Moroccan Households in the World Economy: Labor and Inequality in a Berber Village

6 GLOBALIZATION BEGINS AT HOME

145 6 Globalization Begins at Home H owever significant the dynamics of state-guided development discussed in the previous chapter, by far the most important contemporary interchange between Tadrar and the outside world is migration for wage labor. The ability to access wage-paying jobs in the plains and cities is becoming a crucial means by which the community of Tadrar is constituted, both locally in the mountains and in the broader sense; wages are ever more important in village life. In the last chapter Abdurrahman Ait Ben Ouchen was often a singular interface between the local economy of Tadrar and exogenous (ultimately state-controlled) resources; wage labor is far more diffuse, with many different families seeking money in different places, for different reasons, at different points in their domestic cycles, and with different results. The capitalist economy is volatile, fertile, and perilous, and its capacities are becoming vital to contradictory processes: the reconstitution of the traditional patriarchal order of the village, and its transformation, including the extension of the village community into the broader Moroccan sociogeographic context. This chapter thus ties the local sociopolitical dynamics of earlier chapters—beginning with households— into an argument about globalization. In essence, globalization, as I will use the term, is about interconnectedness , a particularly profound interconnectedness spawned by the global expansion of the economic system we call capitalism. That capitalism is necessarily global has been recognized since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, even if its origins can be traced much further back (Mielants 2007). A famous quote from the Communist Manifesto suggests that the business class must “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere,” must constantly grow to create a “universal inter-dependence of nations” if the system is to stay alive (Marx and Engels 1967, 83). Some { { 146  Moroccan Households in the World Economy have suggested that this capitalist dependence on growth leads to a condition of continuous “dynamic disequilibrium” (Desai 2002, 254), the productivity of the system grounded in “creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1976). But if it is clear why the capitalists are so energetic (they are seeking profits), what of the places where capitalism is expanding to, the viewpoints, motivations, actions, and reactions of people being globalized? The Liberal view’s most rosy assessment—or what in the United States is called the conservative position—is simply that capitalism offers a better deal than traditional social orders, and thus people choose it for rational, material reasons. There would seem a certain amount of evidence for this in Tadrar, as we will see. Slightly more ominously, however, some argue that capitalism is more productive, and thus outcompetes other forms of economic organization. This view emphasizes the destructive part of capitalist growth, but portrays it as necessary to the creativity and fecundity of the system. This too has some support in the village where I worked. And most pessimistically, scholars on the Left suggest that capitalist economic organization is foisted upon regular people by elites (both national and international) without regard to what regular folks really desire, or by manipulating desire such that folks are drawn into wage labor because they are mystified, because they do not understand their own best interests. I did not find people to be especially confused, but did find that wage labor was foisted on people rather than simply chosen. This last, most pessimistic view has elicited much scholarly attention from those interested in the marginal, pre- or newly capitalized world. Perhaps the most celebrated work on the victims of (or new participants in) globalization has been the work on “resistance” begun by James Scott (1985). In Weapons of the Weak, Scott argues that capitalism happens to regular people (the “weak”), but that they do not merely accept it or misunderstand what is happening. Scott thus criticizes an earlier Marxist position that viewed the peasantry as either mystified (i.e., unaware or uncaring that they were being dominated) or absolutely powerless. He showed that peasants in Malaysia understood very well that the Green Revolution, the arrival of capitalist farming methods and their accompanying forms of social organization, was a terrible deal for the poor. However, the poor did not fail to openly revolt because they were stupid or unaware, but rather because they very rationally calculated the likelihood of success. An open revolt was sure to be violently repressed, so peasants instead “resisted” the landlords through myriad acts of work slowdown, wasting time, and sabotage. Scott’s [3.138.122.4] Project MUSE (2024-04...