The Ethical Economy

Gießen.
We're in the afternoon session of the Gießen conference now (and I will need to run out a little early from here, in order to catch my train back to Hannover in the evening). The keynote speaker is Adam Arvidsson, whose interest is in what he calls the ethical economy (an online book of the same title is being released next week). Session chair Jörn Lamla introduces the session by referring to the German Website Ciao.de, a consumer-driven product discussion and rating Website (perhaps similar to sites like Epinions the English-speaking world) which is operated by a PR company - a kind of commercialisation of culture and a culturisation of commerce at the same time.

Adam begins by asking what the potentials of the generalisation of social production may be for an overcoming of conventional capitalist production - there is great potential for this in the ethical economy, he says. Customer co-production is a key trend of recent years, and in the 'exerience economy', customers are increasingly involved. Such initiatives, where they come from a marketing perspective, are managerial responses to an emerging new mode of production (what I would call produsage, I guess): variously described as social production, p2p production, open design, but not only online - even community-supported agriculture, and self-organised service economies (including LETS schemes, especially in large European cities) are part of this trend. (This trend is also driven further by current economic crises.)

Such initiatives, even where they take place online, are significantly supported by the Internet and related information and communication technologies. Leadbeater & Miller report that some 58% of the UK population are now engaged in social production; Adam's own research sets the figure as 83% (including purely online efforts) for Malmö. Such social production does not follow the value logic of capitalist production - value is not necessarily directly related to labour - but it does follow a value logic, if a different one.

Social production is not beyond value, but value here is related not to labour time (or productive time) but to the ability to construct ethically significant social relations. Value here lies in the brand that forms community, the project team, the p2p network, the creative 'scene' - the ability to give organisation to a particular task or project, often on a nomadic, case-by-case basis.

Social production realises an ethical economy, then. This economy is 'ethical' because value is contingent on the production of affectively significant ties (strong links in a world of weak links); actors are motivated not by money but by the social recognition of self; and value is communicated in 'ethical' media: networks and social recognition that measure and embody the social impact of a person or object. This ethical economy already has an important presence in contemporary capitalism, in brands, knowledge management, and corporate values. This is reflected in the growing financial importance of intangibles - indicated for example in corporate investment trends.

People have of course always organised their own processes of production, and people have always valued networks and respects; however, in the information society, such tendencies have been scaled up and the capacity for self-organisation is much greater. The potential for aggregating and communicating networks and respect is much greater (this is one of the attractions of social media, indeed), and the media for doing so are becoming objectified, much in the same way that in very early stages of the industry revolution the medium of capitalist exchange - money itself - was objectified.

This connects also to the continuing mediatisation of production and consumption, the socialisation of the means of cognitive production; to the now existential necessity to produce an identity; to the expansion of a new class of knowledge workers who value self-realisation; and to the expansion of education and the overproduction of university graduates in the last decades of the twentieth century, who have now become the workforce of the ethical economy. This affirmation of a new ethical economy is the consequence of the socialisation of the capitalist production process in the form of what Marx called General Intellect, Adam says. What creates value are not the means of production, but the ability to organise them in a meaningful way.

This trend will continue, because the ethical economy is more efficient as a source of immaterial expansion; because it will expand further into material production; and because it will form its own objective forms of value, its own 'iron cage': networking and rating are the fastest growing online activities, and projects and companies are emerging which aim to combine such ratings into more comprehensive indices, rating the overall ethical impact of companies, for example.

This way, brands can become the global public spheres that accompany global production processes, and such ethical indices can democratise financial markets and reconnect them to a 'real' economy (rather than providing only indices which rate brands against one another within a market).

We are seeing the emergence of a new economic form within the capitalist system, then, and this new economy will become very relevant for the organisation of the 21st century in terms of production, consumption, and value. In the longer term, capitalism will have to adapt to the logic of the ethical economy, and this ethical economy has the power to transform the central institutions of the current capitalist system.

That's the end of Adam's presentation - my apologies to the other panellists, but I have a train to catch!

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