The governments of the Soviet Union and its East European dependencies fell in 1989-90 with almost no loss of life. How could the most powerful and coercive bureaucracies the planet has ever seen collapse so quickly and utterly? They ruled in the name of equality through surveillance and fear, but their structures had been hollowed out. They no longer provided the means of life and people filled the void with their own initiatives based on kinship, religion, locality, the black market and similar informal practices.
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. Continue reading ‘What do the Tunisian people want from their election?’ »
The story about voting giving the people democratic power is an example of the cover-up that passes for education at every level in our societies. Politicians need money and money men need political cover. Central banking was invented to institutionalize their partnership. The Bank of England, Banque de France and Federal Reserve are all private institutions which were given the appearance of public authority in return for absorbing the “national debt”, that is of the King, Napoleon and Congress respectively. I am not sure about the ECB’s constitution, since one problem with the euro is that monetary union preceded political or fiscal union. Of course, the educators, including the vast bulk of academic social scientists, insist that our societies are built on the separation of public and private interests, when it hasn’t been so for over 300 years.
Perhaps the main thing that is new about neo-liberalism is not the privatization of public interests, which has long been normal, but rather its ideological promotion as an ideal, where before it was clandestine. As Umair Haque noted recently, this makes the Gilded Age look Leninist in comparison. In both cases any social contract between rulers and masses was torn up and revolution seemed inevitable. It is chastening to contemplate what happened after three decades of financial imperialism last stopped — in 1913/14. Continue reading ‘The privatization of public interests’ »
A response to Keith Hart’s call for renewing social anthropology
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). Continue reading ‘A R Vasavi: Deferring the “New Human Universal”’ »
In March 2011, I attended the annual Digital Money Forum organized by David Birch of Consult Hyperion in London. At some point Dave and I recorded this exchange as a podcast in the Tomorrow’s Transactions series.
The written text may be found below, but look at this description by the producer:
“Money. You don’t know where it’s been,
But you put it where your mouth is.
And it talks.” (Money, by Dana Gioia)
The history of money stretches back some 11,000 years. There have been certain key moments in its development and each essay tells their story and the resonance that these revolutionary blips have had ever since.
1. Cows – round about 9,000BC cattle were first domesticated. Soon after they became units of exchange and thus the idea of money was born: cows became cash on legs. And they still are – in certain parts of Africa commodities (especially brides) are priced in cows. Professor Keith Hart explores the early examples of money as part of an economy of living persons and things.
In the rest of the series, Essayists explore: the emergence of the very first banks; the setting of inter-regional and international standards; how the very first coins helped also foster abstract thought; and the appearance of the first forms of paper money in ancient China.
Series Producer: Paul Kobrak.
This was written before I was commissioned to write the essay, but I could not shake Paul from his belief that contemporary practices in Africa and the Pacific are evidence of the early history of money nor that money is a commodity whose origins lie in barter. It means that a century of academic ethnography has not dislodged the ideology of unilinear evolution. I tried to insert more about the contemporary crisis of the money system, but this was excised. The line in every sense had to be maintained. I still managed to keep some of the message in what I read and the notion of “an economy of living persons and things” was added to the notice. But if ever evidence were needed of anthropologists’ collective failure to dispel the idea of “primitive” money from the public imagination, this is it. And why would they listen to us if we refuse to engage with questions of world history? Continue reading ‘The Origins of Money: 1. Cows and Shells’ »
Like many of you, I became a bit worried about this radioactive cloud. I have tried to gather some information to see if my family and friends in Europe, the US and Mexico were safe. As you may have similar worries, here is how I came across this conclusion after reading some newspapers.
For information on what is going on in Japan, look at the US press (eg: Last Wednesday, US authorities said last week there was a problem at reactor 2 before the Japanese authority acknowledged it. cf. NYT)
For information on the US, read French newspapers. (The graphic of the evolution of the radioactive cloud disappeared from the pages of the NYT when it was reaching California. It is now in Le Monde)
A workshop on The Human Economy was held at Goldmiths London on the afternoon of 26th January 2011. It involved all three editors and several contibuting authors and was organized by Professor Catherine Alexander, who is one of them. The editors each spoke about their own involvement in the international project and their vision for it. Antonio David Cattani spoke first, followed by Jean-Louis Laville and then me (part 1, part 2 and part 3, followed by Q&A part 1 and part 2).
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.
