People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis: Perspectives from the Global South: 1 (The Human Economy, 1) PDF
Preview People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis: Perspectives from the Global South: 1 (The Human Economy, 1)
People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis The Human Economy Series editors: Keith Hart, London School of Economics John Sharp, University of Pretoria The 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 recog- nizing 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 Afterword by Keith Hart Volume 4 From Clans to Co-ops Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily Theodoros Rakopoulos People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis Perspectives from the Global South ░ ░ ░ Edited by Keith Hart and John Sharp berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com Published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2015, 2016 Keith Hart and John Sharp First paperback edition published in 2016 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 People, money, and power in the economic crisis : perspectives from the global south / edited by Keith Hart and John Sharp. pages cm. -- (The human economy ; volume 1) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-467-0 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-78533-342-2 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-468-7 (ebook) 1. Sustainable development--Developing countries. 2. Financial crises--De- veloping countries. 3. Money--Developing countries. 4. Power (Social sciences)-- Developing countries. I. Hart, Keith. II. Sharp, John (John S.) HC59.72.E5P464 2014 338.9’27091724--dc23 2014016234 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78238-467-0 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78533-342-2 paperback ISBN: 978-1-78238-468-7 ebook Contents ░ Preface. The Human Economy Project vii Keith Hart and John Sharp Introduction 1 Keith Hart and John Sharp Chapter 1. After the Big Clean-Up: Street Vendors, the Informal Economy and Employment Policy in Zimbabwe 19 Busani Mpofu Chapter 2. Immoral Accumulation and the Human Economy of Death in Venda 41 Fraser McNeill Chapter 3. ‘Letting Money Work for Us’: Self-Organization and Financialization from Below in an All-Male Savings Club in Soweto 61 Detlev Krige Chapter 4. Market, Race and Nation: History of the White Working Class in Pretoria 82 John Sharp Chapter 5. Negotiating Inequality: The Contemporary Black Middle Classes in Salvador, Brazil 106 Doreen Gordon Chapter 6. Live Music in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Cape Verde 129 Juliana Braz Dias Chapter 7. Congo-Gauteng: Congolese Migrants in South Africa 151 Saint José Inaka and Joseph Trapido Chapter 8. Neither Nationals nor Cosmopolitans: The Political Economy of Belonging for Mozambican Indians 173 Jason Sumich vi Contents Chapter 9. Marwari Traders between Hindu Neoliberalism and Democratic Socialism in Nepal 190 Mallika Shakya References 207 Notes on Contributors 225 Index 227 Preface ░ The Human Economy Project KEITH HART AND JOHN SHARP This book is the fi rst in a series that asks how the economy might become more human. Economies were always human, of course, in that people are indispensable to their functioning; but how human interests are expressed in the economies that dominate our world has long been ob- scure. The aim of the series is to explore economy from the vantage point of people’s concrete activities and aspirations, while extending the range of our inquiries to take in the human predicament as a whole. Southern Africa and the global South are our principal focus in this volume, but the comparative perspective that frames our case studies aims to be more inclusive than that. For several centuries now humanity has struggled to break out of unequal society with the hope of achieving genuine democ- racy – government by and for the people. The world economic crisis that began in 2008 and provoked the fi rst stirrings of political revolution in 2011 off ers a new opportunity to launch intellectual initiatives with this aim in mind. We must address the sources of inequality at present and ask how greater economic democracy might be achieved through devel- opment strategies based on what people want and are doing already. The humanities and social sciences have lost their way. One reason for this malaise is that economics has acquired a degree of autonomy, tech- nical sophistication and public dominance that has greatly reduced intel- lectual exchange with other disciplines that have an established interest in economy – such as anthropology, history, sociology, political economy, geography, literature and philosophy. At the same time, society has come to be identifi ed with the market economy and economic considerations are now seen as being central to the achievement of political democracy. We invite a much broader coalition of engaged intellectuals and activists to contribute more to public debate about the economy, while renewing an interdisciplinary conversation with those economists who are open to such a possibility. viii Keith Hart and John Sharp The Berghahn Human Economy series assumes that at base economies are more alike than the contrasts between them as capitalism, social- ism and the rest suggest. People everywhere combine reliance on gov- ernment support, commerce, kinship, voluntary associations, religion, crime and much else. We need to give the specifi c combinations they live by a new direction and emphasis, with the aim of mobilizing their eff orts for the common good. Social rights rest not only on citizenship and market contracts, but also on the mutuality that grows out of living together. We ask in this book: How do people in South Africa and compa- rable societies insert themselves into the actual, unequal economy? How might a more equal economy be built by harnessing and expanding what people already do for themselves? Ultimately, we need new answers to the question, ‘What is a human being?’ These should refl ect human unity and diversity more fully than the economists’ narrow vision allows for. The idea of economy has an unfi nished history, and the current global crisis, far from weakening the ascendancy of free market economics, as many of us expected, appears to have strengthened it. Economy was at fi rst management of a rural household’s budget and it has lately come to be identifi ed with markets everywhere. In the last century it referred principally to the national economy and political confl ict over its man- agement was organized around the poles of market freedom and state socialism, neither of which did much to promote economic democracy. We can no longer aff ord ruinous swings between these poles. Nor is it obvious how a revolutionary break with ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘capitalism’, conceived of as a totality, might be achieved. The economy is too important to be left to specialists whose ideas are far removed from how ordinary people understand the world they live in. The approach adopted here for studying the economy is institutional; that is, rather than rely on totalizing abstractions, we pay close atten- tion to the particular arrangements through which people engage with economic life, whether these are public bureaucracy, commercial fi rms, self-organized activities, the informal economy or domestic groups – and these are always plural. The narrow view of economic needs and interests off ered by mainstream economics should be replaced by a wider concep- tion of human well-being. We hope to broaden discussion of how to bring about meaningful economic democracy through dedicated research and writing on the ‘human economy’. The public might then be able to place themselves imaginatively and practically in such a vision of how the economy works. Above all, we hope to learn from and give a voice to those who are usually neither seen nor heard. Economic democracy means nothing if not trusting the people to identify and express their Preface ix own interests. The practice of ethnography – of joining the people where they live in order to fi nd out what they do and think – is central to such an approach. Its source is modern anthropology, but the general method has now been adopted, at least in name, by a number of disciplines. The present project grew out of the activities of an international net- work of scholars who have been engaged for over a decade in trying to advance a more just and inclusive approach to the development of the world economy. This network, starting out in Latin America and Europe, has widened its international range through several important publica- tions, the most recent being The Human Economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010a). This was an attempt to bring the fruits of the international project to English speakers or at least to those who speak English as a second language. All its predecessor volumes were called, in various languages, Dictionary of the Other Economy. The editors dropped that particular formu- lation for several reasons. We felt that labelling our intellectual work as ‘the other economy’ lent itself too readily to radical binaries. We based our programme on what Marcel Mauss (1990 [1925]) and Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]) understood by economic change, since we were looking for a more positive construction than a simple negation, and this is where the idea of a human economy came from. What makes an economy ‘human’? First, it privileges people before abstractions. People make and remake their economic lives and that has to be the foundation for thinking about economy. Any economics should be accessible to them as a practical guide to how they manage those lives. But the economy is also human in that people everywhere increasingly confront economic problems and dilemmas that are common to us all. The future of humanity as a whole is at stake in the economic crises that we face, not just the world seen through the blinkers of national politics and media. So the idea of a human economy points in these two directions: towards what people really do and hope for, while seeking to extend our perspective to a global level, without ever losing sight of local realities. Since that volume was published, the editors of this series set up a re- search programme on the human economy at the University of Pretoria (UP) in South Africa’s capital. UP has generously funded a programme of post-doctoral fellowships drawing initially from the global South (with fellows from Southern Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Carib- bean). Subsequently, with the support of the Mellon Foundation, the programme has brought researchers from the global North and South together in a creative dialogue focused on Southern Africa. Before The Hu- man Economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010a), publications were largely
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