This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
In a little restaurant in the
midst of a foggy day, Talita served me chicken, rice, salads and a glass of
local wine. She said I was the only customer, the only person around. The
mountain area in the Viseu region in northern Portugal usually attracts tourists
for its special landscape; the granite and slate of the mountain as well as the
lush flora, interlaced with moss and lichens. But with the lockdown during the
COVID-19 crisis people stopped coming. There are not many other industries
here, the only other ones are the wine and the wind businesses, the latter of
which is huge. Talita points to the turbines on display on the top of the
cliffs, surrounding us —an infrastructural crown that towers over the valley.
“You see, we have so much wind here, it is our secret resource.” Talita explains that wind is the special,
often unknown ingredient of Portuguese wine. It plays a role as a natural
antibiotic, preserving the integrity of the vineyards without the need for preservatives
and it dries out the plants after it rains. “You can feel it in the wine.” I
sip from the glass, seeking the taste of the wind. It is not just a sensorial attempt.
I am in Portugal to trace how wind has been harnessed, and how an instrument like a green bond has served as both a financial and an energy source. As part of a larger project which looks at the development and impact of green finance from an anthropological perspective, I followed the first Chinese green bond to be issued in Europe as an ethnographic object of research. This not only sheds light on the way a green bond can be traded across boundaries but also on what its impact is on the ground. Green bonds result from the recent development of green finance, which promises to tackle the current ecological crisis with debt instruments. Similarly to conventional “vanilla” bonds, green bonds are fixed-income debt instruments whose risk is bound to the issuer profile but whose proceeds are earmarked in green infrastructure/projects that the issuer pledges to invest in (Jones et al. 2020).
Green bonds bring cheaper capital
for issuers and lower risk returns for investors by offering projects that decarbonize
infrastructures and favor energy transition. Green bonds exemplify how the
financial and the material are deeply interconnected. As I will show, this is
demonstrated by the way the auditing and certification practices that create
and “provoke” the value of the bond as a financial asset (Muniesa 2014; Birch
and Muniesa 2020) intersects with specific material conjunctures and power
hierarchies in which the bond is embedded.
Thus, this analysis explores the
way finance capital valorization is increasingly interwoven in the process of
assetization of nature, and how this is deeply implicated with the political
role of energy infrastructures as both local connective and collective devices.
It shows how at the bottom of this new green financial pyramid lies the
invisible and infinite potential of wind as energy resource (Franquesa 2018).
As green bonds are proclaimed to have an increasingly important role in
harmonizing the often-antithetical duality between sustainability and finance,
an investigation of how they unpack and are deployed on the ground seems
increasingly urgent.
Image 1: Turbine in the Portuguese countryside, Viseu. (Photo by Giulia Dal Maso, May 2020).
China’s Three Gorges in Portugal
China Three Gorges (CTG) is the state-owned enterprise behind one of the largest dams in the world, the “Three Gorges Dam”; a giant hydroelectric dam celebrated as a triumph of Chinese modern technopower. As the Chinese leader in energy provision, CTG sought ways to penetrate Europe under the encouragement of the Chinese state’s “Go Out” expansion strategy. China not only started to look beyond its borders for sources of energy and natural resources (Mohan and Urban 2019, 248), it also adopted processes of green securitization as a way to boost its position to the world’s most powerful green financial system (Bruckermann 2020) and promoted its ecological civilization (shengtai wenming) outside its borders.
CTG landed in Portugal in 2011
when the country was under the scrutiny imposed by the Troika (the
International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central
Bank) for its high government deficit. Among
other reforms, Portugal was then compelled to eliminate the country’s
growing feed-in tariff debt that compromised Portugal’s path to renewable
energy transition. If a few years earlier Portugal adhered to the EU’s 2009
renewable directive, the aim of which was toachieve 60 per cent of its
electricity generation from renewable energy sources (Andreas et al. 2019), now
it was forced to repay the debt. In the void left by the convoluted austerity
measures promoted by the Troika, Chinese state capital intervened, with CTG
obtaining a stake in the Portuguese energy sector: 21.35 per cent of shares of
the main Portuguese public utility Energias de Portugal (EDP) and 49 per cent
of EDP Renewables (a subsidiary of EDP). Effectively, CTG benefited from this forced privatization, and contributed to a new path in
Portuguese renewable energy transition, a process that the EU had encouraged
but to which it then denied support.
Thus, the CTG became the first
Chinese issuer to release a green bond denominated in Euro and certified and
listed in Europe. However, despite the layers of compliance with the EU
regulations the issuance process does not provide much information about the
nature, the location and the impact of the turbines refinanced by the bond.
Formally, the documents of the bond—the necessary dispostif for the
issuer to certify the truthfulness of its projects and to thus validate the
greenness of the bond—do not specify the location of the wind plants, but name
only the destination countries of the investment. In the case of this specific
bond, the equation of estimated reduced CO2 in wind power in
megawatts is the only formula that speaks of the sustainability of the wind
farms (Sullivan and Hannis 2017). While it is necessary to quantify the
specific number of reduced emissions through wind power, the extent to which
this equation effectively abstracts the essence of the turbines is striking, as
it de-territorializes CTG’s operations in a prospectus which was consequently
validated and certified with no assessment on the location in which these were
implemented.
The green bond, however,
effectively gave consent to CTG to inherit a government permit on the land the
windfarms were built upon, while also benefitting from the previous normative
and labor regime that built them (including the EU feed-in-tariff). In other
words, it allowed CTG to extract a rent from previously funded infrastructures,
with financial capital accruing through the expropriation of a common good in a
process of enclosure of natural resources. The municipality of Viseu had its
benefits, earning central state funds in exchange for land permits, but these
were not extensive. The clausula regulating the funds discounts the price for
land rights if the scope is to build for public interest. Furthermore, the
windfarms refinanced by CTG were just repowering old infrastructure. This
refinancing does not bring much “additionality” at a local level. As many other
large wind infrastructures in marginal areas, the ones in Viseu tended to
reproduce, if not exacerbate, relations of uneven development between rural and
urban areas, as well as public and private investments (Franquesa 2018; Bigger
and Millington 2019).
Image 2: Village surrounded by windfarms, Torres Vedras. (Photo by Giulia Dal Maso, May 2020).
On the Connectivity and
Collectivity of Green Infrastructures
Infrastructures are political entities and as such “a vantage point for rethinking politics” (Opitz and
Tellmann 2015; Larkin 2013). They determine how the green bond “hits the
ground” at a local level. Taking inspiration from Opitz and Tellmann’s (2015)
reflections on the politics of connectivity and collectivity of
infrastructures, I argue that the technological connectivity of energy
infrastructures enables relates to a notion of collectivity, which explains
their impact at local and social level. If windfarms are essential in
guaranteeing connectivity (as a source of energy provision) with the world,
they are at the same time alien to local forms of collectivity. In fact, the
specific rationalities of programming infrastructures that the green bonds
convey doesn’t have anything to do with the local and political space these
infrastructures establish. Often encouraged by austerity measures, green bonds
can become “the conduit of large capitals, often originating from afar, which
lands in local contexts with little clue on their history and specificity”
(transl. Lipari 2020; Scotti 2020). As
noted above, in their making, green bonds often do not include any information
on where the infrastructures are located, and if and how these will impact
collective communities.
Talita shows me her electricity
bill. A chart on it shows that most of her energy power comes from wind power.
She is happy about this. However, she is also angry and frustrated about
struggling to pay her bills; these are way too high. She doesn’t attribute the
high cost of her energy bills to the source of energy, which is wind, but to
the management and distribution of it. Portugal, and Viseu in particular, is
one the EU regions with the highest rate of energy poverty in the EU. Some
locals I met told me that they only use wood stoves to keep warm in winter;
electricity is too expensive.
People hold contradictory
feelings about the wind farms in their area—a mix of indignation and
appreciation. The appreciation stems from the fact that now the turbines are
considered the banner of Portugal’s success in achieving nearly 80 per cent of
renewable energy. Talita tells me she quite likes them as part of the landscape
and some tourists see them as an attraction. They signify that Portuguese
people care about their land and their country’s path to sustainability. They
also reflect a renewed “energy consensus,” which finds roots in the path
dependency between democratic power and electricity provision (see Mitchell
2017; Boyer 2019) that in Portugal partially guaranteed political legitimacy
from the Carnation revolution onwards. The indignation towards the wind farms
instead emerges in the cleavage between the wind blowing on their land and the
infrastructure that harnesses it now. While wind was once a resource people had
used for generations, benefitting the vineyards and fueling local windmills that
still dot the landscapes of Portuguese countryside—and thus directly
contributing to the community’s economic benefit—people now see the externally
financed and technologically advanced wind turbines next door as something
financially distant and out of reach.
Giulia
Dal Maso is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna. She
currently works on the topic of impact/green finance. Her earlier research was
on financialisation in postsocialist contexts; in China and Eastern Europe. She
has published in in Journal of Cultural Economy; Historical Materialism;
Social and Cultural Geography; South Atlantic Quarterly, and has a book out
on Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation: Financial Labor within the
Chinese state-finance nexus. This
article is based on research contributing to the project ‘The Hau of Finance’,
funded by ERC consolidator grant number 772544.
Bibliography
Andreas, Jan-Justus,
Charlotte Burns, and Julia Touza. 2019. ‘Portugal under Austerity: From
Financial to Renewable Crisis?’ Environmental Research Communications 1
(9): 091005. https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ab3cb0
Birch, Kean, and
Fabian Muniesa.2020. Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in
Technoscientific Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bigger, Patrick, and Nate
Millington. 2019. “Getting soaked? Climate Crisis, Adaptation Fiance, and
Racialized Austerity.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and
Space 3, no. 3: 601-623.
Boyer, Dominic. 2019.
Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Bruckermann,
Charlotte. 2020. “Green Infrastructure as Financialized Utopia: Carbon offset
forests in China.” In: Chris Hann and Don Kalb (eds) Financialization:
Relational Approaches, pp. 86-110. New York; Oxford: Berghahn.
Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power struggles: dignity, value, and the renewable energy
frontier in Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Larkin Brian. 2013. The Politics
and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42:
327-343.
Lipari, Samadhi. 2020. “L’Impatto Territoriale
della Transizione Energetica: un’indagine sulla filiera dell’Eolico nel
Mezzogiorno.” Le Parole e le Cose.
http://www.leparoleelecose.it/?p=40083
Opitz, Sven, and
Ute Tellmann. 2015. “Europe as infrastructure: Networking the operative
community.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1: 171-190.
Scotti, Ivano. 2020. Vento forte. Eolico e Professioni
della Green Economy. Salerno: Orthotes.
Mitchell, Timothy.
2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso
Books.
Mohan, Giles, and
Frauke Urban. 2019. “China and Global Resources.” In The Palgrave. Handbook
of Contemporary International Political Economy, 245–61. Springer.
Muniesa, Fabian.
2014. The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn.
Routledge.
Jones, Ryan, Tom
Baker, Katherine Huet, Laurence Murphy, and Nick Lewis. 2020. “Treating
Ecological Deficit with Debt: The Practical and Political Concerns with Green
Bonds.” Geoforum 114: 49-58.
Sullivan, Sian, and Mike Hannis. 2017. “Mathematics Maybe, but Not Money.” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. 10.1108/AAAJ-06-2017-2963.
Cite as: Dal Maso, Giulia. 2021. “The Landing of a Chinese Green Bond in Portugal.” FocaalBlog, 13 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/13/giulia-dal-maso-the-landing-of-a-chinese-green-bond-in-portugal/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and blue patterns revived the previously cracked ground. These traditional geometrical shapes are landmarks of ćilim – a centuries-old weaving technique of wool from sheep herds on the Stara Mountain. Few steps inside, and you are surrounded by the large photographs of nature, people, and customs characteristic of this mountain in eastern Serbia. Only a year ago the walls covered by the photographs were molded due to the damaged roof and windows. The building was empty and in decay. It became again the center of the village’s social life after
Image 1: House of Culture Dojkinci. Meeting between the villagers, the architects and the movement Let’s defend the rivers of the Stara Mountain regarding a new revitalization project (photo by the author, 2020)
the villagers together with architecture students and their teachers and the grassroots movement Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain) renovated this building in 2019 as an act of resistance to the threat of small hydropower plants (SHPPs). SHPPs consist of several kilometers-long pipelines, which channel water to the turbines where the electricity is produced, threatening to leave the riverbeds dry and local communities without water. The more water the pipe holds, the more electricity the turbine creates and the more profit through subsidies it brings to private investors. Thus, for the local villagers and environmental activists the pipes of SHPPs came to symbolize greed, environmental destruction, and social marginalization.
The SHPP in Dojkinci, together with almost 3000 plants in the Western Balkan countries, arose from the network of national capitalists, European banks, and the national energy sectors responding to the EU accession standards. However, Dojkinci and other villages in the Stara Mountain did not succumb to such a wide front of interests. My contribution examines how this happened. I will firstly explain how SHPPs emerged from the Serbian renewable energy (RES) market, and then describe the social responses triggered by SHPPs.
Renewables
between liberalization and water-grabbing
The
Serbian RES market emerged from the pressures for liberalizing the energy
market, the government’s resistance, and the inflows of Western European
capital. The liberalization of the energy sector in the EU candidate-countries
is part of the broad legal, economic and political compliance to EU
standards. The EU expects the Serbian energy sector to go through a double transformation.
From a state-owned system that is largely dependent on coal, the sector should
become competitive, decentralized, at least partly privatized, and promote
renewable energy. This ambitious task unifies both liberalization and energy
transition, keeping the logic of the free market as their leading principle. In
the early 2010s, the Serbian government established the foundations of the RES
market, consisting of a certification procedure for green electricity producers
and fixed-rate feed-in tariffs (FITs) guaranteeing beneficial prices for 12
years. FITs are the means of
subsidizing renewable energy production. They are paid by all citizens through
their electricity bills and transferred to the producers in a form of
subsidized electricity prices
If it had followed entirely the prescribed logic of unfettered competition, the Serbian RES market could have had severe social, political, and economic effects. The state’s monopoly could have turned into an oligopoly of European companies, with FITs pushing up the low electricity prices – repeating developments already seen in Spain (Franquesa 2018). To prevent this scenario, the government found a middle way: to establish the RES market but prevent significant changes. It limited access to FITs through technology and capacity caps. These limitations targeted large investors in wind and solar, but also local people interested in installing small numbers of solar panels on private property. Foreign investors quickly filled the quotas for wind power subsidized by FITs. Only one channel for investments remained wide open – around 800 locations for SHPPs in mountainous, often protected regions.
Investors
and authorities claimed that hydropower is identical to wind and solar sources.
The ideology of untapped hydro potentials, anchored in the socialist
technological heritage, is widespread among Serbian engineers and continuously supported
by all Serbian governments since the 2000s. The costs for planned SHPPs were
lower because expertise in the hydropower construction sector already exists
since socialism. Moreover, SHPPs technology is not as capital-intensive and
dependent on the economy of scales as larger solar and wind parks. This
combination of technological and economic factors meant that the costs were low
and that smaller investors could easily access the financial market. Alongside
the international banks and a few private investors from Western Europe, people
with close affiliation to the Serbian ruling party invested in and owned the
new SHPPs, among them, the godfather of the Serbian president. This implies
that after repaying credits for the SHPPs, the profits gained through FITs
would stay within the circles of national capitalists unlike profits from foreign-owned
wind or solar parks. The purpose of SHPPs was not
to transform the energy sector, as they only contribute to the national
electricity production with 2.5%, but rather to guarantee easy profits through
FITs.
Even though SPPSs investors were usually local capitalist, it does not mean that it has not been a lucrative opportunity also for foreign capital in the region. European financial institutions and manufacturers of hydro equipment have followed a well-established path of foreign direct investments that have transformed the political, economic, and social fabrics of the postsocialist countries. SHPPs have been a good opportunity for the Western European producers of hydro equipment to reanimate an industry drowning because of the current rush for wind and solar sources. Hydro lobbies organized conferences that connected national energy authorities, public producers of electricity, manufacturers, and financiers, to consider new fruitful investments. Foreign financial capital played a key role in supporting SHPPs in the region. Most of the credits for SHPPs in Serbia came from commercial banks such as Erste Bank, UniCredit, Banka Intesa, and Société Général. Large financial institutions like European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, together with Norwegian, Austrian, German, and Italian development banks, poured hundreds of millions of euros into greenfield hydro projects in the region (Bankwatch 2019).
In
this context, environmental and local community protection mechanisms were
hardly implemented and succumbed to the immense pressure of national and
international capital and power. The government lowered environmental standards,
allowing the RES market to turn into water-grabbing. Researchers from the University
of Belgrade identified on all inspected SHPPs malfunctioning or dry paths for
fish migration and pipes unlawfully built-in riverbeds. They argued that the
rule of “biological minimum”, which was supposed to guarantee the minimum level
of water in riverbeds to sustain the river, was conducted by experts close to
the investors and without systematic, often costly studies (Ristić et al 2018).
This “biological minimum” therefore could not limit the investors’ arithmetic
transformations of water into kWh and FITs, leaving behind dry riverbeds especially
in protected areas with high biodiversity, such as the Stara Mountain.
Struggles
against SHPPs
I
first visited the village Topli Do in the Stara Mountain in December 2019, while
the residents had been barricading the bridge in the village for three months
to stop an investor from trying to build two SHPPs on both rivers flowing
through their village. Most of them were retired people and small-scale
agricultural producers, fearing that SHPPs would disturb the underground water
that they use for drinking, as well as pollute and reduce the water in rivers
for livestock and gardens. Numerous springs and waterfalls attract many
visitors to the village, and the villagers were afraid that SHPPs would spoil
both natural exceptionality and their opportunity for supplementary incomes
through room rentals.
Image 2: Panorama of Topli Do (Photo by the author, 2019)
Residents of Topli Do and nearby villages recognized the state and investors as the main perpetrators and directed their anger towards them. But they also conveyed their existential anxieties through narratives of the “approaching global wars for water”, “international corporations stealing water”, and “extinction of their communities for settling migrants” from the Middle East who lived in a refugee camp in the nearby town of Pirot. These anxieties sprouted from the long-term sentiments of the vanishing of Serbian villages where mostly elderly people live. Decaying homes and infrastructure, closed schools, and ambulances are the material witnesses to rural flight. In this context of social degradation, the investors and local authorities promoted SHPPs as opportunities for development. The locals told me that the municipality fabricated the mandatory consultations with them, and portrayed SHPPs as benevolent water mills, and promised benefits for everyone – temporarily employed local workers and landowners near the rivers. “I wanted to bring improvement to this village which has had nothing, I brought my one million euros”, the investor in Topli Do SHPP said in a documentary film about the Topli Do barricade (Marinković 2020).
“The investor even asked us why defending the villages of the Stara Mountain when they would anyway disappear in a few years”, one activist told me. Between 2017 and 2020, the movement Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain resisted heavily SHPPs in Stara planina through protests, legal actions, and physical clashes. Through its actions, the movement connected villagers in Stara planina, academics, environmental NGOs, and international organizations with their pan-European campaigns against SHPPs in the Balkans. Finally, faced with such a broad resistance, the local municipality terminated all SHPPs in the Stara Mountain in September 2020.
Image 3: Protest banners in Topli Do: ‘A lot of money, little energy, zero fish’ and ‘For rivers to death’ (Photo by the author, 2019)
I came again to the Stara Mountain during the pandemic in October 2020, this time in Temska and Dojkinci villages. The mood was post-victorious since villages were not endangered anymore by SHPPs. The activists and locals thought about how to use the momentum and transform the symbolic capital of the river defenders into something more. They looked for financial and institutional support for infrastructure, housing, research centers, and small-scale businesses in the Stara Mountain, and the House of culture in Dojkinci was a result of these efforts. Revitalizations were both immediate reactions to the threatening devastation from SHPPs, and opportunities to demonstrate that revival of the disappearing rural communities was possible and necessary. For the locals, these renovated objects represented debt repayments to ancestors and predecessors and a promise that life in the Stara Mountain would not end, as the leader in one of the villages told me.
Unlike
in other Serbian mountains, the SHPPs paradoxically rescued the villages in the
Stara Mountain from disappearance and marginalization by reviving the local
communities and garnering the support of the Serbian civil society. Attempts to
make profits from greenwashing unexpectedly turned into a second chance for
some Serbian communities.
Whose
market, whose energy transition?
SHPPs were supposed to maintain a status quo in the energy sector – to represent a Godotian energy transition that never arrives and does not go anywhere. However, the wide social resistance turned energy transition from a techno-bureaucratic matter in to an issue decisive for society’s future. This change led to questions about who has access to the RES market, who gets benefits from it, and what role society plays in the energy transition.
These questions are becoming prominent among newly forming energy cooperatives interested in small-scale investments in solar energy. So far, they have been largely excluded from the RES market, not recognized as potential producers, and therefore unable to apply for FITs. Energy cooperatives criticize the closedness of the market to “ordinary people” and aspire to unify activism and business initiative allowing citizens to become active drivers of the energy transition and simultaneously benefit from FITs. Therefore, solar panels are trying to make their way to the roofs of urban dwellings to demonstrate sustainable and market-democratic alternatives open nominally to everyone.
While
the aspiring cooperatives are wishing for a more inclusive market, experts and
regional media specialized in energy are also calling for more and better
markets, i.e. for the usual liberalization that supposedly corrects market
distortions with improved market mechanisms. They wish for competition between big
investors with access to credit and technology, which would ensure that the
public gets measurable and less expensive electricity from renewable sources.
This belief in the market as the only vehicle of energy transition follows the
EU agenda which emphasizes decentralized, competitive, and interconnected national
markets. Public tenders and premiums will most likely be implemented in
Serbia’s new energy laws. These laws will launch a new race between large
foreign and national investors in wind and solar power.
Such
investors wish for a free, unregulated market. A free market which gives space
to big and small producers, fosters innovations and initiative. This kind of
market is seen as a more fair and sustainable solution than the one favoring SHPPs
through FITs. But whose market and energy transition will that be? And the transition
to what? The competition between large investors will hardly open substantial space
for the development of energy cooperatives. The odds for a more democratic and
just energy transition are slim if the promise of the decarbonization of the
Western Balkan countries conveys the ultimatum of oligopolies.
Dragan Djunda is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. His doctoral research analyses the investments in renewable energy in Serbia and their social effects.
Bibliography
Franquesa,
Jaume. 2018. Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier
in Spain. Indiana University Press.
Marinković, Zorica. dir. 2020. Topli Do – donžon Stare planine” [Topli Do – donjon of the Stara
Mountain].
Ristić, Ratko, Ivan
Malušević, Siniša Polovina, Vukašin Milčanović, Boris Radić. 2018. Male hidroelektrane
derivacionog tipa: Beznačajna energetska korist i nemerljiva ekološka šteta. VODOPRIVREDA,
Vol. 50 [Derivate
small hydropower plants: Insignificant energy contribution and
unmeasurable ecological damage].
Cite as: Djunda, Dragan. 2021. “Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/dragan-djunda-transition-to-nowhere-small-hydro-little-electricity-and-large-profits-in-serbia/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
In the past ten years, calls for a “green revolution” on the African continent have cast optimistic and promising scenarios of “leapfrogging” to mass renewable energy generation in order to meet the continent’s targets for electrification and forecast growth for energy demand. With a population expected to increase by 800 million by 2040 with rising urbanisation, the most pressing challenge for the continent in the next 20 years will be to meet growing energy demand in a context of partially-present and unreliable infrastructure (IEA 2019). Renewables have been positioned as a technological messiah of development, enabling the continent to “leapfrog” traditional models of centralized grid-based electricity distribution and to radically green its economies (IRENA 2015). The IRENA 2030 roadmap for Africa’s renewable energy, for instance, suggests that renewables could in the next 20 years constitute half of Africa’s total energy mix (IRENA 2015) – pending an estimated USD $70 billion investment a year. Yet current solar PV installed capacity on the continent only accounts for 5GW, or one percent of the global total (around 600GW) (IEA 2019). Visions of a renewable “energy renaissance” (Olopade 2015, 15) in Africa remain blighted by the current reliance and increasing dependence of African countries on imported oil and fossil-based energy use, and of the continued (and new) opportunities for oil and gas extraction. In turn, discourses of energy transition and leapfrogging, with their unilinear trajectories and singular vision of a low-carbon future, tend to obscure the local specificities and histories of energy systems like Ghana’s, for whom renewable energy, in the form of hydropower, has long been its main source of energy generation.
Image 1: Akosombo Dam. Akosombo, Ghana. 2016. Photo by author
In this post, I look at the contested politics of renewable energy in Ghana through a focus on the rise of “corporate solar” during an energy crisis. Ten years ago, shortly after the country discovered oil in large quantities along the coast of the Western Region, it embarked on an ambitious renewable energy path by passing the Renewable Energy Act (2011) (Act 832). The Act aimed to promote and develop the country’s renewable energy resources to ensure the country’s energy security, indigenous capacity and sustainable development. Ghana’s initial target was to increase the renewable electricity generation share, currently at less than one percent, to ten percent by 2020 (Sakah et al. 2017). Ghana thus positioned itself as West Africa’s new “energy frontier”, ushering in a resurgence of fossil extractivism paired with ambitious support for renewable energy technologies (Degani, Chalfin, and Cross 2020). In the midst of oil and gas discoveries, renewables have become a strategic, moving target conveniently reformulated to fit political agenda and rhetoric (Obeng-Darko 2019). For reasons of space, I will not elaborate on the ways in which new oil production came to stymie the growth of renewables. Instead, I provide a snapshot of solar power’s new corporate contours of energy privilege in Accra. I identify the emergence of a “renewable divide” in urban Ghana through the rise of “green enclaves” mostly enjoyed by corporate bodies and wealthy individuals. Building on the recent literature in the anthropology of energy challenging the “fantasy” of solar as a promise of democratic energy access (Szeman and Barney 2021), I consider how energy disparities endure under the transition to cleaner and renewable energy sources.
Moratorium
on the Future: Renewables as Stranded Assets
In
2019, at an event on renewable energy opportunities for the private sector, a
representative from the Renewable and Alternative Energy department at the
Ministry of Energy made an unpopular announcement. Referring to the 2011
Renewable Energy Act, he declared that Ghana was not only on track to meet its
target for 10% of total energy generated by renewables, but that it had met its
target “long ago”, since the Akosombo Dam, which was built in 1966 by Kwame
Nkrumah and accounts for 27% of the country’s total capacity, was technically a
source of renewable energy.
Invoking
the country’s proud history of electrification through the Akosombo Dam – a key
project in Nkrumah’s vision for African industrialization and self-sufficiency (Miescher
2014) – and its negligible contribution to global carbon emissions, he declared
the matter closed. Rather than seeking to please international conventions that
did not adequately capture Ghana’s place in the global responsibility framework
for climate change mitigation measures, he concluded that Ghana, like other
African countries, would do well to focus instead on providing enough power for
its people and industries.
Renewable energy companies’ representatives, entrepreneurs and analysts were shocked by the Minister’s backtracking commitment. That same year, as a result of overcapacity on the national grid, the government had issued a moratorium on PPAs (power purchase agreements), banning any addition to its grid until 2027. Since then, utility-scale renewable energy projects have come to a stall, leaving many with “stranded assets” and uncertainty about the future viability of large-scale solar PV and wind farms in the country. Of course, the Minister wasn’t technically wrong to claim the Akosombo Dam as a source of substantial renewable energy in the country’s electricity generation mix. To the renewable energy industry, however, it was perceived as a betrayal of the prevailing understanding that the target referred to additional capacity-building, mostly in the form of solar PVs and wind turbines.
Image 2: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by authorImage 3: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author
Corporate
Solar & The Renewable Divide
The
moratorium on renewable energy PPAs exacerbated the inequalities that solar
power has created in Ghana’s energyscape. Today, the largest clients for solar
companies in Ghana are banks, hotels and factories – corporate bodies that have
the capital for upfront costs. Following the frequent blackouts during the
energy crisis that best the country in 2014-2016 (locally known as “Dumsor”),
and the steep increase in electricity tariffs, many businesses, particularly
factories in the industrial zones, switched to distributed generation, adopting
solar as a “commercial strategy” to reduce their costs of manufacturing. “Dumsor”
is Twi for “off-on”, a shorthand for the power outages that have become
increasingly common in the country; today, the word has come to index a more
general situation of disenchantment with infrastructure delivery and political
expediency. Solar energy companies were quick to capitalise on the crisis as a
business opportunity. In 2016, when I was researching Dumsor for my PhD thesis,
I spoke to the representative of an Indian solar company with a large global
presence who told me that initial investments in solar energy in Ghana prior to
the crisis had been minimal because the power sector was “too good” and “too
stable” for profit, compared to countries like Nigeria or Egypt that had more
frequent power cuts and thus a bigger potential market.
In
the turn to solar as a panacea for crisis, large corporate bodies removed their
operations from the national grid, alternating between distributed solar and
diesel-powered generator sets. This commercialization of distributed solar has
further strained the financial situation of the national utilities, heavily dependent
on industrial consumers’ revenues to subsidize residential low consumers. This
has resulted in higher electricity tariffs for urban residential consumers,
making electricity increasingly unaffordable to many. The capacity to switch to
solar during a moment of crisis revealed new forms of energy privilege that
take place outside the grid. In turn, the adoption of solar by a select elite (cf.
Günel 2021) has further exacerbated the conditions of energy inequalities and precarity
that many Accra residents live under. In the low-income neighbourhood of
Western Accra where I have been doing fieldwork since 2014, this “renewable
divide”, as we may call it, crossed two types of association. My neighbours and
interlocutors perceived rooftop solar as a luxury item unaffordable to most, or as a humanitarian good reinforcing unequal
trajectories of transition between the global North and the global South.
Here,
“corporate solar” coexists with the “developmental” deployment of small-scale
solar (in the form of solar lanterns and mini-grids) introduced by NGOs and small
social enterprises in rural areas. The parallel trajectories of corporate and
non-profit interests may appear surprising, operating as they do in divergent moral
economies. Both types of solar projects, however, are driven by the same
material, political and economic advantages of solar, as a form of cheap,
reliable and distributed generation that offers autonomy from the
inefficiencies of state infrastructure (Cross 2019, 54).
In
effect, both “developmental” and “corporate” solar contribute to what may be
called the creation of “green enclaves” in the energy landscape of Ghana,
pockets of autonomous, renewable energy that serve both corporate and
humanitarian rationales. I borrow the term “green enclave” from an engineer of
the Volta River Authority (VRA) responsible for the hydropower generation plant
at the Akosombo Dam that provides a large part of Ghana’s generation capacity. At
a convention for renewable energy in Accra in 2019, he described to me plans to
install solar panels on the roofs of Parliament, ministries, and the
residential facilities at the Akosombo dam as “the greening of our enclaves”, a
term that fittingly describes the infrastructural model of renewable energy at
large in the country. It is not surprising that the Minister who had conveniently
re-adjusted Ghana’s renewable energy target himself had solar panels installed on
his house.
In
a context of widespread energy precarity, solar in urban Ghana has exacerbated inequalities of access to reliable
and affordable electricity, creating “green”
geographies of inequality, energy security, and privilege.
Image 4: Solar panel business. 2019. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author
Conclusion:
Energy Transitions in perspective
Ghana’s case-study
has important implications for understanding energy transitions around the
world. In popular discourses of energy transitions, the replacement of fossil
fuel dependencies by renewable energy sources seems both inevitable and
imperative. Calls for a renewable energy revolution in Africa are appealing,
but they too often assume that renewables come to fill a gap, a lack, or an
evidential need – in other words, that their benefits are too self-evident to
forgo. Renewables, in this case, belong to the future – and fossil fuels to the
past. In many ways, Ghana presents an inverse scenario of this dominant model
of transition. Having powered most of its electricity needs with hydropower, it
is now switching to increased reliance on thermal power plants and an oil
economy. Further, this past of renewable energy through hydropower is today
invoked to encourage a rush for oil and gas exploitation. In discussions with
energy officials, policymakers, and the general public, I am repeatedly
reminded that “Ghana is a low emitter”, bearing no responsibility to global
greenhouse gas emissions. For a country that relied until recently entirely on
hydropower for electricity, yet currently faces issues of reliability and
affordability (Eshun and Amoako-Tuffour 2016), “sustainability” appears as a
secondary concern to more pressing issues of overcapacity and improving access
to reliable and affordable power. In turn, the adoption of renewables may not
primarily be motivated by questions of environmental ideology, but also as a convenient
(if privileged) solution to crisis. Accounting for the political potential of
renewable energy futures around the world will demand that we grapple with the
contradictory, divergent and conflicted visions and temporalities of energy
transitions, and the relations between crisis and capital, privilege and
poverty through which they come into being.
Pauline Destrée is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. She is a member of the ERC-funded research project Energy Ethics. Her research explores energy, extraction, climate change, gender and race in Ghana.
Cross,
Jamie. 2019. “The Solar Good: Energy Ethics in Poor Markets.” Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 25 (S1): 47–66.
Degani,
Michael, Brenda Chalfin, and Jamie Cross. 2020. “Introduction: Fuelling
Capture: Africa’s Energy Frontiers.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
38 (2): 1–18.
Eshun,
Maame Esi, and Joe Amoako-Tuffour. 2016. “A Review of the Trends in Ghana’s
Power Sector.” Energy, Sustainability and Society 6 (1): 9.
Günel,
Gökçe. 2021. “Leapfrogging to Solar.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120 (1):
163–75.
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2019. “Africa Energy Outlook 2019.” Paris: IEA.
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2015. “Africa 2030: Roadmap for a Renewable Energy Future.” Abu Dhabi: IRENA.
Miescher,
Stephan. 2014. “‘Nkrumah’s Baby’: The Akosombo Dam and the Dream of Development
in Ghana, 1952–1966.” Water History 6 (4): 341–66.
Obeng-Darko,
Nana Asare. 2019. “Why Ghana Will Not Achieve Its Renewable Energy Target for
Electricity. Policy, Legal and Regulatory Implications.” Energy Policy
128 (May): 75–83.
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Dayo. 2015. The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern
Africa. Reprint edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt USA.
Sakah,
Marriette, Felix Amankwah Diawuo, Rolf Katzenbach, and Samuel Gyamfi. 2017.
“Towards a Sustainable Electrification in Ghana: A Review of Renewable Energy
Deployment Policies.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 79
(November): 544–57.
Szeman,
Imre, and Darin Barney. 2021. “Introduction: From Solar to Solarity.” South
Atlantic Quarterly 120 (1): 1–11.
Cite as: Destrée, Pauline. 2021. “Solar for the Few: Stranded Renewables and Green Enclaves in Ghana.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/pauline-destree-solar-for-the-few-stranded-renewables-and-green-enclaves-in-ghana/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past and present projects of large-scale resource extraction and subsequent “recultivation” measures to convert the land back to agricultural production or natural conservation. Lignite (or brown coal) is exploited in vast open-pit mines here – the Hambach mine not far from the city of Cologne is dubbed “Europe’s biggest hole” – “swallowing” everything from forests to villages in their way.
Coal mining – in contrast to the more authoritarian
and centralized organization of oil extraction – has been historically
associated with the development of the welfare state and the consolidation of
workers’ rights in western democracies. However, as Thomas H. Eriksen notes,
“contemporary coal mining has been restructured and reconfigured to resemble
oil drilling formally”, becoming “less labour-intensive and more
capital-intensive than in the past” (2016: 38). This neoliberal restructuring resulted
not only in the transformation of institutions of “Carbon Democracy” (Mitchell 2009),
as the conditions for workers to organize and wield influence over the means of
production were eroded, but also in declining economic dependency on the coal
industry in the Rhineland region.
Despite this decrease of economic significance in the
region, RWE, the energy company currently operating the mines, has still been considerably
involved in local politics over the past decades – not least because of its
mandate to secure the provision of cheap electricity for German industry and consumers.
To this day the state-approved “general public interest” serves as the legal
basis for the suspension of fundamental rights, making possible the
expropriation of land titles, the demolition of protected landmarks, or the
circumvention of guidelines for environmental protection for the extraction of
fossil fuels in Germany’s lignite mining regions.
Image 1: A new energy horizon after the end of the world? Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine (Picture taken by the author)
Environmental destruction and relocation of tens of thousands of people due to numerous mine expansions in the Rhineland were thus firmly connected to narratives of national progress and regional prosperity. Mourning over losses of personal possessions and feelings of belonging were relegated to the private realm, and little room was left for critical voices in the public domain.
Recently however, this hegemonic state-industry nexus has been successfully challenged by a coalition of environmentalists, citizen initiatives, radical activists and other civil society actors (despite the continued economic profitability of the coal industry, ensured by “environmental load displacement” (Hornborg 2009) and other indirect subsidies). Their demands to save the remaining forest in front of the Hambach mine effectively stopped the encroaching extractivist operation. They were supported by a government commission installed to negotiate the conditions of Germany’s energy transition, following the decision to phase out the coal industry as a national contribution toward climate change mitigation.
The prospect of a global climate crisis has therefore led to the current reevaluation of lignite mining from guarantor of wealth and stability to driver of multi-scalar uncertainties. This enabled previously marginalized actors to voice their concerns by articulating their demands in terms of these globalized discourses. Yet, the (inter-)nationally reported success of the protests around the Hambach forest was only one instance of ongoing negotiations about the pace and scale of energy transition, from the perspective of the critical civil society actors with whom I conduct research in the Rhineland.
Since this seeming breakthrough for civic participation in shaping the region’s future, numerous setbacks and scandals have occurred. These are testament to the inability of carbon-democratic institutions to deal with a crisis that challenges its basic principles of growth as progress and wage labor as key to well-being. Controversies range from the passing of a coal exit law that many critical voices interpret as a “coal extension law”, to the federal government holding back an official report that questions the energetic necessity of the energy company’s plans for mine expansion.
Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I
regularly participated in meetings of a local group of critical civil society
actors who played a decisive role in saving the forest and turning it into a
national symbol of climate activism. Their political engagement served as an
opportunity to take a closer look at the uneven futures of energy transition in
the Rhineland. As we sit in a circle in the Protestant church hall of a village
close to the Hambach mine, many of the participants share impressions of
feeling alienated from their home region by the energy company’s mining activities.
Despite being part of the majority that does not depend on the coal industry
for income, some of the locals feel their concerns were generally ignored by communal
politics, making them rather skeptical of established political institutions’
capability to develop a sustainable and equitable future for the mining region.
Nonetheless, they see the impending process of energy
transition as a window of opportunity to reconnect with their home region by
actively participating in the development of alternative future visions, beyond
institutions of representative democracy. This desire for autonomous
participation is directly linked to the affective alienation associated by some
of my interlocutors with the large-scale landscape transformation of the mining
activities, coupled with the close connection between local politics and the energy
company.
This carbon-democratic entanglement of political
institutions and energy industry experienced in everyday life in the
Rhineland’s lignite mining region probably finds its most drastic manifestation
in the practice of “creating facts” (“Fakten schaffen”), of which my
interlocutors often accuse the mining company. This expression usually refers
to the practice of producing accomplished facts which alter conditions in a way
to favor certain outcomes. Often their undeniable materiality forces other
actors to acknowledge these facts, in turn leading to the retrospective
legitimization of the outcomes of Fakten schaffen. Thus, actors with the
power and institutional support to “create facts” narrow down an otherwise ambiguous
situation potentially open to negotiation by different actors to a specific
path of options in their interest.
In this way the energy company continues the controversial destruction of almost completely relocated villages. Under Germany’s new energy policy, the company is sticking to its operating plan and regular rhythm of extraction and redevelopment, despite radically changing socioecological and energy-political parameters. While numerous critical actors unsuccessfully appeal to democratic institutions to inhibit this pursuit of enforcing prior arrangements through material destruction, the following, more ambiguous example will serve to illustrate this modus operandi of Fakten schaffen and its relation to the feeling of alienation.
Image 2: “Path dependency” – literal and figurative: Solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest (Picture taken by the author)
Thomas, an outspoken and very knowledgeable member of a local citizen initiative against coal mining, and part of the larger group of civil society actors mentioned above, gives me a ride to the train station after we participated in one of the regular protest-walks through the forest at the Hambach mine. As we pass the bridge over the railway connecting the mines with the nearby power plants, I decide to ask him about the solar panels aligning the tracks beneath us. Their sheer size hardly makes them unnoticeable, but I never paid much attention to them, except for contemplating the irony that the fossil fuel infrastructure gives room to more “sustainable” forms of energy generation here. After all, the solar panels seemed somewhat out of place next to passing trains packed with lignite. The panels simultaneously signal the out-of-time-ness of the coal industry and point to a new energy future on the horizon. But Thomas’ reaction to my question made me aware of another aspect regarding their significance for the issue of affective alienation in relation to the practice of Fakten schaffen.
Knowing that most of my interlocutors are in favor of
direct solar energy generation and having the impressive photovoltaic structure
right before our eyes, I am prepared to finally hear a success story about
civic participation in local development. Yet, Thomas is not sympathetic to the
photovoltaic project at all. He tells me it was a typical outcome of
cooperation between energy company and politics in the region.
This sentiment echoes many civil society actors who
criticize that, being the biggest landowner there, RWE conducts itself “like the
lord of a manor” (“Gutsherrenart”), demonstrating the “feudal” excesses
of carbon democracy in the Rhineland, which regularly undermine popular desires
of stronger democratic involvement in matters of future-making. Thomas goes on
to inform me that a citizen initiative proposed a similar project a few years
ago in which the solar panels ought to be lining the highway that was relocated
closer to the village because of the encroaching mine. They had imagined the
photovoltaic structure as serving multiple other functions, such as protecting
villagers from noise and air pollution emitted by the mine and highway. While
the project gained some attention in the local press, it was not supported by
the communal administration and ultimately had to be relinquished.
Around the same time, the energy company came to an
agreement with the administration to make property available for the hitherto
largest photovoltaic project in the region, co-financed by a local bank. The
uncanny speed with which this project was realized confirmed not only the close
ties between politics and coal industry to critical actors like Thomas, but
also showed clearly how easily something can be achieved in the region when the
energy company is directly involved.
So instead of being perceived as a successful step
towards sustainable energy transition in the Rhineland’s lignite mining area,
the solar panels symbolize a failure of civic participation. They appear to Thomas
as a material (arte-)fact resulting from the dubiously close cooperation
between local politics and the energy company. Judged from a distance, this
instance of Fakten schaffen produced a material outcome in line with my
interlocutors’ desires for sustainable energy generation. However, the concrete
infrastructure stands as a monument that exemplifies how flows of innovation
are caught up in existing power relations and ultimately contribute to
consolidating the local incarnation of the state-industry nexus, even in the
face of impending coal exit.
While the lignite industry will disappear in the
foreseeable future, the longstanding history of capitalist extractivism – the main
reason for the affective alienation of a large group of people in the area –
will likely continue, no matter the source of energy. The deliberate promotion
of technoscientific development interventions carried out by experts in the
context of energy transition policies thus works to forestall the
socioecological transformation from below that Thomas and others envision as a
necessary step for politics in the Anthropocene.
Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the economic ministry’s newly adopted rhetoric of establishing a special economic zone in the area to speed up planning processes and pursue the double-bind of “green growth” (Eriksen 2016). Meanwhile, they were simultaneously hosting forums for civic participation that seem disconnected from this pursuit, because they operate at a different pace. This contradictory course of action leads many local actors to evaluate the efforts to integrate civil society into official planning processes as a mere façade, intensifying their skepticism towards institutions of carbon democracy in the region.
This brief insight into my fieldwork shows how inhabitants
that felt alienated by collusions between energy industry and political
institutions, sensed the diverging interest of politics and industry in the
context of energy transition as an opportunity to regain some autonomy over the
shaping of their region’s future. However, instances of Fakten schaffen enacted
by the state-industry nexus function to curtail this grassroots engagement, and
to (re-)connect extractive infrastructures of late industrialism (Fortun 2014)
to narratives of modernization and progress under the aegis of “green growth”.
A coalition of local actors more attuned to the
socioecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene criticizes this
carbon-democratic variant of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and pushes for a
joint transformation of resource use and political culture in search of a
redefined “good life” for all. Rather than a utopian vision of future
prosperity, this practical engagement might be characterized as “patchy hope” (Tsing
et al. 2019) which, despite being situated and emplaced, operates between the
particular and the universal, the local and the global; aware of its own
limitations within ambiguous entanglements of politics and energy in the
Rhineland.
Felix Lussem is a research assistant and lecturer in the field of environmental anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His doctoral research deals with shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” with a regional focus on the Rhineland’s lignite mining area. Contact: flussem2@uni-koeln.de
Bibliography
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Cruel Optimism. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Eriksen, Thomas H. 2016. Overheating. An
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and Society 38 (3): 399-432.
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Cite as: Lussem, Felix. 2021. “Alienating ‘facts’ and uneven futures of energy transition.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/felix-lussem-alienating-facts-and-uneven-futures-of-energy-transition/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
Debates about climate change have long entered political arenas through diplomacy, bureaucracy and regulations as part of worldwide environmental governance. Global efforts to foster greener energy increasingly supplement resource extractivism (IEA 2019). Yet, unfolding protests, from Fridays for Future to Extinction Rebellion, point to the insufficiencies of current measures. As lawsuits threaten the European mega-corporation RWE Energy with the responsibility for glacial melting in the Andes and Sioux sit-ins block the Dakota Access Pipeline in the USA, direct political action is on the rise to fight climate change by transforming energy infrastructure. Social anthropology’s analytical thrust to treat energy systems as sociotechnical constructs urgently needs to challenge the depoliticizing tendency inherent to energy decision-making (Boyer 2019, Howe 2019).
Image 1. Fridays for Future Cologne, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann
In particular, narratives of incremental improvement based on efficiency, productivity, and development discourse, must be re-examined in of the urgent need for renewable energy generation (Franquesa 2018, Gupta 2015). At the same time, political turmoil accompanies many renewable energy projects. These range from protests against involuntary displacement and the destruction of ecosystems by hydropower megaprojects like the Chinese Three Gorges dam to sovereignty struggles over Bolivian lithium reserves used in the production of solar batteries to the Spanish governments’ recent decision to hand over wind turbine development to big energy players. Beyond doom and gloom, energy’s production, distribution and consumption rise and fall with technological innovation (Winther 2013, Günel 2019). Our imagination of what makes human life easier and what improves living conditions for societies shapes the technologies we come up with and how we put them to use.
Image 2. Treehouse with solar panel on the forest edge of RWE’s Hambach coal mine in protest of surface mine expansion, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann
Over the last decades, anthropology and other academic disciplines have shown that energy systems are interdependent webs of sociotechnical and sociomaterial connections (Boyer 2014; Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014; Gupta 2015; Appel 2015). They are enmeshed in geographical conditions, spatial identities, traditions, norms and imaginaries as well as in political negotiations and financial assessments (Günel 2019; Moss 2020; Mitchell 2011; Bakke 2016). These assessments and negotiations have often privileged not only one energy technology over another, but one community’s or stakeholder’s future over another (Powell 2018). This grave inequality has led the critical social sciences to question what energy futures entail, how much adaptations are necessary or possible, what we can sacrifice for particular energy scenarios, and to ask who exploits what instruments of power to what particular ends (Smith and High 2017).
The contributions to this FocaalBlog feature discuss the political legitimacies and forms of power that become
possible through renewables’ development and the greening of energy systems. Indeed,
the development of renewable energy sources begs questions with high stakes: How does political decision-making on energy sources unfold, including
expanding resource extraction, extending the grid, or developing renewables?
How do historic injustices and exclusionary legacies of extraction, production
and consumption affect future energy horizons? Do imperatives for greening
energy create new role models in energy matters that shift the focus within and
beyond the dichotomy of “the West and the Rest”? When do debates about local
environmental priorities and energy rights undermine or bolster global climate
targets? Which new forms of precarity and scarcity do large-scale
infrastructural impositions by local or international powerholders entail?
Based on a panel at the 16th EASA Biennial Conference virtually
held in Lisbon in July 2020, this collection of papers investigates the contradictions and contestations
between the persistence of conventional energy systems and the rise of
renewables within the complex operations of political power that affect our
anticipated energy futures. From top-down policymaking regarding energy access
to grassroots calls for climate justice, the contributions interrogate the
policies and politics surrounding renewable energy, and the unintended
consequences and alliances in its delivery.
Rethinking
energy futures
After decades of constant growth in energy production
and demand, climate change is no longer an abstract threat. We are therefore forced
to scrutinize established foundations of energy systems. While energy research
has already expanded the view from the misperception of localised, insulated
extractivism to that industry’s real-world global conditions, climate change
forces us to rethink our energy future on all levels.
Formerly the elephant in the room, all too often
ignored in energy action, climate change increasingly factors into decisions on
changing energy systems large and small. At least, this is reflected in the
figures: In 2019, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global
energy-related CO2 emissions flattened (slightly) at around 33 gigatons,
resulting mainly from a sharp decline in CO2 emissions from the
power sector in advanced economies (IEA 2020). This flattening is the result of
the expanding role of renewable sources (mainly wind and solar photovoltaic), of
fuel switching from coal to gas, and results from higher nuclear power output.
We need to expand our understanding of energy systems
beyond sociotechnical systems to socio-ecological horizons. In his Capitalism and the Web of Life, Jason
Moore (2015) proposes that the separation of humans and nature resulted in the
exploitation of “Cheap Nature”, exacerbating resource use in excess of
sustainability several fold. This extensive extractivism then fuelled the rise
of capitalism, supporting financial systems that rest on exploitation of both
minority societies and the interrelated human-nature-complex. Many energy
systems, regardless of their sustainability status, threaten global living
conditions and operate by privatizing profits and socializing risks and losses.
Critical understanding of conventional energy systems and creative approaches
to potential energy futures therefore require both intellectual and political
engagement.
Image 3. A squirrel scurries across entangled electricity cables in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo by Kirsten W. Endres, 2019
Bridging different scales of inequality and extraction, the blog contributors challenge the undemocratic and unequal ways of owning and producing energy. They question the financial assessments of energy production that ignore or miscalculate environmental and climate effects. However, as anthropologists, they also direct our attention to the human experiences and personal pathways forged through engagement with energy futures. Their case studies affirm that obligations rather than incentives are needed to make green technologies work for all and to reduce energy consumption. Cash cows of energy production within established political and market systems too often fail to provide just and sustainable energy systems.
Thinking of our energy future, CO2 emission
developments indicate that socioecological considerations are gaining weight in
energy debates and practice, as they flattened after reaching a historical
height (IEA 2020). However, these shifts are not yet substantial enough to outpace
political powers that focus on the economic or technological dimensions of energy
production systems only. Time and again, official statements from politicians
and others claim that faster or more consequential shifts to renewable energy are
not feasible, thus revealing a reticence to realize sustainable energy futures.
Arguments abound that energy networks and electrification need (fossil fuel
based) development, or that they require at least bridging technologies to
guarantee cheap and reliable supply of sufficient energy. In parallel, quarrels
that a technology is not mature or marketable enough break out alongside complaints
that solar energy was too expensive to survive on the market. Fears of economic
losses, of declining voter favour or of structural change prevent energy
transitions that are socioecological in nature and backed by sociopolitics
(Sovacool 2016).
Image 4. Joint launch of Green Bond Index between the Luxembourg und Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Beijing, People’s Republic of China 2017. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann
To accomplish energy transitions, voluntary
obligations of private companies are not sufficient. Such obligations have hardly
ever led to improvements of community goods, especially not if cutting profits
was a necessity. The voiced by non-corporate stakeholders need to be heard and implemented
through legally binding rules. Climate, nature and the planet cannot speak for themselves,
but require a socioecological understanding of energy systems to be the basis
for energy decision making. This does not imply that we can solve the climate
dialectic (Goodman 2016). A socioecological energy system concept will not allow
for a sudden political regulation of the climate crisis through regulating
energy production. Yet, understanding the political powers at play in energy
systems is essential so as to not become paralyzed and to retain instead agency
in times of severe crisis: energy futures need to be envisioned, power mechanisms
understood and analysed. The papers of this special issues contribute to this endeavour.
Image 5. Power lines shaping current and future energy systems, Germany 2021, photo by C. Schulze
Ethnographic
inquiries into energy futures
Our blog contributions take the reader to a variety of geographical settings and socio-political environments. Felix Lussem’s contribution explores the contemporary entanglement of political institutions and the energy industry in Germany’s lignite mining Rhineland, a region with a long history of large-scale resource extraction. As Lussem shows, this entanglement finds its most obvious expression in the practice of “creating facts” in order to (continue) providing cheap energy from the fossil fuel, while activists and other civil society actors try to prevent further damage to their environment and demand greater public participation in designing pathways towards a sustainable energy transition in the region.
Calls for an accelerated transition to climate-friendlier and cleaner energy sources have also gained momentum on the African continent. Some of the pitfalls and challenges of implementing green energy policies at the national/local level become apparent in Pauline Destree’s contribution. Rather than belonging to the future, renewables (such as hydropower) have dominated Ghana’s power sector in the past, while recent oil discoveries have spurred an increased rush for fossil fuel exploitation. Concomitantly, corporate solar investments gained salience during an energy crisis that hit the country in 2015. As Destree demonstrates, this led to a “renewable divide” in urban areas. While a few “green enclaves” benefit from their installed renewables, the financial situation of national utilities has worsened, resulting in higher tariffs for urban residents who continue to depend on the national grid.
Dragan Djunda’s contribution takes us to the Western Balkans, where small hydropower plants (SHPPs) have recently emerged as a dominant strategy for reducing fossil fuel dependency. This double transformation path to renewable energy and liberalisation of the energy sector as an adaptation to EU standards attracted large flows of foreign investment. But the damming of the last remaining free-flowing rivers in Europe has sparked its own protests, as the selling of SHPPs licences implies the ‘sell-off’ of locally used water and of pristine environs. In the Stara Mountain region in south-eastern Serbia environmental activists and local residents successfully defended rivers and villages against the impending damage from hydropower development in the region. As an unexpected outcome of the conflicts and contestations, the formerly decaying villages suddenly attracted increased touristic attention as well as financial support for community-relevant infrastructure projects.
In northern Portugal, structural reforms and austerity measures imposed by EU institutions to battle the country’s financial crisis have contributed to another path in renewable energy transition, a path that forges links into the global green bond market. Giulia Dal Maso’s contribution traces the history and location of wind farms in the wine-producing Viseu region that had been refinanced by the first Chinese green bond issued in Europe. Whereas the bond-issuing Chinese enterprise has since been able to extract rent from a previously public infrastructure, this refinancing did not produce any “extra good” for local people in the Viseu region, who keep struggling to pay their electricity bills.
From industrialized regions facing their own coal
dependency and growing holes in landscapes of extraction in the German
Rheinland to a Ghanaian balancing act between weathered dams for hydropower, new
oil and gas discoveries, and the mushrooming of privileged green enclaves, from
regional resistance to damming up the rivers of the Balkan mountains to
residents in rural Portugal finding themselves poised between local pride in
their wind and the pressure of paying for its energy delivery by a Chinese
investor: What the contributions to this blog feature show is that pathways
towards a renewable energy future are not straight-forward or unilineal, and global
players in renewables finance usurp local infrastructures and drive their
agendas forward, albeit being consistently challenged and scrutinised by more
local imaginations of a sustainable future.
Beyond a focus on energy experts and policy pragmatists balancing public utilities and personal consumption as a calculative endeavour, anthropological investigations show how every energy provision relies on common resources and reshapes shared landscapes. Big players in energy production wield finance and power in ways that may undermine or further political and personal futures, and lead to surprising twists and turns in energy narratives. Yet suturing scales of energy engagement between corporate hierarchies, different state levels, and local energy producers and consumers, reveal that decisions on the form and type of energy used reach into deep historical experiences of developmentalist projects. Tracing the entangled relationships between people forging their energy horizons and reflecting on their demands and obligations to each other, brings to light their commitment to a collective future.
Katja Müllerworks as a social anthropologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and at the University of Technology Sydney. She conducts research on energy transitions, mining and climate change, as well as on digital cultural heritage.
Charlotte Bruckermann explores carbon as a frontline of value in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Her current research focuses on carbon management in the creation of Chinese ecological civilization, with a focus on carbon offset forests, digital carbon accounting, and the decarbonization of everyday life in a coal region. Her book Claiming Homeswas published in 2019.
Kirsten W. Endres is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany. Her current project focuses on the interrelationship between the development of energy systems and the complex operation of modern states and state power in the Greater Mekong Subregion.
References
Appel, Hannah. 2015. Subterranean Estates: Life worlds of coal
and gas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bakke, Gretchen. 2016. The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between
Americans and our Energy Future. New York: Bloomsbury.
Boyer, Dominic. 2019. Energopolitics:
Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power
struggles: dignity, value, and the renewable energy frontier in Spain.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Goodman, James. 2016. “The climate dialectic in energy policy: Germany and India compared.” In
Energy Policy 99: 184-193.
Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in
the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Gupta,
Akhil. 2015. “An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South.” In Cultural
Anthropology 30(4): 555-568.
Howe, Cymene, Ecologics: Wind and
Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 241 pp.
IEA – International Energy Agency (2020), Global CO2
emissions in 2019, IEA, Paris
https://www.iea.org/articles/global-co2-emissions-in-2019
Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.
Moore, Jason. 2015.
Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital.
London: Verso. Moss, Timothy. 2020. Remaking Berlin. A History of the City through Infrastructure,
1920-2020. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Powell, Dana E. 2017. Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the
Navajo Nation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Richardson, Tanya and Gisa Weszkalnys. 2014. Introduction: Resource
Materialities, Anthropological Quarterly
87 (1): 5-30.
Smith, Jessica and Mette High. 2017. “Exploring the anthropology of
energy: ethnography, energy, and ethics.” Energy Research and Social Science
30: 1-6.
Sovacool, Benjamin.
2016. How long will it take? Conceptualizing the temporal dynamics of energy
transitions, Energy Research & Social Sciences 13: 202-215.
Winther,
Tanja. 2013. The impact of electricity: Development, desires and dilemmas. Berghahn.
Cite as: Müller, Katja, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten W. Endres. 2021. “Introduction: The political power of energy futures.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/katja-muller-charlotte-bruckermann-kirsten-endres-introduction-the-political-power-of-energy-futures/
At the height of this pandemic’s third wave, with many of us sitting in what by now feels like an eternal lockdown, images of a gigantic ship stuck inside the Suez Canal seem to have provided more than just a welcome distraction. The vessel, unable to move one way or another, proved to be immensely relatable, if endless memes flooding the ether over the last few days are any indication at all. With the ship now figuring as a stand-in for every dilemma under the sun, cartoonist Guy Venables, in his work for Metro Newspaper UK, perhaps best summed up the phenomenon with a drawing of the stuck ship that has a voice emerging from the vessel saying, “This is terrible! We’re going to be used as a metaphor for everything!”
The popular fascination with the Suez blockage is not surprising. Ships, if we can be excused for anthropomorphizing them for a moment, are as charismatic as human-made objects can ever be. Standing next to a container ship of the dimensions of the Ever Given is an experience that is hard to shrug off, so massive and overwhelming to the human size are these new ultra-large vessels. At the same time, having over recent years done research among workers involved in producing, operating, maintaining and (un-)loading these ships, we found ourselves rather unsurprised by the events unfolding in the Suez. Among some maritime industry experts, the fact that container ships have gotten too big has been an open secret for quite a while (e.g. see Lim 1998; Merk 2015; Weisenthal and Alloway 2021). Laleh Khalili, for instance, has recently shown how the Suez Canal ironically played a key role in the acceleration of ship growth, when oil tankers rose in size as a response to the Suez crisis in the 1950s (e.g. 2021; see also Khalili 2020). The temporary cardiac arrest that the Ever Given has caused inside the Suez Canal, Khalili’s work and that of other excellent critical logistics scholars has shown (for an overview, see Charmaine Chua’s valuable list here), may only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the damage that ultra-large container ships are causing.
Image 1: “Transiting through the Suez Canal.” Photo: Johanna Markkula.
But first of all – to the hard facts on the ground: For nearly a week, a 400-meter-long container ship has been stuck in the southern part of the Suez Canal, blocking all traffic, and causing an estimated loss of 400 Million US Dollars per hour to the global economy. On her way from Yantian in China to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and with room for 20,000 twenty-foot freight containers (TEUs) when fully loaded, on the morning of 23 March Ever Given was surprised by strong desert winds in shallow waters. Like the Straits of Malacca, the Panama Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal – built partially by forced laborers from 1859-1869 – is a vital vein in the bloodstream of trade. This is the shortest route between Asia and Europe. An average of 52 ships pass through the Suez Canal every day; 12% of international ship traffic and as much as 30% of global container traffic is routed via this narrow chokepoint. For ships that during the past week have been diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, a significantly longer journey awaits. As the queue of waiting ships grew to more than 300 by March 28, deliveries to Europe and beyond have suffered severe delays, while the currently cut-off ports are bracing themselves for a true onslaught of ships that will clog up their waterways once the blockage has been resolved. In a nutshell, this colossal mess will certainly take a while to sort out, even once the ship has become unstuck.
Container Economies on Overdrive
As we have recently summarized in a theme section of Focaal (“Container Economies”, Leivestad and Markkula 2021), global shipping is built on intricate logistical systems, systems that have come into place with the invention of the modern day intermodal shipping container, and where “Just in time” principles govern everything. With the development of new shipping systems and technological solutions from the 1950s onwards, it became cost-effective to transport goods and raw materials between continents, primarily from large production countries in Asia to markets in Europe and the US (see Levinson 2006). Container ships today transport 24% of all the world’s dry goods, and building ever larger ships seemed to be the obvious, cost-effective strategy to embrace. From the mid-2000s onwards, more and more shipping companies have begun to expand their fleets with larger ships. The world’s largest shipping company, the Danish Mærsk, proved to be a leader in this development, and the Asian-owned shipping companies – many of them state-controlled – followed suit over recent years. Between 2005 and 2015, container vessels doubled in size. Since 2017 alone, 77 additional mega-container vessels with a capacity of over 20,000 containers have been brought into use.
As we (Leivestad and Schober) also describe in an upcoming article in Anthropology Today, some maritime experts have long been skeptical about how sustainable these ultra-large box ships actually are – a debate that has certainly flared up again recently. Before the pandemic hit the world economy last year, shipping prices had temporarily fallen to a record low, which was partly due to the overcapacity created by nearly all major shipping companies simultaneously betting on the introduction of ultra-large container vessels. The spectacular 2016 collapse of Hanjin Shipping (see Schober 2021), then among the top 10 of shipping companies in the world, is often attributed as a direct outcome of this over-capacity. In our piece in AT, we discuss how the language of “Economies of Scale” used to justify these ships is more than just of a performative nature. It is, one can argue, part of a false economy in the sense that these ships mark a real redistribution of wealth from public funds to corporate elites, rather than the creation of new wealth that is their ostensible justification.
Size Matters
Through our research in one of Europe’s largest container ports in southern Spain, around South Korean and Philippine shipyards, and on board of various container ships, we have come across other negative effects that ultra-large container ships have caused over recent years. When not clogging up the Suez Canal, these increasingly larger ships are often causing new problems for maritime infrastructure, the environment, and negatively affect people’s working conditions. Fewer and fewer ports can actually accommodate the new ships. For those ports that can – of which many are struggling to survive in a highly competitive industry – major investments are required to build ever higher cranes, longer docks and larger container warehouses. Port work must be adapted to the megaships’ routes and schedules, and workers both at sea and on land fear that the growing ship sizes, together with ever smaller crew sizes on board, eventually will lead to serious accidents. The environmental aspects of shipping in general are significant. For instance, sea beds must be dredged at regular intervals, with major consequences for the marine environment above and below water (e.g. Carse and Lewis 2020).
Although the Ever Given is now
about to be released from the canal, the drama is far from over. In many ports,
maritime workers fear chaotic conditions when all waiting ships resume traffic
– at a time when the pandemic has already caused much havoc across the
industry. Hopefully, the incident in the Suez Canal will be a wake-up call.
Escalating ship sizes have serious consequences, and large parts of the infrastructure
that has enabled the megaship growth are financed by tax payer money. The price
for the Ever Given, and the many
ships of its kind that will continue to sail the oceans, may ultimately have to
be paid by all of us.
Hege Høyer Leivestad is Assistant Professor at Stockholm
University, Sweden, and researcher in the ERC project PORTS at the University
of Oslo, Norway. Her research project, Frontier freight: Maritime logistics at
the Strait of Gibraltar, is funded by the Swedish Research Council and deals
with port life, labor, and global shipping in southern Spain.
Johanna Markkula is postdoctoral fellow at the Department of
Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she is part of the
research project Life cycle of container ships. Markkula is a maritime
ethnographer with ten years of experience researching the maritime industry and
global maritime labor. She has carried out ethnographic research onboard cargo
ships with multinational crews as well as in the Philippines with maritime
organizations and businesses ashore.
Elisabeth Schober is associate professor at the University of Oslo’s Department of Social Anthropology, Norway. Schober is currently the principal investigator at Life cycle of container ships (funded by the NFR), where she focuses on shipbuilding in South Korea and the Philippines. In 2019, she was awarded an ERC-Starting Grant for a project that will center on some of the world’s most important container ports.
References
Carse, Ashley and Joshua A. Lewis. 2020.
“New horizons for dredging research.” In WIREs Water.Vol.7,
issue 6 (November/ December). https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1485
Leivestad, Hege Høyer and Johanna Markkula.
2021. “Inside Container Economies”. Focaal. 89: 1-11.
Levinson, Marc. 2006. The Box: How the
Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lim, Seok-Min. 1998. ‘Economies of scale in
container shipping’, Maritime Policy & Management 25 (4): 361-373.
Cite as: Leivestad, Hege Høyer, Johanna Markkula, and Elisabeth Schober. 2021. “Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences.” FocaalBlog, 30 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/30/leivestad-hege-hoyer-johanna-markkula-and-elisabeth-schober-beyond-suez-escalating-ship-sizes-and-their-consequences/
Contemporary anthropological praxis sits at the intersection of two ethical traditions. Many anthropologists are equipped with both a sophisticated understanding of the ethics and politics of representation and a practical knowledge of the bureaucratic norms and standards of institutional research ethics (informed consent, confidentiality, anonymisation etc.). And yet, if the PrecAnthro/EASA report (Fotta et al 2020) and the recent scandal at the HAU journal tell us anything (Kalb 2018, Murphy 2018, Neveling 2018, Singal 2020), it is that our disciplinary ethics does little to ensure the ethical conduct of our discipline. As other contributors to this debate have noted, the situation described in the report demands a political and an anthropological response. It requires us to unionise and work ethnographically to understand “the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization” (Narotzky 2021). In my opinion, the report should also provoke us to re-evaluate the ethics of anthropological knowledge production.
I welcome the PrecAnthro report for helping to illustrate the scale of anthropological casualisation in Europe, but it is true that my feelings likely reflect how closely the report describes my own experiences of academic precarity: I was educated in the UK and since completing my PhD in 2015, have worked on fixed-term research contracts. As Susana Narotzky (2021) and Natalia Buier (2021) note, the report privileges the perspectives of researchers like me, whilst excluding the experiences of some of the most marginalised precarious workers in anthropology such as low-paid teaching staff for whom EASA membership is neither professionally advantageous nor affordable. I write here from my located perspective as a post-doc who has worked in the field of research ethics for a number of years.
I found little to disagree with in the FocaalBlog commentaries on the PrecAnthro report and would only contend that I do not believe that anthropologists feel uncomfortable talking about precarity within our discipline. On the contrary, in fact, I think that anthropologists are more than happy to discuss academic precarity because they see it as a largely externally driven phenomenon – part of the same great process of neoliberal bureaucratisation that has devolved power from academics to university managers and driven a culture of performance review and job insecurity across the piece (so called publish-or-perish). Rather, I would think, what makes anthropologists feel uncomfortable is talking about how the precarity of junior colleagues leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by senior colleagues and reluctant to report abuse and bullying due to a fear of reputational damage (Kalb 2021, Drążkiewicz 2021, Rajaram 2021). The kind of exploitation that allegedly took place at HAU may be extreme, but as Neveling (2018) argues, it sits within “a spectrum of social, economic, and political processes that have always driven academia and continue to do so” and that reflect the general conditions of capitalism. Yet, whilst we should of course foreground the political economy of academic casualisation in order to understand the grounds for collective resistance, we must also question what it means to produce anthropology is a way that is sensitive to the risks of exploitation inherent to the contemporary academic process. Such a project would necessarily be as much about the ethics of anthropological knowledge production as the political economy of precarity.
One of the difficulties that anthropology faces here is a lack of familiarity. Our existing professional ethics and standards are attuned to the practices of conducing fieldwork and writing ethnography. We are not used to thinking about how we interact with each other as a problem of anthropological ethics. Neither do we tend to think of “the anthropologist” as someone who is particularly vulnerable. Indeed, it was not so long ago that the anthropologist was seen as quite the opposite of a precariously employed, exploited worker. Typified by the image of Stephen Tyler on the cover of Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), the figure of the anthropologist-as-writer marked a dawning disciplinary confrontation with the idea that ethnography was not neutral scientific description, as had apparently previously been assumed, but a genre of “persuasive fiction” largely produced by elite, white men, working under conditions of colonial and post-colonial privilege. Anthropologists, who understandably tend to privilege the ethics of their own discipline to those imposed from the outside (i.e., institutional research ethics), have become keen observers of the politics and ethics of representation. Anthropologists are skilled at unpacking assumptions and revealing the structures of inequality that determine whose experience counts and who gets to speak for whom – as demonstrated in this debate by the various incisive critiques of the limits of the PrecAnthro survey. And yet it is unclear how effective our existing disciplinary ethics alone can be when the subject of exploitation is neither a subject of investigation, nor ultimately representation, but rather a fellow anthropologist.
The PrecAnthro report evokes a strikingly different image of “the anthropologist” to that of the elite, white man of crisis of representation. The typical respondent in the report is described instead as “a woman aged around 40… educated in either the UK or Germany… possibly in a relationship but has no children… and probably dissatisfied with her current employment and her work–life balance due to the fact that she works on a fixed-term contract” (Fotta et al 2020: 1). The report further illustrates what many already knew: contemporary anthropological knowledge production relies on a precariat of low-paid anthropological workers (postgrads, postdocs, teaching assistants etc.), many of whom will never obtain a permanent contract in the discipline nor academia more generally. What does the growing visibility of this version of “the anthropologist” mean for anthropological praxis? Are we to continue to imagine that the rights and wrongs of anthropological knowledge production can be discussed independently of the labour relations that structure our discipline? If not, then we may need consider whether our existing professional ethics are equipped to deal with the moral and political realities of anthropological research in the 21st century. Indeed, if it is our ambition to build the kind of class consciousness required for collective mobilisation, then we may need to start by acting in solidarity with precariously employed anthropologists and try to envisage ways that our working practices can be used to help mitigate, rather than exploit, the forms of vulnerability that academia creates.
Adam
Brisley is a post-doctoral
researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has a PhD from the
University of Manchester and has previously held post-doctoral positions in the
universities of Manchester and Bristol. His research interests focus on the
relationship between care and political economy in the context of health
systems crisis.
Clifford, J. and
Marcus, G. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography.
University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
Fotta, M., Ivancheva, M. and Pernes, R. 2020. The Anthropological Career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists: https://doi.org/10.22582/easaprecanthro
Cite as: Brisley, Adam. 2021. “Ethics and the Anthropological Worker.” FocaalBlog, 9 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/24/adam-brisley-ethics-and-the-anthropological-worker/
On February 22nd police forces
entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating
many students, arresting
31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff.
Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting
against a new bill on “Admission in higher
education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic
environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced.
The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any
dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.
The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.
Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.
Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.
In the
context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political
antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This
consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher
education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and
received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation,
political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space
where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no
surprise that they are being attacked first.
The Neoliberalization of Higher
Education and Law 4777/2021
The efforts to alter the public, free, and open
character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017,
Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made
several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards
universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for
private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article
16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public
institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense
mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially
delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in
higher education over the past two
decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’
degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected
representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack
the prestige of public universities.
However, when Nea Dimokratia came
to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum.
If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world,
in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its
brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest
movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took
place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to
crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never
been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a
seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy
was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses
– unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by
the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the
universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students
and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public
gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the
academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th.
Interestingly, this law was not introduced
by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the
Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in
educational affairs is unprecedented.
To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
The
new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university
autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates
a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and
interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable
not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore,
fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers
for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which
will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on
the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore,
the law allows for many
disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve
in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the
organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and
punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.
All of
these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university
self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals
the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and
the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous
and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from
chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20
million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all
the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first
year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept
police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.
The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.
The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.
Towards a closed and authoritarian university
The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.
More
generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major
centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and
society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been
privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such
critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship,
and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university
campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses
democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly
unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in
Parliament that, under the new law, “it
is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the
state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming
universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking
the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then
it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to
ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If
this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally
different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.
Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.
References
Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera
A., Heintz M. &
A. Horolets (eds.),
Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe:
An Intricate Institutional and
Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.
Gefou-Madianou,
Dimitra 2000. “Disciples,
Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M.
Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in
Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp.
256–78.
Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities
Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens
Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online
petition.
Image 1: Online Petition, “Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS” (Screenshot by FocaalBlog editors, this petition has our undivided support, we call on our readers to join us as signatories)
Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/
One day last October, I
happened to spot an acquaintance’s post on Wechat. It was a simple message
thanking all ‘Ant-izens’ (people who work in Ant Financial of Alibaba) for
their hard work, followed by a short video advertising Ant’s upcoming IPO. It
came from a data scientist who had given up his high-paid job in the US,
returned to China, and joined Ant Financial three years earlier. Ant shares
were then expected to start trading in Hong Kong and Shanghai on 5 November.
Jack Ma, the founder of Ant
and affiliate Alibaba Group Holding, had declared it a “miracle” that such a
large listing would take place outside New York. It was poised to raise up to
$34.4 billion in the world’s largest stock market debut and would create a vast
group of new billionaires. The data scientist’s post, like many posts on social
media, was a showoff: it was a subtle public announcement that he was going to
become extremely rich in two weeks’ time. The post contributed to a rather
complicated, self-consciously suppressed feeling among many professional
Chinese Americans: once again they were tasting the bitter feeling of being
stuck in the US middle-class, left behind by those who had managed to jump on
the fast-track train of China’s economic growth, grabbing opportunity in the
mainland and realizing their ‘Chinese Dreams’ by finally becoming ‘financially
independent’ (meaning rich enough that you and your offspring would never need
to worry about money again).
Then, on 3 November, two
days before the feast, the IPO was suddenly called off by the Chinese
government. Immediately thereafter, China ordered Ant Group to rectify its
businesses and comply with regulatory requirements amid increased scrutiny of
monopoly practices in the country’s internet sector. Such a blow! The data scientist
kept a dignified silence; my professional friends kept a polite silence. And
Jack Ma, the real protagonist of the drama, kept a cautious silence. He has
since disappeared from public view (only reappearing on 19 January 2021 with a
video emphasizing his social work). Where is he? What is he doing now? What
would happen to him? Why would all this happen? What does the state’s
intervention mean to Ant and Alibaba, to the whole ecommerce industry, and to
the whole private sector? What does it say about the logic of the state
apparatus in this enigmatic yet so important country? Where will it go? And how
would this affect the rest of the world, especially the West? So many questions
and so much drama.
Image 1: Jack Ma, who created Alibaba.com in Hangzhou, China in March 1999 (Source: JD Lasica, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/292160777)
Unsurprisingly, the Western liberal media have maintained their usual cold-war tone, by interpreting the drama as a typical attack initiated by a post-socialist authoritarian state towards this too powerful private entrepreneur out of fear or simply for the vanity and narcissism of Your Highness Xi. The Financial Times, for example, compared it immediately with the Khodorkovsky case in Russia (Lewis 2021, paywall). The implication was clear: you can never trust those former socialist authoritarian countries. They would never respect private property, follow the rules of the liberal world, and become “us”. Equally unsurprisingly, some Western Leftists have maintained their idealist tone towards a China that may perhaps be capitalist but is at least not Western capitalist. For them, the crack-down on Ant signifies a determined fight by the state and the population against greedy capital and capitalists.
Most people in China indeed
seem to have welcomed the crackdown and support the state’s actions. There are
various reasons for such support. One economist
I talked to supported it for financial security considerations and for the
state’s antitrust efforts. She mentioned the extremely high and hence hazardous
financial leverage that Ant Financial is playing with, as well as the antitrust
efforts against Facebook and Google in the USA. One private entrepreneur also
supported the action for financial security considerations, but based on
different reasoning. According to him, since there are many different kinds of
capital (including foreign capital) behind Alibaba and Ant, Ant’s IPO would further
open the door for foreign finance capital to enter the Chinese market. Some
intellectuals talked about the vulgar and disgusting advertisements made by Ant
Financial aiming to encourage irrational consumption, as well as the
irresponsible private loans it has given out, and how all these behaviors have
disrupted social order and degraded social morals.
All these reasons were evident in the government’s statements for halting Ant: to regulate the financial market, enforce antitrust legislation, and create a healthier consumption environment (Yu 2020). This all seems valid except that the role Ant is playing is largely as a platform––a middleman between state banks and individual small-loan borrowers. Much of the capital given out as small loans by Ant actually comes from the state banks. The state banks were not allowed to engage in these high profit businesses. They also do not have access to the necessary consumer data and data science. They normally deal with state owned enterprises. So, Ant stepped in to help state banks exploit a previously untouched financial market: grassroots personal loans. They then divided the profit. As some observers rightly pointed , Ant has always aimed at creating partnerships with big banks, not disrupting or supplanting them. More importantly, quite a few important government-owned funds and institutions are Ant shareholders and were expected to profit handsomely from the public offering (Zhong & Li 2020). Thus, the claim that Ant squeezed out the state banks is spurious. They were basically in the same boat. That is why the state never really regulated Ant before. Meanwhile, we should not forget that the informal financial market has long existed in Chinese grassroots society due to the inaccessibility of bank loans for most non-state economic entities and common people. Ant actually formalized (to a certain degree) this informal market. Yes, Ant did play the financial game of ‘asset-backed securities’ to enhance its financial leverage, but hardly to the extent that Wall Street is used to doing. Finally, what about the irrational consumption encouraged by easily accessible loans (especially for youths)? Maybe. But most such loans still come from other smaller and less responsible lending agencies following in Ant’s steps, which try to grasp crumbs from the huge cake but do not have the technology and data required to avoid excessive risk. It is these smaller and less technologically capable actors that are in fact creating chaos in credit supply. In short: even if we all agree that financial capital has always been highly speculative, and that Ant is no exception, some of the official statements justifying the intervention into Ant’s IPO still sound fishy.
Meanwhile, the poor in
China still seem the most determined supporters of the state’s crackdown on
Ant. They supported it out of their hatred toward big capital. On the internet,
they lambasted the bloodsucking behavior of Ant, and called it “Leech Financial”
instead of Ant Financial (Leech is pronounced in Chinese as “Ma Huang” and ant
is pronounced as “Ma Yi”). There is also a popular cartoon being circulated on
the internet that depicts Jack Ma as a beggar in his old age—homeless, fragile,
and sad. One blue-collar worker told me that any big capitalist whose main objective is to extract money from the poor
should be dragged down.
Tellingly, the state has intentionally toned down popular indignation. The relationship between state and capital in this country has always been much more complicated than the mere antagonism imagined by liberal commentators. The state can’t afford a strong group of capitalists with too much power and resources; but neither can it afford losing them and scaring capital away. It has always been an art of balancing. As we have seen, Jack Ma has reappeared recently with a more solemn appearance. His Ant is now required to deploy necessary ‘rectifications’ under the tighter rein of state regulation (CBNEditor 2021). It is, nevertheless, the right thing for the state to do, no matter the underlying aims. Ma, of course, should always keep in mind that there has never been an Era of Jack Ma; it has always been the Chinese Era that created him, as one Chinese official newspaper publicly warned him as early as 2019.
As for those professional
Chinese Americans who believe that they have missed the recent gold-digging
opportunities in China and have started to doubt their earlier decision to go
abroad, the crackdown on Ant—or more specifically, the broken dream of becoming
a billionaire data scientist—has taught them a rather comforting lesson:
miracles, whether for a country, a company, or an individual, are slippery. A
boring yet relatively predictable middle-class suburban life in the West should
at least be bearable, perhaps even enviable.
Juzimu is an ethnographic researcher of Chinese capitalist transitions and writes here under pseudonym.
Times are a Changing. The Trump phenomenon
as a whole, his election, his presidency, the events of the Capitol, Joe Biden’s
accession and Donald Trump’s impeachment are moments of radical process. They
form a dynamic in and of themselves. They express the chaos and transition of
the moment but they are also and at the same time forces in the transformation
and transmutations of capitalism and world history, perhaps, with the
complications of the COVID19 pandemic, virtually an axial moment, a switch or
turning-point of crisis, as
Don Kalb has argued on FocaalBlog early in the pandemic (Kalb 2020).
This involves a re-consideration of what is
fast becoming the master narrative concerning Trump, with ideological
implications of its own. Trump is presented as a spectre of a fascist past
rather than a foretaste, a mediation into, the potential of an authoritarian
totalitarian future involving major transmutations in capitalism. What follows
concerning the Trump phenomenon is written with all this very much in
mind.
Our guess (a risky gamble in these times
when almost anything seems possible) is that Trump will fade. There are
doubtless many other political figures similar or worse who could take his
place. With the going of Trump so may his “movement”. What crystallized around
him was more an assemblage, a loose-knit heterogeneous, motely collection of
diverse persons and groups ranging from the extreme far right to the more
moderate, whose organizational cohesion may be more illusory than real. Not yet
a political ‘Party Trump’ it is as likely to melt into air and go the way of
most populist movements as it might congeal into a longer-lasting force of
opposition headed by Trump.
This is not to gainsay the shock of the
storming of the Capitol on the otherwise ritualistic day of the confirmation of
Biden’s victory that concludes the liminal transitional period conventional in
the US-American democratic cycle. Such a liminal space (Turner, 1969) is a
relative retreat and suspension of the state political order as the presidency
is renewed or changed. This is often a festive time given to all kinds of
political excess when the people vent their potency in the selection of those
who are to rule them. Trump encouraged and intensified the potential chaos of liminality
at its peak when, ideally, it should subside and political order be fully
restored. He aimed to disrupt this critical moment and to maintain his
uncertain presence as the Lord of Misrule, if not necessarily to effect a coup.
Named as “God’s
chaos candidate” by some evangelicals who supported him, Trump promoted,
even if unwittingly, a moment of extreme chaos that was all the more intense
for the liminal moment of its occurrence when the participants themselves blew
out of control.
Night of the World, Pandemonium at the Capitol
In the nightmare of the event, newscasts presented
visions of a fascist future filled with Fascist and Nazi images and other
commonly associated symbols. There was a strong sense of dialectical collapse
along the lines of Hegel’s “Night of the World” of demonic appearances when
forces in opposition dissipate against each other and lose their meaning. The
representatives of the nation cowered under their desks fitting gas masks while
those who would challenge them in festive mood and drunk with brief power put
their feet up on desks aping their masters and carried off the mementos and
spoils of their invasion. Exuberant chants of “this is our house” echoed down
the corridors of power.
Shades of the past paraded in the present,
foremost among them that of the enduring trauma of the rise of Nazi
Germany. What Sinclair Lewis had warned
in It Can’t Happen Here – a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of
the democratic world – anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s
apotheosis, seemed to be actually materializing. This accounts for the
excitement on the steps of the Capitol – “this is America 2021 y’all!!” Arlie
Hochschild captured the millenarian Nuremberg feel of his campaign rallies when
researching Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American
Right (Hochschild 2016), her excellent ethnography of the white far right
and their sympathisers in Louisiana, America’s poorest state and a Donald Trump
heartland. Hochschild recounts at a lecture to the Rosa
Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin a scene, reminiscent of the opening frames
of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, when Trump’s plane,
“Trump Force One”, appears through the clouds and, as if from heaven it
descends “down, down, down” to the waiting crowd; electrified in expectation of
the saviour’s endlessly repeated sermon of redemption of the deep resentment that
they felt for having been pushed aside from the promise of the American
Dream.
But here is the point: The immediate
reaction to the storming of the Capitol gave further confirmation to the real
and present danger of Trump’s fascist threat fuelled in the rumblings of class
war which Trump has inflamed and exploited. It is a liberal fear, mainly of the
Democrats but including some Republicans, who are the chief targets of Trump’s
attacks. His demonisation of elite liberal value (marked by accusations of
moral perversities aimed at unmasking the claims to virtue) is at one with his
condemnation of the liberalism of Federal political and social economic
policies which he presents as contributing to the abjection of mainly white US-American
working class and poor; to be seen in the rapidly increasing power of global
corporations, policies of economic globalization, the privileging of
minorities, refugees, recent immigrants etc.
Image 1: When surprises were minimal and manifest destiny kept on giving. The Capitol Christmas Tree arrives in Washington, D.C., Nov. 26, 2012 (Foto: US Forest Service/Keith Riggs, accessed 8 Feb 2021)
It might be remembered at this point that
the violence of the Capitol invasion–the marked involvement of military
veterans, the carrying of weapons, baseball bats, the reports of pipe bombs–that
shocked so many, reflects the fact that all modern states are founded on
violence. This is particularly the case in the US where the US
Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in defence of
democratic rights. In an important sense the violence of those invading the
Capitol refracts back at the middle class and especially the ruling elite the
very violence that underpins the structure of their rule. If liberal virtue was
shocked by the events on January 6 it was also confronted with the violent
paradox deep in its democratic heart (see Palmer 2021). Thus, this paradox
slips into paroxysm at this critical moment in American political history.
The transitional figure of Trump feeds on
the prejudices of his intended constituencies and exploits an already
ill-formed class awareness building on ready commitments and vulnerabilities – the
well-rehearsed fascist and populist technique – creating indeed a false
consciousness (there is no other way to say it) that is not only destructive
but in the hands of the likes of Trump integral to intensifying the feelings of
impotence and the miseries that give Trump his relative popularity. Slavoj
Zizek says as much in what he describes as “Trump’s
GREATEST TREASON”.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘The Governator,’
was quick to counter the white supremacist, macho, Proud Boy, Oath Keeper and Three
Percenter elements highly visible in media newscasts with a Conan the Barbarian
performance. This was his take on the dominant brand of Make America Great
Again. (Really, all those along the political spectrum participate in MAGA – Democrat
Party badges and hats from the recent election read “Dump Trump Make
America Great Again”). He focussed on his own immigration away from his native
Austria and its Nazi associations to the liberated American world of his
success. For Schwarzenegger, the Capitol invasion and its vandalism equated to Kristallnacht.
Noam Chomsky likens the storming with Hitler’s
Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 observing that it effected a greater penetration
to the heart of power than did Hitler’s failed attempt. But Chomsky, with
characteristic acuity, adds that the fascist danger lies in the anti-democratic
class forces (including electoral and political manipulations on all sides)
that provide the fertile ground for fascism; forces that have acutely and early
been pinpointed by anthropologists (Holmes 2000, 2020; Kalb and Halmai 2011;
Kalb, forthcoming).
But the point must be taken further. New
class formations are in the making right now and they are being driven in the
explosive nature of technological revolution (see Smith
2020). This is something Marx himself was very much aware of and why he
wrote more than one hundred pages on the machine and the human in Capital. This
is also the concern of Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (2002) and the
continued focus of today’s accelerationists such as the Nick Srnicek (2017) on platform
capitalism.
Creative Destruction, the Transmutation in Capital and Corporate State Formation
The rise and fall of Trump (not discounting the
possibility that Humpty Dumpty might come together again, which is the fear of
the master narrative) may be understood as expressing a transition between
two moments of capitalism during which one formation morphs into another. Trump
is the embodiment, instrument, and anguish of this transition, a tragic figure
in a theatre of the absurd. Grand Guignol almost, but in Gothic American Horror
Story style. The accession of Biden is the apotheosis of the new in the
hopes of most; he is a vehicle for healing the divisions in the U.S. that Trump
brought to a head and are still very much present. But Biden’s rise has ominous
oppressive indications of its own.
The Trump events have all the hallmarks of
the crisis and rupture of transformation or, better, transmutation. The
millenarian spirit that Hochschild captures in her account is one born in the
capitalist ideology of the American Dream; fortified in the religious
fundamentalism of Trump’s many followers that revitalizes their hopes in that
American Dream in the face of abject failure. The rallies and the impassioned
actions of those invading the Capitol are filled with revitalizing energy.
Such millenarian explosions, distinct in
their own historical contexts, occur at many other points in global history. It
was apparent at the dawn of capitalism in Europe, at later moments of crisis
and redirection in capitalism up to the present – indeed at the inception of
the Nazi horror, and at points of the disruptive expansion of capital in the
western imperial/colonial thrust as in the Cargo movements of the Pacific (Cohn
1970, Lanternari 1960, Worsley 1970 (1959); Neveling
2014 for a link between Cargo Cults and neoliberal capitalism).
The rupture of transmutation in capital,
the crisis that the Trumpian progress manifests, is an instance of what Marx
and others have understood to be the creative/destruction dynamic of capital;
whereby it reproduces, renews, revitalizes its potency against contradictions
and limitations to its profit motive that capital generates within itself as
well as those thrown up against it in the very process of its own expansion and
transformation.
The circumstances underpinning the current
transmutation in capital relate to the revolutions in science and technology those
associated particularly with the digital age and advances in biotechnology).
The rapid development of capital (and especially that of the still dominant, if
declining, US-American form) was driven by the innovations in knowledge and
technology (something that Marx and many others admired in US-America). What
became known as the nation state (the dominant political form that nurtured
capital) and the class orders that were generated in capitalism and necessary
to it (not to mention the over-population and ecological disasters that grew in
capital’s wake) also constituted barriers and limitations to capital’s
growth.
The new technological revolutions are a
response to the limitations on capital emergent within its own processes.
Technological innovations enabled revolutions in production and consumption, creating
new markets and increasing consumption, reducing the need for human labour and
the resistances it brings with it, overcoming problems, and opening up
novel lines, of distribution; forcing the distress of unemployment (especially
among the erstwhile working class), creating impoverishment and uncertainties
reaching into once affluent middle classes as captured in the neologism ‘the
precariat’; shifting class alignments; redefining the nature and value of work,
of the working day, the expansion of zero hours and, as an overarching
manifestation, a sense of the return of a bygone era.
The current technological revolution is a key
factor in the extraordinary growth in the monopolizing strength of corporations
such as Google, Amazon or even Tencent. The dot.com organizations (the
flagships and spearheads of capitalist transformation with huge social transmutational
effect) have wealth that dwarfs many states and they are functioning in areas
once controlled by the state (from what used to be public services to the
current race to colonize space). Indeed the corporate world has effectively
invaded and taken over the operation of nation-states (Kapferer
2010; Kapferer
and Gold 2018).
This is most noteworthy in those state
orders influenced by histories of liberal social democracy, in Europe and
Australia for example, which tended to draw a sharp demarcation between public
interest and private enterprise. The nation-state and its apparatuses of
government and institutions for public benefit have been corporatized so much
so that in many cases government bureaucracies have not only had their
activities outsourced to private companies but also have adopted managerial
styles and a ruthlessness along the lines of business models. The corporatization
of the state has aligned it much more closely with dominant economic interests
in the private (now also public) sectors than before and enables a bypassing of
state regulation, even that which once sustained capitalist interest, but which
became an impediment to capitalist expansion.
These changes have wrought socio-economic
and political disruption and distress globally and most especially in the
Western hemisphere. This is not merely collateral damage. The revolution in
science and technology has been a key instrument in effecting social and
political changes via destruction, for the regenerative expansion of capital.
It is central to the re-imagination of capital in the opening of the twenty-first
century.
This is particularly so in the United States
whose socio-political order is historically one of corporate state formation which
accounts for its long-term global political economic domination. Some renewal
in leftist thought (e.g. with Bernie Sanders) is an index of the depth of distress
that is being experienced although the ideological and counteractive potency of
the American Dream fuelled especially in fundamentalist Christianity suppresses
such potential and contributes to the intensity and passion of the Trump
phenomenon. The ideological distinction of the Trump event aside, its dynamic
of populism is reflected throughout the globe (Kalb 2021)
One common feature of this is the rejection
of the political systems associated with nation state orders and, to a marked
extent the largely bipartite party systems vital in the discourses of control
and policy in nation states. Trumpism and other populist movements (in Europe
notably) complain of the alienation of the state and its proponents from
interests of the mass. The expansion of corporatization and the further
hollowing out of the state, the corruption of its public responsibilities by
corporate interests, is effectively what Trump was furthering in his
presidency. It is a potent dimension of the Trump paradox and a major irony of
the Capitol invasion that, for all the apparent fascist tendencies, it was the
spirit of reclaiming democracy (admittedly of the freebooting kind) in an
already highly corporatized establishment (subject to great corporate capitalist
interest) that Trump’s actions were directed to. An important figure in this
respect is the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The tech
billionaire, early investor in Facebook and founder of PayPal, was an early
Trump supporter and named a part of Trump’s transition team in 2016. His book, Zero
to One, based on his lecture courses at Stanford University, argues for a
corporate-technocratic governance beyond older systems of government. (Thiel
2014).
From Panopticon to Coronopticon
COVID-19 has highlighted the social
devastation of the destructive/creative dynamic of capitalism’s transmutation (see
also Kalb
2020). The class and associated ethnic inequities have everywhere been
shown up and probably intensified by a pandemic that is starting to equal, if
not surpass, the depressing and devastating effect of two world wars. Like them
it is clearing ground for capitalist exploitative expansion – something like
Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism (Klein 2007).
Under the shadow of the virus, labour
demands are being rationalized, the cutting back of employment and its benefits
legitimated, governments are pumping capital into the economies in a way that
protects consumption in an environment where there is declining occupational
opportunity and income. The idea of the universal basic income is seriously
discussed. Its implementation would offset some of the contradictions in a
transformation of capitalism that is reducing our dependence on labour and endangering
consumption through automation and digitalization. While the poor are getting
poorer the rich are getting richer; most notably those heading the
revolutionary technologies of the digital age and biotechnology, with the
competitive race to secure viable vaccines against the virus one example for
the latter sector’s power.
There is a strange synchronicity linking
the pandemic with the dynamic of capitalism’s transmutational corporatization
of the state. The virus reproduces and spreads in a not dissimilar dynamic.
Indeed, COVID 19 in some ecological understandings is the product of the
acceleration of globalization effected in those processes of capitalism’s
transmutation associated with corporate expansion and the corporatization of
the nation state. As a crossover from animal to human bodies the virus is one
manifestation of increased human population pressure on wild animal territory,
the closer intermeshing of animal and human terrain. The scale
of the pandemic is, of course, a direct consequence of the time space
contraction and intensity
of the networked interconnections of globalization.
State surveillance has intensified as a
by-product of combatting COVID which is also its legitimation, with digitalization
as the major surveillance instrument. The digital penetration into every nook
and cranny of social life (see Zuboff2019, and Netflix’s The Social Dilemma),
is interwoven with the commodification of the social and personal for profit – economizing
individuals calculating the costs and benefits of their social ‘interactions’
(the YouTube or Kuaishou ‘influencer,’ the hype TED talker as Foucault’s
entrepreneurial self, cut, pasted, uploaded and remixed).
The management of Covid-19, demanding
social isolation and the disruption of ordinary social life, has exponentially increased
the role of the digital as the primary mediator of the social and a commanding
force in its very constitution. Covid-19 has been revealed as a kind of social
particle accelerator. As such, and ever more exclusively so, the real of the
social, is being re-imagined, re-engineered and re-mastered as a digital-social,
a ‘Digisoc’ or ‘Minisoc,’ constrained and produced within algorithmically
preset parameters. Here is Peter Weir’s film, The Truman Show,
radically updated. And, as with Truman, the space of freedom is also and at the
same time experienced as a space of unfreedom.
This manifests in the deep ambivalence many
feel about the new technologies they daily live with and through. The digitized
social is often presented as a new agora, a liberating ‘space’ in which new, progressive
ideas and directions are enabled, operationalized and indeed optimized. The
internet has become a site of multiple struggles in which class forces and new
potentials for social difference and proliferating identity-claims are continually
emerging. The freedom of the internet has provided exciting opportunities for
many. Such freedom also and at the same time contributes to conspiracy
imaginations on all sides. As has been made clear in the two elections
featuring Trump, the superpower of corporations like Google and Facebook
threatens to install a domain of hyper-control. Digital walls and electronic
fences are appearing everywhere in the age of the global ‘splinternet.’
The hegemonic and totalizing potential for
the ruling bodies of the corporatizing state who control the digital is as
never before. This is so not just in the global scale of the network reach but
in the heightened degree to which controlling bodies can form the ground of the
social, radically remodel, engineer and design reality in accordance with
dominant interests, and where motivated shut out that which threatens their
order. The awareness of this has driven the fury of censorship and
self-censorship on all sides – Trump’s threatened TikTok ban becomes Twitter’s
actual Trump ban.
Back in Some Form: From 1984 into a Brave New World
Trump and Trumpism are moments in the
transitional, transmutational process of capitalism outlined above and of the
formation of new social and political orders. Echoing the past, they express its
transmutation (and its agonies) rather than repeat it. Trump and Trumpism
manifest the contradictions of such processes, agents and agencies for the
transmutations in the social and political circumstances of life that are in
train, themselves forces in the bringing forth of a future that, in some
aspects, is already being lived.
Trump himself can be described as an
“in-betweener”, a bridge into the new realities, both a force in their
realization and a victim. His manner and style, the brutal no holds barred
amorality is familiar from the captains of industry and robber barons of an
earlier age, who built capitalist America and crushed working-class resistance
by all means, more foul than fair. Trump maintains the style but in reverse
redemptive mode. In his shape-shift he presents as supporter of the working
classes not their nemesis as did his forerunners.
However, his authoritarian business manner,
of The Apprentice’s“you’re
fired” fame, matches well the managerialism of the present. He is an
exemplar of contemporary venture capitalism and most especially of profit from
non-industrial production (often anti production) gained from real estate,
property transfer, asset stripping, and the expanding gaming and gambling
industries (their importance as symptoms of the crises of transformation in
capital) from which some of Trump’s key supporters come.
Trump’s reactive anti-immigrant nationalism
and “Make America Great Again” rhetoric not only appeals to the white right but
is an engagement of past rhetoric to support new political and economic
realities. Trump’s economic war with China stressed re-industrialization but it
was also concerned with counteracting China’s technological ascendancy,
especially in the realm of the digital, a major contradiction born of the
current globalizing transmutation in capitalism involving transfers of
innovatory knowledge.
Trump anticipated the risk to his
presidential re-election. It manifested the dilemmas of his in-betweenness. His
inaction with regard to the pandemic was consistent with the anti “Big
Government” policies of many Republicans and the US-American right who cherish QAnon
conspiracy theories as much as they want to reduce government interference and
modify regulation in capitalist process, a strong emphasis in current
transitions and transformations of the state and of capital.
Trump’s cry that the election was being
stolen was excited in the circumstances of the pandemic. His attack on postal votes
related to the fact that the pandemic gave the postal vote a hitherto
unprecedented role in the election’s outcome by by-passing and neutralising the
millenarian populist potency of his mass rallies already reduced in numbers by
fear. Trump sensed that the COVID-inspired move to ‘working from home’ and ‘voting
from home’ would challenge, fence in and fence out his base of support.
Trump has always taken advantage of the
digital age, his use of Twitter and Facebook the marked feature of his style of
rule. His practices looked forward to the politics of the future ever
increasingly bounded and conditioned in societies of the image. Following the
events at the Capitol, Trump’s own Custer’s Last Stand to allay his
fate, his cyberspace and internet accounts were switched off. He has been
cancelled by the new digitally authoritarian corporate powers (who arguably
benefitted the most from the Trump era and profited greatly under pandemic
conditions) who are behind the growing new society of the image, in which he
was a past-master and within which he had in the main established his identity.
(Kapferer
R, 2016)
The overriding image of the Capitol
invasion and carried across most networks is that of the occupation of the
heart of American democracy by those who would threaten its ideals. The media have
concentrated on what was the dominating presence of the extremist macho white US-American
far right violently parading symbols of a racist past combined with clear
references to the not-so-distant memories of fascism and Nazism. There
were others there more moderate in opinion and representative of other class
fractions, if still mostly white, whose presence does not reduce the fear
of fascism, possibly as in Nazi Germany when what seemed to be small groups of
extremists hijacked power (and the events of the Capitol evokes such memory) to
unleash the horrors to follow. Something similar could be said for what
happened in the Soviet Union leading to Stalinism. These were the worlds of
George Orwell’s 1984, in which some of the major ideals of the time flipped in
their tragic negation. Such events were very much emergent in realities of the
nation-state, its imperialist wars and the class forces of that particular
historical moment in the history of capitalism and the formations of its social
and political orders. There is no statement here that this could not happen
again.
What we are saying is this: a different
authoritarian and oppressive possibility may be taking shape – not of the
fascist past but of the future. This is a future that Trump was mediating but
which may be coming into realization, despite the great hope to the contrary,
in the accession of President Biden. Perhaps this prospect can be seen as more
akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World born in the current transmutations
of capital (and its agonies of class) and in the circumstances of the radical technological
revolutions of the digital era, involving the apotheosis of the corporatisation
of the state, the corporate state emerging out of the ruins of the nation
state.
Aldous Huxley depicted a world centred on production
and efficiency, a bio technologically conditioned global system of perfect
rational, optimised order. The class conflicts of the past are overcome here; everyone
accepts their predetermined place. It is a post-human reality in which the
foundation of human beings in their biology and passions is transcended. It is
a somatised, artificially intelligent world of the image and promiscuity. Indeed,
the American Dream. Those who do not fit or who resist are fenced out. Time and
space are being reconfigured, incurving around the individual and
‘personalised.’
Biden’s inauguration for all its upbeat ceremonial spirit had some
intimation of such a future, taking into full account the security constraints
of its moment: to protect against the murderous unchecked rampage of the virus
and the threat of the attack of right-wing militias. The stress on this, it may
be noted, had an ideological function to distance what was about to come into
being from, for example, the definitely more visceral world of Trump and
thoroughly evident in the invasion of the Capitol – what Biden in his inauguration speech called an “uncivil war.”
The scene of the perfectly scripted inauguration was
virtually devoid of people. Apart from the dignitaries and all-important
celebrities, the highly selected order of the society of the corporate-state. Where
the general populace would normally crowd, was an emptiness filled with flags
and protected by troops, more than currently are stationed in Afghanistan.
Those who might disrupt, Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘resistant
savages,’ were fenced out. It was a totalizing and constructed digital media
image presenting a reality of control, harmony, and absolute surveillance.
We claim that something like Trump and the
events surrounding him would have happened regardless of the specific phenomena
we have focussed on here. The events Trump are a moment, perhaps among the most
intense, in the transitional transmutation of the history of capitalism and the
socio-economic and political orders which build and change around it. The
apparent chaos indicates a major axial moment in world history – a chaos driven
in the emergence of a cybernetic techno-capitalist apparatus on a global scale.
What might be augured in the Biden accession is already taking vastly different
shape in China and elsewhere around the globe. New and diverse formations of
totalitarian authoritarianism are emerging. The Trump phenomenon is crucial for
an understanding of some of the potentials of a future that we are all very
much within and that an overconcentration on the parallels with the past may
too easily obscure.
Bruce Kapferer is a roving anthropologist and ethnographer, Professor Emeritus at Bergen University, Professorial Fellow UCL, Fellow Cairns Institute, and the Director of the ERC Egalitarianism project at the University of Bergen.
Roland Kapferer is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Deakin University, a filmmaker and a musician. He does research on cybertechnologies.
Cite as: Kapferer, Bruce, and Roland Kapferer. 2021. “The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities.” FocaalBlog, 2 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/02/bruce-kapferer-roland-kapferer-the-trump-saga-and-americas-uncivil-war-new-totalitarian-authoritarian-possibilities/
