Dead Economic Man (2018)

Book Review from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The Death of Homo Economicus. Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation', by Peter Fleming (Pluto Press, 2017)

It’s a good title for a criticism of the view that economics can be explained as people behaving as if they were profit-seeking enterprises. Fleming says that this has now led to a ‘wreckage economy’  where the economists' ‘dollar-hunting animals’ perform meaningless work and lead empty lives; homo economicus is dead and survives only as a zombie.

Today, Fleming argues, the preferred way for capitalist firms to make money is not to create new value but to devise ways of tapping in to pre-existing income streams, to pursue interest rather than profit. There is some truth in this ‘financialization’ of parts of the capitalist economy, but a rip-off economy cannot exist without something to rip off. There still has to be, and of course still is, a sector of the economy creating new value to feed the income streams.

A large part of the book is devoted to discussing work – office work as boring and meaningless and the various employer theories and practices to manage it; the growth of ‘self-employment’ which is really a way for employers to off-load the costs of directly employing workers (holiday pay, pensions, time at work not actually working); and resistance by individuals, sometimes violent, sometimes passive withdrawal, to the meaningless work capitalism imposes on them.

Some of the book is heavy going due to its postmodernist and French pop sociologists’ style but Fleming is basically on the right wave-length. The reduction of all (his emphasis) social life, not just economic, to the logic of profit-seeking, which latter-day capitalism has brought about, has led to all sorts of problems, social and psychological, and needs to be ended for the sake of people and the planet.

Adam Buick