Capital

Michael Taussig spent years on the Colombian Pacific coast studying a new form of animism popularized among workers of the sugar industry, after the arrival of capitalist forms of labor. In Colombia as well as in Mexico and other American countries, especially in urban centers such as Bogota and Mexico City, accumulation, alienation, and wage work are aspects of capitalist societies that have become naturalized: we are individuals inserted in these societies (and in the difficult cities that serve as their setting). We buy, sell, and labor in workdays which are homogeneously sorted into work and leisure. We do so as if those were ideal ways of occupying time and space, as if such ways had always been there, only waiting to emerge at the right time in history. In this scheme, and in the light of this new “nature,” a few creations of this very same capital acquire substance and reality, while other entities become inert objects: commodities begin to palpitate with the vital flux of exchange and valuation, while people start to look as mere producing bodies, identical and interchangeable. Under the sway of this system, in communities where labor is bound to the preservation of the land and to the dignity of the worker, the abstract machinery of capital turns into the object of an animist gaze: foreign sugar companies, violently arriving to the fields of the Cauca Valley, acquire the tenor of a demon, a being that comes into life to suck in the souls of the laborers, to dry the earth out. [...]

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