The concept of capital and the current state of capitalism

GAGO, VERÓNICA

Chicago

Conferencia; The Concept of Capital and the Current State of Capitalism; 2016

University of Chicago

?The concept of capital and the current state of capitalism?- Oct, Fri 28 / 3 CT - ChicagoFirst of all, I want to thank the organizers of this event. I am especially grateful to Kaushik Sunder Rajan for inviting me. It is really an honor for me to have the opportunity to share this panel with such prestigious and amazing thinkers. So, I am really glad to have this privileged meeting.I would like to tackle this big subject that Etienne Balibar has proposed as a title from the point of view of my co-research. I have investigated a massive market, called La Salada (described as the largest illegal market in Latin America), that took off with the 2001 crisis in Argentina and since then has not stopped growing and developing, and how much of the clothing that is found there originates from the so-called clandestine textile sweatshops, where migrant workers produce clothing for major brands, as well as to sale in the market and, finally, what implies that the majority of these workshops are located in villas/slums or neighborhoods where migrants are a large part of the population. I try to understand the circuits and mechanisms by which those popular economies produce a multiplicity of labor situations, linked to transnational value chains and major local brands, combining conditions of extreme precarity with high levels of expansion. Then, how this labor force adapts to and struggles against capital appropriation. And finally, how from those concrete situations we can conceptualize transformations in the world of work, which calls for a fundamental re-reading of many categories, such as development and progress, poverty and precarity, inclusion and consumption. In other words, I will take Etienne´s title as an inspiration to re-organize some of my notes.1.Since the the defeat of revolutionary movements in the 1970s, Latin America has served as a site of experimentation for neoliberal reforms propelled ?from above,? by international financial institutions, corporations, and governments. Starting with neoliberalism has a double effect in order to understand the Latin American present: we must underscore that dictatorships and state terrorism originated as a response to a period of increasing class struggle. But also, because dictatorships are where we see a constitutionalizing effect of neoliberalism: they promoted financial legislation that has persisted even into the present moment. During the 1990s, neoliberalism was expressed through structural reforms, known as the Washington Consensus. After a few years of increasing rates of self-employment, massive unemployment caused poverty rates to soar. In 2001 the crisis erupted in Argentina, provoking the organic collapse of the government and banking system and shaking up the public stage by making social movements visible as determinant actors in the conflict. The revolts during the 2001 crisis in Argentina marked the breakdown of the political legitimacy of neoliberalism ?from above.? Those revolts are part of a continental sequence?Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador?which caused the subsequent turn of the region?s governments, epitomized by such names as Chavez, Lula, Morales, and Kirchner. In Argentina, after months of political turmoil, going through five presidents in a week, repression and murder of popular militants, the election of Nestor Kirchner opened a new political cycle.After a long decade of the ?progressive? renewal of governmental line-ups in various countries on the continent, today an end of the era or closure of the cycle is spoken about from very different perspectives. This end of cycle is linked to the end of those governments´ mandates or to the fact that while they survive, they are no longer able to deploy the elements that used to enable their characterization as progressive or popular, demonstrating the precarity of the devices of social inclusion that they created. 2.The crisis of neoliberalism that Argentina experienced did not signify the crisis of the free market, but rather a crisis of legitimacy of neoliberal policies. Two points must be underscored. First, we need to focus on the terrain of resistant subjectivities that, not only in Argentina, but across the continent, led to the crisis of this system of neoliberal regulations. That means a ?veto power? from the social movements against austerity, repression, and massive dispossession of public services. Second, we must think about neoliberalism´s persistence beyond the crisis of its political legitimacy from the point of view of how it becomes rooted in popular subjectivities, resulting in what I call ?neoliberalism from below.?The rentier question will be an essential element for understanding neoliberalism´s persistence in Latin America and the connections between finance and neodevelopmentalism in the last decade. When I propose the idea of neoliberalism from below, I focus on how it hits the ground and the connections it establishes with concrete situations. These situations require us to pluralize neoliberalism beyond its definition as a set of policies emanating from above, as structural planning. By neoliberalism from below, I am referring to a set of conditions that are materialized beyond the will of a government, whether legitimate or not. Upon these conditions a network of practices and skills operates, assuming calculation as primary subjective frame and functioning as the motor of a powerful popular economy that combines self-managed community skills and intimate know-how in the crisis as a technology of mass self-entrepreneurship.Then, speaking of neoliberalism from below is a way of accounting for the dynamic that resists exploitation and dispossession and at the same time takes on and unfolds in this anthropological space of calculation, which is in turn the foundation for an intensification of that exploitation and dispossession. Mapping popular economies is a way of mapping neoliberalism as a battlefield (another way of reading Marx?s warning that ?the real is multiply determined?).. These economies are the space-time of situated economies that are key for thinking about how capital attempts to incorporate new territories through the diversification of financial forms. These territories are what allow us to understand how neoliberalism is simultaneously delegitimized as macrostructrual policies of adjustment and at the same time incorporated in forms of popular know-how for dealing with the consequences of those structural reforms. Thus the question is not about choosing between localist ethnographies or structural statements. The perspective I open up by the notion of ?neoliberalism from below? aims to highlight the dispute over the idea of calculation practiced by the popular economies. At stake here is how the proliferation of financial operations whithin the popular economies implies ?operations of capital?, as Mezzadra and Neilson call them, that use those apparently peripheral economies to expand their terrain of conquest, deploying new forms of capturing labor through financial devices.My argument is that populations of peripheral neighborhoods become key subjects of that new exploitation and are not simply marginalized as subsidized populations, but rather are the target of the new modes of neoextractive exploitation. In this sense, neoliberalism from below is a field of ambiguity that does not assume that neoliberalism?s hegemony is complete. What characterizes the present Latin American conjuncture is that on the on hand the full legitimacy of neoliberalism has been challenged, while ?neodevelopmentalist? and statist policies are not really able to replace it. Instead, it is a perspective that looks ?below? to find something that antagonizes and that ruins, spoils, and/or confronts that supposed hegemony. My hypothesis is that neoliberalism from below consists of the convergence of the action and rationality of popular vitalist pragmatism and finance?s ability to operate concrete mediations on this fabric.3.The idea of calculation has to do with a vitalist pragmatic: this means, on the one hand, that calculation is a vital condition in a context where the state does not guarantee the conditions of neoliberal competition prescribed by the ordo-liberal model. In these forms of doing, calculation assumes a certain monstrosity to the extent that popular entrepreneurship is forced to take responsibility for conditions that are not guaranteed. On the other hand, this imperfection is given as indeterminacy and organizes a certain idea of freedom, which, in its own way, challenges some of the most traditional forms of obedience. One of the questions that must be addressed is how this rationality does not exactly coincide with homo economicus, as if it were a perverse tracing. This is not to imply reductionism to the principle of utility or profit as the only logic of action. Rather, it involves broadening the idea of utility as a tactical sense, as a principle of perseverance. And so, the trajectories are better understood as based on a vitalist pragmatic, a notion that I forged through a peculiar interpretation of Spinoza´s theory of conatus. I use this idea to distance myself from two perspectives: certain functionalist arguments of the ?moral economy? which displace class identities and conflicts, and the pre-political victimizing that neutralizes migrant workers (and popular economies in general) as subjects of decision, calculation, and strategy.In Argentina, these economies became visible and acquired the scale of a mass phenomenon as an effect of the 2001 crisis, due to the intense demonetization experienced in the country. A series of innovative economic institutions (of savings, exchange, loans, and consumption) spread, combining survival strategies with new forms of popular entrepreneurship and brutal forms of exploitation. The economic recovery incorporated them and promoted their articulation as part of its drive to ?development?. The idea of a strategic conatus can be projected over these economies, which are both stable and dynamic urban fabrics that challenge the imaginary of classic developmentalism and also a simplistic idea of utilitarian individual.4.In this context, I think I can go back to the notion of ?operations of capital?, in order to analyze one of those operations in a very concrete terrain: how capital extracts value from the financialization of ?popular economies? in Latin America, especially through an unprecedented growth of consumer credit. It is important to underline the political "origins" of those popular economies -an actual but usually overlooked element- in their present configuration in order to understand the emergent "outside" they once were. It is important to emphasize that living labor, in the form of this popular self-entrepreneurship, is in a way compelled to reckon with a series of dispossessions and with the lack of infrastructure, filling the gaps precisely through labor. This also means that these popular classes are not merely superfluous population. They are rather involved in a series of micro-proletarian economies that continually open up the possibility for a non-neoliberal subjectivation. Financial exploitation is built on the basis of this productivity, trying to exploit these variegated vital strategies.Therefore, finance literally extracts value from a set of activities, forms of cooperation, and obligations of a future capacity to labor, that don´t help to organize. The expansion of debt enables new forms of access to consumption for these subsidized populations, while at the same time it disseminates within the social fabric the compulsion to invent forms of labor and income that are radically heterogeneous with respect to the ones epitomized by the ?Fordist? labor norm and standard.It should be emphasized that the form of finance dedicated to exploiting the popular sector?s productivity through massive indebtedness appeared in Argentina at the moment of neoliberalism?s crisis of legitimacy as structural adjustment policies. The state?s increased involvement in financing that segment employed a rhetoric of opposition to austerity as a resource for its legitimization. This trajectory enables me to argue, as I did for instance in an article I wrote with Sandro Mezzadra, for expanding the concept of extractivism. At stake in this expansion is the possibility to take extractivism as a prototype for understanding finance´s action in the region ? taking the notion of extractivism itself beyond the usual critique of the reprimarization of Latin American economies and their dependence on commodities. These forms of value creation blur the boundaries between the legal and the illegal and can be read as the prototype of financialization´s arrival in the territories. It is there where capital´s frontiers are expanded, exhibiting the need for specific logistics in order to connect high finances with low finances and to make neoliberalism operational as simultaneous dynamics of territorialization and deterritorialization from above and from below.The region?s progressive governments propose a politically complex relation between those populations and natural resources: primary material commodities function as the funding source for social benefits. Exploitation by transnational agribusiness corporations is thus legitimated by the state?s discursive mediation that emphasizes the function of social integration performed through the capture of a portion of this extraordinary profit. Additionally, according to this perspective, anyone who opposes the extractive model is opposed to a form of financing poor populations. But, we need to understand how these dynamics are articulated with one another and the role the state plays in this articulation. There is a triple simultaneous component, which combines state neointerventionism, relaunching accumulation through extractive operations, and the penetration of this modality from above and from below, linking diverse scales and territories. It is this this triple dynamic that requires us to expand the concept of extractivism. 5.The perspectives that theorize neoliberalism as the hijacking of ?the political? are too problematic, from my point of view, to analyze those ?operations of capital? and the ?boundary struggles? ?to quote Nancy Fraser? in relation to the definition of the ?current state of capitalism?. In her book Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown contrasts the figures of homo economicus and homo politicus under the thesis that there is a fundamental antimony between citizenship and neoliberalism. Despite Brown´s sharp analysis, with the predominant image of neoliberalism as ?economization,? the very expansion that allows for understanding neoliberalism as a governmental rationality is restricted to returning to the idea of neoliberal reason as a sort of disappearance of the political. Thus it recreates a distinction between politics and the economy that enables an ?autonomy of the political,? in that the political appears as a colonized field to defend, while the ?reign of the rule? becomes the privileged space for the democratic deployment of homo politicus. I insist that, under this idea of politics, those properly political moments in neoliberalism and, in particular, in the ?operations of capital? that neoliberalism interprets remain unrecognized. On the other hand, I am interested in a practice of politics capable of questioning neoliberalism without thinking of it as ?the reverse side? of politics and, in that movement, defining it as a field of battle that is extremely dynamic precisely because it is already political.In a similar line, in their book The New Way of the World (2013) Dardot and Laval´s political conclusions underscore the idea that this neoliberal reason becomes totalizing, abstract, and thus, homogeneous in its effects. What characterizes my use of the phrase ?neoliberal reason? is a twofold move: the inclusion of resistances that heterogeneize the idea of reason itself and the way in which this heterogeneity challenges neoliberalism as governmentality.6.This kind of conceptualization of neoliberalism, which has its parallel in a whole set of positions in Latin America, is extremely problematic. It translates into a state-centered point of view and connotes one of liberalism´s poisonous legacies: the projection of the social as a space made from above, without its own power or consistency. In fact, neoliberalism is not the reign of the economy subordinating the political, but the creation of a political world (the regime of governmentality) that arises as the ?projection? of the rules and requirements of market competition. Denying this premise, the populist perspective by E. Laclau, appealing to the recovery of the state, aims to abstractly separate the sequence ?liberalism-market-economy? from ?developmentalism-state-politics,? and assume that the latter can correct and replace the former on its own. However, this conceptual separation paradoxically risks implying an immediate and comprehensive relegitimation of ?political? neoliberalism, due to the lack of critical reflection about the modes of articulation between institutions and competition, which seems to make it unnecessary to talk about capital and capitalism.The celebrated ?return of politics,? a figure of speech created by progressive governments to make sense of the cycle, runs the clear risk of re-enforcing this division and freezing the social in place as that which is merely managed, as a territory of ?bare life.? It is this social that today returns as a field of new social conflicts, which are unthinkable from the angle of a state-centric politics. In this politicist schema, the popular, on being a concrete and mottled complexity, is reduced to a strictly rhetorical figure. Only then can it be invoked to legitimate a power that repairs and unifies that which otherwise is condemned as spontaneism and multitudinous disorder. 6.I would like to say a couple of words about how this scenario allows us to think about a critique of political economy, as I read Etienne´s invitation. Neodevelopmentalism, the political epitome of the recent ?progressive? cycle at the regional level, is inseparable from a generalization of the production of rent and the financial mediation of the social. At the same time, at the level of rhetoric and political imaginary, it is presented in opposition to the predominance of the financial. Such a gap generates a special role for the state insofar as it manages to combine and synthesize both lines. The hypothesis that I propose here is the following: what is unique about the progressive governments in South America´s form of management is their attempt to articulate rentier-financial mediation with the conditions opened up by the plebeian revolt. In other words, their attempt to weave together that vitality of revolt and the agenda from below that imposes a ?veto power? with the categories of political economy. In the case of those governments, therefore, financial mediation is inseparable from a politicization of that mediation.Expanding the concept of extractivism also opens up a space for critiquing the notion of development. Even if neodevelopmentalism evokes an industrialist imaginary, today is directly tied to the hegemony of rent. This assumes, and is based on, a decisive mutation in the quality of social inclusion: it is no longer achieved by the expansion of wage labor, but rather by extending the capacity to consume to sectors that do not necessarily have what was traditionally known as inscription into the wage system. As I argue, expanded extractivism is a formula that can account for how multiple financial devices act in these territories, extracting value from a social vitality and cooperation that they do not contribute to organizing. Looking at these issues, I propose a discussion of the notion of ?citizenship through consumption,? which would situate consumption as the pressure for new forms of value creation, in opposition to an argument that posits it as the path to democratization for Latin American societies. Along this line, is interesting how this idea leads to a discussion about the changes in class composition.Bolivia?s Vice-president Álvaro García Linera?s recent evaluation of the MAS?s defeat in last February?s referendum for the re-reelection touches on a key issue in the Latin American conjuncture: the change in the social composition of the popular classes in the wake of several years of so called ?progressive? governments. García Linera indicates concrete mutations: in the habits and intensity of consumption, access to information (digital media that takes away the union and the assembly?s monopoly), the urbanization of territories, and indigenous identity becoming political-symbolic capital (even for obtaining positions in the government). These mutations in the popular classes, in his argument, explain a paradoxical shift: the MAS (the party of García Linera and Evo Morales) produced the subjects that led to its defeat. The ?revolutionary government? (in his terms) finds itself overwhelmed by the transformations of those who had been the protagonists of the social movements that drove the anti-neoliberal agenda during the 2000-2005 cycle. However, the conclusion is deceitful: he argues that there was consumption without politicization. Or a sort of depoliticized consumption. This argument has circulated in other countries with nuances, even if with less sophistication. In Brazil, the celebrated creation of a new middle class, which millions of poor people were able to access, was analyzed as an element of the PT?s success and a foretaste of the decomposition of a part of the people that would stop supporting it electorally. In Argentina, what I have called ?inclusion by consumption,? was later part of the scapegoating of the popular sectors by some of the progressive sectors after the last electoral defeat: it was analyzed in a moralizing way (with paternalistic arguments, e.g., ?the poor don´t recognize the benefits they have received?) or simply corporate fatalism (lamenting that the autonomy of the political cannot persist against the powers that be, such as the media, corporations, etc.). On not modifying the ownership structure of the modes of production nor the images of happiness that consumption makes visible and whose production corresponds with the centers of power in the key countries of global capitalism, the phenomenon of inclusion by access to consumption (that historically substitutes the experience of inclusion via the wage) is maintained by the state´s capacity to pact with rentier ? financial and exporting ? capital. In this order of things, a part of that rent is captured by the state to encourage monetary circulation and a type of consumption based on non-durable goods. But now, this has been exposed as a reason for political defeat, rather than as a realistic form of social inclusion.It is precisely the development of capitalism in Latin America over the last long decade of ?progressive? governments that has produced the conditions of the recent defeats of these governments. Under these conditions the limits of a certain understanding of ?social inclusion? become apparent. I would like to mention three phenomena 1) The segmentation of hierarchized spaces due to differential access to security, which promotes a ?civil war? in defense of property, between peripheral neighborhoods and wealthy areas, but also within the more popular zones; 2) The increased use of private and public security forces to contain all those that under the influence of the stimulus of fulfillment through consumption have no way of legally guaranteeing that access; 3) The business world´s use of submerged ways of living and work based on the rentier structure of accumulation to force ways of precarization/hyper-exploitation. I am convinced that a new critique of political economy cannot avoid taking these points seriously into account.