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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing Local Food

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

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

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

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

Degrowing Local Food

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

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

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

Building and Degrowing in the Post-Corona Rural Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Matrix of our Bodies Electric   

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside Pandemic-related Energy Crises

The February 2021 Texas Freeze Blackout 

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

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

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

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

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

The 2021 British (and European) Energy Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

Patterns of Grid Fragility behind Energy Crises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog, Features, War: New Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Chris Hann: The Agony of Ukraine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a Committee for Committees!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bullshit Tasks

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

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

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

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

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

Capitalism Doesn’t Have a Committee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Isn’t Bullshit?

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn: When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog, Features, War: New Times

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

Image 1: Czar Vladimir, by BakeNecko.

I like the tone and the global historical perspective of David Harvey’s FocaalBlog article. Harvey’s socialist internationalism versus competitive nation-statism should be the only national flag allowed in the 21st century. It was always already essential to make that point against the  environmental and public health catastrophes we are facing. It has become even more essential now that humanity is obviously sliding into a deadly phase of imperial competition of which Russia’s criminal assault on Ukraine is a first episode; as is the West’s emerging reaction to it, and the duplicitous self-serving pro-Russia position of China as well (I am writing 27 February). We should be aware that these are just early moments in a developing story that has been incubating in the dying post-1989 world order for some time.

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Blog, Features, War: New Times

Derek Hall: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to David Harvey

David Harvey’s February 25 FocaalBlog post is presented as “An Interim Report” on  “Recent Events in the Ukraine”. Harvey’s essay effectively covers some of the core forces that have led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the devastating impact of 1990s shock therapy in Russia to Russian reactions to NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 and NATO’s incorporation of new members in central and eastern Europe. As a response in real time to the full-scale invasion of a nation of 40 million people by a nuclear-armed great power, however, it is analytically inadequate and misleading and politically and ethically flawed.

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Blog, Features, War: New Times

David Harvey: Remarks on Recent Events in the Ukraine: An Interim Statement

Image 1: Young girl protesting the war in Ukraine, photo by Matti.

This is a provisional text David Harvey prepared for the 2022 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. He allowed us, nevertheless, to publish it here because of the escalating Russia-Ukraine crisis.

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

Massimiliano Mollona: Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism

One of the lowest moments of my undergraduate studies in Economics back in the 1990s happened whilst reading Tom Peters’ Liberation Management (1992), where the management guru/McKinsey-associate proposes to abolish the tedious, repetitive, and pointless jobs associated with bureaucratic and hierarchical capitalism, and create instead leaner horizontal, collectivist, and autonomous structures, based on meaningful, self-directed, and relationally expanded workers’ actions. I thought to myself: “These bloody managers are appropriating even creativity!” Indeed, that was the beginning of what Boltanski and Chiappello (2005) later called ‘the new spirit of capitalism’. The same charismatic spirit of capitalist reformation echoes in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2019) despite it being an attempt to actually eliminate it.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is based on the article ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, published in 2013 on the blog of Strike! magazine, an umbrella of militant left-wing organizations, which is now closed. The original Strike! page received more than one million hits, and within a week, was translated into a least a dozen languages. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week.  And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, David argues, “technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more” and more importantly, on effectively pointless jobs. Crowds of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. This situation creates deep moral and spiritual damage, “it is a scar across our collective soul” David argues. Yet no one talks about it. Keynes’ promised utopia resurged briefly in the 1960s – remember Andre Gorz’s Farewell to the working-class (1980)? Yet, it never materialised.

Image 1: Fredi’s office, © Masimilliano Mollona

The standard line today is that Keynes didn’t predict the massive increase in consumerism, which rebooted the productive economy, in tandem with the financialization of poverty. Instead, David links the proliferation of bullshit jobs to the explosion of the financial economy. The turning point was the economic deregulation of the 1980s, associated with the new spirit of capitalism, when “the children of the 1960s, used their ideology of cultural liberation, to break the unions and implement the regime of flexible production”. And yet, as I have highlighted in my opening paragraph, flexible production was precisely the result of the managerialist orchestration of expanded and more meaningful tasks for the workforce, and of the sense of expanded agency associated with such “job expansion” – the delusional experience of the new financialised subjects – which Bullshit Jobs advocates as a means against financial capitalism.  Moreover, finance, and the new forms of extractivism associated with it, generates not just bullshit jobs, but also a feudal social system, based on a weirdly sadomasochist protestant work ethics in which the performance of boring and useless jobs and of actions totally separated form real life leads to salvation and economic remuneration whereas the jobs with higher social value are systematically devalued and underpaid. The aim of Bullshit Jobs is to show that neoliberalism is a political project, of the dystopian kind, and not an economic one. In fact, unlike classical capitalism, which was about profit and sound economics, financial capitalism is inherently inefficient and bureaucratic, as is shown by its declining rate of growth worldwide.

By showing that capitalism is a cultural and ideological social construction, which we unconsciously reproduce every day, Bullshit Jobs opens a potential space of collective refusal. By understanding the performative dimensions of economics, we can appreciate that, if we decide so, we can produce a different society, first, by eliminating bullshit jobs. The policy of Universal Basic Income is a possible means to such end.

On the difference between bullshit jobs and shit jobs

Bullshit jobs involve being paid by someone else either on waged or salaried basis for jobs “that are so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”. They are jobs of smokes and mirrors. They are white collar jobs, full of perks and status, honour, and prestige. But those who perform them knows they are meaningless. In fact, the job holder must pretend their job is important. So, bullshit jobs always contain a degree of falsity and pretence. “The lives of bullshit workers are based on lies”. Shit jobs are the opposite of bullshit. They are jobs that are needed but are not well paid. Jobs that are of benefit to society. They are blue collar and paid by the hour. Undignified, but meaningful. Typically, they consist in the ‘reproductive jobs’ of looking after people, which involve care, empathy and emotional labour (Graeber 2019, 14).  Bullshit and shit jobs cut the private public divide, in the same way they equally flourish under capitalism and under socialism.

There are five types of bullshit jobs:

Flunky jobs exist only or primarily to make someone else feel or look important. They are the jobs of the servants, clients, sycophants, the entourage of those at the top of the feudal retainers. David writes: “imagine that a crowd of indigent, runaways, orphans, criminals, women in desperate situations and other disparate people gather around your mansion…. The obvious thing to do is to slap a uniform on them and assign them to minor task to justify their existence…. Such roles tend to multiply in economies based on rent extraction” (Graeber 2019, 29). Flunkies are modern versions of servants and maids, which David notes, have disappeared in the north Atlantic world.

Goonies are people whose jobs have an aggressive element: telemarketers, corporate lawyers, lobbyist. Working in advertising, marketing and publicity, goonies are always dissatisfied, even if their jobs tend to earn them six-figure salaries.  

Duct tapers are workers who make up for inefficiencies in the system. For instance: IT workers inputting information into excel spread sheets; programmers making different hardware compatible or female administrative assistants, who end up doing a lot of work for their (male) bosses, and with their affective labour, soothing their egos.  

Box tickers prepare reports and reproduce the bureaucratic apparatus of monitoring, surveillance, and performance assessment of work bureaucracies.

Taskmasters are the managers who formulate the strategic mission, assess business performances, compose grids of career progression, and keep the bullshit system alive.

Humorously parodying the kind of pointless categorizations that populate the bullshit workplace, David’s classification is loose and unground. On a closer inspection, it turns out that most bullshit jobs he mentions are in fact, shit jobs. Take for instance the IT workers who fix and repair programs or make different platforms compatible – the duct tapers. They may be bullshit jobs, but they are central in the reproduction of value under platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016). The workers for the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced platform for so-called “post-human intelligence tasks”, which outsources small and alienating digital work are paid an average of 15 dollars per day, for anything between two and ten hours work, 100 hits per day. Platform capitalism is the productive side of finance, the new site of capitalist value creation and extraction, fully entangled with global industrial production, their digital infrastructures and automation systems. Amazon, Facebook and Google and their shareholders don’t think these jobs are bullshit and won’t let these jobs go without a fight. Or think of the Flunkies such as porters, security guards, maids, freelance care workers.  These ‘shit shit jobs’ are neither blue collar nor white collar but pertain to an unregulated and highly exploitative service economy, which also proliferates with the proliferation of finance.

The confusion seems to stem from the fact that David’s classification focuses on work, rather than on labour, which depoliticises the issue at stake because it discounts the social relation of production, that is, the field of articulations, negotiations and struggles around which some human actions are deemed to acquire more value than others, and underpin the social constructions of skills, tasks, and actions as building-blocks of the whole ritual edifice of bourgeois micro-economics.

Marxism in anthropology has never been too popular, but the attack to productivism and labour value theory in anthropology, from James Ferguson’s book on redistribution, Li Puma and Lee’s on financial circulation, to various analysis on the productivity of the informal economies of slums, has had the bizarre effect of generating a vast market for popular books about work  – whose more recent examples are Jan Lucassen’s (2021) monumental book The Story of Work a New History of Humankind and anthropologist James Suzman’s (2021) blockbuster book Work: A Deep History from Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Like David, Suzman has become a celebrity anthropologist, outspoken about the pointlessness of contemporary work mental and material structures and advocating the 15 hours a week from the perspective of the ‘stone age economics’ of the Ju/Hoansi bushmen of Namibia’s Kalahari desert, which he studied during his PhD in anthropology at Edinburgh university, started after he resigned as senior manager in the diamond mining giant De Beers. Now Suzman runs Antropos ltd, a think-tank that offers ‘anthropological approaches to present-day problem-solving’ at a corporate rate of up to £1,400 per day – half for NGOs (Hunt, 2020).

These culturalist and evolutionary studies of work undervalue the historical materialist aspects of labour, which Marx considers as a real abstraction that is both material and ideological – economic and political. Marxist labour theory of value says that capitalism is a political and economic construction that systematically undervalues and exploits those actions that are attached to a wage relation, which itself is a form of human devalorization. It is not the content of the action that matters. It is the relationships of production that matter, both at the local and global levels, in the entanglement between finance and industry, centres and peripheries, which generate complex entanglements of bullshit, shit, and shit shit jobs.

Besides, David’s argument that the economy of late capitalism is uneconomical, assumes that capitalism, at least at some point, was about economics rather than power and that the economy (or capitalism?) can be fixed, morally and productively, with an efficient work reorganization and that this reorganization consists in sorting out which jobs are more important than others. First, reproductive jobs are more important than productive ones, productive from the point of view capital. But when you look at his classification, nearly all jobs are reproductive, in fact the very problem of productivism, David argues, is that it forgets that the vast majority of the working-class fixes, maintains, looks after – machines, people and objects – rather than heroically fighting on the production line. David’s intuition about the value of maintenance and reproductive labour is a very important one. But, if nearly all human actions are reproductive in large sense, reproductive of the existent world and of existent institutions, how can we distinguish between those which reproduce capitalism such as unpaid housework, and those which reproduce life outside it?  

Image 2: Office work, photo by Andrea Piacquadio.

Instead of looking at how the value of work is socially constructed through the wage relation, David considers the degree of satisfaction afforded by different work, tasks or actions, satisfaction which is directly related to their different affordance of agency and freedom. The emphasis here is on the morality or ethics of freedom rather than the politics of labour, which resonates with Tom Peters’ ideology of freedom management, that is, the idea that work can be abolished or freed, without abolishing capitalist social relations (on this issue see also Ana Cecilia Dinerstein and Harry Pitts, 2021).

In fact, according to David, there is a clear moral divide between bullshit jobs and shit jobs. Shit jobs are morally satisfying and meaningful, whereas bullshit work is immoral, alienating and ultimately dissatisfying because it leaves the bullshitter without agency and creativity and such lack of agency clashes with humans’ natural tendency to find pleasure in seeing one’s action reaching its imagined end. But why is care work so satisfying despite it involving so little agency? Or can a sense of agency emerge from empowering other people’s actions or in the realization that all actions are ultimately equally powerless because deeply relational? An analysis of the social relations surrounding the evaluation of actions, and of the ethical performativity of value, as in Michael Lambek’s (2013) article ‘The Value of Performative Acts’, would have helped here.

Work as protestant ideology or ethics

But it turns out that freedom at work is heavily constrained by the morality of the time.

David is interested in the morality of labour of Northern Europe and North America and in its specific Christian protestant trajectory, and he explicitly leaves out the aristocratic and patriarchal vision of labour held in the Mediterranean and in ancient Greece, whereby physical labour is only for serfs and women. This historically and geographically essentialising classification, which characterises so much Mediterranean anthropology of the 1980s, doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of labour history.

In the feudal economy of Northern Europe, dominated by the Puritan and Protestant ethical framework, paid and waged labour were a form of education and disciplining of the working-class, of training to show good manners, limited to the initial part of one’s life. Its Judeo-Christian vision of humanity, which Sahlins (1996) highlights so well in his ‘The Sadness of Sweetness’, meant that work had to be self-mortifying, sacrificial and redemptive. In such male dominated society, human production is seen as an emulation of the heavenly process of world creation and reproductive labour is considered a mirror, although derivative, of the productive labour of men and God.

Capitalism transformed service into a permanent relation of wage labour but salvaged the ideology of feudalism. In fact, both managerialism and feudalism are forms of abstraction from real production, in which appropriation and distribution of goods, rather than actual production, creates elaborated ranked hierarchy. “Financial capitalism isn’t really capitalism but a form of rent extraction, where the internal logic are different from capitalism… since economic and political imperatives have come to merge… now it resembles managerial feudalism” (Graeber 2019, 181). But were previous forms of capitalism just economical? Is not always profit a form of rent extraction? David criticises the classical assumption shared by both Marxist and bourgeois economists that under feudalism the political and the economical blur because extraction is based on legal principle, whereas in capitalism the economical is abstracted from the political. In fact, he argues, capitalist economics, including work organization, is an entirely political construction. This depiction of Marxism is disingenuous. Marx clearly describes capitalism as a political construction, in which the fictions and abstractions of capital, embodied as much in bourgeois economics as in the material organization of the factory, become real.

More importantly, according to David, under financial capitalism, human life becomes progressively abstracted and surreal, which turns the ethics of Protestantism into a weird sadomasochistic ideology, in which the relation between social benefits and level of compensation is turned upside down; “people should be compensated for horrible jobs because meaningful jobs are already compensating” (Graeber 2019, 213). Productive labour becomes a form of punishment á la Foucault.

David’s Marxism

David’s Weberian and Foucauldian understanding of contemporary capitalism as a weird form of moral punishment and productive madness is a radical change of direction from his previous Marxist analysis of capitalist labour as an inverted form of slavery (Graeber 2006). There, David’s argument of the historical entanglement of capitalism and slavery was part of a broader reflection on structural Marxism, system theory and the political economy approach in anthropology (Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf and Eric Williams) and engagement with the radical black Marxism of Cedric Robinson. Particularly, David shows that capitalism and slavery share the following traits: both rely on a separation of the place of social (re)production of the labour force, and the place where that labour-power is realized in production – in the case of slavery, this is achieved by transporting laborers bought or stolen from one society into another one; in capitalism, by separating the domestic sphere (the sphere of social production) from the workplace.

The transfer happens by exchanging human powers for money. One effect of that transfer is ‘social death’, in the sense of the devaluation if not annihilation of the community ties and kinship relations and their separation from the workplace. The financial transaction in both cases produces abstract labour, which is pure creative potential and the sheer power of creation. The ideology of freedom which conflicts with how most societies take it for granted that no human is completely free or completely dependent, rather, all have different degrees of rights and obligations. The modern ideal of political liberty, in fact, has historically tended to emerge from societies with extreme forms of chattel slavery.

Such Marxist analysis of the entanglement of capitalism and slavery, tells us much more about contemporary forms of feudal management, the systematic devaluation of reproductive labour and the social construction of unfreedom, than the Weberian approach of Bullshit Jobs.

Reproductive labour

The central theoretical reference in David’s theory of reproductive labour is the feminist scholar Nancy Folbre (2020). For Nancy Folbre, patriarchy is the systematic devaluation of the power of reproducing life by women or alien men such as slaves, which is achieved through three main mechanisms: (1) the creation of property rights and laws that limits the circulation of people and put it under male control; (2) restrictions of rights of women children and sexually non-conforming individuals and (3) under-remuneration of care work.

For Folbre slavery and capitalism are not just moral or cultural systems (associated with patriarchy, aristocracy, caste, or race) or simply work structures (in which factories and plantations mirror each other), but are interrelated political and economic systems in which the wage relation is entangled with and reinforced by conflicting ideological construction of personhood and forms of evaluation of human action. The link between slavery, devaluation of reproductive labour and capitalism is made by Meillassoux (1986) in his anthropology of slavery, which shows how the systematic devaluation of the labour of slaves and the denial of their reproductive powers become a generalised and sustainable economic system only when slavery becomes entangled in merchant capitalism; in the same way in which the systematic devaluation of working-class labour can only be sustainable through the systematic denial of the reproductive labour of women.

Finance

Another Marxist trope in Bullshit Jobs is the link between finance, abstraction, and alienation, whereby the FIRE sectors (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) systematically create abstractions and abstracted organizations which hire ‘complicators’ to increase financial abstractions and the speculation connected to them. Finance creates meaningless ritual and new age gurus, “who paint abstraction as reality, forgetting that there are some things more real than others”. Marx describes capitalism as a form of labour abstraction – CMC to MCM – and finance as a multiplication of such abstract logic. The Marxist philosopher Moishe Postone (1993) considered the abstracted and impersonal kind of work David associates with bullshit labour as the materialization of the commodity form – a real abstraction of capital. But David discusses the proliferation of finance, abstraction and rent extraction as unreasonable and unrealistic deviations from classical capitalism and precisely because unrealistic, to be easily overcome. Even if unrealistic, contemporary forms of rentier capitalism, of the kind described by Christopher Brett (2021) or by Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings (2020) cannot be challenged simply through work re-organizations or wage redistribution, because it is deeply attached to assets inequality and on feudal power relations which capitalism constantly re-produces, via its impersonal machine.   

Solidarity

But the best part of the book are the descriptions of the creative strategies of resistance of this new precarised and dispossessed class of bullshitters consisting of Wikipedia ghost-writers, occupational poets, toilet graffiti artists, deluded rock stars, professional dropouts, and gossipers. It is precisely in the creative agency of these workers, and in David’s empathy towards them, that the book’s call to action emerges. After all, the book is based on interviews with individuals who had read David’s original article and identified with his political project of demystifying the corporate world. That is, the book is based on a sense of solidarity between David and the bullshitters. In this sense, Bullshit Jobs’ greatest potential is as a work of fiction or an ethnography of direct action, which in defiance of the tragic post-workerist sociological narrative, gives voice to the creative withdrawal, artistic desires, and post-capitalist fantasies of platform workers – whose anti-heroic politics resonates with that of the lost people of Madagascar.  

David’s optimism reflected the hopes about the end of capitalism that opened after the economic crisis of 2008 and embodied in the UK by Corbynism with which David had a strong affiliation. At the time, even the gigantic productivist trade union UNITE supported the elimination of bullshit jobs via the Universal Basic Income as a way into what Aaron Bastani (2020) imagined as a ‘fully automated luxury communism’.

This sense of hope was wiped out by the recent global pandemic, which, if anything, widened the gap between overpriced bullshit jobs and undervalued shit jobs. On the one hand, the lawyers, corporate accountants, the platform managers, the internet influencers and gurus. On the other, the Amazon Turkers, the IT engineers who build new Zoomified working environments, or install powerful optical Internet cables in middle class neighbourhood, the gig workers who deliver groceries, parcels, or health services; the nurses, teachers, and carers who continue to be responsible for the reproduction of life. Deadly on humans, the global pandemic didn’t singlehandedly eliminate any useless job or revaluate productive labour. If anything, it introduced the new category of spectral labour, the labour of nurses who are both underpaid and operate daily under deadly working conditions. If a pandemic cannot change capitalism, interstitial changes, operating ‘through the cracks of capitalism’, as John Holloway (2010)  would say, or cultural prefigurations of ‘what could be’, to use a term of Murray Bookchin (1971), won’t do that either.

I have been working on Universal Basic Income project in Brazil for some time, and I must say that the problematic associated with Bullshit Jobs alerted me of the perils of thinking that work can be eliminated with targeted policy measures without the elimination of capitalist social relations. From where we stand now, and looking back at 2013, when the article was written, seems to glance into a different era, one of intellectual hope and political mobilization, so fully embodied in David’s charismatic figure of scholar and activist. His call to action, as hard to follow as it may seem, continues to strongly resonate with me.

Massimiliano Mollona is Associate Professor at the Department of the Arts at Bologna University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Anthropology Department, in Goldsmiths College, London. He specializes on the anthropology of class, labour and political economy, and the anthropology of art. Mollona is currently working on an ethnography of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Marica’ Brazil, in collaboration with economists from the Federal Fluminense University of Rio de Janeiro.

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

References

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Cite as: Mollona, Massimiliano. 2022. “Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism.” FocaalBlog, 22 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/22/massimiliano-mollona-why-the-end-of-work-will-not-be-the-end-of-capitalism/