Mayan Visions

The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization

June C. Nash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135957124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A significant work by one of anthropology's most important scholars, this book provides an introduction to the Chiapas Mayan community of Mexico, better known for their role in the Zapatista Rebellion.

CHAPTER 1

INDIGENOUS COUNTERPLOTS TO GLOBALIZATION PROCESSES

ANTHROPOLOGISTS ARE PRIVILEGED in their study of cultures with distinct worldviews since it allows us to explore alternatives to mainstream thought and action, and through this lens to examine critically the assumptions that prevail in the centers of power. Whether we remain at home to study people whose class or cultural identity situates them outside the mainstream, or whether we travel to other lands, we can find ourselves awakened to possible alternatives to centrist ideas and ideologies. That privilege no longer goes unchallenged. The internal critique in anthropology, combined with the critique by subjects of anthropological investigation who are also writing their own ethnographies, requires an engaged partnership that takes on political responsibility for the impact of their publications.

In this book I return to my first field site in a place called Chiapas, Mexico, that has only recently become known worldwide because of the uprising of Zapatistas on New Year’s Eve of January 1, 1994. Faced with the possible loss of their collective resource base as marginalized cultivators in the global society, they said, “Basta!” (“Enough!”). In the years since the armed uprising, which lasted only a fortnight, the Zapatistas and their supporters have been framing an alternative path to that of being subsumed in global capitalist circuits as “people without faces and without voices.”

Alternative ways of life such as that of Chiapas Mayans are diminishing in a world in which globalization processes are encompassing most societies. Those processes are set in motion by the penetration of unregulated market exchanges in all aspects of life throughout the globe and by the imposition of regimens of work and rewards without representation by those affected. Globalization studies often take as a given the very conditions that are the premises for the resistance and rebellion of those who are most marginalized by the new capital flows. These conditions are the growing “deterritorialization” of peoples, products, and the production process itself, the “fragmentation” or atomization of personal relations and political units, the “homogenization” or “hybridization” of culture, and the “alienation” of people from community, kin groups, and even self.

In the current phase of enterprise capitalism there is no intention of absorbing the disrupted populations as proletarians or consumers. Hunter-gatherers and cultivators in the few remaining tropical forests as well as semi-subsistence small-plot farmers are of interest to global capital enterprises only because of the resources in their territories or the genetic properties of the plants, animals, and even their own bodies in the biospheres of which they are the custodians. Populations already dependent on global enterprises for jobs, markets, or handouts become ever more vulnerable to the cyclical crises of capitalism bringing about changes in employment levels. The fallback once provided by subsistence economies is often no longer available to cushion the impact. These recurrent cycles are further compounded by an environmental crisis caused by intensive agricultural practices, widespread exploitation of forests, fossil fuels, and mineral resources, and contamination of water, earth, and air. The invasion of territories and communities that existed on the margins of earlier capital expansion of the global economy puts semisubsistence cultivators and hunter-gatherers in the center of the storm over territorial control and the debates over development and environment. At the same time, the withdrawal of capital from old industrial areas leaves communities devastated in its wake, forced to resort to subsistence strategies that are no longer adequate.

Because they are not complicit in the universalizing notions of capitalist expansion, indigenous societies often retain unique worldviews that place them in the center of a collective enterprise to maintain the world in balance. These distinct visions, predicated as they are on substantive economies responding to the needs of people in a particular society regardless of their power as consumers in a market, provide a positive coexisting alternative to a world predicated on universal self-regulating markets.¹ By substantive economies, I refer to those which have as their goal the provisioning and servicing of a social group. These may include contemporary as well as past societies in which the economic behavior is governed by kinship or communalistic considerations rather than formal economic claims (Polanyi 1957). I am also supposing that we can characterize some aspects of all societies as falling into substantive economy, even when they occur in highly rational market settings. I do not restrict the term to economies that are exclusively engaged in self-production for a bounded social group, since few, if any, such societies persist. What I should like to emphasize is the ends of production, whether it involves commercial transactions in open market or not.²

Anthropologists have demonstrated the remarkable ability of indigenous peoples throughout the world to carry out commercial transactions with Europeans in their midst while retaining a distinctive logic and practice.³ In their resistance to the latest advance of capitalism, indigenous peoples are formulating innovative ways of rethinking citizenship in pluricultural settings that deny the hierarchical basis for citizenship defined in colonial and postindependence settings. Their attempts to expand the range of collective and individual autonomy offer the most innovative response to the loss of self-determination, often posed as an inevitable consequence of globalization.

The social movements that arise in such settings are now being played out in ways that have been neither predicted nor analyzed in mainstream economic analysis. As the crisis moves from the workplace to the streets and fields, to collective kitchens of the Andes or the soup kitchens of U.S. charities, the protest is phrased in moral terms and the right to survive rather than the end of exploitation. Impoverishment is more often the crucible in which the contradictions of capitalism on a global scale are confronted than is exploitation of the labor force. The unemployed or landless multitudes have problems distinct from those of the working poor, and these provide the motivation for new forms of struggle. Social movements generated by people deprived of their subsistence resources or of gainful employment, and those marginalized or excluded from commodity markets in which to sell their products, appeal to morality more often than the rational calculus of surplus value extortion. These movements become linked with global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with issues of environmental damage and human rights deprivation, including the right to live. It is in these transnational spaces that new forms of governance are emerging which may enable the human species to survive in a globally integrated world that permits alternative ways of survival and coexistence.

In reenvisioning Mayans as they emerge as major combatants in changing the relationship between ethnic groups and the nation-state, I am also reenvisioning anthropological models as we include the global processes in the local settings that we study. As we expand the parameters of our studies, we become critics of existing paradigms of the global system and of our own contributions to those paradigms. I will briefly review some of the paradigmatic shifts in our view of the world and our strategies for correlating local ethnographies with our knowledge of globalization processes.

RETHINKING CAPITALIST CRISES IN GLOBALIZATION

Globalization is the process of integrating the world economy in key production and investment sites. The ideological premise is a self-regulated market ensuring the free movement of goods and resources that escapes national and international controls over production processes and labor conditions. For economies of the South it entails a shift from domestic to export production, commitment of an ever larger percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) to debt payment, decline in public responsibility for welfare, privatization of enterprises, and breaking up of communally based resources. Recurrent crises caused by indebtedness in countries often ruled by corrupt governments incur “restructuring” conditions that shift the burden of debt repayment to workers and peasants.

The diverse ways in which people of areas considered peripheral to advanced capitalism confront the problems of survival in a global economy force us to rethink theories of the crisis, taking into account subsistence systems and the question of survival. Economists of the neoclassical school have always left subsistence production out of their equations, limited as they are to market exchanges. Karl Marx was among the first to recognize the global reach of capitalism, as manufacturers and shippers competed with their counterparts in other nations for overseas markets and trade. Nations were the product of, not the impulse for, this dynamic expansion of commercial interests that needed the protection for their goods through tariffs, and for their property through armies (Marx 1964:133–135, manuscripts written in 1857–1858). Marx and his collaborator, Frederick Engels (1959), predicted the inevitability of capitalist advance throughout the world yet cast a nostalgic glance at the subsistence economies that were devastated in its wake. The dynamic for them lay in the contradiction between expansive production systems and restrictive distribution, leaving real needs unsatisfied as the failure in market demand lead to periodic crises. Only Rosa Luxemburg (1971) foresaw the ultimate crisis in capitalism in the subsumption of all substantive economies when they could no longer provide the resources necessary for their expansion (see below).

Neo-Marxists have extended the analysis of nationally based capitalist enterprises to show how mature economies trying to overcome cycles of recession in their own country tie peripheral economies into an unequal exchange that subverts the development of the latter. Both dependency theorists, who maintained that the underdevelopment of peripheral economies resulted from surplus capital accumulation at the center (Amin 1970; Frank 1967, 1980), and world systems theorists, who asserted the dynamism of core industrial centers determining the levels of production in a worldwide division of labor between core and center, and periphery (Arrighi 1985; Wallerstein 1983), sought solutions within existing trade networks and mediated by nation-states to overcome inequalities. Those who envisioned a “postindustrial” world (Bell 1973; Touraine 1971) chose the new technocrats as the vanguard of social change. Yet the continued growth of industry, particularly in the Asian periphery, required a more global perspective to relate the rise of the newly industrializing countries to the decline of industry in metropolitan centers as they became caught up in the expansion of finance capitalism.

Analyses of the expansion of investments in low-wage areas throughout the world demonstrated the intensified competition among labor markets that depressed wages and reduced the basis for organization in the work site (Fröbel, Heinrichs, and Kreye 1980; MacEwan and Tabb 1989; Nash and Pernandez-Kelly 1983; Rothstein and Blim 1992; Safa 1981). This critique showed that development that focused strictly on industrialization was inadequate, leaving the subsistence sector in countries that hosted export-oriented industrialization impoverished and the substantive needs of wage workers in an ever more precarious condition. It was no coincidence that women were the primary losers, since they were dedicated to the subsistence sector as mothers, wives, and superexploited workers when they entered the wage sector.

The question of why impoverishment persisted with industrial development was left unanswered by most of the macro-theorists who sought the answers within the “wastelands” created by “the capitalist core” and extended to “the periphery” through development programs (Conde et al. 1984; Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf 1990). The rise of East Asian industrializing countries in the 1980s and the subsequent shift to finance capitalization by the 1990s provoked speculation about multiple tracks in the expansion of the modern world system that build on chaos theory rather than fixed hegemonic control (Arrighi and Silver 1999:21–22). The greater dynamism in the emergent models of globalization allows for an expansion of the “collective power of the system’s dominant groups” that can fulfill supply-and-demand conditions needed for stability (Arrighi and Silver 1999:28). Yet the fixation on hegemonic cores overlooks alternative sites of governance that promote stability. These are the sites of social reproduction in households, communities, and religious sodalities that confront the new forces let loose by globalization in alternative ways.

Rethinking the problematic of capitalist expansion in terms of the relations between capitalist production and the domestic reproductive and subsistence sector has a long history. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminists had embraced the interrelationship of production and reproduction in a holistic analysis that included the personal and community dimension of crises. Before Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, Flora Tristan (1983, translated and republished from the 1837 publication in France) published her book, L’Union Ouvrier, calling for an organization of the employed with the unemployed and (in Marx’s terms) unemployable lumpen proletariat of the world—the pimps and prostitutes, the thieves and jailed populations of the London and Paris underworld—along with wage slaves and self-employed peasants. This was anathema to a theory of capitalist accumulation that saw the expropriation of profit as exclusively related to exploitation in the workplace. So, too, were Tristan’s attempts to organize a world union focusing on bread-and-butter issues that preoccupied all workers and the unemployed. Marxists who were her contemporaries considered consumption concerns counterproductive to the struggle to seize the means of production.

The problematic posed by groups marginal to capitalist growth centers was central to Rosa Luxemburg’s (1971 [1913]) thesis concerning the necessary coexistence of a noncapitalist subsistence sector with the advance of capitalism. She recognized the importance of what she called the “natural economy,” or the petty commodity producers and cultivators, as a vital element in the process of accumulation.

The historic process of the development of capitalism on the world stage in all of its colorful and moving variety takes place first in the exchange relation of capital with its non-capitalist environment as it confronts the difficulties of a barter economy, secure social relations and the limited demand of patriarchal peasant economy and artisan production. Capital uses heroic means to conquer the feudal barter economy at home and the subjugation and destruction of traditional communities overseas, laying open the doors to commodity exchange and production. (Luxemburg 1971 [1913]:92)

Marx also recognized the importance of natural economies in the primitive state of accumulation, but what Luxemburg added was the continuing importance of the noncapitalist systems for advanced industrialized countries as well. Comparing simple reproduction with expanded reproduction, she states:

It is quite different with the realization of surplus value. Here outside consumers qua other than capitalist are really essential. Thus the immediate and vital conditions for capital and its accumulation is the existence of non-capitalist buyers of the surplus value, which is decisive to this extent for the problem of capitalist accumulation.

Whatever the theoretical aspects, the accumulation of capital as an historic process depends in every respect upon non-capitalist social strata and the forms of social organization. (Luxemburg 1951 [1913]:365)

She adds to this argument the particular reasons for their essential importance:

The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of noncapitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production, and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system. (Luxemburg [1913] 1951:368)

To state as its primary need “a market for its surplus value,” not simply as a market for its commodities, reveals the essence of her argument. In the recurrent crises of capitalism, she argues that capitalists have to go beyond selling to other capitalists, which does not enhance the reproductive base for the process of accumulation. It is for this reason that she asserts that:

Their [the natural economies’] mode of production and their labour power, no less than their demand for surplus products, is necessary to capitalism. Yet the latter is fully determined to undermine their independence as social units in order to gain possession of their means of production and labour power and to convert them into commodity buyers. This method is the most expedient for capital. In fact, it is invari-ably accompanied by a growing military, whose importance will be demonstrated below. (Luxemburg 1971:[1913] 92)

She encountered opposition from Marxists of her day who objected to her thesis that the “third market” of subsistence producers competed in importance with, or even overshadowed, the surplus value rendered in the workplace as a major and continuing component of the process of capital accumulation.

Rosa Luxemburg’s emphasis on the importance of subsistence-based societies as a condition for enlarged reproduction takes on added significance as global expansion threatens to subsume all non-capitalist sectors. Her premonition that this requires militarization of the society in this predatory expansion was almost a blueprint for what is happening as the jungle retreats of the hemisphere are being overtaken:

Since primitive associations of the natives are the strongest protection for their social organization and for their material bases of existence capital must begin by planning the systematic destruction and annihilation of all non-capitalist social units which obstruct their development. (Luxemborg 1951:370)

We can begin to comprehend in these terms how globalization often leads to the militarization of societies that resist being drawn into capitalist markets. We have reached a point when the predatory expansion of capitalism threatens with extinction not only the marginalized domestic or subsistence economies but also the capitalist sector itself as it eliminates nonrenewable resources and the basis for biodiversity alternatives. Anthropologists, particularly those with a gendered perspective of social reproduction, have taken a lead in expanding our awareness of alternative paths of growth.

DIMENSIONS OF THE WORLD CRISIS

Global integration heightens the cyclical crises of capitalism by reducing the funds devoted to wages while increasing the activity of financial networks. This reduces the selfcorrecting mechanisms of free market flows by promoting speculation while reducing human claims on surpluses. Concomitant with this is an increase in unemployment, with redundant selling and trafficking in drugs that undercut the production of less lucrative subsistence crops and reduce the redistributive function of the state. The terms of trade, that is, that which developing countries receive for their goods and services, have fallen across the board from 1985 to 1994, but the drop in developing economies (from an index of 108 to 96) is greater than that for developed economies of the North (106 to 101) (United Nations 1996, Table 5).

The crisis that was tipped off by sharp rises in oil prices in the middle of the 1970s and culminated in the financial crisis of Asian and Latin American countries in the 1980s differs from that of the 1930s because of three major changes: 1) the growing integration of the world economy, 2) the shift from industrial production to financial capital as the principle basis for accumulation, and 3) the diminishing resources, including labor power, devoted to subsistence production throughout the world. Neoliberal governments are now dismantling the regulations put into place in the decades following the Depression and World War II. Some of the effects of these policies are addressed below.

Integration of the World Economy and Widening Discrepancies

One of the most significant measures of global integration is direct foreign investment. The high point of $178,589 million of investments from OECD countries in 1992–1993 more than doubled in the next five years, with a year-end projection of $382,022 million (Direct Investment Yearbook 1998:8, 23). Financial transactions in the periphery were formerly invested in production or extraction, but in the volatile stock markets of countries vying for entry into global financial sectors there is an increase in credit transactions, stock speculation, and debt. The higher returns in peripheral economies are offset by the necessity of paying off debt in foreign currency that is hard to come by. Debt itself has entered into speculative transactions, as the debt of peripheral economies is traded in internatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Glossary
• Notes
• References Cited