This quote from the Communist Manifesto appears to be an ode to the dynamism of capitalism and to globalisation. Certainly, it highlights capitalism’s immense powers to innovate and to create wealth – and in the process to destroy old forms of social organisation and to create new ones.

That power has impacted in differential and contradictory ways on human history and human lives ever since, because the flip side of this hubris is that poverty and exploitation have also been characteristic of capitalism’s global expansion, with epic struggles focused on how to contain and resist its destructive power at the same time as to harness its ability to create wealth and reduce poverty. In essence, these are struggles over distribution; they are also struggles over power: over who gets to determine the rules of the game. Such struggles have taken many forms, with highly differential outcomes within and between societies and interest groups across the globe – with the process continuing unabated.

In Harold Wolpe’s classic work Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in

South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid (1972) he explains how subsistence agriculture in the bantustans contributed to reducing the costs of labour on the mines:

Over time, however, Wolpe anticipated that pressure on land in the bantustans would place pressure on the contribution that subsistence agriculture could make, that this would increase conflict, not only over wages but over the entire structure of the society, and that such conflict would be met by political measures that would in turn generate a political reaction (Wolpe 1972, p. 444).

The 1987 Mineworkers Strike for a living wage represented a critical moment in such a cycle. By then, the crisis of rural reproduction was acute. Arguably, a tipping point had been reached in bantustans such as the Transkei. Not only was the rural economy unable to fulfil its designated role in underpinning cheap wages, but rural households had become dependent on cash transfers from the mines and the urban economy.

These pressures contributed to NUM’s remarkable growth and made the call for a living wage resonate deeply. A mere five years after NUM was formally launched in 1982, it had become South Africa’s largest trade union, able to organise the biggest industrial strike in South African history:

The market development approach to business development services discussed in the previous chapter turned the existing small enterprise (SE) development paradigm on its head. Within the Mineworkers Development Agency (MDA), we railed against it. It was anathema to our world view and to our strategies. Yet despite the flaws described, the Business Development Services (BDS) market development approach posed important challenges to how development in the sector was understood and done and to the terms of the debate since. Despite our resistance and reservations, we learned sometimes unexpected lessons from the process.

Firstly, despite its narrow initial focus, in which the development of business service markets became the new all-encompassing purpose of development intervention in the sector, it did lay the basis for a far more concerted focus on the role of markets in development. Surprising as this may seem today, a context in which SE development had become a focus of poverty reduction strategies meant the dominant paradigm (in South Africa at least) was often devoid of market analysis. MDA was arguably ahead of the game in its level of focus on market dynamics at the time, in particular, on how the structure of the economy was impacting on the competitiveness of small entrepreneurs and limiting the scope for self-employment to act as a pathway out of poverty. Yet, in the sector as a whole, an understanding of market dynamics was often absent from the discourse. For example, livelihoods approaches then gaining traction in the social sector often lacked any analysis of how markets might be impacting on livelihood opportunities, with livelihoods seen as a category of economic activity operating in some kind of parallel universe largely unaffected by market structure or market forces. So, while we certainly argued about how markets were understood, there was no dispute about the need to do so.

Secondly, the BDS market development approach focused attention on the market effects of development intervention. Until then, the focus of impact assessment had been on the effects of intervention on those SEs that were the direct beneficiaries. Looking at the market effects of development agencies as market players meant stepping back a level and recognising how intervention might be changing a given market context.

La filósofa francesa Christine Buci-Glucksmann sugirió en su momento que el ocular-centrismo que produjo el cruce inesperado entre la celebración contrarreformista de lo visual y la ciencia óptica moderna junto con la consecuente secularización del ojo barroco, dieron lugar a una auténtica hidropesía de la mirada que se manifestó en una multiplicación incesante de la imagen artística en la Europa barroca (5). Esta operación visual barroca, continuaba Buci-Glucksmann, era antiplatónica, pues anteponía la promesa de una variación infinita a la referencia inmóvil a la Idea (5), e incluso justificaba que Walter Benjamin hubiera visto en el arte barroco “the first expression of the ‘decline of the aura’ and the apparition at the very center of religious art, of the ‘exposition value’ characteristic of the future reproducibility of the works of art” (6–7).

La suerte barroca del icono cleopátrico no fue ajena a esos procesos estéticos y económicos que señala la filósofa francesa: los numerosos poetas y dramaturgos auriseculares vistos en los capítulos anteriores percibieron y explotaron la “infinite variety” del icono cleopátrico intuida en su momento por Shakespeare; los escultores, pintores, dibujantes, orfebres y tapiceros de la Europa barroca materializaron esa variedad en numerosos bienes de consumo; y la considerable demanda de esos bienes por parte del coleccionismo aristocrático (que en España llegó a su apogeo durante el reinado de Felipe IV) nos lleva incluso a pensar en un primer momento postaurático en torno a la moda cleopátrica barroca.

El arte barroco llevó a su clímax la estetización de la historia cleopátrica al convertirla en un objeto estético susceptible de ser copiado, pero también al asignarle un carácter autorreflexivo sobre la importancia de la estética y los sentidos en la Europa barroca. Pudimos ya entrever ese carácter en las elaboradas ékfrasis de las comedias pseudocalderoniana y belmontina; Giovanni Battista Tiepolo y Gerolamo Mengozzi-Colonna lo harían todavía más evidente en los frescos y trompe-l'oeils con los que adornaron el salón de baile del Palazzo Labia en Venecia, estableciendo una ilusión de continuidad entre el lujo cleopátrico representado en las paredes (con la escena de la llegada a Cidno y del banquete alejandrino) y la propia ostentación y aspiración social de sus mecenas. Allison Scott acierta, en este sentido, cuando afirma que “‘Cleopatra’ conjured a nexus of meanings and associations encompassed in the shifting idea of luxury in early modern culture” (66).

Safe to the use of Jhc: Speculating on the Jesus Guild

ALTHOUGH we may shed light on many aspects of parish procedure, much remains obscure. It is hard, for instance, to delineate the exact role of the masters, and harder still to compile a full roster of their achievements. To take a now-familiar example, while the masters were evidently deeply involved in the construction and management of the parish conduit in the early sixteenth century, their exact role eludes us. This only confirms a previous observation: that the most abundant parish records – the churchwardens’ accounts – reflect the lowlier routines of administration; paradoxically, we often know much less about major decisions and achievements. With this lesson in mind, we ought finally to consider materials suggesting that, in the later fifteenth century, parish leaders invested in a brotherhood further enriching the parish liturgy and invigorating parish procedures – and whose existence may, indeed, help to explain how parish managers sustained the resolve to achieve so much.

Earlier discussion has already mulled over Alice Chestre's decision, with help from her son, John, in 1477, to devise a tenement in Broad Street to the parish feoffees, so that ‘all outgoings and profits from the tenement’ – some four marks per annum – could support both a perpetual anniversary in the church and also a Mass (said, in an insert, to be ‘le salve de Jhesu’) celebrated on Fridays in the Lady aisle of All Saints’. The benefaction list notes that she did this ‘in the worship of Jesus, to the foundation of a Mass of Jesus by note to be kept and continued every Friday in this church and likewise an anthem, that [Harry and Alice] be prayed for every Friday at that Mass by name’. But the earliest, and albeit one of only a few references to a Jesus Guild in the parish, occurred in the unbound churchwardens’ accounts for 1467–68, noting that the wardens had paid the sum of 6d. ‘for mending the window in Jhc is yelde’, which, while undeniably cryptic, suggests that the guild was already extant and associated with a discrete part of the church – although quite which is not divulged.

When NUM started its co-op programme, the idea of co-ops as an alternative to traditional forms of ownership and to the organisation of work was starting to capture the imagination within the democratic movement in South Africa. Within the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), interest in co-ops was given impetus during the 1980s by the establishment of the Sarmcol Workers Co-operative (SAWCO) in Howick, near Pietermaritzburg. SAWCO was initiated by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and was intended to provide income support and solidarity to workers who had been dismissed in a bruising battle with metal-industry employer Sarmcol.

Co-ops were not new on the South African landscape. A network of credit unions existed, along with scattered community-based initiatives. Most visible, however, were the large agricultural marketing and supply co-ops set up by white farmers. These were constituted as racially exclusive entities and represented a powerful conservative farming lobby in South African politics, through which significant subsidies and support to farmers were channelled.

The emergent co-op movement was at pains to differentiate itself from this tainted tradition, looking to the rest of the world for more democratic and socialist examples on which to build. Close to home, the emergence of co-op movements in Zimbabwe and in other countries across the region provided inspiration, as they grappled with postliberation challenges, providing a window into future possibilities for South Africa that, in the 1980s, still seemed very remote.

Globally, the co-op tradition includes a diverse and dynamic range of forms of co-op. The main categories include user co-ops, such as consumer co-ops, credit unions, child-care and utility co-ops, where the members are users of the services of the co-op; producer co-ops, where the members are self-employed producers such as farmers, fishermen or taxi drivers, who come together to create economies of scale in relation to inputs, processing activities and/or marketing; social or community co-ops, often multi-stakeholder in form, bringing members together around a social goal; and worker co-ops, whose main purpose is job creation and are owned and controlled by workers in the enterprise (Roelants et al. 2014, p. 17; Zamagni 2012, p. 22).

Inspirados por un deseo enciclopédico de agotar toda la historia conocida, los compiladores del scriptorium alfonsino no dudaron a la hora de ofrecer al lector diversas versiones de un mismo hecho histórico. Este fue el caso, por ejemplo, del suicidio de Cleopatra VII:

El alcance y ambición de la General Estoria justificaban la narración meticulosa del suicidio de Cleopatra. Sin embargo, al ofrecer dos finales diferentes de la “estoria” de la reina egipcia el scriptorium real estaba también sugiriendo dos lecturas morales diferentes de un mismo exemplum histórico, ya que para un lector medieval la imagen de una mujer mordida en el brazo por una serpiente no tenía las mismas connotaciones que la de una mujer mordida en ambos pechos por dos serpientes.

La historia medieval de Cleopatra es, en gran medida, la historia de esa mordedura y la de su poder para reformular el cuerpo de la reina al inscribir en él significados diferentes que acotan, controlan y legitiman la reproducción textual y visual de un espacio potencialmente excesivo. Es importante notar aquí el contradictorio simbolismo de la serpiente en el espectáculo de la muerte de Cleopatra. Por una parte, la serpiente se presenta como el símbolo de la resistencia de Cleopatra al poder imperial, encarnado en la decisión de Octaviano de exhibir a la reina cautiva en su marcha triunfal por Roma, tal y como muestra, por ejemplo, la visión procleopátrica de la reina en la tragedia senequista del XVI; por otra, como sugieren las lecturas clásicas anticleopátricas y su alargada sombra sobre la historiografía medieval y renacentista, esa misma serpiente funciona como evidente metáfora fálico-política de la sumisión de Cleopatra y de la tierra que ésta simboliza a la sujeción imperial.