small wonders

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

--Wendell Berry.

~

Following up on yesterday's thoughts about the relation between economic democracy and political democracy I was reminded of how, in mainstream economics textbooks, there is no discussion whatsoever of corporations. The theory of the firm, as it is taught at the undergraduate level, is a one-dimensional black box in which inputs are simply converted into outputs. 

In a similar vein, discussions about markets traditionally start with a stylized example of wheat production, say. Of course, no historical discussion can be allowed (for example: of actual land relations, various understandings of the role of land in sustaining a way of life (a "land ethic") or, indeed, of how power shapes the way in which economic agents interact).

A universal science must abstract from local particularities and idiosyncrasies. The "rational peasant" is motivated by gain alone and culture, social norms an solidarity must be explained as an outcome of individuals interacting (on pain of negating the fundamental outlook or style of thinking in the bizarrely named social sciences: methodological individualism).

For a subject that supposedly promotes (implicitly, that is) a version of liberalism (free competition, individualism, autonomy) it is remarkable how little it has to say on the concentration of economic power and how the system perpetuates inequalities, inequalities that eventually undermine the notion of political democracy that is supposed to go hand in hand with the economic system.

The fact that people are now looking to China and Singapore, to a "managed" form of capitalism, is revealing. 

~

A very interesting discussion on the differences between Sanders and Clinton through the prism of big business/ small yeoman which is still very relevant to all of us. In other words, what are the chances of a small 'r' republicanism, a small 'c' conservatism emerging, one that is not steeped in bigotry and pettiness?  

Is the left, for example, irrevocably committed to an idea of the big state? With dwindling trade union influence and serious questions about the sustainability of a welfare state in the presence of a greying population (not to mention the weakening support for social democracy in an age of instant gratification and a changing composition of the population) is there a case for the left reclaiming a forgotten strand of thinking? Can it go back to the radical notion of opposing capitalism not by setting up large enough forces to tame it (that, on reflection, has resulted in the opposition being compromised: state capitalism) but by becoming small again?

The difficulty with that is that those modes of production (crafts, agriculture) and ways of thinking barely survive. We've been weaned on the market and the state for so long that we've almost lost any sense of a viable alternative (which is why, of course, anarchist thought is floundering). The only really alternative that exists is the nihilistic one of the fundamentalists-at least at the social level.

At the individual level, of course, there is always Pessoa and Walser; take a step away from it all, and live a quiet life amongst the beautiful and small wonders.