What a difference political economy makes: QUESTION: How can economic anthropology promote the construction of just and anti-racist economic forms?

Abstract

The crises of our times cannot be overstated. We have endemic war, massive displaced populations, pandemics, the disappearance of middle classes globally with the vast increase in hyperwealthy and impoverished populations, environmental catastrophes, and the proliferation of authoritarian—trending fascist—leaders whose policies demonize large swaths of national populations, distracting people from their exploitation by the ruling classes.

Economic anthropologists, working across intellectual disciplines with other political-economic scholars, have described both these horrifying evolving realities and the ways in which global movements have arisen to combat them. But we need contemporary clarity of analysis to account for the full interdependent set of negative political-economic and cultural shifts so that we may expose them to build a more just and equal global order. And the first necessary analytic move is understanding the rise of global capitalist neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is an intellectual/political stance that presumes that capitalist trade “liberalization”—the end of all state regulations on business and, indeed, the end of all state-run business—will lead inevitably to market growth and, ceteris paribus, to optimal social ends. As has now been amply documented, neoliberalism took hold across the globe over the last two generations (Harvey, 2005; Went, 2000). Globally, neoliberal policies forced the privatization of state-run utilities and services and withdrew support for independent labor organizing/unions, thus backpedaling from welfare state (or semiwelfare, in the US case) provisions and regulations that ameliorated the naked operations of capital and provided widespread social safety nets. In the Global South, neoliberal ideology was implemented through World Bank/International Monetary Fund “structural adjustment programs” that demand that states denationalize industries, end protectionist policies that had safeguarded native industries, open their markets to international trade, and ruthlessly cut back social programs. In some cases, as in the People's Republic of China, neoliberal policies stimulated economic growth, but at the cost of increasing inequality and heightened populations in poverty.

Despite the immense social suffering resulting from its implementation, neoliberal ideology gained enormous purchase worldwide through its celebration of rapid technological change; through the spectacle of new cornucopias of globally traded goods and individualized consumption—furthering the commodification of identity that Marx first analyzed; through faux-populist rebellions against “useless government bureaucracies”; and finally, through neoliberalism's novel melding of neoclassical economic theory with an identity politics reading of civil liberties. That is, neoliberal ideology incorporates the notion of various populations’ civil but not economic rights.

At the same time, we live in a growing Dickensian reality—the best as well as the worst of times (di Leonardo, 2007). We have seen the surprising and hopeful development of a genuinely syncretic, international progressive public sphere, comprising left-leaning women's, LGBTQ, and racial/Indigenous civil rights, labor, and environmental movements. In the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement and demonstrations, the Women's March, Pride organizing, Asian American and Pacific Islander and Latinx activism, 350.org and other environmental groups, and the revitalized union movement are all elements of this ongoing phenomenon. And these ideological shifts have on-the-ground consequences—as we have seen in the United States, for example, where a formerly moderate Democratic politician has spearheaded the largest labor rights legislation and policy shift since FDR and the Great Depression, along with starkly new environmental, antiracist, women's rights, and pro-LGBTQ policies. We now have a global vision of “just and antiracist economic forms” that we can fight to enact everywhere.

These contemporary movements for rights and liberation all have their own instructive back histories. Indeed, both untrammeled capitalist exploitation and widespread popular resistance have returned in the twenty-first century for their second high-wire act. The first wave of resistance, across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the rise of currents of Western theory and practice—from abolitionism, women's suffrage, and a variety of socialisms to Christian and other religious charities to antimodernism—that contested liberal political theory's overreliance on market mechanisms. These social actors and groups both called for and created institutions to ameliorate the human misery caused by unchecked capitalist growth: labor unions, settlement houses and other private charities, state supports for the poor. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Western governments, under duress from below and within, and gaining speed through the global Great Depression, instituted state programs guaranteeing public education; sanitation; public health and workplace safety; minimum wages and unemployment insurance; public housing for the poor; and aid to the elderly, disabled, and ill. As well, the global franchise expanded as women, race-minority populations, and others gained access to the vote. And self-described Communist revolutions around the globe enshrined women's and race-minority rights in their constitutions, even though they failed to fully implement them.

Keynesian economic theory, with its focus on the necessity of state stimulation of the economy and the key importance of mass consumption, strengthened toward the mid-twentieth century, as Fordism took hold in industrialized states. There evolved an implicit compact among large corporations, labor unions, and states: Corporations would guarantee living wages and some benefits to most of their workers, who could then afford to buy the consumer durables (such as Ford cars) they were producing. Unions would guarantee labor peace in exchange for relatively high wages and benefits. And the state would provide essential benefits, supporting those workers who fell through Fordism's cracks, thus guaranteeing general social peace (Braverman, 1974; Piven & Cloward, 1971). Only starting in the 1970s did Fordism lose its ideological power with the coming of stagflation. The “era of limits” ushered in neoliberal shifts across the globe, and poverty populations exploded.

Analyzing these extraordinarily complex global phenomena requires updating our interdisciplinary theoretical and analytic tools. In the tradition of, among many, Eric Wolf (1982), Sidney Mintz (1986), Bill Roseberry (1989), and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), economic anthropological practice in the 1980s and 1990s investigated colonial and anticolonial movements and the effects of capitalist growth across the globe. But as feminist anthropologists have been arguing since the 1970s, those pioneering figures neglected gender as an analytic category, and Wolf and Mintz tended to treat racial stratification as an epiphenomenon of capitalist growth, failing to see its foundational nature (di Leonardo, 1991).

Left feminist and antiracist political-economic scholars have redressed these lacunae through reframing political economic theory to account for gender/sexuality and race. Left feminists have articulated an expanded definition of social reproduction to include “the labor necessary to keep households and communities functioning and to allow them to send productive members out into the world to work” (Collins & Mayer, 2010, 10), thus incorporating all unpaid and paid women's labor into our comprehension of the larger economy. The more recent “care economy” definition arises from this framing—and, marking its new relevance, was hailed by the World Economic Forum in 2022.

There is a long and distinguished international history of left antiracist scholarship—one need only reference W.E.B. Du Bois (1935), C.L.R. James (1938), and Frantz Fanon ([1963] 1968)—but Cedric Robinson coined the term “racial capitalism” in 1983 to account for the hyperexploitation of Black people in slavery and in postslavery capitalism. We can envision all exploited racial/ethnic populations within this frame. And environmental scholars labeled environmental racism—the process of dumping polluting entities and ignoring toxins in race-minority areas—and called for social justice.

Indeed, left feminist antiracist political-economic scholars have provided us with a plethora of recent ethnographic case studies of people making history, as Marx wrote, in circumstances not of their own choosing. Just considering the United States, for example, there is Nicole Fabricant's (2022) Fighting to Breathe, an engaged ethnography of Black Baltimore youth and female organizing against environmental racism via organic gardening, land seizures, and political pressure. Then there is the case of a Black American radio show with an 8 million strong national audience actively organizing for a quarter century against racist attacks on all US minority groups and also for women's, LGBTQ, and workers’ rights, while being ignored in the wider mainstream public sphere (di Leonardo, 2019). Ana Croegaert's (2020) study similarly shows how working-class Bosnian refugee women in Chicago deal with being “white” and yet Muslim in the US neoliberal context and also criticize neoliberal capitalism via stressing Bosnian as opposed to American coffee-making and -drinking practices. Dario Valles (2022), working with Black refugees on the Mexican–US border, has documented their differential treatment by both US and Mexican authorities and efforts at organizing online. Almita Miranda (2017) has worked with undocumented Mexican families in Chicago, organizing against racist immigration legislation and policy via a progressive church. Alana Glaser (2020) worked with and alongside multiracial and multinational female care workers in New York City, organizing for respect and improved working conditions. And Elisa Lanari (2022) documents Latina Georgian mothers’ schooling activism on behalf of their children as the gendered labor of care. Thus race- and gender-sensitive political-economic research documents both ongoing exploitation and the fierce resistance to which it gives rise.