Comment

Comment by John McCreery on February 3, 2011 at 8:51am

I seem to have exceeded a length limit for comments. Here is how the previous message ends.

-----

What we all share, however, is a growing sense of uncertainty, a fear that things are out of control or controlled by forces indifferent to our fates, a feeling of helplessness —not helped at all by the really bad news. The strike that was the strongest weapon of the unions and labor/democratic socialist parties of the 20th century is not as strong a weapon as it was back then. Now that capital flows freely around the globe, the threat to shut down a plant in one place is countered by the more potent threat of moving the business elsewhere. Thus, while the situation that so many of us share suggests important ground for solidarity, how best to wield solidarity effectively has become an increasingly elusive problem. 

That sounds like a problem to whose solution people trained to dig through complex particulars and relate them to global issues would have a lot to contribute. Keith has carried the ball this far. What will you, dear reader, do to advance this project further?

Comment by John McCreery on February 3, 2011 at 8:48am

If I understand Keith correctly he is not asking for acceptance, critique or praise of the ideas that he describes in his LSE lecture on The Human Economy. He is asking for us to do something with them. He is asking us to put them to work.

In that spirit, I would like to suggest that we knowledge workers now face conditions like those which led skilled artisans and, later, assembly line workers to form the trade or labor unions that became the backbone of social democratic politics in the 19th and 20th centuries — but, unlike our predecessors, we lack their most effective weapon, the ability to unite and go on strike.

This idea is not original with me. I first came across it reading The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002) by U.S. Democratic Party pollsters and strategists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, who drew my attention to data suggesting that middle-class, white collar workers, long stalwart supporters of the Republican Party were turning in growing numbers to we Democrats, instead. Why? In the past, members of this class self-identified with the professional, managerial, and capitalist owner class whose ranks they dreamed of joining. Now they were finding themselves in the same position as the workers who formed the AFL and CIO, held at arms length and treated as interchangeable tools by bosses so rich and powerful that for most any hope of joining their ranks was now an impossible dream. 

Why bring this up here? More and more of what I read online, written by my fellow anthropologists and scholars in other disciplines as well, concerns what is seen as an attack on public education, marked by use of cheap and easily replaceable adjunct faculty to replace tenured professors. I am struck, however, by how parochial most of the response has been, as if academia defined the relevant universe. Why don't all these very smart people recognize that their situation is that of knowledge workers across the board, to anyone, in fact, whose job can be given to someone cheaper, be they robot, living in a low-wage but Net-connected part of the world, or a member of a reserve army of increasingly cheap labor, the unemployed, wherever they call home?

After all, similar conditions affect not only individuals but organizations as well (so long as they depend on larger organizations for work). Just this morning Online Spin, an ad industry e-mail newsletter to which I subscribe (it's free!), carried an article by Cory Treffileti titled, "When did AOR become a four-letter word?"  "AOR" stands for "Agency of Record," and refers to what used to be common practice in the industry, agencies treated as full partners who retained accounts for up to 40 years at a stretch. Now the turnover for Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) is only about 18-24 months, and when the CMO changes so, typically, do all of the agencies a company uses. Agency relationships with clients now typically last only 24-36 months. The "tenure" that AOR used to represent is gone.

All of the people mentioned so far are, of course, much better off than the laborers, often immigrants, who take day labor jobs in construction and other trades in all the developed economies. They, in turn, are better off than those who live in the slums of the world's megacities and scrape a living in what we euphemistically call informal economies or scrape a living from peasant agriculture in the world's agrarian backwaters. 

What we all share, however, is a growing sense of uncertainty, a fear that things are out of control or controlled by forces indifferent to our fates, a feeling of helplessness —not helped at all by the really bad news. The strike that was the strongest weapon of the unions and labor/democratic socialist parties of the 20th century is not as strong a weapon as it was back

Comment by Keith Hart on February 2, 2011 at 10:49pm

Thanks to everyone who has broken the ice so far: Heesun, Erik, David, John. I have already laid out plenty and I don't want to take the lead again now. Some others may wish to introduce themsleves and their interest in this topic, comment on the LSE lecture thread or introduce a new discussion. Perhaps you would consider converting your comment and its associated links into a thread, David. the more the merrier. But I hope we can get some flow rather than slump back into the habitual passivity of these groups. I don't know how to do that without taking over. So I will wait and see.

Comment by David Marsden on February 1, 2011 at 5:17pm

Keith

I listened closely to your presentation at the LSE and I am halfway through reading the Human Economy. I strongly agree with your focus and will be presenting a seminar at SOAS in London tomorrow that echoes many of the themes you touched upon. The seminar in entitled 'W(h)ither Anthropology; Opening up or closing down?' It takes off from the editorial that I wrote for Anthropology Today last October and feeds from a presentation that I gave at the Development Studies Association Annual Conference in London in November last year - to reflect on the demise of the Centre for Development Studies at Swansea. The Anthropology Today editorial can be found here and the DSA contribution can be found here.

Tomorrow's seminar will be from 13-15.00 hrs. on the main campus primarily for masters students in the Anthropology & Development group. Here I will also be advertising the forthcoming initial meeting of the London Anthropology Forum to be held on March 5th. Details of this can be found on the Anthropology Today website here. Anthropology Today have kindly offered to host the web site, and SOAS have kindly offered to host the meeting. The aims of the Forum are to be found on the website.

Comment by Erik Bähre on February 1, 2011 at 12:38pm

Dear Keith,

 

Excellent initiative and I am looking forward to the debates. Let me briefly introduce myself to the participants of the forum. I work at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. My research takes place in South Africa, mostly in the townships and squattercamps of Cape Town. My main interest is in how people deal with rapid economic changes and how this affects their interdependencies. My PhD study was on financial self-help groups among Xhosa migrants and now I am working on commercial insurances among the poor and lower middle classes. So it is easy to see why I am interested to take part in the debate.

All the best,

Erik

Comment by heesun hwang on February 1, 2011 at 10:37am

Oh, thank you Keith, for posting the link to the lecture. I finally received the book a couple of days ago. Let me read it and watch the video first!

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next ›
• Page