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akshay khanna & Alice Tilche: That which cannot be spoken

This is the third of our series of blogposts in relation to the Budhan Podcast project. In earlier posts we have looked at narrations of collective suffering and the re-embodiments engendered by the shift from theatre to film. In this post we turn our attention to a particular feature of the emergent form of film, that of sublimation. 

A forum theatre1 workshop conducted as part of the project produced two short plays centered on various experiences of the participants, of discrimination based on tribal identity, caste, gender, colour and class. One of these related to a young Chhara man’s experience as a reporter for a television channel. At the beginning we hear his conversation with his father, who had invested in his children’s education so that they did not fall back into the business of bootlegging, which characterises a large part of the economy of Chharanagar. ‘It is most important’, the father says when the protagonist informs him that he has been called for an interview at the channel, ‘that you represent our people. Society and the state think of us only as criminals, as thieves, as those in the daaru (alcohol) business. This must change’. He enters the interview, after negotiating the suspicions of the guard at the door, and being intimidated by aggressive expressions of social capital by upper caste candidates in the waiting room. The idiom through most of this had been humour – miscommunication, caricature, cheeky references to contemporary political moments, luring the audience into the story and marking a mutual unreadability between the characters on stage. The protagonist sits down, nervously, in front of his prospective colleagues and bosses.  

‘What is your name?’, they ask. ‘Govind’, he replies. ‘Yes, we know, we have read your application, but what is your name?’. Here emerges a curious fact – Govind has dropped his surname. He goes simply by the name Govind.

The question ‘what is your name?’ in India is much more than about what one is to be called. It is the first question that one is asked – for it is through one’s surname that one’s caste is ascertained, one’s relative position in the interaction, and thus one’s status and terms of engagement. There is a long history of people, especially those from oppressed castes and tribes strategically changing their names. In the 1970s and 1980s, socialist movements such as the ‘JP movement’, led to people dropping their surnames en masse so as to disable the privilege function of caste. Today’s young generation of Ambedkarites of different caste backgrounds do the same and it is not uncommon to come across students and young professionals fighting formal systems that require a caste name as a prerequisite for entry and recognition. 

On the insistence of the interviewers, Govind lets out that his ‘full name’ is in fact Govind Chhara. He is from Chharanagar, the interviewers confirm, where there is daaru business, and crime. The interviewers seem unconcerned with the fact that Govind’s expertise is in culture, that he himself is an actor and is interested in covering cinema and art. Even as they eventually give him a job, this has a very specific remit – he is to give them stories from within the world of crime. The rest of the play traces his journey through the crime beat, his engagements with the police who assume that he is intimate with petty criminals, the various ways in which his identity comes to define his career in journalism, leading ultimately to a resignation and a hard-hitting monologue about casteism.  

The play had been performed and now it was time for the forum to take over as members of the audience (in this case from the community) are invited to enact other strategies in dealing with the situation that was just been performed on stage. The first person to come on stage to do things differently happened to be Dakxin. Dakxin who sometimes goes by the name Bajrange, and sometimes by Chhara. Who has taken pride in his name and written and spoken eloquently about the art of theft. It is for the art of being invisible that his ancestors had been hired by kings as spies in the colonial era, it is for their art of theft that they formed a critical part of the early resistance to British rule, and were ultimately branded as Criminal Tribes. Dakxin came onto stage to express a completely different persona to that of Govind: confident, emphasising his name, and, knowing how television works, making a case for himself by offering them connections with the real leaders of crime, the big corporate houses.  

‘What was the difference in the strategy we just saw?’, I asked as the Joker, the figure in forum theatre who facilitates discussion between audience and stage. And in the discussion that followed what articulated was a crucial dilemma for not just the DNT movement, but for struggles of most marginalised and despised groups – How does one relate to the ‘injurious’ name, the name that marks us as criminals, as oppressed castes, as queers, as minority religions? Do we pick it up and instil pride in it, do we emphasise our otherness, or do we disavow the name, or indeed disavow our difference itself? Do we embrace sanitised forms of address or hold on to, and reinvigorate our ‘states of injury’ as names of pride?  

There are multiple elements to this dilemma, but in this post we hone in on the imperative of respectability in representation. This, we find, has been an underlying tension in the podcast series. On one hand we see the framing of the Chhara self (and of other DNT communities) as respectable citizens, speaking purely of the violence visited upon DNT communities, demanding witness to their struggles for survival and worthy for that reason of dignity. This is the voice of dignified victimhood structurally expected in the documentary form, especially where film is conceptualised as an antidote to injurious stereotypes. It is the impeccable saree of the widow we encountered in our second blogpost, it is the quantified data on school dropouts in policy briefs, it is the measured tone of activists laying down facts which might speak for themselves. It is the face of the unfairly marginalised evoking a moral economy.  

This, in turn produces the affect, if not the figure, of the somehow justifiably marginalised. This is the other face. This is the face of the women who run the production side of the alcohol business, the young man who chooses to work in the business of bootlegging, or indeed of petty theft. In other contexts, this is the sex worker who refuses to occupy the palatable image of victimhood, the working-class queer who emphasises her sexualness publicly (rather than the desexualised ‘good gay’ that the law is willing to accommodate in the realm of citizenship), it is the Adivasi community that maintains its non-vegetarianism and alcohol consumption in the face of either Gandhian or Hindutva imperative of transformation into upper caste Hindu aspirational forms. The public transcript, to borrow a phrase from James Scott (1990), in other words, effectively, and at times aggressively, pushes a fundamental truth of being into the realm of the hidden transcript. It creates that which cannot be spoken.  

That which cannot be spoken, does not, however, disappear. It insists, it rearticulates. Episode 4 of the first season of the podcast, titled ‘History of pre and post-independence’ was made specifically to commemorate ‘Vimukti Divas’, the 31st of August, the anniversary of the day in 1952, 4 years after India has itself gained independence from British rule, when the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 was finally repealed. This is now celebrated as the actual Independence Day by millions of people from De-notified Tribes. The episode is a melange of historical retellings tracing the political and legal history of DNTs, interviews with community leaders and most remarkably a conversation between two old women recollecting their childhoods and the various shifts in lives and livelihood. This is all mostly in the measured tone of the respectable citizen. The rupture in the episode, however, comes in the form of a compelling rap song, Hun Janmjat Chor Kada Tiya (‘I was not born a criminal’) a collaboration between young men from Chharanagar, and Bhantu musicians from Maharashtra, that brings the history of DNT and nomadic tribes into lyrical manifestation, starting with the period before criminalisation and laying out the various ways in which the promise of post-coloniality, and of citizenship has been denied. In the song we find a striking disjuncture between spoken word and image, as the chorus ‘I am not a criminal’ contrasts with the affect of the song, the anger in its choreography and the unapologetic ‘bad boy’ aesthetic. Here, for the first time in the series we see that other self, one that expresses a pride in being able to feed one’s people through the art of theft, which expresses anger at the failure of the state and the violence meted upon its people, one that expresses a revolutionary impulse without being tamed in to a policy negotiation. Scott’s hidden transcript has ruptured onto the main stage, partly in words, but most effectively as aesthetic. 

This combination of the respectable, measured voice and a revolutionary voice unfettered by the imperatives of palatability emerges throughout the podcast series. This category of that which cannot be spoken is not, of course limited to the question of respectability. We saw in earlier blogposts, something similar with the experience of pain and the melodramatisation necessary for conveying the experience of death and loss during the pandemic. In the context of indigenous film, a similar technique has been discussed in terms of hyper-realisation. Drawing on Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor, Biddle and Lea (2018) for instance conceptualise of a “hyper-real of survivance” that uses art (including practices of artificial intensification and faking with the truth) “to make the real more real, when the real is itself what is at risk, at stake: namely, Indigenous history, language, presence”. It is an “hyper-real of survivance” in contexts of erasure of indigenous life and experience and in the absence of responsible media journalism. The striking recurrence here is the role of aesthetics in the expression of that which cannot be spoken, whether this be through music, through dramatic performances and monologues, through evocative cut-aways, soundtrack, poetry or indeed techniques in camera work and editing.  

Freud’s notion of ‘Sublimation’ is a useful starting point for a theoretical meditation on the relationship between these voices as articulating in the podcasts. We may reframe ‘sublimation’ for our purposes, as a mechanism through which an impulse that is too terrifying, or is culturally ‘inappropriate’ to express, re-articulates in another form that is culturally acceptable. In Freud this process is evidence of maturity, whereby the sexual dimension of an ‘infantile erotic wish’ is dispelled in favour of socially acceptable behaviour (Laplanche and Plantis 431-34, cf Buckner). In Freud, we already see this as one of the ‘origins of artistic activity’ (Freud and Strachey, 1905[1953], p. 238). Rather than an evasion of the impulse, its denial, projection or displacement, here we see its transformation, significantly carrying within it the kernel of the impulse itself. There are multiple critiques of Freud’s theory of course, the most striking of which is perhaps Oswald de Andrade’s notion of anthropofagia, a form of cannibalism, as articulating in his 1928 piece, at the same time as we see the publication of Breton’s Surrealist manifesto. The Brazilian artist does not simply reject or resist the idiom of the coloniser, but rather ‘consumes’ it, transforms it and utilises it (Maddox 2014). What we see here is a resistance to the cleaving of the civilised from the savage, and the inversion of the teleology – the indigenous ‘consume’ the coloniser, just as the idiom of respectability is deployed in the podcasts, and yet transformed by their being engulfed in an aesthetic of hyper-realisation. 

A second frame here is the Lacanian approach seeing the inevitable failure of the Symbolic in articulating the Real. Here we see the Real, which by definition cannot be symbolised, constantly returning to haunt the attempts at representation. This haunting in the podcasts is through ruptures generated by aesthetics, a subtle (and often not so subtle) reminder that the voice of respectable victimhood is a failure of representation that nevertheless indexes that which cannot be spoken. The rap song thus ruptures through the respectability of the symbolic and sustains it as an always incomplete object.  

A final theoretical resonance lies with Deleuze’s meditation on the notion of discourse, where he insists that in Foucault’s Archaeological project, every stratum must be understood to be a relationship between the ‘articulable’ (the realm of word, what can be said, what can be written), and the ‘visible’ (that which can be seen). In modernity the articulable gains primacy, and yet, argues Deleuze, “visibilities…remain irreducible to statements and remain all the more so for developing a passion for the action of statements.” (Deleuze 1988:43) What then is the relationship here, between that which is said and that which is made visible? Deleuze conceptualises ‘two lights’, again in reference to Foucault. “…a first light opens up things and brings forth visibilities as flashes and shimmerings, which are the ‘second light’…” (Deleuze 1988:50). The first light, in other words, is the condition for the second being sensed. It is the visible (here, the aesthetic, the musical, the aural) that allows for the articulable (the words of the respectable marginalised) to be experienced beyond itself. In indigenous film we thus see this strategy of surrounding that which can be said, with the aesthetic of that which cannot, which enables the colonised to consume the coloniser and utilise it, for the Real to rupture through the symbolic, refusing erasure through civility. 

Biddle, Jennifer L. and Lea, Tess. Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth’, in Visual Anthropology Review, 34 ( 1): 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12148

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault (trans by Seán Hand) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Freud, Sigmund (1905 [1953]), trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VII, London: The Hogarth Press. p. 238

Laplanche, Jean. 1997. Aims of the Psychoanalytic Process, JEP: European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 5, Spring-Fall.  

Maddox, John T. 2014. AfroReggae: “Antropofagia,” Sublimation, and Intimate Revolt in the “Favela” Hispania,  97 (3): 463-476

Scott, James C. (1990), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press.

akshay khanna is a Delhi-based Social Anthropologist, International Development Consultant, theatre practitioner and amateur chef, with training in Law and Medical Anthropology and the author of Sexualness (2016, New Text), which tells a story of Queer movements in India, develops a framework to think the sexual from the global south, and introduces Quantum Physics into the study of the sexual.

Alice Tilche is a lecturer in Anthropology and Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research at the intersection of art and activism employs visual, collaborative and arts-based methods to research social transformations – including work on the cultural politics of indigeneity, migration, nationalism and most recently Covid-19. Alice’s book Adivasi Art and Activism: curation in a nationalist agewas published with Washington University Press in 2022. Her collaborative film projects including Sundarana (2011), Broken Gods (2019) and Budhan-Podcast (2021) have been selected for a number of international film screenings and festivals.

We very much welcome questions and feedback @ alice.tilche@leicester.ac.uk and xaefis@gmail.com

Cite as: Tilche, Alice and khanna, akshay. 2022. “That which cannot be spoken.” Focaalblog, 5 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/09/05/alice-tilche-akshay-khanna-that-which-cannot-be-spoken/

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Valentina Napolitano & Kristin Norget: Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State

At the end of July, a remarkable event unfolded in three distinct but significant sites in Canada. Pope Francis, the Argentinian current supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, travelled to Maskwacis, Ste. Anne de Beaupré and Iqaluit on his “penitential pilgrimage” in Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for North America), an historic visit intended to allow for “forgiveness” for the heinous acts at Catholic Residential Schools which for over almost a century (1885-1996) separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and communities and subjected them to awful physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

The event earned some attention in the media internationally and in Canada, where it monopolized national and local airwaves and the Internet. The media drummed up popular fascination, in “will he, or won’t he?” fashion, with the potential Apology from the Pope – a possibility planted earlier this year in March when a delegation of members of 32 First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities visited the Vatican and met with the Pope to share their experience in residential schools and express the importance of a formal papal declaration of apology in their homeland. Part of the delegation’s aim was a call for the rescinding of the 1492 Treaty of Tordesillas and its accompanying “Doctrine of Discovery”, which originally endowed early Christian explorers the legal authorization to occupy and extract from a supposed ‘terra nullius’.

We draw attention to the need for anthropologists and other scholars to recognize the importance of what is at stake in this papal event as a culmination of colonial histories and processes that are not merely “religious”. While many may read the papal visit as simply an enactment by an archaic religious institution breathing its last breaths on the global stage, there is much more at work here that touches on the most pressing issues of our day concerning (self-)sovereignty, governance and decolonization, and the powerful hidden theopolitical economy of bodies, blood and soil, and the commons that underlies them. As such, this papal visit and other prominent public Church performances also invoke, implicitly though distinctly, themes familiar to many anthropologists in our thinking and research: debt and guilt, capitalism and care, denizen-ship and vulnerability.

A Pope is never a single story, nor a truly singular individual. Technically, the Pope is the Bishop of Rome, in straight lineal descent from Saint Peter, making him a unique combination of the historical person, the geopolitical configuration of the Church (as sovereign of the Vatican City State), and the liturgical, “God-manifested” investiture of the Pontificate. While many regarded the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as marking a pivotal rejuvenation of the Church and a welcome modernizing shift toward reform and social engagement, the two pontificates that followed Vatican II dampened any such hopes. Both Pope (and now Saint) John Paul II (1978-2005) and Pope Benedict XVI (2005-2013) manifested ambiguous stances toward Indigenous people and the deep histories of violence, neglect, and exploitationin the Americas.

John Paul II, personally invested in a post-cold war politics of anti-communism, was a staunch defender of ‘human life’ as a universal value rather than something to be understood as mediated by social and cultural specificities. He travelled to some 120 countries and oversaw an unprecedented surge in the canonization of new saints, including in the Americas. Yet in this continent he also undid years of efforts by more ‘progressive’ Church factions in promoting participatory democracy, land rights advocacy, human and Indigenous rights, and in the fight against poverty and neoliberal policies of international structural adjustment – the broad canvas of programs that theologically and pastorally became known as part of the movement of Liberation Theology. John Paul II’s geopolitical orientation toward Turtle Island could be summed up by his words during a brief visit in 1984 where, in Ste. Anne de Beaupré, he stated, rather elliptically, “We know that Jesus Christ makes possible reconciliation between peoples, with all its requirements of conversion, justice and social love. If we truly believe that God created us in his image, we shall be able to accept one another with our differences and despite our limitations and our sins.” Reconciliation for this pope was thus fundamentally a repairing enabled by the sweeping of vexing “differences” and past evils under the supposedly apolitical carpet of a transcendent universal (European) catholicity.

In contrast to his predecessor, Benedict XVI appeared more interested in the “Arab world” rather than the Americas, which he visited only briefly twice (Brazil in 2007, and Mexico in 2012, en route to Cuba). In travels to Lebanon, Syria, and Germany he worked to encourage, not always successfully, Christian-Muslimdialogue, visibly more at ease as a theologian rather than a pastor surrounded by a crowd. More generally, he had an infamous role in partly covering priestly sexual abuse before becoming Pope, but also, perhaps unknown to many, while Pope, tried to address the abuses committed within and by members of new 19th and 20th century religious Orders (such as the Congregation of the Legionaries of Christ and their founder Marcial Maciel) that had been much in the grace of John Paul II.  The “traditionalism”–in both theological orthodoxy and disposition – of this German Pope also served to bolster the “old”, pre-Reformation Orders within the church and affirmed the Christian roots of Europe and its ‘civilization’. Yet when Benedict XVI met a First Nations delegation visiting the Vatican in 2009 (headed by then National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Phil Lafontaine), the pontiff expressed a heartfelt shame and sorrow for the suffering of those living with the tragic legacy of Catholic residential schools, and blessed sacred medicine brought by delegation members. However, the Pope’s utterance of remorse took place on Vatican soil, as part of a private visit, not an act of attempted reconciliation on Turtle Island.

When Francis became Pope, however, the world expected something different. As the first Latin American Pope, with a theological and pastoral proximity to the poor and the “peripheries” (though with an unclear association with Argentina’s military regime while Provincial of the Jesuits in Buenos Aires), it was thought he could open the magisterium of the Church to an embracing of the divorced, homosexuality, the ordination of women priests, and the tackling of priestly sexual abuses, while setting in motion a concrete system of reparation. Now, amid the ninth year of his pontificate, an opening on these matters has been only partial.

Nevertheless, Pope Francis has called attention to capitalism’s “culture of waste” and our universal denizen-ship on the earth as “our common home”; in 2015 he met for over three weeks with Indigenous communities in the Amazon toward mobilizing clergy and others for an “Integral Ecology” of “pastoral, cultural, and ecological conversion” in the interests of Indigenous survival. In addition, he has pointed to the aging, “grandfather”–like nature of European societies which he urges must rejuvenate their ancient cultural values by means of new immigrant blood.

These overtures have been appreciated especially by non-Catholics, attracted by their ethically driven politics of inclusion and active collective responsibility in a time of increasing individualist populist politics world-wide. Conservative Catholics, however, have portrayed Francis as a mere pastoral figure rather than one with true theological gravitas, a breaker of traditions rather than an architect of authentic intra-church alliances. Moreover, the ambiguity of this Pope from the Americas is precisely regarding its Indigenous peoples:  they are beloved as ‘primordial’ caretakers of the earth and holders of ancestors’ wisdom yet remain trapped in the romanticizing gaze of Francis in his own embodiment of an immigrant European in the New World.

The most striking image in the just-completed Turtle Island papal pilgrimage is the frail, wheel-chaired body of Francis as the agent of avowed penitence. The popular enthrallment with the highly mediatized story of the papal visit, not just in Canada but worldwide, points to a collective desire for a punctual, perlocutionary healing, as if the spoken apology “for deplorable evil” could perform the erasure of the stubborn stain of guilt not just for the Church. In this context, the Pope as the Church’s metonymic leader becomes the proxy for non-indigenous Canadian society at large (the latter, after all, tacitly accepted the colonial assimilationist system that allowed the unspeakable abuses of Indigenous children to take place).

Indeed, at the very start of his visit this unique (as both the first Jesuit and non-European) Pope could be seen solemnly and pensively cradling his chin and mouth in his hand as if hesitant about the words he would soon be expected to utter. Later, in Maskwacis, he was enveloped in a soundscape of sacred chanting and drumming, grinning as he donned an Indigenous ceremonial headdress. The moment displayed a willful audaciousness typical of the Church, justified by the familiar theological principle of Humanitas – a vitalization of ‘cultures’ under a universal umbrella that sees all members of those Cultures as children of God. Yet, the apparent seamlessness of this harmonious scene later became undone by the raw, devastating, impromptu spectacle of a lone woman, Si Pih Ko, powerfully singing, in Cree, her fist raised to the sky, an alternative version of Canada’s national anthem known as “Our Village”, rebuking the papal presence while protesting the death of her brother in prison.  

Image 1: Chief Wilton Littlechild and Pope Francis, Maskwacis, Alberta, July 26, 2022 (photo by Guglielmo Mangiapane, Reuters; the authors are grateful for the right to publish the image here)

If, as Carl Schmitt says, all political concepts are secularized theological ones, Pope Francis’s  recurring gestures of apology for “cultural destruction” came crashing to a ground of (missed) interpellations and apologies, while he continued to offer his fragile body for a performative Church and State healing of indigenous lives ravaged by the violence of genocide – a word the pontiff spoke only when he was safely on the plane back to Rome.

Thus, the concept of reconciliation by Pope Francis was affectively mobilized through the soil, commons, soundscapes, and bodies as these hinged on the ultimate sacrifice of Christ’s crucifixion and a human/divine suffering that were, in this highly mediatized visit, notably devoid of Marian iconicity. In this framework, the singular yet communal suffering of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples becomes part of the ‘universal’ redemptive incarnation and blood of Christ, and, by extension, the healing sovereignty of the Canadian state.

The much-anticipated apology for the methodical cruelty of educational Catholic missions, and the Catholic Church’s role in past and ongoing colonialism, cannot be understood simply through an anthropological lens of battles for and refusal of modern state (self-)sovereignty. This 2022 papal journey through Turtle Island made glaringly evident that a colonial Church infrastructure is deeply engrained in a Christianity of the modern Canadian state, as the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops made clear by orchestrating, albeit not in line with Pope Francis’s will, an estranging Eucharistic Mass performed in Latin (an archaic norm abandoned post-Vatican II) in Edmonton’s Commonwealth stadium on July 26. Throughout this visit we beheld an aging papal body answering Indigenous calls for the dis-entangling of Catholic colonial violence through his encounter with the sacred soundscape, walking the soil (even if in a wheelchair), and in his public acts of listening.

‘True’ reconciliation remains a matter of the return of stolen gifts and livelihoods, requiring a new articulation between economies of suffering and indebtedness. From the perspective of Catholic theology, indebtedness is intrinsic to the tension between guilt and debt, where guilt is the unavoidable condition of being born as human (fallen from Eden), and debt is enjoined by God’s gift of life that cannot ever be fully repaid. The tension of guilt and debt in their eternal production of indebtedness is a “vital” theological hinge and a primary force of a capitalist market that functions as a never-ending fulfillment of drives and desires. Reconciliation then is also a much-needed breaking of precisely this theological hinge

Yet, in a way that was perhaps unperceived by many, this papal visit with and beyond the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island affords the possibility that “reconciliation” is not only a matter of voicing and representation, sovereignty and its ongoing unravelling, or retribution and (unmade) apologies. It also a political, theological, and cosmological matter of a mystery of incarnation, in its particular bodily forms of fragility—a fragility now more than ever common to all living beings. As potent as this mystery of incarnation may be for healing, it may not be enough.

Valentina Napolitano is Professor of Anthropology and Connaught Scholar at the University of Toronto. Valentina Napolitano’s work weaves together anthropology, political theology, and Critical Catholic Studies.  She is currently focusing on a book on mysticism and politics in the 21st century.

Kristin Norget is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. Her current research interests are concerned with mediatization and contemporary strategies of evangelization of the Roman Catholic Church focused on Mexico and Peru. She has also published on issues of indigeneity and Catholic liberation theology in Mexico.

Cite as: Valentina Napolitano and Kristin Norget. 2022. “Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State.” Focaalblog, 12 August. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/08/12/valentina-napolitano-kristin-norget-pope-francis-reconciliation-and-the-state/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Nonini: The China Conundrum and The Current Conjuncture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deconstructing Socialism’s Deconstruction, Chinese Style

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

A Post-Socialist Developmental State with Chinese characteristics

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

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

Morphing into the Chinese Corporate Party-State

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

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

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

Political Crisis and Economic Stagnation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making China Great Again? – The Costs of Revanchism

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog, Conversations on the Left

Focaalblog: New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism

Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology – IUAES, in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and FocaalBlog, organized a conference on the 26-27 May, 2022, in Budapest, addressing the escalating crises of global capitalism.

Since 1989, processes of neoliberal globalization, financialization, the erosion of welfare states, and the decline of ‘the standard labor contract’, have produced deepening inequalities and hierarchies, long time hidden under the mantra of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Privatization, gentrification, dispossession, devaluation, and displacement have increased in a multitude of settings despite intermittent mass mobilizations, which were often seen as ‘middle class’. The undermining of democratic possibilities has reinforced the super-exploitation of diverse groups in many places. Globalization, technological speed up and the platformization of labor-markets are threatening ‘middle class’ jobs’ in North and South. Deepening exploitation of labor is increasingly intersected with aggressive rent taking by monopoly sections of capital and states. Issues of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, sometimes interwoven with waves of migration, have resurfaced, in tandem with the resulting authoritarianism. Accelerating climate change is being addressed in pro-capitalist ways, likely leading to further inequalities, displacements, and challenges to survival. Global imperial rivalries are intensifying and generating new cold wars and ‘global wars’, increasingly of a purportedly ‘civilizational nature’, like the Ukrainian calamity that is playing itself out on the EU border. 

The late Immanuel Wallerstein predicted that politics in this ‘decisive era of the world-system’ will be ever more volatile as inescapable choices must be made about democratic or authoritarian solutions. Most of our problems are well known and anticipated, but narrow ideas about ‘proven causation’ and ‘concluding evidence’ paralyze any decision making on behalf of established interests, while national publics are being fed lies and deceptions, both by the technocrats and the ‘authoritarians’ and right-wing populists. Crisis moments are steadily dealt with ‘unprepared’ and in fire-fighting mode. Left wing grassroots movements are specialized on small scale practical utopias but large-scale breakthroughs for the Left seem out of reach.

If this describes roughly where we are now, what can we expect next? Can we responsibly extrapolate and speculate? What sort of a global capitalism might we be inhabiting in thirty years from now? What can we discover as its likely core tendencies, elements, and relations? What modes of resistance are people experimenting with? What are the visions and opportunities to build a more equal and just society? Where is the new counter politics, where are the new counter movements?

Roundtable on War

Taras Fedirko (University of St Andrews) Militarized civil society and the economy of war in Ukraine

Volodymyr Arthiuk (University of Oxford) The expected war: scales of conflict around Ukraine from February 2014 to February 2022

Denys Gorbach (Sciences Po) Identitarian landscapes in Ukraine before and during the war

Volodymyr Ischenko (Free University Berlin) Madman’s war? Ideology, hegemony crisis, and the dynamics of depoliticization in Russians’ support for the invasion of Ukraine

– moderated by Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

Roundtable on Migration

Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center) Migration turn and the crisis of capitalism.,

Noémi Katona (Centre for Social Science, Hungarian Academy of Sciences/Helyzet) The division of reproductive labor in global capitalism: the case of migrant care workers in Europe,

Béla Soltész (Eötvös Loránd University), “The wanted, the unwanted and the invisible. Interpreting distinctions and selectivity of Hungarian migration policy”

 Nina Glick Schiller (Manchester University), Has Migration Studies Lost Its Subject?  Migration Studies, Global Disorders, and Shared Precarities

 – moderated by Diana Szántó (Artemisszio Foundation/Polanyi Center)

Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ I

Luisa Steur (University of Amsterdam) Cuba Update

Marc Morell (University of Bergen) On transformative movements in neither authoritarian nor egalitarian but flawed paths. A Maltese illustration

Attila Antal (Eötvös Loránd University) Illiberalism as Emergency Governance

Gábor Scheiring (Bocconi University) The national-populist mutation of neoliberalism in East-Central Europe

– moderated by Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center)

Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ II

Florin Poenaru (University of Bucharest) Tanks, tankies and think-tanks. Anthropological vignettes from the Romanian garrison

Jeff Maskovsky (The City University of New York) Not Yet Fascist: The Journey from Neoliberalism to Corporate Authoritarianism of the United States

Ágnes Gagyi (University of Gothenburg) Bridge position and regime fixes: semi-peripheral contexts to “illiberalism” in Hungary

Bruno de Conti (University of Campinas) Bolsonaro: the economic agenda behind the smoke screen

– moderated by Dorottya Mendly (Corvinus University)

Roundtable on Our Futures

David Harvey (The City University of New York)

Michael Burawoy (UC Berkely)

Ida Susser (The City University of New York)

Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

 – moderated by Mary Taylor (The City University of New York)

Cite as: Focaalblog. 2022. “New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism.” Focaalblog, 5 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/07/05/don-kalb-new-times-confronting-the-escalating-crises-of-global-capitalism/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statecraft and the reception spectacle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ukrainian displacement and European belonging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog

Ida Susser: Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc

On June 19, 2022, the united left party, NUPES (New Ecological and Social Popular Union), cobbled together by Jean-Luc Melenchon in less than two months, won enough seats to become the official opposition in the French National Assembly. How should we understand the growth of this left alliance in France which seems to have taken political pundits by surprise?

Since 2015, I have been conducting ethnographic research on progressive social transformation in Paris and, in fact, documenting the emergence of the counter-hegemonic bloc represented in this alliance. I have focused on what has been called “commoning” (Nonini 2007; Stavrides 2015; Susser 2016, 2017, 2018; Dardot and Laval 2019), the process of creating commons, to consider the ways in which this form of popular contestation is transforming political subjects, generating collective ethics, and reconfiguring democracy.

Image 1: Jean-Luc Melenchon delivering a speech at the NUPES convention on 7 May 2022, photo by Hugo Rota

Two aspects of commoning help to illuminate the current elections. The first is the creation of a new political subject and a political vision through a process of sharing and community activities. The second is the process of thresholding or crossing of transitional space that led to alliances among groups who had not previously recognized common interests. I argue that both aspects contributed to the creation of a public oriented in the direction of social justice, inclusivity and a collaborative left leaning political bloc.

To illustrate these processes, I focus on the Gilets Jaunes, a movement which emerged in November 2018.  From the start there was much debate in France and internationally about whether to characterize the Gilets Jaunes as right or left in the context of Brexit, Trump, and most significantly, Marine Le Pen, head of the extreme right party in France (Rogozinski 2019, Balibar 2019 and many others). It is this dilemma that made these protests particularly important from an analytic and practical political perspective.

Historical Conjuncture and Crisis

In 2016, the Socialist government of Francois Hollande, with Emmanuel Macron as economy minister, initiated legislation to change the labor laws. Although policies to reduce public spending and increase the flexibility of employment had been gradually implemented for some time, this major effort by a Socialist government to change the labor laws set off a political crisis.

Because of this crisis, a new era of street protest emerged in Paris. The first of the protests was Nuit Debout, which began on March 31, 2016. This movement echoed the historic squares occupations of Southern Europe in 2011, although it took place five years later.  As previously, in Spain, the call to action was initially to join the unions in support of the traditional labor laws that a socialist government proposed to relax.

The attempt to change the labor laws, and the protests in response, dramatically undermined the legitimacy of the Socialist Party. The political conjuncture of this event with allegations of fraud on the traditional right opened the way for a new political configuration in France. In this vacuum, the newly created party led by Macron, the left party created by Jean-Luc Melenchon in 2012, and the marginal far right, reincarnated by Marine Le Pen, re-oriented the national arena.

Taking advantage of the wide-open field, in May 2017, Macron, without a traditional party but strongly supported by corporate funding, was elected President for the first time. He rapidly began to implement far-reaching changes. In the interests of workforce flexibility, he weakened employment security and later tried to alter the calculation of union pensions as well as increase the age for pension entitlements. Student admissions to public universities were re-organized and health workers and teachers faced layoffs. The threat of worker disciplining in the interests of capital became widely feared. Each change was accompanied by massive social movements and street uprisings.

Over the years of the first Macron presidency, many different groups under different kinds of pressures opposed the new changes. Resistance took the form of both organized strikes and wildcat worker strikes, the occupation of squares, student sit ins and street rebellions. In November 2018, the Gilets Jaunes uprising began. Finally in 2019, a mass movement was organized by unions to oppose the dismantling of the national pension plans. I analyze the Gilets Jaunes within this broader historical arena as well as in contrast or comparison with the protest movements I have been observing in the United States.

The Gilets Jaunes and Commoning

The Gilets Jaunes began as a one issue protest, against the gas tax. The message was spread through Facebook, and other platforms. Still organizing around one issue, the protesters began to meet in real time, at roundabouts, crossroads and along highways in many parts of France. Next, Gilets Jaunes took to the streets of Paris in enormous and unprecedented marches on successive Saturdays for over eighteen months.

As people who lived near one another but had not necessarily met before began to meet regularly, they began to build a shared sense of community. Starting out as a mixture of pensioners, and many poor and disabled people from the provinces, including disengaged socialists and Le Pen supporters, the Gilets Jaunes can be seen as negotiating positions over time. Negotiations took place within the space of the commoning experience during the occupations, the general assemblies, the assemblies of assemblies and the massive Saturday demonstrations.

Image 2: Gilets Jaunes – Acte IX at Place de l’Etoile in Paris on 12 January 2019, photo by Olivier Ortelpa

The community was built in multiple ways: by barbecues and picnics, by bringing children to play in the environment, by building cabins, sometimes making them comfortable for wintry stays. Saturday afternoons were spent grouping close together in the cold to keep warm in wind, rain and snow, and some Saturday evenings around fires and in cabins. Gilets Jaunes wrote personal statements and commentaries on the backs of their vests. They spray painted slogans and arrayed tags, posters, and banners as well as other forms of graffiti (Le Comité de soutien 31 2019) along the routes of the demonstrations. The yellow vests and the songs such as the ever-present “On est la” generated a sense of belonging and became a signal that Gilets Jaunes were present in whatever guise they happened to be. Over time, singing the song simply indicated that people emulated and echoed the Gilets Jaunes in other demonstrations.  Experiences such as this can be seen as the commoning process of the Gilet Jaunes.

Through meeting several times, a week, sharing narratives, singing Gilets Jaunes songs and, dressing in the familiar yellow vests, group members built a, possibly fragile, sense of solidarity in ways that crisscrossed over divisions of family, income, color, and age, and maintained a strong belief that the disabled were part of the community. Negotiations involved a recognition that poverty and distress need not be shameful but were a product of changing circumstances and uncaring or destructive government policies. As a result, in difficult, often physically uncomfortable, conditions, principles of cooperation were established along with a belief in horizontalism and an aversion to political leaders.

Où sont les neiges d’antan? (Where are the snows of yesteryear?)

Analysts have discussed the solidarity of factory floors or assembly lines and even nostalgia with respect to that solidarity (Muehlenbach 2017). Following Lefebvre there has also been a recognition of the solidarity of the streets and public spaces (Lefebvre 1971, Harvey 2012, Susser and Tonnelat 2013). The experience of the Gilets Jaunes points to the creation of a critical public at the roundabouts which generated or echoed the affect of the lost village community.

Such nostalgia has historically generated conservatism as well as revolutionary ideas (Susser 2008, Williams 1983). The question became, in what ways would this community be invested with emotions? It could generate an exclusive nationalism (as today in Hungary, Romania, or Poland) or a wider sharing sense of the needs of the poor and disabled.

In an ever-evolving process, people came to the roundabouts and talked among one another of their economic challenges and domestic hardship. They managed to escape the individual humiliations of poverty and household desperation, of their unrelenting work for not enough pay, their exhaustion and lack of belief in their own or their children’s future. Instead, they talked collectively about the degradation of everyday life – the loss of a village center, a post office, a bakery, and a public square; the loss of local schools; the need to drive long distances for employment and childcare; and the endless drudgery of work which did not allow sufficient time or provide the means to help their children, their elderly or disabled neighbors and relatives or meet their friends (Susser 2020). Their nostalgia recalled the loss of a social existence centered around local services and a secure welfare state and became the basis of their rage against Macron’s neoliberal policies.

Thresholding

The second aspect of commoning which contributed to a progressive or left positioning on the spectrum was what has been called thresholding (Stavrides 2015). Analysts (Stavrides 2015) have talked of “thresholds” to distinguish commoning from more right wing or nationalist movements claiming territory. The idea was that open doors or thresholds connected different groups which allowed for inclusivity while at the same time recognizing ethnic and other identities upon which the different groups were based. If commoning creates groups which are built on experiences of sharing in new ways, thresholds are a basis for sharing across groups. Thresholding be understood in much the same way as rites of passage which Arnold Van Gennep (1960) saw as taking place in three stages, separation, transition, and incorporation (see also Turner 1958).

We might consider moments of liminality, such as occupations, freezing afternoons at roundabouts or possibly the common experience of violence in the streets as the moments of separation and transition. These represent challenging and bonding processes taking place in liminal or temporarily undefined space. In sharing such trying circumstances, people cross thresholds of trust and build bridges across unusual groups, in processes of incorporation.  Thus, what might be understood as prefigurative politics which emerged in the practice of street protests included both commoning and the recognition of many autonomous groups working together: In other words, inclusivity, and thresholds to new populations.

Environment, convergence, and thresholding

Thresholding among the Gilets Jaunes occurred with respect to the environmental movement. Emmanuel Macron had announced the gas tax as an effort to curb the use of this gas for environmental reasons. Consequently, the Gilets Jaunes protest against the gas tax was interpreted by the government and the media as a protest against ecology. Over the next two years, much time and effort were put into convergence. Environmentalists who were also Gilets Jaunes and others who organized joint marches, teach ins and conferences worked to counteract stereotypes and to build thresholds between the two movements.

In February 2019, the environmental movement staged a demonstration on a Saturday afternoon in Paris which the Gilets Jaunes joined. They started together. However, after the first few blocks the Gilets Jaunes parted ways from the permitted route of the ecological demonstration and made their way on a “wild” protest (undeclared) towards the Champs Élysées. Later all the groups met again listening to passionate speeches at La Place de la République. Some youthful Gilets Jaunes were sitting in the square wearing flowers in their hair reminiscent of green protests over many decades. After about 6pm, as dusk settled, violence suddenly erupted, traffic was stopped, and the square was closed off by police. From the point of view of the Gilets Jaunes, the violence was in response to police arrests in the square.

In spite, or possibly because, of the evening clashes, this demonstration clearly opened portals between the Gilets Jaunes and the environmentalists. From early 2019, “The end of the month and the end of the world” became a characteristic slogan of the Gilets Jaunes. Climate activists continued their efforts towards convergence. The Gilets Jaunes never became a climate movement, but the polarization claimed by the government was not supported by later events. Rites of passage in shared marches and other experiences had opened thresholds for collaboration.

Police brutality and thresholds of race

As I described in a previous post in FocaalBlog (Susser 2020), the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the US were followed by massive demonstrations against police brutality in France. Although police brutality was a long-time theme of the Gilets Jaunes, this time the Paris protests, while including the Gilets Jaunes, focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. This recognition of common problems represented newly possible thresholding between the Gilets Jaunes and people of color from the banlieues.

Here, thresholds were opened between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship, and other forms of historical subordinations.

Joint marches between Gilets Jaunes and people of color most subject to police brutality were not an ongoing phenomenon but again this demonstrated the opening of a portal for common understandings.

Image 3: “Who protects us from the police?” Gilets Jaunes protest in Tours on 12 January 2019, photo by Guillame70

Unions and strikes: thresholding on the left

Many Gilets Jaunes were suspicious of unions and many unions refused to officially march with Gilets Jaunes. However, despite this contentious relationship, there were collaborative efforts on May Day marches and elsewhere. Gilets Jaunes picketed many early mornings with bus drivers when they were out on strike. After the strike, the bus drivers organized a barbecue in front of a bus headquarters for Gilets Jaunes who had come out on those cold winter mornings: one of many thresholding events among strikers and Gilets Jaunes.

The silence of others: a more controversial example of thresholding

While there was openness among the Gilets Jaunes about not having enough to live on and many domestic challenges, Gilets Jaunes avoided talking about the politics of left and right. Their reticence over political persuasions was not surprising in the polarized political situation of France. In 2017, Macron had successfully used the fear of fascism and the history of the Vichy government to mobilize voters in opposition to Marine Le Pen in the second-round elections.

In 2018, as hundreds of thousands of Gilets Jaunes poured into Paris from the provinces, both Le Pen, on the extreme right, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, on the left, pledged support. Reporters and participants claimed that in ACTE 3, Le Pen nationalists led the assault on the Arc de Triomphe. The international leftist Black Bloc may have led the attack on the elite restaurant Le Fouquet a few months later. The participation of many on the left in the protests, and the roundabouts over time led to a movement that called for a diverse democratic voice and the extreme right became marginalized.

While the Gilets Jaunes expressed their rage in breaking windows and other property and participated in attacks on the Arc de Triomphe and Le Fouquet, they did not accept political leadership from either the far right or the left. Silence with respect to political affiliation and the rejection of an official leadership remained a determined response.

Although disagreeing in fundamental ways, Gilets Jaunes were more or less uniform in their hatred of Macron. They believed that he was “stealing the state” with his privatization policies and cutbacks in funding for services and public employment.  They blamed the government for the destruction of a middle-class lifestyle either for themselves or for their children.

Collaboration for a political bloc was not based on a romantic image of common identity. Rather it was built on a restrained acceptance of political difference in a common rage about the loss of accustomed living conditions. This contrasts sharply with the US where polarization between left and right has become more extreme.

Trump, class, and thresholds in the United States

Although the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders certainly raised the possibility (Susser 2018), no political bloc has yet emerged to work across the vicious polarization in the United States. Trump demonstrators also come from the shrinking middle class and displaced affluent working class partially represented in the Gilets Jaunes. However, they have moved to the right and responded to the Trumpian rhetoric of anti-immigrants, whispered racism, antisemitism and now even the adoption of theories of the Great Replacement. What can explain these different reactions to some similar circumstances?

Analysts have been concerned that Gilets Jaunes, like Trump supporters, were opening an avenue for the antisemitism, racism, and anti-immigrant rhetoric expressed by the growing far right. Indeed, in recognition of the popularity of Le Pen, Macron adopted some rightwing exclusive rhetoric. A popular surge to the right was a frightening possibility. However, the Gilets Jaunes did not evolve into a movement fundamentally based on hatred of the other. Instead, as a movement they focused their desperation and rage against Macron’s shredding of the welfare state and reduction in investment in areas outside gentrified Paris (Hazard 2020). They demanded a more receptive democracy and not an authoritarian state.

Conclusions

As political pundits have finally noticed, a new political bloc or a working class with consciousness or agency is emerging. Commoning and the generation of shared values as well as thresholding across autonomous groups were particularly significant in the long-term building of this oppositional left bloc. An important part of this thresholding was the ability to by-pass the polarization of the extreme right and the extreme left. This unusual collaboration, rarely the product of any explicit negotiations, allowed the extraordinary and inspirational mass movement of the Gilets Jaunes to avoid the exclusive and racist nationalism evident in the US.

In the presidential elections of 2022, Le Pen, as in 2017, made it through to the second round. However, Melenchon came in a close third. Macron, lacking the broad support evident in 2017, relied on the anti-fascism of the left to pull him through the second round. The power of the left to support Macron against Le Pen was finally negotiated into NUPES, a united left front for the deputy elections for the National Assembly in June 2022. 

In the June elections, NUPES won enough seats to become an official opposition and deny Macron his majority in the National Assembly. Some of Macron’s nominated ministers did not even make it into the Assembly. Macron was no longer able to pass the much-hated changes in pensions or his other policies. Marine Le Pen also won more seats than previously.   Nevertheless, the success of NUPES clearly represents an unheard-of situation in the fifth French Republic where the President is generally rubber stamped by a weak National Assembly. This new powerful counter-hegemonic political bloc should come as no surprise. It has been formed over five years of extraordinary protest including the collaborative politics of commoning, thresholding and silence in the Gilets Jaunes collective efforts. The forthcoming regime will have to take these progressive voices into account.

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.

References

Balibar, Etienne. 2019. Le sens du face-à-face. In Joseph Confavreux (ed.). Le Fond de l’Air Est Jaune. Editions Seuil

Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. 2019. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hazard, Benoit. 2020. Lorsque les ‘sans-parts’ se rallient au ‘pouvoir vivre’. Ethnographie des associations des gilets jaunes sur les ronds-points de l’Oise. Condition Humaine/ Condition Politique 1 https://revues.mshparisnord.fr/chcp/index.php?id=237#text

Lefebvre, Henri 2003. The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2017. The Body of Solidarity. Heritage, Memory, and Materiality in Post-Industrial Italy. Comparative Studies of Society and History 59(1), 96-126.

Comité de soutien 31. 2019. La rue etait noire de jaunes – 500 slogans, tags, affiches, pancartes, dessins, photos, banderoles….  Éditions du croquant.

Nonini, Donald M. (ed.) 2007. The Global Idea of ‘The Commons’. Berghahn

Books.

Rogozinski, Jacob. 2019. Démocratie Sauvage. Lignes 59, 23-36.

Stavrides, Stavros. 2015. Common Space as Threshold Space: Urban Commoning in Struggles to Re-Appropriate Public Space. Footprint 9(1), 9–19.

Susser, Ida. 2016. Considering the urban commons: Anthropological approaches to social movements. Dialectical Anthropology 40(3), 183–198.

Susser, Ida. 2017. Commoning in New York City, Barcelona, and Paris: Notes and Observations from the Field. Focaal 79, 6-22.

Susser, Ida. 2018 Re-envisioning Social Movements in the Global City: from Fordism to the neoliberal era. In Don Kalb and Mao Mollona (eds.). Worldwide Urban Mobilizations. Class struggles and Urban Commoning. Berghahn Books.

Susser, Ida. 2020. Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries? FocaalBlog, December 3, https://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser-covid-police-brutality-and-race-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries/

Susser, Ida. 2021. “They are Stealing the State”. Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser (eds.). Urban Ethics. Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities. Routledge.

Susser Ida, and Stéphane Tonnelat. 2013. Transformative cities: The three urbans

commons. Focaal 66,105-121.

Turner, Victor. 1958. Schism and Continuity. Manchester University Press.

Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage.University of Chicago Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. Columbia University

Press.

Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2022. “Melenchon: the creation of a left political bloc.” Focaalblog, 21 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/21/ida-susser-melenchon-the-creation-of-a-left-political-bloc/

Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog

Alice Tilche & akshay khanna: Embodying emotions in theatre and film

This is the second in our series of blogposts in relation to the Budhan podcast project, a community led initiative that has sought to capture the experiences of some of the most marginalised communities in India during the COVID19 pandemic. In this post we focus on a fundamental transformation engendered through the project – a shift from Budhan Theatre’s (BT) embodied practice of theatre to that of film production.

It is with a heavy heart that Siddharth began rehearsing his first solo performance, a monologue based on an article written by Roxy Gagdekar, on the death of his brother-in-law – a young lawyer and one of the first Corona victims in the Chhara community. We are in the middle of India’s first lockdown: the outer borders of Chharanagar, a primarily Chhara neighbourhood of Ahmedabad, are all shut, with police patrolling entry and exit of people and goods from the community. There is a retreat to the domain of the household and the podcasts delve into to the realm of interiority, physically, affectively and aesthetically. The camera in these episodes, filmed indoors, focusses on details of hands, faces, objects surrounding actors and interviewees.

The room has faded blue pastel walls, a few everyday objects in the blurry background. The frontal camera angle starts by framing the full  body, but as the drama unfolds, it zooms in focussing on the face, the expression of pain, the tears. The performance, which builds up over more than ten minutes is raw, painful, melodramatic. 

“I had promised my father that I would keep my sister happy. But I failed” cries the character when he reaches the hospital to find his brother-in-law dead. “Where did my Umesh go? Leaving me alone. My Umesh” cries the sister beating her chest with her hands. “Sister, sorry. I could not save your Umesh. You believed in me and my network. But I failed this test.” (…) “This coronavirus took all of our happy moments. Even after the death of my brother-in-law, I cannot hug you. I cannot even wipe your tears. Because you, sister, are corona positive…” Free from the tripod, at the height of the melodrama, the camera gets closer and closer, as the actor falls on his knees sobbing in agony, his glasses flung to one corner, hands reaching towards the camera for help. Soft music of plucked violin strings and low tones increases the tension – music designed by the composer to ‘visualise pain’. The episode ends in classic BT theatrical style, no anchor, no finale, leaving the audience uncomfortable, to remain with pain, injustice, and sans resolution.

Siddharth struggled with this performance, he tells us when we interview him about it. It had to be shot over and over again. And this was not just the closeness of the story to his own experience. It was about acting for the camera. As a theatre performer, he would project his voice, unsuited to the lapel mike attached to his t-shirt. Used to an audience, he found it hard to keep the emotional momentum in an empty room with no immediate feedback, the absence of the to and fro of energy that is so crucial to community theatre. “In film, you face the camera instead of the audience”, he explains. “In theatre, you use all the stage, and all of your voice to get your message to the audience (….). In film, if you want to say ‘this is the moon’ you show it. In theatre, you say: ‘this is the moon’ and show audiences by feeling it. It is by feeling what hides in your heart that the audience will understand and open up their imagination”. This is a glimpse into the complexity of the shift from stage to camera, from theatre to podcast – it is not ‘merely’ a change in medium, but about the very nature of the affective exchange, the intersubjective experience of performance, intensified in its affect for the dire conditions the performance mobilises.

The shift to the digital, or more precisely, the expansion of the digital to enclose life itself (khanna 2019), [1] was already under way before the pandemic and must be understood as part of a historical materialist churning of modes and relations of production and consumption, and the conditions of consciousness. The digital enclosure engendered by the pandemic, was preceded in India by the far-reaching implications of demonetisation – a political stunt that involved de-recognition of 90% of the currency in a cash intensive economy that was at the time predominantly informal.[2] Demonetisation made access to a smartphone essential for even the smallest of transactions (Kaur and Walia 2021), accelerated the ‘penetration’ of smartphones and made them perhaps the most significant tool for political manipulation (Farooq 2018) and the production of political subjectivity (khanna 2019). It also caused a shift in the modes of engagement with cultural forms and entertainment, moving away from the television and undermining the viability of theatre even further (Yadav and Srivastava 2020).     

Several of the communities whose stories feature in the series have traditionally made their living out of street performances. The Bahurupi, Nat and Madari tribes for instance, are predominantly nomadic tribes, moving between villages, states and cities, performing street theatre, acrobatics and dance. Movement being a defining feature of their life and livelihood, its de facto criminalisation during COVID lockdowns made these traditional forms of performance impossible, leaving no livelihood option but begging. This invited violence from mainstream society and the police, in a rearticulation of the underlying logic of caste and notions of pollution that structure Indian society (Guru and Sarukkai 2019), whereby these communities faced specific stigma, being seen as carriers of the virus (Behera and Dasani 2020). During the pandemic, with the smartphone becoming the key site for entertainment, the death of traditional forms of entertainment has been accelerated. It is in this broader context that BT’s shift from theatre to film making is of critical importance.

The story here is of a particular transformation – of a form of realist theatre that emerged from the struggles of an indigenous community, to an emergent form of film that holds together diverse influences and genres: documentary styles that reference a tradition of Indian realist and political documentaries, activist filmmaking and activist theatre, interviews, performances, songs and poetry. Since its inception in 1996, BT has performed hundreds of plays on social and political issues: from police brutality, to forced evictions and communal violence. BT’s work is embedded in communities’ struggles with members directly involved in mobilising on rights violation, legal disputes and in providing support to affected groups. During the pandemic, they also organised to distribute food rations, oxygen and medical kits, offering a form of security in the midst of precarity. In this history, theatre and film have always been interwoven. BT’s artistic director, Dakxin Bajrange is also a prolific documentary filmmaker. In 2009, Bajrange set up his own film production company, Nomad Movies, which he describes as a ‘media unit’ of Budhan Theatre, with the shared aim to be a platform for the struggle of different marginalised communities. To him, theatre and film are the same thing.  “It is only a different space”, he says, “one is digital, and one is physical. But otherwise, it is the same thing. It is about speaking about others’ pain as a way to also understand one’s own.” To other members of the group, however, the move from theatre to film marked a fundamental shift in their artistic practice. While the shift to the digital was quite natural a younger, social media savvy generation, for older members it involved a bigger leap both in terms of technology and artistic expression.

As we reflect with performers on the transformation of the theatrical form, we see at least four interrelated elements at play – temporality, space, intersubjectivity and concerns over the politics of spectatorship. In the realist street theatre performed by BT props, lighting and set design were minimised to render truth more real – to focus on the issues at stake. One actor recalls his resistance to the insistence of his teachers at drama school for more elaborate set-design. Instead, he employed minimal use of props and dim lighting to evade audiences’ escape to a fantasy world. His plays are political, he says, about reality rather than fantasy. Being forced to focus on the actors rather than the set, audiences had to engage with their raw bodies, their emotions, their pain. The body and the voice are centred as actors physically occupy a space, the stage, the square to impress their message on the audience, the message of revolution, for example. The synchronous connection of the bodies of actors and the bodies of audiences – so central especially to the street theatre performed by BT – is crucial to the emotive exchange. And it is in this dance of feelings, between performers and audiences, that the element of improvisation also becomes so important.

Compared to the synchronic interplay of the actor and the audience in theatre, in film the relationship with the audience is both deferred to another time, separated from the performance by a series of interventions, of frame, sound, editing and juxtaposition, and presupposed before the performance. The figuration of space and objects is, as well fundamentally transformed. On the one hand the continuous use of space is often replaced by alogical or discontinuous uses of space, with the change of shot as the basic unit of film construction (Sontag 1960: 29). On the other, the props that actors had so carefully avoided in their realist political theatre, became central to the filming process both in the context of filming performances and interviews. The sovereignty of the body comes to be shared with these other technologies, for a body moving in the wrong light would not make it through the lens; the meaning of an interview in which participants narrate their own real-life stories, could be easily lost in a dark frame. In the absence of raw bodies, actors-as-directors found themselves now thinking a lot about those very things that they before cast aside, experimenting with light from different angles to convey truth.

The video-podcast format, and its digital circulation through social media, also changed possibilities for spectatorship, leading to new concerns over censorship. BT plays have always been political, with actors fearlessly performing in front of police stations, at sites of violence. While these performances had their digital afterlives, featuring as part of documentaries or on youtube channels, their reach was limited. With film, people and places became more exposed, with direct repercussions. In Chharanagar, the threat of police violence is real. Making a film focussed on the community, and therefore documenting livelihood activities deemed illegal, could result in a police raid hours after its release. One way to get around this was to fictionalise, yet the material remained embedded in the community. In this respect the podcast production process was, more than the traditional theatre format, subject to a local politics of what can be shared, while responding to external expectations. In some of the episodes the more powerful statements relating to the failure of the state to address the vulnerabilities of communities were edited out for their potential to create problems for those who spoke, but also for the projects’ sponsors in a time where the ability of organisations to receive foreign funds was becoming increasingly curtailed. Filming issues of marginal livelihoods, and more controversial topics to do with the alcohol business, community quarrels, gender politics, restrictions on intimacies and marriage, was also subject to community censorship. As a community within a community, BT had to  account for different sensitivities – those who supported their documentation efforts, and those who resented any ‘negative’ portrayal of the community as non-representative and damaging to their reputation and wellbeing.

That which cannot be said, does not, however, simply disappear. It insists, it rearticulates in other forms and places, in unexpected ways, within the body of the film. This happens through a range of mechanisms including sublimation and aesthetic play. Our next blogpost will look at these rearticulations.

References:

Farooq, Gowhar (2018), “Politics of Fake News: How WhatsApp Became a Potent Propaganda Tool in India”, Media Watch 9 (1): 106-117

Guru, Gopal and Sundar Sarukkai (2019) Experience, caste and the everyday social, New Delhi, India Oxford University Press

Kaur, Sandeep and Nidhi Walia (2021), “Did Demonetisation Help India’s Transition to the Digital Economy?”, IASSI-Quarterly, Vol. 40 Issue 2: 305-318.

Yadav, Mamta and Manish Srivastava (2020), “A Study of Changing Consumer Trends in The Entertainment Industry”, IRE Journals Volume 4 Issue 4 (October) pp. 9-16.

khanna, akshay (2019), “‘Crisis in the Queer Project – political subjectivity in a time of digital enclosure’  atReconference- Rethink, Reimagine, Reboot, Conference organized by CREA, in Kathmandu, April, 2019

Sardana, MMK (2018), ‘Formalising the Indian Economy on the Wings of Demonetisation, GST and Technology’, ISID Discussion Note, DN2018/02, February 2018. accessible at: https://isid.org.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/DN1802.pdf 

Behera, M., & Dassani, P. (2021). Livelihood vulnerabilities of tribals during COVID-19: challenges and policy measures. Economic and Political Weekly, 56(11), 19-22

akshay khanna is a Delhi-based Social Anthropologist, International Development Consultant, theatre practitioner and amateur chef, with training in Law and Medical Anthropology and the author of Sexualness (2016, New Text), which tells a story of Queer movements in India, develops a framework to think the sexual from the global south, and introduces Quantum Physics into the study of the sexual.

Alice Tilche is a lecturer in Anthropology and Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research at the intersection of art and activism employs visual, collaborative and arts-based methods to research social transformations – including work on the cultural politics of indigeneity, migration, nationalism and most recently Covid-19. Alice’s book Adivasi Art and Activism: curation in a nationalist age was published with Washington University Press in 2022. Her collaborative film projects including Sundarana (2011), Broken Gods (2019) and Budhan-Podcast (2021) have been selected for a number of international film screenings and festivals.

We very much welcome questions and feedback @ alice.tilche@leicester.ac.uk and xaefis@gmail.com

[1] khanna identifies ‘digital enclosure’ as a process through which political subjectivity comes to be enclosed within the digital, and through which the possibility of its articulation outside of the digital is either foreclosed or made subject to articulations and logics in the digital.

[2] It is estimated that prior to demonetisation the informal economy accounted for 52% of the national GDP and employed about 75% of the workforce (Sardana 2018). A report released by the State Bank of India in late 2021, suggests that the informal economy now accounts for less than 20% of the GDP.

Cite as: Tilche, Alice and Khanna, Akshay. 2022. “Embodying emotions in theatre and film.” Focaalblog, 16 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/16/alice-tilche-akshay-khanna-embodying-emotions-in-theatre-and-film/

Blog, War: New Times

Denys Gorbach: Ukrainian identity map in wartime: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis?

The cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of Ukraine is a well-known fact, used and abused in explanations of the ongoing war. Having taken root in the early modern period in the interstitial area contested by three empires – Polish, Turkish and Russian – the Ukrainian nation was, indeed, formed through demographic processes that have left in their wake a complex multi-ethnic composition with varied legacies.

The South, conquered by the Russians from the Ottomans in the 18th century, underwent the process of ‘internal colonization’ (Etkind 2011) that consisted of cleansing the newly acquired lands of the Turkic-speaking nomads and replacing them with sedentary agrarian producers. Persecuted minorities from other countries – German Mennonites, Ottoman Serbs etc. – were invited by the imperial government and settled there. Much of the land, however, was distributed among Russian noblemen, who brought with them serfs from the core ethnic regions of Ukraine and Russia. This settler colonization moment, akin to the one that took place in Northern America at the same time, combined fertile soils with forced labor and made the Russian Empire the breadbasket of Europe.

Image 1: ‘Girls in the field’ (1932), by Kazimir Malevich

One century later, during the Long Depression of 1873-1896, this region was colonized again. At the time, French, Belgian, and British capital was looking for profitable investment opportunities. The Scramble for Africa offered one such possibility; another option was to participate in the rapid industrialization of the Ukrainian steppes, benefiting from the generous protectionism of the Russian government. The massive influx of workforce from every corner of the empire only intensified in the Soviet era, when many if not most of industrial megaprojects were concentrated in Southern and Eastern Ukraine. This produced heavy industrial Russophone cities with no strong ethno-cultural attachments.

Territories on the right bank of the river Dnipro that today constitute northern and central Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire after the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century. To combat the influence of Polish nationalism there, Russian ethnographers promoted the idea of a separate Ukrainian ethnicity, Orthodox religion being the chief criterion versus Catholic Poles. This idea later backfired when Ukrainian romantic intellectuals turned it against the Russian imperial center itself. Following the partitions of Poland, the western-most part of Ukraine became part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, later of interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia. Hotspot of a nationalist guerilla war in the 1940s, Galicia – the former Polish-controlled part of Ukraine – became “the Ukrainian Piedmont” during the national revival of 1989-1991. Being the least Russophone region, it projected an aura of Ukrainian ethnic authenticity. Galicia’s Habsburg past allowed Ukrainian nationalists to articulate their ideology with a quest for a lost Europeanness, from which they imagined an ‘Asian’ Russia to be excluded.

I admit that this is an extremely cursory and almost caricatural snapshot of ethnic histories in Ukraine, but it is still more credible than the simplistic tale of ‘two Ukraines’, cooked up by Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsias in the early 1990s (Riabchuk, 1992). The latter was picked up by Samuel Huntington, the prophet of civilisational wars ([1996] 2011), but even, surprisingly, by an anti-nationalist anthropologist such as Chris Hann (2022). In that narrative, the population’s historical heterogeneity easily slides into an unbridgeable chasm between two civilizational different societies: pro-Western ‘Ukrainians proper’ and Russified ‘Creoles’.

How it started

Still, throughout Ukraine’s 30 years of independence there was considerable diversity in the country’s political geography and political identities, but the cardinal differences were changed together with the transformation of political struggles. Contrary to the nationalist narrative that has gradually become dominant, in the 1990s the actual key political cleavage in the Ukrainian public sphere was closer to the classic left-right binary – not least in the terms used by politicians and journalists themselves. The change toward an ethnic vocabulary came with the Orange revolution in 2004, when the center of gravity in the political field moved from the presidency to the parliament. As a result of that shift, the rivalry between oligarchic groupings that stood behind the major party-political formations had become more transparent and involved from now on open electoral struggle. It was at this point that perceived ethno-linguistic differences between East and West turned into a deepening political cleavage and ‘cultural identities’ began absorbing more conventional programmatic distinctions.

Ukrainian politics after the Orange Revolution became an arena of confrontation between two competing nationalist projects, which perceived themselves as ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ and ‘East Slavic’ (Shulman, 2005). The former put high value on the Ukrainian language and its associated ethnic identity, was implacably hostile to Russia, which it equated with the Soviet Union, and craved a liberal Euro-Atlantic integration. The latter was centered on the protection of Russian language rights, the Russian Orthodox church, and the historical memory of the Soviet people’s victory in the Second World War (which it saw as a victory of its own), and purportedly leaning towards Russia. This division gave elites an easy tool to mobilize the voter base. But at the same time, it served as a safety stop, preventing an authoritarian consolidation of power: any potential dictator backed by either bloc was easily overturned by rivals mobilizing the other “half” of the country against him. This “pluralism by default” became the hallmark of the Ukrainian political system (Way, 2015). Such pluralism was also an insurance against a neoliberal consolidation in the economic domain: the importance of the “populist” component did not allow governing elites to disembed the economy from local social and political configurations and forced all political forces to maintain the Soviet legacy of redistributive mechanisms.

The making of the supposedly identitarian cleavage thus served as a useful fix for social reproduction during the decade of economic growth between 2000 and 2010. However, as with all politico-economic fixes, this one was only temporary. Several factors contributed to its undoing in the early 2010s. First, with no inbuilt checks, the amplitude of the nationalist see-saw kept widening dangerously until the polarization reached unsustainable levels. In the parliamentary elections of 2012, the far-right (‘ethnic Ukrainian’) Svoboda party gained 10% of votes. Its popularity was propelled by the ‘East Slavic’ President Yanukovych, who was visibly aiming at orchestrating his 2015 reelection the way Jacques Chirac had done it in 2002 vis a vis Le Pen, but he must have underestimated the level of tension already accumulated in the society. Predatory activities of the Yanukovych team in the economic domain irritated both the oligarchs and the much more numerous small entrepreneurs and urban middle classes in Kyiv and the West, pushing up the nationalist vote. This coincided with the end of the commodity super cycle that had been sustaining Ukrainian economic growth between 1997-2012 (Chim, 2021). There was less and less to redistribute – especially given that in 2012 Russia, affected by the same turn of the global cycle, launched a full-scale economic attack against Ukraine, with exorbitant gas prices and countless trade wars affecting Ukrainian exporters. Starting from the second half of 2012, after the end of the stimulus from the infrastructure projects associated with the European football championship, Ukraine entered a steep recession. The Russian economic offensive marked the closure of the geopolitical interstitial space that had been vital for Ukraine: Yanukovych was forced to choose a camp while knowing that any choice would be disastrous.

All these contradictions came together in the political crisis known as the Euromaidan of 2013-2014. With Yanukovych deposed, Crimea annexed by Russia, and the Donbas plunged into war, the internal balance of Ukrainian politics became skewed beyond repair. Millions of ‘East Slavic’ voters found themselves now outside the playing field, and the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ party became mathematically dominant (D’Anieri, 2018). This antagonism, however recent and constructed, now all but drove national politics. At the same time, however, both the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ and the ‘Eastern Slavic’ identities that were being offered in the political arena were only weakly anchored in the worldview of the common people. Wherever one lived and whichever language one spoke most smoothly, the dominant popular attitude was an anti-political rejection of party-political games as such, rather than a firm endorsement of one side against the other. As a result of this disconnection between political society and the wider society, and pushed by the logic of the public sphere, Petro Poroshenko spent his presidential term drifting towards an ever more radical form of ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ nationalism. In the end he suffered a humiliating defeat at the 2019 elections: 73% of voters supported Volodymyr Zelenskyi, who was the veritable embodiment of the popular anti-political and anti-elitist attitude.

Once elected, however, Zelenskyi, too, began obeying the structural logic of the political field. By the autumn of 2020, it became clear to the Russian government that Zelenskyi would not accept their version of the Minsk accords, and the Kremlin began military preparations. In the lower echelons of Ukrainian society, meanwhile, the same old detachment from identarian politics persisted. For instance, one of the leaders of the 2020 miners’ strike in Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyi’s native city, was hailed as a hero of the two hardest battles of the Donbas war. However, this did not mean much to him subjectively: in a polemic around the strike, he said he had never even considered himself a patriot (Gorbach, 2022).

How it’s going

What happened when Russia finished its war preparations and moved its troops into Ukraine?  Kryvyi Rih, a stronghold of the supposedly ‘East Slavic’ elite, provides a telling example. The city’s mayor Yuriy Vilkul was elected in 2010, after Yanukovych’s presidential victory. The mayor’s son Oleksandr was a CEO of two large industrial enterprises of the city during the crucial moment of their contested transfer to Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine and the traditional sponsor of ‘East Slavic’ political projects. The anchoring of this family’s political power in the city was accompanied by their sponsoring of the construction of numerous Russian Orthodox churches and other religious objects, as well as monuments reinforcing the Soviet-centred version of WW2 historical memory. Local Ukrainian nationalist and liberal activists were convinced that the ruling elite would switch sides at the first sight of Russian troops.

Instead, Oleksandr Vilkul became the head of the local military administration. Shortly after the invasion, he wrote: “Dear friends, every generation has its own Brest fortress, and its own Stalingrad. We will not give up even a meter of our native land to the occupiers. Kryvbas is behind our backs, we have nowhere to retreat. Behind our backs are our families and our families’ graves… The enemy will be beaten.” These four sentences contain no less than five allusions to Stalin’s wartime speeches. The ‘East Slavic’ identity, long perceived as ‘pro-Russian’, became a mobilizing tool against the Russian invasion. The local ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ civil society has been annoyed and disoriented by this turn of events, but whatever they might think of it, the fact remains: resistance to the Russian invasion is being efficiently organized under the slogans of Soviet antifascism and Orthodox faith. The political leader who spent years opposing Ukrainian ethnonationalism and fighting the post-Euromaidan “decommunization” of urban space, has now received friendly visits from the figureheads of Ukrainian nationalism and initiated renaming all toponyms that have anything to do with Russia (which implies even greater changes then the removal of communist names).

What about the workers? None of my previously ‘apolitical’ or ‘East Slavic’ informers in Kryvyi Rih seem in doubt about the invasion. The specter of reactions ranges from patriotic emotional outbursts in group chats to joining the war effort personally. A trade union leader has demanded weapons from foreign comrades who wanted to send humanitarian aid; a displaced miner from Donetsk has left aside his skepticism about politics and enthusiastically participated in the city’s defense. Further examples abound.

The end of ambiguity?

For decades, the relation of the Ukrainian working class to politics was distant, if not actively antagonistic. Politics of all sorts and colors was perceived as the domain of corruption and lies. What has changed? Probably not much. The univocal reaction to the Russian invasion is so loud precisely because of its ‘non-political’ character: the experience of the war and the response to it are visceral, unmediated by ‘corrupting’ ideologies and politicking. Contrary to previous political events, this one feel ‘real’. It touches upon the very fabric of everyday life and does not rely on abstract reflections mediated by an intellectual class. Hence the surprising level of personal involvement.

Volodymyr Artiukh makes a similar point while comparing the Russian and Ukrainian official narratives that accompanied WW2 commemorations this year: “whereas the Ukrainian side fights iconic signs and appeals to visceral bodily experience through indexes, the Russian side relies almost exclusively on symbols devoid of any relation to lived experience” (Artiukh, 2022). Both discursive strategies exclude the possibility of building a sustainable political movement from below, but whereas the Russian symbolism is demobilizing, the Ukrainian appeal to lived reality mobilizes by generating a powerful emotional loyalty to the event. Oleg Zhuravlev and Volodymyr Ishchenko studied a similar ‘immediate politics’ in the case of Euromaidan – an enormous mobilization that had no verbalized agenda, relying instead on emotional ties between movement’s participants, and between them and their political object (Zhuravlev & Ishchenko, 2020).

Will this bond stabilize enough to create a shared common sense, thus finally constructing a ‘proper’, undivided, Ukrainian nation as a response to the war? It is tempting to anticipate a Hegelian emergence of synthesis out of two antithetic ideologies, the coexistence of which made Ukraine somewhat deficient in many narratives. However, even if such a project does become reality, what might it look like? It may either slide back into narrow ethnonationalism or develop into an inclusive national project, based on the shared war experience, EU aspirations, and a redistributive agenda. It can remain pre-rational (after all, what is nationalism if not a romantic negation of the rationality of Enlightenment?) or morph into a more legible political program.

Little is certain about it at a moment when everything – including the future geographical shape of Ukraine – depends on the war’s outcome. However, it is important to acknowledge that the war is not an independent variable, either; its course is structured by the contradictory political agency of people inhabiting the country.

Denys Gorbach is a postdoctoral fellow at Max Planck Sciences Po Centre for Studying Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo, Paris) and an adjunct lecturer at Sciences Po Toulouse. His recently defended PhD thesis is an ethnographic study of the moral economy and everyday politics of the Ukrainian working class.

This text was presented at the conference ‘New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Capitalism’ in Budapest 26-27 May, organized by the Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission of Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology-IUAES in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, ‘Capitalism Nature Socialism’, ‘Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology’, and ‘FocaalBlog’.

References

Artiukh, Volodymyr. 2022. Destruction of Signs, Signs of Destruction. Emptiness,May 9. https://emptiness.eu/field-reports/destruction-of-signs-signs-of-destruction

Chim, Sandy. 2021. The Dawn of an Iron Ore Super Cycle. Resource World Magazine. https://resourceworld.com/the-dawn-of-an-iron-ore-super-cycle/

D’Anieri, Paul. 2018. Gerrymandering Ukraine? Electoral Consequences of Occupation. East European Politics and Societies: And Cultures  33(1), 89-108.

Etkind, Alexander. 2011. Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Gorbach, Denys. 2022. The (Un)Making of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Socialist City. I.E.P. de Paris.

Hann, Chris. 2022. ‘The Agony of Ukraine’. FocaalBlog, 3 June, https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/11/chris-hann-the-agony-of-ukraine/

Huntington, Samuel P. [1996] 2011. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Riabchuk, Mykola. 1992. Two Ukraines? East European Reporter 5(4).

Shulman, Stephen. 2005. National Identity and Public Support for Political and Economic Reform in Ukraine. Slavic Review 64(1):59–87.

Way, Lucan A. 2015. Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Zhuravlev, Oleg, & Volodymyr Ishchenko. 2020. ‘Exclusiveness of Civic Nationalism: Euromaidan Eventful Nationalism in Ukraine’. Post-Soviet Affairs 36(3), 226-245.

Cite as: Gorbach, Denys. 2022. “Ukrainian identity map in wartime: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis?” Focaalblog, 13 June.
https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/13/denys-gorbach-ukrainian-identity-map-in-wartime-thesis-antithesis-synthesis/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Volodymyr Artiukh: The political logic of Russia’s imperialism

The debate around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the previous contributions in FocaalBlog, has shifted from the ‘either NATO or Russia’ dichotomy to a more nuanced exchange along the lines of ‘it is NATO, but…’ versus ‘it is Russia, but…’. In a welcome development, discussants started following Tony Wood’s (2022) advice to ‘ascribe weights’ to the factors leading to Russia’s invasion. It is also the intention of this text. However, rather than doing so quantitatively, and ascribing ‘weights’ to each individual actor, I aim, like Don Kalb (2022), at presenting a relational narrative.

Beside my interrupted fieldwork in Ukraine (2021), this contribution to the war debate is based on my fieldwork in Belarus (2015-2017) and my conclusions on how Lukashenka’s ‘Caesarist regime’ mutated when faced with popular and geopolitical challenges to its ‘passive-revolutionary strategy’ (Artiukh 2020, 2021), to use Gramsci’s vocabulary. Drawing on my insights from Ukraine and Belarus, I sketch the political logic of Russia’s aggressive territorial expansion against the backdrop of US hegemonic decline. I claim that this expansion, driven by the logic of legitimism whereby Russia offers its prospective clients a new anti-revolutionary ‘Holy Alliance,’ as Tsarist Russia did in the 19th century, and engenders a system of ‘anti-Maidan’ regimes that share important cultural and political commonalities.

Image 1: Head of states, among them Ukrainian and Russian presidents taking part in a meeting in Minsk on August 26, 2014, photo by Mykola Lazarenko/Ukrainian Presidential Press Service

This political logic, clearly formulated in Putin’s 2015 UN speech follows a shift in Russian imperialist strategy. According to the political economist Ilya Matveev (2021), Russian imperialism transitioned from the economic logic to the territorial logic around the year 2014, when the Russian state resigned from the strategy of expanding private businesses to Ukraine and other post-Soviet republics and started waging political control over these territories even at the expense of the interests of private capital. The most salient example of this new strategy was the annexation of Crimea and the support for the pro-Russian rebels in Donbass. However, the strategy seems to be broader and includes the reactivation of other ‘frozen conflicts’ (Georgia 2008, possibly Moldova), involvement in domestic conflicts (Ukraine 2014, Belarus 2020, Kazakhstan 2022), and provision of military services (Syria and several African countries).

The central tenet of this legitimist territorial strategy was the conservation of neopatrimonial regimes threatened by popular discontent. The Donbass break-away statelets were the first in a series of regimes that started appearing in the post-Soviet space since 2014 in reaction to the real or perceived threat of popular protests. I call such forms of governance ‘anti-Maidan’ regimes in reference to their first legitimizing narrative of resisting Ukraine’s Maidan protests. What unites them is the fact that they are reactions to populist uprisings, foster the demobilization rather than mobilization of their populations, and rely on police and military coercion rather than hegemonic projects. As elites in need joined this Holy Alliance, their regimes transformed accordingly: these include Assad’s Syria, Lukashenka’s Belarus, most recently Kazakhstan, and the newly occupied regions of Ukraine. Bringing this logic back home, Russia’s own regime has undergone a transformation into an authoritarian police state with post-fascist tendencies.

This project should be traced back to the continued organic crisis that burst to the surface in 2008 and made the situation on the eve of the 2013 Maidan uprising possible. The Ukrainian Maidan protests were one of the localized ‘worldwide mobilizations’ (Kalb & Mollona, 2018) against neoliberalized neopatrimonial regimes under the strain of the crisis, best epitomized by the Arab Spring. Formed around the territorialized condensation of political passions, such uprisings were rooted in something akin to Sorel’s political myth that was able to create a cleavage between ‘us and them’ but unable to produce lasting change because of the lack of organizational frameworks and leadership. Therefore, it was the more radical violent groups that took advantage of such movements, the contemporary condottiere that, nevertheless, were not able to embody the collective will (Gopal, 2020).

These post-developmental neopatrimonial regimes were in different stages of decline and stood in different relations with their neighbours. Thus, the Tunisian and Belarusian regimes, being able to rely on their patrons and having stronger states, were able to incorporate the uprisings in their continuing passive revolutionary strategies. Others suffered from the intervention of their neighbours, as it happened in Bahrain, Yemen, and Ukraine. Still others plunged into a prolonged civil war, such as Libya or Syria, and became a battleground of competing US, Turkish, and Russian imperialisms.

Contrary to wide-spread preconception, the US demonstrated a failure of its hegemony when faced with these situations. Here I use hegemony in a Gramscian-Arrighian sense, as a set of institutions and ideologies buttressed by the potentiality of the use of credible force that can overcome crises and align the interest of core and peripheral elites. Whereas the US central bank managed to relatively successfully mitigate the crisis of 2008 in Europe, it failed to establish order in its periphery (Tooze, 2019). Similarly, the US military operations brought unintended consequences. Once this hegemonic hole opened and the US showed its weakness, a ‘shitshow’ emerged, in Obama’s words, as the contenders immediately sprang to action offering their help to restore order.

One hegemonic contender was Russia, one of the neopatrimonial regimes whose decline was only beginning to show itself. The first signs of this decline appeared in the urban middle class protests of 2011-2013 and were quickly suppressed. Since domination in international relations, according to Gramsci, is an extension of the modes of domination of the ruling class, Russia’s system of neopatrimonial international dependencies was also slipping away. Thus, Russia came up with a doctrine of the support of ‘legitimate regimes’ against the hybrid war waged by the west (Göransson, 2021). As an alternative of the faltering US hegemony based on the ‘promotion of democracy’ including the support of popular uprisings, Russia came up with an offer of a Holy Alliance for the 21st century. In Gramscian terms, this was an offer of the preservation of the historical bloc that is based on Ceasarist domination rather than hegemony. Thus, as opposed to the faltering US hegemony, Russia offered an international system of domination without hegemony. Such an offer would solve two tasks: bolster the rule of the Russian domestic regime and ensure the stability of the regimes of the states that join the Holy Alliance.

This is how one can read the post-Maidan developments. The fall of Yanukovych signalled the fragility of the neopatrimonial regimes and thereby threatened Russia as the provider of security guarantees after Yanukovych accepted such offer in late 2013. The weak political-mythical quality of the Maidan uprising ended in the ‘us and them’ cleavage, thus alienating a considerable part of Ukraine’s population (Zhuravlev & Ishchenko, 2020). Expectedly, it followed by the stage of far right condottierism that further widened the cleavage. Europe was disoriented and the US was cautious to get involved in yet another ‘shitshow.’ The annexation of Crimea and the fuelling of the civil war in Ukraine was the logical application of the legitimism doctrine. This first move was a typically Ceasarist one, a special operation of Putin’s ‘praetorian guard’. The goal of bolstering domestic legitimacy was attained by the so-called Crimea effect, while the goal of establishing the legitimate order in Ukraine was in process.

Russian analysts expected that the post-Maidan government would not differ much from the previous one and thus would need a donor of security against the separatist threat that Russia itself fuelled. Russian leadership also knew that neither the EU nor the US would be willing to become such donors to the full extent required. Thus, they offered the package of the so-called Minsk agreements which was a military-diplomatic consecration of Russia’s military victory over the weak post-Maidan regime. The Minsk agreements envisaged the presence of the de facto Russian political and military forces within a federal Ukrainian state that would potentially win the ensuing civil war (Koshiw, 2022). The EU had no other choice than trying to freeze the ‘no war no peace’ situation hoping that it would solve itself in the future. The US largely kept at a distance during the Trump interregnum.

However, the Kyiv authorities and the heirs of the Maidan condottiere fought to avoid this situation tooth and nail. They imposed the post-Maidan consensus, profiting from the cleavage opened by the Maidan political passions and supported by the condottiere. With some limited help from the EU and the US, the Kyiv authorities managed to re-establish state institutions and rebuild the army. The West had no choice but to accept the new Kyiv Caesarism. This time Russia decided to wait while developing the separatist republics in Donbass as the outpost for the coming battle.

By that time, the LNR/DNR, kept together by the perpetual state of emergency and harsh repressions against dissident political, cultural and labour activists, became a grey zone controlled by the Russian public and private agencies (Savelyeva, 2022). Having consolidated its sovereignty over the anti-Maidan outpost in Donbass, Russia claimed an undisputed success in Syria by reviving Assad’s rule over most of the country and burying the remnants of the 2011 uprising. Finally, the post-2020 Belarus, which switched from authoritarian populism to an outright dictatorial police state (Artiukh, forthcoming), was undoubtedly the most successful case of Russia’s international assistance within the Holy Alliance. Similarly to the leadership of LNR/DNR, Lukashenka constructed his post-protest legitimacy as a machine-gun brandishing saviour of the country from a west-inspired coup attempt, which explicitly compared to Ukraine’s Maidan. Not only did Russia’s political, media and economic support succeed in stabilizing Lukashenka’s regime but also managed to tie it to Russia, thus securing a military lodgement.

This series of successes against the background of the American and European failures emboldened the Russian elites. While Russia reinstated the power of Assad in Syria, exported its services to African countries, and crashed protests at home, the US was mired in the Trump ‘shitshow’ internally, nearly losing NATO allies, announcing a pivot to Asia, and losing miserably at the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The only unfinished business for the Holy Alliance was Ukraine. Since the beginning of 2020, Russia started integrating the separatist statelets in Donbass into the Russian ideological, economic, and political sphere while simultaneously pressing the Ukrainian authorities to hastily implement the political part of the Minsk agreements.

After a brief flirtation with Putin, Zelensky’s government realized it could not reinstate sovereignty over the separatist regions if the Minsk process was supervised by Russia and domestic politics was contested by nationalists. Russia’s actions hinted at the possibility of either fully integrating these statelets into Russia following the Crimea example or using them as the outpost of the ‘Russian world,’ as proclaimed in the ideological doctrine of LNR/DNR in early 2021. According to some analysts, that’s the time when the Russian authorities started preparing for the eventuality of a full-fledged military operation against Ukraine. Next steps were only a question of time and opportunity.

This opportunity came in late 2021 or early 2022. Many factors converged that would weaken the West and embolden Russia, and Russian elites understood this. Not only were the US and Europe hit by the pandemic, but they also faced political transitions: the new and weak president in the US who continued the pivot to Asia, the new chancellor in Germany and the coming elections in France. Things were going much better for Russia: Belarus was securely under Russia’s control as a poster child of the Holy Alliance, Russia’s economy stabilized and accumulated all-time high resources, the lighting fast special operation in Kazakhstan would prove Russia as a reliable donor of security. Thus, Russia announced its assault with the first war scare of the April 2021 that seemingly opened a dialogue on the matters of strategic security between the US and Russia. After that Putin and Medvedev wrote their texts about Ukraine and Zelensky, essentially offering an ultimatum: either Ukraine would be destroyed as a state, or it would be refashioned according to the Russian will.

Zelensky was probably aware of the coming danger, therefore he stepped up the cleansing of the domestic political domain and tried to improve the army as much as possible while still clinging to the ceasefire in the Donbass. He hoped to balance his way out of the narrow road ahead of him. Russia meanwhile rolled out another ultimatum in December 2022 that already asked for the withdrawal of the NATO infrastructure from the former Warsaw Pact countries in addition to a ban on accepting new NATO members. Much like Austria’s ultimatum against Serbia in 1914, Putin’s was also not meant to be met. After some initial setbacks, the Russian army has continued to occupy Ukraine’s territory beyond LNR/DNR, keeping the political goals of the war deliberately vague.

Three months into the war, the newly occupied territories in the south of Ukraine are controlled by the methods developed by other anti-Maidan regimes, primarily Belarus and LNR/DNR. The tremendous success of Lukashenka’s crackdown against those who protested the results of the unfair elections in 2020 relied on unprecedented police brutality, long-term jail sentences, and the demoralization of dissenters. Having abandoned his trademark populism, Lukashenka proved that brute force alone might work if people are sufficiently atomized in cities and on the shopfloor. Initial mass demonstrations against the Russian occupation have been dispersed as Russia strengthened its policing capacity in the rear of the invading army. There are reports of political activists being kidnapped and tortured, repeating the Donbass experience. One of the methods used in Belarus, the systematic video-taping of forced self-denunciations, was recently repeated in Kherson oblast, where people unhappy with the occupation were forced to apologize on camera and say that they have ‘completed a denazification course.’ This is not accompanied by any coherent ideological narrative; instead, Russian media project a wild mix of Soviet, Tsarist, and vaguely fascist symbols whose sole purpose is to intimidate and show that the resistance is futile (Artiukh, 2022).

While constructing the system of anti-Maidan regimes, Russia has also transformed itself from a ‘managed democracy’ into a police state with post-fascist tendencies and imposing a postmodern mix of ideologies that are not meant to truly persuade the masses (Budraitskis, 2022). If the US presided over the emergence of post-Soviet world by promoting neoliberal textbooks and failing to create a hegemonic security paradigm, Russia’s anti-Maidan strategy accomplished the end of post-Sovietness by destroying all remnants of the Soviet civilization that the successor states fed on. On the one hand, this is symbolic decommunization – from the literal destruction of monuments in Ukraine to the zombification of Soviet symbols which are being turned into symbols of the colonial conquests of the Russian Federation; on the other hand, it is political and economic “decommunization” – the delegitimization of the borders of the former republics and the destruction of the centers of Soviet industrialization in the Donbass, Mariupol, or Kharkov. The long decline of pax postsovietica is almost over.

Volodymyr Artiukh is a Postdoctoral Researcher at COMPAS with the ERC-funded project EMPTINESS: Living Capitalism and Democracy after (Post)Socialism. He completed his PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in 2020 with a dissertation about labour and bureaucratic control in Belarus. His research interests include the anthropology of labour and migration in post-Soviet countries, the anthropology of populism, and the study of hegemony in Eastern Europe.

This text was presented at the conference ‘New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Capitalism’ in Budapest 26-27 May, organized by the Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission of Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology-IUAES in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, ‘Capitalism Nature Socialism’, ‘Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology’, and ‘FocaalBlog’.

References

Artiukh, V. (2020). The People against State Populism. Belarusian protests against the “Social parasite law.” Schweizerisches Archiv Fur Volkskunde, 116(1), 101–116.

Artiukh, V. (2021). The anatomy of impatience: Exploring factors behind 2020 labor unrest in Belarus. Slavic Review, 80(1), 52–60.

Artiukh, V. (2022). Destruction of signs, signs of destruction. Emptiness, May 9. https://emptiness.eu/field-reports/destruction-of-signs-signs-of-destruction/.

Artiukh, V. (Forthcoming). Dramaturgy of Populism: Post-electoral protest ideologies in Belarus. New Europe College Yearbook. Pontica Magna Program.

Budraitskis, I. (2022). From Managed Democracy to Fascism. Tempest, April 23. https://www.tempestmag.org/2022/04/from-managed-democracy-to-fascism/

Gopal, A. (2020). The Arab Thermidor. Catalyst, 4(2).

Göransson, M. (2021). Understanding Russian thinking on gibridnaya voyna. In M. Weissmann, N. Nilsson, B. Palmertz & P. Thunholm (Eds.), Hybrid Warfare: Security and Asymmetric Conflict in International Relations (pp. 83–94). London: I.B. Tauris.

Kalb, D. (2022). War: New Times. FocaalBlog, 21 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/21/don-kalb-war-new-times/

Kalb, D. & Mollona, M. (2018). Introductory Thoughts on Anthropology and Urban Insurrection. In D. Kalb & M. Mollona (Eds.), Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Koshiw, I. (2022). Everyone is talking about Minsk but what does it mean for Ukraine? Open Democracy, 4 February. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-ukraine-what-are-the-minsk-agreements/

Matveev, I. (2021). Between Political and Economic Imperialism: Russia’s Shifting Global Strategy. Journal of Labor and Society, 25(2), 198–219.

Savelyeva, N. (2022). Eight Years of War before the War. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, March 25. https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/46205.

Tooze, J. A. (2019). Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world. Penguin Publishing Group.

Wood, T. (2022). Matrix of War. New Left Review, 133/134.

Zhuravlev, O., & Ishchenko, V. (2020). Exclusiveness of civic nationalism: Euromaidan eventful nationalism in Ukraine. Post-Soviet Affairs 36(3), 226-245.

Cite as: Artiukh, Volodymyr. 2022. “The political logic of Russia’s imperialism.” Focaalblog, 9 June.
https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/09/volodymyr-artiukh-the-political-logic-of-russias-imperialism/

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Khin Thazin and Stephen Campbell: How the Myanmar coup has impacted migrant workers abroad

The February 2021 military coup in Myanmar put an end to the country’s ten-year period of quasi-civilian electoral rule—the so-called democratic transition, as it was optimistically called. Since then, nation-wide anti-coup protests, a violent military/police crackdown, and the emergence of a decentralised armed resistance movement have garnered extensive international and domestic media coverage. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the detrimental impact of the coup on the livelihoods of millions of ordinary Myanmar workers within the country and abroad.

It was to better understand the coup’s impact on Myanmar migrant workers that we began a collaborative research project in late 2021—specifically, on how the coup, coupled with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has impacted Myanmar migrant domestic workers in Singapore. While a more detailed presentation of our findings awaits future academic publication, we offer here a brief account of the post-coup experiences of some of the women we interviewed between late 2021 and early 2022.

Image 1: Myanmar migrant workers at Peninsula Plaza (Singapore’s “Little Burma”) in June 2022 (photo by Khin Thazin).

Post-coup precarity

Following the coup, mass workers’ strikes and violent military/police repression prompted widespread workplace closures across public and private sectors in Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands of factory workers fled the industrial zones around Yangon for the relative safety of their home villages. And many foreign brands ceased sourcing products from Myanmar-based factories. Due to these combined factors, 250,000 garment sector jobs were lost in Myanmar by July 2021, while 1.6 million jobs were lost over 2021 as a whole, according to the International Labour Organisation. By September 2021, the Asian Development Bank projected that Myanmar’s annual GDP growth rate would be -18.4% (see Figure 1). Under these conditions, employers in Myanmar leveraged post-coup precarity to lower wages and undermine workplace organising.

Figure 1: Asian Development Bank’s 2021 growth forecasts for Southeast Asian countries

Even before the coup, workers in the industrial zones around Yangon were labouring under highly precarious conditions—conditions that COVID-19-related economic contraction greatly exacerbated. Since the coup, heightened economic precarity and enduring military repression have significantly increased the number of people attempting to leave the country for work abroad. Under renewed military rule and pandemic-related travel restrictions, many individuals trying to leave the country have encountered bureaucratic delays, state-imposed barriers and unscrupulous brokers seeking to exploit the current crisis. Some aspiring migrants have sought to reach foreign countries through perilous irregular channels. Meanwhile, the 4.25 million Myanmar migrants residing abroad face added pressures to increase remittances to family back home, and to postpone plans to return permanently to Myanmar.

These restrictive conditions formed the context of our research. In what follows, we present some of the narratives of Myanmar migrant domestic workers in Singapore to show how post-coup precarity in Myanmar has negatively impacted their migration experiences abroad.

Migrant domestic workers in the post-coup moment

After ten years of labouring in Singapore, 43-year-old Ma Khaing felt she had had enough. The two-year contract she had signed at the start of 2020 was supposed to have been her last. “I had decided that I’d return to Myanmar in February of this year,” she told us in early 2022. Her plan, however, had been thwarted. First it was the COVID-19 pandemic. “When COVID started, the economy constricted a lot,” Ma Khaing explained. But also, her widowed mother contracted the virus, as did all seven of her siblings in Myanmar. “My mother had to close her betel stall… And since she closed it, I obviously had to send back more [money].” Eventually the pandemic “calmed down,” said Ma Khaing, and her mother was able to reopen her stall. “But now,” she added, “the [post-coup] unrest has happened. So, she’s had to close her stall again.” All of these developments impinged on Ma Khaing’s decision making: “I’d been planning to return—to go back home to stay when the two years [of the contract] finished. But now, because of the turmoil in Myanmar, I’m no longer going back. I’m going to continue [working in Singapore]. I’ve got to stay on, obviously.”

As a Myanmar migrant domestic worker in Singapore, Ma Khaing’s experiences were far from unique. Indeed, her life course paralleled that of tens of thousands of her compatriots who labour as domestic workers in Singapore. Of course, Myanmar migrants in Singapore faced difficulties even before the coup, and before the pandemic. Yet, with the onset of the pandemic, conditions for migrants deteriorated further.

In late 2020, the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics, a Singaporean migrant worker advocacy and support organisation, reported the following trends in migrant domestic worker employment conditions due to pandemic-related restrictions and pressures: increased workload, imposed work on rest days, heightened surveillance by employers, increased restrictions on communication and mobile phone usage, loss of employment, substantial wage decreases, increased verbal abuse by employers, and increased workplace stress due to prolonged isolation with employers.

Notwithstanding the effects of pandemic-related restrictions in Singapore, our research focused specifically on how recent developments in Myanmar have impacted migrants abroad. On this matter, the domestic workers we interviewed highlighted two main issues–both related to the worsening economic situation back home. These were: needing to send more remittances to family members and needing to remain working longer in Singapore. Thus recounted Ma Sein, a 36-year-old woman from Yangon:

“After Covid started, I had to send back more remittances, obviously. For example, I’d been sending 350 to 400 [Singaporean dollars] per month. But then I had to send over 500, or up to 600 per month because prices increased and all my family members became unemployed. When Covid started, they could have continued selling in the market, but I didn’t want them to go outside. It was better for them to stay at home.”

Ma Shwe, a 33-year-old woman who supported her three school-age siblings and whose widowed mother sold rice at a market, felt similarly pressured. “When Covid started, some businesses had to close,” she recalled. “My plan had been to just work two years in Singapore. But then Covid happened, and it wasn’t possible to return to Myanmar.”

Such were the added challenges for migrant domestic workers in Singapore during the pandemic. The 2021 military coup in Myanmar has compounded these difficulties. Alongside intensified post-coup violence and repression, the ensuing insecurity and economic fallout have reduced livelihood options in the country and have heightened pressures on family members abroad to increase their financial support. The coup and ensuing humanitarian crisis have thus exacerbated what were, under the pandemic, already difficult conditions for Myanmar migrants in Singapore.

After the coup, recounted Ma Shwe, “The economic situation [in Myanmar] got worse, of course. Some people had to pawn their belongings just to eat, because they had no work.” Responding to these conditions, many migrants increased their remittances. “I’d been sending money each month—three lakhs [S$219] for one month,” explained Ma Ni. However, “since the coup, I’ve been sending about four to five lakhs [S$292 – 365].”

Meanwhile, most migrant domestic workers in Singapore are seeking to renew their contracts, and many have set aside prior aspirations for future livelihoods in Myanmar. “I had planned to save and buy a home [in Myanmar],” recounted Ma Sein. “Now, because of the political situation and the Covid situation, my plan isn’t feasible anymore. Given the current situation, I’m going to continue staying [in Singapore]. Will I stay for one year, two years, or four or five years? I can’t say.” Ma Yadana reflected similarly: “I’d thought about opening up a restaurant [in Myanmar], or something like that. But now, I have to continue on here [in Singapore].”

Understandably, these conditions are also motivating individuals in Myanmar to seek work abroad in larger numbers. “Now, everyone wants to leave, since there isn’t work in Myanmar,” said Ma Sandar. “Especially since the coup,” she added, “there are those with passports waiting to leave for Singapore.” Confirming Ma Sandar’s observation, Mizzima News reported at the end of 2021 that the Yangon passport office had seen a near ten-fold increase in applicants despite a doubling of the passport fee.

Ruth, an employment agent we interviewed, offered further detail. “Now, since the coup, there are so many people who want to come [to Singapore],” she said. “There are many people who want to leave [Myanmar]. In the past, I’d have about 50 maid profiles to advertise. Now, I have 200 to 300. There are so many. There are so many people who want to come. There is so much supply.” The reason, Ruth explained, is that since the coup, “There’s no work anymore. There’s no office work. There’s no work for school teachers. Workplaces are closed. Factories are closed. That’s why there are so many young women who want to come [to Singapore].”

One of the more pernicious outcomes of this situation, added Ruth, is that certain agents are leveraging post-coup precarity to reduce salaries for new migrant domestic workers below the previous standard of S$480 per month. “Some agents,” she explained, “they’ve got so many helpers [waiting in Yangon]. So, they negotiate with the helper. They say, ‘You’ll have to wait here for however many more months. So, why don’t you accept 460 or 450 [Singaporean dollars]. Then you can go faster [to Singapore].’ So, maybe some of them want to go faster [and therefore accept a lower salary].” Ruth would never do this, she assured us. But “some agents,” she acknowledged, “are unethical.”

Stressing the impact of home-country conditions on migrant domestic workers in Singapore risks conveying a rather deterministic analysis. It is thus important to note, as well, that many of the women we interviewed expressed a sense of political awareness and agency, in which they saw themselves as active participants in the post-coup struggle against renewed military rule in Myanmar. Ma Sein, for example, said, “Now I send [money] to support my family. I send whatever is left to support the revolution.” Similarly, Ma Yadana explained,

“At first, I thought I’d gone abroad to work for my family. Later, beyond my own family’s financial status, I realised that it’s actually because of my country’s poor conditions that I had to migrate, and it’s not because of my family… That’s why I haven’t returned. Because even if I do have the financial means, while people around me are struggling, it can’t be like that. That’s why I can’t return just yet… Even if we win the revolution, there’s a lot of work to be done in rebuilding.”

Conclusion

The narratives of the women we interviewed reveal the intimate linkages between deteriorating home-country conditions and the financial and psychological stresses that migrants face abroad. A related analytical implication is that migrant labour regimes in countries of arrival cannot be disentangled from home-country conditions and larger geopolitical shifts. Our inquiry into migrant domestic workers’ experiences in Singapore thus advances a global-relational analysis of migrant labour arrangements.

Drawing on the personal accounts of migrant women in Singapore, we also write this piece to inform ongoing discussions of Myanmar’s post-coup landscape. The enduring effects of the pandemic, compounded by post-coup insecurity and economic contraction in Myanmar, means that more and more migrants are likely to leave the country for work abroad in the coming years. The experiences of migrants abroad are also an important aspect of current social-political dynamics within Myanmar. Whatever the outcome of the ongoing revolution in Myanmar, the current crisis will continue to significantly impact the lives of Myanmar migrants abroad in the years to come. Despite, however, the evident difficulties that Myanmar migrants face in the post-coup moment, the narratives of the women we interviewed reveal political critiques and personal aspirations expressive of the self-emancipatory agency of a nation-in-making.

Khin Thazin is a researcher in the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health. She has worked with local NGOs on migrant support programs and has researched migrant labour issues in Singapore. Her recent publications include, “Keeping the Streets: Myanmar’s Civil Disobedience Movement as Public Pedagogy” and “Homespace: The Intimate Precarity and Oppositional Praxis of Migrant Workers in Singapore.”

Stephen Campbell is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Border Capitalism, Disrupted: Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone (2018), Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement (2022), and numerous articles on labour and migration in Myanmar and Thailand.

Cite as: Thazin, Khin and Campbell, Stephen. 2022. “How the Myanmar coup has impacted migrant workers abroad.” Focaalblog, 7 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/07/khin-thazin-and-stephen-campbell-how-the-myanmar-coup-has-impacted-migrant-workers-abroad/

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