Selective Hegemony and Beyond-Populations with “No Productive Function”: A Framework for Enquiry

Abstract

A significant shift in the form of the political economy since the 1980s is frequently described as a shift from the welfare state to neoliberalism, the latter either referring to new principles of rule or more broadly to include the nature of the economy. The paper argues that it is more fruitful to explore how these changes reflected a shift in the dominance of forms of capital–principally from production to finance. The dominant class blocs in the former period pursued hegemonic projects described here as expansive; in the latter period such projects became selective. Insofar as finance capital seeks security through diversification (benefitting from difference) and is not itself productive of value, so it relies on and [re-]producesrespectively, a) selected populations invested in distinctions, and b) an absolute residual population. The politics of the former is one of negotiation, of the latter counter-politics beyond negotiation. Exploration of this difference becomes a crucial task for social analysis.

Keywords:

• finance capital
• production capital
• class
• Keynesianism
• neoliberalism
• hegemony
• political economy
• governmentality
• surplus population
• Marx
• Gramsci

Acknowledgments

This article has benefitted from the insights of so many friends and colleagues in workshops, over coffee, in seminars, and across dinner tables that, but for its limitations, it should really be seen as cooperatively authored. Thanks to Malcolm Blincow, Victor Breton, Michelle Buckley, Deb Cowen, Jaume Franquesa, Kanishka Goonawadena, Ken Kawashima, Kundun Kumar, Winnie Lem, Tania Li, Susana Narotzky, Jennifer Ridgley, Neil Smith, David Sworn, and Judy Whitehead.

Notes

1. “The Turks have conquered Germany exactly how the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: with a high birth rate … a large number of Arabs and Turks [in Berlin] have no productive function with the exception of selling fruit and vegetables” [italics added]. Thilo Sarrazin, administrator of the Bundesbank and once Berlin minister of finance in the Social Democratic Party Le Monde [Online] 12.10.09.

2. See, for example, Giorgio Agamben's ‘bare life’ (1998), Zygmunt Bauman's Wasted Lives: Modernity and its outcasts (2004), Mike Davis's Planet of slums (2006), Mark Duffield's (2007) Foucauldian reading of ‘development’ as the liberal ‘enlightened’ form of eugenics, or Judith Butler's (2009) lives whose ending is ungrieved.

3. I realize that ‘revindicative’ is not to be found in the English dictionary, but I use the term here because it captures an element of the dialectics of politics that I cannot find in another word in English. I take it from the Spanish reivindicar—to take back.

4. He contrasted this to ‘willfulness.’ See Smith (2004,2006) references.

5. For a response to Roy by Jairus Banaji, go to http://kafila.org/2010/03/22/response-to-arundhati-roy-jairus-banaji/ (Accessed 16 April 2010).

6. This was the substance of Gunnar Myrdal's Asian Drama (1968) in which he referred to the problem of cumulative disadvantage in which the success of growth poles undermines the economic possibilities of less endowed regions.

7. While my discussion of Chatterjee here refers mostly to his article in Economic and Political Weekly of 2008, which is confined to India, it is consistent with his book (2004) (especially chapter 2) whose subtitle is “Reflections on popular politics in most of the world.”

8. Given his past among the historians of subaltern studies it is surprising to find Chatterjee reproducing here a picture remarkably similar to that of W. A. Lewis (1954) and his followers in the 1950s, one in which value flows from the “modern or formal sector” to the “traditional or informal sector,” this time through government beneficence.

9. “… the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration, as politics without politics” (Zizek 2006: 38).

10. The allusion here is to the two elements of hegemony, its production and its reception, that I discuss at length in Smith (1999; 2004; 2006). See also Narotzky and Smith (2006).

11. Ironically Banaji (see Footnote 6) accuses Roy of precisely the reverse omission—of leaving out of her discussion what we have here seen as ‘civil’ and ‘political’ society.

12. For neoliberalism itself is “an extraordinary departure in policy that can be deployed to include as well as to exclude” (ibid: 5).

13. The shift in measuring the worth of the nation in terms of the wealth of the citizens toward measuring it in terms of their contribution to overall productivity was a slow and uneven emergence from mercantilism. Gregory King, who conducted the first sociological style survey of England, in his General Account of the 1690s, divided the population into 500,586 nobles, merchants, lawyers, etc., who increased England's wealth, and 849,000 labouring people, seamen, servants, etc., who decreased it (cited in Mount 2004: 119–120).

14. ‘Security’ is a keyword (in Williams's sense), indicating juridical treaties that reflect the conjunctural moment in class and imperial wars. From social security, to the securities and exchange commission, to national security, neighbourhood security to the securitizing of supply chains.

15. Bourdieu captures the overall ethos that results from the relation of ‘freedom’ to the reigning in of value back to capital: “Workers may contribute to their own exploitation through the very effort they make to appropriate their work, which bindsthem to it through the freedoms—often minute and almost always ‘functional’—that are left to them … This is especially true when the dispositions that Marx calls ‘vocational prejudices’. … find the conditions for their actualization in certain characteristics of the work itself, such as competition in the occupational space for example … It follows that, in many work situations the margin of freedom left to the worker … is a central stake; it introduces the risk of non-work or even sabotage, going slow, etc.; but it opens the possibility of investment in work or self-exploitation. … It is on this principle that modern management theory, while taking care to keep control of the instruments of profit, leaves workers the freedom to organize their own work, thus helping to increase their well-being but also to displace their interest from the external profit of labour (the wage) to instrinic profit.” (Bourdieu, 2000) 203–204 [italics in original]).

16. By ‘enclosure’ I wish to stress not just the image of the enclosed field, to which the small firm might be analogous but also the image of enclosing water through channels and tubes, to direct flows.

17. For example: “Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm … presents itself as … a struggle between collective capital, ie. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, ie. the working class” (Marx 1976: 342–344 [italics added]).

18. Those who debated the masa marginalista in the late sixties by contrast were concerned precisely with the connection between forms of capitalism and the juridical and normative elements that made it possible to designate a population ‘surplus.’ They began with an understanding of capitalist society as a dynamic tension-filled process and asked how such a society produces surplus populations, and they then tried to show how these ‘surpluses’ affect the further reproduction of that society: “The first element of research … the mould … of a social formation dialectically inter-relates three instances: the economic, the jurido-political, and the ideological. Emergent at the level of the economy, the relative surplus population necessarily involves the other two” (Nun 1969: 225–226 [translation mine]). See Smith, forthcoming.

19. “necessary labour appears as superfluous, because the superfluous is … necessary only to the extent that it is the condition for the realization of capital” (1973: 609).

20. “If a definite amount of labour capacity is given, the relation of necessary labour needed by capital must necessarily continuously decline, ie: part of these capacities must become superfluous, since a portion of them suffices to perform the quantity of surplus labour for which the whole amount was required previously” (1973: 609). Marx explicitly notes that this abstract division of labour into its necessary and its surplus components could actually become a distinction among people, making some necessary and others surplus.

21. “society in its fractional parts undertakes for Mr Capitalist the business of keeping his virtual instrument of labour … intact as reserve for later use” (1973: 609–610).

22. One way to address this issue is to re-configure such people as in some way different (e.g., indigenous, or tribal) and then tie them to a place like a reserve (Li 2009). Another is to propose that migration eg to urban centres will resolve the issue (Breman 2009).

23. The social and political implications of these kinds of surplus populations are dealt with acutely by Li (2009)

24. But we should not overstress North/South distinctions; regional or urban sectoral concentrations in the global south can themselves produce their own relative surplus populations as well as demands for land and resources.

25. It is important to assert that this is not the de Soto (1986) argument. Rather, I am simply drawing attention to the obvious—the extent to which monopoly and competitive industrial capitalism depended on the non-commodified sphere for what is usually (misleadingly in my opinion) called social reproduction and on the intricately commodified sphere for a vast array of supplies and services. Hobsbawm (1984) notes that the huge expansion of factories in mid-nineteenth century England was accompanied by a multiplication of such operations.

26. It is hard to overemphasise the degree to which financialization occurred in the United States and Britain. Arrighi (2007: 140 [italics in original]) notes that by the 1990s in the United States not only had finance, insurance, and real estate surpassed the share accounted for by manufacturing profits, “non-financial firms themselves sharply increased their investment in financial assets relative to that in plant and equipment, and became increasingly dependent on financial sources of revenue and profit relative to that earned from productive activities … manufacturing not only dominates but leads this trend towards the ‘financialization’ of the non-financial economy.”

27. “Buying a property and waiting for its price to inflate was deemed as productive as investing in new means of production” (Michael Hudson 2008).

28. The capital-labour relationship expressed in the wage, the tripartite pact of the political representatives of capital and labour mediated by the state, etc.

29. The limitations of what Glick Schiller calls “methodological nationalism” become especially apparent under these conditions. Problems of exposition are made still more challenging when we recognize that we are trying to grapple with economic, juridical, social, and cultural features that are reciprocally connected in a kind of moebius strip (see also W. R. Scott 2004) The abbreviated discussion here is given more extensive treatment in Smith, forthcoming.

30. Production capital remains the baseline upon which value (through labour) is generated. It follows then that finance capital cannot be ‘pervasive’ and old-fashioned labour has not disappeared (though it may have moved). Rather, finance capital is dominant in the sense that its principles condition the priorities of production capital and, as we will see, the priorities of some kinds of labour.

31. Earlier in this article I used the term ‘instruments’ when referring to capital tools, rather than the more frequently used ‘machines.’ The expression ‘financial instruments’ is in common parlance. Here I use it to refer to a vast array of things from derivatives like credit default swaps (CDS) or collateralized debt obligations (CDO) to models like the Gaussian Cupola, as well as the software programmes required to generate them. Use of the word across these instances is intentional.

32. “the effect of securitization was to aggregate a vast number of otherwise discrete mortgage transactions … into a single mass of exposures; generating a socialized working class expression in financial markets” (Bryan and Rafferty 2010: 4).

33. As Michel Feher notes for the notion ‘human capital’: “It is precisely as a consequence of [the] desire to overcome the divide between the intimate man and the entrepreneur that one should understand the promotion of human capital—that is, the presentation of the individual as ‘investor in him or herself” (Feher 2009: 33). The analogy with the firm is brought out further by Feher (ibid: 34), who notes that, “while labour power is the property of the free labourer, neoliberal subjects do not exactly own their human capital; they invest in it.” The parallel with shares in a joint stock company is patent and, lest we still resist the association with finance capital Feher continues, “the relationship between the neoliberal subject and his or her human capital should be called speculative, in every sense of the word” (ibid [italics his]). I am grateful to Drew Gilbert and Andrea Muehlbach for pointing me to Feher's reflections.

34. The appearance of selective hegemony is especially obvious in development projects in the Global South, where particular groups whose names acquire extraordinary symbolic capital, become the selected targets of multiple agencies pursuing often uncoordinated programmes: creditworthy single mothers, indigenous peasants, pandas … and so on, whereas inevitably others—non-creditworthy mothers, non-indigenous peasants, non-panda consumers of bamboo—do not. And any urban or regional ‘renewal’ project will reveal the same kind of phenomena.

35. Evidence for the shift from expansive to selective hegemony in Latin America is provided in Roberts and Petras who remark: “[Urban policies] mark a shift from the old urban political economy of the highly centralized states of the Import Substitution Industrialization period to a new one. … An important part of this shift … is a decreasing emphasis on the universalistic social policies of the past and an increasing emphasis on policies targeted to specific groups and individuals in need” (2006: 58).

36. I need to add an important caveat here. It seems to me that the role of ‘surplus populations’ has become crucial to a revindicative politics in the future. And I feel that this is so in a way that was not the case at the height of the KNWS. I have therefore talked of the distinctions between these two situations. Yet it would be absurd to imply that this situation is unique. Through history societies have produced people who appear as ‘surplus’ to that society. Indeed, it has been argued that for Marx and Engels there was a ragbag of people who were also surplus to revolutionary politics (Stallybrass 1990). The question I pose, therefore, is whether this remains the case (if it were ever the case in the first place).

37. In principle only of course. ‘The whole of society” is understood in terms of force and counterforce so that hegemony has to do with alliances under conditions of conflict.

38. This raises the question as to whether countries like China where production capital is quite prevalent can indeed address pressures through growth and increased productivity. Only empirical investigation can offer the beginnings of an answer. Factors to consider though are the fact that China has tended to increase the distinctions among the populations in the shift toward capitalism; financialization is a major source of wealth and hence capital flow; and this in turn has influenced China's national and international investment decisions.