Paper short abstract:

The paper introduces an experimental approach that revisits the problem of Marxist analytic authority, defies singular interpretations of inequality and consciousness, and makes visible the dynamic, open-ended articulation of dependency and compromise in the ethics of solidarity.

Paper long abstract:

What happens when more than one Marxian interpretation compete in local narratives? How can multiple Marxian-views influence the ideological position of the Marxist author, or the product of the Marxist analysis? This paper makes visible the contradictions inherent in ethnographic representation—but also within Marxist-inspired ideological approaches—by splitting the author's voice in two: a hard-idealist and a soft-realist Marxist interpreter. The two voices of the author match two ideological directions regarding humanitarian solidarity and the ethics of giving in austerity-afflicted Greece. One that rejects humanitarian aid—along with the idea of 'charity'—for failing to address the roots of inequality; and another that embraces solidarity initiatives as empowering action that strengthens the socialist consciousness of the giver. The experimental representational mode of the paper provides an example of how 'reflexive Marxism' can refine ethnographic attention on power and inequality, but from a less authoritative and singular interpretative perspective. The introduced approach aspires to advance reflexivity in the Marxist project, add a new model of analysis on the Marxian tool-kit, and provide solutions to the problem of analytic authority in interpretations of inequality, dependency, and compromise.

Paper short abstract:

Debates on reflexivity in activism ask what kind of subject position the activist should imagine for its target (e.g. the suffering victim, the rights-bearing individual, the political subject). We reframe this debate by focusing on the structural conditions for the subjectivities in activism.

Paper long abstract:

There is an ongoing debate in anthropology on the kinds of subject positions which are ascribed to marginalized actors and the political consequences this has. The critique of humanitarianism (e.g. Didier Fassin) puts forth the idea that ascribing the subject position of the suffering body marginalizes people more than that of the rights-bearing individual (as in human rights activism). Critics of the human rights approach to international politics (e.g. Kamari Clarke) argue that the rights bearing individual (as a Western liberal construct) is similarly disadvantaging non-European subjects. Those critics make a plea (at least implicitly) for taking on the subject position of the politically conscious actor (as in political activism). We argue that this debate should be reframed. Instead of finding the 'right' subject position for the individual, ethnography should — in the tradition of Marxist anthropology — focus on the material conditions in which the subject is embedded and which structure the subject's consciousness. We draw from ethnographic research on how political activists engage with asylum seekers in refugee shelters in Berlin as well as how human rights activism shapes perspectives on justice and legal pluralism in Northern Uganda. We argue for a Marxist approach on ethnographically conceptualizing political subjectivity and propose a materialist reading of what the approaches of humanitarianism, human rights activism, and political activism overlook.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork in Germany and inspired by Marx's analysis of capitalism in general and commodity fetishism specifically, I argue that turning finance into a utility has the unintended consequence of revealing some of the aspirations and deficiencies of German capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Since the last financial crisis, it has become commonplace to speak of finance in terms of rent-seeking and of the finance sector as parasitic upon a healthier and more productive form of capitalism. Accordingly, corrections at the state level to short-termism and speculative excess, take the shape of regulations meant to turn finance into a utility and its provision into a public service. But Marx has shown that in a capitalist system, surplus value is accumulated through production itself in a way that precedes more overt and contingent forms of extraction. One understanding of commodity fetishism is that an underlying process of accumulation is veiled by overt relations of power between people and the assets they command. Marx's analysis of capitalism suggests that the transparent abuses of finance in its unbridled extractive moments conceal capitalism's "normal" exploitation. My argument here is that the opposite also holds true. Namely, finance reined in by capitalist states and harnessed for their social projects puts into sharp relief both the aspirations of national capitalism and some of its enduring deficiencies. I will develop this argument by drawing on my fieldwork on financial advice in Germany.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that ecological Marxism can offer useful insights for expanding and advancing the contribution of Marxist anthropology to the contemporary understanding of value formation, accumulation, exploitation and social reproduction across different temporal and spatial scales.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decades, ecological Marxism expanded our understanding of Marx's dialectic of natural-social metabolism, highlighting the relevance of the ecological dimension in Marx's critique of capitalism. Through a rigorous investigation of the "metabolic rift" (J.B. Foster) and the "ecological value analysis" (P. Burkett), several works emphasized the fundamental inter-connection between the contradictions of capitalism and the natural conditions of production, pointing out the recurring frictions between economic-financial crisis and environmental degradation. This paper argues that ecological Marxism can offer useful insights for advancing the contribution of Marxist anthropology to the contemporary understanding of value formation, accumulation, exploitation and social reproduction across different temporal and spatial scales.

Drawing on ethnography of livelihood practices in Brindisi, an industrial city in southern Italy, the paper addresses the intersection of uneven development and environmental dispossession. Home to chemical, coal and oil-based industries - peripheral articulations of multinational corporations, the city also shows high rates of unemployment, poverty and widespread informal precarious employment. Industrial pollution, soil contamination and health risk define the main "environmental issues", around which revolve much of the internal social and ideological conflicts over the livelihood dilemma of the "job blackmail".

Following the broader historical development of capitalism in Italy, the paper provides an ethnographically grounded discussion of the link between uneven development and environmental dispossession through the concept of the "metabolic rift". Revisiting debates on "uneven development" and "unequal exchange" the paper argues that ecological Marxism can offer useful theoretical underpinnings to a Marxist anthropology of today's world.

Paper short abstract:

For Marx, the value of labor-power is unitary and given. But what if variously valued labor-powers could coexist in a market? I suggest that by assigning workers to differently valued groups based on embodied and inheritable "characteristics", the labor market plays an active part in racialization.

Paper long abstract:

In Capital, Marx points out that "the number and extent of [the worker's] so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied … depend on the conditions in which" the proletariat has been formed and on its consequent "habits and expectations" (1982, 275). Nevertheless, Marx assumes that "in a given country, at a given period, the average quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for the labourer is practically known," and therefore treats the value of labor-power as constant. Wages above this value can be understood as returns on investment in training or bribes disbursed to a labor aristocracy, and those below it as super-exploitation, i.e. of a "surplus population". But what happens if we relax Marx's assumption and allow that in a given market varieties of labor-power with different values might coexist, each assigned to a different fraction of workers as an outcome of the conditions in which it was formed? We may find that, by assigning people to categories that are both embodied and inherited, the capitalist labor market does much of the work of racialization that is often seen as incompatible with a Marxist analysis. Based on ethnographic experience with citizen logistics workers and Thai migrant farmworkers in Israel, and building on the work of social reproduction theorists, I suggest that allowing the possibility of coeval but differential values of labor-power can help Marxists to make sense of a crucial political and analytical problem: the co-constitution of race and class in contemporary societies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper shapeshifts Karl Marx's analysis of the original accumulation of capitalism to analyse the birth of neoliberalism in the global peripheries after World War.

Paper long abstract:

Special economic zones are today central to most programs for regional and national development, with governments across Africa, Asia, and increasingly Europe and the Americas driving up the number of zones well beyond 4,000 and zone factories employing around 100 million workers. Yet, how did it come to this, given decades of resistance against exploitative labour conditions, runaway factories and tax evasion that prevail in the zones?

This presentation charts the resistible rise of special economic zones since 1945 and shows how their inherent promise of miraculous growth rates turned peripheral locations such as Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and later Mauritius and PR China into the birthplaces of an "otherwise neoliberal". In linking these origins of neoliberal practices and markets with Sidney Mintz interpretation of colonial Caribbean plantations as "landmark experiments of modernity", the paper proposes an analytical model for world historical change as a periphery-driven phenomenon.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses Marx's theories of value to make sense of Romani experience in postsocialist Hungary. By tracing the valuation of Roma as socialist factory worker, postsocialist non-citizen, and asylum-seeker in Canada, the paper studies the reorganization of value within postsocialist illiberalism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses a close reading of Marx's theories of valuation to study the everyday experiences of Romani people fleeing Hungary to seek refugee status in Canada. Using interviews with former socialist factory workers now living as refugees in Toronto, the paper traces the processes of valuation and devaluation experienced by Roma within postsocialist deindustrialization, illiberalism, and migration. The paper focuses on the intersections of class reorganization and citizenship formation that Roma face as they undergo a historical transformation from "worker" to "non-citizen" to "asylum-seeker". Moving beyond anthropological analyses of "surplus populations," the paper highlights capitalist processes of devaluation to analyze what happens when socialist industries that once gave blue-collar workers an identity disappear, and how this impacts citizenship formation in postsocialist contexts increasingly defined by illiberal politics. The paper is based on fieldwork in which former factory workers speak of being survivors of the double dispossession of losing both their livelihoods and their inclusion in Hungarian citizenship, arguing that using Marx's theories of value is a fruitful way to make sense of how Roma understand these intersecting postsocialist processes of class and citizenship reorganization. In doing so, this paper takes up issues that are of great urgency to Marxian anthropology given the ways in which we have witnessed the simultaneous unfolding of the global refugee crisis, the rise of illiberal movements, global austerity and economic crisis, thus emphasizing the need for a Marxian anthropology that pays attention to dynamics of citizenship and migration within capitalist processes of (de)valuation, dispossession, and class formation.

Paper short abstract:

Based on participant observation and a critical reading of Marx's Fragment on Machines, this paper explores informal IT and smart city pedagogies in Cluj-Napoca for the paradoxical reductions they perform on the conjoined notions of knowledge and economy.

Paper long abstract:

Earnestly dubbed as the East European Silicon Valley, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) hosts a growing IT industry that thrives as an outsourcing market in constant need of labor. Information technology has become key to personal as well as city-wide projects of transformation. This paper analyzes two contemporary contexts of informal learning in Cluj for the paradoxes they reveal about contemporary concatenations between knowledge, technology and economy: a two-month IT introduction class geared towards personal professional reconversion and a bi-monthly community meet-up of participants from city government, IT industry clusters and media convened for the purposes of developing a smart city strategy for Cluj. In the first case, participants drawn in by the compelling mirage of well-paid IT jobs strive to become initiated in the basics of algorithmic thinking and computer programming. In the second, experts as well as interested citizens aim to recalibrate the categories of urban life to the algorithmic fixes of smart technology. I explore both pedagogical contexts through the lens of Marx's Fragment on Machines. Invested with famous optimism in the postoperaismo tradition as well as in more recent proposals of postcapitalism and accelerationism, the Fragment has provoked much debate about the shape of value, but less so about the shape and distribution of knowledge. For heuristic as well as critical purposes, I reduce knowledge to data in an effort to capture the algorithmic stripping of economy that is, paradoxically, at the core of these pedagogical object lessons in the capacity of technology to deliver radical change.