Brian Holmes:

On 05/05/2012 01:56 PM, Nicholas Knouf wrote:

How does one take a principled stand against the repugnant policies of the Koch Bros., while also holding out the possibility that their philanthropic actions just_might_ cause some positive change in the world?

I reckon it’s close to impossible.

The reason why is that by continuing to admire, in whatever way, the oligarchs of your country or any other, and by refusing to condemn them and the people who support them, one sits on the fence and thereby encourages everyone else to do exactly the same. How to oppose the oligarchy without frankly opposing them? How to be part of and against the ruling class?

This has ever been the dilemma of the so-called “middle classes,”those who mediate between the rulers and the ruled. It is not an easy position when one springs from those middle classes, because as you point out, Nick, our culture, our very subjectivity, is largely given to us by the “gifts” of the rulers. Only by some deliberate effort can the middle-class person actually break out of this position of admiration, this inarticulate belief that the rulers are somehow “the good people.” The great resource whereby the rulers have always legitimated the iniquity of their rule has always been art, culture, philanthropy. Should one be suspicious of those things? Is the culture of the rich a double-edged sword? What does it mean to be cut by it?

To rule is not simply to bestow gifts on the less enlightened. It is to extort one’s wealth and power by means of violence both physical and psychic. And in the case of oil magnates, it is to participate in military imperialism, to support war and to damage the environment irreparably. The case of the Koch brothers is surely the most explicit in this regard. I recall, for those who would somehow not know, that the Koch brothers are in the oil business; that they founded the libertarian Cato institute which has served as an ideological arm of corporate neoliberalism; paid out more to their political action committee between 2006 and 2010 than any other oil industry including
Exxon-Mobile; and have backed since its inception the one organization that has done more than any other to support the Tea Party, namely Americans for Prosperity, which is also pushing climate-change denial. Well, I could go on, but anyone who has not done a minimum of reading about the Koch brothers simply should do so. I will put a few links below, but I think everyone already knows these things.

Under the rule of oligarchs like the Kochs, the US has led the world in the transformation from public cultural funding to private. So isn’t it nice, they pay for your museums. At present this structural transformation is overtaking Europe and other regions under the pressures of austerity, which arise from the very libertarian philosophy promoted by the Koch brothers and so many other corporate billionaires defending their class power. The transformation extends to the formerly public universities, which are now debt-traps for unwitting human prey. The transformation of the formerly public institutions is documented quite well in books such as Academic Capitalism, Unmaking the Public University, and many others which I cite in my text “Silence=Debt.” When this transformation is complete, you will indeed have something like the Carnegie Libraries on which to nourish your subjectivity. You’ll have the Met, Harvard, the MoMA, a militarized and corporatized UC Berkeley, etc. What you will not have are self-governing institutions maintaining a sense of responsibility both to the internal ethics of intellectual disciplines, and to broader regulative ideals of equality. That is to say, what you won’t have is any pretence of a democratic society. The tacit requirement for crossing the threshholds of these institutions will be to bow down before the godlike figures who created them.

I am not sure how to exit from this situation where we “middle-class” people are dominated while serving also as the vectors and relays of domination. I know it’s a fact, because I have seen conditions in both the US and Western Europe degrade over my lifetime, particularly the US, where the existence of what’s called “the oligarchy” or
“the ruling class” is now a reality so patent, so statistically evident, that it is simply undeniable. And yet people accept it, they internalize the competitive, winner-take-all values of the oligarchy, just as they have followed the lead of the oligarchy in increasingly denying the existence of human-induced climate change. Trusting that this rule of the oligarchs “just might” create something culturally positive – that’s naive, Nick. While you’re trusting, or even merely speculating on the possibility, we are headed toward the complete disempowerment of our democracy by billionaire Political Action Committees. One more step and and naivete becomes complicity. Which is
the usual fate of the middle classes.

Help me out, everyone or anyone, if you are interested. I don’t know exactly what to do. At this point, I think it would be politically useful and valuable to publicly tell people that they are wrong when they speak in support of the ruling classes. The first time one can do it very politely, as I did a while ago to Sascha D. People told me privately that I was wasting my time. But it seems to me that one can and should try publicly to tell people why they might reconsider what they say; and one can argue these things at length, it’s a good thing.

However, at a certain point I do believe one also has to say: “Declarations that support the culture, and therefore the influence, of the super-rich, are quite simply declarations in support of the ruling class.” That’s not a simple ad hominem attack. That’s a political argument based on principle.

If my dear friend Mark Stahlman were right, that is, if life in democratic societies were always and ever simply the rule of the powerful minority over the powerless majority, then another consequence must necessarily ensue. We must all, to the extent that we are in the powerless majority, become either hopelessly naive (“Well, every capitalist Armageddon has it’s cultural silver lining”) or we must become hopelessly paranoid (“It’s all a trap, a Matrix, foisted on the majority of zombies by the minority of all-powerful rulers”). To refuse that diabolical alternative, it seems to me that one has to say, “Well, the situation is bad, but because we are capable of something better, we must appeal to those who recognize the danger and begin to struggle together not only against the ruling classes, but also against those who do not recognize the danger and choose instead to promote complicity.”

Translation: At some point, you gotta say to those around you: “Stop defending the rulers for their poison gifts. Start attacking them because they are a clear and present danger.”

Alas, this means accepting the friend/enemy distinction of classical politics, which is not a happy one. At a certain level it means tearing your very self apart, when you are partially the creation of those ruling classes in their more enlightened, gift-bestowing aspects. I don’t find the vocation of the critic particularly smooth. When people start defending the Koch borthers, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or privatized universities and museums because they’re excellent and they have such good art, I admit it, I sometimes freak out: I think I’m be hearing the ventriloquized voice of the enemy. Friend, enemy, dualism, linear, bad. Therefore anyone who has a better solution to this whole problem, go ahead, speak up. Let’s go forward with all this.

best, Brian

***

Oh, and by the way, fuck the Koch brothers:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/reports/koch-industries-secretly-fund

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOCHAv25uTw

Keith Hart:

Brian, saying what you say is an inspiration for many of us. But you ask for a different perspective, so I will try to fabricate one that stands separate from all that I share with you.

The first thing that stands out to me is that you identify your own role with that of a critic. There are other ways of engaging society and perhaps we should start with that. Which critics in history do you think made a difference? Cicero? Milton? Rousseau? Poe? Adorno? How did they do it?

Second, the US has become a blatant plutocracy. All we need is for Mrs Romney to say let them eat cake and the parallels with the Old Regime will be complete (reference to Ed on rentseeking etc). But the American left, from its strongholds in New York, Chicago and LA, rarely identifies other social forces that might help to make things budge, choosing rather to demonize the popular majority, their culture and politics, as dupes. Here is the contradiction, the United States is still the only society where democracy occasionally makes itself felt. The appropriation of old liberal slogans by the plutocracy is so insidious because American institutions and people still embody those ideas to some degree.

Third, all economies combine plural principles and, when the Pentagon is the largest state-run collective in world history, we should think twice before describing the US economy as “capitalism”. Ours is an age of money (Locke and Marx) which is transitional to a more just society, but where is the world in that trajectory today, when for the first time capital has gone genuinely global? If capitalism’s historical mission is to make cheap commodities and break down the insularity of traditional communities, how far has humanity progressed down that road, when a third still work with their hands in the fields and multitudes haven’t made a phone call in their life?

Fourth, the Europeans are in worse shape than the Americans and are nowhere more depressed than in Britain and France, the empires the US had to displace in order to build their own. If your constituency is the West in decline, why would you expect to locate progressive social forces in a population who live beyond their means because they have the world currency and most of the weapons or in another that shelters behind that power to derive unearned income from the rest that is fast running out?

Finally — but not really, this is just the beginning — the political economists identified three classes based on property in Land, Money and Labour, landlords, capitalists and workers. What has happened to those classes by the early 21st century? The first has become Governments, the second Corporations. Their unholy alliance-cum-rivalry took the form of national capitalism (Hegel’s recipe), but is becoming something else, maybe home rule for the corporations (step forward Oliver Williamson and Coase). And the rest of us, the epeople, what, who and where are we? Could the digital revolution support the equivalent of the factory proletariat and how good an example is that anyway? No wonder Karl Marx never finished the sketch of his big book provided in the introduction to Grundrisse.

Whatever the way forward from your impasse, Brian, it has to be grounded in a contemporary perspective on world history and not just the internal whingeing of western populations condemned to the slippery slope of history. I don’t expect this idea to take root soon. After all, the British haven’t woken up to historical reality despite being on the skids for a century. I have made my second home in South Africa and I look especially to Brazil and India rather than China, as well as to the rest of Africa, for progressive social movements. Africa already has 7 out of the top ten fastest-growing economies; its share of would population will be a quarter in 2050 and over a third by 2100. Now there is a revolution to contemplate in our racist world society, one where the value of black, brown and white will be reversed.

Your comrade, Keith

Brian Holmes:

Hey Keith, good to hear from you.

I think there are tons of writers who have made a difference, and it continues today. Your list is pretty literary – and literature is a strong force, much stronger than people usually give credit. I’m also interested in more humble sociologists, economists, philosophers, and of course… art historians. But you know, critic is just one part. I like to be part of social movements and also experimental art-and-politics groups that come to grips with territorial realities. There are few Adornos and less Poes. Baudelaire and Rimbaud are pretty rare too! No use wishing to be a world-historical genius. How to be part of a grounded community that lives its critique and breathes its alternatives? It’s a very good question. That’s why a bunch of us go around asking it in the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor!

What the left is, and what the popular majority is, is a real question in the US (but also France or Germany for that matter). Dan Wang shows in his last post that a broad electoral left has come into existence again through conflict in Wisconsin. That could be a growing tendency nationally, but it isn’t yet. In Chicago I still see a big split between a popular, grassroots left that comes out for a primarily Latino immigrant march like Mayday (and for a thousand other everyday causes) and a middle-class liberal left that frankly doesn’t know what to do in the face of a police-state, finance-friendly, austerity-enforcing Democrat like Rahm Emmanuel (former Obama chief of staff and now our mayor). Who’s the popular majority? There isn’t one, there’s two or three or more. It’s as useless to call people dupes as it is to deny the use of vast machineries for influencing behavior. Proof enough of the latter is the success of the “Kochtopus” — ie the huge multi-headed apparatus that the famous two brothers help to fund, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) whose program Scott Walker has tried to carry out in Wisconsin.

Keith, you are more confident than I that capitalism’s mission has been to bring cheap commodities to the masses. We’re looking arguably at some kind of transnational state capitalism, in which the state itself warps beyond recognition. If the crisis of the 70s produced a trilateral governance (“Triad power” as Kenichai Ohmae said back then) we now see an attempt to widen the hegemony (or stretch the management of “hege-money”) to include the BRICS. The locus of this attempt has been the G-20 finance ministers meeting. But the hedge funds aren’t really cooperating. Moishe Postone has pointed out that under neoliberalism, the classic inability of capitalists to coordinate their efforts globally has returned to plague the whole system. And he said that before 2008 and the Greek debacle! Postone argues for some specific consideration of the greatest critic of Lockean bourgeois property conceptions. I.e. Marx. As a critic I still want to be part of a collective rewriting of Marx for the 21st century. In my view, transnational state capitalism is still failing to deliver the goods we need.

Pretty darn good question! I just happen to live here in the “Heartland.” Where a buncha climate-change deniers, the Heartland Institute, are meeting, hopefully to general scorn, this weekend.

Well, they have become intertwined for better and worse, I’d say. Crucially, the formation of socialist and social-democratic states in the 20th century has confused the working classes with both the territorial nation-state and the money-wielding transnational corporations. For us, the big alternative is, do we fight back to regain power over monetary flows within some territorial container called a nation-state? Or do we go for Exodus and try to create a new formation, “the missing people” or “le people qui manque,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it? I think you have to do both at once. The corporate-state nexus is too powerful and ugly to ignore, and we can’t yet fight it effectively outside the nation-state. At the same time, the national culture it has produced — with workers’ cooperation — is too deadly to make it one’s own. Is it really possible to do both at once? Not for nothing did D&G write about capitalism and schizophrenia!

So you go for Exodus!

Here in the Americas, there is infinitely more to be learned from the South than the North. With all due apologies to my good friends in Canada. Y muchos saludos a los demas!

Thanks for the inspiration, amigo.

Keith Hart:

Michael H Goldhaber wrote: It seems to me that Conard’s text presents those on the left with a rare opportunity –though not enough of one by itself to turn the situation entirely around….In general, the extremes of capital and inequality now, open the whole system for critique in more obvious ways that at any recent time, and finding astute ways to make that critique is a worthwhile endeavor.

Good point, Michael! Come back, Thorstein Veblen, all is forgiven.

I am really just making a plea for the introduction of world history into this discussion. The fastest-growing economy in the world between 1890 and 1913 was Russia with an annual growth rate of about 10%, similar to China’s today. We all know what happened next after the imperialist powers started fighting each other and the revolution was not in Germany. The British thought the world economy was in a Great Depression 1873-1896, but it turned out that returns on middle class savings (consols) were being squeezed by American and German capital, while the world economy boomed (Siberia, South Africa, Brazil).

We are not just witnesses to the self-serving ideologies of the super-rich. (Thomas Jefferson presciently called commercial monopolists a pseudo-aristocracy and wanted to include inhibitions to their growth in the constitution, but the Federalists got round that one. Whether he knew that or not, Veblen made the same point a century later and now it is our turn.) There are massive changes taking place under our noses and, as far as nettime is concerned, you would think nothing much is going on outside the US.

I think the main difference between Brian and me is that he wants to engage personally with the politics of our moment in history and this comes across sometimes as being myopic (which he is not), whereas I want to get a sense of the global picture and that makes me rather detached about the politics. I do think we are entering a period of war and revolution that could be as long as the neoliberal phase and that is why I gobble up what Brian has to say.

I did produce this reflection on revolution and the human economy not long ago:

http://thememorybank.co.uk/2012/02/07/the-human-economy-in-a-revolutionary-moment-political-aspects-of-the-economic-crisis/

Inequality is endemic to this world economy, but South Africa’s detailed profile, as revealed by the following selected indicators, is remarkable:

Security exchange regulation 1

Soundness of banks 2

Efficacy of corporate boards 2

Financial services availability 3

Financial market development 4

Management schools 13

Air transport infrastructure 17

Professional management 18

Home market index 24

Scientific research 30

Firm technology 30

Buyer sophistication 31

Marketing 31

* * * * * * * * * * *

Electricity supply 97

Internet use per capita 105

Supply of scientists & engineers 112

Pay and productivity 130

Life expectancy 130

Education system 133

Crime and violence 136

Hiring and firing practices 139

HIV prevalence 139

TB prevalence 141

Businessmen listed the most problematic factors as inefficient government bureaucracy (20%), poorly educated workforce (17%), restrictive labour regulations (16%), corruption (12%),  crime and theft (10%) and poor infrastructure (8%).

What we have here is a world-class business environment surrounded by some of the lowest human development conditions in the world. It would have been easy to explain such dualism not long ago, when South Africa was notorious as a mining enclave run for the benefit of whites only; and perhaps two decades of ANC rule (with the black union federation COSATU as its principal supporter) are too short to undo the legacy of neglect and harrassment endured by the poor black majority for over a century. But South Africa’s first world corporate capitalism and the third world conditions most citizens live in are both to a significant extent a product of post-apartheid government. Moreover, public discourse in South Africa could hardly be said to reflect these stark contrasts. The arrival of “democracy” in the form of black majority rule in 1994 is still celebrated without any apparent irony.

The social glue for this paradoxical situation is the ANC’s ability to count on the votes of the poor black majority whose interests it systematically neglects. No wonder the South African left is hamstrung by its ideological legacy on race and class. South Africa’s growth rate of an average 3% a year is less than half that of the seven African countries who (with China, India and Vietnam) currently make up the top ten fastest-growing economies in the world. Surely this relative stagnation is an effect of the country’s business-friendly (some would call it “neoliberal”) economic model. The prospect for major social explosions still seems to be low, not least because South Africans have been told they are superior to the rest of the continent and are easily diverted by resentment of other Africans who come there for jobs.

2011/12 is the political consequence of the financial crisis of 2007/8. There is still a tendency to see the crisis in economic rather than political terms. In this respect, neoliberalism’s detractors often reproduce the free market ideology they claim to oppose. The euro is by no means the only symptom of this crisis, but it may well be seen in retrospect as the decisive nail in the coffin of the world economy today. One way of approaching our moment in history is to ask not what is beginning, but what is ending. This is not straightforward.

As a partial antidote to the daily news, I find it useful to attempt a historical periodization of the last two centuries or more, mainly to indicate that the present rupture in history opens up the prospect of several decades of turbulence.

1776-1815            An age of war and revolutions

1815-1848            The industrial revolution

1848-1873            Origins of national capitalism

1873-1914            First age of financial globalization

1914-1945            The second thirty years war

1945-1979            Les trente glorieuses of social democracy

1979-2008            Second age of financial globalization

2008-                     Another age of war and revolutions?

My aim is not to predict the inevitably dire outcome of the present global crisis, but to invite public debate at a more serious level that may help us to avoid such an outcome.

“National capitalism” is the synthesis of nation-states and industrial capitalism. Its main symbol has been national monopoly currency (legal tender or central bank money). It is the institutional attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation through central bureaucracy within a cultural community of national citizens. Its origins lay in a series of linked revolutions of the 1860s/early 70s based on a new alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class.

Governments then combined with large corporations to launch a bureaucratic revolution and mass production in the late 19^th century. The national system became general after the First World War when states turned inward to manage their economies in war and depression. Its apogee was the social democracy built after 1945; but it has been unravelling since the US dollar went off gold in 1971, a new regime of floating currencies emerged and money derivatives were invented in 1972.

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.  Its 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 as a way of achieving their practical purposes together.

Nation-states have been so successful in a relatively short time that it is hard to imagine society in any other way. I identify here five ideal-types of community all represented by the nation-state:

•  political community: a link to the world and a source of law at home
•  community of place: territorial boundaries of land and sea
•  imagined or virtual community: the constructed cultural identity of citizens
•  community of interest: subjectively and objectively 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.

In my article on “heads or tails” (Hart 1986), I argued, following Polanyi (1944), that money is both a token of state authority and a commodity made by markets, at the same time an aspect of relations between persons and a thing detached from persons.  States and markets are combined in national capitalism, but policy swings erratically between the two extremes. David Graeber (2011) has made a similar contrast between money as virtual credit and as currency or bullion to analyse the history of debt over the last five millennia.

Money is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal (Hart 2009). According to Georg Simmel (1900), it is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society. But we will first have to get past national capitalism as the twentieth’s century’s dominant social form.

In The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi listed money as a “fictitious commodity” whose exchange in the free market came close to buying and selling society itself. He held that money and markets originate in the effort to extend society beyond its local core; society has to become more inclusive since none is self-sufficient. “Token money” facilitates domestic trade, “commodity money” foreign trade; but conflict between internal and external dimensions often disrupts economy.

In a later article, “Money objects and money uses” (1964), he approached money as a semantic system, like writing. Only modern money combines the four functions of payment, standard, store and exchange in a limited number of “all-purpose” symbols. (This is not the same as “general-purpose money” which just means money can buy anything.) Primitive and archaic forms attached the separate uses to different symbolic objects or “special-purpose” monies.  Polanyi argued against the primacy of money as a medium of exchange and for a multi-stranded model of its evolution.  It is basically a means of payment or “purchasing power”.

Although this analysis was intended only to illuminate the history of money, Polanyi’s approach offers remarkable insight into the global economic crisis today. Our challenge is to conceive of society as plural rather than singular, as a federated network rather than as a centralized hierarchy, the nation-state. The era of national monopoly currencies is very recent (from the 1850s) and “all-purpose money” has been breaking up for four decades now, since the US dollar went off gold in 1971 (Gregory 1997).

World economy has reverted since the break-up of the Bretton Woods system of fixed parity exchange rates to the plural pattern of competing currencies that was normal before the modern era. The crisis was precipitated by the creation of an offshore banking system which brought the informal economy to the heart of global finance (Shaxson 2011). It was also significantly a result of a separation of functions between different types of monetary instruments. Central bank control was eroded by a shift to money being issued in many forms by a global distributed network of corporations, not just governments and banks.

The digital revolution in communications has been transforming money and exchange for two decades now (Hart 2000). Radical cheapening of the cost of transferring information introduces new conditions for engagement with the impersonal economy. The formation of world society is driven by money, markets and telecommunications.

This process of social extension beyond national boundaries is fraught with danger, much as the kula ring was (Malinowski 1922). We need to extend systems of social rights to the global level before the contradictions of the market system collapse into world war. But local political organization resists such a move. This dialectic of globalization is very ancient. Ours is becoming a multi-polar world whose plurality of associations and convergent income distribution resembles the medieval period more than anything since.

This is the context for understanding the monetary crisis that has overwhelmed the eurozone of late. The apparent triumph of the free market at the end of the Cold war in 1989/90 induced two huge political blunders. Radical privatization of Soviet bloc public economies ignored the common history of politics, law and social custom that shored up market economies in the West, thereby delivering the economy to gangsters and tycoons. And the European single currency was supposed to provide the social glue for political union without first developing effective fiscal institutions or economic convergence between North and South.

The big mistake was to replace national currencies with the euro. An alternative, the hard ecu, would have floated politically managed national currencies alongside a low-inflation European central bank currency. Countries that didn’t join the euro, like Britain and Switzerland, have in practice enjoyed the privilege of this plural option. Eurozone countries cannot devalue and so must reduce their debts through deflation or default. The euro came after money was already breaking up into multiple forms and functions. The Americans centralized their currency after a civil war; the Europeans centralized theirs as a means of achieving political union.

If Polanyi’s ghost is haunting us now, so too is Georg Simmel’s. One of money’s anchors, according to him (Simmel 1900), was its physical substance (metals, paper etc). He believed that this would wither away, revealing more clearly money’s functionality (the ends to which it is put and its technical organization). Money’s essence is what people use it for in society. It always introduces a third party to bilateral exchange — the community that shares its use. Virtual money would make that social foundation of money more explicit.

Simmel’s prophecy has been realised to a remarkable degree, as the digital revolution accelerates and cheapens electronic transfers (Dembinski and Perritaz 2000). But if the essence of money is its use in a community with shared social institutions, national capitalism has lost its grip on reality. We must therefore move from singular (national) to plural (federal) conceptions of society. The infrastructure of money has already become decentralized and global. A return to the national solutions of the 1930s or to a Keynesian regime of managed exchange rates and capital flows is bound to fail.

Where are the levers of democratic power to be located, now that globalization has exposed the limitations of national economic management? The cultural logic of national capitalism leads the political classes who got us into this mess to repeat the same mistakes. Politics is a dialogue of the deaf, between those who deny the need for any political regulation of markets and others who remain trapped in the outmoded model of central bank money.

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 to build an infrastructure of money adequate to humanity’s common needs. This agenda seems impossibly remote right now. One move in such a direction goes by the name of “alter-globalization” (Pleyers 2010). The idea of a “human economy“(Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010) offers a bridge to that movement.

“Economy” is putting ones house in order in a world shaped increasingly by markets (Hann and Hart 2011). Social units of widely varying scale may be said to have one. Economy is pulled inwards to secure local guarantees of a community’s rights and interests; and outwards to make good local supply by engaging with outsiders through the medium of money and markets of various sorts, not just our own (Mauss 1925).

The idea of a human economy relies less on abstractions than on what people are doing already, with the aim of imparting a new emphasis, combination and direction to their efforts. A preliminary definition of its assumptions would include the following:

• Aim for a pragmatic economics that people can understand and use
• Economy is made and remade by human beings
• A focus on complex institutional particulars
• A more holistic conception of everyone’s needs and interests
• Address humanity as a whole and the world society we are making

Three things count in our societies  as they are increasingly emancipated from a territorial base — people, machines and money, in that order. But money buys the machines that control the people. Our political task – and I believe it was Marx’s too – is to reverse that order of priority, not to help people escape from machines and money, but to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money.

To the idea of economic crisis and its antidotes, we must now add in 2011-12 that of political revolution. Revolutions are fed by digital contrasts with what has gone before, but the human economy is built on analogue processes. Europe has become the main focus once more of a world revolution. The euro crisis is a Sophoclean tragedy in which good intentions cannot remedy the consequences of past mistakes. Now if ever a synoptic vision of humanity’s plight is vital, if we are to save ourselves from a disaster that our institutions prevent us from even seeing, never mind avoiding.

References

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.

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.

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. 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.

Malinowski, B. 1961 (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton.

Mauss, M. 1990 (1925) The Gift : Form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London : Routledge.

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.

Shaxson, N. 2011. Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world. London: Bodley Head.

Simmel, G. 1978 (1900). The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge.

I was asked to report on the project I am involved in which has the same name as The Human Economy book; but, given this course’s focus on social movements, I decided that I should try to insert the perspective on economy I have developed into contemporary political processes and events. I have been writing, editing and researching about alternative approaches to the economy for a long time and blogging about politics more recently, but never the two together. In the last year, as a result of the North African revolutions and then the Occupy movement, I have come to see that the economic and political arguments have to be brought much closer together. Taking our lead from this moment in world history, we need to ask how the work that Jean-Louis and I have long been engaged in – on human economy, économie solidaire, social economy – needs to be modified in order to lend support to what has become a serious political movement at the global level.

I entered our collaboration after Jean-Louis, with Antonio David Cattani, published an expanded version of the Dictionnaire de l’autre économie in 2006. I published an enthusiastic review essay about it. I was staggered by the range of analysis concerning economic and political development that it contained. I have been living in Paris for 15 years and I feel lucky to have been here during what I see as a Renaissance of French economic sociology. The book edited by Philippe Steiner and François Vatin, Traité de sociologie économique, is a testament to the constellation of brilliant economic sociologists that France has produced in the last decade or more. It was equally clear that this work was largely unknown in the English-speaking world and, increasingly under Chirac and Sarkozy, lacked a receptive audience in France as well. So, since my friends in this field were being frozen out of French politics to some extent, we had the idea of selling the project to the English-speakers or at least to those who speak English as a second language. Geoffrey has already introduced the result, The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (2010).

All the predecessor volumes were called, in various languages, Dictionary of the Other Economy. We dropped that particular formulation for reasons that will become the main theme of my talk today. The difference between what are conventionally known as the extreme left and the centre left lies in the concept of change that each of them has. The extreme left conceives of the future as the negation of what it calls “capitalism” in a unitary way and imagines a radical rupture with that system in ways that are not always specified, but are thought to be revolutionary. The centre left, whether it relies on state intervention or the mobilization of voluntary associations of various kinds, tends to emphasize more gradual and continuous developments building on what people are doing already. We felt that labelling our intellectual work as “the other economy” lent itself too readily to radical utopias. Jean-Louis and I based our conversation on what Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi understood by economic change, since we were looking for a more positive construction than a simple negation; and this is where the idea of a human economy came from.

What makes an economy “human”? First, it privileges people before abstractions. People make and remake their economic lives and that has to be the basis for thinking about economy. Any economics has to be accessible to them as a practical guide to how they manage those lives. But the economy is human in another sense too in that we increasingly confront economic problems and dilemmas as humanity. The future of humanity as a whole is at stake in the economic crises that we face and not just the world seen through the blinkers of national politics and media. So the idea of a human economy points in these two directions: towards what people really do and extending our perspectives to a global level, if possible.

Since publishing the book, I have helped to set up a research program on the human economy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa’s capital. UP was an Afrikaner establishment close to government power in the apartheid period; but South Africa is on the move and has been for more than two decades, so the university wants to refurbish its image and expand in more progressive directions. They have generously funded a program of post-doctoral fellowships drawing initially from the global South (with fellows from Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia and Southern Africa), but now linking researchers from North and South in a creative dialogue focused on South Africa. Volumes before The Human Economy were largely a Francophone and Latin American venture, so we widened the range of contributors to take in 15 countries, adding authors from Britain, North America and Scandinavia, as well as translating a selection from the Dictionnaire. But it soon became apparent that Asia and Africa – where most of the people live – were still missing from this impressively diverse international project. The series was launched in Brazil and Argentina soon after the millennium and it was always intended to advance collaboration between networks of researchers and activists. The books are a digest of existing knowledge and experience that might help to inform readers who wish to change the world in a progressive direction. Ours too did not offer much guidance for how to carry out active research on the human economy. So the Pretoria program aims to fill these two gaps: first, to enrol Africans and Asians, alongside Latin Americans and Europeans, into studying how to make a better economy; and second, to foster post-doctoral research that would help to inform and refine this program.

The Dictionnaire that Jean-Louis put together came out in the middle of the credit boom (2002, 2006). Very few people saw much prospect for economic and political change at that time. By the time we published The Human Economy in 2010, after the financial crisis had broken, it was clear that the ideas it contained should find a more fertile reception in the new climate of public opinion. At the very least, the absolute hegemony of mainstream economics has been damaged by the crisis. It really isn’t feasible to argue any longer – although many economists still do – that the best guarantee of improved human well-being is to leave markets free of political intervention and social control. Surely no-one believes that any more. Markets were never free, but the dominant ideology provided cover for siphoning wealth to the top; and that is now very much on the political agenda. Even the Financial Times publishes articles saying that we maybe need a new synthesis of anthropology, history and economics to replace the old discipline. So we were pretty sure that our ideas would meet a more favourable audience in this context.

Even so, we distanced ourselves, in the introduction and in our approach to editing the book, from any “revolutionary” eschatology that suggested society had reached the end of something rotten and would soon be launched on something quite new. The idea of a human economy rested on drawing attention to the fact that people do a lot more than might be imagined if we focus only on the dominant economic institutions. Against a singular notion of the economy as “capitalism”, we argued that all societies combine a plurality of economic forms and that several of these are universally distributed across history, even if their combination is strongly coloured by the dominant type of organization in particular times and places. For example, in his famous essay on The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss tried to show that other economic principles were present in capitalist societies and understanding this would provide a sounder basis for building non-capitalist alternatives than the Bolshevik revolution’s attempt to break with markets and money. Karl Polanyi too, in his various writings, insisted that the human economy throughout history was made up of a number of mechanisms of which the market was only one. We argued therefore that the idea of radical transformation of an economy conceived of monolithically as capitalism into something regarded as its opposite was an inappropriate way to approach economic change. We should pay attention to the full range of what people are doing already and build economic initiatives around giving these a new direction, combination and emphasis, rather than suppose that economic change has to be invented from scratch. Although this might seem to be a gradualist approach to economic improvement, adopting such an approach on awide scale would in fact have revolutionary consequences.

I have been working quite closely for 5 or 6 years now with my friend and colleague at Goldsmiths, David Graeber. He is an anarchist who was prominent from the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. His book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is a best-seller. His politics inform his economic analysis; and he has always taken an anti-statist and anti-capitalist position, with markets usually subsumed under the concept of capitalism. That is, he sees the future and the means of getting there as being based on the opposite of our capitalist states. The core of his politics is “direct action” which he has practised and written about as ethnography. I have always been centre-left with a liberal streak, but my mentor, the person from whom I have learned most, was the West Indian revolutionary, C.L.R. James and through him I gained a literary interest in the history of revolutions. In our book, Jean-Louis and I argued that people everywhere rely on a wide range of organizations in their economic lives: markets, nation-states, corporations, cities, voluntary associations, families, virtual networks, informal economies, crime and war. We should be looking for a more progressive mix of these things. We can’t afford to turn our backs on the institutions that have helped us make the modern transition to the world society that humanity now lives in. Large-scale bureaucracies co-exist with varieties of popular self-organization and we have to make them work together rather than at cross-purposes, as they often are now. All of these are responses to the challenges posed by the modern world and we need to combine them at a new and more inclusive level.

David and I agree on much of the economics. As anthropologists, we both claim inspiration from Marx and Mauss in departing from mainstream economics. Our theories of money are pretty close. Although he is less explicitly indebted to Polanyi, he too believes that economic life everywhere may be understood as a plural combination of moral principles – sharing or “communism”, reciprocity and hierarchy – which take on a different complexion when organized by dominant social forms. Thus helping each other as equals is essential to capitalist societies, but capitalism is a terrible way of bringing it out effectively. But at the same time he believes that a radical rupture with the norms of capitalist states is necessary if we are to realise out human potential through a new kind of political economy. At first, I saw our positions as being incompatible, but recent political developments now persuade me otherwise.

I would bet that 2011-2012 will turn out to be a revolutionary moment in world history comparable at least with the changes that took place in 1989-1990 and maybe more significant than that. The trigger for such a perception has been the so-called Arab Spring, the revolutions that deposed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt during early 2011. I am an Africanist and I have written about Tunisia online (e.g. http://thinkafricapress.com/tunisia/elections-2011-economic-democracy-preeminent). Then uprisings followed in Europe (protests in Greece, Los Indignados in Madrid), the student protests and riots in Britain and the student movement in Chile before OWS captured the world’s attention in New York last September. I felt from the beginning that OWS, whatever its consequences for American society and politics and whether or not it could claim some long-term success there, had profound significance for the global movement. It showed that the American monolith was not fixed in stone and that revolts around the world had a counterpart within the US. We live after all in the American Empire and I always thought that the “Arab Spring” should be seen as a revolt against that Empire. Oil has succeeded gold as the world economy’s principal commodity and control of it underlies the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency. The Middle East, Israel and oil are so central to American influence in the world – not to mention the wars they have launched against Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe soon Iran from their bases and fleets there – that the sacking of Mubarak had immense significance in and beyond the region. But at first there was no sign that anything was moving in the US. All you had was the Tea Party and a stalemate in Congress.

CLR James came from Trinidad and died an old man in the late 1980s. He was saying after 1968 that there were only two world revolutions left – the second Russian revolution and the second American revolution. He wrote a book that I co-edited called American Civilization (1993 [1950]) in which he argued that the contradiction between totalitarian bureaucracy and the struggle to bring democracy into people’s lives was at its strongest in the United States. He always believed that American society must be central to any future world revolution. I am not predicting that the OWS movement will lead directly to mass insurrection in the US. But its cultural example was immediately taken up within the country and across the world; and this reflects the fact that we live in a world unified by the contradictions of American imperial power. I watched Tiananmen Square on TV with James in April 1989. He was 88 years old and died a few weeks later. If you recall, the students were protesting because of an international meeting there to which Gorbachev was invited. The whole world was gripped by the spectacle. He said that the Chinese Communist Party would put down this rebellion easily, but “The Russians will find it hard to hold onto Eastern Europe after this”. The Berlin Wall came down six months later and that was the start of what may or may not turn out to have been the second Russian revolution.

All of this led me to reconsider the perspective we adopted in the Human Economy volume. It now seems that the piecemeal reformist approach to economic change we took there needs to confront the world revolution that we may be living through. This morning, while I was contemplating my talk and wondering how I was going to deal with “Human Economy meets the Occupy Movement” for the first time ever, three documents landed in my lap, or rather in my laptop, and I wish to give you a chance to read excerpts from them. One was an article in Harper’s by Nathan Schneider, “Planet Occupy”, on the principles of the Occupy movement (http://harpers.org/archive/2012/01/hbc-90008434); another was by the same author at Waging Non–Violence, “Is Anonymous our future?” (http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/is-anonymous-our-future/ ); this in turn was based on one by Gabriella Coleman at Triple Canopy, “Our weirdness is free: the logic of Anonymous–online army, agent of chaos, and seeker of justice” (http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_free). In addition, I am circulating among you something I wrote for a list on Lenin, James and revolution, since the perspective we operate with in normal times doesn’t really apply to revolutionary situations where timing is everything. James has a lecture, ‘Walter Rodney and the question of power’, given to California  students in 1981 http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1981/01/rodney.htm. He draws extensively on a letter written by Lenin in 1917 and later published as ‘Marxism and insurrection’: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/sep/13.htm.

In January 1917, Lenin gave a speech to Swiss socialists in Zurich where he said he did not expect revolution in his lifetime, but he hoped that the younger comrades would be able to fight in one. The Russian revolution got going in March, when the soviets took to the streets; in September, Lenin writes a letter seeking to justify why he called for revolution in September, but had not in July; and by October the revolution was a done deal. You should read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution: it takes 1300 pages to cover nine months and some events like a pivotal meeting in which the author’s intervention was decisive get 40 pages. We are talking about speed-up here. The normal pace of talking, writing and publishing that we worked with in our book can’t accommodate this reality. I don’t want to give all this up to join the barricades. I’m an intellectual who wants to train young people to study and work for economic progress, like this seminar. Nevertheless even this more sedate approach has to distinguish between the time frame of revolutionary insurrection and building a more effective economic platform to help people experience a measure of economic democracy in their lives. These piecemeal long-term projects are vital, but the premise of a revolutionary moment puts pressure on that work.

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who has been a participant observer in Anonymous’ 4chan chat rooms since 2008. Anonymous is an occult organization of geeks, trolls and agitators who came to prominence in 2011 with attacks on government and corporate websites in defence of Wikileaks and other causes. If you haven’t heard of them, blame it on the French media who would rather that the digital revolution hadn’t happened. This is not all of France which, with Finland, Korea and Japan, is one of the four countries with the fastest and cheapest broadband and supports the largest blogosphere outside the US. Anonymous started out justifying opaque identities as a cloak for freedom of expression which at times meant being disruptive just for the fun of it. But it has since become an engaged force for social justice. There are important parallels between Anonymous and OWS, but their modus operandi is strikingly different in that one is clandestine and the other transparent. This might be thought to be a contradiction if it were not the case that the pursuit of openness as a political virtue requires a degree of closure also. We might want the banks to be more transparent, but which of us would like our own income an dexpenditure to be made public? So the open/closed dialectic may be less polarised than it is sometimes made out to be. The same may be said of freedom and necessity, perhaps also of revolution and reform. You can’t have one without both. Walk on two legs. It’s better than standing on one foot and falling over…

In winding up her argument, Coleman draws on Ernst Bloch, a favourite writer of mine too:

“Anonymous acts in a way that is irreverent, often destructive, occasionally vindictive, and generally disdainful of the law, but it also offers an object lesson in what Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch calls ‘the principle of hope.’ In his three-volume work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1938-47), Bloch attends to a stunningly diverse number of signs, symbols, and artifacts from different historical eras, ranging from dreams to fairy tales, in order to remind us that the desire for a better world is always in our midst. Bloch works as a philosophical archaeologist, excavating forgotten messages in songs, poems, and rituals. They do not represent hope in the religious sense, or even utopia—there is no vision of transcending our institutions, much less history—but they do hold latent possibilities that in certain conditions can be activated and perhaps lead to new political realities. ‘The door that is at least half-open, when it appears to open onto pleasant objects, is marked hope,’ Bloch writes. The emergence of Anonymous from one of the seediest places on the Internet seems to me an enactment of Bloch’s principle of hope.”

So Bloch’s vision is that this aspiration for a better world is everywhere and inside us, an infrastructure always ready to be tapped into and given more concrete impression. It is similar, at the level of ideology, to what Jean-Louis and I are arguing for the economy – people have always had many different ways of organizing their economic lives and these make up a reservoir of knowledge and aspiration that, given appropriate direction, could lead us to a better economy.

The basic principles of the Occupy movement, as Schneider shows, are quite general and easily understood. One question that immediately comes to mind is how we might account for the similarities between so many movements that sprang up independently or soon after OWS. The Indignados of Madrid predated New York, yet their principles of organization are remarkably alike. Where did these principles come from? Are they an instinctive negation of mainstream political economy? Are they an innate expression of human democracy? Or were they diffused by the new digital media? Perhaps all three or none of these are relevant. Schneider has a good summary which is worth quoting at length:

“The Declaration of the Occupation is addressed not to governments—no hope there—but rather “to the people of the world,” urging communities everywhere to “assert your power.” “We are creating an exemplar society,” states Occupy Boston’s Declaration of Occupation… “No one’s human needs go unmet,” [it] continues. Planet Occupy, like last fall’s occupations, provides food and shelter for everyone, no questions asked. It also ensures health care, mutual education, childcare, legal representation, and a large, meticulously catalogued library. Sounds like a good social democracy—except that, in the words of Occupy Wall Street’s Principles of Solidarity, the basic unit of political life is not the ballot box but ‘autonomous political beings engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy.’ Though they might be wired to the teeth, the political beings of Planet Occupy carry out their democracy face to face, in well-coordinated small groups that operate by consensus. It’s ‘participatory as opposed to partisan,’ suggesting that the aim is for all voices to be heard, rather than for one party to prevail over others. Those with ‘inherent privilege’ defer whenever possible to others. The consolidation of power is discouraged, and resisted when necessary. Policing troublemakers becomes the job not of cops, but of assertive, well-trained listeners.

“Even with its inhabitants’ passion for local autonomy, though, Planet Occupy is a globalized place. People and their ideas travel freely, creating new opportunities and partnerships wherever they go. Assemblies share their plans and innovations over Interoccupy. (The movement’s conference-call network will have supplanted the original Internet, which was overrun by corporate advertising.) Following the urge in the Principles for ‘the broad application of open source,’ all ideas are common property, and these collective resources are, according to the Statement of Autonomy, valued more highly than money—if money still exists at all. SOPA-style censorship in the name of ownership is not okay. Also not okay is using violence to resolve conflicts. Almost every Occupy document makes some statement to this effect. Occupy Boston’s Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples envisions ‘a new era of peace and cooperation that will work for everyone.’ When conflict occurs, as is inevitable, people resist injustice through ‘non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance and love,’ in accordance with the Principles. Every such struggle is both local and global.

“Is this anarchist utopia realistic, or even desirable? It’s at least a little out there, perhaps a lot out there. But the Declaration of the Rights of Man, drafted while Louis XVI still had his head, wasn’t easy to comprehend in its time. The circumstances of our world exceed the politics we’re used to imagining for it, and the politics that are really necessary might therefore seem impossible. ‘We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual,’ explains Communiqué 1, an article in the movement journal Tidal. ‘We seek to rediscover and reclaim the world.’

“The movement’s documents contain fewer hints about economy. The Principles of Solidarity calls for ‘redefining how labor is valued,’ which may look something like the worker-owned cooperatives currently being developed at the Freedom Plaza occupation in Washington, D.C. Broadly speaking, human needs prevail over claims on profit. Companies are chartered for the public good, not private gain. Participatory democracy prevails in workplaces, neighborhoods, and other productive groupings. Many aspects of the economy—food, especially—remain local. This is necessary partly in order to preserve and sustain the natural environment. Everyone on Planet Occupy knows, after all, that if they don’t protect the planet, there will be nothing left to occupy.”

There must be no divisions, no exclusions. Goods must be shared on the basis of to each according to their needs. There are obvious links in the above to économie solidaire or human economy. What we have here is a version of a common revolutionary eschatology based on the negation of how capitalist states appear to be run. Production is of public goods, not for profit. This contrasts quite starkly with our approach in the international human economy project. We believe that limited markets can be fair distributors of goods and that states are good for redistribution and guarantees of social rights, as long as they make room for people to help themselves drawing on the mutuality that comes from living together, not just contracts and citizenship. I have been impressed by recent developments in Brazil. Alternative economic organization in Europe tends to be conceived of as bottom up initiatives that are independent of government and large corporations or against them. The Brazilian government, however, has played a major role in promoting and coordinating the solidarity economy. They have introduced a system of community banks, for example, which is organized by the government, but combines community currencies and microcredit in a locally accountable and participatory way. It is possible to imagine something similar in France under a socialist president. We might call this social democracy revisited and it is not to be sniffed at.

We do not subscribe to the capitalist model of markets or to governments imposing themselves in undemocratic ways; but we do expect the movement from below to be supported and even coordinated by the powers. I have not yet come across a civil society movement capable of launching a communications satellite. So there probably will be room for mutual accommodation between large-scale and small-scale economic organization in any imaginable future. The political terms of their cooperation remain to be settled, of course and there lies the scope for revolution.

It is thus possible to discern in the Occupy movement and the work of their most visible spokesmen, such as David Graeber, two competing visions of economic change, each with its counterpart in constructions of the idea of a human economy. One is “the world turned upside down”, a complete break with the past which might be envisaged as a return to a simpler and more wholesome way of life before the state and capitalism. The other insists that we can rely on people to be who they are, to find ways to come together and develop their mutual interests without violence or coercion. These two visions are struggling with each other in the politics of this revolutionary moment. That is why we have to think seriously about what revolutionary situations are like. It’s a very different world from one where we plan and build programs that people can live by in the long run. That is why I refer to James’s remarks on Lenin in a speech to students about the Guyanese academic-turned-revolutionary, Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), who was blown up by an agent provocateur he trusted. He tells the students that they don’t understand what revolution is and neither did Rodney who lost his life as a result. No competent revolutionary organization should have left its leader unprotected in this way. (James himself was a Trotskyist dodging the bullets of Stalinist assassins while researching The Black Jacobins in Paris during the 1930s).

James quotes from Lenin’s letter of September 1917 where he talks about “insurrection”. It is important to have discriminating vocabulary rather than call everything a revolution. The events of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt were insurrections, not revolutions. Lenin identifies three components of any revolution and the party has nothing to do with any of them. James lists these as “Firstly, there must be a clash, a revolutionary upsurge of the people. Then, secondly, there must be a turning point, when the activity of the advanced ranks is at its height; and thirdly, the enemy must be vacillating.” Lenin is often misrepresented as an advocate of the vanguard party, He himself abandoned all those ideas as soon as he arrived at the Finland station and found the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets in the streets. Until then, he said, I was just another bourgeois politician. Revolutions change people. Lenin also said that insurrection is an art, not a science. At the end of his speech, James recalls a conversation with Trotsky in Mexico in 1938: “But how come, time and again, the revolutionary party – this is the party, not the mass movement — was wrong in its analysis of the situation and Lenin turns out to be right and set it the correct way? How did that happen?” And I expected him to tell me how Lenin knew philosophy, how he knew political analysis, how he knew psychology, or how he knew the revolution. He did not. He said, “Lenin always had his eyes upon the mass of the population, and when he saw the way they were going, he knew that tomorrow this was what was going to happen.” The prophet as anthropologist! And Gabriella Coleman is there in these hackers’ conversation rooms trying to figure out what they are doing.

So what are the implications of all this for the idea of a human economy? Like Jean-Louis, I seem to have spent the last few years producing books. It is a very different enterprise writing for educational purposes in the long run from trying to understand the moment we are living through. The best methodological statement on this I know is by Marx in the introduction to Grundrisse, the notes he compiled from 15 years of reading in the British Museum library which he completed in 1859. We must start, he says, from our concrete moment in world history, whatever that is. We start with the conditions we encounter and study them. Then we build analytical concepts and propositions using the results of what we have studied. Analysis is making sense of what we find out there. Some people — Marx here nodding rather unfairly in my view towards Hegel — think that the task finishes there, with the ideas. Once you have the analysis, you can rest happy, publish your book and get tenure. But the point of the analytical tools we have developed is to insert them back into the moment we are living in; and you can do that in many ways, through writing, propaganda, political parties, controlled experiments, social networking, blogs, whatever. The test of their validity lies in this dialectical process. Only then might we generate an analytically informed and empirically tested account of our moment in history seen as a synthetic whole. He plans to do this in Capital; but actually he never got there. He lists five prospective volumes culminating in a historical account of the world economy as a whole; but he hardly made it to three.

We all, if we are honest and realistic, have to locate ourselves at some point along the path that Marx charted. The core of the human economy project lies in dealing with the two approaches I have mentioned. I find it really fertile to juxtapose my own work with that of David Graeber, taking account of the similarities and differences in ways that change subtly over time. David arrived at the term “human economy” more or less when I did, in the last decade. He uses it to refer to an earlier period of human history, the world we have lost that survives in ethnographic accounts of primitive, exotic peoples, when people were purer than we are, living in a natural state of humanity. It’s an old story, but a powerful one and he tells it well. For him, the human economy is one whose objective is the social reproduction of people. It takes the form in Africa, for example, of cows being exchanged for women in marriage as a source of legitimation for children. This version of the human economy is based on principles diametrically opposed to those of capitalism, the market and the state.

Jean-Louis and I take the view that the human economy exists everywhere in some kind of dialectical tension with the dominant economic institutions of our day. It is not incompatible with money and markets. These can be made to serve human interests and needs, as they always have in varying degree, and they don’t have to take the exploitive form that they currently do in our societies as a source of unequal power and wealth. I for one like ordering books and apps online and don’t want to spend my days haggling over my daily bread without a means of payment or standing in line for a handout. We take our lead from Mauss’s insistence that markets and money rest on what Durkheim called “the non-contractual element in the contract”, a body of customs, laws and history that is obscured, marginalized and repressed by bourgeois ideology, even as it contains the living potential to humanize our economic institutions.

A counterpart to these competing constructions of the human economy may be found in the two visions of revolution I touched on earlier – a digital one that envisages a radical switch to the negation of what we know and an analogue version that expects to mobilize people by building on what they know and do already. A lot hinges on our ability to see a way towards combining these approaches rather than opposing them. I would argue that David and I already do that, each in our own way. The tension between them is to be found in all the current protest movements from Tahrir Square to OWS and Anonymous. We cannot afford to go back to the polarized and often sectarian politics of the twentieth century, when “revolution” and “reform” defined opposite sides in a destructive and partisan conflict. If we were aiming for anything in articulating the human economy idea, it was to get beyond the extremes of state socialism and free enterprise that misleadingly identified the sides in the Cold War. What is the Pentagon after all if not the largest socialist collective in world history?

I sum this up in the chart below. The human economy is conceived of as mediating between two paired antinomies – state and market, home and world – which helped to define the twentieth century’s dominant social form, “national capitalism” — the attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation though central bureaucracy in the name of a cultural community of national citizens. The economic crisis of our time may be understood as the collapse of this system. Rather than oppose the poles of either pair to each other, the aim is to synthesize them through a pragmatic focus on what people really do.

Three things count in our societies — people, machines and money, in that order. But money buys the machines that control the people. Our political task – and I believe it was Marx’s too – is to reverse that order of priority, not to help people escape from machines and money, but to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money. To the idea of economic crisis and its antidotes, we must now add that of political revolution. I have argued here that the dynamics of revolution require active consideration in this context. Revolutions give rise to digital contrasts and rightly so, but human societies are built on analogue processes. This is not just an academic debating point. A lot hinges on how humanity responds to the contradictions of the turbulence ahead.

                                                                                                       THE HUMAN ECONOMY

                                                                                                                  WORLD

                                                                                EMPIRE                                                        GLOBALIZATION

                                                                                                                   People

                                                 STATE                                                      SOCIETY                                   MARKET

                                                                                                Machines                             Money

                                                                              NATION                                                           CAPITALISM

                                                                                                                    HOME

“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/

Part One Jack Goody’s Vision

In a short preface to Production and Reproduction, the first in his series of comparisons between Africa and Eurasia, Jack Goody (1976:ix-x) tells us that ethnography, the aspiration to write about another culture studied intensively through fieldwork, never defined his intellectual horizons. His subject has always been historical comparison and beyond that “the development of human culture”. He deliberately sets himself at odds with his greatest contemporary, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), as being uninterested in binary oppositions between the modern and the primitive. Rather he places himself as an actor in a historical period, coming of age in the Second World War, encountering the Eastern Mediterranean, escaping from a prison camp into the mountains of Abruzzo, entering Africa at the decisive moment of its anti-colonial revolution and in its epicentre, Ghana. With European empires collapsing everywhere, he rejects the eurocentric idea that the West is special, looking instead for forms of knowledge that are more truly universal, better suited to the new world society launched by the war.

As a former student of English literature, he knew something about medieval European society and culture. He wanted to connect a newly independent West Africa to the Islamic civilization he encountered briefly during the war. His subject is therefore the comparison of pre-industrial societies, past and present, an ethnographically informed juxtaposition of Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He stresses that this enquiry is an extension of his own personal experience, fuelled by social interaction and political engagement. The ultimate historical question is where human civilization is going, but the key lies in the similarity and divergence of regions with an agrarian past or present. Only a series of books could begin to address this question and this is the first of them. It is worth recalling its full title, Production and Reproduction: a comparative study of the domestic domain. The focus is on how human beings produce their livelihood within families and how this influences attempts to secure their future. But Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962) remains his key work. The three themes of the title — how we seek to transcend death materially and spiritually — come together in Goody’s preoccupation with writing itself, a project he launched with The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977).

The time from the Second World War until now has been extraordinary, a period when humanity formed world society as a single interactive network for the first time. This society is massively unequal and riddled with conflict, but now at last there is a universe of communications to give concrete expression to universal ideas. Future generations will want to study this emerging human society and they will look to us for antecedents; but they will be disappointed by the fragmented narrowness of our anthropological vision. For we have been slow to move beyond ethnography. Jack Goody, with Eric Wolf (1982) as his only serious contemporary rival, devised and carried out an anthropological project with a scale to match the world society being formed in his day. How does Goody’s project of historical comparison illuminate the world society emerging in our time? What is his vision of the development of human culture, past, present and future? My own answers are shaped by his, since he was my teacher, but I depart from him in some respects. Reproduction was always so.

World society has not been formed completely in our time nor does it lack antecedents; but think what the human condition was like in 1945 and what it is now. Something tremendous has happened in between. Humanity has been brought closer together in dramatic ways. We have difficulty imagining the processes involved, not least because of national consciousness. Anthropologists, in sticking with their ethnographic method, have not risen to the challenge of documenting this huge shift in civilization. Jack Goody could not settle for just “getting to know another culture”. In reaching for a more universal conception of human history, he knew that he was an active participant in the making of a new world. But, even as he inserted himself into contemporary society, he chose to step back from the modern age. By focusing on pre-industrial societies in Europe, Asia and Africa, he left out any direct consideration of two centuries of machine revolution, the capitalist world economy, the New World in its entirety. But his topic is nevertheless “the development of human culture” and, as I hope to show here, his inquiries do reflect a consistent position on the social priorities of his own time.

A few years after his wartime sojourn in the Mediterranean basin, Jack Goody carried out research in West Africa, a region connected to the Mediterranean by Islamic civilization long before it was colonized by Europeans. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in Northwest Ghana during the decade before that country won independence from colonial rule, he soon established himself as a force in West African anthropology, first as an ethnographer and later as a historian (Hart 1985). Goody was impressed, however, by the similarities and differences between Africa, Europe and the Islamic world. It took him three decades to formalize the terms of comparison; but, when he did, it turned out as follows: Europe may be opposed to Asia as West to East, but the two should be seen as a single entity, Eurasia, opposed to Africa South of the Sahara. This model contrasts with the dominant imperialist stereotype which opposes the West to the Rest. Goody was anxious to avoid any hint of racial hierarchy. Yet he concluded that African societies were fundamentally different from the others in important ways and he wanted to explain why.

He started with kinship and marriage, the domestic relations though which people manage their own reproduction and participate in the wider society. In Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962), he concluded that the key to variations in kinship organization lay in the transmission of property, the material link between generations constituted by patterns of inheritance and manifested in religious observances such as the ancestor cult. The book drew extensively on classical sources of British comparative jurisprudence; but Goody balked at making a systematic comparison of Africa and Europe then. In Tradition, Technology and the State (1971), he questioned the habit of transferring categories from European history to the study of pre-colonial states in Africa. Once again his focus was on property forms. European feudalism was based on private property in land and this was absent from traditional West Africa. Why? Because land was scarce in Western Europe, but not in Africa, where the scarce factor was people; and control over them was exercised through monopolies of the “means of destruction” (horses, guns etc.), not the means of production. Africa’s polities were both centralized and decentralized, the former acquiring manpower by force through carrying out slave raids on the latter (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940). Shifting hoe agriculture was the norm, with the bulk of manual labour being performed by women. In both types of society they were hoarded as wives by polygamous older men and their children were recruited to exclusive descent groups. The key to major differences in social organization between Africa and Eurasia thus lay in the conditions of production and specifically in demography, in the ratio of people to the land.

Production and Reproduction takes off from this premise into a global survey of kinship, marriage and property transmission, using the data compiled by G. P. Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas (1962-1980). Kin groups in the major societies of Eurasia frequently pass on property through both sexes, a process of “diverging devolution” (including bilateral inheritance and women’s dowry at marriage) that is virtually absent in Subsaharan Africa, where inheritance follows the line of one sex only. [Note 1: See Hann (2008) for a much fuller treatment of inheritance and property in Goody’s work.] Especially when women’s property includes the means of production, in agricultural societies land, attempts will be made to control these heiresses, banning premarital sex and making arranged marriages for them, often within the same group and with a strong preference for monogamy. Direct inheritance by women is also associated with the isolation of the nuclear family in kinship terminology, where a distinction is drawn between one’s own parents and siblings and other relatives of the same generation, unlike in lineage systems. All of this reflects a class society. “Diverging devolution (especially dowry) [is] the main mechanism by which familial status was maintained in an economically differentiated society” (Goody 1976:19). But

Why should the African and Eurasian patterns be so different? I suggest that the scarcer productive resources become and the more intensively they are used, then the greater the tendency for the retention of these resources within the basic productive and reproductive unit, which in the large majority of cases is the nuclear family… Advanced agriculture, whether by plough or irrigation, permits an individual to produce much more than he can consume….[T]he greater volume of production can maintain an elaborate division of labour and stratification based upon different styles of life. An important means of [this]… is marriage with persons of the same or higher qualifications…. Advanced agriculture [also] allows the expansion of population, another factor making for scarcity of land (Ibid:20).

The agrarian economies of all the major Eurasian civilizations conformed to this pattern. They were organized through large states run by literate elites whose lifestyle embraced both the city and the countryside. This is Gordon Childe’s “urban revolution” in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago , where

…an elaborate bureaucracy, a complex division of labour [and] a stratified society based on ecclesiastical landlordism…[were] made possible by intensive agriculture and title to landed property was of supreme importance (Ibid:24).

Africa South of the Sahara apparently missed out on these developments, even though North Africa was one of the first areas to adopt the new institutional package. Goody would never countenance the standard racist explanation for this, the cultural backwardness of black people. To low population density as one explanation he now adds the barrier posed to intensive agriculture by tropical soils. By starting from the relationship between types of property transmission and forms of kinship and marriage, he arrives at a new synthesis of the agricultural roots of civilization.

By the time Jack Goody became an anthropologist, colonial empire was rapidly being dismantled and racial discrimination of the sort practised in apartheid South Africa was becoming outlawed. Yet the intellectual legacy of imperialism still underpinned the anthropology of his day. So he chose to attack the lingering opposition of “modern” and “primitive” cultures by studying the chief activity of literate elites, of which he was himself a leading example — writing. Contrasted mentalities should rather be seen as an effect of different means of communication. The most important of these are speech and writing, orality and literacy. Most African cultures are predominantly oral, whereas the ruling classes of Eurasian civilization have relied from the beginning on literate records. The year after Production and Reproduction, Goody published his most general assault on the habit of opposing us and them, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977). This was a pointed repudiation of La Pensée Sauvage of Lévi-Strauss (1962), suggesting that the latter’s lists linking ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ societies to other pairs, such as history and myth, science and magic, far from exemplifying universal reason, were a parochial by-product of mental habits induced by writing. This emerged in a specific time and place and became essential to the reproduction of Eurasian civilization, reducing the status of oral communication that still animates African cultures. Literacy is a key feature of the institutional complex that marked the urban revolution.

In The East in the West(1996) and numerous volumes since, Jack Goody sought to refute the claim, derived from the founders of modern social theory, that the West’s economic ascendancy, driven by capitalism and its machine revolution, could be attributed to a unique type of rationality missing from the less fortunate societies of Asia. [Note 3: The Eurasian Miracle (Goody 2009) sums up this thesis, but the most important text in my view is The Theft of History (2007) reviewed in Hart (2007).] Goody shows first that Europe’s distinctiveness is in most cases either non-existent or has been exaggerated; and second that the rate of adoption of western industrial techniques by Japan, China and India has been faster than it took for the innovations of the Italian Renaissance to diffuse to Northwest Europe. He concludes that eurocentrism obscures Asia’s current economic performance and potential, while misrepresenting western history. It makes more sense to see Eurasia as a single entity, at least since the Bronze Age, where the advantage of particular regions has been highly unstable. Africa, whose exceptional character remains unchallenged throughout the series, tends to drop out of Goody’s focus at this point.

Jack Goody drew on Gordon Childe’s materialist synthesis of the great revolutions that marked the history of human production and society. [Note 2: Childe (e.g. 1942) was a prehistorian of Europe who produced a Marxist synthesis of the stages theory of human social evolution marked by three revolutions in production, the ‘neolithic, ‘urban’ and ‘industrial’. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._Gordon_Childe.] Childe got the basic framework from L.H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) which some have seen as the origin of modern anthropology; this was made more widely accessible by Friedrich Engels as The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). But they got it in turn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau whose Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754) could be said to be the source for an “anthropology of unequal society” whose leading protagonist for half a century has been Jack Goody (Hart 2006a, Hann and Hart 2011:10-12).

In the last two centuries, the human population has increased seven times and the rate of growth of energy production has been double that of the population. Many human beings work less hard, eat better and live longer today as a result. Whereas about 97% of the world’s people lived in rural areas in 1800, today half of humanity lives in cities. This hectic disengagement from the soil as the chief object of work and source of life was made possible by harnessing inanimate energy sources to machines used as converters. Before 1800 almost all the energy at our disposal came from animals, plants and human beings themselves. The benefits of modern development have been distributed highly unequally, the prime beneficiaries being the pioneers of western imperialism. This made the world economy of a century ago uni-polar and highly divergent (that is, unequal); whereas today it is multi-polar and convergent as a result of the West’s relative decline and the rise of ‘emerging’ economies like China, India and Brazil.

Despite a consistent barrage of propaganda telling us that we now live in a modern age of science and democracy, our dominant institutions are still those of agrarian civilization — territorial states, embattled cities, landed property, warfare, racism, bureaucratic administration, literacy, impersonal money, long-distance trade, work as a virtue, world religion and the family. This is because the rebellion of the middle classes against the Old Regime was co-opted by that synthesis of industrial capitalism and the nation-state that I call “national capitalism” and humanity’s emancipation from unequal society has suffered reverses as a result (Hart 2009). Consider the shape of world society today. A remote elite of white, middle-aged, middle-class men, “the men in suits”, rule masses who are predominantly poor, dark, female and young. The rich countries, who can no longer reproduce themselves, try to stem the inflow of migrants seeking economic improvement. Our world resembles nothing so much as the Old Regime in France before the revolution, when Rousseau wrote his Second Discourse.

Africa is the most poignant symbol of this unequal world. In 1950 Greater Europe (including Soviet Central Asia) had twice the numbers of Africa. Today Africa has a population double the size of Europe and Central Asia. By 2050 Africans will be a quarter of humanity and by the end of the century over a third. [Note 4: According to the latest projections of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm, Africa’s population in 1950 was less than 0.25bn out of a world population of 2.5bn (under 10%); in 2000 it was 0.8bn (13% of 6.1bn); in 2050 it will be 2.2bn (24% of 9.3bn); and in 2100 3.6bn (35% of 10.1bn).] Although Africa is still often represented as a land of starving peasants ravaged by war and AIDS, the new reality is burgeoning cities full of young people looking for something to do (Hart 2010). Africa largely missed out on the first and second stages of the machine revolution, but in places it is now ahead in some aspects of digitization. [Note 5: Such as for example Kenya’s pioneering experiment in mobile banking, the M-Pesa (Mas and Morawczynski 2009).] Even so, today development there often consists of irrigation and ox-plough agriculture (Hart 1982). Africa has at last been going through Childe’s urban revolution, erecting state bureaucracies and class society on the basis of surpluses extracted from the countryside. This is not without its contradictions.

Simply as a comparative history of pre-industrial civilizations, Jack Goody’s contribution is enormous; but he has also been telling us something about the formation of contemporary world society. Like Bruno Latour (1993), he says that we have never been modern. Modern democracy is predicated on the abolition of the unequal society that ruled the Eurasian landmass for 5,000 years. Goody reminds us of the durable inequality of our world and suggests that its causes may be less tractable than we think. At the same time, the rise of China and India underlines his warning against European complacency. The world is now simultaneously more connected than ever and highly unequal. The reduction of national political controls over global markets in the last three decades has accelerated the gap between the haves and have-nots everywhere, generating huge regional disparities in the process. Redress for this situation seems further away today that it did in 1945, when Jack Goody set out on his post-war journey.

Let me recap the core elements of Goody’s framework. The key to understanding social forms lies in production and that means the uneven spread of machine production today. Civilization or human culture is largely a consequence of the means of communication — once writing, now an array of mechanized forms, but always interacting with oral and written media. The site of social struggles is property. Are nation-states still an effective instrument for enforcing global contracts? And his central focus on reproduction has never been more salient when the aging citizens of rich countries need to come to terms with the proliferating mass of young people out there. Kinship needs to be reinvented too. If human culture is to be rescued from the unequal society that results when agrarian civilization is strengthened by machines, Jack Goody’s anthropological vision offers one indispensable means of contemplating how.

Part Two Africa today: the challenge of development

[Note 6: Hart (2010) is a fuller version of the arguments summarized here. The general question of African development is discussed in chapter 6 of Hann and Hart (2011). Hart and Padayachee (2010) review Africa’s development prospects from the perspective of the continent’s most powerful economy, South Africa. A long-delayed book, The African Revolution (Polity, forthcoming), explains why I believe that Africa’s economic future is brighter than many might imagine.]

I now turn to what has happened in Africa since Jack Goody first went there more than a half-century ago. He has never lost interest in the region of his original field research, but it has not figured prominently in his work since the early years of independence. The African continent is divided into three disparate regions — North, South and Middle (West, Central and East Africa); but a measure of convergence between them is now taking place. A preoccupation with Africa’s post-colonial failure to ‘develop’ – or to ‘take-off’ — has obscured what really happened there in the twentieth century. The rise of cities has been accompanied by the formation of weak and venal states, locked into dependency on foreign powers and leaving the urban masses largely to their own devices. The latter have generated spontaneous markets to meet their own needs and these have come to be understood as an “informal economy” (Hart 2006b, 2010). [Note 7: Robert Neuwirth (2011) has published an engaging round-up of what he calls “the global rise of the informal economy”. I have some sympathy with his preference for a less negative term: he opts for “Système D”, an expression found in the French Caribbean and West Africa, which expresses something of the entrepreneurial inventiveness of the informal economy.]

In order to make sense of the extraordinary transformation of what is after all a highly diverse continent, I distinguish between three broad types of social formation: “egalitarian societies” based on kinship; “agrarian civilization” in which urban elites control the mass of rural labour by means of the state and class power (Hart 2006a); and “national capitalism”, where markets and capital accumulation are regulated by central bureaucracies in the interest of citizens (Hart 2009). These oversimplified categories help me to indicate some broad historical trends. Africa South of the Sahara has a more complex history than is captured by this typology; but its dominant institutions before the modern period may be understood in terms of the classless type based on kinship institutions in the main. The second type, agrarian civilization, covered most of Europe, Asia and North Africa for the last few millennia. National capitalism has only taken root so far in South Africa, until recently for the benefit of whites only. Middle Africa has made a belated transition to the Old Regime of agrarian civilization in the course of the twentieth century, while Europe and North America, followed by Asia, embraced national capitalism. This brought North and Middle Africa closer together as pre-industrial class societies, while South Africa has drawn closer to the rest of Africa since the coming of majority rule.

Egypt and the Mediterranean littoral embraced agrarian civilization long ago. The rise of cities there was accompanied by the formation of states whose function was to supervise a new kind of class society, in which a narrow urban elite extracted agricultural surpluses from an increasingly servile rural labour force. Sub-Saharan Africa, according to Goody (1976), largely missed out on this urban revolution along with its agricultural technology, higher population density and unequal property relations. This is why traditional African forms of kinship and marriage are so distinctive and their societies were, relatively speaking, classless. Even where a measure of stratification existed, redistribution through kinship institutions prevented the emergence of classes with different styles of consumption.

As we have seen, the contrast between egalitarian societies built on kinship and unequal societies based on state power and class division goes back to L. H. Morgan (1877) and before him to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754). It cannot be applied unambiguously to Africa and Eurasia before the modern age, even if we try to isolate Black Africa from its Northern and Southern extremities. Africa’s urban history is complex (Freund 2007). The Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades generated coastal urban enclaves in both West and East Africa. The medieval civilization of the West African Sahel was a significant part of the Islamic world. Of the Yoruba agro-cities, Ibadan’s population had reached 200,000 by the onset of colonial rule. Even so, large swathes of Middle Africa entered the modern era with a minimal urban population and their dominant institutions owed a lot more to kinship than to class differences. Indigenous states were common in the early modern period, often emerging in response to European imperial expansion. The grip of agrarian civilization on modern world society is still strong, since national capitalism everywhere incorporated elements of the Old Regime.

Of course, inequality was not wholly absent from traditional African societies. Engels made much of the historical subordination of women, first in tribal societies of farmers and herders, later in pre-industrial states and finally in capitalist societies. Marxists and feminists (e.g. Meillassoux 1981) extended this analysis to the conflict between African males of different age, with polygamous elders commanding young men’s labour through control of access to marriageable women who were in their turn condemned to do most of the work without effective political representation. Gender and generation differences are of immense importance in African societies.

In 1900, Africa had less than 2% of its inhabitants living in cities. By 2000, a population explosion saw the urban share rise to almost half, compressing into one century what took much longer elsewhere. Since Africa’s population is still growing at 2.5% per annum, so too is its relative size in the world, if not yet its purchasing power (around 2% of the world economy according to the World Bank 2010). This urban revolution does not just consist in the unprecedented proliferation of cities, but also in the installation of the whole package of pre-industrial class society: states, new urban elites, intensification of agriculture and a political economy based on the extraction of rural surpluses. African development must build on independent nation-states whose economic base is pre-industrial agriculture (Hart 1982).

The anti-colonial revolution unleashed extravagant hopes for the transformation of an unequal world. These have not yet been realized for most Africans. But the model of development they were expected to adopt was “national capitalism”. Development in this sense never had a chance to take root in Africa. For the first half of the twentieth century, African peoples were shackled by colonial empire and in the second, their new nations struggled to keep afloat in a world economy organized by and for the major powers, then engaged in the Cold War. Yet in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, two-thirds of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies have been and are expected to be African. [Note 8: According to The Economist (6^th January 2011), Africa had six of the top ten fastest-growing economies in 2001-2010 and is expected to have seven in 2011-2015. The latter consist of Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Congo, Ghana, Zambia and Nigeria in that order; the other three are China, India and Vietnam.] Africa’s new national leaders thought they were building modern economies, but in reality they were erecting fragile states whose economic base was the same backward agriculture as before (Hart 1982). This weakness inexorably led them to exchange the democratic legitimacy of the independence struggle for dependence on foreign powers. These ruling elites first relied on revenues from agricultural exports, then on loans contracted under dubious circumstances, finally on the financial monopoly that came from being licensed to supervise their country’s relations with global capitalism. But this bonanza was switched off in the 1980s, when foreign capital felt that it could dispense with the mediation of local state powers and concentrated on collecting debts from them. Many governments were made bankrupt and some collapsed into civil war.

Concentration of political power at the centre led to primate urbanization, as economic demand became synonymous with the expenditures of a presidential kleptocracy. The growth of cities should normally lead to enhanced rural-urban exchange, as farmers supply food to city-dwellers and in turn buy the latter’s manufactures and services. [Note 9: Sir James Steuart (1767) makes this argument and I drew on it in Hart (1982:160).] But this progressive division of labour was stifled at birth in post-colonial Africa by the dumping of cheap subsidized food from North America and Europe and of cheap manufactures from Asia. For “structural adjustment” meant that African national economies had no protection from the strong winds of world trade. A peasantry subjected to violence and political extraction was forced to choose between stagnation at home and migration to the main cities or abroad. Somehow the cities survived on the basis of markets that emerged spontaneously to recycle the money concentrated at the top and to meet the population’s needs. These markets are the key to understanding the economic potential of Africa’s urban revolution.

Africa’s urban informal economy (Hart 2010) everywhere supplies food, housing and transport; education, health and other basic services; mining, manufactures and engineering; and trade at every level, including transnational commerce and foreign exchange. But its scope varies. In West/Central Africa, where white settlement was minimal, the cities were substantially an indigenous creation and their markets were always unregulated. Foreign middlemen like the Lebanese flourished outside colonial administrative controls. The great ports of the Atlantic seaboard enjoy a degree of mercantile freedom that underwrites their contribution to Africa’s commercial growth. Today Angolan women jump on planes heading for London, Paris, Dubai and Rio, where they stock up on luxury goods for resale in the streets of Luanda. In Southern Africa, cities were built by a white settler class who imposed strict controls on the movement of the indigenous population. South Africa’s informal economy today is hedged in by rules designed to promote modern industry. Elsewhere, in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Kenya, the state has long played a more controlling role than would be considered normal today in Lagos or Dakar.

African nation-states have learned the hard way that they are not free to choose their own forms of political economy. When the world was divided by the Cold War, state ownership of production and control of distribution seemed to offer the best chance of defending the national interest against colonial and neo-colonial predators. From the 80s, the mania for privatization led to ownership being ceded to corporations. Structural adjustment forced governments to abandon public services, lay off many workers and allow the free circulation of money. In the Congo, Angola, Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone, failed states and civil wars encouraged informal mining and trade, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of warlords and their followers. The restoration of peace restored limited bureaucratic controls over distribution. The situation is highly dynamic and variable.

Tax collection in Africa never attained the regularity it has long achieved in Europe and Asia; and governments still rely on whatever resources they can extract from mineral royalties and the import-export trade. The new urban classes control and live off these revenues, usually under a patrimonial regime propped up by foreign powers (Mbeki 2009). This constitutes an Old Regime ripe for liberal revolution and the Arab Spring that began earlier this year in North Africa carries great significance for the continent as a whole. The new states and class structures of Africa’s urban revolution are entangled in kinship systems that remain indispensable to the informal economy as a means of social organization (Bayart 2009). The middle classes pass off exploitation of cheap domestic labour as an egalitarian model of African kinship; while “family business” has never lost favour and child labour is still acceptable. Formal bureaucracy, on the other hand, is hostile to kinship, where it is normally viewed as corruption. In the absence of a welfare state, Africans must rely on kinship to see them through the life cycle of birth, marriage, childrearing, old age and death; and this reinforces the power of rural elders who control access to the land in the face of emigration by the youth and women.

The prospect of rapid economic improvement soon in Africa seems counter-intuitive at this time, especially given Africa’s symbolic role as the negation of “white” superiority. [ Note 10: In the last couple of years there has been a spate of literature boosting Africa’s economic prospects. This is built partly on the minerals boom, partly on population growth, partly on belated recognition that Africa has a growing share of world consumption. For an upbeat even breezy version of this story, see Severino and Ray (2011).] Black people have played this role for centuries as the stigmatized underclass of an unequal world society organized along racial lines; and never more than now, when American and European dominance is being undermined by a shift in the balance of economic power to countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia and, within its own region, South Africa. [Note 11: Known as the BRICS, although the South African economy has nothing like the dynamism of China, India and Brazil; and, at around 50mn, its population is much smaller than the others. See Hart and Padayachee (2010) on the case for greater integration of South Africa into the African region.] Rather than face up to a decline in their economic fortunes, the whites prefer to dwell on the misfortunes of black people and on Africa’s apparently terminal exclusion from modern prosperity. Failed politicians and aging rock stars announce their mission to “save” Africa from its presumed ills. The western media represent Africa as the benighted battleground of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine and death. It all goes to reassure a decadent West that at least some people are a lot worse off than themselves.

It is a curious fact that China occupied a similar slot in western consciousness not long ago. In the 1920s and 30s, Americans and Europeans often spoke of the Chinese the way they do of Africa today. China was then crippled by the violence of warlords, its peasants mired in the worst poverty imaginable. Today the country is spoken of as the likely successor to the United States as world leader, while its manufactures make inroads into western dominance on a scale far greater than Japan’s ever did. This profound shift in economic power from West to East does not guarantee Africa’s escape from the shackles of world inequality, but it does mean that structures of Atlantic dominance which once seemed inevitable are perceptibly on the move; and that should make it easier to envisage change. We are entering a phase of new economic possibility, as well as altered patterns of dominance in world society. Africa’s advantage in the current global economic crisis is its weak attachment to the status quo. Africans have less to lose; and the old Stalinist “law of unequal development” reminds us that, under such circumstances, winners and losers may easily change places.

The classical liberal revolutions were sustained by three ideas: that freedom and economic progress require increased movement of people, goods and money in the market; that the political framework most compatible with this is democracy, putting power in the hands of the people; and that social progress depends on science, the drive to know objectively how things work that leads to enlightenment. [Note 12: Goody’s successor as head of Cambridge University’s social anthropology department, Ernest Gellner, wrote Plough, Sword and Book (1988) in which the triad of market, democracy and science are inherently related as the modern replacements for the symbols of economic, political and intellectual technology of agrarian civilization that make up the title.] For over a century now an anti-liberal tendency has disparaged this great movement of emancipation as a form of oppression and exploitation in disguise; and, in common with many social revolutions, this is partially true. Africa today must escape soon from varieties of Old Regime that owe a lot to the legacy of slavery, colonialism and apartheid; but conditions there can no longer be attributed solely to these ancient causes. It is possible that the example of the classical liberal revolutions, reinforced by endogenous developments in economy, technology, religion and the arts, could offer fresh solutions for African underdevelopment. These would have to be built on the conditions and energies generated by the urban revolution of the twentieth century (Hart 2010).

We all know that power is distributed very unequally in our world and any new liberal movement would soon run up against entrenched privilege. In fact, world society today resembles quite closely the Old Regime of agrarian civilization, as in eighteenth century England and France, with isolated elites enjoying a lifestyle wildly beyond the reach of masses who have almost nothing. It is not just in post-colonial Africa where the institutions of agrarian civilization rule today. Since the millennium, the United States (and not only the US), whose own liberal revolution once overcame the Old Regime of King George and the East India Company, has regressed to a form of rentier capitalism where income from politically secured property has replaced the profits of production as the main source of wealth. [Note 13: Rentier capitalism is “a type of capitalism where profit takes the form of property income (interest, intellectual property rights, rents, dividends, fees or capital gains)…The beneficiaries monopolize access to physical assets, financial assets and technologies… Often the term is used with the connotation of parasitism or a decadent form of capitalism.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_capitalism.]

It has long been acknowledged that the rise of capitalism in Europe drew heavily on religion as one of its motors. Max Weber (1921) insisted that an economic revolution of this scope could only take root on the back of a much broader cultural revolution. What might be the cultural grounds for elements of Africa’s informal economy to evolve into a more dynamic engine of urban commerce (Hart 2010)? Whatever happens next must build on what has already been put in place. The basis for Africa’s future economic growth has to be the cultural production of its cities and not rural extraction or the reactionary hope of reproducing capitalism’s industrial phase. This in turn rests on:

1. The energy of youth and women
2. The religious revival
3. The explosion of the modern arts
4. The digital revolution in communications
5. The new African diaspora

What follows is a brief sketch of a book-length argument (The African Revolution, forthcoming).

1. African societies, traditional and modern, have been dominated by older men. Women have benefited less from the opportunities men have had and are less tied to their burdens. In many cases they have been quicker to exploit the commercial freedoms of the neoliberal international economy. Even when men and boys have plunged whole countries into civil war, thereby removing state guarantees from economic life, an informal economy resting on women’s trade has often kept open basic supply lines. The social reality of Africa’s cities is a young population without enough to do and a growing generation gap. The energies of youth must be harnessed more effectively and the chances of doing so are greater if the focus of economic development is on something that interests them, like popular culture.

2. The religious revival in Africa, both Christian and Muslim, is a matter of immense significance for the forms of economic development. This is in many cases founded on young people’s rejection of the social models and political options offered by their parents’ generation. Fundamentalist and less extreme varieties of religion, based on the assumption of American dominance or its opposite, make a different kind of connection to world society than that offered by the nation-state. They help to fill the moral void of contemporary politics and often offer well-tried recipes for creative economic organization, e.g. the Mourides of Senegal (O’Brien 1971, Copans 1988). Christian churches are usually organized and supported by women, even if their leadership is often male.

3. In all the talk of poverty, war and AIDS, the western media rarely report the extraordinary vitality of the modern arts in post-colonial Africa: novels, films, music, theatre, painting, sculpture, dance and their applications in commercial design. There has been an artistic explosion in the last half-century, drawing on traditional sources, but also responding to the complexity of the contemporary world. One example in the last decade is the ‘Africa Remix’ exhibition that toured Europe and Japan, a hundred installations from Johannesburg to Cairo, showing the modernity of contemporary African art (Elliot and Njami 2005). The African novel, along with comparable regions like India, leads the world (Irele 2009). I refer to the creativity of the film industry below.

4. Africa largely missed the first two phases of the machine revolution, based on the steam engine and electricity; but the third phase, the digital revolution in communications whose most tangible product is the internet, the network of networks, offers Africans very different conditions of participation that they already show signs of taking up avidly. In origin a means of communication for scientists and the military, the internet is now primarily a global marketplace with very unusual characteristics. Like the informal economy, it goes largely unregulated; but this market freedom is harnessed to the most advanced technologies of our era. The internet has also generated new conditions for managing networks spanning home and abroad by radically shortening the time and space dimensions of communication and exchange at distance. The extraordinarily rapid adoption of mobile phones (Aker and Mbiti 2010) has made Africa a crucible for global innovations, such as the first multi-country network and use of phones for banking purposes in East Africa. Nor should we neglect the role of television as a transnational means of widening perceptions of community.

5. In the last half-century a new African diaspora has emerged, based unlike that formed by Atlantic slavery on economic migration to America, Europe and nowadays Asia. These migrants are usually known away from home by their national identity, but many of them by-pass the national level when maintaining close relationships with their specific region of origin. They are often highly educated, with experience of the corporate business world, while retaining links to relatives living and working in the informal economy at home. One consequence of neoliberal reforms has been that transnational exchange is now much easier than it was, drawing at once on indigenous knowledge of local conditions and the expertise acquired by migrants and their families in the West. Remittances from abroad are of immense importance everywhere, but they are bound to play a major role in Africa’s economic future (Gupta et al 2007).

To speak of economic growth in the future begs the question of what Africa’s new urban populations could produce. So far, African countries have relied on exporting raw materials, when they could. Minerals clearly have a promising future owing to scarce supplies and rising demand; but the world market for food and other agricultural products is skewed. Conventionally, when seeking to diversify away from raw materials, African governments have aspired to develop manufacturing exports, but here they face intense competition from Asia. But the world market for services, cultural commodities like entertainment, education and media, is booming and perhaps greater opportunities lie there. It would be more fruitful for African countries to argue collectively in the councils of world trade for some protection from international dumping, so that their farmers and infant industries might at least get a chance to supply their own populations first. But the world market for services is booming and perhaps greater opportunities for supplying national, regional and global markets exist there.

There was a time when most services were performed personally on the spot; but today, as a result of the digital revolution in communications, they increasingly link producers and consumers at distance. The fastest-growing sector of world trade is the production of culture: entertainment, education, media, software and a wide range of information services (Hart and Padayachee 2010). The future of the human economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010), once certain material requirements are satisfied, lies in the infinite scope for us to do things for each other — like singing songs or telling stories — that need not take a tangible form. The largest global television audiences are for sporting events like the World Cup or the Olympic Games. The United States’ three leading exports are now movies, music and software; and this is why they have sponsored an intellectual property treaty (TRIPs) that seeks to shore up the profits of corporations whose products can be reproduced digitally at almost no cost. The central conflict in contemporary capitalism is between this attempt to privatize the cultural commons and widespread popular resistance to it (Hart 2005). Any move to enter this market will be confronted by transnational corporations and the governments who support them. Nevertheless, there is a lot more to play for here and the terrain is not as rigidly mapped out as in agriculture and manufactures. It is also one where Africans are exceptionally well-placed to compete because of the proven preference of global audiences for their music and plastic arts.

Did you know that the world’s second largest producer of movies, after Hollywood and before Bollywood, is Lagos in Nigeria or ‘Nollywood’ (Hugo et al 2009, Saul and Austen 2010)? Most of their movies cost no more than a few thousand dollars, a pattern reminiscent of Hollywood when W.G. Griffith was king. American popular culture is still that country’s most successful export. There is no reason why it couldn’t be for Africans too. The Mourides, a Sufist order founded almost a century ago (O’Brien 1971, Copans 1988), constitute an informal state within the state of Senegal. Their international trading operations are capable of influencing national economies, as when they recently shifted shoe supplies to the USA from Italy to China. Pioneering communications enterprises in Kenya and Ghana are beginning to be noticed for their exciting ability to tailor modern technologies to local demand. As I noted above, mobile phone banking there now leads the world.

Conclusions

According to Jack Goody (most recently, 2010), the relative standing of Eurasia’s regions has fluctuated over 5,000 years, with Western Europe (and its North American offshoots) enjoying some advantage since the Renaissance, especially since the industrial revolution. He utterly rejects any claim that Asia was ever structurally inferior. In most respects, Asian civilizations were well ahead of Europe for much of history. The speed with which they have adopted modern capitalism points to a fundamental similarity that helps us to understand the reversal in economic dominance that is underway now.

Goody set out to deconstruct the racist binaries that organize so much thinking about anthropology and world history. He thinks too much has been made of the industrial revolution as a decisive break in history; that modern capitalism may not be so radically different from its predecessors; and that attempts to associate recent history exclusively with the achievements of the West are deluded. This leads him to assert that many of the cultural features taken to be distinctive of particular regions (notably Europe) may be found elsewhere, often in quite well-developed forms. So, rather than classify whole societies according to the presumed presence and absence of cultural traits, it is better to consider how institutional patterns vary in emphasis and combination. Then the grounds for racial superiority are undermined and economic development is seen less readily as a series of radical breaks. He is right to insist that the legacy of agrarian civilization is still strong in our world and that older forms of capitalism (merchant and financial) have not been swept aside by factory production. But we must still try to understand the economic revolution we are living through, if only to head off global disaster. Marx (1867) and Weber (1921) have more uses in this respect than as mere cheerleaders for western hegemony.

Jack Goody rarely makes it explicit that his whole approach is an attack on cultural anthropology. Like Morgan (1877) and Childe (1942) before him, he explains cultural difference by technological change. The intensification of agriculture (the plough and irrigation) and new means of communication (writing) underpin the unequal class structure of agrarian civilization and explain the cultural differences between Eurasia and Africa. So western supremacists are not only mistaken in assuming Europe’s uniqueness, but they are idealists who fail to grasp the material conditions underlying the differences they celebrate. This leaves two gaping holes in Goody’s understanding of modern world history. I have not been able here (but see Hart 2007) to engage with the first of these, his relative neglect of the machine revolution that has transformed the world in just two centuries. The other is the place of contemporary Africa in his scheme.

Jack Goody’s time spent as an ethnographer in Northern Ghana provided the original ground for his extended foray into world-historical comparison. The problem is that “Africa” forms a binary contrast with Eurasia in his work and the lifestyle of the stateless hoe-farmers he knew stands as its symbol. If Asia is more complex than western stereotypes allow, so too is Africa which has just been through a demographic explosion. “Africa” seems to have lately become for Goody a static abstraction used to support his assault on western disparagement of Asia. This stands in contrast with his early recognition of and support for the anti-colonial revolution in Ghana. The United States and Europe could soon be replaced as the engines of world society by countries such as China, India and Brazil who were not long ago subject to cultural condescension whose premises Goody has undercut. Modern ethnographers too have criticized Western complacency, but their examples have generally been taken out of the context of world history. Jack Goody has excavated a new anthropological vision of our world that is bound to become even more salient as the present century unfolds. His anthropological legacy will last, even if the contemporary rise of Africa is not prefigured in his writing on the continent. I have tried to show here that Goody’s extension of the tradition that I call “the anthropology of unequal society” is indispensable to understanding what really happened in Africa during the twentieth century and may happen there in the twenty-first.

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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[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/.