Mariana Mazzucato’s proposal for a new embedding of capitalism is inspired by the Kennedy administration’s Apollo project for landing a man on the moon. The contrast proposal is an anarcho-capitalist’s Mars project. She departs from the postulation that contemporary capitalism has become dysfunctional.
Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy. A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. London: Allen Lane 2021
Mariana Mazzucato’s 2021 proposal for a new kind of capitalism in a new political economy, a mission economy, is inspired by the John F. Kennedy administration’s work on landing the first man on the Moon within a ten-year horizon, the Apollo project. Under the administration’s goal orientation and guiding hand, academic research at universities on digital computing technology, astronomy, physics, and biosciences, and experts in these fields in profit-driven capitalist enterprises were mobilised and coordinated in a giant project difficult to survey and steer in any detail but with a clear goal. The building of a shared commitment to a common goal and an eagerness to arrive at it compensated for the difficulty in monitoring and surveying. Quality control and other feedback were additional instruments in this respect.
Mazzucato postulated that contemporary capitalism had become dysfunctional fueled by and fueling climate crisis. Four drivers maintained dysfunctionalism: finance sector short-termism, financialization of business and values, fossil fuel dependence, and slow or absent governments. The book’s point of departure to confront this order of the things was how the Kennedy administration brought order through risk-taking and generous scope for creative fantasy. One might remember the president’s State of the Union speech in 1961: “Before my term has ended, we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain.” Goals and determination did not mean certainty. Boldness went hand in hand with uncertainty. There was awareness about the risks. Negative and positive surprises were treated in a learning process where many things didn’t follow the plan at the outset. Mazzucato’s mission is to translate the experiences of the moon mission into a new form of capitalism for the future. Her mission, inspired by the Apollo project, is an attempt to capture and reshape capitalism legitimised by the neoliberal globalisation narrative, which in the end became laissez-faire and got rid of political ties.
Three years after Mazzucato’s book, the goal is not the moon but Mars, and its formulator is not a presidential administration, but the brain of a billionaire leaning towards a new imaginary (dis)order called anarcho-capitalism fighting ideas of the deep state. These ideas might look like a figment of the brain, but Elon Musk is not a Don Quixote. He is an influential presidential advisor, which, knowing the president, does not guarantee a lasting position, but whatever happens, he is not fighting windmills. One should take both his planetary goal and his lust to destroy as much as to create seriously. Fighting the deep state and, simultaneously, being the aid of its highest leader, his informal copresident, is not a contradiction but the very point.
Mazzucato’s engaging and well-articulated plan for a new planetary political economy fits hand in glove with a new view on capitalism from within, new at the time the book was published. At the Davos meeting 25-29 January 2021, Klaus Schwab, the director of the World Economic Forum, declared a new era of stakeholder capitalism. The era of narrow pursuance of shareholder capitalism was over. Employees, buyers, governments, and all the other stakeholders were essential for a functioning world economy. The time was threatful and the prospects gloomy. The Covid pandemic was the everything permeating background. However, there was a sign of light. Donald Trump had lost the presidential election in the US in November and Joe Biden had been inaugurated as the new president just a few days before the Davos gathering. Trump had confronted the idea of stakeholder capitalism, which he called woke capitalism. Shareholder laissez-faire became his maxim. His exit offered the prospects of a new dawn around the stakeholder imaginary. It was a coincidence that Mazzucato’s book was published during the Davos meeting, 28 January was its official publication day. In the aftermath, it looks like a concerted action, but Mazzucato’s book was not a theme there. However, the Davos men soon intercepted the news about the book and at the Davos Forum’s Jobs Reset summit in June in Geneva, Mazzucato was one of the speakers.
Klaus Schwab had made a similar attempt to give capitalism a human face when he, in the 1990s, used the Davos meetings of the world’s economic and political elites to warn of the social and political consequences of excessive laissez faire. In retrospect we know that he was speaking to deaf ears. The near future was casino capitalism and the orgies on the financial markets that paved the way towards the collapse in 2008. The new start of Schwab in 2021 must be understood against the backdrop of this way and the collapse and its aftermath.
The stakeholder moment was a potential rather than the beginning of a new start. It was like the blink of an eye. There was no real debate on the stakeholder proclamation in Davos and Mazzucato’s book in the same spirit. The pandemic promoted other debates and threats which even the relief of Trump’s exit could not suppress. The pandemic was the overwhelming problem for the world’s governments. A year or two after the end of the pandemic Trump was back in an age that has become much more warlike and the unlikely far more possible. His previous fight against woke capitalism has become a fight for anarcho-capitalism.
Trump’s come back and Musk’s Mars plan and destructive ideas for reshaping capitalism make it urgent to recall the moon mission and the stakeholder view. The necessary reshaping of the neoliberal laissez-faire capitalism around the global finance industry must go in a very different direction than what Trump and Musk have in mind. Mazzucato’s book remains an important point of reference in a necessary debate about alternatives to what is propagated to be our predestinated future, anarchic chaos and authoritarian world order hand in hand with “private” capitalist Mars missions without the state. The next step in that scenario might be “private” capitalist Star Wars. One hears Hannah Arendt’s warnings about future that technology brings.
The Moon Mission
Mazzucato’s ambition to rethink capitalism does not focus on capitalism and its representatives. Her focus is on public policy, and what it could be like, where the Kennedy administration’s moon project is just the case. Capitalism is the subordinated dimension. Her question deals with measuring public value and connecting it to participatory structures in the goal formulation for the economy. Today, like when the book came, the problem is the costs of public services, not the ambition or the grand outcomes. According to today’s guiding doctrine, spending more in one area means spending less in another. In the Kennedy administration’s space exploration around the Apollo project, everyone’s energy and attention were dedicated to the outcome, a successful moon landing. The means were veritable mobilisation and galvanisation of the whole society. The wicked problems required technological, social, organisational, and political innovations that were hugely complex, often contradictory, and resistant to simple solutions. Policymaking focusing on outcomes meant getting the public and private sectors to collaborate for the achievement of a goal. The public sector was leading the work in cooperation with small, medium, and large firms on hundreds of individual problems, being part of a mission led by the government and achieved by many, integrating all the efforts and giving them direction towards the goal.
Mazzucato’s approach means restoring public purpose in policies driven by public interest considerations rather than profit. The purpose must be at the core of corporate governance, and the shareholders’ interests must be given away to those of the stakeholders, of whom the public, res publica, is one and the shareholders not more than one, either. The background of the Apollo project was the Sputnik launch in 1957. The Kennedy administration’s competing model for catching up and overtaking the Soviet Union in the space race did not try to copy the Soviet model of a hierarchical state bureaucracy but was about what makes one think of an expansion of the Keynesian political economies in the welfare states in the 1960s. There, the governments focused on keeping the demand side of the economy at a high level and claiming parts of the profits of the prosperous Fordist capitalism for social redistribution. There was a division of roles between governments and capitalist enterprises. The governments were superior, and the economies were political economies dealing with the ordering of the markets in clear demarcation to the Soviet state economies
Mazzucato’s moon mission model cuts through this division of roles in the Keynesian management of the welfare economies, establishing a shared purpose, which means defining a public purpose that guides policy and business activity beyond pure demand management. A public purpose is not only about redistribution ex-post but also predistribution ex-ante, a more symbiotic way for economic actors to relate, collaborate, and share. The mission thinking means a restructuring of contemporary capitalism from shareholders towards stakeholders. Public interest deals with the question of what kind of markets a society and a political community want rather than what problem in the market performance needs to be politically fixed to make the market work according to the shareholders’ interests. The wrong question is how much money and what we can do with it. The right question is what needs to be done and how we can structure budgets to meet those goals. The point is to begin with the problem and then find the financing to solve it, not to begin with the financial situation and ask what can be done and not done. Mazzucato’s proposal is about rethinking both government and capitalism. Instead of capitalism building economies that inflate speculative bubbles, enriching the already immensely wealthy and destroying the planet, capitalism must be subordinated to a sustainable growth path and public interests defined in new ways.
Are Polanyi and Keynes still relevant?
Politics under neoliberal conditions was subordinated to market conditions. It was market-compliant, as Angela Merkel authoritatively stated. She said the market’s verdict was alternativlos, without alternatives, echoing Margret Thatcher. The submission to the market tied the hands of politicians under ideals of budget balance and austerity. Politics without money is politics without visions. Politics without vision means the loss of capacity to shape the future. The art of policymaking and statesmanship declined and became the reactive practice of muddling through with the consequence of accelerating loss of legitimacy and the rise of populist politics. The amount of solvable but unsolved problems grew.
Of course, the money was there irrespective of what the market assured. The market was not self-propelling, irrespective of what the economics pundits maintained. It could be harmful if left to itself. Of course, it was never left to itself. Behind the myth of the self-propelling market were powerful hands that ruled for shareholder interests, profit maximisation, and wealth accumulation. The powerful were happy to hide behind what Adam Smith, in a durable metaphor, described as an invisible hand. The market and what was argued to be without alternatives was fiction, a myth that nurtured powerful interests that should not be mistaken for public interests. Mazzucato dispels that myth by introducing the vision of public interests in new ways.
Her rethinking of both government and capitalism requires, for orientation, a historical point of reference going back to before the neoliberal breakthrough in the 1980s. What is new? And what historical experiences can we draw on?
In his seminal The Great Transformation in 1944, Karl Polanyi confronted the prevailing hegemonic thought in economics, assuming that the economy is an interlocking system of markets automatically adjusting supply and demand through a price mechanism. Using the term embeddedness, he argued that markets are not autonomous but subordinate to politics, religion, and social relations. They are embedded in a larger context. Representatives of capital incessantly try to escape this embedding, to disembed themselves, but total disembedding is doomed to fail because that would mean that labour became a commodity. Before getting that status, reembedding protest movements would emerge in the deep society, getting capitalism under political control back.
One can discuss how relevant Polanyi is today after almost half a century of neoliberal disembedding. Today’s reaction in the form of populism and authoritarianism is hardly a reembedding in the sense of Polanyi. The question is furthermore whether the neoliberal regime didn’t make a considerable part of the global labor force commodities. Another mark of question is the incessant oscillation between disembedding and reembedding. However, what remains relevant is the very idea of embedding, that markets/capitalism/the economy are not superior and automatic but dependent on political, social, and cultural relations. Mazzucato sees this condition as clearly as Polanyi but less dynamic, unstable, and dialectic. She is drafting more lasting relationships of what Polanyi would call embedding of capitalism. She doesn’t even refer to Polanyi. On this point, one must take note of the fact that the dialectic dynamics that Polanyi described, dealt with the history that led to the 1930s world economic crisis. It was a warning. For the future, he outlined a lasting and stable postwar order of embedded capitalism. He outlined what became the Keynesian welfare states. Mazzucato is close to Ploanyi on this point of a lasting order. However, the later history also tells that lasting is a problematic concept.
Already before Polanyi, John M Keynes had, in his theoretical reasoning, demonstrated that the economy must be seen in a broad social and political framing, managed and manipulated by politics. Markets do damage and harm if they are left to themselves. However, they are never left to themselves. Believing that they are is a myth. The question is who manages and manipulates them. The similarity between Mazzucato and Keynes is the view that the economy must be a political economy. On this point, one must again emphasise what just has been said, that it is not the market that maintains that it is autonomous. The representatives of capital argue that they (“the Market”) are autonomous and superior to politics and governments. Their argument must be confronted. A fight against the abstraction/the fiction called the Market is nothing but a fight against windmills. The contention must be with those who call themselves the Market. Mazzucato is clear about this order of things.
The Brandt Commission in the 1970s drafted a new economic world order and how it could be managed politically. When it came to political control and coordination of the new kind of global corporations, the multi-or transnationals, Brandt became vague, however, staying with references to mutual interests between the representatives of capitalism and those of the global public good, hoping that they somehow would find each other on the dance floor and begin the dance. As opposed to the representatives of the Third World, who, in their claims at the time for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), did confront the MNCs/TNCs, Brandt circumvented them just by appealing to their insights of mutual interests. History soon showed that the interests that preoccupied them were self-interests, however. The follow-up Carlsson-Ramphal Commission in the 1990s still invested its hope in mutual interests, implicitly rather than explicitly, however, and didn’t see that their vision of a deliberating global civic society was about to shift to a global market society in a take-over action by the global corporations. Brandt and Carlsson-Ramphal provide historical lessons to learn from in the important continued development work on Mazzucato’s mission approach.
Can missions for warfare be a model for peace missions?
The background of the Apollo project was the Cold War and the superpowers’ space race, which sped up after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957. Historically, the large-scale mobilisation of resources and populations for a specific goal, with no consideration for the costs, is a military phenomenon where a nation’s or a civilisation’s destiny is argued to be at stake. It deals with armament for the struggle against an enemy, in the Cold War framework under the label of peaceful competition, although under the umbrella of the nuclear threat of extinction of human life on Earth. Another case that comes to mind is the D-Day project for the landing of an invasion army on the European continent against Nazi Germany. It was a huge project with a clear goal and meticulous preparations of the smallest details coordinated by the Allied governments and their military headquarters, where the utmost responsibility of the USA was clear. The cost issue came second. The D-Day project was a particular part of a much larger project after the US entry into the war in 1941 to defeat the nazi and fascist powers.
The question that Mazzucato’s book provokes is why it is so difficult to bring about a corresponding goal-bound mobilisation for large-scale civil projects costing whatever it takes. She refers to Richard Nelson’s seminal work 1977, The Moon and the Ghetto. [1] There, he asks why our innovation systems managed such difficult tasks as landing a man on the moon but demonstrated such an inability to mobilise resources and populations in a similarly goal-oriented way for problems such as poverty and world hunger and eliminating ghettos and slums. He argued that no purely scientific and technological solutions existed to such problems. Social problems are entangled in social, political, technological and behavioral factors.
Mazzucato agrees and moves Nelson’s problem field to the global social justice and environmental and climate areas. Getting to greener cities requires many changes in regulations, citizen attitudes, and incentives to use cleaner energy and materials. Top-down projects like Apollo, the first generation of mission-oriented policies, pursued a big science meets big problems strategy, which worked well in some areas, like the space race, but in others created inertia or, like in the nuclear energy, long-term problems. Applying mission-oriented thinking in our time to solve social problems of justice and distribution of wealth or confronting the climate threat requires not just adaptation but also institutional and normative conceptual innovations around, for instance, the way we think the market. In particular, it requires citizen participation. The moon landing was run from the top down by a white elite. This is clearly not how to successfully confront planetary social inequalities and climate change.
Mazzucato discerns The UN’s sustainable development goals (the SDGs with 169 targets) as an area for mission policies and politics. They involve stakeholders across the world and identify internationally agreed grand challenges. They cover global poverty, hunger, climate, and gender inequality. They provide a planetary perspective. Like the Apollo mission, they have a goal year: 2030. That year was almost a decade distant when Mazzucato published her book. The target year has come uncomfortably close today, but this fact doesn’t make it less urgent or relevant. Instead of seeing the threat our situation exposes, Mazzucato sees the fight for the SDGs as “huge opportunities to direct innovation at multiple social and technological problems to create societies that are just, inclusive and sustainable” (109). On this point, Mazzucato widens her national mission focus towards a planetary UN mission but doesn’t go closer into the institutional implications. This is not said as a criticism of a shortcoming but rather as a suggestion where her proposal needs more emphasis.
The implementation
The implementation does not look like playing football against only one goal. The main trend today goes in a different direction. The implementation is a fight in a stormy headwind. The representatives of the prevailing trend, such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, are monopolists and billionaires who understand the common good at most as profit-generating investment projects. They have no answer to those many who are the target of Mazzucato’s proposal, the losers of global society: the homeless, the dwellers in the tent cities, the refugees moving away from war, drought and floods trying to cross the walls that the wealthy rise. Those many are the losers of climate change and wars and of the operations of the rich globalists. There is a connection between their operations transcending governmental influence on global labour markets and the accelerating misery and woes. What can Mazzucato’s proposal do to break that connection?
A major problem is that the missions’ coordinating hands are governments operating within national frameworks. This is where they have the political, economic, and legal resources to do something. However, the problem transcends national borders and cannot be solved within them. It is probably not by chance that Mazzucato devotes particular space in her volume to the UN sustainable development goals. They are the case that demonstrates how planetary and globally entangled the world problems are and that the solution can only be planetary in a concerted negotiation and decision action. The existing UN institutions offer an arena for negotiations and decisions. However, they are too weak when it comes to the execution and the implementation of the decision, as well as when it comes to the payment.
This conclusion is not a criticism of Mazzucato’s mission proposal but an idea of how it could be developed. Her achievement is to be so concrete in her draft of the future political economy. Influential voices for a necessary change have so far been vaguer with references to after-capitalism or post-growth, where the world after the preposition and the temporal adverb is very foggy, like the transformation to take us there. Mazzucato’s new economy is clear. The problem is not the financial resources but to define the goal. She is convincing in her argument that the financial resources are there. The problem with which she leaves us is collecting and allocating them at a planetary level. This is not an unsolvable problem but requires determined and fearless confrontation. The good thing is that there seems to be an emerging general agreement that no self-propelling global market will do it. The bad thing is that this consensus is drifting off towards authoritarianism, populism, right extremism, nationalism, and that laissez-faire is shifting from escape of rules towards destruction of state structures, destructive anarcho-capitalism.
The remaining question is how to get the Mars planners to contribute to completing a planetary moon mission, in the sense of Mazzucato, before proceeding towards the stars and doing it in the same sense as Mazzucato, with an ordering instead of destroyed state. The US space agency NASA wants to send astronauts to the moon with the Starship, while Musk’s Space X is pursuing the goal of one day reaching Mars as a “private” capitalist enterprise freed from the “deep” state. To this remaining question, one might add that what we know about the president’s and his co-president’s plans is not a prognosis. Psychologists teach that when two strong egos manage to cooperate, they might sooner or later turn their egos against each other. Trump has made a deal with the devil and like Faust, he will one day try to reverse his deal. Nothing is forever. There are always alternatives. Mazzucato hints of one that is different to the prevailing trend of hopeless muddling through.
One must take note of the big difference in the preconditions between then and now, however. The moon mission happened during the peak years of Fordism and capital monitored by national governments through demand management. After its collapse in the 1930s it had been mobilized for the overall struggle against nazi Germany and its allies, and after the war it was mobilized for the Cold War. Capitalism was politically embedded, as Polanyi put it. In the 1960s capitalism began its escape from this arrangement when the global corporations, the multinationals and the transnationals developed their particular planetary perspective beyond national governments. They have today become the global digitalized giants with a capital concentration and digital power unthinkable in the 1960s. Still, what is the alternative to Mazzucato’s proposal?
[1] Richard R Nelson, The Moon and the Ghetto. New York: W W Norton & Co New York 1977. Cf ibid, “The Moon and the Ghetto Revisited” in Science and Public Policy 38 (9) 2011: 681-90.
How to quote:
Cit. Bo Stråth, “The Moon as Guide and Mars as Goal: Two Versions of Capitalism.” Blog. https://www.bostrath.com/planetary-perspectives/conceptualizing-capitalism/the-moon-as-guide-and-mars-as-goal/ Published 02.12.2024
