Mama Laja, Piti Oy and the Gran Machine (Mother-Capital, Child-Profit and the Big Machine/Order of Capital)
Creators: name: Beckett Chingono, Phoebe
Publisher: name: University of Chicago
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Value, Creativity, Spontaneity, Order, Capital, Power, Peircian Semiotics, Substantivist economic anthropology, Pratik, black feminist theory, market formation, monetary theory, financialisation, Jacobson's poetics, Christianity of Anthropology, Caribbean

description: The essay starts by troubling the idea of production, my main thesis, conceived as a kind of unmediated transmission of substance into form, a forward moving arrow of directionality from an identifiable authorial source to an embodied thing. This is a move others have made on slightly different grounds– economic thinkers Johnathon Nitzan, Simpshon Bichler and Ann Pettifor are the main people I engage here. For instance, the idea of the capitalist “nomos”, of capital gains through rent-seeking, of wealth creation through investment, has been posed in opposition to a materialist understanding of capital, of an entrepreneurial capitalism based on profit that engages with land and labour. But these are just parallel debates and currents which I am seeking to return to my original language of inquiry, about the cosmological precepts of the ideology of production, and a search for a formalist aesthetic of value creativity. As my aim is to understand how value is created outside of a productivist framework, this critique is offered initially as a small provocation, to be a point of departure. There are multiple modes of writing adopted but I make use of a narrative style in the first instance to explain my starting-off point. Departing from production lands me at the level of market intermediation, where, we could say, nothing is made, simply gathered and reordered in form. There is a feminine gendered aspect to this which cannot be overlooked; see Gayle Rubin’s discussion of Claude Levi-Strauss on women as signs/conduits (1975); Gregory Duff Morton on women as managers not producers of household production, signalling an external party’s originary claim on the product (2015); Deidre de la Cruz on feminine religious mediation (2015); Sophie Lewis’ comparison of production with “circlusion”; Ursula le Guin’s metaphor of a gathering and the container as feminist practice, in contrast to ‘long hard pokey things’; and Marilyn Strathern on Melanesian wealth evaluations as bringing forth forms from other forms to ‘see the mother in the child’ (1992). Marketing in Haiti happens to be women’s work. I want to study how value is created through mediatory processes. But how to express this without falling back on marxist feminist and feminist substantivist approaches which seem to counter-intuitively turn everyone into a producer while remaining ambivalent toward this strategy where I am left wondering what the feminist position toward production is. I suggest an approach to understand value creation through mediation involves overcoming a dualism that I identify in social theory between creativity and order. This is the main subsidiary argument that supports the essay’s overarching thesis, and is where a case for the use of semiotics for understanding political economy is formulated. And so this is where the essay begins, firstly with a critique of the spontaneity of markets. The subtle gradation to this critique is why if they’re not, do markets appear spontaneous? This is the first tension which the essay sustains. I look at this first through a historical framework, with a discussion of theories of market formation, and then structurally, by focussing in on Haitian women market traders’ role as historical actors, in accordance with Marx’s line ‘makers of history but not under conditions of their choosing’, to think through the market as both made and imposed. An underlying question is that by seeing the women traders as creators of value are they then creators of capital, and so are they capitalists? This question is after the manner of John Holloway’s line ‘stop making capitalism’ and is the second tension that this essay addresses, which I again suggest arises from our putting creativity and spontaneity on one side and order and intentionality on the other. Gradually, the essay works its way up to a resolution of the first and second tensions. The first by looking at ethnographic descriptions of the organisational lay-out of regional markets, transactional exchanges, and the madan saras own accounts of their calculations and forecasting, I show how market values come into being through Peirician semiotics, Goodwin’s interactive turn-taking, Goffman’s performativity, and Silverstein’s improvisational modelling. Having recovered an idea of creative ordering from a limited sense of spontaneity, the second tension is then resolved by a deeper investigation of autonomy in relation to spontaneity, looking at how market orders emerge from a paradox of social creativity, how it is that our creations can come to stand as something autonomous from ourselves, which I make sense of using Roman Jakobson’s formalist poetics and Carlo Severi’s parallelism, to critique whilst thinking with Marx’s fetish–which was an exact response to this creative paradox in capitalist markets. I sense that where subjects act one way and say another thing is a moment of social creativity. Parallelism allows us to understand the market as a complex ideal consisting in and of conflicting class interests. Looking at interviews with informal market traders about their business plans, their desires and disinterest in modern ideals of city-life, and detailed field-notes on the role specifications within the intricate system of market intermediation, I broaden, and allude to, Marx’s category of the “petty bourgeois” and Werner Sombart’s “businessman” and their historical evolution, by reflecting on how the Haitian women traders perhaps see themselves, and what their pursuits are. Considering also the political sense of autonomy, I take into account examples where madan saras subvert market capitalism and are, we could say, “anti-capitalist”. I consider this while still rejecting Braudel’s notion of the “natural economy”. I also choose not to adopt David Graeber’s (2007) ascription “provisional autonomous zone”, nor Johnhenry Gonzalez’s (2019) romanticised notion of anarchic “marronage”. Instead I see that Haitian local market operations don’t open up straightforward pathways for capitalist moves and countermoves. Here I am starting to respond also to the subsumption debate (see Antonio Negri, 2000), my conclusions on this topic are fleshed-out in a later section with a critique of commodification and Polanyi’s definition of the “market principle”. To explain how the market women subvert the market I go into a brief analysis of monopoly capitalism inspired by Thorstein Veblen. This part, in sum, offers an approach to the semiotics of capitalism in transitional or post-colonial economies. Having outlined a preliminary approach to understanding how the market emerges from the practices of local market traders who also stand against it— by developing our understanding of creativity, spontaneity and autonomy— I then bring to the fore wider debates on monetary theory and financialisation in order to redress how my earlier question of whether “if the marketers are creating value, do they create capital, and are they then capitalists?” and also “how does this linguistic shift from talking about marketplaces to the market economy occur?”, has been thought about by economic thinkers who basically say we cannot talk of exchange and commodity markets separately from financial capital which transpires the whole economy. However, my contention with some of these thinkers, which include Ann Pettifor, Fernand Braudel and Karl Polanyi, is they describe how capitalist institutions work and coordinate different levels of the economy (such as banks) but do not define what the principle that “penetrates” the economy is, and so there isn’t a way of defining what is or is not capitalist. This is the problem I see the theory of “capital as power”, by Jonathan Nitzan and Simpshon Bichler, as solving. Equipped with this theory of capital, I break it down into digestible chunks which can draw out and illuminate aspects from the ethnographic data, starting with the financial aspect. Here, I return to Mintz's field-notes on the Haitian marketer's informal credit system, which is called “pratik” and which Mintz wasn’t quite able to make sense of within his limited theory of markets, which doesn’t touch on finance and thus capitalisation in much depth. I then join this account of how madan saras capitalise in a financial sense with the other piece of Nitzan and Bichler’s integrative theory of capital, power, and basically argue madan saras are not capitalist because they don’t have capitalist power. To make this point I elaborate a theory of power, a subsidiary thesis, which adds to, and goes a little beyond the scope of, Nitzan and Bichler theory of power, building on the first two parts of the essay which overcome the dualism of spontaneity and order with regard to value creativity, to bring us to a firmer conclusion in terms of what the former can tell us about the nature of capitalist orders. The thesis on power and order I offer dialogues and debates directly with David Graeber’s theory of play, games and the violence of bureaucracy, introducing ideas of chance, rules and risk into how women source credit and try to secure returns, their limited potential to save, and why they need liquidity, with reference to Hanks’ deictics, and Peirce’s abduction. While Nitzan and Bichler’s theory of capital provides a way to say whether or not the practices of Haitian market traders is capitalist– and corroborates by main thesis because because it doesn’t talk about the creation of capital in productivist terms but rather in terms of a power ordering–I acknowledge the limitation of theory is that it openly works from a perspective of capital of the dominant capital class themselves–who can by and large capitalise state power and the legal system. I also recognise madan saras are talking about capital differently, and for them the state is oppressive and restricts their economic activity, and taking what they say seriously–as anthropologist love to say–can actually tell us more about how the capitalist order persists not in spite of but on the basis of these conflicting perspectives which markets open up. Ethnographic material becomes most pertinent here, folk conceptions advance social science. The form of speech the market traders’ responses take, invoking the metaphor of mother and child to describe capital and profit in their experiences of running businesses through constant journeying, allows me to reformulate my initial criticism of the material-productivist idea of capital–which I identify with the Left as well as the Right through a discussion of neoclassical economics, Marxism and ideas promulgated by industrial sciences. This brings me to a new understanding of a feminist position toward production, one that is earthy and textural. You could say I make an admission, give space for something vital in terms of a cosmic rather than economic truth. Nonetheless, I finally want to demonstrate how pertinent a critique of production and a theory of capital as power is specifically to understanding the political economic and historical context of Haiti, which I do by revisiting Trouillot and challenging his marxist categories which lead him, I think, to make the problematic conclusions about the direction of future policy decisions in his home country and potentially even the true stakes of the Haitian revolution which was in fact a revolution in value that came about through the restructuring of land and labour. It is at this point that it should become clear to the reader that it is a smoke-screen to go from production to market intermediation, which would imply a split between material and ideal, real economy and symbolic one, which my argument is precisely refuting. We could have just as easily proceeded from cultivation, labour, the making of goods because, as is revealed, the “lakou”– the traditional system of land tenure and cultivation in Haiti–is just as much a nomos, a nomological order. Which is why I end with a discussion of the lakou and what can and can’t be grown in it, for various reasons some ecological and some economic.