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Blog, Features, War: New Times

Marc Edelman: Encirclement: Historical Roots of Putin’s Paranoia

“What’s going on inside Putin’s head?” “He’s insane.” Questions and declarations like these pepper discussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While insanity appears an obvious — albeit broad — diagnosis, particularly to those in the West, even the most delusional psychosis has its internal logics and deep structures. And while we can never really get into someone else’s head, anthropological or psychoanalytic conceits about others’ subjectivity notwithstanding, it may be possible and useful to grasp another’s craziness, if we understand the roots of their version of reality.

Encirclement always loomed large in pre-1917 Russian, Soviet, and then post-1991 Russian imaginaries. Russia experienced four invasions that came through Ukraine — in 1812, 1914, 1919, and 1941. Many analyses point to NATO’s eastward expansion as a proximate cause of today’s crisis, with some viewing it as a tragic historic mistake and others pointing to the invasion itself as a post-hoc justification. What these and other studies almost always miss, however, is that NATO’s expansion is significant because it triggered archaic anxieties dating back to Tsarism. That Ukraine’s constitution enshrines an aspiration to join NATO and the EU did little to allay these historical, though clearly overblown, fears.

Vladimir Putin and I were both born in 1952. Our fathers and uncles fought Nazism on different fronts, his in the Soviet Red Army and mine in the U.S. Army and Navy. The Great Patriotic War certainly overshadowed his childhood, as World War II did mine. Fascism and Nazism, even if defeated before our births, remained a frightening specter. Putin’s family, like most Soviet families and virtually all Leningraders, suffered terribly in the War (Gessen 2013). In my family, one great uncle went missing in the Battle of the Bulge when his assault boat capsized in the Roer River after a reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines (the Army confirmed his death five years later, but never recovered his remains). My father and other uncles returned with horrifying stories, relatively minor injuries, and what we might today describe as PTSD.

Unlike almost all Americans but like quite a few New Yorkers of my generation, as a child I knew many more Communists and ex-Communists than I did Republicans. Later, in 1986, as an exchange scholar in the Soviet Union, I had many conversations with young university students who were suffering through the soporific required course on “Nauchnyi Kommunizm” (“Scientific Communism”) and with a more ideologically zealous or simply opportunistic subset of these who were majoring in Istoriia KPSS (History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — yes, that was an important, if soon to be useless, undergraduate major). So, between growing up among red and pink diaper babies in 1960s New York  (Freeman 2001) and my brief but intense sojourn in the USSR (Edelman 1996), I have some sense of the emotional valence that attaches to encirclement in the minds of those socialized in orthodox Communist worldviews.

The Russian inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West is a longstanding, hackneyed trope in writing on geopolitics. What is frequently forgotten is that Russia — or its upper classes at least — also had an inferiority complex in relation to the East. Japan, a rising power in Asia, trounced the Russian Empire in their 1905 war. This was a huge blow to the narcissism of the Russian nobility and elites, who not long before had conquered most of Central Asia and imagined themselves as part of European civilization, ipso facto superior to those “lesser” peoples of the East.

Russia’s performance in World War I was little better than it had been against the Japanese and the near collapse of its military was part of the maelstrom that led to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Russia’s withdrawal from the War. In the immediate aftermath of the Bolsheviks’ seizing power, more than a dozen foreign armies invaded Russia (Ullman 2019) and fought with the Whites against the Reds in a bloody Civil War that only ended in 1920. These mostly small interventions didn’t make much difference militarily, but the memory seared into Soviet and later Russian collective consciousness, fueling a siege mentality. Soviet (and western) Communists would self-righteously point to this long after as a key reason why the USSR had to be vigilant and maintain strong defenses.

Towards the end of the Civil War, in 1919-20, the Red Army launched a separate campaign out of Russia’s northwest that tried to spread Bolshevism to Belarus, Lithuania, and newly independent Poland. While this complicated conflict aimed in part at opening a Red corridor to Germany, where the military crushed a Communist uprising in 1919, Polish resistance at Warsaw turned back the Bolshevik advance. Isaac Babel’s (2006) memoir Red Cavalry , reports that in one of the last battles, “The enemy machine-guns were firing from twenty paces away, and men fell wounded in our ranks. We trampled them and attacked the enemy, but his square did not falter; then we ran for it.”

Image 1: 1920 poster by Vladimir Mayakovsky hailing the Soviet invasion of Poland. “To the Polish front! The commune is getting stronger under a swarm of bullets. Comrades, we’ll triple our strength in riflemen!”

The 1939-40 ”Winter War” with Finland barely went better. Ignited with a Soviet invasion that aimed at grabbing a wider buffer zone between Leningrad and the border, the conflict ended with some minor Finnish territorial concessions and a humiliating Soviet defeat inflicted by agile ski troops in white camouflage uniforms. Hitler was watching, and many historians attribute his fatal 1941 decision to invade the USSR to a belief that if the Finns could thrash the Soviets, the Germans certainly could too.

The Red Army, of course, was key to defeating the Nazis, but it did so at tremendous cost. Soviet casualties in most battles were many multiples of German ones and the country lost as many as 27 million citizens, between military and civilian fatalities. The sacralized state-managed memory (Markwick 2012) of the Great Patriotic War and the victory over Nazism became the pivotal legitimating narrative in the post-Stalin USSR. This was even more the case for post-Soviet Russia, when the state pushed War-related patriotism to plug what Putin called the “ideological vacuum” left by the collapse of communism.

Many Ukrainians understand this narrative in different terms. Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s hit Ukraine especially hard, with a planned famine in which at least 3.5 million peasants died of starvation. Not surprisingly, many Ukrainians came to despise and distrust Russia.

After Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the USSR some 250,000 Ukrainians joined the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS or served as concentration camp guards (millions, of course, fought in the Red Army) (Khromeychuk 2016). Some Ukrainian nationalists today glorify Stepan Bandera and other pro-Nazi fighters. Statues of these loathsome figures dot today’s Ukraine (as they do upstate New York, not far from where I live). The Azov battalion, a far-right militia that attracted foreign white supremacists and whose members became part of Ukraine’s military in 2014, figures significantly in Russia’s anti-Ukraine propaganda and in that of the “campist” left in the West, even though its support base is rather paltry (Gomza and Zajaczkowski 2019).

Putin sees today’s Ukrainian nationalists as progeny of the enemy in the Great Patriotic War, an earthshaking event imbued with deep emotion for Soviet and now Russian patriotism. It’s not that fascists and antisemites aren’t worrisome, whatever country they are from. But as VICE reporter Tim Hume pointedly notes, “Ironically, given the Kremlin’s attempts to use Azov’s extremist ideology to smear the Ukrainian forces as a whole, white supremacist foreign fighters also received training and fought for the pro-Russian separatists through groups like the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), an ultranationalist organisation which claims to be fighting for the ‘predominance of the white race.’”

Ukraine’s despicable far-right and neo-Nazi elements, while theatrically visible at times, are hardly significant in the country’s politics. National Corpus, the Azov-aligned political party, failed to elect a single candidate in the most recent parliamentary elections. The same is true for Right Sector, another pro-fascist party. The extreme nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) Party has one representative. Vox in Spain, Rassemblement National in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, or the Republicans in the United States have vastly more support. After a Russian attack damaged the Holocaust memorial at Babyn Yar, where the Nazis massacred 33,771 Jews in two days in 1941 and some 70,000 more Jews and others during the rest of their occupation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — from a secular Jewish family — seethed with anger as he accused Russia of “killing Holocaust victims for the second time.” These are not the words of the head of a “neo-Nazi” state.

Putin’s assertion that Ukraine is suppressing Russian language is equally risible, especially given how the USSR actively Russified its non-Russian republics. In practice, most Ukrainians are bilingual and in rural zones many speak a mix of Ukrainian and Russian known as Surzhyk. The country did pass a law making the use of Ukrainian mandatory for public sector workers, but Zelensky, then a presidential candidate, opposed it, has failed to enforce it, and frequently uses Russian when he addresses domestic and international audiences.

Masha Gessen’s (2013) biography of Putin depicts a prickly, thin-skinned, and pugnacious boy and young man who then and later cultivated a reputation as a brawler and thug. Recent accounts highlight his isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic and the way he has surrounded himself with sycophants and “yes-men.” Like Stalin, he rises late and often works into the wee hours of the morning.

Since the USSR’s collapse, Russia has consolidated control inside, with two wars in Chechnya, and relentlessly expanded outside, annexing Crimea (2014) and carving out bogus “republics” that it controls in Transdniestria (Moldova, 1992), Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Georgia, 2008), and Donetsk and Luhansk (Ukraine, 2014). In Putin’s embittered and aggrieved mind these military conquests, which — like its backing for Assad in Syria and today’s invasion of Ukraine — exhibited a total indifference to human life and international norms, were necessary steps to buffer Russia’s heartland against foreign attack.

The first Cold War was never really “cold” and this one isn’t either. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unfolding in a context where the binding treaties and security architecture that regulated East-West competition have mostly unraveled. When the United States withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, a few isolated voices warned that this was hugely destabilizing. Now both sides have deployed these previously banned weapons, including U.S. missile interceptor launchers in Poland. In 2020-21 the United States and then Russia withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty. The Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty died a slow death, marked by eight years of reduced Russian compliance and finally withdrawal in 2015. The 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is the only remaining treaty limiting U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and it expires in four years, which is not enough time for negotiating a new agreement, especially when a “hot” war is ongoing.

The late Viktor Kremenyuk — Russian, though born in Odessa and with a Ukrainian surname — was for many years one of the Soviet Union’s and Russia’s leading academic experts on the United States. A decade ago, in a paper on international negotiations, he remarked that, “In the long run much will depend on the psychological framing of the activities of negotiators and their ability to prove to national decision-makers that negotiable solutions are ‘not worse’ than unilateral ones and may be even better” (Kremenyuk 2011)

Kremenyuk also observed, with eerie prescience given the current situation and Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling, “In a democracy the processes that shape the negotiation behavior and changes in position are totally different from those in a totalitarian system where very often one person decides the final shape of the position of the nation. It also depends on the tradition and previous experience of the nation.”

This does not augur well for efforts to restore peace and stability in Europe or to rein in the squandering of vast resources on military budgets. The renewed love affair on both sides with fossil fuels further delays urgent transformations of the energy matrix needed to avert climate catastrophe.

Americans are famously amnesiac about the past, but in Ukraine and Russia historical memories have a long arc and terrible contemporary resonance. They are the background conditions for an unfolding confrontation that can only bring more tragedy to a region that suffered massively in the twentieth century and, in the worst case, to the entire world.

Marc Edelman is professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Many years ago, he held an IREX fellowship at Columbia University’s W.A. Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union and did research in Tashkent and Moscow on Soviet-Latin American relations.

References

Babel, Isaac. 2006. Red Cavalry and Other Stories. Penguin Classics.

Edelman, Marc. 1996. “Devil, Not-Quite-White, Rootless Cosmopolitan: Tsuris in Latin America, the Bronx, and the USSR.” In Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. AltaMira Press.

Freeman, Joshua B. 2001. Working-Class New York. Life and Labor Since World War II. The New Press.

Gessen, Masha. 2013. The Man Without a Face. The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Riverhead Books.

Gomza, Ivan and Johann Zajaczkowski. 2019. “Black Sun Rising: Political Opportunity Structure Perceptions and Institutionalization of the Azov Movement in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine.” Nationalities Papers 47 (5), 774-800

Khromeychuk, Olesya. 2016. Ukrainians in the German Armed Forces During the Second World War. History. The Journal of the Historical Association 100 (343), 704-724

Kremenyuk, Victor. 2011. “Ideal Negotiator: A Personal Formula for the New International System.” In Psychological and Political Strategies for Peace Negotiation. Springer.

Markwick, Roger D. 2012. “The Great Patriotic War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Collective Memory.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History. Oxford University Press.

Ullman, Richard H. [1961] 2019. Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917-1921, Volume I. Intervention and the War. Princeton University Press.

Cite as: Edelman, Marc. 2022. ”Encirclement: Historical Roots of Putin’s Paranoia.“ FocaalBlog, 18 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/18/marc-edelman-encirclement-historical-roots-of-putins-paranoia/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Chris Hann: The Agony of Ukraine

After nearly two weeks of violent conflict in Ukraine, it is increasingly difficult to stand back and see the bigger picture. The West has lined up behind the charismatic President Zelensky, who has addressed parliaments in Brussels and Westminster to rapturous applause. In Britain, football stadia and Oxbridge colleges (including my own) have draped themselves in the Ukrainian national colours. There is little or no attempt to representation of the Russian perspective. It is light versus darkness, innocent victims versus post-communist megalomaniacs, Europe versus Oriental Despotism. In her recent contribution to this blog, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn presents the binary in terms of the right of smaller peoples to choose freedom in the face of Russian neo-imperialism.

The evidence seems so clear cut that only a Putin stooge or an idiot could argue differently. But anthropologists have a habit of complicating matters and they are not alone in doing so. You don’t have to be a Marxist to highlight the humiliation heaped upon Russia by Western leaders unable to discard their Cold War blinkers; but David Harvey addresses this emotional dimension particularly well. The West bears a lot of responsibility for creating the monster called Putin: it rebuffed Russian efforts to integrate into western institutions, instead targeting their closest relations for admission to the world’s most militarily powerful and economically prosperous alliances (Kalb 2022). Elsewhere, Michael Hudson has pinpointed the American interests that lie behind spectacular demonstrations of renewed Western unity; the catastrophe in distant Ukraine is already a defeat for Europe, and especially Germany, by the military-industrial complex of the capitalist hegemon, in combination with the key sectors of resource extraction and finance.

Image 1: The CIA was actively involved in the maidan demonstrations of 2014; it did not trust Ukrainian “civil society” to secure an optimal outcome for Washington, photo by Ivan Bandura

Few of the analyses I have read so far engage with the history and geography of the places where the violence is unfolding. I suspect most Western Europeans and North Americans perceive Ukraine naively as the historic homeland of the Ukrainian people, regrettably complicated by a subversive Russian minority. In fact, the territory of contemporary Ukraine has been occupied by many diverse populations since prehistoric times (Magocsi 2010 provides a dispassionate and comprehensive history). The dominant elements in the last millennium have been Slavic. Kyiv was the centre of the first Rus’ polity. The city was conquered by the Mongols in 1240 and was not reintegrated into a Slavic state until centuries later. A Ukrainian national consciousness emerged only in the late Tsarist era. When the great empires of the region collapsed at the end of the First World War, the majority of former subjects hardly knew what their identity was (or should become) as citizens of a nation-state. In the case of Ukraine, this learning process has dragged out over a century. It is being completed before our eyes in the most tragic way imaginable.

This particular history needs to be born in mind constantly when commentators write about “the Ukrainian people” as an entity of great antiquity. It goes without saying that the writers of history books in today’s post-Soviet Ukraine can evoke national heroes who repelled invaders in the distant past. This is in fact easier terrain than the twentieth century. Elizabeth Dunn is right to note that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a product of forcible incorporation into a new empire, that of the USSR. She does not describe the chaotic and violent circumstances in which very different Ukrainian polities were constructed on the ground in 1918-9, when the national flag was already the flag in use today. She does not mention the large-scale pogroms that characterized the larger of these embryonic Ukrainian states. The dark history of repressed Ukrainian nationalism continued during and after the Second World War (see also Kalb 2022), when most of its leaders collaborated with Nazi occupying forces and instigated new campaigns of terror against Poles as well as Jews. Dunn cites the result of the referendum of 1991 as evidence that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian citizens wished to regain their sovereignty. She does not detail the circumstances in which this referendum was held, following an attempted coup in Moscow, when the socialist empire had already imploded. Earlier in that same year (despite a national revival in the years of perestroika), a large majority of Ukrainian citizens voted not for independence but for a continuation of the Soviet Union in some form.

It is easy to get lost in such details and anthropological case-studies are unlikely to help. We need tools for comparative analysis at the macro level. In an original comparison of the demise of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, Andre Gingrich (2002) proposed the concept of “dethroned majorities” to help grasp the virulence of national sentiment both inside and outside the boundaries of the shrivelled states that emerged from imperial collapse. It is instructive to consider contemporary Ukraine in this light, where the “dethroning” was interrupted for almost a century by socialist federalism. In this post-imperial conjuncture, the familiar range of ressentiments at the former imperial centre has been intensified by the broken promises of the West. Simultaneously, emotions also run high among those motivated by a mission to consolidate a new nation-state on exclusivist principles, with a particular distaste for co-citizens suspected by virtue of their nationality of identifying with the ancien régime.

Structurally, the comparative analysis of socialist empires should be extended to China. While copying many aspects of Soviet nationalities policy, Mao was careful to maintain continuity with the Qing dynasty: thus even “autonomous” regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang were integral components of the sovereign nation-state. Although few Cold War scholars in the West took Soviet federalism seriously, without this “decorative fiction” the constituent republics would not have been able to proclaim their independence as they did, hastening the final disintegration of the USSR.

Does each sovereign state have the right to seek out new partners freely and without restriction? International law guarantees this, but again it is worth considering real-life comparisons. Elizabeth Dunn invokes Canada and Mexico hypothetically, but the case of Cuba seems more pertinent. When the Soviet Union (responding to Western initiatives in Eurasia) sought to place missiles on the territory of its ally in 1962, President Kennedy triumphed in the ensuing diplomacy. So much for sovereignty. If we are to avoid double standards, it is incumbent on us in the West to see the expansion of NATO through Russian eyes, i.e. as aggression.

The Russian Federation has swallowed the admission to the Western military alliance of several former allies and even the Baltic states that were formerly inside the empire. But it has always stressed that Ukraine was different. Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric concerning Ukraine is open to the same objections as that of his neo-nationalist opponents: essentialist notions of the Eastern Slavs as one people eternally are no more convincing than Adolf Hitler’s justifications for the Anschluss of Austria. So Dunn is right: Ukrainian citizens should have the right to opt for new allegiances. Some observers may object that they have not done so freely, that the CIA played a key role in the Maidan demonstrations that toppled an elected government. The circumstances were tarnished. Yet it is reasonable to assume that the “European” course would in any case have triumphed eventually. With millions of Ukrainians already working in the West as labour migrants, the material incentives to benefit from consolidating this affiliation were overwhelming.

At the supra-national level, the European Union must be similarly free to decide who is eligible for “priority partner” status and who is to be left out in the cold. But those who formulate and justify these policies in the name of “democracy promotion” have elementary obligations to reckon with the consequences of their implementation. The combination of geopolitical security considerations and intimate historical connections make for a complex configuration in which it was irresponsible of the West to forge ahead in transforming Ukraine into a neoliberal “vassal state” (Kalb 2022) while isolating Russia.

Almost thirty years have passed since Samuel Huntington put forward his own distinctive vision of how cultural factors would come to dominate geopolitics in the wake of the Cold War (Huntington 1996). The conservative political scientist, though hardly an expert on East-Central Europe, paid considerable attention to Ukraine. He saw the country as divided by a “fault line” between east and west. In the west, Galicians had been free to nurture national sentiment under the Habsburgs, while the Greek-Catholic Church had introduced elements of pluralism characteristic of the West. No such pluralism was tolerated in the Russian-controlled territories, which according to Huntington belonged to a distinct civilization. This binary makes anthropologists uncomfortable but it is not entirely fabricated. East-west differences have been clearly visible in Ukrainian voting patterns since the 1990s, as the country oscillated between pro-Russian and pro-Western governments. Nationalist sentiment has always been strongest in western cities such as Lviv. This is not the sort of nationalism that commends itself to liberals in Brussels. In practice it has meant, for example, significant constraints on the evolved rights of Hungarian and Rusyn minorities in Transcarpathia.

Might any positives emerge from this tragedy? It is hard to be optimistic. Persistent nationalist blemishes in Ukraine might be excused in light of the post-imperial conjuncture, and corrected once the country is inside the European Union (though the examples of neighbouring Hungary and Poland are not encouraging in this regard). Another pious hope would be that the corruption riddling Ukraine’s post-Soviet kleptocracy (until now so similar to that of Russia) might be more effectively addressed following accession.

In any case, rapid accession is surely inevitable. When the “dethroned majority” resorts to such brutal action, Huntingtonian fault lines will finally be transcended. Ukraine will not have to oscillate any longer. Having paid a ghastly price in blood, it will be welcomed as a worthy member of the Euro-American civilization, thereby taking its long history of imperial peripherality to a new level. Fast-track admission may also be offered to Moldova and Georgia. NATO membership will perhaps have to be postponed for all three, but only for as long as Western Europe remains highly dependent on Russian gas and oil.

It is hard to see any grounds for optimism at all concerning Russia. The Kremlin will dig in and continue to behave badly in fogs of nationalism. Putin and his eventual successors will emphatically deserve to remain in that category of “other” (for the free West), with all glimmers of a post-Soviet escape route extinguished. Russia will continue to occupy that slot at least until an alternative “other” has taken shape (perhaps the socialist empire that rejected the federal model?).

Meanwhile the immediate winners of this catastrophe are Washington, numerous large American corporations, and generally the manufacturers of weapons and flags.

Chris Hann is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

References

Gingrich, Andre 2002. “When ethnic majorities are ‘dethroned’: towards a methodology of self-reflexive, controlled macrocomparison” in Andre Gingrich and Richard G. Fox eds. Anthropology, By Comparison. London: Routledge. pp. 225-48.

Hudson, Michael. 2022. “America defeats Germany for the third time in a century.” Monthly Review online blog, 28th February: https://mronline.org/2022/02/28/america-defeats-germany-for-the-third-time-in-a-century/

Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Kalb, Don. 2022. “‘Fuck Off’ versus ‘Humiliation’: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East.” FocaalBlog, 1 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/01/don-kalb-fuck-off-versus-humiliation-the-perverse-logic-towards-war-in-europes-east/

Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2010. A History of Ukraine. The Land and Its Peoples. (Second Edition) Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Cite as: Hann, Chris. 2022. “The Agony of Ukraine.” FocaalBlog, 11 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/11/chris-hann-the-agony-of-ukraine/

Blog

Gavin Smith: ­­­Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour

Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations] for the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems.” (Kaminer, 2022). A task preliminary to operationalizing the concept, however, is the task of clarifying what it refers to. This is especially so for two reasons.

First: currently the term is not derived specifically from Marx’s reflections but is used to refer to a wide range of phenomena not all of them by any means consistent with one another.  Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that in the majority of its uses ‘surplus population’ (and similar terms like ‘wasted lives’ and so on) is not a problem produced by capitalism but to the contrary describes people who do not have enough of it (e.g., Ferguson and Li, 2018). As a result, conversations where the term has been operationalized risk being confusing from the start, interlocutors thinking they are dealing with the same apples when in fact what they share looks more like a fruit salad.

Second: even for those explicitly tying their use of the concept to Marx there is disagreement. How does it differ from a reserve army of labour? Is it indeed just surplus labour? Is the surplus population always a relative surplus or are there historical moments when it becomes absolutely surplus? (See for example, Nun, 1969; Quijano, 1974) And anyway: relative to what? To the non-surplus population? Or in temporal terms, surplus today but not so tomorrow? Then, whatever it is á la Marx, there are those who would argue that a population surplus to capital is simply inconceivable: capitalism is everywhere, its tentacles making even the most apparently surplus of populations simply one more cog in its machine of reproduction.

This makes it hard for me to agree with the opening of Matan’s final paragraph, that “regardless how we parse the concept… its continuing and even growing relevance shows that [Marx’s] analytic categories… are… relevant today,” (Kaminer, 2022) if by ‘relevant’ he means also useful. And my point is well illustrated by what he then suggests that, “even the possibility of being exploited has become a coveted privilege denied to billions.” For surely the question of who is exploited, over-exploited, or super-exploited and by what means has by no means been settled in such a way that we can assume that billions are denied this opportunity.

There is much that I agree with in Matan’s reflections. Indeed, it is the precision of his argument that so well illustrates the preliminary problems we face before we can operationalize the concept. Nevertheless, the almost matching pair ‘social reproduction’ and ‘surplus population’ now have such vast currency that any step towards clarity might be useful however small. And useful above all, as Matan would have it, to enable “a rethinking of political strategy.”

And so, in what follows, I would like to make some observations that help at least me, to think about surplus populations in the context of contemporary capitalism, and then make suggestions about political strategy that are intended to be more provocative than conclusive. To anticipate, it may be that some of the concepts/terms we use as though they were common currency may actually get in the way of contributing to the kind of subaltern praxis of populations of this kind.

On surplus and populations

What follows arises mostly from the second of the two difficulties I have spoken of. But we cannot so easily distinguish the two because many who use the often-paired concepts social reproduction/surplus population are either under the impression that their casual usage is more or less in line with Marx’s various uses, or are intentionally and explicitly seeking to refine it for contemporary application; they are not uncomfortable with Marx but they believe Marx would be uncomfortable in the present (and for some, should have been uncomfortable in the past too). Because of this discourse as it has unfolded at least since the seventies, there is a risk that the notes that follow appear to be overly rigid and uncompromising. This is not my intent. Rather I am hoping the following notes might function more as a foundation on which to continue a longstanding conversation.

I hope I am not saying anything too controversial to start with if I say that Marx set out to write a book called Capital. What concerned him was to study how capital was reproduced through the use of both a dialectical and an historical method. In the course of this study a figure emerges who time and again is spoken of in terms of a conflicted binary. On the one hand, this figure provides labour power to capital from which surplus value is produced. As a result this labour and its performer is valued. On the other hand, this same figure has to devote necessary labour to the reproduction of the performer and all that that implies. A peculiarity of this kind of society is that “necessary labour appears as superfluous, because the superfluous is . . . necessary only to the extent that it is the condition for the realization of capital” (Marx, 1973: 609). In other words, this figure is made up of valued labour and necessary labour. In the Alice in Wonderland world of capital the labour producing surplus is valued labour and the other, the necessary labour, is surplus. The value:surplus of this figure – and here we might see it as a person, a group, or a category of a population –  can be written as a ratio in which 9:1 looks more like a valued figure (person, population etc) working 90% of the time to produce surplus value, while a 1:9 ration gets closer to being a surplus figure working only 10% of the time for capital.

I hope it is clear why I put the valued labour/surplus labour notion in this way. It suggests that insofar as a person, a category of persons – even those resident in a specific space – devoting a mere 10% of their energies to reproducing capital are to that degree surplus. It doesn’t of course mean that capital runs so close to the bottom line that only those who devote absolutely none of their energies to its reproduction are rendered surplus. What it does mean is, in Marx’s words that “society in its fractional parts undertakes for Mr Capitalist the business of keeping his virtual instrument of labour . . . intact” (1973: 609–610). It is a service, in other words, that various spheres of society provide to Mr Capitalist. In fact, Marx goes on to say, “as reserve for later use,” but – since this temporal feature is not a transhistorical fact we will come back to it later. Anyway, even were this reserve function not performed, global capital does not run so close to extinction through loss of surplus value that it is unable to tolerate a population ‘surplus’, one way or the other.

‘Society’ then in its fractional parts is the component that matters when speaking of the necessary side of labour activity. We can assume that ‘society’ comes as a cost to capital. Politics is a lot to do with which ‘fractional parts’ across a spectrum capital is prepared to pay for. We will return to this but it does mean that the practices and relationships that involve this element of reproduction will vary as they are moved from one site in the social fabric to another. So, a mistake is made when the reproduction of ‘society’ – in other words ‘social reproduction’ – is understood as entirely a matter of the direct interrelationships among those performing necessary labour, in households and ‘families’ for example.

On social relations and their reproduction under capitalism

In any case, as I have said, Marx wrote a book called Capital about the social relations that are necessary for the reproduction of capital. This is because that’s what Marx was interested in: the reproduction of capital (via labour). What then are the social relations necessary for the reproduction of labour? From what we have said we can see that these cannot be entirely disentangled from the conditions required by capitalist relations. But as we move from one end of the ratio to the other, are there ‘logics’, embedded in the reproduction of labour that need to be understood as such? Is it possible that, insofar as Marx’s interest in labour really only extended to those closer to the 9:1 ratio, so he left for later study the reproduction of the class of labour itself?(Lebowitz, 2003; Smith 2022). While, through the reading of Capital and Grundrisse we can come to a useful understanding of the underlying mechanisms conditioning the reproduction of all forms of capital – and hence the social relations extending variously therefrom. The same is not so for the very different instances for the way combined labour is reproduced. By combined labour I mean both ‘valued’ and ‘necessary’, but the issue is specifically to do with the principles that must be in place for necessary labour to be reproduced.

Image 1: Laborers harvesting lavender in Kent, UK (photo: FR Lawrence Lew, July 2019, Creative Commons/Flickr)

We might begin by noting that no theory of the reproduction of labour can be adduced along the lines that Marx used in his study of capital. So, whereas the inroads of various Marxist versions of ‘social reproduction theory’ have been crucial in helping us understand different instances of capitalist society, they do not warrant use of the term ‘theory’ in the same way as the theory Marx developed through his historical realist method. Instead, beginning with the conditionalities we must take into account from the actual processes by which capital is reproduced in the specific setting we are studying, we need to explore through the methods of historical-realist ethnography specific instances of the social reproduction of labour as it articulates with capital. 

This then is the first hurdle to be crossed: that unlike the circuit that determines the reproduction of capital through the realization of surplus value, there is no such circuit for the reproduction of labour. In the former instruments – tools, machines, etc. – are made productive through the inputs of labour power. The value that results is realized in the market and any surplus arising thereby is retained by the owner of those instruments. In principle the circuit closes with the realization of value made possible by the market: no market → no realization → no value → no surplus: no capital. Such a circuit transferred to what I am calling combined labour can only refer to that labour ‘realized’ on the labour market: i.e., valued labour. Necessary labour does not reach a point of realization – completing a circuit. So, there is no ‘logic of realization’ in this sense.

A second hurdle paradoxically arises from the entanglement of necessary labour with the kind of society within which it is to be found – a capitalist one.  Neither the arena in which combined labour is to be found nor even just its ‘necessary’ component can ever be understood therefore as an ‘assemblage’ or package of multiple ‘contingent’ or ‘aleatory’ variables bumping into each other like billiard balls. Resort to such carpet-bagged bits and pieces reveals simply a failure to tackle the difficult terrain in which all forms of social practice are dialectically related to – that is to say mutually/reciprocally produced by – capital. So, the second hurdle arises because combined labour is articulated with capital, not autonomous from it.

These two conditionalities provide the challenge for understanding the myriad practices that are required to ensure the reproduction of necessary labour with the precision that is possible for the reproduction of capital for analytical purposes taken alone. This is well illustrated by the common practice in the literature of contrasting so-called ‘use values’ to be found in the arena of social reproduction with ‘exchange values’ found beyond it. As much as the distinction is useful it can be misleading since use values do not complete a circuit by being realized in the market. Along one dimension, in terms of labour they are better understood as an array of practices and relationships that, in being so, do not present themselves as complete or even in some cases named. (Williams, 1977: 115-20) Or put another way, their evident practice though often called upon, obviates the need to be named. Along another dimension, it is commonly overlooked that the realm of necessary labour requires tools and the occupation of physical space. Yet these ‘means of production’ tend to occupy an ambivalent position between their valuation as property on the one hand and as the necessities of survival on the other.

Taken together this means that the authorization of labour as value and of tools and space as property stand in dialectical opposition to necessary labour and the use of tools for undertaking it. It is in this sense that it is possible to understand this sphere of reproduction as inherently resistant to the value regime arising from labour-as-commodity and tools-as-property. (Smith, 2016). The particular point at which such structural tension is felt is a function of the historical moment or geographical setting where one or other form of capital is regnant in the dominant bloc. In my own work in Peru I showed how the move by capitalist agriculture to replace open-ended practices of labour with the fixed closure of wages gave rise to rebellion (i.e., from structural to willed resistance). (Smith, 1989) Extractive capital effects a similar transformation over space, just as finance capital does so over tools (credit schemes) and sites of necessary labour (rents).

These perpetually active ‘collectively orchestrated improvisations’ (Bourdieu, 1977:72) in the present to regulate the future are not well captured by terms like ‘use values’ or ‘non-commodified practices/relations’. While the following remark by the early Bourdieu is too emphatic….

“It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know.” (ibid: 79)

…. it does go some way toward capturing what Gramsci spoke of in terms of common sense and good sense. Williams identifies the point I am trying to make when he speaks of the strongest barrier we have as social analysts trying to capture the sense of presence in social activity being, “this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products.” Williams, 1977: 128). Finished products – a circuit completed, something we understand intuitively through our social engagement with a market that realizes our value as we step into the street. Yet what we are dealing with here is precisely a sphere that fails to realize – complete, condense, contract – practices and relationships that for populations of the 1:9 ratio constitutes most of their sociality. We should be careful what we ask for therefore, when we demand that such lifeworlds be taken from where they are hidden and brought within the norms of capitalist society.

The social relations of social reproduction

But this realm of social life is only one of the fractional parts undertaken for Mr Capitalist to keep his virtual instrument of labour intact. When it is remarked in respect to these populations, as it so often is, that what Mr Capitalist pays is below the socially necessary costs of reproduction, we are obliged to look for what the ‘fractional parts’ may be that Marx suggests come into play. One such part cannot be the unrecognized necessary labour of the kind I have been speaking of since, by definition, we have been told those social necessities cannot thus be met. Does this mean that, like lemmings, the chasm of extinction calls? While this is certainly the fate of many, one has the feeling that it is not this very obvious surplus population that these writers are referring to, so how do they survive? The kinds of fragments that Marx may have been alluding to were the poor houses, Speehamland arrangements and so on of the past. In the mid-twentieth century these were glossed under the term ‘welfare’ and mostly undertaken by the state. Later in that century and currently in this one, elements of the social reproduction of necessary labour became broken up very much into the fractional parts Marx (presciently?) spoke of. By relying on distinct sources of philanthropy church groups, secular non-governmental organizations, food banks, and so on exposed the very specific fractions he spoke of.

Simultaneously they brought into play a multiplicity of social relations and practices that crowded together to undertake the task of social reproduction for Mr Capitalist. In each case, however, whether we speak in the past, of the poor houses of the nineteenth century, or the schools and hospitals of the postwar period; or whether we speak in the present, of church groups or food banks, they come as costs for capital as a whole and, insofar as they are fractional, they are also factional: they impact on different kinds of capitalists in differing ways producing their own (class, ethnicized, regional, etc.) flavour of politics as a result. In other words, the social relations brought into play for the purposes of social reproduction, once removed from the necessary labour of workers themselves, vary considerably and articulate with capital in different ways.

Finance capital as a hegemonic bloc

Seen in this way we begin to understand why ‘neoliberalism’ is such an unhelpful, imprecise notion for deconstructing what is happening to reshape social reproduction. Rather we need to turn attention to the different fractions of capital that are regnant in a dominant bloc. This is not a question of ‘financialized capitalism’; capitalism has always needed to be financialized. It is a question of the dominance of finance capital as such that we need to address, the conditions it needs to have in place for its reproduction and the ways in which its dominance is reflected in the reproductive logics of other forms of capital – industrial, agricultural, extractive and so on. As for the conditions of possibility this presents to valued and necessary labour – the realm of ‘social reproduction’ if you like – there is a great deal that can be said and indeed has been said.

But I want to draw implications from a particular feature of finance capital which is that it takes the form of the direction of flow and then the capture of surplus value. It is, for example, this characteristic that helps us to untangle the multifarious flows of ‘the surplus’ that finance is able to direct and capture my being woven into the vast array of market valuated arrangements that now make up the fractured and competitive field of governmental, non-governmental, and privatized social ‘supports’.

There are three features of finance capital that underly its role in the reproduction of a capitalist society dominated by its form. First, as I have said, it is about flows of surplus value, their direction/regulation and always their capture (and then release). Second, while it relies on the amounts of surplus value available and its form – its liquidity, fungibility, quantifiability, etc. – it does not itself produce surplus value. Finally, while by no means the only way of doing so, a principle means of managing risk in the realm of finance is through diversification.

These three features have their cognate manifestations in society as a whole. In this setting the flow of goods and services are not only channeled through market principles, they allow the dyke to direct flow through financial instruments. Then, insofar as the management of risk is achieved through diversification it is essential that diversity of phenomena, material and social – their distinction from one another – can be reliably assessed. Difference cannot be simply perceptual; it must be sufficiently real to meet the requirements of investment diversification: including investment in a population. Thus, insofar as left to itself, finance capital does not increase the overall surplus value available to a social formation, so it cannot absorb a reserve army of labour.

Finally, we come to the politics. I have suggested elsewhere that once people and the perquisites can all be given an asset value it becomes important for managing risk that there be differences among them. These cannot be simply claims to difference. There must be social diversity that translates into risk reduction by diversifying investments in different kinds of population – identities if you like. Different elements of the population are then encouraged to negotiate to enhance their ‘asset value’ for society understood as a collectivity of this sort. The hegemony of the dominant bloc works as such by being openly selective: celebrating distinction, selection, difference. This heterogenous population then expresses participation by negotiating the best possible placement in the social field.

But surplus value is made available to finance – finance as such – only by means of capture. It seeks to enhance its position by expanding the field across which it can make this capture effective, legal and cost-effective. It is pre-eminently expansive in this sense, not in the sense that industrial capital expands, enhancing surplus value both in space and in time albeit unevenly: in regional and temporal crises. These latter produce relative surplus populations that can, if the conditions are right, serve as reserve armies of labour. No such cycle has this effect in the cases where finance capital dominates. The result is that populations come into being for whom a politics of negotiation has little or nothing to offer them because they have nothing with which to negotiate.

Externally and brutally, they are threatened by forces against which they must resist – in some way collectively. Yet internally and more subtly they are threatened by the destruction of their sense of collective ‘presence’, – of the form of subjectivity on which they rely. A kind of sociality that invokes their active imbrication in a necessarily inter-relational future: “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” in Williams’ terms (1977: 132). This means that their daily existence is one of resistance. Their choice is being obliged to negotiate as wretched citizens and, as such, always failing; or finding means for turning the resistance that inheres in the lives they value into a politics of refusal: what we might term a counter-politics against the pervasive hegemony that selects among beneficiaries. (Smith, 2014)

And, still, no surplus population

It is only after a series of enquiries of this kind – globally and historically – that we can then begin to speak usefully of whether or not certain populations are surplus in the sense that they are unable to meet either capital’s requirements or those of the socially constituted necessities of population. Academics who for the purposes of their score on the Marxian league table (and its various social democratic extensions) argue that there are no surplus populations insofar as they are perforce obliged to consume capitalists’ commodities despite the fact that in doing so they cannot survive (and anyway when the absence of such minimal consumption would not make even an itch to be scratched for capital), or by pointing to the outsourcing of incarceration, or the administration of refugee camps etc. are thereby not surplus, detritus or of no value, display a coy intellectual condescension that simply reveals their splendid isolation from an unfortunately large part of the world they live in.

Gavin Smith is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and has worked in South America and Western Europe.  Apart from ethnographic monographs he has published two books of essays, Confronting the present, 1999; and Intellectuals and (counter-) politics, 2014.

References

Bourdieu, 1977: Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge

Ferguson, James, and Tania Li. 2018. “Beyond the ‘Proper Job:’ Political-Economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man.” Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies. University of Western Cape.

Lebowitz, Michael 2002: Beyond Capital: Marx’s political economy of the working class Palgrave Macmillan. London

Nun, José 1969: “Sobrepopulación relativa, ejercito industrial de reserva y masa marginal,“ Revista Latino-Americano de Sociología, 5, 2  178-236.

Quijano Obregón, Aníbal 1974: “The Marginal Pole of the Economy and the Marginalized Labour Force,“ Economy and Society, 3, 4. 393-428.

Smith, Gavin, 1989: Livelihood and resistance: peasants and the politics of land in Peru. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Smith, Gavin 2014. Intellectuals and (counter-)politics: essays in historical realism. Berghahn, Oxford

Smith, Gavin 2016: “Against social democratic angst about revolution: from failed citizens to critical praxis.” Dialectical Anthropology 40: 221-239

Smith, Gavin, 2022: “Social reproduction and the heterogeneity of the population as labour” in Gill, L. & Kasmir, S. (eds): The Routledge Handbook of The Anthropology of Labor [Forthcoming] Routledge, New York

Williams, Raymond. 1977: Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Cite as: Smith, Gavin. 2022. “Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour.” FocaalBlog, 9 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/09/gavin-smith-toward-a-non-theory-of-the-reproduction-of-labour/

Blog, Bullshit Jobs, Features, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Andrew Sanchez: Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs

There’s a Committee for Committees!

A few weeks ago, I received a message from a colleague. It was the sort of funny thing that one friend says to another when their most ridiculous suspicions have been proven true. It said:

“There’s a committee for the membership of committees!”

My colleague discovered this while filling out a form at the University of Cambridge that required her to declare all the committees she sits on (ostensibly to keep an eye on conflicts of interest). I had to complete the form too because I am a Trustee of the University. This means that committees play a substantial role in my working life. Too substantial in fact. As of December 2021, I sit on about 20 of them.

I spend hours per month sitting in one committee, checking the minutes of other committees that I also sit on. Sometimes I write reports that are technically addressed to myself. This is not the satisfying and intellectually curious life I imagined when I became an academic. It feels like I am trapped in an Escher picture, walking endlessly up and down a looping stairway to nowhere. So of course, there would be a Committee for Committees. That’s what happens when a university has so many committees.

Image 1: Maurits Cornelis Escher lithograph “Convex and Concave” (1955), photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões

Like so many aspects of human social life, Graeber has an idea about this experience. It is an idea about that feeling of wasting your time on tasks that are not worth doing. The idea is called Bullshit Jobs (Graeber 2013, 2018). It says that most of us spend our time doing jobs are unsatisfying and serve no real purpose for society. Graeber says that capitalism has given us these jobs to keep us busy.

The Bullshit Jobs book (2018) was adapted from an essay published in Strike! Magazine (2013). One of the most memorable arguments of the essay is that there is an inverse relationship between one’s salary and the genuine social importance of one’s work. The more important you are to society, the less you get paid. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Graeber was proven correct when lockdowns prompted many nations to categorise some people as essential workers without whom society would collapse. If you had to go to work, then you were genuinely important to society. But you probably didn’t get paid a lot for being so. This maps well onto Graeber’s vision of a world of dockers, nurses, and rubbish collectors, ranged against all the management consultants and people sitting on pointless committees.

Like so much of Graeber’s work, the essay made me question why we do the things that we do. In the true spirit of anarchism, the work was destabilising. Which means that it revealed the injustice and weakness of the existing social order and showed the possibility for change. As I once heard Graeber say in a 2010 London Teach-Out shortly before a riot, ideologies of power are like the glass windows of a jewellery store. They tell you to stay in your place. But if enough people smash them, it becomes clear that they were always just glass.

The Bullshit Jobs essay was in this spirit. It was a prompt to imagine a different world, and I loved it. But when that prompt was expanded to the length of a book, it was stretched so thin so that you could see through it. I am going to talk about Bullshit Jobs by considering three things. First, whether Graeber misunderstands how bullshit tasks relate to one another in complex systems. Second, whether the thesis misunderstands capitalism’s tendency towards profiteering and the disregard for marginal populations. Finally, whether the thesis is focussed on the wrong sort of human satisfaction in work. But this is a short essay, so each issue will only be addressed briefly.

Bullshit Tasks

One of the main problems with the book was the research method, which largely rested on asking people which aspects of their work were ‘bullshit’. This is a problem, because by focusing solely on the emic experience of work, we do not necessarily understand the structural significance of that work. A person paid to guard an empty warehouse may seem to be doing a ‘bullshit job’ and perhaps it feels that way too. But the work is generative of profit for somebody else, even in an attenuated manner. In this instance that job would be integral to an opaque structure of risk assessment and insurance that dooms some of us to stand in front of empty warehouses because doing so is in the economic interest of other people. The Bullshit Jobs model tends to conflate questions of work satisfaction with those of wider structural and economic significance.

More importantly the model does not grapple with the fact that there is no necessary consistency of experience in bullshit jobs through time. The model implicitly rests on the assumption of a continuous temporal imagination of work, where satisfaction is to be had all the time or not at all. That is not how work functions. And it is especially not how bullshit, box-ticking work functions. Such forms of bureaucratic work make up a substantial proportion of Graeber’s analysis. One may spend all day checking whether a box on a form has been ticked, and it might feel pointless. But on the odd occasion where it turns out that the box has not been ticked, or where the form contains a lie… that is the moment where the value of the exercise becomes clear and a bullshit job can be socially transformative.

Imagine that you are the absurd character of a (once) working class, Marxist academic in an elite university, spending hours a week trawling through committee papers. Perhaps your soul aches with the suspicion that you are wasting your time and have sold out. Until you find an innocuous line of text tucked away in a committee paper; a text that if unchallenged would quietly remove permanent employment status from everybody in your university that changed their institutional role at any point in the future. Suddenly it seems important that somebody is there to read all these papers. And it seems especially important that the people doing the reading should not assume that the work is bullshit.

Bullshit jobs are not usually bullshit all the time. It would probably make more sense to rather talk of bullshit tasks. One should then consider whether those tasks coalesce into something more impactful, and why this is integral to the nature of complex economic and institutional action. You would be prudent to pay more attention to the box ticking bureaucrats, because even if you consider their work to be ‘stupid’ (Graeber 2015) the combined aggregate of their tasks will nonetheless shape the world around you. However, you probably wouldn’t know about it, because bureaucracy is by its very nature quiet and anonymous (Kesküla and Sanchez 2019). The transformative dimensions of much bureaucratic work are slower, and they are crucially less individualised than other types of work. But they coalesce into forms of power (Bear and Mathur 2015), and as power they can never be bullshit.

Many of Graeber’s bullshit jobs are artefacts of social complexity, and their impact is distributed at a social and temporal scale that exceeds his model. I doubt the existence of a coherent category of bullshit jobs. There is also no evidence that they exist to keep people out of trouble.

Capitalism Doesn’t Have a Committee

Modern capitalism lacks the concerted agency to create mass pointless work for reasons of social engineering. It principally strives towards the economic exploitation of mass populations, and is content to abandon those that it cannot readily exploit.

Graeber (2013) says that the only societies that used to give people pointless work were state socialist ones. They did this to redistribute wealth and keep people out of trouble. However, he argues that in the late 20th century increasing mechanisation and the shifting of production to the developing world left much of the working population in wealthy capitalist societies with nothing to do. That population was a threat to the established social order, and needed to be given bullshit jobs to distract them and tire them out.

This claim is incorrect. Neoliberal capitalism doesn’t have a committee. It certainly doesn’t have the type of committee that engages in a coherent global endeavour to stop us from sliding into thoughtful idleness. Some people would like to believe that neoliberalism doesn’t exist at all and is only conjured into being by left wing social scientists. Those people are wrong. There are explicit packages of policies, reforms, professional networks, and ways of looking at the world that make neoliberalism a real thing. But still, neoliberal capitalism does not have a committee.

I appreciate anthropological attention to the discursive and moral life of neoliberalism, and I have written about how neoliberal actors may feel that they are doing good in the world (Sanchez 2012). However, for a structural analysis like Bullshit Jobs what matters is the core motivation of capitalism, which is profit. The notion of a world of pointless employment that does not exist to make money, simply does not fit with what we know about most of economic life. More broadly, there is the lingering issue that capitalism is untroubled by the fact that plenty of people in wealthy societies have not been given pointless work.

If I can be permitted to stick with the anecdotal style of Bullshit Jobs here is an example to illustrate my point: I was raised on a British council estate where a good proportion of people were completely without any form of work. Some tended to get into trouble, and aged into lives where they harmed themselves and others. Feasibly, those populations could be imagined as a threat to social order. But the Committee was untroubled by that possibility. Capitalism was happy for our family to live on state benefits for years, treading water below the poverty line, sliding into depression and violence. Although the hateful notion of a ‘Chav’ underclass would suggest otherwise, people in those environments often have critical perspectives on how the world works. And sometimes they try to do something about it. It was in just such an environment that I was radicalised as a young teenager, and grew into the person writing this essay. This personal example is perhaps a little cloying. But the fact remains that there are too many people left behind by the Bullshit Jobs Committee, for the idea to make sense.

Or less anecdotally we might consider populations at the acute end of the social marginality spectrum, those apparently expelled by capitalism as if they are somehow worthless, condemned to lives of floating marginality, living in refugee camps or prisons, standing by the road at labour markets waiting for a gig that never comes (Sassen 2014). It is mistaken to see such populations as lacking in creativity and will (Alexander and Sanchez 2019). It is also mistaken to not recognise them as sources of economic value for capitalism. Bourgois’ (2018) work on predatory accumulation shows this, as does older thinking on the Prison Industrial Complex. It turns out that those allegedly dangerous populations are still worth something to somebody. If this were not so, then marginalised communities would not be beset everywhere by landlords, credit agencies, racketeers, brokers, and for-profit providers of social and justice services.

Capitalism has not found ways of giving dangerous populations bullshit jobs to keep them out of trouble. Rather, capitalism is all too often immune to the trouble that they might cause, and indeed routinely finds them to be a useful area of exploitation.

What Isn’t Bullshit?

When Bullshit Jobs discusses how people feel about their work, it rests on Graeber’s theory of value, where action that is meaningful is that which is socially productive. I am a fan of Graeber’s theory of value. But his reconfiguration of it for a discussion of work tasks is not quite right. For Graeber, work is socially productive principally when it cares for the world. I believe that this idea is trained at the wrong level of action. The ability for one’s work to ‘care’ might be better conceived as just one expression of the ability to transform the world.

As I have argued elsewhere (Sanchez 2020), the single most important factor in peoples’ determination of satisfying work is an engagement with processes that make demands on one’s ability to affect change upon the world. Put simply, people like work that challenges them to alter something, be it the material form of an object, the value of a commodity, the dispositions of other people, or the skills and capacities of themselves. Troublingly, transformative work does not map onto ‘caring’ and some people may find it enjoyable to do impactful things that harm others. More broadly, transformation is not restricted to an impact on human relations, or a lasting contribution to social life.  

I have spent my working life talking to people about their working life. And because I am an enthusiast, I tend to do this even when I am not ‘working’. My experience is that there are many jobs that I would find pointless to do myself, but which other people do not. That is because they have found a meaningful transformative dimension in their work that would elude me, and they therefore find it satisfying to manage IPOs, trade stocks, or write advertising copy. The transformative action of work needn’t happen in an instant. And indeed, it often takes lots of people to make it happen at all. People are smart enough to know this, which is why the daily grind of bullshit tasks does not necessarily translate into a wholly bullshit job. Every now and again, the box hasn’t been ticked properly, and it matters.

Conclusion

I think that Bullshit Jobs is basically wrong. Nonetheless I like the fact that a book like this exists, and I wish that there were more of them.

Anthropology is often mired in citations and pedestrianism. Or else we are that other type of Anthropologist (my least favourite): the one mired in pretentious, performative theorising. As a consequence, we are a discipline that often struggles to say anything original and of wider social significance. But in Bullshit Jobs we have a work that is imaginative, fun to read, and about issues that most people can relate to. It is the voice of a man speaking to the reader not as an academic showing off or trying to intimidate you, but as though he had met you at a party, and you were lucky enough to be chatting to somebody that really made you think. 

That’s what I love about Graeber’s writing; the essential humanity of it. His work conveys the mind of a person that cares enough to look at things that matter to everybody else, and who cares enough to speak about them in a way that is exciting and intelligible. Even when Graeber was wrong, he made you think. And what he made you think about was invariably something important. That’s what an academic is for.

Andrew Sanchez is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has published on economy, labour, and corruption, including Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India, Labour Politics in an Age of Precarity co-edited with Sian Lazar, and Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination co-edited with Catherine Alexander. 

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on “Bullshit Jobs”.

References

Alexander, C. & Sanchez, A. (eds). 2019. Indeterminacy: Waste, Value and the Imagination. Berghahn

Bear, L. & Mathur, N. 2015. ‘Introduction: Remaking the Public Good’ The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33(1): 18–34

Bourgois, P. 2018. ‘Decolonising drug studies in an era of predatory accumulation’ Third World Quarterly, 39(2): 385-398

Graeber, D. 2013. ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant’ Strike! 3

Graeber. D. 2015. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House

Graeber, D. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Allen Lane

Kesküla, E. & Sanchez, A. 2019. “Everyday Barricades: Bureaucracy and the Affect of Struggle in Trade Unions” Dialectical Anthropology 43(1): 109-125

Sanchez, A. 2012. ‘Deadwood and Paternalism: Rationalising Casual Labour in an Indian Company Town’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(4): 808-827

Sanchez, A. 2020. ‘Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work’ Social Analysis 64(3): 68-94

Sassen, S. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press.

Cite as: Sanchez, Andrew. 2022. “Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs.” FocaalBlog, 4 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/04/andrew-sanchez-work-is-complicated-thoughts-on-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn: When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism

The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order.  While the fundamental tenets of postwar geography—that national boundaries would not be moved, that each country had the right to territorial integrity, and that every nation-state could govern its own territory without interference—might have been weakened before, now they have been quite literally blown up. Making sense of these world-historical changes will take time. A recent article on FocaalBlog by geographer David Harvey argues that the post-Cold War policies of the West played an important role in pushing Russia towards the current war in Ukraine. Harvey argues that the West’s failure to incorporate Russia into Western security structures and the world economy led to Russia’s political and economic “humiliation,” which Russia now seeks to remedy by annexing Ukraine. By focusing on Western imperialism, however, Harvey ignores the politics of the USSR’s successor states as well as regional economic dynamics. It is Russian neoimperialism, not the West’s actions, that motivates the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Harvey’s argument rests on the idea that in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Western institutions inflicted grave “humiliations” on Russia. He argues that “the Soviet Union was dismembered into independent republics without much popular consultation.” But this begs the question of consultation with whom. Estonia declared national sovereignty in 1988, and both Latvia and Lithuania declared independence from the USSR in 1990–all of them before the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 (Frankowski and Stephan 1995:84). All three of these countries were independent prior to 1940, and, like Ukraine, were forcibly incorporated into the USSR; all three saw declarations of independence after 1988 as a restoration of previous national sovereignty.  Georgia, too, elected a nationalist government in 1990 and formally declared independence in 1991. Like Ukraine, Georgia claimed a restoration of national sovereignty that was held prior to forcible incorporation in the USSR in 1921.  Like Ukraine, each of these countries held referenda on independence which passed with over 74% percent of citizens voting to leave the USSR permanently. Ukraine’s own referendum passed with 92.3% of the population voting “yes”  (Nohlen and Stover 2010:1985). There was thus plenty of consultation with the people who mattered–the citizens of countries formerly colonized by Russia who demanded the right to decide their own futures. Why Russia should have been consulted on the independence of nations that had been incorporated into the Russian empire and the USSR by force is unclear; colonizing countries are rarely asked for permission when their colonies declare independence.

Dimly lit firefighters stand amid smoke and ruined buildings.
Image 1: An apartment block in Kyiv (Oleksandr Koshyts Street) after shelling, 25 February (Credit: Kyiv City Council, Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine?fbclid=IwAR3ieAzQ7Nt8LBf62tYs1P2fORG-QVNV1uP-8DNiZqlZ6j1tJHFRaI1Rrzg#/media/File:Житловий_будинок_у_Києві_(вул._Кошиця)_після_обстрілу.jpg)

Second, Harvey argues that Russia was “humiliated economically.”  He writes,“With the end of the Cold War, Russians were promised a rosy future, as the benefits of capitalist dynamism and a free market economy would supposedly spread by trickle down across the country. Boris Kagarlitsky described the reality this way. With the end of the Cold War, Russians believed they were headed on a jet plane to Paris only to be told in mid-flight ‘welcome to Burkina Faso.’”

Harvey blames the collapse of the Russian economy in the early 1990s on the Western-led practice of so called “shock therapy,” or rapid marketization, saying that it resulted in a decline in GDP, the collapse of the ruble, and disintegration of the social safety net for Russian citizens. But an explanation of economic collapsed based solely on “shock therapy” negates the internal dynamics of state-socialist economies, which were already in free-fall as the supply-constrained planned economy succumbed to its own internal contradictions (Dunn 2004:Chapter 2). As the Hungarian dissident economist Janoś Kornai aptly showed, soft budget constraints, which allowed state socialist enterprises to pass their costs onto the state, and thus prevented them from ever failing, led to intense cycles of shortage and hoarding. In turn, endemic shortage led to limited and low-quality production, which in turn led to more shortage and hoarding. All of this disincentivized investments in industrial modernization. Why invest in modern equipment or production methods, when a firm could sell whatever it made, and when there was little incentive to improve profit margins? It was the Soviet economy that kept Soviet industry technologically behind, not the West. The result of the dynamics of state-led planning meant that when Soviet industries were exposed to the world market by shock therapy mechanisms eagerly adopted by reformers in their own governments, they were not at all competitive. Thus, the deindustrialization of the USSR was a product of state socialist economics.  

Shock therapy, too, was largely a local production rather than one led by the West, despite Jeffrey Sachs’ relentless advocacy of it. The point of shock therapy was not just to make East European economies look like Western economies as quickly as possible. Rather, local non-communist elites argued that it was a tool to prevent a Communist restoration. They argued that if the Communist nomenklatura, which controlled both politics and production, was allowed to dismantle state owned enterprises and repurpose state-owned capital for their own private gain, its members would oppose political reform or seek to regain political power (Staniszkis 1991). As Peter Murrell, an ardent critic of shock therapy, writes, shock therapy was thus pushed most heavily by East Europeans:

“These reforms were condoned, if not endorsed, by the International Monetary Fund; they were strongly encouraged if only weakly aided, by Western governments; and they were promoted, if not designed, by the usual peripatetic Western economists.” (Murrell 1993:111).

The result, as we now know, was the destruction of state-owned enterprises, the rise of mass unemployment, and the creation of oligarchs whose wealth was founded on formerly state-owned assets.  But this was not the result of policies pushed by the West, but rather of the devil’s bargain necessitated by internal political dynamics in Soviet successor states, including Russia.  As Don Kalb points out in his response to Harvey, “When all modernist projects had collapsed in the East, as it seemed in the mid 1990s, the supposedly universalist Western project of democratic capitalism was simply the only available project left. The post-socialist East was happily sharing for a while in Western hubris.” This was as true about free-market ideologies as it was about the political support for NATO that Kalb discusses.

Third, Harvey decries the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, citing this as a further humiliation as well as a security problem. His formulation of this problem is odd: he seems to assume that NATO expansion is entirely a question of relations between the Western powers and Russia, which can make decisions on behalf of smaller countries without consulting them. Nowhere in all this are the security imperatives of Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, the three countries who wanted to join NATO at the Bucharest Meeting of NATO in April, 2008, each of whom had legitimate reason to fear Russian invasion (Dunn 2017). The right of smaller countries to decide their own foreign policy and to join alliances for their own strategic reasons is entirely absent from Harvey’s account. This absence of the Ukrainian state as an actor in determining the country’s future is an implicit acceptance of Putin’s claim that the former Soviet republics are rightfully in Russia’s sphere of influence. But imagine this argument applied in a different context: Should Canada’s security interests give it the right to occupy upstate New York? Is Arizona rightfully in Mexico’s sphere of influence, given the dangers that US military adventures might pose? Both of those propositions are obviously untenable. Yet the same argument, which is most often made by Vladimir Putin, is taken by many on the Western left as a legitimate basis for Russian action in Ukraine (Shapiro 2015, cf. Bilous 2022).

The notion that the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Ukraine again now are defensive actions on the part of Russia is deeply wrongheaded. They are pure aggression. They are first of all aggression towards the peoples and territories forcibly incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As the experience of Chechnya shows, Russia is willing to utterly destroy places and people that seek to leave the empire (Gall and DeWaal 1999). Russia continues to signal that willingness with the presence of the Russian 58th Army in South Ossetia for the past 14 years, where it has been poised to overrun Georgia at the first sign that it is unwilling to be controlled by Moscow (Dunn 2020).  Likewise, the current invasion of Ukraine is not defensive. There was no realistic possibility of Ukraine joining NATO in the foreseeable future, and Ukrainian sovereignty posed no credible threat to Russian security. (As German Chancellor Olaf Schultz said, “The question of [Ukrainian] membership in alliances is practically not on the agenda”). The invasion of Ukraine is about Russian control of what it believes is its historical sphere of influence, rather than any particular defensive imperative.

David Harvey clearly believes that his analysis is anti-imperialist. But it is in fact a pro-imperialist argument, one that supports Russian irredentism and the restoration of empire under the guise of a “sphere of influence.” (As Derek Hall points out in his response, nowhere in Harvey’s argument does he condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.) Russian imperialism has always worked on different principles than Western imperialism, given that it has been largely non-capitalist, but it is imperialism nonetheless, in cultural, political and economic senses of that term. Blaming the West for “humiliating” Russia occludes Russia’s own expansionist ideologies and desires for restoration of empire, and justifies the violent military domination of people who can and should decide their own destinies.  

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University.  Her work has focused on post-Communist Eastern Europe since 1992.  Her first book, Privatizing Poland (Cornell University Press 2004) examined the economic dynamics of post-socialist property transformation.  Her second book, No Path Home (Cornell University Press 2017) looked at the aftermath of the 2008 Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia and the effects of Western humanitarian aid on IDPs.  Dunn also serves on the board of two refugee resettlement agencies.

References

Bilous, Taras. 2022. “A letter to the Western Left from Kyiv”, Commons, February 25, https://commons.com.ua/en/letter-western-left-kyiv/

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2020. ” Warfare and Warfarin: Chokepoints, Clotting and Vascular Geopolitics”. Ethnos https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2020.1764602

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen.  2017. No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Dunn, Elizabeth C. 2004.  Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor.

Frankowski, Stanisław and Paul B. Stephan (1995). Legal Reform in Post-Communist Europe. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Gall, Carlotta and Thomas De Waal. 1999. Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus. New York; NYU Press.

Hall, Derek, 2002. “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to Harvey.” https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/28/derek-hall-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-a-response-to-david-harvey/

Kornai, Janoś. 1992. The Socialist System. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Murrell, Peter. 1993. “What is Shock Therapy? What Did It Do in Poland and Russia?” Post-Soviet Affairs 9(2):111-140.

Nohlen, Dieter and Philip Stöver (2010) Elections in Europe: A Data Handbook, Baden-Baden: Nomos

Shapiro, Jeremy. 2015. Defending the Defensible: The Value of Spheres of Influence in US Policy. Brookings Institution Blog, March 11. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2015/03/11/defending-the-defensible-the-value-of-spheres-of-influence-in-u-s-foreign-policy/.

Staniszkis, Jadwiga. 1991. .Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: the Polish Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cite as: Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2022. “When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism.” FocaalBlog, 3 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/03/elizabeth-cullen-dunn-when-western-anti-imperialism-supports-imperialism/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Kalb: “Fuck Off” versus “Humiliation”: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East

Image 1: Czar Vladimir, by BakeNecko.

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Mario Schmidt, University of Cologne

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Mariya Ivancheva, University of Liverpool

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