The Telos Press Podcast: David Pan on Economy, Ecology, and Universal Basic Income

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Telos editor David Pan about his article “Economy and Ecology: Federal Populism and the Devil in the Details of Universal Basic Income,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.

From Telos 191 (Summer 2020):

Economy and Ecology: Federal Populism and the Devil in the Details of Universal Basic Income

David Pan

Work and Nature

Our economic life is ultimately a function of our interactions with nature. If Marx held that nature was our “inorganic body,” to be exploited without consequence, we must now accept that it is an active force that provides the overarching structure for our economic life. We are not in control of nature but merely, like ants on the volcano, struggling to make our lives within the space that nature allows to us. Consequently, the world of work is always subject to our changing relationship to nature. The pandemic underlines the way in which our economic decisions take place within a larger context in which our values must confront such outside exigencies. This shift in our attitude toward nature is of course not new. With the advent of realizations about climate change, we have already become accustomed to thinking about our economic life as part of a larger dynamic involving our relationship to natural forces that cannot be controlled or manipulated. Since our actions feed into such larger processes, future considerations of economy will have to consider more directly this interaction with nature rather than assume a one-sided relation of manipulation.

Part of this reevaluation will require a reconceptualization of the idea of value. The economic theories of value to which we are accustomed, including the ideas of exchange value and use value, as well as the labor theory of value, are oriented around a conception of nature that leaves its dynamics out of the equation. If exchange value reduces all value to market value, use value still confines our understanding of value to the idea of utility, thereby bracketing from consideration the question of which values are really worthwhile. As a result, we neglect to consider how values structure human activity in general. The labor theory of value not only fails to account for different proportions of labor to utility value and market value but also values all labor in the same quantitative way, as if the labor in a meat processing plant could be equated to the labor of a doctor, a novelist, or a mayor. Different forms of activity have different kinds of meaning, and such qualitative considerations cannot be separated from the idea of labor. A more general conception of value would link economy to nature in a way that goes beyond the utilitarian mode of relationship based on exploitation. To arrive at such a conception, the scope of economic thinking would need to be expanded to include discussions of different values to be pursued.

Such a consideration of value can begin with a reformulation of the concept of work. This concept links economy with nature, as the definition of work in nature can provide a more general frame within which to situate human work. Terrence Deacon presents a general theory of work that sees it as a kind of activity that opposes a natural development that, if otherwise left unopposed, would lead to a different future set of events. Thus, a blade of grass does work by altering the path of the sun’s energy. Rather than simply heating the earth, sunlight is instead being harnessed for the energy needs of the grass, ultimately converting the sun’s energy into the reproduction of the grass’s organic structure. The grass does work by altering the path of sunlight. Our work of planting a seed takes advantage of this existing natural process in order to channel it to human ends. If our labor diverts natural processes so that they provide survival, sustenance, and well-being to us, this labor process describes the way we interact with nature to turn its developments to our advantage. The predictability of this interaction between humans and nature makes work possible as an economic activity.

Different kinds of labor can have different effects, depending on the way in which the labor relates to natural processes. In all cases, work involves the subverting of a natural process, in effect changing its course. In the case of planting seeds and caring for the crop until harvest, a natural process has been mobilized to serve a human goal, and the relationship of labor to work accomplished is easy to calculate by comparing the labor hours to the resulting crop. But in the case of the initial work of clearing a forest to create new farmland, the labor hours do not have such a direct relationship to the work achieved. This improvement of land is a basic form of the creation of capital, whose value lies in the establishment of a mechanism for future work. If the planting of the seed channels the natural mechanism of the plant’s growth toward a particular goal, the clearing of the forest makes possible the mechanism of the farming process itself, and the labor hours of the latter activity, depending on the relative need for such new farmland, might accomplish more work than the hours spent planting the seed.

Innovations have a work effect that is disproportionate to the labor hours spent. Sometimes innovations turn out to have no value, but other innovations can lead to the establishment of new mechanisms with large-scale consequences. The labor time of the entrepreneur in fact does not stand in any predictable relationship to the work accomplished because the entrepreneur can affect the course of history. In establishing a new business, the entrepreneur puts together a new mechanism linking nature with human activity in a way that was not done before, thereby establishing a framework for work that would not otherwise have existed. Whether the entrepreneur clears the forest to create a new farm or creates a new search engine that others find useful, the entrepreneur’s achievement extends to all the work that is enabled by the creation of the new mechanism, which structures human activity into the future. Because the act of creating the new mechanism can have continuing effects on the productivity of work in the future, the relation between labor time and work accomplished is very loose in the case of the entrepreneur.

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