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MORAL ECONOMY

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2012, Books on Moral Economy, Moral Economy

Moral Economy is the central characteristic of economic activity in a tribal society. Rather than economic exchanges being motivated by self-interest, greed or profit, exchanges are driven by moral obligations created by kinship relations, gift giving, and rituals.

In a moral economy, a hunter or food gatherer may by obliged to give much of the food to a network of relations, thus accounting for the distribution of food within the community.

It was the final collapse of moral economy, economic exchange as moral obligation that Karl Marx bemoaned when he described the ‘cash nexus’ that has become the central medium and motivator of exchange in a capitalist society.

The moral economy embodies norms regarding the responsibilities and rights of individuals and institutions with respect to others and regarding the nature and qualities of goods, services and environment. These norms shape both the formal and informal, including household, economies. While the norms may be considered part of a moral order, they are invariably influenced by networks of power and considerations of cost; indeed many such norms are compromised by, or are rationalisations of, the effects of economic power. The story of capitalism and modernity is often told as one of the replacement of moral economy by a political economy, in which the fate of actors comes to depend on the outcomes of anonymous contending market forces, the positioning of people as consumers turns moral judgements concerning the social good into matters of private preference, and their fortunes become heavily dependent on luck, as even market advocates such as Hayek, acknowledge. Polanyi's critique of the commodification of labour-power, recently taken up by authors such as Will Hutton and Maurice Glassman, is directed at a major instance of this de-moralization (Polanyi, 1944; Hutton, 1995; Glasman, 1995). 

The Moral Economy of the Mexican Miner - Adrian Bantjes, University of Wyoming.
Paper seeks to explain the isolated, conservative political role played by mineworkers during the radical presidency of Lazaro Cardenas (1934 1940), using the Sonoran miners as a case study.

The paper first examines traditional studies of mineworkers based on the outdated "isolated mass" hypothesis postulated by Kerr and Siegel in 1954. Despite severe criticism, this structuralist approach, which explains the miners' perceived militancy in t erms of their existence as an homogeneous isolated mass in foreign controlled enclave settings, continues to influence the field of Latin American labor history. Mineworkers are still considered "archetypal proletarians" who have played a key role in rev olutionary struggles throughout Latin America, including the Mexican Revolution.
A detailed examination of the Sonoran mineworkers' traditions, work habits, culture and mentality demonstrates that, far from being an homogeneous isolated mass, the mining workforce was severely divided by cultural, geographic, work and wage differences. 
Instead, I argue for the use of a moral economy approach to explain the political behavior of miners. Though politically aloof from the Cardenas regime, miners did engage in large scale collective action to protest mass layoffs and other negative effects of the Depression. Miners felt that they had a moral right to work the mines, either as workers contracted by a company for specific tasks, or as independent gambusinos. When mines closed on a massive scale during the 1930s, former mineworkers engaged in "radical"collective action, invading mines and ignoring private property rights, working in a "haphazard" fashion, totally at loggerheads with modern industrial discipline. This did not reflect a radical anti imperialist political stance, but the reaction of semi-artisanal, privileged workers against the violation of their moral principle.
The moral economy of the Mexican miner was not accepted by the State, which imposed cooperativism, mass unionism, and de-skilling on this "labor aristocratic" sector of the workforce. The relative freedom and independence of the Mexican miner would soon be a thing of the past. 

Books on Moral Economy:

The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia Professor James C. Scott - Review: By Faruk Ekmekci - In his The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, Scott sets out to solve the puzzle why some types of exploitative relations give way to grassroots revolutions and others not. Scott's analysis of the moral economy of the peasants in Asia portrays that the underdevelopment and poverty of today's less developed countries is not simply a result of their failure to develop; yet it is an active process of impoverishment and social destruction which results from "the way in which they are joined to the international system."

Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism Charles Tripp "Surprisingly, despite the importance of the topic, little has been published concerning the specifically Islamic responses to capitalism as a social and conomic phenomenon. Charles Tripp's Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenges of Capitalism fills this significant gap in the literature. In one sense, it is a lively and well thought out survey of what dozens of major Muslim thinkers have thought about capitalism." - Robert Looney, Middle East Journal

Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures) Paul Gilroy Review: Paul Gilroy's most important gift to cultural criticism is the deft manner in which he finds novel ways to explicate his great concern: the interweaving of ethics and aesthetics, through the example of the African American tradition. In Darker than Blue, Gilroy brilliantly examines some basic tensions within African American culture—in particular the changing relation, over the past half-century especially, between expressions of group consciousness and atomistic individualism. Gilroy is delightfully curious and rigorously analytical, making this book a pleasure to read and to argue with. It reaffirms his position as one of the leading cultural critics of our time. --Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University (20100514) If the moral force of Baldwin's writing was fuelled by the solidarity of the Civil Rights movement, Gilroy's book is a warning of moral bankruptcy creeping into contemporary U.S. black culture. According to Gilroy, commodities have replaced community, and the spirit of the freedom marches has been overtaken by the roar of accessorized Hummers. This is not simply a curmudgeonly critique of contemporary culture, and Gilroy teases out the reasons why the moral energy that galvanized the Civil Rights movement has been diluted by corporate American life in three penetrating and exhilarating chapters. --Douglas Field (Times Literary Supplement )

The Moral Economy of the Peasant - Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia - James C. Scott - yalepress.yale.edu - Scott draws from the history of agrarian society in lower Burma and Vietnam to show how the transformations of the colonial era systematically violated the peasants’ “moral economy” and created a situation of potential rebellion and revolution.

The Moral Economy - John P. Powelson is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Colorado - press.umich.edu. The Moral Economy proposes a desirable world that is historically possible, if certain trends of the past millennium are continued into the next, and if world power becomes more diffuse. As we enter the twenty-first century, it looks to the horizon to suggest what a distant future might bring. Shows how a moral economy—a balance between interventionism and libertarianism—and economic prosperity are mutually reinforcing.

Abstract of The Moral Economy 
Adam Smith's classic liberal economy works well only when economic and political power is well distributed. The distribution of power in the twenty-first century depends on which of three paths we take: interventionism, libertarianism, or the middle path proposed in this book. 
This path is called "the moral economy." It seeks balance of power among social groupings, in which socially desirable behavior is imposed sidewise-by group acting upon group-rather than downward, through government regulation. Environmental and other social goals are sought by nongovernment agencies as much removed from politics as possible, while social assistance is administered by private agencies financed in part by cash or voucher grants supplied by government, or by a negative income tax. 
After two introductory chapters, Part One describes seven current, major problems, showing how, if new institutions (ways of behavior) are formed, these problems can be resolved with discipline from the market and minimal government intervention. They are: poverty, population, environment, ethnic bias, welfare, social security; and health care. 
The new institutions are discussed in Part Two: accountability for the management and use of resources, trust, property, money and inflation, law, containment of corruption, taxes, education, religion, morality, and values. These institutions are shaped by the interaction of social groupings with relative balance of power, rather than by government mandate. The final chapter describes the moral economy, using the solutions to the problems cited in Part One and the institutions proposed in Part Two. It also outlines the path by which the moral economy might be approached.  

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