‘Alternatives’ to austerity: a critique of financialized infrastructure in India and beyond

Current infrastructure development across the globe is described as an ‘alternative’ to austerity and as a nationalist riposte to globalization. From the UK to India to the US, it is represented as a way of reviving the fortunes of the ‘common man’ and a dispossessed, male working class. This article, based on research in the waterscape of the Hooghly River in India and World Bank initiatives, argues that current policies of financialized infrastructure are a false alternative to austerity and are a continuation of a longer historical process. These policies have emerged from the gradual movement of fiscal control from governments to central banks, commercial banks and financial markets. This began with the financialization of sovereign debt in the 1980s–90s, which led to fiscal constraint within the public sector. Such policies eroded the material forms of state-provided public works and led to private sector accumulation through public-private partnerships and financial market speculation. Now governments are turning to commercial banks and financial markets to solve the problem of infrastructures starved of capital, even though it is the governance of the economy through these networks that has generated the current ‘infrastructure deficit’. Anthropologists now need to take part in public debates by revealing the financial predation on infrastructures and arguing for a renaming of them as citizens' commons for the public good. Ultimately, it is through a combination of ethnographies of austerity and analyses of the political economy of finance that anthropologists can challenge current inequalities

Capitalist divination: popularist-speculators and technologies of imagination on the Hooghly River

Economic theory and technocratic policy have long understood economic action to be a communicative activity. From Laplace and Adam Smith to current liberalisation fiscal policy in India designed to produce price signals and entrepreneurial behaviour this conceptualisation has been dominant. Instead this article draws on the anthropology of divination to argue that capitalist action is provoked by technologies of the imagination that generate speculation. These issues are explored in the context of changing forms of governance of the Hooghly riverine economy by bureaucrats in the Kolkata Port Trust. Through ethnography we track how public-private partnerships are forged by exemplary men or 'seers' deploying divinatory action. The fortunes of business, trade and the livelihoods of informalised workers rest on these practices, which generate short-term unstable forms of capital accumulation. Drawing on this case, we can potentially develop comparative critical approaches to the recent emergence of popularist-speculators in India and elsewhere

Capitalist divination: popularist-speculators and technologies of imagination on the Hooghly River

Economic theory and technocratic policy have long understood economic action to be a communicative activity. From Laplace and Adam Smith to current liberalisation fiscal policy in India designed to produce price signals and entrepreneurial behaviour this conceptualisation has been dominant. Instead this article draws on the anthropology of divination to argue that capitalist action is provoked by technologies of the imagination that generate speculation. These issues are explored in the context of changing forms of governance of the Hooghly riverine economy by bureaucrats in the Kolkata Port Trust. Through ethnography we track how public-private partnerships are forged by exemplary men or 'seers' deploying divinatory action. The fortunes of business, trade and the livelihoods of informalised workers rest on these practices, which generate short-term unstable forms of capital accumulation. Drawing on this case, we can potentially develop comparative critical approaches to the recent emergence of popularist-speculators in India and elsewhere

Speculations on infrastructure: from colonial public works to a postcolonial global asset class on the Indian Railways 1840-2017

This paper issues a challenge to examine the current emergence of infrastructure as a global asset class against a longer-term colonial history of speculation. Taking the case of the Indian railways, it shows that their current financialization and transformation into a logistical network emerges from colonial techniques of calculations of risky frontiers, state guarantees and debt accounting. Historical forms built from racial and national inequalities have been incorporated into a new era of the financialization of public works led globally by the World Bank. This new moment erases the distinctive political histories of public works, while also capitalizing on these. Overall this leads to two theoretical claims: firstly, that we should only use the term ‘infrastructure’ self-consciously as a mode of critique of such contemporary moves. Secondly, that our theories derived from Marx, Foucault and Callon place too much emphasis on ‘economization’ and that we need to replace this with attention to speculation. Speculation is affective, intellectual and physical labour that aims to direct capital towards various ends. It involves the ethical imagination of social differences and places distinctions of race, nation and gender at the core of calculative regimes. This labour is governed by key nodal contracts between the market and the state and associated accounting and legal regimes or treaties for accumulation

Speculation: a political economy of technologies of imagination

This introduction explores how to build a critical analysis of post-crisis capitalism by moving beyond Marx, Foucault and Callon's approaches. This is crucially important because powerful technocratic institutions and the discipline of economics are attempting to regain legitimacy by adopting theories that mirror performativity, discursive, narrative and network concepts within the social sciences. To combat this we need to forge a new approach that returns our attention to questions of accumulation and inequality. It is with this in view that the articles in the special issue use the concept of speculation and explore it in real estate markets, infrastructure financing, oil and gold trading, ethical finance and gambling. Overall speculation is understood to be future-oriented affective, physical and intellectual labour that aims to accumulate capital for various ends. Control of the means of speculation is governed by the distribution of contracts and credit in society. And crucially the amount of surplus value extracted depends on calculations of risk based on the imagination of social differences. Social evaluations are at the core of the technologies of imagination used in speculation. Speculation is akin to practices of divination or magic because it aims to reveal a hidden order of human and non-human ethical powers that explain the past, present and future and make it possible to act. Importantly this means that racial, gendered, national and other imaginings of the social permeate acts of speculation. From our perspective, we can write a critical and post-colonial account of capitalism that addresses inequalities of race and nation scandalously omitted from Marx, Foucault and Callon's accounts of ‘the economic’

Fixing Inequalities in Time: Radicalising Westermarck’s moral emotions for a critique of financialised speculation

Precarity and uncertainty are a key axis of inequality; yet these are not problems in or of time. They are experiences generated by the forms of financialised speculation that have eroded long term planning for the public good since the late 1980-90s. Key mediating institutions such as central banks and bureaucracies have been influenced by epistemes of Post-Keynesian economics that have eroded their capacity to provide us with security of livelihoods and relationships. These have their ethical foundations in Adam Smith’s accounts of moral selfhood, and we can draw on Edward Westermarck’s critical anthropological relativizing of Smith’s ethics in order to critique them. We can also deploy Westermarck’s analyses of moral emotions to push back against emerging epistemes of narrative economics and agent based modelling that are relegitimising financialised speculation within our economic institutions at present. But more significantly perhaps, we should take Westermarck’s approach into the wild of contemporary speculative practice to analyse the moral emotions of care that characterise it. This approach is illustrated though an ethnography of the precarious, uncertain waterscape of the Global Thames. Such ethnographies should lead us to demand new versions of care based on mutuality and solidarity from our public economic institutions. This is especially important in the present moment of the COVID-19 epidemic, which has re-politicised fiscal and monetary policy.Keywords: precarity, uncertainty, timescapes, financialisation, speculation, mutuality,solidarit

Phenotype, functions and fate of adoptively transferred tumor draining lymphocytes activated ex vivo in mice with an aggressive weakly immunogenic mammary carcinoma

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Regression of established tumors can be induced by adoptive immunotherapy with tumor draining lymph node lymphocytes activated with bryostatin and ionomycin. We hypothesized that tumor regression is mediated by a subset of the transferred T lymphocytes, which selectively infiltrate the tumor draining lymph nodes and proliferate <it>in vivo</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Adoptive transfer of B/I activated tumor draining lymphocytes induces regression of advanced 4T1 tumors, and depletion of CD8, but not CD4 T cells, abrogated tumor regression in mice. The predominant mediators of tumor regression are CD8+ and derived from CD62L^-T cells. Transferred lymphocytes reached their peak concentration (10.5%) in the spleen 3 days after adoptive transfer and then rapidly declined. Adoptively transferred cells preferentially migrated to and/or proliferated in the tumor draining lymph nodes, peaking at day 5 (10.3%) and remained up to day 28. CFSE-stained cells were seen in tumors, also peaking at day 5 (2.1%). Bryostatin and ionomycin-activated cells proliferated vigorously <it>in vivo</it>, with 10 generations evident in the tumor draining lymph nodes on day 3. CFSE-stained cells found in the tumor draining lymph nodes on day 3 were 30% CD8⁺, 72% CD4⁺, 95% CD44⁺, and 39% CD69⁺. Pre-treatment of recipient mice with cyclophosphamide dramatically increased the number of interferon-gamma producing cells.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Adoptively transferred CD8+ CD62L^lowT cells are the principal mediators of tumor regression, and host T cells are not required. These cells infiltrate 4T1 tumors, track preferentially to tumor draining lymph nodes, have an activated phenotype, and proliferate <it>in vivo</it>. Cyclophosphamide pre-treatment augments the anti-tumor effect by increasing the proliferation of interferon-gamma producing cells in the adoptive host.</p