National capitalism, unhinged

Keith Hart's magisterial, eclectic essay “The Rise and Fall of National Capitalism” takes on a dizzying array of topics, from the nature of money to the concept of the nation to the tension between “shareholder value” and “corporate social responsibility” to the mutual admiration society of celebrities, economists, politicians, and journalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The essay must be read as part of Hart's project over the past few years of synthesizing his past work and conveying through multiple publications, venues, and media his universalist, humanist view, which is above all against parochialism in all its forms (including the disciplinary parochialism of economic anthropology and anthropology more broadly) to meet the exigencies of the current moment—a moment centuries in the making.

He has approached this task in several ways, recently and emblematically in the publication of his book Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes (Hart, 2022), which he described at the launch at the London School of Economics as an attempt to realize the poles of individual and society as a dynamic yet integrated whole (Hart, 2023).

Hart's universalist vision, and his Gramscian blend of “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will,”¹ takes form in this essay of an account of ways in which, since the middle of the nineteenth century, the nation-state as an ideological and institutional form has acted as a more or less functioning stage manager for a particular phase of capitalism that Hart terms “national capitalism.” This phase, through a bewildering series of forces, but perhaps especially changing technologies and politics surrounding money and its particular currency forms, is now drawing to a close, with no clear sense of what is to come.

What is to come is not yet completely clear, in Hart's view, partly because, as he says in the second paragraph, “folk models lag behind world history in the making” and partly because most people are trapped within narrow understandings of their identity, circumstances, interests, desires, sectors, academic and nonacademic fields and disciplines, and so on. The essay is diagnostic: it seeks to provide a heuristic, temporal frame to unite and make sense of disparate happenings and phenomena. It is also hortatory: “Humanity,” says Hart, “is sleepwalking into what could be a terminal disaster,” and this essay is meant to be an alarm clock.

There are many paths to follow in this essay; I will focus on just three: temporal choices, materials and money, and what kinds of politics is called for in response.

Hart's essay relies on timelines. He identifies several key switch points in the past 150 years, including the consolidation of “national capitalism” in the 1860s, the first span of “financial imperialism” from the 1880s to 1914, and the second from the late 1970s–1980s to the present (although the key conjuncture inaugurating this latest phase seems to be the end of dollar–gold convertibility and the Bretton Woods pact of 1971).

Hart's strategy is to gather together diverse events into clusters or junctions where their force intensifies and crosses over one to another. Seeing history in this way helps to fortify Hart's position that such points of junction and intensification cannot be clearly apprehended in the moment.

Yet he asserts strongly that “it is all coming unstuck now.” What, then, is “now,” and how would we know? Hart points to a few signs—the intensification of inequality, the rise of digital finance, xenophobia as a kind of riptide as the nation as a political and economic form retreats. But are these the key points that draw the curtain over a phase or epoch, and not others? And again, how would we know, especially as we seem to be lurching from millennial crisis to crisis with ever increasing velocity?

Much of Hart's work has focused on theorizations of money. He has contributed important concepts to the anthropology of money, such as money as the meeting ground of state and market, iconized by “heads or tails” (Hart, 1986), and money as a “memory bank” (Hart, 2000). He draws on both of these insights in this discussion and extends them in his consideration of the relationship between currencies thought to be “national,” now strained to breaking point, and undercut by the fluidity and speed of digital communications.

By his own account, Hart takes a Simmelian view of the development of money from substance to abstraction and argues that “the shift to immaterial money [has been] speeded up by the digital revolution in communications,” linking this shift to the “volatility of identity” and economies based on “hierarchies of abstract value.” This line of argument is persuasive, even revelatory—and it is also incomplete. Although there is some explanatory leverage in describing these changes as “immaterial” and “abstract,” the digital world is material, if by that term we mean things like moving objects in the world, creating effects that can be touched, seen, and tasted, that change the physical environment, and so on (Beunza et al., 2006; Starosielski, 2015). And pace Simmel's (1950) argument about money as the “frightful leveler” (414), money and finance are still specific, embedded, and incommensurate in many ways (Zelizer, 1995).

The fiber-optic cables necessary for high-frequency trading were laid by drilling through the Allegheny Mountains, giving “sharp economic significance to spatial location and to physical phenomena” (MacKenzie et al., 2012, 279). The coming transition to a post–fossil fuel economy will require unprecedented extraction of copper, coltan, and rare earth minerals (Bebbington, 2023). Half the gold ever mined has been mined since 1971, the year dollar–gold convertibility ended and the world financial system purportedly took a giant step toward immateriality (Ferry, unpublished manuscript, 2023).²

These diverse instances go to show that the decline of tangible and specific dimensions and effects in the economy has been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the materiality of purportedly immaterial money and finance plays a key part in the transitions that Hart describes. Incorporating the stubborn materiality of financial imperialism more fully into his argument would also bring in the environmental dimensions that seem so central to the transitions he describes, yet are only glancingly mentioned in the essay.

Hart ends the essay with a gesture toward the “multitude of networked ‘alter-globalization’ movements inspired by the 2001 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre” and then states, as his final words, “I think of myself as political, but as a writer and teacher, not a politician.” I read this as at least partly tongue-in-cheek, because Hart clearly thinks that teaching is one of the highest political acts one can undertake. But given Hart's dire diagnosis of our current predicament, the reader might reasonably wait for more detail on the kinds of movements and—even more—the ways in which these might act on a large enough scale to avert or perhaps even only to mitigate “the coming depression and world war.”

Hart's essay simultaneously makes temporal, conceptual, and political arguments. As an essay, for me, for the most part, it works. I am drawn into the conjunctural fields he sketches out, ambitious as they are. Indeed, I am left wanting more: more on his choices for periodization, more materials in his conceptualization of money and its role in financial imperialism and the fall of national capitalism, more concrete counterpolitics (Smith, 2014) in the face of this moment, as it “is all coming unstuck.” Then again, this state of wanting more might be the very effect Hart is aiming for—as we teeter on the edge of an unhinging future.