Wholes and Fragments: Reflections on the Economy of Affection, Capitalism, and the Human Cost of Development

Abstract

The ideas underlying life in kin-based societies differ fundamentally from those underlying life in Western socie- ties. The key differences involve wholeness and scale. Kin-based societies provide a life of wholeness and connectedness - people produce what they consume, live and deal with risk and hardship within a reinforcing system of mutual aid, and have a common set of values, life chances, and life expectations - an economy of affection. The scale is small, local. Western industrial capitalist society provides simultaneously opportunities, risks, rewards, uncertainties and ambiguities. It celebrates individualism. In capitalist economies the features of kin-based societies become fragmented or destroyed. Individuals become interconnected and interdependent in impersonal, non-familial ways. The scale of the system increases greatly, becoming finally global in extent. The underlying causes trace to: 1) the division and social relations of labor, 2) the narrowing of the calculus of kinship, 3) the seg- mentation of consciousness, 4) the universalization/standardiza- tion of time, space, measure, value and money, 5) the individua- tion of resources, and 6) the compartmentalization of the institu- tions of production through the limited liability corporation. People in less-developed countries who remain uncaptured by Western industrial capitalism are attracted by but fearful of it. In embracing a Western model they must weigh what they will lose against what they may gain. Alternate paths to development which retain, or regain, non-exploitative kin-based features re- main elusive but are worth seeking.