Table Of ContentPeople, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis
The Human Economy
Series editors:
Keith Hart, London School of Economics
John Sharp, University of Pretoria
The social sciences and humanities concerned with the economy have
lost the confidence to challenge the sophistication and public dominance
of the field of economics. We need to give a new emphasis and direction
to the economic arrangements that people already share, while recog-
nizing that humanity urgently needs new ways of organizing life on the
planet. This series examines how human interests are expressed in our
unequal world through concrete economic activities and aspirations.
Volume 1
People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis
Perspectives from the Global South
Edited by Keith Hart & John Sharp
Volume 2
Economy for and against Democracy
Edited by Keith Hart
Volume 3
Gypsy Economy
Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century
Edited by Micol Brazzabeni, Manuela Ivone Cunha and Martin Fotta
Afterword by Keith Hart
Volume 4
From Clans to Co-ops
Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily
Theodoros Rakopoulos
People, Money and Power
in the Economic Crisis
Perspectives from the Global South
░ ░ ░
Edited by
Keith Hart and John Sharp
berghahn
N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
Published in 2015 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2015, 2016 Keith Hart and John Sharp
First paperback edition published in 2016
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
People, money, and power in the economic crisis : perspectives from the global
south / edited by Keith Hart and John Sharp.
pages cm. -- (The human economy ; volume 1)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78238-467-0 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-78533-342-2 (paperback) --
ISBN 978-1-78238-468-7 (ebook)
1. Sustainable development--Developing countries. 2. Financial crises--De-
veloping countries. 3. Money--Developing countries. 4. Power (Social sciences)--
Developing countries. I. Hart, Keith. II. Sharp, John (John S.)
HC59.72.E5P464 2014
338.9’27091724--dc23
2014016234
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-78238-467-0 hardback
ISBN: 978-1-78533-342-2 paperback
ISBN: 978-1-78238-468-7 ebook
Contents
░
Preface. The Human Economy Project vii
Keith Hart and John Sharp
Introduction 1
Keith Hart and John Sharp
Chapter 1. After the Big Clean-Up: Street Vendors, the Informal
Economy and Employment Policy in Zimbabwe 19
Busani Mpofu
Chapter 2. Immoral Accumulation and the Human Economy
of Death in Venda 41
Fraser McNeill
Chapter 3. ‘Letting Money Work for Us’: Self-Organization and
Financialization from Below in an All-Male Savings Club
in Soweto 61
Detlev Krige
Chapter 4. Market, Race and Nation: History of the White
Working Class in Pretoria 82
John Sharp
Chapter 5. Negotiating Inequality: The Contemporary Black
Middle Classes in Salvador, Brazil 106
Doreen Gordon
Chapter 6. Live Music in the Age of Digital Reproduction:
Cape Verde 129
Juliana Braz Dias
Chapter 7. Congo-Gauteng: Congolese Migrants in South Africa 151
Saint José Inaka and Joseph Trapido
Chapter 8. Neither Nationals nor Cosmopolitans: The Political
Economy of Belonging for Mozambican Indians 173
Jason Sumich
vi Contents
Chapter 9. Marwari Traders between Hindu Neoliberalism and
Democratic Socialism in Nepal 190
Mallika Shakya
References 207
Notes on Contributors 225
Index 227
Preface
░
The Human Economy Project
KEITH HART AND JOHN SHARP
This book is the fi rst in a series that asks how the economy might become
more human. Economies were always human, of course, in that people
are indispensable to their functioning; but how human interests are
expressed in the economies that dominate our world has long been ob-
scure. The aim of the series is to explore economy from the vantage point
of people’s concrete activities and aspirations, while extending the range
of our inquiries to take in the human predicament as a whole. Southern
Africa and the global South are our principal focus in this volume, but
the comparative perspective that frames our case studies aims to be more
inclusive than that. For several centuries now humanity has struggled to
break out of unequal society with the hope of achieving genuine democ-
racy – government by and for the people. The world economic crisis that
began in 2008 and provoked the fi rst stirrings of political revolution in
2011 off ers a new opportunity to launch intellectual initiatives with this
aim in mind. We must address the sources of inequality at present and
ask how greater economic democracy might be achieved through devel-
opment strategies based on what people want and are doing already.
The humanities and social sciences have lost their way. One reason for
this malaise is that economics has acquired a degree of autonomy, tech-
nical sophistication and public dominance that has greatly reduced intel-
lectual exchange with other disciplines that have an established interest
in economy – such as anthropology, history, sociology, political economy,
geography, literature and philosophy. At the same time, society has come
to be identifi ed with the market economy and economic considerations
are now seen as being central to the achievement of political democracy.
We invite a much broader coalition of engaged intellectuals and activists
to contribute more to public debate about the economy, while renewing
an interdisciplinary conversation with those economists who are open to
such a possibility.
viii Keith Hart and John Sharp
The Berghahn Human Economy series assumes that at base economies
are more alike than the contrasts between them as capitalism, social-
ism and the rest suggest. People everywhere combine reliance on gov-
ernment support, commerce, kinship, voluntary associations, religion,
crime and much else. We need to give the specifi c combinations they
live by a new direction and emphasis, with the aim of mobilizing their
eff orts for the common good. Social rights rest not only on citizenship
and market contracts, but also on the mutuality that grows out of living
together. We ask in this book: How do people in South Africa and compa-
rable societies insert themselves into the actual, unequal economy? How
might a more equal economy be built by harnessing and expanding what
people already do for themselves? Ultimately, we need new answers to
the question, ‘What is a human being?’ These should refl ect human unity
and diversity more fully than the economists’ narrow vision allows for.
The idea of economy has an unfi nished history, and the current global
crisis, far from weakening the ascendancy of free market economics, as
many of us expected, appears to have strengthened it. Economy was at
fi rst management of a rural household’s budget and it has lately come
to be identifi ed with markets everywhere. In the last century it referred
principally to the national economy and political confl ict over its man-
agement was organized around the poles of market freedom and state
socialism, neither of which did much to promote economic democracy.
We can no longer aff ord ruinous swings between these poles. Nor is it
obvious how a revolutionary break with ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘capitalism’,
conceived of as a totality, might be achieved.
The economy is too important to be left to specialists whose ideas are
far removed from how ordinary people understand the world they live
in. The approach adopted here for studying the economy is institutional;
that is, rather than rely on totalizing abstractions, we pay close atten-
tion to the particular arrangements through which people engage with
economic life, whether these are public bureaucracy, commercial fi rms,
self-organized activities, the informal economy or domestic groups – and
these are always plural. The narrow view of economic needs and interests
off ered by mainstream economics should be replaced by a wider concep-
tion of human well-being. We hope to broaden discussion of how to bring
about meaningful economic democracy through dedicated research
and writing on the ‘human economy’. The public might then be able to
place themselves imaginatively and practically in such a vision of how
the economy works. Above all, we hope to learn from and give a voice
to those who are usually neither seen nor heard. Economic democracy
means nothing if not trusting the people to identify and express their
Preface ix
own interests. The practice of ethnography – of joining the people where
they live in order to fi nd out what they do and think – is central to such
an approach. Its source is modern anthropology, but the general method
has now been adopted, at least in name, by a number of disciplines.
The present project grew out of the activities of an international net-
work of scholars who have been engaged for over a decade in trying to
advance a more just and inclusive approach to the development of the
world economy. This network, starting out in Latin America and Europe,
has widened its international range through several important publica-
tions, the most recent being The Human Economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani
2010a). This was an attempt to bring the fruits of the international project
to English speakers or at least to those who speak English as a second
language. All its predecessor volumes were called, in various languages,
Dictionary of the Other Economy. The editors dropped that particular formu-
lation for several reasons. We felt that labelling our intellectual work as
‘the other economy’ lent itself too readily to radical binaries. We based
our programme on what Marcel Mauss (1990 [1925]) and Karl Polanyi (2001
[1944]) understood by economic change, since we were looking for a more
positive construction than a simple negation, and this is where the idea
of a human economy came from.
What makes an economy ‘human’? First, it privileges people before
abstractions. People make and remake their economic lives and that has
to be the foundation for thinking about economy. Any economics should
be accessible to them as a practical guide to how they manage those lives.
But the economy is also human in that people everywhere increasingly
confront economic problems and dilemmas that are common to us all.
The future of humanity as a whole is at stake in the economic crises
that we face, not just the world seen through the blinkers of national
politics and media. So the idea of a human economy points in these two
directions: towards what people really do and hope for, while seeking to
extend our perspective to a global level, without ever losing sight of local
realities.
Since that volume was published, the editors of this series set up a re-
search programme on the human economy at the University of Pretoria
(UP) in South Africa’s capital. UP has generously funded a programme of
post-doctoral fellowships drawing initially from the global South (with
fellows from Southern Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Carib-
bean). Subsequently, with the support of the Mellon Foundation, the
programme has brought researchers from the global North and South
together in a creative dialogue focused on Southern Africa. Before The Hu-
man Economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010a), publications were largely
