Introduction: Creative Destruction, Destructive Creation
Ognjen Kojanic and Ana Flavia Badue
In Grundrisse, Karl Marx (1993: 750) conceptualizes violent destruction as a condition of capital’s self-preservation: as new organizational forms and technologies emerge, old ones need to be replaced. This process is an outcome of ‘bitter contradictions’, he writes. ‘These contradictions, of course, lead to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled [to go on] fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide’. The contradictions Marx has discussed are inherent to capitalism. In his analysis, he identifies the tendency of the rate of profit to fall at the same time that productivity and wealth increases as one of the key laws that define the circulation and reproduction of capital. To counter that tendency, capitalists need to tinker with the ratio of capital to living labour. They can extend the time they employ the labour power they purchase in order to expand absolute surplus value. But since the expansion of absolute surplus value quickly reaches its limits, they have to expand relative surplus value by investing in machinery or revolutionizing the labour process. Taking this into account, destruction appears as a systemic element of capitalism, visible not only in large-scale crises, but also in the everyday functioning of capitalist enterprises.
Joseph Schumpeter carries this conception further by positing that the revolutionization of the economic structure requires capitalist firms to unleash the ruinous energies of capitalism in the process of ‘creative destruction’. Schumpeter (1994: 31-32) emphasizes that ‘capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary…. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment. Any existing structure and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out. Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil’. Schumpeter took the destruction unleashed by capitalism as its productive and creative moments, while Marx understood the creation of new forms of accumulation as destructive.
Neither Schumpeter nor Marx expected capitalism to reproduce itself forever—the former ascribed capitalism’s upcoming undoing to its successes, the latter to its failures—but we have yet to see a broad-scale replacement of capitalism as the reigning economic system. We have, however, seen multiple crises since the time they wrote, which have brought about bouts of creative destruction that have spanned continents or even the whole planet. Crisis, instability, and destruction, therefore, are not unexpected outcomes of a capitalist system that is not working well, but conditions that enable capitalism’s continued survival. As David Harvey (2010: 71) put it, writing after the most recent crisis that had unfolded on a planetary scale, ‘crises are, in effect, not only inevitable but also necessary, since this is the only way in which balance can be restored and the internal contradictions of capital accumulation be at least temporarily resolved’. According to Harvey, large-scale crises of capitalism require abandoning some spaces of accumulation in favour of finding new outlets for capital to regain lost profit rates. The spatial mobility of capital depends on the solidification of credit systems that make it liquid and flexible to colonize new spaces and new enterprises. Consequently, new forms of colonization and imperialism emerge, reconfiguring political and economic geographies. Factories in Eastern Europe, infrastructural projects in the Middle East, and rural settings in Latin America are some of the spaces where the infusion of capital reshapes local social relations, at the same time that these local relations shape how capital can be deployed.
Like Harvey, various social scientists have taken up the notion of creative destruction to question the cycles of production and destruction under capitalist economies. Theorizing this process in the abstract requires one to focus on the way capital operates in society: the way political-economic incentives shape the behaviours of enterprises and individuals as the capitalist system as a whole continues on. Ethnographically, however, we can focus on smaller scales to trace the contradictions between creation and destruction that create disruptions in the lives of individuals and communities. Ethnographies of creative destruction reveal that contradictions appear in different moments, not only those of crisis. The underlying argument of the ethnographic pieces that compose this collection is that social phenomena are permeated by contradictory combinations of creative and destructive processes. Capitalism endures by absorbing mundane examples of creative and destructive processes into circuits of capital accumulation. These ethnographic cases show that such appropriation is silent, granular, as well as full of problems and obstacles.
Moreover, ethnographies enable us to describe and understand how the complex and variegated consequences of the destruction are, also, facilitators of capitalist circulation and accumulation. Ethnography offers us opportunities to theorize the lived experiences of the coexisting cycles of production and destruction by shedding light on everyday fluxes, flows, circuits, and micro-interactions that characterize capitalism and do not necessarily appear to conform to its logic at first glance. The ethnographic approach is also important for unravelling the lingering effects of destructive processes, as it enables us to conceptualize crisis and instability as ongoing, shapeshifting, and moving processes—not one-time-only events. In this sense, material and geographical ruins that are constantly produced constitute a major lens for conceptualizing the workings of capitalism and the creation of unevenness that it entails. As Dawdy (2010: 772) puts it, focusing on ruins and ruination reveals ‘the failures and impermanency of capitalism and the necessary poverty it engenders temporally or spatially, in contrast to its promises of ever-expanding flow and possibilities of social uplift’.
If the accelerated tempo of destruction under capitalism continuously alters the ways we interact with our lived environments, how can we theorize the instabilities and unevenness that permeate various objects and geographies? With this question in mind, the essays presented here focus on lifeworlds in a variety of ethnographic settings that stand at the intersections of decay and innovation, investment and deprivation, catching up and making do.
Ana Flavia Badue’s essay focuses on startups that aim to replicate Silicon Valley’s technologies business models in rural Brazil. By exploring how entrepreneurs develop digital and algorithmic devices with the expectation of provoking irreversible transformations in industrial farming, Badue argues that crises and destruction are converted by the Brazilian rural entrepreneurs into positive forms of accumulation and of modernization.
Ognjen Kojanic analyses the gradual replacement of machines in a worker-owned metalworking company in Croatia. Metalworking technologies of different generations coexist as necessary for production in this company. To understand why creative destruction operates in fits and starts, Kojanic argues that it is necessary both to situate the company within the workings of peripheral capitalism and to pay attention to ideas and practices of machine use in the company.
Turning to the coalfields of central Appalachia, Bradley Jones examines the economic and ecological forms that emerge from capitalism’s damaged landscapes. He treats creative destruction as a capacious analytic that can help us better understand ongoing processes of ruination and recovery, offering a window into worlds that capital has made, unmade, and which are being remade once more.
The commentary by Kedron Thomas parses out the term creative destruction. While attention to destruction is evident in many ethnographies, including the accounts in this collection, Thomas focuses on what creative means. How come creativity is discursively constructed as a capitalist trait and what are examples of creativity beyond it? If Schumpeterian discourse asks us to celebrate the creativity of entrepreneurs in capitalism, Thomas invites us to be mindful of alternative figurations of creativity, including in the examples analysed by Badue, Kojanic, and Jones.
Taken together, these essays reveal how capitalism is constantly re-crafted through the continuous production of scraps, disruptions, machinery replacement, and factory expansions. They show how anthropologists can contribute to the study of creative destruction by paying attention to uneven geographies, variegated outcomes for laborers, and the multi-scalar political-economic responses it engenders.
Acknowledgments
The idea for a collection of essays about creative destruction grew out of a panel at the Spring meeting of AES, ALLA, and ABA under the title ‘Ethnographic Futures’, held at Washington University in St. Louis, March 14-16, 2019. The panel, entitled ‘Crumbling Materials, Uneven Geographies: Destruction of Capitalism’, was organized by Hazal Corak. Earlier versions of the contributions by Ognjen Kojanic and Ana Badue were presented there.
References
Dawdy SL (2010) Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity. Current Anthropology 51(6): 761–793.
Harvey D (2010) The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Marx K (1993) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Schumpeter JA (1994) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Routledge.
Cite As
Ognjen Kojanic and Ana Flavia Badue (2020) 'Introduction: Creative Destruction, Destructive Creation', Anthropological Theory Commons.
url: http://www.at-commons.com/2020/02/21/introduction-creative-destruction-destructive-creation/
About the author(s)
Ognjen Kojanic is a PhD Candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. He is interested in the anthropology of political economy in Central and Eastern Europe. His research on ideas and practices of ownership in ITAS was generously supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the University of Pittsburgh European Studies Center. He recently published ‘“You Can't Weed Out Corruption”: Railway Workers' Assessments of the State in Post-Socialist Serbia’ in the Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Ana Flavia Badue is a PhD Candidate at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her work focuses on the creation of agricultural innovation ecosystems in Brazil, and how the relations between entrepreneurs, investors, and farmers affect the national political economy. She acknowledges and appreciates support from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. With Florbela Ribeiro, she recently published ‘Gendered redistribution and family debt: The ambiguities of a cash transfer program in Brazil’ in the journal Economic Anthropology.