Today I want to revisit part of that realm of madness and mutiny and look at what Marx has to say about a burning question (for some) left aside in my previous article. It's the answer to the problem of inequality Breusers proposes: "A first condition for solving the problems of poverty, inequalities and exclusion is to abandon the dogma of economic growth."

This is a daring claim, isn't it? It draws the entire history of economic thought within the realm of philosophical speculation. However, the fact that so many people remain so poor – despite the general understanding that economic growth makes many positive contributions to the world – is a problem that demands consideration.

Let's begin with the basics. In an interesting discussion on development, the philosopher Christopher Wraight expresses a worry about the global situation of justice;

Social rights and economic benefits are not divided equally between the rich countries in the north and the poor ones in the south. "The statistics" – says Wraight – "are depressing: a sixth of the world's population live in extreme poverty. More than a billion people have insufficient money to feed themselves and their families adequately. Around 75 million children receive no formal education, and 9.7 million babies born around the world will not live to see their fifth birthday."

Perhaps even more dispiriting is the fact that all of this is taking place in a global economy which was until very recently experiencing one of the most impressive periods of growth in recorded history.

Concerns of this kind not only indicate angst and unrest, but also point to the question of whether "economic growth" is a new Western curse. I doubt it's anything new, or necessarily Western, or a curse. There are, however, many difficulties we face in working out a better model of distributive justice.

It's not immediately obvious, though, how the rejection of the dogma is indeed a solution to the problem of inequality – nor is it obvious whether economic development is a dogma at all. So let's try to illustrate the issue by means of an example. Consider this story, told over and over again about a fisherman and a Wall Street executive.

One early afternoon, a fisherman returns home on his little boat to find a smart executive on holidays in his village in a tropical island – somewhere in the South Atlantic. The businessman asks the fisherman how long he had fished for. The fisherman looks at the rich guy with a wide grin across his face and replies.

"I usually fish for about three hours every day."

The executive insists. "Why don't you stay longer?" The fisherman patiently explains that what he usually catches is all he needs to take care of his family. Dumbfounded, the businessman persists. "But why don't you continue catching more fish?" "Because" – says the fisherman cheerfully – "I plan to spend the rest of my day playing with my children and talking to my family ... Then I'll probably take a little siesta after lunch, relax on the beach and drink some Caipirinha."

Here the businessman realizes it's time to teach this fool a thing or two. Recalling the lessons he had learnt in his 'classical economic' lectures at Harvard, he explains the fisherman that he should stay at sea all day and catch more fish. Then he should save up the extra money he makes and buy a bigger boat to catch even more fish. Then he should keep reinvesting his profits in even more boats and hire other fishermen to work for him. End of the story, if he worked really hard, in 20 or 30 years he would be a very rich man.

The executive leans backward on his beach chair and sips from his Cosmopolitan – feeling pleased he's teaching this wally how to be rich and happy by maximising his profits. The fisherman stares at him with a puzzeled look on his face and asks.

"What should I do after I become very rich?" The businessman responds quickly. "Of course, you retire, live with your family in a nice tropical island, spend time with your friends, enjoy a drink or two, and relax on the beach." This gave the fisherman a long pause, since it wasn't quite clear to him whether he understood the logic behind that lesson.

This story is intriguing because it's easy to picture oneself on both sides. The first time you hear it, you almost instinctively agree with the businessman about the idea of buying a bigger boat and so on; only to realize the paradox, since it's obvious that the fisherman doesn't have to work that hard to appreciate life – he's currently already enjoying his afternoons with his family and friends, his Caipirinha and his siesta.

How this absurdity arises remains to be seen. To this end, I now turn to a more philosophical discussion. What shapes modern society to think like the executive in our story? What shapes our strong belief in the godlike necessity of economic development?

For one thing, when we think of the fisherman's 'poor' lifestyle, we often think of it as some kind of aberration: a result of the lack of our sophisticated technological, industrial and economic structures. To think in such terms, though, is perhaps to get things the wrong way round. Perhaps the very idea is a joke. But how does it start?

The idea of maximising profit begins well before we come to the issue of poverty, inequality and exclusion; it begins with the myth that it's only in highly industrialized societies that we can achieve our full potentiality as satisfied human beings.

Perhaps the basic flaw of the thesis is in the way our thoughts and desires are conditioned. After all, in preaching to the poor fisherman, our posh executive is only following the almost coherent economic model promoted by great theorists such as Keynes, Domar and Harrod – who constructed closely related models of economic growth intended to show how wealth can be expanded by means of saving and investment, which in turn increases the stock of capital and thereby the final product.

But the absurdity becomes obvious when we look at our story closely; for clearly the fisherman doesn't need the legacy of classical economy to enjoy life with his family and friends in a nice tropical island (or anywhere else for that matter).

Hence, Marxist writers such as Shalins and Godelier criticize capitalism and its law of value, as explained by classical theorists, for propagating the dogma of economic growth. In Marx's own words, it's not hard to see that the idea of value of the executive in our story is motivated by a desire for profit and accumulation of capital as goals in themselves – not as sources of consumption and satisfaction of needs. Who's right? I leave that for the reader to decide.

Perhaps our story does nothing to elucidate the dogma of economic growth, nor does it rehabilitate the issue of global justice, but it clearly illustrates that only with some radical changes we can begin to see the clear light of equality through the other side of the dense and dark jungle of poverty that still divide the rich north and the poor south.

As for the fisherman, we can probably learn an Epicurean lesson here: the pursuit of excessive wealth as an end in itself doesn't necessarily yield the realization of our full range of capabilities as human beings. |