#anna tsing

In her fascinating study of the dense networks of entanglement, contradiction, and conflict in Indonesia’s forests, many of which are today being razed for palm oil plantations, anthropologist Anna Tsing encourages us to recognize that capitalism advances through the friction between its universal logic of accumulation and the particular cultures, lifeways, and structures of power in each locale. Contrary to the dreams of a “friction-free” capitalism promised by billionaire, philanthropist, and self-styled intellectual Bill Gates, capitalism is defined by conflict and tension. Gates is only the latest of a long line of capitalist thinkers to dream that the free market, if allowed to flourish without regulation, will create a smooth world where the hardworking and talented, no matter their origins or station in life, could compete to succeed, and that this competitive striving would have beneficial effects for global society at large: greater wealth and greater innovation. Even many critics of capitalism fall prey to the myth of frictionlessness in their attempts to explain the nefarious clockwork of this demonic machine that metabolizes people and the earth not only into profit, but into the energy that fuels system’s endless reproduction and expansion. Tsing’s insistence that we look to the friction encourages us to recognize that what moves this machine forward (and halts its “progress”) is the friction that stems from forms of complicity and resistance, acquiescence and refusal that define every point where the abstract system of capitalism encounters the material realities of the entangled earth and its people.

Without collaborations, we all die.