Between Inequality and Injustice: Dignity as a Motive for Mobilization During the Crisis

Abstract

Structural adjustment policies in Europe underscore the lack of sovereignty and responsibility of nation-states towards the wellbeing of their citizens. As a result, in popular mobilizations arguments of inequality and injustice, expressed in a demand for dignity, are intertwined. The article explores this shift away from older arguments of exploitation and domination. Using ethnographic material from an industrial town in Galicia (Spain), I analyze two apparently different types of mobilization that have emerged after the 2008 crisis, trying to understand what grievances and objectives pull people together. One is the local expression of new social movements; the other is the remaining expression of working class organization. Each of these models reinterprets a particular historical tradition of struggle while developing a new interpretation of the social objectives and subjectivities of the future. My hypothesis is that a 'moral economy' framework has superseded a 'political economy' framework in the motivation for struggle.

Political Economy Comes Home: On the Moral Economies of Housing

“…The increase in populist sentiments and reactionary rights that have fostered the return of right-wing movements across Europe and beyond (Kalb, 2009;Kalb, 2011;Edwards et al, 2017) can also be understood through the notion of moral economy (Hann, 2010). Narotzky (2016) what structural inequalities they link up with. This special issue is a first step in this direction.…”

Les déterminants sociaux du sentiment d’injustice fiscale

“…Dans un monde populaire où le travail constitue de longue date une valeur cardinale, l'impôt apparaît de plus en plus comme un obstacle posé par les gouvernants à la jouissance d'une activité rémunérée. La notion même de prélèvement est associée à l'« assistanat », par opposition au travail considéré comme le moyen d'accéder à une certaine dignité (Narotzky, 2016). Pour les plus touchés par la crise, l'accès au travail indépendant apparaît comme une issue possible, mais cette perspective de promotion suppose de s'approprier un discours stigmatisant le « trop plein de charges et de prélèvements » 6 .…”

Introduction

“…What is more, current anthropology, and especially so a Marxian anthropology, in its active contribution is critical about relegating debates about 1968 to an ill-defi ned nostalgia (Baca 2018). Instead, there is a serious engagement with the many actors searching for new pathways toward agency and effi ciency in overcoming capitalist exploitation and its various manifestations in global warring and escalating inequalities (Carrier and Kalb 2015;Narotzky 2016;Reyna 2016). Another anniversary, the 2017 centenary of the Russian Revolution, has received far too little attention.…”

“…One of several contemporary currents that emerge from Marx and stand out in anthropological debates is the notion of primitive accumulation and the related concept of accumulation by dispossession (Franquesa 2016;Hirslund 2016;Kaminer 2015;Narotzky 2016;Nonini 2015;Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2016;Salemink and Rasmussen 2016). In this regard, it is paramount to note that Marx's chapter on "Th e Original Accumulation of Capital" in the fi rst volume of Das Kapital presents this as a multilinear evolution from the end of the fourteenth century onward, a combined and uneven development driven in part by the growing demand for wool on international markets that increased wool prices and thus motivated the British gentry to expropriate dependent smallholder farmers from their lands and turn these into pastures.…”