The human economy 10 January 2008

The new human universal

Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At much the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas opposed the racial inequality of Spain’s American empire in the name of human unity. We are living through another ‘Magellan moment’. In the second half of the twentieth century, humanity formed a world society – a single interactive social network – for the first time. Our world too is massively unequal and the voices for human unity are often drowned. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. (more…)

anti-capitalism 16 August 2007

Extract from a recent exchange with David Graeber about an “anti-capitalist” conference on money.

 
KH: Just in case I never made it explicit, my resistance to the term anti-capitalist is as follows. First, it seems to me that capitalism has not yet fulfilled its historic task of bringing cheap commodities to the masses and undermining the insularity of traditional communities (when a third of humanity work with their hands in the fields and have never made a phone call in their lives). Second, when the grip of America and Europe over world economy is being loosened by a genuine globalization of capital accumulation in places like India, China, Brazil and Russia for the first time, anti-capitalism could be just the defense of white privilege in drag. Third, If Locke and Marx envisaged capitalism as a transitional phase between landed reaction and a future just society, we have to figure out where we are in that process and I think not all that far. Premature anti-capitalism leads to some nasty versions of social control. Fourth, for many parts of the world, such as Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, people languish under varieties of the Old Regime and are ripe for a liberal revolution. This to my mind usually involves some fractions of capital as well as progressive popular movements. Fifth, I never yet heard of a popular social movement with the capacity to launch communications satellites or to run a modern health service. So sixth, I would not wish to be against all capitalist firms. Some could be useful to a progressive movement (Red Hat Linux, HP’s 4 billion poorest initiative), while others are only concerned with developing neo-feudal monopoly (Microsoft, Halliburton). A lot of it has to do with timing. It's just that, after living through the last 60-odd years, I don’t get on particularly well with a bunch of rich white boys sounding off about being anti-capitalist. Individuals are a different case.

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The Human Economy 30 July 2007

Proposal for a book that never took off (2003). Now I will be starting again through a keynote address for a conference on Rethinking economic anthropology at LSE in January 2008. The founders of neoclassical economics, such as Alfred Marshall, started out with the same broad style of questioning as their classical predecessors; but their speculations on human nature and society subsequently dropped out of the modern discipline, leaving it to anthropologists and others to pick up on these questions. Anthropologists aim to produce an understanding of the economy that has people in it, in two senses. First, we are concerned with what people do and think, both as workers or consumers in economies dominated by large-scale organizations and when left relatively free to be self-organized as farmers, traders, managers of households or givers of gifts. Second, our interest is — or should be — in the universal history of humanity, in its past, present and future. Somehow we have to find meaningful ways of bridging the gap between the two. There are of course many economies at every level, but economics is itself universal in pretension and so anthropologists too, in giving priority to people’s lives and purposes, aspire to a degree of intellectual unity. (more…)

Money: towards a pragmatic economic anthropology 15 July 2007

The mystery of money

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

(John Kenneth Galbraith)

Ours is an age of money. If human society has any unity at this time it is as a world ‘market’. There is nothing wrong with people exchanging goods and services as equals. Markets are indispensable to the extension of society. The problem is that they use money: some people have lots of it and most don’t have enough. Money marks social relations in capitalist societies. We think it makes a huge difference if a transaction involves payment or not. But we don’t ask why this should be so, even less where the power of money comes from. With the exception of a few whistle-blowers like Galbraith (1975), the economists prefer to keep us mystified; the media and the schools do little to enlighten us either. So we are sustained in our ignorance by vague beliefs and assailed by a mass of trivial facts, being left to build up our personal defenses against an impersonal system we regard as inevitable. (more…)

The urban informal economy in retrospect 8 June 2007

The term ‘informal sector’ (later ‘informal economy’ and now often just ‘informality’) arose almost four decades ago to describe the unregulated activities of the Third World urban poor. But the problem of proliferating urban masses, supporting themselves in invisible ways and at some perceived risk to public safety, is an older one.

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Money in the making of world society 1 1 May 2007

Je dois d’abord rappeler que la France ne vit ni en vase clos ni dans un monde immobile. Nous devons prendre conscience que nous vivons une communauté de destin planétaire, face aux menaces globales qu’apportent la prolifération des armes nucléaires, le déchaînement des conflits ethnico-religieux, la dégradation de la biosphère, le cours ambivalent d’une économie mondiale incontrôlée, la tyrannie de l’argent, l’union d’une barbarie venue du fond des âges et de la barbarie glacée du calcul technique et économique. Le système planétaire est condamné à la mort ou à la transformation. Notre époque de changement est devenue un changement d’époque.

Edgar Morin, Si j’avais été candidat…, Le Monde, 24^th April 2007

I explore here the formation of ‘world society’ in our time and the relationship of money to this process. Clearly, as ‘capitalism’, money is both a creative and an oppressive force driving globalization. I believe that money and markets are indispensable to the extension of society, even if their contemporary form often conflicts with humanity’s common interests. My main precedessors are Kant, Durkheim and Mauss, from whom I draw what might be understood as an ‘anthropology’. After an ‘Introduction’, I first consider the rupture between self and society that resulted from modern society’s reliance on impersonal institutions and the conditions for restoring a measure of unity to that relationship – to live as a whole person in harmony with society. Then I examine why ours is a special moment in the history of world society. As the first generation for whom world society is a fact, we are equipped with the means to study it and are indeed obliged to do so, if we can overcome the myopia of nationalism. Next, I present my principal conclusions on money. Money was a human universal long before its current apotheosis as the ‘money markets’. Although capitalism generates economic inequality and injustice worldwide, its historical mission to produce cheap commodities and to break down the insularity of traditional communities still has a long way to go. We must nevertheless explore the possibilities for economic democracy today; and I conclude with some brief reflections on method inspired by Mauss. (more…)

The African Revolution: development in the 21st century world 23 April 2007

 Revised version of 'A liberal revolution for Africa?' below. 

From Pan-Africanism to national capitalism

I consider here Africa’s development prospects in the coming half-century, viewed in the light of the century that has just passed. Africa has seen extraordinary urban growth in the twentieth century and this, rather than the conventional view of the continent as a rural exporter of raw materials, should form the basis for thinking about development in future. This means exploring ways of linking present forms of urban commerce to the world economy, as well as to national and regional markets. Indigenous commerce has so far been approached mainly in terms of the ‘informal economy’. The concept tells us what these activities are not – not regulated by law and public bureaucracy – but little about what they positively are. This has led me to ask what social forms organize the informal economy and mobilize its resources, since they must surely play a significant part in whatever happens next.

What prospects do neo-liberal markets hold for the African continent as a whole? Could Africa sustain a liberal revolution of its own — sooner rather than later? What might be the social and cultural conditions for this? Africa’s experience in the twentieth century is often represented as a failure to ‘develop’. This perception obscures what actually happened, a development of extraordinary scale and speed that I call Africa’s ‘urban revolution’. If there is to be an African liberal revolution in the next half-century, it will be fed by social forces that have already taken root in the century that has just passed. (more…)

The Hit Man’s Dilemma 3 April 2007

Or business, personal and impersonal
Pamphlet No. 18 for Prickly Paradigm Press

Table of contents

“Don't take this personal, it's just business”
The moral dilemma in politics, law and business
Impersonal society as a modern project
Private property: a short history
The digital revolution
Intellectual property
The crisis of the intellectuals revisited
Conclusions

Further reading
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Marcel Mauss: our guide to the future 20 March 2007

Durkheim assembled a team to promote his vision for sociology, but he and Mauss were a double act like Marx and Engels. There was room for only one leader of the movement, so we speak of the Durkheimians and the Marxists. Mauss and Engels each assumed leadership of the movement they jointly founded after their partner’s death, but the intrinsic inequality of the partnership was made worse in Mauss’s case by age difference, kinship seniority and his inability to write books of his own. The publication of an abridged English translation of Marcel Fournier’s Marcel Mauss: a biography allows us to reconsider his historical relationship with Durkheim, as well as his legacy for anthropology, history and the social sciences today. French scholarship on Mauss is, of course, much more advanced than its Anglophone counterpart and it is less confined to academic anthropology. Fournier’s 800-page collection of Mauss’s Écrits politiques remains virtually unknown to English-speakers and the collective organized in his name, the Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales (with its journal, revue du MAUSS), continues the eponymous founder’s commitment to integrating progressive politics and intellectual work over a wide range of issues. In both cases, The Gift has iconic significance as Mauss’s most discussed work; but, as Sigaud has already pointed out, the Anglophone academy, with assistance from one or two leading French anthropologists, has taken up its message in ways that depart seriously from the author’s original intentions.

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A liberal revolution for Africa? 8 January 2007

(Public lecture, 'The African Revolution: urban commerce and the informal economy', given at the University of Ghana in Accra, 8^th January 2007)

I spent over two years, 1965-68, living mainly in an Accra slum area, Nima 441. Not long afterwards and drawing on that research, I was credited with being the source of the ‘informal economy’ concept (Hart 1973, 2006). But the real sources of the idea were the mostly poor Ghanaians who took in a young English student and allowed me to share something of their lives. Everything I have done since has been inspired by that formative period spent here in Ghana. In what follows, I will not dwell at length on the informal economy concept as such or on the experience that gave rise to it.Rather, I will take advantage of the seminar series’ invitation to consider the next fifty years in this jubilee year of Ghana’s independence. If the ‘informal economy’ concept drew attention to a wide variety of hitherto invisible practices, at this stage we need to investigate more closely what these practices stand for positively. I will argue that they constitute a dramatic expansion of urban commerce, ‘the market’, which just might be the foundation for an economic revolution in Africa during the decades that lie ahead. (more…)

Informal Economy 18 December 2006

The term ‘informal economy’ became current in the 1970s as a label for economic activities that take place outside the framework of bureaucratic public and private sector establishments. It arose in response to the proliferation of self-employment and casual labour in Third World cities; but later the expression came to be used with reference to societies like Britain, where it competed with epithets of deindustrialization – the ‘hidden’, ‘underground’, ‘black’ economy, and so on. (more…)

Intellectual Property 20 October 2006

In this essay I address anthropologists’ concerns with intellectual property and relate them to the principal conflict in global capitalism today. The drive of corporations and governments to privatize the cultural commons has gained momentum only in the last two decades, a period when neo-liberal ideas and policies have dominated world economy. Most anthropologists intuitively oppose the interests driving this process (Benthall 1999), yet it has some affinity with the pursuit of cultural integrity by indigenous groups, heirs to the nationalism that spawned ethnography as our current method of choice. Once again, in the name of defending the victims of imperialism, anthropologists naturalize an enclosure movement that threatens to become a second feudalism. We need to be more self-conscious about how our ideas and practices are influenced by the interests shaping the current phase of capitalism. It will not do for anthropologists to claim innocence while reproducing the idea of intellectual property (IP) in whatever derivative form. If we wish to understand the wider implications of the key terms we use, there is no substitute for taking a more comprehensive approach to contemporary world history.

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Peopled Economies 11 May 2006

Staffan Löfving (Editor), Peopled Economies: Conversations with Stephen Gudeman Stephen Gudeman has earned the right, through a series of exemplary books published since the 1970s, to be considered the world’s leading practitioner of ‘economic anthropology’. His commitment has always been, under a number of labels, to bring an anthropological sensibility to the study of economies in the plural. Starting out from social relations and business studies at Harvard, his anthropology PhD at the other Cambridge diverted him from studying development in Panama to a structuralist analysis of compradazgo. But he reverted to his original topic in The Demise of a Rural Economy (1978); went on, in Economics as Culture (1986), to examine the cultural logic of some exotic economies and western economists; again juxtaposed the history of economic ideas and peasant ethnography in Conversations in Colombia (1990); and produced the nearest thing yet to a general textbook in The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market and Culture (2001). (more…)

British Social Anthropology’s Nationalist Project 15 September 2004

We are all indebted to David Mills (Anthropology Today, October 2003) for his well-informed account, mainly of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (ASA). [2] We need reliable histories if we are to make sense of our own murky times and chart a way forward. Mills, thanks to careful research, a dispassionate style of writing and extensive scrutiny from the profession, has produced what I hope will be a consensual basis for future debate about the forms of association anthropologists need today, if any. Here I bring a more subjective line to the reconstruction of our shared past, fragmented present and precarious future. I argue that British social anthropology drew strength in its prime from the twilight of empire, when it seemed that European thought could make a universal object of the world’s peoples, especially those who lacked their own history. [3] (more…)

Varieties of national economy 15 June 2004

…be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air. — The Tempest IV: I, 147

There is a shop near our local park that sells little girls’ ballet dresses. The yellowing models in the window do not speak of a thriving enterprise. When I tell English or American visitors that there are still lots of specialist shops like this in Paris, they invariably ask, “Yes, but do they make money?” Wrong question. The family of the old lady who runs this one is happy to subsidize her – it gets her out of the house; it grants her the company of children; it is what she likes to do; and she may even contribute something towards expenses. It doesn’t matter if she makes a profit or not. (more…)