It seemed important to us to assess this argument. We might ask whether the cultural imperialism of our times resides less in the superficial messages of ‘content’ than in those vaster and simultaneously more efective cultural forms that are the ideological ‘grand discourses’ of collaboration, creativity, sustainable development, diversity, empowerment, and so on. We have therefore tried to verify how far the development of these apparatuses is accompanied by the production or dissemination of ‘grand discourses’.
Nevertheless—this is our third point—we set out from the principle that social financing (like other uses of digital intermediation platforms) can also be used within the framework of vernacular or autonomous cultural expressions that self-identify as resistant or alternative—in relation to either authoritarian or semi-authoritarian political regimes, or ideological and socioeconomic logics imported from the Western North, including the discourses and practices of the ‘creative’ economy. In parallel, we should recall that, contrary to the Western configuration, much cultural production in Africa (and in the Andean countries) falls outside of any appropriation through intellectual property rights, which are the cornerstone of the ‘creative’ industries. This historical process of the ‘enclosure’ of culture by intellectual property (Nixon 2014) remains incomplete in the countries of the South, and has met with tenacious resistance movements, which make for interesting cases of the incarnation of the commons within the cultural field (Lobato 2010). These regions may potentially ofer prefigurations of postcapitalist forms of organization, free of the asymmetrical power relations characteristic of Western ‘collaborative’ apparatuses. We have kept this hypothesis in mind in our empirical research. But we have also been attentive to evidence which confirms the inverse hypothesis: that the Global South is ahead of the old Western societies, but this time as the ‘avantgarde of the market epoch’ (Comarof and Comarof 2012)—a distinction due especially to the absence of labour regulations, permitting a wholesale ‘uberization’ of the relations of production.
A final introductory observation involves vernacular crowdfunding systems in these regions (including tontine, iquib, pasanku, and susu) and their distant cousin, the international monetary and financial system. In the interview extract below, the co-founder of the South African platform Backabuddy mentions traditional devices of community solidarity and mutual aid, while emphasizing the platform’s dependency on financial flows from the North:
In African culture, there has always been a spirit of ubuntu which, while based on mutual aid within the community, has never yet been translated into the form of charitable giving—which leaves us still largely dependent on external sources for fundraising.
These statements raise wider issues than that of cultural production in itself. Using cultural crowdfunding as one of his examples, de Beukelaer emphasizes that the expansion of digital technology incontestably brings about possibilities that were previously unimaginable. As he remarks, though, the emergence of intermediation platforms in this domain has taken place mostly within the framework of partnerships with Western economic players (as well as foreign governmental agencies and international organizations), and has generally profited international markets (De Beukelaer 2015: 89). Studying cultural crowdfunding leads us to the question of the presence of Western economic (and political) players in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, and their control or influence over financial flows, policies (social, cultural and land use planning), and modes of labour organization (cultural or otherwise). On a macroeconomic level, the economist Costas Lapavitsas notes that, ‘during the 2000s, capital has flowed from poor to rich countries on a large scale … Even impoverished Africa contributed to the net flow of capital from poor to rich countries’ (Lapavitsas 2009: 118). Lapavitsas shows how this process was largely driven by the expansion of Western banks into developing countries over the course of the same period: ‘Significant proportions of total banking assets are now foreign-owned even in low income countries, most notably in Africa where foreign ownership constitutes more than two thirds of banking assets in ten countries’ (Lapavitsas 2009: 122). In the context of our research this question became unavoidable, insofar as cultural crowdfunding (and, by extension, the crowdfunding of ‘technological’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ projects) seems in many regards like a Trojan horse for significant developments in fintech.
Globalization and the Logics of Capitalism
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