ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 30 NO 6, DECEMBER 2014 13

John Sharp, Keith Hart, Vito LaterzaThis article is based on a lecture given by John Sharp to a conference of the Latin American Asian-African Studies Association on 20 years of South African democracy held at the University of Buenos Aires, 7-8 August 2014. It draws on our work together and separately in the Human Economy Programme of the University of Pretoria. John Sharp is South Africa Director of the programme, Keith Hart its International Director and Vito Laterza a postdoctoral fellow there.

We seem to have entered another age of inequality. South Africa once attracted the worlds attention as home to an extreme version of racial inequality known as apartheid. Today, 20 years after achieving majority rule (democ-racy), South Africa is still a world leader in inequality, but its racial foundations are more opaque than before. At the same time the principle of separating rich and poor has become a universal feature of our world, with the United States and Europe erecting lethal barriers against would-be immigrants from the South.

At one level the struggle for a less unequal world pitches the North Atlantic societies against the rising powers of the global South. Two recent events reveal something of this. One was the US court ruling in favour of the so-called vulture funds and the prospect of another default by Argentina.1 Another is South Africas participation (as a junior partner) in the formation of the BRICS bank, conceived of as an alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.2 Each points to a different side of current global inequality on the one hand, the unfairness of US and European dominance, and on the other the need to find institutional redress for the unilateral nature of the world economy since the Second World War.

Money is at the core of both of these events. Notions of credit and debt are central to both. But it is also a political struggle for the South to reduce the dominance of the US and Europe. What is at stake is the decline of one model of society and the possible rise of another. It is, indeed, about how world politics might better serve the cause of democracy and equality.

We examine here some features of the Southern African regional economy that point to a more humane alternative to unequal society, to a human economy. Because the problem of inequality is universal, particular local con-figurations inevitably reflect global trends while offering a grounded perspective on what people do and want in the contexts that impinge most directly on their lives..

South Africa in world developmentSouth Africa has been a central, not a peripheral, player in world society over the last 150 years. Its inhabitants have long been engaged in the struggle for democracy and equality, albeit on different sides. This is why its leading political figures are either world famous (Nelson Mandela, but not forgetting Mohandas K Gandhi, who cut his political teeth in South Africa) or notorious (such as Hendrik Verwoerd).

South Africas gold underpinned the booming world trade during the decades that culminated in the First World War, a period that laid the foundations for the unequal world of the 20th century. At this time, South Africa was another jewel in the British Empire alongside India, and it received the lions share of British foreign investment. South Africas mining industry played a crucial role in establishing the contours of the 20th-century racial order, not only in South Africa but in world society as a whole.3 That racial order, premised on the assumption of cate-gorical inequality among human beings, eventually gave rise to the anti-apartheid struggle within South Africa and to the worldwide movement that reinforced it. The end of that struggle two decades ago marked a turning point in world history comparable to the end of slavery and colonialism elsewhere in Africa and the world. The demise of apartheid in South Africa may well be seen, in the future, as having started a course in world affairs where race (and other ascribed characteristics such as gender) began to lose the political significance they have had for so long.

South Africa still merits global attention 20 years later because, while it has undergone a successful political revolution in the shape of formal democracy, it remains a world leader with regard to the unequal distribution of wealth and income. Many of the rights conferred on all South African citizens by its widely celebrated constitu-tion have yet to be realized in practice; and it is by no means clear how this could come about. South Africas story has now become a great deal more confused than in the heyday of apartheid, when things appeared to be written quite literally in black and white.

Numerous accounts try to make sense of the present confusion. White reactionaries argue that the country is heading downhill rapidly now that they are no longer in charge. ANC (African National Congress) boosters insist that the party in government knows exactly what it is doing, and that the GDP (gross domestic product) will soon begin to grow, bringing much-needed jobs and reducing poverty and inequality. Academic commentators point to the chal-lenges the government faces, often drawing attention to the debilitating effects of the capital flight that has fol-lowed the partial deregulation of the post-apartheid South African economy.4 In the second half of the 20th century the South African economy was dominated by a so-called minerals and energy complex, and corporations in these

1. After Argentinas default in 2001, debt was restructured with cooperation from the bond holders. However, after vulture funds had bought up these debts they got a New York court order to pay out not 30 cents but 100 cents on the dollar, making Argentinas further default likely

South Africa in world developmentProspects for a human economy

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(Eichengreen 2014).2. It should be noted that

the BRICS bank was born out of frustration in these countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) with the IMFs policies in the developing world, especially in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis and the unfair lack of representation (e.g. see Pilling 2014).

3. Jeeves (1985); Wilson (2011).

4. Feinstein (2005); Marais (2010); Hart & Padayachee (2013).

5. Ashman & Fine (2013).6. This section draws on a

Human Economy research theme developed by Vito Laterza and John Sharp through a workshop, Land, money and human relations in southern and central Africa, held at the University of Pretoria, 5-6 September 2014.

7. http://web.ac.za/humaneconomy; http://thehumaneconomy.blogspot.com.

8. See note 2; Delius et al. (2014).

9. First (1983).10. Southall (2008).11. Maurer (2012).12. Hart (2013).13. This second Human

Economy research theme, led by Keith Hart, was launched at a conference in Pretoria, 19-21 August 2014. It draws on Hart and Ortiz (2014).

14. Hart (2000).15. Hart (2009).16. Polanyi (1977).17. Dembinski & Perritaz

(2000). 18. Pleyers (2010); Hart et al

(2010); Hart & Sharp (2014); Hart (2015).

19. Hart (2007).20. This section is drawn

from Hart (2008).21. Keynes (1936).22. Kant (1795).23. Lewis (1978). 24. The greatest possible

commerce between the peoples of the world, the least possible commerce between the governments of the world (Richard Cobden, Frieze of the main auditorium, Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 1856).

Ashman, S. & B. Fine 2013. Neo-liberalism, varieties of capitalism, and the shifting contours of South Africas financial system. Transformation 81/82: 144-178.

Delius, P. et al. 2014. A long way home: Migrant workers worlds 1800-2014. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Dembinski, P. & C. Perritaz 2000. Towards the break-up of money. When reality driven by information technology outshines Simmels vision. Foresight: Journal of Future Studies, Strategic Thinking and Policy (2)5: 483-97.

Eichengreen, B. 2014. Restructuring debt restructuring. The Guardian, 9 Sept.

sectors have taken advantage of the ANCs relaxation of exchange controls to ship their profits offshore in order to share more fully in the financialization of the global economy.5

There is much debate about whether the ANC govern-ment had any choice in devising more capital- or business-friendly policies. Is it still a party of the revolution that was forced into these steps against its will and judgement? Or are these policies the outcome of the fact that the left within the ruling party lost out to African nationalists for whom the first, and possibly the only, step in the revolution is the creation of a black bourgeois elite to join hands with, and possibly in due course replace, the old white one?

Unsurprisingly, there is no clear answer to this question yet. Nor do any of those supplying these various narra-tives have a clear ideological direction or political recipe to impart. But perhaps this is not a bad thing. Rather than bemoan the absence of definite ideological and political formulas, we should be glad of the opportunity to get beyond the undialectical extremes of 20th-century thinking and move towards a more realistic appraisal of the human condition as a whole. The challenges of the pre-sent and near future will not be met by dogmatic insistence on capitalism or socialism, as we knew them in the last century, as the sole guiding principle. Neither has done much to promote democracy and equality so far nor do they offer viable recipes for maintaining national integrity when the economy has gone global.

This is the contradiction that has to be resolved somehow and, in view of the countrys centrality to the great ques-tions of the past, South Africa offers a good vantage point from which to think about it. Of course South Africa cannot provide any solution to these problems alone. Only the region and indeed the world at large can address them. We need to think of South Africa not as a nation-state, but as a place in the development of world society.

Building a human economy from below6

The notion of South Africa as a strategic vantage point for such an inquiry led Hart and Sharp to launch a large research project at the University of Pretoria, dedicated to fundamental research on how to build a human economy.7 Lets start by explaining what we mean by a human economy.

The southern African region faces a significant moment. For more than a century the migrant labour system sup-plying the mines of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, the Zambian Copperbelt and Katanga in the Congo, domi-nated its economy. Mining once created millions of jobs. The wages and welfare they provided had effects that spread well beyond the industry itself. Today this is largely a thing of the past.8

For a long time, rural areas across the southern African region acted as labour reserves for the mines. Migrant workers, sustaining and sustained by tight-knit family networks, moved back and forth between town and coun-tryside. They invested cash and other urban resources in agriculture and other informal enterprises based on their rural homesteads. If development in the global North has often been seen as a linear replacement of rural informality with urban and state bureaucracy, the two spheres devel-oped interdependently in southern Africa. The colonial set-tler societies exploited and discriminated against African workers, and a softer version of segregation in the form of limited class mobility has continued since independence.

Yet the migrant workers and their families worked round the political restrictions placed on them, producing and distributing wealth in alternative economies of their own making that afforded them a measure of autonomy from the structures imposed by settler rule. From the perspective of individual workers, these alternative economies were

aimed at building the house not just keeping members of the household in rural areas alive, but facilitating their involvement in economic activities that served to construct meaningful lives for the worker and his dependents, and to ensure the social reproduction of the household over time.9 There is no doubt that within South Africas bor-ders, apartheid planning constituted a major attack on the viability of rural livelihoods. Despite this, however, the trend towards dispossession and the declining importance of the rural material base developed unevenly across the southern African region, ranging from areas where over-crowding and dependence on cash wages for survival were acute to others where it remained possible to carry out sub-sistence agriculture and other informal activities centred on the household economy.

Mining is very different today. The large mining cor-porations have now casualized and much-reduced labour forces. They have outsourced production, cut down dras-tically on welfare provision, and move their profits off-shore without hindrance. Deprived of their former tax revenues, the regions governments are less committed than before to providing quality public services and con-centrate instead on attracting foreign private investment which is increasingly able to demand freedom from regu-lation.10 The governments delegate macroeconomic man-agement to technocrats operating under instructions from the international financial institutions, so that politicians who have little to say about economic development are left to mouth meaningless platitudes about GDP growth and job creation.

All of this poses serious challenges to people who have to secure a livelihood in southern Africa. The global crisis has hit the region hard; and major structural changes have overtaken its economy. We have witnessed the rise of an economic regime sometimes referred to as flexible capi-talism. This system has come in for widespread criticism on the grounds of escalating inequality and impoverish-ment in recent decades. But workers in the settler mining economy were able to exploit opportunities for self-organized development; and southern Africans now must explore the potential of flexible capitalism to generate a more sustainable future.

The tradition of building alternatives to formal eco-nomic structures is as flexible in its own way as capitalism. If we pay attention to what people are actually doing, we could well find that this regional tradition is expanding in the era after the heyday of the mines. Flexible capitalism obliges people to be more flexible themselves. They move continuously between formal and informal structures, and forge proliferating social ties linking them to all varieties and scales of organization. They draw on local and ethnic identities, church membership, educational institutions, and large firms in new sectors, while networked technolo-gies such as the social media allow them to move with greater ease between their work situations, rural homes, and street markets, and to transfer money across the region and indeed the world.

The mobile money system M-Pesa is an excellent example of such a technology, although it works much better in Kenya, where the banks are not strong enough to limit its proliferation, than in South Africa, where the banks are powerful. And it is also an example of a tech-nology that ordinary Kenyans were able to reshape to their own ends rather than just accept those of the mobile phone company that initiated its design and development.11

Southern Africans from all walks of life transgress the boundaries imposed by increasingly remote governments, while developing their own economic institutions based on extended families, savings clubs, street commerce and much else besides. This potentially adds up to a significant counterweight to the decline of the big mining companies

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 30 NO 6, DECEMBER 2014 15

Feinstein, C. 2005. An economic history of South Africa: Conquest, discrimination and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

First, R. 1983. Black gold: the Mozambican miner, proletarian and peasant. Brighton: Harvester.

Hart, K. 2000. The memory bank: Money in an unequal world. London: Profile. Republished 2001. Money in an unequal world. New York: Texere.

2007. Money is always personal and impersonal. Anthropology Today 23(5): 16-20.

and the current ravages of casualization. But we must approach peoples livelihood strategies and plans for eco-nomic improvement not as isolated local activities opposed to states and markets, but as an integral, semi-autonomous aspect of how the latter function. Interactions with large bureaucratic structures, whether public or private, are indispensable to economic life in the region, and so too are activities that extend beyond their reach.12 Southern Africans are already building their own economic futures, and it is time that development policy took more serious account of their activities.

The failure of orthodox economics to address the chal-lenges people face in the real economy is widely acknowl-edged. We need to find out what people are doing and thinking wherever they live and to make recommendations for greater economic democracy that engages practically with their circumstances. This means substituting aware-ness of peoples plural economic practices for oversimpli-fied ideas held in ignorance of them. There is more to the idea of a human economy than this, but its first principle is to give priority to what people are already doing in the local contexts that they know best.

Money in the making of world society13

People are also subject to larger historical developments and structures whose causes are less obvious to them than their own everyday lives. Ultimately this involves human-

itys shared predicament; the common need for seven bil-lion of us to discover ways of living together on this planet. The Human Economy programme at Pretoria seeks to help people to link their own intimate circumstances to more inclusive levels of social interdependence. Starting from peoples economic activities in their home region, we must extend our reach to develop an operational vision of the world economy that sustains us all.

The last three decades of globalization have seen a rapid extension of society to a more inclusive level than the pre-vious norm where it was identified with the nation-state. So far this has been closely linked to money, markets and telecommunications.14 Money is the ocean in which we all swim. It is central to any possibilities for a more human economy. Money is not just a means of exploitation, but rather has redemptive qualities, particularly as a mediator between persons and society. One might say that the mine workers of southern Africa understood this dual character of money from the start. To earn it they had to submit to an oppressive system of migrant labour. But it was also vital to the construction of a socially meaningful life beyond the confines of that system.

The distinctive feature of our era is, nevertheless, the development of communications linking all humanity. This has two striking features. First, it is a highly unequal market of buyers and sellers fuelled by a money circuit that has become detached from production and politics. Second, it is driven by the internet, the network of net-works. How are forms of money and exchange changing in the context of this communications revolution? Unbridled accumulation has been made possible by deregulation in a period of global economic expansion. We now have an opportunity to consider how world markets might be organized in the general interest.

The extension of society to a more inclusive level has positive features. We should try to turn money and markets to institutional ends that benefit us all. Clearly the main political question facing humanity concerns distributive justice. The removal of controls over money in recent dec-ades has meant that politics is still mainly national, but the money circuit is global and lawless. The current crisis is a moment in the history of money, occasioned by the col-lapse of the economic system that the world lived by in the last century. What is ending now is national capitalism, the synthesis of nation-states and industrial capitalism. Its main symbol has been national monopoly currency legal tender policed by a central bank.15

Economics says more about what money does than what it is. Its main function is held to be as a medium of exchange, means of payment, standard of value (unit of account) and store of wealth. Only modern money com-bines these four functions in a few all-purpose symbols, national currency.16 Our challenge is to conceive of society as something plural rather than singular, as a federated net-work rather than a centralized hierarchy, the nation-state. The separation of functions between different types of monetary instrument was crucial to moneys great escape from the rules of the post-Second World War consensus. Central bank control has been eroded by a shift to money being issued in multiple forms by a globally distributed network of corporations, not just governments and banks. Radical reductions in the cost of transferring informa-tion have introduced new conditions for engagement with the economy. The replacement of single currencies by numerous types of specialized monetary instruments is one result.17

We need to extend systems of social rights to the global level before the contradictions of the market system plunge us into another world war and depression. But politicians resist such a move. Where are the levers of democratic power to be located, now that globalization has exposed

Fig. 2. A shanty town in Soweto, South Africa.Fig. 3. Lord Milner Hotel at Matjiesfontein (Western Cape).

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2008. The globalization of apartheid. http://thememorybank.co.uk/2008/09/02/the-globalization-of-apartheid/.

2009. Money in the making of world society. In Hann, C. & K. Hart (eds). Market and society, 91-105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2013. Manifesto for a human economy. http://thememorybank.co.uk/2013/01/20/object-methods-and-principles-of-human-economy .

(ed.) 2015. Economy for and against democracy, Human Economy Series No. 2. New York: Berghahn.

et al. (eds). 2010. The human economy: A citizens guide. Cambridge: Polity.

& H. Ortiz 2014. The anthropology of money and finance. Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 465-482.

& V. Padayachee 2013. A history of South African capitalism in national and global perspective. Transformation 81/82: 55-85.

& J. Sharp (eds). 2014. People, money and power in the economic crisis: Perspectives from the global South, Human Economy Series No. 1. New York: Berghahn.

Jeeves, A. 1985. Migrant labour in South Africas mining economy: The struggle for the gold mines labour supply. Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press.

Kant, I. 1795. Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch. http://www.constitution.org/kant/perpeace.htm.

Keynes, J.M. 1936. The general theory of employment, interest and money. London: Macmillan.

Lewis, W.A. 1978. The evolution of the international economic order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Marais, H. 2010. South Africa pushed to the limit: The political economy of change. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.

Maurer, B. 2012. Mobile money: Communication, consumption and change in the payments space. Journal of Development Studies 48(5): 589-604.

Pilling, D. 2014. The Brics bank is a glimpse of the future. Financial Times, 30 July.

Pleyers, G. 2010. Alter-globalization: Becoming actors in a global age. Cambridge: Polity.

Polanyi, K. 1977 [1964]. Money objects and money uses. In Polanyi, K. The livelihood of Man. Studies in social discontinuity, 97121. New York: Academic Press.

the limitations of national economic management? By studying monetary relations on different scales, from inti-mate encounters to foreign exchange markets, we can help create new meanings and interconnections between eve-ryday life and the human predicament as a whole.

The world now has universal media for the expression of universal ideas. Money is essential to their dissemina-tion. It is a constitutive part of our multi-layered identi-ties. We learn about politics and belong to larger groups through participation in monetary networks that exclude and entrap us even as they extend our horizons. The notion of society itself is reshaped by this multifarious expan-sion. If we hope for a more peaceful and integrated world society, money will certainly play an important role in its formation. We need to build an infrastructure of money adequate to humanitys common needs, even if this seems impossibly remote at present. One move in this direction goes by the name of alter-globalization, a body of ideas that has emerged principally from Latin America. The idea of a human economy offers a bridge to this alter-globali-zation movement.18

A human economy must be informed by an economic vision capable of bridging the gap between everyday life the efforts of people everywhere to insert themselves into an unequal society and our common human predicament, which is inevitably impersonal and lies beyond the actors point of view. Small may be beautiful, and a preference for initiatives grounded in local social realities is hard to dismiss out of hand. But large-scale bureaucracies gov-ernments, cities, or business corporations are essential if our aspirations for economic democracy are to be realized in the world where we live.

Money is personal and impersonal, subjective and objective, analytical and synthetic because it mediates the extremes of infinite possibility and finite conclu-sion.19 Money links individual and society; past, present and future; science and narrative; local and global. We need to think dialectically through these categories and to work out practical ways of combining them socially. The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and exchange of objects through money are now converging in a single form of communication, the internet. We must use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. The task is, ultimately, to make a world society fit for all humanity. Money is how we can learn to be truly human.

The globalization of apartheid20

In the Great Depression, Maynard Keynes offered a solu-tion to national elites concerned that their governments would be overwhelmed by the poverty and unemployment generated by the economic collapse.21 It was to increase the purchasing power of the masses. Now the rich coun-tries are similarly cast adrift in a sea of human misery. The main fetter on human development today is the adminis-tration of the world economy by nation-states which pre-vent the emergence of new forms of economic life more appropriate to conditions of global integration. This also prevents the implementation of a Keynesian programme to alleviate world poverty by transnational redistribution of purchasing power.

We might well ask how people live with economic inequality. The short answer is that they dont, if they can help it. Most human beings like to think of themselves as good. This involves being compassionate in the face of others suffering. The worst thing would be to be held responsible for that suffering in some way. Better to explain it away as having some other cause: perhaps the people deserve to suffer or are just pretending to be poor. Better still not to have to think about it in the first place.

In the last resort we can ignore the problem by defining them as less human (not like us). Distance in every sense physical, social, intellectual, emotional is the answer to the unwelcome conflict between inequality and human compassion. And, while each of us engages in thousands of voluntary acts distancing ourselves from the suffering of others, the task is performed more reliably, at the com-munal level, by institutions.

An institution is an established practice in the life of a community or it is the organization that carries it out. Institutions have much in common with the cultivation of plants. Agriculture fixes society in the ground, whereas modern conditions require us to reinvent it on the move. The contemporary global crisis forces us all to confront this contradiction daily. The maintenance of inequality depends on controlling the movement of people. If the poor are to be kept at a proper distance, it would not do to have them invade the protected zones of privilege estab-lished by the rich. Better by far that they should know their place and stay there.

The two principal institutions for upholding inequality, therefore, are formal political organization (law enforce-ment by states) and informal customary practices shared by members of a community (culture). Their task is to separate and divide people in the interest of maintaining rule by the privileged few. One of the ways modern ruling elites everywhere have come to terms with the anonymous masses they govern is to pigeon-hole them through sys-tems of classification.

To the extent that society has become a depersonalized interaction between strangers, an important class of cat-egories rests on overt signs that can be recognized without prior knowledge of the persons involved. These are usu-ally visual physical and cultural characteristics like skin colour or dress; speech styles may also sometimes be taken as revealing social identity. Modern states are, of course, addicted to identity cards. By a standard symbolic logic, these sign systems are often taken to reveal personal char-acter trustworthiness, ability and much besides. On this arbitrary basis, personal destinies are decided, people are routinely included and excluded from societys benefits, inequality is made legitimate and policed, the world is divided into an endless series of us and them and mon-strous crimes against humanity are carried out.

After the Second World War, South Africas ruling National Party set out to institute what they called apart-heid. Despite the close integration of people of European and African origin in the countrys economic system, they decided to separate the races, by allocating to Blacks a series of homelands (themselves fragmented according to tribal origin) and denying them the right to reside in the cities, except with a pass (work permit). Within the cities, black and white areas were kept apart and were une-qually endowed with resources. Keeping up such a system required the systematic use of force. Internal resistance built up gradually and the rest of the world expressed var-ying degrees of outrage, eventually translated into a boy-cott. It is always easier to condemn something elsewhere than to confront our own failings. The release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 signalled a retreat from this policy which culminated quite soon in African majority rule. But apart-heid cant be abolished by the stroke of a pen. After the official demise of apartheid in South Africa, something similar is how the inequalities of world society are man-aged everywhere today.

Inequality is intrinsic to the functioning of the modern economy at all levels from the global to the local. The rich and poor are separated physically, kept apart in areas that differ greatly in their standards of living. It is impos-sible to prevent movement between the two areas in any absolute sense, if only because the rich need the poor to

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 30 NO 6, DECEMBER 2014 17

perform certain tasks on the spot (especially personal ser-vices and dirty work of all kinds). But movement of this sort is severely restricted, by the use of formal adminis-trative procedures (state law) or by a variety of informal institutions based on cultural prejudice. This rests on sys-tems of classification of which racism is the prototype and still an essential means of inclusion and exclusion in our world. Everyone knows that people of colour are likely to be held up at passport control in European airports, and being tough on immigration has long been a matter of consensus for the British political class.

There is a great lie at the heart of modern politics. We live in self-proclaimed democracies where all are equally free; and we are committed to these principles on a uni-versal basis. Yet we must justify granting some people inferior rights, otherwise functional economic inequalities would be threatened. This double-think is enshrined at the heart of the modern nation-state. So-called nations, them-selves often the outcome of centuries of unequal struggle,

link cultural difference to birth and define citizens rights in opposition to all-comers. The resulting national con-sciousness, built on territorial segmentation and regulation of movement across borders, justifies the unfair treatment of non-citizens and makes people blind to the common interests of humanity.

Race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, region and class may be signalled in many ways. But the pervasive dualism of modern economies derives from the need to keep apart people whose life-chances are profoundly unequal. The apartheid principle is now to be found everywhere in local systems of discrimination, more or less blatant.

The historical relationship between the peoples of rich and poor countries is one of movement in both directions. Let us think of the systematic attempts to control such movement today and ask whose interests these policies serve. Concerns with immigration to countries in Europe, North America and elsewhere are intrinsically tied to the development of poor areas by the economic inequality on which the contemporary world economy rests. Western workers are facing increased competition both at home and abroad, just as capital has become truly global for the first time by diffusing to new zones of production and accumulation, notably in Asia.

Neoliberalism aims to dismantle the social democratic institutions (welfare states) that arose in the mid-twentieth century to protect national workers and their families. This is accompanied by consistent downward pressure on wages through the threat of exporting capital to cheaper countries or importing cheap labour. The result in the rich countries and indeed in South Africa itself today is racist xenophobia exacerbated by job insecurity and rising levels of poverty at home. This is evidence of the globalization of apartheid as a social principle. More than two centuries ago, Kant argued for the cosmopolitan right of free move-ment everywhere. Our world seems to be the opposite of that now. But, sooner or later, economic and political crisis will force a reconsideration. We must not only show how people organize themselves in the face of global inequality today, but how society might be made more just.22

The world has never been more connected and unequal than now. The reason for both is the freedom enjoyed by global capital at this time. Inequality is administered by territorial states, one of whose functions is to restrict the movement of people, especially from the poor areas to the rich. This division of the world into zones of high-paid and low-paid labour has its origins in the decades of imperialism before the First World War.23 It persists in the organization of the world economy as an apartheid system in which inequality is informed by the semiotics of race. Resistance to globalization encourages some protection-ists to seek to reinforce national boundaries against the predations of capital. But more often it plays into the hands of racists and fascists by encouraging xenophobia.

The world needs a new free trade movement24 that would begin to dismantle the institutions of national privilege and insist on movement as a human right. Only then will the better off be forced to engage with the world outside their fortified enclaves. The world belongs to all human beings and each of us has a right to move in it as we wish. The most difficult task for humanity is to con-struct a universal system of justice. A modified Keynesian programme for the world economy, redistributing pur-chasing power to the impoverished masses, might be one step in that direction. Now at last we have universal media capable of expressing universal ideas. As long as popular forces are unable to mobilize freely, however, global capital will remain unchecked. Dismantling state controls over the international movement of people is essential to the ending of global apartheid and to the emergence of a human economy. l

Southall, R. 2008. The new scramble and labour in Africa. Labour, Capital and Society 41(2): 128-155.

Wilson, F. 2011 [1972]. Labour in the South African gold mines 1911-1969. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fig. 4. M-pesa agent in Nairobi. This mobile phone money transfer system, which originated in Africa, is now increasingly used all over the world.Fig. 5. Europe-bound migrants arriving in Lampedusa. August 2007. Thousands of migrants from Africa have drowned attempting the journey.

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By Keith Hart and John Sharp

Ronald Coase, shortly before his death this year, published an article in the Harvard Business Review,

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Saving economics from the economists (Coase & Wang, 2012). He argued that the degree to whicheconomics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate. In the 20thcentury, economics identified itself as a theoretical approach of economization and gave up the real-worldeconomy as its subject matter. It thus is not a tool the public turns to for enlightenment about how theeconomy operates. It is time to reengage with the economy. Market economies springing up in China,India, Africa, and elsewhere herald unprecedented opportunities for economists to study how the marketeconomy gains its resilience in societies with cultural, institutional, and organizational diversity. Butknowledge will come only if economics can be reoriented to the study of man as he is and the economicsystem as it actually exists.

There are many heterodox economists who reject the dominant model of rational choice in free markets,and want to reconnect the study of the economy to the real world; to make its findings more accessible tothe public; and to place economic analysis within a framework that embraces humanity as a whole, theworld we live in. The human economy approach shares all these priorities. Our focus draws inspirationfrom and seeks to contribute to the tradition of economic thought, but, more explicitly than these currentswithin economics, we are open to other traditions, notably anthropology, sociology, history anddevelopment studies.

The University of Pretoria research programme has been shaped by the alter-globalization movement ofthe last decade. It is the third phase of an international project that originated in the World Social Forum.The first phase was a series of volumes in several languages, produced by a network of Latin American andFrancophone researchers and activists, which aimed to introduce a wide audience to the core themes thatmight organize alternative approaches to the economy. These books brought together short essays on thehistory of debate in many topics. A second phase saw publication of the first English-language collection inthis series, The Human Economy: a Citizens Guide (Hart, Laville, & Cattani, 2010). Fifteen countries wererepresented, but there was only one author from Asia and Africa, where most people live. The focus onexchanges between researchers and activists also left questions of research methodology relativelyunexplored.

The University of Pretoria programme adds a Southern African node to this network of scholars andactivists, thereby giving greater weight to African, Asian and Latin American voices in a broader South-South and North-South dialogue. It is the first coordinated academic research programme in the processinitiated by the World Social Forum. Starting from a core of social anthropologists, the programme nowincludes sociology, history, political science, geography and education. We have appointed some 20 post-doctoral fellows from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe; and in 2012 an inter-disciplinary group of eightAfrican PhD students from five countries. Our main research focus is on Southern Africa, but participantsbring research expertise from many geographical areas.

Our first method is ethnographic with the aim of joining the people where they live in order to discoverwhat they do, think and want. Second, the economy is always plural and so we must address the variety ofparticular institutions through which people experience economic life. Third, we wish to help people toorganize and improve their own lives. Our findings ultimately should be accessible for their practical use.This all adds up to a sort of humanism. It must be so, if the economy is to be returned from remoteexperts to the people who are most affected by it. But humanism is not enough. The human economy mustbe informed by an economic vision capable of bridging the gap between everyday life and humanityscommon predicament, which is inevitably impersonal and lies beyond the actors point of view.

Emergent world society is the new human universal not an idea, but 7 billion people who occupy theplanet crying out for new principles of association. We urgently need to make a world where all people canlive together. Humanitys hectic dash from the village to the city is widely assumed to be driven bycapitalism. But a number of social forms have emerged to organize the process on a large scale: empires,nation-states, cities, corporations, regional federations, international organizations, capitalist markets,machine industry, global finance, telecommunications networks. So the task is to figure out how states,cities, big money and the rest might be selectively combined with citizens initiatives to promote a moredemocratic world society. Somehow small-scale humanism and large-scale impersonal institutions mustwork together.

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If economic strategies should be anchored in peoples everyday lives, aspirations and local circumstances,the intellectual movement should be one of extension from the local towards the global. We cant arriveinstantly at a view of the whole, but we can engage more concretely with the world that lies beyondfamiliar institutions. The chief way of achieving social extension has always been through markets andmoney in a variety of forms. Money and markets are intrinsic to our human potential, not anti-human asthey are often depicted. Of course they should take forms more conducive to economic democracy.

An economy should have at its core a specific strategy. Such an economy, to be useful, should be basedon general principles that guide what people do. It is not just an ideology or a call for realism. The socialand technical conditions of our era urbanization, fast transport and universal media must underpin theprinciples of a human economy. We do not assume that people know best, although they usually know theirown interests better than those who presume to speak for them. In origin economy privileged budgetingfor domestic self-sufficiency; political economy promoted capitalist markets over military landlordism;national economy sought to equalize the chances of a citizen body. Perhaps human economy is a way ofenvisaging how unique human beings are linked to humanity as a whole. It would then contain a sequenceof its predecessors (house-market-nation-world) whose typical social units are complementary and co-exist.

The human economy idea has its source in small-scale informality and a humanist ideology, but an effectivechallenge to the corporations which dominate world economy requires self-organized initiatives to makeselective alliances with larger powers, much as the French revolution was backed by the shippers of Nantesand Italys by the industrialists of Milan and Turin. We have to build bridges between local actors and thenew human universal, world society. A human being is a person who depends on and must make sense ofimpersonal social conditions. The granting of human rights to business corporations is one obstacle to that.The drive for economic democracy will not be won until that confusion has been cleared up.

Keith Hart and John Sharp are co-directors of the Human Economy research programme at the Universityof Pretoria, South Africa.

Coase, R. H., & Wang, N. (2012). Saving economics from the economists. Harvard Business Review, 90(12),36.

Hart, K., Laville, J.-L., & Cattani, A. D. (Eds.). (2010). The human economy: A citizens guide. Cambridge:Polity.

From: pp.10-11 of World Economics Association Newsletter 3(5), October 2013http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/files/newsletters/Issue3-5.pdf

Download WEA newsletter Volume 3, Issue No. 5, October 2013

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