Re: on "social capital"

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2003-05-27 15:58 +0800, you wrote:

> Chris,
>
>  
>
> I've been following this thread with interest. When you say that
>
>
> > in the Gramscian battle for ideological hegemony the concept of
> "social
> > capital" may be contested ground, which Marxists leave
> uncontested to the
> > enemy if they merely content themselves with dogmatic sarcastic
> utterances
>
>  
>
> it implies that we agree with the framework of hegemony and so on, when
> not even all "Marxists" actually agree on these
> concepts.


Sure. I was pushing the argument a bit to see if anyone wanted to put a
different perspective. I do not know Ben Fine or John Harriss's books
directly but I get the impression they are attacking the idea of social
capital rather than trying to win over the territory from some basically
positive people who need to be able to see the issue in a wider marxist
concept. Indeed the article from Ben Fine on the internet which I cited
does not seem to me to address that more fundamental Marxist frame of
reference which might persuade people in the middle ground of the debate
on social capital to come over as allies to a more marxist point of
view.

I am not familiar with MP Cowen or the context in which he was writing,
but I have re-read the passages your forwarded, and understand from
Google, that he has written about development theory, and theories of
underdevelopment.

I can see the possibility that by discussing two concepts of "social
capital" in parallel, Cowen may widen the terms of the debate in
such a way as to draw Marx's concepts to readers' attention, and to win
people for the broader marxist perspective that economic activity is
social activity, even if privately owned under capitalism. I do not know
the audiences for whom he was writing and academics have to make tactical
compromises, but from my point of view I can see that such arguments
could conceivably help to contest the middle ground more effectively than
a polemic which just dismisses "social capital" out of
hand.



> I would say there may be little or no real
> separation between the two versions of "social capital" ---
> Marxian and contemporary -- and, in fact, they may feed off each other.
> This loops back into the paper by Mike Cowen which I posted several days
> ago, i.e.
>
>  
>
> "These two concepts of social capital, the one arising out of more
> recent
> social theory, with the other stemming from Marx's critical thinking
> about
> capital, can now be brought together. Over the past two decades, 
> the
> concepts have run along parallel paths with each other. For the
> first,
> social capital stemmed from addressing what used to be called the
> social
> 'question' or 'problem', and in the more recent case quoted above, that
> of
> addressing inner-city unemployment and poverty in North America. It is
> this
> concept which has ended up in Africa, to address a much larger scale of
> what
> is intended to be done for development. For the second, social
> capital
> addressed what had happened during the course of immanent 
> capitalist
> development and gave grounds for understanding the transactions of
> corporate
> capital. One concept is meant to positively counteract the negative
> of
> capitalist development while the other looms so large in explaining why
> the
> unchecked transactions of capital play so much of a role in creating
> the
> social problem in question.?
>
>  
>
> And here's a bit which I didn?t post before:
>
> ?By taking up the negative dimension of social capital, the oft mentioned
> propensities for 'criminals', in the name of the mafiosi or
> cronyism, to act cohesively through the trust relation for a socially
> malficient purpose, we are provided with a second source of glue to bind
> the two concepts of social capital together. For the purpose of this
> lecture, a significant implication follows for international development
> practice from what Seligman had concluded from his understanding, as
> mentioned above, of the trust relation. Trust is not some intrinsic end
> of social action but the means to accommodate two different orientations
> towards activity. From the standpoint of donors, assistance is intended
> to act for social welfare whereas from that of a ruling state agency as
> recipient, aid serves an immediate self-interested purpose. It is only
> the trust that conditional self-interest, working through what the
> Idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant called 'unsocial sociability', will
> establish the conditions for development that keeps the practice
> going.?
>
> http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/kmi/Julkais/WPt/1998/WP1198.HTM
>
>  
>
> In other words, ?social capital? may not be contestable, because it is
> permanently tainted by the society in which it was born.
>
>  
>
> Regards,
>
>  
>
> Grant Lee.
>