Global Capitalisms

15th January 2019

LECTURE

Part 1. Globalization in the public domain - how do people talk about globalisation, what are their
expectations and how can anthro contribute to this understanding?
● Globalization is dead? This relatively new pessimism.
● Downfall of soviet union in 1991 after berlin wall collapse in 1989, particular forms of market
economies becoming practically universal
● Francis Fukuyama - the end of history? Political and economic liberalism has scored an
unabashed victory, and this was the endpoint of mankind’s ideological revolution and
universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government
● fukuyama ‘s argument in hindsight (anthro opinion) see,ms rash and deluded. Its macro ideas,
disregard of human everyday life.
● Globalisation in the public domain:
○ Trump - unemployment, jobs taken elsewhere, wipes out the middle class, benefits elites,
and is avoidable.
○ WEF leaders - trade strengthens middle class, generates profit for all, fosters peace,
pushes innovation, upheld by institutions, unstoppable: we should embrace connection.
● The ‘global’ as a single, towering force of economic change that acts on the ‘local’
○ ^Anthropology can question and find different answers of what globalisation is in
response to this question
● These ideas are rooting from a particular tradition in global capitalism - a move from Fordism to
flexible accumulation.
Part 2. Transformation in the global political economy
● Fordism
○ Emphasis on mass production, mass consumption
○ Cheap materials from other parts of the world
○ Large corporations with their own labour forces
○ Capital, labour and the state have a particular type of balance. Employers provide
benefits for their workers. Company management would adopt paternalistic approach to
their workers, ford hired social workers to ensure workers were behaving in a moral type
of way. Rational consumption in this sense would be buying a ford automobile.
○ The politics of labour unions was big part of Fordist economy. Imagine a ford factory: if
there was a strike, there would be great impact on production
○ Fordism as a ‘way of life’: white, male, highly unionised
○ Economy booming post-1945.
○ Images of labour at this time are gendered and racialised.
● Fordism under stress
○ Rising oil prices
○ Unemployment
○ Recession
○ Inflation
 ○ Rising state expenditures
○ Corporations have excess capacity and need to find ways to profit
○ Civil rights and feminist movements challenging what was upholding fordism
● Régime of accumulation that exists is flexible accumulation - david harvey
○ Flexible labour markets
○ Way of responding to a corporations fluctuating needs for labour
○ Growing service sector, industrial growth in poorer parts of the world
○ Faster transportation and communication
○ Corporations increasingly produce a ‘brand’
○ Reorganization and exponential growth of the financial system
○ Anna Tsings piece - the company would outsource labour but it sells the brand

● Demise of Fordism - reorganisation and exponential growth of the financial sector as a result of
deregulation
● Coal mining in Spain - Diz’ ethnography
○ The way the industry has transformed is illustrative of broader tends
○ 1960s strong unions, state backing, large permanent workforce.
○ 1990s Spain joins EU and subsidized coal mines gradually phased out. Lots of violent
protests
○ 2012: Goldman Sachs, imports cheap Colombian coal to Spanish power plants during
upheavals over austerity (mobile capital)
○ As mines close down privileged, male, Spanish workforce downsized, but migrant
workers hired on temporary contracts and send remittances home
Part 3. Anthropological contributions to the study of global capitalism
● Methodological contributions & theoretical insights
○ Ethnographic approaches
○ People as agents in their own lives
○ Highlight the diversity of positions and experiences
 ○ Identify synergies & contradictions (and their productivity)
○ Explore why people participate in this exploitative system
● Challenging the separateness of ‘the economy’ as a domain
● Instead, highlighting intimate and cross-cutting life practices
● Displacing capitalism as an “already determining structure, logic, and trajectory”
● Capitalism as unstable and contingent yet socially generative
● Capitalism as an open ended process which leads to different results and situations

Do we need a re-think of our social theories?

● Work, class, state, solidarity...Concepts that helped the industrial revolution.
● Work is not available for many people, states may lack sovereignty which is taken up by
corporations, what about solidarity when its divided along ethnic, racial and gendered lines?
● Are these concepts too focused on the West?
● Outdated social theories?

CLASS

Capitalism
● Free markets, invisible hand
● consumers/producers, merchants
● supply/demand - goods, commodities, services
● Profit driven - where you place the value (surplus vs use value, with exchange value lying in the
middle)
● Surplus value
○ Through branding and marketing
○ Exploitation - surplus value is generated through exploitation of labour as a way of
cutting costs
● Ideologies associated with capitalism
○ Individualism
○ Consumption/greed
○ Modernity/progress/development/growth
○ Freedom
● Values becoming forces that condition the way we behave

Anthropological definition of capitalism:

A network of profit-driven market relations with multiple actors that navigates between different
structures of value, while still attempting to present itself as a totalised and coherent whole.

Tsing - what does it tell us about capitalism?

● Importance of diversity
● Unitary system
● Ambiguity of agents involved in supply chains
 ● Niches - edges/motivations. Even if you fall over the edge it doesn't harm their standing (Nike for
example)
● Undocumented migrants
● Responsibility is diffused.
● Super-exploitation - working with very specific types of oppression

Huang
● Serendipitous encounters with capitalism? But messy also
● Llots of overlapping contradictory agendas that came together for a common cause
● Diversity of actors involved
● Narratives of capitalism are trying to make sense of things happening

Cattelino
● Seminole using capitalism as an advantage, whereas previously they were historically exploited
● Not the usual story of what capitalism does
● Its inverse of what you hear about neoliberalism being stronger than state, bc Seminole using
their sovereignty (granted to them by the state) to work capitalism to their advantage.
● Hard rock wouldn't exist without a long history of exploitation and marginalisation

Gens manifesto - capitalism as being generative. Generative of what a good life may be for the Seminole

What are the political implications of thinking capitalism as diverse, messy, generative? How does it
change how we think about struggle in capitalism?
Does it change how we think of exploitation or superexploitation?
how do anthro portraits of life under capitalism change the homogenous stories and presenting us with a
mroe fluid picture of hwo this political and economic system works.