Image 1: Photo taken by author in 2019 at one of the Anti-Extradition Law Bill demonstrations
Since 2021, along with the British and Australian governments, the Canadian government has relaxed immigration policy for Hong Kong immigrants. This policy offers an unconventional path with lowered barriers for Hong Kongers to apply for permanent residency in Canada. Popularly framed as ‘lifeboat’ campaigns, these immigration policies directly respond to the post-2019 political situation in Hong Kong. This political contingency was instigated by the tumultuous 2019-2020 Anti-Extradition Law Bill Movement, and the subsequent implementation of National Security Law in June 2020. Against this background, the Canadian government has combined an economic narrative, i.e., Hong Kongers being economically productive, with a political narrative, i.e., human rights concern, to legitimise this ‘lifeboat’ scheme.
The Canadian ‘lifeboat’ scheme includes two pathways: Stream A and Stream B. Stream B requires candidates to have post-secondary education qualifications and one year of work experience within Canada before they apply for permanent resident status. Interestingly, the government cancelled the requirement on education qualifications on 15 August 2023, further lowering the barrier. Following Canadian activist Harsha Walia’s writing about borders (2021), I illuminate the way a democratic logic intersects with a capitalistic logic to control border mobility under the state’s purview. I seek to problematise this naturalised connection. Under the benevolent notion of democratic intervention, how does the state deploy the notions of human rights and humanitarian care to serve an economic purpose? Why do these migrants have to be first taxonomised as productive labouring subjects in order to be considered “worthy” of democratic intervention? Further, what does democracy mean within this existing liberal democratic regime?
Under the “lifeboat” policy, it is stated that “Canada shares longstanding ties with the people of Hong Kong and is concerned with the deteriorating human rights situation there. […] Canada has put in place a number of facilitative measures to help Hong Kong residents come to Canada” (Government of Canada 2021b). Clearly, human rights concern is identified as a key component to this policy. Paradoxically, it considers economic contribution rather than political risks at home as a legitimizing clause for permanent residency. In the policy, under the section “Public policy considerations”, it is stated that: “[The policy] recognises the contributions made by Hong Kong residents to Canada’s economy and social-cultural landscape through human capital, while also promoting democratic values” (Government of Canada 2021b). In another government press release issued on 4 February 2021, similar language was adopted: “The first Hong Kong residents arrived here over 150 years ago, contributing immensely to Canada’s economic, social and political life” (Government of Canada 2021a).
Border regimes serve to create differentiated entry of migrants in order to protect public interests within the border, such as job availability and welfare system. As Walia (2021, 19) suggests, borders ‘buffer against the retrenchment of universal social programs.’ In a liberal democratic regime with strict border control, citizenship is granted based on one’s expected contribution to the national economy. It is therefore not surprising that a neoliberal state rationalises immigration policies under the premise of economic calculations (Xiang 2007). Still, in this case, the economic logic is weaved into a democratic intervention in a language that renders this intersection rational, natural, and reasonable. In other words, democratic intervention is about human rights concerns—so long as it is also generative of economic benefits. To do so, the Canadian government racialises a history of Hong Kong diaspora; this taxonomises incoming Hong Kong migrants as productive labour, which becomes a strange but also naturalised prerequisite for democratic intervention.
Scholars have examined the way the global north extracts labour from the global south while imposing militarised border regimes to deter immigrants (Besteman 2019), resulting in ‘coloniality of migration’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Nevertheless, the emigration of East Asia migrants, particularly the middle-class and the upper-middle-class, has complicated the way coloniality of migration is configured. In the case of Canadian ‘lifeboat’ campaign, I suggest that the Canadian government uses a democratic narrative to add moral fervour as they extract both skilled and unskilled labour from Hong Kong. There are two sets of repercussions. First, the democratic intervention is only enjoyed by those who are considered economically productive. Borders continue to facilitate accumulation of capital within a sovereign state. At the same time, borders preclude universal access to political refuge. Second, the democratic intervention becomes a rationalised labour extraction from East Asia to the global North.
In sum, political discourses about human rights and democracy are instrumentalised and repackaged by the West (by which I refer to as anglophone-speaking countries) to solidify their image as the global protector of human rights, while benefiting materially from westward movement of labour and capital from the global East, which sustain their roles as the civilised Man and a civilizing force in the unfinished project of modernity (Wynter 2003).
David Kwok Kwan Tsoi is a DPhil student at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. His research examines the relationship between housing, class, and migration amid political changes in Hong Kong. He also writes about informal economy and queer politics in Hong Kong.
References
Besteman, Catherine. 2019. “Militarised Global Apartheid.” Current Anthropology 60 (19): 26–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/699280.
Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación. 2018. “The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism.” Canada’s Journal on Refugees 34 (1): 16–28. https://doi.org/10.7202/1050851ar.
Walia, Harsha. 2021. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
Xiang, Biao. 2007. Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Cite as: Tsoi, David Kwok Kwan 2024. “‘Lifeboat’ Campaign for Hong Kongers: Why is Capitalistic Agenda a Mandate for Democratic Intervention?” Focaalblog 6 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/06/david-kwok-kwan-tsoi-lifeboat-campaign-for-hong-kongers-why-is-capitalistic-agenda-a-mandate-for-democratic-intervention/
Presenters: Don Kalb, Jaume Franquesa, Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Don Nonini, and Sharryn Kasmir
Disscusant: Oana Mateescu
It is forty years ago that Eric Wolf published his pathbreaking “Europe and the People Without History” (1982). The book gave an anthropological account of 500 years of European capitalist imperialism, seen from the peripheries. By doing so, it crystallized and clarified multiple debates in anthropology, history, and social theory that had marked the turbulent 60s and 70s of the last century. It was a book that in retrospect prepared the discipline brilliantly for the accelerating capitalist globalization that would mark the next fifty years.
Paradoxically, while path-breaking qua vision and method, the imminent paths opened by “Europe and the People” were almost immediately cut off. Post-structuralism, postmodernism, and “thick description” combined to destroy systemic, global, and historically explanatory visions. Such theoretical ambitions were shoved aside as “grand narratives” and delegitimized as associated with a totalizing modernism.
Under the guises of “anthropology and history” and “political economy” some of the possibilities inscribed in Wolf’s work were conserved in the 1980s and 90s. They came back to life from the 2000s onwards, carried by a younger generation, as neoliberal globalism became ever more crisis prone and new cycles of contestation were emerging. The new work, now often aligned with critical approaches in geography, focused among others on issues of labor, class, surplus populations, post-development, post-socialism, post-colonialism, austerity, new capitalist extractive and oppressive social forms, migrations, and contestations. This led to a re-uniting of political, economic, and cultural inquiry under a larger dialectical vision and method, and it came with a renewed interest for Marxian approaches next to for example anarchist, Maussian and Polanyian ones.
What sort of questions would a Wolfian anthropology pose in the current world? What is the Wolfian take on Marx and where lies its exact value? What ought to be the role of history and comparison in the anthropological endeavor? What is the value of archival and secondary sources in anthropological research and theory, next to ethnography? If we compare the Wolfian approach to thinking big with other large scale visions in anthropology – Sahlins, Levi-Strauss, Graeber, Godelier for instance – what specificities emerge that remain overly relevant?
Cite as: FocaalBlog 2022. “Eric Wolf, Europe, Histories, Capitalism. Where are we now?” Focaalblog 22 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/12/22/focaalblog-eric-wolf-europe-histories-capitalism-where-are-we-now/
In April 2022, University of Pennsylvania Press published A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador, by University of Toronto anthropologist Christopher Krupa. Tracing the expansion of capitalism in the largely rural, agrarian canton of Cayambe, Krupa’s book is an historically informed ethnography of Ecuador’s cut flower industry. In the interview below, Focaalblog co-editor Stephen Campbell talks with the author about this important new monograph.
Book cover of A Feast of Flowers
Stephen Campbell: First, thank you for agreeing to talk with me about your new book. A Feast of Flowers is brilliant on many levels—most broadly as a theoretically sophisticated contribution to anthropological political economy. To start, I’d like to ask about the book’s background. Could you say a bit on how you came to this project? What were the initial research interests that led you to studying Cayambe’s cut flower industry?
Chris Krupa: Thanks for your kind words about the book, Stephen. I know this is an ethnographic cliché, but I actually didn’t begin this project with the intention of studying the cut flower industry, at least not directly. Since the mid-90s, I’d been spending time living in indigenous communities around Cayambe and had become fascinated with both the political work of territorialized communities and the technical details of indigenous agrarian practice. I was invested in the debates occurring in Marxist anthropology at the time about rural societies, things like the articulation of modes of production and simple commodity production literatures, and was always keeping an eye on the massive export plantation sector then starting to engulf the whole region.
I started trying to map out the complex ways in which any one thing I was interested in—a community, let’s say, or a small plot of commercial onions—was becoming intelligible only as one part of a complex and dynamic social formation that included things like flower plantations and foreign currency markets in them. I found that no matter how I composed this map, capital always seemed to enter my analysis as a kind of disruptive externality, turning the anthropological project into a rather obvious moral tabulation of the violence effected by capitalist expansion, something one could do well enough without much ethnographic or historical research at all.
At the time, we were getting a lot of really competent studies of indigenous political practice in Ecuador by scholars who quite explicitly positioned their scholarship as a contribution to a kind of radical democracy project of expanding the presence of indigenous activism, something that joined with similar projects in other parts of the world. The more time I spent with these movements, the more curious I became about our opponents, which also resonated with the questions the activist-intellectuals I was living and working with were posing to me.
What we didn’t have, and don’t often get, I think, when the terms of contestation are so neatly drawn, are in-depth studies of how power actually works in a historically-specific social formation. This is particularly true, I think, of capital, especially when the dynamics of local capitalist practice seem to express broader patterns going on worldwide, such as, in this case, the expansion of labor-extensive production systems in the Global South dedicated to making specialized goods for Northern consumers.
Through a series of accidents, I managed to get invited to do research inside a flower plantation, which led to further invitations (after many, many refusals), and which kind of opened up this completely bewildering insider’s view of how wealth is made in a place like rural Ecuador today. This was something that the indigenous federations and communities I was aligned with and living in were far more interested in than anything I might have to say about what they were doing. Figuring this out became a major part of my research and took me well over a decade to really piece together, as Part I of the book tracks. It also, I think, tells a different kind of story about how rapid capitalist expansion happened in places like the indigenous highlands of Ecuador in the late 20th century.
SC: The book covers a lot of ground—from a global history of financialisation since the 20th century, to a survey of Ecuadorian race thinking, to industrial psychology, to workplace labour processes. The unifying thread running through the book, however, in my reading, is the dialectics of capitalist expansion. Would that be a fair gloss of the book’s overall conceptual contribution? Or how would you most succinctly state the book’s primary theoretical concerns?
CK: That works. One thing I really wanted to do with the book was provide a deep ethnographic account of primitive accumulation, one that could at least aspire to treating primitive accumulation with all the nuance evident in Marx’s retheorization of it. The crucial thing for me was to address with equal complexity the two inseparable processes Marx identifies as making up primitive accumulation. On the one hand, there are the brute material processes under-girding the consolidation of capitalist class relations and the increasingly narrow organization of these relations and their reproductive capacities around emergent forms of commodity production and capital accumulation. On the other hand, there is the assemblage of a new register of history that reconfigures historical positionings like past, present, and future or then/now distinctions or senses of historical arc and momentum, as well as frames of historical action and intervention, around these material transformations such that broader issues of being and becoming and so on can’t but be inflected with one’s positioning in a new capitalist historicity. There’s been a tendency to emphasize the first of these processes over the second and to reduce everything in that to somewhat shorthanded notions of dispossession, with land theft or things matching the metaphysics of property seizure becoming the iconic, foundational, scene of capitalist arising.
In northern Ecuador, the juridical weight of its rural community system has rendered indigenous land unavailable for capitalist expropriation, and the whole history of land ownership is an important part of the story. But more than that, the constellation of actors and forces and interests that came together in rapidly developing this plantation system in and around indigenous territories in northern Ecuador (which turned the country from a non-producer of commercial flowers to the third largest global exporter of them in only a few years) was infinitely greater than what can be explained by a single violently explosive event like a land grab. It involved all the forces you mention, Stephen, and I wanted to be able to trace out the interactions between these in detail to really outline what this part of primitive accumulation, the first set of processes I mention above, really looked like in this one case, as a model for how such things might be coming together in other parts of the world.
Because so much of this information is secret or not publicly available or just hard to get is probably why we tend to get rather truncated stories of capitalist process—and why it also took me over ten years to write this part of the book. But attending to the other part of this, capital’s interventions into historical production, is equally important because it allows us to see how the people directing these processes situate them in a local reality—what they imagine that to be, why they think it is that way, and how the work they are doing will intervene into that. It is where the foundational logics of capitalist accumulation get de-abstracted, rendered socially specific and concrete, and shape the way that very human component of primitive accumulation—turning people who aren’t wage workers into them—gets actualized and justified in one way or another. And it is where questions arising in our attention to the first set of processes—like, in my case, why the science of industrial psychology figures so prominently in shaping plantation labor systems and securitizing the borders between capital’s inside and outside—get answered. So, all of this, this expanded definition of primitive accumulation and its attendant ethnographic critique of capitalist historicity, is perhaps what I’d say shapes any conceptual or theoretical contributions the book may offer.
SC: You’ve framed your book as a contribution to understanding post-colonial capitalism in general. But you also delve, in much detail, into the specificity of Cayambe’s cut flower industry and its situatedness in Ecuadorian history and in Ecuadorian race thinking. Is there something particular about this case that renders it especially helpful in illuminating the workings of post-colonial capitalism more broadly?
CK: Yes, I think there is but I should probably clarify what I mean by “postcolonial capitalism”. This is a term of specification not generalization. On the one hand, it is meant to push for a specification of the components of a given capitalist system that draw their force from their invocation of frameworks devised to advance or stabilize a prior colonial system. This involves a pluralization of both capitalism and colonialism and the tracing out of historical continuities between these in their unique historical assemblages.
For instance, it matters a good deal that the Spanish conquest of the northern Andes did not advance through a singularly genocidal agenda and that it wasn’t just the land, as a potentially vacant resource, that was valued. Indigenous people were needed, as both tribute-paying subjects and as workers in the Crown’s labor drafts, in mining operations throughout the colonial Andes, on the agrarian and domestic operations of settlers, and in all kinds of jobs that settlers wanted done for them. The violence of conquest regularly returned to the question of how to fold indigenous subjects most productively into dominant economic and political agendas and reap value from that way.
This orientation comes to define the ways hacienda complexes operated when they took over the entire rural Andes and absorbed indigenous populations into them as resident peons after Independence. And this sets up a particular approach to capitalist development in the 20th century, which itself builds on over 100 years of dominant political thinking in Ecuador that united questions of economy and race, of capitalist expansion and indigeneity, into a single question that then shapes the capitalist-expansion-as-indigenous-salvation script organizing plantation hiring practices, labor processes, and so on, as I discuss throughout the book. So that’s one part of what I mean, which is a kind of broad methodological orientation.
The other part is more specific, in that I use the term “postcolonial capitalism” to characterize a form of capitalism that folds a certain claim to historical intervention into its operational rationality, specifically presenting itself and its expansion as curative of the lingering colonial residues haunting the present. In other words, I don’t use the term “postcolonial” here as an objective descriptor—obviously, if I were to try to locate the mis-en-scene of capitalist arising in highland Ecuador, it could certainly be debated whether “postcolonial” is most effective for capturing its complex temporal register. Similarly, if I were trying to offer a political perspective on that same process, it is open to debate if postcoloniality would best capture that.
Instead, I use the term here to identify what might be called an ideological framework appropriated by capital itself to position itself historically and to overlay the violence of expansion with a claim, drawing on ideas about progressive futurity and temporal momentum, to beneficent social good. Here, the colonial legacy up for grabs is indigenous abjection, the equation of indigeneity with misery and exclusion, and even the relevance of racializing terms like indigeneity at all. Capital’s claim is to finally get over all this—this is what its expansion promises. “Postcolonial capitalism” points to the interactive co-existence of these contradictory processes—the appropriation of colonial residues into the core operational procedures of an expanding capitalist system and the claim that this system is uniquely qualified to eradicate colonial residues from the places it expands into.
SC: The term “racial capitalism” appears in the book’s introduction, though it’s not a concept to which you explicitly return. Yet, the dialectics of race and capitalism is definitely one of the book’s central concerns. How would you situate your book in relation to the growing literature on racial capitalism? What do you see as your book’s primary contribution to this literature?
CK: Right, well as I’ve said above, one of the core historical threads running through the book is the deep connections between the economic and racial sciences and agendas in Ecuador, and of political projects fusing the two together as a pretext for various sorts of interventions into indigenous territories. By the early 20th century, the idea of “capitalism” in Ecuador becomes hard to think outside of its figuration as a liberating force for highland indigenous people bound in different ways to hacienda enclosures. Capitalism emerges as the solution to what was referred to as the “Indian Problem,” and today’s flower plantations are heirs to this mission. The ethnographic work inside flower plantations in the latter chapters of the book show how this agenda is set in motion in plantation labour systems.
But at another level, I’ve been admittedly quite influenced by the ways early American contributors to the literature on racial capitalism based their use of the concept on a searing critique of the millennialism under-girding conventional capitalist history. Their re-tracing of the rise of capitalist class relations out of post-abolition efforts to continue the economic structure of slavery opens up a pretty important discussion of the inherently racializing character of the location “labour” itself. It also points to our need to continually ferret out the historically specific ways that capitalism disguises the violence inherent to its routine operations. As I show in the book, the social work of primitive accumulation rests entirely on both of these processes in its historical reconstruction of the pre-labouring poor as marked by forms of consequential and often essentialized difference that are progressively overcome by their proletarianization. This is a central narrative trope inherent to primitive accumulation as a genre of elite historicity.
SC: Race is central to your theorisation of post-colonial capitalism. Yet, it struck me that the large white and mestizo populations of Latin America distinguish this region from most post-colonial countries in Asian and Africa. Is that a relevant distinction to make? Would you nonetheless say that the dialectics of race and capitalism that you trace in the book play out similarly in post-colonial contexts elsewhere in the global South?
CK: I can’t answer that question, but I think that’s the sort of fine-grained ethnographic and historical question that I hoped to offer one more source of inspiration for with this book.
SC: One thing that stood out for me was how deeply Hegelian the book is. You write, for example, of “the plantation as an object constituted by relations with forces outside it,” of “the flower as negation,” of narrative frames “located neither entirely inside nor outside” the domain of capital, of “mediation between inner and outer worlds,” of a site of knowledge creation “dialectically related to its opposite,” and of a form of capital accumulation “whose ‘outside is essential,’ of its essence.” This Hegelian dimension is not explicitly named as such in the book. Could you elaborate on how an understanding of Hegelian logic informed your research analysis and writing? Was this an approach you had in mind before you started the project, or was it something that developed over the course of research and writing?
CK: Good catch, Stephen. Guilty. I think one of the most consequential things I did during my graduate training was participate in a slow, page-by-page, group reading, led by Neil Larsen, of Hegel’s Phenomenology, followed immediately by doing the same with Capital V.1. I also, having received zero training in field methods during my graduate education, brought Bertell Ollman’s Alienation with me to the field and used that as my field methods training instead. It’s all there, I suppose, in Ollman’s Hegelian reading of Marx’s method, and it’s striking how well that book works as a primer in ethnographic methodology if you’re interested in the sort of things you and I might be interested in.
Ollman’s reading of Marx centers on his dialectical phenomenology, his radical critique of the object, his explosion of metaphysical notions of presence, and of suchness being an effect of overlapping webs of relations, which logically exist prior to and become determinate of things themselves. How to set all this in dynamic motion as an ethnographer? was a question I asked myself throughout fieldwork and there were a lot of missteps in it along the way. Writing the book, I think I was best able to work through this in the chapters on interiority, especially in the overlaps between notions of psychological interiority that can only be grasped through processes of exteriorization like projection, capital’s outwardly expansive dynamics that only work through processes of interiorizing its externalities, the shifting spatial dynamics codifying capitalist/non-capitalist locations, and the scientific efforts to construct a profile of the inner life of indigenous people as preludes to various forms of external intervention upon them.
SC: One of the recurring themes in your discussion of post-colonial capitalism is the notion of difference. Difference has also been a key theme in the anthropology of capitalism that is influenced by J.K. Gibson Graham. Yet, whereas Gibson-Graham, and the anthropologists whom they’ve influenced, employ a Deleuzian notion of autonomous difference, your book advances an explicitly relational understanding of difference—specifically, of differences that are “internally related.” Would you say that this is a relevant distinction to make? Could you elaborate on your understanding of difference, especially as it pertains to the theorisation of capitalist expansion?
CK: Let me answer this in a slightly different way than I think you might intend. The book is an anthropological critique of political economy and its topic is capitalism. I am not interested in attempting a general theory of something like difference, though I do draw from some of my teachers who were. Difference enters the analytic because it was there from the start. There from the start because the lineage I trace of capitalist thought in Ecuador, right up to the present, begins with, and never ceases to ponder, the question of what the imposition of things like free labour contracts or monetary remuneration of hourly wages or disciplined, routinized labour routines, or regularized working hours might mean for effecting a (spiritual, moral, political) transformation of indigenous society.
The reverse was also true—at a certain point in the late 1800s, questions about what indigenous people are, why they are that way, how they might become different, and so on, get completely entwined with questions about the ways these markers of indigenous difference are determined by the hacienda enclosures to which they are imagined to be universally bound, stimulating the question of what, then, would become of indigenous people, and indigeneity itself as a category of difference, were the haciendas to be replaced by capitalist forms of production. There from the start also because primitive accumulation, as a genre, locates the foundational act of capitalist emergence in an encounter with difference, that is, with a description of a population retroactively constituted as pre-labour and defined by certain features that are magically transformed through their absorption into the project of capitalist expansion. Those originary features are bad or pathological, their transformed conditions are good or curative. This is a pretty standard trope in primitive accumulation’s narrative form, as I said earlier.
To follow your distinction, an “autonomous” notion of difference is as central to capitalist method as a “relational” one is to its critique. The urban and rural poor are so because they are given to sloth and the wasteful expenditure of time, says the former. Time thrift only marks the pre-labouring subject with difference because their potential labour-power is being valued in measured temporal units for your profit, says the latter, who addresses the former as a predator. Difference is there from the start. So is its critique.
SC: To close, could you say a bit about what are you working on now? What is your next project?
CK: I’m currently writing an anthropological history of the late Cold War years in Ecuador, focusing on the way a small guerrilla movement was used by the proto-neoliberal state to justify an expansive campaign of terror. It’s also about the Cold War prison and the intimate solidarities of revolutionary practice, and attempts to do all this through an analytic method that I associate with older Marxist literary criticism.
SC: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. I encourage interested readers of this interview to check out the full book, which is available at the University of Pennsylvania Press website, and elsewhere.
Christopher Krupa is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto (Scarborough). He has researched and written on Andean Ecuador for over 15 years. He is co-editor (with David Nugent) of State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule (2015), and author of A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador (2022).
Cite as: Campbell, Stephen. 2022. “On the dialectics of capitalist expansion: An interview with Christopher Krupa.” Focaalblog 6 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/10/06/stephen-campbell-on-the-dialectics-of-capitalist-expansion-an-interview-with-christopher-krupa/
At the end of July, a remarkable event unfolded in three distinct but significant sites in Canada. Pope Francis, the Argentinian current supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, travelled to Maskwacis, Ste. Anne de Beaupré and Iqaluit on his “penitential pilgrimage” in Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for North America), an historic visit intended to allow for “forgiveness” for the heinous acts at Catholic Residential Schools which for over almost a century (1885-1996) separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and communities and subjected them to awful physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
The event earned some attention in the media internationally and in Canada, where it monopolized national and local airwaves and the Internet. The media drummed up popular fascination, in “will he, or won’t he?” fashion, with the potential Apology from the Pope – a possibility planted earlier this year in March when a delegation of members of 32 First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities visited the Vatican and met with the Pope to share their experience in residential schools and express the importance of a formal papal declaration of apology in their homeland. Part of the delegation’s aim was a call for the rescinding of the 1492 Treaty of Tordesillas and its accompanying “Doctrine of Discovery”, which originally endowed early Christian explorers the legal authorization to occupy and extract from a supposed ‘terra nullius’.
We draw attention to the need for anthropologists and other scholars to recognize the importance of what is at stake in this papal event as a culmination of colonial histories and processes that are not merely “religious”. While many may read the papal visit as simply an enactment by an archaic religious institution breathing its last breaths on the global stage, there is much more at work here that touches on the most pressing issues of our day concerning (self-)sovereignty, governance and decolonization, and the powerful hidden theopolitical economy of bodies, blood and soil, and the commons that underlies them. As such, this papal visit and other prominent public Church performances also invoke, implicitly though distinctly, themes familiar to many anthropologists in our thinking and research: debt and guilt, capitalism and care, denizen-ship and vulnerability.
A Pope is never a single story, nor a truly singular individual. Technically, the Pope is the Bishop of Rome, in straight lineal descent from Saint Peter, making him a unique combination of the historical person, the geopolitical configuration of the Church (as sovereign of the Vatican City State), and the liturgical, “God-manifested” investiture of the Pontificate. While many regarded the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as marking a pivotal rejuvenation of the Church and a welcome modernizing shift toward reform and social engagement, the two pontificates that followed Vatican II dampened any such hopes. Both Pope (and now Saint) John Paul II (1978-2005) and Pope Benedict XVI (2005-2013) manifested ambiguous stances toward Indigenous people and the deep histories of violence, neglect, and exploitationin the Americas.
John Paul II, personally invested in a post-cold war politics of anti-communism, was a staunch defender of ‘human life’ as a universal value rather than something to be understood as mediated by social and cultural specificities. He travelled to some 120 countries and oversaw an unprecedented surge in the canonization of new saints, including in the Americas. Yet in this continent he also undid years of efforts by more ‘progressive’ Church factions in promoting participatory democracy, land rights advocacy, human and Indigenous rights, and in the fight against poverty and neoliberal policies of international structural adjustment – the broad canvas of programs that theologically and pastorally became known as part of the movement of Liberation Theology. John Paul II’s geopolitical orientation toward Turtle Island could be summed up by his words during a brief visit in 1984 where, in Ste. Anne de Beaupré, he stated, rather elliptically, “We know that Jesus Christ makes possible reconciliation between peoples, with all its requirements of conversion, justice and social love. If we truly believe that God created us in his image, we shall be able to accept one another with our differences and despite our limitations and our sins.” Reconciliation for this pope was thus fundamentally a repairing enabled by the sweeping of vexing “differences” and past evils under the supposedly apolitical carpet of a transcendent universal (European) catholicity.
In contrast to his predecessor, Benedict XVI appeared more interested in the “Arab world” rather than the Americas, which he visited only briefly twice (Brazil in 2007, and Mexico in 2012, en route to Cuba). In travels to Lebanon, Syria, and Germany he worked to encourage, not always successfully, Christian-Muslimdialogue, visibly more at ease as a theologian rather than a pastor surrounded by a crowd. More generally, he had an infamous role in partly covering priestly sexual abuse before becoming Pope, but also, perhaps unknown to many, while Pope, tried to address the abuses committed within and by members of new 19th and 20th century religious Orders (such as the Congregation of the Legionaries of Christ and their founder Marcial Maciel) that had been much in the grace of John Paul II. The “traditionalism”–in both theological orthodoxy and disposition – of this German Pope also served to bolster the “old”, pre-Reformation Orders within the church and affirmed the Christian roots of Europe and its ‘civilization’. Yet when Benedict XVI met a First Nations delegation visiting the Vatican in 2009 (headed by then National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Phil Lafontaine), the pontiff expressed a heartfelt shame and sorrow for the suffering of those living with the tragic legacy of Catholic residential schools, and blessed sacred medicine brought by delegation members. However, the Pope’s utterance of remorse took place on Vatican soil, as part of a private visit, not an act of attempted reconciliation on Turtle Island.
When Francis became Pope, however, the world expected something different. As the first Latin American Pope, with a theological and pastoral proximity to the poor and the “peripheries” (though with an unclear association with Argentina’s military regime while Provincial of the Jesuits in Buenos Aires), it was thought he could open the magisterium of the Church to an embracing of the divorced, homosexuality, the ordination of women priests, and the tackling of priestly sexual abuses, while setting in motion a concrete system of reparation. Now, amid the ninth year of his pontificate, an opening on these matters has been only partial.
Nevertheless, Pope Francis has called attention to capitalism’s “culture of waste” and our universal denizen-ship on the earth as “our common home”; in 2015 he met for over three weeks with Indigenous communities in the Amazon toward mobilizing clergy and others for an “Integral Ecology” of “pastoral, cultural, and ecological conversion” in the interests of Indigenous survival. In addition, he has pointed to the aging, “grandfather”–like nature of European societies which he urges must rejuvenate their ancient cultural values by means of new immigrant blood.
These overtures have been appreciated especially by non-Catholics, attracted by their ethically driven politics of inclusion and active collective responsibility in a time of increasing individualist populist politics world-wide. Conservative Catholics, however, have portrayed Francis as a mere pastoral figure rather than one with true theological gravitas, a breaker of traditions rather than an architect of authentic intra-church alliances. Moreover, the ambiguity of this Pope from the Americas is precisely regarding its Indigenous peoples: they are beloved as ‘primordial’ caretakers of the earth and holders of ancestors’ wisdom yet remain trapped in the romanticizing gaze of Francis in his own embodiment of an immigrant European in the New World.
The most striking image in the just-completed Turtle Island papal pilgrimage is the frail, wheel-chaired body of Francis as the agent of avowed penitence. The popular enthrallment with the highly mediatized story of the papal visit, not just in Canada but worldwide, points to a collective desire for a punctual, perlocutionary healing, as if the spoken apology “for deplorable evil” could perform the erasure of the stubborn stain of guilt not just for the Church. In this context, the Pope as the Church’s metonymic leader becomes the proxy for non-indigenous Canadian society at large (the latter, after all, tacitly accepted the colonial assimilationist system that allowed the unspeakable abuses of Indigenous children to take place).
Indeed, at the very start of his visit this unique (as both the first Jesuit and non-European) Pope could be seen solemnly and pensively cradling his chin and mouth in his hand as if hesitant about the words he would soon be expected to utter. Later, in Maskwacis, he was enveloped in a soundscape of sacred chanting and drumming, grinning as he donned an Indigenous ceremonial headdress. The moment displayed a willful audaciousness typical of the Church, justified by the familiar theological principle of Humanitas – a vitalization of ‘cultures’ under a universal umbrella that sees all members of those Cultures as children of God. Yet, the apparent seamlessness of this harmonious scene later became undone by the raw, devastating, impromptu spectacle of a lone woman, Si Pih Ko, powerfully singing, in Cree, her fist raised to the sky, an alternative version of Canada’s national anthem known as “Our Village”, rebuking the papal presence while protesting the death of her brother in prison.
Image 1: Chief Wilton Littlechild and Pope Francis, Maskwacis, Alberta, July 26, 2022 (photo by Guglielmo Mangiapane, Reuters; the authors are grateful for the right to publish the image here)
If, as Carl Schmitt says, all political concepts are secularized theological ones, Pope Francis’s recurring gestures of apology for “cultural destruction” came crashing to a ground of (missed) interpellations and apologies, while he continued to offer his fragile body for a performative Church and State healing of indigenous lives ravaged by the violence of genocide – a word the pontiff spoke only when he was safely on the plane back to Rome.
Thus, the concept of reconciliation by Pope Francis was affectively mobilized through the soil, commons, soundscapes, and bodies as these hinged on the ultimate sacrifice of Christ’s crucifixion and a human/divine suffering that were, in this highly mediatized visit, notably devoid of Marian iconicity. In this framework, the singular yet communal suffering of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples becomes part of the ‘universal’ redemptive incarnation and blood of Christ, and, by extension, the healing sovereignty of the Canadian state.
The much-anticipated apology for the methodical cruelty of educational Catholic missions, and the Catholic Church’s role in past and ongoing colonialism, cannot be understood simply through an anthropological lens of battles for and refusal of modern state (self-)sovereignty. This 2022 papal journey through Turtle Island made glaringly evident that a colonial Church infrastructure is deeply engrained in a Christianity of the modern Canadian state, as the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops made clear by orchestrating, albeit not in line with Pope Francis’s will, an estranging Eucharistic Mass performed in Latin (an archaic norm abandoned post-Vatican II) in Edmonton’s Commonwealth stadium on July 26. Throughout this visit we beheld an aging papal body answering Indigenous calls for the dis-entangling of Catholic colonial violence through his encounter with the sacred soundscape, walking the soil (even if in a wheelchair), and in his public acts of listening.
‘True’ reconciliation remains a matter of the return of stolen gifts and livelihoods, requiring a new articulation between economies of suffering and indebtedness. From the perspective of Catholic theology, indebtedness is intrinsic to the tension between guilt and debt, where guilt is the unavoidable condition of being born as human (fallen from Eden), and debt is enjoined by God’s gift of life that cannot ever be fully repaid. The tension of guilt and debt in their eternal production of indebtedness is a “vital” theological hinge and a primary force of a capitalist market that functions as a never-ending fulfillment of drives and desires. Reconciliation then is also a much-needed breaking of precisely this theological hinge
Yet, in a way that was perhaps unperceived by many, this papal visit with and beyond the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island affords the possibility that “reconciliation” is not only a matter of voicing and representation, sovereignty and its ongoing unravelling, or retribution and (unmade) apologies. It also a political, theological, and cosmological matter of a mystery of incarnation, in its particular bodily forms of fragility—a fragility now more than ever common to all living beings. As potent as this mystery of incarnation may be for healing, it may not be enough.
Valentina Napolitano is Professor of Anthropology and Connaught Scholar at the University of Toronto. Valentina Napolitano’s work weaves together anthropology, political theology, and Critical Catholic Studies. She is currently focusing on a book on mysticism and politics in the 21st century.
Kristin Norget is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. Her current research interests are concerned with mediatization and contemporary strategies of evangelization of the Roman Catholic Church focused on Mexico and Peru. She has also published on issues of indigeneity and Catholic liberation theology in Mexico.
Cite as: Valentina Napolitano and Kristin Norget. 2022. “Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State.” Focaalblog, 12 August. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/08/12/valentina-napolitano-kristin-norget-pope-francis-reconciliation-and-the-state/
Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology – IUAES, in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and FocaalBlog, organized a conference on the 26-27 May, 2022, in Budapest, addressing the escalating crises of global capitalism.
Since 1989, processes of neoliberal globalization, financialization, the erosion of welfare states, and the decline of ‘the standard labor contract’, have produced deepening inequalities and hierarchies, long time hidden under the mantra of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Privatization, gentrification, dispossession, devaluation, and displacement have increased in a multitude of settings despite intermittent mass mobilizations, which were often seen as ‘middle class’. The undermining of democratic possibilities has reinforced the super-exploitation of diverse groups in many places. Globalization, technological speed up and the platformization of labor-markets are threatening ‘middle class’ jobs’ in North and South. Deepening exploitation of labor is increasingly intersected with aggressive rent taking by monopoly sections of capital and states. Issues of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, sometimes interwoven with waves of migration, have resurfaced, in tandem with the resulting authoritarianism. Accelerating climate change is being addressed in pro-capitalist ways, likely leading to further inequalities, displacements, and challenges to survival. Global imperial rivalries are intensifying and generating new cold wars and ‘global wars’, increasingly of a purportedly ‘civilizational nature’, like the Ukrainian calamity that is playing itself out on the EU border.
The late Immanuel Wallerstein predicted that politics in this ‘decisive era of the world-system’ will be ever more volatile as inescapable choices must be made about democratic or authoritarian solutions. Most of our problems are well known and anticipated, but narrow ideas about ‘proven causation’ and ‘concluding evidence’ paralyze any decision making on behalf of established interests, while national publics are being fed lies and deceptions, both by the technocrats and the ‘authoritarians’ and right-wing populists. Crisis moments are steadily dealt with ‘unprepared’ and in fire-fighting mode. Left wing grassroots movements are specialized on small scale practical utopias but large-scale breakthroughs for the Left seem out of reach.
If this describes roughly where we are now, what can we expect next? Can we responsibly extrapolate and speculate? What sort of a global capitalism might we be inhabiting in thirty years from now? What can we discover as its likely core tendencies, elements, and relations? What modes of resistance are people experimenting with? What are the visions and opportunities to build a more equal and just society? Where is the new counter politics, where are the new counter movements?
Roundtable on War
Taras Fedirko (University of St Andrews) Militarized civil society and the economy of war in Ukraine
Volodymyr Arthiuk (University of Oxford) The expected war: scales of conflict around Ukraine from February 2014 to February 2022
Denys Gorbach (Sciences Po) Identitarian landscapes in Ukraine before and during the war
Volodymyr Ischenko (Free University Berlin) Madman’s war? Ideology, hegemony crisis, and the dynamics of depoliticization in Russians’ support for the invasion of Ukraine
– moderated by Don Kalb (University of Bergen)
Roundtable on Migration
Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center) Migration turn and the crisis of capitalism.,
Noémi Katona (Centre for Social Science, Hungarian Academy of Sciences/Helyzet) The division of reproductive labor in global capitalism: the case of migrant care workers in Europe,
Béla Soltész (Eötvös Loránd University), “The wanted, the unwanted and the invisible. Interpreting distinctions and selectivity of Hungarian migration policy”
Nina Glick Schiller (Manchester University), Has Migration Studies Lost Its Subject? Migration Studies, Global Disorders, and Shared Precarities
– moderated by Diana Szántó (Artemisszio Foundation/Polanyi Center)
Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ I
Luisa Steur (University of Amsterdam) Cuba Update
Marc Morell (University of Bergen) On transformative movements in neither authoritarian nor egalitarian but flawed paths. A Maltese illustration
Attila Antal (Eötvös Loránd University) Illiberalism as Emergency Governance
Gábor Scheiring (Bocconi University) The national-populist mutation of neoliberalism in East-Central Europe
– moderated by Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center)
Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ II
Florin Poenaru (University of Bucharest) Tanks, tankies and think-tanks. Anthropological vignettes from the Romanian garrison
Jeff Maskovsky (The City University of New York) Not Yet Fascist: The Journey from Neoliberalism to Corporate Authoritarianism of the United States
Ágnes Gagyi (University of Gothenburg) Bridge position and regime fixes: semi-peripheral contexts to “illiberalism” in Hungary
Bruno de Conti (University of Campinas) Bolsonaro: the economic agenda behind the smoke screen
– moderated by Dorottya Mendly (Corvinus University)
Roundtable on Our Futures
David Harvey (The City University of New York)
Michael Burawoy (UC Berkely)
Ida Susser (The City University of New York)
Don Kalb (University of Bergen)
– moderated by Mary Taylor (The City University of New York)
Cite as: Focaalblog. 2022. “New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism.” Focaalblog, 5 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/07/05/don-kalb-new-times-confronting-the-escalating-crises-of-global-capitalism/
Responding to a question about future of the MBA (Master of Business Administration) in the wake of the pandemic, the Dean of a top program recently suggested that “the future is bright,” but would require “a fundamental rethinking of business education. When the MBA was first established a century ago, there was a real sense that we would be forming leaders of business and society, a focus on forming values. I see a return to that earlier concept of business education.”
Just prior to the onset of the pandemic, MBA applications were sharply down, business and popular press were declaring the death or obsolescence of the MBA, and business programs were scrambling to reinvent themselves. But what a difference a global pandemic makes. My comments here build on ethnographic research conducted in MBA programs prior to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as a recent sampling of online informational forums for MBA applicants, program websites, and business media to examine the ways MBA administrators are reframing the value proposition of the MBA, marketing the degree as a necessary feature of the “bright future” of capitalism after COVID.
The early 20th and 21st centuries are productive bookends for thinking about this. There are intriguing parallels of economic and social disruptions, transformations in globalization, epochal technological changes, and, of course, experiences of global pandemics. But rather than thinking with the Dean about these parallels, I want to highlight some salient differences in the anticipatory rebranding of the post-COVID MBA. Thinking against the grain of the Dean’s hearkening back to origins elucidates a sleight-of-hand in current directions in MBA training – having to do less with a reanimation of the early 20th century specialist manager, than with “his” disappearance.
Producing Managerial Subjects
A common misperception of MBA training is that the students learn nothing; the programs are merely credentialing exercises providing entrée to elite business networks. But, as I’ve argued in a recent ethnography of MBA training in US business programs, MBAs get more than they bargain for (Orta 2019). MBA programs present highly distilled versions of the concepts and habits of capitalism. Course content is simplified, to be sure, but this streamlining takes on compelling depth through the cascading reinforcement of material across the curriculum. Programmatic simulations of professional life further instill a habitus of fast-paced decision-making in overscheduled conditions, based upon imperfect information. MBAs learn to frame the necessity of this simplification as an index of “hard work,” for which they should be highly compensated.
MBA programs have developed an additional value proposition: technical skills are not enough; an effective capitalist leader requires “talent.” MBA programs sell themselves as spaces for the cultivation of talent, helping students become better versions of themselves to be more effective versions of “the MBA.” The “x-factor” of talent is cast as the necessary supplement to the shortcomings of technical business teachings when faced with the real world. And the connections of the MBA to the technical operations of capitalism as a systemic form of profit extraction are increasingly masked by the rhetoric of talent as a driver of corporate success – a talent theory of value.
MBA Programs on the Eve of COVID
On the eve of COVID, MBA programs were dying—reeling from a set of compounding crises, including the Great Recession and MBA complicity in the runaway financialization that led to it. A season of institutional soul-searching spurred updated curricula and non-finance focused program tracks. A second crisis involved MBA programs’ increasing dependence over recent decades on international student enrollments. The visa policies of the Trump administration triggered a precipitous drop in international MBA enrollments. Some programs closed; others rolled out a variety of online degrees aimed at a broader pool of international and domestic students.
The Continuous Reinvention of the MBA
Such challenges and changes were business as usual. The arc of MBA education has been a continuous project to legitimize and reinvent the MBA idea across a series of scandals, crises, and transformations of capitalism, beginning with the founding of collegiate business degrees at the turn-of-the-20th century. Seen as lowering institutional standards with vocational school commonness, nascent business programs sought to emulate more established programs in law or medicine. And they tapped into an intensifying cultural sense of “business” as a discrete realm and a driver of an American modernity (Cruikshank 1987, Daniel 1998).
While the earliest iteration of the MBA curriculum was thus tightly connected to claimed civic needs, those needs were in the service of a still emerging order of extractive capitalism. By the 1930s, the corporation could be taken as standing for a particularly “American” modernity and generative of what came to be seen as the American way of life (Berle and Means 1932, Chandler 1977). MBA programs connected their mission explicitly to serving this process (e.g., Johnson 1906, Donham 1931).
By mid-century, business education was an established part of the landscape of higher education in the U.S. “The MBA” was a recognizable avatar of capitalism, albeit a shifty one: subject to recurring reinventions in the face of critiques, challenges and crises over the post-War decades and beyond – including the fallout from 2009 and the enrollment crisis (e.g. Drucker 1950, Gordon 1959, Pierson 1959, Petriglieri 2012).
The MBA Value Proposition for a Post-COVID World
The MBA responses to the post-2009 and post-2016 challenges positioned the programs well for the COVID years. Flexibility in delivering the MBA was already becoming a habit as many programs developed online and hybrid MBAs to maintain access to international students as well as employed domestic students. “Rigor” is a new keyword as recruiters legitimate the online programs; there is now a separate infrastructure of rankings for online MBAs, reproducing the bounding and marketing mechanisms of the traditional programs.
“Diversity” is another keyword. Business schools continue to struggle with gender and, especially, racial inclusion and equity among students and faculty—a concern linked increasingly by administrators and business trade publications to BlackLivesMatter and the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color in the U.S. However, while many programs report statistics along lines of gender and race, the emphasis of much of the recruitment materials I have reviewed is on the “diversity” of professional fields represented in a cohort. This follows from post-2009 efforts to distance the MBA from finance. Deans now say things like: “many of our students come from homogenous worlds, but their classmates have a diversity of professional experiences in different careers.” Students echo the pitch, describing the ways the “MBA experience of working with people outside of your industry broadens horizons.”
As MBA programs recruit for the post-COVID world, they are most aggressively selling their “transformational” impact on students – often downplaying traditional functional training in business. “Transformational impact is the mission,” said one Dean, adding, “Our realization is that a lot of that impact will not come from the classroom only.” Students describe their “MBA journey” similarly, stressing how the degree allows them to “view things more holistically.” “The MBA program forced me to look at what I value,” reports one student. Others describe a growing sense of “confidence,” and tell prospective applicants, “the MBA helps bring more you into the world.”
While the MBA may help bring more you into the world, it does so in coordination with a curious managerial self-effacement. There is a lot of talk about teams and the value of delegating decisions to local levels. This squares with neoliberal the rhetoric of decentralization and agility, and is familiar from existing MBA emphasis on entrepreneurial talent and soft skills.
But there is something more in the mix: the disruptions and anxieties of the pandemic. Students are “rethinking what they are doing.” Programs now promise “lifelong career coaching” for careers of change and uncertainty. And at a time when routinized neoliberal truths of business are explicitly up for debate, MBA programs stress the importance of humility, of not knowing what to do, as a facet of leadership in uncertainty.
The focus on talent and leadership skills increasingly downplays the relevance of core functional practices of managerial capitalism. They are mentioned – usually as part of the effort to show the “rigor” of online programs. But current marketing of the MBA underscores an ascendant conceptualization of talent that eclipses the core disciplines of capitalist extraction and harnesses the post-COVID business leader to a differently imagined project.
MBA marketing explicitly positions the talented MBA as the solution to a set of social and political crises exacerbated by the pandemic. “Leadership is more important than ever,” commented one Dean as he described a three-fold crisis facing the post-COVID US: “health, economics, and inequality.” Further, he laments, increasing polarization from before the pandemic has led to a loss of trust in governmental and non-governmental institutions, which “typically provide the safety net in times of crisis.” Thus, he identified a fourth post-COVID crisis: “leadership.”
That amounts to a familiar reading of the times. But he caught my attention when he went on to say, “But the level of trust has gone up dramatically in the business community. This is a great time for the business platform. An opportunity that goes well beyond anything that has been there before. […] We can now tackle issues that go beyond traditional profit and loss. We can have a bigger impact on society. [T]he expectation is there that business will step in.”
This goes beyond a post-2009 trend in business schools to link business to transformative social solutions through electives in social entrepreneurship or sustainability. Those turned on a familiar vision of doing good through doing well (in business) and have spawned a host of metrics to measure (and therefore manage) social impact in familiar business style. The Dean’s comments decouple the impact of business leadership from the fundamental operations of business and gesture to political governance in ways that have not been an explicit part of the MBA project – at least with reference to the US.
There is good strategic reason for this shift, as the post-pandemic economy seems likely to be characterized by continuing changes in the neoliberal alliance of governing policies and capital. As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink puts it in his most recent annual letter to CEOs,
“COVID-19 has also deepened the erosion of trust in traditional institutions and exacerbated polarization in many Western societies. This polarization presents a host of new challenges for CEOs. […] In this environment, facts themselves are frequently in dispute, but businesses have an opportunity to lead. Employees are increasingly looking to their employer as the most trusted, competent, and ethical source of information – more so than government, the media, and NGOs.”
Other guidance for the post-pandemic economy makes a similar point: “beyond building resilience in busines and the economy, public and private leaders must also build societal resilience.” As MBA programs are marketing themselves to prospective applicants whose concerns are shaped by the crises listed by the Dean, this message of civic leadership seems resonant.
The pandemic has made the contradictions of capitalism visible in new ways, including accelerating levels of inequality. While this has opened up new conversations about equity and governance and provoked commentary on the expanding job description of the CEO, there is no indication that extraction of profit is not still the name of the game. Yet, in marketing the MBA for the post-COVID world, there is a sleight-of-hand by which the extractive operations of capitalism are screened from view. This may be the apotheosis of the manager-turned-leader, as the training of capitalist managers has progressively erased direct reference to the technical ends of managerial capitalism.
MBA programs have long been adept at repackaging themselves to weather crises, and scandals. Along the way they have shaped an ideal of the capitalist manager that balances the technical operations of capitalist industry with the softer skills and innate qualities of leadership – even entertaining the claim that MBAs don’t really learn anything of functional importance from their programs. As they turn to their “bright” post-COVID future, MBA programs are continuing a longer project of producing the disappearing manager.
Andrew Orta is professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture (California, 2019).
References
Berle, Adolf A., Gardiner C. Means. 1991 [1932]. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Reprint edition. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A: Transaction Publishers.
Chandler, Alfred. 1977. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. 1987. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908-1945. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press.
Daniel, Carter A. 1998. MBA: The First Century. Bucknell University Press.
Donham, Wallace Brett, and Alfred North Whitehead. 1931. Business Adrift. Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill.
Drucker, Peter Ferdinand. 1950. “The Graduate Business School” Fortune 42 (August 1950): 92-116.
Gordon, Robert Aaron, and James Edwin Howell. 1959. Higher Education for Business. Columbia University Press.
Johnson, Joseph French. 1906. “The Business School and What It Should Do.” The New York Times, September 15, 1906 page 9.
Petriglieri, G. 2012. “Are Business Schools Clueless or Evil.” Harvard Business Review Blog Network.
Pierson, Frank Cook. 1959. The Education of American Businessmen: A Study of University-College Programs in Business Administration. McGraw-Hill.
Orta, Andrew. 2019. Making Global MBAs. The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Oakland, California: University of California Press.
Cite as: Orta, Andrew. 2022. “The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear.” FocaalBlog, 30 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/30/andrew-orta-the-mba-wont-die-but-it-is-trying-to-disappear/
Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations] for the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems.” (Kaminer, 2022). A task preliminary to operationalizing the concept, however, is the task of clarifying what it refers to. This is especially so for two reasons.
First: currently the term is not derived specifically from Marx’s reflections but is used to refer to a wide range of phenomena not all of them by any means consistent with one another. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that in the majority of its uses ‘surplus population’ (and similar terms like ‘wasted lives’ and so on) is not a problem produced by capitalism but to the contrary describes people who do not have enough of it (e.g., Ferguson and Li, 2018). As a result, conversations where the term has been operationalized risk being confusing from the start, interlocutors thinking they are dealing with the same apples when in fact what they share looks more like a fruit salad.
Second: even for those explicitly tying their use of the concept to Marx there is disagreement. How does it differ from a reserve army of labour? Is it indeed just surplus labour? Is the surplus population always a relative surplus or are there historical moments when it becomes absolutely surplus? (See for example, Nun, 1969; Quijano, 1974) And anyway: relative to what? To the non-surplus population? Or in temporal terms, surplus today but not so tomorrow? Then, whatever it is á la Marx, there are those who would argue that a population surplus to capital is simply inconceivable: capitalism is everywhere, its tentacles making even the most apparently surplus of populations simply one more cog in its machine of reproduction.
This makes it hard for me to agree with the opening of Matan’s final paragraph, that “regardless how we parse the concept… its continuing and even growing relevance shows that [Marx’s] analytic categories… are… relevant today,” (Kaminer, 2022) if by ‘relevant’ he means also useful. And my point is well illustrated by what he then suggests that, “even the possibility of being exploited has become a coveted privilege denied to billions.” For surely the question of who is exploited, over-exploited, or super-exploited and by what means has by no means been settled in such a way that we can assume that billions are denied this opportunity.
There is much that I agree with in Matan’s reflections. Indeed, it is the precision of his argument that so well illustrates the preliminary problems we face before we can operationalize the concept. Nevertheless, the almost matching pair ‘social reproduction’ and ‘surplus population’ now have such vast currency that any step towards clarity might be useful however small. And useful above all, as Matan would have it, to enable “a rethinking of political strategy.”
And so, in what follows, I would like to make some observations that help at least me, to think about surplus populations in the context of contemporary capitalism, and then make suggestions about political strategy that are intended to be more provocative than conclusive. To anticipate, it may be that some of the concepts/terms we use as though they were common currency may actually get in the way of contributing to the kind of subaltern praxis of populations of this kind.
On surplus and populations
What follows arises mostly from the second of the two difficulties I have spoken of. But we cannot so easily distinguish the two because many who use the often-paired concepts social reproduction/surplus population are either under the impression that their casual usage is more or less in line with Marx’s various uses, or are intentionally and explicitly seeking to refine it for contemporary application; they are not uncomfortable with Marx but they believe Marx would be uncomfortable in the present (and for some, should have been uncomfortable in the past too). Because of this discourse as it has unfolded at least since the seventies, there is a risk that the notes that follow appear to be overly rigid and uncompromising. This is not my intent. Rather I am hoping the following notes might function more as a foundation on which to continue a longstanding conversation.
I hope I am not saying anything too controversial to start with if I say that Marx set out to write a book called Capital. What concerned him was to study how capital was reproduced through the use of both a dialectical and an historical method. In the course of this study a figure emerges who time and again is spoken of in terms of a conflicted binary. On the one hand, this figure provides labour power to capital from which surplus value is produced. As a result this labour and its performer is valued. On the other hand, this same figure has to devote necessary labour to the reproduction of the performer and all that that implies. A peculiarity of this kind of society is that “necessary labour appears as superfluous, because the superfluous is . . . necessary only to the extent that it is the condition for the realization of capital” (Marx, 1973: 609). In other words, this figure is made up of valued labour and necessary labour. In the Alice in Wonderland world of capital the labour producing surplus is valued labour and the other, the necessary labour, is surplus. The value:surplus of this figure – and here we might see it as a person, a group, or a category of a population – can be written as a ratio in which 9:1 looks more like a valued figure (person, population etc) working 90% of the time to produce surplus value, while a 1:9 ration gets closer to being a surplus figure working only 10% of the time for capital.
I hope it is clear why I put the valued labour/surplus labour notion in this way. It suggests that insofar as a person, a category of persons – even those resident in a specific space – devoting a mere 10% of their energies to reproducing capital are to that degree surplus. It doesn’t of course mean that capital runs so close to the bottom line that only those who devote absolutely none of their energies to its reproduction are rendered surplus. What it does mean is, in Marx’s words that “society in its fractional parts undertakes for Mr Capitalist the business of keeping his virtual instrument of labour . . . intact” (1973: 609–610). It is a service, in other words, that various spheres of society provide to Mr Capitalist. In fact, Marx goes on to say, “as reserve for later use,” but – since this temporal feature is not a transhistorical fact we will come back to it later. Anyway, even were this reserve function not performed, global capital does not run so close to extinction through loss of surplus value that it is unable to tolerate a population ‘surplus’, one way or the other.
‘Society’ then in its fractional parts is the component that matters when speaking of the necessary side of labour activity. We can assume that ‘society’ comes as a cost to capital. Politics is a lot to do with which ‘fractional parts’ across a spectrum capital is prepared to pay for. We will return to this but it does mean that the practices and relationships that involve this element of reproduction will vary as they are moved from one site in the social fabric to another. So, a mistake is made when the reproduction of ‘society’ – in other words ‘social reproduction’ – is understood as entirely a matter of the direct interrelationships among those performing necessary labour, in households and ‘families’ for example.
On social relations and their reproduction under capitalism
In any case, as I have said, Marx wrote a book called Capital about the social relations that are necessary for the reproduction of capital. This is because that’s what Marx was interested in: the reproduction of capital (via labour). What then are the social relations necessary for the reproduction of labour? From what we have said we can see that these cannot be entirely disentangled from the conditions required by capitalist relations. But as we move from one end of the ratio to the other, are there ‘logics’, embedded in the reproduction of labour that need to be understood as such? Is it possible that, insofar as Marx’s interest in labour really only extended to those closer to the 9:1 ratio, so he left for later study the reproduction of the class of labour itself?(Lebowitz, 2003; Smith 2022). While, through the reading of Capital and Grundrisse we can come to a useful understanding of the underlying mechanisms conditioning the reproduction of all forms of capital – and hence the social relations extending variously therefrom. The same is not so for the very different instances for the way combined labour is reproduced. By combined labour I mean both ‘valued’ and ‘necessary’, but the issue is specifically to do with the principles that must be in place for necessary labour to be reproduced.
Image 1: Laborers harvesting lavender in Kent, UK (photo: FR Lawrence Lew, July 2019, Creative Commons/Flickr)
We might begin by noting that no theory of the reproduction of labour can be adduced along the lines that Marx used in his study of capital. So, whereas the inroads of various Marxist versions of ‘social reproduction theory’ have been crucial in helping us understand different instances of capitalist society, they do not warrant use of the term ‘theory’ in the same way as the theory Marx developed through his historical realist method. Instead, beginning with the conditionalities we must take into account from the actual processes by which capital is reproduced in the specific setting we are studying, we need to explore through the methods of historical-realist ethnography specific instances of the social reproduction of labour as it articulates with capital.
This then is the first hurdle to be crossed: that unlike the circuit that determines the reproduction of capital through the realization of surplus value, there is no such circuit for the reproduction of labour. In the former instruments – tools, machines, etc. – are made productive through the inputs of labour power. The value that results is realized in the market and any surplus arising thereby is retained by the owner of those instruments. In principle the circuit closes with the realization of value made possible by the market: no market → no realization → no value → no surplus: no capital. Such a circuit transferred to what I am calling combined labour can only refer to that labour ‘realized’ on the labour market: i.e., valued labour. Necessary labour does not reach a point of realization – completing a circuit. So, there is no ‘logic of realization’ in this sense.
A second hurdle paradoxically arises from the entanglement of necessary labour with the kind of society within which it is to be found – a capitalist one. Neither the arena in which combined labour is to be found nor even just its ‘necessary’ component can ever be understood therefore as an ‘assemblage’ or package of multiple ‘contingent’ or ‘aleatory’ variables bumping into each other like billiard balls. Resort to such carpet-bagged bits and pieces reveals simply a failure to tackle the difficult terrain in which all forms of social practice are dialectically related to – that is to say mutually/reciprocally produced by – capital. So, the second hurdle arises because combined labour is articulated with capital, not autonomous from it.
These two conditionalities provide the challenge for understanding the myriad practices that are required to ensure the reproduction of necessary labour with the precision that is possible for the reproduction of capital for analytical purposes taken alone. This is well illustrated by the common practice in the literature of contrasting so-called ‘use values’ to be found in the arena of social reproduction with ‘exchange values’ found beyond it. As much as the distinction is useful it can be misleading since use values do not complete a circuit by being realized in the market. Along one dimension, in terms of labour they are better understood as an array of practices and relationships that, in being so, do not present themselves as complete or even in some cases named. (Williams, 1977: 115-20) Or put another way, their evident practice though often called upon, obviates the need to be named. Along another dimension, it is commonly overlooked that the realm of necessary labour requires tools and the occupation of physical space. Yet these ‘means of production’ tend to occupy an ambivalent position between their valuation as property on the one hand and as the necessities of survival on the other.
Taken together this means that the authorization of labour as value and of tools and space as property stand in dialectical opposition to necessary labour and the use of tools for undertaking it. It is in this sense that it is possible to understand this sphere of reproduction as inherently resistant to the value regime arising from labour-as-commodity and tools-as-property. (Smith, 2016). The particular point at which such structural tension is felt is a function of the historical moment or geographical setting where one or other form of capital is regnant in the dominant bloc. In my own work in Peru I showed how the move by capitalist agriculture to replace open-ended practices of labour with the fixed closure of wages gave rise to rebellion (i.e., from structural to willed resistance). (Smith, 1989) Extractive capital effects a similar transformation over space, just as finance capital does so over tools (credit schemes) and sites of necessary labour (rents).
These perpetually active ‘collectively orchestrated improvisations’ (Bourdieu, 1977:72) in the present to regulate the future are not well captured by terms like ‘use values’ or ‘non-commodified practices/relations’. While the following remark by the early Bourdieu is too emphatic….
“It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know.” (ibid: 79)
…. it does go some way toward capturing what Gramsci spoke of in terms of common sense and good sense. Williams identifies the point I am trying to make when he speaks of the strongest barrier we have as social analysts trying to capture the sense of presence in social activity being, “this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products.” Williams, 1977: 128). Finished products – a circuit completed, something we understand intuitively through our social engagement with a market that realizes our value as we step into the street. Yet what we are dealing with here is precisely a sphere that fails to realize – complete, condense, contract – practices and relationships that for populations of the 1:9 ratio constitutes most of their sociality. We should be careful what we ask for therefore, when we demand that such lifeworlds be taken from where they are hidden and brought within the norms of capitalist society.
The social relations of social reproduction
But this realm of social life is only one of the fractional parts undertaken for Mr Capitalist to keep his virtual instrument of labour intact. When it is remarked in respect to these populations, as it so often is, that what Mr Capitalist pays is below the socially necessary costs of reproduction, we are obliged to look for what the ‘fractional parts’ may be that Marx suggests come into play. One such part cannot be the unrecognized necessary labour of the kind I have been speaking of since, by definition, we have been told those social necessities cannot thus be met. Does this mean that, like lemmings, the chasm of extinction calls? While this is certainly the fate of many, one has the feeling that it is not this very obvious surplus population that these writers are referring to, so how do they survive? The kinds of fragments that Marx may have been alluding to were the poor houses, Speehamland arrangements and so on of the past. In the mid-twentieth century these were glossed under the term ‘welfare’ and mostly undertaken by the state. Later in that century and currently in this one, elements of the social reproduction of necessary labour became broken up very much into the fractional parts Marx (presciently?) spoke of. By relying on distinct sources of philanthropy church groups, secular non-governmental organizations, food banks, and so on exposed the very specific fractions he spoke of.
Simultaneously they brought into play a multiplicity of social relations and practices that crowded together to undertake the task of social reproduction for Mr Capitalist. In each case, however, whether we speak in the past, of the poor houses of the nineteenth century, or the schools and hospitals of the postwar period; or whether we speak in the present, of church groups or food banks, they come as costs for capital as a whole and, insofar as they are fractional, they are also factional: they impact on different kinds of capitalists in differing ways producing their own (class, ethnicized, regional, etc.) flavour of politics as a result. In other words, the social relations brought into play for the purposes of social reproduction, once removed from the necessary labour of workers themselves, vary considerably and articulate with capital in different ways.
Finance capital as a hegemonic bloc
Seen in this way we begin to understand why ‘neoliberalism’ is such an unhelpful, imprecise notion for deconstructing what is happening to reshape social reproduction. Rather we need to turn attention to the different fractions of capital that are regnant in a dominant bloc. This is not a question of ‘financialized capitalism’; capitalism has always needed to be financialized. It is a question of the dominance of finance capital as such that we need to address, the conditions it needs to have in place for its reproduction and the ways in which its dominance is reflected in the reproductive logics of other forms of capital – industrial, agricultural, extractive and so on. As for the conditions of possibility this presents to valued and necessary labour – the realm of ‘social reproduction’ if you like – there is a great deal that can be said and indeed has been said.
But I want to draw implications from a particular feature of finance capital which is that it takes the form of the direction of flow and then the capture of surplus value. It is, for example, this characteristic that helps us to untangle the multifarious flows of ‘the surplus’ that finance is able to direct and capture my being woven into the vast array of market valuated arrangements that now make up the fractured and competitive field of governmental, non-governmental, and privatized social ‘supports’.
There are three features of finance capital that underly its role in the reproduction of a capitalist society dominated by its form. First, as I have said, it is about flows of surplus value, their direction/regulation and always their capture (and then release). Second, while it relies on the amounts of surplus value available and its form – its liquidity, fungibility, quantifiability, etc. – it does not itself produce surplus value. Finally, while by no means the only way of doing so, a principle means of managing risk in the realm of finance is through diversification.
These three features have their cognate manifestations in society as a whole. In this setting the flow of goods and services are not only channeled through market principles, they allow the dyke to direct flow through financial instruments. Then, insofar as the management of risk is achieved through diversification it is essential that diversity of phenomena, material and social – their distinction from one another – can be reliably assessed. Difference cannot be simply perceptual; it must be sufficiently real to meet the requirements of investment diversification: including investment in a population. Thus, insofar as left to itself, finance capital does not increase the overall surplus value available to a social formation, so it cannot absorb a reserve army of labour.
Finally, we come to the politics. I have suggested elsewhere that once people and the perquisites can all be given an asset value it becomes important for managing risk that there be differences among them. These cannot be simply claims to difference. There must be social diversity that translates into risk reduction by diversifying investments in different kinds of population – identities if you like. Different elements of the population are then encouraged to negotiate to enhance their ‘asset value’ for society understood as a collectivity of this sort. The hegemony of the dominant bloc works as such by being openly selective: celebrating distinction, selection, difference. This heterogenous population then expresses participation by negotiating the best possible placement in the social field.
But surplus value is made available to finance – finance as such – only by means of capture. It seeks to enhance its position by expanding the field across which it can make this capture effective, legal and cost-effective. It is pre-eminently expansive in this sense, not in the sense that industrial capital expands, enhancing surplus value both in space and in time albeit unevenly: in regional and temporal crises. These latter produce relative surplus populations that can, if the conditions are right, serve as reserve armies of labour. No such cycle has this effect in the cases where finance capital dominates. The result is that populations come into being for whom a politics of negotiation has little or nothing to offer them because they have nothing with which to negotiate.
Externally and brutally, they are threatened by forces against which they must resist – in some way collectively. Yet internally and more subtly they are threatened by the destruction of their sense of collective ‘presence’, – of the form of subjectivity on which they rely. A kind of sociality that invokes their active imbrication in a necessarily inter-relational future: “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” in Williams’ terms (1977: 132). This means that their daily existence is one of resistance. Their choice is being obliged to negotiate as wretched citizens and, as such, always failing; or finding means for turning the resistance that inheres in the lives they value into a politics of refusal: what we might term a counter-politics against the pervasive hegemony that selects among beneficiaries. (Smith, 2014)
And, still, no surplus population
It is only after a series of enquiries of this kind – globally and historically – that we can then begin to speak usefully of whether or not certain populations are surplus in the sense that they are unable to meet either capital’s requirements or those of the socially constituted necessities of population. Academics who for the purposes of their score on the Marxian league table (and its various social democratic extensions) argue that there are no surplus populations insofar as they are perforce obliged to consume capitalists’ commodities despite the fact that in doing so they cannot survive (and anyway when the absence of such minimal consumption would not make even an itch to be scratched for capital), or by pointing to the outsourcing of incarceration, or the administration of refugee camps etc. are thereby not surplus, detritus or of no value, display a coy intellectual condescension that simply reveals their splendid isolation from an unfortunately large part of the world they live in.
Gavin Smith is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and has worked in South America and Western Europe. Apart from ethnographic monographs he has published two books of essays, Confronting the present, 1999; and Intellectuals and (counter-) politics, 2014.
References
Bourdieu, 1977: Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge
Ferguson, James, and Tania Li. 2018. “Beyond the ‘Proper Job:’ Political-Economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man.” Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies. University of Western Cape.
Lebowitz, Michael 2002: Beyond Capital: Marx’s political economy of the working class Palgrave Macmillan. London
Nun, José 1969: “Sobrepopulación relativa, ejercito industrial de reserva y masa marginal,“ Revista Latino-Americano de Sociología, 5, 2 178-236.
Quijano Obregón, Aníbal 1974: “The Marginal Pole of the Economy and the Marginalized Labour Force,“ Economy and Society, 3, 4. 393-428.
Smith, Gavin, 1989: Livelihood and resistance: peasants and the politics of land in Peru. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Smith, Gavin 2014. Intellectuals and (counter-)politics: essays in historical realism. Berghahn, Oxford
Smith, Gavin 2016: “Against social democratic angst about revolution: from failed citizens to critical praxis.” Dialectical Anthropology 40: 221-239
Smith, Gavin, 2022: “Social reproduction and the heterogeneity of the population as labour” in Gill, L. & Kasmir, S. (eds): The Routledge Handbook of The Anthropology of Labor[Forthcoming] Routledge, New York
Williams, Raymond. 1977: Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Cite as: Smith, Gavin. 2022. “Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour.” FocaalBlog, 9 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/09/gavin-smith-toward-a-non-theory-of-the-reproduction-of-labour/
I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part of the Frontlines of Value research group at the University of Bergen. The workshop, featuring participants of different generations, academic fields and geographic specializations, was educating and revealing in a number of ways (see below for the full programme). In what follows, I will not try to do justice to the presentations or the engaging debates, but to pick out a few themes which seem to me to be of abiding importance for anthropology and related disciplines, and to make some tentative suggestions of my own.
As many have remarked, the Marxism now
resurgent in certain sections of the academy, including European social
anthropology (Neveling and Steur 2018),
seems much more preoccupied than preceding generations of the tradition with
questions surrounding the relations between this mode of production and its
“outside” – whether conceived of in temporal terms, as pre-capitalist (or, much
more rarely, post-capitalist); in spatial terms, as subsisting in regions
outside the control of global capital; or in more complex theoretical terms.
The concept of “primitive accumulation,” used by Marx himself to describe the
events leading up to the flowering of capitalism in England, has been applied
and even stretched (Glassman 2006), up to
a point which some consider excessive. Accumulation by unequal exchange, backed
up by the threat of force, certainly exists in our late-late capitalist
society; but what do we gain, ask theorists like Henry Bernstein, by calling
that accumulation “primitive”? (Agrarian
Questions JAC 2019)
Additional questions regarding the relations
between capitalism’s putative “inside” and “outside” are raised by the concept
of the surplus population, which stood at the center of the workshop. As with
other of Marx’s terminological choices, there is an easily missed irony at play
here: proletarian populations can only be “surplus” from the point of view of
capital itself, insofar as it does not find it profitable to exploit them as
laborers. Furthermore, people deprived of access to their own means of
production but denied the opportunity to participate in production by selling
their labor-power to others are not necessarily superfluous to capital’s needs
in every sense: they may be useful as consumers, as soldiers and guards, or
indeed as a “reserve army” of strikebreaking laborers. They are only “surplus” in
the specific sense that the ability of capital to absorb labor-power is limited
on the one hand by aggregate effective demand – which grows sluggishly, due to
the lopsided distribution of the fruits of capitalist development – and on the
other by the productivity of labor, which grows swiftly as a result of capitalist
competition. This is Marx’s “general law of capitalist accumulation”: the number
of laborers required by the demands of profit-making enterprise, as a portion
of the total proletarian population, will tend to fall (Marx 1990, chap. 25).
Anthropologists, who have always been curious
about the lives of people outside Europe and outside wage-labor, have good
reason to be interested in the concept of the surplus population. However, as
the contributors to the workshop highlighted, operationalizing this concept for
the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems. The most
obvious of these is that most people who lack access to “proper jobs” (Ferguson and Li 2018) do, after all, work.
Some of them retain some access to land and other means of production, and engage
in “petty commodity production”; others labor in the ill-defined “informal
sector,” for example as petty merchants; still others do sell their labor-power,
but not under conditions considered viable or legal by national and
international institutions (Campbell 2020; Cowan 2019). All these people purchase
at least some of their means of subsistence on the market, and are thus tied
into capitalism as consumers, if nothing else. To be truly outside of
capital, as one participant at the workshop remarked, one would need to be
“undiscovered,” a member of one of those mythical, self-sufficient tribes of
whose non-existence anthropologists are well aware. Hence, surplus populations
are at best “inside-outside,” taking on a painfully ambiguous role.
The “functionality” of surplus populations is a
related issue. Is the emergence of such populations a side-effect of the rise
in the productivity of labor, primarily caused by capitalists’ desire to gain
short-term “super-profits” by producing more efficiently than their
competitors, or is it actively encouraged by these capitalists and their
agents, such as the state? My own contribution to the workshop came down on the
“functional” (if not functionalist) side of the debate. Setting aside the ample
empirical evidence which could be used to make the case, I argued on purely
theoretical grounds that exclusion from the labor market should not be
understood as diametrically opposed to exploitation within it. It is easy
enough to understand why lack of choice should force those at greater threat of
exclusion to accede to greater exploitation, thus exposing the same individuals
to the cruelest brunt of both processes.
There are, however, some important objections
to this account. By all estimates, the surplus population is far vaster than
capital could ever be expected to absorb into standard employment – perhaps
around three quarters of the world’s total population (see Neilson and Stubbs 2011). Thus, most “surplus” workers have no
hope of ever entering the army of labor, even as “reservists” or scabs, and any
question of how they might behave given such a chance is moot. But the
ethnographic evidence, which shows that many such people do in fact work and
consume in quite recognizably capitalistic ways, casts doubt over such a
formulation. Perhaps the calculations of scholars like Neilson and Stubbs are
over-hasty? If surplus populations are only surplus from the point of view of
capital, perhaps this perspective is less singular and unambiguous than the
assumptions of such quantitative exercises require?
Image 1: Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean Sea, heading from Turkish coast to the north-eastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016 (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe; Wikimedia Commons).
I would like to suggest one way of getting at the problem, through a category that remains under-theorized despite its crucial role in Marx’s labor theory of value: the value of labor-power. One of Marx’s greatest theoretical discoveries was the distinction between the value of labor-power and the value which labor can produce: in other words, the difference between what human beings need in order to live and work, and what they are capable of producing with their life and their work. It is only with the total commodification of life (and work) under capitalism that these two quantities become commensurable, as both the needs and the capacities of the worker can now be measured with one yardstick: money. At the same time, capitalism disguises the difference between the two quantities by insisting that after the costs of living and working are deducted and transferred to the worker as her wage, the remnant is not the product of her labor but a special sum called “profit,” which the employer is legally and morally entitled to appropriate.
But the value of labor-power is
underdetermined. Even ignoring changes in productivity – we shall get to these
in a moment – the needs of a worker, of the working family, and of the
proletariat as a whole, are eminently contestable. Indeed, everyday class
struggle consists to a great degree in disputations over the value of
labor-power in the broad sense, which includes the wage itself as well as the
length of the working day, “social wages” like health insurance and pensions, and
so on. But despite this underdetermination, the value of
labor-power can only fluctuate between two limits: at the top is the point
where the wage begins to eat into profits to an extent unacceptable to
employers, and at the bottom is the minimum of biological reproduction, below
which the workers would begin to die off.
But even given a particular level of needs, the value of labor-power will shift with changes in the productivity of the types of labor which produce the essentials of life, however these are defined. The most obvious of these necessities, and the one which preoccupies Marx above all, is food. If the amount of labor necessary to produce the standard food basket goes down, for example through the introduction of agricultural technologies such as those of the Green Revolution, then so does the value of labor-power (Moore 2010). But many other technologies also play a role: for example, the great advances in hygienic and epidemiological science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also lowered the value of labor-power by drastically reducing infant mortality and raising life expectancy. Here then is one of those paradoxical ironies of capitalism: the more we invest in improving the quality of life, the cheaper human life becomes, in a very literal sense.
The relation between the value of labor-power
and surplus populations now becomes clear. Marx insists that there is no general
“law of population” in capitalist societies, and specifically rejects (against
Malthus) any tendency to exponential increase in population (Foster 2000). If anything, long-term trends appear
to demonstrate that human populations adjust their birthrates to prevailing deathrates,
such that population tends to increase quite slowly. The boom in world
population over the last century, as Aaron Benanav (2019) shows, can be interpreted as following from an easily understandable
lag between the introduction of the hygienic and medical reforms which lowered
deathrates and the subsequent adjustment of birthrates. Thus, experts expect world
population to stabilize by the end of the current century (United Nations 2015), while the environmental
preconditions of cheap labor-power may be under threat from climate change and
related environmental crises (Moore 2015),
potentially triggering a secular rise in the price of food. Nevertheless, the minimum
value of labor-power – the amount of work required to produce the basket of
goods absolutely necessary to keep the proletariat capable of working and
reproducing, per capita – has decreased drastically since the publication of Capital.
Of course, the global working class is not satisfied with this level of bare
subsistence: even in poor countries, workers demand additional goods, like
electronics and education. But this only points to the growing extent to which the
value of their commodity is not reducible to physical constraints, but determined
by the outcome of political processes. So long as the supply of labor-power
tends to outstrip demand – that is, for the next few decades at least – the
pressure of competition over jobs will tend to push the value of labor-power
toward the minimum. Only proletarian resistance can counter this trend.
But the agency of proletarians cannot be
reduced to the extent to which capital needs them as laborers. Even the most
outcast of populations have means of putting pressure on capital, and maintenance
of global hegemony requires that their demands be dealt with in one way or
another. One way is, of course, violence: when people are not needed as
workers, the global power structure is happy to countenance their warehousing,
and if need be, their mass death (Mbembe 2003).
But since the necessities of life have become so cheap, maintaining them in a
sort of social death while providing them with the means of bare existence
through humanitarian aid or debt is also an option (Sanyal 2014). With regard to these populations, global capital has
become something like the Calvinist God, capable of arbitrarily granting or
denying their every wish yet devoid of any need for their labors and
supplications.
Regardless of how precisely we parse the concept of the surplus population, its continuing and even growing relevance shows that the analytic categories of Marx’s Capital are as relevant to our world as they were to those of the 19th century. The workings of the “general law of capitalist accumulation” have produced a world in which even the possibility of being exploited has become a coveted privilege denied to billions. This certainly necessitates a rethinking of political strategy, one to which anthropology is particularly suited to contribute. However, the final goal of that strategy – a world in which each contributes according to her abilities and receives according to her needs – remains the same.
Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His article “Saving the Arabah: Thai migrant workers and the asymmetries of community in an Israeli agricultural settlement” is forthcoming in American Ethnologist. He is a member of Academia for Equality and LeftEast, among other political initiatives.
Benanav, Aaron. 2019. “Demography and
Dispossession: Explaining the Growth of the Global Informal Workforce,
1950-2000.” Social Science History 43 (4): 679–703.
Campbell, Stephen. 2020. “Debt collection
as labour discipline: the work of finance in a Myanmar squatter settlement.” Social
Anthropology 28 (3): 729–742.
Cowan, Thomas. 2021. “The Village as Urban Infrastructure: Social
Reproduction, Agrarian Repair and Uneven Urbanisation.” Environment and
Planning E 4 (3): pp. 736–755. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619868106
Ferguson, James, and Tania Li. 2018.
“Beyond the ‘Proper Job:’ Political-Economic Analysis after the Century of
Labouring Man.” Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies.
Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s
Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Glassman, Jim. 2006. “Primitive
Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession, Accumulation by ‘Extra-Economic’
Means.” Progress in Human Geography 30 (5): 608–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132506070172.
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique
of Political Economy (Volume I). Translated by Ben Fowkes. Middlesex:
Penguin.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public
Culture 15 (1): 11–40.
Moore, Jason W. 2010. “The End of the
Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 1450–2010.” Journal
of Agrarian Change 10 (3): 389–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00276.x.
———. 2015. “Cheap Food and Bad Climate:
From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology.” Critical
Historical Studies 2 (1): 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1086/681007.
Neilson, David, and Thomas Stubbs. 2011.
“Relative Surplus Population and Uneven Development in the Neoliberal Era:
Theory and Empirical Application.” Capital & Class 35 (3): 435–53.
United Nations, ed. 2015. World Population Prospects. ST/ESA/SER.A 377. New York: United Nations.
This article is linked to a research workshop that was held at Bergen University in December. The full workshop program is below.
Rethinking Surplus Populations: Theory From the Peripheries 13-14 December 2021, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Frontlines of Value Research Program
Monday 13 December 10.00 – 10.15 Welcome and Introduction Don Kalb (University of Bergen)
10.15 – 11.00 Rethinking Surplus Populations: Theory from the “Peripheries” Stephen Campbell (Nanyang Technological University) and Thomas Cowan (University of Nottingham)
11.00 – 11.45 Surplus Labour, Surplus Population, Primitive Accumulation: Notes for Discussion Henry Bernstein (SOAS, University of London)
11.45 – 12.30 New Exploitation of an Old Form of “Work”: Exploitation of Tenant Shopkeepers’ Livelihoods in South Korea Yewon Lee (University of Tübingen)
14.00 – 14.45 Violence of Abstraction, Violence of Concretion: Surplus Population as an Element of a Marxist Theory of Racialization Matan Kaminer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
14.45 – 15.30 The Death of the Proper Job? Aspiration, Class, and Labour in Urban Brazil and Egypt Harry Pettit (Northumbria University) and Mara Nogueira (Birkbeck, University of London)
15.30 – 16.15 Surplus Population/Surplus Labour: Past and Present Marcel Van Der Linden (University of Amsterdam)
Tuesday 14 December 10.00 – 10.45 From Assumed Reluctancy to Enforced Redundancy: The Changed Depreciation of Labour in the Transition Towards Global Capitalism Jan Breman (University of Amsterdam)
10.45 – 11.30 Land/Ocean Grabs and the Relative Surplus Population in Ghana Jasper Abembia Ayelazuno (University of Development Studies, Tamale)
11.30 – 12.15 ‘Productive’ Migrants and ‘Dependent’ Left-behind Brothers Hadia Akhtar Khan (University of Toronto)
13.30 – 14.15 Surplus Population In-Situ: Brick Kiln Labour and the Production of Idle time Pratik Mishra (King’s College, University of London)
14.15 – 15.00 The Social Reproduction of Pandemic Neoliberalism: Planetary Crises and the Reorganization of Life, Work and Death Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS, University of London)
15.00 – 15.45 A Surplus Population? The Making of a Racialized (Non) Working Class in a Former Romanian Mining District Sorin Gog and Enikö Vince (Babes-Bolyai University)
15.45 – 16.30 Comment and General Discussion Gavin Smith (University of Toronto)
Cite as: Kaminer, Matan. 2022. “Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop.” FocaalBlog, 26 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/26/matan-kaminer-marxist-anthropology-in-a-world-of-surplus-population-reflections-on-a-frontlines-of-value-workshop/
To understand the massive
world-disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic we need a sociology of complicity.
Since the different waves hit the planet, we have been hearing repeatedly two crucial
phrases: 1) “we are all in this together” (or the opposite: “we are not in this
together”), and 2) “we are all becoming complacent to the virus.” Politicians
and epidemiologists have shown us how we have “lowered down our collective guards”
to community transmission of the virus. Simultaneously, the pandemic has exposed
and accelerated social inequalities like never before. Complicity has led us to
be complacent, and complacency has only exacerbated our complicity. Complicity
with these increasingly genocidal and fascist forms of late capitalism at the
macro level and its counterpart of auto-exploitative neoliberal subjectivity at
the micro-level (see Chapoutot 2020) took us all to here-now.
The key question Michel
Foucault and other critical thinkers (see Peters 2020) have repeatedly asked
is: What causes us to love and obey forms of power/subjectivity that are
strictly against our interests? I argue that as we
move away from complicity/compliance, we should choose complicity/connection.
That is, we should aim to create entanglements of solidarity and ethical
relatedness to fight the current and future forms of oppression and inequality
that will emerge during and after the COVID-19 capitalist and neoliberal world.
Beyond
complicity/complacency
Two key ideas from Karl
Marx and Émile Durkheim can form our compass. First, the world-remaking
thesis: we need to go beyond inferring the world to radically change it. We
need to seize our complacencies with an individualistic commodity-driven world
shaped by extreme (auto)exploitation and (outer)profit. (2) the
connection-as-sociability thesis: we need to look at how solidarity works
as a form of social connective tissue, even more when considering the social
disconnection and the exacerbation of prior inequities created by the current
pandemic. Both Marx and Durkheim dealt with the ‘complacency’ dynamic, the
former as a matter of complicity (including cross-class alliances for
revolution), the latter as a matter of connection (social solidarity in an
anomic world). When we look up the etymology of complicity, we are
struck by the realization that it has the same root as compliance (from com– ‘together’ + the root of plicare ‘to fold’).
A kind of ‘folding together,’ the latter more like folding in the sense of
bending to authority or just giving up: as we have all had to adapt to wearing
masks, social distancing, following changing public
health orders, etc. Conversely, many have resisted this on the grounds of their
freedom being violated.
The
world-remaking thesis
Karl Marx was among the
first to confront the fact that intellectuals are never detached observers but
rather deeply connected with, and implicated in, structures of power, status,
wealth, and symbolic captures. In The German Ideology, Marx (1970) goes
against the Hegelian intellectuals who were “merely interpreting the world” (as
if that was ever possible). For Marx, the key organizing idea has always
been to “change the world.” Marx (1990) wrote Kapital while helping
to organize the International Workingmen’s Association in the middle of debates
with Bakunin and Proudhon on how to mobilize the working class to change the
world according to their interests. He was both a public writer and public
speaker fueling the masses to decode and transform this unjust (human-made,
and, thus, human-changeable) world. Those two things were never a contradiction
but his raison d’être.
Today, we have
naturalized and reified the capitalist world. We cannot imagine the end of it.
As Frederic Jameson (2003, 76) says “[s]omeone
once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the
end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine
capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” Imagining the end of the
world is visualizing our complicities with this capitalist world. We can see
how we (social scientists) are
wired and networked in ways that both insulate us and implicate us without
questioning capitalism itself. But for Marx, everything was about how
intellectuals–philosophers, historians, political organizers, and workers–were
complicit, compliant, and complacent with the unjust social worlds experienced
by the working-classes. That was the key back then, that is the key right now.
Does a post-covid world
help us imagine post-capitalism and post-neoliberal subjectivity? Or can we re-envision
capitalism by way of imagining the end of the COVID-19 world? Both are
intrinsically interconnected. Of course, there are “competing narratives”
pushing/pulling us to/from inequality and merit, deservingness and
undeservingness (Kalb 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has both intensified and
revealed myriad social, racial, gender, economic, political, migratory, and
ecological crossroads that were swept under the rug or systemically denied as
glitches in the default system designed for endless economic growth (and
endless economic gains by a very few; see Robbins 2020). This pandemic did not
begin in December 2019. The colonial violence and world imperial destruction,
before even industrialization, made this world. And the West would not be the
West without complicity with slavery and colonialism (Davis and Todd 2017).
Many interconnected
crises and vast inequalities of late capitalism have surfaced at the forefront
of the planetary consciousness because of the pandemic. In some weird
way, we need to thank the tiny virus for its contribution to seeing what we
cannot unsee.
Remarkably, those overlapping crises of late capitalism were not hiding out of
sight, quite contrary they were/are essential crises of the larger
politico-economic systems of accumulation and dispossession that were forced to
shift and pivot in new ways (think about Silicon Valley capital investing in
telecommunication apps, refugees always on the move finding even more dangerous
paths, and state agencies funnelling public money to big-pharma R&D for
COVID vaccines).
The
dual meaning of “complicity”
When Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848, 1), their first words
were these: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the
powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German
police-spies.” As Derrida (1994) writes, the “spectre of communism” were the
anti-status-quo forces; the phantasmagoric and powerful fears of imagination
(and the imaginative powers of fear) that worked for social revolution. These
phantom-like forces were spreading like a summer forest fire through Europe
ready to purge this “holy alliance.” They were threatening to destroy
everything that was prefiguring the current present (the separation of
production from reproduction, human exceptionalism, the racial/imperial project
of white European male supremacy). This is one meaning of complicity. COVID-19
is indeed a threat to the current status-quo because of its potential and
spectral capacity to disrupt the COVID-capitalist world.
The second meaning of complicity is linked to morality, like in this definition: “the fact or condition of being involved with others in an activity that is unlawful or morally wrong” (Oxford Dictionary). We can see that in the moral justification of outrageous social inequalities (Chancel 2021). For Marx and Engels (1848, 1), “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” and there is no other place to see this right now than in the dramatically unequal and obscene distribution of vaccines between high- and low-income countries. Of course, that is not what Marx and Engels meant about class struggles. Yet, the history of our existing COVID-capitalist society is now the history of vaccine apartheid. There is a vaccine nationalism with an outspoken political and moral agenda. Nigeria, for instance, had to ask the World Bank for a USD400M loan to purchase vaccines. The good wishes of COVAX clashed with national and big-pharma plans.
Madhukar Pai argued, “… the widening chasm of vaccine inequity has devastating consequences, especially with the Delta variant ripping through populations. Millions of people will die, and trillions of dollars will be lost. Addressing this inequity MUST be a top priority for everyone, regardless of where they live.” In late 2020, India and South Africa proposed to the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Council a patent waiver proposal that would free vaccine technology to low- and middle-low-income countries to speed up the vaccination rollouts and to contain the further development of more mutations in those countries unable to access to vaccines via market purchases. In their statement, India argues “[o]n the one hand, these [high-income] countries are buying up as much of the limited supply as they can, leaving no vaccines in the pie for developing and least-developed countries. On the other hand, and very strangely, these are the same countries who are arguing against the need for the waiver that can help increase the global manufacturing and supply to achieve not just equitable, but also timely and affordable access to such vaccines for all countries” (Usher 2021, 1791). It is morally reprehensible that high-income countries are complicit with the further expansion of Delta and potential other variants in low and middle-low-income countries (and among their own marginalized communities).
The last words of Marx and Engels’ Manifesto were the working-class mantra: “Proletarians of all lands, Unite!” In this urgent context, there is no time to waste on any form of complicit-complacency regarding collective solutions to this pandemic (vaccines being not the only one but a big one). By September of 2021, according to the WHO, “Only 20% of people in low- and lower-middle-income countries have received a first dose of vaccine compared to 80% in high- and upper-middle income countries.” Few countries are overflowing with vaccines, whereas many parts of the world have few or no vaccines at all. There is a full-fledged vaccine diplomacy war (“vaccine nationalism”) developing between China, Russia, UK, and U.S (Zhou 2021). Calls to liberate patents and transfer know-how to rapidly accelerate the vaccination campaigns throughout the whole world have been scarce or muted. How, then, did we allow big pharma to set the tone of the vaccine campaigns worldwide when we know that no one will be safe until everyone is?
The
connection-as-sociability thesis
Émile Durkheim (1912) coined
the concept of “collective effervescence” during the vast secularization
and individualization processes of the early 20th century in metropolitan and
imperial Europe. His concept refers to instances in which a community,
social group, or society may come together as a sort of
collective-at-sync political-emotional unfolding. We could argue that the
COVID-19 pandemic is a fundamentally social phenomenon that (very unevenly) affects
humanity in the same way religion was for Durkheim back then. Some events can cause collective
effervescence which inspires individuals and can act as a catalytic
to unite society (think, for instance, the race to create COVID-19
vaccines or the anti-mask movement). We are all going to get out of it worse or
better and it entirely depends on how we manage this “collective effervescence.”
The police killing of George Floyd, Brionna Taylor, Jared Lowndes and many other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color created long-lasting effects, political organizing, communal solidarity, and forms of resistance. The live-filmed death of Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman who suffered from a rare heart condition and filmed her health care providers in a Quebec hospital mistreating her and letting her die shook Canada. It prompted the province coroner to ask the Quebec government to recognize the systemic racism within the health care system. These are examples of how the pandemic has both exacerbated and made visible structural violence. We could expand the argument in the direction of the fresh COP26’s massive failure and global warming apocalypse, a massive capitalist restructuring from above is very possible, one which is going to replicate the injustices and unevenness of Covid. Yet, what keeps us together despite a brutal pandemic that tends to isolate, alienate, oppress, and vaccine-apartheid us? What is the source of hope despite, and because, of this pandemic? Naomi Klein says that we are living in Coronavirus Capitalism, and “If there is one thing history teaches us is that moments of shocks are profoundly volatile. We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites, and pay the price for decades, or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier. This is no time to lose our nerves. The future will be determined by whoever is willing to fight harder for the ideas they have lying around.” If we can transition from complicity-complacency to complicity-connection, we could still change this story. We could change this world.
Rafael Wainer is a medical anthropologist and Lecturer in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His main research interests are children’s experiences of cancer treatment, palliative care, and medical assistance of dying, hope and resilience, and the socio-anthropological understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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2003. Future Cities. New Left Review, 21(May-June): 65-79.
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David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his scholarly legacy is slowly emerging. I want to contribute to such a critical assessment of his oeuvre by concentrating on his book “Utopia of Rules” published in 2015. This assessment has resulted from my participation in the roundtable “On David Graeber’s Work: Potentialities for a Radical Leftist Anthropology” at the conference of the German Anthropological Association (DGSKA) in Bremen on 28.9.2021, the stream of which can be watched on Facebook.
I propose
that a scholarly book can be evaluated according to three criteria:
Does it present new facts—that is, results
of research according to accepted research protocols, be they ethnographic or
others?
Does it engage with theory, and the
body of existing knowledge, in a novel way?
If that is not the case, does it
present new ideas, even if only in a more essayistic way, e.g. without the
necessity to give evidence; or does it present old ideas in a better way than
they have already been presented elsewhere.
Even if a
book is written for a larger audience, as this book clearly is, it should still
stand the test of at least one of these criteria. This is in fact in line with
what Graeber himself (in a highly unusual six-page response to a five-page
negative review of his book) demanded—i.e., that the book should be judged
“according to the actual arguments and the evidence assembled to support these
arguments” (Piliavsky 2017; Graeber 2017: 118). These criteria can be summed up
in the question of whether I would put the book, or parts of it, in a list of
core readings, say for a course on the anthropology of bureaucracy.
I will limit myself to the introduction to the book and the central essay on structural stupidity (ch. 1). The chapter – the only one with an anthropology pedigree – first came into being as the 2006 LSE Malinowski lecture under the title “Beyond power/knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity” (https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:viz386gos). Later, however, Graeber did not want the lecture to be cited any longer. He replaced it by the text “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor. The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture,” which he published in HAU (a journal that he co-edited) and which, in a strangely bureaucratic turn of phrase, he declared “the official one” (Graeber 2012: 105 fn. 1; https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau2.2.007). It finally turned into a 2015 book chapter. Each time the text became longer. I have found lots of praise of the book, but predominantly from outside anthropology (but see Piliavsky 2017) and mainly from journalists (see the praise page of the book).
The central
argument seems to be that the world is faced with an increasing
bureaucratisation whereby public and private bureaucracies, as well as
neoliberal capitalism melt into each other and form a total structure of
oppression and exploitation which furthermore relies on technology and sheer
physical violence. This over-bureaucratisation of the world stifles creativity
and imagination, in particular revolutionary imagination, so the left needs to
reflect on how to get out of this trap (which according to Graeber it has not
done, therefore the need for his intervention).
I say this “seems to be” the argument, as Graeber’s writing is not very structured. He writes more by way of analogy, and about whatever comes to his mind. His style of writing has been called “ruminative” by a reviewer; the author resembles a happy deer strolling across a sunny alpine meadow, picking a weed here, plucking a shamrock there, and then chewing the whole thing several times over. So, to give the reader a selection of topics touched upon: the two chapters jump from huge generalisations on « the » Germans, Americans, and British (p. 13), to Graeber’s experiences as a customer of an American bank (p. 15), student debt, again in the US (p. 23), chats with a World Bank economist at a conference (pp. 25-26) as well as with a British bank employee at another occasion (note 15 p. 231), newspaper opinion pieces which he presents as results of ethnographic research (p.22), the shape of bank buildings “when I was growing up” (p. 33), surprising but unsubstantiated references to Goethe as a supporter of Prussian bureaucracy (p. 39), similarities between refugees and female applicants to London music schools (p. 41), a visit to an occupied factory in Marseilles (p. 43), his mother’s death (pp. 45-50), problems of registering his car in New York (p. 48), to academics complaining about too much paperwork (pp. 53-54), why a thick description of a bureaucratic document is impossible (p. 52, but see Göpfert 2013), violence as the weapon of the stupid (p. 68), gender roles in American situation comedies of the 1950s (p. 69), stories about American teenagers that somebody told him but he doesn’t remember who it was (note 59 p. 242), to what a friend told him about degrees in library science (note 26 p. 233), what “most of us” think about the police (p. 73), to vampires (p. 77), Sherlock Holmes and James Bond (p. 78), and American prisons (p. 102).
Now my criterion
1: where is the evidence, and what about new knowledge? Graeber has a
remarkably cavalier use of what is habitually called evidence. I can only give
two examples here: In the beginning of the introduction, he claims that “we” (a
pronoun, like “us” and “ours”, he frequently uses but never defines) are
increasingly faced with paperwork. He then presents three graphs to prove his
point (pp. 4-5). At closer inspection, however, the graphs – presented without
any source – rather show how often “paperwork” or associated terms like
“performance review” have appeared in English language books over time, which
of course is different from the thesis it is supposed to illustrate, and rather
refutes his other thesis, that “nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy”
(p. 3). In fact, Graeber admits that he is purely “imagining” graph no. 2 (his
words, p. 4; see also p. 15) which supposedly shows that people spend ever more
time filling out forms. In any case, he has a penchant, throughout the text, for
terms like “apparently”, “I suppose”, “we all know that”, “most of us believe”,
“apparently”, the subjunctive form of the verb, and what “everybody knows” (p.
27).
Apart from
these imagined figures, Graeber’s main type of evidence are personal anecdotes,
which for him apparently assume the function of explanations. He starts off chapter
1 with the problems he had when, after a life mostly spent as a “bohemian
student” (p. 48), he was suddenly faced with different bureaucratic hiccups
when his mother had a stroke, the problems being caused by a particularly
incompetent notary. Like this coming-of-age story, all the other anecdotes are also
taken from his immediate personal experience, almost exclusively concern the US
and the UK and not rarely relate to narcistic insults he suffered from some apparently
stupid bureaucrat who did not recognize his, Graeber’s, intelligence (e.g., p.
48, p. 64). In fact, he also has six pages on Madagascar where he essentially
says that outside the capital city, state bureaucracy is practically absent,
but then immediately nuances this statement with respect to schools (pp. 61-66;
one would wonder what this evaluation would say about health centres, for
example, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and more generally, also). As an
Africanist, that doesn’t surprise me (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 1997),
but Graeber does not consider the fact that this widespread absence of state
bureaucracy in the highlands of Madagascar might in fact invalidate his general
thesis of total bureaucratization as a planetary phenomenon.
Image 1: A utopia of rules? The bureaucratic embeddedness of ethnographic research (Photo: Thomas Bierschenk, 2009)
What about criterion 2, the engagement with existing knowledge and theory? Graeber clearly is somebody who does not like reading but prefers writing up and sharing with the world whatever comes to his mind. In the introduction, he claims that despite the increasing importance of bureaucracy, nobody is interested in analysing it, so that is why he must do it. This sounds a bit overly self-confident, as there is a huge body of social-science literature on bureaucracy and organisation since the beginning of the 20th century, mainly in sociology, but from the 1980s increasingly also in anthropology (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2021). Graeber simply does not know this literature. And when, here and there, he does mention selected topical works, he does not engage with them (e.g. note 44 p. 238).
What about
theory? The book cover claims that we are faced with “a powerful work of social
theory in the traditions of Foucault and Marx”. This might be discounted as
commercial overselling but then Graeber himself sees his book as “an exercise
in social theory” (p. 75). However, throughout the book, he is very eclectic in
his theoretical references. He likes neither Weber nor Foucault, but dislikes Foucault
more than Weber, and sees both as intellectual frontmen of neoliberal
bureaucratic capitalism, in passages on the history of ideas, which he himself qualifies
as “caricaturish” (p. 57). On the other hand, and surprisingly, Graeber likes Lévi-Strauss,
and structuralism in general (pp. 76 seq.). As for Marx, he prefers to lie low,
but stresses repeatedly that he was a man of his times (e.g., p. 88). Many of
his renderings of theorists, say Weber, appear somewhat crude to the educated
reader, if not outright wrong. In the passages where that is the case, and when
you turn to the footnotes, you are then puzzled to read from Graeber’s pen a
sentence like: “I am aware this (i.e., his own [Graeber’s] claim about Weber in
the main text, p. 74) is not really what Weber said.” (fn. 64 p. 243). Elsewhere,
he admits that his reflections are not new but have already been formulated
somewhere else, and possibly better (e.g., by feminist standpoint theory or
critical race theory, p. 68). But he admits to this only in passing and shares
his inspirations with the reader anyway. It is also interesting to reflect upon
what social theory Graeber leaves out. To name only a few authors who
immediately come to my mind as they clearly resonate with Graeber’s concerns
but are absent from his book: Hegel’s and Sartre’s theorem on the dialectics of
the master-servant relationship, Gramsci’s writings on hegemony, the whole
Frankfurt school of critical theory, and in particular Herbert Marcuse’s
One-dimensional Man, or the sociology of critique of Boltanski. So, in sum, the
happy ruminator, in this book, has confidently waded into areas where he didn’t
have many bearings, and not surprisingly, he got lost.
I do not think I need to dwell much on criterion 3 as the reader will not be surprised by my negative answer. One could ask why, after all, the book has been rather successful even if much less successful than the Debt book (Graeber 2011). I have two answers to that, one of which I will present later. My main charge against the book is that it essentially confirms middle-class readers and fellow academics from the Global North, in particular the Anglo world, in their clichés about and grudges against bureaucracy. In fact, in Germany which remained rather untouched by the hype around Graeber, Die Tageszeitung (TAZ), a left-wing daily, titled its review of the book “cliché as scholarship” (Klischee als Wissenschaft) and notes the author’s “love of the commonplace” (Walter 2016, https://taz.de/David-Graebers-Buch-Buerokratie/!5280790/). It is true that there are interesting ideas in the book, which are not, however, developed (for example, was Foucault a neoliberal thinker? In fact, I wonder if Graeber is not a neoliberal thinker himself.). Other propositions are pure reinventions of the wheel. How many books and articles have been written about the bureaucratisation of the world? (See for example the solidly researched Hibou 2015). Other statements are truisms, like that all banks are regulated (p. 16) or commonplaces like “most human relations … are extremely complicated” (p. 58). Again others are outright wrong. All this is woven into a text with no discernible structure, and basically from a perspective, which implicitly makes the claim that a middle-class perspective from the Anglo-academic world describes the global default situation.
In sum, I
would not give the book to anthropology undergraduates to read. It would be
embarrassing if they got the impression that this is what anthropology is about,
and it would be wasting their time. Anthropology is, I propose, about creating
new, and preferably counterintuitive knowledge. It is about discovering the
unknown, putting question marks behind common sense, and not about confirming
what “we” anyway believe we know. The book may have clicked with many people
because it resonates with widespread uneasy feelings especially among fellow
academics that “we” are wasting our time in meetings and with paperwork.
However, that a book confirms common sense is certainly not a sufficient
criterion for its scientific quality.
We should
realize (Graeber does not) that criticism of bureaucracy is as old as bureaucracy
itself; since its invention in 18th century France, it has been
criticised from the left (not acknowledged by Graeber), but more prominently
from the right (Fusco et al. 1992). This criticism from the right came in two
kinds, and not just one, as Graeber claims: there was and is indeed the
bourgeois right which is concerned with red tape over-regulating the market and
thereby diminishing profits. But there also have been aristocratic critics who were
more concerned about being restricted by rules, rules which may be appropriate
for the lower classes, but which inhibit the freedom of the gentleman to do
whatever he pleases. Graeber’s critique is dangerously close to the latter
position; as he admits himself in passing, it is a critique from the
positionality of somebody who likes to see himself as a bohemian.
Which brings me to Graeber’s theory of revolution, as far as it can be ascertained from this book. Graeber is an anthropologist who is not only interested in what is, but also how to make the world a better place “without states and capitalism” (p. 97). In other words, he aims at an emancipatory theory of revolution. The classic model here is Marx, who analysed not only the way capitalism functioned – after having spent years in the British library reading the whole body of political economy of his time – but also the internal contradictions of capitalism, which in the long run would lead to its transformation, and, most relevant for the point I want to make, which the social actors were best positioned to bring about these transformations. Graeber is silent, at least in this book, on the first point (the transformational dynamics of contemporary bureaucratic capitalism) and very short on the second (the social carriers of revolution). He only speaks of “social revolutionaries” who profess immanent—i.e., practically grounded—conceptions of utopianism, and who act “as if they are already free“, in alliance with avantgarde artists (p. 89, 97). There is nothing about the class positions of these revolutionaries. Who are they? US-American and European anthropology students under the guidance of their enlightened teachers? Here, again, the figure of the bohemian lurks in the wings. Neither do we read much about realistic strategies, necessary for any successful revolution, of how to seize the masses, to paraphrase Marx (“The weapon of critique cannot replace the critique of weapons; material violence must be overthrown by material violence; theory alone also becomes material violence as soon as it seizes the masses”, Marx 1843/44, p. 385). The catchy phrase “we are the 99 percent,” which Graeber is often said to have coined (regarding whether that is true or not, see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html), is not very helpful in this respect. It is pure populism, coupled with a nostalgic over-reading of the impact of the global justice movement of his youth.
Finally, I want to come back to why the book has sold well. I think the cover explains that. I have already referred to the über-promotion on the back cover, while on the front cover, Graeber is presented as the author of a previous, highly successful book. As Wikipedia explains, after the success of the previous book (Graeber 2011), the same editor quickly entered into a new contract with the author (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules; see also Walther 2016). Obviously, both the commercial editor and author were trying to capitalize on Graeber’s acquired reputation and his having “captivated a cult following” (Roberts 2020). The mechanism is well known, and thereby the book is a very good example of the capitalist economics of reputation, which govern the academic book market and which function according to a winner-takes-all logic (similar to international soccer, social media, and investment banking). The expression of this logic is the star cult, which in the academic world takes the form of the cult of the genius, and it explains how an altogether, from a scholarly perspective, bad book becomes a required citation. One may detect a slight contraction here between the anti-capitalist substance of the book and its capitalist form. So, while I do not recommend the book for an undergraduate course on the anthropology of bureaucracy, it would make fascinating case material for a postgraduate course on the political economy of the academic world.
Thomas Bierschenk is professor emeritus at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz/Germany. He has worked on development, the state, bureaucracy, and the police in Oman, Central and West Africa, as well as Germany, and has co-edited, together with Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies (Leiden: Brill 2014). More about his work at: https://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/prof-dr-thomas-bierschenk/
References
Bierschenk,
Thomas, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 1997. Local powers and a distant
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Bierschenk,
Thomas, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 2021. The anthropology of bureaucracy and
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University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.2005.
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