Critical Review of the History of Economic Thought

An Essay by R.C. Smith

Like other dimensions of social life, economics has been subject to or entwined in the historical structures and processes of ideology.

This history can often be seen today in the frustration expressed by many about how there is ‘no longer any difference between mainstream political parties’. The essential ‘sameness’ of modern politics is defined almost wholly according to the economic, ideological context in which most mainstream political organisations and movements operate today.

The ideology of modern politics is especially evident in the context of the present economic crisis, where neither the mainstream Left or the mainstream Right have come up with viable solutions or alternatives.

As a result of empty political representation that is more concerned with tax cuts for the rich and supporting the greed of reckless bankers, communities and families are left to increasingly struggle in a fundamentally unjust economic circumstance with little to no viable political alternative. Thus we witness the disturbing reemergence of extreme right-wing sentimentality throughout much of Western society, which speaks to the unspoken anger and frustration long stewing deep within the heart of the oppressed.

In this context, the modern political landscape is starting to uncomfortably resemble that of the early 20th century.

Some of the reasons for this can be broken down according to the ideological paradigm that defines much of mainstream political and economic thought in capitalism.

In the present crisis, for example, conservatives claim austerity is the only option, ignoring the fundamental causes of the economic turmoil in the first place. Likewise, it is traditionally the belief of conservatives that despite the systemic reasons for the economic crisis, deep cuts in public spending and social programmes are the only rightful steps to reestablishing wealth and prosperity. Further to the right, the extreme right-wing parties traditionally take things one step further and introduce immigration, multiculturalism and historical liberal forces as key antagonisms at the heart of society’s political and economic problems.

Liberals, on the other hand, while traditionally supportive of social programmes and public spending, also refuse to challenge the systemic reasons for the economic crisis and the market forces that are ultimately antagonistic to genuine social progress and processes of liberalisation.

To that end, liberals favour more stimuli packages that go beyond the Wall Street bailouts as opposed to radical, fundamental changes to the economic and political structure of society. As a result, mainstreams liberals often become lost in a paradox of their own making, supporting a social agenda but refusing to challenge the fundamental context in which a socially driven socioeconomic-politico state of affairs is made impossible. Usually, this type of progressive economic thinking emerges further left in the form of green groups and alternative economic forums.

The central ideological structure of mainstream political parties, including the far-right but often excluding the more progressive alternatives movements traditionally found on the left, is historically easy to observe. Both sides of the ideological spectrum and their many splintered hybrids have more or less a direct lineage that extends from mercantilism and the classical school to Keynesianism and monetarism.

The sense that many people have that history repeats itself is indeed true in this respect. From the 16th century to the 21st, the ideology of economic thought has emerged in almost near cyclical forms inasmuch as the constant crises of capitalism have emerged in almost near cyclical forms.

In this article, which I produced as an extract from a paper that I am presently writing on the systemic failures of social collectivity, I will focus on the history of economics as it is subject to the historical processes of ideology, beginning from classical economics to modern neo-liberal austerity programmes.

In doing so my aim is to map out society’s economic evolution in the context of the transhistorical ideology of domination and oppression, which I introduced in , so as to better understand the nature and scope of modern forms of capitalism and the present need for a fundamental alternative.

Classical Economics

The foundations of economics were laid by the “classical economists” of the 18th and 19th centuries, with the publication of Adam Smith’s Enquiry into the Wealth of Nations in 1776. This work is widely acknowledged as the first comprehensive study on the subject of economics. It is also a significant moment in the history of capitalism (Clark, 2005), because it introduced several economic-ideologial concepts that would soon be woven into the very structure of society and which the system of modern capitalism would come to depend as a set of universally true, presupposed principles (totality) on the nature of economic and social functioning (Adorno, 2001, 2005).

Smith’s main thesis was mainly about broadening the market, which he more or less argued as critical to the wealth of nations. In his argument about how the market might be broadened, Smith introduced some of the most basic forces that still arguably govern the market economy today.

The most notable of these forces is rooted in his theory of individualism, which has left a significant mark on the evolution of social agency and structure. This is evidence in Smith’s arguement that the basic impulse of economic agents participating in and contributing to the market were governed purely by the pursuit of “self-interest”.

Moreover, it was Smith who first theorised a set of economic structures dependent on the fragmentation of community for the benefit of a purely self-interested pursuit in individual gain.

What is perhaps considered as Smith’s most widely famous illustration, he argued that the butcher, the baker and the brewer do not supply meat, bread and wine for satisfying the ‘consumer’ but for serving their own self-interest in the form of ‘making a living’. It was in this famous string of words that the now token symbol of the religion of the Market was born: namely the invisible hand of the market, which miraculously turns self-serving activities into activities for greater public good.

This historical turn in thought, to borrow the words of Theodor W. Adorno, was the mark of ‘self-preservation gone wild’ (Adorno, 2001, 2005). The result was the development of historical social settings governed by economic structures that depend on the distortion of social agency within the scope of an increasingly alienated ‘self’ (Ibid).

Despite a vast amount of anthropological and historical evidence that directly contradicts Smith’s main economic presumptions as well as his theories of individualism and self-interest, his work supported the already existing hierarchy of social relations, encouraging not the individual pursuit of existentially meaning projects and life-goals, but the division of labour (Clarke, 1991, 2005).

Adam Smith’s emphasis on the importance of division of labour, something which has been identified by Marxists and Frankfurt School critical theorists as being essential to the structure of capitalism, lead to labor no longer being directly linked to the worker’s immediate benefit, but as a means of profit for another (Adorno, 2001, 2005; Marx, 1976; Clarke, 1991).

Indeed, it was Smith’s conceptualisation of the division of labor that marked the coming of instrumental reason, which resulted in the institutionalisation of production methods and techniques geared principally toward using human beings for profit generating activities and with the littlest regards to the social, political and labour conditions of the workers.

By his labour, moreover, a worker makes or produces or creates something. But this object of the workers labour, as a result of the division of labour, was turned into a commodity that remained the boss’s property.

By the fact of remaining the boss’s property, the commodified object of a person’s labour became distanced from the immediate benefit of the worker who produced it. This is basis for the spawn of systemic alienation (Marx, 1976).

Capitalist alienation, which is rooted in the earliest stages of classic economics, reduces human beings to something less than human. It robs the individual of his labour, of his ability to create and produce things, for the benefit of the capitalist (i.e., a person who is the sole benefit of the worker’s labour).

While Smith wrote in his work Theory of Moral Sentiments that moral values are important when it comes to the social aspect of the economy, condemning the tendencies of the upper classes and business owners who are driven purely for economic gain over the interest of social good.

In this respect, Smith did openly acknowledge the important role of government or State in supporting and even upholding moral and legal frameworks that would guide economic and market operations toward the common good for all. But these moral hunches and inclinations in Smith’s work were far too polarised – even isolated – from his theories on individualism and self-interest.

As I commented in a recent lecture, what we see in the work of Adam Smith is almost a projection of the inherent contradictions of capitalism insofar that there is a great divide between his idea of an economy for the good of all and one based purely on the profit motive.

It is worth noting that Smith was also the person who first formally identified the principles of supply and demand, which today are common market forces. As an extension to Smith’s work in this area of economics, his successor Ricardo wrote Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, introducing extremely one-dimensional concepts of international trade. Perhaps more significantly, Ricardo theorised the law of comparative advantage, which is referenced by mainstream economists today.

During this time the paradigmatic phenomenon of privatisation was intensifying. This movement was strengthened by Ricardo’s formulations around the law of diminishing returns, which had particular emphasis on land.

Interconnected to the work of Smith and Ricardo – even if only paradigmatically – was Thomas Malthus’ thesis entitled Principle of Population. In this work Malthus formulated the conflict between economic agriculture and population growth, which I would argue remains heavily in the background of economic and social policy debate today.

In sum, Malthus concluded that economic agriculture tends to grow in arithmetic proportions while population growth is more or less subject to geometric proportion. The outcome is conflict between these two poles, which can only be rectified by epidemic disease, famine and social institutional or social reproduction of loss of life.

Lastly we come to J.S.Mill, who we might consider as the last of “classical economists”. Mill wrote Principles of Political Economy in 1848, conceptualising further the distinction between production and distribution.

As a result of the “classical economists” the world had witnessed a turn in history. While many would profit from this turn, even more would suffer its consequences. With the increasing division of labour, institutional legitimacy to exploitative labour conditions, the loss of political hope to economic influence, and the ideologically engendered concepts of privatisation and free market enterprise (which was less about individual autonomy and more about the ironic economic coercion of individual autonomy), labour unions started to emerge and class struggle really started to ignite.

In response to the social crisis of his time, Karl Marx began to question the economic and ideological paradigm that he grew increasingly witness to and wrote his seminal critique Das Capital – thus marking the end of “classical economics” with an analysis of the exploitation of the working classes and the inherent, perpetual crises of capitalism.

Neo-classical Economics

During the late 19th century and early 20th century, an economic shirt occurred in Western society. This shift can be defined by what’s considered as the emergence of “neo-classical economics”.

Neo-classic economics does not represent significant variations in terms of the fundamental structure and scope of the classical economics of capitalism. Rather, what neo-classical economics represents the most is the further honing of previous economic theories, making them far more instrumental and absolute in the form of a science of exploitation, control and domination.

Furthermore, the neo-classical economists are known for formulating irreducible “economic laws” which cover everything from production and distribution to consumption and utility maximisation.

Most of these laws are commonly understood to rely on theories of optimisation through calculation of costs and margins of surplus.

It was also during the turn from classical to neo-classical economics that a more heightened emphasis on the concept of ‘consumerism’ emerged, which as a theory has arguably evolved into the engine of the modern capitalist system.

Alfred Marshall is considered by many to be one of the earliest fathers of neo-classical economics. He wrote Principles of Economics in 1890. Almost 40 years later Professor Lionel Robbins published his essay Nature and Significance of Economics, which extended the classic and neo-classic paradigm of thought by contributing to the reforming of economics in the context of advanced capitalism.

A historical example of instrumental rationality (i.e., the idea of using human beings as a ‘means’ toward achieving economic ‘ends’) being introduced explicitly to core theories of economics is highly noticeable in Robbins writing.

Accordingly, economics was no longer to be seen as a study of political economy but as a science in-itself, one which is concerned with effectively using “means” to achieve the economic “ends” of capitalism. Economics became an official academic discipline of business, of the economy, separated from direct scrutiny of the social sciences (Adorno, 2001, 2005).

While a variety of mainstream economic theories emanated from out of the neo-classic era, majority if not all of the mainstream theories were concerned with the maximisation of the present economic structure of society.

Hitherto the neo-classic era is most significant for its limiting the overall focus and scope of mainstream economic theory and practise. Of course countless alternative theories, studies and research activity took place in this time (which we will get to later), the predominant economic ideology was already set and was, in fact, systemic.

This is evidenced particularly in how the increasingly one-dimensional (Marcuse, 2002) mainstream view of the foundation of economics started permeating in the teaching of economics throughout Western society.

Economic history and the history of economic thought, which is defined considerably through the lens of the classic and neo-classic perspective, became central to the syllabi or form of study for University students.

During this period students started being taught overly mathematical theories of economics, which removed economic theory from the humanity of all economic practise. As a result, a one-dimensional and abstract view of economics and economic history continued to permeate.

Students were increasing influenced to interpret economics through numbers and equations without any background in the social sciences or consideration of the ‘human subject’ central to it all. Economics therefore became divorced not only from economic reality, but also social and existential reality, and developed an extremely rigid view of social evolution.

Keynesian Macro-economics and the turn to Micro-Economics and Finally Neo-liberal Economics

Neo-classical economics faced a severe challenge during the Great Depression in 1929, which saw the US economy plummet and unprecedented social and economic crises unfold as a result.

Despite the pretensions of neo-classical economists and their belief in the irreducible laws of their economic theories, the underlying truth was that neo-classical thought was extremely removed from everyday life and, indeed, dogmatic (Clarke, 1988).

The neo-classic economists were divorced from humanity, from human experience and from existential conditions, as they worked purely with ideological concepts that floated almost divinely in the realm of the abstract (Fullbrook, 2005; Ormerod,1997).

When capitalist society entered into its next period of crisis the neo-classical economists of the time were forced to engage with the concrete economic needs of the epoch. Needless to say they were left wanting, with little to no prescription to remedy the challenges confronting capitalist economies. They were not even able to present constructive policy ideas to governments or present viable alternatives to the public.

The primary solution according to the neo-classical thinkers was based almost wholly on the previously unshakable laws of neo-classic economic theory: that to remedy the crisis governments were required to cut costs and generate profits. It was said that this approach would stimulate business and encourage the reincarnation of the market.

The result of these measures is forever documented in history. The result of the cuts meant diminishing wages, which in turn reduced demand and only deepened the depression.

On the other hand, the miraculous work of the invisible hand of the market as first theorised by Adam Smith was nowhere to be seen In fact, not only did the market not correct itself and steer society toward the path of greater good, it started to disintegrate to the point where public intervention was required on a massive scale (Ibid).

This intervention was not so dissimilar to the recent Wall Street bailouts, with the US government having to implement dramatic legislative measures just to keep the economy above water.

Around the same time J.M. Keynes published his thesis entitled General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936. This was celebrated as a huge success in that Keynes outlines a new theoretical construction, arguing for a shift from micro-economics to macro-economics.

One of the more popular parts of Keynes economic theory, which is now often considered under the heading of the “Keynesian revolution”, was his work on aggregate demand and aggregate supply.

In sum, aggregate demand and aggregate supply is often referenced in relation to the idea of economic equilibrium. One of the conclusions of Keynesian economics is that for the economy to enter a state of equilibrium at full employment levels, the government or State would be required to stimulate aggregate demand by increasing consumption, investment and so on.

This was an obvious reverse to recent economic policy and stood in direct contrast to neo-classic theories of economics. As a result, Keynes more or less inspired a new wave of economics, known as macro-economics.

But much of Keynesian analysis was still very much anchored in the present economic and social structures of capitalism. It served to remedy the systemic crisis of the pre-war economy, but only in the context of the systems and structures of that ideological enterprise to begin with (Adorno, 2001, 2005; Fullbrook, 2005; Ormerod,1997; Coyle, 2007).

While waves of new research and studies were published elaborating and expanding Keynesian analysis and macro-economics as a whole, the statistical systems, the monetary theories and policies, the ideas on investment and consumption and production, the general concept of labour – all of these subjects remained more or less embedded in the psychology of shallow reform.

That is to say, all of this newly founded analysis never reached the depths of the problem in the first place and rather than studying the real need for systemic change across economics, society and politics it remained limited to the fundamental totality and confines of capitalism.

After the Second World War, Keynesian policy was considered ineffective against the new economic woes of post-war society. In fact, it was commonly held responsible for inflation and as a result a new shift in economic thinking occurred (Fullbrook, 2005; Ormerod,1997; Coyle, 2007).

This shift came in the form of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, which took Keynesian economics head-on, and returned once again to orthodox economics and economic structures and principles.

The unfortunate legacy of the Chicago School is its emphasis on flexible labour markets, which could support cheap wages, as well as severe cuts to public programmes like unemployment benefits, disability benefits, public healthcare – the cornerstones of a ‘welfare state’ or social system that represents at least a fraction of belief in ‘the common good’.

In fact, it was the belief of the Chicago School that mass privatisation was the cure to society’s ailments – meaning a more hardened, unleashed, unregulated and profit-determined capitalism was the way forward.

It was the opposite of economics for social welfare, benefit and progress. The Chicago School treated unemployment as a mere statistic, something to be negotiated not in terms of the suffering of those unemployed but in terms of freeing the government of responsibility (Fullbrook, 2005; Ormerod,1997; Coyle, 2007).

Perhaps best summarised by Margret Thatcher well after the economic theories of the Chicago School became the next source of life for capitalism: “there is no society, only individuals and families”. In other words, society was being pushed back to its classical economic roots and old concepts of pseudo-individualism and ‘the economic drive of self-interest’ was taking on more modern, hardened forms.

Indeed, it was at the turn of the Chicago School that the notion of public communities, social communes – society, in both practise and principle – was reduced to a superficial image. It was done so in the name of control and profit. Human beings were now regards as “utility maximisers”, theorised and objectified purely as means to achieve profitable ends.

On the same token, the concept of “natural unemployment” was introduced as a piece of economic theory that eliminated all State responsibility for the welfare of its citizens insofar that “natural unemployment” was considered as necessary. Groups of people will always be unemployed because the very existence of their unemployment and the consequences that follow will inspire the ‘working class’ to work harder on lower wages (Ibid).

Principles and policy of economic coercion of this kind became institutionalised through the economic theories of the Chicago School, and had a huge impact on how capitalist society would restructure itself in the future.

Fast forward to the birth of neo-liberalism in the 1980’s and the austerity programmes being unleashed on Western society today and the mark of the Chicago School is entirely evident. The historical evolution of human society and of capitalism is clear.

Maintaining nearly the same irreducible economic pretensions as the classical and neo-classical economists of old, present-day economic theory continues down a one-dimensional and ideologically driven path (at least in the mainstream).

With neo-liberal policy initiated in 1982 by Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and institutionally imposed by the “Washington Consensus” on all economies around the world, deregulation of the private sector and the systematic elimination of public welfare have been cemented as the next stage of the economic-ideological paradigm (Ibid).

Capitalism, still alive crisis after crisis, generating mass wealth for the top 1 percent, has undergone several transformations over the last few centuries. But one could argue that none have been so explicitly regressive and so intentionally damaging to the ‘betterment of society’ than the neo-liberal era.

On the back of Chicago School economics and as a result of the sweeping policies of the earliest neo-liberal political enforcers, executives of companies draw salaries today 150 times the average worker (Oxfam, 2012).

On the basis of the belief in economic efficiency and productivity, an overwhelming amount of people have become increasingly underpaid in real terms and have been coerced into accepting the conditions of a new social-Darwinism. The concept of society is now based on the psychology of ‘the survival of the fittest’.

As I noted in recent article on the financial crisis, the national share of income going to the top 1 percent has more than double since 1979. In fact, income distribution to the top 1 percent has seen an overall increase of 6 percent to a whopping 14.5 percent. In real terms this means that executive pay, the income of the wealthiest in society has increased from 50 to 150 times average earnings, leaving the gap of social inequity unbridgeable (Oxfam, 2012).

These dramatic increases in wealth for the top 1 percent have occurred whilst recent figures by the Department for Communities and Local Government suggest a 14 percent rise in homelessness in the past year.

Likewise, as the British government exercises its most sweeping cuts to date as part of its aggressive austerity programme, Oxfam reports overall depression across society with minimum wage in decline in real terms full-time work becoming increasingly scarce. Not only that, a recent report published by Oxfam concludes that in the context of mass accumulation of wealth by some and severe austerity for others total annual incomes are falling, while food, energy and housing prices are rising.

“Spending cuts are deeply regressive, hitting the poorest thirteen times harder as a proportion of income than the richest, partly due to lower incomes and partly due to greater reliance [on social services that have been targeted by the government’s austerity programme]. Benefit cuts, of course hit people in poverty hard – indeed, 72 percent of those announced in 2010 will be paid by women. It is therefore significant that the government has chosen to meet its fiscal deficit reduction targets primarily through spending cuts (a planned 77 percent) rather than tax rises (23 percent). Most of the tax portion has come through an increase from 17.5 percent to 20 percent VAT (an direct tax on consumption), which impacts twice as hard on the poorest tenth of the population as on the richest.”

This summary of neo-liberal Britain is capped off by the fact that the day the government set out its most severe austerity measures, the top 1 percent of society received a sizeable tax cut (Oxfam, 2012).

And yet this overall picture does not include the extreme environmental degradation that has occurred as a result of severe economic distortion. Pollution and over consumption of natural resources have emerged as a serious threat to the future of humanity as a direct result of the economic ideology, which has underlined humanity’s social-ideological evolution.

Continuous emission of toxic gases from industrial enterprises and transport vehicles etc. has polluted air and water. Green house gases have led to the phenomenon of global warming which has upset the balance of nature. Different parts of the world have suffered from unexpected torrential rains and cyclones. In other parts of the world droughts and high temperature have become serious problems.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recommended the planned reduction of emission of toxic gases by 5.8 per cent but the biggest polluter, the USA, has refused to accept the target on the ground on the plea that it would put a constraint on its economic growth and its high living standard, and that it is not prepared to accept.

Emerging economies like China and India are also unwilling to accept limits to their growth, while economic processes create wastes which negatively impact on human welfare.

While some may argue that environmental pollution and degradation was a necessary result of the industrial turn of society and for the greater progress of humanity, there remains no justification for the continuation of that paradigm with the emergence of alternative energies and technology.

On the other hand, unrelented demands of the economy have created the possibility of exhaustion of finite and non-renewable resources. While the technology for development of alternative sources of energy like solar, wind and wave energy as well as biological energy has been suppressed, economic superpowers who sit at the top of the hierarchy are attempting to grab control over scarce hydro carbon resources through invasion and lets loose violence on other countries which are endowed by nature.

Thomas Carlyle was right, this is not economics for the betterment of humanity. This is not “soul economics” or economics with social progress in mind. Rather it is “dismal economics”. It is an economics that is principled on the neo-liberal philosophy of a society-less existence, wherein public citizens no longer have the power to regulate their own lives.

As I have written elsewhere, it is in this context that politics is dead. It is dead insofar that the government and main political parties, which should in practise be an extension of the public, now have little integrity or authority to maintain a legal framework which regulates private enterprises so as to ensure public well-being. In fact, the force of mainstream politics is to push for further privatisation, an even heavier hand against labor unions and the systematic disassembling of whatever remaining social programmes are left. The motive of society is profit and self-interest, never mind social progress and overall communal health.

Mainstream economics today is founded on the structural principle of capitalism, which looks only toward short gains as opposed to the greater picture of the progress of all of humanity. It does not take into account the dynamic problems of society or the need for the reallocation or distribution of resources. It promotes wealth over social welfare. Greed over community. Selfishness over empathy.

As Paul Ormerod noted in his discussion on the death of economies, conventional economics gives a very misleading view of the way the world actually operates. The transhistorical ideological paradigm of economics speaks of a need for deep systemic change. Economics should not govern society; rather the public domain should have the power to govern economic theories and structures for it-self.

Alternatives

There are plenty of individuals, organisations and communities presently working toward the realisation and practise of viable, concrete alternative economic structures and systems.

This month Heathwood will be publishing, for example, an article by Professor Richard D. Wolff whose work in democratic economics has gained quite a lot of momentum as of late. But there is an extensive list of others, who are presently developing more sustainable economic models. They include: New Economics Foundation, New Economics Institute, Ha-Joon Chang, The Transnational Institute, Oxfam, Nouriel Roubini, Steve Keen, Democracy Now, Yves Smith (main author of the Naked Capitalism blog), the Capital Institute, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the New Economics Foundation, Chris Cutrone and The Platypus Affiliated Society, Democracy at Work, the (NAME) community, and countless others.

The examples listed above represent just a fraction of what is presently being developed and discussed with regards to progressive, viable socioeconomic-political alternatives. Perhaps at another time it would be more appropriate to cover the whole range of individuals and organisations and spend several minutes describing the aims and objectives of each.

For now, it will suffice to explain that what they all tend to share in is not only a tremendous commitment to the idea of the fundamental transformation of economic structures, processes and systems from a top-down perspective ; but also a commitment to the idea of systemic change on the level of social agency.

In other words, it is not just a top-down approach to alternative economic systems and processes that many of these movements have in common, but the awareness that the fundamental transformation of present economic structures must also be approached from on the level of individual experience.

Working through a sort of dialectics between greater social systems and forces and individual agency, what many of the above examples seem to share, whether realised or not, is their implicit and explicit development of an alternative epistemology, anthropology and cosmology, which is the true foundation systemic change.

Indeed, while it is true for example that social transformation must be guided by a top-down scope and that in order for progressive alterative economic theory to realise itself, it must be developed on the basis of the reintegration of economics back into the social sciences as a whole. This is just the beginning.

These theoretical and conceptual dimensions are crucial to understanding change, but what many alternative economic and political movements are growing increasingly aware of is the necessity to ground the concept of alternative economic structures in an epistemological and anthropological model that functions contrary to that of the transhistorical ideology of capitalism: namely in opposition to the transhistorical paradigm of objectivistic, instrumental, hierarchical, and experientially distorted reason or ‘way of being’ (Adorno 2001, 2005; Marx, 1973; Sherman, 2007; Smith, 2011).

In other words, the individual’s (efficacious subject) flow of action in the history of ideological society has always been constrained and propelled by a set of social conditions and structures (material, social, epistemic, and so on). This is because the ideology of historic and modern society constitutes the social context from within which individuals experience, plan, act and produce.

As a historically cemented context in which the individual exists and acts and responds, the ideologically engendered paradigm of capitalism is a systemic circumstance wherein its systems, structures and processes represent the greater social forces that define the backdrop of individual experience (Adorno, 2001, 2005; Marx, 1973; Smith, 2011).

In this context, practical and technical knowledge is also established on the basis of the ideological structures of society and the social relationships of power and coercive material production it engenders (Smith, 2012).

On this line of thought, the ideological culmination of the capitalist system in history has translated into a social context wherein knowledge is limited to totality. The epistemic conditions of capitalist society play a role in the forming of social agency, relationships and actions based on power, instrumentality, objectivity, hierarchy and class.

It is for this reason that we have witnessed in history the promotion of alternative economic theories as Keynesianism or different branches of classic and neo-classic economics, even Eastern and Western forms of Communism, which while different in scope and theory are merely different poles of the same ideological spectrum (Smith, 2012).

The individual (subject) is always necessarily shaped to some degree by the social experiences and epistemic context of the period in which he or she exists. On the same token, more often than not it is from within the greater social context in which we exist as human beings that our assumptions, generalisations and objectifications of other people and phenomena are born.

In closing, as contemporary society continues to drive itself historically toward securing a “wholly administered society” in terms of both the ideology of the political and economic landscape (totality), it is clear that our time will be defined by the need to perform a series of fundamental inquisitions into the very nature of our present social context.

As the formal standard of social and economic relations continues to lag the process of globalisation and democratisation, we must confront without resorting to ideology or dogma, the foundational issues at hand (Smith, 2012). We can begin to do so by at least acknowledging that countless alternative movements have already emerged, presenting us with potential frameworks for concrete viable alternatives that could potentially shift history for the better.