Neoliberal Capitalism, Ponzi Logics of Accumulation, and Informal Economic Repertoires: The Great Transformations of the 1990s in Albania
Smoki Musaraj, Ohio University
Overview
Abstract
The 1990s brought a tumultuous wave of political, economic, and social transformations across Eastern Europe and other countries of the former socialist world. Some declared the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992) and the triumph of capitalism over its alternatives. Others described the postcommunist transformations as yet another wave of “great transformations,” echoing Karl Polanyi’s (1944) characterization of earlier capitalist transformations in pre-war England. Albania, a country that pursued one of the most extreme tracks of communism, was eager to embrace the new capitalist promise. Alongside other postcommunist countries, Albania embraced shock-therapy reforms despite a lack of a recent history of capitalist institutions such as private property and commercial banking. Hailed by the international community in 1995 as a leader in democratization and capitalist transformations, by 1997, Albania faced a near “total collapse of the state” (Çupi 2005), an economic collapse and total anarchy that followed the collapse of a dozen Ponzi schemes. These contradictions were also captured in local discourse. In the early nineties, residents described the Ponzi scheme period as one of abundance (bollëk) by noting that “even the dogs were eating petulla”; following the schemes' collapse, people recalled a sense of a second loss, even more devastating than the collapse of communism.
While the transformations of the early 1990s in Albania may seem to be particular to the site, in this presentation, I argue that the economic and social formations that emerged at this time were a combination of global forces and local repertoires. This presentation will outline the intertwined global and local economic and social institutions and repertoires.
I focus more specifically on global neoliberal policies and economies that emerged at this time, including a push for adopting structural adjustment policies that advised (and strongarmed) countries to deregulate, privatize, and financialize. I discuss how, in Albania, such policies generated various economic gaps that people and businesses sought to fill through informal economies. These included speculative economic practices (such as the Ponzi schemes), informal business arrangements (such as the use of sekserë and of klering), and unofficial transfers of remittances from immigrating countries. Some of these economic repertoires, I argue, built earlier economic institutions and practices (such as the communist llotari and previous remittance patterns); others were new practices that mimicked neoliberal economic logics (such as the Ponzi logics of accumulation in the pyramid schemes). I discuss the genealogies of these economic repertoires and their persistence, throughout the last three decades, as pillars of the Albanian postcommunist neoliberal economy. While providing insights into Albania’s postcommunist trajectory, these reflections also seek to speak to the broader contemporary logics of neoliberal capitalism—which I understand, taking after the work of other anthropologists (Tsing 2015) as an assemblage of capitalist and non-capitalist logics of wealth accumulation and economic life.
Introduction to the speaker
Smoki Musaraj is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University, Ohio, USA. She is a cultural anthropologist specializing in economic and legal anthropology. Her research focuses on theories of money and value, speculative bubbles, anthropology of corruption and the rule of law, migration and remittances, postsocialist transformations, and societies of the Mediterranean. She has researched and published on Ponzi schemes, mobile money, corruption indicators, media whistleblowers, speculative economies and remittances, and urban temporalities and materialities in postsocialist spaces. Her findings are reflected, among others, in her book Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania, published by Cornell University Press in 2020. Smoki has also co-edited the volumes Remitting, Restoring, and Building Contemporary Albania (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), co-edited with Nataša Gregorić Bon, and the volume Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Inclusion, and Design (Berghahn Books, 2018), co-edited with Bill Maurer and Ivan Small.
Currently, Smoki Musaraj is beginning a new project titled Mediterranean Dreaming: Migration and Tourism in Maritime Cities. In Fall 2023, she was the Germaine Tillon Chair of Mediterranean Tomorrow Fellowship at the IMéRA Institute of Advanced Studies in Marseille, France. Email: musaraj@ohio.edu.