{"id":10898,"date":"2023-05-23T07:00:57","date_gmt":"2023-05-23T05:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/?post_type=capitalism&#038;p=10898"},"modified":"2023-08-24T13:38:29","modified_gmt":"2023-08-24T11:38:29","slug":"an-infinity-of-traces","status":"publish","type":"capitalism","link":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/researchingcapitalism\/an-infinity-of-traces\/","title":{"rendered":"An Infinity of Traces"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<style>\n\t.dkpdf-download-icon { height: 1.5rem; }\n<\/style>\n\n\n\n\t<div class=\"dkpdf-button-container\" style=\" text-align:right \">\n\n\t\t<a class=\"dkpdf-button\" href=\"\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/capitalism\/10898?pdf=10898\" target=\"_blank\">\n\t\t\t<img src='\/wp-content\/themes\/boasblogs\/dkpdf\/download_red.svg' class=dkpdf-download-icon'\/>\n\t\t<\/a>\n\t\n\t\t<!-- <a class=\"dkpdf-button\" href=\"\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/capitalism\/10898?pdf=10898\" target=\"_blank\"><span class=\"dkpdf-button-icon\"><i class=\"fa fa-file-pdf-o\"><\/i><\/span> Download PDF<\/a> &rarr; -->\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n<p>I have spent the last few years studying the financialization of water utilities in Europe and the insurgencies that often accompany them. These insurgencies tend to arise from households and pose profound challenges to the liberal democratic project as it has evolved under conditions of financialized capitalism. The household has emerged as a site of protest because privatized utilities increasingly rely on them as secure, captive income streams that pay ever-increasing tariffs and fees over predictable time periods \u2013 indefinitely and into the future (Bayliss 2016, 386). Banks count on households producing the wealth that \u201ctrickles up\u201d through the payment of bills for vital goods such as water, but also rent, electricity, or garbage collection (Bayliss 2014, 295). As public services are transformed into tradable assets, households are vital from the point of view of capitalization \u2013 secure anchors to which the world economy is attached. They are extractive zones in a global rush where \u201c<i>terra nullius<\/i> is continually being declared, as if for the first time\u201d (Cooper and Mitropoulos 2009, 367). And yet, these households can be fragile anchors as well \u2013 prone to refusal, exhaustion, evasion, or protest. As the women of the Irish water movement insisted when their water utility began to install meters in 2014 as a signal to global investors that it was rendering itself \u201cbankable\u201d (that is to say, ready to take out huge loans, the costs of which would ultimately be borne by metered households): \u201cYou will take no more blood from these stones!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, as <a href=\"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/salvos\/in-this-house-we-prey-cooper\">Melinda Cooper has recently argued<\/a>, we have seen the phenomenal rise of \u201cfamily offices\u201d into which the superrich channel their increasingly inflated family assets. Family offices, modeled after the late 19<sup>th<\/sup> century Rockefeller prototype, have become \u201ca disruptive force on Wall Street, pursuing deals that were once reserved for private equity firms and hedge funds.\u201d These family enterprises are private and unincorporated (rather than corporate, publicly owned, and managerial) and allow for dynastic wealth holders to accumulate wealth away from the \u201cgrip of outside investors.\u201d More and more of these firms are going \u201cprivate\u201d and forego or delay making public offerings in order to avoid shareholder meddling. Billionaire families and their private investment funds now command so much capital that they have become standalone economic and political forces, offering a serious alternative to public securities markets.<\/p>\n<p>Cooper argues that we have seen a shift from managerial capitalism, which saw publicly traded corporations become the undisputed focal point of American business for much of the twentieth century, to shareholder capitalism which began to challenge managerial capitalism in the 1980s with an overriding concern for maximizing investor returns (Ho 2009). What we are witnessing now is a full-scale shift to an unabashed familial capitalism which weds permanent capital holdings in sectors such as rental housing or infrastructure to the immortality of the family firm &#8211; an immortality guaranteed by the fact that U.S. tax law lets wealth holders build up huge asset portfolios without ever incurring the capital gains tax, as long as they \u201ctransfer these assets to their children and grandchildren.\u201d This loophole is available to no other economic institution but the family, <a href=\"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/salvos\/in-this-house-we-prey-cooper\">Cooper writes<\/a>. In other words, it is the gift between generations (see also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.journals.uchicago.edu\/doi\/full\/10.14318\/hau5.1.023\">Yanagisako 2015<\/a>) that lies at the core of this corporate form as well as the global inequalities it perpetuates &#8211; a consolidation of intergenerational wealth holdings that is treated as a private family matter by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Any financial information requested from these family offices is treated as an intrusion into the private sphere.<\/p>\n<p>Families are thus everywhere at the core of this perversely unequal thing we call the global economy, both feeding into it and leeching off of it, depending on class location. We are in the midst of <i>Gens<\/i> territory, whose authors rightly reassert that global capitalism has at its heart the practices of the household and kinship \u2013 especially since the 1990s. As Bear, Ho, Tsing, and Yanagisako put it, we have seen an increased national and global economic reliance on the commodification of intimacy and affect, on migration networks and remittances, and on personal and family debt. All draw and capitalize on the productive and regenerative powers of kinship. The authors call this kin labour \u2013 the speculation, aspiration, juggling of multiple debts across generations, inheritance, education, childcare and elder care. This labour \u2013 performed across social scales and reaching from the bottom billion to the top 1 percent &#8211; knits this thing that we erroneously call \u201cthe economy\u201d together. This is the second point where the Gens collective rightly insists on a point that has been constitutive of anthropological thinking since its inception \u2013 that there is no such thing as \u201cthe economy\u201d that we can disambiguate from other social or cultural domains, including but not limited to that of kinship. This means that economies are built through a cornucopia of exchanges that cannot be captured or explained through a narrow conceptualization of the economic as purely market-oriented action. Instead, it is built through what the authors call the \u201cfull range of productive powers and practices through which people constitute diverse livelihoods,\u201d and out of which \u201ccapitalist inequalities are captured and generated.\u201d As feminist substantivists have long argued, we need to recognize this \u201cpositive value of life and generativity.\u201d The labour of life-making performed by millions of households around the world is the labour of all labours; a labour so valuable that capitalism works incessantly to tether it to its projects of accumulation (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.plutobooks.com\/9780745341729\/a-feminist-reading-of-debt\/\">Bhattacharya 2021: viii<\/a>). As the Gens collective similarly puts it in its <a href=\"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/researchingcapitalism\/on-the-poverty-of-grand-theories\/\">recent reflection<\/a>, faith in capitalism is maintained \u201cbecause people\u00b4s and the world\u00b4s productive powers or life-forces are yoked to its fundamental, naturalized social hierarchies and evaluations of worth.\u201d These are no \u201csmall stories\u201d that instantiate the \u201cgrand theories\u201d of capitalism, as the authors write as they reflect on their manifesto today. Kinship \u2013 and productive life-forces more generally \u2013 are infrastructural to capitalism, not epiphenomenal to it. Take, for example, Rosa Luxemburg, who made a similar argument more than a hundred years ago. For her, capitalism could not be understood without reference to its dependence on life-making for its processes of accumulation; it has always already depended on not just women\u00b4s labour, but more broadly what she called the Earth\u2019s \u201cfree gifts\u201d and \u201cnatural treasures\u201d (1913, 230\u201331).<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>I do need to signal a quibble in the \u201cspirit that animates feminist assemblies &#8211; disagreement in the secure knowledge that we will find each other on the same side of the barricades\u201d (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.plutobooks.com\/9780745341729\/a-feminist-reading-of-debt\/\">Bhattacharya 2021: ix<\/a>). That is the point the Gens collective made in its original manifesto, which is that they do not take \u201ccapitalism as a priori, as an already determining structure, logic, and trajectory&#8220;, and that they instead \u201cask how its social relations are generated out of divergent life projects.\u201d<b> <\/b>What they criticized is the presumption that capital is a strict (and singular and teleological) determinant in people\u00b4s lives. Perhaps my quibble grows out of the question of what we mean by capitalism, and what we mean by a priori. I certainly agree that capitalism is not, as the authors of the Gens manifesto assert, a singular \u201cthing\u201d or \u201clogic\u201d that we can clearly disambiguate from, say, kinship as well as a host of other heterogeneous social and cultural projects. At the same time, I think we can also agree that capitalism has shown the powerfully recurrent capacity to \u201cyoke\u201d the world\u00b4s \u201cproductive powers of life-forces \u2026 to its fundamental, naturalized social hierarchies and evaluations of worth,\u201d as the Gens authors note. These yokings have a global history that has left powerful traces. Indeed, capitalism has created the \u201centicing\u201d sense that \u201cwe can only be and become ourselves or a collective through its relations.\u201d My point is that paying attention to the a priori \u2013 with capitalism being a priori just like kinship is &#8211; need not mean that we think in terms of singularities, or in terms of limiting logics and teleological determinants, but precisely in terms of these historically specific yokings. This would mean that \u201ccapitalism,\u201d defined as an economic system constituted through and with gender, race and other forms of naturalized, mutually entangled forms of distinction, always already constitutes us and exists as a priori force in our worlds. As Antonio Gramsci put it in his Prison Notebooks, the starting point of all critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is. It is knowing thyself as a product of the \u201chistorical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory.\u201d The task is to \u201ccompile such an inventory\u201d (1971: 337) \u2013 an inventory of forces both multiple and constitutive of our collective worlds. The task is certainly to track how worlds are assembled and re-assembled. But this assembling and re-assembling occurs within a historically constituted context, where yokings have always already happened, giving social life shapes and forms that were and continue to be built out of the long dur\u00e9e. <span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Put differently, the point \u201cthat structure itself is not pre-formed,\u201d as the authors argue in the original manifesto, goes too far for me. Capitalism is not a wheel that reinvents itself over and over again. It does not have to reassemble itself out of nothing, over and over again. It operates powerfully and recursively in its global patternings, its circulatory forms and codings (Pistor 2019). The ethnographic task, then, is certainly to trace instability and contingency, but these instabilities and contingencies come alive within and often also against the historical patterns and parameters produced by racial capitalism and its long, deep injuries. One must, likewise, explore the question of how \u201cpeople, labor, sentiments, plants, animals, and life-ways are converted into resources for various projects of production.\u201d These conversions, as the Gens collective argues, occur through formal mechanisms such as \u201cmoney, contracts, audit, yield curves, and financial models,\u201d as well as also through \u201cintimate social relations such as marriage, parenthood, friendship, gifts, and inheritance.\u201d But these conversions, again, occur within a universe that is formed and shaped. The question is: How did the advent of racial capitalism aim to yoke the heteronormative, \u201cprivate\u201d family to its projects over time, while simultaneously creating the fantasy that families exist outside of them? How have many varieties of \u201cfamily\u201d always already existed alongside, with, inside of and perhaps under and outside of these yokings?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Anthropologists have long made the point that capitalism is a messy rather than a seamless process as it is always, as the Gens collective puts it, generated out of \u201cheterogeneity and difference, and from our varied pursuits of being and becoming particular kinds of people, families, or communities.\u201d We have been able to make this point because much of our scholarship is told from what mainstream scholarship perceives to be the world\u00b4s margins. From this marginal position, as the Gens authors argue, we have argued that capitalism\u00b4s power lies in its capacity to <i>appear<\/i> totalizing, coherent, invincible. It is the production of this appearance, its breakdowns, limits, recursions and recombinations, that many of us have been interested in as scholars. But paying attention to capitalism\u00b4s appearances and limits does not preclude our paying attention to its strengths and durabilities. The challenge for our discipline, I think, is to build an analytic that lies suspended between our knowledge of the ways in which racial capitalism has \u2013 powerfully and with long-dur\u00e9e consequences &#8211; yoked the productive powers of life-forces to many of its projects while at the same time also always being subjected to the volatility, generativity, and creativity that constitutes all social life, all projects of life-making. It is this analytic, suspended between form and generativity, that is our ethnographic task.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>References<\/b><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-indent: -2em; padding-left: 2em;\">\n<p>Bayliss, Kate. 2016. \u201cMaterial Cultures of Water Financialization in England and Wales.\u201d <i>New Political Economy <\/i>22 (4): 383-397.\u2014. 2014. \u201cThe Financialization of Water.\u201d <i>Review of Radical Political Economics<\/i> 46 (3): 292-307.<\/p>\n<p>Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2021. \u201cForeword.\u201d In: <i>A Feminist Reading of Debt<\/i>, edited by Luc\u00ed Cavallero and Ver\u00f3nica Gago, viii-x. London: Pluto Press.<\/p>\n<p>Cooper, Melinda. 2022. \u201cIn This House We Prey: Managing Family Wealth for Dynastic Power.\u201d <i>The Baffler <\/i>66. https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/salvos\/in-this-house-we-prey-cooper [last accessed 10.05.2023].<\/p>\n<p>Cooper, Melinda and Angela Mitropoulos. 2009. \u201cThe Household Frontier.\u201d <i>Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization <\/i>9 (4): 363-368.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Gramsci, Antonio. 1995 [copyright 1971]. Selections from <i>The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci<\/i>.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>NY: International Publishers.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Ho, Karen. 2009. <i>Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. <\/i>Durham: Duke University Press.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Luxemburg, Rosa. 1913 [2003]. <i>The Accumulation of Capital<\/i>. New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n<p>Pistor, Katharina. 2019. <i>The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality<\/i>. Princeton: Princeton University Press.<\/p>\n<p>Yanagisako, Silvia. 2015. \u201cKinship: Still at the Core.\u201d <i>HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory<\/i> 5 (1): 489-494.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><em><b>Andrea Muehlebach<\/b> is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bremen. Her most recent monograph, \u201cA Vital Politics: Water Insurgencies in Europe,\u201d was published with Duke University Press in 2023.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"autor":[646],"class_list":["post-10898","capitalism","type-capitalism","status-publish","hentry","autor-andrea-muehlebach"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/capitalism\/10898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/capitalism"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/capitalism"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/capitalism\/10898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11091,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/capitalism\/10898\/revisions\/11091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"autor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/autor?post=10898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}