Presenters: Don Kalb, Jaume Franquesa, Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Don Nonini, and Sharryn Kasmir
Disscusant: Oana Mateescu
It is forty years ago that Eric Wolf published his pathbreaking “Europe and the People Without History” (1982). The book gave an anthropological account of 500 years of European capitalist imperialism, seen from the peripheries. By doing so, it crystallized and clarified multiple debates in anthropology, history, and social theory that had marked the turbulent 60s and 70s of the last century. It was a book that in retrospect prepared the discipline brilliantly for the accelerating capitalist globalization that would mark the next fifty years.
Paradoxically, while path-breaking qua vision and method, the imminent paths opened by “Europe and the People” were almost immediately cut off. Post-structuralism, postmodernism, and “thick description” combined to destroy systemic, global, and historically explanatory visions. Such theoretical ambitions were shoved aside as “grand narratives” and delegitimized as associated with a totalizing modernism.
Under the guises of “anthropology and history” and “political economy” some of the possibilities inscribed in Wolf’s work were conserved in the 1980s and 90s. They came back to life from the 2000s onwards, carried by a younger generation, as neoliberal globalism became ever more crisis prone and new cycles of contestation were emerging. The new work, now often aligned with critical approaches in geography, focused among others on issues of labor, class, surplus populations, post-development, post-socialism, post-colonialism, austerity, new capitalist extractive and oppressive social forms, migrations, and contestations. This led to a re-uniting of political, economic, and cultural inquiry under a larger dialectical vision and method, and it came with a renewed interest for Marxian approaches next to for example anarchist, Maussian and Polanyian ones.
What sort of questions would a Wolfian anthropology pose in the current world? What is the Wolfian take on Marx and where lies its exact value? What ought to be the role of history and comparison in the anthropological endeavor? What is the value of archival and secondary sources in anthropological research and theory, next to ethnography? If we compare the Wolfian approach to thinking big with other large scale visions in anthropology – Sahlins, Levi-Strauss, Graeber, Godelier for instance – what specificities emerge that remain overly relevant?
Cite as: FocaalBlog 2022. “Eric Wolf, Europe, Histories, Capitalism. Where are we now?” Focaalblog 22 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/12/22/focaalblog-eric-wolf-europe-histories-capitalism-where-are-we-now/
While
identity is of course a fundamental category in European philosophy at least
since Aristotle, its politicization is a much more recent phenomenon. One can
say that it is only in the second half of the 20th century that the
development of cultural anthropology and sociology lays the theoretical ground
for such a politicization, which is unconceivable without taking into account
the emergence in many parts of the world of feminist movements as well as of a
panoply of struggles against racial domination and for the rights of
“minorities.” Such important debates as the one surrounding multiculturalism
contributed to foster identity politics and more generally to nurture a coding
of politics in terms of (cultural) identity. Claims based upon identity played
an important role in denouncing the presumed “neutrality” and even universalism
of political institutions and in shedding light on the continuity of past
histories of conquest and domination. This was for instance the case in settler
colonial countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States, with respect
to the condition of indigenous peoples. More generally, identity provided a
language for the articulation of claims and desires for liberation of a
multiplicity of subjects whose oppression was predicated upon specific systems
of oppression that were not targeted as such by established traditions of emancipatory
politics. Struggles of racialized people or sexual minorities are good
instances in this respect as well as claims proliferating within feminism along
the lines that fracture the unitary figures of “the woman” and “universal
sisterhood” (just think of the debates surrounding “postcolonial feminism”
since the 1980s).
Image 1: Ni Una Menos march, Buenos Aires, 3 June 2017. Photo by Titi Nicola.
From this point of view, it is not surprising that one of the first polemical targets of identity politics was the concept of class and class politics. If one takes class as a collective subject (and even as a collective identity) whose unity and homogeneity are immediately given as an “objective” outcome of the relations of production, it is easy to see that there is no space here for a politics capable to grasp claims and movements articulated in specific terms – be it in gender or racial terms. There is no shortage of historical examples of such conflicts and clashes within the labor movement. Take for instance B.R. Ambedkar, the great spokesperson of the Dalits in colonial India. In the late 1920s he had several debates with the leaders of the Communist Party of India, always pointing to the peculiarity of the position of the Dalits and to the spread of practices of untouchability in the world of labor and emphasizing the need to give priority to those questions in labor politics. This is precisely what Communist leaders did not want to accept, leading to a split with Ambedkar (Roy 2016, 110). The latter, in his The Annihilation of Caste (1936), took stock of those debates writing that caste is “a division of laborers,” and even more precisely “it is a hierarchy in which the divisions of laborers are graded one above the other” (Ambedkar 2016, 233-234). The question of caste is directly addressed here from the point of view of what we could call the composition of labor, of the disruption of its unity as a sociological factor and as a political subject. And Ambedkar points to the relevance of conflicts within the ranks of workers – conflicts that played an important role elsewhere in the world, for instance in the relation between African American struggles and the labor movement in the United States (see for instance Roediger 1991).
In
this essay I will discuss a specific notion that has become particularly
influential in framing the discussion of identity and identity politics –
intersectionality. I will show that the original formulation of that notion was
crucially intertwined with debates on class and class politics. At the same
time, my argument is inspired by a theoretical and political concern with the
main forms of contemporary identity politics, which are nurtured by such
notions as “white privilege” and by “decolonial” language and theories (see
Mezzadra 2021, 30-33). While I remain wary of the moralistic tones of identity
politics today, what troubles me more is the tendency to simply affirm a
subaltern identity as a closed and bordered one (often in the framework of a
race to establish that identity as the most oppressed and humiliated). This
makes alliances, convergences, and coalitions – as well as opposition –
ultimately impossible (Haider 2018, 40). It is against this background that I
ask in the last section of the essay whether it is possible, and even necessary
to rethink the very concept of class to open up a different political
perspective for struggles and movements as the ones that are at the center of
theories of intersectionality. Needless to say, this requires going beyond the
traditional notion of class that I have sketched above, I admit, providing a
kind of caricature.
Intersectionality,
so what?
There is something important
that must be stressed at the outset of this section. Over the last few years,
the notion of intersectionality, originally forged in the United States, began
to travel. And as is often the case with “traveling theories” (Said 1983 and
1994), it acquired new meanings and was in a way even reinvented first of all
in the streets, outside of the academia. This happened in particular in the
framework of the new wave of feminist movements in Latin America and Southern
Europe, often using the slogan Ni Una Menos (“No one less”). In
Argentina and Brazil, the notion of intersectionality is used to articulate and
connect the movements and claims of indigenous and black women, rural and
metropolitan communities, sexual minorities and women living in slums, without
losing sight of their specificity, while in Italy and Spain it allows
addressing issues of migration, colonialism, and sexuality. In a way, one can
say that this appropriation and these uses of intersectionality prompted a
re-politicization of the notion, where what is at stake, to quote the words of
Angela Davis, is “not so much intersectionality of identities but
intersectionality of struggles” (Davis 2016, 144). Interestingly, this notion
of intersectionality also played outstanding roles in the debates within the massive
movement for black lives and against police brutality in the United States in the
summer of 2020 (see for instance Thompson 2020).
I spoke of a re-politicization
of intersectionality because over the last years in the United States the
notion had become a kind of standard academic reference and its original
political imprint had been to some extent neutralized (which does not mean of
course that there were not many scholars continuing to do a very interesting
and even radical work in the framework of intersectionality – see Nash 2019). This
is why there is a need to go back to the origin of the notion, and even beyond
that to shortly reconstruct its genealogy. As I anticipated above, the
reference to the world of work is foundational for intersectionality. Kimberlé
Crenshaw, who is usually credited to have “invented” the notion, defines it as
follows. Intersectionality, she writes, designates “the various ways in which
race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black women’s
employment experiences” (Crenshaw 1991, 1244). Discussing the De Graffenreid
v. General Motors case of 1977, in which the court rejected the claim of
five black women that the company’s seniority system discriminated against them,
Crenshaw famously writes that the court’s refusal to acknowledge “combined race
and sex discrimination” rested on the assumption “that the boundaries of sex
and race discrimination are defined respectively by white women’s and black
men’s experiences” (Crenshaw 1989, 143). The interplay of those boundaries
effectively obscures and deletes a specific subjective experience within the
ranks of workers, the one of black women. In focusing on such a neglected
difference, intersectionality sets out to shed light on the parallel working of
systems of oppression and domination that hierarchize the working class.
Writing in 1989, Kimberlé
Crenshaw was aware of the fact that the notion of intersectionality that she
forged from a specific perspective of critical legal thinking had been long in
gestation in Black feminist thought as well as in the toil and struggles of
black working women in the United States (see Carasthatis 2016, chapter 1 and Bohrer
2019, chapter 0). In the turmoil of the 1970s we can find for instance in the
“Statement” of the Combahee River Collective (1977) a striking
formulation of the problematic of intersectionality. Named after Harriet
Tubman’s raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina during the Civil War,
which freed 750 enslaved people, the collective was a Black radical feminist and
lesbian organization formed in 1974 (see Taylor 2017). As they write, their
politics is defined by an active commitment “to struggling against racial,
sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” and they see as their “particular
task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact
that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” (Taylor 2017, 15). This
notion of “interlocking” systems of oppression clearly foreshadows
intersectionality. At the same time, it calls attention precisely to the moment
of “interlocking,” which means to the junctures and articulation between them.
“We also find it difficult,” the collective writes, “to separate race from
class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced
simultaneously” (Taylor 2017, 19). The concept of “identity politics” that
readers can find in one of its earliest uses in the “Statement” of the Combahee
River Collective has consequently quite different meanings than the ones that
became usual later on. This concept is here a rallying and battle cry, urging
Black women to focus on their “own oppression” and struggle for their own
liberation, which would necessarily be a general liberation since “our freedom
would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Taylor
2017, 23).
Even long before the 1970s,
the experience of the “interlocking” of racial, sexual, and class oppression
had shaped the living experience of a multitude of black women in the United
States. And it was contested in multifarious ways through struggles and
organizing, first against slavery and then against lynching and segregation. While
writings from the early stage of Black feminist thought (including such
important names as Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells-Barnett) compose an
important archive for anybody interested in the genealogy and prehistory of intersectionality
(see Gines 2014), I would like to shortly dwell here on the debates about the
condition of the Black proletarian woman in the Communist Party of the U.S.A.
in the 1930s and in the 1940s. In the writings of Louise Thompson and Claudia
Jones the questions of race and sex are indeed discussed from the point of view
of the concept of exploitation, which will be later marginalized in the
intersectional debate. Writing in 1936, Louise Thompson provides in Toward a
Brighter Dawn a striking analysis of the condition of black women, focusing
on a “Southern road,” on “the plantations in the South,” and on “Bronx Park,
New York.” The legacy of slavery runs through the whole article, which finds a
dramatic apex in the description of the predicament of black domestic workers
in the Bronx. Thompson speaks of a “slave market” in the Bronx, and casts it as
a “graphic monument to the bitter exploitation of this most exploited section
of the American working population – the Negro women.” And this is because they
“meet this triple exploitation – as workers, as women, and as Negroes”
(Thompson 1936).
More than a decade later,
Claudia Jones, born in Trinidad and doomed to live and work in the U.K. after
being deported from the United States in 1955, further develops such analysis.
Her An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! (1949)
starts with an emphasis on the growth in the militant participation of black
women “in all aspects of the struggle for peace, civil rights and economic
security.” It is in front of this intensified militancy that Jones calls for a
new understanding of the role of black women and for an end to the neglect of
that role permeating the labor movement. Jones dwells on the position of black
women in different social spheres, from the family to mass organizations. She
carefully analyzes in particular the condition of black domestic workers,
focusing on the reasons that lead to the relegation of black women to “domestic
and similar menial work” and stressing their “unbearable misery.” She echoes
Thompson’s writing that black domestic workers “suffer the additional indignity,
in some areas, of having to seek work in virtual ‘slave markets’ on the streets
where bids are made, as from a slave block, for the hardiest workers.”
Interestingly, she also analyzes the reasons that divide black and white women
also within the working class. “White chauvinism” works as a boundary at the
societal level, a boundary that crosses and divides also the composition of the
working class. Even the experience of exploitation is hierarchized, as black
women clearly demonstrate. As Jones writes, “not equality, but degradation and
super-exploitation: this is the actual lot of Negro women!” (Jones 1949).
Figures of oppression
“Triple exploitation” and
“super-exploitation,” the concepts introduced by Linda Thompson and Claudia
Jones, are clearly attempts to use a Marxist language to come to terms with the
specific condition of black working women. The proposed diversification and
even hierarchization of exploitation raise however several problems. This is
particularly the case when the notion of exploitation is understood in purely
economistic terms and strictly connected to a narrow interpretation of
“productive labor.” Such an economistic concept of exploitation has long been
prevailing in Marxism, including in the United States, and it allowed a
subordination of all forms of oppression (for instance, in Thompson’s words,
oppression “as women, and as Negroes”) to exploitation itself (“as workers”)
and to the related class politics. Consequently, several activists and scholars
began to underscore the autonomy of those systems of oppression (say, sexism
and racism) and to prioritize struggles against them, in many cases completely
obscuring the relevance of exploitation. This is what characterizes the
mainstream of debates on intersectionality, which are often shaped by a
conceptual opposition between oppression and exploitation (see Bohrer 2019).
The important book by Patricia
Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (originally published in 1990),
joins a long tradition of theoretical reflection on the continuing legacy of
slavery in defining the condition of African American women using the notion of
oppression as the main conceptual reference of her analysis. It is worth
quoting at length Collins’ book on this point. “Oppression,” she writes,
“describes any unjust
situation where, systematically and over a long period of time, one group denies
another group access to the resources of society. Race, class, gender,
sexuality, nation, age, and ethnicity among others constitute major forms of
oppression in the United States. However, the convergence of race, class, and
gender oppression characteristic of U.S. slavery shaped all subsequent
relationships that women of African descent had within Black American families
and communities, with employers, and among one another. It also created the
political context for Black women’s intellectual work” (Collins 2000, 4).
Collins’ theory of
“intersecting oppressions” has been very influential in establishing the field
of intersectionality (or “matrix of domination” as she preferred to say in
1990). It is easy to see that most “forms of oppression” mentioned by Collins
(race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity…) are open to processes of multiplication
form within, and a proliferation of figures of oppression indeed characterizes
debates on intersectionality. Chicana feminism, for instance, introduced new
perspectives into a discussion that was born out of the condition and struggles
of black women (see García 1997), while the topics of sexual oppression and
heteronormativity gained prominence in writings on intersectionality. This led
to a kind of explosion of the field, which allowed multiple processes of
subjective expression and constitution, shedding light on forms of domination
that had long remained invisible, and productively widening the terrain of
struggles for liberation. At the same time, it raised specific problems for a
theory of intersectionality.
It is definitely true that, as
Ashley Bohrer writes, intersectional theorists “have argued against additive
and multiplicative models for their failure to highlight the mutual constitution
of the structures of domination” (Bohrer 2019, 102). Nevertheless, it is
important to remind that the notion of oppression in intersectional debates is
characterized by an emphasis on “irreducibility” (of the single systems of
oppression), which goes hand in hand with an emphasis on “simultaneity,” i.e. with
the claim that those systems “are experienced simultaneously and are
inseparable” (Carasthatis 2016, 57). There is a clear tension here, and while
the critique of “single axis” thinking is a constitutive moment for theories of
intersectionality, one can say that the principle of “irreducibility” has often
tended to obscure the one of “simultaneity.” What is at stake here is the risk
of an identity politics that takes the specificity of a system of oppression as
an exclusive framework not only for analysis but also for the process of
subject constitution. The point is not to propose as an alternative a
hierarchization of oppressions and consequently of struggles and claims, which
is anathema to theories of intersectionality. It is rather to shift attention to
the unitary moment in the working of systems of domination and oppression and
to work toward the establishment of spaces of convergence for diverse and
heterogeneous subjects. A focus on a specific system of oppression can well be
an important moment in a process of subjectivation, even necessary to break
processes of marginalization and to open up new vistas of liberation. Nevertheless,
when the “identity” forged by such focus becomes frozen it paradoxically risks
replicating the boundaries of the specific system of oppression it sets out to
contest. And it becomes an obstacle to wider processes of subjectivation.
Within intersectional debates
this problem is often addressed from the angle of a theory of coalition. “It
was a while,” writes Audre Lorde, “before we came to realize that our place was
the very house of difference rather that anyone particular difference” (Lorde
1982, 226). These words nicely encapsulate the point I just made on identity
and identity politics. The “house of difference” can be a powerful image to
describe an intersectional coalition, intertwining solidarity and resistance
toward a politics capable to bring “into being the worlds we really need”
(Bohrer 2019, 257). Such a coalition, as Bohrer rightly emphasizes (256), is
necessarily different than being what is traditionally understood as the lowest
minimum denominator among different groups. While in this case the subjectivity
and identity of the collectives involved remain untouched, an intersectional
coalition is a space of convergence for a multitude of diverse and
heterogeneous people, within which new subjectivities and even identities are
continuously fabricated in a common struggle for liberation. Needless to say,
the very unity of a coalition is not given in advance, it is itself at stake in
this process of subjectivation.
Image 2: International Women’s Day in Berlin, 8 March 2020. Photo by Leonhard Lenz.
Class, reloaded
The critique of the
economistic notion of exploitation that I sketched above led to a
marginalization of class, and even capitalism, in many debates on
intersectionality. As it happened in cultural and postcolonial studies (see
Mezzadra 2011), capital and capitalism were confined to the realm of “economy”
while class was often identified with white, male, heterosexual workers in a
standard employment relation. Differential systems of oppression like sexism
and racism were considered to operate at the margins of capitalism, which could
definitely instrumentalize the processes of hierarchization generated by them
without ceasing to remain a fundamentally homogenizing power. I am convinced
that such an understanding of capitalism is deeply flawed, and that a different
way to look at the history and contemporary working of capitalism could provide
us with an effective way to tackle the question of the “simultaneity” of
systems of oppression raised by theories of intersectionality.
At stake here is first of all
the question of the relation of capital with “difference” (Mezzadra and Neilson
2019, 32-38). This is a question that has been reframed over the last years by
historians of colonialism and global historians of labor, by postcolonial scholars
and critical researchers working on the topic of development. There is an
emerging consensus that what Lisa Lowe (1996, 28) calls the “social production
of ‘difference’” is a distinct and crucial moment in the operations of capital,
which works in tandem with (and enables) the production of “abstract labor” as
a norm for the reproduction of capitalism writ large. In my work with Brett
Neilson, I have argued that the interplay between difference and abstraction,
or homogeneity and heterogeneity is particularly apparent in the working of
contemporary global capitalism (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013 and 2019). This
interplay regards in particular the question of labor. Following Marx’s
definition of labor power as “the aggregate of attitudes and capabilities”
contained in the body, “the living personality of a human being” (Marx 1976,
270), I contend that there is a need to emphasize the gap between the element
of attitudes and capabilities and their “container,” the body (Marx uses the
German word Leiblichkeit, whose absolute materiality is not adequately
rendered by the English translation with “physical form”).
Such an emphasis on the body
opens up new continents for the understanding of labor power as well as of its
production as a commodity. What is at stake here is what we can call the
production of subjectivity that is required for the very existence of that
commodity. The differential fabrication of hierarchized bodies, where systems
of oppression like sexism and racism have prominent roles to play, emerges as a
crucial moment in the production of labor power as a commodity, which is
according to Marx the cornerstone upon which no less than the existence of
capitalism is predicated. The very boundary between production and
reproduction, as well as between productive and unproductive labor appears
tested and blurred from this point of view. And it is easy to see that a merely
economistic understanding of capitalism and exploitation becomes untenable. The
moment that I called of a production of subjectivity has rather multiple
dimensions that must be acknowledged as internal to exploitation. We are
confronted here with a panoply of (exploited) subjective figures, whose
experience of oppression and exploitation is definitely mediated by different
subject positions (where for instance racism, sexism, or heteronormativity can
be prevailing) while their “simultaneity” is orchestrated by the operations of
capital.
Class is today composed by
this multitude of differences living, toiling, and struggling under the
pressure of capital’s exploitation. Multiplicity is the hallmark of class. While
I emphasize the relevance of a non-economistic notion of exploitation for
rethinking class today, there is a need to add that class politics today
requires a panoply of movements and struggles that go well beyond the
boundaries of class. Once we acknowledge the constitutive relevance for the
working of exploitation of, say, racism and sexism, mobilizations against them,
which may well include people who are not “exploited,” are of the utmost
importance – and can never be considered as addressing a kind of “secondary”
contradiction. Parallel to such transversal struggles there is a need to forge
and practice new forms of solidarity and spaces of convergence, where
intersectionality becomes a method for a multiplicity of encounters and for
counteracting any ossification of identity politics. The latter can definitely
play a positive role in opening up new fields of struggle but is always at risk
of becoming an obstacle for wider processes of subjectivation – for building a
more effective base for struggles against exploitation and oppression. The
notion of class, a “multitudinous class” or a “intersectional class” to put it
with Michael Hardt and Toni Negri (2019, 84), provides a subjective name to
that base and opens new lines of investigation and political intervention. And
the reinvention of intersectionality that I mentioned above (as an “intersectionality
of struggles,” to remind the words of Angela Davis) seems to foreshadow a new
politics of solidarity and even a new class politics.
Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna. His scholarly work has centered on borders and migration, contemporary capitalism and globalization, Marx and workerism. With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and of The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019) As an activist he is currently engaged in the “Mediterranea Saving Humans” project (https://mediterranearescue.org/).
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The EASA membership survey and the associated ‘precarity’
report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) are an
important and timely contribution. Surely these are findings we must build on
and the critical scrutiny of which is indispensable for formulating minimally
shared lines of action. The report is likely to stir discussion both through
its inclusions as well as through some of its inevitable silences. It is some
of the latter that I want to briefly touch upon here.
This introduction is part of a feature on “How Capitalists Think,” moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bergen) and Tijo Salverda (University of Cologne).
Given that nowadays most people live in societies organized according to capitalist principles and given that few oppose those principles fundamentally, capitalists may well constitute the world’s largest ideology-based formation. Most anthropologists have undoubtedly had encounters with capitalists, who occupy positions in all social strata. Yet, apart from the “usual suspects” such as CEOs, elites, leading politicians, and other members of the transnational capitalist class, our discipline pays little, and certainly not enough, explicit attention to the many who equally support and/or benefit from capitalist principles—be they ordinary employees in governments and in the private sector, subalterns with native title claims, or even social welfare claimants (for the varying scope and scale of anthropological research so far, see Friedman 1999; Kalb 1997; Neveling 2015; Rose 2015; Salverda 2015). Continue reading →
This post is part of a feature on anthropologists on the EU at 60, moderated and edited by Don Kalb (Central European University and University of Bergen).
The EU commemorates its 60th birthday today (25 March 2017), at a time when the institution is more contested than ever. The 1957 Treaty of Rome was an indisputable step toward undergirding the Western part of the continent of Europe with a set of international institutions that would help to secure peace, prosperity, and shared social citizenship—the sort of internationalism that had been urged by the likes of Keynes and Monnet long before the war. This happened against a historical background of half a century of deep, recurrent crisis, escalating class conflict, rivalry, and revenge that had unleashed industrialized destruction on an unprecedented scale. Without any irony, therefore, two loud cheers, please, for the Treaty of Rome and what it sought to secure. This is the basis of what majorities on the continent still like to imagine, defend, and wish to become part of, as their common and cherished symbolic home.
Unsettled by Donald Trump’s bigotry and xenophobia, liberal pundits have struggled to understand his improbable anointment as the nominee of the Republican party. Many have sought answers in the experience and behavior of the white-working class, the bedrock of Trump support. Why, asks the New Yorker’s James Surolecki, would any working class person support Trump. Surolecki believes that part of the answer lies in the appeal of Trump’s nativist rhetoric. For William Galston, writing in Newsweek, working class whites vote for Trump because they “seek protection against all the forces that they perceive as hostile to their way of life—foreign people, foreign goods, foreign ideas.” And wary of Trump backers and their potential for violence if the Republicans lose the presidency, Salon’s Michael Bourne locates white working class anger in “1960s-era legislation for promoting the interests of immigrants and minorities over their own, just as they blame free-trade policies of both parties for sending their jobs offshore.” According to Bourne, they are either the hapless “victims of American progress or a bunch of over privileged bigots.” Continue reading →
EU immigration was the primary source of contention in the debates surrounding the recent referendum about the United Kingdom’s EU membership. The “leave” campaign continuously bombarded the public with warnings about “uncontrollable hordes” of EU benefit seekers (for a discussion on the construction of migrant categories, see Apostolova 2016) planning to permanently settle for the “easy” life in the UK and take away the jobs of the locals. Likewise, the “remain” campaign promised to crack down on the number of immigrants and further restrict the rights of newcomers. In this way, both camps reinforced the perception that immigration from the EU, and in particular from eastern Europe, is a problem. Furthermore, in their effort to make the case for a “remain” scenario, academic voices tirelessly demonstrated the economic, cultural, and demographic benefits of EU migration. Such efforts, however well intended, still feed into an instrumentalist policy perspective that constructs migrants’ lives as only important in terms of their added value for the local economy. Continue reading →
A number of liberal scholars of India, ranging from Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze to James Manor, all broadly view democracy as the solution to a variety of social evils including poverty, inequality, corruption, crime, and even violent conflict. They all acknowledge that Indian democracy is at times a messy affair, but they share a common faith in its self-correcting potential. As they see it, democracy has fostered a more assertive citizenry that no longer accepts traditional hierarchies and that is less tolerant of abuses of power. Continue reading →
On 11 February 2011 I stood in Tahrir Square surrounded by millions celebrating the toppling of Mubarak following eighteen solid days of battle. Around me were people from all walks of life: Saʿidis (“Southerners”) who came all the way from villages in the south, street children turned rebels, family members of martyrs who were killed during the eighteen days, leftist feminist women, members from the Muslim Brotherhood—you name it. In between the shoving of the crowd and the incipient boredom with the monotony of the celebrations and the exuberating vibes, the chants were pretty standard: “down down with Mubarak,” “the people have toppled the regime,” and, from the more religious, “God has toppled the regime.” Continue reading →
“The glass will overflow” Written at the entrance of a factory shop floor in Pernik, an industrial Bulgarian town close to the capital, this slogan predicted an uprising. According to workers’ testimonies, the slogan had been written before the February 2013 Bulgarian protests. Nevertheless, the glass did not overflow in the plant during 2013, as it did not overflow in the early 2000s, when the privatization process brought mass layoffs and pay cuts. Since 2013, in different parts of the country, workers went on strike because they were long-term unpaid. However, workers in Sofia and Pernik, who were low-paid but regularly, and with whom I conducted fieldwork in different periods since 20071, did not participate in the urban protests in 2013 and 2014 that contributed to the fall of two successive governments (February 2013 and July 2014) and happened during a period of economic destabilization, with the near collapse of a bank. In this presentation, I explore reasons and mechanisms of workers’ nonparticipation of the ongoing Bulgarian protests. There is a methodological trap here: an ethnography that searches for the lack of an action already presupposes that the ethnographer would anticipate an action. Nevertheless, Bulgarian workers also comment on the lack of their political participation and give various reasons for this. I take their concerns seriously, and I am attempting to think with them and through their daily talks as well as through their practices at work and at home.
