Petty Capitalists and Globalization: Flexibility, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development

3. Movers and Fixers: Historical Forms of Exploitation and the Marketing of a Regional Economy in Spain

3 Movers and Fixers: Historical Forms of Exploitation and the Marketing of a Regional Economy in Spain Gavin Smith and Susana Narotzky The Problem Laid Out The most influential work being done on what might broadly be described as petty capitalism in the European Union (EU) is framed within a discourse of regional economies.1 Not only has a vast amount of literature now been produced on European regional economies and industrial districts, more importantly a major part of EU development policy is built upon the findings of this literature . In this chapter we attempt to demonstrate that this literature is superficial: superficial in its use of a neoclassical understanding of economy and society; superficial in its cursory and teleological use of history; and superficial in its use of “culture ” as an ontologically unexplained residual category employed to save what economic modeling and modernization sociology cannot account for. Following Karl Marx we believe that an historical realist understanding of regionally clustered yet rurally dispersed firm activity is more adequately explained by shifting away from the immediacy of the daily practices of small entrepreneurs in the economy and toward history and the obscuring of relations 45 of exploitation. We hope to show too how “culture” can become a deeply ideological and hence analytically misleading notion. In the past twenty years social science research on small-scale economic activity in Europe has increasingly been driven by the policy institutions who provide the vast majority of funds for this kind of research (Lovering 1999; MacLeod 2001). Policy institutions in turn are enmeshed in a neoliberal discourse that Colin Gordon has described in the following terms: “Work for the worker” means, according to the neo-liberals , the use of resources of skill, aptitude and competence which comprise the worker’s human capital, to obtain earnings which constitute the revenue on that capita. . . . From this point-of-view, then, the individual producer -consumer is in a novel sense not just an enterprise, but the entrepreneur of himself or herself. (1991:44, italics added) All that needs to be added to this observation, in the context of the regions, is that they too must become enterprises and the entrepreneurs of themselves: hence the instrumental use of the notion “local culture.” We will use greatly attenuated material from our forthcoming book (Narotzky and Smith) in order to argue for a quite different understanding of the “regional economy” that has been the object of our studies. We have been working in an area of Spain to the south of Alicante where a variety of consumer goods are produced through a system of dispersed production. These include carpets, nets and ropes, dolls, dolls clothing, and, above all, shoes. Firms running factories employing between 150 to 250 workers outsource jobs to rural-based workshops—often of dubious legal status—of 15 to 20 workers. Homeworkers, almost entirely women, but recently joined increasingly by men, take in work from both sources, and between them run a complex network of work-distributors . This, by the way, takes place in a rural setting of intensive and (up until some ten years ago) productive irrigated agriculture. Since Gavin Smith began doing research in this area (in 1978) these kinds of phenomena have come to be described as the social market (Bagnasco 1981), as an embedded economy (Granovetter 1985), or as a networked society (Law 1986). When these characteristics had some kind of spatial clustering, they came to be seen 46 Gavin Smith and Susana Narotzky as peculiarly regional economies. With the “Third Italy” (Bagnasco 1977) as the flagship model, these regionalist studies2 have had a profound effect on policy—to the extent that the European Union is committed to a development scheme that promotes economies with regional coherence. The area of Spain that we have been studying has been so identified. Yet by giving causal weight to present -day “cultural dispositions” in a region, or unique features of its social institutions, these studies forego a thorough engagement with social contradictions and historical processes. Giacomo Becattini for example writes, The system of values . . . constitutes one of the preliminary requirements for the development of a district, and one of the essential conditions of its reproduction. . . . This does not mean that there will be no clash of interests between the members of the district, or no perception of such clashes. Rather, they are experienced and defined in similar forms and within a framework of a...