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Issue °04 — February 2013
transcendental that orders and authorizes the possibility of innovations is the rule of capital, the rule of the accumulation of wealth in the form of ‘money which begets money’. The injunction is that the entrepreneur can invent anything they wish, as long as it makes money for investors. This is the false allure of absolute freedom, complete independence and infinite variation of ways of life that entrepreneurship promises. But in this logic the accumulation of capital is strictly transcendental in that it cannot be touched. It is the law that governs the movement of all other bodies subjected to it. Anything that cannot be coded as profitable is of little significance. This is why we insist that entrepreneurship can only be understood with respect to capital. Capital is the transcendental of entrepreneurship. It is the vortex around which the ‘perennial gale of creative destruction’ howls. This was well understood in the classical tradition of the understanding of entrepreneurship, and is the implicit backdrop against which even the most culturally savvy contemporary accounts of entrepreneurship today appear. II Subject to the transcendental of capital, independence is severely conditioned, to say the least. It is an independence that depends above all on satisfying the demands of investors, a dependence on the demands of finance that structures the operation of the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship certainly can provide a sense of independence for some. In relation to the whole, however, entrepreneurship leaves intact structural relations of dependence and subjection. From the viewpoint of the whole, this is what entrepreneurship entails: a sense of subjective independence for some; objective subjection and a sense of dependence for others.
on entrepreneurship, which is today filled with discussions of the cooperative and social nature of entrepreneurship. Empirically, it is very hard to explain entrepreneurship in terms of individual genius, and as a consequence contemporary entrepreneurship researchers are documenting the vast cooperative networks that enable entrepreneurship, that precede and coincide with entrepreneurial venturing. This is why we have argued that the fact that production today is production in common is the open secret of entrepreneurship. III This dependence of the entrepreneur on others can be seen in a variety of ways. In the literature on entrepreneurship, a distinction is generally made between the invention or creation of a new concept or product and on the other hand entrepreneurship proper. It is noted that invention is not enough. In order to count as entrepreneurship an invention must be brought to market. What counts as an ‘innovation’ depends on an existing or potential market, which requires the presence of a body of wealth that demands the product. The invention must thus be to the satisfaction not of those who might need it, but those who can exercise ‘effective demand’, that is, those who can pay. Thus the discovery of sugarcane growing bountifully on the other side of the planet, the inventor in the garage coming up with brilliant ideas, or the buddies playing around with new social networking technologies do not in themselves qualify as entrepreneurship. What is required is the judgment on behalf of ‘the market’ that any particular novelty will count as an entrepreneurial innovation. If the idea does not have market viability then it is merely a whacky idea, an unrealistic pipe-dream that might be nice in fantasy but not in reality.
OTHERS The sense of subjective independence that can be attained through entrepreneurship thus rests on a structure of dependence, which the ideology of entrepreneurship seeks to obscure. Entrepreneurship depends not only on a set of cultural values, which are selectively appropriated in order to legitimate a range of activities that might be otherwise suspect. Entrepreneurship also depends on a sense of individual mobility achieved by switching places with others. The activity of entrepreneurship is a fundamentally social act, in that entrepreneurship is not possible without the vast range of others that enable an intuition or impulse to become an entrepreneurial venture. This reality is increasingly acknowledged in the scholarly literature
THIS IS THE LOGIC THAT DETERMINES WHY SO MUCH EFFORT IS PUT INTO THE SEARCH FOR DRUGS FOR ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION RATHER THAN DISEASES SUCH AS MALARIA. This is also one of the reasons why so much emphasis is put in the contemporary
university on the commercialisation of research. According to this logic, it is not enough for researchers to come up with clever new ideas. The important thing is that these are tested on the market for their commercial viability, and hence the need not simply for pure research but for commercial applications. The market thus becomes the arbiter of what is and is not valuable and what should and should not be produced. The production of commodities on any significant scale involves something quite different from the lone individual knocking out a prototype. Here the first example of the product plays an important ideological function. If the prototype for a potential new product can be held in the hands of a single entrepreneur, entrepreneurship in practice is not the result of the creation of the hands or mind of any single individual, but requires a vast array of others.
DEPENDENCE This dependence of entrepreneurship on others can be formalised in strictly economic terms if we consider the place of entrepreneurship in relation to what are known as the other ‘factors of production’ — land, labour and capital. Various arguments have been made about which of these factors is the most important and which contributes most value, and indeed this contestation plays a significant role in the history of economic thought. If we pose the question of which factors depend on which others, in terms of their logical interconnections, it is possible to deduce certain relations of necessity. IV Land, which includes nature above and below the ground, can exist perfectly well without labour, capital and entrepreneurship. The earth existed well before we worked on and invested in it, and will continue in some shape or form after we no longer do so. Although the prospect of continued life on planet earth may have become dependent on future human intervention, this is the result of historical developments and the action on land of human labour, capital and entrepreneurship. Labour is by definition dependent on nature as the raw material of its activity, even if at a certain stage of the development of production direct action on material nature is significantly mediated through the activity of others. By contrast, labour has only a contingent dependence on capital. There was labour before the extensive accumulation of capital and its perceived separation from labour, and there continues today to be self-organising and cooperative labour outside the command of capital. In terms of dependence, capital by