Jairus banaji biography template
Jairus Banaji, A brief history of commercial capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020. Pp. 197. ISBN 978‐1‐6459‐132‐3 Hbk. £15.67)
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“Where is the working class? It’s all over the world today”: Jairus Banaji in conversation with Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu
The following conversation took place in December 2020. On the occasion of Jairus Banaji’s latest publication, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew B. Liu spoke to contextualize his work within a multi-decade trajectory of history, theory, and labor organization, across Europe and Asia. We noted the particular significance of an original intervention developed by Banaji in the 1970s, taking aim at the orthodox Marxist equation between capitalism and ‘free wage labor.’ Whereas the wage constitutes a particular ‘mode of exploitation,’ he argued in 1977, ‘capitalism’ points toward an epochal ‘mode of production,’ which is more capacious and universal. The distinction thereby enables scholars to expand their vision of capitalism’s history, from the classical story centered on the urban north Atlantic to other societies and periods fueled by agrarian, unfree, and the nominally independent working classes.
Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu also touch upon Banaji’s early influences, transformations in theory and global capitalism since the 1970s, and the relevance of theory and history for political imagination in 2020.
Listen on Spotify, Stitcher and Apple or click below:
The transcript has been slightly modified from the audio original; [brackets] indicate new information added after the recording had taken place.
A biography
Sheetal Chhabria (SC): Jairus, your work has been deeply influential for me and, I'm sure, for Andy as well. I remember reading as a graduate student a bunch of your essays, and I was particularly struck by the way in which you attended to the history of capitalism in a very longue durée. You were keen to decenter Eurocentric origin stories, you wanted the non-teleological account. I recently read a sort of unpublished essay of Kenneth Lipartito The American Historical Review, 2016 HISTORIANS ARE EXAMINING THE ECONOMY once again. They are studying commodities, markets, corporations, and banks. They are mapping trade patterns, dissecting marketing strategies, and deconstructing managerial ideologies. Graduate schools now offer courses on the history of finance, political economy, and the grandest topic of all, capitalism. Sensitive to cultural history's critique of simple materialism, the new scholarship in business and economic history offers the possibility of a synthesis of the material and the mental in the study of the past. Fifty years ago, history was anchored in what Geoff Eley and Keith Nield term a "sovereign materialism." 1 Even when studying culture and social relations, historians assumed that at base the past was shaped through material forces, notably systems of production, technology, property, and exchange. Much of the debate in the profession over the past half-century has been about establishing the authority of ideas, values, and identities independent of coarse materiality or narrow economic interests. That project was largely successful, but it isolated the study of economic matters from the mainstream of history. The return of the economic reflects a desire to take the material side of life seriously once again. Things, nature, technologies, labor, and commodities count, not just as cultural representations or referents in language, but in their own right. But things, their making and exchanging, cannot be separated from language and ideas. Understanding the interconnections between material and symbolic life is at the heart of the new literature. The best examples have found original and compelling ways to bring the economic back into the larger narratives of history. The projects of the new economic and business histo .Review: Jairus Banaji, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism