John Keith Hart | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)

Papers by John Keith Hart

A better world somewhere on Substack, 2024

Preface; 1. Cambridge University undergraduate; 2. Doctoral fieldwork in Ghana; 3. Informal econo... more Preface; 1. Cambridge University undergraduate; 2. Doctoral fieldwork in Ghana; 3. Informal economy and the development industry; 4. Teaching in Britain and the US, money, networking online; 5. Reflections on the personal/impersonal pair and nomadic anthropology.

A better world somewhere, Substack, 2024

In March 2022, I published Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes. In the following year, ... more In March 2022, I published Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes. In the following year, I was stricken with three potentially fatal diseases but received an all clear in March 2023. I have increased the pace of writing online essays in the last eighteen months. I wonder where it is all going. I have written this guide initially for my own benefit; but it may also be a convenient work of reference for some readers. I have not tried to add explanation or commentary here. Rather, I have grouped them under two headings: 1. Money, political economy, development, and world society; and 2. Human economy as a religious (moral) project for anthropology. The second includes three previous landmarks in forming the idea of a human economy. It concludes with a link between the two parts, ‘Money is how we learn to be human’ through humanism 2.0. Links: A = Academia.edu; S = Substack; O = Other. If you have problems accessing the links, go to https://johnkeithhart.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-my-online-essays-2022.

A better world somewhere on Substack, 2024

In Keith Hart, Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes (2022) I argue that we can only be f... more In Keith Hart, Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes (2022) I argue that we can only be fully human if self and society reinforce each other. Achieving this is a real, but largely unconscious need for most people. Chapter 3 anchors this judgment in a discussion of the anti-colonial intellectuals—three pan-Africanists: W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James and Franz Fanon (included here), plus the greatest spokesman for this project, Mohandas K. Gandhi. They practised thinking about new worlds when seeking to mobilize the masses to embrace a democratic non-racist global future beyond Western colonial empire. Profound obstacles stand in its way. In this brief note, I extend this claim to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and further to the New Testament.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and Frantz Fanon each grappled with the problem. Like most revolutionaries, they each started out as lower middle class, between the workers and the high bourgeoisie. They lived in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries respectively. All three believed that unequal society corrupts human nature. Yet human beings have the potential for redemption. We can become whole again by tackling the root causes of unequal society together. For Rousseau, it meant abolishing the arbitrary class divisions of agrarian civilization, for Marx the class structure of industrial capitalism, for Fanon it was the racism of colonial empires. All of these made people only part-human. Most people were denied the chance to be whole persons in society.

My Apprenticeship Volume 1, 1926

After my introduction, this is a transcription of an excerpt from My Apprenticeship Volume 1 (192... more After my introduction, this is a transcription of an excerpt from My Apprenticeship Volume 1 (1926:238-271) by Beatrice Potter Webb (1858-1943). It concerns how she found her vocation as a "social investigator" in the 1880s through visits to Bacup, a small Lancashire town where her mother came from. This engaging and profoundly personal narrative is a striking example of how far contemporary academic ethnographers have fallen from the standard she set as a woman of 25 who, with her husband Sidney Webb, later founded a socialist think tank, the Fabian Society and eventually became the great Baroness Passfield. "The Bacup adventure gave a decisive turn to my self-development. Every day actual observation of men and things takes the place of accumulation of facts from books and boudoir trains of thought. Undoubtedly the Bacup trip was the right direction. The time is come now for a defined object towards which all my energies must be bent. The die was cast, the craft was chosen. Through the pressure of circumstances and the inspiration of the time spirit, I had decided to become an investigator of social institutions." Part 1. How she hit upon the idea of travelling incognito to Bacup with her old nurse and her mother's closest friend. Part 2. First encounters and impressions there described in letters to her father, a very rich man with several homes. Part 3. Sociological and political reflections on her first visit in letters to her father. Part 4. Reflections in the 1880s on further visits to east Lancashire and Birmingham as a mature social investigator.

A better world somewhere on Substack, 2024

Contents: Preface; Kant’s Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (1798); The new human unive... more Contents: Preface; Kant’s Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (1798); The new human universal is world society; Historical origins of our world’s current impasse; Kant’s To Perpetual Peace (1795); The relevance of Kant’s cosmopolitan politics today; Renewing Kant’s vision in this century; References.

Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes, 2022

The main event of the last century was the anti-colonial revolution, when peoples forced into wor... more The main event of the last century was the anti-colonial revolution, when peoples forced into world society as part of European empires in the 19th century sought to establish their independent relationship to it in the 20th. Their leaders included intellectuals who were able to persuade the masses to fight for a world from which racist empire had been removed. Their example is important for us since we too need to think and fight for a world fit for all humanity to live in. **** I describe Pan-Africanism, the most inclusive radical movement in the world (1900-1950) and my own efforts to teach anthropology through the work of Third World thinkers. This essay briefly considers four individuals: three Pan-Africanists—W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James. and Frantz Fanon—plus M.K. Gandhi. **** What does it take to think the world differently? And to whom should we look as antecedents? The circuit of money today is global and in effect lawless, while politics are mainly national, without offering much purchase on that more inclusive economy. Not long ago there were several models of humanity and society in circulation, but now there is only one. That is why we need to refresh our thinking about the world.

Informal Market Worlds Reader, 2015

The 1970s were a watershed between three decades of state management of the economy and the free ... more The 1970s were a watershed between three decades of state management of the economy and the free market decades of one-world capitalism that culminated in the world crisis today. The economy has escaped from all attempts to make it publicly accountable. What are the forms of state that can regulate a world of money that is now essentially lawless? The informal economy started off talking about the Third World urban poor living in the cracks of a rule system that could not reach down to their level. Now the rule system itself is in question. The informal economy seems to have taken over the world, while cloaking itself in the rhetoric of free markets. **** We are witnessing the collapse of the last century’s attempt to impose national controls on the economy. We should acknowledge that the core problem is not narrowly economic, but one of political failure, both national and international. Money and markets have escaped from public control and cannot be put back in that straitjacket. So, what democratically accountable structures might be capable of regulating the world economy and under what social conditions?

Intellectual property' is the main reason for conflict in global capitalism today. Anthropologist... more Intellectual property' is the main reason for conflict in global capitalism today. Anthropologists have generally approached IP through indigenous cultural rights. This discourse should be placed more firmly within world economic history. It is commonplace to confuse impersonal and personal dimensions of social organization. This is partly because corporations have long won the legal rights of individual citizens. **** 1. An 'extended case study' shows how IP has become a minefield for ethnographic research. 2. Reviews some of Marilyn Strathern's writing on this theme. 3. Presents an outline history of property rights 4. The key issue is privatization of the cultural commons. 5. Why have academics not resisted more effectively this assault on informal sharing of ideas and information? 6. 'Information feudalism' is an apt term for this universal struggle for democracy; anthropologists are inhibited from playing an active part since the dominant model of fieldwork-based ethnography prevents us from seeing the wood for the trees.

A better world somewhere (Substack), 2024

The relationship between money and power has evolved from the conflict between capitalists and tr... more The relationship between money and power has evolved from the conflict between capitalists and traditional enforcers in the industrial revolution, through their uneasy alliance in national capitalism to contemporary varieties of their despotic merger in the culmination of a counter-revolution against postwar socialism and social democracy operating under the slogan of a revived market fundamentalism. This last phase has now reached its end, leaving us all in the grip of a world crisis of unknowable extent. What could money and markets become after capitalism? My main mentor has been Karl Marx, but I focus here on Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi. These are my main predecessors in exploring the prospects for a human economy. Humanist anthropology could be central to this, but it requires moving on from traditional humanism to what I call Humanism 2.0. The economy at all levels from the local shops to the world market runs on money. Money and markets, in different forms from now, are therefore essential to any version of a human economy, not antithetical to one.

Berghahn, 2018

This essay starts with a personal account of the near starvation of Europe after the Second World... more This essay starts with a personal account of the near starvation of Europe after the Second World War. We called it rationing then. The memory of Britain's "finest hour" in standing alone against Germany for two years was harnessed to the idea of "shared sacrifice". The word "austerity" is Roman, a cousin of the Greek oikonomia (economy). Both expressed the interests of conservative land-holders in their millennial struggle against the power of money. Keynes fought this idea between the wars and the developmental states that flourished for 30 years after 1945 temporarily followed the opposite path of increasing popular spending power. Keynes provided a class analysis of who benefits and loses from inflation and deflation. The term "austerity" has been revived by the western regimes that succeeded the 1980 neoliberal counter-revolution against Keynesianism. This time the political power is based on money not land, but "national capitalism", with its origins in the 1860s, was always based on an alliance between capitalists and the traditional enforcers. Increasingly it seems that economy has become a smokescreen of misleading words. The essay examines the austerity programs implemented in Britain and Europe after the 2008 financial crash and asks if we can still excavate the power that lies behind the words. A coda is added in 2022 as the transition from national capitalism to a new era of war, revolution and economic collapse increases the stakes in this old struggle over ideas and politics. The age of austerity I don't think we called it austerity then. Its general name was rationing and it began during the war, when Britain imported much of its food across hostile seas. The Labour government of 1945-1951 had to justify rationing even though cargo ships were no longer being sunk by U-boats. The country was broke and sometimes the harvest failed. Sugar, eggs, bread, butter, meat, bacon, tea and potatoes were rationed for varying periods, along with non-food items like soap, petrol and clothes. Most milk was used to make cheese, known as 'Government Cheddar'. A delightful memoir of those times-84 Charing Cross Road (Helen Hanff, 1980)-recalls the excitement of receiving a food parcel from America or Australia. But foreign gift food parcels of 5lb or more were soon deducted from a family's rations in the name of equality.

Money in a human economy, 2017

In the last half-century humanity has begun to form a world society. Its engine (and possibly its... more In the last half-century humanity has begun to form a world society. Its engine (and possibly its means of destruction) is widely believed to be capitalism. But the history of money is much more than capitalism. We must look to that history for ways of repairing the damage that modern money has done before it is too late. So where are we in the history of money? Is capitalism nearing its end ('late capitalism') or just beginning as a multi-sited global phenomenon ('one-world capitalism')? Has the bourgeois revolution been replaced in our time by a reversion to the Old Regime that it once conquered? The origins of our times According to writers as varied as John Locke and Karl Marx, ours is an age of money, a transitional phase in the history of humanity. Capitalism is the organization of society by and

The two parts that follow were written in 2001 and 2003, when I was teaching for a term near Chic... more The two parts that follow were written in 2001 and 2003, when I was teaching for a term near Chicago and the Iraq war was launched. The first is rather sententious, the second a series of episodes that I participated in and observed. The numbering of the sections reflects the chronological sequence of when they were written. Substack shows the most recent post first and I prefer reading them backwards: from the most contemporary into the past, a method of extension from concrete to abstract, local to global, with the summary as conclusions, having not seen the trailer in advance of the movie. You choose.

Covid-19 was a historic moment of rupture in human affairs. The flu pandemic left 50 million dead... more Covid-19 was a historic moment of rupture in human affairs. The flu pandemic left 50 million dead, but apparently with few political consequences. I ask here if, three years after the first lockdowns, Covid-19 should be thought of as a revolution, strongly linked to the economic collapse and threat of world war. The first part has extracts from a post written in the first lockdown, with some thoughts on revolution and recall of growing up in Britain after WW2. I describe life in Paris during the first lockdown of spring 2020 and consider why I preferred life in then to being out in the world. For some of us, it was a time to reflect on the pros and cons of this period and normal life no longer seemed inevitable. The second part turns to whether Covid-19 was a revolution, citing Lenin and CLR James. As the most disruptive event of my lifetime, it did seem to be a decisive break with the past. It may have unleashed a world crisis more severe than the violence and destruction suffered by the bulk of humanity in the last century; or just a less dramatic stage in social evolution.

'Preface to the coming world crisis' was written in late 2016 after Britain’s shock Brexit vote a... more 'Preface to the coming world crisis' was written in late 2016 after Britain’s shock Brexit vote and the election of Trump as president. It bears comparison with this update written in the world of 2024 2022-24 after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and in the global economic crisis, when the prospects for world war seem closer now. A recent essay, 'Money and markets after capitalism: toward a new humanism for world society' gives a full account of my position now. **** The world economy is more integrated than in the last Great Depression. Central banks since 2008 have been obsessed with easy money; the present debt crisis if the first truly global one in history. The present crisis has been building since the neoliberal counter-revolution against post-war social democracy and socialism in 1980, when complacent western voters handed over government to the rich. Since 2000 there has been an inexorable move towards democratic deficit everywhere, fueled by plutocracy, autocracy, xenophobia, the replacement of equal citizenship by identity politics, the disempowerment of the working and middle classes, a lawless global money circuit and a collapse of ethical standards in the traditional and new social media. The debt crisis follows four decades of fake credit boom, when leading western central banks lost control of money and turned to maintaining asset prices for the benefit of the corporations and billionaires. We need to develop a perspective on 1800-2100 as a single period. Western progressives must do more than react to the latest news, while reaching out for allies where most of the people live.

Development and Change, 2008

This essay was published in the year of the Lehman financial crash as a critical assessment of Ka... more This essay was published in the year of the Lehman financial crash as a critical assessment of Karl Polanyi’s work. With the benefit of hindsight today, my critique has become more damning. His master concept for capitalism as a “self-regulating market economy” never reflected a Victorian society based on a reactionary alliance between capitalists and the traditional enforcers in government from the 1860s. Polanyi missed its political and bureaucratic foundations. He could not foresee the postwar revival of the "free market" under the political supervision of the United States, prepared at Bretton Woods at the same time as The Great Transformation was published. When complacent western voters handed over government to plutocracy around 1980, a socially responsible form of industrial capitalism reverted to rentier political corruption. This now resembles the Old Regime that the bourgeois revolution was supposed to have ended for good.

The Political Economy of Africa, 2010

Africa is held back by the internal confusion of its regional associations. Classical liberalism ... more Africa is held back by the internal confusion of its regional associations. Classical liberalism offers an answer: build the widest possible area of protected free trade and movement, with minimal and harmonized regulation by the authorities. Africans must develop their own transnational associations to combat those who would deny them self-development. Proposals for integration of trade and finance have taken at the African Union; but this means relying on the political class that has failed Africans. The boundaries of free commerce and of political intervention should be pushed beyond the limits of existing sovereignties. The Southern African Development Community is also mired in nationalist politics, a plethora of tariff arrangements, and bilateral deals. Stability, development and democracy will only be achieved in when a regional hegemon is prepared to underwrite these objectives. South Africa’s economic fate is bound up with the rest of the continent. Its African National Congress government has so far sought to disguise its economic failings by pitting its own citizens against African immigrants. But this is a young country and, if Africa’s population explosion is to pay economic dividends, stronger regional systems—with the active involvement of civil society associations—must overcome the fragmentation of 55 weak nation-states.

The main problem facing humanity is the consolidation of private property by transnational corpor... more The main problem facing humanity is the consolidation of private property by transnational corporations that are increasingly able to shape emergent world society independently of national governments. This essay has ten sections: 1. The relationship between commerce and private property. 2. John Locke's political philosophy of liberal democracy. 3. The bulk of private property is held by huge impersonal entities, nation-states and corporations. A brief history of the rise of the modern business corporation follows. 4. Private property has not only evolved from individual ownership to predominately collective forms; but its main point of reference has also shifted from “real” to “intellectual” property, that is from material objects to ideas. 5. I offer some reflections on my relationship to intellectual property. How has this affected my own writing and publishing strategies today? 6. A history of intellectual property features Lysander Spooner who coined the term. 7. The US is the prime mover behind the spread of IP today, but it stayed out of international copyright agreements until late in the last century. 8. The struggle over IP constitutes the main contradiction of capitalism today, because the digital revolution has boosted information services whose reproduction is free or nearly so. 9. The issue is how to restore the distinction between real and artificial persons in law. 10. Transnational corporations are the main threat to liberal democracy today, while upholding a travesty of Locke’s original conception of it.

Anthropology Today, 2016

Brexit needs to be placed in the context of the United Kingdom’s violent, sometimes revolutionary... more Brexit needs to be placed in the context of the United Kingdom’s violent, sometimes revolutionary history since its foundation 300 years ago. What happens after the UK breaks up has been the primary issue ever since the collapse of empire, not Europe as such. There is a creeping constitutional crisis on many fronts, focusing on parliament's prerogatives, the monarchy, the house of lords, the voting system and centralization of everything in London at the expense of the regions. The main political issue, after Scotland's secession and the reunification of Ireland, will be and already is, decentralization from London in England itself--a trend exaggerated by the pandemic and a disastrous 13 years of Tory rule. A new federation for the former UK is likely. Britain is in some ways the most unstable major polity in the world.

A better world somewhere on Substack, 2024

A better world somewhere, Substack, 2024

A better world somewhere on Substack, 2024

My Apprenticeship Volume 1, 1926

A better world somewhere on Substack, 2024

Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes, 2022

Informal Market Worlds Reader, 2015

A better world somewhere (Substack), 2024

Berghahn, 2018

Money in a human economy, 2017

Development and Change, 2008

The Political Economy of Africa, 2010

Anthropology Today, 2016

Online, 2007

Edited extracts from a recorded conversation with Bill Maurer, Los Angeles, August 2007. Bill is ... more Edited extracts from a recorded conversation with Bill Maurer, Los Angeles, August 2007. Bill is Professor of Anthropology and Law, Dean of Social Sciences and Director, the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California Irvine. We share a passionate interest in the contemporary evolution of money as well as in the future of anthropology. **** The conversation, wide-ranging as it often is between friends, has six sections: 1. Introduction 2. Money as political education 3. The pragmatics of money 4. Money, payment, personal credit and rank 5. Dialectics 6. Getting anthropological knowledge out there.

This essay was written in August 2008 for a book that then folded, a month before my retirement f... more This essay was written in August 2008 for a book that then folded, a month before my retirement from British universities (but not from academic life), a month before the financial crash. I discovered it in my folders much later and found it to be one of the better products of my thinking on the human economy. 2007-8 saw my first conference and publication on that idea (Hart 2008). The owl of Minerva (wisdom) takes wing at dusk (Hegel). There are six sections: 1. In the wake of market fundamentalism 2. Our moment in world history 3. Karl Polanyi vs. Adam Smith 4. Marcel Mauss' economic movement from below 5. Commoditization: The dialectics of social abstraction 6. Money in a human economy' I have now edited it and added some references to my own publications since 2008, including relevant posts on Academia at https://goldsmiths.academia.edu/KeithHart (Papers and Drafts) and a link to my latest book, Self in the World (Hart 2022).

The COP27 conference in North Africa reminded me of something I wrote soon after 2000. This paper... more The COP27 conference in North Africa reminded me of something I wrote soon after 2000. This paper started out as a keynote address for the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, IFOAM's conference, Mainstreaming Organic Trade: New Frontiers, Opportunities and Responsibilities, Bangkok, November 2003. It offers a rather striking summary of the Big Historical Picture, but limits discussion of possible solutions to community currencies. Two decades later I find my writing about the first to have deteriorated and about the second I have narrowed the gap between local and global solutions. A first step was published in 2006: https://www.academia.edu/87126051/Common_Wealth_Building_Economic_Democracy_with_Community_Currencies. I need to update this thinking soon. For now, I offer a lightly edited and renamed version of the IFOAM original.

Although the parliamentarian, William Wilberforce is now more identified with leadership of the i... more Although the parliamentarian, William Wilberforce is now more identified with leadership of the international movement to abolish slavery, Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) was its driving force. This was England's social revolution in the 19 th century, combining anti-slavery, free trade, economic individualism and evangelical Christianity. ****** Cambridge, in and outside the university, was the English hub of the movement. Its éminence grise was William Pitt the younger, prime minister in his 20s and Cambridge's member of parliament. The local network of activists was diverse, bringing together the African former slave, Olaudah Equiano, non-conformist ministers, high churchmen, bankers and radical journalists. Clarkson pioneered modern single-issue politics. He drew on a range of campaigning methods: field trips, petitions, lobbying, pamphlets, a portable museum, deselection of MPs. ****** This forces us to revise how the dialectic of conservatism and innovation has played out in Cambridge University's history. The international movement for human rights grew out of the abolition of slavery. Graduate students and junior fellows from around the world today want to use their knowledge for the benefit of their own people and humanity, but they are often frustrated by university's archaic features. Revisiting 1800 and thereabouts reveals that their present circumstances may be more conducive to social change than they imagine.

In the course of the twentieth century West Africa went through a revolution consisting of an exp... more In the course of the twentieth century West Africa went through a revolution consisting of an explosion in population, the rise of huge cities and the political division of the region into nominally independent states. While becoming more closely integrated into the world economy than ever before, the region remains poor when compared with most other parts of the world. If we wish to understand why this is so and what the prospects are for a more prosperous future, it will not do to focus solely on external determinants of economic backwardness. Many of West Africa’s problems have deep-seated causes, while others are the result of quite recent factors. I attempt here to place contemporary political economy within a long-run framework emphasizing the region’s unity and variety. If I devote more than usual attention to the traditional variety of West African societies, it is because they still shape the present strongly, especially if we wish to take into account the many differences between them.

This essay has an Introduction and four parts. In Part 1 I refer briefly the relationship between... more This essay has an Introduction and four parts. In Part 1 I refer briefly the relationship between economics and the human sciences drawing on Foucault in The Order of Things (1970). ******** 1. Max Weber, General Economic History (1930); 2. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904); 3. V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899); 4. Talcott Parsons, The Theory of Social Action (1937); 5. J.M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (1932); 6. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944); 7.Marcel Mauss, Essay on the Gift (1925). ******** Each of these individuals, with others of course, launched a branch of knowledge that dissented from professional economics: socio-economic history; institutional economics; neo-Marxism and development economics; economic sociology; macroeconomics; the economic history of world crisis; and economic anthropology. ******** Part 3 summarises, in a manifesto, two decades of the human economy approach. Part 4 has two sections: on organized knowledge, especially the two great principles of our civilization, democracy and science; and the relationship between the humanities and popular culture.

C.L.R. James Institute, New York, 1990

This short essay grew out of our work when editing C. L. R. James' American Civilization for publ... more This short essay grew out of our work when editing C. L. R. James' American Civilization for publication in 1993 (now out of print). It compares three visitors from Europe to America: Alexis de Tocqueville, James and Jean Baudrillard. The last doesn't come out of it particularly well, but he made up for that elsewhere.

Paris seminar on money , 2015

Paper for a 2015 Paris seminar, "Singular or plural money? Multi-disciplinary approaches and theo... more Paper for a 2015 Paris seminar, "Singular or plural money? Multi-disciplinary approaches and theoretical challenges”, organized by Jérôme Blanc and Bruno Théret.
It has five sections:
********
1. LETS and me
2. The euro crisis
3. The collapse of national capitalism
4. A human economy approach
5. Harnessing bureaucracy to grassroots democracy
*********
The first two are the longest sections, being concerned with the potential and limits of community currencies, especially a system known as LETS; and the reasons for the euro crisis which are traced to the formation of a single currency by means that privileged markets before politics. The euro, launched as notes and coins in 2002, is juxtaposed with the Argentinian peso crisis of the same period. This is one symptom of the general collapse of the dominant social form of the 20th century, 'national capitalism', in our times -- the attempt to control money, markets and accumulation through national bureaucracies.
In this historical context, I outline a 'human economy' approach which is grounded in people's economic activities, relations and aspirations, while advocating a drive to link up with humanity as a whole through global social networks and large-scale bureaucracies. Finally, some existing examples of this approach are discussed with particular emphasis on a South African case study.

INCLUDES A DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS AND TWO SAMPLE CHAPTERS: 1. The Abolition of Slavery: An ... more INCLUDES A DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS AND TWO SAMPLE CHAPTERS:
1. The Abolition of Slavery: An English Revolution
2. Waiting for Emancipation in West Africa.
****
Introduction:
Africa’s share of world population was 7.5% in 1900 and will be 40% by 2100. Asia’s manufacturers (unlike the West) know this will make Africa central to world markets in the 21st century. How might Africans make this new preponderance count in global political economy? ****
The 20th century’s dominant economic form, national capitalism, is in disarray; it never took root in Africa. Strong men (Trump, Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Modi etc) combine nationalism with a market fundamentalism that overlaps with, but is distinctive from that promoted by neoliberal globalization. ****
I place Africa’s current prospects within North Atlantic history and juxtapose its development now with the early liberal revolutions. These pursued free trade in an expanded home region while protected it from global predators. ****
Africa was said not have ‘developed’ in the last century. But population growth fuelled an urban revolution that brought its main regions together in and Old Regime, whose antidote is liberal revolution. ****
The world market for cultural commodities (entertainment, sport, education, media, information services, mobile phone apps) is the fastest growing. The history of liberal revolutions shows that the support of capitalist firms is vital. Women and youth will lead the struggle to replace societies made by and for old men. ****
Religion and the media will also be strategic. ‘Human unity’, thanks to universal communications, markets and money flows is now an empirical fact. Humanity’s tool of connection is money. The internet is now a global marketplace that goes largely unregulated. Smart phones place Africans on the cutting edge of this revolution. The new African diaspora will ensure that remittances and return migration will play a big role in Africa’s future. ****
A “human economy” links people in the real economy to our global predicament. Human economy 1.0 was a Victorian synthesis of free trade, anti-slavery, economic individualism and evangelical Christianity. It drove colonial empire, however. I point towards a new synthesis, this time coming out of Africa not imposed on it. The concept of ubuntu is a good place to start.

The global economic crisis is not merely financial, a moment in the historical cycle of credit an... more The global economic crisis is not merely financial, a moment in the historical cycle of credit and debt. The removal of political controls over money in recent decades has led to a situation where politics is still mainly national, but the money circuit is global and lawless. Events since 2008 should be seen as the collapse of “national capitalism”, the money system that the world lived by in the twentieth century. This has been unravelling since the US dollar went off gold in 1971 and money derivatives were invented the following year. The idea of central bank money or legal tender is tenacious despite this development. As the need for international cooperation intensifies, the disconnect between economy and political institutions undermines effective solutions. The crisis of the eurozone in 2011-2012 may be understood best as a Sophoclean tragedy in which good intentions cannot remedy the consequences of past mistakes.

Desmond McNeill’s aim is to shift understanding of Marx’s discoveries away from a narrow economis... more Desmond McNeill’s aim is to shift understanding of Marx’s discoveries away from a narrow economistic approach to a focus on his theory of value grounded in the quasi-religious concept of “fetishism”. This idea is explored with great originality and wide scholarship in the opening sections. McNeill then turns to the importance of money and language in structural linguistics and Marxism. He argues that limiting analysis to labour and relations of production is too restrictive. He extends his own reach to economic analysis of exchange and consumption. The last section updates Marx’s relevance for our century by addressing recent Marxist literature on the global issues of environment and financialization.

This is a personal reflection on the origins of our times, times that are currently dominated by ... more This is a personal reflection on the origins of our times, times that are currently dominated by Putin’s war on Ukraine. It draws on various writings since the millennium. The essay begins with 'a brief history of the last half-century in the West’, written now. It hinges on the neoliberal counter-revolution of 1980 against a world revolution launched after 1945. The end of the Cold War in 1989 opened up the world in confusing ways, but this was closed down by a second counter-revolution after September 11th initiated by George W Bush’s White House as the ‘War on Terror’ and the Iraq War. Part 1 considers this period through an essay written in Paris in 2001 and Part 2 consists of an auto-ethnography of my experiences in the Chicago area while teaching for a term in Spring 2003. The common theme is how the West lost the impetus gained by the Second World War when handing government over to capital around 1980. This, not principally Putin or Trump, is why we find ourselves in the current mess of criminality, corruption and decadence.

I trace the human economy approach to my association with French and Latin American activist soci... more I trace the human economy approach to my association with French and Latin American activist sociologists, especially Jean-Louis Laville. Based on the work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, this approach occupies a position on change between reform and revolution. The events of 2011 (Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and a global increase in political activism) persuaded me to revisit the politics of a human economy, this time with greater emphasis on world revolution. Second, I explore this dialectic through my friendship with David Graeber. We more or less agree on the economics, but an initial opposition between centre- and extreme-left politics has been moving perceptibly on my part. My third point of reference is what I have learned about revolution from Lenin and C.L.R. James. Fourth, I examine reports hot from the blogosphere, Gabriella Coleman's study of Anonymous along with Ernst Bloch's principle of hope and a critical view of OWS. The human economy exists everywhere in dialectical tension with the dominant economic institutions of our day. I conclude by drawing on Marx's method in Grundrisse for studying the relationship between people, machines and money in history.

This analysis is based on the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report for 2011-2012.... more This analysis is based on the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report for 2011-2012. It identifies twelve "pillars" of sustainable national competitiveness: institutions; infrastructure; macroeconomic environment; health and primary education; higher education and training; goods market efficiency; labour market efficiency; financial market development; technological readiness; market size; business sophistication; and innovation. 142 countries were ranked in a Global Competitiveness Index. South Africa came number 50 overall, but the BRICs were not much different: China 26, Brazil 53, India 56 and Russia 66. The top ten was dominated as usual by European countries, with Switzerland (the source of the report) number 1. Inequality is endemic to this world economy, but South Africa's profile is two-tiered to an astonishing degree.

Don Quixote was a pastiche of the main fiction genres of his day. This science fiction murder mys... more Don Quixote was a pastiche of the main fiction genres of his day. This science fiction murder mystery is a pastiche of the western novel, drawing on Cervantes, Goethe's Faust, Mann's The Magic Mountain, Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and Roddenberry's Star Trek. The main clue to the book's theme is Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

This was a presentation at the World Bank PSD Forum 2006, Washington DC, April 4-6. This collatio... more This was a presentation at the World Bank PSD Forum 2006, Washington DC, April 4-6. This collation has some features not found elsewhere in my writings and the whole is a unique essay formed by the rare opportunity to address the institution that did more than any other to promote "the informal sector" in the 1970s. After 1980, this fed the campaign to free global capital flows through "structural adjustment policies" (SAPs) aimed at weakening national governments' ability to protect their citizens from global predators. In 2006, the international organizations promoted a world economy favourable to inward investment by transnational corporations, policed by governments with reduced capacity for making economic laws. When I googled PSD, I found the Philadelphia School for the Deaf and other unrelated entities. The acronym was for "Private Sector Development", meaning corporations based in the leading rich countries. This was a long way from the World Bank's original mandate, as an institution formed in 1944, first to help countries rebuild after the war and then to develop backward areas, initially through infrastructure development. The informal economy was now seen as an obstacle to development, mainly by escaping tax burdens. At this Forum, someone from the McKinsey Company showed that, if VAT collection in Turkey could be raised from two-thirds to 90%, the rate charged could be reduced from 17% to 13% with obvious benefits for corporate payers (figures from memory).

Nettime-l is a long-running platform for discussion of media and politics. In 2011, two events pe... more Nettime-l is a long-running platform for discussion of media and politics. In 2011, two events persuaded some of us that the world was moving again: the 21st January uprising in Egypt’s Tahrir Square which, together with a revolution in Tunisia, seemed to promise an Arab Spring at last; and Occupy Wall Street in New York which promised political movement in the heart of the American Empire.

Conversation is one of the two main ways that thought moves, the other being story. Dialectic is its formal expression. New year 2012 opened with some optimism on the left. A thread, 'A movement without demands?', was launched on 5th January, summarising a paper claiming, among other things, that an anarchist movement that made no political demands could not mobilise the social divisions necessary for revolution. Like most nettime conversations, what followed was an exercise in free thinking. I took part.

I reproduce an edited version now for several reasons. It may be useful to revisit political ideas aired a full decade ago. We can learn from both positive and negative aspects of what transpired. I don’t expect readers to plough through all 13,000 words. But I guarantee that a selective reading with feed your intellect and perhaps even your politics.

Dictionary of Anthropological Biography, 2003

I was asked to compile three short biographies for a Dictionary of Anthropological Biography, ed... more I was asked to compile three short biographies for a Dictionary of Anthropological Biography, edited by Vered Amit and published by Routledge in 2003. This has been republished and updated since under another name. I was given only 800 words for each and a very rigid format. They were: Jack Goody, Raymond T Smith and Peter Worsley. As far as I can see, they dropped out subsequently and were granted a pathetically small word count in the first place.

I knew them all very well. Jack was my PhD supervisor and mentor; Ray and I shared Manchester, Cambridge, Ghana, the Caribbean and Chicago; and Peter was a companion and guide when I taught in Manchester and like me was a strong United fan. What struck me when I wrote them all up was that they were almost variations on a common biography. They all fought in the Second World War when very young, went to Cambridge University, developed their personal brand of egalitarian politics afterwards and, despite moving in different directions, shared a lot, temperamentally and intellectually.

I return to this theme of collective biography after reproducing what I wrote then about each. I should say that I am in biographical mode right now – publishing a personal account in Self in the World (Spring 2022), followed by a biography of Marcel Mauss in preparation.

I sum up here what a lifetime of learning has taught me, how I share it with others and some of t... more I sum up here what a lifetime of learning has taught me, how I share it with others and some of the techniques of storage, retrieval and performance that I have picked up along the way. I start with how I spent my time as a young child and what I learned from it. I then turn to learning and teaching as an academic. How do we combine ideas and life, when they are usually kept in separate compartments? They move together through dialectic (conversation) and story. Memory and communication are strongly linked. I conclude by assessing the claims of organized knowledge and popular culture as sources of education.

This joint keynote takes the form of a dialogue between a young African student and an old Europe... more This joint keynote takes the form of a dialogue between a young African student and an old European professor. For each of us the idea of Africa has been a beacon in our personal struggles to overcome the racial, national and economic divisions of unequal society. Taking Livingstone’s life and times as a point of comparison, we ask how Africa’s place in the world may be changing now. The continent’s relative economic and demographic weight is growing and economic progress there in the coming century may undermine the racial foundations of world society. More inclusive visions are needed to situate Africa in this new world. The “human economy” approach is one. We conclude with reflections on its relevance for African development. Our presentation has four parts.
Part 1 (SM, KH) Personal struggles with division
Part 2 (SM, KH) Livingstone’s life and times
Part 3 (KH, SM) Africa in the world today
Part 4 (KH, SM) Towards a human economy

Bringel & Pleyers (2017) Protesta e indignacion global. Los movimientos sociales en el nuevo orden mundial, Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2017

Cultural Anthropology, 2019

This piece, written in honour of Keith’s life and works, was never going to be a conventional Fes... more This piece, written in honour of Keith’s life and works, was never going to be a conventional Festschrift. Rather, we felt it was entirely in Keith’s spirit that it should be rendered as an open-ended, far-reaching, and multi-voiced conversation, in which Keith was an active participant.

The current version published on Cultural Anthropology's Member Voices site, is a transcription of the conversation we held for Keith, which took place at the 2018 European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) meeting in Stockholm. We asked people to think about the great themes of Keith’s work, including both methods and topics: money and currency; and scale and how to bridge individual experience, global process, and world history.