Jean Comaroff is Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

John L. Comaroff is Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Anthropology, also at the University of Chicago.

Millennial Capitalism – CL

By Jean Comaroff

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Jean Comaroff
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822327042

Chapter One

Toward a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature Fernando Coronil

The end of a millennium is a time that invites speculations about the future as well as reckonings with the past. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine suggested that it is only at the end of a life that one can apprehend its meaning. The current fashionable talk about the end of History, of socialism, even of capitalism-or at least the long-announced demise of its familiar industrial form and the birth of an era defined by the dominance of information and services rather than material production -suggests that the close of the millennium has generated fantasies inspired by a similar belief. In a striking coincidence, the end of the millennium has also marked the victory of capitalism over socialism after a protracted confrontation that polarized humanity during much of the twentieth century. Its triumph at this time makes capitalism appear as the only valid social horizon, granting it a sacralized sense of finality that conjures up what Sylvia Thrupp identified as the millennial expectation of a “perfect age to come” (1970: 12).

As an expression of this millennial fantasy, corporate discourses of globalization evoke with particular force the advent of a new epoch free from the limitations of the past. Their image of globalization offers the promise of a unified humanity no longer divided by East and West, North and South, Europe and its Others, the rich and the poor. As if they were underwritten by the desire to erase the scars of a conflictual past or to bring it to a harmonious end, these discourses set in motion the belief that the separate histories, geographies, and cultures that have divided humanity are now being brought together by the warm embrace of globalization, understood as a progressive process of planetary integration.

Needless to say, discourses of globalization are multiple and far from homogeneous. Scholarly accounts generally contest the stereotypical image of an emerging global village popularized by the corporations and the media. These accounts suggest that globalization, rather than being new, is the intensified manifestation of an old process of transcontinental trade, capitalist expansion, colonization, worldwide migrations, and transcultural exchanges, and that its current neoliberal modality polarizes, excludes, and differentiates even as it generates certain configurations of translocal integration and cultural homogenization. For its critics, neoliberal globalization is implosive rather than expansive: it connects powerful centers to subordinate peripheries, its mode of integration is fragmentary rather than total, it builds commonalities upon asymmetries. In short, it unites by dividing. From different perspectives and with different emphases, these critics offer not the comforting image of a global village, but rather the disturbing view of a fractured world sharply divided by reconfigured relations of domination.

Although I, too, am drawn by the desire to make sense of capitalism’s history at the millennium’s end, I will explore its life not so much by chronicling its biography from the vantage point of the present, as Saint Augustine suggests, but by discerning its present configuration and speculating about its future in light of its dark colonial past. My brief sketch of capitalism will be highly selective, drawing on certain features in order to paint, with broad strokes, a rough image of its changing dynamics at this time. To bring forth this image as I see it emerging at the turn of millennium, I will trace some links between the colonial past within which capitalism evolved and the imperial present within which neoliberal globalization has gained hegemony. Needless to say, there is a risk in referring to capitalism by a single word (and in the singular) and attributing to it features that may give the impression that it is a bounded or self-willed entity, rather than a complex, contradictory, and heterogeneous process mobilized by the actions of innumerable social agents. Against the opposite danger of missing the forest (or forests!) for the trees, I opt for the risk of producing what may be no more than a caricature of the capitalist jungle, in the hope that it can help us recognize defining features of its evolving configuration.

NATURE, GLOBALIZATION, AND OCCIDENTALISM

Our familiar geopolitical map of modern world-defined by such classificatory devices as the three-worlds scheme, the division between the West and the non-West, and the opposition between capitalist and socialist nations-is being redrawn by a number of processes associated with the hegemony of neoliberal globalization. These include (1) the re-composition of temporal and spatial relations through new forms of communication and production, (2) the increasing tension between the national basis of states and the international connections of national economies, and (3) the growing polarization of social sectors both within and among nations, together with the concentration of power in transnational networks. As a result of these changes, peoples and natural resources that have been treated as external domains to be colonized by capital increasingly appear as internal to it, subjected to its hegemonic control. In accordance with the Communist Manifesto‘s famous anticipation, capital, mobilized by its relentless and tireless dynamics, seems to be melting all solid barriers that have stood in its way, expanding its reach over our familiar material world, propelling it toward ever more immaterial domains, and subjecting all realms under its power to ever more abstract forms of control. My aim is to catch an image of capital’s expansive dynamics throughout planet Earth as well as into cyberspace in order to explore the significance of its expansion for the organization and representation of cultural differences.

Inspired by the speculative spirit of millennial thinking, I wish to suggest that the current phase of neoliberal globalization involves a significant reordering and redefinition of geohistorical units. Dominant discourses of globalization recast the centrality of the West/Other opposition that has characterized Eurocentric representations of cultural difference. Previous Occidentalist modalities of representation have been structured by a binary opposition between the Occident and its others. As I argue elsewhere, Occidentalist constructs obscure the mutual constitution of “Europe” and its colonies, as well as of the “West” and its postcolonies, through representational practices that separate the world’s components into bounded units, disaggregate their relational histories, turn difference into hierarchy, and thus help reproduce asymmetrical power relations (Coronil 1996: 57).

My argument in this essay is that dominant discourses of globalization constitute a circuitous modality of Occidentalism that operates through the occlusion rather than the affirmation of the radical difference between the West and its others. In contrast to the Western bias or Eurocentrism of previous Occidentalisms, what I call the globalcentrism of dominant globalization discourses expresses the ongoing dominance of the West by a number of representational operations that include: the dissolution of the “West” into the market and its crystallization in less visible transnational nodules of concentrated financial and political power; the attenuation of cultural antagonisms through the integration of distant cultures into a common global space; and a shift from alterity to subalternity as a dominant modality for constituting cultural difference. These changes entail a consolidation of the economy as the neoliberal age’s “cultural dominant,” which I see, building on Fredric Jameson, as a structuring principle that counters notions of random difference while allowing “for the presence and coexistence of very different, yet subordinate features” (Jameson 1991: 4-6). As an “economic” cultural dominant, discourses of neoliberal globalization coexist with celebratory discourses of cultural diversity, as well as with warnings concerning the coming “clash of civilizations”; they subsume the world’s multiple cultures, and competing discourses about them, as subordinate elements within an encompassing, planetary economic culture.

At a time when capitalism parades as most universal and independent of its material foundations, I hope to show that a focus on its relation to nature helps to render visible an emerging imperial cartography of modernity occluded by increasingly abstract modalities of domination.

NATURE, CAPITALISM, AND COLONIALISM

A central dimension of post-Enlightenment discourses of modernity has been the establishment of a radical separation between “culture” and “nature.” These discourses of historical progress typically assert the primacy of time over space and of culture over nature. The separation of history from geography and the supremacy of time over space has the effect of producing images of society cut off from their material environments. Dominant views take for granted the natural world upon which societies depend. Despite the significant work of geographers, feminists, and ecologists who have examined the intimate relation between the social and natural domains, nature is insufficiently theorized in the discussion of capitalism.

Among Western theoreticians of capitalism, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx were exceptional in the detailed theoretical attention they paid to the social significance of the natural foundations of social production. Building on Smith’s and Ricardo’s insights, Marx employed the category “land/rent” as a way of conceptualizing the role of socially mediated natural powers in the construction of capitalism. Yet his analysis of capitalism tended to privilege the capital/labor relation and to assume that “land” (by which he meant all the socially mediated power of nature) would be absorbed by capital. In critical dialogue with liberal and Marxist discussions of natural resources, I have suggested that a fuller recognition of nature’s role in the making of capitalism expands and modifies the temporal and geographical referents that have framed dominant narratives of modernity (Coronil 1997). I present a brief version of this critique now in order to frame my examination of the role of nature during the present phase of neoliberal globalization.

Marx claimed that the relationship among capital-profit, labor-wages, and land-ground rent “holds in itself all the mysteries of the social production process” (1981: 953). As if wishing to evoke simultaneously a celestial mystery and its earthly resolution, he called this relationship “the trinity form.” Yet few analysts, Marx included, have seriously applied this formula to resolve the enigma of the role of “land” in the making of capitalism. Looking at capitalism from a European standpoint, Henry Lefebvre is unusual in both noting this neglect and suggesting ways of examining the role of the social agents associated with land, including the state, in the making of European capitalism (1974). Lefebvre, however, confined his vision to Europe, and did not see the implications of his insight for recasting the relationship between capitalism and colonialism.

Given the importance of the (post)colonies as providers of natural resources that continue to be essential for the development of capitalism, a view of capitalism from the (post)colonies helps modify conventional understandings of capitalism’s dynamics and history in two respects.

First, it helps theorize more fully the role of nature as a constitutive dimension of modern wealth, rather than simply as a form of “natural” capital-as is the common view among liberal economists-or as capital’s necessary condition of existence, a limitation to its growth, or a source of entropy-as some Marxists have argued (see O’Connor 1994). Even thinkers like Marx, who recognize nature’s role in the formation of wealth, often forget their own insight in their analysis of capitalist production. Drawing from William Petty (and reproducing a common identification of culture with man and nature with woman), Marx argues that wealth must be seen as the union of labor (“the father”) and nature (“the mother”) (1967: 43). Yet in an influential section of Capital, Marx argues that the physical properties of commodities have “nothing to do with their existence as commodities” (1967: 72). In his effort to demonstrate that labor power is the only source of value and therefore that a commodity’s value resides in the inscription, not in the object, Marx neglects his own insight that labor inscribes value through a material medium, and that wealth is the joint result of labor and nature. This neglect of nature by capitalism’s major critic has obscured the dynamics of capitalist wealth formation. A recognition that a commodity is inseparable from its physical materiality, and that as a unit of wealth it embodies both its natural and its value form, presents a different view of capitalism. This perspective makes it possible to view the specific mechanisms through which capitalist exploitation extracts surplus labor from workers as well as natural riches from the earth under different historical conditions. It also makes it possible to see lines of continuity and change between modes of appropriating nature under colonial and neoliberal regimes of domination.

Second, a “grounded” view that complements the recognized importance of labor with the neglected but no less fundamental significance of nature in capitalism’s formation reinforces works that have sought to counter Eurocentric conceptions that identify modernity with Europe and relegate the periphery to a premodern primitivity. By bringing out a neglected structuring principle of capitalist development, this perspective helps us to see capitalism as a global process rather than as a European phenomenon. Since for Marx land stands for nature in its socialized materiality rather than in its independent material existence, “bringing nature back in” recasts the social actors directly associated with it. Instead of restricting these agents to vanishing feudal lords or declining landowners (the emphasis in Capital), they may be expanded to encompass the social agents that since colonial times have been involved in the commodification of what I have called “rent-capturing” or “nature-intensive” commodities, to distinguish them from commodities whose exchange value predominantly reflects labor power rather than ground-rent. In (post)colonial nations, these agents include the states and social classes that directly own natural resources or regulate their production and commercialization (Coronil 1997). Deciphering the mystery of the “trinity form” involves seeing the dialectical play among capital, labor, and land in specific historical situations.

Continues…
Excerpted from Millennial Capitalism – CLby Jean Comaroff Copyright © 2001 by Jean Comaroff. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.