The hope of critical finance studies
Before the election and the current crisis, I was revisiting the theoretical frameworks I use when thinking about education finance. For years and years, since I started writing this newsletter, my touchstone was Marx, but specifically Louis Althusser and those influenced by him like Stuart Hall and others.
But as I did more research about this connection between the broad tradition of critical theory/marxism and education finance, I came upon a subfield called critical finance studies. It’s really been an eye-opener. I’ve had to go back and revise some of my basic presuppositions about this whole project of critical school finance.
Those revisions have turned out to be relevant for our chaotic moment. Some of the ideas I’ve taken away from critical finance studies have given me a feeling rarer and rarer today: hope.
This week I wanted to write about one idea in particular from a short but punchy essay called “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” by Langdon Winner.
This essay has been widely cited across a bunch of disciplines, mainly in the arena of science and technology studies. (I hadn’t run into it until I was combing through Liliana Doganova’s citations in Discounting the Future, which I think is my favorite book of 2024.)
The essay makes a simple but powerful point. When it comes to artifacts—the essay is about technology, but I think its insights apply to financial policy—they’re obviously political. But how are they political? Winner charts out two positions: determinist and possibilist (I’m sort of making those up).
The determinist position about artifacts’ politics is that these politics are rigidly defined by the ideologies of the people and groups that make the artifacts. If conservatives make a financial policy and put it in place, that policy is therefore a conservative policy. If socialists make a financial policy and put in place, that policy is therefore a socialist policy. Again, the ideologies of those making the policy determine the ideology of the policy. That’s determinism.
The possibilist position disagrees. It says that artifacts’ politics are separate from the ideologies of their makers. This is Winner’s position: artifacts have their own politics. They create worlds unto themselves. And while those worlds do build order through power and shape the outcomes of peoples’ lives, those worlds, orders, powers, and thus outcomes, aren’t determined rigidly by the ideologies of the people that put them into place.
To the possibilist, the politics of finance policy are no less political, no less charged, no less ideological. But those politics, charges, and ideologies aren’t necessarily determined in advance by the people that put them into place.
It’s naïve to think that a finance policy can be totally divorced from the ideologies that created it, and also to think that there won’t be a clear correspondence between the ideologies of policymakers and policies themselves. Of course we’ve seen historically that the policies people put into place enact their ideologies. They have ideological reasons for doing so.
But it’s also true that those policymakers’ ideologies didn’t determine their policies’ ideologies in advance. History would be much different had this been the case: what about unintended consequences? Creative exploitations? This insight has to be true to make sense of how any policy has been taken up and taken on from within its stipulations and mobilized to do different things for different interests.
It's also naïve to think it’s easy to understand why, when, and how a certain policy—particularly finance policy—doesn’t align with its makers’ ideologies. Figuring out what a finance policy means and says and does, and how it works in practice, to a degree that permits us insight into its potentialities entails a lot of technical knowledge.
Possibilism has a lot of implications. One of them is that it’s not simple to determine which finance policies are ruling class capitalist policies, for instance, and which are working class policies. It also means that a certain policy’s ideology can be complex, multiple, and go in different directions, or be made to go in different directions.
It’s also a bit dangerous for the more traditional Marxist mode of thinking, since it becomes more difficult to denounce and critique a certain policy as being a certain way. One cannot theorize with social forces as easily if there’s a gap between the policies made by policymakers when it comes to ideology. It’s hard to know as much in advance without investigating the intricacies of the policy and the worlds it creates.
But honestly I think possibilism is much more in the spirit of Marxism’s basic insight, which is that history is contingent. As Stuart Hall said, there are no guarantees when it comes to ideology, and there’s no guarantee that a certain finance policy will align with its makers’ ideologies.
Ultimately this gives me some hope in the current moment. We oppose these policymakers and their ideologies and we’re suspicious of their policies, but there could be possibilities within their policies that don’t align with their ideologies, the worlds of which align more with our own, so we can face this force knowing that nothing is guaranteed in advance.