“What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page.” -Harold Bloom

I can not speak for the global Occupy movement, but I think we here in
the US have done a poor job of representing ourselves. We are not
professional media spinners, and it is unfair to judge this movement
by what is shown on the television news stations. Even those
sympathetic to our cause, such as the John Stewart Show or the Colbert
Report, while often painting Occupy Wall Street in favorable light,
have been unable to avoid widespread misconceptions.

Please allow me a few words to attempt a more clear painting of what
Occupy is and is not.

First, our movement is radically inclusive. There are many supporters
from the right, center and left of the political spectrum. We have
many Tea Party-ers who are unhappy with how that movement has
developed. We have many Ron Paul supporters who do not believe he has
been treated fairly by the Republican party. We have Veterans
concerned about healthcare, and Green party supporters concerned about
environmental issues and genetically-modified foods. And yes, there
are some students, hippies, and anarchists; some homeless people
looking for a handout, and soccer moms looking for a cause.

But Occupy does not support any particular political party. Instead
this movement has focused on the things that bring people together.
The Occupy protesters have latched on to the “99%” moniker because it
is a statistical number that appears very infrequently. The US’s two
party system focuses, both in the media and in Washington DC, on
issues which divide the populace into two halves. The media only
covers controversial issues and pollsters only measure the divisions.

For instance, you will never see Occupy approach the issue of
abortion. It is too derisive. Rather than championing one side, the
huge innovation of the Occupy movement is its focus only on issues
which unite people. We care most about people and care what most
people support.

Rather than asking if government regulation should be increased, a
complicated issue on which many people have different opinions, the
Occupy movement seeks a language that describes the frustrations of
people on both sides of the regulation debate. While Republicans and
Democrats differ on their solutions, most people agree that corruption
in the financial sector has lead to a crisis which should have been
avoided.

Yet, Occupy has no shortage of real-world solutions, and we do not
shrink from an intelligent conversation of both the problems and
solutions, but that is not the conversation currently represented in
the media or in Washington DC. As John Stewart said, the “well” of
political debate has been “poisoned” with the “toxic language” that
indicts anyone who questions corporate greed as “freedom hating.”
Once the conversation has been framed as pro-Amercian vs
anti-American, it becomes nearly impossible to return the subject to a
constructive and realistic debate about the issues.

Occupy has not defined their demands because they refuse to allow our
concerns to be dismissed out-of-hand by sound bites and the curt
one-up-man-ship that pervades political discourse in the popular
media.

Secondly, the Occupy movement is far from disorganized. Our inclusive
nature does not mean we give equal weight to everyone, regardless of
the merit of their ideas. Radical inclusion simply means we are
willing to listen. We still have goals, rules, process, critical
evaluation and all the systems required to be successful.

The rumors of Occupy’s demise have been grossly exaggerated. The
Occupy uprising in America united many people with common interests
and there is nothing that could happen to dispel our common
connection. We have collected in small groups that meet regularly in
coffee-shops, salons and restaurants, far from the tent cities and
violence which appears in the TV news. And until there is some outlet
for our common concerns, until our demand is met, we will continue to
organize, build and convert more to our circles.

In conclusion, our efforts to find those things which concern All of
US, our attempts to find language to articulate the most popular of
reforms, we have found one thing that seems nearly universal across
all demographics within the US and likely beyond: nearly everyone
agrees that there is a problem. Everyone agrees that things can not
continue as they have been.

The only question is what to do about it. The answer Occupy offers,
and its amazing innovation over the last 20 years of politics and
activism in America, is the simple statement: doing nothing is not an
option, and we will hold vigil until something is done.

—–

The Occupy Flowchart:

Q1. Do you think there is a problem?

A. Yes, goto Q2
B. No, stay home

Q2. Do you know what should be done about the problem?

A. Yes, Come to Occupy
B. No, Come to Occupy
C Unsure, Come to Occupy

——

Harris Poll. Feb. 16-21, 2010.

“And now a question about the power of different groups in influencing
government policy, politicians, and policymakers in Washington. Do you
think [see below] have/has too much or too little power and influence
in Washington?”

__Too Much
87% Big Companies
83% Big Banks
83% Lobbyists
85% PACs
75% News Media
70% Celebrities

__Too Little
71% Non-profits
82% Public Opinion
93% Small Business

—–
93% believe GE foods should be labeled (10/10,Thomson Reuters PULSE™
Healthcare Survey, “National Survey of Healthcare Consumers:
Genetically Engineered Food”)
96% believe genetically modified foods should be labeled (6/11, MSNBC)
95% of consumers believe GE foods should be labeled (11/08, Consumers
Union, “Food-Labeling Poll: 2008,” p. 13)
94% believe genetically modified food should be labeled (9/10, Washington Post)
93% of the American public wants the federal government to require
mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods (6/11, ABC News)

—–

ABC News/Washington Post Poll. Jan. 13-16, 2011

“I have some questions about the political discourse in this country
– that is, the way people talk about politics. Overall, do you think
the tone of political discourse you hear is very positive, somewhat
positive, somewhat negative or very negative?”

82% Very Negative or Somewhat Negative

—–

CBS News/New York Times Poll. April 25-29, 2008

“Do you think foods that contain genetically modified ingredients
should be labeled indicating that or don’t you think that is
necessary?”

87% Should be

—–

CBS News Poll. May 20-23, 2011

“Who do you think benefits most from the policies of the federal
government: the rich, the middle class, the poor, or do they all
benefit equally?”

66% Rich

—–

United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll
conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. July
28-31, 2011

“This year, have Republicans and Democrats in Washington been working
together more to solve problems, or have they been bickering and
opposing one another more than usual?”

82% Bickering more than usual

—–

CBS News/New York Times Poll. Oct. 21-26, 2010

“When it comes to reforming the way political candidates raise and
spend money, how important is it that the amount of money campaigns
can spend be limited: very important, somewhat important, not too
important, or not important at all?”

86% Very or Somewhat Important

“How important is it that campaigns be required by law to disclose how
much money they have raised, where that money came from, and how they
have spent the money: very important, somewhat important, not too
important, or not important at all?”

92% Very or somewhat important

—–

Polling Data Source:
http://www.pollingreport.com/

Well, Ed, that was worth waiting for, as Brian said. It may seem churlish, after your generous remarks, to harp on the one point of apparent difference between us, but I do so because, while I share many of your views on monopoly capitalism and bureaucracy, I believe that sharpening our historical vision and conceptual apparatus to grasp the changing composition and strategies of capital is important.

I start from the idea that we are going through the early stages of a world revolution as profound and far-reaching for humanity as the invention of agriculture. I also reject any linear evolutionary model of human history, which means that a shift as major as this calls into question the relationship between many modern revolutions of the last half-millennium whose legacies remain with us in an unstable mixture. So you are right to point out that many of the elements of today existed 150 years and vice versa. Making comparisons between periods involves judgment, not clearcut contrasting definitions or the idea that there is nothing new under the sun.

I stopped citing Marx as an authority long ago, but I do feel that his take on the Great Transformation of the mid-19th century is potentially fruitful for us. Das Kapital is difficult to interpret since he seems to have decided for rhetorical and political purposes to accept a number of propositions of liberal economics (which he had already refuted many times) so that he could reach the opposite, revolutionary conclusions while starting from shared premises. The opening chapter of Volume 1, which he wrote last, is an egregious example of this. Even so the book is a critique of political economy and there is a lot there about the relationship between the three components of surplus value — profit, rent and interest — which accounts for why he was unwilling to reduce capital to profit.

The idea of surplus value in turn rests on a homology between feudal and capitalist exploitation which gives the lie to any notion of capitalism as the revolutionary negation of its precursor. Even so, Marx held that capitalist profit in his time subordinated rent and interest to its logic and that is what matters for us here. In case anyone thinks this is a minor quibble, it is the main reason why Marx and Engels considered that what was going on in Victorian England then was the future of the entire world economy, one of the better predictions. It goes without saying that ever since we have tried to identify new phases of capitalist development and decline. We need to do so again now.

I find the notebooks of Grundrisse more helpful than Capital in some ways, partly because Marx was talking to himself and not to a public for complicated reasons. The introduction to this work is particularly illuminating. Here he tackles relations between the main economic categories — production, distribution, exchange and consumption — as well as offering some remarkable insights into his dialectical method of history. Of particular interest are his comments on production and consumption, on how distribution had been collapsed into exchange and why it was never the case that distribution dominated production (the main idea of agrarian civilization or the Old Regime). This is the crunch for any meaningful comparison between different phases of capitalism or with its precursors. It boils down to this, forging an iron bond between Marx and Locke’s labour theory of value: the way to get ahead in the past was always to use political power to extort value from its producers (if you wanna get ahead, get a gun). But what if producers got to keep what they made rather than hand it over to licensed bandits? Locke made no distinction between the owners and workers in enterprises, while Marx aimed to show that the difference was crucial. At the same time, he remarked famously that you can’t steal from a nation of shepherds in the same way as from a nation of bankers. So the mode of production conditions distribution.

The 1860s saw a transport and communications revolution (steamships, continental railways and the telegraph) that decisively opened up the world economy. At the same time a series of political revolutions gave the leading powers of the coming century the institutional means of organizing industrial capitalism. Capitalism has always rested on an unequal contract between owners of large amounts of money and those who make and buy their products. This contract depends on an effective threat of punishment if workers withhold their labour or buyers fail to pay up. The owners cannot make that threat alone: they need the support of governments, laws, prisons, police, even armies. By the mid-nineteenth century, it became clear that the machine revolution was pulling unprecedented numbers of people into the cities, where they added a wholly new dimension to traditional problems of crowd control. The political revolutions of the 1860s and early 70s, from the American civil war to the Meiji Restoration and German unification, were based on a new and explicit alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class to form states capable of managing industrial workforces and of taming the criminal gangs that had taken over large swathes of the main cities (Scorsese’s Gangs of New York!).

Before long, governments provided new legal conditions for the operations of large corporations, ushering in mass production and consumption through a bureaucratic revolution. The national system became general after the First World War and was the dominant social form of twentieth-century civilization. Its apogee or ‘golden age’ (Hobsbawm) was the period 1948-1973. This was a time of strong states and economic expansion when the idea of ‘development’ (poor nations growing richer with the help of the already rich) replaced colonial empire for most Third World countries. When, shortly before his downfall, Richard Nixon announced that “We are all Keynesians now”, he was reflecting a universal belief then that governments had a responsibility to manage national capitalism in the interests of all citizens. We all know what happened next. But neither Marx nor Polanyi (who had less excuse to miss it almost a century later) saw the social consequences of converting the class struggle that animated the liberal revolutions into a form of bureaucratic capitalism based on an alliance between the capitalists and the enforcers. But Weber did, with the Prussian junkers and Rhineland capitalists under his nose. And Hegel envisaged it in The Philosophy of Right as urban commerce and the family/land complex mediated by the state.

Selling stuff for profit means adding value through production. As Marx insisted, there is nothing intrinsically productive about tangible rather than intangible commodities (a mistake that Adam Smith made a century earlier). Productive labour under capitalism is anything that generates surplus value for capital, which could be teaching services (an example he uses). Rent-seeking is “an attempt to derive economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by adding value” (Wikipedia). Marx claimed that rent and interest (banking) in his time took their scale, form and function from industrial capitalist production for profit; and this could probably said of the main capitalist countries before the 1980s, but no longer. Of course all three sections of surplus value co-existed then and now. I believe it is quite criucial to establish if the emphasis of political economy has tipped away from industrial production (in the broadest sense, not just manufacturing) towards rents derived from political privilege rather than adding value. It is hard to see how the richest 1% have done so well in the last three decades otherwise.

The digital revolution is highly relevant to this question, since many intangible commodities can be copied easily at no cost. It is also the case that, whereas if you steal my cow, I can no longer milk it, no-one loses out if I copy your song. The entertainment industry is the fastest-growing sector of the world economy after finance, so what happens there matters. Your emphasis on oligopoly and restrictions on competition is correct, Ed, but again a lot hinges on whether, under the stimulus of national capitalism, markets became more monopolistic in the last heyday of financial imperialism from the 1880s to the first world war than in the mid-19th century. We also need to be aware of what happened when that period ended if we wish to understand the economic crisis today.

It may be akin to angels on a pin head theology to worry about how profit and rent account for the spoils in the today’s market for DVDs as opposed to the cinema of the 1950s. But the crazy DRM regimes being installed around the world point to importance of political and legal coercion that follows the relative dominance of rent-seeking over value-added by production.

The war over intellectual property escalates to ever new levels of absurdity, but, when it comes to internet-based products, a powerful competitive sector based on principles diametrically opposite to those of corporate command and control, is no longer the pitiful loser that Brian takes from James O’Connor’s book, published in 1973. If I didn’t believe that the people have some powerful forces and principles on their side in the fight against states and corporations, I would have given up long ago. So would Marx and Engels if they hadn’t believed that the machine revolution was potentially a force for greater economic democracy.

Keith

The money crisis in world history

I take the ‘financial crisis’ to mean the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 with the subsequent attempts of leading governments to stave off economic collapse by printing money to save the banks. Now that their capacity to do so has been almost exhausted, the world is in the grip of a growing sovereign debt crisis and risk of government defaults. Although there is talk of a ‘double-dip recession’, the world economy has not recovered since 2008 and its future continues to look bleak indeed. This is a turning point. Its denouement may be global depression, world war, fascism or democratic revolution, but eventually the contours of a new era will become clearer. One way of approaching this moment of transition is to ask not what is beginning, but what is ending. This is not straightforward.

World history since 1945 falls into two distinct periods divided by the 1970s (Hann and Hart 2011: chap. 6). In the first, developmental states generated economic growth through extending public services and increasing the purchasing power of ordinary people. The second saw the unfettered expansion of money, markets and communications and a general increase in economic inequality. We may label these periods, respectively, as social democracy and as neoliberal globalisation or one-world capitalism, and the rich benefited from the switch. Some think that the neoliberal paradigm still best describes our world. I believe that free market economics, as a matter of public ideology rather than academic science, has been holed beneath the waterline by the financial crisis. But the current break in history goes far deeper.

The 1970s were a watershed. US expenditure on its losing war in Vietnam generated huge imbalances in the world’s money flows, leading to a breakdown of the fixed exchange-rate system devised at Bretton Woods (Gregory 1997). America’s departure from the gold standard in 1971 triggered a free-for-all in world currency markets, leading in 1972 to the invention of money futures in Chicago to stabilise export prices for Midwestern farmers. The world economy was plunged into depression in 1973 by a hefty rise in the price of oil. ‘Stagflation’ (high unemployment and inflation) increased, opening the way for neo-conservative liberals such as Reagan and Thatcher to revive the strategy of giving economic priority to ‘the market’ rather than ‘the state’.

In 1975, all but a minute proportion of the money exchanged internationally paid for goods and services purchased abroad. Three decades later, payments of this kind accounted for only a small fraction of global money transfers, the rest being devoted to exchanging money for money in another form. This rising tide of money represented the apotheosis of financial capitalism, with the production and sale of commodities and the political management of currencies and trade virtually abandoned in favour of feeding an autonomous global circuit of capital. In the process, from having been tied to gold bullion, money quickly became once more a form of virtual credit (Graeber 2011).

We are witnessing the end of the social form that dominated the twentieth century. I call it ‘national capitalism’ and its origins lie in the political and technological revolutions of the 1860s (Hart 2009). Its historical trajectory includes two phases of financial imperialism, from the 1880s to the First World War and from the 1980s to the financial crisis. To understand these, it is important to distinguish between money and finance. Whereas money is a universal system of human communications on a par with language, finance concerns public- and private-sector institutions specialised in the management of money, typically banks. The financial crisis is only superficially a question of credit boom and bust. At bottom it is the unravelling of a social organisation of money that the world has come to live by since its inception a century and a half ago. Even so, we persist in thinking of money as just one thing, national monopoly currency or legal tender. As always, folk models lag behind social realities.

Money in the national community

Money expands the capacity of individuals to stabilise their own personal identity by holding something durable that embodies the desires and wealth of all the other members of society. The modern system of money provides individuals with a vast repertoire of instruments to keep track of their exchanges with the world and to calculate the current balance of their worth in the community. In this sense, money’s chief function is remembering (Hart 2000). People learn to understand each other as members of communities, and money is an important vehicle for this. They share meanings (cultural symbols) as a way of achieving their practical purposes together. If wealth was always a marker of identity, then the shift to wealth in the immaterial form of money, a process accelerated and expanded by the digital revolution, contributes to the growing volatility of identity. Once fixed or ‘real’ property was dominant as its marker, but this function has now been split between value realised in consumption and hierarchies of value expressed as abstract quantities. Money is intrinsic to both of these. In this way, money defines each of us by articulating relationships between individuals and their communities.

National capitalism is the modern synthesis of the nation-state and industrial capitalism, the institutional attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation through central bureaucracy within a cultural community of national citizens, and its prophet was Hegel in The philosophy of right (1967 [1821]). It is linked to the rise of large corporations as the dominant form of capitalist organisation in a bureaucratic revolution late in the nineteenth century. Its main symbol has been a national monopoly currency (central bank money). The nation-state has become the dominant model for thinking about society, and it is hard to imagine society in any other way even though society itself has been leaking across its boundaries for a while now. I identify five ideal-types of community, all represented by the nation-state:

• political community: our link to the world and a source of law at home
• community of place: territorial boundaries of land and sea
• imagined or virtual community: a constructed cultural identity of citizens
• community of interest: subjective and objective (shared purposes in trade and war)
• monetary community: common use of a national monopoly currency

The rise and fall of single currencies is one way of approaching national capitalism’s historical trajectory.

A framework for studying money

In an early paper that borrowed from Polanyi (2001 [1944]), I (Hart 1986) identified two strands of Western monetary theory: money as a token of authority issued by states and as a commodity made by markets. I saw the coin as a metaphor for the two sides of money. One carries the virtual authority of the state; it is a token of society, the money of account (heads). The other says that money proper is itself a commodity, lending precision to trade; it is a real thing (tails). The two sides are related to each other as top to bottom; but, rather than acknowledge the interdependence of top-down and bottom-up social organisation (‘heads and tails’), economic policy in the Anglophone countries swings wildly between the two extremes (‘heads or tails’).

Money is at the same time an aspect of relations between persons and a thing detached from persons.[i] Anthropologists and sociologists have long rejected the impersonal, detached model of money and markets offered by mainstream economics, even as they long steered clear of studying banks and firms. People everywhere personalise money, bending it to their own purposes through a variety of social instruments. Increasing awareness of this neglected dimension is surely significant, but the economy exists at more inclusive levels than the person, the family or local groups. This is made possible by the impersonality of money and markets, where economists remain largely unchallenged. Money is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between every day, personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal. Money, as a token of society, must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong, but people make everything personal, including their relations with society. This two-sided relationship is universal, but highly variable. Impersonal markets have historically undermined traditional social identities and hierarchies, while generating inequalities of their own. Money is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.

The reality of markets, then, is not just universal abstraction, but this mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete. If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment lends concrete finality to your choice. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination. Georg Simmel (1978 [1900]) had something like this in mind when he said that money is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society.

Money and markets, according to Polanyi (2001 [1944]), have their origin in the effort to extend society beyond its local core. He believed that money, like the sovereign states to which it was closely related, was often introduced from outside, and this was what made the institutional attempt to separate economy from politics and naturalise the market as something internal to society so subversive. For him, ‘token money’ was designed to facilitate domestic trade, ‘commodity money’ foreign trade; but the two systems often came into conflict. Thus the gold standard sometimes exerted downward pressure on domestic prices, causing deflation that could be only partially alleviated by central banks expanding the money supply. The tension between the internal and external dimensions of economy often led to serious disorganisation of business. The final collapse of the international gold standard was thus one consequence of the ruinous attempt to separate commodity and token forms of money.

In ‘Money objects and money uses’, Polanyi (1977 [1964]) approaches money as a semantic system, like language and writing. His main point is that only modern money combines the functions of payment, standard, store and exchange, and this gives it the capacity to sustain those functions through a limited number of ‘all-purpose’ symbols. Primitive and archaic forms attach the separate functions to different symbolic objects, which should therefore be considered to be ‘special-purpose’ monies. Here Polanyi is arguing against the idea that money is only a medium of exchange, and in favour of a multi-stranded model of its evolution.

The breakdown of all-purpose money

Polanyi pointed out that the era of national monopoly currencies to which we have grown accustomed is very recent. Before the 1850s the circulation of several currencies within a given territory was normal (Guyer 2004; Kuroda 1987) and it took half a century after the Civil War for the dollar to secure a domestic monopoly in the United States (Zelizer 1994). ‘All-purpose money’ in the sense of one symbol combining the four functions of exchange, payment, store and standard has been breaking up, ever since the US dollar went off the gold standard in 1971 (Dembinski and Perritaz 2000). One possible explanation for the financial crisis, then, is that it was precipitated by the separation of functions between different types of monetary instruments. The currency wars of today are vivid proof that the world economy has reverted since the break-up of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates to the plural pattern of competing currencies that was normal before the modern era.

National capitalism has been in decline since the 1970s, but it still dominates popular and, to some extent, professional thinking about the economy. How can we conceive of society as plural rather than singular, as a federated network rather than as a bounded and centralised hierarchy? Before the era of national monopoly currencies, and already for some decades now, multiple currencies have been the norm. Central bank control has been undermined by a shift to money being issued in many forms by a global distributed network of corporations, not just states and banks, as Horacio Ortiz (2009) has demonstrated. The formation of world society as a single social network has been driven by money, markets and telecommunications for several decades (Hart 2009). After a period of convergence of a highly unequal world as a result of Western imperialism, ours is now a multi-polar, divergent world whose plurality of associations and centres of influence resembles the Medieval period more than anything since. The digital revolution in communications has been transforming money and exchange through a radical cheapening of the cost of transferring information. This has introduced new conditions for engagement with the impersonal economy (Hart 2000).

The apparent triumph of the free market after the Cold War induced two massive blunders based on the illusion that the design of specific political institutions was not an indispensable prerequisite of economic progress. Radical privatisation of Soviet bloc public economies ignored the history of politics, law and social custom that shored up market economies in the West (Durkheim 1960 [1893]). The new European single currency, introduced by the treaty of Maastricht, was to provide the social glue for political union without prior development of effective fiscal institutions or economic convergence between the EU’s North and South. This error took longer to be exposed than the first, because it was masked by the credit boom.

The biggest mistake was to replace national currencies with the euro without the necessary institutional change. An alternative, the ‘hard écu’, would float politically-managed national currencies alongside a low-inflation European central bank currency. Countries that did not join the euro, like Britain and Switzerland, have in practice enjoyed the privileges of this plural option, since they participate in Eurozone markets but retain the flexibility of manipulating their own currency. That flexibility is important, because the debt crisis can only be addressed through devaluation, managed defaults and the unpleasant alternatives of deflation and runaway inflation. The first option is denied Eurozone countries, with the results we have seen in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The euro was invented as an expanded single currency after money had already broken up into multiple forms and functions. The Americans centralised their currency only after a civil war; the Europeans hoped that centralising theirs would be a means of achieving political union, even though it is difficult to see how a single currency could serve the interests of 300 million Europeans (Hart 2002).

The euro may not be a national currency, but it does aim to be federal, like the US dollar, and the participating countries represent in effect a league of states. Joining a larger currency bloc is a way of trying to cope with ‘the markets’, the global tide of virtual money that threatens to swamp the independence of national economies. However, the euro is still a form of state money and its management is even less democratically accountable than its national precursors. The euro is in principle a throwback to the Bretton Woods era of fixed exchange rates; and the Europeans are paying now for its rigidity. The EU is a community, not a state, and its founding principle of ‘subsidiarity’ ensures that there is room for many levels of community underneath. There is plenty of scope, therefore, for less inclusive monetary instruments to complement the euro, as long as Europeans can break with the outmoded idea of a national monopoly currency. However, the Europeans hoped for political union as a result of centralising their currency. This was a mistake.

Alternatives to national monopoly currency

The nation-state is such a powerful and enduring social form that, although single currencies have been with us for only a short time, were only partially realised and have been breaking up since the 1970s, it is very hard to dislodge the idea of money as legal tender in a sovereign territory to which its users belong. There are alternatives to national monopoly money in the form of thousands of community and complementary currencies (Blanc 2010), but most people are initially reluctant to embrace new approaches to money (Hart 2006).

The situation is psychologically complex, however. On the one hand, conventional money flatters our sense of self-determination: with some money, we can exert power over the world at will. On the other hand, there is comfort in the notion that money is not in our control at all. As an exogenous force of necessity, it serves, in a manner analogous to number, to promote clarity of judgement and action, whereas otherwise things might be frighteningly wide open. If they issued their own currencies, people would not only be freer, but would have greater responsibilities also. There is a parallel with slavery: the monopoly claimed by national currency is felt to be inevitable, since no one would freely choose it; to be told that there are viable alternatives makes nonsense of a lifetime’s enslavement to an unrewarding system. So, we cling to what we know as the only possibility. We often talk about wanting to be free, but we choose the illusion of freedom without its responsibilities. This is perhaps why we prefer money not to be of our own making. People have to be sold the idea of making their own money, and this involves challenging their most cherished beliefs.

One reason it is difficult to persuade people consciously to adopt new ideas is the unconscious use of old models when they form new associations. The nation-state has successfully represented society for a century or more, so that we have internalised its principles and reproduce them whenever we construct new forms of community. It is not surprising that, when people come together to make alternatives to the national economy, they often replicate it in their design for a new association – as a stand-alone multi-purpose community of like equals rather than, say, as a federated network of unequal social entities (Hart 2006).

A stand-alone community currency is like a radio or TV that can only tune to one station, a computer with just one programme.[ii] Supporting trade between people who keep their accounts in different currencies requires some sort of clearing network. This would be operated primarily through the internet, with each community or complementary currency having its own unique domain name. Such a system would be further enhanced by ‘multi-cc’ smart-card systems, which currently can carry up to 15 different currencies at a time, off-line and anonymous, and are designed to make community money systems easily adopted in the retail sector. The card system allows participating businesses to have their own loyalty loops if they choose. Of course, co-ordination is difficult when there is no one body concerned with establishing standards. In order to provide a genuine alternative to national monopoly money, community currencies should mimic what mainstream money has already become, a multitude of monetary instruments issued by a distributed network of institutions including far more than governments and banks.

There is, however, an alternative to plural currencies or to the global distributed network of specialist money instruments that I have described earlier, a single currency divided into compartments by a political authority. Thus, not everyone can use the Chinese renmimbi for the same purposes and its circulation is restricted in several ways. For example, the ability to purchase shares in domestic stock markets requires a licence, as does participation in foreign markets through Hong Kong banks acting as a port-of-trade. It is conceivable that, if the eurozone broke up, one form this might take would be for France and some of its smaller neighbours to impose controls on foreign exchange and capital flows, in much the same way that France and Italy re-introduced passport controls within the Shengen area in response to the North African crisis. This represents an attempt to return to the 1970s and it probably requires a political economy as large and controlled as China’s to achieve a measure of success. Meanwhile, some economists are contemplating a return to capital controls.

The evolution of money today

Simmel (1978 [1900]) argued that money’s substantial form (precious metals, then coins and paper) would wither away and be replaced by social institutions. Its functionality (the ends to which it is put and the technical means of its organisation) would be emancipated from its substance and money’s essence (what people use it for in society) progressively revealed. Money, according to Simmel, always introduces a third party to bilateral exchange, the community that shares its use. Polanyi, as we have seen, identified the four functions of money conventionally as means of payment, standard of value, store of wealth and medium of exchange. ‘All-purpose money’ unites these four functions in one symbolic form, ‘modern money’. Special-purpose monies and plural currencies were always in circulation before central banks learned how to impose the system of legal tender and this pluralism is rapidly becoming the case again.

‘Financialisation’ (Epstein 2005) describes the situation since the 1970s when institutions specialised in money management grew in size and influence while the money circuit became detached from production, trade and political oversight. The digital revolution in communications has vastly accelerated and cheapened electronic transfers, allowing many more institutions specialised in particular monetary instruments to join governments and banks in a distributed network supplying money in multiple forms.

So Simmel’s prophecy of the triumph of function over substance has been realised, thanks in part to technical innovations of the last few decades. But if the essence of money is its use within a community with shared social institutions, this too is in bad shape. Central bank currencies helped crucially to define where society and the state are, but this is no longer so. At the same time money has become much harder to define, since it is breaking up. Yet the idea and practice of national money remain strong. Globalisation has stimulated the formation of new supra-national groupings like the EU and ASEAN, while two-thirds of the 100 largest economic units on the planet are now corporations, not countries. Digital communications support new forms of commerce and association world-wide. Local currencies have sprung up in their thousands; corporate loyalty systems (e.g. air miles) multiply (Blanc 2010).

At one level, the financial crisis of 2008 was the bursting of a credit bubble that took a quarter century to build up. The larger states moved to bail out the banks, while promising to rein in their profligacy (split up investment and retail branches, curtail bonuses etc). But this did not last and the use of financial means to solve intransigent economic problems has left the world on the edge of deeper systemic failure, now manifested as a sovereign debt crisis. Nothing has yet been done to restore consumer demand in the leading Western economies and all of them look vainly to exports as their salvation. In the meantime, the banks and other corporations exploit the plurality of national jurisdictions to ensure that they are not held accountable for their financial recklessness, while seeking to influence supine governments to preserve a political framework favourable to them.

When it comes to money, one size does not fit all and it never has. But the national moment in history established the illusion that it could. If Simmel was right, if money, having lost its anchorage in substance, must be shored up by a community’s social institutions, there will have to be as many monies as there are communities. The digital revolution has begun to make that technically feasible. But there is clearly a contradiction between the technical possibilities for organising money today and the idea of society as a closed hierarchical community rather than as a decentralised egalitarian network. Society has escaped from its former home and has not yet found another one. The infrastructure of money has already become decentralised and global, and attempts to squeeze it back into a national straitjacket can only lead to international breakdown, at best economic depression, at worst world war.

Money in the making of world society

It is no longer obvious where the levers of democratic power are to be located, since the global explosion of money, markets and telecommunications has exposed the limitations of national frameworks of economic management. A return to the national solutions of the 1930s is bound to fail. We seem to be aware of the lessons of the 1930s, but are pushed by the cultural logic of national capitalism into repeating the same mistakes. There are substantial parallels between the last three decades and the similar period before 1914. In both cases, market forces were unleashed within national societies, leading to rapid capital accumulation and an intensification of economic inequality. Finance capital led the internationalisation of economic relations and people migrated in large numbers all over the world. Money seemed to be the dominant social force in human affairs, and this could be attributed first to its greater freedom of movement as the boundaries of society were extended outwards, then to colonial empire, now to the digital revolution and transnational corporations. The main difference is that the late nineteenth century saw the centralisation of politics and production in a bureaucratic revolution, while now public bureaucracies are being dismantled by neoliberal globalisation.

I have suggested that money has reverted to a plural form where specialised monetary instruments are now issued by a distributed network of disparate organisations that go far beyond just governments and the main banks. The functions of exchange, store, standard and payment are now performed by money instruments that few people understand. The history of credit default swaps, for example, and AIG’s under-capitalised role in insuring banks against loss was only revealed after the financial crisis broke. This case highlights how inadequate government regulatory pressure is when the money force has escaped its national bounds. Yet politics is a dialog of the deaf, between those who deny the need for political regulation of markets and others who remain trapped in the outmoded discourse of central bank money. I do not know how this impasse can be transcended.

Reversion to national protectionism would be a disaster, but social thinkers are not yet offering a more inclusive alternative. The idea of world society is still perceived by most people as at best a utopian fantasy or at worst a threat to us all. We need, however, to build an infrastructure of money adequate to humanity’s common needs. One response in this direction goes by the name of the ‘alter-globalisation’ movement (Pleyers 2010). This is a loose network of initiatives seeking to coordinate global development from below. The idea of a ‘human economy’ (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010) may offer a bridge to that movement for progressives of an interdisciplinary bent. Meanwhile the tragedy of the euro drags the world economy into a terminal crisis of Sophoclean proportions. Even if the Germans come round in the end with proposals to save it, they will fail since human intentions cannot undo mistakes made in the past. The Europeans will cling to their notions of national interest while thinking of the crisis as one of debt when it is a turning point in the history of money.

References

Blanc, J. 2010. Complementary and community currencies. In K. Hart, J-L. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds) The human economy: a citizen’s guide. Cambridge: Polity.

Dembinski, P. and C. Perritaz 2000. Towards the break-up of money: when reality driven by information technology outshines Simmel’s vision. Foresight 2: 483–97.

Durkheim, E. 1960 (1893). The division of labour in society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Epstein, G. 2005. Financialization and the world economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: the first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House.

Gregory, C. 1997. Savage money: the anthropology and politics of commodity exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood.

Guyer, J.I. 2004. Marginal gains: monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hann, C. and K. Hart 2011. Economic anthropology: history, ethnography, critique. Cambridge: Polity.

Hart, K. 1986. Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin. Man 21: 637–56.

Hart, K. 2000. The memory bank: money in an unequal world. London: Profile; republished as: 2001. Money in an unequal world. New York: Texere.

Hart, K. 2002. A tale of two currencies. Anthropology Today 18: 20–2.

Hart, K. 2006. Richesse commune: construire une démocratie économique à l’aide de monnaies communautaires. In J. Blanc (ed.) Exclusion et liens financiers – Monnaies sociales: Rapport 2005-6. Paris: Economica.

Hart, K. 2009. Money in the making of world society. In C. Hann and K. Hart (eds) Market and society: The great transformation today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hart, K., J. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds) 2010. The human economy: a citizen’s guide. Cambridge: Polity.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1967 (1821). The philosophy of right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kuroda, A. 2008. Concurrent but non-integrable currency circuits: complementary relationships among monies in modern China and other regions. Financial History Review 15: 17–36.

Ortiz, H. 2009. Anthropologie politique de la finance contemporaine: évaluer, investir, innover. Doctoral thesis, l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales.

Pleyers, G. 2010. Alter-globalization: becoming actors in a global world. Cambridge: Polity.

Polanyi, K. 2001 (1944). The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our times. Boston: Beacon.

Polanyi, K. 1977 (1964). Money objects and money uses. In K. Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man. New York: Academic Press.

Simmel, G. 1978 (1900). The philosophy of money. London: Routledge.

Zelizer, V. 1994. The social meaning of money. New York: Basic Books.

[i] David Graeber, in his path-breaking new volume (2011), takes the contrast between credit money (its original form) and currency (notably bullion) as the basis for a wide-ranging analysis of world history over the last 5,000 years.

[ii] I learned most about the potential of community currencies from Michael Linton and his associates in 2000–02. See http://www.openmoney.org/.

Over at the “Democracy in America” blog at The Economist, M.S. has a new post that replies to Florida Governor Rick Scott’s recent “we don’t need no anthropologists” statement.  The author provides a rehash of the whole debacle, and then quotes Arizona State University president Michael Crow’s response to the situation:

[R]esolving the complex challenges that confront our nation and the world requires more than expertise in science and technology. We must also educate individuals capable of meaningful civic participation, creative expression, and communicating insights across borders. The potential for graduates in any field to achieve professional success and to contribute significantly to our economy depends on an education that entails more than calculus.

Curricula expressly tailored in response to the demands of the workforce must be balanced with opportunities for students to develop their capacity for critical thinking, analytical reasoning, creativity, and leadership—all of which we learn from the full spectrum of disciplines associated with a liberal arts education. Taken together with the rigorous training provided in the STEM fields, the opportunities for exploration and learning that Gov. Scott is intent on marginalizing are those that have defined our national approach to higher education.

M.S. argues that Crow’s statement is “a solid response,” but that something more is needed: “What it lacks are rhetorical oomph and concrete examples.”  So what can provide that extra OOMPH and rhetorical power?  Actual examples of anthropologists putting their training and knowledge to work:

Some of the best analysis of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and of the ongoing follies on Wall Street these days, has been produced by the Financial Times‘ Gillian Tett. Ms Tett began warning that collateralised debt obligations and credit-default swaps were likely to lead to a major financial implosion in 2005 or so. The people who devise such complex derivatives are generally trained in physics or math. Ms Tett has a PhD in anthropology.

M.S. then links to a 2008 profile of Tett by the Guardian’s Laura Barton.  Here’s a key selection that quotes Tett speaking about how she put her anthropology background to work:

“I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,” she reasons. “Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.”

The Economist article ends with a little chiding of our dear Governor Scott, saying that it’s never too late to learn, and that maybe he should take a course or two in anthropology for good measure.  He could, of course, just ask his daughter.  Sorry, I couldn’t help that one.

The broader point here is about liberal arts education, society, and anthropology.  Interestingly, what a lot of this comes down to is a perceived clash between SCIENCE and other perspectives that are, according to some, less worthwhile and meaningful.  If you take a look at the comments section for the article, you’ll see evidence of this version of events (some comments mention the supposed division in anthropology about the whole “science” issue).  The basic argument for folks who make this sharp science vs humanities division is that the former is useful and important to society (because it supposedly produces jobs directly) and the latter is nice, but not really all that necessary.  I think Rex did a pretty good job of explaining why a well rounded liberal arts education does indeed, matter.  And he used Thomas Jefferson’s words to do it.  Nice work, Rex.

So what does Gillian Tett add to the picture?  I think she’s an excellent example because her work illustrates what anthropology can bring to the table when it comes to everyday processes and behaviors that get taken for granted.  Economics is just one area where anthropology has a lot to add to the discussion–the discipline has a deep history of empirical and theoretical research on human economic systems (Malinowski was, after all, questioning arguments about “Economic Man” way back in the 1920s).  Business, finance, and economics are all issues that get a lot of attention, day in and day out, from the general public, politicians, and pundits.  The financial crash of 2008 has made these issues even more important.

But if you look at a lot of business and economics and finance books, theories, and models, there’s a lot missing.  History is one key ingredient, as Jason Antrosio argues.  A recent article called “Economics has met the enemy, and it is economics” points to other glaring issues in the discipline.  Anthropology is certainly well-placed to contribute to a rethinking of economics…in theory and actual practice.  There are, in fact, lots of economic anthropologists doing just that.  It would be nice to see more of their names in the pages of publications like The Economist, for starters.

But there’s another important point here.  In their 2011 book Economic Anthropology, Chris Hann and Keith Hart write, “The project of economics needs to be rescued from the economists.  Economic anthropology, in dialog with neighboring disciplines, as well as with more flexible economists, could be part of that process of intellectual reconstruction” (2011: 162).  Hart also argues that anthropological critiques and contributions to economics have to move beyond simply bashing on individual economists or the discipline as a whole:

It is convenient to beat up on the economists, but I wouldn’t be an economic anthropologist if I didn’t believe in the historical project of economics which has been debased by the economists, especially in the last half- century. We should not allow our disgust with the blatantly ideological uses of neoclassical economics in producing undemocratic outcomes in our societies to lead us to discount the marginalist revolution (Hutchinson 1978) which launched modern economics in its present form. We should remember that economics was the first social discipline to introduce a subjective theory of value. There are all kinds of problems with this particular theory, especially its reliance on prices as a proxy for value. Nevertheless, it provoked and encouraged some of the most progressive social thought that we still rely on today, such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Talcott Parsons and others (Hart 2011: 7).

What this means to me is that increased engagement from anthropologists requires something more than just critique.  It requires actual participation in debates, and well-argued contributions.  For me, this is a crucial point, and it applies across the board.  Anthropologists can and should add to wider, more public debates about issues like economics–and other critical subjects such as race, culture, human nature, and so on.  Jason Antrosio makes this case pretty powerfully in a recent post about how a critically informed and yet morally optimistic anthropology can challenge many contemporary economic assumptions.  Absolutely.

I appreciate Antrosio’s combination of critical anthropology with the morally optimistic arguments of Michel-Rolf Trouillot.  In his 2001 book “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value,” David Graeber makes a similar argument when he balances the relentless criticism of Marx with the moral optimism of Marcel Mauss (Graeber 2001: 255-56).  Unending critique, Graeber argues, can lead to “a picture of the world so relentlessly bleak that in the end, criticism itself comes to seem pointless” (2001: 256).  Hann and Hart focus their argument on the idea of interdisciplinary dialog and–the part that I find most appealing–intellectual reconstruction, rather than critique alone.  Teaching, as Alex Golub and many others point out, is a fundamental part of that reconstructive project.

Politicians such as Governor Scott wave the banners of science and technology in the name of producing jobs.  Scott seems particularly enamored with engineering, technology, and mathematics.  Anthropology, which is uniquely positioned between the so-called hard sciences and the humanities, can illustrate the fact that science does matter.  Engineering matters.  Physics and biology matter.  Mathematics is indeed important.  The larger point here is that it’s not an either/or choice that we need to make.  Science is fundamentally important…but that’s not all we need.  Economists, for example, love to spend their time with numbers, statistics, and complex models. What anthropologists can add to the discussion is not just a critical assessment of how such models play out on the ground, but also what those numbers actually mean in particular social, cultural, political, and geographic contexts.

Anthropologists can add to these discussions through teaching, and through their research.  The main objective is to find ways to share such discussions about both of these aspects of the discipline with wider audiences–and to do this in creative, dynamic, informative, and challenging ways.  The best counter to ill-informed, instrumentalist arguments against liberal arts education, social science, and anthropology is, as the post on The Economist blog illustrates, with concrete evidence.  The proof, the saying goes, is in the anthropological pudding–all the way from Franz Boas to Gillian Tett.

References

Graeber, David.  2001.  Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value.  New York: Palgrave.

Hann, Chris, and Keith Hart.  2011.  Economic Anthropology.  Malden: Polity Press.

Hart, Keith.  2011.  Building the human economy: a question of value?  Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society.

The Great Recession has mostly hit Europe and America. It is in Spain
and now in the States that indignado/occupy movements have sprang most
forcefully against so-called financial dictatorship, i.e. more than 30
years of monetarist policy in Europe and of neoliberal deregulation of
financial markets everywhere, a way to echo the 2011 uprisings in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain that have toppled (or not
yet) all-too real dictatorships. Other hubs of discontent have been
Greece (basically rioting and striking non-stop since 2008) and Chile
(the huge and hardy student movement against the privatization of
college education shares many traits of the young-precarious-led
Spanish indignad@s movement).

However it is Occupy Wall Street, started in September 17, that has
sparked the global imagination, prompting similar protests all across
the Anglosphere (#OccupyVancouver, #OccupyMelbourne, #OccupyLSX etc)
and reinfusing life in the European indignado movement, most notably
in Brussels and Rome, two polar cases of what happened on October 15,
or #15o in twitspeak, being Twitter the medium of choice for political
mobilization against the crisis. The revolution might have not been
televised, but it is being tweeted. Anonymous and its hive mind have
managed to set off a swarm of political agitation unseen since
Seattle-Genoa and most likely to be the historical equivalent in the
Great REcession of popular front politics and sit-down strikes during
the Great Depression.

I was in Brussels, while the bulk of MilanoX (a free weekly which was
decisive in making the present left-of-center mayor of Milano, a man
with a radical past, win the primaries; he went on to humiliate
Berlusconi and the League in municipal elections last May) was in
Rome. We had set up a twitterbox for comparative viewing of the
so-called #europeanrevolution and #globalchange being triggered on
October 15 (http://www.milanox.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/TwitterBox1.html).

Rome was an Athenian large-scale riot. Anger for the precarious
present and future reserved to the youth by most gerontocratic society
in the world, and especially at the Berlusconi government, whose ass
had just been saved once more the day before, erupted during but
especially at the end of the demonstration in the worst riots since
the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands of spaghetti neoindignad@s, mostly
students, interns, temps, young precarious employees, joined by the
metalworkers’ union, NoTAV, SanPrecario, and the remnants of the
noglobal movement, were sidelined by media discourse, which
predictably focused on the 2-3000 baddies (many of them girls!) who
threw rocks at carabinieri and police for hours and hours, threw a
fire extinguisher and burned a carabinieri van (a kind of symbolic
vengeance for Carlo Giuliani’s death a decade before) in piazza San
Giovanni, normally used by the political and union left for staid
political speeches. The choice made by the respectable radical left to
constrain the demo in an itinerary that did not pass by the symbols of
political and financial power was probably not a wise one, given the
pent up anger (students had rioted a year ago when the political and
economic rot had barely started). Likewise, the outburst of blind
violence prevented the blooming of indignado movement in
Spaghettiland, with its now customary proliferation of tents and camps
in symbolic squares for weeks and months on end, until power is
defeated or at least ridiculed.

By contrast, the spontaneous manif in Bruxelles was sunny, creative,
joyful, peaceful and unexpected in its success (the night before we of
Precarious United formerly EuroMayDay were hotly debating with fellow
activists why this was a movement we had to contribute to, but
uncertainty hovered about how local people would respond to it). Led
by a Spanish and French core of activists (German and English were
also widely spoken) it was amazingly diverse in its political
expression against financial domination in Europe. It ended near
Schuman Square, next to the buildings of European Commission and
European Council (where EU summits are held, now frantically this
Sunday and Wednesday), and set up camp in the nearby park. Brussels
had been prepared by a month-long march of indignados form Barcelona
to Brussels through Marseille, Paris, Lille, which arrived in the EU
capital on October 8, tried to occupy a park and was given an
abandoned university building from where it started stirring things up
in the European/Belgian capital. The experience of the 15 May movement
in Madrid (acampada Sol) and then Barcelona (plaza Catalunya) was that
of a wide mobilization against the austerity peddled by all political
parties. The majority of Spanish and Catalan civil society sided with
the protesters in the Spring of Discontent. In Barcelona, the
parliament was assaulted on June 15. Zapatero, after losing the local
elections, called early elections and said he’d step down after that.
The protesters correctly concluded that the cuts (recortes) were being
decided elsewhere. That the whole of Spain and the rest of Europe had
to strike at El Pacto del Euro, i.e. the Maastricht Treaty forcing
austerity, deflation and unemployment down the throats of the people
in all countries of the eurozone. The austerity strategy was being
formulated in Brussels and Frankfurt, following the diktats of the
Merkel-Sarkozy diarchy, in order to appease financial markets and
rating agencies, which after Greece, were targeting Spain and Italy
and could undermine that beautiful monetarist creation called the
euro, the first currency in history based on a single monetary policy,
but 17 different fiscal policies, now all restrictive. US economists
like Krugman had long said it: a monetary union without a fiscal union
is a recipe for disaster, should a major crisis hit.

European policymakers are still living in the dreamworld of the Great
Moderation (1989-2008), where inflation and balanced budgets are the
most pressing concerns. Only unavowedly and half-heartedly is the ECB
practicing quantitative easing, which the Fed is doing again to rescue
the US economy from the double-dip and, arguably, help Obama’s
re-election. Fact is, we live in the world of Great Depression
economics, we have fallen into a liquidity trap and only aggressive
keynesian fiscal policy can get us out of mass unemployment and
escalating inequality. What the indignado movement in Europe and the
occupy movement in America are saying in macroeconomic terms is the
same: stop cuts, invest in society. In Europe, there’ll be no
political will to do so until Sarkozy and Merkel (and Berlusconi..)
are unseated. In America, Obama is finally distancing himself from
Wall Street, but is constrained on the right to do another stimulus,
which would presumably be more oriented toward the unemployed and
investment in social capital.

To conclude, a brief analysis which clashes with Bowles’ and that of
other traditional red leftists. Luckily, this is not the
anti-globalization movement, insofar as it is unaffected by 20th
century revolutionary marxist dreams and nightmares. It is resolutely
postcommunist and nonviolent, unlike the Seattle-Genoa movement. It
shares with the 1999-2007 movement two aspects: it is intrisincally
anarchist, i.e. horizontal, networked, direct-democracy oriented,
mistrustful of organized politics, and it despises neoliberalism. But
while in the late 90s neoliberalism seemed to be a viable economic
discourse to the eyes of the majority, it is now totally discredited,
while neoliberals are still in power. Thus the Occupy Wall Street is
strongly anti-elitist: “We Are the 99%”, in a way the previous
movement (more preoccupied with systemic critique) wasn’t, and has a
much wider social appeal. In terms of social composition, the
occupy/indignado movement is mostly young and middle-class. They are
the downwardly mobile children of the middle class. I’d argue that all
postwar movements (nuclear disarmament, civil rights, may ’68,
feminism, gay+lesbian liberation etc) have been middle-class and that
the educated middle classes have been bastions for the defense and
conquest of real democracy from Johannesburg to Cairo, from Lisbon to
Hong Kong. The occupy/indignado thing is about democracy, something
despised by some as “bourgeois illusion”, but very real in the hearts
and minds of those presently rocking the secluded world of politics
and finance. The movement of the Teens is about radical democracy,
this is the “revolution” it aspires to. It uses revolutionary ends for
reformist means. I find this perfectly reasonable, in the context of
Great Recession politics, which, like during the Great Depression,
favors big social coalitions on the left to defeat economic élites
and, in Europe, the ever-present danger of slides to the populist,
racist, facist right. If you read the decidedly lefty Occupy Wall
Street Journal, you will find not only hope for radical change about
the economy, but also doubts about whether the indignant movement will
be able to revitalize climate activism, which has been on the wane
since the failure of the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, while the
consequences of global warming have worsened. But, surely,
environmentalism is a middle-class concern;)

Alex Foti        Posted on nettime-l, 23 October 2011

I can’t speak for Mark Stahlman, but I don’t imagine that anyone who can write so interestingly would dream of a world without machines. “Machines” should rather be taken as a metaphor for the organized attempt to reduce human beings to working on machines or like machines. Will machines serve people or people serve machines? At some risk of oversimplification, Marx’s project was based on the observation that what matter in our world are people, machines and money. As things stood then and still do, money buys machines and people work on them. The political task is to reverse the order, to put people in charge of machines and money. Marx hoped that machine production might generate the social conditions for this revolution and so do we. Maybe we can dispense with the apparatus of party, classes etc, but that is history.

Philip Mirowski’s cumbersome but essential book, Machine Dreams: How economics became a cyborg science, explains how operations research (OR) in World War 2 spawned a family of social models built on an analogy with machines: cybernetics, game theory, systems theory etc. These were incorproated into the management of production and of society more generally, nowhere more than in the United States. The economists, building on a mathematical revolution of the 1940s, launched by Tinbergen and Koopmans during the war, happily adopted this family of approaches. Their version of it was “rational expectations” theory or the “efficient market hypothesis” and we all know what happened next. In this sense the twentieth century, and especially its last half, saw the machines win.

But not irreversibly. Thomas Sargent was just interviewed about his Nobel prize this year. Even the economists are no longer triumphalist in the face of the damage done to the world economy by governments and corporations blindly following the dictates of the rational expectations model. Sargent admitted: “We experiment with our models, before we wreck the world.” If I share the aspiration to build a human economy fit for all of us, it would not be one without machines or money. It would just put human interests first.

You can read this long and interesting article from the Globe and Mail, “Economists have met the enemy and it is economics“.

Tunisia is a small country of no obvious strategic significance, but in post-colonial Africa and the Arab world, it pioneered the single-party state. After his medical coup d’état against Bourguiba, Ben Ali ruled through police violence and surveillance by the party. We are fortunate to have available a wonderful dissection of the techniques of repression deployed by the Ben Ali regime. Béatrice Hibou’s The Force of Obedience (Polity, 2011) was first published in French in 2006, but her analysis shines a bright light on the Tunisian revolt and its aftermath.

Ben Ali was removed by his own military commanders and nothing has yet been done to dismantle the security state. The main problem was never Ben Ali’s absolute power or even the rapacity of his extended family. It was the bureaucracy’s ability to reward obedience and to spread fear and anxiety through the disruption of everyday practices, especially those affecting economic life. Each bureaucratic encounter, concerning taxes, a licence or whatever, was made into a potentially destabilizing experience.

The bare facts of the spark that ignited the Tunisian revolt are well-known. Mohamed Bouazizi was 26 years old and supported an extended family of eight. He had an unlicensed vegetable cart in Sidi Bouzid, a city 300 km south of Tunis. In December 2010 a policewoman confiscated his cart and produce. Bouazizi attempted to pay the fine, but she slapped him, insulted his father and spat in his face. His complaint was turned away by municipal officials. Within an hour, he returned to the headquarters, doused himself with flammable liquid and set himself on fire. His immolation spawned protests the next day which were dealt with brutally by the police, provoking riots on a small scale. President Ben Ali, in a gesture that many found repellent, visited Bouazizi in hospital shortly before he died on 4 January 2011. Ben Ali fled the country ten days later.

It would be hard to find a more dramatic symbol of the politics of domination identified by Hibou. The violence, indifference and humiliating behaviour of officials are all there, but at the core of Mohamed Bouazizi’s tragic death lies in systematic destabilization of the economic life of individuals. It is not yet known how far the bureaucracy itself has been internally undermined or whether alternative informal structures have already been built up in Tunisian society, as in the Soviet example. In any case, the road to a genuinely democratic government is likely to be a long one, regardless of the election result.

Even so, the most tangible consequence of the uprising so far is that Tunisians now feel more able to express themselves in public without fear, in contrast to grumbling in private before. What they want from any future government is a guarantee of their own social rights, especially as they affect everyday economic life. They want more open participation in the public sphere with justice and dignity. I was asked to comment on the consequences of the election for redistribution. For sure, there are class and regional disparities to be redressed and economic problems for which the state’s agency is indispensable. But economic democracy is the preeminent issue.

What the Tunisians began has since spread, most notably within the Arab world, but also with echoes in the London riots and the current occupation of Wall Street. According to the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary, C.L.R. James, in American Civilization (Blackwell, 1993), there is a growing conflict between the concentration of power at the top of society and the aspirations of people everywhere for democracy to be extended into all areas of their lives. This conflict is most advanced in the United States. The struggle is for civilization or barbarism, for individual freedom within new and expanded conceptions of social life (democracy) or a fragmented and repressed subjectivity stifled by coercive bureaucracies (totalitarianism).

The media are often caught between the constraints of bureaucracy and the growing power and presence of people as a force in world society. Commentary on the Tunisian election is no different. But what was started here by Mohamed Bouazizi’s death less than a year ago could be as epoch-making in its own way as the fall of the Berlin wall or Nelson Mandela’s release from prison two decades earlier.

A R Vasavi is a social anthropologist and professor at the National Institute for Advananced Studies, Bangalore. This piece was written in reponse to one of mine: Kant, ‘anthropology’ and the new human universal, Social Anthropology 18:4, 441-447 (2010). An even shorter version of this essay is available online here. This post is closer to the published version. We intend to exchange thoughts here and hope that others may feel like joining in.

Keith Hart’s call (Social Anthropology, 18 (4) 2010) for anthropology to reckon with the ‘new human universal’ or the ‘emergent world society’ is worthy of attention and aligns with the corpus of his own creative and sensitive work. In seeking to address the needs of social configurations arising in the fast globalizing world, Hart makes a plea for an anthropology rooted in Kant’s foundational principles of recognizing the subjective in the objective world and the “ ‘cosmopolitan right’, the basic right of all world citizens, (to) rest on conditions of universal human hospitality” (2010: 442). Hart’s call is altruistic and seeks to develop an anthropology which can facilitate the building of “a more equal world fit for everyone’ (page 446).

While Hart’s call and the overarching perspective are to be appreciated, the conditions and characteristics associated with the ‘new human universal’, seen as synonymous with the ‘emergent world society’ or the ‘globalised world’, need to be better understood and delineated. For the emergent world society as is currently being forged encodes within itself strictures and premises that like the injunctions of enlightenment and modernity, once also considered to be universal, may not bode well for all peoples, cultures and societies.  While the broader philosophy and approach, that of not just tolerating cultural particulars but also of what Hart insists on being “founded on knowing that true human community can only be recognized through them” (page 446) are worth pursuing, it is the need to further explicate, qualify and assess how anthropology can contribute to a judicious and equitable ‘new human universal’ that must be pursued.

Calls for and pronouncements of ‘cosmopolitanism’ have a long history, traced even to classic Greek scholars, and recent endeavours trace their source to Kant and to what is considered his prescient, and then unusual, call to forging new ideals of inter-human relations.  Yet, as Hart accurately notes, Kant’s eighteenth century postulate of an emergent world order was also “overwhelmed by its twin offspring, industrial capitalism and the nation-state’ (page 443).  Far from a cosmopolitan ideal what much of Europe expressed and experienced were the construction and rejection of even one’s own people and the near destruction of a civilian population as the enemy. If the precedent events, structures and results of the past two centuries hold for us many lessons, then we should also ponder on what the fall-out of the new emergent world order and its current carriers, flexible global capital and the international regimes of developmental lending, migration flows, and techno-capital assemblages portend further for all humanity and for all cultures. Just as the teleologies associated with progressivism, socialism, developmentalism and now increasingly even capitalism and post-communism are being questioned or rejected, a call for a broad-based humanism without attention to details of what the current conditions and predicament of a vast majority of humanity are and to the approaches, methodologies, and perspectives that are required to either address these may only contribute to the negligent and insouciant attitude of much of the social sciences, including social anthropology.

Perhaps what we need to stress about the ‘emergent world society’ is not so much that it portends a ‘new human universal’ as much as that the linkages, and not necessarily shared universals, between societies are now stronger than ever before.  Such linkages generated by the commonality of capital, market, media, migration, transnational sociality, and commodities are that: linkages which will forge relationships of demand and supply; prescription and preference; deference and defiance; hegemony and resistance; acculturation and fragmentation; hybridity and fundamentalism among other results.  What Anthropology will have to pay attention to are the results of these linkages forged on the anvil of the new globalism. For these will have implications both for the definition of culture and for the formation and manifestations of diverse cultural forms.

ERODED CULTURES

Hart notes that the ‘new universal will not just tolerate cultural particulars, but will be founded on knowing that true human community can only be realized through them”. (page 446). Yet, the fate of cultural particularities is complex and contradictory and anthropology will have to go beyond recording and noting how global economies forged by capitalism intensify national cultures and belonging or that global diversity has reached the shores of the once nearly cultural homogenous West. But stark and more widespread than these trends is the fact that emerging across the world are significant shifts in the very location of cultures; in their placement and articulation, and in their disembedding and reconstitution of societies. All of these call for Anthropology to note these emergences and that far from shared “cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical universals” (page442) that Hart expects, there are now on the world stage expressions of cultures that indicate the manifestations of a range of ‘eroded cultures’ which are results of the loss of structures of meaning and belonging, and of the declining influence of foundational institutions that had once been scaffolds for the tensions of individuals and groups.

To document and recognize these eroded cultures is not to recall or restate the litany of the poor and marginalised and their oversight by Western academia. Rather, it is to call attention to the myriad expressions of new cultures, played out both in the heart of the West and in the vast regions of the world but all displaying elements that fly in the face in of both older and more recent definitions of culture.  How will ‘cosmopolitan’ ethics or an anthropology directed by such cosmopolitanism address or understand translocated cultures, especially those relocated into the cultures and nation-states of the West which have layered characteristics, bearing with them the onus of reproducing past heritages and traditions and also forging strategies of survival?  How in the context of the rise of different forms of slavery, piracy, magic and witchcraft, sale of body parts, and re-invention of ‘traditional rituals’ that defy cosmopolitan notions of rights and humanity, can these be understood and represented ?

Should scholarship see and recognize all these also as new ‘cosmologies of cosmopolitanism’ and if so, what methodologies and perspectives are to be deployed to understand them?  If we are to understand the multiple forms of erosion as processes emanating from loss of structures of meaning that were enabling and facilitating devises; the removal and non-substitution of the panoply of institutions, norms, relations, values, and strictures that once formed the bases of different life-worlds, then where would we search for the ‘new human universal’ among such societies?  Should the pathologies of power that combines with the disarray of  life-worlds, as now being manifested not only in the fields of Kandahar and Darfur but also in the streets of Wall Street and Chicago and in the inner streets of Berlin and Amsterdam, in vast regions of India and China, be framed within the same discourse?

These trends are all interlinked but what universalism do they portend or represent?  Do they emanate from the same source, do they manifest similarities, and do they have same impacts on individuals, groups and on inter-societal relations? Do these conditions of life and living; of interactions and transactions; of dissent and resistance lend themselves to the new human universal?

In seeking to indicate possible ways of anthropological methods to study the ‘new human universal’, Hart also draws from Kant’s question, privileging the ‘what’ of knowing, doing, hoping, and being a human being. While the last is the premise or foundation of anthropological quests, Hart overlooks the importance of the ‘How’s and the Whys’— questions that are more the need of our times than the ‘What’s and the ‘Where’s’ of enlightenment, modernity, post-modernity, and post-communism. In posing these related ‘Why’ and ‘How’ questions anthropology will have to interrogate all those ideas, concepts, precepts, terms, and ideologies taken as universals and for each pose the question of ‘why’ they did become universal and ‘how’ and ‘who’ they have served and ‘how’ they can be challenged and ‘what’ the new alternatives can be.

The past decades of research have competently challenged and rejected earlier postulates of civilizational, modular and composite definitions of culture. And the current focus on culture as processual, negotiated, and strategised forms of meaning represent trends in much of the world. Yet, how can Anthropology understand and represent the contemporary forms of erosion?  How can researchers locate ‘culture’ on a template in which the particular and the universal coincide and co-exist in tension and not necessarily in the celebrated forms of hybridity, which overlook the integral shifts in cultures, or in the altruistically anticipated forms of recognizing others as cosmopolitan citizens?

Hart draws on Kant’s focus on the agency of the individual, but the methodological and sociological limitations of this need to be recognized. In the context of increasingly new burdens borne by individuals, who are now bearers of mass-mediated aspirations, which have to be realized even in the absence of collective support structures, should the agency of the individual be the beacon for new societies?

Generous in seeking to forge a ‘new human universal’ Hart calls for the “ageing White, West to ‘embrace’ (page 445) and break the barriers between them and the younger, coloured, poorer peoples of the world.  Such a call is rooted in the current predicament of Western Europe which is faced with the challenges of having non-western others translocated to the inner rings of its nations and societies.  The challenges of transforming the ‘Non-Western Subject’ into the ‘Western Citizen’, who must be both integrated and yet also allowed cultural-religious options now stands to test not just the secularism of European nations but also the cultural and humanistic barometers of all citizens.

In the alternatives to the hegemony of capitalism, Hart sees a potential in “transnational capitalism complemented by grassroots democratic movements of all kinds’ (page 445). Reposing faith in capitalism to be able to redress its motives of gain and to align with social movements may not bear fruit as the teleology of capital is profit and most movements, whether local, national or transnational, encode within themselves the contradictions of the societies in which they are located. The ideas and views of a few that make and mark contributions are rarely integrated into the hegemonic structures of capitalism and in the mindsets of those that decide the fate of the majority.  Hence, the twinning of capitalism to democratic movements may be an altruistic gesture that overlooks the impossibility of such alliances and their abilities to address the many erosions of human societies.

Hart also reposes faith in information and communication technologies (ICTs) which hold for him the promise of breaking barriers, facilitating access to knowledge and information, and as leading to the making of new shared commons. But, this is much like the cruel irony of how mediatised and commercially constituted new, ‘global villages’ are celebrated even as real villages are being destroyed.  Expecting ICTs to address long entrenched forms of structural inequities, so varied in different countries and regions, is to also fail to recognize how such high technology only furthers the divides and knowledge gaps.  As studies now indicate, ICT’s alone may have enhanced the divides; the ‘digital divide’ becoming only one more factor in the multiple ways in which the forms of interlocked inequalities are reproduced.  In the magic reposed to ICTs, the structural conditions of disadvantage, low income, non-literacy, lack of infrastructure and lack of sustained teaching and learning etc., are often overlooked. Instead, the reposing of faith in ICTs as capable of resolving several disadvantages has only led to the strengthening of the industry and its allied class. Perhaps, more disturbingly, what is increasingly emerging is the ways in which ICTs and the rhetoric associated with them, have become the hegemonic narrative of  quick development and overall economic growth and social equity, thereby obfuscating opportunities in which layered forms of inequity and injustice can be addressed.

Hart is right in that it would be very inadequate for anthropology as a body of knowledge and for its practitioners to be confined within the walls of academia.  For the time has now come for a broader ‘outing’ of the discipline, so that ideas and understandings of the multiple ‘others’, who are now no longer distant and exotic but in close and everyday contact, can be disseminated. Not only policy-related prescriptions but the broader, public discourse on cultures and the inevitability of inter-cultural living will have to be better informed by Anthropology. What fora and what forms of dialogues and conversations Anthropologists will have to participate in are issues that need better clarity.

Hart’s early work (on the informal economy, money, and markets) has documented and detailed many of the complex predicaments of different societies. Hence, extending the perspectives from these to understand the making and unmaking of different societies under the regime of the ‘emergent world society’ will facilitate new anthropological perspectives thereby making any claims to a ‘new human universal’ or to primarily Kantian notions of ‘cosmopolitanism’ redundant.

A.R.Vasavi

July/1^st/2011