Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism

Manuela Boatcă

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317127741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Globalizzazione

Based on theoretical developments in research on world-systems analysis, transnational migration, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, whilst considering continuities of inequality patterns in the context of colonial and postcolonial realities, Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism proposes an original framework for the study of the long-term reproduction of inequalities under global capitalism. With attention to the critical assessment of both Marxist and Weberian perspectives, this book examines the wider implications of transferring classical approaches to inequality to a twenty-first-century context, calling for a reconceptualisation of inequality that is both theoretically informed and methodologically consistent, and able to cater for the implications of shifts from national and Western structures to global structures. Engaging with approaches to the study of class, gender, racial and ethnic inequalities at the global level, this innovative work adopts a relational perspective in the study of social inequalities that is able to reveal how historical interdependencies between world regions have translated as processes of inequality production and reproduction. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology, political and social theory and anthropology concerned with questions of globalisation and inequality.

Part I Marx and Political-Economy Approaches

Chapter 1 Class vs. Other: Coloniality as Anomaly in Karl Marx

DOI: 10.4324/9781315584867-2

For a few decades after World War II, Marxism – both as a political position and as a social scientific stance – was an adversary to be reckoned with. Accordingly, when not positively espoused, it had to be explicitly disavowed: While modernisation theorists advocated liberal capitalist development under the banner of a “Non-Communist Manifesto” (Rostow 1960), inequality researchers marked their distance from Marxism by advancing “anti-class theory” (Schelsky 1966). Marxism started occupying the centre-stage of politics and theory once again with the administrative decolonisation of most of Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, the subsequent proliferation of socialism in the region on the one hand, and the rise of Marxist structuralism, radical political economy, and dependency theory during the same period on the other. However, at least within the field of social theory, it had already forfeited this pivotal role by the end of the century.

Politically, the end of the Cold War, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and not least the bourgeoisification of the working class in the Western world made socialist movements negligible there, proving the thesis of the immiseration of the proletariat a mistake. Individualisation processes and the pluralisation of life forms under conditions of globalisation were instead declared the order of the day. Economic and political developments thus seemed to prefigure the “collapse of Marxism” (Wieviorka 2003) in theoretical and political terms and validate the “end of history” approach (Fukuyama 1992). At the same time, given the pluralisation and internal differentiation of Marxism itself into diverse and even competing approaches, the exact scope of the delegitimisation was not clear. Moreover, and in particular with respect to the analysis of social inequality, the Marxist tradition seemed to be deader in some countries – and their national cultures of scholarship – than in others.¹ A minimal academic consensus as to the core of Marx's sociology of social inequality is outlined below.

1 In a survey of mainstream German approaches to social inequality, Rainer Geißler (2002: 141) spoke of the “German Sonderweg of social structure analysis”, in which the appropriateness of social classes and social strata as categories of analysis of postindustrial Western societies was seriously questioned during a decade-long debate. Geißler noted that no corresponding rejection of Marxist terminology can be found elsewhere in Europe, or, for that matter, in North America. While Anglo-Saxon sociology developed a macrosociological tradition in which Marxist and Weberian approaches were pitted against each other, but nevertheless counted as equally valid choices, German scholarship drew an imaginary evolutionary line between Marx’ economistic sociology and Weber's historical-comparative, culturalist approach, making Marxism an illegitimate choice.

Class vs. Other: Coloniality as Anomaly in Karl Marx

Marx and Engels's materialist conception of history departed from the premise that all human history rests on the material basis of the existence of living individuals, their activity, and their consequent relationship to nature (Marx and Engels 1977a). In what they called the materialist method, the first act in human history was considered to be the production of material life, while the various modes of production of human physical existence, i.e., of the means of subsistence, were ever so many modes of life:

As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production. (Marx and Engels 1977b: 242)

As such, the material conception of history was the result of the inversion of Hegel's idealist notion of history as the self-realisation of Spirit, or God. According to Hegel, the self-objectification of spirit as space yielded nature, whereas the gradual process of its self-objectification as culture amounted to the succession of world civilisations from the ancient Orient to modern Europe. Marx and Engels claimed to have stood Hegelian dialectic on its head, “or rather, turned [it] off its head, on which it was standing, and placed [it] upon its feet” (Marx and Engels 1962: 387): To Hegel's view that history, and, with it, all human activity was a mere manifestation of the Spirit acting through people, Marx countered that Spirit was nothing but human activity itself, and that history was a product of human labour:

Hegel makes the predicates, the object, independent, but independent as separated from their real independence, their subject. Subsequently, and because of this, the real subject appears to be the result; whereas one has to start from the real subject and examine its objectification. (Marx 1997: 166)

Hegel conceptualised human nature in general and man in particular as “universal self-consciousness”, arguing that the world achieves consciousness of itself as spirit through the philosopher's mind; alienation of human nature thus equalled alienation of self-consciousness of the world as spirit, until the attainment of absolute knowledge – the recognition of the whole of creation as spirit (Tucker 1978: xxi). By contrast, Marx held that man² was in the first place a social being and that consciousness was constructed by man's social practice – which was, through its very capacity to change the material world, objective practice.

2 Generic grammatical forms notwithstanding, Marx's constant reference to “man” as subject of history on the one hand echoes Hegel's use of the term, on the other reflects Marx's own gender bias in conceptualising the role of men and women in history. In the following, the use of the masculine form mostly follows Marx's own, while gender-neutral terms are employed when assessing those parts of Marx's analysis referring to humankind in general. The issue of gender in Marx's and Engels’ work is addressed later in the chapter.

Ludwig Feuerbach's “transformational criticism” of Hegel, which used an inverted reading of Hegelian philosophy to conclude that alienation in the religious sphere stems from man's projection of an idealised self-image onto an imaginary God, served Marx as a basis for his own analysis of man's alienation in the economic sphere. In an explicit departure from Hegel's view of history as the self-objectification of Spirit in culture, Marx therefore conceptualised history as the process of self-development of the human species through labour, across several stages leading up to communism. Against the Young Hegelians (including Feuerbach) and their abstract notion of Man as the universal motive force in history, Marx and Engels argued for a conceptualisation of men “within given historical conditions and relationships”, in turn made up by “the productive forces and forms of intercourse at any particular time” (Marx and Engels 1977b: 182). Hence, Marx held that any study of human history should reflect the various stages in the history of economic activity and the social relations corresponding to them.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Marx 1971: 20f.)

In Marx's view, the labour process itself was an objectification of human powers. Since man's essential nature was that of being a free, conscious producer, alienation was man's loss of control over his own activities, especially labour, and resulted in his loss of the role of subject and initiator of the historical process (McLellan 2003: 38). For Marx, not only was the relation of workers to the product of their labour not the basis for alienation, as Hegel would have it, but, as objectification of man's essential nature, it was the only genuinely human relation: “It is just in the working-up of the objective world … that man first really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. Through and because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality” (Marx 1978a: 76). In turn, commodity production under capitalism turned labour itself into an object, while the relation of the worker to the product of his labour became one of alienation:

Labour-power is, therefore, a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live. But the exercise of labour-power, labour, is the worker's own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labour as a part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity which he has made over to another. Hence, also, the product of his activity is not the object of his activity. (Marx 1978c: 205)

Historically, other forms of production, whether that of independent producers epitomised by the figure of Robinson Crusoe, subsistence producers in patriarchal industries, and even dependent producers rendering services and payments in kind under feudalism more adequately reflected the social character of labour by laying bare the social relations connecting the amount of individual labour-power with the value of labour's product. By contrast, commodity production substantially relied on wage labour, which disguised the fact that, in the bourgeois society for which this labour form was characteristic, the labour-power through which individuals manifest their lives had in itself become a commodity. In ancient slavery, the labour-power being traded was only part of the commodity that the slave as a whole represented, and as such it belonged to the slave owner; during feudalism, it made up only a part of the labour-power of serfs, who in turn belonged to the land owned by the feudal lord; it was only during capitalism that labour-power was a commodity, the only one which free labourers could sell to the capitalist in exchange for wages, and which thus ensured that every wage worker belonged to the entire capitalist class (Marx 1978c: 205; Marx 1978e: 256).

By focusing on the centrality of wage labour in bourgeois society in later works such as Wage Labour and Capital, the Grundrisse, and Capital itself, Marx implicitly built and followed up on the theory of alienated labour developed in the 1844 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts. While the arguments for a discontinuity between Marx's philosophical and his economic work have usually entailed considering “alienation” to be a concept restricted to his early, philosophical-humanist thought, with no reverberations into his economic writings, the logic underlying Marx's critique of capitalist labour points in the opposite direction.³

3 Marcuse's early assessment that “Marx's early writings are mere preliminary stages to his mature theory” (1986: 281) has been echoed several times throughout the literature – at times in a similar, at others in a qualified form (McLellan 1973: 39; Tucker 1978: xxxi; Pilling 1980: 161). For a discussion of the implications of the continuity vs. discontinuity thesis within Marx's work in general, see below.

In order to trace back the economic analysis of wage labour in Marx's late work to the central theme of alienation of the early writings, Robert Tucker prefaced his selection from Wage Labour and Capital by noting that

If the thesis on ‘alienated labour’ was to be made scientifically cogent and if the expectation of coming proletarian revolution was to be based upon it, [Marx] needed to show the capital-labour relationship, which he took to be the core of the bourgeois socio-economic system, to be dialectically self-destructive, i.e., transitory by virtue of its inner dynamics of development. (Tucker 1978: 203)

In tracing the relation between labour power and property through various modes of production, Marx therefore laid the basis for examining the relationship between labour and capital in bourgeois society, which, again drawing on Hegel, he revealed as one of reification. Hegel's analysis of the relationship of lord to servant as a result of certain modes of labour rested on the insight that it was through the products of their own labour that workers acquired consciousness of themselves and that this consciousness later became objectified (Marcuse 1986: 116). For Marx, however, this dialectical process of reification (of the worker in labour) and its negation (self-realisation of consciousness in labour product) failed to do justice to social reality, since, according to him, the existing antagonisms could not be resolved at the level of abstract thought, as Hegel postulated, but only in relation to a given social and political order. In bourgeois society, the reification of social relations occurred via commodity production: “the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products” (Marx 1978f: 320).

Marx therefore rejected classical economic theory's naturalisation of the relation between capital and labour as a purely objective material relationship and instead built on Hegel in order to analyse both the categories of bourgeois economy more generally and the relationship of the capitalist to the wage worker in particular as expressions of the specific historical mode of labour control of commodity production (Marx 1978f: 319ff.). In this particular context, the historically determined mode of production and the social character of labour characterising it appeared as objective relations resulted from the expenditure of human labour power, the exchangeability of commodities thus produced, and commodity prices as expressions of the magnitude of their exchange value – a condition that Marx called the “fetishism of commodities”:

The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. (Marx 1978f: 323)

Hence, both the alienation of labour through production for wage instead of life-activity, and the fetishism of commodities through the universalisation of exchange-value were forms of reification of labour-power. If one concealed the commodity-form that labour-power acquired during capitalism, the other concealed the qualitative aspect of value inherent in the concrete way in which products meet human needs, i.e., their use-value. Marx consequently pleaded for a conceptualisation of the social character of labour as two-fold, i.e., as comprising both the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of value:

On the one hand all labour is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of human labour-power, and in its character of identical abstract human labour, it creates and forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is the expenditure of human labour-power in a special form and with a definite aim, and in this, its charact...