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76 I THE MODERN CRISIS
realm for new forms of selfhood as well as directly
democratic forms of social management.
November 12, 1984
I
I
Mu._rr-a..i Dockck1 ~
Market Economy or
Moral Economy?
Sooner or later, every movement for basic social
change must come to grips with the way people
produce the material means of life-their food,
shelter, and clothing-and the way these means of
life are distributed. To be discreetly reticent about
the material sphere of human existence, to loftily
dismiss this sphere as "materialistic," is to be grossly
insensitive to the preconditions for life itself.
Everything we eat to sustain our animal metabolism,
every dwelling or garment we use to shelter us from
the inclemencies of nature, are normally provided
by individuals like ourselves who must work to
provision us, as we, one hopes, are obliged to
provision them.
Although economists have blanketed this vast
activity with amoral, often pretentiously "scientific"
categories, preindustrial humanity always saw)production and distribution in profoundly moral
terms. The cry for "economic justice" is as old as the
existence of economic exploitation. Only in recent
times has this cry lost its high standing in our notion
of ethics, or, more precisely, been subordinated to a
trivial place by a supraeconomic emphasis on
"spirituality" as distinguished from "materiality."
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78 I THE MODERN CRISIS
Accordingly, it is easy to forgive the great German
thinker Theodor Adorno for acidly observing a
generation ago: "There is tenderness only in the
coarsest demand: that no one shall go hungry
anymore."1
Overstated as this image of tenderness may seem,
it is a much-deserved slap in the faces of those
privileged strata whose "chubby insatiability" for the
good things of life is matched only by their "chubby
insatiability" for the contrived problems of their
shrivelled and bored egos. It is time-indeed,
l
necessary-to restore the moral dimension of what
we so coldly denote as "the economy," and more to
the point, to ask what a truly moral economy is.
The difficulty in tying economics to morality stems
from the nature of economic life as we know it today.
Not that any economy can ever really be "amoral" as
the economists or practitioners of "economic
science" would have us believe, nor, for that matter,
can ways of work and technology ever be regarded
as "amoral."*
*Marx, like David Ricardo, played a major role in divesting
economic theory of its moral content and surrounding it with a
scientistic ambience even while he denounced capitalism for its
brutality and egotism. Marx's Capital is riddled with mixed
messages that impute the all-presiding, seemingly "just" role to
equivalence in the capitalist economy, particularly in the
exchange of labor power for wages, while exhibiting a genuine
revulsion for an economic system that reduces every human
relationship to a cash nexus. Marx's scorn for demands like
"economic justice," particularly a "just wage," seems to be almost
unknown to most Marxists these days, a scorn which would be
laudable were it not the product of his own scientistic image of
economics as the study of "the natural laws of capitalist production."2
For further discussion of the nature of justice, see Chapter
V of The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books; 1982).
Market Economy or Moral Economy? I 79
The fact is that our present market economy is
grossly immoral. Even in denying that economics can
be regarded as an authentically moral domain in
which people always make decisions about who shall
do what, what shall be distributed to whom, and how
"scarce resources" shall be weighed against
"unlimited needs," the economists have literally
"demoralized" us and turned us into moral cretins.
Price formation, to take only one example, is not
merely an impersonal "amoral" computation of
supply versus demand. It is an insidious
manipulation of both supply and demand-an
immoral manipulation of human needs as part of an
immoral pursuit of gain. In speaking of a "market
economy" as distinguished from a "moral economy,"
it would not be false to speak of an "immoral
economy" as distinguished from a "moral economy."
But this distinction is hard to see, not only because
economics, with its panoply of scientistic
pretensions, has muddled the entire issue of
economics and morality. It is also hard to see because
we tend to assume that the economic status quo is a)
given, a "natural state of affairs," that is assumed to
be part of a fictitious "human nature." So deeply
rooted is the market economy in our minds that its
grubby language has replaced our most hallowed
moral and spiritual expressions. We now "invest" in
our children, marriages, and personal relationships,
a term that is equated with words like "love" and
"care." We live in a world of "trade-offs" and we ask
for the "bottom line" of any emotional "transaction."
We use the terminology of contracts rather than that
of loyalties and spiritual affinities. This kind of
business babble, garnished with electronic terms like
80 I THE MODERN CRISIS
"input," "output," and "feedback," could easily fill
a dictionary for our times and those whichlie ahead.
Life, in effect, has acquired those descriptive traits
that earlier generations once assigned to strictly
market interactions-interactions whose influence
on their conduct was marginal, however invasive it
became in periods of economic difficulty. The
"dignity of labor" denoted the subordinate role of
work to the higher moral concerns of the worker's
sense of self-esteem, however much this dignity was
violated by the harshness of toil and the commanding
presence of economic hierarchies. "Respect" was a
criterion for transactions of any kind, and figured no
less in the claims of the workplace militant than it
did in those of the Mafia "Godfather." In many
countries on the road to industrialization, workers
waged strikes to defend their self-esteem and express
their moral solidarity, not only to gain material and
social benefits.
~
Today, we have virtually lost this sense of moral
irection because our social map has been completely
aken over by the market. Our economic coordinates
eny us any of the means for comparing ethical
images of the past with the gray "amorality" of the
/Present. As recently as the 1930s, people could
contrast the "dog-eat-dog" attributes of the market
place with the solidarity of a village-type
neighborhood world and its rich supports in the
extended family, whose oldermembers formed living
\ recollections of a more caring preindustrial society.
Lrmmediately outside the dense, poisoned cities of the
world, the countryside was a visible presence, with
traditional agrarian lifeways that were hallowed by
the ages. However much one may choose to criticize
Market Economy or Moral Economy? I 81
this archaic refuge from the factory, office, and
commercial emporium for its parochialism and
patriarchialism (a criticism, I can say from personal
experience, that has been greatly overstated), the fact
remains that it provided a deeply human and)
personal refuge-one that was fecund with a limitless
capacity for renewal and vitality.
Perhaps equally important, it provided "industrial
man" with a sense of contrast and tension between
a moral world where values of virtue and the good
life guided economic standards, and a marketplace
world where values of gain and egotism guided moral
standards. This sense of contrast and tension was
carried inwardly by workers into shop and home,
union and family, factory and neighborhood, city and
town. Even when the market economy seemed to be
the focal center of life during the working day, a sense
of an older, more congenial, and moral world to
which one could later repair existed in the peripheral
vision of the ordinary worker. The space to be a
human being with spontaneous human concerns
clashed with the space which forced the individual
to be a class being, a creature of the market economy
and its highly rationalized industrial core. .
Ironically, in the vision of millions, the Great
Depression of the 1930s moved the market economyr
from its primary status in the previous decade to a
secondary one. Despite the prevalence of a naive
commitment to progress and belief in the power of '
technology to remove all the ills of society, the ·
generation of the early thirties moved in great
numbers from the city to the countryside, tightened
its family bonds to meet economic adversity,
intensified its sense of local solidarity and, with it,
82 I THE MODERN CRISIS
neighborhood and town,support systems. In short, it
recovered moral commitments between people,
despite the great dislocations that occurred among
farmers in the Dust Bowl and the torrential increase
in urban strays who filled the railroad box cars of
the middle and far West.
As a result of this parallel movement into and out
of the centers of industry and commerce, the
impersonal world of frenzied speculation and paper
riches so exuberantly celebrated during the boom
years of the 1920s suffered a major loss of prestige,
as the revival of populist and socialist movements
so clearly revealed. The stock market collapse in 1929
ended a popular reverence not only for corporate
wealth, but also for the market system itself. Barter,
mutual aid, the verities of an agrarian America, selfreliance,
and independence, together with
regionalism and cultural identity, haunted the land
for years and even invaded its artistic canons, as
witness the paintings of Grant Wood, the WPA
muralists and photographers, and the resurgence of
research into local lore and traditions.
Today, this decade-long lapse of the market
onomy's prestige has simply been forgotten. From
the 1950s onward, the market economy has not only
imperialized every aspect of conventional life, it has
also dissolved the memory of the alternative lifeways
that precede it. We are all anonymous buyers and
sellers these days, even of the miseries that afflict us.
We not only buy and sell our labor power in all its
subtle forms, we buy and sell our neuroses, anomie,
loneliness, spiritual emptiness, integrity, lack of selfworth,
and emotions, such as they are, to gurus,
Market Economy or Moral Economy? I 83
specialists in mental and physical "well-being,"
psychoanalysts, clerics in all garbs, and ultimately
to the armies of corporate and governmental
bureaucrats who have finally become the authentic
sinews of what we euphemistically call "society."
We buy and sell the outward trappings of personality:
the sheen-like leather jackets that make humble
bookkeepers look like dashing pimps and the highheeled
boots that make bored secretaries look like
dangerously seductive whores. Clothing, face paint,
well-blown coiffures, baubles, a vast array of insignia
and tokens all combine in the urban cesspools of the
world to make us seem more "interesting" and less
depersonalized than we really are.
Convention submerges in a quick dip only to
resurface as stylized indiosyncracies, damningbadges
of "individuation" that subtly affirm its loss. The
snapped cap of the traditional worker, even the high
hat of the cartoon bourgeois, once topped faces that
were etched with character, experience, inner
strength, and individuality. Today the doll-like heads
of our "bohemian" middle classes, these relics of a
vibrant past, seem like grotesque caricatures. Today
the market economy has shown its power to reach
the most inward recesses of personality by making
its acolytes into look-alikes even as they grasp for
the idiosyncratic in dress and the low culture of the
mass media. Indeed, whatever is culturally exciting
and fills our concert halls and theaters to the bursting
point is the recycled product of generations now dead
or dying-often recycled with a technical proficiency
and slickness that bleeds it of all character and
earthiness.
Our liberalism toward every moral excess seems
84 I THE MODERN CRISIS
more like indifference than tolerance. Anomic,
spiritless, and unfeeling, we have become the very
free-floating commodities we so eagerly produce and
devour. Society, in turn, flattened and colorless, has
become the very market economy we once confined
to the personally remote world of "business." The
immorality of our credo of "amorality" sterns from a
sense of indifference that is evil because it has no
criteria for the good and the virtuous. Its philosophy
consists of the endless prattle of small talk and its
ideals are embodied in its garishly cluttered shopping
malls, which have become its most imperious and
sacred temples.
The market economy is blessed with a grand secret
from which it draws its power to shape the totality
of social life: the power of anonymity. Sellers do not
know buyers and buyers do not kno~ sellers. What
sellers dump on the market-all self-serving myths
of "salesmanship" aside-are their commodities, not
themselves. A buyer who purchases a dress
ultimately confronts an object, a dress-not its
producer, a person. Admittedly, there are producers
who fit a buyer for a garment and "sales" personnel
who oil the purchase along. But the fitter or tailor is
a marketplace archaism who actually belongs to a
bygone era, or serves a highly affluent elite. The
"salesperson" is at best a catalyst for making
purchasable dreams more palatable. He or she is
virtually nonexistent in the great shopping malls,
where the principal encounter between buyer and
seller occurs on a checkout line at a cash register,
not in the more intimate world where the purveyor
of merchandise tries to persuade a potential buyer
into a purchase. No, the market economy is structured
Market Economy or Moral Economy? I 85
around buyer and object, or producer and retail
establishment, not between person and person.
The anonymity of the exchange process today has
formidable consequences, more far-reaching than we
normally suspect. We are struck first by its
suffocating impersonality. A machine called the
market takes over vital functions that rightly should
be performed by the intercourse between people.
Although electronic and print media continually
barrage us with images and voices that seem like
human beings, we rarely encounter real flesh-andblood
people in the modern market. Often, no way
exists to leisurely discuss the worthiness of a product
with the producer who, it would seem, can best judge
its qualities and utility. Salespersons, few as they
are, are notoriously ignorant about the commodities
they purvey and can be easily outwitted by any
knowledgeable buyer. Moreover, they are generally
outrageously indifferent and excessively rehearsed.
They can be-in some places have already beenreplaced
by a recording. In the impersonality of the
market, no interchange between buyer and seller
exists that can lend itself to ethical guidance.
In all past eras, the worthiness of a product was)
morally integrated with the worthiness of its seller
and producer. The value that a buyer placed on a
commodity, indeed, on any exchangeable entity,
constituted an ethical gauge of the moral integrity of
the individual from whom it was acquired. To
denigrate this object, to return it with disparaging
remarks about its quality, was to impugn the seller's
probity and self-esteem-not simply as a "good"
producer, but as a person with ethical standards. The
86 I THE MODERN CRISIS
craftsperson, in this sense, was as "good" as the
"goods" he or she crafted; the seller, as "good" as the
"goods" he or she sold. I use the word "good" not
instrumentally, in terms of technical proficiency-a
word that today, quite characteristically, usually
means precisely that-but ethically, in terms of
human "goodness" and moral probity. "Good will"
meant honesty, integrity, reliability, responsibility,
and a high sense of public service, rather than staying
power in the marketplace jungle, fiscal soundness,
and the contrived myth of "superiority" inculcated
in the public mind by advertising. One did not buy
a "name" that repeatedly appeared on television
screens, neon signs, and billboards; one "bought" the
moral certainty of a good personal reputation, an
artist's sense of commitment to aesthetic excellence,
the cherished arete, or virtue, that the Greeks imputed
to an individual's vocation as a moral calling, and
the deeply felt responsibility of a good worker to a
product that constituted an extension of his or her
human powers. "Goods" and "goodness"-a
commonality of terms that is not accidental- carried
the ethical imprimatur of social responsibility, not
the instrumental slickness of technical finesse and
hard-sell.
The actual act of selling, in turn, had its own
etiquette and personal ambience. Buyer and seller
encountered each other with talk about the affairs of
the day, personal inquiries and assurances, opinions
on a host of public issues, and finally, a mutual
interest in the product, with knowledgeable remarks
about its components, artwork, and merits. A price
was a moral bond, not a mere exchange of "goods"
for money. The signature of the producer or seller
Market Economy or Moral Economy? I 87
appeared on the product as well as the bill of sale.
People used terms like "just prices," not simply
"bargains." Between buyer and seller was an ethical)
tie that signified their reliance, indeed their
dependence, on each other for the needful and good
things of life. A high sense of mutuality, based on
trust and a shared recognition of faith in a nexus of
complementarity for sustaining survival itself,
permeated the entire exchange process.
We should not consign such relationships to
distant ages like the medieval world. However
vestigial inform, they existed as recently as the 1930s,
when production, despite its increasingly mass
character, was commonly tested in the deeply
personal arena of small neighborhood retail shops;
in the fitting rooms of garment makers; in cobbler,
cigar-making, and bakery shops; and in an endless
array of service establishments where work was done
under the eyes of the customer and even under the
eyes of passing crowds.
Today, the anonymity and depersonalization of the
market has almost completely divested the exchange
process of this moral dimension. Even in so-called
alternative enterprises like organic farms, craft shops,
and food cooperatives, the ethical inspiration which
presumably gave rise to them has been gravely
diluted and threatens to fade away. To the degree
that these establishments become "established," they
become more entrepreneurial than moral. This is
especially true when moral inspiration is confused
with material need. An organic farm that is meant
merely to satisfy a "need" for "good food" rather than
food that is cultivated from a sense of "goodness"
88 I THE MODERN CRISIS
and ecological concern-like a "food cooperative"
that is meant to provide "good food" at cheap pricesis
guided more by need than by ethics. That is to say,
it is meant to satisfy a concern that is pragmatic rather
than moral.
Ironically, none of these concerns can ever
supplant the shopping mall. No organic farm can
compete successfully with agribusiness, and no food
cooperative can successfully outbid, much less
outsupply, a supermarket. The most these
"alternative" enterprises can do is to coexist
precariously with the giants that tower over them, as
mere marginalia that appeal on strictly material
grounds to society's fringes, not society at large.
Worse, as practical projects that aim for
"efficiency," "high returns," expanded operations, a
more "successful" marketing strategy, they begin to
objectify their consumers as much as they do the
produce they sell. They become merely another
impersonal business enterprise whose "goods" are as
lacking in "goodness" as those of their larger rivals.
Dwarfed by the giants who smirk at their existence
and claims, they become food pharmacies for
dispensing unpolluted "organic" products instead of
pills-the drugs for coping with a social disease, not
for preventing or curing it. In short, they become as
inorganic, depersonalized, computerized, and
cynical as the larger enterprises on whose turf they
nibble-dumping grounds for organic foods to meet
the therapeutic needs of an increasingly anonymous
and inorganic public. The moral aspects of
distributing or growing food and other produce are
blotted out by considerations of "efficiency" and
"success"-the two attributes of capitalistic
Market Economy or Moral Economy? 89
enterprise that lend themselves to a concern for
economic quantity at the expense of ethical quality.
To put the issue bluntly: an organic carrot, a
homespun garment, a crafted plank of wood, or a
hand-worked leather boot is merely a "thing" that
people confront as impersonally in a food cooperative
or a craft shop as they do in a shopping mall if it
does not carry a moral message that changes it as
an exotic creature of an immoral economy. The
"thing" itself will never give voice to a moral message]
merely by its quality, ecological pedigree, and
usefulness. As wholesome, nourishing, attractive,
and free of the pollutants that infect our bodies and
tastes as it may be, it does not become a "good" in a
moral sense for these reasons alone. Moral)
"goodness" can come only from the way in which
people interact between themselves, and the sense
of ethical purpose they give to their productive
activities. It is through the way "goods" are
exchanged or, to state the case more radically, the
way exchange is used to appropriately distribute
them such that "buyer" and "seller" cease to be
polarized against each other and are joined in an
economic community, united by a fraternal or sororal
relationship based on a sense of mutual identification
and personal complementarity. Care, responsibility,
and obligation become the authentic "price tag" of
the moral economy, as distinguished from the
interest, cost, and profitability that enter into the
"price tag" of the market economy.
Care, responsibility, and obligation, we are told,
are "ideological" concepts which have no place in a
scientistic notion of economics. This criticism points
to the very heart of the issues raised by a moral
90 I THE MODERN CRISIS
)economy. A ~-a participatory system
{ o!--$filrihution based on ethical concerns-is meant
r to dissolve the immorality that the modern mind
identifies with economics as such. Its goal is to
dissolve the antagonism between "buyer" and
\
"seller," to show that in practice both "buyer" and
"seller" form a community based on a rich sense of
mutuality, not on the opposition of "scarce
resources" to "unlimited needs." The object
exchanged is secondary to the ethical values that are
explicitly shared by the participants of a moral
economy. For "buyer" and "seller" to care for each
other's well-being, for them to feel deeply responsible
to each other, and for them to be cemented by a deep
sense of obligation for their mutual welfare is to
replace a strictly economic nexus with an ethical
one-that is, to turn economics into culture rather
than to visualize it as the "circulation" of things.
Where distribution becomes a form of
complementarity, it ceases in fact to be economic in
~
e usual meaning of the word and the terms "buyer"
nd "seller" become meaningless.
Material needs begin to express one of many ways
in which claims for things become claims for moral
integrity. The "buyer's" expectations begin to expand
beyond mere needs to a belief in the "seller's" ability
to exhibit the highest moral probity in providing the
material means of life. The "seller," in turn, advances
his or her goods, and "goodness"-an ethical
conviction that the means of life serve to satisfy not
only material needs, but also spiritual ones that foster
trust, community, and solidarity. The rivalry and
seeming independence that pervades the market
economy is replaced by reciprocity and
Market Economy or Moral Economy? I 91
interdependence in which distribution with its moral
etiquette-like primitive rituals-affirms a sense of
unity and shared destiny between its participants.
The inequalities conferred by differences in strength,
health, age, and skill cease to be the damning stigmas
of a specious "equality" that permits each individual
to drift on his or her own in a deadening and
emotionally blunted pursuit of advantage. To the
contrary, they spawn a sense of complementarity and
a commitment to compensation that yields the great
radical maxim: From each according to his or her
abilities, to each according to his or her needs.
These images of a moral economy and its ethical
preconditions are not abstractions. They imply
concrete institutions and specific forms of behavior.
Institutionally, they presuppose a new form of\
productive community, as distinguished from a mere
marketplace where each buyer and seller fends for
himself or herself-a community in which actual
producers are networked and interlocked somewhat
like the old medieval guilds in a responsible supportj
system. In this support system, the producers-be
they organic farmers, carpenters, leather workers,
jewelers, weavers, clothiers, builders, craftspeople
and shop workers of all kinds, indeed, professionals
such as physicians, chiropractors, nurses, attorneys,
teachers, and the like-explicitly agree to exchange]
their products and services on terms that are not
merely "equitable" or "fair" but supportiv~ of each
other. Like all real communities, they form a family
that provides for the welfare of its participants as a
collective responsibility, not simply a personal
responsibility. For example, medical people assume
92 I THE MODERN CRISIS
a moral duty to care for the health needs of
craftspeople, who in turn assume the task of
provisioning the community's physicians, nurses,
dieticians, etc. This sense of moral
complementarity-this social
6
"ecotyhte!,!l,'' so to
speak-encompasses all mem ers o t e productive
community. Price, resources, personal interests, and
costs play no role in a moral economy. Services and
provisions are available as needed, with no
"accounting" of what is given and taken.
"Need," in turn, is moralized in the very profound
sense of a shared concern of the giver as well as the
receiver, for it becomes important for the producer
of a "good" to see to it that the consumer suffers no
privation or want for lack of his or her product,
indeed, that the "good" is the "best" that can be given
to whoever is needful. To go "beyond good and evil,''
if I may use the title of Nietzsche's provocative work,
is to seek excellence for its own sake and, above all,
for the community's sake rather than remain trapped
in amorality or moral relativism.
"Need" turns from mere want of a "good" into a
way of identifying producer and consumer in a caring
social bond that is guided not by interest,
profitability, and cost, with all their quantitative
trappings, but by that ineffable qualitative and
disinterested sense of mutual welfare such as we
expect in parental and sibling relationships. It is no
longer the yearning of one individual for a "good,"
but a collective funding of desire with the shared
. expectation that fulfillment is a communal
desideratum, just as a lover experiences the joy of
the beloved in the very fact that a desire is satisfied.
Market Economy or Moral Economy? I 93
Inasmuch as virtually every consumer is in some
sense a producer, the fictive opposition between
consumption and production, with its connotation
of the "innocent consumer" who must be protected
from the "predatory producer,'' is eliminated.
That the infirm, elderly, or very young do not seem
to belong to such a productive community in the
technical sense is perhaps all the more reason to
include them fully in its benefits, if only to test
continually the moral intentions of such a
community-that is, to confront it with an ongoing
challenge of its own moral probity and
disinterestedness. And yet even the elderly and the
infirm, I suspect, will want to find a function for
themselves in a moral economy, be it simply
custodial, clerical, or instructive, depending on their
training and background in the more active periods
of their lives. The point is that a moral economy
exists for moral reasons, not simply for reasons of
survival or gain. The good life, materially supported
by "goods" that are the messengers of "goodness," is
an end in itself: a source of new selfhood and new
ways of life; an ongoing education in forms of )
association, virtue, and decency; a countervailing
force to the socially, morally, and psychologically
corrosive marketplace and its unbridled egotism.
Such a moral economy has no historical precedents
on which to model itself-and, in a very real sense,
can only be created by practice and experience, rather
than precept and past example. But its architects can
draw some inspiration from many so-called primitive
communities in which usufruct, not ownership,
guided people in the availability of tools
,-
94 I THE MODERN CRISIS
and resources.* Possibily, too, they can learn from
the democratic guild forms of organization that
existed in early medieval townships and from certain
cooperative or quasi-religious forms of productive
association like the Hutterite and Tolstoyan
communes. But these forms of associations are hints,
often defective when taken by themselves and useful
when selectively pieced together, of what must
ultimately be a broader concept of a moral economy
~
r society as a whole. A moral economy, structurally
peaking, may for a long time be a marginal example
what the human community as a whole should
ne day become. But so much that now exists in the
nter of human affairs formerly developed on their
margins that we should not despair that a moral
economy can only be peripheral to society today.
Even more fundamental than structure is the
problem of behavior. A moral economy, based on
shared concern rather than private interest, is no
better than the sensibilities it fosters. If our concept
of a material "good" comes from a waning sense of
moral "goodness," the recovery of the tie between
the material and the moral, between "good" and
"goodness," recasts our very notion of an economy
in a radically new light. It places upon a moral
economy the crucial function of developing an
economic community into an arena for ethical
*The notion of usufruct, the freedom of individuals to
appropriate resources merely because they want to use them at
a time when the "owner" has no need of them, is too complex
to discuss here. For a more thorough and historical examination
of the pronciple, see The Ecology ofFreedom (Palo Alto:Cheshire
Books, 1982), especially pp. 50, 51.
Market Economy or Moral Economy? I 95
education, as well as a moral system of production
and distribution.*
Like the Athenian polis of some two thousand years
ago, a moral economy must become a school fc¥1
creating a new kind __g_f citizenshiE: economic L
citizenship as well as political, productive
citizenship as well as participatory, a place for
learning a respect for "things" as products of afecund
nature as well as a center for dedicated work, and
the embodiment of a spiritualized physicality as well
as a productive domain for creating objects for
personal consumption. The "curriculum" for such-~ f
school involves a "respiritization" of the wofi-1
process, the "raw materials" this process shapes, the
moral context in which people work together, and
the purposes for which they work-this, aside from
the more obvious issues of familial, communal, or
distinctly pedagogical institutions and politically
libertarian forms of self-governance through which
*This function has often been sadly overlooked by many food
cooperatives which, for a time, were administered by the
"cooperators" who did the buying as well as the "staff" which
organized the distribution of food. That the need for "efficiency"
and the competitive stance in which many such cooperatives
were placed with large commercial food emporia ultimately
provided some justification for a "tightening up" of their
operations goes without saying. What is troubling, however, is
that the mentality which the seemingly more concerned
administrators of the cooperatives exhibited often differed very
little from that which we would expect to find in the manager
of a supermarket. "Efficiency" was not merely placed before]
morality and the educative functions of a food cooperative; the
latter simply dropped out of sight completely, as though a food
cooperative was a cheaper depot for victuals rather than a
cooperative in any sense of the term.
96 I THE MODERN CRISIS
people are educated. Hence, the economic arena
becomes a "school"-as it has always been, more for
the worse than for the better-forming the moral
character of the individual as well as providing major
guidelines for his or her behavior.
This economic image of moral self-development is
inseparable from the tools and machines that give it
reality. Ecotechnologies, such as small-scale solar
and wind-power devices, ecological agriculture,
aquacultural techniques, energy-conserving shelters
and devices, in short, that entire panoply of so-called
appropriate technologies (a term I find difficult to
~
ccept because the word "appropriate"-for what?s
too morally ambiguous) should be seen more in
erms of their ethical function than their operational
fficiency. That we must bring the sun, wind, land,
ora, fauna, and the building materials of our shelters
into our lives in a new, ecologically oriented way if
we are to develop an authentic respect for the natural
world, its fecundity, and our dependence on it should
be obvious. There is more to ·ecotechnology than its
efficiency and renewability: our metabolism with
nature will either be mutually interdependent such
that our vision of ourselves will place us firmly
within the natural world-not "above it"-or we will
become its most destructive parasites.
Fundamental to that sense of interdependence is
a re-visioning of nature as a moral basis for a new
ecological ethics. This moral basis, so suspect to the
modern scientistic mind, forms the stuff of social
ecology and requires separate discussion. Here it
suffices to point out that we will either re-vision
nature as a domain of fecundity and development or,
in the marketplace mentality, conceive of it as a rank
Market Economy or Moral Economy? I 97
jungle to be savagely exploited as we exploit each
other in the buyer-seller relationship. A market
economy and a moral economy thus stand
counterposed to each other on many different levels:
in their images of nature, technology, education,
work, the production and distribution of the means
of life, community, and "goods" as commodities or
the embodiment of "goodness."
Above all, they stand counterposed to each other
in the way men and women envision themselves and
the ideals they advance for human intercourseindeed,
whether these ideals advance no further than
mere survival, with all its narrow technocratic and
economistic implications, or rise to the level of life,
with its broad ecological and ethical implications.
On this score, a market economy and a moral
economy raise fundamentally opposed notions of
humanity's self-realization and sense of purpose,
concepts which define the very meaning of material
premises on which our development eventually
depends.
July, 1983