SI SI 49007292 COLEGIO DE EDUCACION

In a recent essay James Ferguson (2013) has suggested that we re-examine our established preconceptions of personhood that rest on the presumably cross-cultural value of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency. He points to the somewhat

surprisingly common practice in post-apartheid South Africa where people are "openly pursuing a subordinate and dependent status"; and instead of resisting "hierarchical subordination" people are actively seeking it out (ibid: 224). The reason we look at such practices as disturbing leftovers of colonial mentality is to be found precisely in the history of anti-oppressive struggles in which we are invited to equate human dignity with autonomy and independence. Consequently, dependence, as it moves up the scale, becomes a process of dehumanization or degradation. The trouble with this view is that it rests upon a specific understanding of personhood in which authentic human beings are seen as holistic individuals who ought to be able to fully govern their own selves. In contrast he says, in many parts of Africa persons have historically never been

understood as monadic individuals, "but as nodes in systems of relationships" that are more often than not of an explicitly hierarchical nature. In other words, the person does not precede the relations of dependence in which she enters but is constituted by those

very relations. It is precisely through networks of dependence that one becomes incorporated into a social system within which one could be recognized as holding a valued social position, with opportunities for improving it (ibid: 227). Outside of such relations you are a “nobody”, a person of no consequence.

My analysis will show that the specific economic culture nurtured by socialism rests on a similar understanding of personhood. I will argue that what held the system together was not the successful internalization of the ideology of a workers’ democracy, but a complex web of interdependencies between workers, technocrats and the state within the framework of a redistributive "moral economy" geared towards the satisfaction of substantive human needs. Being part of this network meant being someone, or being recognized as a moral person in relation to others and with certain rights to make claims on those others. In other words, persons during socialism were not constituted as

monadic individuals but as “dividuals” which requires seeing persons as “constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them” (Strathern 1990: 13). Through their position within socialist firms and the moral economy of

redistribution workers were to a great extent able to operate on themselves by operating on others, whether co-workers or superiors in the form of managerial technocrats or party officials, and thus satisfy both their moral and material needs (Dunn 2004).

But it is precisely this kind of entanglement between the moral and the economic that was identified as an obstacle to post-socialist neoliberal reforms that sought to promote a new vision of the modern subject modelled on the image of the independent, risk taking entrepreneur. Macpherson has dubbed this specific kind of person the possessive

individual and argued that the historical emergence of such a notion of personhood “corresponds substantially to the actual relations of a market society” (1962: 3-4). Within the realm of the latter individuals are seen as “owners” of their person and

capacities, independent from any larger social or moral whole. Such an understanding of personhood is an important precondition for imagining a model of a society where individuals freely exchange their capacities (e.g. labour power) and possessions on the market.

The application of this model in post-socialist Macedonia however, has only tended to generate growing forms of inequality and precarity under the legitimizing veil of individualism. For example the rhetoric of individual responsibility has not only facilitated the withdrawal of the welfare state but is effectively deployed on the shop floor as a means of controlling labour. We might be tempted therefore to interpret the possessive individual, in Althusserian fashion, as an ideological subject category that recruits from the masses and reproduces the supply of labour for capital. The trouble with this approach is that, the “recruits”, more often than not, refuse to recognize themselves in that category when entering into relations with the new captains of industry. Moreover, not all of the labour released through the dispossession of the industrial commons enjoyed the prospects of reabsorption (particularly the old and “unskilled”), effectively reducing a great portion of the labouring population to what Li terms an unnecessary "surplus" to the requirements of capital accumulation (2009: 67). In other words, the privatization process did its utmost in "releasing" individuals from the shackles of a state controlled economy (the "webs of dependence") but it did not necessarily create the prospects of their re-absorption, and even when it did the integration took place on terms that were hardly acceptable for workers and are still being vigorously contested. Contra Althusser, we might say there were no “ready- made” subject categories at the end of the process, and that besides subjects, a whole class of people found themselves as superfluous abjects, with no value recognized by capital.

The question then is, what happens to dividual persons in the context of post-socialism marked by excessive labour surplus and suffused with a neoliberal commitment to the monadic individual as the very basis for the concept of the "free entrepreneur"? My own research suggests that as the economy took a turn towards “disembedding”, the newly unemployed found themselves in pursuit of new forms of dependence in order to

combat the prospects of remaining perilously unattached and unable to realize both their moral and economic needs. We can define these struggles, as Ferguson does, as

attempts to shift their relationship to powerful others from a kind of “asocial inequality” brought about by the impersonality of the marketplace (i.e. exchanging labour for cash and leaving it at that), towards a form of “social inequality” (i.e. an enduring

relationship in which the larger social and moral needs are also accounted for)

(Ferguson 2013: 233). This may appear as a dubious distinction considering that when we speak of inequality, however conceived, we are usually speaking of some kind of relation between groups or individuals. In other words we are speaking about relations between human beings that are by some definition always "social". This much is certainly true, but what Ferguson means by "asocial inequality" is not something that occurs outside the scope of human relations, but a specific kind of relationship between human beings who do not relate to each other as members of a binding moral

community (ibid: 233), i.e. where those who are dominated lack any social means to relate back to or make claims on the powerful.

Following from this, I suggest that workers’ struggles, insofar as they exist in

contemporary Macedonia, are not driven by the desire for autonomy but by a desire to become recognizable within some kind of imagined moral community. Such pursuits however differ in accordance with the way that workers interact with the needs of capital and their social position as it relates to differences in age, gender, education or

ethnicity. All of these factors open up different possibilities and limits to the pursuit of dependence by workers, who nonetheless share an underlying aversion to the arrival of homo-economicus. It is in these indeterminate struggles by people to contextualize and re-value themselves that we can look at the neoliberal transformation as a “productive” and “oppressive” at the same time.