Juanita Elias and Lena Rethel (eds), The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pbk 2018. Hbk 2016, £67.99; pbk, £23.99.
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There is no doubting the accelerated pace of integration of global markets, and its all but universal impact, reaching down to the daily lives of individuals practically everywhere. But while the forces driving the process can easily be enumerated in general terms – many-sided technological advances, accelerated division of labour, increasingly intense competition, the global ascendancy of a politics of competitiveness, and so on – their impact across the world is enormously varied. The overall picture is not one of smooth and uniform progress, but of stops, starts and diversions shaped by incessant struggle in particular regional, national and local circumstances, and contextually specific interactions with broader patterns of social relations. Prevailing social relations and cultural practices do not dissolve overnight, to assume forms more compatible with global competitiveness, so specific paths of change and their collective impact are unpredictable, for all that the overall direction of travel is unmistakably clear. There is a need, therefore, for detailed investigations of the manner in which global forces are refracted through local circumstances in different locations around the world. This strong collection does this for Southeast Asia: the editors provide a tightly focused analytical framework, and they are supported by ten good to excellent case studies. The contributors, who come from well-established traditions of research on Southeast Asia in Australia and the UK, all make empirically and analytically rich contributions that bring out forcefully the variety and intricacy of particular processes of engagement, and leave no doubt that marketisation in its various forms is transforming the region.
In doing this they draw on notions of the ‘everyday’, ‘everyday politics’, and 'everyday life'. This requires a brief preliminary comment. At its worst and most bombastic, the ‘everyday politics’ approach advances the feeble claim that ‘dominant elites do not play the exclusive role’, substitutes the vapid 'realm of co-constitutive interactive social relations’ for the capital relation, and replaces class struggle with a ‘dialogical, negotiative relationship’ between the dominant and the weak (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007: 13, 15). At its best, it looks beyond the conventional places and forms of politics to behaviour of the ‘everyday, quotidian sort’, with no greater claim than this is a ‘fruitful realm of study’ (Kerkvliet, 2009: 227), and identifies a spectrum of orientations that runs from support and compliance to evasion or modification and resistance. Kerkvliet, following James C. Scott in key respects, begins with a focus on behaviour regarding the production, distribution and use of resources, and differentiates ‘everyday politics’ from both ‘official’ politics and ‘advocacy’ politics. In this approach, the latter two forms of politics embrace ‘governments, states, and the organised efforts to influence what those two institutions do or to change them altogether’, and so ‘pretty much restrict their examinations of the control, allocation, and use of resources and values underlying them to the activities of state authorities and agencies, political parties and their supporters, elections, organisations and individuals lobbying or otherwise trying to influence government officials and policies, and to movements, rebellions, and revolutions challenging existing governments and states or proposing different ones’ (ibid: 228). Everyday politics, in contrast, is distinct from any public or organised politics, though it may lead to it. It involves ‘people embracing, complying with, adjusting, and contesting norms and rules regarding authority over, production of, or allocation of resources and doing so in quiet, mundane, and subtle expressions and acts that are rarely organised or direct’; it is often ‘entwined with individuals and small groups’ activities while making a living, raising their families, wrestling with daily problems, and interacting with others like themselves and with superiors and subordinates’, and ‘also includes resource production and distribution practices within households and families and within small communities in ways that rely primarily on local people’s own resources with little involvement from formal organisations’ (ibid: 232).
Elias and Rethel and their contributors are, thankfully, close in spirit and content to Kerkvliet. Their Everyday Political Economy (EPE) approach is ‘interdisciplinary and inclusive’, and specifically aimed to ‘reach beyond the intellectual confines of IPE’; the unity of the collection comes from a shared focus on ‘how the emergence of more marketized forms of economic policy making is sustained and challenged through everyday practices of economic engagement’, in a context in which states attempt to ‘accommodate dissent by creating spaces for “market friendly” and regime-maintaining civil society engagement’. Importantly, it includes households and families. And the objective, according to the editors, is to consider ‘how processes of economic transformation are refashioning – and refashioned by – the lives and daily routines of ordinary people: their decisions to migrate across borders; their experiences of growing affluence as well as of inequality, poverty and associated forms of violence and destitution; their activities as activists, citizens and workers; and the ways in which economic and social relations, responsibilities and activities are being transformed’ (3-5).
Principal features of Southeast Asia’s position in the global political economy – the regional context and the wide range across the eleven constituent states (Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) in terms of size, economic development, social and cultural characteristics, and politics – are succinctly addressed in the introduction. On the first point, the editors note the 1997-8 ‘Asia financial crisis’, the ensuing wave of market-oriented and regulatory reform culminating in the creation of the ASEAN Economic Community, and the proliferation of processes of enclosure, commodification and proletarianization, along with the rise of precarious, low-paid work, and the prevalence of authoritarian systems of rule, oligarchic capitalism and political violence. On the second, they introduce the themes of ‘variegated pathways towards economic modernization’, and resulting ‘multiple modernities’ (12), as a prelude to introducing the case studies themselves. These are organised in three groups: ‘From Development to Multiple Modernities’, ‘Widening and Deepening Markets’, and ‘People, Mobilities and Work’.
As the reference above to activists and citizens signals, some of the individual chapters are focused more on what Kerkvliet terms advocacy politics than on the ‘quiet, mundane, and subtle expressions and acts’ of everyday politics: this is true of Nem Singh and Camba on protest against large-scale mining in the Philippines, Henry on trade unions in Myanmar, Rosser on judicial challenges to education reform in Indonesia, and Tan on litigation undertaken by migrant Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong. These are good and useful accounts: taken together they are informative on the range of struggles taking place across the region, and provide a helpful backdrop, but they are not considered further here. The more innovative chapters are the majority that focus on everyday politics proper, and relate it to the political economy of marketisation. On this, the measured approach of the collection as a whole is reflected in a short but important passage at the end of the introduction (19-20), where the editors suggest that ‘the contributors to this book demonstrate, rather than simply assert, that everyday actors and their daily actions and routines have significant implications for top-down neoliberal and other market-centric development agendas. In so doing, they can lead to unanticipated outcomes and economic, political and cultural transformations that are distinct to local and/or regional settings’. The EPE perspective, they say, adds value to an elite-centred approach, and can show ‘how an everyday approach unmasks tensions, subjectivities and behaviours otherwise hidden from scholarly eyes that are very much focused on (state) elites’. The role of elites is not rejected, but problematized: the volume ‘seeks to reveal how elite plans and programmes are intricately bound up with the various responses of non-elites as well as their daily routines of economic life, often in unexpected and seemingly non-rational ways’, with the result that top-down, elite-dominated agendas are complicated and even frustrated (19). But the chapter closes on a more open-ended note, suggesting that the volume shows
‘the capacity of everyday actors to find spaces for creative responses to official policies and structural conditions beyond the simple dichotomy of acceptance/acquiescence or rejection/resistance. By confirming the complexities of the social world and its diverse sources of variability, the following chapters draw attention to the myriad forms of agency exerted by a wide range of elite but also – and perhaps increasingly so – non-elite actors which make up local political economies and feed into national political economic outcomes’ (20).
All well and good. But there is an unspoken issue here that goes right to the heart not only of this collection, but of the whole ‘everyday politics’ approach. Let’s accept as axiomatic that top-down plans are never rolled out smoothly and perfectly achieved, and that unanticipated outcomes and local variations within them are the norm. A bigger question remains unanswered: is the process of ‘neoliberal’ or ‘market-centred’ reform (as I would put it, the embedding of a politics of global competitiveness) still on the whole moved forward, albeit with stops, starts and detours, or is it blocked, halted or reversed? To ask this question is to accept that neither ‘elites’ nor ‘non-elites’ are entirely in control of the process of change, and to direct attention to the question of whether the unanticipated outcomes and local variations identified represent unanticipated forms and trajectories of what is still on the whole a process of movement towards a global politics of competitiveness, driven by a range of forces that can be summed up as the logic of capital. That is to say, are emerging patterns of mobility and work productive of a politics of global competitiveness? Are markets actually becoming wider and deeper? And are the ‘multiple modernities’ identified, however varied, all shaped by these processes? And if so, how do these processes work? I return to this later.
The issue is front and centre in the first of the substantive chapters, in which Jonathan Rigg contrasts the developmental intentions of the state with the ‘vernacular, alternative, multiple or “other” modernities’ produced by urban migrants in Vietnam and rural dwellers in Thailand. Rigg’s argument is ‘not that the everyday provides an alternative view of transformation, but that it permits us to connect individual capabilities and volitions, national policies and socioeconomic processes, and societal structures’ (29). The cases studied actually reveal a good deal more. The Vietnamese study explores the realities behind the country’s modified but largely unreformed ho khau (household registration) system, which hinders the free mobility of labour, and the practice of urban migrants who have disregard the restrictions they face to move anyway, the majority (in a small sample of 30) having temporary registration or none at all. Rigg quotes the UNDP as arguing that the system ‘presents a systemic institutional barrier for internal migrants in accessing both basic and specialized Government services, contrary to the rights provided to them and all other citizens under the Constitution of Viet Nam’ (34). This is true, and like the World Bank it favours reform of the system (and its counterpart in China) in order to give equal access and provide for the more efficient building of human capital. But migrants flock to urban factories and ‘informal’ employment regardless, maintaining meanwhile their links to communities of origin, and shift for themselves as best they can, pending a time when the Vietnamese state has the will and resources for a universal system of social protection. The Thai case examines the fortunes of sethakit phorpiang (sufficiency economy), a policy in place since the late 1990s, and seen here as reflecting a rather vaguely conceived desire to balance development with a bedrock of small-scale subsistence-oriented peasant agriculture. Here Rigg’s point (39-40) is that ‘there is a considerable gap between the vision offered by the sethakit phorpiang (which pays attention to local knowledge, in situ living and livelihoods, traditional lifestyles, production for consumption and not for sale, and communitarian values) and the modes of living that most villagers actually embrace (modern technology, reliance on migration and remittances, non-farm livelihoods and cash for consumption)’. A study of 105 households in three villages (survey plus 45 interviews and community discussions) found clear attachment to community values, but ‘eight out of ten households were in debt, to an average of more than 100,000 baht ($3,500); three-quarters of household heads, at some point, have had to leave the village to find work; at the time of the survey, on average, each household had at least one member absent; and almost every household owned a TV and a motorbike, and approaching one-half of households also owned a vehicle’ (40). Rice production is increasingly marketed, while the sufficiency economy ‘goes little further than rhetoric’ (43): to the extent that there is any substance to it, the shift to market runs ahead of it. And more broadly (looking beyond the specific aspect of policy isolated for attention): ‘The migration of rural Vietnamese to Hanoi is shaped by national policies [doi moi]; the nature of rural work (and its absence) in Thailand is similarly partially explained by the policies of kaanpattana (development) over the last half century’ (45). In both cases, in short, state policies may be unhelpful or contradictory, but people are anyway adapting their everyday practices and accommodating to the pressures of marketisation and a politics of competitiveness.
Chapters on the political economy of Muslim markets in Singapore and Islamic finance in Malaysia reflect a similar tendency. In the first case, Johan Fischer explores the state certification of halal production, trade and consumption – in the context of a global market worth US$2.3 trillion, one third of it food – that has accompanied a shift from wet markets and corner stores to abattoirs and super- and hyper-markets. Consumers ‘now rely on the authority involved in proper Islamic branding through marking commodities with logos or accompanying certificates’ (99); in the context of the development of a strong audit culture, ‘halal as an ancient Muslim food taboo is promoted as a national and neutral brand that benefits the economy, while the moral implications are downplayed’ (102). Here consumers have embraced the certification system, smoothing the path of marketisation: ‘the proliferation of halal in Southeast Asia cannot be divorced from the fact that over the past three decades these countries have witnessed steady economic growth, the emergence of large groups of Muslim middle-class consumers and bureaucrats, as well as centralized state incentives to strengthen halal production, trade and consumption’ (113). In the chapter that follows, Rethel presents innovations in Islamic finance ‘as an elite project first aimed at modernizing the Malaysian economy and now also increasingly part of Malaysia’s international competitiveness agenda’, and considers how it is ‘engaged with, sustained and challenged by ordinary Malaysian citizens’ (117). Malaysia has promoted itself assiduously as a regional/international Islamic financial centre, and set out at the same time to promote ‘financial inclusion’ by bringing Malays and their savings into the financial system. Following on the introduction of shariah-compliant microfinance from the 1980s, the 2013 Islamic Financial Services Act has been accompanied by financial literacy training, shariah advisers in banks, and a proliferation of household debt:
‘Thus, for some ironically, Islamic finance in Malaysia seems to further entrench the market state and to reproduce existing notions of capitalist development rather than to represent a genuine alternative or site of resistance. Effectively, Islamic finance has served as a conduit for Malaysian commercial and financial elites to play a more prominent role in global circuits of capital. At the same time, Islamic finance has been reflective of the changing dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that have shaped Malaysia’s political economy. While in its early days Islamic finance was a means to encourage rural Malays to save and engage with the formal financial system, more recently it has become the facilitator of an aspiring consumer society, with participants keen to purchase houses and cars’ (133).
In the first contribution on people, mobilities and work, Anja Franck reports on fieldwork in four locations in and around Penang’s local markets, which surveyed and interviewed eighty women working there. Most were over forty, three-quarters had held formal sector jobs in the past, but all were now working in small-scale informal businesses. The typical pattern she describes (while noting that patterns in rural areas are different) is that marriage and child-bearing are largely incompatible with travel to relatively distant formal sector jobs with fixed hours of work, so women tend to switch out of the formal sector at some point. ‘Due to the increased educational attainment of women and delayed age of marriage,’ she reports, ‘the peak in female participation has shifted from the age group of 20–24 in 1990 to the current 25–29 age group’ (63). Although she gamely seeks to invoke the idea of resistance (173), she concludes by defending the view that ‘women workers are not just passive receivers’ on the grounds that ‘as they find the conditions of formal work incompatible with their everyday lives, they act to find income-generating activities elsewhere’ (174). As Franck makes clear throughout, the Malaysian authorities would like to see more women in formal work. As it is, the everyday agency of these women, not least in the postponement of marriage, reflects at least an accommodation to pressure for increased activity in the labour market.
Adam Tyson then explores another crucial aspect of the competitiveness agenda in Malaysia: the attempt to cultivate and retain 'skilled workers, innovative entrepreneurs, and corporate protégés’ (178). He argues that the pro-bumiputera (native Malay) policy introduced with the New Economic Policy of 1971 has become counter-productive, and is encouraging talented minority citizens to move abroad: successive initiatives aimed at reversing the ‘brain-drain’ since 1995 have met with only limited success. Efforts to create bumiputera entrepreneurs through talent enrichment initiatives add fuel to the fire, serving as much to maintain the political power base of the ruling party as to foster ‘neoliberal enterprising economic subjectivities’ (188). The ‘everyday politics’ that results – the ‘exit’ option chosen by skilled non-Malay professionals both for themselves and for their children’s education – reinforces a pattern in which on the whole Malaysia exports skilled professionals and imports unskilled workers. Following this, Juanita Elias and Jonathon Louth explore Malaysia’s ‘maid shortage’ and the transnationalisation of domestic labour. They use successive disputes with Indonesia and Cambodia over the treatment of migrant domestic workers, and the resulting restrictions on labour flows, as a window onto ‘everyday political economies (be it of social reproduction, everyday agency or work) that constitute the conditions of possibility within which bilateral disputes and labour agreements between Southeast Asian states take shape’, with particular attention to ‘the role of gendered and racialised power relations ... within households’ (197). Their focus on social reproduction in transnationally marketized households opens into an analysis of the accompanying system of labour recruiters and the ‘active construction of markets for migrant domestic work’ (198), acknowledging and building upon Kerkvliet’s identification of the significance of ‘resource production and distribution within households and families’ noted above (cited p. 199). Their exemplary grounding of the analysis in ‘the way in which household labour has become increasingly commodified as the challenges of meeting the social reproductive needs of states are met by the growing market for domestic paid work’ (200) is an appropriately context-specific identification of their more general perspective on households as sites of transformation and change, making one short section in particular (198-200) the best starting-point for an appreciation of the potential of a materially rooted everyday political economy. Tan's essay concludes the section.
The stage is set, then, for a return in the conclusion to the central issue posed at the outset: ‘how the developmental ambitions of elites intersect with local social relations of gender, race, class and even age, producing distinctive political-economic outcomes, and how capitalist processes of marketization intersect with everyday lived experiences on the ground' (6). Unfortunately and to me unaccountably, this is not the conclusion we get. Instead, Elias and Rethel are joined by Hobson and Seabrooke, in a very awkward chapter which incorporates whole chunks from the work of the latter pair (compare pp. 244-5 here with Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007, pp. 14-15 for example), confusingly renders Kerkvliet's 'advocacy politics' as 'everyday politics' and 'everyday politics' as 'everyday life', leaves the reader in considerable doubt as to who is meant in references to 'we' and 'us', and conspicuously fails to address the excellent framework set out in the introduction. This leaves the reader with some work to do. But it does not mean that the book should be set aside. Rather, it makes it necessary to think back through the collection in the light of that framework, with the chapter by Elias and Louth as the anchor. To do so, I return to the questions posed above: Are emerging patterns of mobility and work productive of a politics of global competitiveness? Are markets actually becoming wider and deeper? And are the ‘multiple modernities’ identified, however varied, shaped by these processes? The answers, already foreshadowed, are yes, yes, and yes. It is useful here to invoke the four headings - support, compliance, modifications and evasions, and resistance - under which Kerkvliet (2009: 233) clusters the various forms that everyday politics can take, and to remember that the principal instance of resistance that he identifies is precisely peasant resistance to collective farming and their embrace despite official objectives of marketization. While resistance or at least challenge to aspects of marketization is prominent in the four chapters on advocacy politics, the everyday politics described similarly reflects practices of compliance or support. Domestic workers still seek work in Malaysia, even when states put obstacles in their way; skilled professionals similarly seek out positions in the global market when the local economy appears inhospitable; women first choose to delay marriage to spend longer periods in the formal economy, and subsequently take on the double burden of informal sector work and household and family responsibility; the rising middle classes embrace the opportunities for consumer finance and culturally appropriate brands; and Thai and Vietnamese peasants and urban migrants pursue market opportunities even when their respective governments are less than wholly supportive. In other words, the relationship between state policies and behaviour of the 'everyday, quotidian sort' may vary widely, but both unfold in the global context of many-sided technological advances, an accelerated division of labour on a global scale, increasingly intense competition, and the global ascendancy of a politics of competitiveness, 'everyday politics' adapts to its logic. The focus on everyday politics is thoroughly vindicated. Underpinning it is the relationship between 'the ongoing incorporation of the region into a globalizing market economy as states increasingly embrace forms of neoliberal developmentalism that significantly expand the scope and reach of the market into all spheres of social life' and 'the increased marketization and transnationalization of established patterns of social reproductive relations centred on the household' (203): this observation, from Elias and Louth, is relevant to every single one of the aspects of everyday politics noted above, suggesting that it is the essential starting point for the analysis of everyday political economy on a global scale. And in turn this takes us back to the original historical materialist perspective on behaviour of the everyday, quotidian sort:
'The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way' (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, Volume 5, p. 31).
References
Hobson, John M., and Leonard Seabrooke, 2007, ‘Everyday IPE: revealing everyday forms of change in the world economy’, in John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke, eds, Everyday Politics of the World Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kerkvliet, Benedict J. Tria, 2009, ‘Everyday politics in peasant societies (and ours)’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 36, 1, 227-243.
In doing this they draw on notions of the ‘everyday’, ‘everyday politics’, and 'everyday life'. This requires a brief preliminary comment. At its worst and most bombastic, the ‘everyday politics’ approach advances the feeble claim that ‘dominant elites do not play the exclusive role’, substitutes the vapid 'realm of co-constitutive interactive social relations’ for the capital relation, and replaces class struggle with a ‘dialogical, negotiative relationship’ between the dominant and the weak (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007: 13, 15). At its best, it looks beyond the conventional places and forms of politics to behaviour of the ‘everyday, quotidian sort’, with no greater claim than this is a ‘fruitful realm of study’ (Kerkvliet, 2009: 227), and identifies a spectrum of orientations that runs from support and compliance to evasion or modification and resistance. Kerkvliet, following James C. Scott in key respects, begins with a focus on behaviour regarding the production, distribution and use of resources, and differentiates ‘everyday politics’ from both ‘official’ politics and ‘advocacy’ politics. In this approach, the latter two forms of politics embrace ‘governments, states, and the organised efforts to influence what those two institutions do or to change them altogether’, and so ‘pretty much restrict their examinations of the control, allocation, and use of resources and values underlying them to the activities of state authorities and agencies, political parties and their supporters, elections, organisations and individuals lobbying or otherwise trying to influence government officials and policies, and to movements, rebellions, and revolutions challenging existing governments and states or proposing different ones’ (ibid: 228). Everyday politics, in contrast, is distinct from any public or organised politics, though it may lead to it. It involves ‘people embracing, complying with, adjusting, and contesting norms and rules regarding authority over, production of, or allocation of resources and doing so in quiet, mundane, and subtle expressions and acts that are rarely organised or direct’; it is often ‘entwined with individuals and small groups’ activities while making a living, raising their families, wrestling with daily problems, and interacting with others like themselves and with superiors and subordinates’, and ‘also includes resource production and distribution practices within households and families and within small communities in ways that rely primarily on local people’s own resources with little involvement from formal organisations’ (ibid: 232).
Elias and Rethel and their contributors are, thankfully, close in spirit and content to Kerkvliet. Their Everyday Political Economy (EPE) approach is ‘interdisciplinary and inclusive’, and specifically aimed to ‘reach beyond the intellectual confines of IPE’; the unity of the collection comes from a shared focus on ‘how the emergence of more marketized forms of economic policy making is sustained and challenged through everyday practices of economic engagement’, in a context in which states attempt to ‘accommodate dissent by creating spaces for “market friendly” and regime-maintaining civil society engagement’. Importantly, it includes households and families. And the objective, according to the editors, is to consider ‘how processes of economic transformation are refashioning – and refashioned by – the lives and daily routines of ordinary people: their decisions to migrate across borders; their experiences of growing affluence as well as of inequality, poverty and associated forms of violence and destitution; their activities as activists, citizens and workers; and the ways in which economic and social relations, responsibilities and activities are being transformed’ (3-5).
Principal features of Southeast Asia’s position in the global political economy – the regional context and the wide range across the eleven constituent states (Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) in terms of size, economic development, social and cultural characteristics, and politics – are succinctly addressed in the introduction. On the first point, the editors note the 1997-8 ‘Asia financial crisis’, the ensuing wave of market-oriented and regulatory reform culminating in the creation of the ASEAN Economic Community, and the proliferation of processes of enclosure, commodification and proletarianization, along with the rise of precarious, low-paid work, and the prevalence of authoritarian systems of rule, oligarchic capitalism and political violence. On the second, they introduce the themes of ‘variegated pathways towards economic modernization’, and resulting ‘multiple modernities’ (12), as a prelude to introducing the case studies themselves. These are organised in three groups: ‘From Development to Multiple Modernities’, ‘Widening and Deepening Markets’, and ‘People, Mobilities and Work’.
As the reference above to activists and citizens signals, some of the individual chapters are focused more on what Kerkvliet terms advocacy politics than on the ‘quiet, mundane, and subtle expressions and acts’ of everyday politics: this is true of Nem Singh and Camba on protest against large-scale mining in the Philippines, Henry on trade unions in Myanmar, Rosser on judicial challenges to education reform in Indonesia, and Tan on litigation undertaken by migrant Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong. These are good and useful accounts: taken together they are informative on the range of struggles taking place across the region, and provide a helpful backdrop, but they are not considered further here. The more innovative chapters are the majority that focus on everyday politics proper, and relate it to the political economy of marketisation. On this, the measured approach of the collection as a whole is reflected in a short but important passage at the end of the introduction (19-20), where the editors suggest that ‘the contributors to this book demonstrate, rather than simply assert, that everyday actors and their daily actions and routines have significant implications for top-down neoliberal and other market-centric development agendas. In so doing, they can lead to unanticipated outcomes and economic, political and cultural transformations that are distinct to local and/or regional settings’. The EPE perspective, they say, adds value to an elite-centred approach, and can show ‘how an everyday approach unmasks tensions, subjectivities and behaviours otherwise hidden from scholarly eyes that are very much focused on (state) elites’. The role of elites is not rejected, but problematized: the volume ‘seeks to reveal how elite plans and programmes are intricately bound up with the various responses of non-elites as well as their daily routines of economic life, often in unexpected and seemingly non-rational ways’, with the result that top-down, elite-dominated agendas are complicated and even frustrated (19). But the chapter closes on a more open-ended note, suggesting that the volume shows
‘the capacity of everyday actors to find spaces for creative responses to official policies and structural conditions beyond the simple dichotomy of acceptance/acquiescence or rejection/resistance. By confirming the complexities of the social world and its diverse sources of variability, the following chapters draw attention to the myriad forms of agency exerted by a wide range of elite but also – and perhaps increasingly so – non-elite actors which make up local political economies and feed into national political economic outcomes’ (20).
All well and good. But there is an unspoken issue here that goes right to the heart not only of this collection, but of the whole ‘everyday politics’ approach. Let’s accept as axiomatic that top-down plans are never rolled out smoothly and perfectly achieved, and that unanticipated outcomes and local variations within them are the norm. A bigger question remains unanswered: is the process of ‘neoliberal’ or ‘market-centred’ reform (as I would put it, the embedding of a politics of global competitiveness) still on the whole moved forward, albeit with stops, starts and detours, or is it blocked, halted or reversed? To ask this question is to accept that neither ‘elites’ nor ‘non-elites’ are entirely in control of the process of change, and to direct attention to the question of whether the unanticipated outcomes and local variations identified represent unanticipated forms and trajectories of what is still on the whole a process of movement towards a global politics of competitiveness, driven by a range of forces that can be summed up as the logic of capital. That is to say, are emerging patterns of mobility and work productive of a politics of global competitiveness? Are markets actually becoming wider and deeper? And are the ‘multiple modernities’ identified, however varied, all shaped by these processes? And if so, how do these processes work? I return to this later.
The issue is front and centre in the first of the substantive chapters, in which Jonathan Rigg contrasts the developmental intentions of the state with the ‘vernacular, alternative, multiple or “other” modernities’ produced by urban migrants in Vietnam and rural dwellers in Thailand. Rigg’s argument is ‘not that the everyday provides an alternative view of transformation, but that it permits us to connect individual capabilities and volitions, national policies and socioeconomic processes, and societal structures’ (29). The cases studied actually reveal a good deal more. The Vietnamese study explores the realities behind the country’s modified but largely unreformed ho khau (household registration) system, which hinders the free mobility of labour, and the practice of urban migrants who have disregard the restrictions they face to move anyway, the majority (in a small sample of 30) having temporary registration or none at all. Rigg quotes the UNDP as arguing that the system ‘presents a systemic institutional barrier for internal migrants in accessing both basic and specialized Government services, contrary to the rights provided to them and all other citizens under the Constitution of Viet Nam’ (34). This is true, and like the World Bank it favours reform of the system (and its counterpart in China) in order to give equal access and provide for the more efficient building of human capital. But migrants flock to urban factories and ‘informal’ employment regardless, maintaining meanwhile their links to communities of origin, and shift for themselves as best they can, pending a time when the Vietnamese state has the will and resources for a universal system of social protection. The Thai case examines the fortunes of sethakit phorpiang (sufficiency economy), a policy in place since the late 1990s, and seen here as reflecting a rather vaguely conceived desire to balance development with a bedrock of small-scale subsistence-oriented peasant agriculture. Here Rigg’s point (39-40) is that ‘there is a considerable gap between the vision offered by the sethakit phorpiang (which pays attention to local knowledge, in situ living and livelihoods, traditional lifestyles, production for consumption and not for sale, and communitarian values) and the modes of living that most villagers actually embrace (modern technology, reliance on migration and remittances, non-farm livelihoods and cash for consumption)’. A study of 105 households in three villages (survey plus 45 interviews and community discussions) found clear attachment to community values, but ‘eight out of ten households were in debt, to an average of more than 100,000 baht ($3,500); three-quarters of household heads, at some point, have had to leave the village to find work; at the time of the survey, on average, each household had at least one member absent; and almost every household owned a TV and a motorbike, and approaching one-half of households also owned a vehicle’ (40). Rice production is increasingly marketed, while the sufficiency economy ‘goes little further than rhetoric’ (43): to the extent that there is any substance to it, the shift to market runs ahead of it. And more broadly (looking beyond the specific aspect of policy isolated for attention): ‘The migration of rural Vietnamese to Hanoi is shaped by national policies [doi moi]; the nature of rural work (and its absence) in Thailand is similarly partially explained by the policies of kaanpattana (development) over the last half century’ (45). In both cases, in short, state policies may be unhelpful or contradictory, but people are anyway adapting their everyday practices and accommodating to the pressures of marketisation and a politics of competitiveness.
Chapters on the political economy of Muslim markets in Singapore and Islamic finance in Malaysia reflect a similar tendency. In the first case, Johan Fischer explores the state certification of halal production, trade and consumption – in the context of a global market worth US$2.3 trillion, one third of it food – that has accompanied a shift from wet markets and corner stores to abattoirs and super- and hyper-markets. Consumers ‘now rely on the authority involved in proper Islamic branding through marking commodities with logos or accompanying certificates’ (99); in the context of the development of a strong audit culture, ‘halal as an ancient Muslim food taboo is promoted as a national and neutral brand that benefits the economy, while the moral implications are downplayed’ (102). Here consumers have embraced the certification system, smoothing the path of marketisation: ‘the proliferation of halal in Southeast Asia cannot be divorced from the fact that over the past three decades these countries have witnessed steady economic growth, the emergence of large groups of Muslim middle-class consumers and bureaucrats, as well as centralized state incentives to strengthen halal production, trade and consumption’ (113). In the chapter that follows, Rethel presents innovations in Islamic finance ‘as an elite project first aimed at modernizing the Malaysian economy and now also increasingly part of Malaysia’s international competitiveness agenda’, and considers how it is ‘engaged with, sustained and challenged by ordinary Malaysian citizens’ (117). Malaysia has promoted itself assiduously as a regional/international Islamic financial centre, and set out at the same time to promote ‘financial inclusion’ by bringing Malays and their savings into the financial system. Following on the introduction of shariah-compliant microfinance from the 1980s, the 2013 Islamic Financial Services Act has been accompanied by financial literacy training, shariah advisers in banks, and a proliferation of household debt:
‘Thus, for some ironically, Islamic finance in Malaysia seems to further entrench the market state and to reproduce existing notions of capitalist development rather than to represent a genuine alternative or site of resistance. Effectively, Islamic finance has served as a conduit for Malaysian commercial and financial elites to play a more prominent role in global circuits of capital. At the same time, Islamic finance has been reflective of the changing dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that have shaped Malaysia’s political economy. While in its early days Islamic finance was a means to encourage rural Malays to save and engage with the formal financial system, more recently it has become the facilitator of an aspiring consumer society, with participants keen to purchase houses and cars’ (133).
In the first contribution on people, mobilities and work, Anja Franck reports on fieldwork in four locations in and around Penang’s local markets, which surveyed and interviewed eighty women working there. Most were over forty, three-quarters had held formal sector jobs in the past, but all were now working in small-scale informal businesses. The typical pattern she describes (while noting that patterns in rural areas are different) is that marriage and child-bearing are largely incompatible with travel to relatively distant formal sector jobs with fixed hours of work, so women tend to switch out of the formal sector at some point. ‘Due to the increased educational attainment of women and delayed age of marriage,’ she reports, ‘the peak in female participation has shifted from the age group of 20–24 in 1990 to the current 25–29 age group’ (63). Although she gamely seeks to invoke the idea of resistance (173), she concludes by defending the view that ‘women workers are not just passive receivers’ on the grounds that ‘as they find the conditions of formal work incompatible with their everyday lives, they act to find income-generating activities elsewhere’ (174). As Franck makes clear throughout, the Malaysian authorities would like to see more women in formal work. As it is, the everyday agency of these women, not least in the postponement of marriage, reflects at least an accommodation to pressure for increased activity in the labour market.
Adam Tyson then explores another crucial aspect of the competitiveness agenda in Malaysia: the attempt to cultivate and retain 'skilled workers, innovative entrepreneurs, and corporate protégés’ (178). He argues that the pro-bumiputera (native Malay) policy introduced with the New Economic Policy of 1971 has become counter-productive, and is encouraging talented minority citizens to move abroad: successive initiatives aimed at reversing the ‘brain-drain’ since 1995 have met with only limited success. Efforts to create bumiputera entrepreneurs through talent enrichment initiatives add fuel to the fire, serving as much to maintain the political power base of the ruling party as to foster ‘neoliberal enterprising economic subjectivities’ (188). The ‘everyday politics’ that results – the ‘exit’ option chosen by skilled non-Malay professionals both for themselves and for their children’s education – reinforces a pattern in which on the whole Malaysia exports skilled professionals and imports unskilled workers. Following this, Juanita Elias and Jonathon Louth explore Malaysia’s ‘maid shortage’ and the transnationalisation of domestic labour. They use successive disputes with Indonesia and Cambodia over the treatment of migrant domestic workers, and the resulting restrictions on labour flows, as a window onto ‘everyday political economies (be it of social reproduction, everyday agency or work) that constitute the conditions of possibility within which bilateral disputes and labour agreements between Southeast Asian states take shape’, with particular attention to ‘the role of gendered and racialised power relations ... within households’ (197). Their focus on social reproduction in transnationally marketized households opens into an analysis of the accompanying system of labour recruiters and the ‘active construction of markets for migrant domestic work’ (198), acknowledging and building upon Kerkvliet’s identification of the significance of ‘resource production and distribution within households and families’ noted above (cited p. 199). Their exemplary grounding of the analysis in ‘the way in which household labour has become increasingly commodified as the challenges of meeting the social reproductive needs of states are met by the growing market for domestic paid work’ (200) is an appropriately context-specific identification of their more general perspective on households as sites of transformation and change, making one short section in particular (198-200) the best starting-point for an appreciation of the potential of a materially rooted everyday political economy. Tan's essay concludes the section.
The stage is set, then, for a return in the conclusion to the central issue posed at the outset: ‘how the developmental ambitions of elites intersect with local social relations of gender, race, class and even age, producing distinctive political-economic outcomes, and how capitalist processes of marketization intersect with everyday lived experiences on the ground' (6). Unfortunately and to me unaccountably, this is not the conclusion we get. Instead, Elias and Rethel are joined by Hobson and Seabrooke, in a very awkward chapter which incorporates whole chunks from the work of the latter pair (compare pp. 244-5 here with Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007, pp. 14-15 for example), confusingly renders Kerkvliet's 'advocacy politics' as 'everyday politics' and 'everyday politics' as 'everyday life', leaves the reader in considerable doubt as to who is meant in references to 'we' and 'us', and conspicuously fails to address the excellent framework set out in the introduction. This leaves the reader with some work to do. But it does not mean that the book should be set aside. Rather, it makes it necessary to think back through the collection in the light of that framework, with the chapter by Elias and Louth as the anchor. To do so, I return to the questions posed above: Are emerging patterns of mobility and work productive of a politics of global competitiveness? Are markets actually becoming wider and deeper? And are the ‘multiple modernities’ identified, however varied, shaped by these processes? The answers, already foreshadowed, are yes, yes, and yes. It is useful here to invoke the four headings - support, compliance, modifications and evasions, and resistance - under which Kerkvliet (2009: 233) clusters the various forms that everyday politics can take, and to remember that the principal instance of resistance that he identifies is precisely peasant resistance to collective farming and their embrace despite official objectives of marketization. While resistance or at least challenge to aspects of marketization is prominent in the four chapters on advocacy politics, the everyday politics described similarly reflects practices of compliance or support. Domestic workers still seek work in Malaysia, even when states put obstacles in their way; skilled professionals similarly seek out positions in the global market when the local economy appears inhospitable; women first choose to delay marriage to spend longer periods in the formal economy, and subsequently take on the double burden of informal sector work and household and family responsibility; the rising middle classes embrace the opportunities for consumer finance and culturally appropriate brands; and Thai and Vietnamese peasants and urban migrants pursue market opportunities even when their respective governments are less than wholly supportive. In other words, the relationship between state policies and behaviour of the 'everyday, quotidian sort' may vary widely, but both unfold in the global context of many-sided technological advances, an accelerated division of labour on a global scale, increasingly intense competition, and the global ascendancy of a politics of competitiveness, 'everyday politics' adapts to its logic. The focus on everyday politics is thoroughly vindicated. Underpinning it is the relationship between 'the ongoing incorporation of the region into a globalizing market economy as states increasingly embrace forms of neoliberal developmentalism that significantly expand the scope and reach of the market into all spheres of social life' and 'the increased marketization and transnationalization of established patterns of social reproductive relations centred on the household' (203): this observation, from Elias and Louth, is relevant to every single one of the aspects of everyday politics noted above, suggesting that it is the essential starting point for the analysis of everyday political economy on a global scale. And in turn this takes us back to the original historical materialist perspective on behaviour of the everyday, quotidian sort:
'The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way' (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, Volume 5, p. 31).
References
Hobson, John M., and Leonard Seabrooke, 2007, ‘Everyday IPE: revealing everyday forms of change in the world economy’, in John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke, eds, Everyday Politics of the World Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kerkvliet, Benedict J. Tria, 2009, ‘Everyday politics in peasant societies (and ours)’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 36, 1, 227-243.