Eurocentrism and Communist Economics

["FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Novick wrote:

(...)

> my frustration with this list -- the lack of any content related to either
> the contributions of indigenous societies or the insights of
> environmentalists.  the treatment of the Zapatistas on this list tends to
> sharply discount any of the aspects of their politics and critique based on
> the pre-Colombian character of the Mayan and other indigenous peoples of
> Mexico.  The treatment of Marx and of capital on this list seems to ignore
> entirely Marx's insight that there are several different forms of capital,
> and that rent on land (based on private ownership) is a separate and
> independent form of capital, with its own set of attendant social
> relations) than the capital which grows out of private expropriation of
> wage labor.  I have seen little or no discussion of Vandana Shiva's
> tremendously insightful work about the continuing expropriation by capital
> of the commons.  And all this discussion of pricing and labor time has not
> given an ounce of consideration to what the capitalist economists refer to
> as "externalities"  the costs to the planet, the environment, air , water,
> the genome, etc etc of doing "business."

I agree with Michael's concern, and we probably need a more attentive
look at the multiplicity of forms of capitalist exploitation and
resistance. I also agree that the thread on "Economics of a
Communist Society" has revolved around alternatives not
always aware of the problems raised by that multiplicity. However, I
think his judgement on discussions on the list
is a bit too easily dismissive. There have been discussions on the
relevance of politics of identity and construction subjectivity in
different locales as important dynamics of identification of forms of
oppression and strategies for popular response. Many comrades (I
think of John Hutnyk in particular, but there are surely others) have
greatly contributed on the list to emphasize dynamics of struggle in
non-western world. The discussion around Monty's Chiapas paper
emphasized, I think, the debate on "indigenista" approaches to
revolution, with their shortcomings and ambiguities. I think that
we can retrieve aspects of Monty's et al paper dealing with the
"popular" aspects of the Zapatista as driven, rather than by abstract
conceptualization of "united front" politics, by what I see as an
understanding of the power of a politics of needs and identity in the
diverse figures of exploitation created by global capital.

On the content of Michael's post, I'm not quite sure that "rent" on
the land still defines a totally independent form of capital
accumulation, separate from proletarianization in its "classical"
meaning. I rather think that processes of rural exploitation more
often give rise to a plurality of class relations simultaneously
experienced in a same locality, not differently from the plurality of
relationships of employment if factory. Take the expansion of
sharecropping (on which here in SA there's a massive debate, but
that has involved, for example, the strawberry fields of California
in the last two decades, for example): to what extent it can be
conceptualized along a clear-cut capitalist-precapitalist divide?
More generally, is the existence of non-capitalist relations of
production: a) clearly identifiable; b) a recipe for
resistance/weakness of global capital; c) a potential for alternative
forms of politics capable at the same time to address what Michael
calls the "externalities"? Recent contributions (eg. the debates on
"Rethinking Marxism" suggest this, but I have my doubts. I'm probably
too simplificatory, but I think that idealizing non-capitalist forms
of economy and identity without a political project to
circulate struggles arising from their ambigue and
contradictory nature implies, at best,
to suggest a strategic retreat. There's nothing wrong with strategic
retreats in themselves. Provided, of course, that you have some
gain to defend...

Franco

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Unit
Dept of Sociology
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University of the Witwatersrand
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