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Please take the time to read the following excerpts from a very fine study by Marty et al (2022) on Maasai pastoralists in contemporary southern Kenya:

As an adaptation process, diversification brings new opportunities for some people, but can also displace risks and bring new exposures for others, acting as ‘a socially stratifying capitalist fix providing new avenues for accumulation and market penetration’, benefiting a small elite (Mikulewicz 2021, 424)’. . . .

Our results also align with recent research evidencing the increased importance of capital relations for grazing access in the context of changing land use across Kajiado (Jeppesen and Hassan 2022), which is likely to further accentuate processes of social differentiation and associated class formation dynamics. . . .

Our findings suggest that diversification tends to promote more individualized and market-based adaptation strategies, but that the drivers and ramifications of increased integration into capitalist production systems and renegotiation of production relations are complex and dynamic. Differentiated engagements with diversification in pastoral areas are not only related to changing material conditions, but also linked to ‘intangible’ dimensions, such as changing norms and values. New social differentiations emerge through the increased emphasis placed on formal education and how knowledge influences one’s position within the community and beyond (e.g. the relation to state or non-governmental actors). At the same time, other entrenched markers of differentiation persist and are crystalized through exclusionary decision-making processes and established roles, perhaps most notably gendered discriminations. The research findings thus underscore the need for climate change adaptation planning in agrarian environments to extend beyond the dominant technical focus (Eriksen, Nightingale, and Eakin 2015), by showing how adaptation processes in pastoral environments are closely intertwined within rapidly evolving socio-political and economic transformations.

Edwige Marty, Renee Bullock, Matthew Cashmore, Todd Crane & Siri Eriksen (2022): Adapting to climate change among transitioning Maasai pastoralists in southern Kenya:an intersectional analysis of differentiated abilities to benefit from diversification processes., The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2022.2121918

I’ve left the original references in to indicate that the authors are not alone in their views–which to be clear from the outset I believe to be true as far as they go.

I want however to go further and take up the authors’ own suggestion that the adaptation processes be studied in terms of how they are now “closely intertwined within rapidly evolving socio-political and economic transformations”.

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Let’s look at the history behind those “socio-political and economic transformations.”

Since there are many historians to choose from, allow me to take the most recent one I’ve read: Capitalism: The story behind the word, by historian of ideas, Michael Sonenscher (2022, Princeton University Press).

I believe he is well-regarded, but that doesn’t matter for what follows: There are plenty of histories of capitalist relations, any number of which usefully complicate the above quotes and indeed compel us to go further.

–Sonenscher starts by underscoring that the development of commercial societies preceded the development of capitalism. More, when the two histories, which do get intertwined later on, are distinguished from the get-go, it becomes altogether clear that commercial societies and capitalist societies were characterized by different features and path dependencies.

Most notably, commercial societies had markets induced by divisions of labor that preceded capitalist class formation. Indeed, terminology introduce after that of “commercial societies”, like “primitive accumulation,” have served to misdirect analysts away from the high degree of economic differentiation on and specialization in those societies–again prior to very introduction of capitalist relations for financing war and debt.

–Hopefully, some readers recognize that this emphasis on trade and markets, along with a division of labor that was differentiated and specialized in terms of trade routes and transactions, also characterized significant pastoralist societies well prior to the commonly narrated version of 18th – 19th century introduction of (Western) capitalism.

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–So what? So what if these earlier commercial societies had markets and transactions for goods and services?

After all, the point underscored in the above quotes and many like them is that those earlier formations have long been superseded by capitalist relations and their accentuation/extension into what are no longer and must now be considered “former pastoralist societies.”

Really? Are we sure about that?

I can well believe processes the authors describe are going on in Kajiado, elsewhere in East Africa, and elsewhere in Africa and beyond.

What I can’t believe is that pastoralists are colonized everywhere by capitalism. You mean all (or even most?) of these people Wikipedia record are integrated in capitalist relations: “As of 2019, between 200 million and 500 million people globally practised pastoralism, and 75% of all countries had pastoral communities.”

–There are too many different types of livestock production systems, too many regional differences in the impacts of the climate emergency, too many different path dependencies historically and now into the Anthrocpocene to deny the following:

Just as researchers now talk about the varieties of capitalism, there all along were varieties of commercial societies, and among that latter were and still are pastoralist systems with their evolving–that is, with less ruptured than many think–divisions of labor, differentiations and specializations.

–But, again, so what? I have argued that pastoralisms are a global critical infrastructure. I now argue they have been one for a very, very long time in terms of their differentiation and specialization of services and opportunities to advance and change.

Related source

E. Roe (2020). A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure, STEPS Working Paper 113, STEPS Centre: Brighton, UK (available online at https://steps-centre.org/publication/a-new-policy-narrative-for-pastoralism/)

–The terms, risk and uncertainty, are used all the time by real-time infrastructure operators without meaning or referring to “expert probability estimates,” be they Bayesian, or based in frequencies, or recast as threats, vulnerabilities and exposure. But the operational usages of risk and uncertainty differ depending on where the operators are in the cycle of infrastructure operations and the standards of effective management at those stages.

For example, control room operators we interviewed (during their normal operations) spoke of the probability of failure being even higher in recovery than during usual times. Had we interviewed them in an actual system failure, their having to energize or re-pressurize line by line would have been described in far more demanding terms of operating in the blind, working on the fly and riding uncertainty.

–Note the phrase, “more demanding;” it is not “the estimated risk of failure in recovery is now numerically higher.”

It is more demanding because the cause-and-effect of normal operations is moot when “operating blind” (their term) in failure. What had been cause-and-effect is now replaced by nonmeasurable uncertainties accompanied by disproportionate impacts, with no presumption that causation (let alone correlation) is any clearer in that conjuncture.

What may have been the high reliability standard of preventing certain disasters from every happening has now been replaced by a requisite variety standard of effective emergency response, that is, then-and-there task demands are matched by then-and-there resource capabilities, even if only temporarily. It is true that there are urgency, clarity and logic in immediate response after failure, but they in no way obviate the need for impromptu improvisations and unpredicted, let alone hitherto unimagined, shifts in human and technical interconnectivities as system failure unfolds.

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Once we understand that the conventional notion that infrastructures have only two states–normal and failed–is grotesquely underspecified for empirical work, the whole-cycle comparisons of different understandings of infrastructure risk and uncertainty become far more central and rewarding.

Assume a major infrastructure has witnessed systemwide operations that were normal, disrupted, restored back to normal or tripped into outright failure, immediately responded to when failed (e.g., saving lives), followed by restoration of backbone services (electricity, water, telecoms), then into longer term recovery of destroyed assets (involving more and different stakeholders and trade-offs), and afterwards the establishment of a new normal, if there is to be one.

It is my belief that what truly separates the risks and uncertainties of longer-term recovery from risks and uncertainties found in a new normal isn’t that, e.g., the politics and conflicts have altered, but rather when or if infrastructures adopt new standards for their reliability management.

This may (or not) be in the form of different standards seeking to prevent specific types of events from ever happening. We already know that major distributed internet systems, now considered critical, are reliable because they expect components to fail and are better prepared for that and other contingencies. Here each component should be able to fail in order for the system to be reliable, unlike systems where management is geared to ensuring some components never fail.

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More has to be said, but let me leave you with a worry: namely, those commentators who assume “the new normal” is at best endless attempts at repair, where coping is the order of the day and managing for recovery no longer possible (if only because of management’s unintended consequences and the economics of coping).

From a whole-cycle approach, this reductionism is premature and thus exaggerated. In the first place, how can you have “proper pricing of risk,” if you don’t know the socio-technical system to be managed across its states of operation, the reliability standard to which it is to be managed then and there, and the risks and uncertainties entailed by subscribing to that standard for those systems? In the second place, there are of course no guarantees that the whole cycle will be spanned, but at least its format doesn’t, e.g., miss Dresden-now by stopping time at its 1945 devastation.

–It just isn’t that values about (in)equality are socially constructed. It’s that a smothering paste of statistical generalizations or macro-principles cannot stop the bubbling up and surfacing of all those contingent factors that differentiate inequalities for the purposes of really-existing policymaking and management–societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, legal, geographical, governmental, psychological, neurological, technological, religious, and more.

–So what?

The World Bank estimates over 1.5 billion people globally do not have bank accounts, many being the rural poor. Yet having bank accounts ties us into a global financialized capitalism. What, then, is to have more value? The rural poor with bank accounts or not? Integrated even more into global capitalism or not?

There are, of course, those who insist such is not a binary value choice. Many with bank accounts also work to change the upper reaches of financial capital. But there are also those aiming for the lower-reach specifics: Surely, bank accounts work in some instances and even then differently so.

–Insisting on case-by case looks to be weak beer. That is, until you realize the self-harm inflicted when political possibilities are foreclosed by a policy narrative that assumes the world is irreducibly colonized by capitalisms and their inequalities.

–I finished reading the Collected Critical Writings of Geoffrey Hill, which discussed a poet I don’t remember reading before, Ivor Gurney. Which in turn sends me to his poems, which leads me to his “War Books” from World War I and the following lines:

What did they expect of our toil and extreme
Hunger - the perfect drawing of a heart's dream? 
Did they look for a book of wrought art's perfection,
Who promised no reading, nor praise, nor publication? 
Out of the heart's sickness the spirit wrote
For delight, or to escape hunger, or of war's worst anger,
When the guns died to silence and men would gather sense
Somehow together, and find this was life indeed….

“What did they expect of our toil and extreme/Hunger—the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?” reminded me of an anecdote from John Ashbery, the poet, in one of his essays:

Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

It’s as if Chuang-tzu’s appetite—his form of hunger—did indeed produce the perfect drawing. Gurney’s next two lines, “Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,/Who promised no reading, no praise, nor publication?” reminds me of very different story, seeming to make the opposite point (I quote from Peter Jones’ Reading Virgil: Aeneid I and II):

Cicero said that, if anyone asked him what god is or what he is like, he would take the Greek poet Simonides as his authority. Simonides was asked by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, the same question, and requested a day to think about it. Next day Hiero demanded the answer, and Simonides begged two more days. Still no answer. Continuing to double up the days, Simonides was eventually asked by Hiero what the matter was. He replied, ‘The longer I think about the question, the more obscure than answer seems to be.’

I think Hiero’s question was perfect in its own right by virtue of being unquestionably unanswerable. In the case of Chuang-tzu, what can be more perfect than the image that emerges, infallibly and unstoppably, from a single stroke? In the case of Simonides, what can be more insurmountable than the perfect question without answer?

–Yet here is Gurney providing the same answer to each question: War ensures the unstoppable and insurmountable are never perfect opposites—war, rather, patches them together as living: Somehow together, and find this too is life.

Ashbery records poet, David Schubert, saying of the great Robert Frost: “Frost once said to me that – a poet – his arms can go out – like this – or in to himself; in either case he will cover a good deal of the world.”