Negotiations

I keep thinking about ideas and social justice--in particular about microcredit and the ways it makes me reassess the ways I've almost always thought about capitalism. My class identification's conflicted, but I've been largely at an intellectual impasse about it. At best I said: yup, I'm a contradiction. Doing: ok--give. But thinking through it--that was the hard part. Thinking through it. This whole visit's made me do that, indeed the entire reason we're here makes me think about globalization and capitalism in a way far more complex than: globalization=bad/local=good. But then, that's true of almost everything, when you get down to it. Binary oppositions foreclose any sort of complex analysis. And to be honest, I've never seriously pushed a critique of the easy critiques of globalization. Yes, many horrendous things have come out of it. That part seems easy. Further than that, though, I hadn't gone far.

I think one of the reasons that Yunnis's book (and by extension, the notion of microcredit and its larger implications) has stayed with me is the absolute practicality of the question it approaches: How do you help the people at the very bottom--the poorest people in any given capitalist society? In the academy, where Marxist/post-marxist thinking is most effective, the focus is on an analysis of capitalism, not the way to a socialist utopia. It's useful for analyzing how capitalism shapes how we think and understand the world, the means of cultural and material production and reproduction. The post in post-marxism comes in here: you can use these analytic tools to negotiate the system you are subjecting to critique. Marxism itself is often invoked to describe a economic/political system, and yet The Communist Manifesto is all about industrial capitalism. While I understand that the radical critique of any system that oppresses people often involves a divestment from that system, its a position that doesn't seem tenable to me. Capitalism, especially in its information based, globalized form, isn't going anywhere anytime soon-- in spite of the hopefulness of calling it "late capitalism." Complicating this are my observations being in a developing, third world country. There are some very very good things about modernization, that capitalism can, and has, brought about here: basic quality of life stuff. And yet, not for the poorest of the poor. The benefits are uneven--cruelly and fantastically so.

Ding's comment below has gotten me thinking again about negotiating class, or any other system of privilege (race, gender, sexuality) from below--how do you negotiate terms you didn't agree to and that don't benefit you from the get-go?

Obviously, I'm on the side of negotiations. The metaphors of war don't get you far. Chicanas are always already traitors--we come from a long line of vendidas, as Moraga would put it. The alternative is to negotiate:to do that, you have to learn the other side's language, the other side's rules. You become part of both sides, something new--classic new mestiza stuff.

I don't think, however, that anyone's used mestizaje, or a Chicana feminist methodology to think about how poor women might negotiate capitalism. As a model of transnational feminist consciousness yes, as a challenge to the canon, of course. But the jump from thinking to doing, that's where we need help. Poetry, art, culture, all of these offer a vision of change: but the doing--that still matters.

The thing is, you need to be in a position to negotiate in the first place.