The moral economy

Ryan Schram

Mills 169 (A26)

ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au

Monday, August 27, 2018

Available at: http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/5.1

• The trap of nostalgia: Cultures are dying.
• The trap of modernism: Everything is getting better.

Positive thinking has deep roots in Western culture, going back to the Enlightenment:

• There is a reason for all of this.
• Everything is getting better.

Yet there has also been a critical tradition in Western culture which has been skeptical of this.

Doctor Pangloss believes:

• There is no effect without a cause, and
• All is for the best in, this, the best of all possible worlds.

For Doctor Pangloss, there is no other way that things could turn out

• “Legs are visibly designed for stockings–and we have stockings.”
• “Pigs were made to be eaten–therefore we eat pork…”

• There is no such thing as modernity.
• All societies change all the time, but no two societies end up in the same place.
• Societies cannot be ranked on scale of progress.
• Global capitalism needs there to be a diversity of kinds of societies. Maimafu, Kabre, Kawelka are needed to make it possible for there to be places like Trinidad and Sydney.

Marx offers us a theory of capitalism as a product of history. Marx's goal was to predict what would happen to capitalism, and what ultimately would lead to its demise. He argued that capitalism, like any social system, is defined by its contradictions. The contradictions of capitalism would eventually overwhelm it. This perspective has helped scholars to understand how capitalism has changed in the 20th century.

• Standardization of processes, specialization and regimentation of workers
• High wages and high employment and cooperation between capital and labor
• Centralization of all aspects of production in one firm
• Mass production for a mass market

• Many different, small firms involved in each aspect of production
• Flexibility, rapid change in production processes
• Precarious labor, greater competition among workers, and hence lower wages
• Specialized production for many niche markets
• Extensive commodity chains facilitated by free trade and global transport networks

As Fordist production expanded over the 20th century, capital also puts pressure on states to liberalize trade and investment across borders, so that it may invest in cheaper processes (or offshore and outsource some aspects of production to places with lower wages). Production as well as consumption is globalized, and this requires new methods of production which are more “flexible.” A post-Fordist model is born: Lots of little shops competing for a number of different small jobs for big companies.

The globalization of capitalism does not mean that once isolated societies become integrated into a single global system. We have already seen how gift systems adapt to their contact with global markets. Global capitalist firms and the global system as a whole also depends on the maintenance of this alternative as a means of reproducing labor it can exploit.

• Maimafu villagers will never be able to earn enough from coffee; Campos needs Maimafu to keep growing sweet potato
• At the Signature Fashions factory, workers need to be willing and able to change jobs and hours fast. The firm depends on them having side jobs and being generally familiar with all the jobs at the factory. That means it depends on having workers who help each other make extra clothes for each other.

One of the ways societies respond to market forces is by placing limits on individual choices

• Wamira (Papua New Guinea) taro gardens can't be tended with metal tools (Kahn 1986)
• When Luo (Kenya) people sell land, they earn “bitter money” (Shipton 1989)

Market-driven societies also place some kind of moral limit on profit as well

• Human tissue cannot be sold in Australia
• Prostitution is illegal in the United States, except Nevada

Certain kinds of value remain embedded in social relationships while other kinds are able to be commodified, bought and sold. Is M-C-M' itself immoral?

We can apply the same kind of thinking to the relationship of wage labor, which is based on exploitation. Workers often find ways to collectively resist the extraction of surplus value

• Cleaning one's wool-spinning machine promptly at the end of a shift - a clean machine usually doesn't get turned on again until tomorrow (Shehata 2009, 68)
• Breaking machine counters, which meant that operators and not supervisors had to determine when a machine's spindles were completely full and could be replaced (Shehata 2009, 69)

Many of these and similar tactics were also used by workers in socialist firms so that they could subvert the control of managers.

Of course, from another perspective, resisting control of labor or limiting market forces are bad for moral reasons:

• Peasants are lazy; they only produce what they need
• Factory workers are irresponsible; they don't care if the compant meets its quotas
• Indigenous people are backward; they think their territory is more valuable than having enough food.
• Workers who “thief” time and material are stealing, and stealing is immoral (Prentice 2015, 95)!
  Do mass production and production for the market have their own morality? Where does it come from?

An either-or distinction is a dichotomy.

An opposition between individual self-interest and the collective force of a social norm, like reciprocity, is one example of dichotomous classification.

Many societies see their own involvement in markets in terms of this dichotomy. Their ideology focuses on the dilemma - a choice between opposed ends - posed by trading: Do I earn for myself or give help to my neighbors and kin?

• Making gin in Frafra slums
• Selling betel nut around PNG
• Selling tobacco in Auhelawa

• Informal enterprise looks different when we apply gender as a lens.
• Informal enterprises are often “women's work,” done alongside or part of women's roles in families.
• Both labor markets and gift systems are male dominated.
• Women fill in the gaps and make the whole system hang together, but don't get recognized for this.

• Fordism is a method of organizing production, but Fordism also sustained a social contract between the ruling class and society: High wages and general affluence in exchange for private profits through mass production.
• When Fordism fades, women must work a “second shift” - first wage labor then housework and child care (Hochschild 1989).
• Hence, informal economies matter more for making ends meet.
• Poor single mothers have to find work and care for children, so they exchange labor with each other (Stack 1974).
• Welfare activism has often argued that women's informal exchanges of care are unpaid labor and should be supported (e.g. Mazelis 2017).

• The gig economy: Is it also partly sustained by informal support?
• Family-based aged care?
• Can you think of other examples of needs which middle-class wage-earners could once meet through the market, but now involve gifts and informal support?

• The encounter between social forces and market forces is not simply collective constraints on individual behavior. (That's a false dichotomy!) Rather, social forces and market forces are driven by two distinct value systems.
• These value systems conflict, but they also interact in not-so-obvious ways.
• The formation of informal economies is not a breakdown of capitalism. It's an unintended, but inevitable, side effect of the contradictions in capitalism
• The value created by informal ties not only helps people survive, but can be exploited by global capital. We shall discuss this again in detail next week.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell, and Anne Machung. 1989. The Second Shift. New York: Penguin Books.

Kahn, Miriam. 1986. Always Hungry, Never Greedy: Food and the Expression of Gender in a Melanesian Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mazelis, Joan Maya. 2017. Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor. New York: New York University Press.

Prentice, Rebecca. 2015. “'Is We Own Factory:' Thiefing a Chance on the Shop Floor.” In Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad, 87–110. Boulder, Colo.: University Press of Colorado.

Shehata, Samer S. 2009. Shop Floor Culture and Politics in Egypt. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press.

Shipton, Parker. 1989. Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association.

Stack, Carol B. 2008 [1974]. All Our Kin: Strategies For Survival In A Black Community. New York: Basic Books.

Voltaire. 2006 [1759]. Candide, or Optimism. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19942/19942-h/19942-h.htm