What Would I Change

I Need to Be Held Accountable

This piece is dedicated to Lilli who some years ago confronted me over a heated discussion on the injustices of our society by asking, So what would you change then?

If I were to change anything about the system we live in, I would make every transaction, every producer, every seller, every labourer, every expropriator of capital accountable for their actions. I would make it impossible, or at least very difficult to do something in the financial and production spheres of society without being held accountable for doing so. One of the most unjust characteristics of capitalism is its unaccountable quality. It is not the only one, and it is not exclusive to capitalism either but it is a specificity of capitalism. No one is held accountable for anything in the private sphere because they don’t need to be. This is unique to capitalism in the fact that it is an inherent feature of it. In the feudal system, one could physically see the expropriators of resources because they lived in large castles and stately homes beside those they fielded tax from. If the aristocracy wanted more from their peasants, they had just levy them directly at their doors, farms and shops. Their ability to levy taxes and dues were only as efficient as their ability to militarily take it from them. The peasants were accountable for their own production also because they grew mostly what they ate. They knew the shoe makers, locksmiths and goldsmiths, they knew them because they lived next to them, went to church, mosque and temple with them. Certainly there was dishonesty, there was cheating and lying but the supply chains, producers and expropriators were intimate enough to be held accountable for their actions. There was a face to everything, you knew how things got to you, where they came from just like you knew where your things went and who they affected. It made it easier to make morally better choices. Dishonesty came with a consequence because you were known by your community, whether you liked it or not. 

Capitalist modes of production are rather different. Capitalism, in my opinion is marked most virulently and most perniciously by its ability to hold very few actors accountable. That is because of the shear complexity of supply chains, the shear number of owners in a single property, the melange of producers for a single product, the stock market, the personhood of corporations. Specialisation of agriculture into a commodity market marks the beginnings of a capitalist system in 17th century Britain, where the products of farmers and producers would become lost in a market outside of their own community. A farmer’s specialised grain for instance, was to become valued, sold and bought on a market totally outside his power by farmers being forced to sell into an accumulated pool of every farmer’s specialised grain. This pool of grain under a capitalist system is owned by someone else (or many someones) as a commodity to be resold again to another market. Processors, bakers, packagers, labelers, distributors retailers and so the market chain continues. The farmer thus have little accountability to those who eat his food as his numerous buyers have little relation to the farmers/labourers who produced the product in the first place. Specialisation would become ironic by name, for one’s specialised production would become no more special than anyone else’s speciality. Suddenly, the farmer is made accountable only to the market and its purveyors who bought en mass his produce as a commodity, that is not a grain rather now more like a number on a stock sheet. Those purveyors themselves are not people rather, stakeholders whom may have nothing personally to do with that farmer or even farming itself. It’s the money of the stakeholder that shows up in the end. Stakeholders and the stock market that supports them allows for one of the most unjust components of capitalism. It distributes finance to industries that need investment to grow. The origins of the stock market comes out of imperial Holland, though it was extended with the greatest velocity in 19th century Britain, where the private sphere would directly finance public activities; war most commonly. As Ellen M. Wood observes the uniqueness of capitalism, she observes the separation of the political from the economic. “The social functions of production and distribution, surplus extraction and appropriation, and the allocation of social labour are, so to speak, privatized and they are achieved by ‘non-authoritative’, non-political means”. In other words “The social allocation of resources and labour does not, on a whole, take place by means of political direction, communal deliberation, hereditary duty, custom, or religious obligation, but rather through the mechanisms of commodity exchange” (1995 , pg.81). That is, the economic sphere; or the sphere that makes profit by expropriating capital, is separated from the political sphere of public duty and social obligation. Authoritarianism in the private workplace, democracy in the public space. What does it mean when something becomes ‘Privatised’. It means that service, land, product or most dubiously; ideas, are no longer in the public domain, which plainly means it’s been made unaccountable and undemocratic in the private sphere.

Those who field the stock market are invisible, it could be one person investing in a firm which later invests in something else. Suddenly the person who invests in the stock market disappears and their actions dissipates with it. Except those who have a huge amount of stock in one company. These people have an unprecedented influence in a company by virtue of their wealth and ability to invest enough to be made influential. These are our contemporary oligarchs though we often don’t know these people because they have learnt from the aristocracy of ages that it’s better not to be seen. People can’t storm the Bastille if they don’t know where it is or who’s in it. Our plutocratic system of late is upheld by an invisible few.

Anything that can be commodified, that is something that can be bought and sold on a market to make money, is in someway threaded through the stock market. You may own that coffee pot in your cupboard, but someone else in the market owns your student debt, or mortgage. If the bank recalled that debt, and you couldn’t pay; which invariably you cannot since you got into debt in the first place, suddenly that coffee pot isn’t owned by you anymore rather the one that owns your negative equity. Who owns that negative equity? Who owns that debt that really, owns you? Well, no one person does. In fact it could be thousands who do and they don’t even know it. Hell, your neighbor could potentially own your student debt and mortgage and will likely never know. Even the oligarchs don’t know who’s debt they own, they have indebted most of the world and as their reward as our proprietors of capitalism, they don’t need to know. We have developed a situation whereby corporations are only accountable to their invisible shareholders. By its nature, the chain is deliberately confusing. That is why corporations can desecrate the natural world, lay off hundreds of workers at a time and constantly lessen the pay of people because they’re not accountable to them, they’re accountable to non-faced shareholders whom either have little or nothing to do with the business itself, or they’re our invisible oligarchs. 

This is why states are so eager to sell off their industries, a business is more difficult to run while it’s held somewhat democratically in the public sphere. Those ‘necessary’ immoral practices companies undertake to stay competitive are more difficult to undergo when it’s being made accountable in the public sphere. By selling state industries they’re been made unaccountable to the public allowing them to most efficiently expropriate resources and make profit without the burden of democracy.

Capitalism is reductionist by origin, such that it allows a very efficient and productive means of expansion. While this expansion is made unaccountable, it takes on an unstoppable and revolutionary zeal.

Not everything can be blamed on capitalism but it does harbour some specificities that certainly make negative impacts on society and ecosystems. Indeed, the latter system is nearly wholly unaccounted for which is why its desecration is so obnoxious and rapid. 

Your tomato bought from the supermarket, if you’re living in the United States, was likely picked by slave labour in Florida or California (Hedges 2011). If you’re from Europe, often they’ve been picked by illegal immigrants treated with likened slavery conditions in Spain (Lawrence 2011). Now if you’re reading this, I’d suspect you’d almost certainly not support slave labour. Though there is a high chance that a lot of your agriculture was harvested by it. The reason you don’t think about it is because you don’t need to. It’s gone through so many supply chains and the owners of production are so far detached and dispersed, that except the managers who force the labourers to work each day; no one needs to see or care. It’s a rather heavy responsibility for today’s managers to bear the frontline of our unaccountable system, as they serve companies that inherently exhibit gross injustices. I should think that people personally do care about injustices done towards our neighbors, brothers and sisters, that is why the system was established as inherently unaccountable in the first place, to externalise people’s morality from production. It’s not to say that it doesn’t happen whether you see it or not, or whether one is held accountable by the law or not. Injustices in production do happen but it is served most efficiently by our contemporary system of institutionalised ignorance.

So what do I propose to make this change for a more just system? Well it has long since been proven throughout history, and my own modest experience, that people must be held accountable for all their actions. For we do have evil in all our hearts, it must be confronted, we all have the capacity for injustice. I have succumbed to this fact and made peace knowing we all need through means of laws, institutions, communities or families to be held accountable since our societies cannot be trusted otherwise to act morally. The only way a system based wholly on accountability can be conceived is through simplifying chains of interaction. By making supply chains smaller and fewer run and owned by the producers and buyers themselves. By decreasing the physical sizes of communities. To say a state is a community is a ridiculous assertion, with such volumes of people, very few people can be held accountable. Consensus is paralysis when the numbers are too high. A just system is one where everyone is held accountable and it is a personal belief coming out of my own fear for the capacity of the human heart. You need to know who produced your tomatoes just as you need to know who and where your computer was produced. It will take sacrifices on large scales but in the end, that specificity of capitalism must change. Whether that means something resembling less like contemporary capitalism occurs, who’s to know? But it must change if we want a just system. 

I am willing to be held accountable for everything I do and to everyone I interact with, be they friends, or the people who grow the tomatoes I eat. So what do I need to do to be held wholly accountable???

1) Hedges. C (26/09/2011), ‘Tomatoes of Wrath’ (www.truthdig.com) http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tomatoes_of_wrath_20110926/ (Viewed: 30/10/2012)

2) Lawrence. F, (7/02/2011), ‘Spain’s Salad Growers are Modern-Day Slaves, Say Charities’, (The Guardian) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/07/spain-salad-growers-slaves-charities (Viewed 30/10/2012)

3) Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1995) [1981], ‘The Separation of the Economic and The Political in Capitalism’, E. Wood, ‘Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism’, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), ch. 1