The network of global corporate control

The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.

PDF

Share/Bookmark

In this short RSA Animate, renowned philosopher Slak investigates the surprising ethical implications of charitable giving.

Share/Bookmark

We already participate in cloud computing when we run searches and get millions of results in a fraction of a second — the search process is performed by thousands of connected computers sharing resources in the cloud. Similarly, Google Books makes millions of digitized works available any time, anywhere around the world. Not to mention the new level of socialization opened up by smartphones: today a smartphone will typically include a more powerful processor than that of the standard big box PC of only a couple of years ago. Plus it is connected to the Internet, so that I can not only access multiple programs and immense amounts of data, but also instantly exchange voice messages or video clips, and coordinate collective decisions, etc.

This wonderful new world, however, represents only one side of the story, which as a whole reads like the well-known doctor joke: “first the good news, then the bad news.” Users today access programs and software maintained far away in climate-controlled rooms housing thousands of computers. To quote from a propaganda-text on cloud computing: “Details are abstracted from consumers, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ that supports them.”

There are two tell-tale words here: abstraction and control. In order to manage a cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning, a system which is by definition hidden from the end-user. The paradox is thus that, as the new gadget (smartphone or tiny portable) I hold in my hand becomes increasingly personalized, easy to use, “transparent” in its functioning, the more the entire set-up has to rely on the work being done elsewhere, on the vast circuit of machines which coordinate the user’s experience. In other words, for the user experience to become more personalized or non-alienated, it has to be regulated and controlled by an alienated network.

This, of course, holds for any complex technology: a TV viewer typically will have no idea how his remote control works, for example. However, the additional twist here is that it is not just the core technology, but also the choice and accessibility of content which are now controlled. That is to say, the formation of “clouds” is accompanied by a process of vertical integration: a single company or corporation will increasingly have a stake at all levels of the cyberworld, from individual machines (PCs, iPhones, etc.) and the “cloud” hardware for program and data storage, to software in all its forms (audio, video, etc.).

Everything thus becomes accessible, but only as mediated through a company which owns it all — software and hardware, content and computers. To take one obvious example, Apple doesn’t only sell iPhones and iPads, it also owns iTunes. It also recently made a deal with Rupert Murdoch allowing the news on the Apple cloud to be supplied by Murdoch’s media empire. To put it simply, Steve Jobs is no better than Bill Gates: whether it be Apple or Microsoft, global access is increasingly grounded in the virtually monopolistic privatization of the cloud which provides this access. The more an individual user is given access to universal public space, the more that space is privatized.

Apologists present cloud computing as the next logical step in the “natural evolution” of the Internet, and while in an abstract-technological way this is true, there is nothing “natural” in the progressive privatization of global cyberspace. There is nothing “natural” in the fact that two or three companies in a quasi-monopolistic position can not only set prices at will but also filter the software they provide to give its “universality” a particular twist depending on commercial and ideological interests.

True, cloud computing offers individual users an unprecedented wealth of choice — but is this freedom of choice not sustained by the initial choice of a provider, in respect to which we have less and less freedom? Partisans of openness like to criticize China for its attempt to control internet access — but are we not all becoming involved in something comparable, insofar as our “cloud” functions in a way not dissimilar to the Chinese state?

Share/Bookmark

In a just world, the idea of wealth–be it money derived from the work of human hands, the resources and natural splendor of the planet itself–and the knowledge handed down through generations belongs to all of us. But in our decidedly unjust and imperfect world, our collective wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. There is be a better way–the notion of the commons–common land, resources, knowledge–is a common-sense way to share our natural, cultural, intellectual riches.

In this innovative animation, filmmaker Laura Hanna, writer Gavin Browning and video artists/animators Dana Schechter and Molly Schwartz examine the concept of “The Commons” as a means to achieve a society of justice and equality.

Video licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b… to view the license.

Inspiration from the film came from four provocative books:

Unjust Desserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take it Back by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly ( http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?… )

Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, by Maude Barlow ( http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?… )

Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, by David Bollier ( http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?… )

The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, by Peter Linebaugh ( http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10… )

In cyberspace, the “viral spiral” is a way ideas and innovations grow and be shared with ever-larger numbers of people. That spiral path could be the way the ideas of the commons can help shape a more just society. Learn more at OnTheCommons.org.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license” in a prominent
place near the video frame.

You should also insert a web link to the Creative Commons page for the
Attribution license, which is: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

Share/Bookmark

In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th century, come back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Lord Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and sing about why there’s a “boom and bust” cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it.

Share/Bookmark

I generally agree with the efforts of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek to renew the idea of communism and the communist hypothesis. The concept of communism, like that of democracy, has been corrupted so that today in standard usage it has come to mean its opposite, that is, state control of economic and social life. I would like to shift the discussion slightly, however, or recenter it from Badiou’s and Zizek’s focus on the political decision to the critique of political economy and the project for the abolition of property. To realize the communist hypothesis for our times we need to move, so to speak, from Lenin to Marx. Indeed one of the reasons that the communist hypotheses of previous eras are no longer valid is that the composition of capital – as well as the conditions and products of capitalist production – have altered. Most importantly the technical composition of labor has changed. How do people produce both inside and outside the workplace? What do they produce and under what conditions? How is productive cooperation organized? And what are the divisions of labor and power that separate them along gender and racial lines and in the local, regional, and global contexts? In addition to investigating the current composition of labor, we also have to analyze the relations of property under which labor produces. Along with Marx we can say that the critique of political economy is, at its heart, a critique of property. “The theory of the Communists,” Marx and Engels write in the Manifesto, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”1

In order to explore the relationship and struggle between property and the common, which I consider to be central to communist analysis and proposition, I want to read two passages from Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. By referring the Manuscripts I do not intend to pose the early Marx against the late, celebrate Marx’s humanism, or anything of the sort. These are arguments, in fact, that continue throughout Marx’s work. The Manuscripts provide a model for reading the common in communism and measuring the distance between Marx’s time and our own.

In the first passage, titled “The Relation of Private Property,” Marx proposes a periodization that highlights the dominant form of property in each era. By the mid-19th century, he claims, European societies are no longer primarily dominated by immobile property, such as land, but instead by mobile forms of property, generally the results of industrial production. The period of transition is characterized by a bitter battle between the two forms of property. In typical fashion Marx mocks the claims to social good of both property owners. The land-owner emphasizes the productivity of agriculture and its vital importance for society as well as “the noble lineage of his property, the feudal reminiscences, the poetry of remembrance, his high-flown nature, his political importance, etc.”2 The owner of movable property, in contrast, attacks the parochialism and stasis of the world of immobile property while singing his own praises. “Movable property itself, “ Marx writes, “claims to have won political freedom for the world, to have loosed the chains of civil society, to have linked together different worlds, to have given rise to trade, which encourages friendship between peoples and to have created a pure morality and a pleasing culture” (339). Marx considers it inevitable that mobile property would achieve economic dominance from immobile property. “Movement inevitably triumphs over immobility, open and self-conscious baseness over hidden and unconscious baseness, greed over self-indulgence, the avowedly restless and versatile self-interest of enlightenment, over the parochial, worldy-wise, artless, lazy and deluded self-interest of superstition, just as money must triumph over the other forms of private property” (340) – and, I will add soon to this list, profit over rent. Marx, of course, mocks both of these property owners, but he does recognize that movable property, however despicable, does have the advantage of revealing “the idea of labor as the sole essence of wealth” (343). His periodization, in other words, highlights the increased potential for a communist project.

I want to analyze a parallel struggle between two forms of property today, but before doing that I should note that the triumph of movable over immobile property corresponds to the victory of profit over rent as the dominant mode of expropriation. In the collection of rent, the capitalist is deemed to be relatively external to the process of the production of value, merely extracting value produced by other means. The generation of profit, in contrast, requires the engagement of the capitalist in the production process, imposing forms of cooperation, disciplinary regimes, etc. By the time of John Maynard Keynes profit has such dignity with respect to rent that Keynes can predict (or prescribe) the euthanasia of the rentier. This conception of an historical movement within capital from rent to profit also corresponds to the purported passage in many analyses from primitive accumulation to capitalist production proper. Primitive accumulation might be considered, in this context, an absolute rent, expropriating entirely wealth produced elsewhere.

The passages from rent to profit and from the dominance of immobile to that of mobile property are both part of a more general claim by Marx that by the mid-19th century large-scale industry has replaced agriculture as the hegemonic form of economic production. He does not make this claim, of course, in quantitative terms. Industrial production at the time made up a small fraction of the economy even in England, the most industrialized country. And the majority of workers toiled not in the factories but in the field. Marx’s claim instead is qualitative: all other forms of production will be forced to adopt the qualities of industrial production. Agriculture, mining, even society itself will have to adopt its regimes of mechanization, its labor discipline, its temporalities and rhythms, its working day, and so forth. E. P. Thompson’s classic essay on clocks and work-discipline in England is a wonderful demonstration of the progressive imposition of industrial temporality over society as a whole.3 In the century and a half since Marx’s time this tendency for industry to impose its qualities has proceeded in extraordinary ways.

Today, however, it is clear that industry no longer holds the hegemonic position within the economy. This is not to say that fewer people work in factories today than 10 or 20 or 50 years ago – although, in certain respects, their locations have shifted, moving to the other side of the global divisions of labor and power. The claim, once again, is not primarily quantitative but qualitative. Industry no longer imposes its qualities over other sectors of the economy and over social relations more generally. That seems to me a relatively uncontroversial claim.
More disagreement arises when one proposes another form of production as successor to industry as hegemonic in this way. Toni Negri and I argue that immaterial or biopolitical production is emerging in that hegemonic position. By immaterial and biopolitical we try to grasp together the production of ideas, information, images, knowledges, code, languages, social relationships, affects, and the like. This designates occupations throughout the economy, from the high end to the low, from health care workers, flight attendants, and educators to software programmers and from fast food and call center workers to designers and advertisers. Most of these forms of production are not new, of course, but the coherence among them is perhaps more recognizable and, more important, their qualities tend today to be imposed over other sectors of the economy and over society as a whole. Industry has to informationalize; knowledge, code, and images are becoming ever more important throughout the traditional sectors of production; and the production of affects and care is becoming increasingly essential in the valorization process. This hypothesis of a tendency for immaterial or biopolitical production to emerge in the hegemonic position, which industry used to hold, has all kinds of immediate implications for gender divisions of labor and various international and other geographical divisions of labor, but I’ll have to leave those for another occasion.

What I want to focus on here is the new struggle between two forms of property implied by this transition, which takes us back to Marx’s formulations. Whereas in Marx’s time the struggle was between immobile property (such as land) and moveable property (such as material commodities), today the struggle is between material property and immaterial property – or, to put it another way, whereas Marx focused on the mobility of property today at issue is centrally scarcity and reproducibility, such that the struggle can be posed as being between unreproducible versus reproducible property or, rather, property that is easily shared. The contemporary focus on immaterial and reproducible property in the capitalist economy can be recognized easily from even a cursory glance at the field of property law. Patents, copyrights, indigenous knowledges, genetic codes, the information in the germplasm of seeds, and similar issues are the most actively topics debated in the field. The fact that the logic of scarcity does not hold in this domain poses new problems for property. Just as Marx saw that movement necessarily triumphs over immobility, so too today the immaterial triumphs over the material, the reproducible over the unreproducible, and the shared over the exclusive.

The emerging dominance of this form of property is significant, in part, because it demonstrates and returns to center stage of the conflict between the common and property as such. Ideas, images, knowledges, code, languages, and even affects can be privatized and controlled as property, but it is more difficult to police ownership because they are so easily shared or reproduced. There is a constant pressure for such goods to escape the boundaries of property and become common. If you have an idea, sharing it with me does not reduce its utility to you, but usually increases it. In fact, in order to realize their maximum productivity, ideas, images, and affects must be common and shared. When they are privatized their productivity reduces dramatically – and, I would add, making the common into public property, that is, subjecting it to state control or management, similarly reduces productivity. Property is becoming a fetter on the capitalist mode of production. Here is an emerging contradiction internal to capital: the more the common is corralled as property, the more its productivity is reduced; and yet expansion of the common undermines the relations of property in a fundamental and general way.

This contradiction is clearly evident in terms of scientific knowledges and code: free access to information and free exchange of ideas – in other words, the autonomy of the common – is necessary for future creation. The same is true, I argue, for all forms of biopolitical production, such as linguistic or affective production. You can produce affects and social relations on command, but productivity and creativity will be severely limited.

We could say, in rather broad terms, that neoliberalism has been defined by the battle of private property not only against public property but also and perhaps more importantly against the common. Here it is useful to distinguish between two types of the common, both of which are object of neoliberal strategies of capital. (And this can serve as an initial definition of “the common.”) On the one hand, the common names the earth and all the resources associated with it: the land, the forests, the water, the air, minerals, and so forth. This is closely related to 17th century English usage of “the commons” (with an “s”). On the other hand, the common also refers, as I have already said, to the results of human labor and creativity, such as ideas, language, affects, and so forth. You might think of the former as the “natural” common and the latter as the “artificial” common, but really such divisions between natural and artificial quickly break down. In any case, neoliberalism has aimed to privatize both these forms of the common.
One major scene of this has been the extractive industries, providing access to transnational corporations to diamonds in Sierra Leone or oil in Uganda or Lithium deposits and water rights in Bolivia. Such neoliberal privatization of the common has been described by many authors, including David Harvey and Naomi Klein, in terms that mark the renewed importance of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession. 4

The neoliberal strategies for the privatization of the “artificial” common are much more complex and contradictory. Here the conflict between property and the common is fully in play. The more the common is subject to property relations, as I said, the less productive it is; and yet capitalist valorization processes requires private accumulation. In many domains, capitalist strategies for privatizing the common through mechanisms such as patents and copyrights continue (often with difficulty) despite the contradictions. The music industry and computer industry are full of examples. This is also the case with so-called biopiracy, that is, the processes whereby transnational corporations expropriate the common in the form of indigenous knowledges or genetic information from plants, animals, and humans, usually through the use of patents. Traditional knowledges of the use of a ground seed as natural pesticide, for instance, or the healing qualities of a plant are made into private property by the corporation that patents the knowledge. Parenthetically I would insist that piracy is a misnomer for such activities. Pirates have a much more noble vocation: they steal property. These corporations instead steal the common and transform it into property.

In general, though, capital accomplishes the expropriation of the common not through privatization per se but in the form of rent. Several contemporary Italian and French economists who work on what they call cognitive capitalism, Carlo Vercellone most prominently, argue that just as in an earlier period there was a tendential movement from rent to profit as the dominant mode of capitalist expropriation, today there is a reverse movement from profit to rent.5 Patents and copyrights, for example, generate rent in the sense that they guarantee an income based on the ownership of material or immaterial property. This argument does not imply a return to the past: the income generated from a patent, for instance, is very different from that generated from land ownership. The core insight of this analysis of the emerging dominance of rent over profit, which I find very significant, is that capital remains generally external to the processes of the production of the common. Whereas in the case of industrial capital and its generation of profit, the capitalist plays a role internal to the production process, as Marx claims, particularly in designating the means of cooperation and imposing the modes of discipline, in the production of the common the capitalist must remain relatively external.6 Every intervention of the capitalist in the processes of the production of the common, just as every time the common is made property, reduces productivity. Rent is a mechanism, then, to cope with the conflicts between capital and the common. A limited autonomy is granted the processes of the production of the common with respect to the sharing of resources and the determination of the modes of cooperation, and capital is still able to exert control and expropriate value through rent. Exploitation in this context takes the form of the expropriation of the common.

This discussion of rent points, on the one hand, to the neoliberal processes of accumulation by dispossession insofar as primitive accumulation can be called form of absolute rent. On the other hand, it casts in a new light the contemporary predominance of finance, which is characterized by complex and very abstract varieties of relative rent. Christian Marazzi cautions us against conceiving of finance as fictional, in opposition to the “real economy,” a conception that misunderstands the extent to which finance and production are both increasingly dominated by immaterial forms of property. He also warns against dismissing finance as merely unproductive in contrast to an image of productivity roughly tied to industrial production. It is more useful to situate finance in the context of the general trend from profit to rent, and the correspondingly external position of capital with respect to the production of the common. Finance expropriates the common and exerts control at a distance.7

Now I can bring to a close and review the primary points of my reading of this first passage from Marx’s early manuscripts, “The Relations of Private Property,” in which he describes the struggle between two forms of property (immobile versus moveable) and the historical passage from the dominance of landed property to that of industrial capital. Today we are also experiencing a struggle between two forms of property (material versus immaterial or scarce versus reproducible). And this struggle reveals a deeper conflict between property as such and the common. Although the production of the common is increasingly central to the capitalist economy, capital cannot intervene in the production process and must instead remain external, expropriating value in the form of rent (through financial and other mechanisms). As a result the production and productivity of the common becomes an increasingly autonomous domain, still exploited and controlled, of course, but through mechanisms that are relatively external. Like Marx, I would say this development of capital is not good in itself – and the tendential dominance of immaterial or biopolitical production carries with it a series of new and more severe forms of exploitation and control. And yet it is important to recognize that capital’s own development provides the tools for liberation from capital, and specifically here it leads to the increased autonomy of the common and its productive circuits.

The brings me to the second passage from the Manuscripts that I want to consider, titled “Private Property and Communism.” The notion of the common can help us understand what Marx means by communism in this passage. “Communism,” he writes, “is the positive expression of the abolition of private property” (345-346). He includes that phrase “positive expression” in part to differentiate communism from the false or corrupt notions of the concept. Crude communism, he claims, merely perpetuates private property by generalizing it and extending it to the entire community, as universal private property. That term, of course, is an oxymoron: if property is now universal, extended to the entire community it is no longer really private. He is trying to emphasize, it seems to me, that in crude communism even though the private character has been stripped away, property remains. Communism properly conceived instead is the abolition not only of private property but property as such. “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it” (351). What would it mean for something to be ours when we do not possess it? What would it mean to regard ourselves and our world not as property? Has private property made us so stupid that we cannot see that? Marx is searching here for the common. The open access and sharing that characterize use of the common are outside of and inimical to property relations. We have been made so stupid that we can only recognize the world as private or public. We have become blind to the common.

Marx arrives at the common (as the abolition of property) about 20 years later in Chapter 32 of Capital, volume 1, on the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation. He still poses this development from property to the common in dialectical form. “The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.”8 Capitalist development inevitable results in the increasingly central role of cooperation and the common, which in turn provides the tools for overthrowing the capitalist mode of production and constitutes the bases for an alternative society and mode of production, a communism of the common.

What I find dissatisfying about this passage from Capital, though, aside from its dialectical construction, is that the common Marx refers to – “co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production” – grasps primarily the material elements in question, the immobile and moveable forms of property made common. This formulation does not grasp, in other words, the dominant forms of capitalist production today. If we look back at the passage in the early Manuscripts, however, and try to filter out Marx’s youthful humanism, we find a definition of communism and the common that does highlight the immaterial or, really, biopolitical aspects. Consider, first, this definition of communism, which Marx proposes after having set aside the crude notion: “Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being” (p. 348). What does Marx mean by “the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man”? Clearly he is working on the notion of appropriation against the grain, applying it in a context where it now seems strange. No longer appropriation of the object in the form of private property but appropriation of our own subjectivity, our human, social relations. Marx explains this communist appropriation, this non-property appropriation in terms of the human sensorium and the full range of creative and productive powers. “Man appropriates his integral essence in an integral way,” which he explains in terms of “all his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving” (351). I think the term “appropriation” here is misleading because Marx is not talking about capturing something that already exists, but rather creating something new – this is the production of subjectivity, the production of a new sensorium. Not really appropriation, then, but production. If we return to the text we can see that Marx does, in fact, pose this clearly: “Assuming the positive supersession of private property, man produces man, himself and other men” (349). On this reading Marx’s notion of communism in the early manuscripts is far from humanism, that is, far from any recourse to a pre-existing or eternal human essence. Instead the positive content of communism, which corresponds to the abolition of private property, is the autonomous human production of subjectivity, the human production of humanity – a new seeing, a new hearing, a new thinking, a new loving.

This brings us back to our analysis of the biopolitical turn in the economy that I described briefly. In the context of industrial production, Marx arrived at the important recognition that capitalist production is aimed at creating not only objects but also subjects. “Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”9 In the context of biopolitical production, however, the production of subjectivity is much more direct and intense. Consider a few examples of contemporary economists who analyze the transformations of capital in just these terms. “If we had to hazard a guess on the emerging model in the next decades,” posits Robert Boyer, “we would probably have to refer to the production of man by man and explore right away the institutional context that would permit its emergence.”10 And, Christian Marazzi explains that the current passage in capitalist production is moving toward an “anthropogenetic model.” Living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this transformation and the production of forms of life is becoming the basis of added value. This is a process in which putting to work human faculties, competences, knowledges, and affects – those acquired on the job but more importantly those accumulated outside work are directly productive of value.11 One distinctive feature of the work of head and heart, then, is that paradoxically the object of production is really a subject, defined, for example, by a social relationship or a form of life. This should make clear at least the rationale for calling this form of production biopolitical, since what are produced are forms of life.

If we return to Marx in this new light, we find that the progression of definitions of capital in his work actually give us an important clue for analyzing this biopolitical context. Although wealth in capitalist society first appears as an immense collective of commodities, Marx reveals that capital is really a process of the creation of surplus value via the production of commodities. But Marx develops this insight one step further to discover that in its essence capital is a social relation – or, even further, the ultimate object of capitalist production is not commodities but social relations. From the standpoint of biopolitical production we can see that the production of the refrigerator and the automobile are only midpoints for the creation of the labor and gender relations of the nuclear family around the refrigerator and the mass society of individuals isolated together in their cars on the freeway.

What I have been doing here is pointing out the correspondence or proximity between Marx’s definition of communism and the contemporary biopolitical turn of the capitalist economy, both of which are oriented toward the human production of humanity, social relations, and forms of life – all in the context of the common. At this point I need to explain how I regard this proximity and why it is important. But before doing so let me add one more element to the mix.

Michel Foucault appreciates all the strangeness and richness of the line of Marx’s thinking that leads to the conclusion that “l’homme produit l’homme” (using like Marx the gender defined formulation). He cautions that we should not understand Marx’s phrase as an expression of humanism. “For me, what must be produced is not man as nature designed it, or as its essence prescribes; we must produce something that does not yet exist and we cannot know what it will be.” He also warns not to understand this merely as a continuation of economic production as conventionally conceived: “I do not agree with those who would understand this production of man by man as being accomplished like the production of value, the production of wealth, or of an object of economic use; it is, on the contrary, destruction of what we are and the creation of something completely other, a total innovation.”12 We cannot understand this production, in other words, in terms of the producing subject and the produced object. Instead producer and product are both subjects: humans produce and humans are produced. Foucault clearly senses (without seeming to understand fully) the explosiveness of this situation: the biopolitical process is not limited to the reproduction of capital as a social relation but also presents the potential for an autonomous process that could destroy capital and create something entirely new. Biopolitical production obviously implies new mechanisms of exploitation and capitalist control, but we should also recognize, following Foucault’s intuition, how biopolitical production, particularly in the ways it exceeds the bounds of capitalist relations and constantly refers to the common, grants labor increasing autonomy and provides the tools or weapons that could be wielded in a project of liberation.

Now I can explain the point of recognizing the proximity between the idea of communism and contemporary capitalist production. It is not that capitalist development is creating communism or that biopolitical production immediately or directly brings liberation. Instead, through the increasing centrality of the common in capitalist production – the production of ideas, affects, social relations, and forms of life – are emerging the conditions and weapons for a communist project. Capital, in other words, is creating its own gravediggers.

It would be interesting to investigate relation between this economic discussion of the common and the way the common functions centrally in Jacques Rancière’s notion of politics. “Politics begins precisely when one stops balancing profits and looses and is concerned instead with dividing the parts of the common” (Disagreement, p. 5 ; La Mésentente, p. 24). The common is the terrain of the partage, division and sharing. “Politics is the sphere of activity of a common that can only ever be contentious, the relationship between parts that are only parties and credentials or entitlements whose sum never equals the whole” (p. 14; p. 34-35).

There are two primary points of my intervention. The first is a plea for the critique of political economy or, rather, a claim that any communist project must begin there. Such an analysis makes good on our periodizations and reveals the novelties of our present moment by conducting an investigation of not only the composition but also class composition – asking, in other words, how people produce, what they produce, and under what conditions, both in and outside the workplace, both in and outside relations of wage labor. And all this reveals, I maintain, the increased centrality of the common.

The second point extends the critique of political economy to the critique of property. And, specifically, communism is defined by not only the abolition of property but also the affirmation of the common – the affirmation of open and autonomous biopolitical production, the self-governed continuous creation of new humanity. In the most synthetic terms, what private property is to capitalism and what state property is to socialism, the common is to communism.

Putting my two points together – that capitalist production increasingly relies on the common and that the autonomy of the common is the essence of communism – indicates that the conditions and weapons of a communist project are available today more than ever. Now to us the task of organizing it.

Notes:

1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, London: Verso, 1998, p. 52.

2 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, London: Penguin, 1975, p. 338.

3 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, vol. 38, no. 1, 1967, pp. 56-97.

4 See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. For an excellent analysis of neoliberalism’s focus on extractive industries in Africa, see James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

5 See, for example, Carlo Vercellone, “Crisi della legge del valore e divenire rendita del profitto,” forthcoming.

6 See Marx’s discussion of cooperation in Chapter 13 of Capital, volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1976, pp. 439-454.

7 See Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language, trans. Gregory Conti, New York: Semiotext(e), 2008.

8 Capital, vol. 1, p. 929.9 Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1973, p. 92.

10 Robert Boyer, La croissance, début de siècle, Paris: Albin Michel, 2002, p. 192.

11 Christian Marazzi, “Capitalismo digitale e modello antropogenetico di produzione” in Jean-Louis Laville, ed., Reinventare il lavoro, Rome: Sapere 2000, 2005, pp. 107-126.

12 Michael Foucault, “Entretien” (with Duccio Tromadori), Dits et écrits, vol IV, Paris : Gallimard, 1994, pp. 41-95, quote p. 74. Published in English as Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991, pp. 121-122. At this point in the interview Foucault is discussing his differences from the Frankfurt School.

Share/Bookmark

Deuda externa y tercer mundo – Eric Toussaint from AttacTV on Vimeo.

Entrevista realizada por AttacTV a Eric Toussaint, presidente del CADTM-Bélgica (Comité por la Anulación de la Deuda del Tercer Mundo), miembro del Consejo Científico de Attac Francia y miembro del consejo internacional del Foro Social Mundial, hablando de la deuda externa.

“Si no hay una salida anticapitalista a esta crisis, habrá una salida capitalista”

En la presentación de su libro 60 preguntas, 60 respuestas sobre la deuda, el FMI y el Banco Mundial, el historiador y economista belga Eric Toussaint nos habla de la crisis que atraviesa Occidente. Este doctor en ciencias políticas, y miembro del Consejo Internacional del Foro Social Mundial, explica algunas de las claves para entender la actual crisis económica.

D.: ¿Cómo se explica que, pese a una reducción del salario real desde el año 1982 hasta 2007, el consumo en los países del Norte haya tenido un nivel de crecimiento alto?

ERIC TOUSSAINT: Durante todo ese tiempo, el consumo de masas se ha sostenido gracias al endeudamiento privado. Los que permitieron esto son las empresas capitalistas del sector del crédito que otorgaron líneas de crédito más voluminosas. Lo hicieron a través de un montaje totalmente artificial de instrumentos de deuda e, inesperadamente, la cadena del endeudamiento privado en EE UU se rompió en el eslabón más débil, que era el sector del crédito hipotecario en un segmento del mercado que era el de las hipotecas subprime: los sectores de la población más frágiles que aceptaron endeudarse en condiciones extremas, con tasas de interés bajas los dos primeros años y pasando a 13% de interés anual los siguientes años. Este sistema de endeudamiento funcionaba mientras la burbuja inmobiliaria seguía creciendo, mientras el valor de la vivienda subía. En EE UU era posible refinanciar su deuda cada dos años basándose sobre el nuevo valor de la vivienda que había aumentado. Todo esto era sin contar con una sobreproducción de vivienda en el año 2006 y la caída en 2007 del valor de la vivienda que generó la crisis de las subprime. Para resumir, hemos asistido, con la crisis financiera de los años 2007- 2008, a una crisis de la deuda privada, que se está transformando ahora en una crisis de la deuda pública del Norte porque el Gobierno de EE UU –pero también el Gobierno británico, belga o francés– rescató a la banca privada regalando dinero. Ahí es cuando la deuda privada se transformó en deuda pública. El sector público asumió el coste del rescate.

ERIC TOUSSAINT. El activista también es presidente del Comité por la Anulación de la Deuda del Tercer Mundo (CADTM-Bélgica).

D.: ¿En qué situación nos hallamos ahora?

E.T.: Llegamos a un círculo vicioso en el cual para rescatar a la banca privada se endeudan los Estados y financian ese endeudamiento pidiendo préstamos a la misma banca. La explosión de la deuda pública obliga a los Gobiernos a disminuir el gasto público, a reducir el gasto en las universidades, reducir las subvenciones a la salud pública, limitar las inversiones en infraestructuras públicas, congelar los salarios de los funcionarios. Por eso hemos vuelto a un discurso de ajuste estructural en los países del Norte y sólo estamos empezando a enfrentarnos a la situación.

D.: ¿Cómo se encuentra el sector inmobiliario?

E.T.: Respecto a la crisis inmobiliaria, sabemos que en el Estado español la vivienda está todavía sobrevalorada en un 50%. En Inglaterra lo está en un 30% y en Irlanda en un 30%. Es decir, la crisis inmobiliaria no ha terminado. Quizás en EE UU haya tocado fondo. Por otro lado, empieza ahora la crisis inmobiliaria del sector comercial con la quiebra en Dubai de un proyecto de edificios comerciales. Sabemos que la deuda contratada por el sector privado en el sector comercial es enorme y que esa crisis del sector comercial va a crecer con la crisis económica. Algunas empresas de servicios van a tener que cerrar oficinas.

D.: ¿Cuáles son las especificidades de la crisis española?

E.T.: En el Estado español no ha habido la misma crisis bancaria que en la mayoría de los países occidentales –como en Inglaterra, EE UU o Bélgica– donde el rescate ha sido masivo. Quizás se produzca en un futuro cercano cuando veamos que el BBVA o el Banco Santander, que hasta ahora no parecían tan afectados, puedan estarlo también.

D.: ¿Se está acabando el sistema capitalista?

E.T.: El sistema capitalista atraviesa una crisis muy grave. En el pasado este mismo sistema ya pasó por crisis muy severas y es importante entender que, si no hay una salida anticapitalista a esta crisis, habrá una salida capitalista. La salida capitalista a la crisis se basa solamente en aumentar la presión sobre el trabajo y pasar la factura a los asalariados. Ha sido siempre la misma solución. Incluso puede haber una salida capitalista neokeynesiana. Lo que llama la atención es que en 2008 la crisis era tan profunda que los Gobiernos de derecha y los ideólogos del capitalismo atravesaron una crisis de confianza. Temieron una salida anticapitalista porque veían que lo que se avecinaba era una auténtica crisis del capitalismo. Ellos lo saben, lo niegan en las grandes entrevistas de televisión, pero, leyendo el Financial Times o The Economist, uno puedo decir que no se equivocaban. Se imaginaron que, desde las bases de la izquierda, surgiría una denuncia del capitalismo, pero no ocurrió. La izquierda tradicional acompañó el rescate de la banca. Sarkozy, que llegó a hablar de refundar el capitalismo en algunas entrevistas, no ha vuelto a hablar del tema porque no encontró una denuncia suficientemente fuerte como para refundarlo. ¿Por qué refundar algo que la gente puede seguir aguantando?

ERIC TOUSSAINT: No comparto la idea de que las propuestas ofrecidas por las izquierdas son demasiado radicales y que son rechazadas por ese motivo. El problema fundamental es que la mayoría de los pueblos del Norte afrontan una crisis de confianza en la política. Es una crisis de credibilidad de la izquierda, una crisis del proyecto de la izquierda, pero no porque sea demasiado radical sino porque durante las campañas electorales la izquierda hace promesas de izquierda y, estando en el poder, implementa programas de derecha. La izquierda acaba ejecutando políticas sociales neoliberales y eso provoca frustración y pérdida de confianza. Además, como la izquierda tradicional no ofrece unas críticas claras del sistema, las confusiones se generalizan. Estas confusiones se deben también a la influencia de los medios de comunicación dominantes. El objetivo de estos medios es crear confusiones, maquillar los datos, dar falsas explicaciones, y la izquierda, que antes daba explicaciones claras sobre la crisis, no las está dando, e incluso ha abandonado sus propios diarios. ¿Cuántos diarios de izquierda existen en Europa comparando con hace 30 años? Para mí, el verdadero problema no es que las propuestas sean demasiado radicales. El problema real es la pérdida de credibilidad.

Share/Bookmark

Seminário com Maurizio Lazzarato – UFRGS – Trabalho imaterial e subjtevididade

De la connaissance à la croyance, de la critique à la production de subjectivité

Maurizio Lazzarato

Deutsch English Español

Je ne suis pas sûr que le problème politique de notre présent soit celui de l’art de la critique, puisque c’est le concept même de critique qui pose problème.

Foucault à déjà démontré que dans l’œuvre de Kant nous pouvons trouver deux concepts de critique : le premier « qui pose la question des conditions sous lesquelles une connaissance vraie est possible » et le deuxième qui pose la question « Qu’est-ce que c’est notre actualité ? Quel est le champ actuel des expériences possibles »[1]. Le premier pose la question d’une critique théorique des « limites que la connaissance doit renoncer à franchir » et le deuxième pose la question d’une critique pratique des « franchissement possibles » qu’il qualifie ailleurs comme l’art de ne pas se faire gouverner ou de se gouverner soi-même.

Je voudrais développer ce deuxième concept de critique, que je ne sais pas justement si on peut l’appeler critique. Est-ce nous aurions pas plutôt besoin d’un art de l’événement, d’un art de  possibilités d’existence, l’art de modes de subjectivation, d’un art de ne pas se faire gouverner et de se gouverner soi-même?

Je voudrais développer ce deuxième concept de critique à partir de Gilles Deleuze pour qui il y a dans la philosophie une tradition qui remplace le modèle du savoir ou de la connaissance par celui de la croyance.

Si on substitue le modèle de la croyance à celui de la connaissance, la question change radicalement, puisque ce qui est au centre de l’interrogation ne sont plus les limites de notre connaissance, mais les possibilités de notre action, les possibilités de nos modes d’existence.

Ce changement de modèle a des profondes implications politiques, dont je vais essayer d’en nommer les principales.

Tout d’abord, qu’est-ce que c’est la croyance ?

Les deux grandes « mines » ou « fonds » qui aliment, travaillent, stockent cette « force motrice » (M. de Certeau[2]), cette « disposition à l’action » (W. James[3]), cette puissance d’affirmation et d’investissement subjectif qu’on appelle « croyance » sont la religion et le politique.

Selon William James, dans le phénomène religieux, notre expérience ne se limite pas au « monde visible » et « tangible », mais intègre aussi un « monde invisible », animé par des forces (âme, esprit, etc.) dont la perception et la connaissance nous échappent et qui font du monde visible un monde « incomplet », un monde non entièrement déterminé. L’indétermination et l’incomplétude du monde visible font appel à la croyance dont le principe et la mesure consistent dans l’action. L’essence de la foi consiste à affirmer et à croire dans le monde invisible comme réel et à risquer la puissance d’agir du sujet sur cette possibilité.

La religion s’adresse à nos « forces les plus intimes » dont la nature est à la fois « émotionnelle et agissante » (James) ou affective (Deleuze et Guattari). Il s’agit moins de forces personnelles ou psychologiques, que des forces qui, avec les concepts des savoirs contemporains, nous pourrions définir comme pré-individuelles, transindividuelles,  subconscientes, pré-discursives, des forces intensives (l’affect et les perceptions « pures » ). Plutôt que nous appartenir, elles nous traversent et produisent à la fois une altération et un élargissement des états de « conscience » et donc une augmentation de « notre puissance d’agir ».

La croyance (« disposition à l’action ») est à la fois une force génétique et expansive, un « pouvoir généreux » qui croit dans l’avenir et ces « possibles ambigus » et une force éthique puisqu’elle croit aux possibles que notre relation au monde et notre relation aux autres recèlent. Elle engage et risque le sujet dans une action dont le succès n’est pas assuré d’avance. Elle est donc la condition de toute transformation et de toute création.

Elle établit un lien au monde et un lien aux autres hommes que ni la connaissance ni les sensations ne sont pas capables d’instaurer, puisque le savoir et sens nous donnent toujours un monde fermé, sans vraie « extériorité ».

La sécularisation de la croyance religieuse dans le monde invisible et ses forces peut se dire à la manière de Gabriel Tarde : « le réel n’est intelligible que comme un cas du possible », « l’actuel n’est qu’une infinitésimale partie du réel ». Le réel n’est pas entièrement actualisé de façon que notre action « s’exerce sur des possibilités » et non points sur des faits « bruts et actuels ». Le monde « invisible », dont la connaissance nous échappe, « puisque les éléments du monde recèlent des virtualités inconnues et profondément inconnaissables, même à une intelligence infinie », ne constitue plus un monde de l’au-delà, mais le « dehors » immanent au réel. Il s’agit d’un monde qui n’est pas « régit par l’espace et par le temps »[4], mais par la logique de l’événement qui est à la fois immanente et hétérogène au temps chronologiques, qui rompt sa progression linéaire et, en la rompant, ouvre à une nouvelle chronologie et recharge le monde des possibles, en faisant ainsi appelle à notre puissance d’agir. L’expérience se transforme en expérimentation, prise de risque et paris, volonté de mettre à l’épreuve soi-même, les autres et le monde.

Donc la croyance et l’agir et notamment l’agir politiques sont étroitement liés.

Selon Deleuze, c’est la croyance qui dévoilent une partie des problèmes politiques contemporains : « le fait moderne, c’est que nous ne croyons plus en ce monde ». Le lien éthico-politique de l’homme et du monde et de l’homme avec les autres hommes est rompu.

« Dès lors, c’est le lien qui doit devenir objet de croyance : il est l’impossible que ne peut être redonné que dans une foi. La croyance ne s’adresse plus à un monde autre ou transformé (…) Nous avons besoin des raisons de croire en ce monde »[5] tel qu’il est et aux possibilités d’action et de vie qu’il recèle. Ainsi, notre scepticisme n’est pas cognitif, mais éthique. L’impasse est à la fois politique et éthique, une impasse qui concerne notre prise de position, d’engagement, de mise à l’épreuve du monde, des autres et de nous-même.

Qu’est-ce que Deleuze veut dire avec l’affirmation que nous ne croyons plus au monde et que nous devons croire au monde tel qu’il est ? Croire au monde tel qu’il est, signifie prendre parti par rapport à ces possibilités, puisque leur actualisation est à la fois l’objet des conflits et des bifurcations et des alternatives radicalement différentes.

Croire au monde tel qu’il est signifie à la fois investir la puissance d’agir contre ses dispositifs d’assujettissement et de domination pour ne pas se faire gouverner, mais aussi croire dans les nouveaux possibles, dans les nouvelles significations, agencements, modes d’existence que la lutte contre ces mêmes relations de domination et d’assujettissement ouvre pour se gouverner soi-même.

Dans les sociétés disciplinaires, le communisme a constitué une « hypothèse vivante » qui a mobilisé la croyance et les forces les plus intimes, « passionnelles et volitives », d’une grande partie de l’humanité. Pour cette dernière, pendant la deuxième partie du XIX et presque tout le XX siècle, la révolution a représenté le lien existentiel et éthico-politique entre l’homme et le monde et le prolétariat ou la classe ouvrière, le lien existentiel et éthico-politique qui tenait ensemble les hommes.

William James définit « hypothèse tout ce qui est proposé à notre croyance » et établit une différence entre « hypothèses vivantes » (ou options vivantes) et hypothèses mortes » (ou options mortes). L’hypothèse vivante se pose comme une « véritable possibilité », c’est-à-dire qu’elle « dispose à agir irrévocablement », l’ « hypothèse morte », au contraire, ne constitue pas une véritable possibilité et ne dispose pas à l’action.

Pourquoi le communisme, la révolution, le prolétariat, tels que nous les avons connus à partir de la fin du XIX siècle, sont aujourd’hui des hypothèses ou des options mortes ? Pourquoi le communisme, tels qu’il a été et qu’il continue encore à être pratiqué par les trotskistes, les maoïstes, les communistes ne fait plus appel à notre puissance d’agir ? Pourquoi notre croyance n’adhère pas à cette hypothèse ?

Une hypothèse morte est « un appel à l’action qui ne saurait trouver aucun écho dans notre conscience »[6]. Une option morte est une hypothèse sur le monde et sur ses possibilités qui ne résonne plus avec notre subjectivité.

Prenons un topos classique de l’hypothèse communiste au XX siècle : la relation entre ouvriers et intellectuels, qui suppose toute une réalité et une théorie de la production matérielle et de la superstructure, un ordonnément et une hiérarchie des fonctions, des rôles, des connexions des ouvriers et des intellectuels aussi bien dans l’action sociale que dans l’acte révolutionnaire.

Dans la subjectivité d’un intermittent, d’un chercheur, précaire intellectuel, etc., les fonctions, les rôles et les connexions des ouvriers et des intellectuels et leur possibilités d’action ne sauraient trouver beaucoup d’écho, puisque ce qui était séparé dans les conditions de l’hypothèse communiste (la subordination salariale de l’ouvrier et l’autonomie de l’intellectuel qui se renversait d’ailleurs dans la liberté de l’acte révolutionnaire du premier et dans la subordination à sa classe , la bourgeoisie, pour le deuxième) se trouve complètement reconfiguré dans l’intermittent. Ce dernier est une hybridation et une transformation radicales de ces deux fonctions. Il vit d’autres formes de subordination et d’autres formes d’autonomie, son action se déroule dans une situation, l’industrie culturelle, et à l’intérieur d’une segmentarité sociale, des dispositifs d’assujettissement, etc., qui n’ont pas grande chose à voir avec le monde de l’hypothèse communiste.

L’ « attente » ou le « sens de l’avenir », qui selon James font « partie à tout moment des éléments de la conscience » ou, comme on dirait aujourd’hui, de la subjectivité, sont passablement différents chez un intermittent et chez un ouvrier ou un intellectuel de l’hypothèse communiste. De la même manière que l’actuel et le virtuel d’un chômeur, d’un travailleur pauvre , d’un travailleur à l’emploi discontinu et même d’un salarié à plein temps, se différencie radicalement de ceux de l’ouvrier de l’hypothèse communiste.

Les possibles que l’attente et le sens de l’avenir peuvent créer ne viennent pas de nulle part, ils ne sont pas une invention ex nihilo , autrement il suffirait un acte de volonté ou de conscience pour les faire surgir. « Faire reposer la foi sur la volonté constitue une sotte entreprise », nous suggère James.[7]

Les possibles sont à la fois engagés dans le monde (et on pourrait en faire une critique) et radicalement irréductibles et hétérogènes à ce même monde (et on ne peut pas faire une critique de quelque chose qui n’est pas actuel). On ne peut ni les déduire du monde, ni les créer de façon indépendante du monde tel qu’il est. L’action se loge dans ce paradoxe.

Croire au monde tel qu’il est, c’est d’abord accepter et reconnaître ces transformations, qui sont d’abord de transformations qui affectent la subjectivité, ses attentes, son sens de l’avenir et donc ses possibilités d’action.

Ce qui a tué l’hypothèse communiste ce n’est pas le capitalisme, ni la démocratie, ni le libéralisme comme croient ce qui reste des communistes, des trotskistes, des maoïstes. Ce qui l’a tué « pour nous c’est en grand partie une certaine sorte d’action antagoniste préalable de notre nature volitive » et passionnelle.[8]

La reconversion de la subjectivité qui s’est produite à l’occasion d’un événement politique mondial (qu’on appelle pour commodité 68) nous a fait rentrer dans un autre monde, dans d’autres relations de domination et d’assujettissement, mais aussi dans un monde enveloppant d’autres possibles qui, nouveau paradoxe, sont déjà là et dont l’actualisation est une création, une nouvelle et imprévisible différentiation.

L’hypothèse communiste n’est pas seulement une option morte. Elle constitue aussi un obstacle au déploiement de l’invention politique. Pour pouvoir développer un mouvement politique dans le capitalisme contemporain, il faut opérer une neutralisation des « croyances-habitudes » qui nourrissent, encore aujourd’hui, les analyses et les pratiques des porteurs de l’hypothèse communiste (les trotskistes, les maoïstes, les communistes).

Le monde de l’hypothèse communiste est un monde où les relations de pouvoir, les rôles sociaux, les fonctions sont strictement définis et hiérarchisés autour du travail et de la classe ouvrière et les possibles qui s’en dégagent et qu’il s’agit d’actualiser sont tout aussi strictement déterminés par des séquences d’action politique codifiées (action syndicale et politique) qui convergent vers la « lutte finale » (prise du pouvoir, dictature du prolétariat, transition, etc.). Ces croyances ne résonnent pas dans l’âme puisqu’elles sont désormais des clichés, des habitudes autoritaires et dogmatiques.

Le communisme a cru à l’histoire universelle et à l’avènement du prolétariat et de la révolution qu’elle portait dans son sein. Les ruptures révolutionnaires, l’enchaînement des événements et leur sens n’étaient que des étapes dans un processus dont les finalités étaient définies et ordonnées par l’histoire. Le passage par le capitalisme marquait sa dernière étape, avant la réconciliation « finale ».

L’action était mesurée, réglée et ordonnée à des valeurs transcendantes, même si cette transcendance se présentait comme sécularisée, même si la croyance (la disposition à l’action) ne visait plus un monde de l’au-delà , mais un monde à transformer, ici-bas. La croyance dans l’hypothèse communiste subordonnait le temps à l’histoire universelle, l’action à son déroulement.

La disjonction de temps et de l’histoire implique un changement radical de la manière d’agir, puisqu’elle fait émerger un devenir qui échappe au temps chronologique, à l’histoire. Croire au monde tel qu’il est signifie loger l’action sur les modalités de l’événement qui, vient de l’histoire et retombe dans l’histoire sans être lui-même historique.

Les luttes comme contemporaines se trouvent confrontées à des nouveaux problèmes. Elles éclatent et se déroulent dans un capitalisme qui n’a pas grande chose à voir avec celui décrit par l’hypothèse communiste, puisque l’action se développe dans le cadre de la disjonction du temps et de l’histoire.

La rupture de la subordination du temps à l’histoire fait appel non pas à une faculté déterminée (telle la connaissance, par exemple), mais à l’indétermination de notre puissance d’agir, de façon que la question « ce qui se passe ? » et « ce qui va se passer ? », devient l’obsession du pouvoir. Comment et sur quoi fixer la croyance, comme maîtrise et réguler la « disposition à agir » ? Comment à la fois exploiter, solliciter, favoriser la croyance-confiance qui est la condition ou le germe de toute nouvelle création, de toute rupture et de toute ouverture à l’action ? Et comment la contrôler et la brimer, pour qu’elle ne déborde pas des limites de l’entreprise et du marché, pour qu’elle ne se transforme en processus de subjectivation dont celui des intermittents est seulement une petite et partielle expérimentation ?

Par des dispositifs à la fois hypermodernes et néo-archaïques qui opèrent sur ce que William James appelle la « zone plastique » qui se configure comme « le courroie de transmission de l’incertain, le point de rencontre du passé et de l’avenir », comme la zone du « présent mouvant » de l’événement. Cette zone plastique (ou « zone d’insécurité »), où se produisent les « différences singulières » qui provoquent des « modifications sociales » est au cœur de la bataille politique du capitalisme contemporain, puisqu’elle implique un conflit autour de l’actualisation des possibles et de la production de subjectivité.

Si limitée qu’elle soit, elle « suffit à contenir toute la série des passions humaines », tandis que les domaines des attributs moyens d’un peuple ou d’une société, « si vaste qu’il soit – il est inerte et stagnant », c’est une « richesse indéfiniment acquise qui exclut toute incertitude ».[9] Les dispositifs hypermodernes affirment que non seulement la « zone plastique » existe et qu’il faut y croire et qu’il faut donc la ménager, l’élargir, la favoriser, la financer en tant que zone plastique de et pour l’entreprise et le marché. En effet, ils ajoutent immédiatement que si possibles existent, ils n’existent nulle part ailleurs que dans le marché et dans l’entreprise. L’hypermodernité de la déterritorialisation capitaliste nous enjoint d’investir la subjectivité, son « pouvoir généreux » et son sens de l’avenir, dans des alternatives qui n’en sont pas, puisque s’il y a des choix à faire, ce sont de choix qui portent sur des alternatives déjà déterminées et codifiées.

La gouvernamentalité néo-libérale produit de la liberté, dit Foucault, c’est-à-dire, des possibles et des choix sur ces possibles. Mais cette production de « libérté » est différentielle et très sélective. Elle est distribuée de façon très inégalitaire entre les groupes sociaux et les individus et elle ne peut s’exercer qu’à l’intérieur de contraintes et des subordinations de l’entreprise et dans des conditions préalablement fixées par le marché). Elle encadre et canalise la croyance vers la « production » et la « consommation » par la série de dispositifs que nous avons analysé.

Ce que les « reformes »  néo-libérales montrent de façon irréfutable est la chose suivante : ce qui donne le ton et la couleur, ce qui imprègne l’univers néo-libéral n’est pas la « liberté », ni le possible, ni le choix. Dans le cœur même du capitalisme contemporain, c’est-à-dire dans le marché et dans l’entreprise, il n’est pas question d’agonisme et de rivalité entre des hommes libres qui impliquent risque, courage, confiance, mais de concurrence de tous contre tous dont le ressort principale est la peur.

La « réformes » détruisent certaines libertés, certaines conceptions et certaines pratiques du risque, du choix et de la confiance, pour en instaurer d’autres qui à leur tour sont soumis à des nouvelles formes de contrôle et de management.

Les reformes doivent distribuer des différentiels de liberté en essayant d’augmenter la fidélité à l’emploi et à la gouvernamentalité de la part des couches supérieures des gouvernés et en diffusant l’incertitude et la précarité dans les couches inférieures. La stratégie générale, qui concerne aussi bien les insiders que les outsiders, consiste dans d’introduire plus de  concurrence, plus d’incertitude, plus de peur.

Cette même logique de la concurrence, de la peur et de la méfiance est secrété et diffusé dans le corps social par les institutions qui devraient garantir les droits de salariés et de la population.

Le passage de la mutualisation à l’assurance privée qui affecte l’Etat Providence, n’est pas simplement un changement dans les modalités du gouvernement économique et social, mais aussi et surtout un changement dans le gouvernement des passions et notamment de la croyance-confiance.

Les réformes constituent un dispositif de reconversion de la subjectivité qui consiste à la fois  dans la captation de l’énergie motrice de la croyance et dans son déplacement. Il s’agit de fabriquer la croyance (la confiance) en l’efficacité de l’entreprise et des marchés dans la couverture des risques et de désigner les modalités mutualistes de protection comme des résidus collectivistes d’un temps révolu dont il faut se méfier.

Pour que les réformes réussissent, il faut vider les institutions de la sécurité sociale des passions, affects et croyances « mutualistes » qui les ont rendu possibles et qui les reproduisent (solidarité, égalité, confiance, dans l’action collective, etc., qui malgré le paritarisme, conservaient encore quelque chose de leur origine). De la même manière, les formes collectives d’assurance, comme la retraite par répartition doivent susciter, par leur prétendue insolvabilité, la peur.

Si la devise pour le développement des luttes contemporaines peut se résumer dans l’affirmation de Deleuze « croit au monde tel qu’il est », celle du capitalisme contemporain s’énonce de cette manière : « ait peur et méfie-toi du monde, des autres et de toi-même ».

Qu’au niveau micro, le management s’agite beaucoup, aussi bien à niveau d’entreprise que du social, pour parler de responsabilité, autonomie, créativité, fierté, confiance, esprit d’équipe, n’empêche pas, qu’au niveau macro la passion dominante, soigneusement produite et entretenue, soit la peur.

La peur, constitue moins une inhibition à l’action (passivité), qu’un retournement des forces passionnelles et volitives et de la « disposition à agir » contre les autres, contre le monde, contre soi-même. La peur aussi fait appel à la puissance d’agir et à la force d’invention, puisque les néo-archaïsmes qui doivent fixer la croyance (les relations aux valeurs de la tradition, à la religion, à l’autorité, les généalogies individuelles et collectives, les filiations, etc.) sont à fabriquer à travers un montage des dispositifs législatifs, économiques, financières et discursifs. La peur mobilise la disposition à agir, les énergies les plus intimes, les forces volitives et passionnelles, les penchants actifs de la subjectivité, mais pour les retourner contre l’immigré, l’étranger, le pauvre, le chômeur, les femmes et contre les possibles que leurs mondes contiennent.

Plutôt qu’une simple neutralisation de la puissance d’agir (passivité), la peur opère un retournement de sa direction temporelle. Le mouvement punk avait parfaitement saisi au moment même où la gouvernementalité néo-libérale se mettait en place la nature profonde de sa temporalité que Foucault, à la même époque, n’a pas su saisir avec le même brio : le « Nous vivons vers l’avant »[10] de notre expérience de tous les jours est retourné en « No future ! »

En colonisant le présent, la crainte change la direction de la flèche du temps de notre disposition à l’action : nos sociétés vivent à l’aune du devoir de mémoire, prisonnières de leur passé inventé de toute pièce, d’ailleurs. La gouvernementalité néo-libérale opère un renversement qui est un classique dans l’histoire de la domination et de l’assujettissement, la transformation de l’espoir en crainte, du pouvoir généreux et de la force qui donne, en ressentiment, de la confiance en méfiance.

L’action reste le principe et l’étalon de la gouvernementalité neo-libérale, mais il s’agit de l’action qui a déjà été, de l’action qui s’est déjà produite. Le sentiment d’attente et le sens de l’avenir qui mobilisent notre puissance d’agir et qui, en principe, devraient trouver des conditions favorables à leur actualisation dans le « capitalisme cognitif », dans le « capitalisme culturel » ou dans la société du savoir, sont retournés vers le passé, vers la mémoire, vers ce qui a été.

L’histoire revient, non pas comme dans la philosophie de l’histoire, c’est-à-dire comme quelque chose à accomplir par la révolution ou par le progrès, mais comme quelque chose qui s’est déjà achevée et qui, du fond du passé, fonctionne comme principe et mesure de l’action au présent. L’événement n’est pas ce qui va se produire, ce qui est en train de se faire, mais ce qui s’est déjà produit. L’étalon, la mesure de l’action est devenu le « devoir de mémoire » dont le président Sarkozy est un de plus grands adeptes. L’esclavage, la shoah, les massacres et génocides, les victimes du communisme soviétique, le nazisme allemand, la révolution culturelle, Pol Pot, etc. sont les événements qui contraignent et dirigent l’action de l’homme démocratique contemporain.

C’est un comble pour la soi-disant société de la connaissance qui signifie, en réalité, que ce n’est sûrement pas du côté savoir qu’il faut chercher le salut, mais plutôt dans le processus de subjectivation, c’est-à-dire dans le processus éthico-politique qui se produit à partir des configurations actuelles des relations de pouvoir et de domination du « capitalisme cognitif » et de possibles que la lutte (micro et macro-politique) contre ces formes de domination crée et actualise.

Lorsque nous décrivons les possibles du capitalisme contemporain (culturel, cognitif, de la connaissance, etc., peu importe), nous n’avons encore rien dit sur les modalités de subjectivation qu’à partir de cette réalité peuvent être produites, puisque ce que l’on décrit sont « possibilités ambiguës » qui sont précisément l’objet d’actualisation conflictuelle. Si la subjectivation vient de l’histoire et retombe dans l’histoire, elle se produit dans cette « zone plastique », dans cette « zone d’insécurité » qui, en faisant appel à notre subjectivité, ajoute quelque chose d’imprévisible au monde qui rejaillit, traverse et reconfigure l’histoire.

Nous avons encore eu un exemple terrifiant de comment on peut basculer de l’hypermodernité au néo-archaïsme, avec une vitesse impressionnante, grâce à la puissance de la subjectivation.

Dans les Etats-Unis de Bush, l’hypermodernité de la soi-disant « classe créative », l’hypermodernité des savoirs, des nouvelles technologies, des modèles innovants de formation, de consommation, de communications, de crédits, de production, etc., n’ont pas été capables d’opposer aucune résistance à un mensonge en soi bancal et risible comme celui qui a ouvert et légitimé la guerre en Irak. L’hypermodernité a produit une « croyance », une conversion de la subjectivité et donc une disposition à agir qui n’a rien à envier aux phénomènes de contagion collective, de « superstition », d’ « ignorance » dont on suppose que nos sociétés acculturés et cognitives se sont libérés. La croyance, il faut le répéter, précède et dépasse le savoir.

Les savoirs, les technologies de l’information, les dispositifs démocratiques, la formation et l’acculturation de la population, etc., n’ont pas formé une barrière, mais elles ont, au contraire, amplifié la « croyance » et la disposition à agir dans des hypothèses aussi réactionnaires que possibles. Comment se fait-il que la société la plus hypermoderne de la planète produise, accepte, légitime les néo-archaïsmes des néo-conservateurs les plus bornés ? La rapidité du basculement tient au fait qu’il s’agit, comme nous ont appris Deleuze et Guattari de deux faces inséparables du mouvement du capitalisme.

Le gouvernement néo-libérale est, selon une autre intuition de Deleuze et Guattari, un dispositif d’anti-production, puisque la conversion de la subjectivité qu’il produit consiste en son laminage, sa standardisation, son homogénéisation. Ce n’est pas en opposant une critique que on peut s’opposer à ce déferlement de croyance.

Pour terminer. Dans cette nouvelle configuration politique, comment mobiliser la croyance, c’est-à-dire la disposition à agir ?

En croyant dans le monde nous a dit Deleuze.

Croire dans le monde et à ses possibilités, signifie risquer une action qui ne se subordonne plus à aucune normativité extérieure, à aucune transcendance, mais construit, en montant et en problématisant des dispositifs « processuels, polyphoniques et autopoïetiques », ses propres règles, ses propres protocoles, ses propres modalités d’organisation, ses propres hypothèses partielles et spécifiques qu’elle met toujours à l’épreuve de ce qui est et de ce qui arrive.

Croire dans le monde tel qu’il est et à ses possibilités, signifie ne pas s’engager dans processus de subjectivation transcendants et totalisants, mais dans processus qui n’ont pas déjà un modèle auquel se conformer, mais qui problématisent, interrogent, explorent leur propre devenir. Croire dans le monde tel qu’il est, signifie croire que la recomposition, la synthèse, l’unité est toute aussi problématique que l’événement, car aussi bien la première que le second, en même temps qu’il se pose et s’actualise, se scinde et se différencie, de façon que l’affirmation n’est pas fusion. Croire au monde tel qu’il est, signifie encore risquer sa disposition à agir dans la synthèse disjonctive de modes d’action hétérogènes (l’être-contre et l’être-ensemble, le micro et le macro-politique, le changement politique et le changement dans le sensible) et croire dans l’impossibilité de totaliser les différents éléments et les différents modalités de subjectivation dans un tout harmonieux et dans une réconciliation finale.

A travers l’engagement subjectif dans les luttes contemporaines et leurs modalités d’expression, on peut aisément saisir ce à quoi nous ne croyons plus. Nous n’engageons pas notre subjectivité dans un savoir universel, surplombant et synthétique qui embrasserait le monde et ses contradictions. Les savoirs se produisent dans l’écart entre le pathique et le cognitif et la parole s’énonce dans l’intervalle du discursif et du non discursif. L’action, pour trouver un écho dans la subjectivité contemporaine, doit se dérouler aussi bien en deçà et au-delà du savoir et en deçà et au-delà du langage et de la représentation.

« Notre expérience est faite entre autre de variations de vitesse et de direction et vit plus dans ces transitions que dans la fin du voyage » et elle a pour frange « un plus à venir » et un « peut – être » à réaliser. C’est pour cette raison que le mot d’ordre du mouvement de 68 « Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible » n’a pas cessé de prendre de la consistance politique et existentielle.

Avec la nécessité de croire à l’impossible et à l’impensable, la portée de la critique est très limitée puisque elle doit s’agencer à des nouveaux savoirs et à des nouvelles pratiques et des nouvelles techniques politiques (l’art de ne pas se faire gouverner et de se gouverner soi-même, à l’art de la production de modes d’existence et de modalité de subjectivation). Sans cet agencement la critique elle risque même d’être anti-productive.

Share/Bookmark

Dr. Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics on October 12th, 2009, just four months after speaking at the Frankfurt School on the same topic in which she was awarded the prize.

Renowned political scientist, Dr. Elinor Ostrom, from Indiana University – Bloomington, gave a lecture on Friday June 19th, 2009, outlining her latest research and outcomes regarding the problem of “the commons.”

In the lab, she had simulated conflicts concerning the allocation of the commons and had derived a complex theoretical framework that exploits the various elements (e.g. leadership, trust and reciprocity) of this process.

Her framework had been applied in a number of field studies by Professor Ostrom and her team, among others in a study of three villages in the Gulf of California (Mexico), where people rely on fishing. She presented her study and outlined how different forms of managing and allocating the resource „fish lead to different levels of prosperity. Ultimately, the findings of the field study confirmed her framework.

Share/Bookmark

Jacqueline Novogratz shares stories of how “patient capital” can bring sustainable jobs, goods, services — and dignity — to the world’s poorest. Filmed jun 2007. from TED.com

Transcript:

I really am honored to be here, and as Chris said, it’s been over 20 years since I started working in Africa. My first introduction was at the Abidjan airport on a sweaty Ivory Coast morning. I had just left Wall Street, cut my hair to look like Margaret Mead, given away most everything that I owned, and arrived with all the essentials — some poetry, a few clothes, and, of course, a guitar — because I was going to save the world, and I thought I would just start with the African continent.

But literally within days of arriving I was told, in no uncertain terms, by a number of West African women, that Africans didn’t want saving, thank you very much, least of all not by me. I was too young, unmarried, I had no children, didn’t really know Africa and besides, my French was pitiful. And so, it was an incredibly painful time in my life, and yet it really started to give me the humility to start listening.

I think that failure can be an incredibly motivating force as well, so I moved to Kenya and worked in Uganda, and I met a group of Rwandan women, who asked me, in 1986, to move to Kigali to help them start the first microfinance institution there. And I did, and we ended up naming it Duterimbere, meaning “to go forward with enthusiasm.” And while we were doing it, I realized that there weren’t a lot of businesses that were viable and started by women, and so maybe I should try to run a business too. And so I started looking around, and I heard about a bakery that was run by 20 prostitutes. And, being a little intrigued, I went to go meet this group, and what I found was 20 unwed mothers who were trying to survive.

And it was really the beginning of my understanding the power of language, and how what we call people so often distances us from them, and makes them little. I also found out that the bakery was nothing like a business, that in fact, it was a classic charity run by a well-intentioned person who essentially spent 600 dollars a month to keep these 20 women busy making little crafts and baked goods, and living on 50 cents a day, still in poverty. So, I made a deal with the women. I said, “Look, we get rid of the charity side, and we run this as a business and I’ll help you.” They nervously agreed, I nervously started, and of course, things are always harder than you think they’re going to be.

First of all, I thought, well, we need a sales team, and we clearly aren’t the A-Team here, so let’s — I did all this training, and the epitome was when I literally marched into the streets of Nyamirambo, which is the popular quarter of Kigali, with a bucket, and I sold all these little doughnuts to people, and I came back, and I was like, “You see?” And the women said, “You know, Jacqueline, who in Nyamirambo is not going to buy doughnuts out of an orange bucket from a tall American woman?” And like — (Laughter) It’s a good point.

So then I went the whole American way, with competitions, team and individual. Completely failed, but over time the women learnt to sell on their own way. And they started listening to the marketplace, and they came back with ideas for cassava chips and banana chips and sorghum bread, and before you knew it, we had cornered the Kigali market, and the women were earning three to four times the national average. And with that confidence surge, I thought, well, It’s time to create a real bakery, so let’s paint it. And the women said, “That’s a really great idea.” And I said, “Well, what color do you want to paint it?” And they said, “Well, you choose.” And I said, “No, no, I’m learning to listen — you choose. It’s your bakery, your street, your country, not mine.” But they wouldn’t give me an answer. So one week, two weeks, three weeks went by, and finally I said, “Well, how about blue?” And they said, “Blue, blue, we love blue. Let’s do it blue.” So, I went to the store, I brought Gaudence, the recalcitrant one of all, and we brought all this paint and fabric to make curtains, and on painting day we all gathered in Nyamirambo, and the idea was we would paint it white with blue as trim, like a little French bakery. But that was clearly not as satisfying as painting a wall of blue like a morning sky.

So, blue, blue, everything became blue; the walls were blue, the windows were blue, the sidewalk out front was painted blue. And Aretha Franklin was shouting “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.,” the women’s hips were swaying and little kids were trying to grab the paintbrushes, but it was their day. And at the end of it, we stood across the street and we looked at what we had done, and I said, “It is so beautiful,” and the women said, “It really is.” And I said, “And I think the color is perfect,” and they all nodded their head, except for Gaudence, and I said, “What?” And she said, “Nothing,” and I said, “What?” And she said, “Well, it is pretty, but you know our color, really, it is green.” And — (Laughter).

And I learned then that listening isn’t just about patience, but that when you’ve lived on charity and dependent your whole life long, it’s really hard to say what you mean. And, mostly because people never really ask you, and when they do, you don’t really think they want to know the truth. And so then I learned that listening is not only about waiting, but it’s also learning how better to ask questions.

And so, I lived in Kigali for about two and a half years, doing these two things, and it was an extraordinary time in my life. And it taught me three lessons that I think are so important for us today, and certainly in the work that I do. The first is that dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth. As Eleni has said, when people gain income, they gain choice, and that is fundamental to dignity. But as human beings we also want to see each other, and we want to be heard by each other, and we should never forget that. The second is that traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.

I think Andrew pretty well covered that, so I will move to the third point, which is that markets alone also are not going to solve the problems of poverty. Yes, we ran this as a business, but someone needed to pay the philanthropic support that came into the training and the management support, the strategic advice and maybe most important of all, the access to new contacts, networks and new markets. And so, on a micro level, there’s a real role for this combination of investment and philanthropy. And on a macro level, some of the speakers have inferred that even health should be privatized. But, having had a father with heart disease, and realizing that what our family could afford was not what he should have gotten, and having a good friend step in to help, I really believe that all people deserve access to health at prices they can afford. I think the market can help us figure that out, but there’s got to be a charitable component or I don’t think we’re going to create the kind of societies we want to live in.

And so, it was really those lessons that made me decide to build Acumen Fund about six years ago. It’s a nonprofit venture capital fund for the poor, a few oxymorons in one sentence. It essentially raises charitable funds from individuals, foundations and corporations, and then we turn around and we invest equity and loans in both for-profit and nonprofit entities that deliver affordable health, housing, energy, clean water, to low income people in South Asia and Africa, so that they can make their own choices. We’ve invested about 20 million dollars in 20 different enterprises, and have, in so doing, created nearly 20,000 jobs, and delivered tens of millions of services to people who otherwise would not be able to afford them.

I want to tell you two stories. Both of them are in Africa. Both of them are about investing in entrepreneurs who are committed to service, and who really know the markets. Both of them live at the confluence of public health and enterprise, and both of them, because they’re manufacturers, create jobs directly, and create incomes indirectly, because they’re in the malaria sector, and Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year because of malaria. And so as people get healthier, they also get wealthier.

The first one is called Advanced Bio-Extracts Limited. It’s a company built in Kenya about seven years ago by an incredible entrepreneur named Patrick Henfrey and his three colleagues. These are old-hand farmers who’ve gone through all the agricultural ups and downs in Kenya over the last 30 years. Now, this plant is an Artemisia plant, it’s the basic component for artemisinin, which is the best-known treatment for malaria. It’s indigenous to China and the Far East, but given that the prevalence of malaria is here in Africa, Patrick and his colleagues said, “Let’s bring it here, because it’s a high value-add product.” The farmers get three to four times the yields that they would with maize.

And so, using patient capital, money that they could raise early on, that actually got below market returns, and was willing to go the long haul and be combined with management assistance, strategic assistance, they’ve now created a company where they purchase from 7,500 farmers. So that’s about 50,000 people affected. And I think some of you may have visited — these farmers are helped by KickStart and TechnoServe, who help them become more self-sufficient. They buy it, they dry it and they bring it to this factory which was purchased in part by, again, patient capital from Novartis, who has a real interest in getting the powder so that they can make Coartem. Acumen’s been working with ABE for the past year, year and a half, both on looking at a new business plan, and what does expansion look like, helping with management support and helping to do term sheets and raise capital. And I really understood what patient capital meant emotionally in the last month or so. Because the company was literally 10 days away from proving that the product they produced was at the world-quality level needed to make Coartem, when they were in the biggest cash crisis of their history.

And we called all of the social investors we knew. Now, some of these same social investors are really interested in Africa and understand the importance of agriculture, and they even helped the farmers. And even when we explained that if ABE goes away, all those 7,500 jobs go away too, we sometimes have this bifurcation between business and the social. And it’s really time we start thinking more creatively about how they can be fused. So Acumen made not one, but two bridge loans, and the good news is they did indeed meet world-quality classification and are now in the final stages of closing a 20 million dollar round to move it to the next level, and I think that this will be one of the more important companies in East Africa.

This is Samuel. He’s a farmer. He was actually living in the Kibera slums when his father called him and told him about Artemisia and the value-add potential. So he moved back to the farm, and, long story short, they now have seven acres under cultivation. Samuel’s kids are in private school, and he’s starting to help other farmers in the area also go into Artemisia production — dignity being more important than wealth.

The next one, many of you know. I talked about it a little at Oxford two years ago, and some of you visited A to Z Manufacturing, which is one of the great real companies in East Africa. It’s another one that lives at the confluence of health and enterprise. And this is really a story about a public/private solution that has really worked. It started in Japan. Sumitomo had developed a technology essentially to impregnate a polyethylene-based fiber with organic insecticide, so you could create a bed net, a malaria bed net that would last five years and not need to be re-dipped.

It could alter the vector, but like Artemisia, it had been produced only in East Asia, and as part of its social responsibility Sumitomo said, “Why don’t we experiment with whether we can produce it in Africa, for Africans?” UNICEF came forward and said, “We’ll buy most of the nets and then we’ll give them away as part of the global fund’s and the UN’s commitment to pregnant women and children, for free.” Acumen came in with the patient capital, and we also helped to identify the entrepreneur that we would all partner with here in Africa, and Exxon provided the initial resin.

Well, in looking around for entrepreneurs, there was none better that we could find on Earth than Anuj Shah, in A to Z Manufacturing Company. It’s a 40-year-old company, it understands manufacturing. It’s gone from socialist Tanzania into capitalist Tanzania, and continued to flourish. It had about 1,000 employees when we first found it. And so, Anuj took the entrepreneurial risk here in Africa to produce a public good that was purchased by the aid establishment to work with malaria.

And, long story short again, they’ve been so successful. In our first year, the first net went off the line in October of 2003. We thought the hitting it out of the box number was 150,000 nets a year. This year they are now producing eight million nets a year, and they employ 5,000 people, 90 percent of whom are women, mostly unskilled. They’re in a joint venture with Sumitomo. And so, from an enterprise perspective for Africa, and from a public health perspective, these are real successes.

But it’s only half the story if we’re looking at solving problems of poverty, because it’s not long-term sustainable. It’s a company with one big customer. And if avian flu hits, or for any other reason the world decides that malaria is no longer as much of a priority, everybody loses. And so, Anuj and Acumen have been talking about testing the private sector, because the assumption that the aid establishment has made is that, look, in a country like Tanzania, 80 percent of the population makes less than two dollars a day. It costs at manufacturing point, six dollars to produce these, and it costs the establishment another six dollars to distribute it, so the market price in a free market would be about 12 dollars per net. Most people can’t afford that, so let’s give it away free. And we said, “Well, there’s another option. Let’s use the market as the best listening device we have, and understand at what price people would pay for this, so they get the dignity of choice. We can start building local distribution, and actually, it can cost the public sector much less.”

And so we came in with a second round of patient capital to A to Z, a loan as well as a grant, so that A to Z could play with pricing and listen to the marketplace, and found a number of things. One, that people will pay different prices, but the overwhelming number of people will come forth at one dollar per net and make a decision to buy it. And when you listen to them, they’ll also have a lot to say about what they like and what they don’t like, and that some of the channels we thought would work didn’t work. But because of this experimentation and iteration that was allowed because of the patient capital, we’ve now found that it costs about a dollar in the private sector to distribute, and a dollar to buy the net. So then, from a policy perspective, when you start with the market, we have a choice. We can continue going along at 12 dollars a net, and the customer pays zero, or we could at least experiment with some of it to charge one dollar a net, costing the public sector another six dollars a net, give the people the dignity of choice, and have a distribution system that might, over time, start sustaining itself.

We’ve got to start having conversations like this, and I don’t think there’s any better way to start than using the market, but also to bring other people to the table around it. Whenever I go to visit A to Z, I think of my grandmother, Stella. She was very much like those women sitting behind the sewing machines. She grew up on a farm in Austria, very poor, didn’t have very much education. She moved to the United States where she met my grandfather who was a cement hauler, and they had nine children. Three of them died as babies. My grandmother had tuberculosis, and she worked in a sewing machine shop making shirts for about 10 cents an hour. She, like so many of the women I see at A to Z, worked hard every day, understood what suffering was, had a deep faith in God, loved her children and would never have accepted a handout. But because she had the opportunity of the marketplace, and she lived in a society that provided the safety of having access to affordable health and education, her children and their children were able to live lives of real purpose and follow real dreams.

I look around at my siblings and my cousins — and as I said, there are a lot of us — and I see teachers and musicians, hedge fund managers, designers. One sister who makes other people’s wishes come true. And my wish, when I see those women, I meet those farmers, and I think about all the people across this continent who are working hard every day, is that they have that sense of opportunity and possibility, and that they also can believe and get access to services so that their children too can live those lives of great purpose. It shouldn’t be that difficult. But what it takes is a commitment from all of us to essentially refuse trite assumptions, get out of our ideological boxes. It takes investing in those entrepreneurs that are committed to service as well as to success. It takes opening your arms, both, wide, and expecting very little love in return, but demanding accountability, and bringing the accountability to the table as well. And most of all, most of all, it requires that all of us have the courage and the patience, whether we are rich or poor, African or non-African, local or diaspora, left or right, to really start listening to each other. Thank you. (Applause)

Share/Bookmark