A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category.
Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary in three parts, ‘The Trap’, shows how ideas and methods gestated in the Second World War and developed in the Cold War led to the narrow and false notion of freedom that flourished in the neoliberal period. Brian Holmes’s brilliant essay on Adam Curtis, featuring The Trap in particular, offers a valuable summary and critique of the documentary.
The Trap Part 1 Fuck you buddy
The problem with writing about Marx for readers schooled in the analytical tradition is that dialectical thinking is often opaque to them. How can production be both all of the economy and part of it? How can history be philosophical speculation and empirical inquiry without joining up the ends? How can Capital be both a serious work in political economy and a cultural critique, even a huge joke? I suppose I mean this piece to be an invitation to visit the Marx of Grundrisse as one way of circumventing the arid formalism that dogged much Marxist anthropology in the 70s.
An ‘anthropology’ is any systematic study of humanity as a whole. The modern academic discipline has its origins in the democratic revolutions and rationalist philosophy of the eighteenth century. The question then was how the arbitrary inequality of the Old Regime might be replaced by an equal society founded on what all people have in common, their human nature. It was thus a revolutionary critique of the premise of inequality and a source of constructive proposals for a more equal future. Such a future was thought to be analogous to the kinship organization that preceded societies based on the state and class division and that could still be observed among contemporary savages. This framework for thinking about social development was retained and elaborated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it is no longer the leading anthropological paradigm, having been replaced by an ethnographic relativism that is more compatible with a world society fragmented into nation-states.
Continue reading ‘Marxism and economic anthropology’ »
A lecture with discussion given in the School of Development Studies, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban in November 2009.
A lecture in five parts given at Goldsmiths College, London on November 26th. Filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola.
Part 1
The rest of the lecture can be found here:
1. LETS and Me
All my life money has been an obsession. When I was 5, I was bewildered by the relationship between rationing coupons and pocket money. When I was 12, I took up betting on the horses. Gambling saw me through university. I even became an entrepreneur in the slums of a West African city as part of my doctoral fieldwork. I put together a small real estate fortune during the 70s and then lost it when I was divorced. So, when I was asked to give a public lecture to my fellow anthropologists in the mid-80s, it was perhaps not surprising that I hit upon the topic of money. I brought plenty of personal experience to my subject, none of which showed in my official presentation. I called this ‘Heads or tails?’, referring to the two sides of the coin, one representing money as an aspect of political society, the other its value as a commodity in exchange. My argument was that both sides were indispensable to money, but for much of the 20th century we had been subjected to ruinous swings between theories emphasizing one side to the exclusion of the other. The lecture was published in Man, 1986. Continue reading ‘Two pieces on money for a Japanese magazine’ »
Has been published in a new open source journal created by the Association of Social Anthropologists, ASAOnline.
See the original keynote lecture of the Rethinking Economic Anthropology conference held at the LSE on 11th and 12th of January 2008 here as streaming video.
World society has been formed as a single interactive network in our time. Universal means of communication are now available to give expression to universal ideas. This essay explores the role of markets and money in the human economy. They are intrinsic to the extension of society from the local to a global level. By calling the economy human we put people first, making their thoughts, actions and lives our main concern. ‘Humanity’ is a moral quality of kindness and, since theoretical abstraction is impersonal, economic anthropology should pay attention to the personal realm of experience. But ‘humanity’ is also a collective noun, meaning all the people who have existed or ever will. So the human economy is inclusive in that sense too, requiring us to engage with society in its impersonal dimensions. Money mediates the personal and impersonal extremes of social existence. These reflections lead us to Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). ‘Anthropology’ is indispensable to the making of world society. It would then mean whatever we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a more equal world. This usage could be embraced by students of history, sociology, political economy, philosophy, geography, cultural studies and literature, as well as by some anthropologists.
Is informal economy plus information technology a path towards economic democracy?
This essay is frankly autobiographical. It is an attempt to excavate the intellectual and political connections between my early and later work in economic anthropology. Continue reading ‘IE + IT = ED?’ »
This is an undergraduate lecture on Anthropology and Globalisation (in five parts) that I gave at Goldsmiths College, London in 2006. Filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola.
Part 1
The rest of the lecture can be found here:
Russian comment on YouTube:
Not many people even politicians can talk about serious matters for such a long time without looking at the written text.
In the wake of market fundamentalism
We have lived in the last three decades through an explosion of money, markets and communications and are now beginning to experience the consequences. Whatever else this hectic period of ‘globalization’ brings, it represents a rapid extension of society to a more inclusive level than the twentieth-century norm which identified society with the nation-state. In order to live in the world together, we have to devise new ways of doing things for each other that go beyond our attempts to achieve local self-sufficiency. I call this historical process ‘commoditization’ (Hart 1982), the evolution of methods for making work social, so that it can circulate in the form of commodities. This essay is one such commodity. It does not have to be sold, but it was written with the aim of finding some limited circulation in this form. So far in history commoditization has been closely linked to the extension of society by means of markets and money. But there are other means and they may become more important as a result of the digital revolution in communications — and no doubt other factors. Continue reading ‘On commoditization: exchange in the human economy’ »
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
keith@oac
