°G8 - Management - NGOs
The stock of labour & the corraling of protests.
Now, take a look at this photograph of preparations for the upcoming G8.
Agamben, on the genealogy of oikonomia: “the oikos, the Greek household, was a complex organism with different interwined relations, stretching from family ties in the strictest sense to master-slave relations and the management of agricultural enterprises of often large dimensions. What holds these relations together is a paradigm that we can define as ‘managerial’: it is a system that is neither held down by a set of norms nor constitutes an episteme. It is a science in its own right but one that requires different decisions and dispositions to confront specific problems. In this sense, a correct translation of the term oikonomia would be, as Lidell-Scott suggests, management.
[…] the economic paradigm, which continued in a subterranean way throughout the medieval period, reappears in the 17th century with Leibnizian debate on the theodicy and in the 18th century with the emergence of animal economy. In the Encylopedia of Diderot and D’Alambert there are two distinct entries: political economy and animal economy. These are two things that have nothing to do with each other, since animal economy refers to medicine and natural science while political economy is close to our own notion of political economy. I believe I can demonstrate that animal economy derives from the paradigm of economic theology. And if you consider that the 18th century authors (Quesnay and the other physiocrats) who are at the beginning of political economy also wrote tracts of animal economy, it is possible to advance the hypothesis of a theological genealogy for the modern economy.”
The rest of the interview, translated by Brett Neilson, is here.
Let’s turn to the NGO’s who are, in many cases, increasingly engaged in updated versions of workhouse arrangements. Recent scandals over sweatshop-produced headbands for Live 8 are only scandalous if one imagines that NGOs and UN ‘aid’ agencies are in the habit of operating other than as adjuncts to exploitation.
This is from a UN’s World Food Program paper, titled “Program Facilitation (FOOD-FOR-WORK)”
It reads, in part:
“Program Facilitation have two major benefits as an investment for the future:
1. Provision of food to people in need of food. A ration is provided to each worker, sufficient for a small family (a family ration). It is desirable to stick to one person per family so that food reaches as many families as possible.
2. The results of the service/work which is done - something which can produce, protect, or in some way help the population.
3. Maintain an attitude that food has value and is not a free commodity.
4. Maintain the attitude that productivity is valuable and worthy of some reward.”
From Brunhoff: “Non-capitalist institutions [such as charities] are […] indispensible for the management of the ’stock’ of labour-power needed by capitalists, but which they themselves cannot secure directly. The form of this management must maintain insecurity of employment, while merely limiting its effects, and must not affect discipline at work, while aiding those without work. The institution most adapted to these objectives was the nineteenth-century English workhouse, which displaced forms of charitable relief in either money or kind, was financed by the rates and lay somewhere between being a prison and a factory.” (Suzanne de Brunhoff, The State, Capital and Economic Policy)
