In Greece, during the summer of 2021, we saw again a
proliferation of wildfires that went on for days, like in 2020. While the
climate change argument makes sense, at the same time Greece has experienced
wildfires for many decades now. In the post-dictatorial Greek popular
imaginary, fire represents the creative destruction process of a violent
disjunctive modernization, led by a quasi-illicit capitalism based on the
construction boom. Across Greece, one can hear stories about great wildfires
that flattened forests and green mountainsides only to see villas, casinos and
tourist resorts growing in their place some years later. Tied to the monolithic
emphasis on an economic growth strategy based almost entirely on tourist
services, wildfires over the last decades have facilitated the expansion of
tourist infrastructures and the built environment. The systematic exploitation
of gray areas (parathirakia/παραθυράκια) in Greek environmental law and urban
planning law have facilitated these opportunities (see Dalakoglou and Kallianos
2019). Factual or not, such arguments have been enhanced during the recent
wildfires, as many informants of the infra-demos project are noticing that
during the early years of the financial crisis (2010-2016) when real estate,
tourism and infrastructures investment saw a drop, one also witnessed a
noticeable decrease in wildfires, for the first time in decades. Although we
cannot confirm such datasets on wildfires, if one takes as case study the ways
that the state protects archaeological sites from wildfires and other risks,
there is arguably an implied link with specific shifts in the Greek state’s
touristic growth strategies.
Antiquities on Fire
In one of these usual wildfires in August 2020, some shocking news came to the attention of the Greek public. The famous Lion Gate of Mycenae, erected in 1250 BC, was set ablaze as the Greek civil protection agencies failed to protect it from a wildfire that had flared up in the area. The Greek government downplayed the issue, stating that no real damage had been done. Many local informants of Poulimenakos claimed that during the previous years there had been fire-brigade forces near the site for its protection, but they were not present that summer.
In August 2021, Greece faced perhaps the most destructive
wave of wildfires in its recent history, with more than a million acres of
forest turned into ashes. During this wave, the archaeological site of ancient
Olympia in Peloponnese was almost eradicated, with people on the site talking
about the pure luck in the guise of a change in the wind direction, which
ultimately prevented that catastrophe. The official policy of the Greek state
was to evacuate the area and protect human lives, with saving the forest or the
archeological sites seen as less of a priority. A few weeks earlier, the most
important archaeological site in the Attica region outside the Athens
metropolis, Poseidon Temple in Sounio, saw a wildfire next to the monument. It
was extinguished thanks to its proximity to the town of Lavrio, where sizeable
forces of fire brigades are stationed, yet many locals mention to Dalakoglou
that if it was not for the five-star hotel that was between the ancient temple
and the fire, they would not have saved it in time. Another wildfire entered
the national park of Sounio later in August 2021.
Figure 1: Remains of fire 1km away from the ancient temple of Sounio (on the background). Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
The Archaeology of Greece 2.0
Earlier in 2021, the Ministry of Culture caused outrage among
archaeologists of the country with its actions. To mention a few, a large public
construction project was carried out in the Acropolis of Athens to create a
large concrete walkway, which was built near the monument during the lockdown.
Many compared the construction to a fashion show stage. And the truth is that a
few months later, a luxury clothing brand arranged a show on the new cement
corridor with the Parthenon as the background for the videos and photos. A few
weeks later, Sounio was booked by the same brand for another fashion show. The
indifference that the current Ministry of Culture has shown towards ancient
sites has other facets. For example, in the summer of 2021, the Minister
announced that the entire Byzantine high street in Thessaloniki that was
discovered during the public works for the construction of Thessaloniki metro
will be removed. The Minister, an archeologist herself, would not consider the
proposals to exhibit and integrate the findings within the metro
infrastructure, which was promoted by various archaeology associations. The
promise that 92% of the site will be reconstructed on the site after the works
for the metro are completed did not convince the archaeologists. The metro and
the gentrification it will bring to various parts of the city were more
important priorities than the findings, which are significant even for a nation
with as much archaeological wealth as Greece.
Figure 2: The announcement that the Sounio temple will not be open to the public due to the photoshoot. Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
Figure 3: The Acropolis after the cement walkway was built. Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
“Greece 2.0” was what Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis,
leader of the neoliberal New Democracy party, named the country’s post-covid
recovery plan. Greece 2.0 suggests a plan oriented to all-inclusive hotels,
casinos and hip new neighborhoods, signifying a shift to a new tourism model to
appeal to different kinds of customers. The city branding and the emphasis on
this new type of tourism has been going on for some years now at the behest of
Greek tourism policymakers, targeting so-called “high quality” tourists with
big wallets. These new categories of tourists are expected to be rich enough to
buy cheap metropolitan properties to rent out on airbnb when they are not
staying there, thus gentrifying the cities, or to afford the high prices of
5-star tourist accommodation. To put it simplistically, there seems to be a
transition from the stereotypical history-aware tourist in socks and sandals
wandering around the acropolis, to new categories, with little interest in
archaeology (e.g. Western yuppies, Arab sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, and upper
classes from emerging economies).
Before the pandemic, there was a widely held idea that Greek
tourism is no longer affordable for Greeks and is thus only open to foreigners.
The drop in the real income of many Greeks since the crisis of 2010 and the
unaffordability, for most Greeks, of tourist products, especially
accommodation, has caused this gap. To put it simply, until the early 2010s,
there was expensive luxurious accommodation in the islands of Greece, but it
was not rare to also find local small units with a cost of 40-50 EUR per night,
even in the high session. Today, however, such prices are nothing but a fantasy
for many millions of Greeks, who have seen a decrease in their income since
2010. Many people in Greece wait for the state-sponsored ‘social tourism
vouchers’ in order to get a few days in one of the many touristic destinations
of the country. Yet this affects international tourism too, as the Greek
tourist product is addressed increasingly to wealthier classes who look for
five-star tourist experiences.
The Resetting of Popular Greekness
As the anthropological preoccupation with infrastructures has
taught us, things like social and cultural identities, the relation between the
state and its citizenry, and even ideology itself, are not abstract, immaterial
ideas installed in the hearts and minds of the people. A very concrete,
material basis that shapes particular socio-cultural environments is a
prerequisite for social contracts and imagined communities to be shaped. The
archeological sites in Greece served in many ways as such infrastructures, as
they secured the ideological and, in many instances, also the economic
integration of an emerging Greek middle class. As many people (not just the
wealthy elites) were profiting from the commodification of the national identity
within the touristic industry. Restaurants, hotels, stores selling souvenirs,
local and international tour operators, guides, airports, and port
infrastructures all relied to a great extent on that same materiality. The
creative imagination often has depicted with humor the image of the Greek
islander holding a ‘rooms to let’ sign in the port of their island, with
museums and archaeological sites having a significant role in this industry.
Much of the material basis of the national identity was simultaneously the main
axis of the touristic industry.
Of course, Greece is not the only polity that is abandoning
its archeological infrastructures and by extension abandoning a classic liberal
need for a minimum of social cohesion based on a common sociocultural identity.
The destruction of the Notre Dame in Paris some years ago, with the French
state failing to secure one of the most acknowledged material symbols of the
continent, marked probably the end of the western need to produce relations and
continuities with a timeline and a purpose that make sense.
What can this seeming abandonment of a certain kind of
archaeological tourism infrastructure tell us about Greece today? As the
neoliberal model deepens, the tourist industry is “liberated” from the need to link
with a collective identity. This identity traditionally functioned by
economically and socio-culturally integrating the lower classes inside Greece,
and by addressing mass tourism outside. As this link was inextricably connected
with certain material infrastructures, the indifference towards them signifies
an era in which the tourist model, and perhaps the very structure of Greek
society, will no longer be based on gaining consensus from the lower strata,
but in aggressively serving the 1%.
The neoliberal management of the world is sending collective
identities and the sense of history or geography into a state of limbo. The
aesthetics of a 5-star all-inclusive hotel on a beachfront are almost
context-free, a tourist could be pretty much in any of the 5 continents, and in
any recent decade, and have a very similar, if not the same, experience.
Similarly, the aesthetics of a New York loft, which preoccupies much of the
renovation for airbnb purposes in apartments in downtown Athens (even quoting
‘New York style loft’ in the airbnb ad), could be almost anywhere else in the Americas
or Europe. What is needed for neoliberalism is a culture of the present
expressed in constant transactions. Everything else can be surrendered to the
merciless critique of entropy.
Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is director and PI of the research project infra-demos (funded from NWO-Vidi grant) and co-director of the Lab on Infrastructures Sustainability and the Commons.
Giorgos Poulimenakos holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University and a MA from University of Sussex, UK. He is currently a PhD fellow in the ERC-funded project PORTS, based in the department of social anthropology of the University of Oslo. He will be researching the increasing significance of ports and maritime logistics in globalized, contemporary capitalism through the case study of Piraeus, an emerging Greek port in the global market bought recently by Chinese interests.
Dalakoglou, D., & Kallianos, Y. (2018).
‘Eating mountains’ and ‘eating each other’: Disjunctive modernization,
infrastructural imaginaries and crisis in Greece. Political Geography, 67,
76-87.
Poulimenakos G. & Dalakoglou D. (2018). Airbnbizing Europe: mobility, property and platform capitalism. Online publication or Website, Open Democracy
Cite as: Dalakoglou, Dimitris and Georgos Poulimenakos. 2021. “The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%.” FocaalBlog, 30 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/30/dimitris-dalakoglou-georgos-poulimenakos-the-past-is-on-fire/
‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility.
The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals
is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing politicians endorsed by
police unions in countries such as Brazil and the United States. In the case of
Brazil, a global reference in police terror, the narrative of police victimization
helped president Jair Bolsonaro to galvanize popular support around the
fictional image of patriotic officers (or soldiers like himself), ready to put
their lives on the line to protect citizens and save the country.
Certainly, police officers are killed in Brazil at a rate
that supersedes any other country in the hemisphere. According to the Brazilian
Forum of Public Safety, 343 officers were killed in 2018 alone, 75% of them
off-duty (FBS 2019). Although the numbers are extremely high when compared with
the United States, for instance, where 181 law enforcement agents were killed
in 2019 (NLEOMF 2020), this is a profession that, contrary to popular belief, has
very low lethality rates worldwide. Yet, even in Brazil, with astonishing
levels of officers killed on and off-duty, homicide is not the leading cause of
police death. In what seems to be a trend in Brazil and the US, the leading
cause of officers’ death is suicide (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Exame
2019; see also Miranda and Guimarães 2016).
While assault and killings of law enforcement officers do
occur, this real risk is part and parcel of the work they perform. In fact, it
is common-sensical that their work grants them special protection not enjoyed
by any other civilian occupation. To raise a hand against a police officer is
not only a serious felony offense, but is also quite often a lethal one. In
Brazil, when an officer is killed, dozens of poor and predominantly black youths
are killed in revenge raids such as the infamous 2006 massacre, when at least 600
youth were killed within the span of one week in response to gangs’ lethal attacks
against police stations (Mães de Maio 2018). Police even deploy assassinations in
order to pressure politicians to grant them better labor conditions.
Indeed, spreading terror has been an ‘efficient’ police strategy to gain political leverage. For instance, in February 2020, days before carnival, the Military Police of Ceará went on strike. Although the direct involvement of striking officers in the slaughter is the object of an ongoing investigation, there were several denunciations of police-linked death squads and hooded men in police patrols terrorizing the population. Coincidently or not, and repeating a pattern seen in other Brazilian contexts (see De Souza, 2016), at least two hundred individuals were killed within the span of one week (Jucá 2020; Adorno 2020). To no avail, the leftist governor Camilo Santana denounced these uses of terror as a tactic to bring the government to its knees. Widespread denunciations of human rights violations, from torture to assassinations, are consistently met with impunity in a country where at least 6,200 individuals were killed by the police in 2018 (17 deaths each day!), of which 99% were young male, favela residents and 75% were blacks (FBSP 2019).
Image 1: While the US is the leading country in incarceration rates, Brazil leads the way in the killing of Black individuals by law enforcement policies. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, within six years (2015-2020) 29, 952 civilians were killed by the Brazilian police force. Black youth account for 8 in 10 individuals killed by the police. Click here for geo-reference on the lethality of policing in Brazil.
In this following, I focus not so much on the
paradigmatic victims of police terror in societies of the African Diaspora such
as Brazil and the United States, but rather on the critical role urban
ethnographers can play in demystifying the ‘war on police’ and in advancing an insurgent
movement pushing toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is
the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the
highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has, within the last few
decades, seen a proliferation of socio-anthropological studies on police
violence and police culture. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing
attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but
officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of
its techniques – in their attempts to provide ‘privileged’ accounts of police
praxis (e.g., França 2019; Muniz and Silva 2010; Storani 2008).
This article should be understood neither as a literature
review of the burgeoning field of police studies in Brazil (for an overview
see, Muniz et., all, 2018) nor an overview of global anthropology of policing. Instead,
I call attention to new directions in the study of policing as a colonial regime
of control that exists in urban contexts in Brazil and the USA, but is hardly unique
to those societies. Crucially, as a global project, the practice of anthropology – and police fieldwork in particular (Steinberg
2020) – cannot be dissociated from the geopolitics of empire and global
antiblackness. Enduring global
colonialism is configured and continuously reinforced by Europe/US-led regimes
of security and knowledge production. And yet, racial apartheid enforced by police
terror –homeland security? — blurs geo-ontological boundaries between global
north and global south and reasserts the afterlife of colonialism (Susser 2020;
Nonini 2020; Beaman, 2020).
How should anthropologists objectively treat police innocence
and victimhood narratives without participating in this ongoing coloniality? If,
as Anna Souhami forcefully argues, ‘the dynamics of police culture [ethnographers]
so powerfully criticis[e] are reflected in the construction of the ethnographic
process’ (2019: 207), how should we ethically write about police victimization
without (even if involuntarily) endorsing the trope of cops’ fragility? What
does the narrative of victimization engender? Finally, what should be the place
of anthropology of policing in the urgent call of black activists and black
studies to defend the dead? While studying the police (and any mainstream
institution) does not necessarily lead to uncritical alignment to power, the
antiblack animus of policing makes it extraordinarily challenging and politically
compromising for anthropologists to work with the police in the name of
ethnographic complexity and simultaneously engage with social movement’s
critique of policing-as-antiblackness (Hale, personal communication). That is
to say, the anthropology of policing, even when highly critical of policing
structure, seems to underscore a liberal reform paradigm that goes against what
the paradigmatic victims of police terror demand: defunding, dismantling and
abolishing the police state.
The Myth of Police
Fragility
There is a scene in Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s 2019 movie, Queen and Slim,
that is worth recuperating here. The young couple is going on their first date
when a white cop pulls them over. The minor traffic violation ends with Slim (Daniel
Kaluuya) taking the cop’s gun and shooting him dead in self-defense when the
officer fires his gun against Queen (Jodie Tuner). Slim wants to turn himself
in, but Queen (who is a lawyer) reminds him that their blackness has already
sealed their destiny. The ‘cop-killers’ go on the run through the deep South,
hoping to reach Cuba. As the video of the killing goes viral, Queen and Slim’s
story mobilizes other African Americans and images of Black Lives Matter
protests are merged with their fugitive endeavor. The scene that strikes me
features Junior, a black boy in the foreground leading a demonstration. With
fists in the air he shouts, ‘Let them go!’ When an officer tries to stop him,
he pulls the officer’s gun and shoots the officer dead.
One may speculate: What led him to such an
expected act of violence? Perhaps the painful consciousness of his blackness? Perhaps
the limited options available, within the context of ‘fugitive justice,” to stop
the “grinding machine of human flesh” policing represents? The film and the scene in particular aroused
heated debate on the nature and scope of Black resistance against police
violence in the Black Lives Matter era. Lena Waithe has called the movie ‘a
meditation on black life in America’ (King 2019). However, where the filmmakers
gave cinematic representation to an all too familiar “state of captivity”
(Wilderson 2018:58), some received the movie as a ‘war on cops’ while others
blamed it for ‘going too far left in its
implications in that black people condone, protect and are inspired by
reciprocating violence against police as a result of their experiences with law
enforcement’ (Vaughn 2019).
The “war-on-cops” rhetoric and
its attending practices in the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement in the United
States and its parallel (albeit diffuse) pro-cops movement in Brazil can be
read as what legal scholar Frank Rudy Cooper calls “the myth of cop fragility”.
Hecontends that such mythology draws a false equivalence between ‘blue
lives’ and ‘black lives’ by ‘reposition[ing] police officers, and whites in
general, as the new victims’ of racism (Cooper 2020: 654). In that sense, ‘white backlash better
explains Blue Lives Matter’s self-defense perspective than does the
vulnerability of police officers to attack’ (2020: 655).
By hijacking the
meanings of the black struggle for life, the police also cannibalize the terms
of the debate. This, in turn, seems to resonate in the academia’s ambivalence (unwillingness?)
in dealing with the cruelty of police power. Whereas radical social movements
and scholars lay bare the impossibility of freeing justice from its coloniality
(e.g., Best and Hartman 2005; Segato 2007; McDowell
and Fernandez 2018; Flauzina and Pires 2020), we see a proliferation of
works on police reform, or, in the case of anthropology, an investment in cops
as a new subject of inquiry whose violent work must be understood in relation
to broad social norms and power dynamics. I have nothing against the election
of cops as ethnographic subjects and indeed, such an election has been crucial
to illuminate social processes that otherwise would continue to remain obscure.
Though in a fragmented form, I take this very path in my own ethnographic work
on police brutality in São Paulo, Brazil and Cali, Colombia.
Likewise, recent groundbreaking ethnographies of policing
(I am consciously grouping scholars from distinct disciplines whose work
employs ethnography as its main methodology) have shed light on the ways in
which officers justify their work as habitus – ‘just doing their job’ – which
reflects a socially shared belief in torture and killings as a form of ordering
the chaotic social world. In racialized geographies such as the Paris’ ‘banlieues,’ Los Angeles’ ‘ghettos’ or Brazil’s
‘favelas,’ these critical ethnographies show that officers enforce sociospatial
imaginaries of belonging, entitlement and justice (Fassin 2013; Denyer-Willis 2015;
Roussell 2015). Officers also perform a peculiar form of order-making in
contested regimes of urban governance by competing local authorities such as
drug-traffickers, paramilitarism, power-brokers and so on (e.g., Salem and
Bertelsen 2020; Larkins 2013; Penglase 2012; Arias 2006). Other interventions
have accounted for the ways in which police negotiate their everyday encounters
with institutional violence and public discredit. Officers are forcefully
portrayed as political actors whose practices, emotions and subjectivities echo
broader systems of morals (Pauschinger 2020; see
also Jauregui 2014). Police and policing produce a mode of “sociability,”
an ethos, and a political rationale of governance (Karpiak 2010; Sclofsky 2016; Muniz and Albernaz 2017). Finally,
there is the call for ‘publicity, practicality and epistemic solidarity’ among
anthropologists, law enforcement agencies and larger publics to respond to the
disciplinary invitation for political engagement with pressing problems of
corruption and violence (Mutsaers et al. 2015: 788).
These and many other works (too many to be listed in a
commentary note) reflect an important anthropological contribution to demystifying
this troubling institution and the subjectivity of its agents. In the last
decade or so, it has become a consensus in the field – regardless of one’s
theoretical perspective – that policing is much more than uniformed personnel
patrolling the streets. By making
ethnographically visible what policing does and produces, ethnographers have
provided insightful understandings of mundane forms of order-making,
statecrafts and rationales of government (see Karpiak and Garriott 2018, Martin
2018, Steinberg 2020 for an overview).
My
intervention does not go against these contributions that I loosely locate
within the field of ethnographies of police. My concern here is with what
anthropology does and what anthropology produces when giving cops more voice
and space in these critical times when cities are on fire. In their edited
volume, The Anthropology of Police, editors Kevin Karpiack and Willian
Garriott ask the important questions: ‘What are the ethical and political
stakes of trying to humanize the police? Are there any grounds on which one
could even justify an approach that took up such a project of humanization over
and against one centered on cataloguing, critiquing, and decrying
police-perpetuated harms?’ (2018: 6-7). The authors answer this crucial question
by calling for the study of police as a way to challenge the discipline’s trend
to “study up” and as an attempt to understand contemporary notions of humanness
embedded in policing and security practices. To them, one cannot understand the
world and what it means to be human without understanding the work of police
(2018: 8).
In
this sense, it is argued, the risk pays-off: when attentive to one’s own
positionality, critical ethnographies of policing can shed light on important issues
such as the culture of militarism, the corrosion of democracy and the
normalization of gendered violence (Kraska 1996; Denyer-Willis 2016). I can relate
to that. My fragmented ethnographic encounters with police officers (usually
themselves from the lowest social stratum of the society they supposedly serve
and protect) gave me a first-hand understanding of how officers negotiate
apparently contradictory approaches of defending the killings of ‘criminals,’ enthusiastically
supporting a ‘new’ human rights-oriented community police, energetically detaching
themselves from the “bad cops,” and embracing a hyper-militaristic crusade to ‘save’
family and Christian values (Alves 2018).
While doing ethnography with/of police does not necessarily stand in contradiction to the ethics and promises of anthropology in solving human problems, something I have no doubt my colleagues genuinely embrace as a political project, and while we should suspend assumptions that all anthropologists must adhere to the militant/activist theoretical-methodological orientation (Harrison 1992; Hale 2008, Hale personal communication), studying the police requires one to face tough ethical questions on the troubling position of witnessing the perpetration of violence, the unintended normalization of police culture (see Souhami 2019), and the dangerous humanization of police work.
My analysis (and that of many of my
colleagues), was politically aligned with activists and empathic with
individuals embracing outlawed forms of resistance against police terror.
Still, I was constantly asked which side I was on. For instance, a black young
man, who by the time of my research in the favelas of São Paulo was making a
living in what he refers as ‘the world of crime,’ unapologetically told me I
was an asshole for being ‘too straight, too naïve, too afraid to die.’ In Cali,
Colombia, although I was considered “not kidnappable” — as the member of a
local gang laughed and joked around, perhaps demarking the difference between
my physical appearance and those of other foreign researchers usually from the
global north — I was awkwardly enough associated with the mestizo middle
class and its regime of morality that called for state violence against black
youth seen as the scapegoat of the city’s astonishing levels of violence.
Thus, my contention here is not so much to
stop studying police, but rather, to disengage from a seductive analysis of
power that, while compelling in scholarly terms and in-depth ethnographic description,
may involuntarily give voice to unethical power structures personified by the
police. Following Frank Wilderson’s assertion that police terror ‘is an ongoing
tactic of human renewal…a tactic to secure humanity’s place’ (2018:48), one
should ask what such an anthropological project of humanization entails. If we do not want our work to end up fueling
and corroborating the skepticism over a discipline with an ugly history of complicity
with oppressive power, then it is about time for an unapologetic ‘f*ck the
police!’ in studies of policing.
Maroon Anthropology
In Progressive dystopia, abolition, antiblackness and schooling in San Francisco, anthropologist Savannah Shange urges anthropologists to apply ‘the tools of our trade to the pursuit of liberation, and [to enact] the practice of willful defiance in the afterlife of slavery’ (Shange 2019: 159). Abolitionist anthropology responds to scholars law-abiding investment in policing – what she calls carceral progressivism – by refusing the promises of the liberal state and liberal academia (39-42). The imperative ‘F*ck the Police!’ could be another way of engaging with Shange’s invitation to make space for freedom in our writing and our practices. The urgency of the moment asks anthropologists to work against the police, not with the police. If nothing else, the recent urban ‘riots’ in response to the lynching of black individuals in the United States and in Brazil support my call. Individuals strangulated with knee-to-neck asphyxia, skulls broken by police boots, wounded bodies calculatedly left agonizing in the streets or tied to the police patrol and dragged through the streets, rapes, disappearances and continued extortion are some of the mundane practices of police terror that should make us pause and reflect.
Image 2: On March 14, Marielle Franco, a black feminist, human rights defender and city councilperson from the socialist party, was murdered. She was also leading the Human Rights Commission to monitor police and military abuse during the military intervention decreed by then president Michel Temer and she was vocal against paramilitary groups that control Rio’s political system. Two years after her death, the question remains: “Who ordered the killing of Marielle?” (Source: Workers Party. https://pt.org.br/caso-marielle-franco-um-ano-sem-solucao/)
Let’s be honest, as a discipline, we have failed to side significantly
with the victims of police terrorism beyond sit-in moments at conferences, open
letters, creatively designed syllabi or academic journal articles such as this
very one. Anthropologists seem to be too invested in the economy of
respectability that grants us access to institutional power ‘to engage
anthropology as a practice of abolition’ (Shange 2019: 10). Nothing can be more
illustrative of such an abysmal dissonance with this call than the political
lexicon we use to describe police terrorism itself – it is telling that the
word terror is barely articulated in the field of anthropology of police
– and people’s call to ‘burn it down’ and ‘end the f*cking world’. With one fist
in the air and a rocket in the other hand, demonstrators have denounced again
and again that ‘Brazil is a graveyard,’ ‘the US is a plantation,’ ‘police are
the new slave-catcher.’ Cities turned into a
smoking battleground, police stations stormed, patrols set on fire. What
has anthropology got to offer beyond well-crafted texts, sanitized analyses of
the moment and good intentions to decolonize the discipline? We lack rage!
Like police, and unlike workers in general, tenured
scholars (including anthropologists) have very low risk in performing their
work. Police perform what Micol Siegel forcefully calls ‘violence work’ (Siegel
2018). They are professionals that essentially deliver violence represented as a
public good. Anthropologists, I would argue, are ‘violence workers’ not only in
performing the enduring colonial project of othering, but also when taking a ‘reformist’,
‘neutral’ or distant stance on social movements that demand radical changes.
Even worse, in giving voice to police based on a pretentious technicality of
‘just’ collecting data, anthropology ends up helping to quell that struggle (see
Bedecarré 2018 for groundbreaking work on the role of white scholars in
promoting vigilante justice against Black anger). That is to say, the nature of
the violence performed by ethnographers of policing may differ in degree and
scope from police terror but, as Hortense Spillers reminds us, “we might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us”
(Spillers 1987: 68).
If
the subfield of anthropology of police wants to be coherent to the discipline’s
(incomplete) decolonizing turn, it should have no ambiguity in regarding police
‘violence’ as terror, have no doubts as to which lives are in peril in these terroristic
policing practices and refuse the false promises of reforming this colonial
institution. For ethnographers, refusing to performing ‘violence work’ may
require disloyalty to the state – including rejecting the self-policing
required by corporate academia – and instead unapologetically embrace the
position of an insurgent subject whose ‘coherence [is] shaped by political
literacy emanating from communities confronting crisis and conflict’ (see James
and Gordon 208:371).
I am
not completely sure how an insurgent anthropology of police would look (Ralph,
2020 is a powerful example of how anthropologists can use the discipline’s
tools to mobilize larger audiences against police terror). A departure point
for discussion, however, would be the intellectual humbleness to learn from the
wretched of the earth’s refusal to legitimize, ‘humanize’ and promote the
reforming of the police, not to mention the temptation to equate cop’s (real)
vulnerability to violence with the (mundane) killing of civilians. Ultimately,
those of us doing ethnography in collaboration with men and women in uniform ought
to ask ourselves how to express empathy with and mourn blue lives – since as
ethnographers we develop emotional bonds to our interlocutors even if critical
of their behaviors– and still remain critical of the regime of law that
necessitates and legitimizes the evisceration of black lives. How do we attend
to the ethical demand for all (blue) lives’ grievability while also attentive
to the ways, as some anthropologists have shown (Kurtz 2006; and Vianna et
al., 2011), the state is anthropomorphized and performed by
political agents? Are not cops’ lives, insofar as their identity are attached
to the (state) terrorism they perform, an expression of state livingness? That
is to say, blue lives are not the same as black lives because blue lives are
state lives (albeit not the only ones, a peculiar performance of state
sovereignty). There is no space for a theorization on the multiple ways the
state comes into being as a mundane practice of domination. It is enough to say
that at least in the USA and Brazil, statecraft is antiblackcraft. Indeed, the
military labor performed by the police in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil
and the United States is only made possible by the ‘politics of enmity’ (Mbembe
2003) that informs contemporary regimes of urban security. It is in the terrain
of sovereignty, thus, that one has to situate the work of policing. As Siegel and others have shown, one of the
most important realizations of state violence is the mystification of police
work as civilian as opposed to military labor. The police, the myth goes, works
under the register of citizenship to protect and serve civil society. Still,
both police and the military are one and same. The field in which police
operates is a military one, which works effectively and precisely to deploy
terror in a sanitized and legitimate way (Wooten 2020; Siegel 2018; see also Kraska
2007).
This is not a peripheral point. One has only
to consider the ways black people encounter officers in the streets as soldier
and experience policing as terror (again, asphyxiated with the knee on the
neck, dragged in the streets, dismembered and disappeared) in opposition to the
contingent violence experienced by white victims of cops’ aggression (Wilderson
2018; Alves and Vargas 2017) or by cops’ vulnerability inherent to their
profession. And yet, if the logic of enmity is what sustains the enduring
antiblack regime of terror enforced by policing, from the point of view of its
paradigmatic enemy reforming the police is absurd and praising blue lives is
insane.
How might anthropologists challenge the
asymmetric positionality of terrified police lives and always already terrifying
black beings? When one officer dies, it
is a labor accident. When an officer kills, it is part of his or her labor in
performing the state. The degrees, causality and likelihood matter here. Even
in societies such as Brazil, where the number of officers killed is extremely
high, police lives are not as in peril as conservative pundits want us to
believe. The lives of those cops eventually killed ‘in service’ are weaponized
forms of life that predict the death of black enemies. Thus, police and their
victims belong to two different registers, and if there is an ethical issue in
relativizing any death—an approach I firmly refuse –, there is equal or
even greater risk in lumping together state delinquency and retaliatory
violence by its victims.
There is no equivalence between blue lives
and black lives, and even if the call for equivalence is the order of the day in
the liberal sensibility that ‘all lives matter,’ this is not the job of
anthropology to reconcile these two positions. It is in the spirit of
anthropology’s moral and political commitment to the oppressed – a commitment that
while empathic with the powerless is also highly critical of the uses of violence
as liberatory tool — that we should insurge against this false
equivalency.
Based on her work with activists in the South
African liberation movement, Nancy Scheper-Hughes
asks, “what makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from the human responsibility
to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of
historical events as we are privileged to witness them?” (1995:411). The author
deals with this question by highlighting the complexity of not relativizing
violence of the oppressed or taking a neutral distance from the cruelty of the
oppressor and yet, positioning one’s fieldwork as a site of struggle. She
opposes the anthropologist as a “fearless spectator” (a neutral and objective
eye) and the witness (the anthropologist as a “companheira”). The later is
positioned “inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally
committed being” and “accountable for what they see and what they fail to see,
how they act and how they fail to act in critical situations” (1995: 419).
If we consider current waves of demonstrations
against police terror as a historical moment that scholars committed to human
liberation cannot refuse to attend, how do we respond to this call without been
misunderstood as inciters of violenceagainst the police? Although an insurgent
anthropology should learn from different historical and ethnographic contexts
where retaliatory violence has been deployed as one legitimate tool to
counteract the brutality of power (Abufarha 2009; Cobb 2014; Umoja 2013), my
critique here is obviously not an argument for embracing
violence against cops as the way out of the current crisis of policing. I am
also not turning a blind eye to a range of political possibilities militant and
activist anthropologists already embrace in favor of empowering victims of
state-sanctioned violence as “negative-workers”, public intellectuals, or
member of advocacy groups (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995; Mullings 2015). Rather, informed
by a black radical tradition, I am inviting anthropologists to rebel and change
the terms of engagement with the police by questioning our (and our
discipline’s) loyalty to the carceral state.
Thus, f*ck the police! is
not a rhetorical device, but rather an ethical imperative and moral obligations
to the eviscerating lives lost by state delinquency. It is indeed an invitation
to seriously engage with the desperate call from the streets for making Black Lives
Matter. Attending to their call, on their terms, would require a deep scrutiny
on how anthropology participate in antiblackness as a socially shared practice.
It also requires us to consider how antiblackness renders legal claims for
redressing police terror quite often of little account, and what resisting
police terror means to those whose pained bodies resist legibility as victims. What
does the anthropological project of humanizing the police mean to those ontologically
placed outside Humanity? For those whose marked bodies make Queen and
Slim’s subject position – as new runaway slaves – very familiar and intimate, the
answer is quite straightforward. Fuck the police!
Acknowledgments: This
paper has benefited from generous comments from Charlie Hale, Micol Siegel,
Graham Denyer-Willis, João Vargas and Tathagatan Ravindran, as well as from
engaging audiences at the University of Colorado/ IBS Speaker Series,
University of London / Race Policing and the City Seminar, and the University
of Massachusetts/Anthropology Colloquium. I also thank Terrance Wooten and
Amanda Pinheiro for a joint-conversation on police terror during the Cities
Under Fire forum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Don Kalb,
Patrick Neveling and Lillie Gordon provided invaluable editorial assistance. Errors
and omissions are of course mine.
Jaime A Alves teaches Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His academic interest includes urban coloniality and black spatial insurgency in Brazil and Colombia. He is the author of “The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minesotta Press, 2018). His publications can be found at https://jaimeamparoalves.weebly.com
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This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past and present projects of large-scale resource extraction and subsequent “recultivation” measures to convert the land back to agricultural production or natural conservation. Lignite (or brown coal) is exploited in vast open-pit mines here – the Hambach mine not far from the city of Cologne is dubbed “Europe’s biggest hole” – “swallowing” everything from forests to villages in their way.
Coal mining – in contrast to the more authoritarian
and centralized organization of oil extraction – has been historically
associated with the development of the welfare state and the consolidation of
workers’ rights in western democracies. However, as Thomas H. Eriksen notes,
“contemporary coal mining has been restructured and reconfigured to resemble
oil drilling formally”, becoming “less labour-intensive and more
capital-intensive than in the past” (2016: 38). This neoliberal restructuring resulted
not only in the transformation of institutions of “Carbon Democracy” (Mitchell 2009),
as the conditions for workers to organize and wield influence over the means of
production were eroded, but also in declining economic dependency on the coal
industry in the Rhineland region.
Despite this decrease of economic significance in the
region, RWE, the energy company currently operating the mines, has still been considerably
involved in local politics over the past decades – not least because of its
mandate to secure the provision of cheap electricity for German industry and consumers.
To this day the state-approved “general public interest” serves as the legal
basis for the suspension of fundamental rights, making possible the
expropriation of land titles, the demolition of protected landmarks, or the
circumvention of guidelines for environmental protection for the extraction of
fossil fuels in Germany’s lignite mining regions.
Image 1: A new energy horizon after the end of the world? Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine (Picture taken by the author)
Environmental destruction and relocation of tens of thousands of people due to numerous mine expansions in the Rhineland were thus firmly connected to narratives of national progress and regional prosperity. Mourning over losses of personal possessions and feelings of belonging were relegated to the private realm, and little room was left for critical voices in the public domain.
Recently however, this hegemonic state-industry nexus has been successfully challenged by a coalition of environmentalists, citizen initiatives, radical activists and other civil society actors (despite the continued economic profitability of the coal industry, ensured by “environmental load displacement” (Hornborg 2009) and other indirect subsidies). Their demands to save the remaining forest in front of the Hambach mine effectively stopped the encroaching extractivist operation. They were supported by a government commission installed to negotiate the conditions of Germany’s energy transition, following the decision to phase out the coal industry as a national contribution toward climate change mitigation.
The prospect of a global climate crisis has therefore led to the current reevaluation of lignite mining from guarantor of wealth and stability to driver of multi-scalar uncertainties. This enabled previously marginalized actors to voice their concerns by articulating their demands in terms of these globalized discourses. Yet, the (inter-)nationally reported success of the protests around the Hambach forest was only one instance of ongoing negotiations about the pace and scale of energy transition, from the perspective of the critical civil society actors with whom I conduct research in the Rhineland.
Since this seeming breakthrough for civic participation in shaping the region’s future, numerous setbacks and scandals have occurred. These are testament to the inability of carbon-democratic institutions to deal with a crisis that challenges its basic principles of growth as progress and wage labor as key to well-being. Controversies range from the passing of a coal exit law that many critical voices interpret as a “coal extension law”, to the federal government holding back an official report that questions the energetic necessity of the energy company’s plans for mine expansion.
Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I
regularly participated in meetings of a local group of critical civil society
actors who played a decisive role in saving the forest and turning it into a
national symbol of climate activism. Their political engagement served as an
opportunity to take a closer look at the uneven futures of energy transition in
the Rhineland. As we sit in a circle in the Protestant church hall of a village
close to the Hambach mine, many of the participants share impressions of
feeling alienated from their home region by the energy company’s mining activities.
Despite being part of the majority that does not depend on the coal industry
for income, some of the locals feel their concerns were generally ignored by communal
politics, making them rather skeptical of established political institutions’
capability to develop a sustainable and equitable future for the mining region.
Nonetheless, they see the impending process of energy
transition as a window of opportunity to reconnect with their home region by
actively participating in the development of alternative future visions, beyond
institutions of representative democracy. This desire for autonomous
participation is directly linked to the affective alienation associated by some
of my interlocutors with the large-scale landscape transformation of the mining
activities, coupled with the close connection between local politics and the energy
company.
This carbon-democratic entanglement of political
institutions and energy industry experienced in everyday life in the
Rhineland’s lignite mining region probably finds its most drastic manifestation
in the practice of “creating facts” (“Fakten schaffen”), of which my
interlocutors often accuse the mining company. This expression usually refers
to the practice of producing accomplished facts which alter conditions in a way
to favor certain outcomes. Often their undeniable materiality forces other
actors to acknowledge these facts, in turn leading to the retrospective
legitimization of the outcomes of Fakten schaffen. Thus, actors with the
power and institutional support to “create facts” narrow down an otherwise ambiguous
situation potentially open to negotiation by different actors to a specific
path of options in their interest.
In this way the energy company continues the controversial destruction of almost completely relocated villages. Under Germany’s new energy policy, the company is sticking to its operating plan and regular rhythm of extraction and redevelopment, despite radically changing socioecological and energy-political parameters. While numerous critical actors unsuccessfully appeal to democratic institutions to inhibit this pursuit of enforcing prior arrangements through material destruction, the following, more ambiguous example will serve to illustrate this modus operandi of Fakten schaffen and its relation to the feeling of alienation.
Image 2: “Path dependency” – literal and figurative: Solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest (Picture taken by the author)
Thomas, an outspoken and very knowledgeable member of a local citizen initiative against coal mining, and part of the larger group of civil society actors mentioned above, gives me a ride to the train station after we participated in one of the regular protest-walks through the forest at the Hambach mine. As we pass the bridge over the railway connecting the mines with the nearby power plants, I decide to ask him about the solar panels aligning the tracks beneath us. Their sheer size hardly makes them unnoticeable, but I never paid much attention to them, except for contemplating the irony that the fossil fuel infrastructure gives room to more “sustainable” forms of energy generation here. After all, the solar panels seemed somewhat out of place next to passing trains packed with lignite. The panels simultaneously signal the out-of-time-ness of the coal industry and point to a new energy future on the horizon. But Thomas’ reaction to my question made me aware of another aspect regarding their significance for the issue of affective alienation in relation to the practice of Fakten schaffen.
Knowing that most of my interlocutors are in favor of
direct solar energy generation and having the impressive photovoltaic structure
right before our eyes, I am prepared to finally hear a success story about
civic participation in local development. Yet, Thomas is not sympathetic to the
photovoltaic project at all. He tells me it was a typical outcome of
cooperation between energy company and politics in the region.
This sentiment echoes many civil society actors who
criticize that, being the biggest landowner there, RWE conducts itself “like the
lord of a manor” (“Gutsherrenart”), demonstrating the “feudal” excesses
of carbon democracy in the Rhineland, which regularly undermine popular desires
of stronger democratic involvement in matters of future-making. Thomas goes on
to inform me that a citizen initiative proposed a similar project a few years
ago in which the solar panels ought to be lining the highway that was relocated
closer to the village because of the encroaching mine. They had imagined the
photovoltaic structure as serving multiple other functions, such as protecting
villagers from noise and air pollution emitted by the mine and highway. While
the project gained some attention in the local press, it was not supported by
the communal administration and ultimately had to be relinquished.
Around the same time, the energy company came to an
agreement with the administration to make property available for the hitherto
largest photovoltaic project in the region, co-financed by a local bank. The
uncanny speed with which this project was realized confirmed not only the close
ties between politics and coal industry to critical actors like Thomas, but
also showed clearly how easily something can be achieved in the region when the
energy company is directly involved.
So instead of being perceived as a successful step
towards sustainable energy transition in the Rhineland’s lignite mining area,
the solar panels symbolize a failure of civic participation. They appear to Thomas
as a material (arte-)fact resulting from the dubiously close cooperation
between local politics and the energy company. Judged from a distance, this
instance of Fakten schaffen produced a material outcome in line with my
interlocutors’ desires for sustainable energy generation. However, the concrete
infrastructure stands as a monument that exemplifies how flows of innovation
are caught up in existing power relations and ultimately contribute to
consolidating the local incarnation of the state-industry nexus, even in the
face of impending coal exit.
While the lignite industry will disappear in the
foreseeable future, the longstanding history of capitalist extractivism – the main
reason for the affective alienation of a large group of people in the area –
will likely continue, no matter the source of energy. The deliberate promotion
of technoscientific development interventions carried out by experts in the
context of energy transition policies thus works to forestall the
socioecological transformation from below that Thomas and others envision as a
necessary step for politics in the Anthropocene.
Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the economic ministry’s newly adopted rhetoric of establishing a special economic zone in the area to speed up planning processes and pursue the double-bind of “green growth” (Eriksen 2016). Meanwhile, they were simultaneously hosting forums for civic participation that seem disconnected from this pursuit, because they operate at a different pace. This contradictory course of action leads many local actors to evaluate the efforts to integrate civil society into official planning processes as a mere façade, intensifying their skepticism towards institutions of carbon democracy in the region.
This brief insight into my fieldwork shows how inhabitants
that felt alienated by collusions between energy industry and political
institutions, sensed the diverging interest of politics and industry in the
context of energy transition as an opportunity to regain some autonomy over the
shaping of their region’s future. However, instances of Fakten schaffen enacted
by the state-industry nexus function to curtail this grassroots engagement, and
to (re-)connect extractive infrastructures of late industrialism (Fortun 2014)
to narratives of modernization and progress under the aegis of “green growth”.
A coalition of local actors more attuned to the
socioecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene criticizes this
carbon-democratic variant of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and pushes for a
joint transformation of resource use and political culture in search of a
redefined “good life” for all. Rather than a utopian vision of future
prosperity, this practical engagement might be characterized as “patchy hope” (Tsing
et al. 2019) which, despite being situated and emplaced, operates between the
particular and the universal, the local and the global; aware of its own
limitations within ambiguous entanglements of politics and energy in the
Rhineland.
Felix Lussem is a research assistant and lecturer in the field of environmental anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His doctoral research deals with shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” with a regional focus on the Rhineland’s lignite mining area. Contact: flussem2@uni-koeln.de
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Cite as: Lussem, Felix. 2021. “Alienating ‘facts’ and uneven futures of energy transition.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/felix-lussem-alienating-facts-and-uneven-futures-of-energy-transition/
The purpose of
this work is to examine and elaborate on the relationship between the people of
Native North America and the material and ideological content of
developmentalism as examined within the fields of anthropology and Native American
or Indigenous studies. I observe that Indigenous North American peoples are
frequently excluded from discussions of economic development within
anthropology. I try to reconcile this situation and reinsert native peoples
into the anthropology of development by demonstrating the historical and political
continuities between United States Indian Policy with the exported ‘development
apparatus’. In doing so, I follow Neveling (2017) and others in pushing back
against postdevelopment’s dematerialization of development and its emphasis on
development as discourse. Instead, I argue that a historical materialist or
political economic approach (Rose 2015, 2017, 2018) that conceptualizes
development in the terms of Neveling’s (2017) “political economy machinery”
better explains the situation of Indigenous North American peoples and the
processes that make and unmake their lives.
The
overall point here is that in order to properly understand the political
economic basis and ideological dimensions to the Post-War developmentalism
project it is necessary to understand and examine the history of those
political economic models and the history of those ideological dimensions.
While there likely were developmentalist antecedents in the policies of the
European empires, a major distinctive feature of post-war developmentalism is
that it was rooted in the political economy and hegemonic position of the
United States. As such, it is crucial to understand the local antecedents for
American developmentalist policies, which necessarily brings us to Indigenous peoples
as they were the early laboratories of these policies and political economic
models.
Contextual Disconnect
On
the global level, the sub-discipline of the anthropology of development has
flourished in the last half century, along with the interdisciplinary field of
development studies. In that time, prominent anthropological works have been
produced within the sub-discipline that have had a broad impact within
anthropology and influence beyond their own regional and disciplinary scope.
Some of these classics include the works of Arturo Escobar (1995), James
Ferguson (1990), Akhil Gupta (1998), David Mosse (2005), and Tania Murray Li
(2007). These works describe the transformative effects of ‘development’,
especially on the role of state policies, on the regions formerly grouped
together as the “Third World” (i.e. Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin
America), which are now more conventionally referred to as the global South. The
field of the anthropology of development, along with the interdisciplinary
field of development studies, has remained almost exclusively “Third World”
focused. Chibber (2013) observes that this isolation in the form of the lack of
thorough comparative engagement between capitalist development in Western
Europe and capitalist development in the Third World has led to an inaccurate
and romanticized portrayal of each in postcolonial studies of Third World
development. While I generally agree with Chibber’s critique, I wish to move
into a different context. The anthropological literature on development in the
global South is also disconnected from the anthropological literature on what
would otherwise be called ‘development’ in what was at one time called the “Fourth
World” (i.e. stateless nations), especially in regard to Indigenous peoples in
North America. This disconnect actually goes both ways. Jessica Cattelino’s
(2008) book is likely the most popular anthropological work on Indigenous
economic development in Native North America in the last several decades. Even
though her ethnography on (capitalist) economic development within the Seminole
Nation of Florida was published after the texts of those aforementioned
prominent anthropology of development authors, and deals with many similar
issues around development such as the intricacies and problematics of
sovereignty, governmentality, and possible alternative modernities, she does
not utilize them or the other work from this subfield. Furthermore, Tania Murray
Li’s (2010) comparative discussion of the relationship between capitalism and
dispossession in different regions does not include Native North America despite
the lengthy and ongoing history of dispossession of Indigenous peoples in North
America in relation to both colonial policies of the past as well as
contemporary processes of neoliberal capitalism and state (re)formation in the
United States and Canada. Instead of including Native North America as another
case study alongside Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, she mentions Indigenous
people in the Anglo settler states (i.e. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United
States) or CANZUS countries (Cornell 2015) only once and in passing, and does
so with the effect of driving a further wedge between them by saying that the
processes of class differentiation were different among Indigenous peoples in
those locations. Similarly, David Mosse’s (2013) summary article on the state
of the subfield is telling of its geographic orientation as there is no mention
of Indigenous North America at all and only a passing mention of development in
Europe. The point is that these works are not drawing from and are not in
dialogue with each other. There is a disconnect between anthropological studies
of development in the global South with those on the economics and development
of Indigenous people in the Anglo settler states even though (as I will argue) they
share certain commonalities and histories.
Developmentalism and Native North America
The
general scholarly consensus is that the modern ‘development apparatus’ and the pseudo-utopian
vision that is the modernist-developmentalist paradigm began with the Truman
administration after the Second World War, the emergence of the United States
as a superpower, and actions taken within the context of the Cold War in
needing to make capitalism more appealing for the (newly) former colonies in
comparison to the political economic model of the Soviet Union and then later
China (Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1995; Cowen and Shenton 1996; Rist 2008; Kiely
2007). As Escobar (1995: 3-4) states:
The Truman doctrine
initiated a new era in the understanding and management of world affairs,
particularly those concerning the less economically accomplished countries of
the world. The intent was quite ambitious: to bring about the conditions
necessary to replicating the world over the features that characterized the
“advanced” societies of the time—high levels of industrialization and
urbanization, technicalization of agriculture, rapid growth of material
production and living standards, and the widespread adoption of modern
education and cultural values.
The
disconnect between the subfields is especially problematic here because while the
Truman administration does mark a shift in global development policy, scholars
of Native North America would observe that the Truman administration also
constituted a dramatic (and infamous) shift in United States Indian Policy. These
two phenomena are not disconnected. When the Truman administration began
exporting this pseudo-utopian vision of the glories of capitalism, technology,
and Western modernity to the world, United States Indian Policy shifted away
from similar policies of bureaucratization, technicalization, and
industrialization for tribal governments. These policies were based around the
creation and support of local/Indigenous bureaucratic institutions that would
in essence aid internally in the development of Native American societies
toward a form of collectively managed capitalism, which was intended to bring
them as societies into the modern world. Although it had antecedents in United
States Indian Policy in the nineteenth century (Miner 1989) stretching back
even to the Jefferson administration’s ‘civilization’ program, this type of
internal developmentalism began in a comprehensive manner with the
administration of Franklin Roosevelt in the early 1930s and crystallized around
the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (Jorgensen 1978). The Act, as the
product of the political economy of the United States of the period, was
therefore in accordance with the interests of the American bourgeoisie
(Littlefield 1991), and brought about the transformation of Native American
societies by formally institutionalizing capitalism within bureaucratic tribal
governments. In many locations, it had the effect of solidifying political
power over Indigenous communities by the emergent Indigenous bourgeoisie (Schröder 2003; Nagata 1987; Ruffing 1979;
Rose 2014).
The Truman administration marked the shift in Indian Policy away from Reorganization and towards Termination (Duthu 2008; Fixico 1986). The Termination period involved a series of policies that sought to formally complete the integration or incorporation of Indigenous peoples into the American mainstream political economy by means of subjecting them to the authority of the States, physically relocating them off reservations and to urban areas, and ending—or terminating—the political and legal standing of Indigenous governments in the eyes of the United States (Duthu 2008). In short, the Termination era represents a shift in the orientation of developmentalism for native peoples: from one where their own local bureaucratic institutions were fostered as the means to bring native people into capitalist modernity, to one where these same institutions were viewed as the impediments to their achievement of modernity. It represents a shift from the policies of internal developmentalism to an external developmentalism.
The
internal developmentalist policies of Indian Reorganization bear a resemblance
to the modernist-developmentalism that the United States exported to the world
during the Truman administration. It is my contention that the development
apparatus and the modernist-developmentalist paradigm are direct successors to
the long history of United States Indian Policy and these efforts. The Truman
administration’s shift to a policy of global scope meant that they were to
export what is in essence the same civilizing project except they did so in the
language of development and modernity. However, by the 1970s, Indian Policy
would shift back toward internal developmentalism in the periphery except this
time under the label of self-determination (Duthu 2008). This represents an
oscillation of developmentalism in the center and in the periphery
corresponding to periods of expansion and contraction of American political
economy (Friedman 1994). For native peoples, internal developmentalism marks a
period of peripheralization as the center contracts, while termination and
assimilation mark a period of external developmentalism and reincorporation
into the center as it expands.
Similarly,
the geographic contexts must be comparatively examined to draw out these
historical parallels to better understand the historical and contemporary
dimensions of capitalist development. For example, at around the same time that
James Ferguson (1990) was famously discussing the “anti-politics machine” and
how development (even ‘failed’ development) is linked not simply to an
expansion of capitalism but to the expansion of state power, Marxist
anthropologist Alice Littlefield (1991: 219) was writing that
Studies and critiques of these major policy shifts [in US Indian Policy] have frequently noted that the assimilation policies often failed to assimilate, and that self-determination policies often failed to provide for meaningful self-determination. Looking beyond the discourse of the reformers who claimed credit for these policy shifts, it can be observed that material interests of various sectors of American capital were often well-served by the workings of particular policies.
While
I recognize and agree with Neveling’s (2017) critiques of the theoretical and
empirical dimensions of Ferguson’s work in his overemphasis on discourse to the
exclusion of political economic context, the crucial point here for me is to
understand that the underlying processes being described are not dissimilar.
These two works are describing a singular process or a singular political
economic machinery, except that it is occurring at different times and in
different places. Ferguson is describing “development” in Lesotho in the middle
to late twentieth century, while Littlefield is describing “civilization”,
“assimilation”, and “self-determination” in the United States as applied to
Native Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Further Research
We do not have the space here to delve into a detailed examination of each of the finer points. Rather, my purpose with this piece was to try to begin to connect these disparate areas and fields of study and put them into dialogue with each other. Further comparative study would better elucidate the parallels and lines of divergence in the operation of capitalist development and the experiences of peoples within this machinery. This would lead to a greater understanding and greater insights into the history and operation of capitalist development as a global project and singular machinery.
Samuel W. Rose is an independent scholar based in Schenectady, NY. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2017. His dissertation was entitled Mohawk Histories and Futures: Traditionalism, Community Development, and Heritage in the Mohawk Valley. His research has focused on the indigenous populations of eastern North America, community and economic development, political economy, and issues of race, identity, and the politics of history. His work has appeared in journals such as Anthropological Theory, Dialectical Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology, and the Journal of Historical Sociology.
References
Cattelino,
Jessica. (2008). High Stakes: Florida
Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Chibber, Vivek.
(2013). Postcolonial Theory and the
Specter of Capital. New York: Verso.
Cornell, Stephen.
(2015). Processes of Native Nationhood: The Indigenous Politics of
Self-Government. The International
Indigenous Policy Journal 6(4), Article 4.
Cowen, M.P. and
R.W. Shenton. (1996). Doctrines of
Development. New York: Routledge.
Duthu, N. Bruce.
(2008). American Indians and the Law.
New York: Penguin.
Escobar, Arturo.
(1995). Encountering Development: The
Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Ferguson, James.
(1990). The Anti-Politics Machine:
“Development”, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Fixico, Donald.
(1986). Termination and Relocation:
Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Friedman,
Jonathan. (1994). Cultural Identity and
Global Process. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Gupta, Akhil.
(1998). Postcolonial Developments:
Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Jorgensen, Joseph
G. (1978). A Century of Political Economic Effects on American Indian Society,
1880-1980. Journal of Ethnic Studies
6(3): 1-82.
Kiely, Ray. (2007).
The New Political Economy of Development:
Globalization, Imperialism, Hegemony. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Li, Tania Murray.
(2007). The Will to Improve:
Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Li, Tania Murray.
(2010). Indigeneity, Capitalism, and the Management of Dispossession. Current Anthropology 51(3): 385-414.
Littlefield,
Alice. (1991). Native American Labor and Public Policy in the United States. In
Alice Littlefield and Hill Gates (eds.), Marxist
Approaches in Economic Anthropology (p. 219-232). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Miner, H. Craig.
(1989). The Corporation and the Indian:
Tribal Sovereignty in Indian Territory, 1865-1907. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Mosse, David.
(2005). Cultivating Development: An
Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. New York: Pluto Press.
Mosse, David.
(2013). The Anthropology of International Development. Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 227-246.
Nagata, Shuichi.
(1987). From Ethnic Bourgeoisie to Organic Intellectuals: Speculations on North
American Native Leadership. Anthropologica
29(1): 61-75.
Neveling, Patrick.
(2017). The Political Economy Machinery: Toward a Critical Anthropology of
Development as a Contested Capitalist Practice. Dialectical Anthropology 41(2): 163:183.
Rist, Gilbert.
(2008). The History of Development: From
Western Origins to Global Faith, 3rd Edition. New York: Zed
Books.
Rose, Samuel W.
(2014). Comparative Models of American Indian Economic Development: Capitalist
versus Cooperative in the United States and Canada. Critique of Anthropology 34(4): 377-396.
Rose, Samuel W.
(2015). Two Thematic Manifestations of Neotribal Capitalism in the United
States. Anthropological Theory 15(2):
218-238.
Rose, Samuel W.
(2017). Marxism, Indigenism, and the Anthropology of Native North America:
Divergence and a Possible Future. Dialectical
Anthropology 41(1): 13-31.
Rose, Samuel W.
(2018). The Historical Political Ecological and Political Economic Context of
Mohawk Efforts at Land Reclamation in the Mohawk Valley. Journal of Historical Sociology 31(3): 253-264.
Ruffing, Lorraine
Turner. (1979). The Navajo Nation: A History of Dependence and
Underdevelopment. Review of Radical
Political Economics 11(2): 25-43.
Schröder, Ingo W. (2003). The Political Economy of Tribalism in North America: Neotribal Capitalism?. Anthropological Theory 3(4): 435-456.
Cite as: Rose, Samuel W. 2020. “Disconnected Development Studies: Indigenous North America and the Anthropology of Development.” FocaalBlog, 17 November. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/11/17/samuel-w-rose-disconnected-development-studies-indigenous-north-america-and-the-anthropology-of-development/
Don Nonini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Insa Koch’s recent (2020) FOCAAL blog, “The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain,” reminds us that enslavement and the bodies of black people are profoundly interconnected, and the link to challenges to “the punitive turn” and police abuse in the UK by the Black Lives Matter movement protests are all but explicit in her piece. At the same time, other recent FOCAAL blogs have dealt with the connections between the Covid-19 pandemic and contemporary global capitalism.
Black enslavement and Covid-19 are intimately intertwined. The insurgency of Black Lives Matter during the months of May-June 2020 has its own dynamics. That said, the wide turning out of protests supporting Black Lives Matter in the streets of European cities and towns (London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Milan, Kraków, Dublin, Manchester, Munich…) demonstrates that the European left has strongly shown its ongoing antiracist solidarity with African-American struggles, seeking to come to terms with Europe’s own troubled imperial history of enslavements, and challenging its current neo-nationalist or fascist resurgence under declining neoliberal capitalism (Kalb 2020).
The links between black enslavement and Covid-19 start – and continue with – the formation of agro-industrial capitalism and its relations to transnational finance capital.
The Lash, Degraded Ecologies, Finance
There is a clear relationship between the emergence of modern enslavement and the history of a full-blown agro-industrial capitalism. The close connections between fully rationalized capitalist agrarian production, finance, and slavery are only recently becoming clear.
New research on the North American southern plantation economies shows just how advanced rationalized capitalist production was under the conditions of slavery (Baptist 2014). Beyond its monocropping ecology, “many of agribusinesses’ key innovations, in both technology and organization, originated in slavery” (Wallace 2016: 261). Slaveholders measured land only against the capacity of slave labor to transform it, setting the cotton production line in terms of “bales per hand,” with enslaved African men being “hands,” nursing mothers “half hands” and children “quarter hands.” The labor process of picking cotton was measured and held to a standard by another unit of measurement – the “lash.”
“Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck” (Baptist 2014: 130). As Baptist further points out, “on the nineteenth century cotton frontier… enslavers extracted more production from each enslaved person every year. . . the business end of the new cotton technology was a whip” (2014: 112). Planters managed a refined rationality based on the application of the whip measured out in lashes to the backs of a slave calculated relative to their infraction – how many pounds of cotton his basket fell short of making a bale, whether or not there were impurities in it, whether one slave helped another pick her quota – in which case the former received extra lashes. Under the circumstances, the rationality of increased “labor productivity” so vaunted by economists depended straightforwardly on graduated torture – with little contribution (the cotton gin aside) from “technological innovation.”
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 culminated the violent displacement of Indian nations from the Mississippi Gulf region and transformation of their territories into “new lands” of thousands of acres ready for slave-based production (Baptist 2014: 228-229). Cotton monoculture quickly exhausted the rich soils of the South, exposed the crops to rust, rot, and worms, while plowing rows of cotton aligned to the day’s sunlight to maximize yield eroded the land and exhausted aquifers within 10 to 15 years after clearing (Wallace 2016: 266).
Due to the lack of food self-sufficiency and the seasonality of cotton harvests, indebtedness by plantation owners to Northern financiers and cotton brokers became increasingly common. By the 1830s, the cotton plantations of Mississippi, Alabama and Eastern Louisiana had adopted new forms of finance and indebtedness, when the Consolidated Association of Planters of Louisiana was established to allow their member planters to mortgage their slaves as collateral for loans from international financiers, led by the Baring Brothers and the Bank of England, that pooled investments from Europe’s finest old and new upper classes to buy the lucrative bonds issued by the Association (Baptist 2014: 245-8).
Monocropping of plants and animals, the simplification and degradation of local and regional ecologies, rapid expansion of logistics over space, reliance on finance capital for loans to expand production, and the use of enslaved degraded labor – these design features of agro-industrial capitalism have remained in effect to the present.
Meat Markets, Neo-Slave Markets
The coerced use of black labor continued after the Civil War in the cotton sharecropping economy until its decline in the 1930s. At the same time, the new agro-industrial complex of livestock production in the U.S. South – again based on the hyper-exploitation of black labor – got underway. By the 1970s, the livestock industries of intensive hog, poultry, and beef production had become thoroughly institutionalized – through vertical integration (Heffernan and Constance 1994; Stiffler 2005), increases in slaughterhouse assembly-line tempos, and incorporation of meat eating as a universal practice within the diets of the U.S. population (Schlosser 2001, 2012; Stiffler 2005). Since the 1990s the meat industries have globalized to penetrate the BRICS economies, a process facilitated by the lubrication of capital provided by hedge funds and investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs’ deal-making in the sale of Smithfield Foods to Shuanghui in China (Wallace 2016: 269-271).
Subjugated and coerced black labor has anchored and offered up surplus value through U.S. agro-industrial cotton and meat production since the end of legal slavery. Since the 1960s, rural poor African-Americans, especially women, have worked in the meat processing plants of the Midwest, Mississippi delta and Carolinas regions experiencing intensified exploitation, sexual harassment and brutalized and unsafe working conditions. By the 1990s, they were joined by immigrant Mexican and Central American workers (Nonini 2003; Stiffler 2005; Stuesse 2016), with whom white plant managers sought to set them in competition.
The Great Migration of 6 million African-Americans from 1915-1970 from the South to cities in the northern and midwestern U.S. was a form of flight from re-legalized enslavement at the hands of Jim Crow whites. Migration to the Midwest and Northeast placed large numbers of blacks at the factory doors of the Fordist industries of the North. Relegated to secondary labor markets by discrimination from white industrial labor unions during the 1950s-1970s (Cowie 2010: 236-244), black industrial workers by the 1990s, like their white counterparts, were thrown out of work by the globalization of industrial production. The only exceptions were the neo-slavery of hyper-sweated meat processing and related industrial food labor.
“Broken Windows Policing” and the Expropriation of Black Lives
The grown children and grandchildren of these laid-off black industrial workers, with more recent Latinx immigrant workers, now form both the hyper-exploited workers in the food industries (meat processing, fast foods, farm work) and situated in the cities and small towns of the South, Midwest and the Northeast, and those who are chronically unemployed and underemployed, doubly discriminated against due to their poverty (forcing them to leave school before high school graduation), and their race. Those African-Americans who have more or less steady employment also show disproportionate levels of consumer debt – from credit cards, student loans, and medically -related debt. Whether steadily employed or not, a key insight is that by and large both groups draw on the same population of urban African-Americans.
The population of urban African-Americans has the profound misfortune of living in cities recurrently subject to gentrification at the new “urban scale” of globalized real estate and finance-rentier capital (Smith 2008: 239-266). Their residence in spaces made newly desirable by gentrification by the 2000s is the obverse of the fact that up to the 1990s whites fled inner cities in large numbers for segregated suburbs, while African-Americans found themselves only able to afford to live, and only allowed to live within, housing in these redlined inner-city districts.
By the 2000s, however, real estate in these districts had become “hot properties” for global finance capital seeking new sites for safe but extraordinarily profitable rent collection and property speculation in realizing value. This trend by the 1990s was both shaped by and reinforced through the “broken window policing” that targeted unemployed and underemployed African-Americans and Latinx populations (Camp et al. 2016).
What precisely is the role of broken windows policing in the gentrification process? Put non-too-subtly, even one broken window indicates the existence of a “criminal” – an undesirable element in a neighborhood. The role of such policing is the physical removal to jails or prison, or, if that is impossible, the destruction of African-Americans whose very presence threatens the “real estate values” that the finance industry and its local allies hold dear. This goes far to explain the more than 1000 people killed by local police every year in the US, of whom more than one fourth are African-American; the one third of African-American men between ages 19-35 who are “justice involved” – in jail awaiting trial, on bail, undergoing trial, in prison, on probation or parole; and their disproportionate representation in the US’s incarcerated population, the largest per capita in the world.
Nancy Fraser (2016) observes that there is an historical dialectic between the conditions that set out “normal” exploitation of the working force, and the conditions of expropriation of the lives, labor, and property of racialized and vulnerable (e.g. immigrant) populations — as two complementary means through which the accumulation of capital can and does take place under capitalism. Fraser argues that that the new being of neoliberal global capitalism is “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker,” and that “the racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits” (Fraser 2016:163).
Image 1: Black Lives Matters Protests in Durham, U.S. (Credit: Durham Workers Assembly Durham, North Carolina, with kind permission)
We can see these two modes of appropriation of surplus value in the tense interconnections between whites and the African-American population in the United States through the latter’s vexed history with respect to agro-industrial and finance capitalism. These interconnections are potentially the point of class differentiation between the increasingly precarious white “middle class” and urban African-Americans, who straddle a black employed working-class subjected to intensified exploitation on one hand, and a lumpen-proletariat subjected to police-impelled expropriation and dispossession, on the other.
Ongoing criminalization and the indebtedness of black people (the latter a tool of finance capital’s domination) are the instruments driving large numbers of urban black workers disproportionately employed in the agro-industrial food sector toward the toxic mix of indebtedness, unemployment (where employers often refuse to hire blacks holding consumer debt), bankruptcy, evictions from shelter, police “stop and frisk” harassment, enforced fines and fees levied (via police and private firms working for straitened municipalities), assault, imprisonment, and death (Wang 2018:99-192).
Don Nonini is Professor of Anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent books are “Getting by”: Class and State Formation among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell, 2015), and The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: Unsettled States, Migrants, Movements in Flux, co-edited (Routledge, 2020). His most recent publication in FOCAAL is “Theorizing the Urban Housing Commons” (2017).
References
Baptist, E. E. (2014). The half has never been told : slavery and the making of American capitalism.
Camp, J. T. and C. Heatherton (2016). Policing the planet : why the policing crisis led to black lives matter.
Cowie, J. (2010). Stayin’ alive : the 1970s and the last days of the working class. New York, New Press : Distributed by Perseus Distribution.
Fraser, N. (2016). “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies3(1): 163-178.
Harvey, D. (2018). Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York, Oxford University Press.
Heffernan, W. and D. H. Constance (1994). Transnational corporations and the globalization of the food system. From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food. A. Bonanno, L. Busch and e. al. Lawrence, KA, University Press of Kansas Press: 29-51.
Nonini, D. M. (2003). American neoliberalism, ‘globalization,’ and violence: Reflections from the United States and Southeast Asia. Globalization, The State, and Violence. J. Friedman. Walnut Creek, CA, Altamira Press (Rowman & Littlefield): 163-202.
Schlosser, E. ((2001), 2012). Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal, with a New Afterword. Boston, MA, Mariner books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Smith, N. and D. Harvey (2008). Uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space. Athens, University of Georgia Press.
Striffler, S. (2005). Chicken : the dangerous transformation of America’s favorite food. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Stuesse, A. Scratching out a living : Latinos, race, and work in the Deep South.
Wallace, R. (2016). Big Farms Make Big Flue: Dispatches on infectious disease, agribusiness, and the nature of science. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Wang, J. (2018). Carceral capitalism. Semiotext(e) Interventions, 21. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e).
On May 28th the liberal Romanian government published the last data on the employment situation. This is therefore a good time to review the fate of Romanian labor in and after the lockdowns. I argue that we see a deepening of the export oriented neoliberal paradigm that demonizes the “social” and represses social reproduction in favor of subsidies to capital. Moreover, some of those subsidies now go towards increased militarization and the further beefing up of policing. What the liberal government calls “economic recovery” policies, turn out to be nothing more than a return to the “normality” of state supported international capital accumulation that has characterized much of post-socialist Europe after 1989.
Reviewing labor contract data from the end of March to the end of May, one notices a steady increase in the number of both suspended and terminated contracts. By the end of April, this trend changes: suspensions decline while terminations increase. By the end of May, the total number of suspensions and terminations reaches alarming proportions: over 1 million. More than four hundred thousand workers (especially in manufacturing, retail, and construction) had their labor contracts fully terminated. These workers receive paltry unemployment benefits of 25% of the minimum wage, amounting to about 330 lei/68 euro per month. If they are lucky and can claim technical unemployment, they receive 75% of their salaries. This probably means that some 600,000 former manufacturing and retail workers will now receive a monthly benefit of about 1,000 lei/208 euro (75% of the minimum wage). By the end of May, then, about 1,100,000 workers have less than some 200 euro per month while the value of the minimum consumption basket is even in the official calculation more than double that amount (at the end of 2019, the minimum consumption basket was over 2650 lei/525 euro per month).
Image 1: “Poverty kills”, Romanian protesters in Cluj (Photo: Enikő Vincze, 2020)
The labor crisis is exacerbated by the return of Romanians who used to work abroad: 1,270,000 of them at the end of April, of which at least 350,000 are actively looking for a job and receiving unemployment benefits. Of a total Romanian population of 17/18 million, some 1,5 million people, then, live on an income that just allows for bare survival. However, one should point out that this is not new for them: they were pretty bad or very bad off even before the pandemic, when they had fully paid jobs. Now, they hardly differ from the more than 4,632,000 persons who, according to Eurostat 2019 data, lived below the official poverty line, meaning on less than 900 lei/191 euro per month. In sum, 30 years after the revolution and 12 years after EU accession, Romania, a belated but by now dedicated student of neoliberal transition economics, may well have some 6 million people just above or under the poverty line, about half the working population. Against the policy rhetoric, these people have no “normality” to return to after the pandemic (keep in mind that In the “old good times”, over 30% of Romania’s employees (or 42% of formal employment contracts) earned only half the value of the minimum consumption basket per month). But the current government does not even talk about inequalities, poverty, or the public responsibilities of the state for the dispossessions brought by capitalism. Instead, it dreams of returning to a fictitious normal that for many never existed. As in the past, the crisis of capitalism induced by the Covid pandemic is solved through the “normality” of state supported capital accumulation: further enrichment of the rich, facilitation of transnational capital, and even deeper impoverishment of the many.
The current government’s “economic recovery plan” is leading to the further pauperization of labor (for more details see here). The plan is based on state aid schemes used throughout EU in the context of the pandemic: guaranteeing commercial loans for firms, but also capital and investment loans for both small and medium-sized enterprises, and large companies; subsidizing the interest rates of bank loans; offering aid to newly established companies. Moreover, there are several other facilities granted to large property owners: reducing the price of electricity for large consumers, refunding VAT, halting seizure on their debts. The government also foresees some measures to support employers who keep employees in their jobs or plan on hiring new staff. However, it does not provide anything that would directly support labor, like raising wages or improving labor conditions. In short, it is imagined as an economic recovery but not for ordinary people.
These ordinary people are told the EU funnels billions of euro to aid Romania’s recovery. At the same time, the government refuses any talk of wage rises, social protection, or public housing investment. Such talk is branded “toxic populism” or “economic ignorance” of the critical role that investment rather than consumption plays in growth. Romanian labor is no longer interesting, not even as a consumer. This supply-side policy in support of capital is based on the expectation that labor must remain cheap (regardless of the problems that further decreases in demand would create for many local small enterprises), so that international capital may come along to exploit it. But will an export-led model work in a global economy interrupted by a global recession, with shrinking returns to capital? True, for Romania it did work in 2010. But will it again?
After the pandemic has shown so clearly that labor is the very carrier of production, the current Liberal government chooses to further disregard workers. Instead, it’s doing everything possible to grant state aid to multinational companies operating in Romania. For that goal this government is also ready to borrow on the international market or from international financial institutions, which will push debt over the 50% of GDP threshold that rules as “normality” in CEE, in which case international pressure will force it to cut public sector spending such as on public wages, social assistance, and social protection. Saving capital goes therefore hand in hand with austerity measures (as prescribed in the Convergence Program 2020 of Romania, see Vincze 2015). Once again we see the tasteless spectacle of arrogant private entrepreneurs being saved by the visible hand of the state, grinning with satisfaction at public sector cuts while claiming the right to be supported at all costs, looting the public sector on behalf of their apparently deserved private profits.
In contrast to the 2008 crisis, however, this time Romania bets that the military industry will save the economy. “Among the government’s priorities are greenfield and offset investments in industries such as the military,” says the prime-minister. This option crowns former initiatives such as the acquisition of the $ 3.9 billion American Patriot missile system, promoted by the country’s president since his first mandate. The 2020 budget allocations provide for an 18% rise of military budget as compared to 2019, while the Ministry of Internal Affairs can do with an extra 13% on top of the increased budget for the Romanian Intelligence Services.
In this increasingly troubled world with various contradictory scenarios for the future, there is a risk that the current crisis of capitalism will be resolved not only by the militarization of the economy but also by rising political and social fascism. There is consistency there. Promoting racialized hatred (Stoica 2020), provoking interethnic conflicts and tensions between social classes is part of the justification for investments in a police state with military muscle. As other branches of industry are struggling hard to recover from the recession, capital needs war industry investments to save itself. Perversely, Romania’s leaders also offer the domestic reserve army of labor the opportunity to make a career out of warfare. President Iohannis recently stated that Romania’s armed forces can be made available for participation in missions and operations outside the Romanian state, claiming “important resources for equipping the Romanian Army make it possible to achieve national defense capabilities within the collective defense system of NATO and, at the same time, coherent multiannual programs can offer the Romanian industry the chance to relaunch. especially through institutional cooperation with the companies of our allies.”
We may not be surprised by these developments, but we can and must revolt against them. We could begin by imagining different economic recovery scenarios. What if the state took over the companies that can no longer function according to the rules of the “free market”? What if state aid came with the demand for decent wages for the employees? What if the state taxed large fortunes in real estate and banking accumulated over the past decades? What if the state decided to implement measures in support of people rather than profit: banning forced evictions, municipalization of public utilities, controlling private rents, achieving a significant stock of social housing through various methods? What if the state acted for the benefit of labor? For peace and disarmament? What if we did all of this now, to mark 75 years since the defeat of fascism and the promise of a better era for humanity? Why long for the “normality” of capital accumulation when we can long for other possible worlds?
This is the English version of an article published in Romanian on the platform Baricada, June 4th, 2020. The Romanian version contains additional graphs and references. Accessible here: https://ro.baricada.org/relansarea-economica-a-romaniei/
Enikő Vincze is Professor of Sociology at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, and a political activist for housing justice with the group Căși sociale ACUM/ Social Housing NOW!
One thing is sure. If just briefly, the pandemic struck at the heart of capitalism. It paralysed the economy, broke the bureaucratic machine of nation-states and forced conservative governments worldwide to pass quasi post-capitalist policies which, only a few months earlier, were considered too radical even for the radical Left. The renationalization of public utilities, the rolling out of universal basic income schemes, the debates on debt defaults, rent freezes, and recapitalization of the public sector, could be taken from the post-capitalist manifestos of Paul Mason or Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018).
At some point in late January I told my family over WhatsApp with the Marxist bluster they usually enjoy from me that if Covid was to come to the West it would be the end of capitalism. Wuhan was already in lockdown and a red alert was sounding for many other places in China, followed by South Korea and Iran.
“One of the many perils lies in normalizing the ‘batshit crazy’ presently underway.” —Wallace, Liebman, Chavez & Wallace 2020: 5
The COVID-19 pandemic has stripped the veneer off capitalist society whether in its softer social democratic version or its bare-faced pseudo Darwinian version. Both the cause and the cure are down to the way capitals, now thoroughly integrated into states, have driven the direction of technology to produce this perfect storm. The staggering failures at the curing end are not just glaringly obvious in the present crisis; you’d have to be especially starry-eyed not to see that the wheels and most of the chassis had been stripped off public health well before now. But at the causative end “the normalizing [of] the batshit crazy presently underway,” risks being lost in the chatter.
When HAU was launched, my grad students at Central European University were celebrating. Open access! Finally, a breach in the wall that separated the haves from the have-nots. Their local universities in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe hardly had the resources to pay for these Western journals offered at extortionate prices by the likes of Elsevier, Springer, Oxford, Chicago. Indeed, even CEU did not have sufficient means to pay all the subscriptions that scholars were asking for. Now the have-nots would finally have unlimited access. More, the HAU journal preached what it imagined itself to embody: self-conscious intellectual revolution in the apparently newly found horizontalist mode: Occupy anthropology! For the intellectual assertion of the commons! My rightly rebellious students loved it. And went on producing some great open access undertakings—but not in academia—that helped to feed the ongoing mobilizations in their countries (most prominently: http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast). They had all my support while we continued to disagree about HAU.
