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Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Susan Paulson: Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds

Coronavirus has provoked some of us to think about our worlds in new ways and to consider different horizons of change. Yet in many pandemic-related discourses and policies, I have been frustrated to see hegemonic ideals about care, kinship, and residence distract attention from empirical realities and adequate solutions. Examples range from the ubiquitous representation of care as embodied by women health workers and mothers to the shocking silence about disproportionate burdens of coronavirus illness and death born by men, and the wildly incorrect assumption that most humans live in and are cared for by nuclear family households.

Covid masculinities

Much attention has been drawn to vulnerabilities of women nurses, health aids, and caretakers. More gender awareness is needed for millions of men performing essential jobs as sanitation workers, truck and bus drivers, agricultural workers, miners, fishers, and loggers. These occupations are absolutely vital for public health, yet were already among the most dangerous and deadly before adding exposure to coronavirus. Around the world, they are performed overwhelmingly by men, in patterns of workplace violence so highly gendered that, in countries like USA, men suffer 92% of occupational deaths. The workplace, then, is a realm that calls urgently for improved care.

Data from countries around the world show that coronavirus infections tend to be much more severe among men than women, with death tolls as high as two times greater for men (Bhopal and Bhopal 2020). In the US, the death rate from coronavirus for men is 1.6 times that of women. This intersects with disproportionate burden of coronavirus infections and underlying conditions among racial and ethnic minorities, and among those who are less wealthy and less educated. In many contexts, then, it is poorer less-white men who are most vulnerable to suffer critical illness and death from coronavirus (Rushovich et. al 2021). Care for these groups needs to be much more visible in news and policy responses.

While analyses of structural inequalities in occupation, residence, and healthcare rarely address masculinities, some airtime has been dedicated to men’s behavior. Studies in various contexts found men to be much more likely than women to go without masks and to break quarantine. How can criticism of the behavior of individual men shift to societal commitments to supporting self-care among all humans, including variously positioned men?     

Is it useful to blame men for getting sick? Feminists have struggled to motivate compassion for women whose conditions constrain the development of skills and confidence needed to establish dignified lives for themselves. Transitions to care-full worlds will also require compassion for boys and men whose gender expectations push them to demonstrate their manliness by performing dangerous labor in hazardous conditions, by exercising and enduring violence, and by taking risks with their health and their lives. Perhaps the devastating gendered impacts of the virus can spark mobilization against gender-linked violence that harms men and women in different ways.

While some people find safety and comfort at home, others face conflict and crowding, or lack homes altogether. Reports from diverse countries indicate that domestic violence has intensified during lock-downs, impacting women disproportionately. People who don’t even live in homes face different kinds of vulnerabilities. In most countries, women outnumber men among residents in long-term care centers, while men make up majorities as high as 90% in prisons, jails, migrant labor camps, homeless shelters, immigrant detention centers, and military barracks, all of which became hotspots for the virus. In these residential patterns too, the forms of violence and discrimination borne by men intersect with ethno-racial and class inequalities. Demands of care for those not living in households call for moral and institutional shifts away from private family responsibility toward community and commons.

Normative households

Kinship and sexuality are also fundamental in the organization of care. Many public health messages, exemplified by those pictured below, reinforce the widespread—and incorrect—assumption that contemporary populations live mostly in heteronormative nuclear households. In the US, however, only 20% of households consists of nuclear families, as measured by the US Census Bureau. Can we do better at supporting the other 80% to respond to this pandemic and conditions of life beyond?

A public health announcement banner shows a photograph of a man and woman seated on either side of two small kids. Text reads: Covid-19. Es en serio! #QuédateEnCasa. AUS: Asociación de Usuarios Sanitas
Image 1: One of many COVID prevention posters depicting nuclear family households that dominate public health messages in the world

The false portrayal of residential life as reflecting a normative kinship model limits support for the actual residential and kin arrangements through which care and provisioning are organized in today’s societies. Inaccurate assumptions that all people live like the Flintstones, the Simpsons, or the Jetsons seriously limit public health efforts by obscuring empirical realities, which are plural. Those public messages also operate to demean and delegitimize other ways of living, and to stifle creative responses to coronavirus and other challenges.

An illustration of a Black person, wearing comfortable clothes, seated and reading a book with a houseplant in the background. Text reads: Stay Home, Yew Yorkers. Do your part to help stop the spread of coronavirus.
Image 2: New Yorkers Stay Home poster

Across wealthy countries, the most common household category is a single person living alone (27% US and Canadian households, 40% of Swedish households). This New Yorkers Stay Home poster taps into possibilities of nourishing companionship in uni-person households through literature and interspecies relations (human & plant). Another creative response to needs for care and conviviality is found in queer dance parties organized online with scopes ranging from local communities to celebrity-filled global gatherings. This is not a trivial example; opportunities to dance, laugh, move together not only provide care and acknowledgement needed in quarantine (and other isolating conditions), they can also build values and pleasures outside the realm of economic competition, consumption, and profit. Alliances with LGBTQ and related social movements help to honor the diverse household and kin arrangements that people are already living, and to support innovations provoked by the pandemic, as well as those motivated by desires for positive transformation.

Where did this ill-fitting model come from?

Generations of anthropologists and archaeologists have documented a rich variety of arrangements for care, protection, provisioning, and regeneration of human communities. These are often lumped together under the term “extended family,” reinforcing the false assumption that all kinship is based on the nuclear family, from which other relations may “extend.”

Today, much public discourse, together with a surprising amount of academic work, ignores the diverse realities of kinship across cultures and through history, and instead features an ideological model of (re)production that was established and disseminated with the rise of colonial capitalism, through the following historical processes:

  • conceptual and institutional divorce of market-oriented activities identified as “productive labor” from other activities identified as “reproductive care“   
  • designation of the first as “masculine” and the second as “feminine” allocation of disproportionate monetary value, resources, and power to masculine-associated production 
  • 20th century push toward nuclear family households as economic and residential unit
  • media, political, and educational messages convey expectations that human organization be based in heteronormative nuclear family households where men are excluded from care work
Images of three families from classic cartoons: The Simpsons, The Flintstones, and the Jetsons. All three family images include a father, a mother, one or more children, and at least one pet.
Image 3: Images from cartoon series suggesting that humans have always and will always live in single-family homes among heteronormative nuclear families with man bread-winner and woman care-provider. Audiences worldwide have watched the Flintstones since 1960, the Jetsons since 1962, and the Simpsons since 1989.

What drives ongoing pushes to keep imposing this model on populations that it so poorly represents? Why continue allocating responsibility of care to putative nuclear families in strategies that overburden some and fall short of needed care for many?

One key motive is the role this model has played as an instrument of industrial capitalist growth, adapted to engineer and to justify forms of appropriation that support profit and accumulation. The model has also been instrumental to the militarization of domestic and international conflicts related to this push. For me, then, challenging normative assumptions about this gender-kinship model is a vital move to curb and to heal eco-social damages provoked by the drive for growth.

What policies, practices, messages can support and motivate people of all identities to organize care with healthier arrangements of care?

A silver lining can be found in the potential of historical crises (like COVID-19 and climate break-down) to destabilize established orders, opening possibilities for new alliances toward healthier and more equitable worlds.

While respect for planetary boundaries demands degrowth of the total quantities of resources and energy transformed each day by the global economy, some features need to be nurtured and developed, namely infrastructures and institutions of care that enhance the well-being of more people in more places. Care-full paths forward are being explored by Degrowth and Feminism(s) Alliance (FaDA), in contexts including the coronavirus pandemic (Paulson 2020).

Amid the pandemic, we have been happily surprised to see governments experimenting with policies proposed in our book The Case for Degrowth (Kallis et al. 2020): companies and governments have reduced working hours, implemented work-sharing, and subsidized workers during quarantine and business closings. Enhanced public services have supported household and community economies, and mechanisms such as the US Defense Production Act have been mobilized to secure vital supplies and services.

Can we think about these moves as anticipatory strategies that may secure ongoing care for populations, and slow down the rush toward future disasters? For example, can provisional cash payments to sustain residents through the crisis lead the way to basic care incomes? Can defense budgets shift emphasis from updating military armaments toward protecting and regenerating human resources?

Policies like these may work in very different ways, depending on the degree to which they are institutionalized to stimulate economic growth or to promote equitable wellbeing; to prolong productivism or to support reproduction; to provide charity for vulnerable people or to replace hierarchical and exploitative social systems that produce those vulnerabilities.

Beware that these crises also nourish divisive and reactionary alliances. Amid the ongoing pandemic, powerful actors continue pushing to reconstitute the status quo, and to shift costs to others. There is danger that abilities to ally for change will be undermined by politics of fear, xenophobia, and blame; intensified surveillance and control; and isolation that constrains political organizing and all kinds of common efforts. Campaigns to discredit vaccinations and masks synergize with attacks against climate action, gender equity, and racial justice. All are rallied in the name of political economic stability and defense of geopolitical interests. On personal levels, this allied resistance to change is fueled by understandable fear of losing identities and relations that have been construed and experienced as natural, meaningful, and morally correct (even as I understand them as historically adapted to support growth). In the face of polarizing narratives and blame, what strategies can support shifts away from divisive competition toward mutual collaboration?

Conclusion

I would like to see economies slow down by design, not disaster, in ways that support societies to become more caring and equitable. However, it looks like transitions may be unplanned and messy, like those we are living through now. Finding ourselves amid global pandemic and climate change, we must seize opportunities to build healthier priorities, policies, and sociocultural systems. Such transitions depend on alliances among differently positioned actors. And they must involve attention to gender and kinship systems that honor diverse contributions, and that assure care and minimize vulnerabilities for all.

Susan Paulson is Professor at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies. She studied and taught about human-environment relations during 15 years in Latin America, and taught sustainability studies during 5 years in Europe. Paulson contributes to theory and practice in political ecology; degrowth; and gender, masculinities and environment.

References

Bhopa, Sunsil and  Raj Bhopal. 2020. ‘Sex differential in COVID-19 mortality varies markedly by age.’ Lancet 396 (10250): 532-533.

Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria 2020. The Case for Degrowth. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Paulson, Susan 202. ‘Degrowth and feminisms ally to forge care-full paths beyond pandemic.’ Interface: A journal for and about social movements. Volume 12 (1): 232 – 246. https://www.interfacejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Interface-12-1-Paulson.pdf

Rushovich, Tamara, Marion Boulicault, Jarvis T. Chen, Ann Caroline Danielsen, Amelia Tarrant, Sarah S. Richardson, and Heather Shattuck-Heidorn 2021. ‘Sex Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality Vary Across US Racial Groups.’ Journal of General Internal Medicine 36: 1696-1701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-021-06699-4.

Cite as: Paulson, Susan. 2022. “Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds.“ FocaalBlog, 26 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/26/susan-paulson-gender-aware-care-in-pandemic-and-postgrowth-worlds/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Kalb: War: New Times

It is now becoming overly clear that this cruel and unjustifiable war in and on Ukraine is not going to last ten days – as the strategists in Moscow, Brussels, and Washington D.C originally expected – or ten weeks, as the pessimists thought. It may well extend to ten months and possibly morph into another ‘forever war’ (both hot and cold).

We are therefore turning our original FocaalBlog discussion, launched in the very first days of the war, into a rolling Feature that is open for any genre of submission: ethnographical, historical, theoretical, global.

So, this is an open call: we invite further contributions.

However, given the sprawling passions around this topic and the massive ideology production and propaganda on all sides, we emphasize that at FocaalBlog we continue to honor the elementary distinctions between description, explanation, historical contextualization, and moral justification. We are not in the business of the latter, and none of our authors engages in it.

A white man wearing a gray beanie and black tracksuit, with a cigarette in his mouth, carries a small dog and a grocery sack down a pathway surrounded by trash and rubble. A larger dog walks behind him and others follow in the distance.
Image 1: Bucha after Russian invasion, photo by Oleksandr Ratushniak

We remain deeply and intimately interested not only in what is going on in Ukraine and Russia, and with Ukrainian and Russian citizens of all sorts – including the young and better educated current refugees into the EU as well as the older vulnerable people who remain behind in the war torn villages and suburbs without food or water – but also in the critique of war, militarism, imperialism, violence, primitive accumulation, ideology, nationalism, fascism, racism, and the shifting power fields of the ever less liberal global order in which this war is embedded, into which it feeds, and which it may accelerate.

This involves any type of critique of all the main actors in this cruel and utterly dangerous drama started by Putin. There is no doubt, this is Putin’s war. While this is so in a juridical sense, we should carefully consider that the very possibility of this war, with the exact same stated reasons and objectives from the side of Russia (minus the ethno-essentialism), was already discussed between US Secretary of State James Baker and (former) President Gorbachev in 1992, long before Putin came on stage (Sarotte 2021). Thus, the critique also continues to include prominently the US, the EU, and NATO.

There are loud and self-advertised NATO anthropologists around these days who imagine that NATO can save us from the abys and must have been the solution all along. They should never forget this: while NATO was steadily expanding in Eastward direction towards Russian borders (CEE, Georgia, Ukraine), it was simultaneously waging war for one and a half decade in the Middle East, invading, occupying, and destroying countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, at the cost of close to a million official deaths (on Yemen, a proxy war, we keep counting). The US and the UK had acted on transparent lies and treacherous accusations, had blatantly ignored the United Nations, and pushed aside the principled objections against their aggression within NATO/the West. The unprecedented and globe spanning anti-war demonstrations of early 2003 made no impression whatsoever. Russia, not averse to superpower aspirations of its own, duly took note (as did China): this is apparently allowed. We as anthropologists and citizens (mostly) of the Western world do not have the moral luxury to forget this. This is ‘hard’ knowledge, and it is an anthropological sine qua non for understanding the contemporary world order.

We are writing almost two months into the violence (19 April 2022). The UN has openly acknowledged that a majority of the more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees will probably never actually ‘go home’ again. In the centers of war planning, it is also now gradually accepted that the expected but failed Russian blitz into Ukraine, which in Russia itself was not allowed to be called a war, is sliding unstoppably into a ‘proxy war’ between Russia and NATO, with heavy and advanced weapons deployed on both sides and both military colossuses determined not to lose. Ukrainians continue to heroically play their part and to actively imagine, and being made to imagine, that it is a war for their ‘sovereignty and freedom’. At some point, the distance between these abstract and lofty desires and the raw reality of death, destruction, and mass out-migration will for some begin to feel alienating. After the sinking of the Moskva missile cruiser on 16 April even TV commentators in Moscow, in emotional outbursts, are now allowed to call this a war. Patriarch Kiril of the Russian Orthodox church continues to defend the holy war of Mother Russia against the sinful West of the LGBT’s and the gay parades. Meanwhile, in a militarily surrounded and levelled Mariupol, the hard Right Azov Brigade, or what is left of it, refuses to give up its arms and has retreated into the underground tunnel complexes of the giant Azov Steel complex. They are betting that the massive soviet heritage of industrial labor they had so ardently wished to erase ideologically during the ‘de-communization’ campaigns and memory wars after the 2014 Maidan revolution, might in the end offer them some paradoxical protection. President Zelensky, chosen in 2019 on a platform that resolutely rejected the polarizing identarian logic of the nationalist-civilizational cleavages of Ukraine’s antagonistic governmental elites (‘European Ukraine’ versus ‘Russian’), saw his program quickly collapse in the face of determined right wing nationalist opposition, such as from the members and supporters of the Azov Brigade. The Minsk 2 peace process then all but stalled. Zelensky has now announced that if these circa 2000 national heroes of Ukraine get killed in the Azov Steel tunnels, there cannot be any peace negotiations and Ukraine must fight for final victory. All the actors are overwhelmed by the logic of war.  

Outside of the immediate theatre, much of the Global South and all the BRICS have refused to support the Western condemnation and isolation of Russia, which they find sanctimonious. The spiking inflation in the prices of energy and food probably mean that, after the massive build-up of pandemic related debt, many of these postcolonial nations are going to face simultaneous famine and debt-defaults by the end of the year, with likely resounding political consequences. The West, meanwhile, bootstrapping itself out of the embarrassing Afghanistan debacle of just half a year ago, and finding itself viscerally surprised about its own sudden unity, has accepted President Zelensky as the brave contemporary embodiment of its own historical ideals of liberty and freedom, so under siege lately by domestic ‘populism’. It has launched unprecedented financial punishment on Russia – deploying its continued exclusive control over financial circuits and values – and is seeking to isolate and cut down Russia for the long term by banning its oil and gas while claiming to speed up its own green transition. China, clearly, is far from ready to impose a Bismarckian moment (the Berlin conference of 1885 that carved up the world for colonialism) and seems willing to remain modestly supportive of the Russian side – indeed, Putin started his war directly after meeting privately with Xi. There is no doubt that the US is waging its proxy war also with an eye on teaching China what can happen if it does not abide by Western rules. Western Central Banks, meanwhile, faced with the highest inflation in four decades, revert to an earlier monetary normal, and are beginning to push up the interest rates, loosely talking about ‘a repeat of stagflation’ (a misplaced comparison with the 1970s), a possible ‘Volcker moment’, and a ‘necessary economic recession’. Global South and other big debtors are forewarned. Donald Trump is waiting rather quietly in the wings, as is Marine Le Pen, both (former?) admirers and clients of Vladimir Putin.

The palimpsest is utterly scary, full of actual and potential future violence, extremely volatile and dynamic, and full of powerful contradictions. We need to think, discover, describe, and analyze. On the ground and off the ground. New Times.

Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Editor at Large of Focaal Journal and FocaalBlog.

References

Sarotte, M.E. 2021. Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate. New Haven: Yale U.P

Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2022. ‟War: New Times.‟ FocaalBlog, 21 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/21/don-kalb-war-new-times/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Antonio De Lauri: The idea of a clean and efficient war is a dangerous lie

The war in Ukraine resuscitated a certain dangerous fascination for war. Notions such as patriotism, democratic values, the right side of history, or a new fight for freedom are mobilized as imperatives for everyone to take a side in this war. It is not surprising then that a large number of so-called foreign fighters are willing to go to Ukraine to join one side or the other.

I met a few of them recently at the Poland-Ukraine border, where I was conducting interviews with a Norwegian film crew with soldiers and foreign fighters who were either entering or exiting the war zone. Some of them actually never got to fight or be “recruited” as they lack military experience or proper motivation. It’s a mixed group of people, some of whom have spent years in the military, while others only did military service. Some have family at home waiting for them; others, no home to go back to. Some have strong ideological motivations; others are just willing to shoot at something or someone. There is also a big group of former soldiers who transitioned towards humanitarian work.

As we were crossing the border to get into Ukraine, a former US soldier told me: “The reason why many retired or former soldiers moved to humanitarian work might easily be the need for excitement.” Once you leave the military, the closest activity that can take you to the “fun zone,” as another one said, referring to the war zone in Ukraine, is humanitarian work – or, in fact, a series of other businesses mushrooming in the proximity of war, including contractors and criminal activities.

A white person stands in front of a destroyed house, wearing a camo balaclava, green jacket, and ammo and gear vest with a gun strapped across one shoulder. A Ukrainian flag is displayed on the chest of the gear vest.
Image 1: Fighter of the Ukrainian 43rd Territorial Defense Battalion “Patriot”, photo by Алесь Усцінаў

“We are adrenaline junkies,” the former US soldier said, although he now only wants to help civilians, something he sees as “a part of my process of healing.” What many of the foreign fighters have in common is the need to find a purpose in life. But what does this say of our societies if, to search for a meaningful life, thousands are willing to go to war?

There is dominant propaganda that seems to suggest war can be conducted according to a set of acceptable, standardized and abstract rules. It puts forth an idea of a well-behaved war where only military targets are destroyed, force is not used in excess, and right and wrong are clearly defined. This rhetoric is used by governments and mass media propaganda (with the military industry celebrating) to make war more acceptable, even attractive, for the masses.

Whatever deviates from this idea of a proper and noble war is considered an exception. US soldiers torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib: an exception. German soldiers playing with a human skull in Afghanistan: an exception. The US soldier who went on a house-to-house rampage in an Afghan village, killing 16 civilians including several children with no reason: an exception. War crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan: an exception. Iraqi prisoners tortured by British troops: an exception.

Similar stories are emerging in the current war in Ukraine too, even though mostly still “unconfirmed”. With the information war obfuscating the distinction between reality and fantasy, we don’t know if and when we will be able to verify videos such as one showing a Ukrainian soldier talking on the phone with the mom of a killed Russian soldier and making fun of her, or Ukrainian soldiers shooting prisoners to make them permanently injured, or news about Russian soldiers sexually assaulting women.

All exceptions? No. This is exactly what war is. Governments make big efforts to explain that these kinds of episodes don’t belong in war. They even pretend to be surprised when civilians are killed, even though systematically targeting civilians is a feature of all contemporary wars; for example, over 387,000 civilians were killed in the US post-9/11 wars alone, with more likely to die from those wars’ reverberating impacts.

The idea of a clean and efficient war is a lie. War is a chaotic universe of military strategies intertwined with inhumanity, violations, uncertainty, doubts, and deceit. In all combat zones emotions such as fear, shame, joy, excitement, surprise, anger, cruelty, and compassion co-exist.

We also know that whatever the real reasons for war, identifying the enemy is a crucial element of every call for conflict. In order to be able to kill – systematically – it is not enough to make fighters disregard the enemy, to despise him or her; it is also necessary to make them see in the foe an obstacle to a better future. For this reason, war consistently requires the transformation of a person’s identity from the status of an individual to a member of a defined, and hated enemy group.

If the only objective of war is the mere physical elimination of the enemy, then how do we explain why the torture and destruction of bodies both dead and alive is practiced with such ferocity on so many battlefields? Although in abstract terms such violence appears unimaginable, it becomes possible to visualize when the murdered or tortured are aligned with dehumanizing representations portraying them as usurpers, cowards, filthy, paltry, unfaithful, vile, disobedient – representations that travel fast in mainstream and social media. War violence is a dramatic attempt to transform, redefine and establish social boundaries; to affirm one’s own existence and deny that of the other. Therefore, the violence produced by war is not mere empirical fact, but also a form of social communication.

It follows that war cannot be simply described as the by-product of political decisions from above; it is also determined by participation and initiatives from below. This can take the form of extreme brutal violence or torture, but also as resistance to the logic of war. It is the case of the military personnel who object to being part of a specific war or mission: examples range from conscientious objection during wartime, to explicit positioning such as the case of the Fort Hood Three who refused to go to Vietnam considering that war “illegal, immoral, and unjust,” and the refusal of the Russian National Guard to go to Ukraine.  

“War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves,” wrote Leo Tolstoy. But it’s like holding your breath underwater – you can’t do it for long, even if you are trained.

This text was originally published in Common Dreams.

Antonio De Lauri is a Research Professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, the Director of the Norwegian Centre for Humanitarian Studies, and a contributor to the Costs of War Project of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He received an ERC grant for a project on soldiering and warfare.

Cite as: De Lauri, Antonio. 2022. “The idea of a clean and efficient war is a dangerous lie.” FocaalBlog, 18 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/18/antonio-de-lauri-the-idea-of-a-clean-and-efficient-war-is-a-dangerous-lie

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Martin Fotta: Towards Anti-War Anthropology: On EASA, CEE and NATO

One of the casualties of Putin’s war on Ukraine will be European critical social science. While the war has instigated important discussions about ‘US-plaining’, ‘Westplaining’ and about Russian imperialism, we also see—so far in a clash of keyboards—a growing weaponization of scholarship. There are signs of growing censorship of those ideas that would not align neatly into friend-enemy dyads. In the fight against ‘misinformation’, diverging opinions are framed, often preventively, as problematic and even pejoratively as “pro-Kremlin.”

It is with this in mind that I revisit herein the campaign to amend the “EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine”, published initially on 26 February 2022 and amended on 15 March 2022. The case reveals how not only mainstream media and big tech are changing what is permissible, but how militarism, securitisation, and warmongering is creeping into anthropologists’ language and analyses, at times insidiously as they usurp anti-hegemonic and decolonial positions to enhance their credibility. Where it will take us is hard to predict, but it might be worth looking into the amendments of the EASA statement to cast light on possible futures in social anthropology’s debates and in order to make a case for anthropology as an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan and anti-war discipline.

EASA’s statement on the Russian war and the protest campaign to rewrite it

On the 26th of February 2022, two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EASA executive committee (EASA EC) published a statement ‘EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine’. While in the context of atrocities its value is symbolic rather than practical, the EASA EC must be commended on the swiftness of their response and the clarity of their stance against the war and imperialism. The first two paragraphs of the statement are particularly strong:

The Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) condemns the Russian government’s illegal and unprovokedmilitary invasion of Ukraine: an imperialist war that is leading to immeasurable suffering and losses for the Ukrainian people, whose dignity, well-being, and independence we wholeheartedly support.

As scholars we reject President Vladimir Putin’s distorted interpretations of Russian and Ukrainian history and the assault against and brutal denial of Ukraine’s sovereignty that they seek to justify. We see him as the main aggressor in the current situation that – as many anthropologists working in the post-socialist world have shown through their work – has its roots in both the Russian imperial ambitions and the NATO expansion into the Eastern European territory.

The last sentence has since been removed. The preamble to the new statement explains:

As the Ukraine war has worsened in all sorts of shocking ways, the Executive feels that our statement needs to be unequivocal in order to avoid ambiguity of any kind. A group of EASA members contacted us to say that there were some ambiguities in our initial statement and therefore we have amended it.

How did this change come about? On Friday, 11 March, almost two weeks after the statement had been published, a group of anthropologists from East Central Europe wrote an email to EASA EC demanding that what they saw as ‘controversial ideas’ in the statement be revoked. In the meantime, they also uploaded a petition to GoogleDocs and started gathering signatures. They explained in earlier versions of the petition that if EASA did not retract the wording by noon on Monday, 14th March, they would feel ‘morally obliged’ to go public with the petition. As EASA EC changed the wording, the petition was never widely circulated.

Image 1: Screenshot from “EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine” (April 11, 2022; source: https://www.easaonline.org/publications/support/ukraine0222)

The style of the protest itself is quite stunning as it features moralistic-conservative language (‘controversial ideas’), forces the executive committee to decide over a weekend, and in many ways resembles wartime Realpolitik (the initiators speak of ‘kind appeals’ but set conditionalities and prepare to escalate further, justifying such their steps with reference to morality).  But it is the content of the protest that interests me here. As the authors of the petition explain:

While we fully agree that the war against Ukraine has roots in Russian imperial ambitions, we reject the suggestion that Russia’s armed aggression is caused by NATO expansion into the Eastern European territory. Such a statement would imply that sovereign countries of Eastern Europe do not have the right to join international alliances unless Russia approves, justifying Russia’s colonialist and imperialist claims over countries in Eastern Europe. As anthropologists, we understand Ukraine’s defensive actions as resistance against the reactionary empire and recognize the right of people of sovereign states to decide on membership in international alliances. The sentence [this refers to the final sentence in the EASA EC statement quoted above; M.F.] also contains a deeply troubling ambiguity—referring to Putin as “main aggressor” implies that there are more aggressors in this war than Putin and Russia, assigning the blame for the war against Ukraine (even asymmetrically) to another party.

Don’t mention the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation

The “ambiguity” raised by the last point can be debated. On the other hand, most EASA members are not native speakers of English and thus there may always be ambiguity in written English statements from the organization. But I believe, it is clear from the statement condemning “Russian government’s illegal and unprovoked military invasion” in the opening sentence who is the aggressor.

It is, however, the arguments made in the first three sentences which are particularly striking. I ask the readers to take a look at the first two paragraphs of the original EASA statement quoted above again. How could a mention NATO’s role in the longer history preceding the invasion imply that sovereign countries do not have the right to join international alliances unless Russia approves? What logical somersault was performed here? Does the protesters’ problem with EASA EC’s statement lie in the word “roots”? Do the protesters read this as equivalent to “the cause”?

It is certainly not a marginal position to argue that Putin’s actions are framed in geopolitical terms (where the key agents are the US and China) and that the West has not really tried to “inscribe Russia in a more comprehensive security agreement and all of the bilateral and multilateral agreements”. It is also not a marginal position to point out that NATO policies have made Russia’s invasion more likely. Moreover, pronouncements about Ukrainian membership in NATO (or in the European Union) had been merely symbolic. Even countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had never truly supported Ukraine’s membership until now (geopolitics, in other words), leaving it in a particularly vulnerable position. In no way, however, does acknowledging “the geopolitical confrontation between the US-led liberal “empire”, and the Russian imperialist project in East Europe” mean that Ukrainians are mere puppets without desires, hopes and agency, who should not freely express their will on which international alliances their country should enter, without a fear of becoming targets of military invasion.

Of course, most Ukrainians have no time and patience for such debates now—their country has been brutally attacked and the fight against the Russian invaders is all that matters to them. In this sense, it is good that the EASA EC removed the final sentence of the statement to avoid a social media storm that would have followed with the publication of the petition and which would have detracted from the statement’s overall message.

But let’s be clear here: there was no ambiguity in the original statement. The ambiguity was created by the initiators of the protest. Unless, of course, for anthropologists it is inconceivable that one can support the independence and sovereignty of Ukrainian people while seeing Russian tsarism and NATO enlargement as shaping the context of the invasion. But there is a danger that knee-jerk ascriptions of culpability and contests over the moral high ground will weaken our capability to take a critical view of ourselves, and to understand how our activities contribute to fascism and militarism.

NATO in CEE

The choice presented by the protest initiators is straightforward: if the EASA EC statement mentioned NATO as an actor shaping geopolitical contexts, it would go against Ukraine’s right of self-determination. This, to me, is a whitewashing of NATO. It is striking that it comes from anthropologists who must know that the pro-NATO position was never unequivocally embraced by Ukrainians. This is why, Volodymyr Arthiuk explains, “a silent majority” elected Zelensky who “promised to end the war, to not press issues of identity and language.” And while for reasons of bare survival under occupation, support for NATO membership, or at least for a closer cooperation, increased among Ukrainians in comparison with the pre-war period, these views will continue to be in flux and are regionally specific. As regards Ukrainians’ political opinions, one must also wonder what it will be in the future, given how NATO has failed to come to their defence.

Equating NATO membership unproblematically with popular sovereignty, with “the right of people of sovereign states to decide on membership in international alliances”, is even more disingenuous coming from CEE scholars, as in most CEE countries there were no referendums about NATO membership—there was no popular decision. And while in Poland or the Baltic countries, the majorities would have probably been in favour, even Václav Havel was against the referendum in Czechia, since the opinion polls were far from conclusive. In Slovakia, another country that I know well, barely 50% supported membership in 2003 when the country joined the alliance. Continued ambivalence of these two countries to NATO can be seen, for instance, in demonstrations against the installation of tracking radar and kinetic missiles in Czechia. Although politicians argued these would protect from attacks by rogue states, such as Iran, the public overwhelmingly (68%) rejected them. In Slovakia, just prior to the invasion, more people blamed NATO than Russia for the escalation of the tensions along Ukraine’s borders.

The petition was initiated by eight anthropologists – seven Polish and one Slovak (see ‘Protest initiators’). The petition now claims to speak for an “international anthropological community”, whereas the EASA website speaks of an initiative by “EASA members” that stimulated the change. Since the petition with signatures was never publicised, I must suppose that the executive committee decided to change the wording of the statement following the email from the protest initiators. A predominantly CEE character of the initiative is further reflected in the online social life of the petition: most of the signatures come from Poland, Slovakia and Czechia. And while a public campaign was stopped short by the EASA EC changing its statement, any momentum for obtaining a critical mass for the protest would have emerged from within this region.

In this way, the narrative of the protest echoes important discussions about the position of Central and East European anthropologists within the discipline, in which many signatories of the protest letter have been taking part actively. However, consider the irony it leads to: a group of CEE anthropologists led by former members of EASA EC end up defending NATO against EASA, which they imply is a Western hegemonic institution misunderstanding the region (even if it is currently presided over by a Bulgarian). Such positioning undoubtedly added to the pressure on the EASA EC, since it suggested that EASA’s statement was denying sovereignty to Ukrainians and to peoples of other “sovereign countries of Eastern Europe”, legitimising Russia’s imperialist claims.

We must be wary of such east-Europeanising re-alignments in the context of the prevalent view of Ukraine in many CEE countries as a failed state between Central Europe and Russia; the racialisation of Ukrainians as cheap and thus exploitable, also sexual, labour, but ‘white’ (good migrants and even refugees!). Likewise, it is important to critically reflect on the grading of Europeanness in the CEE public sphere, where NATO and EU membership have been constructed as its unambivalent symbols.

It would also be misleading to say that all CEE anthropologists found EASA’s original statement to be “the dangerous distortion” that the protesters saw it to be. Many disagreed, or would have disagreed, if they had been aware of the protest, and if not with the content of the protest, then with its tone. Indeed, there was a lively discussion on the mailing list of the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA), with voices pro and contra. In the end, only a few members signed the petition. Of course, some were probably waiting for EASA EC’s response, while others might have thought this whole thing ridiculous, since, as one member put it, and I paraphrase, “Ukrainians need guns, not statements.” In any case, it shows that the options presented by the protest initiators as clearcut were not wholeheartedly embraced by all.

The need for anti-militarism

Let’s be honest here. Rather than an argument about popular sovereignty, the initiators’ position is a pro-NATO one. It presents a false dichotomy: if one is against Putin, one cannot be against NATO. To be sure, I understand where this position comes from. The feeling among many people in CEE, including my parents, confirmed by the invasion, can be summarised in the following way: only NATO membership protects our countries from becoming prey to Russia’s tsarist ambitions; it is therefore only NATO that enables people in member states to be safe and, by extension, CEE anthropologists to pursue our careers.

Certainly, such an argument is counterfactual, as the world where CEE countries would not be NATO members would be a different world. Precisely because any line of argument about the absence of NATO membership must remain counterfactual it invokes both fears and desires, and in its operation must reproduce legitimising narratives. These are things anthropologists should be mindful of. The argument is also problematic as it separates NATO’s past interventions and invasions from its role as a defensive alliance through which smaller states can protect themselves against an imperialist next door. Violence elsewhere (e.g., Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and with Turkey as a NATO members conducting a war against the Kurdish population within its borders and in Syria) and often against a threat of “tribal” or racialised “savagery” (Pierre 2013: 548) are treated in isolation from peace and European values at home. This compartmentalization is understandable in the context of Russian imperialist warfare, but it leads to simplistic listing of pros (NATO as a national-level ally against Russian colonialism) and cons (continued militarisation internationally; ‘humanitarian interventions’), which is a sophisticated approach to neither the history of imperialism nor to a critical anthropology of military alliances. As anthropologists, we must resist such a compartmentalization. Our discipline must be anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan and anti-war, even though it is always practised from a specific locale, such as CEE. We must reject simplistic Manichaeism, labour against provincialism, and reject seeing anthropologists as Putin’s apologists, just because they are critical of NATO and of their own countries’ role in it.

Furthermore, the above line of argument promises only war; it extends Russia as a threat into the past with only war and crisis on the horizon. One must wonder how such “truths” (constructed through the piling up of historical analogies, which are now in vogue) skew anthropological sensibility, especially in and about Central and Eastern Europe. Gregory Bateson (2000: 265), among others, showed how our truths, premises and habits of thought recursively reinforce our understanding of the world and of ourselves, which leads further to the petrification of these truths.  Against the real threat of securitisation in European anthropology, I suggest we promote an anti-war anthropology, a part of a broader anti-war movement. To break the militarist habit of thought we should become apprehensive of how militarism and militarisation shape research topics and field sites (Gusterson 2007).

We should also proceed as if we knew that the forever war (as a problematic, not static ontology) was the ground on which we stand and from which we speak as anthropologists. This task is more urgent now when countries are increasing their military spending or when some argue for the need to destroy Russia in a long-term war, with the suffering borne by Ukrainians. We might find inspiration in abolitionist anthropology and rethink European anthropology as a speculative analysis that not only critiques the existing order, but in a move of counter-war imagination, reimagines and—through collective practical effort—reinvents the possible, “past the ruins of the world (and the discipline) as we know it” (Shange 2019: 10).

Two final comments

The fact that Putin clearly broke international law and the Russian army has been committing war crimes should not make us blind to the fact that the war has been going on in Ukraine for eight years preceding the invasion. As anthropologists we must recognise the complexity of that situation. This does not make us Putin’s apologists. In fact, the real problem from the point of view of the discipline is the way European anthropology chooses which ‘events’ it notices: while we have had discussions on Brexit and COVID (e.g., dossiers in Social Anthropology and two series of articles on FocaalBlog), the war in eastern Ukraine—with 14,000 casualties between 2014 and 2021—was never the focus of critical discussion (e.g., no dossier or EASA-sponsored roundtable, not even by the protest initiators).

Turning to the internal politics of EASA, it is important to note that many members would want the association to function as a learned society that abstains from activism and politics. For them, EASA’s past activities related to HAU, precarity, and possibly also the open letters published by the current EASA EC signify an unwelcome ideological move to the left.  It is ultimately EASA members who will decide on this in the future elections. I, personally, am proud to be a part of an association that published such a strong anti-war statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Organising biannual conferences, publishing a journal or facilitating various topical networks is not enough.

Martin Fotta is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. His current research focuses on the Romani diaspora across the Lusophone South Atlantic region.

References

Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2007. “Anthropology and militarism.” Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 36: 155-175.

Pierre, Jemima. 2013. “Race in Africa today: a commentary.” Cultural Anthropology 28.3: 547-551.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia. Duke University Press.

Cite as: Fotta, Martin. 2022. “Towards Anti-War Anthropology: On EASA, CEE and NATO.” FocaalBlog, 14 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/14/martin-fotta-towards-anti-war-anthropology-on-easa-cee-and-nato/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Alexander W. Anthony: Covid in the confines of the US

Introduction

There is a calendar in my office which still hangs at March 2020; an artifact of the confusion and rush to ‘lockdown’ and to find shelter from the upcoming storm. I keep it there because it seems strange to take it down after so long, but also as a reminder that time is not as straightforward as we like to believe. The solitude of lockdown taught me that, but that was my privilege, that I needed such an extreme event to experience this beyond the boredom of standing in a long line or the lightning flash of an enjoyable night with friends. People who have been incarcerated know the absurdity of time better than most perhaps. As distressing as the past two years has been for society, for incarcerated individuals locked away and largely forgotten, the burden is unthinkable. U.S. federal and state prisons have acted as miniature epicenters where infection rates have been three to four times higher than national averages or those for surrounding communities. In recent months, as the Omicron variant has spread, New York City’s Rikers Island jail reached an astonishing 17% positive infection rate (Ceron 2021). Watching this unfold, I wondered why we, as a society, have so complacently left prisoners to this fate, and as Foucault (2015:1-2) noted, what we can learn about ourselves according to the “fate [we] reserve for those of the living whom [we] wish to be rid of…”

Running the Numbers

Two years into the pandemic, and as the Omicron wave continued to sweep through the country, the Covid Prison Project reported 541,538 positive cases among individuals incarcerated within prisons. At least 2,780 people have died of COVID while incarcerated. An estimated 531,060 individuals in incarceration have received at least one dose of the vaccine (covidprisonproject.com), although institutions have slowly become less forthcoming with internal statistics over the course of the pandemic, and some have stopped offering regular reports altogether (Schwartzapfel and Blakinger 2021). While the number of positive cases both inside of prisons and within the US has continued to increase, what is most concerning is that the ratio of positive cases between incarcerated and non-incarcerated individuals in the US has remained steady since the beginning of the pandemic. For example, as of May 2020, the infection rate in New York city (the global epicenter at that time) jails (including Rikers Island) was at 9.56%, whereas the city itself reported a positive case rate at 2.10% (Griffard and Ciaccio 2020). For further perspective, the previous global epicenter, Lombardy, Italy, had a positive infection rate of 0.78%. Thus, the infection rate within NYC jails was 3-4 times higher than the surrounding community. Further data indicates that this was an early foreshadowing of what would be the national norm in the following years. As of April 2021, a comparison of incidence and mortality rates between prisons and the US population indicated that within prisons there were 30,780 cases (per 100,000) as compared to the US population which was 9,350 (per 100,000). This ratio continues to hold steady as I write this today nearly a year later (covidprisonproject.com). It also needs to be noted that there may be some hesitancy for incarcerated people to report symptoms, as a positive test would likely result in solitary confinement, rebranded by the CDC as ‘medical isolation’ (Blakinger 2020). Thus, the actual number of infections within prisons is likely even higher.

Bodies Commodified

Long before the word ‘coronavirus’ was a household name, Wacquant (2009) noted the correlation between US welfare reform, the criminalization of poverty, and the “War on Drugs”, which he astutely noted was nothing less than a ‘guerilla campaign’ waged against young men living in the inner city for whom “the retail trade of narcotics has provided the most accessible and reliable source of gainful employment” (2009:61). Two observations can be taken away from this; first there are two economies operating in the US (and globally), one is deemed illegitimate and therefore illegal, but it provides a necessary livelihood for its participants.

Three men of color wearing jumpsuits and safety glasses work at industrial sewing machines amid piles of camo fabric.
Image 1: Prisoners in a UNICOR (Federal Prison Industries) program producing military uniforms, photo by Federal Bureau of Prisons

The second is the correlation between the ballooning incarceration rate due to drug related arrests and the boom of private-run prisons which began in the 1980s (Pelaez 2014; Wacquant 2009). Private prisons contracted by the Federal and state governments receive a fixed sum of money per prisoner held in their custody, regardless of the cost of maintaining that prisoner. Thus, the bodies of the poor have become commodified. The construction of private prisons reached its height in the 1990s (alongside welfare reform) under President Clinton, when the Justice Department contracted private prisons to incarcerate undocumented workers (Pelaez 2014). Again, workers selling their labor outside the bounds of the legitimate capitalist system. This is a for-profit industry that exploded at the closing of the twentieth century (Wacquant 2009).

The Alienation of ‘Commodified Bodies’

The pandemic shuttered global economies and only businesses providing essential goods or services remained open. Meanwhile, within the penal system, incarcerated labor was deemed ‘essential.’ Perhaps predictably as labor has long been associated with the modern disciplinary apparatus. Quoting Brissot; “’One will not succeed by locking beggars up in filthy prisons that are more like cesspools’; they will have to be forced to work. ‘The best way of punishing them is to employ them’” (Brissot quoted in:Foucault 1977:106). Additionally, public works have often been the source of that labor since the prisoner became the “property of society” (Foucault 1977:109). Incarcerated labor was used in just this way throughout the pandemic. For instance, Lo Wu prison in Hong Kong reportedly had female inmates working shifts around the clock to produce face masks for wages significantly under Hong Kong’s minimum wage (Grant 2020). Additionally, former New York governor Cuomo announced that the state would be using prison labor to produce hand sanitizer for schools, transportation systems, etc. (Grant 2020).

Amidst the pandemic prison labor demonstrates one of the most extreme examples of the alienation from the product of one’s own labor (Marx 1990). For instance, although many prisons used the labor of incarcerated persons to produce hand sanitizer,  most prisons ban products higher than 60% alcohol which includes most hand sanitizers (CDC 2020). Thus, the product which could have helped keep them healthy was taken to ship to the world outside the prison.

Time and a Social Death

Some useful parallels can be drawn between prisons and other sites of confinement which may help shed some light on the current plight or our incarcerated populations. For instance, on one hand, prisons and care homes are dramatically different environments. On the other hand, both effectively provide the same service to society: the removal of a particular class of individuals. The criminal has been disconnected from the public realm in response to a crime committed against society itself (Foucault 2015), whereas individuals in care homes have been removed from society to better ‘care’ for them. Thus, one has been confined to protect society – the other has been confined under the protection of society. Now, one parallel between these institutions is time. In prison, time is taken away as a punishment for an infraction, just as labor (which is nothing less than time-sold) is rewarded with wages (Foucault 2015:70). Thus, the criminal is detached from their social milieu, placed in confinement, and punished by the removal of “time to live” (Foucault 2015:72). The centrality of time within the penal system is apparent, but how is this relevant to care home facilities? I believe that it lies at the other end of this duality of time sold/time taken. In contrast, those living within care centers no longer, or never had, the ability to sell their time in the form of labor. The only greater affront to capitalism than the inability (care homes) to contribute to the production of accumulation is the refusal to contribute (penal systems). Thus, “any person hostile or opposed to the rule of the maximization of production” (Foucault 2015:52) is implicitly an ‘enemy of the state’. Of course, most people housed in care facilities are neither ‘opposed’ nor ‘hostile’ towards production directly, yet they are unable to contribute, which places them nearer on the spectrum to the ‘enemy of society’. Indeed, some of the earliest poor laws in the ‘West’ differentiated those who were able-bodied without work (vagabonds) against those who were physically unable to labor (beggars) (Marx 1990).

Incarcerated peoples, on the other hand, have been labelled as enemies of the state. The shift from the physical tortures of the Ancien Régime to the modern disciplinary apparatus included a change in who a crime was seen as perpetrated against. Instead of committing an offense against the sovereign, criminals were seen as committing crimes against society. Executions became fewer and confinement became nearly homogenous with the penal system. In order to rationalize long-term imprisonment and continued (if less occasional) executions, the ‘monstrosity’ of the criminal became a focal point (Foucault 1978:138). This has become a mantle worn by all criminals as ethnographic work has illustrated time and again (Conover 2001; Feldman 1991; Rhodes 2004). The inmate bears a stigma and somehow “we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human” (Goffman 1963:5). It is something Foucault witnessed during a tour of Attica, where he described living conditions as “a cage for wild animals” (Foucault and Simon 1991:29). It is no surprise that incarcerated lives are valued as ‘less than’ when society’s root metaphor for criminality is animalism (Turner 1975).

Lepers in Exile-Exclosure

Analysis of the societal response to COVID-19 has suggested that it reflects Foucault’s smallpox or quarantine model of power through the use of statistical analysis and empirical data (Sarasin 2020). This appears true; however, places of confinement seem to have regressed to a more primitive model of power. As the quarantine model served as the basis for the modern surveillance society, the ‘leper model’ was foundational to the formation of the quarantine model (Foucault 1977:198-199) and most closely reflects what is transpiring at sites of confinement. “The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-exclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate…” (Foucault 1977:198). Anecdotally, in discussions of the mass release of prisoners, opponents often essentialize all incarcerated people as ‘violent’. Yet, the data does not support this argument. Only 3.2% of inmates in the US federal prison system have been convicted of homicide, aggravated assault, or kidnapping (BOP 2020). Yet the stigma of crime has turned them into a mass of bodies which it is “useless to differentiate.”

This analysis has been somewhat more historical than anticipatory; however, history does tend to repeat itself. Incarcerated laborers have been exploited since the penal experiment of confinement began. As the pandemic has persisted, they continued to be disproportionately affected by sickness and death. For over two years, infections, and mortality rates inside of confinement exceeds what is occurring outside threefold. Unfortunately, I believe we can anticipate more of the same in post-COVID confinement. I would say that again, “capital [will continue to come] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx 1990:926).

Alexander W. Anthony is a doctoral student in anthropology at Syracuse University with a focus in historical archaeology. His primary research is on the influences of prison reform movements and ideology on the human and spatial/material dimensions and experiences of incarceration in late 18th – early 20th century Southern Italy.

References

Blakinger, Keri. 2020. As COVID-19 Measures Grow, Prison Oversight Falls. The Marshall Project 03/17/2020.

BOP. 2020. Federal Bureau of Prisons Statistics of Offenses, edited by Federal Bureau of Prisons, bop.gov.

CDC. 2020. Interim Guidance on Management of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Correctional and Detention Facililities, edited by Center for Disease Control. Center for Disease Control.

Ceron, Ella. 2021. NYC Sees Jail ‘Crisis’ on Positive-Test Rates over 17% at Rikers. Bloomberg Equality December 22, 2021. www.bloomberg.com.

Conover, Ted. 2001. New Jack. Vintage Books, New York.

Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2 ed. Random House, New York.

Foucault, Michel.1978 . The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Pantheon Books, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 2015. The Punitive Society: Lectures at the College de France 1972-1973. Translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Foucault, Michel, and John K. Simon. 1991. Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview. Social Justice 18(3):26-34.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Simon & Schuster Inc., New York.

Grant, Harriet. 2020. Vulnerable Prisoners ‘Exploited’ to Make Coronvirus Masks and Hand Gel. The Guardian. UK.

Griffard, Molly, and Vincent Ciaccio. 2020. COVID-19 Infection Tracking in NYC Jails. The Legal Aid Society https://www.legalaidnyc.org/covid-19-infection-tracking-in-nyc-jails/, accessed 5/5/2020.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin, England.

Pelaez, Vicky. 2014. The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery? Global Research.

Rhodes, Lorna A. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Sarasin, Philipp. 2020. Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic with Foucault? foucaultblog, 3/31/20. https://www.fsw.uzh.ch/foucaultblog/essays/254/understanding-corona-with-foucault, accessed.

Schwartzapfel, Beth, and Keri Blakinger. 2021. Omicron has Arrived. Many Prisons and Jails are Not Ready. The Marshall Project, accessed January 29, 2022.

Turner, Victor. 1975. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Politics, History, and Culture. Duke University Press, Durham.

Cite as: Anthony, Alexander W. 2022. “Covid in the confines of the US.” FocaalBlog, 1 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/01/alexander-w-anthony-covid-in-the-confines-of-the-us/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Andrew Orta: The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear

Responding to a question about future of the MBA (Master of Business Administration) in the wake of the pandemic, the Dean of a top program recently suggested that “the future is bright,” but would require “a fundamental rethinking of business education. When the MBA was first established a century ago, there was a real sense that we would be forming leaders of business and society, a focus on forming values. I see a return to that earlier concept of business education.”

Just prior to the onset of the pandemic, MBA applications were sharply down, business and popular press were declaring the death or obsolescence of the MBA, and business programs were scrambling to reinvent themselves. But what a difference a global pandemic makes. My comments here build on ethnographic research conducted in MBA programs prior to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as a recent sampling of online informational forums for MBA applicants, program websites, and business media to examine the ways MBA administrators are reframing the value proposition of the MBA, marketing the degree as a necessary feature of the “bright future” of capitalism after COVID.

Two men and two women, dressed in business attire, look at a whiteboard with a graph showing an upward trend.
Image 1: Business meeting, photo by Yan Krukov

MBA programs are zombies: always returning from the dead. Their death is announced every few years, usually correlated with scandals or catastrophes tarnishing the capitalist brand. But the MBA cheats death through periodic reinventions. Indeed, the legitimacy of the MBA and its purchase on civic life in the US has been an open-ended project from the founding of the degree just over a century ago.

The early 20th and 21st centuries are productive bookends for thinking about this. There are intriguing parallels of economic and social disruptions, transformations in globalization, epochal technological changes, and, of course, experiences of global pandemics. But rather than thinking with the Dean about these parallels, I want to highlight some salient differences in the anticipatory rebranding of the post-COVID MBA. Thinking against the grain of the Dean’s hearkening back to origins elucidates a sleight-of-hand in current directions in MBA training – having to do less with a reanimation of the early 20th century specialist manager, than with “his” disappearance.

Producing Managerial Subjects

A common misperception of MBA training is that the students learn nothing; the programs are merely credentialing exercises providing entrée to elite business networks. But, as I’ve argued in a recent ethnography of MBA training in US business programs, MBAs get more than they bargain for (Orta 2019). MBA programs present highly distilled versions of the concepts and habits of capitalism. Course content is simplified, to be sure, but this streamlining takes on compelling depth through the cascading reinforcement of material across the curriculum. Programmatic simulations of professional life further instill a habitus of fast-paced decision-making in overscheduled conditions, based upon imperfect information. MBAs learn to frame the necessity of this simplification as an index of “hard work,” for which they should be highly compensated.

MBA programs have developed an additional value proposition: technical skills are not enough; an effective capitalist leader requires “talent.” MBA programs sell themselves as spaces for the cultivation of talent, helping students become better versions of themselves to be more effective versions of “the MBA.” The “x-factor” of talent is cast as the necessary supplement to the shortcomings of technical business teachings when faced with the real world. And the connections of the MBA to the technical operations of capitalism as a systemic form of profit extraction are increasingly masked by the rhetoric of talent as a driver of corporate success – a talent theory of value.

MBA Programs on the Eve of COVID

On the eve of COVID, MBA programs were dying—reeling from a set of compounding crises, including the Great Recession and MBA complicity in the runaway financialization that led to it. A season of institutional soul-searching spurred updated curricula and non-finance focused program tracks. A second crisis involved MBA programs’ increasing dependence over recent decades on international student enrollments. The visa policies of the Trump administration triggered a precipitous drop in international MBA enrollments. Some programs closed; others rolled out a variety of online degrees aimed at a broader pool of international and domestic students.

The Continuous Reinvention of the MBA

Such challenges and changes were business as usual. The arc of MBA education has been a continuous project to legitimize and reinvent the MBA idea across a series of scandals, crises, and transformations of capitalism, beginning with the founding of collegiate business degrees at the turn-of-the-20th century. Seen as lowering institutional standards with vocational school commonness, nascent business programs sought to emulate more established programs in law or medicine. And they tapped into an intensifying cultural sense of “business” as a discrete realm and a driver of an American modernity (Cruikshank 1987, Daniel 1998).

While the earliest iteration of the MBA curriculum was thus tightly connected to claimed civic needs, those needs were in the service of a still emerging order of extractive capitalism. By the 1930s, the corporation could be taken as standing for a particularly “American” modernity and generative of what came to be seen as the American way of life (Berle and Means 1932, Chandler 1977). MBA programs connected their mission explicitly to serving this process (e.g., Johnson 1906, Donham 1931).

By mid-century, business education was an established part of the landscape of higher education in the U.S. “The MBA” was a recognizable avatar of capitalism, albeit a shifty one: subject to recurring reinventions in the face of critiques, challenges and crises over the post-War decades and beyond – including the fallout from 2009 and the enrollment crisis (e.g. Drucker 1950, Gordon 1959, Pierson 1959, Petriglieri 2012).

The MBA Value Proposition for a Post-COVID World

The MBA responses to the post-2009 and post-2016 challenges positioned the programs well for the COVID years. Flexibility in delivering the MBA was already becoming a habit as many programs developed online and hybrid MBAs to maintain access to international students as well as employed domestic students. “Rigor” is a new keyword as recruiters legitimate the online programs; there is now a separate infrastructure of rankings for online MBAs, reproducing the bounding and marketing mechanisms of the traditional programs.

“Diversity” is another keyword. Business schools continue to struggle with gender and, especially, racial inclusion and equity among students and faculty—a concern linked increasingly by administrators and business trade publications to BlackLivesMatter and the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color in the U.S. However, while many programs report statistics along lines of gender and race, the emphasis of much of the recruitment materials I have reviewed is on the “diversity” of professional fields represented in a cohort. This follows from post-2009 efforts to distance the MBA from finance. Deans now say things like: “many of our students come from homogenous worlds, but their classmates have a diversity of professional experiences in different careers.” Students echo the pitch, describing the ways the “MBA experience of working with people outside of your industry broadens horizons.”  

As MBA programs recruit for the post-COVID world, they are most aggressively selling their “transformational” impact on students – often downplaying traditional functional training in business. “Transformational impact is the mission,” said one Dean, adding, “Our realization is that a lot of that impact will not come from the classroom only.”  Students describe their “MBA journey” similarly, stressing how the degree allows them to “view things more holistically.”   “The MBA program forced me to look at what I value,” reports one student.  Others describe a growing sense of “confidence,” and tell prospective applicants, “the MBA helps bring more you into the world.”

While the MBA may help bring more you into the world, it does so in coordination with a curious managerial self-effacement. There is a lot of talk about teams and the value of delegating decisions to local levels. This squares with neoliberal the rhetoric of decentralization and agility, and is familiar from existing MBA emphasis on entrepreneurial talent and soft skills.

But there is something more in the mix: the disruptions and anxieties of the pandemic. Students are “rethinking what they are doing.” Programs now promise “lifelong career coaching” for careers of change and uncertainty. And at a time when routinized neoliberal truths of business are explicitly up for debate, MBA programs stress the importance of humility, of not knowing what to do, as a facet of leadership in uncertainty.

The focus on talent and leadership skills increasingly downplays the relevance of core functional practices of managerial capitalism. They are mentioned – usually as part of the effort to show the “rigor” of online programs. But current marketing of the MBA underscores an ascendant conceptualization of talent that eclipses the core disciplines of capitalist extraction and harnesses the post-COVID business leader to a differently imagined project.

MBA marketing explicitly positions the talented MBA as the solution to a set of social and political crises exacerbated by the pandemic. “Leadership is more important than ever,” commented one Dean as he described a three-fold crisis facing the post-COVID US: “health, economics, and inequality.” Further, he laments, increasing polarization from before the pandemic has led to a loss of trust in governmental and non-governmental institutions, which “typically provide the safety net in times of crisis.” Thus, he identified a fourth post-COVID crisis: “leadership.”

That amounts to a familiar reading of the times. But he caught my attention when he went on to say, “But the level of trust has gone up dramatically in the business community. This is a great time for the business platform. An opportunity that goes well beyond anything that has been there before. […] We can now tackle issues that go beyond traditional profit and loss. We can have a bigger impact on society. [T]he expectation is there that business will step in.”

This goes beyond a post-2009 trend in business schools to link business to transformative social solutions through electives in social entrepreneurship or sustainability. Those turned on a familiar vision of doing good through doing well (in business) and have spawned a host of metrics to measure (and therefore manage) social impact in familiar business style. The Dean’s comments decouple the impact of business leadership from the fundamental operations of business and gesture to political governance in ways that have not been an explicit part of the MBA project – at least with reference to the US.

There is good strategic reason for this shift, as the post-pandemic economy seems likely to be characterized by continuing changes in the neoliberal alliance of governing policies and capital. As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink puts it in his most recent annual letter to CEOs,

“COVID-19 has also deepened the erosion of trust in traditional institutions and exacerbated polarization in many Western societies. This polarization presents a host of new challenges for CEOs. […] In this environment, facts themselves are frequently in dispute, but businesses have an opportunity to lead. Employees are increasingly looking to their employer as the most trusted, competent, and ethical source of information – more so than government, the media, and NGOs.”  

Other guidance for the post-pandemic economy makes a similar point: “beyond building resilience in busines and the economy, public and private leaders must also build societal resilience.” As MBA programs are marketing themselves to prospective applicants whose concerns are shaped by the crises listed by the Dean, this message of civic leadership seems resonant.

The pandemic has made the contradictions of capitalism visible in new ways, including accelerating levels of inequality. While this has opened up new conversations about equity and governance and provoked commentary on the expanding job description of the CEO, there is no indication that extraction of profit is not still the name of the game. Yet, in marketing the MBA for the post-COVID world, there is a sleight-of-hand by which the extractive operations of capitalism are screened from view. This may be the apotheosis of the manager-turned-leader, as the training of capitalist managers has progressively erased direct reference to the technical ends of managerial capitalism.

MBA programs have long been adept at repackaging themselves to weather crises, and scandals. Along the way they have shaped an ideal of the capitalist manager that balances the technical operations of capitalist industry with the softer skills and innate qualities of leadership – even entertaining the claim that MBAs don’t really learn anything of functional importance from their programs. As they turn to their “bright” post-COVID future, MBA programs are continuing a longer project of producing the disappearing manager.

Andrew Orta is professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is author of Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture (California, 2019).

References

Berle, Adolf A., Gardiner C. Means. 1991 [1932]. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Reprint edition. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A: Transaction Publishers.

Chandler, Alfred. 1977. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. 1987. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908-1945. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press.

Daniel, Carter A. 1998. MBA: The First Century. Bucknell University Press.

Donham, Wallace Brett, and Alfred North Whitehead. 1931. Business Adrift. Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill.

Drucker, Peter Ferdinand. 1950. “The Graduate Business School” Fortune 42 (August 1950): 92-116.

Gordon, Robert Aaron, and James Edwin Howell. 1959. Higher Education for Business. Columbia University Press.

Johnson, Joseph French. 1906. “The Business School and What It Should Do.” The New York Times, September 15, 1906 page 9. 

Petriglieri, G. 2012. “Are Business Schools Clueless or Evil.” Harvard Business Review Blog Network.  

Pierson, Frank Cook. 1959. The Education of American Businessmen: A Study of University-College Programs in Business Administration. McGraw-Hill.

Orta, Andrew. 2019. Making Global MBAs. The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

Cite as: Orta, Andrew. 2022. “The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear.” FocaalBlog, 30 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/30/andrew-orta-the-mba-wont-die-but-it-is-trying-to-disappear/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Don Nonini: Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization

Introduction

Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning point – whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital set for them, or to shift toward a new militancy toward capitalism. Now, two years into the pandemic, they have suffered severe personal hardships due to Covid-related illness, hospitalizations and deaths, and sudden loss of employment. These traumas have occurred even as they have experienced an historically unprecedented hiatus of relative economic security, given the Covid-related payments and protections they received from the US state, while many have been praised as “essential workers.” This essay seeks to review what has happened to them over the last four decades that has made this into such a turning point.

Anthropologists speak of the period since the 1970s as one of neoliberalism. Instead, in this essay I adopt a different perspective by exploring the conditions prevailing under the transition from the liberal nation-state to the corporate-oligarchic state that has occurred widely with the integration of platform-surveillance capitalism into state administration and the use of massive databases by corporations and governments to govern populations (Kapferer and Gold 2018). Freedom and enslavement in the contemporary United States are linked to two now converging phenomena. One is digitalization; the other is the expansion of expropriation as a mechanism of capital accumulation beyond its historically racially marked boundaries to encompass the racially dominant white population. These changes have taken place with the rise to domination of finance capitalism in the world economy, a new period of economic decline and social crisis in the West.

A large sign reads "CHECKS CASHED" on a small building with a curved roof, stone facade, and glass walls in a parking lot.
Image 1: Payday Lender in Durham, North Carolina, photo by Don Nonini

First, as to digitalization. It has not only led to unprecedented levels of economic inequality among the population, but also to new mechanisms of accumulation organized around the generalized dispossession of working-class people made possible by their indebtedness combined with corporate and state deployment of digital technologies with large-scale predictive capabilities. The rise of surveillance capitalism and its integration into the corporate state has taken the form of a massive, commercialized apparatus of surveillance – “a single behemoth of a data market; a colossal marketplace for personal data” (Harcourt 2015, 198).

The ascendance of finance capital has come to operate in tandem with a racialized corporate state formation using an apparatus of analog surveillance and control of working people combined with digital surveillance over them. This apparatus has come to rationally extract and then realize large volumes of surplus value from them outside the capitalist workplace. This apparatus employs digital technologies (i.e., artificial intelligence) to increase the hyper-exploitation and expropriation of racially vulnerable groups, but also extends to the racially dominant white population. I focus my attention on the United States because its relentless attachment to new forms of financialized repression of working people through capitalizing (on) their debt repayment and petty income streams leads the way for capitalist regimes in other “advanced industrialized” countries undergoing economic decline.

Second, connected to the dominance of finance capital since the 1970s there has been the generalization of mechanisms of expropriation beyond racially marked vulnerable groups to the broader majority/plurality white population. In an important article, Nancy Fraser (2016) argues that capitalism throughout its history has always been accompanied by the racialization of the populations governed by the states that support it, and that this has continued up to the present. She distinguishes the industrial exploitation of a Euro-descended or white population within the cores and peripheries of the European (British, French, etc.) and United States empires that has been set apart from the expropriation of people of color within the cores and peripheries of these empires. By expropriation Fraser means, “distinct from Marxian exploitation, expropriation is accumulation by other means. Dispensing with the contractual relation through which capital purchases ‘labor power’ in exchange for wages, expropriation works by confiscating capacities and resources and conscripting them into capital’s circuits of self-expansion” (Fraser 2016, 166). This is important: dispossession as such is only the loss of labor-power, reproductive capacity, land, money, or property by those dispossessed. Expropriation, however, goes beyond dispossession to confiscate these use-values and transform them into exchange-values incorporated into capital’s circuits of accumulation. Expropriation leads to accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004: 74-75).

Fraser goes further to assert that as an historical regularity until quite recently capitalism has survived at times of economic crisis only because the expropriation of people of color accelerates the rate of capital accumulation beyond that possible through sustained exploitation of white workers within industrial production. “Expropriation… covers a multitude of sins, most of which correlate strongly with racial oppression… such as territorial conquest, land annexation, enslavement, coerced labor, child labor, child abduction, and rape” but also “assumes more ‘modern’ forms – such as prison labor, transnational sex trafficking, corporate land grabs, and foreclosures on predatory debt, which are also linked with racial oppression” (Fraser 2016, 167).

Although Fraser has captured an historical regularity of capitalism in the United States, she points out that expropriations by corporations and the US state are increasingly imposed on the dominant racial group of whites as well as on racially subordinate groups. In her periodization of capitalism since the 17th century, she refers to the current period of “financialized capitalism” which she dates from the 1990s to the present as characterized by the emergence of “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker, formally free but acutely vulnerable” (Fraser 2016, 176). To be more accurate, they are also exploitable and expropriable when they own petty property (e.g., low-end real estate), or are not “legal” U.S. citizens (e.g., “non-documented” Latinx immigrants among hyper-sweated workers in the meat processing industry). This figure refers to working people who racially may be of color or may be white.

Fraser’s (2016, 176) argument that “expropriation has become ubiquitous, afflicting not only its traditional [racial] subjects but also those who were previously shielded by their status as citizen-workers” has much support. This can be identified in the events leading up to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 when subprime mortgage lenders in 2000-2001 shifted their target demographic for peddling these mortgages away from African-American elderly couples and women toward “a white, blue-collar construction worker who drinks beer,’” in the words of Roland Arnall, the CEO of Ameriquest, one of the largest and most fraudulent subprime mortgage lenders (Hudson 2010, 148). Other subprime mortgage lenders followed suit. In consequence, 3.8 million families from 2007-2010 lost their homes due to foreclosures. Is the racialized class hierarchy within US capitalism being reordered by redefining the white/non-white boundary? Are déclassé whites becoming less “white” or even “non-white”?

How do generalized expropriation and digitalization now combine to characterize capitalist society in the United States? Expropriation made more precise and discriminating in its objectives by artificial intelligence is often but not always centered on taking advantage of working people through indebtedness (from subprime mortgages, payday lending, student loans, etc.). It allows for the rationalized and sustained extraction of working peoples’ income streams, thus allowing such extraction to be scaled up and “securitized.” Under these conditions, expropriation enhanced by digitalization directed at working people has become a major mode of realizing (surplus) value from working people, outside the “normal” profit-making by corporations through consumer markets.

The New Digital Scores and the Corporations’/States’ Management of Life

Consider persons’ awareness in the U.S. of their FICO credit score when applying for a loan. Most soon learn of their FICO Score and its importance but they may not know of other less-regulated consumer scores that evaluate their potential to incur, manage and repay debt, and tap on their income streams for money – scores like “ChoiceScore,” “Risk IQ”, the geographically defined “Median Equivalency Score,” and the “Consumer View Profitability Score” (Dixon and Gelman 2014, 43-44). Similarly, persons in the US may not know about many other aspects of their lives that are being quantified and analyzed through AI-based algorithms to create scores for them that predict and shape their lives. 

These scores are commercially available to any corporate or state buyer that can afford to purchase them. They assess the individuals forming the US population as debtors, potential job occupants, rent or utility payers, real estate buyers, hospital patients, disease sufferers, consumers of specific commodities, securitized air travelers, student borrowers, political dissidents, “street people,” defaulting child supporters, perpetrators of domestic violence, or criminals, among many other possibilities. My analysis of the data in Dixon and Gelman (2014) discovered more than 50 such common scores, and eight years later there undoubtedly are dozens more that have been invented and applied to the US population.

The Dynamics of Dual Enslavement: Analog and Digital

In addition to extracting super-profits from debtors (e.g., via “foreclosures”), there are other ways in which expropriation and digitalization appropriate value from working people. The Behemoth’s algorithms – the FICO credit scores, the legally unregulated “consumer scores” that profile individuals’ work, consumption, and credit histories, the predictive policing scores, the digitalized background checks for prospective job applicants and apartment renters, and much more – dynamically reinforce and cement the connections between the surveillance by digital technologies and the “on the ground” analog expropriations that once only targeted racial groups like African Americans for special treatment, but now extend to the working class as a whole. 

The defining characteristic of the putative “middle class” individual is the job. African-Americans are known to have lower average and median credit ratings than whites (Garcia Perez, Gaither and Darity 2020). One survey found that the 60% of employers surveyed ran credit checks of job applicants as part of the job application and review process (Wang 2018: 129). These could involve the applicant’s official FICO score, but more likely include one of the financial consumer scores referred to above (e.g., “Consumer Profitability Score”). In one study, one out of ten respondents who were unemployed were informed that they would not be hired for a job because of their credit report, while one in seven applicants with “blemished” credit histories were told they were not being hired because of their credit record. Those not even aware of the use of their electronic scores against them constitute many more who have been discriminated against. There is evidence that employers concerned about curbing their future health insurance costs due to unhealthy employees use health scores, scores from personality tests, and reputation scores to exclude persons with medical conditions when they apply for jobs (O’Neil 2017:213).   

Credit scores are now used routinely by landlords who require these from prospective renters before agreeing to rent to them. These credit scores are increasingly derived from massive digital databases of prior renters as well as applicants without prior rental histories, are increasingly refined by electronic vetting corporations, and are resorted to by the large-scale absentee corporate landlords that took over distressed apartment housing after the 2007-2008 financial crisis. TransUnion advertises its SmartMove ResidentScore as estimating “the reliability and level of risk” an individual rental applicant brings, draws on the prior credit, rental/eviction and criminal histories of the applicant, and brags that landlords will “get a 15% better prediction score than a typical credit score.” The codification of discrimination through these new scores that draw on underlying databases as one might expect leads disproportionate numbers of African-American applicants for rental housing to be rejected, but large numbers of whites and Latinx applicants are also excluded.

In the cases of job hires and rental applications, expropriations brought on by digital and analog surveillance not only deny applicants access to specific kinds of jobs and housing, but also drive them into more insecure hyper-exploitative labor and predatory rental markets – where their labor power and incomes can be confiscated and put to work for accumulation by employers and landlords.

Even those who are too impoverished to be creditworthy have use-values that can be capitalized by capitalists. This illustrates another connection between expropriation, digitalization, and value extraction. If the presence of “street people” in the way of gentrification jeopardizes the realization of the market value of real estate, they must be separated by force from its spaces. This leads to police harassment and arrests of young men and women, disproportionately African-Americans and Latinx, but also including many whites.

Their arrests transform incarceration itself into a commodity. Large numbers of urban poor people are arrested and remain in local jails on trivial misdemeanor charges because they cannot afford to pay bail – a form of debtors’ prison. The families of those arrested and jailed send them money to pay for their food and telephone calls, thus subsidizing the privately-owned industries providing these services ($1.6 billion and $1.3 billion respectively). Even though three-fourths of all prisoners in local jails are never convicted of a crime, their jailing leads their families to raise money to pay for their bail, thus providing a $1.5 billion subsidy to the bail industry.

Criminalization and imprisonment of poor people are not only inscribed in the official hardcopy records of City Hall, but also in the digital data on “justice-involved” African-Americans and others collected, analyzed with algorithms, and commercially disseminated as scores by data brokers. Their electronic “criminal records”, even just arrests without convictions, follow them into the digital world and are used against them in job interviews and rental applications. Algorithms for predictive policing software (e.g., PREDPOL, COMPAS) pull the impoverished urban defendant down more tightly under the yoke of electronic prediction and control. PREDPOL concentrates police “stop and frisk” in specific urban areas with “high crime” and reinforces previous discrimination and leads to more arrests, injuries, and deaths among the urban poor. COMPAS scores the degree of “risk” of those convicted of “crime” to help judges determine whether they should be allowed free on probation or conversely sentenced for longer periods of time.

Employers, realtors, bankers, speculators, et al. profit from the expropriation of use values from poor people when such confiscations yield the values these economic elites realize (e.g., lower wages paid, higher rents extracted, houses foreclosed on and resold, higher payday loan and student debt interest payments, court fines and fees assessed, bails posted). Allies of these economic elites also profit from such expropriations. Judges set high court fees and impose steep fines on arrested and convicted poor people to raise revenues for local governments (Wang 2018, 155-161). Police confiscate the cash, houses, and cars of arrestees suspected of  committing a crime through “civil forfeiture,” and use the plunder to benefit the local police force. Local Chambers of Commerce attract new capital to invest in gentrifying urban neighborhoods by supporting the evictions of poor residents from their rental units.

The Age of Covid: “Essential Workers,” Ironic Respite, Labor Militancy

Since March 2020, working-class people in the United States, especially African-Americans and other people of color, have suffered disproportionately from Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. They have witnessed  one of the largest direct transfer of wealth from the state to corporations and the 1% in US history – more than $2 trillion alone in one year in payments and tax breaks to corporations from the Covid-relief CARES Act. At the same time, they have also experienced the temporary economic security provided them by Covid-related transfer payments from the US state (CARES Act and American Rescue Plan), while a CDC-imposed eviction moratorium has only recently come to an end. Historically, this is the first time that the US state has intervened to provide basic income support for most of the working-class population over a protracted period of time, irrespective of whether they were employed. Finally, many have been rhetorically elevated in their status to “essential workers,” that is the idealized national sacrifice – most at risk of contracting and dying from Covid yet deemed most indispensable to “the economy.”  

These contradictory experiences – temporary economic security, awareness that corporations received far more support than workers, disproportionate losses from Covid and unemployment, and for some, praise as essential workers – have been a revelation for many considering the decades of expropriation and hyper-exploitation recounted in this essay. Deadly pandemics, like war, tend to revolutionize one’s self-awareness and concentrate one’s imagination of the possible. 

It is therefore not surprising that nurses, hospital orderlies, oil rig workers, Amazon warehouse laborers, and workers in cereals and agricultural equipment manufacturing  are showing a profound unwillingness to rejoin “the economy” on capitalism’s terms – including persisting risks to their health from Covid imposed by employers – through workers’ militancy. In increasing numbers, for the first time since the emergence of the corporate state and the domination of finance capital, they are organizing themselves to confront the abuses of capital. Hopefully, these militants will soon be joined in larger numbers by low-end service and gig workers, as is already occurring in the fast foods industry.

Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published extensively on Chinese trans-nationalism, on class and ethnic relations among the Chinese diaspora of Malaysia and Australia, and on local politics and race relations in the US. He has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous books and reviewed journal articles on these topics.

References

Dixon, P., and R. Gelman. (2014). “The Scoring of America: How secret consumer scores threaten your privacy and your future.” World Privacy Forum, 1-89.

Fraser, N. (2016). “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies 3(1), 163-178.

García-Pérez, M., S. Gaither, and W. Darity Jr. (2020). “Baltimore study: Credit scores.” Working Paper Series, Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Washington, DC.

Harcourt, B. E. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in The Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (2004). “The New Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” Socialist Register 40, 63-87

Hudson, M. W. (2010). The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America – and Spawned a Global Crisis. New York: Times books/Henry Holt and Company

Kapferer, B. and M. Gold (2018). A nail in the coffin. Arena Magazine 152, 37-43.

O’Neil, C. (2017). Weapons of Math Destruction. New York: Broadway Books.

Wang, J. (2018). Carceral Capitalism. Intervention Series, 21. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

Cite as: Nonini, Don. 2022. “Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization.” FocaalBlog, 28 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/28/don-nonini-scoring-the-u-s-working-class-expropriation-and-digitalization

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Ieva Snikersproge: Jobs or ecology? Why green growth is a pipe dream and how the pandemic could change this

My interest in the tensions between job preservation and ecological transition comes from my fieldwork among neorurals in Diois, a relatively isolated mountainous area in Southeastern France. The term neorurals (a literal translation from French néoruraux) refers to a diverse group of urban-to-rural migrants; one of its major components is back-to-the-landers who move to the countryside because they want to live in an environmentally friendly manner. The modern neorural movement is about fifty years old and has been at the forefront of inventing new, environmentally friendly ways of living. For example, neorurals have been pioneers in organic farming, they have experimented with environmentally friendly construction techniques, and have re-localized production chains, such as washing, brushing, colouring, and threading of wool, which disappeared from France because they were judged as economically unviable.

The economic dissolvability of environmental practice

It is curious that, despite neorural experiments using extant ecological alternatives for nearly fifty years, they struggle to become the mainstream. It is mainly because these ecological initiatives are more labour-intensive than conventional choices and, hence, are harder to access.  By and large, there are two ways to get to environmentally friendly goods, such as organic food, a passive house, and a locally produced woollen pullover. First, it is possible to buy them on the market, but they will inevitably be upmarket goods because the price needs to cover the longer working hours involved in producing them. This poses a serious limitation because these goods become out of reach for most people, particularly in rural areas, where there are very few jobs in competitive, well-paying industries.

A blonde, white person in a dirty jacket and work boots kneels on a gravel floor lined with boards, holding a power drill.
Image 1: A voluntary worker helping to build a self-constructed, ecological house in Diois, France, photo by Ieva Snikersproge

The second option for accessing these goods is self-producing them. In economically poor areas, such as where I did my fieldwork, this was a common, if complicated option. At first glance it might appear to be a “free” solution, but it requires access to space, land and/or other expensive inputs that cannot be self-produced and thus necessitate monetary resources. Moreover, in many cases, self-production imposes imperial time demands that are hardly compatible with a regular job. In the end, through self-production, essentially “productive” environmental practices, such as organic vegetable growing or construction of houses, become “reproductive” activities subordinated to money and time dispositions of everyone. There is a kind of economic insolvability innate to environmentally friendly practices because they require “uncompetitive” amounts of work.

Of course, neorurals represent a marginal fringe of French society, but the environmental crisis has become a mainstream policy concern. The neorurals show that, from a technical point of view, it is possible to dramatically reduce the footprint of our livelihoods by re-localizing production and reducing our needs. However, there are socio-economic impediments that limit the ability for this to become a mainstream solution. For now, environmentally friendly practices are either “free” but do not allow practitioners to make a living, or they allow for a living but are reserved for well-paid elites and well-funded institutions. In other words, ecological transition is not only a technical but also, and probably primarily, a socio-economic problem.

Economy and jobs: “No matter how much it costs”

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a major turnaround in France’s macro-economic policy. Emmanuel Macron, the current French president, is known as a follower of right-wing economic policy. Just to give a few examples, he has sought to reduce France’s sovereign debt by decreasing state expenditure and to increase the age of retirement to balance the budget of pensions. However, when Macron announced the first social confinement on March 12, 2020, he immediately added, “the government will mobilize all the necessary means (…) to save lives no matter how much it costs.” Macron’s speech echoed the European Central Bank’s (ECB) former president, Mario Draghi’s, famous phrase “whatever it takes,” which showed his willingness to open the tap of public money to assume all monetary costs of his political decisions.

Macron’s decision meant massive state expenditure, not only to buy medical equipment and boost hospitals but also to “avoid the collapse of the national economy and mass unemployment” (Coeuré and Inspection générale des finances 2021, 5). The logic was that it was less painful to keep the economy afloat artificially with state support than let the lockdown destroy enterprises and jobs that would need to be rebuilt afterwards. To achieve this, the economic plan included four key measures: First, state-guaranteed loans to enterprises (141 billion euros); second, a solidarity fund to small enterprises facing bankruptcy (35 billion euros); third, a partial activity/technical unemployment scheme for workers who cannot continue working full time because of the confinement (32 billion euros). And last but not least, it involved a scheme to cover the cost of small-to-medium enterprises whose activity was administratively suspended (8.4 billion euros). The plan confirmed French commitment to job preservation, as unemployment rates remain a major yardstick for assessing the performance of successive governments.

Unsurprisingly, these COVID measures caused French sovereign debt to skyrocket. A year later, a report commissioned by the prime minister estimated that COVID measures had created a loan worth 215 billion EUR and surged the sovereign debt from 98.1% of GDP to 120% of GDP (Arthuis and Commission pour l’avenir des finances publiques 2021). The report concluded that, under the current lending conditions (low interest rates due to the European Central Bank’s (ECB) PEPP program that bought loans worth 750 billion EUR), the loan is not putting the state in the difficulty of repayment. However, it argued that ECB would not be able to continue this policy endlessly. According to the reporters, the ECB was buying sovereign debts because its mission is to keep inflation under 2% and to avoid deflation. If inflation approached 2%, the ECB would immediately stop this policy (Ibid, p.23-24). Thus, again, according to the authors, it is important to create strategies that show France is taking its indebtedness seriously and is considering ways to reduce it. Until the onset of the COVID recession, France had not managed to stabilize its sovereign debt that it had contracted in previous decades. The report advised marking the COVID debt separately from the rest of the debt with the sole reason of “transparency.” Yet, the authors advised against all three publicly discussed solutions for handling the sovereign debt: first, effacement of the debt; second, making the debt perpetual; and third, confining the COVID debt to create a new mechanism/tax for paying this portion of the sovereign debt.

A week after the report, Bruno Le Maire, the French minister of economy and finance, said that he understands French worries about the repayment of the debt and that the subject requires “responsibility.” He said: “we could envisage dedicating a part of economic growth to the repayment of the debt. During the crises we have helped enterprises a lot (…). If in the near future they grow, if there is supplementary growth that increases income from the tax on enterprises, would it not be right just to use part of this tax to repay the COVID debt?” In other words, Bruno Le Maire envisages repayment of the debt from economic growth alone, as he specified, he has no intention of increasing tax on entrepreneurial activity. On the contrary, in 2022, it will decrease to 25%.

A green growth plan to mop up the sovereign debt and create jobs

As early as July 2020, the government announced that the state would mobilize extra funding to boost the French economy at the end of the lockdown. On September 3, 2020, the government unveiled a new program entitled “France relance” or “France restarts/relaunches” with a 100-billion euros envelope (of which 40 billion are covered by the Next Generation EU) to rebuild the economy. Macron presented the program by explaining that the most remarkable aspect was not its budget, but its project, i.e., France does not want to return to “pre-crisis normal.” Instead, it wants to turn the crisis into an opportunity by investing in sectors that “will make the economy and jobs of tomorrow”.

France relance consists of three pillars: ecological transition (30 billion EUR), competitiveness (34 billion EUR), and territorial cohesion (36 billion EUR). Ecological transition includes such measures as aid for energy renovation of (public and private) buildings, aid for buying more ecological cars, investment in trains as well as decarbonization of the industry. The competitiveness of the French economy is encouraged through support measures for export, investment aid for the development and modernization of the industry, aid to “digitalize” small and medium enterprises, and loans to help enterprises that want to invest but whose investment capacity has been affected because of COVID-19. Territorial cohesion includes many insertion measures, such as a special program for integrating young workers in the labour market, aid for reclassification schemes to avoid firing, investment in hospitals and allocations to local authorities for local infrastructure development projects.

While France relance includes a few investment schemes that tackle infrastructure and help households to consume better, the backbone of it is job creation through green growth. All documents and videos that present the program advertise it as a plan to “create employment that the French are waiting for.” The idea is that by greening energy and investing in innovative, cutting-edge enterprises, France will manage to create economic growth that will then create jobs. In fact, economic growth is sold as a panacea to three macro-economic problems: it helps to keep France’s sovereign debt sustainable; it permits (at least in theory) the creation of jobs; and it permits the state to raise funds for financing the “ecological transition.”

Jobs and ecology?

There are a few problems to this narrative. First, not all economic growth creates jobs (Kannan and Raveendran 2009). If it creates jobs, it first creates jobs in competitive economic sectors and only then, secondarily, in sectors that are centred on the reproduction of everyday life, such as public services, the care sector, agriculture, etc. (Davezies 2009). There is no guarantee that economic growth will trickle down to create and fund jobs that service local needs. Among neorurals, it was precisely the lack of income that limited their possibilities of remunerating local labour and generalizing environmentally friendly practices. Second, the competitive sectors might not be green sectors at all (like the automotive industry, nuclear energy, or aircraft building). To name this widespread phenomenon when job preservation takes priority over ecological concerns, sociologists have coined the term “jobs versus environment dilemma” (Räthzel and Uzzell 2011). Third, economic growth might not be strong enough to keep ahead of technological advancement and produce enough taxable income for both financing environmental transition and repaying the sovereign debt. Decades long sluggish economic growth (that Larry Summer analysed as “secular stagnation”) and desperate state attempts to boost it have largely contributed to the creation of sovereign debts in the first place. Finally, there is mounting evidence that green growth is impossible. Economic growth is not just (or not only) a manipulation of numbers, but also an increase in goods and services that use energy and other material inputs for their functioning (Hickel and Kallis 2020).

In short, France Relance is heading for green growth but it is most likely a misguided policy goal. The necessity to create jobs and service a humongous sovereign debt makes the French economy growth-addicted but imaging that economic growth can be simply “greened” appears to be a pipe dream. Of course, I would not like to suggest that, to live within the ecological limits of planet Earth, we should all become neorurals. The neorural experience, however, could invite us to find ways of remunerating environmentally friendly practices directly (Conditional cash transfers? Basic income schemes? Subsidies?) without engineering economic growth that will hopefully trickle down to all the layers of society in the form of jobs and produce enough taxable income. Where the pandemic could help – but only could because none of this has been acquired, far from it! – is to change the laws of monetary creation to fund the ecological transition without pushing for economic growth. The pandemic made many governments change their position on deficit spending; it also made the EU, for the first time in its history, take on a collective debt. Could the widespread explosion of sovereign debts finally change the rules of debt repayment and, with it, monetary creation? Or is it going to precipitate us first into unreasonable struggle for economic growth and then painful austerity measures that will curb government capacities to finance ecological transition?

Ieva Snikersproge is a post-doc research fellow at the Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporain at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. Her thesis, “Working Alternatives to Capitalist Factory Takeovers and the Return to the Land in Early Twenty-First Century France,” investigated two alternatives to capitalist ways of (re)production in Southern France. She is currently carrying out a large-scale quantitative study that seeks to understand the articulation of productive and reproductive economic practices for achieving ecologically sustainable livelihoods.

References

Arthuis, Jean, and Commission pour l’avenir des finances publiques. 2021. “Nos Finances Publiques Post-COVID-19: Pour de Nouvelles Règles Du Jeu.” https://www.viepublique.fr/sites/default/files/rapport/pdf/279092.pdf.

Coeuré, Benoît, and Inspection générale des finances. 2021. “Comité de Suivi et d’évaluation Des Mesures de Soutien Financier Aux Entreprises Confrontées à l’épidémie de Covid-19.” France Stratégie: Évaluer. Anticiper. Débattre. Proposer. https://www.viepublique.fr/sites/default/files/rapport/pdf/281253.pdf.

Davezies, Laurent. 2009. “The Residential Local Economy.” Géographie, Économie, Société 11 (1): 47–53.

Hickel, Jason, and Giorgos Kallis. 2020. “Is Green Growth Possible?” New Political Economy 25 (4): 469–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964.

Kannan, K.P., and G. Raveendran. 2009. “Growth Sans Employment: A Quarter Century of Jobless Growth in India’s Organised Manufacturing.” Economic and Political Weekly 44 (10): 80–91.

Räthzel, Nora, and David Uzzell. 2011. “Trade Unions and Climate Change: The Jobs versus Environment Dilemma.” Global Environmental Change 21 (4): 1215–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.07.010.

Cite as: Snikersproge, Ieva. 2022. “Jobs or ecology? Why green growth is a pipe dream and how the pandemic could change this.” FocaalBlog, 25 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/25/ieva-snikersproge-jobs-or-ecology-why-green-growth-is-a-pipe-dream-and-how-the-pandemic-could-change-this

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Andrew Flachs, Ankita Raturi, Juliet Norton, Valerie Miller, and Haley Thomas: Building back bigger or degrowing local food? US alternative food networks and post-corona agrarian economies

There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. – John Steinbeck

Midway through The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck turns away from the dispossessed Joad family to consider the injustice of a farm system that values profit over a flourishing rural economy. The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted local food economies and supply chains, and these disruptions have been centuries in the making: beginning with the privatization of commons, settler colonialism, redistribution of labor, and efforts to intensify the capitalization and technification of agricultural work. Like any agrarian crisis, the pandemic reveals cracks and opportunities amid hegemonic order (Flachs 2021). Although all stakeholders want to shift labor and production, their post-pandemic visions for the future differ: some advocate for an agrarian degrowth, yet others see the pandemic as a chance to better position themselves in a post-COVID hierarchy.

Food Regime (Friedmann and McMichael 1989) and Capitalocene (Moore 2015) analysts roughly agree in seeing agrarian capitalist crises emerging from industrializing Europe (Araghi 2000; Kautsky 1988) as a combination of colonialism and enclosure. As land in the colonial periphery was made cheap and exploitable, common land and labor relationships were severed back in the metropole through a slow process of privatization. In much of the world since the mid-20th century, farms became increasingly consolidated and production increasingly specialized as technology and capital appropriated discrete elements of farm production (Goodman, Sorj, and Wilkinson 1987).

Current pandemic-induced agri-food anxieties in the US stem from a century of agrarian change that has embraced productivism: the ideology that production yields and profit growth are and should be the key drivers of agriculture (Buttel 1993). In the decades following the Great Depression, US farm sizes have steadily increased while the number of individual farms has plummeted (Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel 2000), destabilizing land tenure, work, and rural institutions (Goldschmidt 1978).

A phone screenshot of a spreadsheet tab labeled "2021 Onions" with columns of data including "Market", price, quantities, and percentage calculations.
Image 1: This screenshot illustrates the digital record-keeping and spreadsheet logics that guide farmer decision-making, as well as the invisible infrastructures of pricing, efficiency, and abstraction predetermined by spreadsheets that may lead farmers to pursue growth and simplicity. Image shared by Midwest farmer participant, summer 2021.

Alternative food networks are common responses to acute economic crisis: Americans flocked to vegetable gardening during the first and second world wars (Lawson 2005), civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer organized America’s largest farm cooperative in response to the eviction of Black tenant farmers across the American South in the 1960s (White 2018), and Americans returned to urban gardens in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis (Flachs 2010; Poulsen et al. 2014). Shaken by shortages and price hikes at grocery stores, Americans rushed to buy vegetable seeds and garden supplies during the first waves of the pandemic, but they also supported an explosion of interest in local food through farmer’s markets, farm shares, and food deliveries.

To understand how local farmers responded to this sudden uptick in interest, we recruited farmers and farm managers as part of a larger, long-term project led by Dr. Ankita Raturi on data management and resilience in the local food system. Thanks to support from the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Covid-19 Rapid-Response program, we interviewed 12 local food coordinators and 29 Midwest farmers across rural, periurban, and urban environments to map the flows of information and food before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Growing Local Food

Farmers across the Midwest experienced the pandemic as a time of growth and expansion. “People were going to stores and they were out of meat, so it became this scramble: where can I get meat,” explained a rural Indiana beef farmer. “[It] opened their options a little bit more…We hear from some of our new customers that, ‘wow this is great!’ We didn’t know you were here this whole time and now we buy from you every other week.” Similarly, an urban herb and vegetable farmer laughed when we asked how his business coped with COVID-19. “Everything was booming through the roof…I don’t want to sound harsh, but the pandemic was good for farmers.” Growth is a desired goal here, outpacing the low-scale, high diversity local farms from before the pandemic. “This is the year of simplicity,” explained an urban farmer. “We don’t have 1,001 products; we specialize in 10-20.”  Local farmers turned to their data collection as demand grew and began asking where they could save time. “I really focus on how to reduce labor costs,” explained a periurban orchard manager. “Are there ways that I can automate in those areas or at least use tools or make a mechanical means to reduce labor and time spent?” Guthman (2004) called this creep toward agrocapitalist logic conventionalization, to note how alternative organic agriculture came to resemble industrial farming. Here, we observe that this is also as a growth trap and a data organization issue: conventionalization manifests as a combination of labor shortage, intensified demand, opportunism, and digital nudges implicit in data monitoring.

After initial hesitation over social distancing and public health, farmer’s markets and local food distributors across the country sprang back with new safety protocols and tools to arrange local food pickups.  Market managers also saw upticks in consumer interest in local food and especially in local meat. One such program became especially popular in Indiana and later across the Midwest as a tool to aggregate local food in regional cities and then deliver directly to consumers. The founder, himself a participating farmer, recalled:

[The stay-at-home order] hit and that Saturday we did as much volume that day as we would usually do in an entire week… Monday, we were freaking out. We did 400% volume that week and we thought: alright, let’s figure out how to just survive this week, we don’t have the shelf space or anything, but the vendors were there… We bought every black insulated tote east of the Mississippi that we could find.

Nine months into the pandemic, the program expanded from six to 32 cities, a sign of the enduring demand for local food deliveries that circumvent grocery store supply chains.  Critical scholars of science and technology have shown how the forms people use to organize information also dictate future planning (Ballestero 2019; Benjamin 2019). Produce demand grew alongside data management including spreadsheets, social media communications, and shifting inventory ledgers. Seeing these spreadsheets, many Midwest local farmers struggled to grow their production, ultimately paring back the diversity of food and services they offered.

Degrowing Local Food

Others looked over their data to find that their work, and the sociocultural values underpinning it, needed reexamining after March 2020. Degrowth, a political-economic theory of reorganizing production to achieve socio-ecological sustainability over the long term (Gerber 2020; D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2015), provides a framework to evaluate the lasting impact of persistent local farming beyond the production or sale of agricultural commodities. By questioning externalized costs, capitalization, and yield growth in small farmer economies, degrowth asks how alternative rural development programs enable a range of possible futures on farms beyond continual expansion. Conversely, agriculture forces degrowth to face difficult questions around labor, productivity, and technological change – local food systems confront challenges in equitable labor and resource management in that they depend on difficult work and local ecological constraints. Scholars have looked to cases spanning Cuban agroecology (Boillat, Gerber, and Funes-Monzote 2012), Via Campesina (Roman-Alcalá 2017), and European allotment gardens (Vávra, Smutná, and Hruška 2021), questioning what an agricultural system might value apart from growth (Gerber 2020). Some Midwestern local food workers, having experienced the pressures of rapid growth, offer another perspective.

As employers cut hours for off-farm work, many farmers responded by intensifying their farm businesses – not merely to recoup lost wages but also to finally pursue more meaningful work. “As much as it was frustrating and difficult, and horrible, and terrifying, it has really given us time that we needed to put everything in perspective,” explained an automotive industry engineer whose plant closed during the initial COVID-19 shutdown. “We did definitely arrive at a place where people [realized] I have all of this extra time but I’m not feeling like I have something fulfilling to do,” agreed a rural Wisconsin farmer. “I think labor is often talked about in the ag circle as something to reduce down to nothing. And I think that we need to flip that completely on its head … I think that the sort of stuff we’re doing can be a healthful meaningful activity.” Similarly, a periurban orchard grower delved into his data not to specialize in top sellers but to understand how to turn buyers on to rare or unusual varieties.  “My wife is an educator, my father is an educator, my grandfather was. We just enjoy doing that sort of thing,” he explained. “We also need probably 7 or 8 varieties because a part of the educational aspect of this, which I dearly love, is helping people select the apple that they enjoy.”

Others explicitly saw their agricultural work as a path toward social justice. “I know that my price points are not all that low because I have a high input cost. But… it costs a lot of money to heal this planet,” a rural Minnesota farmer explained. She plans to continue this healing process by donating her farm to Indigenous or Black female farmers when she retires as a form of reparation for centuries of systemic racism in American agriculture.  “It’s really hard I think to figure out how to do reparation on a system level. But on a one-sie, two-sie level I can make that happen.” For an urban hydroponic farmer, growing vegetables in a shipping container was an explicit response to the generational marginalizing of Black farmers that stems from “not having access to land. I don’t have access to seven acres of land to try to grow lettuce. So, pivot and do something different…If you don’t have fertile land that plants like, and that you can grow plants in, and that has that nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium that plants need, you’re just wasting your time. And most people that look like me don’t have access to that kind of land that’s suitable for plant growth.” Amid questionable, data-driven indoor agriculture expansions over the last decade, this farmer highlighted the role that indoor agriculture can have in bringing equity to local food production.

Building and Degrowing in the Post-Corona Rural Economy

Anthropological insights should always tie to lived experiences of particular times and places, not universalist theories bent to match interesting case studies. No farmers discussed wanted to produce less. However, a degrowth perspective on agricultural sustainability is not inherently against all increases, but rather against a particular model of short term extraction (D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2015; Gerber 2020) that imagines rural economies as short term assets to be leveraged and then liquidated in the mode of financial capitalism. When the Midwestern local food economy experienced rapid growth, some took it as a sign to intensify production and compromise on biodiversity and employment – but many were cautious to pursue goals of diversification and meaningful work, eschewing growth that came at the expense of solidarity and ecological commons.

Smallholder theory building from A.V. Chayanov (1966) and Robert Netting (1993) offers a general model wherein farmers often want to expand their sales, group memberships, savings, and production, because it helps them to escape difficult work, subsidize risks, and build a promising future in their own terms. Historically, crises of political economy have opened doors for temporary exercise of radical politics as seen during the resurgence of US urban gardens through war and financial crises and the organization of Black farmer cooperatives in response to civil rights activism and white agrarian closure in the US South. As they grew into internationally regulated brands, organic and Fair-Trade initiatives succumbed to conventionalization as they adopted productivist logics and ultimately aimed to increase yields, profits, and consumption. Clearly, some of the farmers above are taking this opportunity to expand into new markets. Yet others seek not an expansion of sales or production so much as an expansion in labor, skill, education, or equity. As a moment to challenge agri-food hegemony, the pandemic allows these farmers to pursue these goals above sheer growth. Such work is sorely needed to reorient food systems toward the kinds of collective solidarity and local investment necessary to provide a future in which US farmers and their farms can diversify away from extractive monoculture farming underwritten by the violence of cheapened labor. The efforts that farmers and farm supporters make now to manage renewed interest in local food economies is having serious repercussions for rural, urban, and peri-urban farm economies moving forward. Equal attention should be paid to how these changes ultimately reflect what kind of lives people want to live on the farm.

Andrew Flachs researches food and agriculture systems, exploring genetically modified crops, heirloom seeds, and our own microbiomes.  An associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University, his work among farmers in North America, the Balkans, and South India investigates ecological knowledge and technological change in agricultural systems spanning Cleveland urban gardens and Indian GM cotton fields. Andrew’s research has been supported by public and private institutions including the Department of Education, the National Geographic Society, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Volkswagen Foundation, while his writing on agricultural development has been featured in numerous peer-reviewed publications as well as public venues including Sapiens, Salon, and the National Geographic magazine. Andrew’s work has been recognized by numerous international awards, including most recently the Political Ecology Society’s Eric Wolf Prize and the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Book Prize Committee.

Ankita Raturi is an assistant professor at Purdue University, where she runs the Agricultural Informatics Lab, focused on human computer interaction, information architecture, and software engineering, for increased resilience in food and agricultural systems. Ankita’s current work includes: the development of modular, open source, decision support tools (e.g., for cover cropping); information modeling for the development of agricultural ontologies and data services(e.g., for plant data); design methods for agricultural technologies (e.g., for soil health management technologies); and design for diversified farming systems (e.g., for community food resilience).

Juliet Norton is an Informatics Research Scholar in the Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering at Purdue University working with Ag Informatics Lab. She is a co-project manager for the NECCC Cover Crop Species Selector Tool and Seeding Rate Calculator, MCCC Seeding Rate Calculator, SCCC Species Selector Tool, and Informatics for Community Food Resilience projects. She works remotely from her home in Martinez, CA. http://aginformaticslab.org/index.php/2020/04/15/juliet-norton/ 

Valerie Miller is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the anthropology department at Purdue University. She holds an MA in applied experimental psychology. Now studying as abiocultural anthropologist, she researches alloparenting, postpartum experiences, maternal cognition, and mental health in the United States and the Commonwealth of Dominica. Valerie is trained in several ethnographic and psychological methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, and integrates these approaches while researching human matrescence, cognition, and lifeways of Caribbean women. She is passionate about highlighting maternal perspectives within biocultural research projects as well as the centering of children’s voices and insights in ethnographic studies. Her writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals as well as public-facing online spaces including Teaching Anthropology and Ethnography.com.

Haley Thomas is an undergraduate at Purdue University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering. She is working with Agricultural Informatics Lab to study farmers’ data management and software for local foods. Her other academic interests include ecological restoration and natural resource management. http://aginformaticslab.org/index.php/2021/07/15/haley-thomas/  

References

Araghi, Farshad. 2000. “The Great Global Enclosure of Our Times:  Peasants and the Agrarian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century.” In Hungry for Profit:  The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment, edited by Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H Buttel, 145–60. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Ballestero, Andrea. 2019. A Future History of Water. Illustrated edition. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. 1 edition. Medford, MA: Polity.

Boillat, Sébastien, Julien-François Gerber, and Fernando R. Funes-Monzote. 2012. “What Economic Democracy for Degrowth? Some Comments on the Contribution of Socialist Models and Cuban Agroecology.” Futures, Special Issue: Politics, Democracy and Degrowth, 44 (6): 600–607. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2012.03.021.

Buttel, Frederick H. 1993. “Ideology and Agricultural Technology in the Late Twentieth Century: Biotechnology as Symbol and Substance.” Agriculture and Human Values 10 (2): 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217599.

Chayanov, A. V. 1966. The Theory of Peasant Economy. American Economic Association Translation Series. Homewood, Ill: Published for the American Economic Association, by R.D. Irwin.

D’Alisa, Giacomo, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis. 2015. Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. New York: Routledge.

Danovich, Tove. 2020. “With Social Distancing, CSAs Are Trending as a Way to Shop for Groceries.” Eater, April 2, 2020. https://www.eater.com/2020/4/2/21200565/csa-trend-coronavirus-covid-19-stay-at-home-delivery-groceries.

Flachs, Andrew. 2010. “Food For Thought:  The Social Impact of Community Gardens in the Greater Cleveland Area.” Electronic Green Journal 30 (1): 1–9.

Flachs, Andrew. 2021. “Charisma and Agrarian Crisis: Authority and Legitimacy at Multiple Scales for Rural Development.” Journal of Rural Studies 88 (1): 97–107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.10.010.

Flachs, Andrew, and Matthew Abel. 2019. “An Emerging Geography of the Agrarian Question: Spatial Analysis as a Tool for Identifying the New American Agrarianism.” Rural Sociology 84 (2): 191–225. https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12250.

Friedmann, Harriet, and Philip McMichael. 1989. “Agriculture and the State System: The Rise and Decline of National Agricultures, 1870 to the Present.” Sociologia Ruralis 29 (2): 93–117. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.1989.tb00360.x.

Gerber, Julien-François. 2020. “Degrowth and Critical Agrarian Studies.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 0 (0): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2019.1695601.

Goldschmidt, Walter Rochs. 1978. As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness. Montclair: Allanheld, Osmun & Co.

Goodman, David, Bernardo Sorj, and John Wilkinson. 1987. From Farming to Biotechnology: A Theory of Agro-Industrial Development. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Guthman, Julie. 2004. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Guthman, Julie. 2017. “Willing (White) Workers on Organic Farms? Reflections on Volunteer Farm Labor and the Politics of Precarity.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 17 (1): 15–19. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2017.17.1.15.

Kautsky, Karl. 1988. The Agrarian Question: In Two Volumes. Translated by Pete Burgess. London ; Winchester, Mass: Zwan Publications.

Lawson, Laura J. 2005. City Bountiful:  A Century of Community Gardening in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Magdoff, Fred, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds. 2000. Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso.

Netting, Robert McC. 1993. Smallholders, Householders:  Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Olson, Kathryn A. 2019. “The Town That Food Saved? Investigating the Promise of a Local Food Economy in Vermont.” Local Environment 24 (1): 18–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2018.1545753.

Poulsen, Melissa N., Kristyna R. S. Hulland, Carolyn A. Gulas, Hieu Pham, Sarah L. Dalglish, Rebecca K. Wilkinson, and Peter J. Winch. 2014. “Growing an Urban Oasis: A Qualitative Study of the Perceived Benefits of Community Gardening in Baltimore, Maryland.” Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 36 (2): 69–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuag.12035.

Ricker, Hannah, and Mara Kardas-Nelson. 2020. “Community Supported Agriculture Is Surging Amid the Pandemic.” Civil Eats, April 9, 2020. https://civileats.com/2020/04/09/community-supported-agriculture-is-surging-amid-the-pandemic/.

Roman-Alcalá, Antonio. 2017. “Looking to Food Sovereignty Movements for Post-Growth Theory | Ephemera.” Ephemera 17 (1): 119–45.

Vávra, Jan, Zdeňka Smutná, and Vladan Hruška. 2021. “Why I Would Want to Live in the Village If I Was Not Interested in Cultivating the Plot? A Study of Home Gardening in Rural Czechia.” Sustainability 13 (2): 706. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13020706.

White, Monica M. 2018. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. UNC Press Books.

Cite as: Flachs, Andrew, Ankita Raturi, Juliet Norton, Valerie Miller, and Haley Thomas. 2022. ”Building back bigger or degrowing local food? US alternative food networks and post-corona agrarian economies.” FocaalBlog, 23 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/23/andrew-flachs-ankita-raturi-juliet-norton-valerie-miller-and-haley-thomas-building-back-bigger-or-degrowing-local-food-us-alternative-food-networks-and-post-corona-agrarian-economies

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Sandy Smith-Nonini: Energy Crises in the Time of Covid: Precarious Fossil Infrastructures

The spectacle of Russia invading Ukraine has elevated tensions over Europe’s access to natural gas and may herald a sea-change in regional geopolitics of energy. But prior to Putin’s war, energy crises played out across dozens of countries in 2021. Ramped up economic demand in the fourth quarter contributed to many, but there were forewarnings of instability – from rolling blackouts during California wildfires to over 200 bankruptcies of US gas fracking companies since 2015 due to high debt and low prices.

Ironically, Coronavirus lockdowns in early 2020 accomplished in one fell swoop what divestment activists only dreamed of when oil and gas stocks crashed, leading to a write-off of $145 billion in oil/gas assets by year’s end. But outcomes to date do not include greening. The US government rescued the industry with $120 billion in direct and indirect pandemic stimulus funds and benefits. The industry diverted the largess into stock buybacks and dividends, rather than invest in (green or brown) production.

The fragility of gas infrastructure involves more than financial debt. As a surge of Covid-19 cases overwhelmed Texas hospitals in February 2021, a wicked polar vortex and ice storm brought the state to a standstill due to prolonged blackouts caused by frozen gas lines, leaving over 5 million families without heat in the extreme cold, some for up to a week. Temperatures fell to 6° F (-14° C) in Austin, where lows seldom drop below 40° F (4.4° C).  

More crises followed. In June, just weeks after a private consortium took over Puerto Rico’s rickety electric grid, a substation fire and a series of blackouts left a million islanders without power. By fall ongoing grid failures prompted mass protests from a weary public that had only three years earlier gotten the lights back on after an 11-month blackout from Hurricane María.  Prolonged outages also followed Hurricane Ida’s August landfall in New Orleans.

Protesters march down a street, holding signs that say "Luz para Caguas" and "¿Y Caguas pa' cuando? ¡Nuestra gente necesita luz!"
Image 1: Puerto Ricans from dozens of small towns protesting in San Juan for power restoration four months after Hurricane Maria, photo by Marla Perez-Lugo

Then as economic demand rose in the fall, fuel shortages and high coal and gas prices spurred energy crises in Europe (especially the United Kingdom), Pakistan, Singapore, China, India, South Korea and Lebanon, including blackouts and/or steep hikes in electric bills. The high gas prices reflected, in part, low production from collapsed demand in 2020 that left US frackers  dependent on previously drilled wells, while lenders, burned from bankruptcies, were hesitant to extend them credit. Tensions with Russia, source of over a third of EU gas supplies, added to perceived risks. Pandemic economic stresses contributed to energy crises, as did extreme weather and grid fragilities from poor maintenance during decades of utility deregulation.

This essay discusses the social and political costs of energy crisis, with a focus on the Texas and UK cases, based on study of over 150 government, non-profit, academic and media reports, and participation in two panels on the freeze blackout at the University of Texas -Rio Grande Valley.  I draw on other research, including ethnographies on earlier energy crises in Puerto Rico and Greece (Smith-Nonini 2020a, 2020b), to sketch out common patterns and implications for a green transition. 

The Matrix of our Bodies Electric   

The multiple factors behind these crises attest to the complex nature of the grid – simultaneously an aging mechanical infrastructure and cultural artifact, shaped by specific histories and geographies (Bakke 2017) amid a volatile capitalist industrial ecology of fuel flows, climate change, growing inequality and new risks of contagion.

Blackouts often result from the convergence of unusual weather, poor regulation and incentives that reward profit-seeking at the expense of grid maintenance or equitable rates. Prolonged grid breakdowns contribute to energy poverty, or lack of access to energy, which affects 25% of humanity and is both a cause and result of “underdevelopment.”(Sovocool and Dworkin 2014).

But recent energy crises highlight “new energy poverty” in industrialized countries. Most low-income US families qualify as energy poor (i.e., over 10% of incomes spent on utilities) (Mohr 2018), while over 50 million Europeans struggle to pay utility bills – especially in the UK, Eastern Europe, and Mediterranean area (Bouzarovski 2014).

Grid fragility has been exacerbated since the 1990s by pressures to break up and privatize profitable assets of public utilities, a trend associated with rate increases, service cuts, and increased utility debt, especially in indebted countries where privatization is a condition of loan agreements and utility regulation is often weak (Luke 2010, Palast et. al 2003).  

Nearly ubiquitous access to electricity in wealthy countries obscures the magnitude of fossil fuel dependence that underwrites modernity.  Hurricane María’s 2017 destruction of Puerto Rico’s grid plunged residents into the worst blackout in US history. “The country was upside down,” a local activist observed, noting that while power is not considered a basic need like water, “people cannot afford to be in this society — a high energy society — without electricity” (Smith-Nonini 2020a).  

The storm laid bare electricity’s role as routine conduit for basic needs. Around 3000 people died, including many reliant on power for medical therapies. A million lost water service. Residents stood in long lines for food, which grew scarce, and had to survive for weeks with cash on hand for lack of bank machines (Smith-Nonini 2020a).

Inside Pandemic-related Energy Crises

The February 2021 Texas Freeze Blackout 

The Texas freeze caused over 700 deaths and blacked out 4.5 million households. COVID patients could not access care and stores ran out of food. Republican Governor Greg Abbot blamed frozen windmills, but had to walk this back once it was clear that frozen gas lines supplying power plants caused 55% of the outages. The news was a shock to this petro-“state” where fracked gas and oil are credited with restoring US global economic clout since the 2008 financial crisis.  

A failure to weatherize the grid was widely blamed for the debacle. Unlike some islands (e.g., Puerto Rico) that lack options for grid sharing to shore up reliability, Texan politicians voluntarily isolated their grid from other states after an earlier 2011 freeze to evade federal weatherization rules (Busby, et al. 2021). Two cold snaps in early 2022 that reduced gas flow highlighted the fact that weatherization of gas lines remains only partially completed.

During the 2021 freeze, administrators of the largely deregulated grid marked up the wholesale electricity price to $9,000 per MWh (vs. a $22 per MWh average in 2020) in a failed bid to incentivize more gas production. This led to an estimated $50 billion in charges over five days to energy retailers and ratepayers, causing many suppliers to incur large debts and bankrupting three utilities.  Meanwhile, other energy generators and suppliers with “variable contracts” earned billions because they were allowed to pass the astronomical rates to ratepayers, most of them unaware they could be hit with a monthly bill of $10,000 or more due to factors outside their control (Busby, et. al 2021).

Rather than cancel what some would call “odious debt,” Republican state legislators later socialized the debt, offering long-term payment plans to customers and issuing state-backed bonds for $7 billion in low-cost loans to impacted energy companies. Many lawsuits remain pending. One involves Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), a large gas company that earned $2.5 billion during the storm, and later contributed $1 million to Gov.  Abbott’s campaign chest. $300 million of ETP’s profits were billed to San Antonio’s municipal utility, whose residents now face a surcharge to cover the tab. The city has sued ETP.  

Overall, gas companies took home $11 billion; other winners in the Texas “power pool” included speculators—banks and energy trading companies—which placed lucrative bids on prices while Texans burned furniture to stay warm, but had no role in actually supplying energy. 

The 2021 British (and European) Energy Crisis

In October, a five-fold rise in natural gas prices in Europe, along with a drop in wind power and Brexit complications, led to steep price hikes for British wholesale electricity and warnings from National Grid, the system’s corporate operator, of possible winter power cuts. The inflation was linked to shortages of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), in part from ramped up Chinese demand, and speculation over geopolitical tensions, given the EU’s heavy reliance on Russian gas. UK electricity is 40% dependent on gas, roughly double the level for the EU.  

Regulators raised the UK public cap on electric rates by 12%, and it goes up another 54% in April, the largest cost of living increase in a quarter century.  An early 2022 government aid package will offset costs for low-income families, and allow extended payments, but regulators warn the cap may rise further. An astounding 29 utilities (mostly small, poorly vetted retailers) in the UK’s “power pool,” went bankrupt since the cap forced them to absorb extra costs, leaving millions of ratepayers without service. One large utility, Bulb, was bailed out by the government, which failed to take wider action. Meanwhile, North Sea oil and gas firms, long-term heavy donors to Tory politicians, took home windfall profits, leading to calls for new taxes on the sector.

Ironically, after long delays on renewables, in 2019 the UK had expanded wind power to a remarkable 28% share of electric power, but a rare calm weakened the turbines’ output in mid-2021.  Also, a fire in a trans-channel electric cable and new Brexit rules disrupted a promising system of cross-border undersea cables aimed at mitigating supply shortfalls.  

Competition with China over LNG gas helped drive prices up. China had phased down coal due to an economic slump, climate goals and Olympic optics, but encountered an energy shortage as demand ramped up in the fall. To compensate, officials reversed a Trump-era ban on US gas imports and Sinopec signed long term contracts for LNG offering higher prices than EU importers, which diverted many LNG tankers to Asia.  

Prices peaked in Europe at a record 171.40 euros/MWh just before Christmas due to tensions over lower-than-normal Russian gas flow to Europe and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. They moderated, then soared again in late February as Russia invaded Ukraine.

Patterns of Grid Fragility behind Energy Crises

Extreme weather was a factor in many 2021 crises – deadly storms, shifting winds, and Asian floods (which cut coal production). Also, rapid growth in electricity demand year over year (e.g. video streaming, Bitcoin mining) has put pressure on power plants, feeding a narrative from conservatives and business critics that the green transition is the problem, and more gas plants the solution. 

But many crises have deeper roots. Since the 1980s, 18 US states and over 35 countries, (including the UK and much of the EU), have partly or fully deregulated electricity. Neoliberal policies favoring such “unbundling” have resulted in privatization of profitable assets, widespread layoffs of utility workforces and neglect of grid maintenance (often left to state authorities). The reforms enabled renewable energy on the grid, and promised lower rates, but hurt public oversight (Oppenheim 2016), while favoring extraction of profits and speculation through energy trading. California’s 2000 Enron debacle, Puerto Rico’s 2021 grid failure after a hasty privatization, steeply priced electricity in Central and Eastern Europe –where energy poverty is high — (Bouzarovski 2014) and are examples of deregulation’s downsides.

In many places, including the UK and Texas, large corporate players dominated the deregulation process, precluding actual competition and setting the stage for steep consumer fees and rates that outweigh earlier cuts in rates. This corporate control enabled the 2021 price gouging of Texas and UK ratepayers and the string of British utility bankruptcies.

During earlier energy crises in Greece and Puerto Rico, steep price hikes for electricity tied to austerity over public debt, left many consumers unable to pay bills, with some turning to energy theft (an option aided by organized anti-debt advocates in Greece). Loss of revenues fed back on public utilities causing institutional debt and providing a rationale for privatizations that benefitted hedge funds and foreign investors more than ratepayers (Smith-Nonini 2020a, 2020b).   

These energy crises expose the socio-material path dependency embedded in grid infrastructures which creates friction, slowing green transitions, while creating scalar vulnerabilities to disruption that are difficult to predict and have complex repercussions (Boyer 2017).  A key question is whether the 2021 crises are short-term, or evidence of a long-term mismatch between supply and demand rooted in resource limits intertwined with capitalist contradictions.

Notably, growth in conventional global oil/gas production has been tepid since 2005, and unconventional extraction (e.g. fracking and deep-sea drilling) is not profitable without high debt and large state subsidies. Also, volatile energy markets often fail to satisfy both consumer needs for affordability and corporate needs for growth, provoking new crises.

In late 2021 the International Energy Agency reported that growth in renewables won’t supplant fossil fuels in time to keep global heating below 1.5°C, and the gap – as electric grids expand and fossil energy is phased out (or loses profitability) — will feed destructive cycles of volatility in markets for energy and energy-intensive goods, including food. The current spike in natural gas prices has driven up fertilizer costs, which is likely to exacerbate regional food crises.  

An understudied problem is how divestment and pandemic capital destruction will affect the green transition. Can energy crises stimulate degrowth innovations?  Might fledgling movements for community solar (e.g., as exist in Cuba, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico) help solve energy poverty and climate goals at the same time?    

But scaling up, for society to transition we need stable grids. As an environmental advocate once told me, “We need to burn some fossil fuels to get to where we don’t need to.” If electricity is to be the centerpiece of a renewable future, we have much work to do. We should start by demanding accountable public oversight of electric systems.

Sandy Smith-Nonini is a research assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She produced “Dis.em.POWER.ed: Puerto Rico’s Perfect Storm,” a film on the causes of the longest blackout in US history, and is the author of Healing the Body Politic .  

References

Bakke, Gretchen. 2017. The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future. Bloomsbury.

Boyer, Dominic. 2017. “Revolutionary Infrastructures” Infrastructures and Social Complexity, eds: P. Harvey, et. al.  CRESC.

Bouzarovski, Stefan 2014 “Energy poverty in the European Union: landscapes of vulnerability.” WIREs Energy and Environment 2014, 3: 276–289.

Busby, Joshua W. et al. 2021 “Cascading risks: Understanding the 2021 winter blackout in Texas.” Energy Research & Social Science, 77: 102-106.

Luke, Timothy. 2010. Power Loss or Blackout: The Electricity Network Collapse of August 2003 in North America, 55-68, in Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, ed. S. Graham, Routledge.

Mohr, Tanga M. 2018. “Fuel poverty in the US: Evidence using the 2009 Residential Energy Consumption Survey.” Energy Economics 74: 360–369.

Oppenheim, Jerrold 2018. “The United States regulatory compact and energy poverty.” Energy Research & Social Science 18 (2016) 96–108.

Palast, Greg et. al. 2003. Democracy and Regulation: How the Public Can Govern Essential Services. Pluto Press.

Smith-Nonini, Sandy. 2020a. “The Debt/Energy Nexus behind Puerto Rico’s Long Blackout: From Fossil Colonialism to ‘New’ Energy Poverty.” Latin American Perspectives 232: 47(3): 64–86.

Smith-Nonini, Sandy. 2020b. “Networked Flows through a ‘Porous’ State: A Scalar Energo-political Analysis of the Greek Debt Crisis”, in The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, eds: D. Nonini and I. Susser, Routledge Press.

Sovocool, Benjamin and M. Dworkin. 2014. Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles, and Practices. Cambridge University Press.

Cite as: Smith-Nonini, Sandy. 2022. “Energy Crises in the Time of Covid: Precarious Fossil Infrastructures.” FocaalBlog, 21 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/21/sandy-smith-nonini-energy-crises-in-the-time-of-covid-precarious-fossil-infrastructures