Abstract
Wild speculation in the financial sector is credited with sparking the Great Recession and the hardships wrought on workers of limited means who counted on job stability, equity in their homes, and their retirement savings to carry them through. Arvidsson and Peitersen argue in their new book, The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value After the Crisis, that a value crisis within neoliberal capitalism is much to blame. Under neoliberalism, financial speculation is a much larger driver of accumulation than it was under Keynesian–Fordism. With that shift comes a move away from value rooted in the socially necessary labor time required to reproduce the labor force that produces surplus value through the manufacture of commodities. We witness instead a move toward speculative value regimes rooted in the increasingly intangible assets of highly automated firms that are valued largely based on branding and their presence on social media. Arvidsson and Peitersen suggest this unmooring of value in the transition to neoliberal capitalism leads us into a scenario where the actions and worth of companies become difficult to assess or measure, potentially leading to more crises associated with antisocial behaviors by firms and speculators. Yet the authors suggest that the seeds of a new and more ethical value regime already exist in the operations of firms in the age of digital, open-source production.
They go on to suggest that publics are emerging online and in social media platforms featuring educated people in the knowledge economy who work together across vast distances to innovate and build new products. These people are motivated to work based on concerns for bolstering their reputations and embracing more ethically oriented endeavors. Open-source software production is used as an example throughout the book where knowledgeable publics come together to create free software that challenges privatized, for-profit firms like Microsoft. Arvidsson and Peitersen’s point is that these publics, both in their productive and consumerist iterations, can demand or create new ethical forms of capital anchored to values these publics hold dear. Value for these publics can include concern for common resources like the environment, public accountability, or for affordable access to resources and products. If private firms operate in ways that violate the new-value regimes set by publics, they may suffer the consequences as people refuse to identify with a brand, stop contributing to its production and/or consumption, or disinvest from the firm altogether. The authors go on to suggest that value rooted in ethical capital can be easily measured based on the online and social media sentiments of productive and consumer publics—what they refer to as affective proximity between publics and firms. Although Arvidsson and Peitersen’s book was written before the Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal emerged in 2015, their analysis can tell us much about how the public has reacted to the corporation’s malfeasance. It is a good example by which to operationalize the authors’ thesis.
Volkswagon is a company that does much to foster its brand through the formation of a sophisticated public that identifies strongly with the auto company. In this way, VW is said to be affectively proximate to its public that not only consumes its stylized brand of cars but that actively coproduces the company’s environmental image through online and social media interactions and promotions regarding its low-emissions vehicles. Needless to say, the fact that VW cheated on the emissions control devices for some of its diesel cars was construed as a major betrayal of consumer trust and loyalty. Volkswagon sales and stocks have taken major hits around the world as a result. The backlash on social media has been harsh as well. These are instances of a particular public seeking retribution for corporate wrongdoing. Only time will tell if VW can recover its image and win back the trust of its loyal and ethical consumer public that helped build its reputation prior to the scandal.
Examples like this demonstrate the need to read, consider, and debate arguments for ethical economies like the one made by Arvidsson and Peitersen. In a neoliberal era when governments seem unwilling to regulate or discipline economic actors, productive and consumer publics will have to take up the slack if they want to live in a more ethical and equitable world. The authors are also right to suggest that for a truly ethical economy to emerge, our politics will have to shift away from the reactionary policies of neoliberalism in defense of unbridled accumulation. For these reasons, this reviewer highly recommends students of political economy read this insightful and provocative book. However, Arvidsson and Peitersen’s work leaves some pressing questions unanswered, and is therefore incomplete.
The argument for an ethical economy, as prefaced in their book, relies much on open-source software production as an example of an industry where publics can muster common resources to produce new forms of value; but rarely is this extended in the analysis to include other industries or commodities. Their argument therefore presumes that the ethical economy will emerge almost exclusively from the knowledge economy. What about the legions of blue-collar workers in the United States and Europe cast aside in the demise of Fordism? What about the hundreds of millions of people around the world still working in manufacturing who are making consumer goods for workers in the knowledge economy (and by extension are still subject to the vagaries of value rooted in socially necessary labor time)? Are these people in their legions to participate as contributors in the ethical economy somehow? It seems that one important aspect of an ethical economy is that it encourages participation as broadly as possible, but this is little acknowledged here. Yet another major concern is that productive (even knowledge-based) publics as construed in the book still work in a wage economy. How do productive publics eat, pay the rent, and come up with college tuition money when they are working for their reputation only? These serious concerns go almost completely unaddressed. Because of these lacunae, the tome almost reads as an apology for neoliberal capitalism and its affinity for piecemeal, contingent forms of labor—although this is clearly not the authors’ goal. Hopefully, these concerns can be addressed in detail in their next book.