they hypothesize is naturally the human that functions and acts within precisely these conditions of economic phenomena, which is to say that it is a human whose social basis is precisely that of capitalism. Yet because they regard this capitalist “economic man” as eternal, one applicable to all times and places, the ahistorical character of the “economic man” resolves itself into the dehistoricization and reification of capitalist society as such. In this situation, either the economic movement of capitalist society comes to “sublate” this “economic man,” or the “economic man” loses its social basis.
We must, in actuality, come to understand a number of further characteristics as they pertain to the “economic man.”
First, although “economic man” marks an abstraction from the totality of human life, or a singular state that has been isolated for the purpose of research, it also possesses the most real content. The “economic man” is not a Crusoe, but rather a corporeal entity that embodies the antagonistic class relations of a specific society.
Second, the “economic man” is the subject of economic activity, but this does not mean that he strictly controls the economy in reality. Quite the contrary, the real economy consistently exerts control over this subject, compelling his economic activity to approximate reality, to do his utmost to be in accord with reality. It can only be thus.
Third, as the “economic man” plays his role in the real economy, he constantly undergoes a change in his capacities and in his position in accordance with the constant transformations in the real economy itself. This demonstrates that he is not a fixed state or phenomenon, but is, rather, in reality, materialized as the real economy itself. The “economic man” must therefore be understood according to the ongoing transformations of the real economy.
In order to precisely confirm these explanations, and to deliver a true cognition and criticism of this “economic man” of bourgeois economics, we must develop a concrete analysis of the concept of the human in economic science.
5 The archetypal human of capitalist society
To the extent that economic science takes capitalist society as its object of research, the human of that science will comprise the archetypal human of capitalist society itself. If the archetypal human of feudal society might be said to comprise the feudal lord and his serfs, then the archetypal humans of capitalist society comprise capitalists and wage laborers: “… the relation between capital and wage-labor determines the entire character of the mode of production. The principal agents of this mode of production itself, the capitalist and the wage-laborer, are as such merely embodiments, personifications of capital and wage-labor; definite social characteristics stamped upon individuals by the process of social production; the products of these definite social production relations.”Footnote 7
Yet in a society in which capital governs social relations, the economic motives and commitments of the capitalists are easily visible. In actual fact, that human which Marshall described as he “who is under no ethical influences and who pursues pecuniary gain warily and energetically, but mechanically and selfishly,” largely refers to the capitalist, the capitalist being the master of capitalist society. There are even some economists who regard capitalists as the creators of capitalism. Werner Sombart described things as follows: “capitalism is the work of outstanding individual men … Capitalism came into the world in the form of ‘enterprises’: in the form of rational, considered, far-sighted developments of the human spirit. In the beginning there was the ‘creative act’ of the individual; of a ‘daring’, ‘enterprising’ man who courageously decided to step away from the tracks of traditional economic management and take new paths … the capitalist entrepreneur affects entire countries with his activities, he tears entire populations out of their usual ways of existence … the capitalist entrepreneur creates new ‘economic modes’ for thousands. His gaze is directed into the distance; he wants to use his will to direct the will of many people, even if they live and work away from him … even if history did not confirm it for us: our insight into the essence of human nature would lead us to the conclusion: such different makers, such innovators, such subversives, such creators were always only individuals, were always only a few.”Footnote 8
In the history of warfare, the greater part of the stories consist of “success born of mountains of bones,” and so too in the history of modern capitalist development do we find “tales reeking of blood.” Both capitalists and heroes are undoubtedly people who seek “to use his will to direct the will of many people,” yet is it the case that their wills do not suffer any kind of external restraint or limit? Indeed, the idea that “only a few individuals” called capitalism into being is hardly “confirmed by history.” In actual fact, “insight into the essential human nature” on the part of capitalists will not yield this conclusion either.Footnote 9
In the first place, we must examine this will of the capitalist. The English economist McCulloch notes that “the inextinguishable passion for gain, the auri sacra fames, will always lead capitalists.” If that remains rather unclear, best to add an addendum: “the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M–C–M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only insofar as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist”Footnote 10
“The appropriation of ever more and more wealth,” “the expansion of value,” do not emerge from circulation. From this fact, it becomes necessary to undertake a yet closer examination of the “human nature” or the “life” of the capitalist: “As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labor. Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”Footnote 11
The soul of the capitalist becomes the “soul of capital.” The demand that capital poses for its own expansion, the impulse to constantly increase value, to expand the scale of enterprise operation, to expand markets, and all the related transformations in the regulatory conditions—all of these increasingly assume the form of natural laws, or they assume a form that is independent of the actual participants in production and which brooks no human control. Moreover, these laws internal to the capitalist relations of production subordinate “every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws.”Footnote 12
In this context, to the extent that capitalists are regarded as the personification of capital, their frenzied desire for the expansion of value is expressed as the motive force for the development of the social productive forces, and as those agents who engender the material conditions that comprise the actual base for a yet higher form of social organization. Within these limits, the historical value of the capitalists and the area in which they should be accorded respect becomes fully visible. Yet at the same time, in the course of expanded reproduction, the natural state of the animal kingdom, in which there is a cruel struggle for subsistence, is transposed by the capitalist to human society. This lamentable reality can hardly be seen as the individual responsibility of the capitalists alone. “But here individuals are dealt with only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”Footnote 13
This explanation demonstrates that capitalists not only express that which Sombart describes as the “accomplishment” of “creating” the world, so too can they avoid responsibility for all the ills, all the evils of that world. Yet one point to which we should pay careful attention is that if capitalists are not seen as the personification of capital, but praised as “farsighted” organizers equipped with “courage,” then not only can this perspective not demonstrate their historical value and “accomplishments,” so too does it make it impossible for them to escape responsibility for the ills they have engendered.
If you defend capitalists, then you cannot defend the capitalist system in which capitalists make their existence. If you regard capitalists as creators of a world on the basis of their free will, then you cannot absolve them of responsibility for bringing the ills of that world into being; generally speaking, economists will, in this situation, experience some level of hesitation, and even difficulty. Yet what really causes them to experience the greatest loss of direction is another collectivity in capitalist society, the class of laborers; although the economists generally place this group of people outside the category of “economic man,” their existence can hardly be ignored in political economy.
6 Labor becomes subject, the laborer becomes thing
Capitalist commodity production, which serves as the standard of the modern economy, has as its distinguishing characteristic the fact that the labor power of the laborers is itself a commodity, which is to say, it is a system of wage labor. Those who sell labor power—that is, those who engage in wage labor—are laborers. Yet what the capitalists desire in purchasing labor power is not the laborers themselves, but rather the labor that is capable of creating greater value than that embodied in the commodity of labor power itself. In the same way, the person who buys oil on the basis of its use value desires not the seller of oil, but rather the oil in and of itself. When the laborer sells their labor power, the use of that labor power belongs to the capitalist. Yet the similarities between oil and labor power stop there. In the process of use, oil and its seller have already ceased to have any relation to one another, whereas with labor power, its use comprises the direct expenditure of the mental and physical energy of he who sold it; in this relationship, the capitalist who avails himself of wage labor must occasionally take notice of the wage laborers. Yet, in their eyes, the positions of wage labor and the wage laborers are inverted: wage labor becomes personified, whereas the wage laborers are reified [wuhua]. Their economics quite clearly reflect this sort of reality.
In the early modern period, the activities of both labor and capital were still trapped within the limits of the archaic regulations of feudalism, as well as within the mercantilist system. Adam Smith, who offered apologies for the capitalists, not only emphasized the freedom of capital but also cried out in support of the freedom of labor. He argued, “The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property.”Footnote 14 His advocacy for the sacred freedom of labor was very clearly based on the fact that, for him, the sacred freedom of capital had, as its “original foundation,” the sacred freedom of labor. Yet the reason why he emphasizes the freedom of labor rather than that of the laborers (despite occasional mentions to this effect in The Wealth of Nations) is because, to talk about the freedom of the laborers in this situation, simply denotes a secondary condition for the freedom of labor. Labor is personified, whereas the laborers themselves are reified [wuhua].
If, in these circumstances, we cast our eyes to the production process, the process of value accumulation, or, that is to say, the inner abode of the process by which labor power is used and expended, there will arise a yet deeper impression. In the production process, capital exerts the power of control over labor (realized labor power). The production methods that embody capital are fully expressed as those methods that absorb the labor of others. Within these limits, no longer do the laborers make use of the means of production; rather, it is the means of production that make use of the laborers. The laborers do not regard these means of production as the material elements of their production activities, which serve to meet their consumption needs; rather, the laborer himself comes to function as a specific means of production, one who is consumed by the material means of production. A lyric poet for the mechanized factory, Dr Ure, once said that the automatic factory comprises “a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinate to a self-regulated moving force.” In his imagination, the central machine, from which the motion comes, is not only an automaton, but an autocrat. “In these spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials.”Footnote 15 Moreover, those whom this autocrat commands are not only the laborers who serve him, but also the capitalists who must act according to the functions of this autocrat, and abide by the orders that are issued on the part of those functions, as he engages in his activity. Yet, to the extent that the capitalist expresses the blind, untrammeled impulses of capital, to the extent that the capitalist expresses the wild thirst for surplus value on the part of capital, so too are the laborers expressed as utterly lacking in human qualities, being reduced to a state of pure labor power without any regard for their health or longevity; for the sake of surplus value, for the sake of ensuring that the different machines do not cease their operations for even a single moment, the entire time of the laborers, who are regarded as pure labor power, becomes labor time under capital, directed for the purpose of value accumulation. Their time for the education of the human personality, their time for spiritual development, social interaction, the free expression of their physiological and spiritual powers, even their time of rest on a Sunday, all of this is expropriated. The result is that with the advance of industry and of mechanization, the laborers are increasingly expressed in a manner wholly opposed to any life of knowledge and spirit. As one sociologist notes, “ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject to error; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may … be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.”Footnote 16
The human becomes a constituent component of the machine. As a result, under the form of wage labor, to provide him with food becomes like feeding coal into a furnace, or applying oil to a machine. The laborers are, in reality, deprived of their humanity; yet, generally speaking, bourgeois economists stand wholly within this reality, so that, for them, the life of the laborers, their health, their production, are not worth any consideration, and are even purely superfluous. For example, Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population seeks to demonstrate that, according to the natural laws of population, laborers must, at the appropriate juncture, be deprived of their right to satisfy human desires, which is to say, they must be deprived of their right to exist as human beings.
Yet from another economic viewpoint, the human characteristics of the laborers or their human desires receive adequate attention. The laborers render two kinds of service to the society of the capitalists. In one respect, they are the producers of commodities, in another, they are the consumers of the commodities that they have themselves produced. He is a producer, though only insofar as he is a body of labor power; he is a consumer, which requires that his purchasing power be taken into account. In actuality, in acknowledging the laborer as an agent of consumption, capitalist society only recognizes his purchasing power, just as, in acknowledging the labor as an agent of production, it pays attention only to his labor power. Yet it remains necessary to ensure that these laborers possess sufficient purchasing power, which is to say, to raise the consumption of the laborer. In this sense, a number of bourgeois economists have, in giving the appearance of raising the human characteristics and life of the laborers, put forward a number of rather romantic proposals for reform, believing that laborers might be granted a rather larger portion with respect to distribution. The result is always of greater advantage to the pocket of the capitalist. Bastiat’s “optimistic theory of distribution,” Thunen’s “theory of natural wages,” and J. S. Mill’s “wage-fund theory” all seek to restore in the field of consumption that human dignity of which the laborers have been deprived during the process of production. Yet in actuality, the violation or discarding of the humanity of the laborers is not simply because they are turned into instruments commanded by machines in the course of the production process, so too is it because they are also deprived of human life and enjoyments in the area of consumption.
7 Political economy cannot provide for the realization of rational relations between human beings
The archetypal capitalist society is one in which capitalist and laborer serve as the archetypal human agents. The relations of production that comprise capitalism are such that the relations between these sets of agents are not relations between human beings, but between objects. The manner in which economists express this deformed relation (one which is all too regular under capitalism) is not as something callous, or as anything liable to cause upset, but simply as the appropriate order of things. The correction of this deformed relation does not lie within the province of economics. The mode of life of slaves is such that there can be no human relations between slaves and their masters; the feudal mode of production is such that neither can there exist human relations between lords and serfs. The capitalist mode of production is one step more advanced in that there exists the outer appearance of freedom and equality, yet as for the relations between human beings themselves, whilst there might be some areas in which things appear rather better, elsewhere they are even worse. In capitalist society, capitalists and laborers always stand opposed to one another, looking on each other with hostility; in contexts of competition, in fact, there is no obvious means of reconciliation, either amongst the capitalists, or amongst the laborers. When a capitalist destroys one of his small counterparts, in his eyes there is no small capitalist as such, but instead only the small capital to be conquered. As for the larger capitalist himself, he obeys the direction of the unlimited desires of capital without even being aware of it. The mutual antagonism between the laborers themselves is similarly because they are placed in a competition for survival. All of this is maintained by a definite set of social and economic laws. Thus all that economics can do is provide a rational justification for this state of affairs. As soon as human relations have freed themselves from relations between objects, the historical mission of economics will have come to an end. In this understanding, it is precisely because our society is still characterized by irrational relations between human beings that economics exists as a discipline. For exactly this reason, this economics, which cannot account for the irrationality of the current relations between human beings, and which even intentionally obfuscates their true appearance, still maintains its superfluous existence.
“The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.”Footnote 17 Only with the integration of human subjects, whereupon relations will assume the form of true freedom, rather than the coercive, unequal form, or the unnatural form of buying and selling, will the unnatural phenomena of society, the economy, and life begin to disappear.
Yet this is not something that can be accomplished in the realm of thought. Without the formation of a definite social and material basis, this irrational history will endure, and so too must we continue to adopt economic science to correct the irrational economic relations that persist between human agents.
Commentary: economic man, socialist economics, new human
What is the historical scope of political economy as a body of knowledge? Under what conditions might political economy and its categories cease to apply, and do those categories continue to be applicable in postrevolutionary conditions? How do we understand Marx’s intervention as a critique of political economy, as the subtitle of his work Das Kapital indicates?
Wang Yanan’s 1942 essay “The Human of Political Economy” addresses these and other problems through a particular frame of analysis—that of the human. The author, Wang Yanan, was, together with Guo Dali, the translator of noted classics of political economy, notably the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and, most significantly, the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. He encountered Marxist ideas through his travels in Japan and Europe, and, after 1949, with the foundation of the People’s Republic, became the president at Xiamen University in Fujian, as well as continuing to publish academic and popular works on socialist political economy.Footnote 18 The essay “The Human of Political Economy” was therefore written at a transitional moment, in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War, when Wang was geographically and intellectually separate from the wartime communist base area of Yan’an. The object of Wang’s text is the status of the human in the theoretical discourses of classical political economy, the Austrian school, and the German historical school. He notes that the Austrian school, together with its antecedents in classical political economy, postulates a figure of the human—economic man. This figure serves as the legitimating principle for the transhistorical postulation of the market and capital as the rational bases for the organization of social life. The decisive characteristic of this figure, as well as the social order that it comes to legitimize, is premised upon the autonomy of the “economic” from other forms of human activity and other forms of life. The rationality of the economic (and, more specifically, the permutation of the economic that governs capitalism) is consequently universalized as the defining characteristic of the human as such in all times and places. Wang’s imminent critique of this reification of the figure of the economic man is centrally indebted to Marx’s Capital (Part I, Volume 1), insofar as, even without using the term, Wang envisages the economic man as functioning like the commodity form. The figure of economic man also marks a fetishistic mode of appearance, one that comes to obscure its own historical character and the conditions of historical possibility from which it emerges, namely the capitalist mode of production itself. As Wang writes in this piece, the abnegation of its own history allows the figure of the economic man to perform a legitimating function as the spontaneous ideology of capital.
Wang’s critical analysis of the figure of “economic man” is therefore underpinned by an impetus towards historicization. His fundamental methodological approach resembles Marx’s own critique of political economy, insofar as Marx too was concerned with how categories that are historically specific to capital assume a suprahistorical mode of appearance in the ideological universe of political economy. Yet Wang’s impetus to historicize does not yield, crucially, to the blunt historicism of his other discursive antagonist, namely the historical school, who “have long fantasized about incorporating all forms of social life beyond the economic into the research framework of economics.” Wang accepts in advance the necessity of a process of abstraction as the condition of possibility for economic science, as for all forms of knowledge. For economics as for physiology, a process of bracketing in the form of epistemological abstraction is necessary for the coherence of the field of knowledge in question. Wang’s critique of economic man, then, is unlike that of the historicists because he does not invoke historical sensuousness against abstraction and abstractions. Instead, Wang seeks to attend to the historical conditions under which those abstractions stabilize themselves as a kind of common sense and obtain the status of ideology, and how, more to the point, a given abstraction becomes true or real under determinate historical conditions. Crucial to Wang’s argument is his acknowledgment towards the end of section 4 that the figure of economic man is no mere fragment of ideology that can be dismissed under the aegis of historicism, but rather comprises a determinate historically constituted reality.Footnote 19 Wang therefore poses, in opposition to the ahistorical abstraction of the Austrian school, the problem of real, historical abstraction, or a form of historicization that is precisely not the historicism of the German historical school. This is a historicization of how the theoretical figure of the “economic man” comes to emerge as part of the theoretical vocabulary of classical and Austrian economics, but so too, and more provocatively, is it the understanding that the “economic man” comes to comprise the dominant mode of subjectification under capitalism, albeit in terms striated by class antagonism according to the figures of the capitalist and the wage laborer. In the interstices of Wang’s arguments, though uncited, are Marx’s own remarks from the first part of Volume 1 on what he terms the “social validity” of the forms of thought that comprise political economy. Having acknowledged that the value form already occupies a central position in the thought of classical political economy, Marx goes on,
the categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.Footnote 20
The figure of “economic man” is no simple lie, but has a “social validity” for the capitalist mode of production. For Wang, the task is to understand how the agents of capitalist production assume the form of the “archetypal humans,” if not through the treatment of invariable characteristics of already existing subjects in the manner of the Austrians. The conceptual axis on which his whole theorization turns is that of “personification,” in which “individuals are dealt with only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories.” To an even greater extent than Marx, this is not simply an analytical operation, but a description of a real social process in which human subjects are expressed as the conduits for the mute compulsion of the relations of production. These relations of production come to take on the form of human personae, and yet Wang rejects any notion that economic life can be explained in terms of the subjective wills of its participants. For Wang, then, the actions of capitalists in contexts of competition over accumulation are subordinate to the decidedly impersonal compulsion of economic forces, rather than the autonomous decision making of individual capitalists. The economic man thus emerges as the archetypal human of capitalist society. In his quotations from Marx as well as his own discussions of personification, Wang deploys the term rengehua (人格化) as the translation of the German Personifikation (whence comes the English). Wang’s consistent use of this processual term underscores that his concern is not with the status of the human fully imminent within each subject, but rather with the process by which capitalist social relations assume the form of human subjects. In the same terms, capitalism itself tends to engender and require specific forms of subjectification, which themselves also embody the illusion of agency and subjectivity, not least through the image of the heroic capitalist imagined by Sombart. Wang does, in sections 6 and 7 of his essay, mount a critique of capitalism in terms that suggest the possibility of an alternative set of social relations that are more fully human. He does so once again through the theoretical sources of Marx’s Chapter 1, in the form of the inverted relations that capitalism produces between actors and things: “the relations of production that comprise capitalism are such that the relations between these sets of agents are not relations between human beings, but between objects.” So too are there intimations of Marx’s formulations as derived from his 1861–3 Economic Manuscripts. Marx, observing that under capital the worker comes to be “subsumed” under the conditions of labor, notes that
even this relation in its simplicity is an inversion, a personification of the thing and a reification of the person, for what distinguishes this form from all previous ones is that the capitalist does not rule the worker in any kind of personal capacity, but only in so far as he is “capital”; his rule is only that of objectified labor over living labor; the rule of the worker’s product over the worker himself.Footnote 21
The status of the archetypal human forms that predominate under capitalism—the wage laborer and the capitalist, which together mark variations on “economic man”—are, then, for Wang, simultaneously the personification of economic forces, and the reification (in Chinese wuhua (物化)—thingification—marking a close parallel to the German Verdinglichung, the literal transformation of social relations into objects) of the very human actors who participate in the social relations, as governed by a set of mediations that render capitalist social relations other than fully human. For Wang, postulating a transformed social condition in which relations once again assume the form of relations between human beings marks the elimination of fetishistic appearances that comprise the central object of his critique, specifically with the “economic man” no longer holding validity as the archetypal human. In his final and most suggestive turn, Wang argues that, insofar as economic science marks the fetishized representation of those very capitalist relations of production comprising its own conditions of historical necessity, these conditions are themselves delimited. Wang thus maintains a fidelity to Marx’s project as a critique of political economy. The transformation of social relations will, therefore, for Wang, also mark the end to the historical necessity of economic science as such, insofar as its modes of representation, including that of the economic man, will have lost their historical validity. For Wang, then, the “mission” of economics is historically delimited. Thus its current superfluous existence cannot be negated through thought, but only on the basis of real historical praxis. The critique of political economy in the present can, for Wang as for Marx, only be an imminent one, as the mode of critique that continues to inhabit and make use of the categories of the capitalist mode of production but constantly subjects them to a rigorous critique by disclosing the historical conditions of which they are but the fetishized representation. The historicity of the figure of the “economic man” is therefore redoubled with respect to economics as such.
A question arises: how does Wang’s problematic of the historicity of political economy and of its corresponding archetypal figures of the human—capitalist and wage laborer—enable us to think the question of the economic under socialism, both in its epistemological permutation as political economy and as an organizing principle of social life? Wang was closely aware of this question, insofar as it emerges in his other texts from 1942, above all his essay “The Laws of Political Economy.” This latter essay is, in its modes of argumentation, entirely consistent with Wang’s essay on the human insofar as he seeks to emphasize that the laws of political economy obtain their validity and indeed universality only within the context of particular social and historical conditions. This being the case, for Wang, “the absolute character of economic laws exists only in relation to the economic reality of the definite society that these laws embody. When this society ceases to exist, or when one departs from that society, the absolute character of the economic laws immediately becomes purely relative.”Footnote 22 Hence, if the postulation of the law of value, for example, is to be understood as having an absolute character only under capitalist society, how can its invocation in the Soviet Union be understood? Wang’s answer marks a moment of exceptional dynamism in his thought:
does the Soviet Union, which declares itself to be introducing socialism, not also continue to operate and research the economic laws of capitalism? In fact, when we undertake a close analysis, we find that rather than it being the case that socialist society continues to operate under the laws of capitalism, instead, it is the case that this sort of society continues to exhibit a relative degree of capitalist economy.Footnote 23
In other words, the economic laws of capitalism cannot be abstractly universalized to encompass all other societies, but rather the persistence of those laws indicates that Soviet society is other than fully or simply noncapitalist.
Reading this fragment in relation to Wang’s essay on the human, it is clear that certain laws of capitalist economy continue to exercise their effectivity under postrevolutionary conditions, to the extent that those conditions themselves do not mark a “pure” socialist social formation but encompass the persistence and reproduction of capitalist forms and logics. Here, a sharp divergence from the fate of political economy under post-Lenin Soviet socialism emerges. Soviet theoreticians were willing to take the coherence of “socialist political economy” for granted on the basis that the economic laws of socialism are radically autonomous from those of capitalism. For them, the task of political economy therefore lay in ensuring the rapid development of the productive forces. For Wang, however, on the basis of his observations in the 1940s, the extension of political economy into socialism was informed by the persistence of precisely those prerevolutionary social and historical conditions that render political economy necessary, namely in the form of the reproduction of social relations and social forms that are carried over from capitalism. In fact, Wang’s comments on the Soviet discourse on socialist political economy as they emerged after 1949 mark a considerable skepticism about Soviet socialism. This is true especially in relation to the Soviet textbook introduced into China in the early 1950s; Wang contrasted the Soviet fetishization of the “productive forces” with the persistent problem of the relations of production, and drew attention to the Chinese attempts, from the late 1950s onwards, to craft their own textbook of socialist political economy.Footnote 24
In the debates immediately preceding the Cultural Revolution on the commodity form under socialism, Wang emphasized that
to say that, under conditions of socialist society, the commodity and value maintain their fundamental essence and are only restricted, rather than being transformed or abolished, such that they maintain the soil for the spontaneous forces of capitalism [to develop] is ultimately correct … in actuality, because socialist society is a society of the transitional type, in this society, each aspect of economic relations retains various elements and traces of the old capitalist society, whereas, on the other hand, the communist and socialist elements increase on an ongoing basis.Footnote 25
These and other of Wang’s analyses from 1958–66 bear on the question of socialism as an extended and contradictory period of transition in which the operation of categories derived from political economy is radically overdetermined. Wang’s insights received a wider echo in the broader debates of the period through to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, where the vocabulary of “bourgeois right”—a vocabulary that Wang also deployed in selected writings—provided the theoretical rubric for thinking the reproduction of capitalist forms under postrevolutionary conditions.
Read in these terms, the possibility of a socialist economics, or a socialist political economy, emerges for Wang as for some others in the Chinese revolutionary Marxist tradition as a moving contradiction, where the continued validity under socialist conditions of the categories of political economy marks precisely the extent to which socialism is uneven with itself and characterized by hybrid forms. In his academic exegeses of Capital from this same period, Wang continued to make explicit invocations of the category of “personification” that had informed his thinking in the 1942 essay.Footnote 26 Wang’s interventions on the challenges of socialist construction in China, as well as his exegeses as they dated back to the 1940s concerning the historicity of the categories of political economy, ultimately pose the question of socialist personhood—that is, the contents of the “person” beyond the forms of subjectification engendered by capitalism as economic man. This was not a question Wang ever took up directly, yet it emerges from his 1942 essay in the envisioning of “rational relations” between human subjects as well as in the interstices of his diverse commitments. Emerging in the wider theory and practice of the Chinese Revolution in the figure of the “new human,” the new socialist human can be posed as the counterpoint of the “economic man” of Wang’s analysis; the defining feature of the new human is that they arise from and are the site of possibility for conditions in which “human relations have freed themselves from relations between objects,” and where the categories of political economy therefore cease to be operative.
Such conditions cannot, we should be reminded, be an affair of thought, but only of political practice, in lived historical time. The brilliance of Wang’s thought as expressed in his 1942 essay and other such texts lies precisely in the double bind by which his texts seek to articulate the conditions under which their object, terrain, and premise—economic science—will finish its historical mission, even while he moves within that very terrain through the power of imminent critique. How to unravel that double bind—and so to secure the possibilities of a different modality of being human—is nothing less than the task of revolutionary politics as such.
Acknowledgments
I thank all the other participants who made this project possible, and Rebecca Karl and Harlan Chambers in particular for offering incisive comments on my translation and commentary.
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