Business is Business

In response to a recent post on soaps, someone draws my attention to a frequent Eastenders cliche:

"Maybe the most heavily loaded token in the lingua franca you mention (particularly in 'Stenders) is that word 'business': 'it's only business, nothing personal'". An action is thereby put beyond question and removed from accountability in one stroke. 'Business' is indeed 'nothing personal', i.e., a neutral framework of adjudication against which personal pleas and allegiances are worthless, or magically dissolved. The autistic tautology 'business is business', like 'law is law', means there is no external standard by which it can or should be judged. To 'judge' it is merely impractical or irrational, like condemning a gust of wind. If the economy is a machine - something built by human beings - it seems to have become, somewhere along the line, an ahistorical machine.

This a-historical machine will exploit and immiserate people on our behalf and exonerate us in the process. I use and humiliate someone, skim off the fruits of their labour and then discard them, and represent it to myself as 'submiting to necessity'. 'Sorry if I hurt you, but I only did what Business required me to do; go and talk to it if you have any objections.' (Business assumes here the place of the Big Other). In using the alibi of 'business' I therefore also hide the enjoyment I derive from such acts. And this is exactly the structure of moral disavowal; indeed, the shirking of moral responsibility by referring one's actions to some 'external' and 'unalterable' framework is in a basic Kantian sense the very definition of immorality.

At the same time, this is hardly just a question of personal morality. The underlying and facilitating premise, that the framework of 'business' is 'unalterable,' is first given in the culture itself. Ultimately (via subtle dialectical mediations of course) it reposes upon the depoliticization of the economy. Marx, who is writing when such depoliticization is trying to get off the ground, is among the first to condemn it, and with caustic logic:

the error of the bourgeois economists, who regard these economic categories as eternal laws and not as historical laws which are valid only for a particular historical development, for a definite development of the productive forces. Instead, therefore, of regarding the politico-economic categories as abstract expressions of the real, transitory, historic social relations, Mr Proudhon, owing to a mystic inversion, regards real relations merely as reifications of these abstractions. These abstractions themselves are formulas which have been slumbering in the bosom of God the Father since the beginning of the world.' (The Poverty of Philosophy)

&

the vulgar economists confine themselves to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of production about their own world, which is for them the best possible one."
Capital Volume 1

That no one now speaks of 'vulgar economists' or 'bourgeois economists' is not a sign of their defeat but the almost total victory of their assumptions. Indeed, this depoliticization of the economic system in which we live, and of economic relations, is surely one of the great achievements of (we might still call) bourgeois ideology. Depoliticized, it is relegated to a place beyond question, and 'politics' is strategically confined to the machinations and polemic of the parliamentary theatre. This 'confinement' works to block cognition of the the true workings of power, the limits and pressures exerted upon Democracy by economic determinants, and the very failure of democracy to approach its Concept. To use an out of fashion word, we are denied access to the totality of relations in which parliamentary democracy is intricated, and waylaid instead by a decoy theatre. This theatre, featuring various Andrew Marrs and other impressarios, brings with it a whole time-consuming entourage of commentary and analysis, and the lillipution disputes of these 'theatre critics' serve as indubitable proof of the healthyness of the democratic process.

From Marx (see above) onwards, the tradition of the left always sought to qualify 'democracy' with 'bourgeois' or 'capitalist', and said that such qualifications are a fatal brake on and contamination of real democracy. The task has always been not simply to defend democracy that is, but to posit a democracy to come and to idenitify what, in the present, blocks its realisation. It shouldn't surprise us if those trying to uphold this tradition are accused of being its heretics and saboteurs. To stick with this tradition involves a continual commitment and effort of thought. It is quicker and more rewarding to cut your moorings and enter the Market.

And politics? As in the old joke, many prefer to look for true politics under the bright spotlight of media debate rather than in the dark engines of the economy, not because it's likely to be found under the spotlight but simply because its easier to look.