Deborah James

Post-Marx, social scientists have tended to define ‘labour’ as working for others in return for a wage rather than as a harmonious Durkheimian-style interdependency. This mini-review of recent anthropological literature considers whether, in a world where the ‘standard employment contract’ is dwindling and many are out of work, ‘division of labour’ has any continuing relevance. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Division of labour as key driver of social evolution’.

This chapter draws on a study of advice encounters in the UK and South Africa to explore two apparently contradictory facets of comparison. In the everyday life of such encounters, because advisors start from the generalized grid and recipients start from specific practices that appear as unique, comparison pushes them in different directions. There are forces – here tagged as ‘principles’ – that propel some towards abstraction and generalization, just as there are other forces – glossed as ‘pragmatics’ – that propel others towards particularism or even incline them to refuse all comparison. But each of these tendencies represents a pole in an unrealized binary: fully general, abstract comparisons are always undermined, in the end, by the compelling nature of particulars, of difference and incommensurability; just as particularism is impossible to maintain in the face of the forces that drive towards abstraction. Thus, the two tendencies – in advice encounters as in anthropology itself – interact in often paradoxical ways, and the stark binary collapses back into hybrids. The chapter, as an ethnographic account of these opposing forces in two distinct settings, also reveals the relations of inequality and exploitation that are in play and gives an account of attempts, during the advice encounter, to mitigate or ameliorate those relations. It is a comparison of comparisons structured in and around unequal exchanges of the kind that result from (and that in turn intensify) status and wealth differentials such as those of creditor vs debtor.

This introduction to our special issue addresses scholars’ failure, in recent times, to consider and analyse the forms of capitalism that have developed on the African continent. To redress the balance, it takes up the study of economic arrangements on the continent – property, infrastructure, debt, financialization, regulation – as well as exploring the history and politics of the scholarly field of African economics as an intellectual and institutional project. In the process it considers the advantages (and drawbacks) of seeing Africa as part of the ‘Global South’. Central to the special issue is the question of how to marry an analysis of intimate and smaller-scale economies centred on household, family and (often informal) labour regimes, on the one hand, with a recognition of large-scale processes such as the central banking systems imposed by states, the increasing prevalence of high-tech finance, the emergence of continent-wide regulation, and the influence of multilateral development agencies and the international publishing industry, on the other. How, we ask, can the importance of these institutions, so unlike in size and scale, be reckoned without assuming that the bigger and more powerful ones always prevail?

This paper explores how, in countries in the global south where sharp rises in indebtedness have accompanied the financialization of the economy, debt factors into other relationships and meanings in the life of the family and household. Using ethnographic material from South Africa, it explores local concepts of householding, obligation and saving (asking whether relations of commodified debt nullify those of longstanding social commitment), investigates how people convert between cash-based or short-term imperatives and moral or longer-term ones, and shows how barriers are sometimes erected between these separate spheres thus making them incommensurable. The paper challenges some accounts of the ‘financialization of daily life’ which imply a one-way, top-down intrusion by the market – with state backing – into people’s intimate relations, commitments and aspirations, and maintains that we need to explore the complicity of participants’ engagement with these processes rather than seeing them as imposed on unwilling victims.

The central premise of this article can hardly be questioned: that the theoretical discussion of reproductive labor is “unfinished.” Whether one calls it unpaid work, unfree labor, care, or social reproduction, the topic seems increasingly to demand (and increasingly receive) more attention. This seems to be ever more the case as we move ever further away from the decades when the postwar consensus, established especially in Northern European countries, held sway. The imposition, by various regimes, of harsh austerity measures on their populations also makes this a key scholarly concern. Jan Newberry and Rachel Rosen’s contention that much of the burden of such work is increasingly taken up by women also seems well taken, if uncontroversial. Their observations about “familialization” and the “re-traditionalizing” of certain aspects of reproduction squares with the claim by Wendy Brown that women’s work intensifies under neoliberal capitalism, as states withdraw the provision of facilities for those who “cannot be responsible for themselves”; and indeed that women—in the face of the disappearance of the necessary infrastructure—become that infrastructure (2015: 105). If we add financialized debt into the mix, such points also echo the findings of scholars in diverse settings who have shown that women are frequently prime targets for microfinance and other kinds of moneylending (Guérin 2019; Han 2012; Kar 2018). But it is at the point that children and issues of temporality are added into an already heady theoretical brew that I find myself parting company with the vision of the authors.

Contemporary attempts to govern ‘the state of the welfare state’ are as much about moral endeavours as they are about political and economic imperatives. Such is the argument put forward in this Introduction, which focuses on the work that advisers perform in settings of austerity across Europe. Advisers are often the last call for help for their clients/dependents who find themselves increasingly at the mercy of local authorities, immigration regimes, landlords, banks and debt collection agencies. But competing visions of moral worth and social justice continue to permeate the everyday deliberations of those who administer, support and advocate advice. Struggles and dilemmas over how best to provide assistance and balance individuals’ moral judgments against the collective good frequently occur. We explore both the dovetailing of and divergence between domains and roles, in disrupting as well as reproducing dominant logics of extraction and accumulation.

Under UK austerity, people are obliged to pay up: either to the market (those with debt to commercial creditors) or the state (for those receiving welfare benefits – a person may owe the local council or tax office because she is in arrears or was ‘overpaid’). Seeking clarification or counsel from advisers means entering a world where payments often seem to be automated and where the state is ‘giving with one hand and taking away with the other’. Yet payments have a human, even moral/ethical aspect and must be negotiated. The adviser helps the debtor to close the flood gates through which these payments flow, or temporarily to reduce the cascade to a trickle. Under austerity, with legal aid and other funding withdrawn, the advice sector is performing the government’s work of care. Agencies must identify new wellsprings of care and concern, or intensify the demands placed upon existing ones.