This collection of essays thematizes ‘creative destruction’, a phrase coined by Karl Marx and popularized by Joseph Schumpeter (1994) in his seminal work on the promises of capitalist entrepreneurship. Destruction, the second term in this felicitous formulation, does not need much description or discussion here. As evidenced in the introductory essay, we have robust vocabularies and analytic frames for dealing with capitalist ruins. Environmental degradations, diminished livelihoods, toxic landscapes, sick bodies, crumbling buildings, neocolonial exploitations, racisms, and inequalities are centered in contemporary ethnography to the point that some anthropologists lament that the discipline is such a downer¹. That life is truly difficult and the planet in crisis does not seem to be the fault of anthropology, however. And in conversations around infrastructure, precarity, political ecology, and the Anthropocene, anthropologists maintain a critical eye on the destructive forces of capitalism.

Creative, the other term invoked in the collection’s focal phrase, needs some critical explication.  It receives much less attention in anthropology than does ‘destruction’, in spite of the important cultural work that notions and practices of creativity perform across social contexts, and especially in contemporary state-market systems. Ana Flavia Badue’s contribution to the collection highlights this kind of cultural work. The idea of creativity, she writes, has been packaged and sold by U.S. business schools in the guise of ‘radical disruption’. The Brazilian entrepreneurs with whom she has carried out research return home from MBA programs at top-ranked U.S. universities having taken classes and completed trainings on creative, disruptive, and innovative thinking and planning. Creativity is a commodity in this educational economy, and an international, elite, entrepreneurial class buys into it as an acquired and special skill, a virtuous practice, and even a sort of religious commitment whose enactment promises market pay offs and messianic modernity arrivals.

What is most interesting to me about Badue’s case study is how capitalism and creativity are collapsed into a single frame in this rhetoric of ‘radical disruption’, as if radical ideas, disruptive action, and real innovation could not happen outside of a capitalist market economy and would not happen if not for the profit motive. This is Schumpeter’s principle legacy. The tethering of creativity to capitalism is a powerful ideological discourse that continues to underwrite a global political economy oriented toward expanding capitalism’s reach in the name of advancing progress. Creativity carries positive valences and implies something new and better. It should be fostered and fed, so it is said. Entrepreneurship and enterprise. Intellectual property and cultural novelty. Positive futurism. Onward and upward. Destruction is worth it.

In Marx’s formulation of ‘creative destruction’, approbative connotations surrounding creativity only add to the tragic irony of the capitalist condition. Recall that, for Marx, industrial capitalism has reduced our productive capacities—including not only our manual abilities but also our creative drives—to a commodity form (labour), such that the only kind of creativity that has real value within a totalizing market system is that which serves to generate wealth. Thus, from a Marxian perspective, Schumpeter’s conflation of creativity with the business activities of capitalist and professional classes reflects a broader subsuming of all human action to market values, needs, and goals. Bradley Jones’s contribution to this collection nicely illustrates this ideological capture-point around creativity. In the ruins of the U.S. coal industry, he writes, venture capitalists turn sheared off mountaintops, high unemployment rates, and failing food systems into an agro-industrial fantasy-scape of super sustainable greenhouse gardens, rural revitalizations, and returns on speculative investment. The cyclical booms and busts of a capitalist market permit a reconfiguration of capital and labour that is touted as ‘creative’, innovative, problem-solving, and progressive, not because it addresses the problem of perpetual crisis but because it offers opportunities for wealth creation.

Creative destruction. Radical disruption. Everyone wins. But, like Marx, we’re suspicious. Surely, there is more to creativity than the generation of wealth. There are more values than that of accumulation. There must be creativity outside of capitalism, and there must be non-capitalist creativities within it. Understanding creativity as a combinatory process—involving aspects of imitation, mimicry, interaction, ingenuity, and invention—to which people ascribe value and through which social life and material culture are transformed (Rosaldo et al., 1993: 5; see also Thomas, 2016), anthropologists are well-positioned to analyze, engage, and contribute to its diverse enactments and productions. Where in these essays do we detect modes of creativity and resulting ‘economic, social, and technological forms’, as Jones puts it, that are not completely captured by or caught up in capitalist market systems?

In the part of central Appalachia where Jones has done research, he tells us, a local newspaper is rescued and relaunched as a collective, community-centered endeavor. It might not last, say the townspeople, but they did what they could do, and in the process, generated a forum that foregrounds engagement and collaboration. Jones does not characterize this productive effort as an act of overt resistance to capitalist hegemony. It is not a radical disruption of the multinational media conglomerates that continue to pipe dominant narratives into the region. But it does reconfigure resources and control for goals beyond profit and open up an avenue for different kinds of stories and different kinds of storytelling—creativity and creative potential that is not, perhaps cannot, be subsumed to market needs and values.

Ognjen Kojanic writes about another collective—a worker-owned, Croatian factory also on the verge of collapse. Some of the workers refuse to give in. They cling to the old, even lugging worn out machines to their homes to avoid seeing them scrapped. Their actions are irrational from the standpoint of capitalist creativity chronicles. Why resist innovation? Are they so caught up in an outdated culture of communism that they cannot perceive the benefits of entrepreneurial advances? Such culturalist explanations pervade the business schools where Badue’s interlocuters are interpellated as entrepreneurs. A less cultural anthropology urges attention to the creative ways that Croatian workers are making the most of the means of production. Their commitments to maintenance and repair perhaps signal that—amidst degradations, ruinations, and precarities—the world is in need of skilled and careful upkeep, a slowed down sustainability practice that calls into question superimposed visions of greenhouse gardens and computerized calibrations.

In communist Yugoslavia, Kojanic recounts, factories primarily supported reinvestments in the social welfare. In capitalist Croatia, industrial assemblages afford multiple and contested visions of the national future. The machines and people that populate the factory where Kojanic carried out research are caught up in contingent relationships, and although the general bent of the factory is toward the accumulation of capital, the employees’ productive efforts sometimes support recalcitrant forms of community and permit different socio-material arrangements to unfold.

Creativity is not just capitalist. And Badue, Jones, and Kojanic advance an anthropology that does not concede innovation to business schools nor conflate production with the generation of wealth. Attuned to how capitalist market systems attempt at every turn to commoditize creativity and financialize its nonmonetary forms of value, these authors expound a set of social, aesthetic, and political impulses, movements, and potentials that belie or resist such a ‘conversion’ process (Bear et al., 2015). Alongside related ethnographic tales of persistence and ongoing emergence amidst capitalist destruction—stories about the fecundity of indeterminate life (Tsing, 2015) or the making of unfamiliar kin (Haraway, 2016), for example—this collection inspires robust consideration of the multiple and diverse creativities that endure against the odds.

Endnotes

1. I refer to the much-discussed calls from Joel Robbins (2013) and others for an ‘anthropology of the good’, a more hopeful (or, at the least, less dour) mode of ethnographic narrative and analysis. [↩]

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