131 | Ferguson | Proletarian Politics Today: Dangers and Opportunities in Historical Analogies (Part 2)

Academic concepts have their own history. In using various "conventional" terms, academic production inevitably involves their context and context, forming historical analogies with past events and scenes. This analogy can effectively compare and deepen the analysis, but it may also confuse reality and mislead perception. Ferguson's paper emphasizes the need to expand the point of reference for analysis and imagination while reflecting on the limitations of historical analogy.
The article specifically analyzes the concept of "proletariat" and its application in contemporary Southern African studies and politics. Ferguson critically points out that the relevant term is rooted in and limited to the Marxist tradition, the historical context of European industrialization, and thus introduces a new historical analogy—the concept of "proletarian" in the ancient Roman population classification before it was purified by Marx. He believes that the living conditions of the proletarians in ancient Rome are similar to those of the urban poor in contemporary southern Africa; the urban structure, economic distribution, and political ideas of ancient Rome are also similar to those in southern Africa. Introducing and valuing this new analogy will help to characterize the economics and survival of contemporary southern Africa (and indeed the global South) and to better understand proletarian politics today.
The article also continues Ferguson's long-standing focus on distributive politics (especially transfers) (2007, 2009, 2011, 2015). In his new book " Give a man a fish " in 2015, he criticized the "productive fundamentalism" of traditional welfare policy, stressed the reality of shrinking wage labor opportunities, and called for a new political Imagine - develop a politics around distribution (rather than production) based on citizens' rightful share of the nation's wealth. This article further discusses the past and future of distributive politics by introducing ancient Rome as a new historical analogy reference point.

Original author / James Ferguson (James Ferguson)
Original title / Proletarian Politics Today: On the Perils and Possibilities of Historical Analogy
Original post / Comparative Studies in Society and History 2019;61(1):4–22.
Translation / Edited by Peng Zhongyao / Ye Wei

Proletarian Politics Today: Dangers and Opportunities in Historical Analogies (Part 1)

02. A non-capitalist analogy for a capitalist society?

We cannot really think without analogies, because we always make sense of the new and the unfamiliar based on what we know about earlier events and pre-existing, already-familiar cases. Using historical analogies in a conscious and rigorous way can be both beneficial and fun. But it also imposes constraints and creates blind spots. Putting together our most used historical analogy (the proletariat as the emerging industrial wage labor class) with another less familiar one (the proletariat as propertyless citizens, dependent on vassal distribution and direct state subsidies), May help to better focus on these limitations and blind spots.

In this spirit, I propose here that many of the economic and social conditions of the urban poor of contemporary South Africa are characterized by a striking resemblance to that of the Roman proletariat, no more similar to that of the proletariat of nineteenth-century industrialized Europe. Similar little. But I should also point out that the unexpected conceptual relevance of ancient categories to contemporary developmental issues is not just about southern Africa. I'm not the first to notice this either.

No matter how they view the value of their specific assertions, many theorists have been drawing analogies between history and contemporary reality lately, and these analogies have disrupted some of the old progressive idea of a linear time view that we now seem to be "trapped" In time" (like Kurt Vonnegut's character, Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five), jumps chaotically and in isolation from one point to another. Thus, while we were once convinced of an orderly development (both historical and theoretical) in which Hegel leads to Marx as the past leads to the present; Žižek has recently proposed that it is It was Marx's conception of the proletariat that became increasingly incapable of capturing contemporary reality, but Hegel's thought of "the rabble" was becoming more and more realistic. In fact, he points out, "One could argue that the position of the 'universal rabble' perfectly captures the plight of today's new proletarians." Instead of being exploited as wage labor, "the rabble today is even deprived of the right to be exploited through work […]; as Hegel describes them, they sometimes express their needs as the need to survive without work….” (Žižek, 2012: 440). Speaking of Rome, Hart and Negri influentially describe emerging forms of contemporary global capitalism as "empires" - without appealing to any Marxist principles, of course, but explicitly referring to "[ancient] Rome The tradition of imperial power” as its foundation (2000: 10). Recently, Göran Therborn, the patriarch of sociological theory of class, wrote an introduction to the future of class in the 21st century, concluding that the "working class", once the dominant political force of the 20th century, is now important is rapidly declining, "the time [it] was seen as the future of social development...gone are the days" (2012). In fact, he points to the middle class organized around consumption, and the so-called "popular class" which he named "plebeian" with little explanation. (popular classes)". Meanwhile, another sociologist, Carlos Forment, proposed a concept he called "plebeian citizenship" to explain contemporary Buenos Aires local politics ( 2015). So what used to be the bottom categories of society, especially in ancient Rome, seems to be a strange kind of hard currency today. However, I think the theoretical tension here is not in the literal meaning of the question—whether the social categories of past times really apply to the present—but in the value of some strictly principled anachronism, which This anachronism shocks us, but will also help us move away from the conceptual categories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that still dominate the theoretical imagination .

Still, it's hard not to raise concerns that something fundamentally wrong is going on in the move to the ancient world. Because (whatever historical differences make one question the analogy between southern Africa today and England at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a crude analogy like Max Gluckman's), the fact remains that industrialized Europe was a capitalist society, And ancient Rome, despite what some others say, it wasn't. So should we, just because we already know a priori that the analogy does not "really" apply, should we abandon the analogy with the non-capitalist case? I think that thinking like this gives too much power to the naming operation, as if simply naming a social form "capitalism" already answers all the key analytical questions about how it works . Instead, I want to use another ancient form of proletarian politics that surprisingly resonates with the world today to show that, in fact, what is happening in southern Africa today is not just the development or unfolding of the capitalist mode of production.

Of course, the idea that the region's development is not just capitalist is an insight from old "modes of production" studies that are rooted in the central theoretical claim of "structural Marxism" of the 1970s that any practical What happens in social formations is always richer than in the structural model of a single mode of production. But even the most adept thinkers of "modes of production" argue that the non-capitalist elements contained within these complex structures are old and fading, while the capitalist elements are new and expanding. Likewise, Eric Hobsbawm (as I mentioned) insightfully sees the "lumpen" masses as a key driver of modern urban politics. But here again, the meta-narrative of the birth of the proletariat allows one to confidently attribute some social elements to the ancient past, while others are seen as pointing to the inevitable future. Let us recall the work of Hobsbawm I quoted earlier, titled "Primitive Rebels," which aims to identify - as the subtitle says - "the primordial Archaic Forms of Social Movement”. In this perspective, politics based on urban "mobs", or funding relationships, or the direct distribution of power, constituted primitive, evolutionarily "early" forms of political resistance, eventually replaced by fully modern insurgents, modern forms Substitute resistance, and eventually by organized and "conscious" working-class mobilization.

Current realities suggest that we need to learn to think about futures that are less well known and not confidently envisioned, and to consider the possibility that some non-capitalist elements—those old-fashioned habits of mind—will Classify it as an element of the past—which may in fact be new and emerging, rather than old, remnant ; thereby replacing the "expectations of modernity" that we have repeatedly played out (as I the name once given to them [Ferguson 1999]). We used to talk confidently about proletarianization, yet today, in many countries around the world, it seems that more and more people live neither on agriculture nor on wage labor. In many of these countries, as in ancient Rome, direct state distribution forms a central part of the material life of these social classes (in the form of cash transfers and other social payments, as I have analyzed elsewhere [Ferguson 2015]). And, as in Rome, the urban forms we encounter are driven not by industrialization but by the quest for distributional possibilities - not mining towns that thrive on production and industry, but rather like Lusaka or "Administrative" and "political" cities like Rwanda are not so much places of production as places of distribution and consumption.

As JK Gibson-Graham (1996) pointed out (in an article I keep referring to more than two decades ago), contemporary societies, whether in the global North or the South, , never outright "capitalist". Non-capitalist ways of life and production are all around us, they are not going away. In fact, if we measure the degree of capitalism of a society by wage labor (which I doubt Marx would agree with), then we must conclude that non-capitalist elements, at least in some parts of the world today , increasing, not decreasing .

Now let me clarify: "non-capitalist" is not the same as "good" here. After all, slavery was also non-capitalist, and neither Rome's outrageously hierarchical social structure nor its imperial militarism should invite imitation. But it is not time to cede the future to capitalism, when fewer and fewer people on the planet have the opportunity to become capitalists or wage laborers, and when more and more people have adapted to Michael In what Michael Denning (2010) calls "wageless life", we need new ways of understanding how proletarian politics work.

If what we understand by "proletarian politics" is not the politics of the working class, but the politics created by those without property and for those without property, then the real challenges and opportunities of proletarian politics in southern Africa today what is it? Nineteenth-century European analogies would say that this awaits the continued development and consolidation of the "true" working class that can consistently organize, protect its labor, form class-based political groups, and so on. The analogy would also emphasize that economic distribution and political forms unrelated to labor (such as patriarchy and patriarchy) belong to the past—the prehistory of capitalism, not its present, let alone the future. By contrast, the Roman analogy provides clues to other understandings. Here I summarize some of the possibilities for this analogy by listing five themes that emerge from my understanding of Roman material. For each theme, I point to a contemporary topic relevant to Southern Africa—perhaps even more broadly to the Global South; on these issues, perspectives from Rome may be instructive.

(1) The importance of direct state distribution as a source of livelihood and as a political strategy. Here, the contemporary reality in my mind is the recent massive expansion of state programs that provide direct cash transfers to the poorest citizens in the Global South. As I have mentioned elsewhere (Ferguson, 2015), these programs do not simply represent a belated attempt to replicate the northern welfare system, but operate on completely different assumptions and rationales. The welfare state system in the Global North revolves around the rise of the industrial working class, especially designed to provide some kind of insurance for the “family” of “workers” and their “dependents,” while the new programs of cash transfers sweeping the Global South There is no place for this "worker" image . Instead, they determined beneficiaries based on criteria unrelated to labor, including those familiar to the ancient Roman proletariat, namely citizenship, age and number of children. While 19th-century scripts of "proletarianization" struggled to understand this type of modern distributive politics, the Roman analogy pointed to a different way of understanding how subsistence and distribution patterns were organized in ways unrelated to wage labor .

(2) The centrality of door-customized vertical dependence between the poor and wealthy donors or donors, and the relative weakness and threats of labor-based horizontal organizations. Here I am referring to the continued prominence of the problem of attachment in the sociology of social assistance systems and unpaid communities in southern Africa and elsewhere. This is not to say that these issues are ignored by social scientists (hardly they are), but stubborn assumptions continue to interpret this alliance as either pathological ("dependence" in the dreaded social policy discourse) or backward (traditional and pre-modern "door-to-door" and "hereditary" systems, sadly contaminate good modern political forms—whether from class consciousness and class interests, or from rights-based democratic liberalism and "hereditary systems"). from the perspective of civil society”). Here, focusing on a more complex and historically deep political genealogy of the proletariat may help us to notice, and thereby suppress, these bootlegs from nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist narrative threads .

(3) The importance of the political and social responsibility of those who have property, which is rooted in what Weiner calls Euergetism (or duty to give) and, as he puts it, this related notion of wealth It is "a trust fund, an asset to which all members of the wider community have a share" (Veyne, 1990: 10). Here, I would like to point out that not-for-profit, donor-driven NGOs and philanthropic organizations are playing a growing role in many parts of the world. These institutions have achieved increasing influence on the political and social arena in much of the world, but their motivations and modes of operation are very different from capitalist corporations. In fact, their projects are difficult to understand from the necessity of capitalist production, and their "target groups" are usually neither workers nor customers, but "recipients". But if global economic figures like Bill Gates don't fit so well with Marx's image of a capitalist these days, perhaps we can try Paul Weiner's understanding of "the notable." The Romans certainly understood that the relentless pursuit of fame, recognition, and admiration by the rich and powerful was not outside of politics, but at the very heart of it.

(4) The idea of direct distribution can be justified by the premise that citizens of a large polity are entitled to share in the wealth that flows into that polity, regardless of their role in the production system. Here I am reminded of a very similar view currently prevailing in Southern Africa that poor citizens should and can also claim some ownership of the mineral wealth produced by "their" countries - which I have elsewhere referred to as The requirement is called “a rightful share” (Ferguson 2015). Progressive political mobilization in the northern world has long been based on labor demands, and the assertion that the value of wealth created by a society belongs, at least in part, to those who work hard to create it. But if large segments of the population are chronically excluded from opportunities for productive labor, many of the demands for the sharing of social goods and services must be advanced through other types of arguments . Here, the ancient Roman notion that even the dispossessed (the proletarian without property) owns something—as citizens themselves—sounds not at all ancient, but rather relevant.

(5) Finally, we may note that the widespread contemporary applicability of Roman forms of proletarian agency was rooted both in its urban presence and in the fears that such presence might evoke. Here, it is possible to identify connections with contemporary attempts to transcend the construction of citizenship as the basis for political and economic rights, and the possibility of extending the concept of "presence" and enabling new political identities and propositions (I have This idea has been briefly explored elsewhere [see Ferguson 2015, Conclusions]). In the simplest sense, the efficacy of "presence" does not consist in cessation of labor, but as a force that inhabits and sometimes destroys social space . For example, in the megacities of the Global South, the state has long subsidized basic food for those who may be involved in food riots or other criminal activities. More broadly, in the politics of such urban settings, the specific demands of the inhabitants (which Partha Chatterjee refers to as "denizens" rather than "citizens") for service provision and practical daily needs are often Stronger than 'civil society' claims of legal rights or trade unions' demands for an orderly economy (Chatterjee, 2006). To understand this "politics of the ruled" (as Chatterjee calls it), the Roman analogy may help us move beyond the nostalgic dream of a single-class subject defined by labor (a nostalgia implicitly defined by Marx's shaped by the 19th-century proletariat) and allow us to recall the very different ways in which the original (Roman) proletariat manifested its existence - not primarily through labor or political representation, but through physical presence and this presence. The vague fear that the place may awaken.

These clues, refracted by contemporary reality through the odd prism of ancient Rome, complement rather than replace those offered by other, more traditional historical analogies. But their connection to the actual situation of the proletariat in southern Africa is not much. They may also help us understand and appreciate political forms elsewhere that may be invisible or even contemptible under the filters of those more familiar analogies. As I have discussed elsewhere (Ferguson, 2015), for many, making claims based on labor is becoming increasingly impossible, and with it, new material support and a basis for socially recognized claims appearing . This includes things that the ancient Romans were all too familiar with - the political basis of citizenship and belonging, the (quasi) family and cosmic obligations of justice and honor, but also those completely foreign to them - social equality and the rights of the poor requirements.

in conclusion

Historical analogies, like any good metaphor, can take us to some interesting places. But as Ulf Hannerz once said, "Whenever one begins an intellectual journey with the aid of a metaphor, he must know where to get off" (1992:264). I have observed that users of the historical analogies discussed in this article sometimes have to be told where they should get off. Those who compare the Zambian miners of the mid-twentieth century to the British coal miners of two centuries earlier do not observe a natural, substantial identity category as they sometimes imagine (as if seeing both rocks as Quartz) - they're actually using a complex historical analogy. In some ways this analogy illustrates the problem well. However, if taken too literally, the same analogy is likely to lead to misunderstanding and confusion.

The same is true for other proletarian figures, even if the analogies are more explicit and conscious in their intentions, such as the Roman proletarian I cite here. Of course, we should not expect a rediscovery of the "primitive" meaning of the word "proletariat" to tell us in some way what the prevailing urban class is "really"; class” contemporary analytical issues—if these “working classes” often don’t even have jobs these days. But if we can focus on the dangers and opportunities that accompany historical analogies—that is, if we can both think analogically and remember to tell ourselves from time to time where we should stop—we might We will find it useful to develop our analogies elsewhere, outside the time and space of the classical analogies of history and sociology. Indeed, perhaps only by expanding the range of reference points from which we compare and imagine can we find our way to more fully understand proletarian politics today, as it exists, but perhaps not in our wishful thinking and nostalgia among.

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author

James Ferguson is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. His research focuses on Southern Africa, focusing on topics including the politics of 'development', rural-urban migration, the construction of space, urban culture in mining towns, the experience of modernity, the spatialisation of the state, 'Africa' in real and imagined worlds, and Ethnographic theory and politics, etc. Professor Ferguson's recent work has focused on direct cash payment programmes for the poor in the Global South.

translator

Peng Zhongyao, bullshit worker, East African gangster

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