Category Archives: Features

Blog, Debt, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Keith Hart: Comment on ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years was published in summer 2011. In August-September of that year, he took part in the first New York City General Assembly that formed the Occupy Wall Street movement. Much of the contemporary world revolves around claims we make on each other and on things: ownership, obligations, contracts and payment of taxes, wages, rents, fees etc. David addressed these through a focus on debt in broad historical perspective. It is a central issue in global politics today, at every level of society. The class struggle between debtors and creditors to distribute costs after the long credit boom went bust in 2008 is universal.

David held that the social logic of debt is revealed most clearly when money is involved (Hart 2012). Following Nietzsche, he argued that money introduced the first measure of unequal relations between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Indeed, one school of thought holds that “money is debt”. This includes the French and German traditions. Money was always both a commodity and a debt-token, giving rise to much political and moral contestation, especially in the ancient world. Whereas Rousseau traced inequality to the invention of property, he located the roots of human bondage, slavery, tribute, and organized violence in debt relations. The contradictions of indebtedness, escalating class conflict between creditors and debtors fed by money and markets, led the first world religions to articulate notions of freedom and redemption, often involving calls for debt cancellation.

The book contrasts “human economies” with those dominated by money and markets (“commercial economies”). These societies are not necessarily more humane, but “they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings”. They use money, but mainly as “social currencies” which maintain relations between people rather than being used to purchase things.

“In a human economy, each person is unique and of incomparable value, because each is in a unique nexus of relations with others”. Yet money forms make it possible to treat people as identical objects in exchange and that requires violence. Brutality is omnipresent. Violence is inseparable from money and debt, even in the most “human” of economies, where ripping people out of their familiar context is commonplace. This is taken to another level when they are drawn into systems like the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery and freedom — a pair driven by a culture of honour and indebtedness — culminate in the ultimate contradiction of modern liberal economics, a worldview that conceives of individuals as being socially isolated.

David Graeber then organizes the world history of money in four stages: the first urban civilizations; the “axial age” of world religions; the Middle Ages; and “the great capitalist empires” that ended in 1971 when the US dollar abandoned gold. Money oscillates between two broad types, “credit” and “currency” (bullion), between money as a virtual measure of personal relations, like IOUs, and as impersonal things made from precious metals. The recent rise of virtual credit money may indicate another long swing in money’s central focus. Ours could be a multi-polar world, more like the Middle Ages than the last two centuries. It could offer more scope for “human economies” or at least “social currencies”. The debt crisis might provoke revolutions. Perhaps the institutional complex based on states, money, and markets (capitalism) will be replaced by forms of society more directly responsive to ordinary people and their reliance on “everyday communism”. David’s historical vision has no room for a Great Transformation in the nineteenth century.

Most anthropologists of the last century conceived of a world safe for fieldwork-based ethnography; another minority interest co-existed with this. I call this “the anthropology of unequal society”. Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1754) launched modern anthropology as the critique of unequal society. Morgan (1877) and Engels (1884) were heavily indebted to him when they reconstructed human history as the evolution of society from a kinship matrix to states based on class divisions. This genre was continued by Lévi-Strauss (1949), Sahlins (1958) and Wolf (1982), but with less explicit political content. Overlapping the millennium, its main exponents have been Jack Goody (1976, 2013; Hart 2006) and David Graeber (2011).

Goody sought to undermine Western claims to superiority over the main Asian societies. He downplayed the industrial revolution that allowed Europeans to take over the world in the nineteenth century. Following Braudel (1975), Goody (2013) preferred to point to the similarities between industrial capitalism and the “merchant cultures” of pre-industrial civilizations. He claimed that Marx (1867) misread merchant capitalism, but did not address his case for treating industrial capital as strategic. Weber (1922) too gets short shrift for suggesting that modern capitalism differs from its predecessors. Given their common origins in the Bronze Age urban revolution, modern European capitalism diffused faster to Asia than the Italian renaissance to Northwest Europe.

Despite a 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, bureaucracy, literacy, impersonal money, long-distance trade, work as a virtue, world religion, and the nuclear family (Hart 2002). The rebellion of the bourgeoisie against the Old Regime was co-opted by “national capitalism” in a series of political revolutions of the 1860s and 70s (Hart 2009). This severely set back humanity’s emancipation from inequality. 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, darker, female, and young. The rich countries, who can no longer reproduce themselves, vainly try to stem the inflow of migrants. Our world resembles nothing so much as the Old Regime in France before the revolution (Tocqueville 1859). Goody may have a point in asking us to reconsider how exceptional our societies are.

I have taken part in a conference and book, Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East (Weisweiler 2022), which was inspired by David’s Debt book. He drew attention to the political economy underpinning a sequence of ancient empires in western Eurasia from the Persians and classical Greeks through Alexander’s conquests to republican and imperial Rome and the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean. Its logic hinged on the need to provision vast armies on prolonged marches. That meant using precious metal coinage, sustained by a network of mines, states and mercenary soldiers, then converting conquered peoples into slaves to be sold for the money needed to complete the cycle. There seems little doubt that western empires from 1500 to 1800 relied on a similar logic. But they were unable to take over the world until industrial capitalism raised their technological competence to a far higher level than the rest.

Marxists and liberals agreed that a world-change was taking place in nineteenth-century Britain. Hegel’s (1821) historical model, however, was very different from Marxism’s successive stages (from feudalism to capitalism to socialism). His three phases were based on the family and the land, the market economy of urban civil society and the modern state respectively. These now co-existed under the coordinating guidance of the state. Both Polanyi (1944) and Marx missed the revolutions of the 1860s and 70s that installed a new class alliance in the leading countries, the partnership between capitalists and the traditional enforcers that I call “national capitalism”. This new alliance soon spawned the legal conditions for modern corporations, as well as a massive expansion of state property and a bureaucratic revolution at all levels of the economy. Mass production and consumption was the result.

Man speaking into microphone, as at a conference, with overlaid book cover of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," by Thomas Piketty.
Image 1: Book cover and economist Thomas Picketty, photo by Frontieras do Pensamento/Greg Salibian (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Thomas Piketty’s (2014) book on capital was the smash hit of our times. It was based on serious economics, up to two centuries of national income accounting for a few rich countries. An economist who can quote Balzac can’t be all bad. I identify three reasons for his success. First, Piketty brought inequality back onto the mainstream agenda, just as Occupy Wall Street did — “we are the 99 percent”; and this touched a nerve after three decades of neoliberal responses to the financial crisis that included bailing out the rich and making the poor pay. Second, Piketty’s argument rests on two simple equations describing the relationship between capital and labour over the last 200 years; he uses these to demonstrate that capital’s share of national income must always increase. It is unlikely that teeming historical diversity can be captured by timeless categories and equations. Third, against the notion that capitalists make their money by producing competitively for profit, Piketty claimed that property was a growing component of wealth; inheritance and rent are neglected factors in distribution today.

There is something special about the plutocracy built up in recent decades. The rise of modern corporations comes from their being granted the rights of individual citizens by the US Supreme Court in 1884; and they now combine those rights with their long held special privileges, like limited liability for debt (Hart 2005). Even the Romans, not noted as champions of democracy, limited the spending of the rich on political campaigns. The US Supreme Court recently refused to accept any restriction on corporate political spending since it would infringe their “human rights” and allowed companies exemption from government rules on religious grounds.

These corporations once built their wealth by producing industrial commodities for profit at prices cheaper than their competitors. Now they rely on extracting rents (transfers sanctioned by political power) rather than on producing for profit in competitive markets. Thus “Big Pharma” makes more money from patents granted by Congress than the entire Medicare budget. Sony makes 75% of its revenues, not from selling machines, but from DVDs which are reproduced, almost without cost, from movies sold in cinemas; they call duplicating movies “piracy” (Johns 2009). Goldman Sachs retrieved from the US Treasury at full face value the $90 billion lost by insurance giant, AIG in the 2008 crash. These rent-seekers are not punished for stealing from the public, but are bailed out by our taxes and held up as shining examples of super-rich consumption to a public that has exchanged equal citizenship for bread and circuses (reality TV). This is decadence: there are no longer any national political solutions to economic problems that are global in scope.

Marx held that industrial capitalist profit subordinated rent and interest to its logic. This is why he and Engels thought that Victorian England held the future of the world economy. New phases of capitalist development and decline have been identified ever since. The American macro-economist, Dean Baker (2011) provides much insight into rentier capitalism in the US today. Selling stuff for profit means adding value through production. 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”. Rent and interest (banking) no longer take their scale, form, and function from industrial capitalist production for profit, as Marx insisted in Capital. Has the focus of political economy tipped away from industrial production (in the broadest sense) towards rents derived from political privilege? It is hard to see how the richest 1% could have done so well in the last four decades otherwise, given the overall stagnation of production and real wages in this period.

The digital revolution in communications is highly relevant, since many intangible commodities can now be copied easily at no cost. If you steal my cow, I can no longer milk it, but no-one loses out if I copy your song. Entertainment is the fastest-growing sector of the world economy after finance. National capitalism’s rise to dominance after the First World War is central to understanding today’s economic crisis, since it has been eroded since the early 1970s. Digital Retail Management regimes now being installed around the world illustrate the dominance of political and legal coercion in the economy now.

Rent-seeking now trumps value-added through production. The war over intellectual property escalates to ever higher levels of absurdity; and the rise of Big Tech, in extending corporate command and control, undermines our ability to make society in the interest of the American Empire. Like Marx and Engels, I believe that the machine revolution can be a force for greater economic democracy; but the open source and free software movements have lost the influence they once promised. Our main hope is to mobilise global networks to develop democracy, knowing that the multitudes are faster than they are. That was certainly David Graeber’s project.

Image 2: Economist Dean Baker, photo by CEPR (CC BY 4.0)

David’s book is or will be the biggest best-seller by an anthropologist, even over Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), the previous frontrunner. In 2011, he spent a sabbatical leave from Goldsmiths in New York where he was able to promote the book heavily before becoming a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was invited by the German President to debate on national television with the leader of the Social Democratic Party and Debt sold 30,000 copies there in two weeks. In the last two decades his books have been translated into many languages. He has a strong following in Japan, Korea, and China.

Debt’s phenomenal success was not an accident or freak of creative genius (Hart 2020, 2021). Anthropology narrowed its scope in the last century to meet the needs of academic bureaucracy and lost its public appeal in the process. David set out to write a big book with big ideas that allowed readers to place themselves in history. Anthropologists, in adopting fieldwork-based ethnography as their standard method, settled for narrow localism and a truncated version of their own history, finding in ethnography a replacement for racist colonial empire, while ignoring the fragmentation of world society into myopic nationalisms. David by-passed all this to resurrect the Victorian polymath and the world thanked him profusely for it. But there were other strings to his methodological bow, chief of them the ability to combine academic life with revolutionary politics when most of his colleagues were trapped in universities committed to bureaucratizing capitalism (Hart 2021). From the time he was a graduate student, he trained himself to write accessibly for the general public. He wrote each piece twice, once for himself and once for everyone else.

David’s intellectual success in a curtailed lifetime drew on self-conscious methods: vision, imagination and endurance through hardship, for sure; reading with no bounds; love of comparative ethnography; writing “to be understood rather than admired and not for knowing and over-acute readers” (Nietzsche); active participation in democratic politics; and returning to anthropology’s original mission as the study of humanity (Hart 2020). Call that genius, if you like; I prefer to call it a personal synthesis built on disciplined hard work over an extraordinary range of human activities. If only we could each aim to emulate him in some respects.

Keith Hart is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London and a full-time writer based in Paris and Durban. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes will be published in Spring 2022.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Debt’.

References

Baker, Dean. 2011. The End of Loser Liberalism: Making markets progressive. Washington DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Braudel, Fernand. 1975. Capitalism and Material Life. New York: Harper Collins.

Engels, Friedrich. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: Pathfinder.

Goody, Jack. 1976. Production and Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goody, Jack. 2013. Metals, Culture and Capitalism: An essay on the origins of the modern world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

Hart, Keith. 2002. World society as an old regime. In: C. Shore and S. Nugent (eds.), Elite Cultures: Anthropological perspectives. London: Routledge, 22-36.

Hart, Keith. 2005. The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or business, personal and impersonal. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Hart, Keith. 2006. Agrarian civilization and world society. In: D. Olson and M. Cole (eds.), Technology, Literacy and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the Work of Jack Goody. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 29-48.

Hart, Keith. 2009. Money in the making of world society, C. Hann and K. Hart (eds.), Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 91-105.

Hart, Keith. 2014. Jack Goody: the anthropology of unequal society. Reviews in Anthropology, 43(3): 199-220.

Hart, Keith. 2012. David Graeber and the Anthropology of Unequal Society. https://www.academia.edu/44225307/David_Graeber_and_the_Anthropology_of_Unequal_Society

Hart, Keith. 2020. David Graeber (1961-2020). https://www.academia.edu/44852890/David_Graeber_1961_2020_

Hart, Keith. 2021. Anthropology as a revolutionary project: David Graeber’s political legacy. https://www.academia.edu/48898491/Anthropology_as_a_revolutionary_project_David_Graebers_political_legacy

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2010 [1821]. The Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Johns, Adrian. 2009. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969 [1949].  The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon.

Marx, Karl. 1970 [1867]. Capital Volume 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Morgan, Lewis H. 1964 [1877]. Ancient Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Polanyi, Karl. 2001 [1944]. The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our times. Boston: Beacon.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1984 [1754]. Discourse on Inequality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1958. Social Stratification in Polynesia. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2004 [1859]. The Old Regime and the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weber, Max. 1961 [1922]. General Economic History. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction.

Weisweiler, John. Ed. 2022. Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Credit, Money and Social Obligation in David Graeber’s Axial Age (c.700BCE–700CE) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Cite as: Hart, Keith. 2021. “Comment on Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” FocaalBlog, 20 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/20/keith-hart-comment-on-debt-the-first-5000-years/

Blog, Debt, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Debt

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Keith Hart & Maka Suarez

In 2011, David published Debt: The First 5000 Years, a book that would establish him as one of the major contemporary critics of our current economic paradigm. Around the same time, he contributed to the creation of Occupy Wall Street, a movement that made the book all the more timely and important. Debt is a sweeping historical account of ‘human economies’ and an exposé of the moral foundations of modern economics. In dialogue with a range of influential economic thinkers, Keith Hart critically assesses the significance of the book as an exemplary work of ‘anthropology of unequal society.’ Maka Suarez weaves the theoretical insights of Debt into her own ethnography of Spain’s largest movement for the right to housing (La PAH), analysing how La PAH exposes the kind of politicised debt relations that are the historical focus of David’s book.  

These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.

Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Keith Hart is Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE, Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and co-director of the Human Economy Programme. His research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money, and the internet. His latest book is Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes.

Maka Suarez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a co-director of Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at the University of Cuenca.

Blog, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks, Value

Don Kalb: Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’

Cover image of David Graeber's book "Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value."
Image 1: Book Cover.

The last two decades in anthropology would have been dramatically less exciting without David Graeber. Given David’s prominent association with the Occupy rebellions and with the Western Left more generally, this is even true for the Western world at large. With the publication of his debt book (Graeber 2010) – also exactly a decade ago – as Keith Hart once said, David became the most famous anthropologist among the general public of our age, taking that long empty seat next to Margaret Mead (and Levi Strauss perhaps). With the launch of the ‘Society for Ethnographic Theory’, the HAU journal and the turn towards Open Access publishing, David, now world famous, once more stirred up anthropology as well as academia more broadly. It feels a bit weird to say this about an anthropologist of the gift, but David literally made history by attacking established centers and practices of power and wealth.

While some in this series of seminars knew him well as a direct colleague or friend, I only ran into David a couple of times. I felt it was not easy to get to know him. He seemed a bit solipsistic, drawn into conversation with himself, sometimes mumbling and laughing privately about the sudden insights he seemed to run into while doing so. If you had not been introduced to that intimate conversation before, it was not so easy to enter it, I felt. He and I never had the time to get to that point, for which I am sorry.

I remembered these few moments of mutual awkwardness while rereading Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (Graeber 2001). Its style of writing reminded me of David’s internal conversations and his moments of private enjoyment. The narrative of this book meanders, feels sometimes elliptic (as it does in all his books). The flow of the argument regularly gets punctuated. Jolts of joyful energy seem to pull the author in multiple unexpected directions. The possible connections that emerge from the words that he happened to choose, seem to seduce him to leave the path and get into the bush around it. David, who celebrates creative freedom, is certainly the Zizek of anthropology. As with Zizek, things can become very detailed within a narrative that was already far from linear. As a reader you may feel you are being unduly slowed down, even taken advantage of. But David can also take you by the hand while making a reckless jump, allowing you for a moment to tower over a conceptual landscape where most people would normally be lost, and you are struck by the sudden clarity of perception. I now imagine that such apparently reckless jumps produced his moments of private enjoyment.

My discussion here of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value must be short. I will leave the bush aside – the book has long chapters on gift giving societies in Melanesia, Madagascar and among Amerindians, some of it very interesting, some of it less compelling for non-specialists – and I will focus on the landscapes that emerge during those conceptual jumps. This book is not just representative of his writing style and his counterintuitive rhythm of discovery. It also partly lays out the tool kit of concepts, perspectives, and issues that was going to dominate his later work. In fact, it offers in embryo his full program of research. What is then David’s theory of value? How do Marx and Mauss cohabit in it? How do his very outspoken Chicago teachers, Marshall Sahlins and Terence Turner, figure? What are its possibilities and blind spots?

David developed his ‘anthropological theory of value’ against the intellectual and political background of what he calls ‘the bleak 1990s’. He is very explicit about it: neoliberal hegemony, globalized capitalism, economics as dominant social imaginary, post-structuralism, and the reduction of politics to ‘creative consumption’ and identity, both in anthropology and other social disciplines. While structure and history had gone out of fashion, he writes, action and agency had become cynically equated in social theory to mere individual market choices. Before 1989, Bourdieu had worked out ‘habitus’ as the connecting concept between structure and agency (and Giddens had been busy with similar issues). Graeber swiftly passes him by for the focus on dominance and power games that underlie Bourdieu’s project, in David’s eyes another symptom of the cynicism that he saw around him. For David, at this point in his career, it still seemed paradigmatic that anthropologists are dealing with people in relatively egalitarian societies and with people who desire (a core concept for him) to precisely escape such power games. David proposes ‘value’ as the point where structure and agency meet. After an interesting interlude on Roy Bashkar (and critical realism) and his thinking in terms of forces, tendencies, and processes rather than objects he emphasizes that his value does exactly that: setting open-ended dialectical processes in motion. What is this value and what are the anthropological traditions that help him shape it up?

The shortest way to answer that question is to bring in that concept that is all but foundational for David’s work: ‘constituent imagination’. While he borrows that term from Italian autonomous Marxism (Virno and Negri), he links it to a long anthropological pedigree that connects Klyde Kluckhohn, Marshall Sahlins, Terence Turner, Louis Dumont, and others, all of whom are discussed in interesting and original ways here. Value then emerges as what people tell themselves they find important in the realization of their lives, not very different from the common-sense meaning of value in various European languages. David’s value is emic, idealist, and dynamic. While his notion seems initially not very different from let’s say Talcott Parsons, David wouldn’t be Graeber if he didn’t loudly refuse the implied structural functionalism: David’s value emphatically doesn’t work to solidify stable social reproduction. On the contrary, it feeds the social imagination, both collectively and individually, and it is both agonistic and liberating. In the social processes that it sets in motion people die, strive, love, compete, believe, pray, moralize, estheticize, sacrifice, fetishize, and whatnot. Value is about making differences, and about ranking and proportioning them. De Saussure’s structuralism may be essential for how our language and imagination works, but David, following his teacher Terence Turner, adroitly embraces Vygotsky’s ‘generative structuralism’ and shifts the weight from langue to parole and towards ‘signifying material action’. Hence his interest in ethnohistory and the telling and remembering of histories. Stories become part of ‘constituent imagination’ in action, the practiced struggle for individual and collective autonomous becoming and in how these struggles are being remembered.

In the end he concedes that his foundational notion of value is perhaps not that different from Dumont, a student of Levi Strauss and the ultimate theorist of hierarchy, except for its emphasis on process, action, and agency. And while the structure of our social imagination is certainly ‘a totality’ of the Saussurian kind and as such fully embedded in the existing structuration of our societies, as well as fundamental for how we teach our children and reproduce ourselves, it is clear to David that this is a totality ridden by ambivalence and contradiction. There are inevitably contradictions between desires and pragmatic realities. ‘Constituent imagination’ often seems more the property, desire, and practice of individuals or groups and moieties within societies than of societies as a whole.

Where is Marcel Mauss here, David’s most basic theoretical and political inspiration? Mauss appears at all levels of David’s approach. David spends some very interesting pages introducing him as the key thinker for a non-cynical anthropology and for a humanist Left, who famously rejected the Bolsheviks for their recourse to state terror, authoritarianism, and bureaucratic diktat. In the book, Mauss of course appears as the quintessential theorist of the gift and of egalitarian societies, which, as I said, are for David at this point still the self-evident object of anthropology. David may criticize him for his romanticism, but he fully embraces his notion of ‘everyday communism’ as the glue of human sociality. Then there is also the basic methodological notion of the ‘total prestation’ where the full quality, the core values, of a whole society are reflected in each and every of its parts, including the imaginations and actions of its members. David does not discuss it explicitly, but if I’m not mistaken, he does seem to think that Mauss’ approach may be too static for his purposes. The constituent values for which people once congregated as a distinct group or society, may become corrupted over time and people seek repair, interpretations will differ, agonistic and liberating conflict will ensue. Holism, for David, therefore, does not take away the dialectics. On the contrary, it feeds them and is fed by them.

In all this Graeber seems to follow Terence Turner closely. And indeed, in a much later preface to a collection of Turner’s essays (2017) David remarked that he wrote his value book to make the notoriously complex texts of Turner understandable for a wider public. The book was thus originally intended as a gift to Turner.

But Turner was strong on Marx, indeed perhaps the most outspoken Marxist in the anthropology of the 1990s. And Marx was strong on totality and dialectics too, but of a less idealistic kind. David in this book sets a Turnerian Marx into a dynamic conversation with Mauss. How does that work out? A Marxist will immediately wonder how the thoroughly idealist concept of value as constitutive imagination that Graeber is on to will relate to Marx’s similarly dialectical but certainly not idealist conceptions of (use, exchange, and surplus) value. Most importantly, how does it relate to Marx’s ‘law of value’, which is Marx’s short formula for talking about the social relations of capitalist accumulation. 

Graeber is sympathetic to the young Marx who wrote on behalf of the emancipation of humans from their self-constructed religious fetishes which he wanted them to begin to see as the mere products of their own powers of creative imagination rather than as the gods that they had to obey. This indeed corresponds perfectly to David’s own agenda as his long and interesting discussions of fetishism show. But the post 1848 Marx of capital and labor receives rather short shrift. David repeatedly complains about the ‘convoluted language’ of Marxists. He does not like the Marxian vocabularies and prefers for example to talk about ‘creative powers’ rather than about labor (a concept that hardly appears in this book on value). Marx for David is mainly interesting, he says, for his approach to money – and here we find an early announcement of the coming book on debt. So, not capital, not labor, but money. He emphasizes that for Marx value and money are not the same, but in the next pages Marx’s value disappears and David gets stuck with money and prices, which are of course a holistic system too. With Terence Turner, he embraces the idea that ‘socially necessary labor time’ – a core element of Marx’s ‘law of value’ – is also inevitably a cultural construct but the discussions about that centrally important concept for Marx are not referenced in this book as they are by Turner (2008). Nor does David seem aware that this concept helps Marx to discover a particular relational form of value under capitalism that consistently operates behind people’s back and is therefore ontologically something rather different than a self-conscious ‘constituent’ value choice. In Chicago David was apparently not exposed to Moishe Postone. He also does not seem aware of the important value debates among Marxist theorists of the 1970s (in particular Diane Elson 1979, whom Turner had read closely). Considering the number of pages dedicated to such discussions in this book, Marx’s value appears intellectually far less compelling then Kluckhohn’s, Parson’s or Dumont’s value. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in David’s handling is then in the next moment reduced to a rather static cultural concept for determining, via prices, how important we find particular items of consumption as compared to other items of consumption (cars: 7% of yearly consumer expenditures in the US in the late nineties). David’s Marx, surprisingly, seems in the end not to be about capital and labor but primarily about consumption, not unlike the way David’s teacher Marshall Sahlins looked at capitalism in ‘Culture and Practical Reason’ (1976).

It is also as if David at once forgets about his discussion of Roy Bhaskar and his own declared embrace of forces, tendencies, and processes. ‘Socially necessary labor time’ in Marx is a dynamic dialectical relation between abstract capital and abstract labor that produces immanent tendencies and is indeed also a dynamic dialectical cultural construct. It is the basis for Marx’s ‘law of value’, which Marx knew well was not a law but a tendency. As labor does its daily work for capital, labor productivity would systematically be driven up because of the competition among capitals and of the class struggle with labor, via mechanization, automation, and the overall capitalization of life. Over time labor would lose any sovereignty over its own conditions of life and social reproduction. Apart from being disciplined in its wage claims and lifestyles, lest capital would move to cheaper and more hardworking places, labor would also be forced into (paying for) ever more education or face devaluation and degradation. And of course, it would have to face the inescapable uncertainties of life and status. The same would be true for cities, regions, and states that failed to compete within a globalizing capitalism and would therefore literally be up for grabs. All of this, including the geographically uneven and war-mongering repercussions, is a logical part of Marx’s ‘law of value’. David could have used Mauss and the gift to give a deeper anthropological and relational twist to Marx’s rather flat notion of use value. But Marx is never allowed in this book to play on his own unique strengths: in the end both capital and labor, the two elementary positions whose combination produces not just use values and exchange values but, crucially, surplus value, the very returns to capital that are the key driver of social change in a capitalist world, simply disappear. According to David Harvey (2018), Marx sees capital as ‘value on the move’. But in this book that sort of value is just moved out – only to be rediscovered big time and with ‘anarchist concreteness’ in David’s later work on debt and bullshit jobs.  

Constituent imagination is David’s core concept. It was a concept that came from Italian Marxist post-operaismo authors who were impressed by labor’s refusal to work for capital in the Italy of the seventies and eighties after they had lost a series of violent confrontations. Young workers now preferred to seek the creation of autonomous worlds of life and labor outside the wage nexus. This is shortly mentioned by Graeber, and he imagines, like James Scott, that his egalitarian kinship groups similarly refused to further engage with hierarchical power centers and simply moved out to constitute their own desired societies inspired by constituent egalitarian imagination. Clearly, this is a further radicalization of the original concept, which talks about evading the wage nexus but does not carry any hint at a mass exodus out of Egypt towards a promised land and a new separate society, to use an image. David even argues that all societies at some point were formed out of such mass rejection of earlier power centers and were therefore always founded on constituent imagination. This to me seems like an extravagant claim, largely untestable, and suspiciously supportive of David’s theoretical purposes. However, Italian Marxists such as Antonio Negri always kept the development of capital and the state in dynamic tension with the autonomous desires of his multitudes, which were indeed urban subjects rather than spread out kin-groups in marginal spaces. In Graeber’s Value book that dynamic tension disappears. David’s egalitarians are on their own, engaging in a similar constitutive mytho-praxis that has inspired Marshall Sahlins’s work (see also Jonathan Parry’s discussion of Lost People for a similar disappearance of the IMF and therefore of global capital in David’s analysis of recent Malagasy histories).

Tweet from @DavidGraeber reading "Arjun Appadurai's footnote about my Debt book in his latest work on financial derivatives. Apparently my work is irrelevant because I see 'no hope whatever for redemption in the new financial instruments.' Um, yeah. I'm anti-capitalist." A screenshot of the footnote in question is attached to the tweet.
Image 2: Screenshot of David Graeber’s tweet responding to Arjun Appadurai’s critique of his book on debt.

David in this book firmly dismisses Appadurai’s ‘regimes of value’ notion (1986) for his neoliberal fixation on consumption. Appadurai recently returned the compliment by claiming that David’s anthropology was an entirely traditional one. David did a fantastic job in giving 21st century anthropology a new pride in focusing on egalitarian desires and popular values of autonomy in rejection of the rule of capital. But Appadurai is unfortunately right in one way: the values David envisions are emic, singular, particular, idealist, and deeply place-based and return us to classic bounded fieldwork and a bounded notion of culture. The book has no references to Wolf, Wallerstein, or anyone else dealing with space and multiscalar dynamic analysis of the dialectical value processes associated with globalized capital and the ensuing popular counter politics and desires. Except for a journalistic type of political economy, there is in fact hardly any serious political economy at all here, not even an anthropological political economy – a school that traces itself back to leading scholars like Wolf, Mintz, and Leacock, always largely ignored by both Graeber and Sahlins. David later improved marvelously on that lack with the Debt book (but see for example Kalb 2014), which, importantly, also brought long run and deep global histories back into anthropology. But while that book appears to have been incubated during the writing of this text on value via David’s interest in Marx and money, it is not yet conceptually or methodologically anticipated, and I do wonder how David later looked back on this very traditional anthropological theory of value he develops here.

David was a magnificent and creative utopian and moralist. He was uniquely in tune with the resistant Western mood of the times, from the alter-globalists to Occupy, including in his embrace of the ethos of the mass refusals and moral outcries that we have seen in the last twenty years, often driven by the desire for autonomy and the condemnation of the overall bleakness of things. But he did not at all anticipate the rise of the populist right, which is also very much about value and values, and indeed loudly proclaims a desire for the resurrection of (white, male, majoritarian etc.) hierarchy (see Kalb 2021 for further discussion). The rise of the right in many places after the failed rebellions of 2011 must be understood from within the failures of the ‘horizontalist’ mobilizations of which David and many of us were a part and which at that point seemed to have an elective affinity with the anthropology of egalitarianism. Nor does David’s book on value anticipate a situation where core central bankers and enlightened economists write books about the economics of the green transition with ‘value’ prominently in the title while making a claim to the heritage of the value-driven popular risings that David sees himself part of (Carney 2020; Mazzucato 2019). And finally, in the excitement of retrieving some pride for the traditions of the discipline, in David’s book on value we also seem to have forgotten some of the earlier advances in ‘the anthropology of complex societies’ and of ‘world society’, including some Marxist ones which are very precisely about value. 

Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and FocaalBlog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Value’ .

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction: commodities and the politics of value” In  The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3-36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carney, Marc. 2020. Value(s): Building a better world for all. William Collins: Dublin.

Elson, Diane. 2015 (1979). Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: Verso

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Graeber, David. 2010. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House.

Harvey, David. 2018. Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. London: Profile books

Kalb, Don. 2014. “Mavericks: Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and Marxism in world anthropology.“ Focaal 69: 113-134.

Kalb, Don. 2021. “The neo-nationalist ascendancy: further thoughts on class, value and the return of the repressed.” Social Anthropology 29 (2): 316-328.

Mazzucato, Mariana. 2019. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London: Penguin.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Terence Turner. 2008. “Marxian Value Theory: An Anthropological Perspective.” Anthropological Theory 8 (1): 43-56.

Turner, Terence. 2017. The Fire of the Jaguar. Chicago: HAU Books.

Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2021. “Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’.” FocaalBlog, 13 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/13/don-kalb-constituent-imagination-versus-the-law-of-value-on-david-graebers-anthropological-theory-of-value.

Blog, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks, Value

Chris Gregory: What is the false coin of our own dreams?

I confess that the first time I met David I was not impressed. It was in 2006 at a conference in Halle. David gave a 50-minute summary of what was to become his Debt book. He covered 5,000 years in 50 minutes, and this was in an era when the Grand Narrative was very much out of fashion. His presentation struck me as rambling and incoherent.

Over the past 15 years I have come to change my mind about him completely. I have just published an article (Gregory, 2021) where I have argued that Sahlins and Graeber should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. For many, this is high praise, but I can’t be sure that David would accept it. His approach to the theory of value stands opposed to everything the so-called ‘Nobel Prize’ for Economic Science symbolises.

My brief today is to discuss his book Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value (2001). I shall keep to that brief as best I can. I must say, however, it was only after reading his books on Anarchism (2004), Direct Action (2009), Debt (2011), and Bullshit Jobs (2019) that I began to get my head around the central arguments of his Value book, by far his most difficult book. What struck me about all these books was the extraordinary unity of theme and content. I see them as a five-volume study of the value question. I am not saying that this is the best way to interpret what he has done. There are many ways to approach his work. This is the one I find most useful.

In the acknowledgements to his Value book David thanks everyone at Palgrave except the editor who made him switch around his title. If we restore the order he wanted, the main title of his book becomes, The false coin of our own dream, and the subtitle, Toward an anthropological theory of value. This inversion gives us a different angle on his work. The word ‘toward’ suggests a movement, not yet completed, from an old theory to a new one. It also brings the expression ‘the false coin of our dreams’ to front and centre. The origin of this expression can be traced back to Mauss and Hubert in their General Theory of Magic (1902-03; 1972), but David gives the metaphor a 21st century twist. As I see it, the phrase false coin of our own dreams defines a paradox that is the central organizing metaphor of all five volumes of his books on value. But what does he mean by this paradox?

My short answer to this question is that he is referring to the political battle over those big ideas that can change the world. For him the value question is, first and foremost, the battle over competing images of wealth. The false coins are the images of wealth produced by the dreamers of yesterday, the false coiners of an image that has become adulterated and debased through excessive use over time. David the dreamer wants to recoin these debased images of wealth to create a new image of what could be. His dream is not a fantasy. It is a real possibility grounded in economic history, cultural geography, and the political present. Graeber the dreamer, then, is a political activist who wants to appropriate the false coins of the ruling elite, melt them down, and forge something new in collaboration with those who have a hopeful image of the future. He wants to join them in the streets as they ‘shout, clamour and make joyful noises’ in the now obsolete sense of the word ‘dream’ (OED).

What is this new image of wealth?

David, we must never forget, was born in New York and raised in Chelsea, just four miles from Wall Street. He has a New York-centric view of the world he has never lost. This visual image captures the essence of his approach as I understand it. It shows the Charging Bull sculpture that artist Arturo Di Modica secretly installed near Wall Street in 1989 in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. In 2017 Kristen Visbal installed her sculpture of Fearless Girl facing down the Charging Bull, but following complaints, the Fearless Girl was relocated to a different part of Wall Street, totally transforming Fearless Girl’s symbolic power. She now represents, Google Maps tells us, the fight for female equality inside the boardrooms of Wall Street. The original juxtaposition of images admits of a very different interpretation, especially when we overlay with the lyrics of the ‘blah, blah, blah’ song the rebellious young sing.

Statue of young girl in a skirt, legs astride and hands on hips, faces down a statue of a charging bull opposite.
Image 1: Fearless girl statue by Kristen Visbal, New York City, Wall Street, by Anthony Quintano is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Greta’s ‘blah, blah, blah’ is a quote from a song very popular among the young. The other line of the song goes ‘Ja, Ja, Ja.’ The language of this song is not double Dutch, even though the elite might think so given that the composer, Armin van Buuren, was a Dutchman. A Dr Sev from Poland has mixed Greta’s speech and Armin’s song. It was premiered on YouTube 30 September 2021. The sonic image, created to excite the passions of the young, raises a serious question: What does ‘No more blah, blah, blah’ mean? What is the message the young are trying to convey to those in power with lyrics of this kind?

Enter David Graeber, the bilingual Wall Street ethnographer. Not only has he has learned the language of the bulls and the bears inside the offices of Wall Street, but he has also learned the language of the young protestors on the streets outside in New York, London and elsewhere. In May 2019 he attended the Extinction Rebellion in London. He duly recorded what they said and reported it (Graeber 2019). The following is my very brief gloss on how he might re-present their point of view.

‘No more blah, blah, blah’ is a polite way of saying: ‘tell us the truth about climate change. Stop lying. Stop talking bullshit. Don’t give us bullshit jobs to do. We, too, are capable of imagining different possibilities for life on earth. If you old folks in power don’t listen to our dreams, we are all finished (one imagines that the protestors may have used different F-words in this final sentence).

The distinction here between the liar and a bullshitter, which David (2018: Ch 1, fn 10) notes but does not develop, is very important one. The bullshitter, Frankfurt (1986) notes in his classic essay, is one who exaggerates or talks nonsense to bluff or impress. The liar, by contrast, deliberately sets out to mislead with falsehoods. In other words, it is one thing for an academic to talk nonsense unintentionally to impress, but quite another for a politician like Trump who knows the truth to deliberately propagate falsehoods. Bulls can also produce manure, which is to say that the academic bullshitter can produce something very useful.

We are dealing here with two quite distinct values. The ambiguous quality of academic bullshit requires that it be handled with the greatest of care and respect. David does precisely this in his writings. However, his unique meandering rhetorical style takes some getting used to. I can now see some virtues in it, but it is not one that I would urge my students to imitate!

Let me now move to David’s analysis of the language of those on the other side of the barricade. The bulls and the bears of Wall Street who excite the emotions and imagination of academics and well as sculptors, singers, and other creative artists. On the one side we have academics from the schools of business and economics who crunch the numbers and give advice, for a price, to the politicians and shareholders who run the show. On the other side, we have academics like David who occupy the streets and call for radical change, often at some cost to their careers.

Academics, then, can be divided into three categories: those who work for Wall Street, those who work against it, and those interested in other questions. It is a quaint feature of the English language that those who work for Wall Street are called ‘policy advisors’ whilst those who work against it are called ‘political activists.’ Henceforth I shall refer to both as political activists. It is obvious, then, that the schools of business and economics and law are full of political activists whilst anthropology has very few. This raises the uncomfortable question for us non-activists of the political implications of our inaction.

Activists in the schools of Economics and Business come in many different stripes and political persuasions defined by their approach to the theory of value: Neo-Smithian, Neo-Ricardian, Neo-Marxist, Neo-Keynesian and Neo-classical among many others. Most belong to the mainstream neo-classical school epitomised by the work done by the economists of the Chicago School of Economics, a school that has produced ten Nobel Prize winners, two short of Harvard, the top school.

The image of wealth that informs the thought of these people, I assert, is the false coin of David’s dream, the anti-thesis that defines his thesis. Let me be clear. When it comes to an image of wealth, there is a sense in which David is opposed to the whole history of European economic thought from Adam Smith in 1776 to the Nobel Prize winners of 2021. Everyone. Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Jevon, Keynes, Friedman. It is a different matter when it comes to concepts of value and specific theories of value and, especially those of Marx. Some fine conceptual distinctions between images, concepts and theories are at stake here. I will come back to this trichotomy below. In the meantime, it suffices to note that when a theory of value uses concepts to make an argument it presupposes an image of wealth as a moral precept.

What does this ‘false coin’ of European economic thought look like? What image of wealth does it excite in the mind of its beholders?

In 1895 Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prize to be awarded to those who ‘have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.’ Five prizes are given each year: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace. In 1968 the Swedish Central Bank donated money for a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel. This award, which is administered by the Nobel Foundation, it not a Nobel Prize. However, by the operation of the Law of Contagious Magic, it is falsely called the Nobel prize in Economics when in fact its real name is the Swedish Reserve Bank [Sveriges Riksban] Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Nobel’s descendants are very unhappy about this situation. ‘Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society’s well-being,’ said Peter Nobel, a great grandnephew. In 2001 they demanded, without success, that the Nobel name be dropped from the Swedish Reserve Bank award because, they said, Alfred Nobel was highly sceptical of economics and as such the existence of this award was an insult to his legacy.

David Graeber and Alfred Nobel obviously shared certain assumptions about the ability of economic science to confer wealth and happiness upon humankind. I feel, therefore, that while he would reject the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science, he would happily accept the Nobel Prize for Peace. As Don Kalb (2014: 115) has correctly noted, David is a political activist in the Gandhian tradition rather than the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary tradition. Music, dance, and discussion are his preferred weapons, not guns.

David has a very interesting discussion of ‘dream tokens’ in his Value book, but I fault him for not including a discussion of the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science as a token of value. This is the true coin of the economic scientist’s dream, but the false coin of David’s dream. For David, the token is a ‘false coin’ because it epitomises an impoverished and debased Eurocentric image of wealth, one whose use-by date has long passed.

David’s life’s work has been the search of a better image. For inspiration he raided the cabinet of ethnographic curiosities, the historical archives, and of course spoke to the young. He has no new answers to old questions. His concern is to identify the constraints that economic history and cultural geography impose on our capacity to imagine new possibilities for life on earth. This enables him to pose new questions and to change the terms of debate. He has no manifesto, no commandments, just difficult questions that get to the root of the matter. He is primarily concerned to excite creative debate about issues of pressing importance for the human condition. If you are looking for simple answers to these questions you will not find them in David’s work. He is no messiah. He teaches us how to think, not what to think. He takes a few steps toward an anthropological theory of value. He has not arrived at the final destination.

The theory of value is the most hotly disputed subject in economics. If you ask ten economists to define money, for example, they will give you ten different answers. However, when it comes to the question of an image of wealth, there is remarkable agreement. This can be found in the image they have selected for themselves to distinguish their discipline. I refer to the image of the horn of plenty, the symbol of abundance and nourishment found in European mythology that appears on the Swedish Bank Prize for Economic Science but not the real Nobel Prizes. All 89 Economic Science laureates have all proudly accepted this token as a symbol of the true coin of their dreams.

Two gold coins with male profiles side by side. One is labeled "The Nobel Prize 1896," the other "The Swedish Reserve Bank Prize for Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel 1968." Header text says "Spot the difference."
Image 2: Nobel Prize vs. The Swedish Reserve Bank Prize

David correctly notes that modern European economic thought has its origins in the secularisation of European economic theology. This image of the horn of plenty, which has its origins in a Greek myth, could not be a better illustration of his thesis.

For the economic scientist the horn of plenty conjures up images of Adam Smith, their revered founding ancestor, whose book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) serves as the creation myth of their science. The very first line of his classic text introduces the image of wealth that his concepts and theories presuppose.

“The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.” (Smith, 1776: 1)

What students in Economics 101 don’t learn is that Adam Smith had a labour theory of value, one that excited the thoughts of Karl Marx. Marx’s revised version of Smith’s labour theory of value was published in 1867. Like Smith, the very first line of Marx’s classic work introduces the image of wealth that his concepts and theories presuppose.

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.” (Marx, 1867:1)

What separates these two images of wealth was, of course, the industrial revolution. This revolution not only excited the thinking of radicals like Marx, but it also excited the thinking of more conservative thinkers such as William Stanley Jevons and two others who were independently working on a new theory of value that turned Smith’s objective labour theory of value upside down. This was a subjective marginal utility theory of the value based on the mathematical calculus of the pleasure and pain derived from the differential consumption of goods. It provided different answers to questions about wages, prices, and profit. Instead of a class-based historically grounded theory of profit as exploitation, Jevon’s theory was based on the figure of the abstract, ahistorical individual making free choices in the marketplace. In came Smith’s doctrine of laissez faire, out went his labour theory of value. This new theory of value was informed by a radically new paradoxical image of the horn of plenty. As Robbins (1932:47) put it, “wealth is not wealth because of its substantial qualities. It is wealth because it is scarce.” Thus, wealth for the conservative economist is not the material abundance produced by industrial wage labour, but the subjective scarcity as perceived by the universal consumer of consumption goods.

Marx’s political economy inspired the dreams of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others; Jevon’s economic science the dreams of the heretic Keynes, the true-believer Friedman, and others. At one extreme a very negative Smithian-inspired image of wealth as historically specific surplus value, at the other extreme a very positive Smithian-inspired image of wealth as universal scarcity value. The rest, as they say, was the history of the 20th century.

David concern is the quest for a 21st century image of wealth that enables us to put this Eurocentric image in its place and to imagine something that goes beyond it. David’s thinking was inspired by the comparative ethnographic literature which revealed to him the common ground of both sides of the debate between economists. Like Sahlins, he rejects the idea of universal scarcity and strives to extend Marx by looking at the ethnographic evidence on non-capitalist and pre-capitalist images in the quest for a 21st century post-capitalist image.

“Political economy”, David (2007: 47) notes, “tends to see work in capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to women.” Political economy gives primacy to abstract labour time on the factory floor. David wants to turn this upside down and give primacy to the creative thoughts and actions of people engaged in the process of reproducing their society and their children in a culture of their own making.

As a contribution to thinking about the value question in general, David’s work in not original. He is careful to acknowledge his debt to the many anthropologists who have inspired him, especially his teachers at Chicago: Terry Turner and Nancy Munn. He also acknowledges the work of many others whose work he has critiqued such as Marilyn Strathern and me. Since he published his book, many other anthropologists, such as Hart and Hann, have developed important new approaches to economic analysis that put human beings at the centre.

What distinguishes David’s contribution, it seems to me, is that his five-volume study of value is the most radical and the most ambitious. David’s life work—which now amounts to some fifteen books by my count—is nothing less than a whole socio-economic history and cultural geography of the human condition.

A defining characteristic of David’s approach is his interest in the economic theology as well as the political economy of wealth. He finds much economic theology in European political economy, and much political economy in non-European economic theology. He is concerned with what our image of wealth has become and with signs of hope of what it can become.

One of David’s projects, for example, was the deep cultural history of the secularisation of European economic theology, and the extent to which the secularisation was unfinished business. European political economy from Petty in 1662 to Marx in 1867, for example, is full of talk about Father Labour and Mother Earth as the creators of Wealth, but no mention of God the Son in the form of a wheat-God named baby Jesus or baby Zeus suckling their mother’s milk. This partial secularisation of the horn of plenty myth not only devalues women as mothers, but it also devalues males as sons as the supreme form of wealth. This is a truly great revolution in human thought, one whose English history the OED lexicographers have documented in painstaking detail. I know of no male-centric economic theology of wealth from the non-European world that goes this far. In 21st century India, for example, the quest for wealth in the Smithian laissez faire sense reigns supreme, but so too does the ideology of the son as a supreme form of wealth. As the census data on the sex ratio shows, this ideology is strongest in those areas of Northwest India where capitalism is the most advanced. Where I work in east-central India, by contrast, the economic theology of wealth assumes the ritual form of a rice goddess named Lakshmi, the daughter of Mother Water, not Mother Earth. The 31,000-line sacred poem priestesses sing celebrates Lakshmi as fearless daughter rather than dutiful wife. Indeed, her wedding to a wife-bashing husband leads to her demise. The story has a happy ending when wife-beating husband, and jealous co-wives realise the error of their ways. As political economy this theology is womb-centric, daughter-centric, rice-centric, and water-centric. But as David notes, comparisons like this enable us to perceive the phallo-centric, wheat-centric European images of wealth of Political Economy for what they are.

Concluding remarks

Theories of value present themselves as descriptive accounts of the world that use a limited set of concepts—such as ‘use-value’ ‘exchange-value,’ ‘reciprocity,’ and the like—to develop general theories about what is. The flip side of these descriptive accounts is a prescription of what should be. The difference between a description and the prescription are the policy conclusions needed to bring about the changes necessary to close the gap. When it comes to Political Economy and Economic Science, the prescription is a very simple image of wealth, one that has its origins in Adam Smith’s version of the Greek myth of plenty. On the one side, an historically specific image of the abundance of commodities, on the other side a universal image of scarce goods.

This Eurocentric dream, which has enabled millions of people the world over to escape from the material poverty of their forebears, has become the nightmare of us all. It has led to obscene wealth here, dire poverty there, and environmental destruction everywhere. David rightly identifies the image of wealth that informs Political Economy and Economic Science as the false coins of our dreams today. The anthropologically and historically informed concepts and theories that he develops in all his books are all concerned to reveal the debased and worn-out nature of this false coin. He wants to encourage collective thought about how to forge a new image of wealth. The concepts and theories in his Value book, his Debt book and his Bullshit Jobs book present us with alternative images of wealth from non-European, non-capitalist economies, pre-capitalist economies, and 21st century capitalist economies respectively.

The image of wealth that informs David’s dreams, like all images of wealth, is very simple and possible to achieve. He wants to move the focus of attention from the production of commodities, and the consumption of goods, to the reproduction of people, one where the children of today have a say in the world of tomorrow. The task of re-imagining a world where people can reproduce themselves has become a very urgent one. His writings reveal the huge gap between what is and what could be. His non-violent political actions, and his optimism, remind us that scholarly work is a necessary but not a sufficient means to achieve this end. Political activists in the schools of Business, Law, and Economics who give ‘policy advice’ to governments and the captains of industry have long recognised this fact. The Fearless Girl who used to oppose the Charging Bull on Wall Street reminds us that anthropology for David is not just about taking a point of view, it is also about taking action. Anthropologists, he might say echoing Marx, have only interpreted the world; the problem, however, is to change it.

Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University. He specialises in the political and economic anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Value’.

References

Barnes, J. A. (1994). A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frankfurt, H. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Graeber, D. (2001). Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an anarchist anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. (2007). Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Edinburgh.

Graeber, D. (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5000 years. New York: Melville House Publishing.

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Simon & Schuster.

Graeber, D. (2019). If Politicians Can’t Face Climate Change, Extinction Rebellion Will: A new movement is demanding solutions. They may just be in time to save the planet. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/extinction-rebellion-climate-change.html

Gregory, C. (2021). On the Spirit of the Gift that is Stone Age Economics. Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, LV (1), 11-34. doi: DOI: 10.26331/1131

Hubert, H., & Mauss, M. (1902-1903). Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie. L’Année sociologique, 7, 1-146.

Kalb, D. (2014). Mavericks: Harvey, Graeber, and the reunification of anarchism and Marxism in world anthropology. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (69), 113-134. doi:https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2014.690108

Marx, K. (1867). Capital. Vol. I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production: Moscow: Progress.

Mauss, M. (1972). A General Theory of Magic, with a foreword by D. F. Pocock (R. Brain, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Robbins, L. (1932). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan.

Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Everyman’s Library, 1970.

Cite as: Gregory, Chris. 2021. “What is the false coin of our own dreams?” FocaalBlog, 9 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/09/chris-gregory-what-is-the-false-coin-of-our-own-dreams.

Blog, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks, Lost People

Jonathan Parry: The Burdens of the Past: Comments on David Graeber’s ‘Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar’

Image 1: Book cover of Lost People

David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar began life as his University of Chicago doctoral thesis. It was not for some years that it appeared in print. That was 2007, and by then he had already published a considerable amount of other work, including a couple of significant books. To my shame, I have to admit that I hadn’t read Lost People until Alpa signed me up to comment on it today and that I should never have accepted her invitation. I am neither a specialist on Madagascar, nor expert in the literature on slavery or on narrative and history. But it’s worse than that. Something I have always especially admired about David’s writing is its clarity; his ability to state propositions that seem blindingly obvious once he has set them out but were never obvious before. Several of Lost People’s reviewers comment on its literary qualities, so I guess it’s just me. For my part, however, I found it uncharacteristically heavy-going, its narrative labyrinthine and its detail overwhelming. I was often unsure that I was getting the point.

David himself describes its style as experimental, “a kind of cross between an ethnography and a long Russian novel.” The aspiration was to produce a ‘dialogic ethnography’ that would do away with the distance between author and informants created – as David sees it – by so much social science writing. As I’ll later explain, he here draws a sharp distinction between social scientists and historians, and he identifies himself squarely with the latter. His sympathies are with what he represents as old-style ethnography where the objective is to provide a window on a way of life rather than to deploy ethnography – as is currently usual – as a prop for some single theoretical argument. He wants his Malagasy interlocutors to emerge “as both actors in history, and as historians” (Graeber 2007, 379). 

Despite the difficulties of his text, it’s relatively easy to say what it’s centrally about and to summarise its main narrative. In case there are people present who haven’t read it, or whose memories need refreshing, that’s what I’ll do. It’s centrally about slavery, about its local history, and more especially about its post-abolition legacy. Above all, that is, it’s about the past in the present, about the ways in which history impinges on contemporary relations between people of free and of slave descent in a rural area in the western highlands of Madagascar, an hour or so drive from the capital, Antananarivo. Betafo (his fieldsite) is in Imerina, the old kingdom of the Merina people, who ruled most of the island in the nineteenth century, and of whom Maurice Bloch has written with such distinction. David’s main window on these relationships is through the narrative of an ordeal held in 1987, that provoked the ancestors, resulted in disaster for the principal protagonists, and ended by dividing the community even more deeply than formerly between people of slave descent and the “nobles” who had been their erstwhile masters. This narrative threads through the book with new interpretations, new perspectives on it, and new details piling up over 400 pages. 

Betafo, something like a parish, is made up of around fifteen scattered hamlets which in total have a floating population of 300-500. It’s locally notorious for witchcraft and sorcery, and for the hostility of relations between its inhabitants – a major reason for selecting it, David reports. In the 1980s, it experienced an epidemic of petty thefts. The village assembly decided to hold an ordeal to identify the culprit(s). The villagers were to drink water in which earth from the ancestors’ tombs had been dissolved. But since they were not all of the same ancestry – there were nobles and ex-slaves, who were in principle totally separate groups between whom marriage was theoretically impossible – the earth should come from two separate tombs. And even that was a political fudge because the ex-slaves weren’t in fact a single descent group, though that is how the procedure adopted for the ordeal represented them. Nor was this provocative mixing of earth the only dangerous blunder. It turns out that both elders who had instigated and organised the ordeal – one noble, one slave – had recently taken a wife from the other group. They were guilty of mixing bodily fluids and bloods as well. No wonder disaster followed. The rice had just been harvested and was still in the fields. A flash flood swept it away. Actually, it later transpired that it was only the crops of the two elders that were completely destroyed. This was 1987. David started his research three years later and witnessed the aftermath. What had been intended to reassert communal solidarity had provoked a definitive rift. Now ‘blacks’ (slave descendants) were avoiding ‘white’ (‘noble’) parts of Betafo and were exploiting their reputations for magical powers and knowledge of local taboos to harass and constrain Betafo nobles who had moved to the capital but were now threatening to return and to resume their lands.

In parenthesis, it should perhaps be said that by standards elsewhere, the levels of antagonism seem muted. Returnee nobles might be told that there was a taboo on taking water from a particular spring. They weren’t physically attacked or forcibly prevented from moving back home. Intermarriage was anathematized, but we nevertheless hear of quite a few instances. None had resulted in murder, nor even in serious boycott. Compare rural Bihar or Haryana where couples who have contracted such serious misalliances could never be sure of their safety. 

Even in eighteenth century Madagascar, slavery and slave-trading had a prominent role in many local economies. In the nineteenth, however, slavery took off spectacularly in Imerina after the British did a deal with the Merina king by which he agreed to halt the international trade of slaves for guns on the understanding that the British would supply him with guns anyway (and would not supply his rivals). That enabled the Merina state to dominate most of the island and to capture more and more slaves. They were deployed on public works and in agriculture in the Merina heartlands from where more and more Merina went as soldiers. Later in the century, perhaps as many as half Imerina’s population were slaves, according to Bloch. It was in any event an enormous proportion and that had a profound impact on Merina society and cultural representations.

The French annexed Madagascar in 1895. Slavery was abolished in 1897. From Betafo many nobles moved off to the capital to join the civil service, a few to Paris. Their former slaves became their sharecroppers and generally thrived. That was widely attributed to their manipulation of their magical powers. The downward mobility of many nobles was put down to the sins of slavery – even by nobles themselves. Nobles were increasingly deeply divided between a rich elite (who largely moved out) and the poor (who largely remained). David offers a vivid picture of just how opulent and aristocratic these rich nobles were in the early years of the colonial period with their twilit parties, music and dancing, and their colourful silk garments and golden diadems. Still at the time of his fieldwork, émigré nobles would descend on Betafo in numbers to collect a share of the harvest or to bury some kinsman in their ancestral tomb. When a corpse was flown in from Paris, the paths were jammed with cars and vans, and in their hundreds ‘everywhere around the tomb were knots of grave-looking men in three-piece suits with expensive watches, ladies in silk dresses, pearls, gold and silver jewellery.’ Within village society itself, however, the most fundamental division – regardless of class – remained that between andriana (nobles) and andevo (slaves). Though the topic of slavery was avoided, nobody could ever forget it, and slaves were still associated with pollution and ideas of contamination. 

Historic sepia photograph of a Black woman wearing white looking directly into the camera.
Image 2: Female slave mourning, 1886, source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF

Crucially, however the situation of many of these émigré nobles became seriously precarious after the 1972 revolution. Subsequent to it, the peasant sector was badly neglected. The government took vast loans for development which it could not service, resulting in insolvency, dependence on the IMF, structural adjustment, the slashing of state budgets, the withdrawal of welfare and services from the countryside, a catastrophic collapse in living standards and widespread pauperization. The state largely withdrew from places like Betafo, leaving them as “temporary autonomous zones.” At the same time, many metropolitan civil servants were badly impoverished and were tempted to move back to their ancestral villages to resume the land that their ex-slave sharecroppers had been cultivating. And that, of course, is the essential background to the tensions that resulted from the Betafo ordeal at the heart of Lost People. 

What that background significantly qualifies, as it seems to me, is David’s claim to represent his informants as both actors in history and as historians. Of course, they are the first in a limited sense, but as actors they are highly constrained and have little autonomy. By that I mean to suggest that the most important part of the story that explains why Betafo’s andriana and andevo are at each other’s throats takes place off-stage between the Malagasy state and the IMF in Antananarivo’s corridors of power. That is what really drives the story and that bit of it is pure Graeber. It has no part in his informants’ narratives, which are as it were epiphenomenal. They are a derivative discourse that is somehow beside the main point. As historians, they were severely limited by having no access to sources that would give them a proper handle on that crucial background. That’s a no doubt rather crude way of introducing a more general reservation about David’s preoccupation with narrative. Nobody could possibly doubt its importance for history and politics, but Lost People repeatedly seems to claim that that’s what history and politics are. I worry that that leaves an awful lot out. If history is “mainly about the circulation of stories,” what of all the ecological, epidemiological and demographic influences on our lives of which we are often unconscious. If political action “is action that is intended to be recorded or narrated or in some way represented to others afterwards,” what kind of action is all the effort that goes into ensuring that so many of the deeds and misdeeds of rulers are never recorded. Representations, discourses and narratives are unarguably important, but they should not in my view be allowed to occupy all the space in an anthropological analysis. 

In a podcast discussion of David’s Debt book chaired by Gillian Tett sometime after his death, one contributor acutely observed that if there is any one value that informed his work it is freedom. That made me wonder how Lost People fits in. Though it says little about freedom explicitly, the ethnography overwhelmingly suggests its absence. This is a society that seems entirely unable to escape its past. In David’s other writings, there is usually some possibility of escape from oppression that is provided by other ideological alternatives. Here the past seems almost inescapably tyrannical. The Merina are condemned to continually renew the legacy of guilt and resentment that stems from the history of slavery. And whether or not David intended us to put the two things together, his ethnography shows that the burden of the past goes well beyond that. The Merina ancestors play a significant role in the lives of their descendants, and in Bloch’s writings their influence seems mostly benign. In Lost People they come over as much more threatening. They are always telling the living what they cannot do and they regularly attack them. That provokes the resentment and hostility of the living, which are dramatically expressed in the secondary burial when the ancestral remains are assaulted, their bones crunched up, their dust bound tightly in wrappings, and they are securely locked up in their tombs once more. History, it seems, is some kind of prison against the walls of which the living can only bang their heads. Marx had already summed it brilliantly: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

All that prompts a series of comparative questions that I think are important, but which David passes by – largely I suspect because they fall outside the narrative frame of his informants. Crucially, why – well after a century since manumission – are the Merina still so obsessed by slavery? Partly no doubt on account of its scale and its cruelty, but there must be more to it. Recent contributions to the regional literature have drawn attention to wide variations between Malagasy societies in the degree to which slave descent remains stigmatised, in the extent to which they appear haunted by its history and in whether they are willing to speak of it at all. Margaret Brown (2004), and Denis Regnier and Dominique Somda (2018, Regnier 2020), make brave stabs at specifying the conditions that might explain that variation (differences in social structure, resources, ethnic mixing and migration, and according to whether the slaves were Malagasy or of African origin), while Luke Freeman (2013) writes illuminatingly about the mandatory silence on the subject of his Betsileo informants and of how that re-entrenches the stigma of slavery by making it literally unspeakable. 

Moving right across to the other side of the Indian Ocean, the legacy of slavery in Sri Lanka is dramatically different. According to Nira Wikramasinghe’s (2020) recent book, the collective memory of it has been all but entirely obliterated. True, it was never on the same scale and was abolished some decades earlier than in Madagascar, but on her analysis, on the Ceylon side, the comparison would have to include the way in which the creolization brought about by slavery seriously challenged doctrines of racial purity in the south, and the way in which the enslavement of Tamil Untouchables by high-caste Tamil Vellalars subverted later political projects of Tamil nationalism in the north. But questions of that comparative order are not part of David’s enquiry. 

The broader terrain on which he does locate his study, my final observation, concerns rather the relationship between history and the social sciences. I confess I find his pitch a bit puzzling and am hoping that somebody might help me out. What he postulates is a broad contrast between the concerns of social science, which have primarily to do with patterns of regularity and predictability, and the concerns of history which deals with the irregular and unpredictable. It’s “the record of those actions which are not simply cyclical, repetitive, or inevitable.” Anthropology should align itself with history. That seems to be above all because it is “the very concern with science, laws, and regularities that has been responsible for creating the sense of distance I have been trying so hard to efface; it is, paradoxically enough, the desire to seem objective that has been largely responsible for creating the impression that the people we study are some exotic, alien, ultimately unknowable other.” Personally, I don’t believe any of that, but what interests me more is whether you will be able to tell me whether this disciplinary opposition has resonances in David’s other work. Or is it, as I suspect, an opportunistic answer to the requirement to justify and explain the literary style he adopted in writing this book? Certainly, Debt seems to be larded with “social science”-type propositions about repetitive, predictable patterns: slavery played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere; bullion currency predominates in periods of generalised violence; coinage, slavery, markets and the state go inexorably together. . . and so it goes on. 

Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.

This text was presented at the David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Lost People’.

References

Brown, Margaret L. 2004. Reclaiming lost ancestors and acknowledging slave descent: insights from Madagascar. Comparative studies in society and history, 46(3), 616-645.

Freeman, Luke. 2013. Speech, silence, and slave descent in highland Madagascar. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(3), 600-617.

Graeber, David. 2007. Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

———. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

Regnier, Denis. (2020). Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar: Ethnography, History, Cognition. New York: Routledge.

Regnier, Denis, and Somda, Dominique. (2019). Slavery and post-slavery in Madagascar: An overview. In T. Falola, D., R. J. Parrott & D. Porter Sanchez (eds.), African Islands: Leading Edges of Empire and Globalization. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Pp. 345-369.

Wickramasinghe, Nira. (2020). Slave in a Palanquin. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cite as: Parry, Jonathan. 2021. “The Burdens of the Past: Comments on David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar.” FocaalBlog, 7 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/07/jonathan-parry-the-burdens-of-the-past-comments-on-david-graebers-lost-people-magic-and-the-legacy-of-slavery-in-madagascar/

Blog, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks, Value

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Value

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Chris Gregory & Don Kalb

‘Value’ is the one central theme that runs throughout and conjoins all of David Graeber’s writings. This week focuses on his first book, whose original title, eventually flipped around by the editor, was The False Coin of our own Dreams: Towards an anthropological theory of value. While Chris Gregory delves into the core of what David meant by ‘false coin of our own dreams’, Don Kalb casts a critical lens of his conception of ‘value’ and the constituent imagination. As the first considers David’s work in relation to the economists and their images of wealth, the second looks at its place among the Marxists, drawing a combined picture that situates David’s most challenging book in a refined comparative perspective.

These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.

Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Chris Gregory is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of NSW. He specialises in the political and economic anthropology of Asia and the Pacific.

Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal and Focaalblog and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project.

Blog, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks, Lost People

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Lost People

Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Jonathan Parry & Maurice Bloch

Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar is not David’s first published book, but it is based on his doctoral thesis and, in this sense, his first, major scholarly work. We are led in this discussion by Prof. Maurice Bloch and Prof. Jonathan Parry—two of David’s colleagues at the LSE and engaged readers of David’s work. They carry us through the complexity of David’s arguments about history and narrative and raise important questions about whether he engages deeply enough with the socio-economic realities that Malagasy people faced at the time of his research.

These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.

Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.

Maurice Bloch is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He has carried out long-term ethnographic research in Madagascar, is the author of In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theories of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social, and writes more broadly on power, history, kinship, ritual, and cognition.

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Giulia Dal Maso: The Landing of a Chinese Green Bond in Portugal

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

In a little restaurant in the midst of a foggy day, Talita served me chicken, rice, salads and a glass of local wine. She said I was the only customer, the only person around. The mountain area in the Viseu region in northern Portugal usually attracts tourists for its special landscape; the granite and slate of the mountain as well as the lush flora, interlaced with moss and lichens. But with the lockdown during the COVID-19 crisis people stopped coming. There are not many other industr­ies here, the only other ones are the wine and the wind businesses, the latter of which is huge. Talita points to the turbines on display on the top of the cliffs, surrounding us —an infrastructural crown that towers over the valley. “You see, we have so much wind here, it is our secret resource.”  Talita explains that wind is the special, often unknown ingredient of Portuguese wine. It plays a role as a natural antibiotic, preserving the integrity of the vineyards without the need for preservatives and it dries out the plants after it rains. “You can feel it in the wine.” I sip from the glass, seeking the taste of the wind. It is not just a sensorial attempt.

I am in Portugal to trace how wind has been harnessed, and how an instrument like a green bond has served as both a financial and an energy source. As part of a larger project which looks at the development and impact of green finance from an anthropological perspective, I followed the first Chinese green bond to be issued in Europe as an ethnographic object of research. This not only sheds light on the way a green bond can be traded across boundaries but also on what its impact is on the ground.  Green bonds result from the recent development of green finance, which promises to tackle the current ecological crisis with debt instruments. Similarly to conventional “vanilla” bonds, green bonds are fixed-income debt instruments whose risk is bound to the issuer profile but whose proceeds are earmarked in green infrastructure/projects that the issuer pledges to invest in (Jones et al. 2020).

Green bonds bring cheaper capital for issuers and lower risk returns for investors by offering projects that decarbonize infrastructures and favor energy transition. Green bonds exemplify how the financial and the material are deeply interconnected. As I will show, this is demonstrated by the way the auditing and certification practices that create and “provoke” the value of the bond as a financial asset (Muniesa 2014; Birch and Muniesa 2020) intersects with specific material conjunctures and power hierarchies in which the bond is embedded.

Thus, this analysis explores the way finance capital valorization is increasingly interwoven in the process of assetization of nature, and how this is deeply implicated with the political role of energy infrastructures as both local connective and collective devices. It shows how at the bottom of this new green financial pyramid lies the invisible and infinite potential of wind as energy resource (Franquesa 2018). As green bonds are proclaimed to have an increasingly important role in harmonizing the often-antithetical duality between sustainability and finance, an investigation of how they unpack and are deployed on the ground seems increasingly urgent.

Image 1: Turbine in the Portuguese countryside, Viseu. (Photo by Giulia Dal Maso, May 2020).

China’s Three Gorges in Portugal

China Three Gorges (CTG) is the state-owned enterprise behind one of the largest dams in the world, the “Three Gorges Dam”; a giant hydroelectric dam celebrated as a triumph of Chinese modern technopower. As the Chinese leader in energy provision, CTG sought ways to penetrate Europe under the encouragement of the Chinese state’s “Go Out” expansion strategy. China not only started to look beyond its borders for sources of energy and natural resources (Mohan and Urban 2019, 248), it also adopted processes of green securitization as a way to boost its position to the world’s most powerful green financial system (Bruckermann 2020) and promoted its ecological civilization (shengtai wenming) outside its borders.

CTG landed in Portugal in 2011 when the country was under the scrutiny imposed by the Troika (the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank) for its high government deficit. Among other reforms, Portugal was then compelled to eliminate the country’s growing feed-in tariff debt that compromised Portugal’s path to renewable energy transition. If a few years earlier Portugal adhered to the EU’s 2009 renewable directive, the aim of which was toachieve 60 per cent of its electricity generation from renewable energy sources (Andreas et al. 2019), now it was forced to repay the debt. In the void left by the convoluted austerity measures promoted by the Troika, Chinese state capital intervened, with CTG obtaining a stake in the Portuguese energy sector: 21.35 per cent of shares of the main Portuguese public utility Energias de Portugal (EDP) and 49 per cent of EDP Renewables (a subsidiary of EDP). Effectively, CTG benefited from this forced privatization, and contributed to a new path in Portuguese renewable energy transition, a process that the EU had encouraged but to which it then denied support.

Thus, the CTG became the first Chinese issuer to release a green bond denominated in Euro and certified and listed in Europe. However, despite the layers of compliance with the EU regulations the issuance process does not provide much information about the nature, the location and the impact of the turbines refinanced by the bond. Formally, the documents of the bond—the necessary dispostif for the issuer to certify the truthfulness of its projects and to thus validate the greenness of the bond—do not specify the location of the wind plants, but name only the destination countries of the investment. In the case of this specific bond, the equation of estimated reduced CO2 in wind power in megawatts is the only formula that speaks of the sustainability of the wind farms (Sullivan and Hannis 2017). While it is necessary to quantify the specific number of reduced emissions through wind power, the extent to which this equation effectively abstracts the essence of the turbines is striking, as it de-territorializes CTG’s operations in a prospectus which was consequently validated and certified with no assessment on the location in which these were implemented.

The green bond, however, effectively gave consent to CTG to inherit a government permit on the land the windfarms were built upon, while also benefitting from the previous normative and labor regime that built them (including the EU feed-in-tariff). In other words, it allowed CTG to extract a rent from previously funded infrastructures, with financial capital accruing through the expropriation of a common good in a process of enclosure of natural resources. The municipality of Viseu had its benefits, earning central state funds in exchange for land permits, but these were not extensive. The clausula regulating the funds discounts the price for land rights if the scope is to build for public interest. Furthermore, the windfarms refinanced by CTG were just repowering old infrastructure. This refinancing does not bring much “additionality” at a local level. As many other large wind infrastructures in marginal areas, the ones in Viseu tended to reproduce, if not exacerbate, relations of uneven development between rural and urban areas, as well as public and private investments (Franquesa 2018; Bigger and Millington 2019).

Image 2: Village surrounded by windfarms, Torres Vedras. (Photo by Giulia Dal Maso, May 2020).

On the Connectivity and Collectivity of Green Infrastructures

Infrastructures are political entities and as such “a vantage point for rethinking politics” (Opitz and Tellmann 2015; Larkin 2013). They determine how the green bond “hits the ground” at a local level. Taking inspiration from Opitz and Tellmann’s (2015) reflections on the politics of connectivity and collectivity of infrastructures, I argue that the technological connectivity of energy infrastructures enables relates to a notion of collectivity, which explains their impact at local and social level. If windfarms are essential in guaranteeing connectivity (as a source of energy provision) with the world, they are at the same time alien to local forms of collectivity. In fact, the specific rationalities of programming infrastructures that the green bonds convey doesn’t have anything to do with the local and political space these infrastructures establish. Often encouraged by austerity measures, green bonds can become “the conduit of large capitals, often originating from afar, which lands in local contexts with little clue on their history and specificity” (transl. Lipari 2020; Scotti 2020).  As noted above, in their making, green bonds often do not include any information on where the infrastructures are located, and if and how these will impact collective communities.

Talita shows me her electricity bill. A chart on it shows that most of her energy power comes from wind power. She is happy about this. However, she is also angry and frustrated about struggling to pay her bills; these are way too high. She doesn’t attribute the high cost of her energy bills to the source of energy, which is wind, but to the management and distribution of it. Portugal, and Viseu in particular, is one the EU regions with the highest rate of energy poverty in the EU. Some locals I met told me that they only use wood stoves to keep warm in winter; electricity is too expensive.

People hold contradictory feelings about the wind farms in their area—a mix of indignation and appreciation. The appreciation stems from the fact that now the turbines are considered the banner of Portugal’s success in achieving nearly 80 per cent of renewable energy. Talita tells me she quite likes them as part of the landscape and some tourists see them as an attraction. They signify that Portuguese people care about their land and their country’s path to sustainability. They also reflect a renewed “energy consensus,” which finds roots in the path dependency between democratic power and electricity provision (see Mitchell 2017; Boyer 2019) that in Portugal partially guaranteed political legitimacy from the Carnation revolution onwards. The indignation towards the wind farms instead emerges in the cleavage between the wind blowing on their land and the infrastructure that harnesses it now. While wind was once a resource people had used for generations, benefitting the vineyards and fueling local windmills that still dot the landscapes of Portuguese countryside—and thus directly contributing to the community’s economic benefit—people now see the externally financed and technologically advanced wind turbines next door as something financially distant and out of reach. 

Giulia Dal Maso is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna. She currently works on the topic of impact/green finance. Her earlier research was on financialisation in postsocialist contexts; in China and Eastern Europe. She has published in in Journal of Cultural Economy; Historical Materialism; Social and Cultural Geography; South Atlantic Quarterly, and has a book out on Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation: Financial Labor within the Chinese state-finance nexus. This article is based on research contributing to the project ‘The Hau of Finance’, funded by ERC consolidator grant number 772544.

Bibliography

Andreas, Jan-Justus, Charlotte Burns, and Julia Touza. 2019. ‘Portugal under Austerity: From Financial to Renewable Crisis?’ Environmental Research Communications 1 (9): 091005. https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ab3cb0

Birch, Kean, and Fabian Muniesa.2020. Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bigger, Patrick, and Nate Millington. 2019. “Getting soaked? Climate Crisis, Adaptation Fiance, and Racialized Austerity.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3, no. 3: 601-623.

Boyer, Dominic. 2019. Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bruckermann, Charlotte. 2020. “Green Infrastructure as Financialized Utopia: Carbon offset forests in China.” In: Chris Hann and Don Kalb (eds) Financialization: Relational Approaches, pp. 86-110. New York; Oxford: Berghahn.

Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power struggles: dignity, value, and the renewable energy frontier in Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Lipari, Samadhi. 2020. “L’Impatto Territoriale della Transizione Energetica: un’indagine sulla filiera dell’Eolico nel Mezzogiorno.” Le Parole e le Cose. http://www.leparoleelecose.it/?p=40083

Opitz, Sven, and Ute Tellmann. 2015. “Europe as infrastructure: Networking the operative community.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1: 171-190.

Scotti, Ivano. 2020. Vento forte. Eolico e Professioni della Green Economy. Salerno: Orthotes.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso Books.

Mohan, Giles, and Frauke Urban. 2019. “China and Global Resources.” In The Palgrave. Handbook of Contemporary International Political Economy, 245–61. Springer.

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Cite as: Dal Maso, Giulia. 2021. “The Landing of a Chinese Green Bond in Portugal.” FocaalBlog, 13 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/13/giulia-dal-maso-the-landing-of-a-chinese-green-bond-in-portugal/

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Dragan Djunda: Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and blue patterns revived the previously cracked ground. These traditional geometrical shapes are landmarks of ćilim – a centuries-old weaving technique of wool from sheep herds on the Stara Mountain. Few steps inside, and you are surrounded by the large photographs of nature, people, and customs characteristic of this mountain in eastern Serbia. Only a year ago the walls covered by the photographs were molded due to the damaged roof and windows. The building was empty and in decay. It became again the center of the village’s social life after

Image 1: House of Culture Dojkinci. Meeting between the villagers, the architects and the movement Let’s defend the rivers of the Stara Mountain regarding a new revitalization project (photo by the author, 2020)

the villagers together with architecture students and their teachers and the grassroots movement Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain) renovated this building in 2019 as an act of resistance to the threat of small hydropower plants (SHPPs). SHPPs consist of several kilometers-long pipelines, which channel water to the turbines where the electricity is produced, threatening to leave the riverbeds dry and local communities without water. The more water the pipe holds, the more electricity the turbine creates and the more profit through subsidies it brings to private investors. Thus, for the local villagers and environmental activists the pipes of SHPPs came to symbolize greed, environmental destruction, and social marginalization.

The SHPP in Dojkinci, together with almost 3000 plants in the Western Balkan countries, arose from the network of national capitalists, European banks, and the national energy sectors responding to the EU accession standards. However, Dojkinci and other villages in the Stara Mountain did not succumb to such a wide front of interests. My contribution examines how this happened. I will firstly explain how SHPPs emerged from the Serbian renewable energy (RES) market, and then describe the social responses triggered by SHPPs. 

Renewables between liberalization and water-grabbing

The Serbian RES market emerged from the pressures for liberalizing the energy market, the government’s resistance, and the inflows of Western European capital. The liberalization of the energy sector in the EU candidate-countries is part of the broad legal, economic and political compliance to EU standards. The EU expects the Serbian energy sector to go through a double transformation. From a state-owned system that is largely dependent on coal, the sector should become competitive, decentralized, at least partly privatized, and promote renewable energy. This ambitious task unifies both liberalization and energy transition, keeping the logic of the free market as their leading principle. In the early 2010s, the Serbian government established the foundations of the RES market, consisting of a certification procedure for green electricity producers and fixed-rate feed-in tariffs (FITs) guaranteeing beneficial prices for 12 years.  FITs are the means of subsidizing renewable energy production. They are paid by all citizens through their electricity bills and transferred to the producers in a form of subsidized electricity prices

If it had followed entirely the prescribed logic of unfettered competition, the Serbian RES market could have had severe social, political, and economic effects. The state’s monopoly could have turned into an oligopoly of European companies, with FITs pushing up the low electricity prices – repeating developments already seen in Spain (Franquesa 2018). To prevent this scenario, the government found a middle way: to establish the RES market but prevent significant changes. It limited access to FITs through technology and capacity caps. These limitations targeted large investors in wind and solar, but also local people interested in installing small numbers of solar panels on private property. Foreign investors quickly filled the quotas for wind power subsidized by FITs. Only one channel for investments remained wide open – around 800 locations for SHPPs in mountainous, often protected regions.

Investors and authorities claimed that hydropower is identical to wind and solar sources. The ideology of untapped hydro potentials, anchored in the socialist technological heritage, is widespread among Serbian engineers and continuously supported by all Serbian governments since the 2000s. The costs for planned SHPPs were lower because expertise in the hydropower construction sector already exists since socialism. Moreover, SHPPs technology is not as capital-intensive and dependent on the economy of scales as larger solar and wind parks. This combination of technological and economic factors meant that the costs were low and that smaller investors could easily access the financial market. Alongside the international banks and a few private investors from Western Europe, people with close affiliation to the Serbian ruling party invested in and owned the new SHPPs, among them, the godfather of the Serbian president. This implies that after repaying credits for the SHPPs, the profits gained through FITs would stay within the circles of national capitalists unlike profits from foreign-owned wind or solar parks. The purpose of SHPPs was not to transform the energy sector, as they only contribute to the national electricity production with 2.5%, but rather to guarantee easy profits through FITs.

Even though SPPSs investors were usually local capitalist, it does not mean that it has not been a lucrative opportunity also for foreign capital in the region. European financial institutions and manufacturers of hydro equipment have followed a well-established path of foreign direct investments that have transformed the political, economic, and social fabrics of the postsocialist countries. SHPPs have been a good opportunity for the Western European producers of hydro equipment to reanimate an industry drowning because of the current rush for wind and solar sources. Hydro lobbies organized conferences that connected national energy authorities, public producers of electricity, manufacturers, and financiers, to consider new fruitful investments. Foreign financial capital played a key role in supporting SHPPs in the region. Most of the credits for SHPPs in Serbia came from commercial banks such as Erste Bank, UniCredit, Banka Intesa, and Société Général. Large financial institutions like European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, together with Norwegian, Austrian, German, and Italian development banks, poured hundreds of millions of euros into greenfield hydro projects in the region (Bankwatch 2019).

In this context, environmental and local community protection mechanisms were hardly implemented and succumbed to the immense pressure of national and international capital and power. The government lowered environmental standards, allowing the RES market to turn into water-grabbing. Researchers from the University of Belgrade identified on all inspected SHPPs malfunctioning or dry paths for fish migration and pipes unlawfully built-in riverbeds. They argued that the rule of “biological minimum”, which was supposed to guarantee the minimum level of water in riverbeds to sustain the river, was conducted by experts close to the investors and without systematic, often costly studies (Ristić et al 2018). This “biological minimum” therefore could not limit the investors’ arithmetic transformations of water into kWh and FITs, leaving behind dry riverbeds especially in protected areas with high biodiversity, such as the Stara Mountain.

Struggles against SHPPs

I first visited the village Topli Do in the Stara Mountain in December 2019, while the residents had been barricading the bridge in the village for three months to stop an investor from trying to build two SHPPs on both rivers flowing through their village. Most of them were retired people and small-scale agricultural producers, fearing that SHPPs would disturb the underground water that they use for drinking, as well as pollute and reduce the water in rivers for livestock and gardens. Numerous springs and waterfalls attract many visitors to the village, and the villagers were afraid that SHPPs would spoil both natural exceptionality and their opportunity for supplementary incomes through room rentals.

Image 2: Panorama of Topli Do (Photo by the author, 2019)

Residents of Topli Do and nearby villages recognized the state and investors as the main perpetrators and directed their anger towards them. But they also conveyed their existential anxieties through narratives of the “approaching global wars for water”, “international corporations stealing water”, and “extinction of their communities for settling migrants” from the Middle East who lived in a refugee camp in the nearby town of Pirot. These anxieties sprouted from the long-term sentiments of the vanishing of Serbian villages where mostly elderly people live. Decaying homes and infrastructure, closed schools, and ambulances are the material witnesses to rural flight. In this context of social degradation, the investors and local authorities promoted SHPPs as opportunities for development. The locals told me that the municipality fabricated the mandatory consultations with them, and portrayed SHPPs as benevolent water mills, and promised benefits for everyone – temporarily employed local workers and landowners near the rivers. “I wanted to bring improvement to this village which has had nothing, I brought my one million euros”, the investor in Topli Do SHPP said in a documentary film about the Topli Do barricade (Marinković 2020).

“The investor even asked us why defending the villages of the Stara Mountain when they would anyway disappear in a few years”, one activist told me. Between 2017 and 2020, the movement Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain resisted heavily SHPPs in Stara planina through protests, legal actions, and physical clashes. Through its actions, the movement connected villagers in Stara planina, academics, environmental NGOs, and international organizations with their pan-European campaigns against SHPPs in the Balkans. Finally, faced with such a broad resistance, the local municipality terminated all SHPPs in the Stara Mountain in September 2020.

Image 3: Protest banners in Topli Do: ‘A lot of money, little energy, zero fish’ and ‘For rivers to death’ (Photo by the author, 2019)

I came again to the Stara Mountain during the pandemic in October 2020, this time in Temska and Dojkinci villages. The mood was post-victorious since villages were not endangered anymore by SHPPs. The activists and locals thought about how to use the momentum and transform the symbolic capital of the river defenders into something more. They looked for financial and institutional support for infrastructure, housing, research centers, and small-scale businesses in the Stara Mountain, and the House of culture in Dojkinci was a result of these efforts. Revitalizations were both immediate reactions to the threatening devastation from SHPPs, and opportunities to demonstrate that revival of the disappearing rural communities was possible and necessary. For the locals, these renovated objects represented debt repayments to ancestors and predecessors and a promise that life in the Stara Mountain would not end, as the leader in one of the villages told me.

Unlike in other Serbian mountains, the SHPPs paradoxically rescued the villages in the Stara Mountain from disappearance and marginalization by reviving the local communities and garnering the support of the Serbian civil society. Attempts to make profits from greenwashing unexpectedly turned into a second chance for some Serbian communities.

Whose market, whose energy transition?

SHPPs were supposed to maintain a status quo in the energy sector – to represent a Godotian energy transition that never arrives and does not go anywhere. However, the wide social resistance turned energy transition from a techno-bureaucratic matter in to an issue decisive for society’s future. This change led to questions about who has access to the RES market, who gets benefits from it, and what role society plays in the energy transition.

These questions are becoming prominent among newly forming energy cooperatives interested in small-scale investments in solar energy. So far, they have been largely excluded from the RES market, not recognized as potential producers, and therefore unable to apply for FITs. Energy cooperatives criticize the closedness of the market to “ordinary people” and aspire to unify activism and business initiative allowing citizens to become active drivers of the energy transition and simultaneously benefit from FITs. Therefore, solar panels are trying to make their way to the roofs of urban dwellings to demonstrate sustainable and market-democratic alternatives open nominally to everyone.

While the aspiring cooperatives are wishing for a more inclusive market, experts and regional media specialized in energy are also calling for more and better markets, i.e. for the usual liberalization that supposedly corrects market distortions with improved market mechanisms. They wish for competition between big investors with access to credit and technology, which would ensure that the public gets measurable and less expensive electricity from renewable sources. This belief in the market as the only vehicle of energy transition follows the EU agenda which emphasizes decentralized, competitive, and interconnected national markets. Public tenders and premiums will most likely be implemented in Serbia’s new energy laws. These laws will launch a new race between large foreign and national investors in wind and solar power.

Such investors wish for a free, unregulated market. A free market which gives space to big and small producers, fosters innovations and initiative. This kind of market is seen as a more fair and sustainable solution than the one favoring SHPPs through FITs. But whose market and energy transition will that be? And the transition to what? The competition between large investors will hardly open substantial space for the development of energy cooperatives. The odds for a more democratic and just energy transition are slim if the promise of the decarbonization of the Western Balkan countries conveys the ultimatum of oligopolies.

Dragan Djunda is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. His doctoral research analyses the investments in renewable energy in Serbia and their social effects.

Bibliography

Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier in Spain. Indiana University Press.

Marinković, Zorica. dir. 2020. Topli Do – donžon Stare planine” [Topli Do – donjon of the Stara Mountain].

Ristić, Ratko, Ivan Malušević, Siniša Polovina, Vukašin Milčanović, Boris Radić. 2018. Male hidroelektrane derivacionog tipa: Beznačajna energetska korist i nemerljiva ekološka šteta. VODOPRIVREDA, Vol. 50 [Derivate small hydropower plants: Insignificant energy contribution and unmeasurable ecological damage].

Bankwatch, 2019. “Western Balkans Hydropower: Who Pays, Who Profits?” Accessed February 23, 2021. https://bankwatch.org/publication/western-balkans-hydropower-who-pays-who-profits.

Cite as: Djunda, Dragan. 2021. “Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/dragan-djunda-transition-to-nowhere-small-hydro-little-electricity-and-large-profits-in-serbia/

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Pauline Destrée: Solar for the Few: Stranded Renewables and Green Enclaves in Ghana

Africa’s Green Energy Revolution

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

In the past ten years, calls for a “green revolution” on the African continent have cast optimistic and promising scenarios of “leapfrogging” to mass renewable energy generation in order to meet the continent’s targets for electrification and forecast growth for energy demand. With a population expected to increase by 800 million by 2040 with rising urbanisation, the most pressing challenge for the continent in the next 20 years will be to meet growing energy demand in a context of partially-present and unreliable infrastructure (IEA 2019). Renewables have been positioned as a technological messiah of development, enabling the continent to “leapfrog” traditional models of centralized grid-based electricity distribution and to radically green its economies (IRENA 2015). The IRENA 2030 roadmap for Africa’s renewable energy, for instance, suggests that renewables could in the next 20 years constitute half of Africa’s total energy mix (IRENA 2015) – pending an estimated USD $70 billion investment a year. Yet current solar PV installed capacity on the continent only accounts for 5GW, or one percent of the global total (around 600GW) (IEA 2019). Visions of a renewable “energy renaissance” (Olopade 2015, 15) in Africa remain blighted by the current reliance and increasing dependence of African countries on imported oil and fossil-based energy use, and of the continued (and new) opportunities for oil and gas extraction. In turn, discourses of energy transition and leapfrogging, with their unilinear trajectories and singular vision of a low-carbon future, tend to obscure the local specificities and histories of energy systems like Ghana’s, for whom renewable energy, in the form of hydropower, has long been its main source of energy generation.

Photo of a rural landscape with dam in the distance.
Image 1: Akosombo Dam. Akosombo, Ghana. 2016. Photo by author

In this post, I look at the contested politics of renewable energy in Ghana through a focus on the rise of “corporate solar” during an energy crisis. Ten years ago, shortly after the country discovered oil in large quantities along the coast of the Western Region, it embarked on an ambitious renewable energy path by passing the Renewable Energy Act (2011) (Act 832). The Act aimed to promote and develop the country’s renewable energy resources to ensure the country’s energy security, indigenous capacity and sustainable development. Ghana’s initial target was to increase the renewable electricity generation share, currently at less than one percent, to ten percent by 2020 (Sakah et al. 2017). Ghana thus positioned itself as West Africa’s new “energy frontier”, ushering in a resurgence of fossil extractivism paired with ambitious support for renewable energy technologies (Degani, Chalfin, and Cross 2020). In the midst of oil and gas discoveries, renewables have become a strategic, moving target conveniently reformulated to fit political agenda and rhetoric (Obeng-Darko 2019). For reasons of space, I will not elaborate on the ways in which new oil production came to stymie the growth of renewables. Instead, I provide a snapshot of solar power’s new corporate contours of energy privilege in Accra. I identify the emergence of a “renewable divide” in urban Ghana through the rise of “green enclaves” mostly enjoyed by corporate bodies and wealthy individuals. Building on the recent literature in the anthropology of energy challenging the “fantasy” of solar as a promise of democratic energy access (Szeman and Barney 2021), I consider how energy disparities endure under the transition to cleaner and renewable energy sources.

Moratorium on the Future: Renewables as Stranded Assets

In 2019, at an event on renewable energy opportunities for the private sector, a representative from the Renewable and Alternative Energy department at the Ministry of Energy made an unpopular announcement. Referring to the 2011 Renewable Energy Act, he declared that Ghana was not only on track to meet its target for 10% of total energy generated by renewables, but that it had met its target “long ago”, since the Akosombo Dam, which was built in 1966 by Kwame Nkrumah and accounts for 27% of the country’s total capacity, was technically a source of renewable energy.

Invoking the country’s proud history of electrification through the Akosombo Dam – a key project in Nkrumah’s vision for African industrialization and self-sufficiency (Miescher 2014) – and its negligible contribution to global carbon emissions, he declared the matter closed. Rather than seeking to please international conventions that did not adequately capture Ghana’s place in the global responsibility framework for climate change mitigation measures, he concluded that Ghana, like other African countries, would do well to focus instead on providing enough power for its people and industries.

Renewable energy companies’ representatives, entrepreneurs and analysts were shocked by the Minister’s backtracking commitment. That same year, as a result of overcapacity on the national grid, the government had issued a moratorium on PPAs (power purchase agreements), banning any addition to its grid until 2027. Since then, utility-scale renewable energy projects have come to a stall, leaving many with “stranded assets” and uncertainty about the future viability of large-scale solar PV and wind farms in the country. Of course, the Minister wasn’t technically wrong to claim the Akosombo Dam as a source of substantial renewable energy in the country’s electricity generation mix. To the renewable energy industry, however, it was perceived as a betrayal of the prevailing understanding that the target referred to additional capacity-building, mostly in the form of solar PVs and wind turbines.

Image 2: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author
Image 3: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author

Corporate Solar & The Renewable Divide

The moratorium on renewable energy PPAs exacerbated the inequalities that solar power has created in Ghana’s energyscape. Today, the largest clients for solar companies in Ghana are banks, hotels and factories – corporate bodies that have the capital for upfront costs. Following the frequent blackouts during the energy crisis that best the country in 2014-2016 (locally known as “Dumsor”), and the steep increase in electricity tariffs, many businesses, particularly factories in the industrial zones, switched to distributed generation, adopting solar as a “commercial strategy” to reduce their costs of manufacturing. “Dumsor” is Twi for “off-on”, a shorthand for the power outages that have become increasingly common in the country; today, the word has come to index a more general situation of disenchantment with infrastructure delivery and political expediency. Solar energy companies were quick to capitalise on the crisis as a business opportunity. In 2016, when I was researching Dumsor for my PhD thesis, I spoke to the representative of an Indian solar company with a large global presence who told me that initial investments in solar energy in Ghana prior to the crisis had been minimal because the power sector was “too good” and “too stable” for profit, compared to countries like Nigeria or Egypt that had more frequent power cuts and thus a bigger potential market.

In the turn to solar as a panacea for crisis, large corporate bodies removed their operations from the national grid, alternating between distributed solar and diesel-powered generator sets. This commercialization of distributed solar has further strained the financial situation of the national utilities, heavily dependent on industrial consumers’ revenues to subsidize residential low consumers. This has resulted in higher electricity tariffs for urban residential consumers, making electricity increasingly unaffordable to many. The capacity to switch to solar during a moment of crisis revealed new forms of energy privilege that take place outside the grid. In turn, the adoption of solar by a select elite (cf. Günel 2021) has further exacerbated the conditions of energy inequalities and precarity that many Accra residents live under. In the low-income neighbourhood of Western Accra where I have been doing fieldwork since 2014, this “renewable divide”, as we may call it, crossed two types of association. My neighbours and interlocutors perceived rooftop solar as a luxury item unaffordable to most, or as a humanitarian good reinforcing unequal trajectories of transition between the global North and the global South.

Here, “corporate solar” coexists with the “developmental” deployment of small-scale solar (in the form of solar lanterns and mini-grids) introduced by NGOs and small social enterprises in rural areas. The parallel trajectories of corporate and non-profit interests may appear surprising, operating as they do in divergent moral economies. Both types of solar projects, however, are driven by the same material, political and economic advantages of solar, as a form of cheap, reliable and distributed generation that offers autonomy from the inefficiencies of state infrastructure (Cross 2019, 54).

In effect, both “developmental” and “corporate” solar contribute to what may be called the creation of “green enclaves” in the energy landscape of Ghana, pockets of autonomous, renewable energy that serve both corporate and humanitarian rationales. I borrow the term “green enclave” from an engineer of the Volta River Authority (VRA) responsible for the hydropower generation plant at the Akosombo Dam that provides a large part of Ghana’s generation capacity. At a convention for renewable energy in Accra in 2019, he described to me plans to install solar panels on the roofs of Parliament, ministries, and the residential facilities at the Akosombo dam as “the greening of our enclaves”, a term that fittingly describes the infrastructural model of renewable energy at large in the country. It is not surprising that the Minister who had conveniently re-adjusted Ghana’s renewable energy target himself had solar panels installed on his house.

In a context of widespread energy precarity, solar in urban Ghana has exacerbated inequalities of access to reliable and affordable electricity, creating “green” geographies of inequality, energy security, and privilege.

Image 4: Solar panel business. 2019. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author

Conclusion: Energy Transitions in perspective

Ghana’s case-study has important implications for understanding energy transitions around the world. In popular discourses of energy transitions, the replacement of fossil fuel dependencies by renewable energy sources seems both inevitable and imperative. Calls for a renewable energy revolution in Africa are appealing, but they too often assume that renewables come to fill a gap, a lack, or an evidential need – in other words, that their benefits are too self-evident to forgo. Renewables, in this case, belong to the future – and fossil fuels to the past. In many ways, Ghana presents an inverse scenario of this dominant model of transition. Having powered most of its electricity needs with hydropower, it is now switching to increased reliance on thermal power plants and an oil economy. Further, this past of renewable energy through hydropower is today invoked to encourage a rush for oil and gas exploitation. In discussions with energy officials, policymakers, and the general public, I am repeatedly reminded that “Ghana is a low emitter”, bearing no responsibility to global greenhouse gas emissions. For a country that relied until recently entirely on hydropower for electricity, yet currently faces issues of reliability and affordability (Eshun and Amoako-Tuffour 2016), “sustainability” appears as a secondary concern to more pressing issues of overcapacity and improving access to reliable and affordable power. In turn, the adoption of renewables may not primarily be motivated by questions of environmental ideology, but also as a convenient (if privileged) solution to crisis. Accounting for the political potential of renewable energy futures around the world will demand that we grapple with the contradictory, divergent and conflicted visions and temporalities of energy transitions, and the relations between crisis and capital, privilege and poverty through which they come into being. 

Pauline Destrée is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. She is a member of the ERC-funded research project Energy Ethics. Her research explores energy, extraction, climate change, gender and race in Ghana.

Twitter: @PaulineDestree https://twitter.com/PaulineDestree

Bibliography

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Degani, Michael, Brenda Chalfin, and Jamie Cross. 2020. “Introduction: Fuelling Capture: Africa’s Energy Frontiers.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 38 (2): 1–18.

Eshun, Maame Esi, and Joe Amoako-Tuffour. 2016. “A Review of the Trends in Ghana’s Power Sector.” Energy, Sustainability and Society 6 (1): 9.

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Cite as: Destrée, Pauline. 2021. “Solar for the Few: Stranded Renewables and Green Enclaves in Ghana.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/pauline-destree-solar-for-the-few-stranded-renewables-and-green-enclaves-in-ghana/