Browsing by Subject "Capitalism"

Following World War II, in the estimate of the Congress of Industrial

Organizations (CIO), one out of every six people in the city of Gadsden, Alabama

belonged to the union, making it the “best organized CIO city in the US.” At

midcentury, as most southern communities were growing more antiunion and more

conservative, workers in this city of 60,000 in northeastern Alabama insisted that they

had the same interests as union workers elsewhere and looked to a liberal Democratic

Party and robust federal government to bolster them. In the late 2010s, little evidence

remains that Gadsden and Etowah County were once so different from the rest of the

South. White people here often vote for Republicans. Unions have all but vanished. Development officials openly brag that 94 percent of

industry in the county operates unorganized.

A visitor to Gadsden today might find it hard to believe that the community was

once perhaps the most pro-CIO city the world has ever known. Yet those who came to

study Gadsden in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to see it as a union town, like the

famous American author John Dos Passos, had to reckon with a transformation even

more difficult to conceive: just a few years before their arrival, the city was perhaps the

most anti-CIO town in the country. In the mid-to-late 1930s, it was dangerous to give

even tacit support to the federation. On more than one occasion, workers joined with

police and civic leaders to literally run organizers out of Alabama. But this antiunionism

represented even yet another sea change: in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Gadsden had

also been something like a union town.

The purpose of this dissertation is to use Gadsden as a case study to come to

terms with the historical forces that have turned its feeling about unions upside down

and inside out. When the residents of Gadsden changed their minds

about unionism, for the most part, they did so as a community. This consensus was not

the result of shared values; neither was it compelled by the dominance of local elites. It

was, to the contrary, an outcome of Gadsden’s relationship to the out-of-town capitalists

who sustained it. For all but a few exceptional years in the twentieth century (when

Gadsden could be a union town), residents here have had to fight for capital against

people from communities like their own. In both of the cases in which this working class

city has forsaken unionism, it was because, and only because, that was what American capitalism demanded of it.

This dissertation examines the politics of industry and industrialization in Ethiopia. I analyze how multinational alcohol companies and the Ethiopian state are brewing development, meaning spurring the creation of industrial linkages through the production, distribution, sale, and consumption of commercial beer as well as their corresponding socio-cultural consequences as the Ethiopian people respond to such processes. An ethnography at the nidus of corporate supply and value chain management and the state’s industrialization policy, the following pages examine how state and companies are making industry to meet the developmentalist goals of an Ethiopian ruling party and the needs of capital, respectively, albeit not without local collaboration and resistance.

Reconciliation language, however well-intentioned, is neither innocent nor innocuous. In this dissertation, I argue that reconciliation is part of a grammar of whiteness. This word, particularly when spoken and enacted by White people, works violence upon Black life. I argue that reconciliation grammar is a performance of whiteness that banks on racial difference properly managed to assuage White anxiety of otherness. This performance is explored in three acts. The first act concerns the theo-economics of reconciliation accounting and its afterlife in Luca Pacioli. The second act concerns the theo-patriarchy of Lethal Weapon fantasies of racial reconciliation that is real if men are really men, and if the explosions of violence upon muscular White male flesh look real enough. The final act concerns the theo-technology of the human found in White feminist theological writings of Letty Russell, revealing a reconciling humanism that renders difference an “ism” to be overcome by Jesus’ singular humanity. Each of these acts works violence upon Black life in different, and yet intersecting ways. Each of these acts performs reconciliation in such a way that inequitable power relationships result. Reckoning with reconciliation entails a reckoning not only with the words White people use, but also with the ways those words have a material effect on relationships, imaginations, and bodies. I show how reconciliation as a grammar of whiteness has been performed on Black life to account for it as fungible and expendable, to profit from a Black Madonna attending a manly White hero Jesus, and to render the Black woman as plastic material from which any manner of White theologies and ontologies might be built. I then point toward the excess and otherwise life that can never fully be consumed by reconciliation grammar; I argue for the liberative possibilities of life unreconciled.

This dissertation examines the visual production of capital in socialist realist images during the Maoist era (1949-1976). By deconstructing the pseudo-opposition between capitalism and socialism, my research demonstrates that, although the country was subject to the unchallenged rules of capital and its accumulation in both domestic and international spheres, Maoist visual culture was intended to veil China's state capitalism and construct its socialist persona. This historical analysis illustrates the ways in which the Maoist regime recoded and resolved the versatile contradictions of capital in an imaginary socialist utopia. Under these conditions, a wide spectrum of Maoist images played a key role in shaping the public perception of socialism as a reality in everyday lives. Here the aesthetic protocols of socialist realism functioned to create for the imagined socialist world a new currency that converted economic values, which followed the universal laws of capital, into the fetish of socialism. Such a collective "cognitive mapping" in Fredric Jameson's words - which situated people in the non-capitalist, socialist world and inserted them into the flow of socialist time - rendered imperceptible a mutated capitalism on the terrain of the People's Republic of China under Mao. This research aims to build a conversation between the real, material space subordinated to the laws of capital and the visual production of imaginary capital in the landscapes of socialist realism, for the purpose of mapping out how uneven geographical development contributed to activating, dispersing, and intensifying the global movement of Soviet and Chinese capital in the cultural form of socialist realism. This study also illustrates how, via the image-making process, socialist realist and Maoist images influenced by Mao's romantic vision of the countryside were meant to neutralize this uneven development in China and mask its on-going internal colonialism. Through this analysis, I argue that, in the interesting juncture where art for art's sake and art for politics intersected, Maoist visual culture ended up reproducing the hegemony of capital as a means of creating national wealth.

Perhaps second only to coffee, Ethiopia is best known worldwide for its long-distance runners. Since the 1960s, the country has indeed won countless Olympic medals and major marathons. However, the persisting explanatory rhetoric for East African running dominance relies on deterministic understandings of race, genetics, and environment. Little attention has been paid to the dimensions of labor, culture, and gender at work. This dissertation is the first in-depth ethnographic study of young Ethiopian women seeking a career in long distance running.

Based on two years of fieldwork in Addis Ababa and surrounding areas, domestic trips to competitions and training camps around Ethiopia, an internship at an international sports agency based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and travel to competitions around the world, the dissertation investigates the transnational networks of people and corporations that female runners move within and across as they navigate a global athletics market. Foregrounding gender, body politics, and global capitalism, my project revises the biology-centered concept of “running economy” into a multi-faceted sociocultural analytic for exploring how aspiring runners strive to make monetary value. How, I ask, can we look at running economy more holistically?

In underlining the social and cultural dimensions of running economy and centering the perspectives of women who exist within the transnational economy of running, we can see how Ethiopian women contest commonsense understandings of how this global athletics economy functions – and make their own moral judgements about what a more just economy would look like. Even as some of them drastically improve their lives by running, and remain hopeful while reaching for success, they find ways to cause frictions and disrupt hegemonic flows of ideas and money. By listening to how they politicize their training as labor, and by hearing their demands and desires, I argue that Ethiopian women runners expose many of the failed opportunities that capitalist structures and ideology espouse and urge us to rethink how we could better structure transnational economies.

How did our world’s wealth become so unevenly distributed? How did a small group of Europeans and Americans manage to acquire and retain so much wealth while so many others struggled to acquire enough to sustain their basic life functions? Why did some individuals desire to accumulate massive amounts of wealth? In answering those questions, this dissertation first examines the physical, emotional, intellectual, and social forces that inhibited wealth acquisition and the technologies that overcame those forces. The primary technologies under consideration are not of the mechanical type, like guns and steel. This dissertation primarily examines social technologies that relate to practical human action: patterns of buying and selling, rhythms of speaking, and structured systems of ideas about truth, goodness, and beauty. I call these action and idea patterns “technologies” because they were, like all technologies, intentionally constructed over an extended period of time, and they served a critical function. They executed valuable work and facilitated wealth accumulation. After examining the essential forces working against and the technologies working for wealth accumulation, this dissertation uses slave narratives and the theology of Thomas Aquinas to explore how distorted human passion, in the form of greed, served as a principal motive force in unjust wealth accumulation. Finally, this dissertation attempts to construct a Christian anthropology that redefines human life and purpose in order to heal greed distorted passions.

In our capitalist world-economy, fear has become the primary source material for wealth production. Fear underwrites regimes of limited access and various systems of occupation. Occupation as a strategic operational paradigm extends into civilian life of the dark and unresolved colonial, imperial and totalitarian legacies. The domestic and international exclusion of certain populations is grounded in age-old, mostly violent self/other distinctions that have been re-activated from their latent state and again made into viral political discourse material. An array of complex infrastructures, which include legal architectures and the built environment, have acquired operational importance. Such infrastructures are characterized by a built-in violence designed to control, contain, and redirect the massive population flows created by the globally destabilizing and denaturalizing affects of contemporary capital. Access to opportunity, vital resources, and security have become the crucial equity that populations compete for in the early 21st century. The very nature of capital has been transformed into actual economies of fear. Whereas parts of the world’s population will have the chance to live a dignified life, other parts will be indefinitely deprived of such fortunes and left to perish. The end result of such economies is the death-world.

The analysis proposed by this dissertation blurs the disciplinary boundaries between art, cultural anthropology, sociology, military history, economics, political science, psychology, architecture, urban studies, philosophy. This transdisciplinary methodology originates from the understanding that an effective critique of global capital as the dominant economic world-system can no longer be explained via a single knowledge field or academic specialty. Moving a step beyond interdisciplinary studies to bona fide informational crossovers between textual and visual archives allows for a more encompassing and thick investigation. The multi-sited approach of this study examines the visual traces found in the built environment and the controversial social realities expressed in current global geopolitics. The resulting synthesis between theory and practice offers new pathways for citizen participation and for potential solutions to collective grievances and global risks. This transdisciplinary approach gives art a leading role in establishing a new sense of place in which people are empowered to articulate their ideas—a new place built from a rehabilitated understanding of trust in self, trust in collective institutions, and trust in reality and truth. Above all, this new place holds the promise of a future worth living and fighting for.