The
space where I live and work is described and prescribed by its past, by what it
no longer is: post-Yugoslav, post-socialist, post-conflict,
some even claim post-colonial. This world is rarely framed in terms of
what it is or what it might become. Stef Jansen in his
ethnography of residents in a block of flats in Sarajevo wrote of „yearnings in
the Dayton meantime“ (Jensen, 2015), capturing a liminal space framed by a
craving for the possibility of hope and the seeming impossibility of ‘returning
to normal’ within the dystopian governance arrangements in Bosnia-Herzegovina
deriving from the Dayton Peace Agreement of December 1995. In focusing on
Bosnia-Herzegovina here, I reflect on the temporalities of (failed) external
political engineering, the proliferation of (failed) projects and the
performative practices of everyday life, refusing a deterministic narrative of
the absence of hope without talking up the possibilities of repoliticisation.
The
governance arrangements that have been in place in Bosnia-Herzegovina since Dayton,
drawn up by a team of young United States lawyers, are at the centre of the
problem. Somewhat successful as a peace agreement, albeit one that more or less
froze the status quo and allowed the main ethno-nationalist political parties
that had fuelled the conflict to continue business as usual, it makes governance
of the state almost impossible. A recurring Bosnian joke is that everyone
considers the constitution laid down in the agreement as unworkable but, of
course, no one can agree on what to replace it with. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a
sovereign federal state, with a three-person Presidency and a rotating
President, based on what is referred to as “the ethnic key” with members
elected from Serbian-Orthodox, Bosniak-Muslim and Croatian-Catholic
constituencies. It remains a kind of semi-protectorate with many powers vested in
the Office of the High Representative, merged in 2009 with the EU
Representative’s office. It has a Central Bank that is carefully regulated and
there are a small number of symbolic Ministries and agencies at Federal level albeit
with very little power. Most power is vested in the two entities Republika
Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina – there is also an
autonomous Brčko District (total population 93,000) with its own foreign
administrator as the parties could not agree which entity the town should
belong to. The Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina is itself divided into ten
Cantons each of which has a Cantonal Governor and a full cabinet of Ministers.
If we just take health and social policy as one example, there is no Federal
Law, there are entity laws, and each Canton also passes its own Law.
Furthermore, financing is a municipal responsibility so that rights can vary
from one small part of the country to another. This means there are some 140
Ministries across the country, each with a Minister, a deputy, a couple of
Assistants, a large staff, many advisors, and a large number of official cars.
Bosnia-Herzegovina
remains something of a ‘crowded playground’ in which we find a proliferation of
diverse actors – Sarajevo was often referred to as ‘acronym city’ as all manner
of international organisations, NGOs, think tanks, agencies, consultants
(‘insultants’ in local parlance) and policy entrepreneurs had a presence there
(Stubbs, 2015). Indeed, as post-conflict aid money dwindled, the Sarajevo
central office would usually be the last to close, existing on scraps from the
donor table. Sometimes, as what became euphemistically known as an ‘exit strategy’,
an international NGO would create its own FrankeNGO, a local spin-off, with no
certainty as to what kind of monster might emerge. The distortions of an
immediate post-conflict economy could be observed at both a macro-level
(estimates of donor aid making up 15% of total GDP were being sprayed around a
while ago) and at the micro-level. You would be significantly better off as,
say, a university professor if you could retreat to your weekend house full-time
and rent your inner-city apartment to an NGO for an office or a flat for its
staff. You could also make ends meet by receiving honoraria from all manner of
agencies for writing reports, even those of questionable quality and
originality. Still, today, the crowded playground is populated and dominated by
all manner of flexians, in Janine Wedel’s terms (Wedel, 2009), blurring
boundaries between the public and the private, the national and the international,
the state and the non-state, and more. In crowded flex land, it is the army of
intermediaries, brokers, translators (literal and metaphorical), operating in
the cracks and interstices of governance, and almost completely
non-transparent, that possess the real power.
Central
to failed futures is ‘the project’ as an
organizational form; a managerial-bureaucratic process; a funding
modality and a practice of governmentality. ‘Projectification’ is a peculiar
assemblage of repertoires, processes and practices, drawing together material,
human, and non-human resources, calculative logics, consisting of temporalised
stages that, whilst highly contingent, serve to technocratise and depoliticise
the lifeworld and, in mundane ways, reproduce the everyday techniques of
neoliberalism (Scott, 2021). Projects operate at variegated speeds across
multiple sites and scales. They also come in waves or clusters: in
Bosnia-Herzegovina the first wave of ‘stand-alone’ projects was notable for
their sheer arbitrary diversity, short time scales, and rapid shifts from one
theme or target group to another. The
second wave were ‘pilot projects’ – as I was told in the late 1990s “Bosnia has
many pilots but no aeroplanes”. ‘Pilots’ were meant to have the potential to be
‘scaled up’ and become sustainable; that is to become long-term or permanent
features of the governance landscape. In a third wave, more explicit systemic
reform was prioritised, through ‘projects of strategic support’, aiding
Ministries and agencies to plan, implement and evaluate reforms, and introduce
new laws and regulations. Such projects were brought closer to centres of
policy making whilst also keeping a distance through sub-contracting arrangements,
a range of ‘implementing partners’ and, not unusually, the creation of new
parallel agencies, often with a chameleon-like character, to ‘drive reform’ and
‘bypass’ those likely to stand in the way of ‘progress’. A number of donors invested
a great deal in agencies that, often, became empty shells, literally and
figuratively.
Bosnia-Herzegovina
is marked by the absence of the kind of statecraft that provides what Jansen
refers to as ‘grids’, institutional frameworks that calibrate and order
individual, household and community concerns, providing a modicum of basic
orientation in terms of what to expect from the authorities. The state, along
with the family, is ‘semi-absent’, with state practices highly uneven, often
indifferent, or else over-punitive (Hromadžić, 2015). A study of mothers of
children with disabilities points to the erratic, ambiguous, fraught,
provisional, contingent, unpredictable, even ‘mysterious’ nature of care
services. Surviving, for anyone reliant on state support, is a constant
struggle to gain access to the right people who, if you are lucky, if all the
pieces fall into place, might offer help that is as far away from a structured,
system-based, ‘right’ as it is possible to get (Brković, 2017). One
conceptual entry point here is the ‘semi-periphery’, a deeply contradictory space, promoting ‘rapid modernization’ in conditions of deindustrialization,
desecularisation, repatriarchalisation and anti-intellectualism (Blagojević, 2009). Reforms are simultaneously
accepted and opposed, imitated and rejected, in thin, degridded, structural conditions.
Quite
deliberately, I want to end this essay in two alternative ways. In one, the
longing for normalcy breeds a kind of passivity, a resignation if you wish, an
erosion of the capacity to aspire and, at best, an ironic dismissal of the
absurdity of governing practices. The phrase bit će bolje can often be
heard uttered by South Slavic speakers but it means the exact opposite of its
literal translation – ‘things will get better’. This is captured in a quote
from Ivo Andrić’s novel Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina),
published in 1945, describing local responses to attempts by the
Austro-Hungarian Empire to modernise the town of Višegrad in the late 19th
century:
“The newcomers were never at peace; they allowed no one else to be at peace. It seemed that they were resolved with their impalpable but ever more noticeable web of laws, regulations and orders to embrace all forms of life … and to change and alter everything … Old ideas and old values clashed with the new ones, merged with them or existed side by side, as if waiting to see which would outlive which. … The people resisted every innovation but did not go to extremes, for to most of them life was always more important and more urgent than the forms by which they lived.” (Andrić, 1995: 135)
Nebojša
Šaviha Valha (2013) discusses the phenomena of raja, referring to one’s
interlocking circles of trusted friends, often based around an activity (coffee
raja, skiing raja, hiking raja, …), where one can be oneself and practice zajebancia,
enjoying oneself in an uninhibited way. For Šaviha-Valha, raja is seen
by many Sarajevans, and Bosnians more generally, as that which was held onto
against all odds during the conflict and subsequently becomes a kind of
auto-ironic way of both critiquing the absurdities of the political elite but,
in the end, resting on that critique and settling for raja as quotidian
survival.
For my alternative ending, it is worth noting that as of 8 June 2021, Bosnia-Herzegovina had the third highest rate of COVID deaths per million population in the world, behind only Peru and Hungary. The first wave of the pandemic was marked by a corruption scandal in which a fruit-processing company with close links to political leaders secured a lucrative contract to import ventilators from China that proved to be deficient. Today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina is also policing the border with the EU and is a major holding centre for refugees and asylum seekers held in appalling conditions, many of whom have been violently pushed back by Croatian and Bosnian authorities. Localised acts of solidarity with the asylum seekers do still occur but not on the scale of responses along the so-called ‘Balkan route’ in 2015, when a kind of inter-generational geopolitics of solidarity saw grassroots activities offering practical and political support to migrants from Libya, Syria and elsewhere.
These
actions followed on from protests in February 2013, termed bebalucija when,
after a law on personal identification numbers was declared unconstitutional,
politicians from the major nationalist parties failed to reach agreement on a
new law meaning that new-born babies could not obtain a passport nor a health
insurance number. In a sense, it was precisely the absurdity of an impasse over
personal IDs that triggered the anger of the protesters, reaching a crescendo
when a three-month old child died in June 2013 because she was not allowed to
enter neighbouring Serbia for treatment. Later, several days of rioting began
in the industrial city of Tuzla in February 2014 when workers from several
factories who had lost their jobs clashed with police outside the Cantonal
Government building. The unrest spread to many other towns and cities, mainly
in the Federation and, although widely reported to have ‘run out of steam’ they
remain important for the experiment of direct democracy through plenums that
lives on today across the post-Yugoslav space. I will not try to formulate some principles regarding the
relationship between the everyday and the political in terms of which ending is
more likely. As Stuart Hall remarked (Hall, 2007: 279), such things are always “open
to the play of contingency”.
Paul Stubbs is a UK-born sociologist who has lived and worked in
the post-Yugoslav space since 1993. He is Senior Research Fellow in the
Institute of Economics, Zagreb and a former Co-President of the Association for
the Anthropology of Policy of the American Anthropological Association. His
edited book on Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement is due to be
published in 2022.
References
Andrić,
Ivo. 1995. The Bridge Over the Drina. London: Harvill.
Blagojević,
Marina. 2009. Knowledge Production at the Semi-Periphery: A Gender
Perspective, Belgrade: Institute for Criminological and Sociological
Research.
Brković, Čarna. 2017. Managing Ambiguity: How Clientlism, Citizenship and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, New York: Berghahn Books.
Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Epilogue: through the prism of fan intellectual life,” in Brian Meeks and Stuart Hall (eds.) Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: the thought of Stuart Hall, London: Laerence & Wushart: 269-291.
Hromadžić, Azra. 2015. “Loving Labor: Work, Care and Entrepreneurial Citizenship in a Bosnian Town,” in Stef Jansen et al. eds. Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Farnham: Ashgate.
Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex, New York: Berghahn Books.
Stubbs, Paul. 2015. “Performing Reform in South East Europe: consultancy, translation and flexible agency”, in John Clarke et al Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage, Bristol: Policy Press: 65-94.
Šaviha
Valha, Nebojša. 2013. Raja: Ironijski aspekt svakodnevne komunikacije u
Bosni i Herzegovini i raja kao strategija života. Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk.
Wedel, Janine. 2009. Shadow Elite, New York: Basic Books.
Cite as: Stubbs, Paul. 2021. “Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” FocaalBlog, 17 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/06/17/paul-stubbs-liminal-temporalities-of-hope-in-bosnia-herzegovina/.
For the first time since El Salvador’s mid-20th century military dictatorship, a single political party dominates both the legislative and executive branches of the government, and by all accounts aims to control the judiciary soon as well. The Nuevas Ideas or “New Ideas” party, the political vehicle of populist president Nayib Bukele, recently used its new supermajority in the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly to unconstitutionally expel five supreme court judges. It will soon replace them with new appointees, presumably picked by Bukele, in a move that social movement activists are denouncing as a “technical coup.”
Unlike the military dictatorships that dominated
El Salvador up until its bloody civil war, however, Bukele’s government is
nominally democratic. Bukele was elected president in 2018 and will serve a
five-year term, after which he is supposed to leave office for good.
Legislative and municipal elections in El Salvador delivered his party, branded
distinctively with a bold “N” the stands for both “Nuevas Ideas” and
“Nayib”, a resounding majority.
The elections marginalized both the centre-left FMLN, former communist guerrillas, and the traditional right ARENA, anti-communists organized by former military junta members. Bukele claimed to have “turned the page” on the postwar two-party system that characterized El Salvador’s political reality following the 1992 Peace Accords. Bukele has repeatedly claimed that he is “neither left nor right” and described both sides of the country’s bloody civil war as equally criminal, despite evidence to the contrary.
Yet in spite of a nominal democratic mandate (problematized by mass abstentionism in recent Salvadoran elections) and a post-ideological veneer, Bukele has much in common with other right-wing authoritarians in the region, such as Jair Bolsanaro – whose son and advisor tweeted supportively of the sacking of the supreme court. The instrumentalization of legislative proceedings to consolidate power also bears similarity to the tactic of lawfare used in Brazil and elsewhere by the Latin American far right. Bukele’s tendency to both issue government decrees and launch harassment campaigns against his perceived enemies via twitter has also prompted comparisons to Donald Trump.
Bukele has political power, and all signs suggest that the repressive elements of the state stand behind him – in some cases, literally, as when he stormed the legislature last year, attempting to force the assembly to approve his Territorial Control Plan and secretive US$109 million loan to upgrade the country’s police armaments. Yet in the name of security and order, he needs to consolidate more.
Speaking in the aftermath of the move to overturn the judiciary, a participant told me, “This is a strategy that could be regionalized.” The move is consistent with the strategy of “autogolpe” or “self-coup” used by other civilian governments with close military ties to kneecap and paralyze opposition, often in the name of rooting out designated enemies. Turkish president and fellow right-wing populist Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have attempted a similar strategy in 2016, and if Eduardo Bolsanaro’s comments are any indication, there is potentially appetite for it in Brazil.
Bonapartism, Bukeleism
Bukele’s personalist leadership, claims to be post-ideological, and appeals to an abstract Salvadoran people, all reflect what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called “caesarism,” or what Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, called Bonapartism. Like these historical regimes, Bukele’s rise was precipitated by a crisis. El Salvador is a microcosm of the global economic, ecological, health, political and social crises that have prompted a meteoric rise of right-wing populism around the world.
Gramsci called these conditions, which can precipitate reaction or revolution, organic crises. Organic crises usually lead to a rejection of established political parties, economic policies, and value systems. Such crises are transnational in their origins but also intimately local. El Salvador’s domestic crisis reflects global and regional trends of collapsing party systems, increased securitization, and growing disaffection with globalization and accumulation-by-dispossession. Using the framework of an organic crisis, my research situates the rise of right-wing populism in Central America within the global rise of populism.
For populism experts in the liberal tradition, like Cas Mudde and Cristobal Kaltwasser, populism signals a degeneration of the health of liberal democracy and liberal institutions. Populism’s emphasis on majoritarianism leaves little room for liberal pluralism and reduces politics to a Schmittian dichotomy of “friends” and “enemies.” On the other hand, following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, some on the Left see the rise of populism as a positive, calling for socialists to seize the “populist moment” to rally “the people” to a left-populism.
Both these perspectives focus on the ideological anatomy of populism, tracing its political reasoning and descriptive effects. This is insufficient to explain Bukele. On the one hand, if we rely on liberal accounts of populism, we end up reproducing simplistic narratives of democratic backslide and the Latin caudillo. On the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive analysis fails to make a link between the “superstructural” language of nation, sovereignty, order, and belonging that we find in right-wing populism, and the world of production, finance, and recessions.
El Salvador’s organic crisis
Bukele and his party, Nuevas Ideas, emerged out of the 2011 indignados protests, named after the Spanish mobilizations of the same name. While initially buoying the left, middle-class Salvadoran indignadosquickly became disillusioned by the FMLN. Bukele, an ex-FMLNista himself, in many ways capitalizes on the unfulfilled anti-corruption demands of the indignados. His response in office to this crisis, though punitive, also reflects this popular disillusionment with the postwar Salvadoran political system.
Out-migration has for the past three decades acted as a kind of release valve for social pressures in Central America, pushing peasants and workers dispossessed by capitalist development north towards the United States and buoying Central American economies with billions in remittances. But as William Robinson points out, mounting ecological, social, and economic dispossession, combined with slumping economic growth and rising foreign debt (even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has only made the slump worse), and a labour market unable to absorb the remaining dispossessed population, have pushed the region towards implosion.
Organic crises lay bare fundamental contradictions in the system that the ruling classes are unable to resolve, provoking resorts to open force. Central American countries, aided by the United States through the Alliance for Prosperity and Regional Security Initiative, have responded to simmering unrest and growing social movements with escalating violence and repression. Military and police aid nominally supports anti-gang efforts and the regularization of immigration—favourite talking points of Bukele.
While in neighbouring Guatemala this stewing crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has escalated into anti-systemic protests, Bukele has kept a lid on the pot through a mix of emergency welfare provisions and increasing militarization. Bukele’s mixing of highly-publicized social supports and punitive populism is again a consistent Bonapartist strategy of weathering the interregnum by attempting to simultaneously reconcile and repress social conflict.
Image 1: Bukele receives the baton of command from the Armed Forces of El Salvador at an official event. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Crisis, protection, and sovereignty
Even as they are assailed by COVID-19 deaths, right-wing populists in Latin America are rebounding, signaling a potential future for right-wing populism in the ‘post-COVID’ world. Sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo recently argued that post-COVID politics will be defined by the theme of ‘protection’ – from epidemics, from climate change, from crime and instability. Don Kalb has argued on this blog that current protection measures are facilitating the formation of a new ‘techno-capital’ post-COVID regime of accumulation with new kinds of contestations.
Bukele’s El Salvador foreshadows a possible post-COVID political environment dominated by right-wing populism. Like his preceding controversial actions, Bukele’s autogolpe is being justified with a mix of militaristic and pseudo-religious language—demonizing his enemies and framing the fight against corruption and organized crime in terms of literal warfare to secure the sovereignty of the country.
Throughout the Global South, pandemic measures that prioritize repression over healthcare and bolster existing over-policing have led to the peripheralization of neighbourhoods and the stripping of meaningful citizenship from villainized populations. In the context of widespread dispossession in El Salvador, the state’s longstanding mano duro approach to crime, and now Bukele’s autogolpe, these measures signal an even more repressive kind of capital accumulation coming out of the COVID crisis.
Bukele also benefits from a demoralized left that has strained relationships with its base and social movements. El Salvador is thus also a cautionary tale when it comes to simplistic calls for a left alternative – be it to reclaim populism or reclaim the politics of protection. The marginalization of the leftist FMLN is not for lack of trying to appropriate populist or protectionist language – the outgoing FMLN government of Salvador Sanchez Ceren also attempted to combine punitive anti-crime legislation with progressive social programs, as well as symbolic gestures like refusing to take up residence in the presidential palace, converting it into a public venue.
The late Ralph Sprenkels and Hillary Goodfriend have both pointed out that the FMLN’s collapse was not due to being inadequately populist, but rather due to frayed internal organization, clientelism and corruption, and a strategy in power that prioritized pragmatism over a transformational program. Enthusiasm for left-populism or left-protectionism should thus be tempered by a serious diagnosis of the organizations, from grassroots to party leaderships, that are supposed to carry a left alternative to power.
Social struggles persist outside the FMLN, however. Bukele’s hostile attacks on public sector employees have prompted strikes, and at the time of writing, protests against the autogolpe, hunger movements and other mobilizations are beginning to make cracks in what Bukele insists is his popular mandate. Whether Bukele’s right-wing populism will totter like it has in neighbouring Guatemala or whether his autogolpe will consolidate a new authoritarian state remains an open question, one worthy of attention for anthropologists interested in the new contours and contestations of the present moment.
Abram Lutes is a graduate researcher at the Carleton University Institute of Political Economy in Ottawa, Canada. His research interests include Gramscian theory, world-systems theory, social movements, and populism. At the time of writing, he is conducting digital fieldwork on El Salvador and Guatemala.
Antonini, Francesca. 2020. The Concepts
of Bonapartism and Caesarism from Marx to Gramsci. Caesarism and
Bonapartism in Gramsci. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004441828_002.
Gusterson, Hugh. 2017. “From Brexit to
Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism.” American
Ethnologist 44 (2): 209–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12469.
Rey-Araujo, Pedro. 2019. “Grounding
Populism upon Political Economy: Organic Crises in Social Structures of
Accumulation Theory.” Science & Society 83 (January): 10–36. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2019.83.1.10.
Rodrik, Dani. 2018. “Populism and the
Economics of Globalization.” Journal of International Business Policy 1
(1–2): 12–33. https://doi.org/10.1057/s42214-018-0001-4.
Torrez, Clara
Guardado, and Ellen Moodie. 2020. “La Línea, Los Indignados, and the
Post-Postwar Generation in El Salvador.” The
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
25 (4): 590–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12498.
Cite as: Lutes, Abram. 2021. “Anatomy of an Autogolpe: On the consolidation of Nayib Bukele’s power in El Salvador.” FocaalBlog, 26 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/05/26/abram-lutes-anatomy-of-an-autogolpe-on-the-consolidation-of-nayib-bukeles-power-in-el-salvador/
‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility.
The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals
is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing politicians endorsed by
police unions in countries such as Brazil and the United States. In the case of
Brazil, a global reference in police terror, the narrative of police victimization
helped president Jair Bolsonaro to galvanize popular support around the
fictional image of patriotic officers (or soldiers like himself), ready to put
their lives on the line to protect citizens and save the country.
Certainly, police officers are killed in Brazil at a rate
that supersedes any other country in the hemisphere. According to the Brazilian
Forum of Public Safety, 343 officers were killed in 2018 alone, 75% of them
off-duty (FBS 2019). Although the numbers are extremely high when compared with
the United States, for instance, where 181 law enforcement agents were killed
in 2019 (NLEOMF 2020), this is a profession that, contrary to popular belief, has
very low lethality rates worldwide. Yet, even in Brazil, with astonishing
levels of officers killed on and off-duty, homicide is not the leading cause of
police death. In what seems to be a trend in Brazil and the US, the leading
cause of officers’ death is suicide (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Exame
2019; see also Miranda and Guimarães 2016).
While assault and killings of law enforcement officers do
occur, this real risk is part and parcel of the work they perform. In fact, it
is common-sensical that their work grants them special protection not enjoyed
by any other civilian occupation. To raise a hand against a police officer is
not only a serious felony offense, but is also quite often a lethal one. In
Brazil, when an officer is killed, dozens of poor and predominantly black youths
are killed in revenge raids such as the infamous 2006 massacre, when at least 600
youth were killed within the span of one week in response to gangs’ lethal attacks
against police stations (Mães de Maio 2018). Police even deploy assassinations in
order to pressure politicians to grant them better labor conditions.
Indeed, spreading terror has been an ‘efficient’ police strategy to gain political leverage. For instance, in February 2020, days before carnival, the Military Police of Ceará went on strike. Although the direct involvement of striking officers in the slaughter is the object of an ongoing investigation, there were several denunciations of police-linked death squads and hooded men in police patrols terrorizing the population. Coincidently or not, and repeating a pattern seen in other Brazilian contexts (see De Souza, 2016), at least two hundred individuals were killed within the span of one week (Jucá 2020; Adorno 2020). To no avail, the leftist governor Camilo Santana denounced these uses of terror as a tactic to bring the government to its knees. Widespread denunciations of human rights violations, from torture to assassinations, are consistently met with impunity in a country where at least 6,200 individuals were killed by the police in 2018 (17 deaths each day!), of which 99% were young male, favela residents and 75% were blacks (FBSP 2019).
Image 1: While the US is the leading country in incarceration rates, Brazil leads the way in the killing of Black individuals by law enforcement policies. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, within six years (2015-2020) 29, 952 civilians were killed by the Brazilian police force. Black youth account for 8 in 10 individuals killed by the police. Click here for geo-reference on the lethality of policing in Brazil.
In this following, I focus not so much on the
paradigmatic victims of police terror in societies of the African Diaspora such
as Brazil and the United States, but rather on the critical role urban
ethnographers can play in demystifying the ‘war on police’ and in advancing an insurgent
movement pushing toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is
the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the
highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has, within the last few
decades, seen a proliferation of socio-anthropological studies on police
violence and police culture. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing
attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but
officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of
its techniques – in their attempts to provide ‘privileged’ accounts of police
praxis (e.g., França 2019; Muniz and Silva 2010; Storani 2008).
This article should be understood neither as a literature
review of the burgeoning field of police studies in Brazil (for an overview
see, Muniz et., all, 2018) nor an overview of global anthropology of policing. Instead,
I call attention to new directions in the study of policing as a colonial regime
of control that exists in urban contexts in Brazil and the USA, but is hardly unique
to those societies. Crucially, as a global project, the practice of anthropology – and police fieldwork in particular (Steinberg
2020) – cannot be dissociated from the geopolitics of empire and global
antiblackness. Enduring global
colonialism is configured and continuously reinforced by Europe/US-led regimes
of security and knowledge production. And yet, racial apartheid enforced by police
terror –homeland security? — blurs geo-ontological boundaries between global
north and global south and reasserts the afterlife of colonialism (Susser 2020;
Nonini 2020; Beaman, 2020).
How should anthropologists objectively treat police innocence
and victimhood narratives without participating in this ongoing coloniality? If,
as Anna Souhami forcefully argues, ‘the dynamics of police culture [ethnographers]
so powerfully criticis[e] are reflected in the construction of the ethnographic
process’ (2019: 207), how should we ethically write about police victimization
without (even if involuntarily) endorsing the trope of cops’ fragility? What
does the narrative of victimization engender? Finally, what should be the place
of anthropology of policing in the urgent call of black activists and black
studies to defend the dead? While studying the police (and any mainstream
institution) does not necessarily lead to uncritical alignment to power, the
antiblack animus of policing makes it extraordinarily challenging and politically
compromising for anthropologists to work with the police in the name of
ethnographic complexity and simultaneously engage with social movement’s
critique of policing-as-antiblackness (Hale, personal communication). That is
to say, the anthropology of policing, even when highly critical of policing
structure, seems to underscore a liberal reform paradigm that goes against what
the paradigmatic victims of police terror demand: defunding, dismantling and
abolishing the police state.
The Myth of Police
Fragility
There is a scene in Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s 2019 movie, Queen and Slim,
that is worth recuperating here. The young couple is going on their first date
when a white cop pulls them over. The minor traffic violation ends with Slim (Daniel
Kaluuya) taking the cop’s gun and shooting him dead in self-defense when the
officer fires his gun against Queen (Jodie Tuner). Slim wants to turn himself
in, but Queen (who is a lawyer) reminds him that their blackness has already
sealed their destiny. The ‘cop-killers’ go on the run through the deep South,
hoping to reach Cuba. As the video of the killing goes viral, Queen and Slim’s
story mobilizes other African Americans and images of Black Lives Matter
protests are merged with their fugitive endeavor. The scene that strikes me
features Junior, a black boy in the foreground leading a demonstration. With
fists in the air he shouts, ‘Let them go!’ When an officer tries to stop him,
he pulls the officer’s gun and shoots the officer dead.
One may speculate: What led him to such an
expected act of violence? Perhaps the painful consciousness of his blackness? Perhaps
the limited options available, within the context of ‘fugitive justice,” to stop
the “grinding machine of human flesh” policing represents? The film and the scene in particular aroused
heated debate on the nature and scope of Black resistance against police
violence in the Black Lives Matter era. Lena Waithe has called the movie ‘a
meditation on black life in America’ (King 2019). However, where the filmmakers
gave cinematic representation to an all too familiar “state of captivity”
(Wilderson 2018:58), some received the movie as a ‘war on cops’ while others
blamed it for ‘going too far left in its
implications in that black people condone, protect and are inspired by
reciprocating violence against police as a result of their experiences with law
enforcement’ (Vaughn 2019).
The “war-on-cops” rhetoric and
its attending practices in the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement in the United
States and its parallel (albeit diffuse) pro-cops movement in Brazil can be
read as what legal scholar Frank Rudy Cooper calls “the myth of cop fragility”.
Hecontends that such mythology draws a false equivalence between ‘blue
lives’ and ‘black lives’ by ‘reposition[ing] police officers, and whites in
general, as the new victims’ of racism (Cooper 2020: 654). In that sense, ‘white backlash better
explains Blue Lives Matter’s self-defense perspective than does the
vulnerability of police officers to attack’ (2020: 655).
By hijacking the
meanings of the black struggle for life, the police also cannibalize the terms
of the debate. This, in turn, seems to resonate in the academia’s ambivalence (unwillingness?)
in dealing with the cruelty of police power. Whereas radical social movements
and scholars lay bare the impossibility of freeing justice from its coloniality
(e.g., Best and Hartman 2005; Segato 2007; McDowell
and Fernandez 2018; Flauzina and Pires 2020), we see a proliferation of
works on police reform, or, in the case of anthropology, an investment in cops
as a new subject of inquiry whose violent work must be understood in relation
to broad social norms and power dynamics. I have nothing against the election
of cops as ethnographic subjects and indeed, such an election has been crucial
to illuminate social processes that otherwise would continue to remain obscure.
Though in a fragmented form, I take this very path in my own ethnographic work
on police brutality in São Paulo, Brazil and Cali, Colombia.
Likewise, recent groundbreaking ethnographies of policing
(I am consciously grouping scholars from distinct disciplines whose work
employs ethnography as its main methodology) have shed light on the ways in
which officers justify their work as habitus – ‘just doing their job’ – which
reflects a socially shared belief in torture and killings as a form of ordering
the chaotic social world. In racialized geographies such as the Paris’ ‘banlieues,’ Los Angeles’ ‘ghettos’ or Brazil’s
‘favelas,’ these critical ethnographies show that officers enforce sociospatial
imaginaries of belonging, entitlement and justice (Fassin 2013; Denyer-Willis 2015;
Roussell 2015). Officers also perform a peculiar form of order-making in
contested regimes of urban governance by competing local authorities such as
drug-traffickers, paramilitarism, power-brokers and so on (e.g., Salem and
Bertelsen 2020; Larkins 2013; Penglase 2012; Arias 2006). Other interventions
have accounted for the ways in which police negotiate their everyday encounters
with institutional violence and public discredit. Officers are forcefully
portrayed as political actors whose practices, emotions and subjectivities echo
broader systems of morals (Pauschinger 2020; see
also Jauregui 2014). Police and policing produce a mode of “sociability,”
an ethos, and a political rationale of governance (Karpiak 2010; Sclofsky 2016; Muniz and Albernaz 2017). Finally,
there is the call for ‘publicity, practicality and epistemic solidarity’ among
anthropologists, law enforcement agencies and larger publics to respond to the
disciplinary invitation for political engagement with pressing problems of
corruption and violence (Mutsaers et al. 2015: 788).
These and many other works (too many to be listed in a
commentary note) reflect an important anthropological contribution to demystifying
this troubling institution and the subjectivity of its agents. In the last
decade or so, it has become a consensus in the field – regardless of one’s
theoretical perspective – that policing is much more than uniformed personnel
patrolling the streets. By making
ethnographically visible what policing does and produces, ethnographers have
provided insightful understandings of mundane forms of order-making,
statecrafts and rationales of government (see Karpiak and Garriott 2018, Martin
2018, Steinberg 2020 for an overview).
My
intervention does not go against these contributions that I loosely locate
within the field of ethnographies of police. My concern here is with what
anthropology does and what anthropology produces when giving cops more voice
and space in these critical times when cities are on fire. In their edited
volume, The Anthropology of Police, editors Kevin Karpiack and Willian
Garriott ask the important questions: ‘What are the ethical and political
stakes of trying to humanize the police? Are there any grounds on which one
could even justify an approach that took up such a project of humanization over
and against one centered on cataloguing, critiquing, and decrying
police-perpetuated harms?’ (2018: 6-7). The authors answer this crucial question
by calling for the study of police as a way to challenge the discipline’s trend
to “study up” and as an attempt to understand contemporary notions of humanness
embedded in policing and security practices. To them, one cannot understand the
world and what it means to be human without understanding the work of police
(2018: 8).
In
this sense, it is argued, the risk pays-off: when attentive to one’s own
positionality, critical ethnographies of policing can shed light on important issues
such as the culture of militarism, the corrosion of democracy and the
normalization of gendered violence (Kraska 1996; Denyer-Willis 2016). I can relate
to that. My fragmented ethnographic encounters with police officers (usually
themselves from the lowest social stratum of the society they supposedly serve
and protect) gave me a first-hand understanding of how officers negotiate
apparently contradictory approaches of defending the killings of ‘criminals,’ enthusiastically
supporting a ‘new’ human rights-oriented community police, energetically detaching
themselves from the “bad cops,” and embracing a hyper-militaristic crusade to ‘save’
family and Christian values (Alves 2018).
While doing ethnography with/of police does not necessarily stand in contradiction to the ethics and promises of anthropology in solving human problems, something I have no doubt my colleagues genuinely embrace as a political project, and while we should suspend assumptions that all anthropologists must adhere to the militant/activist theoretical-methodological orientation (Harrison 1992; Hale 2008, Hale personal communication), studying the police requires one to face tough ethical questions on the troubling position of witnessing the perpetration of violence, the unintended normalization of police culture (see Souhami 2019), and the dangerous humanization of police work.
My analysis (and that of many of my
colleagues), was politically aligned with activists and empathic with
individuals embracing outlawed forms of resistance against police terror.
Still, I was constantly asked which side I was on. For instance, a black young
man, who by the time of my research in the favelas of São Paulo was making a
living in what he refers as ‘the world of crime,’ unapologetically told me I
was an asshole for being ‘too straight, too naïve, too afraid to die.’ In Cali,
Colombia, although I was considered “not kidnappable” — as the member of a
local gang laughed and joked around, perhaps demarking the difference between
my physical appearance and those of other foreign researchers usually from the
global north — I was awkwardly enough associated with the mestizo middle
class and its regime of morality that called for state violence against black
youth seen as the scapegoat of the city’s astonishing levels of violence.
Thus, my contention here is not so much to
stop studying police, but rather, to disengage from a seductive analysis of
power that, while compelling in scholarly terms and in-depth ethnographic description,
may involuntarily give voice to unethical power structures personified by the
police. Following Frank Wilderson’s assertion that police terror ‘is an ongoing
tactic of human renewal…a tactic to secure humanity’s place’ (2018:48), one
should ask what such an anthropological project of humanization entails. If we do not want our work to end up fueling
and corroborating the skepticism over a discipline with an ugly history of complicity
with oppressive power, then it is about time for an unapologetic ‘f*ck the
police!’ in studies of policing.
Maroon Anthropology
In Progressive dystopia, abolition, antiblackness and schooling in San Francisco, anthropologist Savannah Shange urges anthropologists to apply ‘the tools of our trade to the pursuit of liberation, and [to enact] the practice of willful defiance in the afterlife of slavery’ (Shange 2019: 159). Abolitionist anthropology responds to scholars law-abiding investment in policing – what she calls carceral progressivism – by refusing the promises of the liberal state and liberal academia (39-42). The imperative ‘F*ck the Police!’ could be another way of engaging with Shange’s invitation to make space for freedom in our writing and our practices. The urgency of the moment asks anthropologists to work against the police, not with the police. If nothing else, the recent urban ‘riots’ in response to the lynching of black individuals in the United States and in Brazil support my call. Individuals strangulated with knee-to-neck asphyxia, skulls broken by police boots, wounded bodies calculatedly left agonizing in the streets or tied to the police patrol and dragged through the streets, rapes, disappearances and continued extortion are some of the mundane practices of police terror that should make us pause and reflect.
Image 2: On March 14, Marielle Franco, a black feminist, human rights defender and city councilperson from the socialist party, was murdered. She was also leading the Human Rights Commission to monitor police and military abuse during the military intervention decreed by then president Michel Temer and she was vocal against paramilitary groups that control Rio’s political system. Two years after her death, the question remains: “Who ordered the killing of Marielle?” (Source: Workers Party. https://pt.org.br/caso-marielle-franco-um-ano-sem-solucao/)
Let’s be honest, as a discipline, we have failed to side significantly
with the victims of police terrorism beyond sit-in moments at conferences, open
letters, creatively designed syllabi or academic journal articles such as this
very one. Anthropologists seem to be too invested in the economy of
respectability that grants us access to institutional power ‘to engage
anthropology as a practice of abolition’ (Shange 2019: 10). Nothing can be more
illustrative of such an abysmal dissonance with this call than the political
lexicon we use to describe police terrorism itself – it is telling that the
word terror is barely articulated in the field of anthropology of police
– and people’s call to ‘burn it down’ and ‘end the f*cking world’. With one fist
in the air and a rocket in the other hand, demonstrators have denounced again
and again that ‘Brazil is a graveyard,’ ‘the US is a plantation,’ ‘police are
the new slave-catcher.’ Cities turned into a
smoking battleground, police stations stormed, patrols set on fire. What
has anthropology got to offer beyond well-crafted texts, sanitized analyses of
the moment and good intentions to decolonize the discipline? We lack rage!
Like police, and unlike workers in general, tenured
scholars (including anthropologists) have very low risk in performing their
work. Police perform what Micol Siegel forcefully calls ‘violence work’ (Siegel
2018). They are professionals that essentially deliver violence represented as a
public good. Anthropologists, I would argue, are ‘violence workers’ not only in
performing the enduring colonial project of othering, but also when taking a ‘reformist’,
‘neutral’ or distant stance on social movements that demand radical changes.
Even worse, in giving voice to police based on a pretentious technicality of
‘just’ collecting data, anthropology ends up helping to quell that struggle (see
Bedecarré 2018 for groundbreaking work on the role of white scholars in
promoting vigilante justice against Black anger). That is to say, the nature of
the violence performed by ethnographers of policing may differ in degree and
scope from police terror but, as Hortense Spillers reminds us, “we might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us”
(Spillers 1987: 68).
If
the subfield of anthropology of police wants to be coherent to the discipline’s
(incomplete) decolonizing turn, it should have no ambiguity in regarding police
‘violence’ as terror, have no doubts as to which lives are in peril in these terroristic
policing practices and refuse the false promises of reforming this colonial
institution. For ethnographers, refusing to performing ‘violence work’ may
require disloyalty to the state – including rejecting the self-policing
required by corporate academia – and instead unapologetically embrace the
position of an insurgent subject whose ‘coherence [is] shaped by political
literacy emanating from communities confronting crisis and conflict’ (see James
and Gordon 208:371).
I am
not completely sure how an insurgent anthropology of police would look (Ralph,
2020 is a powerful example of how anthropologists can use the discipline’s
tools to mobilize larger audiences against police terror). A departure point
for discussion, however, would be the intellectual humbleness to learn from the
wretched of the earth’s refusal to legitimize, ‘humanize’ and promote the
reforming of the police, not to mention the temptation to equate cop’s (real)
vulnerability to violence with the (mundane) killing of civilians. Ultimately,
those of us doing ethnography in collaboration with men and women in uniform ought
to ask ourselves how to express empathy with and mourn blue lives – since as
ethnographers we develop emotional bonds to our interlocutors even if critical
of their behaviors– and still remain critical of the regime of law that
necessitates and legitimizes the evisceration of black lives. How do we attend
to the ethical demand for all (blue) lives’ grievability while also attentive
to the ways, as some anthropologists have shown (Kurtz 2006; and Vianna et
al., 2011), the state is anthropomorphized and performed by
political agents? Are not cops’ lives, insofar as their identity are attached
to the (state) terrorism they perform, an expression of state livingness? That
is to say, blue lives are not the same as black lives because blue lives are
state lives (albeit not the only ones, a peculiar performance of state
sovereignty). There is no space for a theorization on the multiple ways the
state comes into being as a mundane practice of domination. It is enough to say
that at least in the USA and Brazil, statecraft is antiblackcraft. Indeed, the
military labor performed by the police in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil
and the United States is only made possible by the ‘politics of enmity’ (Mbembe
2003) that informs contemporary regimes of urban security. It is in the terrain
of sovereignty, thus, that one has to situate the work of policing. As Siegel and others have shown, one of the
most important realizations of state violence is the mystification of police
work as civilian as opposed to military labor. The police, the myth goes, works
under the register of citizenship to protect and serve civil society. Still,
both police and the military are one and same. The field in which police
operates is a military one, which works effectively and precisely to deploy
terror in a sanitized and legitimate way (Wooten 2020; Siegel 2018; see also Kraska
2007).
This is not a peripheral point. One has only
to consider the ways black people encounter officers in the streets as soldier
and experience policing as terror (again, asphyxiated with the knee on the
neck, dragged in the streets, dismembered and disappeared) in opposition to the
contingent violence experienced by white victims of cops’ aggression (Wilderson
2018; Alves and Vargas 2017) or by cops’ vulnerability inherent to their
profession. And yet, if the logic of enmity is what sustains the enduring
antiblack regime of terror enforced by policing, from the point of view of its
paradigmatic enemy reforming the police is absurd and praising blue lives is
insane.
How might anthropologists challenge the
asymmetric positionality of terrified police lives and always already terrifying
black beings? When one officer dies, it
is a labor accident. When an officer kills, it is part of his or her labor in
performing the state. The degrees, causality and likelihood matter here. Even
in societies such as Brazil, where the number of officers killed is extremely
high, police lives are not as in peril as conservative pundits want us to
believe. The lives of those cops eventually killed ‘in service’ are weaponized
forms of life that predict the death of black enemies. Thus, police and their
victims belong to two different registers, and if there is an ethical issue in
relativizing any death—an approach I firmly refuse –, there is equal or
even greater risk in lumping together state delinquency and retaliatory
violence by its victims.
There is no equivalence between blue lives
and black lives, and even if the call for equivalence is the order of the day in
the liberal sensibility that ‘all lives matter,’ this is not the job of
anthropology to reconcile these two positions. It is in the spirit of
anthropology’s moral and political commitment to the oppressed – a commitment that
while empathic with the powerless is also highly critical of the uses of violence
as liberatory tool — that we should insurge against this false
equivalency.
Based on her work with activists in the South
African liberation movement, Nancy Scheper-Hughes
asks, “what makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from the human responsibility
to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of
historical events as we are privileged to witness them?” (1995:411). The author
deals with this question by highlighting the complexity of not relativizing
violence of the oppressed or taking a neutral distance from the cruelty of the
oppressor and yet, positioning one’s fieldwork as a site of struggle. She
opposes the anthropologist as a “fearless spectator” (a neutral and objective
eye) and the witness (the anthropologist as a “companheira”). The later is
positioned “inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally
committed being” and “accountable for what they see and what they fail to see,
how they act and how they fail to act in critical situations” (1995: 419).
If we consider current waves of demonstrations
against police terror as a historical moment that scholars committed to human
liberation cannot refuse to attend, how do we respond to this call without been
misunderstood as inciters of violenceagainst the police? Although an insurgent
anthropology should learn from different historical and ethnographic contexts
where retaliatory violence has been deployed as one legitimate tool to
counteract the brutality of power (Abufarha 2009; Cobb 2014; Umoja 2013), my
critique here is obviously not an argument for embracing
violence against cops as the way out of the current crisis of policing. I am
also not turning a blind eye to a range of political possibilities militant and
activist anthropologists already embrace in favor of empowering victims of
state-sanctioned violence as “negative-workers”, public intellectuals, or
member of advocacy groups (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995; Mullings 2015). Rather, informed
by a black radical tradition, I am inviting anthropologists to rebel and change
the terms of engagement with the police by questioning our (and our
discipline’s) loyalty to the carceral state.
Thus, f*ck the police! is
not a rhetorical device, but rather an ethical imperative and moral obligations
to the eviscerating lives lost by state delinquency. It is indeed an invitation
to seriously engage with the desperate call from the streets for making Black Lives
Matter. Attending to their call, on their terms, would require a deep scrutiny
on how anthropology participate in antiblackness as a socially shared practice.
It also requires us to consider how antiblackness renders legal claims for
redressing police terror quite often of little account, and what resisting
police terror means to those whose pained bodies resist legibility as victims. What
does the anthropological project of humanizing the police mean to those ontologically
placed outside Humanity? For those whose marked bodies make Queen and
Slim’s subject position – as new runaway slaves – very familiar and intimate, the
answer is quite straightforward. Fuck the police!
Acknowledgments: This
paper has benefited from generous comments from Charlie Hale, Micol Siegel,
Graham Denyer-Willis, João Vargas and Tathagatan Ravindran, as well as from
engaging audiences at the University of Colorado/ IBS Speaker Series,
University of London / Race Policing and the City Seminar, and the University
of Massachusetts/Anthropology Colloquium. I also thank Terrance Wooten and
Amanda Pinheiro for a joint-conversation on police terror during the Cities
Under Fire forum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Don Kalb,
Patrick Neveling and Lillie Gordon provided invaluable editorial assistance. Errors
and omissions are of course mine.
Jaime A Alves teaches Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His academic interest includes urban coloniality and black spatial insurgency in Brazil and Colombia. He is the author of “The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minesotta Press, 2018). His publications can be found at https://jaimeamparoalves.weebly.com
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Cite as: Alves, Jaime A. 2021. “F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 27 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/27/jaime-a-alves-fck-the-police-murderous-cops-the-myth-of-police-fragility-and-the-case-for-an-insurgent-anthropology/
At the height of this pandemic’s third wave, with many of us sitting in what by now feels like an eternal lockdown, images of a gigantic ship stuck inside the Suez Canal seem to have provided more than just a welcome distraction. The vessel, unable to move one way or another, proved to be immensely relatable, if endless memes flooding the ether over the last few days are any indication at all. With the ship now figuring as a stand-in for every dilemma under the sun, cartoonist Guy Venables, in his work for Metro Newspaper UK, perhaps best summed up the phenomenon with a drawing of the stuck ship that has a voice emerging from the vessel saying, “This is terrible! We’re going to be used as a metaphor for everything!”
The popular fascination with the Suez blockage is not surprising. Ships, if we can be excused for anthropomorphizing them for a moment, are as charismatic as human-made objects can ever be. Standing next to a container ship of the dimensions of the Ever Given is an experience that is hard to shrug off, so massive and overwhelming to the human size are these new ultra-large vessels. At the same time, having over recent years done research among workers involved in producing, operating, maintaining and (un-)loading these ships, we found ourselves rather unsurprised by the events unfolding in the Suez. Among some maritime industry experts, the fact that container ships have gotten too big has been an open secret for quite a while (e.g. see Lim 1998; Merk 2015; Weisenthal and Alloway 2021). Laleh Khalili, for instance, has recently shown how the Suez Canal ironically played a key role in the acceleration of ship growth, when oil tankers rose in size as a response to the Suez crisis in the 1950s (e.g. 2021; see also Khalili 2020). The temporary cardiac arrest that the Ever Given has caused inside the Suez Canal, Khalili’s work and that of other excellent critical logistics scholars has shown (for an overview, see Charmaine Chua’s valuable list here), may only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the damage that ultra-large container ships are causing.
Image 1: “Transiting through the Suez Canal.” Photo: Johanna Markkula.
But first of all – to the hard facts on the ground: For nearly a week, a 400-meter-long container ship has been stuck in the southern part of the Suez Canal, blocking all traffic, and causing an estimated loss of 400 Million US Dollars per hour to the global economy. On her way from Yantian in China to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and with room for 20,000 twenty-foot freight containers (TEUs) when fully loaded, on the morning of 23 March Ever Given was surprised by strong desert winds in shallow waters. Like the Straits of Malacca, the Panama Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal – built partially by forced laborers from 1859-1869 – is a vital vein in the bloodstream of trade. This is the shortest route between Asia and Europe. An average of 52 ships pass through the Suez Canal every day; 12% of international ship traffic and as much as 30% of global container traffic is routed via this narrow chokepoint. For ships that during the past week have been diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, a significantly longer journey awaits. As the queue of waiting ships grew to more than 300 by March 28, deliveries to Europe and beyond have suffered severe delays, while the currently cut-off ports are bracing themselves for a true onslaught of ships that will clog up their waterways once the blockage has been resolved. In a nutshell, this colossal mess will certainly take a while to sort out, even once the ship has become unstuck.
Container Economies on Overdrive
As we have recently summarized in a theme section of Focaal (“Container Economies”, Leivestad and Markkula 2021), global shipping is built on intricate logistical systems, systems that have come into place with the invention of the modern day intermodal shipping container, and where “Just in time” principles govern everything. With the development of new shipping systems and technological solutions from the 1950s onwards, it became cost-effective to transport goods and raw materials between continents, primarily from large production countries in Asia to markets in Europe and the US (see Levinson 2006). Container ships today transport 24% of all the world’s dry goods, and building ever larger ships seemed to be the obvious, cost-effective strategy to embrace. From the mid-2000s onwards, more and more shipping companies have begun to expand their fleets with larger ships. The world’s largest shipping company, the Danish Mærsk, proved to be a leader in this development, and the Asian-owned shipping companies – many of them state-controlled – followed suit over recent years. Between 2005 and 2015, container vessels doubled in size. Since 2017 alone, 77 additional mega-container vessels with a capacity of over 20,000 containers have been brought into use.
As we (Leivestad and Schober) also describe in an upcoming article in Anthropology Today, some maritime experts have long been skeptical about how sustainable these ultra-large box ships actually are – a debate that has certainly flared up again recently. Before the pandemic hit the world economy last year, shipping prices had temporarily fallen to a record low, which was partly due to the overcapacity created by nearly all major shipping companies simultaneously betting on the introduction of ultra-large container vessels. The spectacular 2016 collapse of Hanjin Shipping (see Schober 2021), then among the top 10 of shipping companies in the world, is often attributed as a direct outcome of this over-capacity. In our piece in AT, we discuss how the language of “Economies of Scale” used to justify these ships is more than just of a performative nature. It is, one can argue, part of a false economy in the sense that these ships mark a real redistribution of wealth from public funds to corporate elites, rather than the creation of new wealth that is their ostensible justification.
Size Matters
Through our research in one of Europe’s largest container ports in southern Spain, around South Korean and Philippine shipyards, and on board of various container ships, we have come across other negative effects that ultra-large container ships have caused over recent years. When not clogging up the Suez Canal, these increasingly larger ships are often causing new problems for maritime infrastructure, the environment, and negatively affect people’s working conditions. Fewer and fewer ports can actually accommodate the new ships. For those ports that can – of which many are struggling to survive in a highly competitive industry – major investments are required to build ever higher cranes, longer docks and larger container warehouses. Port work must be adapted to the megaships’ routes and schedules, and workers both at sea and on land fear that the growing ship sizes, together with ever smaller crew sizes on board, eventually will lead to serious accidents. The environmental aspects of shipping in general are significant. For instance, sea beds must be dredged at regular intervals, with major consequences for the marine environment above and below water (e.g. Carse and Lewis 2020).
Although the Ever Given is now
about to be released from the canal, the drama is far from over. In many ports,
maritime workers fear chaotic conditions when all waiting ships resume traffic
– at a time when the pandemic has already caused much havoc across the
industry. Hopefully, the incident in the Suez Canal will be a wake-up call.
Escalating ship sizes have serious consequences, and large parts of the infrastructure
that has enabled the megaship growth are financed by tax payer money. The price
for the Ever Given, and the many
ships of its kind that will continue to sail the oceans, may ultimately have to
be paid by all of us.
Hege Høyer Leivestad is Assistant Professor at Stockholm
University, Sweden, and researcher in the ERC project PORTS at the University
of Oslo, Norway. Her research project, Frontier freight: Maritime logistics at
the Strait of Gibraltar, is funded by the Swedish Research Council and deals
with port life, labor, and global shipping in southern Spain.
Johanna Markkula is postdoctoral fellow at the Department of
Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she is part of the
research project Life cycle of container ships. Markkula is a maritime
ethnographer with ten years of experience researching the maritime industry and
global maritime labor. She has carried out ethnographic research onboard cargo
ships with multinational crews as well as in the Philippines with maritime
organizations and businesses ashore.
Elisabeth Schober is associate professor at the University of Oslo’s Department of Social Anthropology, Norway. Schober is currently the principal investigator at Life cycle of container ships (funded by the NFR), where she focuses on shipbuilding in South Korea and the Philippines. In 2019, she was awarded an ERC-Starting Grant for a project that will center on some of the world’s most important container ports.
References
Carse, Ashley and Joshua A. Lewis. 2020.
“New horizons for dredging research.” In WIREs Water.Vol.7,
issue 6 (November/ December). https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1485
Leivestad, Hege Høyer and Johanna Markkula.
2021. “Inside Container Economies”. Focaal. 89: 1-11.
Levinson, Marc. 2006. The Box: How the
Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lim, Seok-Min. 1998. ‘Economies of scale in
container shipping’, Maritime Policy & Management 25 (4): 361-373.
Cite as: Leivestad, Hege Høyer, Johanna Markkula, and Elisabeth Schober. 2021. “Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences.” FocaalBlog, 30 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/30/leivestad-hege-hoyer-johanna-markkula-and-elisabeth-schober-beyond-suez-escalating-ship-sizes-and-their-consequences/
On February 22nd police forces
entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating
many students, arresting
31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff.
Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting
against a new bill on “Admission in higher
education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic
environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced.
The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any
dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.
The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.
Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.
Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.
In the
context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political
antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This
consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher
education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and
received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation,
political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space
where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no
surprise that they are being attacked first.
The Neoliberalization of Higher
Education and Law 4777/2021
The efforts to alter the public, free, and open
character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017,
Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made
several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards
universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for
private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article
16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public
institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense
mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially
delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in
higher education over the past two
decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’
degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected
representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack
the prestige of public universities.
However, when Nea Dimokratia came
to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum.
If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world,
in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its
brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest
movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took
place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to
crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never
been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a
seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy
was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses
– unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by
the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the
universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students
and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public
gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the
academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th.
Interestingly, this law was not introduced
by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the
Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in
educational affairs is unprecedented.
To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
The
new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university
autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates
a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and
interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable
not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore,
fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers
for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which
will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on
the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore,
the law allows for many
disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve
in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the
organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and
punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.
All of
these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university
self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals
the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and
the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous
and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from
chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20
million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all
the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first
year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept
police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.
The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.
The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.
Towards a closed and authoritarian university
The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.
More
generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major
centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and
society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been
privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such
critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship,
and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university
campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses
democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly
unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in
Parliament that, under the new law, “it
is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the
state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming
universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking
the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then
it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to
ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If
this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally
different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.
Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.
References
Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera
A., Heintz M. &
A. Horolets (eds.),
Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe:
An Intricate Institutional and
Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.
Gefou-Madianou,
Dimitra 2000. “Disciples,
Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M.
Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in
Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp.
256–78.
Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities
Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens
Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online
petition.
Image 1: Online Petition, “Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS” (Screenshot by FocaalBlog editors, this petition has our undivided support, we call on our readers to join us as signatories)
Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/
One day last October, I
happened to spot an acquaintance’s post on Wechat. It was a simple message
thanking all ‘Ant-izens’ (people who work in Ant Financial of Alibaba) for
their hard work, followed by a short video advertising Ant’s upcoming IPO. It
came from a data scientist who had given up his high-paid job in the US,
returned to China, and joined Ant Financial three years earlier. Ant shares
were then expected to start trading in Hong Kong and Shanghai on 5 November.
Jack Ma, the founder of Ant
and affiliate Alibaba Group Holding, had declared it a “miracle” that such a
large listing would take place outside New York. It was poised to raise up to
$34.4 billion in the world’s largest stock market debut and would create a vast
group of new billionaires. The data scientist’s post, like many posts on social
media, was a showoff: it was a subtle public announcement that he was going to
become extremely rich in two weeks’ time. The post contributed to a rather
complicated, self-consciously suppressed feeling among many professional
Chinese Americans: once again they were tasting the bitter feeling of being
stuck in the US middle-class, left behind by those who had managed to jump on
the fast-track train of China’s economic growth, grabbing opportunity in the
mainland and realizing their ‘Chinese Dreams’ by finally becoming ‘financially
independent’ (meaning rich enough that you and your offspring would never need
to worry about money again).
Then, on 3 November, two
days before the feast, the IPO was suddenly called off by the Chinese
government. Immediately thereafter, China ordered Ant Group to rectify its
businesses and comply with regulatory requirements amid increased scrutiny of
monopoly practices in the country’s internet sector. Such a blow! The data scientist
kept a dignified silence; my professional friends kept a polite silence. And
Jack Ma, the real protagonist of the drama, kept a cautious silence. He has
since disappeared from public view (only reappearing on 19 January 2021 with a
video emphasizing his social work). Where is he? What is he doing now? What
would happen to him? Why would all this happen? What does the state’s
intervention mean to Ant and Alibaba, to the whole ecommerce industry, and to
the whole private sector? What does it say about the logic of the state
apparatus in this enigmatic yet so important country? Where will it go? And how
would this affect the rest of the world, especially the West? So many questions
and so much drama.
Image 1: Jack Ma, who created Alibaba.com in Hangzhou, China in March 1999 (Source: JD Lasica, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/292160777)
Unsurprisingly, the Western liberal media have maintained their usual cold-war tone, by interpreting the drama as a typical attack initiated by a post-socialist authoritarian state towards this too powerful private entrepreneur out of fear or simply for the vanity and narcissism of Your Highness Xi. The Financial Times, for example, compared it immediately with the Khodorkovsky case in Russia (Lewis 2021, paywall). The implication was clear: you can never trust those former socialist authoritarian countries. They would never respect private property, follow the rules of the liberal world, and become “us”. Equally unsurprisingly, some Western Leftists have maintained their idealist tone towards a China that may perhaps be capitalist but is at least not Western capitalist. For them, the crack-down on Ant signifies a determined fight by the state and the population against greedy capital and capitalists.
Most people in China indeed
seem to have welcomed the crackdown and support the state’s actions. There are
various reasons for such support. One economist
I talked to supported it for financial security considerations and for the
state’s antitrust efforts. She mentioned the extremely high and hence hazardous
financial leverage that Ant Financial is playing with, as well as the antitrust
efforts against Facebook and Google in the USA. One private entrepreneur also
supported the action for financial security considerations, but based on
different reasoning. According to him, since there are many different kinds of
capital (including foreign capital) behind Alibaba and Ant, Ant’s IPO would further
open the door for foreign finance capital to enter the Chinese market. Some
intellectuals talked about the vulgar and disgusting advertisements made by Ant
Financial aiming to encourage irrational consumption, as well as the
irresponsible private loans it has given out, and how all these behaviors have
disrupted social order and degraded social morals.
All these reasons were evident in the government’s statements for halting Ant: to regulate the financial market, enforce antitrust legislation, and create a healthier consumption environment (Yu 2020). This all seems valid except that the role Ant is playing is largely as a platform––a middleman between state banks and individual small-loan borrowers. Much of the capital given out as small loans by Ant actually comes from the state banks. The state banks were not allowed to engage in these high profit businesses. They also do not have access to the necessary consumer data and data science. They normally deal with state owned enterprises. So, Ant stepped in to help state banks exploit a previously untouched financial market: grassroots personal loans. They then divided the profit. As some observers rightly pointed , Ant has always aimed at creating partnerships with big banks, not disrupting or supplanting them. More importantly, quite a few important government-owned funds and institutions are Ant shareholders and were expected to profit handsomely from the public offering (Zhong & Li 2020). Thus, the claim that Ant squeezed out the state banks is spurious. They were basically in the same boat. That is why the state never really regulated Ant before. Meanwhile, we should not forget that the informal financial market has long existed in Chinese grassroots society due to the inaccessibility of bank loans for most non-state economic entities and common people. Ant actually formalized (to a certain degree) this informal market. Yes, Ant did play the financial game of ‘asset-backed securities’ to enhance its financial leverage, but hardly to the extent that Wall Street is used to doing. Finally, what about the irrational consumption encouraged by easily accessible loans (especially for youths)? Maybe. But most such loans still come from other smaller and less responsible lending agencies following in Ant’s steps, which try to grasp crumbs from the huge cake but do not have the technology and data required to avoid excessive risk. It is these smaller and less technologically capable actors that are in fact creating chaos in credit supply. In short: even if we all agree that financial capital has always been highly speculative, and that Ant is no exception, some of the official statements justifying the intervention into Ant’s IPO still sound fishy.
Meanwhile, the poor in
China still seem the most determined supporters of the state’s crackdown on
Ant. They supported it out of their hatred toward big capital. On the internet,
they lambasted the bloodsucking behavior of Ant, and called it “Leech Financial”
instead of Ant Financial (Leech is pronounced in Chinese as “Ma Huang” and ant
is pronounced as “Ma Yi”). There is also a popular cartoon being circulated on
the internet that depicts Jack Ma as a beggar in his old age—homeless, fragile,
and sad. One blue-collar worker told me that any big capitalist whose main objective is to extract money from the poor
should be dragged down.
Tellingly, the state has intentionally toned down popular indignation. The relationship between state and capital in this country has always been much more complicated than the mere antagonism imagined by liberal commentators. The state can’t afford a strong group of capitalists with too much power and resources; but neither can it afford losing them and scaring capital away. It has always been an art of balancing. As we have seen, Jack Ma has reappeared recently with a more solemn appearance. His Ant is now required to deploy necessary ‘rectifications’ under the tighter rein of state regulation (CBNEditor 2021). It is, nevertheless, the right thing for the state to do, no matter the underlying aims. Ma, of course, should always keep in mind that there has never been an Era of Jack Ma; it has always been the Chinese Era that created him, as one Chinese official newspaper publicly warned him as early as 2019.
As for those professional
Chinese Americans who believe that they have missed the recent gold-digging
opportunities in China and have started to doubt their earlier decision to go
abroad, the crackdown on Ant—or more specifically, the broken dream of becoming
a billionaire data scientist—has taught them a rather comforting lesson:
miracles, whether for a country, a company, or an individual, are slippery. A
boring yet relatively predictable middle-class suburban life in the West should
at least be bearable, perhaps even enviable.
Juzimu is an ethnographic researcher of Chinese capitalist transitions and writes here under pseudonym.
Times are a Changing. The Trump phenomenon
as a whole, his election, his presidency, the events of the Capitol, Joe Biden’s
accession and Donald Trump’s impeachment are moments of radical process. They
form a dynamic in and of themselves. They express the chaos and transition of
the moment but they are also and at the same time forces in the transformation
and transmutations of capitalism and world history, perhaps, with the
complications of the COVID19 pandemic, virtually an axial moment, a switch or
turning-point of crisis, as
Don Kalb has argued on FocaalBlog early in the pandemic (Kalb 2020).
This involves a re-consideration of what is
fast becoming the master narrative concerning Trump, with ideological
implications of its own. Trump is presented as a spectre of a fascist past
rather than a foretaste, a mediation into, the potential of an authoritarian
totalitarian future involving major transmutations in capitalism. What follows
concerning the Trump phenomenon is written with all this very much in
mind.
Our guess (a risky gamble in these times
when almost anything seems possible) is that Trump will fade. There are
doubtless many other political figures similar or worse who could take his
place. With the going of Trump so may his “movement”. What crystallized around
him was more an assemblage, a loose-knit heterogeneous, motely collection of
diverse persons and groups ranging from the extreme far right to the more
moderate, whose organizational cohesion may be more illusory than real. Not yet
a political ‘Party Trump’ it is as likely to melt into air and go the way of
most populist movements as it might congeal into a longer-lasting force of
opposition headed by Trump.
This is not to gainsay the shock of the
storming of the Capitol on the otherwise ritualistic day of the confirmation of
Biden’s victory that concludes the liminal transitional period conventional in
the US-American democratic cycle. Such a liminal space (Turner, 1969) is a
relative retreat and suspension of the state political order as the presidency
is renewed or changed. This is often a festive time given to all kinds of
political excess when the people vent their potency in the selection of those
who are to rule them. Trump encouraged and intensified the potential chaos of liminality
at its peak when, ideally, it should subside and political order be fully
restored. He aimed to disrupt this critical moment and to maintain his
uncertain presence as the Lord of Misrule, if not necessarily to effect a coup.
Named as “God’s
chaos candidate” by some evangelicals who supported him, Trump promoted,
even if unwittingly, a moment of extreme chaos that was all the more intense
for the liminal moment of its occurrence when the participants themselves blew
out of control.
Night of the World, Pandemonium at the Capitol
In the nightmare of the event, newscasts presented
visions of a fascist future filled with Fascist and Nazi images and other
commonly associated symbols. There was a strong sense of dialectical collapse
along the lines of Hegel’s “Night of the World” of demonic appearances when
forces in opposition dissipate against each other and lose their meaning. The
representatives of the nation cowered under their desks fitting gas masks while
those who would challenge them in festive mood and drunk with brief power put
their feet up on desks aping their masters and carried off the mementos and
spoils of their invasion. Exuberant chants of “this is our house” echoed down
the corridors of power.
Shades of the past paraded in the present,
foremost among them that of the enduring trauma of the rise of Nazi
Germany. What Sinclair Lewis had warned
in It Can’t Happen Here – a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of
the democratic world – anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s
apotheosis, seemed to be actually materializing. This accounts for the
excitement on the steps of the Capitol – “this is America 2021 y’all!!” Arlie
Hochschild captured the millenarian Nuremberg feel of his campaign rallies when
researching Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American
Right (Hochschild 2016), her excellent ethnography of the white far right
and their sympathisers in Louisiana, America’s poorest state and a Donald Trump
heartland. Hochschild recounts at a lecture to the Rosa
Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin a scene, reminiscent of the opening frames
of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, when Trump’s plane,
“Trump Force One”, appears through the clouds and, as if from heaven it
descends “down, down, down” to the waiting crowd; electrified in expectation of
the saviour’s endlessly repeated sermon of redemption of the deep resentment that
they felt for having been pushed aside from the promise of the American
Dream.
But here is the point: The immediate
reaction to the storming of the Capitol gave further confirmation to the real
and present danger of Trump’s fascist threat fuelled in the rumblings of class
war which Trump has inflamed and exploited. It is a liberal fear, mainly of the
Democrats but including some Republicans, who are the chief targets of Trump’s
attacks. His demonisation of elite liberal value (marked by accusations of
moral perversities aimed at unmasking the claims to virtue) is at one with his
condemnation of the liberalism of Federal political and social economic
policies which he presents as contributing to the abjection of mainly white US-American
working class and poor; to be seen in the rapidly increasing power of global
corporations, policies of economic globalization, the privileging of
minorities, refugees, recent immigrants etc.
Image 1: When surprises were minimal and manifest destiny kept on giving. The Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C., Nov. 26, 2012 (Foto: US Forest Service/Keith Riggs, accessed 8 Feb 2021)
It might be remembered at this point that
the violence of the Capitol invasion–the marked involvement of military
veterans, the carrying of weapons, baseball bats, the reports of pipe bombs–that
shocked so many, reflects the fact that all modern states are founded on
violence. This is particularly the case in the US where the US
Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in defence of
democratic rights. In an important sense the violence of those invading the
Capitol refracts back at the middle class and especially the ruling elite the
very violence that underpins the structure of their rule. If liberal virtue was
shocked by the events on January 6 it was also confronted with the violent
paradox deep in its democratic heart (see Palmer 2021). Thus, this paradox
slips into paroxysm at this critical moment in American political history.
The transitional figure of Trump feeds on
the prejudices of his intended constituencies and exploits an already
ill-formed class awareness building on ready commitments and vulnerabilities – the
well-rehearsed fascist and populist technique – creating indeed a false
consciousness (there is no other way to say it) that is not only destructive
but in the hands of the likes of Trump integral to intensifying the feelings of
impotence and the miseries that give Trump his relative popularity. Slavoj
Zizek says as much in what he describes as “Trump’s
GREATEST TREASON”.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘The Governator,’
was quick to counter the white supremacist, macho, Proud Boy, Oath Keeper and Three
Percenter elements highly visible in media newscasts with a Conan the Barbarian
performance. This was his take on the dominant brand of Make America Great
Again. (Really, all those along the political spectrum participate in MAGA – Democrat
Party badges and hats from the recent election read “Dump Trump Make
America Great Again”). He focussed on his own immigration away from his native
Austria and its Nazi associations to the liberated American world of his
success. For Schwarzenegger, the Capitol invasion and its vandalism equated to Kristallnacht.
Noam Chomsky likens the storming with Hitler’s
Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 observing that it effected a greater penetration
to the heart of power than did Hitler’s failed attempt. But Chomsky, with
characteristic acuity, adds that the fascist danger lies in the anti-democratic
class forces (including electoral and political manipulations on all sides)
that provide the fertile ground for fascism; forces that have acutely and early
been pinpointed by anthropologists (Holmes 2000, 2020; Kalb and Halmai 2011;
Kalb, forthcoming).
But the point must be taken further. New
class formations are in the making right now and they are being driven in the
explosive nature of technological revolution (see Smith
2020). This is something Marx himself was very much aware of and why he
wrote more than one hundred pages on the machine and the human in Capital. This
is also the concern of Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (2002) and the
continued focus of today’s accelerationists such as the Nick Srnicek (2017) on platform
capitalism.
Creative Destruction, the Transmutation in Capital and Corporate State Formation
The rise and fall of Trump (not discounting the
possibility that Humpty Dumpty might come together again, which is the fear of
the master narrative) may be understood as expressing a transition between
two moments of capitalism during which one formation morphs into another. Trump
is the embodiment, instrument, and anguish of this transition, a tragic figure
in a theatre of the absurd. Grand Guignol almost, but in Gothic American Horror
Story style. The accession of Biden is the apotheosis of the new in the
hopes of most; he is a vehicle for healing the divisions in the U.S. that Trump
brought to a head and are still very much present. But Biden’s rise has ominous
oppressive indications of its own.
The Trump events have all the hallmarks of
the crisis and rupture of transformation or, better, transmutation. The
millenarian spirit that Hochschild captures in her account is one born in the
capitalist ideology of the American Dream; fortified in the religious
fundamentalism of Trump’s many followers that revitalizes their hopes in that
American Dream in the face of abject failure. The rallies and the impassioned
actions of those invading the Capitol are filled with revitalizing energy.
Such millenarian explosions, distinct in
their own historical contexts, occur at many other points in global history. It
was apparent at the dawn of capitalism in Europe, at later moments of crisis
and redirection in capitalism up to the present – indeed at the inception of
the Nazi horror, and at points of the disruptive expansion of capital in the
western imperial/colonial thrust as in the Cargo movements of the Pacific (Cohn
1970, Lanternari 1960, Worsley 1970 (1959); Neveling
2014 for a link between Cargo Cults and neoliberal capitalism).
The rupture of transmutation in capital,
the crisis that the Trumpian progress manifests, is an instance of what Marx
and others have understood to be the creative/destruction dynamic of capital;
whereby it reproduces, renews, revitalizes its potency against contradictions
and limitations to its profit motive that capital generates within itself as
well as those thrown up against it in the very process of its own expansion and
transformation.
The circumstances underpinning the current
transmutation in capital relate to the revolutions in science and technology those
associated particularly with the digital age and advances in biotechnology).
The rapid development of capital (and especially that of the still dominant, if
declining, US-American form) was driven by the innovations in knowledge and
technology (something that Marx and many others admired in US-America). What
became known as the nation state (the dominant political form that nurtured
capital) and the class orders that were generated in capitalism and necessary
to it (not to mention the over-population and ecological disasters that grew in
capital’s wake) also constituted barriers and limitations to capital’s
growth.
The new technological revolutions are a
response to the limitations on capital emergent within its own processes.
Technological innovations enabled revolutions in production and consumption, creating
new markets and increasing consumption, reducing the need for human labour and
the resistances it brings with it, overcoming problems, and opening up
novel lines, of distribution; forcing the distress of unemployment (especially
among the erstwhile working class), creating impoverishment and uncertainties
reaching into once affluent middle classes as captured in the neologism ‘the
precariat’; shifting class alignments; redefining the nature and value of work,
of the working day, the expansion of zero hours and, as an overarching
manifestation, a sense of the return of a bygone era.
The current technological revolution is a key
factor in the extraordinary growth in the monopolizing strength of corporations
such as Google, Amazon or even Tencent. The dot.com organizations (the
flagships and spearheads of capitalist transformation with huge social transmutational
effect) have wealth that dwarfs many states and they are functioning in areas
once controlled by the state (from what used to be public services to the
current race to colonize space). Indeed the corporate world has effectively
invaded and taken over the operation of nation-states (Kapferer
2010; Kapferer
and Gold 2018).
This is most noteworthy in those state
orders influenced by histories of liberal social democracy, in Europe and
Australia for example, which tended to draw a sharp demarcation between public
interest and private enterprise. The nation-state and its apparatuses of
government and institutions for public benefit have been corporatized so much
so that in many cases government bureaucracies have not only had their
activities outsourced to private companies but also have adopted managerial
styles and a ruthlessness along the lines of business models. The corporatization
of the state has aligned it much more closely with dominant economic interests
in the private (now also public) sectors than before and enables a bypassing of
state regulation, even that which once sustained capitalist interest, but which
became an impediment to capitalist expansion.
These changes have wrought socio-economic
and political disruption and distress globally and most especially in the
Western hemisphere. This is not merely collateral damage. The revolution in
science and technology has been a key instrument in effecting social and
political changes via destruction, for the regenerative expansion of capital.
It is central to the re-imagination of capital in the opening of the twenty-first
century.
This is particularly so in the United States
whose socio-political order is historically one of corporate state formation which
accounts for its long-term global political economic domination. Some renewal
in leftist thought (e.g. with Bernie Sanders) is an index of the depth of distress
that is being experienced although the ideological and counteractive potency of
the American Dream fuelled especially in fundamentalist Christianity suppresses
such potential and contributes to the intensity and passion of the Trump
phenomenon. The ideological distinction of the Trump event aside, its dynamic
of populism is reflected throughout the globe (Kalb 2021)
One common feature of this is the rejection
of the political systems associated with nation state orders and, to a marked
extent the largely bipartite party systems vital in the discourses of control
and policy in nation states. Trumpism and other populist movements (in Europe
notably) complain of the alienation of the state and its proponents from
interests of the mass. The expansion of corporatization and the further
hollowing out of the state, the corruption of its public responsibilities by
corporate interests, is effectively what Trump was furthering in his
presidency. It is a potent dimension of the Trump paradox and a major irony of
the Capitol invasion that, for all the apparent fascist tendencies, it was the
spirit of reclaiming democracy (admittedly of the freebooting kind) in an
already highly corporatized establishment (subject to great corporate capitalist
interest) that Trump’s actions were directed to. An important figure in this
respect is the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The tech
billionaire, early investor in Facebook and founder of PayPal, was an early
Trump supporter and named a part of Trump’s transition team in 2016. His book, Zero
to One, based on his lecture courses at Stanford University, argues for a
corporate-technocratic governance beyond older systems of government. (Thiel
2014).
From Panopticon to Coronopticon
COVID-19 has highlighted the social
devastation of the destructive/creative dynamic of capitalism’s transmutation (see
also Kalb
2020). The class and associated ethnic inequities have everywhere been
shown up and probably intensified by a pandemic that is starting to equal, if
not surpass, the depressing and devastating effect of two world wars. Like them
it is clearing ground for capitalist exploitative expansion – something like
Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism (Klein 2007).
Under the shadow of the virus, labour
demands are being rationalized, the cutting back of employment and its benefits
legitimated, governments are pumping capital into the economies in a way that
protects consumption in an environment where there is declining occupational
opportunity and income. The idea of the universal basic income is seriously
discussed. Its implementation would offset some of the contradictions in a
transformation of capitalism that is reducing our dependence on labour and endangering
consumption through automation and digitalization. While the poor are getting
poorer the rich are getting richer; most notably those heading the
revolutionary technologies of the digital age and biotechnology, with the
competitive race to secure viable vaccines against the virus one example for
the latter sector’s power.
There is a strange synchronicity linking
the pandemic with the dynamic of capitalism’s transmutational corporatization
of the state. The virus reproduces and spreads in a not dissimilar dynamic.
Indeed, COVID 19 in some ecological understandings is the product of the
acceleration of globalization effected in those processes of capitalism’s
transmutation associated with corporate expansion and the corporatization of
the nation state. As a crossover from animal to human bodies the virus is one
manifestation of increased human population pressure on wild animal territory,
the closer intermeshing of animal and human terrain. The scale
of the pandemic is, of course, a direct consequence of the time space
contraction and intensity
of the networked interconnections of globalization.
State surveillance has intensified as a
by-product of combatting COVID which is also its legitimation, with digitalization
as the major surveillance instrument. The digital penetration into every nook
and cranny of social life (see Zuboff2019, and Netflix’s The Social Dilemma),
is interwoven with the commodification of the social and personal for profit – economizing
individuals calculating the costs and benefits of their social ‘interactions’
(the YouTube or Kuaishou ‘influencer,’ the hype TED talker as Foucault’s
entrepreneurial self, cut, pasted, uploaded and remixed).
The management of Covid-19, demanding
social isolation and the disruption of ordinary social life, has exponentially increased
the role of the digital as the primary mediator of the social and a commanding
force in its very constitution. Covid-19 has been revealed as a kind of social
particle accelerator. As such, and ever more exclusively so, the real of the
social, is being re-imagined, re-engineered and re-mastered as a digital-social,
a ‘Digisoc’ or ‘Minisoc,’ constrained and produced within algorithmically
preset parameters. Here is Peter Weir’s film, The Truman Show,
radically updated. And, as with Truman, the space of freedom is also and at the
same time experienced as a space of unfreedom.
This manifests in the deep ambivalence many
feel about the new technologies they daily live with and through. The digitized
social is often presented as a new agora, a liberating ‘space’ in which new, progressive
ideas and directions are enabled, operationalized and indeed optimized. The
internet has become a site of multiple struggles in which class forces and new
potentials for social difference and proliferating identity-claims are continually
emerging. The freedom of the internet has provided exciting opportunities for
many. Such freedom also and at the same time contributes to conspiracy
imaginations on all sides. As has been made clear in the two elections
featuring Trump, the superpower of corporations like Google and Facebook
threatens to install a domain of hyper-control. Digital walls and electronic
fences are appearing everywhere in the age of the global ‘splinternet.’
The hegemonic and totalizing potential for
the ruling bodies of the corporatizing state who control the digital is as
never before. This is so not just in the global scale of the network reach but
in the heightened degree to which controlling bodies can form the ground of the
social, radically remodel, engineer and design reality in accordance with
dominant interests, and where motivated shut out that which threatens their
order. The awareness of this has driven the fury of censorship and
self-censorship on all sides – Trump’s threatened TikTok ban becomes Twitter’s
actual Trump ban.
Back in Some Form: From 1984 into a Brave New World
Trump and Trumpism are moments in the
transitional, transmutational process of capitalism outlined above and of the
formation of new social and political orders. Echoing the past, they express its
transmutation (and its agonies) rather than repeat it. Trump and Trumpism
manifest the contradictions of such processes, agents and agencies for the
transmutations in the social and political circumstances of life that are in
train, themselves forces in the bringing forth of a future that, in some
aspects, is already being lived.
Trump himself can be described as an
“in-betweener”, a bridge into the new realities, both a force in their
realization and a victim. His manner and style, the brutal no holds barred
amorality is familiar from the captains of industry and robber barons of an
earlier age, who built capitalist America and crushed working-class resistance
by all means, more foul than fair. Trump maintains the style but in reverse
redemptive mode. In his shape-shift he presents as supporter of the working
classes not their nemesis as did his forerunners.
However, his authoritarian business manner,
of The Apprentice’s“you’re
fired” fame, matches well the managerialism of the present. He is an
exemplar of contemporary venture capitalism and most especially of profit from
non-industrial production (often anti production) gained from real estate,
property transfer, asset stripping, and the expanding gaming and gambling
industries (their importance as symptoms of the crises of transformation in
capital) from which some of Trump’s key supporters come.
Trump’s reactive anti-immigrant nationalism
and “Make America Great Again” rhetoric not only appeals to the white right but
is an engagement of past rhetoric to support new political and economic
realities. Trump’s economic war with China stressed re-industrialization but it
was also concerned with counteracting China’s technological ascendancy,
especially in the realm of the digital, a major contradiction born of the
current globalizing transmutation in capitalism involving transfers of
innovatory knowledge.
Trump anticipated the risk to his
presidential re-election. It manifested the dilemmas of his in-betweenness. His
inaction with regard to the pandemic was consistent with the anti “Big
Government” policies of many Republicans and the US-American right who cherish QAnon
conspiracy theories as much as they want to reduce government interference and
modify regulation in capitalist process, a strong emphasis in current
transitions and transformations of the state and of capital.
Trump’s cry that the election was being
stolen was excited in the circumstances of the pandemic. His attack on postal votes
related to the fact that the pandemic gave the postal vote a hitherto
unprecedented role in the election’s outcome by by-passing and neutralising the
millenarian populist potency of his mass rallies already reduced in numbers by
fear. Trump sensed that the COVID-inspired move to ‘working from home’ and ‘voting
from home’ would challenge, fence in and fence out his base of support.
Trump has always taken advantage of the
digital age, his use of Twitter and Facebook the marked feature of his style of
rule. His practices looked forward to the politics of the future ever
increasingly bounded and conditioned in societies of the image. Following the
events at the Capitol, Trump’s own Custer’s Last Stand to allay his
fate, his cyberspace and internet accounts were switched off. He has been
cancelled by the new digitally authoritarian corporate powers (who arguably
benefitted the most from the Trump era and profited greatly under pandemic
conditions) who are behind the growing new society of the image, in which he
was a past-master and within which he had in the main established his identity.
(Kapferer
R, 2016)
The overriding image of the Capitol
invasion and carried across most networks is that of the occupation of the
heart of American democracy by those who would threaten its ideals. The media have
concentrated on what was the dominating presence of the extremist macho white US-American
far right violently parading symbols of a racist past combined with clear
references to the not-so-distant memories of fascism and Nazism. There
were others there more moderate in opinion and representative of other class
fractions, if still mostly white, whose presence does not reduce the fear
of fascism, possibly as in Nazi Germany when what seemed to be small groups of
extremists hijacked power (and the events of the Capitol evokes such memory) to
unleash the horrors to follow. Something similar could be said for what
happened in the Soviet Union leading to Stalinism. These were the worlds of
George Orwell’s 1984, in which some of the major ideals of the time flipped in
their tragic negation. Such events were very much emergent in realities of the
nation-state, its imperialist wars and the class forces of that particular
historical moment in the history of capitalism and the formations of its social
and political orders. There is no statement here that this could not happen
again.
What we are saying is this: a different
authoritarian and oppressive possibility may be taking shape – not of the
fascist past but of the future. This is a future that Trump was mediating but
which may be coming into realization, despite the great hope to the contrary,
in the accession of President Biden. Perhaps this prospect can be seen as more
akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World born in the current transmutations
of capital (and its agonies of class) and in the circumstances of the radical technological
revolutions of the digital era, involving the apotheosis of the corporatisation
of the state, the corporate state emerging out of the ruins of the nation
state.
Aldous Huxley depicted a world centred on production
and efficiency, a bio technologically conditioned global system of perfect
rational, optimised order. The class conflicts of the past are overcome here; everyone
accepts their predetermined place. It is a post-human reality in which the
foundation of human beings in their biology and passions is transcended. It is
a somatised, artificially intelligent world of the image and promiscuity. Indeed,
the American Dream. Those who do not fit or who resist are fenced out. Time and
space are being reconfigured, incurving around the individual and
‘personalised.’
Biden’s inauguration for all its upbeat ceremonial spirit had some
intimation of such a future, taking into full account the security constraints
of its moment: to protect against the murderous unchecked rampage of the virus
and the threat of the attack of right-wing militias. The stress on this, it may
be noted, had an ideological function to distance what was about to come into
being from, for example, the definitely more visceral world of Trump and
thoroughly evident in the invasion of the Capitol – what Biden in his inauguration speech called an “uncivil war.”
The scene of the perfectly scripted inauguration was
virtually devoid of people. Apart from the dignitaries and all-important
celebrities, the highly selected order of the society of the corporate-state. Where
the general populace would normally crowd, was an emptiness filled with flags
and protected by troops, more than currently are stationed in Afghanistan.
Those who might disrupt, Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘resistant
savages,’ were fenced out. It was a totalizing and constructed digital media
image presenting a reality of control, harmony, and absolute surveillance.
We claim that something like Trump and the
events surrounding him would have happened regardless of the specific phenomena
we have focussed on here. The events Trump are a moment, perhaps among the most
intense, in the transitional transmutation of the history of capitalism and the
socio-economic and political orders which build and change around it. The
apparent chaos indicates a major axial moment in world history – a chaos driven
in the emergence of a cybernetic techno-capitalist apparatus on a global scale.
What might be augured in the Biden accession is already taking vastly different
shape in China and elsewhere around the globe. New and diverse formations of
totalitarian authoritarianism are emerging. The Trump phenomenon is crucial for
an understanding of some of the potentials of a future that we are all very
much within and that an overconcentration on the parallels with the past may
too easily obscure.
Bruce Kapferer is a roving anthropologist and ethnographer, Professor Emeritus at Bergen University, Professorial Fellow UCL, Fellow Cairns Institute, and the Director of the ERC Egalitarianism project at the University of Bergen.
Roland Kapferer is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Deakin University, a filmmaker and a musician. He does research on cybertechnologies.
Cite as: Kapferer, Bruce, and Roland Kapferer. 2021. “The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities.” FocaalBlog, 2 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/02/bruce-kapferer-roland-kapferer-the-trump-saga-and-americas-uncivil-war-new-totalitarian-authoritarian-possibilities/
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.
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?/
As Covid-19 has washed over Latin America
like a tsunami and the pillars of shaky economies have shuddered under
lockdowns, the priority of profits over public welfare stands out in starker
relief, restating the need for effective public policies and demanding
government intervention more than ever. Such an unprecedented moment poses
strong challenges for the left and Latin America’s social movements. Remobilizing
in the wake of Covid and building lasting, independent social movement power
are key tasks ahead.
