Entropy, alchemy and negative pigs: Obviating the matter of wealth

ABSTRACT

The labour theory of value is the lynchpin of classical political economy, the modern science of wealth. And the idea that labour is the source of all value, and hence the wealth of the nation, is our uneasy inheritance from Adam Smith. The flipside of the labour theory of value is a yearning for a life without labour and a form of wealth that defies the law of entropy. This fantasy informs various strategies for escaping the exigencies of wealth derived from human labour. In this paper I review three different strategies for securing wealth in a form that not only obviates the necessity of productive labour for its owner, but also holds out the promise of permanence – that is, a form of wealth that escapes the limits of ordinary materiality. These strategies involve the creation debt, fame, and brands.

KEYWORDS:

• Wealth
• brands
• debt
• fame
• kula

Acknowledgements

I thank Knut Rio and Theodoros Rakopoulos for inviting me to participate in the workshop on wealth in Thessaloniki. I also thank them and the other participants in the workshop for their stimulating comments and good company.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Robert J. Foster http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4353-956X

Notes

1 Marx similarly noted in his Critique of Political Economy: ‘It would be wrong to say that labor which produces use-values is the only source of the wealth produced by it, that is of material wealth … . Use-value always comprises a natural element’ (cited in Foster and Clark 2009). In this regard, Marx, like many ecologically minded critics of capitalism, follows William Petty’s hoary dictum that ‘Labor is the Father and active principle of Wealth, as Lands are the Mother’ ([1662] 1899, 68).

2 Smith perhaps registers concern over such divergence in his skepticism of the ranks of society known as masters and landlords. Masters and landlords of a certain magnitude, because of their ownership of much stock and land, respectively, could in effect live off the labour of others who must offer wealth in exchange for the use of said stock and land. Smith frowned upon these rentiers.

3 Compare the confusion between wealth and value mentioned at the beginning of this paper.

4 Daly (1980, 473) helpfully paraphrases Soddy (1922):

While man can use fuel-fed machinery to lighten labor, he can feed his internal fires only with new sunshine, or rather the energy of new sunshine as transformed through the good offices of the plant. Life thus depends on a continuous flow of energy, and hence the enabling requisites of life must partake of the nature of a flow rather than only a stock.

5 Soddy’s invectives against bankers and financiers at times border on anti-Semitism (see, e.g. Soddy 1922, 25; on anti-Semitism in the work of Soddy and other contemporary critics of orthodox monetary policy, see Coleman 2003).

6 US President Barrack Obama gave a re-election campaign speech in July 2012 in which he sought to highlight the role of government in assisting the growth of American businesses, say, through the provision of infrastructure. In the speech he said: ‘If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’ Obama’s words were used against him by his political opponents as evidence of insulting disregard for successful entreprenuers and innovators.

7 For a discussion of Soddy’s work in relation to the metaphor of alchemy, see Morrisson (2007).

8 As Soddy (1922, 28) elaborates:

 … life is consumption from the cradle to the grave, consumption of that pristine flow of energy we owe to the sun … . Life is a continuous expenditure of wealth and in this point again Ruskin, rather than the modern chrematist, was absolutely in agreement with science.