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Economic Identity and Ecological Caste [draft excerpt]
Here are some thoughts gradually cohering:
Since the advent of mercantile capitalism, and more so since the Industrial Revolution, and even more so since the Information Age, the ecological relationships and roles of the caste pyramid have become vastly more complex than the rudimentary and general outline sketched above. Instead of a well-demarcated relationship between ascriptive social role and energy budget (i.e. being born into the role of producer, processor, coordinator, or regulator), under the current system one’s energy budget is mediated – and consequently often obscured - by a variety of economic and cultural factors, the most overt being the presence or absence of monetary wealth.
Wealth, measured in money, is indeed a reasonable and reliable indicator for ecological caste. In the absence of a pricing system that reflects the true ecological costs of products and services, however, monetary wealth and caste will remain somewhat autonomous. The flow of money – now more than ever a flow of information - emerges from and coordinates flows of energy and resources, but it is not identical with them.
Thinking about “economics,” like other hard and soft sciences, we suffer from confusion over the use of one word for both the discipline and the phenomena that it observes. And in the case of economics, which unlike some other sciences is prescriptive, a confusion between what it describes and the rules and norms it proposes.
In the methodology of the symbolic/ecological split, then, economics belongs in the symbolic domain. It has long been accused by professionals in the hard sciences of having little or no empirical grounding, for all its mathematical sophistication. In that light, the discipline of economics (neoclassical economics in particular, the elite orthodoxy that it is) can be understood as a set of justifications and strategies for the coordination of ecological caste relations.
It is for these reasons that economic class, in caste ecology, is not understood as the foil to identity, a la class politics vs. identity politics. Rather, it is viewed as a particular kind of identity, albeit a unique, special kind. One is marked by money, much as by style of dress, accented speech, occupation (i.e. behavioral patterns), and other symbols, as having a particular class position. Class status is ultimately a symbolic marking for a particular kind of treatment by those with the power to allocate resources. In this way it is not, at the root of it, functionally different from the way in which we are marked by skin color, gender, other variations in accent and style of dress, citizenship, body shape, spatial/geographic location, etc. I don’t want to suggest for a moment that we should collapse class and other forms of identity – each system of marking operates according to it’s own logic (and illogic) and each requires it’s recognition as a distinct system, as well as it’s own strategies of resistance and techniques of subversion. I do mean to suggest each of these systems of marking are in effect at the same time, amplifying, suppressing, and distorting each other in ways that are not always predictable. The effects, however, are readily observable, in the myriad moments in anyone’s day, when one is granted or denied access to some resource – or singled out for violence. I propose that, for the project of collective liberation, it is singularly important to recognize a basic underlying unity to the function of the various marking systems, even as we maintain and develop our critical understanding of the particularities of the distinct codes.
This being said, it remains a reasonable methodology to look to monetary wealth as a rough indicator of energy budget, and thus ecological caste position. The monetary system of marking is the most powerful of the various symbolic modes for determining one’s access to and use of resources, and this in turn is perhaps the signature variable of the energy budget.
Since the advent of mercantile capitalism, and more so since the Industrial Revolution, and even more so since the Information Age, the ecological relationships and roles of the caste pyramid have become vastly more complex than the rudimentary and general outline sketched above. Instead of a well-demarcated relationship between ascriptive social role and energy budget (i.e. being born into the role of producer, processor, coordinator, or regulator), under the current system one’s energy budget is mediated – and consequently often obscured - by a variety of economic and cultural factors, the most overt being the presence or absence of monetary wealth.
Wealth, measured in money, is indeed a reasonable and reliable indicator for ecological caste. In the absence of a pricing system that reflects the true ecological costs of products and services, however, monetary wealth and caste will remain somewhat autonomous. The flow of money – now more than ever a flow of information - emerges from and coordinates flows of energy and resources, but it is not identical with them.
Thinking about “economics,” like other hard and soft sciences, we suffer from confusion over the use of one word for both the discipline and the phenomena that it observes. And in the case of economics, which unlike some other sciences is prescriptive, a confusion between what it describes and the rules and norms it proposes.
In the methodology of the symbolic/ecological split, then, economics belongs in the symbolic domain. It has long been accused by professionals in the hard sciences of having little or no empirical grounding, for all its mathematical sophistication. In that light, the discipline of economics (neoclassical economics in particular, the elite orthodoxy that it is) can be understood as a set of justifications and strategies for the coordination of ecological caste relations.
It is for these reasons that economic class, in caste ecology, is not understood as the foil to identity, a la class politics vs. identity politics. Rather, it is viewed as a particular kind of identity, albeit a unique, special kind. One is marked by money, much as by style of dress, accented speech, occupation (i.e. behavioral patterns), and other symbols, as having a particular class position. Class status is ultimately a symbolic marking for a particular kind of treatment by those with the power to allocate resources. In this way it is not, at the root of it, functionally different from the way in which we are marked by skin color, gender, other variations in accent and style of dress, citizenship, body shape, spatial/geographic location, etc. I don’t want to suggest for a moment that we should collapse class and other forms of identity – each system of marking operates according to it’s own logic (and illogic) and each requires it’s recognition as a distinct system, as well as it’s own strategies of resistance and techniques of subversion. I do mean to suggest each of these systems of marking are in effect at the same time, amplifying, suppressing, and distorting each other in ways that are not always predictable. The effects, however, are readily observable, in the myriad moments in anyone’s day, when one is granted or denied access to some resource – or singled out for violence. I propose that, for the project of collective liberation, it is singularly important to recognize a basic underlying unity to the function of the various marking systems, even as we maintain and develop our critical understanding of the particularities of the distinct codes.
This being said, it remains a reasonable methodology to look to monetary wealth as a rough indicator of energy budget, and thus ecological caste position. The monetary system of marking is the most powerful of the various symbolic modes for determining one’s access to and use of resources, and this in turn is perhaps the signature variable of the energy budget.
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