A discussion: Capitalist crisis and economic estrangement

Abstract

I am grateful to the editors, Michaeline Crichlow and Dirk Philipsen, for inviting me to think alongside and reflect upon this archive of essays. It is a rare treat to read such a diversity of analyses that nonetheless cohere around a clear theme: the problems and possibilities of the moral economy of (neo)liberal capitalist markets in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic. Marisa Wilson offers what I found to be a useful explanation of the designation of capitalism as a moral economy: whereas the concept is more often associated with noncapitalist economic models, we need to acknowledge that market liberalism is an equally moralizing force, that ethical prescriptions for and judgments of the being, practices, and values of both individuals and groups are part and parcel of a capitalist mode of production. Arjo Klamer echoes this insight with his insistence that neoliberalism needs to be recognized as a perspective, that is, as situated, partial, and value-laden as any other. The authors agree that the pandemic has thrown into painfully sharp relief the multiple practical failures and ethical injustices that the entanglements within the label “racial, colonial, patriarchal capitalism” only begin to suggest. For example, as Maziki Thame notes, class and race are inextricable everywhere and carry profound consequences for the impact of the COVID crisis across the differentiated spaces of the postcolonies. Michaeline Crichlow, too, usefully steers our attention to “the fundamental articulations of racialization, gender, and economic deprivation.” Building on these insights, we could posit that race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation intersect to predict the particular manner of one’s utility to and deprivation within this globalized system, whether, for example, this experience is best described in terms of which combination of dispossession, marginalization, informality, extraction, indebtedness, precarity, disposability, or exploitation. Again, the point of naming this a moral economy, as I understand it, is to underscore that the values of the economic system are an integral part of these intersecting axes of debility and subordination, including, as Dirk Philipsen describes them, the tragic “capitalist focus on self-interest rather than common good, on efficiency rather than resilience, on more rather than better, on the private over the public.” To put it in other terms, if capitalism is not just an economic system in the narrow sense but what Marxists call a mode of production inclusive of