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akshay khanna & Alice Tilche: The Political Voice and The Revolutionary

This is the fourth in our series of blogposts in relation to the Budhan podcast project, a community led initiative that has sought to capture the experiences of some of the most marginalised communities in India during the COVID19 pandemic.

In the previous blogposts we reflected primarily on  Season 1 of our series, at a community speaking of, sometimes enacting their own experience of pain, and at the key role of the aesthetic in offering glimpses of that which cannot be spoken – through hyper-real and melodramatic performances. As an attempt by members of the Chhara DNT community to make sense of its own experience, and bolster its response to the pandemic, a primary audience for Season 1 had been somehow internal. Taking Season 2 as our focus, in this post we consider the challenges of a marginalised group speaking of the plight of other marginalised groups, as artists step out of the community to document the experiences of other DNT groups. We look at how that which could not be spoken becomes expressed through the political voice as marginalised communities make claims (to resources, equality, visibility) in the context of the pandemic.

Materiality of a season

The material conditions of production of season 2 differ substantially from season 1. In season 2, we have a team with greater technical expertise, having worked on ten episodes in lockdown conditions, and now supported by more substantial funding and professional equipment. The actors who had enacted plays, songs and monologues are now standing behind the camera, as directors in their own right. Although theatre performances continue being used, there is a clearer shift towards the realist documentary form – a shift that goes alongside the reimagination of the audience. If in the early episodes the audience was most explicitly the Chhara community itself, and the subject and the audience intermingled in ways that unsettled the mode of audienceship, in Season 2, the subject is more clearly demarcated. The audience is equally sequestered outside of the frame – if not an ‘outside gaze’, in a simple sense, the audience is seated outside the process of the film. The films, in other words are not speaking ‘to one‘s own’, but rather to an abstract audience constituted of diverse positionalities. The narrative voice (whether of the anchor, or of Budhan Theatre (BT) and other performers who take on the role of the anchor in some episodes) is also one that is familiar to the documentary form – the audience is being introduced to the community, their history and struggles. As such, even though the films continued to be made by indigenous film makers, this was a gaze of members of one marginalised community onto others.

We are now also at a different point in the unfolding of the pandemic. Most of the shooting that features in season 2 was done after the first wave of the pandemic had subsided and when it became possible to move out of the confines of closed spaces and neighbourhoods. A lot of the footage is outdoors, in streets, in neighbourhoods and in temporary settlements of nomadic communities. By the time we arrived at the stage of editing, however, India was thrown deep into the devastating second wave of the Delta variant, when the country faced a shortfall of oxygen, vaccines, medicines and wood to burn the dead. In such a situation it was neither possible to base the films simply on the footage already collected, nor was it possible to return to the field. What we have then is the juxtaposition of footage, of interviews and performances shot ‘between waves’, and online interviews carried out as the second wave unfurled. A creative response to this situation can be seen in episode 7 based on the experiences of the Pardhi community in Maharashtra, wherein montages of still photographs are juxtaposed with videos of online interviews, where the smart phone is included in the frame to make the materiality of production visible.

The Political Voice

Episodes of season 2 articulate an explicit political voice. There are clear demands being made, which are easier for the audience to identify. The actors, and the interviewees are composed, their speech is political, their words well-chosen and addressed outwards – the interviewee looking straight into the camera.  In the episodes, we hear about a shift to begging, which as an activity further criminalises the community, putting lives and livelihoods at risk, and that this labour falls entirely on women. We learn about the deepening educational gap given by digital education, about living in poverty, about evictions and resettlements, about (lack of) livelihood and the overall exclusion of these communities from the mechanisms through which humanitarian support was extended by state and civil society alike. These issues are all being articulated as demands rather than laments or complaints with a recognisable aesthetics. We point here to the specificity of the unambiguity of a political voice that makes explicit demands, laying out frameworks of (in)justice and demanding the interlocution of the state. Perhaps it is the case that by this time the dust had settled on the extent of suffering brought about by the neglect of the state in enforcing a lockdown without warning or preparation (see in particular the episode ‘We wanted to go back’, focussed on the suffering of the millions of ‘migrant workers’ who walked thousands of kilometres to get home), the spectacular inefficiency of the state in preparing for the second wave, the extent of death and suffering this caused, and the continuities between this violence and the long history of social and political abjection.

The political voice of the podcast is diverse in its articulation, and the aesthetic difference between its forms is instructive of the complexity of the DNT political subject. The clearest political demands are made from the chair. There are plastic chairs where interviewees sit – chairs placed outside of households, where interviewees sit holding onto their arms, projecting their voices with clarity. The chair is a key symbol of authority, especially in rural India and in poor urban settings, where entire settlements may only have one chair available that is shared for important guests. Elevated from the floor, sitting on a chair also means not sitting on dirt, and is as such loaded with the political connotations of hierarchy and pollution. Demands made from the chair, with a few exceptions, are articulated by men.

Other voices, largely those of women, speak instead from the floor: sitting or squatting on the mud floors of their kitchens, and sometimes on charopais, the woven beds where entire families sleep in the open. Their demands from the floor are more like laments: ‘what can we do sir’, some conclude, addressing the interviewer behind the camera. Their apparent helplessness should however not be mistaken with passivity. In fact, if there is a resignation to one’s condition of abject poverty, a resignation that it will not change, there is also a resolution to do what it takes to survive. During the pandemic, many of the women we see ran entire households on their own, defying lockdown restrictions to beg. If the men made demands from chairs and women laments from the floor, women were the one who actively defied authority as men had to take on more passive roles (for being more easy targets of police retaliation, but also out of a sense of entitlement to ‘better’ work i.e. they would not take up household chores). From the floor, women’s voices conform to societal expectations (reproduced within communities) of a certain passivity attached to their behaviour, that same ‘passivity’ that allows them more easily than men to circumvent the law, even as this exacerbates the risk of social and sexual violence (Episode 4 features archived footage of a mob lynching of a Madari woman accused of ‘child lifting’ and an account of the gang rape and murder of another, for instance). Spoken as monologues (from the chair or the floor), these speeches have what Bakhtin calls the quality of the dialogue – they are addressed to one and in fact multiple audiences. At one level they are addressed to the immediate listener, a member of BT behind the camera asking questions – who, for many of the communities, is also seen as a patron (with political and humanitarian connections). At another level they are addressed to a more abstract authority of the state. This distinction between the chair voice and the floor voice also speaks to the relationship between the signifying voice and vocality outside referential meaning (Weidman 2014), and of the gendered differentiation in the aesthetic deployments of the political voice.

Performance as Ethnographic Layer

The articulation of a political voice reconfigures the function of other elements of the podcast assemblage. As an instance here we focus on the role of theatrical performance. As compared to the role of sublimation, enabling a glimpse of ‘that which cannot be spoken’, performances here play a very different role – that of  re-enacting through hyper-realisation. The first episode of the season focussed on the Bahurupia community of itinerant performers demonstrates this well. The episode features two performances: the first is drawn from the community’s own traditional repertoire, while the second is a performance by one of BT’s lead actors, Ruchika Kodekar. The interview of a Bahurupia community leader and actor, talking about the vanishing art of the community, and the abuses they endure, is intercut with scenes of their community performances enacted for the camera, of (male) actors dressed like monkeys, gurus or women performing characters from modern Hindu epics. This is a stunning interview and framing, with the camera moving between the lead actor wearing full makeup, a side actor who speaks in all seriousness with a bloody eye drawn over a white foundation, and the scene of the performance itself. These scenes from the community are then themselves intercut with Ruchika’s performance, dressed up as Kali Mata (with a blue face, her tongue sticking out, a nose ring and nose chain) performing in the middle of Chharanagar, paraphrasing, offering back to both the community and the viewer another version of the interview:

I am mother

And I am hungry,

My children are also hungry,

My husband (gharwala) is also hungry

Hunger and struggle have very old connections

Ruchika’s performance is intercut with interviews from the community now focussed on the experience of women who, during the pandemic, bore the brunt of earning livelihood for the whole community by begging, subjecting themselves to police violence and the risk of infection. A pregnant woman tells of how she went begging when nine months pregnant, walking for miles, and how she was beaten up by the police. As she recounts her story, Kali Mata echoes it, returning to the public these experiences:

When the pandemic came everything stopped,

There was no work

And no grains of food to eat

I was pregnant at the time

I was hungry

And with me, my children were hungry too

When I asked for food, then I received sticks

After falling down, I had to go back

You entertain yourself with TV and mobile phones

But I am born artist

Yes, a born artist

Which you call Bahurupia

I feed my family by showing my art

But today I am receiving sticks instead of food.

Kali Mata’s performance is filmed in slow motion, with a focus on the actress’ blue face, her facial expressions, her tongue sticking out. At times, when the camera moves back it reveals a small audience around her, gathered from the street where the act is being filmed. The slow-motion choice, (which was in fact the fixing of a technical glitch in which voice and images failed to sync), lends this piece a grave and dramatic style supported by a suspense-kind of background music. The image and words of the deity embodied are in themselves ponderous, as though the cosmic, the mythological had manifested in the mundane. It is beautiful, grotesque, and evokes the terrifying power of the Mother’s justice. The uncanny presence of a street audience, of the everyday, at the corner of the frame makes them all the more so.

In the case of both performances, we see the creative use of intercutting as a technique, a to and fro movement between temporalities in such a way as to create contiguity, meaning and affect within each temporality and beyond their sum. The intercut here produces a rich ethnographic layer, which picks up, reinterprets, transforms and hyper-realises the political voice, setting the stage for the revolutionary voice. It is important here to recognise that this technique lies in continuity with a longer tradition in BT’s theatre practice, which takes real-life stories and re-enacts them both to communities and to power: for communities in order to heal shared experiences of pain and create a movement; to power in order to make claims but also to achieve redemption. The interpretative work of BT theatre is made evident, there is a real that the hyper-real performances directly refer to. In film, through the intercut, these are made adjacent, enmeshed in each other.

The Revolutionary Voice

In the initial episodes of season 2 the documentary form is prevalent and the political voice – although augmented via performances – remains composed. As we move through the series, through the peak of the pandemic in India, we also see a shift from a more respectable voice to an unruly one (khanna 2012, Shankland et al 2011) – one that, paying witness to the sheer dispossession of the participants eventually, calls for a revolution. In episode 9, focussed on one of the most deprived Muslim-DNT communities that we encounter in the series, we are thrown back to the often-appearing theme of the threshold between animal and human. “They treat us like animals”, so the episode is called – a line repeated by different interviewees, alongside descriptions of chronic hunger, backbreaking work and a life confined to the most abject poverty with no possibility of redemption for oneself or the next generation. “Our children are not very smart”, the woman seated on the mud floor of her house declares, having grown up with food for two days out of four. “We have to live under this oppression”. Instead of echoing and augmenting the resigned voices of interviewees through performance, performers intercut their speech with a parallel dialogue calling on those who care to overrule the powerful.

“Those who care about the weak should speak,

We should change the world

It should scream

It should feel that those fighting hunger won’t get tired

The fire in the belly gets into the head

If some food goes into their belly, then there will be victory”

There is a shift in tone and addressivity (Bakhtin). If in the performance of Episode one the actress speaks in the first person as the interviewee, here actors address the audience head on. “Would you not get food and stay quiet? One must speak up”. They speak here almost to a ‘superaddressee’, that third person other than the speaker and the listener who listens sympathetically and understands justly.

References

Bakhtin, Michael. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. M. Holquist (ed.), Austin: University of Texas Press.

Khanna, A. Seeing Citizen Action through an ‘Unruly’ Lens. Development 55, 162–172 (2012).

Khanna, akshay. 2012.  Seeing Citizen Action through an ‘Unruly’ Lens. Development 55, 162–172.

Shankland, Alex, Danny Burns, Naomi Hossain, Akshay Khanna, Patta Scott-Villiers and Mariz Tadros. 2011. Unruly Politics: A manifesto. Brighton: IDS (mimeo).

Weidman, Amanda. 2014. Anthropology and Voice, Annual Review of Anthropology , 43: 1, 37-51

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

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

Cite as: Tilche, Alice and khanna, akshay. 2022. “The Political Voice and The Revolutionary.” Focaalblog, 3 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/10/03/akshay-khanna-alice-tilche-the-political-voice-and-the-revolutionary/

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akshay khanna & Alice Tilche: That which cannot be spoken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Nonini: The China Conundrum and The Current Conjuncture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deconstructing Socialism’s Deconstruction, Chinese Style

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

A Post-Socialist Developmental State with Chinese characteristics

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

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

Morphing into the Chinese Corporate Party-State

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

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

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

Political Crisis and Economic Stagnation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making China Great Again? – The Costs of Revanchism

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog

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

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

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

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

Post-coup precarity

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

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

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

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

Migrant domestic workers in the post-coup moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog

Alice Tilche & akshay khanna: The Village of the Dead

“Near Ahmedabad’s civil hospital, 

in a small dilapidated house. 

A dog lives with his wife and their children. 

After two days, the dog returns to his home. 

After seeing him, the wife says: 

“Oh! Look at your face, it is glowing 

First tell me where you have been for two days? 

The dog shakes his tail and tells her with a laugh: 

“Do you know today I ate human flesh, 

And the human was alive”. 

I return to this episode every time, ‘Murdon ka Gaon’ (The Village of the Dead). I watch it once more, working on a translation to Italian for a film screening, moving from the English subtitles while paying attention to the original Bhantu words that by now I mostly understand. I pay attention to the words, the pace of the story, I stop and listen again. Finding words in Italian, my mother tongue, strikes me – the words are more emotive than they sounded in English. They touch me more; perhaps it is also in the slow attentive viewing that I let them touch me. 

The core of the episode is simple: shot in a dark room, four people sit in a closed circle, telling a story, their faces folded into shadows by a candle placed in the middle. The image is dark and grainy, their voices varied but all intensely expressive. Sometimes, we cut to the image of a dog. Dogs sleeping, a dog roaming the streets at night, a dog licking its wounds. We move between close-ups of the faces of the actors and, occasionally, the dog. As I watch the film I am struck by the vivid, yet dark affects it provokes. The simplicity of the images on camera, and the ekphrastic storytelling (Favero 2018) allows you to watch and at the same time imagine the unimaginable – that which, in fact, is too inhuman to be represented. 

The story, an adaptation of the Hindi short story by Dharamvir Bharti, ‘Village of the Dead’, is told from the perspective of a dog, a dog that roams the streets at night to find half-dead bodies, the bodies of migrants, of slaves, of corona patients that are so hungry and thirsty that they begin eating themselves. It is a story of thresholds, of the threshold between the living and the dead, between humans and non-humans, between humans and slaves, between humans and hungry humans. 

Finding the city’s hospital dark and empty we follow the dog wandering towards the highway in search of food. Near the highway, the dog encounters thousands of migrants and their children walking “dhak, dhak, dhak, like machines” – an encounter that evokes the brutal images of the bleeding feet of migrants, walking thousands of kilometres to return home in the face of a lockdown of the country announced with a few hours’ notice, a mass migration estimated to be the largest in the history of the subcontinent. The dog sees a hut perched against some tall buildings, where a boy gasps, barely able to form the word water: “pa… pa … pani”. There is only an old man to listen to him, himself too helpless to help. “I will get relief if you die”, the old man shouts at the boy in an angry tone. The dog continues wandering through hallucinatory scenes of poverty, of hunger, of mothers trying to feed their children, of people who are too helpless to love, of humans that may have been dead but are in fact half-alive, eaten by the dog, then by flies, and who are so hungry and thirsty that they too drink their own blood. After digging its teeth in the flesh of a hungry human: 

“The dog got ashamed. And put his head down 

Because he ate the flesh of a hungry, slave migrant. 

Corona patients and hungry slaves are not humans” 

I find the storytelling format reassuring, about the four people talking softly, intimately – the intimacy of a story read before bedtime. The voice of the narrator, the dog, is soft. Perhaps this is done on purpose, like in many (terrible) folktales, where you are invited to trust, relax, be guided by the narrator to unimagined and terrifying places. This intimacy contrasts with the shocking images that the telling provokes, with the angry voice of the old man who tells the boy that the only relief is death. It contrasts with the reality that, perhaps unlike in folktales, we are presented with following the story. 

This vignette relates to one amongst several disturbing moments from an arts-based research project set in western India, which has sought to document and intervene in one of the most difficult collective experiences in recent human history. It was in May 2020, during the first wave of India’s Covid-19 pandemic, that a collective of indigenous theatre artists associated with Budhan Theatre and belonging to the ‘Denotified’[1] Chhara tribe began an extensive project of documentation of the lockdown and post-lockdown experiences of their communities through film and digital technology. This project had, by early 2022, produced two series of video podcasts in indigenous languages, disseminated through community social media platforms and messaging services such as WhatsApp. The first series filmed during the early days of the pandemic between May and December 2020 focussed inward, at the experiences of pain and loss of their own Chhara community. Starting in January 2021, the second series moves outwards, to document the experiences of other Denotified and Nomadic Tribes in the region and across the country. The third series, underway during this writing, brings the skills and experience developed beyond DNT communities by training young leaders from other marginalised groups in filmmaking.

Episodes in the series address the health, socio-cultural and politico-economic dimensions of the pandemic through multiple art forms that include theatre performances, story-telling, songs and poetry alongside more conventional forms of documentary film making such as interviews, fact sharing and event capture. They cover topics ranging from health and safety measures, changes in death and marriage rituals, precarious livelihoods, the lives of children and the gendered unfurling of the pandemic. The podcasts are an attempt to tell stories of the pandemic that do not find space in mainstream public spheres, to speak to one’s own community in one’s own language, as a companion, a community space in which to make sense of unprecedented suffering where the precarity, disenfranchisement and marginalisation of centuries took on another dimension altogether, where the fault-lines of a post-colonial society, subsumed in the everyday, rose to the gaze as the horrific realities of the reduction of the human to the inhuman. It is in this context that this particular episode serves as something of an index through which to navigate this moment. 

In the episode, the narration of collective suffering, made all the more effective through the absurdist use of the voice of the street dogs, sets the scene for an individual narrative of loss. Following the story told in a scantly lit room, we move to a brightly lit interview setting, with a widow and her son soon after they lost their husband and father to Corona. Sitting in a chair outside her house, dressed in a white ‘good’ sari, the widow speaks calmly. The widow is well held-together, as is her son. They do not cry. They both demonstrate utmost dignity, precisely that which has been denied to them, and which differentiates the dead and the living. As they speak, however, the precarity of their situation becomes clear: the debts they have taken to pay hospital bills, the unpaid school fees, the loss of livelihood. At the end of the interview, still keeping her composure, the widow turns to the camera with her hands joined pleading the government for help. Glimpses of death and its rawness break through the frame of respectability as interspersed with their story is the WhatsApp footage of the husband / father in hospital, intubated, gasping for breath – an image of the physical suffering of the disease that has been invisible from most representations of the pandemic. Contrasting with the composed telling of his story the image takes us back to “the village of the dead” – to that suffering beyond the human which only a dog can recount.

The telling of this story, and the images that it both evokes and presents, is an attempt at disturbing the political order of images and their associated experiences – and the relationships of visibility / invisibility that obliterate certain kinds of suffering and the possibility of its memory. Less than a year after the second wave of the Covid pandemic in India, its sheer horror and the absolute failure of the state to address it, is being aggressively erased. The various elements of the catastrophe, and in multiple registers are being denied – be it in terms of numbers[2], of causation of death and morbidity, of narratives of loss, emotional and spiritual distress – are thus at the risk of being ‘aggressively forgotten’. The project of holding on to experience, of creating portals to memory is thus a complicated affair, bringing together the material conditions for this creation, the emotive and affective challenges of recounting, the historical struggle of some of the most marginalised peoples of the world to articulate an intelligible voice, and the dramatic shifts in the materiality of public spheres, aesthetic and artistic practices in a post-COVID world.

This production of images also forces a reconsideration of the ethical debates around representations of suffering that frame ethical protocols within academia. In the late 1980s, at a time when shocking images of wars and famines became widely broadcasted, medical anthropologists criticised the ‘globalisation of suffering’ through which images become appropriated to appeal to global audiences (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996; see Ong 2019 for more recent debates). Scholars then argued that these iconic images involved a problematic commoditisation, and therefore thinning out, of the experience of suffering. Instead, they called for a kind of moral witnessing that is reflexive, that accounts for local realities by involving local participants in the development of images and interventions. These debates, however, continue tend to be structured by an imagination of the filmmaker, the anthropologist, the researcher, the producer of representations as outsiders, whereas those represented are imagined as objects bereft of agency. At the outset then, the representation of suffering itself comes to be suspect as a form of exploitation, and subject to technologies of taming, of decaffeination, so that representations may be considered and consumed without an engagement with the experience itself. There is thus a crucial misalignment between these ethical preoccupations aimed at protecting the vulnerable and the demand of communities to be heard and seen. The pandemic put indigenous communities in India in the grips of a devastating humanitarian crisis. Their vulnerability was greater because of their inability to enter and become visible in the public sphere.  If we engage with indigenous groups as active consumers and producers of images – through mobile phones, social media and through artistic practices like film and drama – what are the material, or ethical concerns that underly the making of images? What does it mean for a research to be led by the community?

In the following weeks we shall in this series of blogposts, share episodes from the project, alongside reflections on the questions that they force open or complicate, around the changing nature of collaborative research, the transformation of embodied performance into digital objects and processes, the emergence of a new visual and political language around suffering and the place of death in current political formations.

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

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

References

Kleinman, Arthur, and Joan Kleinman. “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times.” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 1–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027351.

Favero, Paolo. 2018. The present image. Palgrave MacMillan.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69499-3_5

Ong, Jonathan Corpus. “Toward an Ordinary Ethics of Mediated Humanitarianism: An Agenda for Ethnography.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 22, no. 4 (July 2019): 481–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877919830095.

Notes

[1] ‘Denotified’ refers to tribes were ‘notified’ as born criminals during the British colonial rule under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. Despite their denotification five years after India’s independence the stigma of criminality continues to be associated with these groups, depriving them of citizenship rights and entitlements. The population of India’s Denotified and Nomadic is estimated to be around 10 % of India’s total population.

[2] The World Health Organisation estimates that the total number of excess deaths associated with the COVID pandemic in the year 2020 and 2021 is about 47 lakh/4.7million. The Government of India in turn rejects the report and insists that the number is 1/10th of the WHO estimate.

Cite as: Tilche, Alice and Khanna, Akshay. 2022. “The Village of the Dead.” Focaalblog, 31 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/05/31/alice-tilche-akshay-khanna-the-village-of-the-dead/

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

Susan Paulson: Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds

Coronavirus has provoked some of us to think about our worlds in new ways and to consider different horizons of change. Yet in many pandemic-related discourses and policies, I have been frustrated to see hegemonic ideals about care, kinship, and residence distract attention from empirical realities and adequate solutions. Examples range from the ubiquitous representation of care as embodied by women health workers and mothers to the shocking silence about disproportionate burdens of coronavirus illness and death born by men, and the wildly incorrect assumption that most humans live in and are cared for by nuclear family households.

Covid masculinities

Much attention has been drawn to vulnerabilities of women nurses, health aids, and caretakers. More gender awareness is needed for millions of men performing essential jobs as sanitation workers, truck and bus drivers, agricultural workers, miners, fishers, and loggers. These occupations are absolutely vital for public health, yet were already among the most dangerous and deadly before adding exposure to coronavirus. Around the world, they are performed overwhelmingly by men, in patterns of workplace violence so highly gendered that, in countries like USA, men suffer 92% of occupational deaths. The workplace, then, is a realm that calls urgently for improved care.

Data from countries around the world show that coronavirus infections tend to be much more severe among men than women, with death tolls as high as two times greater for men (Bhopal and Bhopal 2020). In the US, the death rate from coronavirus for men is 1.6 times that of women. This intersects with disproportionate burden of coronavirus infections and underlying conditions among racial and ethnic minorities, and among those who are less wealthy and less educated. In many contexts, then, it is poorer less-white men who are most vulnerable to suffer critical illness and death from coronavirus (Rushovich et. al 2021). Care for these groups needs to be much more visible in news and policy responses.

While analyses of structural inequalities in occupation, residence, and healthcare rarely address masculinities, some airtime has been dedicated to men’s behavior. Studies in various contexts found men to be much more likely than women to go without masks and to break quarantine. How can criticism of the behavior of individual men shift to societal commitments to supporting self-care among all humans, including variously positioned men?     

Is it useful to blame men for getting sick? Feminists have struggled to motivate compassion for women whose conditions constrain the development of skills and confidence needed to establish dignified lives for themselves. Transitions to care-full worlds will also require compassion for boys and men whose gender expectations push them to demonstrate their manliness by performing dangerous labor in hazardous conditions, by exercising and enduring violence, and by taking risks with their health and their lives. Perhaps the devastating gendered impacts of the virus can spark mobilization against gender-linked violence that harms men and women in different ways.

While some people find safety and comfort at home, others face conflict and crowding, or lack homes altogether. Reports from diverse countries indicate that domestic violence has intensified during lock-downs, impacting women disproportionately. People who don’t even live in homes face different kinds of vulnerabilities. In most countries, women outnumber men among residents in long-term care centers, while men make up majorities as high as 90% in prisons, jails, migrant labor camps, homeless shelters, immigrant detention centers, and military barracks, all of which became hotspots for the virus. In these residential patterns too, the forms of violence and discrimination borne by men intersect with ethno-racial and class inequalities. Demands of care for those not living in households call for moral and institutional shifts away from private family responsibility toward community and commons.

Normative households

Kinship and sexuality are also fundamental in the organization of care. Many public health messages, exemplified by those pictured below, reinforce the widespread—and incorrect—assumption that contemporary populations live mostly in heteronormative nuclear households. In the US, however, only 20% of households consists of nuclear families, as measured by the US Census Bureau. Can we do better at supporting the other 80% to respond to this pandemic and conditions of life beyond?

A public health announcement banner shows a photograph of a man and woman seated on either side of two small kids. Text reads: Covid-19. Es en serio! #QuédateEnCasa. AUS: Asociación de Usuarios Sanitas
Image 1: One of many COVID prevention posters depicting nuclear family households that dominate public health messages in the world

The false portrayal of residential life as reflecting a normative kinship model limits support for the actual residential and kin arrangements through which care and provisioning are organized in today’s societies. Inaccurate assumptions that all people live like the Flintstones, the Simpsons, or the Jetsons seriously limit public health efforts by obscuring empirical realities, which are plural. Those public messages also operate to demean and delegitimize other ways of living, and to stifle creative responses to coronavirus and other challenges.

An illustration of a Black person, wearing comfortable clothes, seated and reading a book with a houseplant in the background. Text reads: Stay Home, Yew Yorkers. Do your part to help stop the spread of coronavirus.
Image 2: New Yorkers Stay Home poster

Across wealthy countries, the most common household category is a single person living alone (27% US and Canadian households, 40% of Swedish households). This New Yorkers Stay Home poster taps into possibilities of nourishing companionship in uni-person households through literature and interspecies relations (human & plant). Another creative response to needs for care and conviviality is found in queer dance parties organized online with scopes ranging from local communities to celebrity-filled global gatherings. This is not a trivial example; opportunities to dance, laugh, move together not only provide care and acknowledgement needed in quarantine (and other isolating conditions), they can also build values and pleasures outside the realm of economic competition, consumption, and profit. Alliances with LGBTQ and related social movements help to honor the diverse household and kin arrangements that people are already living, and to support innovations provoked by the pandemic, as well as those motivated by desires for positive transformation.

Where did this ill-fitting model come from?

Generations of anthropologists and archaeologists have documented a rich variety of arrangements for care, protection, provisioning, and regeneration of human communities. These are often lumped together under the term “extended family,” reinforcing the false assumption that all kinship is based on the nuclear family, from which other relations may “extend.”

Today, much public discourse, together with a surprising amount of academic work, ignores the diverse realities of kinship across cultures and through history, and instead features an ideological model of (re)production that was established and disseminated with the rise of colonial capitalism, through the following historical processes:

  • conceptual and institutional divorce of market-oriented activities identified as “productive labor” from other activities identified as “reproductive care“   
  • designation of the first as “masculine” and the second as “feminine” allocation of disproportionate monetary value, resources, and power to masculine-associated production 
  • 20th century push toward nuclear family households as economic and residential unit
  • media, political, and educational messages convey expectations that human organization be based in heteronormative nuclear family households where men are excluded from care work
Images of three families from classic cartoons: The Simpsons, The Flintstones, and the Jetsons. All three family images include a father, a mother, one or more children, and at least one pet.
Image 3: Images from cartoon series suggesting that humans have always and will always live in single-family homes among heteronormative nuclear families with man bread-winner and woman care-provider. Audiences worldwide have watched the Flintstones since 1960, the Jetsons since 1962, and the Simpsons since 1989.

What drives ongoing pushes to keep imposing this model on populations that it so poorly represents? Why continue allocating responsibility of care to putative nuclear families in strategies that overburden some and fall short of needed care for many?

One key motive is the role this model has played as an instrument of industrial capitalist growth, adapted to engineer and to justify forms of appropriation that support profit and accumulation. The model has also been instrumental to the militarization of domestic and international conflicts related to this push. For me, then, challenging normative assumptions about this gender-kinship model is a vital move to curb and to heal eco-social damages provoked by the drive for growth.

What policies, practices, messages can support and motivate people of all identities to organize care with healthier arrangements of care?

A silver lining can be found in the potential of historical crises (like COVID-19 and climate break-down) to destabilize established orders, opening possibilities for new alliances toward healthier and more equitable worlds.

While respect for planetary boundaries demands degrowth of the total quantities of resources and energy transformed each day by the global economy, some features need to be nurtured and developed, namely infrastructures and institutions of care that enhance the well-being of more people in more places. Care-full paths forward are being explored by Degrowth and Feminism(s) Alliance (FaDA), in contexts including the coronavirus pandemic (Paulson 2020).

Amid the pandemic, we have been happily surprised to see governments experimenting with policies proposed in our book The Case for Degrowth (Kallis et al. 2020): companies and governments have reduced working hours, implemented work-sharing, and subsidized workers during quarantine and business closings. Enhanced public services have supported household and community economies, and mechanisms such as the US Defense Production Act have been mobilized to secure vital supplies and services.

Can we think about these moves as anticipatory strategies that may secure ongoing care for populations, and slow down the rush toward future disasters? For example, can provisional cash payments to sustain residents through the crisis lead the way to basic care incomes? Can defense budgets shift emphasis from updating military armaments toward protecting and regenerating human resources?

Policies like these may work in very different ways, depending on the degree to which they are institutionalized to stimulate economic growth or to promote equitable wellbeing; to prolong productivism or to support reproduction; to provide charity for vulnerable people or to replace hierarchical and exploitative social systems that produce those vulnerabilities.

Beware that these crises also nourish divisive and reactionary alliances. Amid the ongoing pandemic, powerful actors continue pushing to reconstitute the status quo, and to shift costs to others. There is danger that abilities to ally for change will be undermined by politics of fear, xenophobia, and blame; intensified surveillance and control; and isolation that constrains political organizing and all kinds of common efforts. Campaigns to discredit vaccinations and masks synergize with attacks against climate action, gender equity, and racial justice. All are rallied in the name of political economic stability and defense of geopolitical interests. On personal levels, this allied resistance to change is fueled by understandable fear of losing identities and relations that have been construed and experienced as natural, meaningful, and morally correct (even as I understand them as historically adapted to support growth). In the face of polarizing narratives and blame, what strategies can support shifts away from divisive competition toward mutual collaboration?

Conclusion

I would like to see economies slow down by design, not disaster, in ways that support societies to become more caring and equitable. However, it looks like transitions may be unplanned and messy, like those we are living through now. Finding ourselves amid global pandemic and climate change, we must seize opportunities to build healthier priorities, policies, and sociocultural systems. Such transitions depend on alliances among differently positioned actors. And they must involve attention to gender and kinship systems that honor diverse contributions, and that assure care and minimize vulnerabilities for all.

Susan Paulson is Professor at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies. She studied and taught about human-environment relations during 15 years in Latin America, and taught sustainability studies during 5 years in Europe. Paulson contributes to theory and practice in political ecology; degrowth; and gender, masculinities and environment.

References

Bhopa, Sunsil and  Raj Bhopal. 2020. ‘Sex differential in COVID-19 mortality varies markedly by age.’ Lancet 396 (10250): 532-533.

Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria 2020. The Case for Degrowth. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Paulson, Susan 202. ‘Degrowth and feminisms ally to forge care-full paths beyond pandemic.’ Interface: A journal for and about social movements. Volume 12 (1): 232 – 246. https://www.interfacejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Interface-12-1-Paulson.pdf

Rushovich, Tamara, Marion Boulicault, Jarvis T. Chen, Ann Caroline Danielsen, Amelia Tarrant, Sarah S. Richardson, and Heather Shattuck-Heidorn 2021. ‘Sex Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality Vary Across US Racial Groups.’ Journal of General Internal Medicine 36: 1696-1701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-021-06699-4.

Cite as: Paulson, Susan. 2022. “Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds.“ FocaalBlog, 26 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/26/susan-paulson-gender-aware-care-in-pandemic-and-postgrowth-worlds/

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

Alexander W. Anthony: Covid in the confines of the US

Introduction

There is a calendar in my office which still hangs at March 2020; an artifact of the confusion and rush to ‘lockdown’ and to find shelter from the upcoming storm. I keep it there because it seems strange to take it down after so long, but also as a reminder that time is not as straightforward as we like to believe. The solitude of lockdown taught me that, but that was my privilege, that I needed such an extreme event to experience this beyond the boredom of standing in a long line or the lightning flash of an enjoyable night with friends. People who have been incarcerated know the absurdity of time better than most perhaps. As distressing as the past two years has been for society, for incarcerated individuals locked away and largely forgotten, the burden is unthinkable. U.S. federal and state prisons have acted as miniature epicenters where infection rates have been three to four times higher than national averages or those for surrounding communities. In recent months, as the Omicron variant has spread, New York City’s Rikers Island jail reached an astonishing 17% positive infection rate (Ceron 2021). Watching this unfold, I wondered why we, as a society, have so complacently left prisoners to this fate, and as Foucault (2015:1-2) noted, what we can learn about ourselves according to the “fate [we] reserve for those of the living whom [we] wish to be rid of…”

Running the Numbers

Two years into the pandemic, and as the Omicron wave continued to sweep through the country, the Covid Prison Project reported 541,538 positive cases among individuals incarcerated within prisons. At least 2,780 people have died of COVID while incarcerated. An estimated 531,060 individuals in incarceration have received at least one dose of the vaccine (covidprisonproject.com), although institutions have slowly become less forthcoming with internal statistics over the course of the pandemic, and some have stopped offering regular reports altogether (Schwartzapfel and Blakinger 2021). While the number of positive cases both inside of prisons and within the US has continued to increase, what is most concerning is that the ratio of positive cases between incarcerated and non-incarcerated individuals in the US has remained steady since the beginning of the pandemic. For example, as of May 2020, the infection rate in New York city (the global epicenter at that time) jails (including Rikers Island) was at 9.56%, whereas the city itself reported a positive case rate at 2.10% (Griffard and Ciaccio 2020). For further perspective, the previous global epicenter, Lombardy, Italy, had a positive infection rate of 0.78%. Thus, the infection rate within NYC jails was 3-4 times higher than the surrounding community. Further data indicates that this was an early foreshadowing of what would be the national norm in the following years. As of April 2021, a comparison of incidence and mortality rates between prisons and the US population indicated that within prisons there were 30,780 cases (per 100,000) as compared to the US population which was 9,350 (per 100,000). This ratio continues to hold steady as I write this today nearly a year later (covidprisonproject.com). It also needs to be noted that there may be some hesitancy for incarcerated people to report symptoms, as a positive test would likely result in solitary confinement, rebranded by the CDC as ‘medical isolation’ (Blakinger 2020). Thus, the actual number of infections within prisons is likely even higher.

Bodies Commodified

Long before the word ‘coronavirus’ was a household name, Wacquant (2009) noted the correlation between US welfare reform, the criminalization of poverty, and the “War on Drugs”, which he astutely noted was nothing less than a ‘guerilla campaign’ waged against young men living in the inner city for whom “the retail trade of narcotics has provided the most accessible and reliable source of gainful employment” (2009:61). Two observations can be taken away from this; first there are two economies operating in the US (and globally), one is deemed illegitimate and therefore illegal, but it provides a necessary livelihood for its participants.

Three men of color wearing jumpsuits and safety glasses work at industrial sewing machines amid piles of camo fabric.
Image 1: Prisoners in a UNICOR (Federal Prison Industries) program producing military uniforms, photo by Federal Bureau of Prisons

The second is the correlation between the ballooning incarceration rate due to drug related arrests and the boom of private-run prisons which began in the 1980s (Pelaez 2014; Wacquant 2009). Private prisons contracted by the Federal and state governments receive a fixed sum of money per prisoner held in their custody, regardless of the cost of maintaining that prisoner. Thus, the bodies of the poor have become commodified. The construction of private prisons reached its height in the 1990s (alongside welfare reform) under President Clinton, when the Justice Department contracted private prisons to incarcerate undocumented workers (Pelaez 2014). Again, workers selling their labor outside the bounds of the legitimate capitalist system. This is a for-profit industry that exploded at the closing of the twentieth century (Wacquant 2009).

The Alienation of ‘Commodified Bodies’

The pandemic shuttered global economies and only businesses providing essential goods or services remained open. Meanwhile, within the penal system, incarcerated labor was deemed ‘essential.’ Perhaps predictably as labor has long been associated with the modern disciplinary apparatus. Quoting Brissot; “’One will not succeed by locking beggars up in filthy prisons that are more like cesspools’; they will have to be forced to work. ‘The best way of punishing them is to employ them’” (Brissot quoted in:Foucault 1977:106). Additionally, public works have often been the source of that labor since the prisoner became the “property of society” (Foucault 1977:109). Incarcerated labor was used in just this way throughout the pandemic. For instance, Lo Wu prison in Hong Kong reportedly had female inmates working shifts around the clock to produce face masks for wages significantly under Hong Kong’s minimum wage (Grant 2020). Additionally, former New York governor Cuomo announced that the state would be using prison labor to produce hand sanitizer for schools, transportation systems, etc. (Grant 2020).

Amidst the pandemic prison labor demonstrates one of the most extreme examples of the alienation from the product of one’s own labor (Marx 1990). For instance, although many prisons used the labor of incarcerated persons to produce hand sanitizer,  most prisons ban products higher than 60% alcohol which includes most hand sanitizers (CDC 2020). Thus, the product which could have helped keep them healthy was taken to ship to the world outside the prison.

Time and a Social Death

Some useful parallels can be drawn between prisons and other sites of confinement which may help shed some light on the current plight or our incarcerated populations. For instance, on one hand, prisons and care homes are dramatically different environments. On the other hand, both effectively provide the same service to society: the removal of a particular class of individuals. The criminal has been disconnected from the public realm in response to a crime committed against society itself (Foucault 2015), whereas individuals in care homes have been removed from society to better ‘care’ for them. Thus, one has been confined to protect society – the other has been confined under the protection of society. Now, one parallel between these institutions is time. In prison, time is taken away as a punishment for an infraction, just as labor (which is nothing less than time-sold) is rewarded with wages (Foucault 2015:70). Thus, the criminal is detached from their social milieu, placed in confinement, and punished by the removal of “time to live” (Foucault 2015:72). The centrality of time within the penal system is apparent, but how is this relevant to care home facilities? I believe that it lies at the other end of this duality of time sold/time taken. In contrast, those living within care centers no longer, or never had, the ability to sell their time in the form of labor. The only greater affront to capitalism than the inability (care homes) to contribute to the production of accumulation is the refusal to contribute (penal systems). Thus, “any person hostile or opposed to the rule of the maximization of production” (Foucault 2015:52) is implicitly an ‘enemy of the state’. Of course, most people housed in care facilities are neither ‘opposed’ nor ‘hostile’ towards production directly, yet they are unable to contribute, which places them nearer on the spectrum to the ‘enemy of society’. Indeed, some of the earliest poor laws in the ‘West’ differentiated those who were able-bodied without work (vagabonds) against those who were physically unable to labor (beggars) (Marx 1990).

Incarcerated peoples, on the other hand, have been labelled as enemies of the state. The shift from the physical tortures of the Ancien Régime to the modern disciplinary apparatus included a change in who a crime was seen as perpetrated against. Instead of committing an offense against the sovereign, criminals were seen as committing crimes against society. Executions became fewer and confinement became nearly homogenous with the penal system. In order to rationalize long-term imprisonment and continued (if less occasional) executions, the ‘monstrosity’ of the criminal became a focal point (Foucault 1978:138). This has become a mantle worn by all criminals as ethnographic work has illustrated time and again (Conover 2001; Feldman 1991; Rhodes 2004). The inmate bears a stigma and somehow “we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human” (Goffman 1963:5). It is something Foucault witnessed during a tour of Attica, where he described living conditions as “a cage for wild animals” (Foucault and Simon 1991:29). It is no surprise that incarcerated lives are valued as ‘less than’ when society’s root metaphor for criminality is animalism (Turner 1975).

Lepers in Exile-Exclosure

Analysis of the societal response to COVID-19 has suggested that it reflects Foucault’s smallpox or quarantine model of power through the use of statistical analysis and empirical data (Sarasin 2020). This appears true; however, places of confinement seem to have regressed to a more primitive model of power. As the quarantine model served as the basis for the modern surveillance society, the ‘leper model’ was foundational to the formation of the quarantine model (Foucault 1977:198-199) and most closely reflects what is transpiring at sites of confinement. “The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-exclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate…” (Foucault 1977:198). Anecdotally, in discussions of the mass release of prisoners, opponents often essentialize all incarcerated people as ‘violent’. Yet, the data does not support this argument. Only 3.2% of inmates in the US federal prison system have been convicted of homicide, aggravated assault, or kidnapping (BOP 2020). Yet the stigma of crime has turned them into a mass of bodies which it is “useless to differentiate.”

This analysis has been somewhat more historical than anticipatory; however, history does tend to repeat itself. Incarcerated laborers have been exploited since the penal experiment of confinement began. As the pandemic has persisted, they continued to be disproportionately affected by sickness and death. For over two years, infections, and mortality rates inside of confinement exceeds what is occurring outside threefold. Unfortunately, I believe we can anticipate more of the same in post-COVID confinement. I would say that again, “capital [will continue to come] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx 1990:926).

Alexander W. Anthony is a doctoral student in anthropology at Syracuse University with a focus in historical archaeology. His primary research is on the influences of prison reform movements and ideology on the human and spatial/material dimensions and experiences of incarceration in late 18th – early 20th century Southern Italy.

References

Blakinger, Keri. 2020. As COVID-19 Measures Grow, Prison Oversight Falls. The Marshall Project 03/17/2020.

BOP. 2020. Federal Bureau of Prisons Statistics of Offenses, edited by Federal Bureau of Prisons, bop.gov.

CDC. 2020. Interim Guidance on Management of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Correctional and Detention Facililities, edited by Center for Disease Control. Center for Disease Control.

Ceron, Ella. 2021. NYC Sees Jail ‘Crisis’ on Positive-Test Rates over 17% at Rikers. Bloomberg Equality December 22, 2021. www.bloomberg.com.

Conover, Ted. 2001. New Jack. Vintage Books, New York.

Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2 ed. Random House, New York.

Foucault, Michel.1978 . The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Pantheon Books, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 2015. The Punitive Society: Lectures at the College de France 1972-1973. Translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Foucault, Michel, and John K. Simon. 1991. Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview. Social Justice 18(3):26-34.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Simon & Schuster Inc., New York.

Grant, Harriet. 2020. Vulnerable Prisoners ‘Exploited’ to Make Coronvirus Masks and Hand Gel. The Guardian. UK.

Griffard, Molly, and Vincent Ciaccio. 2020. COVID-19 Infection Tracking in NYC Jails. The Legal Aid Society https://www.legalaidnyc.org/covid-19-infection-tracking-in-nyc-jails/, accessed 5/5/2020.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin, England.

Pelaez, Vicky. 2014. The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery? Global Research.

Rhodes, Lorna A. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Sarasin, Philipp. 2020. Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic with Foucault? foucaultblog, 3/31/20. https://www.fsw.uzh.ch/foucaultblog/essays/254/understanding-corona-with-foucault, accessed.

Schwartzapfel, Beth, and Keri Blakinger. 2021. Omicron has Arrived. Many Prisons and Jails are Not Ready. The Marshall Project, accessed January 29, 2022.

Turner, Victor. 1975. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Politics, History, and Culture. Duke University Press, Durham.

Cite as: Anthony, Alexander W. 2022. “Covid in the confines of the US.” FocaalBlog, 1 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/01/alexander-w-anthony-covid-in-the-confines-of-the-us/

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

Andrew Orta: The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear

Responding to a question about future of the MBA (Master of Business Administration) in the wake of the pandemic, the Dean of a top program recently suggested that “the future is bright,” but would require “a fundamental rethinking of business education. When the MBA was first established a century ago, there was a real sense that we would be forming leaders of business and society, a focus on forming values. I see a return to that earlier concept of business education.”

Just prior to the onset of the pandemic, MBA applications were sharply down, business and popular press were declaring the death or obsolescence of the MBA, and business programs were scrambling to reinvent themselves. But what a difference a global pandemic makes. My comments here build on ethnographic research conducted in MBA programs prior to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as a recent sampling of online informational forums for MBA applicants, program websites, and business media to examine the ways MBA administrators are reframing the value proposition of the MBA, marketing the degree as a necessary feature of the “bright future” of capitalism after COVID.

Two men and two women, dressed in business attire, look at a whiteboard with a graph showing an upward trend.
Image 1: Business meeting, photo by Yan Krukov

MBA programs are zombies: always returning from the dead. Their death is announced every few years, usually correlated with scandals or catastrophes tarnishing the capitalist brand. But the MBA cheats death through periodic reinventions. Indeed, the legitimacy of the MBA and its purchase on civic life in the US has been an open-ended project from the founding of the degree just over a century ago.

The early 20th and 21st centuries are productive bookends for thinking about this. There are intriguing parallels of economic and social disruptions, transformations in globalization, epochal technological changes, and, of course, experiences of global pandemics. But rather than thinking with the Dean about these parallels, I want to highlight some salient differences in the anticipatory rebranding of the post-COVID MBA. Thinking against the grain of the Dean’s hearkening back to origins elucidates a sleight-of-hand in current directions in MBA training – having to do less with a reanimation of the early 20th century specialist manager, than with “his” disappearance.

Producing Managerial Subjects

A common misperception of MBA training is that the students learn nothing; the programs are merely credentialing exercises providing entrée to elite business networks. But, as I’ve argued in a recent ethnography of MBA training in US business programs, MBAs get more than they bargain for (Orta 2019). MBA programs present highly distilled versions of the concepts and habits of capitalism. Course content is simplified, to be sure, but this streamlining takes on compelling depth through the cascading reinforcement of material across the curriculum. Programmatic simulations of professional life further instill a habitus of fast-paced decision-making in overscheduled conditions, based upon imperfect information. MBAs learn to frame the necessity of this simplification as an index of “hard work,” for which they should be highly compensated.

MBA programs have developed an additional value proposition: technical skills are not enough; an effective capitalist leader requires “talent.” MBA programs sell themselves as spaces for the cultivation of talent, helping students become better versions of themselves to be more effective versions of “the MBA.” The “x-factor” of talent is cast as the necessary supplement to the shortcomings of technical business teachings when faced with the real world. And the connections of the MBA to the technical operations of capitalism as a systemic form of profit extraction are increasingly masked by the rhetoric of talent as a driver of corporate success – a talent theory of value.

MBA Programs on the Eve of COVID

On the eve of COVID, MBA programs were dying—reeling from a set of compounding crises, including the Great Recession and MBA complicity in the runaway financialization that led to it. A season of institutional soul-searching spurred updated curricula and non-finance focused program tracks. A second crisis involved MBA programs’ increasing dependence over recent decades on international student enrollments. The visa policies of the Trump administration triggered a precipitous drop in international MBA enrollments. Some programs closed; others rolled out a variety of online degrees aimed at a broader pool of international and domestic students.

The Continuous Reinvention of the MBA

Such challenges and changes were business as usual. The arc of MBA education has been a continuous project to legitimize and reinvent the MBA idea across a series of scandals, crises, and transformations of capitalism, beginning with the founding of collegiate business degrees at the turn-of-the-20th century. Seen as lowering institutional standards with vocational school commonness, nascent business programs sought to emulate more established programs in law or medicine. And they tapped into an intensifying cultural sense of “business” as a discrete realm and a driver of an American modernity (Cruikshank 1987, Daniel 1998).

While the earliest iteration of the MBA curriculum was thus tightly connected to claimed civic needs, those needs were in the service of a still emerging order of extractive capitalism. By the 1930s, the corporation could be taken as standing for a particularly “American” modernity and generative of what came to be seen as the American way of life (Berle and Means 1932, Chandler 1977). MBA programs connected their mission explicitly to serving this process (e.g., Johnson 1906, Donham 1931).

By mid-century, business education was an established part of the landscape of higher education in the U.S. “The MBA” was a recognizable avatar of capitalism, albeit a shifty one: subject to recurring reinventions in the face of critiques, challenges and crises over the post-War decades and beyond – including the fallout from 2009 and the enrollment crisis (e.g. Drucker 1950, Gordon 1959, Pierson 1959, Petriglieri 2012).

The MBA Value Proposition for a Post-COVID World

The MBA responses to the post-2009 and post-2016 challenges positioned the programs well for the COVID years. Flexibility in delivering the MBA was already becoming a habit as many programs developed online and hybrid MBAs to maintain access to international students as well as employed domestic students. “Rigor” is a new keyword as recruiters legitimate the online programs; there is now a separate infrastructure of rankings for online MBAs, reproducing the bounding and marketing mechanisms of the traditional programs.

“Diversity” is another keyword. Business schools continue to struggle with gender and, especially, racial inclusion and equity among students and faculty—a concern linked increasingly by administrators and business trade publications to BlackLivesMatter and the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color in the U.S. However, while many programs report statistics along lines of gender and race, the emphasis of much of the recruitment materials I have reviewed is on the “diversity” of professional fields represented in a cohort. This follows from post-2009 efforts to distance the MBA from finance. Deans now say things like: “many of our students come from homogenous worlds, but their classmates have a diversity of professional experiences in different careers.” Students echo the pitch, describing the ways the “MBA experience of working with people outside of your industry broadens horizons.”  

As MBA programs recruit for the post-COVID world, they are most aggressively selling their “transformational” impact on students – often downplaying traditional functional training in business. “Transformational impact is the mission,” said one Dean, adding, “Our realization is that a lot of that impact will not come from the classroom only.”  Students describe their “MBA journey” similarly, stressing how the degree allows them to “view things more holistically.”   “The MBA program forced me to look at what I value,” reports one student.  Others describe a growing sense of “confidence,” and tell prospective applicants, “the MBA helps bring more you into the world.”

While the MBA may help bring more you into the world, it does so in coordination with a curious managerial self-effacement. There is a lot of talk about teams and the value of delegating decisions to local levels. This squares with neoliberal the rhetoric of decentralization and agility, and is familiar from existing MBA emphasis on entrepreneurial talent and soft skills.

But there is something more in the mix: the disruptions and anxieties of the pandemic. Students are “rethinking what they are doing.” Programs now promise “lifelong career coaching” for careers of change and uncertainty. And at a time when routinized neoliberal truths of business are explicitly up for debate, MBA programs stress the importance of humility, of not knowing what to do, as a facet of leadership in uncertainty.

The focus on talent and leadership skills increasingly downplays the relevance of core functional practices of managerial capitalism. They are mentioned – usually as part of the effort to show the “rigor” of online programs. But current marketing of the MBA underscores an ascendant conceptualization of talent that eclipses the core disciplines of capitalist extraction and harnesses the post-COVID business leader to a differently imagined project.

MBA marketing explicitly positions the talented MBA as the solution to a set of social and political crises exacerbated by the pandemic. “Leadership is more important than ever,” commented one Dean as he described a three-fold crisis facing the post-COVID US: “health, economics, and inequality.” Further, he laments, increasing polarization from before the pandemic has led to a loss of trust in governmental and non-governmental institutions, which “typically provide the safety net in times of crisis.” Thus, he identified a fourth post-COVID crisis: “leadership.”

That amounts to a familiar reading of the times. But he caught my attention when he went on to say, “But the level of trust has gone up dramatically in the business community. This is a great time for the business platform. An opportunity that goes well beyond anything that has been there before. […] We can now tackle issues that go beyond traditional profit and loss. We can have a bigger impact on society. [T]he expectation is there that business will step in.”

This goes beyond a post-2009 trend in business schools to link business to transformative social solutions through electives in social entrepreneurship or sustainability. Those turned on a familiar vision of doing good through doing well (in business) and have spawned a host of metrics to measure (and therefore manage) social impact in familiar business style. The Dean’s comments decouple the impact of business leadership from the fundamental operations of business and gesture to political governance in ways that have not been an explicit part of the MBA project – at least with reference to the US.

There is good strategic reason for this shift, as the post-pandemic economy seems likely to be characterized by continuing changes in the neoliberal alliance of governing policies and capital. As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink puts it in his most recent annual letter to CEOs,

“COVID-19 has also deepened the erosion of trust in traditional institutions and exacerbated polarization in many Western societies. This polarization presents a host of new challenges for CEOs. […] In this environment, facts themselves are frequently in dispute, but businesses have an opportunity to lead. Employees are increasingly looking to their employer as the most trusted, competent, and ethical source of information – more so than government, the media, and NGOs.”  

Other guidance for the post-pandemic economy makes a similar point: “beyond building resilience in busines and the economy, public and private leaders must also build societal resilience.” As MBA programs are marketing themselves to prospective applicants whose concerns are shaped by the crises listed by the Dean, this message of civic leadership seems resonant.

The pandemic has made the contradictions of capitalism visible in new ways, including accelerating levels of inequality. While this has opened up new conversations about equity and governance and provoked commentary on the expanding job description of the CEO, there is no indication that extraction of profit is not still the name of the game. Yet, in marketing the MBA for the post-COVID world, there is a sleight-of-hand by which the extractive operations of capitalism are screened from view. This may be the apotheosis of the manager-turned-leader, as the training of capitalist managers has progressively erased direct reference to the technical ends of managerial capitalism.

MBA programs have long been adept at repackaging themselves to weather crises, and scandals. Along the way they have shaped an ideal of the capitalist manager that balances the technical operations of capitalist industry with the softer skills and innate qualities of leadership – even entertaining the claim that MBAs don’t really learn anything of functional importance from their programs. As they turn to their “bright” post-COVID future, MBA programs are continuing a longer project of producing the disappearing manager.

Andrew Orta is professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is author of Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture (California, 2019).

References

Berle, Adolf A., Gardiner C. Means. 1991 [1932]. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Reprint edition. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A: Transaction Publishers.

Chandler, Alfred. 1977. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. 1987. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908-1945. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press.

Daniel, Carter A. 1998. MBA: The First Century. Bucknell University Press.

Donham, Wallace Brett, and Alfred North Whitehead. 1931. Business Adrift. Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill.

Drucker, Peter Ferdinand. 1950. “The Graduate Business School” Fortune 42 (August 1950): 92-116.

Gordon, Robert Aaron, and James Edwin Howell. 1959. Higher Education for Business. Columbia University Press.

Johnson, Joseph French. 1906. “The Business School and What It Should Do.” The New York Times, September 15, 1906 page 9. 

Petriglieri, G. 2012. “Are Business Schools Clueless or Evil.” Harvard Business Review Blog Network.  

Pierson, Frank Cook. 1959. The Education of American Businessmen: A Study of University-College Programs in Business Administration. McGraw-Hill.

Orta, Andrew. 2019. Making Global MBAs. The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

Cite as: Orta, Andrew. 2022. “The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear.” FocaalBlog, 30 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/30/andrew-orta-the-mba-wont-die-but-it-is-trying-to-disappear/

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

Don Nonini: Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization

Introduction

Working-class people in the United States are now at a turning point – whether to compliantly return to the pre-Covid conditions capital set for them, or to shift toward a new militancy toward capitalism. Now, two years into the pandemic, they have suffered severe personal hardships due to Covid-related illness, hospitalizations and deaths, and sudden loss of employment. These traumas have occurred even as they have experienced an historically unprecedented hiatus of relative economic security, given the Covid-related payments and protections they received from the US state, while many have been praised as “essential workers.” This essay seeks to review what has happened to them over the last four decades that has made this into such a turning point.

Anthropologists speak of the period since the 1970s as one of neoliberalism. Instead, in this essay I adopt a different perspective by exploring the conditions prevailing under the transition from the liberal nation-state to the corporate-oligarchic state that has occurred widely with the integration of platform-surveillance capitalism into state administration and the use of massive databases by corporations and governments to govern populations (Kapferer and Gold 2018). Freedom and enslavement in the contemporary United States are linked to two now converging phenomena. One is digitalization; the other is the expansion of expropriation as a mechanism of capital accumulation beyond its historically racially marked boundaries to encompass the racially dominant white population. These changes have taken place with the rise to domination of finance capitalism in the world economy, a new period of economic decline and social crisis in the West.

A large sign reads "CHECKS CASHED" on a small building with a curved roof, stone facade, and glass walls in a parking lot.
Image 1: Payday Lender in Durham, North Carolina, photo by Don Nonini

First, as to digitalization. It has not only led to unprecedented levels of economic inequality among the population, but also to new mechanisms of accumulation organized around the generalized dispossession of working-class people made possible by their indebtedness combined with corporate and state deployment of digital technologies with large-scale predictive capabilities. The rise of surveillance capitalism and its integration into the corporate state has taken the form of a massive, commercialized apparatus of surveillance – “a single behemoth of a data market; a colossal marketplace for personal data” (Harcourt 2015, 198).

The ascendance of finance capital has come to operate in tandem with a racialized corporate state formation using an apparatus of analog surveillance and control of working people combined with digital surveillance over them. This apparatus has come to rationally extract and then realize large volumes of surplus value from them outside the capitalist workplace. This apparatus employs digital technologies (i.e., artificial intelligence) to increase the hyper-exploitation and expropriation of racially vulnerable groups, but also extends to the racially dominant white population. I focus my attention on the United States because its relentless attachment to new forms of financialized repression of working people through capitalizing (on) their debt repayment and petty income streams leads the way for capitalist regimes in other “advanced industrialized” countries undergoing economic decline.

Second, connected to the dominance of finance capital since the 1970s there has been the generalization of mechanisms of expropriation beyond racially marked vulnerable groups to the broader majority/plurality white population. In an important article, Nancy Fraser (2016) argues that capitalism throughout its history has always been accompanied by the racialization of the populations governed by the states that support it, and that this has continued up to the present. She distinguishes the industrial exploitation of a Euro-descended or white population within the cores and peripheries of the European (British, French, etc.) and United States empires that has been set apart from the expropriation of people of color within the cores and peripheries of these empires. By expropriation Fraser means, “distinct from Marxian exploitation, expropriation is accumulation by other means. Dispensing with the contractual relation through which capital purchases ‘labor power’ in exchange for wages, expropriation works by confiscating capacities and resources and conscripting them into capital’s circuits of self-expansion” (Fraser 2016, 166). This is important: dispossession as such is only the loss of labor-power, reproductive capacity, land, money, or property by those dispossessed. Expropriation, however, goes beyond dispossession to confiscate these use-values and transform them into exchange-values incorporated into capital’s circuits of accumulation. Expropriation leads to accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004: 74-75).

Fraser goes further to assert that as an historical regularity until quite recently capitalism has survived at times of economic crisis only because the expropriation of people of color accelerates the rate of capital accumulation beyond that possible through sustained exploitation of white workers within industrial production. “Expropriation… covers a multitude of sins, most of which correlate strongly with racial oppression… such as territorial conquest, land annexation, enslavement, coerced labor, child labor, child abduction, and rape” but also “assumes more ‘modern’ forms – such as prison labor, transnational sex trafficking, corporate land grabs, and foreclosures on predatory debt, which are also linked with racial oppression” (Fraser 2016, 167).

Although Fraser has captured an historical regularity of capitalism in the United States, she points out that expropriations by corporations and the US state are increasingly imposed on the dominant racial group of whites as well as on racially subordinate groups. In her periodization of capitalism since the 17th century, she refers to the current period of “financialized capitalism” which she dates from the 1990s to the present as characterized by the emergence of “the expropriable-and-exploitable citizen-worker, formally free but acutely vulnerable” (Fraser 2016, 176). To be more accurate, they are also exploitable and expropriable when they own petty property (e.g., low-end real estate), or are not “legal” U.S. citizens (e.g., “non-documented” Latinx immigrants among hyper-sweated workers in the meat processing industry). This figure refers to working people who racially may be of color or may be white.

Fraser’s (2016, 176) argument that “expropriation has become ubiquitous, afflicting not only its traditional [racial] subjects but also those who were previously shielded by their status as citizen-workers” has much support. This can be identified in the events leading up to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 when subprime mortgage lenders in 2000-2001 shifted their target demographic for peddling these mortgages away from African-American elderly couples and women toward “a white, blue-collar construction worker who drinks beer,’” in the words of Roland Arnall, the CEO of Ameriquest, one of the largest and most fraudulent subprime mortgage lenders (Hudson 2010, 148). Other subprime mortgage lenders followed suit. In consequence, 3.8 million families from 2007-2010 lost their homes due to foreclosures. Is the racialized class hierarchy within US capitalism being reordered by redefining the white/non-white boundary? Are déclassé whites becoming less “white” or even “non-white”?

How do generalized expropriation and digitalization now combine to characterize capitalist society in the United States? Expropriation made more precise and discriminating in its objectives by artificial intelligence is often but not always centered on taking advantage of working people through indebtedness (from subprime mortgages, payday lending, student loans, etc.). It allows for the rationalized and sustained extraction of working peoples’ income streams, thus allowing such extraction to be scaled up and “securitized.” Under these conditions, expropriation enhanced by digitalization directed at working people has become a major mode of realizing (surplus) value from working people, outside the “normal” profit-making by corporations through consumer markets.

The New Digital Scores and the Corporations’/States’ Management of Life

Consider persons’ awareness in the U.S. of their FICO credit score when applying for a loan. Most soon learn of their FICO Score and its importance but they may not know of other less-regulated consumer scores that evaluate their potential to incur, manage and repay debt, and tap on their income streams for money – scores like “ChoiceScore,” “Risk IQ”, the geographically defined “Median Equivalency Score,” and the “Consumer View Profitability Score” (Dixon and Gelman 2014, 43-44). Similarly, persons in the US may not know about many other aspects of their lives that are being quantified and analyzed through AI-based algorithms to create scores for them that predict and shape their lives. 

These scores are commercially available to any corporate or state buyer that can afford to purchase them. They assess the individuals forming the US population as debtors, potential job occupants, rent or utility payers, real estate buyers, hospital patients, disease sufferers, consumers of specific commodities, securitized air travelers, student borrowers, political dissidents, “street people,” defaulting child supporters, perpetrators of domestic violence, or criminals, among many other possibilities. My analysis of the data in Dixon and Gelman (2014) discovered more than 50 such common scores, and eight years later there undoubtedly are dozens more that have been invented and applied to the US population.

The Dynamics of Dual Enslavement: Analog and Digital

In addition to extracting super-profits from debtors (e.g., via “foreclosures”), there are other ways in which expropriation and digitalization appropriate value from working people. The Behemoth’s algorithms – the FICO credit scores, the legally unregulated “consumer scores” that profile individuals’ work, consumption, and credit histories, the predictive policing scores, the digitalized background checks for prospective job applicants and apartment renters, and much more – dynamically reinforce and cement the connections between the surveillance by digital technologies and the “on the ground” analog expropriations that once only targeted racial groups like African Americans for special treatment, but now extend to the working class as a whole. 

The defining characteristic of the putative “middle class” individual is the job. African-Americans are known to have lower average and median credit ratings than whites (Garcia Perez, Gaither and Darity 2020). One survey found that the 60% of employers surveyed ran credit checks of job applicants as part of the job application and review process (Wang 2018: 129). These could involve the applicant’s official FICO score, but more likely include one of the financial consumer scores referred to above (e.g., “Consumer Profitability Score”). In one study, one out of ten respondents who were unemployed were informed that they would not be hired for a job because of their credit report, while one in seven applicants with “blemished” credit histories were told they were not being hired because of their credit record. Those not even aware of the use of their electronic scores against them constitute many more who have been discriminated against. There is evidence that employers concerned about curbing their future health insurance costs due to unhealthy employees use health scores, scores from personality tests, and reputation scores to exclude persons with medical conditions when they apply for jobs (O’Neil 2017:213).   

Credit scores are now used routinely by landlords who require these from prospective renters before agreeing to rent to them. These credit scores are increasingly derived from massive digital databases of prior renters as well as applicants without prior rental histories, are increasingly refined by electronic vetting corporations, and are resorted to by the large-scale absentee corporate landlords that took over distressed apartment housing after the 2007-2008 financial crisis. TransUnion advertises its SmartMove ResidentScore as estimating “the reliability and level of risk” an individual rental applicant brings, draws on the prior credit, rental/eviction and criminal histories of the applicant, and brags that landlords will “get a 15% better prediction score than a typical credit score.” The codification of discrimination through these new scores that draw on underlying databases as one might expect leads disproportionate numbers of African-American applicants for rental housing to be rejected, but large numbers of whites and Latinx applicants are also excluded.

In the cases of job hires and rental applications, expropriations brought on by digital and analog surveillance not only deny applicants access to specific kinds of jobs and housing, but also drive them into more insecure hyper-exploitative labor and predatory rental markets – where their labor power and incomes can be confiscated and put to work for accumulation by employers and landlords.

Even those who are too impoverished to be creditworthy have use-values that can be capitalized by capitalists. This illustrates another connection between expropriation, digitalization, and value extraction. If the presence of “street people” in the way of gentrification jeopardizes the realization of the market value of real estate, they must be separated by force from its spaces. This leads to police harassment and arrests of young men and women, disproportionately African-Americans and Latinx, but also including many whites.

Their arrests transform incarceration itself into a commodity. Large numbers of urban poor people are arrested and remain in local jails on trivial misdemeanor charges because they cannot afford to pay bail – a form of debtors’ prison. The families of those arrested and jailed send them money to pay for their food and telephone calls, thus subsidizing the privately-owned industries providing these services ($1.6 billion and $1.3 billion respectively). Even though three-fourths of all prisoners in local jails are never convicted of a crime, their jailing leads their families to raise money to pay for their bail, thus providing a $1.5 billion subsidy to the bail industry.

Criminalization and imprisonment of poor people are not only inscribed in the official hardcopy records of City Hall, but also in the digital data on “justice-involved” African-Americans and others collected, analyzed with algorithms, and commercially disseminated as scores by data brokers. Their electronic “criminal records”, even just arrests without convictions, follow them into the digital world and are used against them in job interviews and rental applications. Algorithms for predictive policing software (e.g., PREDPOL, COMPAS) pull the impoverished urban defendant down more tightly under the yoke of electronic prediction and control. PREDPOL concentrates police “stop and frisk” in specific urban areas with “high crime” and reinforces previous discrimination and leads to more arrests, injuries, and deaths among the urban poor. COMPAS scores the degree of “risk” of those convicted of “crime” to help judges determine whether they should be allowed free on probation or conversely sentenced for longer periods of time.

Employers, realtors, bankers, speculators, et al. profit from the expropriation of use values from poor people when such confiscations yield the values these economic elites realize (e.g., lower wages paid, higher rents extracted, houses foreclosed on and resold, higher payday loan and student debt interest payments, court fines and fees assessed, bails posted). Allies of these economic elites also profit from such expropriations. Judges set high court fees and impose steep fines on arrested and convicted poor people to raise revenues for local governments (Wang 2018, 155-161). Police confiscate the cash, houses, and cars of arrestees suspected of  committing a crime through “civil forfeiture,” and use the plunder to benefit the local police force. Local Chambers of Commerce attract new capital to invest in gentrifying urban neighborhoods by supporting the evictions of poor residents from their rental units.

The Age of Covid: “Essential Workers,” Ironic Respite, Labor Militancy

Since March 2020, working-class people in the United States, especially African-Americans and other people of color, have suffered disproportionately from Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. They have witnessed  one of the largest direct transfer of wealth from the state to corporations and the 1% in US history – more than $2 trillion alone in one year in payments and tax breaks to corporations from the Covid-relief CARES Act. At the same time, they have also experienced the temporary economic security provided them by Covid-related transfer payments from the US state (CARES Act and American Rescue Plan), while a CDC-imposed eviction moratorium has only recently come to an end. Historically, this is the first time that the US state has intervened to provide basic income support for most of the working-class population over a protracted period of time, irrespective of whether they were employed. Finally, many have been rhetorically elevated in their status to “essential workers,” that is the idealized national sacrifice – most at risk of contracting and dying from Covid yet deemed most indispensable to “the economy.”  

These contradictory experiences – temporary economic security, awareness that corporations received far more support than workers, disproportionate losses from Covid and unemployment, and for some, praise as essential workers – have been a revelation for many considering the decades of expropriation and hyper-exploitation recounted in this essay. Deadly pandemics, like war, tend to revolutionize one’s self-awareness and concentrate one’s imagination of the possible. 

It is therefore not surprising that nurses, hospital orderlies, oil rig workers, Amazon warehouse laborers, and workers in cereals and agricultural equipment manufacturing  are showing a profound unwillingness to rejoin “the economy” on capitalism’s terms – including persisting risks to their health from Covid imposed by employers – through workers’ militancy. In increasing numbers, for the first time since the emergence of the corporate state and the domination of finance capital, they are organizing themselves to confront the abuses of capital. Hopefully, these militants will soon be joined in larger numbers by low-end service and gig workers, as is already occurring in the fast foods industry.

Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published extensively on Chinese trans-nationalism, on class and ethnic relations among the Chinese diaspora of Malaysia and Australia, and on local politics and race relations in the US. He has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous books and reviewed journal articles on these topics.

References

Dixon, P., and R. Gelman. (2014). “The Scoring of America: How secret consumer scores threaten your privacy and your future.” World Privacy Forum, 1-89.

Fraser, N. (2016). “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies 3(1), 163-178.

García-Pérez, M., S. Gaither, and W. Darity Jr. (2020). “Baltimore study: Credit scores.” Working Paper Series, Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Washington, DC.

Harcourt, B. E. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in The Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (2004). “The New Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” Socialist Register 40, 63-87

Hudson, M. W. (2010). The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America – and Spawned a Global Crisis. New York: Times books/Henry Holt and Company

Kapferer, B. and M. Gold (2018). A nail in the coffin. Arena Magazine 152, 37-43.

O’Neil, C. (2017). Weapons of Math Destruction. New York: Broadway Books.

Wang, J. (2018). Carceral Capitalism. Intervention Series, 21. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

Cite as: Nonini, Don. 2022. “Scoring the U.S. Working Class: Expropriation and Digitalization.” FocaalBlog, 28 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/28/don-nonini-scoring-the-u-s-working-class-expropriation-and-digitalization