Economics and Liberating Theory

Unlike mainstream economists, political economists have always tried to situate the study of economics within the broader project of understanding how society functions. However, dissatisfaction with the traditional political economy theory of social change known as historical materialism has increased to the point where many modern political economists and social activists no longer espouse it, and most who still call themselves historical materialists have modified their theory considerably to accommodate insights about the importance of gender relations, race relations, and the "human factor" in understanding social stability and social change. The liberating theory presented in this chapter attempts to transcend historical materialism without throwing out the baby with the bath water. It incorporates insights from feminism, anti-colonial and antiracist movements, and anarchism, as well as from mainstream psychology, sociology, and evolutionary biology where useful. Liberating theory attempts to understand the relationship between economic, political, kinship and cultural activities, and the forces behind social stability and social change, in a way that neither over nor underestimates the importance of economic dynamics, and neither over nor underestimates the importance of human agency compared to social forces. Whether the theory of people and society that follows accomplishes all this while avoiding unwarranted assumptions and unnecessary idiosyncrasies is for you, the reader, to judge.

People and Society

People usually define and fulfill their needs and desires in cooperation with others – which makes us a social species. Because each of us assesses our options and chooses from among them on the basis of our evaluation of their consequences we are also a self-conscious species. Finally, in seeking to meet the needs we identify today, we choose to act in ways that sometimes change our human characteristics, and thereby change our needs and preferences tomorrow. In this sense people are self-creative.

Throughout history people have created social institutions to help meet their most urgent needs and desires. To satisfy our economic needs we have tried a variety of arrangements – feudalism, capitalism, and centrally planned "socialism" to name a few – that assign duties and rewards among economic participants in different ways. But we have also created different kinds of kinship relations through which people seek to satisfy sexual needs and accomplish child rearing and educational goals, as well as different religious, community, and political organizations and institutions for meeting cultural needs and achieving political goals. Of course the particular social arrangements in different spheres of social life, and the relations among them, vary from society to society. But what is common to all human societies is the elaboration of social relationships for the joint identification and pursuit of individual need fulfillment.

To develop a theory that expresses this view of humans – as a self-conscious, selfcreative, social species – and this view of society – as a web of interconnected spheres of social life – we first concentrate on concepts helpful for thinking about people, or the human center, and next on concepts that help us understand social institutions, or the institutional boundary within which individuals function. After which we move on to explore the relationship between the human center and institutional boundary, and the possible relations between four spheres of social life.

The Human Center

Natural, Species, and Derived Needs and Potentials

All people, simply by virtue of being modern humans, have certain needs, capacities, and powers. Some of these, like the needs for food and sex, or the capacities to eat and copulate, we share with other living creatures. These are our natural needs and potentials. Others, however, such as the needs for knowledge, creative activity, and love, and the powers to conceptualize, plan ahead, evaluate alternatives, and experience complex emotions, are more distinctly human. These are our species needs and potentials. Finally, most of our needs and powers, like the desire for a particular singer's recordings, or the need to share feelings with a particular loved one, or the ability to play a guitar or repair a roof, we develop over the course of our lives. These are our derived needs and potentials.

In short, every person has natural attributes similar to those of other animals, and species characteristics shared only with other modern humans – both of which can be thought of as genetically "wired-in." Based on these genetic potentials people develop more specific derived needs and capacities as a result of their particular life experiences. While our natural and species needs and powers are the results of past human evolution and are not subject to modification by individual or social activity, our derived needs and powers are subject to modification by individual activity and are very dependent on social environment – as explained below. Since a few species needs and powers are especially critical to understanding how humans and human societies work, I discuss them before explaining how derived needs and powers develop.

Human Consciousness

Human beings have intellectual tools that permit them to understand and situate themselves in their surroundings. This is not to say that everyone accurately understands the world and her position in it. No doubt, most of us deceive ourselves greatly much of the time! But an incessant striving to develop some interpretation of our relationship with our surroundings is a characteristic of normally functioning human beings. We commonly call the need and ability to do this consciousness, a trait that makes human systems much more complicated than non-human systems. It is consciousness that allows humans to be self-creative – to select our activities in light of their preconceived effects on our surroundings and ourselves. One effect our activities have is to fulfill our present needs and desires, more or less fully, which we can call fulfillment effects. But another consequence of our activities is to reinforce or transform our derived characteristics, and thereby the needs and capacities that depend on them. Our ability to analyze, evaluate, and take what we can call the human development effects of our choices into account is why humans are the "subjects" as well...