Global Integration and Subsistence Insecurity

Global integration heightens the cyclical crises of capitalism by incorporating the subsistence sectors of advanced and peripheral economies. World trends show a contraction in industrial production, the rise of unemployment, an increase in military spending and decline in social welfare, a reversal of capital flows from developing countries to developed economies, and a worldwide drop in real wages. The impact of these trends on communities in Mexico, Bolivia, and the United States where the author has done fieldwork is assessed in relation to current economic crises and the social movements that respond to them. The author shows that collective action to oppose the devastating effect on subsistence is more prevalent in marginal economies that are just beginning to experience the effect of capital penetration than in the industrial wastelands of developed countries. Theories of the crisis neglect those arenas where resistance and protest are most active: the urban barrios struggling for food and water, the rural laborers forced off of their land base, and the hunters and cultivators of the jungle. Luxemburg's thesis asserting the importance of the subsistence sector in capital accumulation acquires increasing significance at a time when those economies are threatened with extinction. Expanding the notion of subsistence production to include nonwage work allows us to theorize the significance of social reproduction in crisis conditions. THE INTEGRATION OF PEASANTS AND WORKERS throughout the world in a global economy exacerbates the cyclical crises of capitalism as more people are affected by changes in employment levels and fewer resources in subsistence economies are available to cushion the impact. These recurrent cycles are further compounded by an environmental crisis caused by intensive agricultural practices and widespread exploitation of forests, fossil fuels, and mineral resources, depleting wild fauna and fish that once fed millions. The crisis is reaching alarming proportions as capitalist enterprises expand the frontiers of investment into new areas that offer more promising returns. Hunter-gatherers and cultivators in the few remaining tropical forests are among the most recent to lose their subsistence base with the advance of loggers, drug dealers, cattle raisers, miners, irrigation dams, and multinational corporations (Bodley 1988; Davis 1977; Lee 1992). Like peasants and proletariats of decades past, the forest dwellers are becoming dependent on global enterprises for jobs, markets, or handouts. At the same time, the withdrawal of capital from old industrial areas leaves communities devastated in its wake, forced to resort to whatever subsistence strategies are still viable. In the present global crisis, anthropologists have a mandate to integrate their views of foragers and cultivators in these new frontiers of capitalist advance with studies of declining industrial wastelands. The multiplicity of ways in which people in very diverse settings are experiencing and responding to the threat to subsistence security reveals the importance of local knowledge in balancing productive strategies with the restoration of natural resources for future generations. Residents of the same community and even members of the same family may operate simultaneously within several distinct productive systems, alternating wage work with subsistence farming, petty commodity production, and commercial sales or trucking operations.