Economy for and Against Democracy 9781782388456

Citation preview

Economy For and Against Democracy

The Human Economy Series editors: Keith Hart, University of Pretoria John Sharp, University of Pretoria Those social sciences and humanities concerned with the economy have lost the confidence to challenge the sophistication and public dominance of the field of economics. We need to give a new emphasis and direction to the economic arrangements that people already share, while recognizing that humanity urgently needs new ways of organizing life on the planet. This series examines how human interests are expressed in our unequal world through concrete economic activities and aspirations.

Volume 1 People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis Perspectives from the Global South Edited by Keith Hart & John Sharp Volume 2 Economy For and Against Democracy Edited by Keith Hart Volume 3 Gypsy Economy Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century Edited by Micol Brazzabeni, Manuela Ivone Cunha and Martin Fotta Volume 4 From Clans to Co-ops Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily Theodoros Rakopoulos Volume 5 Money in a Human Economy Edited by Keith Hart Volume 6 Money at the Margins Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion and Design Edited by Bill Maurer, Smoki Musaraj and Ivan Small

Economy For and Against Democracy ░░░ Edited by

Keith Hart

First edition published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2015, 2017 Keith Hart First paperback edition published in 2017

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Economy for and against democracy / edited by Keith Hart. pages cm. -- (The human economy; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-844-9 (hardback: alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78533-747-5 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-845-6 (ebook) 1. Developing countries--Economic policy. 2. Equality--Developing countries. 3. Social change--Developing countries. 4. Democracy--Economic aspects. I. Hart, Keith, editor. HC59.7.E31954 2015 330.9172’4--dc23 2015003141

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78238-844-9 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-78533-747-5 (paperback) ISBN: 978-1-78238-845-6 (ebook)

░ Contents

Introduction1 Keith Hart Part I. Economy versus Democracy Chapter 1.  Habits of Austerity: Financialization and New Ways of Dealing with Money Jürgen Schraten

19

Chapter 2.  What Financial Crisis? The Global Politics of Finance: Distributional Consequences and Legitimizing Narratives Horacio Ortiz

39

Chapter 3.  Party Funding For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa Booker Magure

58

Part II. The Struggle for Economic Democracy Chapter 4.  Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique: Pushing Lobolo from Price to Propriety Albert Farré Chapter 5.  Negotiating State and Market: The South African HIV/AIDS Movement and Social Change Theodore Powers Chapter 6.  Beyond the Market: White Workers in Pretoria John Sharp and Stephan van Wyk Chapter 7.  Waves of Unrest: Wildcat Strikes and Possible Democratic Change in Swaziland Vito Laterza

83

103 120

137

Part III. Visions of Human Economy and Democracy Chapter 8.  Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece: ‘Movementality’, Economic Democracy and Social Reproduction during Crisis Theodoros Rakopoulos

161

vi Contents

Chapter 9.  Money for a Human Economy: A Reflection from Argentina182 Hadrien Saiag Chapter 10.  Human Economy: The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness201 Keith Hart Chapter 11.  Building a Human Economy Movement: The Precedent of Transnational Feminism Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox

221

References237 Index259

░ Introduction KEITH HART

The Object, Methods and Principles of a Human Economy Approach Ronald Coase won a Nobel prize in economics for inventing the idea of transaction costs in his famous paper ‘The Nature of the Firm’ (1937). Shortly before his death in 2013, at the age of 102, he and Ning Wang announced their desire to found a new journal called Man and the Economy. Coase’s manifesto, ‘Saving Economics from the Economists’, was published in the Harvard Business Review. He argues there that: The degree to which economics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate … In the 20th century economists could afford to write exclusively for one another. At the same time, the field experienced a paradigm shift, gradually identifying itself as a theoretical approach of economization and giving up the real-world economy as its subject matter. This separation of economics from the working economy has severely damaged both the business community and the academic discipline … Economics thus becomes a convenient instrument the state uses to manage the economy, rather than a tool the public turns to for enlightenment about how the economy operates. But because it is no longer firmly grounded in systematic empirical investigation of the working of the economy, it is hardly up to the task … The reduction of economics to price theory is troubling enough. It is suicidal for the field to slide into a hard science of choice, ignoring the influences of society, history, culture and politics on the working of the economy. It is time to re-engage the severely impoverished field of economics with the economy. Market economies springing up in China, India, Africa and elsewhere herald unprecedented opportunities for economists to study how the market economy gains its resilience in societies with cultural, institutional and organizational diversity. But knowledge will come only if economics can be reoriented to the study of man as he is and the economic system as it actually exists. (Coase and Wang 2012)

2

Keith Hart

This plea echoes a movement of economics students a decade ago, calling itself ‘post-autistic economics’, which later took the form of the ‘real-world economics review’. Meanwhile, the legions of heterodox economists multiply and an interdisciplinary World Economics Association, formed in 2011, had acquired thirteen thousand members three years later. So there is plenty of resistance within the economics profession to the dominant model of rational choice in ‘free’ markets. From these developments several priorities stand out: to reconnect the study of the economy to the real world; to make its findings more accessible to the public; and to place economic analysis within a framework that embraces humanity as a whole, the world we live in. The ‘human economy’ approach shares all these priorities. Over a century ago, Alfred Marshall, in his synthesis of the marginalist revolution, Principles of Economics (1890), defined economics as ‘both a study of wealth and a branch of the study of man’. Keynes’ teacher at Cambridge, Marshall was a cooperative socialist who also developed a Hegelian theory of the welfare state and was later celebrated by Talcott Parsons (1937), with Durkheim, Weber and Pareto, as an author of the new theory of social action that replaced the utilitarian evolutionism of Herbert Spencer in the decades before the First World War. We draw inspiration from and seek to contribute to the tradition of economic thought, but, more explicitly than the currents within economics described above, we are open to other traditions in the humanities and social sciences, notably anthropology, sociology, history, geography, philosophy and development studies. The Human Economy Programme of research at the University of Pretoria has been shaped more directly by another movement of the last decade which now goes by the name of ‘alter-globalization’ (Pleyers 2010). It is the third phase of an international project that originated in the first World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre soon after the millennium. The first phase (2002–2009) was a series of volumes in several languages, produced by a network of researchers and activists in Latin America and France, which aimed to introduce a wide audience to the core themes that might organize alternative approaches to the economy. These books, called Dictionary of the Other Economy, brought together short essays on the history of debate concerning particular topics, and offered some practical applications of concepts relevant to building economic democracy. Taken together they point to a new language for addressing common problems of development. A second phase saw publication of the first English collection in this series, The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010), for which a number of additional authors were commissioned from Brit-

Introduction 3

ain, North America and Scandinavia. The new title reflected a double shift, being based less on expectation of a radical break with existing practice and more on the global context of humanity as a whole. We aimed to build on what people are doing already, even if this is obscured, marginalized or repressed by mainstream institutions. Fifteen countries were represented, but there was only one author from Asia and Africa, where most of the people live. Taking the international project to the anglophone West still left a lot to do. It was also clear that the focus on interaction between researchers and activists left questions of research methodology relatively unexplored. The University of Pretoria programme is a new departure in several senses. First, by adding a Southern African node to the burgeoning network of scholars and activists mobilized in publications so far, we seek to give greater weight to African and Asian voices and to broaden the geographical range of South–South and North–South dialogue. Second, this is the first coordinated academic research programme in the process initiated by the World Social Forum. Earlier volumes were aimed at a general audience of activists, whereas our priority is to contribute dedicated academic research in the service of the movement for greater economic democracy. Third, starting from a core of social anthropologists, the programme has extended its reach to include sociology, history, political science, economics, geography and education. In the first two years we appointed eighteen postdoctoral fellows from Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola), Asia (Nepal), the Americas (Brazil, Jamaica, USA and Canada) and Europe (Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Greece and Italy). In 2012 we appointed an interdisciplinary group of eight African PhD students from South Africa, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Cameroon. The majority of these two groups carry out research in Southern Africa, but the collective brings to Pretoria previous and continuing research interests in a wide range of geographical areas. In 2015–18 we have appointed sixteen postdoctoral fellows and doctoral scholars, all of them African. The Human Economy Programme started out with only loose guidelines. Our aim was to build a conversation among ourselves and with other specialists, and ultimately with the general public. This conversation is as much based on empirical investigation and comparison as it is on developing a theoretical and methodological framework for planning research. Our first basic method is inspired by the ethnographic revolution that launched social and cultural anthropology in the twentieth century. This was the first sustained effort by a class of academics to break out of the ivory tower and to join the people where they live in order to

4

Keith Hart

discover what they do, think and want. Second, the economy is always plural and people’s experience of it across time and space has more in common than the use of contrastive terms like ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ would suggest. This approach addresses the variety of particular institutions through which most people experience economic life. Third, our aim is to promote economic democracy by helping people to organize and improve their own lives. Our findings must therefore ultimately be presented to the public in a spirit of pragmatism, and made understandable for readers’ own practical use. All of this is compatible with a humanist view of the human economy. It must be so, if the economy is to be returned from remote experts to the people who are most affected by it. But humanism by itself is not enough. The human economy must also be informed by an economic vision capable of bridging the gap between everyday life (what people know) and humanity’s common predicament, which is inevitably impersonal and lies beyond the actor’s point of view (what they do not know). For this purpose a variety of methods have to be drawn from philosophy, world history, literature and grand social theory. Globalization is not irreversible – a similar phase of financial globalization and mass population movement around 1900 ended in war, nationalism and economic introversion – but we do have to extend our normal reach to address its contradictions. 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 (Hart 2010). We urgently need to make a world where all people can live together. Small may be beautiful and a preference for initiatives grounded in local social realities is unchallengeable, but largescale bureaucracies, whether governments or business corporations, are also essential if our aspirations for economic democracy are to embrace the movement of the world we live in. What after all is the ‘great transformation’ of human history that we are living through? Around 1800 the world’s population was just one billion. At that time less than three in a hundred people lived in cities. The rest mainly extracted a living from the land. Animals and plants were responsible for almost all the energy produced and consumed by human beings. Just over two centuries later, the world population has reached seven billion. The proportion living in cities is about a half. Inanimate sources converted by machines now account for the bulk of energy production and consumption. For most of this period, the human population has been growing at an average annual rate of 1.5 per cent; cities at 2 per cent; and energy production at around 3 per cent. The fact that this last figure is double the rate of population increase is a powerful index of the

Introduction 5

economic expansion of the last two hundred years. As a result, many people live longer, work less and spend more than they did before. But the distribution of all this extra energy has been grossly unequal: a third of humanity still works in the fields with their hands; and Americans each consume four hundred times more energy than the average Ugandan. This hectic dash of humanity from the village to the city is widely assumed to be driven by an engine of economic growth and inequality known as ‘capitalism’. But several social forms have emerged to organize the process on a large scale, not all of them reducible to this single term: empires, nation-states, cities, corporations, regional federations, international organizations, capitalist markets, machine industry, financial services and telecommunications networks. There is a pressing need for more effective social coordination at the global level, and the drive towards local self-organization is strong everywhere. Special interest associations of every kind proliferate. Resistance to inequality often takes the form of denigrating the dominant bureaucratic institutions – ‘the state’ and ‘capitalism’ being favourites in this regard – in favour of promoting small-scale self-organized groups and networks. Yet no future society of this century could dispense altogether with the principal social forms that have brought us to this point. So the real task is to work out how states, cities, big money and the rest might be selectively combined with citizens’ initiatives to promote a more democratic world society. A first step would be to cease viewing the economy in predominantly national terms. This idea is not new. It is just that many activists in the SSE field (‘social and solidarity economy’ – see Rakopoulos in this volume), not to mention more radical groups, will not consider working with bureaucracies which they think of as the enemy. Yet the French Revolution only succeeded because it was backed by the shippers of Nantes and Bordeaux, the Italian Revolution by the industrialists of Milan and Turin. Kenya’s world-leading experiment in mobile money, M-pesa (M for mobile, pesa is Swahili for money), was launched by a subsidiary of the communications group, Vodacom. Hewlett-Packard has been developing research stations in outlying areas for some years now as part of an attempt to make computers accessible to the world’s ‘poorest four billion’. The notion of a ‘popular economy’ has been emerging in Latin America since the 1990s, bringing new coalitions (peasants, urban informal workers, unions) into an alliance with progressive governments. Brazil under Lula introduced a community banking system combining microfinance and complementary currencies with strong local democratic input. The government of Uruguay has sponsored a ‘3C’ alternative circuit of

6

Keith Hart

exchange and credit for SMEs in which national utilities and local tax offices anchor the circulation of unpaid invoices as currency. South Africa is speeding up SMEs’ access to liquidity through an Invoice Clearing Bureau that brings together, in a fast and efficient service, banks, corporations and potentially two hundred thousand small businesses, many of them black. It does not make sense to go it alone on a small scale, but equally one has to be selective in picking capitalist firms and state regimes to work with. This dialectic of small-scale humanism and large-scale impersonal institutions may be illustrated by a composite portrait, where the balance is tipped towards the personal end of the spectrum. Lindiwe, a middle-aged Zulu woman who once worked in a factory and is now a domestic servant in Durban, rents township accommodation from the municipality and travels to and from work in informal minibuses (‘taxis’). She looks after her mother, who is crippled and receives a state pension, and her brother’s young daughters since he has AIDS. Her teenage sons are unemployed and drifting into crime and drugs. Her husband disappeared over ten years ago. She sells cosmetics to neighbours in her spare time, shops once a week in a supermarket, and at local stores the rest of the time. She attends a prosperity church, has joined a savings club there and owes money to loan sharks, but does not have a bank account. She lives in a society that some might summarize as ‘South African capitalism’, but she has only a peripheral connection to it. Note the complexity of Lindiwe’s economic arrangements and the variety of sources she draws on, few of them directly part of corporate capitalism. She understands her own life better than anyone else. But there are questions that she does not know the answers to: Where have all the men’s mining jobs gone? Why did all the factories close? Why are the schools failing? Why has a black government done so little to reduce poverty and inequality? A human economy approach must somehow bridge the gap between Lindiwe’s life and a world driven by forces she cannot know. This implies a huge effort of public education, but our programme’s first task is to carry out research that might illuminate such an effort. We should note also that religion has always done a better job than social science in linking human subjects to a world of objects; and her spiritual community already does that for Lindiwe now. Given our preference to anchor economic strategies in people’s everyday lives, their aspirations and their local circumstances, the intellectual movement that defines our research is conceived of as an ‘extension’ from the local towards the global. We cannot arrive instantly at a view of the whole, but we can engage more concretely with the world that lies

Introduction 7

beyond the familiar institutions that immediately secure people’s rights and interests. According to Mauss (1925) and Polanyi (1944) especially – but all the founders of modern social theory too – the chief way of achieving social extension has always been through markets and money in a variety of forms (Hann and Hart 2009, 2011). Lindiwe could not juggle the plethora of institutions and activities she relies on without money. Money and markets are intrinsic to our human potential, not anti-human as they are often depicted (Hart 2000). Of course they should take forms that are more conducive to economic democracy. Her unanswered questions require answers grounded in the circumstances she knows well, while opening up to broader perspectives. It helps to recognize that money and markets span the extremes of human existence: they link us to the universe of our social relations and give precise definition to our most intimate circumstances. As Simmel (1900) pointed out, money reflects our human potential to make universal society. It is also true, of course, that human motivations for economic action are more holistic than the economists allow for, taking in concerns with well-being and the good life, for example. These too have traditionally been shaped by organized religion. A human economy approach must revisit the complex interaction between religion, education and economy. The principles of an ‘economy’, conceived of as a specific strategy, must be discovered, articulated and disseminated. Such an economy, to be useful, should be based on general principles that guide what people do. It is not just an ideology or a call for realism. The social and technical conditions of our era – urbanization, fast transport and universal media – must underpin any inquiry into how the principles of human economy might be realized. A human economy approach does not assume that people know best, although they usually know their own interests better than those who presume to speak for them. The history of the word ‘economy’ is both long and unfinished (Hann and Hart 2011: Chapter 2). Any modern English dictionary reveals the residue of that history in the way we use terms today like economy, economical and economize, referring as they do to order, management and thrift in contexts ranging from household budgets to a world made by markets and money. In origin ‘economy’ privileged budgeting for domestic self-sufficiency; ‘political economy’ promoted capitalist markets over military landlordism; ‘national economy’ sought to equalize the chances of a citizen body. Perhaps ‘human economy’ could be a way of envisaging the next stage, linking unique human beings to humanity as a whole. It would then be a synthesis of the various elements in a sequence of social extension

8

Keith Hart

– house–market–nation–world – whose typical social units are not replaced, but rather coexist. We are of course getting way ahead of ourselves. The Pretoria Human Economy Programme is first of all a new node in an international network animated by a common desire to advance economic democracy through academic research, social initiatives and public outreach. Based in Southern Africa, our aim is to articulate a new perspective in South– South and North–South dialogues about how to build a better world. This will be achieved through research and intellectual exchange more than by issuing programmatic statements. But we have to keep our eyes on the prize. So why not ask where the human economy is situated in a historical sequence of named economic strategies that still coexist? Finally, there is a contemporary political context that might add point to the human economy idea at this time. Oliver Williamson received a so-called Nobel (Bank of Sweden) prize in economics for his development of Coase’s theory of the firm. Coase (1937) asked why, if markets are efficient, any self-employed person would choose to work in a collective rather than outsource what they cannot do best themselves. Williamson takes this division between what is internal and external to the firm to be entirely flexible, and extends this idea to the social division of labour as a whole, including relations between corporations and governments who have maintained an uneasy alliance for a century and a half. The Fordist phase of internalizing transaction costs is over, not least because the digital revolution has cheapened the cost of transferring information reliably. This does not mean that corporations have ceased to be large and powerful. Of the one hundred largest economic entities on earth, two-thirds are corporations and, of those, half are bigger than all but eight countries. Moreover, we are witnessing a drive for corporate home rule which would leave them the only citizens in a world society made to suit their interests. This is the logical conclusion of the collapse of the difference between real and artificial persons in law in the late nineteenth century (Hart 2005), granting business corporations the legal standing of individual citizens. As Thomas Jefferson foresaw – he identified commercial monopolies (which he called ‘pseudo-aristocrats’) as a powerful threat to democracy – mere human beings cannot compete with organizations of their size, wealth and longevity. Coase and Williamson provide the intellectual flexibility to imagine a world where companies control the marketing of their brand, outsource production, logistics and much else, and internalize government. For example, why rely on governments for conflict resolution? After all, corporations also have to handle conflict resolution internally. Why have

Introduction 9

state laws, when what the world needs most is moral law? The discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility (Salmon 2010) is a major field for negotiating changes in the relationship between firms and society. We all know about the privatization of public services, which is another side of that coin. This is a matter of deadly significance and we have to ask what kinds of political mobilization are capable of challenging the power of corporations at every level, from the local to the global. The human economy idea may have its origins in small-scale informal activities and a humanist ideology, but effective resistance to a corporate takeover will require selective alliances between self-organized initiatives on the ground and large-scale bureaucracies of the public and private kind. It will also require the development of global social networks of the kind from which our Human Economy Programme drew its initial impetus. For, as Camus told us in The Plague (1947), the human predicament is impersonal; there are powerful anti-humanist forces in the world we share. So we have to build bridges between local actors and the new human universal, world society. To be human is to be a person who depends on and must make sense of impersonal social conditions in order to act effectively. Individual rational choice does not come close to approximating this situation. In the struggle with the corporations, we need to be very sure that we are human and they are not. The drive for economic democracy will not be won until that confusion has been cleared up.

Diagram 1. The Human Economy

10

Keith Hart

Diagram 1 sums up the polarities that we hope to bridge somehow. Traditionally the ‘world’ is everything outside each of us that is relevant to our lives (Heidegger 1927); its counterpart is the inside, whatever is familiar, ‘home’. Managing the external and internal dimensions of society is particularly difficult when politics is mainly national and the money circuit has gone global (Hart 2013a). Human beings need to feel ‘at home in the world’. The twentieth century opposed state and market as two principles that came into ruinous conflict during the Cold War, whereas they are indispensable to each other, even if they leave out people much of the time (Hart 1986). ‘Society’ bridges these extremes and, following Marx (1867), we consider that people, machines and money matter most in our societies, even if the order of their priority is usually the opposite to what is desirable. Money buys the machines that control people’s access to work. Humanity’s task is to reverse that order.

Economy For and Against Democracy In the four years that the human economy programme has been operational, our internal conversation has been sustained by working towards collective research publications, of which this volume is the second. The first (Hart and Sharp 2014) was People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis: Perspectives from the Global South. That book, with a strong focus on Southern Africa, placed a series of case studies by our fellows and associates, all from the global South, within the dialectic of public power and private money that framed Cold War ideologies. Most of the contributors were social anthropologists writing about field research that they had carried out as part of their doctoral programmes. This anchored our combined efforts in an ethnographic approach; but the tradition of scientific ethnography privileges local empiricism above normative or political perspectives. Accordingly, the book’s main task was to humanize the world historical relationship between rulers and moneymakers in specific cases taken from the global South. The synthesis of the two sides makes up the twentieth century’s dominant social form, ‘national capitalism’, the attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation through central bureaucracy in the interest of a constructed community of national citizens. The failure of this institutional synthesis to cope with the effects of neoliberal globalization provides the broadest context for the world economic crisis that has been unfolding since the credit boom burst in 2007–2008. National capitalism had not taken root in most of the coun-

Introduction 11

tries that provided our case studies, and we explored the variety of forms of crisis there. We were content to show how people from a wide variety of class positions in the global South experienced economic crisis. We left open what might be an appropriate way forward for the societies of the global South, since our conversation had not yet matured to the point of incorporating different political perspectives on human economy. This is the principal focus of the present volume. We bring to it, however, an interdisciplinary team of much wider range than our first effort. The contributors to this volume practise disciplines that include political science, institutional economics, economic sociology, African studies and education, along with half a dozen anthropologists. Our research is still grounded in empirical investigation, but we bring a variety of methodological traditions to the table, not just ethnography. We believe that the best research and writing has often been informed by politics, by the desire to make a better world. So this would align a number of us with development studies. This affects the questions asked, if not necessarily the search for evidence and answers. It is not enough to refer only to what is already out there if we want to improve it. Such a perspective requires a dialectical method capable of linking actual to possible worlds in the style of Rousseau or Hegel and their many successors. The contemporary academic norm of positivist empiricism is hardly suitable for that purpose, not only because it fragments the object of knowledge, but also because it conceives of the present as eternal rather than as transitional from the past to the future. We have to feel our way into such an approach, and the chapters that follow bite off pieces of it in very different ways. Our method is still evolving in a gradual process of extension from the circumscribed habits of existing academic practice. The modern age is a struggle between the forces of unequal society and the drive by people everywhere for greater democracy in their lives. This is a political struggle, of course, but politics increasingly involves economic organization: people vote according to their economic interests, and political guarantees of equality and democracy do not mean much if different classes bring highly unequal resources to their participation in society. Markets are democratic in the sense that everyone votes with the money at their disposal; but Walmart votes with a lot more money than you or me and, since the late nineteenth century, business corporations have exercised the same rights as individual citizens. After three decades of world war and general economic depression, the industrial societies on both sides of the iron curtain, along with the independent regimes formed out of the collapse of colonial empire, opted for developmental states whose main purpose was to make income distribution more equal

12

Keith Hart

and to expand the purchasing power and public services available to ordinary working people. This was a democratic world revolution, and it lasted until the end of the 1970s. After then, markets were given freer rein, especially after the end of the Cold War, and the world took an undemocratic turn which resulted in much greater economic inequality. The last half decade or so has witnessed various political and economic threats to ‘neoliberalism’ without much evidence so far of fundamental change. The chapters of this book are organized to throw light on different phases of this global situation, again with a central focus on Southern Africa, where our research programme is located.

The Contents of this Volume Part 1, ‘Economy versus Democracy’, identifies financial globalization as a major source of the inequality in today’s world economy, before offering examples of the predatory political regimes that dominate large swathes of the global South. In both cases the consequences of prevailing economic arrangements are highly inimical to democracy. Jürgen Schraten locates the origins of neoliberalism in Milton Friedman’s monetarist economic theories translated into policy through two ‘shocks’ – Paul Volcker’s liberalization of interest rates at the U.S. ‘Fed’, and the City of London’s ‘big bang’ administered by Margaret Thatcher shortly afterwards. After briefly sketching how these policies affected the issue of credit in South Africa, he draws on Max Weber’s theory of the origins of capitalism to ask why people still accept an economic system that offers most of them so little. Horacio Ortiz carried out an ethnographic study of financial corporations in Paris and New York during the height of the credit boom. He shows how the everyday practices of financial professionals reproduce a liberal Utopia where rational investors sustain efficient markets and, when they do not, precipitate ‘crises’. His ultimate aim, however, is to trace how this system generates economic inequality on a global scale, thereby bridging the extremes linking everyday life to world society. Neither Schraten nor Ortiz offer potential solutions to the present impasse in world political economy. Booker Magure compares political party funding in Zimbabwe and South Africa. According to him, President Mugabe learned his latest method for funding the ruling party from the African National Congress. In both cases, the ‘freedom struggle’ to replace a white settler regime and its colonial enclave economy allowed the successor regime to justify its

Introduction 13

own enrichment as economic empowerment of the black majority. The undemocratic consequences of the global neoliberal regime are exacerbated by blatant abuse of political power to secure rents from underperforming economies. Part II, ‘The Struggle for Economic Democracy’, reports on people’s limited efforts to insert themselves actively into the unpromising economic circumstances that they face. Albert Farré’s historical and ethnographic study of bridewealth (lobolo) in rural Southern Mozambique is placed within a comprehensive review of the regional literature on kinship and marriage, and of an account of Southern Africa’s economic history since the late nineteenth century. Male migration to the mines in the twentieth century had disastrous consequences for women, pushing them into impoverished domesticity and reducing their traditional rights. With the collapse of mining employment, they are beginning to win a more equal place in their home societies, not least in negotiations over lobolo. Theodore Powers examines the HIV/AIDS movement’s chequered attempts to democratize access to drugs in South Africa. He shows how political fields operating on different scales – transnational donors, national government, civil society organizations, intermediate institutions and the law – interact in ways that complicate and contradict simpler stories of the process. In this case the main action group opted to work with the state rather than against it. The movement consequently benefited from Treasury funding as well as from global donors. Divisions within the ruling party and shifts in economic policy resulted in broadening access to anti-retroviral therapy. John Sharp and Stephan van Wyk report on segments of the white working class in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, that have been downwardly mobile since the end of apartheid. Afrikaans-speaking nationalist organizations provide segregated menial employment and shelter for their racial brethren that trap them in immobility and coercive hierarchy. On the other hand, a mixed-race informal settlement offers flexible and egalitarian means of livelihood to former white workers, whose plight is similar to that of the black majority. This democratic social experiment is threatened by a property development scheme, unlike the other initiatives which are secured by private property. Vito Laterza offers a vivid account of a wildcat strike in Swaziland and asks what it suggests about the future of democracy in a kingdom which combines customary land tenure with a market economy fully exposed to the ravages of neoliberalism. His case study is of a timber town run by American missionaries. Here the resources of a rural commons are essen-

14

Keith Hart

tial to workers’ survival, but they are considered by most urban union leaders and democratic activists to be a drag on anti-monarchist politics. Laterza draws on Gramsci, Polanyi and Negri to analyse how the contradictions of this situation might be harnessed to more progressive forms of political conflict. Part III, ‘Visions of Human Economy and Democracy’, is explicitly speculative. Contemporary small-scale struggles for a better world, responding to the exigencies of present and recent history, generate visions of what might be possible that are informed by knowledge of what is and has been. Theodoros Rakopoulos takes us to Greece, the current hot spot in Europe’s crisis of money and debt. His case study focuses on the anti-middleman movement, in particular on a group of radical activists in Athens’ suburbs who practise solidarity economy. They seek to bring producers and consumers of agricultural commodities together without intermediaries. The group is ideologically driven and its views are subject to intense debate; participants vary widely in their degree of attachment to the core political ideas. They belong to a broader movement which hopes to establish a system of cooperatives that might offer some members more secure employment. Rakopoulos captures the dynamism of this struggle for democracy without predicting how it will end. Hadrien Saiag, based on his own academic research, offers a programmatic statement for how Argentina’s savings and credit institutions might be improved in the interest of most citizens. He situates his ethnographic study of Rosario’s working class within a historical context of evermore precarious employment since the 1990s. This period has also seen the rise and fall of barter clubs (trueque) and of provincial government monies which peaked in the peso crisis of 2001–2002. Saiag shows how people meet their own financial needs despite the inadequacy of existing microfinance institutions; and he then draws on this evidence to suggest ways that formal mechanisms for credit and savings might be developed to address their practical economic requirements. This is the most clear-cut example of how the human economy approach, drawing on history, ethnography and the comparative method, can suggest economic improvements based on knowing what people already do for themselves. Keith Hart looks back at the history of democratic revolutions – liberal and anti-colonial – to clarify some of the conceptual issues raised by a human economy approach. Democracy might be seen as a ‘struggle for happiness’, in terms originally formulated by Thomas Jefferson when he added a distinctively American concept to the European goals of equality and freedom. Alexis de Tocqueville and C.L.R. James, at different times, examined the interplay between these principles in the American

Introduction 15

democracy, each stressing the importance of free associations as a counterweight to political and economic despotism. Mohandas K. Gandhi, however, showed us how to bridge the gap between a puny self, endowed with the subjective capacity to act alone or with others, and a vast, unknowable world which we experience as an external object. Hart asks how the stirrings of revolution in today’s world might shape the human economy project in a more radical direction than its current emphasis on existing popular practice might allow for. The work of David Graeber offers some counterpoint to this discussion. Finally, Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox asks how a programme securely entrenched in academic research practice can reconcile scholarship with the aspiration to being socially relevant. Given our origins in the international alter-globalization movement, what would it take for the human economy project itself to take on the form of a social movement? In the late twentieth century, coming out of the Western youth rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s, the women’s movement has established some remarkable precedents for answering this question. Here Sutton-Brown-Fox looks to transnational feminism as a guide, and concludes by suggesting how the chapters assembled here point to possibilities inherent in our collective endeavour. Keith Hart is International Director, Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria and Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology, London School of Economics. He has taught at a number of universities, for the longest time at Cambridge. He contributed the idea of an informal economy to Development Studies and has written extensively on money. His recent books include The Human Economy (2010) and Economic Anthropology (2011).

Part I Economy versus Democracy

Chapter 1

░ Habits of Austerity

Financialization and New Ways of Dealing with Money JŰRGEN SCHRATEN

‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul’. – Margaret Thatcher, Sunday Times, 1 May 1981

The Spirit and Ghosts of Financialized Capitalism The global economy has been subject to financialization since the 1970s. In contrast to an industrial economy, financialization emphasizes a shift of focus from the output of goods and services towards the monetary returns of payments themselves. During the period under observation, the volume of money circulating in financial markets reached a multiple of the material commodities produced. This development has been analysed quite extensively with regard to the world economy and nation-states on the one hand, and the focus of companies on shareholder value on the other. The products and practices of financialized capitalism have now penetrated into everyday life, and ordinary citizens are increasingly required to engage in financial investment and risk management (Froud, Johal and Williams 2002; Martin 2002; Shiller 2003; Erturk et al. 2007; Leyshon and Thrift 2007; Aitken 2007: 113–39; Aalbers 2008; Aitken 2010; Asham, Fine and Newman 2011; van der Zwan 2014). Although skilled workers and owners of capital benefited from this development, the majority of workers now have longer working hours, lower wages and reduced social benefits, increased insecurity and a higher intensity of employment; also, the number of unemployed has risen and their situation has deteriorated owing to cuts in social services (Sennett 2006; van der Zwan 2014: 109). Financialization is sometimes suggested as

20

Jürgen Schraten

an alternative to the welfare state (Cutler and Wayne 2001; Shiller 2003; Dixon and Sorsa 2009; Trumbull 2012). This chapter contributes an analysis of financialization in South Africa to this debate. The most salient feature of this dramatic example of the process in the Southern hemisphere is the extension of consumer credit to low-income clients and the vast numbers of over-indebted citizens that result. Current forms of capitalism are unable to reduce economic inequality and poverty; indeed they increase the numbers of those who suffer from these conditions. So what incentive do people have to accept a capitalist economy when the majority do not benefit from it? For an answer to this question, we draw on a reinterpretation of Max Weber’s ideas about the ‘spirit of capitalism’. We start with an analysis of the economic and political developments that allowed financial markets to expand in the first place. The theoretical ideas of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, although propagated since the 1940s, received serious attention only in a period of ‘stagflation’, when economic stagnation and the erosion of purchasing power were combined. The second section describes the different levels and forms of financialization, with special emphasis on how finance penetrates daily life. We then turn to the financialization of daily life in South Africa, under conditions of extreme social inequality and high unemployment and poverty. The benefits of an economy of austerity are even more questionable there than under first-world conditions, making it even harder to understand why the majority of people engage with capitalism of this type. The final section applies Max Weber’s account of the origins of capitalism in the West to current global developments. Financialization seems to mobilize a purer form of the ‘spirit of capitalism’, containing a promise that we can mould our own future rather than just sustain it. People no longer save and buy, they borrow and invest, thereby becoming managers of their own future. Under current political conditions, however, this promise is highly misleading.

The Volcker Shock and the Big Bang During the 1970s, the core capitalist countries experienced a severe economic crisis. It brought to an end what has been called in retrospect a ‘Golden Age’ (Hobsbawm 1995: 257–86). The main internal cause of a retreat from state control of economic development was ‘stagflation’, a combination of economic stagnation and inflation, or the lower purchasing



Habits of Austerity

21

power of money. In a context of the economic turmoil caused by the breakdown of the international framework of fixed exchange rates for currencies, the overthrow of traditional economic power relations as a result of decolonization and the formation of a cartel of oil-exporting countries, economists and politicians alike were open to a change of economic paradigm. Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman had long attacked government attempts to direct economic development through fiscal measures. Friedman’s main argument was that monetary policies were unable to stimulate long-term investment because the effect of low interest rates vanished as soon as all economic actors expected cheap money. Workers would then demand higher wages and producers would set higher prices, so that the overall price level would rise and the gains of entrepreneurial risk would vanish because of a reduced difference between current costs and future revenues. As a consequence, investment would fail to materialize and unemployment would rise. In such a situation, government actions based on the wrong ideology made the situation worse. Their main mistake had been to try to stimulate investment by reducing interest rates further, thereby entering into a vicious circle of higher money supply with low investment (Friedman 1968: 5–11). Rather, the two main objectives of monetary policy should be to refrain from irritating economic activity and to secure a stable money supply (ibid.: 12–13). Because politicians cannot foresee the consequences of their actions, they should only change the mechanisms they can control, namely the exchange rate with foreign currencies, the price level, and the total money supply. Friedman advised against controlling the exchange rate because it only affects a small portion of a nation-state’s economic activities. He discouraged trying to influence prices because calculation of the effects depends on a stable environment that usually does not exist. This left him recommending a stable money supply. This theoretical model has a hidden core that Friedman only mentioned once at the beginning of a lecture.1 He stated there that ‘changes in the real quantity of money can affect aggregate demand even if they do not alter interest rates’ – in other words, there is an alternative way of achieving government goals, namely ‘changes in wealth’ (Friedman 1968: 2). To put this bluntly, his analysis of the failure of government attempts to stimulate investment and his recommendation to stabilize the monetary supply boil down to the finding that investors are not able to earn enough. The prospect of profit is the only effective incentive to work on. Political models that direct economic development for the social benefit of the general population must be set aside so that owners of capital can

22

Jürgen Schraten

increase their wealth. Of particular interest is the priority given to an abstract goal, economic growth, over the common good. This argument marks the turn to an anti-democratic political economy. After decades of academic and political neglect,2 the public merits of this ideology met the highest reward of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, given to Friedrich von Hayek in 1974 and to Milton Friedman in 1976. The political implementation of their ideas followed soon afterwards, not without revealing the shortfalls of economic theory. After a prelude in Chile following Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973 (Valdes 1995), and at a regional level after the fiscal crisis of New York in 1975 (Susser 1982), 1979 was the decisive year for implementing monetarism. On 4 May 1979 Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of Great Britain, and on 6 August 1979 Paul Volcker was appointed chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in the United States (‘the Fed’). Volcker aimed to bring down inflation with a move that became famous as the ‘Volcker shock’, and Margaret Thatcher, among other things, turned the banking landscape of London upside down, which became known in retrospect as the ‘big bang’. These two measures are highlighted here because they exemplify the new political will to accept social distortions as a precondition for developments that conformed to economic theory. These political steps were crucial for the boom in consumer credit that eventually transformed the lives of most people. The appointment of Volcker took place against a background of runaway inflation and a collapsing U.S. dollar. During the 1950s and 1960s the average annual rise in the consumer price index had been 1–2 per cent, and between 1966 and 1972 it rose to 3–6 per cent, but in the aftermath of the first oil price shock it rose by more than 12 per cent at the end of 1973 and remained at that level in 1974. Most crucially, as a confirmation of Milton Friedman’s theoretical assumptions, the rate of increase in the consumer price index after the oil shock remained high, at 5–7 per cent, during both the recession and the recovery from 1975 to 1977. This showed that the price level followed inflationary expectations, not real costs (Axilrod 1985: 15). After a second oil price shock in early 1979, the index rose again by over 10 per cent. In this situation U.S. president Jimmy Carter appointed Volcker, knowing what he intended to do. Paul Volcker announced a new operating procedure at a very unusual Saturday press conference on 6 October 1979. This act was intended to be symbolic and was deliberately characterized as a ‘watershed event’ (ibid.: 14). The control of the money supply from now on would be managed by a new market mechanism. In order to borrow money from the central bank, U.S. commercial banks had to deposit a reserve at the central bank as



Habits of Austerity

23

collateral. Instead of manipulating the interest rate,3 from October 1979 onwards the cost of central bank money would be calculated from the difference between these aggregate reserves at the central bank and the demand for money from commercial banks. Hence, the interest rate would no longer be set by the Fed, but would reflect the banks’ demand for credit in relation to their reserve requirements. This step was politically crucial since it transferred responsibility from actors to mechanisms. From now on, the chairman of the Fed could not be blamed for the interest rate because it represented the effect of market supply and demand. His responsibility was just to announce the figures for required reserves. As a result, the interest rate began to fluctuate and then to rise; from 11.5 per cent in mid September 1979, it rose to 15.5 per cent in late October. Then the market mechanism kicked in. The demand for credit dropped and so did the interest rate, to between 12 and 14 per cent in November and December 1979. In February and March 1980 the interest rate reached 20 per cent, fell to 8.5 per cent in June and rose again to 20 per cent at the end of 1980 (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2013).4 These volatile but on average very high levels of interest had a triple effect, each one predictable: money became scarce, consumer demand collapsed and industrial investment was postponed. Low turnover and low recruitment resulted in high unemployment. This led to the introduction of a second market effect: ‘The policy adaptation in that context represented an effort to improve the trade-off between unemployment and the rate of inflation by itself leading to a shift in attitudes in labour and product markets that would bring the [Phillips] curve [indicating the relation between wages and unemployment] back down’ (Axilrod 1985: 17). In other words, central bankers expected lower wage demands in response to higher unemployment and, as a secondary effect, lower prices owing to reduced labour costs and the expectation of plummeting consumer demand. Indeed, unemployment rose to 7 per cent in 1980 and reached a post-war peak of 10.8 per cent in November and December 1982. The inflation rate fell from 17 per cent in January 1980 to about 5 per cent in October 1982. During the post-war Golden Age, full employment had been a key political objective for the core capitalist countries (Harvey 2007: 10), and commentators who favour the political turn to monetarism after 1979 explain the shift in economic paradigm by higher unemployment rates in the 1970s. None of the measures introduced in the United States and Britain at this time, however, were aimed at fighting unemployment. On the contrary, Paul Volcker repeatedly insisted that social hardship had to be accepted as the price for curbing inflation (ibid.: 23). Margaret Thatcher

24

Jürgen Schraten

and Ronald Reagan, who was elected president in 1980, agreed to take on the trade unions that they represented as workers’ interest groups whose cartelization of supply and manipulation of market mechanisms contradicted a neoliberal approach to the economy (ibid.: 22–25). On the other hand, the power of companies was never a matter of political concern for them. David Harvey suggests, in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism, a distinction between two interpretations of the new economy: ‘We can, therefore, interpret neoliberalism either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of the economic elites’ (Harvey 2007: 19). When we take into account the obscure theoretical programme outlined by Milton Friedman in 1967 and the strategic focus of the political reforms after 1979, these two options are virtually identical. Turning away from policies aiming at full employment and citizen social welfare in favour of the newly hegemonic neoliberal economics constituted an attack on the majority of ordinary people: ‘People as such play almost no part in the calculations of economists and they find no particular reflection of themselves in the quantities published by the media. The economy is rather conceived of as an impersonal machine, remote from the everyday experience of most people’ (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010: 4). In this regard, we may say that human beings were transformed from citizens into factors of economic calculation. Besides the lack of investment during economic recessions, technological innovation was another main reason for unemployment. New developments in information and communication technologies, which had already affected industrial production during the Golden Age, allowed all sectors of services and bureaucracy to be streamlined. The previous period when governments directed economic development could now be seen as the progenitor of this historical sequence: ‘The major characteristic of the Golden Age was that it needed constant and heavy investment, and increasingly that it did not need people, except as consumers … Human beings were essential to such an economy only in one respect: as buyers of goods and services’ (Hobsbawm 1995: 266). The need to keep up levels of consumption in the face of relatively high rates of unemployment and low wages coincided with commercial banks’ attempts to circumvent the tight money supply from central banks. This is how and why the monetarist economic paradigm developed into financialized capitalism. During the Golden Age, many countries had developed a quite effective system of taxation and economic regulation. Already in the 1960s some companies were evading taxation and legal control by transferring



Habits of Austerity

25

their headquarters offshore to remote places beyond the control of government bureaucracies. This move was easier if a business did not depend on workers with specific skills, on material means of production or on transferring physical goods. So service providers led the way in this respect, especially banks. Of course, electronic data processing and telecommunications were crucial. Margaret Thatcher was encouraged by all this to knock into shape the legal restrictions on the banking business at home. New legislation introduced by the British government in 1986 was crucial. The Financial Services Act (1986 c. 60) said in Part I, Chapter V, Section 63 that ‘(n)o contract to which this section applies shall be void or unenforceable by reason of [the Gaming Act]’, which meant that contracts based on some kind of gambling now became legal. Uncertainty concerning the future, instead of being the common fate of humans and excluded from most economic calculations, became a tool for owners of capital to earn money (MacKenzie and Millo 2003). It allowed banks to develop products that were based on risk calculations and therefore were more hazardous (Knorr Cetina and Preda 2005). The City of London was transformed overnight as a place for banking business. U.S. banks in particular took over smaller banks in London and changed the way they did their business by encouraging strong competition. London became a centre of capitalism again.

Financialization and the Extension of Consumer Credit The economic paradigm of monetarism, together with the political ideology of neoliberalism, changed the dominant mode of production into ‘financialized capitalism’. This phenomenon of may be divided analytically into three different aspects: informatization deals with the implementation of technologies as a precondition for this development; securitization shows how an age-old technique penetrated economic activity and became the foundation of new products; finally, capitalization points to a new economic paradigm whereby small amounts of money become an interesting source for financial markets, connecting everyday economic activities to their operations. The precondition for all three phenomena is political will.

Financialization The combination of high interest rates (that serve owners of capital) with legal liberalization of business models (allowing new high-risk products

26

Jürgen Schraten

to emerge) and promotion of the political goal of making profit the main object of investment and economic growth triggered a new social development, often known as ‘financialization’ (Froud, Johal and Williams 2002; Erturk et al. 2007). At first, it was represented as a general strategy for a time of crisis, because when returns to investment are insecure, owners of capital tend to keep their money out of production and trade. This was then extended to the development of companies through widespread adoption of the catchphrase, ‘shareholder value’. This refers to giving priority to stock prices and monetary returns on holdings over profits made by producing goods and services for a market (Aglietta and Breton 2001). These seemingly separate developments reshaped the overall form of the economy by transforming the main sources of income to capital and then affecting the everyday life of ordinary people too. Greta Krippner (2005) has shown for the United States that the social sciences had to change their view of society in order to accommodate the new paradigm of political economy. Social scientists had got used to measuring the economic wealth of a country through (un-)employment figures and calculations of the Gross Domestic Product. By definition, these depict a socially useful capitalist economy by taking notice of how many people earn their income in various branches and how many goods are produced and sold. But the changes brought in by monetarist politics and neoliberal ideology devalued these figures. Nowadays one can earn a lot of money without employing anyone or without producing a good or service more tangible than information flows (Knorr Cetina and Preda 2005), especially if this information crosses the border of legality (Higgins and Mason 2004). So Krippner inevitably takes into account new sources of profit introduced after ‘changes in wealth’ became the main goal of politics and economics alike. Her analysis of the U.S. economy (1950–2001) shows without any doubt that the economy is now dominated by earnings from the business activities of finance, investment and real estate (Krippner 2005: 179). She argues that we must not confuse ‘activities’ with ‘business sectors’, since ‘financialization [is] a pattern of accumulation in which profit-making increasingly occurs through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production’ (Krippner 2005: 181). This shift affects companies in traditional sectors, such as car producers and retailers, who now build up their own consumer credit branch.



Habits of Austerity

27

Informatization Many current market exchanges could not take place without recent developments in data-processing and information technology. Thanks to these, both accelerated trade at distance and expanded gathering and distribution of information are made possible; and so communication technologies build the backbone of the forms of monetary economy that predominate now. ‘Credit-scoring’ played a crucial part in the drive to draw citizens into financialized capitalism. ‘In most advanced societies, credit-scoring bureaux are central nodes in a sophisticated network within the credit knowledge industry’ (Burton 2008: 53). Mathematical models for credit-scoring had already been developed in the United States during the 1930s. The social consequences of the Great Depression made it attractive to increase sales without demanding immediate payment. In consequence, the probability of future repayment became more important than an assessment of the past economic achievements of a customer. But fast credit-scoring on an extensive scale had to wait until sophisticated data-processing became possible for small companies and ordinary people. It became popular with the spread of personal computers alongside monetarist policies. Credit-scoring introduced three changes to the procedure for granting loans. First, estimation of the creditworthiness of a borrower was no longer based on face-to-face-evaluation of a customer by a clerk, but on calculation at distance of statistics relating to age, gender, level of education, job prospects, income, property, residential area, credit history and so on. Second, these factors entailed a shift in emphasis from the past to the future as the basis for a lender’s decision to extend credit. Existing income and collateral as well as a person’s credit history still play a role, but these are often secondary to the promise of a bright future. The most striking example of this is student loans, the repayment of which now makes up a significant portion of commercial bank revenues in many countries. Third, offering differentiated interest rates, depending on the risk a borrower represents to the lender, made credit-scoring an interesting tool. Such differentiation is a crucial technique for securitization, as will be shown below; at the same time it switched the balance of emphasis in credit companies’ lending policies from risk-minimizing to profit-maximizing. As Burton (2008: 57) says: ‘It has become clear that some of the most profitable consumers are the ones that have a high risk attached to them. It has long been recognized that the most profitable customers are those who pay the minimum monthly payment each month and con-

28

Jürgen Schraten

tinue to pay high interest rates on outstanding balances’. Credit-scoring was the technological foundation allowing financialization to be realized as the spread of consumer credit. The extension of the business model of securitization to the credit industry was the second factor.

Securitization Granting high-risk loans is not without danger, even for institutional moneylenders. But thanks to the legal liberalization that took off with the ‘big bang’ in 1986, the technique of securitization had a double advantage. The basic deal here consists in exchanging a steady flow of small amounts of money for a once-off payment (Leyshon and Thrift 2007; Langley 2008). The advantage for the buyer is that he gets more money back overall than he paid in the beginning, therefore it is a kind of interest. The advantage for the seller is to get rid of liabilities – and possibly unwanted risks – immediately, and to have liquid funds available for investment. Deals are made attractive by bundling together huge amounts of small loans, for two reasons. First, even small loans can be passed onto an investor as part of a bigger package. Second, loans can be diversified according to the level of risk attached to them (Langley 2008). As collateral debt obligations (CDOs) show, they may even be bundled into a mix of different risk levels in very sophisticated ways. A high proportion of secure loans gives the impression of a secure investment product, but the small portion of risky loans provide an outlook of high returns – and the possibility of a collapse of the whole bunch, of course. Investors may decide that they are willing to take a higher risk in exchange for a higher return and a higher probability of default. For the lender – usually an institutional lender, often outsourced as a special purchase vehicle (SPV) so that the transaction does not appear as a debit on the balance sheet of the original institution – it discharges pending repayment of existing loans and thus permits an acceleration of the business cycle, because the one-off payments to investors allow them to grant new loans.5 As became clear during the financial crisis of 2007 and after, this model may be as risky as a pyramid scheme when several investments are based on a single payment obligation at the same time. In the event of one default, many investments may collapse. If such a default injects mistrust into a whole sector of products – for example, all mortgages of small income earners in a certain country – this could even push the world economy into distress, quod erat demonstrandum (Bank for International Settlements 2007: 11–33; and 2008: 11–40).



Habits of Austerity

29

Capitalization The securitization model relates directly to the next major consequence of financialization. In a compelling analysis, Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thrift (2007) made their readers aware of a tendency for ‘capitalization of almost everything’. The mechanism of securitization, when taken with the technological ability to gather detailed and dispersed information over a wide range of activities, enables companies to aggregate huge amounts of small but reliable money flows and to sell them on as a bundled package. In this way, specific and at first glance negligible resources like rents, mortgages, fees paid to a contractor or even student payments to a university hall of residence become interesting targets for securitization (Leyshon and Thrift 2007: 103–6). This development is important for two reasons. First of all, capitalization means that a huge part of the population gets involved in financialization, sometimes without being fully aware of it. The financial system, like all capitalist entities, must be able to constantly reproduce itself to survive, and this means that it must continuously prospect for new asset seams that can be turned into collateral, a process which itself provides examples of novel strategies of capitalization, as agents turn to all kinds of activity for sustenance and replenishment. (Leyshon and Thrift 2007: 98)

Second, these small daily contributions of ordinary people become the main source for a complex financial system because ‘the financial bases upon which speculation is built have to be secure’ (ibid.: 99).The diversified small resources of households and daily business offer a sounder return than a few massive chunks of venture capital. The meltdown of said huge amounts of capital in the aftermath of the financial crisis reinforces this tendency. The changes brought about in capitalism’s character by growing reliance on these small portions of money should not be underestimated, since ‘they are to the contemporary financial system what gold was to its precursors, a source of value from which financial innovation can proceed (ibid.: 98). These three economic elements of financialized capitalism – informatization, securitization and capitalization – have penetrated deeply and widely into society. The daily lives of a huge number of ordinary people have become a growing source for investment in financial markets. And the returns in the form of profits serve a vast number of customers, too. Almost anyone with a steady income will be granted a bank overdraft, a credit card or a small loan. Relatively cheap loans and instalments, as

30

Jürgen Schraten

well as worthwhile returns on saving plans and retirement schemes, all stem from these three developments. But debtors form the base of this pyramid. As mentioned earlier, Burton (2008) has revealed the mechanism at the core of the economics of consumer credit: the higher the risk attached to a customer and the longer the period of repayment, the more profitable a loan will be. As a result, small high-risk loans become the most interesting target for capitalization. One example is the extraordinary growth of credit card debt. Originally a product aimed at the more affluent, this debt product has now penetrated into much lower income groups. This debt is also securitized and, because of the higher interest rates that credit cards incur, can be used to produce higher yielding – although more risky – assets than loans or mortgages. (Leyshon and Thrift 2007: 107–8)

The process has some stringent preconditions, however: enforcement of repayment and security of private property rights. A strong state is thus essential for this neoliberal economy (Harvey 2007: 64–86), whereas the promise of individual freedom is turned into a pipe dream for a majority of the population.6 Most of the studies mentioned so far focus on the United States and Britain. Their validity for the other core capitalist countries is largely unquestioned. But the tendency towards capitalization makes it clear that Third World countries represent an interesting opportunity for extension of this business model. The first steps in this direction have already been taken, as the next section will show.

South Africa as a Laboratory for Third World Financialization During the apartheid era, South Africa had restricted links to the world market and this also limited the impact of new mechanisms of capitalist competition on its domestic economy. To a degree, the economic essence of apartheid was first to grant systematic priority to the needs and wants of citizens of Dutch settler ancestry, and to whites in general after that (Westhuizen 2007). Even credit regulations were old-fashioned, being oriented to instalments more than loans (Kelly-Louw 2008: 203). The Usury Act 73 of 1968 set an interest rate cap, which prevented banks from making big loans with a high risk attached. The first attempts to liberalize the legal frameworks of the financial sector after the turn to democracy in 1994 were rather modest. Loans below ZAR6,000 were excluded from interest rate caps, resulting in a



Habits of Austerity

31

fast-growing business for moneylenders and in over-indebtedness getting out of hand, accompanied, even worse, by rough methods of money collecting (Goodwin-Groen 2006: 24–30; Campbell 2007: 252; Kelly-Louw 2008: 202; Hull and James 2012; James 2013). At the same time, consumer credit was seen as an important source of financing social reform, especially access to housing. As a result, awareness of the need for a complete reform of the credit sector grew (Department of Trade and Industry 2003). Between June 2006 and June 2007, the various regulations of a new National Credit Act No. 34 of 2005 (NCA) were put into effect. According to its preamble, the NCA was designed to develop a ‘competitive … credit market and industry, and to protect consumers’ at the same time (Section 3 NCA No. 34 of 2005). One of the main tools introduced with the NCA was the establishment of a National Credit Regulator and this institution started to publish quarterly reports on loans and indebtedness in June 2008. The figures of these reports clearly indicate that the development of a competitive credit market took precedence over consumer protection. Between June 2008 and December 2013 the numbers of credit agreements arose from 4.5 million to 6.5 million. During the same period, the proportion of unsecured loans increased from 8.4 per cent to 18.2 per cent (NCR 2008: 2–3; NCR 2012a: 4). At the same time, institutional lenders – usually commercial banks – took over from small moneylenders thanks to Section 40(4) NCA which demands the registration of lenders with more than a hundred loan agreements or outstanding credit exceeding ZAR500,000. As an effect of this rule, moneylenders have to compete within the frame of the NCA. Unlike a commercial bank, they cannot rely on their customers’ deposits, on central bank money or on the gains of securitization; so they are unable to offer loans at a competitive price and lose their market share. Most of them have transferred their business into the grey market, offering highcost emergency loans in the classified ad columns or even on lampposts. Banks have a more than 80 per cent share in the business of consumer credit (NCR 2012a: 4). This development should be read against the background of domestic economic conditions and South African monetary policy. To begin with the second, the South African Reserve Bank is committed to a monetarist policy, using a transmission mechanism for the money supply that is more sophisticated than what the Fed outlined in 1979, which is now commonplace for central banks at the beginning of this century (Schraten 2011: 528–30). It involves management of the minimum reserve requirements of commercial banks, overnight (‘standing’) facilities and open market

32

Jürgen Schraten

operations. In other words, central banks themselves act in the market as buyers or sellers of financial assets. Despite this expansion of instruments, the main goal of the Reserve Bank remains the same. It gives all of nine reasons for ‘why inflation is bad’: losses to savers; losses to people with fixed incomes; losses to taxpayers; confusing price signals to producers; slower expansion of businesses; speculation crowds out production; reduced attention to productivity; wastage of resources; and heightened tension and social disruption (South African Reserve Bank 2012b: 2f.). These reasons can be boiled down to three main rationales: owners of capital have to benefit, investors need a bright outlook, and anyone without capital should concentrate on being diligent. The last point is made clear in a further explanation of monetary policy: ‘Inflationary pressures will also be alleviated if the general public works harder and smarter, i.e. if an improvement in productivity raises the quantity (or quality) of the goods and services produced’ (South African Reserve Bank 2012c: 3). Taken together, these measures serve one clear goal: ‘The only effective way to contain inflation in the long run is therefore to restrict growth in the money supply’ (ibid.: 2). At first glance, a review of the recent effects of these policies yields an ambiguous picture. Over the five quarters starting in the first quarter of 2011 the household sector continued to provide momentum to the economy through firm increases in real final consumption expenditure, which remained well aligned with households’ real disposable income … While households incurred more debt, their disposable income rose more strongly than their indebtedness, with the result that the household debt-to-income ratio declined further. (South African Reserve Bank 2012a: 2)

This calculation – as is obvious, but it may easily slip the attention – draws on indicators for debts and earners that would only be accurate if all borrowers had a steady and sufficient formal income. The Annual Economic Report has to confess the opposite, albeit implicitly. The average growth rate over the five quarters starting in the first quarter of 2011 came to a pedestrian 3 per cent per annum – far below the rates required to make strong inroads into the high level of unemployment in the economy. (South African Reserve Bank 2012a: 2)

Finally, the source of strong consumer demand is revealed. Instalment sale advances picked up as purchases of durable goods increased, while general advances gained considerable momentum – in the case of general advances to households, also sometimes referred to as unsecured lending, the twelve-month rate of increase reached levels around



Habits of Austerity

33

40 per cent in mid-2011 before moderating to around 30 per cent more recently. Overall, bank loans and advances gradually gained momentum over the period, with its twelve-month rate of increase remaining in single digit territory. (South African Reserve Bank 2012a: 3)

Basically, the report admits that consumerism was to a certain degree paid for with money that was not yet earned. ‘Economic growth can now be seen to have been sustained by a regime of cheap consumer credit’ (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010: 3), even in South Africa. The picture becomes clearer when we examine the National Credit Regulator. During the last five years, there has been a growing disposition to give unsecured loans to people with monthly incomes below ZAR3,500. At the same time, the average period of repayment has more than doubled. This can be summarized as follows: much more credit was granted for much longer terms of repayment to customers with much higher risks of becoming over-indebted. In 2013, twenty million South Africans out of an overall population of fifty million were ‘credit active’, and nearly ten million of them had impaired credit accounts – i.e. they were in arrears (NCR 2012b: 1). Astonishingly, this rising indebtedness has not resulted in the banks suing their debtors through legal procedures (Statistics South Africa 2012: 2). The reason for this is that the option of debt discharge is completely absent from the NCA, in striking contrast with the global tendency (Kilborn 2007; Roestoff and Coetzee 2012). As a result, banks do not have to fear default on repayments; they just have to wait and, by imposing higher fees and prolonging repayment periods, they even increase their earnings in the process. The picture of consumer credit in South Africa shows all the central elements of financialization, in the specific shape of a Third World country with a First World financial system. The National Credit Regulator and emerging credit bureaux support informatization. Credit agreements explicitly contain the option of securitization: ‘Africa Bank will be entitled to cede, sell, assign or transfer all or any of its rights under this agreement, without your consent or prior notice to you’, it says in the ‘standard terms and conditions’ for a loan at this prominent bank.7 Finally, 15 per cent of all unsecured loans with an overall value of nearly ZAR1.5bn were granted to people with a monthly income below ZAR3,500 (NCR 2013a: 26). As already noted, the legal options of debt discharge are missing. South Africa – a society with the most unequal income distribution in the world and very high levels of unemployment, where large parts of

34

Jürgen Schraten

the population have next to no income – has quite recently experienced financialization on an impressive scale.

Familiarization with Debt – A Habit of Austerity The Spirit of Capitalism is an Attitude towards the Future A question arises from this analysis: why do people continue to engage with the economy in their everyday lives, when the broad majority do not benefit from it? Max Weber (1961, 2001) offered a classic reply to this question. In the course of explaining why capitalism developed in the West, he coined the phrase ‘capitalistic spirit’: In the last resort the factor which produced capitalism is rational permanent enterprise, rational accounting, rational technology and rational law, but again not these alone. Necessary complementary factors were the rational spirit, the rationalization of the conduct of life in general, and a rational economic ethic. (Weber 1961: 260)

To prevent misunderstanding, Weber rejected the idea that modern societies were mostly driven by the economic interests of individuals. For him, the development of capitalism was caused by an alteration of social conditions and not by a change of human nature. The basic step was taken by the European Reformation of the sixteenth century when life was divided into two different realms. ‘It is this fact of impersonal relations [in capitalism] which places certain human affairs outside the church and its influence, and prevents the latter from penetrating them and transforming them along ethical lines’ (Weber 1961: 262). Henceforth, society was divided into a realm of morality and solidarity, represented by religion and politics, and another that allowed the pursuit of one’s own benefit, the economy. The conflict between them is well illustrated in, for example, the two main books produced by the founder of economic theory, Adam Smith. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) he was still concerned with the emergence of morality from social relations, but in his groundbreaking economics textbook, The Wealth of Nations (1776), he praises the overall gains that society may derive from economic individualism. Judaism – with its tendency to expel magical beliefs from everyday affairs – and Christianity together have been crucial to the development of capitalism because they were always ‘plebeian religions’ (Weber 1961:



Habits of Austerity

35

266) and, as such, shaped the everyday ethics of ordinary people. But before the Reformation a distinction was still made between a virtuoso religion, practised in monasteries and the higher ranks of the church, and the daily routines of laypersons. The ‘monk is the first human being who lives rationally, who works methodically and by rational means towards a goal, namely the future life’ (Weber 1961: 267). This ‘future life’ refers, of course, to the Christian belief in an eternal life after death. The (religiously) rational way of life in monasteries was not unique to Christianity; it could be found in Buddhism as well. So this factor alone could not explain the development of Western capitalism. ‘The Reformation made a decisive break with this system … The stern religious characters who had previously gone to monasteries had now to practise their religion in the life of the world’ (Weber 1961: 268). So Max Weber’s basic idea was that one element of a highly specific religious denomination – the belief in double predestination held by Calvinist Protestants – had a decisive impact on society by supporting a tendency towards rationalization. There are two obvious objections to this claim. First, Calvinists were a very small minority in Britain and on the European continent. So how could they influence the way of life of most people in society? Second, Weber was concerned with a certain period of time, lasting from the Protestant Reformation in 1517 to the beginning of the twentieth century. But this is exactly the time when the sacred retreated from society and religious faith lost its grip on law and education. So, how could one aspect of an insignificant sect have so much social influence, while Christianity in general lost its importance for public and private life? Max Weber was not wrong, but he was not abstract enough. What made and still makes people willing to lead their lives in a capitalistic way is a certain concept of the future that is exemplified by the idea of double predestination in Calvinism. As Weber knew, the revelation of a future life (after death) encouraged rational planning of daily life. But Calvinism is neither its cause nor its main expression. The idea is basic to economy and education, to science and politics. Human activity in these areas switched from the fulfilment of classical ideals to an orientation towards future needs. In economic terms, as long as the satisfaction of needs is mainly based on agriculture, the future remains unpredictable. A thunderstorm or flooding may destroy the harvest tomorrow and the whole economy may break down; this changes with capitalism.8 The future is still unpredictable, but uncertainty is turned into calculable probability. People start to bank on particular future outcomes and Weber was right to derive this expectation from the realm of religious faith. The

36

Jürgen Schraten

spirit of capitalism depends on faith in the everlasting growth of wealth, a faith maintained despite contradictory experiences in everyday life.

Enacting a Democratic Spirit: The Human Economy Project The notion of a capitalistic ‘spirit’ contains a mystical undercurrent that does not really fit well with Weber’s concept of rationality. To repeat, he himself stressed that the development of modern capitalism was not triggered by a psychological motivation or change of human nature, but by changed social conditions. In this chapter I have traced the latest radical development of this ‘spiritualized’ capitalist concept of a human being. Economics, in rejecting any notion of the economy being embedded ethically in society, ironically ended up promoting a highly normative concept, Homo economicus (Beckert 2012: 249). This type may be ‘defined for instance by the ability to set his own goals, to determine and calculate his interests, to stand back from the world surrounding him, to instrumentalize it, to be utilitarian, selfish and opportunistic’ (Callon 2007: 142). Of course, no human being can live that way – it signifies an attitude that can only be fulfilled inside a social niche designed for a limited sort of action. But, as I have shown here, the scope of these market niches is being constantly extended and so opportunities to prosper as Homo economicus multiply. Max Weber’s capitalistic spirit may be reconceptualized as a socio-economic setting that enables human beings to externalize all unprofitable social entanglements. Money itself, as this setting’s main tool, has to be made easily available without losing its functionality as a result of inflation. This is the project of monetarist policies. It is quite successful. Financialized capitalism contains more promise for the future than previous forms. Capitalism once demanded resources that had already been accumulated – this seems to have changed in times of easy access to consumer credit. As a consequence, rational planning of the future in all respects of daily life becomes more important. The dynamic indicated by Max Weber is more vibrant than ever before. Financialization teaches the customers of financial market products to become ‘revolvers’ (Langley 2008: 139–40). This term refers to the required ability to cope repeatedly with financial demands. Instead of seeing debts as an exceptional life event, people get used to being exposed to the ‘revolving’ necessity to serve monetary claims. Yet there are crucial differences between financialization in First World countries and in the Third World. The higher insecurity of living conditions and employment in South Africa is matched by the lenders’ stronger legal position. In-



Habits of Austerity

37

debted citizens cannot escape their obligations – they only can prolong them into the future. In this way, the ‘spirit of capitalism’ – the ability to manage one’s own future despite its uncertainties – turns into a ghost: obligations of the past haunt their victims. One crucial aspect of financialization, and of the habits of austerity that it entails, is that social beings are transformed into ‘individuals’. Indebtedness is treated as the result of individual misbehaviour, despite the fact that contracting partners – banks – systematically calculate returns based on the default of debtors and in the expectation of mass unemployment, which is a social problem seldom brought on by an unemployed person. Other risks of indebtedness, like illness, accidents and effects of natural catastrophes, bear no human responsibility at all and should be shared socially. So a human economy would need first to show how the tools of financialization are themselves embedded in politics and society. Then they might be transformed into tools for the democratization of finance and the economy. NOTES  1. The article is based on an address Friedman gave to the annual meeting of the American Economics Association in December 1967, so it may be seen as being programmatic.  2. Friedrich von Hayek had published The Road to Serfdom as a first attack on interventionist policies in 1944. The Mont Pelegrin Society was founded in 1947 to promote these ideas.  3. To be precise, in the case of the U.S. dollar, we have to deal with the Federal Funds Rate, which is what banks have to pay for overnight loans to bridge an acute demand for credit.  4. More than a few analysts connect the moderate levels during 1980 to the U.S. presidential election campaign.  5. This procedure becomes even more attractive for banks as a way of making fresh money available without drawing on central bank reserves (Schraten 2011: 531).  6. Indeed the adjustment of the legal system, especially concerning property rights, builds another crucial element of financialized capitalism; but this cannot be discussed here.   7. Africa Bank, one of two banks allowed, not long ago, to compete with the Big Four commercial banks, collapsed in August 2014 when repayments on unsecured loans dried up, provoking the rating agency Moody’s to downgrade the Big Four.  8. Even as late as 1870 in Britain, then the world’s leading industrial capitalist power, the main indicator of the national economy’s standing was the weather at harvest time.

38

Jürgen Schraten

Jürgen Schraten is Postdoctoral Research Assistant (Akademischer Rat) at the University of Giessen, Germany, and Associate of the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria. He received his PhD in 2006. His research focusses on financialization, credit markets and indebtedness in South Africa and Germany.

Chapter 2

░ What Financial Crisis? The Global Politics of Finance Distributional Consequences and Legitimizing Narratives HORACIO ORTIZ

Introduction It is March 2004, in a large open office containing over one hundred highly paid finance professionals, in the Paris district of La Défense. Bastien, a 29-year-old junior fund manager at Acme, a major financial multinational, says ‘I buy 10 million dollars at 20 bp’ and thereby closes a transaction to buy a fraction of a U.S. mortgage-backed security. At the time, Bastien and his colleagues, who hired me as an assistant and allowed me to make observations in their office, considered that credit derivatives were among the safest assets available. It is a good deal to get a spread of ‘20 bp’ (i.e. 0.2 per cent over the 3.4 per cent Libor [London inter-bank offered rate]), the rate at which major banks lend to each other, which is considered ‘risk-free’. This yield would pay a return to the owners of the US$700 million managed by Bastien for his clients, and cover his salary and bonus out of the fee extracted by his employer. At the time, Brazilian sovereign bonds, for a similar maturity of ten years, offered a rate of 10 per cent, the fiscal capacity of this state to repay being deemed much lower than that of middle-class Americans buying their first home. The war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DCR) then had an external debt of US$10 billion, only slightly more than the 5 billion euros managed by the ‘ABS [asset-backed securities] team’ of which Bastien was a member. But, unlike the Brazilian state, the DRC does not make it into the ‘investment universe’ of companies like Acme. With its decimated population, the state’s capacity to extract revenue to repay its debt is deemed ‘too risky’ an investment.

40

Horacio Ortiz

Like most of his colleagues, Bastien’s salary is supposed to be justified by his technical expertise in one specific asset, in his case asset-backed securities. His decision to buy is backed, literally and legally, by a set of standardized procedures that he would consider to be morally and politically neutral – a technical matter (Foucault 2004). But is this so? How can we account for the connection between Bastien’s everyday actions as an employee and the global hierarchy governing the distribution of monetary resources? Six years after I made these observations, in 2010, Bastien was still ‘managing risks’ at Acme. The investments his team were responsible for rose to 7 billion euros by 2006 and lost more than 2 billion after that. Acme had invested only a small fraction of the 300 billion euros under its management in asset-backed securities and came almost unscathed out of what has been termed the biggest financial crisis since 1929, when major global financial companies reported compounded losses of hundreds of billions, requiring bailouts by some of the world’s richest states. But what does the word ‘crisis’ mean in this context? During the same period, Brazil’s sovereign debt saw its yield fall to around 4 per cent, since that country was now deemed to be much less risky than before. And while the DRC was still bleeding, an outcast in the distribution of credit managed by the finance industry, the world’s biggest banks, measured by assets and profits, were no longer privately owned American or European institutions, but state-owned Chinese banks. If, after 2008, the slump in cross-border trade was observable in most places around the world, its effects were different from one place to another. Just as in 2008, the bursting of the ‘internet bubble’ in 2001 was also considered to be ‘the biggest financial crisis since 1929’, evoking the bloody culmination of the Wall Street Crash in world war. The long-term situation in the DRC, as in many other places around the world, constitutes a crisis of much bigger proportions: the definition of a ‘crisis’ is contested territory (Ortiz 2012). In the liberal parlance of financial regulators, which itself explicitly appeals to mainstream financial theory1 as it is taught in universities and business schools around the world, the term ‘crisis’ refers to an error in otherwise ‘efficient markets’. These errors consist in mistaken evaluations, giving high prices to risky investments and thereby orienting the money of ‘investors’ in a way that results in a suboptimal allocation of capital. The bubble and crash sequence would then be a result of the market erring and then correcting itself. The revaluation of Brazilian debt, the exclusion of the DRC and the new hype for Chinese assets, as errors or corrections to global market efficiency, would all be part of this process. This discourse has been adopted in financial regulations worldwide,



What Financial Crisis?

41

not just as a narrative, but also in their technical details. Everywhere, ‘qualified’ or ‘sophisticated’ investors, defined as those who master financial theory and have the means to apply it,2 are given the right to levy funds, most often coming from middle classes with the capacity to save, then to distribute them in financial assets around the world. The hierarchy established thereby, so the theory goes, is justified not only in technical terms but also in political terms, as the best possible distribution of credit available today. In this chapter, based on fieldwork observations made of the finance industry and in business schools,3 I will explore how to account for the politics of this global hierarchy of the access to credit. Exploring the everyday lives of people like Bastien, I will analyse the workings of crises – of subprime mortgage securitization and of the exclusion of billions of people by the everyday procedures of the financial industry. In this I will draw on descriptions of everyday operations at Acme, as I observed them, but I will also address the limits of fieldwork-based research. As we will see, the liberal discourse of financial regulation is not simply a narrative that floats above the everyday workings of global financial discrimination. On the contrary, it is used to make sense of its most minute operations. At the same time, the world depicted in the discourse is far from what I observed in fieldwork. If we wish to account for the distributional effects of the finance industry, we need to understand where this discourse fits, and how anthropology must go beyond theoretical critique. I will first present the everyday operations of the ABS team to show how these made sense for those who carried them out, as the deeds of ‘investors’ in more or less ‘efficient markets’. Although the use of these terms is, in practice, far from the utopian political philosophies from which they stem, I will show how these terms have meanings that are technical, moral and political. I will then explore how anthropology can account for how they play a central role in the distributional effects and legitimizing narratives of the finance industry. Finally, I will examine critically the methods and conceptual tools available to anthropologists to address the global political role that finance plays in the allocation of credit.

Investors, Efficient Markets and the Finance Industry’s Liberal Political Project Bastien does not buy an ABS with his own money, but on behalf of his clients, in this case some French insurance companies. He is an ‘investor’

42

Horacio Ortiz

in so far as someone has given him a mandate to handle their money, and the owners of money are ‘investors’ who can purchase ABS if Bastien does it for them. The investor, as an agent in the transaction, exists only as the effect of a relation of representation. Yet, in doing so, the employee is expected to behave as though he is indeed the investor. Marie, 35 years old, was the head of the seven-member ABS team, which had started with her as the sole fund manager three years before. In 2004 she was no longer making purchases personally, but in an interview she expressed the official position of her profession on this issue: At the end of the day, as an investor, you are alone in front of your screen … You must hold on to your strong beliefs. I have kept my beliefs because I have one principle: if I do something that goes against what I strongly believe and it turns against me, I’d say to myself that I am the worst of all idiots.

Purchasing an ABS would then be the act of a person engaging her own opinions, principles, taboos and feelings.4 Even though many other employees expressed a more distant and sometimes cynical attitude towards their work, having to produce a personal opinion about the price and opportunity to buy an ABS was part of the standardized procedures that fund managers had to follow in order to keep their jobs. I was an assistant to Juliette, also 35 years old, and the most senior manager after Marie. I would take up the ABS contracts that she had analysed before buying them, and produce reports in which I synthesized the reasons for the purchase; these would then be read by clients and other employees in Acme. In these documents, Juliette would highlight the main reasons to consider an ABS a safe investment. The asset is produced by a bank that bundles around ten thousand loans into a single security, sold by an independent legal entity. The profit to the owner of the ABS thus comes from the interest payments of the people who took out the loans with the bank. To do what is called a ‘fundamental valuation’ of the asset, Juliette would check, for instance, the FICO5 scores of the borrowers, their geographical distribution, whether they were purchasing their main or a secondary home, and the kind of loan they had signed up to. Thibaud, 27 years old, who was in charge of producing a systematic follow up on all the ABS bought by the team, explained that this evaluation, on which any purchase decision was based, needed the personal opinion of an expert: ‘In the analysis there is after all a part of added value, a little bit intellectual, if you wish, not simply automatic, otherwise we would not hire analysts, we would just use software’.



What Financial Crisis?

43

Besides Thibaud and myself, the team had another assistant, Fatima, 26 years old, who had a master’s in financial mathematics, but who had been relegated to administrative tasks. Even though she was better qualified than me, I had been hired to perform analyses that demanded more skills than those required in her own job. This was awkward for me, but Marie and the other managers told me they had hoped Fatima would be more active and eventually take up more responsibilities, something they claimed she did not do, thereby justifying their decision not to renew her short-term contract. Fatima, on the other hand, told me in an interview that she was frustrated by the fact that the managers did not give her more chances to take responsibility and prevented her from knowing more about the team’s strategy, leaving her cornered into performing administrative tasks that she loathed. She was adamant that she was not being discriminated against for having North African parents, but she said that such discrimination was systematic in the finance industry and this only enhanced her resolve to become a fund manager eventually. Thibaud expressed the same wish to reach a position where he would have the responsibility to evaluate and decide whether to buy or sell assets on the basis of his own personal opinion. The figure of the investor that all these employees officially embodied or wished to embody does not make sense if the procedures of valuation and investment are considered apart from the assumption of market efficiency. According to the theoretical framework from which all formulas used by employees were derived, in ‘efficient markets’ free investors meet to transact on the basis of their personal valuations, setting a price that then reflects all available information about the asset. In that case, says the theory, no single investor can expect to have more information than what is already integrated in the price. The investor must then accept the price of the asset, buy it and keep it, while looking for more information. The notion that prices are representative of the value of the asset, as Adam Smith asserted in his philosophy of markets (Smith [1776] 1960; Foucault 1966), has been reinforced by the use of probabilities in financial theory since the late nineteenth century. Prices would then be representative of the social activities on whose cash flows the asset is a claim and would only vary with new information, which would be by definition unpredictable. This uncertainty was transformed into probabilistic ‘randomness’, a technical term meaning that, in the long run, prices or the returns that they represent revolve around averages, with a spread measured through standard deviations (called ‘volatility’) and correlations. According to this line of reasoning, the volatility of a single investment is, by statistical construction, higher than that of a bundle.

44

Horacio Ortiz

The ‘logical solution’ is then to buy ‘the whole market’, to diversify the investment to the maximum, in order to minimize a standard deviation considered to be one of the most important measures of risk. This rationale, which landed a Nobel prize for the economist who formalized it mathematically in the 1950s as ‘Modern Portfolio Theory’, underpinned the construction of indexes which were considered to be as representative as any other number in measuring natural phenomena for over a century (MacKenzie 2006). As a result, in Europe and the United States, investing in financial assets slowly gained the legitimacy of being considered a scientific endeavour, instead of being thought to be a kind of gambling, as it was before (De Goede 2005; Preda 2009). When Juliette purchases an ABS, after analysing the ‘fundamentals’, she is actually integrating that asset into a strategy of diversification. At the time of my observations, she had to invest US$1.5 billion in $10 million purchases of around 150 different ABS. She followed the procedure that was then current for more renowned assets, such as stocks and bonds. The strategy was to ‘replicate’ the market – or an index considered to be its proxy – giving the assets the same weight in the portfolio that they had in the market, but slightly tinkering with this weight in order to invest more in assets that would outperform the index and less in those that would underperform. Since there were no official indexes for ABS at the time, Juliette and her colleagues would use reports produced by different banks and brokers to establish their own index. The whole methodology only made sense within the frame of Modern Portfolio Theory. This approach did not just affect the ABS team’s strategy, but also the overall strategy that Acme proposed to its big clients – an approach that was standard for major companies. While a small investment fund investing a few hundred million dollars may specialize in a single type of asset and even in one geographical location, Acme claimed to cover the whole world as a single efficient market, thus diversifying investment as much as possible. A team of mathematicians in the Allocation department would establish statistical data on all the assets available in order to calculate their respective average returns, volatilities, correlations and the like. On this basis, they would propose an investment that replicated the whole market and at the same time would try to outperform it by giving higher weights to assets expected to yield higher returns for a similar risk. Stocks and bonds of rich countries were each allocated a third of all investments within the Equity and Fixed Income departments, the rest being distributed among other assets, such as credit derivatives in the Structured department or ‘emerging markets’ which had only a small share. Just as with Juliette’s diversification procedure, this strategy was



What Financial Crisis?

45

explicitly proposed for contracts in which Acme represented the interests of its clients, and it had to be respected if employees did not want to lose their jobs. In these procedures, Juliette considered that the prices they were negotiating and paying for, thanks to market efficiency, were representative of the cash flows of social activities receiving the credit. She, like her colleagues, considered herself to be part of the process of market efficiency, which was performed not by random agents but by other experts like her, hired within the finance industry to abide by the regulations that shaped the everyday work experience of all participants. An employee like Juliette would not only use market efficiency as a conceptual tool to determine her investment strategy, but she would also apply the term to her own concrete interactions with colleagues in her everyday professional life. This justified respecting the information produced and accepted within this professional realm, as though it were closer to truth than any produced elsewhere, since it was a product of the market, which, according to normal procedures, was considered to be efficient. Juliette used reports produced by rating agencies, banks and brokers. The latter often drew on numbers obtained by information providers such as Reuters or Bloomberg, who produce statistical averages of future expectations generated by hundreds of qualified employees. These numbers are usually called ‘the market consensus’. Since the credit derivatives market was not organized as a regulated exchange, but as an over-the-counter market allowing personal transactions, being in the market every day, interacting and exchanging personal opinions with other investors meant gaining access to information that ensured the market’s efficiency. At the time of my observations, a change occurred at the top of Acme’s Allocation department whose decisions affected all the other departments. Nicole, 47 years old and head of the ‘Structured’ department, replaced Fernand, who was ten years older and had always worked in the Equity department. Nicole’s new position was a reward for her department’s results, which had grown faster and made more profit than any other. In her opening speech, she announced that the company wished to expand its use of derivatives, such as indexes, options, futures and swaps, a move that was in line with what was happening in the industry at the time (LiPuma and Lee 2004). This meant that contracts with clients would have to be reoriented in the future, implying different volumes of the funds under management for employees, teams and departments. Remuneration by Acme came from the proportionate fees it charged on the amount of money it managed, and a similar logic governed the salaries and bonuses of each employee. More funds under management meant

46

Horacio Ortiz

higher salaries, bonuses and responsibilities, including the chance to hire new staff. This was in all employees’ minds at the time and, while some expressed anxiety that their team or department would be downsized, the members of the ABS team expected the opposite, since they had been part of Nicole’s success as head of their department. So Juliette said: ‘For us, I hope, [the change] should be positive, it should foster some ideas, say, that instead of having 3 per cent of ABS in the portfolio, maybe the optimal allocation – we should work on it, but we have made our own calculations – could reach 15 to 20 per cent’. For the ABS team, this came at a difficult moment. The yields of the ABS that were considered less risky, the best according to the rating agencies, were falling. This meant that the team could not launch a new project based on its previous practice, where it bought and kept the assets for years, paying a fixed return to clients and deducting fees for salaries, bonuses and hiring. The amount to be distributed was simply no longer enough. The solution, according to all team members, was to purchase riskier assets whose yield was higher. But this meant that they could not be kept in the long run, since some of them might default. Thus, instead of a ‘buy-and-hold’ strategy, a more ‘active’ strategy was required of buying, selling and buying again, and this meant that managers could hope to make short-term gains by buying low and selling high. Instead of a fundamental valuation of the assets, it meant developing a speculative approach. This change was not simply a technical shift from one set of procedures to another, since both were actually standardized. It meant a break with the idea that the market was efficient. Considering that one could gain from playing with short-term price movements, thus abandoning the notion that prices represent their long-term ‘fundamental’ value, markets were no longer performing the social function that financial theory ascribes to them. Thus, although all employees agreed it was necessary to change, and the company situation was favourable to this, the shift gave expression to different positions communicated to me in interviews or random conversations. Marie, Juliette and Bastien had all been trained to make a fundamental evaluation of ABS, and most of their professional lives so far had depended on this. Yet they did not describe the change in the same way. For Marie: There are other ways to create value, which are opposed to my way of thinking, but… I am starting to recognize that there is value in trading, in buying and selling, in playing with big discontinuities, even if you don’t care about fundamentals. … We must not cut ourselves off from it. Nevertheless, I



What Financial Crisis?

47

remain very much attached to our beliefs concerning credit.6 … When you manage money for insurance companies, you can’t just go and Spiel!7 But then again, as far as my sources of value are concerned, I am changing. I think that those guys bring value. Even if I think it is artificial, it is value… So I have to be able to integrate that way of working in my team.

The moral content of a fundamental valuation was a strong aspect of this discourse, where the idea that prices do indeed reflect all available information about the asset is deemed to be a necessary operational assumption. Juliette’s position differed from Marie’s: I think that, as long as you have a fundamentalist view, which in this market is for me the credit approach, nothing prevents you from trading. Trading is just technical, it’s just, at a certain moment, taking the right position, but it’s … I think that the most important thing is that you remain in a frame where you feel comfortable as far as credit is concerned.

Thus, like Marie, Juliette accepted that there was a contradiction between the two ways of acting as an investor. Yet, she attempted to reconcile them, as long as she could stress that her expertise was based on something that was not ‘just technical’ – that is, her views about market efficiency were being based on fundamental analysis. Bastien was personally indifferent to the two sides of the controversy. Confronted with the need to take a position, he used humour to try to slip out of the challenge. In an occasional chat, smiling and playing with his allegedly high-class upbringing, he told me that he would adapt and remain a proactive follower of his two bosses, yet he said: ‘Trading, to buy and sell all the time, to speculate on short-term price changes, does not appeal that much to me: I find it a bit vulgar!’ Eventually, Marie left Acme to work at a rating agency, where she only did fundamental valuations. Juliette replaced her, Bastien became second in command and the team expanded to ten members, four of whom were analysts. These new hires were expected to support the idea that the team was not discarding its initial expertise, even though the new funds it launched were sometimes based on a speculative approach. So all the employees felt obliged to take a stance on the moral injunction to support the efficiency of markets, and this remains fundamental to the justification of financial regulation today. Fernand, who as head of the Allocation department had been in charge of directing the money managed by Acme around the world, gave a more explicitly political account when attempting to make sense of the internet bubble, which he understood as part of the process of market efficiency:

48

Horacio Ortiz It seems to me that we have broadened our management universe fantastically. I mean, in this company there are people who are interested in buying bonds issued by a Thai brewery or by an Argentinian bank … The market has imposed the discipline of returns … so, if you want, the flows of money have been bent; they were poured over activities promising 15, 20, 25 per cent returns … So we can see all the strength of this system, that is, its capacity to define a hierarchy between returns and therefore to impose true discipline, true rigor … We have been able to create hierarchies, but at the same time we have made collective mistakes to a proportionate degree. I would say, with hindsight, that the blindness, the stupidity, the bandwagon mentality, whatever, now seems incredible. The finance industry, because of its globalization and because it set itself in competition with itself, has exaggerated. And I think it is a fundamental feature of this activity. I think that in its tendencies it does not make mistakes, but on the other hand, it always exaggerates … So it is true that financial markets have had the role of … I would say, in a certain way, that they have increased the rigor of profitability in the markets, they have increased the level of requirements, they have imposed better transparency, they have provoked capital to be more efficient, as it is said, but indeed there have been situations of excess.

For Fernand, market efficiency made prices reflect the real returns that ‘investors’ could expect from purchasing financial assets – i.e. their fundamental value. Nicole, who replaced him as head of the Allocation department, held a different view. According to her, fundamental valuation was not enough to deal with the risks of markets, where price variations could be disconnected from them: ‘I think that when you are a fund manager like that, [based on] fundamental [valuation], and you take positions in the market, you do things without controlling anything’. For her, in order to avoid the volatility of the markets that characterized the internet crisis, ‘the solution is to develop use of derivatives’. Both Fernand and Nicole tried to defend their professional expertise and the role of the finance industry in the face of what appeared officially to be a failure. The internet bubble was deemed a ‘crisis’ that was eventually corrected by the markets, which thereby proved their efficiency. In this narrative, which is the point of reference for the different moral stances taken by Juliette, Marie and Bastien, the finance industry has a global political role, namely the ‘optimal allocation’ of resources. This expression, used by Juliette to support her demand to manage more funds and thereby increase her salary, bonus and responsibility, had a technical meaning in applications of Modern Portfolio Theory, and a moral or political meaning in the role ascribed to the finance industry by financial regulators worldwide.



What Financial Crisis?

49

The reality for employees, when they applied procedures for remuneration within a professional network of exchange, seems distant from the Utopia of free individuals exchanging in open arenas, which is part of the liberal democratic project to combine individual freedom and common welfare. Yet this discourse is not merely a facade. It is fundamentally constitutive of the procedures, calculations and justifications that employees must mobilize in their everyday work. And its moral and political underpinnings are the limited repertoire with which they can try to legitimize both their personal actions and those of their professional environment. In this context, a ‘crisis’ is not the hierarchical distribution of credit, with its toll of violence and discrimination, but a variation in prices deemed too extreme within a limited time frame. This raises questions concerning how to study the meaning of these professional practices in order to understand their global political consequences.

Analytical Tools and Methods If we want to understand how the distribution of credit works in the finance industry, we must observe the distance between the liberal Utopia and its current use in financial operations in the details of everyday practice, including both the operations that decide where the money goes or does not go and in the stories that legitimize the claims made for them. This poses a challenge, since most analytical concepts are based on the same liberal framework used by the financial employees themselves. Moreover, participant observation and classic fieldwork techniques are not enough if we aspire to understand the global geography of financial flows and regulations. An interdisciplinary approach must engage with the limits of current conceptual frameworks. In almost every calculation and procedure of evaluation and investment, employees like Juliette can explain, with reference to the details of what they do, how they may be interpreted as the actions of an individual investor attempting to maximize returns and limit volatility in markets considered to be more or less efficient. The concepts of the investor and efficient markets are thus disseminated through the commercial networks that together compose the finance industry. They take on multiple meanings within limits that are explored by employees in the interest of both innovation and self-justification. And this multiplicity includes tensions and contradictions that employees use to make sense of the conflicts that confront them and of the events, known as

50

Horacio Ortiz

‘crises’, that seem to escape the conceptual horizon within which they operate (Ortiz 2014a). When Juliette decides to buy an ABS, she is putting her personal opinion at stake, as stated by Marie in the interview above. Yet, Juliette’s opinion was not possible without the research produced by the employees of other companies. It was also impossible without the decisions made by Marie, her superior, and by Nicole, as director of the Structured department and later of Acme’s Allocation department. The decision to invest in more risky asset-backed securities was thus not made by a single investor, incarnated in a fund manager, but was rather disseminated through interactions between employees, inside the company and in the wider network of exchange. In all these instances, employees apply procedures accomplished under the gaze of a maximizing investor; but this figure is not to be found anywhere. Closer in spirit to what Foucault calls an ‘intentionality’, this gaze gives meaning to operations, but does not stand outside them as their cause (Foucault 1976: 125; Ortiz 2011). At the time of my observations, the money invested by Juliette came from a big British bank, which I shall call the ‘GBB’, and from French insurance companies, while AIG8 received a return for insuring the nominal price of the assets in case of default, typically through a credit default swap. The investment was structured as a collateralized debt obligation (CDO), whereby the ABS bought by Juliette would be held by an independent legal entity that sold a single security, divided in tranches and rated by the rating agencies. This structure, mirroring that of an ABS, was a classic way to do these deals at the time. Juliette explained to me that the diversification she sought had been a result of negotiations with her commercial partners who imposed certain clauses that were in turn a reflection of mainstream professional standards: I had guidelines … it was decided by AIG [who had] certain rules of distribution by type of asset … after all, it’s pretty common sense, it means a maximum exposure to each asset of 2 per cent, whether it be ABS or anything else, you see… So the rules were discussed mainly with Jean-Paul9 at the beginning, then certain rules of functioning of a CDO were added because of [the requirements of] rating agencies … it is really a back-and-forward process, it takes a month … with the GBB mainly … we discussed the spreads.

The assumption that the ABS market was efficient gave meaning to an attempt to replicate it by diversifying as much as possible within it, and was thus not the decision of a single employee but was disseminated, like the gaze of the investor, through the network of exchange and within Acme.



What Financial Crisis?

51

This dissemination allows for a multiplicity of stances that are not always fully compatible. As the case of the ABS team shows, the hierarchical distribution of the gaze of the investor, with Marie at the top and the rest with varying degrees of responsibility below, allowed different positions to be taken within the same team and even within the same person. Thus Juliette tried to defend a stance that she later took as head of the team, affirming at once that markets were eventually efficient and so it made sense to do fundamental valuation; but also that they were not, which justified a systematically speculative approach. This contradiction is already present in the mainstream attempt both to replicate a market that is considered to be efficient and also to try to beat it by tinkering with the respective weights of the assets in the portfolio. This tension becomes an open conflict, for instance between hedge fund managers, who claim that markets are not efficient and can be beaten, and experts who develop software replicating the market, with the implication that it is so efficient that investment does not need the intervention of a person, even less a highly paid hedge fund manager. All these stances existed within Acme, which was not original in this respect, and were included in the offer it proposed to its clients, allowing Acme to represent them as contradictory single investors. Employees used these conceptual tensions to justify or denigrate their careers and professional environment. As we saw with Nicole, Fernand, Marie and Juliette, they all tried to justify their career choices as ways of upholding the project of market efficiency. Yet they did so with different arguments, which in each case tended to justify their personal expertise and position in the struggle for funds, fees, salaries, bonuses and responsibilities within the company. The change that took place in Acme during my time there meant an increase for the ABS team in the funds under management, and therefore in salaries, bonuses and hiring, to the detriment of other assets either already being purchased in the company or still outside its ‘investment universe’. For employees whose careers depended on their expertise in specific assets, the pricing of the debt of the Brazilian state, the exclusion of the DRC, the progressive attempt to purchase stocks from Chinese companies and the hype over credit derivatives and then the collapse of demand for them were all considered to be attempts to increase market efficiency by applying the multiple, but limited, possible gazes of the investor. Thus, investors, efficient markets, justice and crisis are all part of how the distributional consequences of the financial industry make sense, both in the minute details of operations and in their moral and political legitimization.

52

Horacio Ortiz

My analysis obviously challenges the use of liberal theory to describe and justify the current role of the finance industry. Financial regulation uses this theory, when it defines a crisis in the credit derivatives market and considers that better alignment of the revenues of employees with those of their clients might be a solution, for instance by reforming the bonus system, or when it indicates that a lack of transparency is the main problem. The assumption of this discourse is of course that if employees truly respected their clients’ interests and if there were no problems with information and fraud, the finance industry would indeed be an instance of market efficiency. The narrowness of how crisis is defined in this context becomes evident when we consider that these reforms fail entirely to address the global hierarchy created by the finance industry. On the contrary, in recent decades, IMF and World Bank ‘aid’ programmes have been consistently oriented towards transforming economic activities so that they ‘adapt’ to the rationales of the finance industry, in order to obtain credit from it. The increased inequality of income distribution and reductions in basic public goods and services such as education, health and infrastructure that have accompanied these programmes would then all be passed off as a trajectory towards market efficiency. Marxist approaches do at least address this hierarchy as their starting point for linking it to the rest of economic activity. Instead of attempting to see independent markets composed of individuals or their agents, they focus on the global context and the political question of distribution. Yet a Marxist ontology has deficiencies of its own. Dividing the real economy from the financial one, which, according to this ontology, is inevitably abstract and alienated, like all money in capitalist society, does not help us to understand the concrete workings of the current distribution of resources. Detailed accounts of operations, of the sort generated by my ethnography, disrupt the idea that they are indeed oriented towards the interests of concrete investors. Although the finance professionals receive the biggest salaries, finance is not necessarily where the biggest fortunes are made. In today’s corporations, the biggest shareholder is usually an institution, while firms like Acme which act on behalf of other people rarely own a major share. The issue of control of the means of production and of alienation due to the separation of producers from production is dissolved when we consider the dissemination of agency in financial procedures and their contradictions. Juliette, with 300,000 euros of annual revenue in 2004, is no classic capitalist and nor are her major clients, such as banks and insurance companies, whose shareholder structures are themselves diluted (Ortiz 2013).



What Financial Crisis?

53

Max Weber tried to grasp this situation by mixing the Marxists’ intuition about exploitation carried out in the name of shareholder value with his own analysis of depersonalization in an era of bureaucracy. He wrote: In [hierocratic domination], interests that are personal and flexible are at play within broad limits, and purely personal action can change in a decisive way the relation and situation of the participants. On the other hand, the director of a company with shareholders will find it very hard to establish that kind of relation with the workers in the factory, because it is his duty to defend the interest of the shareholders as his true ‘masters’; and this will be almost impossible for the director of the bank that finances the company in his relation to the factory workers or for the owner of a mortgage credit in his relation to the owner of the good that serves as collateral for the credit given by the bank. Behaviour is here determined in a decisive manner by ‘competition’, by the market (labour market, money market and goods markets), by ‘objective’ considerations that, being neither ethical nor anti-ethical, but simply non-ethical, seem absurd to any ethics, i.e. by factors that all introduce impersonal instances between the people concerned. From an ethical point of view, this ‘slavery without a master’ in which capitalism enmeshes the worker or the debtor of a mortgage can only be discussed as an institution. But, by principle, this discussion cannot concern the personal behaviour of the participant, whether he is dominant or dominated. Under the threat of disappearing because he would be, from any point of view, economically useless, this behaviour is prescribed to him essentially in objective relations and – this is the decisive point – it is characterized as a ‘service’ with an impersonal objective aim. (Weber [1922] 1978: 709; modified translation, italics in the original)

The case of the ABS team above would contradict Weber’s assertion that there is no ethical component in the application of financial procedures. As we saw, the neoliberal project itself is present both in the technicalities of calculation and in the moral and political justification of their distributive effects. And these justifications are used to account for broken careers, power struggles and massive redirection of the money under management. They are thus not a simple facade; but, as we saw, the liberal discourse does not correspond to what it is expected to describe. The common thread to liberalism, Marxism and their alliance in Weber is the need to base the analysis on situating an embodied subject for whom a single dichotomy between alienation (or depersonalization) and human realization is problematic. The bureaucratic context of the financial system and the global connections it makes between millions of people render this dichotomy hard to use. Some people, in rich countries for instance, are both shareholders as owners of pension funds and vic-

54

Horacio Ortiz

tims of the search for shareholder value as employees made redundant. The owners of stocks and bonds often do not know the intricacies of the methodologies of valuation and investment that their trustees use in a procedural way; and yet massive violence is often the result. And the vast majority of the world’s people, who are excluded from the financial circuit as clients or owners of money, exercise very little influence over how their situation is actually connected to the way the finance system works today. Yet, in all these respects, people do make sense of their situation by manipulating technical, moral and political concepts. We are neither totally alienated nor living in a utopian liberal arena where each person’s lot is either their own choice or the imposition of some evil monopoly that will disappear when its source is revealed. My approach here is more inspired by pragmatism. Using the fieldwork method allows the researcher to take time to understand the complex meanings, uncertainties and taboos through which employees in the finance industry make sense of the operations they perform. This method produces similar results with subscribers of bank loans, users of insurance contracts, the excluded or the exploited, for instance through financial programmes of the World Bank and the IMF. What comes out of these studies is a much more complex picture, where money, credit and financial relations extend throughout the world, taking on different meanings in the social spaces that they connect or separate. Fieldwork alone cannot grasp the global effects of these connections; it can only follow some of them, singularly, as they develop and thereby shape the global landscape. Thus interdisciplinary work is essential if we are to grasp the complexity of the meanings with which these global connections are made possible and the violence that these global hierarchies produce (Hart and Ortiz 2014). The analysis of everyday financial practices developed here is interested in understanding the concrete operations whereby the hierarchies in the access to credit are achieved by the financial industry, which itself plays a big role in the production and reproduction of global inequalities. These do not simply concern the plight of the poor in the United States or other rich countries, often highlighted during the ‘subprime crisis’. The concentration of monetary resources in certain activities and certain parts of the globe is concomitant with the exclusion of billions of people from resources, such as food, health, housing and education. The chronic hunger of over eight hundred million people,10 to mention the biggest crisis of our times, is certainly not uniquely the deed of the way in which the financial industry’s operations exclude them from the monetary resources that would be crucial to solve the immediate and



What Financial Crisis?

55

crying problems they face. But the fact that the monetary resources are indeed available to solve these problems, and that not using them to do so is actually justified in terms of market efficiency, integrates the financial industry in the ‘physical’ violence of this inequality. Linking everyday financial practices to the issue of the global distribution of resources allows for connecting these practices in a politically meaningful way to the hierarchies in which they participate. Adopting a pragmatic approach may also confer another advantage. By considering the multifarious and often contradictory meanings through which each of us engages and is taken into the financial relations that shape our global political landscape, we are less likely to imagine that our analysis yields a unique political solution. This is so because it does not rely on a transcendent logic, whether of more neoliberalism or a Marxist revolution (Ortiz 2014b). Moreover, by showing the plasticity of meaning to be found in financial connections and disconnections, it points to the possibility of changing them, not transcendentally from without, but by changing everyday practices themselves (De Certeau 1990).

Conclusion Marcel Mauss ([1925] 1990) used the metaphor of the kula ring to address a political issue concerning the working classes of industrializing Europe. He considered that monetary exchange was central to the meaning of social hierarchies and that it could also be part of how they evolved through time, as new people entered exchange circuits, changed their rules, and the definition of society itself was transformed. This was because exchange broke the boundaries of who could transact with whom and with what. Criticism of the current political role of the finance industry thus raises the question of how we define credit. In current financial parlance, credit appears as an exchange between money now and money later in the form of interest, a dividend or some other remuneration in future, while ignoring other considerations. As we saw, however, moral and political considerations are present in finance, and what counts as an activity worthy of credit is constrained by procedures and standardized methodologies. Yet, as Mauss and others have suggested, credit may also be a means for the extension of society, the promise of future interdependence and social connection. Money, as credit, can be as much an element of division and destruction as it can be a means of connection and sharing (Hart 2000). The Keynesian project of issuing more money and making it accessible to citizens-as-consumers endowed with social rights was one attempt

56

Horacio Ortiz

to redraw social hierarchies through currency and credit. The Chinese government’s use today of corporate state-owned financial institutions to eradicate poverty and create a powerful middle class is another. In the European and U.S. cases, similar processes took place in the context of the Cold War and of wars provoked by collapsing colonial empires. In the Chinese case, it has happened after decades of internal and colonial wars and under the Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorial control of the state apparatus, in a context of global expansion and new forms of colonialism. Despite such differences, these changes have occurred when national currencies are heavily controlled by states within their own borders, as was the case in the first twenty years of the Bretton Woods agreements and is the case with China now. Addressing the global distribution of credit, especially in places where states do not have the power summarized here, will call for different forms of organization. In a context of increased global interdependence, the project of statist self-centeredness is likely to be increasingly inadequate. Like the challenges posed by migration and environmental change, the distribution of credit creates relations at the global level where only a few powerful states are able to operate effectively while pretending to be minding their own business – which, of course, they do not. Analytical tools are intimately linked to the political projects for which they are used, but not in a direct or clear way. The limits and rules of global society are being redrawn by financial flows that stretch the liberal frame in which they operate to its conceptual limits. Anthropology can make a crucial contribution to an interdisciplinary dialogue by liberating the financial imagination, sharing the multiplicity of what is observable and opening up new paths. NOTES  1. See Abdelal (2007) for Europe, Krippner (2011) for the United States, Amyx (2004) for Japan, Reddy (2009) for India, Hertz (1998) for China, and Müller (2006) for Brazil.  2. This legal definition also includes very wealthy individuals who account for a small share of the volume of transactions and asset holdings.  3. Research involved: (a) four to five month internships as an assistant analyst with stock brokers in New York during 2002, with hedge fund consultants in Paris during 2003 and the observations reported here; (b) around a hundred interviews with professionals; (c) studies for a professional diploma as a financial analyst; and (d) giving courses on finance in business schools in Paris and Shanghai between 2008 and the present. In order to respect my informants’ anonymity, as they wished, all names have been changed. This chapter



What Financial Crisis?

57

benefited from the financial support of the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant 263529).  4. See Zaloom (2006) for a similar approach to traders in the finance industry.  5. These scores, produced by a private company, rate the probability of default by an individual in a single number. They are fundamental in production of the category ‘subprime’, which means a FICO score of below 620 (Poon 2009).   6. Credit is part of the ‘fundamentals’, since it is the main activity underlying the asset.   7. ‘Game’ or ‘play’ in German – i.e. something akin to gambling in this context.  8. I did not change AIG’s name, since this insurance company, the biggest in the world at the time, was present in most deals. Its omnipresence ensured that Acme’s anonymity was not endangered by giving the real name of one partner.  9. The head of the Derivatives section, to which the ABS team belonged. 10. If we follow only indicatively the estimates of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, IFAD and WFP 2013).

Horacio Ortiz is an associate professor at the Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China and an Associate of the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria. His research focuses on everyday practices in the financial industry and how they take part in the global distribution of resources. After conducting research in New York and Paris, he is now doing fieldwork in Shanghai.

Chapter 3

░ Party Funding For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa BOOKER MAGURE

The aggressive search for funds may induce politicians to listen more to those who contribute to party coffers than to those who vote for them. – C. Tshitereke, ‘Securing Democracy: Party Finance and Party Donations’

Introduction Money is of fundamental importance to political campaign processes associated with informing and mobilizing the citizenry to vote. However, on the flipside, election campaigns are sometimes closely intertwined with various forms of corruption, clientelism and patronage. Since political clientelism involves the distribution of material resources on a quid pro quo basis, political parties tend to promulgate public policies that can potentially boost their coffers. The term ‘money politics’ does not have a clear-cut definition. For the purposes of this study, however, money politics is a form of bribery or corruption where political parties get illicit funds from rich individuals and businessmen who want something in return – especially government tenders (Teh 2002: 338). In the existing literature, money politics is also known as ‘cheque book democracy’ or ‘political corruption’, and these terms are often used interchangeably. Money politics can also entail a predominant party favouring its supporters with respect to stateled empowerment schemes in return for something – votes and financial kickbacks. In that sense, redistributive policies become a new electionwinning formula as well as an avenue for generating party funding. My research is inspired by political party and political corruption theories that are one way or the other influenced by literature on patron–cli-



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

59

ent relations. As Sorauf (1960: 28) argues, ‘patronage is best thought of as an incentive system – a political currency with which to purchase political activity and political responses’. Patronage assists in the maintenance of an active party organization, promotion of intra-party cohesion, attraction of voters and supporters, financing the party and its candidates, procurement of favourable government action and the creation of party discipline in policy making (ibid.: 28f.). Patron–client relations act as a vehicle for structuring the social exchange of resources – ‘instrumental, economic, as well as political ones (support, loyalty, votes, protection)’ (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1980: 49). These relations are also based on norms of reciprocity, promises of solidarity and loyalty. It is against this background that party-driven economic empowerment policies are said to have opened up new channels for raising patronage-based campaign finances in Zimbabwe and South Africa. This chapter makes the point that, while South Africa has its own fair share of problems, it is in many ways a flourishing democracy when compared with Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, how party fundraising is taking place there now could lead to the breakdown of the country’s nascent democracy. The two parties to be studied here are South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) and Zimbabwe’s African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF). There is a sense in which these two political parties have demonstrated an unusual capacity for imitating the American model of party funding. Such development is akin to what can be defined as the ‘Americanization’ of both South African and Zimbabwean politics.1 It is worth noting that systematic corruption has become endemic in a number of political parties, thereby explaining why party finances have come under increasing scrutiny across the world. Over the years, a number of embarrassing corruption scandals involving political parties have been reported in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Kenya and South Africa, among other countries. This paper underscores the point that what has been happening in Zimbabwe under ZANU PF during the past decade with respect to corrupt party financing, and the attendant abuse of economic empowerment initiatives, is indeed a global problem. Political corruption is not inherently just an African problem as is often touted by some Afro-pessimists. However, the Zimbabwean case stands out in that, whereas political party financing scandals are reported in European countries such as Spain and Germany, there is not much talk in Zimbabwe of the gross human rights violations that form part of their electoral process or of the stark economic inequalities that characterize this Southern African country. For example, although the deterrence of black voters in the United States is a persistent scandal, President Obama

60

Booker Magure

does not contract militias to terrorize the electorate. In Zimbabwe, party-aligned vote brokers (usually militias) are paid cash and other assets by their larcenous political patrons to intimidate innocent voters. These vote brokers are sometimes threatened by their patrons with losing their pieces of land or their jobs if ZANU PF loses to the opposition (from an interview). Globally, corruption tends to work against the specific ideals and principles that inform democracy – freedom, equality, transparency and the rule of law (della Porta and Mény 1997). This points to how dirty money creates unequal opportunities for political participation, thereby inhibiting free expression of the popular will. Thus the goal of exerting some degree of control over the potentially negative impact of money on politics stems from a compelling need to have a semblance of sanity and oversight in the conduct of elections in both developed and developing countries. While a number of scholars have addressed the question of corrupt party finances in South Africa as a result of economic empowerment legislation2 (Southall 2008; Butler 2010), the topic tends to escape extensive academic analysis in Zimbabwe. There is a dearth of empirical studies and serious literature relating to empowerment-induced political corruption in Zimbabwe. I attempt to fill this gap here by focusing on a relatively under-researched area in Zimbabwean politics – the negative impact of money politics on democracy seen in the light of developments that threaten South Africa’s nascent democracy. I will also demonstrate how liberation movement parties often perpetuate their predominance by hijacking public policymaking for their own partisan ends. I do not dispute the principle of redressing colonially induced injustices and racial imbalances in the ownership of the means of production through deliberate policies designed to increase indigenous economic participation (Magure 2012). My critique stems from the tendency of ruling elites in both Zimbabwe and South Africa to abuse these affirmative action policies to further their own party and business interests. Following Southall (2004, 2006a), this chapter builds a case that, while economic empowerment is an inevitable policy, given the history of settler domination in both countries, it has given rise to cronyism and political corruption.3 The threat posed by these redistributive policies goes beyond the economic damage that is likely to ensue as a result of capital flight and scared investors. Corrupt and empowerment-driven party financing has a negative impact on democracy and, by extension, on the rule of law, electoral competition, political participation, transparency and the accountability of officials to the electorate.



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

61

The Political Economy of Chequebook Democracy Following Rose-Akerman (1978), I start from a political economy approach to the study of corruption in which politicians are regarded as rational actors seeking to maximize utility defined ‘in terms of material selfinterest’ (Hopkin 1997: 256). Similarly, from the point of view of an economic theory of political parties, these are basically opportunistic power-contenders (ibid.: 261). While Downs (1957: 28) might be accused of overstating his case when he suggested that ‘[p]arties formulate policies in order to win elections, rather than win elections in order to formulate policies’, that standpoint has some element of truth and must not be dismissed. Indeed politicians across the world seek office not as an end in itself, but to benefit from the spoils of office. The astronomical costs associated with vying for and maintaining political office predisposes parties and their candidates to engage in corrupt practices for the sake of financial support. As Hopkin notes: ‘Corruption appears a likely solution to the fundraising problem [of political parties] … Wealthy individuals may donate to parties but the economic theory stipulates that they would expect something in return, in terms of favourable public policy decisions or similar private benefits’ (Hopkin 1997: 263). For West (2000) the prohibitive costs associated with elections and maintaining a political party give rise to chequebook democracy – a form of government in which money has hijacked the campaign process. He further argues that: It is a system characterized by large contributions, secret influence, citizen cynicism, weak public representation, and increasingly unaccountable elected officials. Big money tied to private interest groups has disrupted democratic elections, raised the volume of negative ads, and turned off the general public. Checkbook democracy weakens the leadership accountability that is such a crucial part of our political system. The need to raise large sums of money leads public officials to pay more attention to donors than voters. (West 2000: 7)

Chequebook democracy can also give rise to a ‘shadow state in which securocrats, businessmen and politicians flout stipulations of the law for private gain’ (Holden and van Vuuren 2011: 417). The rise of a shadow state and the salience of money politics may be attributed to the evolution of party systems from the mass party model (based on fee-paying party membership) to a capital-intensive hybrid model based on clientelism and external finance. In other words, a swing of the pendulum in favour of the hybrid political party model and its prohibitive financial

62

Booker Magure

costs accounts for the increasingly negative impact of money on political processes across the world. Hopkin (2004: 631–33) maintains that a mass party model is not usually attractive to potential supporters, given its emphasis on non-material incentives, while clientelistic mass parties and externally financed elite parties are more effective in generating political party participation and, by extension, supporters. Simply put, an externally financed elite party is a top-heavy political organization that relies excessively for funding on outside political donors such as companies and individuals. On the other hand, a clientelistic mass party, as the name suggests, is based on patron–client relations and is created by exploiting state resources through redistributive policies (Hopkin 2004: 632). The distinction between the three models is basically academic, since in practice a hybrid party model incorporating elements borrowed from all three is the norm, especially in the African context. Such a political party is financed through state resources, political donors and, to a lesser extent, membership fees. What motivates former liberation movements to resort to clientelistic models of party funding? What is the likely impact of patronage and empowerment-based party funding strategies with respect to democracy and, by extension, state security, the rule of law and the general population’s access to the political system through opposition parties? I will seek to answer these questions based on interviews conducted in 2011, 2012 and 2013 in Zimbabwe, on newspaper articles,4 and on scholarly sources.

Identifying Similarities and Differences between the ANC and ZANU PF There are enough similarities between ANC and ZANU PF to warrant systematic comparison between them. In the process we may learn something about the shortcomings of anti-colonial movements when they come to power. This is relevant not only for the Zimbabwean and South African cases, but it adds a comparative perspective on liberation movements that became governments in the region. The prevalence of political corruption in South Africa and Zimbabwe shows how liberation movements that transformed themselves into political parties responded to insufficient campaign funds. For Steven Friedman, ‘a liberation movement represents the nation, and if you are the nation then distinctions like party and state can become blurred. There’s a tendency to conflate the two’ (The Economist, 15 April 2010).



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

63

The most important similarity between ANC and ZANU PF stems from both South Africa and Zimbabwe being former settler colonies. The expropriation of land by settlers and the subsequent policies of separate development led to protracted and violent armed struggles in both countries. As settler colonies, South Africa and Zimbabwe were an exception to the general colonial situation as a consequence of ‘more real capitalist development’ (Good 1976: 597). According to Veracini (2010), who speaks of a ‘post-settler colonial situation’, settler colonialism is a resilient formation that persists even after it is officially abolished. Structures and ideologies inherited from settler colonialism account for much of identity politics in former settler colonies. For example, it continues to shape state–society relations in both South Africa and Zimbabwe. Both countries have high levels of inequality worsened by the implementation of neoliberal policies. Path dependency theory may be evoked to explain ANC’s and ZANU PF’s political behaviour, even if this could never be a total explanation for their history. As I have suggested previously (Magure 2009), this school of thought holds that the longue durée of historically constructed institutions, structures and vested interests can determine political behaviour. In both countries, an elaborate system of patronage emerged from seeking to consolidate the gains of independence through to redressing colonially induced imbalances in the ownership and control of the means of production. This state of affairs accounts for the controversy and intense politicization often associated with indigenization policies there (Andreasson 2010: 425). The two former liberation movements turned political parties predominate in their respective polities primarily because of their ‘heroic struggle’ against colonialism (Reddy 2005: 274) and the role they played in establishing a new and inclusive political dispensation. The parties have significantly contributed to neo-patrimonialism and, by extension, to a blurred line between the state and the party. Southall (2006b: 33) claims that liberal critics accuse the ANC of using affirmative action instruments such as Black Economic Empowerment not only to correct historical injustices, but also to consolidate its political power. ZANU PF also stands accused of similar political transgressions in addition to abusing public funds to finance its electoral campaigns. Over time, indigenization and empowerment policies provided useful alternative sources of party finance and political patronage for both ruling parties. The resulting inequality is inimical to the realization of both economic and political democracy. Another similarity is the long history of repression within the ranks of the two former liberation movements. Both parties exhibit elitist and

64

Booker Magure

command-and-control mentalities that were shaped by the wars of liberation. For example, both the Skweyiya5 and Motsuenyane6 commissions of inquiry reported that the ANC committed gross human rights violations during the liberation struggle. Some ANC members were detained and tortured while in exile for allegedly being apartheid government spies. These abuses took place in ANC camps dotted around Angola, Zambia and Tanzania. Similarly ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army – ZANU’s military wing) used forcible mobilization strategies during the war of liberation, and suspected ‘sell-outs’ were either killed or tortured. Human rights violations were also committed by the ZANLA leadership against soldiers accused of trying to take over the nationalist movement (Magure 2009). While the ANC’s police force is infamous for brutalizing the shack dwellers’ movement (Abahlali base Mjondolo in Kennedy Road, Durban) and more recently for callously shooting thirty-four striking miners in Marikana, ZANU PF is in a class of its own. Cases of politically motivated violence linked to ZANU PF are an endemic feature of Zimbabwean politics, where opposition supporters are brutalized for supporting the labour-backed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). There are also a number of documented cases of organized violence; for example, Operation Murambatsvina (Drive out the Filth) launched in May 2005 saw close to a million people being internally displaced. The operation was launched following the continued poor electoral showing of ZANU PF in urban constituencies. There was also the brutal suppression of close to thirty-five thousand illegal diamond miners in November 2008 at the Marange Diamond Fields. All of this is indicative of the violence inflicted on its citizenry by ZANU PF. The attempt by both governments to create a black capitalist class have led to crony capitalism – a form of capitalism that ‘restricts the allocation of economic resources and opportunity to a country’s privileged elite or politically connected cronies’ (Enderwick 2005: 117). Enderwick further asserts that crony capitalism carries considerable costs and often results in serious misallocation of resources (ibid.: 117). Crony capitalism encourages rent-seeking behaviour, as in the controversial Arms Deal in return for kickbacks to the ANC (Holden and van Vuuren 2011) and when ZANU PF authorized in 1998 the country’s costly participation in the Congo war for similar reasons. These white elephant projects had nothing to do with South Africa seeking to assist with future peace-keeping operations in Africa or with Zimbabwe protecting the territorial integrity of a fellow SADC member. The persistent economic irrationality of the two former liberation movements’ projects leads one to suspect that financing their



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

65

electoral campaigns (along with personal accumulation) is their main purpose. Another similarity is that the two parties’ empowerment policies have so far not attained the twin goals of eradicating oligarchic business ownership and control. Their policies have instead widened the gap between the poorest and the richest (Gumede 2005: 86f.), primarily because they catered for individual and party material interests and not for the public good. Redistributive policies thus tend to be zero-sum in nature, and attainment of economic democracy remains a pipe dream. Both countries are still characterized by glaring levels of inequality, and both governments seem inclined to make ‘conscious use of racial distinctions in order to create a non-racial society’ (Sachs 2006: ix). As Badat warns: Such an approach has many dangers. For one, employing solely ‘race’ for redress purposes could benefit only or primarily the black political and economic elites, and so simply reproduce the severe class inequalities that we already have. The conspicuous consumption of our off-the-body sushi-loving elites and the rapid ascendancy of politically connected elites into billionaire and millionaire businesspersons make no difference to eliminating the massive inequalities in our society. (Badat 2011: 4)

While the major objective of the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution (NDR) is to eradicate injustices suffered by blacks under apartheid (Southall 2006a), the implementation process is not without controversy. For instance, the ANC’s cadre deployment policy rewards loyal party supporters with positions in state-owned enterprises and local authorities. This policy is neither transparent nor accountable, and does not address the needs of the citizenry. Similarly ZANU PF’s Soviet-style Politburo ‘deploys’ serving and retired military and other security personnel in key positions of both government and state-owned enterprises in order to protect party interests (Zimbabwe Institute 2008; Crisis Coalition 2011). Here party loyalists are seconded across key sectors of the economy to be the ‘eyes and ears of ZANU PF’ (interview). The evidence from Zimbabwe and South Africa suggests that party loyalists can use the politics of connections to amass obscene wealth (luxury vehicles and plush homes) in a blatantly greedy manner. The meteoric rise of party-aligned people into the elite’s inner circle comes from empowerment deals and their attendant patronage politics. Clearly ZANU PF and ANC members’ grotesque displays of wealth invite calls for a audit in order to ascertain how they finance such ostentatious lifestyles. A red flag was raised about how the former ANC Youth League’s president, Julius Malema, and ZANU PF’s maverick politician and flamboyant

66

Booker Magure

businessman, Philip Chiyangwa, fund their penchant for exotic goods. Patronage acts as the glue that holds corrupt political networks together, and empowered individuals feel obliged to maintain the cosy relationship through bankrolling the party.7 It is hard to address the perversion of redistributive objectives by bureaucrats and party loyalists (Robinson and Brummer 2006: 2) because the ruling party benefits from their overt and covert donations. The main difference between the ANC and ZANU PF relates to how they treat opposition parties and civil society. As already stated, ZANU PF deploys forcible mobilization strategies against the electorate, manipulates electoral rules and undermines both the opposition and civil society. The latter are demonized as representing imperialist and neocolonial interests. Patriotism is synonymous with uncritical support for ZANU PF policies, and opposition is treated as being treasonous. For a long time the opposition in Zimbabwe was at the mercy of a capricious ruling party that not only did not tolerate it, but expressed this intolerance with considerable violence. In contrast, the ANC generally allows the opposition parties to exist, to campaign freely and to challenge its policies to a large extent (Reddy 2005: 275). Furthermore the ANC generally tends to carry out its redistributive policies within the rule of law, whereas ZANU PF prefers a chaotic way of redressing colonially induced imbalances in the ownership of the means of production.

Economic Empowerment and Party Funding in Zimbabwe and South Africa In May 2011 the South African Sunday Times revealed that ZANU PF was broke – and this was confirmed by a party spokesperson, Rugare Gumbo. ZANU PF’s main sources of income are membership cards, subscriptions, donations and returns from investments. The current membership fee is US$5 and it has a life span of five years, while $12 is charged as an annual subscription (Financial Gazette, 26 November 2010). At the 2010 congress in Mutare, the party treasurer openly admitted that the party was in debt, was struggling to pay its 180 workers and had frozen 142 posts (Sunday Times, 29 May 2011). It is worth noting that ZANU PF adopted a more abrasive posture in favour of empowerment after this conference whose theme was ‘Total Control of our Resources through Indigenisation and Empowerment’. Furthermore ZANU PF is generally experiencing low levels of membership (The Zimbabwean, 15 December 2011). A number of people still



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

67

harbour grievances against ZANU PF because of the political violence, economic problems and corruption (interview). Indeed the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) exploited this mass disenchantment. According to a ZANU PF Central Committee report tabled at the party’s 2011 annual conference, the party’s cardholding members are 579,000 out of a population of around thirteen million people. A breakdown of the party’s 2011 income is as follows: Membership fees and subscriptions

$579,000

Government grants

$2,900,000

Donations

$305,000

Returns from investments

$281,000

Table 3.1: ZANU PF 2011 party income (in US$) It would seem that the state of ZANU PF finances leaves a lot to be desired. This is one overwhelming reason why the implementation of indigenization and economic empowerment laws will be crucial for how politics is financed in Zimbabwe. ZANU PF’s promotion of clientelistic forms of party finance may be interpreted as an attempt to postpone party failure by adapting to a changing socio-economic environment. The quest for party reinvigoration and continued relevance after a long period of decline (undoubtedly because of the electorate’s disillusionment with elite corruption and flagrant disregard of human rights) prompted ZANU PF to woo the electorate through empowerment policies (interview). This pushed ZANU PF to promulgate and implement the empowerment act in a more abrasive and militaristic fashion, especially in 2011. Its ability to win elections in some of its strongholds depends on its ability to keep its electoral clientele satisfied by constant supplies of material resources. Political corruption in Zimbabwe may be traced back to the early 1990s when ZANU PF unofficially abandoned the 1984 Leadership Code. The code sought to regulate the relationship between the party and business by recognizing that corruption was an ‘evil disease destructive of society’. The primitive accumulation strategies of a cabal of ZANU PF political businessmen show how the party’s practices stand in stark contrast to the principles enshrined in the code. The situation was worsened when ZANU PF’s financial incapacity was exacerbated by the economy’s non-performance, especially between 2006 and 2008. Hyperinflation also affected ZANU PF investment vehicles such as Jongwe Printers, Catercraft and Tregers, which enjoyed preferential treatment like state-owned enterprises. This unprecedented situation forced Zimbabwe to dump the

68

Booker Magure

local currency in 2009 and adopt a multi-currency system linked to the American dollar, South African rand and other convertible currencies. The party’s financial quagmire deteriorated further when it lost control of the Finance Ministry in the Government of National Unity formed in 2009. A number of businesses and cronies linked to ZANU PF had been the major beneficiaries of the corrupt and populist BACOSI (Basic Commodities Supply Intervention Facility) championed by the Reserve Bank governor in 2007–08. Clearly the dollarization of the economy and the MDC’s control of the treasury exposed the precariousness of ZANU PF’s private economy, since it could no longer raid the treasury through the central bank printing money, and the BACOSI facility was undermined. BACOSI was meant to give producers and suppliers access to concessional financial support for working capital. In reality, however, its fiscal activities were meant to buy votes for ZANU PF; and this contributed significantly to the unprecedented hyperinflation and Zimbabwe’s economic collapse (Magure 2009). The central bank was responding practically to ‘extra-ordinary challenges’ posed by a ‘casino economy’ (Gono 2008). This was sustained, among other malpractices, by massive printing of the local currency. Money politics and patronage also stifled political change in Zimbabwe: The system of patronage, particularly that which centred around Gideon Gono and his ‘casino economy’ at the central bank, fuelled and sustained the Zimbabwean state in no small measure over the last five years, including direct support to a bureaucracy and securocracy, most of whose members thereby constituted a stonewall without which the opposition might have succeeded to power years ago. (Mandaza, Zimbabwe Independent, 22 May 2009)

Before the 2013 elections that ZANU PF went on to win ‘resoundingly’, albeit in very controversial circumstances (Magure 2014b), the party was on record as saying that the inclusive government with the two MDC factions was not working, and that the 2013 elections would be won by a landslide. An electoral victory secured by any means necessary was going to protect ZANU PF from the uncertainties of a change of political leadership (interview). This was confirmed when Philip Chiyangwa donated US$100,000 at the eleventh ZANU PF People’s Conference held in Mutare in December 2010. According to this flamboyant businessman, ‘I have assets with a value of about $200 million, and if it means selling everything to ensure that MDC does not get into power, let it be. ZANU PF brought us independence and it is the independent Zimbabwe where we made our



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

69

money, and no one should reverse these gains’ (Manica Post, 5 November 2010). This is how the beneficiaries of patronage politics protect their wealth. Their continued prosperity depends on reciprocating favours received, so they make donations to the party. Kickbacks take the form of monetary and non-monetary contributions to party coffers in order to fund campaigns. As one interviewee put it, ‘What is wrong with ploughing back to my revolutionary party? It is an African way of doing things – chirere chigokurerawo [a Shona idiom meaning look after one of your own today and they will also look after you in future]. Remember you reap where you sow!’ In 2011, Chiyangwa again told ZANU PF supporters to guard against an MDC victory in the 2013 polls because he feared that the labour-backed party would seize their businesses. According to him, ‘[t]here is no ZANU PF politician or relative of the president with [ill-gotten] riches who feels safe [if Tsvangirai wins] because MDC wants to pounce on us and our businesses’ (NewsDay, 21 November 2011). Coming from one of the founding members of Affirmative Action Group (AAG), this statement indicates how closely empowerment policies and money politics are intertwined. Of course another motive might be to amass wealth in anticipation of an MDC victory: ‘we can give the MDC politics temporarily and keep the banks forever’ (interview). ZANU’s push for comprehensive indigenization across all sectors of the economy is a gimmick tied to money politics. ZANU PF’s then Youth Development, Indigenization and Empowerment minister, Saviour Kasukuwere, confirmed this when he claimed that the MDC was soliciting for campaign funds from mining companies: The indigenization crusade is in full swing and we will be moving to other sectors after we have finished with mining. However, what is disturbing is that some very senior officials from the MDC-T [Movement for Democratic Change – Tsvangirai faction] are going around telling companies, especially the major mining firms, to ignore the Government’s directives and [instead] fund their election campaign so that they will reverse the empowerment policies once in power. They are promising them that they will implement what they call ‘business-friendly policies’. (The Herald, 4 October 2011)

‘Diversification’ of the empowerment process from agriculture into other sectors of the economy such as banking and mining is meant to increase party funds through members’ donations. After the 2010 ZANU PF congress, the role of the party in private accumulation was heightened in order to offset the ever-rising costs of patronage brought about by dollarization. The basic building block of ZANU PF’s future funding

70

Booker Magure

is largesse from party-aligned businessmen who benefited from the empowerment exercise. That is why the empowerment crusade has become vital for ZANU PF’s quest to reclaim and entrench its hegemonic control over Zimbabwe’s state and society. Zimbabwe has a very weak revenue base compared to South Africa’s, and so the ANC is in a stronger position than ZANU PF to extract revenue from individuals and corporations through government tender processes. This may have led Southall (2008: 290) to conclude that the ANC is probably one of the richest political organizations in the world. Party financing models can move from one country to another – ZANU PF has just started experimenting with the ANC model of party funding. Both ruling parties now use similar fundraising techniques. ZANU PF could be said to be learning quite a lot from the ANC. Its recent move to tap corporate largesse could have been borrowed from the ANC playbook. For example, in 2010 ZANU PF started to reach out formally to big corporations ‘in the hope of winning its support and financial backing’ through ‘Business Talks to ZANU PF’ (Mail & Guardian, 10 December 2010). Business executives paid undisclosed sums to meet with top members of the ZANU PF politburo. ZANU PF maintains that the meetings were meant to give business executives an opportunity to influence public policy through interfacing with senior party leaders. At the inaugural meeting, the national chairman, Simon Khaya Moyo, told the business executives: ‘You have always been a major source of funding for us. Not because you were compelled to do so, but because you felt you had a duty to see the party move forward for the benefit not only of yourselves but [for] our people’ (ibid.). A similar fundraising strategy called the Network Lounge was actually introduced by the ANC in 2002 when businesses and government departments ‘paid a substantial sum to associate with the ANC elite’ (Southall 2008: 287). Like ZANU PF, the ANC sought to silence its critics by arguing that the initiative was a legitimate fundraising scheme that encouraged social dialogue between the corporate world and the ruling party (ibid.). I agree with Southall’s view that such networking and dialogue would normally lead to influence-peddling.8 The ZANU PF national chairman’s comments above confirm this interpretation.

Regulation of Party Funding in Zimbabwe and South Africa Around the world, money and politics are conjoined like Siamese twins, so that the regulation of political party funding is of paramount impor-



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

71

tance if the influence of ‘dirty’ money on political processes is to be reduced. There is a scholarly consensus that democracy is threatened when the impact of money on politics is not subject to some form of regulation, primarily because party-aligned businessmen are infamous for abusing their financial power to influence policymakers, putting their own narrow interests before those of the majority of citizens (Friedman 2010: 156). Private funding plays a critical role in the financing of political parties, especially in countries where public funding for them is either insufficient or non-existent. It presents formidable challenges to policymakers, particularly in the emerging democracies of the South. The regulatory framework governing party finances in Zimbabwe is different from South Africa’s. Masunungure (2006: 11) argues that the impulse to regulate aspects of political activity in Zimbabwe stems from the ‘imperative to constrict the operations of political [parties]’. For instance, in 2001, ZANU PF repealed the 1992 Political Parties (Finances) Act and replaced it with a new one with a similar title. The hallmark of the 2001 Act was the prohibition and criminalization of foreign funding that is provided by section 6 of the act. The MDC strongly suspected that the new bill was motivated ‘by a number of reasons but primarily the desire to limit the financial space of [the] MDC’ (Parliamentary Debates, 3 April 2001, 6501). The 2001 Act also included donations from Zimbabweans working in the diaspora (who are thought to be sympathetic to the MDC) in a broad definition of illegal foreign funding. The 2001 Political Parties (Finances) Act was not the last such attempt at reform. ZANU PF further promulgated an NGO bill that sought to cripple the operations of civil society organizations (Magure 2009). Since the MDC largely depends upon external funding for its sustenance, it was hamstrung by the criminalization of foreign funding and circumvented the act by turning to civil society organizations as fronts for international aid. Civil society organizations were also being used as conduits for private donations to the MDC. So the NGO bill aimed to stem the growing influence of international political party aid to the opposition (Carothers 2006; Southall 2006c), while plugging loopholes in the 2001 Political Parties (Finances) Act. This is all part of a grand political strategy to starve the MDC of funds while capitalizing on corporate donations from its own pool of empowered party loyalists. It is worth noting that 2013 saw ZANU PF deliberately flouting the Political Parties (Finances) Act as it sought to boost its party campaign coffers ahead of the hotly contested elections following the termination of the Government of National Unity. Claims that ZANU PF contravened the Political Parties (Finances) Act were substantiated, for example, by Tendi

72

Booker Magure

(2013) and the independent newspaper The Zimbabwean. Tendi claimed that Mugabe’s party had a ‘considerable campaign largesse’ whose origins was not known even by a majority of senior party members (ibid.: 969). He further revealed that suspected ZANU PF benefactors included China, Israel, African leaders (Equatorial Guinea and Democratic Republic of Congo) and local white businessmen, among others (ibid.: 970). These claims that ZANU PF received foreign funding were corroborated by ZANU PF spokesperson, Rugare Gumbo, in an interview with The Zimbabwean. This illegal funding of the party enabled it to distribute an unprecedented quantity of freebies to the electorate that left an indelible mark on Zimbabwean society. As I argue (Magure 2014a), ‘there was at least something for everyone as the party sought to seduce the electorate’. It is probably why almost a year after the disputed election, Zimbabweans across the political divide are still seen clad in T-shirts and caps emblazoned with the party campaign message: ‘indigenize, empower, develop and employ’. A huge quantity of party regalia was available for distribution to the electorate in 2013. Indeed, freebies such as caps, bandanas, T-shirts, teapots and cups, as well as food parcels, meant a lot to the majority of poverty-stricken Zimbabweans. In Zimbabwe with its crippling structural poverty and unemployment (Magure 2014a), a party with deep pockets will be rewarded by the electorate’s votes. The lacklustre performance of the MDC in the 2013 election can also be attributed in part to a shortage of campaign funds following the party’s desertion by traditional Western donors (Zamchiya 2013; Magure 2014b). To summarize, neither domestic nor foreign private donations are regulated in South Africa.9 The country’s political elite would seem to be content with the status quo. Foreign donations to political parties are prohibited in Zimbabwe, and disclosure is not required for funds from domestic sources. While Zimbabwean political parties use public funds as they deem fit, in South Africa stringent accounting requirements apply with respect to public funds allocated to political parties.

Implications for Democracy of Corrupt Empowerment-Driven Party Finances The negative implications of corrupt party financing are far-reaching, especially considering the rule of law and separation of powers in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Again Zimbabwe stands out as an exception, but South Africa is far from being exempt from criticism. Zimbabwe’s packed and compromised judiciary usually throws out cases involving party loy-



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

73

alists. In 2010, Mliswa of the controversial Affirmative Action Group was arrested for allegedly swindling white commercial farmers out of cattle and farming equipment. He was also charged with fraud for attempting to take over a vehicle accessories company. The state’s case was that Mliswa and other party loyalists had tried to take over Noshio Investments after misleading the owner into thinking that the then indigenization minister, Kasukuwere, and President Mugabe had given them the green light (Herald, 19 January 2011). In June 2011 Mliswa was controversially acquitted of all charges by the courts in quick succession (Daily News, 23 June 2011). The presiding magistrate concluded that the state’s case was weak on a ‘highly technical issue … No reasonable court acting reasonably can safely convict the accused’ (ibid.). Mliswa is well known for substantial donations to ZANU PF, thereby lending credence to the view that in patronage politics everything is based on norms of reciprocity. In another example, a number of white commercial farmers ‘were made to pay “protection fees” to senior ZANU PF officials so that their farms, equipment or livestock would be spared from marauding war veterans who were acting on behalf of senior party chefs’ (The Standard, 11 July 2010). Over the years, a number of the remaining white farmers are said to have donated undisclosed amounts in foreign currency towards ZANU PF electoral campaigns and annual congresses as ‘protection fees’. Similarly teachers in rural areas have been forced to contribute money towards the annual congresses held in return for protection. Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks reports also provided insight into how the empowerment policy was abused by powerful ZANU PF politicians who demanded shares in foreign-owned businesses in return for ‘protection’. A leaked U.S. diplomatic cable revealed that the late ZANLA commander, Solomon Mujuru, the husband of Vice President Joyce Mujuru, approached the Zimbabwe Platinum Mines Limited (Zimplats) ‘offering to be its indigenous partner and protector’ (U.S. Embassy Cable – 05 Harare 1088 of 2005-08-02). The late Mujuru also allegedly promised to prevent China from entering Zimbabwe’s platinum industry if the giant company accepted his terms and conditions. The South African-owned Zimplats is currently the biggest firm in Zimbabwe’s mining industry. Claims of preferential treatment for corporations aligned with ZANU PF were vindicated when the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe (BAZ) gave the first two commercial private radio licences to former Affirmative Action Group president and ZBC news anchor Supa Mandiwanzira’s10 Zi FM Radio and to Zimpapers’ Star FM ahead of other applicants, including Oliver Mtukudzi – one of Zimbabwe’s most celebrated musicians and a director of Kiss FM (Zimbabwe Independent, 25 November 2011). The latter

74

Booker Magure

was seeking one of the two commercial radio station licences, but only the ZANU PF-linked companies received them in the name of empowerment. The cosy relationship of Mandiwanzira and Zimpapers with ZANU PF makes these licence grants open to heavy criticism and deep suspicion. All of this represents more continuity than change in ZANU PF’s tight grip on the airwaves. The media has long been a weakened force when it comes to playing an effective watchdog role and to making elected governments more accountable. Monopolistic ownership of the broadcast media by ZANU PF-linked companies will also undoubtedly contribute towards more hate speech and political polarization in Zimbabwe. The quality of elected leaders is severely compromised primarily when the huge costs of election campaigns generally deter ‘sincere but comparatively less wealthy individuals from seeking [political] office’ (Lindberg 2003: 128). As a result, free and fair electoral competition is not possible in countries characterized by glaring economic inequality. In Zimbabwe, at the party level, political corruption influences the selection of party representatives during primary elections that determine who will represent it at a national constituency level. In the absence of central funding from the party, prospective members of parliament often rely on dubious sources of funds to finance their election campaigns. The result has been the imposition of wealthy candidates who hardly have any support at the grassroots level. Political corruption undermines the electoral process by increasing the cost of running for political office, thereby weakening under-resourced opposition political parties. This suffocation of electoral competition was not an unmitigated blessing for ZANU PF since disgruntled party loyalists, who over the years had felt robbed of an opportunity to become legislators, ended up contesting elections as independent candidates. As already indicated, money politics also explains the rise in political violence in Zimbabwe, since party youths employed as vote brokers make frantic efforts to ensure victory for their candidates and party. Consequently, unemployed and poverty-stricken militias funded by rich party figures end up unleashing violence on innocent people. Vote brokers engage in these anti-social activities because they want to earn a living. State-sponsored violence or state barbarism is the end result. Finally, even the august House of Assembly in Zimbabwe has not been spared. In March 2010 the MDC faction led by Morgan Tsvangirai claimed that Jonathan Moyo, a former independent legislator who crossed the floor to ZANU PF, tried to bribe legislators to vote for Simon-Khaya Moyo as speaker of parliament (NewsDay, 30 March 2011). The MDC said it was in possession of US$25,000 from its own members of parliament who



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

75

were allegedly paid out by Moyo (ibid). The latter denied these claims and instructed his lawyers to take legal action against the MDC (The Herald, 31 March 2011). No defamation lawsuit has been filed against the MDC by the highly litigious Moyo to date. Turning now to South Africa, over the years the ANC benefited immensely from black economic empowerment deals and state tenders in a number of South Africa’s economic sectors through its investment arm, Chancellor House. While the rule of law is usually observed in South Africa, there have been cases when it was subverted. For example, during President Jacob Zuma’s corruption trial, ‘intelligence and counter-intelligence were activated to derail what should have been straightforward legal processes’ (Holden and van Vuuren 2011: 417). This may be attributed to the rise of a shadow state, mentioned earlier. The incestuous relationship between political elites and the corporate world at times borders on being criminal. Hence Justice Squires pronounced that the relationship between Zuma and his former financial advisor Schabir Shaik was ‘generally corrupt’. Shaik was convicted of corruption and fraud, and spent about two years in prison and in various Durban hospitals before he was controversially released on parole owing to a ‘terminal illness’ (Sunday Times, 29 May 2011). Some allege that Shaik was given preferential treatment in jail and released on parole owing to his fundraising when the ANC had financial problems. A Sunday Times exposé revealed that former president Thabo Mbeki advised Shaik to create Nkobi Holdings to ‘fund the ANC through “patriotic” dividends paid out for major government contracts’ (Sunday Times, 15 August 2010). This is how the cash-strapped ANC became linked to a highly controversial arms deal. Mbeki’s advice was in line with the ANC’s notion of a National Democratic Revolution that seeks to create a patriotic and productive black capitalist class (Southall 2004: 313). Furthermore, the ANC’s capture of the state provided party loyalists with vast opportunities to control the economy (Southall 2004: 314–15; 2006a: 68). This works in its favour by enabling the ANC to create front companies or give preferential treatment to party loyalists who are in business. For instance, the late Sandi Majali’s Imvume Management was an ANC ‘front company’ that received preferential treatment from the stateowned PetroSA in the name of Black Economic Empowerment (Robinson and Brummer 2006: 12). The Oilgate kingpin sponsored a number of ANC dinners and at one time paid salaries for the staff at Chief Albert Luthuli House – the ANC’s headquarters in Johannesburg. Majali allegedly funded the ANC’s 2004 election campaign to the tune of R18 million at the taxpayer’s expense (Sunday Times, 18 September 2011). His ‘donations’ to the

76

Booker Magure

ANC were made from an advance paid by PetroSA to his company for the procurement of an oil condensate that was never delivered (Southall 2007: 221). The fact that Majali was fingered in the United Nations report on the Iraq oil-for-food scandal shows how South Africa’s foreign policy was sold to the highest bidder ‘in return for institutional favours’ (Holden and van Vuuren 2011: 256). In 2013, continuing deterioration of the rule of law in South Africa saw the controversial and rich Gupta family using the country’s main military air force base to land a wedding party from India, against every rule of national security. Zuma’s relationship with the wealthy Guptas was thought to be too cosy, even before this scandal. The deployment of ANC loyalists ostensibly to fulfil the party’s mandate to the electorate in government is also not without controversy. This policy has compromised national security and undermined the rule of law. For example, former police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, appointed by the ANC to head the South African Police Services, accepted bribes from a convicted drug lord in return for confidential intelligence reports. The involvement of criminal syndicates in politics is about as bad as it gets. Many South Africans fear that the symbiotic and unhealthy relationship between criminal syndicates and politicians will lead to the police being infiltrated by mafias. The Gauteng e-tolling system (an expensive automatic system for charging motorists between Johannesburg and Pretoria) provides yet another example of the ANC’s penchant for abusing public policy in the interest of party gain. Unconfirmed reports by the Sunday Times claim that the African National Congress has links to companies that benefit from e-tolling. An NGO called ‘Opposition to Urban Tolling’ was formed to oppose the collection of e-tolls on Gauteng highways. The North Gauteng High Court subsequently granted temporary reprieve, preventing the project from going ahead, but the Constitutional Court overturned the interdict. (See National Treasury and Others vs. Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance (OUTA), and others.) The major beneficiary of the e-tolling system was a company previously owned by the Swedish-based Svenska Aeroplan AB (SAAB), which bribed ANC heavyweights to supply fighter jets in a controversial arms deal (Sunday Times, 6 May 2012). The ANC’s spirited defence of the e-tolling system, despite resistance from motorists, speaks to how unaccountable the party thinks it is. In short, the ANC elite are accountable only to themselves, and to financiers who lobbied for the e-toll policy despite its negative distributive consequences. Before concluding, I must briefly highlight how party funding issues came to the fore when South Africa’s opposition political parties sought to wrestle power from the ruling party in the run-up to the country’s May



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

77

2014 elections. Clearly, an effective election campaign is a very expensive exercise and this is why the newly formed party Agang South Africa, led by anti-apartheid activist Mamphela Ramphele, and the Democratic Alliance under the leadership of Helen Zille had a short-lived political marriage that considerably damaged the reputation of both parties in the eyes of the electorate. The main casualty was Agang, whose disgruntled supporters abandoned the party at the eleventh hour and accused their leader of not consulting them about the merger. Confirmed reports suggest that the botched merger was originally meant to appease anonymous donors. Interestingly, both Ramphele and Zille admitted that donors had demanded the merger of the two parties as a condition of providing funds. The donors wanted a united and strong opposition that would challenge the ANC’s hegemony more effectively. The centrality of money in political processes is reinforced by South Africa’s Electoral Act, which stipulates that a party must pay an electoral deposit for it to appear on both national and provincial ballot papers. Against this background, another new party, the Economic Freedom Fighters led by Julius Malema, filed in 2014 an urgent chamber application in the North Gauteng High Court (though it was later dismissed by the judge) seeking to compel the Independent Electoral Commission to remove or substantially reduce the deposit required for a party to contest an election. Requirements of this sort generally work against smaller parties who cannot afford to pay the deposit, thereby limiting their supporters’ or the general electorate’s right to vote for a party of their choice.

Conclusion While redistributive policies are inevitable in the context of a history of settler domination in both countries, they have given rise to cronyism and political corruption. Neo-patrimonial and party-funding considerations now take precedence over the other goals of empowerment in South Africa, and now in Zimbabwe also. A cabal of party-aligned business people increasingly play an active role in the formulation of public policy at the expense of the majority. Corruption has a negative impact on democracy, the rule of law, electoral competition, political participation, transparency and the accountability of elected officials to the electorate. Thus the liberal model of democracy entrenches elitism and unaccountability (Good 1997), primarily because ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’. Empowerment policies laced with cronyism and money politics are not only

78

Booker Magure

dangerous for democracy, but will also lead to the replacement of a white oligarchy with a black one, thereby perpetuating the massive inequalities that characterize former settler colonies. NOTES  1. This idea was borrowed from Hopkin (1997), who also argued for an ‘Americanization’ of Italian politics.  2. For that reason I will not dwell on economic empowerment or political party finance in South Africa. Passing reference will be made, however, to relevant examples taken from the existing literature, while a detailed account of current affairs on this subject will be provided for South Africa.  3. A case may be made that political corruption contributes to inequality in South Africa. This is as a result of two issues – mechanisms of party funding in a neoliberal context and the idea of seeking redress for colonially induced inequalities. In seeking to deal with these challenges, the policies crafted by political elites often produce the opposite of the ideal outcome; this is akin to Hayek’s argument against central planning in The Road to Serfdom (1944).  4. Communications technologies shape and reshape society and, by extension, data collection techniques. Many newspapers and magazines have gone digital, with a commentary section after every story. The online debates that follow some newspaper headlines offer an invaluable window into public opinion, as do social media such as Facebook and Twitter. I have drawn here on online debates following some stories on Zimbabwe’s political economy carried by domestic and international online newspapers. This technique was used successfully, for example, by the anthropologist James Ferguson (2006) in the article ‘Chrysalis: The Life and Death of the African Renaissance’ from a Zambian internet magazine. Good (2009) eloquently defends the same method.  5. Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Complaints by Former African National Congress Prisoners and Detainees (the ‘Skweyiya Report’), Johannesburg, August 1992.   6. ‘Justice for All?’ An Independent Assessment of the ANC-sponsored Motsuenyane Commission of Inquiry into External Detention Centres, 1993.   7. In June 2013, I witnessed a demonstration by sidelined aspiring candidates at ZANU PF headquarters in Harare who wanted to represent ZANU PF in the 2013 local authority, provincial council, national assembly and senate elections. Many claimed that the new attempts to regulate the conduct of party primary elections discriminated against poor candidates who had grassroots support. Some said they were crafted to promote wealthy donors to the party, such as business tycoon Philip Chiyangwa.  8. In 2014, South African Breweries donated about R9 million to six political parties in the run-up to the 2014 general election, almost doubling its political donations since 1999 (R5 million). This too could be labelled influence peddling, given that several provincial legislatures in South Africa are tightening



For and Against Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa

79

legislation governing the sale of alcohol. We will see if this legislation goes ahead. He who pays the piper calls the tune.  9. See Lowry (2008) on the regulation of campaign finances in South Africa. 10. Mandiwanzira went to on contest the 2013 election on a ZANU PF ticket, and President Mugabe recently appointed him as deputy minister of Information and Broadcasting Services.

Booker Magure was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria, and is now a Political Science Lecturer at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa. His current research focuses on black economic empowerment and money politics in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and the role of spirit mediums in contesting power and authority in emerging democracies. For his PhD he examined civil society’s quest for democracy in Zimbabwe.

Part II The Struggle for Economic Democracy

Chapter 4

░ Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique Pushing Lobolo from Price to Propriety ALBERT FARRÉ

Historically African customary marriage has been associated with a payment (lobolo). In the Southern Africa region, at least since the mid nineteenth century, this payment was related to a social context where many men had access to money through wage labour, most of them in South African mines, industry and farms. In many cases, regular access to cash led young men to adopt more individualistic behaviour, as they could marry without any help from their lineage elders. By earning their own money they were able to get rid of a system that restricted lineage wealth to the elders and kept the young in a permanently dependent position. In this process, men also got used to negotiating with their inlaws in terms of market logic: if we agree on a price, I can marry your daughter/sister. Moreover, throughout the twentieth century another factor, lobolo, was subject to an inflationary trend, meaning that the bride-givers, her relatives, normally tried to get the highest possible price (Alpers 1984; Harries 1994). During the colonial and post-colonial periods, the social effects of the individualization of men and the commodification of women as wives were studied by many researchers, ranging from Christian missionaries to Marxist anthropologists and members of the feminist movement.1 The object of this chapter is to focus on a possible reversal of this trend in the present day under the post-war social conditions in Mozambique. By using a ‘human economy’ approach I will emphasize both what women do for themselves and how their example goes beyond the intricacies of lobolo, opening up a broader perspective on uses of money and social rights. As a consequence of increasing unemployment in the whole Southern Africa region, in addition to the scars left in the social fabric by a

84

Albert Farré

sixteen-year war (1977–92), many young Mozambican men are unable to marry in the same way that their parents and grandparents did; some women can now reclaim agency in the marriage process, which was lost before. This new – or recovered – female agency has consequences for how people marry today: specifically, it reduces the role of the price to be paid to marry and puts more emphasis on considerations of propriety regarding the respect due from the husband to his wife’s relatives. By placing themselves in a mediating position between their father’s and husband’s lineages, some gains have been made in women’s influence and rights. First I will describe some basic kinship rules in southern Mozambique, which are necessary in order to understand any debate on lobolo. Then I will consider lobolo in the context of debates in economic anthropology on money and exchange, referring specifically to Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi on reciprocity, markets and money. Next I will address the labour dimension at the domestic level, showing how lobolo was affected by the interplay between colonialism and industrialization. Finally, the present diversified situation will be illustrated with some examples from Massinga district, allowing an assessment of recent public debates at the national level on women’s rights in Mozambique. In conclusion, I will sketch the contours of a human economy approach to lobolo.

Some Kinship Norms in Southern Mozambique Kinship in south-eastern Africa is probably one of the longest debates in social anthropology. Henri Junod and Radcliffe-Brown initiated the debate during the 1920s. Junod had been in southern Mozambique and northern Transvaal since the early 1890s as a Presbyterian missionary, and was one of the pioneers of scientific ethnography.2 Radcliffe-Brown was professor of social anthropology at Witwatersrand University, and has been one of the most influential authors in British social anthropology ever since. Junod’s long fieldwork experience contrasted with and was complemented by Radcliffe-Brown’s large-scale comparative models.3 Another contemporary was Dora Earthy, also a missionary, who contributed the ethnography Valenge Women (Earthy 1968). She lived and researched in the same area where David Webster (1977, 1981) did fieldwork among the Chopi during the late 1960s.4 If Junod and Radcliffe-Brown focused on descent and bride-wealth, Earthy and Webster emphasized the importance of corporate kin groups formed by siblings in the organization of labour and inheritance. The debate over descent versus alliance began



Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique

85

with the publication of Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), and it dominated disciplinary debates on kinship through the 1950s and 1960s (Burnham 1987). In the 1970s, Jack Goody opened up a new path by putting aside the descent and alliance opposition per se, and focusing on the interrelation of kinship and marriage within productive and reproductive systems, specifically the position of women in those systems (Goody 1973; Goody and Tambiah 1973). Despite their differences, dowry and bride-wealth are not opposites nor incompatible since both mark established social inequality. Goody noted how in most African societies marriage payments are linked to the transfer of a corpus of rights (Goody and Tambiah 1973). The fact that an African bride increases her status and rights after marriage, in contrast with other forms of marriage payment, lies at the core of my argument here. At a broader comparative level, Goody contrasted Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa, arguing that in Eurasia land was scarce, but in Africa people were scarce. In the long run, this shaped the kinship and inheritance differences between these areas, which is why dowry predominates in Eurasia and bride-wealth in Africa (Goody 1976; Hart 2012). Several important publications appeared during the 1980s that reviewed and refocused the debate on marriage payments in Southern Africa (Comaroff 1980; Krige and Comaroff 1981; Kuper 1982; Parkin and Nyamwaya 1987). Adam Kuper’s general theory of kinship and bridewealth encompassing many Southern African cases was contested by Luc de Heusch. Both maintained their different points of view in the French journal L’Homme, focusing on the Tsonga of southern Mozambique as one case where they were in most disagreement (De Heusch 1983; Kuper 1983).5 Finally some publications on lobolo in the capital city, Maputo, have appeared recently (Granjo 2006; Bagnol 2008). Two conclusions may be drawn from all this. First, despite the deep social changes undergone by Southern African societies during the twentieth century, there is a consensus that lobolo remains a crucial social institution and has itself been adapting to change. Second, the debate turns around why and how lobolo identifies the close relationship between siblings of the opposite sex, which projects a special relationship between descendants of each, so that a man has a special relationship with his mother’s brothers, and a woman with her father’s sisters. In this regard, I must refer briefly to three important features of kinship in southern Mozambique. The first is that rules of filiation (intergenerational ties) are founded on two complementary principles: a vertical one known as patrilineality, meaning that all sons and daughters of a man belong to the same

86

Albert Farré

lineage, and a horizontal bond between female and male siblings that is strengthened after their marriage. This second principle is crystallized in the special role of the mother’s brother (kokwane)6 with the sister’s son (zukulu) and of the father’s sister (hahani), with the brother’s daughter (hlavlana). As kinship terms usually entail rights and duties, this means that men and women have special rights and duties over their sibling’s descendants. The second is that relations with in-laws in southern Mozambique are based on open exogamy. This means that, instead of listing the kin groups into which you have to marry, the rule identifies those into which you cannot marry – in this case, any member of your father’s and mother’s lineages. In the first case, there is always a limited choice of whom to marry; while in the second, once you respect the negative rule, the options are unlimited. This difference is crucial when it comes to how the valuables paid as lobolo circulate: in the first case they follow a prescribed pattern, whereas in the second there is none (Kuper 1981).7 The third aspect concerns the preference for polygyny: once a man is married and considers his marriage to be successful, if he decides to marry again he prefers to choose from among the marriageable kin of his first wife.8 The first wife may welcome this as a way of reducing her labour burden9 (Lubkemann 2009), so that the negative rule (do not marry here and there) is transformed into a positive recommendation (better marry here). This preference is institutionalized in practice through the special relationship between a woman and her brothers’ daughters (Earthy 1968). To conclude, kinship is about the rights and duties of an individual according to his/her relative position in respect to another.10 The institution of lobolo is placed at the crossroads of the three principles above, where descent and relations with in-laws intertwine in several ways. Therefore, it is hard to exaggerate the normative aspect of lobolo.11 Since the word ‘lobolo’ is used to refer to several ceremonies in a set, to the amount of valuables paid during that process and to an institution in general, it is important to distinguish between these three uses. Pauline Peters (1983) insists that marriage is not a one-day event, but a long process that unfolds over many years and sometimes over the whole life of a person. Of course the day when a marriage is publicly made official, and ritualized in a ceremony transferring the main payment from the groom’s kin to the bride’s kin, is in a way decisive. But the marriage itself may have started many years before. Lobolo is a social institution that enables men and women to develop their self-identity by expanding their kin in several directions, and it cannot be reduced to just a ceremony.



Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique

87

All the following are important: the commitment of a couple to marry; the agreement and support received from their close kin to do so; and the couple’s plans for the marriage ceremonies, which are usually expensive. In practice, once a couple agree to marry and the man, normally accompanied by some kin, communicates their intentions explicitly to his bride’s family, they can live together as a married couple, even though the lobolo has not yet been paid. Time, however, does not pass without effects and, as we shall see below, problems may arise if the payment is not made before the death of one of the two spouses, especially if it is the woman who dies.

Lobolo, Markets and Money As the men ate and drank palm-wine they talked about the customs of their neighbours … ‘All their customs are upside down. They do not decide bride price as we do, with sticks. They haggle and bargain as if they were buying a cow in the market’. ‘That is very bad’, said Obierika’s eldest brother. ‘But what is good in one place is bad in another place. In Umunso they do not bargain at all, not even with broomsticks. The suitor just goes on bringing bags of cowries until his in-laws tell him to stop. It is a bad custom because it always leads to a quarrel.’ (Achebe 1994: 73–74)

This quotation from Chinua Achebe’s most famous novel echoes a theme of Marcel Mauss’s essay, ‘The Gift’, written in the 1920s (Mauss 1967). Mauss stated that markets and gifts coexist at different levels and with different emphasis in all societies; but some exchanges are always accompanied by tension, by a threat of misunderstanding which is part of the game. He addressed matters of law (contracts) and economy (how apparently voluntary gifts were often compulsory) in the ancient world and in contemporary exotic societies. He wanted to show that the principles operating in these ancient societies are in fact shared by modern societies, and indeed are relevant to all humanity. Everywhere, law and exchange ultimately refer to morals; they are imbued with them, even as they reproduce and extend a given social order. Mauss also considered money to be a universal tool used to manage the complexities resulting from law and exchange. In other words, money should not be reduced to the currencies coined by modern nation-states, but the broomsticks and cowries mentioned by Achebe may also be thought of as money (Mauss 1967; Hart 1986). In this context, Karl Polanyi’s work offers some insights into how lobolo in south-eastern Africa has been transformed by the interplay between industrialization and multiple colonial traditions (Portuguese,

88

Albert Farré

Afrikaner and British). Polanyi identified a set of forms of economic integration – reciprocity, redistribution and exchange – in order to explore how they are interrelated in a given society. He also made an important distinction between ‘all-purpose money’ and ‘special-purpose money’, and considered how they coexist (Polanyi 1977b).

Forms of Economic Integration: Institutions Matter According to Polanyi, reciprocity, redistribution and exchange each depend on a specific institutional frame to be effective (Polanyi 1977: 37). As institutions precede the socialization of individuals, they do not choose alone whether to act reciprocally, to participate in a redistributive system or to exchange. Individuals do what the supporting structures of society allow them to do. Only in a symmetrically organized environment will reciprocative attitudes result in economic institutions of any importance; only where centres have been established beforehand can the cooperative attitude of individuals produce a redistributive economy; and only in the presence of markets instituted to that purpose will the bartering attitude of individuals result in prices that integrate the economic activities of the community. (Polanyi 1977: 38)

Like Mauss before him, Polanyi insisted that these forms of integration coexist, and the fact that one of them is dominant in a given period does not mean that the others have disappeared (ibid.: 42). The first question then is this: in which form of economic integration should we place lobolo? I argue here that lobolo has to be understood primarily as an institution in a society where reciprocity is dominant. The basic symmetry lies in the relationship of siblings of different sex after marriage. A man and a woman who are siblings belong to the same lineage, and the woman remains a member after her marriage (Radcliffe-Brown 1952; Ngubane 1987). But because their respective sons and daughters will be members of different lineages, their crossed rights and duties over them have the effect of intensifying their relationship beyond the lineage itself. The man becomes kokwane of his sister’s son and the woman hahani of her brother’s daughter. However, as age and rank hierarchies12 also condition sibling relations (Webster 1977), this symmetry is not to be understood as a strict equality among siblings. Therefore, inside the sibling group, symmetry and hierarchy originally balanced each other in permanent tension. The social changes brought by industrialization and colonization broke up this balance, opening the



Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique

89

way for the predominance of the oldest men in the sibling group and relegating their women siblings to a subaltern position. The fact that sisters lost influence over the lobolo process undermined the principle of symmetry, and lobolo lost its power as an engine of reciprocity. The next section considers how this actually happened. Since marriage implies the creation of new household units, we should look at the evolution of household economy and at the role of kinship obligations there.

Marriage and Household: The Economic Implications From the second half of the nineteenth century, men from southern Mozambique migrated to areas whose industries offered wage labour, while women remained at home in charge of the household economy. Since these industries had a monopsony, they could impose longer-term contracts on the migrants that normally lasted from a year up to eighteen months. The prolonged absence of the men intensified a traditional lack of labour during peak agricultural periods. Moreover, this was exacerbated when, from the 1930s to the 1960s, the Portuguese colonial government enforced cotton cultivation on local households (Isaacman 1992). The burden of this labour-intensive crop ensured that domestic units could not grow enough food for their own needs. These parallel processes of industrialization and enforced domestic cash-crop production worsened women’s living conditions dramatically. They had to work more to get less and ended up being dependant on men’s earnings to buy food (Young 1977; van den Berg 1987). On the other hand, migrant men were also exploited in several ways, but the position in the household economy of those who had a regular income was strengthened. Building on Polanyi, we may say that men’s labour was commoditized, while women’s labour was insufficiently commoditized: as long as women remained in the domestic sphere, their labour was taken for free. In rural settings, single and married women perform the same kind of domestic and agricultural duties. The big difference is that while a single woman is living in someone else’s household – normally her mother’s or her hahani’s (father’s sister) – she has to obey the senior woman and follow her plans and interests. This situation of dependency often resulted in women being overburdened with domestic labour, as a consequence of the acute labour shortage mentioned above. Therefore, marriage provided a woman with her own household – and the associated right to call on her brother’s daughter to help her – so that it offered a means of domestic emancipation.

90

Albert Farré

Household production was normally based on unpaid labour; and the labour shortage during peak periods was addressed by organizing several types of mutual-aid working groups that shared drinks and/or food (Pottier 1985; O’Laughlin 1996). Due to the pseudo-commodification of domestic production, however, and a permanent rather than occasional labour shortage, the improvements normally attached to marriage were blurred. Since markets existed for everything, and domestic labour was still embedded in kinship and therefore unpaid, the alienation of those who remained at home increased: their kinship duties were harder, while their kin rights were diluted. Last but not least, in this creeping process of alienation at home, women also found themselves marginalized by the dynamics introduced by the monetization of lobolo. In southern Mozambique, as in much of Southern Africa, lobolo used to be paid in cattle. But in the early nineteenth century cattle became scarce, partly because of systematic looting of cattle in the course of Nguni migrations,13 and partly because several diseases decimated cattle later in that century. This led to a shift in how lobolo was paid: from cattle to iron hoes (Harries 1994; Fialho 1998). At the same time, industrial production boomed in the Natal, Free State and Rand regions of what became South Africa. A growing need for labour generalized the circulation of the pound sterling, and by 1900 it had become the usual money for paying lobolo (Harries 1994). Finally, when a system of deferred payment to miners was introduced in the 1930s, the Portuguese colonial state kept the sterling that had been paid to the returning migrants, and gave them escudos – the Portuguese currency. In this way the Portuguese authorities accumulated reserves in a strong currency while compelling the migrants to spend their money in Mozambique (Fialho 1998; Covane 2001). This reduced the value of migrant’s labour once again, exacerbating the exploitation of the African population.

Lobolo and Uses of Money: Payment Is Not Only about Buying Polanyi (1977) explained that money is used in several ways according to what is to be achieved. He identified the four conventional uses of money: as means of payment, standard of value or unit of account, store of wealth and medium of exchange. In the past each use had its own form of money, meaning that each was physically identifiable by a different object – or types of objects. The peculiarity of modern money is that a single object (currencies coined by nation-states) serves for all uses, so that we



Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique

91

may call it all-purpose money. He affirmed further that the integration of the four different uses in a single symbolic form was achieved by giving precedence to the medium of exchange over all other uses (ibid.: 99). Referring to the use of money as payment, Polanyi identified a period when civil law, penal law and sacral law were not really differentiated from each other (ibid.: 105). He mentioned bride-wealth as an institution whereby payment was revealed in its original essence, arguing that these were originally non-economic transactions. Once money as a means of exchange is established in society, however, the practice of money payment naturally spreads far and wide … Money is now a means of payment because it is a means of exchange. The very notion of the independent origin of payment is lost, and the millennia of human civilization in which payment sprang not from economic transactions, but directly from religious, social or political obligations, have been forgotten. (Polanyi 1977: 107)

By disaggregating the different uses of money, Polanyi seems to have reached the same crossroads between law and economy that had previously interested Mauss. He could argue that payment is not only about buying, but also about circumscribing obligations; and, as a corollary, that bride-wealth was once not confounded with bride-price. But how does lobolo relate to the different uses of money? Now we may return to southern Mozambique with the following specific questions in mind: Why were cattle and iron hoes abandoned as specific forms of money used to pay lobolo? What were the consequences of adopting sterling as the money used for paying lobolo? Were the rights and duties established by customary marriage affected at any level?

Money Uses, Markets and Price in Southern Mozambique Money as a store of wealth is easily understood by looking at the shifts experienced by lobolo in southern Mozambique. Cattle were abandoned as lobolo payments because looting and disease made them scarce. They were then replaced by iron hoes produced locally in Venda region. These hoes were called beja (a local name for Venda) and had a standard shape, 45 cm long with a head 18 cm wide, weighing about 1.5 kilograms (Harries 1994: 87). Curiously, these hoes were not used for agriculture. People used to protect them from rust by burying them in the ground, waiting for when a marriage had to be paid for, since they had to be brand new. Harries (ibid.: 88) quotes a governor general saying that these hoes were

92

Albert Farré

‘considered a sacred deposit in the hands of the father, brother or tutor of the wife that could under no circumstances be used for agricultural purposes’. The beja hoes thus provide a clear case of the payment and store uses of money. Access to them was only possible in the highlands, some several hundred kilometres from the coast. As in the kula system described by Malinowski, people took advantage of mobility to engage both in impersonal market exchanges and in more personal and ceremonial ones. The two coexisted but were strictly differentiated, and political institutions observed this difference (Hart 1986). The same men who used this type of hoe to pay lobolo in the late nineteenth century were also involved in the ivory trade or worked on sugar plantations in Natal. European traders searching for ivory soon noticed the value of the hoes and began to import industrial copies from Europe. These imported hoes were exchanged in Lourenço Marques at a rate of one hundred for a large elephant tusk, a price 25 per cent below their cost in Venda (Harries 1994: 87).14 In this way they acquired another money use: as a standard of value or unit of account. Without this it would have been impossible to exchange iron hoes and elephant tusks; nor could Patrick Harries have made a comparison of prices. European imports of hoes caused their value to fall so that inflation rocketed, and before long the hoes ceased to be used for lobolo payments. Sterling, fuelled by the increasing demand for wage labour, became the most reliable standard of value for everything: from elephant tusks to labour and guns. Everything now had a price in all-purpose money, and lobolo was no exception. Colonialism and industrialization intensified a process that had already begun in this region of Africa before any colonial power had started to control trade and production there. In all this, the part played by brides in the lobolo process declined: from being an actor binding her husband to her relatives through an obligation, she became an asset exchanged by two men. In other words, men as future in-laws could now bargain for a woman’s price: ‘Money [became] a means of payment because it was a means of exchange’. Polanyi seemed to think that payment in its original sense was found only in civilizations of the forgotten past. I will confirm Mauss’s claim that special monies used for payment belong much closer to our own times.

Can Everything be Paid for with All-Purpose Money? My example is a recent one from Massinga district, where unemployment is rampant and access to money is now difficult, especially in the rural areas, but nevertheless people still need to marry and reproduce them-



Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique

93

selves as usual. ‘Z’ is a young man who already has some children with ‘M’, the woman who lives with him, but he had not yet made any attempt to inform his potential in-laws about his plans to marry their daughter. This situation happens often, because young men are afraid of being humiliated by their would-be in-laws if they dare to visit them with empty hands. Z tried to earn some money by migrating to South Africa. He had been told that there is a lot of unemployment and xenophobia there, but he still hoped to raise enough money to at least start the marriage process. Actually South Africa’s dynamic informal economy gave him a chance to earn some money. A problem arose when M became sick and most of the little money that Z had managed to save had to be spent on her treatments. The situation became completely shameful when M eventually died and Z had to bring the cadaver to her parents’ home to be buried there.15 Lobolo not only regulates filiation but also the place where a person can be buried. A married woman may be buried in her husband’s lineage’s graveyard, but an unmarried one (no matter how many years she has been living with her partner or how many children she has had with him) can only be buried in her lineage graveyard. So Z had no other option than to visit M’s parents for the first time carrying the body of their daughter. He was accompanied by many of his siblings and two of his father’s brothers. Needless to say, this is the kind of highly emotional situation where the chances of both sides understanding each other are rather low. From M’s father’s point of view, to the grief of his loss were added all the accumulated feelings of not being respected by the couple for all those years. This combination of feelings was transformed here into resentment of the man – and his lineage – bringing the cadaver. It was manifested by putting a big log across the path leading to their home, preventing any vehicle from coming in. When the visitors carrying the coffin asked for permission to enter, they got the following reply: ‘I don’t know you; we don’t know who you are’. M’s father was reminding Z that he had never set foot in his house before. If he could manage without him while his daughter was alive, he must do the same now she is dead. After the anger and shame had been expressed on both sides, an agreement was proposed: if you want to bury that corpse here, you may first have to pay a fine. Since the fine is expressed in all-purpose money, two possibilities arose: either they propose an amount that, although high, may be possible to pay; or they fix an amount so big that they make it really clear that they do not expect it to be paid. In this case the fine was 75,000 meticais (more than US$ 2,000). This came closer to the second option than the first. As room for manoeuvre reduced and the situation be-

94

Albert Farré

came more violent, some neighbours called in the authorities. Perceiving an impasse, the latter asked Z to give them the coffin and then ordered M’s father to answer if he recognized the body as being that of his daughter. When he said yes, they ordered him to open the path and they then buried the coffin in the domestic graveyard with the help of any present who wished to do so.

The Limitations of All-Purpose Money This example shows that neither all-purpose money nor fines could settle the dispute. When the offended party had to state the size of the fine,16 they were less interested in getting an amount of money – as if they were selling something – than in showing that Z could never pay for the offence that had been committed. Maybe they wanted him to realize that he was involved in the kind of debt that David Graeber (2011) says is never intended to be repaid. My second point is that the actual origin of the problem is the scarcity of all-purpose money for the majority of people in southern Mozambique today. People would like to pay if they could, but both wage labour and markets for anything produced in rural areas are hard to find. Moreover, if it is true that cattle were once replaced by iron hoes, a similar change of money is harder to achieve now: after the generalization of all-purpose money, people are not used to thinking in different kinds of limited-purpose moneys for specific issues. Finally, the post-war situation puts special emphasis on burying people properly. After a long war (1977– 92) with much violence to the civil population, and violence consciously used to destroy the social order through rape, killing children, forcing people to kill their relatives and suchlike, nowadays the proper ways of conducting marriages and burials are particularly stressed. Lobolo is among those institutions whose original function was not related to the exchange use of money, but rather to other uses closer to law and morals, to a certain balance between symmetry and hierarchy in social relations. Although lobolo implied the transfer of certain valuables that may have a market value, it was set apart from market calculations. Once all-purpose money became a common standard of value, however, these institutions were subjected to the logic of price and most of their capacity to settle conflicts was blocked. Price works against the rights of anyone who has limited access to all-purpose money. Women have been suffering from this situation since industrialization and colonialism began; and since the early 1980s17 many unemployed men have been affected too.



Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique

95

Women as Mediators for Their Rights: Some Possibilities for Improvement? Many Mozambicans are aware that the kind of nasty situation described above is increasing, but it is still not easy to find a way out. Some women imagine that if they take part in the marriage process from the beginning, mediating between the two lineages involved, the level of conflict may be better controlled. The following example is less dramatic. ‘A’ is a married woman from rural Massinga living in the provincial capital of Inhambane. Food dependency is a feature of the whole region and A is engaged in informal trade supplying the town with food. To help her with the domestic work, she asked her niece, ‘Y’, to come and live with her. Y was 16 years old and had been born in a rural district of Massinga. She was happy to come because she felt that the town had many advantages when compared to her parent’s rural home: the burden of agricultural labour is less heavy in urban than in rural areas since it is reduced to small plots of vegetables near well-watered areas, the high school is nearer so she can attend evening classes after working at home in the morning, and the many schools and churches there would make it easier to meet new people. The proof of this last point is that, after only a few months of living in town, Y became pregnant. Once Y’s mother and A were aware of the situation, they foresaw two different options. One, proposed by Y’s mother, was abortion; the other, A’s preference, was to call in Y’s boyfriend, ‘P’, and ask him what he thought about the situation. P had a job in the central market and, according to local opinion, was considered to be a responsible person. A decided to meet the young couple and explain to them the two options: abortion or, if they were really willing to form a household together, she would help P to approach Y’s parents. This second option would require P to act very fast: he needed to inform his kin and to organize a visit to Y’s parents’ home in Massinga before the pregnancy had become too evident. Once P had informed his relatives and found some of them willing to accompany him to Massinga, A phoned her brother-in-law (Y’s father) and informed him that someone had called at her house about Y. She then asked him whether he wanted her to send them to Massinga or not. At this point A did not inform Y’s father about the pregnancy. Of course he would find out soon enough and recognize that P had introduced himself to Y’s kin after the event. Then, Y’s relatives would probably ask P to pay a fine. A knew that this sequence would probably occur, but she was convinced that, if P could act fast, he could convince Y’s family of his respect

96

Albert Farré

towards his in-laws. Then Y’s mother and A, back stage, could make sure that the fine would be a reasonable amount for someone with a job. Why? In the end, all men are interested in a proper marriage for their daughters and sisters: it is the only way they can have zukulus (sister’s sons). And these have an important role to play in ceremonies addressed to the ancestors of any lineage. Moreover, zukulu and kokwane are supposed to have a relationship of mutual aid.18 A turned out to be right. Even though P went to visit Y’s family with little money (they just offered 5 litres of wine and a 200 meticais note – around US$ 6), the latter accepted him with goodwill. This first visit established a model that eased following visits when P accepted the fine, paid it and committed himself to organizing the lobolo ceremony sometime in the future. As a result, Y went to live at P’s place in Inhambane before the delivery, and P is now accepted as a son-in-law (mwane) in Y’s lineage. There is no guarantee that all will go perfectly for the new couple, but the foundation has been laid.

From Price to Propriety: Lobolo Is about Sharing with Kin From these two examples, we can see that in the several visits P made to Y’s kin, money appeared and was always welcomed. But the amount did not seem to be the main point. Instead, it seems to be about doing the right thing at the right moment with the proper attitude and respect. In those meetings a new set of rights and duties were clarified and properly established among two lineages, along with a crossed hierarchy: on the one hand, the young woman accepted to be under her husband’s authority; on the other hand, the husband accepted her significance in terms of kinship and that is why he had to accept her parents’ right to impose a fine on him when he failed to do his duty in time. This two-way acceptance of authority reminds us about balance and symmetry. Lobolo is not about buying anything, but about sharing kinship,19 and assuming rights and duties in respect to other kin members. That is why A pushed P to go to visit Y’s lineage. She taught him an important lesson: if you want a wife and children, propriety is important. Propriety means respecting others’ position and rights; and it can be achieved without much all-purpose money. Secondly, thanks to this kinship norm of sharing, Y added to her status as daughter and sister in her own lineage, plus that of wife and mother in P’s lineage. Her sons and daughters will be members of P’s lineage, but they will also be zukulu in her lineage of origin. Y is now more pro-



Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique

97

tected than M (the woman in the first example) was. But because Y is too young and inexperienced to know how it all works, she alone could not have managed to secure her boyfriend a minimal welcome from her parent’s household, nor have convinced him to visit her family. Only a senior woman like A, already well established in adult life, is in a position to mediate for young women’s rights. Thus, this example shows that hierarchy is not only a male affair, with women remaining subservient. It shows that women can also play a part in social hierarchies, and in doing so they push for the re-establishment of that symmetry that once curtailed the power of male siblings. Thirdly, we can see how in post-war Mozambique some women are no longer limited to the domestic sphere, nor burdened with the obligation to perform unpaid agricultural labour. Now that the government does not force women into agricultural work, those who have the option prefer to migrate to town to trade with food instead of producing food.20 In fact, female migration from rural areas to towns commonly follows the pattern of this example: a senior woman calls a junior relative to help her at home while she is busy with informal trade or wage labour. This intergenerational relationship between women reminds us about the rights of the hahani over the work and education of her brother’s daughter. Although, in this case, A called a sister’s daughter instead of a brother’s daughter, the trend to seek domestic help from siblings’ descendants is the same. Whether it is a brother’s or sister’s daughter depends on the development cycle of each sibling group (Peters 1983). Finally, A’s mediation helped to delink lobolo from a market logic. Like many Mozambican women, A complements her household income by trading informally. She is fully aware of how exchange works in a market economy and she is certainly proud of generating income on her own account. A’s example also shows, however, that in order for some women to stand up for their rights as women, lobolo has to be placed outside the logic of market exchange. We may hypothesize that, once some women are freed from domestic agriculture, a next step for their social improvement is to free the lobolo process – and the rights embedded in it – from the limitations of all-purpose money.

Activism for Women’s Rights in National Politics In 2004 a new family law was passed in Mozambique’s national assembly. It followed a period of intense public debate that had begun in 1997, when a parliamentary commission was established to reform the Family

98

Albert Farré

Law inherited from colonialism. During these years some associations for women’s and human rights revealed their ability to shape public debates (at least in Maputo) by opposing the so-called traditionalist or cultural point of view in civil law. The 2004 law was considered progressive and a great improvement: it established a minimum marriage age of eighteen for both sexes; it only recognized traditional and religious marriages if they were written down and only if they followed an administrative procedure similar to civil marriage; the family’s authority was vested in both parents and not only in the father as had been the case previously; and it introduced the concept of ‘união de facto’ (common law marriage) that allowed partners to claim filiation and patrimonial rights after one year of living together. This last measure mostly aimed to guarantee the right of one partner to claim a pension, as well as ownership of assets bought while living together, in the event of the other partner’s death or abandonment of the household. Despite some initial euphoria over such a law being passed, recent research (Arthur et al. 2012) concludes that the new Family Law has not improved women’s rights in Mozambique much. Our two examples provide us with some hints as to why. In the first case união de facto (common law marriage) could have helped M to assert her status as a long-standing partner of Z. In the rural areas, there is no access to the services of a court, and few civil servants working there – let alone citizens – have any knowledge of the law. Moreover, even when the administration of justice is efficient, the law is normally superseded when it comes to burial issues, like in the example above, since this involves private gravesites and is embedded in propriety issues linked to fear of spiritual punishment (becoming ill, suffering accidents) when someone fails to do what they are morally obliged to. In the second case, the fact that Y, the woman who got married, was under eighteen years old made her situation problematic, since she was not qualified to marry under the new law, and could not be considered eligible for a common law marriage. Forced marriage of girls still exists in Mozambique,21 and this is one of the practices the law wants to stop. Although, in our example, Y was not being forced to marry, in her case the law would prosecute P for attempting to marry a minor. The law does not consider that many women under the age of eighteen marry according to their own will, and these are left in limbo. My two cases show that it is very difficult to regulate all these matters by relying exclusively on a legalistic point of view. Without understating the importance of the law, knowing what people are doing for themselves may often be a more effective way of seeking to uphold their rights.



Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique

99

As Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox argues in this volume, types of knowledge are always plural, not singular. Democracy is about taking this pluralism into consideration. But to put a plural democracy into practice is not as easy as it may seem. In Southern Africa there has been an attempt to introduce and normalize plurality by officially recognizing so-called traditional or customary institutions and integrating them in national law codes. This option, fair as it may be, has many limitations; and the Mozambican case is one more example exposing the shortcomings of a legalistic approach. Moreover, since legislators must define what tradition or custom is, they reproduce a dualistic way of understanding African social dynamics (as traditional or modern) that divides people into being for or against tradition. The renewal of these old debates exacerbates contradictions inherited from the colonial period, and hardly encourages the establishment of new alliances between different social sectors who may all be interested in strengthening democracy. The examples from Massinga show us another possible way of enforcing democracy in Mozambique: do not think of people who use lobolo as being particularly traditional, but think of them just as citizens who live in a market economy and need institutions and ways of regulating some social domains that do not rest on market logic. Then consider that lobolo is a useful way of facing, not traditional imperatives, but the everyday challenge of securing one’s rights, morals and money. Lobolo may contain something that cannot be found in other institutions. For instance, lobolo allows us to think about a specific type of money to be used for payments. Taking account of the plurality of money may be one way of defending women’s rights. Women are already taking advantage of this to clarify relations between kin and to improve both their rights and their general well-being. It is unfortunately the case that many academics, social activists and politicians are reluctant to acknowledge this type of lived plurality, or to accept that how people confront their everyday problems may sometimes be more effective than the abstract offerings of lawyers and economists.

Conclusion The examples presented here are not representative of present-day lobolo, which permits many complex variations. But they do help to illustrate the argument of this chapter. I began by showing that lobolo is an institution that allows intertwined rights and duties to bind people of different lineages, generations and gender. This complex system of rights

100

Albert Farré

and duties is embedded in kin positions, and it once offered a degree of symmetry and balance that alleviated the patrilineal and patriarchal condition of society. But these were broken by two overlapping processes linked to industrialization and colonialism: labour and money. Both these processes affected women’s social position and rights negatively. Karl Polanyi’s work on systems of economic integration helped to frame this shift as a transition from the hegemony of reciprocity to that of market exchange. Polanyi’s differentiation of money uses also helped us to understand the historical process that led lobolo to be captured by the rationale for all-purpose money. Building on these theoretical considerations, two examples from the present day showed how the limitations of all-purpose money are aggravated when access to it becomes scarce for the majority of the population. In this context, an emphasis on propriety is one way to overcome the limitations of all-purpose money when it comes to meeting the need for payments and obligations. It requires us to understand money as a tool that goes beyond markets and exchange. Since people everywhere insert themselves practically into economic life, the ‘human economy’ perspective focuses on unveiling useful initiatives that are ‘often obscured, marginalized or repressed by dominant economic institutions and ideologies’ (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010: 5). In the light of these practices, a broader way of understanding the economy is revealed – an economy that includes and refers to the whole of humanity. My examples from Massinga show that, by avoiding the limitations imposed by all-purpose money, some Mozambicans are exploring the possibility of a fairer and more equitable lobolo that allows women to recover their agency as mediators. Nobody expects marriage to be easy, but it has to be available to everyone, including the great majority who have little access to all-purpose money. The rich will still use lobolo ceremonies to show off their wealth (renting limousines, offering imported liquors, etc.). But however luxurious the setting, lobolo is not principally about buying but about sharing. Understanding this point might make marriage less of a trial for ordinary Mozambicans. NOTES  1. The contrasting points of view by Sansom (1981) and Ngubane (1987) on the Pedi and Zulu cases exemplify this variability.  2. For an assessment of Junod’s ethnographic work and his commitment to scientific knowledge, see Harries (1981).



Women as Mediators in Postwar Mozambique

101

 3. A summary assessment of their debate may be found in Kopytoff (1964) and Kuper (1976).  4. Valenge are nowadays included in the Chopi ethnic group. Junod’s work still influences official ethnic classifications in southern Mozambique. Harries (1988) provides a critical view on the missionary and colonial habit of linking languages and ethnicity.  5. Since de Heusch was a disciple of Lévi Strauss, this controversy was one of the last in the more general kinship debate mentioned above.  6. The kinship terms in brackets belong to the Xitshwa language, by far the most widespread in Massinga district. Xitshwa was included in the Tsonga group by Junod, along with Shangaan and XiRonga. Tsonga languages are closely linked to the so-called Nguni group of languages.   7. This differentiates southern Mozambique from other Southern African cases (Krige and Comaroff 1981).  8. It includes younger sisters of his wife, daughters of his brothers-in-law and daughters of his wife’s mother’s sisters.  9. For a general view of polygyny and agricultural labour, see Goody (1973). 10. This is different from the Enlightenment tradition where all individuals have rights and duties per se (Dumont 1992). 11. For the moral aspects of kinship and how it relates to agricultural work, see Bloch (1973) and Pottier (1985). 12. Siblings of a second wife are always ranked below those of the first wife (nkosikazi), regardless of their age (Webster 1977). 13. Period when armed groups were moving from the south to the north, crossing and stopping in present day Mozambique several times (Liesegang 1970). 14. He refers to one source in support of this statement. While it does indicate that the price was probably lower on the coast, this does not justify concluding that prices in Venda and Lourenço Marques differed by 25 per cent. 15. There are few public cemeteries in Mozambique and many people who die in the city are transported to their home villages to be buried in the family’s graveyard. 16. Polanyi also mentions punishments or fines for not having fulfilled an obligation on time as one instance where the original payment use of money often applied (Polanyi 1977: 106). 17. The independence of Mozambique and the geopolitical changes that followed in the region coincided with a major reduction of Mozambican migrants contracted by the mines (CEA 1998). 18. Radcliffe-Brown (1940) considered this to be a ‘joking’ relationship. 19. Isabelle Hillenkamp and Jean Michel Servet have developed the idea of reciprocity as sharing. 20. Sender, Oya and Cramer (2006) have emphasized this generalized will of women to get rid of unpaid agricultural labour. 21. According to Benilde Nhalivilo, from the Civil Society Organizations Network (ROSC), a study carried out in 2008 showed that in Mozambique 18 per cent of girls marry before they are 15 years old, and 55 per cent before 18 years old. Retrieved on 16 July 2013 from http://www.verdade.co.mz/destaques/ democracia/38285-casamentos-prematuros-devem-ser-criminalizados.

102

Albert Farré

Albert Farré is postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University of Brasilia. Formerly he was research fellow in the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria, and in ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon. He studied Social Anthropology and History and holds a PhD in History from the University of Barcelona. He has conducted research in Mozambique, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo focusing on migration, state administration at the local level and rural development.

Chapter 5

░ Negotiating State and Market The South African HIV/AIDS Movement and Social Change THEODORE POWERS

A critical history of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic must account for the sustained challenges to government inaction that arose to increase access to treatment and democratize policymaking. Although it emerged later than in the global North, the social response to the political management of the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic is a significant episode in this radical history. Over the course of two decades, the South African HIV/ AIDS movement has succeeded in transforming public health responses there in the direction of international treatment norms based on human rights. The South African HIV/AIDS movement ran up against significant political and economic hurdles when it sought to create new institutional conditions in support of human life by increasing access to treatment. Overcoming these obstacles involved negotiations between a wide range of actors, organizations and institutions. Chief among these were transnational networks of HIV/AIDS activists, multinational corporations, international institutions, political parties, labour unions, NGOs, community-based organizations, professional medical associations and health workers. The South African HIV/AIDS movement relied heavily on the support of transnational donor capital, on the solidarity of trade unions and on the power that came from organizing poor and working-class people who were either infected or affected by the epidemic. Analysing the tactics of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS alliance in an era of globalization underscores the need to think across institutional scales, so that grassroots initiatives of local actors and their representatives can connect with powerful actors and organizations at national and transnational levels. It has become common in anthropology to emphasize cross-cultural trends that may be attributed to the political, economic and social effects of globalization. The concept of ‘neoliberalism’ has been taken to explain

104

Theodore Powers

the increased social inequality entailed in the unrestrained movement of finance capital (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Schneider and Susser 2003; Dumenil and Levy 2005). One feature of this kind of analysis is to see the nation-state as having withdrawn from society while adopting fiscally austere macroeconomic policies. Social services that were a pillar of the Rooseveltian social contract have been privatized, while workers’ rights and security have been reduced in a global race to the bottom (Harvey 1989). This line of argument highlights the consequences of new forms of power associated with globalization. In general, advocates of this approach connect ‘global’ and ‘local’ scales through ethnographic case studies. They examine the effects of what is understood as globalization on poor and working-class communities. This top-down conceptualization has also been applied to the expansion of Western biomedical norms in the global South (Nguyen 2005; Robins 2006; Biehl 2008). Despite their significant research findings, ‘neoliberalism’ approaches usually underestimate the role of intermediate institutions and socio-political processes when explaining the social effects observed. Harvey’s (2005) theory that neoliberalism is a class project of rich elites offers a more grounded approach to some extent. But his focus is still on national-level dynamics, while provincial, regional and ‘local’ socio-political processes are neglected. Earlier schools of anthropology took seriously the relationship between internal and external forces at the local level. In an attempt to overcome a ‘bounded’ concept of culture and society associated with structural functionalism, the Manchester School developed the concept of a ‘social field’. This brought a unified analytical lens to Western and traditional political systems operating together. Building on the work of Max Gluckman (1940), this approach allowed anthropologists to examine how Africans navigated their journeys between the overlapping spheres of colonial and traditional authority. Subsequent scholarship took this line to politics or the political field (Swartz, Turner and Tuden 1966). Fallers (1955) could be said to have taken it even further, developing the concept of ‘intercalary institutions’ to show how African political systems articulated with the political economy of colonial administrations. This emphasis on political fields formed by social processes on different scales allows us to rethink the conceptual tools needed to analyse the multi-scalar strategies employed by South African HIV/AIDS activists. Some recent research has analysed the social and institutional factors involved in ‘scale making’ at different institutional, economic and political levels (Tsing 2000). But Tsing tends to assume continuity across these scales, rather than analysing the dynamics of competition and conflict between them. I



Negotiating State and Market

105

propose a ‘scaled political field’ approach here as a means of accounting for this tension within socio-political processes operating across institutional levels. In South Africa, national, provincial and ‘local’ health institutions constituted distinct but interrelated nodes in the political field of HIV/AIDS. Put simply, the activities of various individuals, organizations and political parties were directed towards these different institutions. However, rather than seeing them as a single ‘project’, these institutional hubs were places where actors and activities were concentrated and where different outcomes were reached. As such, formations at each scale were able to operate autonomously, to some degree. However actions or events that occurred at one level reverberated throughout the political field of HIV/ AIDS, informing the dynamics of the other political scales. Therefore, the ‘scaled political field’ approach allows us to observe how individual actors and organizations converge on state institutions at several levels, thereby reifying the significance of different political scales for producing social change (Powers 2013c). This approach offers a means of recognizing the interdependence of socio-political activities at different sites that are linked through the actions of organizations, activists and networks. I apply this scaled political field approach here to the tactics employed by the South African HIV/AIDS movement in seeking to expand access to treatment and democratize HIV/AIDS policymaking. The limited account that follows will focus on how actors, organizations and institutions interacted to produce these outcomes at the national level. My narrative centres on the political and economic limits that HIV/AIDS activists faced in the campaign to democratize policy and gain better access to treatment. My main focus will be on the restructuring of the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) to expand the role of activists and community-based organizations in the oversight, and development of, national HIV/AIDS policy. The chapter will describe how the South African movement overcame political and economic obstacles to achieve a limited measure of democracy in the treatment of HIV/AIDS.

The Limits to AIDS Treatment in Post-Apartheid South Africa The HIV/AIDS epidemic arrived in force just as South Africa was emerging from apartheid and reintegrating into the international community. While the first case of HIV/AIDS in South Africa had been identified in the mines during 1982, the apartheid state did little to stem the tide of HIV/ AIDS during that decade (Iliffe 2006). But the epidemic received greater

106

Theodore Powers

attention during the political transition through the efforts of HIV/AIDS and gay rights activists, human rights supporters and the African National Congress (ANC), the government-in-waiting. Despite the adoption of a rights-based National AIDS Plan (1994) following the country’s first democratic elections, HIV prevalence in South Africa grew between 1990 and 1999 from under 1 per cent to 23 per cent (Gilbert and Walker 2002). While restructuring of the South African state limited the capability of government health institutions, the influence of global forces on economic policy also played a significant role in the exponential growth of the epidemic. A democratic South Africa emerged in a geopolitical context far different from other post-colonial African states. From the 1950s onwards, newly independent African states had vied for autonomy in a bipolar world through the non-aligned movement and the adoption of development strategies intended to secure economic independence. The fall of the Soviet bloc and the rise of the Washington Consensus limited the scope for policy autonomy of an economy that depended heavily on foreign investment. The ANC faced a situation where the power of national states to influence the movement of finance capital was very limited. As a result, the ANC abandoned its policy of nationalization during the political transition. Perception of pressures from capital became more acute when the ANC moved away from its ‘Reconstruction and Development Programme’ (RDP), a Keynesian policy platform. This move away from the RDP represented a philosophical shift from ‘growth through redistribution’ to ‘redistribution through growth’. After a series of currency crises in 1996, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki convened a working group of economists and private sector bankers who developed the fiscally austere ‘Growth, Employment and Redistribution’ (GEAR) macroeconomic strategy. This policy was closely modelled on the International Monetary Fund’s ‘structural adjustment’ programmes (Bond 2005). GEAR imposed sharp limits on social spending, and restricted the transformative potential of the negotiated political transition. Its implementation slowed the expansion of the South African public health sector through downward pressure on the national health budget. Until 2006/07, national and provincial allocations for health remained stagnant in real terms as a result of this macroeconomic framework (McIntyre and Thiede 2007). The fiscal austerity imposed by GEAR was a powerful obstacle to making HIV/AIDS treatment available in South Africa. During the 1990s, it was established that antiretroviral therapy (ART) was an effective way of extending the lives of people with HIV/AIDS and of preventing mother-



Negotiating State and Market

107

to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT). The cost of these drugs was prohibitively high, however. The pricing structure for antiretroviral (ARV) drugs was, and continues to be, determined by multinational pharmaceutical corporations based in the global North. Economic control over these chemical compounds is secured through the World Trade Organization’s ‘Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights’ (TRIPS) agreement. In this way, international institutions and the Northern economic interests that they represent impeded access to treatment for South Africans living with HIV/AIDS. In contrast to its relatively passive macroeconomic policy, the ANC challenged the restrictions imposed by the global pharmaceutical industry. Through the adoption of the Medicines and Related Substances Control Amendment Act (1997), the ANC asserted the right to acquire generic medicines (Nattrass 2007: 50). Citing the TRIPS agreement, forty-two pharmaceutical corporations sued the South African government the following year in an attempt to prevent the implementation of this policy. The United States government threatened to put South Africa on a watch list for potential sanctions and lodged a complaint with the World Trade Organization (Fassin 2007: 68). During the ensuing legal action, United States Vice President Al Gore actively pressured the ANC to accept a deal of reduced prices for antiretroviral drugs in exchange for South Africa dropping its court case (Gevisser 2007: 739). In response to these actions, Minister of Health Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma declared HIV/AIDS treatment to be too expensive for public health sector provision (Fassin 2007: 53). Alongside the ANC’s legal challenge to Northern pharmaceutical corporations, the South African HIV/AIDS movement mounted a campaign of direct action against the pricing system for AIDS drugs. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a non-governmental organization founded in 1998 by former anti-apartheid activists, led this campaign. The TAC broadened the base of the South African HIV/AIDS movement by organizing poor and working-class black South Africans in support of their efforts. The organization built a campaign on this foundation to ‘name and shame’ global pharmaceutical corporations to provide antiretroviral drugs at affordable prices. Its high point was civil disobedience by one of the TAC’s leading activists, Zackie Achmat (Robins 2004). In October 2000, Achmat illegally imported five thousand fluconazole pills from Thailand, where they were generically produced. The cost of one pill in Thailand at this time was R1.78 (US$0.25), while in South Africa it cost R124.84 (US$18.10) (Soal 2000). The TAC also activated transnational networks of HIV/AIDS activists to pressure the United States into dropping its threats against the South African government.

108

Theodore Powers

This series of protests won worldwide attention and led to significantly reduced costs for AIDS drugs in developing countries. The South African HIV/AIDS movement succeeded in its challenge to global pharmaceutical corporations, with some manufacturers lowering the cost of their medications by up to 95 per cent of patent-protected prices (Karon 2001). The United Nations played a notable role in bringing this about. In achieving these outcomes, the South African HIV/AIDS movement displayed tactics that later secured the involvement of activists and community-based organizations in health policy development. Despite the ANC’s challenge to the international drug pricing regime, a section of the ruling party remained opposed to public provision of HIV/AIDS treatment in South Africa. The emergence of the ‘AIDS dissident’ faction within the ANC and concomitant rejection of ART delayed the adoption there of orthodox biomedical treatment for AIDS. ‘AIDS dissidence’ was the name for an ideological platform that questioned the scientific link between HIV and AIDS, rejected what they took to be a general view of Africans as over-sexualized, and disputed the economic claims of the global pharmaceutical industry (Fassin 2007; Nattrass 2007; Gevisser 2007; Susser 2009). According to HIV/AIDS activists, the dissident faction within the ANC included President Thabo Mbeki, National Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and Director General of Health Thami Mseleku, among others. The circumspect attitude of these political figures towards ART delayed the adoption of a comprehensive HIV/ AIDS treatment programme and is estimated to have shortened the lives of some 330,000 South Africans (Chigwedere et al. 2008). The human toll of government foot-dragging led the activists and organizations of the South African HIV/AIDS movement to launch another campaign of direct action to alter the course of the epidemic. Through a series of legal challenges and the development of alliances with the labour movement and moderate elements of the ruling party, the South African HIV/AIDS movement was able to alter government policy in favour of making ART more readily available. The TAC once again provided the lead in challenging government inaction. The South African HIV/AIDS movement cultivated strategic ties with the ANC’s governing alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). These ties proved to be critical in bringing pressure to bear on moderate elements within the government to adopt an HIV/AIDS treatment plan based on international norms. Echoing earlier HIV/AIDS activism in the global North, the TAC also used international venues such as the International Aids Conference to mobilize transnational networks of activists, health professionals and members of



Negotiating State and Market

109

international institutions to pressure the ANC into adopting an orthodox treatment plan. The internal struggle for access to treatment focused on control over state institutions. For the HIV/AIDS movement, the organs of state were central to the goal of increasing access to treatment, since ARVs are controlled substances. For the ANC’s AIDS dissident faction, their control over national institutions – and ability to limit public provision of ARVs – underwrote their power to dictate policy. In order to reverse this situation, the South African HIV/AIDS movement had to leverage the socio-economic rights guaranteed by the post-apartheid constitution to engage with the legal process built into state institutions. Despite some legal victories, dissident control of national institutions – particularly the National Department of Health – continued to limit the availability of ART in South Africa’s public health sector (Powers 2013a). It was only with the restructuring of the South African National AIDS Council that the South African HIV/AIDS movement began to influence the development and implementation of policy.

The South African National AIDS Council and the Democratization of AIDS Policy The South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) was founded in January 2000 to coordinate government responses to the epidemic and to channel foreign donor funding (Papadakis 2006: 60). Transnational norms were influential in this process, since coordinating national institutions were promoted by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (ibid.). At first, however, SANAC did not make significant progress in the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Reflecting the political dominance of the AIDS dissidents, no leading HIV/AIDS activists, health professionals or research scientists were appointed to SANAC (Butler 2005). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first period of SANAC’s existence (2000–03) was largely deemed to be a failure (Strode and Grant 2004; Papadakis 2006). SANAC was amended to expand civil society representation in 2003. Here again, the influence of transnational donor institutions was central. At this time the Global Fund changed its eligibility criteria, requiring broader representation if country-coordinating mechanisms were to receive grants (Papadakis 2006: 61–62). While SANAC was charged with ensuring input from non-state members, ANC officials were hostile to receiving feedback from the new civil society delegates. I spoke with

110

Theodore Powers

several of these from the 2003–06 period, all of whom reported an atmosphere of thinly veiled animosity between civil society delegates and government officials. On matters of policymaking, the government remained closed to input from civil society representatives, despite their physical presence on the coordinating body. This situation persisted until SANAC was restructured in 2006. It began after the South African response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic was condemned at the International Aids Society Conference in August 2006. The South African cabinet then enlisted Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka to spearhead a second restructuring of SANAC (Office of the South African Presidency 2006). The new SANAC evolved from being a high-level coordinating body to an institution that incorporated the input of HIV/AIDS activists, health professionals, scientists and government officials. While this was an important step towards including input from the South African HIV/AIDS movement, the primary space for input existed within the civil society sectors themselves. The potential democratic power of this hybrid institution to expand the influence of HIV/AIDS activists was based on SANAC’s key role in guiding the state response to the epidemic. Quite unlike any other creation of the state, SANAC is an advisory, oversight and coordination body that brings with it a novel mode of democratic co-governance. Established by Cabinet primarily ‘to advise government on the development and implementation of appropriate HIV and AIDS policies and programmes’, SANAC brings together representatives and experts from government and civil society (which includes business and labour). Its key committees draw members from across departments and sectors, with each one being led jointly by a government and civil society representative. (Khumalo and Berger 2008: 65)

In this new structure, three civil society delegates channelled input from non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations arranged by sector. There were seventeen civil society sectors in total. Each sector held a national meeting at which members of non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations democratically elected three delegates. One of these elected sectoral representatives then sat in the upper SANAC body – the plenary – where recommendations on HIV/ AIDS policy were voted upon. In order to coordinate the different consultative processes within these civil society sectors, a series of national meetings were held from June to November 2008. This process was led by HIV/AIDS activist Mark Heywood



Negotiating State and Market

111

in his position as deputy chairperson of SANAC. It is critical to note that Heywood was a founding member of the TAC and was formerly the director of the AIDS Law Project. A central feature of this was a national meeting of all civil society sectoral representatives before a SANAC plenary meeting in late November. This meeting was a litmus test for the South African HIV/AIDS movement’s ability to transform inputs from all civil society sectors into policy development. The meeting was entitled the ‘National Civil Society Conference on Implementing the National Strategic Plan on HIV & AIDS’. Because of my participant observation research with the TAC at this time, I was invited to take part in this meeting. On the morning of 26 November, the conference room hummed with conversation and excitement. Organizations and individuals representing a broad cross-section of South African society were in the room, including government officials. Civil society delegates from all over the country were flown in for the meeting. I had flown to Johannesburg along with a contingent of TAC activists from the Western Cape province who had been selected as sectoral representatives. Their mood leading up to the meeting was focused. It was seen to be critical to the success of the new SANAC and to the implementation of a new national AIDS policy, the National Strategic Plan (NSP). The conference opened with a series of presentations that focused on the four key priority areas for the NSP: (1) Prevention; (2) Treatment, Care and Support; (3) Research, Monitoring and Surveillance; and (4) Human Rights, and Access to Justice. The presentations covered a wide range of topics including male circumcision, behavioural interventions and strategies for implementing a ‘human rights’ approach to HIV based on reducing stigma. The conference broke for lunch after this series of general analyses on how various sectors might work to incorporate the different priority areas of the NSP into their implementation plans. Afterwards, the civil society delegates broke up into six working groups to develop policy recommendations for the SANAC plenary meeting. The working groups focused on communications, prevention of mother-tochild transmission of HIV (PMTCT), antiretroviral roll-out and community education, behavioural intervention and positive prevention, human rights and stigma and food security. I chose to participate in the PMTCT working group following conversations I had had with leading members of the TAC. The South African HIV/AIDS movement was focusing on updating the national guidelines for PMTCT as one of their first goals within the new SANAC. As an observer during this meeting, I volunteered to take notes and to develop a PowerPoint presentation for the group to ‘report back’ to the meeting.

112

Theodore Powers

This working group was charged with the development of new PMTCT guidelines. Its composition included leading paediatric AIDS clinicians, labour union representatives, HIV/AIDS activists, representatives of non-governmental organizations, and a member of the National Department of Health. The meeting began with each person introducing themselves and the organizations and constituencies they represented. It then quickly moved to address the key priorities for a new PMTCT policy. Each person in the group was given time to explain the input of their sector, how they had reached these recommendations, and the priority that should be given to each of these policy inputs. The working group developed fifteen policy recommendations that government should adopt when updating PMTCT policy. These recommendations drew both on updated guidelines from the World Health Organization and on the experience of people living with HIV/AIDS in South Africa. The internal dynamics of the working group were fascinating to observe. The person who asserted himself most – a nationally recognized paediatric AIDS clinician – emerged as the de facto chair of the group. This underscored the influence of policy expertise and of orthodox biomedical knowledge in the development of state policy on HIV/AIDS. Another interesting dimension involved the representative from the Department of Health. At the meeting’s outset, she stolidly asserted herself with a critical assessment of the appropriate role for non-governmental organizations in HIV/AIDS policy. However she fell quiet as sectoral representatives told story after story emphasizing the inadequacy of the government’s response to the epidemic. The life stories and experiences of those infected and affected by the epidemic thus created space within the working group to discuss the new PMTCT guidelines. The final set of suggestions emerging from this working group largely reflected the revised biomedical norms that had been produced by the World Health Organization (Powers 2013b). However, such an outcome may not have been possible without the presence and participation of HIV/AIDS activists and health professionals in the policy development process. As note-taker, I compiled the recommendations of the working group into a presentation that was given to the conference following a short break. This offered the opportunity for additional feedback from civil society sectoral representatives who had participated in other working groups. While some small changes were made, the general recommendations developed by the PMTCT working group remained in place. These were included in the civil society conference report that guided the agenda for the SANAC plenary meeting the following day. At this meeting, the deputy president committed to publishing the updated PMTCT guidelines



Negotiating State and Market

113

within two weeks (Geffen 2007: 81). This ethnographic vignette highlights how the leading organizations of the South African HIV/AIDS movement were able to transform SANAC and to guide its policy recommendations. The meeting held out the promise of an inclusive consultative body that could pull together the perspectives of doctors, nurses, people living with HIV/AIDS, activists and non-governmental organizations working against HIV/AIDS. The new SANAC offered an opportunity for activists, representatives of community-based organizations and labour union leadership to participate in the development of norms for national policy. South Africa’s PMTCT policy was finally updated in early 2008, marking a major victory for the South African HIV/AIDS movement. The democratic potential of SANAC was evident in this series of events; but political and economic constraints subsequently limited its efficacy as a joint civil society–government institution.

Political and Economic Limits to Democratic Process within SANAC Further obstacles emerged to limit SANAC’s ability to influence access to HIV/AIDS treatment in the public health sector. Although the movement had created space within the government for policy input, the ANC’s conservative macroeconomic policy imposed economic limits on health budgets. In line with transnational norms, the ANC had adopted a medium-term expenditure framework that governed the country’s finances. This allowed a degree of predictability for foreign investors while placing a cap on government spending levels over a three-year period. SANAC had no power over the allocation of funding to support its recommendations. Rather, the South African National Treasury determined the resources assigned for health. Despite having made so much progress in formulating national policy, SANAC’s initiatives were little more than unfunded policy recommendations, with the power reserved for South Africa’s fiscal planning system. In this context, SANAC’s advisory role on HIV/AIDS policy was also complicated by the way that socio-economic rights are guaranteed by South Africa’s constitution. The government has a responsibility to protect the rights of South African citizens ‘within available means’. This constitutional principle was left unchallenged by the South African HIV/ AIDS movement in the campaign for AIDS treatment access. Rather, they argued that any policy change would not lead to increased long-term government expenditure on health (Nattrass and Geffen 2003). Moreover,

114

Theodore Powers

apart from an initial allocation of R30 million, SANAC received only tenuous financial support from the government (Khumalo and Berger 2008: 67). The Council relied on the unpaid labour of civil society representatives. According to several delegates, it was extremely difficult to coordinate the operations of their sectors with little or no funding to support their efforts. The South African HIV/AIDS movement navigated these economic challenges by securing international donor support and lobbying for increased resource allocation within the ruling party. Initially, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided the primary source of funding for SANAC. In January 2008, the foundation awarded a R6.3 million grant (US$900,000) to the Human Sciences Research Council. This research centre then administered the grant on behalf of SANAC to support research and sectoral coordination (van der Linde 2008). This grant also supported the office of SANAC deputy secretary Mark Heywood, providing him with an administrative assistant (Khumalo and Berger 2008: 68) in the absence of direct funding from the Department of Health. The National Treasury, surprisingly in view of its reputation for miserliness, then emerged as a major source of support for the South African HIV/AIDS movement in its goal to improve access to treatment. Despite the continuing influence of the AIDS dissidents in government, the National Treasury expanded the budget allocation for HIV/AIDS from R213 million (US$30 million) in 2000/01 to R1.439 billion (US$227 million) in 2004/05 (Wouters, van Rensberg and Meulemans 2010). The budget for HIV/AIDS increased even further with the expansion of treatment, rising to R6.08 billion (US$875 million) in 2007/08 (SANAC 2013). The relative autonomy of the National Treasury within government can work both ways. This exponential increase in treasury funding was undoubtedly an outcome of the South African HIV/AIDS movement’s strategy of engaging with moderate elements in the ANC and its alliance partners, COSATU and the SACP. The primary political obstacle to SANAC during this time was the continued influence of the ANC’s AIDS dissident faction. Despite the development of new committees, a wide range of representation for civil society and the appointment of a leading HIV/AIDS activist to the position of deputy chairperson, ANC officials in key government posts limited input from representatives from civil society. In addition, the committees that were charged with overseeing the allocation of resources and implementation of the National Strategic Plan were chaired by two of the most notable figures in the ANC’s dissident faction. Up until September 2008, a restructured SANAC was seriously undermined by the institutional control exercised by the dissidents (Powers 2012).



Negotiating State and Market

115

Matters were soon resolved after Thabo Mbeki resigned as president on 20 September 2008. National Minister of Health Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was also recalled to serve as ‘Minister at Large’ within the presidency and was replaced by ANC member, Barbara Hogan. One of Hogan’s first acts as National Minister of Health was to commit R932 million (US$94 million) to support SANAC (Thom 2008). The removal of noted AIDS dissidents from high posts in the government also led to a new configuration for SANAC’s administrative support. The management of SANAC’s day-to-day operations was moved outside the National Department of Health to the Development Bank of Southern Africa (Khumalo and Berger 2008: 67). To some degree, this limited the National Department of Health’s ability to undermine SANAC’s operations. The international community also played an important role in supporting SANAC in the post-Mbeki era. The United Kingdom donated £15 million near to World AIDS Day 2008 in support of South Africa’s new PMTCT policy (Watts 2008). This funding was also used to supply administrative support for SANAC. In addition, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has played an important support role for SANAC operations since 2010 (CDC 2013). So, through international solidarity and new mechanisms of administrative support, SANAC was at last capable of confronting the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In June 2013, the South African National Minister of Health, Aaron Motsoaledi, announced that the country had provided treatment to 80 per cent of the women and 65 per cent of the men and children with HIV/ AIDS that needed it (SANAC 2013). While the rate of HIV infection remains stubbornly high in South Africa, this massive expansion of treatment is a remarkable achievement in a country that had stringently limited access to treatment before 2004. The South African government has taken the credit for completing a task that was once thought insurmountable. But near-universal coverage would not have been possible without the tireless work of the South African HIV/AIDS movement, without restructuring SANAC, without the solidarity of transnational networks of HIV/AIDS activists and without the support of transnational donors.

Conclusion: SANAC’s Relevance for Other Social Movements The South African HIV/AIDS movement, in the face of daunting constraints, developed a joint state–civil society mechanism that encouraged democratic inputs to policymaking on HIV/AIDS. This process also depended on a historically particular set of institutional conditions:

116

Theodore Powers

strategic relationships with the South African labour movement and ruling party; the support of transnational donor capital; alignment with global biomedical norms and international institutions; and a vision of how democratic processes should operate. These factors deserve to be analysed at greater length in order to assess whether SANAC’s example is relevant for social movements that aim to expand democratic access to policymaking in other countries. The particular institutional conditions faced by the South African HIV/ AIDS movement during the post-apartheid era are crucial for analysis of its efficacy in changing the trajectory of treatment in South Africa. The adoption of a socio-economic rights approach within the framework of the new constitution (1996) was obviously significant. This included an emphasis on the principle of a human right to health, which the South African HIV/AIDS movement used to argue for access to treatment in a number of court cases. While this right is only guaranteed within ‘available means’, this did not prevent the TAC and Aids Law Project from winning many court decisions to expand HIV/AIDS treatment. The creation of consultative policy institutions during the negotiated political transition was also vital to the success of the South African HIV/ AIDS movement. More specifically, the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) proved to be a critical source of support for HIV/AIDS activists. Created in 1995, NEDLAC is a joint civil society– government institution within which negotiations occur over socio-economic policy. In 2002 the South African HIV/AIDS movement was able to negotiate within the framework of NEDLAC an HIV/AIDS treatment plan between government, labour and the private sector. While this was rejected by the ruling party at the time, the ‘NEDLAC Plan’ served as a model for the first national policy to include antiretroviral treatment – the Comprehensive Treatment Plan (2003). The success of the South African HIV/AIDS movement has led some to stress the openness of government institutions to policy input from civil society organizations, which allowed the activists to alter post-apartheid HIV/AIDS policy decisively through formal political engagement. But this does not give enough credit to the role of the anti-apartheid movement and early HIV/AIDS activists in creating the rights-based policy conditions necessary for the movement’s subsequent success (Heywood and Cornell 1998). This became part of national policy with the National AIDS Plan (1994) and helped the South African HIV/AIDS movement to use the law to expand access to treatment. This formal institutional approach to expanding democratic input into policymaking required critical engagement between HIV/AIDS ac-



Negotiating State and Market

117

tivists and political parties over time. Whether one takes the ‘positive’ rights framework ensconced in South Africa’s constitution or the rightsbased approach to HIV/AIDS, these are the direct outcome of extended political negotiations. Reflected in and developed though this particular history, the South African political system has mechanisms at several institutional levels enabling policy consultation. While this avenue for policy input does not always lead to substantive change, its existence is an important factor to consider when analysing the context of SANAC’s transformation. Equally important is the tactical approach taken by the HIV/AIDS movement towards South Africa’s ruling party, the ANC. From its establishment in 1998, the TAC stood out from other organizations in the South African HIV/AIDS movement for its emphasis on direct action and civil disobedience to expand access to treatment. The TAC was also notable for its fearless critique of the ANC over its inaction in face of the epidemic. Despite the combative political debate between the two organizations, the TAC’s leaders always maintained that they were ANC members and supported the ruling party. This position presented the TAC as being an organization that sought to change the ANC’s policies from within the party. This decision to work within the ruling party to change the trajectory of HIV/AIDS policy grew out of a split within the South African left that began during the negotiated political transition. As has been noted elsewhere, many of the TAC’s leaders were active in the anti-apartheid movement. More specifically, a significant number of its founding members were part of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency, a Trotskyist organization that was aligned with the ANC and was part of the mass democratic movement against apartheid (Grebe 2011). During the political transition many of these activists were sidelined when the South African Communist Party was ‘unbanned’ and entered into the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid. The SACP was a Stalinist organization that sought to channel the left’s contribution to these negotiations through its own structures. Many Marxist Workers’ Tendency members were sidelined by the ANC-SACP alliance as a result. A number of these individuals came to play significant roles in the ‘New Social Movements’ that emerged in response to fiscally austere macroeconomic policies. Notable figures within the TAC, the Anti-Privatisation Forum, the Anti-Eviction Campaign, Social Movements Indaba and Jubilee South Africa all fit into this general profile. In contrast to the other ‘New Social Movements’ in post-apartheid South Africa, the TAC chose to work with the ANC and through the state. This underlines how movements that sought to organize resource dis-

118

Theodore Powers

tribution according to human needs could relate to the parties and/or interests controlling government institutions. In both the ‘roll-out’ of ARVs and the restructuring of SANAC, the TAC worked closely with the deputy president of South Africa to ensure that these initiatives were implemented. The unequivocal success of this strategy suggests that social movements might seek out factions within the ruling class to support their agenda. This is particularly the case if state institutions are a necessary component of the change that is sought. As the expansion of HIV/AIDS treatment was predicated on ARVs – which are controlled substances in South Africa – engagement of this sort was unavoidable. A final and vital aspect of the South African HIV/AIDS movement’s success was the support of transnational donor capital. The example of SANAC is particularly useful for thinking this issue through. The cause of the South African HIV/AIDS movement was buttressed by an alignment between transnational biomedical norms regarding HIV/AIDS treatment and their domestic political agenda. The international community of activists, doctors, health practitioners and scientists was aligned with them in rejecting the AIDS dissidents’ critique of orthodox HIV/AIDS treatment based on antiretroviral drugs. This too was critical, and has obvious relevance for social movements that seek to achieve policy outcomes that differ from global – or Eurocentric – political, economic or biomedical norms. The way that the ruling party defined its interests in relation to international forces cannot be reduced to a simplistic notion of ‘neoliberalism’. The story outlined in this chapter reveals many shifts and counter-currents in this respect. It was presumably only after moderate elements of the ANC saw the continued exclusion of the TAC and other HIV/AIDS organizations as a threat to their own power that they were incorporated into SANAC. It is of some general interest to ask how a social movement could leverage the power of international institutions, domestic political pressures and transnational donor capital to reach such a tipping point.

Acknowledgements Special thanks go to Keith Hart for his supportive editorial approach and to Eddie Cottle for his many insights regarding South African social movements over the years. I would be remiss not to thank also John Sharp, Donald Robotham, Ida Susser and David Harvey for their intellectual support.



Negotiating State and Market

119

Theodore Powers is assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa, and research associate of the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria. He received his PhD in cultural anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on the politics of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in post-apartheid South Africa. The aim is to understand better the relationship between institutions, social change and transnational forces.

Chapter 6

░ Beyond the Market White Workers in Pretoria

JOHN SHARP AND STEPHAN VAN WYK

The Impoverishment of the White Working Class This chapter flows out of a larger project in which we are engaged that goes under the working title of ‘Changing Whites in Pretoria’. The project looks at the different trajectories followed by white residents of South Africa’s capital city in the post-apartheid era. Most of Pretoria’s white residents are Afrikaners and the city was always their heartland, the main urban area in which they called the shots without having to negotiate with anyone else. How are they responding to the end of their predominance in this city, and have they been able to find new roles for themselves in circumstances no longer controlled in their name? We focus here on members of the apartheid-era white working class who have been adversely affected by restructuring of the city’s and the country’s economy in recent decades. Many of them have lost the secure jobs they once held, as well as the housing and other amenities that were provided for them. These people have, in short, been reduced to a position of being excluded from the system of labour markets and private property, not unlike that long occupied by most black South Africans. Why has Pretoria’s white working class been excluded and impoverished in this way? A popular view holds that white, Afrikaans-speaking workers are now being punished for the privileges they were granted during the apartheid era. This view plays a part in shaping the responses discussed below, but it is deeply flawed and is not necessarily shared by the former workers themselves. There is no question that they were accorded significant privileges for much of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, the South



Beyond the Market

121

African state intervened in the market to create conditions favourable for indigent whites. For instance, the state imposed job reservation (the colour bar) on the mining industry and used state-owned industries, such as the Iron and Steel Corporation (ISCOR), to offer white workers preferential employment in new plants, as well as housing and other benefits nearby (O’Meara 1996). The ISCOR steel mill in Pretoria was the first of many stateowned industries that played a key part, from the 1930s to the 1980s, in raising white workers to the status of a labour aristocracy in the city. Afrikaner nationalists put pressure on the state to embark on these steps, but their extent would have been limited if the nationalists had not taken control of the state in two crucial periods – the mid 1930s and the apartheid era after 1948. It was the combination of Afrikaner nationalism and control of state power that made measures to overcome white exclusion and poverty so successful, not Afrikaner nationalism alone. The Afrikaner nationalist state intervened in the market to give white workers a better vantage from which to compete in it. But it did not commit to sustaining this situation forever. Pressure from the industries affected by job reservation, from international investors and from an increasingly militant black labour force led to progressive dismantling of their privileges in the 1970s and 1980s (Giliomee 2003). Faced by a capital shortage in the 1980s, the state opted to privatize many of the industries it had hitherto owned. This was the fate of the steel mill in Pretoria, and its new multinational owner had closed it down entirely by the mid 1990s. The loss of thousands of steel jobs was exacerbated by mass lay-offs in the city’s state-owned arms and munitions factories, which had flourished in the era of sanctions and the apartheid state’s wars in Southern Africa, but went into their shell when the wars came to an end and sanctions were lifted. The roots of the impoverishment experienced by Pretoria’s white working class lie in these developments, which began well before 1994, and were not, as popular opinion has it, because of any vindictive move by the post-apartheid state to punish the white working class for the privileges they had previously enjoyed. The neoliberal prescriptions to which the post-apartheid state has succumbed since the second half of the 1990s have certainly accentuated the plight of South Africans in this class, but they did not target white workers specifically (Marais 2011). Moreover, not all members of Pretoria’s former white working class were equally affected by these changes in the labour market. The short-term consequence of mass lay-offs was widespread and uniform distress. Given that thousands of workers lost their jobs in a short period, it was difficult for any of them to find new employment quickly. Whole suburbs in Pretoria’s industrial

122

John Sharp and Stephan van Wyk

west became economically depressed, leading to a glut of houses being put up for sale, and falling prices as a result. But different trajectories emerged from this condition of general impoverishment in the longer term. Over the past twenty or so years, a proportion of the workers who had acquired artisanal skills in Pretoria’s state-owned heavy industries were able to find new employment elsewhere in the urban economy. The skills they had learnt were, in other words, transferable between different areas of work. The result is that, after a period of initial hardship, these people have managed to insert themselves back into Pretoria’s formal labour market as well as, in some instances, into the city’s property market. Even if they were forced to sell their apartheid-era homes in the wake of being retrenched and to live for a time in less formal circumstances, they have now reached the point where they can buy or rent new homes in the west of Pretoria. On the other hand, the majority of the former white working class – particularly those who did not acquire transferable skills in the state-owned industries – have struggled to recover anything approaching their earlier employment and living conditions. In this chapter we intend to follow the trajectories of two categories of people who have had to confront this circumstance. One category comprises ex-workers who have become entangled in attempts by a minority of Pretoria’s white, Afrikaans-speaking middle class to sustain the viability of the Afrikaner volk (nation) under post-apartheid conditions. This is a section of the white middle class that has been reluctant to relinquish the notion that Pretoria is ‘their’ city and who consequently believe that they have an obligation to assist fellow volk members who have fallen out of the formal economy and into poverty. But their capacity to rescue their fallen comrades is limited. The state no longer acts to support their efforts and as a result there are many from the ranks of the former white working class who are left to their own devices. They must attempt to cope with the fact that they have been reduced to the same level of exclusion and impoverishment as many black South Africans, and must do as best they can on their own. How do people in this second category deal with their straitened circumstances, particularly in contrast to those who become embroiled in schemes to resuscitate the Afrikaner ‘volk’ (nation)? We offer two examples of poor white people in the first category: menial workers in a separatist enclave that aspires to a form of political independence; and residents in a system of shelters exclusively for white homeless people. We then contrast both of these with a case where poor whites have joined their black majority counterparts in building a shared approach to livelihood in an informal settlement.



Beyond the Market

123

Volkstaat workers Which middle-class people were involved in attempts to sustain the Afrikaner volk? Some of them were not only opposed to the National Party government’s decision in 1990 to negotiate the end of apartheid with the recently unbanned liberation movements, but were also determined to take steps to extricate themselves from the consequences of these negotiations. The number of activists in this regard was, predictably, much smaller than that of the objectors. They formed a number of organizations (commonly viewed as being ‘right wing’) that pressed the National Party government to set aside a portion of South Africa to serve as an Afrikaner Volkstaat (People’s State). Their idea was that Afrikaans-speaking whites who did not want to be part of a ‘new South Africa’ ruled by a government they insisted on seeing as ‘black’ should be granted space to set up a sovereign, independent state. One of these organizations, the Pretoria-based Boere Vryheidsbeweging (Boer Freedom Movement), demanded that a fifth of South Africa’s land area, which they expended a great deal of effort to identify, should be removed from the negotiating table and presented to the people they claimed to represent, whom they styled the ‘Boere-Afrikaners’, the descendants of the citizens of the two independent Boer republics formed in the nineteenth century (Du Toit 1991; Sharp and van Wyk 2013). The Boer Freedom Movement’s demands were, of course, ignored by the negotiators, but some of its self-appointed office bearers refused to give up their cause. In 1992 they purchased a small farm, Kleinfontein, on the eastern outskirts of Pretoria, and announced that it was to be a ‘growth point’ for a more extensive territory for the Boere-Afrikaner volk, which they would acquire over time by buying up additional land on the open market. Since even farmland close to Pretoria is expensive, adding to their original purchase has proved easier said than done. They managed to buy one property adjacent to Kleinfontein in 2001, giving them a total of 850 hectares. Ownership of this land has been vested in a co-operative whose four hundred members were persuaded by the original purchasers to buy shares giving them access to plots of land on which they are encouraged to build houses. Prospective shareholders do not have to prove that their forebears were citizens of the Boer republics, nor do they have to be Afrikaners to qualify for entry. It is enough for them to be white people – South Africans or indeed foreigners – who are adjudged to share the ideals of the Boere-Afrikaner volk. What these ideals are is currently a matter of heated debate within Kleinfontein. Some residents still dream of buying up enough land to be

124

John Sharp and Stephan van Wyk

able to demand a volkstaat independent of the ‘new South Africa’, while others aim simply to create a modest refuge allowing selected Afrikaners to negotiate the terms on which they are willing to participate in the country. It is highly uncertain if their view will prevail in the long run, but one thing all residents agree on is that Boere-Afrikaner ideals require them to prohibit black South Africans from entering their settlement for any purpose. This means that all the unskilled labour needed to maintain the resident shareholders and their families must be done by white workers. Kleinfontein shareholders refer to this stipulation as their policy of volkseie arbeid (labour from one’s own people). This term is not new: it was used in the early apartheid years to justify the preferential treatment that had been given to white workers in South Africa’s state-owned and private white-owned industries since the 1920s (O’Meara 1983). The argument was that it was by no means unfair to reserve jobs for white workers in these industries or to oblige the latter to provide white workers with housing and other amenities, because the black states and blackowned industries envisaged by the policy of separate development would be able to provide the same privileges for their ‘own’ black workers in the fullness of time (Van Heerden 1990). Some of Kleinfontein’s more thoughtful residents are prepared to acknowledge that the original volkseie arbeid ideal was an empty pipe dream. They concede that there was never any prospect that white-owned industry in twentieth-century South Africa would be willing to replace cheap black workers with more expensive white labour on a scale sufficient to make the ideal a reality (let alone finance a partitioning of South Africa generous enough to facilitate the emergence of significant black-owned industry). Therefore the privileges afforded white workers turned them into a labour aristocracy that sided with white capital and the white-dominated state in the effort to make the most of a ready supply of black labour that was cheap because it was denied all these privileges. But, these residents say, they will manage the ideal of volkseie arbeid better this time round, because they are content to implement it on a much smaller scale. Moreover, they insist that they have a duty to employ their ‘own’ people to do the donkey work in Kleinfontein because this will allow them to make a contribution, however small, to rescuing members of Pretoria’s white working class from the plight of growing unemployment and poverty to which – they allege – the ‘black’, post-apartheid government has consigned them. We will now look briefly at the conditions of employment and general circumstances of the white workers whom the Kleinfontein share-



Beyond the Market

125

holders have recruited to work in the settlement. There are about thirty of these workers at present who, together with their families, make up a tenth of the settlement’s population of nine hundred. Some are employed as general labourers and gate guards by the co-operative, which pays them between R3,000 and R4,000 per month (US$300–400). Some work for a contractor who builds houses in Kleinfontein, while the rest are employed as domestic servants, childminders and gardeners by individual shareholders. The workers live in Kleinfontein itself, but in an area of the main village separated off by a fence. They live in a collection of caravans, wooden sheds and tents, but have access to a communal ablution block. They pay rent to the co-operative for their dwellings. The latter has built a couple of small brick houses for workers, but claims to have run out of funds to build more. It has recently encouraged individual shareholders to finance the building of brick houses and to enter into private rental agreements with their worker-tenants. The social life the workers have in Kleinfontein is of particular interest because we intend later to compare it with the lives of similarly indigent members of Pretoria’s white working class in a radically different kind of settlement on the other side of the city. White workers and their dependants are allowed to attend church services in Kleinfontein, but are not welcome at shareholders’ public meetings or social events. They may send their children to the small primary school in the settlement, which is privately run, but shareholders have long since withdrawn their own children from this school and sent them to the state-funded primary school in the nearest village outside the settlement. Workers are encouraged to purchase groceries at the local shop, owned by a shareholder, but its prices are too high for them and they prefer to go to the nearest supermarket outside the settlement. Shareholders charge those who do not have their own cars between R50 and R100 for a round-trip lift to shops outside the settlement. These limited instances aside, there is no socialization between shareholders and workers at all. The latter spend their time in a separate camp, and most shareholders do not know who they are – they were certainly unaware that a recent drunken brawl between workers led to one of them dying. Indeed this incident also throws light on relations among workers and their families. One worker told us that he had heard the late-night fight going on in the dwelling next to his, but decided that it was better not to get involved. He only discovered that his next-door neighbour had died of his injuries the next morning when the police arrived. A few of the workers are related and there is interaction within this extended family. But the members of most households in the

126

John Sharp and Stephan van Wyk

workers’ camp keep to themselves and mind their own business. Part of the reason for this is the presence of a caretaker in the camp, whose job is to keep track of what is going on among the workers, which she does by encouraging them to gossip about each other. The caretaker is an employee rather than a Kleinfontein shareholder, but she reports to a supervisor who is a shareholder and has the authority to expel troublesome workers from the settlement.

‘Poor White’ Shelters Most of the middle-class white residents of Pretoria we encounter regard the small number of people who have become shareholders in Kleinfontein as a lunatic fringe. They say these people give Afrikaners a bad name and insist that they have nothing in common with them. This claim is certainly accurate in respect of Kleinfontein’s volkstaat dream. Few members of Pretoria’s white middle class can see the sense in investing considerable amounts of money in a settlement with an uncertain future in an attempt to free themselves from submission to a ‘black’ government. The extravagant fears they may have had in the early 1990s have since been allayed – the post-apartheid state has respected private suburban property, preserved pension funds and other private investments, and has not imposed punitive taxes to make white South Africans pay reparations for past injustices. Moreover the substantial portion of Pretoria’s Afrikaans-speaking middle class that was employed, directly or indirectly, by the apartheid state has had considerable success in making the transition to employment in the private sector (including self-employment). As a result many are clearly more affluent now than they were in the 1980s. What motive could they possibly have for upsetting their new circumstances by dreaming of an autonomous Afrikaner state excised from the rest of South Africa? Kleinfontein’s other raison d’être, however, does have wider purchase among Pretoria’s white middle class. As we noted above, some of the settlement’s residents have put forward the idea that Afrikaners are a minority group within post-apartheid South Africa rather than a volk whose destiny is to escape it. They argue that, as a minority group, Afrikaners have certain inalienable rights, notably to be able to exercise their own ‘cultural values’ separately, and without undue interference, from the wider society of which they are part. They claim that their rights in this regard have come under threat in the post-apartheid era and insist that it



Beyond the Market

127

is necessary for them to build institutions such as Kleinfontein that will protect and foster these rights in future. A similar argument is pursued by numerous organizations beyond Kleinfontein. These include the political party Vryheidsfront (Freedom Front) and the trade union Solidariteit (Solidarity), as well as ancillary bodies to which the latter has given rise such as AfriForum and Helpende Hand (Helping Hand). The political party has limited backing in Pretoria, or elsewhere, but it has had considerable impact among Afrikaans-speaking students at universities (including, in particular, the University of Pretoria). Solidarity, on the other hand, draws growing support among Pretoria’s middle class, despite its origins in the 1990s as a successor to the apartheid-era white Mine Workers Union. The union has reinvented itself in the 2000s, largely by scaling down narrow shopfloor concerns and expanding its involvement in propagating the notion that Afrikaners of all classes are an endangered minority group whose rights – notably, but by no means exclusively, language rights – are being trampled in post-apartheid South Africa. Solidarity also strongly supports the argument that ‘affirmative action’ – the state’s attempt to redress the apartheid-era’s ‘racial imbalances’ in employment in the civil service, the universities and the private sector – constitutes an infringement of Afrikaners’ rights that has helped to push many working-class whites into a condition of extreme poverty in the past two decades (Visser 2006; Boersema 2012). Helpende Hand is the branch of Solidarity’s endeavours devoted to addressing this last issue. Set up in 2009, it devotes much of its attention to assisting white people who have fallen on hard times, mostly in Pretoria because its headquarters, together with Solidarity’s, are in the city. One of the ways it does this is by supporting the growing number of homeless shelters in Pretoria. These shelters are usually started by private individuals who own or rent pieces of land in or on the outskirts of the city that are suitable for the erection of temporary housing, ranging from woodand-iron shacks to tents and wooden sheds. Many of these individuals attempt to make a living out of succouring the poor in this fashion, by charging residents rent for their accommodation and by managing their pensions or other social grants for them. Some also put their indigent tenants to work on maintaining the shelter, preparing food for communal meals, and manufacturing craftwork or other items for external sale. In the case of many shelters, which now run to forty or fifty scattered throughout Pretoria, entry is explicitly restricted to indigent white people. Since these are private institutions on private land, there is nothing to stop people running them in this way, although they do forego any

128

John Sharp and Stephan van Wyk

possibility of official assistance from city or state welfare departments. Some are cagey about stating openly that they will not offer refuge to poor black people, but matters are arranged so that in practice their residents are overwhelmingly white. This fits well with Helpende Hand’s idea of its mission, which is to encourage middle-class Afrikaners, especially those running appropriate businesses, to assist their less fortunate fellows through donations of cash, food, clothing, building materials and other materials used in craft production. The message is that members of the Afrikaans-speaking minority have to stand together, because no one else will help them. Helpende Hand’s contribution is to distribute the public’s largesse among the shelters and to provide counselling and guidance intended to make it easier for residents to get back on their feet (Visser 2011). We have done field research in one of these shelters. Situated in what was historically a whites-only, working-class suburb in the west of Pretoria, it consists of a ramshackle brick building – once the headquarters of the local civil defence unit – surrounded by seventy wooden garden-sheds with small windows. At the time of the fieldwork it did not receive assistance from Helpende Hand, but rather from a kindred organization (now defunct) called Volkshulp (Assistance to the Volk) that was based in Kleinfontein (although those involved were not limited to the settlement’s members). The shelter had 150 residents who paid rent to the family that ran the place – a retired social worker and her son and daughter-in-law, who lived on the premises and made use of the ready supply of cheap labour to sustain small metal-working and bedspread-making businesses. The residents were all from the surrounding working-class suburbs – white Afrikaners who had lost their blue-collar jobs when the nearby factories that had given them preferential employment had been downsized or closed down in apartheid’s last years. The people who ended up in this shelter had not been able to recover from the sudden de-industrialization of this part of the city in the 1980s and early 1990s. They had also, in due course, lost their homes and had nowhere to turn to except the shelter. Conditions in the shelter differed in one respect from those facing the white workers employed at Kleinfontein. The former social worker shares the inmates’ lives in a way that Kleinfontein’s shareholder-residents do not. She eats the same food as they do, prepared in a communal kitchen from ingredients supplied by a local supermarket that are past their sell-by-date, and eats it with them. She lives among them and is intimately aware of each resident’s history and weaknesses – this individual’s taste for alcohol, that one’s for drugs – and she intervenes personally, and forcefully, to sort out their problems with the dealers who supply



Beyond the Market

129

these items on credit through the shelter’s fence. But in most respects the shelter is as soul-destroying as Kleinfontein’s workers’ camp. In both cases, the indigent white residents are marooned in an artificial world from which there is limited opportunity for escape; and the assistance they get from outsiders, who are dedicated to protecting Afrikaners as a vulnerable minority group in an ostensibly hostile environment, makes little difference to their plight. Their past lives as blue-collar workers favoured by the apartheid state have not prepared them for the hardships they encounter now. Two decades after apartheid ended, most of them lack the ‘street skills’ necessary to cobble a livelihood together outside the formal labour market or to meet the challenges posed by a post-apartheid bureaucracy that is indifferent, for the most part, to the needs of all poor people. Places such as Kleinfontein and the whites-only shelters in Pretoria are in no position to remedy the shortfall.

‘A Place for All’ One reason for this is, of course, that such places deliberately cut poor whites off from contact with the vast numbers of black South Africans who have ample experience in such matters. Another reason, however, concerns the standard used in settings such as Kleinfontein and Solidarity to measure whether white Afrikaners need their assistance or not. ‘Our hearts go out to fellow Afrikaners who have neither jobs nor homes’, explained one of Kleinfontein’s leaders, ‘and we bring them here to teach them the value of proper work and private ownership’. The blind spots in this pious assertion are all too obvious. Does one need to teach the value of formal jobs and homes to people who have known them? Is there any point in rehearsing this value to people who may never get access to ‘proper work and private ownership’ again in their lives? Can would-be philanthropists be serious about propagating the value of these things when it is convenient for them to employ people who cannot realize them? Many of these contradictions are largely absent from the West Fort informal settlement on the western outskirts of the city. This settlement has been in existence for ten years and presently has about four thousand residents. The site they occupy was the main leper hospital-cum-settlement in South Africa from the late nineteenth century (when Robben Island ceased to perform this function) until the 1980s (when advances in the treatment of leprosy made isolation unnecessary). In the late 1980s the settlement, which included not only a hospital but also many ad-

130

John Sharp and Stephan van Wyk

ministrative buildings and extensive housing for doctors, nurses and patients, was acquired by a private owner with an eye to redevelopment. The redevelopment never took place, however, and the owner appears to have abandoned the site in the interim, along with the people employed to secure and maintain it. These abandoned employees opened the site to occupation by homeless people. One of them told us that he could not see the sense in having dozens of sturdy brick homes standing empty while there were so many people in the city in desperate need of accommodation. As far as the Pretoria City Council is concerned, the current settlement is illegal, since the residents do not have permission from the owner to be there. Moreover, since no one is paying the rates and taxes on the property, the council no longer supplies electricity, running water or refuse removal (although it delivers water by truck to a number of tanks scattered among the houses). In the absence of the owner, the council has taken steps to reclaim the property and to sell it to a housing-estate developer. Residents do not know whether title to the property has passed into the new developer’s hands already, but the fact that a hoarding advertising the proposed housing estate has gone up at the main entrance is a source of deep concern to them, particularly since they have heard that the developer intends to demolish all the buildings that were part of the old leper colony. The residents of West Fort informal settlement have therefore been under considerable strain for the past year, which makes the character of the relationships they have forged between themselves that much more remarkable. There is no formal organization among them – no committee they have elected to represent their collective interests. Residents meet as and when necessary near the old administrative complex in the only large venue that has not been converted into accommodation. Some of the absent owner’s erstwhile employees appear to have a measure of sway in these meetings and in dealing with city council officials, NGO workers and private individuals who visit the settlement, but their position has not been institutionalized in any way. They may have opened the former leper settlement to invasion by homeless people a decade ago, partly to get their own back against the owner who disappeared without paying them properly, but they have long since given up trying to control movement into or out of it. ‘I can’t be in charge,’ one of them told us, ‘because this is a place for all in need of shelter, and we all have to make what we can of it’. There are severe limitations on what residents can make of the West Fort settlement. There is enough land to keep sheep, goats or cattle, but



Beyond the Market

131

the fence around the settlement has been holed. There is enough land for vegetable gardening, but no means of watering the soil. Some residents know how to work machinery, but there is no electricity. The most reliable sources of income for the settlement as a whole are the pensions that most of the elderly receive, and the child-maintenance grants that most mothers receive. Those who do not get this assistance either lack the necessary identity documentation and are stymied in their attempts to acquire it by a bureaucracy that is indifferent to their circumstances, or are foreigners who are not entitled to it. About a thousand of the residents are Zimbabweans who have fled to South Africa in search of jobs and a better life. But hardly anyone in West Fort – male or female, South African or Zimbabwean – has a job in Pretoria’s formal economy. The settlement is a place for people who have neither homes nor formal employment. But many local taxi drivers have discovered that it makes business sense to extend their route beyond the last suburb in the west to West Fort, because many of its residents travel daily to take part in the city’s informal economy. Over time they have developed several niches in this sector. We are told, for instance, that many of the city’s cardboard-scrap collectors – a familiar sight as they push their unwieldy and overloaded carts down public roads – are from West Fort. Other niches doubtless comprise illegal or criminal activities, although most of the settlement’s residents adopt a resolute ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach to the origins of the goods and money that are brought in, and it is consequently difficult to uncover any hard evidence in this area. It is easier to see how these resources, acquired by ‘raiding’ the outside world in various ways, are circulated within the settlement. Many goods and services are sold internally for cash, but the market involved is hardly an impersonal one. One resident sells vegetables and fruit that she collects at the city’s Fresh Produce Market at the end of the trading day, but she adjusts the prices she charges in West Fort to the immediate circumstances of individual buyers. If they are flush with a windfall on any given day, she charges them more than if they are short of cash; and she offers a larger quantity for a given price if there are young children in the household buying from her. Another resident offers haircuts at R20 if customers have the necessary cash, but if they do not, she readily commutes the debt into an obligation to fetch her twenty buckets of fresh water from the municipal tank nearest her dwelling. Other examples of such practices are legion, and all rely on the vendors having a detailed knowledge of the circumstances of different buyers and of day-to-day changes in them. Buyers also need to understand the logic by which the vendors

132

John Sharp and Stephan van Wyk

make decisions and to have faith that they are not being cheated. Similar principles are at work in the case of the half-dozen informal ‘tuck shops’ that sell goods from fixed premises in the settlement. Their prices may be more stable than those of the door-to-door vendors, but their proprietors are obliged to acquire the same detailed insight into their customers’ circumstances in order to be able to offer them goods on short-term credit. Anyone running a tuck shop that did not offer credit would soon lose out to competition from those that did. But these diverse market relationships comprise only the tip of the iceberg of the exchanges among West Fort’s residents. Residents claim that everyone in the settlement – all four thousand of them – is included in dense networks of exchange organized according to principles of reciprocity, where there is an expectation of a return for goods and services rendered, and of ‘everyday communism’, where the guiding idea is that people give according to their capacity to do so and receive according to their needs (Graeber 2011). The prominence of these forms of exchange, which is in strong contrast to the situation found among the indigent whites who work in Kleinfontein or languish in the shelters supported by Solidarity, is closely related, we argue, to the terms on which the settlement has been occupied. No resident has any kind of formal title to the land in West Fort or to the dwellings standing on it, and there is no one there exercising control over other residents. And although there is informal recognition that individuals have rights to the particular dwellings they have come to occupy – other residents cannot force them out – they do not have rights of sole use. If newcomers in need are willing to be the seventeenth household to occupy a now-derelict ablution block, for instance, then the sixteen domestic groups already in occupation are expected to shift over to make space for them, although the newcomers will be charged a small rent by existing occupants for the privilege of moving in. West Fort is not without internal tensions. The South African residents are inclined, for example, to point fingers at their Zimbabwean counterparts, suggesting that the latter are troublemakers who spoil the peace in the settlement. But this does not preclude the Zimbabweans from participating as individuals in the networks of exchange that make everyday life possible amidst the hardships and uncertainty of West Fort. And there are few divisions at all among the South Africans in the settlement. The majority of West Fort’s residents may be black, but there are more than a hundred indigent white people among them participating in the internal exchanges on exactly the same footing as everyone else.



Beyond the Market

133

Ways beyond the Market Having focused on the different trajectories followed by indigent white, Afrikaans-speaking inhabitants of Pretoria since the end of apartheid, we now wish to expand discussion of the contrasts between the settlements referred to so far, from the perspective of their white residents. Veteran BBC journalist John Simpson (2013a, 2013b) recently visited several ‘poor white’ shelters in Pretoria, similar to the Solidarity example above. Noting the hopelessness of the residents’ circumstances, he asked whether white people in these shelters ‘had any future in post-apartheid South Africa’. This question generated a controversy largely because he contrived to give the impression that he thought it was unacceptable for white South Africans to be as poor as their fellow citizens who are black. He would have been better advised to have linked the hopelessness of these shelters to the fact that their residents are isolated, intentionally, from the large numbers of black people who have more hard-won experience of dealing with poverty. Most white residents of West Fort did not move there in order to avoid such isolation. They ended up there by chance or because they had an inside contact who told them they could find shelter and refuge without bureaucratic obstruction. But they soon came to realize the value of being surrounded by people who were adept at making a living beyond the bounds of formal urban existence. ‘I was so naive when I arrived that I thought the only way to survive in this place was to close my front door’, said a middle-aged white female occupant of a two-roomed, former leper cottage facing onto a busy square; ‘but my neighbours were patient in showing me how wrong I was. To survive here you must reach out to everyone’. Indeed, as she explained to us, her fellow residents are utterly indifferent to the fact that she is white, on the one condition that she betrays no hint of believing that her fate should be different from theirs. In this spirit, they have shown her and her fellow whites how to participate in scrap cardboard selling, how to get round unhelpful city bureaucrats and how to take part in the networks of reciprocity and mutuality that serve to lighten the load of daily existence in the settlement. It is hardly surprising then that the white residents of West Fort have told solicitous representatives of Solidarity’s Helpende Hand that they are not welcome in the settlement: ‘Not under any circumstances,’ a white resident told us, ‘because those people [from Solidarity] want to target us [the white residents] for assistance, and we simply cannot afford that. I say to hell with their volk’. Simpson’s mistake was to allow rep-

134

John Sharp and Stephan van Wyk

resentatives from Solidarity to guide him on his brief tour of the ‘poor white’ shelters and to pick up their line about their ‘duty’ to treat poor white people in Pretoria as a special case of poverty, deserving rescue as part of the Afrikaner volk that had become a vulnerable minority group in its own city. The proper answer to Simpson’s question is the one given implicitly by the black residents of West Fort – the white residents of the settlement have the same future as their black counterparts, whatever that may be, and the only way to jeopardize the former’s prospects is to insist that their future should be special. It is absurd to suppose, long after the National Party and the bulk of its middle-class supporters abandoned the project from the 1980s onwards, that the handful of Afrikaner nationalists still in business could match the earlier measures taken by the state to rescue Afrikaners from poverty. As we have shown, Kleinfontein’s shareholders may intervene in the market to select only white people to work for them, but the jobs they offer can scarcely be said to confer any advantage on the people they patronize. These are, to all intents and purposes, casual jobs and, despite the high-sounding rhetoric about helping fellow members of the volk, those making them available do not actually know or care who fills them. Kleinfontein’s owners have, at best, an abstract interest in sustaining the Afrikaner volk. For the rest, they are too well versed in the principles of present-day labour markets to pay even passing attention to the future of the flesh-and-blood people they employ. In this respect, and for all their talk, they treat their current white employees in exactly the same way that they treated black workers in the past. The West Fort settlement is, in many ways, a realistic answer to this indifference. All its residents are resigned to the fact that there is not the remotest chance of a miraculous spurt in the formal economy’s demand for labour bringing them salvation. Given that they are beyond this particular pale for the rest of their lives, they have embarked on fashioning an alternative, based on a spontaneous application of collective common sense. This sense tells them that, in order to survive the hardships to which they are all exposed, they have to modify how the market operates among them, to alter received wisdom about the sanctity of personal ownership and to embrace mutuality and reciprocity in their daily lives. Few of them see their home-grown arrangements as anything more than an alternative to the formal economy, which they need, in any event, to supply them with the resources necessary to make these arrangements work. At the same time, however, they do not understand why they cannot be left alone to see what they can achieve.



Beyond the Market

135

But here we come to the rub in post-apartheid South Africa. The developers are at West Fort’s gate and will soon move in to raze the settlement in order to build a housing estate that will bring a substantial profit in the property market. Since the residents invaded the area unlawfully, they can have no recourse to the law in their attempts to stop this happening. Since the rules of private property and the formal market remain sacrosanct in present-day South Africa, there is no space for a plural economy that might offer alternatives to the poor in Pretoria and in the country as a whole, or indeed afford them a measure of democratic participation. The pill is made especially bitter by the fact that a settlement such as Kleinfontein – which flies in the face of post-apartheid South Africa’s core value of ‘non-racialism’ – is much more likely than West Fort to survive in future. It is private property, lawfully owned by the co-operative established by its shareholders, and as long as they are able to maintain the settlement as an undivided property, they will have little difficulty asserting their right to determine who should be admitted to it and who excluded. Moreover, if push comes to final shove, the state is unlikely to insist that the shareholders should forfeit the three hundred private homes they have, in good legal faith, invested personal capital in building on their own property. The fact that the settlement’s white workers have no stake in their employers’ project, and no interest whatsoever in sustaining it, will be of little moment. Moreover, Kleinfontein is clearly a once-off phenomenon – it will not expand as originally envisaged and it will not be widely replicated. Therefore the number of whites who may conceivably find employment in places of this kind will remain insignificant. One can be sure, on the other hand, that if and when the West Fort settlement is destroyed, others with similar characteristics will spring up to replace it, in Pretoria and elsewhere in South Africa. Indeed there are others already in existence. When will those charged with the task of addressing poverty and inequality in post-apartheid South Africa recognize the potential for economic democracy that we found to be so evident in these settlements? John Sharp is professor of Social Anthropology, University of Pretoria, and South Africa director of the Human Economy Programme there. He taught at the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch. He has done field research in the mission reserves of Northern Cape Province, in the bantustan of Qwaqwa, and in Pretoria among its white, Afrikaans-speaking inhabitants. He has published widely on all of these, and on the history of South African anthropology.

136

John Sharp and Stephan van Wyk

Stephan van Wyk is a junior lecturer in anthropology at the University of South Africa and holds a Master’s degree in social anthropology from the University of Pretoria. He is an associate of the Human Economy Programme. He has conducted research in a settlement fashioning itself as the starting point of an Afrikaner-only separate state. Going forward he aims to conduct research on state-led class formation in Pretoria during apartheid and subsequent developments.

Chapter 7

░ Waves of Unrest

Wildcat Strikes and Possible Democratic Change in Swaziland VITO LATERZA

Wildcat strike action is becoming an increasingly common feature of workers’ struggles for economic democracy in Southern Africa. The brutal killing of thirty-four workers in the Marikana platinum mine in August 2012 and the resulting wave of wildcat strikes spreading throughout South Africa are the most visible instances of this trend, but wildcat strikes have been erupting in the region for some time now. A wildcat strike is a form of workers’ mobilization that does not go through the formal process of union authorization and takes place outside the legal framework of collective bargaining. Wildcats erupt and can spread spontaneously, that is, without much advance planning by formal unions. The dynamics of crowd formation play a primary role in the development and dissolution of these actions. All wildcat strikes, whether waves or isolated incidents, unfold under specific local and national circumstances, and express different concerns and demands. Perhaps the most obvious similarity between them lies in the workers’ shared experience of living and working conditions. Poor housing, harsh and unsafe working conditions, low levels of protection of workers’ rights, and limited purchasing power due to appallingly low wages in economic contexts characterized by surging food and transport prices provide the common background for explosive labour–management relations and a general instability that can easily precipitate overt confrontations. Workers’ struggles to get by are further aggravated by an infuriating sense of inequality that permeates these national economies. The social ills of cheap labour persist in environments that have sometimes seen formidable growth rates and a major influx of foreign investment in recent years. In this context, the relationship between workers and trade unions is an increasingly tense one. The frequent complaint of workers involved in

138

Vito Laterza

wildcats is that unions are ‘in bed’ with management and do not really pursue the workers’ interests. Unions, on the other hand, struggle to extend their reach to large sectors of the workforce, which becomes fragmented and casualized as a result of the expansion of ‘flexible’ capitalist production. These strikes then cannot be reduced to just the narrow pursuit of economic interests. They are rarely about moderate wage demands that could be pursued through conventional negotiations or collective bargaining by formal unions. When the rock drillers in Marikana began a wildcat strike in early August 2012, they wanted their wages raised to ZAR 12,500, about three times what they were earning at the time.1 Other miners in the ensuing wave of wildcats made similar demands. These demands send a clear message for any who want to hear: we are not happy with our current conditions of life and we want radical change. Wildcat strikes take place in the wider political context of contestation over the conventional forms of representative democracy. They are one important symptom of this crisis, further highlighting the general feeling of workers and citizens that post-colonial (or post-apartheid) states have not delivered the general improvements in livelihood and well-being that were expected after liberation, nor did they curb the exploitative effects of regional and global capital investment. Many workers maintain some connection with rural areas and customary tenure systems so that their political tactics often blend ‘traditional’ idioms and practices with more ‘modern’ demands concerning wages and living conditions. Of course, customary systems are not notably effective in radically reducing capitalist inequality. In this chapter, I will explore the possibility that these actions are not only a symptom of general economic and political crisis, but may also be harbingers of something new – forms of collective action embodying strong and legitimate demands for improvement of livelihoods and the empowerment of workers and citizens that could have significant results beyond the short term. I will do so by drawing on the ethnographic case study of a wildcat strike that took place in June 2008 in a Christian company town run by white missionaries in north-western Swaziland, where I carried out long-term ethnographic research. The case study encapsulates all the features of flexible capitalist production that I have already mentioned. It also demonstrates important overlaps between market relations and non-market logics such as reciprocity. The latter emerge in livelihood practices organized through customary land tenure and traditional idioms heavily influenced by Swaziland’s system of monarchy. The implications of this case for social change and economic democracy



Waves of Unrest

139

in the country are far reaching, and the unique mix of modern and traditional structures of local and national governance reveals features that are often glossed over in favour of ‘high modernist’ narratives – Marikana being one such instance. My analysis is informed by the work of labour scholars like Michael Burawoy (2003) and Jonathan Parry (2009), and three major theorists of political economy, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi and Toni Negri. Gramsci’s (1971, 1977) notion of hegemony may help us to reflect on whether these spontaneous protests exhibit truly counter-hegemonic tendencies. What is needed to harness their revolutionary potential to promote economic democracy? Will these intense waves always be sporadic, or can they evolve into more structured social formations? If new institutions emerge from these strikes, will they too be co-opted by the dominant system? Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ provides another promising angle. The structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s initiated an aggressive expansion of neoliberal markets in the Southern African region. Governments have accommodated this expansion, while showing little concern for social protection of the vast majority of the population. Does spontaneous workers’ unrest represent a Polanyian counter-movement of society? Should these strikes be seen as a clear symptom of society’s self-organized reaction to the brutal effects of unbridled markets? Hardt and Negri’s (2004) concept of the multitude provides a complement to Polanyian concerns by deriving some key characteristics of these spontaneous formations from contemporary global capitalist production. Production, according to them, should be approached through models that go far beyond Homo economicus: it encompasses domestic, cultural and social life, and ultimately is concerned with the regeneration and transformation of life itself, not merely with the objects created and exchanged in formal capitalist structures (Hardt and Negri 2004; Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010; Laterza, Forrester and Mususa 2013). Wildcat strikes might be viewed as being intrinsic to the continuum of production, not as random breaks from the norm. Once the link between livelihood and labour unrest is made visible, it becomes clear that these forms of protest are particularly relevant to understanding the inner workings and possibilities of a human economy, and the struggle for economic democracy in Southern Africa. We need to study what people do on the ground, their real life economic activities, and how they are embedded in social life (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010; Hart 2013b). Then we might be able to link their everyday experiences of labour to their experience of struggle and unrest.

140

Vito Laterza

Enkopolwani: A Christian Company Town I carried out two years of doctoral field research in Swaziland during 2007 and 2008. For the second year, I stayed in Enkopolwani,2 once one of the biggest mining operations in Southern Africa. It is now being redeveloped by a group of (mostly) white Southern African and North American Pentecostal Christian missionaries and businessmen as a sustainable social business project under the aegis of a not-for-profit company, Enkopolwani Ministries Swaziland (EMS from now onwards). Its primary purpose of providing care for orphans is combined with various enterprises – timber logging, plank making, a tourist lodge, livestock and agriculture, honey harvesting, a bakery, a machine workshop, a carpentry workshop and bottled water production. Profits from the economic activities are meant to help in running the town, its social services and a wide-ranging orphan care programme. But in practice, EMS relies heavily on donor funding, from a mix of secular and Christian donors mostly based in North America and Europe. Located near the border with South Africa, only 16 km from a medium-sized urban centre in north-west Swaziland, Enkopolwani is an enclave development. The main road is not tarred and local transport is infrequent. The landscape is mountainous. The steep slopes and heavy rains make it a tough place for maize farming, the main subsistence crop in Swaziland. The adjacent rural area under customary land tenure is less prosperous than the rest of Swaziland. Enkopolwani inherited the workers’ residences, management houses, old club areas and other infrastructures from the mining period. Asbestos was extracted from the 1930s, but infrastructure development only started in earnest from the 1940s. The property comprises 2,200 hectares of forest. Timber was planted in the heyday of the mine. It fostered a parallel local economy that supplemented the core business by providing wood for home use by workers. When the mine went into liquidation in 2001, timber was the main capital asset left to attract potential buyers. A business partnership that bought the town in 2004 derived its core revenues from a timber sawmill. One of the two partners was Dan, a white Swazi of Afrikaner descent, a Pentecostal Christian and the biggest independent timber operator in Swaziland. He was principally responsible for transforming the project into a not-for-profit Christian business. He brought Christian businessmen and missionaries together to buy the property and develop the Enkopolwani vision. In May 2006, he donated his share of the company to the not-for-profit company, and now sits on the EMS board of direc-



Waves of Unrest

141

tors. The other partner was bought out by EMS. The timber business has grown steadily without any major change in employment structures or management since EMS took over. Workers in EMS profit-making activities were not employed by the company. A labour broker was used as an intermediary, and all employees – around four hundred at the end of 2008 – were formally employed by another company, Malindzisa & Sons. This arrangement was carried forward from the private partnership that ended in 2006. The labour broker had employed all workers in the private timber business owned by Dan. This formula created a grey area, leading to confusion and contradictions that emerged during the strike. Dan typified EMS’s ambivalence about its goals: charitable provider and carer for orphans and the poor on one side, business operator on the other, paying low wages in a harsh work environment and using cut-throat labour practices. Most Enkopolwani workers and residents found this puzzling. They struggled to understand how missionaries could engage in the exploitation of cheap labour and still call themselves ‘Christians’.

Rural–Urban Interactions Another important element in Enkopolwani labour relations was workers’ links to the surrounding rural area, Lapha, and to others across the country. Almost all workers located their home in a customary area under chiefly rule (indzawo yesikhulu). Rural areas are known as emakhaya, the plural of ekhaya, which means home. For most Swazis, a ‘proper’ home is in a rural area under chiefly rule. Almost all workers kept up some significant exchange with a rural area in the form of visits, gifts and remittances.3 It was normal to get a job in Enkopolwani with a relative’s help, often someone from their rural homestead, or through neighbours who lived in the same rural area. Most workers visited a rural homestead often, usually at the end of the month when salaries had been paid. Unmarried youths relied heavily on their parents’ or other relatives’ homesteads. For married adults, the rural areas were the only places they could afford to build their own houses and have their own plots for farming. The kukhonta system – paying tribute to a chief as a modest one-off payment in exchange for a piece of land – enabled them to have indefinite usufruct over their land, and these rights were automatically transferred to their immediate kin, if they wished. To buy property on the private market was out of reach for the overwhelming majority. This dual land tenure system comes from the colonial division of space instituted by the

142

Vito Laterza

Land Partition Act of 1907, which confined Swazis to about a third of the country known as ‘native reserves’ under chiefly rule. Historically, the mine was developed on ‘Native Area no.3’, part of the national land allocated by the colonial government to the Swazi population under customary tenure. Consequently, the multinational company that bought the prospecting rights in 1929 and developed infrastructure in the 1930s did not own the land. There were few homesteads in the Enkopolwani valley, however, compared to the rest of Swaziland; while the land was good for grazing, it did not provide fertile soil for maize cultivation (Crush 1992: 373). A few homesteads were relocated north of Enkopolwani and became over the years the core of Lapha, whose steep hills were even less conducive to maize farming, but that boomed as a shack settlement when the mine grew (ibid.: 376–77). Although Lapha declined after the mine’s closure, it was still closely linked to Enkopolwani at the time of the fieldwork. Lapha’s residents in early 2009 numbered about 270; there were eighty-five active homesteads.4 Maize farming was marginal and livestock scarce. They relied heavily on cash remittances and gifts in kind from relatives with a job in the formal economy, either in Enkopolwani or in other Swazi or South African urban centres. Most homesteads had at least one person employed by EMS.

Private Property and EMS From the EMS missionaries’ perspective, Enkopolwani was private property, protected by national law and independent from what was going on in the adjacent customary rural area. The mine had acquired title over the town in 1951. EMS owned the property and did not allow individual ownership of houses or plots. Managers and missionaries, like workers, were provided with free housing as part of their salary packages. Many workers and residents, however, did not recognize EMS as the owner of the property. Some claimed that Dan, the private timber operator who set up the sawmill, owned its machinery and the forests. Others said that Richard, the housing manager, owned the houses. Even when EMS was acknowledged to be the owner, ownership was seen as being connected to real people, rather than abstract entities operating in the realm of company law. EMS for most workers was a group of people, the EMS missionaries. Besides this personalization of property, the idea that Enkopolwani could be owned as inalienable property by a group of individuals was often disputed.



Waves of Unrest

143

A security guard once explained that the missionaries ‘own everything, even the trees’. Many people directly contested this assertion by cutting wood from the Enkopolwani forests and picking avocados from Enkopolwani trees without permission, in defiance of the EMS rules. Workers were allowed to collect the off-cuts from the sawmill, but this was a considerable distance from the workers’ village. Few had the opportunity to get lifts, and sawmill workers found it hard to arrange transport of wood for their stoves at home. EMS organized a transport service with a designated pick-up truck, but the price it charged for each pick-up was out of most workers’ reach. ‘Illegal’ pick-ups filled the gap. Workers in the forests also illegally sold wood to other residents. Workers who wished to pick avocados were supposed to get a permit from the security guards’ headquarters. The head of security issued them for a specific number of avocados. Most workers found this ludicrous, especially since EMS had no plans to use the avocados. Some of them remarked that under customary tenure forests were usually communal and people could fetch wood from there without special permission. Anybody who walked by could pick fruit from trees outside homestead perimeters. Many people wondered why it should be any different in Enkopolwani. One story circulated by the chief of Lapha shows that contested private property is linked by Swazis to dispossession by white colonial rulers. According to him, Enkopolwani was given to the whites on a 99-year lease by King Sobhuza II; but this concession was for mineral extraction and did not include other activities like agriculture or timber production. The EMS missionaries could stay in Enkopolwani under the lease, but they should not have carried out non-mining activities.5 In other words the EMS missionaries did not own the land as private property. They too, like Swazi commoners who pay allegiance to a chief, were given permission to stay by the king, by virtue of the previous agreement made with the asbestos mine people. The EMS missionaries could be asked to leave; and traditional rights of usufruct overrode any property rights granted by the ‘Western’ legal system. Many workers made similar claims without knowing this story. A title deed did not mean you could do whatever you liked with your land without the king’s authority. All land in Swaziland, according to this view, is owned by the king in trust for the nation. This came out clearly in the wildcat strike discussed below. Workers claimed that as Swazi citizens they owned Enkopolwani’s land communally; and the whites had better listen to their demands if they wanted to stay there.

144

Vito Laterza

The Strike A new sawmill opened in December 2007, specializing in big poles of the kind used for canals and bridges, and these were exported to Europe, while the planks produced in the old sawmill were exported to neighbouring South Africa. In December 2008, the new sawmill closed down, due to the global financial crisis and labour tensions in the aftermath of the strike. During June of that year, a full stoppage involved all Enkopolwani workers for three days. The following account, giving the day-by-day outline of events, is based on conversations with workers who were present during the three-day strike. I also collected opinions and information from managers and missionaries.6

Day 1 Around noon, workers at the new sawmill have downed their tools and are discussing the possibility of a wage increase with Peter Malindzisa, the labour broker. Peter makes it clear that they will not get an increase: he takes a 20 emalangeni banknote and rips it apart. That is about twothirds of most Enkopolwani workers’ daily wage, which is 30 emalangeni at this time.7 The new sawmill workers, about thirty in all, collect the torn pieces of banknote, leave their workplace and walk down the main road leading to the old sawmill. They claim that Malindzisa has insulted the king by ripping a note with his effigy on it. The crowd continues its march, collecting other workers along the way. They end up outside the general headquarters office, ‘toyi-toying’ (South African and Swazi jargon for dancing and singing protest songs). A journalist for the Swazi Times, a national newspaper, joins them in the late afternoon. An improvised placard asks for a wage increase of 20 emalangeni. At 5 P.M., closing time for most EMS workplaces, the crowd disperses. They will meet again at the soccer pitch the next day.

Day 2 The crowd gathers very early in the morning, before the weekly EMS prayer meeting that is scheduled for 8 A.M. in the small church near the marketplace. All workers and managers are required to attend. This time no workers attend. The crowd on the soccer pitch is entertained by speakers who talk extempore about workers’ claims and complaints. Soon after, two police cars and a small military truck arrive in Enkopol-



Waves of Unrest

145

wani. They keep a low profile, just monitoring the situation. Managers, still puzzled by the unexpected outbreak, are cautious. Some of them stick around at the back of the soccer pitch. Everybody is careful not to inflame ‘the mob’. A few dozen people, however, are en route to the church, where prayers are taking place. Some of them break in and toyi-toyi in the midst of the church service. They soon leave, without harming anyone physically. The crowd is now directed to the large marketplace, which can hold a few hundred people. Voices call for Peter Malindzisa to be held accountable for what he has done. Some workers throw stones at the labour broker’s office on the square. It is empty, and no one is harmed. Marc, the managing director, comes out to meet the workers who sit in silence, listening to his speech. After this, Marc listens to a number of people who stand up and speak. Complaints include not only poor wages and bad working conditions, but extend to workers’ living conditions, including the lack of proper toilet facilities and electricity in many homes. Other issues are raised, not obviously related to labour relations. These include complaints about the eviction order issued by EMS to a local teacher living in the workers’ village; the prohibition of Lapha cows grazing on Enkopolwani private property; the ban on firewood collection in the Enkopolwani forests; and the need to ask permission from the security office to pick avocados on EMS property. Marc refers vaguely to the need for some kind of process to address the issues at stake. He calls for a separation of what he sees as labour issues from other ‘community’ issues. After Marc, it is the turn of Peter Malindzisa who makes a timid apology for what he had done the day before. Dissatisfied with Marc’s vague promises of further discussion and unsure about his role in the company, many voices now call for Dan to come and meet them. Dan is not around or, if he is, he is not coming out to meet the workers. The crowd moves back to the soccer pitch, where self-appointed strike leaders and two union leaders from a nearby town talk to the workers about the need for workers’ solidarity in action.8 Thulani emerges as a dominant figure – he is often referred to as the ‘unofficial’ strike leader. Thulani is busy putting together a petition to Dan that lists all the complaints raised during these days of protest. By now, the 20 emalangeni wage increase seems to have gained universal appeal among those present. The other main request is for workers to get food rations on top of their wages, in line with government regulations for forestry (the ‘gazette’). One persistent theme is that ‘the land belongs to us, the belungu [“white people” but also “bosses” in siSwati] have to listen to our demands’. The crowd disperses around 5 P.M. The strike is not over.

146

Vito Laterza

Day 3 Workers assemble at the sports ground early in the morning. Later, Dan addresses the crowd in siSwati. This is appreciated, but can create further misunderstandings, as Dan’s siSwati is often sloppy. Dan says that he ‘can’t negotiate with a gun pointed at him’ – this is a metaphor referring to the sudden and unannounced strike action. That way, he continues, people will keep on having strike after strike and he would be forced to close down the company, for lack of profits. When some voice shouts from the crowd, ‘We’ll burn the forests’, Dan answers that they can burn them as he has insured them, so he could retire on the money he would make. Acceding to the general perception that he is the owner of EMS business operations, he asks people to go back to work. If everything is back to normal for two weeks, then wage negotiations can start. Some people understand this as a promise that they will get a wage increase in two weeks’ time. Dan invites the workers to elect representatives for what will be known as the ‘strike committee’ who will sit with him in negotiations. By acclamation and a raising of hands, workers appoint seven out of the nine people who come forward for election. Thulani is one of them. The crowd disperses. The umlungu, the boss, has talked with them, as they asked from the beginning. Many agree that talking is the best way forward to resolve conflicts and misunderstandings. This attitude also resonates with traditional Swazi idioms.9 The day after, Saturday, everybody is back at work.

The Negotiations and the Final Deal On 6 July, another workers’ meeting was called by the ‘strike committee’; there had been two others since the end of the strike. The soccer pitch had been won as a place to meet and discuss issues outside working hours without being harassed by management, yet morale seemed quite low. A few hundred workers attended, probably half of the total at the time. They listened to Thulani as he reported the offer made by Dan. All wages between 30 and 33 emalangeni per day were going to be raised by 5 emalangeni. Wages around 36 emalangeni were raised to 40. For all the others, a 10 per cent increase would apply. This offer, however, came with the proviso that the annual round of bargaining due to take place in December 2008 would be postponed until December 2009. Taking inflation into account, this meant in practice that the actual increase would be minimal or nothing. All other matters would be dis-



Waves of Unrest

147

cussed separately; no promise was made about food rations or other requests. Workers unenthusiastically voted in favour. The energy of the crowd had gone. People were seated, some vented their complaints, but after Thulani’s speech there was very little talk. They had got an increase, even if it was not what they wanted. Other matters were more pressing. The strike committee continued to meet with Dan for another couple of months. Apart from reopening a workers’ club, on the condition that no alcohol would be allowed on the premises, not much else came out of discussions. The workers’ meeting of 6 July was the last one. Thulani’s name dissolved into thin air. The energy represented by the strike had dissipated and everything went back to normal.

Beyond Planning: The Leader and the Crowd A major feature of this wildcat action was the lack of conventional planning by either the trade unions or a ‘workers’ vanguard’ operating behind the scenes. This does not mean, however, that the strike came out of the blue. The tensions revealed during the strike had been simmering for some time; and discontent with low wages, dismal living conditions and poor treatment by managers was high when the strike broke out. Although wages were higher than the minimum level set by government regulations for the forestry industry, they were substantially lower than those paid by comparable multinational companies. While housing in Enkopolwani was free, most workers’ houses did not have electricity and many had to share badly maintained public toilets. There were no food rations or subsidies, no union was recognized, and wages had to be negotiated personally. In the year leading up to the strike, petrol and food prices went up rapidly, increasing the workers’ burden. Most could not save much and were indebted to loan sharks. Maize from subsistence farming in their rural homes did not cover workers’ food needs. Employment levels in Swaziland had been static for many years and most households depended on the little cash that workers earned to keep afloat. The inequality between workers and managers fed these tensions further. Managers were given large houses and company cars. Workers felt that the company placed buying new cars for the belungu above taking care of their essential needs. The action started in the two largest and most hostile workplaces. Conditions in both sawmills were very dangerous, with an unsafe clutter of wood around and badly serviced machinery, and thus a high accident rate – as well as stressful work rhythms.

148

Vito Laterza

Thulani provided the spark that lit the fire. Most people quickly acknowledged him as the strike leader and he led negotiations with Dan. Thulani was in his late twenties and unmarried; he lived with the mother of his two children in Lapha. He had recently come back from working in Matsapha, the country’s biggest industrial area, a place where union activity and labour protests were the order of the day. In March 2008, he was hired by the new sawmill and soon afterwards nominated by his co-workers to represent them in weekly meetings with the labour broker. This council had no powers; but it provided the only workers’ forum in Enkopolwani. Before the strike, workers did not have any formal means of meeting on their own or with management. Since April 2008, Thulani had been meeting regularly with four other workers at the soccer pitch on Sundays to discuss workers’ issues, while others played or watched the game. Njabulo, a friend of mine, was involved in these regular meetings and was unaware of plans for strike action. On the morning of the strike, Thulani was attending the weekly workers’ representatives meeting with Peter Malindzisa, the labour broker. An altercation between Peter and Thulani led to the latter being sent back to work. Peter refused to deal with Thulani as the new sawmill representative. Thulani reported that Peter wanted the workers to elect another representative. They refused. The supervisor had promised them a salary increase from January 2008, after the annual round of wage adjustments. Thulani had been reminding him of this promise for several months, but with no result. After a short discussion at around midday, the workers downed their tools and waited for Peter Malindzisa to come and talk to them. But when he did, he made it clear that they would not get an increase. Some people explained that they did not want to strike; they had stopped working only to discuss things, and were willing to catch up wasted production time afterwards. With a bitter expression, Peter performed his notorious banknote ripping gesture; some workers picked up the pieces and the rest stood there silently. Peter then told them to get back to work; but there was no response. He threatened them and finally told them to come to his office to be disciplined. Thulani and a few others advised against it, as they imagined they could be fired on the spot. The time for discussion was over and a small crowd formed spontaneously. Building up morale and bonding through toyi-toying, they went down to the old sawmill. By now, any worker they met on the way had to join them. The crowd left them no choice. There was no negotiation. People were collected from their workplaces and homes. The crowd quickly took on a life of its own, not unlike the mobs that occasionally form at bus stops in the cities to attack girls in alluring clothes or to chase thieves



Waves of Unrest

149

on the run.10 While many were scared of the crowd, they acknowledged that it was the real protagonist of the strike, the embodiment of workers’ suffering and demands. This was not a human actor, but a temporary, yet powerful entanglement of human bodies, feelings, affects and memories. The crowd provided safety in numbers, anonymity and a collective space for expressing grievances.

Tradition beyond Royal Hegemony The traditional idioms and practices that emerged during the wildcat strike call for a deeper analysis of their implications for economic democracy. This requires a brief description of relations between the state, capital and labour in the wider national context. Swaziland has been integrated into the Southern African regional economy since the early twentieth century, first through mass labour migration to the South African mines and then through heavy investment there by South African capital. Swazi migration to South Africa remains high, and economic ties between the two countries are strong. Although Swaziland is often represented in the media as an isolated and ‘backward’ place ruled by an archaic monarchy, its economy is one of the most globalized in Africa (Lockwood and Redoano 2005). Large-scale investment is based on an alliance between the monarchy and foreign capital. The former invests in business through the royal fund, Tibiyo Taka Ngwane. Purportedly held by the king ‘in trust for the nation’, the fund is not accountable to parliament or any other body. This alliance is most prominent in the main export sector, the sugar industry, where the two major players, the Royal Swaziland Sugar Corporation and Ubombo Sugar,11 are jointly owned by foreign shareholders and Tibiyo. Wages are much lower than in South Africa, government imposes only limited labour standards, and union leaders are consistently harassed as ‘pro-democracy dissidents’. This political climate for business helped the white missionaries to set up shop in Enkopolwani without intervention. Dan’s timber business relied, as would any other of that size, on connections with royalty and the government for approval and relative freedom from interference by politicians. The same connections guaranteed a similar modus operandi for the EMS. Monarchical rule employs a traditionalist ideology that gives prominence to customary law and land tenure, placing emphasis on social conservatism and preservation of heritage. The monarchy thus plays the dual role of keen ally of capital in formal enterprises and overseer of

150

Vito Laterza

the customary tenure system in the rural areas, a crucial buffer against destitution for workers and their families. Labour unions find themselves in a double bind. Historically, their growth and strength drew on progressive Swazi town-dwellers opposed to monarchical rule. Unions are painfully aware that, despite formal compliance with ILO international standards, the monarchy is reluctant to protect workers’ interests, while the latter see customary tenure as being upheld by the regime. They therefore have to organize workers who are not a proletariat in classic Marxist terms, but are more akin ‘worker-peasants’ (First 1983), moving back and forth between the formal sector and the rural areas. Consequently, there is often a major disconnect between the union leaders’ progressive ideology and the interests and idioms employed by most workers. This has a direct bearing on the question of economic democracy in Swaziland. Do practices sustained by customary land tenure dilute the revolutionary potential for collective action? Should we see them as being ideologically and practically tied to a royal ruling elite, and thus a reactionary force when it comes to promoting economic democracy? Antonio Gramsci offers some insight into these questions. Writing from prison in the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci differentiated forms of national capitalism according to the presence or absence of civil society. ‘Modern states’ were held to be different from other states like Russia or the colonies. Civil society – with its voluntary associations like trade unions, political parties and churches – acts as a buffer between state and economy, so that ‘when the state trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only the outer ditch behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks’ (Gramsci 1971, cited in Burawoy 2003: 215). The hegemony of the state is perpetuated through civil society, which often acts as an invisible arm of state power. Civil society tends to propagate the ideological hegemony of the state, but it is also a terrain of struggle, where discourses and practices of counter-hegemony might emerge. For revolutionary activity to be effective in this context, a frontal and rapid attack on the systems of power, such as the ‘War of Movement’ (Gramsci 1977) of the Bolsheviks in the 1917 Russian Revolution, is impossible. Rather, a ‘War of Position’ is needed, where ‘revolutionary activity involves the slow, patient work of reorganizing associations, trade unions, parties, schools, legal systems and so forth’ (Burawoy 2003: 215). In Gramsci’s terms, Swazi society today has a weak, but growing civil society. Nevertheless, traditional idioms and practices perform a surprisingly similar role to that played by civil society in his analysis of West-



Waves of Unrest

151

ern states. Although the formal economy is controlled by royal elites in alliance with white businessmen and foreign investors, the monarchy selectively uses tradition as a bulwark against external rule, thereby justifying its control over the rural areas as protection of poor Swazis from the threat of ‘foreign’ invasion. At the same time, the royals do not have an absolute monopoly of tradition. This is also sustained through forms of reciprocity entailed in everyday economic life, primarily through customary land tenure. Swazis are embedded in reciprocal kinship and other social obligations that cross-cut the market economy at many points; and they adapt traditional idioms to their own needs and desires. Tradition, then, plays a dual role: it is a powerful tool in perpetuating the hegemony of the royal elite; and, like any flexible set of ideas and practices, it lends itself to multiple uses and interpretations, providing a social and cultural medium where counter-hegemony may emerge. This ambivalent notion of tradition throws light on the apparently irrational claims made by Enkopolwani workers during the wildcat strike. Communal land ownership and the notion of property rights that comes with it provided the workers with a powerful discourse against missionary rule. Customary tenure creates a crucial space of social and economic autonomy for Swazi workers who cannot afford to buy private land or property. But tradition informed the demands and concerns of the workers in a deeper sense. The basic criticism of the missionaries was that they did not honour their reciprocal obligations. In return for being allowed on Swazi land as guests, and given a legitimate claim to the profits of enterprise, they were expected to treat the workers well, and make sure that their livelihoods were sound and that they lived and worked under humane conditions. Here too, the workers transposed ideas of reciprocity taken from chief–subject relations (and nationally those between the king and his subjects) to their relations with the missionaries. Inequality is accepted, but only if the privileged actors (the chief or the employers) take on themselves responsibility for the well-being of the subaltern classes (James 2007; Englund 2008, 2011; Ferguson 2013). When workers claimed that the labour broker had insulted the king by ripping apart a banknote, they meant that the king stands for the whole Swazi polity, including all its subjects, and more specifically themselves. Ripping the note symbolized breaking the social contract between workers and managers. And that was probably the labour supervisor’s intention too. As one worker told me, ‘if these whites treat us badly, we will ask other whites to come over and run things for us’. Workers made no attempt to

152

Vito Laterza

take control of the production process. They just wanted decent employers (‘good whites’) who would run the formal economic activities – and make profit from it – while taking proper care of workers’ livelihoods. While such paternalism is not easily reconciled with Western ideas of democracy, asymmetrical relationships of this kind are founded on principles of equality and reciprocity, as elsewhere in Southern Africa (Farré in this volume, Englund 2011). The basic idea is well captured by the proverb ‘umuntfu ngumuntfu ngebantfu’, a person exists only through other people – an idea found widely in the region and one often cited by philosophers of ubuntu, a label for African humanism. It speaks to the immanent sociality of human life, to how people must live in reciprocal ties of obligation and exchange. But there is a deeper philosophical meaning: a human being becomes fully human and is recognized as such by other humans, when s/he is able to recognize the humanity of others (Ramose 1999). In the most apparently asymmetrical relations, there lurks tacit recognition of a common humanity. This is so powerful that it transcends racial and cultural boundaries: white missionaries in Enkopolwani were not criticized for being racial others (as they might have been in South Africa), but as persons who were not fully human because they failed to recognize the humanity of Swazi workers. This material and symbolic experience of tradition in everyday life by most Swazis should not be equated with royal hegemony. True, it is difficult to envisage how tradition might be practically disentangled from the power of the royal elite, which is often excessive. Yet these practices and idioms currently perform a protective role in Polanyi’s sense. They also plant seeds of future change by encouraging these workers to seek a more humane and equitable economy.

Where Are the Unions? A Question of Alliance It would seem that these movements asserting traditional reciprocity could never underwrite effective resistance to a dehumanizing capitalism, since they appear to take place in isolation, disconnected from national and regional counter-hegemonic struggles for democracy. How do we explain the unions’ absence from the wildcat strike? Enkopolwani has a long history of unions and political activism that dates back to the colonial period. Despite this, unions were invisible in this strike. On the very few occasions that they were mentioned, comments were rarely positive. To say that the workers were actively opposed to unions would be too strong, yet many felt that unions in Swaziland were not particularly good at protecting workers’ interests.



Waves of Unrest

153

Swaziland has a strong union movement and, despite the absolute monarchy, unions are still recognized as legal actors in collective bargaining. About two-thirds of workers covered by collective bargaining agreements are unionized. Unions have been at the forefront of struggles for democracy and have strong links with pro-democracy movements and banned political parties like the People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO) and the Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO). Union protests and general strikes have featured prominently in the political life of the towns, rallying thousands of workers and citizens in the streets of Mbabane and Manzini over the years. As the crisis of material livelihoods worsens with the convergence of an HIV/AIDS pandemic, a fiscal crisis, economic stagnation and crumbling public service delivery, these protests channel discontent against the monarchy and the current economic system. In 1997, after a month-long general strike that spread through all sectors of the economy, the unions did not manage to capitalize on popular support. Another wave of strikes and protests spread throughout most sectors of the economy in 2011–12, when the government was pushed close to insolvency by a fiscal crisis caused by declining revenues from the Southern African Customs Union. Increasing police brutality and harassment of pro-democracy activists and union leaders contributed to the fact that no substantial political or economic change resulted from these actions. In any case, no clear vision for regime change was articulated. Pro-democracy forces ask for Westminster-type multi-party democracy and the transformation of the absolute monarch into a constitutional one. They do not have a clear plan for how to achieve this. Nor do they address the crucial question of customary land tenure. Swazis do not know what the unions and other pro-democracy organizations have in mind in this regard. So, while they demand political democracy and better legislation and conditions for workers in the formal sector, these organizations have not thought through how to manage Swazi workers’ de facto ‘welfare state’ – that is, their access to land at a minimal price. Another contradiction works against effective counter-hegemonic action. The unions have a long history of organizing, and are the main conduit for, national demands for democracy, while favouring people employed in the formal sector and who live in the towns. They also have strong international alliances with other union movements, in particular with COSATU and other grassroots organizations in South Africa. Yet, by failing to address the complex interactions between rural and urban economies, they cannot convince many workers that they are the right horse to bet on if they wish to improve their livelihoods.

154

Vito Laterza

Tension inevitably emerges when organizations like formal unions with a long tradition of national federative structures are recognized in collective bargaining. This is between the urgency of workers’ demands, with their calls for radical change, and the routine bureaucracy of negotiating with employers and operating within the hegemonic framework of state and economy. How can spontaneous collective action maintain its impetus while reaping the benefits of organizing formal associations at the national and international levels? What forms of direct democracy should be instituted that might enable a smooth dialectic linking rankand-file workers to regulatory structures?

Spontaneous Counter-Movement and the Emergence of the Multitude The energy behind the Enkopolwani wildcat strike clearly did not spring from organized union leadership or from the presence of other associational structures. Despite this, it still provoked a real rupture of everyday labour–management relations, and enabled workers to vent their complaints and aspirations for change. Karl Polanyi’s notion of counter-movement can help us to move beyond a narrow focus on formal structures as the primary vehicles for democratic change. The Enkopolwani strike was an instance of society’s reaction against the dehumanizing and destructive effects of the self-regulating free market’s penetration into all aspects of social and economic life through commoditization of human labour, land and other natural resources (Polanyi 1944: 76, 141–50). Workers’ claims and their constant references to various aspects of domestic and community life provide further support for this interpretation. Christian capitalism threatens the workers’ day-to-day economic survival, for sure, but it also threatens their belief that the economy should remain embedded in society. Their demands for a wage increase, food rations and better working conditions go along with claiming back vital degrees of autonomy from the missionaries’ attempts to control all aspects of the reproduction of life. The movement emerging through the wildcat strike is thus not a conscious ordeal orchestrated by political actors driven by an ideology, but the result of individuals and groups pursuing their own interests (Polanyi 1944: 135–50). There is no evidence here of unified class consciousness of the Marxist kind. Workers made demands and raised different concerns, using a variety of idioms, from ‘modern’ expressions of class exploitation to traditionalist claims invoking reciprocity and redistribution. Neverthe-



Waves of Unrest

155

less, pursuit of these specific interests has wider societal effects; it comes to embody the protective counter-movement of society at large. The plurality of desires and demands emerging from the workers’ formation as a crowd also evokes Hardt and Negri’s (2004) concept of the multitude. They see the latter as a distinctive form of social organization emerging from the contemporary conditions of global capitalist production, carrying within it the seeds of change and the potential to subvert the system through radical forms of direct democracy. A multitude is not a unity, in that it does not express a unified standpoint through any representative mechanism reducing the plural demands and aspirations of different people to a clear sovereign will. The multitude does not respect conventional ideas of representation in a liberal democracy. Individuals act together in a multitude without losing their own distinctive desires and outlook on life. They share ideas and emotions and are connected at an unconsciously affective level. They influence each other’s moods and dispositions and form a coherent social formation with a real embodied component, while resisting abstract identification with one principle or ideology alone. A drive towards democracy may be said to be already immanent in the Enkopolwani workers’ movement as a multitude. This cannot be imposed or adopted from outside, through the intervention of formal organizations like trade unions. The main challenge is to explore potential synergies between the workers’ multitude and formal associations like unions, but also specific institutional forms, such as workers’ committees and collective meetings, that might mediate and coordinate the dynamic impetus of the multitude. The tension between the desires of the multitude and the imperatives of bureaucracy often dissipates its revolutionary potential. In Enkopolwani, the strike committee became involved in narrow piecemeal negotiations that for the most part ignored the deep desires for change and the multiple claims expressed by the crowd during the strike. This soon led to an anticlimax and dissolution of the energy that drove the action in the first place. The absence of structures to channel workers’ enthusiasm or enable them to participate in meaningful negotiation with management worked against sustained collective action in this case.

Conclusions The plight of Swazi workers and the structures that impede their emancipation from dismal working and living conditions are well illustrated

156

Vito Laterza

by Charles Feinstein’s (2005) rigorous and clear-headed analysis of South Africa’s economic history. He shows how the systematic exploitation of cheap labour along racial lines was achieved by keeping wages low and working conditions harsh, by excluding black workers from access to credit and social security, and by curtailing their participation in markets more generally. The history of Swaziland and other Southern African countries has been similar, if less extreme. A focus on substantial improvement of workers’ livelihoods requires us to confront the enduring legacy of a settler society with its enclave economy. This region as a whole still lacks most of the conditions that enabled workers’ emancipation and substantial redistribution of wealth within a market economy in the former social democracies of Northern Europe. Better labour laws, increased social welfare, a higher minimum wage, more taxes on businesses and more efficient use of public funds would all improve the situation. This route to economic democracy, however, implies the presence of a strong state that is able to combine liberal and social democracy effectively. We need to find new models more attuned to Southern Africa’s actual history. Rather than pursue a ‘one size fits all’ approach, we should look at ways of enhancing a plural economy that gives more opportunities for more people to improve their lives (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010). The big challenge is to develop new institutions that are anchored in existing social practice, but allow for transformations that cannot be accommodated on the ground by current structures (ibid.). We need to think holistically and systematically. The complex set of informal and formal practices that constitute local, national and global institutions make up a living interdependent system, where change in one part of the system affects all the others too. We cannot afford to be nostalgic for the social engineering encouraged by nation-states in the twentieth century (ibid.). It is unrealistic to propose top-down interventions when the lack of political will at the top is evident. As human economists, we should try to devise interventions that operate outside, but not necessarily in opposition to, the technocratic forms of rule that currently underpin the consortia of state and capital. Unions should still aim to reform a highly unequal labour market by channelling discontent on the ground in ways that go beyond the scope of collective bargaining. They and their pro-democracy allies need to shift their rhetoric and vision for political change to incorporate idioms and practices fostered by the dual system of land tenure. The guarantee of land in indefinite usufruct is probably the most important factor sustaining royal hegemony, and it explains why most Swazis are sceptical about engaging in openly anti-monarchist politics. It does not pay to import



Waves of Unrest

157

tactics of resistance from places where capitalism long ago completed enclosure of the commons as private property to a country where this has not yet occurred. Unions and pro-democracy movements need to be more explicit about how they envisage the transition to multi-party democracy, and learn from the failures of similar experiments across the region. They should develop an approach to customary tenure that does not endanger the social protection it affords, while encouraging resistance to the more reactionary and hierarchical elements of the status quo. This is not easy; it resembles Gramsci’s ‘War of Position’ more than a frontal attack on monarchical rule – which would probably fail under present conditions. These innovations could have much wider consequences. COSATU and other South African allies of Swazi unions might learn a lot from this case. It is one thing to fight royal hegemony and undemocratic rule, but quite another to acknowledge that scores of millions of Southern Africans are embedded in relations of reciprocity and solidarity that are strongly influenced by customary land tenure and associated practices. Progressive social movements here should engage constructively with these realities, rather than writing them off as ‘backward’ or ‘reactionary’. There is a strong need to develop new institutions that organize people’s ideas and aspirations in the present with a view to achieving a different and better future. Further research and linked action might explore how existing local institutions and customary practices might help to develop direct democratic structures that would be better able to channel current waves of wildcat action. Such research would be a form of dialogue, actively linking people around the world who share much in common while maintaining their differences and plural demands. Through the constant interplay of micro and macro forces, between classes and people located in different parts of the globe, a new world society is emerging (Hart 2008): a society that struggles for a more human – and humane – economy, and that actively fights against the dehumanizing advance of the logic of private property in all spheres of social and material life. NOTES  1. The Observer, ‘South African miners’ families back Julius Malema’s call for nationalisation’, 18 August 2012. Received from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2012/aug/18/south-african-miners-julius-malema.  2. I have made up the names of places and people to protect research participants, except for three major urban areas of the country: Mbabane, Manzini and Matsapha.

158

Vito Laterza

 3. The data presented in this section are based on an in-depth semi-structured questionnaire given to forty-one workers in late 2008. The sample was about 10 per cent of Enkopolwani workers.  4. I conducted a short survey of Lapha homesteads in late 2008 with the assistance of Mandla Shabangu, a research collaborator and resident of the area.  5. This is quite different from the ‘academic’ story. For one, the colonial government claimed the ultimate right to grant concessions on ‘native reserves’. Secondly, the mine had acquired title over the Enkopolwani property in 1951, with the agreement of the ‘Paramount Chief’ Sobhuza II.   6. When the strike broke out, I was somewhere else. I decided not to go back to Enkopolwani to witness the events in person, since I thought it might endanger my independence in the town.   7. In June 2008, that was about GBP 2 a day. The lilangeni is linked to the South African rand on a 1:1 basis.  8. The union leaders were from two different forestry unions. At the time, there were two national union federations in Swaziland, competing for the same potential members. The two have since merged and are now under the umbrella of the Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA).  9. Laurel Rose (1992) refers to this as the ‘politics of harmony’, and develops it as a central theme in her ethnography of land disputes in traditional Swazi courts. 10. See Devisch (1995) and Buur (2009) on mob formation in Congo and South Africa respectively. 11. Tibiyo Taka Ngwane, Royal Swaziland Sugar Corporation and Ubombo Sugar are the real names.

Vito Laterza is a postdoctoral fellow in the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria. He received a BSc in Employment Relations from the LSE, and a PhD in Social Anthropology from Cambridge. He is a labour anthropologist interested in new forms of social and political mobilization in Africa, and carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Swaziland. He has published widely in international journals and is a columnist for Al Jazeera English.

Part III Visions of Human Economy and Democracy

Chapter 8

░ Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece ‘Movementality’, Economic Democracy and Social Reproduction during Crisis THEODOROS RAKOPOULOS

Anti-middleman Activity in Greece It is a sunny Sunday in the early autumn of 2012. “One of the few things worth something in this country these days, the sun”, claims Mrs Elena, a local 60-year-old pensioned woman, whom I am following uphill, as she leads the way to the new spot where agrarian produce is distributed; “and of course, the fact that we have initiatives like this, even in our area – these are things to feel good about being in Greece”. I had met Mrs Elena by accident on the street; I recognized her from similar meetings of the anti-middleman organization RA.ME (Coalition against Middlemen), and asked whether I could join her on her way to today’s sale spot. It was among the first of several times at a RA.ME sale for me. When we reach a car park, where the town ends, we are greeted by a banner that I had seen before in local anti-austerity demonstrations; it reads: “We spread the seed of solidarity”. There are people all around, as Lithoupoli’s residents rush up the hill to buy in bulk from the producers, brought to town via RA.ME contacts. Through RA.ME’s website, as well as by contacting members by phone, locals have ordered the exact amount of basic agrarian produce they need. It comes from all over the country: flour and pasta from Pieria (the core region for solidarity trade), honey from the Peloponnese, white cheese from Lesvos, olives from Evia – seven products in all. Some local consumers urge the RA.ME volunteers to ‘hurry up’. ‘Some think we have vested interests in this, and that we make a profit’, explains Georgia, a 30-year-old RA.ME volunteer. However, many others show their appreciation by hugging the activists, shaking

162

Theodoros Rakopoulos

their hands or agreeing to ‘become more involved in all this’. Mrs Elena tells me that she feels ‘moved, but also mobilized’, and would like to ‘contribute more to the RA.ME initiative than just buying in bulk’. A few hours later, I met Georgia and other RA.ME members informally in a local cafe. When asked about the association, she explained: ‘The movement started as a response to the vicissitudes of the liberal market on a “movemental” (kinimatiki) level.1 Too much money going into the pockets of middlemen, too little produce for consumers, too little profit for farmers; so there is a direct relationship between solidarity and the crisis’. I will explore here the most widespread and politicized case of the solidarity economy movement in contemporary Greece by tracing the meaning of this contested term in the context of concerns over democracy and economy. I discuss how some (mainly young unemployed) people organize in their communities the distribution of agricultural products supplied directly by producers, without the mediation of commercial middlemen and gaining no profit for themselves. To elucidate wider developments in Greece’s solidarity economy,2 I focus on a case study, taking the example of RA.ME,3 one of many informal associations that cater for the distribution of agrarian produce in this way. Participants aim to make it a cooperative soon. The association operates like an informal solidarity network, organizing the collection and distribution of agrarian produce directly from producers to consumers, at prices well below the retail norm. RA.ME operates and has wide appeal in Lithoupoli, an urban area of eighty thousand people in a corner of the ‘Western Districts’, a popular Athenian term referring to the working-class, low-income and most densely populated areas of Athens that have been severely affected by the crisis.4 RA.ME is part of a coalition of anti-middleman groups and, in line with the participants in my research, I consider it in the context of the ‘anti-middleman movement’ that is currently strong in Greece. Most of the around eighty such initiatives have started since 2010. The producers were farmers contacted by RA.ME to be ‘mobilized’ and ‘incorporated’ in their movement. The association is one of the movement’s most successful cases and broadly representative of it; most of its members are outspoken partisans of the left, and many of them are members of the SYRIZA party5 or affiliates of the ‘Bot. Coalition’, a squatted social centre in Athens, located in Lithoupoli’s botanical gardens (now abandoned by the state) with an anarchist and radical left core. RA.ME hold their meetings in the squat. Solidarity’s vicissitudes should be traced to the interplay between solidarity as a native term and as an analytical term, which this chapter will



Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece

163

elucidate, using ethnographic data from Greece, where the term is popular. To fully reconcile this tension is pragmatically slippery, in the context of the crisis. The seismic processes under way undermine any attempt to consolidate the term as an analytical category. The chapter’s aim is rather to grasp its dynamic meanings in the lives of Greeks in this condensed historical circumstance. I therefore address the links between the sovereign debt crisis and engaged social practices (anti-broker cooperativism), exploring the crisis as a total social fact, where antithetical notions, such as debt and solidarity, give meaning to each other. My concern here is with the strategic significance of cutting out the middleman in the Athens case and the relationship of solidarity economy to the state and the market in Greece, especially when both are in crisis (as per Herzfeld 2011). In a politically radicalized Greece, how tight is the relationship between the rise of solidarity economy and the crisis, and how does radical political commitment inform SSE initiatives? The theme I explore through ethnographic analysis is the tension between economy and democracy in a cooperative economic configuration triggered and organized by the politicized agenda of anti-middleman activity. Out of five sections, the main one discusses the historical significance of the Greek crisis. I address the relationship of anti-middleman initiatives to the crisis, and then explore its reproductive potential in two directions: from the standpoint of ‘economy’ – how informal SSE groups imagine themselves as cooperatives in the near future – and then from that of ‘democracy’ – the activists’ own views and the state’s role in SSE. Finally, the chapter will locate the notion of solidarity in a context of democracy and economy. The chapter contributes to a debate on the definitions, meanings and applications of solidarity, in the current economic turmoil in a country that has been most severely affected by the aftermath of the credit crunch, providing a lens on the place of the solidarity movement in the global financial crisis.

Solidarity Economy in (or because of?) the Crisis The idea that Greece has been ‘living beyond her means’ – a commonplace that is only now gradually being challenged – led an institutional ‘troika’ (International Monetary Fund; European Central Bank; European Commission) to impose fast-track structural adjustment based on austerity and fiscal discipline according to Debt Memoranda signed by Greece. The country is currently governed by a bipartisan coalition from the right to the cen-

164

Theodoros Rakopoulos

tre-left, which inflicts austerity through dubious parliamentary legislation (i.e. voting hundreds of articles in one Act). This ‘fast-track’ politics lays out a structural framework in condensed historical time that is unprecedented and undermines democracy, not least because of the rise of the grassroots neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, largely in response to austerity.7 In financial terms, Greece has become even more marginal to global capitalism and is seen, after its consumer-driven growth bubble of the mid-2000s, as a ‘grounded PIIG’.8 Opinion makers often note that, because Greece contributes only 3 per cent of the EU’s GDP, even in case of a ‘grexit’ (Greek exit from the Eurozone), the EU’s development would not be affected (The Economist 2013). Greece’s own GDP has shrunk by 25 per cent since the troika imposed its rules, and the rate of contraction is growing: –3.9 per cent in 2009, –4.9 per cent in 2010, –7.1 per cent in 2011, and –6.7 per cent in 2012, after an expansion of 5.5 per cent in 2006.9 This may be the largest recession that a European country has experienced since the Second World War (Lapavitsas 2012). The peak of Greece’s bubble-boom was 2003, right before the Olympic Games of 2004 and soon after having – miraculously, given its economic performance – joined the Eurozone’s twelve countries in 2002. That same year, the César Institution, in noting the absence of SSE, asked, ‘Can we really talk of a third sector?’ (cited in Rylmon 2013). A decade later, in places like the northern region of Pieria, where the ‘potato movement’ (the first anti-middleman food distributions, in 2011) took off, an estimated 80 per cent of local households are being served through a solidarity economy of informal agrarian distribution; roughly 22 per cent of the overall Greek population has taken advantage of this movement.10 In response to austerity, Greece is experiencing the rapid dissemination of anti-middleman-cum-solidarity economy practices. Similar initiatives, coordinated through grassroots ‘co-ops’, are spreading. It is therefore reasonable to correlate a flourishing solidarity economy with the crisis. This is especially intriguing if SSE is understood not as a means of development (Dacheaux and Goujon 2012; Hillenkamp 2013b), but rather as immediate livelihood assistance in economic terms and as a democratic challenge to austerity politics – or as a movement, in other words, aiming to democratize the economy and thereby promote an alternative vision of democracy. Participants in these cooperatives argue that they spring from and contest the recession, brought about by the debt crisis, and that SSE will have fundamental consequences for their livelihoods and communities. It may be useful, if we wish to understand its historical meaning and the new social obligations it has provoked, to think of the Greek crisis



Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece

165

as a ‘total social fact’. This idea stems from Marcel Mauss’s famous essay, where the gift is seen to rest not primarily on exchange, but rather on social obligations whose source lies significantly in non-contractual conditions outside it (Mauss 1990). A specific reading of Mauss links the gift to markets and money, arguing it is not just a mark of disinterested charity (Hart and James 2014). It takes on this appearance only in bourgeois ideology (Parry 1986). For instance, as I shall show for the Greek cases, it could mean indebtedness of a political nature. Sigaud (2002) claims that anthropologists have underplayed the role of moral indebtedness in Mauss’s conception of the gift, preferring to oppose gift exchange to the market rather than locate his analysis in his politics (Mauss 1997) which culminated in a new method of studying ‘total social facts’ (Hart 2007a: 370; 2007b). Solidarity economy presents itself as a network of activities that seek to replace disembedded market relations of exchange with obligations of reciprocity within a general call for political mobilization (Krugman 2012). The geography of the crisis has been spreading; its impact far outreaches Greek or even European borders, since its origins and effects lie outside Greece. It affects all human life, enclosing it in the shared experience of historically compressed time. The current EU debt crisis presents an opportunity to rejuvenate solidarity in the context of the decline of employment, especially since solidarity discourse is becoming counter-hegemonic to that of debt. Solidarity can also be understood in the light of political indebtedness: the need to mobilize democratically, through the vicissitudes of markets, while opening up access to basic resources, such as food. The native discourse of Greek cooperativism allows us to revisit the idea of solidarity as an urgent commentary on the morality of debt as a vector of reciprocal and solidary relations (Graeber 2011). Greece’s economic contraction as a result of austerity measures (Varoufakis 2011) makes the debt crisis also a political one. A grassroots focus on the real economic problems of the crisis highlights the tensions between economy and democracy. Solidarity-based forms of distribution and production in Greece, usually in the form of cooperatives, are not the outcome of neoliberal strategies of outsourcing the state’s obligations to civil society. Nevertheless, the privatization of public services stimulates solidarity activity on the ground. This dialectic reflects official management of the crisis in Greece itself: the crisis reproduces itself, not despite official austerity measures, but because of them. Greek political movements, within which SSE is located, do not exist despite the above conditions – but because of them.

166

Theodoros Rakopoulos

This complex relationship evokes Polanyi’s idea of a ‘double movement’ (see Laterza in this volume): society protects itself from the market’s aggressive drive to disembed the economy from its social fabric (Polanyi [1944] 2001). However, we should be aware of the problem of simplistic Polanyian teleologies in looking for counter-movements, for instance seeing the solidarity economy as a mechanistic response to the hardship people encounter due to austerity. Instead, the Polanyian ‘double movement’ here poses an intriguing dialectic. The collapse of the welfare state in Greece and the roll-back of the social safety net both gave rise to the solidarity economy and allowed it to fill some of the gaps left by the state’s withdrawal. SSE replaces the historically disjointed social welfare state, in ways that cannot be legislated, but relies on the voluntary commitments of its members. This shows how inherently dynamic and yet temporally limited these initiatives are. Accordingly, I now turn to the question of their potential reproduction.

Social Reproduction of the Solidarity Economy: Movementality and Cooperatives I opened with a question about the strategic significance of cutting out middlemen. Kalman Applbaum (2003) criticizes anthropologists for focusing on intermediary activities in commerce when the corporations that dominate world economy seek to integrate everything from research to final consumption in a unified marketing strategy. Other anthropologists have associated broker capitalism with mafias (Schneider and Schneider 2006) and stressed the precariousness of personalized economy for workers (Gill 2001). The main local interest in diverting middlemen in Greece, however, is to mobilize the community through immediate action in a form of direct democracy. People involved in RA.ME spoke of kinimatikotita – movementality. They expected producers and consumers to demonstrate and gradually acquire a radical outlook on economy. ‘Apart from breaking with mediators of consumption, our movement is opposed to middlemen in society at large. This is why and how we are inspired by direct democracy’, Georgia explains in the makeshift bar of the squat, at a weekly Wednesday meeting of RA.ME. A few days after the most successful distribution yet (nine hundred families served), I sit among twenty-five activists, half of whom make up the ‘production team’, the other half the ‘propaganda team’. Hours later, as midnight approaches, most of them check their watches, as they need to return home; but the heated discussion goes on, as each speaker, with the coordinator’s



Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece

167

permission, shares their animated thoughts with everyone. The occupation of BIOME (a factory in Northern Greece), and the establishment of an industrial workers’ cooperative there, are discussed. References are made to how the factory draws inspiration from Argentina (Saiag in this volume)11 and some point out its relationship to ‘movementality’. Stella, a 34-year-old woman related to two members, including her aunt, jumps into the conversation when someone mentions that RA.ME’s goals are not philanthropic. There is an issue regarding solidarity from the consumer side as well; the cooperatives should spread solidarity there: this concerns buyers who should be helping out those who are in no position to buy … Consumers should be part of the production process and conscious of who is producing for them. We must try to establish or propagate collectives from both sides: cooperatives of consumers and of producers. Spreading the movement, spreading cooperatives (Rakopoulos 2014a), in the end is what movementality is about: ‘spreading the seed of solidarity’.

A series of practical proposals are made in the course of the evening. Putting together a network for other services is proposed, as elsewhere in Athens, while plans are discussed for the days and weeks ahead: for their presence at a local football match, with a ‘seed of solidarity’ banner, in order to publicize the next distribution; for dissemination of their doings by shooting a promotional video; and for forming a ‘health team’ and a solidarity pharmacy. Kostas, Georgia’s partner, points out that ‘the liberals now promote “direct trade” in the name of “the rational consumer”, but are unable to explain to us why, in all the years they have been in power, they did not encourage such initiatives before’. It takes political will to eliminate middlemen through a movement that cannot be imposed from above by neoliberal policies: the freedom of movement of commodities and money that markets promise stumbles against the inequality of people’s access to resources. This mobilizing political will, ‘movementality’ for my research participants, is also a major answer to the problem of how to reproduce their activity in the longer run. AMAP in France12 (Association pour le Maintien de l’Agriculture Paysanne) is a comparable movement that arose under different circumstances, reflecting the alter-globalization movement from the late 1990s. A formation of four thousand operating branches, AMAP organizes frequent meetings of producers and urban consumers that enable them to exchange directly without distributors’ fees. The movement aims at bypassing middlemen only at a first, imme-

168

Theodoros Rakopoulos

diate level – the politics of experience. This praxis, however, as noted in similar movements for economic democracy (Graeber 2009a, 2013; cf. Hart this volume), may trigger broader social alliances with wider, more daring goals. AMAP is thus a mobilizing technique, and part of a larger movement, that instigates social activism and political education. In that respect, it is not trying to build an alternative economy, since its impact on wider society is low, but rather an alternative ‘economic’ mechanism, whose aim is political rather than economic: to educate and mobilize on food issues by means of democratic participation (Counihan and Siniscalchi 2013). It is an experiment in the movement of ideas more than a challenge to the organization of production and consumption. Agrarian cooperatives are often involved in food activism (Rakopoulos 2013, 2014c), although political mobilization is not always a central aim. Unlike elsewhere (Christian organizations, the Anglo-Saxon donation culture), explicit politics drives participation in Greek informal solidarity networks. Greek hegemonic media stress the solidarity economy’s ‘philanthropic’ aspect (Adam 2012), whereas in fact distancing themselves from philanthropy, especially in its corporate forms, is crucial for SSE activists who embrace the importance of political awareness and ‘movementality’. Some anthropologists have noted how entrepreneurs advocate philanthropy (Osella and Osella 2009), while others have critiqued the use of ‘solidarity’ as a marketing strategy (Edwards 2010). Philanthropy has been shown up as a cover for elites to promote right-wing ideology while appropriating ‘solidarity’ (Dowie 2001). The distinction between philanthropy and solidarity has repeatedly vexed RA.ME members, who donate 10 per cent of the produce they collect to the local diocese, where the bishop organizes its distribution to local families living in conditions of extRA.ME poverty. Many members argue that this philanthropy is another form of broker activity. ‘Philanthropy is static. Our sense of being in a movement is cumulative’, Georgia told me, while handing out honey at a Sunday distribution spot. Kostas added: [The movement] is built up over time with experience, but also with people’s willingness to hear our message, when they buy produce in bulk. The message is both oral and practical: people are exposed to this mobilisation and then go looking for it. This is obviously incRA.MEntal, obtaining a sense of solidarity as they go, because now we have 900 requests, last time we had 550, and before that even less [sic]. So it is like a snowball – mobilizing people on the way. But it is also about changing consciousness, being put in movement, in mobilization, in the process of movementality.



Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece

169

I was exposed mainly to the ‘propaganda team’ (mainly youngsters seen in Lithoupoli’s streets handing out leaflets). So I was surprised on distribution days to see people of all ages (the youngest being twenty and the oldest well over seventy). My informants understood movementality to refer to both local consumers and rural producers, whom they wanted to involve in RA.ME. On another occasion, I sat in their social centre hangout with two middle-aged men from different social backgrounds, both involved in RA.ME. Edi was a 42-year-old Albanian immigrant who worked in the construction sector, and Stergios a 50-year-old civil engineer who had gone out of business some months earlier. The latter still enjoyed local life: ‘I refuse to despair. If we try, collective solutions are on their way for all of us in Greece’. Edi was less optimistic about Greece, not because he was not originally from the country, but, he said, because he was not ‘a communist’ like ‘most members of RA.ME’. Stergios, a leftist himself, burst out laughing. Edi acknowledged that he does take part in distribution days: ‘This means I believe in this movementality; but you don’t have to be a commie for that’. Stergios agreed: ‘As you know, RA.ME distributions are the only thing that actually gets people out of their homes in Lithoupoli – and en masse!’ Movementality is, in that respect, a form of socialization, but also a coming together around problems generated by the crisis. The solidarity economy in Greece, through the procedural agenda that movementality sets, is not only an investment in the present, easing out discrepancies in everyday economic life during the current crisis, but also a potential alternative for the future: it offers an imaginary ethical break with the disillusionment of the crisis. In cases like Edi’s and Mrs Elena’s, many non-radicals embrace an alternative projection of the future. Movementality, revered as it is by RA.ME’s members, is then an educational technique, like AMAP’s strategy for mobilization. Left-wing pundits have repeatedly proposed the solidarity economy as a relief from the immediate consequences of the crisis, but also as a prospective way of running the economy more democratically. SSE developments in Greece, however, are different from elsewhere. In the absence of state protection, the Greek SSE activists promote a different outlook – especially given how outspokenly critical they are of current state policies, even as they claim to be independent from political parties. RA.ME participants have argued, in interviews, that it is the vision of overall change in Greece that inspires them: the generalization of a localized struggle into a mass movement. Thus, in March 2013 in Katerini, Pieria, three RA.ME members participated in the movement’s national meeting of anti-middleman initiatives. Overall, 150 representatives from across

170

Theodoros Rakopoulos

Greece met to coordinate their activities according to a basic template. They agreed to aim for deeper collaboration and to transform themselves into a system of cooperatives in a process of generalized change. Thus although RA.ME is one of the most politicized anti-middleman groups, they are not alone in envisioning broader change beyond their own communities and imagining a system of political economy that transcends their microcosm.13

Social Reproduction of the Solidarity Economy: Cooperatives and Democracy Movementality entails both deepening their work (becoming cooperatives) and spreading it (collaborating with similar groups, on a national level). The transformation of volunteer-based anti-middleman groups into self-sustaining cooperatives, securing the livelihood of some participants, was seen to be the means for the project to survive over time. It was agreed that remuneration for younger unemployed members (such as Georgia) would guarantee the continuation of RA.ME’s work and influence in the long run. ‘We struggle for cooperatives to be established. Their history implies they have previously been co-opted, and today they form part of the problem [corporate capitalism], but this should not make us suspicious of the cooperative idea’, says Roula, a state employee in her late fifties. She is sympathetic to SYRIZA and is one of the group’s most talkative members. ‘We have to avoid our cooperatives-to-be ending up operating as middlemen, buying from the producers’, she added soon afterwards. Cooperatives occupy an odd position at the junction of state and market, participating in both at once. Both a system of procurement for labour and a self-help association with a social plan, cooperatives have achieved relative autonomy from state protection of labour. They have evolved from ideas that recognized the conflict between capital and labour, and aimed to bridge what was, for Marxism, unbridgeable. Like the trade union movement, cooperative socialists have secured some state endorsement of cooperativism. Mauss himself was an active cooperative socialist committed to ‘associationism’ (Hart 2007b: 5; Fournier 2006: 125). Anthropologists have linked cooperation to a pluralistic ‘human economy’ (Graeber 2012), but also have argued that cooperative principles are ‘experienced’, not encompassed by totalizing systems (Whyte 1999). They form, as it has been written for Greece, an actually existing new world. Recent ethnographic accounts



Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece

171

note how cooperatives have followed crises (Sitrin 2012). Workers’ management was inspired by ‘solidarity’ as a principle (Degl’Innocenti et al. 2003; Macpherson 2008), giving way to ‘market mutuality’ as an organizing discourse, when cooperatives sought to open themselves up to global markets, generating internal hierarchies in the process (Kasmir 1996). If reshaping cooperatives into more legally binding forms has been economically significant, sharpening up ideas of democracy by allowing access to their groups through collaboration was also central for RA.ME. Politics play a major role in how members engage with SSE informal networks. For instance, one member mentioned in a meeting that the association would find it hard to procure strawberries. The best quality strawberries in Greece, exported to a number of countries, are grown in a small Peloponnesian town, Manolada. Bangladeshi immigrants were reportedly working ten-hour shifts there for around 10 euros a day, and were housed in chicken coops.14 RA.ME would never collaborate with Manolada producers due to the area’s infamous working conditions. ‘No freedom to the enemies of freedom’, claim participants, meaning that not anyone can collaborate with their association: people have to be ‘on the right side’ to enter the association as members or collaborating producers. This politicized understanding of economic democracy implies a series of obligations. RA.ME uses an agreement form that a prospective supplier is asked to sign in advance. Getting involved with them requires an obligation – an a priori moral commitment to RA.ME ideas of democracy: open acceptance of the ‘democratic principles’ of anti-fascism and anti-racism, as well as agreement to channel a percentage of their produce to the poor for free. Affiliation to the ‘broader cause’ (emancipating society from middlemen overall) is important. This tendency, which is often criticized,15 raises several issues. First, it suggests that movementality for solidarity economy participants is inseparable from their radical political allegiances. There are specific ways of choosing both from whom to draw resources and to whom to allocate them. If solidarity economy aims to provide access for everyone to all resources and services, mediated by fellow citizens (Mitas 2013b), this implies a tension between democracy and economy in anti-fascist RA.ME. This assertive democracy poses obligations, for farmers and consumers, to abide by anti-fascism, as a guiding principle. Movementality implies moral obligation: the principles of economic cooperation are embedded in those of ‘assertive democracy’. So farmers have to prove that they do not entertain racist sentiments (as in Manolada), and have to show to whom they are willing to provide resources.16 Farmers who are understood to be ‘reactionary’ are rejected, while those sympathetic

172

Theodoros Rakopoulos

to progressive ideas are welcomed into such groups. This has resulted – ironically – in some producers, who are willing to be part of the project, sending RA.ME politically sensitive texts, to attract members’ interest and thereby secure collaboration.

Solidarity Economy’s Reproduction: Relations with the State Distribution in economic anthropology and history has generally been privileged over production. Redistribution by the state was central to Polanyi (1957). The idea that a progressive state would engage with and endorse SSE is popular with Polanyian scholars (Buğra 2007) and has been integrated in SSE movements in France and Brazil, for example, where the term was conceived and the concept first put into practice. Lula embraced economia solidária, while strengthening his workers’ party government’s ties to grassroots movements. Polanyi’s work resonates in the ‘third sector’ today, mediating the tension between a social economy directed at capitalist markets and a solidarity economy that is more critical of the market’s emancipatory potential (Alexander 2009; for a severe critique of social economy, see COPAC 2012). In the midst of the austerity era, recalling Polanyi’s point on the ‘centricity’17 of the state’s redistributive role, the neoliberal paradigm’s rollback of the welfare state may be conceived of as a ‘lost centre’, in Mitas’s terms (2013a). Welfare provision cannot be substituted by free will, and equality cannot spill over as a citizens’ duty into a legislated solidarity. Moreover, what belongs to the market (even goods vital for people’s livelihoods, such as food) can more easily be rolled over to asymmetrically organized SSE distributors, who cut middlemen out. NGOs often outsource services to ‘willing volunteers’ in the name of solidarity, acting like welfare middlemen.18 In that respect, the third sector can serve aggressive markets against the state in affirming the freedom of the few against the equality of the many. Flexible labour further promotes this model. The loss of responsibility/capacity by welfare institutions implied the mobilization of ‘civil society’, promoted for instance by the British coalition government’s idea of a ‘Big Society’ where ‘we’re all in this together’. The third sector, represented as a benign form of capitalism, and repeatedly shown to disguise exploitation (Roelofs 1995; Žižek 2006) is far removed from the movementality of the Greek solidarity economy – it constitutes, in fact, its conceptual opposite. RA.ME participants’ lack of trust in the Greek state is not original to them, since most locals feel likewise. Contemporary anthropological



Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece

173

scholarship has noted how ‘actually existing’ social practices of the neoliberal ‘Centaur’ state (liberal at the top, paternalistic at the bottom) have evolved (Wacquant 2012: 73). Much debate frames neoliberalism as subjectivization in the Foucauldian tradition (Ong 2006). Some scholarship has associated debt with the neoliberal ‘condition’ (Lazzarato 2012). Accepting the multiplicity of neoliberalisms and attempting to steer away from a ‘shared empirical vision’ on the spread of neoliberalism (Goldstein 2012) and political denial of the current crisis (Kalb 2012) helps to elucidate how places like Greece respond to debt crises. No system is ever total: rather, socio-economic systems are composed, at a grounded, invisible level, by people pursuing their livelihoods through many complementary strategies. Organizing solidarity economies should therefore be seen as being in a critical direction, emphasizing the state’s decisive support for capital accumulation (Harvey 2011). The Greek solidarity economy, as in the RA.ME example, points in a different direction, challenging neoliberalism as an all-encompassing, biopolitical project of subjectivization and embodied resignation. If solidarity is understood as the ‘duty of promoting the life sufficiency of everyone’ (Mitas 2013b), the plural strategies of a human economy contest neoliberal policies by showing the system to be complex and the idea of welfare to be multi-centred. Pluriactivity entails a plethora of diverse, often contradictory economic activities with which people engage in the context of a human economy of solidarity when distributing agrarian produce. Neoliberalism’s regime of flexible labour promotes pluriactivity, but cannot contain its subversive effects. There is an urgent need, therefore, while acknowledging that ‘markets against the state’ is a false representation of contemporary capitalism (Hann and Hart 2009), for forms of multi-centred distribution that include all three poles of democracy (liberty, equality, fraternity/solidarity) and economy (market, state, the gift/solidarity). The collapse of the piecemeal welfare state in Greece gave rise to cells providing a safety net, built on a horizontal idea of distribution, rather than being based on a centre organizing the distribution of resources. ‘Cells’ of politicized social activity autonomous from state and markets are propagated by radical political theorists such as Noam Chomsky (2005) who favour mutual aid; the anthropological bias for non-state communities has some affinity with them (Morris 2005). Change is incRA.MEntal, like a thousand stings on the body of the system; each sting might not be very significant, but the accumulation of venom is harmful to the organism. The accumulation of tactical individual moves by a social group can build up to change. Similarly, in anthropology, James Scott’s ‘Weapons of the Weak’, the everyday forms of resistance of subalterns (Scott 1985), followed the lit-

174

Theodoros Rakopoulos

erature on ‘moral economy’ (but see Parry 2009). Arguments concerning infra-politics and non-conscious tactics as dynamics of resistance have limited application in Greece’s solidarity economy in the context of neoliberal austerity: SSE participants are conscious of what they do and of a broader, encompassing system of politics, since fundamental change is the inspiration for their activities. The state has been hostile to SSE: the mayors of Athens and Piraeus banned the anti-middleman trade fair on two occasions.19 Many on the left were enraged. Later, three days before the Orthodox Easter, the mayor of Athens also banned Golden Dawn’s distribution of free seasonal food, provided exclusively for the Greek poor.20 Nevertheless, voices want to place the solidarity economy under the tutelage of the state (Pantos 2013), often arguing that the state’s participation is urgently needed in the form of legislation aimed at various kinds of SSE activity, making community participation every citizen’s obligation and right (Taylor 2010).21 Of the thirty most committed members of RA.ME, most would welcome some degree of recognition and assistance by the state – and they were universally agreed that this would be impossible under a government ‘subservient to the troika’, as many put it. Their hopes for the near future were strongly linked to developments in the country’s broader political life and they felt that the radicalization of Greece as whole was essential if their microcosm of radical distributive politics was to expand. Despite being against mediator economics, these movements play an active mediating role in community politics, aiming to establish a redistributive centre sensitive to associationist principles. RA.ME activists and their colleagues in informal Greek SSE networks neither work towards collaboration with the state nor do they reject state institutional help altogether. In State, Power, Socialism, Poulantzas ([1978] 2000) brought to social theory the term ‘articulation’, using the term politically to represent the transformation of representative parliamentary democracy through dispersed initiatives in self-organization: an articulation between representative democracy and direct democracy (ibid.: 401). The idea reflects his conviction that the state itself contains various fragments of political activity and meaning.22 This notion of articulation suggests multi-centred institutions that can bridge state and civil society, managing the distribution of goods and services while taking inequality into account. Recovering Poulantzas’s idea of the state as a plural organization, while condensing the contradictory social relations present in civil society, suggests an articulation of the top-down social welfare state with various grassroots activities of reciprocal economy from below (Mitas 2013c). Movementality, for anti-middleman activists who welcomed



Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece

175

the prospect of a radical government, suggests that a movement could be nudged in that direction.

Solidarity: A ‘Third Pole’ between Economy and Democracy The term ‘solidarity economy’ has implications for how we conceive the relationship between economy and democracy. Throughout the modern period, and especially in France, solidarity has been a foundational concept for democracy, an ambiguous one when it is linked to actors’ specific political affiliations, and a concept too slippery to be universally intelligible. Moreover, the left has historically been more concerned with equality and the right with freedom (Bobbio 1997). If paired with economy (as in ‘solidarity economy’) and associated with material resources, it becomes more urgent to think through the ambiguity of this term. ‘Fraternity’ was its original conception before ‘solidarity’ took its place, suggesting a move away from family and the immediate community towards a wider humanistic sense able to encompass and imagine remote relations in a polity whose scope transcended immediate, face-to-face allegiances. Imagining ‘impersonal’ community through abstract institutions has been a major achievement of political modernity (Hart 2013b). While ‘solidarity’ was hotly debated as the ‘third pole’ of the French republic’s revolutionary democracy, the solidarity economy has been usually understood of late to be part of the ‘third sector’. This is no coincidence. Solidarity is the ‘other’ to freedom and equality – obfuscated by neglect in mainstream debates concerning both democracy and economy. This begs for an anthropological approach. The MAUSS group’s economic sociology, inspired by anti-utilitarianism, sees in the gift the third dimension beyond state and market (Godbout and Caillé 1998) suggesting links between the gift and solidarity within the realm of reciprocity. Partly because of the notion’s alterity and ambiguity, the ideological tension23 over ‘who owns’ SSE has been lively (Amin, Cameron and Hudson 2002). Liberals, reformists, progressives and radicals have tried to appropriate it, and the term has often evolved in different directions.24 In general, however, the social economy is thought to operate within a capitalist environment, while the solidarity economy undermines it and aims to break away from it. The terms ‘social economy’, ‘solidarity economy’, ‘popular economy’ and others proliferate. In anthropology, the concept of moral economy25 is increasingly contested (Hann 2010). This is a product not only of the phenomenon’s dynamism or of the lag between theory and the social reality it depicts. It rather reflects internal struggles

176

Theodoros Rakopoulos

in a very loose movement that, unlike the poles representing equality (State) and freedom (Market), has no point of reference other than the ideologically contested field of civil society (Gramsci 2010). Économie solidaire (Laville 2010) has a twofold meaning: it refers both to economics and economy. Separate essays by Laville and Singer in Dictionnaire de l’autre économie (Laville and Cattani 2006) show the dual roots of the solidarity economy concept, as well as its endorsement by both state and market, in France and Brazil. An American volume, Solidarity Economy (Allard, Davidson and Mattaei 2008), introduced the noun as an adjective, reinforcing the notion of economy as a thing rather than a way of thinking about it.26 So solidarity economy lies at the heart of the relationship between economy and democracy. From an anthropological perspective, each concept based on local people’s ideas is important. As can be gathered from the ethnographic discussion, this chapter does not aim to make of solidarity an analytical, all-encompassing term that could be used to assess counter-movements across the world. Rather, it has illuminated the very local meaning of the notion that Greeks employ in their anti-austerity mobilization, even as they are aware of global trends such as crises. Activists are at the heart of SSE, and their own views concerning what ‘solidarity’ means may illuminate the relationship between economy (as crisis) and democracy (as popular participation) through the case of Athens in this compressed moment of history (Rakopoulos 2014b). The term allileggia oikonomia (solidarity economy), is commonplace among radical groups in contemporary Greece,27 and is normally contrasted with ‘social economy’. The term oikonomia allileggiis (economy of solidarity) is used more rarely, and has a more obviously left-leaning political weight. These emic ideas on ‘solidarity’ are pivotal to debates among participants and organizations over the meaning of economy and democracy. In Greece, the term is usually seen as the recent outcome of a movement (Rakopoulos 2014c). The solidarity economy, in that respect, is always in the making. It reflects the fluctuations of crisis, as well as the internal processes of the movement and its real impacts on its people’s communities. This might explain the strategic significance of the ‘anti-middleman’ struggle in Greece’s solidarity economy: activists envision a society where ‘direct’ democracy and ‘immediate’ economy are central to social processes. Informal solidarity networks in Greece are at once an offspring of the crisis and themselves a means to manage and contain some of its most dreadful results (Rakopoulos 2014b). But SSE must ensure its own reproduction over time. The question of the social reproduction of anti-mid-



Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece

177

dleman initiatives, and the conditions of life around them, including the crisis, arises: if radical politics contributed to the making of these initiatives, what can guarantee that they reproduce themselves and their activity? Will the informal cooperatives and solidarity networks continue to exist if the crisis is over? Do we need a centre of reference for solidarity – as a distributor/allocator of social obligation? So far, I have touched on the rise of informal solidarity networks in Greece’s debt crisis. But what can pull these organizations together over time? Following Mauss, we might ask where the obligation to cooperate comes from under conditions of division of labour, of which that between rural and urban producers and consumers is the most fundamental. The free will and personal availability of participants cannot be enough. Two complementary avenues, relevant to RA.ME, will be discussed: reproduction through economy, via the transformation of informal networks into cooperatives capable of supporting themselves financially; and reproduction through democracy, in the form of cultivating relationships with the state, so that legislation that is friendly to solidarity economy cooperatives might evolve.

Towards a Conclusion: Solidarity Economy as Process The definition of solidarity economy is always in the making if it is to form a constitutive process of economy and democracy. Potentially it changes the meaning of solidarity itself, setting it into movement. Rather than a fait accompli, the meanings of solidarity economy are processual. It is ‘a way of thinking about the economy that opens up spaces of hope and for building a more just, sustainable and democratic economy. It is an emerging language for building a movement to transform economic life, a framework for strategising about how to create this other economy’ (Miller 2010). For Greece, the idea of movementality is central to this objective. Solidarity economy’s set of practices corresponds to the crisis in a dialectical fashion that is encapsulating in a microcosm the crisis’ main features – which cannot be understood without it or outside it (Rakopoulos 2014b). Born of the crisis, SSE aims to transform its consequences. Since it cannot guarantee income for participants, it can only last by orchestrating obligations between participants, and between consumers and producers. The most popular prospect for RA.ME participants and SSE representatives from across Greece28 was the gradual transformation of the anti-mid-

178

Theodoros Rakopoulos

dleman movement from a loose alliance of associations to a constellation of distribution cooperatives with legal protection which could guarantee the social reproduction of the initiative within the market economy over time. RA.ME does not propose to escape from the state and market, but rejects their current configuration. The anti-middleman movement therefore, as a third pole to state and market, is not a ‘realm’ separate from them, as the MAUSS group suggest for the gift (Godbout and Caillé 1998), or a cell of independence from the two, ready to break away from capitalism, as many radical theorists propose (COPAC 2006). SSE has managed to cut across the configuration of state and market (both of them being in crisis), but it is unable to guarantee either equality of access to resources (the distributor state) or freedom of movement for these resources (the accessible market). In that respect, the SSE in Greece might have the potential to pursue a role that could vitalize both state and market, allowing each to transcend the crisis. Since it is not antagonistic to the realms of state/equality and markets/freedom, and cuts across them, it promotes the democratization of both. A pluralistic, ‘human’ economy potentially endorses diversified, multi-centred welfare provision, which might suggest that SSE is complementary to the state. People’s pluriactivity informs a human economy of solidarity activities organized around the distribution of agricultural produce. Ingrained as it is in movementality, and developed swiftly in the few years since the sovereign debt crisis, Greece’s solidarity economy has do-it-yourself qualities whose reproduction might lie in an articulation of democracy and economy rather than in institutionalization of the movement, which could reify its internal processual nature and dynamism. The state in Greece now actively endorses commodification at all levels of the distribution of resources and services, using markets against the reciprocal ‘third pole’, the gift or solidarity. With Parry’s (1986) critique in mind, we can say that this false separation of the gift from markets and money is relevant only to Western bourgeois society. Since solidarity is not charity, reproductive remuneration (through the formation of co-ops) and assistance from the state should not be seen to contradict solidarity principles or to co-opt anti-middleman activities. Rather, they should be perceived as the result of a multifarious, plural and anti-utilitarian system of integrated democracy and economy, where the realms of equality (state), freedom (markets) and solidarity (reciprocity) collide and are rendered interdependent. Solidarity, in order to survive over time, should be linked to enduring obligations, including remuneration for its participants (through market economy) and political power granted to its organizations (through political democracy). Movementality is an indig-



Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece

179

enous way for solidarity to be fused with state and markets through the gradual transformation of informal networks into cooperatives and SSE’s endorsement by the state. The solidarity economy was born in and is fuelled by the crisis. Unlike elsewhere (for example, France), it is the direct offspring of a critical historical turn and consequent political radicalization. Because of this, radical readings of ‘democracy’ are a pronounced feature of how ‘solidarity’ is understood in Greece, departing from the social-democratic tradition found in much sociological literature (Dacheaux and Goujon 2012; Hillenkamp 2013a) that sees the term as an alternative to development. This perspective suggests why we should take into account a major postulate of the ‘human economy’ approach, namely that a plural state structure must be built from below and negotiated through flows of multi-centred welfare, through articulation between the state and solidarity economy, always with an eye on redressing inequality. This observation leaves for another occasion the question of whether, in the midst of the sovereign debt crisis, rather than emancipating people from debt, the solidarity economy creates social relations that may be understood as the reverse of debt, even as they are often perceived in the context of moral indebtedness and reciprocity. The framework for this type of reciprocity is political in that it is informed by the radical politics of RA.ME members’ vision of what anti-middleman activity is for, which they then insert into a wider problematic concerning politics at large. NOTES  1. The term is a neologism in Greek, and has not yet joined the canon of the language. It first appeared in oral communications and eventually in articles of the radical left around 2003; it has been rejuvenated by the crisis and by the rise of the left in 2012, but is still relatively unknown outside the circle of sympathizers. I opt here for a neologism in English.  2. The group is committed to ‘solidarity economy’, sometimes distinguished from ‘social economy’; the two are often opposed, but also often joined together, especially in francophone countries. I shall use the term SSE (Social and Solidarity Economy) to indicate the more inclusive usage.  3. In other articles, I have focused on a similar group and its cohort in Thessaloniki, the second biggest city in Greece. What follows in the argumentation of the present chapter regarding ‘co-ops’, stands in relative contrast with findings in Thessaloniki, where groups do not apparently strive towards co-operativization. The nature of politics in the two places does seem to exhibit different dynamics, reflecting the social history of the two cities. The biggest contrast is between the evolution towards co-operativism and associated bu-

180

Theodoros Rakopoulos

reaucracy on the one hand, versus an insistence on informal sociality and antagonism towards bureaucracy on the other (Rakopoulos forthcoming).  4. Roughly 15 per cent of Greece’s population lives in the Western Districts.  5. SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left, has been influential in Athens and in the Parliament because of its vocal opposition, but it was just a small party before 2012. In the election of June that year it rose from 4 per cent to 27 per cent of the national vote and is, at the time of writing, Greece’s leading opposition. In a coalition of eleven parties about to become unified, the most dominant is Synaspismos, which has various official ‘tendencies’. The party is sympathetic to SSE. In contrast, KKE, the Communist Party, has repeatedly accused grassroots anti-middleman mobilization of ‘light’ neoliberal practices (Adam 2012).   6. I have studied RA.ME through intermittent fieldwork, spending time with its members in the squat, their homes, and on distribution days between late 2012 and late 2013, as part of an ongoing project. As, admittedly, ethnographic fieldwork elicits data that are temporally located in the time of fieldwork, by now (2015) a few things have changed. The most significant one is the fact that RA.ME, which increasingly identifies with the left, after falling out with anarchists running the ‘Bot. Squat’, are forced to meet elsewhere, mainly in cafes.   7. The party skyrocketed from 0.3 (in the 2009 elections) to 7 per cent of the national vote in May 2012, with eighteen seats in the Parliament and then kept on peaking, with 9.4 per cent and three seats in the European Parliament elections of May 2014, while in the general elections of 2015 it finished third.  8. From the acronym ‘PIIGS’ (‘Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain’). http:// www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/gdp_forecasts.  9. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13361934. 10. Data from the report of a Greek SSE Observatory (http://www.solidarity4all. gr/), confirmed by the Confederation of Trade Unions. 11. http://roarmag.org/2013/05/vio-me-zanon-factory-argentina-greece/. 12. http://www.amap-france.org/. 13. ‘The social and solidarity economy lies in the middle of the road of the politically impossible, until the point that it becomes politically impossible to avoid’ (Nikolopoulos and Kapogiannis 2013). 14. Three months after a RA.ME meeting ruled out the possibility of collaboration, tragic events confirmed these suspicions: three armed landowners fired on and severely wounded eight immigrant workers who simply wanted to be paid. 15. Not everyone was happy about this assertiveness. Informants who did not belong to the organization, but whom I had met through it, thought the term ‘solidarity’ suffered ‘overuse’ or ‘abuse of usage’. 16. The racist charity (food distributions, blood donation) organized by the neoNazi Golden Dawn, is concerned rather with the origin of those they are willing to offer resources to, strictly excluding immigrants. 17. ‘Reciprocity and redistribution are able to ensure the working of an economic system without the help of written records and elaborate administration because the organisation of the societies in question meets the requirements of



Solidarity Economy in Contemporary Greece

181

such a solution with the help of patterns such as symmetry and centricity’ (Polanyi 1957: 48). 18. A wide bibliography illustrates this idea, mainly in development studies (Lewis and Kanji 2009). 19. Admittedly, a Social Economy law was voted in recently (4019/2011). The Act was partly a response to the grassroots solidarity economies described here. 20. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/05/201352103715660344.html. 21. As we have seen, movementality’s assertive democracy excludes this prospective: the actors involved, including farmers, are expected to show some commitment to RA.ME’s views on democracy; and people like the Manolada producers are ruled out. Access to economic opportunity is thus conditional on abiding by their democratic principles. 22. This argument was heatedly debated with Ralph Milliband ([1973] 2009). See also, Powers (this volume). 23. This tension has a practical impact. For instance, grassroots ‘Social Doctors’ currently practice in Lithoupoli alongside, and inspired by, RA.ME. Social Doctors reflect various ideological tendencies within the Greek SSE. The Social Doctors in Thessaloniki are a radical citizens’ initiative that provides services universally, across the social spectrum (including immigrants); in Alexandroupoli, a small northern town, they do not cater for immigrants, since the service is organized by a conservative local diocese. 24. Corporate social responsibility also arises, where the most prominent market players proclaim themselves to be subjects of the social economy, refining an efficient marketing strategy. 25. Interestingly, the term has been linked to consumption crises and with community resistance to middlemen. 26. ‘Solidary economics’ is a possibly preferable translation of ‘économie solidaire’. 27. ‘It seems that the development of the solidarity economy is a consequence of political mobilisation at large’ (Rylmon 2013). 28. This stands, by and large, for Thessaloniki informal distribution groups as well, although they seem to prioritize informal relations of organization and distribution. Although being two instances of one movement, the case studies in the present and in another article (Rakopoulos forthcoming) diverge from the main idea, and my conceptualization of the situation follows suit.

Theodoros Rakopoulos is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Egalitarianism programme, Social Anthropology department, University of Bergen, and was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria. He is preparing a monograph tentatively entitled Divided by Land: Labour and Moralities in Sicilian Antimafia Cooperatives, based on his PhD research (Goldsmiths). He has published on food activism, cooperatives, community, mafia, crisis and the solidarity economy.

Chapter 9

░ Money for a Human Economy A Reflection from Argentina HADRIEN SAIAG

This chapter provides a normative reflection on the form that money could take in a human economy, based on Argentina’s recent history. The human economy is conceived from a bottom-up perspective, as a transformative process through which each individual is allowed to participate fully in a wide spectrum of collective entities, including the abstract structures of society,1 based on people’s local practices and needs. Addressing money issues from this perspective implies taking some distance from the widespread view that this abstract character necessarily ‘erode[s] the sociability subtending human existence, and the very idea of society itself’, as in the accounts of both Marx and Simmel (Maurer 2006: 19). Money is plural and diverse, as it can take a wide variety of forms and tends to reproduce an ample range of social relations, from exploitation to emancipation. From a human economy perspective, then, money’s abstract character should be put to the service of collective emancipation, through the extension of society beyond local and interpersonal bonds (Hart 2013a). To avoid exploitation and social marginalization through money, however, it is necessary to ensure people’s equal access to it. This chapter’s aim is twofold. First, I try to show that unequal access to money resulting from financial marginalization leads to important consequences for a household’s financial management. These observations are based on ethnographic research carried out in 2009 in Rosario, one of the most industrialized areas in Argentina, located 400 km from Buenos Aires. Financial marginalization refers to the fact that Rosario’s working class has been integrated into financial institutions in an extrovert way, focused almost exclusively on consumer credit, ignoring all other reasons for wanting access to money. Rosario’s working class is exemplary in this respect, since they were progressively deprived of protected wage-labour during the 1990s, and no formal financial institutions tackled their need



Money for a Human Economy

183

for savings (the National Post Savings Bank closed in 1994) (Roig 2009). Second, I suggest how finance might be transformed in order to reverse the monetary exclusion of the low-income population. One possible approach might be to extend working-class access to the national currency (the Argentinian peso) through substantial reform of the microfinance industry, based on a clearer understanding of the complexity of existing informal financial practices. I argue first that diversification of microfinance products with an emphasis on savings is much needed if the various competing financial needs of Rosario’s working class are to be addressed. A second, more radical suggestion is to construct new monetary systems through federated networks of local currencies, issued by grassroots organizations. Argentinian monetary history provides evidence of such a possibility in trueque (a system of ‘barter clubs’ from 1995 to the present), supplemented by currencies issued by provincial governments (1983–2003). The chapter is organized as follows. The first section shows how Rosario’s working class has faced financial marginalization during the last two decades and how cash shortages are managed through a myriad of informal financial practices. The next considers the limitations of assimilating microfinance to microcredit, and suggests some possible developments that could strengthen workers’ access to the Argentinian peso. The final section suggests more radical changes, through the issue of local currencies within a federal structure, based on civil society organizations (trueque), and provincial governments.

Monetary Exclusion and Social Marginalization A Historical Process The marginalization of Rosario’s working class from financial institutions that command access to the Argentinian peso is relatively recent. Indeed, contrary to many southern countries, Argentina’s working class was once relatively well integrated into the formal wage-labour market and into the national system of social protection. In the interwar period, Argentina was considered to be a rich country because of sustained growth in agro-exports. Workers’ full integration into the national social protection system was achieved during Perón’s first presidency and was then legally extended to the entire active population in the period 1944–55 (Goldberg and Lo Vuolo 2006). This scheme, based on employers’ and workers’ collective insurance, was however weakened by growth in undeclared

184

Hadrien Saiag

employment during the 1980s and 1990s, because social benefits (e.g. pensions, health care and unemployment insurance) remained strongly tied to formal wage-labour employment until the end of the 1990s. Even so, in the early 1990s, Rosario was still one of Argentina’s main industrial bastions, along with Buenos Aires’ southern suburbs (Sosa 2007). Most of the male labour force was employed in big industries based along the Parana River (mainly paper pulp and the harbour). Women used to work in a porcelain factory before they got married. Formal wage-labour employment was usually maintained until retirement and allowed wage-earners’ families to be fully integrated into the national social protection scheme. In the case of married couples, men were usually the sole breadwinners; wives stayed at home to manage the housework. For Rosario’s working class, then, the key change arose with the implementation of a new monetary regime in 1991, which was intended to call a halt to the hyperinflation that struck Argentina in the late 1980s (in 1989 the annual inflation rate exceeded 3,700 per cent). The so-called ‘convertibility regime’ was born at this time. It consisted of ensuring that the peso was the equivalent of the U.S. dollar for domestic transactions, through maintaining strict parity between the two currencies (usually referred as a ‘currency board’). This fixed parity deeply affected the competitiveness of Argentina’s domestic firms. There was no room for devaluation because the whole social fabric was said to depend on this parity (Roig 2007). In order to compensate for losses, the federal government introduced much greater flexibility in the labour market, but the reduction in gross wages did not match any gains from the fixed parity (Beccaria, Esquivel and Maurizio 2007). As a result, the 1990s saw massive deindustrialization and a sharp increase in income inequality and informal employment. Keeping the convertibility regime after the Brazilian crisis of 1998 led to a huge economic, social and political crisis in 2001–02: GDP decreased by almost 20 per cent (compared with its level in 1998), new forms of social protest emerged and five different presidents took office between December 2001 and January 2002. The convertibility regime was abandoned in January 2002. Since then, the peso is still considered to be the only legal tender (Sgard 2007) and its exchange rate with foreign currencies was deliberately undervalued to support Argentina’s partial reindustrialization (Giosa Zuazúa 2007). As a result, employment and real wages rose and income inequality decreased from 2003 to 2007 (and then stayed at that level until 2009). However, this did not significantly alter the employment norm, since the absolute number of non-registered wage earners (i.e. those not registered in the Argentinian social security system)



Money for a Human Economy

185

increased only slightly from 2003 to 2010 (Damill, Frenkel and Maurizio 2011). The proportion of non-registered wage earners fell from 44 per cent to 36 per cent between 2003 and 2008 because the number of declared wage earners increased. In addition, the income gap between registered and non-registered wage earners increased slightly: the real wages of the former regained their 2001 level after 2007, while the real wages of the latter only recovered 90 per cent of their 2001 level in 2009 (ibid.). Because Rosario’s suburbs were highly industrialized, its working class was directly affected by these macroeconomic changes. Admittedly, their economic situation has improved substantially since 2002. However, in the longer run, a dramatic change happened in their employment conditions. Until the early 1990s, all the people I interviewed were involved directly or indirectly (through their partner or parents) in an employment relationship that offered stability, a regular salary and social protection. Yet, the structural shifts mentioned above relegated them to the margin of protected employment: during my fieldwork, only two interviewees had relatives with this kind of job. Most household livelihoods were based on a combination of precarious jobs. Men might work as non-registered truck or taxi drivers, construction or industrial workers, street vendors, urban waste recyclers and every kind of contingent daily labour. In addition, their wives’ contributions to household income increased, through home-based sewing, street vending (mostly food), paid housework, home-based cloth retail and participation in second-hand markets based on their own local currency (‘trueque’ – see below).

Managing Cash Shortage through Informal Financial Practices This new context is characterized by strong pressure on households’ financial management, due to the growing gap between money income and expenditure. On the one hand, access to money became scarcer and irregular due to falling real wages, the shift to precarious unregistered jobs, and fluctuating self-employed earnings (often seasonal, or affected by daily weather conditions). On the other hand, the need to access and use money became more pressing, both in order to tackle short-term fluctuations of income (self-employed earnings often depend on wage earners’ spending their pay, which usually happens twice a month) and to protect households against long-term uncertainty (changes in the macroeconomic environment, job loss, death, illness, split in the household unit, etc.). Moreover, this last need has been intensified by a weakening of the social protection system, due to the growth of informal employment in the 1990s. Admittedly, in order to deal with the exclusion of

186

Hadrien Saiag

informal workers from such a system, federal, provincial and municipal governments implemented a myriad of non-contributory assistance programmes for vulnerable households, based either on cash or transfers in kind (Barrientos 2009).2 Most of Rosario’s working class households benefit from some of them. However, the benefits are limited – they meet short-term emergency needs but ignore both short-term income fluctuations and long-term protection against uncertainty.3 My interviewees used to cope with pressing financial needs through a myriad of informal savings and credit/debt arrangements.4 In order to maintain ‘financial self-discipline’ (Guérin 2006), these are fragmented and not substitutable. They are diverse, but all seek to separate what can be spent from what cannot (Roig 2009). A first category of such practices aims at controlling short-term cyclical cash flows that are specific to non-wage activities, characterized by low and irregular incomes. The most common of these consists of allocating income to specific expenses, through an earmarking system of boxes or envelopes (Zelizer 1994). For instance, women with small-scale income-generating activities (sewing, cloth resale, cooking, etc.) would put their earnings from the first sales of each week into a separate envelope until the accumulated sum was sufficient to buy the inputs required for the next week’s production; only the earnings of subsequent sales would be used to cover daily expenses in the household’s budget (see also Absi 2007). Likewise, interviewees whose more capital-intensive income-generating activity (such as a home-based sewing shop) relied on considerable inputs (e.g. wool, sewing thread, paint) systematically purchased more inputs than needed in the shortterm to make sure they would not spend savings on non-business items, since it would endanger their activity’s continuity. Finally, this separation between short-term cash-flow management and household consumption needs was also based on the common practice of deferred payment for foodstuffs from local shops, known as fiado (Villarreal 2000; Roig 2009). When it comes to lump sums, savings are not usually held in cash. Rather, they are held in the form of objects, in order to keep them separate from monetary resources that might be spent on daily needs. In other words, they are made ‘illiquid’ (Shipton 1995; Roig 2009). The most common way to do this is through accumulating recyclable goods, such as iron, zinc, copper, cardboard, plastic, and glass bottles. These are obtained in different ways, according to household livelihoods: slum dwellers would salvage by night, working as waste recyclers but only selling part of what they collect (Roig 2009); they can also be obtained through people’s jobs (construction workers recycle used pipes, small shopkeepers break down cardboard packaging, etc.), or by stripping down parts



Money for a Human Economy

187

of miscellaneous items found in the street (e.g. a fan or radio). A related practice is to gradually acquire bricks to improve housing, either through payment in kind for casual labour or through the regular purchase of large quantities of bricks in pesos (here people would save part of their cash income through a system of envelopes, in order to buy bricks in bulk). Bricks can never be resold: as soon as they reach a critical number, they are used to improve housing. These practices allow households to guard against long-term linear uncertainty and long-term life-cycle events (see also Shipton 1995). Indeed, recyclable goods can be sold in case of a temporary loss of income (e.g. loss of a job, illness, broken marriage), unexpected expenses, or in order to finance life-cycle events (birthdays, rites of passage towards adulthood – girls’ fiesta de quince and boys’ 18th birthday, wedding and marriage-related expenses – house construction, funerals, etc.). Amassing bricks serves similar purposes: construction projects are often reserved for the new generation (a house for a recently married offspring, a room for the children); accumulating bricks rather than cash allows housing to be improved in face of long-term uncertainty. Compared with other southern contexts (Adams and Fitchett 1992; Servet 2006; Collins et al. 2009), these practices rarely extend beyond household boundaries. Household savings are physically kept within the domestic unit. Short-term cash-flow management, protection against uncertainty and financing life-cycle events often rely on borrowing from relatives. Only the fiado goes beyond the extended family’s boundaries: to my knowledge, there are no pawnbrokers, no neighbourhood associations for funerals, and rotating saving and credit associations (ROSCAs) are restricted to formally employed wage earners. This is probably due to the conjunction of Rosario workers’ marginalization from formal financial institutions and their previous integration into the formal complex of wage-labour and national social protection. All of this illustrates how precariously they engage with society through money.

Transforming Microfinance A first way to reverse monetary exclusion would be to propose financial innovations that allow Rosario’s working class better access to national currency in case of need. These are usually referred to as ‘microfinance’, because low-income populations in most southern countries are often excluded from formal financial institutions (Servet 2006). However, microfinance is often conceived in a narrow way, when it is restricted to

188

Hadrien Saiag

microcredit, understood as a tool for poverty reduction. Such a view is based on the myth of the ‘industrious poor’, according to which an exclusive focus on providing credit to the poor will necessarily reduce poverty, as the latter are only poor because they lack productive assets (Fouillet et al. 2007). Moreover, this argument is politically highly problematic, as it suggests that financially self-sufficient microfinance organizations could replace government spending. I argue, therefore, that Argentinian microfinance should be reformed, given that it is almost exclusively focused on microcredit. Rather than aiming at poverty reduction, it should, more modestly, seek to improve people’s financial management capacities, extending the financial repertoire of Rosario’s working class (Servet 2008).5 It should be conceived of as being complementary to rather than a substitute for informal financial practices (Morvant-Roux 2009). In this section, I suggest two possible changes, based on detailed knowledge of people’s informal financial practices and needs (see also Vonderlack and Schreiner 2002; Lont and Hospes 2004; Collins et al. 2009; Guérin, Morvant-Roux and Servet 2011): first, to diversify microcredit beyond only financing micro-enterprises; second, and most important, to introduce a wide range of savings schemes.

A Narrow Focus: Microfinance as ‘Productive’ Microcredit Narrow assimilation of microfinance to microcredit is widespread in Argentina: offers of microfinance products are almost exclusively focused on lending for productive use; savings schemes and credit for other purposes are exceptional (de Nigris 2008). But Argentinian microfinance has two distinctive features. First, the estimated number of users is very low, compared with other Latin American countries: Renaud (2007) suggests that only twenty-five thousand people use microfinance products in Argentina. Second, most microfinance services are provided through a government programme created in 1997 (the FONCAP, Fondo Fiduciario de Capital Social), since the scope of local and international NGOs operating in this field is very limited in Argentina. This programme funds a network of local NGOs that deal directly with local populations (de Nigris 2008). The main implication of such public funding is that annual nominal interest rates are very low (6 per cent, while the official inflation rate was 7.7 per cent in 2009). Otherwise, microcredit is openly inspired by the Grameen Bank’s lending method based on joint liability groups of five borrowers: the loaned sum ranging from 500 to 1,000 pesos (100 to 200 euros at the time of fieldwork) for a six-month period, with weekly instalments.



Money for a Human Economy

189

In the northern suburbs of Rosario, the distribution of FONCAP microcredit is supervised by a local NGO, Poriajhú. During fieldwork, approximately half of my interviewees used it. All loans financed selfemployed income-generating activities,6 in three different ways. First, buying from a wholesaler in order to sell retail, adding a commercial margin, is common, and encompasses a wide range of activities, including small-scale street vending (clothes), home-based clothes selling in slums, and establishing general stores (kiosko), especially for beverages and food. Second, microcredit is also often used as working capital, when income-generating activities need an injection. This is mostly the case for cooked-food producers (street or home-based – flour, eggs, sugar, pie plates, etc.) and home-based sewing shops (materials such as clothing, thread, wool, needles, etc.). Finally, microcredit is sometimes used to acquire productive capital, such as a sewing machine, oven, fridge, electric whisk, bicycle or bricks. Such items are often too expensive, however, to be financed through microcredit alone, which is thus usually complemented by personal savings or credit from a shopkeeper. The needs met by microcredit and its impact on livelihoods depend on how it is used.7 When used as working capital, microcredit helps to tackle short-term cash-flow management: it allows weekly productive expenditures to be financed independently from household daily consumption. Cash-flow management is also improved by using microcredit to acquire miscellaneous items from wholesalers, but less often because weekly instalments do not fit with sales fluctuations over a month (especially for clothes). Finally, when it is used for productive capital, microcredit tends to increase the productivity of food production, sewing capacity, sales and the variety of foodstuffs sold. Microcredit for productive purposes alone, however, does not by itself reverse the monetary exclusion of workers, for two reasons. First, such loans hardly benefit the poorest, because they tend to target the financial management of small businesses that are already established (Collins et al. 2009: 167; Servet 2015: chapter 3). Moreover, there is a risk of increasing inequality from below, since only the better off (well-established businesses, with relatively significant working capital) use them to increase their productivity. Second, if productive microcredit is a useful tool to tackle cash-flow management needs, it by no means addresses every financial need of Rosario’s working class.

190

Hadrien Saiag

Reforming Microfinance: Some Suggestions It is therefore important to conceive microfinance in terms that go beyond microcredit so that two other kinds of needs might be tackled: obtaining lump sums to finance life-cycle events and protecting households against a radically uncertain future (Lont and Hospes 2004; Servet 2006; Collins et al. 2009; Guérin, Morvant-Roux and Servet 2011). To meet these purposes, microfinance services should be based on lessons gained from the informal practices presented in the previous section: these reveal that it is crucial to find a balance between two constraints that are hard to reconcile. On the one hand, the fragmented characteristics of informal saving and debt practices should be retained, because both earmarking and objectification of cash allow people to maintain ‘financial self-discipline’ (Guérin 2006). One way of meeting this constraint consists in proposing a wide range of ‘special-purpose’ savings and debt services, aiming to tackle specific needs (see Mutesasira 1999). On the other hand, financial services need to be flexible, in order to allow people to adapt their behaviour to uncertainty and change (Guérin, Morvan-Roux and Servet 2011; see also Guyer 2004: chapter 9). Indeed, low-income populations usually face a myriad of competing financial needs, and juggling them is always subject to unexpected events. Therefore, financial services would probably be used for different purposes. Given massive popular mistrust of financial institutions, such flexibility would probably also help to build trust in microfinance institutions, since this is the main feature of informal financial practices. A first way to improve working-class financial management, therefore, is to extend credit for more purposes than just existing ‘productive’ microcredit. However, it is important to keep interest rates at a reasonable level otherwise income transfers generated by working class’ indebtedness would tend to increase income inequalities in favour of the owners of financial capital. Three paths, which are not mutually exclusive, could be followed in this respect. First, credit for larger amounts could be offered in order to finance the acquisition of productive capital by relatively well-established businesses (at present loan amounts are too low). Second, following the experience of SafeSave in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the flexibility of loans should be increased as regards to the amount, repayment period and speed of processing (Rutherford 2004). This is important so that people can gain access to loans quickly in case of an emergency, while the rigidity of existing ‘productive’ microcredits in Argentina prevents this. Third, in order to facilitate the accumulation of lump sums, the Grameen Bank’s ‘top-up’ facility, which allows microfinance debtors to refresh their loan once half of it has been repaid, could be deployed.



Money for a Human Economy

191

Indeed, detailed analysis of low-income Bangladeshi financial practices shows that this is very popular among the poorest as a way of meeting cyclical expenses that involve large amounts, for buying food stocks, paying school fees and funding funerals (Collins et al. 2009: 162–64). An exclusive focus on loans would be highly problematic, however, for three reasons. First, this would impede full participation by the poorest, who try to avoid debt because of its cost and anticipated repayment difficulties. Second, it would likely contribute to people becoming over-indebted, as exemplified by microfinance crises in Andhra Pradesh (India), Nicaragua, Morocco, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Pakistan, and even more by the growing indebtedness of low-income populations in southern countries (Guérin, Morvant-Roux and Villarreal 2013; Schraten this volume). Even if the microcredit offered in Argentina is limited nowadays, this risk is real because of the rise of consumer credit since 2004, and its being targeted on the poorest8 (de Nigris 2008: 31). Third, and most important, the fact that all my interviewees save in multiple ways and do so through complex practices aimed at preserving them from being tempted to spend beyond their low and irregular incomes shows that for them saving is more important than access to loans. Yet, much must be done to improve savings facilities, since no formal financial institution offers such a service to Argentina’s working class. First, easily accessible savings would help them to tackle short-term cash-flow management problems, as does Poriajhú’s innovative ‘personal savings’ programme (ahorro personal). During the weekly microcredit repayment sessions, debtors are given a chance to repay a bit more than their weekly instalment; this excess is noted and can be withdrawn during any repayment session. There are three main advantages to this. First, repayment of microcredit is made less rigid, because savings may be withdrawn in order to make good low sales during the week. Second, it improves women’s control over their savings, allowing them to save outside the household. Third, accessible microsavings can also be used as a protection device, providing access to money in case of pressing need. Such ‘passbook savings’ schemes (Collins et al. 2009: 160–62) could also be detached from microcredit in order to meet non-microcredit users’ needs to make regular savings deposits and withdrawals. Improving long-term savings management (either for financing lifecycle events or protecting against long-term uncertainty) is also vital because the value of saving in the form of objects fluctuates. This requires more complex products to be provided in order to put long-term savings out of reach of the temptation to spend them for routine purposes. Four avenues could be explored in this respect:

192

Hadrien Saiag

(1) First, savings and credit institutions could be formed with a view to financing specific expenses (housing improvements, funerals, etc.). Their degree of formality could vary from ROSCAs to workers’ cooperatives9 (as in nineteenth-century building societies); in any case, the collective saving acts as a strong incentive not to use savings for ordinary consumption. (2) ‘Special-purpose savings’ products,10 aimed at financing specific life-cycle events (such as birthdays, marriage, puberty ceremonies, housing improvement, funerals, etc.) could be developed. In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank’s ‘commitment savings account’ provides such a product for relatively predictable events, offering a better interest rate if savers save regularly over a five-to-ten-year term. But the poorest hardly use this service, because it is hard to generate regular savings over such a long period (Collins et al. 2009: 167–71). (3) To broaden access to long-term savings, Vonderlack and Schreiner’s (2002) proposal to ‘match savings’ is one possibility, whereby a premium is granted only if savings are withdrawn for specific expenses (e.g. health care, childbirth, wedding, funerals). Such a service requires external funding to pay the premium. (4) Finally, long-term financial needs could also be tackled by microinsurance focusing on specific risks, such as health care and funerals (Churchill 2006) or cyclical expenses (marriage, puberty ceremonies, etc.). In order to avoid transferring income to private companies, these products could be collectively managed through mutual contributions to neighbourhood or workers’ associations, when withdrawals could be expected on a specific date.

Pluralizing Money The second way to reverse the Rosario working class’s experience of financial marginalization would be to issue multiple monies in addition to the national currency. This approach is much more radical than the innovations in microfinance suggested above; rather than transforming the existing monetary system from its margins, it allows for the creation of wholly new monetary forms. In any case, such currencies are based on political communities whose social and geographical boundaries do not necessarily coincide with those of unitary states (Servet 2013b). They need not necessarily compete with national currencies, but should be seen as complementary, restricted to specific transactional spheres defined by geographical and social boundaries (as were Polanyi’s [1968] ‘special purpose monies’).



Money for a Human Economy

193

This proposition admittedly contradicts popular wisdom according to which each political entity should have its own monopoly currency. But this view is in fact quite recent, and is specific to the rise of a peculiar political organization, the nation-state (Helleiner 2003) – and it is not irreversible. Emerging in the mid nineteenth century and culminating in the twentieth, legal tender was used to unify national markets, enforce fiscal policy, control money supply, and, last but not least, strengthen national identities (ibid.). Before that, a plurality of money forms was the norm: both foreign currencies (for long-distance trade) and low-denomination coins issued by local merchants and towns circulated alongside national gold and silver currencies. The nation-state became hegemonic in Europe because it allowed industrial capitalism to be managed on a centralized basis (Hart 2013a). Yet, as Hart argues, this hegemony has been threatened of late by the extension of markets beyond national boundaries as a result of neoliberal globalization. National political institutions are becoming more disconnected from the world economy, and money’s uniqueness is increasingly contested, through monetary unions, use of foreign currencies, electronic currencies issued by private corporations and local currencies (Helleiner 2003). As Hart points out, regional federations, based on a plural conception of society, are one response to this situation. Money should ideally conform to a federal political structure (Théret) by being organized as a ‘federated network’ (Hart 2013a: 41) of issuers, allowing both local interests to be safeguarded and participation in an increasingly globalized world. Money, then, should be plural and decentralized, and issued in a non-exclusive way by various levels of government (including municipal, provincial and federal) and by civil society organizations. Argentina’s recent monetary history illustrates such a view in a particularly interesting way: it has seen multiple currencies issued by provincial governments and networks of civil society organizations. This history shows that radical social change may be achieved through introducing new money forms, and provides examples of how to federate local monetary experiments.

The Potential for Radical Change: The Trueque in 2009 In addition to the peso, several unconvertible paper monies denominated in their own unit of account (crédito) circulate in the main Argentinian urban agglomerations. These currencies are also known as trueque,11 which refers to a wide diversity of monetary experiments initiated in civil society from 1995 onwards (see the next subsection). As such, the trueque

194

Hadrien Saiag

belongs to a wider family of ‘community and complementary currencies’, which aims at making money a tool of collective emancipation, in line with the utopian socialisms of Owen, Proudhon and Gessell (Blanc 2010). In Rosario and its surroundings, the crédito bills are of very low denomination, and tap into part of the urban informal economy. They are used on market days (ferias) when the main items sold are food (mainly groceries and vegetables), used clothes, sewn items and cleaning products. Such ferias are attended by up to a hundred people, coming from different social backgrounds: slum dwellers, activists and members of the impoverished middle class. My ethnographic research in Rosario and its surroundings documents both the potential and the limitations for radical social transformation through local currencies (Saiag 2014). Indeed, the situation varies widely between the city of Rosario and its northern suburbs. In the former, crédito bills are issued by the couple who first implemented trueque there (in 1998), but no formal organization runs it (ferias are supervised by ‘coordinators’, but their influence on crédito users is very limited). Moreover, use of the crédito is not associated with any political project. On the other hand, in Rosario’s northern suburbs, trueque is integrated into the wider activities of Poriajhú, an activist organization inspired by liberation theology, which aims to liberate the poorest through critical education (by radio, school tutoring, an adult literacy scheme, a microcredit programme, etc.). Moreover, the crédito embodies Poriajhú’s political project, because of its symbolic dimension and the way créditos are issued. In Poriajhú, trueque participants receive their first crédito bills before getting involved in any transaction; they are therefore indebted to the collective, thereby underlining the political and holistic nature of Poriajhú’s project. Rosario is the opposite of all this. Such differences in the institutionalization of trueque lead to deep contrasts in the social relationships for which the crédito is a medium. On the one hand, in Rosario, multiple currencies tend to reinforce prevailing social stratification, because of trueque participants’ unequal ability to take advantage of price structures. Indeed, in this locality, relative prices depend on the unit in which transactions are denominated, as the crédito/peso ratio varies from one commodity to another. This means that participants who can juggle between the peso and the crédito are able to gain from doing so. Yet, only those who enjoy a comfortable income in pesos and are mobile around the city can take advantage, whereas most slum-dwellers are restricted to making deals through trueque using commodities they received as payment in kind for daily contingent work (mainly used clothes and expired industrial groceries).



Money for a Human Economy

195

In Poriajhú, on the other hand, keeping to strict parity between crédito and peso for every commodity prevents this kind of market stratification (some juggling between peso and crédito also takes place, but with no systematic gain). This version of trade using créditos is an important achievement, since trueque participants’ socio-economic backgrounds are highly diverse: they range from relatively well-established small shopkeepers to street vendors and people relegated to working on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, it is a tool for collective emancipation in that the social inequalities that prevail outside the limits of trueque are not reproduced within it. This overview yields two lessons. First, local currencies do not necessarily lead to a more inclusive monetary system: in order to do that, they must translate a wider political project into the language of money (price determination and condition of access to money), as underlined by Poriajhú’s insistence on crédito/peso parity. Second, the social change induced by such currencies is confined within local borders, as money circulation is limited to the main urban agglomerations. Yet, in a human economy perspective, it is just as important to extend the scope of economic alternatives beyond local and interpersonal relations, in order to engage with and transform large-scale bureaucracies and the world order (Hart 2013b).

Transcending Local Borders through Federated Networks: Trueque (1995–2002) A crucial issue, then, is to find ways to extend the reach of local currencies, without putting into peril their local roots. One solution, suggested by the history of the trueque from 1995 to 2002, might be to build federated networks that allow locally issued currencies to be used beyond their territory of origin. Such a federative structure did emerge by degrees (Saiag 2013). From May 1995 to late 1996, the trueque consisted of small-scale systems of ‘multilateral compensation of credit and debt’ (Servet 1999: 183): the account of each participant, denominated in créditos, was debited or credited according to their purchases and sales. Ferias organized by the founders of trueque first took place in Bernal (a southern suburb of Buenos Aires) in the garage of three environmental activists. Several new ferias opened in 1996. At this time, they were not connected, because debt settlement happened at each feria independently. An attempt to go beyond interpersonal relations was made in late 1996, when the system of debt compensation was replaced by issuing bills denominated in créditos

196

Hadrien Saiag

(the computer files were said to be too time consuming to update when the number of participants increased). Créditos were issued locally and belonged to a specific feria (they could not be used to settle transactions outside their original feria). A few months later, the trueque founders replaced the locally issued crédito bills with a homogeneous set of bills that could be used at any feria. The first trueque network was created (‘Red Global de Trueque’), but was based on a centralized structure. A federative structure emerged in 1997 as a way of maintaining the singularity of the unit of account (crédito) throughout the network, while promoting decentralization of the mechanism for issuing bills.12 The issuing process became fragmented, through a spatial division of ferias into different ‘zones’ of Buenos Aires: Capital (city), Southern, Western and Northern (suburbs). This structure was adapted to the spatial expansion of the network, adding ‘zones’ when new parts of provinces were incorporated. Each zone established its own rules for issuing money, but in order to be part of the network they had to respect a maximum ratio of créditos per participant established by the ‘Interzonal Commission’ (composed of representatives of each zone who met every two months). As a result, each zone issued its own set of bills, clearly distinguishable from other zones’ bills (in colour, motif, shape and size), but each locally issued bill was accepted throughout the network, regardless of its original zone. In this way trueque achieved scale (it was present in all provinces at the peak of the Argentinian crisis), while strengthening local development. Trueque’s federal structure ended in 2002. After reaching an estimated 2.5 million participants in the first semester, the main trueque networks were subject to hyperinflation from May to September 2002. After that, trueque recovered on a local basis, but it lost its federal structure. We need to understand the roots of this crisis if we want new forms of federal money be more resilient. This question is highly complex and contested (counterfeit and a switch in political alliances certainly played a role). I have argued elsewhere that this crisis revealed the political dimensions of how money is issued, as hyperinflation seems to have resulted partly from the use of créditos issued by centralized trueque networks, thereby showing that the federal political project supported by the first trueque network was not shared by all crédito users (Saiag 2013). Therefore, for monetary federalism to be sustainable, we should acknowledge its political dimension, embedded as it is in collective values and representations.



Money for a Human Economy

197

Extending Federalism through Provincial Currencies (1983–2003) Following Théret and Zanabria (2007), the idea of federal monetary networks can also be applied to state currencies, when the state takes the form of a federal rather than unitary entity. Argentina provides an interesting case, since federated entities (provinces) recurrently issued their own currencies from the 1880s, under a regime of democratic government. They were also called fiscal currencies, because they were closely linked to provincial fiscal circuits, being issued to pay local government employees and suppliers, and accepted in settlement of provincial taxes. In most cases they were convertible into the national currency. They re-emerged in the period 1983–2003, when up to sixteen provincial currencies represented 40 per cent of the means of settlement in circulation (M1). The oldest provincial currencies emerged soon after the end of the last military dictatorship in the north-western provinces (Salta, La Rioja, Tucuman and Jujuy) as a way of gaining a degree of financial autonomy from Buenos Aires. They were much more durable than the national currencies in that they survived the hyperinflations of the late 1980s (the switch from the Austral to the ‘convertible peso’) and the crisis of the convertible peso in January 2002. Most of them, however, emerged to combat the degradation of provincial finances during the 1990s (Cordoba, Catamarca, Formosa, Mendoza, Rio Negro, San Juan, Misiones and Corrientes) or in the state of emergency at the peak of the 2001–2002 crisis (Buenos Aires, Chaco, Entre Rios, San Luis and Santiago del Estero). Admittedly, the room for bottom-up radical social change in this case is slighter than through local currencies, since provincial currencies are necessarily integrated into bureaucratic structures. Provincial currencies are interesting from a human economy perspective for two reasons. First, they may help to redress the geographical roots of financial marginalization, as Argentina’s peripheral provinces are characterized by a recurrent shortage of cash due to the extreme centralization of the monetary system (Olivera 1992). Second, and more importantly, provincial currencies enhance the value of building selective alliances with progressive provincial governments. Indeed, they increase the latter’s room for economic manoeuvre, through offering greater financial autonomy as regards both central governments and financial markets. Moreover, provincial currencies are a monetary translation of federative political structures (Olivera 1992) which make it easier for grassroots initiatives to engage with large-scale transnational bureaucracies, based on recognition of local singularities.

198

Hadrien Saiag

Conclusion: From Research to Political Implementation I have tried here, building on my ethnographic research, to suggest a number of ways to improve the low-income population’s access to money. This has meant engaging with politics on the basis of scholarly research. This raises the question of a researcher’s role in the politics of formulating policy: what is his specific contribution in this respect? The social sciences must not be reserved as a toolkit for policy experts, since this would bypass collective discussion of societal issues – a sine qua non for the goal of economic democracy. I would argue that the researcher’s task is twofold. First, research should shed new light on political issues and alternative possibilities. In this respect, a study of people’s savings and loan behaviour can highlight how exclusion from access to money is a synonym for social marginalization. Conceptual work may also frame possible actions to redress this situation: as Roig (2009) argues, governments’ and bankers’ ignorance of people’s need for savings is mainly due to the prevailing conception of poverty as being trapped in the short-term and to a fantasy of escape through entrepreneurship, both of which are wrong. Moreover, if federated networks of local and provincial currencies are to be considered as viable alternatives, we need to challenge the dominant conception of money. Rather than considering it as a single instrument performing all the monetary ‘functions’, it should be seen as a fragmented set of instruments aiming to evaluate and settle different kinds of debts (Guyer 2004; Kuroda 2008; Servet, Théret and Yildirim 2008; Saiag 2014). It is also possible to engage more deeply with society. Grounding our researches in what people do and making our work available to the public are important in this respect (Sutton-Brown-Fox this volume). A further step might be to promote a vast dialogue linking institutions and people on the ground, which could act as a possible lever of social change. In the case of money, this would include microfinance programmes involving governments and NGOs, but also provincial governments and grassroots organizations. Researchers’ suggestions could then be openly discussed, but also challenged and transformed by confronting other possible alternatives drawn from popular sources. Such a confrontation would aim to generate an unlimited series of interactions from society to research, and back to society. The different avenues I have touched on here are rooted in the experience of Rosario’s working class people. Wider exposure within a broad but selective network of alliances is needed if the core ideals they convey are to be inserted into other contexts.



Money for a Human Economy

199

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Keith Hart, Jean-Michel Servet and the members of the internal seminar of the Human Economy Programme for their comments on this text. An earlier version was presented at the international conference, ‘The Human Economy: Economy and Democracy’, University of Pretoria, 22–24 August 2013. NOTES  1. This normative view is influenced by Nancy Fraser’s (2003) conception of parity of participation, according to which ‘justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers’ (ibid.: 36). In this perspective, social justice embraces both the equal distribution of material resources (redistribution) and equal status, regardless of age, sex, sexual orientation, etc. (recognition). As this text focuses on money, it mainly tackles the economic dimension of social justice. We need to understand better the implications of the forms of money and wealth distribution for status differentiation.  2. Most cash programmes are implemented by federal or provincial governments. They focus on households considered to be vulnerable, because of unemployment (plan trabajar, assignación universal por hijos), single mothers, big families (plan madre de mas de siete hijos), disabled household members, etc. Transfers in kind are usually implemented by municipalities and churches.  3. In addition, most of these subsidies are distributed on a discretionary basis in order to win political support (except the asgnacion universal por hijos).  4. I do not provide details about remittances here, because I have no fieldwork data on them. However, they are common, as the World Bank highlights: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT/countries/1W?display=graph (Retrieved 3 July 2013).  5. The idea of ‘repertoire’ is taken from Guyer (2004).   6. Beneficiaries had to present receipts in order to attest a ‘productive’ use.   7. For a deeper critique of microcredit’s socio-economic impact, see Servet (2015: chapter 3).  8. In 2009, some interviewees used consumer credit, but it was only available to someone who could produce a payslip, in a context of high employment and informality (see also Roig 2009).  9. Such institutions are also known as friendly societies. In Europe, they played an important role during the industrial revolution before evolving into specialized formal institutions (see Smelser [1959] 2005 for the case of England). 10. The expression ‘special-purpose savings’ refers to Polanyi’s (1968) ‘special-purpose monies’, which are used in specific ‘money-uses’. 11. Its literal translation is ‘barter’. The Spanish term highlights that it is an alternative form of money.

200

Hadrien Saiag

12. This federative structure was challenged in 2000–2002 by the creation of two centralized trueque networks. These networks are not described here.

Hadrien Saiag is research fellow in economic anthropology at the CNRS in Paris (research unit IIAC-LAIOS). He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pretoria (Human Economy Programme), when this paper was written. He is the author of several articles published in Economy and Society, the Revue Française de Socio-Economie, Economie et Sociétés and a forthcoming book, La monnaie par le bas en Agentine: heurs et malheurs du trueque (Paris: Karthala).

Chapter 10

░ Human Economy

The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness KEITH HART

The Introduction dealt quite fully with the object, methods and principles of a human economy approach. Here I examine some of the precedents for such an approach in the history of modern revolutions. I then compare the idea of a human economy in our programme with David Graeber’s (2011). Graeber (2013) has been closely associated with direct action politics of revolutionary intent, and I conclude with some reflections on the tension between gradualism and revolution in our moment of history. The writings and politics of C.L.R. James figure prominently in this account for the good reason that most of what I know about revolution (at second or third hand) I learned from him. The ‘human economy’ is one way of taking forward the great conversation about making a better world. I will mention here a few individuals who have inspired me, all of them participants in the revolutions that made the modern era. I focus on two historical sequences – the Western liberal revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the anti-colonial revolutions that displaced European empire in the twentieth. The American Revolution was both liberal and anti-colonial. A similar combination undermined the Soviet ‘empire’ two decades ago and now fuels insurgency against the American ‘empire’ in North Africa and the Middle East. After three decades of neoliberal globalization, we are entering a new phase of the struggle for a better world. 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. So the context for a human economy approach is this unfinished attempt to remove unequal society – a process that has often entailed war and revolution.

202

Keith Hart

The Struggle for Happiness: Kant, James, Tocqueville, Gandhi Immanuel Kant (2006; see also Hart 2010) summarized ‘philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense of the word’ as four questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? What is a human being? The first question is answered in metaphysics, the second in morals, the third in religion and the fourth in anthropology. But the first three ‘relate to anthropology’, he said, and might be subsumed under it. Anthropology for him was the practical arm of moral philosophy. It is indispensable to understanding any interaction involving human agents, being ‘pragmatic’ in a number of senses: it is ‘everything that pertains to the practical’, popular (as opposed to academic) and moral, in that it is concerned with what people should do and with their motives for action. How then might human beings find a more secure foundation for self-knowledge as individuals and as a species? Kant held that the political project of building a just world society was necessary for human development in the long run. His anthropology, however, refers more to his vision of individual subjectivity, and is a branch of humanist education. There are two prerequisites for being human: we must each learn to be self-reliant to a high degree and to belong to others, merging our identities in a bewildering variety of social relations. Much of modern ideology emphasizes how hard it is to be both self-interested and mutual. Yet some societies, by encouraging private and public interests to coincide, have managed to integrate them more effectively than ours. Twentieth-century civilization erected strong barriers between each of us as a subjective personality and society as an impersonal object. Transcending this division must be intrinsic to the human economy project, one of its premises being to aim for unity between self and society, and thus to be at home in the world. The object of a Kantian anthropology therefore is to discover whatever we need to know about humanity in order to build a more equal world fit for everyone. This project could be embraced by students of history, sociology, geography, political economy, philosophy and literature, as well as by some anthropologists. The idea of ‘development’ has played a similar interdisciplinary role in the last half century. The Human Economy Programme is thus a particular extension of anthropology and development studies, perhaps even their synthesis. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ Thomas Jef-



The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness

203

ferson (1776) wrote these words in the tradition of liberal Enlightenment that was launched as a political programme by Locke (1690), harnessed to the anthropology of human nature by Rousseau (1754), transformed into economics by Smith (1776) and established as critique by Kant (1790). They all envisaged a democratic revolution to replace the inequality of the Old Regime. A constitution guaranteeing equality to citizens should be based on knowledge of what all human beings have in common, their ‘human nature’, and from this might be derived their ‘natural rights’. Government by and for the people is incompatible with entrenched social inequality in the form of political privilege. Human beings have a right to a full life, to free will unconstrained by arbitrary rules or by masters – that is, to metaphysical, anarchic and personal freedom – and to ‘happiness’. The Trinidadian writer and revolutionary, C.L.R. James – author of The Black Jacobins, a history of Haiti’s slave revolution (James 1938) – drew heavily on this idea in American Civilization (1950).1 James took from America the idea of happiness as a revolutionary goal to be added to the European legacy of freedom and equality. Happiness appeared repeatedly in his writings, from asserting that Marx and Hegel ‘believed that man is destined for freedom and happiness’, to emphasizing the centrality of happiness for American society and culture, in contrast to Europeans’ sense of the tragic. The notion of happiness lay too at the heart of his Modern Politics (James 1960), but there he called it ‘the good life’. Conventionally, ‘happiness’ has been understood to be a trivial thing, a moment of pleasure that is necessarily fleeting. The notion now often means just material satisfaction. In the eighteenth century, however, the pursuit of happiness in this life was contrasted with religious passivity in the face of earthly suffering. James held happiness to be as essential as the desire for freedom and equality. It was the desire of the modern age, ‘what people want’, expressive of complex and deeply rooted needs of human beings to be integrated, to become whole, to live in harmony with others in society. For James then, happiness had two facets, the freedom to be a fully developed, creative, individual personality and to be part of a community based on principles conducive to that end. This was the unity of private interest and public spirit that Alexis de Tocqueville (1840) found in the early American democracy and that James believed was still the palpable goal of the American people. James used ‘the struggle for happiness’ as the title for his chapter on the workers. The integration of individuals in modern society requires a fundamental reorganization of how people experience work. The United States contributed the idea of happiness to our understanding of civilization itself. Today it has become a universal

204

Keith Hart

goal; and the peoples of the global South serve as the potent symbols of the collective force of humanity in our opposition to the forces of oppression. Happiness is inseparable from the active struggle for its attainment. Both Tocqueville and James visited the New World after the political landscape had been transformed by two major events, the French and Russian revolutions. Each of them thought that democracy was the moving force in modern history and that America played the leading role in that movement. Their faith was not based on laws or formal institutions, but on the common people, and their pragmatic political sense. They saw ordinary Americans’ customs and attitudes to life as the safeguard of democracy’s future. The structure of both Democracy in America and American Civilization reflects this premise. Each has two parts, the first dealing with the ideas and outward appearance of America’s public institutions, the second with the inner life and social practices of the American people themselves. Each book contains a movement from form to content that mirrors a historical contrast between European civilization and its American successor. Tocqueville wanted to know how Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity had been incorporated into the new society. He found the principle of equality to be a more fundamental and durable feature of democracy than freedom; but he recognized their relationship to be close and complex: ‘Men cannot be equal without being free, and equality, in its extreme form, must merge with freedom’. For Tocqueville the essential feature of American society was its people’s pursuit of worldly prosperity (happiness) under conditions of general equality. Accordingly, the central paradox facing American civilization was the unequal treatment of blacks, ‘the most formidable evil threatening the future of the United States’. Moreover, the pursuit of happiness channelled the restless energies of the population into commercial and industrial activity. Yet Tocqueville, like Jefferson before him, saw here the possible growth of an aristocracy based on money. The drive for greater efficiency in America was achieved, echoing Adam Smith (1776), through increasing specialization that resulted in a devastating dehumanization of the work process: ‘What is one to expect from a man who has spent twenty years of his life making the heads for pins?’ The greatest threat to a democratic society, however, was posed by ‘despotism’, which was part and parcel of the growth of democracy itself. Equality was linked to individualism; but, in isolating individuals, democracy weakened the connections between them and undermined their resistance to encroaching centralization. The power of society in a democracy was likely to be oppressive; the only



The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness

205

counterweight in Tocqueville’s view was the ability of citizens to form free associations. James’s own study, begun a century later, builds on Tocqueville’s. In American Civilization he takes up the themes of liberty, equality and the forms of association; and he examines their meaning in a mid-twentiethcentury America where the pursuit of material wealth had reached its full expression in the system of mass production pioneered by Henry Ford. For James in 1950, the society’s original ideals of freedom and equality had by then been sacrificed to an oppressive work regime that paradoxically made it feasible for many people to aspire to the material means of achieving these goals. Whereas Tocqueville made equality central to the new democracy, James was preoccupied with freedom or rather with the awareness of its loss that permeated the consciousness of Americans in his day. Moreover, the worldwide struggle of popular forces against totalitarian bureaucracy brought Tocqueville’s prediction of rivalry between America and Russia to the nightmare conclusion of the Cold War. For James there was a growing conflict between the concentration of power at the top of society and the aspirations of people everywhere for democracy to be extended into all areas of their lives. The struggle was for individual freedom within new and expanded conceptions of social life (democracy) or a fragmented and repressed subjectivity stifled by coercive bureaucracies (totalitarianism). The intellectuals were caught between the expansion of bureaucracy and the growing presence of people as a force in world society (see also Grimshaw and Hart 1993). Unable to recognize that people’s lives mattered more than their own ideas, they oscillated between an introspective individualism (psychoanalysis) and service to the ruling powers, whether of the right (fascism) or the left (Stalinism). As a result, the traditional role of the intellectual as an independent witness standing for truth had been compromised. Their absorption into bureaucracy as wage slaves and pensioners not only removed the intellectuals’ independence, but separated their specialized activities from social life. Thus, for both writers, the pursuit of happiness could only take root in a democratic society whose institutional forms and cultural content were conducive to self-expression and free association on the part of equal citizens. Subsequent experience of modern capitalism has shown that, while mass production of cheap commodities contributes to popular emancipation, reliance on formal politics alone leaves the engines of economic inequality untouched. The human economy approach foregrounds economic democracy as a goal, while retaining the struggle for freedom and happiness as its larger context.

206

Keith Hart

At the core of such an approach is the pressing need to overcome the ruinous split between individual personality and impersonal society that became entrenched in the twentieth century. On the one hand, we wish to return the study of economy to ordinary people’s concerns, to the level of human beings themselves; but being human also means learning to live together on this planet as one species among many – what I have called ‘the new human universal’. Another giant of the twentieth century’s anti-colonial revolution has contributed more than most to figuring out how to bridge these extremes of the human condition. Mohandas K. Gandhi preferred to start from the humanist end of the spectrum, arguing that, ‘[a]s human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves’. Gandhi’s critique of the modern state was devastating (Parekh 1989). Like Rousseau, he believed that it disabled its citizens, subjecting mind and body to the control of professional experts, when the purpose of a civilization should be to enhance its members’ sense of their own self-reliance. His vision of humanity was based on two universal postulates: every human being is a unique personality; and each of us takes part in an encompassing whole that humanity shares with other life forms (the individual and the species in Kant’s terms). Modern social science has tended to efface both extremes in favour of a focus on the proliferating associations and social divisions that mediate them – race, class, gender, nationality, religion, locality, etc. These are intrinsic to living in society, but we have to choose which social forms are best suited to spanning the gap between self and world for most people. As an Indian, Gandhi settled on the village and therefore on agricultural society as the most appropriate social vehicle for human development in that context. The problem Gandhi confronted has been largely ignored by modern social theory. If the world is devoid of meaning, being governed by remote impersonal forces known only to specially trained experts, each of us is left feeling small, isolated and vulnerable. Yet modern cultures tell us that we are personalities with significance. How do we bridge the gap between a vast, unknowable world, which we experience as an external object, and a puny self, endowed with the subjective capacity to act alone or with others? The answer is to scale down the world, to scale up the self or a combination of both, so that a meaningful relationship might be established between the two (Hart 2003). This was once achieved by prayer, but today more often by works of fiction – novels, plays and films. Gandhi chose the village as the site of India’s renaissance because it was where most Indians lived and, more importantly, because it had a social



The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness

207

scale appropriate to self-respecting members of an agrarian civilization. Moreover, he devoted a large part of his philosophy to building up the personal resources of individuals (Gandhi 1927). Our task is to bring this project up to date, and that too is one aim of the human economy project. All the authors considered in this section, however else we might want to pigeonhole them, were writing within a framework that we can only call ‘liberal’. But the dominant strand of modern theory has privileged society over individuals. In many traditions – socialist, social democratic, communist, social scientific – the perceived problem is that market capitalism has dissolved our social bonds, and rebuilding them is seen as the most urgent task. Freedom and happiness might then be assimilated to a negative depiction of contemporary civilization, with solidarity, cooperation, sharing and equality as their recommended antidotes. Perhaps this is one reason why happiness as a political principle has dropped out of view. At the same time, the twentieth century contrast between reform and revolution may also be at stake.

Human Economy: Between Gradualism and Revolution There was a time, around 2011–2012, when it seemed likely that the global economic crisis provoked by the financial collapse of 2008 had taken a radical political turn: the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street (Graeber 2013), as well as Los Indignados of Madrid, the London riots, the Chilean students, and developments in Greece (see Rakopoulos in this volume) all lent credence to this idea. This book is one outgrowth of that moment – a sense that the Human Economy Programme had better become political. Could our approach be too gradualist at a time of revolution? In The Human Economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010), the editors resisted use of labels like ‘the other economy’ that lent themselves too readily to utopian ideologies. We followed what Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi understood by economic change, since we were looking for more positive constructions than a simple negation. To recapitulate, what makes an economy ‘human’? First, it privileges people before abstractions. People make and remake their economic lives and that has to be the basis for thinking about economy. Any economics must be accessible to them as a practical guide to how they manage those lives. But the economy is human in another sense too in that we increasingly confront economic problems and dilemmas as a species. Unlike the world seen through the blinkers of national politics and media, the future of humanity as a whole is at stake in today’s economic crises.

208

Keith Hart

So the idea of a human economy points in these two directions: towards what people really do and towards extending our perspective to a global level, if possible. The French predecessor of The Human Economy – the Dictionnaire de l’autre économie (Laville and Cattani 2002, 2006) – came out at the height of the credit boom. Very few people saw much prospect for major economic or political change at that time. When we published the English version in 2010, after the financial crisis had broken, we hoped that its message would find a more fertile reception in a new climate of public opinion. At the very least, the absolute hegemony of mainstream economics should have been damaged by the crisis. Surely it was no longer feasible to argue that the best guarantee of improved human well-being is to leave markets free of political intervention and social control. Even the Financial Times published articles saying that we might need a new synthesis of anthropology, history and economics to replace the old discipline. It has not worked out quite like that, has it? Philip Mirowski (2013) has correctly pointed out that neoliberalism was strengthened by the crisis, not weakened. And Egyptians, after Tahrir Square, ended up with Sisi. So the presumption that our case for a human economy would be economically and politically reinforced by recent developments should probably be revised. Even so, we distanced ourselves, in the introduction and in our approach to editing The Human Economy, from any ‘revolutionary’ eschatology that suggested society had reached the end of something and would soon be launched on something quite different. The idea of a human economy drew attention to the fact that people do a lot more than might be imagined if we focus only on the dominant economic institutions. Against a singular notion of the economy as ‘capitalism’, we argued that all societies combine a plurality of economic forms and that several of these are universally distributed across history, even if the dominant type of organization shapes the emphasis of their combination in particular times and places. In his famous essay on The Gift, Marcel Mauss (1925) tried to show that other economic principles were present in capitalist societies and that understanding this would provide a sounder basis for building non-capitalist alternatives than the Bolshevik revolution’s attempt to break with markets and money (Mauss 1997). Karl Polanyi too, in his various writings, insisted that the human economy throughout history was made up of a number of mechanisms of which the market was only one. We argued therefore that the idea of radical transformation into its opposite of an economy conceived of monolithically as capitalism was an unrealistic version of economic change. The Introduction to the present volume ar-



The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness

209

gues that we cannot afford to turn our backs on the institutions that have helped humanity to form the world society that we now live in. Largescale bureaucracies coexist with varieties of popular self-organization, and we have to make them work together rather than at cross purposes, as they often do now. They all respond in their own way to the challenges posed by the modern world, and we need to combine them in new and more inclusive ways. Although this looks like a gradualist approach to economic improvement, adopting it widely could have revolutionary consequences. I have been working quite closely for some years now with my colleague, David Graeber. I have learned more from him than from any other contemporary – not passively, but in a dialogue between equals. David, as everyone now knows, is an anthropologist and anarchist who was prominent from the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. His book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber 2011), is a best-seller and he has followed it up with an account of OWS, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (2013). His politics inform his economic analysis; and he has always taken an anti-statist and anti-capitalist position, with markets often merged with capitalism. That is, he sees the future and the means of getting there as being based on the opposite of our capitalist states. The core of his politics is ‘direct action’, which he has practised and written about as an ethnographer (Graeber 2009a). Graeber’s book on debt spells out his analytical framework in great detail. Following Nietzsche, he argues that money introduced a measure of unequal relations between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Whereas Rousseau traced inequality to the invention of property, he locates the roots of human bondage, slavery, tribute and organized violence in debt relations. The contradictions of indebtedness, fed by money and markets, led the first world religions to articulate notions of freedom and redemption in response to escalating class conflict between creditors and debtors, often generating calls for debt cancellation. His positive story counters the one advanced by mainstream liberal economics. ‘A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations’ (Graeber 2011: Chapter 5) develops a critique of the attempt to construct the ‘economy’ as a sphere separate from society in general. He identifies three principles of distribution: ‘everyday communism’, hierarchy and reciprocity. By the first Graeber means a human capacity for sharing or ‘baseline sociality’; the second is sometimes confused with the third, since unequal relations are often represented as exchange – you give me your crops in return for not being beaten up. The difference between hierarchy and reciprocity is that debt is conceived of as being permanent

210

Keith Hart

in the first case, but temporary in the second. All three principles are present everywhere, but their relative emphasis is coloured by dominant economic forms. Thus ‘communism’ is indispensable to modern work practices, but capitalism is a lousy way of harnessing our human capacity for cooperation. The main idea of the book, from our perspective here, follows the contrast between ‘human economies’ and those dominated by money and markets (Graeber prefers to call them ‘commercial economies’ or sometimes ‘capitalism’). First he identifies the independent characteristics of human economies and then he shows what happens when they are forcefully incorporated into the economic orbit of larger ‘civilizations’, including our own. This is to some extent a great divide theory of world history, although elements of a human economy persist in capitalist societies. ‘Human economies’ are, in a sense, the world we have lost, but might recover after the revolution. Graeber is at pains to point out that these societies are not necessarily more humane, but ‘they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings’ (2011: 130). They use money, but mainly as ‘social currencies’ whose aim is to maintain relations between people rather than to purchase things. ‘In a human economy, each person is unique and of incomparable value, because each is a unique nexus of relations with others’ (ibid.: 158). Yet their money forms make it possible to treat people as quantitatively identical in exchange, and that requires a measure of violence. Brutality – not just conceptual, but physical too – is omnipresent, more in some cases than others. Violence is inseparable from money and debt, even in the most ‘human’ of economies, where ripping people out of their familiar context is commonplace. This then gets taken to another level when they are drawn into systems like the Atlantic slave trade or the Western colonial empires of yesteryear. An extended reflection on slavery and freedom – a pair that Graeber sees as being driven by a culture of honour and indebtedness – culminates in the ultimate contradiction of modern liberal economics, a worldview that conceives of individuals as being socially isolated in ways similar to how enslaved and conquered peoples are forced to experience the world. Since we cannot easily embrace this account of our own history, it is not surprising that we usually confuse morality and power when thinking about debt. David Graeber and I came up with the term ‘human economy’ independently during the last decade (Hart 2008; Graeber 2009b). For him it marks a specific stage in human history, whereas I, like Mauss, see the human economy everywhere, including in the cracks of modern societ-



The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness

211

ies. This goes along with treating markets and money as human universals rather than as the cause of a rupture in human history. But Graeber also believes that economic life everywhere is based on a plural combination of moral principles which take on a different complexion when organized by the locally dominant form. Thus, helping each other as equals is essential to capitalist societies, but capitalism distorts and marginalizes this human propensity. Yet he also appears to anticipate a radical rupture with capitalist states fairly soon, and this is reflected in a stages theory of history. At first sight, these positions (let us call them ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ for shorthand) are incompatible, but recent political developments such as the Egyptian ‘revolution’ require us to transcend such an opposition, even if their radical promise has not been immediately realized. The gap between our respective approaches to making the economy human may therefore be less than it seems at first glance, since I acknowledge the need to place the human economy approach within a revolutionary framework, and David Graeber finds the sources of change in universal moral propensities as well as in revolution. Perhaps we each envisage two approaches, not one, to the problem of democratic change. Even so, there are differences of theory and method that need to be identified and debated. Graeber’s penchant for lumping together states, money, markets, debt and capitalism, along with violence, war and slavery as their habitual bedfellows, is one bone of contention. Money and markets have redemptive qualities that in my view could be put to progressive economic ends in non-capitalist forms (Hart 2000). I do not imagine that modern institutions such as states, corporations and bureaucracies will soon die away. If ‘everyday communism’ may be found in capitalist societies, and the division separating human and commercial economies is blurred by the former’s occasional brutality, then clearly David Graeber’s historical vision allows for gradual variations. Even so, revolutionary binaries (A versus B) surface at various points in his writing, where it would seem that human progress depends on making a radical rupture with capitalist states. And yet, as we all know, the past persists in post-revolutionary situations.

A Revolutionary Moment in History We must, nevertheless, take seriously the view that our present constitutes a revolutionary break in world history. If Western Europe’s eastern periphery saw the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989–1990, the escalating

212

Keith Hart

wars and political conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa expose the vulnerability of the regional order imposed by the American ‘empire’ for at least half a century now. From the beginning, Occupy Wall Street, whatever its consequences for U.S. society and politics and whether or not it could claim some long-term success there, was a global movement. It showed that the American monolith was not fixed in stone and that revolts around the world had a counterpart within the United States. Oil has succeeded gold as the world economy’s principal commodity, and control of it underlies the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency. The Middle East and oil are so central to American influence in the world – quite apart from the wars they have launched of late against Iraq and Afghanistan – that the chain of events in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Israel and Iran has immense significance beyond the region. C.L.R. James grew up in Trinidad and died an old man in London during the late 1980s. He often said after 1968 that there were only two more world revolutions left – the second Russian Revolution and the second American Revolution. In American Civilization, as we have seen, he argued that the contradiction between totalitarian bureaucracy and the struggle to bring democracy into people’s lives was at its strongest in the United States. He always believed that American society must be central to any future world revolution. We do not have to believe that the OWS movement will lead directly to mass insurrection in the United States to see that its cultural example was immediately taken up within the country and across the world; and this reflects the fact that we live in a world unified by the contradictions of American imperial power. I watched Tiananmen Square on television with James in April–May 1989. He was 88 years old and died not long afterwards. If you recall, the students were protesting at the time of an international meeting in Beijing, to which Gorbachev had been invited. The whole world was gripped by the spectacle. James thought then that the Chinese Communist Party would put down this rebellion easily enough, but he also said, ‘The Russians will find it hard to hold onto Eastern Europe after this’. The Berlin Wall came down six months later and that was the start of the ‘second Russian Revolution’. We tend to identify revolutions with particular dates, but all the revolutions that changed the world have involved their societies in wars and upheavals that lasted decades. The piecemeal reformist approach to economic change that we took in The Human Economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010) needs to confront the idea of world revolution. Rather than undertake scholarly research into this issue, and reflecting the way most of us garner information from the internet these days, I will refer here to three documents that landed in my



The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness

213

lap, or rather in my laptop, at the same time. One was an article in Harper’s by Nathan Schneider (2012a), ‘Planet Occupy’, on the principles of the Occupy movement; another was by the same author, ‘Is Anonymous Our Future?’ (Schneider 2012b). This was based in turn on Gabriella Coleman’s ‘Our Weirdness is Free: The Logic of Anonymous –Online Army, Agent of Chaos, and Seeker of Justice’ (Coleman 2012).2 To these I would add two occasional pieces on revolution by Lenin (1917) and James (1981). In January 1917, Lenin gave a speech to Swiss socialists in Zurich in which he said he did not expect revolution in his lifetime, but he hoped that the younger comrades would be able to fight in one. The Russian Revolution got going in March, when the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets took to the streets; in September, Lenin wrote a letter seeking to justify why he called for revolution then, but had not done so in July (Lenin 1917); and by October the revolution was a done deal. Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (1932) takes 1,300 pages to cover these nine months; and some events, like a pivotal meeting in which the author’s intervention was decisive, get 40 pages. This is speed-up. The normal pace of talking, writing and publishing that marked The Human Economy book cannot accommodate this reality. I am not suggesting that we should all give up academic scholarship to join the barricades. Nevertheless, even a more sedate approach has to distinguish between the time frame of revolutionary insurrection and building a more effective platform to help people to experience a measure of economic democracy in their lives. These piecemeal long-term projects are vital, but the premise of a revolutionary moment puts pressure on that work. Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who has been a participant observer in Anonymous’s 4chan chat rooms since 2008. Anonymous is an occult organization of geeks, trolls and agitators that came to prominence in 2011 with attacks on government and corporate websites in defence of Wikileaks and other causes. Anonymous at first justified its members’ opaque identities as a cloak for freedom of expression. But it has since become an engaged force for social justice. There are important parallels between Anonymous and OWS, but their modus operandi is strikingly different in that one is clandestine and the other more transparent. This might be thought to be a contradiction; but openness and closure, like freedom and necessity, and perhaps revolution and reform too, have to be combined selectively in order to be effective. We might want the banks to be more transparent, but which of us would like our own income and expenditure to be made public? So the open/closed dialectic is more complicated than it seems. You cannot have one without both. In winding up her analysis, Coleman draws on Ernst Bloch:

214

Keith Hart

Anonymous acts in a way that is irreverent, often destructive, occasionally vindictive, and generally disdainful of the law, but it also offers an object lesson in what Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch (1995) calls ‘the principle of hope’. In his three-volume work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1938–47), Bloch attends to a stunningly diverse number of signs, symbols and artefacts from different historical eras, ranging from dreams to fairy tales, in order to remind us that the desire for a better world is always in our midst. Bloch works as a philosophical archaeologist, excavating forgotten messages in songs, poems and rituals. They do not represent hope in the religious sense, or even utopia – there is no vision of transcending our institutions, much less history – but they do hold latent possibilities that, in certain conditions, can be activated and perhaps lead to new political realities. ‘The door that is at least half open, when it appears to open onto pleasant objects, is marked hope’, Bloch writes. The emergence of Anonymous from one of the seediest places on the Internet seems to me an enactment of Bloch’s principle of hope. (Coleman 2012)

So Bloch’s vision is that this aspiration for a better world is everywhere and inside us – an infrastructure always available to be given concrete impression. It is similar, at the level of ideology, to what the Pretoria research programme argues for the human economy: people have always had many different ways of organizing their economic lives and these make up a reservoir of knowledge and aspiration that, given appropriate direction, could lead us to a better economy. The basic principles of the Occupy movement (Schneider 2012a) are quite general and easily understood. We might ask how to account for the similarities between so many movements that sprang up before or soon after OWS. The Indignados of Madrid predated New York, yet their principles of organization are remarkably alike. Where did these principles come from? Are they an intuitive negation of mainstream political economy? Are they an innate expression of human democracy? Were they diffused by the new digital media? Or, more likely, did participants in the previous Madrid demonstrations help OWS to think differently. Schneider has a good summary which is worth quoting at length: The Declaration of the Occupation is addressed not to governments – no hope there – but rather ‘to the people of the world’, urging communities everywhere to ‘assert your power’. ‘We are creating an exemplar society’, states Occupy Boston’s Declaration of Occupation … ‘No one’s human needs go unmet’, [it] continues. Planet Occupy, like last fall’s occupations, provides food and shelter for everyone, no questions asked. It also ensures health care, mutual education, childcare, legal representation, and a large, meticulously catalogued library. Sounds like a good social democracy – except that, in the words of Occupy Wall Street’s Principles of Solidarity, the basic unit of political life is not the ballot box but ‘autonomous political



The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness

215

beings engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy’. Though they might be wired to the teeth, the political beings of Planet Occupy carry out their democracy face to face, in well coordinated small groups that operate by consensus. It’s ‘participatory as opposed to partisan’, suggesting that the aim is for all voices to be heard, rather than for one party to prevail over others. Those with ‘inherent privilege’ defer whenever possible to others. The consolidation of power is discouraged, and resisted when necessary. Policing troublemakers becomes the job not of cops, but of assertive, well-trained listeners. Even with its inhabitants’ passion for local autonomy, though, Planet Occupy is a globalized place. People and their ideas travel freely, creating new opportunities and partnerships wherever they go. Assemblies share their plans and innovations over Interoccupy (the movement’s conferencecall network will have supplanted the original Internet, which was overrun by corporate advertising). Following the urge in the Principles for ‘the broad application of open source’, all ideas are common property, and these collective resources are, according to the Statement of Autonomy, valued more highly than money – if money still exists at all. SOPA-style censorship in the name of ownership is not okay. Also not okay is using violence to resolve conflicts. Almost every Occupy document makes some statement to this effect. Occupy Boston’s Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples envisions ‘a new era of peace and cooperation that will work for everyone’. When conflict occurs, as is inevitable, people resist injustice through ‘non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance and love’, in accordance with the Principles. Every such struggle is both local and global. Is this anarchist utopia realistic, or even desirable? It’s at least a little out there, perhaps a lot out there. But the Declaration of the Rights of Man, drafted while Louis XVI still had his head, wasn’t easy to comprehend in its time. The circumstances of our world exceed the politics we’re used to imagining for it, and the politics that are really necessary might therefore seem impossible. ‘We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual’, explains Communiqué 1, an article in the movement journal Tidal. ‘We seek to rediscover and reclaim the world.’ The movement’s documents contain fewer hints about economy. The Principles of Solidarity calls for ‘redefining how labour is valued’, which may look something like the worker-owned cooperatives currently being developed at the Freedom Plaza occupation in Washington, D.C. Broadly speaking, human needs prevail over claims on profit. Companies are chartered for the public good, not private gain. Participatory democracy prevails in workplaces, neighbourhoods, and other productive groupings. Many aspects of the economy – food, especially – remain local. This is necessary partly in order to preserve and sustain the natural environment. Everyone on Planet Occupy knows, after all, that if they don’t protect the planet, there will be nothing left to occupy. (Schneider 2012a)

216

Keith Hart

There must be no divisions, no exclusions. Goods must be shared on the basis of ‘to each according to their needs’. There are obvious links in the above to human economy and to économie solidaire. This is a revolutionary negation of how capitalist states appear to be run. Production is of public goods, not for profit. This contrasts quite starkly with our approach in the human economy project. We believe that limited markets can be fair distributors of goods, and that states are good for redistribution and guarantees of social rights, as long as they make room for people to help themselves by drawing on the mutuality that comes from living together, not just contracts and citizenship. I have been impressed by recent developments in Brazil (which, after a period as a star of ‘emerging markets’, has now sunk into deep trouble). Alternative economic organization in Europe tends to be conceived of as bottom-up initiatives that are independent of government and large corporations, or are against them. The Brazilian government, however, has played a major role in promoting and coordinating the solidarity economy. We might call this social democracy revisited. I have long opposed the capitalist model of markets as the dominant economic form and states imposing themselves in undemocratic ways (Hart 2000). But the counter-movement from below will have to be supported selectively by powers with more resources than are usually available to grassroots initiatives. I assume that we will want to remain wired, but I have not yet come across a civil society movement capable of launching a communications satellite. At the same time, carrying computers around in our pockets as cell phones is obviously more conducive to democracy than when they filled the rooms of some military establishment. So there will have to be room for mutual accommodation between largescale and small-scale economic organization in any imaginable future. The political terms of their cooperation remain to be settled, of course, and there lies the scope for revolution. It is possible then to discern in the Occupy movement and the work of their most visible spokesmen, such as David Graeber (2013), two competing visions of economic change, each with its counterpart in constructions of the idea of a human economy. One is ‘the world turned upside down’, a complete break with the past that might be envisaged as a return to a simpler and more wholesome way of life before the state and capitalism. The other insists that we can rely on people to be who they are, to find ways to come together and to develop their mutual interests without violence or coercion. These two visions are struggling with each other in the politics of our moment. We have to think seriously about what revolutionary situations are like, and there are plenty of historical



The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness

217

examples. Revolution is a very different world from one where we plan and build programmes for people to live by in the long run. In this context, I wish to cite James’s remarks on Lenin in a speech to students about the Guyanese academic-turned-revolutionary, Walter Rodney (1972), who was blown up by an agent provocateur whom he trusted. James (1981) tells Berkeley students that they do not understand what revolution is, and neither did Rodney who lost his life as a result. No competent revolutionary organization should have left its leader unprotected in this way (James himself was a Trotskyist dodging the bullets of Stalinist assassins while researching The Black Jacobins in Paris during the 1930s). James quotes from Lenin’s letter of September 1917 in which he talks about ‘insurrection’ (Lenin 1917). We need discriminating vocabulary rather than calling everything a revolution. The events of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt were insurrections, not revolutions. Lenin identifies three components of any revolution, and the party has nothing to do with any of them. James lists these as follows: firstly, there must be a clash, a revolutionary upsurge of the people; then, secondly, there must be a turning point, when the activity of the advanced ranks is at its height; and thirdly, the enemy must be vacillating. Lenin is often misrepresented as an advocate of the vanguard party. He himself abandoned all those ideas as soon as he arrived at the Finland station and found the soviets in the streets. Until then, he said, he was just another bourgeois politician. Revolutions change people. Lenin also said that insurrection is an art, not a science. At the end of his speech, James recalls a conversation he had with Trotsky in Mexico in 1938 where he asked: But how come, time and again, the revolutionary party – this is the party, not the mass movement – was wrong in its analysis of the situation, and Lenin turns out to be right and set it the correct way? How did that happen? And I expected him to tell me how Lenin knew philosophy, how he knew political analysis, how he knew psychology, or how he knew the revolution. He did not. He said, Lenin always had his eyes upon the mass of the population, and when he saw the way they were going, he knew that tomorrow this was what was going to happen.

The prophet as anthropologist! And Gabriella Coleman is in the hackers’ conversation rooms trying to figure out what they are up to.

218

Keith Hart

Conclusions for the Human Economy Project So what are the implications for the idea of a human economy? Writing for educational purposes in the long run is a very different enterprise from trying to understand the moment we are living through. The best methodological statement on this that I know is by Karl Marx in the introduction to Grundrisse (1859), the notes he compiled from fourteen years of reading in the British Museum library. We must start, he says, from our concrete moment in world history, whatever that is. We start with the conditions we encounter, and study them. Then we build analytical concepts and general propositions using the results of what we have studied. Analysis is making sense of what we find out there. Some people – Marx here nodding towards Hegel, rather unfairly in my view – think that the task finishes there, with the ideas. Once you have the analysis, you can rest happy, publish your book and get tenure. But the point of the analytical tools we have developed is to insert them back into the moment we are living in, and you can do that in many ways: through academic writing, journalism, forming political parties, scientific experiments, social networking, blogs, demonstrations, guerrilla warfare, whatever. The test of their validity lies in this dialectical process. Only then might we generate an analytically informed and empirically tested account of our moment in history, seen as a synthetic whole. He plans to do this in Capital (Marx 1867) but actually he never got there. He lists five prospective volumes culminating in a historical account of the world economy as a whole; but he hardly made it to three. We all, if we are honest and realistic, have to locate ourselves at some point along the path that Marx charted. And however urgent the present moment may seem to be, most lasting innovations take decades to implement. The core of the human economy project lies in reconciling the two approaches I have mentioned. For David Graeber, the human economy’s objective is the social reproduction of people. It takes the form in Africa, for example, of cows being exchanged for women in marriage as a way of legitimizing for children (see Farré, this volume). This version of the human economy is based on principles opposed to those of capitalism and the state. In my view, the human economy exists everywhere in some kind of dialectical tension with the dominant economic institutions of the time. It is not incompatible with modern money and markets. These can be made to serve human interests and needs, as they always have in varying degree, and they do not have to take the exploitative form that they currently do in our societies as a source of unequal power



The Revolutionary Struggle for Happiness

219

and wealth. I, for one, like ordering books and apps online and do not want to spend my days haggling over my daily bread without a means of payment or queuing for a hand-out. I take my lead from Mauss’s insistence that markets and money rest on what Durkheim (1893) called ‘the non-contractual element in the contract’ – a body of customs, laws and history that is obscured, marginalized and repressed by bourgeois ideology, even as they contain the living potential to humanize our economic institutions. A counterpart to these different constructions of the human economy may be found in the two visions of revolution I mentioned earlier: a binary or digital one that envisages the radical negation of what we know, and an analogue version that expects to mobilize people by building on their existing potential, knowledge and associations. A lot hinges on our ability to see a way towards combining these approaches rather than opposing them as being mutually incompatible. Both David Graeber and I, each in our own way and with different emphasis, might be said to be doing that already. The tension between them is to be found in all the protest movements unleashed by an unrepentant neoliberalism today. We cannot afford to go back to the politics of the twentieth century, when ‘revolution’ and ‘reform’ defined opposite sides of a destructive and partisan conflict. If nothing else, the human economy idea aims to get beyond the extremes of state socialism and free enterprise that defined the sides in the Cold War (Hart and Sharp 2014). This is all summed up in Diagram 1 in the Introduction chapter. The human economy is conceived of there as mediating between two paired antinomies – state and market, home and world – which helped to define the twentieth century’s dominant social form, ‘national capitalism’ – the attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation though central bureaucracy in the name of a cultural community of national citizens. The economic crisis of our times may be understood as the collapse of this system (Hart 2013b). Rather than oppose the poles of either pair to each other, the aim is to synthesize them through a pragmatic focus on what people really do, think and want. Three things count in our societies – people, machines and money, in that order. But money buys the machines that control the people. Our political task – and I believe it was Marx’s too – is to reverse that order of priority, not to help people escape from machines and money, but to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money. To the idea of economic crisis and its antidotes, we must now add that of political revolution. I have argued here that we cannot afford to neglect the dynamics of revolution in this context. Revolutions give rise to binary

220

Keith Hart

contrasts and rightly so, but human societies are built on analogue processes. This is not just an academic debating point. A lot hinges on how humanity responds to the contradictions of the turbulence ahead. NOTES  1. This work, originally written in New York around 1950 as Notes on American Civilization, was edited for publication by Anna Grimshaw and myself, with a new title, The Struggle for Happiness, approved by James. After his death in 1989, the book became an object of contention between the editors and his literary executor, Robert Hill. It was eventually published in 1993 as American Civilization and is now out of print. The argument of these paragraphs is taken from the editors’ introduction.  2. Coleman (2013) has since published a monograph, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, where she likens the Free Software Movement today to Liberal and Romantic movements of the early modern era.

Keith Hart is International Director, Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria and Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology, London School of Economics. He has taught at a number of universities, for the longest time at Cambridge. He contributed the idea of an informal economy to Development Studies and has written extensively on money. His recent books include The Human Economy (2010) and Economic Anthropology (2011).

Chapter 11

░ Building a Human Economy Movement The Precedent of Transnational Feminism CAMILLE SUTTON-BROWN-FOX

Personal Note For some of us, the tension that results from the imbalance between maintaining a focus on producing academic scholarship and active involvement in community-based service can become agonizing. During the period of my involvement in the Human Economy Programme, I leaned heavily towards the former – submitting articles for publication in accredited journals, presenting at academic conferences, and participating in human economy seminars with other scholars. These activities match the terms of my appointment and contribute to the development of my academic career. Yet still I yearn for something more. This longing is fuelled by a desire to reignite the advocacy aspect of my identity. I was previously involved in action-research activities, advocating on behalf of young people with disabilities, and volunteering at urban shelters for the homeless. The social value of my doctoral dissertation, which focused on women’s empowerment in the context of microfinance, was its policy-oriented approach and the tangible implications it had for the participants and their communities. Being engaged in advocacy is part of who I am. Thus, in trying to find a balance between the academy’s expectations and what I sometimes think of as my more ‘authentic’ self, I began to think of ways to satisfy both strands: theory and praxis. How might participation in the Human Economy Programme help me to push forward a pragmatic agenda to complement its focus on scholarship? This is the context for asking a second question: What if the human economy were a social movement? The views expressed in this chapter are my own and, in line with the feminist notion that the personal is political, I have used

222

Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox

the first person throughout. But what I have written has been shaped by my participation in a collective programme. Much is the result of work in common, but we are each encouraged to develop a personal perspective and this is mine, not ours.

Introduction The Human Economy Programme was developed to address a specific gap – the lack of a dedicated and coordinated active research channel from which on-the-ground data and accounts of ordinary citizens could be used to inform the theoretical and pragmatic basis of a human economy. We carry out original research with the deliberate intention of reinserting an engagement with human concerns into global economic practices by exposing, theorizing and debating them. The resulting research should contribute to deepening our understanding of how people participate in the economy, and it indirectly supports the drive for greater economic justice and reduced inequality on a global scale. In essence, the human economy is specifically dedicated to advancing ‘economic democracy through academic research, social initiatives and public outreach’ (Hart 2013b). It has been successful in achieving the first of these three broad aims during the first two years after its inception. As the previous edited collection (Hart and Sharp 2014) illustrates, the postdoctoral fellows have produced a variety of case studies to demonstrate how a human economy approach can help us to reconceptualize the relations between the academy and the public sphere. By rejecting a top-down paradigm that confines people’s thoughts and behaviour to an abstract economic model, we have drawn on people’s lived experiences to inform economic analysis from the bottom up (allowing the experiences of people on the ground to inform our academic work). The emphasis on research came first, because the Human Economy Programme had to establish its credentials in an academic institution and because predecessor volumes outlining The Other Economy had focused on bringing researchers and activists together more than on exploring how the economic processes involved might be studied. This has, however, meant that the programme’s other objectives (social initiatives and public outreach) have been neglected and will need to be addressed more directly before long. This chapter asks how the human economy might itself be considered as a social movement, rather than just analysing such movements from the margins. In the end, if our academic work is to contribute to making a better world for all, the



Building a Human Economy Movement

223

Human Economy Programme must be both theoretically engaged and oriented to praxis.

Rationale for a Human Economy Movement The Human Economy Programme, in its most general expression, has always stressed the need for practical engagement. An activist stance is thus entailed in the project from the beginning. So we must consider what type of activist stance is best suited to the promotion of greater economic democracy through a human economy approach. Two critical questions come to mind: What political programme does the human economy aim to serve? And what are the potential political applications of our research? Any network formed around a collective push to realize a human economy agenda will be defined by answers to these political questions more than by the requirements of academic scholarship. The forerunners of the human economy (notably Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010) have contributed to public debates about reimagining economies, understanding how people continually make and remake their everyday lives, enhancing the possibilities for economic democracy and developing visions of a more inclusive world economy. The human economy movement that I envisage is not a departure from this outlook, but rather a continuation of it. In essence, I propose that we shift from emphasizing the research side of the dialogue that launched the forerunners of our programme towards closer engagement with the practical questions that inspired the international movement in the first place. I envisage a participatory process, built on the historical trajectory of the Human Economy Programme, consisting of sustained dialogue between actors with the aim of determining concrete applications on the ground. Thus, the movement would advance in the same direction as the current work already begun, extending it to develop advocacy activities that could channel North–South and South–South dialogue. It is of course vital to think through what we want the movement to be. A human economy movement could join some notable examples that have emerged in the last two decades: the alter-globalization movement referred to in the Introduction chapter, an increasingly strong local food movement in North America (Starr 2010) and of course the Occupy movement which has quickly become a global phenomenon. The advantage of entering the scene as a relative latecomer is that we can learn from the successes and shortcomings of recent predecessors. Although a human economy movement could draw inspiration from these various other social movements,

224

Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox

I focus here on one such model with which I am familiar: the transnational feminist movements. Blumer (1969) argues that movements ‘emerge out of dissatisfaction with a “form of life” [and they] seek to establish a new form of life’ (cited in Crossley 2002). As a human economy approach seeks to initiate broad systemic change (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010), with the alter-globalization movement as its inspiration, its logical trajectory would be to establish a movement of its own. Such a movement, however, would support, as well as extend, the existing academic research programme. Recognizing that the production of knowledge also occurs in public spaces outside of institutions of higher education, a viable human economy movement would need to establish a position for itself as a site of learning. This is the crux of Eyerman and Jamison’s (1991) idea of social movements as cognitive praxis. They examine a number of social movements to illustrate how knowledge is created in various forms within their mode of organizing. Jamison’s later work asserts that ‘social movements play an essential role in the creation of scientific knowledge’ (Jamison 2006: 47). Rather than pose theory and praxis at opposed ends, a human economy movement would be conceived towards making each indispensable to the other. This would mean, above all, extending our work to broader public audiences, otherwise our research will run the risk of losing any pragmatic value. Academic institutions are precarious locations for the production, valuation and reproduction of knowledge (Alexander and Mohanty 2010; Mohanty 2003). Defining and determining what constitutes ‘valid’ knowledge is a political process, even if ‘the academy’ has a long-standing reputation as the golden standard for the production of knowledge and its appraisal. Academic work is situated within a realm of power – more specifically, a realm of power differentials. The rules defining the spatiality of power dictate what is considered ‘intellectual thought’, and its degree of acceptance depends on framing observations according to academically sanctioned frameworks. The interplay that occurs within the space of power determines who is the knower, who is to be known (studied), and how the knower narrates the stories of the known. The knower is sanctioned, indeed encouraged, to observe the known, to collect data, and to fit the data into his or her preferred theoretical framework. This is a oneway process of knowledge production that operates according to academic rules. Thus, ‘the academy’ plays a central role in reproducing knowledge and defining its relationship to society. Working within these higher institutions of learning, academics are assured of a privileged reception for the information we deliver. Recognizing this requires us to consider the ethical implications of how we constitute and reproduce knowledge.



Building a Human Economy Movement

225

Rather than accept an archaic division of knowledge to inform relations between the academy and the general public, a human economy approach seeks to bridge what might otherwise be the separation of academic knowledge from what ordinary people know about their own lives and circumstances. This bottom-up approach brings voices that have been marginalized by economic theory to the centre of our work. This is one way of trying to redress the biases of normal knowledge production processes. But we need to do more than just listen to some people encountered ‘in the field’. We must also engage with general audiences in reciprocal communicative exchanges, so that ordinary citizens are not excluded from developing ideas about what a human economy might be. It is not enough for the knowledge we produce to remain confined to those who have direct access to the channels of advanced formal education. There is not much that is democratic about limiting our publications to academic journals that reserve to themselves the right to decide what constitutes ‘valid’ knowledge. The current distribution of knowledge conforms to a kind of colonialism, and this is incompatible with a genuine human economy movement. Two developments are crucial if we are to ‘liberate’ the human economy from imprisonment in antiquated institutions: first, the target audience for our work must be broadened by disseminating our findings to the public beyond the academy; and second, we need to create new networks as a means of extending collaboration.

Broadening the Target Audience for our Work The people who have helped to shape our case studies and how we think about them are marginalized from the process of advancing this knowledge beyond its initial stages. So a priority for a human economy movement is to establish forums where we can share our work with the community to find out how our ideas can be of value to people in their everyday lives. Entering a dialogical process of this kind helps to create spaces of exchange as a means to diffuse the spatiality and power of knowledge production, reception and co-creation. This is one of the primary steps towards social transformation. Thus, the initial task of such a movement is to ‘begin to think through what it takes to create and sustain a way of collaborating that does not reproduce the very power dynamics we claim to aim to abolish’ (Benson 2009: 108). A human economy movement that aims to make the knowledge produced readily available to ordinary citizens would be better positioned to engage actively in a reciprocal process of its production. If what people

226

Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox

do in everyday life is to inform our vision of a more democratic society, knowledge production ought increasingly to be a negotiated process of creating meaning together, so that what is considered valid knowledge within academic discourse must move towards the norms of everyday life. As Alexander and Mohanty point out: If we take seriously the mandate to do collaborative work in and outside the academy, the kind of work that would demystify the borders between inside and outside and thereby render them porous rather than mythically fixed, it is imperative that the academy not be the only location that determines our research and pedagogical work … And this mandate in turn requires the recognition that knowledge is produced by activist and communitybased political work – that some knowledge can only emerge within these contexts and locations. (Alexander and Mohanty 2010: 27)

This means that ordinary people’s knowledge should be embedded in peer-reviewed articles, should inform academic textbooks and should permeate conference keynote speeches. In turn, theoretical answers to bigger questions that link people’s local contexts to larger globalized practices should be anchored in the preoccupations of community1-based grassroots initiatives and in ways to help people improve the quality of their daily lives. Without such an effort, the Human Economy Programme aspiration to extend beyond academic circles, engage with social initiatives and reach out to the public will be thwarted. How might a human economy movement address society at large? It cannot be done without a parallel effort to build the more democratic economy of which we speak. This does not mean we have to take to the streets like the Occupy movements of 2011–2012, although protests and direct action may expand what the participants imagine is possible. What I have in mind rather is a movement based on active engagement and concrete linkages between scholars, activists, leaders of community organizations, the general public and corporate entities sympathetic to some initiatives launched by local organizations. It is not necessary for academic researchers to be involved in bringing about grassroots change, but we do need to present our work to general audiences in a variety of accessible media. If our research is guided by the desire to make a better world, as in this volume, such efforts to bridge the gap with the public would help our findings to make contact with a more grounded level of social experience.



Building a Human Economy Movement

227

Creating and Extending Collaborative Networks Since the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria is composed of a dedicated group of scholars, it should come as no surprise that we have a large academic network. Tapping into the alter-globalization network formed over the last decade or more, we have links with scholars from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and, of course, Southern Africa where we are based. As the programme gains some longevity, this network of interdisciplinary linkages and collaborations will continue to grow. In fact, August 2013 marked the first Human Economy Programme conference on ‘Economy and Democracy’. The three-day event involved more than sixty scholars, mainly from Southern Africa and the global North – and a few local activists. What we lack, however, is a coordinated network that extends into non-academic spheres. As I have already insisted, the promise and potential of the human economy idea to make a difference is contingent on our active engagement with a myriad of players at both extremes of the local–global spectrum. Therefore we ought to make a concerted effort to create alliances with members of civil society, both locally and globally. We can extend the outreach of our work by creating alliances with individual community members, grassroots organizations, NGOs, journalists, housing/food co-operatives and so on, to create a shift in the balance of those who are in a position to receive and dispute our work. By collaborating with community partners and hosting dialogues with them, our work could begin to transcend the theory–praxis divide, while avoiding the one-way traffic in ideas that has become the depressing academic norm. Community partners are essential if we are to integrate the spheres where academic and grassroots knowledge are produced. Forming long-term relationships, rather than ephemeral ones, creates a space for transformation by allowing both parties to gain a deeper understanding of the work each is doing. The aim would be to identify points of overlap where both can participate in regular dialogic exchange concerning issues held in common. So how could research be made more political and relevant to activist practice, if we do not actually down tools and take to the streets? Even a superficial examination of our local community in Pretoria, and in South Africa more generally, reveals many NGOs, individuals, community organizations and lobbyists working on similar issues to those presented in this book. So, without trying to reinvent the wheel, one of the most appropriate ways for our work to become politically engaged is to reach

228

Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox

out to a public audience. This is not as hard as it may seem. In fact, it is achievable without a lot of extra work. I will explain how, using transnational feminism as a guide.

Transnational Feminism Transnational feminism (Moallem 1999) is an apt analogy for our attempt to move the human economy forward, since it is both an academic and an activist movement. Transnational feminists too share the goal of making a more just world. I identify five main reasons why a human economy movement might draw some of its key principles from transnational feminism: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Transnational feminism has been engaged in activist struggle since the 1980s (before the emergence of the alter-globalization movement). Their efforts are primarily rooted in resistance to neoliberal economic policies, whereby the privatization of the public sector has led to the feminization of poverty as well as to more pronounced exploitation of cheap labour in the global South (Moghadam 2005). So they have organized to confront issues of free trade, structural adjustment and debt. Transnational feminists stimulate debate and change at institutional policy levels (United Nations) and at grassroots levels (place-based activism). Social movements operating under the umbrella of transnational feminism are small and culturally/historically/geographically grounded rather being conceived of as a single mass movement. Transnational feminism has a strong orientation towards both theory and praxis – as the human economy movement that I propose might emulate. Transnational feminism adds an explicit and critical assessment of gender to the human economy approach, while affording us some key lessons for use in building a movement.

Transnational feminism is a strategic attempt to confront and dismantle discriminatory discourse and practices that are embedded firmly in our social institutions. More specifically, transnational feminists target issues that adversely affect women of different race and class, sexual orientation and religion (Kaplan and Grewal 1999). They are firmly anchored in post-colonial theory and in the practice of relational analysis. The point is to gain a contextualized understanding of the power dynamics that are deeply embedded in the intersections of gender, race, economics, class, and historical conditions (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Shohat 1997).



Building a Human Economy Movement

229

The discursive context is predicated upon a myriad of experiences and divergent perspectives. Transnational feminism is also built on visible networks of communication (Thayer 2010). These operate at both national and international levels. The dialogues that occur within these modes of organization seek to challenge various forms of oppression in different geographic locations. In the 1980s, when the world’s economic structures shifted to accommodate a free market global economy, feminists from around the world began to communicate and unite as advocates (Moghadam 2005). Developments in telecommunications made this possible (the fax machine followed by the internet); and their role in organizing transnational feminism cannot be overestimated. This was in stark contrast to the second wave of feminism, which was primarily limited to national struggles (Thayer 2010). The restructuring of social action at a global level in the Reagan–Thatcher era allowed new concerns to emerge that affected women in both global North and South, while the economic and political structures embedded in neoliberal forms of capitalism affected women of various classes and races across geographical borders. Thus, a shared struggle against globalized capitalism motivated a diverse group of women to form transnational feminist networks of communication and allegiances across national, class and racial borders. The explicit shift to an anti-globalization posture changed the nature of feminist politics and activism (Naples 2002); this new international movement was called ‘transnational feminism’ for its focus on issues that transcended national boundaries, to connect feminists from various backgrounds and to help them identify inequitable gender relations that needed to be restructured globally. Transnational feminists claim that any assumption of universally shared women’s experience ignores geographical, cultural and historical influences on gender-based analyses (Alexander and Mohanty 1997). For this reason, they vehemently reject hegemonic perspectives that would bind women together as a unified category. Rather they recognize the multiplicity of women’s experience and the importance of context for attempts to confront oppressive institutional structures. Transnational feminists unite according to their shared goals, and create a solidarity based upon difference. That is, they work together across political, religious, racial, class and disability borders for a common purpose. The result is a global network of feminist communication built on making visible women’s heterogeneous experiences that take place across and within national borders and social divisions. This concept of solidarity directs its focus towards political praxis, encouraging women of diverse

230

Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox

backgrounds to draw strategically on their differences while working for common ends. There is no single transnational feminist theory. A stable feature, however, across the variety of frameworks adopted is fervent opposition to the current forms of globalized capitalism. Transnational feminists argue that neoliberal globalization, which paradoxically has supported their efforts to form a world movement, involves oppressive structures that have exacerbated the political and social inequalities between men and women (Brenner 2003). In particular, Desai (2002: 16) notes that globalization includes ‘a complex set of relations that are built on pre-existing patriarchal, racial and ethnic practices’. Capitalism is blamed in particular for the feminization of poverty. This prominent feature of life in both the global South and the global North consists in women being disproportionately affected by the reality of poverty, and also more likely to fall into poverty than men. The current international division of labour is particularly responsible for reproducing this situation. Many companies, in an attempt to cut costs, have transferred the production of goods to countries in the global South. This has resulted in a disproportionate number of women and children participating in the lowest income sectors of employment as part of the global assembly line (Moghadam 2005). Nor does the feminization of poverty occur in a vacuum. Poverty is also racialized (Emigh and Szelenyi 2001): if systemic power relations result in economic discrepancies between women and men, people of colour are also disproportionately poorer than their white counterparts. These gender-based and racialized inequalities illustrate how naive it is to examine gender in isolation. As a result, while creating new sites for feminist struggles against global capitalist oppression, feminists now enter broader alliances for local, national and transnational change.

Integrating Theory and Praxis A human economy movement might learn from two core practices of transnational feminism: the integration of theory and praxis, and the formation of network alliances. Transnational feminism is a deliberate attempt to practise theory and to theorize practices. In addition to theorizing about how gender is situated alongside other forms of identity, transnational feminism is also committed to activism. This is grounded in a realization that effective resistance to global systems of domination requires the active engagement of civil society as a whole. Thus transnational feminism is a praxis-oriented space for movements based on various principles of solidarity to disrupt the discursive powers that sustain



Building a Human Economy Movement

231

social injustice (Mohanty 1997). Transnational feminists attempt to create ‘new sites for action at the local, national [and] transnational levels in which to enact new political, economic and cultural practices’ (Desai 2002: 16). As the theoretical basis of transnational feminism emphasizes the need to contextualize our understanding of power relations, so too does its practical implementation. Recognizing that the structures of oppression differ according to a variety of contextual factors, transnational feminist activism comprises many small social movements that are culturally, historically and geographically grounded. It is not a mass political party with a single organization or aim. Transnational feminism provides a model of a complex, intricate web of small entities that work collaboratively to address common concerns. These entities usually take the form of locally based grassroots initiatives. They are specifically created in this manner to address issues that directly affect the communities in which they are based. This way, feminists who have a contextual understanding of their community are strongly positioned to address the issues that are pertinent to that specific locale. Recognizing the limited ability of community-based activism to challenge the pervasive systematic hierarchies of power entailed in contemporary globalization, local organizations link together with other small organizations that have common concerns and goals. As the linkages build and increase in number, a transnational network of communication emerges. The smaller entities also network with larger organizations in an attempt to use local struggles to inform and disrupt global politics (Naples 2002). Sometimes several networks link together and unite in a common struggle to form larger social movements that constitute a more substantial force to resist global capitalist expansion. One such example was the World March of Women 2000. This movement consisted of coordinated marches and demonstrations involving six thousand organizations from over a hundred countries in the fight against poverty and violence (Moghadam 2005). In this way, transnational feminism combines place-based political activism (Osterweil 2005) with transnational political practices.

Lessons for a Human Economy Movement Just as transnational feminists draw on experiential knowledge to advocate and organize political struggle, we human economists could draw on our ethnographic material to scale up its use to broader contexts of collective advocacy, if we want our work to become more politically engaged, more practically relevant and of pragmatic value for the people

232

Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox

we include in our research. We should emulate those feminist theorists who focus on the power discrepancy between researchers and those whom they research. Reflexivity of this kind highlights the need for collaboration across various social divisions, while drawing on each actor’s strengths to diffuse the power dynamics of social hierarchy. Only then will our emancipatory rhetoric truly work towards liberation. I next illustrate how a human economy movement can also integrate theory and praxis in two predominant forms: making our work available to wider audiences and creating networks inside and outside the academy.

Broadening the Target Audience A selection from the chapters assembled here may illustrate how we can broaden the target audiences for our work, with little extra effort. We already favour a bottom-up or gradualist approach in our research (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010), and the local particularities that we have mined can help to initiate dialogue with community actors and serve as platforms for regional social change. Booker Magure, for example, could speak at town hall meetings in Zimbabwe and South Africa organized by the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition. This is a coalition of more than 350 civil society organizations that seeks to coordinate responses to social, political and economic issues. It is often concerned with political elections, governance and democratization in Zimbabwe, although it also runs a regional office in South Africa. Booker could present there some of the ideas related to his research on political party corruption. Theodore Powers’ chapter links a theoretical framework to pragmatic attempts to create a democratic space for the South African HIV/AIDS movement.3 It is well positioned to speak to a variety of audiences simultaneously at conferences, such at the International Aids Conference, which attracts large numbers of academics, health practitioners, activists and NGO workers. His approach could help to push forward a dialogue between the various actors by making visible the similarities, differences and paradoxes of approaches to a single issue. Tijo Salverda, another postdoctoral fellow here, proposed initiating a joint venture between Human Economy Programme researchers and a South African newspaper. This would consist of a series of weekly seminars, led by our researchers and attended by a journalist who would then engage the public in discussion of these issues in a newspaper. This would gain publicity for the programme and make wider collaboration possible.



Building a Human Economy Movement

233

Creating Alliances on a Global Scale If we are to initiate change on a broader scale, we need to make alliances at the global level. These could include transnational organizations, government officials and firms. It is not surprising that small- and large-scale movements aiming for economic justice and sustainable democratic development (such as transnational feminism, social and solidarity economy) have largely excluded government and corporate players. Although there is a range of opinion within the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria, we should consider working with large-scale bureaucracies, at least selectively and in part. Strategic partnerships with some larger bureaucratic institutions may promulgate our mission faster and more effectively than smaller grassroots movements could achieve by themselves. Referring to Keith Hart’s ‘Manifesto for a Human Economy’ (2013b): the French revolution was partly financed by the shippers of Bordeaux and Nantes, the Italian revolution by the industrialists of Milan and Turin. Kenya’s world-leading experiment in mobile money, M-pesa, was launched by a subsidiary of Vodacom. Hewlett-Packard has developed research stations in outlying areas for some years now as part of an attempt to make computers accessible to the world’s ‘poorest four billion’. The notion of a ‘popular economy’ has emerged in Latin America since the 1990s, bringing new coalitions (peasants, urban informal workers, unions) into an alliance with progressive political regimes. Brazil under Lula introduced a community banking system combining microfinance and complementary currencies with strong local democratic input. The government of Uruguay has sponsored a ‘3C’ alternative circuit of exchange and credit for SMEs, in which national utilities and local tax offices anchor the circulation of unpaid invoices as currency. South Africa is developing a solution to the problem of slow payments to the self-employed by pioneering a clearing system that allows banks to pay 70% of the value of invoices immediately.

These examples illustrate the possibilities for progressive corporations and governments to work with local initiatives in developing more democratic economic practices. We will have to see how it works out, but a human economy movement may have something to show transnational feminism in this regard.

Creating Alliances at the Local Level Hadrien Saiag’s research on money in Argentina is one example of how strategic collaborations may benefit both his own work and the local community where he conducted his fieldwork. After a one-year absence,

234

Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox

Hadrien will go back to Argentina to discuss the implications of his research. Over a two-year period, Hadrien developed a professional relationship with one of the key members of a grassroots activist organization called Poriajhú. Using its radio programme as a vehicle for transmission, Hadrien will have a timeslot to discuss his research and data analysis with the radio host. He will also make a public invitation for all who are interested to participate in a community forum that he will organize. This forum will allow him to present some of his findings, which he believes could be important for the management of local financial practices. But equally, Hadrien will ask the audience for feedback on his analysis, which would allow him to take account of some things he may have missed. He had initially been reluctant to address normative questions when writing his doctoral thesis, but now he asks ‘what can we do?’ and ‘what should we do?’ Hadrien will also present the findings of his research at an academic conference in Rosario, Argentina. He has invited his contact from Poriajhú to attend it with him, so that she can react to the various academic propositions and, if she cares to, establish links between Poriajhú and other academics. Active collaboration of this sort greatly increases the chance for research to help to transform communities. There is no need for the process to end here, and indeed Hadrien plans to continue this feedback process in future. The audience for his work has been expanded through several media (radio show, public forum), and academic knowledge benefits from being that much more porous in this instance. A local activist may come away from all this with a deeper understanding of his or her own work, and of how it directly relates to social forces at the local and global levels. In sum, reciprocal exchange as a result of establishing networks with local people and organizations serves two main purposes, which benefit both parties: first, it helps to shape our current and future research; and second, our work may inform the work that is being done on the ground. Activists may use our theoretical knowledge to reflect analytically on their strategies and practices for inducing social change. As specialist intellectuals, we ought to be more up to date on the latest theories and methods, although this is not always so (Ramazanoglu and Holland 2002). Universities are often isolated (literally and figuratively) from the realities of contemporary society. Those who live and work in the trenches are often more aware of pressing and relevant issues affecting their lives; and it may take time for these issues to reach the ivory tower. Greater ease of exchange across these social divisions is conducive to more cutting-edge research and to results that might benefit the researched more directly.



Building a Human Economy Movement

235

Final Remarks The human economy approach must extend its reach if it is to become a significant force in the movement for economic democracy. In essence, we ought to find practical ways to combine politics and intellectual life. Using transnational feminism as a precedent, a human economy movement should first seek to address general audiences and to establish a coordinated tactical network at both local and transnational levels. Enlisting local community members, journalists and NGOs as allies is essential for a reciprocal process of knowledge transfer to develop. This will help to shape the aims, theories and methods of our future research, and be sure that it is integrated with praxis. By this means the gap between academic scholarship and lived reality should be reduced. At the transnational level, the mission of promoting a human economy requires alliances with larger organizations as well as participating in the sort of decentralized networks that have been typical of the alter-globalization and occupy movements. I have not stressed here the importance of gender if a human economy movement is to join the fight for economic justice effectively. It is not always the case that the social and solidarity economy movement takes this lesson to heart. At present, feminism and feminist theory remains the only lens that specifically names and is reflexive about the politics and problematics of gender, and that offers a means of analysis of the complicated ways gender, race, sexuality, class and embodiment are distinct yet intertwined in dominant structures of power. (Pillow and Mayo 2007: 156)

This is central to any strategy for achieving economic democracy. We need to broaden our conceptualization of the economy beyond a narrow financial paradigm that would define it solely in monetary terms. Theoretical erasure of contextual influences based in everyday experience leads to naive constructions of gender as a power struggle between men and women, rather than as just one factor in a complex web of patriarchal, capitalist, racist, imperialist domination. Human economists could further deepen their understanding of the plurality of economics along similar lines. As many of the case studies presented here show, money (an important, but not the sole factor in a human economy) may be examined as a manifestation of an intricate ecosystem of geography, social divisions, health policy, cultural practices, legal frameworks, and so on. There is a danger that envisaging economic democracy may lead to deferring endlessly the need to bring about whatever is necessary to make it

236

Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox

happen. This is the burden that I carry and struggle with. Would anyone like to share this burden with me? Together we might begin to move forward. NOTES  1. The term community is used in this chapter to describe a group of people, with varying characteristics, who share social ties in a specific geographic setting (MacQueen et al. 2001). The term often implies a sense of group consensus and commonality (Nelson and Wright 1995) as well as some form of shared narrative (Rappaport 2000) with regard to a particular issue.  2. Invited participants included Jackie Dugard and Thapelo Tselapedi of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa; Tim Jenkin of the Community Exchange System South Africa; and Vishwas Satgar and Michelle Williams, of the Cooperative and Policy Alternative Centre.  3. Ted Powers’ fieldwork consistently blurred the line separating observation from active participation. The question is whether that unity of theory and praxis in the field is diminished when ‘writing up’.

Camille Sutton-Brown-Fox was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Educational Research in the Bagwell College of Education at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, USA. She holds a PhD in Educational Policy Studies: Research, Measurement and Statistics from Georgia State University. She has conducted research in Mali, India and the United States, focusing on the intersections of gender, education and development. She uses participatory methodologies in policy-oriented research, with the aim of benefiting participants and the communities involved.

░ References

Aalbers, M. 2008. ‘The Financialization of Home and the Mortgage Market Crisis’, Competition & Change 12(2): 148–66. Abdelal, R. 2007. Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Absi, P. 2007. ‘Il ne faut pas mélanger les fortunes: Travail, genre et revenus chez les commerçantes de Bolivie’, in V. Hernandez, P. Ould-Ahmed, J. Papail and P. Phélinas (eds), Turbulences monétaires et sociales: l’Amérique Latine dans une perspective comparée. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 355–93. Achebe, C. 1994. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books. Adam, E. 2012. ‘About the Social Economy and Social Antagonism: An Attempt for a Critical Approach’ (Περί Kοινωνικής Oικονομίας και Kοινωνικού Aνταγωνισμού: Mια Aπόπειρα Kριτικής Προσέγγισης). Eνθἐματα Aυγής, 1 April. Adams, D., and D. Fitchett (eds). 1992. Informal Finance in Low-Income Countries. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Aglietta, M., and R. Breton. 2001. ‘Financial Systems, Corporate Control and Capital Accumulation’, Economy and Society 30(4): 433–66. Aitken, R. 2007. Performing Capital: Toward a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. ‘Regularization of Fringe Credit: Payday Lending and the Borders of Global Financial Practice’, Competition & Change 14(3–4): 80–99. Alexander, C. 2009. ‘Illusions of Freedom: Polanyi and the Third Sector’, in C. Hann and K. Hart (eds), Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 221–39. Alexander, M.J., and C.T. Mohanty. 1997. ‘Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements’, in M.J. Alexander and C.T. Mohanty (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge, pp. xiii–xlii. ———. 2010. ‘Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis’, in A.L. Swarr and R. Nagar (eds), Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. Albany, NY: SUNY, pp. 23–45. Allard, J., C. Davidson and J. Mattaei (eds). 2008. Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet. Chicago, IL: ChangeMaker Publications. Alpers, E. 1984. ‘State, Merchant Capital and Gender Relations in Southern Mozambique to the End of the Nineteenth Century: Some Tentative Hypothesis’, African Economic History 13: 23–55. Amin, A., A. Cameron and R. Hudson. 2002. Placing the Social Economy. London: Routledge. Amyx, J. 2004. Japan’s Financial Crisis: Institutional Rigidity and Reluctant Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

238 References Andreasson, S. 2010. ‘Confronting the Settler Legacy: Indigenisation and Transformation in South Africa and Zimbabwe’, Political Geography 29: 424–33. Applbaum, K. 2003. The Marketing Era: From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning. London: Routledge. Arthur, M., et al. 2012. A Lei da família e a igualdade de direitos. Balanço da sua aplicação. Maputo: WLSA-Moçambique. Asham, S., B. Fine and S. Newman. 2011. ‘The Crisis in South Africa: Neoliberalism, Financialization and Uneven and Combined Development’, Social Register 47: 174–95. Axilrod, S.H. 1985. ‘US Monetary Policy in Recent Years: An Overview’, Federal Reserve Bulletin 71(1): 14–24. Badat, S. 2011. ‘Rhodes University Graduation Ceremonies Address’, 7–9 April. Bagnol, B. 2008. ‘Lovolo e espíritus no sul de Moçambique’, Análise Social 63(2): 251–72. Bank for International Settlements. 2007. 77th Annual Report. 1 April 2006 – 31 March 2007. Basel. ———. 2008. 78th Annual Report. 1 April 2007 – 31 March 2008. Basel. Barrientos, A. 2009. -Labour Markets and the Hyphenated Welfare Regime in Latin America’, Economy and Society 38(1): 87–108. Beccaria, L., V. Esquivel and R. Maurizio. 2007. ‘Crise et reprise: les effets sur le marché du travail et sur la distribution du revenu’, in V. Hernandez, P. OuldAhmed, J. Papail and P. Phélinas (eds), Turbulences monétaires et sociales: L’Amérique Latine dans une perspective comparée. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 173–208. Beckert, J. 2012. ‘Die sittliche Einbettung der Wirtschaft. Von der Effizienz- und Differenzierungstheorie zu einer Theorie wirtschaftlicher Felder’, Berliner Journal für Soziologie 22: 247–66. Benson, K. 2009. ‘Collaborative Research in Conversation’, Feminist Africa 13: 107–16. Berg, J. van den. 1987. ‘A Peasant Form of Production: Wage-Dependent Agriculture in Southern Mozambique’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 21(3): 375–89. Biehl, J. 2008. ‘Drugs for All: The Future of Global AIDS Treatment’, Medical Anthropology 27(2): 99–105. Blanc, J. 2010. ‘Community and Complementary Currencies’, in K. Hart, J.-L. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds), The Human Economy. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 303–12. Bloch, E. (1938–1947) 1995. The Principle of Hope (3 vols). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloch, M. 1973. ‘The Long Term and the Short Term: The Economic and Political Significance of the Morality of Kinship’, in J. Goody (ed.), The Character of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 75–87. Blumer, H. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Bobbio, N. 1997. Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boersema, J. 2012. ‘Between Recognition and Resentment: An Afrikaner Trade Union’s Brand of Post-Nationalism’, African Studies 71(3): 408–25. Bond, P. 2005. Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa. 2nd Edition. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

References 239 Brenner, J. 2003. ‘Transnational Feminism and the Struggle for Global Justice’. Retrieved 6 February 2011 from http://www.choike.org/documentos/wsf_s106_ brenner.pdf. Buğra, A. 2007. ‘Introduction’, in A. Buğra and K. Agartan (eds), Reading Karl Polanyi for the Twenty-first Century: Market Economy as a Political Project. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Burawoy, M. 2003. ‘For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi’, Politics & Society 31(2): 193–261. Burnham, P. 1987. ‘Changing Themes in the Analysis of African Marriage’, in D. Parkin and D. Nyamwaya (eds), Transformation of African Marriage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 37–54. Burton, D. 2008. Credit and Consumer Society. London: Routledge. Butler, A. 2005. ‘South Africa’s HIV/AIDS Policy, 1994–2004: How Can It Be Explained?’, African Affairs 104: 591–614. ———. (ed.). 2010. Paying for Politics: Party Funding and Political Change in South Africa and the Global South. Auckland Park: Jacana. Buur, L. 2009. ‘The Horror of the Mob: The Violence of Imagination in South Africa’, Critique of Anthropology 29(1): 27–46. Callon, M. 2007. ‘An Essay on the Growing Contribution of Economic Markets to the Proliferation of the Social’, Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8): 139–63. Campbell, J. 2007. ‘The Excessive Cost of Credit on Small Money Loans under the National Credit Act 34 of 2005’, South African Mercantile Law Journal 19(3): 251–71. Camus, A. (1947) 2002. The Plague. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carothers, T. 2006. ‘Examining International Political Party Aid’, in P. Burnell (ed.), Globalising Democracy: Party Politics in Emerging Democracies. New York: Routledge, pp. 69–87. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 2013. ‘Our Progress in South Africa’. Retrieved 27 June 2013 from: http://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/countries/ southafrica/. Centro de Estudos Africanos-UEM. 1998. O Mineiro Moçambicano. Um estudo sobre a exportação de mão de obra em Inhambane. Maputo: CEA-UEM. Chigwedere, P., G. Seage III, S. Gruskin, T. Lee and M. Essex. 2008. ‘Estimating the Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral Drug Use in South Africa’, Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 49: 410–15. Chomsky, N. 2005. Chomsky and Anarchism. London: Pluto Press. Churchill, C. (ed.). 2006. Protecting the Poor: A Micro-insurance Compendium. Geneva: ILO. Coase, R. 1937. ‘The Nature of the Firm’, Economica 16(4): 386–405. Coase, R., and N. Wang. 2012. ‘Saving Economics from the Economists’, Harvard Business Review 90(12): 36. Coleman, G. 2012. ‘Our Weirdness is Free: The Logic of Anonymous – Online Army, Agent of Chaos, and Seeker of Justice’. Triple Canopy. Retrieved 6 November 2013 from http://canopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_free. ———. 2013. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Collins, D., J. Morduch, S. Rutherford and O. Ruthven. 2009. Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

240 References Comaroff, J.L. (ed.). 1980. The Meaning of Marriage Payments. London and New York: Academic Press. Comaroff, J., and J. Comaroff. 2001. ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on A Second Coming’, in J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (eds), Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–56. COPAC. 2006. ‘Cooperative Alternatives to Capitalist Globalisation: Building Human Solidarity to Sustain Life’. University of Witwatersrand Conference, 4 July 2005. Johannesburg. ———. 2012. ‘Beyond the Social Economy: Capitalism’s Crises and the Solidarity Economy Alternatives’. University of the Witwatersrand Conference, 21 October 2011. Johannesburg. Counihan, C., and V. Siniscalchi (eds). 2013. Food Activism: Agency, Democracy and Economy. Oxford: Berg. Covane, L.A. 2001. O Trabalho Migratório e a Agricultura no Sul de Moçambique (1920– 1992). Maputo: Promédia. Crisis Coalition. 2011. ‘The Military Factor in Zimbabwe’s Political and Electoral Affairs’. Harare. Crossley, N. 2002. Making Sense of Social Movements. Buckingham: Open University Press. Crush, J. 1992. ‘The Construction of Compound Authority: Drinking at Havelock, 1938–1944’, in J. Crush and C. Ambler (eds), Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 367–94. Cutler, T., and B. Wayne. 2001. ‘Social Insecurity and the Retreat from Social Democracy: Occupational Welfare in the Long Boom and Financialization’, Review of International Political Economy 8: 96–117. Dacheux, E., and D. Goujon. 2012. The Solidarity Economy: An Alternative Development Strategy? Oxford: Blackwell. Damill, M., R. Frenkel and R. Maurizio. 2011. ‘Macroeconomic Policy for Full and Productive Employment and Decent Work for All: An Analysis of the Argentine Experience’. Employment Working Paper No. 109, ILO. De Certeau, M. 1990. L’Invention du Quotidien, I: Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard. Degl’Innocenti, M., A. Varni, R. Zangheri, Z. Ciuffoletti, G. Silei and S. Bianciardi. 2003. Solidarietà e Mercato nella Cooperazione Italiana tra Otto e Novecento. Manduria, Bari and Rome: P. Lacaita. Department of Trade and Industry, Republic of South Africa. 2003. ‘Credit Law Review. August 2003. Summary of the Findings of the Technical Committee’. Pretoria. Desai, M. 2002. ‘Transnational Solidarity: Women’s Agency, Structural Adjustment, and Globalization’, in N.A. Naples and M. Desai (eds), Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics. New York: Routledge, pp. 15–33. ‘Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era’. 2013. History. Retrieved 7 March 2013 from http://www.dawnnet.org/about.php?page=history. Devisch, R. 1995. ‘Frenzy, Violence and Ethical Renewal in Kinshasa’, Public Culture 7(3): 593–629. Dixon, A., and V.P. Sorsa. 2009. ‘Institutional Change and the Financialization of Pensions in Europe’, Competition & Change 13(4): 347–67.

References 241 Dowie, M. 2001. American Foundations: An Investigative History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Downs, A. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper & Row. Dumenil, G., and D. Levy. 2005. ‘The Neoliberal (Counter-)Revolution’, in A. SaadFilho and D. Johnston (eds), Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, pp. 9–20. Dumont, L. 1992. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, E. (1893) 1933. The Division of Labour in Society. Glencoe: Free Press. Du Toit, B.M. 1991. ‘The Far Right in Current South African Politics’, Journal of Modern African Studies 29(4): 627–67. Earthy, D. (1933) 1968. Valenge Women: The Social and Economic Life of the Valenge Women of Portuguese East Africa. London: Frank Cass & Co Ltd. Economist, The. 2013. ‘Greece: Is Grexit off the Table?’, 9 February. Edwards, M. 2010. Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Eisenstadt, S.N., and L. Roniger. 1980. ‘Patron–Client Relations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22(1): 42–77. Emigh, R. and I. Szeleni (eds). 2001. Poverty, Ethnicity and Gener in Eastern Europe in the Market Transition. Westport CT: Greenwood. Enderwick, P. 2005. ‘What’s Bad about Crony Capitalism?’, Asian Business & Management 4(2): 117–32. Englund, H. 2008. ‘Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations: Beyond Morality in the Anthropology of Africa?’, Social Analysis 52(3): 33–50. ———. 2011. Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Erturk, I., J. Froud, J. Sukhdev, A. Leaver and K. Williams. 2007. ‘The Democratisation of Finance? Promises, Outcomes, and Conditions’, Review of International Political Economy 14(4): 553–75. Eyerman, R., and A. Jamison. 1991. Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Fallers, L. 1955. ‘The Predicament of the Modern African Chief: An Instance from Uganda’, American Anthropologist 57(2): 290–305. FAO, IFAD and WFP. 2013. ‘The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013. The Multiple Dimensions of Food Security’. Rome: FAO. Fassin, D. 2007. When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 2013. ‘Historical Changes of the Target Federal Funds and Discount Rates, 1971 to Present’. Retrieved 5 August 2013 from http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/statistics/dlyrates/fedrate.html. Feinstein, C. 2005. An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination, and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, J. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in a Neoliberal World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2013. ‘Declarations of Dependence: Labour, Personhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(2): 223–42. Fialho, J. 1998. Antropologia económica dos Thonga do Sul de Mozambique. Maputo: AHM (Estudos 12).

242 References First, R. 1983. Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner, Proletarian and Peasant. Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, M. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Editions Gallimard. ———. 1976. Histoire de la sexualité 1. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Editions Gallimard. ———. 2004. Naissance de la Biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979. Paris: Gallimard Seuil. Fournier, M (ed.) 2006. Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Fouillet, C., I. Guérin, S. Morvant-Roux, M. Roesch and J.-M. Servet. 2007. ‘Le Microcrédit au Péril du Néolibéralisme et de Marchands d’Illusions’, Revue du MAUSS 1(29): 329–50. Fraser, N. 2003. ‘Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition and Participation’, in N. Fraser and A. Honneth (eds), Redistribution or Recognition? A Political–Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso, pp. 7–109 Friedman, M. 1968. ‘The Role of Monetary Policy’, The American Economic Review 53(1): 1–17. Friedman, S. 2010. ‘Government Buy the People? Democracy and the Private Funding of Politics in South Africa’, in A. Butler (ed.), Paying for Politics: Party Funding and Political Change in South Africa and the Global South. Auckland Park: Jacana, pp. 155–86. Froud, J., S. Johal and C. Williams. 2002. ‘Financialisation and the Coupon Pool’, Capital and Class 78: 119–51. Gandhi, M.K. (1927) 1982. An Autobiography: Or My Experiments with Truth. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Geffen, N. 2007. ‘Policy, Communications and Research (PCR) Report for period September to November 2007’, in Treatment Action Campaign 4th National Congress Programmes Report. Cape Town: Treatment Action Campaign, pp. 81–84. Gevisser, M. 2007. Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Gilbert, L., and L. Walker. 2002. ‘HIV/AIDS in South Africa: An Overview’, Cadernos de Saũde Pũblica 18(3): 651–60. Giliomee, H. 2003. The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. Charlottesvillle: University of Virginia Press. Gill, T. 2001. Men of Uncertainty: The Social Organization of Day Laborers in Contemporary Japan. Albany: State University of New York Press. Giosa Zuazúa, N. 2007. ‘L’emploi, intégrateur social dans l’Argentine de l’après-convertibilité?’, Revue Tiers Monde 189: 35–50. Gluckman, M. 1940. ‘Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand’, Bantu Studies 14: 1–30. Godbout, J., and A. Caillé. 1998. The World of the Gift. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Goede, M. de. 2005. Virtue, Fortune and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goldberg, L., and R. Lo Vuolo. 2006. Falsas Promesas: Sistema de Previsión Social y Régimen de Acumulación. Buenos Aires: Miño y Davila. Gono, G. 2008. Zimbabwe’s Casino Economy: Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges. Harare: ZPH Publishers,

References 243 Good, K. 1976. ‘Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 14(4): 597–620. ———. 1997. ‘Accountable to Themselves: Predominance in Southern Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies 35(4): 547–73. ———. 2009. Diamonds, Dispossession and Democracy in Botswana. Johannesburg: Jacana. Goodwin-Groen, R. 2006. The National Credit Act and its Regulations in the Context of Access to Finance in South Africa. Johannesburg: FinMark Trust. Goody, J. 1973. ‘Polygyny, Economy and the Role of Women’, in J. Goody (ed.), The Character of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 175–90. ———. 1976. Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, J., and S.J. Tambiah. 1973. Bridewealth and Dowry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Government of Zimbabwe. 2001a. House of Assembly Debates (HAD), 3 April, 6501. ———. 2001b. Political Parties (Finances) Act, Chapter 2: 11. Graeber, D. 2009a. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Baltimore, MD: AK Press. ———. 2009b. ‘Debt, Violence, and Impersonal Markets: Polanyian Meditations’, in C. Hann and K. Hart (eds), Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 106–32. ———. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House. ———. 2012. ‘On Social Currencies and Human Economies: Some Notes on the Violence of Equivalence’, Social Anthropology 20(4): 411–28. ———. 2013. The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. New York: Penguin. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. ———. 1977. Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 2010. Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press. Granjo, P. 2006. ‘Winning Back Our Good Luck: Bridewealth and Nowadays Maputo’, Ufuhamu: Journal of the African Activist Association 32(3): 123. Grebe, E. 2011. ‘The Treatment Action Campaign’s Struggle for AIDS Treatment in South Africa: Coalition-Building Through Networks’, Journal of Southern African Studies 37(4): 849–68. Grimshaw, A., and K. Hart. 1993. Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Pamphlets No. 1. Guérin, I. 2006. ‘Women and Money: Lessons from Senegal’, Development and Change 37(3): 549–70. Guérin, I., S. Morvant-Roux and J.-M. Servet. 2011. ‘Understanding the Diversity and Complexity of Demand for Microfinance Services: Lessons from Informal Finance’, in B. Armendáriz and M. Labie (eds), Handbook of Microfinance. London: World Scientific Publishing, pp. 101–22. Guérin, I., S. Morvant-Roux and M. Villarreal (eds). 2013. Microfinance, Debt and Over-Indebtedness: Juggling with Money. London: Routledge. Gumede, W. 2005. Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. Cape Town: Zebra Press. Guyer, J. 2004. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

244 References Hann, C. 2010. ‘Moral Economy’, in K. Hart, J.-L. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds), The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide. Cambridge: Polity Press, 187–98. Hann, C., and K. Hart (eds). 2009. Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Harries, P. 1981. ‘The Anthropologist as Historian and Liberal: H.-A. Junod and the Thonga’, Journal of Southern African Studies 8(1): 37–50. ———. 1988. ‘The Roots of Ethnicity: Discourse and the Politics of Language Construction in South East Africa’, African Affairs 87: 25–52. ———. 1994. Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South Africa, c.1860–1910. Johannesburg: Heinemann-Witswatersrand University Press. Hart, K. 1973. ‘Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana’, Journal of Modern African Studies 11(1): 61–89. ———. 1986. ‘Heads or Tails? Two Sides of the Coin’, Man, New Series 21(4): 637–56. ———. 2000. The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World. London: Profile. ———. 2001. Money in an Unequal World. New York: Texere. ———. 2003. ‘Studying World Society as a Vocation’. Goldsmiths Anthropology Research Papers No. 9. Retrieved 6 November 2013 from http://thememorybank. co.uk/2010/01/11/studying-world-society-as-a-vocation/. ———. 2005. The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or Business, Personal and Impersonal. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm. ———. 2007a. ‘Towards an Alternative Economics: The View from France’, Social Anthropology 15(3): 369–74. ———. 2007b. ‘Marcel Mauss: In Pursuit of the Whole. A Review Essay’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49(1): 1–13. ———. 2008. ‘The Human Economy’, ASAOnline 1(1). Retrieved 6 November 2013 from http://www.thesa.org/publications/asaonline/articles/asaonline_0101.htm. ———. 2010. ‘Kant, “Anthropology” and the New Human Universal’, Social Anthropology 18: 441–47. ———. 2012. ‘Jack Goody’s Vision of World History and African Development Today’. Retrieved 10 July 2013 from http://thememorybank.co.uk/2012/01/10/ jack-goodys-vision-of-history-and-african-development-today/. ———. 2013a. ‘Why the Euro Crisis Matters to us All’, Scapegoat 4: 36–46. ———. 2013b. ‘Manifesto for a Human Economy’, The Memory Bank. Retrieved 29 July 2013 from http://thememorybank.co.uk/2013/01/20/objectmethods-and-principles-of-human-economy/. Hart, K., and W. James. 2014. ‘Marcel Mauss: A Living Inspiration’, Journal of Classical Sociology 14(1): 3–10. Hart, K., J.-L. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds). 2010. The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hart, K., and H. Ortiz. 2014. ‘The Anthropology of Money and Finance: Between Ethnography and World History’, Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 465–82. Hart, K., and J. Sharp (eds). 2014. People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis: Perspectives from the Global South. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

References 245 Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. (2005) 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayek, F.A. 1944. The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge Press. Heerden, W.M. van. 1990. Hartland van die Afrikaner. Morgenzon: Oranjewerkers Promosies. Heidegger, M. (1927) 2001. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Helleiner, E. 2003. The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hertz, E. 1998. The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzfeld, M. 2011. ‘Crisis Attack: Impromptu Ethnography in the Greek Maelstrom’, Anthropology Today 27(5): 22–26. Heusch, L. de. 1983. ‘Du bon usage des femmes et des boeuf. Les transformations du mariage en Afrique austral’, L’Homme 23(4): 5–32. Heywood, M., and M. Cornell. 1998. ‘Human Rights and AIDS in South Africa: From Right Margin to Left Margin’, Health and Human Rights 2(4): 61–82. Higgins, E., and J. Mason. 2004. ‘What is the Value of Recourse to Asset-backed Securities? A Clinical Study of Credit Card Banks’, Journal of Banking and Finance 28: 875–99. Hillenkamp, I. 2013a. ‘Le principe de householding aujourd’hui. Discussion théorique et approche empirique par l’économie populaire’, in I. Hillenkamp and J.-L. Laville (eds), Socioéconomie et démocratie. L’actualité de Karl Polanyi. Toulouse: Erès, 215–39. ———. 2013b. ‘Solidarity Economy in Europe and Latin America’. Human Economy Programme Seminar, Pretoria, 30 January. Hobsbawm, E. 1995. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Abacus. Holden, P., and H. van Vuuren. 2011. The Devil in the Detail: How the Arms Deal Changed Everything. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball. Hopkin, J. 1997. ‘Political Parties, Political Corruption, and the Economic Theory of Democracy’, Crime, Law & Social Change 27: 255–74. ———. 2004. ‘The Problem with Party Finance: Theoretical Perspectives on the Funding of Party Politic’, Party Politics 10(6): 627–51. Hull, E., and D. James. 2012. ‘Introduction: Popular Economies in South Africa’, Africa 82(1): 1–19. Iliffe, J. 2006. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History. Oxford: James Currey. International Aids Conference. 2012. ‘A History of the International AIDS Conferences’. Retrieved 20 June 2013 from http://www.aids2012.org/WebContent/File/ History%20of%20the%20IAC.pdf. International Labour Organization. 2002. ‘International Labour Conference on Decent Work and the Informal Economy’. Geneva. ———. 2012. ‘Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions’. Geneva.

246 References Isaacman, A. 1992. ‘Peasants, Work and the Labour Process: Forced Cotton Cultivation in Colonial Mozambique 1938–1961’, Journal of Social History 25(4): 815–55. James, C.L.R. (1938) 1963. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage. ———. (1960) 1973. Modern Politics. Detroit: Bewick Editions. ———. 1981. ‘Walter Rodney and the Question of Power’. Retrieved 6 November 2013 from http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1981/01/rodney.htm. ———. (1950) 1993. American Civilization (edited by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart with an Afterword by Robert Hill). Oxford: Blackwell. James, D. 2007. Gaining Ground? ‘Rights’ and ‘Property’ in South African Land Reform. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. ‘Regulating Credit: Tackling the Redistributiveness of Neoliberalism’. Anthropology of this Century 6. Retrieved 5 August 2013 from http://aotcpress. com/articles/regulating-credit-tackling-redistributiveness-neoliberalism/. Jamison, A. 2006. ‘Social Movements and Science: Cultural Appropriations of Cognitive Praxis’, Science as Culture 15(1): 45–59. Jefferson, T. (1776) 2007. The Declaration of Independence (Introduced by Michael Hardt). New York: Verso. Junod, H. 1927. The Life of a South African Tribe (2 vols, 2nd, revised edition). London: Macmillan. Kalb, D. 2012. ‘Thinking about Neoliberalism as if the Crisis was Actually Happening’, Social Anthropology 20(3): 318–30. Kant, I. (1795) 2006. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1790) 2008. Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaplan, C., and I. Grewal. 1999. ‘Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism divides’, in C. Kaplan, N. Alarcon and M. Moallem (eds), Between Women and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational feminisms, and the State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 349–63. Karon, T. 2001. ‘South African AIDS Activist Zackie Achmat’, Time Magazine, 14 April 2001. Retrieved on 28 July 2013 from: http://www.time.com/time/nation/ article/0,8599,106995,00.html. Kasmir, S. 1996. The Myth of Mondragón: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kelly-Louw, M. 2008. ‘The Prevention and Alleviation of Consumer Over-indebetedness’, South African Mercantile Law Journal 20(2): 200–226. Khumalo, N., and J. Berger. 2008. ‘SANAC and the Implementation of the NS’, in J. Berger (ed.), AIDS Law Project: 18-month Review: July 2007 – December 2008. Johannesburg: Aids Law Project, pp. 65–72. Kilborn, J.J. 2007. Comparative Consumer Bankruptcy. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Knorr Cetina, K., and A. Preda. 2005. The Sociology of Financial Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kopytoff, I. 1964. ‘The Mother’s Brother in South Africa Revisited’, American Anthropologist (New Series) 66(3): 625–28. Krige, E.J., and J. Comaroff (eds). 1981. Essays on African Marriage in Southern Africa. Cape Town: Juta.

References 247 Krippner, G. 2005. ‘The Financialisation of the American Economy’, Socio-Economic Review 2005(3): 173–208. ———. 2011. Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Krugman, P. 2012. ‘The G.O.P.’s Existential Crisis’, The New York Times, 31 December. Kuper, A. 1976. ‘Radcliffe-Brown, Junod and the Mother’s Brother in South Africa’, Man (New Series) 11: 111–15. ———. 1981. ‘Tied by Bridewealth: The Tsonga Case’, in E. J. Krige and J. L. Comaroff (eds), Essays on African Marriage in Southern Africa, Cape Town: Juta, 68-83. ———. 1982. Wives for Cattle: Bridewealth and Marriage in Southern Africa. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul. ———. 1983. ‘Des femmes contre des boeufs. Réponse a Luc de Heusch’, L’Homme 23(4): 33–54. Kuroda, A. 2008. ‘What Is the Complementarity Among Monies? An Introductory Note’, Financial History Review 15(1): 7–15. Langley, P. 2008. ‘Financialization and the Consumer Credit Boom’, Competition & Change 12(2): 133–47. Lapavitsas, C. 2012. Crisis in the Eurozone. London: Verso. Laterza, V., B. Forrester and P. Mususa. 2013. ‘“Bringing Wood to Life”: Lines, Flows and Materials in a Swazi Sawmill’, in T. Ingold and G. Pálsson (eds), Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Biological and Social Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 162–90. Laville, J.-L. 2010. ‘The Solidarity Economy: An International Movement’, RCCS Annual Review 2: 3–41. Laville, J.-L., and A. Cattani (eds). 2002. Dictionnaire de l’autre économie. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. ———. 2006. Dictionnaire de l’autre économie. Second expanded edition. Paris: Gallimard. Lazzarato, M., 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Lenin, V.I. 1917. ‘Marxism and Insurrection’. Retrieved 6 November 2013 from http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/sep/13.htm. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1977 [1949]. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon. Lewis, D., and N. Kanji. 2009. Non-Governmental Organizations and Development. London: Routledge. Leyshon, A., and N. Thrift. 2007. ‘The Capitalization of Almost Everything: The Future of Finance and Capitalism’, Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8): 97–115. Liesegang, G. 1970. ‘Nguni Migrations between Delagoa Bay and the Zambezi, 1821–1839’, African Historical Studies 3(2): 317–37. Lindberg, S.I. 2003. ‘It’s Our Time to “Chop”: Do Elections in Africa Feed Neo- Patrimonialism Rather Than Counteract It?’, Democratization 10(): 121–40. Linde, I. van der. 2008. ‘HSRC Receives Gates Foundation Grant to Support SANAC Research Sector’. Human Sciences Research Council Media Briefs. Retrieved on 10 January 2013 from: http://www.hsrc.ac.za/Media_Release-340.phtml. LiPuma, E., and B. Lee. 2004. Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Locke, J. (1690) 1960. Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

248 References Lockwood, B., and M. Redoano. 2005. ‘The CSGR Globalisation Index: An Introductory Guide’. CSGR Working Paper no.155. Lont, H., and O. Hospes (eds). 2004. Livelihood and Microfinance. Delft: Eduron. Lowry, M.P. 2008. ‘Legitimizing Elections through the Regulation of Campaign Financing: A Comparative Constitutional Analysis and Hope for South Africa’, Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 31(2): 185–212. Lubkemann, S. 2009. ‘From Circular Migrants in the Mines to Transnational Polygynists in the Townships: A Century of Transformation in Central Mozambican Male Migration Regimes’, International Migration 47(3): 51–92. MacKenzie, D. 2006. An Engine Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MacKenzie, D., and Y. Millo. 2003. ‘Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange’, American Journal of Sociology 109(1): 107–45. Macpherson, I., 2008. ‘The Co-operative Movement and the Social Economy Traditions: Reflections on the Mingling of Broad Visions’, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 79(3–4): 625–42. MacQueen, M.K., E. McLellan, D.S. Metzger, S. Kegeles, R.P. Strauss, R. Scotti, L. Blanchard and R. Trotter. 2001. ‘What Is Community? An Evidence-Based Definition for Participatory Public Health’, American Journal of Public Health 91(12): 1929–38. Magure, B. 2009. ‘Civil Society’s Quest for Democracy in Zimbabwe: Origins, Barriers and Prospects 1900–2008’, unpublished PhD dissertation. Grahamstown: Rhodes University. ———. 2012. ‘Foreign Investment, Black Economic Empowerment and Militarised Patronage Politics in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 30(1): 67–82. ———. 2014a. ‘Interpreting Urban Informality in Chegutu, Zimbabwe’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 49(3): 1–17. ———. 2014b. ‘Land, Indigenisation and Empowerment: Narratives that Made a Difference in Zimbabwe’s 2013 Elections’, Journal of African Elections (forthcoming). Mail & Guardian Staff Reporter. 2007. ‘SA’s Aids Plan on Track says Deputy President’, Mail & Guardian, 10 September. Retrieved on 10 January 2013 from http:// mg.co.za/article/2007-09-10-sas-aids-plan-on-track-says-deputy-president. Marais, H. 2011. South Africa Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Marshall, A. (1890) 2009. Principles of Economics. New York: Cosimo. Martin, R. 2002. Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Marx, K. (1867) 1970. Capital: The Critique of Political Economy. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. (1859) 1973. Grundrisse. New York: Vintage Books. Masunungure, E. 2006. ‘The Regulation of Political Parties in Zimbabwe: Registration, Finance and other Support’. Report prepared for the Zimbabwe Elections Support Network (ZESN). Harare. Maurer, B. 2006. ‘The Anthropology of Money’, Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 15–36.

References 249 Mauss, M. 1925. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: Norton (1967) and London: Routledge (1990). ———. 1997. Écrits Politiques (Marcel Fournier editor). Paris: Fayard. McIntyre, D., and M. Thiede. 2007. ‘Health Care Financing and Expenditure’, in P. Ijumba and A. Padarath (eds), South African Health Review. Durban: Health Systems Trust, pp. 35–46. Miller, E. 2010. ‘The Solidarity Economy: Key Concepts and Issues’, in E. Kawano, T. Masterson and J. Teller-Ellsberg (eds), Solidarity Economy I: Building Alternatives for People and Planet. Amherst, MA: Center for Popular Economics. Milliband, R. (1973) 2009. The State in Capitalist Society. London: Merlin. Mirowski, P. 2013. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. New York: Verso. Mitas, S. 2013a. ‘A Main Articulation: Public Policy and Solidarity Economy’ (Mια Kαίρια Συνάρθωση: Δημόσια Πολιτική και Aλληλέγγυα Oικονομία). Eποχή, 4 March. ———. 2013b. ‘Solidarity as a Main Principle of Law’ (H Aλληλεγγύη ως Θεμελιώδης Αρχή Δικαίου). PhD thesis. Retrieved 21 September 2013 from: http://phdtheses. ekt.gr/eadd/browse?type=author&order=ASC&sort_by=2&rpp=20&value=%CE% 9C%CE%AE%CF%84%CE%B1%CF%82%2C++%CE%A3%CF%84%CE%AD%CF%81%CE %B3%CE%B9%CE%BF%CF%82. ———. 2013c. ‘The “Commonwealth of Others” and the “Self-sufficiency of All”: Means for Solidarity as a Binding Rule of Law’ (H ‘Eυδαιμονία των Άλλων’ και η ‘Aυτοτέλεια Όλων’. Όροι για τη Θεμελίωση της Aλληλεγγύης ως Δεσμευτικού, Δικαιικού Kαθήκοντος), Aξιολογικά 27/2012: 117–38. Moallem, M. 1999. ‘Transnationalism, Feminism, and Fundamentalism’, in C. Kaplan, N. Alarcon and M. Moallem (eds), Between Women and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 320–48. Moghadam, V.M. 2000. ‘Transnational Feminist Networks: Collective Action in the Era of Globalization’, International Sociology 15(1): 57–85. ———. 2005. Globalizing Women: Transnational Networks. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Mohanty, C. 1997. ‘Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideological Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity’, in M. Alexander and C. Mohanty (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge, pp. 3–29. ———. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morris, B. 2005. Anthropology and Anarchism: Their Elective Affinities. London: Goldsmiths Anthropology Research Papers. Morvant-Roux, S. 2009. ‘Accès au microcrédit et continuité des dynamiques d’endettement au Mexique: Combiner anthropologie economique et econométrie’. Revue tiers monde 196: 109–30. Müller, L. 2006. Mercado Exemplar: um estudo antropológico sobre a Bolsa de Valores. Porto Alegre: Editora Zouk. Mutesasira, L. 1999. ‘Savings and Needs in East Africa: An Infinite Variety’. MicroSave-Africa Paper, 21.

250 References Naples, N.A. 2002. ‘Changing the Terms: Community Activism, Globalization, and the Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Praxis’, in. N.A. Naples and M. Desai (eds), Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics. New York: Routledge, pp. 3–14. Nattrass, N. 2007. Mortal Combat: AIDS Denialism and the Struggle for Antiretrovirals in South Africa. Scottsville: UKZN Press. Nattrass, N., and N. Geffen. 2003. ‘The Economics of HAART in South Africa’, at seminar ‘Scaling Up the Use of Antiretrovirals in the Public Health Sector: What are the Challenges?’, Johannesburg, 1 August. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, School of Public Health and Perinatal HIV Research Unit. NCR (National Credit Regulator). 2008. ‘Consumer Credit Market Report, Second Quarter, June 2008’. Retrieved 5 August 2013 from http://www.ncr.org.za/publications/Consumer%20Credit%20Report/NCR%20CCR.pdf ———. 2012a. ‘Consumer Credit Market Report, Second Quarter June 2012’. Retrieved 5 August 2013 from www.ncr.org.za/press_release/CCMR.pdf. ———. 2012b. ‘Consumer Credit Market Report, Fourth Quarter December 2012’. Retrieved 5 August 2013 from www.ncr.org.za/publications/Consumer Credit Report/NCR CCR.pdf. Nelson, N., and S. Wright. 1995. ‘Participation and Power’, in N. Nelson and S. Wright (eds), Power and Participatory Development: Theory and Practice. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, pp. 1–18. Ngubane, H. 1987. ‘The Consequences for Women of Marriage Payments in a Society with Patrilineal Descent’, in D. Parkin and D. Nyamwaya (eds), Transformation of African Marriage. Manchester: International African Institute, pp. 173–82. Nguyen, V. 2005. ‘Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship’, in A. Ong and S. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. New York: Blackwell, pp. 107–24. Nigris, A. de. 2008. La Bancarización en Argentina. Buenos Aires: CEPAL. Nikolopoulos, T., and D. Kapogiannis. 2011. ‘Social Economy of Solidarity or of the Market?’ (Kοινωνική Oικονομία της Aλληλεγγύης ή της Aγοράς;), Eνθέματα Aυγής, 3 April. Office of the South African Presidency. 2006. ‘The Restructuring of the South African AIDS Council: Record of Agreement. 1 December 2006’. Retrieved 10 January 2013 from http://www.doh.gov.za/docs/pr/2006/pr1201b.html. ———. 2007. ‘Press Statement on the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) Meeting’. Retrieved on 10 January 2013 from http://www.info.gov.za/ speeches/2007/07112909451005.htm. O’Laughlin, B. 1996. ‘Through a Divided Glass: Dualism, Class and the Agrarian Question in Mozambique’, Journal of Peasant Studies 23(4): 1–39. Olivera, J. 1992. ‘Banca Central, Federalismo Económico y Constitución Monetaria’, Nuevas Propuestas, Revista de la Universidad Católica de Santiago del Estero (June): 7–17. O’Meara, D. 1983. Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital, and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party, 1948–1994. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

References 251 Ong, A. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ortiz, H. 2011. ‘Marchés efficients, investisseurs libres et Etats garants: trames du politique dans les pratiques financières professionnelles’, Politix 95(3): 155–80. ———. 2012. ‘Anthropology – of the Financial Crisis’, in J. Carrier (ed.), Handbook of Economic Anthropology. 2nd edition. London: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 585–96. ———. 2013. ‘Financial Professionals as a Global Elite’, in J. Abbink and T. Salverda (eds), The Anthropology of Elites: Power, Culture, and the Complexities of Distinction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 185–205. ———. 2014a. ‘The Limits of Financial Imagination: Free Investors, Efficient Markets and Crisis’, American Anthropologist 116(1): 38–50. ———. 2014b. ‘Funcionalismo, idealismo y pragmatismo: dilemas sobre el dinero en las ciencias sociales’, Perspectivas. Analisis de Economia, Comercio y Relaciones Internacionales 8(1) (Agosto): 135–54. Osella, C., and F. Osella. 2009. ‘Muslim Entrepreneurs in Public Life between India and the Gulf: Making Good and Doing Good’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(1): 202–21. Osterweil, M. 2005. ‘Place-based Globalism: Locating Women in the Alternative Globalization Movement’, in W. Harcourt and A. Escobar (eds), Women and the Politics of Place. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, pp. 174–87. Pantos, P. 2013. ‘Can the Solidarity Economy Offer a Way out of the Crisis?’ (Mπορεί η Aλληλέγγυα Oικονομία να Δώσει Διέξοδο στην Kρίση;). Red Notebook, 3 April. Papadakis, K. 2006. Civil Society, Participatory Governance and Decent Work: The Case of South Africa. Geneva: International Labour Organization. Parekh, B. 1989. Ghandi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Parkin, D., and D. Nyamwaya (eds). 1987. Transformation of African Marriage. Manchester: Manchester University Press Parry, J. 1986. ‘The Gift, The Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift”’, Man 21(3): 453–73. ———. 2009. ‘“Sociological Marxism” in Central India: Polanyi, Gramsci, and the Case of the Unions’, in C. Hann and K. Hart (eds), Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 175–202. Parsons, T. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. Glencoe: Free Press. Peters, P. 1983. ‘Gender, Developmental Cycles and Historical Process: A Critique of Recent Research on Women in Botswana’, Journal of Southern African Studies 10(1): 100–122. Pillow, W., and C. Mayo. 2007. ‘Toward Understandings of Feminist Ethnography’, in S.N. Hesse-Biber (ed.), Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pleyers, G. 2010. Alter-Globalization: Becoming Actors in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity. Polanyi, K. 1957. ‘The Economy as Instituted Process’, in K. Polanyi, C.M. Arensberg and H.W. Pearson (eds), Trade and Market in the Early Empires. New York: The Free Press, pp. 243–70.

252 References ———. 1968. ‘The Semantics of Money-Uses’, in G. Dalton (ed.), Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi. New York: Anchor Books, pp. 175–203. ———. 1977a. ‘Forms of Integration and Supporting Structures’, in H.W. Pearson (ed.), The Livelihood of Man. New York: Academic Press, pp. 35–43. ———. 1977b. ‘Money Objects and Money Uses’, in H.W. Pearson (ed.), The Livelihood of Man. New York: Academic Press, pp. 97–121. ———. (1944) 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon. Poon, M. 2009. ‘From New Deal Institutions to Capital Markets: Commercial Consumer Risk Scores and the Making of Subprime Mortgage Finance’, Accounting, Organization and Society 34: 654–74. Porta, D. della, and Y. Mény (eds). 1997. Democracy and Corruption in Europe. London: Pinter. Pottier, J. 1985. ‘Reciprocity and the Beer Pot: The Changing Pattern of Mambwe Food Production’, in J. Pottier (ed.) Food Systems in Central and Southern Africa. London: School of Oriental and African Studies. Poulantzas, N. (1978) 2000. State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso. Powers, T. 2012. ‘Institutionalizing Dissent: HIV/AIDS, the Post-apartheid State, and the Limits of Transnational Governance in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 38(3): 531–49. ———. 2013a. ‘Institutions, Power and Para-State Political Alliances: A Critical Reassessment of HIV/AIDS Politics in South Africa, 1999–2008’, Journal of Modern African Studies 51(4): 605–26. ———. 2013b. ‘Institutions and the Social Change: A Case Study of the South African National AIDS Council’, Anthropology Southern Africa 36(3&4): 116–23. ———. 2013c. ‘Policy Consultation, Transnational Capital and Scaled Political Fields: A Case Study of HIV/AIDS in South Africa’, paper presented at the Human Economy Conference: On Economy and Democracy, 23 August, University of Pretoria. Preda, A. 2009. Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. (1924) 1952. ‘The Mother’s Brother in South Africa’, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society. London: Cohen & West, pp. 15–31. ———. (1940) 1952. ‘On Joking Relationships’, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society. London: Cohen & West, pp. 90–104. Rakopoulos, T. 2013. ‘Food Activism and Antimafia Cooperatives in Contemporary Sicily’, in C. Counihan and V. Siniscalchi (eds). Food Activism: Agency, Democracy and Economy. Oxford: Berg, pp. 123–42. ———. 2014a. ‘Cooperative Modulations: The Antimafia Movement and Struggles over Land and Cooperativism in Eight Sicilian Municipalities’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 19(1): 15–33. ———. 2014b. ‘The Crisis Seen from Below, Within and Against: From Solidarity Economy to Food Distribution Cooperatives in Greece’, Dialectical Anthropology 38(2): 189–207. ———. 2014c. ‘Resonance of Solidarity: Anti-Middleman Food Distribution in Austerity Greece’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32(2). ———. Forthcoming. Tensions That Matter: The Informality of the Greek Solidarity Economy.

References 253 Ramazanoglu, C., and J. Holland. 2002. Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ramose, M.B. 1999. African Philosophy through Ubuntu. Harare: Mond Books. Rappaport, J. 2000. ‘Community Narratives: Tales of Terror and Joy’, American Journal of Community Psychology 28(1): 1–24. Reddy, T. 2005. ‘The Congress Party Model: South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) and India’s Indian National Congress (INC) as Dominant Parties’, African and Asian Studies 4(3): 271–300. Reddy, Y. 2009. India and the Global Financial Crisis: Managing Money and Finance. London: Anthem Press. Renaud, J. 2007. L’impact social des microcrédits: le cas d’une institution de microfinance Argentine’, L’Economie Politique 36(4): 33–45. Robins, S. 2004. ‘“Long Live Zackie, Long Live”: AIDS Activism, Science and Citizenship after Apartheid’, Journal of Southern African Studies 30(3): 651–72. ———. 2006. ‘“From Rights to Ritual”: AIDS Activism and Treatment Testimonies in South Africa’, American Anthropologist 108(2): 312–23. Robinson, V., and S. Brummer. 2006. ‘SA Democracy Incorporated: Corporate Fronts and Political Party Funding’, Institute of Security Studies Paper 129: 1–38. Rodney, W. (1972) 2012. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Cape Town: Pambazooka. Roelofs, J. 1995. ‘The Third Sector as a Protective Layer for Capitalism’, Monthly Review 47(4): 15–25. Roestoff, M., and H. Coetzee. 2012. ‘Consumer Debt Relief in South Africa: Lessons from America and England, and Suggestions for the Way Forward’, South African Mercantile Law Journal 24(1): 53–76. Roig, A. 2007. ‘La monnaie impossible: la convertibilité Argentine de 1991’. PhD dissertation. Paris: EHESS. ———. 2009. ‘Le développement depuis ses impensées: l’epargne populaire et l’institution nonétaire en Argentine’, Informations et Commentaires 148: 23–39. Rose-Ackerman, S. 1978. Corruption: A Study in Political Economy. New York: Academic Press. Rose, L. 1992. The Politics of Harmony: Land Dispute Strategies in Swaziland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1754) 1984. Discourse on Inequality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rutherford, S. 2004. ‘The Microfinance Market: Huge, Diverse – and Waiting for You’, in H. Lont and O. Hospes (eds), Livelihood and Microfinance: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives on Savings and Debt. Delft: Eduron, pp. 263–85. Rylmon, P.L. 2013. ‘The Solidarity Economy and the Form of Subversion’ (Η Αλληλέγγυα Οικονομία και ο Χαρακτήρας της Ανατροπής). Red Notebook, 2 April. Sachs, A. 2006. ‘Foreword’, in E. Kennedy-Dubourdieu, Race and Inequality: World Perspectives on Affirmative Action. Hampshire: Ashgate, ix–xii. Saiag, H. 2013. ‘Le trueque Argentin ou la question du fédéralisme monétaire (1995–2002)’, Revue française de socio-économie 11. ———. 2014. ‘Towards a Neo-Polanyian Approach to Money: Integrating the Concept of Debt’, Economy and Society 43(4): 559–81. Salmon, A. 2010. ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’, in K. Hart, J.-L. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds), The Human Economy, pp. 166–74.

254 References Sansom, B. 1981. ‘Cash Down for Brides’, in E.J. Krige and J.L. Comaroff (eds), Essays on African Marriage in Southern Africa. Cape Town: Juta, pp. 97–111. Schneider, J., and P. Schneider. 2006. ‘Sicily: Reflections on Forty Years of Change’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 11(1): 61–83. Schneider, J., and I. Susser. 2003. ‘Wounded Cities: Deconstruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World’, in J. Schneider and I. Susser (eds), Wounded Cities: Deconstruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World. New York: Berg, pp. 1–24. Schneider, N. 2012a. ‘Planet Occupy’. Harper’s Magazine. Retrieved 6 November 2013 from http://harpers.org/archive/2012/01/hbc-90008434. ———. 2012b. ‘Is Anonymous Our Future? Waging Non-Violence’. Retrieved 6 November 2013 from http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/is-anonymous-our-future/. Schraten, J. 2011. ‘Systemisch verdunkelter Sinn: Beobachtungsschwieirgkeiten einer Zentralbank am Finanzmarkt’, Berliner Journal für Soziologie 21: 521–38. Scott, J. (1985) 2008. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sender, J., C. Oya and C. Cramer. 2006. ‘Women Working for Wages: Putting Flesh on the Bones of a Rural Labour Market Survey in Mozambique’, Journal of Southern African Studies 32(2): 313–33. Sennett, R. 2006. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Servet, J.-M. (ed.). 1999. Une Economie Sans Argent: les Systèmes d’Echange Local. Paris: Seuil. Servet, J.-M. 2006. Banquiers Aux Pieds Nus: la Microfinance. Paris: Odile Jacob. ———. 2008. ‘Responsabilité Sociale Versus Performances Sociales en Microfinance’, Revue Tiers Monde 197: 55–70. ———. 2013a. ‘Le principe de réciprocité aujourd’hui. Un concept pour comprendre et construire l’économie solidaire’, in I. Hillenkamp and J.-L. Laville (eds), Socioéconomie et démocratie. L’actualité de Karl Polanyi. Toulouse: Erès, pp. 187–213. ———. 2013b. ‘Monnaie complémentaire versus microcrédit solidaire et tontines: contribution comparée à un développement solidaire local’. Conference on Potentials and Limits of Social and Solidarity Economy, 6–8 May. Geneva: UNRISD. ———. 2015. La Vraie Révolution du Micro-crédit. Paris: Odile Jacob. Servet, J.-M., B. Théret and Z. Yildirim. 2008. ‘Universalité du fait monétaire et pluralité des monnaies: de la confrontation coloniale à la rencontre des sciences sociales’, in E. Baumann, L. Bazin, P. Ould-Ahmed, P. Phélinas, M. Selim and R. Sobel (eds), Argent des Anthropologues, Monnaie des Economistes. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 167–207. Sgard, J. 2007. ‘Hyperinflation et reconstruction de la monnaie nationale: une comparaison de l’Argentine et du Brésil (1990–2002)’, in B. Théret (ed.), La monnaie dévoilée par ses crises, vol 1. Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, pp. 461–87. Sharp, J., and S. van Wyk. 2013. ‘The Most Intractable Whites in South Africa? Ethnography of a “Boere-Afrikaner” Settlement’, European Conference on African Studies Conference, Lisbon, 28 June. Lisbon: Centre of African Studies. Shiller, R. 2003. The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

References 255 Shipton, P. 1995. ‘How Gambians Save: Culture and Economic Strategy at an Ethnic Crossroads’, in J. Guyer (ed.), Money Matters: Instability, Values and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities. London: James Currey/ Heinemann, pp. 245–76. Shohat, E. 1997. ‘Post-third-worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema’, in M.J. Alexander and C.T. Mohanty (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge, pp. 183–209. Sigaud, L. 2002. ‘The Vicissitudes of the Gift’, Social Anthropology 10(3): 335–58. Simmel, G. (1900) 1978. The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge. Simpson, J. 2013a. ‘Do White People have a Future in South Africa?’, British Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 20 August 2013 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/magazine-22554709. ———. 2013b. ‘Reactions to BBC South Africa Report’, British Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 20 August 2013 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ magazine-22708507. Sitrin, M. 2012. Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. London: Zed Books. Smelser, N. (1959) 2005. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution. London: Routledge. Smith, A. (1759) 2010. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: Penguin. ———. (1776) 1960. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Methuen. Soal, J. 2000. ‘Rebels Show Smuggled Drugs Cost R100 Less’. IOL News, 17 October. Retrieved on 28 July 2013 from: http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/ rebels-show-smuggled-drugs-cost-r100-less-1.49696. Sorauf, F.J. 1960. ‘The Silent Revolution in Patronage’, Public Administration Review 20(1): 28–34. Sosa, R. 2007. ‘El concepto de trabajo en un cambio de época. Un estudio sobre la restauracion contemporanea del capital y los impactos objectivos y subjectifos en el mndo del trabajo en Argentina (1976–2006)’. PhD dissertation. Rosario: Universidad Nacional de Rosario. South African AIDS Conference. 2013. ‘National AIDS Conference: Fact Sheet’. Retrieved on 27 June from: http://www.gov.za/speeches/2013/AIDS%20conference. pdf. South African National AIDS Council (SANAC). 2013. ‘South Africa’s National Aids Spending Assessment Brief (2007/08–2009/10)’. Retrieved on 29 July 2013 from: http://www.sanac.org.za/resources/aids-spending. South African Reserve Bank. 2012a. ‘Annual Economic Report 2012’. Pretoria. ———. 2012b. ‘Why is Inflation Bad?’ Pretoria. ———. 2012c. ‘How to Fight Inflation’. Pretoria. Southall, R. 2004. ‘The ANC and Black Capitalism in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy 100(31): 313–28. ———. 2006a. ‘Ten Propositions about Black Economic Empowerment in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy 111(34): 67–84. ———. 2006b. ‘The ANC, Party Dominance and Social Reproduction’, in Challenges to Democracy by One-Party Dominance: A Comparative Assessment. Johannesburg: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.

256 References ———. 2006c. ‘Party Assistance and the Crisis of Democracy in Southern Africa’, in P. Burnell (ed.), Globalising Democracy: Party Politics in Emerging Democracies. New York: Routledge, pp. 163–80. ———. 2007. ‘The ANC, Black Economic Empowerment and State-Owned Enterprises: A Recycling of History?’, in S. Buhlungu, J. Daniel, R. Southall and J. Lutchman (eds), State of the Nation: South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press, pp. 201–25. ———. 2008. ‘The ANC for Sale? Money, Morality and Business in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy 116(35): 281–99. Starr, A. 2010. ‘Local Food: A Social Movement’, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 10(6): 479–90. Statistics South Africa. 2012. ‘Statistics of Civil Cases for Debt (Preliminary). March 2012’. Pretoria. Strode, A., and K. Grant. 2004. Understanding the Institutional Dynamics of South Africa’s Response to the HIV/AIDS Epidemic. Pretoria: Institute for Democracy in South Africa. Susser, I. 1982. Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. AIDS, Sex and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Swartz, M., V. Turner and A. Tuden (eds) 2006 [1966]. Political Anthropology. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction. Taylor, M. 2010. ‘Community Participation’, in K. Hart, J.-L. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds), The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 236–47. Teh, Y.N. 2002. ‘Money Politics in Malaysia’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 32(3): 338–45. Tendi, B. 2013. ‘Robert Mugabe’s 2013 Presidential Election Campaign’, Journal of Southern African Studies 39(4): 963–70. Thayer, M. 2010. Making Transnational Feminism. New York: Routledge. Thom, A. 2008. ‘SANAC Invigorated by Political Changes’. Health-e News, 28 October. Retrieved on 17 January 2013 from: http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20032108. Tocqueville, A. de. (1840) 2003. Democracy in America (2 vols). New York: Penguin. Toit, B. du. 1991. ‘The Far Right in Current South African Politics’, Journal of Modern African Studies 29(4): 627–67. Treatment Action Campaign. 2003. ‘Civil Disobedience Campaign Begins Today’, Treatment Action Campaign, 20 March. Retrieved 26 June 2013 from http://www. tac.org.za/newsletter/2003/ns20_03_2003.htm. Trotsky, L. (1932) 2007. The History of the Russian Revolution. London: Haymarket. Trumbull, G. 2012. ‘Credit Access and Social Welfare: The Rise of Consumer Lending in the United States and France’, Politics & Society 1: 9–34. Tshitereke, C. 2002. ‘Securing Democracy: Party Finance and Party Donations – The South African Challenge’, Institute of Security Studies Paper 63: 1–12. Tsing, A. 2000. ‘The Global Situation’, Cultural Anthropology 15(3): 327–60. United Nations. 2012. ‘The Millennium Development Goals Report 2012’. New York.

References 257 Valdes, J.G. 1995. Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School of Economics in Chile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Heeren, W.M. 1990. Hartland van die Afrikaner. Morgenzon: Oranjewerkers Promosie. Varoufakis, Y. 2011. The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy. London: Zed Books. Veracini, L. 2010. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Villarreal, M. 2000. ‘Deudas, Drogas, Fiado y Prestado en las Tiendas de Abarrotes Rurales’, Desacatos 3: 69–88. Visser, W.P. 2006. ‘From MWU to Solidarity: A Trade Union Reinventing Itself’, South African Journal of Labour Relations 30(2): 19–41. ———. 2011. ‘Die vestiging van Solidariteit se Helpende Hand as ‘n suksesvolle gemeenskaps gebaseerde welsyns-organisasie’, Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 51(1): 21–35. Vonderlack, R., and M. Schreiner. 2002. ‘Women, Microfinance and Savings: Lessons and Proposals’, Development in Practice 12(5): 602–12. Wacquant, L. 2012. ‘Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Social Anthropology 20(1): 66–79. Watts, S. 2008. ‘UK to Give £15m to Fund S Africa Aids Fight’. BBC News, 28 November. Retrieved on 15 January 2009 from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/ susanwatts/2008/11/uk_to_give_15m_to_fund_s_afric.html. Weber, M. 1961. General Economic History. Translated by Frank H. Knight. New York: Collier Books. ———. (1922) 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2001. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London and New York: Routledge. Webster, D. 1977. ‘Spreading the Risk: The Principle of Laterality among the Chopi’, Africa 47(2): 192–207. ———. 1981. ‘The Politics of Instability: Divorce and Ephemeral Alliance among the Chopi’, in E.J. Krige and J.L. Comaroff (eds), Essays on African Marriage in Southern Africa. Cape Town: Juta, pp. 50–67. West, D.M. 2000. Checkbook Democracy: How Money Corrupts Political Campaigns. Boston, MA: North Eastern University Press. Westhuizen, C. van der. 2007. White Power and the Rise and Fall of National Party. Cape Town: Zebra Press. Whyte, W.F. 1999. ‘The Mondragón Cooperatives in 1976 and 1998’, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 52(3): 478–81. Wouters, E., H. van Rensberg and H. Meulemans. 2010. ‘The National Strategic Plan of South Africa: What Are the Prospects of Success after the Repeated Failure of Previous AIDS Policy?’, Health Policy and Planning 25: 171–85. Young, S. 1977. ‘Fertility and Famine: Women’s Agricultural History in Southern Mozambique’, in R. Palmer and N. Parsons, The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa. London: Heinemann, pp. 66–81. Zaloom, C. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

258 References Zamchiya, P. 2013. ‘The MDC-T’s (Un)Seeing Eye in Zimbabwe’s 2013 Harmonised Elections: A Technical Knockout’, Journal of Southern African Studies 39(4): 955–62. ZANU PF. 1984. ‘Leadership Code’. Adopted at the Second People’s Congress, 8–13 August. Harare. Zelizer, V. 1994. The Social Meaning of Money. New York: Basic Books. Zimbabwe Institute. 2008. ‘The Security–Military Business Complex and the Transition in Zimbabwe’. Harare. Žižek, S. 2006. ‘Nobody Has to be Vile’, London Review of Books 28(7): 10–11. Zwan, N. van der. 2014. ‘Making Sense of Financialisation’, Socio-Economic Review 12(1): 99–129.

░ Index

A affirmative action 60, 63, 69, 73, 127 alter-globalization 2, 15, 167, 223–4, 227, 228n1, 235 anarchist utopia 215 ANC (African National Congress in South Africa) 59, 77, 78n6 black economic empowerment deals and 75–6 dissident faction on AIDS, political obstacle of 114 Guateng e-tolling system 76 HIV/AIDS Movement, social change and 106–7, 108–9, 109–10, 113, 114–15, 117, 118 party loyalists in business, preferential treatment for 75–6 similarities between ZANU PF and 62–6 Anonymous 213–14 antiretroviral therapy (ART) 106–7, 108–9 Arab Spring 207, 217 Argentina, savings and credit institutions in 14, 182–200 bottom-up radical social change, limitations on potential for 197 cash shortages, management of 185–7 debt avoidance 191 debt services 190 decentralization 196 electronic currencies 193 federated networks, transcending local borders with 195–6

federative structure, emergence of 195–6 financial marginalization 182–3 financial self-discipline 190 households, protection against uncertainty for 190 human economy 195, 197 bottom-up state structure and plurality of 182 hyperinflation 196 informal financial practices 185–7 Interzonal Commission 196 life-cycle events, finance for 190 local currencies, potential and limitations for 194–5 long-term savings management, improvement of 191–2 market days (ferias) 194, 195–6 market stratification 194–5 match savings 192 microfinance, transformation of 187–92 microinsurance 192 monetary exclusion, social marginalization and 183–7, 198 monetary exclusion of lowincome population 182–3 monetary history 183–5, 193 monetary unions 193 money, organization in federated networks 193 money, plurality and diversity of abstract character 182 monopoly currencies 193 neoliberal globalization 193 parity of participation, concept of 199n1

260 Index passbook savings 191 personal savings, innovation in 191 pluralization of money 192–7 political implementation of research findings 198 productive microcredit 188–9, 190–91 provincial currencies, extension of federalism with 197 radical change, potential for 193–5 radical social transformation, potential and limitations for 194 selective alliances, value of building 197 social marginalization, monetary exclusion and 183–7, 198 social relations, range of 182 social stratification 194–5 society abstract structures of 182 engagement with 198 plural conception of 193 special-purpose savings and debt services 190, 192 specific expenses, finance for 192 trueque currencies 193–5, 195–6 assets bundled assets 42 ‘buy-and-hold’ strategy for 46 diversification strategy, integration into 44 market efficiency and investment in 44–5 prices and values of 43–4 speculative approach to valuation of 46–7 association free association, importance of 15, 205 liberty, equality and forms of 205 principles of 4, 201 self-help association 170

see also RA.ME (Coalition against Middlemen) austerity 20, 37, 106–7, 163–4, 166, 172, 174 anti-austerity 161, 176 debt and 34–7 economic contraction and 165 responding to 164–5 social obligation and 164–5 B black economic empowerment 63, 75–6 bottom-up approaches 182, 197, 216, 225, 232 Brazil, sovereign debt of 39–40 Bretton Woods agreements 56 bridewealth (lobolo) in rural Mozambique 13, 83–101 alienation at home, process of 90 all-purpose money 91 limitations on uses of 94 price and, problem of 94 uses of 92–4, 100 burial, problem of regulation of 93–4 colonial and post-colonial periods, social effects of 83 corporate kin groups 84–5 customary marriage in Africa 83 democracy, enforcement of 98–9 dependency 89 economic integration, institutions and 88–9, 100 exchange 84, 87–8, 90–91, 92, 94, 97, 100 Family Law, reform of 97–8 female agency 84, 95–6, 97–9, 100 female migration from rural areas 97 filiation (intergenerational ties) 85–6, 93, 98 forced marriage 98 household production 90 industrial monopsony 89

Index 261 industrialization, colonial traditions and 87–8, 88–9, 92 institution of, rights and duties within 86–7 kinship and bridewealth, Kuper’s general theory of 85 kinship and marriage, interrelation between 85 kinship norms 84–7, 99–100 market logic, delinking from 97 markets money and 87–8 price and money uses 91–2 marriage households and 89–90 marriage payments, debate on 85 monetization of, dynamics of 90 money Polanyi’s disaggregation of different uses of 91 uses of 90–91 open exogamy, relations with inlaws based on 86 patrimonial rights 98 plural democracy 99 polygyny, preference for 86 propriety, considerations of 84, 96–7, 98, 100 reciprocity 84, 88–9, 100, 101n19 redistribution 88 sharing with kin 96–7 sibling relations 84–5, 85–6, 88–9, 97, 101n12 social changes in Southern African societies 85 social relations and 94 unemployment, consequences of 83–4, 92–3 women as mediators of their rights 95–6, 100 women’s living conditions 89 women’s rights in national politics, activism for 97–9 C Calvinist Protestantism 35

capitalism 4 capitalist markets 5, 7–8, 172 capitalistic spirit, Weber’s notion of 20, 34–6 crony capitalism 64–6 development in West of 34–6 financialized capitalism 19–20, 21–2, 25 Gramsci’s perspective on 150 money in capitalist society 52 national capitalism 10–11 transnational feminism and globalized capitalism 230 urbanization and 5 venture capital 29 capitalization 29–30 small high-risk loans as target for 30 Carter, Jimmy 22 China 1, 72, 73 state control in 56 state-owned banks in 40 Christianity 34–5 clientelism 58, 61–2 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 28, 50 companies, power of 24 counter-movement, Polanyi’s notion of 139, 154–5, 166 credit ‘credit active’ people in South Africa, over-indebtedness of 33 credit-scoring 27–6 financialization and extension of consumer credit 25–30 global hierarchy of access to 41 credit derivatives 39, 44–5, 51, 52 crisis definitional narrowness on 52 efficient markets, ‘crisis’ and error in 40–41 financial crisis (2007), securitization and 28 financialization as strategy in time of 26 solidarity economy and 163–6

262 Index D democracy assertive democracy 171–2, 181n21 collaboration and 171 democratic world revolution 11–12 economy and 162, 163, 164, 165, 169, 171, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178 enforcement of 98–9 mobilization of 165 movementality and 166–7 radical readings of 179 representative and direct 174 strike action and future in Swaziland for 13–14, 137–58 undermining of 164 see also economic democracy democracy and ‘happiness,’ human economy and struggle for 14–15, 201–20 American society and culture, centrality of happiness for 203 anarchist utopia 215 Anonymous 213–14 anti-colonial revolutions 201, 206 Arab Spring 207, 217 association, liberty, equality and forms of 205 democratic revolution, inequality and 203 direct action, Graeber’s politics of 209 distribution of goods, limited markets and 216 economic inequality, engines of 205 economic organization, mutual accommodation of 216 equality individualism and 204–5 Jefferson’s perspective on 202–3 French Revolution 204 Gandhi and struggle for happiness 206–7

gifts, Mauss’ perspective on markets and 208–9 happiness, James’ facets of 203–4 hope, Bloch’s principle of 214 human economy betterment for the world and 201 commercial economies and 209–11 dual directionality of 207–8 gradualistic approach to 201, 207, 209, 211 revolutionary approach to 201, 203–4, 206, 207–8, 209, 210, 211, 212–13, 216–17, 219 human universal, emergent world society and 201 humanity, Gandhi’s vision of 206 Indignados of Madrid 207, 214–15 individual personality and impersonal society, split between 206–7 individual subjectivity, Kant’s vision of 202 insurrection, Lenin’s ‘art’ of 217 James and struggle for happiness 203–4, 205, 212–13, 217, 220n1 Kant and struggle for happiness 202–3 Lenin and James’ remarks on revolution 213, 217 liberty, equality and fraternity, Tocqueville on ideas of 204 neoliberalism, crisis and 208 Occupy Boston’s Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples 215 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) 207, 209, 212, 213, 214–15, 216–17 political privilege, social inequality and 203 Rights of Man, Declaration of the 215 Russian Revolution 204, 212, 213 self-knowledge 202 sharing ‘to each according to their needs’ 216

Index 263 society over individuals, privileging of 207 solidarity economy, Brazilian promotion of 216 Tocqueville and struggle for happiness 204–5 violence, money and debt, inseparable nature of 210 Western liberal revolutions 201 work process, dehumanization of 204–5 world revolution, concept of 212–13 world society, James and pursuit of happiness within 205 Democratic Republic of Congo (DCR), external debt of 39–40 direct action Graeber’s politics of 209 HIV/AIDS Movement in South Africa 107, 108, 117 E economic democracy 2, 3, 7, 9, 13, 65, 135, 213 human economy approach and goal of 4, 8, 198, 205, 222, 223, 235–6 social alliances and 168 solidarity and social reproduction during crisis 161–3, 168, 171 workers’ struggles for 137 workers’ struggles in Southern Africa for 137, 138–9, 149–50, 156 economics Coase on real world and 1–2 corporations, power of 8–9 economic strategies, grounding in everyday lives 6–8 the firm, Coase’s theory of 1, 8–9 global economy, financialization and effects of 19–20 hegemonic neoliberal economics 24 human economy approach, personal experience of 6–7

human economy idea, origins of 9–10 humanist view of human economy 4 impersonal nature of 24 national economy 7–8 national perspectives on, risks of 5 political economy 7–8, 12, 22, 26, 61–2, 78n4, 104, 139, 170, 202, 214 popular economy, notion of 5–6, 175–6, 233 real economy, division from financial economy 52 real-world economics review 1–2 social and solidarity economy (SSE) 5 see also economic democracy; Human Economy Programme F financial industry credit distribution in 49–55 discrimination in 43 distributional consequences of, making sense of 50–51 efficient markets and investors, dissemination of concepts of 49–50 ethics in application of financial procedures 53–4 exclusion of people from 41 financial practices, analysis of 49–55 hierarchy within Marxist approaches to 52, 53–4 Weber’s depersonalization of 53–4 legitimizing narratives of 41 liberal political project of 41–9 liberal theory of role of, challenge to 52 political projects, analytical tools and links to 56 valuation and investment, methodologies of 43, 49–50, 53–4

264 Index financialization 25–6, 29–30 ordinary people, speculation and involvement in 29 as strategy in time of crisis 26 Friedman, Milton 12, 20, 21–2, 24, 37n1 G Gandhi and struggle for happiness 206–7 gifts, Mauss’ perspective on markets and 87, 165, 175, 178, 208–9 Global Fund, eligibility criteria for 109–10 globalization 4, 12, 48, 103–4, 231 global financial discrimination, workings of 41 neoliberal globalization 10–11, 193, 201, 230 see also alter-globalization Golden Age of state control full employment objective 23–4 industrial production 24 stagflation and end of 20–21 taxation and economic regulation 24–5 Guateng e-tolling system 76 H happiness James on 203–4, 205, 212–13, 217, 220n1 Kant on 202–3 Tocqueville on 204–5 see also democracy and ‘happiness,’ human economy and struggle for Hayek, Friedrich A. von 20, 21–2, 37n2m 78n3 Hegel, Georg W.F. 2, 11, 203, 218 hegemony, Gramsci’s notion of 139 HIV/AIDS Movement and access to drugs in South Africa 13, 103–18 AIDS Law Project 111 aids movement, economic challenges for 113–14

ANC AIDS dissident faction, political obstacle of 114 antiretroviral therapy (ART) 106–7, 108–9 civil disobedience 107–8, 117 Civil Society Conference on Implementing the National Strategic Plan on HIV & AIDS 111 Comprehensive Treatment Plan (2003) 116 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) 108 consultative policy institutions, creation of 116 consultative processes, coordination of 110–11 cross-cultural trends 103–4 democratic input, formal institutional approach to expansion of 116–17 direct action 107, 108, 117 geopolitical context for democracy in South Africa 106 Global Fund, eligibility criteria for 109–10 government inaction, challenges to 103 Growth, Employment and Redistribution’ (GEAR) 106–7 health institutions 105 International Aids Conference 108–9, 110 international drug pricing regime, ANC challenge to 108 Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS 109 limits to AIDS treatments 105–9 Marxist Workers’ Tendency 117 Medicines and Related Substances Control Amendment Act (1997) 107 mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) 106–7, 111–12, 113, 115 recommendations of 112–13

Index 265 working group on, internal dynamics of 112 National AIDS Plan (1994) 106 National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) 116 National Strategic Plan (NSP) 111 neoliberalism, social inequality and concept of 103–4 pricing structure for antiretroviral (ARV) drugs 107, 108 Reconstruction and Development Programme’ (RDP) 106 SANAC (South African National AIDS Council) 105, 109–11, 112–13 democratic process within 113–15 international community support for 115 policy on AIDS, democratization of 109–13 relevance for other social movements 115–18 restructuring of (2006) 110 state response, key role in guidance for 110 scaled political field approach 104–5 social field, concept of 104 socio-political activities, interdependence of 105 South African Communist Party (SACP) 108 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights’ (TRIPS) 107 transnational networks of HIV/ AIDS activists 103 Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) 107, 108, 111, 116, 117–18 hope, Bloch’s principle of 214 human economy 14–15, 195, 197, 201–20 betterment for the world and 201

bottom-up state structure and plurality of 179, 182 commercial economies and 209–11 cooperative socialism and 170–71 democratic revolutions and 14–15, 201–20 dual directionality of 207–8 enactment of democratic spirit in 36–7 gradualistic approach to 201, 207, 209, 211 money in, reflections from Argentina on 14, 182–200 movement for, construction of 15, 221–36 revolutionary approach to 201, 203–4, 206, 207–8, 209–11, 212–13, 216–17, 219 welfare provision within 178 human economy movement 15, 221–36 academic research and discourse 222–3, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 232, 234, 235 alliances, global and local, creation of 233–4 bottom-up approach within 222, 225 collaborative networks, creation and extension of 226, 227–8, 233–4 construction of 15, 221–36 contextual influences, danger of theoretical erasure of 235 historical trajectory of 223–4 human concerns, engagement with 222 knowledge dissemination 225–6, 232, 235–6 knowledge production 224–5 lessons from transnational feminism for 231–4 movements, emergence of 224 power differentials, realm of 224 practical engagement in, need for 223

266 Index praxis, integration of theory and 230–31 public outreach 222, 227 rationale for human economy movement 223–5 social initiatives 222, 226 social movement, human economy as 221–2, 223–4, 231 society at large, approach to 226 target audience, expansion of 225–6, 232, 235–6 transnational feminism 228–31, 235 collaborative working 231 free market global economy and 229 globalized capitalism and 230 principles of 228 strategy of 228–9 universal shared experiences, denial of assumption of 229–30 Human Economy Programme 2–3, 8, 9, 221, 222–3, 226, 227, 232, 233 African and Asian voices, added weight to 3 anthropology, development studies and 202–3 development of 3–4, 222–3 economic democracy and 4, 8, 198, 205, 222, 223, 235–6 humanities and social sciences, openness to other traditions in 2, 4 objectives of, implications for 218–20 Occupy movements 207, 209, 212–13, 214–15, 216, 223–4, 226 participatory process, dialogue and 223 political task of 219–20 real life and human economy, Coase’s perspective on 1–2 reform approach to 207–11 revolutionary approach to 208–11, 216, 219

human history, ‘great transformation’ in 4–5 humanity, Gandhi’s vision of 206 I IMF (International Monetary Fund) 52, 54, 106, 163–4 Indignados of Madrid 207, 214–15 individual subjectivity, Kant’s vision of 202 inequality financial corporations and generations of 12, 39–57 resistance to 5 sense of 137 informatization 25, 27–8, 29–30, 33 insurrection, Lenin’s ‘art’ of 217 interdisciplinarity 2, 3, 4, 11, 49, 54, 56, 202, 227 interest rates 188, 190, 192 caps on 30–31 financialization and 25–6, 27–8 fluctuation in 23 investment effects of 21 Volker’s liberalization of 12 investment volatility 43–4 investors asset values and 43–4 conceptual tensions for 50–51 definition of 41, 42 evaluation criteria for 46–7, 50–51 fund management agents as 42–3, 46–7 funds under management by 45–6, 46–7 investment volatility and 43–4 market efficiency and 43–4, 44–5, 48, 51 speculative approach to valuation for 46–7 J Jefferson, Thomas 8, 14, 202–3, 204 Judaism 34–5 K kinship norms 84–7, 99–100

Index 267 M market efficiency assumption of, valuation and investment apart from 43–4 investors’ upholding of project of 43–4, 44–5, 48, 49–50, 51 market consensus and 45 moral injunctions in support of 47–8 process of 44–5, 47–8 replication of markets and process of 44–5 markets capitalist markets 5, 7–8, 172 democracy and 11–12 human potential and 7 money and 87–8 price and money uses 91–2 Smith’s philosophy of 43 stratification of 194–5 Marshall, Alfred 2 Marx, Karl 10, 182, 203, 218 Marxism 52–3, 55, 83, 117, 150, 154–5, 170 modern age, circumstances of 11–12 Modern Portfolio Theory 44, 48 monetary exchange, Mauss’ perspective on 55 monetary resources, concentration of 54–5 money centrality in political processes 77 human potential and 7 Keynesian project of issuance of 55–6 organization in federated networks 193 plurality and diversity of abstract character of 182 Polanyi’s disaggregation of different uses of 91 political campaign process and 58 supply of, adoption of market mechanism for control of 22–3 moral economy, concept of 175–6

movementality 162, 166–7, 168, 169, 177, 178, 181n21 moral obligation in 171–2 Mozambique, bridewealth (lobolo) in rural south of 13, 83–101 M-pesa in Kenya 5 mutuality 134, 216 market mutuality 171 networks of 133 N neoliberalism 13–14, 25–6, 53, 55, 63, 78n3, 118, 121–2, 139, 219, 229 capital accumulation and 24 crisis and 208 neoliberal economy 30, 228n1 neoliberal globalization 10–11, 193, 201, 230 origins of 12, 19–37 social inequality and concept of 103–4 solidarity economy in Greece and 165, 167, 172–3, 174, 180n5 North-South dialogues 3, 8, 223 O Occupy Wall Street (OWS) 207, 209, 212, 213, 214–15, 216–17 oil price shocks 22 P philanthropy, movementality and 168 Pinochet, Augusto 22 political party funding 12–13, 58–79 cheque book democracy, political economy of 58, 61–2 civil society, treatment of opposition parties and 66 corrupt empowerment-driven finances, implications for democracy of 72–7, 77–8 economic empowerment policies, party-driven 59, 66–70 elected leaders, quality of 74 empowerment process, diversification of 69–70

268 Index fundraising strategies, financing models and 70 illegal funding 71–2 patronage and 58–9, 62, 63, 65–6, 68–9, 73 redistributive policies 58, 60, 62, 65–6, 77–8 regulation of 70–72 systematic corruption, endemic nature of 59–60 violence, political motivation of 64, 66, 67, 74 see also ANC; ZANU PF pragmatism 4, 54, 55, 163, 202, 204, 219, 221–2, 224, 231–2 Pretoria Human Economy Programme see Human Economy Programme livelihoods for working class whites in 13, 120–35 R RA.ME (Coalition against Middlemen) 161–2, 166, 167, 168, 169–70, 171–2, 173, 174, 177–8, 179, 180n6, 180n14, 181n21, 181n23 Reagan, Ronald 24, 229 reciprocity 84, 88–9, 100, 101n19, 134, 138 networks of 133 principles of 132 tradition and forms of 151 worker transposition of ideas of 151–2 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 11, 203, 206, 209 Russian Revolution 204, 212, 213 S savings and credit institutions see Argentina, savings and credit institutions in securitization 28, 29–30 mechanism of 28, 29 socialism 4, 194 state socialism 219 society

abstract structures of 182 engagement with 198 over individuals, privileging of 207 plural conception of 193 solidarity economy in Greece 14, 161–81 anti-middleman activity 161–3 articulation, notion of 174 assertive democracy 171–2, 181n21 Association pour le Maintien de l’Agriculture Paysanne (AMAP) in France 167–8 austerity economic contraction and 165 responding to 164–5 social obligation and 164–5 bubble-boom 164 cooperatives and cooperativism 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170–71, 177–9 crisis, solidarity economy and 163–6 Debt Memoranda 163–4 democracy collaboration and 171 economy and 162, 163, 164, 165, 169, 171, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178 mobilization of 165 movementality and 166–7 radical readings of 179 representative and direct 174 undermining of 164 direct trade, promotion of 167–8 distribution, redistribution and 172 double movement, Polanyi’s idea of 166 economic democracy, social alliances and 168 EU debt crisis 165 fraternity 175 human economy bottom-up state structure and plurality of 179

Index 269 cooperative socialism and 170–71 welfare provision within 178 informal solidarity networks, participation in 168, 176–7 market relations, solidarity economy and 165 MAUSS group, economic sociology of 175, 178 moral economy, concept of 175–6 movementality 162, 166–7, 168, 169, 177, 178, 181n21 moral obligation in 171–2 neoliberalism 173 philanthropy, movementality and 168 pluriactivity 173 process, solidarity economy as 177–9 RA.ME (Coalition against Middlemen) 161–2, 166, 167, 168, 169–70, 171–2, 173, 174, 177–8, 179, 180n6, 180n14, 181n21, 181n23 revolutionary democracy 175 social and solidarity economy (SSE) 5, 163, 164, 165–6, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177–9, 180n5, 181n23 social reproduction of solidarity economy 162, 166–70, 170–72 socio-economic systems 173 solidarity economy and democracy and 175–7 interplay between native and analytical terms 162–3 sovereign debt crisis 163, 178, 179 state hostility to SSE of 174 relations with 172–5 ‘troika’ of international institutions 163–4 trust in state, lack of 172–3 welfare provision 172 collapse of 173–4

South Africa Communist Party (SACP) 108 consumerism in, economic growth and 32–3 financialization in 20, 25–6, 29, 36–7 geopolitical context for democracy in 106 monetary policy, Reserve Bank commitment to 31–2 National Credit Act (NCA) in 31, 33 political party funding in 12–13, 58–79 Third World financialization, laboratory for 30–34 see also working class whites in Pretoria South-South dialogues 3, 8, 223 sovereign bonds 39 sovereign debt crisis 163, 178, 179 Spencer, Herbert 2 stagflation 20–21 subprime mortgage securitization 41 Swaziland, strike action and future for democracy in 13–14, 137–58 asymmetrical relationships 152 business development, political climate for 149–50 capitalism, Gramsci’s perspective on 150 chiefly rule (indzawo yesikhulu) 141 citizen and worker empowerment 138–9 civil society, state hegemony and 150–51 collective action 138–9, 150, 154, 155 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) 153, 157 counter-movement, Polanyi’s notion of 139, 154–5 customary land tenure, labour unions and problem of 153 economic democracy, workers’ struggles for 137

270 Index Enkopolwani, Christian company town 140–41 Enkopolwani Ministries Swaziland (EMS) 140–41, 142–3, 144, 145, 146, 149 hegemony, Gramsci’s notion of 139 inequality, sense of 137 large-scale investment, basis for 149 kukhonta tribute system 141–2 labour, link between livelihood and 139 labour unions contradictions within international alliances of 153–4 double bind for 150 pro-democracy movements and 156–7 strength of movement 153 workers and, tensions between 137–8 Land Partition Act (1907) 141–2 multitudes, Hardt and Negri’s concept of 139, 155 obligation and exchange, reciprocal ties of 152 paternalism 151–2 People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO) 153 private property, EMS and 142–3 production, Hardt and Negri and continuum of 139, 155 purchasing power 137 reciprocity tradition and forms of 151 worker transposition of ideas of 151–2 rock drillers in Marikana 137, 138, 139 Royal Swaziland Sugar Corporation 149, 158n11 rural-urban interactions 141–2 social contract between workers and managers, breaking of 151–2

spontaneous collective action 154–5 strike by Enkopolwani workers day-to-day details 144–6 democracy, immanent drive towards 155 free markets, societal reaction against destructive effects of 154 leadership and worker involvement 147–9 negotiations and final deal 146–7 Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO) 153 Tibiyo Taka Ngwane (royal investment fund) 149, 158n11 Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA) 158n8 tradition, dual roles of 151 tradition idioms, implications for economic democracy 149, 150 Ubombo Sugar 149, 158n11 ubuntu (African humanism) 152 ‘War of Position,’ Gramsci’s concept of 150, 157 wildcat strikes 137 political context of 138 workers’ rights 137 T Thatcher, Margaret 12, 19, 22, 23–4, 25, 229 transnational feminism 228–31, 235 collaborative working 231 free market global economy and 229 globalized capitalism and 230 principles of 228 strategy of 228–9 universal shared experiences, denial of assumption of 229–30 U ubuntu (African humanism) 152 unemployment consequences of 83–4, 92–3

Index 271 technological innovation and 24 trade-off between inflation and 23 V violence, money and debt, inseparable nature of 210 Volcker, Paul 12, 22–4 W Wall Street Crash (1929) 40 ‘War of Position,’ Gramsci’s concept of 150, 157 Williamson, Oliver 8 working class whites in Pretoria 13, 120–35 affirmative action 127 AfriForum 127 Afrikaner nationalism 121, 134 Afrikaner volk (nation) under post-apartheid conditions 122 apartheid-era white working class 120 privileges of 120–21 Boere Vryheidsbeweging (Boer Freedom Movement) 123 bureaucratic obstruction 133 homeless shelters, growing number of 127–8 impoverishment of white working class 120–22 lay-offs and unemployment 121 roots of 121–2 Iron and Steel Corporation (ISCOR) 121 isolation 133 Kleinfontein settlement 123, 124–6, 126–7, 128–9, 132, 134, 135 Boere-Afrikaner ideals of 123–4, 126–7 cooperative ownership of 123–4 employment conditions in 124–5 once-off phenomenon 135

origins of 123–4 private property, survival and ownership 135 shareholders and workers, socialization between 125–6 social life of workers 125–6 volkseie arbeid, empty dream of ideal of 124, 126 labour market failure, collective common sense in face of 134 middle class whites 122, 123, 126–7, 128, 134 militant black labour force 121 multinational ownership 121 mutuality 134 networks of 133 neoliberal prescriptions of postapartheid state 121–2 place for all in need of shelter, 129–32 ‘poor white’ shelters 126–9 conditions in 128–9 entry criteria for 127–8 ‘poor white’ shelters, hopelessness in 133 poverty, black experience of dealing with 133 property market development 135 reciprocity 134, 138 networks of 133 principles of 132 Solidariteit (Solidarity) 127, 129, 132, 133–4 Solidarity’s Helpende Hand 127–8, 133–4 ‘street skills,’ lack of 129 transferable skills 122 Volkshulp (Assistance to the Volk) 128 Volkstaat (People’s State) workers 123–6 Vryheidsfront (Freedom Front) 127 West Fort settlement 129–30, 131, 132, 133–4, 135 informality of 130

272 Index internal tensions 132 limitations on development of 130–31 market relationships in, diversity of 131–2 workers in, treatment of 134 World Bank 52, 54, 199n4 World Economics Association 2 world revolution, concept of 212–13 World Social Forum, Porto Alegre 2–3 world society emergence of 4 James and pursuit of happiness within 205

Z ZANU PF (African National Union Patriotic Front in Zimbabwe) 59–60, 67–8, 69–70, 71–2, 73–4, 78n7, 79n10 corporations aligned with, preferential treatment for 73–4 income (2011) of 67 similarities between ANC and 62–6 Zimbabwe, political party funding in 12–13, 58–79