COVID 19,communal capital and the moral economy: Pacific Islands responses

Abstract

One of the impacts of COVID-19 is that communities have looked for alternative means of survival as the market economy went into a major crisis and people lost their jobs. For many communities in the Pacific Islands, who have relied largely on the market economy over the years, this means falling back on their communal way of life which has provided resilience for centuries. The revival of various forms of communal capital such as kinship exchange, subsistence farming and strengthening of social solidarity have become features of this bourgeoning moral economy. In the post-COVID era, there needs to be a major rethinking of how community-based moral economies can be mainstreamed as assurance for resilience and as a responsive mechanism against future economic calamities.

Keywords

barter communal capital COVID-19 market moral economy Pacific resilience social solidarity

This essay examines the significance of communal capital in Pacific communities as a central constituent of what Peterson and Taylor refer to as the “indigenous domestic moral economy” (Peterson and Taylor, 2006) and how these have been mobilized in response to the COVID-19 social and economic calamities. I define communal capital as the array of social and cultural norms, institutions, innovations and resources, which are embedded in and mobilized by communities to satisfy their basic needs, sustain social solidarity and develop resilience. Some examples of communal capital are kinship-based social networks, reciprocal goods exchange, collective labor, group landownership, cosmological connections, common ethical principles and shared intellectual property.

Despite being vilified by neoliberal economists as outdated and un-innovative (Duncan, 2014), communal capital has proved vitally important as wellbeing ‘subsidy’ for lowly paid employees in the formal economic sector by providing resilience in normal times as well as act as social protection mechanisms in times of crisis (Ratuva, 2014). In many Pacific communities, the pandemic has forced people to “reset” their development strategies away from the dominant market system to a communal mode of enterprise based on strengthening socio-cultural connections and producing for consumption and community sustenance rather than for the market. How this plays out in the current climate of economic depression resulting from COVIOD-19 is the focus of this brief appraisal.

COVID-19 has generated unprecedented impact on the global neoliberal order, exacerbated deep-seated inequalities and accentuated the marginalization of subaltern groups around the world (International Labour Organization, 2020). It has jolted humanity into rethinking strategically about framing a new developmental path which is resilient, people-centered, sustainable and empowering. For many Global South countries already fissured by the predatory excesses of neoliberalism, this has become a major challenge, especially for many still reeling from the post-colonial structures of inequality and voracious appropriation of resources by big multinational corporations. In many of these countries, the communal and market economies are betrothed in a complex syncretic way and people use selected and accessible aspects of both systems as they attempt to navigate the contours of social change, political tension and economic hardship. In a deliberative way people oscillate between the two modes as they see fit.

Since the advent of COVID-19, most Pacific Island communities have resorted to alternative means of survival and the one they are most familiar with is the communal economy, which has been part of their indigenous livelihood for centuries (UNDP, 2020). For instance, within the last 3 months, communities have resurrected the age-old practice of what anthropologists refer to as generalized reciprocity, commonly referred to as the barter system. It started in Fiji as the Barter for Better Fiji project and this expanded around the Pacific to Tonga, Samoa, Vanuatu, New Zealand and other Pacific countries (Williams, 2020). This operates on the basis of the centuries old practice of economic exchange where people from different islands or different parts of the same islands near the coast exchanged goods they produced or specialized in with goods from other communities. This was common throughout the Pacific. In Papua New Guinea for instance the Kula trade routes between islands has been well documented by anthropologists. Ancient trade between Fiji, Tonga and Samoa on red bird feathers, mats, canoes and other artifacts existed for centuries, the same as trading links between various Micronesian islands in the north Pacific. Other forms of communal economic activities practiced in the Pacific now in response to COVD-19 include the “green thumb” model for local farming; rise beyond the reef economic empowerment for women in rural communities; incubator and seed fund for start-ups by those losing their source of income; smart farms Fiji; Pacific Blue farming; and alternative communities trade, to name a few (UNDP, 2020). These are largely based on the use of communal capital.

In the pre-COVID era social reciprocity existed in various forms, especially in relation to ceremonial practices, but these were largely overshadowed by the dominance of the cash economy. Reciprocity was often stereotyped as a backward, uncivilized and anti-modernity practice often carried out by lazy people who had no ambitions for progress. This was a colonial narrative which, through colonial education and cultural domestication, was assimilated by locals as part of the new hegemonic ideology of colonial cultural enlightenment. The demonization of the past and the reification of colonial values of subservience and capitalist values of individualism became a dual process of intellectual pacification.

Despite the expansion and dominance of the colonial capitalist economy, the communal economy continued to thrive because the extent of capitalist penetration was intermittent and limited, although the colonial political pacification process was more transformational, although this differed in degree from country to country. Also, most of the land was still communally owned by traditional clan groups and this formed the basis for the communal economy. Local communities played a decisive role in negotiating, leveraging and synthesizing both the capitalist and communal modes of production to serve their interests. The communal economy was based on reciprocal exchange of goods, kinship support system, communal labor exchange, cultural production of services and use of land and resources for ceremonial, subsistence and surplus for cash. Production was based on a complex interrelationship between people, representing communal capital and the land.

The COVD-19 has in many instances strengthened the communal capital further through global virtual support. The virtual world has been reinvented as a site for communal gathering and reinforcement of kinship identification and relationships. People use it to share cooking recipes, transfer money, help to seek out resources and provide psychological support. However, there are also drawbacks to the virtual communal networking.

Rethinking the future

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to rethink about alternative economies, ethics and strategies for life. The global economic recession emanating from the pandemic has revealed in a starkly manifest way the fragility and vulnerability of the global neoliberal system thus dispelling the myth that it is the imperative and natural order of the time. The search for alternatives needs to have a conceptual, practical and moral basis and must be framed by human security values such as equity, diversity, participation, empowerment and progressive social transformation (Carrier, 2018). The neoliberal order has often created conditions for the creation and enhancement of conditions which undermine these normative principles. The predatory, expansionist, exploitative and manipulative nature of neoliberalism has undermined and marginalized the significance of human values and morality as basis of a new economy, a new moral economy, or in the Pacific, communal economy.

In the Pacific Islands, the basis of the communal economy is communal capital, which refers to the interconnecting synergies between reciprocal system of trade, kinship networks, collective labor and skills, social and spiritual relationship to land and environment and connection with the ancestral and wider cosmology. These have provided the basis for communal resilience as communities and individuals have responded and adapted quite successfully to the economically paralyzing impacts of the pandemic. Reverting to the old system of exchange has proven to be effective and durable while strengthening social bonds ensured that no one in the community suffered from the severity of the lockdowns, unemployment and lack of access to resources.

The future of how humanity responds to social calamities in the post-pandemic era in some ways dependents on the types of social and economic configuration we construct to address inequality. Reliance on a mono-system, driven by powerful economic interests and profit motives of the very few is unsustainable. There is now an imperative need to incorporate elements of the communal capital and the moral economy to address inequality, empower people and strengthen resilience in times of crisis. This requires thinking outside the box and incorporating the centuries old wisdom of other communities and cultures which were often regarded as subaltern and insignificant in the neoliberal gaze. Many people in Global South such as the Pacific, used this as basis for communal support and realized that it worked. The promises of eternal wealth and progress by the prophets of neoliberalism did not eventuate and like the ‘American dream,’ it only served the interests of some and left the majority in a state of limbo. The series of events linked to COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement has galvanized a new synergy for revolutionary change and rearticulating of new strategies and new hopes.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

References

Carrier

(2018) Moral economy: What’s in a name? Anthropological Theory 8(1): 18–35.

Duncan

(2014) Reflections on constraints to growth in Pacific Island countries. Devpolicy. Available at: https://devpolicy.org/reflections-on-constraints-to-growth-in-pacific-island-countries-20140626/.

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Peterson

Taylor

(2006) The modernising of the indigenous domestic moral economy. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 4(1-2): 105–122.

Ratuva

(2014) Failed states or resilient subaltern communities: Pacific indigenous social protection systems in a neoliberal world. Pacific Journalism Review 20(2): 39–57.

UNDP (2020) Local COVID-19 response projects in Fiji and Vanuatu to benefit from UNDP’s support. Available at: https://www.pacific.undp.org/content/pacific/en/home/presscenter/pressreleases/2020/local-covid-19-response-projects-in-fiji-and-vanuatu-to-benefit-from-undp-support.html.

Williams

(2020) Facebook barter page grows cash-free trade in Fiji and beyond. Available at: https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/415644/facebook-barter-page-grows-cash-free-trade-in-fiji-and-beyond.