Politics is the continuation of economics by other means and vice versa. Economics is the practice of production, distribution, exchange and consumption of the sum total of tangible and intangible assets existing in society. Politics is the art of communication engaged in systematically and purposively to enable the collective social existence of a territorially, and, with the advent of the modern nation-state roughly in the mid-seventeenth century, ideologically delimited community of a people. One needs the other to exist and work. So we can safely assume that society, in a nutshell, functions by means of the inherence of economics as communicative production and politics as productive communication. The Keynesian legacy stands as a telling proof this unity; even the more recent prominence of the Chicago economists represented most powerfully by Milton Friedman, is a proof-in-reverse of the self-same mutual immanence.
The concept and practice of power is born out of the distributive outcomes of the political-economic practice. This practice is both generated and constrained by the existence of uncertainty as a permanent feature of human life, embodied most powerfully by the phenomenon of the market. The theory of probability as a branch of mathematics, with relevance for economic and political behaviours in the form of game theory, tries to make sense of the unmitigated certainty that characterises human practice in the world understood in the broadest terms. The ease with which a coin, which also acts as money, as a medium of exchange, and as an object of commerce, lends itself to act as a figure for uncertainty of human actions in terms of the odds of its being head or tails when tossed alludes to the necessity of the state’s regulation of money supply directed at controlling the uncertainty of market embodied in money.
Just as money in economics functions as the universal equivalent for all commodities, so is the political practice founded on the recognition of the concept of fundamental equality of all human beings. The importance of politically enforced equitable distribution is heightened when we come to think that money which equalises all commodities, when concentrated asymmetrically, can also undermine the political practice of equality in society in the form of asymmetrical concentration of power. This clarifies why the uncertainty of the market, appearing as cycles of booms and busts caused by the disturbance of the relations of equivalence between money and all the other commodities, needs governmental corrective actions to remain beneficial for the continued welfare of society. Similarly the uncertainty of human relations arising out of the innate differences and clashing desires of human beings is modulated by means of the practice of democracy as a consensual enforcement of the political notion of equality. When it does so, the notion of political equality becomes the universal equivalent to regulate the natural diversity of human beings.
We can say that money as the commodity of universal equivalence preserves the diversity of goods by allowing them to be traded for each other. Equality, on other hand, serves not only as the universal political equivalent that maintains the diversity of humanity by allowing everyone an equal chance to participate in the making of a common world of happiness and freedom but also as a lever to prevent money from becoming an obstacle to the construction of this common world. Seen from this perspective, the entire enterprise of politics as democracy exists, among other things, to make sure that the incessant circulation of commodities does not result in the creation of a world where the concentration of assets has become a barrier to the practice of equality across the whole social spectrum of human existence.
It follows therefore that the nature of economics practiced in a society holds valuable clues for knowing the nature of politics of that society. Inequitable economics cannot co-exist with democratic politics and an equalitarian politics cannot exist in the same social space with economics of inequity. All political and economic creeds that say they these two can live together on an absolutely equal footing are philosophical nonsense passing as serious theory. However, there are transitional moments or periods in the life of society when it so appears that political equality can in fact co-exist with economic asymmetry. The fact of the matter is that such moments tend to be those when either politics as equality or economic of the concentration of wealth has become victorious and is about to completely overpower the other and the one is about to put the other in relations of subordination. So next time we need to see how people are faring politically in any society we should quietly go through the national household survey of that society with a quick analysis of the income differentials amongst the five quintiles and from there proceed to the study of the inverse relationship between democracy and uneven distribution of assets. This, I am sure, would do more good than going through a dozen books of theory proclaiming the separation of powers and freedom of market as undeniably objectively existing facts.
The writer is a Senior Policy Analyst working for the OIC’s Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation
