A Federation of Ways of Life Towards A Globalized Social Heresy

A FEDERATION OF WAYS OF LIFE: TOWARDS A GLOBALIZED "SOCIAL HERESY"
Christian Arnsperger Assoc. R.I.P. | Revue internationale de philosophie

2007/1 - n 239 pages 81 104
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A federation of ways of life: Towards a globalized social heresy

CHRISTIAN ARNSPERGER
The pro-globalization zealots are in fact merely pro-capitalist zealots. Their discourse has not changed signicantly over the last two centuries, and they view the global marketplace as the natural area over which the logic of capitalism can and should be extended. What they need to be faced with is not a strained and grim Marxism itself also more than 150 years old but a more joyous and other-worldly form of alter-globalization. This nonMarxist anti-capitalism will completely destabilize the pro-capitalist zealots because they, more than anyone else, have an interest in perpetuating the Marxism/ anti-Marxism divide. Critics of capitalist globalization therefore need to be radically heretical, playing along with capitalist rules and values while, at the same time, working hard to subvert them from the inside. As can perhaps already be felt, this is a paper of strongly engaged philosophy. Making the reection on global justice more open requires what I would call combat philosophy. On the horizon, what heretical reection on global justice ought to aim for is a federation of ways of life some capitalist, some non-capitalist, and some even non-market structured by a small set of regulating principles to ensure the coexistence of heretical (sub-)societies. Such a federation would be the true expression of universality, rid of the hasty and undue amalgamation of world peace, world trade, and world capitalism.
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Underlying this paper is a broad and ambitious project: to re-envision globalization by replacing the current apologetic and monolithic trend in international economics with a more heretical and therefore more pluralistic trend. Contemporary anti-globalization movements have indeed espoused pluralism and have occasionally called themselves a movement of movements. However, the vast majority of them keep playing into the hands of the pro-globalization zealots by perpetuating a restrictive and now antiquated face-off between Marxism and anti-Marxism. Social heresy attempts to re-think globalization while moving beyond this historical dualism.
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Globalization and religious messianism

The political base of economic globalization Most of those who nowadays are calling for reection on global justice start out from the diagnosis of a failure of existing international institutions () to address the () challenges posed by accelerating globalization (Cronin and De Greiff, 2002: 1, italics added). The focus of the discussion is predominantly on economic globalization, namely diverse forms of international integration (Bhagwati, 2004: ix, italics added). Only rarely is such a multi-faceted integration process considered to be completely innocuous. There will always be, of course, the few ultra-liberal illuminati who continue to believe that international economic integration is the spontaneous continuation of the organic unfolding of natural history. Somewhat surprisingly for the former director of the top regulatory institution in the area, ex-WTO chief Mike Moore writes that Globalisation is not a policy, but a process, which has been going on since man has climbed down from trees (Moore, 2003: 20). Perhaps Moore would not deny that while not being a policy (that is, a set of measures consciously implemented by a small number of persons mandated by the people to do so), the integration process has required a fair amount of politics, backing from state power, and so on (see, e.g., Cox, 1987). Indeed, the majority of scholars and activists whether on the right or on the left agree on the fact that the current global order is also a political order, and that those who are in a position to inuence its design and operation have a responsibility to ensure that it satises basic requirements of justice (Cronin and De Greiff, 2002: 1, italics added). Therefore, in the reection on globalization, there is absolutely no legitimacy for splitting economics off from political science and moral and political philosophy. Any statement about how to organize worldwide capital ows, trade and migration will always be inseparably economic, political and philosophical. Indeed, most right- and left-wing thinkers are even apt to agree that the citizens of the developed countries and their governments share some degree of moral responsibility for the misery, insecurity, and injustice to which a large proportion of the worlds population is currently exposed, and that this responsibility is far from being discharged in the global order as it is presently constituted (Cronin and De Greiff, 2002: 1-2).
A FEDERATION OF WAYS OF LIFE: TOWARDS A GLOBALIZED SOCIAL HERESY
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Conicting Messiahs? Such a broad consensus, however, will always ourish on deep disagreements about exactly how that (collective) responsibility is to be discharged; in essence, the unanswered question that allows the apparent consensus to stand is, Is it our collective responsibility to perfect and deepen the current integration process, or is it to halt it and in the latter case, what ought we to put in its place? Here are two radically opposed, and rather emblematic, answers:
The so-called Washington consensus of the 1980s (...) emphasized the importance of sound scal and monetary policies and greater reliance on market forces in economic development. (...) a world integrated through the market should be highly benecial to the vast majority of the worlds inhabitants. () The problem today is not that there is too much globalization, but that there is far too little. (Wolf, 2004: xvii) The ever more visible failure of the economic experiment we variously call economic globalization, neoliberalism, or corporate globalization to live up to any of its own announced goals () has led the poorest nations on earth into a kind of rebellion against the richest nations [because] they have clearly learned from previous WTO rounds that they were not designed to benet them. (Cavanagh and Mander, 2004, xi-xii)
Clearly, both passages are written from an earnestly well-meaning perspective, purporting to take into account the basic interests of the least advantaged majority of the worlds population. Both are heavy with precisely the sense of collective responsibility so dearly called for; they simply do not agree in the least on how that moral responsibility, even when it is fully acknowledged, is to be put into practice. Indeed, the rst sounds vaguely more realistic not because its fundamental ethical stance is more convincing (it is not to me), but simply because it adheres more closely with what is already going on, i.e., with the ongoing political process of worldwide economic integration. When Wolf calls for more globalization not less, he is essentially calling for more of the same: a continuation and intensication of the current trend. Sure enough, the protests and rebellion evidenced by Cavanagh and Mander are no less empirically observable; no amount of revisionism can deny the reality of these movements and their quantitative signicance. However, if their underlying aim is to provide an alternative blueprint in the form of an alternative world reality, these protests will be barking up the wrong tree. The reason is not, of course, that they are in any sense wrong or unethical, but that they will be hurling one monolith against another monolith in the hope, perhaps, that their alternative ethics will draw sufcient unanimity so that this world can be uprooted and
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replaced, wholesale, by another world. On the opposite side, so to speak, Wolf, Fukuyama and others will exert all efforts to help this world stay in place and to discredit as totalitarian dreams all proposals of another world. This contemporary clash of titans is the most recent remake of a very old, fundamentally religious scheme. Judaism and Christianity have, from their very inception, entertained the hope that this world could be uprooted and regenerated through and through by Gods Messiah, by a message of liberation; and after Hegels strained efforts to transform Christianity into a secular philosophy of the World Spirit, Marxism offered the secularized version of messianism and claimed that single-minded social struggle, propelled at all times by a chosen class, would eventually make manifest the other world in the form of a classless, scarcity-less society. As Longley (2002) has shown rather convincingly, the UK-USA alliance of the postwar period seeks to implement yet another version of this age-old dream, in the constricted context of visionary Protestantism. And unsurprisingly, even a critic such as Shipman (2002) ultimately sees US-led globalization as the right way ahead. There is religious messianism involved because, as Shipmans book later makes clear, going along with Americas wish to recongure the world, and recognizing and seeking to share the USAs ambitions, means espousing the whole corpus of economic globalization theory which Wolf with irony, of course, but still quite revealingly sums up in his ten commandments of globalization (Wolf, 2004: 319-320). The sheer amount of religious inspiration and vocabulary involved in the discourse of both globalizations zealots and globalizations rebels must prompt us to inquire whether it might not be the very religious nature of the face-off that makes it look so hopelessly gridlocked. Perhaps the most fruitful way ahead in the debate on global justice, then, would be to renew social criticism beyond the clash of blueprints inherent in that quasi-religious face-off, and to move in the direction of what I will later on call a federation of ways of life that sees the market-nonmarket face-off as irrelevant. To proceed along this line, a rst step consists in understanding more deeply why the body of economic theory underlying defenses of globalization is a body of quasi-religious doctrine.
Economics as a secular religion and the realized eschatology of a global earthly kingdom
We are witnessing a clash of securalized religious views: staunch pro-globalizers today are rst and foremost debating with their secular-religious rival,
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namely Marxism. In that sense, we have not exited from economic crypto-religion Marxism still polarizes the debate, and most defenders of globalized capitalism as the right way forward are promoting mainly anti-Marxist doctrine. Marxist eas and lice: Wolf and Moore on anti-globalizers Martin Wolf, for instance, thus recounts his college years at Oxford in the mid-1960s. I met many sub-species of Marxist. They seemed to believe the differences among them were important. I was reminded of what Samuel Johnson said when asked to distinguish the merits of two minor poets: there is no point in settling the point of precedency between a louse from [sic] a ea. I already knew that all varieties of Marxism were both wicked and stupid. The hostility to liberal or bourgeois democracy they shared I found contemptible. (...) Liberals, social democrats and moderate conservatives are on the same side in the great battles against religious fanatics, obscurantists, extreme environmentalists, fascists, Marxists and, of course, contemporary anti-globalizers (Wolf, 2004: x-xi, xii-xiii, italics added). A somewhat less abrupt, but still rather mind-boggling amalgamation is provided by ex-WTO head Mike Moore: It is ironic that some of the most strident critics of globalisations most modern incarnation come from some of the same churches that sent missionaries into the eld to globalise their faith and harvest recruits, joined by old-time Marxists, or their ideological children, who sing The Internationale while marching on the streets against globalisation. (...) Globalisation is not an aberration. The aberration was how world trade was stopped in its tracks as a response to the Great Depression which began in late 1929. That Great Depression was made deeper, more prolonged and more lethal by the outburst of protectionism and economic nationalism. (...) From all this came the twin tyrannies of the last century Fascism and Marxism. Both protectionist, nationalistic and murderous (Moore, 2003: 26-27). It is instructive to note that for both Wolf and Moore, anti-globalization protesters are part of a large alliance which also includes religious fanatics and extremists, that is, people who want to promote a non-secular religion and who, as a result, are bound to share objective interests with Marxists and their promotion of a secular religion. What neither Wolf nor Moore say is that their own alternative to Marxism is also a secular religion. In Moores passage, the two scourges of fascism and Marxism are not accompanied by the third and in the end dominant scourge, namely capitalism. The reason, of course, is that Moore does not believe it is a scourge; rather, he sees capitalism as the natural medium in which the centurys development ought to have, and even-
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tually did, unfold: World trade, he indicates, was stopped in its tracks implying that it did have tracks to begin with, just like in the good old Hegelian truism that universal Reason is on its way to self-realization in history. Wolf is rather more blunt than Moore and lays down his cards at once. Like Moore, he starts out from the 1930s but then plunges directly into what we might term a religion of secular salvation through trade and prosperity: The chief lesson [I learned in Oxford] concerned the damage caused by the collapse of liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the assault of assorted collectivist ideologies. But I also learned that good economic policy could help sustain a liberal society and economy against such attacks. Political stability and social harmony were in great danger once an economy failed, as it had done in the 1930s. Economics was about far more than prosperity, signicant though that was. It was also important if we were to sustain civilization. Once people are deprived of hope of a better life for themselves and their children, societies based on consent are likely to founder. (...) Subsequently, the works of Friedrich Hayek (...) convinced me that a market economy was (...) a necessary condition for a stable and enduring democracy. The market may not be a sufcient condition for such a democracy. But it was a necessary one, because the concentration of power inherent in a planned economy was incompatible with effective pressures from below (Wolf, 2004: xi-xii, italics added). Obviously, the reference to Hayek and to the need to sustain civilization gives it all away, since the Austrian economist was undoubtedly the most strident zealot of the secular religion of market order. What Wolf naively glosses over is, of course, that Hayek could never defend the market economy without also defending capitalism and its own specic way of generating concentrations of economic and political power; competition and the prot drive cannot treat every economic agent equally throughout history, there are winners and losers, and Hayek never hid the fact that the losers themselves had to nd solace in the awareness that theirs had been a sacrice for the greater good a religious image if there ever was one. As an inuential but ultimately mediocre disciple, Wolf neglects this when he repeats the catechism, and he thus makes it sound as if what he calls democracy were not, as a result of historical dynamics of the economic system, capitalist democracy. Moreover, Wolf omits one crucial historical detail namely, that what he calls the collapse of liberalism was, at least for the case of fascism, largely hastened by what Marx had very early on diagnosed as capitalisms main structural aw namely, its self-destructive tendency to generate deep
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economic crises. So in a very real sense, fascism was actually brought on by capitalisms own internal contradictions and failures of the time. Robert Nelsons thesis of economics as religion Although this discussion could be taken much further and could be fuelled by additional quotations from the zealots, I believe we already have enough material to begin realizing that these staunch defenses of globalized capitalism as a just and prosperity-generating system make sense only within the context of a battle between the faithful a battle in which the only alternative is between really existing socialism and really existing capitalism with their associated dogmatic underpinnings: Marxian economics on the one hand; classical, Austrian and neoclassical economics on the other both of which, clearly, suggest a blueprint for secular salvation through material prosperity. Neoclassical economists as well as Marxist economists deeply believe in economic progress as a civilizing endeavor, and more precisely as the only rational civilizing endeavor. What they deeply disagree on, however, is whether capitalism and its systemic logic is a vector of, or an obstacle to, such economic progress. In that precise sense, current debates about globalization are still debates among clerics or among priests if one can accept the somewhat controversial idea that economists, whether Marxist or antiMarxist, are basic religious gures of contemporary societies. What both categories of economists are trying to do is to shut non-economic religion from the debate by conating religious fanatics and extremists with their own secular adversaries, a rhetorical procedure which very securely masks each camps own fundamental religiosity... Nelson (2001) has suggested that economists, especially neoclassical one but also, earlier, Marxist ones, occupy in contemporary societies the place of high priests. At the end of his book, Nelson ends up with a scathing but deeply relevant critique of the way in which non-Marxist economists have taken up the burden of disseminating orthodox doctrine: Historically, the greatest obstacle to the market is [that] many people have objected to the market for moral and ethical reasons that is to say, they have strong religious (or quasi-religious) objections of one form or another to the wide scope for the expression of self-interest as found in the market. () As a matter of intellectual content, the basic economic principles of price theory [and of international trade theory] could be learned in a few days if not hours. The resistance of many students is more moral than intellectual. If they must be exposed to many concrete examples that show how the market works, it is
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because there is a strong initial predisposition to reject the message (one that many noneconomists never overcome) (Nelson, 2001: 331, italics added). This last point is very crucial: most globalization zealots see themselves truly as evangelizing educators called to duty to lead the masses in overcoming their misguided resistance to simple and benign economic principles such as the international division of labor, the law of comparative advantage which grounds it, and various other ideas such as technology-led growth, the growth gap and the catching-up principle of development, and so on. Bhagwati has coined a striking expression for most of anti-globalization protests: fears masquerading as evidence (Bhagwati, 2004: ix) a classical stance among enlightened educators... What is at stake in this foundational religious task is to bring the masses around to accepting a key idea: that capitalism, if adequately regulated, is open to any and all initiatives which a genuine human being might engage in for his or her self-development; of course, capitalism whether national or internationalized has its laws of functioning, and these must be respected so that overall optimality in market allocation can be achieved; but this, the enlightened masses should realize, is no obstacle to any of the self-fulllment projects anyone may harbor. Woe be to those who still refuse to become rational and repeatedly fail to understand this Of course, in our present context, such a thesis might at rst appear as cheap provocation. Why speak of religious dogma and of priesthood in connection with political reection on economic globalization? My ultimate aim is to be able to re-introduce another gure from religious philosophy namely the heretic, who at all times stood rmly in the face of dominant dogma and claimed his right to choose or pick out part of the dogma while rejecting other parts of it. There have been heretics both in Marxist and in non-Marxist circles. As I will suggest below, the best way forward in the critique of globalization is the replacement of the current clash of Churches by a much less structured, heretical network of life experiments based on a twofold claim to choice outside of the dominant dogmas: rst, the choice to live in a market economy that is not also capitalist; and second, the choice to live in a non-market economy. This defense of economic and social heresy is the task I set myself to in the following two sections.
Social heresy in the age of globalized markets

In their otherwise insightful remarks on global justice, Cronin and De Greiff end up adhering to the clash-of-Churches view in a very direct way, by
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insisting on value universalism: Wholesale criticisms of the evils of globalization tend to overlook the fact that the governments and populations of underdeveloped countries have a clear and urgent interest in promoting economic development, provided that it does not give rise to one-sided dependencies and is consistent with basic principles of social justice (De Greiff and Cronin, 2002: 29, n. 2, italics added). From the clash of Churches to the friction of universalisms I believe this formulation, though well-meaning, is ultimately awed because it plays into the hands of the globalization zealots: for them, globalization does have a human face, it does promote universal values but it is too sluggish and too complex to do so quickly enough. Therefore, we need minimally intrusive regulations to channel the energies of the market into the right pipes so that social justice will be achieved. Let me just ask as simple question: Who is we? Human beings will perhaps never quite leave the realm of religious thought in the general sense that most of us feel the need to live in a world where beliefs and practices are unied sufciently to ensure that our daily lives are on the whole orienting us towards progress. What matters crucially, however, is that the global macrocosm be organized in such a way that all microcosmic faiths, all ideas of human progress be able to have a go at it. For this purpose, global universalism is simply inadequate. I want to suggest an alternative route (though of course not one which no one has ever trodden before): that of a federalistic universalism of partial universalisms a route which sees globalization as a federal coexistence of capitalist and noncapitalist ways of life rather than a hegemonic generalization of a restricted plurality of capitalist ways of life. A direct implication of this is that what Cronin and De Greiff call the aspiration of Third-World governments and populations to economic development can perfectly well be catered to without any universally valid notion of development being afrmed at any level of the local or international institutions. Universalism itself becomes a local notion, in the sense that while each community may afrm its own development choices as universal (they may believe these choices would be good for anyone), there can never be any overarching theory of development guiding the international institutions. The same will hold true for conceptions of social justice: what the international institutions have to do is merely to coordinate the interactions of various communities each carrying its own conception of what a just society is including its own
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conception of the extent to which social justice has anything to do with markets and/or with capitalism. Imperialism then has a very simple denition: it consists of any community A treating another community B as if B had the same conception of social justice as A but the authorities of A knew better than the authorities of B how to implement that supposedly shared conception. As a result, the logical structure of universality is deeply modied. In the contemporary pro-globalization ethos, it is one particular blueprint of a good and/or just society, so-called free market democracy, which serves as the universal lter through which all aspirations to life and meaning have to ow before they can meet and interact. In the new universalistic ethos to be developed here, a crucial distinction has to be made between concrete or ex post universality and abstract or ex ante universality. Any communitys particular way of life, to the extent that it sees itself as universalizable, embodies an abstract universality; this does not mean at all that its members experience it as an abstraction, only that from the point of view of the whole, it is de facto not (yet) universalized. Concrete universality cannot be grasped as an ex ante set of principles or values; like life in the complex interaction of cells, it emerges unchecked and unplanned through the interaction of the various abstract universalisms. We therefore get the picture of a sort of friction of the universalisms: abstract universalisms attracting or repelling each other and, in the process, generating whatever concrete universalism emerges from their particular interactions. In fact, this picture is more general than that of the clash of Churches we saw earlier; the clash of Churches is a special and degenerate case of the friction of universalisms: it arises when each abstract universalism forgets its partial character and when its members act as if their abstract universalism coincided with an illusory concrete universality even though, from a purely causal and logical viewpoint, such a coincidence is impossible (since the whole never pre-exists to the parts even when it emerges from them). It is only when each competing abstract universalism has within itself the reective capacity to become aware of itself as partial, that the concrete universality will be, in the right sense, universal. Of course, the way in which each partial universalism will color or affect the morphology of the concrete emergent universalism depends on the prevailing international context, including the geopolitical and military situation; but however one sees it, one blueprint such as free market democracy can become parasitic on the concrete universality only if substantial efforts are exerted to reduce and then deny the actual plurality of abstract universalisms.
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Since, as Wolfs, Moores, Bhagwatis and other zealots writings amply demonstrate, the free market democracy i.e., capitalist value system is endowed with almost no reective capacity to become aware of itself as only partial, and since Marxs and the Marxists own theoretical endeavors possessed an equally totalizing ambition, it is no wonder what could be a friction and mutual fertilization of partial universalisms has today remained stuck at the undeconstructed and unreconstructed stage of a clash of Churches. I want to argue in what follows that such deconstruction and reconstruction can only come, today, from the heretic fringes of capitalist society. Probing the perversity argument The word heretic comes from the verb to choose. In Catholic doctrine, the heretic is the one who erroneously or so it is claimed separates at his own choosing several truths of faith and severs them from the organic whole to which they supposedly belong. Heretics are those who, on the basis of this opinionated choice i.e., on the basis of an opinion different from the opinion expressed in the organic dogmatic structure dare to separate themselves from the Church and to form their own Church. In older times, heretic communities were brutally persecuted. Nowadays, we are more civilized or so it appears. Still, some of the zealots edgy remarks betray an itching desire for unication and purication. Moore is uneasy about heresy, i.e., about the choice to accept part of globalization while rejecting other parts of it; for instance, he does not very much approve of the use of capitalism-generated technology for anti-capitalist purposes: The very forces of information ows and openness are the same ones that have empowered critics to mount anti-globalisation Internet campaigns deploring it, an irony lost on some. (Moore, 2003: 25) The reason why he can continue to crunch out such all-or-nothing reasoning is that he still remains stuck in the old McCarthian paranoia about the Communist takeover of the free world. Thus, for example, talking about environmental conservation, he reverts to the good old rhetoric and the preachers tone: Let us hope those who seek freedom to choose win through, not those who seek central controls to get desired results. History shows that the most polluted places and poorest people are those that have suffered from governments which tried to plan outcomes by central and government ownership, and that have suffered from fraud, the absence of democracy, accountability and the lack of an active, engaged civil society. (Moore, 2003: 90, italics added)
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I learned [from my parents] that enlightenment ideals of freedom, democratic government and distinterested search for truth were innitely precious and frighteningly fragile. I discovered, too, that these values had many enemies, some open and some covert. Worst among them were those intellectuals who benet from the freedom only liberal democracies provide, while doing everything they can to undermine it. These, I later discovered, were the kind of people George Orwell had attacked before, during and after the Second World War. But they return in every generation, spreading their havoc upon the innocent young. In the 1960s the most inuential pied piper was probably Herbert Marcuse. More recently, it seems to have been Jacques Derrida. (Wolf, 2004: x, italics added)
The criticism of Marcuse and Derrida as bourgeois Marxists might be well taken, if we could be sure that Wolf was not using their names only to advance a very different covert agenda namely, the totalitarian idea that we now know what freedom means and that liberal democracies are a kind of absolute essence to be forevermore protected against the ever returning, deep-rooted tendencies of perverse thinkers. Is this not a form of metaphysical and religious drama? Of course, both Moore and Wolf know deep down that they cannot fully uphold this monolithic clash of Churches. Being more of an adroit politician, Moore tries to constantly navigate between scorn and political correctness; thus, he denounces civil-society protests when they are (perversely) directed against free market democracy, but at the same time he glories the active,
Actually, most anti-globalization protesters though not all would probably agree with most of this, without however deducing from it an unconditional defense of capitalism or of mere free market democracy. So how can the two above passages be made compatible? How can one at the same time glorify freedom of choice and condemn some of those who, as heretics, exercise precisely that freedom of choice? The Catholic Inquisition had an answer ready, and it remains the only answer which even Moore must give if he wants to remain consistent: The heretic is perverse; he knows that he cannot separate one part from the organic whole of the doctrine, but he does so nevertheless for merely self-serving purposes in other words, he exercises metaphysical egoism in an arena where (in line with Nelsons earlier thesis on religion) only submission to the dogmatic authority can ensure salvation. Thus, the militants who use Nokia cell phones and IBM computers with Microsoft programs to organize a protest against corporate globalization are thereby demonstrating the perversity of their misplaced freedom of choice: through their actions, they are undermining the very system that allows their action to occur. The same argument of perversity can be found in Wolfs diatribe against certain left-wing intellectuals:
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engaged civil society. This only means that, in classically dogmatic fashion, he views civil society not as the breeding ground for conceptions of justice and goodness, but as the instrument through which individuals and groups can optimally t themselves into his own preconceived, thoroughly capitalist conception of justice and goodness: Economic liberty, which allows choice, rewards enterprise and allows the creators of wealth to enjoy the results of their work and risk, means a more efcient allocation of resources, labour and capital (Moore, 2003: 52). And for added effect, Moore reverts to religiosity in order to ground his naturalistic amalgamation of peace, reciprocity, trade, and capitalism: ... what is conscience? Why do we know instinctively what is basically right and wrong? Perhaps conscience is simply God whispering in our ear. Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, appealed to the better angels of our nature in seeking conciliation between the warring sides (Moore, 2003: 51). A truly amazing feat of rhetoric...
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Deconstructing and reconstructing: The vital role of the social heretic The perversity argument is pernicious because it closes off any possibility for legitimate internal criticism. It protects the prevailing dogma by casting out the heretic and denying him any right to reform the dogma from within by either killing or excommunicating him. Thus, it allows the adherents to the dogma to deny a basic truth of axiomatics, namely, that any axiomatic system is at base a collective political choice: in place of the prevailing dogmatic system S, there could have been another dogmatic system S, but we chose S. Evolutionary naturalism conspires to make this political, collective-choice dimension virtually invisible, as when Moore contends that There is nothing new about globalisation, its been around since long before Britain ruled the waves and waived the rules or that History has always been about movement, of people, ideas and products (Moore, 2003: 24-25). This would be truly charming apologetics if it did not y squarely in the face of much of what economic history teaches us about the complementarity rather than substitutability of conquest and commerce (see, e.g., Chomsky, 1999; Chang, 2002) and if it was not contradicted by rst-hand testimonies by agents of the heavy-handed organizations that forcibly promote so-called free trade (see, e.g., Grifths, 2003; Perkins, 2004). A natural history of capitalism without a natural history of brutal extraction power is a fairy tale, as recently uncovered evidence from the epistolary exchanges between early economists (see Perelman, 2000) further demons-
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trates. Politics backed by weapons played a role too often neglected by the evolutionary narrative. Interestingly, Bhagwati has it almost right when, in his slim but incisive book on free trade, he starts by acknowledging that comparative advantage is, in fact, a rather recent idea. But then comes the usual litany of the misunderstood economists and the lack of common sense of the populace, which is so quick to embrace communism as a hasty x for the inevitable and/or remediable injustices of capitalism:
Today, (...) free trade is the target of a growing anticapitalist and antiglobalization agitation among the young that derives from what I like to call the tyranny of the missing alternative. The collapse of communism, the ideological system that rivaled capitalism, and the rise of Fukuyama-led triumphalism about markets and capitalism have created an intolerable void among the idealist young whose social conscience is attuned to the conviction that capitalism is a source of injustice. They do not see that capitalism can destroy privilege and open up economic opportunity to the many. I wonder how many of them are aware that Mrs. Thatcher was a grocers daughter and that, with all her failings, her leadership of the Conservative Party saw the rise to high levels of many who had, not a BBC accent or an inherent title, but simply merit. How many understand that socialist planning in countries like India, aimed at replacing markets with quantitative allocations, often accentuated, instead of reducing, unequal access because the latter meant queues that the well-connected and the well-endowed could jump with their moneys, whereas the former allowed a larger number to get to the desired targets? The untutored conviction that markets and capitalism are to be equated with social injustice has fueled the frustration that spills over into the street theater staged against free trade and its principal institution, the World Trade Organization. (Bhagwati, 2002: 3-4)
The main interest of this passage lies in Bhagwatis closing-off of any credible alternatives outside of Thatcherian capitalism. The way he goes about this is by opposing classically the economist in the know and the untutored masses. While strangely acknowledging (presumably out of a concern for political correctness akin to Moores) that the populace does harbor frustrations and convictions, he portrays them as resulting from a lack of genuine economic knowledge and as resulting in agitation and street theater. So, if we were to ask Bhagwati why there are still some idealist young whose social conscience is attuned to the conviction that capitalism is a source of injustice, he can only reply one thing: their feeling of intolerable void comes from the fact that the missing alternative is exercising on them a peculiar tyranny exactly like a missing limb that has been amputated still hurts for a long while even though it is forever gone. So these young people are simply the victims of psychological inertia: they have not yet gotten used to the fact that there is no more alternative to globalized capitalism no more alternative, that is, based on credible economic
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knowledge and on a sound economic worldview. To Bhagwati, antiglobalization protest is a bit like drug use: it is something you do as long as you have not been reconciled to reality as it is, a form of social escapism. The social heretic, on the contrary, is someone who stubbornly denies that reality as it is contains no radical virtualities and untapped possibilities. He does not at all deny that there is a reality which constrains the present, but he envisages rationally perceivable potentialities and openings which common sense rationality fails to perceive. In the ethics of globalization I want to argue for, this is a crucial cognitive capacity which all the pro-globalization zealots close off, or reduce to a minimum, by equating rationality with the functioning of globalized free-market democracy and by making it sound as if the natural drive to exchange were synonymous with market exchange, and as if the latter were synonymous with the capitalist logic of competitive prot maximization. Moreover, underscoring the need for an active civil society and then viewing that civil society essentially as a tool for rational market integration implies a view of democracy that is so narrow that the globalized free-market democracy is really a tiny fraction of what the rational heretical mind can and wants to envisage. In that sense, rational escapism is a crucial talent to be fostered and cultivated among heretics. In an intellectual climate where the very notion of ex ante perceivable potentiality suffers from neglect, especially on the part of pragmatists and positivists, I want to insist that rational escapism must in fact lie at the heart of social science if we want to escape the tyranny of the missing alternative. Indeed, only by ultimately portraying contemporary economic globalization itself as one among many possible outcomes of the interaction of rational social heretics can we begin to deconstruct the naturalistic essentialism that has everywhere crept into globalization discourse. As Rosenberg (2000) has emphasized, the pro-globalization zealots among economists are part and parcel of an intellectual trend which overemphasizes globalization as the factor of social change to the detriment of globalization viewed as the result of social change who overemphasize globalization as the (to them, legitimate and liberating) constraint on action to the detriment of globalization as the (to them, elusive and intractable) result of action. As a result, these economists are almost completely closed to the idea that heretical social action might be aimed at deconstructing what they believe to be common sense and their lip service to anti-globalization critics is always followed by a reassertion of the virtues of the concrete universality of free-market democracy, despite some heretics street theater scenogra-
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phies aimed at shouting out that the existing world economy is not free, that it is not even a market economy, and that it is certainly not a democracy simply because it is a capitalist world economy. Only if this deconstruction is allowed to be voiced and to be followed by concrete action by those heretics who wish to act, can various partial reconstructions of alternative common senses take place in various parts of the world. To make this audible and possible is the main and vital function of the social heretic.
From anti-globalization to a federation of ways of life

The illusion of the one right universalism There are essentially two key issues in anti-capitalist heresy. The rst is whether it is possible to construct, through collective action and legislative tailoring, a non-alienating market economy, i.e., a market economy in which all individuals can come into contact with and unfold their deepest human potentials. The second question is whether, in order to truly be non-alienating, economic life ought to take place in a non-market society. Both questions are equally crucial for a full understanding of the implications of social heresy. In the search for cognitive resources to envisage non-alienating market mechanisms or for non-market mechanisms, one could reach for the fashionable, all-purpose answer by saying that what is required is essentially the emergence of a new form of critical citizenship, based on an active civil society with cosmopolitical and universalistic overtones. As I argued earlier, the quest would quickly run up against a radical under-determination because there is no way of knowing ex ante whose partial universalism should become the embodiment of the capitalist or anti-capitalist concrete universalism of the cosmopolis. Luckily, however, this confused (i.e., too hasty) search for the right universalism is not the whole story. There has emerged recently a small number of signicant contributions to what I would not hesitate to call a genuine heretical reection on the global market a reection concerned with agents who critically accept the globalized market system, i.e., with forms of resistance to globalized markets that are emergent properties of the globalized market system itself (Matustik, 1998; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Aubenas and Benasayag, 2002). Despite their many deep differences, what these works have in common is the conviction that globalized resistance, if it is ever to emerge, cannot be planned by any single heretical mind or even by
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any group of well-meaning heretics, but needs to be brought forth as the unanticipatable consequence of multifarious experiences of heretical praxis. There is also, as we have seen, a parallel, more traditional, and naively universalistic globalism which keeps to more classical doctrines about the global economy as the legitimate emergence arena of all possible emancipation. These capitalist globalisms coexist in todays globalized capitalism with various anti-capitalist globalisms and with the anti-globalisms. The main point is that now, instead of being able to claim some kind of ex ante authority as being the right view about the benets and weaknesses of globalized markets, these more traditional views are themselves only a fraction of the available views so that they, too, represent particular partial universalisms. In a world of social heretics, both capitalist and anti-capitalist ideas would participate in the emergence of a concrete universalism which none of the doctrines in isolation can claim to dene ex ante.
This provides a deep lesson: In a world of generalized heresy, even the dominant dogma can be viewed as a heresy, which essentially implies that each and every doctrine or set of dogmas recognizes itself as a possible object of rational choice by individuals endowed with the capacity for critical acceptance of the dominant dogma. Beyond Multitude? It would be hopeless to attempt a general discussion of the global dynamics of heretical doctrines in this paper. In what follows, I shall concentrate more on the Empire variant of anti-capitalism because Negri and Hardt as well as Aubenas and Benasayag have begun to advance a particularly stimulating action-theoretic model. As we shall see, however, they have not yet developed it sufciently beyond rhetoric in order for it to offer a satisfactory exit from the antiquated clash-of-Churches vision. Reaching back to Spinozas rejection of Hobbes and Lockes notion of the people, Hardt and Negri advance an alternative action-theoretic category which they call the Multitude and which enters into an intra-systemic faceoff with its alter ego, Empire. Their book is so full of hypostatized entities that at rst one is tempted to view it in the same way one enjoys a Japanese lm with two huge intergalactic iron monsters clashing into each other in a barren desert. Upon reection, however, things get more serious; in fact, Empire is the logic of de-territorialized domination of globalized market actors and their institutional acolytes, whereas the Multitude is a kind of
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collective subject. This is, no doubt, what makes their concept of Multitude a purely metaphorical concept in the eyes of most individuals today interested in the dynamics of contemporary globalization, i.e., interested in how their own efforts to become rational heretics could be combined with similar efforts by others. Still, a more careful reading shows that Negri does speak of an ensemble of subjectivities which enter into relations which clearly suggests that the Multitude is a complex system of individual parts. But if so, emergent properties have to be looked for, and while there are certainly elements of emergence out of complexity in Hardt and Negris discussion, they immediately become obscured by holistic metaphors. Whatever ones judgment, in the end, about the intellectual credentials of their attempt at viewing globalization as the interpenetration of Empire and Multitude, it seems clear that Hardt and Negri would prot by replacing their metaphorical collective subject with a subjectless process based on the assumption that each member of the multitude attempts to share with the other members, through interactive experience and experimentation, elements of her personal heretical vision. Aubenas and Benasayag come closer to a fully edged picture of interacting social heresies. They insist on the variety of heretical experimentations and the difculties of individuals and subgroups in attaining any degree of certainty as to the possible success of their resistance:
Neither the landless in Brazil nor the Argentinian and Bolivian piqueteros nor the Algerian protester (especially in Kabylia) nor the European anti-globalizers are any longer viewing the conquest of power as a central objective of their movement. () This refusal to seek inscription into classical political modes of functioning of course generates numerous discussions within that movement: even more than others, it lacks the features of a monolithic block; rather, it appears as a moving mass shot through with uctuating and contrary winds. () [G]lobally, it is the rst time that within such a durable and multifarious movement, a movement held together by a powerful desire for change, the question of conquering power has become a question and not an obvious foregone conclusion. From this new assumption there almost spontaneously ows a whole new way of being and doing. () Up to today, () at the center of every revolutionary party or more simply of all those who were demanding social change, was the belief that man could orient the course of events all the way to the point where the society he had preconceived would emerge. () This is no longer the time of classical revolutionary struggle according to which we are struggling because we have the alternative model, a full blueprint ready for application as soon as we take power. () A squat in Toulouse, an
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alternative publishing house in Milan or a peasant experiment in India are no longer conceived as the foundations from which tomorrows society is bound to emerge. No these situations are now being lived with no aim other than themselves, what is at stake in them is only what is occurring here and now. (Aubenas and Benasayag, 2002: 10-15 passim, italics added)
This is almost literally the picture of a heretically pluralistic society shaped in which the various critical visions are localized and situational. These rationally heretical citizens have their own personal critical views on global capitalism and their own personal associated ways of life, but they do not claim to possess the conception or the way of life that can immediately replace the concrete totality of their ongoing interactions. Here we would move from Hardt and Negris indistinct and somewhat mystical Multitude to a more modest, but also more complexity-conscious way of modeling our societies as composed of a multitude of heretical communities, some pro-capitalist, some anti-capitalist, each attempting to realize as much as possible its own way of life without presupposing that it is the only rational one and that everyone should be pulled into their way of life as is the case now with the globe-spanning ideology of market integration where all ways of life have to be tailored to international competition or to international rules or trade regulations. Toward a global federation of ways of life Perhaps the most important aspect of this radically pluralistic but neither pro-capitalist nor anti-capitalist model of coexistence is that, depending on the concrete overall systemic logic that emerges from the interactions of heretic communities, some of them will nd it much harder than others to further their desired way of life. Especially in the early stages of heretical life, non-market communities and non-capitalist market communities may incur systemic sanctions from their uneasy coexistence with capitalist communities. As is well-known for the case of cooperative rms competing with capitalist rms in a market economy, and as would undoubtedly also be the case if say the European Union became a federation of self-management economies but continued to compete with a fully capitalist United States economy on a world market, the systemic sanctions linked with a life of critical acceptance may be so high that such heretical alternative may simply get destroyed by the dominant system.
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This could be the case if, instead of simply catering to trade between capitalist countries according to rules favorable to capitalist ways of life (consumption, prot, competition, wage labor, etc.), the international organizations were to implement three non-trivial mechanisms: Heavy worldwide redistribution in the form of community-level basic income grants so that each heretical community could buffer its preferred way of life from capitalist sanctions as much as possible. Concretely, this would amount to taxing each communitys GDP at the highest possible rate and redistributing the proceeds equally among all communities. Heresies would then still achieve unequal material wealth depending on their modes of internal organization, but would not have to face external systemic sanctions in addition. The establishment and development of a world market of rationally heretical ideas so that the members of each heretical community have access to as many alternative life scenarios as possible. In that way, the worldwide circulation of goods and services which interests promarket and especially pro-capitalist communities would be supplemented by worldwide circulation of existential resources, so to speak. The organization and nancing of worldwide mobility between heretical communities so that members and their families who wish to adopt another heretical way of life can do so without incurring either external systemic sanctions or internal communitarian sanctions. As a result, those seduced by alternative heresies could have the highest possible (though perhaps not the total and unrestricted) real freedom to move from one community to another. It would then be these mechanisms, rather than the more restricted, capitalistically oriented trade regulations of the WTO, which would apply to all communities of the globe. They, and not the WTOs (even reformed) rules or any allegedly universal conception of development, would properly embody global justice alongside the reparative and/or redistributive measures suggested, for instance, by Unger (1996) or Pogge (2002). In that way, there could be the beginnings of a genuine federation of ways of life, conceived as the maximally pluralistic coexistence of capitalist and non-capitalist groupings of rationally heretical individuals. How would such a world differ from the world envisaged by todays proglobalization zealots? It would be both a globalized world and a globally governed world not necessarily one ridden with conict and protectionist
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or nationalistic isolationisms. It would, in fact, correspond more to what the French language nowadays calls altermondialisation, instead of the buzzword of anti-globalization which the zealots like to use. Nor would it necessarily be a world with no religious dogmas in fact, each heretical community could be conceived as building its way of life on religious or pseudo-religious conceptions and foundations, just as Muslim, Christian and lac citizens do in Belgium or France. However, it would be a world that is not ruled by any economic religion, in the sense of a set of economic axioms and conceptions of social life that are de facto imposed on all those who wish to live according to reason. In such a world, no individual will be absolutely forced to live a life of wage labor, to sell his resources at a prot, to produce for the market or to open his borders to foreign products. Some such constraints may subsist due to the complexities of community life and of the coexistence of diverse communities but they are likely to be much less monolithic than in todays scheme of global commercial governance. Of course, todays capitalist globalization might still be one particular way in which a myriad of heretical communities end up organizing their coexistence. But that is precisely the crucial point of my whole discussion: it would be merely one particular way, not the way inherited from natural or common-sense evidence or from the historically evolved distribution of economic and political power. There is no straightforward argument as to why any such friction of universalisms would necessarily, under the three above mechanisms, converge quickly on concretely universalized capitalism. There is no straightforward argument, either, why it should never do so, or why it should necessarily converge on concretely universalized socialism or communism. These monolithic teleologies have no place in the present paradigm. Rational heretics have no reason to be sheepish or chronically singleminded; they will search, probe, and inquire but not under any constraint of remaining capitalistically correct. As a result, so-called international economics could never again coincide with the religious dogmatism it has acquired nowadays. In fact, economics itself would cease to be what it still is largely today, namely a sophisticated rationalization of capitalist market institutions and mechanisms. Trade may still yield a Pareto-efcient allocation of world resources under the assumptions of neoclassical theory, but a large portion of the worlds citizens may not care primarily for exhausting all gains from trade; some may not even care primarily about all-out market integration, or about for-prot production tout court. Accordingly, each heretical community would have its own heretical economic theorie(s), suited to the
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values and conceptions of social life that it deems foundational. One of them will still be the (neo)classical view of the world, but not all of them will. Democracy would, in such a world, be essentially federalistic that is, much as in John Rawlss Law of Peoples (Rawls, 1999) but without the added emphasis on capitalist world-market integration. Obviously, through the three above international institutional mechanisms, human rights and democracy will still stand high on the agenda of many societies, but they will no longer be tied up with the distorting ideological effects of either capitalism or of anti-capitalism. There will be, if anything, a gradual and bottom-up emergence of local forms of democracy co-evolving with the economic ways of life desired by each society (see, e.g., Falk, 2000). Universit de Louvain-la-Neuve
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References
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PERELMAN, M. (2000), The Invention of Capitalism: The Secret History of Primitive Accumulation, Durham, Duke University Press. PERKINS, J. (2004), Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler. POGGE, Th. (2002), World Poverty and Human Rights, Cambridge, Polity. RAWLS, J. (1999), The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. ROSENBERG, J. (2000), The Follies of Globalisation Theory, London, Verso. SHIPMAN, A. (2002), The Globalization Myth, Cambridge, Icon. UNGER, P. (1996), Living High and Letting Die, Oxford, Oxford University Press. WOLF, M. (2004), Why Globalization Works, New Haven, Yale University Press.

A Federation of Ways of Life Towards A Globalized Social Heresy

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A FEDERATION OF WAYS OF LIFE: TOWARDS A GLOBALIZED "SOCIAL HERESY"

Christian Arnsperger Assoc. R.I.P. | Revue internationale de philosophie

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A federation of ways of life: Towards a globalized social heresy

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A FEDERATION OF WAYS OF LIFE: TOWARDS A GLOBALIZED SOCIAL HERESY

A FEDERATION OF WAYS OF LIFE: TOWARDS A GLOBALIZED SOCIAL HERESY

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A FEDERATION OF WAYS OF LIFE: TOWARDS A GLOBALIZED SOCIAL HERESY

A FEDERATION OF WAYS OF LIFE: TOWARDS A GLOBALIZED SOCIAL HERESY

A FEDERATION OF WAYS OF LIFE: TOWARDS A GLOBALIZED SOCIAL HERESY

A FEDERATION OF WAYS OF LIFE: TOWARDS A GLOBALIZED SOCIAL HERESY

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