They F**k You Up Those Social Capitalists

Ben Fine
Department of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, UK; bf@soas.ac.uk

The current intellectual climate marks a dual retreat from the extremes of neoliberalism and postmodernism. The rise of globalisation and social capital across the social sciences is stunning evidence. One attempts to deal with contemporary realities at the international level, the other at national or nether regions, but neer the twain shall meet. In raising the virtues of civil society to pedestal status, social capital has studiously ignored questions of power, conflict, the elite and the systemic imperatives of (contemporary) capitalism. Though fundamentally flawed as a concept, and equally flexible as the global financial system that it takes as metaphor, globalisation cannot be so indicted. Social capitalists do not demonstrate at Seattle. Social capital has eight critical features. First, its attraction derives from its scope of application and capacity to draw uncritically on any handy analysis. Robert Putnam has suggested Marx as social capitalist for exhorting workers of the world to unite. Even the workingmans curse, the pub, is social capital, since television-watching in public is good compared to a sack of couch potatoes. And, policy-wise, social capital is wide-ranging, able to complement economic with social engineeringthe principle of self-help raised from the individual to some collective level of community. Second, social capital is definitionally elusive. More variables are included, from horizontal to vertical, from bonding to bridging to linking, from social values to networks and associations, and so on to its dark, negative or perverse side, as in the Mafia, fascists, exploitation of family labour, and so on. Whilst this ought to render social capital subject to collapse under the weight of its own inconsistencies, exactly the opposite prevails. It absorbs any criticism by the refinement of adding another variable or ten. Third, social capital has a gargantuan appetite. It explains everything from individuals to societies (the global apart)the sick, the poor, the criminal, the corrupt, the (dys)functional family, schooling,
2002 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

They F**k You Up Those Social Capitalists

797

community life, work and organisation, democracy and governance, collective action, transitional societies, intangible assets or any aspect of social, cultural and economic performance across time and place. All can participate from their own perspectivefrom scholars to the wider community of activists, politicians and media gurus. Fourth, although the radical Pierre Bourdieu is a (decreasingly) acknowledged founder of social capital, the critical aspects of his contributions have been excised in deference to the tamer versions of James Coleman, rational-choice sociologist, and Putnam, social capitals most ardent populariser and reputedly the single most cited author across the social sciences in the 1990s. Bourdieu emphasises the social construction of social capital (what it means and how it relates to practices), and that it is irreducibly attached to class stratification and the exercise of economic and other forms of exploitation. Significantly, the functional approaches to social capital attached to the founding empirical studies of Coleman and PutnamCatholic community as a positive influence on schooling outcomes and the incidence and impact of associational activity on differential regional development in Italy, respectivelyhave both been shown to be questionable. False empirical observation gives rise to theory that subsequently takes on a life of its own. Such are the shaky foundations for the evolving knowledge attached to social capital. Thus, the attraction of social capital derives less from the unconsciously scurrilous scholarship of its founders and more from their having tapped the intellectual nerve of social theory at the turn of the millennium. Social capitalists continue to neglect the foothills of the criticism (they occupy the mountains) that has been raised against themexcept to add another variable or application, or fifty. Fifth, with a wish for renewed confrontation with the real, by its very name, social capital appears to get to grips with both the social and capital. Not true. For the terminology social capital demonstrates its weaknesses. That social is attached to capital to mark a distinct category is indicative of the failure to understand capital as social in its economic, putatively nonsocial form. What is adopted with use of capital, especially with the physicalist overtones attached to mainstream economics, is the failure to incorporate the most important insight for social theory to be derived from postmodernism: that concepts need to be historically and socially grounded. In this vein, universal concepts such as social capital would be banished and beyond rescue by appeal to historical and social context as path-dependence, influence of other factors, initial conditions or multiple equilibria. Sixth, as social capital is ahistorical and asocial, so it is complicit with mainstream economics and its new information-theoretic microfoundations. Developments within and around economics on this basis have allowed it to understand both the economic and the noneconomic

798

Antipode

as the consequence of market imperfections. Consequently, economics is colonising the other social sciences as never before, with an as if market imperfection world as opposed to the as if market perfection world that previously proved a colonising tool of significant, if limited, impact. Not surprisingly, social capital has proved attractive to some mainstream economists in such endeavours. For economists, social capital is simply everything else after other more traditional forms of capital have been taken into account, with these understood as physical, natural, financial or human. Becker, of humancapital infamy, was the first major economist to popularise social capital, having long collaborated with Coleman at Chicago. The effect is to add the social to an otherwise unchallenged orthodox economic analysis, albeit one based on market imperfections. This ludicrous posture is at its most extreme with mainstream economics. For it, capital is a physical or other asset that ultimately provides a stream of utility to individuals, a universal, ahistorical and asocial thing rather than a definite economic relationship, with associated structures and processes for the generation of profit. This reflects a profound misunderstanding of the social and of capital(ism). Essentially, economists can bring in the social to complement the individual only because the social has been omitted in the first instance. This is all confirmed in the development field by the simultaneous shift in the World Bank from Washington to post-Washington consensus, its heavy promotion of social capital and the adoption of the Comprehensive Development Frameworkfor which, in practice, plus a change. Equally significant is the response of noneconomists to social capital and colonising economics. Here, seventh and crucially, social capital betrays in its intellectual origins a renewed attempt to establish rational choice within social theory (and to swing it towards economic rather than psychological reductionism). Social capital evolved out of social-exchange theory, designed to address the relationship between macro and micro in the context of the relationship between the social and the individual. These originsand their generally strong affinities with rational-choice methodologyhave been obliterated in the ready reception granted to social capital as the cure-all for social theory. Thus, whether influenced by a colonising economics or not, the use of social capital across the other social sciences is equally uncritical of the economic. The only difference is that the rational-choice elements are disguised and tempered by more informal types of arguments and by being set together with the more traditional variables of social theory, with the downside, power and conflict being thrown as necessary. Eighth, ironically, social capitalists from outside economics are attracted to it as an assault upon economics. Economists are perceived as being civilised, forced to take account of the social, and social capital is praised for placing interdisciplinarity upon the agenda. But the

They F**k You Up Those Social Capitalists

799

only economics is that of the mainstream. It has long since abandoned exclusive reliance on market forces. By analogy, social capital is a form of peripheral colonisation, incorporating all social theory other than economics. Whilst presenting itself as the opposition to economics imperialism, it offers feeble resistance because it has no alternative. Indeed, it prepares social theory for the colonising advance of the economic approach. Social capital is the degradation of scholarship, independent of its popularisation and potentially self-help, win-win, reactionary overtones. Politically it is the Third Way, the there is no alternative to the there is no alternative of neoliberalism. Those with progressive intentions, intellectual integrity and scholarly capital have been beguiled on the grounds that it is better than neoliberalism and postmodernism, its omissions can be corrected and it addresses the social. This sets aside the social capital of social capital. It incorporates and neutralises dissent.1 Isolated occurrences aside, it can only be rejected, not appropriately transformed (Fine 2001, forthcoming). With apologies to Philip Larkin:
They fuck you up with social cap. They may not mean to but they do. They fill you up with faults on tap And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in rational hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one anothers throats. Man hands on social cap to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And dont have any for yourself.

Endnote
1

This note is my only addition after seeing drafts of other contributions. But Bebbington, whose work on social capital is of the most sophisticated and scholarly, has surely been seduced to offer nave, ivory-tower ex-post rationalisations, as exemplified in the second sentence of his second paragraph. Of course these distinctions must be made, but how are the objects of criticism being run together in practice despite the criticisms?

References
Fine B (2001) Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at the Turn of the Millennium. London: Routledge Fine B (forthcoming) It aint social, it aint capital, and it aint Africa. Studia Africana 13