Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction

A vagabond, as is well known, moves from place to place without a fixed home. However, vagabondage insinuates a little dissolution—an unsettled, irresponsible, and disreputable life, which indeed can be said of the globalization of capitalist production. This paper reframes the discussion on globalization through a materialist focus on social reproduction. By looking at the material social practices through which people reproduce themselves on a daily and generational basis and through which the social relations and material bases of capitalism are renewed—and the havoc wreaked on them by a putatively placeless capitalism—we can better expose both the costs of globalization and the connections between vastly different sites of production. Focusing on social reproduction allows us to address questions of the making, maintenance, and exploitation of a fluidly differentiated labor force, the productions (and destructions) of nature, and the means to create alternative geographies of opposition to globalized capitalism. I will draw on examples from the “First” and “Third Worlds” to argue that any politics that effectively counters capitalism's global imperative must confront the shifts in social reproduction that have accompanied and enabled it. Looking at the political‐economic, political‐ecological, and cultural aspects of social reproduction, I argue that there has been a rescaling of childhood and suggest a practical response that focuses on specific geographies of social reproduction. Reconnecting these geographies with those of production, both translocally and across geographic scale, begins to redress the losses suffered in the realm of social reproduction as a result of globalized capitalist production. The paper develops the notion of “topography” as a means of examining the intersecting effects and material consequences of globalized capitalist production. “Topography” offers a political logic that both recognizes the materiality of cultural and social difference and can help mobilize transnational and internationalist solidarities to counter the imperatives of globalization.     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WORKER PENSION FUNDS

Increasing concentration of economic power within the corporate sector, as well as the extent of corporate control by a few financial institutions such as commercial banks, have been subjects of intense scrutiny and debate in recent years. However, the role of private and public worker retirement trusts in providing power for institutional investors has not been adequately addressed. Pension fund assets, which were relatively inconsequential prior to 1960, and their investment in and share of total corporate equities minor, have grown to over $l410 billion by the end of 1977. In their analysis of and interest in public and private pension trusts, scholars, employers and even employees have tended to emphasize narrow economic issues such as investment performance. It is the central argument of this article that workers’ funds have become a major source of capital in the American economy, and as such have been used to help create and/or sustain practices that adversely impinge on workers themselves. It is argued that pension assets have contributed to: 1) the increasing power of financial institutions; 2) growth of corporate profits that only minimally benefit some pension plan participants; 3)capital shortages for 'socially useful’ investments; and 4)support of corporate enterprises that refuse basic worker demands including unionization itself. The study further suggests that the rapidly growing pension assets have the potential to serve‘the public interest’ as well as the needs of workers. Threat of withdrawal of funds from selected money managers and corporations, and utilization of share–holder voting rights to influence corporate policies can be potent weapons for organized labor. Since this is an exploratory analysis, the aim of the article is to gather, present and clarify basic information on worker pension trusts and to propose alternative avenues for future research in this critical area.     

"Testimonies from the Field": The Coming of Christian Science to Australia, c. 1890–1910*

The account of the coming of Christian Science to Australia given in this article is based on testimony contributed by early adherents to the two main church publications, The Christian Science Journal and the Christian Science Sentinel , supplemented by Church records and other sources. The first two decades are covered, from the earliest known intimations of interest to the death of Mary Baker Eddy in 1910, when a Christian Science presence in Australia was assured. Interest shown by writer Miles Franklin, and her association with Melbourne adherents such as leading feminist Vida Goldstein, provides the starting point. The focus is on positive responses. It is postulated that in addition to the documentary and expressive value of the testimonies, they point to problems of class and health in turn-of-the-century Australia. A preponderance of women in both the testimonies and the practice is evidenced, and the openness of progressive women to new approaches is noted. With reference to male testimony, it is suggested that further research into responses to American ways in religion by the urban midle class would be very valuable.     

Erotic Modesty: (Ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers,USA, 1800–1930

When middle–class women began to wear drawers in the early 1800s, they were feminised by fabric, ornamentation and an open crotch. Incorporating open drawers into respectable women’s dress within a framework of ‘passionlessness’ constructed female sexuality as both erotic and modest. Crotch construction figured in the twentieth–century struggle to establish modern boundaries of women’s sexual propriety. The accepted sexual and moral meanings generated by open– and closed–crotch undergarments reversed as women increasingly chose to wear closed drawers during a period of women’s greater public presence and feminist activism. The transition from open to closed drawers reveals not only the power of clothing as a medium of significance, but how women’s struggles for autonomy interact with resistant social forces to reconfigure gender distinctions.     

Bad elements: Katrina and the scoured landscape of social reproduction

Hurricane Katrina scoured the political economic landscape of New Orleans revealing the toll of decades of disinvestment in and ‘hostile privatism’ toward social reproduction in a city with corrosive inequalities around class, race, and gender. This piece addresses the failures of the state and capital around issues of social reproduction in the wake of Katrina, and gestures toward the sorts of activism these failures have called forth. Organized around five elements of social reproduction, including the environment and relief infrastructure, health care, education, housing, and social justice, the essay argues that the absence of these elements of the social wage both created conditions that made Katrina a disaster and thwarted response to the storm's social, economic, and physical destruction in New Orleans. The costs can be seen most obviously in the unevenness of neighborhood and infrastructural recovery, the difficulty of establishing a stable workforce of residents because of the lack of support for workers and their families which especially affects women and lone parents, and the deepening of various neoliberal tendencies toward privatization in education, health care, and housing. Examining the classed, gendered, and racialized nature of these issues, I will look at community based social movements working to redress this situation, and interrogate the underlying politics and policies – explicit and implicit – that have produced this situation.     

An Analysis of Arrow and String Bag Craft Variability in the Upper Sepik and Central New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper describes an analysis of relationships between language, geography and material culture in the upper Sepik region of New Guinea. We used Mantel tests and principal coordinate analysis to assess and compare the associations between arrow and string bag crafts and language and geographical distance. The Mantel tests resulted in a significant association between each class’ craft variability and both geographical distance and language, however, after statistical control was applied to either of the independent variables only a significant association with geographical distance remained. We argue that these results indicate craft techniques were readily disseminated and that craft distributions are unlikely to reflect any deeper historical relationships between groups. The spatial autocorrelation of arrow crafts was particularly great. A comparison of the principal coordinate analysis plots indicates a greater degree of diffusion and synthesis had taken place between lowland and highland arrow craft traditions. We conclude that the more intensive learning regimes needed to master string bag craft techniques, as well as a greater degree of interdependence between string bag components, had ensured more abrupt differences between bag types resulting in a more moderate degree of spatial autocorrelation.