The hallmark of the [social] revolution of the 1960s was the defence of individual liberty against the constraints of mass conformist society. Resistance to the draft; the defence of free speech; the right to divorce, abortion, contraceptives, and other sexual freedoms all references the desire to make choices for oneself, through one's own reason and according to one's own conscience.21
Following in the footsteps of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom captured the wave.22 Friedman argued that political and economic freedom are inextricably linked; that ‘a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.’ He was well aware of the fact that society was not always harmonious and that there was therefore the risk of an inherent conflict between society and the individual. Friedman argued that the market could ease the resultant tension, allowing us to engage in an anonymous fashion without having to agree with one another. The result was that we could all live side by side and meet our daily needs in a way that avoided enforced conformity. To quote Voltaire: ‘Go into the London Stock Exchange … and you will see representatives from all nations gathered … Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith.’23
Not only do markets allow us to try to escape the norms of society, enabling us to be ourselves, market competition adds a further release valve: it means that individuals have at least some chance of escaping individual cases of abuse. The market might be brutal but so can the state be too. And whilst in human nature ‘bad apples’ are inevitable, they are, in general, more likely to face the consequences of their actions in the marketplace than they are in any state-run economy. Without competition to expose them, the state can cover up wrongdoing, meaning that abuses continue. Indeed, it has an incentive to do so in order to hold on to its reputation for ‘social good’. In the marketplace, even though cover-ups can and do happen, competition pushes in the direction of rooting out wrongdoers. Either consumers get wind of it and stop buying a particular producer's goods, or workers move on to another producer. Although the mechanism for this to happen is not perfect ‒ consumers do not always find out the full facts and workers facing abuse are not always mobile ‒ at least it provides a possibility of punishment and escape that is missing when the state has a monopoly of power ‒ and, all importantly, a monopoly of force, which enables it to imprison or even kill those who speak out.24
Exploitation and violence levelled at women is regularly blamed on capitalism but society is, more often than not, the underlying cause. That includes Federici's classic example: the tens of thousands of women burnt at the stake in Europe during a 200-year period of witch trials in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Witch burnings reflected the way in which society felt threatened by increasingly independent single women. And, as new research shows, they were also a response to increased competition between different Christian religious sects as a means to demonstrate their purity value to the masses.25 In the modern world, witch burnings and other forms of violence towards women ‒ including FGM ‒ are similarly the result of bad social practices. Although it's far from perfect, and needs to be backed up by a legal system that takes violence against women seriously, the market can help to provide a way out.
The Big ‘But’: Markets can (and Should) be Made to Work Better
Until recently, we tended to think that markets were modern. In 1944, for example, Karl Polanyi argued that a ‘great transformation’ to a modern market economy took place around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Over the last twenty years, economic historians have, however, identified a more prominent role for markets than that envisaged by Polanyi throughout many different periods of human history and in many different parts of the world. But, of course, this does not mean that one market is equivalent to another. As Ha-Joon Chang and Alex Marshall have noted, there is, in a sense, no such thing as a free market.26 Markets can take many different forms, depending on the foundations upon which they are built: laws, institutions (both formal and informal) and the regulations we choose to put in place, including what can or cannot be bought or sold. Although markets may appear entirely ‘natural’, well-functioning markets ‒ those that deliver equitable and sustainable prosperity ‒ are the product of careful design and periodic updating of laws, regulations and institutions. Markets do not, in other words, exist independently of the state or society.
As Steven Pearlstein noted in response to the controversial question ‘Is capitalism moral?’:
[T]he way markets distribute rewards is neither divinely determined nor purely the result of the ‘invisible hand’… In our current debate over capitalism, too much attention is focused on whether, how or how much to redistribute the incomes that markets have produced, with too little focus on the institutional arrangements that determine how that income is divided up in the first place.
History provides plenty of examples. In his study of labour markets in the British Industrial Revolution, Mark Steinberg notes that the laws which provided the ‘rules of the game’ within which labour markets operated were not neutral but were ‘embedded in a legal system structured to serve capitalists’ interests’, which included the Master and Servant Act of 1823.27 In the late nineteenth century, we find a further example, one in which the state regulated the working hours of women, in part due to pressure from the rising (and very male) labour movement. In regard to gender equality, past and present, we know that family law, property law, the regulation of abortion and birth control, and laws aimed at sex workers all have significant effects on the extent to which market outcomes are equitable in a gender sense.28
Many economists who initially began to embrace the market ‒ those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‒ recognized that markets would only work well if they operated against the ‘right’ backdrop, where what was ‘right’ needed to be debated and was ultimately determined by normative considerations. According to Avner Offer, this means that neoliberalism is a ‘radical departures from the ethical legacy of Enlightenment and utilitarian economics’ and certainly is ‘not consistent with Adam Smith's own position’.29 When determining the appropriate backdrop for markets, early economists confronted numerous ethical questions, including about what is or is not ‘fair’. This included debating the laws on bankruptcy, the notion of lender of last resort and guarantees for savers, whether people who owned shares should be personally liable for a company's debts and whether inventors should be able to patent their ideas.30 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they also debated equal pay legislation, though they came out against rather than in favour of it, which goes to show just how much social norms creep into the laws that underpin markets.31 However, before long, Milton Friedman began to argue that economics could divorce itself from moral and ethical questions, meaning that the contributions of both earlier liberal thinkers and of early institutionalism were lost.
These early insights have, however, been reborn in modern debates about the market versus the state in at least two ways. First, we've seen a revival of interest in the work of Karl Polanyi, who argued that markets became increasingly disembodied from society in the course of the Industrial Revolution. His modern followers suggest that in order to work better, markets need to be ‘re-embedded’ in society and subjected to non-economic (not just economic) norms.32 A reassertion of social democracy, involving greater social protections, along with encouraging small local efforts to design, trial and demonstrate alternatives to the capitalist firm (along the lines of J. K. Gibson-Graham's Community Economy), is on offer in place of a full-scale anti-capitalist revolution.33 Second is the idea of ‘predistribution’, or, when applied to gender alone, what Elisabeth Prügl has sceptically termed ‘neoliberalism with a feminist face’.34 The idea here is that we do not have to simply accept market outcomes as given, redistributing ex post, but that we can instead work on the very foundations of markets to ensure that those initial outcomes are �
�fairer’ and more successful. Here, rather than society taming capitalism, it is about changing the rules of the game so that they do not rig the game on one side or another. Redesign can include: tackling property and inheritance laws that are different for men and women; laws that ban married women from working, girls from attending certain educational institutions or accessing particular careers; laws that restrict women's ability to control their fertility or their access to financial services and credit; and laws that criminalize sex work. Market outcomes that are not inequitable can also be a result of a lack of female (or other such) representation in the development of those laws, regulations and institutions, which means voices that need to be heard are sidelined.35
Whether we move in the direction of Polanyi or predistribution, or develop some combination, it necessarily requires starting big debates within society about what we think is ‒ or is not ‒ ‘fair’. Most pressing are, I would suggest, debates about whether rights should be equally invested in immigrant and domestic labour, in citizenship as opposed to paid work (the latter being the case with health care, etc. in the United States), how we think care should be distributed, whether we think individuals should be financially responsible for their own children (or whether there should be some collective responsibility due to their ‘public good’ nature and, if so, whether or not there is a ‘right’ number of children where such responsibilities are concerned), and whether women should be free to monetize their bodies.
But, change is never easy. Social norms that penalize women ‒ norms that are in turn embedded in laws, regulations and institutions ‒ must be confronted.36 This requires being aware of the potentially divergent interests of different groups; whilst empowering women might be good for everyone in the longer term, it can also create conflicts of interest in the short term which, unless they are factored in, can lead to worse rather than better results for women. That includes greater violence against women within the home, including, as has been found in India, female relatives being killed in response to changes in inheritance rights.37 Furthermore, as Nancy Fraser notes, the geographical political boundaries within which laws and institutions are constructed ‒ the nation-state ‒ can prove to be a severely limiting factor where justice is concerned. Once again, that's relevant not just to class but also to gender. National boundaries force us to ask who are the relevant subjects that we must consider when determining the laws and institutions that so affect market outcomes? That can lead us to ignore the interests of foreign workers and the world's poorest women. We need to question whether the ‘appropriate unit of justice’ really is the territorial state, and what more can be done to effect more equitable and sustainable outcomes where that is not the case.38
Conclusion
The value of the market cannot be reduced down to economic concepts of efficiency and productivity. What gives markets their power is the very way in which they enable bottom-up as opposed to top-down action, supporting individual freedom: markets allow us all to try different things and to be whoever we want to be, unconstrained by what other people think. Marxism makes the mistake of assuming that we can all happily associate with one another once class has been eliminated; Karl Polanyi assumed social norms and social protections (such as a welfare state) could be entirely innocent. Perhaps the two greatest thinkers of the left, they both completely ignored the way in which society can be vicious, particularly to those it disapproves of, whether that's working women, single mums, people of colour, the LGBT community or immigrants. The reality of life is that, starting from an early age, we frequently come into conflict with one another outside of the marketplace, no more so than in the playground. Every human being is different, and we gain utility from being free to be ourselves. Non-conformity does not, however, always please others, which means that, in a social setting, people often have to hide their individuality or risk open conflict. That includes women who want to escape from heavily gendered social norms ‒ and women who disagree with other women about appropriate behaviour (such as how much of their body it is appropriate to cover or uncover). The market offers a solution by catering to all lifestyles and allowing us to exchange with one another in an anonymous fashion, meaning we don't have to get on with one another.
Whilst markets thrive on diversity, society and the state can punish it with the heavy hand of force. They can respond to the diversity and freedoms that the market has enabled by putting a lid on it: to restrict, as we see today, our freedom to move across borders and our freedom to buy or sell whatever interests or best suits us, which can include monetizing our bodies as well as our brains. Some commentators, such as Nancy Fraser, believe that it's possible to ‘forge a principled new alliance’ between social democracy and emancipatory movements: that we can have more state interventions and social protections at the same time as allowing every individual to be themselves.39 I am altogether less optimistic, as was Friedrich Hayek.40 Not only, as we will see in the next chapter, have many state interventions historically sidelined women, but sex work provides a perfect example of where well-intentioned state interventions designed to be emancipatory are trampling on (rather than supporting) the individual freedom of a heavily marginalized social group. There is a limit to how much we can trust anyone who is given free rein to intervene in the market, even if they are a self-declared social progressive.
Although it must surely be embraced, the second agenda ‒ that of predistribution ‒ also has its limits. As it suggests, the foundations on which market exchange is built ‒ laws, regulations and institutions ‒ can vary quite significantly across place and time and come to embody society's views on what is or is not acceptable and what is or is not ‘right’. Where markets fail to deliver equitable outcomes to women, it is often a result of laws, regulations and institutions that embody unprogressive views. Redesigning markets is essential, but it can also be very tricky when society is unprogressive in its views. Society is always the limiting factor.
The market is far from perfect, but it must be understood in the context of both an imperfect state and a society that can be something other than progressive. When we blame the market, sometimes that blame would be better directed at society.
Notes
1 Stiglitz (2016).
2 Hartmann (1979).
3 Federici (2004).
4 Dowling (2015). Also see Dowling and Harvie (2014).
5 For a historical perspective, Amott and Matthaei (1991) and McClintock (1995).
6 Fraser (2009).
7 Seguino (2000a,b). Also Blecker and Seguino (2002); Ertürk and Cagatay (1995); Standing (1999). On the subsequent debate, see Seguino (2011).
8 Humphries (2012, 2013).
9 Royal Commission on Employment of Children in Factories (1833). See, in particular, section D2, p. 37 and p. 54.
10 Kabeer (2003), p. xix. Also see Kabeer and Natali (2013), p. 36.
11 Agarwal (1992).
12 Fontaine (2014); Polanyi (1944); Thompson (1991).
13 Rubinstein (1981).
14 Ibid.
15 Mokyr and Nye (2007): 67.
16 Mill (1859), ch. 1.
17 De Moor and van Zanden (2010).
18 Froide (2017).
19 Xue (2016).
20 Swedberg (2011).
21 Hickel and Khan (2012).
22 Hayek (1944); Friedman and Friedman (1982).
23 Quoted in Postell and Watson (2011), p. 65.
24 Hignett et al. (2018).
25 Leeson and Russ (2017); Hester (2014); Sollée (2017).
26 Chang (2011); Marshall (2014).
27 Steinberg (2016).
28 Prügl (2016); Htun and Weldon (2017).
29 Offer (2012); Mosini (2012).
30 Medema (2009).
31 Pujol (1998).
32 Fraser (2013b); Faria (2018).
33 Gibson-Graham (2006a,b).
34 Prügl (2016).
35 Agarwal (1992).
36 See Prügl (2016) on the associated agenda of the World Bank.
37 Eswaran (2014), pp. 365‒8.
38 Fraser (2013a), ch. 8, esp. pp. 196‒7.
39 Fraser (2013b), p. 132; Faria (2018).
40 Hayek (1979); Faria (2018).
7
Why Women Make Better States
In the previous chapter, we saw that markets are a necessary ingredient of any successful and progressive economy ‒ and indeed society. In this chapter, we will explore the relationship between the state and economic prosperity in greater detail. As we will see, it is not simply the size of the state that matters but how capable it is. Where states are capable, they can work with (rather than against) the market, leading to a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. However, as we will also see, what economists define as a ‘capable’ state is not always enough for ensuring that the state works in the best interests of women and, in turn, for delivering equitable and sustainable growth. When judging states, gender needs to be brought into view. We will go on to explore how today's most successful states developed, pointing to the largely neglected role of women's freedom. The history of the state is intimately tied to the history of women.
The Sex Factor Page 16
