Tag Archives: economic anthropology

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Katja Müller, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten W. Endres: Introduction: The political power of energy futures

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

Debates about climate change have long entered political arenas through diplomacy, bureaucracy and regulations as part of worldwide environmental governance. Global efforts to foster greener energy increasingly supplement resource extractivism (IEA 2019). Yet, unfolding protests, from Fridays for Future to Extinction Rebellion, point to the insufficiencies of current measures. As lawsuits threaten the European mega-corporation RWE Energy with the responsibility for glacial melting in the Andes and Sioux sit-ins block the Dakota Access Pipeline in the USA, direct political action is on the rise to fight climate change by transforming energy infrastructure. Social anthropology’s analytical thrust to treat energy systems as sociotechnical constructs urgently needs to challenge the depoliticizing tendency inherent to energy decision-making (Boyer 2019, Howe 2019).

Photo of protest crowd holding signs.
Image 1. Fridays for Future Cologne, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

In particular, narratives of incremental improvement based on efficiency, productivity, and development discourse, must be re-examined in of the urgent need for renewable energy generation (Franquesa 2018, Gupta 2015). At the same time, political turmoil accompanies many renewable energy projects. These range from protests against involuntary displacement and the destruction of ecosystems by hydropower megaprojects like the Chinese Three Gorges dam to sovereignty struggles over Bolivian lithium reserves used in the production of solar batteries to the Spanish governments’ recent decision to hand over wind turbine development to big energy players. Beyond doom and gloom, energy’s production, distribution and consumption rise and fall with technological innovation (Winther 2013, Günel 2019). Our imagination of what makes human life easier and what improves living conditions for societies shapes the technologies we come up with and how we put them to use.

Photo of very tall tree in a forest with a treehouse built near the top.
Image 2. Treehouse with solar panel on the forest edge of RWE’s Hambach coal mine in protest of surface mine expansion, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

Over the last decades, anthropology and other academic disciplines have shown that energy systems are interdependent webs of sociotechnical and sociomaterial connections (Boyer 2014; Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014; Gupta 2015; Appel 2015). They are enmeshed in geographical conditions, spatial identities, traditions, norms and imaginaries as well as in political negotiations and financial assessments (Günel 2019; Moss 2020; Mitchell 2011; Bakke 2016). These assessments and negotiations have often privileged not only one energy technology over another, but one community’s or stakeholder’s future over another (Powell 2018). This grave inequality has led the critical social sciences to question what energy futures entail, how much adaptations are necessary or possible, what we can sacrifice for particular energy scenarios, and to ask who exploits what instruments of power to what particular ends (Smith and High 2017).  

The contributions to this FocaalBlog feature discuss the political legitimacies and forms of power that become possible through renewables’ development and the greening of energy systems. Indeed, the development of renewable energy sources begs questions with high stakes: How does political decision-making on energy sources unfold, including expanding resource extraction, extending the grid, or developing renewables? How do historic injustices and exclusionary legacies of extraction, production and consumption affect future energy horizons? Do imperatives for greening energy create new role models in energy matters that shift the focus within and beyond the dichotomy of “the West and the Rest”? When do debates about local environmental priorities and energy rights undermine or bolster global climate targets? Which new forms of precarity and scarcity do large-scale infrastructural impositions by local or international powerholders entail?

Based on a panel at the 16th EASA Biennial Conference virtually held in Lisbon in July 2020, this collection of papers investigates the contradictions and contestations between the persistence of conventional energy systems and the rise of renewables within the complex operations of political power that affect our anticipated energy futures. From top-down policymaking regarding energy access to grassroots calls for climate justice, the contributions interrogate the policies and politics surrounding renewable energy, and the unintended consequences and alliances in its delivery.

Rethinking energy futures

After decades of constant growth in energy production and demand, climate change is no longer an abstract threat. We are therefore forced to scrutinize established foundations of energy systems. While energy research has already expanded the view from the misperception of localised, insulated extractivism to that industry’s real-world global conditions, climate change forces us to rethink our energy future on all levels.

Formerly the elephant in the room, all too often ignored in energy action, climate change increasingly factors into decisions on changing energy systems large and small. At least, this is reflected in the figures: In 2019, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global energy-related CO2 emissions flattened (slightly) at around 33 gigatons, resulting mainly from a sharp decline in CO2 emissions from the power sector in advanced economies (IEA 2020). This flattening is the result of the expanding role of renewable sources (mainly wind and solar photovoltaic), of fuel switching from coal to gas, and results from higher nuclear power output.

We need to expand our understanding of energy systems beyond sociotechnical systems to socio-ecological horizons. In his Capitalism and the Web of Life, Jason Moore (2015) proposes that the separation of humans and nature resulted in the exploitation of “Cheap Nature”, exacerbating resource use in excess of sustainability several fold. This extensive extractivism then fuelled the rise of capitalism, supporting financial systems that rest on exploitation of both minority societies and the interrelated human-nature-complex. Many energy systems, regardless of their sustainability status, threaten global living conditions and operate by privatizing profits and socializing risks and losses. Critical understanding of conventional energy systems and creative approaches to potential energy futures therefore require both intellectual and political engagement.

Photo of electrical chords tangled together near the side of a building
Image 3. A squirrel scurries across entangled electricity cables in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo by Kirsten W. Endres, 2019

Bridging different scales of inequality and extraction, the blog contributors challenge the undemocratic and unequal ways of owning and producing energy. They question the financial assessments of energy production that ignore or miscalculate environmental and climate effects. However, as anthropologists, they also direct our attention to the human experiences and personal pathways forged through engagement with energy futures. Their case studies affirm that obligations rather than incentives are needed to make green technologies work for all and to reduce energy consumption. Cash cows of energy production within established political and market systems too often fail to provide just and sustainable energy systems.

Thinking of our energy future, CO2 emission developments indicate that socioecological considerations are gaining weight in energy debates and practice, as they flattened after reaching a historical height (IEA 2020). However, these shifts are not yet substantial enough to outpace political powers that focus on the economic or technological dimensions of energy production systems only. Time and again, official statements from politicians and others claim that faster or more consequential shifts to renewable energy are not feasible, thus revealing a reticence to realize sustainable energy futures. Arguments abound that energy networks and electrification need (fossil fuel based) development, or that they require at least bridging technologies to guarantee cheap and reliable supply of sufficient energy. In parallel, quarrels that a technology is not mature or marketable enough break out alongside complaints that solar energy was too expensive to survive on the market. Fears of economic losses, of declining voter favour or of structural change prevent energy transitions that are socioecological in nature and backed by sociopolitics (Sovacool 2016).

Photo of stage with empty chairs and vertical green bars on the screen behind.
Image 4. Joint launch of Green Bond Index between the Luxembourg und Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Beijing, People’s Republic of China 2017. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

To accomplish energy transitions, voluntary obligations of private companies are not sufficient. Such obligations have hardly ever led to improvements of community goods, especially not if cutting profits was a necessity. The voiced by non-corporate stakeholders need to be heard and implemented through legally binding rules. Climate, nature and the planet cannot speak for themselves, but require a socioecological understanding of energy systems to be the basis for energy decision making. This does not imply that we can solve the climate dialectic (Goodman 2016). A socioecological energy system concept will not allow for a sudden political regulation of the climate crisis through regulating energy production. Yet, understanding the political powers at play in energy systems is essential so as to not become paralyzed and to retain instead agency in times of severe crisis: energy futures need to be envisioned, power mechanisms understood and analysed. The papers of this special issues contribute to this endeavour.

Photo of power lines running through transmission tower, taken looking up from below.
Image 5. Power lines shaping current and future energy systems, Germany 2021, photo by C. Schulze

Ethnographic inquiries into energy futures

Our blog contributions take the reader to a variety of geographical settings and socio-political environments. Felix Lussem’s contribution explores the contemporary entanglement of political institutions and the energy industry in Germany’s lignite mining Rhineland, a region with a long history of large-scale resource extraction. As Lussem shows, this entanglement finds its most obvious expression in the practice of “creating facts” in order to (continue) providing cheap energy from the fossil fuel, while activists and other civil society actors try to prevent further damage to their environment and demand greater public participation in designing pathways towards a sustainable energy transition in the region.

Calls for an accelerated transition to climate-friendlier and cleaner energy sources have also gained momentum on the African continent. Some of the pitfalls and challenges of implementing green energy policies at the national/local level become apparent in Pauline Destree’s contribution. Rather than belonging to the future, renewables (such as hydropower) have dominated Ghana’s power sector in the past, while recent oil discoveries have spurred an increased rush for fossil fuel exploitation. Concomitantly, corporate solar investments gained salience during an energy crisis that hit the country in 2015. As Destree demonstrates, this led to a “renewable divide” in urban areas. While a few “green enclaves” benefit from their installed renewables, the financial situation of national utilities has worsened, resulting in higher tariffs for urban residents who continue to depend on the national grid. 

Dragan Djunda’s contribution takes us to the Western Balkans, where small hydropower plants (SHPPs) have recently emerged as a dominant strategy for reducing fossil fuel dependency. This double transformation path to renewable energy and liberalisation of the energy sector as an adaptation to EU standards attracted large flows of foreign investment. But the damming of the last remaining free-flowing rivers in Europe has sparked its own protests, as the selling of SHPPs licences implies the ‘sell-off’ of locally used water and of pristine environs.  In the Stara Mountain region in south-eastern Serbia environmental activists and local residents successfully defended rivers and villages against the impending damage from hydropower development in the region. As an unexpected outcome of the conflicts and contestations, the formerly decaying villages suddenly attracted increased touristic attention as well as financial support for community-relevant infrastructure projects.

In northern Portugal, structural reforms and austerity measures imposed by EU institutions to battle the country’s financial crisis have contributed to another path in renewable energy transition, a path that forges links into the global green bond market. Giulia Dal Maso’s contribution traces the history and location of wind farms in the wine-producing Viseu region that had been refinanced by the first Chinese green bond issued in Europe. Whereas the bond-issuing Chinese enterprise has since been able to extract rent from a previously public infrastructure, this refinancing did not produce any “extra good” for local people in the Viseu region, who keep struggling to pay their electricity bills.

From industrialized regions facing their own coal dependency and growing holes in landscapes of extraction in the German Rheinland to a Ghanaian balancing act between weathered dams for hydropower, new oil and gas discoveries, and the mushrooming of privileged green enclaves, from regional resistance to damming up the rivers of the Balkan mountains to residents in rural Portugal finding themselves poised between local pride in their wind and the pressure of paying for its energy delivery by a Chinese investor: What the contributions to this blog feature show is that pathways towards a renewable energy future are not straight-forward or unilineal, and global players in renewables finance usurp local infrastructures and drive their agendas forward, albeit being consistently challenged and scrutinised by more local imaginations of a sustainable future.

Beyond a focus on energy experts and policy pragmatists balancing public utilities and personal consumption as a calculative endeavour, anthropological investigations show how every energy provision relies on common resources and reshapes shared landscapes. Big players in energy production wield finance and power in ways that may undermine or further political and personal futures, and lead to surprising twists and turns in energy narratives. Yet suturing scales of energy engagement between corporate hierarchies, different state levels, and local energy producers and consumers, reveal that decisions on the form and type of energy used reach into deep historical experiences of developmentalist projects. Tracing the entangled relationships between people forging their energy horizons and reflecting on their demands and obligations to each other, brings to light their commitment to a collective future.

Katja Müller works as a social anthropologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and at the University of Technology Sydney. She conducts research on energy transitions, mining and climate change, as well as on digital cultural heritage.

Charlotte Bruckermann explores carbon as a frontline of value in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Her current research focuses on carbon management in the creation of Chinese ecological civilization, with a focus on carbon offset forests, digital carbon accounting, and the decarbonization of everyday life in a coal region. Her book Claiming Homes was published in 2019.

Kirsten W. Endres is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany. Her current project focuses on the interrelationship between the development of energy systems and the complex operation of modern states and state power in the Greater Mekong Subregion.

References

Appel, Hannah. 2015. Subterranean Estates: Life worlds of coal and gas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Bakke, Gretchen. 2016. The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and our Energy Future. New York: Bloomsbury.

Boyer, Dominic. 2019. Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power struggles: dignity, value, and the renewable energy frontier in Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Goodman, James. 2016. “The climate dialectic in energy policy: Germany and India compared.” In Energy Policy 99: 184-193.

Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Gupta, Akhil. 2015. “An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South.” In Cultural Anthropology 30(4): 555-568.

Howe, Cymene, Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 241 pp.

IEA – International Energy Agency (2020), Global CO2 emissions in 2019, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/articles/global-co2-emissions-in-2019

Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.

Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Moss, Timothy. 2020. Remaking Berlin. A History of the City through Infrastructure, 1920-2020. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Powell, Dana E. 2017. Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Richardson, Tanya and Gisa Weszkalnys. 2014. Introduction: Resource Materialities, Anthropological Quarterly 87 (1): 5-30.

Smith, Jessica and Mette High. 2017. “Exploring the anthropology of energy: ethnography, energy, and ethics.” Energy Research and Social Science 30: 1-6.

Sovacool, Benjamin. 2016. How long will it take? Conceptualizing the temporal dynamics of energy transitions, Energy Research & Social Sciences 13: 202-215.

Winther, Tanja. 2013. The impact of electricity: Development, desires and dilemmas. Berghahn.

Cite as: Müller, Katja, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten W. Endres. 2021. “Introduction: The political power of energy futures.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/katja-muller-charlotte-bruckermann-kirsten-endres-introduction-the-political-power-of-energy-futures/

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Aliki Angelidou: “It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn

On February 22nd police forces entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating many students, arresting 31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff. Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting against a new bill on “Admission in higher education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced. The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.

The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.

Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.

Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.

In the context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation, political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no surprise that they are being attacked first.

The Neoliberalization of Higher Education and Law 4777/2021

The efforts to alter the public, free, and open character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017, Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article 16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in higher education over the past two decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’ degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack the prestige of public universities.

However, when Nea Dimokratia came to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum. If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world, in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses – unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th. Interestingly, this law was not introduced by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in educational affairs is unprecedented.

To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.

The new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore, fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore, the law allows for many disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.

All of these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20 million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.

The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.

The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.

Towards a closed and authoritarian university

The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.

More generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship, and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in Parliament that, under the new law, “it is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.

Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.

References

Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera A., Heintz M. & A. Horolets (eds.), Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe: An Intricate Institutional and Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.

Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra 2000. “Disciples, Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp. 256–78.

Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online petition.

Screenshot of a petition header which reads "Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS. Email: NoUniPolice@gmail.com.
Image 1: Online Petition, “Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS” (Screenshot by FocaalBlog editors, this petition has our undivided support, we call on our readers to join us as signatories)

Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/

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Juzimu: Jack Ma: Wherever the Wind Blows

One day last October, I happened to spot an acquaintance’s post on Wechat. It was a simple message thanking all ‘Ant-izens’ (people who work in Ant Financial of Alibaba) for their hard work, followed by a short video advertising Ant’s upcoming IPO. It came from a data scientist who had given up his high-paid job in the US, returned to China, and joined Ant Financial three years earlier. Ant shares were then expected to start trading in Hong Kong and Shanghai on 5 November.

Jack Ma, the founder of Ant and affiliate Alibaba Group Holding, had declared it a “miracle” that such a large listing would take place outside New York. It was poised to raise up to $34.4 billion in the world’s largest stock market debut and would create a vast group of new billionaires. The data scientist’s post, like many posts on social media, was a showoff: it was a subtle public announcement that he was going to become extremely rich in two weeks’ time. The post contributed to a rather complicated, self-consciously suppressed feeling among many professional Chinese Americans: once again they were tasting the bitter feeling of being stuck in the US middle-class, left behind by those who had managed to jump on the fast-track train of China’s economic growth, grabbing opportunity in the mainland and realizing their ‘Chinese Dreams’ by finally becoming ‘financially independent’ (meaning rich enough that you and your offspring would never need to worry about money again). 

Then, on 3 November, two days before the feast, the IPO was suddenly called off by the Chinese government. Immediately thereafter, China ordered Ant Group to rectify its businesses and comply with regulatory requirements amid increased scrutiny of monopoly practices in the country’s internet sector. Such a blow! The data scientist kept a dignified silence; my professional friends kept a polite silence. And Jack Ma, the real protagonist of the drama, kept a cautious silence. He has since disappeared from public view (only reappearing on 19 January 2021 with a video emphasizing his social work). Where is he? What is he doing now? What would happen to him? Why would all this happen? What does the state’s intervention mean to Ant and Alibaba, to the whole ecommerce industry, and to the whole private sector? What does it say about the logic of the state apparatus in this enigmatic yet so important country? Where will it go? And how would this affect the rest of the world, especially the West? So many questions and so much drama.

Image 1: Jack Ma, who created Alibaba.com in Hangzhou, China in March 1999
(Source: JD Lasica, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/292160777)

Unsurprisingly, the Western liberal media have maintained their usual cold-war tone, by interpreting the drama as a typical attack initiated by a post-socialist authoritarian state towards this too powerful private entrepreneur out of fear or simply for the vanity and narcissism of Your Highness Xi. The Financial Times, for example, compared it immediately with the Khodorkovsky case in Russia (Lewis 2021, paywall). The implication was clear: you can never trust those former socialist authoritarian countries. They would never respect private property, follow the rules of the liberal world, and become “us”. Equally unsurprisingly, some Western Leftists have maintained their idealist tone towards a China that may perhaps be capitalist but is at least not Western capitalist. For them, the crack-down on Ant signifies a determined fight by the state and the population against greedy capital and capitalists.

Most people in China indeed seem to have welcomed the crackdown and support the state’s actions. There are various reasons for such support. One economist I talked to supported it for financial security considerations and for the state’s antitrust efforts. She mentioned the extremely high and hence hazardous financial leverage that Ant Financial is playing with, as well as the antitrust efforts against Facebook and Google in the USA. One private entrepreneur also supported the action for financial security considerations, but based on different reasoning. According to him, since there are many different kinds of capital (including foreign capital) behind Alibaba and Ant, Ant’s IPO would further open the door for foreign finance capital to enter the Chinese market. Some intellectuals talked about the vulgar and disgusting advertisements made by Ant Financial aiming to encourage irrational consumption, as well as the irresponsible private loans it has given out, and how all these behaviors have disrupted social order and degraded social morals.

All these reasons were evident in the government’s statements for halting Ant: to regulate the financial market, enforce antitrust legislation, and create a healthier consumption environment (Yu 2020). This all seems valid except that the role Ant is playing is largely as a platform––a middleman between state banks and individual small-loan borrowers. Much of the capital given out as small loans by Ant actually comes from the state banks. The state banks were not allowed to engage in these high profit businesses. They also do not have access to the necessary consumer data and data science. They normally deal with state owned enterprises. So, Ant stepped in to help state banks exploit a previously untouched financial market: grassroots personal loans. They then divided the profit. As some observers rightly pointed , Ant has always aimed at creating partnerships with big banks, not disrupting or supplanting them. More importantly, quite a few important government-owned funds and institutions are Ant shareholders and were expected to profit handsomely from the public offering (Zhong & Li 2020). Thus, the claim that Ant squeezed out the state banks is spurious. They were basically in the same boat. That is why the state never really regulated Ant before. Meanwhile, we should not forget that the informal financial market has long existed in Chinese grassroots society due to the inaccessibility of bank loans for most non-state economic entities and common people. Ant actually formalized (to a certain degree) this informal market. Yes, Ant did play the financial game of ‘asset-backed securities’ to enhance its financial leverage, but hardly to the extent that Wall Street is used to doing. Finally, what about the irrational consumption encouraged by easily accessible loans (especially for youths)? Maybe. But most such loans still come from other smaller and less responsible lending agencies  following in Ant’s steps, which try to grasp crumbs from the huge cake but do not have the technology and data required to avoid excessive risk. It is these smaller and less technologically capable actors that are in fact creating chaos in credit supply. In short: even if we all agree that financial capital has always been highly speculative, and that Ant is no exception, some of the official statements justifying the intervention into Ant’s IPO still sound fishy.

Meanwhile, the poor in China still seem the most determined supporters of the state’s crackdown on Ant. They supported it out of their hatred toward big capital. On the internet, they lambasted the bloodsucking behavior of Ant, and called it “Leech Financial” instead of Ant Financial (Leech is pronounced in Chinese as “Ma Huang” and ant is pronounced as “Ma Yi”). There is also a popular cartoon being circulated on the internet that depicts Jack Ma as a beggar in his old age—homeless, fragile, and sad. One blue-collar worker told me that any big capitalist whose  main objective is to extract money from the poor should be dragged down.

Tellingly, the state has intentionally toned down popular indignation. The relationship between state and capital in this country has always been much more complicated than the mere antagonism imagined by liberal commentators. The state can’t afford a strong group of capitalists with too much power and resources; but neither can it afford losing them and scaring capital away. It has always been an art of balancing. As we have seen, Jack Ma has reappeared recently with a more solemn appearance. His Ant is now required to deploy necessary ‘rectifications’ under the tighter rein of state regulation (CBNEditor 2021). It is, nevertheless, the right thing for the state to do, no matter the underlying aims. Ma, of course, should always keep in mind that there has never been an Era of Jack Ma; it has always been the Chinese Era that created him, as one Chinese official newspaper publicly warned him as early as 2019.

As for those professional Chinese Americans who believe that they have missed the recent gold-digging opportunities in China and have started to doubt their earlier decision to go abroad, the crackdown on Ant—or more specifically, the broken dream of becoming a billionaire data scientist—has taught them a rather comforting lesson: miracles, whether for a country, a company, or an individual, are slippery. A boring yet relatively predictable middle-class suburban life in the West should at least be bearable, perhaps even enviable.

Juzimu is an ethnographic researcher of Chinese capitalist transitions and writes here under pseudonym.

Bibliography

Lewis, Leo, “What we can read into Jack Ma’s disappearance: Printed speech holds key to Alibaba founder’s invisibility — and rehabilitation”, Financial Times, January 8, 2021. https://www.ft.com/content/b3a94f55-5e44-417f-a869-a542d0527fe7

Yu, Chao, “Anti-Trust Rugulation is for Better Development,” Renmin Daily, Demember 25, 2020. http://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/html/2020-12/25/nw.D110000renmrb_20201225_3-07.htm

Zhong, Raymond & Cao Li, “Ant Challenged Beijing and Prospered. Now It Toes the Line.” The New York Times, Oct. 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/technology/ant-group-ipo-china.html?_ga=2.55348649.308985693.1613408960-1859810252.1601304805

CBNEditor, “Ant Group Has Established Rectification Team for Business Overhaul: Chinese Central Bank”, January 18, 2021, China Banking News, https://www.chinabankingnews.com/2021/01/18/ant-group-has-established-rectification-team-for-business-overhaul-chinese-central-bank/

“There Has Never Been an Era of Ma Yun; It Has Always Been the Chinese Era That Created Ma Yun,” People’s Financial Comments, September, 17, 2019.

Cite as: Juzima. 2021. “Jack Ma: Wherever the Wind Blows.” FocaalBlog, 8 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/08/juzimu-jack-ma-wherever-the-wind-blows/

Blog

Charles Dolph: The second time as farce? The IMF returns to Argentina

Argentina’s Mauricio Macri administration unexpectedly announced recently that it had opened negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a Stand-By Arrangement amid intense monetary and financial instability—with the Argentine peso losing roughly 25 percent of its value in a two-week period, the Central Bank of Argentina was forced to sell $10 billion in reserves to contain the volatility. As details began to emerge late last week about the 36-month, $50 billion agreement with the IMF, an institution widely blamed for the country’s devastating crisis and resulting sovereign debt default in 2001, Argentina faces growing financial and political uncertainty.

Pedro Biscay, who served on the Central Bank of Argentina’s board of directors from 2014 to 2017 and currently directs the Centro de Integración Financiera (CINFIN), or Center for Financial Integration, in Buenos Aires,[1] joined me to help make some sense of this situation and discuss the panorama of politics and financial capitalism, social movements, and the state, in Argentina and more broadly.

Macri_y_Lagarde_en_Olivos_02

Figure 1: IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde talks with Argentine President Mauricio Macri at the presidential residence. The Macri administration recently agreed to a $50 billion bailout package with the IMF (photograph by Casa Rosada via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5 AR).

Charles Dolph: Since Mauricio Macri assumed the presidency of Argentina in December 2015, his administration and Cambiemos (“Let’s Change”) coalition have shown a clear vocation for indebtedness. With a February 2016 agreement with vulture funds litigating the value of defaulted bonds in New York courts paving the way, the administration issued more public debt than any other “emerging market” from January 2016 to September 2017. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Argentina accounted for 28 percent of all public debt issued region-wide in 2017. But turning to the IMF was not previously part of the Macri administration’s agenda. Nor was such an agreement foreseen by the IMF, as Christine Lagarde denied that the administration had sought any deal with the institution when Argentina hosted the meeting of the G20 Economy Ministers last March. So, why now? What provoked this sudden monetary and financial instability?

Pedro Biscay: Here in Argentina, an attempt was made to weave together an explanation based on the idea that we were going through an adverse international context due to the rise in the interest rate on US Treasury bonds, which for 24 April, the day that the run on the exchange rate peaked, jumped to over 3 percent. This element was combined—always according to the explanations of the specialists in the “city” [the Buenos Aires financial district]—with the fact that a tax on financial income went into effect, which the government itself had promoted a few months earlier, with the purpose of taxing income from Central Bank notes [known as LEBACs] held by foreign investors. So, the official explanation combines these two aspects, to say that we are facing a scenario of transitory financial turbulence.

But to cling to this idea is to miss the forest for the trees. The underlying problem is extremely serious and has to do with the lack of dollars, which the Argentine economy needs to finance capital outflows and interest payments on the external debt, which, as you say, this government quickly took to record levels. If you look at Argentina’s balance of payments, specifically Central Bank liabilities, you will see that at the end of 2017, there had accumulated debts on the order of $6–7 billion. To put this in perspective, this is where nonresident “carry traders” were arbitraging interest rate differentials on notes issued by the Argentine Central Bank since the beginning of the Macri government. You have a segment of investors extremely sensitive to changes in the international interest rate, to changes in Argentina’s country risk assessment, and to two other key elements, which are the current account deficit and the fiscal deficit.

So, let’s break it down in steps. That segment of investors unloaded their positions in Central Bank securities, converted the profit into dollars, and moved it to other financial markets in the first days of the run on the exchange rate. Pure, hot money. It entered, speculated, and left. That financial mass represents the heart of the investments that the Cambiemos government attracted—all short term, none of it destined for production and development. Once that segment of investors pulled out, the run on the exchange rate first mobilized local holders of Central Bank notes (I would clarify here that this means the government gradually transformed an instrument of sterilization designed to mitigate the effects of speculative financial flows into another instrument of financial speculation) and then to small savers in the country with dollar deposits, who went to the banks to withdraw part of their money in foreign currency. This last aspect did not deepen to the extent of turning the run on exchange rate into a serious withdrawal of deposits from the system. Luckily, it was contained.

CD: Can you put this in the wider context of how the administration’s policies have brought them to this point, and perhaps shed some light on why it has turned, rather desperately, to the IMF? The IMF is clearly rejected by a wide swath of Argentines who place much of the blame on it for the profound political and economic crisis that erupted in late 2001. It would seem that the administration is well aware of this and sought to avoid such a measure. Bloomberg reported that when Wall Street investors rebuffed Minister of Finance Luis Caputo on a further bond issue in March, suggesting that he instead seek a “Flexible Credit Line” with the IMF, he responded that this would not be politically viable.

PB: All this is just the external face of a very serious process of commercial, financial, and fiscal imbalance that the government generated via the indiscriminate application of financial liberalization policies. At the commercial level, this has meant opening the country to imports combined with the elimination of legally established deadlines to repatriate profits on the export commodities that generate foreign currency. This combination caused an accelerated growth of the import sector and a fall in the foreign currency generated by exports, mainly by the agricultural sector that stores part of its wealth outside the country. Thus, after a year and a half of the Macri government, the Argentine economy begins to show record trade deficits, with negative balances for the first five months of the year already above $3.5 billion.

On the financial side, there was also a wave of acute imbalances, mainly due to the deregulation of the capital account, which allowed the free entry of speculative funds into the country and the uncontrolled exit of dollars. This sum is already close to $40 billion, not counting the departures for tourism. Parallel to this, the financing needs of the country require an investment on the order of $30 billion which, if it doesn’t come from the export sector, must be sought by the minister of finance in debt markets. That was the turning point, when in a meeting with Wall Street investors they said “kaput” to Caputo, based on the worrying levels of external debt. Foreign investors said “enough” to funding capital flight from Argentina, because the risk and financial fragility begins to be worrisome. When the international market closed the faucet on dollars, it unleashed the crisis, and the government was forced to go to the IMF in search of some salvage operation.

This point was reached because the government, and in particular the Central Bank, eliminated all the exchange controls that had been designed to monitor capital flows and at the same time sponsored the flight of foreign currency under the pretense of giving greater confidence to investors. What arrived was not the promised wave of investments but the external restriction of a lack of dollars. At the same time, the liberalization of the interest rate led to a greater appreciation of the exchange rate, supported by short-term funds that speculated against nothing less than the central bank itself, leaving little room for maneuver to intervene countercyclically. Notice that, paradoxically, unlike what all other central banks do, they used the Central Bank’s balance sheet to provoke a scenario of financial vulnerability, to the point that the IMF now asks them to clean up this situation.

It’s in this context that they go to the IMF, that they renegotiate the swap of reserves with China, so criticized during our management of the Central Bank [during the previous administration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner], as well as return to operating in currency futures, which was foreseeable despite the fact that they contrived to prosecute the use of this policy tool,[2] costing no less than $10 billion of reserves sacrificed to contain a run on the exchange rate.

CD: So, what is the nature of the agreement with the IMF, and what exactly is its purpose?

PB: This $50 billion agreement with the IMF will do nothing but deepen the austerity that the government is already imposing: reduce salaries, eliminate acquired social rights, privatize retirements, privatize the Banco de la Nación—which is the main asset of the Argentine financial system—cut funds to the provinces, reform the Organic Charter of the Central Bank, that is, a classic program of shrinking the state and reducing the fiscal deficit, combined with measures that deepen the dollarization of the system and reduce the monetary and financial sovereignty of the country. It will be necessary to see which of these measures can be applied and which ones remain pending, because Argentina’s experience is hostile to this type of agreement, and, on the other hand, the experience of countries such as Greece and Jordan reflect that these recipes do not solve any of the financial problems of dependent economies. Rather they facilitate a smooth exit for big economic players, while leaving the economies in a state of terminal recession.

CD: What are some of the potential political implications of all this? At least in electoral terms, Macri and Cambiemos appeared insulated from the backlash that their debt and austerity measures have sparked, further consolidating themselves with important victories in last year’s midterm elections. But how are Argentines reacting to the negotiations thus far? What does all this potentially mean for macrismo as a governing project?

PB: In principle, the population is showing dissatisfaction with the course that the economy has been taking since the government took office. Of course, you have sectors that support its measures, but these are a minority linked to the external sector, and to energy and finance. The rest of the population, above all small and medium enterprises and a large part of the middle class, are dissatisfied with the direction of the economy. The benchmark interest rate set at 40 percent is disrupting the payment chain in productive sectors; companies are facing bankruptcy scenarios that cause greater risks to the financial system. Workers’ salaries gradually erode, causing losses in the purchasing power of the population. The agreement with the IMF is, in this sense, a sign of failure of the government’s economic policies, because it’s not lost on anyone that they come to the Fund in search of a financial bailout, which in the memory of Argentines quickly brings to mind the crisis of 2001. The same day the government announced that it would go to the IMF, people began to wonder about the risk of a financial corralito.[3] Our people are very sensitive to the recipes of the IMF and external debt crises, which we have lived in the past. All this represents a huge political cost for the government, the impact of which is measured in the loss of a positive image of the president. The recent veto to a law that established limits to the increase in utilities prices is also part of the process of the population’s loss of confidence in the figure of the president.

The next scenario of acute conflict will be the approval of the national budget, because the variables established there will undermine the magnitude of the austerity and the conditions established by the IMF in terms of the exchange rate, investment, social spending, and public cuts. In the face of this process, the government sets up scenarios that are increasingly less credible, for example, when the finance minister comes out and says that we are going to charge less but without a loss of purchasing power, or that inflation at the end of the year will be around 20 percent when we know that it already has a floor of 27 percent for the end of the year.

All this implies a process of growing disbelief in the government, which could not solve the problem of inflation either. Since they took office, they have not been able to lower the inherited levels, which were falling sharply as a result of measures to stimulate the development of the domestic market and domestic production. The Central Bank launched an inflation-targeting plan, which was of little use in this sense, because by leaving the exchange rate free, it generated feedback processes by putting upward pressure on prices whenever the dollar appreciated against the national currency. Now the president of the Central Bank, one of the main figures responsible for the financial crisis, comes out and says that for 2018 there is no inflation target, after having modified it at the end of last year. They are not there to govern: they are filibusters.

CD: It was recently reported that the IMF asked the administration to increase taxes on agricultural exports as part of the agreement. This is rather ironic, as exactly 10 years ago the Kirchner administration and powerful landholding interests were locked in a paralyzing standoff over a proposed reform to the system of export taxes on agricultural goods, which were the key source of public revenue during Kirchnerism. That conflict altered the tone and subsequent trajectory of politics in Argentina through the end of CFK’s second term seven years later. Meanwhile, the Macri administration quickly reduced or eliminated these export taxes altogether, thereby slashing state revenues and adding to the question of how any of the debt it was issuing would ever be repaid. What do we know about this aspect of the agreement? Could the Macri administration actually pull such an about-face and raise export taxes without completely antagonizing its political base among Argentina’s powerful landholding interests? And if not through such means, what kind of further austerity measures could the administration impose on society to meet the conditionalities imposed by the IMF, especially that of reducing the fiscal deficit to 1.3 percent of the GDP for 2019?

PB: The government kept the negotiations secret, even violating constitutional rules that require that the National Congress take direct intervention in the handling of foreign debt matters. Within the Congress, there is a Bicameral Commission that works to monitor the debt and has asked the executive for information on these issues, but has not achieved positive results. Basically, the government exercises political power in the form of the presidential veto, oriented toward financial markets with which it openly dialogues and grants much of their demands. But it governs with its back to the Congress and the Argentine people. Therefore, little is known about the specifics of the negotiations. Reestablishing export taxes, setting differential exchange rates—these are possible measures that could help alleviate the core issues that I mentioned at the beginning.

Because one thing is clear, and it is that in this country, dollars are needed to pay the external debt that the government contracted for. The amount agreed to with the IMF is enough to pay the outstanding Central Bank notes; then the government needs to get the rest of the money. How will it do so? Doing this is equivalent to mortgaging the autonomy of the country and its monetary sovereignty, because a project of economic independence is unthinkable if the dollars generated by your economy are deposited offshore and do not return to the country as investments and to finance imports.

That’s why the government is at a crossroads. If it maintains the current scenario of liberalizing policies, it knows that it does not have the necessary capital to finance the rest of the mandate. If it applies measures aimed at intervening in the market, such as export taxes, it opens a scenario of conflicts with a very important sector of power, which until now was a direct ally. This type of scenario occurs as a consequence of a government that is nothing more than a business model for financial capital.

And Congress has a key role in that, because it has to demand that the agreement be debated there. What legitimacy does a democracy have that allows a president, a minister, and a central banker to compromise the fate of future generations, mortgage companies, eliminate the pension system, destroy salaries, and lead us along the same path of default, such that vulture funds come along later to buy our debt at the price of misery? What kind of democracy admits such a level of autocracy?

CD: I want to also situate these developments around the IMF and indebtedness in relation to wider questions about politics, finance, social movements, and the state in Argentina and perhaps more broadly. In their recent book, Assembly, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2017: 224) quote a text of yours to the effect that social struggles need to build “a capacity of political invention able to transform the financial dynamic in the field of battle against capital.” Yet, in arguing for a transformation of the social relations institutionalized through money, they sidestep the question of the state. Making clear that they do not envision such transformation in terms of taking control of central banks, in a kind of contemporary “storming of the Winter Palace” (referring to the mass action of taking over the czar’s palace during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917), they instead elaborate on their version of an antistatist politics of the multitude that, as John Holloway (2002) has put it, seeks to “change the world without taking power.”

However, the rise of left-of-center governments across much of Latin America in the early twenty-first century has entailed more complex relationships between states and social movements. From your own perspective of struggling within and outside the state apparatus and its financial institutions in Argentina, how do you see the relationship between these positions in terms of inventing the political capacities necessary to alter the financial dynamics of capital? What is the importance of central banks in particular?

PB: I believe there are two broad levels of analysis, intervention, and political action that make up the core of strategies of articulation of defenses and proposals against the government of finance. We are currently seeing that for global corporations, the state becomes an increasingly secondary mediation, that is, an actor that suffers a deep crisis in the dimensions of political, legal, and economic sovereignty, but that in turn attempts to establish regulations on the formation of the rate of profit on capital. The role of central banks, which are key to enacting policies aimed at mitigating the destabilizing effects inherent in the dynamics of financial capital, is inscribed on this level. Central banks have this function through the development of instruments to regulate liquidity: they generate liquidity when there is a shortage and restrict it otherwise. They intervene in the exchange rate to avoid distortions in financial stability and not much more than that. In the face of global financial capital, every day it becomes more difficult to formulate plans in which central banks promote full employment in the classical sense. This task faces great political resistance on the part of capital, as, for example, in the Brazilian process against Dilma Roussef and later Lula da Silva. But we must return to that path, the path of full employment. Global corporations, on the other hand, face ever more complex scenarios against the new financial technologies that tend to displace them in controlling market share. The case of Amazon is an example that strongly threatens the main global companies. Financial capital tends to run in hybrid forms and through areas of difficult localization. In this scenario, it is necessary to build forces of social power linked to trade unions, to social movements and the workers of the popular economy, the excluded workers who should have representation on the board of central banks, because that is where the dynamics of financial profit are defined.

It is necessary to represent from this place areas of formulation of the experiences of finance for the community, of new forms of monetary exchange, alternative systems of payment, and, above all, rules to reduce the speculative aspect of finance. In these terms, the world is seeing a process of a deepening schism of inequality and violence around financial exploitation, which recognizes neither ethical justifications nor historical antecedents. The challenge presented by the offshore world is part of that process. The challenge for the next generations is to deepen the role of social movements, their autonomy vis-à-vis the state and the corporations of financial capital. The inequality generated by finance today can only be reversed by a movement that puts an end to forms of speculation by capital.

CD: Expanding a bit on the previous question, there appears to be a flourishing of movements around a heterogeneous set of issues in Argentina. While those around gender violence and reproductive rights such as Ni Una Menos appear especially vibrant, what kinds of articulations are emerging between these and other movements, for example, over extractivism and indigenous rights, Argentina’s historically strong labor unions and human rights movement, and now perhaps mobilization against the IMF? How are the relations between the state and social movements being thought and discussed in Argentina today, and what are some of the political and intellectual inspirations for these discussions and articulations?

PB: The women’s movement marks a renewed course in the debates and experiences of political articulations between social movements and the state. There is a truly revolutionary direction there. The experience of groups such as Las Insumisas de las Finanzas and the slogans of Ni Una Menos—linked to the flags of feminism, crossed with the challenge to external indebtedness as part of a common process against patriarchy, for example—are concrete examples that indicate a little to everyone how to move forward, how to draw up new agendas in view of a collective construction of new forms of revindication, against revitalized forms of colonial subjection. Likewise, there is still a need to link the rest of the demands and alternative projects necessary for the construction of more plural societies that know how to live in full respect with the environment. Extractivism is not yet a core point in the agenda of trade union movements, and we have not been able to concretely synthesize solutions to the problems of energy and sovereignty at the same time. In the case of indigenous peoples and peasant movements, their rights to land and territory are also not guaranteed. The model of a financialized society in which we live demands that we rethink broader and more complex agendas in the face of these manifestations of economic power.

Charles Dolph is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). With support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and CUNY, he conducted research in Buenos Aires from 2014 to 2016 for his dissertation, which analyzes the dynamics of monetary hoarding and state formation in Argentina.

Notes

[1] CINFIN is a project for elaborating policies for financial reform within the Center for Public Policies for Socialism (Centro de Políticas Públicas para el Socialismo, CEPPAS), located in Buenos Aires.

[2] More than a dozen high-ranking officials from the former Kirchner administration, including the president, have been indicted on dubious charges of “unfaithful administration” over the Central Bank’s sale of dollar derivative contracts, known as “future dollars,” during her tenure.

[3] The corralito was a measure taken in late 2001 that contributed to wiping out much of the wealth held by Argentines in the country’s financial system by severely limiting the amount of dollars that they could withdraw from their bank accounts, which were subsequently converted into pesos and devalued from their one-to-one exchange rate with the US dollar.

References

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. New York: Oxford University Press.

Holloway, John. 2002. Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto Press.

Cite as: Dolph, Charles. 2018. “The second time as farce? The IMF returns to Argentina.” FocaalBlog, 20 June. www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/20/charles-dolph-the-second-time-as-farce-the-imf-returns-to-argentina.

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This post is part of a feature on “How Capitalists Think,” moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bergen) and Tijo Salverda (University of Cologne).

Following the concurrent 2007/2008 financial crisis and the global food crisis, investors’ appetite for (agricultural) land around the world has increased considerably. As a consequence, rural residents have been pushed off their lands, or their movements have been restricted because of new forms of enclosure (White et al. 2012), leading to an outpour of concerns about the “global land rush.” Critics such as international peasant movements, NGOs, journalists, (activist) scholars, and, in a more ambiguous way, international governance institutions have campaigned against the negative consequences of investors’ appetite for land. In particular, campaigns by GRAIN, Via Campesina, Global Witness, and Oxfam have increased awareness among the public. The extensive number of academic publications also demonstrates the scholarly attention devoted to the issue (e.g., Anseeuw et al. 2012; Borras 2016; Zoomers et al. 2016).

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Features, How Capitalists Think

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This contribution looks at the implications of how capitalists think about corporate ethics and moral obligations in monoindustrial towns. I present the cases of two mining towns in Estonia and Kazakhstan that share the history of honoring labor dynasties. In both settings, during the Soviet period, labor dynasties had a special place in company histories and grandfather-father-son working together were celebrated through stories in newspapers, awards on miners’ professional holiday, and photos on the mine’s noticeboard. Ideologically, dynasties represented a “labor aristocracy” that was to replace the prerevolutionary hereditary aristocracy, and such workers were to serve as examples to others (Tkach 2003).

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Research on capitalism commonly distinguishes between neoclassical economics and political economy. If neoclassical economics have dominated scientific debates since the 1930s at the latest, the nineteenth century view was that of political economy, with Karl Marx providing a powerful critique thereof. Both theories influence scientific reasoning until today. Yet, could both also elucidate the quotidian behavior of “normal” people in ethnographies of everyday life in the twenty-first century?

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Features, How Capitalists Think

Patrick Neveling and Tijo Salverda: How capitalists think—about belonging, moralities, global entanglements, and historical social processes, for example

This introduction is part of a feature on “How Capitalists Think,” moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bergen) and Tijo Salverda (University of Cologne).

Given that nowadays most people live in societies organized according to capitalist principles and given that few oppose those principles fundamentally, capitalists may well constitute the world’s largest ideology-based formation. Most anthropologists have undoubtedly had encounters with capitalists, who occupy positions in all social strata. Yet, apart from the “usual suspects” such as CEOs, elites, leading politicians, and other members of the transnational capitalist class, our discipline pays little, and certainly not enough, explicit attention to the many who equally support and/or benefit from capitalist principles—be they ordinary employees in governments and in the private sector, subalterns with native title claims, or even social welfare claimants (for the varying scope and scale of anthropological research so far, see Friedman 1999; Kalb 1997; Neveling 2015; Rose 2015; Salverda 2015). Continue reading →