Category Archives: Features

Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Anne-Meike Fechter and Eileen May: Taxonomies of Difference and Inclusion: Notes From ‘Other’ Humanitarianisms

Items donated to people fleeing from fights on the border of Thailand, Kayin State, photo by Jacqueline Hpway

The call for looking at taxonomies of difference in global humanitarianism is a powerful reminder to consider how differences—as well as, we argue, affinities—shape humanitarian practices. Prompted by research with people displaced by violent conflict in the Myanmar borderlands near Thailand, we propose alternative perspectives. First, we suggest that the lens of ‘taxonomies of difference’ can be applied productively to humanitarianism itself. Beyond invoking a singular global humanitarianism, we are calling attention to what is often presented as an un-questioned standard. This is humanitarianism in its highly institutionalised form, often led by organisations from the Global North. This version of humanitarianism offers insights on how taxonomies such as of race, whiteness and more specifically antiblackness, materialise. While such inquiries are overdue, here we suggest that taxonomies of humanitarianisms which forefront such singular form, deserve questioning themselves.

Based on the findings from a larger research project specifically engaging with displacement-affected communities in Myanmar, it emerged that in geographical areas that were harder to reach for international organisations, for practical and political reasons, or where these had recently vacated a humanitarian space, a range of other humanitarian practices became visible. These include locally based civil society groups who step in to support internally displaced people (IDPs) through fundraising, donations, and providing emergency supplies. More broadly, it became clear that due to decades-long conflict, in several locations there were groups of people who had been displaced in earlier periods who were now, to some extent, providing short-term as well as longer-term resources to others including land, or setting up education centres for children and young people. There was thus not necessarily a clear division between those who were considered settled and those who were displaced. At the same time, there was not a hard line between beneficiaries or recipients on the one hand, and those supplying short-term aid on the other. While not all those who experienced displacement in the past support others, there is a fluidity between having been in need oneself, and, once in a more stable position, donating resources to new arrivals. One might understand such practices as vernacular, local, or everyday humanitarianism (Fechter, 2023). Irrespective of nomenclature, they unsettle a taxonomy of humanitarianism which centres the global North-dominated as a default form.

Such vernacular or everyday forms, beyond their ethnographic or empirical significance, hold the possibility of revisiting which taxonomies of difference matter in other humanitarianisms. As outlined in the other contributions, taxonomies centred on anti-Blackness, for example, define categories of exclusion, in stark contrast to what is sometimes presented as the impartiality and all-encompassing ‘humanity’ of global humanitarianism. Among displaced communities, we found that taxonomies of difference certainly matter. This can be in terms of ethnic as well as faith groups. The latter can constitute axes of exclusion, as in the case of one resettlement site which strongly favoured Buddhist faith groups, as opposed to Muslim ones. At the same time, some of these also create of grounds for inclusion. Indeed, a strong driver for humanitarian activity and resource-sharing evolved around taxonomies of affinity, perceived or constructed similarity, and shared biographies. For example, among ethnic Karen groups, Christian church networks, within Myanmar, across the border with Thailand, and further afield, became a significant source of donations. This was especially prominent during festive periods such as Christmas, or Karen New Year. Further, sharing food and resources among displaced people of common geographical origin mattered, as well as on grounds of shared ethnicity. The latter was formalised through ethnic armed organisations, their social welfare units and humanitarian efforts—aimed at, but not exclusively so, fellow ethnic community members. Similarly, substantial humanitarian support is being raised and facilitated through well-documented diaspora networks.

In sum, thinking through taxonomies of difference offers a much-needed opportunity to consider what shapes humanitarian practices, acknowledging that such re-assessment includes taxonomies of humanitarianism itself, as well as how people select, ignore, include or support others according to matrices of difference as well as affinity.

Anne-Meike Fechter is Professor of Anthropology and International Development in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK. She currently works on informal aid among displaced people in Myanmar. Her most recent book is Everyday Humanitarianism in Cambodia (Manchester University Press, 2023).

Eileen May is a research fellow at the Covenant Development Institute in Myanmar and is a PhD student in Human Rights and Peace Studies at Mahidol University in Thailand.

References

Fechter, A.-M. 2023. Everyday Humanitarianism in Cambodia: Challenging Scales and Making Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cite as: Fechter, Anne-Meike & May, Eileen 2024. “Taxonomies of Difference and Inclusion: Notes From ‘Other’ Humanitarianisms” Focaalblog 28 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/10/28/anne-meike-fechter-and-eileen-may-taxonomies-of-difference-and-inclusion-notes-from-other-humanitarianisms/

Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Malay Firoz and Pedro Silva Rocha Lima: Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Exhibition view of Joseph Kosuth’ installation One and three Frames at Castelli Gallery December 8, 2015 – March 13, 2016

Humanitarian action is marked by a striking disjunction between the universalising humanist vocabulary that undergirds its ethical commitments, and the taxonomies of racialised difference that govern its dispensation of moral concern and material aid. This disjunction is not merely indicative of the inevitable discontinuity between principle and practice. Rather, the valuation of the human as a suffering body—shorn of race, gender, ethnicity, and other identifying markers of the social—precipitates an epistemic ignorance towards racialised difference that in fact consolidates and reinforces difference. After all, as Polly Pallister-Wilkins (2021) suggests, drawing on Sylvia Wynter, the figure of the human is itself a “genre of being” inseparable from the Western colonial metaphysics which instituted it. The “human” in this formulation is a differentiated rather than universal category, such that humanitarian empathy for “distant others” is not simply a moral calling but a politically filtered and calibrated gesture. Yet, humanitarian studies has often reproduced the aid industry’s liberal terms of self-representation by eliding the tangible and structuring effects of racialised difference in humanitarian action. Where such questions are raised, as Adia Benton argues, they are addressed “at the level of discourse, glossing racial hierarchies simply in terms of race masquerading as cultural difference, rather than explicitly in terms of racialized practices and identifications” (2016, 269; emphasis original).

An oft-repeated objection to the analytical centring of race alleges that doing so reproduces an American-centric conceptual apparatus that may misrecognize axes of difference in other contexts. White supremacy has an undoubtedly ugly resonance in American politics, such that calls to decolonise fields of inquiry are routinely occasioned by stochastic and spectacular acts of white supremacist violence in the US. However, it is well established that categories of race were integral to the epistemic encounters which constituted the modern world, and continue to suture what Lisa Lowe (2015) calls “the intimacies of four continents” (da Silva 2007; Robinson 2000; Wynter 2003). The global virality of racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter is precisely emblematic of their translatability as a political claim, even if the demands and constituencies they serve are inexorably contextual. Moreover, it is striking that such concerns about the parochial provenance of concepts are rarely posed to European canonical theory (Weheliye 2014). Much intellectual labour is expended, for instance, to map Marxian or Foucauldian categories onto historicities beyond European modernity, yet such improvisatory migrations are rarely afforded to other, more insurrectionist knowledge traditions. This form of epistemic ignorance is itself inescapably within the racial, or as Charles Mills calls it, a “white epistemology of ignorance” (2007, 35).

The essays in this collection stage the question of difference for the field of humanitarian studies. They demonstrate how humanitarianism’s moral valuation of life, while invoking the ideal of a purportedly shared humanity, is ultimately embedded in and filtered through social orders differentiated along lines of race, gender, nationality and power—what Adia Benton in the afterword to this collection calls the “humanitarian vernacular.” Benton’s proposed analytical focus on the humanitarian vernacular is, in part, a play on words referencing Anne-Meike Fechter and Eileen May’s essay in this collection, which analyses aid work by local actors in Myanmar as a form of “vernacular humanitarianism” that stands outside of the institutionalised framework of Western humanitarianism. Fechter and May use the case of Myanmar to argue that we should think of the aid sector in the plural—as “humanitarianisms”—to reflect the diversity of actors and values that orient aid work globally. They posit that this also allows us to consider other principles and moral motivations behind humanitarian efforts that are not normally considered “humanitarian” by Western-led organisations, including for instance ideals of affinity and shared biography.

Within refugee resettlement regimes, we also see how difference may be deemed undesirable when it is framed as a barrier to integration (Allison Stuewe), or, conversely, how difference may be welcomed when specific categories of refugees align with the political or economic interests of a host state (David Tsoi). Tsoi’s and Stuewe’s contributions to this collection challenge the mythical ideal of refuge granted solely on the basis of shared humanity; instead, the refugee or migrant must conform to specific criteria that make them deserving or desirable to the state. Finally, Patricia Ward and Ezgi Güner tackle the intimate workings of race in humanitarian labour. In Jordan, Ward argues that local consultants represent a form of racialised expertise capable of “fast-fixing” last-minute evaluations and reports that INGOs and UN agencies cannot complete on their own. These fast-fixers, whose career prospects are limited by the opportunities available to “local staff,” reject the positional authority of “expats” by stressing the local as the true home of humanitarian dispositions. Güner meanwhile skilfully analyses discourses of sameness espoused by Turkish humanitarians in Africa south of the Sahara. Here, much like their Western counterpart, the Muslim humanitarian appears as a white saviour aiding the prototypical Black African in need of help, while advancing a specifically Ottoman-Islamic pedigree of white supremacy in Turkey.

Taken together, the essays in this collection offer various instantiations of what it means to think with difference as an analytical framework, a theoretical posture, and an empirical object. If humanitarianism is anchored in an invocation of being human, these essays suggest that difference does not merely constrain such universalist ambitions, but rather, is constitutive of humanitarianism’s vernacular grammars, and thereby, constitutive of humanitarianism itself. Following in this stead, more research is needed on the way taxonomies of difference are internally striated and situated in tension with one another. By posing the question of how antiblackness in particular, rather than white saviourism in general, organises the determination of humanitarian entitlements, further work may reveal the patterned morphologies of difference that reproduce themselves across diverse scales and temporalities.

Malay Firoz is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the politics of “resilience-based” approaches to humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, and explores the intersections between humanitarianism, ethics, and forced migration in the Middle East.

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima is a Lecturer in Disaster Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. He researches how humanitarian logics and values travel from war and crisis settings to the context of ongoing chronic urban violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is also interested in related topics of the state, normality, relations, and humour.

References

Benton, Adia. 2016. “African Expatriates and Race in the Anthropology of Humanitarianism.” Critical African Studies 8 (3): 266–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2016.1244956.

Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mills, Charles W. 2007. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 11–38. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Pallister-Wilkins, Polly. 2021. “Saving the Souls of White Folk: Humanitarianism as White Supremacy.” Security Dialogue 52 (S): 98–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024419.

Robinson, Cedric. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Silva, Denise Ferreira da. 2007. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Weheliye, Alexander. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

Cite as: Firoz, Malay & Silva Rocha Lima, Pedro 2024. “Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism” Focaalblog 23 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/10/23/malay-firoz-and-pedro-silva-rocha-lima-taxonomies-of-difference-in-global-humanitarianism/

Blog, Fascism, Features

Maddalena Gretel Cammelli: Reflections on contemporary fascism

Image 1: Building in Rome occupied by the CasaPound movement in 2003, photo by Barbicone

It was 2009 when, while living in a squatted house in the Montreuil, a leftist banlieue on the East side of Paris, I was asked how it was possible that there were people occupying buildings in Rome, Italy who self-defined as fascists. The activities of the CasaPound movement were coming to be known on the other side of the Alps as well, and French Leftists were asking me for explanations. Indeed, CasaPound activists used to call themselves third millennium fascists: they have de facto been the first movement to self-claim this label and assert a direct legacy with Fascism since 1945. It is important to remember that Italian law and the country’s constitution prohibit the re-formation of the Fascist party, so a claim of this kind has a certain weight.

Since that moment, I began to focus my research on this subject, first with my PhD dissertation on CasaPound (Cammelli 2015, 2017), and later by continuing to reflect on the place and significance the concept of fascism has been gaining in contemporary European landscapes (within the ERC project F-WORD).

In some ways, the fact that the activists I first engaged were using the label “fascist” to self-identify made things easier for me: my own reproduction of this category in the research was not a choice of political labelling, but simply an act of respecting the emic perspective claimed by the activists themselves. Nonetheless, the specific nature of such a categorization required unpacking.

It is important to recall that, at that time almost 15 years ago, very few people were taking this group seriously as a danger. CasaPound activists were not generally considered new exponents of a fascist-like identity. At an analytical level, it was suggested that I use the “integralist” category proposed by Douglas Holmes (2000) so as to indicate continuity with more traditional political forms, but without the demonizing consequences the label of fascism might trigger. Alternatively, they could be referred to as neo-nationalist, as suggested by Gingrich and Banks (2006) and Kalb and Halmai (Kalb and Halmai 2011) or populist as used by Kalb in his work on Poland (2009). I engaged with this literature to analyze the way this presence was affecting Italian political life, and indeed how cultural identities and political identities seemed to be playing a primary role in absorbing the disappointment experienced by people suffering the double devaluation (Kalb 2022) produced by the social crisis of European modernity – a crisis which, far from being exclusively economic, still continues today.

Almost fifteen years later, we may be in the position to add a few new pieces to the CasaPound puzzle, as the evolution of the political situation in Italy and Europe allows us to make some more specific arguments.

It is evident, as tellingly signalled by the 2022 election of the Meloni government, that the state of affairs once known as the cultural hegemony of the (so-called) left wing in Italy has lost its “momentum”. If there is anything like a cultural hegemony today in the sense outlined by Gramsci, it aligns with the consensus established around the Meloni government and reflects many of CasaPound’s own values. These activists are no longer at the margins; they now find themselves at the centre of the political imaginary of contemporary Italian society (as in other European countries). As confirmed by Douglas Holmes (2019), this not only means that the fascists of today are no longer the violent, skinhead-like people we would have imagined in the past; they have assumed a much more common and widespread profile. It also means that the people who twenty or even ten years ago appeared to be marginal groups of stigmatized militants now play a completely different role in the political arena, having become mainstream and widely accepted. This development may trigger important changes in the way new research on the topic is delineated, and we need to contextualise the rise of right-wing claims and populist nationalist drives more generally within the development of neoliberalism and its irrepressible hegemonic consensus in Europe and the Americas.

To return to the question of how the concept and word “fascism” are being used, therefore, we may look at the enormous body of literature produced by sociologists and political scientists about political parties and formations positioned on the “right” of the political spectrum. These formations are variously characterised as far-right, extreme-right, radical right or, more recently, populist radical right (Caiani Padoan 2020, Brubaker 2020, Froio et al. 2020, Mudde 2007, 2019). Italian historian Claudio Vercelli recently wrote that, while clearly the past never repeats itself, it is valid to say that the underlying motivations and behaviours evoking an ideological and subcultural substratum with specifically fascist roots does re-emerge (Vercelli 2021: 27). Shortly before (2019), historian Emilio Gentile pointed out the perils of what he calls writing “a-historiography”, that is, the practice of comparing different historical epochs to identify similarities and continuity with the Fascist past; such scholarship, he warns, risks rendering fascism banal and empty. Nonetheless, in view of current political developments in Europe, the USA and beyond, recent literature on EU and US contexts has focused on fascism and faced the f-word head on (Stanley 2018, Traverso 2017, Zetkin Collective 2020). This is not a matter of comparing different historical epochs or making ‘a-historiography’ (Gentile 2019). On the contrary, it is high time for anthropological research to bring its insights to bear on this topic, improving our understanding of the meanings behind the concept of fascism today, its use in social cultural life, and its multiple forms of reception and incorporation.

My argument is that, by silencing the word fascism (using populism, far-right, extreme-right, etc. instead), we risk overlooking the central place historical Fascism plays today as a “mythological machine” (Jesi 2011) and meaning-producer. Silencing this word runs the risk of mis-viewing the central place that the construction of mythological spectacle played historically in the formation of Fascism itself. As Simonetta Falasca Zamponi argues, such spectacle was pursued by using symbols and myths as tools for Fascism to define itself, thus contributing to forging Fascist identity (Falasca Zamponi [1997] 2003: 181). In other words, civic rituals, monuments, and public holidays offered myths and symbols that were instrumental for the self-representation of the nation (Mosse 1975: 145). Mythologies acted to normalise and naturalise meanings, containing them in an apparently permanent space. Historical Fascism used myths and rituals to form/perform a superior spiritual community capable of delineating a cosmology based on (what was asserted as) the natural order of things. Legitimizing the superiority of the virile Fascist man over any other subject, human or non, and with the tools of violence to impose the myth on history, Fascism manifested in history in a deeply pervasive and destructive way. With its future-oriented aspects developed in opposition to the sense of decay characterising the beginning of the last century, it went beyond a simple conservative movement born in reaction to the Bolshevik revolution. Overall, we need to address how memories, rhetoric, and symbols derived from historical Fascism help to constitute new political subjects today, regardless of whether they are ultimately best described as fascists or not (Levi Rothberg 2018: 357). This process is effectively illustrated and concretised by my ethnographic encounter with CasaPound activists (Cammelli 2015, 2017): I found that music and concerts served as gathering sites forging a community of destiny united by faith in the leader and obedience to his will. The community gathered behind this leader become a homogenized collective self, finding significance and reasons for their activism in symbols and images of Mussolini and the Fascist past.

An objective of anthropological investigation should thus be to explore the mythological machine (Jesi 2011) fascism produces of itself, the manifestations that make of this machine that contradictory yet mutable, violent yet meaningful contemporary presence that calls out to be explored in its multiple and differently situated manifestations. Anthropologists should try to find meaning instead of arguing over definitions, to search out lower-case fascism as a heuristic device (Holmes 2019) and violent human reaction to present-day social crises. Nonetheless, fascism is not monstrous, inhuman, or alien in any way. It is a phenomenon wholly entangled with modernity (Bauman 1989) and the way we use reason to justify multiple forms of supremacy.

To conclude, we should consider fascism as it has variously manifested across 1945 and the turn of the millennium, and in its connection with liberalism and the neoliberal turn. And we may need to look more widely around us as well as inside ourselves, not limiting our gaze to some stigmatised militant but instead paying attention to the more general culture of domination and violence that is feeding our contemporary world.

Maddalena Gretel Cammelli is Associate professor in cultural anthropology at the Department Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin, and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project The world behind a word. An anthropological exploration of fascist practices and meanings among European youth (F-WORD) (https://fword.unito.it/).

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. [1989] 2010. Modernità e Olocausto. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Brubaker, Rogers. 2020. “Populism and nationalism” in Nation and Nationalism, 26 (1), 2020, pp. 44–66.

Caiani Manuela, Enrico Padoan. 2020. “Setting the scene: filling the gap in Populism studies” In PACO Partecipazione e conflitto 13(1) pp. 1-28.

Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2014. Millenial Fascism. Contribution à une Anthropologie du Fascisme du Troisième Millénaire. PhD diss. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2015. Fascisti del Terzo Millennio. Per un’Antropologia di CasaPound. Verona: OmbreCorte.

Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2017. Fascistes du Troisième Millénaire. Un Phénomène Italien? Milan: Editions Mimésis.

Falasca Zamponi, Simonetta. [1997] 2003. Lo spettacolo del fascismo. Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino.

Froio Caterina, Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Giorgia Bulli, Matteo Albanese. 2020. CasaPound Italia. Contemporary Extreme-right Politics. London, New York: Routledge.

Gentile, Emilio. 2019. Chi è Fascista. Bari-Roma: Laterza.

Gingrich, André, Marcus Banks. 2006. Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond. Perspectives from Social Anthropology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2000. Integral Europe. Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Oxford, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2019, “Fascism at eye level. The anthropological conundrum”, in Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. 84 pp. 62–90.

Jesi, Furio. 2011. Cultura di destra. Roma: Nottetempo.

Kalb Don, Halmai Gabor (eds). 2011. Headlines of nation, subtexts of class. Working-class populism and the return of the repressed in neoliberal Europe. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.

Kalb, Don. 2009. “Conversations with a Polish Populist: Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in post-socialism (and beyond)”. American Ethnologist 36(2): 207-223.

Kalb Don. 2022. “Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North.” In Journal of Agrarian Change. 23, 1: 204-219.

Levi, Neil, Michael Rothberg. 2018. “Memory studies in a moment of danger: Fascism, post fascism, and the contemporary political imaginary”, in Memory Studies Vol. 11(3) pp. 355–367.

Mosse, George L. 1975. La nazionalizzazione delle masse. Simbolismo politico e movimenti di massa in Germania dalle guerre napoleoniche al Terzo Reich. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, Cas. 2019. The Far-Right today. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stanley, Jason. 2018. How fascism works. the politics of us and them. New York: Random House.

Traverso, Enzo. 2017. I nuovi volti del fascismo. Verona: OmbreCorte.

Vercelli Claudio. 2021. Neofascismo in grigio. La destra radicale tra l’Italia e l’Europa. Torino: Einaudi.

Zetkin Collective. 2020. Fascisme Fossile. Paris : La Fabrique éditions.

Cite as: Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2024. “Reflections on contemporary fascism” Focaalblog 9 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/09/maddalena-gretel-cammelli-reflections-on-contemporary-fascism/

Blog, Fascism, Features

Giacomo Loperfido: Austerity, Charisma, and the Attacks on Reason

Image 1: Beppe Grillo in Piazza Castello in Turin for the campaign of the 5 Stars Movement Piemonte on 14 March 2010, photo by Giorgio Brida

I do not want to focus too much on the definitions of social phenomena because I find it more interesting to look at the structures (synchronic and diachronic) and contexts (at various scales) underpinning them. It is – I believe – analytically more productive to compare those, instead of sticking to what a categorical label (which is always, to an extent, arbitrarily attributed) does or does not include. Moreover, the word “fascism”, having become so morally laden in its century old history, is almost impossible to use it without falling into excessive generalizations (both moral and historical). With this in mind, my tendency towards what might or might not be classified as “fascism”, hinges on one simple principle: I use it either when referring to the movement founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919, or when the category is used “emically” by my research participants to describe themselves.

Consistently with the above, I’d like to focus on some systemic aspects I have been concentrating on in my recent work on populism and conspiracy theory within the Italian 5 Stars Movement (5SM), and put that into relation with insights from previous research. I do not at all intend to suggest that 5SM is a phenomenon of the fascist type, albeit one might notice, historically, a few overlapping tendencies. Rather, I look at the 5SM as a political grouping that was, at its origin, populist. Fascism, too, is an historically specific form of populism. But not every populism is fascist.

My main areas of interest in political anthropology have been concerned with: 1) The ideological innovations of Spontaneismo Armato: a radical and partly clandestine neo-fascist galaxy of small armed groups, active in Italy in the late 1970’s, and deeply engaged in the political violence of those years, (Loperfido 2018, 2022). 2) The constitutive processes, and subsequent collapse, of a specific socio-economic ideology of autarchy/self-reliance in Veneto, Italy. The latter was organized around an organicist understanding of the social relations of production which had also framed the sub-nationalist discourses of Lega Nord, another populist protest party, that had seen the light in Veneto and Lombardia in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Loperfido and Pusceddu, 2019, Loperfido 2020). 3) The above mentioned 5SM, with particular reference to the articulation of its early populistic functioning, and the fantasies of conspiracy against the people, very widespread in the early stages of the party formation (2005-2016). With Victor Turner, I analyze this articulation in terms of the anti-structural logics of charisma/enthusiasm, that informed the party’s constitutive process within the complex political economy of the long crisis unleashed by the financial breakdown of 2009.

All three of these political phenomena have been associated with fascism by variously distributed detractors in the media and at times in scientific discourses. Personally, I only dealt with Spontaneismo in terms of “Neo-fascism”, for the reasons listed above. However, one can notice that the three political formations shared a few ideological features with historical fascism.

Some of these features are:

1) All three – at least in their constitutional phase – claimed to represent various expressions of a third way between left and right, socialism and liberalism.

2) They all, likewise, claim(ed) to represent some form of revolt against the bourgeois world, while leaving unchallenged the system of property, market relations, and capital accumulation more generally.

3) They all were charismatic in nature, vitalistic and transgressive. One could say enthusiastic in the Durkheimian sense, or – more appropriately – anti-structural in a Turnerian perspective.

4) They all opposed action to theory and reason, giving to the former the moral edge over the latter. This created, in all four cases, a strongly anti-intellectual orientation, with attacks on rationalism, and to bourgeois idealist notions of foundational identity.

5) They all produced forms of organicist ideologies which were, more or less explicitly, obscuring class differences, and thus attempting to deny and repress class conflict.

Reflecting on similar ideological configurations, Susana Narotzky makes an important statement when saying that:

“most ‘third-way’ attempts at producing alternative social models have been of the ‘organic’ type, from the social doctrine of the church at the turn of the twentieth century through republican solidarism and fascism, to present-day third-way and social-capital proponents. They are similar in that they all aim at maintaining capitalist market-led relations of production while solving the ‘social question’, that is, the social unrest created by the necessary differentiation those very relations produce. They differ in the means employed to reach these common objectives and therefore in the procedural structures of governance developed. However, they all stress the importance of personalized relationships between agents and the specificity of community contexts” (Narotzky 2007:406, my emphasis).

Following in her footsteps, I would like to explore how third way postulations, and the processes of personalization/naturalization of socio-economic relations that are integral to it, could be related to the macro-context of austerity measures. Can this dynamic of personalization/naturalization be interpreted as the nexus determining a mutually constitutive relationship between austerity and charisma? The above might not give us certainties on what fascism is or is not, but could perhaps illuminate social processes, structures and constraints that elicited the emergence of fascism in its historical form, and that have – at other times – produced ideological tendencies that are – to an extent – comparable with it.

If we look at the historical context, our first realization is that all of these formations were constituted at moments of deep crisis of capital accumulation (historical fascism in the late 1910s, the Liga Veneta – then Lega Nord, then Lega – in the early 1970s, Spontaneismo in the mid 1970s, 5SM in 2009). This is not to say these political formations were reacting to economic crisis per se, rather, they all seemed to embody a reaction to what Stuart Hall has termed – with Gramsci – “a passive revolution”, a sort of reaction to a non-reaction: “when none of the social forces were able to enforce their political will and things go stumbling along in an unresolved way” (Hall and Massey 2010).

Another recurrent aspect in all of these situations is the emergency of austerity as a culturally hegemonic discourse. In a recent book Clara Mattei (2022) explores the relationship between austerity and fascism in Italy, as a process of reciprocal constitution. She sheds new light on austerity presenting it as a project elaborated by British and Italian think tanks at the dawn of the last century with the goal of liberating the forces of capital from the yoke of political control. She reminds us of how in his very first discourse as Prime Minister, Mussolini spoke the idioms of austerity, and promised to de-politicize the economy and remove all meddling of the state within it (Mattei 2022:205). Obviously, the other conjunctures in which the “idioms of austerity” were enforced as culturally hegemonic, were precisely the moments, named above, where the forces of capital appeared to be under severe threat (the 1970s and the 2010s).

Now, there are of course enormous differences, and neither Lega, Spontaneismo, or 5SM, embraced austerity the way Mussolini’s regime did. But I am not interested here in the direct relationship between these movements and austerity. Rather, I’m trying to suggest that austerity became a paradigm, powerful enough to establish a new representation of the relation between the economy and the state, where the possibility and the duty of the former to intervene in the latter and regulate the markets, disappears. This implies a set of consequences that, I shall argue, can be seen as co-responsible for the emergence and social establishment of the ideological configurations listed above.

Yesterday, like today, austerity seems to have the power to de-politicize issues, where these are “removed from the level of public accountability, and designated as ‘non-political’” (Hadjimichalis 2018: 108). Integral to austerity is what Don Kalb has termed “the unstoppable rule of experts” (2011: 3), whereby economic forces are not any longer the object matter of politicians (who govern things), but of technicians, scientists and technocrats (who study and manage things). This seems to inaugurate a process whereby the necessity to govern socio-economic forces is obscured. More than that: these are divorced from their social situatedness, their rootedness in the social process, and their being integral to the unequal relationalities between power holders and the subaltern classes. We could say that – with austerity – economic processes, social facts, power relations, develop a tendency to exit the social, and enter the domain of nature. Costis Hadjimichalis (2018) has shown how the discourse of austerity seems to be endowed with the magic power of making bloody attacks on social welfare, budgetary cuts for health and education, disappear beneath the idioms of flexibility, efficiency, and modernization. The result is “a culture of fear, alongside feelings of injustice and anger” (Hadjimichalis 2018: 108).

I was grappling with similar issues when faced with the problem of populism and conspiracy theories within the 5SM in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 economic breakdown, where not only the relation between the masses and the leader had become personalized, individualized, and as it were unmediated (Calise 2016, Comby 2014), but social and political forces were seen as personified and animated. The state had become a Vampire, the politicians were Zombies, while conspiracy theories about vaccines or organ removal during Covid-19 had come to represent the penetration of the extractive logic of capital down to the intimate sphere of the body itself.

We have known at least since Weber that “the social relationships directly involved in charisma are strictly personal, based on the validity and practice based on charismatic personal qualities” (1964 [1947]: 363-364). Yet, we can perhaps enrich this idea further by exposing a relationship that might connect personalized logics of charisma, 3rd way attempts, attacks on rationalism, with the larger systemic shift to hegemonic austerity. As we have seen, austerity deliberately dis-empowers the state as an abstract mechanism of social-economic regulation: a normative centre immanent over social relations, overseeing, governing, and intermediating social, economic and political interactions between actual persons, groupings, and different orders of institutions. The power of abstraction with which we endow the state, is key to that socially regulating function, tasked with emancipating social relations from their situated imbalances of power and their hierarchical relationalities. It is via these abstracting properties that the socially equalizing function of the state can be implemented via the establishment of a normative order. Obviously, when that function is removed not only is the field open again to the re-embedment of power relations into the given social hierarchy, but also to the general essentialization of social characters and social forces. It seems to me that this is the kind of context Gramsci alluded to, precisely when talking about fascism in austerity ridden Italy, when he saw, between the old that is dying and the new that cannot be born, an interregnum where “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Giacomo Loperfido is an ERC researcher in social and political anthropology for the PACT (Populism and Conspiracy Theory) Project, at the University of Tübingen. His research deals with questions of political violence, political radicalism, cultural enclavization, social and economic disintegration, in the wider context of global systemic crisis. He edited the volume “Extremism, Society and the State” (Berghahn Books, 2022).

References

Calise, Mauro. 2016. La Democrazia del Leader. Roma, Bari: Laterza.

Comby, Jean-Baptiste. 2014. “L’individualisation des Problèmes Collectifs: une Dépolitisation Politiquement Située.” Savoir/Agir:2: 45-50.

Hadjimichalis, Costis. 2018. Crisis Spaces. Structures, Struggles, and Solidarity in Southern Europe. London, New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart, and Doreen Massey. 2010. “Interpreting the crisis.” Soundings 44.44: 57-71.

Kalb, Don. 2011. “Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and The Return of the Repressed in Neo-liberal Europe, Introduction”, inKalb Don and Gabor Halmai, Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and The Return of the Repressed in Neo-liberal Europe. New York, Oxford : Berghan Books.

Loperfido, Giacomo. 2018. “Neither Left nor RIght. Crisis, Wane of Politics, and the Struggles for Sovereignty”, in Kalb, Don and Mollona, Mao, Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 118-141.

–. 2020. “The entrepreneur’s other: Small entrepreneurial identity and the collapse of life structures in the ‘Third Italy’”, in Narotzky, Susana, Grassroots Economies, Living With Austerity in Southern Europe. Pluto Press, 173-191.

–. 2022. “The Empire and the Barbarians: Cosmological Laceration and the Social Establishment of Extremism”, in Loperfido, Giacomo, Extremism, Society, and the State, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 87-108.

Loperfido, Giacomo, and Antonio Maria Pusceddu. 2019. “Unevenness and Deservingness: Regional Differentiation in Contemporary Italy.” Dialectical Anthropology 43:4, 417-436.

Mattei, Clara. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Narotzky, Susana. 2007. “The Project in the Model. Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Politics of Ethnographic Realism.” Cultural Anthropology, 48:3, 403-424.

Weber, Max. 1964 [1947]. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: The Free Press

Cite as: Loperfido, Giacomo. 2024. “Austerity, Charisma, and the Attacks on Reason” Focaalblog, 1 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/01/giacomo-loperfido-austerity-charisma-and-the-attacks-on-reason/

Blog, Fascism

Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber: The Return of Fascism?

Image 1:
Chanting “White lives matter!” and “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists carrying torches marched in a parade through the University of Virginia campus 11 August 2017, photo by
Evelyn Hockestein for The Washington Post

This discussion paper offers two contributions to our collective discussion on the theme of fascism: (a) an integrated set of elements comprising our definition of the concept; and (b) abbreviated notes on the applicability of each element to the present moment (see also Gordon and Webber 2023)

We argue that fascism is a mass movement rooted in the radicalizing petty bourgeoisie, or middle class. Fascist movements may participate in the bourgeois electoral arena, but ultimately the source of their strength and the centre of their political action is in the streets and the exercise of extra-legal violence. While outside of existential crises the bourgeoisie is not favourably disposed to fascists (some exceptions notwithstanding) the bourgeoisie may nevertheless appeal to them in an effort to impose order in such moments if political alternatives are unavailable or insufficient. The threat of fascism is co-extensive with capitalism – and not simply one of its stages – because capitalism systematically produces crises that profoundly destabilize the social order and its class relations. The possibility of fascism deepens when such crises reach a civilizational scale and become irresolvable on the terms of capital (i.e. the restoration of profitability and capitalist hegemony) either through bourgeois democratic means or other forms of authoritarianism, such as military dictatorship. Historically, a feature of those crises and obstacle to their resolution includes partially weakened but undefeated, mass revolutionary forces. As long as there is capitalism, then, the fascist threat remains alive. The intensity of the threat obviously has its ebbs and flows, but it never disappears.

As the definition outlined above would suggest, our preferred point of departure in what follows is a critical return to – but also extension beyond – the classical Marxist theories of fascism, particularly that of Leon Trotsky. In our view, two elements common to most classical Marxist theories of fascism need to be abandoned. The first is the unjustified view that fascism is specific to the kind of inter-imperial rivalry characteristic of the early twentieth century, and the related point that fascism is limited to countries of the imperialist core. The second is the connection of fascism to a “stage” of “monopoly capital,” a theory that was incorrect at the time and is equally without value today. Finally, we also believe that the interrelated phenomena of colonialism, racism, and white supremacy need to be fully integrated into the foundational elements of fascism identified by classical Marxists and synthesized below.

This is the master logic around which the seven elements of our concept of fascism and its potential development into a movement that can contest for power are articulated. We agree with Geoff Eley’s (2021) methodological point on the necessity of “portability” in any conceptualization of fascism that is to be of continued relevance across different historical periods, even as we disagree with his substantive characterization of the present conjuncture. Hence, we intend our concept of fascism as sufficiently abstract to be portable across different times and spaces of the industrial capitalist epoch, but nonetheless sufficiently coherent so as to be able to distinguish the phenomenon of fascism from other closely related phenomena.

First, with regard to context, the rise of fascism requires a severe and sustained crisis of capitalism beyond the mere immediate “conjunctural fluctuations,” and which makes the normal process of capitalist accumulation difficult if not impossible (Mandel 1971). Fascism’s historical role is to radically alter social, political, and economic conditions in order to facilitate a renewal of stable accumulation to the benefit, especially, of big capital. This is the master element whose logic articulates the other elements into a coherent totality. Clearly, the global crisis that erupted in 2008 and the economic stagnation that followed for much of the world – the worst slump in global production and trade since the 1930s, and one compounded by the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic – meets this contextual requirement.

Second, it is necessary that there be a foreboding sense of civilizational degeneration on the scale (but without necessarily the same content) that shaped the political zeitgeist from which classical fascism emerged. Such degeneration radicalizes the petty bourgeoisie. Most pertinent in the inter-war period was the crisis of global imperialism, culminating in the brutality and devastation of the First World War and inurement towards violence. Militarism crystallized in the European psyche generally, and especially among those who gravitated to fascism. The anxieties and traumas of postwar life, amidst economic volatility, were in turn successfully transformed by fascism into a focused hatred of Communism and alien others (Traverso 2017). Muted elements of this contextual factor exist in an incipient manner today, taking most dramatic form in the ecological crisis, the inurement to large-scale needless death and debilitation associated with the management of the COVID pandemic, the heightening of inter-imperial rivalries, the onset of major new wars, and a widespread cultural pessimism reminiscent of classically pre-fascist sentiment. Yet the sense of civilizational degeneration today is not yet comparable in scale to that of the era in which classical fascism was forged.

Third, the crisis of capitalist accumulation must develop into a crisis of bourgeois democracy. The historical context generative of the rise of fascism was one in which social classes deviated from their traditional political parties, and “the immediate situation became delicate and dangerous,” with an acute crisis of authority, “or general crisis of the state” (Thomas 2011). Today, clearly, there is a widespread international context of bourgeois democratic decline and weakening of traditional parties, but not yet the proliferation of the actual overthrow of bourgeois democratic regimes and the installation of military dictatorships – with some important exceptions, such as the counter-revolutionary wave in the Middle East – much less fascist dictatorships.

The fourth element of fascism – the inadequacy of traditional military dictatorship – flows immediately from the third. Traditional forms of police and military repression and dictatorial rule reveal themselves to be inadequate in the face of a strong working-class movement or an unreliable military. As a reactionary and militarized mass movement, with a capacity to mobilize supporters in the streets and electorally, fascism offers a solution. In the current context, by contrast, traditional forms of police and military repression within bourgeois democratic parameters, or in some cases military dictatorship (whether temporary, or longer term), have proved sufficient for the reproduction of capitalist rule.

The fifth component has to do with the petty bourgeois composition of fascism’s mass base. While inter-war European fascism drew cross-class support, at its core it was a petty-bourgeois movement of small business owners, rural landowners, managers, civil servants, professionals, and military and ex-military members. More and more, this radicalizing middle class was drawn to a revanchist politics premised on fortifying the nation, martial discipline, and order. Because of its precarious class location within the capitalist hierarchy, nestled uneasily between a globally ambitious set of large capitalists and an internationalist working-class movement, the petty bourgeoisie is disposed to conflating itself and its interests with those of the nation and to a conservative politics. The petty bourgeoisie is also a sufficiently large section of society to constitute the basis of a mass movement. The contemporary far-right draws heavily on petty-bourgeois radicalization, but the petty-bourgeoisie has not been mobilized and transformed into mass movements willing and capable of regularly engaging in organized paramilitary violence.

Sixth, before fascists are able to take power, with support from the bourgeoisie, they must first alter the balance of forces in their favor by inflicting partial setbacks on movements of the exploited and oppressed. We can call this the weakening, short of defeat, of the revolutionary threat from below.The revolutionary threat once posed by the proletariat may have dissipated, and any civil war scenario between the classes may have abated, but the organizational capacity of the workers’ movement to resist the depression of wages and increases in exploitation through normal means persists. In most of the world where the far-right has strengthened it has not done so in response to a revolutionary threat of any kind, so fascist violence has not been necessary to deliver a weakening-short-of-defeat of such a threat. In the major exception, the revolutionary wave in the Middle East, the counter-revolutions assumed traditional forms rather than fascist ones.

Seventh, and finally, there is assimilation into the bourgeois state and the restoration of capitalist stability. With its victory fascism is “to a large extent assimilated into the bourgeois state apparatus” and thus the most extreme, unassimilable elements of the movement, are of necessity liquidated (Mandel 1971: 20). Fascist rule is put to the task of restoring capitalist stability. Observing the sharp increase of capitalist profits under the Nazis, Mandel notes that while some capitalists, such as those in the arms industry, benefited more than their compatriots, “there clearly emerges a collective economic interest of the capitalist class” (Mandel 1971: 16). The winner in all of this was not a fraction of German capital but large German capital as a whole, which remained very much under the command of the German bourgeoisie, rather than the state or the fascists (Neumann 2009: 435-36, 613). Nowhere in the world have fascists captured state power, and so nowhere have they subsequently been assimilated into the bourgeois state. While some far-right parties with fascist roots have entered into government or hold the balance of power in government in parts of Europe, presently they act within the parameters of bourgeois democracy rather than seek to overthrow it (even if they wish to weaken it).

Todd Gordon is an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and an editor of Midnight Sun. He has written on the Freedom Convoy for Midnight Sun and Studies in Political Economy.

Jeffery R. Webber is a political economist with research interests in Latin America, Marxism, social theory, the history of the Left, international development, capitalism and nature, imperialism, the politics of class and social oppression, and social movements.

References

Eley, Geoff. 2021. “What Is Fascism and Where Does It Come From?,” History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1: 1–28.

Gordon, Todd, and Jeffery R. Webber. 2023. “The Authoritarian Disposition: Capitalism, Liberalism, Fascism,” Spectre, Issue 8, Fall 2023: 42-55.

Mandel, Ernest. 1971. “Introduction,” in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, by Leon Trotsky. New York: Pathfinder.

Neumann, Franz L. 2009. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

Thomas, Peter D. 2011. The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Traverso, Enzo. 2017. Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945. London: Verso.

Cite as: Gordon, Todd & Webber Jeffery R. 2024. “The Return of Fascism?” Focaalblog, 29 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/29/todd-gordon-and-jeffery-r-webber-the-return-of-fascism/

Blog, Fascism, Features

Don Nonini and Ida Susser: Introduction: Fascism, Then and Now

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol_2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol_DSC09268-2_(50820738198).jpg
Image 1: The United States Capitol Building stormed by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021, photo by Tyler Merbler

On November 14, 2023, at the University of Toronto, we, the conveners of the Political Economy Discussion Group, an informal transnational group of anthropologists working in political economy, brought together an in-person group of more than 25 colleagues to discuss the question of the status of contemporary fascism. As part of this process, we invited five of us to sketch out their own ideas in short “position papers” on fascism which were pre-circulated. These papers, only slightly revised, now appear as a feature on fascism on FocaalBlog. We hope these will generate and encourage research among anthropologists on contemporary extreme right-wing formations, whether these are called fascism, proto-fascism, “authoritarian populism,” (Hall 1988), “authoritarian statism” (Poulantzas (2014 [1978]), “authoritarian neoliberalism” (Bruff 2014), “illiberalism” (Rosenblatt 2021), or by some other term. Certainly no one will argue that this topic is not timely or in urgent need of discussion today.

Fascism is fundamentally anti-democratic and violent. It attacks the rights of people to criticize its governance regime or to realize their different realms of freedom and relative autonomy in everyday life. Here we wish to think about contingency and alliances as this is where people agree that they are fighting for the right to exist and exercise realms of autonomy in their lives. We are far from sure that we are confronting the same fascisms as in the past, and we believe we need to generate new tools and new analyses as we face our current disasters. In order to contribute to such a discussion, we see it necessary to draw on a wide range of theoretical analyses from both Marxist and other sources. The effort is to illuminate the present and to prepare for what we expect may be coming in whatever way seems most constructive and strategically valuable.

We begin by considering Marxist analyses of fascism, alerted by the warning posed by Alberto Toscano in his brilliant Late Fascism (2023) that drawing historical analogies between the fascisms of the past (notably in Italy and Germany) and the fascism-candidates of the present is at best unrewarding, and at its worst, given the acceleration of the global rise of the ultra-right and the imperative to respond, a waste of time. But we also need to parse out, given the many Marxist theorizations and numerous Marxist theorists of and organizers against past fascisms – who were among fascism’s first victims! – what was most rewarding from those analyses and what needs to be left behind.

The Inter-war struggles by communist and socialist parties, both before and after fascist movements took state power, provoked insightful inter-war critical Marxist theorizations of the causes of the rise of fascism by Gramsci (1971), Trotsky (1971), Clara Zetkin (1923) and others over and against the conservative and liberal formulations that marked conventional scholarship in the West. These analyses were rich in their sense of contingency and their openness to the social contradiction arising from the economic crises brought on by the uneven and combined development of capitalism.

Among Marxists not all interwar theorizations of fascism were the same. Most held that capitalists were crucial to fascist movements in attaining state power and that, once these movements came to power, the fascist state worked to the benefit of capitalists, even if they did not directly lead it, while it consistently showed extraordinary violence against the organized working class and its supporters on the left. However, here agreement among Marxist conceptualizations ended.

Marxist theorizations that were politically dominant within the Comintern saw the growth of fascist movements and the fascist state as no more than a teleological outcome of hypertrophied capitalism at an inevitable stage of its development, with which these other classes came to be inexorably aligned (Renton 2020 [1999]: 79-84). These approaches, when put into practice, had catastrophic effects. To put not too fine a point to it, these interwar Marxist analyses of the German and Italian cases of fascism (i.e., those coming out of the Comintern after 1928 with the ascent of Stalin) were grossly flawed because they defaulted to an economistic and rigid evolutionist account of capitalism. They failed to offer adequate theoretical accounts of German and Italian fascism’s mobilization of their bases through racism, antisemitism, ethno-nationalism, anti-Leftism, and patriarchy associated with their past bourgeois-imperial and colonial histories. These after all were histories of repression, genocide (viz. Germany’s extermination of Hereros), and ethnic cleansing whose effects continue into the present.

We suggest following Toscano (2023) that instead of assuming that liberal capitalist states, including neoliberal states, provide universal safeguards against fascism, that the practices and ideologies of fascism are far from incompatible with liberalism and the liberal state – and in fact lie within them. After all Western liberalism had indulged in colonialism, slavery, and genocide for centuries before Central European fascists began creating their violently vengeful empires. The latter did so with explicit envy and admiration for the earlier white Atlantic expansionism. This means that instead of regarding fascist movements and even the emergence of fascist states as sudden and unpredictable eruptions of political violence incidentally associated with the economic crises of capitalism, we must go beyond the economistic analyses of fascism to explore the “fascist potential” (Toscano 2023) of what appear unexceptional, even “ordinary” features of contemporary liberal capitalist states (e.g., incarceration, police violence toward Blacks in the U.S.) if we wish to more critically explore the possibilities of fascism today.

We start by pointing out that like the prehistories of German and Italian fascism, the histories of other Euro-American political formations (U.S., Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands) are characterized by the racialized violence of colonization, enslavement, exterminism, and accumulation by violent dispossession of the non-European peoples they came to dominate politically. This has its theoretical corollary. Instead of only undertaking economic analyses of capitalism, there is the imperative of exploring the possibility that late neoliberal states already, like liberal democratic states before them, for historical reasons contain within them fascist potentials. We think, for example of the totalitarian treatment of huge numbers of incarcerated poor and racially marked populations in the United States, or the new state and popular violence against the Roma in central Europe or against North African, Turkish, and other immigrants in western Europe.

Marxist analyses of fascist potentials today must thus take into account the continuities and legacies of racialization, antisemitism, misogyny, and xenophobia that are associated with capitalism as a historical social order but are never merely reducible to its economic logics, in exploring the potential of new fascist emergences as these are occurring globally today. We must instead examine the racialized and gendered violence and ideologies encysted in neoliberal states today and think more of economic crises as the impetus and context for their emergence, instead of being their ‘cause’. In this regard, we could start by drawing on the concepts of racial capitalism, imperialist racism, and abolitionism within the Black radical intellectual tradition of Cedric Robinson, Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and numerous others (Toscano 2023: 25-48).

This might lead us, for example, to see fascist potential in the nostalgic imaginary by the Republican base (many of whom are not economically working class) of a golden age centered on a male “white working class” privileged by industrial employment and U.S. Cold War hegemony in the 1960s and 1970s (Toscano 2023: 8-9). Believers in this white supremacist imaginary, emboldened by Trump’s January 6, 2021 insurrection, form this base that he and the Republican Freedom Party elite now pander to with their MAGA cult of “popular” grievances — that the U.S. is being “invaded” by immigrant “rapists and murderers,” and that “the election was stolen” by “illegal” Black voting in Detroit and Atlanta as well as the age old theme of “the Jews will not replace us.” Above all, Trump and his elite have successfully incited violence against people of color, Jews, women, and trans people – those shut out of the golden age.

Going forward, while continuing to benefit from the classic analyses by Trotsky, Gramsci, Zetkin, et al. of capitalist crises, historical blocs and fascist formations while going beyond them to consider racialized and gendered fascist potentials, we can also draw from non-Marxist critiques of fascism to consider the ideas and practice of democratic freedoms and the ideologies of racism that deployed historical representations politicized in a fascist context. We need to take seriously, for example, the relationship between fascist formations and patriarchal structures as well as the diverse histories and forms of racism employed – from the racial ordering of color and US racism to the images of a Jewish race controlling global power and banks.

We are also attracted to other Marxist approaches which show more strategic openness to trying to tip the balance during periods of fascist ascent by attempting to build coalitions between the organized working class and other classes (e.g., the petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, lumpenproletariat) who could be converted to opponents to fascism, and who might otherwise join fascist movements. There were also strong democratic movements against fascism in many European countries, such as the Popular Front and the French and Italian resistance. These approaches have to be taken seriously in terms of questions of democracy and their possible effectiveness in different nations of the time which did not succumb to fascist domination. Some non-Marxist theories also viewed class relations and class struggle as relevant to the emergence of classical fascisms. However, many such analyses concentrated on fascist ideology or aesthetics, and lacked economic and social context.

For our November 14 session on fascism, we attempted to bring together a broad set of discussions, not in any way limited by the traditional Marxist debates but paying attention to them as part of crucial ammunition for addressing the threatening situation we face today. Are we confronting fascist movements at present that could assume state power by ostensibly democratic means, then transform radically into violent rule? Or are quite different right-wing formations from fascism ascending with very different trajectories if they assume state power?

For the November 14 session, we asked the authors of the blog pieces that follow not so much a factual as an epistemological question to engender discussion, leading off with “How would you know contemporary fascism when you see it, in the one or two cases you know best from your ethnographic or historical knowledge?” We also asked whether the formations in these cases might better be characterized by other terms and theories.

We concluded our questions by pointedly asking our authors about interventions in struggle. If the contemporary right-wing formations now in existence pose a risk to political democracy, peace, and the capacity of large populations to engage in social reproduction – as we believe they do – we asked, “What would be the most effective preemptive responses by the Left to them?” And lastly, “What would be the disposition of social and political forces and economic conditions that would make these responses feasible?” These last two questions were what we as conveners hope that these blogs will provoke the readers of FocaalBlog to respond to, given the grave political crises and economic and ecological contradictions now before us. There is already much practically at stake in these questions: theorists and organizers on the Left are already facing repression from the rising tide of extreme rightwing forces around the globe.

Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His latest book is Food Activism Today: Sustainability, Climate Change and Social Justice (New York University Press, 2024). His new research project examines racial capitalism and its eco-politics.

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is currently studying urban social movements, class and commoning in France, Spain, and the United States.

References

Bruff, I. 2014. “The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism.” Rethinking Marxism 26: 113-129.

Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith, eds. New York: International Press.

Hall, S. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.

Poulantzas, N. A. 2014 [1978]. State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso.

Renton, D. 2020 [1999]. Fascism: History and Theory. London: Pluto Press.

Rosenblatt, H. 2021. “The History of Illiberalism.” The Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism. A. Sajó, R. Uitz and S. Holmes. New York: Routledge, pp. 16-32.

Toscano, A. 2023. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. London: Verso.

Trotsky, L. 1971. The Struggle against Fascism in Germany. London: Pathfinder.

Zetkin, C. 1923. “Facism.” Labour Monthly, August 1923, pp. 69-78.

Cite as: Nonini, Don and Susser, Ida. 2024. “Introduction: Fascism, Then and Now.” FocaalBlog, 24 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/24/don-nonini-and-ida-susser-introduction-fascism-then-and-now/

Blog, War: New Times

Mihai Varga: Crisis-tested, yet forgotten: Family farms in wartime Ukraine

It was often said, in the course of the transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s, that Eastern Europeans are good at surviving. The IMF and the World Bank praised the local population’s capacity to “subsist” through small-scale agricultural production, “relieving” welfare budgets or helping shoulder the liberalization of prices. In fact, this focus on subsistence obscured a broader societal trend in much of post-communist Eurasia, the emergence of what one could term a new ‘great social divide’ between family farms and large corporate farms. Thus, on the one hand, throughout the post-communist region, local mega-corporations grew on the ruins of former collective farms to expand into world-level global producers. On the other, the region also experienced the contrasting trend of large shares of the population returning to or intensifying agricultural production to maintain their livelihoods through a combination of selling and self-consuming their products.

Farms workers harvesting the potato crop in Ukraine in 1991, Photo by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Ukraine is no exception to this trend of what the World Bank and other international organizations call the dualization of agriculture: together with Russia and Kazakhstan, Ukraine saw the emergence of some of the world’s largest agro-corporations in rural landscapes populated by millions of “subsistence” family farms. “Subsistence” though was somewhat of a romantic myth, here as much as elsewhere in the world. Rural and peri-urban populations were far more diverse than that term suggests. Few survived solely on their own produce. Rural people were getting by through a combination of self-consumption, petty entrepreneurship (selling some produce on local markets), sending family members abroad for work, and collecting meagre social benefits. Some 20% of Ukraine’s approximately four million rural households were selling more than half of their production already in the early 2000s, mostly informally. Many families have amassed enough land for participation in the same markets as corporate actors, sending produce such as soy, maize, and sunflower products to sea ports for export.

A hallmark of the approach advocated by states and international organizations vis-à-vis post-communist populations of small-scale producers was a complete break with the communist procurement system, which had been buying up the production of small farmers in order to process it in specialized units (factories). Post-socialist states have allowed that communist procurement system to collapse, and since the 1990s have either failed or explicitly refused to support family farms by means of buying up their production. They assumed that simply freeing markets for land, energy, and food would miraculously spur an entrepreneurial drive that would lead to the disbandment of collective farms and provide the cure to poverty (or at least limit it). Instead of such an entrepreneurial revolution, post-communist countries experienced in the 1990s a pattern of extreme property fragmentation, the return of small-scale farming, and the survival and transformation of the former collective farms. As of the 2000s, authorities and international organizations (the World Bank in particular) expected that land markets would “consolidate” agriculture to produce farmers more akin to Western European ones, incentivizing those “too small to grow” to sell their land and leave agriculture.

Ukraine, a latecomer to land markets liberalization, faced particularly intense criticism from the European Union, World Bank, and IMF for its agricultural land sales moratorium and finally lifted it following intense IMF and World Bank pressure in March 2020. The argument was that higher prices for agricultural products and land would drive investment and production growth. But the reality is that uncertainties over marketing possibilities, access to credit, subsidies, and leasing schemes abound. Three decades after the collapse of communism and facing a largely unprecedented combination of drought and war-induced cost increases, smallholders in Ukraine and elsewhere in post-communist Eurasia are still virtually on their own in the task of commercializing production from below. In Eastern European EU member states, many are excluded from subventions, which are usually only available to larger actors, above 1 hectare, and have no political representation. Links between corporate actors and the smallest family farms do exist. Still, these do not amount to any marketing or production support for small holders. Instead, rural households lease out their land to corporate actors in exchange for animal fodder, and market their small production surpluses locally, reaching global markets only via numerous intermediaries.

In Ukraine, the war exacerbates the divide between corporate actors and family farms; the latter, on their own in marketing their products, are facing depressed prices. Russia’s blockade of the Ukrainian Black Sea ports (until July 2022) and the occupation and destruction of the Azov Sea ports have made agricultural prices in Ukraine collapse. The impact on export routes was dramatic: before the war, trucks delivered agricultural products to the Azov and Black Sea ports, which had important storage facilities. With the blockade, export routes lengthened over several countries, alternating truck, rail, and river barges, to Danube and smaller Black Sea ports in Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania with far smaller storage capacities. Corporate actors were able to cover the associated costs and were well positioned to profit from steep world price increases; at least until July 2022, when a Russian-Ukrainian deal allowed agricultural products to leave Black Sea ports again (the Grain Initiative). The deal made world grain prices, that had doubled at the start of the war, fall. But not even the Ukrainian producers that actually reached the remaining Black Sea export facilities received world prices for their production, as few shippers risked entering Ukraine’s ports and demand premiums that pushed Ukrainian prices far below world levels.

In contrast to large exporters, Ukraine’s millions of family farms were thus confronted by the collapse of inner-country prices for export-intended goods that could not leave the country. Whatever transport and storage infrastructure is left is accessible only at exorbitant prices, and the prices on local markets for export-intended agricultural production have collapsed. In fact, in the summer of 2022, the cost of storing production was as relevant as the market price, as it became difficult to move produce around given the greatly damaged transport and storage infrastructure. Prices have varied more widely for goods intended for local consumption such as potatoes, a key staple for local survival under crisis conditions. Keeping in mind that potatoes are a favoured crop for smallholder specialization, prices went from 46% increases to the prior year to close to zero by the end of 2022, in both cases making it extremely difficult to sell production. The sudden price fall in October 2022 resulted from producers close to Russia – and Belarus seeking to sell as much as possible rather than store, fearing further attacks and disruptions. Depressed prices did not even cover the cost of seed material and according to market analysts will endanger the harvest for 2023.

The state should act as a last-resort buyer for small holders, especially for crops and products in which small farmers specialize, which are difficult to store and costlier to export. Still, such self-evident steps for which there are many workable global examples in the 20th century are not among the options that have ever been considered in the last three decades. What is also not on the table is a centralized state distribution of seeds and fertilizers. The main strategy advocated internationally for preventing hunger and helping agricultural producers get access to increasingly expensive inputs is to remove trade barriers (also for fertilizers). But this will predictably fail to tackle problems as varied as the collapse of infrastructure or speculation via agricultural derivatives which produce hunger and volatile food prices. 

The little export that Ukraine achieved in the summer of 2022 – at one fifth of its pre-war capacity – required unprecedented efforts of trans-border cooperation. Before the war, Ukraine’s grain, soy, and sunflower oil left the country to Asian and African countries by ship directly from the Ukrainian Black Sea and Azov Sea ports. From March to August 2022, Ukraine’s agricultural products had to pass three countries by truck, train, or river barges: Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, before reaching the Black Sea. Even with the Grain Initiative corridor opening in August and the accessibility of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in and near Odessa assured, the three-country land-and-sea route stayed an important export avenue. Authorities had to repair abandoned rail tracks within three months; and expand the storage capacities of – until then – less-used Danube ports. Another new trans-border land-and-sea route now connects Ukraine via Poland by rail to the Lithuanian Baltic Sea port of Klaipeda for Western European markets.

The outcomes of such logistic efforts – as beneficial as they are to the rest of the world – deepen the local divide between export-capable corporate actors and small-scale farmers. While corporate actors have their own transport capacities (“truck fleets”) and can access export routes, the latter continue to face the dramatic situation of exploding production prices for fuel and fertilizers and collapsing prices for locally-sold produce.

Finally, while the drought in Europe drove up prices for the late 2022 and 2023 harvests, Ukrainian producers hardly benefit, as local consumers cannot pay the higher prices and imports of vegetables and fruit to counterbalance the price hikes. In summer 2022, Ukrainian traders were already replacing the lost harvests in fruits and vegetables in the Russian-occupied Kherson area – which they used to market within Ukraine – with products from Moldova and Romania (fieldwork respondents, July and August 2022).

The present-day crisis will, therefore, yet again – such as during the 1990s transition – test and reproduce the local population’s survival skills. Rather than retreating into the imagined peasant subsistence economy of the World Bank technocrats, they will struggle and combine various livelihood sources, from migration remittances and social benefits to small-scale agricultural production. As they are de facto abandoned once more by local and global politics, rural people will above all rely upon each other.

Mihai Varga is a sociologist at the Institute for East-European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His latest book is Poverty as Subsistence. The World Bank and Pro-Poor Land Reform in Eurasia.

Cite as: Varga, Mihai 2023. “Crisis-tested, yet forgotten: Family farms in wartime Ukraine” Focaalblog 14 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/02/14/mihai-varga-crisis-tested-yet-forgotten-family-farms-in-wartime-ukraine/

Blog, The Latin American Pink Tide

Elena Maria Reichl: End of Hell? Brazil’s Election and a Community Kitchen of the MTST

On 30/10/2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) of the Workers’ Party won an exceptionally close runoff election against the current far-right president of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. For volunteers of a community kitchen (Cozinha Solidária) of the leftist Homeless Workers Movement (MTST), Lula’s victory represents an enormous relief and a hope after the long period of anxiety during the election campaign. Nevertheless, his victory does not mean “the end of hell or the entrance into paradise”, as Maria (all names are pseudonyms), one of the volunteers cooking in a Cozinha Solidária noted.

The hell she speaks of means the years of the Bolsonaro government, in which almost 700,000 people in Brazil died of Covid-19, while the president made jokes about patients with respiratory distress. Hell, moreover, means the hunger that the women themselves experience and fight in their volunteer work. In recent years, Brazil has returned to the world hunger map of the United Nations. According to the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty and Security, circa 30% of Brazilian households are currently food insecure. In addition to the Covid-19 pandemic, suspension of state welfare programs, inflation and price increases have led to this development. The aftermath of this period will not be over when Lula takes office early next year.

Hell and paradise are metaphors that reflect the volunteer’s worldview, which is strongly influenced by the Christian system of belief. The all-female chefs of the Cozinha Solidária where I conduct ethnographic fieldwork since March 2022 regularly frequent Catholic or Evangelical churches. Besides that, the women are also part of the political struggle for housing in demonstrations and occupations of urban land. In their everyday lives, they balance left-wing political militancy and religiosity. They are politicized through the social movement and entrenched in their peripheral community. All the kitchen’s volunteers working there currently are also mothers and most of them work or worked in paid cleaning jobs in addition to their volunteer work.  

In this article, I portray the period between the first round of voting on 2/10/2022 and the runoff. How did the cooks negotiate the fear of a second electoral victory by Jair Bolsonaro? A look at the Cozinhas Solidárias sheds light on the positioning of hunger and domestic labor within the election campaign. The perspective of the cooks’ stresses the importance of religiosity to people’s lives and political decisions. After localizing the Cozinhas Solidárias within the Homeless Workers Movement and explaining their emergence and functioning, I consider reflections and concerns about the election, starting from the perspective of the cooks, to arrive at an assessment of the consequences of the election results.

Cozinhas Solidárias of the Homeless Worker’s Movement

The Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) was officially founded in 1997 as the urban counterpart of the rural reform movements of the Landless Workers Movement (MST). The first occupation took place in Campinas, a city close to São Paulo. Nowadays, the MTST is present in 13 Brazilian states, but most occupations are still concentrated in and around the city of São Paulo. The strategy of the movement is to occupy unused land in the periphery of large cities and to obtain expropriation with reference to the legally established duty of fulfilling a social function of the inner-city areas.

Victor Albert traces the history of the movement: In the first decade after its founding, it had little success with the strategies of the Landless Workers Movement. This changed, on the one hand, because of social mobilizations during the housing market crisis and the 2013/2014 World Cup, and on the other hand, primarily through cooperation with the Lula government’s state housing program Minha Casa Minha Vida. The movement was often able to obtain home ownership for the squatters through the State Program and thus acted as an agenda for identifying new building land for the state program.

During Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, which replaced the Minha Casa Minha Vida program with the Casa Verde e Amarelo loan program and classified the MTST as terrorism, their construction projects from the Minha Casa Minha Vida era continued to be completed, such as 216 apartments in São Paulo’s West Zone in March 2021.

Figure 1 Kitchen as part of occupation
Figure 1 Kitchen as part of occupation, Photo: Elena Reichl March 2022
Figure 2 Cozinha Solidária at lunch time
Figure 2 Cozinha Solidária at lunch time, Photo: Elena Reichl October 2022

The idea of Cozinhas Solidárias was already inherent in the community kitchens that are part of every land occupation of the movement.  The occupations of new land areas begin with the construction of tents made of tarpaulins and bamboo. In newly emerged occupations, community kitchens are the first shanties to be set up to nurture the squatters and provide a place of political organization and community economy. Each occupation has numerous of these kitchens, which are the heart of the groupings, the small neighborhoods within the barrack settlements. The kitchens inside the squats are primarily for the squatters who run and finance them.

What is new about the Cozinhas Solidárias is that they now address the peripheral neighborhoods outside the occupations. Diverse people from the nearby neighborhoods frequent the cozinhas solidárias, for example schoolchildren, old people, or workers at their lunchbreak. They pick up hot lunches for free that were prepared and distributed by volunteers like the women mentioned in the beginning of this article. The Cozinhas Solidárias acquire their donations in the form of money from large-scale campaigns and as crops by collaborations with, for example, supermarkets and the MST. Cozinha Solidarias’ dependence on food has brought the MST into close contact with its urban counterpart.

The Homeless Workers Movement founded the first Cozinha Solidária in São Paulo in March 2021, during the peak of the Covid-19 Pandemic, under the motto highlighted by MTST coordinator Guilherme Boulos, “we do what the government does not“. The movement now operates 31 of these kitchens throughout Brazil. By expanding to peripheral neighborhoods in general, the movement claimed a direct confrontation of the cutbacks in state welfare programs under the Bolsonaro government.

Hunger was particularly central to Lula’s election campaign, highlighting how his earlier government had helped to remove Brazil from the United Nations world hunger map, on which the country turned back after the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. In fact, it was through Bolsa Família, as Massimiliano Mollona elaborates,that this government from 2003 to 2008 reduced the population rate below the poverty line from 36 percent to 23 percent. Bolsa Família incorporated the preceding Zero Hunger “Fome Zero” program in 2003 and, as Anthony W. Pereira argues, promoted the democratization of citizenship claims through effective, relatively unbureaucratic redistribution. On the other side, Bolsonaro has introduced the social program Auxilio Brasil at the end of 2021, which is modeled on Lula’s Bolsa Familia but without any long-term strategy or monitoring and therefore has beencriticized as an election campaign method.

Before the Runoff Election

A morning a few days after the first round of voting in one of the cozinhas solidárias in the periphery of São Paulo: In addition to preparing rice, beans, chicken, and fried cassava, we talked about Bolsonaro’s visit to the Freemasons. The video is from Bolsonaro’s 2017 election campaign but gained popularity only in October 2022 via its rapid spread on social media. The context mattered little. Bolsonaro had been campaigning for votes among Freemasons and rumors were spread that he might be a member.  We chatted about the experiences some of the women had as cleaners for members of the Freemasons whom they accused of performing diabolical rituals. On the subject of religion, we also came to a remark that one of them had overheard during services in their parishes: Their pastor had announced that whoever voted for Lula would go to hell.

Ludmilla was indignant: “The place for priests is in the church. What is this about politics?” “They won’t vote for him [Jair Bolsonaro] because of the Freemasons” Retorted Maria.  Ludmilla: “I am afraid that they might do it after all.”

Jair Bolsonaro has many evangelical supporters who, as some of the cooks, consider the Freemasons a diabolical sect and hence expressed their disappointment. On a more general level, religiousness played a key role in the election campaign. Padre Kelmon, who was denied the recognition as a priest by the Catholic Church, ran for president as one of the eleven candidates of the first electoral round. He just received 0.07 % of the valid votes and was called a “folkloric candidate”. For Bolsonaro’s election campaign, his candidacy nevertheless had an important function. He supported Bolsonaro during the first TV Globo debate, to which all candidates were invited. Instead of asking critical questions, he accused Lula of wanting to establish an anti-religious dictatorship in Brazil. Lula, meanwhile, tried to win over conservative church followers through critical statements on abortion and Christian affirmations, as he recently did in a letter to evangelicals.

In the community kitchen, I hear different Christian songs sung by the women every day. “God bless you” is a common phrase used by those receiving the hot lunches, to which the cooks respond with “Amen”. Unlike the students and coordinators of the movement, for whom religion takes a back seat to communist utopias, the cooks and squatters balance left-wing political commitment and the struggle for housing with religious affiliations in their work.

A domestic worker comments on the election

For Lula’s election campaign, starvation, but also ‘gusto’, was a central theme. During this election, Lula’s repeated statement that the people must be able to eat picanha and drink beer again became famous. Ludmilla, a cook at the community kitchen before the runoff election, said she talks to Lula when she sees him on TV. “Lula, stop talking about picanha. When did I eat picanha? Lula, I cleaned the toilet of my patron [where she worked as a maid] during your government.”

Figure 3 Banner that says “First domestic worker in the Legislative Assembly of São Paulo” at the event “Women from the periphery with Lula and Haddad”, in which some cooks of Cozinha Solidária participated, Photo: Elena Maria Reichl, October 2022

Although she supports Lula, she feels unrepresented by his promises of the return of expensive barbecue after the huge price increase during the Bolsonaro regime. Actually, picanha has never been part of her lifeworld. Domestic workers, who are for the first time politically represented in Brazil, gain more political and class-consciousness. In the first round of voting, PSOL candidate, former domestic worker, and occupant of the MTST Ediane Maria, won the post of State Representative in the Legislative Assembly of the State of São Paulo as the first domestic worker to occupy this political position. Like Ludmilla, Ediane Maria had migrated to São Paulo from Brazil’s northeast to work as a domestic worker. Ediane Maria will now represent Ludmilla’s perspective in São Paulo. No easy task in a parliament where the PL, Bolsonaro’s party, won by far the most votes.

Anti PT and “anti-establishment” propaganda

The outcome was close, with Lula winning 50.9% and Bolsonaro 49.1% of the vote. Bolsonaro’s party’s most effective campaign method still seemed to be the “anti-corruption agenda” Flávio Eiró already analyzed after the 2018 election.

Although the court case that led to Lula’s conviction was annulled as illegal in 2021, opposition to Lula’s PT party because of corruption scandals remains widespread. This is despite the fact that Bolsonaro has also been accused of institutionalized corruption, namely the use of public funds in the form of secret budgets to buy approval in Congress.

Bolsonaro still manages to position himself as ‘anti-establishment’ in front of large segments of the population, who spread the slogan “PT never again” and in the aftermath of the election “crimes pay off in Brazil” on the internet. Widespread among his electorate is also a rejection of conventional media and academia. Election forecasts predicting a higher approval rating for Lula than he actually received in the first round of voting confirmed this skepticism. The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral’s decision to cut Bolsonaro’s TV time due to fake news also fuels the debate about media bias. Bolsonaro supporters were already acting violently in some cases, such as federal deputy Carla Zambelli, who a few days before the election chased a black journalist with a firearm under the pretext that he had pushed her.

The End of Hell?

During this interim period between the two votes one clearly sensed the fear that Bolsonaro might not recognize the election results, as he had already spread rumors that the ballot boxes were rigged.  On day one after the elections, while Bolsonaro remained without statement about his loss, his supporters blocked roads within the country to protest alleged electoral fraud. Attempts at electoral fraud did indeed occur, but not on the part of PT supporters: The electoral court investigates against the federal police, who blocked roads for hours in the northeast and near indigenous communities, from where most votes for Lula were expected, under the pretext of carrying out road controls.

Even without a coup, Lula’s victory will mean hard work against right-wing fronts in state and federal parliaments, but above all against what is called ‘bolsonarismo’ in society. The cooks of Cozinha Solidária are well aware of this. Nevertheless, there will be relief for their movement when Lula takes office next year. He has already announced his intention to rehabilitate the program Minha Casa, Minha Vida. Fighting hunger was moved again to the center of the political agenda. Currently, discussions are underway within the MTST to make Conzinhas Solidarias a public policy and to hire the cooks on a regular basis until the acute hunger crisis is resolved. This would mean the end of dependence on donations and volunteerism. Lula, who had already visited a Cozinha Solidária this year, nurtured hope for this possibility.

Elena Maria Reichl is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology of the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany, and member of the Project „Sorting with Care. Human Categorization in Post-Humanitarian Contact Zones“ that is part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1482 “Studies in Human Categorisation” funded by the German Research Foundation.

References:

Albert, Victor. 2018. “Brazil’s Homeless Workers’ Movement is an assertive social work organization.” FocaalBlog, 30 November. www.focaalblog.com/2018/11/30/victor-albert-brazils-homeless-workers-movement-is-an-assertive-social-work-organization

Balloussier, Anna Virginia; Seabra, Catia and Victoria Azevedo. 2022. Lula Releases Letter to Evangelicals and Rejects Abortion and Lying Pastors. Folha de São Paulo, 20 October. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/10/lula-releases-letter-to-evangelicals-and-rejects-abortion-and-lying-pastors.shtml

Boulos, Guilherme. 2021. “Cozinhas Solidárias: fazendo o que o governo não faz” Instituto para Reforma das Relações entre Estado e Empresa (IREE), 22 March. https://iree.org.br/cozinhas-solidarias-fazendo-o-que-o-governo-nao-faz/

Campos Lima, Eduardo. 2022 “Brazil presidential contenders slug it out over who’s the real ‘enemy’ of the church” Crux, 1 October. https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-americas/2022/10/brazil-presidential-contenders-slug-it-out-over-whos-the-real-enemy-of-the-church

Eiró, Flávio. 2018. “On Bolsonaro: Brazilian democracy at risk.” FocaalBlog, 8 November. www.focaalblog.com/2018/11/08/flavio-eiro-on-bolsonaro-brazilian-democracy-at-risk.

Extra. 2022. Padre Kelmon recebe mais de 81 mil votos pelo Brasil; relembre outros ‘candidatos folclóricos’ que marcaram eleições. Globo Extra 3 October https://extra.globo.com/noticias/politica/padre-kelmon-recebe-mais-de-81-mil-votos-pelo-brasil-relembre-outros-candidatos-folcloricos-que-marcaram-eleicoes-25582731.html

Folha de São Paulo. 2022. O que a Folha pensa: Recauchutagem ruim. Folha de São Paulo, 28 October. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/opiniao/2022/01/recauchutagem-ruim.shtml

Globo. 2022. Grupo denuncia Carla Zambelli por racismo em caso que ela apontou arma para homem em SP; ‘Eles usaram um negro pra vir em cima de mim’, diz a deputada. Globo, 29 October. https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2022/10/29/grupo-denuncia-carla-zambelli-por-racismo-em-caso-que-ela-apontou-arma-para-homem-em-sp-eles-usaram-um-negro-pra-vir-em-cima-de-mim-diz-a-deputada.ghtml

John, Tara. 2022. Brazil’s election explained: Lula and Bolsonaro face off for a second round in high stakes vote. CNN, 27 October.

Mollona, Massimiliano. 2018. “Authoritarian Brazil redux?” FocaalBlog, October 6. www.focaalblog.com/2018/10/06/massimiliano-mollona-authoritarian-brazil-redux.

Netto, Paulo Roberto. 2022. TSE cobra explicações da PRF sobre operações durante eleições após decisão. UOL, 30 October. https://noticias.uol.com.br/eleicoes/2022/10/30/tse-explicacoes-prf.htm

Pereira, Anthony W. 2015. Bolsa Família and democracy in Brazil. Third World Quarterly 36 (9): 1682-1699, doi: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1059730

Phillips, Tom. 2022. Fears Bolsonaro may not accept defeat as son cries fraud before Brazil election. The Guardian. 27 October. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/27/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-election-fraud-claim

Romani, André. 2022. Com Bolsonaro ainda em silêncio, bloqueios de caminhoneiros ganham força e se espalham pelo país. UOL Economia. 31 October https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/reuters/2022/10/31/protestos-interditam-br-163-e-trecho-da-dutra-apos-eleicoes.htm

Rizek, Cibele and André Dal’Bó. 2015. The Growth of Brazil’s Homeless Workers’ Movement. Global Dialogue. 22 February https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/articles/the-growth-of-brazils-homeless-workers-movement Soprana, Paulo. 2022. Bolsonarists Freak Out over Video of President in Freemasonry. Folha de São Paulo. 4 October. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2022/10/bolsonarists-freak-out-over-video-of-president-in-freemasonry.shtml

Cite as: Reichl, Elena Maria 2022. “End of Hell? Brazil’s Election and a Community Kitchen of the MTST.” Focaalblog 2 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/11/02/elena-maria-reichl-end-of-hell-brazils-election-and-a-community-kitchen-of-the-mtst/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Nonini: The China Conundrum and The Current Conjuncture

Strategic Ambivalence or Disguised Conflict? China’s Reactions to Russia’s War on Ukraine and to Covid

Why does China’s response so far to the Russian invasion of Ukraine “not add up”? On one hand, China has refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has pushed its own state-controlled media to promote only pro-Russian propaganda, and even republished false reports by the Russian state media. China abstained from a UN Security Council resolution in March 2022 that condemned the Russian invasion. Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently announced that China and Russia “will always maintain strategic focus and steadily advance our comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era,” especially in the energy trade (Quoted in Torigian 2022). And it is an open secret that Xi Jinping gave his assent – or at the very least knew and did not demur – when he heard of Putin’s intention to invade Ukraine during the latter’s visit to Beijing at the recent Winter Olympics.

On the other hand, the same article notes that President Xi Jinping of China said that he was “pained” to see “flames of war reignited in Europe.” While not condemning the Russian invasion, China has not actively supported it, and instead has called for peace talks and “maximum restraint” (Torigian 2022). It has appealed for all parties to respect pre-existing “sovereign” borders. Nor has China so far provided much economic support to Russia, other than continuing their long-standing trade in oil and gas – nor given any military assistance. And the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, in which the PRC holds 27% decisive voting power, halted its work in Russia and Belarus in protest at the invasion of Ukraine (Torigian 2022). What’s going on?

What appears to be ambivalence or failure of the Chinese state to “get its act together”, its confused or contradictory messaging may actually reflect an internal lack of consensus toward the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine at the top of the PRC leadership. It may also indicate a current shift in the balance of power within the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party – away from the extraordinary concentration of power by President Xi Jinping toward  a willingness by other members of the Politburo to impose limits on it after his probable reelection as CCP General Secretary at the Party Congress held later in 2022. There are signs of profound dissatisfaction within these top Party circles, reflecting broader economic, social, and political contradictions within China that have emerged over the last years, as Xi has consolidated his increasingly autocratic rule, undermined adversaries, and done his part to destabilize détente with the EU and the United States.

George Soros recently went so far as to say that Xi may not be reelected to a third term as President at the Twentieth National Congress this fall. Soros stated, “Contrary to general expectations Xi Jinping may not get his coveted third term because of the mistakes he has made. But even if he does, the Politburo may not give him a free hand to select the members of the next Politburo. That would greatly reduce his power and influence and make it less likely that he will become ruler for life” (Ren 2022). 

Then, the day after Ren’s report for Bloomberg.com, we read in the New York Times of Premier Li Keqiang’s recent speech that implied (if not explicitly so) that Xi’s “zero Covid” policies have led to a catastrophic slowdown in the Chinese economy – during the first three months of 2022 there has been a decline in the Chinese GDP rate of growth to 4.8%, well below the official target of 5.5%. This has been precipitated by a two-month lockdown ordered by Xi that brought the everyday life and economic activity of an infuriated population of Shanghai to a standstill for more than two months, as well as episodic lockdowns in other cities which stopped assembly lines, trapped workers, interrupted the movement of goods and confined millions of Chinese to their homes. At a teleconference to more than 100,000 officials across China, Li announced “We must seize the time window and strive to bring the economy back to the normal track” (P. Mazur and A. Stevenson, New York Times, May 26, 2022).  

The key message to take home from this is that China’s #2 highest ranking official has just stepped out in public to implicitly criticize the Covid lockdown policies mandated by China’s #1 highest ranking official – President  Xi Jinping.  There are certain things that are unforgivable in the contemporary PRC, and Xi’s and his faction’s single-handed slowing of the country’s economic growth may be one of them. Whether this is the first step to Xi being ushered out the door to an honorable retirement rather than being reelected to a third presidential term remains to be seen.  

Theoretically, this example points to the importance of investigating the contradictions of illiberal Chinese capitalism that characterizes the corporate Party-oligarchic state in which it is situated.

Deconstructing Socialism’s Deconstruction, Chinese Style

Are (post-) socialist states fundamentally alike? The Chinese Communist Party and its leading intellectuals in the years in the 1990s gave this question much thought. Shambaugh (2008) demonstrates the careful attention after Tiananmen in 1989 with which high-ranking CCP cadres and intellectuals (e.g., from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, and the Central Party School) observed the changes arising from liberalization and “shock therapy” in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They observed the dogmatism of the Soviet nomenklatura, the  overreliance on heavy industry, the neglect of agriculture, and the militarization of the national economy with great interest, and reflected on this as they witnessed the USSR’s fall (Shambaugh 2008:41-86). From these observations, they drew lessons concerning the maintenance of the CCP’s power in China. Li Jingjie, director of the CASS Soviet-Eastern Institute, for example, distilled several of these: “Concentrate on productivity growth,” “be ideologically flexible and progressive,” “seek not only to strengthen confidence in the power of the state [but], more important, [the] material living standards of the people,” among other insights (quoted in Shambaugh 2008:76).

A Post-Socialist Developmental State with Chinese characteristics

What came out of these deliberations of the CCP in the late 1980s-1990s? In particular, unlike the Central and Eastern European late socialist countries, the highest circles of the CCP were determined that the party continue to maintain its ruling position within the state apparatus and organize the national economy, rather than give way to neoliberal penetration by graduates of the University of Chicago School of Economics, and those of similar ilk (Bolesta 2015:230-244).  China’s post-socialist developmental state trajectory has been similar to those of earlier capitalist states (e.g., 19th and 20th-century western Europe, the United States), while very distinct from the post-socialist political systems of Eastern Europe and Russia. Unlike what occurred in these countries, “retaining an authoritarian state was also aimed at creating a strong and capable state… the authorities have attempted to strengthen power and control… over society and the business sector” (Bolesta 2015:232). This has allowed for a gradual and highly planned set of state programs for evolving from a socialist to a capitalist economy.

Being authoritarian and illiberal, however, is not the same as being unaccountable to the “masses” of the working class, rural peasants, and since the early 2000s, the new urban professional managerial classes of China. The “attentive” party-state (Perry 2012) is above all attentive to maintaining its legitimacy among the rural population subject to dispossession, and increasingly among the growing urban middle classes and professionals whose numbers form the new base of the CCP.  Largely, as one might expect, the CCP above all seeks to maintain and increase the standard of living of both the rural and urban populations, ameliorate the environmental disasters that afflict millions of affluent urban residents, and pay specific attention to the protests of thousands of small farmers dispossessed from their land and striking workers exploited in the industrial workplaces. The party has ultimately been willing to bend when large numbers of residents display the capacity for disorder and discontent in public, led by leaders willing to face down beatings by police and to travel to Beijing to petition central cadres and high officials in ministries to redress the injustices committed against them by corrupt local officials. Responsive, yes. Democratic? Not so much.

Morphing into the Chinese Corporate Party-State

The Chinese Party-state takes the form of a corporate-oligarchic structure in that the CCP simultaneously acts as a coordinated body to maintain its power through its deployment of the wealth it extracts, particularly at its highest circles, through securing the loyalty of the population, while seeking to meet the goals of national development undertaken under the “conditionality” of post-socialism, which require playing a role within global capitalism.

The CCP is a heterogeneous organization with approximately 86 million members distributed territorially across the PRC, and is organized in a spatially differentiated bureaucratic hierarchy that mirrors both the official state bureaucracy and private corporate and civil-society organization bureaucracies in tens of thousands of locales. Only a broad summary of how its predatory and developmental practices interact can be given here, given the sheer size of the Chinese population, its heterogeneity, and its regional/macroregional differentiation.  

For the purposes of this essay, I  focus on two defining characteristics of the emergent Party-corporate state — the institutional dominance of large-scale state-owned enterprises managed by the highest circles of the CCP, and the shift by the local corporatist Party-state from investing in  industrial enterprises during the 1990s-2000s toward land speculation and real estate development, and its implications for rural dispossession. 

Political Crisis and Economic Stagnation

China is experiencing the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 which has led to a decline in the rate of capitalist profits, a worldwide realization crisis, the indebtedness of populations and states outside of China, widespread financial speculation in areas essential to social reproduction/human livelihoods (e.g., in energy, foodstuffs, farmland), and compounded, worsening ecological disasters arising from climate change. These global/planetary processes are ones that China’s corporate party-state will have to confront while it is managing its own internal transitions.

In the case of the CCP up to the present, this has entailed managing (and accumulating capital from) the large-scale State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) sector. According to Smith (2015:45), “Thirty-five years after the introduction of market reforms, China’s government still owns and controls the commanding heights of the economy: banking, large-scale mining and manufacturing, heavy industry, metallurgy, shipping, energy generation, petroleum and petrochemicals, heavy construction and equipment, atomic energy, aerospace, telecommunications, vehicles…, aircraft manufacturer, airlines, railways, biotechnology, military production and more.”

These leading state-owned enterprises are managed by the “princelings”, taizibang, the descendants of the first generation of the highest CCP leaders, who have become the most wealthy and powerful members of the Chinese ruling class. As Smith (2015:50) characterizes them, “princelings often are heads of giant conglomerates which themselves own dozens or even hundreds of individual SOEs. Presumably this gives them access to multiple income streams and ample opportunities to plunder the government’s ever-growing treasure.” The princelings form the upper class in the PRC.

Nonetheless, their investments now face diminishing returns as China’s industrial capacity, while still the largest in the world, is plagued by rising costs of labor and environmental controls. Chinese industry is troubled by intense competition and profit crises. Most recently, the Covid pandemic, and the state’s “zero-Covid” response to it imposed by Xi Jinping in particular — total urban lockdown as in 2021-2022 in Shanghai  and in other large cities  — has caused extended shutdowns in industrial production and long-distance supply chains, both critical for its exports.

In so far as their control over the state-owned enterprise sector constitutes the basis of their power, the relatively small Party elite of princelings faces questions about their own reproduction as capitalists and as their continued power at the highest levels of the CCP.  While most will continue to accumulate within the slowing SOE industries, they will compensate by investing capital in China’s burgeoning financial sector. Their turn away from industrial production and its basis in political power is a destabilizing force. Beyond their control over state-owned enterprises, they will continue to exert their capacity to extract rents from privately-owned capitalist enterprises, but their capacity to do so will depend upon their extended political power.  In contrast, those the princelings have targeted in the past, the owners and managers in the privately-owned capitalist sectors in services, high-tech production, and real estate, will be drawn into the middle and upper ranks of the CCP, and seek to increasingly wield power on their own. All this is taking place as economic and social destabilizations are beginning to emerge, such as the failure of large numbers of young Chinese graduates to find work, “brain drain”, flight overseas, and increasing incidences of bailan (withdrawal by discouraged youth from the labor market), which are increasingly presenting a threat to CCP legitimacy.

Under the circumstances, a tendency towards developing and assuming control of increasingly predatory Mafia-like organizations in the absence of more productive uses of their capital, presents a serious risk to the princelings and their many clients.

The Local Corporatist State: Financialization and Dispossession in Rural and Peri-urban Areas

Jean Oi (1995) describes the ways in which local entrepreneurs during the 1980s-1990s came together with local-level Party cadres and established the Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs). This represented the systematic emergence of the local entrepreneurial corporatist state around small-scale industrialization in rural and peri-urban areas. What I want to point to was the logical progression of the local corporatist state as the countryside became increasingly financialized from the mid-1990s onward. Development funds continued to be drawn from increased local tax revenues, supplemented by prioritized development funds sent down by provincial and central state agencies and state banks (So and Chu 2016: 67-69). But after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the influx of funding from central government and state banks began to turn from small-scale industrial to large-scale real estate development, and from investment in industry to speculation in land by developers with the collusion of local officials.

The pattern has been one in which farmers with lands on the edges of nearby growing rural townships found themselves (often repeatedly) facing displacement from their farmland, often with little or no financial compensation, dispossessed by party and state cadres acting in collusion with well-funded real estate developers and construction firms. Farmers resisting eviction from their lands have faced violent attacks by organized criminal gangs working with developers and protected by local officials (Vukovich 2019: 167-198).  

Much productive farmland has thus been taken out of production. Speculation in new residential and commercial real estate has led to dramatic overbuilding, while large numbers of displaced landless farmers have out-migrated to regional cities for precarious wage labor.  Vukovich (2019) writes of the rise of financial capital to a dominant position within the Chinese economy  as the expropriation of farmers’ land for urban development in thousands of periurban villages throughout the country has become the type-case for dispossession.

Vukovich notes that the process is reaching its spatial and physical limits in terms of China’s still un-expropriated farmland: “Urbanization or the pushing of surplus rural labor into the ever-expanding cities and export processing zones is likewise reaching its limits. The chief limit being that this model of growth does nothing to actually develop the countryside…Those urban jobs done by millions of migrant workers… still do not by and large pay an adequate wage for the laborers to stay” (Vukovich 2019:192). 

The consequences have been not only human but also environmental catastrophes – loss of farmland, flooding due to torrential rains on eroded lands, inadequate disposal of human and animal wastes, and lowered quality and quantity of the rural water supply.  

So far, the CCP has prevented complete disaster by allowing farmers to retain family and collective property rights in land – thus making it legally inalienable through the market — but outright confiscation is working with even greater effect. The result is the accelerating degradation in the capacity of hundreds of millions of rural farmers to continue their own reproduction. 

Making China Great Again? – The Costs of Revanchism

Returning to the ethnographic vignette that began this essay — China’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: its apparent incoherence (as viewed from outside) cannot be understood independently of attending to the conjunction of trends and events characterizing China’s simultaneous financial, economic and environmental crises as these have intersected with the pandemic and Xi’s “Zero-Covid” response to it.  On one hand, Xi Jinping is not only a nationalist (as arguably all CCP officials are), but one who seeks  a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (zhonghua minzu weida fuxing) through a successful quest to become a “wealthy and powerful country” (fuqiang guojia) vis-à-vis the West and Japan (Heilmann 2017: 54-55). In Xi’s narrative, this recuperates China from its national humiliation (guochi) at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialisms during the 19th and 20th centuries.  Xi’s autocratic and highly ambitious strategy to accomplish this objective places him ideologically squarely alongside Putin – both sympathetic to a common quest to recover past imperial greatness and civilization vis-à-vis the West. This may well explain China’s refusal at the UN to vote to condemn Russia’s invasion, its repetition of Putin’s lies about the war in China’s state-controlled media, and to defiantly commit to continuing China’s and Russia’s longstanding trade in oil and gas. However, Xi well knows that in this liquid partnership China has the upper hand: in net terms, the tribute flows from Moscow to Beijing.   

On the other hand, Li Keqiang, a technocrat and economist by training, has since his election to Premier in 2013 been responsible for the macroeconomic management of the Chinese economy (Brown 2017: 216). His influence in the Politburo has often been overridden by Xi’s heavy-handed decisions (Heilmann 2017: 165-166, 169-170, 173-174).  However, within his scope of power, Li has been active in setting China’s policies around trade and Chinese investments overseas, where China’s commitment to “nonintervention” and its partners’ sovereignty is closely watched in Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and set against the sordid history of the IMF’s and World Bank’s interventions. Thus Li could argue successfully for China to use its decisive voting shares in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to halt the bank’s operations in Russia and Belarus, to call for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, and to refuse to supply economic or military aid to Russia, despite Xi’s and Putin’s shared revanchist sentiments against an imperialist West. Such aid would not only have triggered economic sanctions by the U.S. and probably EU, but also suspicions of Chinese intentions among its potential trading partners in Latin America and Africa.

As to China’s response to Russia’s war on Ukraine, its incoherence-segue to-conflict between Xi and Li within the Party-state enters into critical junctions with global and temporal processes of political and economic change (Kalb and Tak 2005). Over the last decade, the profitable returns to China’s export industries have declined. Its state banks have made huge Keynesian investments in infrastructure (bullet trains, etc.) to reflate the Chinese economy. It has experienced a stock market crash in 2015 and 2021, been pushed into defensive mode by the worsening of trade and diplomatic relations with the U.S. and EU, and over the last two years has experienced large-scale failures of privately-owned real estate companies backstopped by Chinese state banks. This is where the two longer-term trends mentioned above — decline in SOE industries with resulting dangers for the princelings, and the increased dispossession of rural farmers from their land — come in. The Chinese economy has moved into a precarious state.

And then there has been Covid and Xi’s autocratic response to it.  This was a first-order economic disaster, and everyone in China knew who its author was. It was under these circumstances that Li as China’s #2 could come out from under the shadow of Xi as #1 to declare that “we must strive to bring the economy back to the normal track.” 

Since at least the end of the USSR, top CCP cadres have recognized that those fetishized GDP growth numbers matter, as does the support of the growing urban upper-middle class for the Party’s continued survival.  They recognize that “producing economic growth [is] the most powerful source of [the Party’s] legitimacy. . . [Its] failure to continue delivering a good material standard of living for people would result in its falling from power” (Brown 2016: 215).  

If the situation is now increasingly perceived by CCP leaders as a choice between the Party’s survival and Xi Jinping’s as its leader, there can be no doubt about its outcome.

References

Bolesta, A. (2015). China and post-socialist development. Bristol, England ; Chicago, Illinois, Policy Press.

Brown, K. (2016). CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping. London, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

Heilmann, S., Ed. (2017). China’s political system. Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield.

Kalb, D. and H. Tak (2005). Critical junctions : Anthropology and history beyond the cultural turn. New York, Berghahn Books.

Oi, J. (1995). “The role of the local state in China’s transitional economy.” The China Quarterly 144: 1132-1149.

Perry , E. (2012). “The illiberal challenge of authoritarian China.” Journal of Democracy 8(2): 3-15.

Shambaugh, D. L. (2008). China’s Communist Party : Atrophy and adaptation. Washington, D.C.,Berkeley, Woodrow Wilson Center Press; University of California Press.

Smith, R. (2015). “China’s communist-capitalist ecological apocalypse.” Real-world Economics Review 71: 19-59.

So, A. Y. and Y.-W. Chu (2016). The global rise of China. Cambridge, UK, Polity Press.

Vukovich, D. F. (2019). Illiberal China: The ideological challenge of the People’s Republic of China. Singapore, Palgrave McMillan.

Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He is the author and editor of numerous books, peer-reviewed articles, and chapters on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, on local politics and food politics in the United States, and on the commons.  He can be contacted at  dnonini@email.unc.edu.

Cite as: Nonini, Don. 2022. “The China Conundrum and The Current Conjunctures of Global Capitalism.” Focaalblog, 11 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/07/11/don-nonini-the-china-conundrum-and-the-current-conjuncture/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Céline Cantat: The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders

Since the beginning of the Russian offensive on Ukraine on February 24th, over 5 million people have registered for temporary protection programmes and other schemes across Europe. By and large, Ukrainians have been granted access to assistance, and extended legal statuses allowing them to enter and settle in EU Member States. While this unusual generosity on the part of European States should be applauded, it has given rise to a range of questions about the differentiated treatment of Ukrainians as compared to other displaced groups. A result of this configuration, the many issues surrounding the engagement with Ukrainian displacement have been mainly framed in comparative terms: How have Ukrainians been received in comparison to refugees who arrived in 2015? Why have Ukrainians been allowed to settle in Europe when there are thousands stuck at the Belarus-Polish border? Why have non-Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine been treated differently? Consequently, the public debate has been largely dominated by calls for the inclusion of Ukrainians, suddenly considered to be Europe’s own, flanked by denunciations of the EU’s selective indignation as hypocritical and racist.

Image 1: Direction sign for Ukrainians Welcome Center at Paris-Beauvais Airport (France), photo by author

Beyond official responses by states and their institutions, civilian and grassroots reactions have also been polarised across such lines. When, in early March 2022, I visited Budapest’s train stations, where a range of NGOs and networks of residents were gathering to welcome people fleeing Ukraine, the question of the specific qualities and perceived features of people arriving were central to conversations. A volunteer with a Hungarian Church NGO, pointing in the direction of a woman and her three children, stated: “Look, they are tired, they are vulnerable women and children: they are the real refugees”. He went on to explain that he also came out to help people passing through Budapest in the summer 2015 even though, according to him, many at the time were not refugees but, “migrants or Islamic terrorists”. When I highlighted that, to my knowledge, what legally identified a refugee was the conflict or persecution they were fleeing from, rather than undefined notions of worth connected to their perceived gender, age, or religion, he emphasized that some people deserved asylum while others did not. 

Clearly, the discourse reiterated by some of the volunteers in Budapest went beyond their personal feelings: it built on categories produced by the European border and asylum regime over the last three to four decades. A cornerstone of that is the meticulous construction of a separation between (deserving) refugees and (undesirable) migrants. Within the category of refugees there is a further hierarchisation of deservedness, with different types of assistance (e.g., resettlement to the EU versus humanitarian aid abroad) being extended based on racialised profiling of their capacity for integration into the imagined community of Europe. In the volatile context of the “migration crisis” declared in the region in 2015, this discourse has gained centrality in Hungary and other Central and Eastern European countries. Injunctions to distinguish between “bad migrants” and “good refugees” became articulated with local regimes of social valuation and their racialised, gendered, class- and religion-based hierarchies in the context of regional capitalist transitions. This is closely connected to their own paths of ‘Europeanisation’: former Eastern bloc countries were unequally included into its regional divisions of labour, and have themselves been subjected to, and productive of, racializing dynamics. ‘Becoming European’ has involved claims to superiority, modernity, and whiteness, which have led to the renewed marginalisation’s of various groups – both domestic and non-domestic – and has given rise to articulate forms of racism.

In other words, unequal treatment of different displaced groups is not new and does not happen in a vacuum: even if the refugee as a legal construction claims to be a universal figure, it is in reality always embedded in local social relations. Quite the opposite, a longue durée examination of the relation between states and displacement shows that it has always been a story of selective engagement: systematically, the way states engage with certain groups teaches us more about their projects and political architectures than about the displaced individuals themselves. It is therefore important to go beyond moralised assessments of Europe’s current response to Ukrainian displacement, and to reflect on how states interpellate people moving across borders in relation to specific moral and political economies, which are themselves underpinned by broader projects such as nation-building and capital accumulation. From this perspective, the questions raised by the Ukrainian displacement in Europe become: under which circumstances do states welcome or reject displaced people? How is refugee reception shaped by larger historical processes and their legacy, including state-building, capital expansion and related projects such as colonial domination? How do moral hierarchies and constructions of race, gender, class, and religion, in the receiving states and nations, structure responses to displacement? 

Statecraft and the reception spectacle

As I have argued elsewhere (Cantat 2015), the refugee as a category and a figure is shaped and made in ways that are congenial to furthering states’ aims. My point is not that formal frames overdetermine responses to displacement. Yet informal initiatives still respond to dominant discursive and political reception regimes: the space for creative responses remains moulded by their opposition and denunciation of overarching power structures. To further reflect on the parallels and contrasts between current responses to Ukrainian displacement and engagement with previous episodes of forced mobility, I will reflect on specific displacement episodes and assess how the figure of the refugee has been built historically. This historicization will help us understand the differences and similarities in states’ mechanisms of interpellation of different groups, both over time and across categories.

A classic example in recent history of how the category of the refugee has been shaped by states’ circumstances can be found in the Geneva Convention itself. Presented as a text with universal validity in order to protect people fleeing persecution, the definition of the refugee in fact (re)produces a very specific figure: that of a man fleeing the USSR in the context of the Cold War aiming to join the capitalist West. The restrictive criteria outlined in the Convention regarding refugee status constantly prove to be inadequate for providing appropriate protection to people fleeing a range of violent situations. First, of course, those fleeing economic violence and devastation, considered outside the scope of asylum. But also, those fleeing different configurations of political and social persecution that do not abide by the vision of the world underpinning the Convention.

Going back into past displacements, something which, as noted by Philip Marfleet (2007), neither historians nor refugee scholars are particularly good at for different reasons, allows us to assert yet more clearly that histories of exiles are always underpinned by states’ demands for hospitality or hostility to different groups. Besides, neither hospitality nor rejection are homogeneous circumstances, and states may often be ready to accommodate refugees without actually welcoming them, for instance by allowing people to integrate within labour markets while at the same encouraging discourses of exclusion or refusing them legal statuses and protections. Discursive constructions of displaced populations intersect both with the valuation regimes and social hierarchies that structure host states’ bio–political architectures, by which I mean regimes of race/gender/class (etc.) as articulated with the geopolitics and interstate relations of the moment.

An important example of this can be found in the stories of Huguenot displacements in the 16th and 17th centuries. The flight of 200 000 Huguenots to Geneva, Holland, and England, as they feared persecution from the French absolutist Catholic authorities of the time, is often seen as one of the earliest episodes of contemporary refuge, not because Huguenots were the first group to flee a territory due to violence, but because they were chased away by a state project and received by other states defining themselves against that. It is understood that the word “refugee” entered vernacular language for the first time during this episode. The emerging English and Dutch states promoted openness to those refugees, who came from relatively wealthy commercial backgrounds, including the slave trade, and spectacularized their welcoming attitude as a proof of their attachment to liberalism and religious freedom. This self-presentation was central to their opposition to the French absolutist state. In England, while historical sources show widespread popular hostility towards the Huguenots, the state engaged in a mass sympathy campaign, explaining to people that welcoming Huguenots was a matter of national pride and of, indeed, upholding values of tolerance.

The discourse of brotherhood was also framed in terms of religious proximity. But such categories of belonging are not static. They are insufficient for understanding reception attitudes: we need to recognize racialization, legitimization, and differentiation as dynamic and contingent processes that evolve across time and according to political circumstances. In fact, 50 years later, the Palatines, another group of Protestants fleeing Germany, was seeking refuge in England. Coming from a formally allied and Protestant state, they were received with great hostility. Many were placed in what are believed to be the first refugee camps of contemporary England, along the Thames, before being resettled to Ireland and British America. A highly polarised political debate with similar arguments as those that we now hear regarding the merits of migration and the (im)possibility of integration emerged in England at the time. This underlines that there is nothing new or specific about the unequal treatment of different displaced groups. It also shows that selective empathy tells us very little – perhaps nothing – about groups per se, their circumstances, needs or characteristics: it would be misleading to try to identify reasons for this differentiated treatment in specific qualities of individuals. What is at stake, always, in the relation between state authorities and displaced people is various forms of statecraft and state power.

The famous notion of “border spectacle”, which Nicholas de Genova (2013) has usefully mobilised to examine how exclusion is staged at the border to showcase the state as the protector of a national public that is simultaneously coalesced, has already taught us a lot about how the nation/state/citizen triad is produced in relation to displacement, exile, and borders. Similar observations can be drawn from other episodes where welcoming and hospitality become spectacularized by state authorities. Questions we must ask ourselves to understand selective empathy are never about whether people deserve a better treatment or not, but always about how their inclusion or rejection promote specific state projects at any given moment.

Ukrainian displacement and European belonging

In the case of Ukrainian displacement, discourses about Europe, whiteness, and European belonging have secured people access to reasonable reception conditions. In this context, grassroots reception practices have also been numerous, diverse, and consistent. They have been able to assert themselves publicly in ways that have been altogether forbidden and impossible in other displacement episodes, which were often characterised by the criminalisation of informal aid. This, together with the adoption of legal frameworks allowing Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine (but no other groups!) to cross EU national borders and choose where to settle, can be applauded as not only a uniquely welcoming set of policies but in fact the first properly coherent approach that the EU has ever adopted in relation to displacement. This is a welcome shift from the securitizing response usually reserved to those seeking asylum, which is not just chaotic but also, on many occasions, lethal.

There already are, however, serious issues to consider when we look at the way Ukrainians are being received in Europe. First, the activation of temporary protection schemes, has not meant access to regular (and more protective) asylum regimes. Second, across Europe, the bulk of reception work has been delegated to civilian networks and small-scale organisations. This is the result of decades of neoliberal sub-contracting of public responsibilities to private actors. This continued delegation of responsibility has meant the revival of aid networks formed in 2015: the flexibility and responsiveness of these loser structures, easily reactivated via social networks, was crucial for the execution of reception activities in the first weeks of the conflict. However, as everywhere, the capacity of civil society to fill gaps left by withdrawing states has its obvious limits. We are already seeing how the tide is turning, with volunteers becoming less willing to host the displaced in their homes and tiring from daily assistance activities. In the absence of a coordinated state response this can only deteriorate.

As we have seen in Greece for example, there is no more efficient way to turn popular sympathy into hostility than letting a situation worsen without states providing adequate support to both exiles and host communities. Importantly, while grassroots support activities do not always reproduce government categories developed by states and institutions, they always produce and navigate a sense that practising solidarity is a messy business in contexts of limited resources (Cantat 2018, 2020, 2021). Distributive dilemmas always involve representations, typologies, and moral economies, where (consciously or not) people’s deservingness is assessed by those who have to decide whom and how to help in specific contexts.

In fact, there is nothing inherently progressive to grassroots assistance as compared to state support or the formal aid sector: such initiatives follow their own politics and ethics, build specific socialities and respond to different circumstances. Often, when those circumstances are not clarified, e.g., when people are moved to help by unexamined desires to do good, informal support can fuel extremely unbalanced and unequal power relations. Those may be even more difficult to contest as they take place outside a formalised aid relation where roles are clearly defined and distributed: they might come together with powerful discourses that neutralise criticism, be it religious charity, claims to horizontality, or demands for gratitude. Even when relations are clarified, it is hard to escape combination and hybridization in solidarity practices: doing good and progressive politics usually exist together and this can make people who are the object of help very vulnerable.

This vulnerability is made more problematic because citizens of host countries have been moved into assisting Ukrainians in the name of moral imperatives, rather than because it is considered a public service that states ought to provide to people based on their statuses. If Ukrainians are now being supported in the name of some unstable construction of European belonging, then it begs the question: how long will Ukrainians remain so white? Europeanness is not a homogeneous and stable condition: the EU has produced shades of European belonging where Eastern Europe has always been seen as less belonging, less European, and somehow less legitimate – even for those countries who have become member states. The example of the Brexit campaign is just another reminder of how strong intra-European racism remains.

In the current context of the EU’s mobilisation against Russia, Ukrainians’ Europeanness is strongly asserted, but it could just as well be tempered, questioned, or sacrificed when geopolitics evolve. If so, the lack of deployment of proper state support and the overreliance on popular assistance will become highly problematic. We already see processes of differentiated inclusion unfolding with questions around the type of access that Ukrainians get to different social spheres: for instance, in Hungary, work permits are not needed for certain types of jobs where there are shortages – mostly manual, in the agrarian sector and catering, but also in IT. This in fact reiterates previous labour migration patterns whereby racialised Ukrainian labour has been allowed in the country in order to serve specific industries.

The direction in which Ukrainian instrumentality to the EU’s ideological and economic structures will evolve is far from obvious. Above all, the situation demands that we insist on the continuity of solidarity on the ground of a real grassroots internationalism and that we keep demanding public support for all displaced groups.

Céline Cantat is Visiting Lecturer in Migration Studies and Academic Director for the Masters in Environmental Policy and in Energy Transitions at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po.

This text was developed as part of the EASA fundraising webinar Humanitarian responses to the 2022 Russian war on Ukraine: anthropological perspectives, 07/06/2022, convened by Ela Drazkiewicz and Mariya Ivancheva, and co-sponsored by SIEF and AAA’s SOYUZ, Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

References

Cantat, Céline (2021) “Refugee Solidarity Along the Balkan Route”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 34 (2), 1348–1369.

Cantat, Céline (2020) “The Rise and Fall of Migration Solidarity in Belgrade”, movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies, 5 (1), http://movements-journal.org/issues/08.balkanroute/05.cantat–the-rise-and-fall-of-migration-solidarity-in-belgrade.html.

Cantat, Céline (2015) “Contesting Europeanism: Discourses and Practices of Pro-Migrant Groups in the European Union”. PhD Thesis, roar.uel.ac.uk/4618/  

Cantat, Céline (2018) “The politics of refugee solidarity in Greece: Bordered identities and political mobilization”, MigSol Working Paper, 2018/1, https://cps.ceu.edu/sites/cps.ceu.edu/files/attachment/publication/2986/cps-working-paper-migsol-d3.1-2018.pdf

De Genova, Nicholas (2013) “Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (7), 1180-1198,

Marfleet, Philip (2007) “Refugees and History: Why We Must Address the Past”, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 26 (3), 136–148.

Cite as: Cantat, Céline. 2022. “The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders.” Focaalblog, 28 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/28/celine-cantat-the-reception-spectacle-on-ukrainian-displacement-and-selective-empathy-at-europes-borders/