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Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Katja Müller, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten W. Endres: Introduction: The political power of energy futures

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

Debates about climate change have long entered political arenas through diplomacy, bureaucracy and regulations as part of worldwide environmental governance. Global efforts to foster greener energy increasingly supplement resource extractivism (IEA 2019). Yet, unfolding protests, from Fridays for Future to Extinction Rebellion, point to the insufficiencies of current measures. As lawsuits threaten the European mega-corporation RWE Energy with the responsibility for glacial melting in the Andes and Sioux sit-ins block the Dakota Access Pipeline in the USA, direct political action is on the rise to fight climate change by transforming energy infrastructure. Social anthropology’s analytical thrust to treat energy systems as sociotechnical constructs urgently needs to challenge the depoliticizing tendency inherent to energy decision-making (Boyer 2019, Howe 2019).

Photo of protest crowd holding signs.
Image 1. Fridays for Future Cologne, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

In particular, narratives of incremental improvement based on efficiency, productivity, and development discourse, must be re-examined in of the urgent need for renewable energy generation (Franquesa 2018, Gupta 2015). At the same time, political turmoil accompanies many renewable energy projects. These range from protests against involuntary displacement and the destruction of ecosystems by hydropower megaprojects like the Chinese Three Gorges dam to sovereignty struggles over Bolivian lithium reserves used in the production of solar batteries to the Spanish governments’ recent decision to hand over wind turbine development to big energy players. Beyond doom and gloom, energy’s production, distribution and consumption rise and fall with technological innovation (Winther 2013, Günel 2019). Our imagination of what makes human life easier and what improves living conditions for societies shapes the technologies we come up with and how we put them to use.

Photo of very tall tree in a forest with a treehouse built near the top.
Image 2. Treehouse with solar panel on the forest edge of RWE’s Hambach coal mine in protest of surface mine expansion, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

Over the last decades, anthropology and other academic disciplines have shown that energy systems are interdependent webs of sociotechnical and sociomaterial connections (Boyer 2014; Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014; Gupta 2015; Appel 2015). They are enmeshed in geographical conditions, spatial identities, traditions, norms and imaginaries as well as in political negotiations and financial assessments (Günel 2019; Moss 2020; Mitchell 2011; Bakke 2016). These assessments and negotiations have often privileged not only one energy technology over another, but one community’s or stakeholder’s future over another (Powell 2018). This grave inequality has led the critical social sciences to question what energy futures entail, how much adaptations are necessary or possible, what we can sacrifice for particular energy scenarios, and to ask who exploits what instruments of power to what particular ends (Smith and High 2017).  

The contributions to this FocaalBlog feature discuss the political legitimacies and forms of power that become possible through renewables’ development and the greening of energy systems. Indeed, the development of renewable energy sources begs questions with high stakes: How does political decision-making on energy sources unfold, including expanding resource extraction, extending the grid, or developing renewables? How do historic injustices and exclusionary legacies of extraction, production and consumption affect future energy horizons? Do imperatives for greening energy create new role models in energy matters that shift the focus within and beyond the dichotomy of “the West and the Rest”? When do debates about local environmental priorities and energy rights undermine or bolster global climate targets? Which new forms of precarity and scarcity do large-scale infrastructural impositions by local or international powerholders entail?

Based on a panel at the 16th EASA Biennial Conference virtually held in Lisbon in July 2020, this collection of papers investigates the contradictions and contestations between the persistence of conventional energy systems and the rise of renewables within the complex operations of political power that affect our anticipated energy futures. From top-down policymaking regarding energy access to grassroots calls for climate justice, the contributions interrogate the policies and politics surrounding renewable energy, and the unintended consequences and alliances in its delivery.

Rethinking energy futures

After decades of constant growth in energy production and demand, climate change is no longer an abstract threat. We are therefore forced to scrutinize established foundations of energy systems. While energy research has already expanded the view from the misperception of localised, insulated extractivism to that industry’s real-world global conditions, climate change forces us to rethink our energy future on all levels.

Formerly the elephant in the room, all too often ignored in energy action, climate change increasingly factors into decisions on changing energy systems large and small. At least, this is reflected in the figures: In 2019, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global energy-related CO2 emissions flattened (slightly) at around 33 gigatons, resulting mainly from a sharp decline in CO2 emissions from the power sector in advanced economies (IEA 2020). This flattening is the result of the expanding role of renewable sources (mainly wind and solar photovoltaic), of fuel switching from coal to gas, and results from higher nuclear power output.

We need to expand our understanding of energy systems beyond sociotechnical systems to socio-ecological horizons. In his Capitalism and the Web of Life, Jason Moore (2015) proposes that the separation of humans and nature resulted in the exploitation of “Cheap Nature”, exacerbating resource use in excess of sustainability several fold. This extensive extractivism then fuelled the rise of capitalism, supporting financial systems that rest on exploitation of both minority societies and the interrelated human-nature-complex. Many energy systems, regardless of their sustainability status, threaten global living conditions and operate by privatizing profits and socializing risks and losses. Critical understanding of conventional energy systems and creative approaches to potential energy futures therefore require both intellectual and political engagement.

Photo of electrical chords tangled together near the side of a building
Image 3. A squirrel scurries across entangled electricity cables in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo by Kirsten W. Endres, 2019

Bridging different scales of inequality and extraction, the blog contributors challenge the undemocratic and unequal ways of owning and producing energy. They question the financial assessments of energy production that ignore or miscalculate environmental and climate effects. However, as anthropologists, they also direct our attention to the human experiences and personal pathways forged through engagement with energy futures. Their case studies affirm that obligations rather than incentives are needed to make green technologies work for all and to reduce energy consumption. Cash cows of energy production within established political and market systems too often fail to provide just and sustainable energy systems.

Thinking of our energy future, CO2 emission developments indicate that socioecological considerations are gaining weight in energy debates and practice, as they flattened after reaching a historical height (IEA 2020). However, these shifts are not yet substantial enough to outpace political powers that focus on the economic or technological dimensions of energy production systems only. Time and again, official statements from politicians and others claim that faster or more consequential shifts to renewable energy are not feasible, thus revealing a reticence to realize sustainable energy futures. Arguments abound that energy networks and electrification need (fossil fuel based) development, or that they require at least bridging technologies to guarantee cheap and reliable supply of sufficient energy. In parallel, quarrels that a technology is not mature or marketable enough break out alongside complaints that solar energy was too expensive to survive on the market. Fears of economic losses, of declining voter favour or of structural change prevent energy transitions that are socioecological in nature and backed by sociopolitics (Sovacool 2016).

Photo of stage with empty chairs and vertical green bars on the screen behind.
Image 4. Joint launch of Green Bond Index between the Luxembourg und Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Beijing, People’s Republic of China 2017. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

To accomplish energy transitions, voluntary obligations of private companies are not sufficient. Such obligations have hardly ever led to improvements of community goods, especially not if cutting profits was a necessity. The voiced by non-corporate stakeholders need to be heard and implemented through legally binding rules. Climate, nature and the planet cannot speak for themselves, but require a socioecological understanding of energy systems to be the basis for energy decision making. This does not imply that we can solve the climate dialectic (Goodman 2016). A socioecological energy system concept will not allow for a sudden political regulation of the climate crisis through regulating energy production. Yet, understanding the political powers at play in energy systems is essential so as to not become paralyzed and to retain instead agency in times of severe crisis: energy futures need to be envisioned, power mechanisms understood and analysed. The papers of this special issues contribute to this endeavour.

Photo of power lines running through transmission tower, taken looking up from below.
Image 5. Power lines shaping current and future energy systems, Germany 2021, photo by C. Schulze

Ethnographic inquiries into energy futures

Our blog contributions take the reader to a variety of geographical settings and socio-political environments. Felix Lussem’s contribution explores the contemporary entanglement of political institutions and the energy industry in Germany’s lignite mining Rhineland, a region with a long history of large-scale resource extraction. As Lussem shows, this entanglement finds its most obvious expression in the practice of “creating facts” in order to (continue) providing cheap energy from the fossil fuel, while activists and other civil society actors try to prevent further damage to their environment and demand greater public participation in designing pathways towards a sustainable energy transition in the region.

Calls for an accelerated transition to climate-friendlier and cleaner energy sources have also gained momentum on the African continent. Some of the pitfalls and challenges of implementing green energy policies at the national/local level become apparent in Pauline Destree’s contribution. Rather than belonging to the future, renewables (such as hydropower) have dominated Ghana’s power sector in the past, while recent oil discoveries have spurred an increased rush for fossil fuel exploitation. Concomitantly, corporate solar investments gained salience during an energy crisis that hit the country in 2015. As Destree demonstrates, this led to a “renewable divide” in urban areas. While a few “green enclaves” benefit from their installed renewables, the financial situation of national utilities has worsened, resulting in higher tariffs for urban residents who continue to depend on the national grid. 

Dragan Djunda’s contribution takes us to the Western Balkans, where small hydropower plants (SHPPs) have recently emerged as a dominant strategy for reducing fossil fuel dependency. This double transformation path to renewable energy and liberalisation of the energy sector as an adaptation to EU standards attracted large flows of foreign investment. But the damming of the last remaining free-flowing rivers in Europe has sparked its own protests, as the selling of SHPPs licences implies the ‘sell-off’ of locally used water and of pristine environs.  In the Stara Mountain region in south-eastern Serbia environmental activists and local residents successfully defended rivers and villages against the impending damage from hydropower development in the region. As an unexpected outcome of the conflicts and contestations, the formerly decaying villages suddenly attracted increased touristic attention as well as financial support for community-relevant infrastructure projects.

In northern Portugal, structural reforms and austerity measures imposed by EU institutions to battle the country’s financial crisis have contributed to another path in renewable energy transition, a path that forges links into the global green bond market. Giulia Dal Maso’s contribution traces the history and location of wind farms in the wine-producing Viseu region that had been refinanced by the first Chinese green bond issued in Europe. Whereas the bond-issuing Chinese enterprise has since been able to extract rent from a previously public infrastructure, this refinancing did not produce any “extra good” for local people in the Viseu region, who keep struggling to pay their electricity bills.

From industrialized regions facing their own coal dependency and growing holes in landscapes of extraction in the German Rheinland to a Ghanaian balancing act between weathered dams for hydropower, new oil and gas discoveries, and the mushrooming of privileged green enclaves, from regional resistance to damming up the rivers of the Balkan mountains to residents in rural Portugal finding themselves poised between local pride in their wind and the pressure of paying for its energy delivery by a Chinese investor: What the contributions to this blog feature show is that pathways towards a renewable energy future are not straight-forward or unilineal, and global players in renewables finance usurp local infrastructures and drive their agendas forward, albeit being consistently challenged and scrutinised by more local imaginations of a sustainable future.

Beyond a focus on energy experts and policy pragmatists balancing public utilities and personal consumption as a calculative endeavour, anthropological investigations show how every energy provision relies on common resources and reshapes shared landscapes. Big players in energy production wield finance and power in ways that may undermine or further political and personal futures, and lead to surprising twists and turns in energy narratives. Yet suturing scales of energy engagement between corporate hierarchies, different state levels, and local energy producers and consumers, reveal that decisions on the form and type of energy used reach into deep historical experiences of developmentalist projects. Tracing the entangled relationships between people forging their energy horizons and reflecting on their demands and obligations to each other, brings to light their commitment to a collective future.

Katja Müller works as a social anthropologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and at the University of Technology Sydney. She conducts research on energy transitions, mining and climate change, as well as on digital cultural heritage.

Charlotte Bruckermann explores carbon as a frontline of value in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Her current research focuses on carbon management in the creation of Chinese ecological civilization, with a focus on carbon offset forests, digital carbon accounting, and the decarbonization of everyday life in a coal region. Her book Claiming Homes was published in 2019.

Kirsten W. Endres is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany. Her current project focuses on the interrelationship between the development of energy systems and the complex operation of modern states and state power in the Greater Mekong Subregion.

References

Appel, Hannah. 2015. Subterranean Estates: Life worlds of coal and gas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Bakke, Gretchen. 2016. The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and our Energy Future. New York: Bloomsbury.

Boyer, Dominic. 2019. Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power struggles: dignity, value, and the renewable energy frontier in Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Goodman, James. 2016. “The climate dialectic in energy policy: Germany and India compared.” In Energy Policy 99: 184-193.

Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Gupta, Akhil. 2015. “An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South.” In Cultural Anthropology 30(4): 555-568.

Howe, Cymene, Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 241 pp.

IEA – International Energy Agency (2020), Global CO2 emissions in 2019, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/articles/global-co2-emissions-in-2019

Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.

Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Moss, Timothy. 2020. Remaking Berlin. A History of the City through Infrastructure, 1920-2020. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Powell, Dana E. 2017. Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Richardson, Tanya and Gisa Weszkalnys. 2014. Introduction: Resource Materialities, Anthropological Quarterly 87 (1): 5-30.

Smith, Jessica and Mette High. 2017. “Exploring the anthropology of energy: ethnography, energy, and ethics.” Energy Research and Social Science 30: 1-6.

Sovacool, Benjamin. 2016. How long will it take? Conceptualizing the temporal dynamics of energy transitions, Energy Research & Social Sciences 13: 202-215.

Winther, Tanja. 2013. The impact of electricity: Development, desires and dilemmas. Berghahn.

Cite as: Müller, Katja, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten W. Endres. 2021. “Introduction: The political power of energy futures.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/katja-muller-charlotte-bruckermann-kirsten-endres-introduction-the-political-power-of-energy-futures/

Blog

Hege Høyer Leivestad, Johanna Markkula and Elisabeth Schober: Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences

Stuck

At the height of this pandemic’s third wave, with many of us sitting in what by now feels like an eternal lockdown, images of a gigantic ship stuck inside the Suez Canal seem to have provided more than just a welcome distraction. The vessel, unable to move one way or another, proved to be immensely relatable, if endless memes flooding the ether over the last few days are any indication at all. With the ship now figuring as a stand-in for every dilemma under the sun, cartoonist Guy Venables, in his work for Metro Newspaper UK, perhaps best summed up the phenomenon with a drawing of the stuck ship that has a voice emerging from the vessel saying, “This is terrible! We’re going to be used as a metaphor for everything!”

The popular fascination with the Suez blockage is not surprising. Ships, if we can be excused for anthropomorphizing them for a moment, are as charismatic as human-made objects can ever be. Standing next to a container ship of the dimensions of the Ever Given is an experience that is hard to shrug off, so massive and overwhelming to the human size are these new ultra-large vessels. At the same time, having over recent years done research among workers involved in producing, operating, maintaining and (un-)loading these ships, we found ourselves rather unsurprised by the events unfolding in the Suez. Among some maritime industry experts, the fact that container ships have gotten too big has been an open secret for quite a while (e.g. see Lim 1998; Merk 2015; Weisenthal and Alloway 2021). Laleh Khalili, for instance, has recently shown how the Suez Canal ironically played a key role in the acceleration of ship growth, when oil tankers rose in size as a response to the Suez crisis in the 1950s (e.g. 2021; see also Khalili 2020). The temporary cardiac arrest that the Ever Given has caused inside the Suez Canal, Khalili’s work and that of other excellent critical logistics scholars has shown (for an overview, see Charmaine Chua’s valuable list here), may only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the damage that ultra-large container ships are causing.

Image of containers on a ship passing through the Suez Canal.
Image 1: “Transiting through the Suez Canal.” Photo: Johanna Markkula.

But first of all – to the hard facts on the ground: For nearly a week, a 400-meter-long container ship has been stuck in the southern part of the Suez Canal, blocking all traffic, and causing an estimated loss of 400 Million US Dollars per hour to the global economy. On her way from Yantian in China to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and with room for 20,000 twenty-foot freight containers (TEUs) when fully loaded, on the morning of 23 March Ever Given was surprised by strong desert winds in shallow waters. Like the Straits of Malacca, the Panama Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal – built partially by forced laborers from 1859-1869 – is a vital vein in the bloodstream of trade. This is the shortest route between Asia and Europe. An average of 52 ships pass through the Suez Canal every day; 12% of international ship traffic and as much as 30% of global container traffic is routed via this narrow chokepoint. For ships that during the past week have been diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, a significantly longer journey awaits. As the queue of waiting ships grew to more than 300 by March 28, deliveries to Europe and beyond have suffered severe delays, while the currently cut-off ports are bracing themselves for a true onslaught of ships that will clog up their waterways once the blockage has been resolved. In a nutshell, this colossal mess will certainly take a while to sort out, even once the ship has become unstuck.

Container Economies on Overdrive

As we have recently summarized in a theme section of Focaal (“Container Economies”, Leivestad and Markkula 2021), global shipping is built on intricate logistical systems, systems that have come into place with the invention of the modern day intermodal shipping container, and where “Just in time” principles govern everything. With the development of new shipping systems and technological solutions from the 1950s onwards, it became cost-effective to transport goods and raw materials between continents, primarily from large production countries in Asia to markets in Europe and the US (see Levinson 2006). Container ships today transport 24% of all the world’s dry goods, and building ever larger ships seemed to be the obvious, cost-effective strategy to embrace. From the mid-2000s onwards, more and more shipping companies have begun to expand their fleets with larger ships. The world’s largest shipping company, the Danish Mærsk, proved to be a leader in this development, and the Asian-owned shipping companies – many of them state-controlled – followed suit over recent years. Between 2005 and 2015, container vessels doubled in size. Since 2017 alone, 77 additional mega-container vessels with a capacity of over 20,000 containers have been brought into use.

As we (Leivestad and Schober) also describe in an upcoming article in Anthropology Today, some maritime experts have long been skeptical about how sustainable these ultra-large box ships actually are – a debate that has certainly flared up again recently. Before the pandemic hit the world economy last year, shipping prices had temporarily fallen to a record low, which was partly due to the overcapacity created by nearly all major shipping companies simultaneously betting on the introduction of ultra-large container vessels. The spectacular 2016 collapse of Hanjin Shipping (see Schober 2021), then among the top 10 of shipping companies in the world, is often attributed as a direct outcome of this over-capacity. In our piece in AT, we discuss how the language of “Economies of Scale” used to justify these ships is more than just of a performative nature. It is, one can argue, part of a false economy in the sense that these ships mark a real redistribution of wealth from public funds to corporate elites, rather than the creation of new wealth that is their ostensible justification.

Size Matters

Through our research in one of Europe’s largest container ports in southern Spain, around South Korean and Philippine shipyards, and on board of various container ships, we have come across other negative effects that ultra-large container ships have caused over recent years. When not clogging up the Suez Canal, these increasingly larger ships are often causing new problems for maritime infrastructure, the environment, and negatively affect people’s working conditions. Fewer and fewer ports can actually accommodate the new ships. For those ports that can – of which many are struggling to survive in a highly competitive industry – major investments are required to build ever higher cranes, longer docks and larger container warehouses. Port work must be adapted to the megaships’ routes and schedules, and workers both at sea and on land fear that the growing ship sizes, together with ever smaller crew sizes on board, eventually will lead to serious accidents. The environmental aspects of shipping in general are significant. For instance, sea beds must be dredged at regular intervals, with major consequences for the marine environment above and below water (e.g. Carse and Lewis 2020).

Although the Ever Given is now about to be released from the canal, the drama is far from over. In many ports, maritime workers fear chaotic conditions when all waiting ships resume traffic – at a time when the pandemic has already caused much havoc across the industry. Hopefully, the incident in the Suez Canal will be a wake-up call. Escalating ship sizes have serious consequences, and large parts of the infrastructure that has enabled the megaship growth are financed by tax payer money. The price for the Ever Given, and the many ships of its kind that will continue to sail the oceans, may ultimately have to be paid by all of us.  

Hege Høyer Leivestad is Assistant Professor at Stockholm University, Sweden, and researcher in the ERC project PORTS at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research project, Frontier freight: Maritime logistics at the Strait of Gibraltar, is funded by the Swedish Research Council and deals with port life, labor, and global shipping in southern Spain.

Johanna Markkula is postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she is part of the research project Life cycle of container ships. Markkula is a maritime ethnographer with ten years of experience researching the maritime industry and global maritime labor. She has carried out ethnographic research onboard cargo ships with multinational crews as well as in the Philippines with maritime organizations and businesses ashore.

Elisabeth Schober is associate professor at the University of Oslo’s Department of Social Anthropology, Norway. Schober is currently the principal investigator at Life cycle of container ships (funded by the NFR), where she focuses on shipbuilding in South Korea and the Philippines. In 2019, she was awarded an ERC-Starting Grant for a project that will center on some of the world’s most important container ports.

References

Carse, Ashley and Joshua A. Lewis. 2020. “New horizons for dredging research.” In WIREs Water.Vol.7, issue 6 (November/ December). https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1485

Merk, Olaf. 2015. “The Impact of Mega-ships. Case Specific Policy Analysis. International Transport Forum.” https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/15cspa_mega-ships.pdf

Khalili, Laleh. 2020. Sinews of war and trade: Shipping and capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. London: Verso.

Khalili, Laleh. 2021. “Big ships were created to avoid relying on the Suez Canal. Ironically, a big ship is now blocking it.” In Washington Post. March 26. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/26/big-ships-were-created-avoid-relying-suez-canal-ironically-big-ship-is-now-blocking-it/

Leivestad, Hege Høyer and Johanna Markkula. 2021. “Inside Container Economies”. Focaal. 89: 1-11.

Levinson, Marc. 2006. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lim, Seok-Min. 1998. ‘Economies of scale in container shipping’, Maritime Policy & Management 25 (4): 361-373.

Schober, Elisabeth. 2021. “Building ships while breaking apart.” Focaal. 89: 12-24.

Weisenthal, Joe and Tracy Alloway. 2021.’Shippers saw a need for bigger vessels. They built them too big’. Bloomberg. 23 January 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-23/shippers-saw-a-need-for-bigger-boats-they-built-them-too-big

Cite as: Leivestad, Hege Høyer, Johanna Markkula, and Elisabeth Schober. 2021. “Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences.” FocaalBlog, 30 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/30/leivestad-hege-hoyer-johanna-markkula-and-elisabeth-schober-beyond-suez-escalating-ship-sizes-and-their-consequences/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Adam Brisley: RESPONSE: Ethics and the Anthropological Worker

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Contemporary anthropological praxis sits at the intersection of two ethical traditions. Many anthropologists are equipped with both a sophisticated understanding of the ethics and politics of representation and a practical knowledge of the bureaucratic norms and standards of institutional research ethics (informed consent, confidentiality, anonymisation etc.). And yet, if the PrecAnthro/EASA report (Fotta et al 2020) and the recent scandal at the HAU journal tell us anything (Kalb 2018, Murphy 2018, Neveling 2018, Singal 2020), it is that our disciplinary ethics does little to ensure the ethical conduct of our discipline. As other contributors to this debate have noted, the situation described in the report demands a political and an anthropological response. It requires us to unionise and work ethnographically to understand “the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization” (Narotzky 2021). In my opinion, the report should also provoke us to re-evaluate the ethics of anthropological knowledge production.

I welcome the PrecAnthro report for helping to illustrate the scale of anthropological casualisation in Europe, but it is true that my feelings likely reflect how closely the report describes my own experiences of academic precarity: I was educated in the UK and since completing my PhD in 2015, have worked on fixed-term research contracts. As Susana Narotzky (2021) and Natalia Buier (2021) note, the report privileges the perspectives of researchers like me, whilst excluding the experiences of some of the most marginalised precarious workers in anthropology such as low-paid teaching staff for whom EASA membership is neither professionally advantageous nor affordable. I write here from my located perspective as a post-doc who has worked in the field of research ethics for a number of years.

I found little to disagree with in the FocaalBlog commentaries on the PrecAnthro report and would only contend that I do not believe that anthropologists feel uncomfortable talking about precarity within our discipline. On the contrary, in fact, I think that anthropologists are more than happy to discuss academic precarity because they see it as a largely externally driven phenomenon – part of the same great process of neoliberal bureaucratisation that has devolved power from academics to university managers and driven a culture of performance review and job insecurity across the piece (so called publish-or-perish). Rather, I would think, what makes anthropologists feel uncomfortable is talking about how the precarity of junior colleagues leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by senior colleagues and reluctant to report abuse and bullying due to a fear of reputational damage (Kalb 2021, Drążkiewicz 2021, Rajaram 2021). The kind of exploitation that allegedly took place at HAU may be extreme, but as Neveling (2018) argues, it sits within “a spectrum of social, economic, and political processes that have always driven academia and continue to do so” and that reflect the general conditions of capitalism. Yet, whilst we should of course foreground the political economy of academic casualisation in order to understand the grounds for collective resistance, we must also question what it means to produce anthropology is a way that is sensitive to the risks of exploitation inherent to the contemporary academic process. Such a project would necessarily be as much about the ethics of anthropological knowledge production as the political economy of precarity.    

One of the difficulties that anthropology faces here is a lack of familiarity. Our existing professional ethics and standards are attuned to the practices of conducing fieldwork and writing ethnography. We are not used to thinking about how we interact with each other as a problem of anthropological ethics. Neither do we tend to think of “the anthropologist” as someone who is particularly vulnerable. Indeed, it was not so long ago that the anthropologist was seen as quite the opposite of a precariously employed, exploited worker. Typified by the image of Stephen Tyler on the cover of Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), the figure of the anthropologist-as-writer marked a dawning disciplinary confrontation with the idea that ethnography was not neutral scientific description, as had apparently previously been assumed, but a genre of “persuasive fiction” largely produced by elite, white men, working under conditions of colonial and post-colonial privilege. Anthropologists, who understandably tend to privilege the ethics of their own discipline to those imposed from the outside (i.e., institutional research ethics), have become keen observers of the politics and ethics of representation. Anthropologists are skilled at unpacking assumptions and revealing the structures of inequality that determine whose experience counts and who gets to speak for whom – as demonstrated in this debate by the various incisive critiques of the limits of the PrecAnthro survey. And yet it is unclear how effective our existing disciplinary ethics alone can be when the subject of exploitation is neither a subject of investigation, nor ultimately representation, but rather a fellow anthropologist.

The PrecAnthro report evokes a strikingly different image of “the anthropologist” to that of the elite, white man of crisis of representation. The typical respondent in the report is described instead as “a woman aged around 40… educated in either the UK or Germany… possibly in a relationship but has no children… and probably dissatisfied with her current employment and her work–life balance due to the fact that she works on a fixed-term contract” (Fotta et al 2020: 1). The report further illustrates what many already knew: contemporary anthropological knowledge production relies on a precariat of low-paid anthropological workers (postgrads, postdocs, teaching assistants etc.), many of whom will never obtain a permanent contract in the discipline nor academia more generally. What does the growing visibility of this version of “the anthropologist” mean for anthropological praxis? Are we to continue to imagine that the rights and wrongs of anthropological knowledge production can be discussed independently of the labour relations that structure our discipline? If not, then we may need consider whether our existing professional ethics are equipped to deal with the moral and political realities of anthropological research in the 21st century. Indeed, if it is our ambition to build the kind of class consciousness required for collective mobilisation, then we may need to start by acting in solidarity with precariously employed anthropologists and try to envisage ways that our working practices can be used to help mitigate, rather than exploit, the forms of vulnerability that academia creates.

Adam Brisley is a post-doctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has a PhD from the University of Manchester and has previously held post-doctoral positions in the universities of Manchester and Bristol. His research interests focus on the relationship between care and political economy in the context of health systems crisis.

References

Buier, N. 2021. “What sample, whose voice, which Europe?” Focaal Blog, 27 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/27/natalia-buier:-what-sample,-whose-voice,-which-europe?/

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Drążkiewicz, Ela. 2021. “Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia” Focaal Blog, 5 February 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/05/ela-drazkiewicz-blinded-by-the-light-international-precariat-in-academia/

Fotta, M., Ivancheva, M. and Pernes, R. 2020. The Anthropological Career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists: https://doi.org/10.22582/easaprecanthro

Kalb, Don. 2021. “Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t” Focaal Blog, 27 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/27/don-kalb:-anthropological-lives-matter,-except-they-don’t/

Kalb, Don. 2018. “HAU not: For David Graeber and the anthropological precariate.” www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/26/don-kalb-hau-not-for-david-graeber-and-the-anthropological-precariate.

Murphy, Fiona. 2018. “When gadflies become horses: On the unlikelihood of ethical critique from the academy.” www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/28/fiona-murphy-when-gadflies-become-horses.

Narotzky, S. 2021. “A History of Precariousness in Spain” Focaal Blog, 29 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/susana-narotzky:-a-history-of-precariousness-in-spain/

Neveling, Patrick. 2018. “HAU and the latest stage of capitalism.” FocaalBlog, 22 June. www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/22/patrick-neveling-hau-and-the-latest-stage-of- capitalism

Rajaram, Prem Kumar. 2021. “The Moral Economy of Precarity” Focaal Blog, 9 February 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/09/prem-kumar-rajaram-the-moral-economy-of-precarity/

Singal, J. 2020. How One Prominent Journal Went Very Wrong: Threats, rumors, and infighting traumatized staff members and alienated contributors. They blame its editor. The Chronical of Higher Education, October 5th 2020: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-one-prominent-journal-went-very-wrong?bclid=IwAR1F_go7fNeeRXDtTLZmAhBsNlKjv8ta3fb8e3o2uRn5WD-74cVqWKwsiVI

Cite as: Brisley, Adam. 2021. “Ethics and the Anthropological Worker.” FocaalBlog, 9 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/24/adam-brisley-ethics-and-the-anthropological-worker/

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Aliki Angelidou: “It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn

On February 22nd police forces entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating many students, arresting 31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff. Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting against a new bill on “Admission in higher education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced. The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.

The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.

Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.

Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.

In the context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation, political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no surprise that they are being attacked first.

The Neoliberalization of Higher Education and Law 4777/2021

The efforts to alter the public, free, and open character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017, Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article 16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in higher education over the past two decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’ degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack the prestige of public universities.

However, when Nea Dimokratia came to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum. If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world, in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses – unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th. Interestingly, this law was not introduced by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in educational affairs is unprecedented.

To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.

The new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore, fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore, the law allows for many disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.

All of these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20 million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.

The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.

The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.

Towards a closed and authoritarian university

The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.

More generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship, and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in Parliament that, under the new law, “it is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.

Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.

References

Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera A., Heintz M. & A. Horolets (eds.), Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe: An Intricate Institutional and Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.

Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra 2000. “Disciples, Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp. 256–78.

Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online petition.

Screenshot of a petition header which reads "Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS. Email: NoUniPolice@gmail.com.
Image 1: Online Petition, “Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS” (Screenshot by FocaalBlog editors, this petition has our undivided support, we call on our readers to join us as signatories)

Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/

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Juzimu: Jack Ma: Wherever the Wind Blows

One day last October, I happened to spot an acquaintance’s post on Wechat. It was a simple message thanking all ‘Ant-izens’ (people who work in Ant Financial of Alibaba) for their hard work, followed by a short video advertising Ant’s upcoming IPO. It came from a data scientist who had given up his high-paid job in the US, returned to China, and joined Ant Financial three years earlier. Ant shares were then expected to start trading in Hong Kong and Shanghai on 5 November.

Jack Ma, the founder of Ant and affiliate Alibaba Group Holding, had declared it a “miracle” that such a large listing would take place outside New York. It was poised to raise up to $34.4 billion in the world’s largest stock market debut and would create a vast group of new billionaires. The data scientist’s post, like many posts on social media, was a showoff: it was a subtle public announcement that he was going to become extremely rich in two weeks’ time. The post contributed to a rather complicated, self-consciously suppressed feeling among many professional Chinese Americans: once again they were tasting the bitter feeling of being stuck in the US middle-class, left behind by those who had managed to jump on the fast-track train of China’s economic growth, grabbing opportunity in the mainland and realizing their ‘Chinese Dreams’ by finally becoming ‘financially independent’ (meaning rich enough that you and your offspring would never need to worry about money again). 

Then, on 3 November, two days before the feast, the IPO was suddenly called off by the Chinese government. Immediately thereafter, China ordered Ant Group to rectify its businesses and comply with regulatory requirements amid increased scrutiny of monopoly practices in the country’s internet sector. Such a blow! The data scientist kept a dignified silence; my professional friends kept a polite silence. And Jack Ma, the real protagonist of the drama, kept a cautious silence. He has since disappeared from public view (only reappearing on 19 January 2021 with a video emphasizing his social work). Where is he? What is he doing now? What would happen to him? Why would all this happen? What does the state’s intervention mean to Ant and Alibaba, to the whole ecommerce industry, and to the whole private sector? What does it say about the logic of the state apparatus in this enigmatic yet so important country? Where will it go? And how would this affect the rest of the world, especially the West? So many questions and so much drama.

Image 1: Jack Ma, who created Alibaba.com in Hangzhou, China in March 1999
(Source: JD Lasica, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/292160777)

Unsurprisingly, the Western liberal media have maintained their usual cold-war tone, by interpreting the drama as a typical attack initiated by a post-socialist authoritarian state towards this too powerful private entrepreneur out of fear or simply for the vanity and narcissism of Your Highness Xi. The Financial Times, for example, compared it immediately with the Khodorkovsky case in Russia (Lewis 2021, paywall). The implication was clear: you can never trust those former socialist authoritarian countries. They would never respect private property, follow the rules of the liberal world, and become “us”. Equally unsurprisingly, some Western Leftists have maintained their idealist tone towards a China that may perhaps be capitalist but is at least not Western capitalist. For them, the crack-down on Ant signifies a determined fight by the state and the population against greedy capital and capitalists.

Most people in China indeed seem to have welcomed the crackdown and support the state’s actions. There are various reasons for such support. One economist I talked to supported it for financial security considerations and for the state’s antitrust efforts. She mentioned the extremely high and hence hazardous financial leverage that Ant Financial is playing with, as well as the antitrust efforts against Facebook and Google in the USA. One private entrepreneur also supported the action for financial security considerations, but based on different reasoning. According to him, since there are many different kinds of capital (including foreign capital) behind Alibaba and Ant, Ant’s IPO would further open the door for foreign finance capital to enter the Chinese market. Some intellectuals talked about the vulgar and disgusting advertisements made by Ant Financial aiming to encourage irrational consumption, as well as the irresponsible private loans it has given out, and how all these behaviors have disrupted social order and degraded social morals.

All these reasons were evident in the government’s statements for halting Ant: to regulate the financial market, enforce antitrust legislation, and create a healthier consumption environment (Yu 2020). This all seems valid except that the role Ant is playing is largely as a platform––a middleman between state banks and individual small-loan borrowers. Much of the capital given out as small loans by Ant actually comes from the state banks. The state banks were not allowed to engage in these high profit businesses. They also do not have access to the necessary consumer data and data science. They normally deal with state owned enterprises. So, Ant stepped in to help state banks exploit a previously untouched financial market: grassroots personal loans. They then divided the profit. As some observers rightly pointed , Ant has always aimed at creating partnerships with big banks, not disrupting or supplanting them. More importantly, quite a few important government-owned funds and institutions are Ant shareholders and were expected to profit handsomely from the public offering (Zhong & Li 2020). Thus, the claim that Ant squeezed out the state banks is spurious. They were basically in the same boat. That is why the state never really regulated Ant before. Meanwhile, we should not forget that the informal financial market has long existed in Chinese grassroots society due to the inaccessibility of bank loans for most non-state economic entities and common people. Ant actually formalized (to a certain degree) this informal market. Yes, Ant did play the financial game of ‘asset-backed securities’ to enhance its financial leverage, but hardly to the extent that Wall Street is used to doing. Finally, what about the irrational consumption encouraged by easily accessible loans (especially for youths)? Maybe. But most such loans still come from other smaller and less responsible lending agencies  following in Ant’s steps, which try to grasp crumbs from the huge cake but do not have the technology and data required to avoid excessive risk. It is these smaller and less technologically capable actors that are in fact creating chaos in credit supply. In short: even if we all agree that financial capital has always been highly speculative, and that Ant is no exception, some of the official statements justifying the intervention into Ant’s IPO still sound fishy.

Meanwhile, the poor in China still seem the most determined supporters of the state’s crackdown on Ant. They supported it out of their hatred toward big capital. On the internet, they lambasted the bloodsucking behavior of Ant, and called it “Leech Financial” instead of Ant Financial (Leech is pronounced in Chinese as “Ma Huang” and ant is pronounced as “Ma Yi”). There is also a popular cartoon being circulated on the internet that depicts Jack Ma as a beggar in his old age—homeless, fragile, and sad. One blue-collar worker told me that any big capitalist whose  main objective is to extract money from the poor should be dragged down.

Tellingly, the state has intentionally toned down popular indignation. The relationship between state and capital in this country has always been much more complicated than the mere antagonism imagined by liberal commentators. The state can’t afford a strong group of capitalists with too much power and resources; but neither can it afford losing them and scaring capital away. It has always been an art of balancing. As we have seen, Jack Ma has reappeared recently with a more solemn appearance. His Ant is now required to deploy necessary ‘rectifications’ under the tighter rein of state regulation (CBNEditor 2021). It is, nevertheless, the right thing for the state to do, no matter the underlying aims. Ma, of course, should always keep in mind that there has never been an Era of Jack Ma; it has always been the Chinese Era that created him, as one Chinese official newspaper publicly warned him as early as 2019.

As for those professional Chinese Americans who believe that they have missed the recent gold-digging opportunities in China and have started to doubt their earlier decision to go abroad, the crackdown on Ant—or more specifically, the broken dream of becoming a billionaire data scientist—has taught them a rather comforting lesson: miracles, whether for a country, a company, or an individual, are slippery. A boring yet relatively predictable middle-class suburban life in the West should at least be bearable, perhaps even enviable.

Juzimu is an ethnographic researcher of Chinese capitalist transitions and writes here under pseudonym.

Bibliography

Lewis, Leo, “What we can read into Jack Ma’s disappearance: Printed speech holds key to Alibaba founder’s invisibility — and rehabilitation”, Financial Times, January 8, 2021. https://www.ft.com/content/b3a94f55-5e44-417f-a869-a542d0527fe7

Yu, Chao, “Anti-Trust Rugulation is for Better Development,” Renmin Daily, Demember 25, 2020. http://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/html/2020-12/25/nw.D110000renmrb_20201225_3-07.htm

Zhong, Raymond & Cao Li, “Ant Challenged Beijing and Prospered. Now It Toes the Line.” The New York Times, Oct. 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/technology/ant-group-ipo-china.html?_ga=2.55348649.308985693.1613408960-1859810252.1601304805

CBNEditor, “Ant Group Has Established Rectification Team for Business Overhaul: Chinese Central Bank”, January 18, 2021, China Banking News, https://www.chinabankingnews.com/2021/01/18/ant-group-has-established-rectification-team-for-business-overhaul-chinese-central-bank/

“There Has Never Been an Era of Ma Yun; It Has Always Been the Chinese Era That Created Ma Yun,” People’s Financial Comments, September, 17, 2019.

Cite as: Juzima. 2021. “Jack Ma: Wherever the Wind Blows.” FocaalBlog, 8 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/08/juzimu-jack-ma-wherever-the-wind-blows/

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Bruce Kapferer and Roland Kapferer: The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities

Times are a Changing. The Trump phenomenon as a whole, his election, his presidency, the events of the Capitol, Joe Biden’s accession and Donald Trump’s impeachment are moments of radical process. They form a dynamic in and of themselves. They express the chaos and transition of the moment but they are also and at the same time forces in the transformation and transmutations of capitalism and world history, perhaps, with the complications of the COVID19 pandemic, virtually an axial moment, a switch or turning-point of crisis, as Don Kalb has argued on FocaalBlog early in the pandemic (Kalb 2020).

This involves a re-consideration of what is fast becoming the master narrative concerning Trump, with ideological implications of its own. Trump is presented as a spectre of a fascist past rather than a foretaste, a mediation into, the potential of an authoritarian totalitarian future involving major transmutations in capitalism. What follows concerning the Trump phenomenon is written with all this very much in mind. 

Our guess (a risky gamble in these times when almost anything seems possible) is that Trump will fade. There are doubtless many other political figures similar or worse who could take his place. With the going of Trump so may his “movement”. What crystallized around him was more an assemblage, a loose-knit heterogeneous, motely collection of diverse persons and groups ranging from the extreme far right to the more moderate, whose organizational cohesion may be more illusory than real. Not yet a political ‘Party Trump’ it is as likely to melt into air and go the way of most populist movements as it might congeal into a longer-lasting force of opposition headed by Trump.

This is not to gainsay the shock of the storming of the Capitol on the otherwise ritualistic day of the confirmation of Biden’s victory that concludes the liminal transitional period conventional in the US-American democratic cycle. Such a liminal space (Turner, 1969) is a relative retreat and suspension of the state political order as the presidency is renewed or changed. This is often a festive time given to all kinds of political excess when the people vent their potency in the selection of those who are to rule them. Trump encouraged and intensified the potential chaos of liminality at its peak when, ideally, it should subside and political order be fully restored. He aimed to disrupt this critical moment and to maintain his uncertain presence as the Lord of Misrule, if not necessarily to effect a coup. Named as “God’s chaos candidate” by some evangelicals who supported him, Trump promoted, even if unwittingly, a moment of extreme chaos that was all the more intense for the liminal moment of its occurrence when the participants themselves blew out of control.

Night of the World, Pandemonium at the Capitol

In the nightmare of the event, newscasts presented visions of a fascist future filled with Fascist and Nazi images and other commonly associated symbols. There was a strong sense of dialectical collapse along the lines of Hegel’s “Night of the World” of demonic appearances when forces in opposition dissipate against each other and lose their meaning. The representatives of the nation cowered under their desks fitting gas masks while those who would challenge them in festive mood and drunk with brief power put their feet up on desks aping their masters and carried off the mementos and spoils of their invasion. Exuberant chants of “this is our house” echoed down the corridors of power.

Shades of the past paraded in the present, foremost among them that of the enduring trauma of the rise of Nazi Germany.  What Sinclair Lewis had warned in It Can’t Happen Here – a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of the democratic world – anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s apotheosis, seemed to be actually materializing. This accounts for the excitement on the steps of the Capitol – “this is America 2021 y’all!!” Arlie Hochschild captured the millenarian Nuremberg feel of his campaign rallies when researching Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (Hochschild 2016), her excellent ethnography of the white far right and their sympathisers in Louisiana, America’s poorest state and a Donald Trump heartland. Hochschild recounts at a lecture to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin a scene, reminiscent of the opening frames of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, when Trump’s plane, “Trump Force One”, appears through the clouds and, as if from heaven it descends “down, down, down” to the waiting crowd; electrified in expectation of the saviour’s endlessly repeated sermon of redemption of the deep resentment that they felt for having been pushed aside from the promise of the American Dream. 

But here is the point: The immediate reaction to the storming of the Capitol gave further confirmation to the real and present danger of Trump’s fascist threat fuelled in the rumblings of class war which Trump has inflamed and exploited. It is a liberal fear, mainly of the Democrats but including some Republicans, who are the chief targets of Trump’s attacks. His demonisation of elite liberal value (marked by accusations of moral perversities aimed at unmasking the claims to virtue) is at one with his condemnation of the liberalism of Federal political and social economic policies which he presents as contributing to the abjection of mainly white US-American working class and poor; to be seen in the rapidly increasing power of global corporations, policies of economic globalization, the privileging of minorities, refugees, recent immigrants etc.

The 2012 Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C. tied to a large trailer. The truck cab has a sign that reads "From one national treasure to another."
Image 1: When surprises were minimal and manifest destiny kept on giving. The Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C., Nov. 26, 2012 (Foto: US Forest Service/Keith Riggs, accessed 8 Feb 2021)

It might be remembered at this point that the violence of the Capitol invasion–the marked involvement of military veterans, the carrying of weapons, baseball bats, the reports of pipe bombs–that shocked so many, reflects the fact that all modern states are founded on violence. This is particularly the case in the US where the US Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in defence of democratic rights. In an important sense the violence of those invading the Capitol refracts back at the middle class and especially the ruling elite the very violence that underpins the structure of their rule. If liberal virtue was shocked by the events on January 6 it was also confronted with the violent paradox deep in its democratic heart (see Palmer 2021). Thus, this paradox slips into paroxysm at this critical moment in American political history.

The transitional figure of Trump feeds on the prejudices of his intended constituencies and exploits an already ill-formed class awareness building on ready commitments and vulnerabilities – the well-rehearsed fascist and populist technique – creating indeed a false consciousness (there is no other way to say it) that is not only destructive but in the hands of the likes of Trump integral to intensifying the feelings of impotence and the miseries that give Trump his relative popularity. Slavoj Zizek says as much in what he describes as “Trump’s GREATEST TREASON”.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘The Governator,’ was quick to counter the white supremacist, macho, Proud Boy, Oath Keeper and Three Percenter elements highly visible in media newscasts with a Conan the Barbarian performance. This was his take on the dominant brand of Make America Great Again. (Really, all those along the political spectrum participate in MAGA – Democrat Party badges and hats from the recent election read “Dump Trump Make America Great Again”). He focussed on his own immigration away from his native Austria and its Nazi associations to the liberated American world of his success. For Schwarzenegger, the Capitol invasion and its vandalism equated to Kristallnacht. Noam Chomsky likens the storming with Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 observing that it effected a greater penetration to the heart of power than did Hitler’s failed attempt. But Chomsky, with characteristic acuity, adds that the fascist danger lies in the anti-democratic class forces (including electoral and political manipulations on all sides) that provide the fertile ground for fascism; forces that have acutely and early been pinpointed by anthropologists (Holmes 2000, 2020; Kalb and Halmai 2011; Kalb, forthcoming).

But the point must be taken further. New class formations are in the making right now and they are being driven in the explosive nature of technological revolution (see Smith 2020). This is something Marx himself was very much aware of and why he wrote more than one hundred pages on the machine and the human in Capital. This is also the concern of Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (2002) and the continued focus of today’s accelerationists such as the Nick Srnicek (2017) on platform capitalism.

Creative Destruction, the Transmutation in Capital and Corporate State Formation

The rise and fall of Trump (not discounting the possibility that Humpty Dumpty might come together again, which is the fear of the master narrative) may be understood as expressing a transition between two moments of capitalism during which one formation morphs into another. Trump is the embodiment, instrument, and anguish of this transition, a tragic figure in a theatre of the absurd. Grand Guignol almost, but in Gothic American Horror Story style. The accession of Biden is the apotheosis of the new in the hopes of most; he is a vehicle for healing the divisions in the U.S. that Trump brought to a head and are still very much present. But Biden’s rise has ominous oppressive indications of its own.

The Trump events have all the hallmarks of the crisis and rupture of transformation or, better, transmutation. The millenarian spirit that Hochschild captures in her account is one born in the capitalist ideology of the American Dream; fortified in the religious fundamentalism of Trump’s many followers that revitalizes their hopes in that American Dream in the face of abject failure. The rallies and the impassioned actions of those invading the Capitol are filled with revitalizing energy.

Such millenarian explosions, distinct in their own historical contexts, occur at many other points in global history. It was apparent at the dawn of capitalism in Europe, at later moments of crisis and redirection in capitalism up to the present – indeed at the inception of the Nazi horror, and at points of the disruptive expansion of capital in the western imperial/colonial thrust as in the Cargo movements of the Pacific (Cohn 1970, Lanternari 1960, Worsley 1970 (1959); Neveling 2014 for a link between Cargo Cults and neoliberal capitalism).

The rupture of transmutation in capital, the crisis that the Trumpian progress manifests, is an instance of what Marx and others have understood to be the creative/destruction dynamic of capital; whereby it reproduces, renews, revitalizes its potency against contradictions and limitations to its profit motive that capital generates within itself as well as those thrown up against it in the very process of its own expansion and transformation.

The circumstances underpinning the current transmutation in capital relate to the revolutions in science and technology those associated particularly with the digital age and advances in biotechnology). The rapid development of capital (and especially that of the still dominant, if declining, US-American form) was driven by the innovations in knowledge and technology (something that Marx and many others admired in US-America). What became known as the nation state (the dominant political form that nurtured capital) and the class orders that were generated in capitalism and necessary to it (not to mention the over-population and ecological disasters that grew in capital’s wake) also constituted barriers and limitations to capital’s growth.

The new technological revolutions are a response to the limitations on capital emergent within its own processes. Technological innovations enabled revolutions in production and consumption, creating new markets and increasing consumption, reducing the need for human labour and the resistances it brings with it, overcoming problems, and opening up novel lines, of distribution; forcing the distress of unemployment (especially among the erstwhile working class), creating impoverishment and uncertainties reaching into once affluent middle classes as captured in the neologism ‘the precariat’; shifting class alignments; redefining the nature and value of work, of the working day, the expansion of zero hours and, as an overarching manifestation, a sense of the return of a bygone era.

The current technological revolution is a key factor in the extraordinary growth in the monopolizing strength of corporations such as Google, Amazon or even Tencent. The dot.com organizations (the flagships and spearheads of capitalist transformation with huge social transmutational effect) have wealth that dwarfs many states and they are functioning in areas once controlled by the state (from what used to be public services to the current race to colonize space). Indeed the corporate world has effectively invaded and taken over the operation of nation-states (Kapferer 2010; Kapferer and Gold 2018).

This is most noteworthy in those state orders influenced by histories of liberal social democracy, in Europe and Australia for example, which tended to draw a sharp demarcation between public interest and private enterprise. The nation-state and its apparatuses of government and institutions for public benefit have been corporatized so much so that in many cases government bureaucracies have not only had their activities outsourced to private companies but also have adopted managerial styles and a ruthlessness along the lines of business models. The corporatization of the state has aligned it much more closely with dominant economic interests in the private (now also public) sectors than before and enables a bypassing of state regulation, even that which once sustained capitalist interest, but which became an impediment to capitalist expansion.

These changes have wrought socio-economic and political disruption and distress globally and most especially in the Western hemisphere. This is not merely collateral damage. The revolution in science and technology has been a key instrument in effecting social and political changes via destruction, for the regenerative expansion of capital. It is central to the re-imagination of capital in the opening of the twenty-first century.

This is particularly so in the United States whose socio-political order is historically one of corporate state formation which accounts for its long-term global political economic domination. Some renewal in leftist thought (e.g. with Bernie Sanders) is an index of the depth of distress that is being experienced although the ideological and counteractive potency of the American Dream fuelled especially in fundamentalist Christianity suppresses such potential and contributes to the intensity and passion of the Trump phenomenon. The ideological distinction of the Trump event aside, its dynamic of populism is reflected throughout the globe (Kalb 2021)

One common feature of this is the rejection of the political systems associated with nation state orders and, to a marked extent the largely bipartite party systems vital in the discourses of control and policy in nation states. Trumpism and other populist movements (in Europe notably) complain of the alienation of the state and its proponents from interests of the mass. The expansion of corporatization and the further hollowing out of the state, the corruption of its public responsibilities by corporate interests, is effectively what Trump was furthering in his presidency. It is a potent dimension of the Trump paradox and a major irony of the Capitol invasion that, for all the apparent fascist tendencies, it was the spirit of reclaiming democracy (admittedly of the freebooting kind) in an already highly corporatized establishment (subject to great corporate capitalist interest) that Trump’s actions were directed to. An important figure in this respect is the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The tech billionaire, early investor in Facebook and founder of PayPal, was an early Trump supporter and named a part of Trump’s transition team in 2016. His book, Zero to One, based on his lecture courses at Stanford University, argues for a corporate-technocratic governance beyond older systems of government. (Thiel 2014).

From Panopticon to Coronopticon

COVID-19 has highlighted the social devastation of the destructive/creative dynamic of capitalism’s transmutation (see also Kalb 2020). The class and associated ethnic inequities have everywhere been shown up and probably intensified by a pandemic that is starting to equal, if not surpass, the depressing and devastating effect of two world wars. Like them it is clearing ground for capitalist exploitative expansion – something like Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism (Klein 2007).

Under the shadow of the virus, labour demands are being rationalized, the cutting back of employment and its benefits legitimated, governments are pumping capital into the economies in a way that protects consumption in an environment where there is declining occupational opportunity and income. The idea of the universal basic income is seriously discussed. Its implementation would offset some of the contradictions in a transformation of capitalism that is reducing our dependence on labour and endangering consumption through automation and digitalization. While the poor are getting poorer the rich are getting richer; most notably those heading the revolutionary technologies of the digital age and biotechnology, with the competitive race to secure viable vaccines against the virus one example for the latter sector’s power.

There is a strange synchronicity linking the pandemic with the dynamic of capitalism’s transmutational corporatization of the state. The virus reproduces and spreads in a not dissimilar dynamic. Indeed, COVID 19 in some ecological understandings is the product of the acceleration of globalization effected in those processes of capitalism’s transmutation associated with corporate expansion and the corporatization of the nation state. As a crossover from animal to human bodies the virus is one manifestation of increased human population pressure on wild animal territory, the closer intermeshing of animal and human terrain. The scale of the pandemic is, of course, a direct consequence of the time space contraction and intensity of the networked interconnections of globalization.

State surveillance has intensified as a by-product of combatting COVID which is also its legitimation, with digitalization as the major surveillance instrument. The digital penetration into every nook and cranny of social life (see Zuboff2019, and Netflix’s The Social Dilemma), is interwoven with the commodification of the social and personal for profit – economizing individuals calculating the costs and benefits of their social ‘interactions’ (the YouTube or Kuaishou ‘influencer,’ the hype TED talker as Foucault’s entrepreneurial self, cut, pasted, uploaded and remixed).

The management of Covid-19, demanding social isolation and the disruption of ordinary social life, has exponentially increased the role of the digital as the primary mediator of the social and a commanding force in its very constitution. Covid-19 has been revealed as a kind of social particle accelerator. As such, and ever more exclusively so, the real of the social, is being re-imagined, re-engineered and re-mastered as a digital-social, a ‘Digisoc’ or ‘Minisoc,’ constrained and produced within algorithmically preset parameters. Here is Peter Weir’s film, The Truman Show, radically updated. And, as with Truman, the space of freedom is also and at the same time experienced as a space of unfreedom.

This manifests in the deep ambivalence many feel about the new technologies they daily live with and through. The digitized social is often presented as a new agora, a liberating ‘space’ in which new, progressive ideas and directions are enabled, operationalized and indeed optimized. The internet has become a site of multiple struggles in which class forces and new potentials for social difference and proliferating identity-claims are continually emerging. The freedom of the internet has provided exciting opportunities for many. Such freedom also and at the same time contributes to conspiracy imaginations on all sides. As has been made clear in the two elections featuring Trump, the superpower of corporations like Google and Facebook threatens to install a domain of hyper-control. Digital walls and electronic fences are appearing everywhere in the age of the global ‘splinternet.’

The hegemonic and totalizing potential for the ruling bodies of the corporatizing state who control the digital is as never before. This is so not just in the global scale of the network reach but in the heightened degree to which controlling bodies can form the ground of the social, radically remodel, engineer and design reality in accordance with dominant interests, and where motivated shut out that which threatens their order. The awareness of this has driven the fury of censorship and self-censorship on all sides – Trump’s threatened TikTok ban becomes Twitter’s actual Trump ban.

Back in Some Form: From 1984 into a Brave New World

Trump and Trumpism are moments in the transitional, transmutational process of capitalism outlined above and of the formation of new social and political orders. Echoing the past, they express its transmutation (and its agonies) rather than repeat it. Trump and Trumpism manifest the contradictions of such processes, agents and agencies for the transmutations in the social and political circumstances of life that are in train, themselves forces in the bringing forth of a future that, in some aspects, is already being lived.

Trump himself can be described as an “in-betweener”, a bridge into the new realities, both a force in their realization and a victim. His manner and style, the brutal no holds barred amorality is familiar from the captains of industry and robber barons of an earlier age, who built capitalist America and crushed working-class resistance by all means, more foul than fair. Trump maintains the style but in reverse redemptive mode. In his shape-shift he presents as supporter of the working classes not their nemesis as did his forerunners.

However, his authoritarian business manner, of The Apprentice’s “you’re fired” fame, matches well the managerialism of the present. He is an exemplar of contemporary venture capitalism and most especially of profit from non-industrial production (often anti production) gained from real estate, property transfer, asset stripping, and the expanding gaming and gambling industries (their importance as symptoms of the crises of transformation in capital) from which some of Trump’s key supporters come.

Trump’s reactive anti-immigrant nationalism and “Make America Great Again” rhetoric not only appeals to the white right but is an engagement of past rhetoric to support new political and economic realities. Trump’s economic war with China stressed re-industrialization but it was also concerned with counteracting China’s technological ascendancy, especially in the realm of the digital, a major contradiction born of the current globalizing transmutation in capitalism involving transfers of innovatory knowledge.

Trump anticipated the risk to his presidential re-election. It manifested the dilemmas of his in-betweenness. His inaction with regard to the pandemic was consistent with the anti “Big Government” policies of many Republicans and the US-American right who cherish QAnon conspiracy theories as much as they want to reduce government interference and modify regulation in capitalist process, a strong emphasis in current transitions and transformations of the state and of capital.

Trump’s cry that the election was being stolen was excited in the circumstances of the pandemic. His attack on postal votes related to the fact that the pandemic gave the postal vote a hitherto unprecedented role in the election’s outcome by by-passing and neutralising the millenarian populist potency of his mass rallies already reduced in numbers by fear. Trump sensed that the COVID-inspired move to ‘working from home’ and ‘voting from home’ would challenge, fence in and fence out his base of support.

Trump has always taken advantage of the digital age, his use of Twitter and Facebook the marked feature of his style of rule. His practices looked forward to the politics of the future ever increasingly bounded and conditioned in societies of the image. Following the events at the Capitol, Trump’s own Custer’s Last Stand to allay his fate, his cyberspace and internet accounts were switched off. He has been cancelled by the new digitally authoritarian corporate powers (who arguably benefitted the most from the Trump era and profited greatly under pandemic conditions) who are behind the growing new society of the image, in which he was a past-master and within which he had in the main established his identity. (Kapferer R, 2016)

The overriding image of the Capitol invasion and carried across most networks is that of the occupation of the heart of American democracy by those who would threaten its ideals. The media have concentrated on what was the dominating presence of the extremist macho white US-American far right violently parading symbols of a racist past combined with clear references to the not-so-distant memories of fascism and Nazism. There were others there more moderate in opinion and representative of other class fractions, if still mostly white, whose presence does not reduce the fear of fascism, possibly as in Nazi Germany when what seemed to be small groups of extremists hijacked power (and the events of the Capitol evokes such memory) to unleash the horrors to follow. Something similar could be said for what happened in the Soviet Union leading to Stalinism. These were the worlds of George Orwell’s 1984, in which some of the major ideals of the time flipped in their tragic negation. Such events were very much emergent in realities of the nation-state, its imperialist wars and the class forces of that particular historical moment in the history of capitalism and the formations of its social and political orders. There is no statement here that this could not happen again.

What we are saying is this: a different authoritarian and oppressive possibility may be taking shape – not of the fascist past but of the future. This is a future that Trump was mediating but which may be coming into realization, despite the great hope to the contrary, in the accession of President Biden. Perhaps this prospect can be seen as more akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World born in the current transmutations of capital (and its agonies of class) and in the circumstances of the radical technological revolutions of the digital era, involving the apotheosis of the corporatisation of the state, the corporate state emerging out of the ruins of the nation state.

Aldous Huxley depicted a world centred on production and efficiency, a bio technologically conditioned global system of perfect rational, optimised order. The class conflicts of the past are overcome here; everyone accepts their predetermined place. It is a post-human reality in which the foundation of human beings in their biology and passions is transcended. It is a somatised, artificially intelligent world of the image and promiscuity. Indeed, the American Dream. Those who do not fit or who resist are fenced out. Time and space are being reconfigured, incurving around the individual and ‘personalised.’

Biden’s inauguration for all its upbeat ceremonial spirit had some intimation of such a future, taking into full account the security constraints of its moment: to protect against the murderous unchecked rampage of the virus and the threat of the attack of right-wing militias. The stress on this, it may be noted, had an ideological function to distance what was about to come into being from, for example, the definitely more visceral world of Trump and thoroughly evident in the invasion of the Capitol – what Biden in his inauguration speech called an “uncivil war.”

The scene of the perfectly scripted inauguration was virtually devoid of people. Apart from the dignitaries and all-important celebrities, the highly selected order of the society of the corporate-state. Where the general populace would normally crowd, was an emptiness filled with flags and protected by troops, more than currently are stationed in Afghanistan. Those who might disrupt, Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘resistant savages,’ were fenced out. It was a totalizing and constructed digital media image presenting a reality of control, harmony, and absolute surveillance.

We claim that something like Trump and the events surrounding him would have happened regardless of the specific phenomena we have focussed on here. The events Trump are a moment, perhaps among the most intense, in the transitional transmutation of the history of capitalism and the socio-economic and political orders which build and change around it. The apparent chaos indicates a major axial moment in world history – a chaos driven in the emergence of a cybernetic techno-capitalist apparatus on a global scale. What might be augured in the Biden accession is already taking vastly different shape in China and elsewhere around the globe. New and diverse formations of totalitarian authoritarianism are emerging. The Trump phenomenon is crucial for an understanding of some of the potentials of a future that we are all very much within and that an overconcentration on the parallels with the past may too easily obscure.

Bruce Kapferer is a roving anthropologist and ethnographer, Professor Emeritus at Bergen University, Professorial Fellow UCL, Fellow Cairns Institute, and the Director of the ERC Egalitarianism project at the University of Bergen.

Roland Kapferer is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Deakin University, a filmmaker and a musician. He does research on cybertechnologies.

Cite as: Kapferer, Bruce, and Roland Kapferer. 2021. “The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities.” FocaalBlog, 2 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/02/bruce-kapferer-roland-kapferer-the-trump-saga-and-americas-uncivil-war-new-totalitarian-authoritarian-possibilities/

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Remembering Leith Mullings (1945 – 2020)

Image 1: Leith Mullings Official Website; an invaluable repository for Black feminist anticapitalist anthropology (Screenshot from page; http://leithmullings.com, 17 Feb 2021)

Leith Mullings, Social Justice Anthropologist

Jeff Maskovsky, City University of New York

Leith Mullings’ death is a terrible blow to anthropology – and a heartbreaking loss to those of us who were lucky enough to have worked and collaborated with her.  For many of us, Leith’s death, which happened on December 13, 2020, is still almost too much to bear.  It would have been hard to accept under normal circumstances, but to have it happen so unexpectedly – and in the context of the Trump insurrection and the extended COVID emergency, when so many of us are already feeling so much vulnerability, grief, fear, isolation, and uncertainty – makes it feel terrible in a way that, at the very least, reveals the deep inadequacies of standard academic grieving rituals.  And yet, here I go.

Leith was a leading figure of the Black Left who established a pathbreaking form of anthropological praxis that was deeply aligned with the struggle for the worldwide emancipation of Black people.  Her praxis was rooted in Black feminism, in the centering of African American working class women’s lives in broader theorizing about political economy, kinship, representation, and resistance, and in emphasizing the importance of social movements involving people of the African diaspora in struggles for justice and equality.  The influence of her work is especially remarkable given the reactionary status quo in anthropology of the last three decades, which, let’s face it, has a very poor track record of providing institutional and intellectual space to Black women scholars.  Fortunately, Leith, her allies, and her students worked over many decades to legitimate Black feminist materialist approaches in a discipline that to this day remains reluctant to give them the attention they deserve.

A remarkable aspect of Leith’s anthropology is the specific and subtle ways that she imparted antiracist political sensibilities into it.  For Leith, as for many other scholars, racism, sexism, and capitalism were co-constitutive of overlapping systems of oppression, exploitation, violence, subordination, and discrimination.  What made Leith’s work unique was her insistence on the power of antiracist activism and organizing to interrupt, unsettle, and contest the system’s hierarchies and inequalities.  In her long-term ethnographic study of African American women’s health in Harlem, for example, she and her co-author Alaka Wali consider race, class and gender not as attributes of low-income women of color who suffer from ill health.  Rather, they see race, class and gender more dynamically, as a set of interconnected relationalities that shape health outcomes in complex ways.  In her famous elaboration of Sojourner Syndrome, the survival strategy of resilience adopted by African American women to support their families and communities, Leith emphasizes not just the resilience that living under the yoke of multiplicative oppressions requires of them and how this stresses them out, but also the importance of Black community struggles for autonomy, power and control.  Along similar lines, in her work on racisms in the Americas, and on Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, Leith showed how new movements build on Black freedom struggles from the past to contest the co-production of racism and capitalism. In a Left intellectual context in which identity politics is frequently disparaged and class universalism reigns, Leith’s was an essential and powerful voice whose work demonstrated the significance of transnational antiracist activism and organizing: what she called “racialization from below.” Across more than 40 years of intellectual work, she provided irrefutable evidence that intersectional struggles have connected targets and effects.  Let us hope that others who are committed to justice and equality pay attention to this important lesson.

Decades after prominent scholars called for decolonizing anthropology, US anthropology still attracts too few Black, Indigenous and Latinx students. In the wake of the Black insurgent activism of last year, abolitionist theories and methods are slowly gaining traction but are not nearly as widespread as they should be.  The task of emancipating critical historical ethnographic scholarship from anthropology’s imperial and white supremacist present remains an enormous challenge.  A new generation of US-based Black anthropologists are influenced by Afropessimist arguments about antiblack world building and the exclusion of Black people from the category of the human. They are looking for ways to incorporate class into their analyses.  This effort is not helped along by a Left anthropology that only gives lip service to race and gender in its anticapitalist critique. Fortunately, there is Leith’s work. Her illumination of Black women’s experience of work, kinship, and community life, her attention to overlapping systems of oppression, exploitation and discrimination, and her pioneering approach to the study of social movements serve as inspiration to all scholars who are searching for a way to move past the tired old race vs. class. vs. gender argument, who wish to take capitalism, racism and sexism seriously, and who seek to reconcile these differences in a unified emancipatory framework.

For Leith Mullings

Don Robotham, City University of New York

I first met Leith Mullings as a doctoral student in the anthropology department of the University of Chicago in 1967. Based on our common background and interests, we quickly became friends—part of a group of progressive students on the eve of the Martin Luther King assassination and the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Those were tumultuous years, formative for both of us. Later, she joined me for fieldwork in Ghana and remained close friends thereafter.

Leith was a remarkable person who was able somehow to manage the feat of successfully raising two wonderful children, political activism, developing her large body of scholarship, rising to the top of her profession while being a major interlocutor for her partner’s intellectual work and those of her colleagues and friends. She was deeply committed to the Black struggle first and foremost and always put this in a larger context of the struggle against racism and all forms of oppression of all peoples worldwide.

Her experience of 1968 and after made her a political economist and she never wavered from that position or methodology. The principal focus of her work was racial oppression as it interacted with class oppression, gender and health, with the emphasis decidedly on the first. From her earliest work on mental health issues in Accra, Ghana, through her book on reproductive health in Harlem to her most recent project on racial oppression of indigenous and African-descended peoples in Latin America, it was the issue of the material basis of racial oppression on which her work was focused. This broad experience and sweep led Leith to the view that racial oppression was by no means a local or national phenomenon of the United States of America but one with deep historical global roots. Thus, over time she was led naturally towards the intersectionality concept as a fundamental tool for understanding oppression and, what was critical for her, laying the basis for a politics of transformation.

We had many debates on the many challenges which this approach raised, principally around how much weight to give to class, as distinct from race and gender, and indeed, whether it was possible or fruitful to make such distinctions. She would generally hold to the race end and I to the class end with gender falling in-between in terms of analytical priority. Leith well understood that adopting the intersectionality concept did not quite resolve the issue but sharpened it: how and why these forces ‘intersected’ and which, if any, was analytically or politically prior remained to be answered, theoretically and empirically via fieldwork. Thus, our debates raged before and through our current political crisis prior to the 2020 US Presidential election.

Leith gave as good as she got, indeed usually one came out on the losing end. She was deeply grounded in both the classics of political economy and a wide range of anthropological research. It was impossible to impress her with theoretical acrobatics. Her combination of academic knowledge and practical political experience made her a formidable interlocutor and scholar. Her devotion to her students and her conscientiousness in the exercise of her doctoral supervision duties was something to behold. Few could compete with her in the quality of the voluminous comments and stylistic guidance provided. While always sympathetic, she insisted that high standards of scholarship be maintained especially when a thesis was addressing radical experiences, as many were. Her scholarly integrity was impeccable and unchallenged, and she enjoyed the wide respect of many who strongly disagreed with her theoretical and political positions.

Leith Mullings was very much a product of the 1960s and 1970s. Like many of us, she was deeply influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Revolution, the Anti-Vietnam War struggle and especially 1968. She has added to that tradition of intellectual and political struggle in a lasting way, always insisting that oppression had a material foundation, the analysis and transformation of which should be the focus of our work and life. We have lost a wonderful, kind, human being, scholar and activist, when we can least afford to.

The editorial boards of Focaal and FocaalBlog join our colleagues and friends in remembering the life and work of Leith Mullings; a scholar and activist who has shaped our scholarship and politics.

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Prem Kumar Rajaram: The Moral Economy of Precarity

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The authors of The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) have made visible the inequality and hierarchy that has become increasingly normalized in higher education in Europe. The impact of the report lies far beyond anthropology, and my reflections here build on the report’s key findings and consider the impact of precaritization on the university and academia as a whole.

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Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Ela Drążkiewicz: Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

I was reluctant to contribute to this blog series. The recently published EASA report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) draws attention to precarious labour in anthropology. However, in the last decade we seem to have been talking about precarity in academia non-stop. There is even a nickname for the genre: “quit lit”. So, what, I wondered, would my story change?

Indeed, I have been telling my story to many colleagues, including to those in positions of power. A few colleagues proved to be wonderful allies, offering kindness, compassion, and practical support. However, quite a few showed little empathy or solidarity, and displayed a strong appetite for power. While academic credentials are key to building a career in academia, personal reputation also matters tremendously. You depend upon your colleagues for recommendation letters. This is even more true when you become an ‘internal candidate’ (the sort of candidate that you, as an international migrant, hated until you finally became one yourself). So you learn to please everybody, to be a “good girl”: not to question your Line Manager in meetings, and surely never, ever, in front of others; do not criticise your institution in public; never make demands; say yes to everything; never complain; do not admit you struggle; and most importantly, show endless gratitude.

When, after almost seven years of working at my last institution (where I arrived from Cambridge with my own Marie Curie grant) my third temporary contract was coming to an end, a group of undergraduates (without my knowledge) decided to collect signatures in support of me. However, at the last minute, they hesitated to go public. They revealed their plans to me and asked, “What if it causes more harm than good?” Even though they were new to academia, they already sensed that critique and bottom-up citizen action might be a great topic for an academic paper, but is not necessarily appreciated at the university offices. For me, the students’ support was moving, not least because it was evidence that I am good at my job – despite the stream of job rejections suggesting otherwise. My students appreciated my research insights and my pedagogical skills, and were willing to take a risk. Yet I feared that it would indeed be seen as an affront and a betrayal. I felt deeply insecure and was afraid of being accused of actually initiating the protest myself. I could be branded as a troublemaker. And who would ever want to hire a troublemaker? 

I was also reluctant to contribute to this important discussion on precarity because I do not wish to be viewed through the lens of the precariat. I want to be known for my craft, not my struggle. After all, we are professional academics, not humans. But, most importantly, I am still struck by the feeling that there is a stigma attached to being a precarious worker.The myth of meritocracy promotes a certain narrative: academic success is based on talent, skill, and accomplishment. Moreover, this is not a mere job, but a vocation, requiring sacrifice. Failure therefore suggests that you are just not good enough, or lazy, an old maid in the academic family. If you struggle, perhaps it’s because you just don’t have what it takes? Maybe you have chosen the wrong job?

Academic labour relations are the perfect field for gaslighting and undermining the abilities and achievements of scholars who are not in a position of power. They also lead to segregation and isolation. In the highly competitive academic market, people are easily reduced to the amounts of identifiable social capital they can offer. If you represent the elite, why would you associate with the academic proletariat?

Furthermore, I did not want to write this blog post because it is embarrassing. How could I be so naïve as to find myself part of a Ponzi scheme? Universities and full professors profit from the accelerated recruitment of people in lower ranks. The more junior scholars you recruit, the less teaching you have to do; they will do it for you. You have more time for research, publishing, networking, gaining ever more valuable ‘academic currency’ in an exponential fashion. The more PhDs you recruit, the more prestige comes to you and your institution. You can build your clan, your estate, your power. The more post-docs you recruit, the better your publication record (the most important academic currency). The goal is therefore the constant expansion of the pool of dependent early-career scholars. The problem is, how to lure them in? In academia, this is done by the promise of permanent, stable, respectable jobs, and the myth of meritocracy: if you work hard, with talent, if you do everything by the book, you will obtain success. But, as the EASA report clearly points out, this is often a false promise.

And here is the final reason for my initial hesitation to write: I am exhausted. I finally obtained the holy grail of academia: a permanent job! I now have the chance to rid myself of the stigma, move on, forget. So why would I go back now and get myself involved in this discussion, associate myself with rebellion, with a fight that is no longer mine? Why would I throw myself back into this mud? I worked so hard to get out of it!

Yet, I decided to write. Because I don’t want to be part of an academia run as a rat race. Because I know intimately about the suffering of the precariat. For those of you, who have never been in that position, think of your pandemic experience: remember March 2020, overwhelmed with teaching because of the unexpected new rules of the game, having to adjust your teaching overnight. This is how many precarious workers feel every September. Scholars who move between institutions have to learn the new rules of the game all the time, prepare new courses, adjust to new environments. Remember, the frustration when senior (often male) colleagues were excited that they would finally have time to publish, while you were drowning in teaching and caring duties? Did you start to stress about your job security, funding cuts, redundancy? These are the daily stresses and frustrations of those in the early career stages. Was it fun to have Christmas or Easter over Zoom, to not see your parents, grandparents? This is how many international precarious workers have been spending Christmas for years. You might also now be familiar with the pressure of caring for your children non-stop. This is the recurrent reality of many of those in the international precariat who have children, but no family networks at hand to help, and who cannot afford a sitter or day care. Did you feel lonely in the pandemic? Are you fed up talking to friends on WhatsApp and would like to see them in person? This is the constant reality of so many international scholars lured by the myths of the Ponzi scheme that academia is, trapped in a precarious limbo.

Many young precarious workers are international migrants, and as such they make good workers. Uprooted from their personal networks, with no relatives to visit on Sunday, they are available to work extra hours. They also have a lot to lose: they have already made so many heavy financial and personal sacrifices for their academic careers that it is very hard for them to change course, which means they are ready to do anything and everything, especially if they are given the hope of another contract. They are also easily replaceable and disposable as often they are excluded from academic patronage networks. Often, they have little or no connection with an Alma Mater of their own. For their new institutions, they are just foreigners who have arrived for their own gain. There is an unspoken assumption that they will leave. Consequently, few feel a moral responsibility for them. They are also highly vulnerable to discrimination based on nationality or race, both within and beyond the workplace. It is shameful that this exploitation happens in academia, particularly in anthropology, where so many careers were built on researching exploitation, migration, and indeed, precarious lives. 

Ela Drążkiewicz is a researcher at the Institute for Sociology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Institutional Dreams: The Art of Managing Foreign Aid. She specialises in political, economic and organisational anthropology.  

Bibliography

Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Cite as: Drążkiewicz, Ela. 2021. “Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia.” FocaalBlog, 5 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/05/ela-drazkiewicz-blinded-by-the-light-international-precariat-in-academia/

Blog

Stephen Campbell: What can workers expect in post-coup Myanmar?

International media coverage of the February 1st military coup in Myanmar has been rather consistent. The focus, overwhelmingly, has been on the detention of State Counsellor and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, with speculations about the political machinations of Myanmar’s commander-and-chief, Min Aung Hlaing. In this way, the developing story has orbited around the theme of liberal democracy in peril, for which Suu Kyi in detention serves as synecdoche. What such a focus misses, however, is the very real threat the coup poses to millions of ordinary workers and their families across the country.

Already by late January 2021, Min Aung Hlaing had hinted of a possible coup. But still, the events of February 1st came as a shock to many inside the country and abroad. Claiming widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 elections, which delivered Aung San Suu Kyi’s ruling National League for Democracy a resounding victory, the military deployed troops to urban centres, detained Suu Kyi and other senior government officials, and declared a nationwide state of emergency this past Monday.

Online commentary has been rife with speculation. Was the coup motivated by Min Aung Hlaing’s presidential ambitions? Or was is it simply a matter of plain stupidity? The latter assertion claims plausibility on the grounds that the military itself drafted the 2008 constitution, which enshrined its role in government even before the coup by way of apportioned parliamentary seats and reserved ministerial positions. And it was a lucrative arrangement. With sprawling business interests under two expansive holding companies and other nepotistic business arrangements, the generals were collecting vast profits, much of it from mining and other extractive industries in the country’s north and northeast. Whatever the motivations behind the coup, little is certain at present. What is clear, however, is that the state of emergency has raised anxieties among the millions of workers and their families who were already struggling to get by in the industrial zones around Yangon (where I have done research since 2016) and elsewhere in the country.

Image 1: Striking garment factory workers in the Hlaingtharyar industrial zone outside Yangon (Yaung Chi Oo Workers Association, 2019).

Working class struggles

The working-class population in Yangon’s industrial zones comprises mostly former villagers pushed out of rural areas due to unmanageable debt, the infrastructural devastation of 2008’s Cyclone Nargis, and outright theft of their land by military and private business interests. As real estate speculation and elitist urban development over the past ten years drove up the cost of housing, hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in the city were priced out of formal accommodation and turned instead to cheaper squatter housing on the city’s outskirts. Many of these new urban residents sought employment in food and other processing factories producing for the domestic market, or at garment factories producing for export. By 2018, over a million workers—mostly young women, including many squatters—were employed in garment, textile, footwear, and accessories factories in Myanmar—mostly around Yangon. In this context, workers at factories and workplaces across Yangon’s industrial zones have over the past decade organised collectively, formed unions, and gone on strike in impressive struggles against employer intransigence and outright violence. Such struggles pre-date the country’s so-called democratic transition that began in 2011, which was also the year new labour legalisation granted workers a legal right to form unions. So, while the new labour law cannot be credited with empowering workers, it did grant them greater legal space in which to organise.

Covid-19

Then Covid-19 happened. A shortage of supplies from the People’s Republic of China in February 2020 led to factory closures and an initial loss of 10,000 to 15,000 jobs, and by September, 223 factories had filed for closure, temporary closure, or redundancy following a government-mandated lockdown. Meanwhile, factory employers used the pretext of Covid-19 disruption to fire unionised workers in mass, while police intervened to break up strikes and arrest organisers. With no effective social safety net in the country, dismissed factory workers have been struggling under the pandemic—taking on further debt, reducing food consumption, and in some cases turning to sex work to support their families. And all of this was before the military coup. Indeed, the day before the military seized power, I was editing a funding report for activist friends in Yangon who had formed a sewing cooperative to support factory workers fired during Covid-19 for their union organising activities.

Another state of emergency

Under these already grim conditions, the declared state of emergency portends even more dire circumstances for workers and their families. A Myanmar labour activist group, Alokthema Awlan [The Workers’ Megaphone], shared online the results of impromptu interviews conducted on the day of the coup with factory workers in the Hlaingtharyar industrial zone, outside Yangon. Respondents spoke of fears of food shortages and temporary store closures, which led to panic buying and drove up prices of basic foodstuffs.

It remains unclear what the status of Myanmar labour law will be under the state of emergency, but there is little to suggest that space for worker organising will do anything but contract. Some workers have already expressed concern that existing labour law will be abrogated or simply disregarded. To get their views on the matter (and since I am in Singapore), a Burmese labour activist friend of mine interviewed, a couple days after the coup, several women employed at garment factories in the Hlaingtharyar industrial zone. One woman, who has been active in her local workplace union, stated:

“Now that the military has taken power, I’m worried the situation will go back to the way it was before [under military rule] and that the workers won’t have any rights anymore. Also, we were told that the [legal minimum] wage was going to be increased in the coming months. The young workers were hoping for that. But now we don’t expect that there’ll be an increase. It’ll be as though we’ve lost our rights. And with the military taking power, it’ll be like it was before, and employers will oppress the workers and reduce their wages. That’s what I expect.”

Trade unions in Myanmar’s global factories

As a precedent, over the two decades of direct military rule from 1988 to 2011, trade unions were prohibited, and police violently repressed workers’ attempts to organise and bargain collectively. Even under Myanmar’s so-called democratic transition (from 2011 to the present), police regularly intervened on the side of employers to repress workers’ struggles. Factories producing for the domestic market have routinely paid below the legal minimum wage, forced employees to work overtime, employed child labour, and violated manifold workplace health and safety laws. Even garment factories producing for export have been in widespread violation of legal labour standards, notwithstanding their greater likelihood of paying the minimum wage and avoiding child labour. Under such conditions, many workers who took their grievances to the government’s industrial relations offices encountered reluctance, evasiveness, and outright collusion with employers by government appointed mediators. Said one such factory worker whom I interviewed in 2019:

“The official at the Township Conciliation Body would say just a little on the side of the workers and would say a lot on the side of the employer. I don’t think that he was trying to achieve justice… I think that the employer and the official were working together.”

“Good” liberal government versus an illiberal military?

Such egregious conditions even before the coup—for industrial workers, but also for impoverished rural dwellers and ethnic minority civilians displaced by ongoing armed conflict elsewhere in the country—raise important caveats for emerging lines of analysis that would frame recent developments in Myanmar as a struggle between a “good” liberal government ousted by an illiberal military. Such was the dominant trope in Burma analysis during the 1990s and early 2000s. It allowed NLD politicians, foreign media, and Western governments to narrowly construe popular opposition to military rule in Myanmar as a singular desire for liberal capitalism and bourgeoise democracy. Military sympathisers could then argue (not without some truth) that such elitist politics disregarded the more immediate health and livelihood concerns of ordinary people in the country—urging, instead, an approach that would ostensibly go “beyond politics to societal imperatives.”

Fighting back

To be sure, workers, unions, and labour activist have already expressed their opposition to recent events. Shortly after the coup, trade unions and labour organisations released statements condemning the military’s actions. Activists disseminated proclamations online of a country-wide campaign of civil disobedience against the reassertion of direct military rule. And by Tuesday night, a day after the coup, the banging of pots was echoing throughout urban centres as an expression of popular dissent. (Friends in the border town of Myawaddy sent me photos of their much-battered kitchenware.) More confrontational tactics are apparently in the works, including strikes by hospital workers, trade unions, and students. And crucially, industrial workers around Yangon are eager to take part in such actions. According to another garment factory worker in Hlaingtharyar whom my friend interviewed:

“Since the 1st [of February] the workers here have wanted to go out and protest. They want to go downtown and join protests. It’s like that. We feel like we can’t accept [the situation]. We all want to do that. We already voted, and then the military seized power. So, we feel that we don’t want to accept what happened. Now, everyone is sharing news on their phones and writing comments about what has happened. If our union federation decided to take some action [against the coup], then all of us workers would want to take part.”

Better lines of analysis and action

There is a sense in which these actions, coming after Suu Kyi’s call for supporters to protest the military’s seizure of power, point to a mere restoration of Myanmar’s brief experiment in bourgeois democracy, which even before the coup had been an elitist project that provided cover for the military’s rapacious resource theft, militarisation of ethnic minority areas, and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya. However, given the frustrations that many workers previously expressed about the repressive working conditions they encountered under NLD rule, current working-class dissent also reveals, I suggest, the enduring material concerns of workers and the unemployed who are struggling to get by in Yangon’s industrial zones.

Such working-class opposition cannot be contained in a liberal narrative that would read proletarian dissent as a mere statement of support for bourgeois democracy under the 2008 constitution. Greater attention to the everyday struggles of ordinary people—under the state of emergency, of course, but also under the NLD’s own elitist rule over the preceding years—would do much to avert the sort of simplistic liberal narratives that dominated international reporting on Myanmar prior to the country’s return to quasi-civilian rule a decade ago.

Stephen Campbell is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, and Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He is the author of Border Capitalism, Disrupted: Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone (2018), as well as numerous articles on labour issues in Myanmar and Thailand.

Cite as: Campbell, Stephen. 2021. “What can workers expect in post-coup Myanmar?” FocaalBlog, 3 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/03/stephen-campbell:-what-can-workers-expect-in-post-coup-myanmar?/