Economists Hate Him!

Text by Alex Dieker

Images by Carme Ferrando Soriano

I live in a world where finance is at once all-pervasive and taboo. To live a good life in, say, the Netherlands—or to live at all in the United States—monetary well-being is of paramount importance. Yet, one’s personal finances are always something “to be sorted out”. They are somehow external to our immediate lived experience, and we find it awkward to broach the topic of how much money we make. Going out for drinks with friends is a common pastime in Amsterdam, a way to strengthen old bonds and to erect them with strangers, yet when the time comes to pay the bill, how quickly arise those anxieties, the modest pleads to Tikkie. Financial institutions affect deeply every part of our consuming lives, yet we do not know the names of their leaders. When we bike past the Rabobank building we only pray that the wind eases up, graciously allowing a gear shift, not that their leadership will manage to divest from harmful agricultural practices and let us consume cheaper, healthier food.

The very concepts of finance and, more broadly, economics have been skewed, painted with an ugly green colour which distinguishes them from the rest of society. ‘The Economy’ is a reified entity which deserves its own newspaper section and academic study. One wins a U.S. federal election by convincing the public that the other party has mismanaged the economy, or that your leadership has harnessed the power of the American economic engine. When Friedrich Merz ‘wins’ the German election, it is the vote not of a body politik but of “Europe’s largest economy”. From the moment we awake to the time our lashes last flutter, our lives are guided by its forces, its ideology, and the people who shape it to their liking. To travel to a friend, take a walk at the park, buy a croissant at a shop, stream a video, go to a club, do an at-home workout…These are all “economic” activities.

But what is it, really? Let’s look at grocery shopping. We work to earn a wage, save a portion of it to buy food, and spend it at Albert Heijn; the farmer performs her own labour and ships foodstuffs away to packaging facilities; the supermarket workers receive a wage by completing the connection between us two, and the corporate entity at the top skims most of the green off the top. This whole process is repeated ad infinitum: the capitalist economy is not a ‘thing’ but a process, a set of relations. It is decisions we make every day. I am in conversation with the farmer, just as she is in conversation with her animals, just as the grocery store manager is in conversation with his workers. We are all connected by this system of trade which, although it appears as impersonal, hanging on by only a thread, is what essentially makes up our lives. To identify the concept of an ‘economy’ and then cast it aside is to paint over life itself.

I contend that one of the most important ways to rectify our issue of political confusion and distress is to grab the sharpest scraper we can find and go to town removing the thick layer of forest green paint from the wall known as social life. Let us encounter the fourth wall of economic reasoning by drawing on Marcel Mauss’ The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. In this 1925 essay, we are greeted by a description of how gift exchanges around the world are meaningful as bonds of social relations. Because certain special objects contain within them a soul, the soul of the giver, we are in essence gifting a piece of ourselves to the receiver. This is a lot of pressure! So the receiver then becomes the giver, and a cycle of obligatory reciprocation ensues.

It is this set of obligations—to gift, to receive, and to reciprocate—which form the basis of social interests in the societies described by Mauss. When we shift to analysing our modern capitalist society, the difference in obligatory deeds could not be more drastic. We are not obliged to maintain ties through a complex web of sharing shiny jewellery or precious shells, but through the propagation of the motion of capital. I exist in order to consume certain goods, to reproduce my body and mind in order to produce more things for others so that they might (you guessed it) consume and produce more. But there is no process of gifting, so there is no true bond created between myself and my economic interlocutors. We are dependent upon people we will never meet.

‘The Economy’ as a thing stretches its tentacles everywhere, yet our current set of economic relations seems to be about as impersonal as one can imagine. The astute reader might recognise a contradiction here—human beings are inherently social creatures…How has a system of blatantly impersonal relations survived to this day? One can take this conversation in plenty of directions, but recently I’ve been focusing on the political constraints on the people of the West; we have the core intelligence to remake our lives for the better but suffer under consciously imposed political propaganda—ahistorical, orthodox economics as a “science”—and a restrained electoral system whereby the only medical fix to a dying social and environmental body is a modern Dutch doctor telling us to just take a couple of Paracetamol.

Sure enough, a patient who receives inadequate treatment for such large issues is bound to either shrivel up in defeat or lash out in anger and confusion. The wave of farmer’s protests in Europe and the concomitant rise of right-wing populist parties is here an important case. In the Netherlands, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) and the powerful PVV have stormed to power in regional and national elections, respectively, after thousands of tractors clogged major highway arteries and sprayed manure on city halls. The policies to restrict the nitrogen pollution from that very same cow poop were seen to be an imposition of rule by the Randstad (think ‘coastal elites’) on farmers specifically and the rural country in general. Our political discourse sees the BBB as a backlash against climate action when it could (and should) be seen also as a release valve for the steaming political frustration with the commodification of farmland and the dispossession of farmers from leading a sustainable way of life, a process which began many decades ago and is exacerbated by financial institutions like the Rabobank. If we could discuss right-wing populism not as perverted but as a genuinely understandable reaction to a system with no alternative, then we could properly address its dangers and work to heal the sickly societal body which gave rise to it.

The first step is to see ‘The Economy’ as either an illusion or an over-generalisation—certainly not a reified entity. It must be one or the other.