Moral economy does not matter

Shahab Sabahi
Energy and Environment for Development – Policy Analysis Research Group

Maha Hosain Aziz in her article in CNN (April 19th 2012), analyzes the causes of Occupy Wall Street movements around the globe. She claims that at various points in the past six months, movements have been fighting for the same cause as the peasant communities of rural Vietnam during the 1930s - the moral economy. She explains that theorists have typically used moral economy rhetoric to explain rural movements where protesters felt their basic right to subsistence was being threatened. In the case of Vietnam, the onset of colonial capitalism in the Great Depression contributed to a food crisis for peasant farmers, prompting significant protests. In effect, an informal contract had been broken between the governing power and the governed involving the individual’s basic right to feed himself. She believes today, a similar “contract” has been broken between governing powers and the governed, thus the main causes of Wall Street Movements were beyond corporate greed and income inequality.

Her analysis and perspective is valid in the context of the Great Depression and the 1930s. Since then, the world has thoroughly got changed. People’s knowledge has advanced and it affected their worldview, perception of world affairs and their rights. The street movements are not just about demanding people’s basic right, such as work, affordable basic goods, and homes. They challenge the government dysfunctional bodies, lousy regulations and ineffective policies. They simply do not trust governments’ corporate –oriented policies.   

Unlike the Great Depression era, there is no a clash of ideologies in the Great Recession time. Now policy making process faces big challenges and should be restructured. Capitalism embraces the culture of change which drives societies toward growth. Some people accept both the joys and comforts of capitalism achievements and challenges posed by those achievements. Capitalism contains the element of creative destruction which creates winners and losers. The gap between winners and losers widen when governments fail to regulate based on facts and reality and instead intervene by giving ill visions and targets which are not inline with society well-being.        

Contrary to Maha, I see the street movements, in different locations, fight their own causes. But what they have in common is “they are fed up with fake government visions”.  

To conceptualize the main causes of the street movements, two macro-questions should be asked “What difference cultural variation would make to capitalism? and Which forms of embedding would be most successful in supporting the street movements' strategies for success in the context of capitalism? (if we admit the importance of economic growth!!)”

Conflict between what societies need and what societies want in our time may be the key barrier. Perhaps moral economy in the context of globalization, integrated markets falls short to provide adequate principles for designing effective global governance and global policies.

From Globalization to Chaos – (application of entropy measure)

Shahab Sabahi

Energy and Environment for Development – Policy Analysis Research Group

With applying the philosophical reasoning approach (see my previous post), I examine the link between globalization and expecting more confrontations. In science, there is an analytical measure, it is called entropy, that being employed to evaluate phenomena which directly dominate human’s life. It can be used to explain aging, society decay, stability life, information, language, codifications, norms and cultures. According to this measure, the trends for the all phenomena tend to converge toward a universal trend for equalization, like the concept of globalization. Globalization has its adherent dynamics which force the whole system to equalization and developing a universal norm. In scientific term it means that an increase in global entropy. It is going to create an equivalent thermal death. There is another philosophical explanation that brings some hope that an open system, as our life system is, may not follow the entropy increasing direction. Chaos theory (I. Prigogine) explains chaotic moves keep a system away from reaching that equalization condition.    

With this perspective, S. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations and new world order” is rather philosophically described a natural phenomenon than posits just a hypothesis.