Moral Economies, Occult Economies

What does economics have to do with rationality?

from Das Kapital, volume one, chapter one, section four - Marx (1867)
There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

It may be the case that objects that were called 'fetishes' may now be labelled 'power objects'
- why do things with low use value have great market value? e.g. gold
- Smith - invisible hand of the market: it is self-governing
- once objects have become alienated from their producer, they produce social relations of their own

Gambling as a moral economy issue
- in America, casinos are only found in the state of Nevada
- whereas there are bookmakers on every high street in England

Other examples of moral economy issues
- women selling their ova
- Islamic prohibition on interest
- transnational adoption

Zombie planattions in Cameroon
- emerging elites have made wealth through imported witchcraft
- witches eat the soul of people who have died and are then enslaved on plantations (akin to slavery?)

Ralph Austen (1970s) The Moral Economy of Witchcraft
- zero-sum: a situation in which a participant's loss or gain is exactly balanced by the loss and gains of the other participant(s), i.e. a person can win if another loses
- witchcraft (as in the case of Cameroon above) was not borne from remnants of colonialism but a consequence of capitalism, for it was believed that a person could only be exceptionally successful if they employed witchcraft. Thus greed was a marker of a person being a witch.
- in Melanesia, greed and success is regarded as inhuman, so entrepreneurs will be brought down by witchcraft/robbery to bring them back into line because they had risen above their rivals and connections. This makes wealth impossible to achieve.

Ok Tedi river in PNG
- not much smaller than Amazon and was the most valuable water source for life in the region was destroyed by mining
- the mountain, where ancestral spirits were believed to reside, was also abolished
- the mining company was then regarded as witches