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8 Regimes of Value and Worthlessness How Two Subaltern Stories Speak

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8 Regimes of Value and Worthlessness How Two Subaltern Stories Speak 8 Regimes of Value and Worthlessness How Two Subaltern Stories Speak Don Kalb In my earlier work on Poland and the Netherlands I have made extensive use of two longer life stories, one told by Maria van de Velde in Eindhoven, the other by Krisztof Zadrozny in Wroclaw. Against the background of other life interviews I held in these settings, those two exceptionally rich stories helped me to understand in more subtle and complex ways the antagonis- tic intimate experiences and immediate struggles that were characteristic of—but can never be “read off”—the historical dynamics of class in the places and times in which these histories were lived and narrated. These were working class stories grappling with the locally lived contradictions of the pre and high welfare state period in the Netherlands (1950–90), and the “transition” from “really existing socialism” to really existing capitalism in Poland (1985–2005), respectively. Both these stories expressed lives unfolding within the proverbially high- pressure relationships of export-oriented mass manufacturing in the light electrical sector. Perhaps more than any other industry, this particular sector, since it emerged in the late 19th century, has been emblematic of “emerging” and “catch up” regions. In this context of perceived local backwardness, it has been surrounded by hopes and ideologies of modernity, welfare, security and middle class consumption. However, in order to secure competitiveness, it often rooted itself deeply within local histories and relationships. In fact, more often than not, the relational logics embedded in those prior histo- ries were magnified, thus turning the promised modernity into an uncom- fortably lingering past. Despite its futuristic glamour, electrical production remained mostly based on a big component of low to middle skilled labor, often highly feminized, strong on kinship ties, weak on formal organization and by definition exposed to ruthless competition from emergent sites with even more exploitable proletariats in the making. I have never before, in any publication, set these stories in relation to each other. They were part of what I thought of as separate projects: one in Western Europe, which I carried out in the early 1990s, the other in post- socialist Eastern Europe (now called Central Europe) conducted in the late 90s and early 2000s. They were also part of apparently separate analyses. What could a socialist/post-socialist case study of industrial privatization DOI: 10.4324/9781315747804-8 124 Don Kalb and restructuring after the fall of the Wall have to do with a solidly capital- ist and Western story of female exploitation and urban-industrial patriarchy in the 1950s? Yet in retrospect the stories, while discontinuous in time and place, are closely implicated in each other and in ways that are, on closer scrutiny, of surprising contemporary anthropological significance. For one, the Whirlpool “white goods” manufacturing complex in Wro- claw, probably the biggest in the sector in contemporary Europe, was an indirect offspring of the Philips large domestic appliances’ sector once head- quartered in Eindhoven. Exposed to fierce competition from cheaper Italian manufacturers, in the 1970s Philips sought to move up the ladder of added value, and sold this typically “mid-tech” business to the Italians. Italian capital, similarly moving up in the 1990s, sold its mass-production inter- ests to the US-based Whirlpool. Whirlpool then became the holding around which the entire sector began to consolidate within a re-unified Europe. In 2002 it took over the “Polar” plant in Wroclaw, then one of the biggest in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), from a failing French investor, and made it the prime European production site for refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines and so on, marketed under various labels including the old Italian ones. Thus, apparently disconnected in time and territory, these were in fact different sites within one European/global rhythm of capital- ist accumulation, a rhythm deeply entangled with a particular combination of “low to middle tech” electronic technologies, consumer products and competitive markets. This was set in motion by capital of an increasingly oligopolistic and transnational nature, in the end traded on the Amsterdam and New York stock exchanges, and hence becoming thoroughly tuned into the global value regime. It is noteworthy that oligopoly in a sector as com- petitive as this one does not imply major curbs on market competition and hence a relaxation of pressures. Rather, it means that there is a small num- ber of hands-on actors who dictate these pressures. But what is most fascinating from the point of view of an anthropology of class is that both stories were narratively framed around what I gradu- ally came to understand as an involuntary and perhaps somewhat com- pulsive conversation, waged both intra-personally, privately and sometimes publicly—not necessarily with a steady voice—on value, or more precisely on personal worth and worthlessness. This alludes to an overwhelmingly urgent contemporary anthropological issue: the question of what is believed to generate value, the competing folk theories on value and its opposite (including those usually represented as “expert theories”), the proponents of those theories, and the struggle among them. While being very different stories about very different local relations, both addressed deep concerns about the possibility of lives being made worthless and hence devalued in the context of particular regimes of value and accumulation. Ideas of personal worth and worthlessness are in contemporary academic language often evoked through the lofty concept of “dignity”. Dignity is a key concept of Catholic-Christian social teaching and theology, as it is of other religions. The coupling of “cultural value” and “dignity” has Regimes of Value and Worthlessness 125 historically been offered, not only by conservatives, as a more wholesome and ethical rival to the liberal and Marxist notions of “value and interest”, rejecting the latter’s connotations of pragmatism, individualism, material- ism, conflict and struggle as supposedly inescapable facts of modern life. “Value and dignity” were also important notions within the ethical social- isms of Proudhon or Polanyi. The “protection of personal dignity” within mutuality is also a core idea of anarchism, which is presently being resur- rected among the anthropological Left. Although both my informants, were Catholic, one of them a schooled Catholic social activist, rather than using the Catholic vocabulary, they spontaneously coined their thoughts in this more down to earth language of “worth and worthlessness”, which seems a perhaps intentionally unstable hybrid of value theory and market-speak. While appreciative of the ethical foundations and prefigurative aims of these pre and non-Marxian approaches, I suggest that a more analytic and rela- tional understanding of the origins, meanings and functions of these two compulsive conversations on value and worthlessness might well take its cue from some Marxian reflections. Investment bankers these days often talk about themselves with a charac- teristic lack of modesty as “the discoverers and un-lockers of value”. They also speak freely about “high worth individuals”, the ones that magazines such as Forbes and Fortune report on. These are people with “heavenly bank-accounts”, as Frank Zappa would say. But beyond the dollars, the bankers’ notion of “high worth individuals” also suggests that these are people worthy of unrestricted attendance to their needs and wishes by the “discoverers of value”. Worthlessness, in contrast, is what describes, mostly in acerbic and strident tones, not only the bank accounts of the plebs but also, and often in the form of a resolute critique, the kind of social relations and practical moralities that are attributed to them: undependable, nonre- ciprocal, undeserving, volatile, lumpen, less than solid and with unpredict- able edges: scrap metal rather than gold. Terence Turner has reminded us recently that Marx built his critique of political economy not only on the labor theory of value, but in no less measure on a value theory of labor under capitalism (Turner 2005). Value under capitalism, Marx argued, was not measured by exchange prices on the market or the application of units of labor power, although the latter was certainly the ultimate source of all value. Rather, value in capitalism was realized only if and when products embodying the cost of “socially necessary labor time” plus the fixed and variable costs of the capitalist could actually be sold with a profit on the market. The value theory of labor demands that living labor can only be allowed to reproduce itself as “valu- able” living labor if it reciprocally allows capital a degree of exploitation and competitiveness that, in the end, does not compare unfavorably to the degree of exploitation and competitiveness realized elsewhere in the sys- tem. Thus, the value that investment bankers will claim to have discovered has already been produced. Marx used the example of the Yorkshire hand- loom weavers after the introduction of machine driven looms in Lancashire. 126 Don Kalb These machine looms doubled the productivity of labor in the area around Manchester. From now on, Marx argued, the value of the labor power of handloom weavers in Yorkshire was only half of what it used to be (Marx 1976: 125–31). It is this unrelenting value regime that is at the root of what Marx called “the dull compulsion” of market-enforced discipline. It is also the origin of alienation. However, as Marxist anthropologists know, market discipline and the resulting alienation are neither merely abstract categories nor are they always-anonymous forces weighing down invisibly but tangibly upon par- ticular working people. Under capitalism, sometimes very visible impostors are delegated to promote the further alienation of control over one’s life. Global regimes of value are often locally enacted with the help of visible financial actors, hands-on managerial power, local status and kinship hier- archies, national political elites, bureaucracies and legal protocols, etc.
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