At the height of this pandemic’s third wave, with many of us sitting in what by now feels like an eternal lockdown, images of a gigantic ship stuck inside the Suez Canal seem to have provided more than just a welcome distraction. The vessel, unable to move one way or another, proved to be immensely relatable, if endless memes flooding the ether over the last few days are any indication at all. With the ship now figuring as a stand-in for every dilemma under the sun, cartoonist Guy Venables, in his work for Metro Newspaper UK, perhaps best summed up the phenomenon with a drawing of the stuck ship that has a voice emerging from the vessel saying, “This is terrible! We’re going to be used as a metaphor for everything!”
The popular fascination with the Suez blockage is not surprising. Ships, if we can be excused for anthropomorphizing them for a moment, are as charismatic as human-made objects can ever be. Standing next to a container ship of the dimensions of the Ever Given is an experience that is hard to shrug off, so massive and overwhelming to the human size are these new ultra-large vessels. At the same time, having over recent years done research among workers involved in producing, operating, maintaining and (un-)loading these ships, we found ourselves rather unsurprised by the events unfolding in the Suez. Among some maritime industry experts, the fact that container ships have gotten too big has been an open secret for quite a while (e.g. see Lim 1998; Merk 2015; Weisenthal and Alloway 2021). Laleh Khalili, for instance, has recently shown how the Suez Canal ironically played a key role in the acceleration of ship growth, when oil tankers rose in size as a response to the Suez crisis in the 1950s (e.g. 2021; see also Khalili 2020). The temporary cardiac arrest that the Ever Given has caused inside the Suez Canal, Khalili’s work and that of other excellent critical logistics scholars has shown (for an overview, see Charmaine Chua’s valuable list here), may only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the damage that ultra-large container ships are causing.
Image 1: “Transiting through the Suez Canal.” Photo: Johanna Markkula.
But first of all – to the hard facts on the ground: For nearly a week, a 400-meter-long container ship has been stuck in the southern part of the Suez Canal, blocking all traffic, and causing an estimated loss of 400 Million US Dollars per hour to the global economy. On her way from Yantian in China to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and with room for 20,000 twenty-foot freight containers (TEUs) when fully loaded, on the morning of 23 March Ever Given was surprised by strong desert winds in shallow waters. Like the Straits of Malacca, the Panama Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal – built partially by forced laborers from 1859-1869 – is a vital vein in the bloodstream of trade. This is the shortest route between Asia and Europe. An average of 52 ships pass through the Suez Canal every day; 12% of international ship traffic and as much as 30% of global container traffic is routed via this narrow chokepoint. For ships that during the past week have been diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, a significantly longer journey awaits. As the queue of waiting ships grew to more than 300 by March 28, deliveries to Europe and beyond have suffered severe delays, while the currently cut-off ports are bracing themselves for a true onslaught of ships that will clog up their waterways once the blockage has been resolved. In a nutshell, this colossal mess will certainly take a while to sort out, even once the ship has become unstuck.
Container Economies on Overdrive
As we have recently summarized in a theme section of Focaal (“Container Economies”, Leivestad and Markkula 2021), global shipping is built on intricate logistical systems, systems that have come into place with the invention of the modern day intermodal shipping container, and where “Just in time” principles govern everything. With the development of new shipping systems and technological solutions from the 1950s onwards, it became cost-effective to transport goods and raw materials between continents, primarily from large production countries in Asia to markets in Europe and the US (see Levinson 2006). Container ships today transport 24% of all the world’s dry goods, and building ever larger ships seemed to be the obvious, cost-effective strategy to embrace. From the mid-2000s onwards, more and more shipping companies have begun to expand their fleets with larger ships. The world’s largest shipping company, the Danish Mærsk, proved to be a leader in this development, and the Asian-owned shipping companies – many of them state-controlled – followed suit over recent years. Between 2005 and 2015, container vessels doubled in size. Since 2017 alone, 77 additional mega-container vessels with a capacity of over 20,000 containers have been brought into use.
As we (Leivestad and Schober) also describe in an upcoming article in Anthropology Today, some maritime experts have long been skeptical about how sustainable these ultra-large box ships actually are – a debate that has certainly flared up again recently. Before the pandemic hit the world economy last year, shipping prices had temporarily fallen to a record low, which was partly due to the overcapacity created by nearly all major shipping companies simultaneously betting on the introduction of ultra-large container vessels. The spectacular 2016 collapse of Hanjin Shipping (see Schober 2021), then among the top 10 of shipping companies in the world, is often attributed as a direct outcome of this over-capacity. In our piece in AT, we discuss how the language of “Economies of Scale” used to justify these ships is more than just of a performative nature. It is, one can argue, part of a false economy in the sense that these ships mark a real redistribution of wealth from public funds to corporate elites, rather than the creation of new wealth that is their ostensible justification.
Size Matters
Through our research in one of Europe’s largest container ports in southern Spain, around South Korean and Philippine shipyards, and on board of various container ships, we have come across other negative effects that ultra-large container ships have caused over recent years. When not clogging up the Suez Canal, these increasingly larger ships are often causing new problems for maritime infrastructure, the environment, and negatively affect people’s working conditions. Fewer and fewer ports can actually accommodate the new ships. For those ports that can – of which many are struggling to survive in a highly competitive industry – major investments are required to build ever higher cranes, longer docks and larger container warehouses. Port work must be adapted to the megaships’ routes and schedules, and workers both at sea and on land fear that the growing ship sizes, together with ever smaller crew sizes on board, eventually will lead to serious accidents. The environmental aspects of shipping in general are significant. For instance, sea beds must be dredged at regular intervals, with major consequences for the marine environment above and below water (e.g. Carse and Lewis 2020).
Although the Ever Given is now
about to be released from the canal, the drama is far from over. In many ports,
maritime workers fear chaotic conditions when all waiting ships resume traffic
– at a time when the pandemic has already caused much havoc across the
industry. Hopefully, the incident in the Suez Canal will be a wake-up call.
Escalating ship sizes have serious consequences, and large parts of the infrastructure
that has enabled the megaship growth are financed by tax payer money. The price
for the Ever Given, and the many
ships of its kind that will continue to sail the oceans, may ultimately have to
be paid by all of us.
Hege Høyer Leivestad is Assistant Professor at Stockholm
University, Sweden, and researcher in the ERC project PORTS at the University
of Oslo, Norway. Her research project, Frontier freight: Maritime logistics at
the Strait of Gibraltar, is funded by the Swedish Research Council and deals
with port life, labor, and global shipping in southern Spain.
Johanna Markkula is postdoctoral fellow at the Department of
Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she is part of the
research project Life cycle of container ships. Markkula is a maritime
ethnographer with ten years of experience researching the maritime industry and
global maritime labor. She has carried out ethnographic research onboard cargo
ships with multinational crews as well as in the Philippines with maritime
organizations and businesses ashore.
Elisabeth Schober is associate professor at the University of Oslo’s Department of Social Anthropology, Norway. Schober is currently the principal investigator at Life cycle of container ships (funded by the NFR), where she focuses on shipbuilding in South Korea and the Philippines. In 2019, she was awarded an ERC-Starting Grant for a project that will center on some of the world’s most important container ports.
References
Carse, Ashley and Joshua A. Lewis. 2020.
“New horizons for dredging research.” In WIREs Water.Vol.7,
issue 6 (November/ December). https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1485
Leivestad, Hege Høyer and Johanna Markkula.
2021. “Inside Container Economies”. Focaal. 89: 1-11.
Levinson, Marc. 2006. The Box: How the
Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lim, Seok-Min. 1998. ‘Economies of scale in
container shipping’, Maritime Policy & Management 25 (4): 361-373.
Cite as: Leivestad, Hege Høyer, Johanna Markkula, and Elisabeth Schober. 2021. “Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences.” FocaalBlog, 30 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/30/leivestad-hege-hoyer-johanna-markkula-and-elisabeth-schober-beyond-suez-escalating-ship-sizes-and-their-consequences/
Contemporary anthropological praxis sits at the intersection of two ethical traditions. Many anthropologists are equipped with both a sophisticated understanding of the ethics and politics of representation and a practical knowledge of the bureaucratic norms and standards of institutional research ethics (informed consent, confidentiality, anonymisation etc.). And yet, if the PrecAnthro/EASA report (Fotta et al 2020) and the recent scandal at the HAU journal tell us anything (Kalb 2018, Murphy 2018, Neveling 2018, Singal 2020), it is that our disciplinary ethics does little to ensure the ethical conduct of our discipline. As other contributors to this debate have noted, the situation described in the report demands a political and an anthropological response. It requires us to unionise and work ethnographically to understand “the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization” (Narotzky 2021). In my opinion, the report should also provoke us to re-evaluate the ethics of anthropological knowledge production.
I welcome the PrecAnthro report for helping to illustrate the scale of anthropological casualisation in Europe, but it is true that my feelings likely reflect how closely the report describes my own experiences of academic precarity: I was educated in the UK and since completing my PhD in 2015, have worked on fixed-term research contracts. As Susana Narotzky (2021) and Natalia Buier (2021) note, the report privileges the perspectives of researchers like me, whilst excluding the experiences of some of the most marginalised precarious workers in anthropology such as low-paid teaching staff for whom EASA membership is neither professionally advantageous nor affordable. I write here from my located perspective as a post-doc who has worked in the field of research ethics for a number of years.
I found little to disagree with in the FocaalBlog commentaries on the PrecAnthro report and would only contend that I do not believe that anthropologists feel uncomfortable talking about precarity within our discipline. On the contrary, in fact, I think that anthropologists are more than happy to discuss academic precarity because they see it as a largely externally driven phenomenon – part of the same great process of neoliberal bureaucratisation that has devolved power from academics to university managers and driven a culture of performance review and job insecurity across the piece (so called publish-or-perish). Rather, I would think, what makes anthropologists feel uncomfortable is talking about how the precarity of junior colleagues leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by senior colleagues and reluctant to report abuse and bullying due to a fear of reputational damage (Kalb 2021, Drążkiewicz 2021, Rajaram 2021). The kind of exploitation that allegedly took place at HAU may be extreme, but as Neveling (2018) argues, it sits within “a spectrum of social, economic, and political processes that have always driven academia and continue to do so” and that reflect the general conditions of capitalism. Yet, whilst we should of course foreground the political economy of academic casualisation in order to understand the grounds for collective resistance, we must also question what it means to produce anthropology is a way that is sensitive to the risks of exploitation inherent to the contemporary academic process. Such a project would necessarily be as much about the ethics of anthropological knowledge production as the political economy of precarity.
One of the difficulties that anthropology faces here is a lack of familiarity. Our existing professional ethics and standards are attuned to the practices of conducing fieldwork and writing ethnography. We are not used to thinking about how we interact with each other as a problem of anthropological ethics. Neither do we tend to think of “the anthropologist” as someone who is particularly vulnerable. Indeed, it was not so long ago that the anthropologist was seen as quite the opposite of a precariously employed, exploited worker. Typified by the image of Stephen Tyler on the cover of Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), the figure of the anthropologist-as-writer marked a dawning disciplinary confrontation with the idea that ethnography was not neutral scientific description, as had apparently previously been assumed, but a genre of “persuasive fiction” largely produced by elite, white men, working under conditions of colonial and post-colonial privilege. Anthropologists, who understandably tend to privilege the ethics of their own discipline to those imposed from the outside (i.e., institutional research ethics), have become keen observers of the politics and ethics of representation. Anthropologists are skilled at unpacking assumptions and revealing the structures of inequality that determine whose experience counts and who gets to speak for whom – as demonstrated in this debate by the various incisive critiques of the limits of the PrecAnthro survey. And yet it is unclear how effective our existing disciplinary ethics alone can be when the subject of exploitation is neither a subject of investigation, nor ultimately representation, but rather a fellow anthropologist.
The PrecAnthro report evokes a strikingly different image of “the anthropologist” to that of the elite, white man of crisis of representation. The typical respondent in the report is described instead as “a woman aged around 40… educated in either the UK or Germany… possibly in a relationship but has no children… and probably dissatisfied with her current employment and her work–life balance due to the fact that she works on a fixed-term contract” (Fotta et al 2020: 1). The report further illustrates what many already knew: contemporary anthropological knowledge production relies on a precariat of low-paid anthropological workers (postgrads, postdocs, teaching assistants etc.), many of whom will never obtain a permanent contract in the discipline nor academia more generally. What does the growing visibility of this version of “the anthropologist” mean for anthropological praxis? Are we to continue to imagine that the rights and wrongs of anthropological knowledge production can be discussed independently of the labour relations that structure our discipline? If not, then we may need consider whether our existing professional ethics are equipped to deal with the moral and political realities of anthropological research in the 21st century. Indeed, if it is our ambition to build the kind of class consciousness required for collective mobilisation, then we may need to start by acting in solidarity with precariously employed anthropologists and try to envisage ways that our working practices can be used to help mitigate, rather than exploit, the forms of vulnerability that academia creates.
Adam
Brisley is a post-doctoral
researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has a PhD from the
University of Manchester and has previously held post-doctoral positions in the
universities of Manchester and Bristol. His research interests focus on the
relationship between care and political economy in the context of health
systems crisis.
Clifford, J. and
Marcus, G. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography.
University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
Fotta, M., Ivancheva, M. and Pernes, R. 2020. The Anthropological Career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists: https://doi.org/10.22582/easaprecanthro
Cite as: Brisley, Adam. 2021. “Ethics and the Anthropological Worker.” FocaalBlog, 9 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/24/adam-brisley-ethics-and-the-anthropological-worker/
On February 22nd police forces
entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating
many students, arresting
31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff.
Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting
against a new bill on “Admission in higher
education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic
environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced.
The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any
dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.
The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.
Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.
Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.
In the
context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political
antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This
consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher
education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and
received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation,
political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space
where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no
surprise that they are being attacked first.
The Neoliberalization of Higher
Education and Law 4777/2021
The efforts to alter the public, free, and open
character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017,
Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made
several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards
universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for
private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article
16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public
institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense
mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially
delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in
higher education over the past two
decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’
degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected
representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack
the prestige of public universities.
However, when Nea Dimokratia came
to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum.
If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world,
in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its
brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest
movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took
place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to
crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never
been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a
seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy
was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses
– unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by
the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the
universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students
and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public
gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the
academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th.
Interestingly, this law was not introduced
by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the
Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in
educational affairs is unprecedented.
To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
The
new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university
autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates
a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and
interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable
not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore,
fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers
for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which
will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on
the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore,
the law allows for many
disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve
in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the
organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and
punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.
All of
these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university
self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals
the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and
the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous
and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from
chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20
million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all
the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first
year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept
police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.
The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.
The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.
Towards a closed and authoritarian university
The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.
More
generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major
centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and
society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been
privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such
critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship,
and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university
campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses
democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly
unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in
Parliament that, under the new law, “it
is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the
state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming
universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking
the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then
it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to
ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If
this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally
different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.
Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.
References
Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera
A., Heintz M. &
A. Horolets (eds.),
Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe:
An Intricate Institutional and
Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.
Gefou-Madianou,
Dimitra 2000. “Disciples,
Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M.
Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in
Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp.
256–78.
Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities
Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens
Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online
petition.
Image 1: Online Petition, “Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS” (Screenshot by FocaalBlog editors, this petition has our undivided support, we call on our readers to join us as signatories)
Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/
One day last October, I
happened to spot an acquaintance’s post on Wechat. It was a simple message
thanking all ‘Ant-izens’ (people who work in Ant Financial of Alibaba) for
their hard work, followed by a short video advertising Ant’s upcoming IPO. It
came from a data scientist who had given up his high-paid job in the US,
returned to China, and joined Ant Financial three years earlier. Ant shares
were then expected to start trading in Hong Kong and Shanghai on 5 November.
Jack Ma, the founder of Ant
and affiliate Alibaba Group Holding, had declared it a “miracle” that such a
large listing would take place outside New York. It was poised to raise up to
$34.4 billion in the world’s largest stock market debut and would create a vast
group of new billionaires. The data scientist’s post, like many posts on social
media, was a showoff: it was a subtle public announcement that he was going to
become extremely rich in two weeks’ time. The post contributed to a rather
complicated, self-consciously suppressed feeling among many professional
Chinese Americans: once again they were tasting the bitter feeling of being
stuck in the US middle-class, left behind by those who had managed to jump on
the fast-track train of China’s economic growth, grabbing opportunity in the
mainland and realizing their ‘Chinese Dreams’ by finally becoming ‘financially
independent’ (meaning rich enough that you and your offspring would never need
to worry about money again).
Then, on 3 November, two
days before the feast, the IPO was suddenly called off by the Chinese
government. Immediately thereafter, China ordered Ant Group to rectify its
businesses and comply with regulatory requirements amid increased scrutiny of
monopoly practices in the country’s internet sector. Such a blow! The data scientist
kept a dignified silence; my professional friends kept a polite silence. And
Jack Ma, the real protagonist of the drama, kept a cautious silence. He has
since disappeared from public view (only reappearing on 19 January 2021 with a
video emphasizing his social work). Where is he? What is he doing now? What
would happen to him? Why would all this happen? What does the state’s
intervention mean to Ant and Alibaba, to the whole ecommerce industry, and to
the whole private sector? What does it say about the logic of the state
apparatus in this enigmatic yet so important country? Where will it go? And how
would this affect the rest of the world, especially the West? So many questions
and so much drama.
Image 1: Jack Ma, who created Alibaba.com in Hangzhou, China in March 1999 (Source: JD Lasica, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/292160777)
Unsurprisingly, the Western liberal media have maintained their usual cold-war tone, by interpreting the drama as a typical attack initiated by a post-socialist authoritarian state towards this too powerful private entrepreneur out of fear or simply for the vanity and narcissism of Your Highness Xi. The Financial Times, for example, compared it immediately with the Khodorkovsky case in Russia (Lewis 2021, paywall). The implication was clear: you can never trust those former socialist authoritarian countries. They would never respect private property, follow the rules of the liberal world, and become “us”. Equally unsurprisingly, some Western Leftists have maintained their idealist tone towards a China that may perhaps be capitalist but is at least not Western capitalist. For them, the crack-down on Ant signifies a determined fight by the state and the population against greedy capital and capitalists.
Most people in China indeed
seem to have welcomed the crackdown and support the state’s actions. There are
various reasons for such support. One economist
I talked to supported it for financial security considerations and for the
state’s antitrust efforts. She mentioned the extremely high and hence hazardous
financial leverage that Ant Financial is playing with, as well as the antitrust
efforts against Facebook and Google in the USA. One private entrepreneur also
supported the action for financial security considerations, but based on
different reasoning. According to him, since there are many different kinds of
capital (including foreign capital) behind Alibaba and Ant, Ant’s IPO would further
open the door for foreign finance capital to enter the Chinese market. Some
intellectuals talked about the vulgar and disgusting advertisements made by Ant
Financial aiming to encourage irrational consumption, as well as the
irresponsible private loans it has given out, and how all these behaviors have
disrupted social order and degraded social morals.
All these reasons were evident in the government’s statements for halting Ant: to regulate the financial market, enforce antitrust legislation, and create a healthier consumption environment (Yu 2020). This all seems valid except that the role Ant is playing is largely as a platform––a middleman between state banks and individual small-loan borrowers. Much of the capital given out as small loans by Ant actually comes from the state banks. The state banks were not allowed to engage in these high profit businesses. They also do not have access to the necessary consumer data and data science. They normally deal with state owned enterprises. So, Ant stepped in to help state banks exploit a previously untouched financial market: grassroots personal loans. They then divided the profit. As some observers rightly pointed , Ant has always aimed at creating partnerships with big banks, not disrupting or supplanting them. More importantly, quite a few important government-owned funds and institutions are Ant shareholders and were expected to profit handsomely from the public offering (Zhong & Li 2020). Thus, the claim that Ant squeezed out the state banks is spurious. They were basically in the same boat. That is why the state never really regulated Ant before. Meanwhile, we should not forget that the informal financial market has long existed in Chinese grassroots society due to the inaccessibility of bank loans for most non-state economic entities and common people. Ant actually formalized (to a certain degree) this informal market. Yes, Ant did play the financial game of ‘asset-backed securities’ to enhance its financial leverage, but hardly to the extent that Wall Street is used to doing. Finally, what about the irrational consumption encouraged by easily accessible loans (especially for youths)? Maybe. But most such loans still come from other smaller and less responsible lending agencies following in Ant’s steps, which try to grasp crumbs from the huge cake but do not have the technology and data required to avoid excessive risk. It is these smaller and less technologically capable actors that are in fact creating chaos in credit supply. In short: even if we all agree that financial capital has always been highly speculative, and that Ant is no exception, some of the official statements justifying the intervention into Ant’s IPO still sound fishy.
Meanwhile, the poor in
China still seem the most determined supporters of the state’s crackdown on
Ant. They supported it out of their hatred toward big capital. On the internet,
they lambasted the bloodsucking behavior of Ant, and called it “Leech Financial”
instead of Ant Financial (Leech is pronounced in Chinese as “Ma Huang” and ant
is pronounced as “Ma Yi”). There is also a popular cartoon being circulated on
the internet that depicts Jack Ma as a beggar in his old age—homeless, fragile,
and sad. One blue-collar worker told me that any big capitalist whose main objective is to extract money from the poor
should be dragged down.
Tellingly, the state has intentionally toned down popular indignation. The relationship between state and capital in this country has always been much more complicated than the mere antagonism imagined by liberal commentators. The state can’t afford a strong group of capitalists with too much power and resources; but neither can it afford losing them and scaring capital away. It has always been an art of balancing. As we have seen, Jack Ma has reappeared recently with a more solemn appearance. His Ant is now required to deploy necessary ‘rectifications’ under the tighter rein of state regulation (CBNEditor 2021). It is, nevertheless, the right thing for the state to do, no matter the underlying aims. Ma, of course, should always keep in mind that there has never been an Era of Jack Ma; it has always been the Chinese Era that created him, as one Chinese official newspaper publicly warned him as early as 2019.
As for those professional
Chinese Americans who believe that they have missed the recent gold-digging
opportunities in China and have started to doubt their earlier decision to go
abroad, the crackdown on Ant—or more specifically, the broken dream of becoming
a billionaire data scientist—has taught them a rather comforting lesson:
miracles, whether for a country, a company, or an individual, are slippery. A
boring yet relatively predictable middle-class suburban life in the West should
at least be bearable, perhaps even enviable.
Juzimu is an ethnographic researcher of Chinese capitalist transitions and writes here under pseudonym.
Times are a Changing. The Trump phenomenon
as a whole, his election, his presidency, the events of the Capitol, Joe Biden’s
accession and Donald Trump’s impeachment are moments of radical process. They
form a dynamic in and of themselves. They express the chaos and transition of
the moment but they are also and at the same time forces in the transformation
and transmutations of capitalism and world history, perhaps, with the
complications of the COVID19 pandemic, virtually an axial moment, a switch or
turning-point of crisis, as
Don Kalb has argued on FocaalBlog early in the pandemic (Kalb 2020).
This involves a re-consideration of what is
fast becoming the master narrative concerning Trump, with ideological
implications of its own. Trump is presented as a spectre of a fascist past
rather than a foretaste, a mediation into, the potential of an authoritarian
totalitarian future involving major transmutations in capitalism. What follows
concerning the Trump phenomenon is written with all this very much in
mind.
Our guess (a risky gamble in these times
when almost anything seems possible) is that Trump will fade. There are
doubtless many other political figures similar or worse who could take his
place. With the going of Trump so may his “movement”. What crystallized around
him was more an assemblage, a loose-knit heterogeneous, motely collection of
diverse persons and groups ranging from the extreme far right to the more
moderate, whose organizational cohesion may be more illusory than real. Not yet
a political ‘Party Trump’ it is as likely to melt into air and go the way of
most populist movements as it might congeal into a longer-lasting force of
opposition headed by Trump.
This is not to gainsay the shock of the
storming of the Capitol on the otherwise ritualistic day of the confirmation of
Biden’s victory that concludes the liminal transitional period conventional in
the US-American democratic cycle. Such a liminal space (Turner, 1969) is a
relative retreat and suspension of the state political order as the presidency
is renewed or changed. This is often a festive time given to all kinds of
political excess when the people vent their potency in the selection of those
who are to rule them. Trump encouraged and intensified the potential chaos of liminality
at its peak when, ideally, it should subside and political order be fully
restored. He aimed to disrupt this critical moment and to maintain his
uncertain presence as the Lord of Misrule, if not necessarily to effect a coup.
Named as “God’s
chaos candidate” by some evangelicals who supported him, Trump promoted,
even if unwittingly, a moment of extreme chaos that was all the more intense
for the liminal moment of its occurrence when the participants themselves blew
out of control.
Night of the World, Pandemonium at the Capitol
In the nightmare of the event, newscasts presented
visions of a fascist future filled with Fascist and Nazi images and other
commonly associated symbols. There was a strong sense of dialectical collapse
along the lines of Hegel’s “Night of the World” of demonic appearances when
forces in opposition dissipate against each other and lose their meaning. The
representatives of the nation cowered under their desks fitting gas masks while
those who would challenge them in festive mood and drunk with brief power put
their feet up on desks aping their masters and carried off the mementos and
spoils of their invasion. Exuberant chants of “this is our house” echoed down
the corridors of power.
Shades of the past paraded in the present,
foremost among them that of the enduring trauma of the rise of Nazi
Germany. What Sinclair Lewis had warned
in It Can’t Happen Here – a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of
the democratic world – anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s
apotheosis, seemed to be actually materializing. This accounts for the
excitement on the steps of the Capitol – “this is America 2021 y’all!!” Arlie
Hochschild captured the millenarian Nuremberg feel of his campaign rallies when
researching Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American
Right (Hochschild 2016), her excellent ethnography of the white far right
and their sympathisers in Louisiana, America’s poorest state and a Donald Trump
heartland. Hochschild recounts at a lecture to the Rosa
Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin a scene, reminiscent of the opening frames
of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, when Trump’s plane,
“Trump Force One”, appears through the clouds and, as if from heaven it
descends “down, down, down” to the waiting crowd; electrified in expectation of
the saviour’s endlessly repeated sermon of redemption of the deep resentment that
they felt for having been pushed aside from the promise of the American
Dream.
But here is the point: The immediate
reaction to the storming of the Capitol gave further confirmation to the real
and present danger of Trump’s fascist threat fuelled in the rumblings of class
war which Trump has inflamed and exploited. It is a liberal fear, mainly of the
Democrats but including some Republicans, who are the chief targets of Trump’s
attacks. His demonisation of elite liberal value (marked by accusations of
moral perversities aimed at unmasking the claims to virtue) is at one with his
condemnation of the liberalism of Federal political and social economic
policies which he presents as contributing to the abjection of mainly white US-American
working class and poor; to be seen in the rapidly increasing power of global
corporations, policies of economic globalization, the privileging of
minorities, refugees, recent immigrants etc.
Image 1: When surprises were minimal and manifest destiny kept on giving. The Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C., Nov. 26, 2012 (Foto: US Forest Service/Keith Riggs, accessed 8 Feb 2021)
It might be remembered at this point that
the violence of the Capitol invasion–the marked involvement of military
veterans, the carrying of weapons, baseball bats, the reports of pipe bombs–that
shocked so many, reflects the fact that all modern states are founded on
violence. This is particularly the case in the US where the US
Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in defence of
democratic rights. In an important sense the violence of those invading the
Capitol refracts back at the middle class and especially the ruling elite the
very violence that underpins the structure of their rule. If liberal virtue was
shocked by the events on January 6 it was also confronted with the violent
paradox deep in its democratic heart (see Palmer 2021). Thus, this paradox
slips into paroxysm at this critical moment in American political history.
The transitional figure of Trump feeds on
the prejudices of his intended constituencies and exploits an already
ill-formed class awareness building on ready commitments and vulnerabilities – the
well-rehearsed fascist and populist technique – creating indeed a false
consciousness (there is no other way to say it) that is not only destructive
but in the hands of the likes of Trump integral to intensifying the feelings of
impotence and the miseries that give Trump his relative popularity. Slavoj
Zizek says as much in what he describes as “Trump’s
GREATEST TREASON”.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘The Governator,’
was quick to counter the white supremacist, macho, Proud Boy, Oath Keeper and Three
Percenter elements highly visible in media newscasts with a Conan the Barbarian
performance. This was his take on the dominant brand of Make America Great
Again. (Really, all those along the political spectrum participate in MAGA – Democrat
Party badges and hats from the recent election read “Dump Trump Make
America Great Again”). He focussed on his own immigration away from his native
Austria and its Nazi associations to the liberated American world of his
success. For Schwarzenegger, the Capitol invasion and its vandalism equated to Kristallnacht.
Noam Chomsky likens the storming with Hitler’s
Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 observing that it effected a greater penetration
to the heart of power than did Hitler’s failed attempt. But Chomsky, with
characteristic acuity, adds that the fascist danger lies in the anti-democratic
class forces (including electoral and political manipulations on all sides)
that provide the fertile ground for fascism; forces that have acutely and early
been pinpointed by anthropologists (Holmes 2000, 2020; Kalb and Halmai 2011;
Kalb, forthcoming).
But the point must be taken further. New
class formations are in the making right now and they are being driven in the
explosive nature of technological revolution (see Smith
2020). This is something Marx himself was very much aware of and why he
wrote more than one hundred pages on the machine and the human in Capital. This
is also the concern of Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (2002) and the
continued focus of today’s accelerationists such as the Nick Srnicek (2017) on platform
capitalism.
Creative Destruction, the Transmutation in Capital and Corporate State Formation
The rise and fall of Trump (not discounting the
possibility that Humpty Dumpty might come together again, which is the fear of
the master narrative) may be understood as expressing a transition between
two moments of capitalism during which one formation morphs into another. Trump
is the embodiment, instrument, and anguish of this transition, a tragic figure
in a theatre of the absurd. Grand Guignol almost, but in Gothic American Horror
Story style. The accession of Biden is the apotheosis of the new in the
hopes of most; he is a vehicle for healing the divisions in the U.S. that Trump
brought to a head and are still very much present. But Biden’s rise has ominous
oppressive indications of its own.
The Trump events have all the hallmarks of
the crisis and rupture of transformation or, better, transmutation. The
millenarian spirit that Hochschild captures in her account is one born in the
capitalist ideology of the American Dream; fortified in the religious
fundamentalism of Trump’s many followers that revitalizes their hopes in that
American Dream in the face of abject failure. The rallies and the impassioned
actions of those invading the Capitol are filled with revitalizing energy.
Such millenarian explosions, distinct in
their own historical contexts, occur at many other points in global history. It
was apparent at the dawn of capitalism in Europe, at later moments of crisis
and redirection in capitalism up to the present – indeed at the inception of
the Nazi horror, and at points of the disruptive expansion of capital in the
western imperial/colonial thrust as in the Cargo movements of the Pacific (Cohn
1970, Lanternari 1960, Worsley 1970 (1959); Neveling
2014 for a link between Cargo Cults and neoliberal capitalism).
The rupture of transmutation in capital,
the crisis that the Trumpian progress manifests, is an instance of what Marx
and others have understood to be the creative/destruction dynamic of capital;
whereby it reproduces, renews, revitalizes its potency against contradictions
and limitations to its profit motive that capital generates within itself as
well as those thrown up against it in the very process of its own expansion and
transformation.
The circumstances underpinning the current
transmutation in capital relate to the revolutions in science and technology those
associated particularly with the digital age and advances in biotechnology).
The rapid development of capital (and especially that of the still dominant, if
declining, US-American form) was driven by the innovations in knowledge and
technology (something that Marx and many others admired in US-America). What
became known as the nation state (the dominant political form that nurtured
capital) and the class orders that were generated in capitalism and necessary
to it (not to mention the over-population and ecological disasters that grew in
capital’s wake) also constituted barriers and limitations to capital’s
growth.
The new technological revolutions are a
response to the limitations on capital emergent within its own processes.
Technological innovations enabled revolutions in production and consumption, creating
new markets and increasing consumption, reducing the need for human labour and
the resistances it brings with it, overcoming problems, and opening up
novel lines, of distribution; forcing the distress of unemployment (especially
among the erstwhile working class), creating impoverishment and uncertainties
reaching into once affluent middle classes as captured in the neologism ‘the
precariat’; shifting class alignments; redefining the nature and value of work,
of the working day, the expansion of zero hours and, as an overarching
manifestation, a sense of the return of a bygone era.
The current technological revolution is a key
factor in the extraordinary growth in the monopolizing strength of corporations
such as Google, Amazon or even Tencent. The dot.com organizations (the
flagships and spearheads of capitalist transformation with huge social transmutational
effect) have wealth that dwarfs many states and they are functioning in areas
once controlled by the state (from what used to be public services to the
current race to colonize space). Indeed the corporate world has effectively
invaded and taken over the operation of nation-states (Kapferer
2010; Kapferer
and Gold 2018).
This is most noteworthy in those state
orders influenced by histories of liberal social democracy, in Europe and
Australia for example, which tended to draw a sharp demarcation between public
interest and private enterprise. The nation-state and its apparatuses of
government and institutions for public benefit have been corporatized so much
so that in many cases government bureaucracies have not only had their
activities outsourced to private companies but also have adopted managerial
styles and a ruthlessness along the lines of business models. The corporatization
of the state has aligned it much more closely with dominant economic interests
in the private (now also public) sectors than before and enables a bypassing of
state regulation, even that which once sustained capitalist interest, but which
became an impediment to capitalist expansion.
These changes have wrought socio-economic
and political disruption and distress globally and most especially in the
Western hemisphere. This is not merely collateral damage. The revolution in
science and technology has been a key instrument in effecting social and
political changes via destruction, for the regenerative expansion of capital.
It is central to the re-imagination of capital in the opening of the twenty-first
century.
This is particularly so in the United States
whose socio-political order is historically one of corporate state formation which
accounts for its long-term global political economic domination. Some renewal
in leftist thought (e.g. with Bernie Sanders) is an index of the depth of distress
that is being experienced although the ideological and counteractive potency of
the American Dream fuelled especially in fundamentalist Christianity suppresses
such potential and contributes to the intensity and passion of the Trump
phenomenon. The ideological distinction of the Trump event aside, its dynamic
of populism is reflected throughout the globe (Kalb 2021)
One common feature of this is the rejection
of the political systems associated with nation state orders and, to a marked
extent the largely bipartite party systems vital in the discourses of control
and policy in nation states. Trumpism and other populist movements (in Europe
notably) complain of the alienation of the state and its proponents from
interests of the mass. The expansion of corporatization and the further
hollowing out of the state, the corruption of its public responsibilities by
corporate interests, is effectively what Trump was furthering in his
presidency. It is a potent dimension of the Trump paradox and a major irony of
the Capitol invasion that, for all the apparent fascist tendencies, it was the
spirit of reclaiming democracy (admittedly of the freebooting kind) in an
already highly corporatized establishment (subject to great corporate capitalist
interest) that Trump’s actions were directed to. An important figure in this
respect is the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The tech
billionaire, early investor in Facebook and founder of PayPal, was an early
Trump supporter and named a part of Trump’s transition team in 2016. His book, Zero
to One, based on his lecture courses at Stanford University, argues for a
corporate-technocratic governance beyond older systems of government. (Thiel
2014).
From Panopticon to Coronopticon
COVID-19 has highlighted the social
devastation of the destructive/creative dynamic of capitalism’s transmutation (see
also Kalb
2020). The class and associated ethnic inequities have everywhere been
shown up and probably intensified by a pandemic that is starting to equal, if
not surpass, the depressing and devastating effect of two world wars. Like them
it is clearing ground for capitalist exploitative expansion – something like
Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism (Klein 2007).
Under the shadow of the virus, labour
demands are being rationalized, the cutting back of employment and its benefits
legitimated, governments are pumping capital into the economies in a way that
protects consumption in an environment where there is declining occupational
opportunity and income. The idea of the universal basic income is seriously
discussed. Its implementation would offset some of the contradictions in a
transformation of capitalism that is reducing our dependence on labour and endangering
consumption through automation and digitalization. While the poor are getting
poorer the rich are getting richer; most notably those heading the
revolutionary technologies of the digital age and biotechnology, with the
competitive race to secure viable vaccines against the virus one example for
the latter sector’s power.
There is a strange synchronicity linking
the pandemic with the dynamic of capitalism’s transmutational corporatization
of the state. The virus reproduces and spreads in a not dissimilar dynamic.
Indeed, COVID 19 in some ecological understandings is the product of the
acceleration of globalization effected in those processes of capitalism’s
transmutation associated with corporate expansion and the corporatization of
the nation state. As a crossover from animal to human bodies the virus is one
manifestation of increased human population pressure on wild animal territory,
the closer intermeshing of animal and human terrain. The scale
of the pandemic is, of course, a direct consequence of the time space
contraction and intensity
of the networked interconnections of globalization.
State surveillance has intensified as a
by-product of combatting COVID which is also its legitimation, with digitalization
as the major surveillance instrument. The digital penetration into every nook
and cranny of social life (see Zuboff2019, and Netflix’s The Social Dilemma),
is interwoven with the commodification of the social and personal for profit – economizing
individuals calculating the costs and benefits of their social ‘interactions’
(the YouTube or Kuaishou ‘influencer,’ the hype TED talker as Foucault’s
entrepreneurial self, cut, pasted, uploaded and remixed).
The management of Covid-19, demanding
social isolation and the disruption of ordinary social life, has exponentially increased
the role of the digital as the primary mediator of the social and a commanding
force in its very constitution. Covid-19 has been revealed as a kind of social
particle accelerator. As such, and ever more exclusively so, the real of the
social, is being re-imagined, re-engineered and re-mastered as a digital-social,
a ‘Digisoc’ or ‘Minisoc,’ constrained and produced within algorithmically
preset parameters. Here is Peter Weir’s film, The Truman Show,
radically updated. And, as with Truman, the space of freedom is also and at the
same time experienced as a space of unfreedom.
This manifests in the deep ambivalence many
feel about the new technologies they daily live with and through. The digitized
social is often presented as a new agora, a liberating ‘space’ in which new, progressive
ideas and directions are enabled, operationalized and indeed optimized. The
internet has become a site of multiple struggles in which class forces and new
potentials for social difference and proliferating identity-claims are continually
emerging. The freedom of the internet has provided exciting opportunities for
many. Such freedom also and at the same time contributes to conspiracy
imaginations on all sides. As has been made clear in the two elections
featuring Trump, the superpower of corporations like Google and Facebook
threatens to install a domain of hyper-control. Digital walls and electronic
fences are appearing everywhere in the age of the global ‘splinternet.’
The hegemonic and totalizing potential for
the ruling bodies of the corporatizing state who control the digital is as
never before. This is so not just in the global scale of the network reach but
in the heightened degree to which controlling bodies can form the ground of the
social, radically remodel, engineer and design reality in accordance with
dominant interests, and where motivated shut out that which threatens their
order. The awareness of this has driven the fury of censorship and
self-censorship on all sides – Trump’s threatened TikTok ban becomes Twitter’s
actual Trump ban.
Back in Some Form: From 1984 into a Brave New World
Trump and Trumpism are moments in the
transitional, transmutational process of capitalism outlined above and of the
formation of new social and political orders. Echoing the past, they express its
transmutation (and its agonies) rather than repeat it. Trump and Trumpism
manifest the contradictions of such processes, agents and agencies for the
transmutations in the social and political circumstances of life that are in
train, themselves forces in the bringing forth of a future that, in some
aspects, is already being lived.
Trump himself can be described as an
“in-betweener”, a bridge into the new realities, both a force in their
realization and a victim. His manner and style, the brutal no holds barred
amorality is familiar from the captains of industry and robber barons of an
earlier age, who built capitalist America and crushed working-class resistance
by all means, more foul than fair. Trump maintains the style but in reverse
redemptive mode. In his shape-shift he presents as supporter of the working
classes not their nemesis as did his forerunners.
However, his authoritarian business manner,
of The Apprentice’s“you’re
fired” fame, matches well the managerialism of the present. He is an
exemplar of contemporary venture capitalism and most especially of profit from
non-industrial production (often anti production) gained from real estate,
property transfer, asset stripping, and the expanding gaming and gambling
industries (their importance as symptoms of the crises of transformation in
capital) from which some of Trump’s key supporters come.
Trump’s reactive anti-immigrant nationalism
and “Make America Great Again” rhetoric not only appeals to the white right but
is an engagement of past rhetoric to support new political and economic
realities. Trump’s economic war with China stressed re-industrialization but it
was also concerned with counteracting China’s technological ascendancy,
especially in the realm of the digital, a major contradiction born of the
current globalizing transmutation in capitalism involving transfers of
innovatory knowledge.
Trump anticipated the risk to his
presidential re-election. It manifested the dilemmas of his in-betweenness. His
inaction with regard to the pandemic was consistent with the anti “Big
Government” policies of many Republicans and the US-American right who cherish QAnon
conspiracy theories as much as they want to reduce government interference and
modify regulation in capitalist process, a strong emphasis in current
transitions and transformations of the state and of capital.
Trump’s cry that the election was being
stolen was excited in the circumstances of the pandemic. His attack on postal votes
related to the fact that the pandemic gave the postal vote a hitherto
unprecedented role in the election’s outcome by by-passing and neutralising the
millenarian populist potency of his mass rallies already reduced in numbers by
fear. Trump sensed that the COVID-inspired move to ‘working from home’ and ‘voting
from home’ would challenge, fence in and fence out his base of support.
Trump has always taken advantage of the
digital age, his use of Twitter and Facebook the marked feature of his style of
rule. His practices looked forward to the politics of the future ever
increasingly bounded and conditioned in societies of the image. Following the
events at the Capitol, Trump’s own Custer’s Last Stand to allay his
fate, his cyberspace and internet accounts were switched off. He has been
cancelled by the new digitally authoritarian corporate powers (who arguably
benefitted the most from the Trump era and profited greatly under pandemic
conditions) who are behind the growing new society of the image, in which he
was a past-master and within which he had in the main established his identity.
(Kapferer
R, 2016)
The overriding image of the Capitol
invasion and carried across most networks is that of the occupation of the
heart of American democracy by those who would threaten its ideals. The media have
concentrated on what was the dominating presence of the extremist macho white US-American
far right violently parading symbols of a racist past combined with clear
references to the not-so-distant memories of fascism and Nazism. There
were others there more moderate in opinion and representative of other class
fractions, if still mostly white, whose presence does not reduce the fear
of fascism, possibly as in Nazi Germany when what seemed to be small groups of
extremists hijacked power (and the events of the Capitol evokes such memory) to
unleash the horrors to follow. Something similar could be said for what
happened in the Soviet Union leading to Stalinism. These were the worlds of
George Orwell’s 1984, in which some of the major ideals of the time flipped in
their tragic negation. Such events were very much emergent in realities of the
nation-state, its imperialist wars and the class forces of that particular
historical moment in the history of capitalism and the formations of its social
and political orders. There is no statement here that this could not happen
again.
What we are saying is this: a different
authoritarian and oppressive possibility may be taking shape – not of the
fascist past but of the future. This is a future that Trump was mediating but
which may be coming into realization, despite the great hope to the contrary,
in the accession of President Biden. Perhaps this prospect can be seen as more
akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World born in the current transmutations
of capital (and its agonies of class) and in the circumstances of the radical technological
revolutions of the digital era, involving the apotheosis of the corporatisation
of the state, the corporate state emerging out of the ruins of the nation
state.
Aldous Huxley depicted a world centred on production
and efficiency, a bio technologically conditioned global system of perfect
rational, optimised order. The class conflicts of the past are overcome here; everyone
accepts their predetermined place. It is a post-human reality in which the
foundation of human beings in their biology and passions is transcended. It is
a somatised, artificially intelligent world of the image and promiscuity. Indeed,
the American Dream. Those who do not fit or who resist are fenced out. Time and
space are being reconfigured, incurving around the individual and
‘personalised.’
Biden’s inauguration for all its upbeat ceremonial spirit had some
intimation of such a future, taking into full account the security constraints
of its moment: to protect against the murderous unchecked rampage of the virus
and the threat of the attack of right-wing militias. The stress on this, it may
be noted, had an ideological function to distance what was about to come into
being from, for example, the definitely more visceral world of Trump and
thoroughly evident in the invasion of the Capitol – what Biden in his inauguration speech called an “uncivil war.”
The scene of the perfectly scripted inauguration was
virtually devoid of people. Apart from the dignitaries and all-important
celebrities, the highly selected order of the society of the corporate-state. Where
the general populace would normally crowd, was an emptiness filled with flags
and protected by troops, more than currently are stationed in Afghanistan.
Those who might disrupt, Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘resistant
savages,’ were fenced out. It was a totalizing and constructed digital media
image presenting a reality of control, harmony, and absolute surveillance.
We claim that something like Trump and the
events surrounding him would have happened regardless of the specific phenomena
we have focussed on here. The events Trump are a moment, perhaps among the most
intense, in the transitional transmutation of the history of capitalism and the
socio-economic and political orders which build and change around it. The
apparent chaos indicates a major axial moment in world history – a chaos driven
in the emergence of a cybernetic techno-capitalist apparatus on a global scale.
What might be augured in the Biden accession is already taking vastly different
shape in China and elsewhere around the globe. New and diverse formations of
totalitarian authoritarianism are emerging. The Trump phenomenon is crucial for
an understanding of some of the potentials of a future that we are all very
much within and that an overconcentration on the parallels with the past may
too easily obscure.
Bruce Kapferer is a roving anthropologist and ethnographer, Professor Emeritus at Bergen University, Professorial Fellow UCL, Fellow Cairns Institute, and the Director of the ERC Egalitarianism project at the University of Bergen.
Roland Kapferer is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Deakin University, a filmmaker and a musician. He does research on cybertechnologies.
Cite as: Kapferer, Bruce, and Roland Kapferer. 2021. “The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities.” FocaalBlog, 2 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/02/bruce-kapferer-roland-kapferer-the-trump-saga-and-americas-uncivil-war-new-totalitarian-authoritarian-possibilities/
